Arrest the Bishop? Read online

  Winifred Peck

  Arrest the Bishop?

  He caught the back of a chair, staggered and groaned. There was a heavy crash and fall, and the parson lay motionless and livid, while lilies from a vase fell, like a wreath, across his chest.

  The Rev. Ulder, everyone agreed, was the parish priest from hell. In addition to tales of drunkenness and embezzlement, the repellent cleric had recently added blackmail to his list of depravities. There was scandal in the district, plenty of it, and Ulder had the facts. Until, that is, a liberal helping of morphia, served to him in the Bishop’s Palace, silenced the insufferable priest – for good.

  Was it the Bishop himself who delivered the fatal dose? Was it Soames, the less-than-model butler? Or one of a host of other inmates and guests in the house that night, with motives of their own to put Ulder out of the way? Young Dick Marlin, ex-military intelligence and now a Church deacon, finds himself assisting Chief Constable Mack investigate murder most irreverent.

  Arrest the Bishop? was first published in 1949. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes a new introduction by crime fiction historian Martin Edwards.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Martin Edwards

  Dedication

  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

  About the Author

  Titles by Winifred Peck

  The Warrielaw Jewel – Title Page

  The Warrielaw Jewel – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  WINIFRED PECK’S achievements have perhaps been overshadowed by those of other members of her astonishingly gifted family. Yet her career as an author lasted for almost half a century, and her work has enjoyed considerable popularity. Less than a decade ago, a reprint of her novel Housebound (1942) earned enthusiastic notices; Michael Morpurgo, for instance, described it as ‘beautifully written … supremely funny’. When Peck died in 1962, The Times said that “she showed a marked talent for sharp characterization, amusing dialogue and an ability to condense a life history into the minimum number of words.”

  Peck was a versatile writer. She published a life of Louis IX in 1909, when she was 27, and turned to writing novels in her late thirties. Most of her books can be described as mainstream fiction, often written with a light touch that has drawn comparisons with the work of E.M. Delafield and Angela Thirkell. During the 1950s, she also wrote a couple of books about her childhood, but before then she had explored detective fiction. Her work as a mystery novelist, however, has tended – despite its quality – to be overlooked.

  The Warrielaw Jewel and Arrest the Bishop? are detective novels that demonstrate the quiet accomplishment of her writing, but there are obvious reasons why she did not make a lasting impact as a crime writer. The books appeared more than a decade apart, and she made no attempt to write a series, or create a signature sleuth. The books had long been out of print and hard to find until Dean Street Press, which has unearthed a considerable number of long-lost gems, resolved to give them a fresh life. Their republication also gives a new generation of readers the chance to compare Peck’s fiction with the more high-profile detective stories written by her brother Ronald Knox, who was one of the leading lights of “the Golden Age of Murder” between the two world wars, and a founder member of the legendary Detection Club.

  The Warrielaw Jewel was first published in 1933, but the events of the story take place in the era ‘when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach’. Thus the novel represents an early example of the history-mystery, a fashionable sub-genre today but much less common at the time that Peck was writing. The setting is Edinburgh, which ‘was not in those days a city, but a fortuitous collection of clans. Beneath a society always charming and interesting on the surface, and delightful to strangers, lurked a history of old hatreds, family quarrels, feuds as old as the Black Douglas. Nor were the clans united internally, except indeed at attack from without. Often already my mother-in-law had placidly dissuaded me from asking relations to meet, on the ground that they did not recognise each other.’

  The story, narrated by the wife of the legal adviser to the Warrielaw family, encompasses such classic Golden Age elements as murder, a trial, a valuable heirloom, and a mysterious curse. The quality of Peck’s prose lifts the book out of the ordinary, and in a review on the Mystery*file blog in 2010, Curtis Evans argued that it is ‘an early example of a Golden Age mystery that, in its shifting of emphasis from pure puzzle to the study of character and setting, helped mark the gradual shift from detective story to crime novel.’

  Pleasingly, Peck makes use of one of the game-playing devices popular with Golden Age novelists, a formal ‘challenge to the reader’, at the end of the twelfth chapter:

  ‘STOP. THIS IS A CHALLENGE TO YOU. At this point all the characters and clues have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery. CAN YOU DO IT? Here’s your chance to do a little detective work on your own – a chance to test your powers of deduction. Review the mystery and see if you can solve it at this point. Remember! THIS IS A SPORTING PROPOSITION, made in an effort to make the reading of mystery stories more interesting to you. So – don’t read any further. Reach your solution now. Then proceed.’

  The mystery writer most closely associated with explicit challenges of this kind was the American Ellery Queen, but the device was also employed by a range of British detective novelists, including Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, and Rupert Penny. It was a way of making explicit the fact that the whodunit essentially involved a battle of wits, dependent on the author playing fair by supplying (although often disguising) the clues to unravel the puzzle.

  Having entered so wholeheartedly into the spirit of Golden Age detective fiction, Peck promptly moved away from the genre, and did not return to it until after the Second World War, by which time tastes in crime writing, as well as much else, were changing fast. Arrest the Bishop? appeared in 1949; set in a Bishop’s Palace, the story made excellent use of her first-hand knowledge of ecclesiastical life. This is another history-mystery, written in the aftermath of one world war, but relating events set in 1920, not long after the end of another.

  As a bonus, the book is also an example of that popular sub-genre, the Christmas crime story. The murder victim is, as so often in traditional whodunits, an unscrupulous blackmailer, and again Peck makes use of tropes of Golden Age fiction such as a timetable of key events, and a list of prime suspects itemising their respective motives, opportunities for committing the crime, and instances of their seemingly suspicious behaviour. The result is a good old-fashioned mystery: Peck’s gentle humour ensures readability, and in the twenty-first century the book has added appeal as a portrait of a vanished age.

  Winifred Frances Knox, born in 1882, was the third of the six children of the fourth Bishop of Manchester. She had an older sister, Ethel, as well as four brothers. The eldest son, E.V. Knox, became well-known as editor of Punch; he was also responsible for a splendid parody of the Golden Age detective story, ‘The Murder at the Towers’. Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox became a legendary code-breaker who worked for British Intelligence during both world wars, while Wilfred Knox earned distinction as an Anglican clergyman and theologian. T
he best-known of the four brothers was Ronald, a man of extraordinary talents, who was also ordained an Anglican clergyman before converting to Catholicism; he proceeded to carve a considerable reputation as ‘Monsignor Knox’. Amongst many other activities, he was a popular broadcaster in the early days of the BBC, one of the first Sherlockian scholars, an expert on word games such as acrostics, and creator of the Detective’s Decalogue – ten jokey commandments for crime writers that were adapted into the initiation ritual for new members of the Detection Club. Suffice to say that these supposed rules of the game were honoured, by Knox as well as by his crime writing colleagues, more in the breach than in the observance.

  Winifred shared, The Times said, ‘her brothers’ lively wit and sharp minds, and was well able to hold her own in the complicated verse games they played among themselves. It was the family custom to spend the summer holiday in a furnished house, generally a rectory, where they amused themselves tracing the life of the absent incumbent as revealed in the photographs that were hung about his walls. In such stimulating and imaginative company she had every inducement to become a writer, where much of the material the novelist needs lay to her hand.’ In almost any other family, Winifred’s record as a high achiever could not possibly be eclipsed, but such was the brilliance of her quartet of brothers that even her niece, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (whose father was E.V. Knox), made only fleeting mention of Winifred in her book The Knox Brothers.

  Winifred was among the first forty pupils to study at Wycombe Abbey School, and proceeded to read History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1911, she married James Peck in Manchester Cathedral. James, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as “a small, quiet, reliable, clever and honourable Scotsman”, was at the time Clerk to the School Board in Edinburgh. The couple had three children, and James became an increasingly influential figure in both local and central government; when he was knighted in 1938, Winifred became Lady Peck.

  By the time Winifred Peck died, her detective fiction had become a footnote to her literary career. It was not even mentioned in her obituary in The Times. Present day readers of the books will, I think, agree that this is a pity. Her contribution to the golden age of crime fiction, although modest in scale, is well worth remembering.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  TO AND FOR MY HUSBAND

  —Or more properly the Ablative—

  BY, WITH AND FROM MY HUSBAND

  because

  We planned to write this together: we discussed it together: you made any original suggestions it may contain: you only refuse to appear as collaborator because I did what you may justly call the donkey-work of writing it. But you cannot deny that it is partly your work and that it was you who horrified a guest at J— by announcing at breakfast: “Yes, we’ll make it a fatal dose of morphia”, that it was you who sent my terrified housekeeper a message: “Tell Lady Peck we must have an inquest”. You read, criticized and corrected the MS: you must, in short, admit a certain responsibility for this belated offspring as far as to accept this dedication from

  YOUR WIFE

  I

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  “How on earth can any one afford to keep all this up nowadays?”

  This was the invariable question of every tourist who, for the sum of half a crown, was privileged once a week to view the grounds of the Bishop of Evelake’s Palace. It was not so much the Palace itself, that long low patchwork of Elizabethan brick and Georgian stone, that plum-and orange-coloured centre in the pattern of brilliant flower-beds, shimmering glass-houses and starry shrubs, which inspired the question. Ringed by shaven lawns, the patchwork quilt was set in a frame of grey fragile arches, haggard pillars, broken lichened steps and tombs, bounded by the crumbling yet inviolate walls of the old Abbey of Evelake. To preserve this grey-gold outer fortification was the responsibility of the Bishop of the See, and a heavy one financially.

  “Well, we married Pound’s Paste!” was the answer of the butler-guide in 1920, a cigarette poised behind his ear. In that time of domestic upheaval any butler was better than none, and the ex-Miss Pound, as Mrs. Broome, the Bishop’s wife, made light of the impertinence when the rumour reached her. “I’ll tell Soames he must really keep to his Book of Words,” she said pacifically to her horrified informant. “He’ll probably understand what I mean and of course it was perfectly true!”

  The See of Evelake was indeed one of those which caused perennial difficulty to the Crown early in this century. Twenty-five years before the diocese had been divided and the episcopal income with it. Twenty-five years later the Palace would be handed over to the National Trust.

  “We must look first for a man of means rather than a man of God,” said the Dean sardonically when the ex-head master of St. Blaze College, Dr. Broome, was appointed. “I am glad to think we shall have a little of both. Ours is the Church of a Compromise!”

  “You’ve got a man of peace anyhow,” suggested his interlocutor. “That is more than you can say of most school masters. Too much peace and too little discipline at St. Blaze in his time, they say.”

  But the Dean was not to be drawn on the possible failings of Dr. Broome in his former career. “The less discipline anyone tries to enforce in the Anglican Church the better!” was his only reply.

  If our Church is one of a compromise so also was the Palace. To the Bishop as he made his way from his low, panelled room to tea in his wife’s drawing-room, on a grey stormy December twilight in the year 1920, it seemed a symbol of his life. The original building, long and low, its mullioned windows gazing from its mellow, red-brick walls with the serenity of three hundred years, recalled to him his early life, his brilliant youth, his Oxford successes, his idyllic marriage and rapid rise in the Church. And then—the low graceful passage opened into an amorphous wing, known as the Bridge. “Thrown out by Bishop Main in 1850, with no architectural pretensions, to house his family of twenty children,” said the Book of Words. (“And no such goings-on nowadays,” Soames usually added with a chuckle.) Now, to this Bishop, that huddle of pantry and offices and rather mean bedrooms above seemed a parable indeed of his years at Blaze, his heart broken by the loss of his young wife, his spirit broken by the covert resistance of the masters, and open rebellion of the boys, against a young and nervous newcomer.

  The Bridge passage terminated in a new wide archway opening upon a magnificent white-panelled hall, and it was thus, it seemed to the Bishop to-day, that his new life with his second wife had begun.

  “My dear, you must just have that Bridge business pulled down,” said Mrs. Broome’s Pound relations, who were all by this time established in vast Palladian country houses. But the ecclesiastical commissioners were difficult, the architect half-hearted, and, after all, St. Paul had indicated, said Mrs. Broome, that a Bishop should have plenty of spare bedrooms, especially at Ordination times. So between them the architect and Mrs. Broome tacked on the excrescence of a more or less Georgian new wing, with a suite of drawing-rooms which Mrs. Proudie might have envied, and luxurious accommodation for guests and servants above. It was a pity, she told her relatives laughingly, that by the time it was finished the Bishop had dug himself into the old wing, and refused to change his own study, or the old bed room suite of long-dead bishops; it was not even possible, in view of the coal shortage, to use the new drawing-rooms habitually. But to-day everything was prepared for a large house-party for the Ordination. (“And that means, dear,” wrote Mrs. Broome to a Nonconformist aunt, “two young men to be priested, six to be ordained deacons, the Chancellor to license them and Canon Wye to address them. As dear little Sue and myself will be the only womenfolk it wouldn’t be your idea of a successful house party!”)

  “Well, did you enjoy your long walk to-day?” Mrs. Broome rose, as she spoke, from a desk covered with Christmas correspondence, as big, welcoming and genial as one of her large gay arm-chairs. This comment on the distances to be covered in the Palace was a well
-worn family joke, but perhaps it was not, she considered, very tactful this afternoon, in view of the Bishop’s weary countenance.

  “It has been a worrying day, a very worrying day,” said her husband, moving gratefully to his luxurious chair by the blazing fire and the shining hearth.

  “Dear me, I am sorry,” said Mrs. Broome, in the voice that somehow always sounded jovial. “Never mind, the Ordination will soon be over, and no one is arriving till about six. Everything is arranged, and I made sure that that stupid Soames had got the name-cards in the bedrooms right—the Chancellor in St. Francis, Canon Wye in St. Dominic, as usual”—(it should be admitted that nothing in Mrs. Broome’s scheme of comfort suggested the austerities of the patron saints)—“And all the candidates will be in the top story of this wing. Except Dick Marlin, for he’s almost one of the family so I’ve put him in St. Bede. These three all like the old panelled rooms like you, I gather, though I can’t understand why! I’m so glad we needn’t use the Bridge bedrooms, as I’ve got poor old Moira in the one over the pantry to save trouble in carrying trays. I do hope the Hospital will send for her soon, for she’s often in such pain!”

  “Dear, dear!” murmured the Bishop courteously. Ordinary people had not at that date begun to see themselves as in a State of Conflict. The Bishop would have diagnosed his state of mind as a want of consistent grace rather than dignifying himself as a split personality, but there was indeed a hidden conflict between the stately ascetic divine revered by his diocese and wife, and the terrified heart, haunted by memories, beset by future fears, which beat beneath his episcopal garb. Let it be said at once that few guilty secrets lurked there, as the world would count guilty. The evil genius of the Bishop’s life, as a scholar, don, cleric and schoolmaster, had been no thrilling vice, but the possession of one of those morbid consciences which cannot put the past behind them, combined with an imagination which hag-rides the mind all the more mercilessly because it has always been so sternly concealed. “The dear Bishop is so sensitive and far-sighted,” was Mrs. Broome’s version of her husband’s character. “The man’s a coward and afraid to say so,” declared one of the Council of St. Blaze College, after a peculiar exposure of indecision in the Headmaster’s attitude. “You’ve only to say that you tremble for the future if he won’t adopt your view, and he’ll give way,” the Dean would advise his clergy confidentially. From the Bishop’s Guardian Angel, who understood the tragedies in his past life, the depth of his devotion for his loved ones and his God, the struggles for trust and for hope, that most elusive of the Christian virtues, we may imagine a far more tolerant and pitying verdict. Few but the angels presumably, and a skilled psychiatrist possibly, could understand the discrepancy between the clean-shaven, finely moulded and lined face, and the cautious self-composed manner, with the heavily lidded eyes of a frightened and hunted child which peered out in side glances. His chaplain, who entered now, held that with his beard the Bishop would represent exactly the drawing of St. Joseph by Leonardo, and some such parallel might be discerned in the Bishop’s nature with the thwarted yet exalted saint who bore in his bosom the torment of doubt and dread, of self-suppression, as the world gazed at his so-called wife and that miraculous Birth whose ultimate promise to the world must have seemed very far away in Nazareth.