Churchyard and Hawke Read online

  Table of Contents

  Churchyard and Hawke

  Copyright

  Other books by author

  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

  About the author

  Churchyard

  and Hawke

  E.V. Thompson

  ROBERT HALE : LONDON

  © E.V. Thompson 2009

  First published in Great Britain 2009

  Hardback ISBN 978-0-7090-8853-0

  Paperback C Format ISBN 978-0-7090-8869-1

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of E.V. Thompson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  2468 10 97531

  By the same author

  THE MUSIC MAKERS

  THE DREAM TRADERS

  CRY ONCE ALONE

  BECKY

  GOD'S HIGHLANDER

  CASSIE

  WYCHWOOD

  BLUE DRESS GIRL

  TOLPUDDLE WOMAN

  LEWIN'S MEAD

  MOONTIDE

  CAST NO SHADOWS

  SOMEWHERE A BIRD IS SINGING

  WINDS OF FORTUNE

  SEEK A NEW DAWN

  THE LOST YEARS

  PATHS OF DESTINY

  TOMORROW IS FOR EVER

  THE VAGRANT KING

  THOUGH THE HEAVENS

  MAY FALL

  NO LESS THAN THE JOURNEY

  The Retallick Saga

  BEN RETALLICK

  CHASE THE WIND

  HARVEST OF THE SUN

  SINGING SPEARS

  THE STRICKEN LAND

  LOTTIE TRAGO

  RUDDLEMOOR

  FIRES OF EVENING

  BROTHERS IN WAR

  The Jagos of Cornwall

  THE RESTLESS SEA

  POLRUDDEN

  MISTRESS OF POLRUDDEN

  As James Munro

  HOMELAND

  CHAPTER 1

  In his first floor office at the Bodmin headquarters of the Cornwall constabulary, Superintendent Amos Hawke became aware of raised voices coming from the police station inquiry office on the ground floor of the building. Frowning irritably at having his concentration broken, he waited for the commotion to cease, but it continued unabated.

  There were three voices. One he recognized as belonging to Sergeant Hodge, the duty station officer, the second probably also belonged to a policeman, but the third was that of a young woman and she sounded upset.

  Sounds from the inquiry office would not normally have been heard on the first floor, but Cornwall, indeed the whole of Britain, was in the grip of a heat-wave and it was being said that 1859 was the hottest summer anyone could remember. As a result, even though it was not yet noon, all windows in the police headquarters were open in the hope that a breeze would spring up and bring some relief to the perspiring policemen working inside who were obliged to carry out their duties wearing heavy, high-necked serge coats.

  The noise from the inquiry office showed no sign of abating and with a sigh of resignation, Amos placed his pen on the ink-tray on his desk and stood up. Fastening the buttons at the neck of his coat and collecting his uniform cap from the hat-stand as he exited the office, he made his way downstairs.

  He reached the corridor on the ground floor just as a young girl wearing cheap but tidy clothes was being led from the inquiry office to the front door between Sergeant Hodge and a constable, both of whom towered head and shoulders above her.

  The girl was no longer protesting, but there were tears on her cheeks and, speaking to the sergeant, Amos demanded, ‘What’s going on, Sergeant Hodge, why is the young girl so upset?’

  Before the police sergeant could reply, the girl wailed, ‘They won’t listen to me . . . they think I’m making things up.’

  Over the girl’s head, Sergeant Hodge gave Amos an exasperated look. After pointing to the girl he put a forefinger to his forehead and twisted his hand back and forth in a gesture suggesting there was ‘something loose’ in her brain, at the same time explaining, ‘It’s all right, sir, I’ve known Enid Merryn since she was small. In fact, it was me who got her work as a scullery maid up at Laneglos House, the big mansion off the Lostwithiel road. There’s no harm in her but she has a vivid imagination and sometimes sees and hears things that aren’t there.’

  Struggling unsuccessfully to break free of the large policeman’s arm, Enid retorted, ‘You may not see or hear everything I do, Alfie Hodge, but I knows Jem well enough when he speaks to me. I knows him only too well and I saw him yesterday evening.’

  ‘Well, even if you did see him there’s nothing we can do about it…’

  To Amos, the sergeant said apologetically, ‘This young man she’s talking about worked up at Laneglos House until a few weeks ago. He wasn’t there more than a couple of months but it was long enough for him to get to know young Enid a little too well and to steal money from her employers.’

  ‘He took money from me too,’ Enid declared, ‘He promised to pay it back but then he ran off.’

  Looking at Amos over the girl’s head once more, Sergeant Hodge shook his head.

  Ignoring the gesture, Amos asked, ‘Why was this young man never arrested?’

  ‘He likely would have been,’ Sergeant Hodge replied, ‘but Lady Hogg, up at the big house said the money involved was such a trifling sum it wasn’t worth all the trouble it would have caused.’

  ‘I should have been informed of this.’ Amos said sharply, ‘I will decide whether or not someone should be arrested for breaking the law.’

  Addressing the Laneglos scullery maid, he asked, ‘This Jem . . . does he have a surname?’

  Despite her earlier indignation at not being taken seriously, now Enid had the attention of a senior policeman she seemed to suffer from a sudden loss of confidence. ‘Yes, and I know it. . . but I can’t remember what it is.’

  ‘Is he a local lad?’ Amos put the question to her.

  ‘No, he comes from London . . . where the Queen lives. He’s seen her, too, lots of times.’

  Amos doubted whether her ‘Jem’ had actually seen Queen Victoria, but had boasted that he had, in order to impress this gullible young scullery-maid. He asked, ‘I don’t suppose Jem mentioned where it was he lived in London?’

  ‘He did tell me, more than once. He said it was one of the smartest parts of London. It was called something like . . . Oxford, but it wasn’t that, although I know it started with "Ox . . . something or another.’

  Amos tri
ed unsuccessfully to think of a London district that began with ‘Ox’, before remembering that an ‘H’ at the beginning of any word was invariably ignored by Londoners from the poorer districts of London. ‘I suppose it wasn’t "Hoxton" by any chance?’ He suggested, mentioning one of the roughest slums in the East End of London.

  Enid’s face lit up immediately, ‘That’s it, "Oxton", that’s where Jem comes from.’

  Before being taken on as a superintendent in the newly-formed Cornwall constabulary, Amos had been a detective in the Metropolitan Police’s Scotland Yard and much of his work had been in the slum areas of London where crime thrived and law and order was despised. Of all these areas of narrow alleyways, dingy streets and jumbled houses, Hoxton was the worst. A high percentage of those arrested for the most violent crimes came from here and its residents were proud of the self-explanatory nickname ‘Kill-copper Alley’ which had been given to the area. If someone - anyone - from Hoxton was in Cornwall, Amos wanted to know about it.

  Speaking to the senior of the two men with Enid, he said, ‘You may release Enid now, Sergeant Hodge. I would like to have a word with her in my office about this young Jem. Have a cup of tea sent up for her, will you?’

  Enid Merryn seemed over-awed at being in Amos’s office and in an effort to put her at ease, he asked general questions about her work at Laneglos House but even when a constable brought a cup of tea to the office for her she maintained her reserve - until Amos asked whether she had always lived in the Bodmin area.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ she replied, ‘I come from Porthpean, near Charlestown. My father was a fisherman there . . . but he died before I came to work up at Laneglos.’

  ‘I know Porthpean well,’ Amos said, glad to have found some common ground between them. ‘My wife was the schoolmistress at Charlestown for many years. You might have known her . . . she was Talwyn Kemow then.’

  ‘You married Miss Kernow, sir?’ Enid’s delight was unfeigned, ‘I liked her very much. My pa paid for me to go to her school and she learned me to write my name - and to read . . . well, just a little. I wasn’t very quick at learning, but she was always kind to me and I liked her lots. I would have liked to stay at her school, but when my pa was drowned we moved into St Austell to live with my grandma and Sergeant Hodge got me work as a scullery-maid at Laneglos - only he wasn’t Sergeant Hodge then, he was a grocer who used to deliver to the big house and he spoke for me.’

  The knowledge that she was talking to the husband of the woman who had once been her much-liked teacher succeeded in putting Enid at her ease and Amos was soon able to broach the subject of the mysterious ‘Jem’. When he asked her once again if she knew his surname, she said immediately, ‘Yes, sir, I’ve remembered now, it’s "Smith", he’s Jem Smith . . . Jeremy Smith, really, but he said I should call him Jem.’

  Even in the unlikely event that this was the young man’s real name, there were hundreds of Smiths in the East End of London, many being of Gypsy origins. Amos knew he would get nowhere with this particular line of inquiry.

  ‘How well did you come to know Jeremy when he was working at Laneglos?’ he asked.

  Enid’s evident embarrassment gave Amos the answer even before she replied. Not meeting his eyes, she said, ‘I thought he loved me . . . he said we would get married one day.’

  ‘I see, but then he borrowed money from you and after stealing money from your employer he was dismissed?’

  ‘No. When the money went missing he knew everyone would blame him because he wasn’t from around here, so he just ran away. He didn’t even say "goodbye" to me.’

  Enid became tearful yet again and Amos said hurriedly, ‘Do you believe he stole the money?’

  Enid hesitated for a long time before replying, ‘No. . . at least, I didn’t then. I loved him and thought he loved me, but when I saw him yesterday he wasn’t the same, somehow.’

  Tears were still trembling in her eyes and Amos asked gently, ‘Where was he when you saw him, Enid . . . and what was he doing?’

  ‘Miss Wicks, who’s housekeeping up at Laneglos, sent me to fetch the candlesticks from the church, for cleaning. The church belongs to the house and is just behind it. When I was on my way there I saw something moving in the bushes. I thought it might have been a sheep got in there, or perhaps a dog, so I went to shoo it out. But it wasn’t an animal, it was Jem and there was a man with him he said was his uncle. Instead of being pleased to see me Jem was angry, especially when I asked him if he’d come to give me back the money he’d borrowed. He was so nasty he made me cry.’

  ‘Did he say what he was doing there?’

  ‘No, but his uncle did. He said Jem hadn’t meant to be angry with me. It was just that he was upset because he thought I was more interested in the money than I was about what he had been doing since he had to run away from Laneglos. His uncle said he and Jem had come all the way from London, ‘specially to tell me they were going into a business . . . something or another.’

  Here she paused, unable to find the word she was seeking and Amos prompted her, ‘. . . venture? Was it a business venture he was talking about?’

  Enid’s face lit up and she said, ‘That’s right, that’s what it was . . . a business venture. He made it sound very important and said it was going to make them a lot of money. When it did he said Jem would come back to Cornwall and give me twice as much money as I’d lent him because I was so kind to him when he was in need.’

  "This "uncle" told you that? Didn’t Jem say anything?’ Amos tried not to sound too sceptical.

  ‘Yes . . . but he still seemed angry with me. He said I wasn’t to tell anyone that he’d come all the way back to Cornwall to see me. If I did he said the police would come looking for him because of the money that had been taken from the big house and that even though he hadn’t taken it you’d put him in prison and he wouldn’t be able to give me back my money.’

  ‘I see . . . yet you must have told someone of seeing him, or you wouldn’t be here now - or did you think you ought to come anyway?’

  Enid appeared uncomfortable now and she said, ‘I didn’t mean to say anything, but last night Lucy, one of the parlour-maids, was teasing me about Jem and she was being nasty to me. She said that because he’d got what he wanted from me I’d never see him again. She went on for so long that I got cross and told her she was wrong. That Jem had come back and I’d seen him only that day. She told Miss Wicks what I’d said and I was sent for this morning and told I had to come here and report that Jem - she called him Jeremy, of course - that he was trespassing on Laneglos land . . . but he wasn’t trespassing, he’d only come back to speak to me. But it doesn’t really matter, Sergeant Hodge didn’t believe me anyway, so Jem shouldn’t be cross with me.’

  Amos was deeply disturbed by what this simple young servant had told him. If the mysterious ‘Jem Smith’ from Hoxton had returned to Laneglos and was skulking around the grounds with a so-called ‘uncle’ the chances were that they were planning to burgle the house.

  ‘Did Jem or his uncle say anything more to you? Want to know who was staying at the house, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’ Enid shook her head, ‘He asked me about some of the servants he’d known but a lot of his talk was about the summer ball that’s being held in the great gallery at Laneglos next month. His uncle said Jem was worried that I might need to work too hard. They asked me how many people would be coming? What time it would end. . . ? All that sort of thing. ‘

  Beaming through her tears at Amos, she added, ‘Jem must have told his uncle lots about me or he wouldn’t have known so much about what I do at Laneglos . . . so Jem really must love me, mustn’t he?’

  Ignoring her question, Amos asked, ‘This uncle . . . does he have a name?’

  ‘Of course! I mean, everyone has a name, don’t they? But Jem never mentioned it.’

  The sound of the town hall clock could be heard through the open window and, suddenly apprehensive, Enid asked, ‘Can I go now, please? Miss Wicks said I was to get
back to the house as quick as I could and not dawdle.’

  ‘Yes, you can go back to Laneglos. Tell Miss Wicks you’ve been a great help to me and I’ll be coming up to the house to have a chat with her and Lady Hogg first thing tomorrow morning.’

  Enid had been pleased when Amos had told her she had been a great help, but she was horrified when he said he would speak to her employer.

  ‘I don’t think Miss Wicks will be very pleased if Lady Hogg is bothered by what’s happened, sir. She says it’s her job to see the family aren’t troubled by the goings-on of servants.’

  Amos smiled, ‘Very well, Enid, just tell her I’ve said you’ve been a great help to the police and very sensible. I’ll be up at Laneglos to speak to her, just as soon as I can. If you see this Jeremy again in the meantime, be sure to tell Miss Wicks - but say nothing to him about the talk you’ve had with me, you understand?’

  Enid nodded, she was in a hurry to get away but paused in the doorway to say, ‘Thank you for listening to me, sir, and for believing me. I know I’m not very clever - but I don’t tell lies.’

  When she had left, Amos decided he liked the simple young scullery-maid. Not least because she had given him an excellent reason for putting boring paperwork to one side for a while and turning his attention to the work he enjoyed most. Pitting his wits against criminals.

  CHAPTER 2

  After Enid had left the police station Amos was still thinking of what she had told him when there came a knock on the open door of his office and a tall, powerfully built man entered the room. On the right sleeve of his uniform coat he wore a badge depicting a silver crown, denoting that he was the force’s sergeant major.

  Responsible for training recruits to the recently-formed Cornwall constabulary, Sergeant Major Harvey Halloran was an ex-Royal Marines colour sergeant. He had served with Amos in the Crimean war and was his second-in-command when Amos was given the task of policing a small town captured from the Russians. Harvey was also an ex prize-fighting champion and Amos had been instrumental in having him appointed to his present post.

  Because of this, and their association in the past, there was a close bond between the two men, although Harvey remained deferential in his manner towards the man who was once again his superior officer.