Category: Amy Rowlings Mysteries (Page 4 of 14)

Ten Years After Book FIVE in the Amy Rowlings Series. Teaser Chapter One.

August 29, 2024 / T. A. Belshaw / 0 Comments

Ten Years After

Chapter One

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.’

Gone but never forgotten. My inspiration.

August 26, 2024 / T. A. Belshaw / 0 Comments

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.

Location Location. Amy Rowlings and Ilkeston. My home town.

August 15, 2024 / T. A. Belshaw / 2 Comments

Amy Rowlings on the Spinton Saturday Market. Summer 1939.

Amy Rowlings. Locations.

I hope that any of my regular readers will find this article of interest but it is especially aimed at readers from my hometown of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, who might have a feeling in the back of their minds that one or two of the locations in my books feel rather familiar. There’s a reason for that. They almost certainly are.

I am an Ilkeston born writer who came back to live in the old industrial town after a forty-year absence and although the place has obviously changed during that time; I was delighted to find that many of the locations I remembered from my youth were still there, albeit repurposed.

When I set about writing the Unspoken series, and soon after, the Amy Rowlings mysteries, I needed a place to set them in. The obvious answer would have been my hometown, but I had a few problems with that as both series would eventually move from the nineteen thirties into the nineteen forties when, of course, the country would be at war and although Stanton Ironworks was regularly targeted by the Luftwaffe, I wanted to be able to feel closer to the events when I wrote about how my characters lived during those dreadful years. Kent seemed to be an ideal location to set the books, as, being right on the English channel, the people living there would have been on the front line had the Nazis ever managed to invade. It was also the ideal place for my characters to find the odd unexploded bomb or watch the aerial dogfights that took place during the battle of Britain, something that is mentioned in the Unspoken series by way of diary entry from the farm owner, Alice.

All this was in the future.

The first book, Unspoken, was a dual timeline family saga set in both 1938 and 2019. The characters came easily to me. What I needed now was a setting.

I chose Kent, north of Gillingham, quite close to the banks of the River Medway and as this was going to be a series of stories that revolved around an old mill factory, I decided to call it Spinton.

Spinton grew in my mind as I began to write the first book and by the time Murder at the Mill, the first Amy Rowlings novel had been written, the town had enlarged considerably as I drew inspiration from old Ilkeston to bring it to life.

Spinton has a lot of garments and hosiery factories, just like Ilkeston. The Mill, the factory Amy Rowlings, supersleuth works at, is based on Rutland Mill (Rutland Garments) on Market Street in Ilkeston. I used to walk past the place every day on my way to Hallcroft School. I considered using Charnos as it was in Hallam Fields and I was born and grew up there, but that factory was only built in 1932 and I had something a little older in my mind when I was writing about it.

The Sunshine Café that Amy has a coffee in every Saturday morning is based on Ilkeston’s oldest traditional Cafe, The Corner Café although it is still known by many as Doug’s Café. Doug was the owner when I spent my early teenage years listening to the 60’s music on the jukebox.

The Carnegie Library on the marketplace was lifted up and transported all the way to Kent, as was the Town Hall. The buildings are right next to each other in Spinton, but they are on opposite sides of the market square in reality. The taxi rank outside the library is in exactly the same spot in Spinton.

St John the Evangelist Church is St Mary’s, although I had to add a larger graveyard that could hold a couple of broken down mausoleums. I also needed a lychgate, but as St Mary’s doesn’t have one, I stole the one from Holy Trinity at Mapperley Village. The slate and gravel paths and walkways are an invention. We don’t have ragstone here.

The canal is our very own Nutbrook canal. I grew up very close to it and it was always going to be in the books. I remember swimming in ‘ot waters,’ at the side of the ironworks when I was very young, and we spent a lot of time playing daredevil, running across the lock gates.

The Spinton Ironworks are, of course, Stanton Ironworks. I was born on Crompton Street slap bang in the middle between the ironworks and the coke ovens. I transported the lot to Kent, ready for the murder mystery series. There is also an abandoned brickworks just like the one I used to play in. Crompton Street became Ebeneezer Street in the process.

The Silverstream, mentioned in Murder on the Medway, is the Nutbrook which used to meander across the fields at the back of our house when we moved from Crompton Street to Kirk Hallam after the flood of 1960.

The Roxy cinema is the Scala cinema, although I moved it and put it where the Ritz is.

For High Street, Main Street and Middle Street, look no further than Bath Street, South Street and Market Street. The police station on Middle Street in the books is actually based on the old police station that used to be on Wharncliffe Road.

Long Lane, where Alice’s farm and Amy’s cottage are located, is based on a mix of Low’s Lane and Quarry Hill, and the Old Bull pub, although not the same internally, is the Bull’s Head on Little Hallam Hill. Other pubs mentioned in the books are loosely based on the Ilkeston pubs in the market square.

Spinton Station is what used to be Ilkeston Town Station at the bottom of Bath Street.

Spinton Post Office is wholly based on the old Ilkeston Post Office. Now Hogarth’s pub.

Spinton Market is Ilkeston Market, complete with the bus stops we used to have back in the day.

Witch Wood, in the latest Amy Rowlings mystery, is based on Shipley Wood.

Russell Park (Murder on the Medway and The Murder Awards) is an amalgamation of Manor Floods nature reserve and the Ilkeston Recreation ground.

Whilst none of the characters in the books are based on real people and none of the storylines are based on actual events, I have used the memory of my time growing up on Crompton Street to help generate them. I particularly remember how strong the women were back in the day. How they coped with the daily struggle to put food on the table for their families. The menfolk used to think they wore the trousers and boasted about it in the Stanton Hotel on payday, but in reality, it was the women who ran things. They made all the major decisions; whether the rent could be paid, whether the slate at the shop further up the street could be utilised that week, and whether a shilling or two could be paid into the club for a hamper and presents at Christmas. Those women were the pillars of the community. They put their family in front of any personal ambition. The men just went to work and came home to find a dinner on the table as soon as they opened the back door. Many were also guilty of lashing out if their wives had the temerity to speak up for themselves when their partner got back from the pub.

I have yet to incorporate the Ilkeston Charter Fair into the books, but it will make an appearance one day.

Brigden’s Nearly New women’s fashion store and the London Connection fashion shop aren’t based on anywhere in Ilkeston.

There are probably a lot of other Ilkeston references in the books. If you find one, please feel free to mention it.

T. A. Belshaw