New Book - The Lodger by Helen Scarlett (Pages 1 - 159)

 First Published: January 19, 2023

SPOILERS!!!

It is after the First World War, and life for Grace Armstrong has changed. Her brother was killed in action, which sent her mother into a deep depression, and her fiancée was reported missing in action. So now it is just her and her father at home, as her mother is in a nursing home, trying to recover. In the last eight years they have had a lodger, Elizabeth Smith, but one day when Elizabeth got a letter, she upped and went when Grace was away.

Grace works for a magazine Nursing World as she wants to be a reporter, but right now she is just an office girl. One of her friends, Arthur, was close to her brother and fiancé, and they often meet, and when she invites to dinner in her home, he brings Tom Monaghan, a man who fought alongside Edward, her brother. The dinner is a disaster as Tom, who comes from a humbler background, won't keep quiet about expressing his views and his disagreement with Grace's father.

One day when Grace returns home, her father tells him that their servants, Bridget, the maid, and Mary, the cook, are upset. When Grace goes to see them, Bridget tells her that there is an article in the newspaper about a dead woman who was fished out of the Thames, and from the description of her clothes she thinks it is Elizabeth. Bridget also tells Grace about an episode in which Elizabeth got a visit from a man in a Rolls Royce, and she swears that the man upset Elizabeth.

Grace goes to the police station with a photograph of Elizabeth, and Constable Fred Alston tells her that it seems that the dead woman is Elizabeth. When Sergeant Williams, who leads the investigation, arrives, he is impatient with Grace, when she asks him if Elizabeth was murdered. Williams states that it is a case of suicide, and there is nothing else to talk about.

Grace leaves the station quite upset and runs into Tom, who she tells about Elizabeth. Tom volunteers to help him locate Elizabeth's family, and when he calls the next day, he says that he went to the village in Essex where Elizabeth claimed she visited her family, but there is nobody there related to Elizabeth. Then Grace and Bridget talk to the priest whose church Elizabeth frequented. It is through this priest who Elizabeth got to live as Grace's lodger. The priest says he knows nothing about the family, and a woman who also knew Elizabeth wants to say something but the priest stops him. Then days later the woman sends a note to Grace, telling her that Elizabeth went under a false name and her real name was Lizzy Burdett-Smith. Grace finds out that Lizzy Burdett-Smith is a name that everybody knows because she was tried for the murder of Hugh Clifton, who she claimed was her lover. Elizabeth was acquitted because the evidence was circumstacial to rule a guilty verdict.

Grace talks to her mother's best fried, Bunty, who knows Hugh Clifton's wife as she is a neighbour of hers. Bunty agrees to help Grace, and she arranges a meeting, pretending that Grace is a niece of hers who is a reporter. Mrs Clifton is sick and tells Grace that Lizzy was a liar and she can prove that her husband didn't meet her when Lizzy said he was with her.

I am very curious to discover the truth about Elizabeth and the crime. Grace also has visions of her fiancée in the streets of London. Is the person who she sees real or is he a vision?