A Dangerous Train of Thought, page 1
Praise for Faith Martin
‘Brilliant characters that leap off the page’ The Sun
‘Faith Martin has created a wonderful Wodehousian world of intrigue and suspicion and a tricky puzzle to solve’ Helena Dixon, author of the Miss Underhay Mysteries
‘Amuses and intrigues in equal measure… a splendid start to what promises to be a long-running series’ Daily Mail
‘All the ingredients of a classic mystery – engaging characters and an impossible crime. The story races along like a runaway locomotive … enormous fun’ Orlando Murrin, author of Knife Skills for Beginners
‘We devoured this whoddunit in one sitting!’ Bella
‘The perfect village mystery. A golden-age world with an energy that is totally contemporary’ J.M. Hall, author of A Spoonful of Murder
‘With murder, intrigue, and ghostly happenings, this will satisfy cosy crime fans’ Heat
‘A charming and clever take on a locked room murder that left you guessing how and why the victim snuffed it! I enjoyed the clever plot, original ideas and the idyllic setting very much!’ Sarah Yarwood-Lovett, author of The Doctor Nell Ward Mysteries
‘Her knowledge of the genre and easy writing style makes this an effortless and fun read’ My Weekly
‘A clever mystery’ Woman’s Own
‘This engaging and energetic mystery hosts an abundance of engaging characters and is great fun’ Platinum
Also by Faith Martin
The Ryder and Loveday series
A Fatal Obsession
A Fatal Mistake
A Fatal Flaw
A Fatal Secret
A Fatal Truth
A Fatal Affair
A Fatal Night
A Fatal End
The Val & Arbie Mysteries
Murder by Candlelight
The Last Word is Death
Copyright
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperCollinsPublishers
Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper,
Dublin 1, D01 C9W8, Ireland
This edition 2026
First published in Great Britain by HQ 2026
Copyright © Faith Martin 2026
Faith Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorised use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception.
Source ISBN: 9780008738433
E-book Edition © January 2026 ISBN: 9780008738419
Version 2025-11-25
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008738433
Contents
Cover
Praise for Faith Martin
Also by Faith Martin
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
England – Spring 1926
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
Catch up on the series so far…
About the Publisher
ENGLAND – SPRING 1926
CHAPTER ONE
Sir Bayard Cherville, resplendent in his royal-blue dressing gown, stood gazing out of his open bedroom window and breathed in deeply the fresh spring air. It was the last week of April, but already the weather felt more as if they were in the middle of May, and the perfume from his gardens below bore the unmistakable mix of wallflowers and narcissus, bluebells and hyacinths.
Beyond the formal gardens of Cleeves Lea Manor spread the rest of his grounds and estate, set in the gently rolling acres of south Yorkshire. Over six miles away lay the coast, just far enough that the salt in the air didn’t affect his crops but close enough for him to keep his yacht and enjoy sailing her, whenever the weather was right and the mood took him. At five feet ten, with grey hair and eyes, he was getting a little solid around the middle now, but still considered himself to be a fine figure of a man.
He turned from contemplating his fiefdom, and far more critically regarded the woman lying in the four-poster bed behind him. She was propped up against the cushions and studiously pretending to attend to the tea and toast on the tray which her maid had just brought in and had carefully positioned over her knees.
Lady Sybil, at thirty-two years old, was a pale, slender woman, exactly twenty years younger than her husband. She possessed a fine length of ash-blonde hair (currently caught up in a becoming bedcap of pearl-coloured silk and lace) and startling aquamarine-tinted eyes. Her husband often said that it was his lady wife’s eyes that had first captured and then hopelessly ensnared him, when he’d first been introduced to her at some soiree or other in Wimbledon five years before.
The youngest daughter of an impoverished son and lord, she had accepted his proposal of marriage six months later, reluctantly conceding that she was in dire danger of becoming an old maid if she didn’t. And even more reluctantly facing the fact that, despite her beauty, breeding and charm, her lack of any dowry worth its name meant that she would almost certainly never be able to make a better match.
It was the truth that Sir Bayard might lack the sophistication she would have preferred, for he came from a generation of landed gentry that were first and foremost farmers, but in Cleeves Lea Manor, at least, a lovely Georgian house with wings stretching back to Elizabethan times, the new Lady Cherville had no cause for complaint. Better yet, wool had made Sir Bayard’s ancestors wealthy enough to keep all successive Cherville brides in silks and pearls, and although the Great War, taxes and the changing times had nibbled into the coffers somewhat, the family were still a name to be reckoned with throughout this part of the county.
It hadn’t taken long, however, for Lady Sybil to chafe at such isolated country living and she had quickly taken to prolonged visits to town, forcing her husband, over the last few years, into hosting rather lavish weekend parties so that he might keep her entertained, whilst safely under his watchful eye. Not by nature a gregarious man, Sir Bayard was nevertheless proud of his home, gardens and estates and liked showing them off well enough and so he bore these proceedings stoically.
So, on this Thursday morning, he found himself contemplating the arrival of the first of his guests for the latest gathering, and his lips twitched in a rather evil-looking smile as he observed his wife making a show of nonchalantly buttering a slice of toast. She studiously avoided the jar of Oxford marmalade, as she watched over her svelte figure with a ferocious regard that had once intrigued him but now only amused him. For he knew well enough why she wanted to stay young, slim and beautiful.
‘We’ve got a mixed bag coming up this time, haven’t we, m’dear?’ he murmured, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and wandering casually back towards the marital bed.
His wife eyed his approach warily. ‘Well, darling, whose fault is that?’ she retorted crisply. ‘If you will go and invite an extra person behind my back at the very last minute and not even let me know in good time…’ She shrugged a slender shoulder to indicate her displeasure at such behaviour.
Sir Bayard affected a look of innocence. ‘But I thought you two were such good friends?’
Sybil felt herself tense and forced a bored smile onto her face. ‘That’s not the point, Bay, and you know it,’ she chided, careful to keep her tone light now. ‘A good hostess picks and chooses her guests carefully, so that they can complement one another, and we can make the most of them. It’s an art, you know, choosing houseguests who can rub along well enough, whilst at the same time, sparking off each other, thus amusing everyone concerned. I had a perfectly balanced group, and then you go and tell me now, this very morning, that you’re bringing in someone who’ll upset the whole—’
‘Nonsense,’ Sir Bayard interrupted her bluntly. ‘You fuss too much. I th ink this weekend party will go with a swing and probably prove to be one of our best yet.’ And so saying, he turned and headed back to the window again, before tossing a final comment over his shoulder. ‘And I, for one, intend to enjoy it enormously.’
And he would too, he thought, his somewhat anticipatory smile quickly falling away as he stared out over the awakening countryside. Oh yes, the Lord of the Manor mused, watching a pair of blackbirds patrolling the well-manicured lawns for early-morning worms. He intended to enjoy the coming long weekend very much indeed. But not everyone, he suspected, would get as much satisfaction out of the things that he had planned for the following few days.
Lying in bed, Sybil watched his back thoughtfully. After four years of marriage, she’d come to know her husband very well, and she was sure that he was up to something. In some ways he was rather childish, and like some children, he could show a definite cruel streak when the mood took him. Uneasily, she put the tray to one side of the bed and swung her feet to the floor. ‘Well, I’m off to have a bath,’ she said, as casually as she could manage.
But as she made her way down the landing towards the nearest bathroom, she was feeling anything but casual. He couldn’t know, could he? The thought made her shiver uneasily, and she told herself crossly not to get a case of the collywobbles. Of course he couldn’t know – there was no way he could possibly have found out. She’d been so careful. They had both been so careful. This unexpected little twist of fate just had to be one of life’s odd little coincidences, that was all. It was all very annoying and everything, but they only needed to keep their heads for a few days, after all.
In the bathroom, where her maid had already half-filled the tub, she poured some of her favourite scented French bath salts into the gently steaming water and settled in with a small sigh of pleasure. But her mind couldn’t rest easily, as she tried yet again to convince herself that she was worrying over nothing. After all, Bayard did sometimes invite people to their parties that she’d rather he didn’t. Take silly Agnes, for instance. He’d put his foot down over inviting her this weekend because the last time they’d enjoyed her hospitality she’d brought the son of a Duke to table, which was always something of a coup, and he insisted they owed her.
Still, her guilty conscience insisted, asking the annoying, fussy, old maid that was Agnes Warren to come was a far cry from inviting…
Suddenly, Lady Sybil sat up in the bathtub with a quick cry of distress as another realisation swamped her. For once, though, her thoughts weren’t solely concerned with herself and her own woes and worries, but with someone else’s.
‘The Rowes!’ she yelped, appalled. Good grief, she simply must stop the Rowes from coming! With a splash, she clambered out of the tub and awkwardly tried to don her silk dressing gown. Of course, she was so wet that it stuck and clung annoyingly to her form, preventing her movements, and with a near sob of frustration, she had to stop and dry herself with a towel first, all the time wondering what time it was.
Perhaps, if she was lucky, they wouldn’t have left for the train yet? But coming all the way from Oxfordshire, they’d be sure to be setting off early.
Cursing her husband roundly, she all but ran down the landing and the stairs, some locks of her damp, long hair flying free from under her bath cap as she headed for the telephone in the hall, quite scandalising Jardine the butler, who was on his way to his pantry to polish the breakfast silver.
* * *
In their Woodstock home, mother and daughter Elizabeth and Bernadette Rowe, known as Betty and Bernie to their closest friends, surveyed the large trunk standing in the hall with somewhat shamed faces. They closely resembled each other with their big blue eyes, their short but shapely figures and the shade of their brown hair – though Bernie favoured the more fashionable bobbed hairstyle of the day, whilst her mother kept her locks long, if swept back and up-rolled into a neat bun on the back of her head.
Widowed young, Betty had raised her late son Marcus and her daughter single-handedly. The two women had always been very close, and after the tragedy that had rocked them both last year, they had taken to clinging to each other more tightly still. Now they looked from one another and then back to the trunk, sighing almost simultaneously.
‘We are only going for a long weekend,’ Betty said fretfully. ‘Do you suppose we should…?’
‘Absolutely not,’ her daughter said instantly, not needing her mother to complete the sentence to know what she was about to propose. ‘We have to hold our end up amongst Lady Sybil’s glamorous set, don’t forget, and besides, we don’t have time to go through it and prioritise our outfits into two suitcases instead.’ She glanced at the grandfather clock standing in the hall, ponderously ticking away the minutes. ‘We’ll miss the train for sure, and who knows when the next connection will be? Yorkshire is all well and good, but Cleeves Lea is the very dickens to get to.’
‘At least they have their own private halt,’ Betty pointed out. ‘And Sir Bayard will send the Rolls to pick us up.’
‘That’s true – oh, what it must be like to have private railway stations and a gorgeous manor house to live in,’ Bernie said dryly. ‘I must say, Mother, your best pal really does have a knack of coming up roses. I’ve never known someone so jammy as her ladyship.’
Betty gave her incorrigible but beloved daughter what she hoped was a stern look. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t say such things. I know you moderns think it’s very funny and all that to be disrespectful to your elders, but I for one don’t like it.’
‘Sorry, Mummy,’ Bernie said meekly enough, although her blue eyes were twinkling.
Betty sighed inwardly, but in truth, her heart really wasn’t set on defending her old friend too stalwartly. Even as the youngest child at their boarding school, Sybil had quickly acquired the irritating habit of always being able to get what she wanted. Which was something that Betty, even at almost six years her senior, had never managed to acquire.
‘I think that’s Mr Draper here with the taxi,’ Bernie said, hearing a car engine rattling along outside. ‘I do hope he can manage that humongous trunk!’ In fact, it took the former blacksmith Mr Draper very little time or effort to affix the trunk to the back of his rattle-trap car, and within minutes they were heading noisily for the station. Betty, vaguely watching the splendour of Blenheim Palace recede in the distance, gave a little sigh. It was always nice, of course, to get away and visit old friends, but there was no place like home. Then her smooth brown brows puckered into a little frown; home hadn’t really felt like home for some time now.
She was only too aware that it was nearly a year to the day since their whole world had turned upside down – so perhaps it was just as well that they had been invited to spend such a dark anniversary far away from Oxfordshire and all that was so familiar. Perhaps in the depths of the beautiful, rolling Yorkshire countryside, the painful memories wouldn’t be so bad.
‘I do hope the other guests are going to be a gay crowd,’ Bernie said wistfully, as if reading her mother’s mind. ‘Sir Bayard hinted that he had a real “celebrity” lined up. I wonder who it is?’
‘As long as he’s not a magician, I don’t mind,’ her mother said firmly. ‘I really can’t abide magicians. All that “pick a card” business and juggling about with those poor doves and rabbits. I’m sure the poor things can’t like it.’
As the two Rowe women contemplated the sad fate of luckless doves and rabbits, back at their house, their housekeeper answered the telephone to a distressed and rather breathless Lady Sybil, and had to inform her ladyship that, alas, madam and Miss Bernie had already left for the station.
At Cleeves Lea Manor, Sybil hung up with a string of frustrated swear words that made the parlourmaid, scuttling past on her way to the morning room, squeak in alarm and turn a vivid shade of embarrassed puce. Just wait until she told the little tweeny about the mistress’s latest goings-on! The in-between maid had always looked up to her so!
* * *
In Harrogate, Miss Agnes Warren was enjoying a much more leisurely and stress-free start to her day. It wasn’t that far for her to travel to dear Lady Sybil and Sir Bayard’s place, and she had already arranged for a private car, due to arrive in a few hours, to take her all the way to the front door. She did find rail travel such a chore. Even in first class you never knew just who might take a seat in your carriage, did you?
