Introducing a new but not-so-amateur sleuth from another peaceful English village with an alarmingly high death rate! Meet Major Bricket, an infrequent resident of Highfield House in Stunston Peveril, Suffolk. In the past the Major's work assignments, frequently in foreign countries, have prevented him from spending much time there and a result, there is an air of mystery around him while everyone in the village speculates on the nature of his occupation. But now the Major has retired and has come home for good in his open-topped little red sports car... and what a homecoming it is, for lying spreadeagled on his lawn in the summer sunshine is the corpse of a clown.
Coincidence that the circus has come to Stunston Peveril for the annual four-day village fair? Yet none of their quota of clowns is missing - or at least, nobody is saying. Or is the body that of an unfortunate early guest at the village's highlight of the social calendar, the Fincham Abbey Costume Ball?
Fortunately Major Bricket's past clandestine career means that he is now very well placed to solve the mystery of the dead clown on his camomile lawn...
Release date:
April 24, 2025
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages:
70000
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‘Good. The instructions will be sent as a voice message to your mobile phone.’
‘Are there any unusual demands as to how the murder is done?’
‘You will see that when you receive the voice message.’
‘Very well,’ said the Employee. ‘And when do you want it done?’
‘That too will be in the voice message,’ said the Employer. ‘As soon as you receive it, I want you to memorise the contents and then delete the message.’
‘Very well. So, it’s just your standard village murder, is it?’ asked the Employee.
‘Oh, it’s rather different from that,’ said the Employer.
‘Major Bricket’s going to be living in Stunston Peveril all the time,’ Venetia Clothbury announced definitively.
‘Oh, where did you hear that?’ asked her friend Mollie Greenford.
‘I have my sources,’ came the mysterious reply.
Mollie nodded sagely. She had long since learnt that, if you wanted to stay a friend of Venetia Clothbury, it was unwise to disagree with her. And, even though she wouldn’t exactly have said that she liked Venetia, she did want to stay her friend. There wasn’t a huge choice of friends in a Suffolk village like Stunston Peveril. And the older ones did have an inconvenient habit of dying off. Most, though not all, from natural causes.
The two octogenarians were having their regular Mon-day morning coffee at the Gingham Tea Shop. Stunston Peveril was too small to have been colonised by one of the global coffee chains like Starbucks, and for over twenty years the Gingham Tea Shop had supplied its needs in hot beverages, fancy cakes and fanciful gossip. It was run with beady efficiency by Elvira Finchcombe, who was always hinting she came from a titled family and who discouraged the invasion of her premises by tourists with sleeveless Union Jack T-shirts and tattoos.
‘It’s interesting that Major Bricket is coming back. It must mean that he’s retired.’ Venetia Clothbury always spoke at full volume. This was not because she was deaf – nor indeed because Mollie Greenford was deaf. It was simply that it never occurred to Venetia that other people might not be interested in what she had to say.
This had certainly been the case with her deceased husband, Sydney, an Old Etonian whose pinched face had always exhibited the discomfort of a man whose entire married life had been spent trying – unsuccessfully – to get a word in edgeways.
‘Retired from what, though?’ asked Mollie. ‘Nobody in the village seems to know what he actually did.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Venetia Clothbury asserted.
‘How clever of you to find out,’ said Mollie.
‘Yes, it was,’ her friend agreed.
‘I’ve heard a lot of theories from people in the village,’ said Mollie. ‘Some say he’s involved in import/export.’
‘“Import/export” of what?’
‘Oh, they didn’t say that. Other people say he works for Interpol.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Oh, they didn’t say that. And then Rhona in Cosy Collectibles says Major Bricket arranges the touring schedules for an international orchestra. That’s why he’s away so much.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘And Lena who cleans at the vicarage says the Major’s a television producer. He does those programmes where celebrities are shut away in the jungle and made to eat insects.’
‘I agree,’ said Mollie. ‘Programmes like that are an insult to my intelligence.’
‘Imagine what they do to mine,’ said her friend loftily.
‘And then Dierdre in the Post Office says the Major writes romance novels under a female pen name and he travels to research them.’
‘Well, as it happens, Mollie, they’re all wrong,’ Venetia Clothbury pronounced with her customary unassailable self-belief. ‘Major Bricket is in fact in the direct employ of Buckingham Palace. His travels are all to check on the security before Royal visits.’
‘Oh,’ said Mollie Greenford admiringly. ‘You know everything.’
Venetia Clothbury smiled smugly. She had never been a woman to let ignorance of the subject matter get in the way of her pronouncements.
‘No trouble down at Ratchetts Common yet?’ asked Gregory, Viscount Wintle, gloomily.
He was sitting in the Yellow Morning Room of Fincham Abbey, a space whose patina of dust and draping of cobwebs bore witness to the fact that the Wintles had insufficient staff. The Viscount was looking out of the windows over his estate, now considerably reduced from the hundreds of acres owned by earlier generations of the family. Many parcels of land had been sold off to pay death duties, particularly in the years after the Second World War. Though the view from the Yellow Morning Room was unspoilt, the Viscount was never unaware of the housing estates encroaching on either side of the diminished gardens he had left. Those housing estates, it should be said, made a great deal more profit for their developers than the sale of the land ever had for the Wintle family.
‘There won’t be any trouble,’ said his wife, Perpetua. Her voice was soothing, a tone she adopted for most conversations with her husband. The Viscount lived in constant anticipation of new disasters. His view was that, during the seventy-odd years of his lifetime, Great Britain had ‘gone to hell in a handcart’. He’d had no respect for any politician since Margaret Thatcher and regarded all governments since then as conspiracies against the upper classes. He entertained a sneaking nostalgia for the feudal system, when at least everyone knew their place.
He was dressed that morning in his uniform of a tweed suit, which had been distressed even back when his father wore it. The collar of his Tattersall shirt was frayed, and the white lining showed through the silk at the edges of his regimental tie. The leather of his brogues was cracked but still highly polished.
The state of Gregory’s attire had nothing to do with poverty. Though he was constantly complaining about not having enough money, he was of the class that made a fetish of dressing scruffily. Clothes, like furniture, should, in his view, be inherited.
Perpetua, by way of contrast, had on a summer dress, whose white background was decorated with a design of forget-me-nots. She wore thick stockings and shoes suitable for dog-walking. Grey hair was swept back in what used to be called an Alice band. Her face was innocent of make-up but its leathery surface bore witness to a life spent mostly outdoors. The couple’s two children had long since left home. Son Henry made money in the City, and daughter Serena was currently occupied with her small children and would be until they were old enough to join the Pony Club.
The Viscount and Viscountess had got beyond the point in their marriage when they might notice each other’s appearance. And both were so short-sighted that to each of them the other was only a blurred outline, anyway. Both still drove battered Land Rovers along the lanes of Suffolk, ever-present hazards to all other road-users.
If either Wintle had been asked the rather impertinent question, both the Viscount and Viscountess would have asserted that they had a very happy marriage. But this did not prevent Gregory constantly moaning at Perpetua. After more than forty years, she had heard all his moans many times before.
There were the continuing ones. Any time of year he could be heard moaning that they couldn’t afford the proper number of staff for a place like Fincham Abbey. They hadn’t even got a butler, for God’s sake.
And then there were the moans that came round on an annual cycle. Perpetua could predict, almost to the hour, that, come July, their subject would be Ratchetts Common.
Despite the implication of its name, Ratchetts Common was not in public ownership, but part of the Fincham Abbey estate. An open area abutting the village of Stunston Peveril, it had never been cultivated, though in more leisured times it had given space to tennis courts and croquet lawns. And every July, it played host to the Stunston Peveril Summer Fair. Which, every July, Gregory complained about.
The summer fair was a surprisingly lavish event for such a diminutive village. As well as a few stalls manned by locals, it featured a small travelling circus, with a ring master and such old-fashioned acts as clowns, trapeze artistes, a strongman and a knife-thrower. The ownership of Lavoisier’s Circus had gone through many generations of the family, until it came to the current incumbent, Bernard Lavoisier. Rumour had it that he was more interested in the booze than the family business. Certainly, while he was in the village, he spent a lot of time at its only pub. Each morning, he left his caravan on Ratchetts Common and was inside the Goat & Compasses the minute it opened.
Along with the circus, there was also a funfair, featuring a range of old-fashioned stalls: coconut shies, whack-a-moles – even a mini-helter-skelter and dodgems. The summer fair was a fixture in the calendar, attracting visitors from many of the nearby towns in that part of Suffolk. The seven days it was encamped in Stunston Peveril contributed healthily to the local economy.
And its popularity seemed to grow rather than diminish. Wealthy people with second homes in East Anglia were attracted to such old-fashioned entertainments as a kind of retro chic. It exerted a similar pull to Cromer’s End-of-the-Pier Variety Show.
On Perpetua’s initiative, soon after she married Gregory, the summer fair had been invited to use Ratchetts Common. Their previous site, an empty area behind the church, had been bought for development. So, without Perpetua’s intervention, Stunston Peveril would have lost its summer fair. And, though its presence did not affect the even tenor of his life one iota, Gregory felt it a point of honour to complain every year about ‘having all that riffraff on Ratchetts Common’.
Every year, his wife listened to the moans with her customary apparent interest, tact and steely determination to get her own way. She had no worries that, with regard to the summer fair, she might have to make any changes to the status quo. Perpetua Wintle had decided, even before their marriage, that, at Fincham Abbey, she would be the one who wore the threadbare corduroy trousers.
The summer fair coincided with a social event about which Gregory felt a lot happier. Indeed, he welcomed it. The Fincham Abbey Costume Ball was a tradition in the Wintle family, dating back to the Roaring Twenties. Except for an unavoidable break during the Second World War, the event had taken place every year since. For historical reasons, which no one could now remember, it had always taken place on a Monday. Gregory had made his first appearance, dressed as a page boy, at the age of four. And, though he felt a duty to complain every year about the disruption caused by the costume ball, it was actually one of the highlights of his social calendar. He derived childlike glee from coming up with ever more bizarre costumes for himself.
The other attraction of the event for him was that the guest list only included ‘his kind of people’. Though Viscount Wintle would hotly deny the accusation, had it ever been raised, he was in fact a terrible snob. His wife was constantly building bridges with the people of Stunston Peveril, but her husband’s unspoken desire was to blow all of those bridges up. He could be polite to the locals at events like the opening of the summer fair, but he never felt that they were members of his tribe. He was always more at ease with the Etonians and Harrovians he had grown up with.
And so, it was their names that filled the costume ball’s guest list. Of the Stunston Peveril locals, only a tiny handful were thought worthy of receiving a stiff invitation card through their letterboxes. And they were instantly dropped off the list if they were ever heard to refer to the event as ‘fancy dress’. Viscount Wintle had his standards.
For him, another great attraction of the Fincham Abbey Costume Ball was that his only input to the preparations was deciding what to wear. Not that this was a minor task for the Viscount. It was something he puzzled over for much of the year between balls. Normally, he homed in quite early in the process on the character he would represent. But finding the perfect costume for that character could be a long undertaking. He had been known to order up to a dozen variations from different theatrical costumiers, and only decide which one to wear on the evening of the ball.
He still hadn’t made the vital decision for the current one. But that was all he had to worry about. As in so many areas of their lives, Perpetua had made all the other arrangements for this massive annual jamboree.
Gregory Wintle was entirely happy about his wife organising everything, with a few significant exceptions. He had always drawn a strict line between what he regarded as ‘men’s work’ and what he regarded as ‘women’s work’. And he was untroubled by the way, gradually during the years of their marriage, an increasing number of responsibilities had been shifted from the first category to the second.
Some duties he still guarded as his own, though. The sporting facilities for weekend guests, of whom there were fewer and fewer over time, the Viscount regarded as exclusively his province. If setting up a shooting party or fishing expedition, he knew the right people, gamekeepers and such, to whom to delegate the actual arrangements.
Gregory Wintle also claimed he was responsible for anything to do with the fabric of the building. Fincham Abbey had been in his family for so long that he felt it to be almost a part of his body, so when structural work was required, he it was who would consult builders and get estimates, generally far in excess of anything the family could afford. Letting the great building quietly collapse into disrepair was, undoubtedly in the Viscount’s estimation, ‘men’s work’. As was paying the regular bills that were inescapable with a property of that size and age. Necessary minor repairs, windows being cleaned less often than they should be, insurance, burglar alarms being checked … all such expenses were paid by Gregory. And, long after most of the world had moved on to online banking, Viscount Wintle made a point of paying by cheque. His cheques were written in fountain pen and posted to their destinations in envelopes. With stamps on them.
Perpetua did, on occasion, question her husband about whether he was keeping up to date with all the bills. Though she would never put the criticism into words, she didn’t have complete confidence in Gregory’s reliability in matters of detail.
Such enquiries, however, only served to engender considerable anger in her husband, so, in the cause of domestic harmony, she stopped making them. And crossed her fingers, in the hope that all the regular demands were being met.
She also very soon backed off making suggestions that their financial situation might be eased by selling off some of Fincham Abbey’s works of art. The walls were decked with dusty, ill-lit family portraits and other paintings, some of which knowledgeable weekend guests had identified as treasures. They had not been catalogued or valued for many decades, but the Viscount would not tolerate any talk of selling even the smallest of them. Like the building itself, they were an essential component of his identity. So, as she had many times in their marriage, the Viscountess once again bit her tongue.
Perpetua’s expertise in the running of Fincham Abbey was part of the way she had been bred. She’d inherited that upper-class skill of making very complex tasks look effortless. Which meant that, on the morning of the ball, while staff shifted furniture in the abbey’s Great Hall, brought up bottles of vintage champagne from the abbey’s wine cellars and prepared delicious food in the abbey’s kitchens, she could take time to sit in the Yellow Morning Room listening to her husband moan about the summer fair.
Gregory was never one to give up after a single moan. He picked further at the old scab by saying, ‘Well, one day there will be trouble down at Ratchetts Common, you mark my word. You can’t invite a criminal element onto your proper. . .
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