Dusty Death
Table of Contents
By J. M. Gregson from Severn House
by J M Gregson from Severn House
Lambert and Hook Mysteries
GIRL GONE MISSING
MALICE AFORETHOUGHT
AN UNSUITABLE DEATH
AN ACADEMIC DEATH
DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE
MORTAL TASTE
JUST DESSERTS
TOO MUCH OF WATER
CLOSE CASS
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN
A GOOD WALK SPOILED
DARKNESS VISIBLE
IN VINO VERITAS
DIE HAPPY
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries
WHO SAW HIM DIE?
MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD
TO KILL A WIFE
A TURBULENT PRIEST
THE LANCASHIRE LEOPARD
A LITTLE LEARNING
MURDER AT THE LODGE
WAGES OF SIN
DUSTY DEATH
WITCH'S SABBATH
REMAINS TO BE SEEN
PASTURES NEW
WILD JUSTICE
ONLY A GAME
MERELY PLAYERS
LEAST OF EVILS
J. M. Gregson
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 2005 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9â15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2005 by J. M. Gregson
The right of J. M. Gregson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the the copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data,
Gregson, J. M.
Dusty death
1. Peach, Percy, Detective Inspector (Fictitious character) - Fiction
2. Police - England - Lancashire - Fiction
3. Squatters - Fiction
4. Detective and mystery stories
I. Title
823.9'14 [F]
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-315-0 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6179-5 (cased)
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
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Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
To James, a two-year-old distraction,
who may one day read this
â. . . And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.'
Shakespeare, Macbeth
No one was anticipating tragedy.
The high brick wall stood firm at the first blow. It had stood here for a hundred and thirty years, and it was not going to go down without a fight. For a moment, it seemed as if it had a stubborn resistance of its own, gritting its teeth against this sudden and brutal assault.
That was a fleeting illusion. The huge steel ball on its thick chain swung slowly away, like a heavyweight boxer setting himself for the killer blow against an opponent punched beyond any defence. The arm of the crane moved slowly to the right, allowing the great steel sphere to swing out beyond it. Then, as if in slow motion, the ball swung back, hitting the filthy old bricks with an impact which could not be resisted. The wall faltered for a moment, like the drunks which had for a century struggled for balance in the cobbled street beneath it, then fell with a dull, reverberating roar on to the piles of rubble below it.
Peter Jennings's lips spread into a thin, involuntary smile as he watched the fall of this, the biggest building of his morning session. He had been operating cranes like this for eight years, had grown used to the power he controlled, was now adept at applying it where it would be most telling. Yet when he saw walls which had stood for so long falling so quickly and easily, terraces which had once housed people descending so inevitably into anonymous industrial detritus, he still felt the same feeling of power which had surged through him all that time ago, when he had moved the big ball so much more tentatively to demolish his first building.
Yet this was also the point at which an odd and disconcerting sadness hit him, a feeling of chilly dejection at the obliteration of those many and infinitely varied lives which had been lived out for so many generations in these houses. So many lives, so much tragedy and hardship and joy, should not disappear so quickly, with so little ceremony.
Yet disappear they did. There were glimpses of the lives that had been led here, but no more than glimpses, as the walls fell. The porcelain of a lavatory bowl rose bizarrely against the sky, then crashed into many pieces, before the dust and broken bricks obliterated it. A kitchen unit, looking for a moment strangely modern amongst so much that was old, reared itself like a cry for help, then splintered and disappeared.
Peter Jennings told himself that it was foolish for a man in his job to be nostalgic. These had never been good houses, even at their best. They had been built in the nineteenth-century heyday of King Cotton, when terraces of mean dwellings were thrown up quickly in the Lancashire towns which spun and weaved fortunes for those fortunate few who owned the mills and their chimneys. For the most part, it was the mill-owners who built the dwellings which would house their workers, developing a secondary source of profit as men and women flocked eagerly into the towns in the high noon of the Industrial Revolution.
When they were built, these houses had been a cut above the worst. They had not had shared yards and privies. Each dwelling had had its own tight, narrow yard at the rear, its low brick privy with its wooden aperture giving on to the âback' at the rear, where the night-soil men would come once a week to cart away the waste.
In later years, after Hitler's war and the death throes of cotton which followed it, some of these places had been much improved, had become what admiring visitors with pardonable hyperbole called âlittle palaces'. Bathrooms had been built into their cramped first floors, kitchens had been extended into the little alcoves beneath the stairs, where coal had once been stored behind a curtain. Central-heating pipes had even been run through into those icy front parlours, which had until then been reserved for Sunday teas and pre-funeral corpses lying in open coffins.
And all this history, all these lives, with their triumphs and disasters, their reminders of the petty aspirations and passing achievements of the men and women who had lived and died here, were swept away with the savage, inhuman blows of Peter Jennings's wall-crusher. Dwellings which had existed for centuries, which had housed sinners and saints and the vast variety of humanity between the two, were gone in a few seconds of noisy mayhem, a few minutes when clouds of noxious dust shut out the sun, and a variety of sour scents rolled over broken bricks and across the bleak industrial site.
Progress, they called it. And progress indeed it was, Peter Jennings told himself firmly. These places had had their day. New and better buildings would arise phoenix-like from the tired old site. No one would have wanted to live in these narrow, rotting houses now. They were buildings, that was all: bricks and mortar, and not very good bricks and mortar at that.
Peter swung the crane round again, measured the next blow with his eye, and swung the ball a long way through the dank February air.
You were never without a crowd when you were perpetrating this spectacular destruction. People were fascinated to see what had taken years to build disappear in minutes. You could see that from the crowds which invariably assembled to see nineteen-sixties tower blocks brought down. Explosives made such demolitions into more spectacular sights than anything Jennings could achieve with his crane. But people were roped off half a mile and more away from these city spectacles; they could get much nearer to his destruction, feel much more involved in the sudden and violent alterations to their local landscape.
At the end of February, most of his audience was juvenile. It was the school half term, and the crowd of children had grown as the morning proceeded. The sounds of his destruction carried through the still air, over the house tops and the office blocks to the new estates and the private housing beyond them. There was a ragged cheer with each major collapse of walls, a round of applause each time a long swing of the steel ball achieved something particularly dramatic.
Peter Jennings kept his eye upon this enthusiastic but undisciplined audience, but he knew that there were people on the ground below him who would ensure that the children did not sneak too dangerously near to the falling buildings, as excitement got the better of them. The ground was uneven and unstable, because a few of these houses had had cellars beneath them.
But most had been the quickly built, shallow-foundationed houses, thrown up as cheaply as possible by mill-owners anxious to house their workers as near to their work as possible. It was important then that the clogged feet did not have far to shuffle to work before the factory whistle sounded.
Those days, like the mills themselves for the most part, were long gone. A Labour council had long ago recognized that these tight terraces of old houses were below the accepted standards for modern living, and made them part of a slum-clearance programme. It is one of the axioms of modern town planning that such clearances inevitably take much longer than the periods originally mooted for them. This area had been unoccupied for ten years and more. The rats had enjoyed themselves, but once the windows had all been broken and the area sealed off as dangerous, there had been no other life here.
The pest-control people had been here last week, on the last of their periodic visits. But rats are resourceful creatures, and the broken remnants of ancient sewers are difficult to penetrate. Colonies of survivors raced clear of the falling walls, seeming to know from the vibrations when Jennings's crane was moving crucially near to them. The scurrying vermin appeared and disappeared within the smoke and dust of the demolition, bringing yells and hastily thrown stones and bricks from the bolder boys, and screams from the girls.
But it was something else which stopped Peter Jennings, which made him twist the levers in his crane and desist abruptly from the work he had planned to complete by the end of the morning. He thought at first that it must be an illusion, that his eyes were playing tricks upon him as the clouds of dust swirled and eddied among the smashed masonry below him.
For minutes which seemed to stretch like hours, he waited for the dust to settle. An acrid smell rose to his nostrils. He felt dry dirt upon his lips, but he made no move to reach for the mask beside him as he leaned out of the window of his cab to get a better view.
It must surely have been an illusion. This was the thing which happened to other demolition men, one in a thousand of them. But never to Peter Jennings.
