ANNE FERENS liked practically everything about Milham in the Moor where she and her husband, Dr. Raymond Ferens, were to live. But she loathed Monica Torrington, warden of the children’s home, at first sight. Sister Monica, as she was called, was a macabre figure, her height accentuated by the ancient, black nurse’s uniform she wore. She had the dark, unsmiling eves of a fanatic, and Anne was convinced that she was a wicked, wicked woman—one who shouldn’t have small children in her charge.
Dr. Raymond Ferens warned Anne not to meddle. Sister Monica was considered a “saint” and she was an unholy power in the village. Still there were furtive rumours—rumours that connected her with the strange death of Nancy Hilton, one of her maids. But as the voting bailiff told Anne, “The village cherishes its own feuds and loyalties and way of life . . . but when you make enemies in a village like this, you don’t murder one another. . .”
The bailiff’s philosophy was proved inadequate. The drowned body of Sister Monica was found floating in the millpool. Chief Inspector Macdonald was called in to solve one of the most difficult cases of his career as he unravelled the hidden events and causes that led to the death of a “saint.”
All of the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deed, is purely coincidental.
This edition published 2019 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Originally published in 1952 by Collins, London
Copyright © 1952 The Estate of E.C.R. Lorac
Introduction copyright © 2019 Martin Edwards
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 5268 0
eISBN 978 0 7123 6479 9
Front cover image © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library
Typesetting, text design and eBook not by Tetragon, London
INTRODUCTION
Murder in the Mill-Race (known as Speak Justly for the Dead in the US) was first published in 1952. Like many of E.C.R. Lorac’s post-war novels, it is notable for a well-evoked setting in rural England—this time on Exmoor in Devon. Dr Raymond Ferens and his wife Anne relocate from a mining town in Staffordshire to Milham in the Moor. The move is prompted by Ferens’ poor health, together with a yearning for a different kind of life: he is still affected by two years spent as a Japanese prisoner of war, as well as by pressure of work in a busy urban G.P.’s practice. At Milham, an elderly doctor’s impending retirement offers the prospect of a geographically far-flung but sparsely populated practice which should not prove unduly taxing, and will enable the Ferens to “live the dream”.
This notion evidently appealed to the author, who had grown up in London, but always had a soft spot for Devon, where she spent many holidays. After the Second World War, she too had escaped to the country, moving to Lunesdale in the north west of England, which became an attractive setting for several of her mysteries. One suspects that Anne Ferens is speaking for her creator when she tells her husband: “I’m not being selfless in saying I want to live in the country. I’m sick to death of cities and soot and slums and factories and occupational diseases.” She tells him to “watch the emergence of a countrywoman. I shall be debating fat stock prices before the year’s out, and prodding pigs at the market.”
So the young married couple set off for their destination, a village on a hill-top lying close to both the moor and the sky. On the surface life there seems idyllic. As an estate manager called John Sanderson tells Anne: “Throughout the centuries, Milham in the Moor has been cut off from towns and society and affairs. Here it has. . . flourished because it has made itself into an integrated whole, in which everybody was interdependent. . . ‘Never make trouble in the village’ is an unspoken law, but it’s a binding law. You may know about your neighbours’ sins and shortcomings, but you must never name them aloud. It’d make trouble, and small societies want to avoid trouble.”
Another local, an old fellow by the name of Brown, also holds forth on the nature of life in such a community: “You try reforming a village and see how popular you are. Villages are all alike, made up of human beings who love and he, who’re unselfish one minute and self-seeking the next, who’re faithful one day and fornicators the next. Human nature’s a mixed bag.” Raymond Ferens takes a similar view, and again one suspects that he is speaking for Lorac: “Whenever you get a group of people living together. . . you find the mixed characteristics of humanity—envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness mingled with neighbourliness and unselfishness and honest-to-God goodness.”
Sanderson also talks about a formidable woman called Sister Monica, who is in charge of a children’s home known as Gramarye. She is regarded by some villagers as saintly, yet Sanderson takes a very different view: “she’s dangerous, in the same way that a virus or blood poisoning can be dangerous. . . She is one of those people who can not only he plausibly and with conviction, but she can tell a he to your face without batting an eyelid, knowing that you know it’s a he.” Most menacingly of all, Sister Monica “knows everything about everybody”.
Anne takes an instinctive dislike to Sister Monica, whom she describes as “plain wicked”, and soon learns that the old woman is making trouble for her. Seasoned readers of detective fiction will not, therefore, be entirely surprised when Sister Monica meets an untimely end, drowned in the mill-race. It’s another case for Chief Inspector Macdonald, who needs to overcome the villagers’ hostility towards inquisitive outsiders in order to make sense of the mystery of her murder.
The pen-name E.C.R. Lorac concealed the identity of Carol Rivett, or more precisely Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958). She was not regarded as one
