2006 - Wildcat Moon

by Babs Horton

  Nan Abelson opened the door and almost swallowed the mouthful of hairgrips that were clenched between her teeth. Her thick dark hair was loose and hung down way past her waist and she looked much younger, more fragile than Madame Fernaud remembered from their first meeting.

  She spat the hairgrips into the palm of her hand and stared at Madame Fernaud.

  “It’s a little early for a glass of wine, but I can give you freshly made coffee.”

  Madame Fernaud followed Nan into the Pilchard.

  “Come through to the kitchen.”

  Madame followed Nan behind the bar and through the curtained doorway into a warm and cosy kitchen that smelled of fresh baking and strong coffee.

  “Just give me a moment while I do my Cissie’s hair and then I’ll be with you.”

  Madame Fernaud smiled at a little girl sitting up on a stool.

  The girl smiled back, a huge smile that split her round, pale face in two.

  Nan brushed the girl’s hair, then put two round pink hair slides on either side of her fringe and lifted her down from the stool.

  “You’re to go straight to Archie’s, okay?” she said, cupping the child’s chin in her hand.

  The girl nodded with exaggerated seriousness.

  “Mrs Grimble said you can play with Archie for an hour or two. Then I’ll come for you.”

  The girl nodded again, her eyes wide with trust.

  “Ask if you need the lavatory, okay?”

  “Ask if you need the lavatory, okay?” the girl repeated parrot fashion.

  “Go on then.” Nan Abelson kissed the child who flung her arms around Nan’s neck and showered her with kisses.

  Then she skipped past Madame Fernaud and out of the kitchen.

  Madame sat down at the table and watched as Nan expertly caught up her own hair and twisted it into a thick plait.

  Then she poured coffee and busied herself at the oven, emerging red-faced with a tray of perfectly formed golden croissants.

  “How wonderful they look,” Madame said.

  “My speciality,” Nan said. “Learned at my mother’s knee.”

  “Well, it’s so good to be out of the house. You were right; it does get rather oppressive and lonely up there.”

  Nan sat down opposite Madame. “Whereabouts in France are you from?” she asked abruptly.

  “Just outside of Bordeaux,” Madame replied.

  Nan drank her coffee. Just outside of Bordeaux, my arse, and yet she speaks English with a Parisian accent.

  “Do you speak French?” Madame enquired.

  “No,” Nan lied. “Apart from bonjour, merci, and the usual bits one remembers from school.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  Nan bristled but covered her annoyance and replied, “Just outside London. Essex.”

  “And how old is your little girl?”

  “Almost ten.”

  Madame Fernaud thought that Nan didn’t look old enough to have a child of Cissie’s age.

  “Have you lived here a long time?” Madame asked.

  Nan felt her anger rising fast. This woman asked too many questions for her liking. It was more an interrogation than a conversation.

  “I’m just going to check that Cissie has shut the door properly, I’ll be right back.”

  Madame Fernaud drank her coffee and thought that this woman wasn’t being quite straight Anyone who could turn out a croissant like that had seen the sky above France. Despite her English accent she’d bet that Nan spoke fluent French. They had something in common, they were both hiding something.

  Nan went through the bar and drew the bolts across the door. She stood for a moment, thinking fast She was damned sure this woman wasn’t who she said she was. She was too interested in Nan and Cissie’s history.

  She made her way silently back into the kitchen, poured more coffee, put a croissant on a plate and placed it before Madame Fernaud.

  She made as if to sit down then suddenly she grabbed Madame Fernaud around the neck, pulled her roughly to her feet and spat out the words, “I don’t know who you are or what your game is but you try and harm a hair on our heads and I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Madame Fernaud opened her mouth to scream but Nan’s hand came down hard across her mouth and the sound died in her throat. She struggled to get out of Nan’s grip but Nan was too strong for her.

  “Sit there and don’t think of leaving,” Nan grated through clenched teeth, shoving Madame Fernaud roughly back down into the chair.

  Madame Fernaud did as she was bid, rubbing her neck and struggling to catch her breath. Then she watched in horror as Nan picked up a sharp kitchen knife from the dresser and came towards her with a look of such fury on her face that it made Madame Fernaud more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

  “Who are you?” Nan spat out the words.

  Madame Fernaud put her hand to her head and with a flourish she whipped off her grey wig.

  Nan put her hand to her mouth and her eyes widened with astonishment.

  “I think you know who I am. Listen, listen to me very carefully, I need your help.”

  Outside in the backyard the wildcats growled and seagulls screeched above the roofs of the Skallies.

  Archie Grimble had slept badly in the nights since he’d met Dom Bradly in the woods. When he did sleep he dreamed such vivid dreams that he began to wish he was awake.

  He dreamed of tigers chasing him through the woods at Killivray. Of escaping into the summerhouse and hiding behind the busted sofa. Then suddenly relief turned to renewed terror as he saw the giant tiger heads looking in through the dusty windows, the squeak of their claws on the glass. Then the door creaking open and the pad of their paws on the wooden floor. Their rasping, foul-smelling breath and the stench of stale blood. Sunlight stirring the dust motes into a myriad of rainbows. The tiger’s mouth opening…

  Benjamin shouting to him, “Put your hand down into their bellies and grab hold of the tail and pull them inside out!”

  The glint of their teeth, sharp, silver teeth ready to rip him limb from limb.

  Then suddenly an army of toy soldiers smashing their way through the dirty glass of the cabinet, firing their pistols, charging with fixed bayonets…

  He dreamed of Romilly waving at him excitedly from her window. The headlights of a car bright as a tiger’s eyes. Someone shouting. He and Romilly running together across the lawns hand in hand…The smell of cinnamon and roses and fresh laundry making him feel light-headed.

  Then Romilly standing beside him in the wobbly chapel looking up at the window of coloured glass. Kaleidoscope colours bathing them in a warm and syrupy light.

  Then the gravestone on the floor moving, sliding quietly open…

  Thomas Greswode climbing out of the hole in the ground, holding a brand new shiny cricket ball. An old, toothless nun following him, a silver fish clasped in her gnarled hand. The fish’s mouth opening and spewing out tiny silver saints that tinkled as they fell to the floor.

  Behind the nun a black man, with a parrot on his shoulder…

  On the third morning after his fright in the woods he woke bathed in sticky sweat, his mouth dry and his whole body stiff and sore.

  He lay without moving for a long while, glad of the daylight seeping through the thin curtains and happy to see the familiar things in his room. The curled-up virgin drinking up the daylight, the outline of the washstand and the mottled glass of the wardrobe that reflected his ashen face.

  Hearing the sound of excited voices out in Bloater Row, he got unsteadily out of bed and staggered across to the window. He drew back the curtains and looked out.

  Outside the Pilchard Inn a noisy crowd had gathered round a flustered-looking policeman.

  Archie dressed hurriedly and went downstairs.

  Mammy was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of tea welded to her hand and a worried look on her face.

  “What’s happening, Mammy?” he asked.

  She looked u
p at him and he knew that she’d been crying.

  “What is it, Mammy?”

  “There’s been terrible trouble up at Killivray House.”

  “At Killivray House? What sort of trouble?” He could barely keep the panic out of his voice.

  “The police are here in the Skallies asking questions.”

  Archie swallowed hard. “What sort of trouble, Mammy?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. It was as if she hadn’t heard his question.

  “I mean it’s not as though we knew any of them but it’s still a terrible thing,” she said absently.

  “What kind of trouble, Mammy?”

  “The worst sort of trouble, Archie.”

  Archie sat down heavily in a chair.

  “Make sure that you keep away from the policemen, Archie. Don’t be letting them ask you any questions. And if they do ask, just tell them you’ve never been near the place and you don’t know anything.”

  “What’s the worst sort of trouble, Mammy?” His voice sounded as though it was being filtered through his socks.

  “Murder,” Martha Grimble said.

  Part Three

  All over Christmas the snow fell incessantly and the air was filled with the distant ringing of police bells.

  In the Skallies doors were slammed shut and curtains were drawn when the hard-heeled policemen came tramping along Bloater Row with their notebooks at the ready.

  They were opened later when the foxy-faced reporters came creeping around in their soft-soled shoes, with their offers of free beer and fancy fags.

  By the end of December the police were gone and the reporters lingered to drink the Pilchard dry. Then suddenly the thaw came. The icicles began to melt, dripping faster and faster, teetering dangerously and then crashing down onto the cobbles of Bloater Row:

  Black slush filled the cracks and crevices of the cobbles and water dripped relentlessly from the broken guttering on the houses. The pipes burst in Periwinkle House and Mrs Galvini got sick and lost the baby she was carrying and gossip was rife that Mrs Kelly was expecting another.

  Archie Grimble went down with a bad case of the chick-enpox along with the Kelly boys.

  In the backyard of the Pilchard Inn three of the wildcats died in one night.

  It was quiet in Bag End. The porker had taken himself off to London on the pretence of looking for work at the first sniff of the police in the Skallies.

  Up in his bedroom Archie languished in bed. His head ached and he was pickled in blisters and made to wear white cotton gloves so as not to scratch the scabs and scar himself for life.

  In between sleeping and his mammy covering him from head to toe in calamine lotion, he read and reread his Christmas annuals and eked out the contents of his selection box.

  All the while he was in a sweat of sickness and anxiety over what had happened at Killivray House. His mammy was tight-lipped about it and she kept the door firmly shut to keep out the nosy police.

  After he had been a whole week in bed Cissie Abelson was allowed to visit and came every day bringing him sweets and fizzy lemonade. Archie was desperate to know what had happened up at Killivray House but he couldn’t get an ounce of sense out of her other than her shouting Bang! Bang! then falling in a pretend swoon to the bedroom floor clutching her chest.

  He persuaded her to smuggle him in some old newspapers carefully hidden inside piles of old comics.

  Archie read them with mounting horror. Jonathan Greswode had been murdered, found dead by a woman guest called Miss Dimont, the daughter of a wealthy London banker. He had been shot through the head with one of his own guns by the new French governess.

  And, worst of all, she had abducted ten-year-old Romilly Greswode!

  Archie reached out for the battered old dictionary that Benjamin Tregantle had given him a few years ago.

  “Abducted: To carry off by force, to kidnap.”

  He sat open-mouthed, staring down at the paper in shock, a blur of tears making the newspaper print wobble.

  Wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his pyjamas, he carried on reading.

  The police and someone called Interpol were looking for the murdering governess and poor abducted Romilly.

  The governess, the papers said, was a woman of many names; Clementine Fernaud alias Marianna Dupois alias Renee Armand were a few of the names she went under.

  She was a conniving thief and con artiste who owed vast amounts of money to people in a trail from Monte Carlo to Bournemouth.

  Stories and rumour abounded in the papers. She was once a small-time actress in Paris, a brassy dancer at the Moulin Rouge. She was a bigamist, a forger and an out-and-out wastrel as well as a cold-blooded murderess and kidnapper.

  A week after the murder Miss Fanthorpe’s car, which had been stolen from Nanskelly on the night of the murder, was found abandoned forty miles away. There was no sign of the governess or Romilly.

  Every day Archie waited impatiently for Cissie to arrive with the latest newspapers. Each day they reported sight-ings of the wicked governess across Europe and beyond but they were false trails and she was not found. Neither was the child, Romilly Greswode.

  There was much colourful speculation on why Clementine Fernaud had shot Jonathan Greswode.

  Maybe, the papers pondered, he had discovered her true identity and challenged her? They hinted that she may have been his abandoned and jealous mistress. The one question was why had she taken an innocent child with her? Had she taken her as a hostage or worse?

  Stories about Margot Greswode, Romilly’s mother, came next.

  She was the only daughter of wealthy parents, the late Mr and Mrs Edgar Lee. She had been educated abroad and had been an aspiring young actress, tipped by many for a great future. She had married Jonathan Greswode and soon after retired from the theatre due, it was said, to a debilitating nervous illness. She had lived quietly in the country with her husband and young daughter.

  She was, the papers said, indisposed at present and being cared for in a nursing home. Sister Mary Campion told reporters that, understandably, Mrs Greswode was overwhelmed with distress both for her dead husband and her missing child and was not well enough to give an interview.

  Archie read the papers over and over again. There was a photograph in one of them showing Romilly standing between her parents. It was faded and a little out of focus. Jonathan Greswode was a tall, sniffy-nosed-looking man and Mrs Greswode had a pretty face and a sad smile. Romilly was looking at the camera curiously, her head on one side, one hand clasped in her mother’s, the other firmly behind her back as though she didn’t want to hold hands with her father.

  Archie fretted for Romilly and prayed for her each night before he went to bed. He lit a special candle and placed it in front of the Virgin. He hoped that Romilly was safe and that the crazy woman wouldn’t harm a hair on her head.

  There was no point in him ever going up to Killivray House again now that Romilly was gone. He would never discover what had happened to Thomas Greswode without her help.

  It had been a daft idea anyway. Him and his mysteries! How could two kids have ever found out about someone who died so long ago? And what was the point?

  He just hoped that the police would find Romilly soon and bring her back safe and sound to Killivray. If she did come back then maybe they could start being friends all over again?

  Suddenly he remembered the things that Romilly had left for him in the stove the last time he’d been up to Killivray. What with all the fright of the car arriving and seeing the black man in the woods he’d shoved it all away in his cupboard. And before he had a chance to look at them he had gone down with the chickenpox.

  He slipped quietly out of bed. His legs felt as weak as a kitten’s and he had to drag himself slowly across the room. Catching sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror, he was shocked at his reflection. He’d got even skinnier since he’d been ill and had to hold up his pyjama trousers to stop them falling down round his ankles. He opened the cupboard
door quietly, because if Mammy heard him up and about she’d play merry hell with him.

  Grabbing the diary and the envelope from the back of the cupboard, he scuttled back to bed.

  He tried for ages to open the lock on the diary but it would not budge. Then he had a thought. He got back out of bed and found the bunch of keys that Benjamin had left him. Painstakingly he tried the smallest of the three keys but he had no luck. It was a sturdy lock and rusted in parts and he’d need to get something like a hammer to belt it with. A bloody sledgehammer, even.

  He turned then to the pile of letters. They smelled vaguely of pine and were thin and yellowed, curling up at the edges. The ink was badly faded and in parts they were almost unreadable.

  At the top right-hand corner an address was written: Casa delle Stelle, Santa Caterina, Italia…

  The letters were written to Thomas Greswode all right and signed by his papa but that was all he could make out. If only he could read Italian! Impatiently he folded them back up and put them under his pillow. Then he opened the envelope and looked inside.

  There were three photographs inside the envelope. They were rough around the edges and looked as if they had been hastily ripped out of a photograph album. He took up the first one and examined it closely.

  It was a peculiar photograph and it took him a while to realize which way was the right way up. There was a man hanging upside down on a trapeze and flying towards him was a woman with her hands outstretched. Archie felt giddy just looking at it Seconds later the photographer would have seen their hands meet and the audience would have known that she was safe and dapped like billy-o! But you couldn’t be sure, looking at the photograph, that he did catch her!

  The second photograph was a sepia picture of a young boy. It took Archie some moments before he realized that the boy was standing outside the summerhouse in the gardens at Killivray. How different it looked in the olden days! The wood looked new and there were even curtains at the windows. The boy was smiling, a really happy smile. He was dressed in an old-fashioned sailor suit and he was holding a cricket bat. On the back someone had written in sloping handwriting, Thomas at Killivray July 5th 1900. He turned the photo back over quickly and knew that he was looking into the face of Thomas Gasparini Greswode. It felt really peculiar to be looking at someone who was dead and buried beneath the floor in the wobbly chapel.