Cover Her Face

P. D. James's Cover Her Face is set in and around Martingale, an Elizabethan manor house in the English village of Chadfleet. The story opens three months before a murder, at a dinner party hosted by Eleanor Maxie, the family matriarch. Her guests include Miss Liddell, the warden of St. Mary's Refuge for unmarried mothers; Catherine Bowers, a nurse and family friend; and Eleanor's adult children, Stephen Maxie, a surgeon, and Deborah Riscoe, a young widow. Mrs. Maxie has recently hired Sally Jupp, one of Miss Liddell's charges, as a house-parlourmaid. Sally waits on the table for the first time while her infant son, Jimmy, sleeps upstairs. A debate erupts about unmarried mothers; Stephen champions Sally with unusual fervor. During Sally's service, Miss Liddell catches Sally's eye and finds not gratitude but amused contempt. Catherine, secretly in love with Stephen, endures the evening consumed by jealousy.

In the following weeks, Sally proves capable but friction builds. Martha Bultitaft, the aging housekeeper who nursed the Maxie children, resents Sally and considers her cunning. Simon Maxie, Eleanor's husband, lies bedridden with advanced arteriosclerosis, a degenerative vascular condition, and requires constant care.

On the Thursday before the annual church fête, Deborah spends the day with Felix Hearne, a publisher and decorated wartime Resistance hero. She then visits Stephen at St. Luke's Hospital, where he shows her Sommeil tablets, their father's prescription sleeping drug, which Sally found hidden in Simon's mattress. Simon had apparently been hoarding them to end his own life. Stephen gives Deborah the tablets to lock in the medicine cupboard. At Martingale, Martha confronts Sally about the tablets, revealing she knew about them. Sally retaliates with devastating cruelty, mocking Martha's devotion, and Martha is left consumed with hatred.

The fête arrives. Sally appears wearing a dress identical to Deborah's, a deliberate provocation that draws stares. Deborah challenges an unfamiliar man on the back stairs of the house; he claims to have been looking for the lavatory and hurries away. That evening, Sally appears at the dining-room door with Stephen and announces that he has proposed marriage. Miss Liddell launches a furious verbal attack; Sally retorts with cutting insults. Stephen confirms the engagement.

Mrs. Maxie lies awake all night. At dawn, Catherine takes aspirin from the medicine cupboard, where she notices the bottle of Sommeil. Martha reports that Sally has overslept and her door is bolted, the baby crying inside. When knocking fails, Stephen and Felix fetch a ladder. Felix climbs through the window and draws back the bolt. Sally lies dead in her bed, bruises on each side of her neck.

Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard arrives with Detective-Sergeant Martin. Sally was strangled, the bedroom door was bolted from inside, and the killer likely entered and exited via a stack-pipe, an exterior drainpipe running down the wall. A mug of cocoa by the bed appears drugged, and a bottle of Sommeil is missing from the medicine cupboard. Dalgleish finds a Venezuelan envelope addressed to a D. Pullen, with dates suggesting pre-arranged meetings, and a collection of hand-embroidered linens and clothes that suggest wedding preparations.

Dalgleish interviews the household. Stephen describes his evening at the cottage of Sam Bocock, a local man who keeps the stables, and admits he bolted the south door at 12:33 a.m. Catherine reveals that at midnight she went to Sally's door; the light was on, but Sally bolted it without speaking. Catherine then found Stephen's bed empty. Dalgleish determines the drug was placed in the dry cocoa, since others drank from the same milk without ill effects; the empty cocoa tin was found rinsed in the dustbin with its paper lining missing. Felix argues an outsider killed Sally, but Dalgleish reveals that Deborah claimed Felix spent the entire night in her room, contradicting Felix's account.

The missing Sommeil bottle is found buried in the fête's treasure-hunt plot, marked by a peg bearing Deborah's name. Mr. Hinks, the local vicar, reveals that Sally told him on Thursday that Jimmy was soon to have a father, two days before Stephen claims to have proposed. A local boy named Johnnie Wilcox, who had been helping at the fête, tells Dalgleish he overheard Sally arguing with a man in Bocock's stable loft during the fête; as they left, Johnnie glimpsed only a brown gloved hand. At the inquest, the medical evidence confirms death by vagal inhibition, a reflex cardiac arrest triggered during strangulation, with barbiturate in Sally's stomach.

After the funeral, Deborah and Felix drive Sally's aunt, Mrs. Victor Proctor, home. She reveals Sally was orphaned when a wartime bombing killed her parents. Mrs. Proctor mentions her husband had a cycling accident on Saturday night. Dalgleish interviews Derek Pullen, a shy young villager who admits to secret nighttime meetings with Sally in the old stables, reached when she climbed down the stack-pipe. Pullen insists they were not lovers and reveals he forwarded letters for Sally from Venezuela.

Catherine telephones Stephen: Someone has tried to strangle Deborah in the night. Dalgleish examines the bruises but is openly skeptical, implying the attack was staged.

A stranger arrives at Martingale. James Ritchie announces he is Sally's husband. They married secretly before he left for a building job in Venezuela; his employer required unmarried men, so they concealed the marriage. When Sally discovered her pregnancy, she entered St. Mary's rather than reveal the truth. The vicar's Thursday conversation is now explained: Sally was telling him about Ritchie's imminent return, not Stephen's proposal. She never accepted Stephen's offer. Shortly after this revelation, Simon Maxie dies peacefully.

That evening, Dalgleish assembles the household and explains that the drugging and the strangling were unconnected acts. Martha had been regularly putting Sommeil into the cocoa tin over weeks, hoping Sally would oversleep, be discredited, and be dismissed. When Sally was found dead, Martha panicked, hid the Sommeil bottle, and destroyed evidence from the cocoa tin. Felix guessed Martha's scheme and coached her for questioning. Dalgleish dismisses the attack on Deborah as a fabrication she and Felix staged to suggest an outside killer.

Victor Proctor, Sally's uncle, bursts in demanding police protection from the angry Ritchie. Catherine recognizes him as the man Deborah challenged on the back stairs during the fête. Proctor removes his artificial right hand, a prosthesis resulting from the same bombing that killed Sally's parents, proving he could not have strangled anyone. Sally had been blackmailing him, having discovered he misused trust money her father left her. She arranged for him to deliver money at midnight, signaled by her bedroom light. When the killer turned Sally's light on and off, Proctor mistook it for the signal. He entered through the unlocked south door, found Sally dead, and bolted the door in panic before escaping down the stack-pipe. Catherine's midnight knock on Sally's door occurred while Proctor was inside with the body.

Stephen's movements are also accounted for: He was returning a ladder used during the fête to Bocock's cottage and encountered Pullen in the stables. They fought, explaining Stephen's cut knuckle and Pullen's injuries.

With every alternative eliminated, Eleanor confesses quietly. She went to Sally's room to discuss the engagement. Sally laughed at her and falsely claimed she was carrying Stephen's child, a lie the post-mortem later disproved. Eleanor's hands closed around Sally's throat. "It was so very quick. One second she was alive and laughing. The next she was a dead thing in my hands" (235). She had been waiting for her husband to die before confessing.

Eleanor is convicted of manslaughter. Martha gives notice. Catherine tells Stephen their relationship is over. One month later, Dalgleish drives through Chadfleet and encounters Deborah outside the village store. She is living alone at Martingale; Stephen works at the hospital, and Felix has gone to Canada. She mentions that Catherine and James Ritchie are growing close, united by their care of Jimmy. As Dalgleish drives away, he feels a sudden certainty that they will meet again.