A Fatal Inversion

Teenage Immaturity, Selfishness, Greed, and Murder

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine is a chilling, emotion fuelled novel. Vine was the name Ruth Rendell used for her psychological thrillers.

The CWA shortlisted A Fatal Inversion for its Dagger of Daggers, or best of the best, award. It was also televised as a mini-series in the 1990s.

Nasty, but gripping.

Synopsis

In the mid-1980s, a pet dog had to be put down. Alec Chipstead and his wife Meg decide to bury him in the pet cemetery at their new Suffolk home, Wyvis Hall. Whilst digging the grave, they uncovered the bones of a woman and child.

Ten years earlier, during the heatwave of 1976, nineteen-year-old Adam Verne-Smith inherited his great-uncle Hilbert’s Suffolk mansion. He spent a lazy summer there with his friend Rufus and a few hangers-on. They talked about creating a commune, “Ecalpemos”, but all they did was drink cheap red wine and sell family heirlooms to pay for it.

As the police work to discover who the dead woman and child were, the memories Adam and his friends had hoped to forget refuse to stay buried.

Review

Rendell quietly and unhurriedly teases out an unpleasant story. Her central characters are a handful of self-centred, middle-class youths in their late teens and early twenties. They are a group of people that are hard to like but easy to understand. Their petty, selfish desires and motivations are all too familiar as the tragedy is acted out in 1970s Suffolk. You can imagine the group’s restlessness during the languor of the long, drawn-out summer evenings.

The plot revolves around the tragedy of an unwed teenage mother. Rendell recounts the story as a series of flashbacks. Each exposing the detail of what had happened ten years earlier from the memories of three male thirty-somethings. The monologue playing inside each of their heads creates a chillingly plausible murder. The mystery isn’t who was the murderer but who ended up dead.

The coldest part of Rendell’s book is the ease with which the murder occurs. You can’t help but wonder how you would have behaved if the same events befell you.

The book is a gripping but profoundly uncomfortable read. The sort of book you want to put down but must pick up again.

Excerpt

‘Easy does it,’ Alec said. ‘It’s Fred we’re burying, not a coffin six feet under.’

These were unfortunate words that he was to remember in the days to come with a squeeze of the stomach, a wrinkling of the nose. His spade struck what he thought was a stone, a long flint. He dug round it and cleared the blade-shaped bone. There was an animal buried here already then … Something that had a very big ribcage, he thought. He wasn’t going to say anything to Meg, but just cover up that ribcage and that collar-bone quickly and start afresh up where she was digging.

Alec was aware of a rook cawing somewhere. Down in the tall limes of the deciduous wood, probably. The thought came unpleasantly to him that rooks were carrion birds. He plunged the spade in once more, slicing into the firm, dry turf. As he did so he saw that Meg was holding out her spade to him. On it lay what looked like the bones, the fan splay of metatarsals, of a very small foot.

‘A monkey?’ Meg said in a faint, faltering voice.

‘It must be.’

‘Why hasn’t it got a headstone?’

He didn’t answer. He dug down, lifting out spade-loads of resin-scented earth. Meg was digging up bones, she had a pile of them.

‘We’ll put them in a box or something. We’ll re-bury them.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we can’t do that. Meg …?’

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘Look,’ he said, and he lifted it up to show her. ‘That’s not a dog’s skull, is it? That’s not a monkey’s?’

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine