Augusta Hawke, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by G.M. Malliet
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
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
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Also by G.M. Malliet
The St. Just mysteries
DEATH OF A COZY WRITER
DEATH AND THE LIT CHICK
DEATH AT THE ALMA MATER
DEATH IN CORNWALL *
The Max Tudor series
WICKED AUTUMN
A FATAL WINTER
PAGAN SPRING
A DEMON SUMMER
THE HAUNTED SEASON
DEVIL’S BREATH
IN PRIOR’S WOOD
Novels
WEYCOMBE
* available from Severn House
AUGUSTA HAWKE
G.M. Malliet
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First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © G.M. Malliet, 2022
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of G.M. Malliet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0602-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0604-6 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0603-9 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Merci to Monica Rocchio for drawing on her Interpol experience to answer my questions regarding how murder investigations would be handled in small French villages. And to Susan Gurney, PhD, of the University of Cambridge, for her expert guidance in forensic science. All mistakes are my own.
To the Royals, for their weekly Zoom support, friendship, advice, and movie recommendations.
To Alison Steventon, forever awesome.
To the members of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and the Crime Writers’ Association (UK). Many thanks for the camaraderie and the memories.
Special thanks to my agent, Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, and Carl Smith, Natasha Bell, and Penny Isaac of Severn House for their excellent advice, calm guidance, and remarkable professionalism.
And above all, to Bob.
‘A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.’
– Sigmund Freud
ONE
My father was bipolar, what they used to call manic-depressive – a better term, more descriptive of his self-destructive highs and lows.
When he was in his late twenties, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy. It did jolt him out of the manic phase he’d been circling in, at least temporarily. Just long enough to settle down and conceive me, if I’m doing the math right. ECT was what they did – what they still do. Centuries before, they’d have drilled a hole in his head to release the demons.
My mother, on the other hand, had borderline personality disorder. She was one of those people who didn’t know where they stopped and others began, resembling Princess Di in looks and personality. In my father she found her own perfect mismatch.
Overall, our household could have done with a lot less drama.
When I was fifteen my father left, a final punch reinforcing my mother’s already rampant fears of abandonment and igniting mine. Still I worshipped him from afar until the enormity of the damage he had done began to sink in. When finally I met the woman he had run off with (younger, goes without saying, and homely, with Ronald McDonald hair, harder to explain), I stopped adoring.
When my husband Marcus died, the finality actually helped. At least I knew he wasn’t somewhere in the world, hiding his assets and being happy without me.
Strangely enough, I had a good if solitary childhood while my parents were preoccupied by their personal tragedies, but I suspect their marriage and its final unraveling are what turned me into a writer. If chaos and disorder are necessary ingredients, along with an abiding need to find a pattern and impose order, my upbringing certainly ticked all the boxes.
Possibly for related reasons, I avoided marriage and anything like a stable, well-paying profession like finance or IT. In college I dabbled in painting and, just as I was thinking I wasn’t terrible at it, I sat next to a girl in class with real talent. It was like watching da Vinci at work on the Mona Lisa.
The next day I switched my major to journalism, suspecting my other interest, creative writing, was unlikely to pay the rent. I was right about that for quite a while. I never attended a writers’ school like Iowa or a writers’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell (they rejected me, just so you know. I’m sure they still regret it). I wrote every day, trying to pin the world to the mood board in my head.
I was drawn to mysteries, of course. That imposing-order thing, although I wonder I didn’t choose some angsty thing (something that might get me into MacDowell), some romance from a bygone age thing, even some dark serial killer thing. I tried, because according to Writers’ Digest these books were what the public wanted, but I couldn’t make it work. The angsty thing became a personal litany of grievances rather than a brave, heart-rending survey of the human spirit. The romance novel wouldn’t get off the ground; it may have been a case of my being unable to write what I didn’t know, but my attempt described two people so insipid I couldn’t stand to be in the room with either of them for the year or more it takes to write a book.
The serial killer thing, I think we can agree, has been done to death. Despite my best attempts at creating a trophy-hunting psychopath with poor dental hygiene and serious mom issues, I couldn’t make the guy scary. He was simply banal, which probably is true of most serial killers.
One day just before graduation, on a train from Maine to New York to interview for a job in journalism, I thought I’d pass the time by trying to write a detective story. I began sketching out an imaginary village on the pages of a shiny blue notebook I’d bought at the station bookstore, along with a guidebook to the south of France.
In my first draft I called the place Carrenac, a real village and a beautiful spot (I’ve since visited). If anyone living in Carrenac recognizes facets of their village and thinks I’m writing about them, let me say here that the people of Carrenac are too nice to commit any crimes. I did appropriate the village church and the personality of its priest and some real houses and shops, but I moved them around as needed for my plot, like pieces on a Monopoly board.
I had recently read a few of the Maigret books of Georges Simenon and been bowled over by the simplicity of the language, the stories which could only have been set in France, the characters who could exist nowhere else. He didn’t have to tell the reader where he was; the giveaways were the trips to the boulangerie to buy baguettes, the travel by Paris Metro, the casual mention of the Arc de Triomphe. It didn’t take a genius to throw those things into a story, of course, but unique to Simenon was the sophisticated, of fhand way he described the world around him. Everything in his world was remarkable and yet it just was.
I didn’t get the journalism job but I soon landed the ideal position for a crime novelist: an entry-level spot in DC, the low pay offering just enough struggle-to-survive to be incentivizing. The dullness of my duties freed up my headspace for what I saw as my real work.
The job consisted of thirty-five hours a week writing advertising and promotional copy for a newspaper that could have been written by a gifted six-year-old. Both the copy and the newspaper. My output consisted largely of documenting the paper’s circulation numbers, and as those numbers rose and fell, I would be called upon to update the promo copy, in much the way a firefighter would be called to a blaze. ‘Over 4 Million Readers’ might have to be changed to ‘Nearly 4 Million Readers’, depending. If I got particularly bored, I might try changing it up to ‘4 Million Readers Worldwide’, but that required approval from marketing so mostly I played it safe. It really was stupendously boring, and only my secret writing life, which began at 4 a.m. each day, saved me.
When the circulation figures fell to 3.7 million and most of my colleagues began openly updating their résumés, I doubled down on my pre-dawn mystery writing. As I had no savings this was a reckless gamble, but by the time the layoffs got started I had landed a three-book publishing contract. I quit the copywriting job and began writing all day in my local library.
This was in the early Internet days, when the library was still a quiet place to work, before programs like Toddler Rock N’ Read had been invented, and Barnes & Noble was still a store stuffed with books rather than toys. I spent many hours there, too, or in Olsson’s Books & Records, a now-defunct local chain. The word ‘Records’ in Olsson’s title tells you how long ago this was.
By immersing myself in guides and photo books, I was able to create a village in the Dordogne – not too large, as it was necessary to keep the suspects to manageable numbers, and not too small, so there would be a variety of cruel or foolish or plain unlucky people to kill off. This setting gave me enormous pleasure, a place I could sink into, a place into which I could disappear.
The Dordogne, as you probably know, is in southwest France, in a region between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees, and famous for its prehistoric cave paintings. That was good; I thought I might work that into a plot one day. Not an art theft mystery – for obvious reasons, stealing cave paintings would be tricky – but perhaps a crotchety misogynistic archeologist might meet his fate in one of the grottos there.
I decided to call my village Villeneuve-Sainte-Marie. Only much later did I realize Carrenac, on which it was based, was in the Lot, not the Dordogne, but no one ever called me on it, proving no one paid much attention to my first book. (‘Diverting. Je ne sais quoi.’ – The New York Times.) I corrected the error in subsequent books without making a deal of it, especially since imaginary villages can be in whatever department they choose. At least Carrenac is (misleadingly, if you ask me) on the Dordogne river, so I was in the ballpark.
Now I needed a Maigret for my village. I knew nothing of the ranks and hierarchies or even the uniforms of the French police; in fact, what little I knew about the police in France was based on reruns of an obscure, trashy crime drama of the seventies called Crime of Passion, where no one was ever given a long sentence for murdering their lover because everyone in France understood a crime passionnel is just one of those things. Shrug. I figured no one outside France knew much about how their murder squads operated, so it didn’t matter. It did matter when my books started being translated into French, but I never thought that far ahead. Apparently, gendarmes are not simply promoted up the ranks to detective, as would happen in the US with patrol officers, but are two separate strands of law enforcement. Now you know.
I wanted a fictional detective who was smart or smart enough, without having to grant him supernatural powers. I wanted him to have a family – a large and warm and loving family, obviously the family I never had, and the sort of wife who would worry about him when he was out chasing villains, who would pack him a gourmet lunch and hand him a baguette on his return in the evenings. Or whenever he returned, generally late at night – it’s a trope of crime stories that the detective is run ragged, that his office has a small budget and a sadistic supervisor, that one officer is a useless screwup, and so on and so forth.
I named my police detective Claude. I never got round to giving him a first name.
I was inspired not only by Simenon; I read all of Holmes and all the Agatha Christies, beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and going straight through to Sleeping Murder.
I noticed Agatha rarely gave Poirot or Miss Marple a regular sidekick in the police force, apart from the ferret-faced Japp. Maybe she found it easier to make up new characters rather than be called out by eagle-eyed readers noticing changes from book to book. (I really am sorry about the Dordogne slip-up.) I wanted a sidekick who would stick around, in case the first book turned into a series. Series were what sold, said the gospel according to Publishers Weekly; series were sometimes made into TV shows.
So. Sidekick. I wanted it to be someone of low rank, a sort of junior detective, and I needed to decide whether the sidekick would be smarter than the boss. This is where the Caroline Bernard figure came into being. She was miles smarter than her supervisor, but so old-school she kept the fact hidden from him as best she could, feeding him clues and making discoveries he could claim as his own. This was getting harder and harder for me to pull off as the series progressed – most women at some point would have told Claude to go to hell. So I gave her a strict Catholic background, having her grow up in the sort of household where the man rules, or thinks he does, while the mother rules in fact.
Caroline would be approaching middle age, and while sharp-featured she would be attractive in the way of most Frenchwomen, who can turn a hazmat suit into a fashion statement with a scarf tied just so. She solved every single crime in the series – eighteen books and counting – and never once did Claude give her credit, although here and there someone in the department noticed and made sure she got mentioned in dispatches. Loyal to her clueless boss and to her husband, who was a ninny, this was how Caroline got by in life. Halfway through the series, she began having an affair with the man who owned the local boulangerie.
To be honest, I never saw it coming. Somewhere along the line, the fictional Caroline had taken on a life of her own and had gone from being a minor player in the series to sharing the spotlight with Claude, if not outshining him altogether. Reviewers and readers seemed to believe she was real. More than one fan letter carried a marriage proposal – for her, not for me.
I was writing book nineteen in the series when I was interrupted by a real-life crime in my neighborhood. My writing had stalled, anyway, so I was easily distractible.
Before long, happenings in the real world had eclipsed anything I could make up.
TWO
My true-crime story begins in Old Town, a place miles from the Dordogne, in spirit as well as geographically.
I’ve lived here twenty-two years, ever since I landed the one-note job in DC, although the success of the series allowed me to move from a one-bedroom apartment near the power plant to a four-story townhouse in the southeast quadrant.
I don’t need four floors, especially with Marcus gone, and one day the stairs may be the literal death of me, but for now, living in lonely splendor in a well-preserved historic town is very pleasant indeed. Old Town is in northern Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, and while it may be a veritable hotbed of political intrigue, sophisticated spycraft, and fine dining, it is also a quaint village – like St Mary Mead, like Villeneuve-Sainte-Marie – and in villages some people (people like me) are congenitally unable to mind their own business.
My neighbors may be busy, busy and often traveling out of town, or rather pointlessly going to and from their weekend homes, but there is little about the surface of their lives I don’t know. What cars they drive, how many Amazon packages they have delivered, how often they have pizza delivered, which desperate housewife is having an affair. (I don’t know whom Bettina thinks she’s kidding. Why would the leaf-blower guy show up several times a week?)
