by Anne Morice
“So having killed him, then what?”
“Immediately rang up Chloe, who gave her brother a treble dose of his sleeping pills, locked him in the house and drove herself up to Hill Grove. She parked her car under a tree on the verge between the lane and the field and walked the rest of the way to Number 32. She and Brenda dumped Mike in the wheelbarrow and placed it in the back of his own car, barrow and all, and the rubber dinghy on top. Between one and two in the morning they all went down the Strand and when it was silent and deserted, in he went, the only slight hitch being the lost punt pole.
“After that it was simply a question of their walking back separately to Hill Grove, where Chloe collected her car and drove home, arriving there well before daylight. Brenda, having snatched a few hours’ sleep, got up at her usual time, locking her bedroom door behind her. As soon as the boys had left on the bus she nipped back home, put on Mike’s dressing gown and began clipping the hedge. In an incautious moment she had told me that whenever he had a day off he liked to take it easy and potter about in the garden before he had his bath. Very likely Peter Wood, the cowman, had never seen him in anything else but a dressing gown, and the clockwork system with the cows cuts both ways, you know. Brenda knew exactly what time the man would bring them back into the field and Chloe knew exactly what time to telephone so that he would hear the outside bell. As soon as it rang Brenda bolted indoors, removed the dressing gown and scurried down to the supermarket, where she probably spent about five minutes instead of the half hour she claimed.”
“And what about the poor dotty brother? Was Robin right about its being a genuine suicide?”
“You know, I have my theories about that too, though they obviously can’t be proved. I believe he did kill himself, either purposely or by accident, but of course that shot Chloe straight into the limelight, which was the last thing she wanted, so to get the matter bundled out of sight as rapidly as possible she decided to remove any doubts that it was suicide. Hence the note, which I am sure was a forgery. After all, you need to be exceptionally skilful with the hand and eye to hold down her sort of job in the art department, and I’m not at all impressed by the experts’ findings. In fact I’d have had more faith in them if they’d come up with the opposite conclusion because the boy’s handwriting would certainly have deteriorated after his operation. However, what really convinces me that Chloe fixed it is the fact that the note was addressed to the coroner. She told me Johnnie had been mentally retarded all his life and I very much doubt if he would have known of the existence of such a person, far less what his functions were. People so often ditch themselves by adding these fancy bits.”
“Well, I suppose we must allow you that one little side-light on human frailty,” Toby said. “Although I trust it will be the last; and personally I feel it was Brenda who made the worst miscalculation. Poor woman, how she must be regretting the impulse to bring her sad story to you!”
“I wonder why she did?” Robin asked.
“I don’t feel it was an impulse exactly. I believe she wanted to establish herself as a creature demented with grief and worry because her husband had walked out on her. It’s rather difficult to do that when you know as few people as she does, and in many respects I was the ideal confidante. She could practise her story on me and make sure she’d got it pat, in the event of having to repeat it in a police station, and there was a good chance too that through me she’d manage to pick up a few tips as to which way the official minds were working. It wasn’t a bad idea and I might never have been able to prove anything against her if it hadn’t been for the dressing gown. When Robin walked in with it last night I suddenly remembered that it had been hanging over my arm when I met Chloe in the car park and she must have thought I was flaunting it at her deliberately, to show that I knew she was in the plot. I didn’t of course, but that was why . . .”
“Why what?” Robin asked, pouncing on the hesitation .
“Why she was so angry,” I replied, recollecting myself. I had been about to explain that that was why Chloe and Brenda had decided I was becoming a danger to them and why Brenda, with a little help from her friend and the studio wardrobe, had impersonated Terry, Frank or Don, in order to deliver a slice of poisoned wedding cake. However, Robin’s next words made me even more thankful that I had stopped in time.
“I wonder,” he said, looking at me in a very wondering way. “I really do wonder that, knowing all this, you should still have taken it into your head to go and visit her at home this morning. Some people would have called it risky.”
“I didn’t visit her at home. I called at the Four Corners Travel Bureau, where I guessed she would be, and I said: ‘The police are now moving in on 32, Hill Grove and I’ve come to take you out for coffee and one last piece of advice.’”
Robin seemed reasonably satisfied by this explanation, but it certainly was a shame that, having sworn to him that I was in no danger, I could not now very well own up to the wedding cake incident. I think it rounds off the story rather neatly, and I am still hoping that the right moment will come to tell him about it.
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 standa
rds, 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 © 1974 Anne Morice
Introduction copyright © 2021 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
First published in 1974 by Macmillan
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 914150 04 3
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk