Act of Murder

ACT OF MURDER

Alan Wright

Alan Wright lives in Wigan, Lancashire, where he taught English for thirty-five years. He now works as a consultant for the Graduate Teacher Programme. He has had several plays
and two volumes of secondary school assemblies published. He is fascinated by all things Victorian and is an avid reader of Golden Age detective fiction.

This ebook edition published in 2012 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alan Wright 2010

The moral right of Alan Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-199-6
Print ISBN: 978-1-84697-167-9

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To my mother and father, who gave me the happiest childhood anyone could have. To my wife Jenny, who is the best person I know. And to my children Ian, Neil and Debbie, who
make me so proud.

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Epilogue

1

The man spoke in low, hushed tones, and everyone in the cavernous hall shivered, moving closer to their neighbour. The gas lighting, which had been slowly dimmed until darkness
now prevailed, emitted a steady hiss that imbued his sombre words with the grimness of a cold graveyard vigil. His almost mesmeric voice now took on a whispered urgency, its tremulous note of
terror becoming more and more pronounced as his account conveyed a lurid horror that seemed to spread through the entire hall like a midnight mist, rather as if each heavy syllable were drifting
upwards into the darkness that now enveloped the audience like a winding-sheet.

‘And on such a dark, moonless and dismal night, with the wind howling and the cypress trees shivering and swaying from the black force around them, there came a sound. The low,
grief-stricken groans of a man ready to rise from the cloying damp depths of his own recently dug grave . . .’

Suddenly they saw a white face – the face of a rotting corpse! – rise with funereal slowness, its body seemingly swathed in a soil-stained shroud; rise, rise, rise, until it hovered
high above them and gazed down, an eternity of sadness and loss etched for ever in its cold, dead features. Where its eyes should have been, thick worms, glistening in the filth of death and
putrefaction, seemed to writhe and gorge their way through to the inner recess of the brain, while around the head, strands of loose cloth caked in filth fluttered wildly in the hellish breeze.

‘Watch closely now. Watch and keep your breathing silent! Let no gasp of air reach the cold ether around us. Can you feel the chill of death close by? Now observe! The risen corpse is not
alone!’

A woman near the back uttered a tiny scream as the gruesome shape of a skeleton slowly rose above the audience where earlier the corpse had appeared. But the skeleton was not alone. Several
goblin-like creatures, their eyes blazing with anger and hatred, swirled around and around the skeleton as if paying tribute to their leader, some swooping as low as the ground and others soaring
high to the very ceiling before plummeting downwards at a fantastical speed and forcing those nearby to cower and sway in terror. More women now began to whimper.

Suddenly, with a whooshing sound that took everyone unawares and generated a whole cacophony of screaming, the skeleton launched itself at the deathly pale corpse and there began the most
frightful struggle for supremacy, a conflict rendered all the more ghastly by the unearthly banshee wail that now filled the entire room.

Women stood up, screamed and held their hands to their faces, as if trying in vain to keep their jaws from dropping senselessly to the floor. Now their menfolk, themselves sufficiently disturbed
to stand and offer at least a semblance of manliness in the face of such terror, pulled their women close to them as the grisly scene playing out above their heads came to its deadly
conclusion.

Then blackness. Total blackness.

*

Benjamin Morgan-Drew sighed, bemoaning the flattened vowels, and prepared to sit in his thirtieth seat of the day. As actor-manager he carried an enormous weight of responsibility, both towards
each member of the company (away from London for eight long and arduous weeks) and towards the audience they had travelled so far to entertain. It was therefore his proud boast that he brought a
meticulous eye and ear to every aspect of the performance, viewing the stage and its environs from every conceivable spot in the auditorium to check for visual impediments or acoustic
inadequacies.

For this reason he insisted on one of the supernumeraries standing centre stage and reciting over and over again ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’.

‘No, no and again no!’ he yelled. ‘The words “with a passion of the strong” need to be imbued with the roar of a lion!’

This particular super (a local youth whose ambition to become an actor overcame the ignominy of treading the boards with the Morgan-Drew Touring Company as ‘Railway Passenger No. 3’)
had been one of three offered as stock actors along with the hire of the theatre and the orchestra. It amused Benjamin to listen to his peculiar northern tongue twist its way around Milton
Hayes’s dramatic syllables, but he didn’t allow his amusement to ignore shoddy projection, supernumerary or no.

‘You want me t’roar like a lion?’ the youth shouted into the dim light of the auditorium.

‘No! I want you to project your voice with passion. Roar the words in the way a lion would. Just read the verses as loudly as you can.’

As the youth’s voice boomed forth, Benjamin felt a hand touch his shoulder. He turned around and saw Herbert Koller sitting directly behind him.

‘Herbert! How long have you been there?’

‘Oh, a few minutes. I’ve been “standin’ in t’dark”, Benjamin!’

Herbert Koller wasn’t much older than the youth who was manfully struggling through the verses on stage, and yet there was a world of difference between the two young men: where the local
youth was hesitant, uncertain and still learning his craft, Herbert had about him a casual elegance, a confident manner that some interpreted as arrogance, with none of the awkwardness of movement
that was being displayed on stage. When Herbert stood before the full glare of the footlights he seemed to transcend the banal confines of a theatre and take his audience wherever he wished. And of
course, with his dark curls fringing a smooth forehead, and the finely chiselled, almost classical features, it was inevitable that his physical beauty would conspire to render even the most
obdurate of females pliant and bewitched.

‘How much longer are you going to torture that poor boy?’ Herbert said, resuming his normal drawl and bringing his mouth close to Benjamin’s ear. ‘It isn’t a
performance, you know. It’s an acoustics test. And it’s quite evident the boy is no monologist. His vocal cords aren’t suited to force.’

‘His vocal cords will do what I demand!’ Benjamin snapped back. He hadn’t liked the tender way Herbert had referred to the ‘poor boy’. ‘Louder!’ he
called out to the stage.

Herbert gave a dramatic sigh and squeezed Benjamin’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps I should coach him? What do you think?’

‘You will do nothing of the kind!’

‘He returned before the dawn with his shirt and tunic torn!’ roared the super with renewed gravitas, ‘And a gash across his temple dripping red!’

‘Better.’

‘Bravo!’ Herbert yelled through cupped hands, then gave a round of applause that brought a blush from the youth on the stage. ‘All he needs is encouragement.’

Benjamin turned around once more and glared, his face reddening with a growing anger. ‘You keep away from him, do you hear, Herbert?’

‘Of course,’ came the smooth response.

‘And another thing. I need to speak to you about earlier.’

‘Why?’

‘Where were you?’

‘Oh, I decided to take a stroll round this delightful town.’

‘You missed the meeting.’

‘Oh dear. Did I miss anything important?’

Benjamin stood up and turned fully and menacingly towards him.

The youth on stage peered out, his recitation slowly grinding to a halt. ‘Have I done, Mr Morgan-Drew?’

He didn’t get an answer. From where he stood it was difficult to see anything with any clarity. He had a vague impression of the great man bending low and saying something to Mr Koller,
but the words were whispered and failed to carry beyond the footlights. Not that it mattered: as Mr Morgan-Drew had explained, an acoustics test helps assess the audibility of sound projecting from
stage to audience, not the other way around. Yet from the darkness he did hear Mr Koller say something in return, followed by what he described to the other two supers later as a cackle.

‘That was what it sounded like, swear on me mam’s grave. That Mr Koller gave a cackle like a witch.’

*

‘Well, it bloody well scared me!’

Constable Jimmy Bowery was sitting in the Wigan Borough Police Station canteen, holding court with several of the younger members of the force. It was that slack mid-afternoon period when
they’d completed their patrols and were now enjoying a cup of hot tea before the pits and the foundries and the cotton mills disgorged their thirsty workforces and the drinking and the
carousing began in earnest. At the far end of the room, two officers were earnestly engaged in a game of billiards, each resonant clack of the balls being met with a cheer or a curse from the few
onlookers. One other, dressed not in regulation uniform but a dark grey suit that had seen better days, sat in the solitary armchair, evidently absorbed in the newspaper he was reading. Outside, a
horse whinnied at the crack of a cabbie’s whip, and the sound of a heavy wagon trundling past the station temporarily distracted the raconteur.