‘Which is when you dropped the book,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘Yes. I was so upset to lose it.’
‘He tied our legs together to prevent another escape attempt and then, once we were all in the van, he took his mother’s handbag and left it next to Shirley’s body,’ said Tremens. ‘He threw our mobile phones in the canal and the rest you know. We were held in those boats overnight, Esme and Brenda in one, me in another, while Fireball drank and ranted and agonised over whether or not to kill us. Then, after Pamela Dallimore escaped on that tractor, he set a series of fires and loaded us into the van and drove off to find a good spot to do us in. I think he planned to bop us on the head and throw us in the canal unconscious to drown. Thank god we were found in time.’
‘Thank god he didn’t just knock us out and leave us there to burn in those sheds,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘This is all so complicated,’ said Molly Wilderspin. ‘It’s like a really bad murder-mystery novel.’
‘Appalling,’ agreed Esme Handibode. ‘It doesn’t follow the rules at all.’
‘And that’s why none of your amateur detective Millies would ever have solved this case,’ said Shunter. ‘Murder investigation isn’t some romanticised game. Real life is nasty and vicious and cruel and maddeningly random. As I said before, there are no rules.’
‘There isn’t even a happy ending to this story,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘There isn’t?’ said Molly Wilderspin. ‘He got caught and no one else died.’
‘Yes, but with Miss Pomerance dead, Tradescant not only inherits the Crabbe estate but the rights to the books too,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘The wrong sister got killed and now Tradescant is a millionaire and the canon is doomed to become a slew of terrible pornography.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
Outside in the street, as the final few Millies climbed aboard their coaches and said their goodbyes, a busker serenaded them with a rowdy rendition of South Herewardshire’s best-known folk song, ‘Go to Hell!’
So when you feel the hand of fate and hear the deathly knell, Remember good men go to Heav’n – but you might go to Hell!
You might go to Hell! You might go to Hell!
Remember good men go to Heav’n – but you might go to Hell!
The festival was over for another year.
And, in a modest little house on the outskirts of Bowcester, Helen Greeley and Troy Savidge, as he’d now accepted that he had to call himself, lay sleepily in each other’s arms.
‘I’m so sorry about your brothers. What an awful day you’ve had,’ said Greeley.
‘It’s been the weirdest weekend of my entire life,’ said Savidge. ‘But I’m very glad it happened.’ He kissed her on the forehead.
‘Do you know why I’m here, in this bed, right now?’ said Greeley.
‘Not really, if I’m being honest.’
‘It’s because you accept me as I am and not as the person everyone wants me to be.’
‘You know I don’t give a toss about all that stuff, don’t you, Helen?’
‘I do and that’s why I’m here. Do you believe in love at first sight, Troy?’
‘Is that what you’re saying has happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Greeley. ‘But . . . this feels right. At least, for the moment it feels right.’
‘Good enough for me,’ said Savidge. He kissed her gently on the lips.
‘They reckon the new hotel will be open in time for next year,’ said Vic, looking out of the pub window at the busy building site opposite. A powerful bulldozer rumbled past. ‘I’m not sad to see the old one being torn down. It was always a bloody eyesore. So, how’s the job-hunting going?’
‘To be honest, I’m not really trying,’ said Shunter. A pint and a pie at lunchtime had become something of a regular habit in the three months that had passed since the festival. His waistline was evidence of the fact.
‘I did happen to notice that they’re after admin staff at Bowcester Police Station,’ said Vic. ‘That’s the kind of job a lot of ex-cops do, isn’t it?’
‘It is. But not me,’ said Shunter. ‘I never tried for promotion because I wanted to avoid all the admin that came with it, so I’m damned if I’ll do other coppers’ admin in my retirement. I need something a little more challenging. Besides which, the pressure is off for a bit. I’ve earned a tidy little sum from the newspapers in the past few months. It means I’ve been able to get the builders in to make the cottage look a bit more like the house that Mrs Shunter deserves.’
‘Very nice.’
‘Oh, and did I tell you? I’ve been approached by a publisher. Apparently, there’s some interest in me writing a book about the Pomerance murder. Quisty put them on to me.’
‘Now there is one very clever man.’
‘And another reason why I’d never go back to police work. I’m an old-fashioned flatfoot and the villains I caught were old-fashioned villains. They threw a brick at a window, grabbed some jewellery and ran. These days, the bad guys click a mouse and steal ten million pounds from a bank on the other side of the world. The bad guys are super-smart and the coppers have to be even smarter. I’m a dinosaur, Vic. PC Plod. I had my time. The job needs people like Quisty now.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, Frank. Quisty may have figured out all the ins and outs of the case but it was you that found the bad guy and caught him. Don’t forget that. So, are you going to do the book?’
‘I’m not sure I have the skills to write a book.’
‘Maybe you could get someone to ghost it? Brenda Tradescant, maybe?’ said Vic. ‘I hear she’s changed her name to Brenda Crabbe now that she’s recovered from her ordeal.’
‘God help us, eh?’ said Shunter. ‘But I couldn’t afford her now even if I wanted to. Her first “New Adventures of Miss Cutter” book has already notched up half a million in pre-orders. It’s called A Dagger in My Reticule. The innuendo couldn’t be any less clumsy if it was in a Carry On film.’
‘There’s always Pamela Dallimore.’
‘She’s busy writing a sequel to her biography of Agnes Crabbe. It’ll probably be just as inaccurate. And sell just as well.’
‘What about your friend Molly then? Didn’t she want to write a book?’
‘Ah Molly! She was something of a dark horse, wasn’t she?’
‘She was?’
‘Didn’t you hear? She’s shacked up in some cottage in the Scottish borders with Esme Handibode’s husband and is working on her first murder-mystery novel.’
‘Really? But I thought she was . . . you know.’
‘Gay? Me too. But it turns out that she and old man Handibode have been at it like knives for years. She just played up the whole dotty lesbian spinster thing to put Esme off the scent. Call myself a detective? I didn’t see that one coming.’
‘She had me fooled too,’ agreed Vic.
‘And the two of them have been enjoying their own private joke at Esme’s expense. They wrote a series of terrible romance novels together under the name of Simone Bedhead. It’s an anagram of Esme Handibode, you see.’
‘Ha!’ barked Vic.
‘Once Esme figured it out she flipped her lid. That’s why Molly and Mr H beat a hasty retreat. Mind you, Esme got her own back. Three years ago, she inherited a great deal of money from a dead uncle but didn’t tell her husband about it because she suspected he was having an affair, although she didn’t know with whom. She kept the money to herself and was using it to fund her obsessions. He’ll never see a penny of it now.’
‘Speaking of dark horses, what about Savidge and Helen Greeley?’ said Vic.
‘I saw them on TV the other night at the Golden Globes,’ said Shunter. ‘The media loves them. Calls them “Helen and Troy”.’
‘He is one jammy bastard. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see him back here in the Onion again.’
‘I would have thought that would please you,’ said Shunter. ‘What did you call him? Kryptonite for publi
cans?’
‘Yeah, but he’d have exactly the opposite effect on business now. He’s Helen Greeley’s fiancé. And he’s Agnes Crabbe’s great-grandson.’
‘He grilled a good burger too.’
‘Yeah, he did.’
‘Hell of a festival, Vic,’ said Shunter, smiling. He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to next year.’
‘There are a few who would rather forget it, I think,’ replied Vic. ‘Blount for one.’
‘He brought that all on himself. If he hadn’t been so paranoid he’d have had a nice little case there. A real promotion booster.’
‘He must have felt like a complete idiot after that press conference.’
‘Announcing the wrong murderer is a bit of a faux pas,’ agreed Shunter.
‘And a vicar as well! I heard that he was transferred over to Morbridge and busted to Detective Sergeant. He only kept his job because, luckily for him, the armed response guys caught most of the flak.’
‘It’ll be interesting to see if the events of this year have an effect on festival attendee numbers,’ mused Shunter. ‘Maybe the Millies won’t be quite so keen to play detective next year.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ said Vic. ‘I bet you they’ll be back in greater numbers and they’ll be worse than ever. They’ve had a taste of it now.’
In the library of her house in Oxford, Esme Handibode finished boxing up her extensive Agnes Crabbe collection, all ready for the auctioneers to collect. The sale would generate a tidy sum, certainly enough with which to build upon her collection of Ngaio Marsh first editions. She loved Marsh’s writing; in fact, there were times when she thought to herself that she could have been the New Zealand author in a previous life. And, now that her enthusiasm for all things Miss Cutter had soured, she rather fancied forming an Inspector Alleyn Society.
And, of course, it would be the best of all the Inspector Alleyn societies.
Afterword
In 1990, my late father Michael began writing a murder-mystery novel called The Chief Constable Regrets. Under his pen-name of Myghal Colgan, he’d already had many articles published – mostly in country lifestyle and Cornish interest magazines – but what he really wanted to do was tell stories.
Set in 1931, the novel centred on the surviving members of a platoon from the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry who had fought together in the First World War. Dad had been researching the historical background for a number of years and was determined to get his facts right. He was the sort of person who needed to meticulously work out the plot and the background for his stories before he started writing them and, in those pre-Internet days, that meant a lot of letter-writing and book-reading and visits to libraries and museums. I can remember long telephone conversations with him (I’d left the family home in Cornwall in 1980 and was working as a police officer in London) when he would tell me all about some new fact he’d discovered and how he planned to incorporate it into the book. He was also very lucky to have known Dame Daphne du Maurier, who was living in Tywardreath near Fowey at the time, and his discussions with her always left him sounding childishly excited and inspired. However, I also recall his frustration over never seeming to have any time to devote to the book; a frustration that any author who isn’t lucky enough to derive their main income from writing knows all about.
Dad was also a police officer, a career detective who specialised in homicide. And, because the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary covers a huge area, being called upon to work on an investigation in somewhere like Plymouth or Exeter would often see him working anything up to 150 miles from his beloved typewriter at the family home in Hayle. There were no affordable laptops back then, of course, and he would often spend weeks away on some serious investigation that took up all of his time.
But then in 1985, and despite good health and fitness, he suffered an unexpected and massive heart attack. He was forty-five, and very lucky to survive it. As he later wrote in an article: ‘Vigorous external cardiac massage and three jolts of enough electricity to resurrect Frankenstein’s monster had been needed to return me to the land of the living.’ He was to endure several smaller but debilitating attacks over the next few years as his body tried to reject the damaged part of his heart. He also suffered painful arthritis of the spine and ribcage caused by the aforementioned cardiac massage, and this kept him from sitting for too long at a keyboard. But he remained cheerful and upbeat and continued his research whenever he felt strong enough.
By 1990, he was feeling stronger, he’d retired from the police, Mum had bought him an expensive newfangled word processor, and now, finally, he had the time and the energy to devote to his unwritten novel. But he was never to finish it. Dad suffered a final heart attack in 1991 and died at the age of just fifty-one.
It took a little while to sort out his affairs and part of that involved me going through the boxes of floppy discs on which he’d stored his work. I was able to convert his documents to a modern format, which means that I now have them safely backed up and preserved for posterity. Everything he’d ever written was there but, to my dismay, there was no trace of Dad’s novel on any of the discs. Nor was it stored on his processor’s onboard memory. I knew that he’d written some of it because he’d once read an extract to me over the phone. But now, it seemed, whatever he had written had somehow been tragically lost.
However, a couple of years later, while sorting through some box files of material that Dad had accumulated while researching our family tree, my brother Si found some notes relating to the novel and twenty-four printed pages of text comprising the first three chapters of the book. The notes seemed to suggest that maybe this was how far he’d got. In some ways, I hope that’s true because I’d like to believe that everything he wrote has been saved.
In the quarter century since he died, people have suggested to me that I finish The Chief Constable Regrets. I love the idea of doing so but, sadly, I have no idea how. The only notes that Dad left behind relate solely to the characters, their backgrounds and their relationships; there are no clues as to the plot and I can’t even be sure who commits the murders (although I can make an educated guess) or how. I wish I could remember details of the discussions we had back in the 1980s, but too much time has passed by. It might be possible to finish it one day, however. The one thing that no one in my family has found yet is Dad’s notebook. He carried it with him everywhere and he was always jotting ideas down (I do the same thing myself). I assume that’s where most of the historical details and his plot ideas were stored. If we ever do find it, who knows what might be in there? In the meantime, however, I thought it might be nice to incorporate some of his first murder mystery within the body of my first murder mystery as a kind of tribute to him.
The plot of The Chief Constable Regrets revolves around a group of demobbed soldiers who had all been part of a ‘Pals and Chums Battalion’ during the First World War. The War Office believed, and with some justification, that people from the same village, or cricket team, or college, would look out for each other during battle and make for a more cohesive fighting unit. Therefore, friends, colleagues and family members were often assigned to the same platoons. However, this also meant that, during the bloodiest engagements, the men who had enlisted together often died together. It was not uncommon for the entire male line of a family to be wiped out in a single push, the evidence of which can be seen on war memorials up and down the country. In Dad’s novel, the survivors return home and settle back into civilian life, but then someone starts to systematically kill them off, one by one, presumably because of something that happened to them all during wartime. Maybe they left someone behind for dead? Maybe there’s a German survivor with a personal grudge? Maybe it’s a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; what they called ‘shell-shock’ back then. The fact is, I just don’t know. However, I thought it might be fun to use the general plot of The Chief Constable Regrets as the plot of a book called Swords into Ploughshares written by my fictional detective,
Agnes Crabbe. By doing so, it meant that I could use Dad’s novel, or part of it at least, as an important component of A Murder to Die For. You’ll find Dad’s writing in Chapters 5, 16 and 17 when Mrs Handibode and DI Blount are reading extracts from the book.
This year marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of Dad’s tragically early death and I still miss his charm, his wit and his wisdom every day. But, by using extracts from The Chief Constable Regrets in this book, I’m making sure that he finally got his novel into print – or some of it, anyway – and I hope that this will, in some small way, commemorate a talented writer, a genuinely lovely man and a wonderful dad.
And I don’t have to pay him any royalties!
He’d have laughed at that.
Stevyn Colgan
Somewhere near Nasely, South Herewardshire
March 2017
P.S. Do you fancy playing detective yourself?
In a sudden fit of mischievousness, I found myself hiding the titles of ten Agatha Christie novels throughout this book. They all take the form of anagrams and they’re all proper names. So, for example, I might have hidden The Pale Horse as the name ‘Peter Holeash’, or Absent in the Spring as ‘Tessa Perth-Binning’, or I could have turned Giant’s Bread into a place name like ‘East Brading’. As it happens, I didn’t use any of those in the book. But I did use ten others.
Good luck finding them all!
You can read more about this book and its characters at amurdertodiefor.blogspot.co.uk
Acknowledgements
I have a lot of people to thank for helping me to make this book a reality. And I should start with the Queens of Crime.
The earliest origins of the detective fiction genre may lie with stories like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) or Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), but it is generally held that the era of the classic crime-fiction novel really began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which entertained readers from 1887 to 1927 (and, indeed, still do to this day). But, as Holmes and Watson bowed out, the twenties and thirties ushered in the ‘Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, which was dominated by women writers and four in particular – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – the so-called ‘Queens of Crime’.1 Their books were immensely popular; Agatha Christie alone has sold over two billion books – a figure beaten only by Shakespeare and the Bible. Her stories have been translated into more than 600 languages and have spawned endless TV series and film adaptations.
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