which hamilton had already won. in netball, england have won the second match of the vitality netball international series against malawi. the roses led 31—25 after half—time and continued that dominance to win 61—53 at the copper box arena in london. they go 2—0 up in the three match series. british olympic pilot lamin deen secured the first major medal of his career with silver in the four—man event at the bobsleigh world cup. britain led the standings after setting a track record in their opening run in whistler, but russia's final run was enough to take gold, with gb‘s combined time 0.285ecs slower. that's all from sportsday. there'll be more sport here on bbc news throughout the evening. a christmas thriller with the ghost stories of mrjames

and carols at kings thrown in. nicola upson takes her investigator to cambridge in the 1930s where, as is her habit, she helps the police with two different investigations, both dark and complicated. nine lessons subtitled some wounds never heal, easiy will realise a conscious contribute to the english detective tradition, not least becausejosephine in real life was a formidable, now though largely forgotten writer of old style thrillers herself. welcome. if anyone doubted the debt you feel to traditional story, they would be left in no doubt after this book, cambridge

1930s ghost stories, a very traditional story, in a sense you're paying your debt, aren't you, you are making it obvious? i am paying debt to that tradition when i decided to go down a route of novels that featured josephine as the character. i decided i would include all the things we love about the golden age, the puzzle mystery, red herrings, suspects, but i would also combine that with a modern sensibility. they are set during the golden age period but they are by no means golden age novels. a couple of plot lines which are intertwined which we won't go into in detail because it's a thriller and we don't want to spoil it. there are a series of attacks on women which is rendered in a contemporary way, that the writers of that period in the early 30s wouldn't have dared touch. no, that is the joy of hindsight with this.

you can treat crimes like that in a more honest way in the way that people would have talked about it to each other at the time but no way would it have got into print. that series of attacks you mentioned is based on a much more contemporary crime, the cambridge rapist peter cook. were you around at the time? no, i was young then. but my partner, interestingly was in cambridge at that time and she ran a music club at a pub there called the anchor, when peter cook was caught and his picture started appearing in the papers, she realised she knew him, served him every week, he worked for a wine merchant and delivered wine to the pub. the shock of that which still resonates with her, i think the fear of the cambridge rapist for people who lived in cambridge in that time is still very strong, you can see the bars on the ground floor windows. and the intimacy of the setting has a lot to do with this story as well, everybody knowing everybody else, you know, students in that era lodging in all the little passageways close to the university centre in the city. it's a very claustrophobic

atmosphere. it is and it's amazing how easily that crime transported itself back to the 30s. in the 70s, the people who suffered that were a group of female students by and large. that wouldn't be relevant in the 30s but transfer that to shop workers, waitresses, nurses at the new addenbrooks hospital and it works very well and those themes, the suspicion of the innocent men, the randomness and the idea that the man who is holding the town to ransom could be your taxi driver, your ambulance driver or the man you queued next to in the cinema is still very relevant. we are dealing with a series of murders which conceal a secret not unconnected and i think it's fair to say this, with the ghost stories of mrjames who was kings at one point and used to read the stories to students at christmas. now, it's an extraordinarily innocent kind of scene in a way, you know, going in and listening to the boss reading

out these things. it is. quite intoxicating. it is. i love the fact that mr james or monty as he was known, he'd emerge from the study with the ink still wet, blow out every candle but one and read the new story to the handful of very select people gathered around to hear it. when you write books like i do that mix fact with fiction, you are always looking for that little window in the truth that's just big enough to get your story through and i found that in december 1913 when for the first time mr james didn't finish a new story. what if something so terrible happened that christmas that 25 years later those men gathered round to be entertained started dying, killed off one by one in ways that echo his stories. you have said it. you talk about merging fact and fiction and there is one particular way in which that is relevant to the novel and the six that preceded it in the series

as it were. that is the character ofjosephine tay who acts as an investigator and assistant to the police. she's on the scene, realises things and has insights. but of course she was a practitioner of the detective novel in the golden age, wrote i think eight books. what was it that attracted you to her as a character? it was in particular her novel the franchise affair which when i read it, i loved the fact that way back in 1948 someone was brave enough to write about two women abusing a young girl. she picked up the golden age rule book and seemed to rip it to shreds. no murder, no puzzle, no brilliant detective. it was a book that could be read on many levels. that's what i love about her. although reading it now, it's about an england that for better or worse is gone and you feel the sunshine on your face when you pick it up, it's nostalgic. there is a depth, modernness and darkness of it way ahead of her time and that is

what appealed to me. she had a life in the theatre, wrote great plays in the west end that ran for over a year. she worked withjohn guilgood. importantly, for her as a character, there were lots of gaps in her life. a bold thing to do, pick a real person that you didn't know, and stick her in a book as a protagonist, as someone who makes the plot turn. did you have to think hard before you did that? i did actually in all honesty. it felt brave. the novels have had a long gestation period so it was before real characters in fiction and film were quite as prevalent as they are today. i also knew that although tay wasn't as well known as people like christie and allingham, the people who loved her

work really loved her. in life she was complex and difficult and contrary. she was aloof and dogmatic. although i don't want to sugar over the cracks, i want to bring the flaws in her personality forward, that is what people like about the character in the books that, she isn't nice all the time, sometimes you want to pick her up, shake her and scream at her. but she is quite likeable. if you are going to use the character of the outsider, the assistant, you know, that looks in on the case and whether it's a blundering police officer or somebody who just has missed the main point, you know, comes in and sets it right that. that person is bound to be a little bit awkward, a little bit of a loner really? she is. that is very true to the woman in real life. she did keep herself to herself very clearly and i think i'm enjoying very much creating the relationship thatjosephine in the books has with archie penrose in the book.

rather than do the on—off romance thing, which is another much—loved thing about crime fiction, to write about their friendship and the ups and downs, particularly in the context of this novel where josephine‘s gift forfriendship is more needed than ever, is quite an interesting thing to look at. it's a pretty gruesome book in the sense that the crimes that we are dealing with in two parallel series of events, leave nothing to the imagination, thai got a modern sensibility, they've got a modern sensibility, if that is the right word, about them, particularly the first one. do you ever feel reluctance or distaste to go so near the edge in what people will do to each other? i think everybody who writes crime fiction has a line and you don't know what that line is until you're nearly at it and i agree with you very much that the first murder in this book comes close.

i think also what is important to me and has been throughout all my books, is to make those murders very, very relevant to the victim, to the life they lead before they became the corpse in your puzzle or the victim in a murder inquiry. i think the crimes that affect these men in this book are relevant to who they were when they were alive. that is very important to me. nicola upson, author of nine lessons, thank you. thank you. hello, weather has rather it flip—flopped between the weather of autumn and winter recently. this weekend, some people have recorded their first snow of the season, and

we are about to change again. this area of low pressure is still in its frontal systems down and across the british isles tonight. it will be wet, 30 or a0 millimetres in some places, and windy, some seeing gusts of a0 miles an hour. let's see how we are shaping up first thing on monday morning. some of this rain will be quite heavy, a lot of surface and spray around bird has stopped breathing to the north of this rain band, but along this rain ba nter this rain band, but along this rain banter could be some heavy pulses of rain. north of that it is a mixture of sunny spells, particularly to the east of the pennines, but there are plenty of showers to be had. some of those will be wintry. we will gang bent together again across the far north of scotland, the tail end of the front they are taking time to pull away into the north sea. the wind quite a feature of the day but the temperatures notjust as low as they are going to get in the days to

come. double figures across the south. that really is the last of the mild air because once those weather fronts have moved across the channel of to the near continent, that then opens the gates to supply of cold air streaming down these isobars from well north of the british isles, so that is what is going to change our weather from the relatively mild layers of late sunday and monday into something a good deal colder as we get into tuesday, wednesday and thursday. notice the supply of showers across northern and eastern parts of the british isles and of the irish sea, into pembrokeshire and parts of the south—west, some of those showers turning wintry across higher ground. the wind really becoming a feature across eastern parts as we get through the day and where we have high ground in the east there will be lying snow and the temperatures never better than about seven and feeling much lower given the strength of that wind. so, briefly

mild, then it turns cold, but watch out for that biting wind. this is bbc news. i'm martine croxall. the headlines at 8 pm. international trade secretary liam fox says the future of the irish border can't be resolved until the uk and eu reach a trade agreement. brothers ellis and elliot thornton are among the five people who died when a stolen car hit a tree in leeds. dangerous drones, owners will have to register and sit safety tests under new plans. a red alert to airlines over the plume of ash from a volcano on the island of bali. also in the next hour, they‘ re changing guard at buckingham palace.