Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

An Expert in Murder

A New Mystery

Featuring Josephine Tey

nicola upson

To Phyllis and to Irene, for their wisdomand belief, with love from us both

Contents

One

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the

3

Two

Detective Inspector Archie Penrose could never travel in the Kings 17

Three

When Josephine awoke next morning, it had just gone nine

31

Four

It was turning into the sort of day that made

49

Five

Penrose sat at his desk on the third floor of

71

Six

Josephine was already waiting on the pavement when Penroses car 79

Seven

Theatre is a self-obsessed medium at the best of times

95

Eight

The telephone on the dark oak desk in Bernard Aubreys

105

Nine

Penrose had not intended to use his ticket for the

123

Ten

Bernard Aubreys body lay just inside his office and Penrose

137

Eleven

Penrose stood at the door to the Green Room, and

155

Twelve

The early hours of Sunday morning brought nothing but despair

185

Thirteen

As Penrose left the interview room and walked out to

203

Fourteen

Peace was an infrequent visitor to 66 St Martins Lane

231

Fifteen

Even late on a Sunday afternoon, Longacre seemed too narrow

249

Sixteen

In the early hours of Monday morning, St Martins Lane

275

Authors Note 289

Acknowledgements 291

About the Author

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Night was falling when at last he sat down, ready to write.

Looking out over the garden, he watched as the louring, grey skieswere replaced inch by inch with a blackness that wrapped itselflike a shroud around the bushes at the limits of his view. Winterhad played its customary trick, weaving the landscape together ina cloth of muted colours and bringing a spent uniformity to all hecould see. The cold had deadened the richness of the world. In themorning, there would be a covering of frost on the window ledge.

Impatient now to hand over his past, he poured the last inch ofwarmth from the whisky bottle on the desk and drained his glassbefore reaching for a sheet of notepaper. It was, he thought withsatisfaction, an original sort of bequest. As if in deference to thesignificance of the moment, the house usually so alive with faintbut familiar sounds fell silent as he picked up the slim, brownvolume that lay on the table in front of him. He flicked through itspages until he came to the section he wished to use; the phrase hadalways struck him as peculiarly apt, and never more so than now.

With a bitter smile, which came half from regret and half from resignation, he picked up the pen and began, his lips forming thewords in perfect unison with the ink on the page. To become anexpert in murder, he wrote, cannot be so difficult.

1

One

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the odds were against her when she found that her train, the early-morning express from the Highlands, was running an hour and a half late. At six oclock, when she walked down the steps to the south-bound platform, she expected to find the air of excitement which always accompanies the muddled loading of people and suitcases onto a departing train. Instead, she was met by a testa-ment to the long wait ahead: the carriages were in darkness; the engine itself gravely silent; and a mountain of luggage built steadily along the cold, grey strand of platform. But like most people of her generation, who had lived through war and loss, Josephine had acquired a sense of perspective, and the trains mechanical failure foretold nothing more sinister to her than a tiresome wait in the stations buffet. In fact, although this was the day of the first murder, nothing would disturb her peace of mind until the following morning.

By the time she had drained three cups of bland coffee, the train appeared to be ready for its journey. She left the buffets crowded warmth and prepared to board, stopping on the way to buy a copy of yesterdays Times and a bar of Frys chocolate from the small news kiosk next to the platform. As she took her seat, she could not help but feel a rush of excitement in spite of the delay: in a matter of hours, she would be in London.

The ornate station clock declared that it was a quarter past eight when the train finally left the mouth of the station and moved slowly out into the countryside. Josephine settled back into her seat and allowed the gentle thrum of the wheels to soothe away 3

any lingering frustrations of the morning. Removing her gloves and taking out a handkerchief, she cleared a small port-hole in the misted window and watched as the strengthening light took some of the tiredness from the cold March day. On the whole, winter had been kind. There had, thank God, been no repeat of the snow wreaths and roaring winds which had brought the Highland railway to a sudden standstill the year before, leaving her and many others stranded in waiting rooms overnight. Engines with snow ploughs attached had been sent to force a passage through, and she would never forget the sight of them charging the drifts at full speed, shooting huge blocks of snow forty feet into the air.

Shivering at the memory of it, she unfolded her newspaper and turned to the review pages, where she was surprised to find that the Crime Book Societys selection was a hair-raising yarn called Mr Munt Carries On. They couldnt have read the book, she thought, since she had tried it herself and considered Mr Munt to have carried on for far too long to be worth seven and six of anybodys money. When she arrived at the theatre section, which she had purposely saved until last, she smiled to herself at the news that Richard of Bordeaux her own play and now Londons longest run was about to enter its final week.

As the train moved south, effortlessly eating into four hundred miles or so of open fields and closed communities, she noticed that spring had come early to England as quick to grace the gentle countryside as it had been to enhance the drama of the hills against a Highland sky. There was something very precious about the way that rail travel allowed you to see the landscape, she thought. It had an expansiveness about it that the close confinement of a motor car simply could not match and she had loved it since, as a young woman, she had spent her holidays travelling every inch of the single-track line that shadowed the turf from Inverness to Tain.

Even now, more than twenty years later, she could never leave Scotland by train without remembering the summer of her seven-teenth birthday, when she and her lover in defiance of the terrible weather had explored the Highlands by rail, taking a different route from Daviot Station every morning. When war broke out, a 4

year later almost to the day, the world changed forever but for her at least that particular bond to a different age had stayed the same, and perhaps always would.

This link with the past was becoming harder to hold on to, though, as she found herself unexpectedly in the public eye. She had had thirteen months and four hundred and sixty performances to get used to being the author of the most popular play in London, but fame still tasted strange to her.