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

by Fliss Chester

  ‘Gosh.’ Fen paused, remembering the other precious objects in the chemicals cabinet. ‘That would be headline news on any other day. Want to know the real top story?’

  ‘Go on.’ James looked more cautious than Fen had thought he would and she wondered if he knew more about today’s goings-on that he was letting on.

  ‘Pascal Desmarais has been murdered.’

  ‘What?’ James looked shocked.

  ‘That’s why I’m out here, looking for Estelle. She’s just heard the news and is in a right old state.’

  ‘Who would kill Desmarais? Do they know?’

  ‘He’s barely cold, James. I don’t think anyone back in the house has any inkling what to do right now, let alone form theories about who knifed him in the heart.’ Fen wasn’t trying to make light of the tragedy, but she could see James looking more and more on edge. What he said next confirmed as to why.

  ‘The last thing I need is the gendarmes back. Let’s guess who they’ll blame.’

  ‘I hate to say it, but Sophie’s already got you pegged for it.’

  ‘Has she now?’

  ‘Fresh out of jail and your killing spree continues and all that.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘But you can’t disappear, that would look even more suspicious.’ Fen had hit the nail on the head and she could see James thinking through his next steps.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said finally. ‘But we have to solve this, and fast. I can’t risk the threat of Madame Guillotine a second time.’

  Fen found Estelle, weeping into her apron, under the fruit trees by the church.

  ‘Come now, Estelle, this isn’t the place to be, come back inside.’

  Estelle snorted and scowled at Fen. ‘Come now, Estelle,’ she mimicked, then, whatever she said next, Fen couldn’t understand through the bawling. After a long while, Estelle started talking. ‘You don’t understand. I had been doing so much for us both, for our life. Now he is gone and I will be alone.’

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Estelle, but you’re not alone. Lots of us are in the same boat.’

  Estelle stopped sniffing and looked at Fen. ‘I remember Arthur.’

  Fen was so taken aback by Estelle’s mention of her fiancé that she started to well up too. Of course the maid would have known him, he lodged in the same house as her. It must have been because of her not-too-friendly demeanour, but it had never really occurred to Fen to ask Estelle about him.

  The two women stood in silence for some time, both coming to terms with their losses. Fen wanted to pry all sorts of information out of Estelle; what had happened the night Arthur was arrested, did she know who had betrayed him… A shiver ran over Fen’s body as she realised it might be the grieving woman next to her as well as anyone else.

  Estelle broke the silence. ‘Pascal meant everything to me. All of our young men went off to fight for France, and, yes, other young men came to the town.’ She nodded at Fen. ‘But, unlike other women, I was not interested in the Englishmen or,’ she spat, ‘the Nazis.’

  ‘Of course,’ Fen murmured.

  ‘I had never looked at Pascal Desmarais before the war, nor he me, I am sure. But with men’s work turning to women’s work and Sophie sending me to the pharmacy for the medicines for the boys and for the Resistance fighters, and, of course, for the winery chemicals that Pascal had ordered in for us, well, we got to know each other a little better.’ She paused for a while. ‘Who would kill him?’

  ‘I don’t know, Estelle.’ Fen laid a comforting, she hoped, hand over Estelle’s arm. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘He was a patriot and a good man.’

  ‘If he wasn’t a patriot, well, would that be motive to kill him? I mean, are there still grievances in the town?’

  ‘Those who collaborated were run out of town after the occupation ended. I don’t think there are any more left. And in any case, my Pascal was not one of them. He had no choice but to serve the soldiers, of course, but he fought in the Great War against the Kaiser’s men, so he was no collaborator now!’

  Fen thought for a bit. She wished, not for the first time, that she’d never come on this bizarre mission. ‘Come on, Estelle, come inside, I know Sophie’s worried about you.’

  After a brief hesitation, Estelle nodded and started to follow her. Fen suddenly remembered something she’d said and asked her, as they walked across the scruffy lawn towards the terrace, ‘What did you mean, Estelle, when you said you’d done so much for you both?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean I… I mean a woman does things, yes.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Yes.’ Fen felt the flush coming up her cheeks but didn’t feel like her question had been answered, not properly anyway, and something was nagging at her. She shrugged it off and flicked on the torch she luckily had in her pocket, guiding them both back to the warmth of the kitchen.

  ‘These are from the church.’ Clément was scratching his head, looking at the gleaming candlesticks on the kitchen table. ‘How did they get into my wine press?’

  ‘They must have been stolen from the church and hidden there,’ Sophie said matter-of-factly.

  ‘What idiot would put candlesticks in a wine press?’ Clément carried on.

  ‘Someone not used to making wine.’ Hubert seemed equally perplexed.

  Fen and Estelle had come back into the kitchen and heard the tail end of this conversation. At the sight of Sophie coming towards her, Estelle had burst into sobs and Fen gratefully handed her over, like a school nurse might hand over a child with a grazed knee to a more sympathetic mother, and joined the men at the table.

  James had picked up one of the candlesticks and was admiring its craftsmanship. ‘Must cost a pretty penny, these.’

  ‘They are priceless.’ Clément was confident in his valuation.

  ‘Not priceless,’ Hubert argued. ‘But divinely purchased.’

  ‘You couldn’t sell these on the open market, they would need to be melted down,’ James stated.

  ‘We should get them back to Father Coulber,’ Clément declared, ‘before they are noticed to be missing and we are found with them.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ James volunteered, and Fen smiled to herself as she realised James had just found his legitimate way of scarpering from the scene of the murder.

  The murder. Why was no one talking about it, and instead harping on about the candlesticks?

  ‘What is happening to poor Pascal?’ she asked, hoping it wasn’t an insensitive question.

  ‘He has been taken to the morgue,’ Hubert answered matter-of-factly, picking up and turning over one of the silver candlesticks in his hand as he spoke.

  Not much more was spoken of that evening. The table was cleared of fancy candlesticks and the usual pewter ones were lit. The adults, except Estelle who had decided to stay in her bedroom, only settled down to eat at gone ten o’clock, the supper preparation having taken second place to most other things, and after a rustic mix of lardons and tomatoes with bread, everyone turned in for the night.

  ‘I’ll take these to Father Coulber in Boncourt-le-Bois first thing in the morning,’ said James to the retreating backs.

  Fen wasn’t sure but she thought she heard Sophie mutter a ‘good riddance’ under her breath, while Clément raised a hand in acknowledgement but didn’t turn around.

  ‘Good plan, James.’ Fen winked at him and went up the spiral staircase to bed.

  Twenty-One

  Château Morey-Fontaine, France,

  October 1945

  Dear Mrs B, Kitty and Dilys,

  Where to start? I have so much to tell you. Don’t panic, but I seem to be tripping over dead bodies… In fact, I have a horrible feeling that my coming here might have started a bit of a chain reaction as I can’t shake the feeling that they may have something to do with Arthur.

  It’s so hard to actually put this into writing, but Arthur is dead – I’ve been told it by two reliable sources. One of whom is Captain Lancaster, who I told you about before, and the other i
s old Clément Bernard, the patriarch of this dwindling family. They both say what a brave and clever man he was though, so I must dwell on that and not the sadness, I suppose.

  Please don’t be alarmed about me being caught up in all these deaths. Luckily, Captain Lancaster has been released (he was arrested for the murder of the local priest, before being exonerated, poor chap) and I feel like he’s a friend worth having. Can you believe, he was stationed near Midhurst too and was actually at the Spread Eagle the night I met Arthur and Edith ran off with that Canadian boy behind the bins! Anyway, I hope he’s not the murderer because I feel like he’s a real link to Arthur. I have one more thing to find out about his death before I leave here, and that’s who betrayed him to the Gestapo. Once I know that, I will let it rest and come home.

  Anyway, these murders…

  Fen filled her old friends in on what had been happening at the château, hoping the exercise of writing it all down would suddenly make the murderer come to light. She closed the envelope and wrote the address of the old Sussex farmhouse on the front, sadly still as mystified as ever. She hoped she sounded more cheerful than she really was, too, as she didn’t want Kitty or Dilys thinking they had encouraged her to come on this trip only to find it a fool’s errand. Well, it had been in a way. Arthur was most certainly dead and, for whatever reason, three others besides.

  She pressed the seal down further on the envelope and slipped it into her dungarees’ pocket. She fished around in there and dug out the other envelope, the one with the German letter inside and her grid on the back. She stared at it for a moment and added a couple more words until it looked like this:

  She stared at it some more, running the words over silently on her lips, and then neatly folded it and slipped it into her pocket alongside the letter to Sussex.

  Breakfast that morning was bleaker than ever. Sophie was quiet and sombre and Estelle… well, Estelle was nowhere to be seen. Fen had heard her leave their bedroom at the crack of dawn and wasn’t quite compos mentis enough to ask her where she was off to. Fen suspected it might have been to the church, or perhaps to the pharmacy, somewhere she could be alone but close to her memories of Pascal.

  Fen chewed on the last of the bread, her plate now empty, bar a few crumbs, which she decided would be a treat for the birds, even if those birds then became a treat for the fluffy old cat.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ Fen said to herself as the cat yawned at her from its place in a sunbeam in the courtyard. ‘I’ll not lead them into your temptation…’ she muttered as she walked a little further away from the kitchen door, before emptying the crumbs from her plate near where the boys had been playing mud pies the evening before.

  Those poor young things, Fen thought to herself. Much of their lives have been shrouded in war and even now they are surrounded by death. As the thought tripped across her mind, she saw something glinting in the morning sunshine. Whatever it was, it was half buried by several failed mud pies and what was visible was mostly covered in dirt.

  Fen crouched down to get a better look. Putting her plate on the cobbles, she used one hand to steady herself as she pulled a long, steel blade out of the mud. It looked like a knife, but over a foot long, and incredibly thin. The handle had an odd fixing to it, including a round opening, and the blade itself, as Fen turned it over in her hand, revealed the word ‘Enfield’ on it.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Fen dropped the rifle bayonet back to the ground, as she realised that it wasn’t just mud that dirtied the blade. Dried blood covered the wooden handle. She shuddered to think that this was what the boys must have been using to mix and then cut up their mud pies last evening. Carefully, she picked up the blade and put it on the plate, and then used both hands to carry the weapon and its platter back into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh no!’ Sophie exclaimed as Fen brought the bayonet to the table.

  ‘I’m sorry, madame.’ Fen felt personally responsible, as if she had left the blade outside to be played with. ‘I think your boys might have been playing with it last night. I hope they’re not hurt. I think it might be…’

  ‘… The blade that killed Pascal?’ Clément had appeared and was standing over her shoulder now, looking down at his old weapon. ‘It’s mine, of course.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw it?’ Fen realised too late that her words could be construed as being slightly accusatory, but she hoped her tone was gentle enough. She just needed to know how this murder weapon got into the courtyard.

  ‘I haven’t seen it since I put it away after our last skirmish with the,’ he spat on the floor, ‘Gestapo.’

  ‘Could the blood be, well, I mean, did you use it that night?’

  ‘I am an old soldier, and I respect my weapon. Whether it saw action or not,’ Clément paused, and Fen inferred that indeed it might have been used against the occupiers, ‘I would never put it away… dirty.’

  Hubert entered the kitchen and Clément beckoned him over. Fen sat down next to Sophie, who was sitting by the fireside, her ankle raised up on a stool.

  ‘You think it’s the weapon that killed Pascal, don’t you?’ Sophie half whispered to her.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘It’s an agent’s weapon, you know. A knife. Like poison.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, accidents do happen in wineries.’ She crossed herself as the memory of her very recently buried husband hung between them. ‘But poison, knives… they are agent’s methods of killing.’

  ‘You mean…?’

  Sophie shrugged and turned her face away from Fen. ‘I will see that it gets to the gendarmes. They need this important piece of evidence.’

  James… Fen thought to herself. James… the only agent left in this neck of the woods, or so she thought. It was, after all, his poison capsule that had been used to kill Father Marchand. He had free run of the winery so could have blocked off the ventilation to the fermentation room. And he was nowhere to be found at the exact time that Pascal was murdered. Had she been a fool to put her trust in him?

  She shook her head. It didn’t make sense, and Fen hoped more than anything that she wasn’t yielding to some sort of patriotic bias, or was being blind to something merely because James was a friend of Arthur’s.

  She stared at the blade on the kitchen table while her thoughts vied for attention in her mind. But what about the white fabric fragment she’d found? Or the mysterious poisons cabinet in the winery? She shook her head, wanting to dislodge something that she’d seen or heard, some subconscious thought that would help her make sense of it all. She knew it was in there, she just needed to work it out.

  Fen made an excuse to return to her bedroom. Finding the bayonet did not excuse her from her daily toil, and she promised Hubert she’d be in the vines as soon as she could. The fragment of white material was snatching at her thoughts, however, and she needed to put that little niggle to rest.

  She knew Estelle had been up and out early and wasn’t surprised to find their bedroom empty when she got there. She closed the door firmly behind her, hoping that the sound of the knob turning the catch would forewarn her of any interloper as she started to search through Estelle’s clothes. She’d assumed the white cloth must have come from one of Estelle’s aprons – she wore them almost every day and Fen was sure she’d been wearing one when she saw her, albeit from behind, when she was leaving the winery the other day.

  She found two freshly pressed ones in the top drawer of the chest of drawers and although she didn’t dare take them out and shake out the creases to examine them, she could peel back the folds and inspect them fairly well there and then. Nothing. They were intact and, Fen had to admit, not really the same texture as the finer fabric that she’d retrieved from the cabinet. I suppose the starch might have worn off. But it was evident to her now that unless Estelle had a better quality pinny than these two, then she had drawn a blank in linking Estelle to the cabinet, save for her own eye-witness account. Fen patted down the aprons and closed the drawer.


  Out of sheer curiosity, she opened the second one down – it was still one of Estelle’s and she felt incredibly deceitful having a peek, and then terribly silly too as all it contained was a jumper or two and her undergarments. Fen was about to close the drawer when she caught sight of something poking out from under one of the jumpers. It was a letter. Fen gently pulled it out from under the heavy thick wool and turned it over so she could see who it was addressed to. To her absolute horror, the black ink spelled out her name, care of Mrs B’s farmhouse address.

  ‘Why does she have a letter addressed to me, and, I assume it’s her, a stash of objects, including Arthur’s cigarette case, in the lockable cabinet in the winery?’

  The fluffy cat didn’t reply, but Fen kept stroking his head in the hope that his furry little ears would provide inspiration. She’d been desperate to keep the letter, it was hers by rights after all, but in the same way she’d put the cigarette case back the other day, she instinctively knew that now was not the time to repossess this most precious of belongings. She gave the cat another stroke and then walked quickly towards the vines, not wanting Hubert to have any excuse to shout at her for shirking her duty.

  When she arrived, the working party was already in the last of the far fields that needed harvesting, the one that Pascal had been found in. Had been killed in. Fen shuddered but picked up her wicker hod and took her position in a row of vines and started picking. She looked along the row and noted that far fewer workers were out today. Catching sight of a tall man nearby, she put down her hod and slipped under the gnarled wood and fulsome leaves of the vines to go and ask him where everyone else was.

  ‘Everyone else?’ He looked at her as if she had a pumpkin for a head. ‘Where do you think? Not here! Not when there’s a murderer about.’

  ‘But the murders are…’ Fen wasn’t sure what she was about to say, only that she felt that the murders were linked somehow to the château, the family, the Resistance, not that an indiscriminate mass murderer was on the loose.