P. D. James
The Skull Beneath The Skin
The second book in the Cordelia Gray series, 1982
Even the most diligent search of maps and charts will fail to discover Courcy Island or its Victorian castle lying off the coast of Dorset, since both have their reality only in the imaginations of the writer and her readers. Similarly, the events past and recent of Courcy's bloodstained history and the characters who took part in them have no relation to actual events or living people.
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.
from t. s. eliot,
'Whispers of Immortality'
PART ONE. Call to an Off-shore Island
CHAPTER ONE
There could be no doubt about it, the new name-plate was crooked. Cordelia had no need to adopt Bevis's expedient of dodging through the mid-morning traffic which cluttered Kingly Street and squinting at it through a dazzle of grinding delivery vans and taxis to recognize stark mathematical fact; the neat bronze oblong, so carefully designed and so expensive, was half an inch out of true. Lopsided as it was, it looked, she thought, despite the simplicity of its wording, both pretentious and ridiculous, a fitting advertisement of irrational hope and ill-advised enterprise.
Pryde's Detective Agency
(Third Floor) Prop: Cordelia Gray
Had she been superstitious, she might have believed that Bernie's unquiet spirit was protesting against the new plaque with the deletion of his name.