Death of a Unicorn

Death of a Unicorn Plot Summary

Introduction

In the gilded ballrooms of 1952 London, twenty-year-old Lady Margaret Millett—Mabs to her intimates—stood trapped in her mother's web of social obligations, the famous Millett sapphires heavy around her neck like a collar. She was waiting for her sisters to emerge from the cloakroom when a voice cut through the crowd's chatter: "Bored already?" The speaker was hideous—a toad-like little man with glossy brown skin and pop eyes, yet when he smiled, charm and danger flooded out of him like magic from a conjurer's box. Amos Brierley owned newspapers, collected art, and played financial games that could make or destroy fortunes. He was also, though Mabs didn't yet know it, a man carrying secrets that could kill. Thirty years later, the middle-aged Mabs has become a successful romance novelist, using her writing to keep the crumbling Cheadle Abbey afloat. When an old colleague arrives to research the history of Night and Day magazine—where she once worked during that transformative year with Brierley—buried truths begin to surface. Some loves leave scars that never heal. Some secrets demand a reckoning, even across decades.

Chapter 1: A Dance with Fate: Meeting Amos Brierley

The crowd pressed thick around the staircase in Fenella's uncle's house, a river of evening gowns and white ties flowing toward the ballroom above. Mabs shifted impatiently, the replica sapphires catching the light as she moved. Her sisters were taking forever with a wardrobe malfunction, and her mother had cornered Lady Fosse nearby, watching Mabs with that familiar mixture of calculation and disapproval. At twenty, Mabs possessed the particular restlessness of someone born to inherit a great estate but not yet allowed to claim it. Four years stretched ahead before she could take control of Cheadle Abbey, four years of her mother's management and manipulation. She yawned deliberately, making sure her mother could see the gesture of rebellion. That's when the voice spoke beside her. The man who turned toward her was perhaps the least prepossessing figure in the room—barely her height, with the smooth brown skin that spoke of tropical origins and eyes that bulged slightly like a toad's. Yet something about him made the air electric, as if lightning had just struck nearby. "Not as bored as I'm going to be," she replied, surprising herself with her boldness. His gaze traveled over her with the practiced assessment of a jeweler examining stones, pausing at the sapphires around her throat. She could feel him cataloging their worth, their authenticity, their significance. When their eyes met again, she saw amusement there, and something else—a recognition that made her pulse quicken. "If you had stayed at home, you would be doing an old jigsaw with three pieces missing," he said in a voice like gravel. "In fact I would be at my desk rewriting the third chapter of my novel." The small nod he gave acknowledged her attempt at sophistication, but also saw through it to the girl beneath. When he smiled, the transformation was extraordinary—charm, interest, and unmistakable danger bloomed around him like flowers from a magician's sleeve. Before she could respond, her mother's voice cut across the space between them: "Mabs! Do go and see why those girls are being such a time!" The command carried its familiar note of punishment for the yawn, for the small act of defiance. The man raised one small, perfectly manicured hand, releasing her. "I'll go and buy a jigsaw tomorrow," she said impulsively. "I suppose you'd like me to do The Hay-Wain." His laugh was soft, delighted. As she turned to obey her mother's summons, she heard him call after her: "Something more challenging, I think."

Chapter 2: Bargains Made in Silk and Shadow

The next morning found Mabs in the dusty, nerve-scented offices of Night and Day magazine on Shoe Lane. The encounter at the dance had led, through a chain of circumstances she barely understood, to this interview with Jack Todd, the magazine's editor. Todd was a large man with the look of a horse heading for the knackers—bloodshot eyes, skin loose over coarse bones, cigarette perpetually smoldering between yellow fingers. "Right," he said, examining the specimen paragraph she'd written in the imitation-debutante voice she'd invented. "Let's see how far her ladyship's jaw drops." He rushed her through swing doors that divided the magazine's world in two. On one side lay the masculine chaos of editorial, with its battered leather chairs and cigarette-scarred desks. On the other stood a receptionist's area of lime-green carpet and silk lampshades, leading to an office that might have belonged to Marie Antoinette. Dorothy Clarke—who wrote under the name Cynthia Darke—rose from a painted escritoire to greet them. Small, plump, and ultra-stately with blue-rinsed hair and a face heavily powdered, she was the undisputed queen of London's social intelligence network. Every shelf in her office bore signed photographs of the great and titled, a collection she'd been building for decades. "How well I remember your parents' wedding," she said to Mabs, though her tone suggested this might not be entirely a pleasant memory. "Such a happy occasion. How is your dear mother?" "Firing on all cylinders," Mabs replied, then watched Mrs. Clarke's eyebrows rise nearly an inch as she read the frivolous paragraph Todd had thrust at her. "Oh, no," Mrs. Clarke murmured. "Quite impossible." But Todd was insistent, and something in the dynamic between them suggested that power had recently shifted. When Mabs emerged from the ornate office, she found herself face to face with Tom Duggan and Ronnie Smith, two of the magazine's writers who would become her closest allies in the months to come. Tom was Irish, elegantly shabby, with a gift for spinning words into gold. Ronnie wore thick spectacles and spoke in the measured tones of a man who knew where all the political bodies were buried—which, as it happened, he did. Both men looked at her with the mixture of curiosity and resignation of workers who'd just seen the thin end of a very large wedge. "Your friend Brierley bought the magazine last week," Tom explained when she mentioned how she'd gotten the job. "Naturally we are somewhat on edge." The name hit her like cold water. So this wasn't coincidence after all, but calculation. Amos Brierley had been hunting, and she had been his prey.

Chapter 3: Behind Closed Doors: A Life of Secrets

The affair began properly at Maidenhead, over dinner at Skindle's restaurant beside the rain-lashed Thames. Brierley had taken her to see Eugene Onegin at Sadler's Wells, then dinner in Greek Street, always the perfect gentleman, always maintaining the careful distance of an older man entertaining a young woman as a favor to her family. But this evening felt different—charged with the electricity that comes before thunderstorms. "Will you come and live with me?" he asked over the wine, as casually as he might have asked her to pass the salt. The question should have shocked her. Instead, she felt the peculiar calm that comes when something inevitable finally arrives. At twenty, she had never been in love, had never even imagined what it might feel like to want someone so completely that the prospect of losing them made the world seem hollow. "Be your mistress, you mean?" "If you choose to put it that way." "How long for?" His smile transformed his face from toad to prince. "Nina left me after two years to marry a farmer in Mull. I kicked another girl out after six weeks and she tried to sell her story to the press." The arithmetic was brutal in its honesty. She was being offered a place in a sequence, not a unique position in someone's heart. Yet something in his manner suggested this wasn't quite the whole truth. "You know I'm a minor?" she said, though her twenty-first birthday was only weeks away. "Until the tenth of August. I have considered that, but I would like your answer in principle." She looked at the dark water beyond the restaurant windows, at the rain hammering against the glass, and felt a strange lightness, as if invisible chains were falling away. Her mother's plans, society's expectations, the whole careful architecture of her prescribed future—all of it suddenly seemed no more substantial than tissue paper. "All right," she said. "In principle." What followed was the most intoxicating year of her life. Brierley was a creature of precise habits and mysterious depths. He rose at six every morning to exercise with his rowing machine and sun-lamp while she retreated to her own small flat upstairs to write. By half-past eight he would telephone with the day's schedule, his voice brisk and businesslike, as if affection were a weakness he couldn't afford to show. Yet in private moments—watching her dress, listening to her talk about her work at the magazine, sharing the small intimacies of daily life—she glimpsed something in him that might have been tenderness. He was also, she gradually realized, terrified of physical pain and obsessed with secrecy to a degree that bordered on paranoia. He paid for everything in cash, never left papers lying about, and spoke of his business affairs only in the most general terms. When she asked direct questions, he would give her a look that made her blood turn to ice water. "It's better," he said once, "if there are some things you don't know."

Chapter 4: The Necklace: A Price for Freedom

The crisis came in the spring, precipitated by Mabs' mother in the most devastating way possible. Lady Millett had discovered the affair—how, she never revealed—and confronted Brierley directly. The encounter left him shaken in a way Mabs had never seen before. "She's trying to blackmail me," he said, showing her the letter that had arrived that morning. His usually steady hands trembled slightly as he lit his cigar. "For money?" "She appears to think that as I have taken something out of the Cheadle estate I ought to put something back, in the shape of a new roof to the Banqueting Hall." The sum mentioned was staggering—over a hundred thousand pounds. But it wasn't the money that worried Brierley, Mabs realized, so much as the threat of exposure. He lived by other people's confidence in his discretion. If Lady Millett chose to make their relationship public, if certain of his business associates began to question his judgment, the whole carefully constructed edifice of his financial empire might collapse. That night, lying in bed beside him and feeling the tension radiating from his small, compact body like heat from a banked fire, Mabs made her offer. "I could sell my sapphires," she said into the darkness. The necklace had been her father's bequest to her personally, not part of the entailed estate. The insurance valuation was two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, largely because of the central stone—a sapphire that had once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, carved with her cipher and set with diamonds. There was an excellent replica that she could continue to wear for public occasions. Brierley was silent for so long she thought he hadn't heard her. When he finally spoke, his voice was carefully neutral: "You're certain they're yours to sell?" The arrangements he made were typically complex and untraceable. The necklace disappeared into the shadowy world of private collectors, the money filtered through several accounts, and eventually a check for precisely the amount demanded by Lady Millett found its way to the fund for Cheadle's repairs. The whole transaction left no traces in any official records. What Mabs didn't understand then was that she had just signed her own death warrant as surely as if she'd put a pistol to Brierley's head. By making herself indispensable to him, by becoming the person he turned to in extremity, she had crossed a line that men like him could never safely allow anyone to cross.

Chapter 5: Death in Rio: The Unicorn Falls

The end came with bewildering suddenness. One evening Brierley was his usual self, discussing plans for a weekend in Brighton. The next morning he appeared at breakfast white-faced and trembling, a cablegram crushed in his fist. "I have to go abroad," he said. "Tonight." "Where?" "That general direction," he replied, gesturing vaguely westward, as if the entire Western Hemisphere was equally dangerous territory. She had never seen him frightened before—irritated, certainly, and coldly furious when crossed, but never actually afraid. It transformed him, making him look smaller and somehow faded, like a photograph left too long in sunlight. "Can I come with you?" "No." The finality in his voice told her not to ask again. Instead, she helped him pack, watching as he selected clothes and documents with the methodical care of a man who might not be coming back. On his desk she noticed a brown paper parcel—her farewell present, he explained, something to keep her occupied while he was away. "How long will you be gone?" "Few days," he said, but his eyes wouldn't meet hers. At the door he kissed her forehead with lips that felt cold as marble. "You're the only person in the world I trust," he said, and then he was gone, leaving behind only the lingering scent of his cologne and a silence that seemed to echo with unspoken farewells. The present was a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting a medieval tapestry—a white unicorn sitting in an enclosed garden, chained to a tree, surrounded by flowers that seemed to symbolize both paradise and captivity. Inside the box, wrapped in tissue paper, she found the sapphire necklace she had sold to save him. The real one, not the replica. A note in his handwriting said simply: "Thank you." Three days later the newspapers carried the story. Three men in a car, submachine guns, broad daylight in Rio de Janeiro. The hotel manager told reporters that Senhor Brierley had seemed nervous during his brief stay, but no one could explain why anyone would want to kill an obscure British businessman. The investigation, such as it was, led nowhere. Mabs never finished the jigsaw puzzle. She threw it piece by piece into the Thames, watching the cardboard fragments disappear into the dark water like the scattered remains of dreams.

Chapter 6: Thirty Years of Silence

Three decades passed before the past caught up with Lady Margaret Millett again. She had become exactly what her mother had always intended—mistress of Cheadle Abbey, successful in her own right as a romance novelist, married to a rising politician named Mark who understood the terms of their partnership and asked no awkward questions about the years before they met. But marriages built on mutual convenience rather than passion have their own fragility. When Mark's political career stalled and he found consolation elsewhere, Mabs discovered that solitude suited her better than she had expected. She had her books, her house, her carefully ordered existence. The girl who had once lived dangerously in Amos Brierley's shadow seemed as remote as a character from one of her novels. Then Ronald Smith telephoned, and the past began to seep back like water through a crack in a dam. Ronnie had aged badly. Once sharp-eyed and cynical, he was now nearly blind, living in squalor in a basement flat in North London. The book he was writing—a history of Night and Day magazine—had been his last chance to reclaim some small portion of his former influence. Now even that was slipping away. "The publishers want new material on Brierley," he explained, his thick spectacles catching the light as he turned his head blindly toward her voice. "Something that justifies the expense of publication. Without it, the whole project dies." Mabs found herself remembering the Ronnie she had known thirty years before—quick-witted, well-connected, dangerous in his own quiet way. She had never known then that his apparent dilettantism concealed a deeper game, that he had been Moscow's man inside the British establishment, watching and reporting and occasionally manipulating events according to instructions from King Street. "I was ordered to investigate Brierley's funding," he admitted now. "My controllers suspected CIA money, aimed at turning Night and Day into a propaganda outlet. What they found instead was something rather different." The story he told was like looking at a familiar painting and suddenly seeing a completely different image hidden beneath the surface. Brierley hadn't been funded by any intelligence service. He had been, in essence, a middle-level war criminal who had turned his position on the Control Commission in Germany into an opportunity for spectacular theft. "Jewish property," Ronnie explained matter-of-factly. "Shops, factories, apartment buildings. Officially returned to the original owners, but the records were carefully falsified. The real owners were dead—murdered in the camps—and their property was sold quietly to men who had helped arrange their deaths. Brierley took a percentage and used it to build his postwar empire." The revelation should have destroyed her memories of their year together, should have made her feel soiled by association. Instead, she found herself thinking of the small bronze sculptures he had brought back from Germany, the medieval ivory saint, the way his hands had shaken when he tried to pour champagne that last evening. He had been afraid not just of dying, but of being exposed. The men who killed him in Rio had been collecting a debt that went far beyond money.

Chapter 7: Excavating Truth: The Past Revealed

The final pieces of the puzzle came from an unexpected source. Mabs' elderly mother, drifting in and out of senility, began to speak in brief, lucid moments about "that horrible man" and the money he had given them. Following these fragmentary clues, Mabs traced the chain of information that had led to Brierley's death. It had begun with Dorothy Clarke, still alive at eighty-something in a neat bungalow in Haywards Heath. Mrs. Clarke's memory remained sharp as cut glass, her collection of social intelligence intact despite her deafness. She had picked up rumors about Brierley's activities in the Caribbean, where he had been trying to launder money through property deals. "I told you all about it, my dear," she said, peering at Mabs through the glare of a reading lamp. "You came to see me after you found out what sort of man he really was. You brought your mother's photograph for me to sign, and you asked me to explain what I had been trying to warn you about." But Mabs had no memory of such a visit. Slowly, painfully, the truth emerged. It had been Jane—her twin sister—who had come to Mrs. Clarke, pretending to be Mabs, claiming to have discovered evidence of Brierley's crimes. Jane had extracted information about his Caribbean operations and passed it on to their mother, who had shared it with her friend Lady Trenchard-Yates, who had mentioned it to her husband Sir Drummond, who as a Director of the Bank of England had felt obligated to alert the Treasury to a possible currency violation. The investigation that followed had uncovered not just the Caribbean scheme but the much darker secrets beneath. Brierley's wartime activities became known to British intelligence, who realized that exposure would be catastrophic for the government. A quiet word was passed to interested parties in South America, where certain financial arrangements could be made to disappear along with the man who had created them. Jane had never intended murder. She had simply wanted to break up an affair that threatened her own future inheritance. But in her jealousy and shortsightedness, she had set in motion forces that neither she nor anyone else could control. When Mabs finally confronted her with the truth, Jane's response was characteristic: "You always said you wanted to be free of Cheadle. I thought I was doing you a favor." The irony was perfect and terrible. In trying to save Mabs from a dangerous liaison, Jane had destroyed the only genuine love either of them would ever know.

Summary

The unicorn in the tapestry is always chained to a tree in an enclosed garden, surrounded by flowers that represent both paradise and prison. Mabs understood this now in ways she never could have at twenty. Love had been her chain and her freedom both, and when it was cut, she had simply found another tree to which to tether herself. Cheadle Abbey became her garden, her novels the flowers she cultivated to keep the walls in good repair. But some stories have endings that arrive decades after the plot seems finished. As she stood in her floodlit palace, watching the lights fail and the darkness reclaim her carefully preserved world, Mabs realized that the jigsaw puzzle had finally been completed. Every piece was in its proper place: the girl she had been, the woman she had become, and the man who had loved her enough to die rather than drag her down with him. The picture was beautiful and terrible and true, and at last—thirty years too late—she understood what it meant to be grateful for the brief time when she had been someone's whole world, and he had been hers. The unicorn rests in its garden still, forever wild, forever captive, forever free.

About Author

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Peter Dickinson

Dickinson reflects on the intricate interplay between reality and imagination, crafting narratives that engage readers across ages. As a prolific author, his work spans children's books, detective stories, and poetry, each marked by intellectual rigor and a willingness to challenge narrative norms. His exploration of identity and morality, especially in his speculative and supernatural fiction, invites readers to consider the boundaries between the known and the fantastical. Books like "The Weathermonger" initiate young readers into a world where alternative histories spark curiosity and reflection, while his adult fiction, such as "Skin Deep," delves into crime with complex plots and historical commentary.\n\nMethodically, Dickinson employs genre versatility, using stylistic subtlety and imaginative scope to craft stories that resonate deeply. His James Pibble series showcases unconventional characters navigating plots that weave historical and social commentary, whereas his children's literature offers inventive storytelling with psychological depth. The author’s thematic focus on chance and destiny, seen in his nonfiction work "Chance, Luck and Destiny," extends his literary inquiry into poetry, emphasizing the human condition’s nuances.\n\nReaders benefit from Dickinson’s unique ability to blend genres and themes, making his works a rich source of insight and entertainment. Those interested in the imaginative possibilities of literature and its capacity to reflect societal complexities will find his books compelling. Moreover, Dickinson’s recognition—winning the Carnegie Medal twice, among other accolades—underscores his impact on literature, while this brief bio encapsulates his legacy as a versatile writer whose contributions continue to inspire.

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