Policeman's Perplexity: Huntley-in-the-Bog Mysteries, #2

By James Court

The year started well in this backwater of rural Dorset, with a double wedding, but then women began to go missing, only to turn up dead.

Singing brick-layers, Dean Martin lookalikes and the voluptuous village temptress ensure that life is never dull in the little village of Huntley-in-the-Bog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Court
• Release date: Feb 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386893127

James Court

James was brought up in Hove, Sussex, on the slopes of the South Downs, but with some of his childhood time spent in rural Huntingdonshire. From an early age he wrote fiction, including co-writing a well received comic pantomime for the local YMCA in his teens. James is best known for his humorous novels. Especially his series of four volumes describing life in Peckham, South London, in the 1960s. The Peckham Novels are set in a factory, staffed by idiots and run by an incompetent boss, until the beautiful Tracey Mulligan takes a hand in its management. They are quirky, comedic and highly improbable. One reviewer described them as ‘The Carry On’ team meet Tom Sharpe’. Book 1 - Strudwick's Successor Book 2 - Mulligan's Revenge Book 3 - Paint the Town Red Book 4 - Farewell to Peckham Also set in the late sixties is The Parsonage Plots, another comedic novel set around a number of idiosyncratic allotment plot holders. Set in Bournemouth in the 1960s, Percy’s Predicament tells the tale of lost love, and crime in the world of accountancy. But not everybody is what they claim to be, and bets on the colour of hippy’s nail varnish are an established office pastime. Moving back in time to 1955, Publican’s Progress is a Wodehouse style humorous murder mystery set in rural Dorset. The main character is a young man who has always wanted to run a pub. But, like the wishes granted by fairies to greedy children, when he does get offered a tenancy he quickly finds that having your wish come true does not always end happily, and life can get very complicated. Then the body count starts to rise... James’s humorous rural romantic two part novel, The Whitedown Chronicles, which is set in post-war Kent, describes an isolated community as it struggles to put tragedy behind it. James is a member of a group of writers who collectively form the INCA Project. The project is a set of like-minded authors who aspire to meet a simple criterion as set down by the late Oscar Wilde, who said, and I paraphrase here, "There are no such things as bad books. They are well written or badly written, that is all."

Book preview

Edition Number: 1

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters and locations are the subject of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locations or objects, existing or existed is purely coincidental.

It is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the writer’s prior consent, electronically or in any form of binding or cover other than the form in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Replication or distribution of any part is strictly prohibited without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Copyright © February 2019

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781386893127

DEDICATION

For Mark.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With thanks to my proof reader, Margaret and the members of the Inca Project whose encouragement inspired me to write this sequel to Publican’s Progress. 

CONTENTS

Policeman's Perplexity

1.   THEIR HAPPY DAY

2.   Night Exercises

3.   Freddy in Charge

4.   An Entertaining Week

5.   Married Life

6.   Find the Lady

7.   Found the Lady

8.   A Mournful Morning

9.   A Body of Evidence

10.   The Finger of Suspicion

11.   The Investigation Moves Ahead

12.   An Early Arrest is Anticipated

13.   A Man is Helping Police with their Enquiries

14.   The Charges of the Lighting Brigade

15.   Canteen Tea is Not the Food of Love!

16.   Bringing a Girl Home To Meet Mum

17.   The Grand Opening

18.   An Arrest is Made

19.   Enquiries Continue

20.   Eating Out In Style

21.   Sleepy Summer Days

22.   Sea, Sun, Sand & Steam

Their Happy Day

The little Norman church in Huntley Major was packed, as friends and relatives squeezed together on the pews to witness the double wedding that was about to take place. Many members of the congregation had anticipated Pete and Irene’s eventual wedding for some time, ever since Pete was first seen walking hand in hand around Wareham with her. They were so ideally suited to each other, and the event they were about to witness had somehow seemed inevitable to everybody who knew the couple.

But Irene’s best friend, Elizabeth, marrying Pete’s best friend, Arthur, had come as a complete surprise to many, including Arthur. Firstly, their rapid courtship had taken place out of the public eye in the sleepy little village of Huntley-in-the-Bog, and mostly conducted indoors in the privacy of the primitive inn that Arthur had taken over the tenancy of. Secondly, they were so obviously mismatched.

Arthur was an intense studious individual, devoted to pursuing his dream of running a pub: a workaholic with little time for anything else, including girls. It was not that he was adverse to female company, simply that he had never met a girl who could hold her own in a conversation about the specific gravity and acidity of cider, or the correct storage temperature of cask conditioned stout.

In contrast, Elizabeth was an outdoor type, revelling in contact sports, camping, hiking and beating up boys who had the temerity to make advances towards her. But from the moment that Elizabeth met Arthur she knew that he was the one for her, and she had immediately set about convincing her chosen partner that it was his desire as well.

Arthur and Elizabeth had initially been introduced to each other by Irene, who at the time had assured him that her best friend only wanted a job away from home, not a romance.

It was not that Arthur was opposed to the idea of a romantic relationship with the Amazon-like Elizabeth, for the longer he knew her the more he became enamoured with her. He marvelled at her devotion to him, and her domestic skills. Skills like skinning a rabbit for dinner, disarming and seeing off armed poachers, lifting full beer barrels, and making fluffy scrambled eggs from old stocks of wartime dried egg powder. It was simply that Arthur was romantically inept, and totally inexperienced with women. The idea of romance had never entered his head, and her initial overtures to him were so totally unexpected. But thrown together in the isolated run-down inn, their romance developed at a pace which took their friends by complete surprise when Elizabeth announced their betrothal.

Even with good intentions on both sides of this unlikely romance, it was surprising that their love had blossomed against a background of seven murder investigations in and around the inn which Arthur and Elizabeth now ran. But blossom it did, and when Irene suggested to Elizabeth that they not only had a double wedding, but also honeymooned together in Torquay, she readily agreed, and rushed to inform her true love of the date of their impending nuptials.

And so, on the first weekend after Easter, the two joyful couples were now minutes away from that commitment that the optimistic parson always expects to be followed by a blissful lifetime together, despite evidence to the contrary all around him. Even in this apparently happy congregation, gathered to witness the couples affirmation of their commitment, and subsequently share their celebration in a pub fully stocked and owned by Arthur, there was ample evidence that the vicar’s outlook was over optimistic.

In the third row of pews sat builder, Freddy Malloy. Freddy was a man with numerous short-lived romances and three failed marriages behind him, and an eager Maude Appleby sitting beside him secretly hoping to become wife number four.

Sitting on his own in the back row, with a PSV licence badge pinned to the lapel of his demob suit alongside his war medals, was a man known to most present as Old Harry, despite the fact that he was only in his late forties.  Harry was the captain of the darts team at the Black Bear in Wareham, and the best known bus driver in that town. His fame as a bus driver was due to his obsessive desire to work overtime over the years, putting in more passenger miles than any other driver at the depot, and chatting to all the customers he met in the ten years since leaving the army.

Harry’s obsession for overtime was not driven by money, rather it was a ploy that had allowed him to spend as little time as possible at home with his sharp tongued wife, and her ever present even sharper tongued sister. Harry’s miserable married life had ended recently with the rather tragic death of his wife in a workplace accident. For Harry the tragedy was mitigated by relief, as his sister-in-law moved out shortly afterwards. But his marital experience had put Harry off female company, and he had made no attempt to fill the ‘and friend’ position that his wedding invitation permitted him to bring.

Soon to escort the lovely Irene Goodknight down the aisle would be Dr Horatio Goodknight, a man whose married life had been dominated by a dragon of a woman, until he finally fought back, and bested her in an argument about his beloved daughter’s choice of husband.

There are always a few last minute worries before a wedding, and a double wedding naturally doubles the number of opportunities for things to go wrong. Elizabeth’s father worked in the United States, and his travel plans to attend his daughter’s wedding had been interrupted. Initially he was delayed by thunder storms in Texas, and later by dense fog. Elizabeth heard from her father late on the night before the wedding, while he hung around in New York’s Idlewild Airport waiting for the fog to lift. It was a brief call to say that the fog was lifting, and they should be speeding on their way soon, but it contained no absolute certainty of timely arrival.

Irene’s mother had left the family home last autumn, and lodged with one sister after another in protest at Irene’s father’s refusal to object to her daughter marrying beneath her. She was not expected to attend, and had returned her invitation to her husband, torn into four pieces to empathise her strength of feeling on the matter, and her disassociation from the event. The good doctor had not gone into details of the state of the returned gold edged card, and simply told his daughter that her mother had decided not to attend.

In contrast to Irene’s mother Pete’s parents had been supportive of Pete and Irene from the start, for she was exactly what his mother would have wished for her only son: bright, pretty, a pleasant personality, and from a good social background that equalled or exceeded her own. Pete’s father also liked the cheerful blonde who always had a smile for him when she came to see Pete at work.

Arthur’s mother was a widow, who had parted from her own recent paramour, and who had lately been helping out at the isolated inn owned by her son. There was a point in time when the four young lovers thought that they would only muster a total of four parents between them to witness their union, let alone a full complement of eight. But nevertheless the day had arrived, a large number of friends had joined the few more distant family members to celebrate the occasion, and they were hopeful of a seventy-five percent parental turnout.

Elizabeth Black’s parents’ flight from America eventually landed at Heathrow, leaving them with a tight two and a half hours to get to Wareham in Dorset where a friend of Arthur waited for them at the railway station, to rush them the ten miles into the rural backwater of Huntley Major. Graham and Patricia Black knew they were to be met at the station, but had no idea they would be travelling locked in the back of a police van, furiously driven by PC 133 John Harris as he made liberal use of the blue light and bells, and in the company of the landlord and his wife from the Black Bear hotel.

Unfortunately the Blacks’ luggage had not accompanied them, and was currently believed to be revolving round a conveyor belt in Dallas, having been rerouted back to that city when the Blacks changed planes at New York.

With only the clothes he stood up in, her father had no opportunity to shave, or change into something more formal for the ceremony. But he was ready to proudly walk his daughter down the aisle in his loud check shirt, crumpled, yoked and embroidered denim Western suit and silver toe-capped boots. Deprived of fresh air and daylight in the back of the faintly urine smelling van, the Blacks were pleasantly surprised when the doors opened to provide a view of the picturesque old village of Huntley Major, and its stone built little Norman church.

Even before the van came into sight, Elizabeth heard it approaching as the tyres protested and twin bells rang. She scrambled from the limousine where she had anxiously sat with her friend Irene and Dr Goodknight, wondering if the good doctor was going to have to perform double escort duty, and give away a bride that was not his to give. Assisting her father from the van, and clasping his arm she rushed him to the great oak door, where she turned to smile at her parent. She stooped and planted a lipstick laden kiss on his unshaven cheek, as they paused for a moment to allow him to recover his composure, after experiencing PC Harris’s blue light style of driving.

A few seconds later Dr Goodknight, dressed more conservatively in a dark grey three piece suit, got out of the limousine where he had been waiting with the two brides, and escorted his lovely daughter, Irene, down the same aisle to join her friend and their future husbands. The doctor waited as the front row shuffled along to make space for him beside the man who looked as if he was more suitable dressed for branding cattle on the open range.

Hi, drawled the man who Elizabeth had rushed to greet as the rear doors of the police van opened, and he extended his hand to the doctor. I’m Graham, Elizabeth’s father, and this is Patricia. Sorry we didn’t make it in time for the dinner last night. Pan Am let us down.

He motioned towards a woman beside him, clad equally conspicuously, in an elaborately frilled dress that would have been more at home on the porch of a plantation house in the Deep South.

Goodknight smiled as he noted how Elizabeth’s mother had at least managed to conform to the convention of ladies wearing a hat in church. He had little idea of women’s fashion, but doubted that the baseball cap, embroidered with the name of the oil company her husband worked for, went with the dress. He knew the woman by sight, for the Black family had been on his list of patients for some years, but the Blacks were a robust family needing little medical attention, and Graham was frequently out of the country, making him a rare visitor to the doctor’s surgery.

Pleased to see you. How’s the job going in Texas?

Graham Black returned the smile, and leaned sideways to speak quietly.

Just fine. How’s doctoring going in Wareham?

From their ornately carved, gated private pew beside the organ loft, Ralph, the eighteenth Lord Shuffell-Worth, and his Lady wife Regina, looked down on the congregation. Regina generally looked down on the masses which she considered the Almighty had tasked her class with governing, but today she was in an amiable mood and looking down was merely a consequence of an elevated seating position. Beside her sat their son, Leopold, sketching furiously in a small pocket book.

I say, Ginny, remarked his Lordship, as he eventually remembered where he had previously seen a face on the brides’ side front row of pews. There’s our accountant. What’s he doing at Thingamy’s wedding?

I wish you’d try to remember that her name’s Elizabeth, dear, and he’s her uncle. Don’t you remember? She introduced us.

Nonsense, Ginny, my love. We met on the boat back from India. I was coming home on leave, and you were being sent home for being drunk at the Gymkhana, and falling off your pony in the second chukka. Besides, I doubt she was even born when we first met.

No, dear, replied her Ladyship, with a patience born of much practise. She introduced us to her uncle. You must remember, she thought that Randolph was cheating us, and suggested he looked at the estate’s accounts for us. It was just before the police took Randolph away.

Lord Shuffell-Worth frowned as she spoke of their disgraced oldest son. He lost interest in the topic, and concentrated on watching a second woman in a white gown being escorted sedately towards the altar rail.

I say, Ginny. You don’t suppose that fool of a vicar has booked two weddings at the same time do you?

No dear. That’s Elizabeth’s friend Irene. It’s a double wedding. It said so on the invitation.

I didn’t think that sort of thing was legal here, my sweet. I know that the postman in The Bog had three wives at the same time, but in the end they arrested him for it. I certainly wasn’t aware that the church condoned such things.

Regina Shuffell-Worth sighed resignedly.

No, dear. Irene is Elizabeth’s friend, and she is marrying Arthur’s friend Peter. Surely you remember Peter, don’t you? He used that van of his to bring us all the stuff from Randolph’s flat and house when we sold them. All that furniture and silver that had gone missing from the east wing when we were in London for the Coronation.

Ralph frowned again. He would have preferred not to have been reminded of his heir, who was currently being detained by Her Majesty while he was waiting for his appeal for clemency to be ruled upon. He switched his gaze to the vicar, who was standing anxiously waiting for the second bride to settle beside her friend.

Of the four young people now standing in the transept before the vicar, the most striking of them was Elizabeth Black. She was by far the tallest of the four, and also the broadest: although it was a shape created by large bones and heavy muscles rather than over-indulgence in food. Stood beside the more slightly built Irene it was like trying to place a shire-horse and a pony together to pull a two horse carriage.

The organist stopped playing, and the vicar launched into his well rehearsed order of service.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today...

The service got under way. The two grooms stepped sideways to make a gap. Two proud fathers handed their daughters forward to enter into that state that their religion dictated to be necessary, if they wished to fully enjoy their chosen partner’s company. The congregation studied the cleric’s voice, and began to try to guess if the sermon would be long or brief, interesting or boring.

Lord Shuffell-Worth watched Elizabeth for a moment, and for some reason which currently escaped his fluffy mind, she reminded him of beef stew. He drifted off into a pleasant daydream of evenings spent in the inn that bordered his estate, where Elizabeth cooked in a giant enamel pot, and the only choice at meal times was usually with or without dumplings.

...if anyone present knows of any reason why these two couples should not be joined together in holy matrimony...

Yes, I do! Stop the wedding! shouted a shrill voice from the back of the church. She can’t marry him. He’s in trade!

Four dozen heads turned to see who was objecting, and which couple they were objecting to. Irene’s mother stood at the back of the nave, her face livid with rage at the thought of her daughter becoming the wife of a shopkeeper, even if Pete and his parents did own a very profitable string of hardware shops spread throughout southern Dorset.

Irene turned towards her father.

Daddy, I thought you said she returned the invitation? she said anxiously, as her mother stormed down the aisle.

Doctor Goodknight shrugged his shoulders.

Yes she did! He raised his voice a little as he turned to face his daughter’s future husband, Pete, you explain to the vicar while I sort her out.

Horatio Goodknight, respected general practitioner and father of the bride, stepped into the aisle and prepared to block his estranged wife’s progress towards the hitherto happy couples. But the doctor had an unexpected ally. Half way down the aisle a burly figure stepped from a pew, and laid a heavy hand on Mrs Goodknight’s shoulder as she passed him. Powerful fingers dug deeply, and painfully, into the muscle, stopping her in her tracks. Constable Charles Hiscock, on his last day of service before retirement from Dorset Constabulary, pulled and wheeled her round to face him. She stood there, eye height to the whistle chain on his imposing ceremonial uniform, and opened her mouth to abuse her assailant.

But no words came out, as her raging brain slowly recognised that the eighteen stone of uniformed man had both the physical and legal power to dictate her future actions.

Now, missus. Let’s take this outside, before I have to arrest you for a breach of the peace.

But he’s not good enough for her. He’s a bloody shopkeeper, she shouted loudly, to ensure that the vicar heard the substance of her objection.

That’s not a valid reason to stop a marriage! And mind your language in church, or I’ll have another reason to arrest you, replied Constable Hiscock sternly.

Mrs Goodknight glared at Hiscock. She had not anticipated the forces of law and order interfering in her plan to object to her daughter’s marriage. She stood impassively, glaring at the constable for a moment, before PC Hiscock side-stepped, bent her arm back into a half Nelson, and propelled her towards the exit. As he neared the rear of the church, a dark suited man stepped from a back pew, and opened the door. Hiscock pushed her out.

Thanks, Mike, said Hiscock, as he passed.

PC Mike Parsons, the suited man, nodded and closed the door behind them. Parsons then took up a position inside the church, with his back to the door, as he listened to to the muffled sound of Charlie Hiscock giving the woman a stern lecture on correct behaviour at weddings... Especially the weddings of people he considered to be close friends.

The lecturing and angry responses petered out, as Hiscock offered the woman the choice of leaving the area quietly of her own volition, or leaving it in the dark blue van parked along the road destined for the cells at Wareham police station. Wisely, seeing she could do no more to prevent what she considered to be an unsuitable wedlock, she chose to leave of her own accord.

A relieved Charlie Hiscock, who had no desire to spend his afternoon in the charge room of a police station, watched her slow departure until he was confident that she would not return. Then he gently tapped on the door, was admitted by Parsons, and returned to his pew. Irene, emerging from the vestry after signing the register, gave Charlie one of those smiles that her new father-in-law so looked forward to.

The commotion had woken Lord Shuffell-Worth from his reverie, and he glanced around as he fought to remember where he was, and why. He watched the smartly suited Mike Parsons as he returned to the rear row of pews, and struggled to recall why his face seemed familiar, but associated with less presentable attire.

I say, Ginny, he exclaimed in surprise, as Mike settled back in his seat. There’s that parson chappie who we met at Arthur’s place. He’s not got his dog collar on, but he seems to have come up in the world. Weren’t you going to talk to the bishop for him, and get him a living at The Bog? Is he working here?

Hush, Ralph, snapped Lady Shuffell-Worth abruptly.

A month or so before last Christmas her husband had assured her that the shabbily dressed Mike was a parson who was down on his luck. He had urged her to use her influence with a distant cousin of hers, who happened to be a bishop, in order to find Mike a living. It was only when she approached the man, to give him details of the interview she had arranged for him, that she discovered he was, in fact, an undercover police officer named Parsons, who was investigating the murder of a previous landlord of the inn in the guise of a tramp.

She’d had a very embarrassing few minutes talking at cross purposes with the constable, until she realised the complete muddle that her fluffy brained husband had made of his own contacts with the officer. Constable Mike Parsons assured her that there was no harm done,