Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  It was a rectangular wooden box about fifteen inches long, six or seven inches deep, encrusted with an intricate pattern of varnished shells, the work of some Victorian young lady, no doubt. The children had found it, empty, among the other odds and ends left behind by previous occupants of the rectory and which had been banished to the attic: murky oil paintings of mournful-looking Highland cattle, up to their knees in mist, dim sepia prints of English cathedrals and countless heavily framed portraits of previous incumbents of St Ethelfleda’s – and sometimes their wives and large families as well. Marianne had immediately pounced on it and it had been the repository for those exercise books with marbled covers in which she had written her stories ever since. Nella dropped the rags and cautiously lifted the lid. The notebooks, which they had never found after Marianne died, were still in there.

  ‘Nella! What are you doing?’ came from Mrs Villiers, distractedly waiting below.

  Later, later. Hastily, she opened Dorothea’s clothes chest and thrust the box in, burying it as far down amongst the dresses and furs still there as she could, and then clattered down the attic stairs with the cloths.

  By the time they had cleared up what they could, there hadn’t been much time left for sleep, and the following morning, bleary eyed from their disturbed night, the women sat around the kitchen table drinking tea and eating an early breakfast, while Francis disappeared into the church to inspect it for any damage which might have occurred there. They were too tired to talk much, and presently Nella left them and went first to her room to collect the exercise books she had spent what was left of the night reading, and then up to the attic to return them. She had the books in her hands and was looking at the shell box, wondering where the best place would be to hide it again, when the door opened and she saw that Amy had followed her.

  ‘I knew there was something the matter,’ Amy said. ‘You’ve been so quiet.’ Her glance went from the familiar box to the notebooks. She made a strangled little sound that was almost a scream. ‘You’ve found them? Oh, Nella, you’ve found them!’

  The bright, hopeful new day which had followed the storm seemed like an affront in view of the appalling event which had occurred the night before, news of which greeted Nella when she arrived at Oaklands. She was stunned by it; she moved through the day like an automaton, avoiding the gossip as much as she could while struggling with the discoveries she’d made the previous night and the feeling of disbelief that the unthinkable could have happened again in virtually the same place – albeit in a different way– even down to the thunderstorm, just as there had been on the night Marianne died.

  The whole hospital was horrified and shocked by the murder, although Edith had only been known to the nursing staff as a distant figure, part of Lady Sybil’s household, one who occasionally appeared among them with a message, always quietly but elegantly dressed, fastidiously avoiding coming into contact with the more unpleasant aspects of hospital life. Whenever she appeared, she had been regarded warily by the hard-working nurses: the appreciative glances of any of the men she accidentally encountered in her scented and graceful progress were enough to remind the women that they were wearing stiff, unbecoming uniforms with their hair bundled under a cap, and were smelling unattractively of carbolic, or worse. They rolled their eyes at each other. All the same, the murder sent a ripple of pity, and then unease, through their ranks when the staff was gathered together and warned by Miss Inman to avoid the woods (a favourite walk of the nurses when they were off duty), where a dangerous homicidal maniac might be lurking. One by one, the male staff, the nurses and the hospital domestic staff were then questioned by Sergeant Wheelan and his men.

  Duncan Geddes, in his turn, was being questioned by Reardon, along with the matron when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the swish of Nella’s skirt as she hurried past the open door with her hands full. This dreadful news could do nothing but open old wounds for her, remind her of her sister’s death. He must find some way to talk to her today, though he could not rid himself of the idea that she was avoiding being alone with him – and who could blame her? he asked himself bitterly. Were they ever going to get the chance for that walk she had promised – and the opportunity for him at least to clear the air? The hospital was quietly and gradually winding down but circumstances seemed to be deliberately conspiring against time being found in the still-busy daily routine which kept them both fully occupied – and now this unexpected and tragic happening, which was taking up every spare minute and disrupting everything. About which it would be unthinkable to complain.

  Reardon was at that moment tentatively enquiring if all the patients could be accounted for the previous night. Only a few were actually bedridden, and although he thought the chances of any one of the ambulant patients having committed this murder were slight, it was necessary routine questioning.

  Duncan had guessed what he had been getting at. ‘Inspector, we all experienced things in the trenches that would turn anyone’s mind, and many of the men here still suffer nightmares – like anyone else who was there,’ he added pointedly. ‘However, this is a surgical unit, not a psychiatric one. I doubt if any one of them—’

  ‘Even if the ward doors were not locked at night,’ interrupted Miss Inman crisply. ‘By myself.’

  ‘Locked?’

  ‘Against the unlikely event of anyone sleepwalking.’

  The notion of any of the patients sleepwalking, following Edith in the pouring rain and battering her to death, never mind the very idea of the redoubtable Miss Inman forgetting to lock the wards securely, did not in fact persist for long in Reardon’s mind. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s drop that idea for the moment.’

  Duncan Geddes listened with half an ear as Reardon continued. He was still thinking about Nella, his mind worrying at ways to find an opportunity to talk to her, really talk, now that he had found her again, at last…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1917

  In the late summer, there had been a curious lull after the prolonged fighting which had ended with the victorious capture of the Messines Ridge from the enemy, and a mood of tentative optimism prevailed, regardless of the artillery thundering in the distance on other battle lines. Rumours were rife that an enormous offensive was in the offing, one designed to drive right through Belgium to the coast and capture the enemy submarines which were doing so much damage to the navy. More than a rumour, if the massive influx of troops, guns, supplies, horses, wagons and tents now camped out in the Ypres salient meant anything.

  Meanwhile, in the relative calm, the day-to-day nursing went on: everyday ailments, coughs, colds and mild flu epidemics, bronchitis, trench fever and the ever-present trench foot. Even, from time to time, cases of highly contagious tuberculosis, consumption, that men from poor backgrounds, malnourished and undersized, unsuspectingly carried, bringing them a certain ticket home if a less than hopeful future.

  The big push eventually began at the end of July, and by the time it was two weeks old, it was only too evident that this was going to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war so far. The bloodiest and surely the wettest. It began to rain, and went on raining as no one had seen it rain since Noah, it seemed, and the mud level, on this low-lying land reclaimed from the sea, rose. Tommies stood up to their waists in mud and slime to fire their guns at the enemy. Dead and wounded men, horses, limbers and guns sank into it without trace. And into the casualty clearing station, barely six miles from the fighting line, where the medical team which Duncan headed was now working night and day, snatching whatever sleep they could, whenever possible, the casualties poured in, convoy after convoy, in numbers uncountable. The wounded and dying, grateful for any comfort they could be given, looked on the nurses as angels, the doctors as miracle workers. The nurses were surely angels, but Duncan knew he was no miracle worker. Amputating hopelessly smashed arms and limbs hour after hour, up to the elbows in blood, he felt more like a butcher.

  Nella had come out of the makeshift ward o
ne night, despatched off duty for a few hours’ rest, just as dark was descending. The nightly barrage, the firework display of Very lights, bursting star shells and the accompanying crescendo of guns, was beginning. He was standing outside, snatching a few minutes to smoke a cigarette in the lee of an ambulance from the last convoy which would shortly return for yet another cargo of wounded, his cigarette a red pinpoint glow in the dark. She didn’t at first see him, and stood for a moment on the duckboards over the mud outside the lighted opening as if she couldn’t quite orientate herself. She looked dazed with exhaustion, as they all were, by the continual demands of the work, and emotionally drained by the suffering they witnessed daily. When would it all end? she had asked, only the day before – not until both sides had annihilated each other and there was no one left to fight? She’d had no news of her brother recently and he knew she lived in hourly dread of seeing him brought in, mortally wounded.

  Two weeks ago, her friend, Daisy, had been killed.

  It was almost an accident, a shell tearing through the canvas walls of the makeshift operating theatre where she and Nella were assisting Duncan. She had turned to catch some light to thread a needle for him to stitch a wound. An orderly, standing two or three feet away, had moved at the precise moment when the piece of shrapnel would have hit him; Daisy fell, and died within a few minutes. She wasn’t the first nurse to have been killed or injured, by any means, but this had been Daisy, Nella’s friend. Funny, brave Daisy who would never again make rude remarks about Sister Griggs, or weep over the bundle of their chopped-off hair on the floor, who would never again run risks to be with George Chiversleigh. In a uniform so unbelievably immaculate it was hardly believable in all that filth and chaos, with his blonde hair disciplined to smooth silk when he took off his cap at the funeral, his face like stone and his eyes dazed and blank, George had been granted a few hours’ leave to come and see Daisy lowered into her grave, watched by a crowd of weeping nurses, the coffin covered with a Union Jack. A week later, he, too had been killed. Company officers did not last long, after all.

  Seeing Nella standing there, looking so lost, Duncan spoke her name gently and she raised her head. ‘Captain Geddes,’ she said automatically, as if still on duty, rubbing her hands, chapped and chilblained in winter, always raw with constant scrubbing and disinfectants: hydrogen peroxide, Lysol and carbolic.

  ‘What’s that you’re rubbing?’

  ‘Only a scratch.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  She nodded. Her glance went to the photo he was holding.

  Creased with much handling, it was with him wherever he went, and without any conscious thought of what he was doing, he held it out to her saying, ‘My son, Jamie.’ He saw his words, and the sight of his wife and child, fall like a blow on her and could not believe what he had done. Apart from the unforgivable insensitivity of it, he could not have chosen a worse time.

  But she seemed hardly to glance at it, and even summoned up the ghost of a smile as she handed the photo back. ‘He looks very like you.’ She said nothing about pretty Dolly, in her light chiffon dress, with her hand on the shoulder of their son, but pushed her hair back from her face and leant back against the wall of the hut, closing her eyes. He could not have forced explanations on her then, utterly spent as she was. She would be asleep where she stood if she stayed there much longer.

  ‘You need some rest,’ he said gently, shaking her. He took her elbow and began to guide her to the billet she now shared with another nurse. Someone came out of the ward. ‘Captain Geddes?’

  ‘You’re needed,’ she said.

  He hesitated fractionally. Then he bent and kissed her gently on the forehead. Tomorrow he would explain.

  The sight of her walking away from him was not one he wished to remember.

  The following day she was forced to report sick, and was immediately despatched by ambulance to the base hospital. Infected fingers weren’t unusual – dressing the filthy, gangrenous and often poisonous wounds the men suffered was dangerous, however careful you were – but this was acute. She lay, very ill, in the base hospital for several weeks, after which she had been sent home. He wondered if she knew how fortunate she was not to have died.

  He carried on with his work. The carnage and suffering was beyond human belief. All for a few yards of territory, and possession of a small village called Passchendaele. It went on and on, mirrored by the never-ending struggle to ameliorate pain, to save what life they could. In the midst of it all, weary above exhaustion, he had found time to scribble one or two brief notes to her, but he never received an answer. He knew it was highly unlikely she had ever received them.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Reardon had left Broughton meanwhile and ridden back to Dudley to give the report Kelly had demanded.

  ‘So it was blackmail?’

  ‘If it wasn’t, I don’t know what else you’d call it.’

  As usual, Kelly had a quick grasp of the situation, most of which he held in his memory, helped by the few meticulous notes he’d taken as Reardon brought him up to date with the case so far.

  ‘Lady Sybil says the jewellery was to repay her maid for services rendered, so to speak,’ Reardon said, ‘but even her husband and daughter seemed to find that hard to swallow. There was nothing of any outstanding value there, I reckon, but added together – well, let’s say I wouldn’t mind finding a collection like that in my Christmas stocking. But I can’t see anyone giving that amount away, unless they were under pressure.’

  ‘Some indiscretion on the lady’s part, maybe, that she needed to keep from her husband? This Arthur Foley’s quite a bit older, you say.’

  ‘Yes he is, but that wasn’t the situation as I read it. He’s elderly and not in the best of health, apparently, but it seems a perfectly happy marriage.’

  ‘And that precludes the possibility of a bit of playing fast and loose? Not from what I hear. The expected thing, in some circles, I understand. And anyway, blackmail doesn’t only apply to sexual shenanigans.’

  Reardon thought for a moment. ‘Any hanky-panky going on was between the victim herself, and the gamekeeper.’

  ‘That’s the man who found her – Naylor…Ben Naylor, right? And I see he found the other girl, the one before the war, Marianne Wentworth, and in the same place, too. Hmm. Unlucky chap – or do we have a prime suspect here?’

  ‘The verdict on the Wentworth girl was given as accidental death.’

  ‘And Edith Huckaby was murdered for sure. Well, we’d better find anyone else, as well as her mistress, who might have had good reason to want her out of the way. The lady is capable of using a heavy weapon, I assume?’

  ‘Physically, I dare say, but—’

  ‘All right, not much of a woman’s crime, I agree. Someone could have done it for her, of course…fancy man, mebbe, if she had one. If the blackmail had become too much to endure. No trace of the weapon?’

  ‘Not yet. We might do better if we had some idea what we’re looking for. Searching for a broken branch or a rock in that spot, I tell you, needles and haystacks aren’t in it! Ten to one it’s been chucked in the lake, anyway,’ observed Reardon gloomily.

  ‘The PM report should tell us more. Should be here any time, in fact.’ Kelly checked the big clock on the wall. ‘Doc Simpson has meetings in London tomorrow, so it’s suited him to give it priority. Meanwhile, this Naylor, the gamekeeper. What about him?’

  ‘He’s been with the family since he was a boy, head gamekeeper now, following his father’s footsteps. He’s a widower, and has been for some time. I reckon he’s a bit of a loner, doesn’t mix much in the village, doesn’t drink there – though he seems respected. He’s a religious type, a Methodist.’

  ‘You’re not saying because he’s a Methodist he couldn’t commit a murder?’

  ‘No more than I’m saying Edith Huckaby couldn’t blackmail because she was a Roman Catholic. But I have to say it doesn’t strike me that way, although he admits she’d been trying to per
suade him to leave and find better-paid employment. The possibility of that appears to be so remote to him I doubt if he even gave it a passing consideration, never mind had a row about it. As far as I know – yet – he could’ve had no other motive.’

  ‘And how many men have you known who’ve committed murder for no motive any sane person would consider reasonable? Come on, Reardon!’

  But Reardon still thought Naylor an unlikely suspect. He was stubborn, no doubt. He would dig in his heels in an argument, but he doubted there was enough passion in him to kill. On the other hand, he could be one of the quiet types who smouldered until something, often a quite trivial something, made them explode. But these sort of murders, the way in which Edith Huckaby had been killed, where the killer was in close contact with the victim, were rarely, if ever, coolly premeditated. They were invariably frenzied, repeated attacks, blow after blow committed in uncontrollable anger, in the heat of the moment.

  The report on the post-mortem was in fact brought in a few minutes later, by the pathologist who had performed the autopsy himself, a man in a hurry, just as Reardon was about to leave. Kelly gave it a quick scan and passed it over. Sifting through the jargon, it appeared that it had indeed been a single blow to the temple which had killed Edith Huckaby, though it had been one delivered with some force, splitting the skin and fracturing the delicate bones beneath, leaving a star-shaped wound, two inches across.

  ‘A wound of that type, what sort of implement does it suggest?’ mused Kelly.

  ‘A police truncheon?’ hazarded Simpson, a man renowned for his humour.

  Kelly looked at him.

  ‘Well, something similar, or with a similar smooth, rounded end.’

  ‘A branch, or a smooth stone, maybe?’ asked Reardon.