Christmas Mourning (The Falconer Files Book 8)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘And when I think what I could have said about him, if I hadn’t been so polite! The Lord only knows what those customers will think of the place, the fuss he made. It was obviously pure spite, for my coffee tastes nothing like instant. And it was the way that he did it. Not just calling me over and whispering in my ear, but calling out like that, so that everyone in the tea room could hear. He manipulated me into taking him behind the scenes, knowing that people would leave, and with an erroneous impression of my standards.’

  Her husband Nick took out his handkerchief and dried her tears, offering what words of comfort he could muster. He was a farmer, a recent change of occupation as he had been thoroughly sick of his former work in the insurance business, and his talents lay in his fitness and strength, and in his hands, for he was not a natural wordsmith. ‘Don’t you be the one to start the rumours, love. You just keep your dignity. He’ll get his comeuppance one of these days, you mark my words. You’re not the only one who’s seen things.’

  ‘I don’t know how I kept my mouth shut,’ she wept.

  ‘There, there, love,’ he spoke softly to her. ‘Your regulars know your standards, and no one has ever queried them. Anyone who was there, and who has tried your coffee, must know what good stuff it is, and if they don’t, then they don’t deserve to drink it.’

  ‘But what shall I do?’ she wailed.

  ‘Stop all this silly weeping – there – you’ve woken Tristram now.’ Tristram was their three-year-old son. ‘They’ve been putting up the tree on the green for the last couple of hours. I should think it would be about time for them to turn the lights on. Shall we get Tristram down, just this once, and all wrap up and go out to have a look?’

  That did the trick, for now, but Rebecca Rollason was already harbouring a deep grudge in her heart for the needless spite that had been directed against her that afternoon, considering what she knew about the man.

  Alan Warren-Browne was seething about treatment of a very different sort, but from the same source, and was only now calm enough to tell his wife Marian about it.

  ‘I was quietly queuing in Allsorts, when I went to fetch some more painkillers and butter for your shortbread, when I found that objectionable little gnome behind me. Before I knew what was happening, he had worked out of me what I was going to buy, and then started making the most obscene insinuations about the frequency and duration of your headaches.

  ‘He’d obviously been told about them, and asked me if you’d suffered from them on our honeymoon, and he nudged me twice, winked twice, and then actually said, ‘Nudge, nudge! Wink, wink!’ As if that wasn’t enough, he said he knew a lot of men who had been denied their conjugal rights, but that he knew a woman in Market Darley who would oblige for a very low price. And then he had the cheek to add, ‘if I didn’t already know her’! I could have punched his lights out.

  ‘And to think he worked all that information out of me without me suspecting a thing,’ he added, changing the subject completely, then returning to it without batting an eyelid. Marian knew what he was talking about. Didn’t she?

  ‘Most of the people in the queue – the shop was of course in the middle of a mini-rush – knew us, but there were a few from Manor Fields that I’d never set eyes on before, and what they thought of his little pantomime is nobody’s business. He’s either a very spiteful man, or he has a twisted sense of humour: probably both, because I don’t know anyone else who has a good word to say about him.

  ‘And now I’ve got a headache, too. Damn and blast the man!’

  Rosemary Wilson, Kerry Carmichael’s aunt, who ran Allsorts, had done something very out of character for her. She had taken herself off to the local pub for a drink to calm herself down. She had witnessed the little incident with Alan Warren-Browne in her shop earlier that day, and had also not long been privy to the information that Jeffries had been terrorising her niece with horror stories of pets and babies and childbirth. She felt fit to burst if she didn’t find someone to talk to about it and get a couple of relaxing drinks down her neck at the same time.

  Glad to see that the object of her disapproval was not in the bar, she ordered herself a large sherry, and espied the Brigadier and Joyce, just settling themselves at a table near the log fire. They would do, she thought, and made her way over to them to ask if they’d mind if she joined them.

  The Brigadier was in a fine old fury, confirmed not just by the colour of his face, but by the way he just threw his pink gin down his throat and slammed the glass on the table, calling out to the bar for a refill.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ asked Rosemary, innocently enough, and was then bowled over by his angry tirade.

  ‘That bloody man! That bloody dreadful little … little … cad! Bounder!’ he began, banging both his fists on the table.

  ‘Come along, Godfrey. Remember your blood pressure. Calm down before you start talking, or you’ll just work yourself up into a right old tizzy,’ advised Joyce, his wife, putting a hand on his arm to pacify him.

  At that moment George Covington the landlord approached the table with a glass on a tray. ‘I made sure it was a large ’un,’ he stated, before transferring the glass to the table, and winking at Joyce conspiratorially.

  ‘Thanks, old man. Just shove it on this evening’s slate, and I’ll settle up later,’ replied the Brigadier, having blown down the boiler considerably to give such a polite answer.

  ‘Come along,’ cajoled Joyce. ‘Tell Rosemary all about it, and it’ll make you feel better.’

  Rosemary interrupted at this point, to say, ‘If it’s the same man who’s got me all wound up, I can tell my story afterwards, and then we can make a little wax doll of him and stick pins in it together.’

  This lightened the atmosphere somewhat, but the Brigadier looked as if he was actually taking her suggestion seriously for a moment.

  ‘It’s that blasted Jeffries man. The one who’s always boasting about his time at the BBC, and all the celebrities he was on first name terms with: kiss my arse and all that.’

  ‘Ditto,’ confirmed Rosemary, and the Brigadier relaxed enough to give her a small smile.

  ‘There you go, Godfrey. Now you two can have a nice bitching session and make each other feel better.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Joyce,’ he replied, but, nevertheless, put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, so that he could tell his tale without the chance of there being too many eavesdroppers.

  ‘The blighter just turned up on the doorstep earlier. No telephone call to let us know he was coming. No appointment, no invitation. Nothing! Always doing that. Damned bad form, in my opinion.’ The Brigadier spoke in a rather telegraphic way, which was a habit which became more pronounced when he was cross about something. Tonight he was beyond cross.

  ‘Walked straight into me billiards room when Joyce opened the door without a bye-your-leave or anything. I was settin’ up a battle scene on the baize,’ (the Brigadier was an inveterate collector of model soldiers and re-enactor of battles), ‘when the blighter just waltzed in and asked me which battle it was.

  ‘I, of course, ignored his enormous lapse in manners, and replied in as courteous a manner as I could muster, under the circumstances. Bounder stood there with his head on one side for a moment or so, then told me I’d laid it out all wrong.

  ‘Damn it all! I’ve been laying out that same battle scene for more than forty years, and he just swans in and tells me I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Godfrey’s going to do a battle re-enactment on the snooker table in the back room here, the day after Boxing Day,’ Joyce explained, to enlighten her husband’s listener as to the point of what he had been doing, when he had been so unexpectedly interrupted.

  ‘That was it, as far as I was concerned. I told him he was a bloody ignorant nincompoop, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, propelled him out of the house, and dumped him on the doorstep. Spoilt my day; and I’d been looking forward to having a dress rehearsal, too. Blackguar
d! By Gad, I’d like to give him a damned good thrashing!’

  ‘I told him just to ignore the fellow, but you know what Godfrey is. He spent hours after that, checking the details in what must have been about a dozen different books, and in the end I dragged him down here to cool off. What about you, Rosemary? Tell us your tale of woe,’ said Joyce, looking at her husband’s colour and seeing that he felt better already for having told someone else about this upsetting little incident.

  ‘It’s my niece, Kerry. You know? The one that’s married to a policeman and lives in Jasmine Cottage?’

  ‘Go on,’ urged Joyce, and Rosemary began her story of Jeffries’ cruel attempts to put the wind up a pregnant woman, then recounted her tale of Alan Warren-Browne’s uncomfortable encounter in her establishment earlier that day. ‘And to think, if it hadn’t been for him, that terrible old man would never have got permission to play Father Christmas in the church this year.’

  At a table at the far end of the pub, there was a similarly acrimonious conversation in full swing regarding the same person that was being discussed at the table near the fire.

  There were only four people sitting round it, and these were Henry Pistorius, Cedric Malting, Robin De’ath, and Alice Diggory. Conspicuous by his absence this evening was Digby Jeffries, and he was the sole subject of conversation. Without his presence, they could all be honest about the way he treated them individually, and were getting things off their chest with enthusiasm.

  ‘I can’t believe the sheer cheek of the man,’ Alice Diggory said, shifting in her chair in a wriggling motion as her anger took form. ‘He was always telling me that he knew much more about English grammar than did I. I wrote a piece for the Parish Council magazine recently, and he lectured me at inordinate length about my use of grammar.’ Although the church was no longer in regular use, the magazine had been kept going as a means of keeping the villagers in touch with events planned in the locality.

  ‘Of course, it was all a load of old codswallop. I don’t know where he was taught English, but I should imagine it was in one of the old secondary modern schools, for he had no idea even about singulars and plurals. Kept saying things like, ‘The BBC are,’ instead of ‘The BBC is’. I tried explaining to him that the BBC was ‘a corporation’, and therefore, singular. He, of course, insisted that, as it had so many employees, it was plural. No amount of example, like ‘the crowd is on the pitch’, and ‘the members of the crowd are on the pitch’ convinced him.’ She was getting in a high old state just talking about Jeffries.

  ‘He dismissed all my objections, saying that I had become out of touch with the language since I had retired, whereas it was obvious that he had no basic schooling in the subject. I could have slapped his silly, smirking face. At the end of it he suggested I invest in a good grammar book and brush up on my subject. I don’t think I’ve ever been so cross with anyone before. He’s got a skin like a rhinoceros!’

  The other two, who had listened with interest, tried to placate her as she had become quite worked up with recounting the tale, and Cedric Malting launched into his particular grievance as a means of solace to the angry woman.

  ‘You’ve no idea how much he belittles me. I’ve written more than a dozen plays over the years, and I’m proud of all of them. Three of them have been put on, to full houses, I might add, by amateur dramatic societies, and got good reviews in the local papers.

  ‘He pooh-poohed that, of course, emphasising the ‘amateur’ status of the actors, and said I could not count on any degree of real success until the BBC had not only bought, but broadcast something I’d written. He couldn’t see beyond the bloody BBC. You would have thought that no other broadcasting service in the world existed. He called me an amateur hack who ought to give up gracefully, and read plays written by some of the great playwrights of the twentieth century to learn from them.

  ‘He’s never even read, let alone seen, one of my plays, yet he made those sweeping swingeing criticisms, based on nothing whatsoever except his own inflated ego and his sense of superiority. I went home after that conversation and kicked the front step until I’d taken the top off the leather of my shoe, just imagining it was him I was damaging.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing!’ cooed Alice, putting a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. ‘I’ll look at your plays anytime. At least I can speak the lingo grammatically, and give you a fair opinion based on my experience of teaching English grammar, language, and literature. Just drop something round anytime, and I’ll look at it straight away.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Alice, dear,’ replied Cedric, looking quite uplifted by this generous offer. ‘I’d be happy for you to read my work.’

  Henry Pistorius broke up this tender little moment with his own grievance. ‘What about me, then,’ he said, in his deep and carrying voice. ‘I could match him, BBC for BBC, but because I worked in BBC Radio, mostly on the World Service, he had me down as a third-class citizen. He looked down on the four best-known radio stations, but his view of anything else – local stations and the World Service – well, he thought they were less than dust.

  ‘Nothing I could say would sway him on that. He put what I did throughout my entire career on a par with hospital radio. Can you imagine how that made me feel?’

  ‘I can, actually!’ It was Robin De’ath who had spoken. ‘It was just as bad for me, because although I worked in television, it was for Channel 6. He thought the channel produced nothing but dross and sensationalism with a good dose of rubbish thrown into the mix.

  ‘It might have been a bit like that when it first hit the air-waves, but over the last five or six years it’s done some very in-depth and hard-hitting documentaries and exposed a lot of sleaze in many quarters. He seemed to view me as some sort of tea-boy. He looked down his nose at me, and there were times when I wanted to tap his claret for him.’

  ‘Why do we put up with him, then?’ asked Alice, with absolute logic.

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ answered Henry, and the others offered answers along exactly the same lines.

  ‘I propose,’ said Henry Pistorius, raising his glass, ‘that we expel Digby Jeffries from our little social circle. He shall be persona non grata from henceforth.’

  ‘I say, Henry, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it? It could be very awkward in a small village like this,’ Alice challenged him.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to socialise with him any more. It only makes me angry. You others must do as your consciences dictate.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ agreed Robin De’ath, but from the other two there was no decision vocalised, and they sat staring into their drinks in an embarrassed silence.

  Chapter Three

  Sunday 19th December

  Only five days before Christmas Eve, the Carmichael household was a seething mass of anticipation, excitement, last-minute bustle, and bursts of Christmas carols and songs, Slade’s 1973 seasonal offering proving the most popular for all the family.

  Carmichael was sitting at the base of the Christmas tree, which had this year been placed under the stairs to stop the dogs and cat from knocking it over every time they swept through the house. He was wrapping up a few presents for people in the village, and stopped to remark, ‘We’d better give Slade and Wizzard a miss if we’re going to the crib service. We’ll need to know proper carols for that, so I think we ought to practise a few. Shall I put on a CD?’

  ‘Yes,’ the other three chorused, and he rose to sort out the music.

  ‘Did I tell you that I spoke to Uncle Harry, and he is coming for Christmas?’ he asked, ingenuously.

  The two boys cheered, but Kerry asked, ‘How long have you known that, you secretive monster, you?’

  ‘Only since Friday,’ he answered, and Kerry threw a cushion at his head.

  ‘You might have said something on Friday, so I could have got in a bit of extra shopping yesterday.’

  ‘A bit of extra shopping? Whatever for? You’ve got enough food in this house to feed the five thousand,
and the inspector’s only one more mouth, not a plague of locusts. We’ll be absolutely fine, and we’ll have loads left over when all of us have eaten – and I include the dogs and the cat in that statement.’

  Kerry put down a second cushion that she was intending to hurl at him, and thought for a moment. ‘You’re right!’ she admitted, after a short silence. ‘Everyone does exactly the same thing and always gets far too much in, then some of it goes to waste. I won’t buy another thing until after Boxing Day.’

  ‘That’s my girl!’ Carmichael said, with a smile, then added, ‘I doubt you’d get through many shop doors, the size you’ve suddenly grown to.’

  Kerry picked up the cushion again, and aimed it at his stomach with pin-point accuracy.

  ‘Oof! That was a heavy one!’ her husband exclaimed, as the missile caught him in the midriff.

  ‘I’m thinking of having one of them stuffed with bricks, for just this sort of occasion,’ his wife retorted. ‘Now, get that CD on, so that we can sing along to some real old-fashioned carols.’

  Over the strains of ‘Silent Night’, Carmichael made a rough inventory of their preparations for the festive seasons, and began to tick things off on his fingers as he recited, ‘Tree – decorated: check. Paper chains and bells: check. Christmas cards strung on walls: check. Presents wrapped and under tree: check. Silly seasonal ornaments strewn all over the place: check.’

  This last item earned him another cushion-missile.

  The Falconer household was much quieter and more grown-up in comparison. The inspector had no paper chains, tinsel bells, or silly seasonal ornaments. He had holly and trailing ivy in a couple of vases, a small sprig of mistletoe suspended over the door to his living room (ambitious to the last), and his cards sensibly kept in order on a cardboard card-tree.

  For his Christmas tree, he had taken special precautions this year as last year, even with only the three cats, he had been forever picking it up and tidying the baubles. This year, with a fourth cat added to his menagerie, he had screwed a white plastic-covered hook into the ceiling above where it stood and attached a length of almost invisible fishing line to this. The other end of it he had firmly tied round the central mass of the tree, thus securing it firmly, and he hoped this little wheeze would at least keep it upright, even if he did have to replace some of its baubles with irritating frequency.