The Yellow Room Conspiracy: A Crime Novel

By Peter Dickinson

In this “exceptional” British mystery by a Gold Dagger winner, an aging aristocrat and her longtime lover explore the dark events of their shared past (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Lady Lucy Vereker Seddon is dying of a terminal illness when something she hears on the radio reminds her of her younger, darker days and inspires her to question her dearest friend and former lover, Paul Ackerley, about his role in a series of past family tragedies. There was the strange death of Lucy’s brother-in-law, the brute Gerry Grantworth, in the Yellow Room of Blatchards—the huge and ugly Vereker estate—and the subsequent destruction by fire of the sprawling manor house. And then there was the infamous Seddon Affair, the sordid scandal that rocked Great Britain in the midst of the Suez Crisis.
 
Surprised to hear that the woman he has always loved suspects him to be the culprit behind these events—especially since he always assumed Lucy herself helped engineer them—Paul suggests that they each record their memories and compare them. By doing so, perhaps they will both find their way to the long-hidden and terrible truth.
 
Told through an alternating series of memories and flashbacks, The Yellow Room Conspiracy brilliantly re-creates a post-war era and a world of privilege corrupted by greed, jealousy, lust, and lies. The astonishing Peter Dickinson, one of Britain’s greatest suspense novelists of the late twentieth century, ingeniously wraps a love story around a mystery and once again solidifies his position alongside luminaries such as P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Peter Lovesey, and Reginald Hill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504004923

Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson is one of the most acclaimed and respected writers of our time and has won nearly every major literary award for his children's novels. THE KIN, his first book for Macmillan, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1999, as was THE ROPEMAKER in 2001. Peter is currently writing the sequel to THE ROPEMAKER, due October 2006. His most recent book for Macmillan, THE GIFT BOAT, was described by Books for Keeps as 'a masterpiece, gripping, the work of a major writer at his very best.' Peter was one of the three shortlisted candidates for the first Children's Laureate. He lives in Hampshire.

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The Yellow Room Conspiracy

A Crime Novel

Peter Dickinson

Editor’s Note

The late Lady Seddon’s instructions were that I should leave the material by Paul Ackerley as it stood, but that I should tidy up her transcribed tapes. To this end the present Lady Seddon lent me a number of letters from her mother-in-law, with which I found the voice on the tapes to be remarkably consistent in style, making allowances for hesitations, repetitions etc. I have to the best of my ability based my version of the transcription on the letters, including such details of orthography as the spelling of alright as a single word. Otherwise I have made no material alterations at all.

PD

PAUL I

Summer 1992

Normally I’d have switched the radio off the moment I heard the name, but I was trapped in the middle of the Yellow Border, poisoning bindweed, a tense and delicate process demanding far greater physical control than most other activities that come my way. I’ve tried various methods, including the one with the rubber glove and the old sock, but nowadays I do it with a plastic bag and a cheap little hand-sprayer. So I was poised in the midst of all the late July uprush (I keep my borders pretty crammed) with my feet twisted into two small clear patches and my hands, having disentwined the growing-tips of the bindweed and eased them into the bag and sprayed them there, now trying to withdraw them and at the same time shake any excess poison from them back into the bag so that it didn’t drip elsewhere. Disentangled bindweed is intransigently floppy. My left calf was on the verge of cramp. I had left the radio on the gravel path twelve feet away.

It was that jokey political quiz, with Critchley and Mitchell, and a couple of columnists as their guests, attempting to give politics a good name by answering questions about politicians as bitchily as the facts allow. If they are on form they can make it work. Part of the format of that particular show is that there comes a point when the contestants are given two minutes to answer, competitively, using buzzers to get in first, as many questions as they can about some past event. Only a week or two before I had heard them doing the Profumo Affair, and it had then crossed my mind that they’d probably get round to Seddon. Still, I wasn’t ready for it when it came. I suppose I am still emotionally unable to believe that anyone could regard it as a fit subject for mirth (though most people now do), because for me the central fact about it has always been the appalling and tragic weekend at Blatchards, whereas in the public view that was marginal to the revelations that made it newsworthy: hypocrisy and corruption and sexual shenanigans linked with hitherto respectable household names.

Anyway, there I was, teetering in the middle of my sunlit border, when the voice said, … two minutes to answer as many questions as possible about the Seddon Affair. Which year?

Buzz. Bizz. (The rival teams use slightly different notes.) Julian?

Too easy. Suez. 1956.

One point. Which sport …?

Bzuizz.

Julian again?

Cricket.

That was the outdoor sport.

(Studio laughter.)

One point to Julian, and one to Austin for a relevant intervention. What was the name of the East End pub …?

I had started to lurch towards the radio, trodden into an eryngium which I had already spent several minutes teasing into natural-looking elegance and propping in place with twigs, and stopped. The momentary and trivial discomfort was not worth the damage I’d cause by trampling around. I had the garden open next day. I could bear two minutes, surely.

… Dirty Dick?

(Wild studio laughter.)

Come on. This isn’t Blackpool Pier. No one know? It was the Wooden Leg.

(I had forgotten that.)

How many Vereker sisters …

Bizz.

Austin?

Five.

One point. Nancy, Harriet, Lucy, Janet and Belinda. How many husbands?

Buzz.

Julian?

Nine. Or was it ten?

Neither. Austin?

I’ll plump for a round dozen.

The Dirty Dozen?

(Animal cackles and brays from human throats.)

May I remind you you have only two minutes. And you’re all wrong. It was eight. I’ll give half a point for each name. Forget your buzzers.

Lord Seddon, Edward Voss-Thompson, that crook who killed himself …

Gerry Grantworth.

That Italian playboy. Gino Arrezzio?

Arrizzio, but it will do.

Paul Ackerley.

No. Not married. Three to go.

Wasn’t there a Smith?

Bobo Smith. Married to Harriet. Any more? David Fish, Richard H. Felder III and—I don’t know how you managed to leave him out—Michael Allwegg.

Aren’t you going to ask us how many of them Lucy had slept with?

The studio brayed. I’d been trying to prop the eryngium back on to its twigs with the hand which wasn’t holding the plastic bag and sprayer. I straightened, snatched the secateurs out of my hip pocket and slung them at the radio. I was never any use at ball-games, but I have often been amused to notice how accurately I can toss weeds into a bucket several feet away, missiles whose differing weights and air-resistances my hand and eye seem to estimate without the intervention of a calculating mind—that is, until the moment of noticing, when I can do it no longer. Had I been told that I must fling the secateurs at the radio in order to save my life, or the human race or something, I should certainly have missed, but I flung them without thought in the pang of shame and anger and they hit, point first, bang in the centre of the loudspeaker grille, and speared in. The cackles snapped off as the radio crashed over, and in the sunlit stillness I heard a collared dove calling. Shuddering with swallowed fury, both at the insensitivity of my species and at my own lack of control in ruining a perfectly adequate little radio, I crouched to finish dealing with the eryngium.

It refused to lean as I’d had it, with its blue heads and stems casually haloing the mahogany and orange daisies of a rudbeckia, so I stayed crouched for a couple of minutes getting it right, with the result that when I rose the blood drained from my brain and I had to stand helpless in the drumming dark, swaying, until my head cleared. As light came back I heard footsteps on gravel and opened my eyes to see Lucy coming slowly up the path with a full glass of sherry in each hand. It was only Saturday, so without thinking about it I registered that she had been listening to the same programme while she was getting lunch ready and had brought me a drink because she’d known I’d need it. A decent-sized glass of sherry was typically thoughtful. Left to myself I’d probably have made a violent Martini, and then felt stupid all afternoon.

She stepped round the radio which lay in the path with the secateurs speared dramatically into the grille. Are you all right? she said.

I stood up too fast. I’m OK now.

Her hands had begun to tremble. Sherry dribbled down her wrists. I picked my way out and took the glasses from her.

Bother, she said. I thought I was going to make it all the way.

I grunted. Shock, emergency, a quick little surprise sometimes, can do that. The shakes go for a few minutes. It’s a commonplace of the disease. If she needs to Lucy can make use of it, deliberately as it were shocking herself into momentary full control, but of course there is a law of diminishing returns. She put a quivering hand on my elbow and let me lead her up to the bench at the top of the border. It’s only there for looks, and the occasional visitor—as far as I’m concerned there are always more interesting things to do in a garden than sit down. But now the sun-sodden stone was delectable against my spine, as necessary to me as the drink. Two doves answered each other, from the orchard and from beyond the stables. The patch of common hemp agrimony at the top of the Maroon Border murmured with insects, which is one of the things it is there for. Something honey-scented drifted on the imperceptible breeze. Lucy leant against my side, her shakes dwindling from their after-shock extravagance to their usual steady tremor. Only the radio was wrong. It was like the focal point in a Magritte, deliberately placed in the perspective between the borders in order to deconstruct the idyll. The black casing contradicted the sunlight. The shape, mean-proportioned, square-edged, embodied the unnaturalness of artifact among all the growth and green. The object itself snapped at me about what I’d done.

I put the glasses on the bench, strode down the path, slid the secateurs into my pocket, took the radio into the scullery yard and dropped it in the bin. When I came back Lucy appeared to have fallen asleep, bolt upright, a knack she’d always had. She was wearing a sleeveless linen shift with nothing, I guessed, underneath. (She could still dress herself, but simplified the process as much as she could.) Though I’d done her hair well that morning, by now it had half-loosened itself from its bun, but that had always been her style. I remember a diplomatic reception, presumably while she was still married to Tommy Seddon, as she was hostess. Royalty of some kind had just arrived and she was greeting them. I was admiring the way she made her formal curtsey look like a friendly and natural gesture when her sister Harriet, standing beside me, whispered Trust Lucy to look as if she’d already started going to bed when she suddenly remembered she was supposed to be here.

Now straggles of fine grey hair hung down by the pale slant of her cheek. The masked look, symptomatic of the disease, was only slightly present, subsumed for the moment into the mask of beauty she had always worn. Her thin white arms seemed frail as paper. Her whole attitude cried to me of her vulnerability (though both frailty and vulnerability had, until her illness, been almost pure illusions). Once again, for the thousandth time, the pang of love stabbed through me. I stood letting it fade away, much as I had done with the blood-loss a few minutes before, and then walked on. My footsteps woke her, or she had not been asleep, but she didn’t open her eyes till I settled beside her.

I switched it off as soon as they said the name, she said.

I was stuck.

Yes, I saw. That was a terrific shot, Paul. I’ll buy you a new one for your birthday.

See if you can find a water-proof one. They have them for camping.

May I have my sherry?

I held it to her lips so that she could empty it enough for her to hold without spilling, then picked up my own and sipped.

What a perfect day, I said.

It’s all looking too beautiful, she said.

I only see what’s still wrong with it. Oh well, I suppose it’s not bad. Let’s hope the weather holds.

You always say you prefer to look at gardens in the rain.

I must have sighed. Despite the banalities of contentment, the aftertaste of the radio programme kept regurgitating itself in my mind. Lucy read my feelings.

I’m sorry, she said.

Don’t let’s talk about it.

I think we’ve got to. As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m going to start getting worse soon.

Nonsense. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay pretty well as you are for years still. You’re on a plateau. I had a long talk with Liz Sterling, when was it …?

She doesn’t know. I’m the only one who knows. It’s been quite a nice plateau, and I’m glad it’s lasted as long as it has, but I can feel the edge coming. It doesn’t matter what Liz Sterling says.

I opened my mouth to snap at her, and closed it again. What was the point? I’d lied to her about what Dr Sterling had told me.

What’s for lunch? I said.

It’s cold. Let’s stay here. It’s lovely here. Please, Paul. I want to talk to you. I’ll make it as easy as I can for you.

You don’t have to make it easy for me.

It’s really just two things …

I was aware of some inner effort taking place. This itself was a rare event—not the effort, but my awareness. I suppose I know her better than anyone else in the world, but I am nowhere near understanding her, why she is what she is, says what she says, does what she does.

I’ll have the good news first. If any, I said.

I don’t know if it counts, she said. Will you marry me, Paul?

I was startled into laughter and spilt some sherry. Years and years ago, lying sleepless in a dirty little hotel in Samos, I’d heard faint rhythmic murmurs from her and realised she was counting.

Greek sheep? I’d murmured.

Men who’ve proposed, she’d said. It’s your fault—you set me off, teasing me about Waldemar.

(He was some kind of international financial brigand who had a plush cruiser moored in the harbour. Lucy had spotted him and let on she’d met him. I’d suggested making ourselves known in the hope of an invitation on board. Lucy had refused, saying that he was one of her rejectees and hadn’t taken it well. I rather crassly—I was in a bitchy mood—had asked how long the list was and where he came.)

I’ve got to thirty-seven, she said. Not counting the ones where I didn’t speak the language so I didn’t know whether actual marriage was part of the proposal.

I’d already known, even then, what she’d been telling me, that part of our unspoken contract was that I should not figure in that list.

I want it soon, she said now. While … while I can still understand what’s happening. It’s all right, Paul. I’m not trying to tie you up. I’ve got everything worked out. While you were in Scotland I got Timmy to come and we went round and looked at some homes and found one which will do. He’s going to sell enough of my shares to buy an annuity which will cover the fees. And we’ll have a marriage contract which will say you’ve got to let me go there as soon as it’s no fun living with me.

Timmy is her son, now Lord Seddon. I like him. He and his wife Janice come and stay two or three times a year. Lucy’s daughter, Rowena, is beautiful in her mother’s style, but has opted for a life of near-fanatical uprightness, and so is uneasy with Lucy and me.

As your husband, I said, I shall surely …

No you won’t. I’m going to tie it up like a miser in a novel. Timmy says … does that mean ‘Yes’?

A provisional yes, subject to contract, as the estate agents say. Do I get a kiss, or must I listen to the bad news first?

She sat still. Again I could sense the inner process. It wasn’t the proposal of marriage which had caused it earlier, either. It must have been whatever was coming now. I waited, steeling myself.

This is while I can still understand, too, she said. Will you tell me how you killed Gerry? I think I know why, but how? How did you get into the room? And out again?

The drumming dark that I had experienced in the flower-bed returned. This time it can have lasted only a few seconds. Lucy seemed not to have noticed.

Silence. The doves. Bees. The far drub of a helicopter. Sunlight. The flood of memory. In my mind’s eye a large lawn, also sunlit, but the air dense and still. Four women in sports gear gazing towards the facade of a large house, their postures tense with amused alarm. The tinkle of breaking glass. All different, all long ago, but in my own throat and chest the selfsame sickness and oppression that I was feeling now.

I had always imagined it was you, I whispered.

LUCY I

Summer 1992

This was my idea. We tried talking about it, but I couldn’t keep my end up. We tried to tell each other why we’d done what we did and thought what we did, but it was too tiring. I couldn’t keep my thoughts in order. I started to stammer, which is a very bad sign. There seemed to be so much the other one didn’t know. So in the end I said, You’ll have to write it all down and then I can put bits in. Don’t do it for me—do it for someone else. Otherwise you’ll leave things out because you think I know them.

So that’s what we’re doing. I watch the telly in the evenings and Paul puts his ear-plugs in and sits beside me writing in a notebook. He still has the most beautiful neat writing, just like him. Everything in order. Mine was always all over the place with letters on top of each other. And of course Paul can’t help wanting to get it right. The words, I mean—the way people talk, the pictures, the feel of things. If he takes anything seriously he has to do it as well as a professional. That’s why his garden is so beautiful.

I’m not like that, and anyway I hardly write at all these days. My hand shakes worse because I’m trying. Even pressing the buttons on this machine brings the shakes on worse. If there are gaps it doesn’t mean I’ve gone to sleep. I’m thinking. I never used to think much about things, once they were over, but I do now, back and back and back. I’m pretty sure my mind’s still alright—they say it oughtn’t to go till last of all.

The first thing I’ve got to say is, whoever you are, don’t pity me. People think it must be awful being like this, but it isn’t. It’s a nuisance, of course, stops me doing things I’d like to, means I have to be looked after, for instance we have to get a nurse in if Paul goes away. I want him to get one all the time so he doesn’t have to do so much for me, but he says not yet, and I don’t feel even slightly guilty. There’s lots I enjoy, things I took for granted before. Sitting at the top of the borders, letting the sun drill through me, drinking my sherry, waiting to see what Paul was going to say, I felt life was so good I wanted to cry. Not so-good-in-spite-of-everything. So good. Like that.

Especially don’t pity me about not being beautiful any more. Actually I’m not too dusty. Being ill has given me a sort of holy, marble-saint look. A saint who’s been kissed by so many pilgrims that she’s worn away a bit, which makes her look a lot more interesting than when she came all polished out of the sculptor’s studio. I suppose I’d better get this business about being beautiful over. Last winter there was a Life of Churchill on the telly. When he was old but before he went gaga he got Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier to come to lunch with him at Chartwell. He sat her next to him and didn’t say anything, just kept looking at her. Once or twice he told her how beautiful she was. That’s all. For God’s sake, I thought, that’s not what you go and have lunch with Churchill for! I don’t think being beautiful was the only reason she was a nutcase, but it can’t have helped.

Don’t worry—I’m not going to start a special brand of feminist hoo-ha. Beautyist it’d have to be, I suppose. Aesthetic harassment. Of course when I was very young and didn’t know how to handle it I sometimes wished it would go away, and it doesn’t help when you’re in a real teapot-throwing temper to be told how terrific you look when you’re cross. And of course you want to eat your cake and have it. You want the pluses and not the minuses. You want the fun and the attention and the parties and you don’t want the slobs barging up and expecting to get off with you. I know I wouldn’t have preferred to be out-and-out plain, but suppose I’d been about as good-looking as Harriet—not a head-turner, but not bad … I don’t know …

People who know me well, Paul for instance, say they can tell if I’m upset because then I look specially calm. I suppose it’s true. I’ve heard singers being interviewed and they have this funny way of talking about what they do. They don’t say my voice, they say the voice, as if it was right outside them, not part of them at all, like a cello or something. It’s a bit like that with me, not that I’ve ever talked about the face, but that’s how I felt. It was something I wore. Me was the person who wore it, quite different, much brighter than I looked for a start, but not specially brave or calm, erratic, impulsive, silly about some of the risks I took, like everyone else, really, only I had this face to hide behind. Just a few people—Father, of course—Gerry was another—they didn’t seem to pay any attention to the face, so the person they saw was me.

No, Paul wasn’t one of them. He still isn’t.

I think that’s probably important. If you don’t understand it, you won’t understand a lot. It certainly doesn’t explain everything. Nothing ever does, about people, does it?

Now I’m afraid I’m tired. I hope I get better at this. I’m going to have a snooze, because Paul’s at his Historic Dorset committee and he’ll ask me if I have when he gets back.

PAUL II

1934-39

Though we were almost exact contemporaries I knew Gerry Grantworth only slightly at Eton. For one thing he was in College, at a phase when there were marked social barriers between Collegers and Oppidans, Collegers being there on scholarships, and so assumed to come from families who were unable to afford the Eton fees. Then I belonged to a different group of unacceptables, having been brought up as a practising Jew. To judge by old photographs I was not very obviously Jewish, in fact as my connections with my ancestral faith and nation have withered over the decades, my appearance seems to have gone in the other direction, so that now I am almost a caricature—apart from the damaged side of my face—of a certain kind of elderly Semite, slight, quick-eyed, smooth-voiced, saurian, cultured, mysteriously wealthy.

(To get it over, though it has no connection with what follows apart from the fact that I have always been able to afford what I wanted and to arrange my time as I chose, there is no mystery about my wealth. I inherited from my father, who died shortly before the end of the war, a business dealing in office equipment. From my Intelligence work in the war I was able to grasp, sooner than most people, the enormous changes that would come with the so-called information revolution. I am good at analysing documents and reports. I have a natural understanding of how bureaucracies and other organisations function. I was lucky in one or two people I met. I acquired the right agencies, backed new enterprises which fulfilled their promise—I won’t go into detail. My father’s modest fortune, enough to send his only son to Eton, though with some sacrifice on his part, became considerable in my hands. That’s all that need be said.)

To return to Eton: it is difficult for anyone much younger than me to appreciate the nature of the anti-Semitism that pervaded our culture in those days. I am talking not only of the class of people who sent their sons to the major public schools, but the considerably larger class of those who would have done so if they could have afforded to. It was not the virulent, Hitlerian strain of the disease (though I believe it could under different circumstances have mutated to that) but it was the air we breathed, so familiar as to have no odour in our nostrils for most of the time. Jews were outsiders, not one of us. You blackballed a Jew from your club as automatically as you blackballed a candidate who had been seen wearing brown suede shoes with a blue suit. I can remember myself looking at another boy—my second cousin, as it happens—who conformed much more closely than I did to the stereotype, with oily black curled hair, loose sensual features and so on, and wondering with a kind of distaste why he needed to seem so blatantly Jewish. His parents, more ambitious for acceptance than my father, had

Reviews for The Yellow Room Conspiracy

[vivienner_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A pair of aging lovers set down their different versions of a 1956 scandal which involved British Intelligence, organized crime, and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. The narrators, the once beautiful Lucy and her devoted lover, Paul, each believed the other guilty of murder. An intelligent and well written mystery.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is told through the alternating viewpoints of Paul and Lucy, an elderly couple who 40 years before were involved in a scandal of Profumo-esque proportions, with a mysterious death at its heart. One morning, Paul is weeding the garden, Lucy pottering in the kitchen, both with the radio on, when a satirical news programme starts to make joking references to the affaire. This leads the two of them to start talking about things which have been buried for decades. Lucy asks Paul to tell her, finally, how he managed to commit the murder. He replies, "I had always imagined it was you".Cracking start, and incidentally the radio gameshow is a great device to introduce us to the dramatis personae. However, the story doesn't quite develop into the countryhouse mystery that you might expect - by the time the reader finds out what the crime is, it's pretty obvious who must have committed it. The pleasure is in hearing their distinctive voices as they tell the story, the portrayal of that post-war social milieu (half people who'd known each other at Eton, half up-and-coming types of dubious reputation), and the relationship between the five Mitford-esque Vereker sisters and their various lovers, husbands, and friends.Highly satisfying.

[michaelm42071 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I was twenty years old, I briefly met Mandy Rice-Davies, who was performing a quite chaste act in an Istanbul night club. Between sets I introduced myself and we chatted for a couple of minutes. I didn’t mention the Profumo affair of the previous year—that would have been too gauche even for me and even at that age. The books and the movie about the Profumo scandal made over the next decades were trash that failed in capturing any real interest in the story. But in 1994, Peter Dickinson wrote a book called The Yellow Room Conspiracy which transcended—even though it was obviously inspired by—the sordid British government scandal of the Foreign Office secretary John Profumo sharing a mistress with a Russian military attaché, call girls hired to service rich businessmen and politicians, the shady Dr. Stephen Ward and his stable of girls for hire, and so on. Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production. Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters. Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who later married another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique.

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"The Yellow Room Conspiracy" begins in 1992, after a radio program has a quiz show that features what was known as "The Seddon Affair" in 1956. Paul Ackerley hears the show while working in his garden and promptly breaks the radio. Lucy (Vereker) Seddon, his companion is suffering from a terminal disease, and asks Paul to marry her. She also asks him to tell her how he managed to kill Gerry Grantworth years ago, considering that the door to the room he was in was locked. He tells her that he'd always thought she had done it. He decides that independently they should write down their individual stories leading up to that fateful night, and thus begins a tale which spans two world wars, brings the reader into politics, and into the lives of a group of sisters of the English country-home set. The story presented is done from two viewpoints, Lucy's and Paul's, told via flashbacks, and isn't a very pretty one. This book was phenomenal. This is my first book by this author, but it most definitely will not be my last. It is well written, the characters are incredibly alive, and the story will hold you in its grip until the very end. This author definitely has a talent for story telling. I'd definitely recommend it to people who want something way above average in their reading, or to people who enjoy books that span a lifetime. Readers of British crime fiction should absolutely not miss this one. At times the story may seem a bit convoluted, but eventually all is explained and clarified, keeping the reader turning pages. I started this book at 8 pm last night and finished it around midnight because I absolutely could not put it down.

[wallace chapman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderfully subtle and nuanced evocation of a mid-century generation of the English upper class And how they come to grief.