An Expert in Murder (41 page)

Authors: Nicola Upson

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BOOK: An Expert in Murder

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Archie,’ she said, oblivious to the scene they were making. ‘How can you talk about playing God after all that’s happened? You know, I’m sick and tired of people making decisions for me, telling me how I would and wouldn’t feel. First I’m caught up in a private war between Vintner and Aubrey, and now you’ve manoeuvred me into some sort of no man’s land between you and Jack.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, stunned. ‘It isn’t the same thing at all.’

‘Isn’t it? You’re manipulating me because of your own guilt, and from where I’m standing that’s exactly the same thing. How dare you tell me how I’d have felt when you never gave me the chance to find out? Yes, I was in love with Jack, but it was young love and it didn’t ask for very much. It might have grown, of course – I assumed it would at the time – but I would have looked for something more sooner or later. I’m not going to live my whole life according to the options I had when I was nineteen. So don’t think you know what’s best for me, because you don’t.’

‘And when exactly is this sooner or later going to arrive? You were let off the hook in deciding whether or not to commit to Jack, and ever since, you’ve used his death as an excuse not to commit to anyone. Instead, you just throw yourself into your work, living with people who don’t exist and never will.’ He stopped, and turned away, unable to trust himself not to go any further and suspecting that he had already said more than he would be forgiven for.

Josephine let him walk away. Shaken by the truth in his parting shot, she sat down on the cold, stone steps of one of the government buildings that lined the street and watched him stride angrily down Whitehall. He stopped by the Cenotaph, and bent down to pick something up from the foot of the memorial. As he stood there, looking at it, she wondered what was going through his head, and realised sadly that she would never truly know: no matter how hard she tried to put herself in his position, or how strong the instinct for forgiveness and reconciliation, understanding was one of the casualties of the war; even now, there was an unbearable void between those who had fought it and those who had not, a stifling of emotion which was not so different from the deaden-287

ing of joy that Marta had talked about. How many generations would it last, she wondered? And what would the future have held for Elspeth if those who loved her had not been so crippled by the past? In the distance, Archie replaced whatever he had taken up and walked on towards Derby Gate. Before he could move too far out of reach, she got up and went after him.

288

Author’s Note

To write fiction about historic fact is very nearly impermissible.

Gordon Daviot,
The Privateer

An Expert in Murder
is a work of fiction, inspired by real lives and events.

Gordon Daviot was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) during a versatile career as playwright and novelist; the other, Josephine Tey, was taken from her Suffolk great-great-grandmother and did not actually appear until 1936, with the publication of
A Shilling for Candles
. It was reserved for detective fiction, and is the name by which we know her best today.

By 1934, she had written a mystery and two other novels as Daviot, but it was
Richard of Bordeaux
which made her name and led to a number of important friendships and professional relationships. Mackintosh divided her time between London and her hometown, Inverness, where she looked after her father, and, when she died, she left the bulk of her considerable estate to the National Trust for England. The Josephine Tey who appears in
An
Expert in Murder
mixes what we know about Elizabeth Mackintosh with the personality which emerges so strongly from her eight crime novels – novels which are loved for their warmth and originality by those who have discovered them, but which are still vastly underrated in comparison with the work of her contem-poraries.

Richard of Bordeaux
ran for 463 performances at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre) in St Martin’s Lane, closing on 24 March 1934. It took more than £100,000 at the box office under the management of Howard Wyndham and Bronson Albery (who lived to enjoy the success), and acquired the sort of 289

popularity that films enjoy today: hundreds of Elspeths went thirty or forty times to see it; the cast took part in high-profile publicity stunts; commemorative portrait dolls were produced; and it turned its leading man, John Gielgud, from a brilliant young actor into a celebrity overnight. The beauty of the set and costumes, designed by ‘Motley’ (Margaret and Sophia Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery), was vital to the play’s success, as was Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’s performance as Anne.
Bordeaux
toured provincial theatres and was produced on Broadway, but the over-all experience was not entirely positive for its author: fame was unwelcome, particularly in Inverness, and, according to Gielgud, she was subject to unfair accusations of plagiarism which hurt her deeply. Gielgud’s own hopes for a film starring himself and Lillian Gish were never realised.

Daviot wrote many other plays –
The Laughing Woman
and
Queen of Scots
were produced at the New later in 1934 – but none were as successful as
Bordeaux
, whose humanity and romanticism struck a powerful chord in an audience haunted by one war and threatened by another. The war’s significance in the public response was a surprise even to the author: what she thought of as a tale of revenge, she admitted later, turned out to be a play about pacifism.

For an author who wrote several historical plays and novels, Elizabeth Mackintosh took a dim view of mixing fact and fiction –

but she allowed it if the writer stated where the truth could be found, and if invention did not falsify the general picture. Readers wanting to know more about the real people involved in
Richard
of Bordeaux
should consult Gielgud’s autobiographical writings, the biographies by Sheridan Morley and Jonathan Croall, and Michael Mullin’s
Design by Motley
. Murder, of course, does rather distort the general picture, but I hope that it won’t entirely eclipse a unique moment of theatrical history and the true beginning of a remarkable writing career.

290

Acknowledgements

An Expert in Murder
was part of the 2005–6 Escalator Literature Awards Programme and funded by Arts Council England, and I am especially grateful to the New Writing Partnership and Michelle Spring, and to all at Arts Council England, East, for their support.

The book is a tribute to the people whose hard work and achievements created such a special world during the 1930s –

particularly to Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Harris of Motley, both of whom were kind enough to talk to me at length about the theatre of the period, and, of course, to Josephine Tey, whose work is at the heart of the novel.

Many other people have helped – wittingly or unwittingly – and I owe particular thanks to Karolina Sutton, Jennifer Joel, Laura Sampson and ICM for wonderful advice and encouragement; to Claire Wachtel, Jonathan Burnham and Heather Drucker for their passion for the novel; to Peter Mendelsohn, Cindy Achar, Roni Axelrod and Julia Novitch at HarperCollins for their care and vision in its production; to Walter Donohue for his magic at the beginning; to Dr Peter Fordyce and Stewart P. Evans for their expertise in very different areas of unpleasantness; to Richard Reynolds for his enthusiasm and knowledge of detective fiction; to Jane Munro and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for influencing Archie’s taste in art so beautifully; to Helen Grime and Margaret Westwood for their great interest and help with the project; to Josceline Dimbleby for the story of May Gaskell in her book
A Profound Secret
; to Virginia Nicholson for the wealth of information in
Among the Bohemians
; to Ian Ross, for the time to 291

make a start; to H.W. for additional typing; and to Sir Donald Sinden, Frith Banbury, Dulcie Gray and the late Michael Denison for their generosity in sharing recollections and stories with me.

Love and thanks go, as always, to my parents and family – for much, much more than their enthusiasm for this novel.

And to Mandy, who has been so instrumental in every moment

– from the original idea and wild beginnings to the fine detail and finished book – the joy of this is all down to you.

292

About the Author

NICOLA UPSON is also the author of two works of nonfiction and has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist. The recipient of the Escalator Award from Arts Council England, she splits her time between Cambridge and Cornwall.

www.nicolaupson.com

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Credits

Jacket photograph © Bert Hardy

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsohn

Copyright

AN EXPERT IN MURDER. Copyright © 2008 by Nicola Upson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader April 2008

ISBN 978-0-06-167019-0

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