Mystery City Read online

  Mystery City

  The Whitborough Novels

  Alistair Lavers

  Copyright © 2017 Alistair Lavers

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  ISBN 9781788032452

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  Dedicated to Bon Scott

  Contents

  Precursor

  Chapter One Jungle Rock

  Chapter Two Saturday Morning

  Chapter Three Up Around the Bend

  Chapter Four The Carr Wold Parkway Incident

  Chapter Five Anarchy Mary

  Chapter Six North Yorkshire Police Headquarters, Northallerton

  Chapter Seven Operation Donkey

  Chapter Eight Boldwood’s Excursion

  Chapter Nine Lords’ and Ladies’ Night

  Chapter Ten The Spy in the Cab

  Chapter Eleven Sunday Lunch at the Shipley Browns’

  Chapter Twelve Jailbreak

  A SéanceAt the Valhalla Retirement Home,

  Chapter Thirteen Bark at the Moon

  Chapter Fourteen MI5 Safe House, Leeds LS2, Sunday Evening

  Chapter Fifteen This Ol’House

  Chapter Sixteen Police and Thieves

  Chapter Seventeen At the Kenwith Valley Gorge Museum

  Shaking The Tree Marshall and Broadhead visit Derek Beautimann

  Chapter Eighteen Police on My Back

  Chapter Nineteen It’s a Long Way to the Top

  Chapter Twenty Tuesday Morning

  Chapter Twenty-One An Amputation at the Vet’s

  Chapter Twenty-Two The Morning After the Night Before

  Chapter Twenty-Three Curry Night

  Chapter Twenty-Four The Forum

  Chapter Twenty-Five Exmoor

  Chapter Twenty-Six The Contract

  Bibliography

  Whitborough on Sea Principal Street Index

  Precursor

  The Yorkshire Coast, July 1645

  Since the time when the first settlers began to study the constellations, within what is now the parish of Cayton, there has been an enclosure known as Caer Broc. It has long been in use, but offers little on first inspection within its borders to draw the interest of any traveller who may find themselves, for a moment, beside its boundary. The greatest length of it, adjoins a carelessly mended dry-stone wall of great age, which runs across the landscape in unequal courses. The wall’s track follows the last ten miles of an ancient ley line, beginning at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, through Glastonbury Tor and Avebury in Wiltshire, where it strikes out north from the cog of the great Herne’s Barrow, through Tolbury mound in South Yorkshire and thence to the great bluestone circle on Landkey Island, two nautical miles north east of Whitborough. The wall’s foundations were laid down long ago in prehistory by the people of the first age, and it still stands.

  From the outlying fields of Cayton, where it first begins to rise and coalesce from the peat, in the flat valley of the Carr, the ancient structure slowly improves, until it reaches Whitborough-on-Sea’s southern flank as solid and pleasing to the eye as any drystack wall in the county; finally terminating at Thumping Gate and the toll bar, behind the great earthwork ditch known as Sigurd’s Dyke.

  It is said, within the loose society of friends that still follow the first religion and the old traditions, that any man who disrespects the old wall’s capstones, during Alban Eilir – the old Beltane festival of spring– should take care to bar his doors and shutters each night, until the next new moon, lest he be carried off into other realms, in the hours before dawn.

  The last fellow to test the old legend did indeed vanish from his rest one night in April 1644, from a room at the Bell Inn, on Cayton High Street. What is not so well known, is the nature of the marks that were left behind – and what was found at the scene, after his disappearance.

  The mysterious affair was the story of a single night – the first and last of his visit­– when a powerful and vindictive gale blew up in the streets outside the inn, lifting tiles, rattling casements and stirring the trees around the vicinity. It was a curious occurrence, notable for the fact that the winds were most fiercely directed about the buildings close to the inn, and made such a bustle within the ivy that the landlord’s dogs hid under the beds. Two witnesses, who later made sworn statements, attested that the landlord collapsed in a swoon the next morn after forcing the door of his strange guest at cock crow, investigating the cause of some terrible scream that was heard from within. He flatly refused to speak of what he had seen for days after – and was very much sick. Three other men also viewed the interior and were similarly afflicted in mind and body. The parson was called, ordered the room sealed and left the town before noon, never to return. No trace of Benjamin Comery was ever found, and the door to his room was never breached until the inn was demolished ten years later.

  There are perhaps only two people still alive in the district who could give an account of the episode that matched the evidence. It was certainly shared within their families, but never to anyone outside the locality, though all written records and testimonies of the occurrence were freely available to the curious within the rooms of the town hall archive. The full facts may therefore have been more widely known than was readily admitted.

  The incident would certainly account for the cold reception afforded to itinerant sellers of mistletoe and hawthorn, who were very badly received inside the town for some years after, all the offenders being followed or escorted in silence to the boundary dyke by the sheriff, though no explanation for their banishment was offered, or given.

  From the seaward side of Caer Broc’s boundary wall, the land descends before the blue grey depths of the Viking Ocean, eventually collapsing into jagged clefts where the heavy clay subsoil loses its grip on the soft bedrock beneath at the face of the cliffs. Too stony for cattle, though tolerable to sheep, it offers that particular kind of isolation that so improves the character of man.

  Elias Rudkin, a shepherd of long standing and the present tenant of the field in the time of the last siege of Whitborough Castle, sat uneasily on the flat base of an upturned milking pail with his back to the sunset, surveying the windblown turf about his Dorsets. Alone with his thoughts and his irksome teeth, whilst his eldest boy Grundig slept fitfully on the small cot, within the close confines of their hut at his back. The monotony and the routines that went wi
th the life of a shepherd, meant Elias did not care to record the names of the days between each Sabbath, only their number and passing, which he marked with a fresh notch on his crook at sundown.

  Father and son – the shepherd and his apprentice – were two faces of an unbroken watch. One awake, one asleep, for the duration of the lambing, though the resting partner was still required to rise every third hour with a handful of coal for the small iron pot boiler stove, to keep the hotplate warm and their clothing dry.

  In the warmer months, the small ventilation hatch cover in the last course of boards, below the roof shingles, could be removed completely, though during the last few nights it had been set down for a different reason. Elias had spent a restless night under the spell of a strange dream which seemed connected to the coming storm and troubled his waking hours.

  The two men had been waiting expectantly for days, listening for the sound of a pistol report; not the sound of the gun of a stranger, or a Cayton huntsman in the weald, but the sound of a gun belonging to them alone, which now covered a switchback in the path through Elvenhome ravine nearby. Cocked and bound to a hazel frame, staked to the ground and concealed under oilcloth, to protect it from rain, it was topped off with a dirt-encrusted fleece, speckled with urine and weighted down with rocks. A bow cord, tied tautly to a tree on the opposite bank, cut across the footpath at knee height, curled around a branch smeared with goose fat and disappeared through a small tear in the tent to the trigger, through a ring bolt hammered into a tree root. The fleece was added as a precaution, to weight down the oilcloth against the wind, and keep foxes, badgers and boars from knocking the mechanism.

  The pistol, a patilla-style miquelet flintlock, had come into the possession of the shepherd by fate and providence. Washed ashore on the storm tides the previous winter in an olive wood case, within a larger chest, protected against moisture and water ingress by a gasket of catgut and honey tar, it was a rare and desirable firearm. But to Elias, its primary value lay in it being unknown and untraceable to him. It would be – he hoped – a tool for his enrichment and the beginning of a new life, the comforts and riches of which he could still barely start to comprehend.

  These intentions had taken form quite by chance –by the simple accident of overhearing the details of a plot hatched by four local adventurers on his boundary one night, to steal a strongbox of gold and jewels which the besieged garrison at Whitborough Castle were desperate to spirit away before the garrison fell. Elias and his son had no history or experience of criminality, outside of poaching. Despite this, they had decided to take what they thought might be a fair risk for the chance of acquiring riches beyond their dreams. They already possessed an advantage over the men who would come through their territory – they had a better knowledge of the terrain through which gold would come than any man guarding it, and the wit to exploit it.

  The last winter of 1644 had been long and cold; snow fell late in January 1645. The British Isles in this period was in the grip of what historians and climatologists would later refer to as the Little Ice Age. Many slow-flowing rivers froze to depths safe enough for horses and wagons to traverse their widths. In the years after the civil war, London held ice fairs on the River Thames, and the ground froze in Somersetshire to depths of four feet. Agricultural communities were hit hard, as the cold thinned out the weak and sickly amongst their livestock and their masters. Magistrates began to meet more and more men of farming stock inside their courts, as families resorted to desperate measures to pay their creditors. Suicides reached crisis proportions and death stalked the highways and byways of the provinces in the guise of brigands and highwaymen. Coal became so precious a commodity that Parliament ordered an army to Whitborough to end the attacks on the coal barges that were so essential to the comfort and warmth of the populace of London.

  Elias had also suffered. The extreme weather had caused him the loss of many animals, though the Dorset Horn and Poll Sheep of his flock were able to lamb all year round and would soon recover their numbers in the spring. Not reliant on a high level of nutrition, they produced abundant wool and a good carcass. In the meantime, he did not go hungry. On the same night, after the priming of their pistol trap, in the last minutes before sundown, a rapping sound was heard on their steps. Father and son were in the midst of exchanging places inside their hut, tossing lice from the seams of their sheepskins onto the coals in the stove.

  ‘Good greetings inside. Wilt thou answer to a servant of the Lord?’announced a familiar voice, which they reasoned was connected to the knocking a few moments earlier.

  ‘Tis the parson father,’ whispered Grundig nervously, ‘we muste answer, muste we not? But why is he come? Not for mutton, for silver?’

  ‘Why indeed boy – itt is not for these things I’ll warrant. The houre of his visit speakes of some other intent – I am not reassured,’muttered Elias as the gusting winds outside whistled through the reed-thin gaps between the joints in their roof.

  ‘Speake low father…’

  ‘Be att ease lad, we cannot be heard without, when the windes make such play in the roof. Dost thou hear other voices now boy? Thou muste be my ears.’

  ‘No, none other father.’

  ‘Then we should meet oure pilgrim. If he cometh alone.’

  ‘Elias! Wilst thou come now to parley? I am att thy door!’called the parson once again, in a cordial but insistent manner.

  ‘Proffer him the stale milk, in the slops jugg. Twill curdle his passion for oure company,’ smiled Elias, impishly. ‘I am inbetween pantaloons parson! Grant me time to arrange myself,’ shouted Elias, for the benefit of his unwelcome visitor outside.

  ‘Ay father, this morsel will heap more discomfort on its sourness,’ added Grundig, snatching up a small damp folded parcel of sacking, into which they had wrapped a piece of cheese which was beginning to fester.

  ‘Be swift Grundig, into the milk then and let us be cunning – like our Lamb of God.We shall tell oure guest that ye are struck by a pox of the throat boy, speake not and cough generously.If he does not curtail his visit then, we shall both have cause to guard oure tongues.’

  As the living cheese was decanted into the milk, and living it most certainly was in the purest sense of the word, one of his dogs began to bark from the bottom field. It was not a territorial kind of bark or a warning, but the fast, repetitive howling of an animal maddened by fear. Elias, sensing danger, lunged for the door, knocking the bolt from its collar as he pushed on its planks. Then as quickly as it began, the noise suddenly ceased, following a brief squeal and a whimper. All three men, Elias, Grundig and their visitor, the parson, were now outside looking downwind in the twilight, distracted from their imminent business by the sudden interruption. Their other dog Jasper had run up the incline from its lean-to den lower down and was now under the hut, quivering beneath the rear axle rod, mewing like an injured puppy. Grundig observed the flock was running up the pasture as one mass towards the shelter of a hawthorn-ringed copse at the very edge of the upper field.

  ‘Father…,’ cried Grundig, ‘look to the flock! The Devil’s beasts are come agayne!’

  ‘Boy, string thy bow and bring oure last pistol!’growled Elias.‘AND THOU!’ he bellowed, seizing their speechless guest by the shoulders,‘can stand wyth us and send them to hell with thy booke of spells!’

  ‘NO, ELIAS… I CANNOT! I have no power o’er them. I…’

  ‘Ye have the most powerful book in all the worlde parson, and divine protection. We have no such armour, but will gladly do battle with these fiends because we have no hiding place left us in the worlde.’

  ‘Elias, there is naught to be done here, we muste shelter or be ripped apart,’ wailed their visitor beseechingly, all his pompous arrogance gone as he joined the sheepdog in its panic, trying to push his way into the hut.

  ‘I would rather that than die of hunger – a pauper. I go to my fate. Stand as
ide.’

  Downwind from their hut, a fast-moving, indistinct mass began to emerge from the darkness in the lower field. Growing in size and detail, it ran towards the three men from the last place of the howling dog. It was as dreadful a thing as any of them had ever seen, in life or described in scripture, as swift and rough-haired as a wolfhound, but as thick and muscular as a bear from the dark northern forests of Saxony. Elias, acting quickly, hefted the silver-tipped lance of cedar, handed down to him from his father; weighting the belly of the stave in his palm, as he felt for the midpoint – the fulcrum– and drew back his arm.

  ‘Aim true now lad. Hold firm and aim true… NOW!’ shouted Elias to his offspring, as they fought to keep their courage from deserting them. His son’s pistol cracked and the ball struck the black form sprinting towards their feet, slowing its run sufficiently for Elias to judge his throw. Then the lance flew with all the power in his arm and shoulders into the mass of the creature which the pistol shot had temporarily checked, ending its charge; the beast folded in upon itself and slumped hard onto the turf, writhing and howling, shedding great handfuls of fur.

  ‘STAND NOW– COWARD!’shouted Elias, scolding the diminishing figure of the parson who was fleeing the field, scampering and stumbling blindly after the flock.’

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Oure protector has beshitt himself!’ yelled the shepherd, mocking the stumbling preacher who was scampering away as fast as his short legs would carry him. ‘Leave him now, protect me boy! I go for the lance. Barbed broadheads on your string!’ordered Elias, instructing his son.

  Elias ran to the place where their first attacker was dying, pulling the spear from the black hide of the monstrous cadaver which seemed to be collapsing in upon itself.