She took another step forward to reach for one packet each of ‘Potiron Bleu de Hongrie’ and ‘Potiron Atlantic Géant’. But as she did so, something crunched underfoot, dragging her attention away from which type of pumpkin to grow for Halloween this year. She glanced down at the ground, and saw a scattering of poultry pellets. A sack must have burst while the Frobarts were transporting it, but it didn’t seem like them to leave a mess on the floor. They took great pride in keeping their premises spick and span.
Martha was now at the end of the last set of shelves. Beyond that was a small locked room in which all the ‘phytosanitaire’ products, the herbicides and pesticides, were stored. Walking along the front of that and turning right took you round to where the poultry feed was kept. Martha needed that area for her chick crumb, as well as to see what all this spilt poultry food was about. She quickly crunched her way towards it. But when she swung round the corner, she stopped dead. The bolt slipped from her hand and thunked onto the floor. Because there, sprawled against the stack of sacks of chicken food behind him, and skewered through the chest by a large hay spike, the sort that fitted to the front bucket of a tractor, was Daniel Frobart. Dead Daniel Frobart.
Chapter 3
Fortunately, on the whole Martha was good in a crisis. She’d get the shakes all over but her brain and composure were unaffected. This was why she’d coped so well when a five-year-old Jared had face-planted on a set of concrete steps outside the Beaver Scout Hall and knocked out six front teeth (fortunately all milk ones) and broken his nose. There’d been copious amounts of blood, and even more of general wailing and screaming from the other witnesses to the event who’d been no help whatsoever. Martha had remained cool and calm, and kept her son the same, while dealing efficiently with the aftermath. The same poise had got her through the unpleasant incident of accidentally treading on Lily’s diminutive Roborovski hamster. Martha only realised it had escaped when she was scraping it off her shoe. And that self-assured sangfroid had really come into its own the day she found Mark dead in bed.
The memories piled unbidden into her head. Getting out of bed, thinking he was still asleep. Going downstairs and pottering in the kitchen for a while and then, half an hour later, deciding to take Mark a cup of coffee. It was so unlike him to sleep in late. Usually he was the first one up by as much as an hour. He’d been complaining of feeling a bit tired for a couple of days, but since they’d been redecorating the bathroom in the holiday cottage, on top of all the usual farm chores, then they’d been extra busy and so feeling weary seemed perfectly normal. Taking the coffee upstairs, putting it on the bedside table. Seeing Mark’s grey face in the dim, morning light and knowing instantly something was horribly wrong. Touching his cheek and feeling how cold it was. How very cold. Fumbling slightly with the phone, her only show of weakness, and calling an ambulance, and then, despite knowing it was hopeless, administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the paramedics had gently pulled her away from Mark twenty or so minutes later. Calmly calling the children, Jared at work in Paris at the time, and Lily at university in Lille, then logging into her bank account to transfer money to them so they had adequate funds to travel home. Meeting them at the station, and hugging them while they cried and cried. Martha didn’t cry until after his funeral. She was too deeply shocked at losing the better part of herself. It was only when, alone again, her children, friends and relatives back to their respective routines, that reality fully hit and she fell apart.
Martha sprang forward. Although it had actually only been a few seconds, she was suddenly worried that she’d been standing there for minutes, even hours, frozen to the spot by grotesque reminiscences of the last time she’d encountered a dead body. She felt for a pulse, but nothing. She couldn’t help noticing the price tag for €39.99 hanging off the hay spike that had impaled Daniel. That struck her as very reasonably priced. How ironic that something so cheap could destroy a priceless human life. She ran a hand down Daniel’s bare forearm. As always, even in the middle of winter, he had his sleeves rolled up. His skin felt only very slightly cool to her touch, so he hadn’t been dead long. She felt light-headed with guilt. If only she’d come straight in here when she arrived, she might have been able to save him. If only she’d remembered about the chick crumb earlier…
“No!” she said loudly. If onlys didn’t help. They just made you torture yourself even more. She had flailed herself with if onlys for months and months after Mark’s death and it hadn’t brought him back. She was in no way to blame for what had happened. He’d been killed, the autopsy had concluded, by an ion channelopathy, most likely sporadic rather than genetic since none of his relations had died in a similar way. Nonetheless Martha insisted Jared start getting regular health checks. And nonetheless, she still felt, deep deep down, that somehow she could have stopped Mark’s death.
Martha dropped to her wobbly knees, and rummaged in her handbag for her refillable powder compact. It sported an enamel lid depicting roses and daffodils. She’d been given this for her sixteenth birthday by dear Aunt Maude, but didn’t use it for more than thirty years. It was only recently her nose had developed the tendency towards redness, due to the increasing number of split veins in it, and so she’d got in the habit of carrying the compact around with her so she could disguise the offending glow when out in public. But it wasn’t the powder she needed now; she was certain that she must look as white as a sheet. It was the mirror she was after. She stood again, opened her compact and held the mirror under Daniel Frobart’s nose. There was no misting. He was definitely, definitely dead, as this double-checking proved. Actually, it was really triple-checking since it had been pretty obvious from the moment she saw him with a huge iron spike impaling him exactly where his heart used to beat, that he was deceased.
“What the hell is wrong with today?” she announced, loudly and angrily to her surroundings, then pulled out her phone, sighed expressively, and dialled 17 for the gendarmes. Her French didn’t let her down as she impassively relayed the details of her discovery. Martha was sure she detected an initial hint of disbelief from the other end of the line. Possibly she was too non-hysterical to be taken seriously. However, after going over the details twice she evidently persuaded the woman, whose name she’d already forgotten, that she wasn’t a time-waster or nutter. She promised to stay at the scene until the forces of law and order arrived, together with an ambulance.
Martha sighed again and sat down heavily on the poultry-pellet strewn floor. The pellets weren’t coming from the skewered sack behind Monsieur Frobart. Martha only noticed now that there was a split sack on the floor a few metres away. Had Daniel thrown this at his charging attacker? It seemed likely. Poor man. Poor, poor man. He was such a nice, decent person, and he and his wife were only a couple of years off retiring. They had a large family, widely scattered, and so had been looking forward to spending a lot of time travelling and visiting them. And now Daniel would never get the chance, and Murielle’s world had been shattered.
Oh dear lord, Murielle. Should Martha go to her house, since that was surely where she must be if she wasn’t here, and fetch her? No. Oh no, no, no. It wasn’t Martha’s job to break the news, and besides, if the police arrived and found Martha gone, then she’d go straight to the top of their suspects list. If she wasn’t already there, that was. Alongside Murielle presumably, who wasn’t helping her case by not being here. Great, the two least likely people in the world to murder anyone would be the ones the police would waste valuable time on to start with. Martha groaned. Would she be hauled off for questioning at a police station? Maybe kept in overnight? What would happen to the animals? She swore under her breath. This was a nightmare. Even the unpleasantness of Carol Cuthbertson paled into nothingness compared with this situation. She dropped her head into her hands.
Two minutes later she raised it. She’d been wondering about who on earth would want to kill pleasant, inoffensive Daniel Frobart, and then she’d remembered the red car. That had been in a tearing
hurry, so much so that it had driven both her and a cyclist off the road. Could the driver have been fleeing the scene? She’d tell the police but she had very few details to give them, other than the car’s colour and the fact it was driven by a young man with stubble and sunglasses. She had no idea what make the car was and hadn’t so much as glanced at its registration plate. She sucked as a witness.
The minutes dragged slowly by. Out here in the sticks gendarmes were few and far between. Most small towns had a gendarmerie, but these police stations weren’t manned all the time. When Mark’s brand new chainsaw had been stolen, it had taken him a couple of days to find an open police station to report the crime at. It seemed that there was a small team of flics constantly rotating between these various headquarters. Certainly you could go for months without seeing an officer.
Apart from Philippe, of course. Philippe Prudhomme was an adjutant-chef in the elusive local gendarmerie, and had been a good friend of Mark’s. They’d met at the local chess club. Mark had always loved chess. He’d taught Martha how to play but she never enjoyed the game. She’d rather be knitting, or gardening, or reading, or doing anything else. She just couldn’t be bothered to plan more than one move ahead, and so she always lost. She provided absolutely no challenge to Mark and so he’d joined various clubs over the years in order to get to play a halfway decent game on a regular basis. The last one had been the association in Bousseix, their local town. Here he’d soon discovered the perfect chess partner in Philippe. The two were equally matched, and kept each other on their toes. Philippe, a divorcee of many years, had started coming round for dinner once a month or so, and then played chess into the small hours with Mark. Martha had enjoyed his company on these occasions, or at least during the eating part of them. She disappeared to her sewing room once the meal was over and the chessboard brought out.
Philippe was a quiet but interesting man, with a gentle sense of humour, and he was very attractive. Like Mark, he was medium height and comfortingly solid in a strong, muscular way. That was how Martha liked men to be. It was a shame he and Mark had fallen out. It was at the club’s Christmas dinner at the bistro. Both of them had probably, no, definitely had a bit too much to drink. All Mark would ever say to Martha was that Philippe had made an inappropriate remark about her. So Mark had blacked his eye.
Martha smiled. Silly Mark! All Philippe could have said was something daft along the lines of ‘your wife’s got a nice backside’ but Mark always had been overprotective of her. She’d tried to get him to patch it up with Philippe several times, but he’d always refused. Philippe, being French, was naturally too proud to make the first gesture towards reconciliation. And so for the last nine months of Mark’s life, she hadn’t seen Philippe at all. He’d been at the funeral, and she’d been pleased to see him there. The French were capable of letting go of grudges after all, at least post mortem. He told her that he’d have come round sooner to help her sort things out, if only he’d known. He’d been away on a fishing holiday the week Mark died, and only found about his death the morning after he returned. The day of the funeral. Since then he’d called by from time to time, to say hello, and occasionally they met for coffee. There was a rumour going round that Philippe was ‘sweet’ on her, but Martha took no notice. They were friends, that was all. She was sure she had no love left to give to another man. Her heart had been cremated along with Mark’s remains.
She really hoped Philippe was on duty today and that it would be he who turned up to deal with this ghastly business. He knew she wasn’t capable of murdering anyone, even a Carol Cuthbertson. So she stood up and hurried to the door when she heard the crunch of tyres on gravel. It was a police car, but it wasn’t Philippe who got out of it. Two youngish, stern-faced gendarmes emerged and glared at her.
“Ici. Here, he’s in here,” gestured Martha, feeling all energy and hope leave her body, as well as her grasp of French. She’d always struggled with the complicated language. Mark had been the better linguist of the two of them, but even he’d been quickly overtaken by the children. Martha had got rather lazy over the years, relying on family members to deal with phone calls or complicated forms. And now that she no longer had to attend parent teacher meetings, or help out at school fundraisers, she wasn’t being challenged any more, apart from those conversations with Murielle. All their holiday cottage guests were English, since they had signed up with a UK rental agency, so other than a few bonjours and mercis when shopping, Martha could go weeks at a time without having to speak French.
She led them round to poor Daniel Frobart and then stood herself in a corner, waiting for the inevitable grilling. When it came, once the gendarmes had made endless calls on their phones and paced around the murder scene a hundred times, it was merciless. She was asked the same questions time and time again. Fortunately simmering anger at their heavy-handed attitude towards her rapidly vanquished the shock she’d been suffering, and enabled her to dredge up French vocabulary she didn’t even know she knew. What time had she got here? Had she heard anything? Had she seen anything suspicious? Had anyone else been around? Why hadn’t she found the body straight away? Why had she helped herself to sacks of animal feed? Had she been about to steal those when Monsieur Frobart had appeared and challenged her, so she’d stabbed him?
To their surprise, and her own horror, Martha had burst out laughing, admittedly a touch hysterically, at that last wild surmise the third time it was proposed.
“It’s what all their regular customers do,” she explained, yet again. “If the Frobarts are busy with another customer, or temporarily unavailable for other reasons, like I thought was the case today, you load your car up yourself and then settle up. It saves them the effort, and everyone the time.”
“How long have you been a customer here?” demanded the more sour-faced of the two gendarmes.
“Gosh, twelve, thirteen years maybe. Just after we got our first sheep.”
So why should she suddenly now decide to murder Daniel Frobart, when she’d obviously had lots of chances during all that time?
The two gendarmes muttered quietly to each other in rapid-fire French, which Martha didn’t even attempt to keep up with.
Something occurred to her.
“Has anyone told his wife yet?” she blurted out, interrupting them. “Murielle. The Frobarts live in the last house in the village that way.” She gestured in the appropriate direction. “White gates, not sure what number. At least,” Martha added, “I’m guessing that’s where she is, since she’s not here.” She was met by two blank looks. “She runs… ran this place with her husband. I guess it’s all hers now.”
Martha could have kicked herself for that last remark. She hadn’t meant to serve up a motive for Murielle being the killer, although did the prospect of sole ownership of a small farm shop count as one when all it meant was having to do two people’s work on your own in miserable solitude? However, the gendarmes’ eyes gleamed at the news of another prime suspect.
“Why didn’t you tell us about her before?” the sourest-faced one demanded.
“Because I didn’t get the chance!” exploded Martha, suddenly furious. “You just kept asking the same zillion questions.” She threw her arms up in irritation.
Damn it, where was Philippe? He wouldn’t have needed telling about Murielle, about how small farm supply shops in the middle of rural Creuse operated, about how nobody around here normally shoved tractor accessories through other people’s hearts. Farmers tragically only tended to kill themselves when depression and debt overwhelmed them, or family members in nasty accidents with farming equipment.
“Kindly keep your temper, madame,” warned the gendarme.
“Oh, go to hell,” muttered Martha under her breath, very quietly and in English. Things were going badly. She could see herself still being grilled in several hours’ time, with nobody getting anywhere, apart from the murderer further away. And then, possibly, her going to a cell…
More vehicles arrived, disgorging more
people. Paramedics milled around, as did the French equivalent of scene of crime investigators. They took Martha’s fingerprints and swabbed her hands, she guessed for traces of blood. They were rather more pleasant than the original cops, who seemed to have vanished. Martha hoped it was because they could see what those two men couldn’t: that she hadn’t been involved in Daniel’s death. At least not directly. It still horrified her to think that she might have been able to save him.
“How long has he been dead?” she blurted out.
“Hard to say exactly,” replied the middle-aged woman, after a quick glance to her younger male colleague to confirm it was all right to divulge this information. “But about an hour and a half.”
“Oh, thank God,” gushed Martha. The woman raised her eyebrows. Martha felt obliged to explain. “I got here about,” she glanced at her watch, amazed to see that it was almost half past twelve, “just under an hour ago. I’ve been so worried that if I’d found Monsieur Frobart sooner, I could have stopped him dying.”
“Given the immense trauma to the heart caused by such a large object piercing it,” the woman said, “there’s nothing you could have done. Monsieur Frobart would have lost consciousness within seconds, and been dead within five minutes.”
“So he didn’t suffer for long?” Martha asked.
“No. It was all over quickly for him,” the woman answered matter-of-factly.
That was something to be grateful for, Martha supposed.
Chapter 4
Martha was fidgety. She was sitting on a torture instrument of a chair in the portacabin, to where she’d been moved about quarter of an hour ago to keep her on-site but out of the way. She let her head loll back against the wall behind her, eyes closed. She was too tired and drained to even think. However, a whiff of coffee prised one of her eyes open. She suddenly realised she was parched and had a thumping headache. She still wasn’t hungry, thanks to the large, late breakfast, but boy did she need caffeine. And when she saw who was holding it, the other eye flew open and she launched herself to her feet. She would have thrown herself into Philippe’s arms, but for two reasons. The first was that he’d probably spill that all-important coffee if she did so, and the second was that Martha wasn’t sure if it was permissible to hug a gendarme in uniform. There was bound to be a sub-sub-clause of some complicated by-law somewhere that forbade such a thing.
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