Death and The D'Urbervilles E-Book

Tim Heald

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

As head of the Criminal Studies department at the University of Wessex, Doctor Tudor Cornwall has murder on his mind. One violent death that has always bothered him is the killing of Alec D'Urberville in the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of The D'Urbervilles. He therefore decides to rewrite Hardy's account in the style of his contemporary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This task is complicated by a real-life contemporary murder that bears some uncanny resemblances to the nineteenth century fiction. With the help of his brilliant young postgraduate favourite, Elizabeth Burney, Doctor Cornwall sets about unravelling these two parallel mysteries.

Leseprobe

Tim HealdDeath and The D’UrbervillesA TUDOR CORNWALL MYSTERY

As head of the Criminal Studies department at the University of Wessex, Doctor Tudor Cornwall has murder on his mind. One violent death that has always bothered him is the killing of Alec D'Urberville in the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

He therefore decides to rewrite Hardy’s account in the style of that author’s contemporary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This task is complicated by a real-life contemporary murder that bears some uncanny resemblances to the nineteenth century fiction. With the help of his brilliant young postgraduate favourite, Elizabeth Burney, Doctor Cornwall sets about unravelling these two parallel mysteries.

Death and The D’Urbervilles is the second of the three witty and observant Tudor Cornwall mysteries, preceded by Death and The Visiting Fellow and followed by A Death on The Ocean Wave.

For little Leonel, also known as the financial advisor, hoping that one day he too will read Thomas Hardy and enjoy walking in Wessex

Foreword

(This piece originally appeared in the June 2005 edition of the Thomas Hardy Society Journal.)

I won Tess of the D’Urbervilles at Sherborne School in 1959. The prize was named after a famous English master called James Rhoades who wrote the words for a series of pageants which must have been performed when Hardy was at his peak around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The tunes were by the school music master, Louis Napoleon Parker.

I loved Tess and other Hardy novels, which as a boy I later devoured in the Macmillan edition – fine old-fashioned books, properly bound with the school crest on the front, the Sherborne penny on the back, and a book-plate signed by the headmaster above the legend, “Magister Informator”.

Being in Sherborne – or Sherton Abbas – gave Hardy’s books an immediacy, an accessibility, a relevance which they wouldn’t have had if I’d been living outside Dorset. That doesn’t mean that great books such as his don’t transcend frontiers but I always felt – and still feel – that I got a sense of place from Hardy that people who are not children of Dorset don’t experience in quite the same way. During my five years at Sherborne I got to know the county quite well. Although we were mostly kept on a tight rein we were occasionally allowed out with visiting parents but, oddly, the best aid to exploring Dorset was the compulsory Combined Cadet Force. I spent many hours bicycling or rambling around Hardy’s Wessex in scratchy khaki battle dress and carrying an ancient .303 rifle. This was a curious way of discovering the living context of great novels and not, I’m sure, what the Commanding Officer intended.

I also think that Hardy’s pervasive sense of lugubrious pre-destination was specially seductive for an adolescent male. Gloom and bad ends were the stuff of my beliefs and girls were infinitely desirable but just as infinitely mysterious and unattainable. Hardy suited me in my teens.

In adult life I’ve maintained my enthusiasm and very occasionally written Hardy-related pieces – an introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Woodlanders, a walk in Tess’s footsteps for the Telegraph –but, on the whole, I have done other sorts of writing.

In the 1970s I turned to crime. I had always wanted to be an author, egged on in part by the mesmerising example of Hardy himself, but despite having been brought up, in part, on Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers it never occurred to me that I would write detective stories.

I started book-writing with attempts at ‘literary’ fiction but I was uncomfortable with the lack of constraint. Too much freedom made me confused and my early efforts lacked purpose and direction. Part of the reason I became a whodunit writer was because the form imposes a discipline which is lacking in other sorts of novel. Some critics think this is limiting but I found it helpful and even liberating. It was a bit like being forced to write sonnets – ABAB and so on for twelve lines until the final rhyming couplet. Corpse on page one, final denouement on page 220, page-turning forensics and deduction in-between.

It’s not altogether surprising that I found myself wondering, from time to time, what certain ‘literary’ classics would have been like if they had been written by crime writers. Death, after all, is central to much fiction but writers such as Hardy don’t make a puzzle out of it. They aren’t into forensics or detectives or fingerprints. Sometimes they don’t seem too bothered with structure, plot or story-telling at all; let alone creating mystery and suspense, making the reader want to turn pages to see what happens next... and being surprised.

As I became more familiar with crime novels it seemed to me that, in Tess, Hardy rather threw away that wonderful scene when the landlady is sitting downstairs and looks up to see a tiny pin-prick of red on the ceiling above. Gradually it expands and then it starts to drip on to the carpet. “Drip, drip, drip”. Had Hardy been a crime novelist he wouldn’t have buried that extraordinary moment in the depths of his novel, but would, I think, have made it a dramatic opening and then, of course, set about unravelling the mystery of ‘whodunit’!

A year or so ago I began a new series of crime novels featuring Dr Tudor Cornwall (a genuflection towards A.L. Rowse) who is head of Criminal Studies at the (fictional) University of Wessex. His first crime was a murder in Tasmania, where I have been a Visiting Fellow at the University (Tassie is, surprisingly, very like Cornwall!). I suddenly thought re-writing Tess in the style of Hardy would be a great second assignment for Dr. Cornwall. And when I realised that both Tess and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were first published in 1891 it seemed an even better idea.

There I think I shall stop. It is bad manners in crime writing circles to give away the ending. Some people even think that the only reason for reading such books is to solve the mystery. I strongly disagree but, even so, I shall leave it there in the hope that at least some readers will be sufficiently intrigued to buy a copy and find out for themselves what happened next!

TIM HEALD

Chapter One

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks stared at the stain on the ceiling and watched it slowly enlarge. The stain was red. When she had first noticed it a minute or so earlier it had been a faint blush on the white-painted surface above her. At first it was the size of a wafer, then quite soon, the size of a man’s hand. And growing. Mrs Brooks had recently had The Herons decorated from top to toe and, like any good sea-side landlady, she was grudging about the money she had to pay the painters. Now, observing the stain turn from a blush to a blemish, she felt the first stirrings of outrage.

‘Those bloody D’Urbervilles,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I knew they’d be trouble.’

She was used to unmarried couples registering under aliases and had assumed from the first that the couple who had taken the front room upstairs were an illicit item. He answered to Alec and she to Teresa or Tess which was usual enough, but the D’Urberville surname was preposterous. Most people checked in as White, Brown, Smith or Clark. She didn’t care. She was guided by that arithmetical demon ‘Profit and Loss’. If people chose to check in with double barrels, or three initials, or fancy foreign names with apostrophes it was all the same to her provided they paid the bills.

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks was not naturally curious, but as the drops of liquid fell regularly on to her precious new carpet and created a mirror image to the desecration of her precious ceiling she could contain herself no longer. Gathering up her skirts she stepped on to a chair and thence to the table, stabbed at the liquid stain with a forefinger, withdrew it and examined it thoughtfully and with growing certainty.

It was blood.

Blood did not normally seep through the floors and ceilings of superior guest-houses in Sandbourne. Sandbourne was not that sort of place. More than a century earlier it had been described as ‘This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens’. It was still now, in 2003, genteel, civilized, the kind of south-coast English resort where Agatha Christie would have felt at home and where water was thicker than blood. Nevertheless Mrs Brooks was standing on the table of her downstairs parlour putting her finger to an ever-widening... well... bloodstain.

She had known when they arrived a few days earlier. He was a raffish, caddish creature in frayed Savile Row suiting; she soulful, tearful, full of coquettish melancholy. Mrs Brooks could smell sex and, when she saw them, she smelt it in buckets. There was something wrong too. This was not the sex between romantic runaways but between a couple of unequals, the one exploited the other exploiting. It smelt incestuous, unnatural, worse than just adulterous, wrong and somehow doomed.

Mrs Brooks was seldom wrong about such matters. Seaside landladies, no matter how prim, no matter how much their houses were of well-repute, had a nose for sexual disorder and crime passionnel. And as soon as she clapped eyes on them she smelt impending doom of an almost certainly sexual nature.

But the man paid cash. In advance.

It was when the other man turned up, skeletal and jaundice-yellow, that her suspicions had been confirmed. Another absurd name, obviously false. Angel. But whether it was Angel Someone or Someone Angel she wasn’t sure. He said it was his Christian name but never volunteered a surname so that Mrs Brooks was inclined to think that Angel was his only name. Avenging Angel, Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death. He had the air of leprosy and he had arrived like the Grim Reaper early in the morning at the milkman’s side asking for Tess Durbeyfield but seemed almost relieved to hear that there was a woman lodging with her husband at The Herons by the name of Mrs D’Urberville. The Angel asked to see her and when Mrs Brooks went upstairs she found the woman awake and ready to see the visitor though in a state of some distress. Mrs Brooks had seen enough fallen women in her guest-house to recognize that such symptoms were the norm.

There had been words, a number of them, but the landlady, listening at the keyhole, had caught relatively few, despite what she would later declare in court. Suffice it to say that the words sounded mutually regretful but also recriminatory. They were angry words though bruised. Then the man called Angel left and the woman, Tess or Teresa, retreated into her quarters and gave herself over to a disconsolate moaning. Then, although we have only Mrs Brooks’s words for this, she heard a man’s voice, presumably Mrs D’Urberville’s alleged husband. He sounded characteristically short and truculent.

Mrs Brooks was getting a bit nervous by now and, feeling guilty about her not very efficient eavesdropping, she retreated to her parlour to finish her own breakfast while her lodgers finished theirs. She was on the point of going up to take away their trays when she heard a creaking of floorboards and a rustling of garments. A few moments later she recognized the form of Mrs D’Urberville leave the room clad now in ‘the walking costume of a well-to-do young lady in which she had arrived’. The only difference was that she now wore a veil over her hat and black feathers so that she could not be recognized.

At this point Mrs Brooks, somewhat perplexed, resumed her sewing, and, after a few moments, glanced up at the ceiling to see the first faint blush of the stain which was to so alarm her.

Drip, drip, drip.

Otherwise silence.

Thoroughly alarmed now the landlady rushed out into the street and bumped into a passing workman whom she knew. She begged him to come into her house as she was concerned about one of her lodgers. They went upstairs to find the D’Urberville breakfast of coffee, eggs and ham completely untouched, except that the carving knife was missing.

Mrs Brooks asked the workman to go into the next-door room. This he did, only to return almost at once, ashen- or rigid-faced, with the words, ‘My good God, the gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife – a lot of blood has run down upon the floor!’

Drip, drip, drip.

‘Nice one boss,’ said the girl in the tight boots, tight jeans and tight T-shirt, who had been reading the afore-mentioned words with a furrowed brow and almost scholarly expression. She cast the paper on the desk-top. ‘Thomas Hardy, crime writer.’

Dr Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, smiled indulgently at his most-loved, most-hated, post-graduate student and said with the donnish superiority of one of the world’s leading experts in his field.

‘Well up to a point, Elizabeth, now let’s discuss. Compare and contrast.’

Chapter Two

‘First off,’ she said, chewing a pencil-end and looking at him almost flirtatiously in a Princess Di, under-the-eyelashes way that she knew he found disconcerting, ‘the landlady’s evidence is completely uncorroborated. Isn’t that so?’

‘I’d say so, yes,’ Cornwall nodded.

‘Would a court have accepted it?’

Cornwall looked thoughtful. ‘In 1891... difficult to say. Hardy doesn’t give us a court scene. I would have thought Mrs Brooks would cut a plausible figure in the witness box but I don’t know how well she would stand up under cross-examination.’

‘There’s no reason not to believe her,’ said Elizabeth Burney. ‘She’s a perfectly respectable, middle-aged boarding-housekeeper and there’s no motive for her to lie. On the other hand I’m not sure I entirely believe what she says.’

‘Ah.’ Cornwall smiled with the air of a man who has executed a particularly effective move at chess. ‘Are you saying you don’t believe what she says or that you don’t believe the interpretation put on it?’

‘We don’t know precisely what interpretation was put on her evidence,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We don’t even know whether she was called as a witness. We assume that Tess pleaded guilty in which case it would have been an open and shut case.’

‘What makes you say Tess pleaded guilty?’

‘She confessed to Angel Clare. She had a motive. She was there in the rooms with the husband she loathed. Her fingerprints would have been on the knife.’

Cornwall rubbed his jaw. It was sandpapery to his touch even though he had shaved with his customary efficiency. His stubble seemed to grow faster by the day now that he had turned fifty. Sometimes he wondered if he should let it go and grow a beard. It would be greyish like the hair on the top of his head, which was still comfortingly thickish, and might give him more gravitas. On the other hand he was not sure he needed more gravitas. He did not wish to be thought austere or forbidding. He liked to put his students at their ease and too many whiskers would make him look like an Old Testament prophet. Actually most of his students were already a little frightened of him though he didn’t know this. What he did know was that Elizabeth Burney was extremely unfrightened of him. In fact he felt that she didn’t even have the respect that a pupil should have for her master. He thought she quite liked him and this was important. He did not have an all-embracing desire to be liked, the reverse if anything, but he wanted to be liked by Elizabeth. God knew why. She was maddening, difficult and young enough to be his daughter. On the other hand she was very bright and, he had reluctantly to admit, attractive. Actually this was something he tried not to admit because he knew he was almost of an age when he could be accused of being a dirty old man. And nowadays for a tutor to even think sexual thoughts about a pupil, even a postgraduate, was to court disaster. Sometimes he was afraid to give Elizabeth an alpha for an essay in case it was construed as sexual harassment.

‘Sorry.’ He was aware that his attention had drifted and that she was talking to him. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated. ‘What were you saying?’

‘I was saying that Hardy wasn’t interested in the murder, he was interested in Tess as a woman and in the terrible things done to her by men. A Victorian novelist like Wilkie Collins was interested in crime as a puzzle. Hardy isn’t. Before that I was saying that it is reasonable to assume that Tess pleaded guilty in court.’

Cornwall raised his eyebrows.

‘Are you sure of that?’ he asked.

‘Of what?’ she parried.

‘First, that Hardy wasn’t interested in crime as a puzzle. Second, that Tess entered a guilty plea.’

It was one of the attractive features of this girl, thought Tudor to himself, that she liked intellectual or academic duels. He did too. Most of his pupils, sadly, were acquiescent to the point of being dull. It was no fun teaching young men and women who hung on your every word and committed them slavishly to paper. Little Elizabeth Burney was a real Tasmanian devil.

‘It’s obvious that Hardy isn’t interested in crime as a puzzle,’ she said, ‘because when he’s writing about Tess we don’t even know there is a crime until the book’s virtually finished. Hardy is about grief and tragedy and the inexorable nature of fate. He doesn’t do twists and coincidences. He’s about the President of the Immortals pulling strings. God’s a puppeteer as far as Old Tom’s concerned. Not even a divine clockmaker.’

‘I need to think about that,’ said Cornwall, recognizing that this was the verbal equivalent of asking for time-out. ‘But what about Tess pleading guilty? Why wouldn’t she have claimed to be innocent. Or at least mitigating circumstances. In France she’d have got off for crime passionnel.’

‘It wasn’t France, it was Wessex at the end of the nineteenth century. Very self-righteous, puritanical, male chauvinist sort of society. Still is pretty much.’

She grinned, all-gamine.

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d read Hardy in Tasmania.’

‘That’s cheap. You know Tasmania. We have a respectable literary tradition. Trollope came calling. Peter Conrad is one of ours. Nicholas Shakespeare has come to live. You know that. A lot of our Victorian women would have been victims just like Tess. Oppressed by men and oppressed by society. We’re a society founded on injustice so we empathize with Tess. That’s why I have a better understanding of the book than you do. Because I’m a woman and because I’m the descendant of convicts. If she hadn’t been hanged Tess would have been transported.’

She tossed her head and looked defiant, daring him to contradict her.

‘Van Diemen’s Land stopped being a penal colony in 1853,’ he said. ‘You ought to know that.’

‘And you,’ she said, ‘know perfectly well that just because Tess was published in the 1890s doesn’t mean to say that it was set in the 1890s. The countryside Hardy is describing is much more primitive than late Victorian Wessex. So I believe transportation could have been an option for Tess. She could have been an ancestor of mine. I could have been a D’Urberville.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Cornwall, ‘and you’ve taken us miles off the point.’

‘Which is?’ She asked the question mildly but with mischief in her eyes.

‘Which is to consider Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a crime novel and to debate my contention that while it may be a great novel it’s a rotten whodunit.’

She grinned. ‘So it’s all part of “what would Macbeth have been like if Agatha Christie had written it”, or “what’s the difference between Dostoevsky and Jeffrey Archer?”’

‘You’re deliberately trivializing,’ said Cornwall. ‘The point I’m making is that Tess of the D’Urbervilles is deeply flawed and that if Hardy had had the slightest knowledge of police procedure or forensics or even human psychology or sexuality he would have written a very different book.’

‘So are you setting me an essay?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m setting myself a task, which is to rewrite Tess as a crime novel. I want you to go away and think about it, but I don’t want it to interfere with your thesis. Merely to inform it.’

‘Oh, OK.’

Elizabeth Burney’s thesis was an examination of Julian Symons’ famous proposition that ‘The idea that detective fiction could not be written until organized detective forces existed is logically persuasive but not literally true.’ It should have been a study confined almost exclusively to the nineteenth century and possibly earlier, but Elizabeth’s febrile imagination and subversive mentality meant that she was straying much nearer the present day. She was also completely unrestrained by the conventional wisdom that such fiction was until very recently the prerogative of the Americans, the British and to a certain extent the French. She was also disturbingly modern or even post-modern about the precise definition of ‘fiction’. Postively Eagletonian though she differed from the famous Professor Terry and his ilk in possessing a prose style which was elegant and incisive. She used the English language as if it were a cross between a sabre and a scalpel. Cornwall admired her, was proud of her, and sometimes a little afraid, but he was damned if he would let any of this show.

She, for her part, was decently impressed by her tutor. Confident enough to believe, perhaps correctly, that she was brighter than he was, she acknowledged that he had almost thirty years’ start on her in their chosen field. He had read more, thought more, seen more, heard more and even if she was wrong and he was actually her intellectual equal or even superior, she had to acknowledge that he knew more. So he bloody well should.

Cornwall had practically invented ‘Criminal Studies’. Until he set up the department there had been departments of pathology and of forensic medicine. There had been the Police Academy at Hendon. There had been centres of media studies and even some avant-garde departments of English where crime fiction was studied and given an arcane language comprehensible only to academics specializing in the subject. There were also departments of sociology dealing in every aspect of real-life crime but also like the Eng. Lit. people, speaking no known language only a mind-numbing form of semiotics. Cornwall was unusual in dealing in good plain English. He always said that he knew enough not to be afraid of being understood. It was only the second-rate who invented a pseudo-academic language incomprehensible to the layman. If they spoke in lay language, lay readers would know what they were talking about it and recognize it for the rubbish or at best the platitudinously obvious that it actually was. And then there were the law schools. At least the lawyers spoke recognizable English. As long as there were juries to convince that was still essential. Tudor suspected that the moves to abolish the jury had nothing to do with the efficient administration of justice but rather the desire of the judiciary to retreat still further into a world in which the only people who understood them were their fellow advocates.

Cornwall’s coup was to incorporate all these disparate elements into a single school. The University of Wessex’s BA in Criminal Studies contained a little bit of criminal this, a little bit of criminal that and much else criminal besides. Graduates would be expected to have some knowledge of the history of the detective story and its plot and character; they would understand the basics of DNA testing and the forensic laboratory; and they would have been taught the differences between admissible and inadmissible evidence. This would not actually qualify them for being barristers or pathologists or even crime writers. Most of Cornwall’s graduates went on to teach criminal studies themselves in one of the burgeoning schools imitating the movement’s onelie begetter. A few became merchant bankers or investment analysts. A very few, and they often the brightest, took to crime, usually of a white collar variety. His seminars on company fraud were unusually well-attended and alarmingly creative. Only one Criminal Studies graduate had become a convicted murderer though there was no telling how many others had avoided conviction. After all, if the teaching was up to scratch, Wessex’s graduate criminals would avoid being found guilty or even being found out.

This pioneering work had brought Cornwall a growing celebrity. There were books, magazine articles and, increasingly, instant opinions. These had originally been offered on matters directly pertaining to crime but now extended to such essentially non-criminal matters as the leadership of the Conservative Party, the European common currency and royal butlers. There was much talk of a major TV series though this remained as yet unmade. Tudor Cornwall was very much arriving.

His enemies, of whom there were many, were bitchily personal in the manner of the academic world, dwelling on such perceived weaknesses as his snappy little Morgan sports car and his well-concealed and therefore possibly non-existent sex life rather than the qualities of his academic achievement. Actually as academics in universities of the third or even fourth division went – and this was where Wessex found itself in most of the published league tables and in private estimations – Tudor Cornwall was pretty hot stuff. His Department of Criminal Studies was not only a pioneer, it was widely perceived to be world-class – the only world-class act in the place. No wonder his fellow academics were jealous.

As for the sports car, it was one of his few indulgences and he enjoyed driving fast with the lid down. The sex life was deliberately private and if pushed he would have to admit that it lay more in the past than the present, which did not mean that he had no hopes for the future. There was grief in the past. Tragedy even. He preferred not to think about it, but some sense that there was a ghost on his shoulder gave him an air of mild melancholy which the more vulnerable of his female students found disturbing and even attractive.

Elizabeth Burney was immune to this but not unaware. Cornwall looked at his watch. It said seven o’clock.

‘Fancy a drink?’ he asked. ‘Or coffee? I feel like a glass of something and I’d appreciate the company.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, grinning. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

She didn’t really have friends either. Not yet anyway. She was a long way from home. And not long arrived.

Chapter Three

It was damp outside in that peculiarly British way which made the atmosphere sodden without there actually being rain or even drizzle. The street lamps were surrounded in a halo of glistening moisture and people’s breaths steamed, though it was not frosty cold, just wet and miserable and November. The streets struck Cornwall as being Dickensian though Hardyesque would have been a more appropriate word. Not that Hardy was a describer of urban landscapes being, he supposed, more of a woodlander. Cornwall often wondered if Hardy and his heroine would recognize the town. He would be surprised to find himself effigied in a seated statue but the essential structure of the place was much as it would have been just over a hundred years earlier. Discard the shop fronts and neon and this was still the small provincial market town it would have been in the nineteenth century.

Tutor and pupil walked close together, he in a belted, off-white riding mac, she in a mud-brown Driza-bone. On the corner of Jude and Bathsheba, Cornwall bought an Evening Echo from the wrinkled newsvendor, stuffed it in his poacher’s pocket out of the damp, and then jaywalked Elizabeth across the street and in through the doors of Henchards wine bar and brasserie.

Henchards was modelled on El Vino, the Cheshire Cheese and sundry other London hostelries, some ersatz and some not. Henchards was fake through and through but in a curiously comforting way, with sawdust on the floor, cockfighting and fox-hunting pictures on the dark-brown walls and old barrels serving as haphazard partitions.

‘Manage half a bottle of red?’ he asked, and the girl nodded absent-mindedly as if to suggest the question was redundant though she was not a particularly heavy drinker. Nor he. But the day had been hard and the weather needed to be kept at bay. There was a large open fireplace and real logs alight, glowing and throwing out pungent smoke. Not fake at all.

‘Rymill or Rockford?’ he asked, naming two favourite Australian wines both of which featured unusually for the wine list of a bar/brasserie in a small Wessex town.

‘We had the Rymill last time,’ she said, so he ordered the Rockford and took the opened bottle and two glasses to a small table within warming distance of the fire.

‘It’s a neat idea,’ she said, when they had removed their coats and sipped at the robust red infuriator from the Barossa. ‘What?’

‘Rewriting great novels in the style of pulp-fiction.’

He smiled. ‘Not exactly pulp-fiction.’

‘OK,’ she agreed, ‘we both have a vested interest in thinking crime fiction is better than pulp. Let’s just say “genre”. That’s non-pejorative. Still a good idea.’

‘Thank you. It’s quite common for crime writers not to be able to understand that they’re not great artists. John Creasey was in a permanent rage because critics didn’t think he was as good as Dostoevsky.’

‘John Creasey?’ she frowned. ‘Who he?’

‘Founded the Crime Writers’ Association. Wrote hundreds of novels but no one knows quite who really wrote them because he operated on a sort of studio basis like Titian or Rembrandt. He had a whole lot of minions typing away in a big room and he’d go round looking over their shoulders and correcting what they wrote. The results went out under his own name. He had a character called “the Toff”.’

‘And he thought he was a great writer?’

Tudor smiled. ‘So I believe,’ he said.

‘Make a good TV series,’ she said.

‘I’d thought of that. In fact my agent’s set up a lunch with Larry Benjamin at Double Take to talk it through. Larry’s seen an outline and he’s apparently very keen.’

Cornwall took the local paper from the inside of his raincoat and shook it open. Despite having been on the inside it had lost its snap, crackle and pop and was a poor limp thing.

‘Just wanted to see the latest score in Bangladesh,’ he said, only half-apologetically. Like many Englishmen of his generation he was still keen on cricket, turned to the sports page first and did not think it at all rude to read a newspaper in front of a woman even when there were only two people present and he found her attractive. Tudor would have been quite hurt if someone had told him he was being boorish or old-fashioned. He regarded himself as almost painfully polite and at the very cutting edge of practically everything with the possible exception of contemporary popular music. He still thought The Who were the world’s greatest band.

‘Another middle order collapse,’ he said to Elizabeth, who, for an Australian, was distinctly odd in that she was not the least bit interested in sport of any kind, not even when the males were good-looking and wore tight shorts.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, almost choking on her Rockford shiraz. ‘Do you believe in coincidences, or do you believe in coincidences?’

Tudor was shaking his head, irritated but unsurprised. ‘Just when you think they’ve sorted themselves out they go and get themselves out to a string of long-hops and half volleys,’ he said, mysteriously.

‘Listen!’ she said loudly, ‘BODY IN B AND B, BLED TO DEATH IN BED. MISSING WOMAN SOUGHT. “BLOOD CAME RIGHT THROUGH CEILING” SAYS LANDLADY.’

‘Hey, I was reading that!’ he said crossly. Elizabeth had snatched the newspaper from him and was reading out loud. First she repeated the screaming headlines, glaring at him with a sort of manic triumph.

Tudor shook his head.

‘You could call it coincidence,’ he said, ‘but you’d be stretching a point. That sort of thing happens all the time, especially at the seaside. People who hardly know each other come for a dirty weekend. Things go wrong. They have too much to drink. There’s a row which starts over something trivial but then turns into a serious shouting match and one of them stabs the other with a sharp instrument, or hits them with a blunt one, and suddenly before you know where you are you’ve got a newspaper headline saying “BODY IN B AND B”.’

‘Well excuse me.’ Elizabeth sounded truculent. ‘If you don’t think it’s a weird coincidence, then listen to this...’ And she read on, ‘The body of a man was found stabbed to death in a bedroom of the Mon Repos Guest-house in Gallipoli Street, Sandbourne, yesterday.

‘Said landlady, Mrs Rose Anderson, 48, “This is a very distressing incident for all of us at Mon Repos. I first became aware that something was wrong when I saw a red patch on the ceiling of my own lounge which is on the ground floor immediately below the bedroom occupied by the deceased and his wife or partner.’

‘Do you really think she said that?’ asked Tudor. ‘No one talks like that in real life. Only in local newspapers.’

‘So local newspaper reporters have tin ears,’ she said, ‘so what’s odd about that? You don’t win Pulitzers on the Wessex Evening Echo. You can bet your bottom dollar though that the landlady’s name is Rose Anderson and that she’s forty-eight and she saw blood on the ceiling and she’s distressed. As is everyone at Mon Repos.’

‘Particularly if you’d just had the place redecorated.’

She glanced at him sharply and reproachfully.

‘You’re muddling your rewrite of Thomas Hardy with what actually happened in Sandbourne as reported here in the Echo. You’re confusing fact and fiction.’

‘Fact and fiction is confusing,’ said Cornwall. ‘That’s what makes a great novelist great. You believe what he tells you even more than what the media tell you. You believe the printed page more than what you see in the street.’

She sighed. ‘That’s a real academic’s argument. Argument for the sake of argument. Ivory-tower stuff. Anyway listen to the next paragraph and tell me if you still think there isn’t something odd going on.’

He started to interrupt but thought better of it, took another mouthful of the blood-red wine and settled back in his chair to listen.

‘The deceased,’ she read, ‘was described by police as being a Caucasian male in his late thirties to early forties. He had registered at the hotel as Mr Alex or Alec Durberville. His wife or partner was booked in as Theresa or Tessa Durberville. Mrs Durberville, believed to be in her early to mid-thirties, of medium build with brown hair and a slightly sallow complexion is being sought by Sandbourne police who are anxious to question her with regard to her husband’s death. It is not known whether foul play is suspected.’

.She put the paper down and fixed him with a stare which said ‘game, set and match’.

He looked back, poker-faced, then swallowed hard and conceded.