Unique Gloucestershire March 2016

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with a tunnel that leads to a temple.
What if, I thought to myself, this society
was much, much worse than the real
Hell Fire Club was rumoured to be, and
what if the house where they met was
now a school? Those skeletons in the
foundations now took on a macabre
aspect.
What I needed next was a murder
victim and a method.
Boiled Alive
It was tempting to draw inspiration for
the murder from a real Gloucestershire
murder. In 1938, fishermen made the
grim discovery of a headless torso in
the River Severn near Tewkesbury. The victim was believed to be Captain William
Butt, but despite the best efforts of the police and the famous Home Office
pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the murder remains unsolved to this day.
I elected instead to invent a murder, and decided on poisoning. There is something
so insidious about poisoning that it makes my flesh creep. We think of food as
nourishment, a way of showing people we care about them. How often do we say
we’ll make someone’s favourite meal to cheer them up? Or offer chocolates to say
we love them? And how often do we think about the food that people give us? We
eat it on trust, never occurring to us that the food offered might kill us. And that’s
what makes poisoning so evil a crime – the poisoner has to be someone close to
the victim. Someone the victim trusts.
During the reign of Henry VIII, poisoning was regarded as so wicked that a new
method of execution was introduced for convicted poisoners: boiling alive. Two
people actually suffered this horrendous punishment – one of them was Henry
VIII’s cook. A terrible way to die, but it underlines what a sinister act poisoning is.
I wanted my novel to be dark, to explore the seediness and ugliness underneath
Cheltenham’s beautiful, elegant Regency façade, so poisoning it was.
Trouble was, I wanted a truly Cheltenham poison. Originally I intended to bump
off my victims with mistletoe, because there’s so much of it in Cheltenham. I love
walking down long tree-lined streets, each tree topped with a lollipop of mistletoe.
And mistletoe has connotations of kissing and Christmas – happy things, and by
using it as a poison it emphasised my theme of turning things on their head. What
you see isn’t what you get.
Unfortunately, when I went to my writer’s big book of poisons, I found that
mistletoe wasn’t deadly enough. I needed a different poison, and after a bit of
browsing through my books I came across something that fitted the bill perfectly,
and helped me to join together the story lines in both Regency and present day
Cheltenham.
Unique Detective
And so I came to my detective. Who was going to solve these uniquely Cheltenham
crimes? I didn’t want a police officer, because they have to do things by the book,
and the rules of policing change so frequently that by the time the novel was
published it would be out of date. And people write and tell you when you get
things wrong. I wanted a detective who didn’t always stick to the rules, who could
go places and do things the police couldn’t. Someone with attitude and guts and a
brooding past.
It took a while to create her, but eventually I came up with private investigator,
Eden Grey. She’s not a Cheltenham local,
but is a former undercover officer who has
to forge a new identity after an operation
goes disastrously wrong. I gave her an Art
Deco flat in the centre of Cheltenham, an
office just off the High Street, and a car
chase round the Poets area of St Marks.
She’s that sort of girl.
When we first meet Eden, she’s collecting
evidence against an insurance cheat, but
it isn’t long before she’s hunting down the
murderer of one of her clients, and getting
herself embroiled in art fraud, people
smuggling and corruption. When her chief
suspect winds up dead, she finds herself in
a shadowy world of powerful men who will
stop at nothing to get their own way.
The novel is called Paternoster, and it
was published in 2015 by Stroud-based
publishers The Mystery Press. I’m currently
working on the next book in the Eden Grey
series set in Cheltenham.
Kim Fleet
www.kimfleet.com
Link to Paternoster:
http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/Paternoster/9780750963688/