A PITGLOOM MURDER

Chapter One

Pitgloom may well be a small Nottinghamshire village, it's old terraced houses being built of crumbling brown bricks and its narrow streets cobbled and dusty with the accumulated dead skin and allied nasttness of the ages. It stands on a single street on a minor “B” road somewhere between the county Town of Nottingham and the ancient streets of Edwinstowe and has largely been lost to time because very little of any consequence has happened there since the old coal mine was closed in the 1960s. People lived there baxck in those rosy times, of course, and still do.

The terraced houses, all built in two long rows, one on each side of the main road, look what they are: utilitarian homes for a sub-species of humanity built by a class that didn't care. Some of them have been empty for years, others have bright white net curtains hiding the interiors from any chance passer by, and every so often you can see an old woman walking purposefully along.

There are other old women, of course, but this one is Amy Garrett. Married seventy years ago at the age of nineteen and a widow for over fifty of them, some look on her as a kind of matriarch though in truth she's nothing of the sort, being touched by suggestions of creeping dementia and frequently absorbed by antics she took part in during the 1950s when she was already too late to fall in love with Elvis Presley and his ilk, though she loved the way he wiggled his close to obscene hips.

Back then she had liked close to obscene. Back then she had liked quite a lot of things she disapproved of now. Back then she had even liked sex.

When she wasn't walking in the aforementioned purposeful way she was steering her little electric mobility scooter along, avoiding obstacles with the skill of the geriatric and hardly ever knocking anyone over. Her great grandson Miles Garrett (how the surname stretched down the generations!) had taken his tool kit to it and adjusted such things as gear ratios (it only had the one gear but that had a ratio and he'd interfered with it) and Amy was quite capable of zooming along at an alarming speed when Pixley Cavendish, the local police officer, wasn't looking, which was most of the time because Pixley had been having an affair with the Vicar's wife, Cynthia Bagfold, for the past two decades, and found it quite time-consuming. Anyway, his job was close to being a sinecure, there being little in the way of crime in the village. Crime belonged to cirties and their suburbs, not forgotten remnants of a bye-gone industrial age like Pitgloom.

At the far end of the village, and set back from the main road, was the Church (of Saint Drood), run with coquettish bad temper by the Reverend Plympton Bagfold who spent a great deal of his time wondering when the next visitor to his church would arrive. Few ever did, least of all on Sundays, but he was occasionally called on to officiate at a funeral. Christenings never happened in Pitgloom and anyone who wanted to get married opted for the Register Office in Nottingham out of preference to the church.

At the other end of the village, and like an open sore on the good Green Earth surrounding Pitgloom, was the village shop. It sold everything the local residence could hardly be expected to want and very little that they actually did want. It was run by the Myrtle twins, Amelia and Conscience, both of them well past the age that most people would consider retiring and reluctant to add to the burden of their poverty by restocking their establishment. But if anyone chanced to require a tin of steel gramophone needles or a gas mantel then their shop was the place to go.

One particular day in early May Amy Garrett knew that she needed to go to the shop. She wasn't quite sure why she wanted to go to the shop, but ten minutes earlier she had felt an urgent need for something or other and the shop was the only place she could think of of going to get it because there was always an outside chance they might stock it. Nottingham and Edwinstowe were both out of the question unless she caught the bus, and she didn't like buses because she usually found herself sitting close to someone who smelt, and that was, in her opinion, repulsive and unpleasant.

So on this particular day she set off on her mobility scooter for the shop at the end of the street. The sun was shining, the sky was blue bar the little white cotton-wool clouds that hopped and skipped across it, and she felt at one with the world. The weather was unusually warm for the time of year so she only wore two overcoats, a pink one with a brown one on top, for warmth.

“Hello Miss Garrett,” quavered a voice from a jitty that ran between two houses on the ground floor. The upper storey was untroubled by it because, as I have said, the houses were one long terrace of attached dwellings and had the jitty been the full height of the houses, and consequently separated them, it would have spoiled the notion of a terrace altogether, and that would never do.

“Well, Miss Pitcher,” replied Mrs Amy Garrett, “You are well, I trust? Hale and hearty? Full of the joys of spring?”

“I would be,” replied Eunice Pitcher, “I would be, but Oswald's gone missing again.”

“Again?” almost sneered Amy Garrett. “You ought to keep a tighter rein on that cat of yours. It'll be pooing on my back yard again, and then there'll be trouble!”

“Now don't you go threatening my Oswald!” shrieked Miss Pitcher. “It ain't him as poos everywhere! He's the only friend I've got, is that cat, and I love 'im. I love 'im more than I've ever loved any man, and that's a fact.”

“Then you should have a word with him about pooing in my back yard!” snapped Amy. “There's nowt worse anywhere under this bright blue sky than cat poo, 'specially when you walk in it and don't notice till it's all over the carpet in your best room.”

“I'll tell 'im,” muttered Eunice, who knew she wasn't a match for the Garrett woman when it came to a slanging match because she depended on lucid logic when she had a point to make, and Amy Garrett didn't. “Anyways, what you up to?”

“Shop, “ replied Amy.

“What for?” asked Eunice.

Amy shook her head irritably. “It'll come to me when I get there,” she said. “I did know, but it's gone and gorn.”

“Well, if you see my Oswald...”

“I know. I'll kick 'im!”

“You'll do no such thing!”

Amy Garrett might have replied that she almost certainly would, which wasn't strictly true, but might have been, but she had accelerated away from the jitty and anything she said would have been carried away and been rendered inaudible so far as the cat-loving Eunice Pitcher was concerned, and she knew it so she saved her breath.

The shop, when she got there, was open, and she went in, still not quite sure what she wanted but determined to remember as soon as she could because something buried in her brain told her it was vital that she did.

But something much more important loomed in front of her and drove everything else out of her mind. For lying on the floor in front of the counter in a pool of nasty red blood was one of the Myrtle twins, and standing behind that counter, holding a knife smeared and almost dripping with blood of that same colour was the other Myrtle twin. In her other hand, and tucked under her arm, was Oswald the cat, and he was purring contentedly as his feline eyes took in the scene of blood and gore and chaos all around him.

“A tin opener!” gasped Amy. “What … what on Earth … a tin opener!”

© Peter Rogerson 03.05.11