Authors: David Roberts
Sweet Sorrow
D
AVID
R
OBERTS
worked in publishing for over thirty years. He is married and divides his time between London and Wiltshire.
Praise for David Roberts
‘Roberts just keeps getting better and better with each book.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Roberts pays meticulous attention to period detail and the result is a really well crafted and charming mystery story.’
Daily Mail
‘This is a witty and meticulous recreation of the class-ridden middle England of the 1930s . . . a perfect example of golden age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away.’
Guardian
‘Roberts has captured brilliantly the light and shade of pre-war Britain under the falling shadow of Nazism. A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit, with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace.’
Peter James
Also by David Roberts
Sweet Poison
Bones of the Buried
Hollow Crown
Dangerous Sea
The More Deceived
A Grave Man
The Quality of Mercy
Something Wicked
No More Dying
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published by Constable
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2009
This edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010
Copyright © David Roberts 2009
The right of David Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84901-378-9
eISBN: 978-1-78033-425-7
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Jane, first and last
How dost thou, Benedick, the married man?
Shakespeare,
Much Ado About Nothing
Parting is such sweet sorrow . . .
Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
Contents
August 1939
Prologue
Byron Gates was a poet. As he used to say, with that characteristic chuckle women seemed to find so attractive, what else could he be with a name like that? Ever since he had first read – though not understood –
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
at the age of eleven, he had determined to be a poet and to honour his namesake. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he adopted a poetic personality which he spent what remained of his life refining and perfecting. He began to dress like a poet, modelling his costume on Oscar Wilde and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, developing a taste for silk shirts and bow-ties. He wore a black or purple cape when he ventured out, the colour depending on his mood. He smoked Gitanes through an ivory cigarette holder and, when he could afford it, he sported a buttonhole – for preference a white carnation. He wore his hair just an inch or two longer than was thought decent and he had a way of combing it with his fingers when he was in the throes of creation which, he had read, was a mannerism of Tennyson’s.
His mild eccentricity was indulged by his college, Christ Church, and he was only once ducked in Mercury, the college fountain – a passage of arms he wore thereafter like a medal. He was suspected of being a ‘pansy’ but this was far from the truth.
Although he was a pastoral poet, writing lyrically of the mountains and lakes of his native Cumberland, he was essentially a city man and was never so happy as when he was sipping at his pint in some smoky, stale-aired public house in Fitzrovia. On leaving the university, with a disappointing third, he attempted journalism but the life of a cub reporter did not suit him and, reluctantly, to pay the bills, he took a post in a preparatory school near Marlborough. As his literary reputation grew, he became increasingly impatient at having to teach small boys Latin and English; necessarily ignorant or at least unheeding of the favour he was doing them, they sensed his dislike of them and ragged him unmercifully. It was a minor compensation that the under-matron was pretty and receptive to his overtures.
By the time he was thirty he had published three slim volumes of verse, the first of which had been described as ‘promising’, the second as ‘daring’ and the third as ‘significant’, though
what
it signified the reviewer – a drinking companion of his – would have been hard put to say. Brief poems extolling natural beauty and platonic love appeared in small magazines with even smaller circulations on a regular basis. He reviewed poetry for the
Telegraph
and
The Listener
, for which he also occasionally set the crossword, writing sharp-edged criticism of his elders, praising his friends, particularly his Oxford contemporaries.
The Listener
brought him into contact with BBC programme makers and he was commissioned to give a series of lectures on how to read poetry, which proved surprisingly popular.
With the approach of war, he wrote a sequence of sonnets expressing his disapproval of violence in any shape or form, bravely declaring to a largely indifferent world that he was a pacifist, like his mentor W.H. Auden. Indeed, he would have gone to America with Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood to sit out the coming conflict in safety had he been able to wangle an invitation from a respectable American university. As it was, he had reluctantly shut up his house in Flask Walk and left Hampstead for Sussex. Virginia Woolf, the celebrated novelist and an old friend of his, had found him a small cottage close to where she lived in the village of Rodmell just outside Lewes, and to this he decamped with his wife and their two daughters.
Whether it was his name or his fame, if he could be said to be famous, or his pallid good looks and small-boy appeal, he had always enjoyed – even at the university – considerable success with women. His first wife, to whom he had been unfaithful from the day of their marriage – with her sister, as it happened – had died five years earlier of cancer, though some unfriendly folk spoke of a ‘broken heart’. With Marion dead, he had remarried almost immediately a moderately well-known actress called Mary Brand.
He discovered that the act of marriage was death to romance and immediately began an affair with Frieda Burrowes, an aspiring actress young enough to be his daughter. They had met when she had interviewed him for the BBC and she had signalled her devotion by attending several of his ‘readings’, staying on after the – usually small – audience had dispersed to tell him how profound he was and how affecting his verse. No one ever said that his poetry was memorable – it wasn’t – and he winced when his women chose to quote from poems by his more famous namesake, instead of a line or two from, say, his moving elegy for his dead wife.
Ada, his daughter by his first wife, now aged twelve, was a shy introverted girl, ‘not particularly pretty’, as her father used to say to her face, who was left very much on her own. Her stepmother was by no means an uncaring woman but she had her career, mostly on the London stage but occasionally in Hollywood. She, too, had a daughter, Jean, from an earlier marriage, now aged fifteen. Jean was everything Ada was not – outgoing, noisy and showing every sign that she would be a beauty. Ada worshipped her stepsister and Jean repaid her devotion with casual friendliness. She had a soft heart and the ugly duckling was so obviously in need of mothering that she did what she could to provide it.
Ivy Cottage to which the Gates family moved was not large and, to Jean’s chagrin, she was forced to share a room with Ada. The girls did not quarrel but it was an uncomfortable arrangement.
Byron’s young admirer, Frieda, remained in London. Fortunately, he had to go up to town quite frequently. With war almost a certainty, the government, rather late in the day, decided to do what it could to foster patriotism and, as part of that effort, Byron was invited to give a series of talks for the Home Service on what it meant to be British. These proved to be even more popular than his talks on how to read poetry.
However, the BBC only paid a pittance and, since he never earned more than fifty pounds a year from his poetry, Byron had been forced to find an alternative source of income. He had tidied up his lectures on poetry and Victor Gollancz had published them as a book which had made him a hundred pounds. Then, in 1937, his publisher, who had a thriving list of crime fiction in its famous yellow livery, suggested he might try his hand at a detective story.
To his own and his publisher’s amazement,
Just Like a Coffin
had sold very well. Setting crosswords had prepared him for constructing the puzzle at the heart of most detective stories of the period. He hardly bothered to invent a detective, merely providing the reader with an idealized portrait of himself. Nicholas Shelley, the name he sportively gave his detective, was wise, good-looking and ‘philosophical’ – by which his creator meant that he was given to spouting platitudinous opinions on life, death, patriotism and other great topics – but he did solve crimes. Bulldog Drummond might be the man you needed beside you in a rough house, but Nicholas Shelley had brain and a way with the ladies which made many a middle-aged female’s heart flutter on the way out of Boots lending library.
There was a certain irony, upon which Byron himself had remarked, that as an avowed pacifist he should prove so good at describing murder – bloodless though it usually was. A much greater irony, particularly in view of the trouble he had taken to remove himself from London and the danger of being bombed – an irony which, unfortunately, he was unable to appreciate – was that, even before the war he so much dreaded had broken out, he met a violent death where he least expected it, in the peaceful Sussex village in which he had made his home. It was just such a murder as Nicholas Shelley might have been called upon to investigate but, with the fictional detective’s creator dead, the onerous duty fell to the newly married Lord Edward Corinth.
1
‘But it’s perfectly all right as it is, Mrs Brendel,’ Verity said firmly. ‘I much prefer the walls white and I know my husband has an aversion to flock except in relation to sheep.’