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Fall of Angels: Inspector Redfyre Mystery #1 (An Inspector Redfyre Mystery, Band 1) - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 2: An Inspector Redfyre Mystery

Cleverly, Barbara

 
9781616958763: Fall of Angels: Inspector Redfyre Mystery #1 (An Inspector Redfyre Mystery, Band 1)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1616958766 ISBN 13: 9781616958763
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Barbara Cleverly, bestselling author of the Joe Sandilands series, introduces an ingenious new sleuth who navigates 1920s Cambridge, a European intellectual capital on the cusp of dramatic change.

England 1923: Detective Inspector John Redfyre is a godsend to the Cambridge CID. The ancient university city is at war with itself: town versus gown, male versus female, press versus the police force and everyone versus the undergraduates. Redfyre, young, handsome and capable, is a survivor of the Great War. Born and raised among the city’s colleges, he has access to the educated élite who run these institutions, a society previously deemed impenetrable by local law enforcement.
 
When Redfyre’s Aunt Hetty hands him a front-row ticket to the year’s St. Barnabas College Christmas concert, he is looking forward to a right merrie yuletide noyse from a trumpet soloist, accompanied by the organ. He is intrigued to find that the trumpet player is—scandalously—a young woman. And Juno Proudfoot is a beautiful and talented one at that. Such choice of a performer is unacceptable in conservative academic circles.
 
Redfyre finds himself anxious throughout a performance in which Juno charms and captivates her audience, and his unease proves well founded when she tumbles headlong down a staircase after curtainfall. He finds evidence that someone carefully planned her death. Has her showing provoked a dangerous, vengeful woman-hater to take action?
 
When more Cambridge women are murdered, Redfyre realizes that some of his dearest friends and his family may become targets, and—equally alarmingly—that the killer might be within his own close circle.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Cleverly was born in the north of England and is a graduate of Durham University. A former teacher, she has spent her working life in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk; she now lives in Cambridge. She is the author of thirteen books in the Joe Sandilands series, including The Last Kashmiri Rose, The Blood Royal, Not My Blood, A Spider in the Cup, Enter Pale Death, and Diana’s Altar.

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CHAPTER 1
CAMBRIDGE, DECEMBER 1923

“Hello? Detective Inspector Redfyre, Cambridge CID here.”
     “There you are, Johnny!”
     John Redfyre flinched. He eased the receiver an inch from his ear to take the edge off the hunting-field halloo of his favourite old relative and looked at his wristwatch. He smiled. Halfway between tea and the first gin, he might well have expected the caller to be Aunt Henrietta.
      “I can’t deny it, Aunt Hetty. You find me here in my foxhole. Had I gone missing?”
     His voice was warm, his tone light. Redfyre’s answer to any swords and lances coming in his direction was always to raise, not a shield, but two defiant fingers and skip away fast. He’d learned to greet Fate with a flirtatious smile, Adversity with a kick in the shins and his Aunt’s summons with a hearty riposte. Family circumstances had forged his resilience, he believed. As the youngest of four boys of a family fallen on hard times—and not only the youngest, but the handsomest—he’d endured a childhood to rival any Biblical tale of family disharmony. He could have told Joseph where he’d gone wrong. He could have given a few pointers to the Prodigal Son.
     He accepted that he was never to lead the easy aristocratic life of his forebears owing to birth order and postwar austerity, but there was one aspect of a privileged situation he still guiltily yearned for, and Hetty’s call had triggered that yearning. On the occasions when she demanded his attention, he felt the need of a butler. Some suave old chap like his father’s Simpson. A man who would purr blandly: “I’m so sorry, Madam. I regret the master is not at home. He is on his way to a Masonic meeting, I believe,” whilst his master, in slippers and dressing gown, sat grinning shamelessly at him from his armchair.
     Bloody telephone! Convenient for professional purposes, but he rather resented the social intrusion of the apparatus into his home. Anyone with access to one of these evil instruments could command his attention at a whim and the communication could not be avoided by crossing the road, affecting a sore throat or inventing an urgent engagement. Yes, here, indeed, was the Detective Inspector, caught in an unbuttoned state, glass of whisky in one hand, Sporting Life in the other at the end of a gruelling day—and no protective Simpson about the place to deny access. Not on a DI’s salary.
     Redfyre accepted the inevitable. He expressed his very real regard for his aunt and voiced his surprise that she should be troubling to speak to him by means of this inhuman device. A threepenny bus ride or a two-bob taxi fare and she could have been with him in person, pouring out her problems while he poured out a London gin and added a slug of Rose’s Lime Juice. A bit of swift work with the ice pick and he could promise a tinkle of ice shards against the Waterford glass and . . . “There’s still time,” he added temptingly.
      “Tinkling ice, eh? So there’s one piece of modern equipment you don’t disdain? Always a lure, of course, but, on this occasion, ice won’t do the trick.”
      “Ah! Like me, Aunt Hetty, you’ve loosened your stays and settled into your evening?”
     His aunt suppressed a gurgle, then gathered herself for the attack. “Now, I have to tell you that your despised telephone is bringing you a delightful offer. Let’s do diaries, darling. Ready? I’m looking at Friday evening. Are you free?”
      “The day-after-tomorrow-Friday? That the one? Hmm . . .”
     She’d caught him on the hop again. Pinned him to the page. There were several things he’d been planning in a vague way to do when his shift ended, involving a jar of ale and congenial conversation—possibly an Oscar Wilde play on the wireless—but none would survive a bald statement over the phone. He’d always found it a more fiendishly accurate revealer of the barefaced lie than the newfangled lie-detector machines he’d been experimenting with. Blood pressure pulses be damned! It was voice tremors they should be calibrating. However hard he stared, his Friday evening slot remained inconveniently blank.
      “I’m free, Aunt,” he admitted.
      “Excellent! Then ink this in at once. I have tickets for a concert you will not want to miss. I find I can’t use them—your uncle’s gout again—so I’m leaving one for you at the ticket desk. Just up your street, you’ll find. It’s a Christmas concert in one of the college chapels, St. Barnabas. Welcoming in the festive season with a blast of traditional music. Mince pies and hot punch in the interval. No pink-faced choir boys—just two soloists. Organ and trumpet . . . Oh, you know, the usual gaggle of Germans—Haydn, Hummel, Bach of course and a bit of Orlando Gibbons batting for England perhaps . . . that sort of thing. Don’t worry, you will absolutely not be called on to sing along,” she added hastily. “It’s an early start—six o’clock for two hours, so you’ll still have time for something of an evening and an early night.”
     But Redfyre was suspicious by nature, especially of Aunt Hetty bearing gifts. He broke into her chatter. “Did you say you had two tickets? Are you expecting me to rustle up an organ-loving chum?” He added provokingly, “At such short notice?”
      “That won’t be necessary, my dear. I’ve already allocated the other one to someone who jumped at the chance. Someone you may remember from your childhood. You’ll be sitting next to Earwig.”
      “I’m sorry, Aunt, I didn’t quite make that out. Do you know, for a moment I thought you said ‘Earwig’! Ho, ho!” He shook the receiver and applied it to his other ear. “Ah! How do you spell that? E-A-D-W-I-G? Eadwig? Mmm . . . Close enough. An Anglo-Saxon acquaintance, would that be? A newly discovered Norwegian branch of the family?”
      “No—English. The Strettons. Don’t pretend you don’t know them. You’ve met them all. Well-to-do family. They own much of the view to the south from the top of St. Mary’s tower, which allows them to indulge their artistic compulsions. Very artycrafty, you’ll have noticed. He paints rather badly; she pots
rather well. All their children were given Anglo-Saxon names: Aethelwulf, Aethelstan, Aelfhelm, Godric and Eadwig . . . Very fashionable twenty, thirty years ago. And now they’re all out in the world, of course.”
     Redfyre groaned. “Now I’m beginning to recall the faces that go with the names. Out in the world, you say? Surprised to hear that! I’d have expected behind bars. And the place, their country seat—Melford wasn’t it? Just south of Cambridge? We used to be sent over to play with them there when we were little.”
      “That’s right. You were quite a favourite with Clarissa, I recall. She preferred your quiet, sunny nature to the rumbustious indiscipline of her own brood. And who wouldn’t? Though perhaps it was ill-judged...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616958766
ISBN 13 
9781616958763
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland