Death by the Exe

Hillary James

Description

It is 1953. New Yorker, Rose Pinner, expects to step off a train in Exeter, one of England's cathedral cities, and into the arms of Simon Knight, her British host and possible mate. Instead she finds herself in the midst of an arrest and then catapulted into a murder investigation. Simon's cousin, her fianc and his mother are all suspects as guests in the dead man's house at the time of his death. Simon and Rose try to explore their relationship while supporting the suspects and pursuing information about the crime. Further complications arise as it is Simon's first term as a new lecturer. Rose finds herself fraught, her attention divided between conflicting concerns.

Sujets

• Inglaterra
• England

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800467392
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DEATH BY THE EXE
Hillary James
Copyright © 2020 Francis Gimblett

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781800467392

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for Martha
Contents
Prologue: September, 1953
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Prologue: September, 1953
“Why do you always do that, you old fool? You’d think you’d know better.” The speaker was no longer a young man but his companion was clearly the older of the two.
“I’m the father; you’re the son. Remember? The parent nodded his head as though reminding himself of some distant occurrence, long forgotten.
“What if you stumbled and fell?” The son surveyed the cliff top in early morning mist. It looked exactly as it always looked at this time of day at the end of summer. ‘Timeless’ was the only word he could think of to sum up the coast between Devon’s Budleigh Salterton and Exmouth. He and his father walked to work every morning at this time almost all year around whatever the weather, excepting pernicious gales of course. ‘Here come Sam and his old man,’ people said. The two of them could have taken the train but they didn’t. For Sam the ancient red cliffs of Budleigh Salterton and their views of the steely English Channel beneath them were what he held on to and fought for in the war. They were ancient and beautiful and permanent – or at least as permanent as anything in life. That didn’t mean that surface shale, rock falls, crumbling edges couldn’t trip up an old man. Every morning he chided his father and urged him to step away from the edges of the cliffs.
His father was standing perfectly still, looking directly down into a cove. “There’s someone down there, son, face on the pebbles right by the water. We’ve got to get down there. It’s a man I’d say and he must be injured or worse.”
Sam joined his father and looked where he was pointing. The old man was right. There was a person on the beach, a man just as his father had said. “Good God,” he cried. “I don’t know no path along here to that cove. I really don’t.”
“There used to be one a little further along,” the old man replied. “It’s on a long diagonal through bracken and stuff but it’s probably still passable.”
“You stay here, Dad. I’ll go see.”
“No way.” Sam’s father, Billy Parsons, was having none of it. He thought himself nearly as nimble as his son.
The two men spent some time locating a path quite a distance away and tore through bracken in some haste to the cove though Sam doubted that hurry was really necessary. The English Channel was already almost too cold for most swimmers except the very fit and hardy and no one could have survived a fall from the top of the cliff. He had an uneasy feeling in his gut, an intuition of who they would find and already he was appalled.
When they reached the still form on the pebbles at the edge of the water and gently turned it over, all Sam’s worst fears were realized. He was dead. The boss - fit, healthy, daring and known for his prowess in the water as well as on horseback, was clearly dead.
“I didn’t see or hear no horse. Did you?” Sam’s father’s hands were trembling. The boss’s early morning habit was to ride his horse to water, swim and ride home to breakfast.
“No, no horse. I’m pretty sure he came out of the water though, looking at him. I don’t think he came off the horse.”
“But what could have happened? He’s a champion swimmer. He swims somewhere along here every day and early. Everybody knows that.”
“I know, Dad. We’ve got to get help. He can’t stay here. One of us should stay with him, I think, and the other get help.”
“You go, Son,” the old man said. “You’ll be quicker than me.”
“Will you be all right?” Sam took off his jacket and wrapped it around the sweater his father wore.
“It’s a sad duty but I’ll do it.” Sir James Hampton was a fine man and their employer. He deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. The old man would stand watch.
Chapter 01
If this were a film script, Rose asked herself, feeling agitated, how would it begin?

Camera, action, scene one: England, 1953 – long shot of the 9:58 from London’s Paddington Station drawing into Exeter, St David’s in mid-afternoon September light. Close in on young American woman with bushy orange hair standing in a tight line of politely anxious people waiting to get off the train.

She wondered for a moment over ‘politely anxious.’ How would the director establish this? Then there was ‘American woman.’ How could the director establish her nationality in one shot? He could hardly dress her in the stars and stripes. The woman she had been sitting next to on the train had known she wasn’t English before Rose had opened her mouth. How had she known? How had Millie Fenton, her fellow passenger, known she was a tourist and a foreigner? Her raincoat? Her luggage, one shabby case her room-mates in New York had called a week-ender?
Thank God she hadn’t brought more luggage. It had been hard enough lugging one case onto the coach at the airport. The coach had been lesson one. There were no buses which would take her to Central London. “Sorry but not possible,” someone in a uniform had informed her. There were coaches, however, which frankly looked like buses to her. Then there was the subway or rather underground and long flights of stairs down into the bowels of the earth and up again with the suitcase bumping against her knee and growing heavier as the day wore on. Yesterday that was. Yesterday, September 23 rd , 1953, and now she was waiting for her turn to get off the train.
Another passenger near the unopened train door inserted himself into the line, necessitating a kind of reluctant communal inhalation as all the other passengers in the carriage line accommodated him. Rose looked over her shoulder to exchange glances with Millie but Millie had turned round to assist a mother carrying a baby and trying to quell the impatience of a toddler at the same time. Rose was not surprised. Mille was that sort of person. Helping out seemed to be second nature to her.
The train was the newer variety in England, someone had told her, with rows of fixed upholstered seats in pairs with an aisle down the middle, an arrangement with which she was familiar. She had hoped it would be the other sort of carriage, the kind divided into compartments where travelers sat opposite each other in their hats on upholstered benches in forties films.
Getting on, she had scanned the modern carriage for an empty seat by a window but then thought it best to sit next to another woman rather than leave the other traveler to chance. She had spotted a large woman with a box on her lap as well as a string bag at her feet, who was sitting beside an empty window seat, and had made her way down the carriage to ask her if the other place was free. It had been a happy choice for a long journey. Exeter was in The West Country, the phrase her Bed and Breakfast landlady had used to refer to Devon and its principal city, and reaching it would take a good five hours.
As the train neared their destination, Millie had risen to her feet and, filling the aisle to the irritation of the people behind her, taken hold of Rose’s arm. “Come on Ducky. Your young man will think you look just fine.”
Rose had carefully said nothing at all about Simon but Millie obviously hadn’t needed much explanation. She had taken the place in the line Millie had made for her and then fumbled in her handbag for the mirror she knew was there. She looked at herself, patting her hair and reaching a second time for a tube of lipstick to apply just a little. She noted with dismay that she was pale and had circles under her eyes. She held the mirror in one hand and pinched her cheeks awkwardly with the other, wondering whether other passengers were watching but they were too busy sorting themselves.
“You look fine,” Mille whispered, turning back to speak to her. “Your case is at the top of the carriage, isn’t it? People get excited at the end of a journey and start behaving like water buffalo.”
There was no real evidence of buffalo behavior in Rose’s opinion, though she was not entirely sure what a water buffalo looked like. However, she was grateful to Millie as the other passengers were all standing up and staring straight ahead in a way she found disconcerting. Americans would have been nodding and smiling at each other or rudely elbowing past whomever they could intimidate. The train door opened but the line moved forward in fits and starts and slowly as passengers ahead of her stopped to retrieve their