by Jamie Probin
‘Gordon?’ Mr Raynor’s eyes narrowed curiously. ‘Now what could you want to know about poor old Gordon?’
‘Anything you can tell us really. Especially about his friendship with the Bowes sisters.’
If it were possible their host’s eyes narrowed further still. Clearly information would not flow freely from his lips. ‘And why would you be interested in that?’
Hollingsworth surveyed the room once more, and noted the proliferation of war memorabilia. Thus far he had said nothing about his profession, but the obvious regard of his host for military matters made him wonder if a more official approach might loosen the tongue of Mr Raynor.
He reached into his jacket pocket and removed his badge.
‘Detective Inspector Hollingsworth eh?’ Raynor read the badge and his recalcitrance visibly weakened. ‘Well, I will help you however I can, sir, although with both Gordon and Diana dead, and Catherine stuck in that wheelchair I’m rather surprised to find the police interested in them.’
‘We are investigating a murder in a village named Upper Wentham, where Miss Catherine Bowes lives. We are also investigating a number of attempts made on the life of Charles Wentworth.’
‘Diana’s boy?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What could that have to do with Gordon? Or Diana for that matter?’
‘Perhaps nothing. Probably nothing, to be honest. But their names keep cropping up in conversation, and we don’t know much about them. It is just possible that something in the past led to the crimes we are investigating.’
Raynor shrugged noncommittally.
‘I wish I could have shown you a photograph of Gordon. I had one, but I sent it to a fellow from our old regiment who is writing an article. Gordon was one of those men whose personality was written in his face. It would have told you everything you needed to know.
‘Gordon and I were best friends before we even started school. We were inseparable in everything. We worked together, drank together, went to mass together every Sunday. That photo,’ Raynor indicated the frame on the mantelpiece that Hollingsworth had noticed earlier, ‘was taken on the day we both signed up. We even went to the trenches together.’
‘He was a good man, clearly.’
‘Gordon was the finest man I ever met,’ replied Raynor matter-of-factly. His gruff and straightforward manner should have drained the emotion from his voice, but if anything the simplicity made the responses more poignant. ‘Kind, funny, generous and charming. We were friends as long as I can remember and I never heard him say a bad word about anybody, nor anybody about him. I know that’s the kind of thing said freely about those who are dead, but in his case it is quite literally the truth.’
‘What about the Bowes sisters? Did you know them well also?’
‘When you live in a village like this, detective inspector, there is no one whom one does not know well, especially when they are your own age. Gordon, Diana and I were all born the same year, and we were three of the four pupils in our school class. In a place like this you don’t choose your friends, they are thrust upon you by circumstance. I was just lucky that my contemporaries included two wonderful people.’
Hollingsworth nodded.
‘In Kingsmere people already know who will be friends with whom before they are old enough to make the decision themselves. In fact to be honest you can usually predict the couples who will marry, twenty odd years before the event.’
‘People thought Gordon Astin and Diana Bowes would marry?’
‘They presumed she would marry him or me, I suppose. But by the time they were nine or ten it was obvious that Gordon and Diana were meant for each other. Gordon loved Diana more than I’ve ever seen any man love a woman.’
‘So what happened?’ interjected Harris.
‘He loved her so much, he felt she deserved more than he could provide,’ said Raynor, sadly. ‘It really was truly selfless. He wanted what was best for her, even if it meant giving her up.’
‘Did she not get a say in the matter? Or was her love for him not as strong?’
‘It was. But you see she and Catherine were orphaned when Diana was seventeen. Catherine had to take care of her sister, and she was a dancer in the West End. She took Diana down to London to live with her, and Diana was very excited at the prospect.’
‘And what did Gordon Astin have to say about that?’
‘Gordon thought it was a good idea for her to experience such a life, and he resolved to make enough of himself here that one day he could ask Diana to marry him and keep her as she deserved. They wrote to each other every week without fail. I can still remember the extra spring in Gordon’s step the days that Diana’s letters arrived.’
At this point Mrs Raynor returned with tea and biscuits, and they all took grateful sips.
‘Did you like Catherine Bowes?’ asked Harris.
Raynor’s lips pursed uncertainly. ‘She was... an impressive woman – and still is, I don’t doubt. Very headstrong and impulsive. But I always felt she was a little selfish. She could have given up her dancing career when her parents died, and moved back here to support Diana. I always considered that dragging a young girl from a place like this to London was thoughtless. I mean, it’s hard to imagine two more different lifestyles isn’t it?’
Hollingsworth could not disagree with that statement.
‘But Diana never came back, I gather?’
‘In the end she didn’t. As much as she enjoyed London, I think she was ready to come home and settle down with Gordon. Catherine had become engaged to George Wentworth, and would soon be moving to Gloucestershire. Gordon had even bought an engagement ring. He showed it to me the night before he received Diana’s letter explaining that Catherine had suffered a fall during rehearsals for a new show, and the doctors did not think she would walk again. Gordon was upset, mainly because he knew that Diana would be devastated.’
‘Come now,’ said Hollingsworth, ‘surely there was a part of him who saw the silver lining? If Catherine could not provide for her sister, they would move home and he could provide instead.’
Bill Raynor took a sip of tea and shook his head decisively.
‘I know you probably think I’m romanticising Gordon, but he really wasn’t selfish enough to think like that.’
‘Perhaps my profession has made a cynic of me,’ replied Hollingsworth, ‘but in my experience everyone has enough selfishness to see the benefit for themselves in a situation.’
‘Not Gordon,’ repeated Raynor firmly.
‘If you say so,’ shrugged Hollingsworth, unconvinced.
‘I do. And of course at that point Catherine was still engaged to George Wentworth. That did not change for another few weeks.’
‘Tell me,’ interjected Harris, ‘was this business of George Wentworth breaking the engagement as spineless and cruel as it sounds? I’ve heard a couple of accounts of the story told with a strange matter-of-fact tone, as if at the time it wasn’t as bad as it sounds now.’
Raynor pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘It’s odd, but you’re right. Not that we didn’t think George Wentworth a terrible cad when he did it…’
‘But when the tale is told now he comes out looking like Judas Iscariot’s more callous brother.’
Raynor frowned at Harris’ flippant tone. ‘I think he managed to make it less offensive by saying that his motivation was a growing and irrepressible love for Diana.’
‘It was a disgraceful and cowardly act.’ Mrs Raynor finally spoke, allaying Harris’ mounting fear that she might be mute. Her accent was markedly more southern. ‘No amount of money or title should disguise that.’
Hollingsworth looked once again at the photographs around the room.
‘But I suppose you’re going to tell me that Gordon Astin didn’t mind?’
For once Raynor actually smiled with genuine good humour.
‘I know you don’t believe me when I tell you how altruistic Gordon was. I don’t blame you. Unless you met him you couldn’t. In
fact we were in London together visiting Catherine and Diana when he found out that George Wentworth had broken his engagement to Catherine. After Diana’s letter about the accident he persuaded me to come with him by train to see them both. It took us some weeks to arrange, and when we finally arrived Diana told him that Wentworth had proposed to her two days previously. If you want my opinion I think she hoped Gordon would tell her not to be so stupid, and come home and marry him instead. But he told her that she should accept the proposal, as she would not want for anything, and she could care for her sister too. It still hurts to think of Gordon on the train journey back home from that trip. Eleven hours and he didn’t speak a single word. Just sat and stared out of the window, even once it was pitch black outside.’
Harris sat with his eyes closed, listening to Raynor’s lilting Cumbrian accent tell the tale. For someone who had seemed very reluctant to impart information when they first knocked at the door, their host had the natural gift of a storyteller.
‘Do you think she would have accepted if Gordon had proposed there and then?’
Bill Raynor shrugged, but it was his wife who answered. ‘Of course she would. And two lives would have been all the richer for it.’
‘Did you know them too Mrs Raynor?’
‘No, not really. I met Gordon once or twice, but as you can probably tell I am not a local. I moved here when Bill and I married at the end of the war.’ She smiled. ‘But I’ve heard so much that I feel like I knew them, if you know what I mean?’
Hollingsworth said he understood, and turned back to her husband. ‘Did Gordon ever show signs of marrying anyone else?’
Raynor shook his head. ‘There was never anyone else for Gordon. He knew when he told her to marry George Wentworth that he was condemning himself to a life alone.’
‘Did he go to the wedding?’
‘No, he wasn’t invited. I think it was very kind of Diana to not place that kind of choice in front of him. And I don’t think she could have gone through with the ceremony with Gordon there. She loved him too.’
‘But he and Diana continued to write? Even after the wedding?’
‘Every week, sometimes more. I don’t know that Diana ever stopped feeling lonely in Upper Wentham, and Gordon was her confidant.’
‘Did they ever see each other again?’ asked Harris.
‘Once. Diana came back here about a year before the war started. She was very unhappy and worried. George Wentworth had divorced his previous wife because she hadn’t become pregnant, and two years into the marriage Diana had not conceived either. She was terrified that Wentworth would divorce her too and there would be no one to provide for either her or her sister. She said there was a woman in the village who had once been engaged to Sir George who was… how did she put it? “Circling around like a vulture” in the event that the position of lady of the manor opened up once more.
‘I don’t think the women of Upper Wentham ever took to Diana at all, and I suppose each of them had probably had eyes on her place at some time or other. After all, the Wentworth family is extremely rich.
‘Of course Gordon comforted her, and told her it would all be alright. Once again the situation could have worked out for him, but instead he persuaded Diana not to give up. And in the end he was right: Diana became pregnant only a month or so later.’
‘And she died nine months after that,’ finished Harris.
‘Yes,’ came the dull reply. ‘That was the last time either of us ever saw Diana. Poor, tragic Diana.’
Hollingsworth stretched his legs and then carefully place his right foot on his left knee.
‘Mr Raynor, you told us that you never heard your friend say a bad word against anyone. But given that George Wentworth married the girl he loved, treated her dreadfully, apparently threatened divorce if she failed to bear him a child and then insisted she proceed with a labour that wound up claiming her life, I find it hard to believe that Gordon Astin did not criticise the man. In fact I would be amazed if he had not utterly hated George Wentworth.’
Raynor pondered this for a moment. ‘I genuinely never heard him say anything against the man. I’m not saying he didn’t dislike Wentworth, insofar as Gordon could dislike anyone, but you need to understand that a good part of Gordon died the day he got the news about Diana. From then on he was more like an empty shell. I don’t think he really felt anything at all after that, whether it be love, hate or any other emotion.
‘If I ever met George Wentworth I would tell him that his decision to make Diana have the baby not only cost him his wife, but it cost me my best friend too.’
Hollingsworth nodded and rubbed his hands meditatively along his trouser legs.
‘Mr Raynor, I’m about to ask you a question, and I think I know how you will respond. But please understand that we need to remain objective about the situation, and also that we never had the pleasure of meeting Mr Astin.’
‘I quite understand.’
‘We are searching for someone who possibly has a deadly hatred for Sir George Wentworth. Is there any chance, any chance at all that Gordon Astin is still alive and is the man for whom we are looking? If you know anything that might suggest he is I beg you to tell us, without thought of protecting him.’
Bill Raynor laughed sourly.
‘I certainly see where you are coming from. But the answer to your question is categorically no. It will mean nothing to you to hear that Gordon could not possibly have devised a plan to harm anybody. But what is less subjective is the fact that my friend is definitely dead. He was killed in a trench in 1915.’
‘I know that is the official line, but we both know what the reality was like on the front line. Bodies everywhere, ID tags grabbed when possible, victims covered in blood. Some identifications are spurious at best. Isn’t it just possible that there was some confusion?’
‘I’m afraid not, detective inspector, not in this case. I remember receiving the news and hoping, hoping against hope that it was the kind of mistake you are talking about.’
‘You said, “receiving the news”? You weren’t with him?’
Raynor shook his head sadly, and a hint of a tear formed at the corner of his eye.
‘I wasn’t. I was already in the hospital with fever. A shell landed in the trench, probably in the very spot I would have been standing. Shrapnel lacerated Gordon’s stomach. They got him to the hospital but he must have known there was nothing they could do. He died hours later, with a nurse holding his hand as he passed away, the same nurse he had met only two days earlier when he came to visit me.’
‘But it’s still possible there was confusion, surely? I mean, the nurse couldn’t have known who he was. And it’s not as though we can find her and ask her now, is it?
‘Actually,’ said Mrs Raynor, ‘you can ask me now.’ There was a pause as the implication of her words sank in. ‘My husband’s best friend died twenty one years ago, detective inspector, in my arms. And I had to break the news. I can remember every second of the experience. I’d give anything to forget it.’
‘Well,’ said Harris, as he and Hollingsworth climbed the stairs to their rooms in the Dog and Whistle several hours later, ‘I wonder how Gordon Astin’s canonisation is coming along?’
Hollingsworth grinned. ‘He does seem to have been some kind of latter-day St Francis doesn’t he? And unfortunately for us he is also definitely dead.’
After leaving the Raynors’ home the pair had spent an hour or two in the hotel lounge, enjoying the local ale and eliciting further memories from the locals about Gordon Astin and the Bowes sisters. Most of it had merely repeated in less detail what they had already heard, and no new information had been gleaned.
‘That’s about all that can be said for this trip so far, that we have ruled out the tiny possibility that Gordon Astin is still alive and putting the finishing touches to a bizarre twenty-year revenge.’
‘Oh I wouldn’t say that,’ replied Harris, as they reached their rooms, opposite each other on the c
orridor. ‘You don’t think we learned something from Bill Raynor?’
‘Obviously you do,’ groaned Hollingsworth, ‘or you wouldn’t be looking so infernally smug. What did we learn?’
‘That when Diana Bowes, or rather Wentworth, returned home in 1913, she was worried that some other woman in the village had her eyes on the position of Mrs George Wentworth.’
‘And?’
‘Well,’ said Harris, ‘I asked Sir George a few days ago whether he would ever consider remarrying, and he said no: his time was past, and Charles was the future of the Wentworth line. But if Charles were to die, and no heir existed… would he still say the same thing?’
‘I wonder who the woman was.’
‘So do I,’ said Harris thoughtfully. ‘So do I.’
Chapter 25
Early the next morning Detective Inspector Crout found himself perched on the edge of Richard Carmichael’s worn sofa, looking at the affectedly scruffy man before him with distaste. In the few minutes he had spent with Carmichael he had already taken the same dislike to him that most others did, and he took a retrospective satisfaction that when he had knocked at the door some ten minutes ago he had evidently awoken the owner much earlier than he was used to seeing the day.
This visit was the latest in a long line of methodically-conceived and strategically-executed plans of action to learn as much as possible about the dead man from the study of Blackwood Manor, none of which had yet produced any worthwhile results.
Tests on the murder weapon and the safe had shown no fingerprints, save those of Sir George and Charles Wentworth, and further fingerprint tests around the house had produced a similar lack of results.
Interviews had been systematically planned to maximise the number of people whose evidence could be heard, and the strategy had been superb. It was hard to imagine that anyone could have confirmed faster than Inspector Crout that not a single person in Upper Wentham had the slightest clue as to the identity of the murder victim. Not only did everyone his team had spoken to so far verify that, first, they noticed the stranger, and second, did not know him, but each had also recounted a similar discussion with a good ten or more other villagers, all of whom said the same thing. Thus the evidence of the entire village had effectively been relayed to Crout, probably about four times over, and yet he was no further along than when he first entered the study two days ago.