Kitabı oxu: «Report for Murder»

Foreword

I grew up reading mysteries. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, from Rex Stout to Chandler and Hammett, I devoured them all. But what started me working on the first Lindsay Gordon novel, Report for Murder, in the mid-1980s was the chance to march to a different drum.

There was a new wave breaking on the shores of crime fiction, and it was led by women. Even though there had never been any shortage of female protagonists in the genre, you’d have been hard pressed to find many you could call feminists. But by the early 80s, a new breed of women had emerged.

They were mostly PIs, though there were a few amateurs among them. What marked them out was their politics. Whether they called themselves feminists or not, they were strong, independent women with a brain and a sense of humour, but most of all, they had agency. They didn’t shout for male help when the going got tough. They dealt with things on their own terms.

Another key difference was that these stories were organic. They weren’t random murders bolted on to a random setting. The crimes grew out of their environment – the particular jobs people did, the lives they led, the situations and recreations they were involved in.

devoured every one of those books I could get my hands on. Sara Paretsky, Barbara Wilson, viSue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Mary Wings, Katherine V Forrest and a dozen others showed me how to write about real lives within the frame-work of murder and suspense. Their protagonists took on the male establishment when they had to, and they didn’t back down. They didn’t shy away from confronting difficult issues either.

I loved them.

I wanted to write my own version of those women. A Scottish version, a woman as firmly rooted as her American sisters, but one who would have to accommodate different laws, different customs, different politics and different histories. I didn’t have the nerve to make her a PI because I didn’t know any at the time. And I suspected women PIs in the UK would have very different professional lives to their US counterparts.

What I did know was journalism. I became a journalist after I graduated from Oxford, just to bridge the gap until I could support myself writing fiction. (I always had the absolute conviction that day would come, a conviction not shared by anyone else back then . . .) I thought if I made my character a journalist, I’d be on safe ground. I knew what journalists were capable of and how we went about circumventing the doors that were closed to us. I knew the rhythm of our working lives and what made a good newspaper story.

In other respects, Lindsay Gordon has congruences with my own background. She’s Scottish, she shares my politics, and she’s a lesbian. It would, however, be a mistake to conflate us. Our personalities are quite different. (Except that we both have a fondness for fast cars and good whisky . . .) She’s far more headstrong and stubborn than I am, for example, and much more willing to take risks.

I’m proud to say that Lindsay was the first out lesbian protagonist in UK crime fiction. It never crossed my mind that she wouldn’t be a lesbian, because those American novels had given me permission to put whoever I wanted centre stage. But the books were never ‘about’ being a lesbian. Lindsay doesn’t wrestle with her sexuality or her gender, nor does she ever apologise for it. It’s only one part of her identity and it’s not one she has a problem with. The gay characters in the books are part of a wider landscape, one that accommodates all sorts and conditions of people.

That was a very deliberate choice on my part. When I was growing up on the East Coast of Scotland, there were no lesbian templates for my life. No books, no films, no TV series, and certainly no lesbians living open lives. I decided that if I was going to write fiction, I was going to give the next generation of gay women a character they could celebrate. I never describe her physically and that’s deliberate too. I wanted her to be a chameleon, to take the form of whatever her readers needed. They could identify with her if they wanted. They could fantasise her as lover or friend or colleague.

Report for Murder was published in 1987 and the Lindsay Gordon books have never been out of print in the UK. I think those early choices I made go some way to explaining why the books have remained so popular. This series is all about character and story, not special pleading or righteous argument.

Each of the books is set in a different world – a trick I learned from reading P D James! My own experiences were the springboard for my imagination in the creation of those environ-ments. Report for Murder is set in a girls’ boarding school; Common Murder, at a women’s peace camp; Final Edition, in the world of newspapers; Union Jack, in the milieu of union politics; Booked for Murder in publishing; and Hostage to Murder moves between Glasgow and St Petersburg in the course of a tense kidnap and murder thriller.

I never intended to write so many Lindsay Gordon novels. Originally I planned a trilogy. (Mostly because the book I really wanted to write was the third one but I couldn’t figure out how to get there without writing the first two.) I even packed her off to live in Half Moon Bay with a view of the ocean so I wouldn’t be tempted to write about her any more.

But she wouldn’t let me go. As soon as I’d despatched her, I had a great idea for another book that gave her the starring role. And then another, and another . . .

Lindsay Gordon took a hold of me and for almost twenty years, she wouldn’t let me go. I hope she has the same effect on you.

PART ONE: OVERTURE

1

Lindsay Gordon put murder to the back of her mind and settled down in the train compartment to enjoy the broken greys and greens of the Derbyshire scenery. Rather like home, she decided. Except that in Scotland, the greens were darker, the greys more forbidding. Although in Glasgow, where she now lived, there was hardly enough green to judge. She congratulated herself on finishing the detective novel just at the point where Manchester suburbia yielded place to this attractive landscape foreign to her. Watching it unfold gave her the first answer to the question that had been nagging her all day: what the hell was she doing here? How could a cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist (as she mockingly described herself) be on her way to spend a weekend in a girls’ public school?

Of course, there were the answers she’d been able to use to friends: she had never visited this part of England and wanted to see what it was like; she was a great believer in ‘knowing thine enemy', so it came under the heading of opportunities not to be missed; she wanted to see Paddy Callaghan, who had been responsible for the invitation. But she remained unconvinced that she was doing the right thing. What had made her mind up was the realisation that, given Lindsay’s current relationship with the Inland Revenue, anything that had a cheque as an end product couldn’t be ignored.

The fact that she cheerfully despised the job she was about to do was not a novel sensation. In the unreal world of popular journalism which she inhabited, she was continually faced with tasks that made her blood boil. But like other tabloid journalists who laid claim to a set of principles, she argued that, since popular newspapers were mass culture, if people with brains and compassion opted out the press would only sink further into the gutter. But in spite of having this missionary zeal to keep her warm, Lindsay often felt the chill wind of her friends’ disapproval. And she had to admit to herself that saying all this always made her feel a pompous hypocrite. However, since this assignment involved writing for a magazine with some credibility, she was doubly pleased that it would avoid censure in the pub as well as provide cash, and that was enough to stifle the stirrings of contempt for Derbyshire House Girls’ School.

Paddy, with the contacts of a life membership of the old girls’ network, had managed to persuade the features editor of Perspective to commission a piece from Lindsay about a fund-raising programme about to be launched by the school with a Gala Day. At that point, Lindsay was hungry for the cash and the prestige, so she couldn’t afford the luxury of stopping to consider if it was the sort of project she’d actually choose to take on. Three months ago she’d reluctantly accepted redundancy when the Daily Nation discovered it needed fewer journalists so that it could pay its print workers their ‘pound of flesh'. Since then, she had been applying for unlikely jobs and frenetically trying to make a living as a freelance. That made the call from Paddy all the more welcome because it meant a relatively quiet weekend away from the demands of the telephone— which would soon stop disrupting her life altogether if she didn’t earn enough to pay the last quarter’s bill.

At that unwelcome thought, Lindsay reflected with relief on the money she would receive from the Derbyshire House job. It seemed poetic justice that such a bastion of privilege should stake her. Good old Paddy, she mused. Ever since they’d met in Oxford six years before, Paddy had not only been a tower of strength in emotional crises but the first to offer help when life got Lindsay into one of its awkward corners. When Lindsay’s car staged a break-down on a remote Greek mountainside it was Paddy who organised the flying out of a spare part. When Lindsay was made redundant it was Paddy who found the cousin who told Lindsay the best thing to do with her less-than-golden handshake. And when Lindsay’s lover died, it was Paddy who drove through the night to be with her. The daughter of two doctors, with an education begun at the ‘best’ schools and polished off at Oxford, Paddy Callaghan had shaken her family by deciding to become an actress. After four years of only moderate success and limited employment, however, she had realised she would never make the first rank. Always a realist, and fundamentally unaffected by four years of living like a displaced person, she reverted to type and decided to make sure that the rising generation of public schoolgirls would have a better grounding on the stage than she’d had. When the two women first met, Paddy was half-way through the teacher training that would take her back to her old school in Derbyshire to teach English and Drama. It had taken Lindsay quite a long time to realise that at least part of her appeal for Paddy was her streak of unconventionality. She was an antidote to the staid world Paddy had grown up in and was about to return to. Lindsay had argued bitterly with Paddy that to go back to her old environment was copping out of reality. Though the argument never found a solution, the friendship survived.

Lindsay felt sure that part of the reason for the continuation of that friendship was that they had never let their separate worlds collide. Just as Lindsay would never drag Paddy off to a gay club, so Paddy would never invite Lindsay to one of her parents’ weekend house parties. Their relationship existed in a vacuum because they understood and accepted the gulf that separated so much of their lives. So Lindsay was apprehensive about encountering Paddy on what was firmly her territory. Suddenly all her fears about the weekend crystallised into a panic over the trivial issue of what she was wearing. What the hell was the appropriate gear for this establishment, anyway? It wasn’t something that normally exercised her thoughts, but she had gone through her wardrobe with nervous care that morning, rejecting most items on the grounds that they were too casual, and others on the grounds that they were too formal. She finally settled on charcoal-grey trousers, matching jacket and burgundy shirt. Very understated, not too butch, she’d thought. Now she thought again and considered the vision of the archetypal dyke swaggering into this nest of young maidens. God help her if St George hove into sight.

If only she’d brought the car, she could have brought a wide enough selection of clothes to run no risk of getting it wrong. But her crazy decision to opt for the uncertain hands of British Rail so she could get some work done had boomeranged—you could only carry so much for a couple of days, unless you wanted to look like the wally of the weekend tipping out at the school gates with two cabin trunks and a holdall. As her paranoia gently reached a climax, she shook herself. ‘Oh sod it,’ she thought. ‘If I’m so bloody right-on, why should I give a toss what they think of me? After all, I’m the one doing them a favour, giving their fund-raising a puff in the right places.’

With this bracing thought, the train shuddered into the station at Buxton. She picked up her bags and emerged on to the platform just as the sun came out from the autumn clouds, making the trees glow. Then through the glass doors she caught sight of Paddy, waiting and waving. Lindsay thrust her ticket at the collector and the two women hugged each other, laughing, each measuring the other for changes.

‘If my pupils could see me now, they’d have a fit,’ laughed Paddy. ‘Teachers aren’t supposed to leap around like lunatics in public, you know! My, you look good. Frightfully smart!’ She held Lindsay at arms’ length, taking in the outfit, the brown hair and the dark blue eyes. ‘First time I’ve ever seen you fail to resemble a jumble sale in search of a venue.’

‘Lost weight. It’s living off the wits that does it. Food’s a very easy economy.’

‘No, darling, it’s definitely the clothes. Who’s the new woman, then?’

‘Cheeky sod! There’s no new woman, more’s the pity. I went out and bought this all by myself. At least six months ago, too. So there, Miss Callaghan.’

Paddy grinned. ‘All right, all right. I’ll take your word for it. Now, come along. I’m parked outside. I’ve got to pick up a couple of things from the town library then we can shoot back to the school itself and have a quick coffee to wipe away the strain of the train.’

In the station car park, they climbed into Paddy’s battered Land Rover. ‘Not exactly in its prime, but it’s practical up here,’ she apologised. ‘Highest market town in England, this is. When the snow gets bad, I’m the only member of staff who can make a bid for freedom to the local pub. You still got that flashy passion wagon of yours?’

Lindsay scowled. ‘If you mean my MG, yes I have.’

‘Dear, oh dear. Still trying to impress with that retarded status symbol?’

‘I don’t drive it to impress anyone. I know it’s the sort of car that provokes really negative reactions from the 2CV brigade, but I happen to enjoy it.’

Paddy laughed, ‘Sorry. I didn’t know it was such a sore spot.’

‘Let’s just say that I’ve been getting a bit of stick about it lately from one or two people who should know better. I’m seriously thinking about selling it just for a bit of peace and quiet from the purists who think you can only be right-on in certain cars. But I think I’d miss it too much. I can’t afford to buy a new sports car. I spend a lot of time in transit and I think I’ve got a right to be in a car that performs well, is comfortable and doesn’t get like an oven in the summer. Plus it provokes interesting reactions from people. It’s a good shorthand way of finding out about attitudes.’

‘Okay, okay. I’m on your side,’ Paddy protested.

‘I know it’s flash and pretentious,’ Lindsay persisted. ‘But then there’s a bit of that in me anyway. So you could argue that I’m doing women a favour by forewarning them.’

Paddy pulled up in a Georgian crescent of imposing buildings. ‘You are sensitive about it, aren’t you? Well, if it’s any consolation, I’ve never thought you were flash. A little over the top sometimes, perhaps …’

Lindsay changed the subject abruptly. ‘What’s this, then,’ she demanded, waving an arm at the buildings.

‘Not bad, eh? The North’s answer to Bath. Not quite on the same scale. Rather splendid but slightly seedy. And you can still drink the spa water here. Comes out of the ground warm; tastes rather like an emetic in its natural state, but terribly good for one, so they say. Come and see the library ceiling.’

‘Do what?’ demanded Lindsay as Paddy jumped down. She had to break into a trot to catch Paddy, who was walking briskly along a colonnade turned golden by the late afternoon sun. They entered the library. Paddy gestured to Lindsay to go upstairs while she collected her books. A few minutes later she joined her there.

‘Hardly over the top at all, dear,’ Lindsay mocked, pointing to the baroque splendours of the painted and moulded ceiling. ‘Worth a trip in itself. So where are all the dark satanic mills, then? I thought the North of England was full of them.’

‘I thought you’d appreciate this,’ said Paddy with a smile. ‘You’re in altogether the wrong place for dark satanics, though. Only the odd dark satanic quarry hereabouts. But before you dash off in search of the local proletarian heritage, a word about this weekend. I want to sort things out before we get caught up in the hurly-burly.’

‘Sort out the programme, or my article?’

‘Bit of both, really. Look, I know everything about the school goes right against the grain for you. Always embraced your principles so strongly, and all that. I also know that Perspective would be very happy if you wrote your piece from a fairly caustic point of view. But, as I tried to get across to you, this fund-raising project is vital to the school.

‘If we don’t raise the necessary £50,000 we’ll lose all our playing fields. That might not seem any big deal to you, but it would mean we’d lose a great deal of our prestige because we’ve always been known as a school with a good balance -you know, healthy mind in a healthy body and all that. Without our reputation for being first class for sport as well as academically we’d lose a lot of girls. I know that sounds crazy, but remember, it’s usually fathers who decree where daughters are educated and they all hark back to their own schooldays through rose-tinted specs. I doubt if we’d manage to keep going, quite honestly. Money’s become very tight and we’re getting back into the patriarchal ghetto. Where parents can only afford to educate some of their children, the boys are getting the money spent on them and the girls are being ignored.’ Paddy abruptly ran out of steam.

Lindsay took her time to answer while Paddy studied her anxiously. This was a conversation Lindsay had hoped would not have had to take place, and it was one she would rather have had over a drink after they’d both become accustomed to being with each other again. At last she said, ‘I gathered it was serious from your letter. But I can’t help feeling it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the public schools felt the pinch like everyone else. It seems somewhat unreal to be worrying about playing fields when a lot of state schools can’t even afford enough books to go round.’

‘Even if it means the school closing down?’

‘Even if it means that, yes.’

‘And put another sixty or seventy people on the dole queue? Not just teachers, but cleaning staff, groundsmen, cooks, the shopkeepers we patronise? Not to mention the fact that for quite a lot of the girls, Derbyshire House is the only stable thing in their lives. Quite a few come from broken homes. Some of their parents are living abroad where the local education isn’t suitable for one reason or another. And others need the extra attention we can give them so they can realise their full potential.’

‘Oh, Paddy, can’t you hear yourself?’ Lindsay retorted plaintively, and was rewarded by scowls and whispered ‘shushes’ from around the reading room. She dropped her voice. ‘What about all the kids in exactly the same boat who don’t have the benefit of Mummies and Daddies with enough spare cash to use Derbyshire House as a social services department? Maybe their lives would be a little bit better if the middle classes had to opt back into real life and use their influence to improve things. I can’t be anything but totally opposed to this system you cheerfully shore up. And don’t give me those spurious arguments about equal opportunities. In the context of this society, what you’re talking about isn’t an extension of equality; it’s an extension of inequality. Don’t try to quiet my conscience like that.

‘Nevertheless … I’ve had to come to the reluctant conclusion that I can’t stab you in the back having accepted your hospitality. Shades of the Glencoe massacre, eh? Don’t expect me to be uncritically sycophantic. But I won’t be doctrinaire either. Besides, I need the money!’

Paddy smiled. ‘I should have known better than to worry about you,’ she said.

‘You should, really,’ Lindsay reproached her. ‘Now, am I going to see this monument to the privileged society or not?’

They walked back to the Land Rover, relaxed together, catching up on the four months since they had last seen each other. On the short drive from Buxton to Axe Edge, where Derbyshire House dominated a fold of moorland, Paddy gave Lindsay a more detailed account of the weekend plans.

‘We decided to start off the fund-raising with a bang. We’ve done the usual things, like writing to all the old girls asking for contributions, but we know we’ll need a bit of extra push. After all, most of our old girls are the wives and mothers brigade who don’t exactly have wads of spare cash at their disposal. And we’ve got less than six months to raise the money.’

‘But surely you must have known the lease was coming up for renewal?’

‘Oh, we did, and we budgeted for it. But then James Cartwright, a local builder and developer, put in a bid for the lease that was £50,000 more than we were going to have to pay. He wants to build time-share holiday flats with a leisure complex. It’s an ideal site for him, right in the smartest part of Buxton. And one of the few decent sites where he’d still be able to get planning permission. The agents obviously had to look favourably on an offer as good as that. So our headmistress, Pamela Overton, got the governors mobilised and we came up with a deal. If we can raise the cash to match that £50,000 in six months, we get the lease, even if Cartwright ups his offer.’

Lindsay smiled wryly. ‘Amazing what influence can do.’

Although Paddy was watching the road, Lindsay’s tone of voice was not lost on her. ‘It’s been bloody hard to get this far,’ she complained mildly. ‘The situation’s complicated by the fact that Cartwright’s daughter is one of our sixth-formers. And in my house, too. Anyway, we’re all going flat out to get the money, and that’s what the weekend’s all about.’

‘Which is where I come in, yes?’

‘You’re our bid to get into the right section of the public consciousness. You’re going to tell them all about our wonderful enterprise, how we’re getting in gear, and some benevolent millionaire is going to come along and write us a cheque. Okay?’

Lindsay grinned broadly. ‘Okay, yah!’ she teased. ‘So what exactly is going to happen? So far you seem to have avoided supplying me with any actual information.’

‘Tomorrow morning we’re having a craft fair, which will carry over into the afternoon. All the girls have contributed their own work as well as begging and scrounging from friends and relations.

Then, in the afternoon, the sixth form are presenting a new one-act play written especially for them by Cordelia Brown. She’s an old girl of my vintage. Finally, there will be an auction of modern autographed first editions, which Cordelia and I and one or two other people have put together. We’ve got almost a hundred books.’

‘Cordelia Brown? The chat-show queen?’

‘Don’t be snide, Lindsay. You know damn well she’s a good writer. I’d have thought she’d have been right up your street.’

‘I like her novels. I don’t know why she does all that telly crap, though. You’d hardly believe the same person writes the books and the telly series. Still, it must keep the wolf from the door.’

‘You can discuss the matter with her yourself. She’s arriving later this evening. Try not to be too abrasive, darling.’

Lindsay laughed. ‘Whatever you say, Paddy. So the book auction rounds the day off, does it?’

‘Far from it. The high point is in the evening - a concert given by our most celebrated old girl, Lorna Smith-Couper.’

Lindsay nodded. ‘The cellist. I’ve never seen her perform, but I’ve got a couple of her recordings.’

‘More than I have. I’ve never come across her, as far as I know. She had left before I came to the school - I didn’t get here till the fifth form. And it’s not my music, after all. Give me Dizzy Gillespie any time.’

‘All that jazz still the only thing you’ll admit is music, then? You’ll not be able to help me, in that case. I’d love to get an interview with Lorna Smith-Couper. I’ve heard she’s one of the most awkward people to get anything out of, but maybe the good cause together with the old school ties will make her more approachable.’

Paddy turned the Land Rover into a sweeping drive. She stopped inside the heavy iron gates, leaned across Lindsay and pointed. ‘See that folly on the hill over there? It’s called Solomon’s Temple. If you look straight left of it you can just see a corner of the stupid green acres that all this fuss is about.’ There was an edge in her voice and they drove on in silence. Ahead of them stood Derbyshire House, an elegant mansion like a miniature Chatsworth. They swung round a corner of the house and dropped down into a thick coppice of birch, sycamore and rowan trees. After a hundred yards, they emerged in a large clearing where six modern stone blocks surrounded a well-tended lawn.

‘The houses,’ said Paddy. ‘About half of the girls sleep in the main building and the more senior ones sleep here,’ she pointed as she spoke, ‘in Axe, Goyt, Wildboarclough and my house, Longnor. The two smaller ones, Burbage and Grin Low, are for teachers and other staff.’

‘My God,’ said Lindsay, ‘the only thing this verdant near my school was the bloody garden of remembrance behind the local crematorium.’

‘Very funny. Come on, Lindsay, do stop waving your origins around like a red flag and have a drink. I can feel this is going to be a good weekend.’