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125 pages

English

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If you think that religion, sex, the aristocracy and mystery might make a good crime novel, TRY THIS ONE!A police investigation into the violent death of a part-time cathedral verger stalls for lack of incriminating evidence. However, three people have a close interest in clearing the matter up where the police have failed: the dead man's sister, anxious to see justice done, and two of the police suspects, both released without charge but keen to clear their names. Striking out on their own, each approaches the murder from a different perspective: book-trafficking on the black market; revenge by an extremist religious organisation for the dead man's betrayal of them; and retaliation in a case of blackmail. The police continue to maintain that the murder was committed out of sexual anger, even though they have no proof apart from the circumstances of the verger's death.Eventually DI Moat and his assistant DS Stockwell, from the North Yorkshire Force, take a hand. Moat pays his predecessors in the investigation, both professional and amateur, the compliment of taking their findings seriously - but comes up with an idea of his own.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

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Publié par	Pneuma Springs Publishing
Date de parution	21 mars 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782282839
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Fearful Madness

Julius Falconer
Copyright
First Published in 2013 by Pneuma Springs Publishing
A Fearful Madness Copyright © 2013 Julius Falconer
Julius Falconer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Book cover image - "Hypnotic tunnel to the light" by "Piku/Piotr Zabicki"
Mobi eISBN: 9781782282754 Epub eISBN: 9781782282839 PDF eBook eISBN: 9781782282914 Paperback ISBN: 9781782282617
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: admin@pneumasprings.co.uk W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Dedication

This book is dedicated to ‘Dr Leonard Croft’, whose magisterial work, The Master, inspired portions of it.

*****
Acknowledgement
The catalogue entry on p. 88-89 is reproduced with permission from the website of Peter Harrington, 100 Fulham Road, Chelsea (www.peterharrington.co.uk).

*****
Foreword
This book is a piece of shameless and unadulterated fiction – but the incident in chapter 1, on which it is based, took place as reported in the press and so is wholly in the public domain. I have altered all names and concealed the location, and I am happy to inform the reader that the seemingly less than competent police exposed in the narrative of this first chapter did not belong to any British or American force.
The Novel
1
It has been said, by whom and when I have forgotten, that the four ingredients of a good story are religion, sex, aristocracy and mystery. In line with this recipe, one practised hand penned the following line:
‘My God,’ said the duchess, ‘I’m pregnant. I wonder whodunnit.’
This might qualify as the shortest short story ever told – and I doubt whether it could be expressed in more compressed form even in an inflected language. The following account of the case of a death by curtain-tie will, I hope, provide you with more extended interest on the basis of the same recipe. It begins with sex and religion, and, if the circumstances strike you as sordid, I cannot help it: I recount the facts as I find them, and they are a necessary prelude to what follows. To protect the living, I have altered all the names, and we shall locate the events in an unnamed city. The aristocracy (but alas! not a duchess) and the mystery follow in due course. The events begin with the discovery, the day following his death, of the near-naked body of a seventy-three-year-old retired teacher and part-time cathedral verger, James Thwaites, who had been hit on the head and then strangled with a curtain-tie, which was still round his neck. Four days after the murder, a fellow-parishioner and fellow-cathedral worker, Jonas Chimes, was arrested on suspicion of murder, his motive being resentment at a man who had made unwelcome advances. The parish was shaken to its foundations. The clergy refused to discuss the matter: they commented only that the events besmirched the cathedral’s reputation; that the events did not concern the general public or the press; that the matter was not important. The parishioners were more forthcoming. The fact of their verger’s homosexuality came as a surprise to most, although one commented that ‘they might have guessed, his house was furnished so carefully – often an indication of a man with that sort of problem’. The general feeling, however, was that Jonas Chimes was an unlikely murderer. This was all in the July of that year.

The cathedral gradually regained some of its customary composure – until March of the following year. Chimes’ lawyer, Josephine Finch, became concerned that the police had not yet produced a single piece of evidence against her client, although the prisoner’s statement was said to have contained a full confession. She demanded to see the video of the interrogation, and on it, although her client was certainly confused and hesitant, he made no such admission. The officer in charge of the case was reprimanded, suspended and finally dismissed from the force.

The investigation, handed to another team, then took three different directions. Traces of semen on the victim’s underwear, which had been originally ignored, were found to belong to another parishioner, sixty-two-year-old Matthias Biddulph, who at first denied any relationship with the deceased but eventually confessed to weekly meetings for sexual purposes: every Tuesday, after lunching together at a particular café, they went back to the verger’s house to watch pornographic films and provide mutual relief. This was the last straw for the parishioners, who could see no end to the squalid saga. The police had still not identified the finger-prints found on the statuette believed to be the weapon used to hit the deceased. And a neighbour testified to having seen a bearded man outside James Thwaites’ house on the evening of the murder.

As for the constabulary high-ups, they were not this time to be hurried into endorsing a hasty conclusion. Mr Biddulph was merely ‘a witness’. The investigation was proceeding normally with the routine identification of all Mr Thwaites’ partners, including particularly the bearded gentleman. As far as Jonas Chimes, now released from prison, was concerned, he protested that his life was destroyed. ‘The cathedral was my life,’ he said, ‘all the family I had. I can’t ever go there again, so many people still believe me guilty.’ With his round spectacles and child-like face, it was difficult to believe him capable of a vicious murder. He explained that he had had a painful childhood. Abandoned by his parents and brought up by a woman who beat him and left scars on his face to prove it, he became an introverted and solitary adult whose sole comforts were his work as a bookshop-assistant and the cathedral, where he carried out menial tasks. The week before the murder he had spent on retreat at a remote centre in the Welsh hills, undergoing short fasts, enduring silence and listening to twice-daily talks from the retreat-master. ‘This priest,’ he said, ‘spoke of his happy childhood and the many joys of his family life. I found this very difficult to deal with.’ He returned home at the end of his retreat in a state of confusion and physically ill.
He telephoned a doctor, but, when no doctor came, he persuaded a friend to drive him at once to a psychiatric hospital. He was kept in for forty-eight hours – the forty-eight hours immediately following James Thwaites’ murder. A deacon attached to the cathedral who visited him in the hospital recorded Jonas Chimes’s ‘delirious remarks on death’ and ramblings about having ‘murdered the bishop’. Two days later, three policemen barged into his house, put him against the wall, handcuffed him and threw him into a police van without a word of explanation. Later, one of them claimed that a surveillance camera in the town had caught him entering the dead man’s house. (This was proved later to be sheer bluff.) Chimes confessed that, if he had done it, he had no recollection of it. As the accusations continued, he began to believe he might be guilty of the murder. He recounted Thwaites’ advances. ‘How handsome you look,’ the dead man had told him, ‘in your white surplice.’ He rejected the advances, and Thwaites stopped; but if the police asserted he was guilty of murder, perhaps he was. On paper he was said to have confessed to killing Thwaites ‘by accident’, but the video contained the record of no such confession. Chimes moved out of the city and was living a withdrawn life - in the hope that the case would be solved and he completely exonerated – when he disappeared.
2
If you know North Yorkshire, you will know also that the county is compact except for the southern projection of the Selby district, which pokes out into what would otherwise be East or West Yorkshire. If you proceed a fraction south of due west from Selby and cross the A1s old and new, you come to a haven of tranquillity bordered by the bird sanctuary at Fairburn Ings on the south and the A63 on the north, by the old Roman road, the modern A656, on the west (beyond which lies west Yorkshire) and by the A1 on the east. These few square miles of near-paradise centre on the villages of Ledsham (pop. 162) and Ledston (pop. 400). The National Gazeteer of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of 1868 has this to say of the former:
The surface is boldly undulating and well wooded. The soil is in general fertile, and in parts luxuriantly rich. The substratum abounds with coal and limestone, which are extensively worked. The village is situated in a vale near the source of a rivulet which flows through it [to join the Aire at Fairburn Ings].
Of Ledston the same source has this comment:
The surface is varied and the land extremely fertile. Ledstone Hall is situated in the midst of a wooded park enclosed within a stone wall. It was formerly the seat of the Witham family, and afterwards of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford.
One of the area’s glories is the network of well-maintained and well-used footpaths threading through the woods, fields, lanes and equestrian gallops, and the estates of both local mansions, Ledston Hall and Ledston Park (or Lodge). If you do not believe me, you have only to consult the hundreds of geographers online!

In a cul-de-sac known as Park Lane, whence a footpath leads up through woodland and then the parkland of Ledston Lodge towards the A1, there stands a modern c