The Mitford Vanishing

Book 5: The Mitford Murders

by Jessica Fellowes

Genres: Traditional Mysteries; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

A classic mystery starring the glamorous Mitford sisters and inspired real events, The Mitford Vanishing is the perfect story for fans of Agatha Christie.

1937. War with Germany is dawning, and a civil war already raging in Spain. Split across political lines, the six Mitford sisters are more divided than ever. Meanwhile their former maid Louisa Cannon is now a private detective, working with her ex-policeman husband Guy Sullivan.

Louisa and Guy are surprised when a call comes in from novelist Nancy Mitford requesting that they look into the disappearance of her Communist sister Jessica, nicknamed Decca. It quickly becomes clear that Decca may have made for the war in Spain - and not alone.

As a second, separate missing person case is opened, Louisa and Guy discover that every marriage has its secrets - but some are more deadly than others . . .

PRAISE FOR THE MITFORD MURDERS SERIES

'A glittering, entertaining, perfectly formed whodunnit'
Adele Parks

'Exactly the sort of book you might enjoy with the fire blazing, the snow falling etc. The solution is neat and the writing always enjoyable'
Anthony Horowitz

'A lively, well-written, entertaining whodunnit'
The Times

Release date: January 18, 2022

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

The note from Nancy Mitford was delivered by a young boy in short trousers, which made Louisa laugh. Anyone would think it was Dickensian London, but this was 1937 and there were telephones and telegrams. Nancy had always been curiously old-fashioned, for all her love of cocktails and Chanel; Louisa rather loved her for it. The envelope was thick white paper and in the top left-hand corner was By Hand in black ink, underlined. The card inside had ‘Mrs Peter Rodd’ and Nancy’s Maida Vale address embossed on it, but the first thing Louisa noticed was that the note had been scrawled – in haste, perhaps. Nancy’s handwriting was usually easy to read, but not here. Louisa squinted and held the card a little closer.

Decca missing. M&F frantic. Police hopeless.

Please come to Rutland Gate. Urgently. Nx

A summons from Nancy was not an altogether unusual thing, but the last time it had happened Louisa had ended up on a liner in the Mediterranean with Lady Redesdale, Nancy’s mother, and Nancy’s sisters, Diana and Unity, and they had become embroiled in a murder and the murkier side of British government. Admittedly, it hadn’t all been Nancy’s fault. Louisa looked down at the floor, where her baby girl, Maisie, almost a year old, was lying on the rag rug, happily gurgling at the woollen rabbit she held. Today was Louisa’s final day at home before she joined her husband, Guy Sullivan, at work. From tomorrow, Maisie was going to be looked after by her grandmother, Guy’s ma, who only lived around the corner. Old Mrs Sullivan had muttered her misgivings but Louisa and Guy had stood firm, and when she understood that it was either her or someone else looking after her granddaughter, she had agreed to do it. Now it looked as if Louisa was going to have to ask her mother-in-law to start a day early.

Louisa knew that Nancy was aware of Cannon & Sullivan, the private detective agency she and Guy had established six months previously. They rented a minuscule office space above a betting shop in Hammersmith, with two desks, a filing cabinet and a telephone. In fact, a few months before, when Nancy had sweetly said she’d like to meet Maisie, Louisa suggested they have tea in the office, knowing it would tickle her old friend. They had known each other almost twenty years now, meeting when Louisa had gone to work in the nursery of the Mitford household. In 1919, Louisa had been a bedraggled, frightened young girl escaping London, and Nancy had only just emerged from the schoolroom herself. In many ways, in spite of their differences, they had embarked on early adulthood almost side by side. Their relationship had its complications, but now – married and a mother – Louisa felt she had at last thrown off the shackles of servitude the Mitfords used to invoke in her. Which was why she questioned her hasty response to Nancy’s request. Did she want to go, or did she have to go? Rutland Gate meant Lord and Lady Redesdale, her former employers – and not people given to thinking of former servants as anything but.

And yet.

Decca, the sisters’ nickname for Jessica, the second to last youngest of the seven siblings, was nineteen years old, and Louisa had a hunch that the situation had to be more serious than her spending one night too many with a friend.

Not to mention that this could be Louisa’s first official piece of work for Cannon & Sullivan.

Louisa picked her daughter up from the floor, held her warm, dumpling body close and kissed her smudge of a nose. ‘Let’s go and see Granny, shall we? Your mother has got to go to work.’



With Maisie safely and happily ensconced in her grandmother’s arms, Louisa took the two buses necessary to get from Hammersmith to Rutland Gate. She considered telephoning ahead but, if circumstances truly were as Nancy described in her note, then she was bound to be with her parents at their London residence. Nor would any of them leave the house so long as news might reach them there. Louisa picked up a newspaper to read on the bus but, as she flicked through, she could see no headlines about Decca; either she hadn’t been missing very long or they had managed to keep it quiet.

When Louisa first worked for the Mitfords, they had been living in a very pretty house in Oxfordshire, Asthall Manor, which had since been sold, much to everyone’s regret. Lord Redesdale built a new house, Swinbrook, which Nancy insisted on calling Swine Brook; it was generally agreed to be too cold and too severe, and the family had sold it a few months before, stranding them, so Nancy claimed, in London. Even Nanny Blor, who’d looked after them all since Nancy was six, had moved to Rutland Gate. The thought of Blor made Louisa smile – she’d have liked her for her own Maisie. Not that she could entertain that idea for a second. It had been hard enough persuading Mrs Sullivan that she, Louisa, was going to work with Guy, let alone that she might employ someone to live in the house and look after Maisie while she did so.

Louisa jumped off the bus outside the Albert Hall and walked the last stretch fast. It was bitterly cold, with a wind that snapped at her ankles like a terrier. The house, with its stacked seven storeys, fronted out onto a small cul-de-sac, close to the wide green spaces of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Louisa walked up the steps and knocked firmly. She was not arriving as a servant today.

It was a maid who opened the door, however. A young girl in a blue-and-white toile de Jouy dress with plain linen apron, the uniform that Lady Redesdale favoured for her staff. Louisa walked into the hall, relieved to feel its warmth, and took off her hat, fluffing her hair a little. ‘Would you tell Mrs Rodd that Mrs Sullivan is here?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ The maid ducked out of view for a minute or two before she came back. ‘I’m to take you through, ma’am. Follow me, please.’

Louisa had never worked in this house. Even when she had stayed there the night before her wedding to Guy, it had been in the former coach house attached at the back. But she had visited Nancy and her mother there a few times before so was reasonably familiar with it. She expected to be taken into the library but was instead led up to the first floor where the drawing room was situated, a rather larger room. Louisa soon realised why the meeting was taking place there: it seemed that almost the entire family was present. Nancy ran up to Louisa and kissed her on both cheeks with even more effusiveness than usual.

‘Oh, darling, I’m so pleased to see you. As you can see, we’re all in bits.’

Louisa looked around to see the evidence of this. Lady Redesdale perched on a narrow armchair by the fire, dressed in a plain skirt and twinset in navy, her face drawn and pale; she did not stand but acknowledged Louisa with a nod. Lord Redesdale was leaning on the mantelpiece, one hand in his pocket, looking rather older than Louisa remembered. His long, lean figure was dressed as elegantly as always, but his face was gaunt and his hair now the steel grey of a pan scrubber. He gave a grunt that could be loosely interpreted as a greeting. Louisa did not blame either of them for their abruptness: they were not people given to changing their view of the world, and former servants becoming equals in their drawing room was a bridge too far. Tom Mitford, their only son in a family of six daughters, was smoking a cigarette in a chair by the window. He turned and gave Louisa a ‘Hi’, his hand in the air, before he resumed his position, gazing listlessly at the street.

Debo came up too, just behind Nancy. The youngest of them all, she was in that sweet phase between being a girl and a woman, a touch plump and uncertain. She gave Louisa a kiss and grabbed one of her hands for a squeeze before dropping it quickly. ‘It’s so lovely to see you. I just wish … ’ Debo trailed off miserably and went to sit back down.

‘I’m sorry to turn up unannounced, as it were,’ said Louisa, ‘but I got your note this morning, and it said it was urgent—’

‘You sent her a note?’ Lord Redesdale looked accusingly at his eldest daughter.

‘Yes, I had to. We’re at our wits’ end, aren’t we?’ Nancy gestured to Louisa to sit down, so she pulled out a small wooden chair that had been hidden against the wall. Lord Redesdale flinched as the former nursery maid took a seat. Lady Redesdale barely acknowledged the action in the room; the cup of tea she held on her lap was half-drunk and grey. Nancy sat down on the sofa beside Debo.

‘As you can see, most of the family has gathered here. Pam’s in France with Derek in newlywed bliss, Unity is in Munich, although on her way back. And Diana is—’ She hesitated and glanced at her parents before stage-whispering, ‘Well, she’s with the Ogre. We won’t say any more about that.’

Louisa knew from Nancy that Diana, now divorced from Bryan Guinness, was living in sin with Sir Oswald Mosley. Which was presumably why her name was verboten.

‘You said that Miss Jessica is missing.’

‘Yes, she—’ Nancy broke off. ‘You’re writing this down?’

‘I don’t want to get any of the facts wrong.’

‘You really are a private detective?’ asked Debo. ‘Farve said it sounded like something out of one of Nancy’s books.’

‘Not that he would know,’ said Nancy.

Lord Redesdale chose not to rise to this tease, but lit his pipe instead.

‘Yes, Miss Deborah,’ Louisa replied, trying to hold her nerve. She didn’t want to tell them that this was the first assignment she had decided to take on. ‘Mr Sullivan and I, we’ve set up our own agency.’

‘He’s left the police?’ Tom had swivelled around. ‘Why? He seemed to be doing rather well, from what I saw.’

Tom’s work as a junior barrister on a case that Guy had brought to the Old Bailey almost two years before had made them near colleagues at the time. But it was that very case that had led to Guy’s resignation from the police force he had so proudly joined more than fifteen years earlier. Louisa and Guy no longer had blind faith in their government or its institutions. It was a destabilising feeling, one that had taken a while to get used to. When the king had abdicated the year before, he was no more than another falling domino to them, while the rest of the country reeled.

‘It seemed like the right thing to do,’ Louisa replied as briskly as possible, not wanting to get derailed by Tom. ‘May I ask what the police response has been so far?’

‘None,’ growled Lord Redesdale. ‘She’s a grown woman, they say, knowing nothing of what an imbecile she is. This leaves her perfectly at liberty to do as she likes, according to the schoolboy who passed himself off as a constable.’

‘Miss Jessica is nineteen years old now, yes? What has been the cause for concern, exactly? Can you tell me what happened, ideally from the moment you last saw your daughter?’

Lord Redesdale straightened up at this, but when he turned towards Louisa she saw the bewilderment and sadness in his face. ‘I suppose you’re our best hope at present.’

‘I promise you that Mr Sullivan and I will do everything we can. In fact, if it reassures you, why don’t we telephone the office and ask him to join us at this meeting? It would only take him half an hour to get here.’ Louisa didn’t like to admit that this was probably more for her reassurance than theirs, but she knew equally well that Lord Redesdale would prefer to talk to a man. He was of the Edwardian era; it wasn’t his fault.

‘Yes, yes, I think I would like that. Dear, what do you think?’ Lord Redesdale bent down and touched his wife lightly on the knee. She started at his gesture and looked up at him, her eyes red with worry.

‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it? I knew she was unhappy. I just couldn’t fathom why.’

‘Let us bring Mr Sullivan in, then.’

Nancy stood. ‘Follow me, Lou-Lou. I’ll take you to the telephone. It’s just in the hall downstairs.’



When the telephone call came through to the office of Cannon & Sullivan, Guy was under the desk looking for a pencil he’d dropped. In his haste to catch the ’phone before it stopped ringing, he banged his head and knocked his glasses off. Not for the first time, he swore at the juxtaposition of his height and the smallness of his office.

When Guy resigned from Scotland Yard in the late summer of 1935, he knew it was what he had to do. But that hadn’t prepared him for the grief he felt at leaving the career that had been his guiding force since he was a young man. Unable to fight in the war, thanks to his extreme short-sightedness, signing up to the police had been his way of serving his country and proving to his family that he had both a sense of duty and moral courage with the best of them. Promoted from the transport police to the London Metropolitan Force, his appointment as a detective inspector for Scotland Yard had been his proudest hour, and as he had looked down the track ahead of him, Guy had been reassured by the linear progression offered by his chosen career: further promotions with corresponding rises in salary and respect from his juniors, culminating in a handsomely pensioned retirement. Guy also liked to think he had a talent for the job, enjoying good working relationships with both his peers and his seniors, as well as solving the odd murder or two.

All of that had been shattered within minutes of Louisa confessing to him what she had known to be the hidden under-currents of an investigation he had led and taken to the Old Bailey across two years. A secret that his most senior officers and the government had forced his wife to keep from him. Louisa always had a natural inclination to cynical suspicion – or at least a critical questioning of the country’s finest institutions – but Guy knew that even she felt cast adrift by this revelation of their underhand methods. She too had given up her plans to become a court stenographer, unable to work for what presently felt like ‘the wrong side’.

Still, they had each other, and that counted for a lot. In those uncertain months in the winter of 1935 they clung together even more closely, watching with joy as the bump in Louisa’s belly grew. Guy knew that alone, he would have floundered, afraid and full of trepidation, but Louisa and the promise of their child rooted him and gave him strength. Together they planned the beginnings of their own private detective agency, one in which they would work as a partnership. Money was tight – both of them worked a series of odd jobs to raise the initial capital – but Louisa was nothing if not capable, never too proud to do whatever was necessary. Guy had watched with awe as each challenge seemed to set off more waves of efficiency and inventiveness in his wife, and she kept them both buoyed.

A few weeks before Maisie arrived, they moved into a two-up, two-down house a few streets away from his mother. They were ready to begin a life – even at their advanced ages of thirty-six and thirty-eight – as a family with their own business.

One year on, Guy was ready for Louisa to join him, physical space notwithstanding. Although he knew he loved Maisie with all his heart, and he loved them being a trio, he also missed spending time with his wife. He had waited so long to be with her that he still couldn’t get enough of her. He had planned to spend his last day alone in the office tidying up and making it as welcoming as he could. He was even contemplating a trip to Peter Jones’s china department – he’d been getting by with a cracked cup for himself, offering his only decent cup and saucer to clients.

Clients. There weren’t quite enough of those, either. Guy had placed ads in the Kensington Post and The Times – ‘Experience in all confidential work’ and ‘All cases undertaken’ – but even his Scotland Yard history wasn’t bringing in the jobs he’d hoped for. He’d handled one or two blackmail cases, but the vast majority of enquiries were from wives wanting their husbands to be followed for suspected infidelity, or husbands needing a ‘co-respondent’ in a divorce case. It had been rather depressing. It wasn’t quite that a murder or a missing person would be cheering, exactly, but he felt that his capabilities were not being tested. He was almost beginning to worry that he might forget how to conduct an investigation. He hoped not only that he and Louisa would enjoy working together but also that her female presence would attract more – or, at least, different sorts of – cases. It was a modern world now, a world in which women worked and traffic clogged the streets of London, quite unrecognisable to the world he had grown up in, with King Edward VII on the throne and the sound of horses’ hooves clip-clopping as they pulled carriages. There had been no telephones, no radios, no aeroplanes – even electricity had been a novelty. Now there was so much information, noise and new-fangled inventions everywhere, Guy sometimes wondered how a man could ever rest. These had been his thoughts as he had dropped his pencil, and then the telephone had rung.



After Louisa had telephoned Guy, as she had predicted, he arrived at Rutland Gate with haste. While they were waiting for him, the maid brought a tray with a fresh pot of tea for everyone. Guy entered the drawing room with an air of professionalism and gravitas that made Louisa proud. She knew it was going to be difficult to prove herself his equal in the business – not because she was a woman but because he had a career as a detective inspector behind him. On the other hand, Louisa’s childhood had exposed her to criminality, even if on a mostly minor level, before her subsequent involvement in one or two murder investigations … She knew she could make a decent contribution. She was excited by that idea. But right now she was concerned for Decca. For several reasons, she would not have hoped for her first assignment to involve the Mitfords.

Guy politely refused the offer of tea and remained standing while he acknowledged the greetings from each member of the family. Pulling out his notebook, he flicked to a clean page and asked the question almost exactly as Louisa had. When had they last seen Miss Jessica, and what had happened?

‘She told me she was going to stay with friends of hers – the Paget twins – in Dieppe,’ said Lady Redesdale, who had recovered herself a little with sweetened tea. ‘She showed me their letter of invitation a few weeks before, which asked her to join them in a house their aunt had taken. The suggestion was that they would do a motor tour to amusing places nearby, which was very clever. It meant I shouldn’t expect to be able to get hold of her easily.’

‘Did you have the address where she was staying?’

‘Yes, 22 rue Gambetta.’

‘Did you write to her there?’

‘Immediately, so that the letter should arrive when she did. She obviously received it as she wrote back, mentioning details I had put in the letter to her.’

‘Right. We’ll return to that in a moment. For now, could you tell me about when she left?’

Lord Redesdale answered, his impatience barely contained. ‘It was Sunday the seventh of February. Lady Redesdale and I took her in a taxi to the station. We paid her train fare – a return ticket to Dieppe. We even made sure that she was comfortable and told her to enjoy herself, goddammit!’

‘She was travelling alone?’

‘Yes. It was the thin end of the wedge, I can tell you, but I had been persuaded.’

Louisa and Nancy exchanged a glance at this. Louisa remembered that Jessica’s three eldest sisters – Nancy, Pamela and Diana – had not been allowed to go anywhere unchaperoned until they were married. Diana had not travelled alone on a train until she was twenty-three years old and the mother of two boys. It seemed that by the time he had reached his youngest daughters – Unity, Jessica and Deborah – Lord Redesdale had been worn down.

‘After you left her on the train, did you watch it depart?’

‘We waved her off, until the train was out of sight,’ said Lord Redesdale.

‘Did you happen to notice if anyone else joined that particular carriage after you had left her?’ Guy barely looked up as he kept writing. Louisa wondered if he was a touch nervous among so many Mitfords. They were quite overwhelming as an entirety.

‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. Perhaps someone did? There were several people getting on and off the train.’

‘No one you recognised?’

‘No.’ Lord Redesdale’s face was morose.

‘And it was not long after she left that you heard from her?’

‘Yes.’ Lady Redesdale picked up the sorry tale while her husband glowered into the fireplace. ‘I was here, packing and preparing for our trip. When she returned, we were due to go on a cruise with Debo. We’ve cancelled it now, of course. Since then I’ve received some postcards from Decca, and a letter.’

She showed Louisa and Guy the post she had received: perhaps the only suspicious thing about the letters was how bland Jessica’s descriptions were. ‘The cathedral is lovely,’ she wrote in one, among general remarks about the weather. She said she would not be home before 21st February.

Guy inspected the stamps on the cards and envelopes. ‘Only the first letter is from Dieppe,’ he remarked. ‘The others are from Compiègne and Rouen, it seems.’

‘Yes, supposedly sent from different stops on the motor tour. But I sensed that something wasn’t right,’ said Lady Redesdale, ‘and cabled the twins’ mother in Austria. The address had been given in the original letter, the invitation Decca had shown me.’

‘Do you have that letter?’ asked Guy.

‘No, Decca kept it as it was hers. I made a note of the address when she showed it to me.’

‘What did the cable say?’

‘Do you know where Decca is? I also wrote to the twins’ aunt in London. I know her slightly. The forged invitation said that the mother’s house in London had been let, but I supposed that that was also an untruth. I was right.’

‘You got a reply?’

‘Yes, very quickly. As we know now, Decca’s story had been a complete invention. She wasn’t with the twins in France. They were in Austria with their mother, completely unaware that she had dragged them into this lie.’

‘Did the Pagets say if they knew where she was?’

‘I suggested the mother ask her daughters, but received the message that they knew nothing of any of it.’

‘Is there any chance they could be concealing her from you?’

‘I suppose there is, but why would she do such a thing? Why would she hide from me?’ There was anguish in her voice. Louisa had never seen Lady Redesdale look this grey, with shadows under her eyes that told of several sleepless nights. This woman had certainly weathered enough shocks in the two decades that they had known each other, but she had nearly always managed to keep Louisa – or anyone else – from knowing what she truly felt about anything. Not now.

‘She finally ran away,’ said Nancy, ‘as she’d been threatening to do for years. We can’t say we weren’t warned.’

‘Miss Jessica opened a Running Away account when she was twelve years old,’ Louisa explained to Guy. ‘Every time she was given money for her birthday or Christmas, that’s where it would go.’

‘How much was in there?’ Guy’s pencil was poised.

‘About fifty pounds,’ said Debo, who had been sitting on the green silk armoire, listening to every word. ‘She showed me her bank book not long ago.’

Guy couldn’t help it: he gave a low whistle. ‘That’s three months’ salary for a policeman,’ he said. ‘She could get quite far on that.’

‘I’m not sure that’s what one might call a helpful remark,’ Nancy quipped.

‘It’s worse than that,’ said Lady Redesdale. ‘I gave her thirty pounds as an advance on her dress allowance for the cruise.’

‘Thirty pounds!’ exclaimed Lord Redesdale, and resumed his stand-off with the fire. Then he muttered, ‘I gave her ten pounds when we said goodbye.’

Guy wrote down the impressive sum: ninety pounds.

‘What cruise?’ asked Louisa. She thought of the last liner they had been on; it was surprising that they were going on another, given past events.

‘I came up with the plan before Christmas, to cheer Decca up because she had been rather unhappy. We were going to go with Debo and a friend of theirs, next month, although I admit that none of the conversations we had about our plans ever seemed to make her any happier.’

‘Do you think she’s gone to Russia? Farve says she’s a Bolshevik.’ Debo’s blue peepers were wide and her eyebrows had the thin, arched look that was fashionable.

At this, Lady Redesdale slumped back in her chair and stared, glassy-eyed, at the fire.

‘Be quiet, Nine,’ said Nancy.

‘I wish you wouldn’t always call me that. I’m sixteen.’

‘You’ve still got the brain of a nine-year-old, as you h. . .