The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (3 page)

I returned to London with a violent cold and horrible memories of my headlong flight down the hill and into the first cottage I saw. The search party had no difficulty finding Tommy Price, in spite of my incoherent directions; apparently she had stumbled into a well-known bog, not deep but treacherous all the same. More than a few ponies had lost their footing there and tired themselves out trying to get free.

Even in London, I could not stop thinking about Tommy Price and Constance Root. Had it been Tommy who drove past me so quickly in the car? Why had Miss Root said Tommy was going to Burma when she was only out on the moors for a walk? That disapproval Miss Root had worn so plainly on her wrinkled face—was that envy? Or hatred? Perhaps she was jealous that Tommy Price’s books were appearing in print again, that she was receiving public attention. But could she have been envious enough to kill Tommy? Would a woman in her eighties have the strength to push Tommy into a bog? And how would Constance have gotten Tommy up there in the first place?

Of course, the oddest thing was that when the constable came to Tommy Price’s cottage to inform Miss Root of the sad news, she was not in. A note pinned to the back door canceled her milk delivery for an indefinite time. The car was gone.

“And she never came back,” said Mrs. Droppington when I rang her a week later. “It’s created an awful confusion here. You see, Miss Price left everything to Miss Root in her will, just like Miss Root left everything to Miss Price. Who’s going to get it if Miss Root doesn’t come back? I’m over there watering the plants every other day, but I can’t do that forever.”

I had a sudden image of Constance strolling among the golden pagodas of upper Burma. Could she have decided to do away with Tommy and to steal her plane ticket? The likeliest way for Tommy to enter Burma was to fly from London to Calcutta or Bangkok, then switch to a smaller plane and fly on to Rangoon. A few phone calls told me that a Miss Constance Root, not a Miss Edith Price, had booked a round-trip ticket with Air India to Calcutta on December 2, but that she hadn’t used it.

That didn’t mean that Miss Root hadn’t murdered Tommy Price and taken quite a different flight. Perhaps Miss Root
had
been planning to flee to Burma after the murder and only my unlooked-for arrival had stopped her. However, for someone who had just murdered a woman and was preparing to escape to Burma, Miss Root had not seemed particularly agitated during my visit. Cold-bloodedness seemed much more likely to have been a characteristic of Tommy Price than of Constance Root.

I recalled a favorite passage from
To the Top of the Very Top
:

James lay there, stiff as a corpse on a mortuary slab.

“Frozen, poor old sod,” I said to my companions.

They were silent, struck with icy horror—James was the first of our party to die—who would be next?

“Well, don’t just stand there,” I said gruffly. “We’ll never get him down the mountain. We’ll have to bury him here, in the snow, on the side of Mount Ktchnqhtl. Yes, he’d like that, I know. James was a brave chap, a climber till the end.”

Yes, it seemed far more plausible that Tommy Price, with her nerves of steel and her tough, resilient old body—hardened by years of trekking, sailing, and camel-riding—would be able to kill fragile Miss Root. But the motives for such a murder seemed even less clear. Why would Tommy, basking in the fame of rediscovery, decide to bump off her old companion, who perhaps had been her lover once, or least a good friend? Were there tensions between them that Tommy’s sudden return to notoriety had inflamed? But if so, why didn’t Tommy, with her vast acquaintance around the world, just leave? Why
didn’t
she take that trip to Pagan?

I kept remembering the tweed cap floating on the green scum of the bog. After evading bandits and mercenaries and surviving frostbite and shipwrecks, what an inglorious end, to die face down in a pool of water.

It struck me as curious that I couldn’t remember ever seeing a photograph of Tommy Price. Not in any of her books, not in the interviews that had recently been published. I called an editor I knew at Harridan Press, which was reprinting Tommy’s travel books, and asked Gillian if she had an author photograph.

“My dear,” said Gillian. “I never even
met
Tommy Price. We corresponded by post and the odd phone call. She said her health was too bad to come to London, that she never travelled any more.”

“What did her voice sound like?”

“Nothing special, rather low and pleasant, not particularly quavery, if you know what I mean.”

That was Constance’s voice all right; but it could also have been Tommy Price’s.

“What’s this all about, anyway?” asked Gillian.

“Oh, just curiosity. I was supposed to meet her, but it didn’t work out. I’m sorry, that’s all.”

“Well I think she had a dashed good pop-off,” said Gillian. “Terribly dramatic, don’t you think, to sink like a stone into a bog on Dartmoor? We’re changing the back cover copy on the next two reprints.”

I went to the British Library and found all Tommy’s books. Not a single one had a photograph inside or out, though there were plenty of drawings of Tommy in burnooses, chaps, and snow parkas with fur around the face. I couldn’t help being struck, as I flipped through the different volumes, by how very many disguises she had assumed. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t want her photograph taken.

Or perhaps there was another reason.

I called Mrs. Droppington again.

“This might seem an odd question, Mrs. Droppington, but did you ever actually
see
Tommy Price?”

“Of course. What do you mean? That is, when she was at the cottage, which wasn’t very often; that is, I suppose she was gone for stretches at a time; that is, I do remember seeing photographs of her as a girl when her brother lived in the cottage.”

There was a lengthy pause, and then Mrs. Droppington said thoughtfully, “Do you know, my dear, you’ve set me thinking. It’s a curious thing, but I am really not so sure after all that I did ever see Tommy Price all that much. Ever since Tommy took over the cottage and Constance came to stay, I suppose it’s Constance I’ve seen. I knew from what Constance said that Tommy was often travelling. Constance would come into the greengrocers and say, ‘Tommy’s just back from Tanzania and says she absolutely must have sprouts for luncheon.’”

“But you couldn’t exactly say what Tommy Price looked like?”

“I often saw her from a distance,” said Mrs. Droppington. “Tommy loved to walk, you know. She was always striding across the moors, with her cap and walking stick. Quite a distinctive walk,” Mrs. Droppington went on, gaining confidence. “Not at all like Miss Root’s, which was so…feminine.”

I had a theory, which might be hard to prove, that Constance Root and Tommy Price were the same woman. That Tommy Price, with her love of disguise, had invented a kind of alter ego in Miss Root. After all, the two of them hadn’t moved to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor until the 1970s, some years after Tommy Price’s books had gone out of print.

I imagined Tommy to be a proud woman, one who would find it difficult to admit that because of age and money she could no longer travel so easily, nor, if she did, write about it in a way that anyone would find interesting. She didn’t want to retire as Tommy Price and have people say that she used to be a famous traveller, so she came up with Constance Root, a proper English lady, who could live on very little, yet still, with her stories of Tommy Price’s adventures, keep her past myth alive. When the books began to be reissued, Tommy Price must have been thrilled at first, and then increasingly worried that her secret would be revealed. Hence the ban on photographs. She didn’t want anyone from the village seeing the face of Tommy Price in the newspaper and saying, “But isn’t that our Miss Root from Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor?”

The strain must have been too much for her, so that she had decided to do away with herself. Which was why no one had seen Constance after Tommy’s death and why the plane ticket hadn’t been used.

Of course, such a theory had its soft spots. Why the camera-shy, reclusive Tommy had invited me to Dartmoor on the day before her suicide was the largest of them.

I travelled to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor in the same way as before, by train to Exeter and then by hired car to the village. But this time I came very late at night. I parked my car in the village and, all in black, with only a flashlight, I walked quickly to the familiar cottage.

The wind whistled through the moonlit night. I tried not to think about Wisht Hounds and pixies. With tools I had borrowed from a friend in London whose East End family dabbled in the burglary trade, I let myself in the front door of the cottage.

It looked the same as it had two weeks ago when I had visited: the same old-fashioned furniture, dustier now, the same book-lined sitting room, illumined through the windows by moonlight. I went into the sitting room and let my flashlight play along the spines of all those wonderful old titles. Tommy Price hadn’t been the only woman writing books in the 1930s. There had been Olive Chapman with
Across Lapland with Sledge and Reindeer
; and Rosita Forbes with
Unconducted Wanders and Adventures: Being a Gipsy Salad: Some Incidents, Excitements and Impressions of Twelve, Highly-Seasoned Years
. I wondered what had happened to those writers. I knew that sometimes a traveller only took one huge trip and then retired in triumph to dine off stories of savages or sultans forever—and that sometimes she kept going, year after year, like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, drawn to hardship and adventure long past the age when most women were settling down to crocheting and gardening. What a shame that Tommy Price hadn’t had the courage to admit to her double life. She was never going to enjoy the acclaim now she so richly deserved. I couldn’t help taking down the volume of
Bound for Greenland
. I had always loved its description of the end of the voyage. Softly I read aloud:

I always considered myself a seaman of the first order, and it never occurred to me that my experience of the sea had been confined to tranquil oceans farther south, azure and emerald playgrounds for dolphins and humpback whales. This was a sea of ice floes as enormous as New York skyscrapers and vast swells the size of Himalayan mountains. Our ship had buckled and almost broken more than once; everything on the decks not tied down had been swept away and shards of glass and ceramic littered the galley where the cupboards had been forced open. But now it was over, now the small band of us stood on the deck, on the mercifully horizontal deck, as Greenland, great Greenland, land of Eskimos and Vikings, land of ice mountains and majestic peoples, came into view. Thank God we were approaching land. At last.

“I always rather liked that passage myself,” said a voice from the hall, a low pleasant voice, not at all quavery.

I was so stunned that I dropped the book and flashed my light every way but the right one.

“I wrote it, you know,” the voice continued. “I wrote all those books. We thought it was a lark at first, Tommy and I. We would go to the British Library and look up information, or we’d talk to people who really had been to those places. Then we’d go back to our small flat in Bayswater and I’d use all my powers of imagination. It was a lark, but it also paid the bills. Times were hard then.”

“So you’ve never been to any of these places?” I sat down in a lump on the sofa, hardly able to take it in.

Constance Root advanced into the sitting room and sat down opposite me. The moonlight gave the room an unearthly cast, but I could see her clearly. Her thin face was tired, yet I noticed she was wearing trousers and a heavy sweater and looked stronger than I remembered.

“We were poor as church mice. How could we travel?”

“Why did you use just Tommy’s name?”

“My family was more respectable than Tommy’s, you see. My father was a vicar in Somerset, and I had five brothers and sisters. They never would have let me go off to Australia on my own, much less Greenland. Tommy had just her brother, who retired from his job in Exeter to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. He was much older than Tommy and thought she was rather wild and boyish. It seemed perfectly plausible to him that his sister would spend all her time exploring foreign places.”

I was still trying to take it in. “And your publishers? Didn’t they ever check?”

“You must remember, my dear, that in those days there was no television and rather less general knowledge of what places looked like. Tommy found she loved acting the part of intrepid explorer, and our publishers loved it, too. Periodically she’d dress up in khaki and tall leather boots with a riding jacket and a tweed cap and swagger into the staid old office of Chatham and Son with a new manuscript. She refused to have her photograph in the books and, on my suggestion, said she always travelled incognito, in disguise. That was to prevent people in the countries we wrote about from realizing that she had never been there.”

“But after the books were successful, didn’t you have any desire to actually travel to foreign places?”

“Tommy did,” said Constance. “But my thought was that neither of us would be able to take the kind of chances I took in the travel books, and that if by any chance we were exposed, it would mean the end of a rather lucrative career.”

“I thought for a while that you and Tommy Price were the same person,” I said slowly. “And that Tommy had created you as a kind of alter ego, someone to stay at home while she explored the world.”

“You could just as easily say that I created Tommy Price as
my
alter ego,” Constance said. “Someone to explore the world for me while I stayed home.”

My eyes went to the shelves of books in their faded bindings. How many happy days I’d passed reading about Tommy Price’s adventures. And now it turned out they were bogus.

“It must have been hard for you when the books began to be reprinted,” I said. “And suddenly the world discovered Tommy Price again.”

“Things had not gone so well with us in the last twenty years,” Constance said, with lips pinched. “Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy had come to believe my stories about her. There were periods when she spent most of her time walking over the moors; and other times when she gave out that she was on a trip but stayed home and inside, expecting me to wait on her hand and foot. When the books began to be reprinted, at first I was happy, for it would be more income. But then I realized what it was going to be like living with her.”