by Anne Morice
‘Yes, it was rather reckless, but she may have been relying on Walter to protect her if things got rough. Perhaps the discovery that his motor bike had gone gave her such a jolt that she gave the game away and Magnus realised that there wasn’t another soul on the premises. After that, she hadn’t a chance.’
‘And so, having done his double bluff with the note on the golf club, all that remained,’ I said, ‘was to nip through the back of the Potteries and across the fields to the Eglinton Garage, where his car was waiting.’
‘Yes, and that’s the part which defeats me utterly,’ Toby complained. ‘Robin told us categorically that it was Babs who drove him to the garage, and furthermore that the petrol pump man saw her drive away again, alive and well.’
‘He thought he did,’ I explained. ‘It was a genuine mistake, but so often people see a certain amount with their eyes and fill in the gaps with their imagination. If I were to walk behind your chair now and go over to the bookcase, at the same time remarking that there was a lion in your garden, I bet you anything that in describing the event afterwards you’d say that I was looking out of the window.’
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ he replied crossly. ‘The point is that this man wasn’t sitting in a chair with his back to them.’
‘No, but the principle is the same. What he actually saw was Magnus walking up the forecourt to his car, getting in and checking the ignition for a bit, and then finally waving and tooting his horn to a female who drove past on the other side of the road. His mind filled in all the rest, including the fiction that Babs, having turned her car round in the interval, was the woman. How was he to know that Magnus deliberately sat there, fiddling with the controls until a nondescript vehicle with a woman driver appeared in his sights? But I guessed it could have happened in that way and I did some checking up. The mechanic who changed my wheel vaguely knew the Grahams by sight, but they’re not regular customers and he wasn’t even sure what make of car they owned.’
‘Tessa’s right,’ Robin said. ‘It’s a curious thing, but the petrol pump attendant could only give the haziest description of the car the woman was driving; on the other hand, he was absolutely positive that she and Magnus knew each other.’
‘All the same Mag was taking a big risk, wasn’t he?’
‘He believed in taking risks,’ I reminded them. ‘In fact, he told me the first time I met him that his worst mistakes had come from being over-cautious. And he had such sublime faith in his own powers that it probably never occurred to him that anything he undertook could go wrong. Being so athletic was a help too; that canter across the fields was a mere bagatelle. On the whole, one must concede that he made very few mistakes.’
‘Except in his marriage, of course.’
‘Oh yes, that was the real failure. And how it rankled! That a woman so blessed by fortune as to become his wife should dare to be unfaithful to him, and then to flaunt her infidelity with two little black eyed strangers! I wonder why Sarah and Julie never caught on?’
‘Well, children rarely question these things, luckily for their parents.’
‘But apart from his very unpaternal attitude, the most conspicuous thing about Magnus was the colour of his eyes; like the sea in the early morning light. Neither of the girls had inherited them, nor their mother’s either. I had to go back for another look at the portrait to confirm it, but I was fairly certain that hers were blue.’
‘Does that prove anything?’ Toby asked, looking rather worried.
‘Apparently, it does. It was one of the facts I prised out of Dr Simmons. He was cagey at first, but he finally admitted that although Sarah and Julie were naturally in the same blood group, Magnus belonged to a different one. That wasn’t conclusive, but he also agreed, on purely hypothetical terms, that it’s virtually unknown for a brown eyed child to be born of two blue eyed parents. It showed me plainly that one could not rule out the concept of Magnus as the murderer, because not only was Sarah unrelated to him, but to a man of his temperament her mere existence would always have been a thorn in the flesh. Perhaps in killing her he was finally revenging himself, in some twisted way, on her mother.’
‘Well, I’m staggered, aren’t you, Robin? Imagine Tessa being so well up in genetics, on top of everything else! Whatever would the C.I.D. do without her?’
‘Oh, they’d have caught up with Magnus sooner or later,’ I told him. ‘A bombastic, conceited man like him was bound to give himself away eventually. It’s like I always say; in the end people are brought down by their own weaknesses. Magnus, for instance, was always going on about his wonderful grasp of detail, but it was more of an Achilles heel in some ways.’
Robin frowned. ‘Why do you say that? If he’d simply concentrated on the little detail of not giving himself away it might have worked out splendidly.’
‘But he would inevitably have tripped himself up at some stage. That’s my point, and to illustrate it I’ll give you an example. When he was yapping away to me in his bedroom, with the knife in his hands, he couldn’t resist accusing me, among other crimes, of having arrived at Missendale only half an hour after Babs was killed. It was a detail, right enough, and it was also a complete giveaway. Anyone could have found out what time I arrived there; only the murderer would have known whether it was half an hour, or two minutes after the event.’
‘You have removed a weight from my mind,’ Toby said gravely. ‘What a relief to know that if you ever give up detection the course of justice may be slowed down, but it needn’t necessarily come to a halt. So I suppose the only one left to worry about now is poor Miss Julie?’
‘Don’t call her that. She hates it, and on the whole it’s not appropriate. Despite everything, Julie has quite a lot going for her. She has no blood ties with the murderer, but on the other hand I bet he’s already settled vast chunks of money on her.’
‘There is a saying to the effect that money can’t buy me love.’
‘I am aware of it, Toby, but I also happen to know that Dr Simmons is a bachelor, and he could certainly do with a softening influence in his life. Then there’s poor lonely Martin, sorely in need of some home comforts, and Julie is quite a passable cook. However, on the whole I think it would be best if she married Kit.’
‘You can’t be serious? I can think of nothing more tedious.’
‘Neither can I, but he worships money, and Julie is conditioned to these bull-dozing reactionary types. And he has one great pull over all the other prince charmings, which I bet hasn’t occurred to either of you.’
‘I bet it hasn’t either,’ Robin admitted sadly.
‘Well, just think! They could jog along together for ever and ever, and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference what colour the children’s eyes were.’
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.
Curtis Evans
About The Author
Anne Morice, née Felicity Shaw, was born in Kent in 1916.
Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of Rebecca Gould and Charles Morice. Muriel Rose married a Kentish doctor, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth. Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by playwright Frederick Lonsdale.
Felicity’s older sister Angela became an actress, married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, and produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.
Felicity went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit. There Felicity met and married documentarian Alexander Shaw. They had three children and lived in various countries.
Felicity wrote two well-received novels in the 1950’s, but did not publish again until successfully launching her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970, buying a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames, on the proceeds. Her last novel was published a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.
By Anne Morice
and available from Dean Street Press
1. Death in the Grand Manor (1970)
2. Murder in Married Life (1971)
3. Death of a Gay Dog (1971)
4. Murder on French Leave (1972)
5. Death and the Dutiful Daughter (1973)
6. Death of a Heavenly Twin (1974)
7. Killing with Kindness (1974)
8. Nursery Tea and Poison (1975)
9. Death of a Wedding Guest (1976)
10. Murder in Mimicry (1977)
Published by Dean Street Press 2021
Copyright © 1974 Anne Morice
Introduction copyright © 2021 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
First published in 1974 by Macmillan
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 914150 02 9
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
