by Amy Myers
‘Of course. Scraggs came here, asking me about it. He’d been to the Bloomfields, who couldn’t or wouldn’t help him, so he came here. While he was painting, he asked me if I knew what had happened to them. He reckoned he was descended from them, and his great-grandfather owned this big estate here. No big estates here, except Wickenham Manor, I told him. Hazelwood House only had a few acres. Would fetch a few bob now, but compared with Wickenham it was nothing. He started asking me all about the Bloomfields and I lost patience. You find them and ask them, I said. That’s their family history, not mine. If you ask me, Georgia, it’s a good thing they’ve gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Moved out last week.’
‘The police must know where they are.’ Georgia was surprised they’d put their plan into practice so quickly, but once they’d been cleared, she supposed the police couldn’t stop them even if they wanted to.
‘I’m sure they do. Why?’ Jim eyed her keenly. ‘Think they’re mixed up in this affair, do you?’
‘I’m beginning to think that they’re mixed up in every affair.’
‘That’s the Manor for you.’
So the Bloomfields had left. Could that be part of the reason that the mood of Wickenham seemed much lighter? Certainly Alice White, whom she ran into outside the Green Man, greeted her as cheerfully as if nothing had happened.
‘I heard Mary wasn’t too good, you might go and see her,’ Alice mentioned.
‘I planned to. What’s happened to the sports fields by the way?’
‘Nothing yet. There’s a rumour that our Trevor’s going to do the honourable thing, though, and turn them into a trust for the village.’
‘Good for him. Though your family will miss out.’
‘No, they won’t. The supermarket’s bought Dickens Field instead.’
Georgia tried not to laugh. ‘Far enough away not to be a threat to the Todds,’ she ventured to say.
‘Want to bet? They’ll object to anything.’
Things were moving on rapidly in Wickenham. It had only been three weeks since she was last here, yet the Bloomfields had vanished, and the waters had closed over the Todd-Elgin feud – for the time being. Happy Christmas, Wickenham.
Even so, as she walked around the village, there still seemed a sense of marking time. Perhaps it was just the inevitable one of waiting for Christmas. It was hard to tell, for the atmosphere she and Peter had picked up not only when they had first come here but when they began this project had been polluted by what had happened. It was easy enough to make a secure area, free of trampling footsteps and contamination, in an official police crime scene, but their own variation of that, full of fingerprints and impressions from the past, could not be so easily maintained.
Troubled at what she might find when she arrived at Four Winds, she was relieved to see Mary was well enough to be in her chair rather than in bed.
‘Morning,’ she grunted, as Georgia came into the room. She had been looking out over the gardens below, and Georgia wondered what she was seeing. Perhaps it was the cottage garden her mother had tended so carefully, that later became hers when she was married to Bill Beaumont.
‘I’m glad to see you up,’ Georgia greeted her, laying a Christmas gift on the bed. She had pondered for some time on what to buy.
‘Thought you’d be coming. What’s that?’ She looked suspiciously at the parcel. ‘Not toffees, is it?’
‘No.’ It was another shawl, the brightest and gaudiest she had been able to find, and she’d arranged for flowers to be delivered later today.
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? You’ve got a bit further.’
If only. Still, there was no need to disillusion her. ‘You’re a miracle worker, Mary, as well having as the sight,’ Georgia joked.
Mistake. ‘No joking matter, young woman. ’Course I can’t work miracles, but I know when they’re about to happen. I knew it that last time I saw you, when you brought Miss Gwendolen’s daughter. ’Ello, I said, to myself, things are moving at last. And with my bowels I know that feeling well.’ She cackled. ‘There now, there’s a joke for you.’
Georgia dutifully laughed. For once Mary’s ‘sight’ must be letting her down. No miracles had appeared on the horizon yet, or showed any indications of doing so.
‘So what is it? Tell me,’ Mary demanded.
‘That’s the odd thing,’ Georgia began, scrabbling to make truth sound positive. ‘Nothing really. We thought we’d inched forward when we learnt that Guy Randolph, Miss Gwendolen’s brother, had been at the Manor that evening, and we were almost sure he would turn out to be the skeleton in the denehole. But her daughter’s DNA didn’t show any matches.’ She wondered if Mary knew what DNA was, but she didn’t comment. ‘So we’re sniffing around the Manor again, because it seems mixed up in some kind of mystery, not to mention the murder of this young man over the sports fields protest. I don’t mean they did it, of course,’ she added, ‘but there’s something there we can’t quite get at.’
‘Bad blood in them Bloomfields,’ was all Mary commented. ‘You sure the old Squire didn’t do Ada in?’
‘It’s a theory,’ Georgia admitted cautiously. ‘Or his visitor that evening, whether it was Guy Randolph or not.’
‘Poor old Ada, eh? Thought she was going to meet her dead lover – can’t think who else she’d traipse over the fields for in the dark. And to think my Davy saw her. I can see him now, as plain as anything, peering out of those curtains. We’d only just finished doing you know what, see, and he was still buttoning himself up with one hand. Come back from those windows, I said. I was giggling, but he just stood there looking out. It’s Miss Ada, he said. Funny thing, that is. And he stayed there watching till she disappeared.’
‘But he didn’t go out to see where she was going?’
‘I wouldn’t let him. Pretended I was jealous. Don’t be daft, he said, and we were just about to go at it again when me Dad came back early. Davy would have liked to go out then I can tell you. Caught with his pants down. We both were.’ She caught her breath. ‘Oh my Davy. Look here, you know that old song “Georgia on My Mind”. Makes me think of you.’
Did she know it? Of course she did. Zac was forever twitting her about it. Even in bed. No, Georgia, no. She pulled herself back to the present.
‘You’ve been on my mind too,’ Mary continued happily. ‘I reckon you’re going to do it, you’re sniffing around the right quarters if you ask me. Go on, girl. Give me and Davy a Christmas present.’
‘I’ll try but—’
‘I’ll make a pact. I won’t die before New Year – give you till then, I could die easy anyway, now I know you’re getting somewhere.’
‘But Mary, we don’t know that!’ Georgia was divided as to whether Mary was deliberately winding her up, or whether she meant it. Perhaps some of both, a thought that alarmed Georgia even more.
‘That’s because you’re out there batting for England and I’m stuck in a chair with nothing to do but think. You try thinking, instead of batting, eh? See you in the New Year. And on your way out, tell that girl I need a pee.’ And as Georgia moved to help her herself, ‘Not you. You’ve got better things to do. The clock’s ticking fast.’
The clock’s ticking fast. What did that remind her of? Georgia thought as she drove back to Haden Shaw. That French watch that could have belonged to anyone, probably to the skeleton, but perhaps not. Perhaps there was a hoard down there of stolen goods. No, the police would have found it by now. Let’s assume the skeleton did own that Bréguet. Ticking away . . .
As she walked in her front door, she bent down to pick up the pile of Christmas cards on the mat. She’d open them this evening, she decided. Then a sudden impulse made her look through the addresses now, just in case there were any with handwriting she didn’t instantly recognize, or recognized only too well and remembered she’d forgotten to include it on her list.
She saw the stamp first – Italian. Then she saw the handwriting, and was instantl
y in shock. It was Zac’s. Why on earth did this have to happen? He never sent Christmas cards, it was one of his pet phobias, albeit because of sheer laziness. He had never sent her one before, so why now? She had no doubt about its source, even though there was no address on the back of the envelope.
This couldn’t be left until this evening. She had to brace herself to open it now. Georgia tore open the envelope and saw a guileless Madonna and child picture, but she knew that when she opened the card she would see his familiar scrawl: ‘Zac with love’. Whenever Peter or someone had nudged him into remembering it was her birthday, or he wrote the occasional note to friend or family, it was never ‘With love from Zac’, but always: ‘Zac with love’. Till he let them down, of course.
She opened the card, feeling her stomach churn, as she saw the words she expected: ‘Zac with love’. Plus ‘Say hello to the old man’. That was Peter, the ‘old man’ who had put him in prison. Great. This time, however, there was a longer message too, which she forced herself to read, though she wanted to chuck the thing away as soon as possible and forget about it. ‘My gorgeous. All hail to thee. Living here with a delightful Botticelli of a lady, but Sweet Georgia always on my mind. The Tichborne Claimant will pop up one of these days.’
You bet he would. Why couldn’t Zac just disappear with his Botticelli Venus and stay that way? He had no claim on her, his former wife, nor any more cause to see her than the false claimant had on the Tichborne estate in the nineteenth-century cause célèbre.
Her stomach churned again. It was Christmas Eve, why did this have to happen now, when her mind was already spinning so much it couldn’t tell turkey from goose or sprouts from cabbage? The stuffing had to be prepared. Why hadn’t she brought the frozen variety? The pudding had to be thought about. The bread sauce. And Luke was coming tonight. What to eat then? And on top of it all, Zac.
Half an hour later she managed the strength to visit her father. She had packed a lot into those thirty minutes, and the glimmerings of the – preposterous? – idea that had come to her had mercifully pushed Zac into the background. She’d take it steadily though, suppressing excitement.
She found Margaret there, though she wasn’t due for another hour or two. It was immediately clear why she’d come. She’d decided to serve his Christmas Eve meal – a special one – herself.
‘Georgia,’ Peter demanded, ‘kindly tell this woman she shouldn’t come in tomorrow. We can manage without her. Not wanted.’ He glared at Margaret.
‘Tomorrow?’ Georgia said, horrified. ‘Oh Margaret, you mustn’t. You’ve your own Christmas, and family.’
Margaret went slightly pink. ‘You’re part of it,’ she muttered. ‘What’s Christmas all about if you can’t help family? You’ll be cooking, Georgia, and rushing around, and Luke will be helping you. It won’t take me a moment to pop in. When I’m too old to work you can put me out to pasture. Until then I’m coming. Is that understood?’
‘I shall take Christmas Day off,’ Peter said grandly, after Margaret had left. ‘I thought I’d read the new Dalziel and Pascoe. Oh, maybe an Allingham too. Haven’t read Tiger in the Smoke for some time.’
‘Father, have I got news for you,’ Georgia said as calmly as she could.
‘Don’t tell me. Trevor Bloomfield’s confessed to murder.’ He looked at her sharply.
‘If only. Look.’ She thrust Zac’s card in his hand.
‘Don’t get upset—’ Peter stopped, as he read the complete message, took a second or two to ponder it, and then realized why she’d shown it to him. Then: ‘Is your conclusion the same as mine?’
‘Yes, it was some threat to the Bloomfield inheritance that caused the deaths of Denehole Man and/or Guy Randolph from Berthès Farm, and probably Terence Scraggs too. What else could have kept them so wary over the years?’ So far so good. She could see Peter was with her.
‘How’s Ada mixed up with that?’ There was no challenge in Peter’s question. He, like she, was thinking fast and furiously. ‘I see. She isn’t the main player after all. Your theory is that it’s been always been Wickenham Manor causing problems in this village, in 1929, 1943 and today. A wide sweep, isn’t it? Have you a scenario, Georgia?’
‘Yes. Guy Randolph from Berthès Farm had a claim on Wickenham Manor.’
‘How can that be?’ Peter’s question was rhetorical, now that they both realized the probable answer.
‘Because he wasn’t Guy Randolph. He was Jack Bloomfield.’
*
The truth had been there before them all the time, but they had been looking in the wrong direction. They chewed it over for an hour, until finally Peter nodded. ‘Okay, Georgia, convincing scenario, please.’
She took a moment to think herself back in the Wickenham of the early twentieth century. ‘There were the six of them, Guy and Gwendolen, Ada and Anne, Jack and Matthew,’ she began, ‘who were the core of the social life at the Manor before the First World War. Guy and Ada were an item, whether formally engaged or not. The war claimed Jack and Guy, and after it Anne married and Gwendolen left the village, leaving only Matthew and Ada in Wickenham in 1929. Matthew married Isabel, the She-Wolf, in the early twenties, and a new chapter opened at Wickenham Manor. Jack had officially died in the war, and Guy was missing. I need to go to the PRO again to check this, but it’s probable that Jack and Guy, being great chums, were in the same regiment, even the same battalion.
‘However it happened, they were both in the same engagement in which Jack Bloomfield officially died, and from which Guy deserted. But it was in fact Guy who died, and Jack Bloomfield, much the same sort of character as Guy, according to what we’ve been told, who deserted, having neatly switched identity tags with Guy’s corpse. He is now, he tells himself, Guy Randolph, and we know how he set himself up nicely in France with first Farmer Berthès’ daughter and then Rosanne. Unfortunately he doesn’t like farming or indeed any hard work. He is, he tells his family, heir to a big estate in England. Not Hazelwood House, as we’d thought, but Wickenham Manor. Perhaps he read the notice of his father’s death in The Times. With his preferred lifestyle, he no doubt kept in touch with events in England. The problem is that he knows he can’t go back there.’
‘Why?’
Georgia’s mind raced. She was slightly surprised Peter hadn’t stopped her before, since she was conscious of more speculation here than usual. ‘Firstly he’s a deserter, and for all he knows, he could still be arrested as Guy Randolph. Secondly, perhaps he didn’t want to knuckle down to the responsibilities of running the estate, and thirdly, there would be a major legal battle with brother Matthew over who was the real heir to Wickenham. True, he was officially dead, but he had only to show his face in Wickenham for the whole village to recognize him.’
‘So why come, and, as he did, why the need for secrecy?’
He’d trapped her, Georgia thought furiously. No, he hadn’t. ‘As I said, he didn’t want the responsibility of running Wickenham. He wanted money, though. So he set out to blackmail brother Matthew and his wife, the She-Wolf. He came straight to the Manor incognito, announcing himself as Guy Randolph. The maid fortunately didn’t recognize him, though he took a chance there. It must have been somewhat of a shock for Matthew, especially since I doubt whether he had the kind of money brother Jack had in mind. Furthermore, no doubt brother Jack pointed out that he had legitimate children of his own, who would be all too interested to know of their heritage. There was an even worse shock when in the midst of their discussions, Ada Proctor rings up in great excitement. All of them are in a quandary now. The Bloomfields can’t risk her seeing Jack’s face, nor can Jack himself if he’s going to get his cash. So . . .’
‘Go on,’ Peter prompted as she broke off.
‘I can’t. I’m stuck.’
‘How about this?’ Peter took up the story for her. ‘Jack/Guy makes an arrangement to meet Ada later on either at the Manor or somewhere along that footpath. Perhaps it was a spot they once knew well and did their courting there.
Jack could have known all about that. What more splendid tool than Ada to get his way over the blackmail, Jack thinks. The Bloomfields are trapped. If they don’t agree, Ada will spread the news of Jack’s Return Home in a flash. They have to come to some financial arrangement by say, ten o’clock, or earlier if Jack had to walk to the meeting place. When Ada turned up, she had to find “Guy” had gone.’
‘Accepted,’ Georgia agreed. ‘Just one problem in Jack’s plan. There was no money at Wickenham to pay him off. So Matthew and Isabel see their whole livelihood threatened, and their kids’ legacy at risk. It would take Jack time to disentangle the official death verdict, but it could be done. His face was evidence enough, coupled with his undoubted grasp of every pre-war family detail. There was only one answer, as they saw it. Jack had to disappear before Ada arrived, and this time for good.’
‘Into the denehole,’ Peter murmured.
‘Yes. Matthew or he and the She-Wolf between them murder Jack and Ada.’
‘Hang on, Georgia. Why Ada? They could time it so they would miss her arrival. They must have known she was coming some time around ten p.m., according to our scenario, and they wouldn’t have wanted to strangle her too, especially Matthew. Far too risky.’
‘The She-Wolf wouldn’t have been so picky,’ Georgia said.
‘Slander.’
‘This is only a scenario.’
‘Go ahead then, but take it easy. I’m not altogether happy.’
‘Nor am I. Perhaps they mistimed it . . .’ Georgia was foxed. ‘Perhaps they killed Jack but it took longer than expected to get him into the denehole. They’re unlikely to have run it so close though. I’m stuck. The timing just doesn’t work.’
‘Timing,’ repeated Peter meditatively. ‘Timing. Now that watch he was wearing . . . could it have been set to a different time, since he’d come from France?’
‘No, I’m pretty sure French time was the same as Greenwich in 1929. Wrong path, Peter.’
‘Time could well come into it somehow,’ he persisted. ‘Otherwise there seems no explanation for Ada’s death. As I see it, Ada must have arrived all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at ten o’clock, just in time to see them either killing the man she thinks is her lover, or throwing him in the denehole. But then, as you said, why did the Bloomfields leave the murder so near to the time when they knew Ada might be around.’
