Amy and her best friend Alice are seventy. It’s 1989 and the world has changed out of all recognition from when they were growing up together in the old town of Spinton in Kent.
This new series will detail the daily lives of the two friends as they reminisce about their earlier lives. Amy will also record some of the shorter mysteries she was involved in. Mysteries that never made the Amy Rowlings Golden Age crime series.
So, here’s chapter one to give you a taste of what to expect. There will be two short mysteries per book. The first is The Jazz Singer.
Seventy Summers
Chapter One
Reunion
‘Mollison Farm, Alice speaking.’ A series of beeps sounded in her ear, then a female voice was heard.
‘Hello Alice speaking, this is Amy speaking.’
‘AMY!’ Alice almost shouted. ‘Have you come home? How long have you been back? When can you come to see me…? Or I’ll come to see you… it’s been so long.’ Alice’s voice cracked as she spoke.
‘One year, two months and six days, not that I’ve been counting,’ Amy said. ‘How are things at the farm?’
‘Oh, never mind the farm. I’ve got so many questions.’
‘I don’t have enough change for questions, dear heart. I’m using my last twenty p coin. I just wanted to wish you a very happy birthday.’
‘At least tell me where you are. Are you back home in Nottingham? No, of course you aren’t or you wouldn’t be calling from a telephone box… How is Alicia? Has she rec…’ Alice stopped speaking as she heard a series of pips, then the line went dead.
‘Damn,’ Alice said as she replaced the handset on the base.
I’ll wait a bit. She might call again if she gets hold of some change.
Five minutes later, she got to her feet as she heard the back door open. Hurrying through the kitchen doorway from the lounge, she threw her hands up in delight as she saw her lifelong best friend standing by the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen. ‘Is it really you?’ she yelled as she scurried across the kitchen and threw herself into Amy’s open arms.
‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she sobbed.
Amy squeezed tight as her own tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry it’s been so long. I’ve thought about you every day.’
It was a full three minutes before the two women let go of each other and began to wipe the tears from their faces.
‘Happy seventieth birthday, dear heart,’ Amy said, patting the gaily wrapped present she had placed on the table. ‘Is the kettle on? I’m parched.’
Still dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Alice crossed the kitchen, picked up the electric kettle and shook it. Then, deciding it needed a top up, she filled it at the tap above the big Belfast sink that had been in place for over sixty years. ‘It’s not fair. I didn’t get to see you on your seventieth.’
‘I was hoping to have been back for that, but Alicia’s recovery took longer than they thought it might. She was in a bad way after that road accident.’
Alice dropped three tea bags into the pot and tapped her foot as she waited for the kettle to boil. ‘Is she all right now? I so wanted to fly out to see her myself, but I couldn’t leave the farm. I was in the middle of negotiating selling off the top pastures to the council. They want to build a new school.’
‘Alicia’s made a remarkable recovery. She won’t play netball at top flight level again though, but as she said, that’s a small price to pay. She was lucky to survive the impact.’ Amy’s face lost a lot of its colour as she thought about how close to death her daughter had come. Continue reading
The storm broke mid-afternoon, finally bringing an end to the oppressive humidity. The heavy, lead-coloured clouds that had hung over the town for days, holding in the heat like a vast, iron, saucepan lid, swirled and churned, lit up here and there by flashes of lightning as if announcing the appearance of the Valkyrie from Wagner’s opera.
Torrents of water ran down the hill from High Street onto Middle Street, washing away the accumulated dust and cigarette ends that had lain undisturbed for weeks. At the Ironworks, sweaty, grime-covered men stepped out into the rain, removed their shirts and raised their hands in the air to welcome the downpour.
In Witchy Wood, a four-acre mass of holm oaks, lindens, sycamores and aspens, interspersed with thick tangles of blackthorn and hawthorn, a lightning strike hit the eaves of a long abandoned cottage causing the eastern end to collapse, opening up an old storeroom that had been hidden away behind a crumbling stone wall and a thick covering of wisteria for decades.
‘Thank goodness!’ Amy Rowlings exclaimed as a deafening thunderclap sounded overhead. Even with every available window open inside the London Connection fashion shop, the customers and staff mopped their brows with already sodden handkerchiefs. The atmosphere had been oppressive since the doors opened at nine o’clock that morning. The humid air enveloped her like a heavy shroud as the strategically placed electric fans whined and strained, only moving the sultry air from one place to another.
Amy resisted the urge to wring out her sopping handkerchief and dropped it instead into the waste bin at the side of the counter. She still had a clean one in her bag after buying two new ones from Jimmy Cousins’ market stall earlier in the day.
Amy worked two and a half days a week at the shop where her keen eye for fashion and her sympathetic manner when quietly explaining to a customer that the particular tight fitting dress she had her heart set on buying wasn’t quite the dress for her, was greatly appreciated. The rest of the week was spent behind her sewing machine at Handsley’s Garments, a clothing factory known locally as ‘The Mill’ because it was once a cotton mill driven by a long-dismantled water wheel that had powered the factory in the late eighteenth century.
Amy wasn’t a clock watcher by any means and thoroughly enjoyed both of her jobs, but today had been stressful, with a stream of bad-tempered customers, all intent on finding someone to complain to about the conditions inside the shop.
At five-thirty, Amy breathed a big sigh of relief and after ushering the last grumbling, sweating, middle-aged lady of the day out of the front door, she hurried through to the staff room, where she half-filled the sink with lukewarm water from the tap and plunged her face into it.
‘Move over,’ Jill, the trainee seamstress said, nudging Amy aside in her hurry to get her own face into the water.
Amy put her head back, looked up at the ceiling and allowed the refreshing water to run onto her neck. After reaching for a towel, she dried her face and stuck her head out of the open window, relishing the cooling breeze that had replaced the stagnant heat. ‘If it’s your turn to lock up tonight, Jill, don’t forget to close all the windows or Josie will arrive to find she has no stock left on Saturday morning.’
Jill pulled her head out of the sink and reached out for the towel that Amy was offering. ‘You’re so lucky getting every Saturday off, Amy. I’d like just one Saturday a month to myself.’
‘Ah, but you get every Wednesday afternoon off,’ Amy replied. ‘When I leave here at one, I have to get the bus straight to The Mill. I have to be at my machine for half past. I don’t even have time for lunch.’
‘It’s still better than working on Saturdays.’ Jill patted at her damp hair as she looked forlornly at Amy. ‘Everywhere closes for half a day on Wednesdays. There’s nothing to do except walk around the blooming market. My young man, Sidney, works through the week, but he gets Saturday afternoons off. Not that he can see me until the evenings. He has to spend his half day watching Spinton United playing blooming football.’ She sighed. ‘He’d much rather be spending that time with me.’
Amy shook her head and smiled to herself. ‘I bet the poor lad has to go to the pub at lunchtime too, just to pass the time.’
Jill sniffed. ‘Yes, but I know he’d much rather be spending time with me than with his mates. He gets to see them all week at work.’
‘Who has the keys tonight?’ Josie, the manager said as she walked through from the shop.
‘Me, madam,’ Jill said, holding out her hand for the large bunch of keys.
‘Make sure you close all the windows. Don’t forget what happened when Jenny Harris forgot to lock up properly. We found a tramp on the floor of the fitting room when we opened up the next morning.’
‘I’ll make sure everything is safe and secure,’ Jill replied, giving the Guides salute. She dropped her hand to her side quickly as Josie gave her a stern eye.
‘Make sure you do.’
At the front of the shop, Amy waited as Josie used her spare set of keys to unlock the half glass doors, then stepped smartly outside as the manager prepared to lock them again.
‘I’m tempted to wait across the road and check that she has locked up properly,’ Josie said as Amy hung her bag over her arm and turned towards the street. ‘She’s meeting her young man later tonight, so she’ll be in a hurry to get away.’
‘She’ll do a proper job, Josie,’ Amy said with a quick nod of her head. ‘She knows she’s lucky to be working here.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Josie replied. ‘I still haven’t forgotten that tramp though. I had to get Elsie the cleaner to disinfect the entire shop. I almost convinced myself that I’d picked up head lice.’
Amy laughed. ‘Right, I’ll get off then. See you next Wednesday.’
Josie put her hand on Amy’s arm. ‘I really wish I could convince you to work here full time, Amy. You know how much the customers love you.’
‘You wouldn’t think so today. I took the worst of the flak from ill-tempered so and sos.’
‘The customer is always right. Isn’t that our motto?’
‘It is,’ Amy replied flatly. ‘Even when they insist they can fit their size eighteen frames into a size twelve dress.’
Josie grinned. ‘Ah, but you explain why it isn’t possible so inventively.’
Amy smiled back and turned to walk across the street to get her bus. ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said as she bumped into a tall, dark-haired man, wearing a shiny suit and an extremely crumpled shirt.
‘Just the lady I was hoping to find,’ the man said. His eyes lit up as he smiled at her.
‘Bodkin? What are you doing here? I didn’t think I was seeing you until tomorrow.’
‘That was the plan, but things can change quickly,’ Bodkin replied. ‘Especially when there’s an unexplained death to investigate.’ He paused, nodded to Josie, then took Amy by the arm. ‘You know your way around the Witchy Wood, I take it?’
‘Of course. Alice and I spent a lot of our summers in there when we were young.’
Bodkin grinned. ‘Good, you’ll know that long abandoned cottage on the west side of the wood, then?’
Amy nodded. ‘We used to call it the Creepy Cottage. No one’s lived there in my lifetime. It’s pretty much a ruin.’
‘It’s even more of a ruin now,’ Bodkin said. ‘An end wall has fallen in during the big storm this afternoon. When it was over, a dog walker and his pooch discovered something very interesting.’
Bodkin was silent as he led Amy towards his Morris car that he’d parked just around the corner.
Amy dug him in the ribs. ‘Come on, Bodkin, stop teasing. What did they find?’
‘A skeleton,’ the inspector replied. ‘A skeleton that may have suffered a brutal attack while it was still attached to a living body… or at least, that’s how it appears. There is severe skull damage.’
‘’How it appears?’ Couldn’t the wall have done the damage when it collapsed?’
‘I doubt it,’ Bodkin said as he unlocked the passenger side of the car and opened the door to allow Amy to climb in. ‘There’s a rusty old pickaxe buried in it.’
The storm broke mid-afternoon, finally bringing an end to the oppressive humidity. The heavy, lead-coloured clouds that had hung over the town for days, holding in the heat like a vast, iron, saucepan lid, swirled and churned, lit up here and there by flashes of lightning as if announcing the appearance of the Valkyrie from Wagner’s opera.
Torrents of water ran down the hill from High Street onto Middle Street, washing away the accumulated dust and cigarette ends that had lain undisturbed for weeks. At the Ironworks, sweaty, grime-covered men stepped out into the rain, removed their shirts and raised their hands in the air to welcome the downpour.
In Witchy Wood, a four-acre mass of holm oaks, lindens, sycamores and aspens, interspersed with thick tangles of blackthorn and hawthorn, a lightning strike hit the eaves of a long abandoned cottage causing the eastern end to collapse, opening up an old storeroom that had been hidden away behind a crumbling stone wall and a thick covering of wisteria for decades.
‘Thank goodness!’ Amy Rowlings exclaimed as a deafening thunderclap sounded overhead. Even with every available window open inside the London Connection fashion shop, the customers and staff mopped their brows with already sodden handkerchiefs. The atmosphere had been oppressive since the doors opened at nine o’clock that morning. The humid air enveloped her like a heavy shroud as the strategically placed electric fans whined and strained, only moving the sultry air from one place to another.
Amy resisted the urge to wring out her sopping handkerchief and dropped it instead into the waste bin at the side of the counter. She still had a clean one in her bag after buying two new ones from Jimmy Cousins’ market stall earlier in the day.
Amy worked two and a half days a week at the shop where her keen eye for fashion and her sympathetic manner when quietly explaining to a customer that the particular tight fitting dress she had her heart set on buying wasn’t quite the dress for her, was greatly appreciated. The rest of the week was spent behind her sewing machine at Handsley’s Garments, a clothing factory known locally as ‘The Mill’ because it was once a cotton mill driven by a long-dismantled water wheel that had powered the factory in the late eighteenth century.
Amy wasn’t a clock watcher by any means and thoroughly enjoyed both of her jobs, but today had been stressful, with a stream of bad-tempered customers, all intent on finding someone to complain to about the conditions inside the shop.
At five-thirty, Amy breathed a big sigh of relief and after ushering the last grumbling, sweating, middle-aged lady of the day out of the front door, she hurried through to the staff room, where she half-filled the sink with lukewarm water from the tap and plunged her face into it.
‘Move over,’ Jill, the trainee seamstress said, nudging Amy aside in her hurry to get her own face into the water.
Amy put her head back, looked up at the ceiling and allowed the refreshing water to run onto her neck. After reaching for a towel, she dried her face and stuck her head out of the open window, relishing the cooling breeze that had replaced the stagnant heat. ‘If it’s your turn to lock up tonight, Jill, don’t forget to close all the windows or Josie will arrive to find she has no stock left on Saturday morning.’
Jill pulled her head out of the sink and reached out for the towel that Amy was offering. ‘You’re so lucky getting every Saturday off, Amy. I’d like just one Saturday a month to myself.’
‘Ah, but you get every Wednesday afternoon off,’ Amy replied. ‘When I leave here at one, I have to get the bus straight to The Mill. I have to be at my machine for half past. I don’t even have time for lunch.’
‘It’s still better than working on Saturdays.’ Jill patted at her damp hair as she looked forlornly at Amy. ‘Everywhere closes for half a day on Wednesdays. There’s nothing to do except walk around the blooming market. My young man, Sidney, works through the week, but he gets Saturday afternoons off. Not that he can see me until the evenings. He has to spend his half day watching Spinton United playing blooming football.’ She sighed. ‘He’d much rather be spending that time with me.’
Amy shook her head and smiled to herself. ‘I bet the poor lad has to go to the pub at lunchtime too, just to pass the time.’
Jill sniffed. ‘Yes, but I know he’d much rather be spending time with me than with his mates. He gets to see them all week at work.’
‘Who has the keys tonight?’ Josie, the manager said as she walked through from the shop.
‘Me, madam,’ Jill said, holding out her hand for the large bunch of keys.
‘Make sure you close all the windows. Don’t forget what happened when Jenny Harris forgot to lock up properly. We found a tramp on the floor of the fitting room when we opened up the next morning.’
‘I’ll make sure everything is safe and secure,’ Jill replied, giving the Guides salute. She dropped her hand to her side quickly as Josie gave her a stern eye.
‘Make sure you do.’
At the front of the shop, Amy waited as Josie used her spare set of keys to unlock the half-glass doors, then stepped smartly outside as the manager prepared to lock them again.
‘I’m tempted to wait across the road and check that she has locked up properly,’ Josie said as Amy hung her bag over her arm and turned towards the street. ‘She’s meeting her young man later tonight, so she’ll be in a hurry to get away.’
‘She’ll do a proper job, Josie,’ Amy said with a quick nod of her head. ‘She knows she’s lucky to be working here.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Josie replied. ‘I still haven’t forgotten that tramp though. I had to get Elsie the cleaner to disinfect the entire shop. I almost convinced myself that I’d picked up head lice.’
Amy laughed. ‘Right, I’ll get off then. See you next Wednesday.’
Josie put her hand on Amy’s arm. ‘I really wish I could convince you to work here full time, Amy. You know how much the customers love you.’
‘You wouldn’t think so today. I took the worst of the flak from ill-tempered so and sos.’
‘The customer is always right. Isn’t that our motto?’
‘It is,’ Amy replied flatly. ‘Even when they insist they can fit their size eighteen frames into a size twelve dress.’
Josie grinned. ‘Ah, but you explain why it isn’t possible so inventively.’
Amy smiled back and turned to walk across the street to get her bus. ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said as she bumped into a tall, dark-haired man, wearing a shiny suit and an extremely crumpled shirt.
‘Just the lady I was hoping to find,’ the man said. His eyes lit up as he smiled at her.
‘Bodkin? What are you doing here? I didn’t think I was seeing you until tomorrow.’
‘That was the plan, but things can change quickly,’ Bodkin replied. ‘Especially when there’s an unexplained death to investigate.’ He paused, nodded to Josie, then took Amy by the arm. ‘You know your way around the Witchy Wood, I take it?’
‘Of course. Alice and I spent a lot of our summers in there when we were young.’
Bodkin grinned. ‘Good, you’ll know that long abandoned cottage on the west side of the wood, then?’
Amy nodded. ‘We used to call it the Creepy Cottage. No one’s lived there in my lifetime. It’s pretty much a ruin.’
‘It’s even more of a ruin now,’ Bodkin said. ‘An end wall has fallen in during the big storm this afternoon. When it was over, a dog walker and his pooch discovered something very interesting.’
Bodkin was silent as he led Amy towards his Morris car that he’d parked just around the corner.
Amy dug him in the ribs. ‘Come on, Bodkin, stop teasing. What did they find?’
‘A skeleton,’ the inspector replied. ‘A skeleton that may have suffered a brutal attack while it was still attached to a living body… or at least, that’s how it appears. There is severe skull damage.’
‘’How it appears?’ Couldn’t the wall have done the damage when it collapsed?’
‘I doubt it,’ Bodkin said as he unlocked the passenger side of the car and opened the door to allow Amy to climb in. ‘There’s a rusty old pickaxe buried in it.’
The last week in August is always the worst week of the year for me as it holds so many sad memories. In two days time it will be nine years since I came home to find that Doreen had succumbed to the hypertension neither of us knew she had. It was the worst moment of my life. There was no preparation, I had only nipped out for twenty minutes. We didn’t know she was ill. The worst thing was not having the chance to say goodbye.
Three days before I found her I had released Out of Control. I was a children’s writer back then and that was my first attempt at a story for adults. I gave up writing that day and didn’t write a word in anger until five years later when I was off work with an internal injury that would keep me housebound for three months, and someone started whispering in my ear with an idea for a brand new series.
So, nine years on I’ve moved back to a cheap little terraced house in my home town and I still talk to her photograph a few times a day. I was never a believer in the afterlife, at least not the one promised us in the bible and (apologies to the God Squad) I still think that’s a load of nonsense, but… I have become a bit of a believer in multiple universes and the quantum theory that says there are an unlimited number of them and what happened to us in this one won’t have happened in millions of others. Maybe when we die we slip into one of these alternative universes or to another dimension. I don’t believe death is the end anymore. That spark of electricity.. the soul… whatever, has to go somewhere.
I know Doreen is watching over me somehow. I can feel it and I know she is helping me get through. We’ll meet again one day. Until then, she’s up on the shelf or slipping in to see me when I’m asleep. I’m sure she’s doing what she can to inspire the Amy mysteries as she was such a big fan of Agatha’s characters and Amy exists in the same timeline as them. I’m wondering if it’s her that talks to me in the strange dimension between sleep and wakefulness. I’ve always blamed Amy for it.
I’ll mark the day as usual with a short post but this week I’ll be trying to get the ideas down that have been whispered in my ear over the weekend for inclusion in the Seventy Summers book that I started to write last week. Last night I was given the plot for the first of the short mysteries that will be included and I’ve now worked out the structure of the books. There will be at least six of them and they’ll all be shorter than the Amy mysteries, around 60k. Each book will contain two short mystery stories that will slot in alongside the story of Alice and Amy’s daily lives at 70 years old. Doreen sadly never got anywhere near that age but she seems keen for me to get these books written before I slip into whichever universe or dimension it is, to join her.
Thanks Dor. I hope you know how much people enjoy the stories you help me with. See you soon.
It began with a trivial moment of carelessness, but the shockwaves that reverberate from this seemingly insignificant incident, spread far and wide.
Ed and his heavily pregnant wife Mary are on an errand for Ed’s ailing father before the pair depart for warmer climes. But the winter of 1962 comes early and one innocuous event and a hastily taken decision will have devastating consequences for the family of young Rose Gorton. Mary’s already fragile mental state is put under further stress while Ed tries to make sense of events that are spiralling massively, Out of Control.
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