I found the envelope a few days later when I was looking for my matriculation card. I have kept the piece of paper – it sits now in the drawer of my own sideboard in my Breton home – and I look at it occasionally just to remind myself what the meaning of life really is. This is what Bob had written. Guard it well for it is the meaning of life:
‘
When you stand on the table you can touch
the ceiling.
’
The Hand of Fate
by
Effie Andrews
Originally published twenty-six years ago, we are pleased to be issuing this special edition of Effie Andrews’ very first ‘Madame Astarti’ novel,
The Hand of Fate
, to coincide with a major new television adaptation of the series.
What the critics say about
Effie Andrews
:
‘A Miss Marple for the Millennium’ Woman’s
Realm
‘She improves a little with every book’
Yorkshire Post
‘Fascinating’
Whitby Gazette
Other ‘Madame Astarti’ novels include:
The Wheel of Fortune
Mermaids Ahoy!
The Finger of Fate
And the prize-winning Pick a Card, Any Card
Effie Andrews was born in Scotland in 1951. She now lives in France.
In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictionally.
Copyright © Effie Andrews 1974
1
Chapter One
Lady Luck
A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body. The fisherman was thinking what a beautiful day it was going to be. The pinkgold rays of a cinematic dawn were gleaming on the dark metallic surface of the sea when he netted the unwanted catch on his little boat, the
Lucky Lady
. He was not a man given to superstition and yet in the semi-dark he thought he saw silver scales and seaweed hair and believed for one wild, terrible moment that he had caught a mermaid. When he hooked her and pulled her towards the boat, however, he saw it was no mermaid but the bloated body of a woman, draped in what remained of a silver-lamé evening dress. Seaweed was entangled in long hair which looked dark, but by the time he had got her to shore was already drying to a bleached-out blond.
He grabbed hold of her hand to help her on board the
Lucky Lady
but her skin peeled off her arm like a long satin glove. The fisherman had to leave her in the water a little longer while he retched over the side of his boat. She drifted lazily off, she was in no hurry, she had been dead five days now and was getting used to her watery element. She was already beginning to suffer a sea-change, her bones were not yet coral but her one remaining eye was an opaque pearl and flat strands of seaweed, crimped at the edges like ribbons, adorned her long tendrils of hair. A whole flotilla of tiny, greedy sea-creatures had seen the early-morning mermaid into safe harbour.
2
The woman was finally brought to shore and logged by a pale Constable Collins at 6.32 a.m. precisely. After an undignified struggle to get her out of the boat, the policeman finally lifted her dead-weighted body ashore in his arms. He thought of the warm body of his wife still asleep in their bed in their little modern house and his sky-blue eyes clouded over. What had she meant last night when she’d rolled over in bed and stared at him unpleasantly and said she was dying of boredom? One thing was certain: it couldn’t be worse than death by drowning.
Flashing blue lights guided Inspector Gannet down to the harbour where a crowd of holiday-makers were craning their necks to try and get a view of the excitement. So, yes, Jack Gannet thought, this is how it begins . .
Last Words
‘Perhaps,’ J agreed cautiously with the man who would forever be an enemy to him, ‘but on the other hand, perhaps not.’
Kenny
| There’s nothing. Nothing. Do you hear me?
|
Dod
| I know.
|
Jed
| Perhaps Rick was right after all.
|
‘Yes, of course I will,’ Flick murmured happily as Jake pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her with fierce abandonment.
‘Well, well,’ Madame Astarti said. ‘Whoever would have thought that you were the murderer all along.’
Duke Thar-Vint mounted his steed Demaal and saluted farewell to his trusty steward Lart. He turned to the Lady Agaruitha riding beside him and said, ‘One chapter may have closed, but the fight for justice will go on for ever.’
And the winner of the Booker Prize for the year 2001 is . . . Andrea Garnett for her novel
Anthea’s Anguish
.
Whatever we fondly call our own
Belongs to heaven’s great Lord
The blessings lent us for a day
Are soon to be restored
(Carved on a tombstone in the Howff, Dundee, and used by Terri as an inscription on the tasteful stone arches which form the entrance to all of the pet cemeteries in the hugely successful chain which she started in San Francisco in 1976.)
Footnote
∗
To fulfil the requirements of this class you must attend one seminar per week and two individual tutorials per term. The course work for this paper comprises one major assignment which must be a piece of individual, original work – a play, a novella, a collection of short stories, the first five chapters of a novel, a portfolio of poems, or some other work agreed with the course tutor.