Love Lies Bleeding. Edmund Crispin

      EDMUND CRISPIN

      Love Lies Bleeding

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by

      Victor Gollancz 1948

      Copyright © Rights Limited,

      1948. All rights reserved

      Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

      Cover image © Shutterstock.com

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008124151

      Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124168

      Version: 2017-10-26

      To the Carr Club

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Chapter 1: Lasciva Puella

       Chapter 2: Find out Moonshine

       Chapter 3: Thieves Break in and Steal

       Chapter 4: Holocaust

       Chapter 5: Bloody-Man’s-Finger

      

       Chapter 6: Love Lies Bleeding

      

       Chapter 7: Saturnalia

      

       Chapter 8: The Death of a Witch

      

       Chapter 9: Love’s Labour’s Won

      

       Chapter 10: Meditations Among the Tombs

      

       Chapter 11: Reasoning but to Err

      

       Chapter 12: A Green Thought in a Green Shade

      

       Chapter 13: A Sennet: Enter Second Murderer

      

       Chapter 14: Exit, Pursued by a Bear

      

       Chapter 15: Rout

      

       Chapter 16: Eclipse

      

       Chapter 17: Peace Indivisible

      

       About the Author

      

       Also in this series

      

       About the Publisher

       1

       Lasciva Puella

      The headmaster sighed. It was, he recognized, a plaintive and unmanly noise, but for the moment he was quite unable to suppress it. He apologized.

      ‘The heat…’ he explained, and waved one hand limply in the direction of the windows, beyond which a good-sized lawn lay parching in the mid-morning sun. ‘It’s the heat.’

      As an excuse, this was colourable enough. The day was torrid, almost tropical, and even in the tall, shady study, its curtains half drawn to prevent wood and fabric from bleaching, the atmosphere was too oppressive for comfort. But the headmaster spoke without conviction, and his visitor was not deceived.

      ‘I’m sorry to plague you with my affairs,’ she said briskly, ‘because I realize that your time must be completely taken up with the arrangements for speech day. Unfortunately, I’ve no choice in the matter. The parents are insisting on some kind of investigation.’

      The headmaster nodded gloomily. He was a small, slight man of about fifty, clean-shaven, with a long, inquisitive nose, sparse black hair, and a deceptive mien of diffidence and vagueness.

      ‘It would be the parents,’ he said. ‘So much of one’s time is spent in trying to dissipate the futile alarms of parents…’

      ‘Only