Fire in the Thatch Read online

  Fire

  in the

  Thatch

  A Devon Mystery

  E.R.C. Lorac

  With an Introduction

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Originally published in 1946 by Collins

  Copyright © 2018 Estate of E.C.R. Lorac

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781464209680 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

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  Contents

  Fire in the Thatch

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Fire in the Thatch is an enjoyable example of E.C.R. Lorac’s ability to impart a distinctive flavour to the traditional detective story. The setting is rural Devon, and Lorac’s fascination with country life, and with people who “care about the land”, is evident from first page to last.

  Colonel St Cyres, a sympathetically portrayed landowner, is about to grant a tenancy of Little Thatch, a rather neglected property on his estate. His quarrelsome daughter-in-law June, who is staying with him because her husband is being held prisoner by the Japanese in Burma, urges him to allow her friend Tommy Gressingham to take the property. But the Colonel’s daughter Anne fears that June’s motives are less than honourable, and the tenancy is ultimately granted to Nicholas Vaughan, a stranger who has turned up in the area after being invalided out of the Navy. Undaunted, Gressingham moves to a house in the neighbourhood, but unlike the reclusive Vaughan, he has no interest in cultivating the land. He is an entrepreneur whose ambition is to build a country club.

  The tension between the old way of life in rural England and the march of progress is sharpened by the timing of the events of the story, set as the Second World War is drawing to a close (although the book was not published until 1946). Lorac creates a vivid picture of an apprehensive society, including small social details that make the story especially interesting to a twenty-first century reader. People realise that change is in the air, but many of them fear the form that change will take.

  Gressingham, however, scents the opportunities: “Farming’s done well during the war, but it’s not going to do so well in future…In five years’ time quite a number of land-owning gentry will be glad to realise a good figure for their property.” His friend Howard Brendon, a lawyer turned businessman, is more sceptical: “In five years’ time the sale of land will be controlled. What you refuse to realise is that this country is going to swing to the left, and the hell of a long way, too.”

  We are also given an insight into the conflicting attitudes of country folk and Londoners. Some villagers resent being ordered to offer billets “which would bring bombed-out townsfolk into farms and cottages. ‘We don’t want them here and we can’t do with them.’” But Anne St Cyres, at least, does not lack “the imagination…to realise the distresses of those who are strangers.” Reading this book, and thinking of debates current at the time of writing, about immigration and the plight of homeless refugees, one is reminded that, whilst the detail of social problems keeps changing, the fundamentals of human nature—both positive and negative—are enduring.

  Four chapters set the scene before we are fast-forwarded to a conversation between Commander Wilton and Chief Inspector Macdonald of Scotland Yard. Little Thatch has been gutted in a blaze, and a body has been found. It seems that the deceased is Nicholas Vaughan, and that he died as a result of an accident, but Wilton isn’t satisfied. Macdonald duly takes himself down to Devon, and soon becomes convinced that there is more to the tragedy than meets the eye.

  The likeable and diligent Macdonald appeared in all the books which Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) published under the name E.C.R. Lorac. Macdonald made his debut in The Murder on the Burrows (1931) and took a final bow in the posthumously published Death of a Lady Killer (1959). The Lorac novels won many admirers, including the sometimes acerbic Dorothy L. Sayers. Writing in the Sunday Times in 1935, Sayers heaped praise upon The Organ Speaks: “Mr. Lorac’s story is entirely original, highly ingenious and remarkable for atmospheric writing and convincing development of character”.

  The next year, the renowned crime critic of the Observer, “Torquemada”, was equally enthusiastic: “I praised the last three of Mr. Lorac’s books each for a different quality, for pleasantness of style, for ingenuity, and for sound characterisation. Now I find all these qualities present in A Pall for a Painter. So it is safe to bet that this author will soon find himself an accepted member of that very small band which writes first-rate detective stories that are also literature.” Sure enough, the following year Lorac was elected to membership of the elite Detection Club, together with the future Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (who wrote crime fiction as Nicholas Blake), Newton Gayle (a pseudonym which concealed the combined identities of Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness), and Christopher Bush.

  After the Second World War, with the Golden Age of Murder in detective fiction effectively over, several of the genre’s most distinguished practitioners, including Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, who had founded the Detection Club, ceased to write detective novels. Lorac, however, continued to write industriously. Because she produced so much, some of her books, and perhaps especially those which appeared under the pen-name Carol Carnac, were relatively routine. But she was never less than a capable craftswoman, and at her best she constructed compelling mysteries. She kept writing to the very end—at her death, a final manuscript was left incomplete. One other novel written towards the end of her life, Two-Way Murder, has never been published, despite the fact that it is a sound and characteristically readable piece of work. Today, her books are ripe for rediscovery, and it is a pleasure to reintroduce this under-estimated author to a new generation of readers.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter One

  1

  Colonel St Cyres stepped out of the French window on to the terrace and drew in a deep breath of frosty air, conscious of the exhilaration of a glorious December morning. He always felt better out of doors. In the open air the worries and irritations of life seemed less immediate, and he felt that he lost a burden when he closed the window behind him.

  The prospect before him was one to give a sense of well-bei
ng to any healthy man, and St Cyres, still in his early sixties, was vigorous enough to enjoy the keen still air and the glory of winter sunshine. Beyond the low wall of the terrace the frost-rimed meadows gleamed and sparkled, sloping down to the river a couple of hundred yards below. On the farther bank the land rose again in a series of gentle ridges, meadow land, plough land, and finally wood land in the distance. Here and there a thatched roof seemed to be tucked into the comfortable folds of the rich Devon valley, and blue wood smoke coiled into the still cold air. Everything was agleam with hoar frost, scintillating in the level rays of a sun which threw shafts of intense light along the valley and made the swift-running river flash back the white beams.

  Down by the river some bullocks grazed in the lush grasses which never fail in a Devon pasture. Colonel St Cyres chuckled as a couple of the lusty young beasts horned one another around the pasture—Red Devons, the famous Ruby beef cattle, snorting and blowing in their youthful vigour.

  St Cyres thrust some letters into the pocket of his old tweed coat and hastened along the terrace towards the corner where a cluster of outbuildings stood against a larch coppice. In his other hand was a good crust of bread and he munched it appreciatively though with a shamefaced grin. He had done a bolt, he admitted it frankly; he had brought his breakfast to finish out of doors or in the wood-shed, and he knew just why he had done it.

  “God knows why he married her, poor chap—but scent at breakfast is more than I can stomach,” he said to himself.

  The “poor chap” of whom the Colonel was thinking was his son, Denis, now a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. Whether the Colonel’s epithet was due to Denis’s plight or to the wife he had married was uncertain, but Colonel St Cyres disliked his daughter-in-law as heartily as any well-bred man allowed himself to dislike a woman. The Colonel was a countryman. He loved the country and his own ancestral acres with an unquestioning tacit devotion. He liked country clothes and country ways, the smell of dung, the rich red Devon mud, the slow slurred speech of his humble country neighbours and the inconveniences of an ancient house set miles away from trains or bus routes.

  June St Cyres was a Londoner. She had been born in a flat in Mayfair, and a flat in Mayfair was her ideal of happiness. She liked fashionable clothes and shoes, French cooking, modern dance music, and what she called Society. She used elaborate make-up, vivid nail varnish, and Coty perfumes. When Denis had been reported as prisoner of war six months ago, Colonel St Cyres had gone up to London to see his daughter-in-law.

  “Come down to us, my dear,” he had said, “and bring the little chap with you. It’ll be better for both of you, and we’ll look after you and save you any worries and troubles we can.”

  Full of kindliness and sympathy, St Cyres persuaded June to give up her flat in town and to come with her small boy to live at Manor Thatch.

  June had acquiesced at first. She was lonely and frightened and in debt. June St Cyres was one of those young women who can never live within their incomes, but she was shrewd enough to know that she could live at the Manor without paying anything for her upkeep. Also, she could not get a nurse for small Michael in town, or any domestic help in the flat, and she was very tired of “the damned chores” as she expressed it. At Manor Thatch there were some old servants—and Anne could help with Michael. Anne was Denis’s sister, a sensible domesticated creature of thirty—though June always regarded her sister-in-law as a woman of fifty. Anne was a sober, quiet woman, who lived contentedly in the same tweed suit year after year.

  June came down to the Manor, bringing five-year-old Michael and a mountain of luggage. She had been there for six months, and it was difficult to say who disliked the arrangement most—June or her father-in-law. Chivalry and a sense of duty prevented Colonel St Cyres from suggesting any other arrangement. With June, it was sheer inertia which kept her at Manor Thatch, coupled to money difficulties. She wanted to go back to London, but the rents asked for any habitation which she called “possible” appalled her. Everything was expensive, and service was unobtainable. Two or three visits to town, staying at the Dorchester, had not assisted her laudable intentions of paying her debts. Bored, grumbling, and discontented, June St Cyres continued to stay at Manor Thatch. Irritated, hurt, but never complaining, her father-in-law tried to keep the peace and to put up with June’s untidiness and laziness, her habit of keeping the wireless on all day, and her total lack of consideration for anyone but herself.

  2

  It was Anne who uttered the warning which sent her father out of doors before he had had his second cup of coffee.

  “June is coming down to breakfast. I believe she wants to talk to you about letting Little Thatch to those friends of hers.”

  Colonel St Cyres choked back his immediate exclamation of “Good God!” and said hastily, “Er…er…later in the day will do for that. I’ve got a letter from a friend of Robert Wilton’s…a naval chap, invalided out. Sounds all right…I shall be in the wood-shed if you want me, Anne…”

  The wood-shed was the Colonel’s favourite refuge. He loved wood and he loved wood fires. At the moment he had two vast logs of ash—the split bole of an old tree—and he wanted to cut them up in his own particular way. “Ash green or ash dry, meet for a queen to warm her fingers by,” he murmured as he rolled the wood over to a convenient angle and considered the matter of driving a wedge in to split it. Leisurely in all his ways, he did not hurry. Having arranged his log and chosen his wedges, he lighted his pipe and took his letters out of his pocket. Anne’s sentence about letting Little Thatch made Colonel St Cyres anxious to consider the letter he had received that morning. Smoothing out the sheet, St Cyres read:

  “Sir,—I am advised to write to you by Commander Wilton, who tells me that you have a small property to let—Little Thatch. I have recently been invalided out of the Navy on account of damaged eyesight, and I am seeking a small holding or house with an acre or more of good fertile land suitable for intensive cultivation. I aim at a market garden combined with an orchard and should be glad to keep a few head of stock if pasture is available. I am very fit and intend to work my own land, and I can housekeep for myself for the time being. If your property is what I am seeking, I should be willing to buy, or to take it on an assured tenancy of some years’ duration so that it would be worth while putting work and capital into cultivating the land. I have the opportunity of driving over to see Little Thatch to-morrow morning at 10.30. If I do not hear from you to the contrary by 10 a.m. I shall assume that I can be allowed to view the property. My telephone number is Culverton 79. Yours faithfully, Nicholas Vaughan.”

  “Sounds just the sort of chap I want there. It’s a fine fertile bit of land, and though it’s out of cultivation now, it’ll pay anyone to cultivate it,” said St Cyres to himself. “I only hope he likes it…”

  He replaced the letter in his pocket and picked up his mallet, aiming skilfully at the wedge he had placed to split his great gnarled log. He was only half-way through the job when the door of the wood-shed opened and a breath of Chypre wafted across the pleasant smell of wood shavings and sawdust.

  3

  June St Cyres stood at the door of the wood-shed, clutching her fur coat round her and surveying her father-in-law with puzzled eyes. The Colonel gave a start.

  “Eh, what’s that?” he asked, as he turned to face the newcomer. His jaw fell when he saw June, but he contrived a kindly “Good-morning, my dear. Deuced chilly morning for you to be out. Better get back to the fireside.”

  “I want to talk to you, Pops,” said June, unaware of the fact that her form of address irritated St Cyres almost to frenzy. “It’s about Little Thatch. I wrote and told Tommy Gressingham about it, and he wants to take it. It’d be a bit of luck for you, because Tommy’s got pots of money and he’d improve it no end.”

  “Well, well. If your friend wants to take the place he’d better write to me in the usual way, and I’ll deal with his applica
tion along with any others,” replied St Cyres.

  “That’s not good enough,” retorted June. “I won’t be put off like that.”

  She had taken a cigarette out of her pocket and lighted it, throwing the match on the floor. St Cyres hastily stamped on the unextinguished match.

  “Look here, my dear: I make a rule never to light matches or smoke cigarettes in the wood-shed. It’s too risky. There’s wood shavings and sawdust all over the place and if the shed catches the main thatch will catch too. It’s true I smoke my pipe, but…”

  “Oh, all right,” she retorted, stubbing out her cigarette irritably. “About Little Thatch. I want you to let Tommy and Meriel have it. They’re my friends, and it’ll make all the difference in the world to me if I have somebody to talk to down here—somebody who’s interested in the same things as I am. I wouldn’t ask you to let them the place if there was any chance of your being done over it, but there isn’t. They’re well off, and he’s a good business man. I do so want them to come. Promise?” she begged, drawing nearer to St Cyres and rubbing her powdered face against his coat.

  Roderick St Cyres had little finesse in his nature; he prided himself on being straight and saying just what he meant, and he answered his daughter-in-law according to his nature.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but I can’t make any promises of that nature. As I’ve told you, if Mr. Gressingham applies for a tenancy, I’ll consider his application on its merits. I can’t promise anything further.”

  “But I don’t see what you mean,” she argued. “I’ve told you he’s wealthy, and he’s a good business man. Anyone will tell you I’m right—his banker or lawyer. You can phone up and ask them.”

  “That isn’t the only point, my dear. As a landlord I have a duty to the land. It’s true that Little Thatch has been shamefully neglected. Poor old Timothy Yeo and his wife just let it go for years, but they were old and they’d lived in that house for quarter of a century. I couldn’t turn them out. Now Yeo’s dead I want to put in a tenant who will live in the house and cultivate the land.”