for Jen Green
Introduction
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair
Theft of the Poet
Belladonna
An Expatriate Death
Wie Bitte?
The Last Laugh
The Antikvaariat Sophie
Mi Novelista
Preview: The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists
About the Author
CASSANDRA REILLY, TRANSLATOR, GLOBETROTTER, and accidental detective, came into being about ten years ago, on a train, appropriately enough, travelling through Norway. My companion Jen Green, an editor at the Women’s Press in London, and I had just been at the International Feminist Book Fair in Oslo, and I was joking that the fair would be a great place to have a (fictional) murder take place. In 1986 I was still relatively new to the mystery genre and to the notion of what a feminist mystery might look like or what I might make of such a male-dominated tradition. I’d begun to experiment with Murder in the Collective, published two years before, and had just finished Sisters of the Road, which dealt with teen prostitution. Both were told in the voice of amateur sleuth Pam Nilsen, a printer and activist, rooted in her Seattle community.
“Would Pam solve the crime at the book fair then?” Jen asked.
“I can’t imagine Pam ever leaving Seattle,” I said. “No, it would have to be someone else, someone completely different.”
Cassandra Reilly, who eventually did solve the book fair murder, was different. She wasn’t rooted, she wasn’t steadily employed, and her community was far-flung. To a large extent she reflected a shift that was taking place in my own life, a movement away from Seattle and into a wider world. In my early twenties, I’d lived abroad and travelled for several years. In my mid-thirties, my work in publishing and translating, as well as a new transatlantic relationship, meant that I would be spending more and more time living away from Seattle and out of suitcases again.
Cassandra’s life history did not come to me all in one piece. In fact, the first story in which she appeared, “Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair,” revealed relatively few details about her. I never conceived her whole, as I had Pam Nilsen, a character so apparently realistic that I was frequently asked personal questions about her and her twin sister (personal questions I found, oddly enough, I could answer). Cassandra was less easy to pin down.
Some things I knew about her right away. She was a translator, from Spanish to English; that was a world I knew and an occupation that gave her a reason to travel. I based her in London, because that was where I was living off and on. I gave her an Irish grandfather, having had one myself. And I put her birthplace in Kalamazoo, Michigan, not far from where my mother was born and where she’d attended college. Most importantly, I gave Cassandra a craving to be in some other place from the place she was, a restlessness that was quite familiar to me.
But in most ways, Cassandra differed greatly from me. She was willingly expatriate—a choice I’d never been able to make—free-spirited, and of an eclectically amorous nature. She was tall and thin, much older than I (though by now I am almost caught up to her), and conveniently erudite. She seemed to know all kinds of things that I had to research and read books about. She spoke many languages well and had been to every part of the globe, several times. In bits and pieces over the years, she has revealed herself to me as not only adventurous and romantic, but also deeply melancholic and on the run from a past of deprivation and narrow-mindedness.
If Cassandra began to realize herself, mosaic-like, in my imagination, so did her circle of friends. One of them, her Australian pal Jacqueline Opal, I got to know quite well as Cassandra’s sidekick in Trouble in Transylvania, but other friends were more reclusive. Her doctor friend Lucy Hernandez, for instance, with whom she always stays in Oakland, has only made one appearance, and the two women from whom she rents an attic room in Hampstead—Olivia Wulf, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, and Nicola Gibbons, a Scottish-born bassoonist—are glimpsed only tantalizingly in the background as yet. Gloria de los Angeles, the best-selling Venezuelan author whose novels Cassandra has translated, has never appeared in person either, but her rival, the Uruguayan Luisa Montiflores, has had a tendency to turn up right from the beginning.
Over the years, the mysteries Cassandra has investigated in foreign countries have enabled me to play with a variety of issues, some political, many literary. I’ve always chosen to interpret the mystery genre rather loosely. Frequently there is a murder; sometimes not. Puzzles of all kinds, robberies and impersonations, failed financial schemes, and hidden romances are quite as intriguing as dead bodies. After all, secrets are the heart of any mystery, and secrets take many forms. But the genre demands dead bodies, and dead bodies there are, along with suspects with bad alibis and relatives with suspicious motives.
As an amateur, Cassandra is drawn into all these situations out of coincidence and with the best intentions. Her work translating fiction has accustomed her to fluctuating meanings and alternative readings. As a translator, Cassandra is never in one world wholly; she shifts in and out of identities, cultures, even sexualities—for although in some urban subcultures of the West, being lesbian may be a fixed role, in other parts of the world there may well be more confusion, invisibility, and fluidity.
My interest in what could happen in the world of a translator-detective on the loose led me to write not only stories about her, but two novels. After I finished the second one, Trouble in Transylvania, I wondered if I would ever write another full-length Cassandra Reilly novel, because all the places I fantasized sending Cassandra (and friends have been very helpful, providing me a list of possible titles that range from Chaos in Cambodia to Bonkers in Bolivia) were as remote and intriguing as the Eastern Europe of Transylvania. I had spent some weeks travelling in Hungary and Romania, and many more weeks reading about the history and culture of those countries, in order to make the background of Trouble in Transylvania more convincing. Unfortunately my life and my other writing projects did not allow for extended visits to, much less extensive research about, Patagonia, Uzbekistan, and a matriarchal island off the coast of Okinawa—all places I was dying to set a mystery.
I contented myself with writing short stories instead, and with sending Cassandra to places with which I was more familiar. In the story form, I felt I’d found a medium that seemed to suit Cassandra Reilly’s wayward nature and literary adventures. The mystery tale offers considerable pleasures. Not least is its ability to be read at one sitting. Brevity is the soul of wit, of course, but compression can also perform wonders with a plot. A single idea is all the story requires—no need for complicated subplots, no hordes of possible perpetrators, no nets-full of red herrings.
The first Cassandra stories were mostly written in response to requests from editors. Later I began to write them for their own sake, and for the pleasure of Cassandra’s company. I’d found that as I travelled, I often ran into Cassandra Reilly in the most unexpected places. I’d see her at the Hamburg harbor, piloting a cabin cruiser up the Elbe River, and wonder what brought her there. Walking down a canal street in Amsterdam, I’d glimpse her again—tall, thin, with her wild hair clamped down by a beret—through the window of a used bookstore specializing in women’s titles. I bumped into her at book fairs and on vacations to Hawaii and Mexico. I seemed to find her most often in London though, a city I’d left behind but she had not. Her connections there helped me remain connected too. And over the years, although I did not quite trust Cassandra to stay away from my girlfriends, she became a friend to me, a compañera. She gave me courage in difficult times and helped keep me amused during tedious hours on trains and buses. I listened to her stories, sympathized with the difficulties of trying to make a living as a translator, envied her zest for seeing the world, was fascinated by some of her friends and alarmed by her propensity for straying into situations where people seemed to be regularly murdered.
I am not Cassandra Reilly. I wouldn’t exactly like to be Cassandra Reilly. But I enjoy being her companion, her amanuensis, her friend.
Other people in my life take an interest in Cassandra too and often suggest scenery for her to wander through and problems for her to solve. Few of their ideas have been ones I could use directly; still, a clipping that came from England in the mail, an anecdote told over dinner in Brussels, an environmental brochure from Germany—all became grist for the mill. The foreign flavor of these stories is no accident. I have spent years of my life outside the United States and have long-standing friendships and connections in many countries. In piecing together a portrait of Cassandra Reilly, expatriate dyke detective and open-eyed observer of what goes on around her, I’ve tried to give the sense of a life lived outside North America yet deeply American all the same—one of the essential themes of our New World literature, and one that crosses gender and genre.
IT IS A COMMONPLACE that in this world there are tourists and then there are travellers. Among the latter are the great travel writers, Jan Morris and M.F.K. Fisher, for example, who delight in words as much as famous sights and cities, and are inclined less to the rigors of the adventurous life than the luxuries or piquant poverties of foreignness. There are also the great travellers—Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird (a frail Victorian lady whose husband said of her, “She has the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich.”)—women who will, whatever age, seek out the bizarre and dangerous and coincidentally sometimes produce works of fine travel literature. And then there are the travellers, not very great, who write books, not very literary ones.
Edith “Tommy” Price was that last sort of traveller, that last sort of writer. And I’d adored her.
I’d grown up reading her books. My Aunt Eavan, who was something of a traveller herself, having ventured to Alaska before the cruise ships and Hawaii before the hordes, was a great fan of Tommy Price’s and had collected all her books and sent copies on to me from the time I was eleven or twelve. Jungle Journey, To the Top of the Very Top, and Lost in the Interior were my favorites. For years they’d been out of print, but the British publisher Harridan had recently relaunched two volumes in a handsome new paperback edition, and interviews with Tommy Price had begun to appear in everything from the Guardian’s Women’s Page to Spare Rib.
She sounded such a dashing, risk-taking, literate woman that I determined to meet her. As an itinerant translator, I have travelled widely myself, but not always adventurously—at least not intentionally. My idea of foreign intrigue is an attractive woman at the next cafe table. I do admire my more intrepid sister voyagers, however, and have a nodding acquaintance with many. Therefore I wrote to Tommy Price at her home in Dartmoor and proposed a visit. I said I was in the process of translating her book, Bound for Greenland, into Spanish for an Argentinean publisher. This was not an entire falsehood. My dear friend Victoria, who runs a publishing house in Buenos Aires, should be publishing Tommy Price, and I’d have to make a note to persuade her one of these days.
A brief reply came immediately: “Tuesday, December 1, I shall be at home from three o’clock. Please join me for tea. Yours sincerely, Tommy Price.”
I took the train to Exeter the morning of Tuesday, December 1, and then hired a car for the hour’s journey to the small village of Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. December was a bleak and glorious time of year to visit Dartmoor, and it was an appropriately bleak and glorious day, with wind sweeping over the yellow gorse and purple heather and sun breaking out dramatically behind the great rock piles, the granite formations called tors. It had been many years since I’d been in this part of the country; the last time had been with Sheila Cragworth, who was at the time nursing a desperate passion for a married woman and hoped to lose herself in the close study of geology and Neolithic archeological remains. I’m afraid I also learned perhaps more than I wanted to know about the way hot lava had once bubbled up to the surface where it cooled to become granite, and about the hut circles, barrows, monoliths, dolmens, menhirs, and kistvaens of the ancient people who once inhabited this severe landscape. It had been forested then; now it was bare and dramatic, with bogs and rivulets, granite rubble, and herds of Dartmoor ponies roaming freely through the military firing ranges.
Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor is an old market village hidden in a wooded valley by a river. It has a stone church, numerous tea shops, and at least one four-star pub for the walkers who throng to Dartmoor in the summer months. The address Tommy Price had given me was down a narrow lane with thick stone walls on either side. As I drove cautiously along, a wild rain burst out, and an oncoming car, in a great hurry, almost sideswiped my rented Ford Escort.
That was irritating, but not quite so irritating as arriving at Tommy’s cottage to find no one at home. I stood on the step knocking loudly, wondering if she were deaf, or if she were the sort of woman who would deliberately invite a stranger to Dartmoor and leave her standing wretchedly in the rain outside. I remembered she had written in Lost in the Interior:
At times, I know not why, a perversely asocial sensibility comes upon me, and I find myself doing and thinking things completely at odds with received notions of good behavior. It is precisely this misanthropic and contrary streak in my character which has enabled me to turn my back on civilization for months at a time and to embrace hardship and solitude with equanimity. Alas for my friends and family, however: the suddenness of my mood changes, the violence of my antisocial emotions!
Alas for Cassandra Reilly, standing on the step and becoming more and more soaked, the unwitting victim of a burst of antisocial contrariness!
Well, I could be contrary too. I returned to the car, found a bed and breakfast not far away, and changed my wet clothing. My landlady made me a cup of tea and commiserated about the failed visit to Tommy Price.
“She’s not what you would call a friendly sort,” Mrs. Droppington said. “Keeps to herself, she does.”
“Has she lived here long?”
“Long enough. The cottage belonged to her brother, who retired here in the thirties. But he’s been dead years and years now. Miss Price keeps the place up, I’ll say that for her, but that’s mainly the work of her friend, Miss Root.”
“Miss Root?”
“Oh yes, childhood friend, I understand. Constance Root. She has always taken care of Miss Price’s things while Miss Price was gallivanting around the world.”
None of the books had ever mentioned a Constance Root.
“And is Miss Root a friendly sort?”
“The two of them keep to themselves mostly, but when Miss Price is away, I’d say Miss Root is friendlier.”
I set out again for the Price-Root household about five, in the dark of an early evening thick with rain. Familiar country smells of animals and manure mingled with the acid scent of peat and bog from the hills above us. Sheila Cragworth had not believed any of the folktales and horror stories that abound in Dartmoor, about the Wisht Hounds and the ghosts and pixies, but I, granddaughter of Irish immigrants, couldn’t help a shudder creeping back and forth across my shoulders, as I squished along the short road from Mrs. Droppington’s. Dartmoor had been a place of great religious significance once, but all that was left were superstitions. I remembered reading that the only way to deal with pixies was to take off one’s coat, turn it inside out, and put it on again.
It was too cold for that and so I only hurried on. This time I found a light on in the cottage window, a light that hadn’t been there earlier.
I knocked. I knocked hard. And harder.
At length a gray head appeared in the window at the top of the door, and a low voice asked cautiously, “Who is it?”
“Cassandra Reilly. I had an appointment with Tommy Price for tea a few hours ago. But no one was here when I arrived, so I’ve come back.”
The door slowly opened and a woman in her early eighties stood there in a plain dress with a heavy shawl over her shoulders and slippers on her feet. The stay-at-home, I thought: Miss Root who keeps the home fires burning while Miss Price is out writing books about her adventures.
“Please come in out of the rain,” she said finally, when she could see I wasn’t moving. “Miss Price isn’t at home, I’m very sorry.”
I stepped into the vestibule and couldn’t help craning my neck for a view of a cozy-looking sitting room stuffed with books.
“She left very suddenly,” the woman said.
I remembered the car that had almost sideswiped me in the narrow lane: Tommy Price on a sudden mission to Borneo perhaps.
“I can offer you some tea,” Miss Root said. “I’m afraid I live very simply when Tommy is not here.”
She invited me into the sitting room.
“Oh look,” I said, going immediately to the bookshelves. “The original editions of Out Beyond Outback and Kangaroo Cowboys. I loved those books when I was a girl. I longed to go live in Australia.”
A faint glimmer of pleasure drifted across Constance Root’s wrinkled features, replaced almost immediately by one of disapproval. “Well, they’re terribly outdated now. The modern day reality is surely quite different. I watch television and read the papers, and what Tommy described is not to be found in Australia today. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in republishing such fairy tales.”
“Oh, but that’s part of the charm,” I said. “We like to imagine a world where everything seemed simpler, where a traveller could come upon an enchanted place and describe it like a fairy tale. Nowadays it’s all Hiltons and package tours.”
Miss Root shook her head and went to put the kettle on for tea. I took the opportunity to scan the bookshelves for other favorite books. Tommy Price had a wonderful library of women’s travel stories. Here were some of the classics: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates by Lady Anne Blunt; My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel; Dust in the Lion’s Paw, the autobiography of Freya Stark; A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.
Here too were hard-to-find, wonderful titles like On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden (1883); To Lake Tanganika in a Bath-Chair by Annie Hore (1896); and Nine Thousand Miles in Eight Weeks: Being an Account of an Epic Journey by Motor-Car Through Eleven Countries and Two Continents by Mildred Bruce (1927). Yes, and here were the complete works of Tommy Price, detailing her travels to Greenland, the Amazon, Tibet, Ethiopia, Australia—all written in the tough, no-nonsense prose that had so delighted me in my youth.
I opened Kangaroo Cowboys and read at random:
It wasn’t long before Jake guessed I was not the fearless British ex-soldier I had made myself out to be. “Why,” he said to me one day as we were riding alongside each other through the bush, “you’re a lady, ain’t you?”
Miss Root came back in with a tea tray and I told her enthusiastically, “One of the things I really loved about Tommy Price was her disguises. Half the time she was masquerading as a man, but she also loved to get herself up in any kind of native costume. Do you remember how she disguised herself as a harem girl to get into the Sheik’s inner sanctum?”
“Oh yes,” said Constance dryly. “Tommy was quite the quick-change artist.”
“I hadn’t realized she was still travelling,” I said. “Where’s she off to this time?”
“The city of Pagan in Burma,” Constance said. “She said she had an old friend there she wanted to see. At her age she’s trying to pack in as much as possible.”
The disapproving look came over Miss Root’s wrinkled face again. I wondered how it must feel to be always left behind.
“You’ve known Miss Price a long time, I gather?” I said.
She shook her head and asked, “More tea?”
I returned to Mrs. Droppington’s farm house and spent the evening curled up with Kangaroo Cowboys, which Constance Root had insisted I take.
“It can’t make up for having come all the way from London, but please take it anyway. I know Tommy wouldn’t mind.”
The next morning I decided that I’d take a walk on the moors before returning to Exeter and London. I was disappointed not to have met Tommy Price, but felt inspired all the same. Would I still be on the go at eighty, visiting pagodas in the jungle? Or would I have retired to some quiet village like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor? I had never been a true adventurer except in spirit; I liked a bittersweet espresso and a good newspaper far better than a jungle teeming with scorpions and snakes.
Mrs. Droppington fixed me a hearty country breakfast and warned me about straying too far from the paths.
“The mists and rain can come sudden up here. There’s plenty of folks lost on Dartmoor every year.”
I promised to be careful and took the Wellingtons and oilskin slicker she pressed on me, as well as a sandwich and thermos of tea for later. It was a clear morning, sunny and brisk, just right for walking, and I set off in good spirits, dutifully sticking right to the paths. The hills above Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor had a number of famous tors, those masses of bulging granite that look in some cases like great fists pushing their way up from the earth and in other cases like Easter Island gods, with enormous noses and full lips. To gaze out across the landscape was to feel in a very wild place, at the top of the world; yet the ground itself was hard going, being covered with what is called clitter, the rubble from outcrops of granite, and being squelchily wet. Dartmoor is poorly drained; the land is a like a sponge, with bogs among the tussocks of purple moor grass and tufts of whortleberries and wild thyme.
I walked for several hours, seeing few signs of life except for the occasional pony and, high above, the lark or stone curlew with its eerie cry. I had hoped to see some of the hut circles that Sheila Cragworth had been so keen on all those years ago, but all I saw were a few moorstones, the old stones along the ancient path that had been erected by villages like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor centuries ago to help travellers find their way across the stretches of high ground. I remembered how irritating Sheila had found my superstitious bent. Poor old Sheila; she was now some sort of Tory functionary in Brighton, which showed what a broken heart could do to you.
I had lunch next to a particularly impressive tor that looked like a Northwest totem pole with a raven’s beak and a bear’s torso and finished Kangaroo Cowboys:
Someone once said to me: Why travel? After all, there’s nothing new to discover, no place where no one has been before. To that I would say that more than half of travel, perhaps ninety percent of travel, is imagination. Some people can stay home and live lives of great adventure; others may roam the entire globe and yet remain as provincial as a country lad. What you get out of travel is what you put into it; and if you put your whole imagination, you get a great deal.
I had difficulty reading the last words and raised my head to realize that, quite suddenly, the weather had changed.
An opaque white cloud was pouring over me like a sift of flour; but this cloud was wet and thick. It blanketed out the sun, the path, and even the tor at my back. Within a few minutes I couldn’t see my boots in front of me. The fog quickly crept under my collar and through my clothes, until I felt chilled all over. I stood up, but had no idea which direction to move, or whether to chance moving anywhere. Shapes and sounds were completely distorted; I thought I heard a curlew, and the cry made my skin crawl. The pixies were going to get me, if the Wisht Hounds didn’t first. It was almost preferable to break my neck stumbling through the clitter, or to fall into a bog and drown. I hugged my arms to my chest and thought, ‘be calm, the fog will lift in a minute.’ But it didn’t. It got worse. A howling wind tore at my hat, and pellets of hail whipped my face.
What would the intrepid Tommy Price do in a situation like this? Once, I remembered, she had run out of petrol in Greenland and had to walk for hours through a blazing white landscape without markers. She had kept her spirits up by singing Noel Coward tunes. I tried one in a quavering voice. In reality I wasn’t much good with nature adventures. I was used to taking care of myself in awkward, unfamiliar, and even dangerous situations involving people, but weather was another matter. Weather was serious.
Still, thinking of Tommy Price helped a little. I flattened my body against the side of the tor and began to inch around its circumference. The cold granite scraped my face, but at last I found what I had vaguely recalled: a slit in the rock wide enough for a body to squeeze into. I don’t know how long I sheltered there, but I had plenty of time to regret large portions of my life, particularly the portion that had begun the day before with my arrival in Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. I assumed that if I stayed there long enough, a search party would be sent out for me. Possibly Mrs. Droppington, seeing the fog sweep over the moors, had already alerted the search-and-rescue mission.
I may have dozed a little; at least I thought I was dreaming when I sensed a lull in the wind and a slight thinning of the fog. It wasn’t complete, but still, looking out from my crack in the tor I realized I could see boulders, and the path, and some furze bushes. That was enough for me; if I didn’t get moving I would freeze to death—my fingers inside my gloves were already like ice. I charged down the path, hoping that by always going down I would find my way back to the valley. I couldn’t see any markers, couldn’t remember how many paths there had been. The landscape seemed completely changed; no longer did the moor seem a bracing plateau with bones of granite jutting up through the thin soil. It was a swampy morass of pea-green bogs and pools that I could only avoid sometimes by jumping from tussock to tussock.
Still, even if I was chilled to the marrow, haunted by the thought of vicious pixies, and terribly, hopelessly lost, the fog was lifting.
If it hadn’t lifted, I doubt that I would have seen what I did: a tweed cap floating on a pool of green scum, and just underneath, the outlines of a woman’s body, face down.
The coroner ruled the death of Tommy Price accidental. Everyone knew Miss Price’s predilection for walking on the moors in every kind of weather. People did drown in the bogs—not often, but within memory. She was eighty-something, after all, and not as clear-headed as she could have been.
I returned to London with a violent cold and horrible memories of my headlong flight down the hill and into the first cottage I saw. The search party had no difficulty finding Tommy Price, in spite of my incoherent directions; apparently she had stumbled into a well-known bog, not deep but treacherous all the same. More than a few ponies had lost their footing there and tired themselves out trying to get free.
Even in London, I could not stop thinking about Tommy Price and Constance Root. Had it been Tommy who drove past me so quickly in the car? Why had Miss Root said Tommy was going to Burma when she was only out on the moors for a walk? That disapproval Miss Root had worn so plainly on her wrinkled face—was that envy? Or hatred? Perhaps she was jealous that Tommy Price’s books were appearing in print again, that she was receiving public attention. But could she have been envious enough to kill Tommy? Would a woman in her eighties have the strength to push Tommy into a bog? And how would Constance have gotten Tommy up there in the first place?
Of course, the oddest thing was that when the constable came to Tommy Price’s cottage to inform Miss Root of the sad news, she was not in. A note pinned to the back door canceled her milk delivery for an indefinite time. The car was gone.
“And she never came back,” said Mrs. Droppington when I rang her a week later. “It’s created an awful confusion here. You see, Miss Price left everything to Miss Root in her will, just like Miss Root left everything to Miss Price. Who’s going to get it if Miss Root doesn’t come back? I’m over there watering the plants every other day, but I can’t do that forever.”
I had a sudden image of Constance strolling among the golden pagodas of upper Burma. Could she have decided to do away with Tommy and to steal her plane ticket? The likeliest way for Tommy to enter Burma was to fly from London to Calcutta or Bangkok, then switch to a smaller plane and fly on to Rangoon. A few phone calls told me that a Miss Constance Root, not a Miss Edith Price, had booked a round-trip ticket with Air India to Calcutta on December 2, but that she hadn’t used it.
That didn’t mean that Miss Root hadn’t murdered Tommy Price and taken quite a different flight. Perhaps Miss Root had been planning to flee to Burma after the murder and only my unlooked-for arrival had stopped her. However, for someone who had just murdered a woman and was preparing to escape to Burma, Miss Root had not seemed particularly agitated during my visit. Cold-bloodedness seemed much more likely to have been a characteristic of Tommy Price than of Constance Root.
I recalled a favorite passage from To the Top of the Very Top:
James lay there, stiff as a corpse on a mortuary slab.
“Frozen, poor old sod,” I said to my companions.
They were silent, struck with icy horror—James was the first of our party to die—who would be next?
“Well, don’t just stand there,” I said gruffly. “We’ll never get him down the mountain. We’ll have to bury him here, in the snow, on the side of Mount Ktchnqhtl. Yes, he’d like that, I know. James was a brave chap, a climber till the end.”
Yes, it seemed far more plausible that Tommy Price, with her nerves of steel and her tough, resilient old body—hardened by years of trekking, sailing, and camel-riding—would be able to kill fragile Miss Root. But the motives for such a murder seemed even less clear. Why would Tommy, basking in the fame of rediscovery, decide to bump off her old companion, who perhaps had been her lover once, or least a good friend? Were there tensions between them that Tommy’s sudden return to notoriety had inflamed? But if so, why didn’t Tommy, with her vast acquaintance around the world, just leave? Why didn’t she take that trip to Pagan?
I kept remembering the tweed cap floating on the green scum of the bog. After evading bandits and mercenaries and surviving frostbite and shipwrecks, what an inglorious end, to die face down in a pool of water.
It struck me as curious that I couldn’t remember ever seeing a photograph of Tommy Price. Not in any of her books, not in the interviews that had recently been published. I called an editor I knew at Harridan Press, which was reprinting Tommy’s travel books, and asked Gillian if she had an author photograph.
“My dear,” said Gillian. “I never even met Tommy Price. We corresponded by post and the odd phone call. She said her health was too bad to come to London, that she never travelled any more.”
“What did her voice sound like?”
“Nothing special, rather low and pleasant, not particularly quavery, if you know what I mean.”
That was Constance’s voice all right; but it could also have been Tommy Price’s.
“What’s this all about, anyway?” asked Gillian.
“Oh, just curiosity. I was supposed to meet her, but it didn’t work out. I’m sorry, that’s all.”
“Well I think she had a dashed good pop-off,” said Gillian. “Terribly dramatic, don’t you think, to sink like a stone into a bog on Dartmoor? We’re changing the back cover copy on the next two reprints.”
I went to the British Library and found all Tommy’s books. Not a single one had a photograph inside or out, though there were plenty of drawings of Tommy in burnooses, chaps, and snow parkas with fur around the face. I couldn’t help being struck, as I flipped through the different volumes, by how very many disguises she had assumed. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t want her photograph taken.
Or perhaps there was another reason.
I called Mrs. Droppington again.
“This might seem an odd question, Mrs. Droppington, but did you ever actually see Tommy Price?”
“Of course. What do you mean? That is, when she was at the cottage, which wasn’t very often; that is, I suppose she was gone for stretches at a time; that is, I do remember seeing photographs of her as a girl when her brother lived in the cottage.”
There was a lengthy pause, and then Mrs. Droppington said thoughtfully, “Do you know, my dear, you’ve set me thinking. It’s a curious thing, but I am really not so sure after all that I did ever see Tommy Price all that much. Ever since Tommy took over the cottage and Constance came to stay, I suppose it’s Constance I’ve seen. I knew from what Constance said that Tommy was often travelling. Constance would come into the greengrocers and say, ‘Tommy’s just back from Tanzania and says she absolutely must have sprouts for luncheon.’”
“But you couldn’t exactly say what Tommy Price looked like?”
“I often saw her from a distance,” said Mrs. Droppington. “Tommy loved to walk, you know. She was always striding across the moors, with her cap and walking stick. Quite a distinctive walk,” Mrs. Droppington went on, gaining confidence. “Not at all like Miss Root’s, which was so…feminine.”
I had a theory, which might be hard to prove, that Constance Root and Tommy Price were the same woman. That Tommy Price, with her love of disguise, had invented a kind of alter ego in Miss Root. After all, the two of them hadn’t moved to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor until the 1970s, some years after Tommy Price’s books had gone out of print.
I imagined Tommy to be a proud woman, one who would find it difficult to admit that because of age and money she could no longer travel so easily, nor, if she did, write about it in a way that anyone would find interesting. She didn’t want to retire as Tommy Price and have people say that she used to be a famous traveller, so she came up with Constance Root, a proper English lady, who could live on very little, yet still, with her stories of Tommy Price’s adventures, keep her past myth alive. When the books began to be reissued, Tommy Price must have been thrilled at first, and then increasingly worried that her secret would be revealed. Hence the ban on photographs. She didn’t want anyone from the village seeing the face of Tommy Price in the newspaper and saying, “But isn’t that our Miss Root from Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor?”
The strain must have been too much for her, so that she had decided to do away with herself. Which was why no one had seen Constance after Tommy’s death and why the plane ticket hadn’t been used.
Of course, such a theory had its soft spots. Why the camera-shy, reclusive Tommy had invited me to Dartmoor on the day before her suicide was the largest of them.
I travelled to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor in the same way as before, by train to Exeter and then by hired car to the village. But this time I came very late at night. I parked my car in the village and, all in black, with only a flashlight, I walked quickly to the familiar cottage.
The wind whistled through the moonlit night. I tried not to think about Wisht Hounds and pixies. With tools I had borrowed from a friend in London whose East End family dabbled in the burglary trade, I let myself in the front door of the cottage.
It looked the same as it had two weeks ago when I had visited: the same old-fashioned furniture, dustier now, the same book-lined sitting room, illumined through the windows by moonlight. I went into the sitting room and let my flashlight play along the spines of all those wonderful old titles. Tommy Price hadn’t been the only woman writing books in the 1930s. There had been Olive Chapman with Across Lapland with Sledge and Reindeer; and Rosita Forbes with Unconducted Wanders and Adventures: Being a Gipsy Salad: Some Incidents, Excitements and Impressions of Twelve, Highly-Seasoned Years. I wondered what had happened to those writers. I knew that sometimes a traveller only took one huge trip and then retired in triumph to dine off stories of savages or sultans forever—and that sometimes she kept going, year after year, like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, drawn to hardship and adventure long past the age when most women were settling down to crocheting and gardening. What a shame that Tommy Price hadn’t had the courage to admit to her double life. She was never going to enjoy the acclaim now she so richly deserved. I couldn’t help taking down the volume of Bound for Greenland. I had always loved its description of the end of the voyage. Softly I read aloud:
I always considered myself a seaman of the first order, and it never occurred to me that my experience of the sea had been confined to tranquil oceans farther south, azure and emerald playgrounds for dolphins and humpback whales. This was a sea of ice floes as enormous as New York skyscrapers and vast swells the size of Himalayan mountains. Our ship had buckled and almost broken more than once; everything on the decks not tied down had been swept away and shards of glass and ceramic littered the galley where the cupboards had been forced open. But now it was over, now the small band of us stood on the deck, on the mercifully horizontal deck, as Greenland, great Greenland, land of Eskimos and Vikings, land of ice mountains and majestic peoples, came into view. Thank God we were approaching land. At last.
“I always rather liked that passage myself,” said a voice from the hall, a low pleasant voice, not at all quavery.
I was so stunned that I dropped the book and flashed my light every way but the right one.
“I wrote it, you know,” the voice continued. “I wrote all those books. We thought it was a lark at first, Tommy and I. We would go to the British Library and look up information, or we’d talk to people who really had been to those places. Then we’d go back to our small flat in Bayswater and I’d use all my powers of imagination. It was a lark, but it also paid the bills. Times were hard then.”
“So you’ve never been to any of these places?” I sat down in a lump on the sofa, hardly able to take it in.
Constance Root advanced into the sitting room and sat down opposite me. The moonlight gave the room an unearthly cast, but I could see her clearly. Her thin face was tired, yet I noticed she was wearing trousers and a heavy sweater and looked stronger than I remembered.
“We were poor as church mice. How could we travel?”
“Why did you use just Tommy’s name?”
“My family was more respectable than Tommy’s, you see. My father was a vicar in Somerset, and I had five brothers and sisters. They never would have let me go off to Australia on my own, much less Greenland. Tommy had just her brother, who retired from his job in Exeter to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. He was much older than Tommy and thought she was rather wild and boyish. It seemed perfectly plausible to him that his sister would spend all her time exploring foreign places.”
I was still trying to take it in. “And your publishers? Didn’t they ever check?”
“You must remember, my dear, that in those days there was no television and rather less general knowledge of what places looked like. Tommy found she loved acting the part of intrepid explorer, and our publishers loved it, too. Periodically she’d dress up in khaki and tall leather boots with a riding jacket and a tweed cap and swagger into the staid old office of Chatham and Son with a new manuscript. She refused to have her photograph in the books and, on my suggestion, said she always travelled incognito, in disguise. That was to prevent people in the countries we wrote about from realizing that she had never been there.”
“But after the books were successful, didn’t you have any desire to actually travel to foreign places?”
“Tommy did,” said Constance. “But my thought was that neither of us would be able to take the kind of chances I took in the travel books, and that if by any chance we were exposed, it would mean the end of a rather lucrative career.”
“I thought for a while that you and Tommy Price were the same person,” I said slowly. “And that Tommy had created you as a kind of alter ego, someone to stay at home while she explored the world.”
“You could just as easily say that I created Tommy Price as my alter ego,” Constance said. “Someone to explore the world for me while I stayed home.”
My eyes went to the shelves of books in their faded bindings. How many happy days I’d passed reading about Tommy Price’s adventures. And now it turned out they were bogus.
“It must have been hard for you when the books began to be reprinted,” I said. “And suddenly the world discovered Tommy Price again.”
“Things had not gone so well with us in the last twenty years,” Constance said, with lips pinched. “Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy had come to believe my stories about her. There were periods when she spent most of her time walking over the moors; and other times when she gave out that she was on a trip but stayed home and inside, expecting me to wait on her hand and foot. When the books began to be reprinted, at first I was happy, for it would be more income. But then I realized what it was going to be like living with her.”
“Now you have the income, but no Tommy Price to worry you,” I said. “I know she left everything to you in her will.”
“Yes, she did.”
“I’m curious about one thing,” I said. “Why Tommy invited me here to visit.”