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

by Fliss Chester

  Estelle blushed, though it was hard to see through the puce of her anger. ‘So what if we stole from the church? It had already lost its relic and its priest, who would miss a couple of candlesticks? But that silver would pay for a new life for me and Pascal.’

  ‘Pascal was no better than a pillaging privateer, and he got what was coming to him.’

  ‘As will you, Madame Bernard.’ James stood up and went towards the door. Fen had also heard the sounds of engines in the courtyard.

  ‘Who called the police?’ Sophie suddenly seemed afraid.

  ‘I did,’ whispered Estelle, who was still fuelled by her fury. ‘When I realised the blue fining packets didn’t add up.’

  ‘Then you have as much to fear as I do, Estelle,’ Sophie started to bargain with her maid. ‘Back me up to the police, tell them I’ve been set up and I’ll say you didn’t steal—’

  ‘It’s too late for that now.’ James placed a hand on Estelle’s shoulder. ‘Father Coulber will understand when we tell him and will forgive Estelle.’

  The gendarmes flooded the kitchen of the château as they had done a few days before, but this time it was Sophie Bernard who was shackled and led towards the door.

  ‘One moment, please,’ Fen called out as they were about to lead the murderess away. The column of policemen, with the nightdress-clad Sophie cuffed between them, stopped and she turned to face Fen. ‘Before you take her away, can I ask one more thing?’

  The most senior gendarme nodded at Fen.

  ‘Sophie, did you betray Arthur?’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sophie thought for a moment. ‘His mission was to sabotage the Germans. I had no trouble with that, as I said, I had no love for the occupiers in general, just my Heinrich. But Heinrich was being pressured by his superiors. With not much in the way of wine flowing back to high command, thanks to my own bloody husband and father-in-law, he had to show them he could deliver in other ways. When Herr Hitler decided he wanted the True Cross, it was easy for me to get it for them.’

  ‘Except you didn’t.’ James was standing behind Fen. She could feel the solidity of his body and was grateful for it. Without him there, she felt like she might crumble to the ground.

  ‘What?’ Sophie tugged against the uncomfortable handcuffs and looked genuinely annoyed.

  ‘Arthur made sure that you’d found the wrong relic, up there,’ he pointed to the chimney breast and the loose stone. ‘We don’t know where the real one is, not yet, but he did save the relic for the town.’

  ‘You betrayed him for… for nothing.’ Fen was determined not to cry.

  Sophie scowled as she was pushed through the open door of the kitchen and out into the hall and from there to the solitary police van.

  ‘Her fate will be a bad one. To be a collaborateur horizontale, not to mention a murderer.’ The voice was Hubert’s; he remained seated at the table, resting his arm around Clément’s back.

  ‘She is a disgrace to us,’ the old man could barely get the words out.

  Fen looked over to them. ‘Hubert, was it you who…?’

  ‘I found the letter from Spatz, yes.’ Hubert anticipated Fen’s question. ‘I found a stash of letters, mostly burnt or ripped up, in the house that he had commandeered. It was my family home, and Sophie had pleaded with me to let Spatz have it instead of the château. How could I refuse Madame Bernard? She was then only a young woman with a young child, and me, one of the family supposedly. She suggested I move into the château if Spatz had my house. And to my shame, the lure of being able to call this place home, finally, appealed. Even if I was only given a room up in the attic with the Englishmen!’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the others about the letters?’

  ‘The S was only a hunch. Who else would believe me? Everyone loves Sophie.’

  ‘She had asked that I sign the estate over to her and her sons…’ Clément’s muffled voice, his mouth hidden in the crook of his arm as his head lay on the table, confirmed all of their suspicions about Sophie’s motives.

  ‘And I think you would have done, you old fool,’ Hubert continued. ‘James is too much of a man of action, he wouldn’t have known what to do with the letter, and Estelle, well, I knew Pascal called her Ess, but I didn’t know if she was trustworthy, if you will allow it.’

  Estelle frowned at him but let the accusation lie.

  Fen made a mental tally of all the clues she’d collected: the pieces of fabric were now explained, as were the shards of porcelain. The phantom had been unmasked and the thief exposed. One more thing niggled at her. ‘Can anyone explain the dead flowers at the funeral?’

  James, Hubert, Clément and Estelle all shook their heads.

  ‘Just dead flowers then, I suppose,’ said Fen.

  ‘Maybe,’ James chipped in. ‘Although they do tally with when Father Coulber and I turned up. He had been Marchand’s mentor and a lynchpin in the local Resistance group too. Perhaps Marchand had shared his suspicions about Sophie with him.’

  ‘So he was in the Resistance too?’ asked Clément.

  ‘Yes, though he ran the groups out of Beaune mostly. He made sure only a few of us knew of his connection, but luckily the Chief of Police was one of them. I didn’t want to say this too openly the other day, but it was when Coulber explained to the policeman that I would never have killed Marchand because of our links, well, luckily I was freed.’

  Fen smiled at him. ‘And there’s me thinking it was my taunts about the Vichy government…’

  Twenty-Eight

  The noise of Sophie’s arrest had unsettled the young boys, so Estelle had bowed to duty and gone upstairs to calm them down and help them drift back off to sleep. In the commotion of events, Fen hadn’t noticed where James, Clément and Hubert had gone. She walked over to one of the large windows, but it was deepest black outside. The church bell managed to get to eleven strokes, so Fen assumed it was eleven o’clock and not just that the bell had finally given up the ghost.

  Ghost…

  There it was again, a light glowing on the horizon, a will-o’-the-wisp hovering in the dark, flickering here and there…

  Fen blinked and peered further into the darkness. For a moment she was confused. Sophie had been the ghost, surely?

  ‘That’s no ghost,’ she said, looking around for a taper to light a spare oil lamp with, then went to find her coat and boots in the hallway.

  She shivered as the fresh air enveloped her but kept her lantern raised up high. She had last seen the flickering light disappear behind the fruit trees by the church, so she headed down the terrace steps and walked briskly across the once formal lawns. There it was again, the light, sweeping the ground this time as if searching for something. Fen felt exposed and crouched, turning down her oil lamp as low as it would go and hiding it, rather dangerously, within her coat.

  She kept focused on the light up ahead and watched as it did one final sweep and then disappeared. Quickly, she trotted over to where she thought she’d last seen it shine and turned the oil lamp up to as bright as it could go. To her absolute surprise, she noticed that a paving slab, for she had come through the trees now to the courtyard around the church, was jemmied out of its natural position and lying awkwardly on the ground, revealing below it a steep staircase down to even darker depths.

  ‘What would Arthur do…?’ Fen mused, and then answered the question herself as she stepped down onto the first tread of the steps.

  She caught sight of the light, and once more lowered her own flame until its glow barely showed her where to put one foot in front of the other, but no matter, the ground seemed firm underfoot. All of a sudden, the light disappeared, most likely around a corner. Fen stopped. Voices carried over the air towards her and she realised that the torch must have belonged to Clément, who was the last to join whoever else was down there. She paused, not wanting her footsteps to give her away, now Clément had stopped walking too.

  She listened
intently. That other voice… who was it?

  ‘Brick by brick, Clément, like how we made it.’

  ‘We had more hands then. Thierry and Jacques were here too.’

  Another voice, ‘Two good men.’

  So there were three of them down there; Clément, James and Hubert, of course.

  Fen crept along the corridor, feeling her way via her fingertips that brushed the cold stone. The voices were soon camouflaged by the sound of hammers bearing down on chisels and the cacophony made it easier for Fen to move even further along the passage. Her right hand never strayed from the stone wall, her guide, but the other one clenched around the handle of the oil lamp.

  She reached the end of the passage and knew the three men were only a foot or so away. What was she doing acting like such a scaredy-cat? She had just helped to uncover the murderer in their midst, she should have nothing to fear from these three…

  Fen rounded the corner and cleared her throat.

  Three headtorches shone into her eyes and dazzled her. Instinctively, Fen raised her hand to protect herself from the bright lights, but it was the sudden resounding silence that shocked her more.

  What must have been only a couple of moments later, James greeted her with the not so friendly, ‘Christ, Fen, we might have shot you, creeping up on us like that.’

  ‘I can’t see you, James, can you…’ she waved her hand around until he and Clément had moved their headtorches. Hubert stubbornly refused to, but turned his face – and the beam of light – away from her and carried on chipping away at the mortar of what Fen could now see was a brick wall. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘What does it look like?’ James fiddled with his headtorch.

  Clément took over, ‘We are retrieving our treasure.’

  ‘Treasure?’ Fen had images in her mind all of a sudden of chests heaving with pirate gold, strings of pearls and precious gems.

  ‘Our wine!’ The booming voice of the older man carried far along the passageway, echoing as it went.

  ‘How did you find us?’ James asked, moving out of the way so that Clément could get back to work, helping Hubert chip away at the wall.

  ‘I… well – I mean, I sort of followed Clément. You’d all left me in the kitchen.’ Fen knew she sounded like the little girl who wasn’t invited to play with the bigger kids. She reckoned she must look it, too, with her bare legs showing above her work boots and her long nightdress showing under her land girl jumper. Her eyes alighted on something familiar on the hard-earth floor of the tunnel. It was the ledger, the one she’d last seen in the kitchen dresser. ‘So this is your hidden wine stash?’

  Hubert finally lowered his headtorch and replied, ‘Yes. When the Germans invaded, we knew we had to protect not only the wine from this domaine but Clément’s and my personal collection too.’ He paused, ‘To think, after all of this subterfuge and believing we were safe, it could have still all been stolen by that bastard Spatz!’

  ‘Why did you wait this long? The Germans have been gone from around here for almost a year?’

  Hubert answered Fen’s question, while Clément shook his head, ‘Because Sophie kept telling us to hold on, hold on. Now, of course we know it’s because she didn’t want us to sell or drink or benefit at all from the wine we saved, she wanted it all for when she’d finished killing us off and could drink all the Romanee Conti herself, with the bloody Weinführer!’

  There was a groan from Clément as he realised how close he, and probably Hubert, had been to losing their lives, and almost worse than that, their wine.

  With the time for contemplation over, the four of them together formed a reasonably organised work party and chiselled and hammered the new wall down. The dust was indescribable, the mortar powder mixing with centuries-old cobwebs and becoming paste-like in the dankness of the cellar.

  ‘No wonder you thought no one would come down here in the first place,’ said Fen to Clément, who had paused to rest while the younger men carried on.

  ‘You only found it by following me, eh?’

  ‘Yes, and quite a surprise I got when I saw you seem to disappear behind a plum tree!’

  ‘This church and the château have been like siblings these centuries past, it seemed only right that we should take our wine from our cellar and hide it here in the church’s vault. Something for you to write about, eh?’

  ‘I suppose I should come clean about that.’ Fen dusted herself down a bit. ‘I’m no journalist or travel writer, just a woman who wanted to know what had happened to her fiancé. I followed Arthur’s clues here.’

  ‘Well, you are welcome. Thank you for lending us him and I’m so sorry that we didn’t look after him for you.’

  Clément’s kind words were almost too much for Fen to bear, but she did her utmost to keep her tears at bay, not least because her eyes were already smarting from the brick dust and ground-down mortar.

  She nodded and thanked the old man, but then stiffened that upper lip and returned to the subject of the tunnel. ‘Did you really build this tunnel from the château’s gardens? All the way under the church?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Clément shook his head. ‘This tunnel is perhaps two hundred years old. It was very useful for the Comte de Morey when he needed to make a timely escape from Robespierre’s men!’ The old man smiled at the thought. ‘Yes, it has been an old friend to us Bernards for many generations.’

  ‘And the church doesn’t mind? I mean, you having access to the vaults?’

  ‘What is there but bones? And in any case, the tunnel has collapsed between here and our cellars, so we can’t access this directly from the house. Hence the entrance by the trees.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow and in so doing swept a streak of dirt across it; then, only half-seriously, he said, ‘We pay our dues though by giving the church the best communion wine in the world!’

  ‘Romanee Conti?’ Fen was reminded of the parish church in Midhurst and Edith always refusing communion. She’d have been up to the altar like a shot, thought Fen, if it had been fine Burgundy in the chalice!

  ‘Better than that,’ Clément corrected her. ‘Domaine Morey-Fontaine!’

  ‘Hallo!’ James called over, and beckoned Fen and Clément to join him. ‘Here we are, we can get through. Coming?’

  ‘Gosh, yes.’

  ‘Oui, allons-y!’

  Led by Hubert and then James, Fen and Clément climbed over the few feet of crumbling bricks and mortar left at the base of the opening. The small room, that once would have been part of the church’s vault, was crammed full of bottles. They were stacked, head to tail, in cage-like shelving. Their glassy, concave ends stared at her like a thousand eyes, gleaming now in the darting lights of the head- and handheld torches. There were wooden cases stacked on the floor too and Fen brushed off some of the mortar dust on top of them.

  ‘Lumme,’ she exclaimed as she saw the name on the first wooden box – ROMANEE-CONTI and above it some other French words about the domaine and a line drawing of the vineyards with a low wall, dominated by a cross on a stake. There were other wines there too, the boxes showing the names of local villages and producers.

  Clément was lovingly brushing the dust off the top of a stack of boxes, touching them as carefully as if they were newborns, while Hubert had already selected a bottle from the same case and was opening it with a corkscrew. Fen looked over and saw that the name burnt onto the wood was Domaine Morey-Fontaine – the Bernard family’s own wine.

  ‘A good vintage?’ Fen asked.

  ‘The best,’ replied Clément, who felt it needed no more explanation.

  To Clément, Hubert and James, the scene was not so astounding, for of course they had built the wall that had hidden the wine, but to Fen it was unlike anything she’d seen before. There was also something magical in this dark place, and Fen could see how the French regarded their wine as their treasure.

  She watched as Clément and Hubert raised bottles from the shelves and looked admiringly at them, as arti
sts would do at an exhibition – talking knowledgeably and with great respect about their comrades, while swigging from the bottle that Hubert had just opened.

  ‘Ah, the Gevrey from ’37! It was a blessed vintage.’

  ‘An idiot’s vintage. Do you remember you let Thierry have a go? Even he managed to make something divine.’

  ‘Thierry had a great future.’ His father blinked away a tear, mentioned something about dust and cobwebs and then changed the subject. ‘But here is a ’34 from Vosne-Romanee, now you are talking.’

  ‘I’m relieved we saved these ’28s and ’29s, Clément. They will be worth ten times more now on the market, unless the Germans decide to give it all back to us.’ Hubert gave a hollow laugh at his own joke.

  ‘Ha, we should be so lucky. It will be gone by now, drunk by philistines who probably paired it with sauerkraut and weinerschnitzel!’

  Fen listened as the two men talked of vintages and domaines. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in the fine wines, and had gratefully swigged from the proffered bottle too, but now the family had their ‘treasure’ back she felt like there was only one more loose end to tie up; solving the clues to find the relic and complete Arthur’s mission.

  She caught James’s attention and showed him the letter Estelle had given her. She had folded it into three now, with only the middle section of the letter showing, not for privacy, but she suspected that if she read Arthur’s final words at this moment she would utterly fall apart. There was no time for that now, and she knew, from witnessing bombing raids back in England, that once your adrenalin runs out – and there was buckets of it coursing through her body currently thanks to the rather dramatic capture of Sophie – that she would just want to sleep. Perhaps, her body was telling her, that’s no bad thing…

  She shook herself and looked up at James.

  ‘I’ve stashed it, knocked about, in Greater Rutland.’ James pondered the clue.

  ‘I’ve been to Rutland, and whatever you can say about it, it doesn’t look like this.’ Fen couldn’t help but shy away from a particularly large cobweb that was hanging from the ceiling, caked in dark, dirtied dust.