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
Chapter 3: Thieves Break in and Steal
Chapter 5: Bloody-Man’s-Finger
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
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
