Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders

by Tessa Arlen

  We left the village hall and I trudged wearily back up the hill to my lecture on “being sensible and not taking silly risks” from Granny.

  * * *

  —

  THE VILLAGE WAS humming like a hive of bees when I joined the queue outside Mr. Angus’s shop to pick up our meat ration. Not the hypnotic sound of a working drone but the agitated buzz of bees in danger from a wasp’s nest that had built itself overnight on the edge of their community and was threatening their existence.

  “I knew those Americans coming here would do us no good.”

  “They say that Ivy’s boyfriend, that Sergeant what’s his name, had no alibi . . .”

  “Constable Jones says she had been under that bridge since the night before.”

  “It’s just like Jack the Ripper—he went in for mass murder, didn’t he?”

  Their anger and fear zipped up and down the High Street, in and out of the bakery and the newsagents like an electric current. Faces were tight, and arms folded. Little Buffenden was under attack.

  “Constable Jones says Joe Perrone broke curfew on the base.”

  “I told you that American sergeant was the one who killed them.”

  “He must be an agile one, then; that fence around the airfield has got to be all of fifteen feet high and it’s got barbed wire on top.”

  “How did he get out of flying missions?”

  “He’s not flight crew—he’s a mechanic.”

  “That’s right. Once they all take off on a raid, he can probably do whatever he likes.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing they arrested him, then. Pity it took them so long.”

  * * *

  —

  IT IS A testament to my powers of persuasion that I set out on my ARP patrol that evening at all. Grandad met Sid at the back door when he arrived and gave him a few sharp words about my being left alone for any part of my patrol.

  “What is the point, young man, of your escorting her in the first place, if you say good night and leave her to walk up past that churchyard alone? I should charge you with dereliction of duty. Except that Poppy tells me that leaving you at your house was her idea.” I had expected Sid to pout, but he stood to attention and took Grandad’s criticism with dignity, as any real fighting man would. He even snapped off some respectful “yes, sirs.” And we were released after a few more minutes of caution and advice.

  Is the entire village in either the Rose and Crown or the Wheatsheaf? I thought later that night as Bess and I walked across the green toward the Rose with Sid marching alongside. The Rose and Crown, always the more popular of the two pubs with the locals, was packed. The farmers’ wives who ran their farms with the help of the Land Girls sometimes pop into the Wheatsheaf and have a glass of sherry or a shandy in the lounge, as it is the more genteel of our two drinking establishments, but it is the Rose and Crown that is the heartbeat of Little Buffenden.

  The door to the pub was wide open, the blackout curtain pushed to one side—I could have read a book out on the green by the light coming through the door. I pushed my way into the pub’s smoke-filled interior. With the arrest of Joe Perrone, the lockdown on base had been lifted but no American voices could be heard in the pub. I elbowed my way through a crowd standing in the middle of the room.

  “The good news is that they have him locked up—Emergency Powers Defence Act: police can detain anyone for however long they like on suspicion alone.” Gladys Pritchard, in a bright cherry-red sweater, pulled a pint of best bitter and put it up on the counter for Mr. Angus. The butcher raised his tankard in his thick red hand and took a reflective sip before he continued. “He’s not in Wickham jail, though, is he, Gladys? They’ve got him locked up on the base. Rightfully, he should be tried in our court since he committed a crime on British soil. They shouldn’t be allowed to deal with it their way.”

  It’s always a bit surprising when our butcher makes a public pronouncement of some length. He has a high-pitched wheezy kind of voice like an old squeeze-box, and he rarely says more than two or three words together. Angus took a long swallow of beer and looked around the bar for agreement. “He has to have a fair trial like anyone else.” And then, obviously feeling he had monopolized the conversation, he buried his nose in the rest of his pint.

  “The vicar says that he will be dealt with just as fairly by an American court-martial, but I don’t believe that.” Mrs. Pritchard, who had advised me to find myself a boyfriend on the base, put two frothing tankards down in front of Mr. Wilkes and Percy the cowman, who had helped Constable Jones pull Ivy out from under the bridge.

  “Here, Percy,” she said. “This one’s on the house. Must have been a shock for you having to pull young Ivy out of that stream.”

  “It was a terrible thing.” Percy’s Adam’s apple rose and fell as he sank half his pint in one long swallow. “Terrible, it were. She been strangled with . . . her boyfriend’s tie.” He glanced around, proud that he had vital information to share. “I don’t hold with violence to women.”

  His observations were met with a chorus of approval. Percy was not a popular figure in our village—his past was a little too murky for that—but he was certainly voicing popular thought.

  “That’s right, Percy, never been anything like that happen here before.”

  Percy looked proudly around the bar again and added, “Not before . . .” He jerked his thumb toward the airfield.

  “That’s right, Percy, that’s right.”

  Mr. Wilkes gave his cowman a nudge and Percy subsided into his beer. “No need to jump to conclusions.” Mr. Wilkes was a peaceable man, and certainly not one to rush to judgment. “There has to be a full investigation.”

  A derisive snort from Bert Pritchard. “I always suspected that the arrival of those Yanks would bring disaster. I said so right from the start, didn’t I, my love?”

  “You certainly did, Bert.” His wife wiped the counter down and set up two more pints of best bitter.

  “War Office should send ’em all packing. What’s wrong with our boys—why aren’t they up at the airfield? Why do we have to have Americans?” Mr. Angus is hardly an enlightened soul, but then that’s village life for you.

  I pushed my way up to the long wooden counter of the bar. “Mrs. Pritchard— Please excuse me, Percy. Mrs. Pritchard, every time someone comes through the door they forget to close the blackout curtain. I know everyone is upset, but I will have to close the pub if this continues.” Five or six heads turned apologetically to look at the door. I had pulled the heavy curtain closed across it when I had come in, but several people, on their way to the ’Sheaf, had left it wide open.

  * * *

  —

  “I KNEW THOSE airmen were a bad lot,” said Sid, who had been waiting outside for me. The pub was closed now, and the villagers were straggling home, and by the looks of things, some of them would be the worse for wear tomorrow.

  “Good night, Mr. Angus. Please remember your blackout when you get home!” I called to our portly butcher as he wandered across the road on unsteady feet toward his cottage. He waved his hand in reassurance and fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey.

  “No respect, none of them—the way they jaw on about what happened.” Sid looked exhausted with grief. His Home Guard battle dress hung on him, and his gun seemed to weigh him down so heavily that his shoulders were slumped forward. “I grew up with them; Doreen and Ivy were like my sisters.” His eyes filled with tears again, and I mustered the last remains of my patience. I had listened to and consoled Sid all evening. By the sound of his voice, he was crying again, and it took all of my patience not to be brusque with him.

  I saw Ivy lying in the stream, her hair drifting around her head like pondweed. There was still a nightmarish quality to the memory of her face under the water. But like all nightmares, the image was fading, and I was left with a feeling of being not quite in the world o
f my village. I felt separate and distant from it—an observer only.

  It was different for Sid; he was far closer to Doreen and Ivy, not just in age but in the enclosed way of village life. They were all connected, all part of a whole. Sometimes this sort of closeness is a burden: it is hard to lead a private life in Little Buffenden—everyone knows everyone else’s business—but when times are bad, it is also a haven. In the past week the village had become a sanctuary of support for the Newcombe and now the Wantage family—all petty feuds forgotten, all differences forgiven. The American base had gone from being an exotic place in our narrow world—generously offering American candy, cigarettes, and a night out of dancing in Wickham—to being an alien, destructive force. Feelings were running high: outsiders must be shut out and kept out.

  “They are holding a double funeral on Friday for Doreen and Ivy. Are you coming to it?” Sid blew his nose in an attempt to be coherent.

  “Of course we are, Sid,” I said as gently as I could. “Grandad is reading the lesson in church, and Granny is doing the flowers. I just wish there was more we could do.”

  He reached out a hand and put it on my forearm. “You are doing it, Miss Redfern—your family always have.” A little shake of my arm. “Not like those stuck-up Bradleys. I just wish they would go away, don’t you?”

  “The Bradleys?”

  “What?”

  I summoned all my fortitude. “You mean the Americans, don’t you, Sid? If Sergeant Perrone is guilty, and please remember he has not been tried yet, that doesn’t mean the Americans wish us harm.” I had found the lynch-mob attitude of the village almost as disturbing as the murders. “They are here to help us fight the war. Perhaps after a while, when all this is behind us, everyone will see it differently.”

  There was a long pause, and then he said, slowly, in a voice determined to be reasonable, “Yes. I understand what you are saying, and I hope you are right, I really do.”

  And on he went with his eulogy to two girls he had grown up with. But I wasn’t listening. The upper-class drawl that I imagine for Ilona came into my head again. Seems a bit obvious to me. I mean, if you are going to kill a girl, why on earth would you use your own tie? Her voice was so real, so clear in its offhand observation, that I nodded in agreement. On the two occasions that I had met him, Joe Perrone hadn’t struck me as being stupid. If anything he had appeared to be a man of above-average intelligence. Ilona was right: if Joe Perrone was the murderer, why had he used his own tie to strangle Ivy?

  EIGHT

  Grandad shook his newspaper at me. “You want to hoover in here again? You’ve only just turned the wretched thing off.”

  “I forgot to dust.”

  “God knows, I am not an unreasonable man, but for pity’s sake, give the dusting a miss for once, would you please? I have to go to the village hall to brief the men on hand-grenade procedure in twenty minutes.” His voice threatened like far-off thunder. I dusted carefully around him. Grandad’s voice had barked across three fields in his hunting days, but I have never been bitten once, no matter how much he growls and bristles.

  “Now that Ivy and Doreen’s funeral service has been held, perhaps the village can start to return to everyday life,” I observed as I dusted the Dresden shepherd and his pouting shepherdess. “German china,” Mrs. Wantage would have said, and sniffed in disgust as she flapped her duster at them.

  “Mm,” and a shake of the Times was his only reply.

  “Mr. Angus turned his old sow, Mable, into pork sausages and I am going to make toad-in-the-hole for dinner tonight,” I said as I moved behind his chair to attend to a more acceptable Royal Worcester ewer.

  The sweetest smile that ever crossed a tiger’s face beamed up at me. “Well done, my dear. There’s nothing like a substantial dinner to lift morale.”

  My toad-in-the-hole has a leathery quality and is as heavy as lead, but Grandad says he thinks it’s more substantial that way. He put down his newspaper. “All well in the village last night?”

  “Oh yes, they are really very good about blackout these days. No complaints.” In some strange way the murder of two Little Buffenden girls had made the inhabitants of our village consciously patriotic. They were determined to do their bit for the war effort as if their overdue diligence would somehow atone for Doreen and Ivy: no one cheated on their food rations or petrol coupons and not a single light could be seen after dusk.

  “You will miss young Sid when you return to patrolling alone.”

  Oh no, I won’t, I thought. Finally, I would be able to enjoy the solace of my patrols.

  “Have they definitely charged Sergeant Perrone?” I asked.

  He nodded, his face grave. “Yes, they have. The sergeant is facing a charge of first-degree murder.” Before he returned to his paper, he said, “Are you sure you don’t want Sid’s company for a few more patrols?”

  “Crikey,” I said, imitating the voice Sid used for Biggles. “A little bit of Sid goes a jolly long way, you know. Things are either good or bad; black or white; English or American.” And in Sid’s Biggles voice again: “It’s a piece of cake patrolling on my own.”

  He laughed at my imitation. “You have to admit that the boy has come a long way since he joined the Home Guard. He’s much more . . . I don’t know if I can use the word ‘assertive,’ but he has certainly come out of himself more. Being cooped up in that house with his mother fussing over his health is no way for a young man to live. He needs to get to know some of these American chaps—have a pint or two with them at the pub, branch out a bit.”

  I was about to explain how much Sid disdained the Americans and that a pint at the pub was his idea of consorting with the devil, when there was a light knock on our front door, sending Bess, who had been curled up in her basket, into a tizzy. “No one we know uses the front,” Grandad said as if this was a reason not to answer.

  We trooped into the hall and threw open the door, and there, standing on the doorstep, head bent to avoid the overgrown honeysuckle climbing over the porch, was Lieutenant O’Neal. I had seen him a couple of times in the village since our first meeting, enjoying a pint outside the Rose and Crown with his fellow officers. He had seen me too and had given me a salute—a rather ironic gesture that I had no choice but to acknowledge with an airy wave.

  Grandad’s response to seeing him on our porch was far more enthusiastic than mine, and Bess was almost beside herself. “Come on in, my boy, that’s the way.” Grandad adores real fighting men and had been hobnobbing with the American Air Force commanding officer ever since our Yank invasion. The simple prejudices of those who believe one bad apple means the entire barrel is rotten are not for the Redfern family.

  Lieutenant O’Neal stepped over the threshold into our humble front hall and took off his hat, passing the flat of his hand over perfectly combed hair. He displayed the sort of grooming we had all enjoyed before the war, when an abundance of coal had produced copious amounts of hot water. But it was not his immaculately starched shirt and his faultlessly pressed uniform that we were happy to see. It was the genuinely pleased-to-see-you expression on his closely shaved face that made us welcome him so warmly.

  O’Neal’s pristine appearance made me realize how much of a fright I must look wrapped up in a faded pinny three sizes too big for me, with my hair in pigtails and tied around with a frayed old scarf.

  “It’s Lieutenant O’Neal, isn’t it? We met when you first came to the pub, didn’t we? You must have been flying a lot; we hear those planes take off every evening.” Grandad ushered the lieutenant into our drawing room. As Mrs. Glossop had prophesied, Bert Pritchard had refused to serve the Americans in his pub when they had first arrived, until my grandfather waded in on their behalf, and the Rose and Crown had been full of American airmen until they were confined to base after Doreen’s death.

  The lieutenant was holding a large bunch of roses, which I recognized came from my
grandmother’s beloved garden at Reaches; their fragrance filled the hall, the blooms still glistening with dew. “Oh, how lovely, Granny will be delighted!” I said as he filled my arms with them.

  “They are for you both, Miss Redfern, a sort of roundabout present from your grandmother’s garden.”

  Glad to get away to do something about my eccentric appearance, I said something about a vase. I trotted down the hall to the kitchen, where I put the roses in a sink full of water and pulled off my pinny and scarf.

  Granny was pottering around in her victory garden. “We have a visitor from the base, Granny. He brought us some of your roses.” As I waited for the kettle to boil, I unplaited my hair and quickly combed it through with my fingers. I could hear Granny taking off her gardening boots in the scullery, and feeling a bit dithery, I laid the tray, made tea for her and coffee for us, and arranged the roses. Then I carried the lot back into the living room.

  “Tea or coffee, Lieutenant?” I said as I set down the tray. “Thank you, again, for the roses. Look how lovely they are.”

  “You know you should really come up to your house and pick them whenever you want,” Lieutenant O’Neal said as Granny arrived and buried her nose in the silken petals.

  “Madame Hardy, Celsiana, and look how well the Blush roses are doing so late in the year. It’s the heat; they love the heat.” She smiled at O’Neal. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Someone at the base must be watering the beds.”

  As I dispensed tea and coffee, Lieutenant O’Neal said rather tentatively, “I am here with an invitation. Our commanding officer, Colonel Duchovny, asks for the pleasure of the Redfern family’s company for dinner. And since none of us are flying tonight, would it be too late to ask for this evening—say seven o’clock for cocktails?”

  And the three of us immediately accepted.