*
I turned into the village of Bottesford and felt another rising panic take hold. Alison’s most recent conversation with me had been polite enough, without any guarantee things would stay that way. I’d abandoned her in a remote part of a foreign country and hardly bust a gut to find out how she’d fared. So, why the panic? Because I knew I couldn’t love her. Young Ben Rogers had been there first, with his youth, the reliable sex drive. The ambition…
I’d failed again, like I had last year in France Truth was, I really had nothing to offer. I was nothing.
*
We sat opposite each other at a pub-style table with benches outside Burnside’s south-facing front wall. With the sun still climbing, the huge, dark copse that lay beyond their largest field being grazed by another farmer’s sheep, resembled the one beyond the carp lake at Les Tourels. Ominous and brooding. The older collie dog had settled himself between our feet. The end of his fine tail occasionally flicking as if in some dream.
Alison looked wonderful. Her smooth, shining har the same as during our fateful trip to Wales. Her skin tanned, and those close-fitting jeans leaving just enough to the imagination. And yet, as during the Enquête, there was still that adversarial tone.
I’d let her down.
“Who’ll be looking after Mathieu?” she asked eventually, pouring black coffee from the full cafetière. “You said yourself he’s been unhappy in that foster home since he heard about his real Dad being dead.”
“Nothing’s been finalised, but there’s still a chance he could go back to Ty Capel.”
“What?” Her blue eyes widened. “Surely not?”
“Who knows? Alain Deschamps is part of his family. What’s left of it.”
“Only through marriage.” She leaned forwards, letting the sunlight deepen her cleavage between her shirt lapels. “Besides, the man’s still recuperating. So,” she paused. “Why not us?”
Jesus…
This was a turnaround. I heistated.
“You’re unsure, aren’t you?” She said, almost accusingly.
“Not really.”
I could imagine Laure convincing everyone she was a model patient and being released early. Crossing the water…
Mistakes like that did happen. A lot.
“Besides,” I added by way of compensation, “in ten years’time, aged eighteen, Mathieu will be a very wealthy young man. We could certainly keep in touch. Wherever he is.”
*
Cumulus louds that had suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, began separating then joining, blocking out the sun and dulling the colours of the land. I shivered, watching a buzzard appear and hover over that same busy field, searching for for prey. I felt just then I had nothing to lose
“Is that what you and Ben would have done?” I said. “Gone for an instant family?” I made her look at me, and not until that buzzard had swooped to snatch up something small that wriggled and screeched in its grasp, did I realise how deep that particular wound had been.
“Don’t be so bloody cruel.”
“I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t.
“And if you’d shown Laure more empathy, she might have been more forthcoming earlier on. Admittedly there’d been no abortion, and the rest, but look how she was. A coiled, resentful spring. If someone had made me have a child I didn’t want, at the age of twelve, or have a hope in Hell of looking after…”
Her voice trickled away on the breeze as I left the table and headed down the slope towards my car. That buzzard gone to find another meal. As for me, I’d phone my sister Carol, still missing George, her late husband. Once I’d reached the road, I glanced back to see that Alison and the dog had also disappeared, and in their place hovered a black-bellied rain cloud’s slowly-shifting shadow.
*
Thursday 29th September. 10 a.m.
The post was late. Not that I’d had much since returning, but just before leaving my flat to buy a new phone, a hard-backed envelope arrived, bearing a French stamp, postmarked Soulebec.
Who on earth?
Two minutes later, having read the typed message and seen the accompanying, shocking photograph, I knew.
Jean-Claude Houbron, then a keen, twelve-year-old photographer had, on that fateful Christmas Eve, sneaked into ‘La Cathédrale’ hopefully to catch sight of Laure, and, via his lens, immortalize her beauty…
…but, Monsieur Lyon, what I saw instead while hidden, will never leave me, and only now am I able to share it with someone I trust. That Laure herself, suffocated and hanged her Maman on her own before placing a small piece of paper in her right hand, must be our lasting secret. I felt you alone should have this photograph. The negative is burnt and no-one else must know, because my family cannot suffer for my actions.
Regrets, Jean-Claude Houbron.
Death Knell
Sally Spedding
© Sally Spedding 2019
Sally Spedding has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2019 by Sharpe Books.
For Hannah and Katharine, with love.
“In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.”
Francis Bacon
“Hell is empty. All the Devils are here.”
Caliban. ‘The Tempest.’ William Shakespeare
PROLOGUE.
Wednesday 14th July 1920. 5 a.m
In all his back-breaking but happy years serving the New Forest and its roaming livestock, he has never known such rain. It began at midnight, while Oak Cottage and its occupants - save for himself - slept like the dead. Now his leather coat hangs like heavy slime from his broad shoulders. His hat brim droops over his eyes, obscuring his view. But as one of five agisters, he has an important job to do. Marking the new stallions, checking the rest are accounted for, and ensuring any mares and foals are well-fed. All this before the latest herd of shorthorns arrives…
He cocks his head at the sound of thunder. Shivers at the prospect of worse to come, as if the Devil himself was up there beyond the black sky, laughing…
As he tussles with the skittish, young stallion, he thinks of his family probably still asleep. How his ever-willing, young son would normally be helping him. But not in this punishing downpour, with his recent breathing problems.
“Whoa! You bastard!”
But the bay flicks his muddy head away from the agister’s waiting ring rope. His mean ears lie flat against his matted mane and a wicked glint whitens his eyes as both forelegs climb upwards into the rain. Suddenly, when hoof bone and human skull collide, the man’s shriek brings yet another enemy, bigger, stronger, crouched behind a beech tree felled by last winter’s storms.
*
Day becomes night and blood and shit replace horse stink as the rope burns through the agister’s bare hands. He’s down on the ground, breathing in fear while another’s knees as huge and hard as rocks press into his chest and the fleeing stallion’s hoof beats fade into the distance.
Then comes a whisper. A threat so vile that the faces of those he loves, bloom like spectres in his mind. “Time you and your spawn went from here, Squire,” adds the one who’s stopping his air, squeezing his throat as he might a chicken doomed for the pot. A younger, stronger man, untouched by war. “To Hell in plague coffins would be best.”
“Why?” Croaks his victim. “We’ve none of us done any wrong.”
“You just got rich by selling off a Forest stallion to line your own pocket. Was that bay to have been your second, eh?”
“He was trapped by that fallen tree over there. It was my job to free him.”
“You’re a thief and a liar. Been watching you a while now. And that pretty wife o’ yours.”
Pretty wife o’ yours? What did he mean by that?
*
Too dark for stars. For anything except knowing what death must feel like. Smell like. Next comes muddy earth. A solid wetness on his face followed by
the constant jab of iron into the ground nearby. The edge of a spade. The weight of another’s hate designed to reduce him to silt while the rudimentary grave is dug.
The sodden digger sings as he leaves the spot; his bawdy song drowning the distant throb of thunder. A fresh slew of rain that will, by dawn, have washed away all traces of his handiwork.
1. JOHN.
Saturday 12th November 1988.10 a.m.
A mile from Colchester’s historic town centre, I turned my new, silver Citroën Visa off Rowhedge Road and on to my own recently-paved drive. Its flesh-coloured slabs laid in connecting circles had made the space seem twice as large. My first serious expense since I’d signed on the dotted line for Lea Villa a month ago.
Having pulled up the hand-brake, I stared at the Victorian red-brick semi in front of me. My new home. A fresh start.
A certain satisfaction seemed to make its repainted window frames even whiter. The jet-cleaned brickwork and the porch with two specially-commissioned stained glass panels, more welcoming. Surely, I could be happy here? I told myself for the umpteenth time since first being shown around the property. After all, it was some two hundred and fifty miles from my cramped, three-roomed flat above a hairdresser’s in Nottingham city centre. Or ‘Shottingham,’ as my former CID colleagues called it, while trying to keep knives in kitchens and syringes from over-used veins.
I often thought I might even return there occasionally to treat my former team to drinks and a curry at The Golden Gate, but there was one person I wouldn’t be seeing any more. DC Alison McConnell. The woman I’d loved but badly let down during an abduction investigation in France’s Poitou region almost eighteen months ago. A selfless breath of fresh air, she’d never again to tread this path to my door or rest her head on my shoulder. And the rest…
Then, on my moving-in day had come the news that Laure Deschamps, damaged twenty-two-year-old daughter of a still-injured racehorse trainer, had been found hanged in Poitier’s Lagarderie psychiatric hospital, using the same method she’d inflicted on her own mother three years before. No-one else was involved, but the coroner admitted her death had been even more painful and prolonged.
The veil I’d kept trying to pull over the whole terrible affair, whilst decorating Lea Villa and tidying up its winter garden, had kept slipping, as if my past would never let me go, or stop those sudden hits to my heart and, for a moment, in my mind’s eye, I glimpsed the Mediterranean Sea beyond Collioure’s pink, bell-towered church, close to where my widowed sister lived. No turquoise water at this time of year, but at least the weather would be dry. Besides, Carol was missing me. Or so she’d said on the phone yesterday. Even though we’d both been orphaned by our parents’ sudden death on a rural Norfolk railway line too long ago, it had taken a different courage for her to make that admission. Why I should make the effort to go there again, perhaps for Christmas? After all, Alison McConnell wouldn’t be partnering me at any end-of-year knees-up in her silver lamé, halter-necked dress like the last time. Before the slow dance and the joy that had lasted till the stars became daylight.
I was a free agent.
With that same southern sea still lapping at he edges of my memory, I reclaimed my shopping bags from the car boot - bachelor fodder, or ‘sad meals’ as Carol called them - and locked it. Even though the estate agent and the sergeant in the local cop shop had reassured me this was a safe area where dog fouling and littering were the only crimes, I’d developed a risk-averse disorder; wanting only to enjoy those things too long squeezed out by overwork and anxiety. By never achieving enough against the swelling tide of lawlessness.
And then, just as my key was still in the lock, my landline phone began to ring.
*
Carol my first thought. Alison a close second, but I knew that possibility was as ridiculous as snow in July. Having disabled the alarm and back-kicked the front door shut behind me, hard enough for its Yale lock to click reassuringly, I realised my shopping bags were still outside. A free lunch and dinner no doubt, for some opportunistic passer-by…
“Yes?” I barked into the receiver.
“Johnny?” Came the other male voice as if from a long way away. “How are you, old mate?”
Johnny?
I’d not been called that since…
“It’s Stephen. Remember me?” My caller’s voice excessively bright and chirpy, also vaguely familiar. “Us canoeing on the Weir?” He went on. “When you were pissed and nearly drowned…”
Durham. Think… Vicars and tarts…
“Vickers?”
“No less.”
“Good God.”
I’d not seen or heard from him for thirty-three years. “Where are you?”
“Longstanton, near Diss. Turkey country and flat as a bloody pancake, but me and Catherine, we love it. “Cycling’s a doddle, only when the sun’s out, mind…”
It had crossed my suspicious mind that this caller could be anybody, except that other name was also oddly familiar…
“How did you find my number?” I asked him. “I’m ex-directory.”
“Your pals in the Midlands.”
I blinked.
“You mean…?”
“DC Alison McConnell was especially keen to help. She seemed to know quite a bit about you. You see, I’d read about your latest French adventure in the papers. You always were a reckless sod.”
Thanks.
“Not brave, then?” That sounded pathetic.
“Absolutely. Why I need your help.”
A pause in which that massive, derelict windmill at Berthigny seemed yet again too real. Its skeletal sails creaking malevolently in the night wind. Just then, those central shapes in my porch’s stained-glass windows were suddenly too red. Blood red, in fact.
Stephen Vickers – if not a hoaxer – was coming alive. He’d been my main friend from Freshers’ year. A lean, wild-haired lad from Surrey who only drank shorts. So, what on earth could he want now?
“Do you remember my late mother’s first name?”
“Sandra. And your father’s mother was Peggy.”
My sigh of relief must have been audible.
“Can I continue?”
“Fire away.”
*
Having reclaimed my shopping then alarmed and locked the house, I ate my early lunch - a Sainsbury’s ploughman’s sandwich with too much onion - on the hoof, while Alison’s name spoken in such a light-hearted way, re-wound over and over in my brain until Stephen’s intriguing news took over. He’d urged me to drive over to see him straight away and, as a sweetener, my expenses would be paid. By whom he’d not said. Mondays were his official research days, and would I be able to stop over for tomorrow at least?
How could I have refused? As Dean of the History faculty at the University of West Norfolk, he’d recently discovered two letters written sixty-eight years ago. One by a local doctor begging for the Church’s help with a family new to the area, in their hour of greatest need. The other, from an uncaring local vicar.
Although details had been brief, my former friend’s keeness had soon grown cautious until I’d assured him my landline was clean. He’d wanted someone with whom to share a terrible and controversial secret.
“I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye,” he’d added. “And to be honest, John…” he’d paused as if somehow ashamed of what was coming next. “My research profile needs a boost. Jobs in Higher Education aren’t for life any more. And at fifty-five…Well, look at you.”
Indeed, look at me…
I screwed up my sandwich wrapper and lowered my visor against the bright sun dazzling between slow-moving clouds. I’d need petrol soon, and this was hardly a jaunt to West Mersea where I usually went to clear my head. Was I simply being reeled in to boost a sagging CV? To keep a guy I’d left behind for so long in a comfortable job with what would, at the end of it, be a far bigger pension than mine?
*
As I joined the A12 heading north-east, I was tempted to turn b
ack and finish unpacking my tea chests. Sorting out my records and books. Putting up the oil paintings I’d recently bought at a local gallery. Views of the North Sea I’d last seen as a kid, where my parents had swum the day before they’d gone forever.
Wenhaston.
A name that was far too long for the quickness of the wipe-out. I’d looked it up on the map to check its distance from Longstanton. Fourteen miles in fact. Killing two birds with one stone had also come to mind and, as I drove over the sluggish River Stour, I also realised that right then, my need to re-visit that tragic site was greater than my need to bolster Stephen Vickers’ academic credentials.
*
The sneaky winter sun didn’t last long, and by two o’clock, the first rain hit my windscreen, smearing the insect carnage into an opaque glaze. Without Radio 3’s Berlioz concert from the Wigmore Hall to distract me, I bypassed Needham Market under the suddenly darkening sky, and took the A140, referred to on my map as Roman Road – leading to Diss, Norwich then Cromer. As I travelled further and further into a flat, rural hinterland, I thought back to those Durham days when Stephen had helped 1rganize various field trips to far-flung places I’d never heard of. Some ancient settlement on the northernmost tip of Scotland. A castle ruins by Eire’s wild west coast and, in his final year once he’d met Catherine – a delicate blonde, to whom I’d also felt a distinct attraction – he’d earmarked the Camargue. Sète, to be precise, where, before author and historian Henry Lincoln had even put pen to paper, he’d formed a theory that Christ and Mary Magdalene had probably settled there and raised a family.
Catherine, although two years younger, had arrived on campus as a post-graduate studying mediaeval French. She’d also gone along on these trips and arrived back from the last one, with an engagement ring on her finger. My jealousy hadn’t lasted long. They were far better suited than she and I would have ever been, and the intervening years had obviously proved it.
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