Dead of Winter (22 page)

‘That’s what they reckon. But it’s the first one that’s really puzzling. Seems he killed her for no reason. She’d been working as a land girl, living on a farm in Surrey, minding her own business. Didn’t have a boyfriend, never been in any trouble. There was nothing to explain it. Nothing about her that was unusual.’

Lily sat frowning.

‘Except she was foreign, of course,’ she added.

‘Well, maybe that was it,’ Fred responded, anxious to be of help. ‘Maybe that’s the reason. I remember you telling me now. Polish, wasn’t it?’

PART TWO

14

‘S
O HE WASN’T
a policeman at all?’ Mary Spencer said. She was standing at the sink, peeling potatoes and looking out of the window into the stable yard where her five-year-old son Freddy was pretending to be a Hurricane. Arms outstretched, he circled the cobbles, now and then emitting a high-pitched staccato noise meant to sound like a machine-gun.’ ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh …’

‘Then what on earth was he doing here?’

‘That’s still a mystery,’ Bess Brigstock replied. Bess was a volunteer postal worker; she delivered mail to outlying farms and houses in the Liphook area and was an invaluable source of information and gossip. ‘Bob Leonard rang Petersfield in case they knew anything about it, but they didn’t. They certainly hadn’t sent anyone, and anyway they pointed out it wouldn’t have been a policeman enquiring about that sort of thing; it would have been someone from the Ministry of Agriculture, or the Board of Trade. They have their own inspectors.’

‘Yes, but he showed Evie a warrant card,’ Mary insisted. Tired of his circling, Freddy had zeroed in on Bess’s pony Pickles, who stood harnessed between the shafts of her trap in the middle of the yard. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh …’ He swooped down on Pickles, who disappointingly showed no reaction but continued to chew thoughtfully on the contents of his nosebag. ‘He told her he was a detective.’

‘Annie MacGregor said the same.’ Bess frowned. ‘He turned up at Finch’s Farm before he came here and he flashed his card at her, too. She said he was a greasy little man.’

‘Evie couldn’t bear him. According to her he just pushed his way into the house.’

Mary brushed the pile of peelings off the edge of the sink into a bucket that already held discarded bits of leaf vegetables, some of them in the first stage of decay, as well as other food fragments, all of them destined for the porkers Hodge was fattening in the pigsty behind the stables. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist.

‘They tell you to cook them in their skins,’ she murmured, peering at a well-thumbed booklet published by the Ministry of Food that was lying open by the sink. ‘It’s supposed to keep the goodness in. Too late now. Potatoes au gratin? We’ve still got some mousetrap. Freddy will hate it. But he hates potato soup even more.’

She turned to look at Bess, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her, taking comfort as always from her burly, reassuring figure, clad that day in a brown, hairy sweater that made Mary think of Mama Bear from the book of children’s stories she read to Freddy every evening. The cup of tea Bess was cradling in her large callused hands might easily have been a plate of porridge.

‘What did he say to Annie MacGregor, this man?’

‘The same as he told Evie, so far as I can gather.’ Bess’s face darkened. Heavy in the shoulders, and with thighs like oaks, her leathery complexion testified to a life lived out of doors. ‘That there’d been reports of illegal slaughtering of livestock in the area and what did she know about it. Annie said she’d never heard of such a thing and if he was trying to insinuate that she and Alec had been killing off their animals on the sly he must be out of his mind. He might not have noticed but they had a
dairy
herd. But it didn’t seem to faze him; he insisted on taking their names and the names of their two farmhands.’

‘That’s what he did with Evie. Took her name and got her to tell him mine and made a note of Hodge’s, too. I only wish I’d been here. Policeman or not, I’d have sent him off with a flea in his ear.’

Mary began to fill a saucepan with water from the sink, and as she did so she caught sight of her son’s nanny, who’d gone out a few minutes earlier to collect eggs, emerging from the barn with a basket on her arm. Spotting a fresh target, Freddy sped across the cobbles towards her. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh …’ Smiling, Mary watched as Evie dropped the basket and caught him in her arms. She swung him around, her long red hair, in plaits that morning, airborne for a moment as she pirouetted on the spot, and while Freddy wriggled, trying to escape, she whispered something in his ear. Her words, whatever they were, seemed to work the desired spell and when she put him down and collected her basket from the ground he took the gloved hand she offered him and together they walked to the end of the stables and then disappeared from sight behind the long, low building.

Mary carried the saucepan to the other end of the kitchen and placed it on the old iron range which stood there radiating heat. Unhitching the gate to the fireplace beneath the stove, she took two logs cut to size from a wood bin and added them to the bed of embers before returning to clean the sink.

‘But is that all Bob Leonard could tell you?’

Leonard was the Liphook bobby. Bess had undertaken on Mary’s behalf to find out all she could about the mysterious man who had called at the Grange a few days earlier brandishing what now seemed to be a bogus warrant card. Mary herself had been in Petersfield that day: she’d gone to the market that was held there once a week, leaving her son in Evie’s care, and had returned to find the girl clearly upset by what had occurred. It appeared from her account that the man had behaved in a menacing way, warning her that the authorities were well aware of what was going on, which had made no more sense to Evie than apparently it had to the MacGregors, who were their closest neighbours.

‘Bob’s only contribution was to wonder whether you had anything worth stealing.’ Bess snorted.

‘He what—?’

‘He said it sounded like this man, whoever he was, might be on the lookout for places to rob. How do they put it in American films? Casing the joint?’

Mary had started laughing even before she finished speaking.

‘Well, if he thinks the Grange is worth casing, he must be even dimmer than he sounds.’

Mary herself had been combing the house for anything that looked remotely saleable since coming to live there, but her rewards had been scant. On the same day the greasy little man had appeared she’d gone to Petersfield with the last of her gleanings: two gilded picture frames discovered in the cellar and an old set of cutlery missing only a carving knife and fork. She’d returned with a sweater and gloves for Evie, some boots for Hodge, whose own were now past mending, six pork chops slipped to her surreptitiously (and quite literally) under a table, and, best of all, a set of lead soldiers of the Napoleonic era complete in number and only slightly damaged.

‘The odd lance is bent and some of the shakos have lost their plumes,’ she’d told Bess, who, ever reliable, had been waiting at the station with Pickles and her trap to take them home. ‘But Freddy will love them. He’s become very martial of late. I was beginning to despair of finding him anything for Christmas.’

All in all the expedition had been a triumph. But Mary’s elation had been short-lived when she’d discovered on returning to the Grange what had happened in her absence. Evie had been so upset by the experience that Mary had asked Bess the following day to find out all she could about the incident.

‘Well, at least I can tell her it’s got nothing to do with the police,’ she said now. ‘Poor Evie. She worries enough as it is.’ One of the reasons Mary had felt drawn to the girl – why she’d employed her in the first place – was that they both shared the same anxieties. Mary’s husband Peter had been posted with his regiment to North Africa in 1942 and was now in Italy. Evie’s was serving with the Allied forces in France.

‘It was all right when he was in hospital over here. But he was returned to his unit last week, so she’ll have to start worrying all over again. She’s such a dear girl. And a great help to me. I don’t want her upset. Not when things are going so well.’

She smiled at Bess.

‘We’ve settled down at last. I’ve never seen Freddy so happy. He simply loves it here. He wouldn’t be back in London for anything. And it’s all thanks to you, dear Bess.’

‘Oh, good Lord! Don’t exaggerate.’

Bess snorted. Scowling, she buried her nose in her teacup. Mary regarded her with affection. Though they’d known each other for only a few months it had taken less time than that to discover that her new friend’s gruff manner was little more than a mask; that her generosity was in fact limitless. Nor, in consequence, had it surprised her to learn later that Bess had spent the better part of her life ministering to others: first as an ambulance driver during the First World War; later as a Red Cross worker in distant parts of the world, a career that had been cut short when her mother had fallen seriously ill and she had had to return to England to nurse her. The old lady, bedridden in her last years, had finally passed away the previous Christmas, at which point Bess, looking around as always to see where else she might be needed, had answered a call for a volunteer to deliver post in the Liphook area.

‘Mind you, I did worry when you first arrived,’ she allowed, running her fingers through her cropped hair, scrunching up her face into a frown that no self-respecting bear would be ashamed of – or so Mary told herself. ‘You’d had your whole life turned upside down, and it’s not easy getting over that sort of thing.’

What Bess was referring to had happened six months earlier when Mary’s house in London – the home she and her husband had bought in Maida Vale when they’d got married – had been destroyed by a V-bomb. Terrible though the event had been, however, it paled beside another memory of that day which continued to haunt Mary’s dreams.

After they had moved into the Grange and she and Bess had got to know each other, she had told her the whole story. How she had left Freddy with his nanny for the afternoon and gone out to keep a dental appointment and how, while travelling on a bus to Portland Road, she had heard the sound of a distant explosion and wondered, with the other passengers, whether it was one of the new flying bombs the newspapers were talking about. And how, an hour later, coming home, she had turned into her street to find a fire engine blocking her way and the road full of men in uniform: air-raid wardens, firemen, police officers. Still vivid in Mary’s recollection had been the sight of the hoses extended like black snakes along the length of the pavement and the smell hanging in the air, which she hadn’t recognized at first but then realized was the scent of freshly turned soil.

‘My heart stopped, Bess. I couldn’t breathe.’

A glance had been all it took her to see that her house had disappeared: the slate roof and the chimney that leaned to one side and the window boxes she had bought that spring and filled with geraniums. All had vanished. In their place was a pile of smoking rubble, and as she’d stood there unable to move, an icy calm had descended on her like a shroud.

‘Then I saw them, Freddy and Evie. They were standing on the pavement hand in hand looking at this awful heap of bricks and plaster.’

Later she had learned that his nanny had taken her son out for a walk only minutes before the bomb had landed. They had gone down to the canal to feed the ducks and had seen the cigar-shaped craft, its tail glowing brightly, pass by overhead.

‘Only
minutes
, Bess …’

Although it had been days before Mary had been able to think clearly, their move to Hampshire had been inevitable in the circumstances and dictated by logic. Short of looking for a flat in London to rent, the Grange had offered the only roof immediately available to her. An old stone mansion situated a mile or two from the village of Liphook, it had belonged to a bachelor uncle of hers and been left to her in his will when he died at the end of 1938. Something of a white elephant – it was too big for a weekend retreat – the house had remained empty during the war apart from a brief spell in 1942 when it had been occupied by a company of sappers on a training exercise. All but settled on the idea of selling it, Mary and her husband had put off a final decision until after the war and in the meantime had arranged with an estate agent in Petersfield to keep an eye on the property, which was left in the day-to-day care of an elderly couple named Hodge who had worked for Mary’s uncle for many years and had a cottage nearby.

A week after losing her home, Mary had taken the train down to Liphook with Freddy and his nanny. Weighed down by suitcases – she and Evie had spent hours picking through the rubble salvaging what they could – they had clambered off the train to find Liphook’s only taxi already commandeered and were sitting in the station waiting for it to return, Freddy growing more fractious by the minute, when the door had opened and a large woman wearing an old army greatcoat and a fur-lined cap with earflaps had put her head in.

‘I’m told you want to go to the Grange,’ she had growled at them. Her heavy frown had seemed to dispel any idea that she might be doing them a favour. ‘I’m headed that way myself. Can I give you a lift?’

Only later had Mary realized that Bess had not been going in their direction at all. She’d finished her round for the day and was about to return home in her trap when she’d heard from the station-master, Mr Walton, that a party from London was camped in the waiting room looking lost.

‘I thought for a moment you were refugees,’ she’d confessed long afterwards, weeks later. ‘You looked so forlorn sitting there with your suitcases.’

15

‘C
OME NOW,
A
NGUS.
It’s no use getting upset. These things take time. We must be patient.’

Bennett removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘Paris was an occupied city until a few months ago. Heaven only knows what the police are having to deal with there. Apart from anything else there’s the matter of wartime collaborators. From what I hear, a lot of private justice is being exacted. It’s not something they can turn a blind eye to. I’m sure they’ll get around to our problem in due course.’