Time to Be in Earnest (22 page)

On Thursday afternoon I flew to the Isle of Man to give a lecture in St. German’s Cathedral, organized by the Friends of the Cathedral, on Friday, and an afternoon talk on Saturday to the island’s Prayer Book Society. I stayed with Mrs. Salisbury-Jones in her stone house in the centre of Castleton. From my top-floor window I could glimpse the sea which, under the red and gold sky of early morning, looked like a sheet of gleaming metal. Even the sand was golden-yellow. Mrs. Salisbury-Jones was welcoming and hospitable and took great trouble to show me the island on Saturday morning and on Sunday.

The architecture is generally undistinguished but the island itself much more interesting and attractive than I remembered from one previous
visit. It seems that all the variety of scenery found in the rest of the United Kingdom is present in this small island. The charming little ports reminded me of Dorset and the West Country. The central hills with the valleys and streams were like parts of Scotland, while the plain in the west leading down to a pebbled shore with dunes and marram grass and great round stones reminded me strongly of East Anglia. The weather was wonderful and I shall retain a very clear memory of Sunday afternoon when we drove to Peel. We found a seat against the castle walls and sat in the strength of the mellow sunshine looking across Peel harbour and eating particularly good crab rolls.

I liked the inscription on Bishop Sam’s tomb in the ruins of the Cathedral: “In this house which I share with my brothers the worms in hope of the resurrection to life lie I, Sam, by divine grace Bishop of this Island. Stay reader, look and laugh at the Bishop’s palace. Died 30th May, Anno 1662, Samuel Rutter, Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man.”

This evening I spoke at a joint
Times-Dillons
literary event at the Institute of Education. I was apprehensive that there wouldn’t be much of an audience, since the charge of £10 seemed to me high. However, there were about 350 people present; an interested and very warm audience. There was no shortage of questions, and a long line at the subsequent signing.

Afterwards, Peter Stothard, the editor, took about twelve of us out to dinner at the Etoile, where I sat next to the Deputy Chief Constable of Thames Valley Constabulary. He offered to show me a murder incident room when I am next in Oxford, and this will be helpful. Apparently some of my details in
Original Sin
were not totally accurate.

Not all the questions after a talk are about my work. Some people expect me to be an expert on crime fiction (which I am not), and I’m frequently asked about my response to real-life crimes and to the death penalty. I reply that I have always been an abolitionist, but that this stance is hardly rational since I do believe that the death penalty deters. I am, therefore, prepared to see people put at additional risk of being murdered rather than live in a country which enacts the death penalty. I
expect my hatred of the death penalty is influenced by my horror of hanging, surely a barbaric if effective way of putting people to death.

It seems to me that when I was a child there was far more public and newspaper interest in murder trials than there is today. Perhaps those detailed accounts, often with photographs, satisfied the public’s fascination with murder which, today, is catered to by television series on crime and the police. I can remember the pages of broadsheet which covered the trial in 1931 of Alfred Arthur Rouse, who murdered a hitchhiker whose identity is still unknown, and can recall the newspaper pictures of the burnt-out car. But the murder which evoked a personal response was that of Vera Page, also in 1931, perhaps because, like me, she was an eleven-year-old. Her body—she had been raped and strangled—was found on the morning of 16th December in the tradesmen’s entrance of a house in Addison Road, Kensington. She had gone after school to show her swimming certificates to her grandmother and never returned home. I can clearly recall her face from the newspaper photographs: dark haired, and with the eager bright-eyed look of a child for whom life is an enchantment. A neighbour, Percy Orlando Rust, was an obvious suspect. He had worn a finger bandage similar to one found on the body, he had no alibi, and there were other physical clues linking him to the crime. During questioning by the coroner a woman stood up in court and shouted, “That man is telling lies, sir.” But the coroner’s jury found the evidence against Rust insufficient and no one was ever brought to trial. It still seems inexplicable to me that the police, provided with so much physical evidence, couldn’t solve the case. Today, with DNA, there would be no difficulty. It is extraordinary how that child’s face is imprinted on my imagination. Perhaps there persists in the human psyche an atavistic belief that a murder must be solved if the dead are to rest in peace.

Gill Frost arrived to give me a massage at 8 a.m. and at 9:30 a journalist rang from New Zealand for a telephone interview, followed by a call at 10 o’clock from an Australian journalist.

In the afternoon Andy arrived with Rosemary in the car to drive us
to Chipping Norton for a talk in the small theatre there, followed by a signing. Rosemary has her left arm in a sling as she fell on the rocks at Purbeck during the weekend and broke her wrist. We went first to have supper with Penelope and Jack Lively at their medieval farmhouse at Great Rollright. They then drove us to Chipping Norton, where Andy had taken his car to find himself a pub meal, and be ready later to drive us back to London.

The theatre was full, the audience lively and encouraging with particularly good questions, although I was very tired at the end of the session, trying to sign for stock while being interviewed simultaneously by a local journalist. But this was a very worthwhile signing, arranged by Elizabeth Sleight, who is the proprietor of a small independent bookshop in Chipping Norton and is dedicated, enthusiastic and successful in attracting writers to talk and sign.

I was asked, as I often am, about one of the novels which isn’t a detective story and doesn’t feature Adam Dalgliesh:
Innocent Blood
. This is the only one of my novels influenced by a real-life murder case. It had, in fact, a twofold genesis: a murder and an act of Parliament.

The inspiration first came when I was working at the Home Office and was concerned with some of the provisions relating to care orders in the Children’s Act 1975. This was a DHSS not a Home Office Bill, but my division had an interest in the provisions relating to juvenile courts. But the Bill was primarily concerned with adoption. Adoption proceedings were confidential. A mother placing her child for adoption would not be told the name of the adopters and they would not know the identity of the birth mother. An adopted child would grow up with no way of finding out its natural parentage. Parliament took the view that young people had a right to this knowledge, even though it meant breaking faith with both those who had adopted a child under the previous arrangement and those who had parted with a child in the assurance of secrecy. The Bill provided that a young person of eighteen, after counselling with a social worker, should be able to see his or her birth certificate and have the possibility of beginning a search for the natural parents.

The murder, which took place some years before the abolition of capital punishment, was the case of Daniel Raven. Raven’s wife had recently given birth to their first child, a son, in a Muswell Hill nursing-home. The young father called to visit his wife and, on the way home, went to the house of his parents-in-law, a Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, and battered
them to death with a television aerial. He was an obvious suspect and the police were not short of damning evidence, including his bloodstained clothing which he had attempted to burn. He was tried, convicted and hanged. When I heard on the radio that Daniel Raven had been executed that morning for the murder of the Goodmans, I thought primarily not of him, nor of his victims, but of the young mother and her baby. How, if ever, could she break the news? What would she answer when her son asked why he had no father or what had happened to his maternal grandparents? Imagining myself in her place, I wondered whether I would even consider placing the child for adoption.

When the Children’s Bill was going through Parliament, the memory of this case surfaced and the idea for the novel was born. I would write about an eighteen-year-old, a highly intelligent but unloving girl adopted by a psychologist and his wife, who began to search for her parents. She would have fantasized about her earlier life; that her father was an aristocrat, her mother perhaps a servant girl in the ancestral home. She would discover that her father had murdered a young girl, her mother had colluded, and that both had been sentenced to life imprisonment. Her father had died in prison, but her mother was soon to be released on licence. The book would have a double theme: a crime story relating how the father of the dead child, patiently waiting for the release of the convicted woman, begins to track her down in London; secondly the growth of love between the daughter and the mother after the daughter’s decision that they should set up house together.

Although the novel didn’t begin with a place, setting is as important to
Innocent Blood
as it is to my detective stories. The father of the murdered child, Norman Scase, tracks his daughter’s murderess through London. The city’s Underground system, its raucous street markets, lanes and streets, and the darkly numinous roof of Westminster Cathedral are all integral parts of the story.
Innocent Blood
was one of three novels—the other two being
Death of an Expert Witness
and
A Taste for Death
—which could not have been written, or at least written with such authority, without my Home Office experience.

Perhaps this is why I carried on working years after it would have been possible to live by my writing—if occasionally precariously. I found that to be part of the working world was a powerful inspiration as well as providing useful background information. And it was
Innocent Blood
which made me prosperous. Before it was published, I had decided to leave the Home Office six months before my retirement date and had
carefully calculated that I would be able to live in reasonable comfort until I received my lump sum and pension in August 1980. The book was modestly successful in Britain. It came at a difficult time for my publishers and was meanly produced, but in the States it rapidly became number one on the New York bestseller list and received rave reviews. The film and paperback rights were sold in the same week.
Innocent Blood
meant the end of anxiety about money, and for that I was grateful.

The film was, in fact, never made, but to sell a lucrative option without having to watch the result on the screen is considered by many writers to be an advantage. Producers still occasionally want to make it, but the company with the rights is holding on to them.

I have just had a highly enjoyable if exhausting weekend. Eliza Oxley had asked me some months ago if I would talk at a dinner in aid of the Charminster Conservative Party, the dinner to be held at Wolfeton, one of the oldest and most historic country houses in Dorset. I would have driven down with Rosemary, but because of her broken left wrist she can’t drive. So Andy again took charge and we drove down, using minor roads where possible, under a sunny sky and through autumn foliage to Stockbridge. There we first had a walk round the craft shop, where Rosemary bought me a necklace as an early Christmas present, and then went to the Vine pub for lunch.