Leave the Grave Green

Curious in spite of her best intentions, Gemma looked round the room. Some of the little old ladies seated nearby might have been Miss Marple’s clones. The faded prints of their dresses (covered by sensibly wooly cardigans), harmonized with the faded blues and violets of their hair rinses, and their shoes—Gemma’s comfortable flats weren’t even in the same realm of sensibleness as their stout brogues.

What an odd place to appeal to Tommy Godwin, she thought, studying him covertly. She pegged today’s navy jacket as cashmere, his shirt was immaculate pale gray broadcloth, his trousers charcoal and his silk tie a discreetly rich navy and red paisley.

As if reading her mind, he said, “It’s the prewar aura I can’t resist. The Golden Age of British manners—vanished now, much to our loss. I was born during the Blitz, but even during my childhood there were still traces of gentility in English life. Ah, here’s our tea,” he said as the waiter brought a tray to their table. “I’ve ordered Assam to go with the sandwiches—I hope that’s all right—and a pot of Keemun later with the pastries.”

Tea in Gemma’s family had run to Tetley’s Finest teabags, stewed in a tin pot. Not liking to admit that she had never tasted either, she pounced on his previous remark. “You only think that time must have been perfect because you didn’t live it. I imagine the generation between the wars saw Edwardian England as the Golden Age, and probably the Edwardians felt the same way about the Victorians.”

“A good point, my dear,” he said seriously as he poured tea into her cup, “but there was one great difference—the First World War. They had looked into the mouth of hell, and they knew how fragile our hold on civilization really is.” The waiter returned, placing a three-tiered tray on their small table. Finger sandwiches filled the bottom tray, scones the middle, and pastries the top, the crowning touch. “Have a sandwich, my dear,” said Tommy. “The salmon on brown bread is particularly nice.”

He sipped his tea and continued his lecture, a cucumber sandwich poised in his fingers. “It’s fashionable these days to pooh-pooh the Golden Age crime novel as trivial and unrealistic, but that was not the case at all. It was their stand against chaos. The conflicts were intimate, rather than global, and justice, order and retribution always prevailed. They desperately needed that reassurance. Did you know that Britain lost nearly a third of its young men between 1914 and 1918? Yet that war didn’t physically threaten us in the same way as the next—it stayed safely on the European Front.”

Pausing to down half the cucumber sandwich in one bite, he chewed for a moment, then said sadly, “What a waste it must have seemed, the flower of Britain’s manhood lost, with nothing to show for it but some newspaper headlines and politicians’ speeches.” He smiled. “But if you read Christie or Allingham or Sayers, the detective always got his man. And you’ll notice that the detective always operated outside the system—the stories expressed a comforting belief in the validity of individual action.”

“But weren’t the murders always clean and bloodless?” Gemma asked rather impatiently through a mouthful of sandwich. She’d felt too tired and unsettled to eat lunch, and her walk had left her suddenly ravenous.

“Some of them were in fact quite diabolical. Christie was particularly fond of poisoning, and I can think of no less civilized way to commit murder.”

“Are you suggesting that there are civilized methods of murder?” Such as drowning your victim in a convenient river, she thought, wondering at the bizarre turn the conversation seemed to be taking.

“Of course not, my dear, only that I’ve always found the idea of poison especially abhorrent—such suffering and indignity for one person to inflict upon another.”

Gemma drank a little more of her tea. She rolled it around on her tongue, deciding she liked the rich, malty taste. “So you prefer your murders quick and clean, do you, Tommy?”

“I don’t prefer them any way at all, my dear,” he said, glancing up at her as he poured more tea into her cup. He was playing with her, teasing her, she could see it in the suppressed laughter in his eyes.

Time for a little dose of reality, she thought, licking egg salad from her fingertips. “I’ve always thought drowning would be quite horrible myself. Giving in at last to that desperate need to draw air into the lungs, then choking, struggling, until unconsciousness comes as a blessed relief.”

Tommy Godwin sat quite still, watching her, his hands relaxed on the tabletop. What beautiful hands he had, thought Gemma, the fingers long and slender, the nails perfectly kept. She found quite inconceivable the idea of him fighting like a common ruffian, using those hands to choke and squeeze, or perhaps to hold a thrashing body under water.