Murder in the Mill-Race Read online

  ANNE FERENS liked practically everything about Milham in the Moor where she and her husband, Dr. Raymond Ferens, were to live. But she loathed Monica Torrington, warden of the children’s home, at first sight. Sister Monica, as she was called, was a macabre figure, her height accentuated by the ancient, black nurse’s uniform she wore. She had the dark, unsmiling eves of a fanatic, and Anne was convinced that she was a wicked, wicked woman—one who shouldn’t have small children in her charge.

  Dr. Raymond Ferens warned Anne not to meddle. Sister Monica was considered a “saint” and she was an unholy power in the village. Still there were furtive rumours—rumours that connected her with the strange death of Nancy Hilton, one of her maids. But as the voting bailiff told Anne, “The village cherishes its own feuds and loyalties and way of life . . . but when you make enemies in a village like this, you don’t murder one another. . .”

  The bailiff’s philosophy was proved inadequate. The drowned body of Sister Monica was found floating in the millpool. Chief Inspector Macdonald was called in to solve one of the most difficult cases of his career as he unravelled the hidden events and causes that led to the death of a “saint.”

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deed, is purely coincidental.

  This edition published 2019 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Originally published in 1952 by Collins, London

  Copyright © 1952 The Estate of E.C.R. Lorac

  Introduction copyright © 2019 Martin Edwards

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5268 0

  eISBN 978 0 7123 6479 9

  Front cover image © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library

  Typesetting, text design and eBook not by Tetragon, London

  INTRODUCTION

  Murder in the Mill-Race (known as Speak Justly for the Dead in the US) was first published in 1952. Like many of E.C.R. Lorac’s post-war novels, it is notable for a well-evoked setting in rural England—this time on Exmoor in Devon. Dr Raymond Ferens and his wife Anne relocate from a mining town in Staffordshire to Milham in the Moor. The move is prompted by Ferens’ poor health, together with a yearning for a different kind of life: he is still affected by two years spent as a Japanese prisoner of war, as well as by pressure of work in a busy urban G.P.’s practice. At Milham, an elderly doctor’s impending retirement offers the prospect of a geographically far-flung but sparsely populated practice which should not prove unduly taxing, and will enable the Ferens to “live the dream”.

  This notion evidently appealed to the author, who had grown up in London, but always had a soft spot for Devon, where she spent many holidays. After the Second World War, she too had escaped to the country, moving to Lunesdale in the north west of England, which became an attractive setting for several of her mysteries. One suspects that Anne Ferens is speaking for her creator when she tells her husband: “I’m not being selfless in saying I want to live in the country. I’m sick to death of cities and soot and slums and factories and occupational diseases.” She tells him to “watch the emergence of a countrywoman. I shall be debating fat stock prices before the year’s out, and prodding pigs at the market.”

  So the young married couple set off for their destination, a village on a hill-top lying close to both the moor and the sky. On the surface life there seems idyllic. As an estate manager called John Sanderson tells Anne: “Throughout the centuries, Milham in the Moor has been cut off from towns and society and affairs. Here it has. . . flourished because it has made itself into an integrated whole, in which everybody was interdependent. . . ‘Never make trouble in the village’ is an unspoken law, but it’s a binding law. You may know about your neighbours’ sins and shortcomings, but you must never name them aloud. It’d make trouble, and small societies want to avoid trouble.”

  Another local, an old fellow by the name of Brown, also holds forth on the nature of life in such a community: “You try reforming a village and see how popular you are. Villages are all alike, made up of human beings who love and he, who’re unselfish one minute and self-seeking the next, who’re faithful one day and fornicators the next. Human nature’s a mixed bag.” Raymond Ferens takes a similar view, and again one suspects that he is speaking for Lorac: “Whenever you get a group of people living together. . . you find the mixed characteristics of humanity—envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness mingled with neighbourliness and unselfishness and honest-to-God goodness.”

  Sanderson also talks about a formidable woman called Sister Monica, who is in charge of a children’s home known as Gramarye. She is regarded by some villagers as saintly, yet Sanderson takes a very different view: “she’s dangerous, in the same way that a virus or blood poisoning can be dangerous. . . She is one of those people who can not only he plausibly and with conviction, but she can tell a he to your face without batting an eyelid, knowing that you know it’s a he.” Most menacingly of all, Sister Monica “knows everything about everybody”.

  Anne takes an instinctive dislike to Sister Monica, whom she describes as “plain wicked”, and soon learns that the old woman is making trouble for her. Seasoned readers of detective fiction will not, therefore, be entirely surprised when Sister Monica meets an untimely end, drowned in the mill-race. It’s another case for Chief Inspector Macdonald, who needs to overcome the villagers’ hostility towards inquisitive outsiders in order to make sense of the mystery of her murder.

  The pen-name E.C.R. Lorac concealed the identity of Carol Rivett, or more precisely Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958). She was not regarded as one of the Queens of Crime who flourished during the “Golden Age of murder” between the world wars, but nevertheless she enjoyed a career as a detective novelist over a span of more than a quarter of a century. The pleasantly persistent Macdonald first appeared in The Murder on the Burrows (1931) and solved crimes in all the books which came out under the Lorac name until the posthumously published Death of a Lady Killer (1959). As Carol Carnac, the author also created a second long-running series cop called Julian Rivers.

  Sister Monica is far from the only character in the Lorac books whose saintliness is more apparent than real; it’s evident that Carol Rivett had a deep distaste for supposedly spiritual hypocrites. One can only speculate as to whether this was inspired by personal dealings with someone of that type in real life; people in Lunesdale, where she lived in her later years, have recalled that several characters in her books were thinly veiled portrayals of people in the area.

  Writing about Lorac on my blog, “Do You Write under Your Own Name?” in September 2009, I referred to her as “a writer forgotten today by the general reading public”. Thanks to the British Library’s Crime Classics, her work is enjoying a renaissance. This novel is another example of her capable storytelling, and illustrates why the revival of interest in her novels is well deserved.

  MARTIN EDWARDS

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  CHAPTER I

  Milham Prior is a place name familiar to motorists who take the shortest route from Taunton to Barnsford, on the north Devon coast. It is seldom anything more than a place name, coupled to a visualisation of a rather tall church tower, and a long hill which you can rush in top gear if you have been able to take advantage of the downslope on the other side of the crossroads. It is a good stretch of main road, wide and well engineered, and by the time holidaymakers reach it from the east, they are aware that the Devon coast is not far away, and that they will soon see—and smell—the wide river estuary at Barnsford, wher
e shining sands indicate the delights in store a few miles farther on.

  Milham Prior has but little to attract the holiday-making hordes; neither—to do it justice—does it want to attract them. The Milham folk are not at all sorry that their High Street is at right angles to the new main road and not part of it. Milham is a prosperous, self-respecting market town, which caters for the countryfolk who live in the huge scattered moorland parishes of Milham Prior and Milham in the Moor. Conscious of a long history—it is one of the oldest Parliamentary constituencies—of a reputation for sound and shrewd dealing, Milham Prior is satisfied with its plain stone High Street, its old-fashioned Georgian inn, and its ancient church (whose interior restoration is only regretted by busybodies from away).

  Anne Ferens, sitting in the dining room of the George Hotel in Milham, looked around her with amused and interested eyes, though most people would have found the room neither amusing nor interesting. It was rather dark, its long windows discreetly curtained and screened; its furniture was heavy mahogany of mid-Victorian date, and its tables had a full complement of enormous cruets. Anne smiled at her husband. “I like it,” she said. “It’s restful. Completely conforming to type without the least element of the incongruous.”

  “That’s because you can’t see yourself sitting in it, angel. You look a complete anachronism. The meal, as you say, conformed to type, including the cabbage. The beer’s good—also true to type.” Raymond Ferens studied his wife with eyes that were at once affectionate and worried. “Milham in the Moor . . . It’s a sin and a shame to take you there, Anne. When I think of all those antiques and funnies, not a soul of your own age to amuse you, miles of moorland and Milham Prior for your shopping town. Seeing you now, against this musty background, I’m appalled to think what sort of life I’m taking you to.”

  Anne laughed. “Flow little you really know about me, Ray. We’ve been married for four years, and you still don’t realise that I’m the most adaptable creature on earth. Chameleons also ran. You’d better leave off thinking of me as a sophisticated wench who is snappy at cocktail parties, and watch the emergence of a countrywoman. I shall be debating fat stock prices before the year’s out, and prodding pigs at the market.”

  “I’ve no doubt you will,” he said. “You can pick up anybody’s jargon quickly—I should know—but how can you be happy away from all the things you value?—intelligent and amusing friends, and the sort of life you have made your own.”

  “My good idiot, must I inform you again that I’ve put all my money on one value?” she retorted. “I can be happy anywhere provided I’ve got you. If you’d packed up on me the rest would have been Dead Sea fruit. And do get it into your thick head that I’m not being selfless in saying I want to live in the country. I’m sick to death of cities and soot and slums and factories and occupational diseases. Sick of them.” She drummed on the table with clenched fists. “Come off it, do,” she pleaded. “I took you at your word when I married you. Take me at mine now. Give me another glass of sherry and let’s drink our own healths—good health and long lives—and no more arguments.”

  2

  Raymond Ferens was a doctor. Born in 1915, he had qualified in 1939, joined the R.A.M.C., been posted out in the Far East, been taken prisoner by the Japs and survived the experience. After a few months’ rest, he had taken a partnership in a practice in the industrial Midlands and had worked in a Staffordshire mining town. It had been a strenuous practice involving interminable surgeries, a lot of night work, and a minimum of free time. In such leisure as he could wrest from the exigencies of occupational diseases, Ferens had tried to continue the specialist work which had fascinated him when he first qualified—the study of asthma and kindred nervous disorders. He went up to London, when he could make the opportunity, to consult with the physicians at his old medical school, and on one of these visits he had met Anne Clements. They had fallen in love and got married without any dilly-dallying. They had been very happy, but excessive work had undermined Ferens’ constitution, already weakened by two years of a Jap prison camp. He had been ill on and off for a year, before Anne persuaded him to take the advice of his colleagues. “Get right out of this and take a country practice,” they said. “You’ll then have a useful life of normal duration. Go on as you’re going now and you’ll have had it in a twelve-month.”

  Both Anne and Raymond had favoured the west country, and when they heard of the approaching retirement of an elderly doctor at Milham in the Moor, Anne fairly bullied her husband into investigating possibilities there. The practice covered an enormous sparsely populated area on Exmoor: apart from the driving involved, it was not a heavy job, and the moor fascinated Raymond Ferens. The fact that a good house was offered him was an additional inducement. Anne paid a whirlwind visit to view the house, and after that formalities were concluded with record promptitude, so that by late March Anne and Raymond had seen their furniture into the van, packed themselves into their own car, and had set out to Milham Prior, to spend a night at the George there, since their goods would not be delivered until the following morning.

  3

  When Raymond Ferens had started enquiries about taking over the practice at Milham in the Moor, one of his first questions had been about a house to live in. Old Dr. Brown, who had been in practice there for over thirty years, did not want to give up his own house, but informed Ferens that the Dower Flouse belonging to the lord of the manor would be available. Ferens decided to go and have a look at it, and he had driven to Milham by himself, telling Anne that he wasn’t going to let her in on it until he had decided if he wanted to take the job on: she could then have her say, a final yes or no, taking house, locality, and amenities into consideration and weighing the pros and cons for herself.

  Ferens drove to Milham one bitter day in January, when the industrial towns of the Midlands were wretched with sleet drifting down from a drear grey sky and smoke mingling with the sleet in a grimy pall. He drove by Gloucester and Bristol, and once he was clear of Bristol the snow and sleet had disappeared, the country looked rich and green, and Raymond Ferens found his spirits rising. Milham Prior was clear of snow, but a keen wind was blowing: beyond Milham Prior the road rose steadily to the moor, and though the sky was clear the country became whiter and whiter with crisp dry snow. When he had his first glimpse of Milham in the Moor, Ferens thought, “Why, it’s like a French hill town.” The village was built well and truly, on the top of a hill. Its tall church tower stood out in silhouette against the clear saffron of the western sky, and snow-covered cottage roofs were piled up against the church as though they, too, were aspiring heavenwards. It was a lovely sight, but Ferens found himself thinking, “Ten miles from anywhere and nothing but the moor beyond, all the way to the sea.”

  He had stayed the night with Dr. Brown and been thankful that there was no question of taking over the old man’s house. It was a dark, cold, dreary house, shut in with overgrown shrubberies and evergreens pressing almost up to the windows. Brown seemed a very old man to Ferens, and rather a snuffly, grubby old man, but he was clearheaded and businesslike enough. He produced large-scale maps and gave details of the scattered steadings and hamlets and their inhabitants, and eventually spoke of the Dower House. It belonged to Sir James Ridding, who lived at the Manor House. “They’ve been trying to let the Dower House for some time,” said Dr. Brown, “but what with folks not wanting to come to anywhere as remote as this, and the Riddings being fussy about who they let it to, well, it’s still on their hands. I think you’ll be able to make them see reason. The fact is, Sir James and his lady don’t want to be without a doctor in the village. Anyway, you’ll see. It’s a good house—a beautiful and historic house.”

  Raymond had been surprised when he saw the Dower House. Dr. Brown took him there next morning, and in the bright pale sunshine the stone house looked enchanting. It was obviously late Tudor and early Jacobean in period, with lovely mullioned windows, a fine stone flagged roof, and handsome chimney stacks. It stood w
ithin the walls which surrounded the Manor House and demesne, but was shut off by dipped yew hedges and had pleasant open lawns around it. After one glance at it, Raymond promptly asked, “What’s the snag? Don’t tell me they can’t let a house like that unless it’s pretty grim in some particular.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with the house. It’s dry and weatherworthy, modernised as to plumbing, got a good water supply and electricity from the mill plant,” said Dr. Brown. “The trouble’s been that Lady Ridding has wanted to let it furnished, and people won’t take it on.”

  “Furnished? That’s no good to me,” said Ferens promptly. “That means a fancy price and no security of tenure.”

  “I know, I know,” said old Brown testily, “hut you talk to her ladyship. She’s not such a fool as she looks, and Sir James is tired of paying rates on a house no one wants to live in.”

  They met Lady Ridding walking her dogs in the drive of the Manor. Raymond enjoyed telling his wife about it when he got home. “They’re a blooming anachronism, keeping up traditional style on inherited capital, I suppose,” he said. “Lady R. is about sixty-five, stout, and having the sort of presence which went out with Edward and Alexandra. She was a beauty once, that’s obvious: in fact, she’s still beautiful; silver hair, blue eyes, and a complexion which owes nothing to a box, and she has a manner which compels admiration: as a technique it’s perfect.”

  With grace and dignity, Lady Ridding welcomed Dr. Ferens charmingly. “My husband has heard of you from his London consultant”—she smiled—“and we do hope you will decide to come here. Dr. Brown has worked so hard, and I do sympathise with him wanting to get out of harness. Now you’d like to see the Dower House. I’m sure your wife will approve of it, it really is a lovely house in its own way.”