Kellings Manor, Wiltshire. January 1935. The snow is closing in.

THE SEASLOTH REVIEW  

is pleased to offer readers the first chapter of Lauden McVey’s Death Comes to Kellings ahead of publication by Barbeque Books. 

An incomplete manuscript has been found among the papers of Lauden McVey — one of the great Queens of Crime, some said better than Christie, better than Lorac, better than Brandt, most said just below the very first tier, which is the kind of thing critics say when they haven’t quite caught up yet.

Even incomplete, it has all the makings of a classic of the Golden Age. A group of guests drawn together by something that happened during the Great War — something that has never been spoken of, something that has been managed for eighteen years — and compelled by a dying man’s last invitation to a manor house in Wiltshire as a January snowstorm closes in.

In other words — everything one could want.

The manuscript has been completed and edited by McVey’s great-niece, C. Langley Dunwood, a poet of some repute (and, it is sometimes said, a resident of a Westchester shed). Ahead of publication by Barbeque Books, you can read Chapter One: Arrivals, and begin to ask the questions the novel intends you to ask — who among these guests knows more than they are saying, what exactly happened during the Great War that has drawn them all to Kellings, and who, if anyone, will be alive to answer by Monday morning.

Death Comes to Kellings

A Max Morgan Mystery

Lauden McVey

Chapter One: Arrivals

The sun had already gone behind Welham Down when Gerald Gibley left the Bath road and turned toward Kellings.

Beside him, Penelope stared straight ahead at the narrow tunnel of hedgerow caught in the headlamps and said nothing, as she had said nothing since Chiswick. She had said rather a great deal before Chiswick, none of it encouraging.

In the dicky seat, wrapped in a travel rug and bitterly regretting the thermos of absinthe-laced coffee that had been drained somewhere before Hungerford, Neville Smitley kept his eyes closed and thought about nothing in particular, which had served him well so far.

At the gatehouse old Ruddle was waiting with a lantern.

Gerald raised a hand.

Ruddle raised the lantern.

It was the full extent of their relationship and had been since Gerald was seven years old.

The house appeared at the end of the drive as it always appeared—suddenly, as if it had been hiding behind the beeches and had finally given up the attempt.

Three storeys of stone and brick and flint, several architectural periods disagreeing quietly, four chimneys smoking against the January dark, the windows lit in a way that suggested warmth without quite promising it.

Gerald had grown up in this house. He had never been entirely comfortable in it.

He parked the MG beside a Bentley 3½ that made it look considerably more modest than it had in London. The Bentley was Stadtmuller’s—purchased in Mayfair three weeks previously and discussed at length with anyone who stood still long enough. Beside it, the MG looked exactly what it was – a slight stretch, carefully maintained, British Racing Green, the hood not entirely reliable in January.

He cut the engine and sat for a moment listening to the tick of cooling metal and the distant wind off Welham Down.

“Well,” he said.

Penelope got out without answering.

From the dicky seat came a sound somewhere between agreement and distress.

—

The entrance hall at Kellings had the usual appointments—the umbrella stand, a potted plant, the portraits of people who had owned the place before the current incumbents and now regarded them from the walls with patient disapproval.

A housemaid took coats.

Gerald’s first. Then Penelope’s. Then Neville’s travel rug, which she accepted without expression.

“Father in the drawing room?” Gerald asked.

“The study, Mr Gerald. He asked not to be disturbed until seven.”

Gerald nodded.

Penelope was already on the stairs. Neville was examining a watercolour of Welham Down with concentration.

The hall emptied.

—

In room seven—the room with the rattling window, the damp patch above the wardrobe the Major had been meaning to see to since 1928, and a view of the kitchen garden that was bleak in July and worse in January—Bodley Brigham was making himself at home with the efficiency of a man who had been here before.

The Swan electric kettle was positioned on the hearth where it could reach the plug without pulling the cord across the doorway, a refinement he had arrived at on his second visit.

The hot water bottles were ready to be filled.

Bedsocks and wool flannel pyjamas were laid out on the bed whose sheets he had already confirmed were as damp as memory suggested.

The brandy was on the nightstand.

And on the writing table, beside the Good Companion portable Imperial, which he had set up before unpacking anything else, was the leather case.

He did not open it.

He knew what was in it.

Three hundred and forty-three pages of typescript.

Eighteen months of work.

And one weekend at Kellings three years earlier during which Major Barrington St. John Gibley DSO, formerly of the Honourable Company of London Rifles, had spoken rather more freely than he had intended about certain events in the winter of 1917 at a base camp in northern France called Étaples.

The Major had invited him that first time to help write his memoirs.

He had left with something rather different.

He had been invited again because the Major wanted to know what he intended to do with it.

Brigham had accepted because he intended to find out.

He filled the kettle from the jug on the washstand, plugged it in, and sat down at the Good Companion.

Outside the window the January dark was complete.

In the kitchen garden a large figure moved along the path toward the woods, carrying a long-handled implement.

Albert.

Brigham watched until he disappeared into the trees.

Then he began to type.

—

On the 4.50 from Paddington, in a corner seat of a third-class carriage that smelled of soot and January cold, Miss Marjorie Murrin was reading the property advertisements in The Lady with great concentration.

She had been reading for an hour when he boarded at Reading. He stowed a small brown leather bag on the rack above and arranged himself with an outward calm that did not conceal his alertness. At intervals he brought out a tin of Balkan Sobranie, examined it without opening it, and put it away. His eyes moved constantly, as if looking for something.

Miss Murrin turned a page.

She had known, when the Major’s invitation arrived, that she would accept. Some things announced themselves in ways she had learned not to ignore—the smell of a wound before it was dressed, the sound a ward made at three in the morning when something had gone wrong, the rumble of an approaching motor ambulance convoy, the quality of silence that fell over a place where something had happened that would not be spoken of.

She had learned those things at Étaples in 1917.

The man in the brown suit took out the tin of Balkan Sobranie and put it back again.

He seemed familiar to her, but she could not quite place him.

There were few lights beyond Newbury. The carriage windows became mirrors.

Miss Murrin looked at the reflection of the man in the brown suit looking at the darkness beyond the glass.

At Bedwyn he rose to take his bag from the rack and stood briefly beside her seat, one hand on the rack above. He sat down again with the bag on his lap. His hands settled on it with the ease of long practice.

He smelled faintly of Balkan Sobranie and the stale anxiety of a man who had been planning something for too long.

Miss Murrin turned another page of The Lady.

At Kellings Halt—a platform, a lamp—they were the only ones to get down.

On the Up platform, milk churns clanked.

Bert and his taxi waited.

They looked at each other on the platform in the lamplight.

“Kellings Manor?” Miss Murrin said.

“Yes.”

His accent was almost entirely English.

Almost.

In the taxi, Bert explained about the snow. The lane would be impassable by morning in his opinion. He had seen worse of course. 1927 had been something. The prospect seemed to cheer him up.

Miss Murrin watched the Wiltshire dark.

The man in the brown suit clutched his bag.

Within minutes they were in the lane to the Manor.

Ruddle was at the gatehouse with his lantern.

He raised it as the taxi passed through the gate.

Miss Murrin looked at his face in the lamplight.

Ruddle looked at hers.

Something passed between them that had been waiting eighteen years.

The taxi continued up the drive.

—

The man in the brown suit—who had given his name to Bert as Daniel Sherriff—stood for a moment in the entrance hall with his bag after the housemaid had taken his coat.

Then he went to find the Major.

The study door was locked.

He knocked twice.

“Not until seven,” the Major said from inside.

Sherriff waited a moment.

Then he went upstairs.

There was time.

There was not, in fact, time.

—

Max Morgan had arrived first.

He had taken the earlier train, and Bert had driven him to the house, and told him too about the prospect of snow and the blizzard of 1927.

“Quite cut us off for days. Dreadful,” he said cheerfully.

The Major’s note had reached Morgan’s flat in Dolphin Square in late December.

“You’ll be the son of an old army acquaintance. Discretion essential. I will explain everything this evening.”

The Major had not yet explained anything, but the fee was in the bank, and Morgan could wait. The bit about the son was true.

He spent the afternoon walking the grounds. The kitchen garden. The path to the woods. The pond, not quite frozen at the far end where the lane to the village curved around it. The gatehouse, where Ruddle stood in the doorway. In the stable yard, the Major’s Rover, where it always stood.

The Major had remained in the study for most of the afternoon, emerging only for his bath, run for him at the same time every day. He was a man of regular habits, in his mid-sixties, his moustache in need of a trim, his face furrowed.

“Ah,” he said. “Lionel’s boy. Take a seat in the study. I will be down shortly. Mrs Crouch will bring tea. We’ll talk. Old times, y’know.”

Morgan sat in the leather armchair and studied the room.

The desk. The decanter. A leather-backed blotting pad. A stationery box with paper and envelopes. A brass cylinder with pencils and pens. Two fluted bottles of Quink, one red, one blue-black. A clean brass ashtray with a crest. The January copy of The Field. Regimental photographs. An Ekco wireless set on a stand by the desk. A regimental sword in a display case. A wedding photograph, and a studio portrait of a small boy in a sailor suit.

A grey metal box with a lock on the desk.

Bookshelves—military history, estate management, an old Debrett’s, and between a Concise Oxford Dictionary and a long row of ledgers, a King’s Regulations and Orders for the Army (1912, with 1914/16 Amendments) in faded red.

And one book whose spine was worn almost white.

C Lines and Base Facilities: A Practical Guide to Base Camp Administration, BEF France 1916–1918.

The Major came down from his bath dressed for dinner.

“Ah”, he said. “Good of you to come. Need a man who can be discreet and keep a steady eye. Got some people here. My box. Drawing pin under the desk holds the key on a string. Someone’s been at it. I’ll explain more when everyone’s arrived.”

He went to the desk. He looked at the metal box and rested his hand on it for a moment.

“Spent a good deal of time in this room”, he said. “One way and another.”

He looked at the wedding photograph.

“She would have known what to do”, he said. “Eleanor. She always did.”

He looked at Morgan. The hand on the box trembled slightly.

Then from the hall—Mrs Peckham, announcing herself to the housemaid.

The Major straightened.

“After dinner”, he said. “We’ll talk.”

They did not talk after dinner.
And then it was time for drinks in the drawing room.

Morgan accepted a glass of amontillado.

It wasn’t bad.

And he waited for dinner.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

The guests have arrived at Kellings. The snow is closing in. The Major is in his study and will not be disturbed until seven.

Death Comes to Kellings by Lauden McVey, completed and edited by C. Langley Dunwood, will be published by Barbeque Books. Read more and pre-order [here.]