A Stroke of Bad Luck

  OTHER TITLES BY DIANE JANES

  FICTION

  The Pull of the Moon

  Why Don’t You Come for Me?

  Swimming in the Shadows

  Stick or Twist

  The Magic Chair Murder

  The Poisoned Chalice Murder

  NON-FICTION

  Edwardian Murder:

  Ightham & the Morpeth Train Robbery

  Poisonous Lies: The Croydon Arsenic Mystery

  The Case of the Poisoned Partridge

  Death at Wolf’s Nick: The Killing of Evelyn Foster

  Copyright © 2019 Diane Janes

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 978 1789019 735

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  In memory of

  Neville Finnemore

  1926-2003

  Contents

  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

  A Postscript From The Author

  Chapter One

  Friday 5 January 1934

  His Majesty’s Prison, Armley, Yorkshire

  As Albert Henshaw paused to unlock the final set of gates, he stole another quick glance at the young woman who was following him. He could see from the flush in her cheeks that she was aware of the curiosity she was generating among the warders, and that she did not welcome it; pretending not to notice the sidelong glances and occasional blatant stares from the men who unlocked each set of doors to admit her, then locked them again when she was safely through.

  When he himself had opened the final set of gates, then stepped aside in order that she should precede him, she acknowledged the gesture with the briefest of nods. She was a proper lady all right. No doubt her father had laid out good money, in order that she should be schooled to walk straight and talk proper. Very neatly turned out too, thick tweed coat, brown stockings and sensible brogues – those fashionable little heels that were so popular just now, were no good with the pavements so icy – not but what she wouldn’t have come by motor car – she wasn’t the sort you’d see on the tram. Her hair was all but hidden under a mustard coloured hat with a green and brown band. Nothing fancy, but made of good quality stuff – a hat that would have cost a working man his week’s wages, Albert guessed.

  ‘Not far now, miss.’ He had half hoped to initiate some sort of conversation, but she just nodded again, tight lipped. Not being snooty, he decided. Most probably nervous. The forbidding atmosphere of the institution was bearing down on her. The smells, the noises, the metallic clatter and clang of gates and keys, which did not quite obliterate the sound of their footfalls, his the sturdy thump of a good strong pair of boots, hers a dainty feminine pitter-pat.

  A different class of visitor to the norm. Alone too. He wondered whether the young woman’s father knew that she had come. A big part of him said that Armley Jail was no place for a well brought up young woman. He wouldn’t let his Mabel come visiting here, nor their two girls when they were old enough, neither. They might not talk posh like this young lady, but they were respectable and that’s a fact. He would have liked Mabel’s opinion of the unusual visitor, but he had been warned to say nothing about her to anyone outside. Instructions had come from the governor himself that there must be no loose talk, for fear of something about it appearing in the newspapers.

  Well quite! What would the general public make of the news that a man convicted of murder was being visited by the victim’s sister? By rights the execution should have been tomorrow, but then word had come through that the condemned man was to be allowed an appeal. Ernest Brown wanted to see whether three judges down in London would have different ideas to a dozen Yorkshiremen, good and true, and in the meantime had come this letter from Miss Florence Morton, sister of the deceased, seeking permission to visit the condemned man, if you please. Albert Henshaw thought it distinctly irregular to say the least, but since Brown himself had raised no objection, there had apparently been nothing in the prison regulations to prevent it.

  Naturally he could see why the governor would be concerned about the papers getting hold of it. Rumours of a visit from a member of the victim’s family might set all kinds of hares running. There was always a bleeding heart minority who seized on the least little thing to protest that a condemned man was innocent after all, or if not innocent then subject to some sort of extenuating circumstances, or if all else failed, to claim that the fellow hadn’t known what he was doing at the time. Abolitionists at heart of course. Well thankfully they didn’t run the country and those that did believed that justice should be done: a life for a life. That was the way it should be. However, Albert had always been a respecter of rules, so if the prison regulations said that Miss Florence Morton could come and visit, well so be it.

  All the same, regulations notwithstanding, there was a whiff of something not quite right about the whole business. As a man who valued order and liked to see things done the proper way, Albert had initially been annoyed at the idea of this bold young woman, flaunting convention and pushing her way into what he thought of as his jail, but now that he was actually confronted with her, he saw that she was little more than a girl, screwing up her courage to accomplish what she evidently considered to be an important errand, and though he could not see what she hoped to gain by it, he couldn’t but admire her nerve.

  When they finally reached the room where the visit was to take place and he had pulled out the chair for her to sit down – not a courtesy he had ever extended to Brown’s mother and sisters when they arrived, but somehow it had been automatic with Miss Morton – he reminded her that she must not attempt to push anything through the wire grill,
nor take anything from Brown, if he attempted to make such a transaction the opposite way. After that Albert retired to a chair set in the furthest corner of the room, and observed the young woman – no more than twenty four or twenty five, at a guess – while she awaited the arrival of the prisoner, watching as she extracted a dainty, lace embroidered handkerchief from her bag and wiped her nose, then refolded the delicate little square and replaced it in her bag. After that she sat watching the door which led to the cell area, waiting for it to open.

  Brown arrived a moment or two later, accompanied by Bottomley and Jordan, a couple of the warders who took turns to sit with him in pairs, on eight hourly shifts. Always two men in the cell with him and another on turnkey duty outside the door. You could take no chances with condemned men, though for the most part, they didn’t make much trouble. There was always a bit of curiosity about the ones who’d been sent down for murder. How did he occupy himself, other officers had wanted to know? Residence in the condemned cell excused a man from work. He got better food and kinder companionship than the regular prisoners. Cards and dominoes were provided for his use. Brown was a keen card player, so they said. He received frequent visits from the chaplain, who had been encouraging him to read his bible. In between times he wrote letters to his folks in Huddersfield. And he remained optimistic about his release.

  ‘Do you think he’s guilty?’ Albert had asked Joe Fazackerley, another of the men who had been detailed to sit with Brown.

  ‘Well he doesn’t think he is,’ had been Joe’s oblique reply.

  ‘How do you fancy his chances with the appeal?’ Albert had asked another of his fellow warders.

  ‘I wouldn’t put my shirt on him getting off.’

  Possibly Brown was unaware of the generally held assessment. Certainly he did not look like a beaten man as he entered the room with a confident stride and his head held high. He was a taller than average man, with thick black hair and dark eyes which met another man’s without flinching. He had the fresh complexion of someone accustomed to being out of doors, and though he was not obviously handsome, women undeniably found him attractive – which was where part of the trouble lay, if what Albert had read in the Yorkshire Evening Post was to be believed. There was nothing whatever in his appearance which endeared him to Albert, who saw him only as typical of a type: not bad looking, but a rough, working man, none the less, and one with a penchant for drinking and womanising, who had eventually been brought low by it.

  ‘Miss Morton.’ The prisoner inclined his head as he spoke, then sat down without waiting for an invitation.

  ‘Mr Brown.’

  Albert Henshaw took an audible breath of disapproval. There was no call for a lady like her to be addressing a man like that as ‘Mr’.

  There was a pause while each regarded the other, unsmiling, wondering.

  ‘I trust they are feeding you well?’

  It was what they all asked, Albert thought. Or variations on the theme. Are you being taken care of, given enough to eat, kept warm on these cold winter nights? Anyone would have thought it was a blasted hotel.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  There was silence again. If Brown knew what she had come for, he was giving her no help in getting to the point.

  Eventually she said, ‘Mr Brown… I have come to ask you… about the death of my brother.’

  ‘I’m not sure as there’s much I can tell you. I told everything I know in court. I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he added, as if by way of an afterthought. ’I was fond of Fred. I’d known him since he were a lad.’

  ‘I wasn’t in court. My father thought it…unseemly.’

  ‘But your father will have told you all that passed? And I expect you’ve read the papers.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘I’m not allowed them in here. Well not the pages with the stuff about the trial. They let me see the sports pages. But my family have told me that pretty well all the evidence appeared in full.’

  ‘So I believe,’ she said. ‘But some things about Fred’s death remain unexplained. I believe there is more to be said.’

  ‘Not by me.’

  There was a pause before she spoke again. ‘By someone else then? By Dorothy perhaps? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘I meant nothing, except that I’ve already said everything that I can.’

  ‘Mr Brown,’ her voice, previously calm and level, took on a note of increasing urgency. ‘Surely you must realise what peril you stand in. You are right when you say that I’ve read about the case. I’ve followed every word of it – and I feel sure that there is something more you are keeping back… And yes, I believe it concerns my sister-in-law, Dorothy.’

  ‘There’s to be an appeal. I don’t expect to hang.’

  The final word seemed to echo around the room, rebounding from the solid, painted brickwork, twisting itself around the bars at the window, until it splintered into fragments against the dirty window panes.

  ‘So you continue to insist on your innocence, but refuse to say anything more?’

  There was another pause. Brown seemed to be thinking. Eventually he said: ‘Are you a Christian, Miss Morton?’

  In his corner, Albert Henshaw bristled at the impropriety of such a question.

  ‘I sincerely hope so, Mr Brown.’

  ‘I’ve done some bad things in my time. Often in drink. There’s been women and gambling and I even thieved some stuff when I were a lad, for which I was caught and punished, and quite right too. My poor Ma has shed a few tears over me, I’ll tell you. I sometimes made my wife unhappy too, when she was alive – I could have been a kinder, better husband to her. But as God is my witness, I never shot a man in cold blood, Miss Morton. I never killed your brother.’

  They sat in silence for a while, and again it was the young woman who broke it. She had been studying her gloved hands, clasped before her on the table, but she looked up at him as she said, ‘And Dorothy’s child, little Diana. Is there any chance that you, rather than Freddie, are the little girl’s father?’

  Chapter Two

  Monday 11 December 1933

  Leeds Town Hall, The Yorkshire Assizes

  His father had always told him, ‘In any circus, son, it’s as well to find out from the off, who the ring master is.’

  Well on this, the first day of the trial, that was pretty obvious. From his position in the dock, Ernest Brown was looking straight across at the judge, with his slightly beaky nose and dimpled chin, his hair hidden under his ridiculous wig. The barristers too, were all done up like dog’s dinners. Even the lesser minions, the ushers and note-takers wore flapping black gowns as they went about their business. All this bloody charade and play acting. He had no time for it, himself, but everyone kept on telling him that showmanship or not, you could trust the outcome. British justice was the finest in the world. If you’re an innocent man, you have nothing to fear.

  The court room was smaller than he had expected. Plainer. From his seat in the dock he looked down on the tables where the barristers sat, the little booth where the witnesses would give their evidence, and the benches for the jury. The public gallery was more elevated even than the judge’s platform and lay directly behind the dock, so that he had to turn in his seat, in order to see who was there. He had only looked back there once, long enough to spot Ma, flanked by good old Doris, who was the best kind of daughter that his mother could ever have had. Charlie and Peggy were there too, but his father had stayed at home, his deafness precluding him from following the proceedings – and anyway someone had to be at home, when little Ethel came in from school. Poor old Ma, her face a study of worry. This should not have happened to Ma, who had enough on her plate already, what with making ends meet now that Dad could get no work, and matters gone from bad to worse with the money he had been sending to help keep Ethel, stopped ever since his arrest back in September. Ma said they had not told E
thel that her Daddy was in prison – the child merely thought him working away, as usual – but Ethel was seven years old and smart as paint, and who knew what she might have picked up in the school yard or overheard in the street?

  Ernest had correctly anticipated that his own small group of relatives and supporters would be vastly outnumbered by the families from the other side. Dolly Morton’s gang were there in force: her brother and her twin sister, both accompanied by their respective spouses, all of them wearing black, as a sign of their respect for Fred, he supposed, though none of them had had much time for him in life, if truth be told; and sitting a little apart from them, there was Fred’s father, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Major McConnell, both of them men that Ernest knew well from the old days, when he had regularly paraded the shire horses belonging to his various employers around the rings at country shows. Frederick Morton Snr. did not look across at the man accused of murdering his son. Instead he gazed, unfocussed, into the middle distance, giving the impression of a man who had already taken too many nips at his hip flask, for all that it was so early in the day.

  Not that he needs to look, Ernest thought, for he knows well enough who I am. He couldn’t even remember how far back their acquaintance went, but he placed their first encounter to a time when he had been no more than a youngster of fifteen or so, working then for the old London and North Western Railway. Old Fred Morton had come up to compliment him on the turnout of a prize winning horse. It had been a kindly gesture, particularly since he had beaten Morton and Son’s own horse and groom into second place. He fancied that young Fred had been with his father on that occasion, and him nobbut a lad of ten or eleven at the time, probably home from school for the holidays. He had won many a rosette for the London and North Western’s stable. They had spotted the way he had with horses, when he was straight out of school. The beasts trusted him. He could sometimes be cruel to a human being, but never to an animal.