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Synopsis
THE MANOR HOUSE MURDER MYSTERY AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT . . . DETECTIVE ROGER LECARRE IS BACK!!!
'What's better than a good crime novel? I'll tell you - a spoof crime novel, by the absurdly funny and clever Fergus Craig'
MIRANDA HART
'We all need more laughs like this'
AISLING BEA
Detective Roger LeCarre. Scourge of crime. Guardian of Exeter. Amateur squash player. And now, party guest at Powderham, the manor house owned by mysterious billionaire tech genius Eli Quartz.
It is a small and unconventional gathering: the Bishop, a fading radio star, a desperate aristocrat, the aging butler and his absurdly beautiful daughter - and Detective Roger LeCarre. Then a snowstorm blows in and the group realise they are trapped.
And when, completely against expectations for this kind of situation, someone winds up dead, it's obvious who must solve the crime. Obvious, but for the fact the murder weapon was in Detective Roger LeCarre's hand, and the body was at his feet...
From the creator of BBC2's Martin Fishback comes the second Detective Roger LeCarre crime fiction parody, daring to go where so many other crime novels have gone before.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 50000
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Murder at Crime Manor
Fergus Craig
Should LeCarre have stopped and offered the two fresh-faced constables assistance? A nasty crash like that could do with a senior officer on the scene. No. They’d have to learn someday. Much as he’d like to, Detective Roger LeCarre couldn’t police Devon and Cornwall all by himself. Besides, he was supposed to be off duty.
Off duty.
LeCarre let out a large manly chuckle at the thought. There was no such thing. Not for him. Ever since the day he’d first put on the uniform, he’d been on duty. Crime didn’t sleep, so neither did he. Obviously, technically, he did sleep, science dictated that he had to, but his duty didn’t sleep. If he saw crime, he dealt with it. Whether he was on Devon and Cornwall police time or not.
LeCarre often made arrests in his dreams. Last night he’d arrested a horse for robbing a Budgens. Clearly, the whole incident was a slumbering figment but in LeCarre’s book, it still counted as an arrest and when he’d awoken, he’d added it to his tally.
The snow fell down like white droplets of cold, fluffy rain. Like snow. Devon hadn’t seen snow like this for a long time, not since the year LeCarre joined the force. A very long time indeed. He still remembered his first arrest. Heck, the whole force did. It was snowing that day. Most officers make their first arrest with a traffic offence, or a burglary. A ‘petty crime’. LeCarre hated the term. An oxymoron. How could crime be petty? It was crime!
His first arrest? An obscure and ancient bylaw said that it was illegal to eat duck inside Exeter’s city walls on a Monday. Four hundred years the law had been there, never used. There was no record of anyone being arrested for such a crime. It was just one of those old laws, an oddity to be read out as entertaining trivia on breakfast radio.
That was, until PC Roger LeCarre came along. His fellow officers couldn’t believe it when he leaped across the table in a Harvester restaurant, pinning an unsuspecting diner against the wall.
‘You’re under arrest under the Poultry Act of 1674.’
The law was the law. LeCarre had read it and now he was here to uphold it.
That was his first arrest. His last arrest was this morning. How many had there been in between? Thousands. Tens of thousands? Probably. Thieves, fraudsters, fighters, beaters, speeders, drinkers, druggers … murderers. They’d all made their way to LeCarre’s door at one time or another and they’d all had to pay the toll. What was the toll?
Time.
That morning, LeCarre had been strolling through an M&S Food feeling a deep sense of national pride as he admired its classy yet affordable selection of cold meats. Suddenly, sensing something, he’d tilted his nose to the air and inhaled – crime. Quickly, he’d turned to see a schoolgirl illegally placing a 170 gram packet of Percy Pigs in her coat pocket.
‘Put down the pigs or I shoot!’ LeCarre’s hand had hovered over his taser.
The girl had frozen, neatly syncing with the cabinet of party food behind her.
‘The only pig in this place is you, copper.’
LeCarre had thrown her into a stack of Colin the Caterpillar birthday cakes. The Colins’ chocolate eyes seemed to express somehow the dark mood that had descended upon the place.
‘You want 50,000 volts running through ya? Well, do ya? Do ya?’
The girl had meekly shaken her criminal head. This little piggy was in LeCarre’s world now and she was a fish out of water.
‘In my office, LeCarre. Now!’ Chief Superintendent Beverley Chang said, as soon as the girl was charged and on her way to a young offenders unit.
‘Happy New Year, Detective.’ The words exited LeCarre’s boss’s luscious lips with a deep, sensual sincerity. LeCarre knew those lips. He knew them only too well.
‘Happy New Year, ma’am.’
‘Any New Year’s resolutions, Detective?’
‘Same as every year, ma’am. To stop crime wherever I find it. And also to start remembering to leave the house with a carrier bag to avoid the ridiculous 10p charge.’
‘You can’t arrest everyone, you know, LeCarre,’ Chang said.
‘Sounds like a challenge.’
‘I’m serious, LeCarre. Devon and Cornwall’s prison service doesn’t have enough capacity for a copper with your … ’ she searched for the right word, ‘appetite.’
‘Guess they need to build some more prisons.’
‘We police by consent. If you arrest the whole two counties, there’ll be no one left to consent. Just a land of police officers, with nothing to do.’
‘Sounds pretty good to me. Perhaps I could finally learn an instrument,’ LeCarre said, with typically excellent humour.
‘How would you learn it, Roger? All the teachers would be in prison.’
‘YouTube?’
LeCarre wasn’t willing to concede it, but Chang had a point.
‘I’ve had an invitation for you.’ Chang took a golden envelope from her desk drawer. ‘I’d like you to accept.’
Chang leaned over to hand it to him, her considerable cleavage showing. He and that cleavage had history, but that’s just what it was – history. Like the Stuarts and the Tudors, the Boer War, the Ottoman Empire. Whatever had happened between Detective Roger LeCarre and the body of Chief Superintendent Beverley Chang was in the past. Like the French Revolution or the invention of gravity, LeCarre had no truck with it now. Looking at that cleavage was like looking at a Simon Schama programme about the Edwardian age, although this was the sexiest Simon Schama programme he’d ever seen.
LeCarre’s gaze turned to the golden envelope now resting in his hand. An invitation? Detective Roger LeCarre didn’t much like the word. When he received an invitation it was usually to ‘step outside’, but those kind of invitations didn’t come in golden envelopes, they came in Plymouth accents, delivered by testosterone-sodden men in football shirts.
This looked like an invitation worth opening.
He delicately set the card inside free from its paper casing, which is to say, he took it out of the envelope.
Eli Jefferson Quartz, the 23rd Earl of Devon, warmly invites Detective Roger LeCarre to Powderham Castle on the evening of Friday, 6 January to celebrate the Earl’s accession to the title. 7 p.m. Black tie. The Earl plans to celebrate in style. All guests will be provided with an en suite room for the night, followed by a magnificent breakfast.
LeCarre’s gaze hit Chang’s, just as she had clearly anticipated.
‘Ma’am.’
‘Not your scene?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
LeCarre’s intellect belonged in rarified climes, but he’d always felt more at home with the salt of the earth in the Crown and Goose, which although under new management and with some worrying steps into the realm of ‘craft beer’, still retained its status as LeCarre’s favourite pub in Exeter.
‘I take it you haven’t heard of Mr Quartz?’ Chang said.
‘The name is familiar. I’m a police officer; the closest I get to royalty is a drugs bust in a Greene King pub or a pub called the Rose and Crown or the Queen’s Head or maybe the King’s Arms or the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Edinburgh or something like that. Basically a drugs bust in a pub with a royal name, do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘I do,’ said Chang.
‘Like a Prince Albert or a Duke of York,’ said LeCarre.
‘I get the point,’ said Chang.
‘Not sure I’ve done one in a while, actually. I think I did a drugs bust in a Red Lion last year, but that’s not a royal name, so … ’ Roger LeCarre paused for a moment. ‘Sorry, what were we talking about?’
‘Eli Quartz,’ said Chang.
‘Prince William in Dawlish! Sorry, I’m just trying to think of pubs with royal names now. That’s it. Done. Eli … Quartz? Tell me about him.’
Chang leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers together, like the high-powered woman she was.
‘As the invitation says, Eli Quartz is the new Earl of Devon,’ she said, ‘but there’s something about Mr Quartz that’s very different from the twenty-two Earls of Devon that came before him … he’s American.’
An American Earl of Devon. She might as well have told him there was a canine pope.
‘Wh-wh – what?’ LeCarre stuttered. ‘How?’
‘He purchased the title.’
‘Can you do such a thing?’ asked LeCarre.
‘For the right price, it would seem so,’ said Chang. ‘And, rumour has it, Mr Quartz paid a very high price indeed.’
‘What’s this got to do with Detective Roger LeCarre?’ said Detective Roger LeCarre, referring to himself in the third person. ‘It’s not illegal, I presume?’
‘Not illegal, no. Concerning? Perhaps. Eli Quartz is a multi-billionaire and a very powerful man. He’s chosen to make our humble county his new home and in rather a grand way. I think it’s important that the Devon and Cornwall police force have a good relationship with such an individual, don’t you?’
‘Why me? I’m hardly what you might call a people person. I’m better at arresting people than making friends with them.’
This had been a consistent problem in LeCarre’s life. He’d meet someone, they’d start to become friends, and then one day they’d commit some obscure minor offence like defacing the Queen by folding a bank note and LeCarre would arrest them.
‘Can’t you send someone else?’
‘Believe me, if I could, I would. I was rather keen on going myself. A weekend at the castle of an attractive bachelor billionaire sounds … ’ Chang licked her powerful lips erotically but also a bit weirdly, ‘delightful. Unfortunately for me, Quartz’s people were very insistent. The invitation was for one man and one man only.’
LeCarre knew that man better than perhaps anyone else on Earth, and yet in many ways he hardly knew him at all. Because that man was a fascinating enigma, a complex character, capable of carrying a series of books and, if the money was right, a TV series probably best suited to the Sunday evening 9 p.m. slot on BBC1 or ITV.
Because that man was him.
Because that man was Detective Roger LeCarre.
Detective Roger LeCarre’s Kia Ceed pulled up to the giant iron gates. They looked like the gates to another world. One day he might pull his Kia Ceed up to the Pearly Gates. Not today, he hoped. In fact, with luck, that day would come so far in the future that he’d be driving a car that hadn’t yet been invented, or maybe even some kind of jet pack.
These gates didn’t lead to heaven, but their grandeur suggested a world no less luxurious. Through the snow, he could make out the gold-plated letters ‘PC’.
Powderham Castle.
LeCarre pondered on what to do. He didn’t know the procedure. He was a man far more used to entering nightclubs, criminal lairs, women, than he was entering the grounds of ancient estates. Just as he was about to get out of his car to look for some sign of an intercom, the gates opened, revealing a little bridge over a stream and a long driveway leading to the castle itself.
As the pretty sight of Powderham Castle, the fortified manor house and its glorious snow-covered grounds was laid out in front of him, LeCarre allowed a pleasant thought to enter his handsome brain: a brief vacation from crime could be good for him. Out there, beyond this wintery paradise, were Devon and Cornwall, two counties pulsating with ceaseless crime. A world like that made it impossible for a man like Detective Roger LeCarre to relax. Here was a retreat. A place so beautiful that something as ugly as crime simply couldn’t penetrate its walls.
The evening ahead was filled with many mysteries. What it held, LeCarre simply did not know. He could be certain of only one thing – no crime would be taking place tonight.
That was for sure.
The castle’s long approach gave LeCarre some time to run over the information he’d been able to acquire on Eli Quartz in the brief time since he had left his sexy superior, Chief Superintendent Beverley Chang.
A thirty-six-year-old tech titan, Quartz had made his fortune in California’s famous Silicon Valley. What little LeCarre knew of him, he liked. Unlike many of his fellow computer nerds, Quartz was a man who actually made things. Amazon, Google, Facebook, these weren’t tangible objects, they were flimsy concepts built on air. When LeCarre’s daughter had joined Instagram, he had considered doing the same thing, in the hope of finding a shared interest, but he couldn’t work out what it was. That afternoon he’d walked into every shop on Exeter High Street asking if they had any Instagrams in stock, but to no avail. Quartz and his business, Quartz Industries, made things – real things. Watches, cars, robots. This was something LeCarre could get on board with. Perhaps he’d even be lucky enough to leave with a goody bag containing a ‘smart pen’ or something.
Two key questions hung in the air like Quartz-made drones: why had Eli Quartz crossed the Atlantic Ocean to settle in East Devon? And why had he been so insistent that Detective Roger LeCarre should attend his lavish castle-warming?
A small collection of cars was parked in front of the castle’s entrance. A quick assessment suggested not all of LeCarre’s fellow attendees had the limits of a Devon and Cornwall police salary. He parked beside a luxury Tesla. LeCarre had no time for electric vehicles. If God had intended cars to be powered by electricity then he’d have made them that way. LeCarre shuddered at the thought that he might be about to spend an evening amongst the liberal metropolitan elite, the ‘woke’. LeCarre was woke: long hours and a serious Red Bull habit meant that he was woke most of the time, but he didn’t feel the need to bang on about it.
LeCarre exited his Kia Ceed and looked at his reflection in the driver’s side window. His tuxedo still fitted nicely. Good. A few years had passed since that night. LeCarre lived on a man’s diet of pasties, booze and KitKat Chunkies, but the life of a Devon and Cornwall police officer kept him in shape. Nothing burned calories like the battle against crime. Carrie had tried to get him onto what she called a ‘balanced diet’. ‘You can’t chase down a suspect with kale in your belly, Carrie. You just can’t,’ he’d protested. She had no complaints about his body in the bedroom: he had, in his opinion, for a man in his age bracket, one of the top 250 most attractive top halves in East Devon.
The tuxedo hadn’t been worn since he . . .
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