The Marlow Murder Club: A Novel

Praise for Robert Thorogood

Very funny and dark with great pace. I love Robert Thorogood’s writing.

—Peter James, New York Times bestselling author

This is a gem.

—Daily Express

Deftly entertaining…satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie–style buttons.

—Independent

For fans of Agatha Christie.

—Mail on Sunday

A treat.

—Radio Times

This brilliantly crafted, hugely enjoyable, and suitably goose bump–inducing novel is an utter delight from start to finish.

—Heat

Also by Robert Thorogood

A Meditation on Murder

The Killing of Polly Carter

Death Knocks Twice

Murder in the Caribbean

For Katie B

Copyright © 2021, 2022 by Robert Thorogood

Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks

Cover design © HQ 2021, Charlotte Phillips

Internal design by Holli Roach/Sourcebooks

Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

sourcebooks.com

Originally published as The Marlow Murder Club in 2021 in Great Britain by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. This edition issued based on the hardcover edition published in 2021 in Great Britain by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thorogood, Robert, author.

Title: The Marlow Murder Club : a novel / Robert Thorogood.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021037059 (print) | LCCN 2021037060 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Thrillers (Fiction)

Classification: LCC PR6120.H6775 M37 2021 (print) | LCC PR6120.H6775 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037059

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037060

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Reading Group Guide

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter 1

Mrs. Judith Potts was seventy-seven years old and entirely happy with her life. She lived in an Arts and Crafts mansion on the River Thames, she had a job she loved that took up just enough of her time and no more, and best of all, she didn’t have to share her life with any man. This meant there was no one asking her what was for dinner that night, or wanting to know where she was going every time she left the house, or moaning that she was spending too much money on whisky, a small glass of which she’d have at about 6:00 p.m. each evening.

On the day Judith’s life changed, it was the height of summer and England had been in the grip of a heat wave for weeks. She’d kept all of her windows open to capture whatever breezes blew down the valley, but it seemed to make no difference. The heat of the sun had gotten into the bricks and timbers of her home into the oak staircase and minstrels’ gallery.

After taking her evening meal in front of the television news, she put her empty plate to one side and got out the latest copy of Puzzler magazine. She turned to a logic grid and started to work on it. Usually, she enjoyed reducing the language of the clues down to mathematical ones and zeros, but tonight her heart just wasn’t in it. It was too hot to concentrate.

Judith’s hand idly went to the key she kept on a chain around her neck, and her thoughts began to drift into the past, into a much darker time. She shot up from her chair. This wouldn’t do, she told herself. Wouldn’t do at all. There was always something else she could do to keep herself busy. She needed a change of scene, that was all, and she had the perfect solution.

Judith began to take off her clothes. With each garment she removed, she felt more and more released from the stifling constraints of the day. By the time she was naked, she was buzzing with an impish delight. She crossed the hallway, past the Blüthner grand piano she only ever played when she was really very drunk, and took up a dark-gray woolen cape she kept by the front door. Judith’s cape was her most treasured possession. She’d tell anyone who asked, and many did, it kept her warm in winter, served as a picnic blanket in the summer, and she could pull it over her head if ever she was caught in a spring shower.

Best of all, Judith believed it was a cloak of invisibility. Every evening, come rain or shine, she’d take off her clothes, wrap the cape around herself, and step out of her house feeling a delicious frisson of naughtiness. She would plunge her feet into a pair of ancient rain boots and stride through the knee-high grass—swish, swish, swish!—to her boathouse. Like the rest of Judith’s house, it was pink-bricked, timber-framed, and somewhat crumbling.

Judith entered the cobwebby darkness and kicked off her rain boots. She hung her cape on an old hook, and, still hidden from the outside world by a pair of ancient boathouse doors, stepped down the stone slipway and into the Thames.

It was almost a religious experience for her, accepting the cold water onto her skin, and she exhaled with a whoosh as she leaned forward into the embrace of the river. Suddenly she was weightless, supported by the soft water that felt like silk to her body.

She swam upstream, the evening sunshine flashing diamonds on the water all around. Judith smiled to herself. She always smiled to herself when she was out swimming. She couldn’t help it. After all, there might be dog walkers on the Thames Path, and there were very definitely plenty of people in the near distance as she looked at the spire of a church and the span of the Victorian suspension bridge that linked the town to the neighboring village of Bisham. None of these people were aware there was a seventy-seven-year-old woman swimming nearby entirely in the nude.

It was just as Judith was thinking, This is the life, she heard a shout.

It came from the opposite riverbank, from somewhere near her neighbor Stefan Dunwoody’s house. But from her position low in the water, it was hard for Judith to see exactly what was going on. Only the roof of Stefan’s house was visible above the thick bank of bulrushes at the edge of the river.

Judith strained her ears, but all was quiet. She decided it must have been an animal. A dog or a fox maybe.

And then she heard a man’s voice call out, Hey, no!

What on earth was that?

Stefan, is that you? Judith called from the river, but her words were cut short by the sharp retort of a gunshot.

Stefan? she shouted again, panic rising. Are you all right?

All was silence. But Judith knew what she’d heard. Someone had fired a gun, hadn’t they? And Stefan’s voice had called out immediately beforehand. What if he was now bleeding from a bullet wound and needed saving?

Judith swam toward Stefan’s house as fast as she could, but as she reached his riverbank, she realized she had a problem. Beyond the bulrushes, Stefan had put corrugated metal across the span of his lawn to protect it from river erosion. Judith knew swimming through the rushes would cut her body to shreds, and even if she made it to land, she wouldn’t be able to pull herself out. She wouldn’t have the strength.

Ahead of her she could see a blue canoe wedged in among the reeds. Could she somehow use it to help lever her body out of the water? She tried to grab hold of the end, but she couldn’t get a proper grip. It kept bobbing around like a cork, and she realized she didn’t have the balance to climb up onto the canoe anyway. But she gave it one last go, and this time just about managed to pull herself up onto the back of it. And then, oh so slowly, she and the canoe barrel-rolled over, and she lost her hold and fell back into the water with an ungainly splash.

She came up for air and shook the water from her hair. The canoe was out of the question, so what else could she do?

Judith swam back to the center of the river, desperately looking for someone who could help. Where were the dog walkers or canoodling couples when you needed them? She couldn’t see anyone. There was only one thing for it. She turned and swam for home as fast as she could.

Reaching her boathouse, Judith climbed out of the water, wheezing, but there was no time to lose. She threw on her cape and strode out onto the lawn, turning back to look at what she could see of Stefan’s house. Only half of his garden was visible behind the weeping willow that grew unchecked on her side of the riverbank.

She ran into her house, grabbed up her phone, and dialed 999. As she waited for the call to connect, she moved over to the bay window to keep an eye on Stefan’s property.

I need the police! Judith said as soon as the call was answered. There’s been a shooting at my neighbor’s house! Hurry! Someone’s been shot!

The operator took down the details of Stefan’s address, recorded what Judith had seen, informed her the emergency services would be on their way, and then ended the call. Judith felt deeply frustrated. Surely there was something else she could do, or someone else she could phone? What about the Coast Guard? It was a waterside catastrophe after all. Or the RNLI?

Judith peered out of her window at Stefan’s property. It was still sitting there, apparently innocently, in the evening sunshine.

If anyone had been out on the river at that precise moment and had had occasion to look up at Judith’s mansion, they’d have seen a very short and comfortably plump woman in her late seventies with wild gray hair standing entirely naked in her bay window, a cape over her shoulders as if she were some kind of a superhero. Which in many ways she was.

She just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter 2

Half an hour later, Judith saw a police car arrive at Stefan’s property and a uniformed police officer get out. Judith tried as best she could to keep her binoculars trained on him as he looked in through the windows of Stefan’s house and took a wander through the garden. She wanted to bellow across the river that the man should jolly well look harder, but she bit her tongue. She had to believe he knew what he was doing, and he’d find evidence of whatever it was that had happened.

However, after twenty minutes of what Judith could only describe as a cursory search, the police officer returned to his car, got in, and drove away.

Was that it? The man had barely explored the garden, and he’d not even entered Stefan’s house. Perhaps he’d gone to get reinforcements? So she kept on looking. And looking.

At midnight, Judith discovered there was no more whisky in the decanter on the little table to her side. That was always a sign to go to bed. As she woozily ascended the heavy oak staircase, she found she had to hold on to the banister a bit more tightly than normal. She then turned left to go to her bedroom when her bedroom was really on her right, but once she’d corrected her course via a brief tangle with a recalcitrant aspidistra, she safely made her destination.

Judith adored her bedroom. The wood panels were painted light green, and there was a majestic four-poster bed with a tapestry of a medieval hunting scene as its canopy. That the room was covered in old clothes, half-finished meals, and piles of discarded newspapers and magazines didn’t bother her one jot. Judith never noticed the mess. In fact, she let it encompass her in the same way she let the river embrace her when she went swimming. The messier her bedroom, the more she felt cocooned and safe.

The following morning, Judith was woken by the sound of the phone ringing. She reached for it, blearily seeing it had just gone 10:00 a.m.

Hello, she croaked.

Good morning, an efficient female voice said. My name’s Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik from the Maidenhead Police Station. I’m following up on the incident you reported at Mr. Dunwoody’s property last night.

Ah, thank you for calling, Judith said, still somewhat groggily.

The detective sergeant explained she’d sent a constable to inspect Mr. Dunwoody’s house and garden. He’d not found anything of note, so she was ringing to inform Judith there was nothing to worry about.

But I know what I heard! Judith said.

Yes, the report said you heard a gunshot.

"Not just a gunshot. I heard someone call out something like, ‘Hey, no!’ and then I heard the gunshot."

But I understand you were swimming in the river at the time. Are you sure it was in fact a gunshot?

Judith was now fully awake and thoroughly irritated. I grew up on a farm. I know what a gun sounds like.

But what if it was something else?

Like what?

Well, for example, maybe it was a car backfiring?

This hadn’t occurred to Judith. She thought for a moment before answering. No. I’m sure I’d have known if it were a car. It was a gunshot. I take it this constable of yours reported that Stefan’s car is still parked at his house?

Why do you mention that?

Because I presume Stefan didn’t answer his phone when you called him, did he?

No, I’m sorry, I can’t quite follow your line of thought there. What phone call?

You must have phoned him last night.

I’m afraid I’m not allowed to share specific details with you.

"But a neighbor reports a shooting at a house, of course you phoned to check up on him. And the fact you haven’t told me he answered suggests to me he didn’t answer. So, seeing as his car is still in his driveway, well, that tells me something’s up with him. After all, if you’re at home, you answer your phone. If you’re away, you take your car. At least someone who owned a car would. I don’t."

Detective Sergeant Malik didn’t respond immediately. You’ve really thought this through, she eventually said.

It’s all I could think about last night. I was so worried for Stefan. What if he’s been shot, and the gunman’s escaped? In fact, what if Stefan is right now lying bleeding in a ditch?

I don’t think he’s lying in a ditch. I’m sure there’s some very innocent explanation for all of this. There wasn’t any indication at his property that anything untoward had happened, and it’s not unusual for someone to ignore their phone. It’s a holiday season. People are away. I’m sure Mr. Dunwoody will turn up in the next few days. And the moment he does, I’ll let you know. Really, there’s nothing to worry about.

DS Malik ended the call by thanking Judith for being such a civic-minded neighbor and then rung off.

Afterward, Judith lay in bed not knowing what to do. Was DS Malik right? Was there in fact a far more innocent explanation for what she’d heard the night before? After all, Judith knew one thing for sure: murders just didn’t happen in Marlow.

She decided to put the matter from her mind and get on with her work for the day.

When Judith had inherited her house from her great aunt Betty in 1976, she’d also received a portfolio of shares that provided her with a modest income, so she didn’t have much need to work for a living, but nothing would have ever made Judith give up her job. She loved it too much.

Judith compiled crosswords for the national newspapers. She set two or three a week, and the hours she spent each day working on the puzzles were a cherished refuge for her mind. When she was setting a crossword, a calm descended over her, and she could lose herself for whole stretches of time as she carefully worked through all the permutations of a particularly satisfying anagram or considered an elegant phrase or word that could be interpreted in more than one way.

Judith crossed her drawing room to the card table by the bay window and smoothed down the green baize with her hand. Next, she reached up to a shelf and pulled down a sheet of squared mathematical paper. She then chose a 2B pencil from a mug of 2B pencils, and even though it didn’t need sharpening, she pushed the pencil into her metal desk sharpener. It gripped the end, the old electric motor clattering as it spun, and the pencil Judith removed a few seconds later wasn’t so much a writing implement as a lethal weapon.

Judith smiled to herself. A fresh pencil. The empty squares on the paper in front of her. The fight ahead.

Sitting down, she picked up her wooden ruler and began to mark out a fifteen-by-fifteen grid of squares. Next, she shaded in a pattern of darker squares around a single line of symmetry, so each darker square had a twin reflected on the right. There wasn’t any particular pattern she followed; it was mostly her many decades of experience that guided her hand.

Once she had marked out her grid, all she had to do was fill in the blank spaces with words. This, she knew, would take her the next hour or so, and only once she was happy she had an interesting collection of words intersecting with each other would she turn her mind finally to creating the clues.

As for the types of clues she liked to set, she eschewed the willful opacity favored by many setters, most famously represented by the near-impossible monthly puzzle that used to appear in the Listener magazine. She felt there was something a bit too male about how they tried to show off how very clever they were. Look at me, they seemed to be saying, you’ll never guess how brilliant I am. Instead, like many setters, she aligned herself with the principles of Ximenes, the legendary setter for the Observer newspaper from 1939 to 1972. Accordingly, her clues had to have two halves, the literal clue on one side, the riddle on the other. And the two halves had ultimately to play fair with the solver, with the small caveat if a clue was ingenious or witty enough, she was prepared on occasion to break the rules.

This morning, however, the muse wasn’t with Judith. Having created her square of blocks and blanks, she couldn’t settle on the correct words with which to fill the grid. She lacked all decisiveness. It was Stefan, she knew. She couldn’t concentrate. She had to know he was okay.

Judith reached for her tablet computer. She didn’t much like the device, but it was useful for photographing and then emailing in her crosswords to the papers, so she’d come to terms with it some years ago.

She held it up to her face, but the stupid machine refused to unlock, claiming it didn’t recognize her. Judith harrumphed, once again cursing at the indignities of being an older woman. The modern world treated her as though she were entirely invisible, and even her own bloody computer criticized her for not looking suitably like herself. But there was no point trying to fight with technology. Judith had learned that a long time ago in an incident that had involved a strawberry-colored iMac, an electric cable that wasn’t quite long enough, and a trip to Accident and Emergency.

Judith took a deep breath and composed herself.

She held the tablet up and looked at it again.

Nothing happened.

Bloody thing! Muttering to herself, Judith entered the passcode and then opened her web browser. Maybe there’d been some news about Stefan in the last twenty-four hours?

She typed Stefan Dunwoody into the search bar, but all of the hits told her he owned an art gallery called Dunwoody Arts in Marlow, a fact she already knew. But she wanted to be thorough, so she clicked through the pages of results.

Although, what was this? One of the later results was a link to a web page from a local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press. It was the headline that caught her attention: BUST-UP AT HENLEY REGATTA.

Clicking the link, she found herself reading a diary piece from a roundup of the Henley Royal Regatta, six weeks before.

Word reaches us that Stefan Dunwoody, local art gallery owner, got into a tipsy dispute in the Royal Enclosure with Elliot Howard, owner of the Marlow Auction House. According to our little birdie, when Mr. Howard threatened to punch Mr. Dunwoody, the stewards were called, and both men were forcibly ejected.

Judith put her tablet down. So, Stefan had gotten into a drunken altercation at Henley with someone called Elliot Howard, and here he was, only a few short weeks later, and there’d been another row of some sort on his property.

A set-to where someone had fired a gun.

And then Stefan had subsequently vanished.

Sod this for a game of soldiers, Judith thought as she strode across the room, swept up her cloak from its peg, and left the house.

She went down to her boathouse, approached an old punt that was half in and half out of the water, and gave it a shove with her foot. She stepped up onto the back of it and grabbed the punting pole as the front of the boat bumped through the rotten boathouse doors and slipped out onto the river.

Despite her advanced years, Judith was an expert punter. With a flick of her wrists, she thrust the pole down into the riverbed, bent at the waist, and pushed with all her might. As the punt shot forward, she twisted the pole up and out of the soft mud, and the boat had the momentum to cross the river.

Once she reached the further bank and the river was shallow again, it was no effort to punt upstream the fifty or so yards to Stefan’s house, use the prow of the punt to penetrate the wall of reeds that protected his riverbank, and step up onto his land. She didn’t need to secure the boat. Entirely surrounded by bulrushes, it wasn’t going anywhere.

Checking her watch, Judith could see that just over eight minutes ago, she’d been sitting in her house, and now here she was, at the sharp end of her neighbor’s mysterious disappearance.

Stefan’s house was really rather splendid to Judith’s mind. It was a converted water mill with a wooden wheel that still turned lazily, but differently sized rectangular glass windows had subsequently been cut into the building. It was both pleasingly old-fashioned and modern at the same time.

She went and looked at Stefan’s car in the driveway. Judith knew nothing about cars and cared even less, so all she could tell was it was gray in color, and it was gleaming, not a spot of dirt on it anywhere. She could see no other tire tracks in the gravel or any other clues that suggested that perhaps Stefan had left the house in a different vehicle.

She went for a walk around the garden, trying to work out where the sound of the gunshot might have come from, but it was hard to place herself accurately when her only reference point was from a position in the river below the height of the bulrushes.

In fact, it took only a few minutes of walking around and inspecting the reed bed by the riverbank for Judith to realize she didn’t even know what she was looking for. A drop of blood on a blade of grass? A muddy footprint?

Judith looked at the wooden wheel turning on the side of the house and the millpond in front of it. Despite the heat of the day, the water here was dark, and Judith shivered at the thought of it. There was something about still bodies of water that spooked her. Although, as she looked, she could see the water wasn’t quite still. There was a slight current tugging at the surface. Where was the water going?

Judith walked around the edge of the pond until she saw it fed into a river that was about ten feet across. Where the millpond ended and the river began, there was a narrow brick causeway that crossed from one side of the garden to the other.

Judith considered the river beyond the dam. It had to feed back into the Thames somehow. But it was hard to see exactly how, as Stefan had allowed this section of the garden to grow wild, and the water soon slipped under dense shrubs and bushes that crowded in from both banks.

With a sigh, Judith realized she’d have to follow the course of the river. She had to be thorough. So she pushed her way through the bushes, branches whipping her body, cobwebs sticking to her face and hair as she struggled to the other side.

Once there, Judith was disappointed. It was even wilder in this corner of the garden, but she