Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  Fog of Doubt

  Christianna Brand

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Introduction

  I’M SURE IT’S MOST IMPROPER to say of ones own books that one likes them, but I must confess that I simply love mine. After all, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t publish them. And of them all, the one I love best is this book, Fog of Doubt (1953).

  Just for fun, I set the scene in my own house. In the book, there’s a desk in the hall and in our house, there’s this desk in the hall. In the book, the curtains in the drawing room are coral-colored and the chair covers are the sort of green that would go with coral-color—and so they are in our house; (it has a ‘drawing room’ because it is that sort of house: a Regency house, left over from the elegent days when the mistress’s carriage would drive into the cobbled yard and the horses be stabled where our garage now is—there are still cobblestones and you can see the stalls). In this house and in the same district, using the real street names, with the same accommodation and the same furniture and even much the same people and very much the same baby and the same poodle and the same Siamese cat, I placed my book; and people who have lived round here since long before the book was written, have told me that nowadays they never pass the bench outside the church without thinking ‘That’s where Melissa sat with Damien’, or the telephone box on the corner without thinking, ‘That’s where Rosie called up from.’ I suppose it does make for a sort of reality—using what you know about.

  As far as I’m aware no murders ever took place in this house; but something rather odd did arise from the book. In the days when it was written, it was not yet fashionable to call girls by the simple old names, but I christened the two sisters-in-law who are major characters in the book, Matilda and Rosie. A neighbor, an old man who had lived a long time next door, asked me, “How could you have known that fifty years ago, there lived in your house two sisters called Matilda and Rose?” I knew nothing of the history of the house and certainly nothing of any Matilda and Rose; for a while I kept looking over my shoulder to see if they were there.

  There is something I think of as “author’s luck” and this plot arose from a bit of author’s luck. I read a book and thought, “Oh, yes, I see what’s coming—” (and I may say, I added, “What a marvellous idea for a plot!”)—and in the end it wasn’t that plot at all. So I used it for my own plot, and whatever its merits, it has this: the entire explanation is given in the last line. It has one other peculiarity too, but if I mention it here, I’m giving my own game away. The reader may like to work it out for himself; it’s glaringly there, for all the world to see.

  In England, the book was titled London Particular. Well, first it was titled Kensington Gore—there is a street in London called Kensington Gore and I wrote the whole thing round it, placing it, naturally, in Kensington—which, in turn, is a district of London. Then I discovered that someone else was using the title so I had to unravel it all and place it in Maida Vale and the new title, London Particular, was one I came to love. A London Particular was the old name for a London fog. We don’t get them now, not the real fogs: we’re obliged to use only smokeless fuels and it does keep the air cleaner. But up to 15 years ago, or so, we had them, sometimes for two or three days at a time, and it really was true that you “couldn’t see your hand before your face”. A pea-souper was another name for them and indeed they were actually thick, a sort of thick yellowy-greeny-grey, very fumey and horrible, and leaving a nasty taste in one’s mouth. It was frightening because, entirely familiar with your surroundings, you could still be bewildered as to just where you were. There was a horrid fascination about them, but it was all pretty grim; the city would grind to a halt, traffic couldn’t move (you could hardly see the glimmer of the street lights, let alone be lit by them) and one hardly dared to venture forth for fear of getting lost. It was all very dank and cold, and infiltrated into the house and made everything dirty. It is part of the absurdity of us who love London—“most kindly nurse” as Spencer called her—that in our secret hearts we were rather proud of our pea-soupers.

  In such a fog, I set my book and called it London Particular. Naturally such a title meant nothing to most Americans, so it was entitled there, as it is now, Fog of Doubt.

  As London districts go, Maida Vale, where the book is set, is not—by that name at any rate—particularly old; though through it runs one of the great, straight enduring roads that the Romans built, 2000 years ago, from their “Londinium”, slowly developing from its huddle of huts on the banks of the river Thames. The long slope of the hill that runs down towards our part of the road, was densely covered with trees and called St. John’s Wood. It was land which from the beginning of the 14th century had belonged to the order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and later was part of the royal hunting ground of Queen Elizabeth I. Gradually, as the city grew, the forest was cleared for farmland and by the beginning of the 19th century when it became Maida Vale, the area was famous for its gardens—we still go to a little old pub in a street called Violet Hill—and especially its fruit gardens. Our huge old mulberry tree—they are very rare in London now, and indeed in most of England—is clearly a hark-back to those days. Pineapples were coming into fashion and a few doors up from our house is one whose gates are still ornamented with plaster pineapples—there was a big pinery there. Gradually these houses were being built up along the old road—one of them being our house; and during a great revision of the paths, toll gates and so on, the district was rechristened Maida Vale, after the battle of Maida in southern Italy; there is a pub called the Hero of Maida (you could write a history of Europe round our old pub names, I sometimes think. Many of them have become confused over the ages; a famous one is the Elephant and Castle, which is believed to have been named originally after that Isabella—the “Infanta Castille”—who packed Columbus off to discover America).

  So Maida Vale, and this house, where all the plot of Fog of Doubt takes place, is 150 years old, or thereabouts. There are no pineapples now, except those plaster ones on the gate along the street; and no fruit trees except for very old apple and pear trees keeping up the tradition in many of the gardens on either side of the house—and our own great mulberry. You will find the mulberry mentioned in the high-walled garden of the house in Fog of Doubt.

  This book was of the genre of the “classic” detective story—Dorothy Sayers disapproved of their being called “thrillers” or indeed anything but “detective stories”. The Detection Club over which she imposed her reign for so long, actually laid down certain rules. One of these was: “there shall be no Chinamen.” By this was meant that scenes and characters should be “real”; the Mysterious East, unknown poisons, anything that was not possible, credible, acceptable to the standards of every day life—all that was out. Except for murder of course; but the murder had to be reasonably accounted for, in a recognizable setting, with a cast of comprehensible people; and there had to be a detective and detecting.

  I think she would not have agreed with my word “fantasy” but in this kind of “entertainment literature” where, in those days especially, the characters were everyday people living in nice, everyday h
omes—I do think that the intrusion of murder is so unlikely as to amount to “fantasy”. Personally, I accept it as such and then strive to make the unreality as real as possible. No people of this kind, I say to myself, living this kind of life, would ever get themselves into this sort of situation. But, confronted with such a situation after all, I then ask myself how, together and severally, these people would have behaved. I often use real people, people I know, and apply the same question—how would they have behaved? There are several characters in Fog of Doubt who are taken from people I know: they react to a situation which would in fact have been quite alien to them, exactly as those friends of mine would have reacted. But the whole basis of the story is—of course it is—a fantasy.

  This is a very difficult kind of book to write. Because it’s made (I hope) “easy to read” that doesn’t mean that a huge amount of work and concentration doesn’t go into the making of it. Just think of the complications. To build up a case against half a dozen people, each of which is absolutely water-tight except for one small point which destroys the theory—every facet dovetailing with all the facets of the other watertight cases against the other people—all the time concealing the real plot while at the same time placing every fact squarely before the reader: it takes a bit of doing! An enormous amount of sleight-of-hand is required to produce each necessary fact, disguising its importance, its real meaning—and not by mixing it up with a lot of facts not otherwise necessary to the story: I like to say that no two lines could be removed from any work of mine, whose removal would not leave somewhere else in the book, a gap, which those lines referred to. If I so much as say that a character “went wearily upstairs, cleaned his teeth and fell into bed”—you watch it! The “wearily” may catch your attention and so deflect from the apparently throwaway detail that he cleaned his teeth, which sounds like just a bit of “color”. But no, no: the fact that his toothbrush is damp, and has evidently been recently used—that may be the important phrase, may be going to fit in somewhere later on. Nor will the “wearily” have been used only as a deflection of the reader’s attention from the toothbrush; there will be a reason somewhere why the character was weary. You may even find that “he went upstairs” is the vital point: two pages ago he was in a ranch house—without your noticing it, he must have changed his scene, he was going to bed elsewhere. Three little, apparently unimportant phrases; but each of them germane to the plot, each of them possibly important to the plot and each of them—and for the author this is the tricky part—fitting in with all the actions of all the other people taking part in the plot.

  Then again, we say lightly “all the other people”. Just those six or seven people and no others? How exclude the gardener, possibly a burglar, the apparently casual passer-by? The reader must be protected from the trouble of suspecting outsiders who have no part in the story and yet in the ordinary way would be part of the scene. “Least likely person” must be one of a well-defined group. The writer leans over backwards to isolate this group—they are on an island, fenced in by some boundary, cut off by snow, flood, fire, fallen tree, what have you? But “what have you?” in this case is a by no means unlimited choice and the old ploys grow stale, at best are too often labored and obvious. For myself, when it has not worked out simply that the group falls into a natural isolation—my book, Green for Danger (1945) was a good example, the action taking place in an operating theatre where there were of necessity only a limited number of characters—where this doesn’t happen, I adapt a simple solution. Beneath the title page, I list my cast of characters, leaving out, as I say, the gardeners and the burglars and the passers-by, and add: “within this group of people were found two victims and a murderer.”

  Within the small group of people who circled about the house in Maida Vale on that fog-bound night, were found two victims and a murderer. A little before the end, the reader will know the identity of the murderer: not until the last line—unless of course he has brilliantly deduced it all—I don’t mean “guessed”; no crime writer is interested in peoples’ guesses, he places his clues for the purpose of deduction—unless he has deduced the solution to it all, and heaven knows, it has been placed squarely in front of him all the way through, and I do mean all the way through—will he know how it was done.

  I know who did it and how it was done; but I still read it over and over again. Like I said, I simply love it!

  CHRISTIANNA BRAND

  London, England

  *

  To my

  adopted daughter

  VICTORIA

  ‘Emma for Love’

  *

  … I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. ‘Oh, dear no, Miss,’ he said, ‘this is a London particular.’ I had never heard of such a thing. ‘A fog, Miss,’ said the young gentleman. Bleak House

  *

  The scenes, characters and events portrayed in this novel are entirely imaginary and no reference whatsoever is intended to any living persons.

  *

  CHAPTER ONE

  T HE dank grey fog was like an army blanket, held pressed against the windows of the car. It seemed an age before Tedward returned from his reconnaissance, his yellow wash-leather glove looming up startlingly, a disembodied hand, knocking at the glass beside her with a terrifying little, muffled thud. Rosie lowered the window and poked out her lovely head. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Yes, it’s Sutherland Avenue we’re in, not Elgin Avenue at all.’ He flashed his torch and there, all the time, was the street name, just a few feet from them, a gleam of white along the low railing. The light went out and he melted back into the grey; she saw the flare of the torch again, dimly glowing, as he passed round the back of the car and climbed into the driving seat, settling himself beside her, stout, solid, comfortable old Tedward, with a reassuring pat upon her knee. ‘Won’t be long now, chicken. I know exactly where we are. Don’t worry.’

  ‘That’s what you said before,’ she complained, driven by shock and anxiety to an unwonted peevishness.

  ‘Yes, but this time I really do; only we seem to have got back-to-front, God knows how, and I shall have to turn her round.’ A bus crept by, a ghost bus, a-glimmer with eerie lights, with more lights making pin-points in the leaden dark where a line of lesser vehicles crawled in its broad wake. He swung round with infinite caution and for a minute or two they crept along in the queue before edging off cautiously, hugging the gutter, to the left. ‘Don’t worry, pet! I really do know now.’

  Rosie jerked impatiently. ‘How can I not worry? We’ve been hours already.’

  ‘A quarter of an hour at most, Rosie. I couldn’t have driven an inch faster, darling—pea soup isn’t in it.’

  ‘No, but losing the way like this—you surely ought to know it by now.’

  ‘I do, when I can see an inch in front of me.’

  ‘If only we’d rung up the police before we started,’ she said, fretfully.

  ‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘That was my fault; I ought to have thought of it. But there it is—it’s usually only about five minutes from my place to yours, and one’s instinct was to leap into the car and dash round. I’d no idea the fog was anything like this.’

  Her round young face was white with anxiety, her long legs twisted about one another, muscles tight with nervous strain. ‘Tedward—you don’t think he’s dead, do you?’

  ‘How the hell do I know?’ he said, losing patience a little in his own acute nervousness.

  ‘Well, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?’

  He leaned out of the window to watch the kerb as they crept round to the left again. ‘Just because I’m a doctor, it doesn’t mean I can diagnose a message over the telephone. Tell me again just what happened.…’

  ‘I’ve told you, Tedward. The telephone rang and I thought it might be a patient for you, so I picked it up, just like I would at home for Thomas. And the voice said in this frightful sort of croak, �
��Come quick!” and I said, “Who is it?” and he said, “Tell the doctor to come quick,” and then he said, “Someone came in and hit me with a mastoid mallet,” and then he said, “I’m dying.” So of course I was utterly bewildered, but I still thought he was just a patient and I said, “Well, tell me where to come to,” and he gave our address. Our address!’

  ‘You’re sure it was your address?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I know where I live, don’t I?’ said Rosie, querulously.

  ‘And he definitely said “a mastoid mallet”?’

  ‘Thomas must have left one lying around somewhere and the burglar just picked it up and hit poor Raoul with it. There’s a lot of old instruments stuck away all over the place.’

  ‘You’re sure it was this Raoul Vernet?’

  ‘Well, the voice said our address and Raoul was having dinner there to-night, and there wouldn’t be anyone else there with a foreign accent. Oh, Tedward—do you think he could be really dying? Of course Frenchmen do make a fuss.’

  ‘You could judge better than I could, Rosie. I didn’t hear him.’

  ‘He sounded frightfully faint and then there was a clonk as though he’d dropped the receiver.…’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon be there,’ he said. They swung round once more, hugging the kerb. ‘This is Maida Vale now: we shan’t be long.’

  They drove on in silence, the little car stealing through the muffled murmur of the fog-blanketed city like a marauding cat—creeping along on its belly, grey body melting into the grey, only its two bright eyes round and agleam in the night. The man’s heavy, middle-aged face, usually so jocund and smiling, was lined with anxiety and as leaden and grey as the fog outside; the girl sat with plump, tapering fingers locked tautly about a nyloned knee. He, whose whole training had been in the preservation of life, told himself stoutly that anyway all vile, seducing rats like this creature Raoul Vernet were a great deal better dead; she, young, anxious, over-excited, gave herself up to the contemplation of her delectable sins and cudgelled her foolish wits to decide whether, from her own point of view, it was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing if poor Raoul proved to have pipped off. And what, if he had pipped off, he had said to Matilda before he pipped.