Murder Fortissimo (13 page)

‘Ohhh!’ It was a long-drawn-out sigh and Ellen cast a glance of astonishment mixed with awe at Harriet. Years of practice, Harriet reflected complacently, had made her an artist in her ability to appear superhuman, with paranormal powers of
deduction. There’s not a lot of difference between little girls and very much older ones, she decided, disguising a slight smirk as the old magic worked yet again.

‘I never thought I’d see her again,’ whispered Ellen, twisting her hands in nervous anguish. ‘It was at the end of the war. I never thought.…’ She raised haunted eyes to Harriet, as if pleading with the other woman for understanding, for mercy.

Harriet managed a kindly nod, but said nothing, waiting for Ellen to continue.

Ellen bent her head and went on. She explained about the munitions factory near Poole and how she had lived with her sister. She told Harriet about Douglas being sent out to the Far East, about his injury, about her first casual meeting with Christiane in the spring of 1945.

‘Douglas and me only had the one night together when we got married in 1942, then he had to go. He was on embarkation leave when we met and he only plucked up courage to pop the question right near the end of his time.’ She had a nostalgic look in her eye as she described the wedding. ‘I was only eighteen, poor silly little cow, but I did look nice. My sister borrowed a dress for me from her neighbour, a rose-pink crêpe it was, with a lovely draped bodice and somebody else lent me a really classy fur stole. What with that and a pale-grey hat I already had, with a pink rose pinned to it, I looked the bees’ knees.’

Harriet waited quietly, a reluctant pity wrung from her as she too contemplated that young bride and her shy bridegroom, about to go off to possible death and even more possible injury.

‘I did love him,’ Ellen said abruptly, almost to herself. She sounded resentful as she remembered her younger self. ‘But he was away for three years, the war didn’t end in the Far East till the August of 1945 and then he had to wait for ages till they were sent home in the transport ships.

‘I had three years of having to live like a nun. I was married but not married, not really. You could only go out with a crowd if you wanted some fun but you couldn’t really go out with a crowd because they all paired up and there you were, like a lemon, all on your own. So – I ended up having some fun of my own.’

Decades later the defiance was still there. Harriet could hear it quite clearly in the other woman’s voice. Would I have felt like that, she wondered? In the same circumstances. If – what was his name? David, that’s it, if David had been about to go abroad, perhaps to die, would I have married him when we were only eighteen, just to have a moment’s happiness? To give him a taste of a normal life, knowing – both of us knowing – that a taste might be all he would ever have?

Harriet had always been singularly clear-sighted and logical, even as a teenager, but given Ellen’s circumstances, with a war raging round the world, she knew that however much her head might have recognized the inevitable pitfalls, she would have done just the same. But if I had married David, she thought, I don’t think I would have gone out looking for
fun
. Still, not everyone felt like that, she conceded, trying to recapture the fleeting moment of sympathy she had felt.

Ellen went on talking, more confident now, her words tumbling over themselves sometimes; at others, halting and faltering.

‘There was this bloke,’ she admitted at last. Harriet waited, concealing a sigh, for the inevitable corollary. Was this what it was all about? Guilt about an illegitimate baby still so shameful that it could cause that amount of pain more than sixty years later?

‘I got caught.’ Ellen spoke bluntly. ‘In the family way,’ she elaborated and Harriet nodded.

‘Somehow or other
she
, Christiane, spotted it. I don’t know
how she knew. I didn’t show and I’d managed to hide it from everybody, even our Mavis and I was actually living with her. Still, one day Chris said to me that she knew lots of old country ways of getting rid of my little problem so that nobody would ever find out.’

Harriet pricked up her ears. Not a baby then, whose existence had been concealed from Douglas Ransom, but an abortion. It had been illegal in those days, of course, but still … even allowing for the change in attitudes, was it so heinous a crime? Enough to contemplate murder?

Ellen was still spilling it all out, speaking quietly, almost to herself.

‘We went down to the beach, near Canford Cliffs it was, between Poole and Bournemouth,’ she explained. ‘You couldn’t actually get on to the beach itself because they still had the barbed wire and concrete blocks all across but they weren’t so strict about keeping watch at that time. I suppose they thought the Japs were unlikely to be invading up the English Channel.’

She bit her lip, clearly shocked at her own temerity in actually making a joke, at such a time. ‘It was really early on a Sunday morning, about the middle of May I suppose it would have been. I’d stayed the night with Chris, who worked as a live-in chambermaid in a hotel just outside Bournemouth; we picked that night because we knew she had the whole day off. We hitched a lift in a lorry with some bloke she had met locally: he was driving to Poole, down to the Quay, and he did a bit of a detour and dropped us off in the village. He made some crack about wishing he could see us in our bathing costumes and we just played along, joshing him, you know. It was all very light and jokey. If only he’d known.

‘Chris had brewed up this drink and she made me swallow it when we woke up, long before we went out. Horrible stuff it was, herbs and so forth; I don’t know what it was – she said she
learnt all sorts of things like that, herbal remedies and medicines, from her grandmother. She came from somewhere quite primitive, I always reckoned, for all her airs and graces and the little hints she used to drop about being landed gentry. Mind you, I never believed that, not for a minute, though she fooled the rest of them. She never said, but I got the idea that she’d used it herself and that’s how she knew it worked.

‘Anyway, it was pretty powerful stuff, whatever was in it, and I’d already started having some contractions by the time the bloke put us down near the top of the hill. It was horrible, I could hardly walk down towards the shelter for the pains, and then the waters broke. It made an awful mess.’

Her eyes closed briefly on the memory of that ancient pain and the shame of it all.

‘I didn’t dare scream out loud, even when we stumbled into the shelter, so Chris broke off a branch of a tree and gave it to me. I bit right through it, even though it was quite thick, it was a dreadful labour, even though it was very fast. When it was nearly over, and the head and shoulders were out, Chris made a funny noise, a sort of shocked gasp. ‘I thought you said you were only about four months gone?’ she said to me.’

Harriet scarcely drew breath, not wanting to distract Ellen from her narrative but she watched her narrowly through
half-closed
eyes.

‘I had no idea what she was talking about but at that moment I gave another great push and the rest of the baby came out; then there was another contraction and the afterbirth followed almost straight afterwards. I just lay back, completely exhausted and gasping and crying, just relieved it was all over. The only thing I wanted to do was have a rest then get away and forget all about it.

‘That was when I heard her.’

Ellen’s eyes darkened at the memory of the long ago horror.
‘Christiane said … she said: “This baby is alive! You lied to me, you stupid bitch, you were at least six months’ gone. What on earth are we going to do now?”‘

Harriet jerked upright, staring at Ellen, her attention entirely focused now. What had happened? Was this what had given the Breton woman such a hold over her English friend?

‘She started to scream at me, but then she hushed up in a hurry. We hadn’t seen anyone but it was too risky to draw attention to ourselves.’ Ellen’s tone was resentful, even at this distance in time, clearly aggrieved at the way her companion had spoken to her. ‘She was a hard, unfeeling cow of a girl, even then, Christiane, but she really went right over the top when she heard that baby cry. I think it was the only time I ever saw her look almost mad, she was usually so controlled, but her eyes looked all fiery and she reached out, went to pick it up but I grabbed at it first. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked again. I didn’t say anything at first, I was trying to think what to do, thinking about Douglas and what he’d say, all the scandal. I knew I couldn’t face it.

‘I was in a mess so she went off to look for some water, to see if there was a stand pipe anywhere near by; there was a café there though, of course, it was shut at the time. “You’d better start thinking
fast
,” she snapped at me. She had found the tap and managed to spot an old jam jar half buried in the sand. I think she had a bit of a hunt round but that was all she could find, and then when she came back she was still in a black temper. I was almost frightened of her but I’d been thinking hard while she was gone.

‘I’d decided by then and I knew what to do.’

Something in her tone sent a chill right through Harriet. There was a manic gleam in the other woman’s eyes as she recalled that long ago desperation. In the end, however, she spoke in the most matter-of-fact voice imaginable as she told
Harriet what she had done, what her solution to her little problem had been.

‘I realized I couldn’t rely on Christiane to do another hand’s turn to help me,’ she said calmly. ‘She told me straight that I was on my own now. The baby was barely breathing so I took out my handkerchief and wadded it into a pad, then I pressed it over the baby’s nose and mouth until it stopped breathing. I remember I was surprised; it didn’t take much doing. Like I said it was only very little and very weak; then when it was definitely dead I got another stick and scratched out a hole in the sand and buried it.’

Around six o’clock the next morning Harriet reluctantly opened heavy, swollen eyelids knowing that once she was properly awake she would have to allow the previous night’s revelations and horrors to come flooding back.

She had managed to get rid of Ellen Ransom quite easily. The other woman had obviously felt a great weight fall from her shoulders as she confessed to her actions and she explained volubly that from the moment Christiane Marchant had arrived at Firstone Grange, she had been blackmailing her erstwhile friend. Apparently, Ellen explained, Christiane had recognized Ellen’s name and photograph from the article in the local paper, when a carefully posed picture had appeared, of Matron Winslow welcoming her first guest to Firstone Grange. This had been the circumstance that had reconciled Christiane to Alice’s desperate venture and made her decide to stay.

No, there had been no suggestion that she wanted any money, that wasn’t it at all, Ellen said, as Harriet had pulled herself together and thrust her out of the room. It had been power that was Christiane’s heady brew. ‘Mind you,’ Ellen had glowered with anger as she recalled the circumstances. ‘She made the most of it at the time. The stuff I had to hand over to that bitch. Silk stockings that I got from some of the boys in the American Army, extra clothing coupons, any treats I got from friends; I had to hand them all over to her, because she
threatened to tell the police. She said I’d made her an accessory to murder and it was a small price for me to pay, coughing up all those luxury items. ‘Specially – she used to smirk at me as she said it – when a word from her could have got me arrested.’

Closing the door on the woman had been the last thing Harriet had managed to do before she collapsed on the edge of her bed in a storm of tears. Why was I so upset, she wondered now, still glue-eyed from that breakdown.

After some difficult introspection she came up with a painful diagnosis.
If
I had been in Ellen’s situation, left alone, married yet not married, and
if
I had taken the same course and had what Ellen had referred to as
fun
– what would I have done, faced with the same terrifying outcome? For terrifying it must have been, she acknowledged, for a young wife to be faced with the prospect of living, breathing evidence that she had betrayed one of the country’s heroes.

She gazed down the years and remembered David, that long ago first love, with his floppy dark hair and his gangling arms and legs, smiling as she recalled that he had courted her with talk of the geography degree he planned to do at Oxford and by enthusing about a coming school field trip where he would be let loose with theodolites and other exciting equipment. Well, she thought. If I had married David then become pregnant by another man while he was away fighting, would I have got rid of the baby?

It would have been difficult, to say the least. When Harriet had been seventeen, abortion was still illegal and dangerous, but what if the situation
had
been similar to that long-ago hypothetical wartime emergency? I wouldn’t have done what Ellen did, she told herself fiercely. It would have broken my parents’ hearts but they would never have rejected me; we’d have managed somehow. They’d have stiffened their already upright spines, held their noses and their heads in the air and
brooked no malicious remarks from family, friends or neighbours.

That was one reason why she had felt so upset at Ellen’s confession. The other had to be dredged up from a much deeper, darker place of secrets. There
had
been a man, there
had
been a baby, but no drastic action had been necessary; nature had taken its course and at the time her overriding emotion had been one of relief. The man was married and she had just been appointed to her first deputy headship. It would all have been extremely messy, but now she realized that part of her bitterly regretted that loss. That she had never grieved, never felt a need to grieve. Now Ellen’s story had unlocked that secret door.

Last night’s harsh and painful tears had been some kind of release, she acknowledged; a final admission of grief for the children she had never had, never before recognized that she had wanted. She was dismayed now to find that her dislike of Ellen Ransom had hardened perceptibly and that the momentary sympathy and fellow feeling she had experienced during the previous night’s confession had completely vanished.

Wiping a stray tear away and blowing her nose, she considered those two other women, the young girls on the beach, long ago. Christiane Marchant, for so long now appearing in Harriet’s imagination like the Bad Fairy at the feast, was confirmed in her role now. It’s possible, Harriet supposed, that there’s an argument that the woman had just escaped from a terrifying situation and was afraid of landing in something just as bad. Harriet pursed her lips. Reasons, she thought – but not an excuse. People have survived worse ordeals and stayed humane.

Not my place to judge though, she concluded; it’s so far outside my own experience, so how can I say what I would have done? But what about the other one, Ellen Ransom, who
saw herself so completely as the innocent victim, caught in the toils of a cold, scheming blackmailer. Ellen resented the fact that she had been, in her own eyes, treated badly both by life and the circumstances that had let her to stray in the first place, and now, recently, by the terrifying reappearance of her nemesis. Suddenly Ellen didn’t look so much like a victim after all.

Among the many sensible and sensitive innovations that Pauline Winslow had introduced at Firstone Grange, one of the most appreciated was the provision of an electric kettle and
tea-and
coffee-making facilities. Every evening Gemma flitted from room to room, turning down the bedclothes, checking on the radiators, and placing a small covered jug of fresh milk on the tea tray, along with a small Tupperware box of home-made biscuits. Firstone Grange might well be expensive but, Harriet thought, you certainly got your money’s worth.

She clambered stiffly out of bed and switched on the kettle, thoughtfully refilled last night by Gemma as part of her routine. Cuddling into her holly-red dressing gown and thrusting her feet into sensible fleecy-lined moccasins, Harriet went to stand by the window, managing, in spite of her misery, to find some kind of uplift in her spirits as she made out a lighter streak to the east breaking through the early morning gloom.

‘Morning has broken, like the first morning,’ she sang, then sniffled at her own eternal optimism. You corny old Pollyanna, she scolded herself but she knew she was already feeling better; had turned the corner from the ordeal of the previous night.

And even then, she clicked her tongue in annoyance, I still didn’t find out if Ellen Ransom actually killed her old friend and enemy. After all that emotion, Harriet realized, so urgent had been her need to get rid of the woman, to be alone, that she had forgotten to probe further. She’s poisonous, she reflected, just as bad as the other one was.

She sipped her coffee, still standing at the window, wondering what the day would bring. With a slight shrug she turned back into the room and spotted the blanket tossed casually across the armchair. Ellen had changed her mind, once into her narrative, and without comment had reached for the soft woollen blanket and draped it over her knees as she sat there, leaning forward to justify her actions. Harriet shrank at the memory of that self-righteous face, with those unpleasant eyes, and the slight flecking of spittle at the lips. Ellen had thrust her face too close to Harriet, invading her personal space, and Harriet, intimidated, had recoiled, leaning back into her banked-up pillows.

Harriet stared now in distaste at the blanket then quite deliberately she took it between her thumb and forefinger and threw it on to the floor. With an equally deliberate motion she emptied the dregs of her coffee mug over it, the brown stain spreading shockingly over the blue, fine-woven wool.

Sorry, Mrs Turner, she apologized, but I don’t want that in my room, not with her smell and her touch and her slime on it. She scanned the rest of the room, her eyes dissatisfied, wondering if she should spray the place with deodorant in a vain attempt to rid the room of all traces of Ellen Ransom. I want the whole place fumigated, she thought.

Foolishness. She looked at her watch and calculated that it would be another forty minutes or so until the early morning tea arrived. Not worth going back to bed for, so she had a quick bath and put on a comfortable grey skirt with a
heather-coloured
cashmere sweater, clasping a string of rough-cut amethyst beads round her throat.

Now what? What to do till the early tea arrived? She sat down on her bed, shrinking from the thought of the armchair with its recollection of Ellen Ransom pouring out her story. No use trying to concentrate on the book that lay open on her
bedside table, and early morning television held no attraction. However, she really needed to rid her room of the forbidding silence, so she turned to the radio to seek distraction with the local BBC breakfast show. In the cheerful, friendly company of her favourite early morning presenter, Harriet found herself calming down a bit.

There would be time enough to think about this latest development when she could get hold of Sam and discuss things with him, to mull it over and offer it up for his consideration. In spite of her sibling-like relationship with him, (which meant by definition, that like most male relatives, he was useless), Harriet knew very well that when it came to a crisis Sam was rock steady.

Besides, he was quite simply her oldest and best friend. A rueful grin lightened her face as she recalled his anxious warning of the night before. He wasn’t very far wrong, she conceded, harking back to the suffocating terror of that first waking, with Ellen’s hand clamped tightly over her mouth. Well, now she knew. If she and Sam were looking for a suspect who could be capable of murder, Ellen fitted the bill only too well. She was a physically strong woman, in spite of her years, and she had killed once. She had also, by her own admission, felt a murderous hatred for the Breton woman, the cuckoo in the nest at Firstone Grange.

But, and it was a fairly big but, she had not been alone in feeling that particular emotion. There had been others in that little group in the hall, so conveniently situated to do murder, if indeed murder had been done. There had been several people clustered near that table, others who could have pulled the fatal thread, and yet others who had been well positioned to give a quick snip with nail scissors or with a penknife. Most important of all, there had been other people there who had hated and feared Christiane Marchant.

Drring! Drring!
For once, when the alarm went off, Sam Hathaway woke straight away, eager and alert for the challenges of the day. There was the inevitable stabbing at his heart as he thought of Avril, but he scrambled out of bed and into the bathroom without that dreadful hiatus between hope and despair, that momentary belief that it had all been a nightmare, that she was there beside him. This morning Sam knew it had all been a nightmare all right, and that it was a nightmare that was never going to leave him, but today he had things to do, people to see, a sense of purpose. Avril would have understood, he knew that; she would have been pushing him out of the house, encouraging him to get on with life.

Showered and shaved he set out briskly for early communion in the cathedral and in the glorious frosty peace he was more aware than ever of Avril’s loving presence. Don’t leave me, he pleaded silently and knew a moment of comfort, knew that she would always be in his heart. Refreshed spiritually he was ready for the fray, bursting to get over to Chambers Forge to sort out Harriet’s problem. A glance at his watch made the decision for him. Matron Winslow would be impervious to his charm at such an early hour so he might as well go home and refresh the body, now that the soul had received its top-up. His administrative duties and his work in the Diocesan Office were none too onerous; in a sense he knew that he had been winding down ever since Avril’s death and he determined now that his next birthday would be the clincher. Not that he intended to sit back, certainly not. There was always locum work, particularly when it came to services conducted at the crematorium which, unlike some of his colleagues who disliked them, he quite enjoyed in an odd way – he was often meeting people who had no other contact with
the church and so he tried to make the encounter both meaningful and comforting. Beside this there must be other people who had need of his energy and his experience. Financially comfortable, Sam was trusting to providence that something would turn up soon.

In the meantime here was Harriet and the conundrum she had set him; not a three-pipe problem
à la
Sherlock Holmes, he decided, but definitely a full English breakfast with all the trimmings. Replete after egg, bacon, mushroom, fried bread and black pudding, Sam lingered over his third cup of coffee and reflected on the situation at Firstone Grange. His first inclination had been to laugh at Harriet’s far-fetched theory. Murder? It was absurd, particularly when considered in the light of the slightly stifling gentility of Pauline Winslow and her creation. But much as he had pooh-poohed the idea, especially her suggestion as to the method, he was gradually coming round to the notion that she might indeed have a point. He was sensitive to atmosphere and right from his first visit he had felt the general unease amongst the residents at Firstone Grange. It had been there then and it was still there now and it could not be explained away by the events of Friday evening.

He applied logic to the ‘accident’. Of course it could be explained away as an entirely unfortunate sequence of occurrences which had culminated in such a distressing result. That in itself would be enough to establish some bad vibes but he, like Harriet, was now almost convinced that there was something else.

The phone interrupted his train of thought. It was Harriet.

‘I wondered if you’d be free to come to lunch with me, Sam?’