A review of Eternity Ring by Patricia Wentworth
Originally published in 1948, Eternity Ring, is the fourteenth in the Miss Silver series from Camberley’s finest, containing many of the traits one has come to expect from a Wentworth murder mystery. It is part thriller, part romance with her amateur sleuth knitting away in the background, closely observing what is going on, using her acute insights into human behaviour to draw conclusions which lead to the unravelling of the mystery, much to the chagrin of Inspector Lamb and the delight of her number one fan, Sergeant Frank Abbott.
It is Frank Abbott whose family provides the mystery. His cousin, Cicely, has left her husband of a few months, Grant Hathaway, without explanation and returned to her parents. Their house is near to Dead Man’s Copse in which there is a deserted cottage. One evening a cosy village tea party is interrupted by the dramatic arrival of Mary Stokes who says that she has just seen the body of a woman, dressed in black and with one earring made from an eternity ring and diamonds. When the police accompany her to the site, there is no body.
The body is eventually found, thanks to Miss Silver’s research, in the cellar of the deserted cottage. Soon Mary Stokes herself is murdered. Suspicion immediately falls upon Grant Hathaway who is known to have financial problems and Cicely’s inheritance was allegedly the driving factor for his marrying the otherwise plain girl.
Eternity Ring is another of Wentworth’s novels which explores the post War impact of individual actions that occurred in the theatre of war, this time the despicable crime of stealing the only valuables, in this case jewels, of a refugee fleeing the oncoming German forces. From this distance it might appear to be low down on the list of atrocities carried out during the Second World War, but it was probably an infrequent but reprehensible enough crime to generate some post war wringing of hands.
Hands form an important part in the resolution of the mystery as the initial victim who had visited Hathaway shortly before her murder had indicated that she could recognise the thief from their distinctive hands. There are just three suspects, Albert Caddle representing the lower orders, Hathaway, and Mark Harlow. That is being generous as the third was never likely to have been the culprit. Each have distinctive features on their hands, a scar, a part missing from a digit, and a stretch appropriate to their profession. I remember Sir Willard White – he was just plain Willard in those days – paying my wife a compliment by remarking that she had pianist’s hands.
Unusually, the murder victim did not deserve to die, her murder compounding the sense of injustice that she has suffered from her slayer. Whether her threat to reveal the identity of the thief who had stolen her jewellery when she was in extremis would really warrant silencing her forever is debatable. Having killed once, the prospect of dancing the hemp jig is not deterrent to strike again.
Having complained in my last review that Christopher Bush had not played fair with his readers in The Case of the Climbing Rat, Wentworth does the reverse, serving up a case where the identity of the culprit is as plain as a pikestaff, even if the motivation, or at least part of it, is a little harder to deduce. Cicely is one of Wentworth’s frustrating heroines, the pretext for leaving her husband turns out to be pretty feeble, over-emotional and a sign of considerable immaturity. The volte-face in her attitude to him is almost as unbelievable and her dash to his side almost leads to her own undoing.
Suspects may be thin on the ground, but there are characters in the story by the charabanc load, there to add colour without adding much to the plot. Two that I had high hopes of, Miss Vinnie whose tea party Mary Stokes burst into, and Maggie Bell, the invalid who amuses herself by listening in to the party line that all the villagers seem to share, but they come and go without making much of a contribution to the story.
For all that, Wentworth knows how to write a cracking story which keeps her reader entertained, and it is easy to shut your mind off from the absurdities of the plot. I left the book with two lessons: a slip of the tongue can be costly and always show the right letter to someone.
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