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Overview
Following the death of the senior English master in a tragic road accident, Mr Campion’s son Rupert and daughter-in-law Perdita are helping out at Ash Grange School for Boys, where Perdita’s godfather is headmaster. While Perdita is directing the end-of-term play, a musical version of Dr Faustus, Rupert is tackling the school’s rugby football team – and both of them are finding their allotted tasks more of a challenge than they had anticipated.
When the headmaster telephones Albert Campion to inform him that Rupert has been arrested, Mr Campion heads to Yorkshire to get to the bottom of the matter. There are no secrets in the traditional mining village of Denby Ash, he’s told – but on uncovering reports of a disruptive poltergeist, a firebrand trade unionist, a missing conman and a local witch, he finds that’s far from being the case. And was the English master, Mr Browne’s, death really an accident . . .?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847517296 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Series: | An Albert Campion Mystery , #3 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Margery Allingham's Albert Campion returns in Mr Campion's fault
By Mike Ripley
Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2016 Mike RipleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84751-729-6
CHAPTER 1
Tremors
No one in Denby Ash, neighbours, relatives, the milkman, the rent man, the local priest, the ladies on the brass cleaning rota or fellow members of the Mothers' Union would ever say that Ada Braithwaite was a woman given to hysteria, flights of fancy or deliberate attention-seeking. None of them would dare. She was, by general consent, a woman who did not make a fuss and got on with life; whatever life threw at her.
And life had, in fact, thrown quite a lot Ada's way.
At the age of fourteen she had gone from school into service at Ash Grange when it was known as 'the Big House' and its owners were, in practice if not in title, Lords of the Manor. Ada worked honestly and hard and the lords and ladies of the Big House were grateful, for this was wartime and if good domestic staff were hard to find in 1939, by 1945, under the looming shadow of a bright new socialist age, they were an endangered species. As were – although they did not yet realize it – the owners of Ash Grange themselves, whose fortunes and standing were based not on gifts of the royal prerogative, nor on rewards for victories in battle from a grateful nation, but on the ownership of land which, by geological serendipity, floated on a black sea of coal.
One morning, in her second year as a scullery maid there, the vicar of Denby Ash called at the Grange and informed Ada that her father had been killed on active service at a place called Tobruk, which was in North Africa, and if she was so inclined she could borrow an atlas from the vicarage to find where it was. The beefy, red-faced cook at the Grange, Mrs Stott, to whom Ada saw herself as understudy, put a comforting ham hock of an arm around her and told her she did not have to – a drop of hard work was what she needed to take her mind off things. She received the same advice from Mrs Stott a year later when she was informed, again by the vicar, that her mother had left the village – and Ada, her only child – to follow a Canadian corporal she had 'struck up with' who had been posted to a signals unit in Southampton. Although Ada was just as unaware of the location of Southampton as she was of Tobruk, the vicar made no offer of the loan of an atlas this time and neither did Mrs Stott offer a consoling embrace. The wartime death of a father was one thing, the desertion of a mother quite another and years later, when a letter arrived addressed to her, care of the vicarage and bearing a Canadian stamp, Ada flung it to the back of the fire without opening it.
On VE Day, Ada Lumley, as she was then, plucked up her courage, handed in her notice and left Ash Grange in search of her own brave new world. She found a job in a textile mill in Huddersfield seven miles away, and discovered a world of dance halls, picture houses, trams, charabanc trips to the Dales and even – for the first time – the coast and the delights of Hornsea and Bridlington. She also discovered young men, and eligible young men discovered her. Ada never, in her mind, set a spark but where there was a flicker of a flame, if she did not exactly fan it she certainly encouraged it to come closer, out of the draught. There was a dalliance – she would put it no higher than that – with the rather fusty, bespectacled accountant of the textile mill where she worked, a man of twenty-eight in years but fifty-eight in demeanour and attitude. Then a much more passionate, even exotically fiery, relationship with a Polish Spitfire pilot who had ended the war on the side of the victors but had found his native country still occupied.
But of all the interested young men who tempted her with port-and-lemons or half-pints of Webster's mild served in the dimpled glasses with handles which were reserved exclusively 'for ladies', the one whose cap was pitched successfully at Ada was that of Colin Braithwaite, a miner at Grange Ash, one of the three collieries which encircled the village of Denby Ash like protective, outlying forts.
And so, after five years of freedom, Ada Lumley returned to Denby Ash to become Mrs Colin Braithwaite, solemnizing the event in the village church of St James the Great under the wistful eye of the vicar who had, until that moment, been the bringer only of bad tidings.
The Braithwaites embarked on married life by moving in to Number 11 Oaker Hill, a two-up, two-down terraced council house still known locally as one of the 'pit houses' which had been built in 1906 by the colliery owners who had built Ash Grange for their own accommodation, and had been rented exclusively by miners ever since. Ada kept the house warm and clean, did the washing on Mondays, scoured the back-door steps on Wednesdays, washed the windows on Thursdays, did the baking on Tuesdays and the grocery shopping at the local Co-Op on Fridays. She made sure that Colin's snap tin and flask were full every morning before he bicycled to work at the pit at 6 a.m., and that there was hot water for a bath on his return, followed by a cooked tea on the table by 5 p.m. For his part, Colin went to work with never a day off sick, brought the coal in and laid the fires every morning, and placed his pay packet on the kitchen table every Friday. The couple visited 'the club' once a week, usually on bingo nights when women were welcomed rather than tolerated, but for Saturday night socializing they divided their custom fairly between the two public houses which bookended the village: the Sun Inn at the 'Huddersfield end' and the Green Dragon which marked the 'Barnsley end' of Denby Ash. They paid their dues into the village holiday club which allowed them an annual coach trip and a week's bed-and-breakfast in Scarborough or Bridlington, or, in an adventurous year, Morecambe.
Colin's workmates and Ada's neighbours – especially the neighbours – all expected the couple to plunge into parenthood and no one could explain (though many wondered) why it took Ada a further five years to fall pregnant with Roderick, their first and, as it turned out, only child.
A healthy son was not a blessing Colin Braithwaite was to enjoy for long, for on one fine spring morning in 1960 the vicar of Denby Ash was once more recalled to mournful and tragic duty. Ada was pegging out washing on a line stretched between the back door and the coalhouse ten yards away at the end of a cinder path, to make the most of an unseasonably good drying day, when the vicar's head appeared around a flapping white sheet and suggested that Mrs Braithwaite come inside and sit down.
Perhaps it was because mining communities were used to sudden and shockingly violent occurrences, or perhaps it was the unexpected appearance of the vicar wading through a sea of festooned clothes' lines, but by whatever osmosis, the news which broke over Ada Braithwaite's bowed head spread within seconds to the women of the street. Abandoning their washing, some with wooden pegs gripped between fingers or even teeth, Ada's neighbours drifted instinctively towards the back door of Number Eleven. Idle chatter and cheery gossip stopped as if by edict, the only sounds coming from the flapping of wet sheets and the distant hum of a coal lorry. They stood in a semicircle around the back door, a silent congregation waiting patiently for a sermon.
The vicar of Denby Ash wisely chose the role of newsreader rather than prophet and when he emerged from Ada's kitchen to face a dozen or more blank-faced women, he kept his bulletin to the bare essentials. Colin Braithwaite had, in the middle of that morning's shift, been killed at the coalface when a large stone had dislodged itself from the roof of the shaft he was crawling along and crushed the life out of him.
Obviously, in the circumstances, Ada would need all the support and comfort her neighbours could offer. There was no question it would be forthcoming; there never was in Denby Ash. It was a small community and almost eighty per cent of the population relied economically on its three collieries, as had been the case for more than a century and a half. The hewing of coal deep underground was a dangerous business and widowhood, even at a relatively young age, was accepted as a trial of life without hysteria, bitterness or appeals for compassion to an implacable God. The community of Denby Ash simply got on with it.
The funeral expenses of Colin Braithwaite were covered by an insurance policy underwritten by the National Union of Mineworkers. Ada received modest compensation from the Coal Board and was allowed to remain in her council house as long as the rent could be paid. To that end she went back to work, not to the Huddersfield mills but to the kitchens of Ash Grange she had left as a brash teenager seeking freedom. The Big House was now a boys' school, but boys needed feeding and Ada knew all too well the quirks of the kitchens there.
Ada worked hard to make sure that her fatherless son, Roderick, wanted for nothing. She accepted no charity but baked cakes for several and pulled her weight in the network of good causes marshalled by the church and the Mothers' Union with military efficiency. She was not flighty with the men and did not gossip about the women of Denby Ash. There were few – very few, but there usually is at least one – who had a bad word to say about her. She had not had an easy life, but then who in the village had? Ada was not the first mother to be widowed by the mines and would not be the last, but she had never complained of her lot.
She was certainly the very last person anyone in the village would have expected to be visited by a ghost.
The floor trembled, the walls shook. A china mug leapt from a shelf and smashed in the sink. In a wall cupboard, more crockery rattled and attempted to join it, lemming-like, in a suicidal plunge. Plaster dropped from the ceiling like volcanic ash; the kitchen table moved, crablike across the linoleum floor, spilling a salt pot and a sugar bowl; pipes rattled and hummed; a three-legged wooden footstool lost its battle with gravity and tipped over; an overhead bulb swung wildly from its flex, its glass shade tinkling ominously. The iron doors of the coal-fired cooking range creaked on their hinges and from the front and upstairs rooms came groans, as if the whole house was in pain.
'Eight seconds,' said the man, consulting his wristwatch with some difficulty as the woman was clinging to his arm for dear life. 'Does it usually last that amount of time?'
Ada Braithwaite released her grip and used her free hands to brush away plaster dust from her cardigan.
'Sometimes it goes on for ages,' she said, dry-mouthed. 'Sometimes it comes back two or three times a night.' Then, despairingly, she added: 'There's no rhyme or reason to it.'
Bertram Browne wiped a hand across his balding head to dislodge a lozenge of flaked paint and realized he was sweating profusely.
'Does it affect your neighbours?'
Mrs Braithwaite shook her head. 'Mr and Mrs Lee at Number Ten are both pensioners and go to bed early. They'd sleep through anything. They brag about it and say that not even Doodlebugs during the war could wake 'em, not that any Doodlebugs ever fell closer than Huddersfield, to the best of my knowledge.
On t'other side' – she bent her head towards the wall connecting them to Number Twelve – 'Percy and Phyllis will still be at the club or at the Green Dragon if they're flush, and they'll be there till chuckin' out time or later if they can manage it. She's never noticed owt much, though she did once say an empty bottle had fallen off a windowsill and smashed. Put it down to the coal lorries thundering up the road all day. Seemed upset she wouldn't get her fourpence deposit back.'
'So the phenomenon is localized both in place and time, I think you said.'
Mr Browne found that the best way to stop his knees knocking and his heart pounding was to imagine himself back in the classroom. There he was in command.
'If you mean it only 'appens to this house and always on Thursdays, then yes, I did say that,' Ada said carefully, worrying that Mr Browne might have judged the way she had clutched at him as a bit too forward. 'And now you've seen it with your own eyes, so I'm not lying, am I?'
'I never said you were, Mrs Braithwaite,' Browne said formally, as if in court. 'When Roderick told me how upset you were, I believed him immediately.'
'It was good of you to let him stay at the school tonight.'
'Think nothing of it. The boy's at that age when boys don't need extra distractions, especially things like this ...'
'Like what, Mr Browne? What is it we just saw?'
The woman, white-faced and wide-eyed, was suddenly a distraught stranger to Bertram Browne, a thin substitute for the competent and stoic Ada Braithwaite who had invited him into her home.
'What do you think it was, Ada?' he said more gently, answering one question with another – an almost unforgivable sin in a schoolmaster's lexicon.
'Ah knows what they'd say round here, reet enough,' said Ada, her face set in Yorkshire granite. 'They'd say it was my late husband Colin come back to haunt me.'
Bertram considered draping a comforting arm around Ada's shoulder, but he had lived in the West Riding long enough to know that would be an unacceptable, not to mention potentially dangerous, action. Instead, he smiled his most innocent smile.
'You don't believe that, do you, Ada?'
'O'course not, Mr Browne. I may not have your learnin' but I'm not daft.'
Bertram Browne, MA (Cantab) felt that his education was distinctly lacking as he pulled up the collar of his coat and tightened his scarf against the cold night air on his walk back to Ash Grange School.
Towards the end of the war he had, as a young, very green lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, played a small but terrifying part in the crossing of the Rhine, and a few weeks later he had found himself helping the walking dead survivors of Bergen–Belsen concentration camp, which was even more terrifying. With peacetime came Cambridge, where he suffered from an imagined inferiority complex caused by the ribbing from fellow undergraduates of his broad Yorkshire accent and the snobbery of dons who had grumpily put up with the influx of young ex-servicemen under edict from the government only on sufferance (there had, after all, been a war on). Any sniping, real or imagined, aimed at Bertram soon dissipated when it became clear that he was an above-average student and a more-than-adequate scrum half on the rugby field. Even the crustiest of the dons regarded 'young Browne' with new respect when, in his third year, he was seen 'walking out' with a frail Jewish girl, a trainee nurse at Addenbrooke's Hospital, who spoke with a thick Hungarian accent and who bore a tattoo on her left forearm comprising the letter 'A' and a five-figure number.
The couple – her name was Rebekka – seemed very much in love, but on the eve of marital bliss, which is always the time when fate strikes its cruellest blow, Rebekka, who had survived horrors unimaginable, was run over in a gruesomely mundane road accident within sight of the hospital where she worked. A distraught Bertram Browne resigned himself to bachelorhood, entered the teaching profession and returned to his native Yorkshire, one of the spikiest and meanest-spirited of his Cambridge tutors asking cruelly which of those three activities was supposed to be a penance.
Yet nothing in his past life, or his present one as a senior master at Ash Grange, had prepared him for Ada Braithwaite's appeal for help on that dark, wintry night.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Margery Allingham's Albert Campion returns in Mr Campion's fault by Mike Ripley. Copyright © 2016 Mike Ripley. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Previous Titles by Mike Ripley,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Map,
Chapter One: Tremors,
Chapter Two: Situation(s) Suddenly Vacant,
Chapter Three: Great North Road,
Chapter Four: 'no Extras, no Vacations, and Diet Unparalleled.',
Chapter Five: Dragons' Den,
Chapter Six: Eminently Practical,
Chapter Seven: Ghost-Hunters of the Upper IV,
Chapter Eight: Sit. Rep.,
Chapter Nine: Scraps,
Chapter Ten: Men Only,
Chapter Eleven: Platelayers' Interlude (Off-Duty),
Chapter Twelve: Prep,
Chapter Thirteen: Flockton Thick, Flockton Thin,
Chapter Fourteen: Man on a Mission,
Chapter Fifteen: The Feast Witch,
Chapter Sixteen: All Is Dross,
Chapter Seventeen: The Noisy Ghost,
Chapter Eighteen: Investigations,
Chapter Nineteen: Prisoner's Friend,
Chapter Twenty: Love Lane,
Chapter Twenty-One: Pepper's Ghost,
Chapter Twenty-Two: The High Place,
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Dark Place,
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Very Important Person Travels North,