Copyright & Information

Silent Witness

 

First published in 1972

© Margaret Yorke; House of Stratus 1972-2012

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Margaret Yorke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

 

Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

 

About the Author

 

Born in Surrey, England, to John and Alison Larminie in 1924, Margaret Yorke (Margaret Beda Nicholson) grew up in Dublin before moving back to England in 1937, where the family settled in Hampshire, although she now lives in a small village in Buckinghamshire.

During World War II she saw service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a driver. In 1945, she married, but it was only to last some ten years, although there were two children; a son and daughter. Her childhood interest in literature was re-enforced by five years living close to Stratford-upon-Avon and she also worked variously as a bookseller and as a librarian in two Oxford Colleges, being the first woman ever to work in that of Christ Church.

She is widely travelled and has a particular interest in both Greece and Russia.

 

Margaret Yorke’s first novel was published in 1957, but it was not until 1970 that she turned her hand to crime writing. There followed a series of five novels featuring Dr. Patrick Grant, an Oxford don and amateur sleuth, who shares her own love of Shakespeare. More crime and mystery was to follow, and she has written some forty three books in all, but the Grant novels were limited to five as, in her own words, ‘authors using a series detective are trapped by their series. It stops some of them from expanding as writers’.

She is proud of the fact that many of her novels are essentially about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations which may threatening, or simply horrific. It is this facet of her writing that ensures a loyal following amongst readers who inevitably identify with some of the characters and recognise conflicts that may occur in everyday life. Indeed, she states that characters are far more important to her than intricate plots and that when writing ‘I don’t manipulate the characters, they manipulate me’.

Critics have noted that she has a ‘marvellous use of language’ and she has frequently been cited as an equal to P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. She is a past chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association and in 1999 was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger, having already been honoured with the Martin Beck Award from the Swedish Academy of Detection.

 

Dedication

To the Dorothies, affectionately

PART ONE

Morning

 

Through the softly-falling snow, it came down to the valley, descending the mountain propped like a doll, frozen stiff in its seat. First to see it were the lehrers, riding up early on the chair-lift to open the runs, and grizzled Hans Schulz, whose days were now spent helping skiers off the lift at Obergreutz. It passed above each of them as they rose. The head lolled against the pole on which the chair hung from its wire hawser; the feet, with skis on, were neatly together on the rail; and one arm was hooked over the bar across the knees. A thick layer of snow covered it, so that it seemed dressed in white. As the men travelling upwards saw it, their shouts shocked those below into some sort of preparation for the end of the macabre journey. Slowly the chair swung down wards: the loaded seat with its rigid burden swinging across the black, shining river until it came to rest on the plank platform of the terminus. The machinery stopped.

There were few to greet the body: the snowcat driver who had not yet mounted the chair; the men who worked the lift; a few visitors out early; and the burgomeister, hastily summoned from his nearby house while at his breakfast, who stood with crumbs still around his whiskers, summoning the concentration to direct what must now be done.

From the balcony of a chalet on the other side of the valley, Dr. Patrick Grant, Fellow of St. Mark’s College, Oxford, watched the scene through a pair of binoculars as a small crowd began to gather at the bottom of the chair-lift.