Pascal Passion (The Falconer Files Book 4)

by Andrea Frazer

  Opening the top right hand drawer of his desk, he extracted a packet of plain postcards, uncharacteristically tore the plastic packaging off using his teeth, and began to fill them in with details of all those he had decided had a reason for making off with the head mistress, no matter how weak or unconvincing the motive seemed to him. Emotions were strange things, and what might seem trivial to one person could prove to be entrail-chewingly important to someone else.

  Scrutinising the school staff, he started with a card for Harriet Findlater, noting that she was a spinster who lived at home with her parents and, in his opinion, had always existed in Audrey’s shadow. She was an ineffectual woman who was easily cowed, even by the boisterousness of children, and was quietly furious with Audrey for refusing to recommend her to take over the school when she retired.

  To someone of Harriet’s meagre achievements in life, this might be enough to enrage her to commit murder. In times gone by, she might have been described as being ‘at a funny age’. Audrey’s retirement really was her last chance to achieve her life’s goal, and the woman had casually shrugged off the idea as if it were too ridiculous to contemplate. It would only have taken her a couple of minutes – easily explained by a bathroom break – and she could have poked her colleague one, and reappeared in the classroom as if nothing had happened. Unlikely, but her rage may have infused her with sufficient courage and motivation.

  Saul Catchpole had actually been dismissed from his post as caretaker at one point in his rather chequered career, and was no fan of the woman. He’d had a nice little scam running with the milk money, and it must have been a severe blow to his wallet to lose not just his scam, but his job as well. It was possible that his resentment could have simmered over the years, and he’d pictured her retiring shortly with a very comfy pension, thank you very much, and compared this with what he had to survive on, including his meagre wage. Resentment and jealousy were powerful motives for acts of pure spite, and what was more spiteful than murdering someone?

  He paused now, with fresh cards in his hand, and considered the Baldwin family. What a nest of hatred existed there! With the accumulated resentment of Mrs Baldwin senior and Frank and Patsy, Audrey was held responsible for the accident after which Stevie lost her leg. It had been down to Audrey that skipping was allowed to continue, in their eyes, and the bitterness just got worse after that. Add an unplanned pregnancy into the list, and ‘bingo’.

  It had appeared to him that they all three believed that if Stevie had not been disabled, she would not have ‘got herself into trouble’. That her disability made her, somehow, worth less than an able-bodied person, which was not only deeply insulting, but incredibly bigoted towards the disabled, thinking of them as some sort of second-class citizens. He had been disgusted with what he had heard from them, and wondered how Stevie and Spike put up with it. He could only presume that they kept it low-profile, and the murder had brought it all to the surface again, like a boil coming to a head. The poison had to escape somehow.

  And how come Mum and Gran had gone to the school separately with contributions to the bake sale, and neither of them had bumped into Stevie? Or found her, to say ‘hello’? Why had they never mentioned that they’d been there? Was it simply forgetfulness, in the light of what had happened, or something more sinister? Did each even know the other had gone? And was it just luck that no one had apparently seen them? So many questions, he thought, and not enough answers.

  He used three cards for this family, omitting Stevie, and added the cards to his board, with the others he had already pinned in place. If he worked his way methodically through everyone on his list, he could repin them in a variety of configurations, and maybe see something that he hadn’t noticed before. Also, it filled an otherwise empty Sunday for him.

  Seth Borrowdale may need more than one card, now Falconer had received notice of his previous convictions, and his holiday at Her Majesty’s pleasure as a youth. He’d spoken to a few others with this particular gentleman in their sights, and it looked like his balloon would soon go up. Computer frauds – and all sorts of electronic scams – were up-and-coming, crimes that allowed one the luxury of not dirtying one’s hands or revealing one’s voice or features, and they had proved very popular of late. Seth was just on trend.

  But Audrey had heard something from the man’s own son, and interpreted it correctly – out of the mouth of a babe he was betrayed. Falconer hoped that retribution would be swift, and that little Isaac didn’t suffer because of something he didn’t even realise he’d done. When parents speak openly, they should be more aware of little ears. They may not understand, but they can transfer what they heard to little mouths, and other people’s ears might find it easier to interpret what had originally been heard.

  Moving on to the Bywaters-Flemyng household, he removed another two cards. Whatever Audrey had done to inspire such fear in Hartley had been horrifyingly effective: she’d done a real job of work on him, and, although Falconer knew the man could speak in a totally uninhibited way in front of his family, he was almost incoherent before strangers.

  It must have a very limiting effect on their social life, and was probably a deciding factor when they decided what to do with their lives. Hartley’s jobs were, in the main, solitary: taking care of the maintenance at the holiday cottages and the stables, and making sure that everything was in apple-pie order for new holidaymakers in the properties. He must resent the way his life had been curtailed from such an early age, and so must India.

  India was an outgoing young woman, strong and handsome, and yet here she was, buried in this not very interesting village. Yes, she got to meet people when the properties were let out; she got to get to know people who came for regular riding lessons, and she met those who hired horses or ponies for trekking, but it wasn’t what you could describe as any sort of a social life. Perhaps she was full of resentment at the hand that had been dealt to her husband.

  That gave him eight cards covered with small, tight writing on his board, and that only represented those who had a direct connection to the school. There were others in Shepford Stacey that he needed to consider.

  He decided to start with Ernie and Margaret Darling. Their son David had been to school with Seth Borrowdale, and it sounded like they had been a couple of bad lads at that early age, and had not really changed over the years. Seth was still up to his eyebrows in scams, and David Darling was actually in prison starting a four-year sentence – which would probably put him back on the streets in less than two, but it was still a long time to his mother.

  Margaret Darling had been hitting the bottle lately, he had learnt. Now, that could be because she was mourning the loss of her son’s freedom, but it could also be guilt at having murdered the person she probably blamed for ratting on him when he was a child: or it could be a combination of the two, he considered. If she’d been necking rather a lot of booze, she might have lost her inhibitions to the point of doing something totally out of character. Drunken people could carry out acts that they would never have considered consciously, but had a subconscious urge to commit.

  Ernie, too, had appeared rather furtive, and not inclined to chat, when they had gone to the Ring o’ Bells for the after-lunch coffee. He must have been proud of his son once, even if it was only when he was very young. Did he feel that life had cheated him out of the opportunity to have a son he could boast about, and showcase to his friends and customers? It must be galling for him to work in the public arena, and know that everyone knew his business. It wasn’t as if he worked office hours, and could retire behind a solid front door at the end of the day.

  The other couple in the village that had an axe to grind were the ‘weird sisters’ at the post office, who were just short of qualifying for jobs in Royston Vasey. Vera had seemed very concerned about what Letty should hear when they had been there, and he had learnt that it was the younger sister, Vera, who was postmistress. She was obviously very protective of her sister, who had been accused of mi
sappropriating some of the school dinner money.

  It had all been a storm in a teacup in the general scheme of things. But to those sisters, it was a huge slight against Letty’s character, and a slur on her intelligence, that she couldn’t even remember what she had done with the unexpected extra bag. Letty did seem to be viewed as a little simple, and maybe she was, and had only survived thus far with Vera’s protection. Neither of them had ever married, and they seemed to share an unusually strong sibling bond, considering that there was a gap of three years between them.

  He halted here, with the thought that he had covered everyone he could think of, when he heard a sound outside, and rose slightly out of his chair to see who was visiting whom.

  II

  The noise hit him first, a mixture of children’s voices shrilly raised in excitement, a booming, and the sound of more than one creature yapping. Halfway to his feet he recognised Carmichael’s car outside his house (he had sensibly filled the drive with his own vehicle), the whole family gathering to launch an assault on his castle.

  His eyes took in, in an instant, his porcelain, glassware, cream carpet, and white leather, and his body was galvanised into action. In a complicated slither, like a human eel, he was away from his desk and beneath his white baby grand piano. There was plenty of room underneath, and the sofa sheltered him from any prying eyes at the window. He knew this was a good plan, as he had hidden here before, and knew he would be impossible to spot.

  He could hear them, now, at the windows, the miniature dogs yapping their heads off. With a slight blush, Falconer realised that they could probably smell him, and could not understand why he was not letting them in and feeding them delicious little treats, and he thanked God that humans did not have the olfactory organs of canines.

  Carmichael knocked on the window with a knuckle, and called out to his boss, and Kerry rattled the letter-box, calling out his name, in case he was on the lavatory and suffering from an acute case of sudden deafness. Movements then relocated to the side and rear of his home, and he began to feel personally invaded, and acutely so when he heard the rattle of the cat-flap and Carmichael’s voice booming through it, in case his boss had his head in the freezer, or other such domestic appliance, and failed to hear their knocking and shouting.

  Grabbing a cushion from the top of the sofa, he got himself comfortable, lying in a foetal position, and waited for the invading hordes to give up, and go off to irritate someone else on their free Sunday afternoon: let them go and wreck and plunder some other Englishman’s castle. He’d have been willing, at this particular point in time, to hand-dig a moat, if he could repel such unwelcome invaders.

  He awoke two hours later, having unaccountably fallen asleep while waiting for the sound of the Skoda starting up with its trademark cough and whine. Every joint in his body ached, and the cheek that had rested on the cushion had a nice flowery pattern on it in red. It would seem that Carmichael didn’t even have to enter the house to do him over.

  As he crawled out from under the piano, his elbow caught a small crystal glass on a bookcase, and tipped it on to the floor, where it promptly turned into a see-through jigsaw. He sighed. His sergeant could also inflict physical damage on his possessions while not even in the house. A vigorous stretch, however, left him staring at the piano, a question in his eyes.

  One’s first encounter with sexual chemistry, the kind that makes you shake like a jelly and unable to speak – a real chemical reaction, whether one is fourteen or forty – is always deeply disturbing, if not downright frightening. Falconer’s first time ‘in the barrel’, as it were, had been the previous year [1], and he had been so affected by it that he had abandoned many of his previously much-enjoyed leisure activities, instead adopting the less productive pastime that is usually referred to as ‘mooning around’ in an aimless manner.

  Still with his eye on his usually treasured white baby grand, he extracted a copy of ‘Over the Rainbow’ from the piano stool: one of those settings that has so many flats in its key signature that you just know it’s going to need an elevator. He sat down at the piano, staring at the dots and lines and the battalion of flat signs, lifted his hands, and played.

  His laughter rolled round the room, as he sight-read with great inaccuracy, but equal enjoyment, the clashing chords his hands were making causing his heart to sing, and in his pleasure, he knew that he was cured, and ready for whatever life had in store for him. Singing along in a light baritone, he decided that he ought to return, too, to his Greek studies – modern, of course – and decided (causing a ten finger pile-up on the keyboard) that he would probably have to go right back to the Mr Men books. Boy, did those kids know some difficult words!

  III

  In Shepford Stacey, Ruth Lockwood was sitting with a cup of coffee and a biscuit, slumped in an armchair with her feet up on the sofa when the phone rang. It was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, and her husband was caught up in a sea of ‘Allelujah, He is risen, He is risen, indeeds.’ Their daughter was in the Sunday school class, absorbing the Easter story for the umpteenth time. .

  Ruth had gone to early communion at seven o’clock, and had bagged this time as a precious oasis in her busy life, when she knew that not only her family, but her husband’s parishioners too, were imprisoned in the church, and could not interrupt her with their petty domestic disputes and family problems.

  That was probably her sister phoning, for she had told Olivia that they would be able to have a conversation in absolute peace, and not the usual chaos she usually had to put up with when she phoned her younger sister.

  They had been talking for the best part of an hour, when Ruth heard the back door, and a noise in the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she informed Olivia. ‘I can hear them in the kitchen: the service must be over. I’ll speak to you again in a week or so. Take care; love you; goodbye,’ and she headed for the kitchen, calling, ‘Hello. Do you want coffee, or are you awash already?’

  From the kitchen there sounded the scuffle of feet and a little ‘yip’ that could have been interpreted as a greeting, and she fully expected to find her husband and daughter in there raiding the biscuit barrel, because they were always hungry, Sep, because he had a fast metabolism, Dove, because she was a child, and had a lot of growing to do.

  But the kitchen was empty when she entered it, the back door open and swinging in the slight breeze that had sprung up overnight. She walked outside to the corner of the building, and looked down the side, but there was no one visible, and she went back in, perplexed and puzzled.

  As she stood, lost in thought, Septimus and Dove burst into the house via the front door and headed straight for the kitchen. ‘Biscuits, Mummy! We need biscuits! Daddy’s been saving souls, and I’ve been acting in an angelic way, and we both need biscuits!’

  ‘Good service?’ Ruth asked, as she passed the biscuit tin to her small daughter.

  ‘Not bad: the usual twice-a-year souls that come for Christmas communion as well, and the usual faithful band. What about you? Nice bit of peace and quiet?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ she answered. ‘Tell me, Sep, did you see anyone leaving here as you came home. Someone perhaps coming out of the front gate?’

  ‘No, no one.’

  ‘What, you didn’t see anyone at all?’

  ‘There was a figure in the distance, just turning into Forge Lane, but I couldn’t say who it was. Not even whether it was a man or a woman. Why?’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s probably just me being silly,’ she answered, dismissing the incident from her mind.

  It wasn’t until quite a while later, that she noticed that the rogue plate that hadn’t been claimed after the bake sale, had disappeared from the work surface and was now nowhere to be found.

  IV

  Harriet Findlater saw Virginia Grainger outside the holiday home as she approached her own drive. The woman from number four Blacksmith’s Terrace had also just overtaken her, a stout canvas bag in her right hand, on her way
back from some unknown errand. Feeling unusually sociable because it was a nice day, the Easter service had been very uplifting, and her parents were away, giving her free run of the house, she hailed them both with a ‘Yoo-hoo!’ and invited them in for a cup of coffee, or a rather daring sherry, as it was almost lunchtime.

  Virginia agreed instantly, as they had decided not to go anywhere today, as most places would be shut, and when her neighbour declined, they both set about convincing her that she really wanted to join them, she just hadn’t realised it yet.

  She introduced herself, reluctantly, as Caroline Course, stating that it was her first visit to the area, and she’d come here for a bit of peace – a strong hint that she would not be staying long, whether she chose coffee or sherry.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Harriet, sounding very impertinent. ‘You look very familiar.’

  ‘I should be grateful if you would credit me with knowing whether I have been somewhere or not. I must resemble someone else you know, and you’re getting muddled. You seem a muddled sort of person to me,’ she replied, trading impertinence for impertinence without the trace of a blush.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Harriet apologised, ‘but in my job I see so many faces that you’re right: sometimes I do get muddled.’

  As predicted, the small gathering suffered from a dearth of conversational topics. Harriet tried to stop the boat sinking by asking Mrs Course if she had any family. No, she had no children and her husband was dead. She asked about other relatives, where she came from, and finally, in desperation, if she had any pets, indicating the framed photos scattered about the room displaying past furry members of the family, gone but not forgotten, but Mrs Course stonewalled her on every topic.