by Nicola Upson
Phyllis threw back her head and laughed, then put her case down and gave him a hug. ‘Of course I haven’t! And you’ll have to ask Josephine and Marta about Mrs Carmichael. They made all her arrangements.’
‘With a little help from fate,’ Josephine said. ‘Phyllis is our Christmas present to you. She was coming as a surprise to Loe House, but then the plans changed and we had to sort everything out with Hilaria. We didn’t want to give the game away, though, so we invented the mysterious Mrs Carmichael for the sake of the guest list.’
‘Except Mrs Carmichael got held up in the blizzards and missed her connection, so she had to spend the night at the hotel in Marazion.’
‘You were at the Godolphin Hotel all the time I was there?’ he asked, and Phyllis nodded. ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’
‘Because you were obviously busy! I heard about what was going on from the staff, so I thought I’d better wait until things were more peaceful. Anyway, I wanted it to be special – we’ve never spent Christmas Day together before.’ Phyllis had been born during the war, but Archie and her mother had drifted apart and Archie had been oblivious to her existence until very recently. Missing her childhood had angered and saddened him, but now, as Phyllis smiled at him and gave him another hug, he couldn’t imagine loving his daughter more, even if he had been part of her life all along. ‘Please tell me that Marlene Dietrich really is here?’ she said. ‘I’ve been dying to meet her.’
‘You’re just in time. She’s leaving in the morning, but I’ll introduce you later.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Fabulous,’ Marta said, ‘and she likes your father very much. In fact …’
They walked ahead, chatting about Marlene, while Josephine hung back with Archie. ‘I’ll never forget the look on your face just now,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘It made Christmas what it’s supposed to be.’
‘Thank you, Josephine,’ he said. ‘This would have been a wonderful surprise at any time, but after everything that’s happened since we got here …’
‘You couldn’t have done more, Archie.’ He was about to brush her concern away, but she had always been able to read his thoughts, and there was something precious in the fact that she cared enough to know him better than he knew himself. ‘I’m sure you’re looking back now, thinking that you could have asked different questions and Jack Naylor’s life would miraculously have been a bed of roses from that day onwards, but you couldn’t. Life doesn’t work like that. If it did, Marta and I would have arrived early yesterday and been chatting to Emily Soper when Mrs Pendean came in to collect the nativity figure. These deaths aren’t your fault.’
‘Perhaps not, but—’
‘Do you know the first thing that Phyllis said when she got here, after she’d asked how you were?’
‘No.’
‘She told us that she’d watched you from the window of the hotel while you were going about your work and getting ready to come back to the island. You spent a long time talking to a young man by the boats. I’m assuming it was Jonathan Soper?’
Archie nodded. ‘That’s right. I was explaining that Jack hadn’t killed his mother, and promising to find out who did.’
‘Phyllis said how kind you were to him. Obviously, she didn’t know the circumstances, but she could see how much you cared and what a difference it made to him. She told us how proud she was that you were her father.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes, she did. And when we explained what had happened, she said that she wished she’d known you better when her mother was killed, because you would have helped her like no one else could.’ He felt again the tears that had been threatening all day, and this time he didn’t fight them. ‘Take a lesson from Dickens, Archie. You can’t change the past, but the future doesn’t have to be full of ghosts as well.’
They walked on in silence as the steep climb up to the castle took its toll. ‘Talking of brighter futures, I thought we might move on to Loe House tomorrow,’ Archie said. ‘After lunch, when all the formalities here are dealt with. How does that sound?’
‘Like all our Christmases have come at once,’ Josephine said. ‘We thought you’d never ask.’
ALSO BY NICOLA UPSON
Sorry for the Dead
Nine Lessons
London Rain
The Death of Lucy Kyte
Fear in the Sunlight
Two for Sorrow
Angel with Two Faces
An Expert in Murder
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England. Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels to feature Josephine Tey―one of the leading authors of Britain’s age of crime-writing. Her research for the books has included many conversations with people who lived through the period and who knew Josephine Tey well, most notably Sir John Gielgud. The book was dramatised by BBC Scotland for Woman’s Hour, and praised by PD James as marking ‘the arrival of a new and assured talent’. Nicola lives with her partner in Cambridge and Cornwall.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Nicola Upson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-634-6
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-635-3
Cover illustration by Mick Wiggins
Printed in the United States
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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First North American Edition: October 2020
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