Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders

by Tessa Arlen

  “She just puts two and two together—”

  “And makes five. And I am sure you told her about your involvement.”

  I hadn’t, of course, and the fact that he thought I had was irritating. “You should know better than that. All I want to know is whether he was a German spy, or worse, an English traitor. You don’t have to tell me exactly what information he was after at the airfield.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Will he be shot for espionage?” I asked, hoping to surprise him into giving me a straight answer.

  He laughed and shook his head. “You’re so quick, Poppy, so darn quick. Now, let’s talk about our suspects—who in this village could possibly be the Buffenden Strangler, I wonder? You haven’t been distracted from our mission by ole Ponsonby, I hope. Are you going to update me about the village flasher? I think my money’s on Percy.”

  I laughed at his flippant reference to our murderer, even though it was said with a completely straight face. “Has it occurred to you that since your base has been proved to have a violable security system that any man who wanted to could leave, after curfew or even if you were all confined to base? I mean, the badgers’ sett has really been an unpatrolled gateway between your world and the village, hasn’t it? We really, at this point, should be looking at every man on the base as suspects for the murders of Doreen and Ivy.”

  He said nothing about Ponsonby at all, which I found supremely annoying and rather arrogant.

  “How is our inquiry going in the village? Any developments there at all?” He took his attention off the road for a moment to turn his head to me. “Percy Frazer, for instance?” And because I am the cooperative type, unlike Griff O’Neal, I filled him in on my now non-suspect: Percy.

  “However much he appears to be a perfect suspect for this sort of murder, Percy is simply not the type: both the vicar and Mrs. Glossop have assured me that he is too timid to do something as aggressive as killing two girls. He is a sad man, and we shouldn’t make fun.”

  “I am not making fun. You just think that because I am an American and we tend to be more lighthearted than you Anglo-Saxons. What you call our flippant attitude is how we cover awkward situations, whereas the English just clam up and look grim. So, even though Doreen made up a story about Percy hiding behind a bush and watching them while they were swimming—and her friend Ivy corroborated it—that wouldn’t be a good enough motive for their murder? You see, although I am just an American, I would have thought that strangulation was the least they deserved for making up such a poisonous story and pinning it on a vulnerable male like Percy Frazer.”

  I sighed, because of course his theory made complete sense. And considering Percy’s sad history, Doreen’s false accusation was a particularly vicious one. But even if Percy had had a sort of breakdown and had sought revenge after all these years, it still wouldn’t wash.

  “Not in this case,” I said. “You see, after all that business years ago when Doreen made up her story about Percy, Mrs. Wilkes had him come and live with them at the farmhouse, so they could keep an eye on him.”

  “With a thirteen-year-old daughter in the house—they must need their heads examined.”

  I could understand his reaction. Surely no one in their right mind would have a man who had been convicted as a Peeping Tom sleep in the same house as their teenage daughter.

  “The Wilkeses have been looking out for Percy since he was a boy. They obviously know and trust him, and they did everything they could to stop him from being sent to prison because they understood his little peculiarities.”

  A whoop of laughter from the driver’s seat. “Little peculiarities! That’s rich—you English are really eccentric, aren’t you?”

  “If you call looking after the defenseless and the weak eccentric, then, yes, I suppose some of us deserve to be called that. Do you want to know why Percy is no longer a suspect, or not?”

  “I do,” he begged. “I really, really do!”

  “Good. You see, Percy had the perfect alibi for when Doreen was killed, the vicar told me. He had injured his foot the night before Doreen was murdered—cut it on the blade of a plow. It sliced right through his boot, and he had to have stitches in his foot. Reverend Fothergill was clear on that point because Dr. Oliver did the stitching. Percy was still unable to walk without a pair of crutches when Ivy was killed. It was the first thing Dr. Oliver told Constable Jones and Inspector Hargreaves when the girls were murdered.”

  I heard him sigh as he changed gears to negotiate a corner. “Damn. I had my heart set on Percy.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you met him.”

  “Okay. So, who’s next on your list?”

  I tried to match his lighthearted mood: “Every single man on your base.”

  And we were still arguing about village versus air-base motives as he parked the car at the back of the Gaumont cinema and we joined the long queue to see Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in a romance set on the home front.

  FOURTEEN

  THE ENDING OF Mrs. Miniver was so terribly unexpected and so devastating that I had difficulty not breaking down as we shuffled out of the cinema, surrounded by a crowd of tear-streaked faces, and walked to the car.

  Griff reached out a hand and took mine. “You expected the pilot to be killed, didn’t you? I know I did.”

  I didn’t want to say anything about pilots being killed; it was all too tactlessly close to home.

  “I was so shocked when she was killed . . . She was so . . . so in love . . .” I stumbled along in the dark trying to see through welling eyes. Griff put me into the car and by the time he got in beside me, tears were streaming silently down my face. “But I didn’t want him to die either—it’s all so terrible. I really hate this war.”

  He put his arm around me and drew me to him. Well, at least he drew me as close as he could, because the hand brake got in the way and jabbed me viciously in the ribs, and I pulled back slightly. He must have taken my not leaning in any further as reluctance to be held too close, because he released me and sat back in his seat, and sadly the moment was gone.

  “Good fighter pilots don’t die, Poppy.”

  “They don’t?” I asked, knowing this wasn’t true. RAF pilots were killed all the time, in frightening numbers. Everyone knew it, and however dashing the Americans are, they are certainly not invincible.

  “Nope, the good ones live forever,” he said and started the engine.

  We drove home in silence, a complete departure from our usual teasing banter. He stopped the car outside the lodge, got out, and came around to open my door.

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening,” he said in such a gentle voice that I almost started crying again. It was a beautiful night, and I’ll say this for the blackout: I have never seen the night sky so thick with stars so bright that a moon would have paled into insignificance. I hoped he would put his arms around me again, but he didn’t.

  He cleared his throat. “We are going to be a bit busy for a few days.” He always called missions “being a bit busy.” “When I get back I’ll come and find you on patrol,” he said, and then he laughed. “If you promise me that Sid won’t be escorting you.”

  “I promise. Thank you for taking me to the pictures, Griff. I can’t imagine that you could have enjoyed the film as much as I did.”

  “I thought it was a clever movie in its own way—the best bit of propaganda I’ve seen in a long time.”

  “Propaganda? I thought it was a film about the heroism of the English on the home front—and it was wonderfully romantic.”

  “Exactly,” he said with finality. “That’s good propaganda for you. There’s no need to bash everyone over the head about how evil Hitler’s Germany is. Just show a decent, law-abiding English family struggling to adapt to the horrors of war and selflessly doing their bit, and you have the making of a perfect propaganda movie. That part
when Mrs. Miniver tries to help that wounded German paratrooper and he repays her by demonstrating just what unpleasant bullies those brainwashed by Nazism really are. That was well done. I am sure Mrs. Miniver convinced lots of Americans that we had done the right thing by joining the war.”

  And in that moment, I saw how clever the plot of the film had been. There had been no frantic flag-waving, no grand speeches, just, as Griff had said, a decent family doing their best for their country in a time of war. I watched him jump back into his car and shoot off down the village High Street and realized that there was a good deal more going on under the surface of Griff’s often playful exterior than I had at first imagined.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT three days I gave my novel everything I had. Egged on by the soft drawl of Ilona’s patrician voice in my head, my plot left matters of murder to concentrate entirely on affairs of the heart. I wrote furiously, pausing every so often to weep into Griff’s handkerchief, with Bess looking anxious or bored by turns as she devotedly washed my hands and polished off my unfinished lunches.

  Three nights later, before I left to go out on patrol, I read through the pages I had written. I had to admit my story was moving forward. The romance part was, I prayed, not slushy or sickeningly sentimental, but, hopefully, deeply and tragically sad.

  I don’t want to spoil anything in case it’s published, but the gist of this part of the book is that the love of Ilona’s life, her editor, Tom Hartley, announces that he has joined the Royal Navy. It’s the least he can do, he says, after the catastrophe of Dunkirk. Ilona is devastated but does a tremendous job of covering up à la Mrs. Miniver. She doesn’t even break down on their final evening together: they go to a nightclub, drink champagne, and dance every dance—and of course Tom is a superb dancer and Ilona looks ravishing in an ivory silk dress that I borrowed from a Ginger Rogers film. In the small hours Tom Hartley walks Ilona back to her flat, and as they stand by the river to watch the sunrise, she says good-bye to him, careful to preserve an affectionate but self-contained shop front.

  He kisses her: a kiss so tender and lingering, so full of love and desire, it leaves her breathless and in no doubt that if he doesn’t come back to her she will simply die. They walk on together to the front door of her flat. They kiss one last time and then he walks away. At the end of the street he stops, turns, and gives her a farewell salute—he is standing in a patch of early morning sunlight, which she takes as an auspicious omen. She lifts a hand to wave, and now that he can’t see her, she allows herself to cry.

  After I had blown my nose, bathed my eyes with cold water, and washed all the dog lick off my hands, Bess and I set off on patrol. The evenings were beginning to draw in, and there was that distinct chill in the air that tells you that autumn is not far off.

  We walked fast in the cold evening and stopped only once to remind Mrs. Angus—who was becoming more forgetful by the week—that her parlor blackout wasn’t completely covering the window. “An air-raid drill will do this lot nothing but good,” I confided in Bess as we came up toward the Wilkes farm.

  I slowed down, hoping to catch a glimpse of Audrey taking a solitary walk along the lane. But there was no sign of her and I decided to drop in and simply say hullo. If I had made a promise to myself that I would no longer pretend I was too busy to spend time with the most overlooked young woman in our village, then I needed to keep it.

  Mrs. Wilkes opened the door and I was surprised to see that Audrey was not sitting at her kitchen table studying her movie magazines.

  “Do you have time for a cuppa? Must be chilly out tonight.” Mrs. Wilkes was already setting down blue-and-white cups and saucers: three of them, I noticed. And sure enough, the door into the kitchen opened and there was Audrey—a wholly different woman from the one I knew. Instead of being confined in a long tight plait down her back, Audrey’s loosened hair framed her large pale face in soft, thick, shiny bay brown waves. It was a magnificent sight: thick and lustrous, the sort of hair a film star would have envied. She was wearing a jade green floral blouse cut quite low to reveal a deep cleavage and satiny smooth ivory skin. Around her shoulders was a dark green cardigan. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, but the little she had on emphasized the blue lights in her dark gray eyes and gave her cheeks an almost silky glow. But wonder of wonders, instead of her old corduroy dungarees she was wearing a skirt and—my eyes nearly popped out of my head—high heels!

  She looked what Granny would describe as Junoesque: an Edwardian term reserved for big and beautiful women. I nearly said, Audrey, you look absolutely smashing! But an admonitory frown made me pick up my cup of tea and blow lightly across its surface. Audrey, I remembered just in time, didn’t go in for flowery compliments.

  “Tea’s on the table, dear,” said Mrs. Wilkes, as if Audrey always swanned into the kitchen looking sensational and not scuffing along in broken-down slippers with slumped shoulders in a shapeless old cardigan that had belonged to her dad.

  She joined us at the scrubbed pine table, and Mrs. Wilkes poured. I knew how much Audrey loved films, so I told her all about Mrs. Miniver. She listened politely and then she yawned, and I had to laugh. “Not your cup of tea, then, Richard Ney? After all, he is a British actor.”

  “No, he’s not; he’s American.” She smiled because she was the expert. “But he does a pretty decent accent. I like the American stars more than ours—they have more oomph.” She sipped her tea and said no more, and when we had finished I thanked them and got up to go. As I walked to the door, Audrey joined me and said she would walk me down the drive.

  As we strolled along in the cool of the evening, she said, in the most offhand way, as if she were discussing the price of livestock in Wickham market, “I don’t miss either of them, you know. Doreen and Ivy. It’s funny, but it’s as if they never lived here, that I never saw them every day when I was a kid. They’ve simply gone—just like that.”

  I let her remark lie there uncommented on and waited.

  “The only thing that I found hard to forgive Doreen for was that she led Brian Chambers on. She wasn’t happy until he had proposed. You know something, Poppy? She was that spoiled and in need of attention that she had to have a proposal from the one hero in our village. I hated the idea that Brian would come home, marry her, and find out how third-rate she was. She wasn’t fit to wipe the dust off his boots.”

  This was pretty condemning stuff from Audrey, considering what had happened to Doreen.

  “Brian was wonderful,” she said softly. “Far too good for the likes of Doreen, but he’s gone now, so he’ll never have to find out how rotten she was.”

  If I had been Constable Jones, I would have taken her in for questioning right then and there. But I wasn’t Jones, and anyway, if she had strangled Doreen, what reason could Audrey have had for bumping off Ivy? And then it came to me. I didn’t need Ilona to prompt my thinking: Audrey had murdered Doreen, and then Ivy had found out and Audrey had had to kill her too. Ivy’s death was a cover-up, as Griff would have called it.

  I was so preoccupied with these thoughts that it took me a moment to realize that Audrey was waiting for me to say good night and go. There was nothing particularly subtle about her demonstrated need to be alone. She sighed, shifted her feet, and then said, “Nippy for the time of year, isn’t it? How much more of your patrol do you have to do?”

  “I am halfway through.”

  “Right then, you’d better be getting on, then, hadn’t you? Looks like rain’s coming in.” I took the hint and, calling Bess, set off toward the village.

  As I paced along lanes and across bridges, I wondered why Audrey had taken the time to walk me down the drive—dressed to the nines—to tell me quite baldly that she didn’t miss either Ivy or Doreen and that she had found Doreen particularly unpleasant. And when she had got that off her chest she had then pretty much told me I could go. What a confusing woman she is, I said
to myself as we walked up Water Lane. She most certainly is. And why is scruffy old Audrey so groomed and dressed in her best? Ilona’s voice chimed in, because things like appearance matter a lot to her. Did you notice that she was wearing stockings?

  I stopped so abruptly and stood for so long that Bess came running back to me. “Stockings!” I said aloud to my little dog. “Audrey was wearing stockings!” She wagged her tailless rump and danced around me.

  There is not one woman in Little Buffenden whose legs are sheathed in sheer nylon. Either we wear ankle socks (it had become fashionable in the last two years), or, if they are going dancing, some girls shave their legs and then ask a girlfriend to draw a dark line with an eyebrow pencil from the back of the ankle on up past the knee to give the effect of seamed stockings. Granny would never tolerate me drawing lines on my legs; she is very clear on what Redfern women do and don’t do.

  The only girls in our village who had worn stockings recently were Doreen and Ivy. Was my new friend Audrey, who wouldn’t be caught dead running around with a Yank, dating an American? Is this why she was all dressed up and had wanted me to leave—so she could meet him privately? I spun on my heel and started to walk back to the Wilkes farm.

  Hold on a moment. Ilona’s voice stopped me from being rash. Darling, you are dating an American too, aren’t you? Oh, come on, don’t deny it. The only difference between you, Doreen, Ivy, and Audrey is that your chap hasn’t given you nylon stockings. He is far too much of a gentleman, she said, as if I needed these things explained for me.

  As usual, Ilona had come to the point with deadly accuracy: the most incriminating evidence about both murders was that Doreen had been strangled with nylon stockings and Ivy with an American Air Force tie. If Audrey was secretly dating an American, she would have had access to both.