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  Contents

  Josephine Bell

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Josephine Bell

  The House Above the River

  Josephine Bell

  Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and 1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College, Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she was granted M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1922, and a M.B.B. S. in 1924.

  Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.

  Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in 1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped found the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and served as chair during 1959–60.

  Foreword

  I was once locked into a prison cell with Josephine Bell. The incident took place in York Police Headquarters in 1979 and was not, I hasten to add, because we were both apprehended felons. We had been attending a Crime Writers’ Association conference in York and were kindly being shown around by the then Chief Constable of North Yorkshire, Mr Kenneth Henshaw.

  Whilst we languished companionably behind bars, Miss Bell revealed her feelings about British crime-writing, expressing the opinion that she did not want to see it slip into a pattern of mere violence and sex as American crime novels were tending to do. ‘In my early days,’ she told me, ‘there was no sex in crime novels. In sensitive places we put a series of dots—now we have to know how to spell the naughty words. As far as I am concerned a crime novel should pose the questions “who dunnit” and “why did they do it” not “who did they do it with”.’

  It was a rule of thumb from which, luckily for her readers, she never deviated.

  When The House Above the River was first published in 1959, Josephine Bell had been writing for 23 years. She was a Grande Dame of the genre, her name ranking alongside Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and other greats of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. A founder member of the Crime Writers’ Association, in 1959 she was the Association’s much respected chairman.

  The House Above the River is not of the Great Detective school of crime fiction. It is not dominated by a super-sleuth in the mould of Poirot or Maigret. It is crime fiction of the classic puzzle variety, heavily laced with romantic suspense and spiced with a chilling touch of the Gothic.

  In the late 1950s Romantic Suspense was riding high. Mary Stewart’s first novel Madam, Will You Talk had been published in 1955 and had struck a deep chord with a large readership. Josephine Bell possessed every trait that made the Stewart novels so popular. She evokes a sense of place, in this case the colourful fishing ports of Brittany, with consummate skill and, without detracting in the slightest from the main thrust of the storyline, she portrays the kind of hero we would all like to have on our side in a time of crisis, and she sustains the mystery until the last page.

  In The House Above the River, Josephine Bell indulges her love of all things nautical and puts her knowledge of all things medical (she was a doctor like many of her family), to good use. The hero is Giles Armitage. Holidaying with two friends, Tony and Phillipa Marshall, he is sailing his yacht, the Shuna, along the Brittany coastline. As heavy fog descends he navigates with difficulty into the mouth of the Tréguier river, anchoring below the house of the title, an unkempt and neglected, though inhabited, château.

  Unpleasant shocks are in store for Giles. He and his companions are invited to the château by Susan Brockley, a pretty young English girl. Susan is a cousin of the owner, Henry Davenport, and when she introduces Giles to the sickly Henry and to Henry’s dramatically beautiful wife Miriam, Giles is stunned to find himself confronting the woman to whom he was once engaged; the woman who nearly destroyed him when she walked out on him.

  His one desire is now to walk out on her, but Miriam Davenport is a woman obsessed by fear, a woman who sees him as her only Saviour. Slowly and inescapably Giles and his companions are sucked into a vortex of evil, enmeshed in a web of malice and greed and revenge and hatred. Murder is the inevitable conclusion. But murder of whom? By whom? And for why?

  Without depicting excessive violence or the distasteful and distracting sex scenes of which she was so disdainful, Josephine Bell keeps the reader hooked and teased until the last page. There can be no better recipe for a good book.

  MARGARET PEMBERTON

  Chapter One

  The fog rolled in from the sea behind them, blotting out the leading marks and blurring the rocks close at hand. The wind, that had lessened for the last three hours, died as the mist came, leaving the yacht’s sails limp, drooping in a clammy silence.

  Giles Armitage swore, Tony Marshall went below to start up the auxiliary engine. Phillipa, Tony’s wife, exclaimed in exasperation, “It would catch us up just here, of all places.”

  Giles only said, “What do we have next? You take over the book of words, Pip.”

  The Stuart Turner engine broke the silence with a satisfactorily steady mutter, and Tony clambered back into the cockpit.

  “Go up for ’ard and look out for snags,” Giles told him. “We have to turn off almost at right angles about here. Tell him the marks, Pip.”

  Busily reading from Hasler’s invaluable guide to the Brittany coast, Phillipa gave the names and positions of the various buoys and beacons that marked the complicated entrance through the rocks to the Tréguier river. Giles, who knew his compass course from the chart, tried desperately to remember how far the set of the tide would carry him off it, now that the sea fog had hidden the distant transit. Without visible leading marks it would be a tricky business groping their way round La Come lighthouse to the line of buoys that marked the entrance of the river itself. If only the wind had held an hour longer, or had died a couple of hours before they made the rocks and lighthouse of Les Heaux. They could have hung about then, safely out at sea, until the fog cleared. But it had been a wonderful passage in record time from the Needles which they had left at dawn the morning before, with a steady northerly wind behind them. The splendid lighthouses of the north Brittany coast had shone out of a clear night. Only when they began to close the coast with the newly-risen sun glittering across the water, the wind had begun to slacken. Perhaps he shou
ld have used the motor then to keep up his speed. But there seemed to be no point in it, with another lovely summer day before them, and the whole of a fortnight’s holiday ahead. No point at all, until that low soft yellow line wiped out the horizon, and caught them up at the landward end of the first part of the Grand Channel leading to Tréguier.

  The yacht Shuna crept forward. Tony, leaning out from the pulpit in the bows, saw a dim black shape ahead. He shouted his warning, but Giles had seen the buoy almost as soon as his crew, and had altered course to pass it.

  “Fine,” he shouted, cheerfully. He was pleased to pass the mark so close, even if the tide was pushing him on to it. This was where he had to alter course, and he could check his position quite accurately on the chart. Also he could see exactly how the set ran on the buoy and make a reasonable guess of how to correct for it in the next reach of the channel.

  “How often have you been in here?” asked Phillipa.

  Her voice had a sharp note of anxiety in it that Giles was quick to note.

  “Hundreds of times,” he said, heartily.

  This was not true. He had, in fact, used this channel only twice before. But he remembered it fairly well, and he saw that he must keep up the morale of his crew. The Marshalls had not done much cruising. They had been too excited all the long day before to take proper rests. Tony had stood up to his night watch without turning a hair, and had slept well when relieved. But Phillipa, though fortified with dramamine, had not slept at all when she went below, and had soon appeared again on deck, queasy, but uncomplaining, to sit up for the rest of the night. She was looking pinched and tired now, Giles thought, and must on no account be frightened into the bargain.

  “It’s lifting!” Tony shouted suddenly from the bows. “I can see a couple of socking great beacons. Look!”

  The fog swirled and broke and they shot out into a clear patch a few hundred yards long. They could not see the shore line to the left, but on the right a formidable pile of rocks, not far away, rose from the water. The beacons stood on the edge of this barrier.

  Giles altered course again. He had not allowed enough for the set, but he did so now, and was rewarded, twenty minutes later, by spotting his next mark where it ought to be. The fog was a little denser again here, but they still had a couple of hundred yards visibility. At any rate, Giles thought, we are not likely to run into any other shipping larger than ourselves. The little summer passenger steamer would not leave the river until the fog lifted. Once past La Corne …

  The in-shore lighthouse, on its spit of rock, came out of the mist, a pale tall ghost, dead ahead, and very uncomfortably close, since they knew they must give it a fairly wide berth, and the current was now setting them down on it very fast. Giles opened the throttle, and Shuna roared away to starboard, slipping past the rocky base of La Corne almost broadside on to the channel.

  “I can see two buoys ahead here,” called Tony.

  “Thank God for that!”

  Giles slowed down again, glancing at Phillipa as he did so. Her face was very white, and he cursed himself for the exaggerated note of relief he had not been able to keep-out of his voice.

  “You go up in the bows with Tony,” he said, quietly. “Help him count the buoys till we turn off to port. It’s only sand now, but I don’t want to stick on it. After this reach we turn off, and then the tide will take us straight into the river. Nearly there, now.”

  She gave him a wan smile and went forward to her husband’s side. Giles checked his new course, praying that the fog would not thicken until they were safely in the river. These coastal fog patches could do anything. They came suddenly and unexpectedly as this one had, and they lifted just as unpredictably. Perhaps it was a clear, sunny morning in Tréguier. Perhaps there was no visibility there at all. They would soon know.

  The fog might have been arranged to tantalise them. As they reached the river mouth it lifted almost completely, and they had a sudden lovely vision of Pen Paluch on their right, the houses climbing up the hill, the fishing boats lying at anchor, the green-gold fields beyond. On the other side, in the sun’s eye, was the woody slope of the hill above the river, and the smaller village of Penguerrec clustered about the mouth of a little creek, with more fishing boats riding the gentle swell. But as they drove forward into the narrowing waters, trees, hills, villages, boats, and even the river itself, were swallowed up in a mist far denser than anything they had so far met. It wrapped them up completely, cold and wet as rain. They could not even see the full length of the yacht.

  “Hell and damnation!” cried Giles, exasperated beyond measure.

  His crew scrambled aft into the cockpit. Giles grinned at them ruefully.

  “We’re here,” he said. “We’ve only got to drop the hook where we won’t dry out at low tide. Only!”

  Tony went back to the foredeck to prepare the anchor and anchor chain; Phillipa stood by with the lead line, ready to take the depth of the water when Giles gave the word. From the way he had spoken she felt sure he knew every inch of this river. And anyway they were in. The great ranged rocks had not seized them on their groping passage. She felt great relief, and she was so tired she could hardly move.

  “Something ahead,” called Tony, in an uncertain voice, breaking the silence.

  “What sort of something, you clot?”

  “Flat. I can’t see.… Yes, I can. A landing-stage.”

  “Landing-stage?” Giles put the engine into neutral, and while Shuna slid gently forward, searched the chart and Hasler’s book. “I don’t see any …”

  “Bear away!” called Tony, “unless you want to ram it.”

  The yacht swung away, and a minute later they slid past a neat well-kept little landing-stage of wooden planks, to which a smart, varnished dinghy and a small, white-painted motor launch were tied.

  “Good enough,” Giles said, cheerfully. “Do your stuff, Pip. I’ll go on a bit and turn and we’ll stop as near that thing as we can make. This fog can’t last for ever, and the day is still very young. We’ll go on up to the town when it’s cleared.”

  He found a position where they were in the deep channel of the river, clear of the mud, and dropped anchor. The two men fixed the anchor chain, Phillipa gathered up the charts, torches, navigation aids, empty mugs and other remains of their passage, and took them below. She could hardly keep her eyes open, but she knew her duty was urgent, and set to at once to make breakfast. Tension had been too high on their approach through the rocks for any of them to think of it until now. She cooked a generous meal of bacon and eggs, and insisted upon the men going below to eat it hot, though they protested they had not finished tidying up on deck.

  “It can wait,” she insisted, and for once Giles took this heresy meekly.

  After breakfast, still wrapped in the stillness of the fog, but secure in the knowledge that they lay off the course of anything larger than a small fishing boat, they all turned in, and slept the undreaming sleep of effort rewarded.

  Phillipa woke first. She and Tony shared the cabin, while Giles occupied a quarter-berth further aft, opposite the galley. Gathering her clothes together, she went forward into the fore-peak, moving noiselessly to avoid waking the two men. She dressed quickly, and climbed on deck through the fore-hatch, drawing in a quick breath of pleasure at what she saw.

  It was now four o’clock in the afternoon, her watch told her. The fog had gone, and a brilliant sun was turning the sandy mud of the river bank to gold. The leaves of the trees beyond glinted and sparkled as they moved in a light breeze blowing in from the sea. Further off, on the same side of the river as Shuna, were the moored fishing boats they had seen for that brief instant as they came in. She could see now that they lay off a sloping hard, where rowing boats were drawn up, and beyond which steps and a sea wall led to a winding road, bordered by stone cottages.

  It was the sort of scene she had looked forward to, never before having sailed on the Brittany coast. It was what Tony and Giles had raved about all the winter, plannin
g this cruise.

  Here it was, then, at last, reminding her of Cornwall or Devon, but with a character of its own, an exciting strangeness, that made her want to go ashore at once, to explore the village and meet the people, some of whom she could see, small in the distance, and slow moving, on the grey rock of the hard below the sea wall.

  She turned to look in the other direction, up the river, and there was the landing-stage, fifty yards away, with the varnished dinghy and the gleaming white launch, the trees dropping to the bend of the river. The whole thing might have been a stretch of the Thames near Goring, she thought.

  “Want to go ashore?”

  Phillipa turned quickly and laughed.

  “That stage looks terribly private,” she said. “I miss the ‘No landing’ notice.”

  Giles laughed.

  “I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it, as it doesn’t have a notice. It’s a hell of a way back to Penguerrec.”

  “Is that the village on this side?”

  “Yes. Pen Paluch further seaward on the other bank. You can’t really see it at the moment; it’s straight into the sun.”

  Phillipa screwed up her eyes and then looked away, dazzled.

  “If we go ashore we could get some milk and bread. I’ve no fresh milk left, and I’m down to rock bottom in bread.”

  “Right. You go and rouse out Tony. Tell him I want a hand getting the dinghy down into the water.”

  Presently Phillipa and her husband went off to the landing-stage, the former taking a milk can and a large haversack for provisions. Giles watched them tip up and disappear among the trees, waving goodbye to him as they took what he decided must be a definite path up the hill.

  When they had gone he turned to various small jobs on deck. These had been his excuse for staying on board, but they were not inventions. The sails, still wet from the fog, needed drying out. He spread the mainsail in the sun, and hoisted the jib to flap in the gentle breeze. He tidied up ends of rope, oiled the winches, tinkered for half an hour with the Stuart Turner, though it had given no trouble on this occasion, and finally, lighting a pipe, sat down in the cockpit to enjoy the sun and the scenery, and a sense of mild achievement.