Strangeways to Oldham

Book 0: The Belchester Chronicles

by Andrea Frazer

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Lady Amanda Golightly of Belchester Towers is a person in complete contrast to the stereotypical image of her upper-class breeding. She is short, portly, and embarrassingly forthright. On a visit to a local nursing home she unexpectedly discovers a long-lost friend, Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump – and stumbles upon a murder.

The pair turn to sleuthing after Lady Amanda reports her appalling discovery to the local police inspector who treats her as a silly old biddy with an over-active imagination. Her outrage prompts her to teach the impertinent young whipper-snapper a lesson, and she and Hugo (Zimmer frame in tow) start investigating, only for murder to become a distressingly frequent occurrence...

Release date: March 20, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 250

Sample

Chapter One

‘Beauchamp!’

The name was shouted in a glass-shattering screech, which echoed round the vast entrance hall of Belchester Towers. ‘Beauchamp! Where the dickens are you! Come here, at once! Beauchamp!’

Thus, she summoned the one and only other occupier of her vast house. She was standing now, in the entrance hall, holding a piece of paper in her hands; holding it at arm’s length and squinting furiously at it.

‘How may I be of assistance, my lady?’ Beauchamp had appeared at her side as if by magic, his footsteps silent as always on the stone-flagged floor. Lady Amanda didn’t know how he did it, but he had often caused her to jump nearly out of her skin, with this inexplicable trick of his, to move around like a shade, with no intimation at all that he was near her. He was just, suddenly, there.

‘What, in heaven’s name, is this?’ she demanded, thrusting the piece of paper in his face, without preamble.

Beauchamp took the proffered document, and scrutinised it in detail. ‘It would appear to be a fine for speeding, my lady,’ he informed his enraged mistress.

‘Just what I thought, but how the devil can it be? I haven’t had the Rolls out for ages. The thing’s covered in dust and cobwebs, out there in the stables.’ She followed this with a noise that it is only possible to write thus: ‘Hrmph!’

‘It does not concern the Rolls, my lady – it is, in fact, a notice for speeding on your tricycle.’

‘My tricycle? Absolute rot! How could I possibly have been speeding on my trike? Don’t know what the world’s coming to, when a respectable woman can’t even ride her own trike without breaking the law. It’s a load of absolute rot, Beauchamp, and I shall phone the Chief Constable about it. His father used to be a good friend of Daddy’s, you know.’

‘I fear that would do little good, my lady. It states here that you were travelling along the entrance road to the hospital, where the speed limit is only five miles an hour, and you nearly ‘had’ the senior orthopaedic consultant with your conveyance.’

Ignoring him completely, she continued, ‘I mean, what sort of damage can one do, with a tricycle?’

Beauchamp eyed Lady Amanda’s generous figure up and down, considered the weight of the ancient machine she had been propelling, and decided not to voice his conclusion, which was ‘a considerable amount’. ‘And the gentleman mentioned, my lady?’ he prompted her to further explanation.

‘He got out of the way in time, didn’t he? I didn’t exactly hit him!’

‘No, but he only escaped being hit by your trike, by jumping off the entrance way into a rose bush, thus sustaining considerable damage to the material of his shirt and trousers, and a number of small scratches and abrasions.’

‘Piffle!’ retorted Lady Amanda, her face bearing a mutinous expression with which Beauchamp was only too familiar.

‘The accompanying letter says that you didn’t even stop to see how the poor man was.’

‘I was late for visiting. Old Enid Tweedie, you know. How ridiculous, having to have her tonsils out at her age. Absolutely shaming, if you ask me. It’s the sort of thing that children have done, then get a week of ice-cream and jelly until the pain goes away. Had it done myself, as a matter of fact, when I was about seven. And then, a couple of weeks later, she had to go back in to have her gall bladder removed. There’ll be nothing left of her, if she keeps having bits taken out at this rate.’

‘It also says here, that you are lucky not to be charged with what is referred to in common parlance as “hit-and-run”.’

‘With a tricycle?’ she shrilled, her voice rising with indignation. ‘I shall dispute it, of course!’

‘There were witnesses, my lady. I think they’ve got you by the proverbial “short and curlies”,’, Beauchamp informed her calmly. He was used to her moods by now, and didn’t let it disturb him, even when she threw a first-class tantrum.

‘Don’t be coarse, Beauchamp!’

‘Sorry, my lady.’

‘So, what do I have to do now?’ she asked him, her colour subsiding a little, as she realised she could probably leave this to Beauchamp to deal with, as he did with most things that arose in the household which required thought.

‘I suggest that you just pay your fine like a model citizen, my lady, and bear in mind the speed limit in future. Mrs Tweedie wouldn’t have been the worse for you arriving just a minute or two later, and you wouldn’t have found yourself in this situation if you had observed the roadside speed limit signs.’

‘Very well, Beauchamp. Get on with it.’

‘There’s just one more thing, my lady,’ he asked.

‘And what’s that?’

‘My name is pronounced Beecham, not that French variation you have used for some years now.’

‘I’m sorry, Beauchamp, but your name is an ancient one that came over with the Conquest, and I cannot find it in myself to use its Anglicisation. Take it or leave it! You should be proud to bear such an ancient name!’

It was a long-running battle between them, and Beauchamp gave in with a good grace, the way he always did, but one day – one day, he might just persuade her. And pigs would fly across a blue moon, when that happened, was his last thought on the matter.

‘I’m going out this afternoon, on the trike, but I shall take what you’ve said into consideration. Enid Tweedie informed me, as best as she could, of course, with her throat being so sore, that old Reggie Pagnell has gone into a nursing home.

‘Poor old thing! I haven’t seen him in absolutely yonks! I expect he was before your time, but he and Daddy used to be business partners when I was a wee one.’

The thought of Lady Amanda ever being a ‘wee one’ made Beauchamp wince, but he managed to make it a mental wince that didn’t appear on his features, lest his employer decided to take offence.

‘Anyway, I thought I’d tricycle over there this afternoon, and see how he is; cheer him up; you know, that sort of thing?’

Beauchamp knew that some people were only too delighted to have the pleasure of Lady Amanda’s company, and would gladly have run up a flag if they knew she were coming to visit. Others were not quite so fond of her, and were more likely to run up a side street at the rumour of a visit from her, but he maintained a respectful silence, knowing which side his bank account was buttered.

‘Perhaps you would be good enough to get the old steed out for me, Beauchamp. Just leave it round the front, as usual, and check the horn, to make sure its bulb hasn’t dozed.’ Attached to the handlebars of the tricycle that used to be her mother’s was a small version of an old-fashioned car horn, brass with a rubber bulb, and she was always worried that the rubber might have deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t use it any more.

In fact, she had used it, she remembered, when that chappie at the hospital had got in her way, and it had been in fine fettle then. Remembering this, she went to prepare for her visit with a smile on her face, hoping it would be a long time yet before she had to resort to one of those horrible little bell thingummyjigs.

Belchester was less than a mile away, now, as the little city’s suburbs crept ever-increasingly outwards, towards BelchesterTowers, and it was a relatively short ride for Lady Amanda to the Birdlings Serenade Nursing Home, (Nursing & Convalescence Our Speciality. Enquire about respite care), next to St Anselm’s Church, and on the city’s old northern border, just south of the cathedral.

She had never visited the place before, but surveyed in dismay its surroundings. To the west of the nursing home lay St Anselm’s, and its beckoning graveyard. To its north was the city hospital, and, to the east, a doctor’s and a dentist’s surgery. The poor residents were surrounded on all sides by decay, illness and death, and it must be very depressing for them, she thought, as she propelled her tricycle, at a snail’s pace, given what had occurred previously, up its drive to the main entrance.

The reception area that greeted her reminded her of how lucky she was not to be reduced by health and finances to live in a place like this. Despite the scents of polish and disinfectant, there lingered the odour of boiling greens and, underneath everything, a decided tang of urine, which made her wrinkle her nose in distaste. To think of poor Reggie Pagnell, ending up here.

At the desk, she announced in a booming voice that she had come to visit an old family friend, but when she announced that friend’s name, the receptionist turned a little pale, and asked her if she’d wait, so that she could check with Matron, whether that would be all right or not.

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ declared Lady Amanda, watching the woman walk off down a corridor to her right, and then, consulting a handy list of residents, which had been pinned to the wall to the side of the desk, she spotted her target’s room number, and toddled off down the left-hand corridor, in search of her father’s old partner. Her eyesight was still good enough to read things at a distance, and she had learned all she needed to know. What did the woman want to involve Matron for?

Room number five was only a few steps away, and she gave a brisk knock on the door, and entered it hurriedly before that interfering receptionist woman came back with some excuse or other about why she couldn’t pop in on poor old Reggie. Closing the door carefully behind her, she turned, ready to greet a familiar face, and was staggered to note that he wasn’t tucked up in bed, as she had expected, but rather was laid out; the whole length of him, including his face, covered with a white sheet.

Startled into silence, she approached the shrouded figure almost on tiptoes, noticing as she did so that his bedside table bore two cocktail glasses, both of them empty. That was odd! She wouldn’t have expected cocktails to have been served in a place like this. Almost instinctively, she bent her nose to the nearest glass, and gave a very unladylike sniff, then moved on to the other glass.

The first had smelled the same as the second, and she knew she recognised it, but could not put a name to it, off the top of her head. Her long experience of imbibing cocktails meant that she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every cocktail that existed, and she knew she had come across this one before. Without even thinking about it, she placed one of the glasses in her capacious handbag, noticing, at the same time, that some liquid had recently been spilt on the carpet, in front of the cabinet.

Without a trace of embarrassment, she got down on all fours, and leant her nose towards the still-damp stain. Another gargantuan sniff confirmed what she had suspected she would find. This, too, was a recognisable cocktail, but there was something else there in the background, which she had detected in the glasses too.

Her thought were interrupted, however, as, at that moment, the door sprang open, and a whippet of a woman with an angry face confronted her. ‘Who are you? And what the devil are you doing in here?’ she barked, furiously.

Still on all fours, her forearms flattened before her as she bent forward, her nose almost touching the carpet, she thought furiously. ‘I’m praying to Mecca, for the soul of the departed,’ Lady Amanda improvised, in double-quick time. ‘And, if it comes to that, who the devil are you?’

‘I think you’ll find that east is in the opposite direction, madam. I am Matron of this home, and you had no right to enter this room. The patients’ privacy is secondary only to their welfare,’ Matron yapped, looking at Mr Pagnell’s strange visitor.

‘In that case, why is poor old Reggie dead?’ she asked, piercing the woman with a gimlet eye.

‘He passed away not half an hour ago, and the doctor hasn’t arrived yet to issue the certificate, although what business it is of yours, I haven’t a clue. Who the devil are you, madam?’

‘I,’ began Lady Amanda, rising ponderously from the floor, and pulling herself up to her full height of five feet four, with the aid of the bed frame, ‘am Lady Amanda Golightly of GolightlyTowers.’ That usually did it. The woman would be quelled now.

But she wasn’t. ‘I don’t care if you’re the Duchess of Cornwall. You can’t just come waltzing into the private room of one of my residents without a by-your-leave. Now, I insist that you vacate this room this instant. You had no right to be here in the first place.’

‘I didn’t realise this was a prison,’ Lady Amanda threw back at her. ‘I thought this was a home, and one can have visitors at one’s home, can’t one?’

‘Not without my say so,’ spat Matron, sure that she had made her point this time.

As if to indicate the end of round one, a male voice called plaintively from a few doors down the corridor, ‘Nurse! Nurse! I haven’t had my tablets yet!’

The timbre of the voice registered in Lady Amanda’s subconscious first, speeding through the twists and turns of

Through the doorway of a room on the other side of the corridor, the owner of the voice looked her up and down, and enquired, ‘Manda?’ unbelievingly.

‘Chummy!’ she hooted again, approaching the figure in a wing chair beside the window. ‘Well, bless my soul, if it isn’t old triple-barrelled Hugo! What the blue blazes are you doing in a place like this?’

‘So it is you after all! I heard you bellowing at that old witch of a matron, and I thought, “good for you”. It certainly sounded like you, but I couldn’t believe it could possibly be you, not after all this time.’

‘But what are you doing here?’ asked Lady Amanda, hardly able to believe her eyes, that the elderly man she was looking at was the friend she hadn’t seen for decades.

‘It’s the arthritis that got me, Manda. I had to have someone in to look after me a few times a week, and then it got even worse, until I just couldn’t cope on my own any more, so I put myself in here. God’s waiting room, we all call it. And that matron! What a gorgon! The old besom calls me Mr Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump! I’ve tried explaining to her that it’s pronounced Chummley-Crighton, but she won’t listen to me – thinks I’m in my dotage, just because I have difficulty in moving around.’

‘Oh, how ghastly for you, you poor old thing! What an ignorant woman, and such bad manners to keep on doing it, after she’s been corrected. I have the same trouble with my Beauchamp – you must remember him from the old days. He insists that his name is Beecham, and won’t listen to a word I say on the subject. Well, I’m not standing for you being subject to that sort of thing! I’m getting you out of here. You simply can’t stay. And whatever’s happened to the house? Lovely old place!’

‘I’ve got it on the market. Can’t afford to stay here for long, at the prices they charge. I’m not made of savings, you know.’

‘Just precisely what is the fee, per month, Hugo?’ asked his visitor, with genu. . .