The Skull Beneath the Skin

The second novel featuring private detective Cordelia Gray opens in London, where the young proprietor of Pryde's Detective Agency struggles to keep her modest business afloat. The agency, inherited from her late partner Bernie Pryde, an ex-policeman who killed himself, subsists largely on finding lost pets. Sir George Ralston, a retired baronet and former soldier, hires Cordelia as a bodyguard and secretary-companion to his wife, the actress Clarissa Lisle. Clarissa has been receiving anonymous threatening messages: typed quotations about death from plays she has appeared in, each topped with a drawing of a skull or coffin. The messages began during her run as Lady Macbeth in 1980, caused her to break down onstage, and have seriously damaged her career. Clarissa is to perform the title role in an amateur production of The Duchess of Malfi, a Jacobean tragedy by John Webster, on Courcy Island, a private island off the Dorset coast owned by Ambrose Gorringe. Sir George cannot attend and wants Cordelia to protect Clarissa and discover who is sending the messages.

Before the weekend, several members of the house party are introduced through their own perspectives. Ambrose, secretly a pseudonymous best-selling novelist, purchases Victorian memorabilia including a marble carving of a baby's arm. Ivo Whittingham, a drama critic and former lover of Clarissa's, reflects on his terminal illness with bitter detachment. Roma Lisle, Clarissa's cousin, runs a failing bookshop and plans to ask Clarissa for a desperately needed loan. Simon Lessing, Clarissa's seventeen-year-old stepson and aspiring pianist, dreads the weekend, sensing her growing disappointment in him. Cordelia studies the threatening messages and deduces that most quotations were copied from a dictionary of quotations and typed on different machines. She also suspects that Clarissa herself sent one of the messages, typed on Sir George's typewriter while he was abroad.

Cordelia arrives on Courcy Island to find a castle of unexpected beauty. She intercepts the post and finds a new threatening message. During a tour, Ambrose displays the marble baby's arm in a cabinet of Victorian curiosities, and Clarissa reacts with visceral horror. Tensions deepen throughout Friday. On the beach, Clarissa's longtime dresser, Miss Tolgarth (known as Tolly), confronts Simon, urging him to leave Clarissa and suggesting his father may have drowned himself because of her. During a rehearsal, Clarissa publicly humiliates Cordelia, and Ivo takes her for a walk. He confides that Tolly had a daughter, Viccy, who was fatally injured in an accident. On the night the child lay dying, the hospital telephoned the theater during a performance. Clarissa took the call and told Tolly there was no urgency. The child died before Tolly could reach her.

That evening, Clarissa confides to Cordelia a lifelong, paralyzing dread of death. She shows Cordelia a jewel casket Ambrose gave her containing a newspaper cutting of a 1977 theater review from Speymouth, which Clarissa calls the most important notice she ever received. Cordelia notices the cutting is oddly shaped and larger than the review itself. Saturday morning brings Sir George's unexpected early arrival. Clarissa insists on visiting the Devil's Kettle, a sea cave accessible through a secret passage beneath the island's church. Ambrose recounts how in 1940, when the island served as a wartime internment center, Nazi internees bound a young man named Carl Blythe to an iron ladder and left him to drown. Sir George knew Blythe from their school days. Another threatening message appears in the tunnel.

After lunch, Clarissa retires to her locked room to rest before the performance. When Cordelia goes to wake her, she finds the door unlocked and discovers Clarissa on the bed with her face destroyed, battered beyond recognition. The marble baby's arm lies on the bedside table, thick with blood, atop a typed quotation from the play. The jewel casket is missing. Cordelia notices forensic details: less blood than expected, suggesting the battering occurred after death, and Clarissa's face makeup had been cleaned off.

Chief Inspector Grogan arrives from Speymouth with Sergeant Buckley to lead the investigation. The suspects are interviewed one by one, and several give unconvincing accounts of their movements. Grogan reveals that the police already knew Clarissa sent one message herself, as saliva testing matched her blood group.

On Sunday evening, Munter, Ambrose's butler, bursts drunkenly into dinner and shouts "Murderer!" at Sir George. In the early hours of Monday, Cordelia spots Munter's wig floating in the ornamental pool below her window. Simon dives in and recovers Munter's drowned body along with a music box. Cordelia realizes the music box came from the tower room, not the ground floor as Munter had claimed, meaning he lied to police about his movements: He was in the upper gallery, within feet of Clarissa's door, around the time she died. Cordelia privately confronts Sir George with a further realization: Munter may have been Carl Blythe's son, since "Munter" is the German translation of "Blythe." His accusation was directed at Sir George over the wartime drowning, not about Clarissa.

Before traveling to Speymouth, Cordelia speaks with Tolly and confirms that Tolly was the original sender of threatening messages to Clarissa, handwritten biblical texts expressing grief over her daughter's death. When Tolly stopped, someone else took over with the typed literary quotations, but Tolly refuses to identify who. In Speymouth, Cordelia locates a duplicate of the 1977 newspaper page. On the reverse of the theater review is a photograph in which Ambrose is clearly visible in Speymouth during his supposed year-long tax exile abroad. A solicitor confirms this could make Ambrose liable for ruinous taxes on his literary earnings. Cordelia deduces that Clarissa discovered the photograph and used it as leverage over Ambrose, forcing him to stage the play and make his island available to her.

Returning that evening, Cordelia finds herself alone with Ambrose, who confesses the full truth. He did not kill Clarissa but battered her already-dead face to obscure the real cause of death. The actual killer was Simon. Clarissa had invited the boy to her room before the performance, ostensibly to discuss his future, but wanted sexual companionship. When Simon recoiled, Clarissa taunted him and his dead father. In a rage, Simon seized the jewel casket and brought it down on her skull. Ambrose discovered Simon emerging from the room and orchestrated the cover-up: He cleaned the blood off Simon, destroyed the newspaper cutting, and sent Simon down the fire escape with the casket to hurl into the sea. Ambrose had stolen the marble limb from the display case, intending to plant it onstage to sabotage Clarissa's performance. Instead, he used it to obliterate her features, making the death appear connected to the threatening messages.

Cordelia realizes Ambrose has been deliberately detaining her and races to find Simon. His room is empty, and handcuffs are missing from a smashed display case. She finds Simon handcuffed to the iron ladder in the Devil's Kettle, the rising tide at his shoulders. After diving repeatedly in the black water, she finds the dropped key and frees him, but the trapdoor above crashes shut and she hears the bolts shot home. Sealed in the flooding cave, they swim through the narrow underwater passage to the open sea. Cordelia surfaces alive, but Simon does not. Weakened by cold and terror, he could not survive the passage. A fisherman rescues Cordelia and sails her to Speymouth.

Cordelia tells the police everything. Ambrose mounts his defense: The trapdoor fell accidentally, Simon killed Clarissa and then took his own life, and the incriminating photograph has conveniently vanished from Cordelia's bag. It will be his word against hers. On the terrace, Ambrose approaches one final time and offers a quiet apology, the only admission he will ever make. A call from the London office brings routine cases. Walking toward the police launch under the steady gaze of the detectives, Cordelia feels a moment of resolve: She will tell the truth, and she will survive.