Dance Floor Drowning Read online

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  Dance Floor Drowning

  Brian Sellars

  www.briansellars.com

  Published in 2014 by SMASHWORDS.COM

  Copyright © text Brian Sellars 2013

  Copyright © cover image

  Picture Parade, Art Gallery and Picture Framers, Sheffield

  www.pictureparade.co.uk

  First Edition

  ISBN 9781311914866

  The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dance Floor Drowning is a work of fiction.

  All characters in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Welcome

  Thank you for choosing Dance Floor Drowning. I hope you will enjoy reading it. Set in the South Yorkshire “Steel City” of Sheffield in the early fifties, it’s a murder mystery written for adults and teenage readers.

  The fresh perspective of schoolchildren detectives aims to provide a new slant and added drama to detective fiction. I hope you’ll agree.

  Like its predecessor, Tuppenny Hat Detective, twelve year-old Billy Perks and his friends Yvonne Sparkes and Kick Morely, team up with old Etonian, M.D., Dr Hadfield and Police Constable John Needham to take on the establishment, exposing corruption and a deadly killer.

  I hope you will agree that Dance Floor Drowning is enjoyably nostalgic, funny and a genuine whodunit, perfect for those who enjoy a gripping murder mystery.

  The fresh perspective of schoolchildren detectives aims to provide a new slant and added drama to detective fiction.

  Table of contents

  Welcome

  Chapter One

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Sheffield-eeze

  A Sheffield-eeze Ditty (Speech exercise)

  Spring Heeled Jack o’ Sheffield

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other books by Brian Sellars

  This work is dedicated to Lily and John

  and all those young lovers who danced over

  the swimming pool at Glossop Road Baths.

  Chapter One

  Note: Glossary of Sheffield dialect words at the back of the book

  Despite rain showers, rumoured bananas quickly brought queues to the pavements of Walkley’s Victorian shopping street. The hairnets and headscarves of the chattering, good natured foragers steamed and bobbed until the insistent clanging of a police car's bell silenced all, drawing them to crane and gawp.

  A black police Wolseley saloon roared into view. It swerved to a halt in front of twelve-year-old Billy Perks, out shopping on his bicycle. The lad struggled to steer around it, but clattered to a tumbling halt. A precious bag of sugar, five pounds of potatoes and the family's ration book spilled onto the pavement. The driver, a sour-faced sergeant, loomed up from the car, setting his helmet on his bullet head. Billy eyed him nervously as he struggled to round up skittering potatoes from between the feet of goggling shoppers.

  'Here, Perks! I've been looking for you. Get in.'

  Billy's spirits plunged. He stood up, quickly fixed a kink in his National Health spectacles and stuck them back on his nose. 'I've done nowt,' he said, thumbing away a bead of blood from a grazed knee. ‘Look, thaz made me squash me new glasses. I’ve only just gorrem. My mam’ll kill me.’

  The policeman bent close to the boy's freckled nose. 'Shurrup and gerrin – if you please,' he said with sneering sarcasm. 'The Chief Superintendent wants a word with you, my lad. We’d best not keep him waiting.'

  'What about me bike? I can't leave it. It'll get nicked.'

  'Stop whining. You probably nicked it anyway.'

  'I never … My dad give it me. It worra prez …'

  'Forget the damn bike and gerrin. Sharpish! We can't keep Chief Superintendent Flood waiting, now can we?'

  'It'll be tha fault if it gets nicked,' said Billy. 'I'll tell me dad.'

  'Ooooh, look at me, I'm shaking in my boots,' cried the sergeant, pretending to quake with fear. 'Now gerrin, or I'll handcuff you for resisting arrest.'

  The clock on nearby Saint Mary's church tower struck one. Billy glanced up at the soot-blackened spire. 'Look! I'm missing me dinner.'

  The officer frowned and fumbled in his back pocket. Fearing he could be looking for his handcuffs, Billy decided to cooperate. He dropped his shoulders and slouched into the car. Walkley's banana hunters watched, fascinated but unsurprised at the sight of the bedraggled, ginger-headed lad climbing into a police car. It was not the first time they'd seen Billy Perks at the centre of police activity. He was something of a celebrity. A year earlier his disconsolate features had appeared on the front pages of the Sheffield Telegraph and The Star, under the headline "Tuppenny Hat Detective Caps Cops' Killer Case".

  *

  Harry Clegg, senior reporter for the Sheffield Telegraph and Star newspapers, stirred five teaspoonfuls of sugar into his pint pot of tea and hungrily eyed his lunch, a towering wedge of steaming meat and potato pie. Whatever Butlers Pie Shop lacked in glamour and choice, it made up for in wholesome volume. Harry dined there often, hiding behind a copy of The Manchester Guardian to eat, smoke and sip tea in the relaxing hubbub and smoke filled anonymity of its dining rooms. He pulled out his notebook, shoved aside his pie to cool, and began reviewing the notes he had made that morning.

  His day had started early – too early. A news desk sub-editor had telephoned his home, waking him before six-thirty. Forty minutes later, still bleary eyed and grumbling, he had steered his Austin Sixteen out of the traffic, rattling nose to tail along a cobbled tramway, and parked near the main entrance to Sheffield's Glossop Road Municipal Baths.

  Early morning visits to swimming pools were not high on his list of favourite things. Even as he glared at the entrance he had still nursed doubts about going inside. For a while, he’d sat gloomily watching raindrops merge into wriggling rivulets on the windscreen. Two police constables, their capes and helmets dripping, had eyed him sullenly from the scant shelter of a stone portico over a pair of regally panelled doors. A handwritten notice dripped from a sodden cat's cradle, binding the door’s bronze handles together. Rain had washed out most of its message.

  Harry snapped out of his reverie to concentrate on his lunch. He shovelled in a mouthful of pie and smiled appreciatively. He ate slowly and with undisguised relish. In his mid-fifties, with twenty-five years’ service and a solid track record, Harry Clegg ploughed his own furrow. Winter or summer, he went about the city wearing a brown trilby hat and a camel coloured overcoat, a silk paisley scarf erupting at the neck. He looked more like an on-course bookie than a journalist. His florid complexion and purplish bulbous nose suggested a close affinity with bar stools. Yet he was a familiar sight at every conflagration, royal visit, punch up, and car crash in the city - day or night. His small, glittering blue eyes flittered over traffic deaths, burglaries, murders, naughty vicars and plucky have-a-go-pensioners, with never a hint of boredom.

  Occasionally swapping fork and pencil, he steadily ate his pie whilst editing his notes; his attention wandering easily between recollections of the morning’s events and the smooth meaty excellence of Butler’
s beef gravy.

  His morning had gone like this:

  7:30 am. Stooping against the downpour, Harry climbed from his car, nodded at the frowning constables and hurried inside through a service door a few yards beyond their post. He found the main pool almost drained. The bright, humid space above it echoed to whirring, slurping sounds from unseen machinery. In the dry shallow end, a white sheet covered what was, unmistakably, a corpse. At the deep end, several grim-faced men, wearing wellington boots and laboratory coats, paddled around, ankle-deep. Unmoved by his arrival they continued their meticulous work. Armed with tweezers and little wooden spatulas they were grazing the Victorian pool's shiny tiles, pausing here and there to peck and scrape at bits of unpleasant looking flotsam. With unconcealed satisfaction, they bagged, labelled and set aside their sordid trophies for later examination.

  Harry recognized Chief Superintendent Flood, overseeing matters at the poolside, despite the angry remonstrations of half-a-dozen elderly men bobbing and jostling around him. Two were in business suits; the others wore only white towelling bathrobes. All were extremely agitated, and clearly held Flood responsible. One, a haughty, military type, whose robe kept flapping open, revealing a good deal more than a potbelly, led the onslaught. His main concern, as far as Harry could make out, was that the Chief Superintendent had ordered the closure of the Turkish bath, a facility used almost exclusively by the city's toffs. According to the bathrobe-flasher, this was "utterly unnecessary" as the facility was outside, what he several times referred to as, "Flood's necessary field of inquiry."

  Chief Superintendent Flood seized on Harry's arrival to escape the tirade. 'Ah, Clegg, so glad you could come,' he called, his trumpeting voice echoing across the empty pool. 'This way please.'

  Harry, who had never known such hospitality from the police, raised an eyebrow and traipsed after him. His was usually the last face the police wanted to see at a crime scene.

  Fending off the flasher and his retinue, Flood led him along a dingy corridor to the pool manager's office, which he had evidently commandeered for his inquiry. On the way, a constable handed Flood a folded sheet of paper. He quickly read it and waved the young man away.

  Inside the cramped, untidy office, Flood motioned that Harry should shut the door. 'Don't get excited, Clegg,’ he said. ‘You're getting nothing. I just needed to escape those old farts …'

  Harry shrugged, as if unconcerned. He eyed the Chief Superintendent, noting as always, the stark contrast between his impeccable, blue-black uniform, and his cadaverous, sallow complexion. Harry had always found Flood’s rapid rise in the force, and his exceptional rate of arrests and convictions, baffling. He didn’t come across as particularly bright, yet his record suggested he must be. Flood invariably got his man. That meant Harry usually got a good story out of it. Hiding a smile, Harry watched him move round the desk, his deliberate reaching movements giving him the look of a stalking heron. His sharp skeletal features and long nose added to the illusion.

  'Now now, Mister Flood,' Harry said, a twinkle in his eyes. 'That's the cream of Sheffield society you're talking about.'

  'God help us,' Flood said, warming slightly to his visitor.

  'Come on, Super – give me something. What happened here?'

  Flood sat in the swimming bath manager's rickety swivel chair and gave it a test spin. He eyed Clegg thoughtfully as he came round to face him, appearing to relax somewhat. 'Oh, why not? But don't quote me, Clegg. If you do, I'll have your …' He unfolded the sheet of paper the young constable had handed him, and read from it. 'Male, late fifties or sixty, wearing nothing but one of the establishment’s bathrobes, – bla – bla – bla - hip flask in pocket – empty – face down in the main pool.' He peered across the untidy desk. Clegg was scribbling into a notebook. 'Almost certainly drowned, of course,' he went on, 'but we'll need the post mortem to confirm that ...'

  'Any marks on the body?'

  Flood scanned the paper. 'Nothing obvious, but, as I say, we'll need a post mortem.'

  'It doesn't sound much like murder, does it?' Harry said. 'He could've just slipped, couldn't he? Sounds like he was in the Turkish bath next door – hitting the old hip flask a bit – maybe had a drop too much – took a wrong turn through the connecting doors - and splash ...'

  Flood shrugged. 'You may well be right.'

  'So, why all the coppers then?’

  Flood stared at him, pursing his lips in a supercilious frown.

  ‘Why all that forensics' mob,’ Harry persisted, ‘in their special issue wellows?'

  'Ah well, that's the thing,' said Flood, tapping his finger against the side of his long nose. 'He's been in there at least thirty-six hours.'

  Harry Clegg stiffened. 'Since Saturday? Wasn’t there a dance? The Summer Ball.’

  ‘Precisely. He had to be in there thirty-six hours ago - before the dance floor was put over the pool.’ Flood paused, watching Harry scribble fiercely into his notebook. ‘He had to. It couldn’t happen otherwise.’

  ‘But how? Surely somebody must have seen him?'

  Flood's head wobbled on his thin neck. He gave Harry a superior stare. 'Exactly. And you can't do that accidentally, can you? No matter how big your hip flask might be.'

  Harry whistled a long, low note and scribbled some more. 'When was the floor fitted?'

  'They finished it Saturday afternoon,' replied Flood absently. He was opening and closing desk drawers and nosily poking around inside them with a pencil. He looked up suddenly. 'They were taking it up again when they found him this morning. It's a night shift that do it. We got the call at five-thirty-two. I was here by seven. I told 'em to finish the job and drain the pool - to give us a better look.'

  'Got a name yet?'

  'I.D. card in his wallet, but of course, it mightn't be his. In any case, I can't give you the name yet – you know, family first and all that …'

  'Where were his street clothes?'

  'Locker, Turkish bath, next door. We’ll need to confirm they fit him, but it seems likely. Nobody remembers when he came in.'

  'So, unknown man drowned by unknown person who accessed the pool by unknown means.' Harry shook his head, frowning cynically. 'Huh, great story that'll make.'

  'Or he may have quietly climbed in on his own when nobody was looking.' Flood grinned, tapping his teeth with his pencil.

  'Suicide? D'you really think so?'

  'Of course I don't.'

  0o0o0

  Chapter Two

  To Billy's eyes, Notre Dame School for Girls was bandit country. There, behind its sooty brick walls, the dark arts of besting boys were studied and refined to deadly elegance. Luckily, it was the school's summer break. The only Furies haunting its hideous tranquillity that day were the black-veiled nuns of Notre Dame de Namur. Their Order had founded the school in the mid-nineteenth century, evidently to teach girls to scratch, kick, scream and deploy killer put-downs against boys. When not doing so, Billy imagined them endlessly reciting the Rosary, or colouring in pictures of soppy-faced saints kneeling before even soppier faced Madonnas.

  He had climbed Notre Dame's lofty perimeter wall, hoping it would offer a useful vantage for spying into Glossop Road Swimming Baths. It did not. All he could see was the combined entrance to the Turkish baths and Slipper baths. Further along the grimy coping, a clear view of the boiler room's coke hatch proved equally unrewarding.

  An hour earlier, he'd been in Chief Superintendent Flood's office, enduring a puzzling verbal battering, after being picked up like Al Capone and driven to what the troll of a driver had told him was to be life imprisonment or execution. It had left him feeling worried and queasy but above all, baffled. Flood had threatened and harangued him, and poked him in the chest. He had shown him etchings, evidently culled from ancient books, showing people hanging in chains. He had ranted over them with such venom that Billy had feared imminent torture in a dripping dungeon. Then, inexplicably, he had ordered him to stay away from the swimming baths.

  Finally, a
s he had pushed him out of his office, the chief superintendent’s parting lash was to tell him sourly that there would be no lift home in a police car. 'You’ll have to walk, my lad,' he had snarled. 'I suggest you use the time to consider what I've said.'

  That petty meanness would seriously backfire.

  *

  As the crow flies, Billy's home in Walkley lay about two and half miles from Police Headquarters at Castle Green in the city centre. It might just as well have been fifty miles, for he had no certain idea how to get there. Tram fare, he supposed, would be a penny or tuppence. Not that it mattered, he didn't have a farthing. However, he knew perfectly well that trams ran to Walkley, and reasoned that all he had to do was follow the tramlines. That would surely get him home.

  Sick with worry, head down and knees wobbly from Flood’s dire warnings, he started for home, chewing over all the chief had said. Flood had seemed puzzlingly resentful that Billy had solved the Star Woman's murder case a year before. Why should this be a problem? Surely, that had been helpful? They should be pleased with him. Instead, Chief Superintendent Flood had accused him of trying to make fools of the police. It was most baffling. Nevertheless, even if Flood was completely off his trolley, Billy reasoned it would be wise to heed him. So, he told himself, no more playing detective, and stay away from the swimming baths, exactly as Flood had instructed.

  Following the tramlines, he plodded home passed shops, little mester forges, offices and the bombed out shells of buildings damaged in the blitz, many still shored up by great timber buttresses and girders. In a miserable daze, he repeatedly reviewed Flood's words, until a tramcar's discordant bell clanged into his thoughts, making his heart jump. He looked around in surprise, suddenly becoming aware of his surroundings. A cold sweat slicked his face when he realised where he was. There, in front of him, not fifty yards away, stood Glossop Road Swimming Baths. The very place he had sworn to avoid. In panic, he dodged into a shop doorway, terrified the chief superintendent might drop from on high and drag him away to be hung drawn and quartered - or even worse.