The Wounded Snake

by Fay Sampson

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘Not to anything like this. To the literary festival in the summer, or sometimes just to wander round the grounds.’

  ‘You must be local, then.’

  ‘Near enough. Twenty miles away. Do I gather this is your first time?’

  ‘Yes. It looked absolutely beautiful in the publicity. And Harry’s keen on gardening. I couldn’t resist the combination. He can wander round the grounds, while I do the dastardly murder. Perfect combination.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Dark deeds in an idyllic setting. It gives an extra frisson, don’t you think?’

  A squat, straight-haired woman was advancing upon them. She was inspecting people as she passed. She stopped in front of Hilary.

  ‘Your name badge,’ she demanded. ‘You must have been given one when you booked in.’

  ‘Upstairs on the dressing table,’ Hilary confessed. ‘I’m not keen on going round with “Hilary” blazoned on my bosom.’

  The woman’s own badge said in bold letters: THERESA.

  ‘You’ll need it to get into Dinah Halsgrove’s talk after this.’

  ‘Sorry!’ said Hilary, feeling like a scolded schoolgirl. ‘I wouldn’t miss that for the world. I’ll nip up and get it when I’ve finished this delicious cake.’

  The stout woman softened. ‘There’s more on the table. Help yourself.’

  Someone tapped a teaspoon against the urn. The chatter across the garden fell silent. A tall man, with wavy black hair and a silver-grey jacket, threw a professional smile around the group, deliberately including all of them.

  ‘Hello, everybody. Good to see you all. I’m Gavin Standforth, in case you hadn’t recognized me from my dust jackets. It will be my delight to entice you into a life of crime over this weekend. Mind you, you could say I’m cutting off my own nose to spite my face. With competition to get published the way it is, why would I want to encourage more of you to become crime writers, and take the bread out of my mouth?’

  His audience shared in the laughter.

  ‘You’ve been given the programme when you arrived. Just to draw your attention to the two highlights of today. First, of course, Dinah Halsgrove’s talk will be in the Great Barn straight after this. Then at seven it’s down to the quay for our evening boat trip on the Dart. There’ll be a buffet supper on board and I’ll talk you through some of the things you’ll see downriver. I believe most of you have got cars, but if you haven’t, see me or Theresa’ – he indicated the stout woman who had inspected their badges – ‘and we’ll fix you up with a lift. If you have any issues on the domestic side, see the Morland Abbey people. They have someone on duty twenty-four/seven, on reception, or in the bar, or failing that on the end of a mobile phone. Anything to do with the programme, come to us. That’s me, Theresa, or Melissa, whom you’re just about to meet.’

  Hilary sensed a commotion behind her. She turned with everyone else. Two women were coming out of the Great Barn to join them. One was unnaturally tall, her head stooped forward under a fall of light-brown hair. She wore a dress of almost-transparent floral material in shades of green, which fell to her ankles and floated as she walked. The other was considerably older, but trimly upright, with the sort of straight backbone you rarely saw nowadays. Her white hair was cut severely short around a weathered but intelligent face.

  ‘Dinah Halsgrove!’ breathed Veronica. ‘In the flesh.’

  Gavin broke off what he was saying. He strode towards his distinguished guest, hand outstretched, face set in a beam of welcome. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. Dinah Halsgrove looked rather startled. She did not return the kiss.

  ‘They did well to get her for such a small affair as this,’ Hilary grunted. ‘There must only be about thirty of us.’

  ‘She’s spoken at the literary festival here before, hasn’t she? I know that’s much bigger, but she probably likes coming to the abbey. Who wouldn’t?’

  Hilary continued to stare at the meeting between the trim, decisive-looking woman, with such a worldwide reputation for crime thrillers, and the rather unctuous Gavin Standforth with his solitary bestseller.

  ‘Now there’s an idea for a crime novel,’ she mused. ‘Which do you fancy? “Famous detective writer murdered at mystery weekend”? Or “Queen of crime suspected of murder at thriller convention”?’

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ Veronica laughed. ‘Not the second one, anyway. Someone who’s written as many bestselling detective stories as she has should be able to plan the perfect murder and get away with it.’

  THREE

  Gavin approached his distinguished guest bearing a plate of cakes and a beaming smile. Dinah Halsgrove waved the offering aside. As if unwilling to accept rejection, he continued to hover at her elbow.

  ‘I can recommend the fruit cake,’ suggested Hilary, who had worked her way within speaking distance. ‘Morland’s finest.’

  The novelist turned a businesslike smile on her. ‘Type two diabetes, I’m afraid. More difficult to control as you grow older. I already take so many tablets I rattle like a maraca.’ She switched that polite smile to Gavin. ‘Tea, if you wouldn’t mind. With lemon.’

  Her host’s eager grin vanished. He strode back towards the tea table.

  Hilary watched Jo Walters advance on their speaker. Her small bespectacled face was a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

  ‘I loved The Case of the Disappearing Rabbit,’ she ventured. ‘The ending really took me by surprise.’

  Dinah Halsgrove favoured her with a rather weary but courteous smile. ‘I’m glad you liked it. Do you write yourself?’

  A strange expression came over Jo’s face. It might almost have been anger. ‘I try.’

  ‘No luck with publication? It’s a tough old world in publishing at the moment, I’m afraid.’

  She accepted the cup of tea Gavin brought her and moved a few discreet steps back, away from her fans. Hilary heard her tell her long-skirted minder, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like a little rest before my talk.’

  Presently the two of them headed back inside the building.

  Hilary turned to find another elderly woman standing on her own. Also small, also trim, but with short grey hair instead of white. There was something about her self-containment which made her solitude seem something to be respected, rather than pitied. She had not moved to intrude upon Dinah Halsgrove, though she had stood not far away.

  All the same, Hilary advanced upon her. ‘Hilary Masters. Here with murderous intent. Like you, I assume.’

  If the woman looked surprised, her smile was warmer than Dinah Halsgrove’s dutiful politeness had been.

  ‘Lin Bell. Yes, I had a go at writing historicals, with no success, I’m afraid. But I discovered an unexpected streak of violence in my books. It made me wonder whether I wouldn’t do better in crime.’

  ‘I think we’re all going to reveal things about ourselves we hadn’t suspected. I can’t wait to get started. My friend Veronica over there …’ She indicated her tall, fair companion, who seemed to be laughing with a pair of young men. ‘She’s the sweetest creature imaginable in real life. I’m dying to know her thoughts about killing someone.’

  The gathering in the private garden was thinning. Veronica came over the grass to rejoin Hilary.

  ‘It looks as if we’re being steered into the Great Barn. It’s nearly four thirty.’

  Gavin’s helper, Theresa, was standing by the door, encouraging the course members into the shadows of the stone-flagged corridor. Stewards were standing by the inner doors that gave access to the Great Barn auditorium. There were a great many more people than Hilary had expected. Veronica showed her name badge and was allowed through.

  Hilary stepped forward. She put on her most authoritative senior teacher’s voice. ‘I’ve left that silly name badge in my room, but I’m booked on the crime-writing course. I’ve come with my friend whom you’ve just let through.’ She favoured the bespectacled young man with a c
onfident beam.

  He blushed. ‘I’m sorry. You have to show a name badge or a ticket. I can’t let you through without.’

  Veronica’s back was disappearing down the crowded aisle towards the front of the hall, under the arching beams. The seats were filling rapidly, not only from the garden, but from the great door nearest the gateway as well. Inside the barn, people were starting to perch on the broad ledges that ran round the walls.

  ‘Idiot!’ Hilary said to herself. Of course, thirty would-be crime writers would hardly pay the expenses for someone like Dinah Halsgrove. What was it the door steward had said? Name badges or tickets. Gavin must have advertised her talk to the general public. And with her reputation, the Great Barn would probably be full.

  ‘Veronica!’ Hilary called. But her friend did not look back. She had probably not heard. ‘Drat!’ The look Hilary gave the young steward should have shrivelled him on the spot. But he was busy checking the badges of other course members behind her and admitting them to the hall.

  Fuming, Hilary headed for the door to the cobbled courtyard and out into the blaze of sunlight. To her dismay, a long queue was snaking along the path, moving slowly up the steps into the barn.

  Unwilling to admit that it was herself she should be annoyed with, she stomped her way against the flow of arrivals. She muttered her excuses as she broke through the slowly moving queue to the cloister garth and the door that led up to her room.

  The two flights of stairs seemed steep, even without a suitcase.

  Mercifully, the name badge announcing ‘Hilary, Beginning a Life in Crime’ was indeed lying on the dressing table where she had a vague memory of discarding it. With a scowl at the mirror, she pinned it on her blouse.

  As she descended the stairs she had a nasty feeling that she might now be expected to join the queue of ticket-holders, and not overtake them to regain the privileged access of the other course members coming straight from the private garden.

  She struggled with the fire doors at the foot of the first flight of stairs and almost cannoned into someone else approaching along the narrow landing.

  The woman drew back with a hiss of indrawn breath.

  ‘Sorry!’ Hilary exclaimed. ‘More haste, less speed. After you. I assume you’re heading for Dinah Halsgrove’s talk. Oh, sorry! You’re on the staff, aren’t you?’

  She recognized the woman now, though the landing was in shadow. The silhouette was familiar. That way of bending her head forward to reduce her height. It was the woman in the long floral dress who had accompanied Dinah Halsgrove out on to the lawn. She was, Hilary assumed, another of Gavin’s assistants, like Theresa. She must have been sent to meet the speaker at the station.

  ‘No! No, it’s nothing. You go ahead.’ The woman spoke rapidly. There was an undercurrent of something sharper in her voice. She withdrew into the shadows of the corridor so swiftly it was as if she had never been there. Hilary could not even hear her steps hurrying along it.

  For all her haste to join the queue, Hilary paused for a second. It seemed an odd time for the woman to be going to her room. Surely no one involved with the crime-writing course would want to miss Dinah Halsgrove’s talk?

  But perhaps it wasn’t her own room she was heading for. Hilary’s experience of attending conferences here before told her that the best bedrooms on the first floor of the historic East Cloister were often reserved for speakers. Opposite, in the West Cloister, the rooms had a more modern feel. And the rooms on the second floor tended to be smaller, like Veronica’s.

  Still, there was only one guest speaker this time. Gavin’s staff might also be occupying rooms on this lower corridor.

  There was no time to stand and wonder about this, or why the woman had seemed so startled to meet Hilary on the landing. Almost – Hilary tested the word in her mind – angry. It seemed a puzzling reaction, but there was no time now to think about it. She hurried down the second flight of stairs and into the courtyard.

  The end of the queue had moved past the door and was moving up the steps into the hall.

  ‘Drat!’ said Hilary again. She pictured the Great Barn full now: the front seats at floor level before the speakers’ table, the raked seating in the back half of the hall, the elevated ledges that could hold several dozen people. As she climbed the steps, almost the last to do so, she sighed. She was past the age of wanting to sit on a narrow ledge. Instead, she turned to the left, showed her name badge to another steward and was allowed through the door which gave access up more steps to the rear gallery, added by Sir George when he turned the tithe barn into his great hall.

  The gallery too was almost full. Hilary squeezed her way past people’s knees to a vacant place on the bench near the wall.

  She was in no good humour as she peered down into the body of the Great Barn. It should have been an emotive sight. Heraldic banners blazed from poles along the walls. A forest of medieval timbers vaulted overhead. A table and two chairs were set on the rostrum. But for once, Hilary was not in the mood to revel in the setting.

  It took her some time to locate Veronica’s fair head in the third row from the front. She seemed to have been keeping an empty seat beside her, but as Hilary watched, she relinquished it to the steward’s appeal and let a latecomer take the vacant place. Hilary glowered. If she had thought, she could have claimed it herself.

  There was a rustle through the audience, then a burst of clapping as Gavin led his distinguished speaker through a door on to the rostrum. Even from this distance, Hilary could sense how thrilled he was to be hosting the grande dame of crime writing at what was, after all, an insignificant provincial writing course. It’s the barn, she thought. It isn’t Gavin Standforth who has lured her here; it’s Morland Abbey. She’s been here for more prestigious festivals and it has laid its enchantment on her.

  Gavin was introducing her. ‘You hardly need me to remind you of her achievements. Forty-one detective novels, guaranteed to go straight to the top of the bestseller lists. The distinguished patron of authors’ organizations and a prominent spokeswoman on their behalf. Something of an expert, I believe, on the administration of poison.’ As he turned to her with a knowing smile, a ripple of appreciative laughter ran through the audience.

  ‘You will understand, I’m sure, if she doesn’t occupy the speaker’s usual place at the lectern. She has asked if she may deliver her talk sitting down. I hope everyone can hear her well enough. So without further ado, I give you … the queen of crime, Dinah Halsgrove.’

  The applause as he sat down was even more enthusiastic.

  Hilary reflected, with a small ray of satisfaction, that she might, after all, have a better view from the gallery than some of those seated in the body of the hall, with other people’s heads in the way.

  Just for a moment, the little woman in the cerise shirt and black trousers seemed about to get to her feet. An instinctive movement. She must have spoken at scores of such gatherings over the years. But she sank down again behind the table with the microphones. She looked a more diminutive figure than she had when drinking tea on the lawn. Her sleekly cut hair was snow white. It was a vivid contrast: red, black, white, though the trousers were largely hidden by the tablecloth. The colours of the Celtic goddess of fertility, Hilary remembered: Maiden, Mother, Crone. Dinah Halsgrove had definitely reached the Crone stage and wore it with an imperious authority. And yet, seated, there was something vulnerable in the ninety-two-year-old facing the expectations of her capacity audience.

  But when Dinah began to speak, Hilary settled back with what she was surprised to identify as relief. The elderly novelist had lost none of her ability to spellbind an audience. And Hilary knew from experience that not everyone who wrote well could speak about it entertainingly.

  ‘I must have killed more people in my career than some of you have had birthdays.’ Gavin’s reference to her expert knowledge of poisons had drawn only laughter. Now, there was something in the way Dinah Halsgrove spoke that sent a frisson down the spine. These
deaths, it said, were serious to her.

  ‘When I share notes with fellow crime writers, I find that we begin with different starting points. For some it is the setting. Everything that happens springs from that place. Other writers are grabbed by their central character, be that the murderer or, more likely, his pursuing nemesis. For me, it is the crime itself. How exactly is it done, and why? And you will appreciate that, after forty-one novels, it gets harder to think of yet another method as arresting as the first, or another twist in the workings of the human mind. I’m praying – and that’s not too strong a word – that the ideas and inventions will keep coming, as long as I’m physically and mentally capable of handling a keyboard.

  ‘Of course, one doesn’t just sit and wait for ideas to arrive out of the blue. They come to those who go in search of them, or at least create the opportunities for them to appear. Gavin, dear boy, you are right. I must have done enough study into the range of poisons, their effect on the human body, and the chances of their going undetected, to qualify for at least two PhDs.’

  Hilary followed the talk with enjoyment. The detailed examples about the physical characteristics of some poisons, combined with the deviousness of the minds that had used them, interwove strangely with the setting of this magnificent medieval hall. Of course, if she wrote a crime novel herself, it would almost certainly be historical and set in Elizabethan times. That, after all, had been the highlight of her teaching and her personal studies for nearly forty years. In an instant, she peopled this hall below her with the aristocratic Woodleigh family and their guests, their ambitious attendants, their low-born servants.

  It was a jolt to be brought back to twenty-first-century science. But the two were not entirely unconnected. At its height, Morland would have had its wise adepts, its herb garden, with plants that could bring both healing or death, depending on the dose. Certainly its share of jealousies, political and personal, to send long shadows down this hall.

  Sooner than she wanted, the talk was over. There were questions, but not too many. Gavin was the solicitous chairman, his famous speaker like a personal treasure he must protect from pawing hands.