Bad Day in Byzantium

Murder, rape, persecution and random acts of cruelty - this is the fare dealt up to the weak and defenceless lodgers of the crumbling mansion ‘Beauregard’ by its resident managers, the identical twins Asquith and Bacon Mudeford.
But forces are at work to change all that.
Asquith has been stabbed at the edge of the pool in Finnian’s Wood, close by the Anglican church of St Columba, which is the centre of 1950s life for several of the lodgers and for Asquith’s mother, Eve. She has a lover, St Columba’s vicar, Rev David Beddow. Together they wheelbarrow the dying Asquith into a wild part of the wood to his steel tomb. In a moment of consciousness, Asquith hears the terminal words of abandonment, ‘bless you my son’, before he is shut in for eternity.
Eve lives in town with Tom, her violent husband. He works a menial job, cheats on Eve with other women, punishes his sons, hates everyone, and is hated in return by Eve. She secretly hoards money in the hope that a world without him would be a much better place. How convenient that Tom develops heart failure.
The boarding house ‘Beauregard’, on the edge of town at the foot of brooding Finnian’s Wood, was originally the home of the twins’ grandfather, the founder of the fire-ravaged Imperial Bearing Company. Gathered there, by reason of poverty, bad luck or desperation, are the vulnerable misfits who see little chance of brighter and glorious days. Their rich Byzantium is under siege, thanks to Asquith and Bacon, hunters with an open season ticket.
Bacon is a petty bully- to the lodgers he offers physical and mental abuse, of a warped but survivable kind. Asquith is something else - he’s a furtively evil and criminal sadist. His bag of tricks includes rape, extortion, pet slaying, theft and constructive murder.
Alive to the nature of her sons and knowing something of their acts, Eve is preoccupied initially with enduring her hellish marriage to Tom and then, following his welcome death, with her affair with Beddow. The good reverend is a man too handsome for his calling and of ambivalent morality. Just as well for Eve. She finds both characteristics go a long way towards her quest to rid herself of a husband and a pernicious son.
As for Beddow, he has a history of womanising, noted well by females of his flock. He is not a schemer nor is he malevolent but he is a survivor, a shallow pragmatist, and as events unfold he turns to trying to rekindle a former love affair with the daughter of the previous vicar of St Columba’s.
The tormented lodgers yearn for the death or disappearance of Bacon and Asquith, especially Asquith. Several visit Finnian’s Wood to escape the depredations of the twins or to satisfy their personal obsessions. In time, Asquith goes there too, intent on a further rape, that of the young, obsessive Carol. Bacon, who is sweet on the girl and beginning to reveal his underlying humanity, follows Asquith and in an act of decency and courage, threatens to expose Asquith’s obscene plan.
There can be only one outcome - death and disappearance. Someone gets dumped into the pool in the Finnian’s Wood. Each of the lodgers finds out about a body in the pool and identifies it as the twin they most want it to be. But silence is best. Who cares who did the killing? This is a good day in Byzantium.
When Asquith and Bacon are both found to be missing, the lodgers enter into a conspiracy of silence - the revenge of the little people.
But rejoice at your peril - all is not over. Beddow find himself mired in the dirty business of corpse retrieval and burial, to save face, to atone, to conceal an act of sincere and vicious and triumphant murder.
All things come to those who wait - don’t they?