The Darkest Summer

by Unknown

  ‘He’s my younger brother, Sera,’ she said, a barely concealed threat in her tone as she waited for me to unlock the car. I was seeing some of the old Dee back. She’d had balls when we were younger and annoyed as I was with her, it was good to see some fight in her again. ‘He may seem like the one in charge of most situations, but not everything is as straightforward as it might appear.’

  You can say that again, I thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  2018 – Oakwold, New Forest

  Sera

  I needed someone sane to talk to.

  I barely kept to the speed limit on my way to the farm, only slowing down as I entered Henri’s dusty driveway. Parking the car, I got out and ran up his porch stairs. He pushed open the front door, concern on his tanned face as he grabbed my arms. ‘You are okay?’

  I smiled, relieved to see him. ‘Sorry, I know we said one hour, but I had an unexpected visitor at my studio.’ Unable to help myself, I leant forward and kissed him. He hesitated and then taking me in his arms, held me tightly.

  Letting go, he stepped back. We stared at each other, both shocked by the recent turn of events.

  Henri laughed. ‘That was… unexpected. We will sit outside, where it is cooler.’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said, slightly dizzy from the kiss.

  ‘I will get us a cold drink and then we can talk.’

  He sounded a little odd, but I put it down to my kissing him. ‘I hope it’s more of that delicious cider,’ I said. Hazel’s cider had always been heavenly, too. I yearned to taste it again but also hoped that if he had something to drink he might be more forthcoming and confide in me about his past life in Paris.

  ‘No. Today I have Calvados.’ He widened his eyes. ‘I brought it with me from France. You look tense in your shoulders and I prescribe at least two glasses, each.’

  I grinned. I liked this friendlier version of Henri. ‘Perfect. I need something to calm me down after spending the last half an hour with Dee.’ I went to go with him into his kitchen.

  ‘No,’ he said, perhaps a little too harshly. ‘I will bring your drink to you, outside.’

  I went to do as he’d said, but first stopped to pet the puppies. Henri took two glasses from the shelf above the sink and caught my eye. I went to smile but he immediately glanced at the table. I followed his gaze, noticing the table was covered with papers. Some looked very old, but from my vantage point I couldn’t make out what they were about.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He picked up a tea towel and gave the clean glasses a cursory wipe before dropping the cloth over the papers on the table. ‘My work. Come,’ he said, grabbing a bottle of Calvados from the sideboard. He shook his head and smiled as he stood back to let me go in front of him, his determination that I leave obvious.

  I was surrounded by too many secrets and didn’t like the idea of him being party to more. I walked ahead of him when he didn’t reply, not letting myself look back at the table, despite how much I wanted to.

  We sat either side of the small rattan table and I recounted my visit to the studio and Dee’s unexpected arrival. ‘I know I sound like a whiny brat, but it’s my private space where I go to get away from everyone.’

  I watched as he poured us both a glass of the amber liquid. He handed me one, held his up and waited for me to do the same.

  ‘Santé. To the whiny brat,’ he teased.

  ‘Do you even know what that means?’

  He nodded head. ‘We are drinking to our good health.’

  I grinned at him. ‘Santé,’ I echoed, staring at my glass, entranced. ‘This is just what I need, thank you.’

  He stared at me thoughtfully, reaching out and taking my nearest hand to him. ‘Drink.’

  I did as I was told this time, enjoying the heat of the apple-brandy drink as it wended its way down my throat and past my chest.

  ‘I heard that the police interviewed you,’ I admitted, wondering if he would tell me the same thing as Dee had. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘They were asking if I had seen anyone I didn’t know… lurking? Is that the word?’ I nodded. ‘Any strangers here before the fire.’

  ‘Had you?’

  ‘No. I don’t see anyone here.’

  ‘Have they discovered who started the fire yet?’

  ‘No, not yet. If they have found out more, they haven’t told me.’

  We sat lost in our own worlds for a moment. So, he had been questioned about the same thing as Dee and Leo. I was relieved for some reason.

  ‘I’ve been trying to figure out what your job used to be,’ I said, making the most of his openness.

  He tapped the side of his nose. ‘I will not tell you. You must guess.’

  ‘Were you in the army?’ I gasped, excited with my idea.

  ‘No,’ he laughed.

  I enjoyed hearing the deep guttural sound. ‘What did you do before coming here then?’ I waved my hands in the air theatrically, accidentally knocking my full glass and sending my drink all over my shorts. ‘Bugger.’

  Henri went to stand. ‘I will bring you a wet towel.’

  Guiltily, I realised this could be my chance to see what he was hiding from me. I shook my head and motioned for him to sit. ‘No. It was my clumsiness, and anyway, I might have to take these off to rinse them out. You refill my glass; I won’t be long.’

  I hurried inside and took off my shorts, running them under the tap and wringing them out. I glanced through the window to check he was still sitting out on the porch, probably too polite to come inside and disturb me. I hurried over to the table and lifted the tea towel to peek underneath, careful not to move anything. Peering at old newspaper cuttings I noted that they seemed to be about the disappearance of a man who hadn’t been heard of for fiftteen years. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t think what.

  ‘Sera?’ Henri called.

  ‘I’m on my way now,’ I said, carefully lowering the cloth once again to cover the paperwork. I pulled my shorts back on and joined him outside. Sitting down I grimaced as my wet shorts connected with the wooden seat, relieved for once that it was such a hot day. Wracking my brains to work out why the missing man seemed so familiar, I said. ‘You were about to tell me what you did before coming to live on this farm.’

  ‘I want to be honest with you, Sera.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I was a detective. I was, how you say, pensioned off, after I did something terrible and a woman was killed.’

  ‘Tell me.’ I felt disgusted with myself for nosing through his things. I needed to make amends and helping him share something that was an obvious burden to him would be a start. ‘Please.’

  ‘We knew each other for many years…’ he hesitated. ‘Her life had gone very badly. I tried to help her by paying for information on suspects and cases that I was working on.’ He stopped. I took one of his hands in mine and waited silently for him to continue. ‘I was warned by her brother not to involve her, but she insisted she wanted to keep helping me.’ His voice cracked with emotion and he gave me a pleading look. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to persuade me or himself. ‘I should have known better.’ He pulled his hand from my grasp.

  ‘Was she the reason you were burnt?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘They set fire to her home. I went into her house to rescue her, but I was too late. She died on the way to hospital.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I failed her, Sera, I let her down.’

  ‘You nearly killed yourself in the process, Henri. I can’t see how you could have done more.’

  He shook his head. ‘I should have listened and left her out of it.’

  ‘Well, I think you were very brave to put your life at risk.’

  ‘No. I didn’t listen, and a good woman died.’

  Trying to take his focus away from the events that obviously traumatised him still, I asked, ‘You’re quite the Jack of all trades, aren’t you?’

  ‘Jack of what? Why would you say that?’

  Unsure whether my att
empt to distract him had misfired, I added. ‘You know, you were a detective, now you’re a farmer. You’re capable of doing various jobs.’

  ‘A Jack of all trades,’ he mumbled staring at the burnt ruins of the barn for a while.

  Jack… the words echoed in my head. Slowly, as if through an early morning mist, an image appeared in my memory.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said, horrified at the prospect of what I was about to say. ‘That newspaper cutting. The missing man.’ I watched as his expression changed to one of shock as he realised what I must have done. ‘He’s Jack, isn’t he? Hazel’s boyfriend.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  2018 – Oakwold, New Forest

  Sera

  Henri clenched his teeth. I could see the muscle working on his jaw and that he was fighting the urge to be angry with me. ‘I covered the table for a reason,’ he snapped. ‘If I wanted you to see, I’d have shown them to you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ashamed at my uncharacteristic behaviour. ‘It was unforgivable of me, but, oh, I don’t know… there are too many secrets in my life already. I wanted my relationship with you to be without any.’

  He closed his eyes briefly and groaned. Lifting the bottle, he went to refill our glasses.

  ‘No more Calvados for me, thanks,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand. Why hide them from me?’ I asked, confused. ‘Are they the reason you’ve come to live on this particular farm?’

  He considered me carefully, then lifted his glass and downed his drink in one.

  Intrigued, I leant back in my chair, crossing my legs thoughtfully. I was missing something, but what?

  Henri sighed heavily. ‘Jack was my father, Sera.’

  ‘What?’ I tried to make sense of it all. Henri was French. ‘I hadn’t realised he had a son.’

  ‘His real name was Jacques. J-A-C-Q-U-E-S.’ He spelled it out for me. ‘He must have wanted to fit in with his British friends and anglicised his name.’ He looked pensive.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Henri, no.’

  ‘He left my mother when I was twelve,’ he said quietly. ‘Theirs was never a peaceful relationship, but he never forgot my birthday, or Christmas. On occasion he would turn up at Maman’s house to see me, usually bearing a gift. They fought. He left. Always the same scenario.’

  ‘So, you suspected something was wrong when he missed a birthday?’ I recalled how upset Katie was when her birthday came around and her father wasn’t there.

  ‘When I didn’t receive a birthday card or any contact from him on my eighteenth birthday, I suspected something was wrong.’

  ‘That’s heartbreaking.’ I felt the urge to hug him, but didn’t like to impose on his grief.

  ‘The need to trace him built over the years. Even as a detective I never gave up searching for a trace of him. Keeping my eyes open for any information that I could find, or news reports.’

  I tried to put this into the context of Hazel’s life. ‘What date is your birthday?’ I asked, not sure how much I wanted to hear the answer. Perhaps I was about to open a Pandora’s box of chaos that could change everything for me.

  ‘Twenty-first of September.’ He waited for me to take this in.

  I could barely catch my breath. How I wished now that I hadn’t looked at the newspaper cuttings. ‘So, you turned eighteen a month after Hazel went missing with Dee and Leo?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed, staring across the yard at the remains of the barn again.

  I followed his gaze and we sat watching the burnt-out shell of the building in silent contemplation. A horrific thought dawned on me. ‘You think… the body in the barn was your father?’

  He kept staring straight ahead. ‘I know it.’

  Stunned as if he’d slapped me, I followed his line of vision to the blackened ruins. I pictured Jack singing and swinging Hazel round in his arms at the last party she’d held. My heart pounded in shock as I struggled to absorb what he had told me. They were incredibly passionate about each other. Could that passion have led to murder? The notion was too dreadful to contemplate.

  ‘But Hazel would never… I mean—’ I couldn’t imagine Hazel being capable of hurting anyone, least of all the man she loved. ‘Not Hazel.’

  I looked at him. There was something else. What was he so nervous to tell me?

  ‘Henri?’ I squeezed his arm when he didn’t look at me. ‘Look, I know Hazel could never have killed your father. She just couldn’t, okay? She wouldn’t have it in her to do something violent. She was all about love and fun.’ He still didn’t say anything. I could see he wasn’t convinced. ‘Maybe you’ve got this wrong.’ Panic rose through me. ‘Or it could have been someone else? Have you considered that?’

  He glanced at his hands then back at me, a haunted look in his dark eyes. I sensed he hadn’t finished confiding in me.

  ‘Go on,’ I said, terrified to hear what he was about to say, but needing to know everything.

  He reached out and took one of my hands in his, resting them on the table in between us. His actions made me nervous. The tables had turned somehow.

  ‘Promise me you’ll listen to everything I have to tell you before making a judgement,’ he pleaded, his eyes boring into me, willing me to agree.

  I frowned. ‘All right.’

  He studied my face momentarily before speaking. ‘My father used to write small notes in birthday cards. His last one mentioned that he was living with a singer called Hazel on a farm in the New Forest.’ He hesitated and narrowed his eyes. He was waiting for me to react, but I wasn’t sure why. He continued, ‘I searched for her through a UK police contact over several years and tracked her down here. That was as far as her records went for many years – that I could find, anyway.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A detective friend, an ex-police officer I’d met years ago in France, had been looking at a cold case in London for a woman who was trying to find out what had happened to her fiancé. I believe she was dying and wanted to resolve a mystery she’d lived with for many years.’ I couldn’t imagine why he would be nervous about telling me something this random, but waited for him to continue. ‘She had told him that the man, a Vincent Black, had travelled to Scotland with two women back in ’90.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, confused.

  ‘A singer called Hazel and a cocktail waitress and wannabe actress called Mimi. They travelled together to a house party. She doesn’t know where the party was and my friend has not been able to find out more about it. Apparently the two women had been sharing a flat.’

  His words echoed in my head. I stared at him, but it was as if we were in a bubble and I was waiting for it to explode all around me.

  ‘Mimi?’ I felt sick. Was he about to fill in some of my mother’s mysterious past? ‘Go on,’ I said, barely able to breathe, my heart was pounding so hard in my chest. I couldn’t imagine Mum and Hazel being flatmates. How did I not know this? Did Dee know?

  ‘Alice said that the three of them disappeared. Never returned to London.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘She suspected Vincent had set up home with one of them, but wasn’t sure which one.’ He exhaled slowly. ‘It seems that she didn’t like the two women very much at all. Which I suppose is understandable if you think one of them has run off with your fiancé.’

  ‘You are talking about Mum and Hazel, aren’t you?’ I knew it was a bloody stupid question, but I needed to be completely certain I’d heard right.

  ‘I am.’ He gave my hands a squeeze and let go of one of them to massage his temple with his free hand. ‘I do not have to continue, if it upsets you.’

  ‘You can’t stop now,’ I snapped. ‘Not now you’ve told me this much.’

  He rubbed his chin and took a deep breath. ‘

  ‘Was anyone else travelling with them to Scotland, do you know?’

  ‘He had a driver. No one can recall his name, so my friend has been unable to trace him.’

  I had always known my mother had wo
rked in London for a short time before moving to the New Forest to have me. I’d always suspected she’d run away from something there, but had assumed my father had been married and the wife had warned Mum off, or a similar scenario. But this seemed much darker than I had expected.

  ‘I had no idea Mum and Hazel were ever close.’ The revelation stunned me. ‘Please, carry on.’

  It was strange hearing him refer to her as Mimi. I’d only ever heard Mum referred to as Maureen, except for Katie calling her Nana Mimi, and that had been Mum’s suggestion. I had assumed it was something she’d come up with as an affectionate name between herself and Katie, not a name she’d used in her past.

  ‘What else do you know?’

  ‘The trail went cold,’ Henri added, raising a shoulder in a lazy shrug. ‘I could not find anything further about these women. I did find the farm several years ago and enquired after her. The tenants told me she had disappeared with her family and, I assumed, my father, but they could tell me nothing more. I thought my search was over. I returned here a few months ago to try and look for Hazel again. In case she had returned here.’ He hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I discovered that the elderly tenants who moved in after she left had died leaving the farm vacant for some years. I enquired about leasing it.’ He looked concerned by my silence.

  ‘Makes sense,’ I said, forcing myself to appear calm. My stomach churned. I needed him to tell me every detail.

  ‘I thought if I could move in to my father’s last known address then maybe I might discover more about what happened to him.’

  No wonder he kept himself and his business private. If anyone around here suspected he was investigating their lives, or those of their neighbours, he’d be even more unpopular than he was already.

  I studied my nails as the enormity of what he’d confided in me took root. ‘As sorry as I am about your father’s disappearance, Henri…’ I said, closing my eyes to try and regulate my rising temper. ‘And I truly am… Why wait this long to tell me you’ve been investigating my mother’s past?’