Table of Contents

  Also by Sally Spencer

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  A Note on Bonfire Night

  November the First

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  November the Second

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  November the Third

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  November the Fourth

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  November the Fifth

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  By Sally Spencer

  The Charlie Woodend Mysteries

  THE SALTON KILLINGS

  MURDER AT SWANN’S LAKE

  DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

  THE DARK LADY

  THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  DEAD ON CUE

  THE RED HERRING

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  A DEATH LEFT HANGING

  THE WITCH MAKER

  THE BUTCHER BEYOND

  DYING IN THE DARK

  STONE KILLER

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

  THE RING OF DEATH

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  A Charlie Woodend Mystery

  Sally Spencer

  For Luis de Avendaño –

  good friend and webmaster extraordinaire

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2003 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  This eBook first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  Copyright © 2003 by Sally Spencer

  The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

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

  ISBN-13 978-0-7278-5931-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13 978-1-4483-0087-7 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  A Note on Bonfire Night

  Though in these safety-conscious days Bonfire Night is no longer quite the important event it used to be, in my childhood it was still regarded as a pretty big thing. What made it so special was that it stood out from Christmas and Easter in one hugely significant way. The latter two events were supposed to be for children, but were in fact organized by adults. Bonfire Night was ours. It would not have happened without us – and we knew it even then.

  Preparations for the night began some weeks before. Once the site had been selected – and most sites, as evidenced by the charcoal circles permanently burnt into the ground, were used year after year – the kids began to collect the material they needed for their bonfire. Some of it was cut down from nearby woods (conservation was not such a big deal back then!); some of it collected from friends and family. The resulting structure, which could be anything up to thirty feet high, was a mishmash of things. Tree branches would protrude out of tea chests; doors from old garden sheds would balance precariously on top of discarded armchairs. And crowning the whole improbable structure would be the guy – a dummy dressed in old clothes, stuffed with balled-up newspaper and wearing a hideous cardboard mask.

  But, to misquote a famous phrase from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who was this guy? His name was Guido (Guy) Fawkes, and in the ten years preceding 1605, he had served as a mercenary in the King of Spain’s army in the Netherlands. He returned to England to find the old place much changed. When he had left, the throne had been occupied by Elizabeth I, a monarch who, in the interests of domestic peace, had been willing to turn a partially blind eye to the practice of Roman Catholicism. The new king, James I, a dour Scot, was much less inclined to tolerate what he regarded as the Papal heresy, and for the first time in over a decade, Fawkes found himself unable to follow his religion openly.

  He was not alone in his dismay, and was soon recruited into a conspiracy of like-minded Catholics. The main problem, they decided, was the king himself. If he could be assassinated, a more amenable monarch might take his place.

  Once the plot had been articulated, the means of carrying it out became obvious. The king intended to open the new session of the Houses of Parliament on November 5th. It would be an ideal opportunity to kill him.

  This would not be as difficult as it might at first appear. As incredible as this may seem to the modern reader, it was then possible to rent cellars under Parliament. This the conspirators did, packing it with enough barrels of gunpowder to blow the building sky high. Since there was virtually no security in those days, the plot would have stood a good chance of succeeding, had not one of the conspirators written to a friend to advise him not to attend Parliament that day. The friend became suspicious and handed the letter over to the authorities. The cellars were searched, and Guy Fawkes arrested.

  He was tortured until he revealed the names of his fellow conspirators, then sentenced to death. Since his crime was treason, he was hung, drawn and quartered – a particularly barbarous form of execution in which he was cut from the gallows alive, had his intestines and genitals removed (a process he was made to watch) and then was sliced into four roughly equal parts. Several of his fellow conspirators suffered the same fate – and to the delight of countless generations of children to follow, Bonfire Night was born.

  November the First

  The means may be bloody

  But where is our choice?

  We must do what’s needed

  To silence the voice.

  One

  It had all seemed so easy when they’d watched it played out on the screen at the Saturday morning pictures. Sitting on the edge of their seats, the ice-lollies in their hands largely ignored, they had thrilled as the blackened-faced commandos reached the edge of the clearing and dropped to the ground. They’d gawped – wide-eyed and hardly daring to breathe – as their heroes wriggled rapidly on their bellies across the stretch of land which separated them from the barbed-wire fence guarded by the jack-booted men with the duelling scars.

  ‘Don’t get caught!’ they’d mouthed silently. ‘Don’t get caught!’

  The suspense had been intolerable but – thankfully – short-lived. Even before the first sticky stream of melted ice-lolly had begun to run down the boys’ hands, the commandos on the screen had risen to their feet again, and the Germans who might have raised the alarm lay dead.

  What a thrill! What an adventure!

  Real life, it was now becoming clear to them, was not like that at all. The black boot polish they had daubed liberally on their faces was starting to itch. The tea cosies they had borrowed from home did not fit as tightly as the soldiers’ woollen caps had done, and so kept falling off their heads. But far worse than either of these things was the discovery that crawling along like a commando could hurt – could really hurt!

  The ground, already hardened by the early winter frosts, scraped mercilessly against their bare knees. Their progress, unlike that of commandos, was slow. Their lungs afire, they looked up, convinced they must have almost reached their target. Instead they saw that the wigwam shape, looming up against the dark early winter sky, seemed to be even further away from them than when they had start
ed. And if all that were not enough, the petrol cans were not only difficult to drag along with them, but noisy, too.

  Though neither was prepared to admit that he was the weaker of the pair, both suddenly found that they needed to stop crawling.

  ‘Why don’t we just stand up, an’ walk across to the bonfire?’ the older of the two gasped.

  ‘What if it’s guarded?’ replied the younger, in a panic.

  The elder rubbed his right knee, convinced that it was bleeding. ‘There won’t be no guards at this time of night.’

  ‘But you said there would be,’ the younger one protested.

  ‘I know, but––’

  ‘That’s what you told the others. You said it’d be dangerous.’

  ‘I didn’t really mean––’

  ‘An’ that was why we should be the ones to do it – ’cos we’re the bravest members of the gang.’

  ‘I know what I said,’ the older one growled.

  And he’d meant it – in the camp!

  Back there, surrounded by broken furniture and old tyres, it had been perfectly reasonable to see the pair of them as Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn – scaling the cliffs of Navarone, planting the explosives to destroy all the enemy cannons. Out here, however – on this piece of cold, hard waste ground – he was finding it harder to sustain the illusion.

  ‘So what are we goin’ to do?’ the younger one asked. ‘Have we to call it off?’

  The older one gave the prospect his very serious consideration.

  No! he decided.

  It was tempting, but it wasn’t possible. He’d bragged to the others – perhaps a little too much, now he considered it – about what they were going to do. To call it off would mean a tremendous loss of face, and might even cost him his position as chief of the gang. Besides, if they retreated along the same route by which they’d arrived, that would involve more crawling. And he was tired of crawling.

  ‘There won’t be no guards,’ he said firmly. ‘They’ll be at home – havin’ their tea or watchin’ the telly.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ his partner hissed hysterically.

  ‘I will be in a minute,’ the older one said, rising stiffly – and apprehensively – to his feet.

  He glanced quickly and nervously around him, half-expecting that bigger boys – thirteen-or maybe even fourteen-year-olds – would suddenly appear from behind the huge stack of wood.

  Nothing! Had it not been for the distant hum of traffic, and sound of the London express clanking into Whitebridge railway station, they could almost have convinced themselves they were all alone in the world.

  ‘I told you they wouldn’t be here,’ the older boy said, his tone suggesting just a little contempt for his companion’s earlier fear.

  The younger boy stood up. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.

  ‘We do what we come here to do in the first place,’ his leader said impatiently.

  Crouched low, they quickly made their way towards their target. They were almost there when the younger boy stumbled forward, lost his grip on his petrol can, and landed heavily on the ground.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doin’?’ the older one demanded.

  His friend groaned. ‘I think I’ve broken me leg,’ he sobbed. ‘I can feel the bone pokin’ through.’

  The older boy knelt down and ran his hand up and down the leg.

  ‘You big cry-baby,’ he said when he had finished his tactile inspection. ‘Get up! There’s nothin’ wrong with you.’

  ‘I’ve broken me leg!’

  ‘Do you want me to go back an’ tell the rest of the gang you’re a sissy?’

  ‘No, but––’

  ‘Then get up.’

  The younger boy climbed slowly to his feet. The pain, he discovered, was not as bad as he’d first thought, but even so, he was buggered if he was going to admit that now.

  ‘What made you fall over, anyway?’ the older boy asked.

  The younger boy bent down and picked up something from the ground. ‘A shoe!’ he said. ‘A lady’s shoe. It looks nearly new.’

  ‘Throw it away.’

  ‘But it might be worth somethin’.’

  ‘Only if you happen to know some one-legged woman who you could sell it to.’

  The younger boy flipped the shoe over his shoulder and retrieved his petrol can.

  Now that they were no longer pretending to be commandos, it took them only seconds to reach their target. The older boy uncapped his jerrycan, and began to slurp petrol over the side of the bonfire. The younger boy did not follow his example. He had other ideas. Anybody who knew anything about bonfire building was well aware that however big the particular bonfire grew, there was always a hollow section at its core – a hollow section packed with the stuff which would actually start the fire. And what kind of stuff was it, usually? Old clothes, cardboard boxes, newspaper – and comics!

  And comics!

  It was more than possible, he reasoned, that there were already comics in there. Comics he’d never read. It would be a shame to burn them with the rest of the bonfire.

  He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the flashlight his granddad had given him for his birthday.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doin’ now?’ the older boy demanded.

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘Pour your bloody petrol over the bonfire, like you’re supposed to!’

  Ignoring his friend, the younger boy squatted down and shone the flashlight into the hollow. ‘I’ve found the other shoe,’ he said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Remember that lady’s shoe I fell over? Well, I’ve found the other one. An’ . . . an’ . . . I think I’m goin’ to be sick.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The . . . the shoe . . .’ the younger boy gasped. ‘It’s still got the lady’s foot inside it!’

  Two

  A virgin copy of the Shostokovich Jazz Suites lay submissively on the record player turntable, ready for its first encounter with the gramophone needle. A box of expensive Belgian chocolates sat on the coffee table in expectation of a frenzied attack. In the fridge, a bottle of Polish vodka was chilling nicely. And judging by the sound coming from the bathroom, the tub was already half full of steaming water. It was the perfect recipe for the quiet night at home which Monika Paniatowski had been promising herself for some time.

  And then the phone rang.

  Paniatowski made a grab for the receiver, and listened intently while the duty sergeant on the other end of the line fed her the details of the report which had just come in.

  ‘So the body was found under the bonfire on Mad Jack’s Field,’ she said, when the sergeant had finished. ‘Is foul play suspected?’

  ‘It’s a pretty odd place to die of natural causes,’ the sergeant pointed out.

  Indeed it was, Paniatowski agreed silently. ‘You’ve dispatched all available patrol units to the scene, have you?’ she asked.

  ‘First thing I did. There should be quite a crowd already there by the time you arrive.’

  ‘And Mr Woodend?’

  ‘He’s been contacted. But since he lives in the back of beyond, there’s no tellin’ when he might get there.’

  Paniatowski tried to summon up the healthy outrage which the disruption of her plans seemed to call for.

  It wouldn’t come.

  And why should it have, she asked herself?

  After all, who in their right mind would savour a night of solitary self-indulgence, when the alternative was to drive out into the dark night and share what would probably turn out to be a particularly grisly murder?

  Paniatowski remembered Mad Jack’s Field from her childhood. Back then it had been surrounded by houses on all four sides. Now, though there were still houses on three sides, a new industrial estate had grown up on the fourth, and it was along the feeder road built for the estate that she made her approach to the scene of the crime.

  Strictly speaking, Mad Jack’s was not really a field at all, she thought as she pulled her six-year-old MGA round one of the new road islands. True, in defence of its status, it could be pointed out that there was indeed grass growing on Mad Jack’s Field – but given the amount of rain with which God punished Lancashire, grass would grow on anything which was not actually continually on the move. Besides, as well as its grass and nettles it also boasted an abundant crop of half-buried house bricks, glass bottles and discarded cobblestones. So it was not so much in a state of being anything, but should rather be regarded as once having been (the site of an old brewery) and as eventually to become (an extension of the new industrial estate).