A Murder to Die For Read online

  Stevyn Colgan spent thirty years as a police officer. But now he’s one of the writers of the award-winning TV show QI and its sister show on BBC Radio 4, The Museum of Curiosity. In A Murder to Die For he brings his sense of humour and his policing experience together to create something that is definitely not your average murder mystery.

  Also by Stevyn Colgan

  Joined-Up Thinking

  Henhwedhlow: The Clotted Cream of Cornish Folktales

  (with Tony Hak)

  Constable Colgan’s Connectoscope

  The Third Condiment

  Colgeroons

  Saving Bletchley Park (with Dr Sue Black OBE)

  Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?

  As a contributor

  I Remember: Reflections on Fishing and Childhood (ed. Joe Cowley)

  Ottakar’s Local History: High Wycombe (ed. Roger Cole)

  The QI ‘F’ Annual

  The QI ‘G’ Annual

  The QI ‘H’ Annual

  The ‘EFG’ Bumper Book of QI Annuals

  Subject Verb Object (ed. Dane Cobain)

  For Michael ‘Myghal’ Colgan (1940–1991)

  and the novels he never got to write.

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type murder5 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  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

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Copyright

  Agnes Crabbe – The Mysterious

  Mistress of Murder Mystery

  By Colin Tossel, President, Nasely Historical Society

  (Reproduced with kind permission from the Agnes Crabbe

  Murder-Mystery Festival brochure 2014)

  The fertile lowlands of South Herewardshire have, since Saxon times, provided generations of farmers with the finest dairy and beef herds and the plumpest of pigs. It is where the deliciously unique Herewardshire Hog, famed throughout the colonies for its rich, fatty bacon, was bred. And it is why the county became known during Regency times as ‘the meat locker of England’ and the heart-attack capital of the Empire. But while blessed with silty chocolate-coloured soil, lush green fields and clean, fresh streams, the county had little else of value to exploit; no coal or salt or metals to mine, no coastline to fish, no stone to quarry, and, with almost everyone in some way involved with the lucrative business of turning pasture into meat, there was little room for genius to flourish.

  As the county’s coffers swelled, a contented indolence settled over the uncommonly productive farms and villages. South Herewardshire became synonymous with unimaginative, gouty businessmen and solid, dependable workers who didn’t seek to rise above their station because they enjoyed far better pay and conditions than their contemporaries elsewhere. The county produced no Brunels, no Austens, no Turners, no Wordsworths. The storytellers had no brave or bawdy tales to tell. The balladeers had no folk heroes, no rogues or wild rovers to sing about, and the county’s most popular folk song – ‘Go to Hell!’ – describes the death by diet-induced stroke of a gluttonous murderer. South Herewardshire would have to wait until the end of the nineteenth century before anyone that could be regarded as historically significant appeared, and, even then, Agnes Crabbe would not achieve that fame until she had been dead for more than half a century.

  Agnes Emily Gertrude Brock, the second and youngest child of a family of farmers from Nasely, came quietly and uneventfully into the world on 8 May 1895. She grew into a plain, shy girl with a penchant for daydreaming and, although she worked diligently, if unexceptionally, at school, she failed to display any notable talent or aptitude for any particular subject. At the age of eighteen, she seemed quietly content to be married off to a neighbouring pig-farmer called Daniel Crabbe, and everyone assumed that this unprepossessing young woman would live out the rest of her life as a respectable, hard-working, but otherwise unremarkable housewife and mother.

  But war was about to change everything. Daniel was one of the first to sign up when the recruiters arrived in the village and, as was the fashion, so did most of his friends and family. However, just eleven months after taking the King’s shilling, Daniel lay dead in Flanders’ fields, along with Agnes’s father and older brother, and most of the men from her village. The news brought great sorrow to Nasely and Agnes withdrew from village life, hiding herself away inside the little cottage that she had shared, for such a tragically short time, with her young husband. Meanwhile, her grief-stricken mother, robbed of both husband and son, took to her bed and refused all food and drink, and met her maker not long after.

  As the months passed by, rumour and speculation began to grow. The fires of gossip were fuelled by the fact that Agnes never left her house, having almost everything delivered to her. The only person she ever admitted inside was her older brother’s fiancée, Iris Gobbelin, another tragic young woman who had lost her lover to the Great War.

  For the next two decades, Agnes’s only contact with the outside world was through Iris. But Iris would never speak of her reclusive friend, which led to a proliferation of lurid tales about what went on inside the Crabbes’ cottage.

  Agnes’s last link with the outside world was severed in 1936 when Iris was killed falling from a horse and, almost immediately, the rumours got sillier and the tall stories got taller. It was said that she lived in one room, surrounded by the debris of her tragic life. Meanwhile, other, more preposterous tales were concocted by village children involving witchcraft or child-stealing.

  Agnes
Crabbe died of cancer in 1944 at the age of just forty-nine and her story might have ended there but for an unusual bequest. As the world celebrated the start of the third millennium, a solicitors’ office in the nearby market town of Bowcester found itself in possession of something quite unexpected and very special.

  In 1943, knowing that she was near the end of her life, Agnes Crabbe had contacted a solicitor called Charles Tremens and gave into his care a heavy locked suitcase, a sealed envelope containing the key and instructions that neither were to be opened until on or after 1 January 2000. With no family or heirs to whom she could leave her modest estate, she requested that the solicitor sell all that she owned so that there would be sufficient funds to ensure that her wishes were carried out.

  The opening of the suitcase caused a sensation. Mr Tremens’s grandson Andrew, now a senior partner in the firm of Tremens, Mallord, Hacker and Budge, discovered that the case contained a number of handwritten and typed manuscripts: twenty-one complete novels – twenty of them detective fiction – and twenty-seven short stories. There were also the scripts for two plays and several volumes of poetry, as well as a substantial number of Agnes Crabbe’s personal diaries that spanned the years between 1909 and 1943. A handwritten letter gave authority to Mr Tremens’s firm to act as her proxy and to see that the manuscripts, none of which, she maintained, had been read by a living soul other than herself, were submitted for publication.

  Mr Tremens duly submitted the work to a number of literary agents, all of whom quickly realised that here was something quite remarkable; a cache of original, unread detective novels from the golden age of crime fiction. A bidding war began, culminating in a six-figure book deal, and the first three titles – Broken and Snared, The Beginning of Sorrows and The Dead Do Not Rise – quickly became bestsellers. In the absence of living relatives, Tremens arranged for a proportion of the proceeds of sale to be paid to charities that supported war widows/widowers and their children.

  Examination of the diaries revealed a very different Agnes Crabbe from the one portrayed in rumour. Far from being the tragic and lonely young widow that everyone had assumed she was, Agnes recorded that she was happy and content and had, in fact, always preferred her own company to that of other people. She expressed great sadness for the death of her husband but more for the life that he would never live than for her own loss. She was not entirely sure that she had ever loved Daniel Crabbe but she had been very fond of him; they had grown up together in a small village, after all. However, his death had freed her from other people’s expectations of her and the death of her mother had released her from all other obligations. Tragic circumstance had provided her with the time, the funds and the isolation to explore the world inside her own head. As she wrote in one of her diaries, ‘Reality is at best a poorly constructed and inadequate substitute for the wonder room of my imagination.’ She began to write in 1915 – not for publication but for her own pleasure – and she would continue to write almost until the day she died.

  Her early works were poems that expressed her feelings about love and loss. But she soon migrated to writing short stories, each one a miniature murder mystery of the kind she so enjoyed reading. Then came the novels. By the age of thirty she had produced five books but had made no attempt to have them published. She was not hungry for recognition and the human contact that would inevitably ensue. She also knew that her prose was too scandalous, her murder scenarios too full of grim realism, and her middle-aged heroine, Miss Millicent Cutter, far too promiscuous for the repressed sensibilities of polite 1920s society.

  By 1942, she had completed twenty novels and had begun her twenty-first when she became gravely ill and learned from her doctor – the first person, other than Iris, to speak to her at any length in decades – that she had a terminal illness. But she continued to write, grimly determined to finish the knowingly named All Things Must Pass. Once that was done, she bequeathed her life’s work to future generations if, indeed, there were to be any, with the words: ‘I hope that the combined wisdom of humanity will eventually bring us to a sense of our situation and that the dawning of the twenty-first century will see a world that has cured all men of the insanity of war.’

  The books proved to be enormously popular and Miss Cutter soon became as much of a household name as Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot. Literary reviewers held Crabbe’s writing in high esteem and her strong female characters were celebrated by feminist writers. But, more importantly perhaps, her complex and ingenious plots quickly gained her a legion of fans, particularly among a certain kind of lady reader who revelled in Miss Cutter’s razor-sharp intuition, frequent romances and sexual encounters with beefy farmhands and swarthy foreign agents. In the character of Miss Cutter, readers caught a glimpse of the kind of woman they wished they could be, living a life they wished they might have had. Crueller social commentators called the canon ‘a curious coupling of Jackie and Wilkie Collins’ but no one could argue that the formula didn’t engage with the fans. The factors that had made Agnes Crabbe unprintable in her lifetime were now her strongest selling point. Within just a few years of their discovery, all of her books had enjoyed dozens of reprints and translations and the number of her fans worldwide was legion. For many readers of golden age detective fiction, the name Agnes Crabbe was spoken with passion and reverence, and the fact that she had been completely unknown until the millennium only added to people’s fervour to elevate her to the ranks of the greats. The arrival of award-winning TV adaptations further cemented her popularity and the multi-award-winning series The Miss Cutter Mysteries quickly transformed actress Helen Greeley from a bit player into an international star.

  Which is why, on or around the date of her birth every year, hundreds of her most devoted fans descend upon Nasely, the tiny South Herewardshire village in which Agnes Crabbe lived out her entire life, to enjoy a weekend of readings, competitions, screenings, dramatic re-enactments, historical tours and talks by Crabbe scholars and other eminent people. From what started out as little more than a local book club, Nasely’s annual Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival has quickly grown to become one of the most popular literary festivals in Great Britain.

  We do hope that you enjoy your visit.

  Agnes Crabbe Bibliography

  (year of writing)

  The Miss Cutter Mysteries

  Broken and Snared (1923)

  The Beginning of Sorrows (1925)

  The Dead Do Not Rise (1926)

  Bite the Dust (1927)

  Brood of Vipers (1928)

  My Brother’s Keeper (1929)

  Wit’s End (1930)

  Absent in the Flesh (1930–1931)

  Babel (1931) (Guest feat. Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)

  Swords into Ploughshares (1932–1933)

  Wallowing in the Mire (1934–1935? Suspected ‘lost’ manuscript)

  Teeth Set on Edge (1940)

  Lying Lips (1940)

  A Wrathful Man (1941) (Guest feat. Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)

  Alpha and Omega (1941–1942)

  Ministry of Death (1942)

  Punishment of the Sword (1942–1943)

  All Things Must Pass (1942–1943)

  The Den of Thieves Trilogy (Colonel Trayhorn Borwick)

  Den of Thieves (1936)

  Dire Straits (1937–1938)

  Pearls Before Swine (1939–1940)

  Other Fiction

  A White Stone (1931)

  Poetry Collections

  A Thorn in the Flesh (1915–1918)

  Remembrance of Former Things (1916–1933)

  The Shadow of Your Wings (1936–1943)

  Short Story Collections

  A Multitude of Sins (1920–1930) –

  includes the Miss Cutter story ‘A Soft Answer’

  Die by the Sword (1937–1942) –

  includes the Miss Cutter story ‘Sour Grapes’

  Plays

  Doubting Thomas (1933) – Featuring Colonel Trayhorn Borwick
<
br />   Evil Company Corrupts (1936) – Featuring Miss Cutter

  A warm drizzle began to fall just as the very last piece of festival bunting was being hung. Up and down the little High Street, stepladders were hastily folded and toolboxes were slammed shut as people made their way indoors out of the rain. Most of the work was done and what little remained could wait until morning. In the meantime, there were windows to decorate and costumes to press, props to be dusted off and cakes to be baked.

  Over the course of a fortnight, the village of Nasely had been returned to how it would have looked in the 1920s. It wasn’t such a difficult trick to pull off as most of the buildings dated from the nineteenth century, and their caramel-coloured stone walls, attractive sash windows and wrought-iron railings were already authentically vintage. The shops too were old-fashioned in style, and the street furniture was traditional and restrained. Wherever possible, unavoidable evidence of the twenty-first century had been hidden or disguised; the street was too narrow for anachronisms such as traffic lights or speed cameras but there were satellite dishes to obscure with hanging baskets and telephone junction boxes to hide behind street vendors’ barrows. It was important that Nasely looked just right for the annual Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival. The little village wasn’t just the venue. It was the star.

  The great crime-fiction author had lived her entire life in the village and had used it as the template for Little Hogley, the setting for many of her hugely popular novels. The two villages were identical; every one of her murder scenes had a counterpart in reality, making a visit to the festival a must for all true fans. As long as somebody had been bludgeoned, poisoned or in some other way done to bloody death at or near its literary doppelgänger, the most banal of locations would attract hordes of devotees in the days to come. They would flock to Chetwynd’s Butcher’s Shop in Sacker Street because it was where Claude Hindeshott had made his arsenic-laced game pies in Absent in the Flesh. They would pose for photographs outside the Gondolier Italian restaurant because it mirrored the location of the Staines family bakery in Bite the Dust (where husband and wife John and Rosina had engineered Sally Foddenam’s grisly explosive end among the flour sacks). And they would queue for hours to visit the village’s most sacred site: the picturesque little cottage at the corner of the High Street and Ormond Road in which the reclusive writer had penned all of her novels and where her much-loved lady detective, Miss Millicent Cutter, had made her fictional home. In recent years, the cottage had been converted into a museum and among its most popular attractions were Miss Cutter’s sitting room and Agnes Crabbe’s study. The sitting room, meticulously reconstructed from descriptions found in the books, was where Miss Cutter routinely scolded Inspector Raffo of the Knollshire Constabulary for his blundering. The study, meanwhile, had been somewhat imaginatively dressed and decorated to look nothing like it probably had done in Agnes Crabbe’s lifetime. The museum would do a roaring trade over the weekend and so too would the happy shopkeepers who rubbed their hands with glee in anticipation of the hugely increased footfall that the festival would bring to their premises.