Gallows Walk

By Giles Ekins

In 1950s United Kingdom, West Garside is a small, rather uneventful town. That is, until a bungled bank robbery leaves two people dead.

Former Battle Of Britain pilot and now detective, DI Christopher Yarrow is called in to lead the manhunt. Soon, a burnt out getaway car and some vital clues reveal more about the gunman's identity.

With every step, the killer seems to be a step ahead of Yarrow and his team. Can they find him, and bring him to justice before more lives are lost?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Jan 21, 2022
• ISBN: 4824103509

Book preview

PROLOGUE

WEST GARSIDE. WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE, CIRCA 1954.

It was the same nightmare, the same nightmare he always had.

Trapped inside his doomed Hurricane fighter as it spiralled down towards the unforgiving, fatal, ground below. The air flailed through the smashed canopy, battering his bloody face. He hauled back on the joystick, desperately trying to pull the stricken plane out of the deathly spin. Blood streamed down his face and into his eyes and he could tell that bullets from the Messerschmitt 109 fighter had smashed into his cockpit, wounding his left leg and hand. the pain a searing throbbing immensity of agony.

Desperately trying to control the spin, he screamed in pain as the crippled Hurricane slowly pulled out of the spin and into a shallow dive.

But the aircraft is still mortally wounded, and the reprieve was only temporary, a crash inevitable. The canopy is smashed and buckled, jammed tight, immoveable, his goggles are shattered, impacting his vision as he vainly tried to wipe the blood away with his gloved hand.

The ground rushed beneath the plane as he frantically searched for a flat landing site, but the Hurricane was now unflyable, totally unresponsive to damaged controls and was headed straight towards a coppice of tall oak trees atop a mound, the only hillock, the only trees in an ocean of green Kentish fields.

The gallant, wounded Hurricane flew straight towards the trees and there was nothing that Yarrow could do to avert the crash, when, as if as guided by a Divine hand, the plane suddenly veered to the right, avoiding the menacing trees. He screamed as the plane smashed to the ground between the trees, entangled in tree-trunks and branches and all was blackness.

He awoke from the nightmare, awaking as always in a heap of tangled sheets and blankets, his heart pounding, his body damp with sweat, his sightless eye throbbing with dull pain.

It was still dark as he stumbled across the bedroom and into the bathroom, fighting the urge to vomit. He washed his face in cold water and made his way downstairs. The house was still and quiet, but full of memories, memories of joy and the painful memories of loss, the ache still raw and crushing.

Detective Inspector Christopher Yarrow of the West Garside CID lit a Players cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs. He is a heavy smoker, even though he was aware of the dangers, having read a story in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper confirming the Ministry of Health’s recent warnings that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer.

He filled the kettle and then brewed a pot of tea, the time was when he would have reached for the whisky bottle rather than a tea pot, but those drink-sodden days were now past. He now rarely drinks, occasionally a beer or a glass of wine, but always with the realisation how easy it would be to sink back into the slough of despond, to wallow in self-pity and misery.

After drinking his tea, he washed his cup and saucer, emptied the tea pot and swilled it out, watching intently as the tea leaves swirled in rotation around the plughole, mimicking the deathly spiral that had so nearly killed him and he pondered on the quirk of fate that had guided that mortally crippled plane to avoid those killer trees, the second time that he had been shot down during the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940.

If fate did intervene, what did fate now require of him? He did not know; fate had not been so very kind to him since.

CHAPTER ONE

DI Yarrow lived in a stone-built bow-fronted Victorian semi-detached house in Carling Green, to the west side of West Garside on the upper slopes of Monksbane Hills, the rolling bank of hills stepping up from the River Gar around which West Garside had grown and expanded.

Nobody seems to know why the town was called West Garside when there is no North or East or South Garside, but ever since the founding of the town in the mid-18th century as an offshoot of Sheffield’s steel and cutlery business, it has been called West Garside.

The hills continue westwards through a series of valleys and ridges before rising up into the Pennines themselves, the stretching vistas of heather-clad moorland and deep shrouded valleys with villages untouched by time since before the war, a harsh country of rugged farms and equally rugged farmers, whilst to the northeast coal mines provide another major source of employment.

To the side of Yarrow’s house stood a lean-to wooden garage in need of painting and every morning when he comes to get into his car, Yarrow tells himself he would do the painting on his next free weekend. But somehow that never seemed to happen, and Yarrow knew that since the death of his beloved wife Marie-Hélène, he had allowed the house to deteriorate.

The garden was unkempt and overrun with weeds and although he cut the lawns when the grass got too long, the rose beds, once his wife’s pride and joy, had not been pruned or weeded and he chided himself, as he did every morning, for allowing her memory to be diminished by his apathy.

‘This weekend for sure, Marie-Hélène,’ he promised. ‘For sure.’

By contrast, his car, a creamy white 4 door 2.5 litre 1952 Riley RME saloon was immaculate. He regularly washed and polished the bodywork, the chrome bumpers, door handles, headlight and side lights all glinting and sparkling in the sharp morning light. The interior leather of the seats was redolent with the tang of lemon scented leather polish, the burred walnut dashboard wax polished to a mirror gleam and he knew that the time he lavished on his car was at the expense of his house and garden.

He slowly backed out of his garage and drove down the hill towards the town centre and Endeavour House, the home of West Garside police and CID.

Parking the Riley in the yard behind the red brick police station, a building so ugly that someone had once remarked that a brick shithouse would look prettier. Constructed in 1928, it was a brick and stone purpose-built police station on four stories and basement with cast-iron columns and beams, small casement windows, slow elevators, poor ventilation and insufficient toilet facilities, toilets which always smelled of sewage no matter how often the cleaners put bleach down the sinks and urinals.

Almost as soon it was built, it had proved inadequate for purpose, with cramped quarters, limited parking and insufficient storage for the mountain of paperwork that a police investigation generates.

As Yarrow walked into the station he stopped by the front desk to have a chat with the duty Sergeant, Dave Armitage, whom Yarrow had known for many years. When Yarrow had first joined the force, it had been Armitage who had looked out for him, as he did all new green coppers. Armitage brought Yarrow up to date on the nights events, although there was nothing of any great consequence and then he turned away to answer the telephone as Yarrow made his way upstairs to the CID department.

It was 7.35 in the morning. As usual he was the first in, he did not sleep well and had been awake since long before dawn, disturbed as usual by the ferocity of his nightmare. Because his sleep pattern was so regularly broken, he had got into the habit of getting to work early, finding that the half hour or so before the other officers arrived helped clear his mind for the business of the day.

Christopher Yarrow, aged 36, the widower and partially blinded ex Battle of Britain fighter pilot and now Detective Inspector with the West Yorkshire Constabulary, was of medium height and build, with rugged good looks, looks seemingly enhanced by the web of faint white scars around his damaged eye and more than one female admirer had remarked that he looked a lot like Richard Todd, the popular film actor best known for his role as Robin Hood in the 1952 film ‘The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men.’ And like Todd, Christopher Yarrow had also been born in India, the son of a missionary in Peshawar, in the north-west of India, now in the recently created country of Pakistan.

But despite attention from several woman, mainly widows, Yarrow remained faithful to the memory of his beloved wife Marie-Hélène.

CHAPTER TWO

1940

The first time he had been shot down, he had been lucky.

He had just shot down a Dornier Do17 ‘Flying Pencil’ bomber (so called because of its long sleek and narrow airframe) when the Me 109 came out of the sun and shot away large pieces of his tail plane. ‘Green 2 baling out!’ he called through the RT, then undid his harness and disconnected the RT and his oxygen mask.

The canopy slid back easily and flipping the Hurricane onto its back, he fell out of the cockpit without difficulty, his parachute opening in a bloom of white silk above him. The Me 109 came round again and Yarrow thought the German was going to machine gun him as he swung helplessly in his parachute, it was not unknown for pilots to be shot in that way. Alan Bird had died like this and Polish pilots in the RAF routinely shot at German pilots dangling in their parachutes or flew so close above the parachute that the canopy would collapse from the backwash, sending the pilot plummeting to his death.

Polish pilots were even known to strafe German aircrew in dinghies after being brought down in the Channel, retribution for the destruction and dismemberment of their country. But this time the German pilot merely waggled his wings in acknowledgment of a fellow warrior of the skies and then turned away, fleeing back across the Channel before his fuel ran out.

The fields of Kent spread out before Yarrow like a Turkish carpet, bright greens and the gold of ripening corn, the red clay roof tiles of a village, a silver curl of a sunlight reflected river, a stand of dark-green-trees swaying lightly in the summer breeze, cows stolidly chewing their cud, the grey-blue haze of the Channel dotted with ships away in the distance as above a criss-cross pattern of con trails from the aerial battles shivered against the brilliant azure sky.

He landed safely in a turnip field but was immediately surrounded by farmers with pitchforks and scythes, thinking that he might a German agent dressed in RAF uniform. Foolishly he had scrambled without his wallet and identity card and, unable to convince the farmers that he was English, had been marched away to the nearest police station, luckier than at least one pilot he knew of who had been stabbed to death by farmers with pitchforks under suspicion of being a spy.

Still unable to convince anyone that he is an English pilot rather than a German spy, he was put in a cell with four Germans. They were the crew of a Dornier Do17 bomber, quite possibly the one that Yarrow had just shot down, the second kill to his name. He gave his squadron telephone number to the duty sergeant, asking him to contact the airfield to verify his story and expected to be freed as soon as somebody arrived to pick him up.

The Germans were friendly enough, one of them, Franz the bomb aimer, spoke good English and they bore him no animosity for possibly shooting them down. They had not been injured and had been able to safely bail out well before the bomber crashed to the ground in flames.

They were, they told him candidly, attached to Luftlotte 2, I Gruppe, stationed in Cormeilles-en-Vexin, just across the Channel in the Pas-de-Calais area. However despite the open friendliness of the Germans, Yarrow was far less forthcoming about his own squadron and airfield, making no mention that he flew with 249 squadron out of Boscombe Down airfield in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge.

The five airmen, four German and one Englishman shared cigarettes, swapped names and Werner the pilot, slightly older than the others, showed Yarrow photographs of his wife, a dumpy dough-faced woman staring wide eyed into the camera and two surprisingly beautiful daughters dressed in Hitler Youth uniforms, their long blonde hair in plaits, open faces shining in fervent adoration of the Führer.

The Germans were philosophical about their impending incarceration in a British prisoner of war camp; eagerly telling Yarrow that it was only a matter of time before Germany invaded England and they would be released.

Strange, he thought, the Germans have no difficulty in believing me to be English, but I can’t persuade my own people that I am.

‘Spitfire pilot, ja?’ asked Franz as they shared cigarettes.

‘No, Hurricane.’

‘Hurricane! Nein, nein.’ There was a heated discussion amongst the German aircrew before Franz turned back to Yarrow. ‘For us to be shot down by Spitfire, sehr gut, very good. Hurricane, no, not so good. Big shame,’ but this was said with a smile on his face and Werner went on to explain that among German fighter pilots, not bomber pilots, it was considered somewhat shameful to be shot down by a Hurricane.

Yarrow tried to explain that he had flown both Spitfires and Hurricanes and found the Hurricane the better fighter of the two, not quite so fast or so tight in the turn but a very stable gun platform able to absorb considerable punishment.

It was more than two hours later when the cell door opened and the Adjutant, Sq. Ldr Willoughby peered in. He took one look at Yarrow and shook his head. ‘No!’ he said, ‘I never saw this man before’ and the door slammed shut again.

‘Sir, it’s me Pilot Officer Yarrow, Christopher Yarrow,’ he shouted, but to no avail. The cell door remained resolutely closed, solid and unyielding.

The Germans thought it highly amusing. ‘Now you are one of us,’ Franz, the English speaker chortled, ‘You come with us to prison camp, we make you German pilot.’

Another hour went by before the door opened again and the Adjutant beckoned Yarrow out. ‘Next time’ he admonished as they got into his MG to drive back to the squadron airfield ‘make sure you carry your Identity Card’

CHAPTER THREE

1954

Taking a cup of tea from the station canteen to his office, Yarrow began to read through the files on his desk. He had sorted them into two piles, New Inquiries and Inquiries Proceeding. Investigations Completed files were sent down to Archives in the basement, a realm guarded by a troglodyte called Sergeant Maurice Capstone, of whom it was rumoured had rarely, if ever, left the archives since his appointment as Archives Officer seventeen years ago and had certainly never ever been seen outside Endeavour House in daylight.

However, Maurice Capstone had an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every single case file amongst the hundreds that had been deposited there over the years, case files that filled the endless yards of dusty shelving that lined the walls and down the narrow aisles of the archives section. Ask for a file for a crime committed fifteen years ago and after a moment’s contemplation, Capstone would raise his ponderous bulk and counting off the rows on pudgy fingers would make straight for the file in question.

Not that there was ever much serious crime, Garside was generally a quiet town, relatively crime free compared to its big sister Sheffield, 16 miles away on the A629.

Yarrow read a file picked out from amongst the New Inquiries pile.

The file concerned an allegation of assault, a Marjorie Forrester had accused an ex-boyfriend of assaulting her during an argument outside a pub.

‘Marcus’ he called to DS Marcus Harding, recently promoted following the retirement of one of the senior detectives, DS Arthur Millward. He passed the flimsy file to him.

‘Go and interview these two, Marjorie Forrester and Norman Craig and sort out the truth of the matter. My feeling is that she’s aggrieved over the break-up of their relationship and is looking for some cheap revenge. If so, read her the riot act, let her know she is lucky not to be charged. OK?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Yarrow then read the file on an alleged theft of jewellery by a cleaner from the house of her employer. The cleaner, Adelaide Milburn, had been accused of stealing a pair of diamond stud earrings from the home of Mrs Christina Wallace, an accusation she strenuously denied

Not without some misgivings, he assigned the case to DC Harry Rawlings. He did not think that Rawlings would handle the issue with sensitivity, but he had little option, being short-handed after Arthur Millward’s retirement. Rawlings he knew, was bitter and angry, resentful that he had been passed over for promotion, but Yarrow hoped that the passage of time would mollify Harry Rawlings somewhat and make him work that much harder to achieve promotion when the next vacancy arose.

But no, DC Harry Rawlings still seethed with anger, permanently in a fuming rage of resentment and umbrage. Furious. Knotted up so tight with bitterness, anger, frustration and resentment that he could barely bring himself to even speak to Marcus Harding.

Even though it was almost 3 months since he had been passed over, Rawlings still held deep rooted resentment against Harding. That resentment had grown and gathered strength like an oncoming storm rather than abating. He, Harry Rawlings, should have been made up to DS rather than Harding. He had more years in the job than Harding, had made more arrests than Harding and knew more about local villains than Harding ever would. Harding. Still wet behind the ears and he wasn’t even English.

OK, he might have British nationality because his Nazi mother managed to hook up and snare an English guy, but that doesn’t make him British and never will. No fucking way. He’s German for God’s sake. A Nazi. He even looked like a Nazi, tall and blond, he was the double of Reinhart Heydrich, author of the Final Solution.

In fact, Marcus had lived in England for almost 18 years. His natural father, Heinrich Müller, had been the editor of an anti-Nazi newspaper in Munich. One day in 1936 he had been beaten almost to death by a gang of Nazi brown shirts and later imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp where he had died from typhus.

His wife Magda and her 2 children, Marcus and Magdalena had fled to England in 1937, Magda eventually marrying Paul Harding, a roofing tiler, who adopted and raised both children as his own

Marcus loved his stepfather unreservedly, could barely remember his own natural father and considered himself as English as anyone. Not a Yorkshireman of course, nobody born outside the County borders could ever be accepted as a Yorkshireman, but he was English and spoke English without a hint of a German accent. He was not German, and most certainly not a Nazi, the Nazis had murdered his father, so how could he ever be considered a Nazi?

Ironically, during his National Service he had been posted to Germany and as his mother had insisted on him speaking German as well as English, he had been seconded to Military Intelligence, helping process suspected Nazi war criminals.

After completing his service he joined the police force, having never wanted to do anything else.

His promotion to DS at age 25 had come as a surprise to him, he had always assumed that Harry Rawlings, 34, who had more years in, would get promotion first. But when DS Arthur Millward had retired to grow prize leeks, DI Yarrow had put Marcus up for the job and station chief, Superintendent Trevor Bullock had agreed.

Yarrow had seen too much of the Harry Rawlings style of policing, learned from his mentor, a DCI called Terry Mason who was in Yarrow’s view, the very worst type of policeman. Mason was arrogant, sarcastic, bullying and condescending to his subordinates but creepily obsequious and fawning to his superiors, lazy and slipshod at his job; preferring to cut corners rather than do the leg work.

Yarrow was sure, but could not prove, that innocent men had gone down because Mason planted evidence or perjured himself in order to obtain a conviction and he could see that Harry Rawlings was headed down the same path.

Marcus Harding had tried to placate Rawlings after the promotion but he had seethed in anger from the day he had been overlooked and nothing that Marcus Harding could say to him could overcome that furious boiling sense of outrage and resentment.

‘Look, Harry,’ Marcus had said, ‘I didn’t ask for this promotion, OK I’ve sat the Sergeants exam the same as you and you should likely have got it before me, I know, but there it is, we’ve just got to get on with it and move on.’

‘Fuck off, Sergeant,’ and with that Rawlings gave a Nazi salute, shouted ‘Seig Heil’ and stomped off, refusing to speak to Marcus (whom he called Mucus behind his back) unless it was strictly necessary.

Yarrow could see all of this and Rawlings’s sullen stubborn anger and childish petulance only proved to Yarrow that he had made the right decision in strongly recommending Marcus for the vacant DS slot over Rawlings. Harry Rawlings would just have to live with it or put in a request to be transferred to Sheffield where promotion opportunities might be greater.

Yarrow worked through the rest of the paperwork, the bane of every coppers life, sending most of the routine cases downstairs for uniform to handle.

CHAPTER FOUR

1940

The next time!

The squadron had been scrambled to intercept a large force of bombers and escorts heading for the airfields of Kent and Essex and he was closing in on the Heinkel 111 bomber. He knew the Me 109 fighters were high above, but he ignored that, his job and that of the rest of his squadron was to shoot down the bombers making such devasting attacks on the fighter airfields. If the bombers got through and damaged the airfields beyond repair the war was lost. Let the Glory Boys in the Spitfires take care of the German fighters.

He closed in on the Heinkel, watching as the target grew larger in his gun sights.

Green One, David Clarke, the section leader was ahead to his right tracking another bomber, part of a massive fleet of over 200 Heinkel’s and Dornier’s from all of the Luftlotte 2 Staffels, escorted by several Jasta of Messerschmitt 109s. The third pilot in B Flight, Edward Morrisey, the Tail End Charlie, was behind to the left. The other planes from the squadron were lost to sight amongst the confused melee of fighters and bombers as from the corner of his eye he saw a Dornier going down in flames, followed down by a spiralling, smoking Hurricane, but not from 249 Squadron.

He lowered his seat as far as possible to reduce his profile and give him more protection. Switch on the guns, then the Aldis gunsight, fixing the calibration for a Heinkel 111 so that when the target filled the sight, wing to black-crossed wing, the range was right – three hundred yards. The Hurricane juddered as he fired, and he noted the check in airspeed as the sun-bright yellow tracer from the 8 wing-mounted Browning machine guns streaked across the airspace like an electrified hose and bits of the Heinkel began to fly away. He closed in, all eight guns firing straight into the circle of his gunsight, wanting to bring the range down to two hundred yards. He aimed for the wing root of the bomber, weaken the root sufficiently and the wing would fold in, bringing the bomber down.

The next time!

‘Break, break, break’, he heard Morrisey shouting through his headset. ‘Chris,109 on your tail. Break!’

Immediately he spun away, diving to the right, but the Me 109 followed him down in a tighter turn. A loud bang, the plane shuddered as each bullet from the Messerschmitt struck and the crippled plane spun away into the death-spiral. The canopy had shattered in the attack and he felt the shards of acrylic striking his face, blood streaming down, sharp needles of pain where broken glass from his smashed goggles pierced his left eye.

He fought the spiral, retarding the engine to idle since the power of the engine only increased