Hollow Vengeance

by Anne Morice

  ‘Well, personally, I’m glad she did,’ Elsa informed us. ‘You’ll say I’m silly, I expect, but I like to think she had one redeeming feature and at least she had the decency to end her engagement to one young man, when she’d made up her mind to marry another.’

  Toby raised his head and addressed the ceiling. ‘I feel I may be forced to drop Elsa. Audiences would never believe that anyone could be so trusting.’

  ‘And Millie shows signs of taking after her,’ I remarked.

  ‘What are they both talking about, please, Robin?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll let Tessa explain. It’s her evening, after all.’

  ‘Tessa?’

  ‘Well, don’t you see, both of you, that Marc didn’t know it had been broken off until two days after the murder had been committed? That was why poor little Diane became so agitated, Millie, when you tried to persuade her to ring him up on this telephone. That was the last thing she wanted, but on the other hand she wouldn’t have dared give him the push once he’d been arrested. That would have made some bad dents in the sweet, loyal little image she wanted the world to believe in. Moreover, she might have been stuck in that situation for God knows how long and she and David only had a few months left, if they were to collect that extra half million. Therefore, it was essential for her to break things off, technically, with Marc before the murder, but to make sure that it only became effective, as it were, afterwards. One has to say that she played it rather cunningly, but in no way was she trying to do Marc a good turn. In fact, in my opinion, the only one you owe any gratitude to is Mrs Trelawney.’

  ‘What have I to thank her for, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘For coming to live here and introducing her grandson into your midst. Diane had started getting her dainty claws on Marc when she was about twelve years old, recognising as far back as that that he was easily the most eligible and attractive boy likely to come her way, and nothing in this world was going to alter that, until Baby Face turned up, with all that vast fortune in the offing.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it’s true, but I’m still rather puzzled about that. We had all been given to understand that he was about to marry someone quite different, such a grand and splendid girl, indeed, that we felt we might all be expected to curtsey to her. Did she never exist? Was she just another invention to put everyone off the scent?’

  ‘Oh no, she existed all right, at least in the beginning. He really was on the brink of becoming formally engaged to someone of that description in the early days. There was a photograph to prove it and it was one reason why his grandmother was so enchanted with him and so eager to indulge his every whim. But then one day he went to inspect Orchard House, which had been earmarked for him and his bride, and there he met Diane, which changed everything. Even if he wasn’t instantly bowled over, and I daresay he was, it wouldn’t have taken her a couple of seconds to see that this was where her really big chance lay and she’d have gone after it with all the wiles she possessed. Everything else followed from that, because they knew from the outset that Mrs Trelawney would never have left him all her money if he’d dashed her hopes by running off with this nonentity of a girl, from such a humble, not to mention unstable background, and he certainly wouldn’t have been quite so attractive to Diane without the money. So, from their point of view, there was only one way out and they took it.’

  Robin said, ‘I always considered that clause in her will to have been carelessly worded and you must agree that this bears me out?’

  ‘Yes, it does; but I suppose that’s the price she paid for being so arrogant and for believing herself to be cleverer than anyone else. And I think the explanation must be that she had begun to realise that David’s official romance was cooling off, though never for one moment suspecting that it was on account of a rival attraction just up the road. He and Diane were much too canny for that. She probably thought it was the girl in the jodhpurs who was beginning to lose interest, so she decided to make an offer, first verbally and then written into her will, which neither of them could refuse. I daresay it would have been in her nature to assume that this was the surest way of bringing the young couple to heel.’

  ‘So that explains why the second photograph disappeared,’ Millie said. ‘I can see that he’d have wanted all the records and rumours about his first love to be wiped out and forgotten as quickly as possible, once his grandmother was dead; but what about the other one, the one of Geoffrey’s tree?’

  ‘Ah well, you see, Millie, the tree really had nothing much to do with it. You and I happened to be concentrating on it and so we didn’t pay any attention at all to what was going on elsewhere. I can’t ever prove this, naturally, but it’s my belief that in one of our shots we’d quite inadvertently included something which could have seriously damaged their carefully preserved pretence of being virtual strangers, if not declared enemies. If you remember, when we first caught sight of her, Diane was just beginning her climb down the slope towards the tree and she was quite alone. But just supposing that only a minute or two earlier she and David had been standing together and talking to each other like the love birds they were? With Geoffrey no longer around to observe them, they might easily have allowed the mask to slip, if they’d happened to meet by chance. And do you also remember what a spin she went into when she looked up and saw us leaning on the fence and brandishing our camera? She tried to make out that she was nervous that we’d disapprove of her using Geoffrey’s garden as a short cut. As though he’d have cared! My theory is that she had realised in a flash that, whether we had consciously witnessed it or not, something of that damning little scene between her and David might actually have been recorded on photograph. Isn’t that the only logical explanation for her first pinching the camera and then, having found what she feared to find, destroying one of the prints?’

  Toby said, ‘I know how it bolsters your ego when we all keep asking questions and, besides, I have a professional interest at stake, so tell me this: was that little episode really enough to suggest to you that there might be something going on between those two? If so, even I must congratulate you!’

  ‘Well, don’t kill yourself over it, because there’d been an earlier one still, which seemed to involve a cover-up of some kind, and with Diane again in the thick of it. It was when the oak tree was attacked in the light of headlamps. Louise had noticed them the instant she got home from searching for her dog, and yet no one at Orchard House appeared to have done so. Or if they had, they’d paid not the slightest attention. Naturally, my curiosity only concerned three people. The younger children were probably in bed and asleep at the time and I eliminated Mrs Hearne for even more obvious reasons. But that still left Diane and Marigold and their father, and Diane, in particular, always made such a great fuss about being so attached to Geoffrey. That was partly why I made my expedition to the Pottery yesterday. I wanted to make sure that they really did have a clear view of the tree from their back windows. Well, of course, I felt I was already getting towards the explanation of why Diane might have seen it plainly and still taken no action and why she might have prevented Marigold from taking any, but there was still Dad to consider. I was keen to find out whether he was batty enough to commit murder, to save himself the trouble of moving house.’

  ‘And, personally, I’m rather sorry you failed,’ Toby said. ‘He was always my number one fancy. I rather liked the idea of his persuading himself that he was acting as the instrument of God, or something on those lines.’

  ‘Even so, the mission couldn’t exactly go down in history as a failure, because when I discovered that Diane had been secretly snooping around and no doubt listening to every word, I felt sure I was on the right track. I guessed that she’d warn David that I was moving in too close and I thought it was just a question of sitting back and waiting for one of them to do something desperate. Unfortunately, I didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon, or to be quite so desperate; but then, as Millie once pointed out, he really was mad. He and Diane were made
for each other.’

  ‘And, in a sense, he died for love of her,’ Toby reminded us. ‘She has that consolation. Not to mention getting off scot free, herself, which may give cause for even greater satisfaction.’

  Elsa said, ‘And, as far as I’m concerned, it leaves only one more question to be answered. It’s about the car keys. I understand now who removed the spare set and why, but who put them back? Not David, as we know, and surely not Diane either? She would hardly have dared walk in the house and calmly put them away in my drawer, when she had just treated Marc so abominably and ran the risk of coming face to face with him?’

  ‘No, this is where Marigold enters the picture,’ I explained. ‘I think that’s what she was on her way to do when Millie met her in the lane last Saturday afternoon, just a few hours before she killed herself. Do you remember, Millie? You said she was in a state about something and also that she could only have been on her way here.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t remind me, Tessa! I still feel awful about it.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t, because I’d just dealt her a far crueller blow myself; only that too was unintentional.’

  ‘Now how can that be?’ Robin asked. ‘I understood you’d never actually seen Marigold? Besides, if memory serves, we’d spent practically the whole of that afternoon on the telephone, trying to find Marc.’

  ‘Yes, so we did and one of the people I spoke to was Marigold. I pretended to be calling from the Pettits estate office and I told her that David Trelawney wanted to get in touch with Diane. She was absolutely dazed and appalled and she must have felt she was really going right out of her mind, poor girl. She had the best of all reasons, after all, for believing that David knew exactly where Diane was and exactly when she’d be back.’

  ‘But you told us that they managed to keep their relationship a secret from everyone?’

  ‘No, I didn’t say everyone; although I’m sure they made very, very few exceptions. On the other hand, it wouldn’t altogether surprise me if James Hearne had picked up some vibrations about how the land lay, which was probably what made him so cheerful and optimistic about everything coming up roses in the end. And Marigold must have been let into the secret too, at some point, don’t you agree? How else can one account for her bearing up so well during the period when the family was living under the threat of eviction and then going completely to pieces when Mrs Trelawney was murdered and, on the face of it, things were about to take a turn for the better?’

  ‘You mean Marigold knew who the murderer was?’

  ‘I’m afraid she must have guessed. That was the strain she was living under, which finally became too much for her; and that was why she addressed her suicide note to Diane, saying that she knew Diane would understand and forgive her. I suppose what happened was that in the first triumphant flush of her splendid new romance, Diane confided in Marigold, swearing her to secrecy, of course, and then later on, when they needed an ally, to pass on telephone messages and so on, Marigold, being easily the most sane and sensible one available, was the obvious choice. Unfortunately, she was rather too sane and sensible for her own good.’

  ‘Yes, it’s dreadfully sad,’ Elsa sighed, ‘and it removes my very last shred of pity for that wicked, detestable girl. Well, my dear, you have explained it all beautifully and I do congratulate you. You have been so amazingly thorough and I’m sure Inspector Bledlow should be grateful to you.’

  ‘I’m not, though,’ Toby informed her. ‘She has been much too thorough for my liking. It seems to me that the only thing she has left for anyone else to do is to write the damn thing.’

  T H E E N D

  Felicity Shaw

  The detective novels of Anne Morice seem rather to reflect the actual life and background of the author, whose full married name was Felicity Anne Morice Worthington Shaw. Felicity was born in the county of Kent on February 18, 1916, one of four daughters of Harry Edward Worthington, a well-loved village doctor, and his pretty young wife, Muriel Rose Morice. Seemingly this is an unexceptional provenance for an English mystery writer—yet in fact Felicity’s complicated ancestry was like something out of a classic English mystery, with several cases of children born on the wrong side of the blanket to prominent sires and their humbly born paramours. Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of dressmaker Rebecca Garnett Gould and Charles John Morice, a Harrow graduate and footballer who played in the 1872 England/Scotland match. Doffing his football kit after this triumph, Charles became a stockbroker like his father, his brothers and his nephew Percy John de Paravicini, son of Baron James Prior de Paravicini and Charles’ only surviving sister, Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice. (Of Scottish mercantile origin, the Morices had extensive Portuguese business connections.) Charles also found time, when not playing the fields of sport or commerce, to father a pair of out-of-wedlock children with a coachman’s daughter, Clementina Frances Turvey, whom he would later marry.

  Her mother having passed away when she was only four years old, Muriel Rose was raised by her half-sister Kitty, who had wed a commercial traveler, at the village of Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, near the city of Margate. There she met kindly local doctor Harry Worthington when he treated her during a local measles outbreak. The case of measles led to marriage between the physician and his patient, with the couple wedding in 1904, when Harry was thirty-six and Muriel Rose but twenty-two. Together Harry and Muriel Rose had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1906. However Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by another man, London playwright Frederick Leonard Lonsdale, the author of such popular stage works (many of them adapted as films) as On Approval and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney as well as being the most steady of Muriel Rose’s many lovers.

  Unfortunately for Muriel Rose, Lonsdale’s interest in her evaporated as his stage success mounted. The playwright proposed pensioning off his discarded mistress with an annual stipend of one hundred pounds apiece for each of his natural daughters, provided that he and Muriel Rose never met again. The offer was accepted, although Muriel Rose, a woman of golden flights and fancies who romantically went by the name Lucy Glitters (she told her daughters that her father had christened her with this appellation on account of his having won a bet on a horse by that name on the day she was born), never got over the rejection. Meanwhile, “poor Dr. Worthington” as he was now known, had come down with Parkinson’s Disease and he was packed off with a nurse to a cottage while “Lucy Glitters,” now in straitened financial circumstances by her standards, moved with her daughters to a maisonette above a cake shop in Belgravia, London, in a bid to get the girls established. Felicity’s older sister Angela went into acting for a profession, and her mother’s theatrical ambition for her daughter is said to have been the inspiration for Noel Coward’s amusingly imploring 1935 hit song “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” Angela’s greatest contribution to the cause of thespianism by far came when she married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, with whom she produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.

  Felicity meanwhile went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit, a subdivision of the United Kingdom’s General Post Office established in 1933 to produce documentary films. Her daughter Mary Premila Boseman has written that it was at the GPO Film Unit that the “pretty and fashionably slim” Felicity met documentarian Alexander Shaw—“good looking, strong featured, dark haired and with strange brown eyes between yellow and green”—and told herself “that’s the man I’m going to marry,” which she did. During the Thirties and Forties Alex produced and/or directed over a score of prestige documentaries, including Tank Patrol, Our Country (introduced by actor Burgess Meredith) and Penicillin. After World War Two Alex worked with the United Nations agencies UNESCO and UNRWA and he and Felicity and their three children resided in developing nations all around the world. Felicity’s daughter Mary recalls that Felicity “set up house in most of
these places adapting to each circumstance. Furniture and curtains and so on were made of local materials. . . . The only possession that followed us everywhere from England was the box of Christmas decorations, practically heirlooms, fragile and attractive and unbroken throughout. In Wad Medani in the Sudan they hung on a thorn bush and looked charming.”

  It was during these years that Felicity began writing fiction, eventually publishing two fine mainstream novels, The Happy Exiles (1956) and Sun-Trap (1958). The former novel, a lightly satirical comedy of manners about British and American expatriates in an unnamed British colony during the dying days of the Empire, received particularly good reviews and was published in both the United Kingdom and the United States, but after a nasty bout with malaria and the death, back in England, of her mother Lucy Glitters, Felicity put writing aside for more than a decade, until under her pseudonym Anne Morice, drawn from her two middle names, she successfully launched her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970. “From the royalties of these books,” notes Mary Premila Boseman, “she was able to buy a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames; this was the first of our houses that wasn’t rented.” Felicity spent a great deal more time in the home country during the last two decades of her life, gardening and cooking for friends (though she herself when alone subsisted on a diet of black coffee and watercress) and industriously spinning her tales of genteel English murder in locales much like that in which she now resided. Sometimes she joined Alex in his overseas travels to different places, including Washington, D.C., which she wrote about with characteristic wryness in her 1977 detective novel Murder with Mimicry (“a nice lively book saturated with show business,” pronounced the New York Times Book Review). Felicity Shaw lived a full life of richly varied experiences, which are rewardingly reflected in her books, the last of which was published posthumously in 1990, a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.