Edmund Crispin - Love Lies Bleeding

EDMUND CRISPIN

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

Victor Gollancz 1948

Copyright © Rights Limited,

1948. All rights reserved

Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2017

Cover image © Shutterstock.com

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008124151

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124168

Version: 2017-10-26

To the Carr Club

Contents

Cover

Title Page EDMUND CRISPIN

Copyright An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1948 Copyright © Rights Limited, 1948. All rights reserved Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2017 Cover image © Shutterstock.com A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008124151 Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124168 Version: 2017-10-26

Dedication To the Carr Club

Chapter 1: Lasciva Puella

Chapter 2: Find out Moonshine

Chapter 3: Thieves Break in and Steal

Chapter 4: Holocaust

Chapter 5: Bloody-Man’s-Finger

Chapter 6: Love Lies Bleeding

Chapter 7: Saturnalia

Chapter 8: The Death of a Witch

Chapter 9: Love’s Labour’s Won

Chapter 10: Meditations Among the Tombs

Chapter 11: Reasoning but to Err

Chapter 12: A Green Thought in a Green Shade

Chapter 13: A Sennet: Enter Second Murderer

Chapter 14: Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter 15: Rout

Chapter 16: Eclipse

Chapter 17: Peace Indivisible

About the Author

Also in this series

About the Publisher

The headmaster sighed. It was, he recognized, a plaintive and unmanly noise, but for the moment he was quite unable to suppress it. He apologized.

‘The heat…’ he explained, and waved one hand limply in the direction of the windows, beyond which a good-sized lawn lay parching in the mid-morning sun. ‘It’s the heat.’

As an excuse, this was colourable enough. The day was torrid, almost tropical, and even in the tall, shady study, its curtains half drawn to prevent wood and fabric from bleaching, the atmosphere was too oppressive for comfort. But the headmaster spoke without conviction, and his visitor was not deceived.

‘I’m sorry to plague you with my affairs,’ she said briskly, ‘because I realize that your time must be completely taken up with the arrangements for speech day. Unfortunately, I’ve no choice in the matter. The parents are insisting on some kind of investigation.’

The headmaster nodded gloomily. He was a small, slight man of about fifty, clean-shaven, with a long, inquisitive nose, sparse black hair, and a deceptive mien of diffidence and vagueness.

‘It would be the parents,’ he said. ‘So much of one’s time is spent in trying to dissipate the futile alarms of parents…’

‘Only in this case,’ his visitor replied, keeping with decision to the matter in hand, ‘something really does seem to have happened.’

From the farther side of his desk, the headmaster looked at her unhappily. He invariably found Miss Parry’s efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity bazaars, visiting the sick and impoverished, training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung about her; and no doubt her headship of the Castrevenford High School for Girls was calculated rather to confirm than to mitigate it…The headmaster began to fill his pipe.

‘Yes?’ he said non-committally.

‘Information, Dr Stanford. What I most need is information.’

‘Ah.’ The headmaster removed some vagrant strands of tobacco from the bowl of his pipe and nodded again, but with more deliberation and gravity. ‘You’ll permit me to smoke?’ he asked.

‘I shall smoke myself,’ said Miss Parry decisively. She waved the proffered box firmly though not unkindly aside, and produced a cigarette case from her handbag. ‘I prefer American brands,’ she explained. ‘Fewer chemicals in them.’

The headmaster struck a match and lit the cigarette for her. ‘It would probably be best,’ he suggested, ‘if you were to give me the facts from the beginning.’

Miss Parry blew out a long stream of smoke, rather as though it were some noxious substance which must be expelled from her mouth as quickly and as vigorously as possible.

‘I need hardly tell you,’ she said, ‘that it has to do with the play.’

This information struck the headmaster as being, on the whole, more cheering than he had dared to hope. For some years past, the Castrevenford High School for Girls had cooperated with Castrevenford School itself in the production of a speech day play. It was a tradition fruitful of annoyances to all concerned, the only palliating circumstance being that these annoyances were predictable and ran in well-worn grooves. Mostly they consisted of clandestine embraces, during rehearsals, between the male and female members of the cast – and for such incidents the penalties and remedies were so well tested as to be almost automatic.

The headmaster’s spirits rose. He said, ‘Then this girl is in the play? I’m afraid I haven’t been able to give it much attention this year. It’s Henry V , isn’t it?’

‘Yes. The choice didn’t please my girls very much. Too few female parts.’