Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murder

by Hazel Holt

  Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murder

  By

  Hazel Holt

  ** SMASHWORDS EDITION **

  PUBLISHED BY

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  Published by Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 95462 Seattle, WA 98145

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  Copyright © 2010 by Hazel Holt

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-046-3 (Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-047-0 (Cloth)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-048-7 (ePub)

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  * * * * *

  FOR JAN FERGUS,

  with love

  * * * * *

  Chapter One

  Because I managed to get myself lost in the Harborne one-way system, it was early evening when I got to the hotel. The M5 had been full of indecisive caravans, thrusting young men in Sierras and the Daf Racing Lorry Team, so I felt pretty exhausted. I threw my bag and coat on to the bed and switched on the television and the electric kettle. I was pleased to see that the ‘tea-making facilities’ included a couple of chocolate wafer biscuits and that there was conditioner as well as shampoo in the bathroom. Not that I planned to wash my hair (I was only going to be staying one night) but it gave me a feeling of agreeable luxury. I love staying in hotels, just for a short time – after a few days I get restless and want my own things around me and I miss the animals – but for a little while I greatly enjoy this enclosed, private world, where everything one might want is conveniently to hand.

  I had travelled to Birmingham from my home in the West Country to speak at a Literary Lunch, organized by a large bookstore. This isn’t something that happens to me very often – the books I write are usually considered too academic – but the latest one was a study of the writer Ada Leverson and the connection with Oscar Wilde made it ‘popular’ enough for the organizers of the Lunch to feel that people (as opposed to academics) might want to listen to me for fifteen minutes or so. I hate speaking in public – the sound of my voice, on the rare occasions when I’ve heard it on a tape-recorder, makes me shrivel up with embarrassment – but in a weak moment I said yes and I’d been fervently regretting it ever since.

  There were to be three speakers and I’d asked to be the first so that I wouldn’t have to sit through the others, getting more and more nervous. Especially since one of the other speakers was Adrian Palgrave, whom I knew and disliked. He is, in effect, a neighbour, living in a converted schoolhouse in a village just outside Taviscombe. I suppose you might describe him as a well-known poet and broadcaster – ‘well known for being well-known,’ as my son Michael says – and he is, in his own opinion at least, a prominent literary figure. Perhaps I am being just a little sour because he has made it very clear that he thinks of me as a mere amateur. He is always affable, but with a patronizing air that I find very irritating indeed. I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t be staying in the hotel, though since the Lunch was to be held there on the following day, I very much feared he might. It was with this thought in mind that I went down to the dining room early, feeling that he would be more likely to dine fashionably late. I ate my food quickly with my head bent low over my book and then retreated to the safety of my room. After I had read through my speech one more time and wondered if anyone would find it remotely interesting, I had an enjoyable evening watching a thriller on television and doing my nails.

  The high-spot of any stay in a hotel for me is the Full English Breakfast. At home I rarely have more than a slice of toast and a cup of tea, but when I’m away I always go the whole hog. This particular morning my plate was deliriously full of bacon, egg, tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding, and fried bread and I sat and contemplated it with satisfaction. I had just unfolded my Daily Telegraph and was giving myself over wholly to pleasure when I was aware of a figure standing beside me. It was Adrian Palgrave.

  ‘Ah, Sheila. May I join you?’ he asked and without waiting for my reply he sat down.

  He went droning on about how tiresome it was to have to come all this way to speak at this tedious luncheon but one did have a duty to one’s publisher. Needless to say, his breakfast consisted of half a grapefruit and a black coffee. Fortunately he didn’t seem to require any actual verbal response so I was able to get on with my food, but the treat was ruined and I was thoroughly put out.

  ‘I must say I was surprised that they asked Alicia Nash to be the other speaker. I mean, she is a highly competent actress – she was in one of my radio plays – but hardly a literary figure.’

  ‘She has just written a book’ I replied. The fried bread was very crisp and a piece shot off my plate when I cut into it. Adrian looked at my still substantial plateful with some distaste and said: ‘Memoirs. Anecdotes, really.’

  ‘I haven’t read it,’ I said, ‘but they say it’s very amusing.’

  Adrian scrutinized my plate more carefully.

  ‘Should you be eating all that fried stuff?’ he asked. ‘I suppose you know it’s crammed with cholesterol and statistics have shown that middle-aged women are just as liable to heart-attacks as middle-aged men.’

  I did not need Adrian Palgrave to remind me that I am a widow in my mid-fifties. I bit into a piece of black pudding defiantly.

  ‘At my advanced age,’ I said, ‘this is the only way left to live dangerously.’

  He gave me a brief humourless smile and went on.

  ‘I hope the book-signing afterwards doesn’t go on too long. I’ve got to get to the Pebble Mill studios for an interview this afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t imagine my book signing will take any time at all,’ I said. ‘I expect I shall just stand there with a pile in front of me feeling embarrassed. What a pity I can’t sign your books for you.’

  This frivolous remark on such a serious subject was not considered worthy of a smile of any kind and he continued.

  ‘I went to the new Concert Hall yesterday evening. The acoustics are superb. They were doing Gerontius. I was following with a score, of course, and every note was like crystal! Quite magnificent. I rather expected to see you there – such an opportunity!’

  I thought guiltily of the thriller on television and said quickly: ‘Oh, I arrived rather late...’

  He pushed aside his half-eaten grapefruit and leaned across the table. ‘I was thinking, as I sat there, that we really must make a special effort with the music for this year’s festival. We need something really unusual – a new piece specially commissioned or some International musician.’

  ‘I don’t really imagine that we could attract anyone of International standing to the Taviscombe festival,’ I protested.

  Adrian regarded me earnestly.

  ‘I think you underestimate the influence that I and some of our other more important residents may have, Sheila,’ he said reprovingly. Certainly our particularly picturesque corner of the West Country has attracted a more than usual number of writers, painters, musicians, actors, and television producers. Oh yes, and p
oets. Not that I would call them residents. Most of them still live mainly in London and just have second homes in the countryside around Taviscombe. There are a few full-timers as well as Adrian. Oliver Stevens, who makes those marvellous television documentaries, lives in a lovely old rectory between Taviscombe and Taunton and Will Maxwell the successful dramatist lives all the year round in a cottage at the end of a rough track in the middle of Exmoor with no mains water. That’s what I call being a resident.

  ‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘Personally I hope we don’t commission anything. I’m not very good at modern music. Anyway, we haven’t settled anything at all about the programme yet. I suppose we’ll have to have a committee meeting soon.’

  I sighed. Committee meetings are very much a part of Taviscombe life and are either terminally boring or seething with passion, fury and umbrage. Adrian, needless to say, loved them. Although, as I’ve said, he had a certain reputation in the literary world, I think he found it much more satisfying to his ego to be a big fish in a little pond, and you could see him positively basking in the admiration and deference of some of the other committee members. Sometimes in a meeting I daren’t catch my friend Rosemary’s eye for fear of laughing.

  The Lunch was less terrifying than I had expected. I sat next to Alicia Nash (Adrian was sitting beside the Lord Mayor) and it turned out that her son was at the same boarding school that my son Michael had gone to so we had a lovely gossipy chat about the masters and how they still hadn’t finished the new science block and how absolutely inedible the food was, so that I forgot to feel nervous. My actual talk went off really very well – the microphones were all right, thank goodness – and people seemed to be listening quite attentively. I enjoyed Alicia Nash’s talk. She was very funny and the audience warmed to her. Adrian spoke about his book on Scott Fitzgerald and I have to admit that he did it very well. That’s the infuriating thing about Adrian. Just when you’ve written him off as a pretentious bore he suddenly produces a really excellent piece of work and makes you feel small-minded.

  After the talks, as we stood rather self-consciously behind our piles of books, pens at the ready, Adrian said: ‘Oh, by the way, did I tell you? I’ve been made Laurence Meredith’s literary executor.’

  He looked particularly smug as he said this and with good reason. Laurence Meredith was a distinguished literary figure, a friend of Fitzgerald and Hemingway – though he was English – who had died quite recently at an advanced age. He had known a great many famous people and any biography of him would have an immense readership. To have scooped the pool, as it were, of his literary remains was quite a coup. ‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘I believe he died in the south of France – will you be going out there? How lovely!’

  ‘The papers have been sent to me by his lawyers so I have to go through them first and, from what I’ve been able to see so far, there’s some really new and quite exciting stuff there. No doubt,’ he continued rather grandly, ‘it will be necessary for me to go to the villa at Cap d’Aniibes at some point.’

  He broke off as a young woman approached him, reverently proffering a copy of his book for his signature, murmuring shyly as she gazed up at him that it was absolutely marvellous. I heard a faint snort from Alicia Nash on my other side and smiled. Adrian was never short of young female admirers. I suppose he did look rather like an archetypal poet, tall and thin with dark wavy hair and large dark eyes. He had long, thin hands, too, which he tended to wave about a lot.

  Then an elderly woman approached who wanted to tell me that her mother had actually known Ada Leverson and I became so engrossed that I forgot all about Adrian, and everyone else, for that matter.

  Driving home I thought about Adrian Palgrave and his wife Enid. She wrote cookery books – well, actually what she did was collect and publish old recipes (which she insisted on calling receipts) some of which sounded pretty revolting, but with a lot of handsome illustrations. The books sold very well, I believe. She was a plain woman in her early forties, a few years older than Adrian, and Taviscombe gossip had it that he only stayed with her (in the face of superior attraction) because ‘she had the money’. Like her husband she, too, had a profound sense of her own importance and a tendency to patronize anyone not in her own ‘circle’, as she put it. I found her a tiresome woman and avoided her when I could, which wasn’t easy since she, as well as Adrian, liked to involve herself in local affairs and our paths crossed quite often. She too was actively concerned with the Festival and I knew I’d end up in my usual state of irritation and fury, vowing to have nothing to do with it ever again.

  The Taviscombe Festival was held every July. Originally it had been a simple and enjoyable event organized by and for the locals who did the whole thing themselves – all the music, drama, poetry reading, and painting. But in the fullness of time it had inevitably been taken over by Adrian and his friends. They wanted to make it ‘more professional’ and imported a number of their friends from outside to sing and play and act and put the whole thing, as Enid said, ‘on a sound financial footing’. When it reached this stage I had hoped to slide out of the whole affair, but they were very keen to keep local participation (that was Adrian being patronizing again) and so a token number of old Taviscombe residents were kept on the committee. I had protested to my friend Rosemary, but she said, ‘Oh, come on Sheila, it’ll be good for a laugh. And anyway, somebody’s got to keep an eye on things or goodness knows what grandiose schemes they’ll cook up!’

  Actually, in among the junk mail and bills waiting for me when I got home there was a summons to a Festival committee meeting the following week. When I telephoned Rosemary to say that I was back and I’d be round to collect the animals (she always nobly looks after them when I’m away) I asked if she was going to the meeting.

  ‘When is it? Tuesday? I suppose so. Thank the Lord for videos – they always choose a night when there’s something I want to watch on the box. I suppose Adrian is too high minded to watch anything but his own programmes and trendy documentaries. How was he? Did he make a mess of his speech?’

  ‘No, actually the speech was very good. He was his usual insufferable self though, banging on about commissioning things for the Festival or getting international stars...’

  ‘All for the greater glory of Adrian Palgrave. How does he intend to lure them down here, then?’

  ‘He informed me that I underestimate the influence that he and his chums have in Artistic Circles.’

  Rosemary laughed.

  ‘You mean he only has to lift his little finger and Menuhin and Pavarotii will drop everything to come to Taviscombe?’

  ‘I don’t suppose even he would aim that high, but I suppose some of his BBC buddies may rally round. Anyway, we’ll doubtless see what delights he has in store for us on Tuesday. Right, then, I’ll be round right away to collect Foss and the dogs. I hope they behaved themselves.’

  ‘Bless them, they were very good, as usual. Foss was sick this morning, but I think it was only because he’d been eating grass.’

  Later that evening, sitting on the sofa with a dog on either side and Foss on my lap, drinking cocoa and watching News-night with half an eye, I idly wondered if this year’s Festival would really be any different from those of previous years.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Oh, Sheila, isn’t it exciting! Adrian says he may be able to get Leo Spenser to read some of his poems – Adrian’s poems, that is – wouldn’t that be thrilling! I thought he was marvellous in that play – you know the one we all went to Bath to see. At the Theatre Royal. Ibsen, was it? Or Chekhov? I always mix them up. But I did think Leo Spenser was absolutely terrific – that bit at the end when he goes mad!’

  Eleanor Scott moved towards me with such enthusiasm that half her cup of coffee slopped over into the saucer, something that didn’t surprise me at all since she is one of the clumsiest people I know. Who but Eleanor could manage to break her ankle falling up the four steps to our local library! She drives me mad in some ways but s
he is a good-hearted soul and I’ve always been very fond of her. The Festival Committee meeting was, in fact, taking place in her house. Well, I say house, but it is rather more of a second-league stately home – Kinsford Manor, a large and splendid example of seventeenth-century domestic architecture. Several of the more prestigious events of the Festival usually take place in the Great Hall and that, of course, is why Eleanor is on the committee.

  Our committee meeting was being held in what used to be the estate office and there were maps and plans on the walls and a great deal of dark oak furniture. In this very masculine sombre setting Eleanor’s bright school-girlish chatter seemed out of place. Indeed, at first glance, Eleanor seemed an improbable chatelaine of Kinsford. It was an unusual story. Sir Ernest Barraclough, whose family had lived at Kinsford for generations, had been a widower with one young daughter when Eleanor’s parents were killed in an air-crash, leaving her an orphan when she was only nine. Her mother was Sir Ernest’s cousin and, since Eleanor had no other close relatives, he had adopted her and brought her to live at Kinsford as a companion for his daughter Phyllis. Tragically, when Phyllis was just twenty-one she died in a sailing accident. And when, some twenty years later, Sir Ernest died, Eleanor inherited the house and the estate. She had never married. The county had hopefully linked her name with those of numerous young men, since she was very definitely a ‘catch’, but it seemed that even the glories of Kinsford were not enough to compensate for her awkwardness and gauche manner.

  ‘Honestly,’ my friend Rosemary said once, when Eleanor was being more than usually Angela Brazil, ‘I sometimes wonder if she isn’t actually retarded.’