Murder at the Manchester Museum Read online

  MURDER AT THE MANCHESTER MUSEUM

  JIM ELDRIDGE

  To Lynne, for ever

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY JIM ELDRIDGE

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  1895

  ‘Crewe next stop!’ called the train conductor. He then began to list the various stops after Crewe the train still had to make before it reached Manchester, before adding in ringing tones, ‘For all other destinations, change at Crewe!’

  Daniel Wilson studied the telegram he and Abigail had received the day before.

  ‘Murder at Manchester Museum. Please come urgently. Bernard Steggles, Director,’ he read, then folded it and put it back in his pocket with a weary sigh. ‘But who’s been murdered? When? And how?’ asked Daniel. ‘There’s been nothing about a recent murder at the Manchester Museum in the newspapers.’

  ‘Because they’re the London papers,’ Abigail pointed out, turning a page in her magazine.

  ‘But they carry news from further afield,’ said Daniel. He tapped the copy of The Times that lay on his lap. ‘There are stories in here from Glasgow, Newcastle, Paris and Berlin. But nothing concerning Manchester.’

  ‘Which suggests whoever was murdered was not seen as an important figure.’

  ‘So why bring us all the way from London when they have a perfectly adequate police force capable of investigating a local crime?’

  ‘Do you know much about the Manchester police force?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Daniel.

  ‘It’s a pity the telephone service hasn’t yet been connected nationally, otherwise you’d have been able to talk to Mr Steggles and got the answers you wanted.’

  ‘The telephone?’ repeated Daniel with a frown.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abigail. She held the copy of the Museum Digest she’d been reading towards him. ‘It says here—’

  The scream of a woman in terror from the corridor cut through the rattling background chug-chug of the train. Immediately, Daniel was out of his seat, had pulled the door of their compartment open and was in the corridor, Abigail close behind him.

  A middle-aged man was at the end of the corridor, holding a young woman viciously by her hair. In his other hand he held a knife, which he was pointing at the two uniformed railwaymen, a guard and the conductor, who stood watching the pair nervously.

  ‘Leave us alone!’ shouted the man. ‘It’s not your business.’

  The man was drunk, realised Daniel. Not drunk enough to be easily overpowered, but drunk enough to do something dangerous. Like stab someone. And the young woman he was holding tightly on to looked the most likely victim. The man was short but stocky, his jacket barely able to contain his muscular upper body. The young woman was wearing a skirt and short-sleeved blouse. There was no sign of a coat or a bag or other outer garments. Daniel guessed they must have been left behind by the woman when she fled the compartment.

  ‘Sir …’ began the guard uncomfortably.

  ‘Go away!’ yelled the man. ‘This whore took my wallet. I want it back!’

  ‘I never!’ sobbed the woman. ‘He must have dropped it!’

  ‘Dropped it?’ sneered the man, adding vengefully, ‘I’ll drop you, you whore!’

  And he slashed at her, the blade opening a wound in her upper arm that sprayed blood towards the two railwaymen, who hurriedly pressed back as far as the corridor would allow them to as the woman screamed.

  Daniel moved. He took his wallet from his pocket and threw it at the man’s face. Instinctively, the man let go of the woman and threw his hand up to protect himself. As he did so, Daniel chopped down hard on the wrist of the hand that held the knife with the edge of his right hand, at the same time following it with a hard left hook that smashed into the man’s face, sending him crashing backwards into the wall of the corridor. The man crumpled as he and the knife fell to the floor. Daniel put his foot on the knife and kicked it away to a safe position, but the fact the fallen man hadn’t moved showed the danger was over.

  Abigail went to the terrified and sobbing young woman, taking a large handkerchief from her pocket, and placed it against the knife wound, staunching the flow of blood.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘If you come to our compartment I can clean and bandage that.’

  The guard stepped forward, his face grim.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, madam,’ he said. ‘This man accused her of stealing his wallet. This is now a police matter. We have to take her into custody and hand her to the police when we reach Crewe.’

  ‘In that case you can have her once I’ve dealt with her wound, and not before,’ snapped Abigail.

  As Abigail led the young woman to their compartment, Daniel gestured at the fallen man and the knife.

  ‘I’d advise you to secure his hands in case he tries anything else when he comes round,’ he said to the two railway officials.

  ‘Thank you, sir, I’d already thought of that,’ said the guard curtly. ‘Everything was under control before you intervened.’

  Daniel nodded and headed back to their compartment, where he found Abigail cleaning the wound. Once she was sure there was no chance of infection, she took a small bandage from her bag and proceeded to bind it around the woman’s upper arm.

  ‘It might need stitches,’ said Abigail. ‘Unfortunately, the needle I carry in my sewing kit is only suitable for cloth.’ She looked at the conductor, who had appeared in the doorway of the compartment and was studying the scene with a look of some discomfort on his face.

  ‘I hope you have more compassion than your oaf of a colleague,’ she said. ‘When you hand this young lady to the police, inform them that she will require stitches in the wound.’ She fixed him with a steely glare. ‘I shall check with the railway company later to make sure my instructions were carried out. If I find they weren’t, I shall report you to your superiors.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ The conductor gulped nervously. ‘They will be.’ His tone changed to one of officialdom as he turned his attention to the young woman. ‘I must ask you to come with me, miss.’

  Daniel followed the young woman into the corridor as the conductor took her gently by the elbow and escorted her along the corridor to the guard’s quarters. The man that Daniel had hit still lay on the floor, and alth
ough he was conscious, he was firmly secured by a rope at the wrist and ankles with the guard standing over him.

  Daniel returned to the compartment and pulled the door shut.

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said. ‘Well done for the swift way you acted on treating her knife wound.’

  ‘It wasn’t as vital as the way you acted in disarming him,’ said Abigail. She gave an angry snort of derision. ‘I heard what the guard said to you. “Everything’s under control.” Ha! Lunacy! And not a word of thanks!’

  ‘You can’t please everyone,’ said Daniel wryly.

  ‘He might have killed that woman. And the guard and conductor!’

  ‘It’s all sorted out now,’ said Daniel. He looked at her inquisitively. ‘You were talking about telephones before all that.’

  Abigail stared at him in amazement. ‘You’ve just saved a woman’s life, overpowered a dangerous knife-wielding maniac, and you want to talk about telephones?’

  ‘I’m interested,’ he said. ‘They say that the telephone is going to be the thing of the future. That there are already plans to put in telephone lines that will link Europe and America, and even Australia. Imagine, being able to talk to someone at the other side of the world without leaving your house!’ He nodded towards the Museum Digest on the seat beside Abigail. ‘You were about to read me something before the trouble began.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Abigail. She opened the magazine and began to flick through the pages. ‘Last night, when you said we were going to Manchester, I decided to look through some of the recent editions to see if there was anything in any of them about the Manchester Museum, and I found this article. Ah yes, here it is.’ She began to read. ‘The museum in Manchester is among the latest to subscribe to the newly installed telephone exchange in that city. It is believed the number of subscribers has now passed seven hundred, many of them private customers. This means that people as far apart as Stockport, Oldham and Bolton can now communicate with one another through the telephone system, making Manchester the first city in England to have a fully operational telephone exchange, with plans to extend the lines to Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and even as far as Birmingham.’

  ‘But not to London,’ observed Daniel.

  ‘That day will come, if the rest of the report is to be believed,’ said Abigail. She offered the magazine to Daniel. ‘Would you like to read the rest of it?’

  Daniel was about to take it, when they heard the conductor’s shout of: ‘Crewe station! Crewe station!’

  ‘Later,’ he said, passing the magazine back to Abigail. ‘I’ve been told that Crewe is one of the busiest junctions on the whole network, and if that’s so then I feel this compartment might suddenly become rather crowded and we’ll be spending most of our time stopping our comfort being encroached on by hordes of travellers bound for Manchester.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Abigail smiled. ‘I’ll protect you. If anyone tries to sit on you, I’ll deal with them.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  As it turned out, although other travellers joined them in the compartment, it did not turn out to be the free-for-all that Daniel had envisaged, just three apparently respectable businessmen and a husband and wife. When Daniel had sometimes taken a train in central London, especially one travelling east towards Southend, he’d often found himself besieged by families with numerous children of all ages who seemed to only want to fight with one another and generally cause mayhem, while their parents sat seemingly oblivious to the distress their offspring were causing the other passengers. The quiet mood of their fellow passengers meant that Daniel was able to take time to read about the Manchester Museum in Abigail’s magazine. As a result he learnt that, as well as the museum enjoying telephone access in the area of Manchester and surrounding cities, the museum was a relatively recent establishment. Although it incorporated material from the earlier collections of the Manchester Natural History and Geological Societies, the newly designed building that housed the Manchester Museum had only been opened to the public seven years before, in 1888. The article highlighted the large number of mounted animals on display, many of them from someone called Brian Houghton Hodgson, who seemed to have discovered many species during his travels in India and Nepal which had been previously unknown to the West. The museum also seemed to have one of the largest collections of beetles and other insects outside of London’s Natural History Museum.

  ‘Not much here about your particular area of expertise,’ commented Daniel, referring to Abigail’s reputation as one of Europe’s leading Egyptologists, a reputation based on her archaeological work at the pyramids in Egypt, as well as her explorations of ancient temples in Greece and of Roman sites.

  ‘It is expanding,’ she said. She laid her finger on a paragraph. ‘You’ll see it mentions new finds being brought in from the excavations at Gurob and Kahun, as well as from Flinders Petrie.’ She gave a smile of reminiscence as she added, ‘I worked with him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Flinders Petrie.’

  ‘In Egypt?’

  ‘Yes, at Hawara in 1888. Then again in Palestine at Tell el-Hesi. 1890.’

  ‘What was he like?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Much the same as he still is today. A big bear of a man. It’s astonishing to think that he’s still so comparatively young for an archaeologist and he’s achieved so much! He was in his late thirties then. In his early days the archaeological establishment considered him a bit of a maverick. He didn’t always stick to the rules. For example, when he began the dig at Tanis in the New Kingdom site he took on the role of foreman in charge of the workers himself. He said it was one less level of bureaucracy which would otherwise slow things down.’

  ‘Attractive?’

  Abigail laughed. ‘Very.’ Then, with a glance at the other passengers, she whispered to him, ‘But you have nothing to fear on that aspect. It was purely a meeting of two minds with one aim.’

  On their arrival at the main London Road station they elected to walk to Oxford Road, where the museum was situated, rather than take a hansom. His years as a police officer had led Daniel to believe that the best way to see any new city was on foot, and he was fortunate that Abigail, with her many experiences exploring exotic towns and cities, was of the same opinion. The museum was a large, rather ornate building.

  ‘It looks like a slightly smaller version of the Natural History Museum in London,’ observed Daniel.

  ‘It was designed by the same architect,’ said Abigail. ‘Alfred Waterhouse. But don’t say anything to them about it being slightly smaller. Museums can be very sensitive about unfavourable comparisons.’

  ‘I wasn’t being unfavourable,’ defended Daniel. ‘I just said it looked slightly smaller.’

  ‘But it may not be inside,’ said Abigail. ‘Sensitivity is all. We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with our new client.’

  ‘Perhaps if I say it looks larger?’ suggested Daniel.

  ‘Better not to say anything,’ advised Abigail.

  Inside, they found a uniformed commissionaire on duty at the door and asked him for directions to the office of Mr Steggles, the museum’s director.

  ‘Would you be Mr Wilson and Miss Fenton?’ asked the commissionaire.

  ‘We are,’ confirmed Daniel.

  ‘Mr Steggles asked me to watch out for you. If you’ll follow me I’ll take you to his office.’

  The commissionaire summoned a similarly uniformed man from inside the museum and indicated for him to take over on duty at the main entrance, then led the way to a narrow stone staircase to one side of the entrance doors. Daniel and Abigail followed him, carrying their overnight bags, and soon they were standing outside a dark oak door on the first floor. The commissionaire knocked at the door, then opened it and announced, ‘Mr Wilson and Miss Fenton, Mr Steggles.’

  ‘Thank heavens!’ said a cultured voice from within. The door was thrown wider and Daniel and Abigail beheld a small, thin man in his fifties dressed in a close-fittin
g soberly dark suit. With his neatly trimmed hair and tiny moustache, he reminded Daniel of a senior bank clerk rather than the man in overall charge of a large and important museum.

  ‘Do come in!’ said Steggles. He led them across the plush, thickly piled carpet to two chairs waiting by his large desk. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he apologised as they put their luggage down. ‘I should have thought and suggested you go to the hotel we’ve booked you into first before you came here, but I’ve been so worried over what happened that the distraction has played havoc with some of my thought processes.’

  ‘What has happened?’ asked Daniel, as he and Abigail seated themselves. ‘Your telegram just said a murder had been committed here at the museum.’

  ‘It’s now two murders,’ said Steggles grimly.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘The first we discovered on the day it happened. The second only manifested itself this morning.’ He looked at them apologetically. ‘I’m forgetting my manners and common courtesy,’ he said. ‘Can I order tea for you? Or anything else?’

  ‘Tea would be perfect, thank you,’ said Abigail.

  Steggles pressed a button on a large black machine on his desk, at the same time lifting what looked like a small metal speaker from it, which was connected to the machine by a length of wire. A woman’s voice came from the black machine.

  ‘Yes, Mr Steggles?’

  ‘Tea for three, please, Mrs Wedburn. With biscuits.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Steggles.’

  As Steggles replaced the metal speaker on the machine, Daniel commented, ‘We were reading about the telephone system here in Manchester.’

  ‘Ah, this isn’t that system,’ said Steggles. ‘It’s a variation. Internal only. It uses similar technology, but it doesn’t have to go through an operator as it’s only connected to my secretary in her office.’ He smiled. ‘It saves me having to walk along there if I have something to tell her about.’

  ‘The murders?’ prompted Daniel gently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Steggles. ‘On Thursday last week, four days ago, a young woman was stabbed to death here in the museum. She’d been sitting at a table in the reading room, apparently doing some research work, and been stabbed in the back, the knife penetrating into her heart and the point of the knife coming out through her ribs at the front of her chest.’