A Snapshot of Murder Read online

  A Snapshot of Murder

  A Kate Shackleton Mystery

  FRANCES BRODY

  To Julie Akhurst, Ann Dinsdale and Steven Wood

  Acknowledgements

  It was a great pleasure to visit Stanbury and Haworth in the depths of winter, during a heatwave and times between. My first stay at Ponden Hall was some years ago when Brenda Taylor, now of Ponden House, was the owner. Brenda and the present owners of Ponden Hall, Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown, have been most welcoming and helpful. They and Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and Haworth historian Steven Wood have generously shared their knowledge. Steven took me on a memorable walking tour of Haworth one rainy day.

  Julie, Ann and Steven read and commented on an early version of the manuscript, as did my good friend Sylvia Gill. Any mistakes are mine.

  This being a work of fiction, I have taken the liberty of creating Lindisfarne Clinic on Bridgehouse Lane and Laverall Hall in Stanbury village.

  In The Real Wuthering Heights, The Story of the Withins Farms, authors Steven Wood and Peter Brears comment on the spellings Withins and Withens and on the spelling variations that have appeared in records since 1567. They jettisoned their preferred spelling ‘Withens’ in favour of ‘Withins’, largely because that is the Ordnance Survey’s spelling. I have followed their example. Withins is also the spelling on local signposts.

  Thanks to Eveleigh Bradford, author of Headingley, this pleasant rural village, the definitive history of Headingley; Peter Brears; Lynne Strutt and Ralph Lindley. I am grateful to the staff of Keighley Local Studies Library and the Leeds Library for their help.

  As always, thanks to Dominic Wakeford and the team at Piatkus, and to Judith Murdoch and Rebecca Winfield.

  Jenny Chen and the team at Crooked Lane created a smooth and pleasurable trans-Atlantic voyage for Kate Shackleton. Thank you.

  The real Elisa Varey bid in a charity auction for the risky privilege of allowing me to use her inspirational name. Thanks, Elisa.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Gentle Art of Photography

  The first whisper that all might not be well in the world of photography came in the spring of 1928. It was just a few days after my niece Harriet and I had travelled to London, with a photographer friend, for a rally outside Parliament to mark the second reading of the Equal Franchise bill.

  At the very next Photographic Society meeting, the idea for a weekend photographic expedition was floated. Our destination would be Haworth, timed to coincide with a momentous event in the world of those of us who love the work of the Brontë sisters.

  On the first Saturday of August, a wealthy benefactor, who had purchased Haworth Parsonage, would present the deeds of the parsonage to the Brontë Society for the benefit of the nation. The new Brontë Museum would be declared open.

  Seven of us went on that photographic outing. Six of us returned.

  The story begins on a fine day in April.

  Sunlight burst through my bedroom curtains. There would be no going back to sleep. What had wakened me was the call of the first cuckoo. 1928 had started well.

  I slid from my bed and went to the open window to look out at the garden and the small wood beyond. Golden light, tinged with the red of sunrise, brought clusters of daffodils into sharp focus. The cuckoo continued its call, chiming with cooing doves and the song of a blackbird, though it remained out of sight. It is the thing you can’t see that you most want to spot.

  This felt like a good morning to be alive.

  The cat stirred as I went into the kitchen, raising her head from her bed in the carton lined with a battered cushion and an ancient woolly.

  She watched me fill the kettle and light the gas jet. She climbed from her bed and stretched. I opened the door for her to go out. Sookie has grown old. Birds have no fear of her.

  Ten minutes later, I put on my coat, carried my cup of tea into the wood and sat on the fallen log to drink it. Just for now, the world was mine.

  A gentle breeze set daffodils nodding to each other. After a stroll around the wood, I went back inside to continue the task abandoned the night before – sorting photographs. The dining room is also our office and I keep photographs in the sideboard. There is a carton, unmarked, containing my husband Gerald’s photographs. After a decade of Gerald’s absence, I can still only look at a few photographs at a time. Some were still in the box on the table that my housekeeper, Mrs Sugden, had marked: Mrs Shackleton – Photographs.

  One day soon I would put them in albums, in some kind of order.

  For now, I needed to remind myself which ones I had chosen to show to my fellow snappers at our photographic society meeting tonight, so that I could plan my commentary.

  Spreading out my collection of pictures, I felt like a Tarot reader who has been given too many packs of cards.

  Certain patterns emerged. A clutch of images portrayed men and women by gates and in doorways. Mrs Sugden posed by our back gate. Lizzie Luck, a weaver, leaned against the frame of her cottage door, proudly showing her handiwork, a piece of wedding lace. Richard Morgan, wearing trousers that ended above his boots, a Capuchin monkey perched on his shoulder, stood by the stable door where he houses a much-loved pony.

  What I liked about these photographs was not just the light and shade, but the question mark. My subjects might be about to bar the way to their abode, or smile a welcome. I placed these together – people, their entrances and exits, rooted to the place they made their own. Was home a refuge or prison? Did they find themselves there by default or design?

  My most recent doorway picture, one that I would treasure, was of my photographer friend Carine Murchison. During our recent trip to London, Carine went to the door of number 10 Downing Street, raised the letterbox and peered in. She wanted to see if the prime minister happened to be standing in the hallway. The burly policeman on duty studiously ignored her.

  While she had her nose practically through the letterbox, I snapped her picture. Our members would laugh at this one. Carine had made extra copies for me, and tinted some of them.

  My train of thought was broken by the sound of my niece tramping down the stairs. Harriet has been staying with me for several months. She has a few daytime hours’ work in a town centre café and an evening job at the local cinema.

  ‘Auntie Kate, what a lot of pictures!’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘Have you chosen?’

  ‘Of course! My talk is this evening.’ My niece has a habit of going to work without as much as a slice of toast inside her. ‘Mrs Sugden will be up by now. There’ll be tea in the pot and porridge on the stove.’

  Mrs Sugden’s annexe has a door to the kitchen. I leave her to her own devices in the morning, so as not to be in the way.

  Harriet pulled a face. ‘I’ll get something at the café.’ She went to the oak sideboard and looked at herself in the mirror, tilting her cloche at the jaunty angle she prefers. I am amazed her hats stay on. ‘I do like this sideboard.’

  ‘So do I.’

  It’s odd how we take the furniture and fittings of our life for granted and then, just occasionally, some item seems to demand attention.

  Harriet ran her finger across the decorative diamond-shaped strip above the drawers and cupboard. The maker had not settled to one type of decoration. Tiny squares and oblongs embellished the sides and the inset of the cupboard doors. Embossed swirls graced the sideboard’s low back. Doors and cupboards boasted anchor-shaped brass handles.

  Its real secret attraction is a flattering mirror, but Harriet commented on its mad legs. ‘It has square feet, ankles shaped like double egg cups and twisty legs.’

  A few years ago, when Harriet saw her young face in the mirror, she as
ked if she could have the sideboard when I die. ‘Ask me nearer the time,’ I had said. She asked me an hour later.

  Her attraction to sideboards, which she regards as posh, is endearing. What worries me is her almost Victorian preoccupation with death. She and her younger brother Austin found their father’s body at the quarry where he worked. It was Saturday afternoon. Ethan Armstrong’s fellow workers had gone home. The children walked through the deserted quarry, carrying their father’s dinner. He was a talented stonemason, working on a slate sundial, a man with enemies as well as admirers. My sister Mary Jane married again. I don’t believe that Harriet and Austin will ever get over the loss of their dad. That is not something a child will ever fully recover from. Yet Harriet is cheerful and resilient. Having left school, she wasted no time in finding work, showing a great reluctance for more sitting at a desk.

  Now she came to look over my shoulder at the doorway and gateway photographs.

  ‘So these are for your magic lantern show?’

  ‘Carine has helped me with it.’

  Harriet was impressed. ‘She does the slides for the picture house. When the screen shows the “Ladies please remove your hats” or the song sheet for the children’s matinée, her studio name appears at the bottom of the slide. I wish I could do that.’

  ‘Have a studio?’

  ‘No! Make slides.’

  ‘Well you could. You can do anything if you put your mind to it.’

  ‘Do you think she’d show me?’

  ‘I’m sure she would. Ask her.’

  ‘Will you ask her for me? She’s your friend.’ She looked over my shoulder at the next batch of photographs.

  ‘I’ll mention it, but you must learn to ask for yourself.’

  If the first selection of my photographs could be called ‘Home’, the next would be ‘Work’.

  A maid reached to take a sheet from a line, clothes pegs clipped to her apron, shadows from the washing creating dark shapes in the cobbled yard.

  A group of dye workers in caps and mufflers, with shirt-sleeves rolled and ragged trousers tucked into their boots, screened their eyes against the sun. All except the small man in the middle with lined skin and a challenging stare.

  ‘You’re going to a lot of trouble, Auntie.’

  ‘It’s my turn to be the entertainment.’

  Harriet picked up a picture of my father in his West Riding Constabulary police superintendent’s uniform, and my mother in her finery on the day of a garden strawberry tea party.

  ‘Aren’t you including family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The photograph of my birth mother, Harriet’s grandmother, had slid under a picture of me as a baby. I call my birth mother Mam, as do my many siblings whom I hardly know, apart from Mary Jane, Harriet’s mother. I had taken this picture of Mam outside her little house in Swan Yard, Wakefield, opposite the railway station, one of those places that the sun gives a miss and where the dirty breeze turns washed sheets grey. Mam was an old woman, old before her time.

  I brought it alongside the picture of my mother and father, who adopted me.

  ‘Think about it, Harriet. Would you want to see portraits of the Photographic Society family members?’

  ‘Certainly not! And I suppose nosey parkers would ask why you have two mothers.’

  Harriet picked up a studio portrait of Gerald, in uniform. ‘Is this my Uncle Gerald?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I’d met him. He’s so handsome.’

  ‘I prefer this one.’ I showed her the photograph that I had taken on the cliffs at Whitby. It captured Gerald’s heart, his soul, his smile and the checks of his shirt. The man in uniform was a man who would never return. The man on the cliffs would never go away.

  She picked up a photograph of our society members taken outside the Bennett Road Institute, our meeting place. ‘I’m glad you’re not showing our family to that funny old bunch. I don’t know how you put up with them.’

  ‘They’re not a bad lot, and we’re all doing the same thing, we snappers.’

  ‘What’s that same thing, Auntie?’

  ‘We make time stand still. If we’re lucky, we capture a fleeting moment.’

  ‘Some of that lot capture too many moments and they’re all the same. The only person there I really like is Carine.’

  ‘Everybody likes Carine.’

  ‘Except her husband.’

  ‘What on earth makes you say that?’ Harriet can be very acute in her observations. ‘Was it something he said or did?’

  ‘Oh nothing!’ She fastened her coat. ‘Do you think it’s going to rain?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘My umbrella went missing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you lost another brolly?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. I was in the queue to see Rin Tin Tin at the Scala. I was taking money from my purse for the ticket and it was such a crush that when everyone moved forward, the brolly must have slipped from my hand.’

  ‘Did you look for it?

  ‘Yes, and I asked the manager afterwards.’

  ‘Take the one with the broken spoke. Have it mended in the market.’ I walked her to the door. ‘Why do you say Mr Murchison doesn’t like Carine?’

  ‘It’s not me who’s saying it.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Derek.’

  Derek Blondell is eighteen years old, and works as a clerk in the newspaper library. I am beginning to think that Harriet likes him more than she will admit. ‘What does Derek imagine he knows?’

  ‘You know he helps Carine on a Saturday afternoon, when Mr Murchison goes to photograph weddings?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well he does, and he suspects Mr Murchison of something.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘Mental torture and slow poisoning.’

  ‘Nothing really serious then.’

  ‘Auntie! Mr Murchison wants to get his hands on the business for himself and some floozy. It’s Carine’s studio, you know, not his, otherwise why would it be called Carine’s Studio?’

  ‘It’s called Carine’s Studio because her grandmother was also named Carine, and the name was passed on. And, Harriet, you mustn’t spread gossip, or believe everything you hear.’

  ‘I thought you would want to know, since Carine is your friend. Which reminds me …’ She fished in her pocket. ‘Nearly forgot. One of the customers in the café gave me this newspaper cutting. I just couldn’t believe it. It’s all about us.’

  I took the cutting, which was from one of our more scurrilous papers.

  Saturday, March 31, 1928

  The Mole of the World

  The newspaper that shines a bright light in dark corners

  Dispatch from Your Northern Mole

  Ayes to the right!

  Yesterday your reporter travelled by crowded train to the capital. Ladies and lassies filled the carriages. Mere males now fight for breathing space on trains that they designed, constructed, maintain, drive and conduct.

  On this mole’s train travelled a titled lady, her daughter who practises the art of detection, a successful photographer whose camera steals the soul of all those who come into her focus, and a lively gel there for the fun of it.

  Determined females congregated outside the Houses of Parliament. Elderly Dame Millicent Fawcett had to be smuggled in by a side door or she would have been mobbed and crushed by enthusiastic supporters. The good dame was there to witness the triumphant conclusion of a victorious revolution that she helped unleash.

  Those females with influence and sharp elbows found their way into the lower chamber to listen to the debate on the Equal Franchise bill. Should females at the age of twenty-one, regardless of sense or sensibility, have the vote?

  It is historically impossible to stop, said the Ayes. We are doing what we believe to be right, said the Ayes.

  In vain did an honourable gentleman of the Noes party mildly point o
ut that the passage of this bill would give women absolute supremacy in the polls, out-numbering their opposites by 3,000,000. ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei – no longer the voice of the gods but of the goddesses.’

  To which Viscountess Astor called, ‘Hear, hear!’

  Is there no stopping the March of the Women? It used to be said that ‘Man has his will but woman has her way.’ Now woman will have both the will and the way.

  Your Little Mole, an admirer and supporter of the fair sex, asks this question, not presuming to address the goddesses in person: Ladies, now that you hold the upper hand, where will you strike next?

  Answer came from the lady detective as she attempted to induct her protégée into the art of world domination. ‘My dear, will you stand for Parliament soon?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the protégée. ‘I like my job as an usherette.’

  Little Mole breathes a sigh of relief.

  Ayes to the right 387. Noes to the left 10. History marches on, or does it?

  I handed the paper back to Harriet. ‘Who on earth could have written this?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know. At first I was really annoyed by it, but now I just think it’s silly.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right that it’s us – my mother, the titled lady, the daughter who practises detection …’

  ‘That’s so obviously you, Auntie.’

  ‘Carine is the successful photographer.’

  ‘And if I ever find out who called me a lively gel, I’ll give them a lively slap in the chops.’

  ‘I have never called you “my dear”, and after seeing what those women Members of Parliament have to contend with, I would be unlikely to suggest you attempt to join them.’

  ‘You’d be good at that though, being in Parliament.’

  ‘Whoever wrote this had at least a little information about the debate, even if they made up the rest.’

  ‘If you were a Member of Parliament, you’d discover everyone’s secret crimes and blackmail them into voting the way you wanted.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘You could live in London. I’ll stay here and look after the house while Parliament is in session.’