If Wishes Were Hearses

Book 298: Murder Room

by Guy Cullingford

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

George White, an inoffensive little chemist in East Anglia, finds himself the possessor of a somewhat unusual accomplishment - he only has to wish someone dead and his wish is granted. The first inkling of his abilities comes when Major James, a petty tyrant who made George the butt of his jokes, dies suddenly. Did he succumb to occult powers or had his own weak heart finally got to him? Although the police accept that the major's death has natural causes, several of the locals think otherwise, and attempt to solve the mystery to their own satisfaction.

Release date: November 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

‘I WISH he was dead’, said Mr. George White, with uncommon ferocity for a man of his mildness.

‘Were’, corrected his daughter patiently, while she prevented the tip of one of her plaits, fat and pointed like a paint brush, from entering the marmalade jar. ‘I wish he were
dead.’

‘Little Miss Highbrow!’ jeered her brother, Jack, from a mouth stuffed liberally with toast. He was bolting his breakfast because it was Saturday morning and he was going on a
fishing expedition with a lad of his own age; he was sixteen.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mr. White, lowering his paper to glower at Una through his bi-focals, a recent acquisition which had already sent him twice hurtling down the step
leading into the shop. ‘I wish he was dead, and that’s quite right. I say it again. I wish he was dead.’

‘I wish he were dead’, reiterated Una who had inherited her father’s stubbornness divorced from that gentleness of disposition which is its rightful pair.

‘Now, now!’ cried Mrs. White from the other end of the table where she sat behind the tea tray, her favourite woman’s periodical propped up against the tea pot and a slice of
bread and butter in her hand, nibbling comfortable away at both.

‘That’s right, Mum, you call ’em to order’, said Jack. ‘They sound like a council meeting.’

‘They both sound extremely bloodthirsty for so early in the morning’, commented Mrs. White, who had only a faint idea of what had been taking place, owing to her preoccupation with a
heroine of alluring beauty but impeccable morals. ‘Didn’t I hear them both wishing somebody dead?’

‘It’s this fellow, Wallace’, explained Mr. White. ‘The fellow who owns this disgusting, ill-printed rag known as the Bloxton Advertiser!’ and he waved it
at the assembled company.

‘Yon needn’t buy it’, said Jack. ‘Another cup of tea, please, Mum, and don’t forget the sugar this time.’

He was not exactly a rude boy, but he had a way of speaking the truth as he saw it, plainly, which has a very similar effect.

‘Don’t be silly, Jack’, reprimanded his mother. ‘You know it’s the only local. Besides, your father has an advertisement in it.’

‘Not for much longer, Mabel. I don’t care to associate myself with such a scoundrel. Why, the man’s nothing but a public menace as far as this village is concerned. First he
sets out to remove an . . . an historical monument . . . the Tidbury Cross . . .’

‘Fairly recent history’, interrupted Jack, that stickler for the accurate.

‘Yes, well, I admit that the cross itself was only Victorian. But the original cross, my boy, which stood on that spot, was Saxon in origin and dated back to the sixth century and . .
.’

‘Oh, yes, yes, we know all about that’, agreed Jack hastily. ‘But after all, Wallace didn’t remove the site. The site’s still there.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr. White, slipping his bi-focals down on to the end of his nose so that he could really see his son instead of only believing that he could, ‘but therein lies the
danger. If a site isn’t marked in a suitable fashion, people forget exactly where it was situated. Look what a lot of valuable information has already been lost historically. Martyrs are
supposed to have been . . . er . . . been . . .’

‘Liquidated’, suggested Jack.

‘Well . . . um . . . martyred in about half-a-dozen places and no one knows exactly where. One authority says one thing, one another. St. Edmund’s oak is a good example. Now, what
are we to believe? You can’t really venerate a place when you aren’t perfectly sure that what happened there did happen,’ said Mr. White whose meaning was clear if his statement
was muddled. ‘And it’s the same with the Tidbury Cross’, he ended triumphantly.

‘Old Wallace’s argument was that he didn’t want any present-day martyrs. You know quite well, Dad, that three lorries had run into that cross. You patched up one of the drivers
yourself.’

Mr. White shifted from a shaky position to one in which he knew from past experience he was secure.

‘It amounts to this’, he said. ‘Heavy traffic shouldn’t be allowed on country roads. They were never built for it.’

His daughter Una was fourteen. She looked like a damsel dreamed up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but beneath her smooth white brow, problem upon problem presented itself for
unceasing solution. To call such a girl Una when her psyche was a battleground of conflicting impulses, was clearly ludicrous. Now, the same instinct which had caused her to correct her father in
his use of the tenses, a desire to be scrupulous at all costs, led her to object.

‘But Mr. Wallace didn’t order the cross to be removed. It was removed by order of the parish council.’

Mr. White clicked twice with his tongue against the back of his teeth. ‘There is such a thing as wheels within wheels.’

‘And we’re not speaking of lorries, my good girl’, put in Jack, sotto voce.

‘If Mr. Wallace likes to start a campaign in his disreputable organ against a certain object, his influence soon becomes felt locally. Everyone knows that he has Major James in his vest
pocket. The Major likes a good press. Then he has to behave like a good boy and do what he’s told, otherwise he doesn’t get one.’

‘I can’t understand, Una dear’, interrupted Mrs. White, her plump and rosy face contorted into an expression which displayed a passionate desire for enlightenment. ‘If
you are standing up for Mr. Wallace now, why did you wish he was dead?’

‘Were dead, Mother.’

‘Well, were dead, dear. It’s all the same.’

‘It’s not! It’s not!’ cried the poor, tormented Una. She burst into tears and fled from the room.

‘Now whatever is the matter with her?’ asked Mr. White. ‘She needs one of my pink powders in my opinion, Mother. You can’t beat them.’

‘Girls always go through a difficult stage, my dear’, purred Mrs. White cosily. ‘It’s just growing-up.’

‘It’s adolescence, Mum. I’ve got it too, but it doesn’t affect me the same way. Just makes me thirsty. Another cup, Mum, please.’

‘Yes, but why ever did she wish that poor Mr. Wallace was dead?’

‘She didn’t. It was me’, said Mr. White, who felt every right to be as ungrammatical as he pleased, now that his daughter had taken herself off. ‘Do you see this
headline, Mabel? Just look for yourself. Biggest type they’ve got. “Village cesspools.” Now what do you think of that!’

‘Well, it isn’t very nice’, admitted Mrs. White.

Very nice! Very nice, indeed! And do you know what cesspools he’s getting at?’

Mrs. White shook her amiable head.

‘Why Tidbury cesspools, of course. The man’s demented, bigoted. And all because he had a bad lunch at the Crown three years ago before the brewery put in the Motts’s. Do you
know of any village round here within a radius of fifty miles which hasn’t got cesspools? Of course you don’t, because there isn’t such a thing. And what on earth does it matter
in the country where there isn’t a dense population? Look at our cesspool!’

‘Does it want looking at?’ asked Mrs. White innocently.

‘No, of course not. That’s just what I mean. For all the bother it is, it might just as well not be there.’

‘Well, I’ve often wondered’, said Mrs. White. ‘Nobody empties it and yet it never runs over. Then, where does it all go to? I’m not worrying, you know. I feel
I’d just like to know.’

‘Does it ever smell?’ demanded Mr. White.

‘No, I can’t say it does.’

‘Does it ever occasion any adverse comment?’ persevered her husband.

‘Only on a dark night when one trips over the thingummajig’, suggested Jack. ‘The small monument which marks the site.’

‘Well, then, what is the sense of friend Wallace getting on his high horse to denounce cesspools, with particular reference to Tidbury?’

‘None at all, dear, that I can see, unless he has sometimes wondered, as I have, where it all goes to.’

‘There’s one consolation’, pointed out Jack. ‘He can hardly cause Major James to go round collecting all the cesspools, and now, after you’ve all ruined my hearty
breakfast by your unpleasant topics, I’ll push off. I promised to meet young Collins by nine-thirty, and I’ve got to pump up my tyres.’

‘Now, do be careful, Jack’, pleaded Mrs. White, who believed her son to be as incapable of looking after his own welfare at sixteen as he had been at six. ‘Don’t go doing
anything dangerous.’

‘My hat, Mum,’ said Jack, disclosing in a grin a row of tombstones, ‘we’re going fishing, not hunting big game. Well, so long, people. I’ll be seeing you. And thank
you for cutting the sandwiches.’

He vanished in the direction of the backyard.

‘How he does shoot up!’ sighed Mrs. White. ‘Why on earth do present-day children grow twice as tall as their parents, and have feet three times as large? Is
it anything to do with the feeding, do you suppose? You’re a chemist, dear, you should know,’

‘Eh?’ queried Mr. White absently. He had returned to a further examination of the offending paper.

‘I was asking you, dear, whether a starchy diet made children have big feet?’

‘Now, that’s interesting’, said Mr. White. ‘That’s very interesting. But I’m sure I couldn’t say.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose that it really matters. Have you finished your breakfast, dear?’

‘What’s that? Yes . . . yes, I have’, said Mr. White, finally lowering the shield of the Bloxton Advertiser in order to wipe any suspicion of crumbs from his lips with
his pocket handkerchief, since progress had robbed him of what he called a serviette. He took a last hurried sip of chilly tea.

‘Did the advertisement come out well?’ asked Mrs. White, who prided herself upon appearing to take an interest in her husband’s business affairs.

‘Oh, so-so. It wasn’t a particularly good block. Why don’t you have a look at it?’

He passed the paper over, and Mrs. White regarded with simulated pleasure a line drawing of a female head covered with long, wiry hair.

‘Zeppeline’, she read, ‘the cure for scurf. Very nice, dear. I’m sure it will bring in a lot of orders. Have you made a fresh batch in case you get a rush on
it?’

Not for worlds would she have told him her honest, private opinion of his advertising acumen. Scurf, for instance, what a word to use! Nobody, even the most depraved, would like to think that
they had scurf! Dandruff would have been better, but the best thing would have been to have left it out altogether. Reconditioning! That was what you wanted to say. That was what hair needed
nowadays. And glamour! Promise them plenty of glamour. And then, of course, it needed a different block. George should get a block made in London, not use one that he had had by him since he took
over the business twenty years ago.

But she knew that none of this was important. The important thing was that a man’s faith in himself should be preserved. There were some natures which couldn’t change, couldn’t
adapt themselves. As long as George was happy, what did it matter if he wasn’t a great success financially? What if he were a good old stick-in-the-mud? You knew where you were with a man
like George. In all their life together he had never caused her any anxiety. The profits out of the business were very small; with more competition they would have been non-existent, but then, so
were the expenses. Just at the moment the children were the biggest drain, they ate such a lot and wore out such a lot, but even then they had been intelligent enough to provide themselves with
scholarships. Oh, yes, she had good reason to be thankful, thought Mrs. White.

So, in regard to the advertisement she only permitted herself one criticism.

‘I still don’t think that it’s a good name, dear. It always reminds me of the war before last.’

‘Ah, I’m afraid that you’re too old-fashioned to appreciate modern business methods, my dear. Now I keep my eyes open and I see that all these things begin with Zipp and Zoff
or a Zed of some kind. Curious, when you come to think of it. There only used to be Zebra. I’m speaking about alphabet books. Anyway, what’s in a name? It’s good stuff—good
scuff!’

Mr. White rose from the breakfast table and turned his back on his wife so that he could look out of his wide-framed country window, at the day, and at the village of Tidbury. The village was
designed accidentally but spaciously in one long, broad street which was bisected by the prettiest thread of a stream named the Tid, spanned by two of the prettiest and ricketiest of rustic
footbridges. Round and about and even in the Tid when its depth permitted, cavorted ducks, of all birds most absurd and lovable.

The ducks had various owners, on whose behalf one supposes that they laid their eggs; it was one of those haphazard but satisfactory arrangements so characteristic of English village life. Mr.
White could look, and did, across the thoroughfare, across the trickle of water fringed on both sides by green grass, into the bow-fronted shop window of Joe Button, the draper, and into the window
shaped like a large cardboard box which held the groceries and provisions of the Widow Varden, whose stock, to judge by her display, largely consisted of dummy cartons of cocoa. Never mind where
the real duck eggs went to, there was a sky of duck-egg blue which had been washed in a shower of rain leaving Button’s old tiles irridescent, and the cobbles at his shopdoor all agleam. Even
without the Tidbury Cross it was wonderfully pleasant to Mr. White who stared at it through his bi-focals, but who could have equally well have looked at it blindfold, for he knew it all by
heart.

‘It’s a lovely day’, he said. ‘What’s Una doing? She ought to be out in the sunshine, not messing about upstairs.’

‘I expect she’s making her bed or reading. She’s a great one for reading’, said Mrs. White.

‘I don’t like it’, frowned Mr. White. ‘She reads a good deal too much, in my opinion. And it’s not as if she enjoyed a good girl’s story, or those nice little
papers you read yourself, my dear. She’s always buying these very odd magazines which cost such a lot of money, like Jack says, highbrow. The make-up’s enough to put you off. They all
seem to be covered in blotting paper. Nothing jolly or attractive. I was trying to read one myself the other day and I couldn’t make head or tail of it.’

‘I don’t suppose she does either’, said Mrs. White, with her innocent and comfortable smile. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. She’s in love with her English
mistress.’

‘Mabel!’ ejaculated Mr. White, twirling round on his heel, ‘What a dreadful thing to say!’

‘Oh dear, well, I didn’t mean anything wicked by it. I don’t know what you can call it but love. We all go through it. I did myself. It’s natural at that age.’

‘But this magazine wasn’t a bit natural. It was all poetry. Now, I used to like Longfellow myself. And Tennyson. But, bless my soul, I couldn’t understand a word of this. At
least,’ corrected Mr. White, ‘I could understand a few of the words, but those I could understand I didn’t like. Now, womb, for instance. That seemed to occur in every piece. I
don’t know what’s wrong with it exactly. It’s a Biblical word. But you don’t expect it to crop up everywhere. It doesn’t seem decent.’

‘I used to say a piece and I always thought that it was by Tennyson that began; “I left the web, I left the womb . . .” ’

‘Loom, dear, loom . . .’

‘Oh well, perhaps it may have been’, agreed Mrs. White with blandness. ‘In any case, you don’t want to worry about Una, Daddy. You’ll find that she’ll turn
out all right. Now, if she’d been like that poor Huggins girl with a dreadful squint . . .’

‘You haven’t found out whether she’s any more reconciled to the idea of coming into the shop?’ inquired Mr. White. It was his dearest wish that one of his children should
follow in his footsteps and, like most dearest wishes, it was doomed to disappointment.

‘I’m afraid not’, admitted Mrs. White. ‘She can’t take to it, George, and it isn’t wise to force her.’

‘A pity. It’s a great pity’, sighed Mr. White. ‘There’s a place all ready for her to step into. She could be apprenticed as soon as she’s got her Matric., and
properly qualified, and if she doesn’t want to go in for retail trade, she could always drop it later on and take up some sort of research work. I think that she’s got a bee in her
bonnet that selling something over a counter is despicable.’

‘What nonsense! I know that Una doesn’t think anything so stupid. It’s just that it isn’t in her line at all, dear. She wants to be a journalist.’

‘Heaven help her!’ said Mr. White with some reason.

‘We’ve all got our lives to lead,’ said Mrs. White, ‘and look at the time, George! You ought to be opening-up. Maureen will be here any minute now, if she isn’t
already.’

‘I daresay you’re right, you usually are, my dear’, agreed Mr. White, turning to the window again and flattening himself against it with the object of seeing whether his
assistant was indeed waiting for him to let her in to her day’s occupation—one could hardly call it work. ‘Yes, you’re quite right, Mabel. There she is. . . . Why must she
wear that awful beret?’

‘Hush, she’ll hear you’, advised Mrs. White. ‘And there goes Gran’, she added, as from the ceiling above her head sounded a series of staccato taps produced by the
ferrule of a walking stick wielded by a peremptory hand.

She rose from behind her tea tray, and started to stack all the crockery together.

‘Much as I love you, dear,’ observed Mrs. White to her husband’s departing back, ‘there are times when I am wicked enough to wish that you had been born an
orphan.’

AS space-saving was of no account in Tidbury, Mr. White’s shop was sprawled on to the side of his house in a clumsy but not unattractive manner.
The date of both was Victorian, but they were of the more pleasing box-type Victorian, not the Victorian Gothic used in the erection of small station-houses all over East Anglia.

Mr. White loved his shop. It was a little on the poky side, perhaps, but it was in the authentic tradition. For all its apparent solidity, it had materialized itself out of the smoky swirl of
the alchemist’s vapours and the steam of the witch’s cauldron. A subtle nose might have picked out of its compound smell, individual hints of certain oils and essences, but in general,
it had that aroma of good, old-fashioned pharmacy which has somehow managed to evaporate away from chain stores, be they never so grimly attractive.

It was modernized to the extent that it was possible to buy a lipstick or a box of face powder there if one wasn’t too fussy as to shade; one might even have the choice out of three
hairbrushes, but these objects were only a sideline, not a mainstay. It had a short but sleek mahogany counter faced with shallow, glass-fronted shelves which were packed with stubby, opaque jars,
plump tubes of varying sizes and those slippery, cold tins holding much the same things as were contained in the opaque jars, at a fraction of the cost. On top of this counter, divided by an open
space sufficiently large to accommodate a round rubber mat with concentric rings to facilitate the taking of change and a glass dish with two compartments, purpose ditto, were two showcases with
convex glass lids in which were displayed amongst other things, toothbrushes and powder puffs, tweezers and orange sticks, razors and razor blades. A loftier projection held on one side a row of
fat, comfortable bottles full of cough sweets, lozenges and barley sugar, and on the other, as a balance, a row of elegantly tortured cut-glass receptacles designed to contain loose perfume, and
now, therefore, quite empty.

Behind the counter, at Mr. White’s back, rose a stack of those fascinating, squarish drawers labelled in glass with mysterious yet vaguely familiar names; SOD.
BICARB., PIP. NIG., SENNAE. FOL., and P. SEIDLITZ F. Not all these drawers by a long chalk, when pulled out by their
crystal knobs, were found to provide what their titles suggested, PIP. NIG., for instance, held babies’ dummies. On the summit of the stack were arranged three blue
jars with Latin inscriptions bought by Mr. White at a sale, and a pot plant varying with the season. Between this ledge and the ceiling all was bottles, of as many shapes and sizes as the rats of
Hamelin, except for one oblong reserved for a heavily framed certificate, testifying to Mr. White’s ability to pursue his profession as an M.P.S.

At the extreme right of the counter, seen from the salesman’s side, was a small, mahogany till with a simplicity of mechanism which still rendered it capable of sticking at inconvenient
moments, and next to that, the tiny gas jet which in other days was kept permanently alight for the sealing of parcels. At the other end a partition was erected, bearing the legend on its curly
headboar. . .