The Elizabeth West Mysteries Read online

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  Two: Femme Fatale

  The body lay half-dressed on the bed. By the expression transfixed upon the face, the deceased had expired in a state of great distress. It seemed as if the poor man, in the moment of death, had looked upon the very devil himself. But then I brushed such thoughts from my mind and concentrated on the facts before me. I noted the details of the room's layout. It was a small room with wooden beams in the ceiling and tiny windows. Access to the room was up a small wooden stairway that twisted itself up the back of the house. As I have said the room was small but it was not tiny and although it was sparsely furnished what furnishings had been provided were of oak, they were soundly constructed and, to my uninitiated mind, valuable antiques. One might say that the room was rather tastefully decorated, with a four poster bed and matching furniture, however my first impression of it was one of horror. Clothes torn and ripped lay in heaps on the floor. Drawers from an oak chest lay flung about the room. The door from an oak wardrobe was ripped from its hinges and both of the diminutive windows were smashed. The deceased, perhaps in his dying spasms, had vomited over the bed and the walls. On the bed lay the body, contorted and convulsed in a panic that had been frozen forever in death.

  'What do you make of it Detective Flatfoot?' I said

  'Pretty grim,' he said.

  'It certainly is.'

  'Yes pretty grim,' he said again.

  'Ah ha.'

  'Definitely pretty grim.'

  'And the body in the garage,' I said.

  'Dog dug it up, eaten half the bloody arm,' he said. 'It's pretty grim.'

  'We will have to make a thorough search for more bodies.'

  'It's pretty grim,' he concluded.

  Pretty grim was just about how things looked all around. For various reasons, of which I will refrain from going into now, I felt under pressure. It didn't help that I was seen by some to be just a little bit too good at my job. Something was rotten in the State of Denmark, or the Greater Manchester Constabulary to be specific. The people at the top, I name no names but they are all men, were jealous of my success. I am by nature a thorough person and thoroughness doesn't always go down well and, as a consequence, I was not popular. I had, in the course of uncovering the rotten apple in the barrel in the case I have described under the title Blowpipe, unwittingly gained a reputation for myself, therefore when another such case cropped up in the Hadfield area, high up in the Pennines, the Superintendent was very eager to proffer my services to the Glossop Constabulary.

  The first thing I did after being assigned to the case was to put on my coat and drive out to the scene of the crime. It was a bleak day in one of the bleakest winter weeks of the century. A gale was blowing through the centre of Manchester as I drove past Manchester's Piccadilly Station. Snow lay in great drifts on the motorway out to Hadfield and I drove at a snail's pace in the wake of a truck dispersing salt grit over the road. As 1 drove along the A628T to Hadfield the sun came out and momentarily blinded me. The mountains covered in snow looked very beautiful. But that beauty covered the grim reality of the harsh life the locals would face up there in the mountains. I turned off to Glossop and then took a turn to the left and promptly got lost. Eventually however I found my bearings and drove up a tiny cobbled lane with snow drifts towering either side of my car. At the top of the lane I was ascending lay my destination. A Tudor house, Hadfield Manor 1673, was carved into a stone above the door post. There were some old cow sheds also of stone and structurally unsound and a garage converted from a semi-circular out house.

  The garage doors were propped wide open and several policemen stood around in shirt sleeves. It was a cold day, it was a freezing day, so six policemen with their sleeves rolled up intrigued me. I parked the car next to a great drift of snow and slid across to the passenger's seat to get out. The ground of the farm, or disused farm as it was, consisted of deep and rutted mud but because of the big freeze it was fossilised by the ice. I made my way cautiously across that ice rink of mud to the garage and then I was able to understand what the fascination with that particular structure was. The police from Glossop had, in severe conditions, dug a shallow pit about three feet deep. At the bottom of the pit lay a body. The body was very well preserved it had been tanned by the soil. So now I had two murders on my hands. I would be lying if I said that after I had investigated all the evidence to hand I didn't feel just a little queasy. It's a grim place up there in the Pennines and this is a grim story, and as usual no clues.

  The body in the house was of one Aidan Jowitt, thirty five years old, originally of Salford. Miss Anna Clark of the Glossop Library, who had discovered the body, was very helpful in filling me in on the details. She was a friend of Aidan's. They often played Trivial Pursuit together on a Wednesday night and for the last two weeks, apparently, she had heard and seen nothing of Aidan and when she telephoned Glossop Grammar where he taught, she had learned that he had not reported for work either. She took the day off, she said, came up to the house and took it upon herself to break in. He might have been sick and dying she said, then she found the body and telephoned the police. She spoke very deliberately as she told me this, she took out a cigarette and could hardly strike a match her hand shook so much. Aidan's, Mr Jowitt's, father, I discovered from Anna, originally came from Knaresborough in the county of North Yorkshire. He was a farm labourer, but had moved to Manchester looking for work. The young Aidan had attended the local school in Salford and through brilliance and industry had succeeded so well that he had won a scholarship to Oxford where he took ancient languages. He had come back north, Anna told me, to confer upon the youth of Lancashire the same opportunities he himself had had. She described Aidan, Mr Jowitt, as tall, refined and scholarly, and added that on one occasion he had carefully removed a worm from his garden path lest it be trodden on. All very fine and noble but perhaps there was another side to Mr Jowitt's character. The Glossop police superintendent pulled out a file, six months previous to Mr Jowitt's demise he had been held on suspicion of murdering one Eugene Clegg. Mr Clegg was a retired mill worker from Hadfield estate. He was married, had four grown up children and lived very quietly. On the 26th of June of the previous year he had proceeded to the local post office to cash his and his wife's pension cheques and was never seen alive again. His body was found in the river Goyt. It seemed he'd been thrown from a bridge and pelted with rocks. There were no witnesses. The last person to see Clegg alive had been Aidan Jowitt. They had been seen talking outside the post office and a second witness had seen them walking towards the Goyt. At first Aidan had denied both claims but later had admitted talking to Clegg but had denied having any knowledge of his subsequent demise. Aidan, Mr Jowitt, said that he was writing a history of the Industrial Revolution in Glossopdale and that was why he had been talking to Clegg, as Clegg had worked in the valley all his life and knew many curious facts. At the time, Miss Clark, the librarian, had confirmed that Aidan was making a study of Hadfield in the nineteenth century. So why hadn't she mentioned this to me? Was Aidan Jowitt the angel she had portrayed him to be? But, on the other hand, why would the classics master of Glossop Grammar kill an old man for his pension money? Antonette from forensic was on the ball again.

  'The analysis of Mr Jowitt's stomach, and the other organs, in addition to samples from the vomit showed that the deceased had consumed a large amount of a substance called muscarine,' she said.

  'Pardon?'

  'He seems to have eaten some toadstools.'

  'And they were poisonous?'

  'Deadly.'

  'An accident?' I said.

  'Possibly, but not likely this time of year and in the dose required.'

  'What were the toadstools?' I asked.

  'Fly agaric,' she said, I was no further elucidated. 'Amanita Muscaria, the Latin.'

  I gave a knowing nod of the head but if the truth be known I was not very knowing.

  'The top of this mushroom is a brilliant scarlet dotted with snow white warts,' said An
tonette.

  'A brightly coloured fungus is never to be trusted,' I said. I'd read that somewhere.

  'Mr Jowitt would have undergone a feeling of profound sickness, then vomiting and diarrhoea, distress, depression, death.'

  'That accounts for the expression on his face.'

  'I should say so.'

  'Not a very pretty sight,' I said.

  'He died of suffocation caused by paralysis.'

  'Anything else?'

  'It is possible he may have eaten the toadstools in mistake for an edible variety. I think the toadstools were picked several months ago dried for storage and then soaked for use.'

  'Do you know something Antonette?' I said.

  'What's that?'

  'There was no sign of any meal.'

  'The toadstools were served up in a pie, mushroom and chicken pie.'

  'Would Jowitt have had time to clear up before the...'

  'No.'

  'I see. So it seems that someone cleared up after he died. The same someone who locked the dog in the garage.'

  'Oh yes I was coming to that,' said Antonette. 'That body is of a woman between forty and fifty and are you ready for this, well first I'll explain that a poison is a substance, natural or it can be synthetic, that causes damage to living tissue. It can be said to have an injurious or fatal effect on the body...'

  'Yes, yes,' I said. Sometimes Antonette likes to build things up instead of just telling me the cold hard facts.

  'Many poisons, are nonspecific,' she said, 'destroying indiscriminately those tissues they come into contact with. Thus corrosives such as sodium hydroxide bring about direct cell necrosis.'

  'The point being?' I said.

  'When swallowed,' went on Antonette, 'they inflict such trauma upon the mucus membrane and the mouth, gullet, stomach and intestines that the consequence can be fatal.'

  'So are you telling me that the second body, the woman, died from drinking an overdose of acid?'

  'My prognosis is that death was caused by the intake through the mouth of a rather large dose of hydrochloric acid.'

  'My God,' I said in disbelief.

  'She would have died in extreme agony. The mouth, throat, windpipe and stomach were all badly burnt by the acid.'

  I looked out of the window of my office, sleet was pelting down onto the people in the street below. A grey mass of heavy cloud blotted out any sunlight as far as the eye could see. In the middle of the day I had to have the light on. The truth was I felt rather depressed. The whole sequence of murders seemed to be some horrible domestic nightmare. Perhaps the body found in the shallow grave was Aidan's mother. Perhaps Aidan himself had been poisoned by some secret society of devil worshipers. I stopped myself from daydreaming, it gets you nowhere, and went over the facts in my mind. A schoolmaster, Mr Jowitt, had apparently lived an impeccable life of service to the community. He had died violently at the hands of a poisoner. He had been held on suspicion of murdering a Mr Clegg, however he could be entirely innocent of that murder. But more disturbing was the discovery of a body in Mr Jowitt's garage. The body was of a woman, she had been dead for two years and had died from poisoning by hydrochloric acid.

  I mapped out a strategy, Mrs Clegg would have to be questioned and Mr Jowitt's fellow teachers, he had no wife, his parents were dead, his only friend seemed to be the librarian. I had someone checking out missing persons to try and find out who the second body could be. The local police had no idea.

  I was about to put on my coat and drive home when I received an urgent telephone call. Another body, or to be more precise, a skeleton, had been found under the flagstones in Mr Jowitt's kitchen. The skull, I was informed over the phone, had been smashed in by a sharp object, such as an axe. I put on my coat and drove straight up to Hadfield.

  Mr Jowitt, far from being the all-round nice guy as Anna Clark had portrayed him, was beginning to look like a homicidal maniac. Why? What was his motive? Money? Many people rob, pillage and maim for money but there would have been very little monetary reward for these crimes. However the perpetrators of many such crimes possess a mind that is unbalanced. One often hears of parents killing their own children for no apparent reason. It seemed to me that Mr Jowitt could have had a history of killing. The first victim of his homicidal tendency had disappeared under Mr Jowitt's kitchen. Jowitt had moved into the old farm about eight years before and that was the estimated time when the body in the kitchen had been killed by the blow of a sharp object to the head. Two years ago Jowitt claimed a second victim, he had poisoned a woman, the second female to die at his hands, the skeleton under the flagstones was also that of a woman. My theory was that Jowitt was a minor version of the phenomena personified in the form of the Yorkshire Ripper. Jowitt was a psychopath who sexually assaulted his victims before murdering them in the most gruesome way possible. Then there was the Clegg murder. Perhaps Clegg was an accomplice. But he was probably just another innocent victim, his murder being almost as gruesome as the other two. The search for more bodies was being carried on and any time I expected yet another body to be unearthed. The biggest stumbling block with my theory was: who killed Jowitt? It wasn't suicide, of that I was sure, perhaps Jowitt himself had prepared the fateful pie for a fourth murder. Perhaps he planned to kill Anna Clark, the librarian, and had eaten the pie by mistake. This seemed unlikely but if he carried out his murders during a temporary state of insanity it is quite likely that in his normal frame of mind he may not have known about his murderous self, a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde syndrome. Therefore he may have made the pie in a state of temporary insanity and later, when his insanity had passed, eaten the pie not knowing that it contained poisoned mushrooms. I suspected that Anna Clark found the body and destroyed the evidence to protect Aidan Jowitt's good name. All supposition, yes, but I had a gut feeling that my theory was substantially right.

  Jim, Detective Flatfoot, had been supervising the various diggings up of Hadfield House. He had also checked out the teachers at the local Grammar for me. His conclusion was that Jowitt was universally liked by the staff and students. Such a situation fitted in with my theory perfectly. Jim added that the headmaster had spoken glowingly of Mr Jowitt and said that he would be missed by all. But Jim concluded that the headmaster had resented Mr Jowitt's popularity and there was even a rumour that the head had attempted to get him transferred to another school. This is where I made my first mistake, I discounted Jim's information of the headmaster's jealousy as it had no place in my theory.

  I questioned Mrs Clegg in her house, she made some tea and produced sandwiches with various fillings and some cake. Her house was a flat on the estate, it wasn't pretty to look at, there was no garden and dogs were busy fouling the footpath but inside it was as cosy as a waterproof tent on a stormy night. Opposite Mrs Clegg's flat was a small wood where she said she liked to walk. I felt that my visit was more a matter of form really. I told her I was looking into the death of her husband. We mostly talked around that subject, I told her that her house was very clean and she smiled in appreciation. She told me about her husband then she began to talk about Mr Jowitt's death without being prompted. Mr Jowitt's death she said was very sad. She also said that Mr Jowitt, she was sure, had nothing to do with her husband's murder. I felt sorry for the old woman, I didn't want to disillusion her until I had some cold hard facts. The tea was very nice and I told her so, then I left.

  From Mrs Clegg's I drove to the Glossop library and questioned Anna Clark in a small reading room. She spoke glowingly about Mr Jowitt and then I said:

  'Did you know that Aidan Jowitt fixed spikes at the end of his garden wall and was greatly amused when cats impaled themselves on the spikes?'

  I'd heard this story from an old farmer but I had checked out the spikes personally. My shock tactics worked and Anna Clark broke down and cried. Unfortunately I had played my trump card too soon and all Anna would say from then on was that it was Mr Clegg and insisting that Mr Jowitt would never hurt a flea.

  When I got back to
Manchester I felt that I had the case more or less wrapped up but then I got a telephone call that completely astounded me. Jim rang me from Glossop, he said that he had got an archaeologist to look at the bones from the kitchen and that the archaeologist was talking five to six hundred years. I was, to say the least, dumbfounded.

  I had only just begun to realise what that information would do to my theory when I received another telephone call, this time from the Bolton police. They were holding a Bolton man, seventeen, blond, first name Garry, family name Galasher, for the murder of his mother. He also admitted to the murder six months earlier of a man in the Glossop area. He said that he had stolen his money and thrown him in the river. All my theorising was shown up for what it was, so much cuckoo chatter.

  I rang up Anna Clark, the Glossop librarian, to apologise to her and a third strange thing happened. She changed her story and suddenly agreed with me and said that she knew about Jowitt's murder of Mr Clegg and Jowitt had threatened her with similar treatment if she didn't keep quiet.

  I put on my coat and drove up to Hadfield. Anna Clark lived in a beautiful old end terrace house. Inside the house wasn't cosy at all but frankly very messy. Every nook and cranny was crammed with ornamental shoes. Newspapers lay on the floor, books climbed over each other in great heaps in every corner. In the kitchen the washing up was piled high. She told me that on the morning when she had discovered the body she had also discovered the remains of a pie. She said that she knew immediately that Aidan had died from the consumption of poisonous mushrooms.

  'How?' I asked.

  To my surprise she was completely at a loss to answer my question. I looked into her eyes and she looked back cold and hard.

  'Prove it,' she said.

  I couldn't. Five months later she gave birth to a six pound boy who she named Aidan. The human heart is a very strange thing.

  The archaeologist and Jim went to town with those bones. Jim discovered that William Garlick Yeoman took a lease out on land lately taken out of common in 1667. In 1673 he had the house built and in 1689 he is recorded to have purchased sixteen cattle at the April fair. In the same year he also married one Elizabeth Bothan of Tintwistle, according to the church records there were no children. In 1695 William Garlick claimed that his maid, Myra Kirkham, had been swept away by a flood of the river Goyt. William was put on trial and several witnesses came forward, it would appear that William had got Myra with child and had promised to do away with his wife and make Myra the lady of the house. Even William's wife testified against him stating that he had paid undue attentions to the girl. In spite of the fact that the body was never found William was hung, drawn and quartered.

  In court it was my word against Anna Clark's. The problem was that when I quoted Anna's words she agreed and the whole case rested on that fateful utterance of hers prove it. She stated that when she had said prove it she had meant prove that Aidan Jowitt was a murderer. Anna Clark was found not guilty.

  I was certain that Anna had baked the fatal pie that had caused Aidan Jowitt's untimely demise, but I could get no further in my investigations of the body found in the garage, or the body in the barn, as I shall call it. I didn't even know the dead woman's name. Perhaps it will be another five hundred years before she is laid to rest. Perhaps Aidan deserved his fate but then again perhaps he was completely innocent. One final point I have so far omitted from my account of the story, the woman buried in the barn was found to be four months pregnant.