Sorry for the Dead Read online

  SORRY FOR THE DEAD

  A JOSEPHINE TEY MYSTERY

  Nicola Upson

  For Val, with love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Ideas for a book come when you least expect them, and I’m grateful to the Charleston guide who—on a tour of that beautiful house—mentioned that it was once run by two women as a boarding house; as Josephine notices during her visit, the ceramic number plates are still visible above the bedroom doors. Further valuable information on Charleston came from Quentin Bell’s book on the house; Frances Spalding’s biographies of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; Angelica Garnett’s Deceived With Kindness; and Stewart MacKay’s book on Grace Higgens, The Angel of Charleston.

  The horticultural history of Charleston is entirely my invention, but is closely based on the work of several pioneering women and their gardening colleges, most notably Viscountess Frances Wolseley at Ragged Lands, Glynde, and Beatrix Havergal and Avice Sanders at Waterperry in Oxfordshire. The peace of the walled garden and spirit of a country estate during the First World War were inspired by the beautiful Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Gertrude Ingham—a remarkable woman—was Principal of Moira House School for more than 30 years, retiring in 1939; the school—now Roedean Moira House—is still flourishing. Kate Adie’s fascinating book, Fighting on the Home Front, is a brilliant account of women’s achievements during the Great War, on the land and in many other arenas.

  My thanks go to Shirley Collins for such a warm welcome to Lewes and the Downs, and to everyone at the Ram Inn, Firle, for their hospitality.

  As always, I’m indebted to the people who work so hard to make these books a success: Veronique Baxter at David Higham and Grainne Fox at Fletcher & Company; Walter Donohue, Sophie Portas and all at Faber & Faber; Matthew Martz, Jenny Chen and Sarah Poppe at Crooked Lane Books; and everyone at W.F. Howes. My thanks go, as always, to my family for their love and support, and especially to Mandy, my favourite gardener, who creates something beautiful wherever she goes.

  Finally, it’s been lovely in this novel to pay tribute to the book that first introduced me to Josephine Tey and, by a circuitous route, inspired this series. The Franchise Affair is a brilliant, complex and original crime novel, a chameleon of a book which shifts and changes with each new reading. If you’ve never read it, go and find a copy; you’re in for such a treat.

  … we are at Rodmell on the loveliest spring day: soft: a blue veil in the air torn by birds voices. I am glad to be alive & sorry for the dead …

  —Virginia Woolf

  1948

  She waited on the step until Josephine was out of sight, then closed the front door behind her. The house seemed unnaturally quiet, and it took her a few moments to accept that she was finally alone. The book—a present she would never read—still lay on the table in the hallway. She unwrapped it and folded the brown paper neatly into a square, then went through to the sitting room to put it on the bookshelf with the others. Out of habit, she straightened the picture above the fireplace, wondering why she had lived for so long with something that she didn’t really like. In a moment of defiance, she lifted the canvas from its hook and put it face down on the floor.

  The pointlessness of her days stared back at her from the tidy room: the vacuumed carpet and dusted shelves, everything pathetically in its place; only the coffee table showed any sign of dissent. She stacked the plates and cups carefully onto a tray and cleared away the remains of a fruitcake made the week before. It was past its best, stale and tasteless in her mouth, but it had served its purpose, and the rest could be thrown away. She took it outside and crumbled it onto the low redbrick wall that separated her cottage from the one next door, smiling to herself when she imagined her neighbors’ indignation at the thought of a week’s dried fruit and sugar going to the birds. Already they thought her selfish and unfriendly, but she had been called much worse in the past, and no doubt would be again.

  April was barely a week old, but the heat could have passed for early June. She sat down on a sun-bleached wooden bench that stood just outside the back door, trying not to disturb the cat, who invariably got there before her. It had taken her a long time to get used to such a small garden—just a plain, unimaginative rectangle in a terrace of the same—but she had planted it with all the things she loved most, nurturing a tiny wilderness of flowers and shrubs that had no purpose other than their beauty. A succession of warm days and spring showers had obliged her by bringing everything out before its time, and she was pleased to see the unexpected joy of early tulips. The promise of summer was everywhere, and the knowledge gave her comfort as well as pain; the rose that bore her name would be magnificent this year. Distracted by her thoughts, she stroked Percy’s head as he lay stretched out in the sun, thin and arthritic in his old age. He had been with her for years, a handsome white and black hunter who arrived on her doorstep on the day she moved in, and stubbornly refused to leave. She had thought him a burden at the time, something else to care for and lose, but his company soon won her over; now, she couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from him.

  In the distance, the clock at St. John’s struck the hour with its customary lack of urgency, and she went inside to collect her purse and shopping basket. Her front door opened straight onto the pavement, and she walked out into the narrow, leafy lane and headed for the high street, taking the most direct route to make sure of reaching the butcher’s before he lowered his blinds for the weekend. She obviously wasn’t the only one to be waylaid by a fine afternoon: the last-minute queue for meat stretched out of the shop door and round the corner, and she took her place in it, nodding to one or two of the customers. Whenever she found herself in a crowd these days, she was increasingly struck by the emptiness in people’s faces, by a flat, going-through-the-motions air that she had never been conscious of before, not even in the depths of war. It was as if this fragile peace, no matter how longed for, lacked the exhilaration of wartime, the shared sense of purpose that had helped people forget their fear and their grief. The danger had passed, but gone too was the laughing in the street, the instinctive kindnesses from one neighbor to another—and it was these small commonplace things that mattered to most people. Now, everyone looked so tired and worn down that she wondered if the world would ever recover.

  Inside, the shop smelled faintly of blood and sawdust. “Two ounces of ham, please,” she said, requesting the full ration when her turn came.

  The butcher nodded, and she watched as he cut thick slices from the bone and weighed them. “What else can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “That’s all you want? I’ve got some of that stewing beef you like, fresh in yesterday. It’ll save you queuing again if you take it now.”

  She looked at the meat and felt the nausea rise in her throat. “Just the ham,” she snapped, feeling the eyes of the queue on her. “I really don’t need anything else.”

  He shrugged and took her money, raising his eyes at the woman next in line, and she left the shop without another word. Across the street, a dress in the window of Jones’s caught her eye, and she went over to look at it, drawn to the startling shade of green. Its tight-fitting waist and extravagantly flared skirt were so unlike anything she owned that, on a whim, she pushed the door open and went inside, conscious of her conservative shoes and the dull, shabby skirt that had seen too many summers. The counter was piled high with the new season’s accessories, a flashback to the time before all the beautiful feminine things disappeared, and a young girl wearing too much rouge came over to greet her. “The dress in the window …” she began but was interrupted before she could finish her sentence.

  “Ah yes, madam. It’s only just come in, and I think you�
�ll find the fabric is—”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “You don’t want to try it on?”

  The girl looked doubtful, and she wondered how many more people that day would question the fact that she knew her own mind; strange, because she had never felt more deliberate or more certain. “There’s no need,” she insisted. “I know it will fit.”

  With a shrug, the assistant went over to the window to set about undressing the mannequin, and five minutes later the dress was hers. Rather than retracing her steps, she decided to walk back via the castle. The steep climb through Castle Gate and into the Precincts beyond made her feel every year of her age, and she paused at the top to catch her breath. Beyond the outskirts of Lewes, the soft green downs spread out before her under a Wedgwood sky. It was a view she had always loved, a reminder of both the happiest and saddest times of her life, but today it was too much; she turned her back on it and headed for home.

  She shook out the dress and hung it on her wardrobe door, then went back downstairs to the kitchen. Percy answered her call immediately, apparently oblivious to the strain in her voice, and she chopped the ham into a dish while he rubbed round her legs, making the small, familiar noises of appreciation that still seemed so out of place in a cat his size. The meat was as salty as brine and less tasty than it looked, and she felt a sudden surge of anger with herself for buying the wrong thing on this of all days. She picked him up and held him, and his ears flicked with irritation as he felt her tears on his fur. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, choking back a sob. “I’m so sorry.” He wriggled in her arms to be released, and she let him have his way, then prepared the last of the milk and put both dishes down in the sunlight just outside the back door, making sure that he had the ham first. His enjoyment was little comfort to her, and when he turned so innocently to the milk, she had to walk away.

  As a distraction, she tidied the already tidy kitchen. Perhaps it was her mood, but the room seemed cheerless and neglected. When everything was as she wanted it, she found the Vim and scoured the oven until it was spotless, then climbed the stairs to change. She washed at the tiny sink in her bedroom, annoyed by the dripping tap that she had never got round to having fixed, and wondered what else had been left undone. As she took the dress from its hanger and put it on, the unfamiliar fabric felt dangerous against her skin, and she smiled to herself. She had been right to trust her instinct: the dress could have been made for her, and for a fleeting moment in the mirror she caught a glimpse of the woman she had once been. The knowledge tormented her, and she put it from her mind. “How do I look?” she asked, but the only answer was a heavy, oppressive silence.

  Back downstairs, she forced herself to go outside. Percy lay in the sunshine; she could have convinced herself that he was merely sleeping were it not for the shallowness of his breath. The tears came again, more forceful than ever, and this time she made no effort to stop them. She owed him that, at least. Gently, she picked him up and clutched him to her, then set him down in the chair that he had always made his own, talking all the time to him while she made her preparations. She closed the window on the spring day and laid a wet tea towel carefully along the sill where she knew the draughts came in, then did the same at the back door and the door into the hallway. When everything was ready, she left the note where it couldn’t be missed and sat by her cat while he took his final breath, then picked up the cushion from the other chair and walked over to the cooker. Astonished by how calm she felt, she turned the gas on and set the cushion in place, then put her head inside, as far as she could bear. This time, there must be no mistake.

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  CHAPTER 1

  It would be hard to imagine a more beautiful walk to work, Josephine thought, as she left King’s Parade behind and turned into the peaceful eccentricity of St. Edward’s Passage, with its old cottages and pretty churchyard. The pavements were cast in shadow by the church tower and nearby Guildhall, but the heat of the September morning was already strong enough to stay pleasantly at her back as she headed for the stage door of the Arts Theater, tucked discreetly between a café and a secondhand bookshop, and easy to miss if you were simply idling the day away.

  The invitation to direct one of her own plays at Cambridge’s newest theater had come out of the blue, a result of her friendship with Lettice and Ronnie Motley, who had been involved with the Arts since its opening production a couple of years earlier. At first she had hesitated, reluctant to take on a role that was alien to her, but Marta’s encouragement and the opportunity to spend time with her lover in a town that excited her made her forget her reservations, and now—in the final days of rehearsal—she had no reason to regret her decision. She was enjoying every minute of the process, relishing the chance to work with a talented group of actors who wanted nothing more than to get the best out of her text, and as the opening night drew closer, the familiar nerves came with a new optimism. The Laughing Woman—a drama based loosely on the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska—was the least successful of her West End productions, but the one closest to her heart. She had always been disappointed by its reception and frustrated by elements of the director’s staging that were beyond her control; at least this time, if the play failed again, she would only have herself to blame.

  She waited patiently at the stage door while the theater’s general manager dealt simultaneously with a consignment of French linen for the restaurant and a telephone complaint about the sight lines from the back of the circle. “You’re early this morning, Miss Tey,” he said when the disgruntled patron had been pacified. “I thought the cast was called for midday.”

  “Yes, that’s right, but Miss Lopokova wants to talk to me before we start the run-through. I gather she has a new idea for the last scene before the interval.”

  “I’m sure she has. She never does anything half-heartedly, that’s for sure.” Norman Higgins gave a wry smile, but his words were spoken with affection. The play’s leading lady was popular with both cast and staff, and not only because she was married to Maynard Keynes, the theater’s founder. A former ballerina with the Diaghilev company, Lydia Lopokova had, in her heyday, been worshipped by London audiences for the fiery beauty of her dancing, but her subsequent forays into acting were less successful. In Twelfth Night at the Old Vic, her portrayal of Olivia had been torn to shreds by the press, but she had stuck doggedly at it, encouraged first and foremost by her husband. According to the Motleys, who made it their business to know everything about anyone who had ever stepped onto a London stage, the marriage had been ridiculed by Keynes’s Bloomsbury friends, but it had lasted against the odds. The Arts Theater—as well as being Keynes’s gift to the town he loved—was a symbol of his devotion to his wife and her career. “Miss Lopokova is already in her dressing room, if you’d like to go and find her,” Higgins added. “I’ve got some post here for you, and someone from the Express telephoned, wanting a quote from you about the play. I’ve got his number if you want it, but he said he’d try again later.”

  Josephine thanked him and took the small bundle of letters, then went downstairs to the basement. The backstage facilities—still fresh and new in comparison with most London theaters’—were unusually comfortable, with a number of good-sized dressing rooms arranged around a central green room, making it easy for the actors to socialize in a jovial, communal atmosphere. She nodded to the young assistant stage manager, who was standing by the kettle, making the first round of teas for the crew, then knocked at the door to dressing room one.

  “Ah, Josephine, come in—so good of you to give up your morning. I’m sorry to have telephoned you late last night, but I was going over and over in my head the scene we had been working on—how do you say it?—wrecking my brain …”

  “Wracking, although the effect is probably the same.”

  “Yes, wracking my brain, when it came to me that we could do something different just before the sculpture falls to the floor, and I was so excited that I had to talk to you about it.” T
he heavily accented voice, which Virginia Woolf had once famously compared to that of a parakeet, was sometimes hard to understand, and Josephine could see why Shakespeare might not have been the ideal vehicle for Lydia’s talents, but with Ingrid Rydman—her character in The Laughing Woman—the broken English simply added to the authenticity of her portrayal. In fact, the first time she had met Lydia—or Loppy, as her friends called her—Josephine was struck by the extent to which the actress could have walked straight out of her own stage directions: the wide, finely cut mouth and slightly hollowed cheeks, the dark hair scraped back from a high forehead, the expressive eyes that moved so swiftly between curiosity and apprehension—all were exactly as she had imagined her character to look while she was writing the play. By her own admission, Loppy wasn’t attractive in the conventional way, but her movements were still graceful and full of energy, and Josephine loved the sense of nervous energy that she brought so naturally to the part. “Here, sit down and let me show you what I mean in the script.”

  The scene in question was the emotional climax to the first half, a passionate argument between Ingrid and her soul mate, René, in which the destruction of a clay model hinted at the tragedy to come. They ran through the lines, engrossed in the intensity of the exchange, until a knock at the door interrupted them. “Is this a good time to borrow you for a moment?” Keynes asked. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Loppy gave a squeal of delight. “Ah, Maynard darling, you have our wonderful surprise.” Josephine looked at her curiously and followed the couple upstairs to the stage, where a sack barrow stood waiting in the wings, half-covered by a red blanket. Keynes gestured toward it with a flourish, like a magician performing his favorite trick. “A little something to bring you all luck,” he said, his eyes twinkling over half-moon glasses. “By all means take a look.”