THE
DETECTIVE
MARKHAM
MYSTERIES
Eight Gripping Crime Thrillers Box Set
CATHERINE MOLONEY
Click on the book you want to go to:
Book 1: CRIME IN THE CHOIR
Book 2: CRIME IN THE SCHOOL
Book 3: CRIME IN THE CONVENT
Book 4: CRIME IN THE HOSPITAL
Book 5: CRIME IN THE BALLET
Book 6: CRIME IN THE GALLERY
Book 7: CRIME IN THE HEAT
Book 8: CRIME IN THE HOME
This box set first published 2020
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
CRIME IN THE CHOIR first published 2019
CRIME IN THE SCHOOL first published 2019
CRIME IN THE CONVENT first published 2019
CRIME IN THE HOSPITAL first published 2019
CRIME IN THE BALLET first published 2019
CRIME IN THE GALLERY first published 2019
CRIME IN THE HEAT first published 2020
CRIME AT HOME first published 2020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.
©Catherine Moloney
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ISBN 978-1-78931-472-4
CONTENTS FOR ALL BOOKS
Book 1: CRIME IN THE CHOIR
Prologue
1. The Summons
2. St Mary’s
3. A Mystery
4. Brothers in Arms
5. The Grottoes
6. Widening Circles
7. Let It Come Down
8. Undivulged Pretence
9. Quiet Consummation
10. Ancient History
11. On the Scent
12. On Our Watch!
13. Lengthening Shadows
14. No Comfortable Star
15. Exhalations Laden with Slow Death
16. Slaying the Demon
Epilogue
Book 2: CRIME IN THE SCHOOL
Dedication
Prologue
1. First Impressions
2. Olivia
3. A Discovery
5. Mourning Rites
6. Another Body
7. Family Snaps
8. Clearing the Air
9. Fear and Loathing
10. The Eye of the Storm
11. Secrets
12. The Net Tightens
14. Nemesis
15. Cornered
Book 3: CRIME IN THE CONVENT
Dedication
Prologue
1. Faithful Servant
2. Give and Bequeath
3. No Quiet Night
4. The Fowler’s Snare
5. Storm Clouds
6. Shades of Darkness
7. Death Is Their Shepherd
8. Seeds of Discord
9. Widening Ripples
10. Troubling Encounters
11. Baal
12. Revelations
13. Fallen Angel
14. Consummation
Epilogue
Book 4: CRIME IN THE HOSPITAL
Dedication
Prologue
1. Voice from the Grave
2. Through the Looking Glass
3. Sleep No More
4. Phantom Threads
5. The Sleep of Reason
6. A Cold Front
7. Diminishing Returns
8. Wheels Within Wheels
9. Aftermath
10. A Mystery
11. Out of Joint
12. Out of the Depths
13. Countdown
14. Finis
Epilogue
Book 5: CRIME IN THE BALLET
Dedication
Prologue
1. Another World
2. An Alternative Religion
3. Walpurgis Night
4. Beyond the Footlights
5. Gathering Storm
6. Unravelling the Threads
7. Pastorale
8. Gordian Knot
9. Enigma
10. The Road to Nowhere
11. Behind the Footlights
12. Spectre at the Feast
13. Doubts and Fears
14. Hidden Malady
15. Final Curtain
Book 6: CRIME IN THE GALLERY
Prologue
1. The Palace of Art
2. Birds of Paradise
3. Demon’s Lair
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls
5. Forebodings
6. On the Trail
7. Echoes from the Past
8. Secrets
9. Appointment with Death
10. Skeletons in the Closet
11. A Bend in the Road
12. Out of the Shadows
13. Deadly Peril
14. Recalled to Life
Epilogue
Book 7: CRIME IN THE HEAT
Prologue
1. And So It Begins
2. A Neighbourhood of Spies
3. Auld Lang Syne
4. Stranger Than Fiction
5. The Paths of Glory
6. Conundrum
7. Distant Rumbles
8. A Trinity
9. Backs to the Wall
10. That’s for Remembrance
11. An Opening
12. Little by Little
13. Baiting the Trap
14. The Figure in the Carpet
15. Resolution
Book 8: CRIME AT HOME
Prologue
1. Bad Omen
2. The Cast Assembled
3. Stirrings
4. A Shock
5. Wheels Within Wheels
6. Tightrope
7. In the Blink of an Eye
8. Hidden Watcher
9. A Lit Fuse
10. Stasis
11. Close to Home
12. Circling the Target
13. Revelation
14. Beyond Anyone’s Reach
ALSO BY CATHERINE MOLONEY
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Glossary of English Slang for US readers
Book 1:
CRIME IN THE
CHOIR
A fiercely addictive crime thriller
Catherine Moloney
Prologue
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Bromgrove Municipal Cemetery on the eve of the millennium. An appropriately miserable day for a teenager’s funeral. Cold, sodden and overcast. The dregs of winter, with dripping boughs scoring the sky like snapped guitar strings.
Though not a fanciful man, it seemed to Detective Inspector Mike Bamber that the blackened walls of the little disused cemetery chapel on the south side – long abandoned in favour of the modern facilities on Bromgrove Avenue – bulged dropsically in the gloom as though from the accumulated damp of centuries.
God, it was a dismal scene, with all those dark stone slabs glistening wetly and weathered hea
dstones pressing in like a ghostly army.
The sonorous words from the burial service echoed in his head.
Sown in corruption… Man born of woman cometh up and is cut down like a flower.
He swallowed hard as he thought of that picture on the coffin – the happy, laughing boy flushed with pride at a sporting triumph – and remembered the pitiful skeleton they had dragged from the slurry.
They might bury the poor lad facing the east, Bamber said to himself, but he hadn’t really had a shot of life at all and his parents would never see the sun shining on their son’s bright golden head again.
He took a long drag on his cigarette, looking across at the grave, denuded of its sheets of fake grass, a mound of sludgy earth waiting to be shovelled on top. It would be six months before it had a headstone. What would the grieving parents inscribe on it? Jonathan ‘Jonny’ Warr. Treasured memories...
Now that everyone had left, the gravediggers too were seizing the chance to have a crafty fag. Nobody bothered him.
Three boys gone missing together in the summer of 1997. Now they’d got one of them back, albeit in a coffin.
Bamber shivered. He had a bad feeling about this case. The trail had gone cold long ago. Three ordinary lads. There one day and gone the next. As if a black hole had opened and sucked them in. A hole like the one where Jonny Warr lay mouldering.
No good getting morbid. He’d be no use to the families like that. The ravaged face of Jonny’s mother was seared on his retina. The fancy send-off – all the great and good of Bromgrove out in force – wouldn’t comfort her when the night horrors struck.
He took another fierce drag, wondering if the boy’s parents would stay together, whether their marriage could survive the spotlight that would be shone into every corner of it. Something about the way that they had looked at the graveside – as if they were seeing each other from a long way off – made him doubt it.
It was getting colder. Bamber flicked his cigarette butt away and hunched his shoulders inside the heavy trench coat. Ducking his head to the grave in an embarrassed little gesture of respect, he began trudging towards the cemetery’s main entrance off Bromgrove High Street.
The cusp of a new century, yet everything around him seemed shrunken, hard and dry, without hope.
That’s my job, he chided himself. To bring hope where there is none.
Passing through the gates, he turned towards the lights and hum of the town.
1. The Summons
Twenty years later. Another cemetery.
Mrs Georgina Hamilton, pillar of St Mary’s Cathedral, eased herself stiffly upright to contemplate the fruits of her labours. Much better! No more straggly weeds, and the tasteful cellophaned bouquet struck just the right note. Nobody would be able to accuse Geoffrey Hamilton’s widow of failing to show appropriate respect. She ran a critical eye along the line of graves in the south-eastern corner of the cathedral graveyard. Yes – it was far and away the best tended plot, she reflected smugly, slipping the miniature trowel into her coat pocket.
Complacently, she cast a proprietorial eye around her. To her left, dominating the graveyard, rose the great cathedral. Just beyond that, on the other side of a low wall, was St Mary’s Choir School, its outlines dimly visible through the gathering twilight. The proximity of the celebrated St Mary’s Grottoes, that ancient religious shrine which lay behind the school, made these precincts doubly blessed.
Somehow, she had lost track of time and it was nearly dark. Shivering in the December twilight, she was uncomfortably conscious of the silence which lapped the precincts of the cathedral. Mist was coming down, wreathing the ancient memorials in clammy vapours. She peered apprehensively through the gloom. For all her sturdy unimaginativeness, she had an uneasy sense that the memento mori and gargoyles were leering at her in the knowledge of some private joke.
With a shake of her head, as though to dispel the fog from her mind, Georgina squared her shoulders and, clutching her capacious handbag like a shield, picked her way along the muddy gravel path between the rows of graves, resolutely ignoring the pale obelisks which beckoned with spectral fingers and the ranks of crooked headstones coated in slippery moss.
There was no avoiding the squat, lichen-stained mausoleum which brooded at the side of the path, affording the nearest exit from the graveyard. In normal circumstances Georgina felt an almost proprietorial pride in the proximity of the Soames Vault – as though the mouldering relicts of Bromgrove’s first family shed a ghostly lustre on those who slept near them. On this occasion, however, as she looked up at the tomb’s rusting iron railings guarded by two angels, curved wings swooping high above their disdainful marble heads, she felt an urge to run. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. Long-forgotten lines from some school play came unbidden to her mind. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. It is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. Quite right too!
At that moment, she heard a harsh scraping noise coming from the rear of the mausoleum. Scarcely daring to breathe and somewhat amazed at her own daring, she tip-toed round the side of the monument to ascertain the source of the disturbance.
Blinking myopically through the murk, a strange sight met her eyes. An odd time to be digging graves was her first thought. Two men, their backs to her, were standing in a trench shovelling vigorously by the light of a heavy-duty lantern. Grunting and panting from their exertions, they were oblivious to everything but the task at hand. A couple of mud-stained headstones and some cracked granite plaques leaned drunkenly against a wheelbarrow piled high with earth.
She vaguely recalled Geoffrey saying something about ‘sensitive’ operations occasionally needing to be carried out at night-time. As verger and local councillor, he was in a position to know. It had been tacitly understood, however, that subjects such as burial law and policy were not suitable to be aired around the tea table. With the cathedral graves being Church of England property, Geoffrey would no doubt have liaised with the archdeacon in the event of any irregular activity in the cathedral environs…
With a sharp pang, Georgina wished she had taken more of an interest in her husband’s municipal responsibilities. Perhaps he would have liked it. Perhaps it was only her own hidebound obsession with gentility that had kept her from being a true helpmeet. And now it was too late…
She was jerked back to the present by a low growl. The taller man was berating his fellow labourer.
‘Get a move on, won’t you! What’s the matter? They can’t hurt you. They can’t hurt anyone.’
The other merely spat on the ground and bent to his work once more.
Even though these words merely echoed her self-admonition of a few seconds earlier, a creeping sense of unease descended on Georgina. Watching the two men in the eerie half-light – presumably cathedral labourers (yes, that looked like the logo of a local contractor on their overalls) – she felt an overpowering urge to get far away from the cemetery and its ghoulish secrets.
Shuddering and slick with perspiration, she caught her breath before inching her way back around the mausoleum. There was nothing for it but to take the long way around. She could hardly interrupt the grave reclamation – or whatever it was – going on at the back of the Soames Vault. It would be almost like gate-crashing a funeral, she told herself firmly. She willed her heart to stop its unnatural pounding before retracing her steps.
Like a sleep-walker, Georgina Hamilton slowly made a circuit of the graveyard and left by the main gates. Once safely clear, she felt herself begin to revive. It would do no harm, she thought, to drop by the town hall on Bromgrove Avenue tomorrow. Just to reassure herself. The police station was round the corner in Bromgrove Drive, so she would call there after her visit to the council offices. Obscurely she felt she owed it to Geoffrey to see that everything was as it should be. That comforting resolution made, she wended her way home.
The following morning, DS George Noakes, lurking hopefully in the back office behind the desk sergeant’s counter at Brom
grove Police Station with a view to picking up stray gossip, listened with half an ear as a distinctly bored constable endeavoured to fend off an importunate visitor. God, that dreadfully insistent voice was giving him a headache.
‘St Mary’s … husband sub-treasurer … council … graveyard … irregular activities … desecration … duty to investigate…’ On and on it went. Put a sock in it, luv, he thought.
Eventually the woman, whoever she was, ran out of steam and he could hear her storm off, presumably in a cloud of self-righteous indignation. Noakes sauntered out and grinned at the young officer who was staring at the visitor’s departing form with no very benign expression.
‘What was all that about?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Noakesy. Old biddy, name of Hamilton. Seemed to think folk have been up to no good at St Mary’s. Saw something peculiar when she visited her husband’s grave apparently.’
‘Fancies herself Miss Marple, does she?’
‘Sounded like it. Probably been at the sherry too.’
Noakes was thoughtful. ‘Best get it checked out, son. Dot the Is and cross the Ts. The DI’s a man on a mission when it comes to detail. It’s all “back to basics” now. No detail too unimportant, if you get my drift.’
The other grimaced. ‘Wilco, mate.’
Noakes riffled through his mental rolodex. Hmmm. St Mary’s Cathedral. With choir school attached. All perfectly respectable to the best of his recollection. Quite ordinary for a cathedral he’d thought, though the chairwoman of the Police Liaison Committee was always wittering on about it being ‘the jewel in Bromgrove’s crown’. Still, might be worth doing a quick recce. Call it a field trip. And if he just happened to take in the Bromgrove Arms on his travels, that was surely all to the good. Publicans, in Noakes’s humble opinion, were the force’s secret weapon!
Standing at the window of his top floor office in Bromgrove Police Station, Detective Inspector Gilbert Markham watched Noakes’s furtive departure with resigned amusement. What was the old devil up to now? His sergeant was hardly an advertisement for cutting edge policing, dressed as he was in an old-fashioned two-piece suit of indeterminate age and colour, his shirt adorned with a tie that appeared to be knotted somewhere under his left ear, and the whole ensemble topped off with a shabby beige mac. Bromgrove’s answer to Columbo. Whatever the nature of his mission, Markham was willing to bet it involved a pit stop at some hostelry or other. All in the interest of community relations!