BARBARA CLEVERLY lives in the middle of Cambridge, surrounded by ancient buildings and bookshops. She was born and educated in the north of England at a Yorkshire grammar school and then at Durham University.
Barbara was inspired to write her first book, The Last Kashmiri Rose, following a successful outline sent to the Crime Writers’ Association/Sunday Times Debut Dagger Competition. A shortlisting and warm reception by the judging panel led to its writing in full. It was a New York Times ‘Notable Book of 2002’, and Barbara has gone on to write a further six Joe Sandilands novels.
Praise for Barbara Cleverly
‘The historical background of Barbara Cleverly’s novel is as fascinating as the murder. Stiff upper lip soldiers, American heiresses, handsome Afghan tribesmen – they are all here in spades. A great blood and guts blockbuster.’
Guardian
‘A well-plotted novel . . . The atmosphere of the dying days of the Raj is colourfully captured.’
Suasanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph
‘Spectacular and dashing. Spellbinding.’
New York Times book review
‘Smashing . . . marvelously evoked.’
Chicago Tribune
‘An historical mystery that has just about everything.’
Denver Post
‘Maintains the high standards set by earlier Sandilands tales, blending a sophisticated whodunit with full-blooded characters and a revealing look at her chosen time and place.’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Titles in this series
(listed in order)
The Last Kashmiri Rose
Ragtime in Simla
The Damascened Blade
The Palace Tiger
The Bee’s Kiss
Tug of War
Folly du Jour
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006
First paperback edition published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008
Copyright © Barbara Cleverly 2008
The right of Barbara Cleverly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84529-431-1
eISBN 978-1-78033-406-6
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
I have on my desk a tiny and very battered memento of the Great War – a soldier’s ‘Active Service Testament’. It is much thumbed and clumsily repaired with pink sewing thread. There is a bloodstain which I have followed through to its source on a loose page of Acts 14, and I wonder if this was the passage the unknown soldier who owned the book was reading when he was hit.
And saying, ‘Sirs, why do ye these things?
We are also men of like passions with you and
preach unto you that ye should turn from these
Vanities unto the living God . . .
Who, in times past, suffered all nations
to walk in their own ways.’
This story is dedicated to the memory of all those who fell in the struggle to ensure their nations could continue to walk in their own ways.
Barbara Cleverly, January 2006
CONTENTS
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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter One
Champagne, northern France, September 1915
Aline Houdart got off her bicycle and stood still, holding tightly to the handlebars. At this moment she needed to have her feet firmly on the ground and she fought down a ridiculous urge to take off her shoes, the better to connect herself to the earth. Surely she was mistaken? The sound she’d heard was a tree crashing to the ground in the forest around her. Or thunder. A snap of her starched headdress in the breeze as she rounded the bend perhaps. The explanations she snatched at were elbowed away by a single word: cannon. But at such close quarters?
Aline thought at once of her parents. They would have been able to identify the make, calibre and direction of fire. Her parents knew all about cannon. In their distant youth they’d been trapped in Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870 and, round a good fire in the wintertime, they still vied with each other to convey the horrors of bombardment by von Moltke’s fifty-ton siege gun. Aline tried to recall their lurid accounts of the hellish din with its earth-trembling accompaniment.
The sound came again. She got her bearings and, as she stood with her face to the north, the late afternoon sun over her left shoulder threw a shadow to the east and north in the direction of the blast. She stretched out an arm, extending the line, trying to remember what lay over there. The plain of Champagne, stretching for wide miles around Suippes and over to the bristling fortifications clustering around Verdun. She could deceive herself no longer. This was heavy artillery but were the guns French or German? Perhaps General Joffre had begun the longed-for offensive to clear von Bülow out of Champagne, but at all events the war was coming closer. No longer static, bogged down in trenches, not even creeping up quietly but advancing openly, snarling, in leaps and bounds. Soon they’d hear its roar in the mountains to the south, one day perhaps in the hills of Provence. And by then her world would have been consumed, this perfect place reduced to rubble.