by Anne Morice
‘So it wasn’t true about their being separated?’
‘Oh no, but they hadn’t time to cover their tracks when Maud died so unexpectedly. Their one thought was to grab what they could while the going was good. I imagine Albert threw in that yarn about his wife’s elopement because, misjudging her so completely, he believed some hard luck story was needed to soften Betsy’s heart if the truth came out about his thefts and so on. The Devonshire bit was pure invention. She never got further than a housing estate in Storhampton, but Ted Williams kept a tobacco shop just around the corner from the houses where they’d salted away their ill-gotten gains. They knew he’d done a flit and they used it to build up their story.’
‘Honestly, Tessa, you amaze me sometimes. How did you find all that out?’
‘It was one of several items which were tossed into my lap by Owen the Taxi. Another was that local opinion had it that Betsy committed suicide. Owen, who’s a bit of a puritan, said it was excusable in view of all she had to put up with. I knew he couldn’t be referring to Jasper’s usual line of squalid infidelities, because people had got quite used to those. It had to be something far more serious. As a matter of fact, Mrs Chalmers dropped a fairly broad hint on the subject, only like a fool I didn’t take it up. She was talking about Maureen and she said she wondered Mrs Craig didn’t put her foot down. I thought she was referring to Piers, but she’s a pretty bright female and she’d obviously realised that Jasper was Maureen’s real target.’
‘The plane landed ten minutes ago,’ Robin announced, taking his seat on the bench, ‘so they should be through quite soon. Well, Toby, have you heard the whole saga now?’
‘Yes. Tessa is flushed with triumph.’
‘I can add something to make her cheeks rosier still. It’s the accolade, Tessa. Mackenzie claims to have had a sharp eye on Jasper right from the start and it was all on account of your telling him about that broken vine.’
‘What broken vine?’
‘The one you noticed hanging loose on the day before the funeral. It planted the idea that Jasper had the best opportunity for doing it.’
‘How absolutely staggering, incredible and amazing!’
‘Oh, I don’t know. He may not be brilliant, but he’s quite capable of putting two and two together.’
‘He put two and nothing together this time. What I told him was quite untrue. I haven’t the faintest idea whether the vine was broken then, or not. I invented it to get him to show his hand. It worked, and that’s how I knew the balcony had been sawn through deliberately.’
‘Ah! I see. Well, perhaps we won’t tell him that.’
‘Would you like to hear what really gave Jasper away?’
‘Yes, of course,’ they both replied dutifully.
‘It was because Betsy would go on insisting that her Family Planners met on Wednesday, even when she knew damn well it wasn’t true. That was so inconsistent because normally she’d have gone around telling everyone what a fool she was to have turned up at a meeting twenty-four hours late. Obviously, what happened was that she set out in good faith, realised her mistake when she got there and came home again. The front door was always left open, so she wouldn’t have made any noise coming in, and what did she see as she stepped into the hall?’
‘You win! What did she see?’
‘Jasper, at the top of the stairs, with his ear to Maud’s keyhole. He who was supposed to be out on the river with all cameras rolling. What he was actually doing, you may be sure, was listening in to Maud’s conversation with Gerald, to make sure the new will was coming out the way he’d planned it. Until that was accomplished, he couldn’t make the next move.’
‘So Betsy, not knowing what it was all about, left him to it and went out of the house again?’
‘Well, she must have realised he was engaged in something underhand. Being her, she wouldn’t want to know, but I daresay it weighed on her terribly, and I’m sure it was mainly the cause of her being so worried and unhappy. Poor Betsy! Much as I shall miss her, I can’t be altogether sorry that she died. She hadn’t much to look forward to. So far as Jasper is concerned though, it just goes to show.’
‘Look out!’ Robin warned. ‘Here comes the moral!’
‘You’re right, and the moral is that if Jasper hadn’t been so megalomaniac and selfish, and had taken the slightest interest in Betsy’s affairs, he’d have known that the Planners met on Tuesday and been on his guard. So it just goes to show that it’s not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are unsuccessful murderers.’
‘Oh God!’ Toby said. ‘Can it be true?’
He had ceased to listen to me and was staring in horror at the Customs exit. Two self-important-looking businessmen had just bustled through, followed by what appeared to be a female albino Bedouin. She was tanned to a mid-mahogany, her hair the colour of bleached bones, and she wore a flowing patchwork skirt, with bits of looking-glass stuck all over it. She carried, among other mystifying paraphernalia, a full size, filigree beehive.
‘It’s a birdcage,’ she explained, setting it down on the bench, the better to fling herself into the arms of her startled relatives. ‘Just what I need for my bedroom.’
‘I got you some gorgeous brass earrings, Tessa,’ she said, when it came to my turn, ‘but unfortunately they were too heavy to pack.’
‘I am relieved to hear it,’ I replied. ‘Too many people have been giving me jewellery just lately. It has led to no end of trouble and I’m all for making a fresh start.’
T H E E N D
Felicity Shaw
The detective novels of Anne Morice seem rather to reflect the actual life and background of the author, whose full married name was Felicity Anne Morice Worthington Shaw. Felicity was born in the county of Kent on February 18, 1916, one of four daughters of Harry Edward Worthington, a well-loved village doctor, and his pretty young wife, Muriel Rose Morice. Seemingly this is an unexceptional provenance for an English mystery writer—yet in fact Felicity’s complicated ancestry was like something out of a classic English mystery, with several cases of children born on the wrong side of the blanket to prominent sires and their humbly born paramours. Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of dressmaker Rebecca Garnett Gould and Charles John Morice, a Harrow graduate and footballer who played in the 1872 England/Scotland match. Doffing his football kit after this triumph, Charles became a stockbroker like his father, his brothers and his nephew Percy John de Paravicini, son of Baron James Prior de Paravicini and Charles’ only surviving sister, Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice. (Of Scottish mercantile origin, the Morices had extensive Portuguese business connections.) Charles also found time, when not playing the fields of sport or commerce, to father a pair of out-of-wedlock children with a coachman’s daughter, Clementina Frances Turvey, whom he would later marry.
Her mother having passed away when she was only four years old, Muriel Rose was raised by her half-sister Kitty, who had wed a commercial traveler, at the village of Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, near the city of Margate. There she met kindly local doctor Harry Worthington when he treated her during a local measles outbreak. The case of measles led to marriage between the physician and his patient, with the couple wedding in 1904, when Harry was thirty-six and Muriel Rose but twenty-two. Together Harry and Muriel Rose had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1906. However Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by another man, London playwright Frederick Leonard Lonsdale, the author of such popular stage works (many of them adapted as films) as On Approval and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney as well as being the most steady of Muriel Rose’s many lovers.
Unfortunately for Muriel Rose, Lonsdale’s interest in her evaporated as his stage success mounted. The playwright proposed pensioning off his discarded mistress with an annual stipend of one hundred pounds apiece for each of his natural daughters, provided that he and Muriel Rose never met again. The offer was accepted, although Muriel Rose, a woman of golden flights and fancies who romantically
went by the name Lucy Glitters (she told her daughters that her father had christened her with this appellation on account of his having won a bet on a horse by that name on the day she was born), never got over the rejection. Meanwhile, “poor Dr. Worthington” as he was now known, had come down with Parkinson’s Disease and he was packed off with a nurse to a cottage while “Lucy Glitters,” now in straitened financial circumstances by her standards, moved with her daughters to a maisonette above a cake shop in Belgravia, London, in a bid to get the girls established. Felicity’s older sister Angela went into acting for a profession, and her mother’s theatrical ambition for her daughter is said to have been the inspiration for Noel Coward’s amusingly imploring 1935 hit song “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” Angela’s greatest contribution to the cause of thespianism by far came when she married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, with whom she produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.
Felicity meanwhile went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit, a subdivision of the United Kingdom’s General Post Office established in 1933 to produce documentary films. Her daughter Mary Premila Boseman has written that it was at the GPO Film Unit that the “pretty and fashionably slim” Felicity met documentarian Alexander Shaw—“good looking, strong featured, dark haired and with strange brown eyes between yellow and green”—and told herself “that’s the man I’m going to marry,” which she did. During the Thirties and Forties Alex produced and/or directed over a score of prestige documentaries, including Tank Patrol, Our Country (introduced by actor Burgess Meredith) and Penicillin. After World War Two Alex worked with the United Nations agencies UNESCO and UNRWA and he and Felicity and their three children resided in developing nations all around the world. Felicity’s daughter Mary recalls that Felicity “set up house in most of these places adapting to each circumstance. Furniture and curtains and so on were made of local materials. . . . The only possession that followed us everywhere from England was the box of Christmas decorations, practically heirlooms, fragile and attractive and unbroken throughout. In Wad Medani in the Sudan they hung on a thorn bush and looked charming.”
It was during these years that Felicity began writing fiction, eventually publishing two fine mainstream novels, The Happy Exiles (1956) and Sun-Trap (1958). The former novel, a lightly satirical comedy of manners about British and American expatriates in an unnamed British colony during the dying days of the Empire, received particularly good reviews and was published in both the United Kingdom and the United States, but after a nasty bout with malaria and the death, back in England, of her mother Lucy Glitters, Felicity put writing aside for more than a decade, until under her pseudonym Anne Morice, drawn from her two middle names, she successfully launched her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970. “From the royalties of these books,” notes Mary Premila Boseman, “she was able to buy a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames; this was the first of our houses that wasn’t rented.” Felicity spent a great deal more time in the home country during the last two decades of her life, gardening and cooking for friends (though she herself when alone subsisted on a diet of black coffee and watercress) and industriously spinning her tales of genteel English murder in locales much like that in which she now resided. Sometimes she joined Alex in his overseas travels to different places, including Washington, D.C., which she wrote about with characteristic wryness in her 1977 detective novel Murder with Mimicry (“a nice lively book saturated with show business,” pronounced the New York Times Book Review). Felicity Shaw lived a full life of richly varied experiences, which are rewardingly reflected in her books, the last of which was published posthumously in 1990, a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.
Curtis Evans
About The Author
Anne Morice, née Felicity Shaw, was born in Kent in 1916.
Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of Rebecca Gould and Charles Morice. Muriel Rose married a Kentish doctor, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth. Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by playwright Frederick Lonsdale.
Felicity’s older sister Angela became an actress, married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, and produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.
Felicity went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit. There Felicity met and married documentarian Alexander Shaw. They had three children and lived in various countries.
Felicity wrote two well-received novels in the 1950’s, but did not publish again until successfully launching her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970, buying a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames, on the proceeds. Her last novel was published a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.
By Anne Morice
and available from Dean Street Press
1. Death in the Grand Manor (1970)
2. Murder in Married Life (1971)
3. Death of a Gay Dog (1971)
4. Murder on French Leave (1972)
5. Death and the Dutiful Daughter (1973)
6. Death of a Heavenly Twin (1974)
7. Killing with Kindness (1974)
8. Nursery Tea and Poison (1975)
9. Death of a Wedding Guest (1976)
10. Murder in Mimicry (1977)
Published by Dean Street Press 2021
Copyright © 1973 Anne Morice
Introduction copyright © 2021 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
First published in 1973 by Macmillan
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 914150 00 5
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk