Land Girls: The Homecoming

by Roland Moore

  “I’m Henry Jameson’s wife,” Connie started. “And I need your help.”

  Dr Beauchamp blinked. “I’ve not seen him. The blighter hasn’t shown up for days.”

  “That’s because he’s in your neighbour’s outbuilding. He’s dying. Please.” Connie was already heading back up the path. Dr Beauchamp frowned as he tried to process this information. “Dying?” Then, he pulled his cardigan tightly around his wheezing chest and set off in slow and lumbering pursuit. His breathing didn’t allow him to move very fast at all, and Connie had to keep turning back and waiting for him to catch up. It was deeply frustrating but she knew that he couldn’t go any faster. And it was still quicker than going to Hoxley Manor.

  “Are you a medical doctor?”

  “A what?”

  “A medical doctor?”

  “Not now, dear.”

  “But you were once?”

  “What?”

  Connie shook her head. She didn’t have time for this. Dimly she realised that the old man was still wearing his slippers, as his feet crunched on the stony path. She helped him over the dip in the hedge and then stood aside to let him enter the outbuilding. Glory looked up from beside Henry’s prone body, as the old man stood in the doorway. The glint of Dr Beauchamp’s spectacles in the moonlight made him look slightly menacing, but Glory knew he was here to help. She stood aside as Connie and the old man moved to Henry, the Frenchman bending slowly on popping arthritic knees to get closer. He placed a gnarled, leathery hand on Henry’s neck, feeling for a pulse. Then he craned his ear close to Henry’s mouth to listen for the sound his lungs were making. He looked back to the women, his face anxious.

  “He is alive. But it is not good,” Dr Beauchamp wheezed. The exertion was more than he was used to and his head felt woozy with the effort. He forced himself to focus, closing his eyes to concentrate on what he needed to say. “You,” he said, pointing to Glory. “Rip open those grain sacks. Cover his body in the hessian. It will keep him warm.” Then he turned to Connie. “You need to telephone for help. There is a telephone in my cottage.”

  The women went to work, Glory ripping open the sacks, Connie running off to the cottage. Dr Beauchamp continued to monitor Henry, stopping only to give a brief, curious look as he noticed that Glory was using a surgical scalpel to rip open the hessian bags.

  “Are you a nurse, dear?” he wheezed.

  Glory didn’t answer, consumed by her work with the sound of ripping bags filling her ears.

  Dr Beauchamp noticed a dried line of blood on Henry’s upper right arm, below the shoulder blade. Something had sliced through his shirt, cutting him. It wasn’t a deep cut, more of a blunt trauma. The doctor wasn’t to know that this was from where Henry had hit the trip wire that ran taut between the trees. The vicar’s skin was grey, no longer sporting the rosy tint from lazy summer bicycle rides.

  Glory brought over two grain sacks. Something small scurried out of one of them into a dark recess in the building. She helped Dr Beauchamp to cover Henry in the hessian. The disturbed dust caused the doctor to start coughing. It took over his body, and the elderly Frenchman couldn’t stop the coughing fit as he struggled to kneel back to admire his handiwork. Glory looked concerned. Was he going to die too?

  Finally the coughing subsided. Dr Beauchamp patted the edge of his mouth with a handkerchief as he regained his breath. And then with a look of utter sadness he turned to Gloria Wayland and said something. At first, she had no idea what he meant.

  “This is why they made me hang on a bit longer,” the doctor said, in a moment of tragic clarity. “One last mission of mercy, eh?” And then his leathery face cracked into an accepting smile. “One last good turn.” He sat in the building, moonlight filtering through the hole in the roof, watching as Glory finished tucking Henry up. And then the two of them waited for help to come.

  By the time seven in the morning came, and the sun was rising in the sky, Connie had been awake all night, her eyes sore with tiredness and her skin taut with stress. For the last few hours, she had been sitting by Henry’s bedside in a private room in Hoxley Manor. Connie guessed that the room might have been a small study before its acquisition as temporary hospital space, noticing a row of hard-bound books that traversed the length of the sill of the single window. Connie had memorised all the titles as she sat there, during those interminable hours; her hand on Henry’s unmoving hand, her arm lying across the crisp white sheet.

  He was still cold to the touch.

  Shortly after he was brought in, the doctors went to work to save his life. She watched through the window of the closed door as they gave Henry air and tried to elevate his temperature. Long moments stretched out. She attempted to read the doctors’ body language, the little looks they gave one another. Were they hopeful? Were they giving up? As she watched this awful silent mime act, an image popped into her head. She had to struggle to get it to go away. It wasn’t the right time. Go away.

  She saw herself in the vicarage, pointing the gun at Vince. The man who had done this. She pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. Vince flew backwards into the armchair, dead before he even sat down.

  Connie shook the thoughts away. Not the time.

  The doctors busied themselves. Did one just smile at the other? Was that a smile of good news or a smile of condolence? Then, at last, she realised that Henry had stabilised.

  Since then, nothing else had happened. But Henry didn’t show any signs of waking up. He hadn’t responded to anything and Connie was starting to become unnerved. From working in the hospital, she recognised the worried looks exchanged between doctors and nurses, and she knew the dangers of patients who had very weak vital signs. In the last hour, Connie had been informed that Dr Channing had arrived to take over from the night team and monitor Henry. Connie knew that he would be straight with her. He’d tell her what’s what. From what she had gleaned so far, Henry was suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition. The nurses had attached a drip-feed down his nose to give him much-needed water and nourishment while he was unable to feed himself. They had also wrapped him in thick sheets to try to increase his core temperature. But his heart beat was weak and his breathing shallow.

  Could he even feel Connie’s hand in his?

  Dr Channing came into the room and Connie looked up expectantly.

  “It may be a while before there’s an improvement.” He scanned her face, perhaps working out how much she could cope with knowing.

  “But that means there will be an improvement?” Connie said, latching onto any shred of hope.

  “I can’t promise,” Channing said, perusing the notes on Henry. “We must presume that he’s been without food or drink for several days.”

  “How is that even possible?” Connie was confused. She knew that you could survive for quite a while without food, as long as you kept drinking. But she thought that people couldn’t survive without water. “Perhaps he managed to drink. Somehow.” Channing pondered. “Did he have access to water?”

  Connie remembered the small hole in the roof of the outbuilding. Maybe her resourceful and clever Henry had found some way to collect the rain water over the last few days. Then she remembered something else. The plant pots in the outbuilding. Maybe Henry had put one of those up to the rain and filled it up, struggling to block the holes in the underside as he waited for enough to drink. And perhaps he’d eaten some of the rotting oats from the sacks. It was guess-work, but Connie thought about what she would have done in that situation. Henry must have done something similar to stay alive. Rain water and rotting oats.

  “I suggest you go to my office and try to sleep for an hour or so,” Channing said.

  “I don’t think I could.” Connie resisted.

  The doctor put his hands on her shoulders and gave her an imploring look. “You’ve got to be well for when he comes round, haven’t you?”

  Connie looked torn. Channing smiled. “I’ll let you know if there’s any change.”

  “You’re sure?
”

  “Go and sleep.”

  She gave Henry’s hand a final squeeze and left the room. Glory was in the corridor, sitting with Dr Beauchamp. The old man had a blanket around his shoulders. He looked ashen and ill, his night in the cold and the dust in the outbuilding having done his chest no favours. Connie asked one of the nursing staff to take a look at him. She thanked Glory for her help. Glory smiled encouragingly. She showed her the notebook and it was obvious that she had had time to write a lot of thoughts down.

  “Glad you found him. I have to find Vince now.”

  Connie didn’t think it was a wise move.

  Glory pointed to the sentence “I have to find Vince now” for emphasis. Then she showed the next page. “I kept my part of the bargain. Helped you.”

  Connie nodded. That was true enough. And Connie didn’t care what happened to Vince now. He had left Henry for dead. He deserved everything that was coming to him. But Connie didn’t want to see Glory get hurt by him. She wasn’t sure the young woman could take on Vince Halliday and win.

  “Why don’t we wait for Amos Ackerly to show up?” Connie suggested. “I’m sure he will soon.”

  To her surprise, Glory shook her head. But she was smiling, knowingly. What was going on? Glory scribbled in her note pad. It wasn’t just a few words, but a whole paragraph. Connie waited, trying to glimpse the odd word: a sneak preview. But Glory was writing too fast and too small for her to see it. Finally she turned the page, and, as Connie read it, she understood what was happening. Things came into sharp focus.

  Connie thought she’d been lucky in London evading Ackerly and his men. She remembered checking on the train from London, watching out for the gangster. Watching out for people following. She just assumed that she’d managed to elude them. Lucky Connie. But she hadn’t been lucky at all.

  Glory Wayland took the scalpel from her handbag, her eyes doggedly intense.

  The writing started with a short sentence: “I made a bargain.”

  After Glory had escaped Amos’s car and ran off down the alley, Amos had changed his mind. He didn’t want to wait for her to turn up at Vince’s bedsit. He told Trilby Hat to drive after her. The car thundered down the alleyway, cornering Glory at the end. She thought they were going to kill her and she closed her eyes for the inevitable impact. But the car stopped inches from her, Amos laughing his head off in the back seat. Glory couldn’t get out and watched as Amos left the car and walked towards her.

  “Got a proposition for you.”

  And he’d made Glory an offer she couldn’t refuse. The terms were simple. She would find Vince and kill him. Then Amos would leave her alone. She would be a free woman. And as a strange sign of his benevolence, he handed something to the young woman. The two shoes she had lost running in the alley.

  “You’re working for him?” Connie said in disbelief. She remembered that the unlikely assassin had come to the bedsit, which must have been her only lead to finding Vince. And then Connie had led her to him. Talk about making a situation worse. But that’s why Connie wasn’t in danger in London.

  Glory flipped the page back to the first thing she had shown Connie: “I have to find Vince now.”

  Connie’s head was thumping. She didn’t know what to do. Would Vince even be in Helmstead now? He had his key, surely he’d be on his way. But then Connie remembered what she thought about the key. It wasn’t really for a safety deposit box in Hatton Gardens, was it? It was just a ruse for Vince to get Connie out of the way so he could –

  So he could get rid of Henry.

  She thought of Henry, lying in bed. The doctors trying to save his life. Vince had very nearly succeeded.

  Another glimpse in her mind’s eye of her shooting Vince dead in the vicarage.

  She couldn’t do that, could she? She couldn’t be a murderer? Why not? Joyce had done it.

  Connie got shakily to her feet. She could feel the weight of the gun in her pocket. She asked Glory to wait for a moment. She needed to talk to the doctor.

  In his office, Dr Channing sipped at a cup of tea. Connie wanted to know whether she could nip back to the vicarage for some things. Would that be advisable? “Would Henry be all right?”

  “He’s pulled through.” Channing considered. “He’s sedated and we’ve put him on oxygen. He’s stable, and I’ll monitor him. But, Mrs Jameson, I want you to prepare yourself for the worst. Go home, but don’t be too long.”

  The words sounded so final.

  Connie walked numbly from the room, where Glory was waiting. Henry had nearly died. And Channing was saying that he might actually die. Suddenly she felt something rising up inside her. It wasn’t tears or anguish, but a dark and twisted anger. Vince Halliday had done this. He had come here, taken over their lives, driven a bigger wedge between them and then, coldly, attacked Henry and left him imprisoned to die. And even while he thought Henry might be dying, he was trying to insidiously get himself closer to the distraught Connie, to win her away. The shoulder to cry on, hoping that the grieving widow would eventually fall into his arms.

  Seething with anger, Connie strode down the corridor. A confused Glory caught up with her. Sensing what was on the girl’s mind, Connie offered an answer:

  “Maybe you had the right idea,” Connie said. “Let’s find Vince and finish this.”

  As Glory struggled to keep up with Connie as she marched through the fields towards Helmstead, she sketched a shakily written question on her notebook, finally managing to put it under Connie’s nose.

  “What about Henry?”

  “I won’t be long and I’ll be back at his side. We might have missed Vince anyway. He might have scarpered already.” Connie’s brown eyes looked cold and hard. “But if he hasn’t, I can’t let him go.”

  Ten minutes later, the unlikely executioners reached the small bridge leading into Helmstead. Connie looked at the familiar scene: the village square, the Bottle and Glass pub, the vicarage. She marched with purpose towards her home. As she passed the church, she stopped momentarily, something catching her eye on the church notice board.

  A handwritten poster for a cake sale with an inept drawing of a fairy cake. Henry’s drawing. The cake that looked like a crushed bag.

  Glory had spotted something more relevant. In the dawning light, Vince was approaching a car on the other side of the square. Had he been waiting to find a vehicle in which to make his escape? Glory tugged at Connie’s arm. Connie was thinking about her gentle husband, a decent man who had only ever once raised a weapon in anger. She knew that Henry was pushed beyond his limits for him to try to use the shotgun to oust Vince. But usually he abhorred violence. And in a moment of clarity, Connie wondered what future they would have together if she killed a man. Could they ever come back from this?

  She saw Vince flying back into the armchair, a patch of crimson blooming over his chest.

  Would it leave a dark, empty core in her relationship with Henry? The goodness and the laughter always tainted by “the thing Connie had done”. They couldn’t cope with the problems they had, let alone one of that enormity.

  And, never mind the emotional cost, then the cold, hard logistics tumbled into her mind.

  Suppose she could actually kill Vince. If Henry survived then she would hang by a noose for a premeditated murder. She couldn’t even say it was self-defence. It was revenge, pure and simple. But this man had left Henry for dead. He had tried to tear them apart with callous and psychopathic disregard. He deserved it, didn’t he?

  Alternatively, if, God forbid, Henry died, would that mean she’d get away with it? Then it would still be revenge, but the judge might take pity on a grieving widow who was pushed over the edge.

  The drawing of the fairy cake. Her sweet, innocent husband.

  Vince smiling and telling her about misdirection.

  Maybe there was a way that would mean no one would die?

  Connie’s fingers feverishly fumbled the gun in her pocket. She could feel the cold metal of the mechanism, the s
moothness of the chamber. Could she do this?

  Misdirection.

  Henry at death’s door.

  As these conflicting thoughts tumbled around, fighting for focus in her tired head, she turned in annoyance. Why was Glory tugging on her arm?

  And then she saw Vince Halliday, his back turned towards them, forcing the door open on the parked car.

  The time for thinking and evaluating was over. Connie found herself striding over the square, her hand holding the gun in her pocket. Glory was beside her, and from her peripheral vision, she could see her unhooking the scalpel from her handbag.

  Was she really going to do this?

  Revenge.

  They got closer to the imposing figure of Vince Halliday. He was fiddling with the car door, and with a final exertion, he wrenched it open.

  “Not so fast,” Connie said flatly.

  Vince slowly turned. Who had caught him in the act? He was shocked to see Connie. Doubly shocked to see Glory. It seemed the girl wasn’t a ghost after all. Her blade glinted in the air.

  “Connie?” Vince said, trying to work out the situation. “Glory?”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Connie said.

  Slowly she took the pistol from her pocket. Vince looked nervously at her brown eyes. Then at the girl with the knife. The girl he had abandoned. His mouth contorted into a broad smile. So this was how it would end. Vince was no coward. He’d thought about his demise a million times, wondering how it would come. But always he hoped he’d face it with strength, not giving his killers the satisfaction of seeing him crumble. And it would be no exception now that two wronged women were about to end his life in an idyllic rural town.

  Connie raised the gun.

  Vince exhaled, a final breath of acceptance. He refused to close his eyes. He would face death head on.

  Connie smiled as she lined the sights up with Vince’s head.