Holy Murder Read online

  Holy Murder

  The Third Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery

  Rodney Hobson

  © Rodney Hobson 2014

  Rodney Hobson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Extract from Dead Money by Rodney Hobson

  Chapter 1

  The bells in the Stump began to ring as Simeon Knowles and Dr Lesley Austin made their way up the 209 steps to the walkway high on the famous tower of Boston’s parish church.

  Across miles of flat land and out across the Wash, the bells were intended to be clearly audible to guide ships to the Haven or warn peasants of floods or pirates; inside the tower they were a deafening racket unbearable to the human ear.

  Even Knowles, hard of hearing as he was, could not cope with the assault on his auditory senses; two officials already higher up, much less so. They all came scurrying down, hands over ears, Dr Austin actually colliding with Knowles and sending him sprawling.

  As they reached the comparative calm of the nave, a churchwarden hurried up to them, full of apologies that they could hardly hear as the incessant ringing continued in their heads. Spectators, organisers and church officials milled round, their anxious voices a whirl of noise.

  Knowles, Dr Austin and the two leaders of the Fens Abseiling Club who had been stationed on the walkway two thirds of the way up the Stump slowly recovered their breath and their hearing. Being by far the eldest at 75, Knowles took longer to return to equilibrium.

  It was Gail Westerham, chairman and leading light of the abseiling society, who let forth an ungodly expression that rang up to what was once the highest roof of any building in the world. The churchwarden and a group of American tourists stepped back, shocked. Other visitors and members of the public supporting the Stump Up charity event that had brought abseilers to the church milled round.

  Eventually the bell ringing stopped. A few moments later, a small, muscular man panting a little from exertion, bustled through from the tower wringing his hands.

  “Terribly sorry. Didn’t realise we’d cause such a fuss. Never anybody up the tower usually when we ring the bells. Didn’t know it would be so deafening.”

  “For goodness sake, man,” Westerham exploded, while keeping control of her language, “how did you think it would sound? What the hell were you playing at anyway?”

  “The Brides of Mavis Enderby,” the bell ringer replied, deadpan.

  “It’s a peal of bells,” the churchwarden explained briefly.

  This ludicrous exchange diffused the situation sufficiently for Westerham to turn her back on church officials and regroup her battered troops.

  “Are we all ready to go up again?” she asked, adding pointedly: “I’m sure there will be no more interruptions. We have lost enough time already.”

  Knowles was already on his feet, talking to well-wishers and showing off the harness that he had already donned for his descent of the outside of the tower before being so rudely interrupted.

  Dr Austin took him by the arm and steered him back to the steps, which were now ringing only with the footsteps of Westerham and her abseiling club colleague leading the way. It had been fully a quarter of an hour between the last descent of the tower and the emergence of Simeon Knowles to make the next one.

  Knowles looked down from the walkway and was gratified to see a large throng on the opposite bank of the river, which was little more than a trickle. Spectators had apparently not dispersed during the unscheduled delay. Directly below, two members of the abseiling club waited to receive him.

  He stretched out his arms and stood framed against the lantern tower that formed the uppermost part of the Stump. Then he turned majestically, sat on the edge of the low wall round the walkway and eased back.

  Soon he was fully outside the tower, leaning back and letting his feet take the weight of his short, stocky body on the wall.

  Suddenly, and without warning, the harness gave way.

  Knowles plunged, his body flat out as it had been in his last moments attached to the rope that had secured him to the tower. The two abseiling club members doing duty at the base of the tower, whose role was to remove the harness at the end of each descent, leapt aside, one throwing himself over the wall into the mud at the edge of the river.

  Knowles hit the ground like a sack of potatoes with a sickening thud. Then there came the squelching of mud as the club member pulled himself up onto the river bank wall and stared, frozen with horror, at his fellow abseiler.

  The two of them slowly turned their eyes and gazed at the motionless body lying flat between them.

  The quiet was broken by a shrill cry from the riverbank.

  “Oh no! Not Simeon. Not Simeon. The man’s a saint!”

  Chapter 2

  Detective Inspector Paul Amos was just about to leave home to go shopping in Lincoln with his wife to find summer clothes for their 1993 annual holiday when the phone rang. He and Mrs Amos both raised their eyes to the ceiling at the intrusion. It was Mrs Amos who spoke.

  “Go on, you’d better answer it. It could be important.”

  Given the marital consent despite this being his day off duty, Amos picked up the phone after a moment’s hesitation.

  “We could have left the house already,” he suggested as he reached across for the receiver. The couple were in the hall, debating whether they needed to take macs. His wife shook her head. He lifted the receiver.

  “Amos here.”

  “Fletcher here,” barked out the voice at the other end.

  Amos nearly dropped the phone. His wife raised her eyebrows. She could hear the voice of the Chief Constable of Lincolnshire clearly enough from three feet away.

  “Sir,” Amos said simply.

  “Amos, this is serious. I need a top man on this, someone I can trust.”

  Amos and his wife, who could hear clearly, looked at each other in surprise.

  “Unfortunately,” Sir Robert Fletcher went on, “Johnson is away on holiday so it will have to be you. So just listen. This has to be handled carefully. Simeon Knowles has been killed in an accident at St Botolph’s Church in Boston. It has to be an accident but I want whoever was responsible to be held to account. I need you down there pronto to sort things out.

  “The Boston squad are keeping everybody involved together until you can get there but I can’t trust them to handle something like this. It’s only their Saturday team anyway and they’ll never cope. Get a squad car and move as fast as you can.”

&nbs
p; “Forgive me, sir, but I take it this Simeon chap is known to you. Who is he?”

  “Amos, you’re wasting valuable time. He’s big in the county, big in charity work, big in local society, big in golfing circles. Need I say more?”

  And big in the Freemasons, too, Amos thought.

  “I’m on my way, sir.”

  Amos put the phone down before Fletcher could berate his tardiness further. He looked anxiously at his wife but she was taking it all rather calmly.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll get on better on my own. I won’t feel you are hanging round bored while I buy clothes. Will you have time to drop me in the centre or is it really urgent?”

  “Just give me a moment and I’ll drop you near the Castle if you don’t mind walking down the hill. The late and apparently lamented Simeon, or whatever he was called, can hang on. The Boston station guys are fine.”

  His wife nodded her assent.

  “Juliet’s on duty today. I’ll get her in a squad car waiting for me.”

  Amos rang headquarters at Nettleham on the east side of Lincoln and made arrangements with Detective Sergeant Juliet Swift. She was in the car park waiting, engine running, when Amos arrived after a short detour that would have given the Chief Constable apoplexy had he known.

  Swift knew she would be driving. She could handle speed better than Amos. Within half an hour, blue lights flashing and siren blaring, they were in Boston market place, parking on double yellow lines.

  Chapter 3

  Detective Sergeant Gerry Burnside of Boston CID was in charge, as Amos and Swift soon discovered after they forced their way through a crowd of people and strode under the statue of the town’s patron saint atop the south door and into the parish church of St Botolph’s.

  Amos was not sorry to see Burnside. Although he was a bit of a plodder, rarely given to bouts of inspiration let alone genius, he was extremely efficient and well organised, never one to panic under pressure.

  Burnside greeted Amos cheerfully.

  “I got here within five minutes of the incident, Sir,” he told Amos. “Someone from the church had the presence of mind to phone immediately after it happened and the police station is only just across the river. I nipped over the footbridge. I’ve managed to corral just about everyone directly involved and a few more besides. Better to err on the side of caution, that’s my motto.”

  “Quite right, sergeant,” Amos responded smoothly. “Can you give us a quick run through in private first.”

  “Absolutely,” Burnside enthused. “I’ve managed to commandeer the vestry as a temporary incident room. Let’s go in there.”

  Amos concurred. He looked round. A couple of dozen people had settled with varying degrees of impatience and annoyance in the pews. An air of shock, as much as the efficiency of the Boston constabulary, had kept them in check.

  Once in the privacy of the vestry, Burnside started to sketch in such details as he had already ascertained.

  “I’ve concentrated on the people who were actually in the church,” he explained. “There were quite a number on the road across the river but they were soon joined by dozens of gawking ghouls so it was impossible to judge who was there at the time, who had left and who had joined the throng since.

  “In any case, they were well away from the action so there didn’t seem much point, although I reckon someone could just about have been in the church when the victim started his ascent, nipped down to the edge of the Market Place, crossed the bridge and trotted up the other side of the Witham by the time the victim reached the top.”

  “You did absolutely right, Gerry,” Amos assured him smoothly. “What do you gather happened, here in the church?”

  “I’m told it was an event organised by the Fens Abseiling Club. It was some sort of charity event. As you can imagine, the Stump has iconic status in these parts so it was a bit of a coup for the club to get permission to scale down it.”

  “Was it just club members doing the descent?”

  “As far as I can gather it was a mixture of club members and public show-offs. Some people, including the chair and vice-chair of the club, had already made the descent, attracting a decent sized crowd on the far river bank because they were so visible.

  “The dead man is Simeon Knowles,” Burnside continued, after a glance at his notebook. Apparently the significance of the name as a personal friend of the Chief Constable and as a general do-gooder had not registered with the detective sergeant, any more than it had with Amos.

  “He fell from the top. It was definitely not an accident. According to at least three members of the abseiling club who have seen the harness since, it had been tampered with, presumably within the church.”

  “That should narrow it down a bit,” Amos commented. “Surely very few people would have had the opportunity. I take it there is no doubt that it was deliberate sabotage?”

  “I’m assured that this was definitely sabotage. Unfortunately the list of possible perpetrators is wider than you might think. At some point just before Knowles went up to his doom, the bell ringers started a peal of bells. Club members up the Stump were forced to abandon their posts or face permanent deafness.

  “There was a lot of chaos and milling about while the matter was resolved. Quite a number of people had the opportunity to intervene. No-one would have particularly noticed if a complete stranger had wandered up in the middle of the melee.

  “However, there are certain people who stand out more than most. Three club members” – again Burnside consulted his notes for the names – “Gail Westerham, Mike Tate and Lesley Austin, plus the church warden and the chief bell-ringer are the main suspects. But other members of the abseiling club would have gone unnoticed and would have had knowledge of how the harness worked.”

  “OK,” Amos decided. “We’ll take the two head honchos from the abseiling club first, then Austin. After that we’ll go for the church warden and the chief bell-ringer. Do you think you and your team could get statements from the others who were on the scene and let them go, Gerry? Hang on to any who look more interesting or whose address you can’t verify.”

  Chapter 4

  Detective Inspector Paul Amos and Detective Sergeant Juliet Swift decided to split the two leaders of the Fens Abseiling Club between them, partly to save time and partly so that their respective stories could be gathered with the least danger that they might collude.

  Swift was allocated the vestry, which had been vacated to make a temporary incident and interview room, and Mike Tate, who was the Fens Abseiling Club’s second in command. Amos settled for a pew in a quiet corner of the church but kept the club leader, Gail Westerham, for himself.

  “Tell me about the club,” Amos asked her. “It seems to me rather odd that a club whose purpose is to scale down vertical drops should be based in the flattest part of the county.”

  Westerham gave a short, nervous laugh.

  “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “Well, yes, that was the point in a way. We all wanted a bit of excitement and scaling buildings and cliffs gave us days out. We’ve done one or two weekends away as well.”

  “And church towers?”

  “Occasionally. We make a donation and it attracts people to the church so vicars are often quite relaxed about it.”

  “And Boston Stump?”

  “We were really excited when we got permission to do it. You know this is the second largest parish church in the country? And, of course, the Stump is famous. You can see it for miles around. It’s easily the biggest challenge we have had, no wonder everyone was so excited. We were sure of a big crowd and piles of publicity.”

  Exciting? Amos thought to himself. Exciting? Watching abseiling makes snooker look exciting. He decided not to voice his thoughts.

  Instead he prompted: “Who’s idea was it?”

  Westerham thought for a moment.

  “Well, actually, I think it was Simeon who first mentioned the idea. Mike – Mike Tate – brought it up at a meeting bu
t I’m pretty sure he said that Simeon had put the idea to him. The church council were a bit reluctant at first but when we offered to raise money through sponsorship and running a collection among spectators on the day, they came round, some with more enthusiasm than others.

  “We agreed that the proceeds would be divided equally between the Stump restoration fund and distressed farmers within the parish and neighbouring parishes. That persuaded the reluctant ones to see reason.”

  “I take it that Simeon Knowles is – was – a member of your club,” Amos interjected. “Is there an age limit?”

  “No and no,” Westerham replied. “Simeon was not a member, although he had done one church tower with us in the past, the one at West Keal on the edge of the ridge. Funnily enough, the tower top is the same height above sea level as the Stump, although the drop is nothing like as far because it’s on the ridge.

  “And no, there is no age limit. It is all about fitness, physical and mental. Simeon passes with flying colours on both counts. On the rare occasions we allow members of the public to take part we always have a doctor on hand to check them over.

  “Dr Austin does the honours. She was here today doing her stuff. She checked that Simeon was OK, although it was pretty much a formality.”

  “OK, she checked him from a health point of view,” Amos accepted. “What about his harness? Who, if anyone, checked that? And by the way,” he interjected as Gail Westerham opened her mouth to reply, “if in fact no-one checked it, it’s better to say so now because we will find out.”

  “Dr Austin said she’d checked it at the bottom of the steps,” Westerham replied, a little testily. “She helped him put it on. We always make safety a top priority, and, if you’ll pardon my saying so, I resent the suggestion that we fell down in our duty to a member of the public on this occasion.”

  Amos ignored Westerham’s pique and pressed on: “Where were you when everything happened?”

  Westerham sniffed but replied: “Mike and I were at the top of the Stump, on the walkway. We were lowering down a club member and looking out for the next abseiler to come up the steps. Then the bells started ringing out right next to us. Luckily the person we were lowering – I think it was Jill Saunders – was just about at the bottom.