A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1)

by Fliss Chester

  ‘If there’s some going, then yes please. And, Kitty?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know if Mrs B has anything like an atlas here? Or a map of France at least?’

  Kitty put the old kettle on the stove and exhaled, blowing air out through pursed lips. ‘An atlas you’re more likely find in the town library, I suppose, or up at the big house. You could ask Mary if you could look.’ She was referring to one of the other land girls, Mary, an aristocratic young lady from the north of England who had managed to get a room in the big house itself. ‘Though I’m not sure she’s taking visitors after Lord Bigwig found her in the hay barn with Johnny Borthwick the other day. Still, poor love needs some excitement before she’s married off to some other toff, I’ve no doubt. Anyway, I’m sure Mrs B’s got a map of France though, wait here.’ Kitty moved the kettle off the hotplate onto the warming side of the stove and disappeared through the low door of the kitchen into the dark passageway beyond.

  Fen, despite the cheering diversion of some gossip, really was starting to feel rather exhausted. It had been quite the day, from all the physical work before the afternoon post, then the reeling horror of realising that Arthur was most likely dead. But it hadn’t been a black-edged telegram, or were they only sent to real family? Perhaps fiancées didn’t count and weeks, even months ago, Arthur’s parents had known what she only feared; that he wasn’t coming home.

  Kitty reappeared with a battered old map in her hands. ‘Thought I’d seen it somewhere. I think it’s Mr B’s from the Great War, but I doubt, bar the odd crater, that France has changed all that much.’

  ‘Thanks, Kitty, you are the very best, you know.’ Fen shook out the old map and found the right area for Burgundy. Now to find a Fontaine somewhere…

  Four eyes and two cups of cocoa worked their magic and Kitty triumphantly pointed out a large village called Morey-Fontaine, close to the famous Château du Clos de Vougeot.

  ‘That must be it!’

  ‘Oh Kitty, you’re wonderful, you know that?’

  Kitty, who had never been called wonderful in her whole nineteen years, smiled a little and nodded.

  ‘I wonder how the Archangel Death fits in with a charming little Burgundian village?’ Fen pondered.

  ‘I think Herr Hitler saw to it that he visited most places.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t suppose there’s many villages in France that haven’t had him fly over them these last few years.’ Fen reached out and held Kitty’s hand in hers as they thought for a moment about all the lives – and loves – lost in France since the war began.

  ‘Maybe Morey-Fontaine has some sort of connection with him? The Archangel.’ Kitty put the idea forward and it made Fen wonder who the Archangel of Death was, and why, indeed, he had some special connection to the village Arthur was so desperate to tell her about?

  Two

  Luckily for both Fen’s mission to find out more about archangels, and for her aching back, the next day was a Sunday, which meant church and an enforced rest from the fields. Mrs B was keener than mustard that if she must have so many young ladies in her house she would ensure their spiritual sustenance as much as their physical one, and the best way to stop her sudden influx of girls being compared to a bawdy house (for some billets did indeed get that reputation) was to frogmarch them all, willingly or not, to church every Sunday.

  ‘I don’t know what I should be thanking ’im for.’ Edith spoke out rather loudly between verses of ‘Now Thank We All Our God’.

  ‘Shush, Edie,’ Kitty glanced over to where one of her cousins was sitting, several pews behind and on the other side of the nave. Fen knew Kitty worried constantly that her father would kick up a stink and demand she come home, to take on the work he and her mother couldn’t manage now the boys were gone, especially if word ever got back to him that she was on some sort of free ticket and enjoying herself a little bit too much.

  Fen raised her eyebrows at her in solidarity; Edith was good fun at times but also a bit of an attention-seeker. She’d flapped her hands around wildly earlier as a bee had buzzed around their hats during the welcome, and now, since no one had paid her much attention, she seemed at it again.

  ‘Ai-eee!’

  ‘Shhhh!’

  ‘Whatever is the fuss?’

  The group of young women were shushed by those in the pews around them and Edith in particular was told to ‘just be quiet’ by Mrs B.

  ‘What is it?’ Dilys whispered to her, once the next hymn had started.

  ‘Got bloody stung, didn’t I?’

  ‘There, there,’ Dilys whispered, the words sounding even more comforting due to her soft Welsh accent. ‘Suck the sting out, else it’ll swell if you’re unlucky.’ Dilys was always the one who knew about countryside lore and how to fix almost anything like that.

  ‘Tch, it’s too late, look at my bleedin’ arm!’

  The girls all looked at Edith’s swelling wrist and each had their own reaction. Fen frowned at the commotion, Dilys patted the poor girl on the shoulder and muttered another ‘there, there’, and Kitty looked sheepishly over at the ever more irritable Mrs B.

  The service came to an end, not before Mrs B had insisted they all take Holy Communion, and they filed out according to their pew into the aisle and from there out to the September sunshine.

  Fen found the vicar, a Reverend Smallpiece, and shook his hand.

  ‘Thank you, Vicar,’ she started the pleasantries. ‘Such an interesting sermon.’

  ‘Thank you, dear girl.’ Smallpiece took his hand back and used both of them to flatten his stole against his surplice. ‘I find the preaching of Romans 12 particularly poignant this year: “… offer your bodies as a living sacrifice”.’ He raised his hands up as if he was back in the pulpit.

  Fen swallowed quickly, not wanting to think too much about the sacrifices made in France, by Arthur in particular perhaps, recently.

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Reverend?’ She felt bad interrupting him, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see her friends waiting not-so-patiently by the lychgate, milling around like chicks next to Mrs B, their mother hen, obviously stalling so Fen could catch up and walk back to the farmhouse with them.

  ‘Of course, my child, what is it?’

  ‘The archangel of death, do we have a name for him?’

  ‘He is never mentioned in the Bible, my dear, but I think we know him from other scriptures as Azrael.’

  ‘Azrael.’ Fen repeated the ancient name and then thanked the vicar and headed over to her friends.

  ‘Thanking the vicar?’ Mrs B looked approvingly at Fen. ‘The only excuse worth having for keeping my roast waiting.’

  ‘Sorry Mrs B, I just had… well I wanted to—’

  ‘No matter, let’s hurry and we’ll be home soon.’

  The other girls dropped into line behind her, the talk still mostly of Edith and her now bandaged, thanks to Dilys’s headscarf, arm – but Fen was deep in thought. The archangel of death was Azrael. It felt an odd sort of connection to Arthur and didn’t quite sit right. Although, in crossword terms, they were both six-letter words starting with A, and even darling Arthur wouldn’t have gone so far as to describe himself as an angel…

  She reached into her pocket as they walked along the footpath through the fields that led back to the old farmhouse and felt the softened paper of Arthur’s letter. Its presence gave her some comfort and, to herself as much as to anybody, she whispered, ‘What are you trying to tell me, my darling?’

  She sighed, pulled her hands out of her pockets, adjusted her Sunday-best hat and ran a little to keep up with Kitty, who was regaling Edith and Dilys about the latest flick she’d heard about starring her heart-throb, Cary Grant.

  ‘Tell me, duckie, something’s bothering you, isn’t it?’ Mrs B was knitting in front of the fire late on Sunday evening. The long scarf was an odd mix of navy-blue wool and some grey left over from the three balaclavas she’d already knitted for ‘those poor fellas in them boats�
��. Fen was helping her by sewing some knitted squares of more brightly coloured wool together for ‘them poor tots in London with no roofs over their blessed little heads’.

  ‘I think Arthur is… missing.’

  ‘Had one of them telegraphs, have you?’

  ‘Telegram,’ Fen couldn’t help but correct the older woman. ‘No. But I got a letter from him and I think he was trying to tell me something about his death.’

  ‘Oh deary, I am sorry.’ Mrs B’s knitting needles fell unusually quiet. ‘Spit it out then, what makes you think he’s a goner?’

  ‘Well, he’s given me a clue or two—’

  ‘Oh he’s a right one for always doing that, isn’t he?’ Mrs B interrupted, starting up her knitting again.

  ‘One of them I’m pretty sure leads to a small village in Burgundy called Morey-Fontaine.’

  ‘Sounds fancy.’

  ‘And the other spells out archangel death.’ Fen looked up from her needlework to see if her words had had any effect on Mrs B. As a keen churchgoer, Fen knew she was on rocky ground blasphemy-wise if she went around dropping the names of the choirs eternal.

  ‘That’s what you were chatting to the vicar about earlier, was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Smallpiece is an educated man and there’s not much he don’t know about scripture and the like, but if you need to find out more, you can look in Mr B’s old country almanac. Has some odd things in it, I can tell you. Birdsong and harvest times, yes, but also Catholic saints and whatnot.’ She put her knitting down and pushed herself up out of the chair with a small grunt. ‘I’ll find it for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs B. Really.’

  Fen concentrated on her sewing until the older woman came back into the room.

  ‘I’d have never put purple and orange together, but it’s a jolly little blankie you got going on there.’ Mrs B took the baby blanket out of Fen’s hands and replaced it with the almanac. ‘Must be that French bit of you.’ It wasn’t said unkindly, but Fen wondered if she should apologise for the slightly clashing avant-garde feel to the charity blanket. Instead, she nodded some thanks to Mrs B and tucked her feet in under her as she leant back in the armchair and started flicking through Mr B’s old book of country lore.

  ‘Gosh,’ Fen exclaimed to the room, which was now home to both Kitty and Dilys, as well as Mrs B. With Fen absorbed in flicking past mowing competition results and flags of the world, Mrs B had had to rope in more volunteers for her blanket stitching. Edith was upstairs setting her hair with some concoction she’d read about in Home Chat magazine, but Kitty and Dilys were both sitting on the floor, needles in hand, vying for room in front of the fire.

  ‘Found something useful, duckie?’ Mrs B asked.

  ‘Rather. And you were right, Mrs B,’ Fen laid the large, and still slightly dusty, book down on her lap. ‘There’s a whole list of Catholic Angels of God here.’

  ‘Does it include us?’ Kitty chirped up, risking a clip round the ear. Instead she got a stern look from the old woman, which didn’t stop her from continuing. ‘Miss Pettifer always said that we English were angels, hence why the Romans called good old England that. Angel-Land. Perhaps I’m an “angel Saxon”?’ She clasped her hands into the prayer position and pouted piously, then giggled as Dilys, being Welsh, jabbed her playfully in the ribs.

  ‘Shush, you silly girl,’ Mrs B chastised her. ‘Fen dear, what have you found?’

  ‘Well, Kitty isn’t right in this case, though there are a few angels listed that I had no idea were patrons of various things. According to the Franciscans, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are all angels of death.’

  ‘Makes you shiver, don’t you think?’ Dilys said, but stared into the fire as she did so.

  ‘But also patron saints of the blind, in Raphael’s case, and Germany of all places for all three of them!’

  ‘Well, I think that’s quite enough of all that now.’ Mrs B made to move around a bit in her armchair. ‘Dilys, be a dear and switch on the wireless. I think we could all do with a nice change. Put it on the Light Programme side and let’s see if that funny RAF show is on, what’s it called again, Kitty?’

  ‘Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh. Oh let’s, those chaps are such cards.’

  Fen closed the almanac and smiled, pleased too of a change of subject. But the names of all the archangels stayed with her: Azrael, and now Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. They sounded more like Renaissance painters than archangels, but she kept the knowledge tucked away as she laughed out loud with the other women over the Sunday-night comedy broadcasting.

  Three

  One Year Later – Late September 1945

  Fen stared out of the train window at the empty green and brown fields of France as they streamed past her. Just over a year had gone by since she had received the letter from Arthur. A year in which she’d continued to work on the farm, tending the crops while Britain’s farmer-soldiers had liberated towns across France. There had been little in the way of highlights, save the odd dance or visit home, and everything she’d done had been tainted by his loss.

  As much as they could, her parents had kept her informed of her brother Andrew’s progress in North Africa – he was fighting on that front against Rommel. Oxford, they told her, was a shadow of its former self, with some colleges requisitioned by the military and others struggling to fill places as so many young men had been called to the front. At least its glorious architecture had been saved; rumour had it that Herr Hitler himself had ordered it preserved as he wanted to make it his new capital, though more practical minds pointed out that the German bombers would have had to have flown unscathed past London and its barrage balloons and anti-aircraft placements to get to it. Fen had offered to come home to help her mother in her tireless work for the famine relief fund, but as she’d anticipated, they shared her belief that her work in the fields should take priority. On those short visits home, though, Fen had reassured herself that her parents were surviving the war in as genteel and comfortable way as possible.

  Kitty had been a real friend, more like a little sister really, and let Fen talk about her plans to go to France to find out what had happened to Arthur. They’d spent the cold nights of 1944’s winter planning her train journeys and saving coupons for appropriate clothes and travel garments. Timetables had been hard to come by, but luckily the stationmaster at nearby Haslemere had done his best to find out what trains were still running from the docks in northern France. They’d also joined Mrs B in bidding farewell to Edith, who’d decided that having a baby on her own wasn’t what she wanted and that the baby’s father’s family in Canada could share the load, even if he had never reappeared.

  ‘Left me his visiting card, didn’t he?’ Edith had moaned as she’d stroked her massive belly. ‘Even if the poor bugger never made it home.’

  They’d made a special trip to Southampton to see her off, and Fen had shed a small tear as they’d waved the large ocean liner away from the dock.

  Mrs B had caught pneumonia in March, it had been such a cold and damp one, and the three of them that were left had taken time out from their field duties to nurse her back to health. She’d been laid up until almost VE Day itself, and the girls were mighty glad she was well again and able to join in the town’s celebrations. They’d downed tools and helped to hang criss-cross bunting along the high street and, between them, they’d saved up ration tokens for sugar and flour. The farm’s cherished chickens meant they had never been short of eggs, so they made a dozen cakes for the town’s children to enjoy at a celebratory tea party. The war was finally over; it didn’t seem real.

  And every single day she had thought about Arthur and the Burgundian village that he had coded to her in that last letter. She’d tried contacting the War Office, but she’d come up against a wall of silence; their staff were either overstretched or unable to help her, and one letter she received even denied Arthur’s existence at all, or claimed he was safely at work in London in some unheard-of branch of the Ai
r Ministry. This obfuscation and hurtful bafflement only made Fen all the more committed to getting herself to France, to find out, using his own clues, what had happened to him and if, hope beyond hope, he was still alive, recuperating perhaps in some field hospital or friendly farmhouse.

  ‘Docked newspaper man got confused going to America – how dull. Seven letters.’ She was stumped. ‘You’re no help.’ She spoke down to the little terrier that was tied via a string to a valise, which in turn was attached by a thin rope to the belt of the gently snoring gentleman in the seat across the carriage from her.

  The dog cocked its head on one side and growled slightly.

  ‘Je m’excuse, monsieur,’ Fen blinked an apology at the dog and then turned back to the window briefly before staring down at her crossword. ‘Come on, old girl, what would Arthur do?’

  ‘I don’t know who Arthur is, but can I help?’ The snoring had stopped, as had the growling, luckily, and the old man who had the valise tied to him was now sitting more upright. ‘You’ll find I have better manners than my friend here…’ he indicated the small dog, ‘but sometimes I think he might be the brains of the operation.’

  Fen smiled at him, and repeated the clue. A few minutes passed in silence, apart from the noises of the train as it clattered on its rails over the farmland beyond the window. The old man closed his eyes again and Fen wasn’t sure if he was deep in thought or if the snoring would start up once more. She felt a bit awkward staring at him and so creased the folded edge of the newspaper slightly firmer and sketched a quick doodle with her pencil.

  At last he spoke. ‘No, sorry, not a clue. I’ve never got those cryptic ones.’

  Fen nodded at him and was about to carry on staring at the fiendish clue when a thought niggled at her. This man was obviously British too, and yet here he was on a train to Dijon as well. Her curiosity got the better of her and she asked, ‘Are you travelling for work or…’