by Pat Herbert
“Thanks all the same, Bernie,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ll bother. I have the feeling you’re matchmaking again.”
“Come on, Robbie, you’ll like her, I know. She’s a widow, so it would be nice for her to meet new people now that she’s living here.”
Robbie wasn’t to be won over so easily. He had met Freda for a coffee the day before, hoping to rekindle his romance. He had tried to forget her, but it hadn’t worked. Anyway, he had reasoned to himself, she was getting a divorce, or so the local gossip seemed to suggest. He might as well carry on seeing her if that were the case, Bernie or no Bernie. He could be a stuffed shirt at times.
Bernard knew his friend was upset with him; he hadn’t been round in the evening for weeks now. The Glenfiddich hadn’t diminished one iota and the chess set had remained locked away in the cupboard. He was missing Robbie very much now, and was almost prepared to overlook the Freda situation: almost. But there was Beryl Mossop. He knew Robbie would like her, if he met her.
“I saw Freda again yesterday,” Robbie confessed.
Bernard was about to remonstrate with him, but the look on his face stopped him in time. “You did?”
“Yes and, thanks to you, she’s found someone else.”
Bernard was puzzled. “Thanks to me? I didn’t introduce her to anyone else.”
“No. But she found him nonetheless. Freddie somebody. He’s always in the Feathers, mooning after her. I bet she wouldn’t have looked at him twice if I hadn’t given her the elbow – like you told me to.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Robbie,” said Bernard, patting his shoulder. “But it’s for the best, believe me.”
“Is it?”
“Come on. Come with me to Beryl’s tomorrow. It’ll get you out of yourself.” He gave him a friendly nudge.
Beryl Mossop was immediately impressed by the tall, handsome doctor. Bernard smiled as he watched her expression. Then he looked at his friend. There was the ghost of a smile around his lips.
When tea was served, they told her all the news about the two murders and how they had remedied two miscarriages of justice.
“I’m glad that you’ve managed to solve them after all this time. It’s a pity that Ernie’s not here to hear the news …” She paused. “Then, maybe it’s better he’s not.”
Bernard nodded. He understood. After all, it was down to Ernie Flagg that both men had been wrongfully convicted in the first place. “He did what he thought was right at the time, Mrs Mossop …”
“Beryl – please. Yes, I know. It’s just that – well, he wanted to get it right and would have accepted that he had got it wrong. He was a decent, kind man.” Her eyes looked watery for a moment as she remembered the man she had loved. “And I never would have met him if it hadn’t been for Dulcie.”
Bernard nodded sagely. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Just what happened that night – the night the poor girl was murdered?”
Robbie was very interested in this woman now. Not only was she attractive, for someone of her years, she had been the most important witness in a high-profile murder case.
Beryl patted her newly permed hair before speaking. She looked at Robbie with approval. If all doctors were like him, it would be a pleasure to get ill, she thought.
“She told me she was meeting him that night. She came into the library in the afternoon to tell me. She said she’d lost the baby and I was glad – well, in a way I was. Of course, I felt sorry for the baby, but it wouldn’t have stood a chance as she was going to have an abortion anyway. Then she told me she wasn’t going to tell Robespierre that she’d had a miscarriage, and was going to take the money for the abortion from him that night. I argued with her. Told her it was wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. Told me she had her eye on a coat in Dickins and Jones, and that she planned to buy it with the money, as well as some new shoes. I think she was a little mad, by then. So I decided to go and tell Robespierre myself. And, well, you know the rest. When I got there she was already dead, and he was running away from the body. I don’t think he saw me at the time, as I hid round the corner as he came past. It was awful.”
“It must have been, dear lady,” said Robbie sympathetically. “But if you hadn’t have gone to meet them that night, you wouldn’t have met your Ernie, would you?”
“Exactly. So out of something so evil, came something so wonderful. Although…” She broke off suddenly and looked sad.
“Although I suppose it was an unhappy time for you when you knew there was no future for your relationship?” suggested Robbie.
She nodded, her emotions starting to get the better of her.
Robbie and Bernard made a point of finding their teacups very interesting while she collected herself. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have missed knowing him for all the world. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Bit of a cliché, but true nonetheless.”
Bernard cleared his throat before speaking. “Anyway, the miscarriages of justice weren’t all down to your police inspector, were they? To be fair,” he said, hoping to veer the conversation away from the embarrassing subject of affairs of the heart. He watched as Robbie and Beryl seemed to be locked into a little world of their own, making him beginning to feel like a proverbial gooseberry. “After all, it wasn’t really down to him altogether, was it? There were two juries involved. Twelve good men and true and all that – twice over.”
Beryl smiled, turning her gaze onto the vicar. “I know. The evidence was very strong – and we can hardly blame Ernie for arresting and charging Danton Fentiman if he confessed. What else could he do?”
Robbie was silent now, staring soppily at Beryl, sipping his tea and nibbling at the cucumber sandwiches. He didn’t like the way she had removed the crusts, leaving a mere mouthful to actually eat. He didn’t put the whole sandwich into his mouth, however; it wasn’t quite the gentlemanly thing to do.
He continued to watch Beryl as she poured more tea and handed round the food. He had to admit she was a very personable woman, probably a little older than himself but not too old, by any means. He could see she had never been a beauty, but she had strong cheek bones and fine eyes. She was the kind who improved with age. She had kept her figure, too. Bernard had told him she didn’t have any children, so that must have helped.
As they walked home later, Robbie began to thaw towards his friend at last. He, too, had missed their social evenings in the vicarage study. He had also missed Mrs Harper. He loved the old curmudgeon almost as much as he loved his own housekeeper, although perhaps not in quite the same way.
“You’re right, Bernie,” he said. “She’s very attractive.”
“I knew you’d like her. Are you going to ask her out?”
“Hold your horses, old boy,” he laughed. “I might telephone her one day next week and have a chat.”
“You need to sign her on your panel, too,” said Bernard as they arrived at the vicarage.
“Yes. Kill two birds, as they say.”
There was a silence between them as they stood at the vicarage gate. Then Bernard broke it.
“Will you be round after surgery tonight?”
Robbie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Only if that bottle of Glenfiddich is still going,” he said.
Autumn, 1956
Bernard was sitting by the fireside in his cosy study, feeling very satisfied with himself. Outside the rain was once again making its presence felt, this time almost horizontally. The trees were losing their leaves fast as the wind whipped them off the branches, many of them finding their way to the vicarage study window on their way down to the ground. All this activity made Bernard feel even cosier, safe and sound inside away from the elements.
He was reading the morning newspaper, dated the fifth of November. There would be fireworks tonight no doubt, so he had to make sure that Beelzebub, at that very moment purring his head off in the chair usually reserved for Robbie, didn’t go out after dark. Putting the paper to one side, he reached up to the mantelpiece fo
r his pipe and matches. He could hear Mrs Harper singing away to the radio as she pushed the vacuum along the landing.
Anbolin Amery-Judge had finally packed up her knitting and gone home. Since the discovery of Robespierre Fentiman’s ring in the former grave of his sister-in-law, there had been little more she could achieve. She had seen off both his ghost and that of his twin Danton; she had no doubt that Robespierre would be returning to his son’s garden shed soon when he was returned to his former place in the Wandsworth prison grounds. But, she decided, that was of no more concern to her. His soul could rot in limbo for ever, as far it mattered to her now. She was glad that the much nicer Danton had been granted a free pardon, as indeed was Bernard and Basil Fentiman. Carl Fentiman wasn’t so chuffed however, as he lost no time in pointing out to Bernard shortly after the pardon was announced.
He strode into Bernard’s study looking like thunder. “You should shoot that blasted woman!” were his opening words.
“And which ‘blasted woman’ would that be?” said Bernard calmly. He didn’t like Carl Fentiman; he had never liked him, or his twin brats. His wife seemed all right; but then she never seemed to have much to say for herself.
“That old trout who calls herself a medium or clairvoyant, or whatever,” said Carl, pacing up and down the room. Bernard hadn’t invited him to sit down, and didn’t intend to.
“Miss Amery-Judge did everything required of her,” Bernard pointed out. “It’s not her – or anybody’s – fault if you don’t like the outcome. You wanted the truth about what happened, and that’s what you got.”
“Oh yes, I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? Grateful that, far from proving my father wasn’t a murderer, you managed to prove he killed my aunt instead. I could kill you.”
“Look,” said Bernard, beginning to lose his patience. “It was you who came to me in the first place. I only did what you asked, as did Miss Amery-Judge. The truth is often painful.”
Carl hadn’t stayed to hear anymore. His twin brother was the next visitor, a mere twenty-four hours later. Bernard asked him to sit down and requested tea and cakes of Mrs Harper.
“I am so grateful to you and that dear old lady,” said Basil Fentiman, chewing happily on one of Mrs Harper’s famous rock cakes. “My dear uncle has been exonerated. I am so pleased.”
Bernard smiled as he helped himself to a third rock cake. His housekeeper had surpassed herself. “Your brother doesn’t see it that way, I’m afraid.”
Basil smiled back. “No, well, he wouldn’t, I don’t suppose. He loved my father and won’t believe anything wrong of him. He knows he was a bit of a lad with the ladies but, in my brother’s eyes, that’s a plus point. I think Carl would like to emulate him and I’m sure sooner or later he will, if he hasn’t done so already.”
“He doesn’t seem glad that his uncle has been proven innocent.”
“He and Uncle Dan were never close. I was his favourite.”
“And, if I may say, you don’t seem bothered that your father is a murderer after all.”
“To tell you the truth,” said Basil, sipping his tea thoughtfully, “I’m not bothered at all. He was a murderer before we started all this and he’s a murderer still. Just a different murder, that’s all.”
Bernard reflected on these two visits as Mrs Harper pushed the vacuum cleaner under his chair and feet. He stood up and made room for her. Beelzebub left the room in undisguised haste as the noise of the machine disturbed his slumbers and woke him from a particularly pleasant dream involving a fat, juicy mouse cowering under one of his paws.
All in all, it was a satisfactory conclusion to both murder mysteries. Yes, thought Bernard, he prided himself on being instrumental in solving them, although he must remember to write to Dorothy Plunkett to thank her for putting him in touch with Anbolin.
He was missing the old girl about the place already. Despite her capacity to overeat, she had been great fun and he hoped it wouldn’t be the last time he saw her. She was getting on in years, it had to be admitted, but she seemed as fit as a fiddle, so he hoped she had many more years of knitting her way through the haunted houses and lives of troubled souls, both living and passed over.
Then there was his dear friend Robbie. He was much happier these days and had been seeing quite a lot of Beryl Mossop. There was a spring in his step and a twinkle in his beady eye that hadn’t been there for a long time. Freda Lossways had been consigned to history, even though she still pulled his pints in the Feathers on a regular basis. But that was all she pulled these days. Robbie was a reformed character.
Bernard was brought back to present by the sound of a familiar pop tune on the wireless that Mrs Harper had got turned up to full volume to drown out the sound of the ancient vacuum.
“Twenty tiny fingers, twenty tiny toes,
Two angel faces, each with a turned up nose…”
It was Alma Cogan again. How he hated that song, ever since Carl Fentiman had whistled it at the christening of his twin sons back in the summer.
“Can you turn that down please, Mrs Aitch?” he called out to her from his study doorway.
She was in the process of vacuuming the stairs. Unbending her aching back, she gave him a disdainful sniff. “I can’t ’ear it if I turn it down. Not above the noise of this blasted machine,” she said meaningfully.
Bernard realised she had a point. If he continued to insist, she would no doubt bring up the subject of when would be buy her a new one, and that was something he wished to avoid at all costs. On balance, Alma Cogan’s singing was preferable; after all, he thought, she does wear very nice dresses.
END
