Salt is Leaving Read online

  SALT IS LEAVING

  by

  J. B. PRIESTLEY

  With a new introduction by

  MARK MASON

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Salt is Leaving by J. B. Priestley

  First published as a paperback original by Pan Books in 1966

  First Valancourt Books edition, 2014

  Copyright © 1966 by J. B. Priestley, renewed 1994

  Introduction © 2014 by Mark Mason

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  J. B. Priestley was in his early seventies when he wrote Salt is Leaving. He was a prolific playwright and novelist; three of his plays, An Inspector Calls, Mystery at Greenfingers and Bright Shadow, and novels such as Benighted, The Doomsday Men and Saturn Over the Water are crime-related, but this was his only proper detective story.

  Salt is Leaving is a lighter novel, written for the author’s own enjoyment as well as the reader’s. It is what we now call cosy crime, with much less of the violence and sexuality that characterizes many modern crime novels. In his essay ‘Reading Detective Stories in Bed’ (from Delight, published in 1949) Priestley explains why people find cosies so satisfying:

  We enthusiasts are not fascinated by violence or the crime element in these narratives. Often, like myself, we deplore the blood-and-bones atmosphere . . . we want a narrative, an artfully contrived tale. But not any kind of tale, no fragrant romances and the like. What we want – or at least what I want, late at night; you can please yourself – is a tale that is in its own way a picture of life but yet has an entertaining puzzle element in it. And this the detective story offers me.

  In Salt is Leaving he gives us a classic murder mystery, where the two main characters, Dr Salt and Maggie Culworth, team up to discover what has happened to his patient and her father, both of whom have disappeared. It brings us satire and social criticism in a typical small town setting, where the amateur detectives persevere to overcome numerous obstacles (including the indifference of the local police) in the search for the truth.

  The novel has a clear sense of time and place, and its storyline reflects English society at the time it was written in the early 1960s. It is set in the fictional towns of Hemton and Birkden, located in the area around the real cities of Birmingham and Coventry, in the English Midlands region. These are classic small provincial towns, where the Chief Constable is an ex-army Colonel, on friendly terms with the senior people who have most influence in the town. Where an important local businessman is also a magistrate (a lay person who sits on the bench in judgement on offenders in a local magistrates court) and has enough influence to ensure that a suicide is recorded as accidental death. Where the nightclubs are run by local criminals; and where a public scandal that might affect the town is to be avoided at all costs. After living in Birkden for seven years, Salt has had enough of the town and is keen to leave, but he won’t go until he has solved the mystery of what has happened to Noreen Wilks.

  Priestley reflects the reality of provincial England at that time in his writing. The traditional market towns were seeking to expand, encouraging new housing developments and industry to provide the jobs. Hempton has a new university, situated just outside the town; and United Fabrics have recently moved to a big new factory on the outskirts of Birkden, employing fifteen hundred women and girls. In 1963 Dr Beeching published his report on the reshaping of British railways, which resulted in the closure of uneconomic lines and over 2,000 stations. Thus there is no longer a rail link between Hemton and Birkden, and people have to travel on the bus or by car.

  Priestley also drew on the revelations of the Profumo affair in 1963, when Government Minister John Profumo had to resign because he lied to Parliament. Profumo had denied having an affair with party-girl Christine Keeler. They met in 1961 at a house party at Cliveden, Lord Astor’s mansion in Berkshire; Profumo was in his mid-forties and Keeler was seventeen years old. This was one of a number of regular parties organised by society osteopath Stephen Ward, who procured poorly educated and naïve young women like Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice Davis, who both worked as topless showgirls in a London nightclub, to entertain the guests. The posh parties held at the United Fabrics Club in Birkden reflect the revelations of the Profumo affair, and Salt describes Noreen Wilks, the girl he is trying to find, as pretty but ‘empty headed, sloppy, silly.’

  There appears to be something of Priestley’s own gruff, pugnacious Yorkshireman in the personality of Dr Salt. They both enjoyed smoking a pipe and cigars, liked a good dinner, books and classical music. From 1959 until his death in 1984 Priestley himself lived in the south Midlands, at Alveston, outside Stratford-upon-Avon; just twenty miles from Coventry, but a world away from the towns of Hemtonshire.

  I hope that you will find this novel a delight, whether or not you read it in bed.

  Mark Mason

  February 4, 2014

  Mark Mason is a retired civil servant who keeps himself busy as an occasional museum exhibition curator. He is a member of the Council of the J. B. Priestley Society and is also the bibliographer of the English poet Alfred Noyes.

  SALT IS LEAVING

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Father is Missing

  1

  A few years ago, W. H. Smith had no branch in the High Street, Hemton. (County town of Hemtonshire; population 13,600; early closing Thursday; Market Day Friday; see medieval Guild Hall and almshouses, University of Hemtonshire – 2 miles N.E. on Hemton-Birkden rd.) Where Smiths are so bright and imposing now, then there was a smaller and far less imposing shop: E. Culworth, Bookseller and Stationer. And it was at the back of this shop, towards closing time on a Monday in early October, that Maggie, only daughter of E. Culworth, might be said to have first set foot in the maze that finally turned into a high road.

  She had spent all the afternoon doing accounts in the little office at the back. Now she came out to ask her father to sign some cheques. In the near room, with children’s books on one side and paperbacks on the other, Sheila Holt was pulling her mouth down to give it more lipstick.

  ‘Where’s Mr Culworth?’ Maggie asked her.

  Sheila stopped lipsticking. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’ This was not surprising. At work she wasn’t sure of anything except that she didn’t know.

  Maggie looked through the archway into the larger room, which led to the street door. Mrs Chapman was attending to a customer, the only one in sight, at the stationery, fountain pens and gifts counter. The old reliable gave Maggie one of her slow fat smiles. Not seeing either her father or the boy, Reg Morgan, Maggie thought they might be rearranging some of the secondhand books down in the basement. The lights were on down there. Beginning to feel impatient, Maggie rushed below, risking a fall at the turn of the stairs.

  ‘Don’t overdo it, Reg.’ Still holding a duster in one hand, he was deep in a book. He was smallish even for sixteen and had a curiously wizened face, so that at times he looked like a professor on the edge of retirement. He wasn’t stupid like Sheila, who, Maggie guessed, never really thought about anything except young men, making love, bedroom suites and where she would spend her honeymoon. Reg, poor lad, failed all examinations and yet carried about with him a kind of bookworm atmosphere; her father believed he might be turned into a first-rate assistant. But where was her father?

  ‘I don’t know, Miss Culworth. He told
me this morning to come down here and tidy up and make more room in the top shelves. Sounded as if he might be going off to some auction sale – y’know, to buy some more secondhands.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it, Reg. But he almost always tells me. Well, you can pack up now. And don’t forget to turn the lights off.’ She hurried upstairs.

  Mrs Chapman’s customer had gone, and she was clearing away, ready to close the shop. Once a teacher, married and then widowed in her forties, now well into her fifties, fat and comfortable but very conscientious, Bertha Chapman had been her father’s chief assistant for years when Maggie came back from London and agreed to work in the shop, taking charge of accounts and correspondence.

  ‘What’s the matter, Maggie?’

  ‘It’s my father, Bertha. Where is he? There are cheques and things for him to sign.’

  ‘He’s not been in all afternoon. Didn’t he tell you at lunch-time where he was going?’

  ‘I don’t go home for lunch on Mondays, Bertha. Mother gets up early on Mondays and does some washing, then she meets her friend Mrs Holroyd somewhere for coffee and cakes, and then they go out to the Cottage Hospital and spend the rest of the day there, doing mysterious good works. So at half past twelve I nip round to the Primrose for some coffee and two poached eggs or one of their rather revolting little messes—’

  ‘And your father goes to the Red Lion for a glass of bitter and a couple of sandwiches,’ said Mrs Chapman, smiling. ‘Usually about one o’clock. Well, I can tell you this, Maggie. He went earlier today – about quarter to one. He took a telephone call in the office, and then went straight off, without a word. And he looked worried – really worried. He often looks anxious – he’s an anxious kind of man, your father is, Maggie, as you must know as well as I do. But this time he looked so worried and in such a hurry to get away, I didn’t like to stop him and ask him where he was going.’ She was serious now.

  Maggie knew that Bertha Chapman was no fusspot. She felt disturbed, but pretended not to be. ‘Probably somebody rang him up to remind him about some sale he’s forgotten, so he rushed off to it.’ She looked hopefully at Bertha, who was now crumpling a paper on which somebody had been trying a fountain pen. ‘Don’t you think so, Bertha?’

  After disposing of the crumpled paper, Bertha gave her a long, hard look. ‘I’m afraid I don’t, Maggie. Your father isn’t going to try rare books again, and he doesn’t want to carry much more secondhand stock. But that’s not it. I know his anxious business face – I ought to after all this time – but the way he looked when he went out today was quite different. He wasn’t thinking about this shop. He was worried about something else. But that doesn’t mean you have to worry about it, Maggie. Better not, I say.’

  ‘And you’re sure you don’t know what it might be?’ It was Maggie’s turn now to stare hard.

  ‘I couldn’t even start guessing, Maggie. We’d better close up, hadn’t we?’

  Maggie liked to walk briskly, and as a rule she was home in ten minutes. But this time it took her nearly quarter of an hour. Not being afraid of taking an interior look at herself, she realized as she approached the house that she had been deliberately loitering a little in the hope she would find her father already there. He might have decided, she told herself, that it was not worth while to return to the shop at closing time. He might. It was just possible. But she was not surprised when she had to unlock the front door. Her mother would still be at the Cottage Hospital; her brother Alan at the University, where he lectured on physics; and wherever her father was, he certainly wasn’t back home.

  It was a tallish but narrow house, one of a row of twelve built about 1900. Everything except the stairs was to the right of something that began as a hall and ended as a passage to the kitchen. In front was the sitting room and behind it was the dining room, close to the kitchen. Her parents had the large front bedroom and she had the back bedroom, too poky even after the bed-sitter she had had in London. Alan claimed both attic rooms, sleeping in one and filling the other with books, his moths and other nonsense. Maggie had often complained that the house was now too small for them – she couldn’t begin to turn her miserable room into a bed-sitter – and that anyhow it had far too many useless things in it. But this evening, for once, it seemed quite large – and disturbingly empty. Halting for a moment at the half-landing, where the bathroom was, she decided to stop wondering about her father and to have a very hot bath.

  2

  Strictly speaking, the Culworths never had dinner. Their midday meal was lunch, and their evening meal, usually taken at about seven o’clock, was supper. And it was apt to be rather sketchy. Mrs Culworth was an indifferent caterer; Alan and his father would eat anything in an absent-minded way; and though Maggie knew better and liked good food – and Hugh Shire had taken her to some splendid West End restaurants during the three years she had been his mistress – the attitude of the other three made any effort look ridiculous. Supper that Monday evening consisted of macaroni cheese and peas, fruit salad and custard, and like her mother and her brother she mechanically consumed it. But, unlike them, she kept worrying about her father’s absence. She had not expected Alan to share her anxiety. It wasn’t rational, she knew, whereas Alan was nothing else but – and anyhow never really saw people as persons, only caring about figures and subatomic particles and moths and things.

  Her mother, however, was a fretful woman, full of odd grievances and regrets for a past she had never really had; very much a molehill-into-mountain type. She was capable of nattering away or sulking throughout a meal just because her husband had been five minutes late for it. But now, when they didn’t know where he was, probably out of sheer contrariness she refused even to appear vaguely worried.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re going on and on about it, Maggie,’ she had said. ‘I expect it’s some silly business that won’t do him or any of us one bit of good. Alan’s not bothering. He knows what your father is.’

  Maggie felt like telling her that Alan didn’t know what anybody was, but restrained herself. She might lose her temper; not being able to share her worry and talk it out, she could feel it might be explosive. And if a row started, Alan would go striding off to his books-moths-and-mess room, giving her no chance to explain why she was the worrier for once – though she couldn’t really understand it herself – and depriving her of his calm science-don act, which she might need soon. Alan was thirty-three, and four years older than she was, a secretly rather desperate twenty-nine. But because he had taken his degree at Birmingham, and then had only gone to Newcastle for a few years before coming back here, whereas she had spent five years in London and had this tremendous if messy love affair, taking her to all kinds of exciting places he had never seen, she always felt she was much older than he was. In some ways he was just a giant schoolboy. He dressed appallingly and never tried to improve his appearance, which was a pity, because really he was quite handsome in a tall, sombrely dark, Abraham Lincoln kind of way. His mother adored him – she was dark too, though not tall – and talked about him in company as if he might be another Einstein, much to his annoyance, for Alan was a modest fellow. There was no such boosting of her husband’s and daughter’s abilities. But, then, they were just Culworths, a kind of mistake she had made when she might have done so much better, and they looked rather alike, being shortish and rather squarely built and having the same blunt noses and grey eyes. There were times when Maggie felt she was quite attractive, but there were other times, and now more and more of them, when she was almost sure she was just a thick, dull lump.

  As they finished their fruit salad, and after several minutes’ silence, Maggie could bear it no longer. ‘The trouble with this family,’ she found herself saying, ‘is that we’re all too dry.’

  ‘There’s some sherry in the cupboard.’ This was one of Alan’s more maddening tricks, pretending he had just heard a literal statement.

  ‘Don’t be idiotic. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Well, I d
on’t.’ Her mother looked and sounded cross. ‘And I doubt if you do.’

  ‘We’re all too dry. There isn’t enough juice in us. That’s why nothing happens.’

  Alan caught her eye and then raised his right eyebrow and lowered his left one, a feat that Maggie had wasted too many years of her childhood trying to copy. ‘I’m not with you, Mag girl. First you try to spread alarm about our Pa popping off somewhere. Then you complain that nothing happens. Is too much happening or too little?’

  ‘Both,’ she replied promptly, an old hand now in dealing with Alan’s logic-chopping questions. ‘If anything is happening, then it’s the wrong kind of thing. Like me being left with a lot of unsigned cheques and things because Daddy’s suddenly vanished. But nothing that we want to happen. And perhaps that’s because we’re all dry—’

  ‘It suits me. Most of the types I try to instruct are much too wet.’

  ‘I think you’re both being rather silly,’ their mother told them. ‘Now about your father—’ She hesitated.

  Maggie couldn’t resist it. ‘I believe Alan should go to the police.’

  ‘The police? You’re out of your mind, Mag. They’d rock round the station laughing at me. Come off it. What’s the matter with you tonight?’ His tone was still mocking, but the inquiring look he gave her wasn’t.

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I suggested it. Not sensible, I agree. Forget it.’

  Their mother was now leaving the table. ‘I’m going upstairs to look round. You two clear and start washing up.’ And she left them to it.

  As they took the supper things out, they agreed that there should be some coffee but disagreed about who should make it. Alan always said hers was too weak; she thought his too strong. As they prepared to wash up, they went through the coffee argument for about the hundredth time, but there was no passion in the debate. They were like actors waiting for an important scene that had been delayed.