Book description
'There was a little girl' . . . and her name was Juliet Payne. When she
was good she lived in the New Forest with her widowed father, principal
of an educational establishment, and once a month she spent a weekend in
London taking piano lessons. When she was bad, which was on those same
seemingly innocent weekends, she became a teenage whore. And as such she
was found strangled in a London flat.
Which brought Detective-Inspector Neil Carter on the scene, for although
it seemed an open and shut case with the girl's last client charged with
the crime, Neil had once given her his name and rank in a sleazy London
bar, and she had appealed to him for help a bare hour before she died.
He had a painful sense of personal involvement in the death of this girl
with two faces. Both faces were hidden. To find them, Neil and his bride
Cathy spend their honeymoon anonymously in the New Forest, asking
questions in pubs and hotels and at the college which was the murdered
girl's home. Their discoveries increase Neil's uneasy conviction that
the wrong man has been arrested. An only child, Eileen Dewhurst was
self-sufficient and bookish from an early age, preferring solitude or
one-to-one contacts to groups, and hating sport. Her first attempts at
writing were not auspicious. At 14, a would-be family saga was aborted
by an uncle discovering it and quoting from it choked with laughter. A
second setback came a few years later at school, when a purple passage
was returned with the words 'Cut this cackle!' written across it in red
ink: a chastening lesson in how embellishments can weaken rather than
strengthen one's message. Eileen read English at Oxford, and afterwards
spent some unmemorable years in 'Admin' before breaking free and
dividing her life in two: winters in London doing temporary jobs to earn
money and experience, summers at home as a freelance journalist,
spinning 'think pieces' for the Liverpool Daily Post and any other
publications that would take them, and reporting on food and fashion for
the long defunct Illustrated Liverpool News, as well as writing a few
plays. Her first sustained piece of writing was a fantasy for children
which was never published but secured an agent. Her Great
Autobiographical Novel was never published either, although damned with
faint praise and leading to an attempt at crime writing that worked:
over the next thirty years she produced almost a book a year and also
published some short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine. Eileen has always written from an ironic stance, never
allowing her favourite characters to take themselves too seriously: a
banana skin is ever lurking.
