Death on the Down Beat by Sebastian Farr

Author:Sebastian Farr [Farr, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Traditional, Police Procedural, Crime, second world war mystery, golden age mystery, whodunit, vintage mystery, Musical Fiction, lost classic, midlands
ISBN: 9781728278599
Google: Zo2fEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1728278597
Published: 2023-09-04T11:00:00+00:00

Wednesday, 12th October

3, BACK OF 61,

BARROWS ROW,

WINTERDALE,

MANINGPOOL.

Oct. 11th.

DR SIR,

I hope as you will escuse me for writing re the Murder but I think I have a claw for you Sir making so Bold has to say, I Cleaned up under the Plattform this a.m. and notticed a Hole in it where I Stood looking strait at the Conductor Sir only of corse he wasnt there being Dead poor Gentleman and I shall be Pleased to Show it to you any Time Sir if Conveaniant to your Good Self

Yrs respy

MRS. HORSFALL.

Wed.

MY DEAR JU,

I went to see the estimable and respectful Mrs. Horsfall ‘this a.m.’ Incidentally I saw a part of the town that was new to me. Winterdale is far from resembling the spacious residential place of the Gillighans & Co., but though a slum now, not a depressing one, somehow, for all its soiled appearance. The Barrows Row houses must have been pretty once, like Miss Colling-Jones, but while she is still more genteel than shabby, it is just the opposite with them. They have that warm, irregular red of old brick (late 18th cent. I should say) and keep some of the more permanent original features: charming moulded architraves (if so pompous a term will do) over the windows, which themselves have yielded their original character to the common glazier, and over the doorways, where you’d expect a fanlight, an actual fan—one of those shell-like sandstone ornaments filling a semi-circular space most gracefully. But again, the doors are debased and hideously grained to present a low caricature of such oak as you see only in baronial halls at the pantomime. The street is drab, but not dull. It is too busy for that and has some funny little shops made out of the once self-respecting front sitting-rooms with a sort of casual and purely practical barbarity. It had been wet and then cleared up, so that the slate-blue tiles of the pavements shone against the light with the preternatural brightness of an Italian sky.

Mrs. Horsfall, as you may have gathered from her address, does not live in all this, but at the back of it. That is to say, when you have agitated a hysterical door-bell at one of those impromptu shops and made polite inquiries from a fat woman whose initial courtesy rapidly dwindles into a superb detachment, you go through a narrow passage between two of these houses and emerge into a place that partakes of the nature both of a backyard and a front-garden. There are little low fences and gates all round four small but quite friendly cottages, also of red brick, but of a newer and cruder variety. And if you have succeeded in detaching No. 3 from these, you have also found yours respy, Mrs. Horsfall.

I’m afraid I caught the good lady at a disadvantage and dragged her in a state of ruffled and panting embarrassment from some fierce household job. Obviously she had not expected her invitation to draw me to her

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