Murder Fortissimo (15 page)

She eyed him narrowly. ‘You’d better make sure you don’t
start giving her one of your “hard stares”,’ she advised. He responded with a faint grin. It was a family joke. A small parishioner had once accused him, not to his face but via Avril, of being like Paddington Bear in his employment of the ‘hard stare’ as a weapon. He took pride in the accomplishment; otherwise the gentlest of men, he could make someone with a guilty conscience tremble at thirty paces, with that clear, impartial, blue-eyed stare.

The gong boomed out for lunch and they dropped the subject, both relieved to discover that they were seated some distance away from Ellen Ransom. Even without employing Sam’s secret weapon they felt they would find it difficult to engage in social chit-chat with the woman. They were both
fair-minded,
intelligent people, accustomed by training and by inclination to giving the benefit of the doubt and looking for the best in everyone, but ultimately they were upright, law-abiding citizens and they were privately appalled by the woman’s confession.

After lunch they retreated with their coffee to their sanctuary and were sitting there in companionable silence, enjoying the sudden burst of pale but valiant sunshine, when a slight cough disturbed them and a diffident voice broke into their peace.

‘Excuse me, Miss Quigley?’ It was Doreen Buchan, nervously clutching her tan leather shoulder bag in both hands, twirling the strap into a spiral, her face looking drawn and grey against the pretty light blue dress that showed under her open dark coat. ‘Could I … do you think I could possibly have a word with you?

‘Do sit down, Mrs Buchan.’ Sam rose, offering her his seat as he prepared to leave, but she gestured to him to sit down again. ‘No, please stay, Canon Hathaway.’ She spoke with a quiet dignity but her eyes were dark with despair. ‘I’d like to talk to both of you, if you don’t mind. There’s something I have to say,
to tell somebody before I go mad, and I thought you might agree to help me. To listen to me.’

Sam pulled up another chair for her and she sat between them, primly upright, the bag lying on her lap, her hands resting on it, folded tightly.

‘Go ahead, Doreen,’ suggested Harriet quietly. ‘I think you want to tell us just why you were so afraid of Mrs Marchant, don’t you? What was it that she threatened to tell your husband?’

Doreen’s gasp of astonishment was followed by a ragged sigh as she visibly relaxed the rigid control of her body. Harriet knew the phenomenon, recognizing it from a thousand guilty children who had come to the conclusion that Miss Quigley would know what to do. Sam, too, had seen this before, when someone let go and handed their conscience over to a person in authority, a clergyman, for example.

‘It was my mother,’ Doreen Buchan began in a quiet, unemotional voice. ‘She was always a bit moody and one day she got very upset about something so she took the coal hammer and battered my father to death while he was dozing beside the fire. Then when my baby brother woke up and cried, she hit him too.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ Harriet put out a swift hand to Doreen’s arm desperate to comfort her, but Doreen just went on speaking in that quiet, frozen voice.

‘I wasn’t there at the time because she’d sent me down to the shops to buy some bread. I was about six at the time. I found her when I got home; she was sitting there amid all that blood, cradling the coal hammer in her arms and singing to it like a baby. With her real baby dead in the hearth and my dad making terrible, gurgling sounds as he died.’

She raised her eyes and looked at Harriet. ‘It turned out that my grandmother had ended up in an asylum and
her
mother
had jumped overboard off the Isle of Wight ferry. They put my mother away for the rest of her life and I was passed round all the aunts on my dad’s side of the family.’

Her listeners had no idea that her head was filled now with the sound of children chanting, holding hands in a circle, hemming her in so that there was no escape from their words. ‘Loony kid.’ ‘Murdering bitch’s brat’, and the chorus of shrill young voices singing: ‘Dippy, dippy Doreen, your mother is a moron.’

‘I worked and worked and I got out. I got away. Nobody knew, I could have sworn it. I was sure there was no way they could find out, but it turned out she knew … I changed my name and moved to Portsmouth, away from Bournemouth where it all happened. Maybe I should have been braver, gone to London, or to Scotland, or even abroad, but I would have felt too strange. Anyway, in the end Portsmouth was far enough and it worked out well, all those years, it worked like a dream. I met Vic and we got married and had the children and we got on, moving up in the world and now we’re really well off. I’ve got everything I ever dreamed of.

‘And then Vic’s mother went and died and his father started to go downhill quite fast, so we got him to try out this place.’

Her eyes were tragic as she stared bleakly out of the window.

‘And then I came here. And saw
her
.’

‘But how did she know?’ asked Sam in a gentle voice.

‘She knew one of my aunts,’ began Doreen, her face twisted in anguish so Harriet interrupted to spare her the difficult story.

‘Of course, Christiane Marchant worked in Bournemouth when she first came over to England. I expect she kept up with some of her acquaintances and must have seen you, heard about you, or rather your mother, sometime when she was visiting them. Your aunt must have let something slip and Christiane seems to have had a taste for scandal.’ She patted
Doreen’s hand with great kindness and sympathy. ‘It sounds more like post-natal depression, you know, than some kind of hereditary insanity; that can certainly run in families too. You haven’t told your husband and children about your family history, I suppose, have you?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’ The younger woman looked appalled and ignored Harriet’s suggested diagnosis. ‘How could I do that? What could I say? How can you tell a man that your mother was locked up in an asylum for murder and that your grandmother was mad and your great-grandmother must have been too, except that she killed herself before she could be locked up.’

A harsh sob broke from her. ‘I’d have lost him if he’d known, he’s so proud of us, so proud of what we’ve achieved, this would kill him; he’s very set on things being done properly, everything has to be normal. And what about my son and daughter? What kind of an inheritance is that to wish on your children? I can’t tell you how I’ve watched them, panicking when they had tantrums, wondering if it was coming out in them.’

Her lips were pressed tightly together to stop them trembling. ‘When that woman started to taunt me about it, something seemed to snap inside me,’ she volunteered. ‘I knew then that I was just like my mother after all. I wanted to see her suffer. I wanted to
kill
her.’

The words hung in the air. Harriet looked at Sam, schooling her face to be absolutely blank, then she turned back to look at Doreen Buchan. She had seen her cousin stiffen with shock, as she had felt herself do also, during that confession of an old and dreadful anguish. As they took on board the horror of it all, so, she realized, did Doreen begin to relax. She seemed quite composed now, her burden laid on other shoulders, much of the coiled spring tension eased and as she rose to her feet with unhurried movements, she held out a hand to Harriet, with a grateful smile.

‘I can’t tell you how much better I feel now,’ she said quietly. ‘Thank you so much for listening.’

‘I … we haven’t done anything to help,’ protested Harriet rather feebly, while Sam held his tongue, but Doreen waved the disclaimer aside.

‘Yes, you have,’ she insisted. ‘You let me talk and it’s helped me to sort out things in my head. I’ve decided to tell Vic.’ For a moment the anxious look was back, doubt lurking in her eyes, then her face cleared and she gave a brisk nod.

‘I don’t suppose I’ll tell him all of it, not about my grandmother and
her
mother perhaps, but I could sort of gloss over what my mother did. I could say something like: she had a breakdown, something of that kind. He needn’t know about my little brother, he’s never heard that I even had one. I told
him I was an only child. And he already knows that my father died when I was little; I don’t have to go into detail about how he actually died.’

She pulled on her suede gloves and hitched the shoulder bag up over her left shoulder. Giving them a bright social smile, she prepared to leave, with just a parting comment at the door.

‘Of course, everything I’ve told you today is in the strictest confidence,’ she said.

‘Naturally,’ Sam assured her, speaking for both of them.

Doreen nodded graciously. ‘As long as you understand that,’ she said and walked out of the room with a spring in her step, leaving them thoughtful and silent.

At last Harriet let out a long, sighing whistle. ‘Am I alone I sensing the tiniest hint of a threat in that parting thrust?’ she queried, regarding Sam with an intelligent interest.

‘No, I should say you weren’t,’ was the response. Sam’s piercing blue eyes were alive with eager calculation. ‘Good God! What on earth are we to make of that little lot? Did she do it, Harriet, do you think? On balance I’d say she had the strength of resolve, not to mention the inherited talent.’

‘Ouch, that’s hardly fair,’ protested Harriet. ‘That’s exactly the kind of crack she must have lived with all through her childhood and dreaded encountering again since she made her escape. She must have been living on a knife edge all through her married life, in case Vic should discover her secret. No wonder she’s such an awkward creature. Still,’ she frowned at a fingernail that needed filing. ‘Did you notice how she was dressed? I’ve never seen her wearing anything other than dull beige or brown, or navy but today she had on a dress that looked brand new, and in a lovely glowing light-blue. I wonder why? Perhaps something has just snapped? I have to admit you could be right. I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t started this burrowing into the past, Sam. God only knows what we’re going to dig up next.’

‘Poor old Harriet.’ His grin was sympathetic. ‘I’m not sure, though, that we actually did any digging for that latest effort. Doreen Buchan wished it on us of her own free will. But you do have a point. Here we are, both of us quite convinced we witnessed a murder and all of a sudden we’re confronted with two perfectly plausible suspects.

He took a surreptitious look round the sun parlour, lowering his voice as a couple more residents entered, and scanned the section of the entrance hall that was just visible through the open door. He shot her another look, with a slight frown and still speaking in a quiet voice.

‘I remember you told me right at the beginning of this, even before the concert, that there were one or two other possible contenders as well. What are we going to do about it all, Harriet?’

He was destined not to hear whatever solution Harriet had in mind at that moment as they were interrupted by Neil and Alice, both trying manfully to disguise their glowing happiness in view of their surroundings, with all the distressing connotations.

‘Hi, guys. Having fun?’

Neil was clearly having real trouble trying to suppress his high spirits and Harriet, who had known him since his babyhood, took great delight in witnessing his happiness after the years of loneliness and heartache. Alice was, not surprisingly, taking it much more quietly but she had a glow of radiant contentment that warmed Harriet’s sentimental heart. Alice was beginning to look like an attractive woman.

‘What are you doing here?’ Sam got up to pull some more chairs forward so they could look out and enjoy the sunshine that was now pulling out all the stops and making an effort to impress. The other occupants of the room got up and departed, looking a bit sniffy at the cheerful buzz of greeting.

Alice answered after a glance at Neil, who nodded encouragement. ‘We just dropped by to tell Miss Winslow that I don’t want any of Mother’s things back,’ she told them quietly. ‘I said she could give them to charity or chuck them out, I don’t really care, as long as I don’t have to do anything with them.’

Harriet’s approving nod seemed to reassure her and she hesitated, then spoke again.

‘Sam,’ she began, turning to the tall man who was regarding her kindly and shrewdly. Are you sure you don’t mind coming to the crematorium tomorrow? I’ve said all along I don’t want a fuss, just the quietest affair possible, in the circumstances, but it will be a real comfort to have you taking the service.’

As Sam smiled and started to reassure her, she turned to Harriet with a pleading look. ‘And you’ll come too, won’t you, Harriet? There’s nobody I’d rather have as support.’ She drew in a sharp breath and the anxious look was back on her face. But will you be up to it? It’s a bit of an imposition, asking you to stand around in the cold, not long after your operation.’

‘Of course I’ll be all right.’ Harriet’s answer was brisk, she was determined to forestall any discussion of her health. ‘Sam can drive me and there’s no standing around at the crematorium, it’s not like a burial. I’ll be fine and only too glad to help out.’

‘Excuse me?’

For a second time that afternoon Harriet and Sam found themselves being interrupted by a member of the Buchan family. This time it was old Fred Buchan himself, looking painfully formal, standing upright with a military bearing, an expression of bleak despair clouding his face.

‘I wish to speak with you, if you please.’ His voice, still so strongly-accented, was heavy and dead and the younger pair rose to leave, clearly glad of the chance of escaping this
haunted old man with his echoes of a past they could never share. ‘No, if you please.’ He held up a peremptory hand. ‘You too, please, if you will. I want that you should stay and hear what I have to say. It concerns the young lady. And you, Mr – that is – Canon Hathaway, you were kind to me. That helped. And now I know that I must make my confession to you all.’

Alice and Neil took their seats with very obvious reluctance, clearly puzzled and in Alice’s case beginning to look distressed. Harriet sneaked a look at her cousin Sam. What now? He gave a tiny shake of his head and looked back at Fred Buchan. A shiver of dread seized Harriet. There was something about the old man that told of long-ago torments and present despair. Whatever he was about to tell them was going to be unpleasant at the very least. At worst it would be unbearable.

She braced herself. ‘Well, Mr Buchan?’ Her voice was cool and, she was relieved to note, unfaltering. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell us about Christiane Marchant and what happened to the men in her family? On that god-forsaken little neck of granite that sticks out into the Atlantic, over in the far west of Brittany.’

‘
Hexe
!’ Unbelievably, the man made the sign of the horns as he shrank back in his chair. ‘You must be –
aber vas
– a witch, yes? How else could you know that? Nobody could possibly know; there is nobody left.’

Alice and Neil had jerked upright in their wicker chairs, both staring at him, open-mouthed. Sam Hathaway’s face wore only an expression of grave interest while Harriet’s face looked remote.

‘I know,’ was all she said at first. Then, as the old man sat there with the light shining on his bald head, his tongue flicking around his dry lips and his frozen, fearful light blue eyes fixed on her, she turned to the other people in the group. ‘We all know the story,’ she said quietly. ‘You told us the other
day, Alice, remember? Your mother lived in a tiny village, remote from any big towns, remote even from the bigger villages and other communities. For much of the time I imagine the Germans left them to their own devices; I don’t suppose it could have been worth much to them.’

A flicker from Fred Buchan caught her eye and alerted her.

‘Or perhaps …’ she thought it over, ‘perhaps it
was
useful? Would there have been some strategic value, I wonder? Anyway, something went wrong, a Resistance attack on the local Germans maybe? Who knows, but whatever it was it went wrong and the Germans rounded up all the men, or rather all the
males
, in the village.’ She bit her lip and fell silent for a moment then continued: ‘What happened next, Mr Buchan?’ She fixed him with an accusing stare. ‘Did you shoot them all, even the little boys?’

‘If only we had,’ came the shocking reply. ‘If only we had.’

There was an appalled silence, broken by Alice who was looking puzzled.

‘But … but I understood Mr Buchan was a Czech, or a Hungarian, or something like that? Eastern European anyhow. Are you telling us that he’s a German? That he was a Nazi soldier?’

‘That’s
precisely
what I’m telling you,’ agreed Harriet. ‘Because that’s what he is, and what he was.’

They all turned to look at the old man seated quietly with them in the sunny bay window. Bald, broken, in his eighties, a harmless old man. Somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, even somebody’s grandfather. But not, surely not, a murderer?

‘Well, Mr Buchan?’ Her clear voice was inexorable, jabbing at him, stirring him to sit up, forcing him to answer. ‘What did you mean when you said that?
If only you had shot them
? What did you do to them that would have made death by shooting a merciful release?’

Alice looked green and nauseated and as she clapped a hand over her mouth, Neil pulled his chair close to hers and put a comforting arm round her.

‘There was a tunnel in the granite,’ he said, still in that flat, dead tone. ‘There had been a small fort, more of a lookout post, I understood, during the Napoleonic times, and they blasted a narrow ammunition store out of the solid rock and sealed it with a stout door. In the Second World War also, there was only a small guard, when I was posted there. Just an observation crew, mostly boys, that was all.’

He glanced at Alice, a kind of pleading in his eyes.

‘I don’t expect you to believe this but they did not hate us, not the small crew of us, just boys and young men. We kept our noses out of their business and they made no trouble for us. They were mostly fishermen, of course, and sometimes we turned a blind eye to their smuggling: it all worked out smoothly, even some joking, a little bit of harmless flirting. Then they sent us a new officer.’ A frown creased his pink, innocent old face. ‘There was a rumour that he had been in some trouble with his previous unit. Ach, he had a hasty temper, that man. There was some bad trouble, it is too long ago to dig it all over now. But the
Herr Oberst
, he … how do you say it? He overreacted and said that they must all die.’

There was a long, long, silence, when even the temperature seemed to drop. Fred Buchan appeared unwilling, or perhaps unable, to break it. A slight movement from Sam, who shifted his chair out of the direct path of the weak sunlight, recalled the old man to his surroundings.

‘All of those men; there were about a dozen grown men and some lads in their late teens and then … then there were the three young ones. We had to herd them into the tunnel, it had been emptied earlier, all the ammunition carted away into the store rooms. Those of us who had been there for quite a long
time, we had no quarrel, we
liked
the people and they got on with us, but he just laughed at our protests. He stood there and laughed and threatened
us
, he said he would shoot us. We were ordered to club them to death; he said … the officer said it would be a crime to waste bullets on such. He told us to collect up stones from a derelict house and … he made us build a wall.’

The dead voice faltered and died away into an appalled silence that went on, and on, and on. At last Harriet let out a shaky little sigh and whispered the question that was uppermost in all their minds.

‘Did you kill them first? Did you make sure that they were all dead? Before you walled them up?’

He made no reply. There was no need.

‘I ran away that night,’ he whispered. ‘I stole some clothes off a washing line and I stole a rowing boat also, then I just set off down the coast, not caring about what happened to me. I had some luck, though. The rowing boat capsized and I was knocked out, but a passing Spanish fishing boat picked me up just in time.’ He shrugged. ‘I think I knew nothing for a long time, I had severe head injuries you see.’ In spite of themselves they all looked at the scar crossing his scalp. ‘The rest of it? Ach, at first I could not speak, then I
would
not speak, so they thought I must be a refugee. And so I got out of France. They put me off the fishing smack in Spain and from there I fell in with a lot of other displaced people and ended up in England.’

‘And Christiane Marchant recognized you?’

Fred Buchan nodded in answer to Sam’s quiet question. ‘After all those years.…’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I did not think it could be possible at first. Oh yes, she knew me from the time I was part of the guard and so she knew I had been there when it happened. She knew that I was part of it. And the other day she told me the things that happened after I had escaped.’