by Mark McCrum
The room was rapt as Francis repeated what Priya had told him about the car crash that had killed her father and brother. ‘As I lay there in the darkness,’ he went on, ‘my first thought was that you might be some sort of fantasist, telling tall tales to draw attention and sympathy to yourself. Lord knows, I’ve met such types before …’
‘Haven’t we all,’ chipped in Virginia.
‘Only later,’ Francis continued, ‘did it dawn on me that the problem with your story wasn’t that it was or wasn’t true, but that there had been a reason for this chapter of apparent accidents …’
He paused and looked around the room.
‘While I’d been rummaging around your suitcase looking for that hard copy of Bryce’s speech I’d noticed that just inside, on the soft underside of the leather, was written the name P.K. JASWAL. OK, so when you’d moved down to London you had dropped the family surname and adopted your second name, the generic Sikh female Kaur – it means “princess”, I believe.’
Francis only glanced at Priya with this question. She wasn’t looking at him, her sloe-dark eyes directed straight ahead of her. He wasn’t expecting an answer and he didn’t get one.
‘Fair enough. Kaur is snappier, easier to remember. Why wouldn’t you want that as a byline for your new life as a journalist? But was there another reason why you wanted to leave Jaswal behind? Did the tragic story you told me last night conceal an altogether darker one? Of, to start with, a pregnant young woman who died in a fire, not accidentally, but deliberately, precisely because she was pregnant.
‘Chinni had been lined up, as is still traditional with many families in the world you come from, for a Rishta, an arranged marriage, with a young man from a similar caste to you. A jat, you explained, the landowning farmer caste. He was from the same area of the Punjab as your father, the son of an old friend. Chinni was only going to meet him just before her wedding day, out in India, so it was hardly likely she’d have become pregnant by him. No, the problem, surely, was that she was pregnant by someone else: a man, who knew, from a lower caste than jat – or worse, some local English guy. Chinni, you told me, had always stood up to your parents, was not going to be put off by what she saw as their old-fashioned ideas.
‘But it was more than just ideas, wasn’t it, it was honour. Izzat, in Punjabi. The strict code that I learned about when I was researching my last but one novel, A Matter of Honour. Izzat meant that your family name would have been so dragged down in public shame within your community that disowning his pregnant daughter was something your father would have felt obliged to do. And if she continued to make trouble, to insist she was going to have this shameful baby, a worse fate for her would have to be considered. Your hard man brother Bilal, with all his pride in his caste and his ideas about honour, would have gone along with that. And helped in the execution, too …
‘As lightning forked outside,’ Francis went on, ‘as bright as the awful – and, now I realised, intentional – fire that had killed your sister, I had a further flash of inspiration. When Scarlett and I had been talking on Sunday afternoon, she told me en passant that Bryce had once been involved with another young Asian woman; one of his students when he was teaching at Birkbeck. He had ended the relationship, she said, almost jokingly, when her brothers had found out …
‘Was it possible that this previous girlfriend had been your sister? Was this the link that made sense of everything? I was just about to phone Scarlett when in you walked, bright-eyed and excited with your progress with Jonty. Now it was my turn to dissemble, as I played along with you and held off on my call. As soon as you’d gone I dialled Scarlett’s number. Could she, I asked, by any chance remember the name of the young Asian woman whom Bryce had dated over ten years ago? Of course she could! She knew Bryce’s lovers like the kings and queens of England. His first Asian dalliance had been called Chinni Jaswal.
‘The man who had got her pregnant wasn’t, as I’d casually assumed, some feckless youth from Derby, but her lecturer from her journalism course in London. Had he stood by her, even offered to marry her and given her baby a respectable home, there would have been serious ructions with your family, but in the end his high status and wealth might have been enough to save your father’s honour as Chinni abandoned her Rishta.
‘But, as we know, this lecturer already had a long-term partner and, at the time, two baby daughters. From his point of view, the whole thing was a mess: if he did the right thing by Chinni he stood to lose both his job and his family. It was a no-brainer. He backed out. I’m sure he did so gracefully enough. Perhaps he even offered money for the abortion, as he’d done at least once before …’
Francis paused. This wasn’t the time to bring up Virginia’s personal tragedy of long ago, even if she would have let him. Instead he turned back to the woman he had got so close to in the last three days.
‘When you and I, Priya,’ he continued, ‘sat in my hotel room early on Sunday morning, waiting for the ambulance and the police, we talked briefly about death. You told me you had only seen one dead body in your life. Your grandfather. And perhaps that was true, because the car crash that killed your father and brother didn’t leave much in the shape of remains, did it? But were they just unlucky to hit that bank of fog and smoke on the M42 on that November night, exactly a year after Chinni had died, or had someone helped their deaths along? Did the prospect of marrying the same Punjabi farmer meant for Chinni, combined with revenge for your poor beloved sister, make you consider doing what would have been very easy for a girl trained in mechanics by her father, fixing the brakes of the family car – a couple of pinholes in the front and rear cables, was it, so they would give out some way along the journey? Perhaps you hadn’t even been sure you wanted them to die; but you wanted to punish them, that’s for sure.’
All eyes were now on Priya. Her gaze was back on Francis, defiant; her mouth set.
‘Only once Chinni’s death had been avenged within your family,’ Francis went on, ‘did it somehow become more important that you reach the last man in the case, that treacherous lecturer who had let your sister down, fatally as it turned out. Even if he hadn’t realised the seriousness of what he’d done, he was still guilty, wasn’t he?
‘It was easy enough to find out who Bryce was. But getting to him was going to be a different matter, because he came not just from a different city, but a different world. It was a world you started to get closer to, as you followed your sister up the education ladder to a course in journalism, in London, too.
‘By the time you had got to that stage, Bryce had moved on from teaching. He was now a big name on the Sentinel. Anything bad that happened to him was hardly going to go unnoticed. In any case, what were you going to do? Visit him at his flat? Arrange an accident for him at work? Even if you did think of something, how on earth were you going to get away with it? So perhaps for some time your revenge on Bryce remained a fantasy; an obsessive one, but not one you were ever really going to do anything about.
‘But then, at one of the parties you had now started getting invited to, out of college, an up-and-coming journo in your own right, you met someone who knew Bryce – one Conal O’Hare. Was the relationship you started with him cynical? Were you just using him to get close to your victim? Or perhaps things were more complex and your feelings for this talented Irishman were genuine? They only cooled when you started to doubt his commitment, when you decided he was more of a passionate fly-by-night than a reliable partner …’
Francis glanced over at Conal and Fleur, hands clasped together on their chintz couch. He needed to say nothing more.
‘Now I totally understand,’ he continued, ‘how you could have got involved with a successful travel writer a few years older than you, who had nothing to do with your sister’s case, who bore no blame. But when it came to Bryce, why, how did you go so far as to go out with him, and for some weeks? The only answer I can come up with is this: because you wanted to get away with your crime. Your revenge was personal,
but you didn’t want it to ruin your life. As you told me the other night, your sister’s death had made you more ambitious, not less. And if you were in a relationship with Bryce, it would seem completely unlikely that you would do away with this man who had employed you, opened doors for you, set you up. This was one of the main reasons why I kept putting the suspicions I had about you to one side. Because the motive just wasn’t there.
‘But tell me, was there a moment when you too came under his legendary spell? Were you able to understand why your sister had fallen for this brilliant, intemperate, quixotic man; and why she had wanted to have his child? Were you even tempted to abandon your obsession, sober up and just seize the life she could have had? Or didn’t you care? Had your mission for what you saw as justice taken you so far outside the norms of human behaviour that sleeping with your victim, softening him up over a few weeks for your final coup de grâce, was just what you had to do to achieve your ends?’
The only sound in the room was the muted laughter and chatter from the now reopened bar, and over it Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ ringing out inappropriately from the juke box.
‘Whatever the answers to these questions, Saturday night was the end of a long-planned act of vengeance, wasn’t it, Priya Kaur Jaswal? Bryce Peabody, that serial breaker of promises to loved ones, finally got his comeuppance.’ Francis looked around the group and allowed himself a little smile. ‘Though some might say he got what he’d always said he wanted: to feel the impact of something real from outside the parochial world he had existed in for so long.’
There was a nervous ripple of laughter from the assembled group. The young woman in the turquoise cheongsam didn’t join in. She stared straight in front of her, out of the window to the deep green shadows of the garden beyond. The sun had set, and the apple trees were turning to silhouettes in the gloaming. Priya’s head turned, and her lovely dark eyes scanned the room, taking in Bryce’s scorned exes, and at the back another, more powerful woman, DCI Julie, looking sternly ahead of her, her male subordinates grim-faced on either side. For several long seconds Priya seemed undecided, staring forlornly at Francis as if, even after this awful denunciation and betrayal, he might announce another twist in the tale and rescue her. Then she tilted up that chin.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, levelly, ‘what on earth you’re talking about.’
She got to her feet, pushed hurriedly past a stunned-looking Jonty Smallbone, and without looking round, made straight for the door.
AFTERWORD
WEDNESDAY 23RD JULY
The whole festival was buzzing with talk of what had happened the previous evening. After a showdown in the White Hart, the police had (apparently) arrested none other than Bryce’s ‘Asian babe’ girlfriend for the murder. What a bizarre turn-up for the books! Nobody could believe it, or (to be honest) quite follow the motive. Something to do with ‘honour killing’, which was still, wasn’t it, a very real issue in parts of the Asian community, however hard it was for outsiders to believe in or understand; that family members might murder each other to prevent some bizarre, outdated idea of ‘shame’. Was it possible that such things still took place in twenty-first century England? Apparently, it was.
But life itself must go on – particularly literary life. This sunny late July morning was an important one for Mold. Laetitia Humble, after much lobbying in London, had scored a coup. This year, for the first time, it was from Mold-on-Wold that the Booker Prize longlist was to be announced, at 11 a.m. in the packed Big Tent.
Towards the back, a fifty-something female with an odd, badger-like streak of white in her otherwise glossy dark hair was fidgeting in her seat. Last night had been riveting, unexpected, novelistic almost (could this be her next subject?), but this morning Virginia could hardly contain herself, as Laetitia stood behind the microphone to read out the names of the lucky contenders. They proceeded in scrupulous alphabetical order, each accompanied on the big screen by an author photograph.
No, she told herself, as the roll call of the acceptably brilliant was read out. No, I do not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Nice of Erica to put me up for it, but no, I must accept my fate.
‘John Banville,’ read Laetitia, ‘Julian Barnes … A.S. Byatt … Peter Carey … J.M. Coetzee … Dan Dickson … Hilary Mantel … David Mitchell. … Rose Tremain …’
How absurd it was to even hope that Sickle Moon Rises might be amongst this glittering crowd. Why had she bothered to turn up? Her books were not the kind to win prizes. They were, let’s face it, better than that. More lasting, deeper than the transient fluff of the zeitgeist. As she so often remarked at dinner parties, Shakespeare had never won a prize. Trollope neither. Virginia’s eye was fixed on a harsher, fairer judge than that haphazard team of modish quasi-intellectuals who made up the Booker panel.
Posterity.
With Sarah Waters they had reached eleven – out of twelve. Virginia’s heart was, as she might have put it in one of her novels, in her mouth. They were at the end of the alphabet, a place she had never enjoyed being, from school days onwards. Catch her another time and she’d have told you at length how authors whose surnames began with A, B, C were bound to do better than those unfortunate to be cursed with V, W, Y or Z, always at the wrong end of the bookshops’ shelves.
Laetitia’s lips parted.
‘Virginia …’ she began, and at that moment, the badger woman saw her literary life flash before her. Right from the very start and the two unpublished novels she had written in her early twenties in Cambridge and London, before her Parisian-set debut, Entente Cordiale, had put her firmly on the map. The six titles since, each one a long-drawn-out labour of love. And now …
‘Westcott,’ she heard, as if in a dream. And then: ‘Sickle Moon Rises.’
‘Oh my giddy … god!’ squealed Virginia, despite her best intentions. It was true, it was true, it was true. The sniff of a prize. After all these years. And not just any old prize. The Booker, no less. Oh, oh, OH … and OH again. And what a dreadful shame that her ancient rival in the world of letters, Bryce Peabody, that evasive bastard, father of her murdered child, whose death in truth she wished she’d had the courage to have a hand in herself, was not around to see this.
Five yards behind her, Francis Meadowes heard her little scream and smiled. He had grown almost fond of her over the past three days and was happy that she should at last be allowed her little moment of triumph. He doubted she would make the shortlist.
He was heading back to London soon, eager to leave the bizarre events of the last four days behind him. He doubted that he would ever forget the look that Priya had given him as she leapt to her feet and left the games room at speed. Not that she had got far. DS Povey and DS Wright had been right behind her, and Francis had heard that almost ritual mantra of arrest as if in a dream. ‘You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on …’
He felt sick at heart for her. She who had overreached herself so insanely, acting on who knows what twisted sense of honour or revenge. For a moment there, down by the river, he had felt his heart reopen, he had seen a future. And then, so quickly afterwards, he had realised the truth. And what alternative had there been for him then?
Now he would go on his way up the long and beautiful valley, onto the A roads and the motorway and the M25 and the crowded North Circular and back to his flat and his life in London. He could console himself with this: that real life did occasionally throw up the kinds of scenarios he had started to doubt were credible. Maybe George Braithwaite wasn’t such a busted flush after all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the organisers of the Shetland Literary Festival for inviting me to speak, as it was there, at a jolly dinner with Scottish crime writers, that it first occurred to me that I might attempt a whodunnit. Various kind friends read the manuscript in its different stages, made useful suggestions and offered encouragement: Hea
ther Brooke, Oliver Butcher, Sue Cooke, Stephanie Cross, Victoria Hodder, Jeff Hudson, Linda Hughes, Susan Jenkins, Philip Kerr, Miles Mantle, Stephen McCrum, Duncan Minshull, Jackie Nelson, Peta Nightingale, Debra Potel, Joanna Swinnerton, Katrin Williams, Antony and Verity Woodward. Roger Stephenson gave me good tips on the life of a country doctor and DCI John Carr advised me on police procedures and made helpful suggestions. Guy Martin put me right on libel law. My agent Mark Lucas offered useful advice on structure and Steve Gove did a fine job of copy-editing. Tina Seskis inspired me to go the independent route and went out of her way to help me with the publishing process. Katie Roden of Fixabook gave me an excellent steer on cover design, while Laura Bamber came up with the goods. Finally of course thanks to my wife Jo, who comes back after a long day’s work with tricky authors only to find one waiting for her at home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Word of mouth is crucial for all authors: traditional, hybrid and indie. If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review at Amazon, even if it’s only a line or two.
You can find out more about me and my work at my website – www.markmccrum.com – where you can also read my blog and contact me. Alternatively you can follow me on Twitter (@McCrumMark) or Facebook: www.facebook.com/AuthorMarkMcCrum.
Enjoy The Festival Murders? Read on for the opening chapter of the second gripping Francis Meadowes mystery, Cruising to Murder …
