Stevyn Colgan spent thirty years as a police officer. But now he’s one of the writers of the award-winning TV show QI and its sister show on BBC Radio 4, The Museum of Curiosity. In A Murder to Die For he brings his sense of humour and his policing experience together to create something that is definitely not your average murder mystery.
Also by Stevyn Colgan
Joined-Up Thinking
Henhwedhlow: The Clotted Cream of Cornish Folktales
(with Tony Hak)
Constable Colgan’s Connectoscope
The Third Condiment
Colgeroons
Saving Bletchley Park (with Dr Sue Black OBE)
Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?
As a contributor
I Remember: Reflections on Fishing and Childhood (ed. Joe Cowley)
Ottakar’s Local History: High Wycombe (ed. Roger Cole)
The QI ‘F’ Annual
The QI ‘G’ Annual
The QI ‘H’ Annual
The ‘EFG’ Bumper Book of QI Annuals
Subject Verb Object (ed. Dane Cobain)
For Michael ‘Myghal’ Colgan (1940–1991)
and the novels he never got to write.
Dear Reader,
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Founders, Unbound
By the Same Author
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Agnes Crabbe – The Mysterious
Mistress of Murder Mystery
By Colin Tossel, President, Nasely Historical Society
(Reproduced with kind permission from the Agnes Crabbe
Murder-Mystery Festival brochure 2014)
The fertile lowlands of South Herewardshire have, since Saxon times, provided generations of farmers with the finest dairy and beef herds and the plumpest of pigs. It is where the deliciously unique Herewardshire Hog, famed throughout the colonies for its rich, fatty bacon, was bred. And it is why the county became known during Regency times as ‘the meat locker of England’ and the heart-attack capital of the Empire. But while blessed with silty chocolate-coloured soil, lush green fields and clean, fresh streams, the county had little else of value to exploit; no coal or salt or metals to mine, no coastline to fish, no stone to quarry, and, with almost everyone in some way involved with the lucrative business of turning pasture into meat, there was little room for genius to flourish.
As the county’s coffers swelled, a contented indolence settled over the uncommonly productive farms and villages. South Herewardshire became synonymous with unimaginative, gouty businessmen and solid, dependable workers who didn’t seek to rise above their station because they enjoyed far better pay and conditions than their contemporaries elsewhere. The county produced no Brunels, no Austens, no Turners, no Wordsworths. The storytellers had no brave or bawdy tales to tell. The balladeers had no folk heroes, no rogues or wild rovers to sing about, and the county’s most popular folk song – ‘Go to Hell!’ – describes the death by diet-induced stroke of a gluttonous murderer. South Herewardshire would have to wait until the end of the nineteenth century before anyone that could be regarded as historically significant appeared, and, even then, Agnes Crabbe would not achieve that fame until she had been dead for more than half a century.
Agnes Emily Gertrude Brock, the second and youngest child of a family of farmers from Nasely, came quietly and uneventfully into the world on 8 May 1895. She grew into a plain, shy girl with a penchant for daydreaming and, although she worked diligently, if unexceptionally, at school, she failed to display any notable talent or aptitude for any particular subject. At the age of eighteen, she seemed quietly content to be married off to a neighbouring pig-farmer called Daniel Crabbe, and everyone assumed that this unprepossessing young woman would live out the rest of her life as a respectable, hard-working, but otherwise unremarkable housewife and mother.
But war was about to change everything. Daniel was one of the first to sign up when the recruiters arrived in the village and, as was the fashion, so did most of his friends and family. However, just eleven months after taking the King’s shilling, Daniel lay dead in Flanders’ fields, along with Agnes’s father and older brother, and most of the men from her village. The news brought great sorrow to Nasely and Agnes withdrew from village life, hiding herself away inside the little cottage that she had shared, for such a tragically short time, with her young husband. Meanwhile, her grief-stricken mother, robbed of both husband and son, took to her bed and refused all food and drink, and met her maker not long after.
As the months passed by, rumour and speculation began to grow. The fires of gossip were fuelled by the fact that Agnes never left her house, having almost everything delivered to her. The only person she ever admitted inside was her older brother’s fiancée, Iris Gobbelin, another tragic young woman who had lost her lover to the Great War.
For the next two decades, Agnes’s only contact with the outside world was through Iris. But Iris would never speak of her reclusive friend, which led to a proliferation of lurid tales about what went on inside the Crabbes’ cottage.
Agnes’s last link with the outside world was severed in 1936 when Iris was killed falling from a horse and, almost immediately, the rumours got sillier and the tall stories got taller. It was said that she lived in one room, surrounded by the debris of her tragic life. Meanwhile, other, more preposterous tales were concocted by village children involving witchcraft or child-stealing.
Agnes Crabbe died of cancer in 1944 at the age of just forty-nine and her story might have ended there but for an unusual bequest. As the world celebrated the start of the third millennium, a solicitors’ office in the nearby market town of Bowcester found itself in possession of something quite unexpected and very special.
In 1943, knowing that she was near the end of her life, Agnes Crabbe had contacted a solicitor called Charles Tremens and gave into his care a heavy locked suitcase, a sealed envelope containing the key and instructions that neither were to be opened until on or after 1 January 2000. With no family or heirs to whom she could leave her modest estate, she requested that the solicitor sell all that she owned so that there would be sufficient funds to ensure that her wishes were carried out.
The opening of the suitcase caused a sensation. Mr Tremens’s grandson Andrew, now a senior partner in the firm of Tremens, Mallord, Hacker and Budge, discovered that the case contained a number of handwritten and typed manuscripts: twenty-one complete novels – twenty of them detective fiction – and twenty-seven short stories. There were also the scripts for two plays and several volumes of poetry, as well as a substantial number of Agnes Crabbe’s personal diaries that spanned the years between 1909 and 1943. A handwritten letter gave authority to Mr Tremens’s firm to act as her proxy and to see that the manuscripts, none of which, she maintained, had been read by a living soul other than herself, were submitted for publication.
Mr Tremens duly submitted the work to a number of literary agents, all of whom quickly realised that here was something quite remarkable; a cache of original, unread detective novels from the golden age of crime fiction. A bidding war began, culminating in a six-figure book deal, and the first three titles – Broken and Snared, The Beginning of Sorrows and The Dead Do Not Rise – quickly became bestsellers. In the absence of living relatives, Tremens arranged for a proportion of the proceeds of sale to be paid to charities that supported war widows/widowers and their children.
Examination of the diaries revealed a very different Agnes Crabbe from the one portrayed in rumour. Far from being the tragic and lonely young widow that everyone had assumed she was, Agnes recorded that she was happy and content and had, in fact, always preferred her own company to that of other people. She expressed great sadness for the death of her husband but more for the life that he would never live than for her own loss. She was not entirely sure that she had ever loved Daniel Crabbe but she had been very fond of him; they had grown up together in a small village, after all. However, his death had freed her from other people’s expectations of her and the death of her mother had released her from all other obligations. Tragic circumstance had provided her with the time, the funds and the isolation to explore the world inside her own head. As she wrote in one of her diaries, ‘Reality is at best a poorly constructed and inadequate substitute for the wonder room of my imagination.’ She began to write in 1915 – not for publication but for her own pleasure – and she would continue to write almost until the day she died.
Her early works were poems that expressed her feelings about love and loss. But she soon migrated to writing short stories, each one a miniature murder mystery of the kind she so enjoyed reading. Then came the novels. By the age of thirty she had produced five books but had made no attempt to have them published. She was not hungry for recognition and the human contact that would inevitably ensue. She also knew that her prose was too scandalous, her murder scenarios too full of grim realism, and her middle-aged heroine, Miss Millicent Cutter, far too promiscuous for the repressed sensibilities of polite 1920s society.
By 1942, she had completed twenty novels and had begun her twenty-first when she became gravely ill and learned from her doctor – the first person, other than Iris, to speak to her at any length in decades – that she had a terminal illness. But she continued to write, grimly determined to finish the knowingly named All Things Must Pass. Once that was done, she bequeathed her life’s work to future generations if, indeed, there were to be any, with the words: ‘I hope that the combined wisdom of humanity will eventually bring us to a sense of our situation and that the dawning of the twenty-first century will see a world that has cured all men of the insanity of war.’
The books proved to be enormously popular and Miss Cutter soon became as much of a household name as Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot. Literary reviewers held Crabbe’s writing in high esteem and her strong female characters were celebrated by feminist writers. But, more importantly perhaps, her complex and ingenious plots quickly gained her a legion of fans, particularly among a certain kind of lady reader who revelled in Miss Cutter’s razor-sharp intuition, frequent romances and sexual encounters with beefy farmhands and swarthy foreign agents. In the character of Miss Cutter, readers caught a glimpse of the kind of woman they wished they could be, living a life they wished they might have had. Crueller social commentators called the canon ‘a curious coupling of Jackie and Wilkie Collins’ but no one could argue that the formula didn’t engage with the fans. The factors that had made Agnes Crabbe unprintable in her lifetime were now her strongest selling point. Within just a few years of their discovery, all of her books had enjoyed dozens of reprints and translations and the number of her fans worldwide was legion. For many readers of golden age detective fiction, the name Agnes Crabbe was spoken with passion and reverence, and the fact that she had been completely unknown until the millennium only added to people’s fervour to elevate her to the ranks of the greats. The arrival of award-winning TV adaptations further cemented her popularity and the multi-award-winning series The Miss Cutter Mysteries quickly transformed actress Helen Greeley from a bit player into an international star.
Which is why, on or around the date of her birth every year, hundreds of her most devoted fans descend upon Nasely, the tiny South Herewardshire village in which Agnes Crabbe lived out her entire life, to enjoy a weekend of readings, competitions, screenings, dramatic re-enactments, historical tours and talks by Crabbe scholars and other eminent people. From what started out as little more than a local book club, Nasely’s annual Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival has quickly grown to become one of the most popular literary festivals in Great Britain.
We do hope that you enjoy your visit.
Agnes Crabbe Bibliography
(year of writing)
The Miss Cutter Mysteries
Broken and Snared (1923)
The Beginning of Sorrows (1925)
The Dead Do Not Rise (1926)
Bite the Dust (1927)
Brood of Vipers (1928)
My Brother’s Keeper (1929)
Wit’s End (1930)
Absent in the Flesh (1930–1931)
Babel (1931) (Guest feat. Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)
Swords into Ploughshares (1932–1933)
Wallowing in the Mire (1934–1935? Suspected ‘lost’ manuscript)
Teeth Set on Edge (1940)
Lying Lips (1940)
A Wrathful Man (1941) (Guest feat. Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)
Alpha and Omega (1941–1942)
Ministry of Death (1942)
Punishment of the Sword (1942–1943)
All Things Must Pass (1942–1943)
The Den of Thieves Trilogy (Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)
Den of Thieves (1936)
Dire Straits (1937–1938)
Pearls Before Swine (1939–1940)
Other Fiction
A White Stone (1931)
Poetry Collections
A Thorn in the Flesh (1915–1918)
Remembrance of Former Things (1916–1933)
The Shadow of Your Wings (1936–1943)
Short Story Collections
A Multitude of Sins (1920–1930) –
includes the Miss Cutter story ‘A Soft Answer’
Die by the Sword (1937–1942) –
includes the Miss Cutter story ‘Sour Grapes’
Plays
Doubting Thomas (1933) – Featuring Colonel Trayhorn Borwick
Evil Company Corrupts (1936) – Featuring Miss Cutter
A warm drizzle began to fall just as the very last piece of festival bunting was being hung. Up and down the little High Street, stepladders were hastily folded and toolboxes were slammed shut as people made their way indoors out of the rain. Most of the work was done and what little remained could wait until morning. In the meantime, there were windows to decorate and costumes to press, props to be dusted off and cakes to be baked.
Over the course of a fortnight, the village of Nasely had been returned to how it would have looked in the 1920s. It wasn’t such a difficult trick to pull off as most of the buildings dated from the nineteenth century, and their caramel-coloured stone walls, attractive sash windows and wrought-iron railings were already authentically vintage. The shops too were old-fashioned in style, and the street furniture was traditional and restrained. Wherever possible, unavoidable evidence of the twenty-first century had been hidden or disguised; the street was too narrow for anachronisms such as traffic lights or speed cameras but there were satellite dishes to obscure with hanging baskets and telephone junction boxes to hide behind street vendors’ barrows. It was important that Nasely looked just right for the annual Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival. The little village wasn’t just the venue. It was the star.
The great crime-fiction author had lived her entire life in the village and had used it as the template for Little Hogley, the setting for many of her hugely popular novels. The two villages were identical; every one of her murder scenes had a counterpart in reality, making a visit to the festival a must for all true fans. As long as somebody had been bludgeoned, poisoned or in some other way done to bloody death at or near its literary doppelgänger, the most banal of locations would attract hordes of devotees in the days to come. They would flock to Chetwynd’s Butcher’s Shop in Sacker Street because it was where Claude Hindeshott had made his arsenic-laced game pies in Absent in the Flesh. They would pose for photographs outside the Gondolier Italian restaurant because it mirrored the location of the Staines family bakery in Bite the Dust (where husband and wife John and Rosina had engineered Sally Foddenam’s grisly explosive end among the flour sacks). And they would queue for hours to visit the village’s most sacred site: the picturesque little cottage at the corner of the High Street and Ormond Road in which the reclusive writer had penned all of her novels and where her much-loved lady detective, Miss Millicent Cutter, had made her fictional home. In recent years, the cottage had been converted into a museum and among its most popular attractions were Miss Cutter’s sitting room and Agnes Crabbe’s study. The sitting room, meticulously reconstructed from descriptions found in the books, was where Miss Cutter routinely scolded Inspector Raffo of the Knollshire Constabulary for his blundering. The study, meanwhile, had been somewhat imaginatively dressed and decorated to look nothing like it probably had done in Agnes Crabbe’s lifetime. The museum would do a roaring trade over the weekend and so too would the happy shopkeepers who rubbed their hands with glee in anticipation of the hugely increased footfall that the festival would bring to their premises.
At the other end of the High Street the village’s only pub, the curiously named Happy Onion, was also preparing for the busy weekend ahead. The saloon bar had been decorated with Agnes Crabbe memorabilia including framed book covers, a school report, prints of the only known photographs of her, a portrait of her tragic young husband, Daniel, in his Herewardshire Rifles regimental uniform, and several of the letters that had passed between him and his young bride before his death in the Great War. There were also autographed monochrome glossies of Helen Greeley, the glamorous star of The Miss Cutter Mysteries TV series and, standing incongruously next to the Gents, a shop mannequin wearing one of her costumes from the show: a pleated ‘flapper’ dress and matching cloche hat, and the trademark double string of pearls with which Miss Cutter daringly lassoed guns, whipped villains across the face or scattered across the floor to make her enemies slip and tumble. Throughout the festival, the pub would be a bustling hive of activity but tonight it was almost empty, a fact that landlord Vic Sallow ascribed not to the rain but to the behaviour of one of his regulars. Savidge was having one of his bad days.
‘Historical accuracy, my arse,’ he growled. ‘You don’t see them taking down the TV aerials, do you? And no one says we should remove all the burglar alarms or paint out the yellow lines on the road. Oh no. Not if it inconveniences the cosy middle classes.’ Savidge was a well-built man in his late forties, with a receding hairline of dark curly hair turning grey at the temples. His unshaven cheeks were ruddy with anger. ‘As usual, it’s people like me who get victimised. Working-class people with businesses to run who need our vehicles to earn a bloody living. And another thi—’
‘Be sensible, man,’ said Vic, deliberately cutting him off. He had known Savidge since he was a boy, and experience had shown that the best way to tackle one of his venomous lectures was to prevent him from getting a word in. ‘There’s only so much the festival organisers can do for authenticity. I mean, they can’t stop jets flying overhead or people using their mobiles, can they?’
‘If you can ever get a bloody signal,’ grumbled Savidge. ‘It’s like a black hole around these parts.’
‘But they can clear the High Street of vehicles,’ continued Vic, ignoring him. ‘And, anyway, it’s not like they’ve sprung this on you, is it? They pedestrianise it every year.’
‘That doesn’t make it right. My burger van has had that pitch—’
‘And besides, moving your van is more about health and safety than historical accuracy.’
‘I didn’t think his burgers were that bad, Vic,’ said Frank Shunter, the only other person who had braved the Saloon Bar on festival’s eve.
‘Oh, ha ha,’ said Savidge humourlessly, breaking off from a deep swig of his beer. The froth on his upper lip gave the impression that he was foaming at the mouth. ‘Just what the world needs, a copper who thinks he’s funny.’
‘Ex-copper,’ corrected Shunter, smiling at Savidge’s irritation. During his thirty-year career with the Met in London, he’d been insulted and screamed at more times than he could remember and had grown a skin as thick and impenetrable as an armadillo’s. Savidge’s regular rants didn’t bother him and he’d learned to tune them out. However, the burger man was having a particularly vociferous evening and even the beer, which would normally help to bolster Shunter’s stoicism, was ineffectual. He’d therefore resorted to attack as a form of defence by throwing the occasional barbed remark into the conversation and watching as Savidge’s face got redder and redder. It was proving to be tremendously satisfying. He finished the dregs of his pint, wiped his neatly clipped grey moustache on the back of his hand and returned to reading his book.
‘You know what it’s like over Agnes Crabbe weekend,’ continued Vic. ‘The High Street will be heaving with Millies and someone would be knocked down for sure if we allowed vehicles through. And it’s only for one weekend a year.’
‘Yeah, the busiest weekend,’ said Savidge. ‘That’s my point. I’ll be the only mug not making any money. It’s all right for you. The Onion is on the High Street but I have to—’
‘Rubbish,’ said Vic. ‘You’ve got a great pitch over on the village green. You did all right there last year. I saw the queues.’
‘There may have been queues but they didn’t bloody buy anything,’ moaned Savidge. ‘All they did was complain. Is the beef organic? Is the coffee Fairtrade? They need shooting, the lot of them.’
‘Probably not the best time to commit a homicide,’ said Shunter. ‘What with eight hundred murder-mystery fans descending on the village. You’d be caught for sure.’
‘It would be worth it,’ said Savidge.
‘Or you could extend your range of products?’ suggested Vic.
‘It might mean less bloodshed,’ added Shunter.
‘Poxy festival,’ snapped Savidge. He sank into a desultory silence and stared at his hands, clenched into fists on the bar.
Shunter shook his head in despair. He was only six years older than the burger van man but their outlooks on life were polar opposites. While Shunter had seen the very worst of humanity, he remained resolutely optimistic about life and the future. He knew that there were far more good people than bad, and that more acts of kindness were done every day than acts of evil or wickedness; they just didn’t get reported in the increasingly sensationalist and fear-mongering tabloids. Savidge, meanwhile, believed everything he read and, as far as he was concerned, the world was going to hell in a handcart. He could find the negative in any situation and seemed to take perverse pleasure in believing that he was either cursed or being deliberately put upon all of the time. His almost constant frown had carved deep crevasses into his forehead.
‘Another pint, gents?’ said Vic, attempting to lighten the mood. ‘Something different perhaps? The Cockering Brewery has put on a special edition ale for the festival called To Die For. I can give you an advance preview if you like. On the house.’
‘Go on then,’ said Shunter.
‘Savidge? One for the road?’
‘Do you want to get me nicked for drink driving?’ said Savidge, pointedly. ‘I’ve had two pints already and, as you well know, I have to move my van off the High Street because it’s a sodding anachronism. It’s like I said, it’s us traders who—’
‘G’night then,’ said Vic firmly. Savidge glowered at him but took the hint. Vic Sallow had the curious build of a man who was simultaneously both short and large, like a fridge with limbs. His shoulders bulged and he didn’t seem to have a neck. There was a lot of strength contained within his oddly shaped body. You didn’t need a gym when you spent your day moving full firkins about. Savidge drained his glass, clonked it heavily on the bar and stormed out of the pub.
‘Drive safely,’ said Shunter, smiling.
‘Thank Christ for that. That man is kryptonite for publicans,’ said Vic, puffing out his cheeks. ‘I should bar him.’
‘He did have a bee in his bonnet tonight, didn’t he?’
‘Swarms, more like. He drives all my customers away. I reckon he needs stronger medication.’
‘Ah, he’s all bluster.’
‘He’s getting worse, I swear,’ said Vic. ‘One of these days he’ll lose it completely, you wait and see.’
‘In my experience, it’s the quiet, introverted ones you have to watch out for,’ said Shunter. He shut his book and placed it on the bar. Vic swivelled it around to read the title.
‘Dalí Plays Golf,’ said Vic. He tapped the author’s name. ‘Shirley Pomerance is a local girl, you know. Her family comes from over Tingwell way.’
‘So I understand.’
‘Any good?’
‘No idea. She uses seven words when one would do, and all seven are words I didn’t even know existed.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘Bletchley Park would have struggled to decode it,’ said Shunter. ‘There should be some way of checking people’s IQ at the till. I’m clearly not smart enough for them to have sold it to me.’
‘I’ve heard people buy her books just so that they can look brainy,’ said Vic.
‘Only a masochist would buy them for fun.’
‘She can’t be that unreadable, surely? She’s won awards.’
‘I’ll give you a taster,’ said Shunter, riffling through the pages. ‘Ah. Here we go. “Lavinia acquiesced her lubricious girlflesh to his dexterous phalanges, all the while assiduously palpating his tumescent boypole to priapic . . .”’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s a sex scene.’
‘If you say so,’ said Vic. ‘I think I’ll stick to Agnes Crabbe.’
‘As I should have done. At least her saucy bits are saucy,’ said Shunter, sipping his pint. ‘Shirley Pomerance’s idea of foreplay is fingering a thesaurus.’
Two miles outside the village, a coach driver glanced nervously at his wing mirrors and pined for the wide open carriageways of the M13 motorway where he usually did most of his business. But this was the eve of the Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival weekend and, for the next seventy-two hours at least, this would be his lot: ferrying fans to and from Nasely on some of the least coach-friendly roads in South Herewardshire. The contract was lucrative, to be sure, but the drive was horrible. There were only three roads into the village and all of them involved negotiating canals, low-hanging trees, narrow lanes and sharp corners. There was no street lighting either, and the light spring rain reduced his visibility still further. He cursed under his breath and prepared to tackle yet another humpback bridge.
Sitting behind him, and oblivious to his discomfort, three dozen middle-aged ladies hungrily devoured the novels of Agnes Crabbe, or discussed the novels of Agnes Crabbe, or listened to Agnes Crabbe audiobooks, or watched The Miss Cutter Mysteries on laptops and tablets, or leafed through the festival brochure and made their plans for the weekend. The atmosphere on the bus was fragrant with lavender and anticipation.
Esme Handibode swept her lifeless silver-grey hair back from her eyes and perched a pair of half-moon reading glasses upon the humpback bridge of her nose. She frowned at the brochure laid out on her friend’s lap.
‘I don’t know why you’re even considering going to the Helen Greeley talk, Molly. It’ll be standing room only and you’ll learn nothing, mark my words.’
Molly Wilderspin looked up into her friend’s face and smiled weakly. ‘Oh, but I hear that she’s very nice.’
‘Nice she may be,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘But we only have two days. You must stick to events that add value to your visit, like the Andrew Tremens talk.’
‘I’m definitely going to that one, Esme,’ said Miss Wilderspin. Short, timid and thickly bespectacled, she was both physically and behaviourally the opposite of her friend, the taller and more bombastic Mrs Handibode. She turned to a different page in the brochure and tapped the photo of a middle-aged man with a very nice smile. ‘It says here: “Andrew Tremens will make an announcement of major importance to all Crabbe fans.” It’s very intriguing.’
‘I dislike that term immensely,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘Intriguing?’
‘Fan. You wouldn’t call a Shakespearean scholar a fan, would you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Miss Wilderspin looked through the programme of events again, eyes lingering on the seductive black-and-white image of actress Helen Greeley who had agreed to open this year’s festival.
‘She is so brave,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘If I ever found myself in a situation like the one she was in last year, I’d go to pieces. She’s like a real-life Miss Cutter, isn’t she?’
‘I very much doubt it,’ huffed Mrs Handibode. ‘I’d be surprised if she’s even read any of the books.’
‘Actually, I meant because of the way she dealt with that stalker,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘So brave. I’d have been too terrified to do anything.’
‘You mark my words: her talk will be packed to the gunwales with star-struck spinsters making silly old fools of themselves and you’ll learn nothing of any worth. Andrew Tremens, on the other hand, has had sole responsibility for the Crabbe archive since its discovery. He has an intimate acquaintance with her work and her diaries and he will have some fascinating insights to share.’
‘There’s a rumour going around that he’s found some kind of manuscript. Maybe an unpublished story or—’
‘You should know better than to listen to gossip. It’s invariably nonsense.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Esme,’ said Miss Wilderspin, resignedly. ‘But we could go to both talks, you know. They don’t clash. Do you think we’re very far away now? I tried looking at the satnav on my phone but there’s no signal around here. I thought that only happened in films.’
‘We’ll be there very soon,’ said Mrs Handibode, looking out of the window. The coach was gingerly inching its way over the bridge while the driver desperately tried not to scrape the bottom of his vehicle. ‘This is the Dunksbury Road canal bridge, just outside Nasely. But do you know which bridge it corresponds to in the books?’
‘Is it the Vallory Road canal bridge?’ ventured Miss Wilderspin.
‘Very good,’ said Mrs Handibode, smiling.
‘That’s where Maynard Grader was murdered in Swords into Ploughshares, isn’t it?’
‘And where Mavis Frusty threw away the murder weapon in Ministry of Death. I’ve taught you well.’
‘How exciting to actually be in the real Little Hogley!’ Miss Wilderspin clapped her hands with glee. ‘I can’t wait to find other locations from the books.’
‘You can pay a tour guide to show you around,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘But I’ve been to Nasely several times before and I’m willing to show you around for free.’
‘Well, I thought I might—’
‘No one knows Agnes Crabbe and her books better than I do,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘In fact, were I to believe in such things, I would say that it was entirely possible that I was her in a previous life.’
Miss Wilderspin considered pointing out that her friend’s life had actually overlapped that of the great author’s by two years but decided to bite her tongue. Esme Handibode was not a person who took kindly to being corrected, even in the face of unimpeachable logic. She considered herself to be the foremost expert on Agnes Crabbe and there was every good reason to think that she might be. She ran the Agnes Crabbe Fellowship, the largest of the many fan clubs and societies, and edited and published the quarterly Agnes Crabbe Fellowship Journal (circulation 27,910). She had amassed an enviable collection of first editions and memorabilia, and had even appeared on TV’s Mastermind, although she had eventually lost in the semi-finals to a man who knew a ridiculous amount about Vincent motorcycles. Her knowledge of Agnes Crabbe was nothing less than encyclopaedic, and she threw herself into her studies with a single-mindedness that, if the gossip was true, had seriously affected her marriage. Certainly, no one had seen Mr and Mrs Handibode together in many months and their relationship was rumoured to be frosty at best.
Naturally, there were pretenders to her crown; people like Denise Hatman-Temples, who ran the Agnes Crabbe Literary Society; Gaynor Nithercott of the Agnes Crabbe Book Club; Brenda Tradescant of the Millicent Cutter Appreciation Society; Elspeth Cranmer-Beamen of the Miss Cutter Mysteries Fan Club and many others who purported to know just as much as she did. But Esme Handibode was confident in her superiority; as far as she was concerned, no other Agnes Crabbe-related fan club could hold a candle to her Fellowship and she refused even to acknowledge claims to the contrary. Instead, she reserved the bulk of her ire for a journalist named Pamela Dallimore who, irritatingly, was the media’s go-to person whenever they needed a perspective on Crabbe’s life and works. Dallimore was chauffeured in luxury cars, or sent by air or rail in first-class comfort to Crabbe conventions and TV appearances all over the world, despite appearing to be quite vague about Crabbe and her books. The reality was that her entire reputation was based upon a bestselling biography that she’d written called The Secret Queen of Crime in which she had alleged that Crabbe was involved in a same-sex relationship with her best friend, Iris Gobbelin. The fact that Dallimore’s claims were based upon specious or entirely apocryphal stories didn’t seem to matter to the thousands who’d bought a copy.
But it mattered to Esme Handibode, and she had made it her business to publicly denounce the book at every opportunity. As far as she was concerned, Pamela Dallimore embodied everything that was wrong with the cult of celebrity in twenty-first-century society: the adoration of the banal; the elevation of the ignorant; the hunger for gossip and scandal; and the complete lack of value placed upon self-discipline, systematic research and hard-won expertise and knowledge. Mrs Handibode had dedicated fifteen years of her life to the study of Agnes Crabbe and her creations, but her thunder was continually stolen by a second-rate hack who just happened to have sold a lot of copies of a very bad book. Hate was not a word that Mrs Handibode used lightly and she rarely wished ill-will to anyone. But she had no qualms in admitting that she hated Pamela Dallimore with a passion and secretly wished that something very nasty would happen to the wretched woman.
The springs in Gaynor Nithercott’s car seat squeaked and groaned as she sped along a dark tree-lined country lane, her ancient Mini Cooper’s thin wheels unerringly finding every rut and pothole. But she was oblivious to everything except the words issuing from her car’s ancient speaker. The audiobook of Punishment of the Sword was reaching its dramatic conclusion and Millicent Cutter had cornered her Belgian nemesis and occasional lover, Dr Florian Belfrage, among the dangerously grinding machinery of a windmill running at full tilt. While Belfrage flustered and ranted, Miss Cutter explained how she had unravelled his dastardly plot to steal the formula for Professor Hubert Foig’s improved form of gunpowder. When Miss Nithercott’s eyesight had become too poor for extended bouts of reading, she’d taken to audiobooks, and was now so addicted to them that she could recite large sections from memory. She joined in as the narration reached one of her favourite moments; when Belfrage realises that he and Miss Cutter have now become so opposed in their moral standpoints that they can never again be lovers.
The flames that had for so long warmed Belfrage’s passions flared all at once and then died. His heart was instantly and for ever baked into a hard, unyielding mass; as insensitive as a fist, as impenetrable as iron, it would lie buried deep inside his chest – for ever still, for ever cold, for ever beyond repair. In that instant, he knew that he would never again be able to stoke those fires to life. He would be eternally invulnerable to Eros’s darts.
A stabbing pain in Miss Nithercott’s chest made her take a sudden deep breath and, for a moment, she wondered if she was suffering an empathetic response to Belfrage’s heartbreak. But, she reassured herself, it was most probably indigestion caused by the jam sandwiches she’d snacked on half an hour ago. She’d eaten them far too quickly and the bread had been very heavy. She fumbled in her handbag for an antacid tablet.
Mrs Denise Hatman-Temples drove sedately along a road that ran parallel to the canal and wished that driving her little Peugeot didn’t preclude her from shutting her eyes and letting her imagination roam more freely. She was listening to a radio dramatisation of Teeth Set on Edge, the book in which Miss Cutter and Dr Belfrage finally ended the ‘will they/won’t they’ speculation with a spirited lovemaking session atop Scafell Pike. Mrs Hatman-Temples’s mental image of Miss Cutter looked nothing like Helen Greeley’s high-cheekboned and glitzy portrayal for the TV series. It looked rather more like she herself had done in her thirties, a fantasy that was enhanced by Maggie Woodbead – the actress who played Miss Cutter in the BBC radio dramas – having a voice not dissimilar in tone to her own. The fact that the TV series portrayed the characters so very differently from the way they appeared in her mind’s eye was one reason why she tended to stick to audio; as Agnes Crabbe herself had once said, ‘Words have all the best pictures.’
He looked deeply into my eyes. His own were full of confusion.
‘No, it’s you who doesn’t understand, Florian,’ I said. ‘Love has no foundation in logic. It is possible to love someone whose morals are not cut from the same cloth as one’s own. In many ways, it is often the tension of opposition that excites; the fact that it is wrong makes it desirable.’
He straightened to his full height and, without another word, slowly buttoned his waistcoat and slid his sword stick back into its Malacca sheath. He took a deep breath and a wry smile crept across his full lips.
‘So where does that leave matters, dear lady?’ he said, his words forming a milky cloud on the frigid night air. ‘Where does that leave . . . us?’
An old Mini suddenly came roaring out of the dark and, in the last second before it smashed into the side of her car, Mrs Hatman-Temples caught a glimpse of Miss Gaynor Nithercott slumped sideways in the driver’s seat. The impact flipped the Peugeot on to its side and it tumbled over and over before plunging upside-down into the shallow waters of the canal. The Mini, meanwhile, careened away from the impact and crashed headlong into the substantial trunk of an ancient oak. The noise of the car horn, stuck on a continuous ear-splitting bleat, echoed across the flat landscape, and a mushroom-shaped cloud of radiator vapour rose above the wreckage and was lost among the high-arching branches above.
Somewhere in the middle distance, sirens wailed. Shunter found himself wondering whether they belonged to a police vehicle or an ambulance. Police sirens were very rare in this sleepy corner of rural South Herewardshire but ambulances weren’t uncommon; no surprise really given the average age of the population. He twirled the corner of his moustache, a habit he often indulged in while thinking. Heavier rain had replaced the light drizzle and he didn’t have an umbrella, but he was a patient man and he’d decided that it was worth waiting a few minutes to see if it eased off before walking home. Besides, Mrs Shunter was in a foul mood, which was what had driven him to the pub in the first place. Her unlikeable and flighty younger sister had just returned from a two-week holiday in Las Vegas at some temporary boyfriend’s expense and had been boasting ever since about what a wonderful time she’d had. To rub salt into the wound, she’d also won over ten thousand pounds purely on games of chance. Mrs Shunter was, understandably, fuming at the injustice of it all.
Shunter had never been ambitious. While friends, colleagues and family had chased promotions, salary increases and bonuses, he’d been content to plod along in public service, happy with his policeman’s lot. All he’d ever wanted to do was catch the bad guys and he had steadfastly rejected the idea of a higher pay grade as it would have meant less hands-on thief-taking and a lot more desk-bound admin. It had also meant living a respectable, if modest, life, but one that he’d found satisfying. However, while Mrs Shunter rarely complained, he knew that she secretly envied her sister’s glamorous lifestyle and that visiting their friends’ ever more extravagant houses made her feel too embarrassed to consider inviting anyone back to her humble suburban semi in west London. Shunter hated the obsessive and greedy keeping-up-with-the-Joneses nature of it all and had little time for people who considered wealth to be life’s primary goal. But he also felt guilty about not having given Mrs Shunter a better life. She deserved better and, not for the first time, he wondered why she’d stayed with him for nearly thirty years.
It was why he had suggested that they move to the country upon his retirement where they could start afresh, away from the corrosive one-upmanship of London. It had meant using all of their savings but they’d been very lucky to find a pretty little cottage in picturesque and much-sought-after Nasely. And, for a while, things in the Shunter household had improved immensely. Mrs Shunter had become embroiled in a handful of local societies and they’d made some lovely new friends. But then her sister and her latest boyfriend – a Premiership footballer – had visited and remarked that the cottage reminded them of a ‘pokey little holiday gîte in Clohars-Fouesnant’ they had once stayed in and old wounds had been reopened. All of which meant that, rather than enjoying his retirement, Shunter now spent much of it looking for a lucrative second career so that he could afford to have the cottage upgraded to a standard that Mrs Shunter would be proud to show off. It had also led to him skulking in the pub and drinking far more beer than he had ever done before.
To lift his mood, he peered out from the pub doorway and up and down the High Street. It was looking very good, he thought, authentically vintage. No one could say that the people of Nasely didn’t put the effort in. This was his first Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival, having only moved to the village ten months previously, and it had been interesting to watch its transformation this past week. The shop-window displays were now delightfully retro with the chemist’s boasting adverts for Goddard’s White Horse Oils and something called Cavanaugh’s Wonder Remedy, and the newsagent’s full of antique posters for Will’s Gold Flake and Titbits magazine. A billboard outside the Masonic Hall advertised the Agnes Crabbe play Evil Company Corrupts, which was due to be performed on Sunday evening as a finale to the festival, and, diagonally opposite the pub, the Empire Hotel displayed a banner that read ‘Welcome Millies!’ Shunter frowned at the hotel, a 1960s Bauhaus, quite out of keeping with the rest of the village, and wondered how the place had ever got planning permission. Backhanders presumably. The current owners had tried to soften its stark outlines by adding rooftop crenellations, balconied windows and a portico over the front doors but the pretence at grand Victorian splendour hadn’t worked at all. When the facade was up-lit at night it had the same effect as a person holding a torch under their chin; it highlighted the true horror of trying to merge two entirely uncomplementary architectural styles. And to make matters even worse, the hotel’s white stuccoed walls had faded to a sickly yellowish colour that gave the building a distinctly jaundiced look. The wet pavement reflected the yellow light from the floodlit hotel and also from the fluted and filigreed cast-iron lampposts, expensively installed along the High Street in an effort to enhance the charm of the village.
Shunter had recently discovered that there were CCTV cameras hidden inside two of the lampposts; as faithfully antique as Nasely might try to appear to be, evidence of the Modern Age was there to see if you scratched the surface. And was there anything that said twenty-first century more than public surveillance? Shunter wondered whether the cameras were ever misused by the staff that monitored them. After all, there was almost no crime in the village but there were plenty of pretty teenage girls around, thanks to the nearby boarding school at Harpax Grange. Big Brother may not be watching, but some pimply youth employed by the village council probably was. Were they watching him now, he wondered? Was the video definition of sufficient quality to identify him from this distance? He was suddenly very aware of his every move. How often had he adjusted his crotch or scratched his backside while forgetful of the cameras? He knew for sure that, during the winter, he’d fallen flat on his face after glissading on ice outside the library. Had he given the lads in the control room a good laugh?
A sudden noise drew his attention to a coach idling slowly up through the High Street towards him. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 10.30 p.m. Coaches and minibuses had been arriving all day, dropping off the faithful in time for the start of festivities in the morning. This one – a special service run by a local company that picked up from Bowcester railway station and from the surrounding villages of Spradbarrow, Tingwell, Panswick and Sherrinford – was probably the last of them, he mused. The vehicle pulled up in front of the village hall and, with a loud hiss, hunkered down on to its suspension like a camel kneeling. The passengers, all middle-aged ladies dressed in an assortment of drab colours, began reaching bags down from overhead racks and pulling on coats and jackets. The door opened and they disembarked noisily while glancing at pieces of paper and pointing in different directions. Sensing that beating a hasty retreat would spare him a good thirty minutes of questions regarding the whereabouts of their various accommodations, Shunter slid quietly back inside the pub.
‘I thought you’d gone home,’ said Vic. ‘I was just closing up.’
‘I would if I were you. Another coachload of Millies has just turned up,’ said Shunter. ‘And if they’re anything like the bunch I met on the way here, they’ll keep us pinned to the wall with questions for the next half hour. Can I hide in here for a few minutes?’
‘Another one for the road then? On the house?’ said Vic as he bolted the pub doors shut.
‘Cheers, Vic. Maybe just a half.’
‘They look so innocent, don’t they?’ said Vic, looking out of the window. ‘But I’ll tell you this, for a bunch of librarians, primary school teachers and Women’s Institute types, they can’t half put it away.’
‘Really? They look more like the occasional glass of dry sherry with the vicar types.’
‘Don’t you believe it. I reckon this is their once-a-year chance to let their hair down. You’ll see what I mean once they’re all in costume tomorrow. It’s like they dress up as someone else and it gives them permission to . . . Oh hang on . . . something’s kicking off.’