by Nicola Slade
He took a surreptitious look round the sun parlour, lowering his voice as a couple more residents entered, and scanned the section of the entrance hall that was just visible through the open door. He shot her another look, with a slight frown and still speaking in a quiet voice.
‘I remember you told me right at the beginning of this, even before the concert, that there were one or two other possible contenders as well. What are we going to do about it all, Harriet?’
He was destined not to hear whatever solution Harriet had in mind at that moment as they were interrupted by Neil and Alice, both trying manfully to disguise their glowing happiness in view of their surroundings, with all the distressing connotations.
‘Hi, guys. Having fun?’
Neil was clearly having real trouble trying to suppress his high spirits and Harriet, who had known him since his babyhood, took great delight in witnessing his happiness after the years of loneliness and heartache. Alice was, not surprisingly, taking it much more quietly but she had a glow of radiant contentment that warmed Harriet’s sentimental heart. Alice was beginning to look like an attractive woman.
‘What are you doing here?’ Sam got up to pull some more chairs forward so they could look out and enjoy the sunshine that was now pulling out all the stops and making an effort to impress. The other occupants of the room got up and departed, looking a bit sniffy at the cheerful buzz of greeting.
Alice answered after a glance at Neil, who nodded encouragement. ‘We just dropped by to tell Miss Winslow that I don’t want any of Mother’s things back,’ she told them quietly. ‘I said she could give them to charity or chuck them out, I don’t really care, as long as I don’t have to do anything with them.’
Harriet’s approving nod seemed to reassure her and she hesitated, then spoke again.
‘Sam,’ she began, turning to the tall man who was regarding her kindly and shrewdly. Are you sure you don’t mind coming to the crematorium tomorrow? I’ve said all along I don’t want a fuss, just the quietest affair possible, in the circumstances, but it will be a real comfort to have you taking the service.’
As Sam smiled and started to reassure her, she turned to Harriet with a pleading look. ‘And you’ll come too, won’t you, Harriet? There’s nobody I’d rather have as support.’ She drew in a sharp breath and the anxious look was back on her face. But will you be up to it? It’s a bit of an imposition, asking you to stand around in the cold, not long after your operation.’
‘Of course I’ll be all right.’ Harriet’s answer was brisk, she was determined to forestall any discussion of her health. ‘Sam can drive me and there’s no standing around at the crematorium, it’s not like a burial. I’ll be fine and only too glad to help out.’
‘Excuse me?’
For a second time that afternoon Harriet and Sam found themselves being interrupted by a member of the Buchan family. This time it was old Fred Buchan himself, looking painfully formal, standing upright with a military bearing, an expression of bleak despair clouding his face.
‘I wish to speak with you, if you please.’ His voice, still so strongly-accented, was heavy and dead and the younger pair rose to leave, clearly glad of the chance of escaping this haunted old man with his echoes of a past they could never share. ‘No, if you please.’ He held up a peremptory hand. ‘You too, please, if you will. I want that you should stay and hear what I have to say. It concerns the young lady. And you, Mr – that is – Canon Hathaway, you were kind to me. That helped. And now I know that I must make my confession to you all.’
Alice and Neil took their seats with very obvious reluctance, clearly puzzled and in Alice’s case beginning to look distressed. Harriet sneaked a look at her cousin Sam. What now? He gave a tiny shake of his head and looked back at Fred Buchan. A shiver of dread seized Harriet. There was something about the old man that told of long-ago torments and present despair. Whatever he was about to tell them was going to be unpleasant at the very least. At worst it would be unbearable.
She braced herself. ‘Well, Mr Buchan?’ Her voice was cool and, she was relieved to note, unfaltering. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell us about Christiane Marchant and what happened to the men in her family? On that god-forsaken little neck of granite that sticks out into the Atlantic, over in the far west of Brittany.’
‘Hexe!’ Unbelievably, the man made the sign of the horns as he shrank back in his chair. ‘You must be – aber vas – a witch, yes? How else could you know that? Nobody could possibly know; there is nobody left.’
Alice and Neil had jerked upright in their wicker chairs, both staring at him, open-mouthed. Sam Hathaway’s face wore only an expression of grave interest while Harriet’s face looked remote.
‘I know,’ was all she said at first. Then, as the old man sat there with the light shining on his bald head, his tongue flicking around his dry lips and his frozen, fearful light blue eyes fixed on her, she turned to the other people in the group. ‘We all know the story,’ she said quietly. ‘You told us the other day, Alice, remember? Your mother lived in a tiny village, remote from any big towns, remote even from the bigger villages and other communities. For much of the time I imagine the Germans left them to their own devices; I don’t suppose it could have been worth much to them.’
A flicker from Fred Buchan caught her eye and alerted her.
‘Or perhaps …’ she thought it over, ‘perhaps it was useful? Would there have been some strategic value, I wonder? Anyway, something went wrong, a Resistance attack on the local Germans maybe? Who knows, but whatever it was it went wrong and the Germans rounded up all the men, or rather all the males, in the village.’ She bit her lip and fell silent for a moment then continued: ‘What happened next, Mr Buchan?’ She fixed him with an accusing stare. ‘Did you shoot them all, even the little boys?’
‘If only we had,’ came the shocking reply. ‘If only we had.’
There was an appalled silence, broken by Alice who was looking puzzled.
‘But … but I understood Mr Buchan was a Czech, or a Hungarian, or something like that? Eastern European anyhow. Are you telling us that he’s a German? That he was a Nazi soldier?’
‘That’s precisely what I’m telling you,’ agreed Harriet. ‘Because that’s what he is, and what he was.’
They all turned to look at the old man seated quietly with them in the sunny bay window. Bald, broken, in his eighties, a harmless old man. Somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, even somebody’s grandfather. But not, surely not, a murderer?
‘Well, Mr Buchan?’ Her clear voice was inexorable, jabbing at him, stirring him to sit up, forcing him to answer. ‘What did you mean when you said that? If only you had shot them? What did you do to them that would have made death by shooting a merciful release?’
Alice looked green and nauseated and as she clapped a hand over her mouth, Neil pulled his chair close to hers and put a comforting arm round her.
‘There was a tunnel in the granite,’ he said, still in that flat, dead tone. ‘There had been a small fort, more of a lookout post, I understood, during the Napoleonic times, and they blasted a narrow ammunition store out of the solid rock and sealed it with a stout door. In the Second World War also, there was only a small guard, when I was posted there. Just an observation crew, mostly boys, that was all.’
He glanced at Alice, a kind of pleading in his eyes.
‘I don’t expect you to believe this but they did not hate us, not the small crew of us, just boys and young men. We kept our noses out of their business and they made no trouble for us. They were mostly fishermen, of course, and sometimes we turned a blind eye to their smuggling: it all worked out smoothly, even some joking, a little bit of harmless flirting. Then they sent us a new officer.’ A frown creased his pink, innocent old face. ‘There was a rumour that he had been in some trouble with his previous unit. Ach, he had a hasty temper, that man. There was some bad trouble, it is too long ago to dig it all over now. But the Herr Oberst, he … how do you say it? He overrea
cted and said that they must all die.’
There was a long, long, silence, when even the temperature seemed to drop. Fred Buchan appeared unwilling, or perhaps unable, to break it. A slight movement from Sam, who shifted his chair out of the direct path of the weak sunlight, recalled the old man to his surroundings.
‘All of those men; there were about a dozen grown men and some lads in their late teens and then … then there were the three young ones. We had to herd them into the tunnel, it had been emptied earlier, all the ammunition carted away into the store rooms. Those of us who had been there for quite a long time, we had no quarrel, we liked the people and they got on with us, but he just laughed at our protests. He stood there and laughed and threatened us, he said he would shoot us. We were ordered to club them to death; he said … the officer said it would be a crime to waste bullets on such. He told us to collect up stones from a derelict house and … he made us build a wall.’
The dead voice faltered and died away into an appalled silence that went on, and on, and on. At last Harriet let out a shaky little sigh and whispered the question that was uppermost in all their minds.
‘Did you kill them first? Did you make sure that they were all dead? Before you walled them up?’
He made no reply. There was no need.
‘I ran away that night,’ he whispered. ‘I stole some clothes off a washing line and I stole a rowing boat also, then I just set off down the coast, not caring about what happened to me. I had some luck, though. The rowing boat capsized and I was knocked out, but a passing Spanish fishing boat picked me up just in time.’ He shrugged. ‘I think I knew nothing for a long time, I had severe head injuries you see.’ In spite of themselves they all looked at the scar crossing his scalp. ‘The rest of it? Ach, at first I could not speak, then I would not speak, so they thought I must be a refugee. And so I got out of France. They put me off the fishing smack in Spain and from there I fell in with a lot of other displaced people and ended up in England.’
‘And Christiane Marchant recognized you?’
Fred Buchan nodded in answer to Sam’s quiet question. ‘After all those years.…’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I did not think it could be possible at first. Oh yes, she knew me from the time I was part of the guard and so she knew I had been there when it happened. She knew that I was part of it. And the other day she told me the things that happened after I had escaped.’
His tongue darted out, licking dry lips. The Herr Oberst, he kept the girls and the women locked up in the church for six or seven days, and he allowed them just enough food to keep them from starving. Then he let them out. She said that they tore that stone wall down with their bare hands but of course it was too late, they were all dead – by then. But they had not all been dead to start with. A few lay huddled up against the wall, their fingers worn to bloody shreds, even the little boys. There were two young ones among those who died … last. They were very, very young, the little one was only twelve. They were both her little brothers.’
The words hung in the silence then Neil pulled Alice into his arms, rocking her as, her face twisted in an agony of shock, she wept harsh, wrenching, difficult sobs that racked her slight frame.
‘Oh God,’ she whispered when she could speak. ‘No wonder she was like she was. How could you be normal, how could you ever recover from something like that?’
Harriet’s face had been buried in her handkerchief but now she raised tear-filled eyes to look at Fred Buchan. Sam was staring fixedly out of the window and she caught the words he whispered, ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ before he turned back to look into the haunted eyes of the man sitting beside him. Neil was too preoccupied with Alice, with her shock and grief to have fully taken on board the implications of the old man’s story.
Fred Buchan hauled himself awkwardly out of his chair and pulled himself erect with a slight bow. ‘I must thank you for allowing me this time and for listening to my … confession,’ he said. He turned on his heel and headed heavily towards the door to the hall.
‘Sam?’ It was just a shred of a whisper but Harriet knew Sam would understand. She watched with approval as Sam stood up hastily and hurried after the other man.
‘Wait a moment, Mr Buchan,’ he called softly. The older man halted and hesitated with an apprehensive look on his face. ‘I’ll just walk along with you, if I may?’
Harriet relaxed with a nod of approval. Sam’s compassion had kicked into action and he was going to give the man what comfort he could, drawing on the wells of humanity deep within his own nature, and on his years of training. That was good, she sighed. It would make him feel less impotent, less strapped by their total inability to accept that any one human being could do such a thing to another, still less to a child. Sam would be gentle with the old soldier, recognizing the anguished conscience that had tormented him for a lifetime. And what could he have done anyway? He would have been just another dead guard and the villagers would still have been massacred.
For herself there was nothing she could do to help Fred Buchan. By inclination and by upbringing he was not the type to accept help from a woman. Kinder, Kirche, Küche, were probably still his watchwords. But Sam might get through to him.
And what about Christiane Marchant? Harriet wondered, and went over the terrible story again. Yes. Alice is right, something so dreadful would poison you, could destroy you. And yet … and yet … people had suffered even worse tragedies, in the concentration camps for instance, and survived with their spirit whole and unsullied. It’s as I thought before, she realized. A reason is not an excuse. Christiane had suffered horribly, there could be no question of that, but it was still no excuse for seeking out weakness and preying on other people. No excuse for tormenting those other human beings for sins committed a lifetime ago. No, in spite of her undoubted ordeal, Christiane Marchant had been a first-class bitch and that was all there was to it.
She turned her attention to Alice, leaning brokenly against Neil’s shoulder. They’d be all right too, no need for any of Harriet’s ministrations there. ‘I think you ought to take Alice home, Neil,’ she suggested gently but firmly. ‘She’s had a nasty shock. You run her a hot bath and once she’s soaking in it, get her a nice cup of tea.’ As he raised an eyebrow, she grinned. ‘Well, I always find it a great comfort,’ she said defensively.
‘Me too.’ Alice struggled into an upright position and managed a watery smile. ‘I like to have a good book to read as well, but this time I think I’d settle for Neil to come in and talk to me instead.’
As they prepared to leave, Neil gave Harriet a searching look. ‘You look pretty exhausted yourself, Old Hat,’ he suggested. ‘Why don’t you take your own advice for once?’
‘Go away, Neil, I’m as tough as old boots, I’ll be fine.’ She shooed him away, flapping her hand at him, and when she found herself alone at last in the now empty room, she sank back in her chair, intending to apply her mind to the various puzzles perplexing her. Instead she dropped asleep almost at once and never stirred when, an hour later, Sam looked in on her. He tiptoed out, holding a finger to his lips as he encountered Matron Winslow.
Pauline Winslow was always glad to see her clients enjoying themselves in whatever they chose to do and Harriet, when Matron looked in on her, certainly looked pretty blissful, snoozing away to the tune of a gentle buzzing that was far too ladylike to be called a snore. Matron nodded gaily to Sam and hung a Do not Disturb notice on the door of the sun parlour as she gently drew it to a close.
‘That ought to do the trick.’ She smiled up at Sam.
‘Thank you, Miss Winslow, he told her gratefully. ‘That’s a very kind thought; Harriet could do with a decent long sleep.’ As she turned away he called out to her again. ‘I wonder, do you think I could leave a note for Harriet? And borrow a sheet of paper to write it on?’
‘Of course you may, Canon Hathaway.’ She nodded immediate agreement, trying a little joke. ‘And would you also like a pen to write it with?’ She was all smiles
and eager to help. Harriet had proved to be a model guest and Pauline Winslow was well aware that between them, Harriet and Sam knew a surprising number of what she thought of as the right people, the kind of people who could afford, and would appreciate, a short stay at Firstone Grange. Especially if it was endorsed by a personal recommendation.
With a grateful smile Sam accepted the offer of pen, paper, envelope and a desk, together with a chair to sit on while he wrote. He scribbled a note, then put the sealed envelope on the table in the entrance hall.
‘I’ll see Miss Quigley gets it the moment she wakes up,’ promised Matron as Sam picked up his scarf and gloves and departed.
More than an hour later Harriet emerged from the sun parlour, slightly embarrassed but considerably refreshed, yawning and stretching as she met Matron’s eyes with a bashful grin.
‘Heavens, isn’t it shocking? I must watch myself; it’s only old people who can’t get through the day without a nap. I must be slipping.’
‘Not you, Miss Quigley.’ Pauline Winslow gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Oh, by the way, Canon Hathaway left you a note. He had to get home, he said, but he’ll be in touch.’
She watched curiously as Harriet picked up the envelope addressed to her in Sam’s tall, pointed handwriting, a sudden frown creasing her brow at a recollection.
‘Canon Hathaway said I was to tell you to be careful,’ Pauline Winslow, looking puzzled.
Harriet smiled and shrugged it off, but she knew what Sam meant. Perhaps Doreen Buchan might not be on the premises and therefore not an immediate threat to Harriet’s safety. However, at Firstone Grange there were at least two self-confessed murderers, both of whom had entrusted Harriet with their secrets. Secrets that had proved a deadly burden for more than sixty years.
Might they not find themselves regretting such a confidence?
Her frown deepened as she read Sam’s hasty note.
‘Just a line to let you know I had a word with Tim Armstrong’, Sam wrote. ‘He obviously wanted to get something off his chest. (Seems to be the “in” thing round here today.) I let him get on with it as it was one of his clear spells.
