Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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       CHAPTER ONE A Cradle in a Grave

      Rain beat incessantly against the window. All weekend she had been alone in her flat, immersed in books and distracted imaginings. The late afternoon light was almost gone as she reached decisively for her mackintosh and umbrella. She was ready, as ready as she would ever be. Up the basement steps she hurtled and onto the London street. The last stragglers of the day dashed purposefully past her, as she pulled the collar of her coat tight around her neck and bent into the weather. She moved swiftly, a tall, dark figure etched by streetlamps against unfolding blackness. Outside the local stationer’s she hesitated for an instant before thrusting into the smell ‘of damp newsprint, cheap magazines, and wet people’. She bought ‘six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat’. Against the wind that threw itself at walls and fingered its way around cracks, she heaped the coal fire in the grate and drew her chair closer. With pencil posed, and exercise book in her lap, she was prepared—for murder.

      It was in this cramped room on a wintry day that Ngaio Marsh committed her first crime to paper. A Man Lay Dead was written quickly in a burst of beginner’s energy. She filled the exercise books in a matter of weeks, and when her mother returned from a motor trip with friends even she was forced to accept that something remarkable had happened. ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ she said. Up to this point, Rose Marsh’s ambitions for her 36-year-old daughter had been theatrical, but in the deceptively clever intricacies of Ngaio’s writing she glimpsed, if reluctantly, a new plot.

      It was 1931, the Depression. The poor and unemployed queued for food and shelter in lines that grew longer by the day. But, in the cosseted circles of privilege, it was also the heyday of the flapper and the frivolous weekend murder party. Since her arrival in England more than two years earlier, Ngaio had been drawn into this world and it was the inspiration for her book. The people she met became models for her murderers and her bodies, and their haunts became her crime scenes.

      On the hall floor at Frantock, Sir Hubert Handesley’s country home, lies her first victim, with the blade of a ritual Russo-Mongolian dagger protruding from his back. The fortissimo bass voice of Doctor Tokareff singing Russian opera can be heard from an upstairs bedroom where he is dressing for dinner. Suddenly, the manor house is plunged into pitch blackness. In his room, handsome Fleet Street journalist Nigel Bathgate strikes a match, which gives him sufficient light to find the landing and grope his way downstairs. ‘The house was alive with the voices of the guests, calling, laughing, questioning…The sudden blaze from the chandelier was blinding. On the stairs Wilde, his wife, Tokareff, Handesley, and Angela all shrank from it.’ Here it is, the stuff of nightmares, waiting to unleash chaos among the sports-car-driving, dress-for-dinner, horsey set. Stunned guests collect around the body.

      Motive for murder abounds. For in life the corpse was a womanizer, a good-looking, smooth-talking purveyor of envy. His girlfriend waited too long for their wedding; his mistress was an old school chum’s wife. There will be few mourners at his funeral and even fewer who will find no silver lining in his coffin. But the measure of a man’s character does not diminish the horror of murder. When a crime has been committed the perpetrator must be brought to justice, and few things galvanize the agencies of social control faster than a suspicious death. So the telephone call is made, and into this tight, almost claustrophobic plot walks the tall, distinguished figure of Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

      He arrives by chance. The local superintendent is down with an acute attack of gastric flu. Because of Sir Hubert’s status and illustrious political career, the local office has been forced to appeal to Scotland Yard. Alleyn is thrilled to head the case.

      ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Detective-Inspector Boys asked, noting his superior’s enthusiasm. ‘Has someone found you a job?’

      ‘You’ve guessed my boyish secret. I’ve been given a murder to solve—aren’t I a lucky little detective.’

      Hurriedly, he assembles his ‘flash’ and ‘dab’ men—Detective Sergeant Smith with his Box Brownie and Detective Sergeant Bailey carrying his fingerprint apparatus; they head for a waiting car. Two hours later, Alleyn and his men are standing in the hall at Frantock.

      The weekend party has assembled at Sir Hubert’s manor house to play the Murder Game. Vassily Vassilyevitch, Sir Hubert’s Russian retainer, was to give a scarlet plaque to whichever guest he chose to be the murderer. That person would have a day to hatch the heinous end of one of the guests by separating them from the crowd and saying, ‘You’re the corpse.’ After the fatal words were uttered, the murderer would sound a primitive gong and turn the lights off at the main switch to symbolize the slaying. Darkness would last a minute or so before light and reason were restored in the form of a ‘mock trial’ with a ‘judge’ and a ‘prosecuting attorney’. All of the party would have the right to cross-examine witnesses, including the murderer. But now the real corpse of Charles Rankin has been discovered with a blade driven into his heart. Shock overwhelms the party as they gather in the library the next day to hear Alleyn’s words. He gives them strict instructions. No one is allowed to leave the grounds. ‘I think the Murder Game should be played out. I propose that we hold the trial precisely as it was planned. I shall play the part of prosecuting attorney…For the moment there will be no judge.’ He believes that playing the game will unravel the complexities of the crime and reveal its perpetrator. So the characters find themselves trapped inside a game inside a house until the murderer confesses.

      When she arrived in England, Ngaio Marsh brought with her two chapters of a manuscript that she hoped would contain the genesis of the great New Zealand novel. She knew it was a literary challenge waiting to be taken up, and worked on it intermittently СКАЧАТЬ