The Death-Cap Dancers

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‘Gladys Mitchell is a wittier and more original writer than Sayers or Christie. She has succeeded in devising a structure which can accommodate the untoward, the ambiguous and the unaccountable; at the same time, many of her novels conform, in outline at least, to a classic detective pattern.’

Patricia Craig in The Guardian

To the long life and happiness of

ADRIAN STEWART SHERATON,

born on St. George’s Day, 1979

‘…for thou art much too fair

To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.’

William Shakespeare

Sonnet VI

THE DEATH-CAP DANCERS

Chapter 1: WOOD PIMPERNEL

Hermione Lestrange — Hermy One to her intimates — stopped the car, got out and surveyed her surroundings. For the last two or three miles she had been uneasily aware that in taking what she had hoped would be a short cut as well as serving to take her off the main road for twenty miles or so, she must have misread the map and was now in a wilderness of cotton-grass, peat-bogs and heather.

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