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  Contents

  John Buxton Hilton

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  John Buxton Hilton

  Death of an Alderman

  John Buxton Hilton

  John Buxton Hilton was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring in 1970 to take up full-time writing.

  He wrote two books on language teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer – his works include the Superintendent

  Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series, as well as the Inspector Mosley series under the pseudonym John Greenwood.

  Foreword

  I first came into contact with John Buxton Hilton in 1985 when we were both working on the arrangements for the CWA Annual Conference in Norwich, and I made a point of seeking him out because my own researches necessitated finding out how he had such a phenomenal knowledge of 19th century England.

  John, who sadly died in 1986, lived in East Anglia and was a former Headmaster, Government Schools Inspector, and author of some twenty books: many feature the present-day Superintendent Kenworthy who figures in this novel, others form part of the ‘Blunt’ series set in 19th century Derbyshire, and some are textbooks. In response to my question concerning his knowledge of the last century, he explained that he could claim a Victorian childhood because as a child he had spent many hours with his grandfather, listening as he described the events of the era that he had witnessed, hence John’s uncanny ability to write novels like Wilkie Collins.

  Equally obviously, his work as Headmaster and Inspector must have personally acquainted him with the workings of local government – its officials, elected representatives and, above all, its jealousies. The title Alderman, an elder or senior man on a City or Town Council, was one of the more unfortunate abolitions of the so-called reforms of local government in the 1970s. In this murder story, the alderman was a young, aggressive, go-ahead, ruthless businessman, with a somewhat shady past and opportunist eye, who attracted countless enemies – one of whom murdered him on the banks of the canal, with a wartime Luger stolen from the town museum.

  Kenworthy is sent for from the Yard, a procedure now fallen into abeyance but which was more prevalent when country forces felt they did not have the technical expertise to carry out murder investigations. Kenworthy and his Sergeant stay in the local hotel, interrogating all ranks of society from the titled chairman of the local political party to the gangs of street toughs, with their girls and their fights. Kenworthy is unorthodox in his ways and means of getting information, even going so far as walking alone at night with one young gang girl – a risk few policemen would dare today.

  Hilton builds up the mass of data at a time, 1968, when computers were only just beginning to relieve police officers of much logging and correlation. Wartime black market deals, amorous intrigues, political chicanery (including clever use of a minor crime that rocked several Councils at about that time), an ex-policeman turned private investigator, the ways of officialdom, street gang warfare – all these threads are drawn together so that in almost the last paragraph of the last page, Kenworthy almost reluctantly hands over the murderer.

  Interestingly, Kenworthy is not averse to threatening witnesses, whether they be gang members or housewives, in a way they seem unable to know how to resist. Offices, meetings, streets, are neatly and vividly described, and the town of Fellaby and its crime are utterly believable, thanks to the author’s eye for detail. He has built up a puzzle containing a bleak element of police procedure convincingly and compellingly.

  JOHN KENNEDY MELLING

  Chapter One

  For fifteen miles there was scarcely a break between the conurbations. Steep streets of terraced houses swept up from the railway embankment, clustering round the red brick Victorian mills that they served. Now and then pit-head gear rose stark and primitive, and here and there the slag-heaps gave way to the coarse grass of hills that bulged away in overlapping folds to the moors of the horizon.

  Detective-Superintendent Simon Kenworthy looked down at a brook spanned by a wooden foot-bridge.

  ‘Before the industrial revolution, Shiner, this must have been rather a lovely county.’

  Sergeant Wright looked up from his unsatisfying paper-back. It was a relief that the old man was taking a pleasurable interest in his surroundings. Kenworthy was notoriously a Londoner and could be difficult company in the provinces.

  The superintendent made a fresh fold in his Ordnance Survey map and studied the landscape.

  ‘That must be the canal in question——’

  Flanked by an infrequently trodden towpath, a waterway ran parallel to the train for some two hundred yards, then curved away behind the suburban gardens of a post-war housing estate.

  ‘It must be somewhere along there that they found him.’

  ‘And that must be the ruin where they found the gun.’

  For a moment they caught sight of a hulk of broken walls beside a stone bridge, and then the train was clasped in a cutting of dripping brown gritstone which sucked them into a short, sooty tunnel. Even before daylight began to lighten the smoke-caked brick-work, the brakes began to clamp the wheels. The two men gathered their bags from the rack.

  The station at Fellaby was crudely unendearing. Black puddles of recent rain swamped the platform. To reach the Exit side they had to go down through a dank subway lit by a single incandescent gas mantle. In the small forecourt the driver of the only taxi was standing with his door held expectantly open.

  ‘We’ll walk,’ Kenworthy said, despite their cases, and ignoring the rain, which was beginning again.

  ‘The police-station’s on the other side of town.’

  ‘To hell with the police-station. Let’s have a look round with our own eyes, before they hamper us with half a dozen guides.’

  They stopped at the first intersection of streets and studied the façades of a mill and a non-conformist chapel, both abandoned, and a row of depressed shops.

  ‘And it said in the Notes,’ Wright commented, ‘that the place is remarkable for its civic pride.’

  ‘“Where there’s muck there’s money”——that’s a basic idea that has entered into their souls. It hasn’t occurred to them yet that a town can be both prosperous and clean.’

  Kenworthy led the way into a newsagent’s and asked for a local paper.

  ‘Do you want the Gazette or the Herald?’
>
  ‘Both.’

  ‘The Herald only comes out on Tuesdays——that was before——’

  The man behind the counter had weighed them up for what they were.

  Borough Alderman Murdered: Wright caught sight of the headline before Kenworthy picked up and folded the paper, and beneath it a head and shoulders portrait of the deceased, affluent, faintly smiling, proud——and rather too flabby for his thirty-five years.

  ‘You’ll need your own copies,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘The Gazette, then.’

  ‘I should get both, if I were you. See what they found to say about this town when it was normal.’

  Wright had not worked with Kenworthy before, and he had been plied with many stories of the superintendent’s mild eccentricities, one of which was an exasperatingly leisurely approach to pending urgencies.

  At the County Hotel he had his first significant experience of this. The sergeant wasted no time after being shown his bedroom. He hurried back into the lounge with the least possible delay, but it was a full half hour before the superintendent came down the broad, floral carpeted staircase, as unhurriedly as if he were on holiday. Wright leaped to his feet, but Kenworthy waved him good-humouredly back to his arm-chair and opened out one of the newspapers, which he still carried under his arm.

  ‘Make anything of it, Shiner?’

  ‘Conventional reportage——family man——three kids——got on well at a pretty early age. Finger in plenty of pies. Must have had influential friends. J.P., too, I notice, and chairman of the juvenile bench. Must have made an enemy or two, as well, I suppose——’

  ‘As you say——influential friends. His rise in this particular political party has been what you might call meteoric for someone born on the wrong side of the tracks.’

  ‘Wrong side of the tracks?’

  Kenworthy tapped the Gazette with the back of his knuckles.

  ‘“Born in Kenilworth Street”——I took the trouble to have a good look at the town map on the way up here. Kenilworth Street backs down to the goods-yard. And “son of Edward Barson, weaver”——that doesn’t add up, either.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Wright said. ‘This is the 1960’s. A man who has it about him——’

  ‘Can get on to the local council in his early twenties? Granted. Can get on to the magisterial and aldermanic benches in next to no time? Possibly. He may have had a magnetic personality. To judge from these——’

  Kenworthy indicated a whole page of photographs: Barson visiting the children’s hospital on Christmas morning, Barson opening a Garden Fête, Barson speaking at a Rotary Charter Night, Barson laying the foundation stone of an extension to the public library.

  ‘Believe me, Shiner——I know towns like this. There are dodderers in their dotage queueing up for this sort of honour. I’m not saying it’s definitely phoney for a youngster to horn in. But it’ll bear looking into——especially when it’s a weaver’s lad from Kenilworth Street.——Make anything of the other rag?’

  Wright picked up the Herald.

  ‘There seems to have been an acrimonious correspondence going on between Barson and the other side.’

  ‘You mean Councillor Durkin’s letter?’

  For a man who seemed asleep three quarters of the time, Kenworthy had a surprising command of detail.

  ‘Yes, Durkin’s letter. But it’s all speculation about what went on at Suez. That was years ago. It’s nothing to do with Fellaby.’

  ‘These people like to sling mud about. Probably both Durkin and Barson fancy themselves in a parliamentary constituency. They like to keep their names in print. Anything else?’

  ‘No. Barson seems to have had a fairly quiet week.’

  Kenworthy pointed to a column.

  ‘Nasty court case. Juvenile delinquent sent to Borstal for about his twentieth offence. It doesn’t say Barson was in the chair, but I think we can take that for granted. And this is the sort of hoodlum who’s sure to have left some bloody-minded pals behind. Again, it’ll bear looking into, though I’m sure the local boys will have covered it.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘And speaking of the local boys——I don’t think we can put the evil moment off much longer——’

  Yet even as they walked across the town, Kenworthy stopped again. He explained that his wife set store by the picture postcards which he had been sending home for years from the various towns where he had handled cases. And he spent as much time over them as if they had been rare reproductions for a connoisseur, though there were only three to choose from: the High Street, the parish church and the war memorial.

  ‘Besides, Shiner, we’ve got to get to know this town. We’ve got to know it better than the oldest inhabitant does.’

  The police-station was a forbidding, overcrowded, late nineteenth century building, situated in that part of the town which was the preserve of Georgian fronted solicitors’, accountants’ and estate agents’ offices. Kenworthy and Wright were shown into an upstairs room whose scrubbed wooden boards and metal filing cabinets were scarcely relieved by a pocket handkerchief of worn red carpet.

  Chief superintendent Grayling, who commanded the Fellaby Division, was a tall, lean, austere man, disciplined through and through. Not spectacularly imaginative, Wright thought, but undoubtedly adept at carrying out the letter of the law without offending local society.

  ‘Meet my deputy——’

  This was a uniformed chief inspector called Dunne, who had the jowls of a hearty beer drinker, and who evidently enjoyed every moment of his work, for he punctuated his cynical comments with resonant guffaws, and it was clear that he had an inexhaustible capacity for anecdote.

  Grayling lifted the house-phone.

  ‘Detective superintendent Rhys, from County HQ, has made himself responsible for the Report Centre——which, incidentally, we’ve set up in the Congregational Sunday School.’

  Kenworthy’s eyes clouded momentarily, and Grayling permitted himself a faint smile. It was as if he had heard that other men smiled, and had taught himself to go through the motions.

  ‘All right, superintendent——we have been warned: you don’t like Report Centres——’

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t like them. We couldn’t get far without them, at the present pace of living. It’s just that I like to feel free——’

  ‘Don’t worry, superintendent. You won’t be nailed down. You can confidently leave the routine to Rhys. And I may say——’

  There followed the expected build-up for the county man, the assurances of a hundred per cent support, the inevitable reserves about the shortages of transport and manpower.

  ‘While we’re waiting for Rhys,’ Kenworthy suggested, ‘perhaps you’d fill us in on the general stuff——Fellaby Borough Council, now. What does it really amount to?’

  Dunne did not wait for his chief to invite him to answer.

  ‘A market,’ he said, ‘lighting the streets and occasionally sweeping them. A public health department, a sewage farm and a cemetery. A park, three housing estates, a library and a museum. A swimming bath in the summer and slipper baths all the year round. A few miles of secondary road. An education committee——’

  ‘Relic of the day,’ Grayling interposed, ‘when they ran their own schools. Nowadays it merely appoints representatives to other bodies.’

  ‘Likewise a watch committee——’

  ‘Relic of the borough police force, which the county took over in the 1930’s. Nowadays it does no more than express opinions——’

  Dunne produced one of his gigantic laughs.

  ‘And it collects reports from dirty old men who crawl about the park with cross-channel binoculars and then express surprise at what they see.’

  ‘And a lot of property,’ Grayling added quickly, ‘most of it let on long lease. The corporation owns a large proportion of the town.’

  ‘And Barson’s part in all this?’

  ‘Chairman of Markets, Vice-chairman of Libra
ry, member of Housing, Health and Finance.’

  Kenworthy took out his pipe and filled its bowl meditatively.

  ‘It doesn’t amount to much, does it?’ he said. ‘I mean, viewed globally.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think so, if you saw the cut-throat competition to get these positions.’

  ‘Conservative controlled?’

  ‘Only just. The constituency, which is bigger than the borough, went Labour for the first time at the last election. But there’s been no change in the borough up to now——though, oddly enough, the new shuffle might just turn the balance. Nobody’s dared to say it in public yet, but Barson’s death gives the other side high hopes.’

  Kenworthy struck a match.

  ‘It seems pretty petty to me. They say power corrupts——but what can come out of power on this little patch?——Forgive me, superintendent——but what could there be in it for a wrong ’ un? Five quid for the best market site? A joint of meat for not seeing the flies on the slab? Cross my palm and go up in the housing list?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ Grayling said. ‘There hasn’t been such a case in my memory. And if the democrats were vulnerable, I’d stake my reputation on the integrity of the officials. We’ve a town clerk with an eye like a hawk. I’ll swear nothing would get past him.’

  ‘Of course——Barson didn’t stop at borough politics——’

  ‘Director of the Town Football Club——’

  ‘J.P.,’ Kenworthy added.

  ‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ Dunne said, and Grayling looked as if he would have liked to apologise for him. But at that moment Rhys knocked and joined them.

  He was a bigly built Welshman, scrupulously careful in his speech, anxious not to appear incompetent in the Yard man’s presence. Kenworthy made no attempt to put him at his ease.

  ‘I’ve read everything you sent by teleprinter, but it would be as well to run quickly over everything.’

  ‘Barson always took his dog for a walk last thing at night, generally along the towpath of a canal on the edge of the estate where he lives.——The Carlton Estate.——Rather expensive——’