An Expert in Murder

275

Author’s Note 289

Acknowledgements 291

About the Author

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Night was falling when at last he sat down, ready to write.

Looking out over the garden, he watched as the louring, grey skies were replaced – inch by inch – with a blackness that wrapped itself like a shroud around the bushes at the limits of his view. Winter had played its customary trick, weaving the landscape together in a cloth of muted colours and bringing a spent uniformity to all he could see. The cold had deadened the richness of the world. In the morning, there would be a covering of frost on the window ledge.

Impatient now to hand over his past, he poured the last inch of warmth from the whisky bottle on the desk and drained his glass before reaching for a sheet of notepaper. It was, he thought with satisfaction, an original sort of bequest. As if in deference to the significance of the moment, the house – usually so alive with faint but familiar sounds – fell silent as he picked up the slim, brown volume that lay on the table in front of him. He flicked through its pages until he came to the section he wished to use; the phrase had always struck him as peculiarly apt, and never more so than now.

With a bitter smile, which came half from regret and half from resignation, he picked up the pen and began, his lips forming the words in perfect unison with the ink on the page. ‘To become an expert in murder’, he wrote, ‘cannot be so difficult.’

1

One

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the odds were against her when she found that her train, the early-morning express from the Highlands, was running an hour and a half late. At six o’clock, when she walked down the steps to the south-bound platform, she expected to find the air of excitement which always accompanies the muddled loading of people and suitcases onto a departing train. Instead, she was met by a testa-ment to the long wait ahead: the carriages were in darkness; the engine itself gravely silent; and a mountain of luggage built steadily along the cold, grey strand of platform. But like most people of her generation, who had lived through war and loss, Josephine had acquired a sense of perspective, and the train’s mechanical failure foretold nothing more sinister to her than a tiresome wait in the station’s buffet. In fact, although this was the day of the first murder, nothing would disturb her peace of mind until the following morning.

By the time she had drained three cups of bland coffee, the train appeared to be ready for its journey. She left the buffet’s crowded warmth and prepared to board, stopping on the way to buy a copy of yesterday’s Times and a bar of Fry’s chocolate from the small news kiosk next to the platform. As she took her seat, she could not help but feel a rush of excitement in spite of the delay: in a matter of hours, she would be in London.

The ornate station clock declared that it was a quarter past eight when the train finally left the mouth of the station and moved slowly out into the countryside. Josephine settled back into her seat and allowed the gentle thrum of the wheels to soothe away 3

any lingering frustrations of the morning. Removing her gloves and taking out a handkerchief, she cleared a small port-hole in the misted window and watched as the strengthening light took some of the tiredness from the cold March day. On the whole, winter had been kind. There had, thank God, been no repeat of the snow wreaths and roaring winds which had brought the Highland railway to a sudden standstill the year before, leaving her and many others stranded in waiting rooms overnight. Engines with snow ploughs attached had been sent to force a passage through, and she would never forget the sight of them charging the drifts at full speed, shooting huge blocks of snow forty feet into the air.

Shivering at the memory of it, she unfolded her newspaper and turned to the review pages, where she was surprised to find that the Crime Book Society’s selection was ‘a hair-raising yarn’ called Mr Munt Carries On. They couldn’t have read the book, she thought, since she had tried it herself and considered Mr Munt to have carried on for far too long to be worth seven and six of anybody’s money. When she arrived at the theatre section, which she had purposely saved until last, she smiled to herself at the news that Richard of Bordeaux – her own play and now London’s longest run – was about to enter its final week.

As the train moved south, effortlessly eating into four hundred miles or so of open fields and closed communities, she noticed that spring had come early to England – as quick to grace the gentle countryside as it had been to enhance the drama of the hills against a Highland sky. There was something very precious about the way that rail travel allowed you to see the landscape, she thought. It had an expansiveness about it that the close confinement of a motor car simply could not match and she had loved it since, as a young woman, she had spent her holidays travelling every inch of the single-track line that shadowed the turf from Inverness to Tain.

Even now, more than twenty years later, she could never leave Scotland by train without remembering the summer of her seven-teenth birthday, when she and her lover – in defiance of the terrible weather – had explored the Highlands by rail, taking a different route from Daviot Station every morning. When war broke out, a 4

year later almost to the day, the world changed forever but – for her at least – that particular bond to a different age had stayed the same, and perhaps always would.

This link with the past was becoming harder to hold on to, though, as she found herself unexpectedly in the public eye. She had had thirteen months and four hundred and sixty performances to get used to being the author of the most popular play in London, but fame still tasted strange to her. Richard of Bordeaux had brought success, but success brought a relinquishing of privacy which, though necessary, was not easily or willingly given.

Every time she journeyed south, she felt torn between the celebrity that awaited her in London and the ties which kept her in Inverness – and knew she was not truly comfortable with either.

But during the miles in between, for a few precious hours, she could still remember how it had felt to be seventeen and sure of what you wanted.