Crime in the Choir Read online

  CRIME IN

  THE CHOIR

  (DETECTIVE MARKHAM MYSTERY 1)

  CATHERINE MOLONEY

  Revised edition 2019

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  © Catherine Moloney

  First published as “A Walking Shadow.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Catherine Moloney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Epilogue

  The D.I. Gilbert Markham Series

  A Selection of Books You May Enjoy

  Glossary of English Slang for US readers

  Prologue

  Bromgrove Municipal Cemetery on the eve of the millennium. An appropriately miserable day for a teenager’s funeral. Cold, sodden and overcast. The dregs of winter, with dripping boughs scoring the sky like snapped guitar strings.

  Though not a fanciful man, it seemed to Detective Inspector Mike Bamber that the blackened walls of the little disused cemetery chapel on the south side – long abandoned in favour of the modern facilities on Bromgrove Avenue – bulged dropsically in the gloom as though from the accumulated damp of centuries.

  God, it was a dismal scene, with all those dark stone slabs glistening wetly and weathered headstones pressing in like a ghostly army.

  The sonorous words from the burial service echoed in his head.

  Sown in corruption… Man born of woman cometh up and is cut down like a flower.

  He swallowed hard as he thought of that picture on the coffin – the happy, laughing boy flushed with pride at a sporting triumph – and remembered the pitiful skeleton they had dragged from the slurry.

  They might bury the poor lad facing the east, Bamber said to himself, but he hadn’t really had a shot of life at all and his parents would never see the sun shining on their son’s bright golden head again.

  He took a long drag on his cigarette, looking across at the grave, denuded of its sheets of fake grass, a mound of sludgy earth waiting to be shovelled on top. It would be six months before it had a headstone. What would the grieving parents inscribe on it? Jonathan ‘Jonny’ Warr. Treasured memories...

  Now that everyone had left, the gravediggers too were seizing the chance to have a crafty fag. Nobody bothered him.

  Three boys gone missing together in the summer of 1997. Now they’d got one of them back, albeit in a coffin.

  Bamber shivered. He had a bad feeling about this case. The trail had gone cold long ago. Three ordinary lads. There one day and gone the next. As if a black hole had opened and sucked them in. A hole like the one where Jonny Warr lay mouldering.

  No good getting morbid. He’d be no use to the families like that. The ravaged face of Jonny’s mother was seared on his retina. The fancy send-off – all the great and good of Bromgrove out in force – wouldn’t comfort her when the night horrors struck.

  He took another fierce drag, wondering if the boy’s parents would stay together, whether their marriage could survive the spotlight that would be shone into every corner of it. Something about the way that they had looked at the graveside – as if they were seeing each other from a long way off – made him doubt it.

  It was getting colder. Bamber flicked his cigarette butt away and hunched his shoulders inside the heavy trench coat. Ducking his head to the grave in an embarrassed little gesture of respect, he began trudging towards the cemetery’s main entrance off Bromgrove High Street.

  The cusp of a new century, yet everything around him seemed shrunken, hard and dry, without hope.

  That’s my job, he chided himself. To bring hope where there is none.

  Passing through the gates, he turned towards the lights and hum of the town.

  1

  The Summons

  Twenty years later. Another cemetery.

  Mrs Georgina Hamilton, pillar of St Mary’s Cathedral, eased herself stiffly upright to contemplate the fruits of her labours. Much better! No more straggly weeds, and the tasteful cellophaned bouquet struck just the right note. Nobody would be able to accuse Geoffrey Hamilton’s widow of failing to show appropriate respect. She ran a critical eye along the line of graves in the south-eastern corner of the cathedral graveyard. Yes – it was far and away the best tended plot, she reflected smugly, slipping the miniature trowel into her coat pocket.

  Complacently, she cast a proprietorial eye around her. To her left, dominating the graveyard, rose the great cathedral. Just beyond that, on the other side of a low wall, was St Mary’s Choir School, its outlines dimly visible through the gathering twilight. The proximity of the celebrated St Mary’s Grottoes, that ancient religious shrine which lay behind the school, made these precincts doubly blessed.

  Somehow, she had lost track of time and it was nearly dark. Shivering in the December twilight, she was uncomfortably conscious of the silence which lapped the precincts of the cathedral. Mist was coming down, wreathing the ancient memorials in clammy vapours. She peered apprehensively through the gloom. For all her sturdy unimaginativeness, she had an uneasy sense that the memento mori and gargoyles were leering at her in the knowledge of some private joke.

  With a shake of her head, as though to dispel the fog from her mind, Georgina squared her shoulders and, clutching her capacious handbag like a shield, picked her way along the muddy gravel path between the rows of graves, resolutely ignoring the pale obelisks which beckoned with spectral fingers and the ranks of crooked headstones coated in slippery moss.

  There was no avoiding the squat, lichen-stained mausoleum which brooded at the side of the path, affording the nearest exit from the graveyard. In normal circumstances Georgina felt an almost proprietorial pride in the proximity of the Soames Vault – as though the mouldering relicts of Bromgrove’s first family shed a ghostly lustre on those who slept near them. On this occasion, however, as she looked up at the tomb’s rusting iron railings guarded by two angels, curved wings swooping high above their disdainful marble heads, she felt an urge to run. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. Long-forgotten lines from some school play came unbidden to her mind. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. It is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. Quite right too!

  At that moment, she heard a harsh scraping noise coming from the rear of the mausoleum. Scarcely daring to breathe and somewhat amazed at her own daring, she tip-toed round the side of the monument to ascertain the source of the disturbance.

  Blinking myopically through the murk, a strange sight met her eyes. An odd time to be digging graves was her first thought. Two men, their backs to her, were standing in a trench shovelling vigorously by the light of a heavy-duty lantern. Grunting and panting from t
heir exertions, they were oblivious to everything but the task at hand. A couple of mud-stained headstones and some cracked granite plaques leaned drunkenly against a wheelbarrow piled high with earth.

  She vaguely recalled Geoffrey saying something about ‘sensitive’ operations occasionally needing to be carried out at night-time. As verger and local councillor, he was in a position to know. It had been tacitly understood, however, that subjects such as burial law and policy were not suitable to be aired around the tea table. With the cathedral graves being Church of England property, Geoffrey would no doubt have liaised with the archdeacon in the event of any irregular activity in the cathedral environs…

  With a sharp pang, Georgina wished she had taken more of an interest in her husband’s municipal responsibilities. Perhaps he would have liked it. Perhaps it was only her own hidebound obsession with gentility that had kept her from being a true helpmeet. And now it was too late…

  She was jerked back to the present by a low growl. The taller man was berating his fellow labourer.

  ‘Get a move on, won’t you! What’s the matter? They can’t hurt you. They can’t hurt anyone.’

  The other merely spat on the ground and bent to his work once more.

  Even though these words merely echoed her self-admonition of a few seconds earlier, a creeping sense of unease descended on Georgina. Watching the two men in the eerie half-light – presumably cathedral labourers (yes, that looked like the logo of a local contractor on their overalls) – she felt an overpowering urge to get far away from the cemetery and its ghoulish secrets.

  Shuddering and slick with perspiration, she caught her breath before inching her way back around the mausoleum. There was nothing for it but to take the long way around. She could hardly interrupt the grave reclamation – or whatever it was – going on at the back of the Soames Vault. It would be almost like gate-crashing a funeral, she told herself firmly. She willed her heart to stop its unnatural pounding before retracing her steps.

  Like a sleep-walker, Georgina Hamilton slowly made a circuit of the graveyard and left by the main gates. Once safely clear, she felt herself begin to revive. It would do no harm, she thought, to drop by the town hall on Bromgrove Avenue tomorrow. Just to reassure herself. The police station was round the corner in Bromgrove Drive, so she would call there after her visit to the council offices. Obscurely she felt she owed it to Geoffrey to see that everything was as it should be. That comforting resolution made, she wended her way home.

  The following morning, DS George Noakes, lurking hopefully in the back office behind the desk sergeant’s counter at Bromgrove Police Station with a view to picking up stray gossip, listened with half an ear as a distinctly bored constable endeavoured to fend off an importunate visitor. God, that dreadfully insistent voice was giving him a headache.

  ‘St Mary’s … husband sub-treasurer … council … graveyard … irregular activities … desecration … duty to investigate…’ On and on it went. Put a sock in it, luv, he thought.

  Eventually the woman, whoever she was, ran out of steam and he could hear her storm off, presumably in a cloud of self-righteous indignation. Noakes sauntered out and grinned at the young officer who was staring at the visitor’s departing form with no very benign expression.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Noakesy. Old biddy, name of Hamilton. Seemed to think folk have been up to no good at St Mary’s. Saw something peculiar when she visited her husband’s grave apparently.’

  ‘Fancies herself Miss Marple, does she?’

  ‘Sounded like it. Probably been at the sherry too.’

  Noakes was thoughtful. ‘Best get it checked out, son. Dot the Is and cross the Ts. The DI’s a man on a mission when it comes to detail. It’s all “back to basics” now. No detail too unimportant, if you get my drift.’

  The other grimaced. ‘Wilco, mate.’

  Noakes riffled through his mental rolodex. Hmmm. St Mary’s Cathedral. With choir school attached. All perfectly respectable to the best of his recollection. Quite ordinary for a cathedral he’d thought, though the chairwoman of the Police Liaison Committee was always wittering on about it being ‘the jewel in Bromgrove’s crown’. Still, might be worth doing a quick recce. Call it a field trip. And if he just happened to take in the Bromgrove Arms on his travels, that was surely all to the good. Publicans, in Noakes’s humble opinion, were the force’s secret weapon!

  Standing at the window of his top floor office in Bromgrove Police Station, Detective Inspector Gilbert Markham watched Noakes’s furtive departure with resigned amusement. What was the old devil up to now? His sergeant was hardly an advertisement for cutting edge policing, dressed as he was in an old-fashioned two-piece suit of indeterminate age and colour, his shirt adorned with a tie that appeared to be knotted somewhere under his left ear, and the whole ensemble topped off with a shabby beige mac. Bromgrove’s answer to Columbo. Whatever the nature of his mission, Markham was willing to bet it involved a pit stop at some hostelry or other. All in the interest of community relations!

  But Noakes’s role as his wingman was non-negotiable. No amount of pressure from the gold braid mob would induce him to part with the stolid and plain-spoken veteran who always ‘had his back’. Whenever evil stalked his dreams, it was invariably to George Noakes that he turned. As though, by some unfathomable scientific principle, there was something in Noakes’s blessedly normal pH which neutralized the demon and forced the genie back into the bottle.

  Superintendent Collier was bemused by the nature of their bond. ‘For God’s sake, Markham,’ he had barked in his usual aggressive semaphore, ‘the man’s a throwback. A complete bloody Neanderthal. Professional Standards has a file an inch thick. Beats me why he wasn’t booted out long ago.’

  But Markham knew better. He had a high regard for Noakes’s native guile and wisdom, and a sneaking sympathy with the DS’s notorious disregard for the fashionable tenets of political correctness. Oddly enough, Markham’s teacher girlfriend Olivia Mullen had taken to Noakes in a big way despite the fact he clearly regarded her as some sort of seductress who had ensnared Markham by means of sexually suspect, if not necromantic, practices. ‘He’s a great big teddy bear,’ Olivia had laughed when Markham apologized for his DS’s latest gaffe. ‘Doesn’t know what to make of arty-farty leftie types like me. I bet that wife of his, the redoubtable Muriel, crosses her fingers whenever she claps eyes on me. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to ward off witches!’

  Olivia.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that Noakes persisted in regarding Olivia as some sort of belle dame sans merci. She had certainly cast a spell over Markham despite being, at thirty-seven, five years his senior.

  He recalled the moment he had caught sight of her from the window of his third floor flat in The Sweepstakes – a complex of upmarket apartments and townhouses at the end of Bromgrove Park, off Bromgrove Avenue – as she moved into one of the ground floor studios in the block opposite his own on a windy Saturday afternoon in November.

  To be more accurate, Markham had heard Olivia before he saw her, a full-throated, joyous peal of laughter breaking through his frowning perusal of local authority crime statistics and drawing him across to the French window.

  At first all he could see was that she was tall, with a mass of unruly copper hair whipping across her face. A girlfriend was with her, helping to empty the contents of what looked to be a hired van. The boxes of books which gradually covered the pavement, and which appeared to constitute the bulk of his new neighbour’s possessions, were greeted like old friends, the two women pulling out volumes at random and exclaiming happily over each new discovery.

  All rather touching and unworldly, reflected Markham. He wondered idly what line of work they were in. Certainly didn’t look the corporate executive type. The shorter woman was wearing some sort of floaty ethnic get-up topped by a Doctor Who style scarf, while her willowy companion sported a voluminous sloppy joe jumper
and leggings.

  Social workers, perhaps. Or no, more like teachers, he decided, spotting a couple of sturdy laundry bags piled high with exercise books.

  At that moment, as though she sensed Markham’s scrutiny, the tall woman looked up and met his gaze head on.

  He caught his breath.

  It was an instant attraction, the most perturbing that he had ever experienced. Not reducible simply to the stranger’s pre-Raphaelite allure – flame-red hair, graceful physique and ethereal colouring, it resided in something else … an immediate sense of psychic affinity. As though the remarkable grey-green eyes had seen beyond his iceberg cold exterior to the passionate man beneath.

  Not at all put out by being spied on, the new arrival smiled. A look of mischievous amusement as if they were partners in a shared complicity. To Markham, it felt like the sun had suddenly come out. And then, with a rueful quirk of her lips, she was gone.

  Discreet enquiries established that she was a supply teacher at a local comprehensive school, a job she apparently combined with freelance writing. Longing, but at the same time fearing, to meet the woman who had affected him so deeply, he finally encountered her at The Sweepstakes monthly residents’ meeting.

  Markham’s colleagues would have been amazed to see how their legendarily chilly boss unbent to the newcomer, with her teasing irreverence and gentle, unaffected charm. His habitual proud reserve melted, all barriers were swept away, and the social part of the evening flew by on wings, the two of them trading anecdotes about their daily skirmishes with officialdom. By the time they parted, he was surprised by the strength of his desire to see her again.

  That was the start of it.

  As time went by, the cord of communion between them became stronger. Quick-witted and with an endearingly roguish sense of humour, there was an innocence about Olivia’s underlying character which had somehow survived unscathed through all the sordid politics, back-stabbing and petty treacheries of school life. When he was with her, Markham felt himself to be sustained by an endless spring of solace and refreshment. Apart from her, he was like a man dying of thirst. When it came to the grim realities of his job, she never pushed or probed, just listened with a grave-eyed earnestness and generous sympathy that was all her own.