by Tessa Arlen
Our villagers had probably dug out their favorite nostrums from their medicine chests as soon as the weather had changed. I counted back to the three rainy nights that had heralded the onset of autumn before our air-raid drill and Audrey’s attack. By now I was thoroughly awake and giving up on sleep. I moved a heavy Bess off my feet and put on my dressing gown. I needed tea.
Downstairs, as I waited for the kettle to boil, I thumbed through the pages of my exercise book to my first list of able-bodied men in our village, the one I had written the day after Doreen’s death.
Not bothering with my grandfather, who uses some infinitely foul ointment for a stiff neck the moment the thermometer sinks below thirty-five degrees, I worked my way methodically through my list.
Cedric Fothergill. How disrespectful, I thought. He is our vicar, for heaven’s sake, and one of the most decent men I know. And he is far too self-contained to strangle women in the dead of night—or at any other time.
Mr. Angus. Unfortunately, I had no difficulty in seeing those red, powerful hands tightening on smooth white skin, and embrocation was one of our butcher’s standbys no matter the season.
Len Smith. How ludicrous of me to have written his name. Gentle Len? He had been sick with distress when he had found Doreen under the hedge. But he was a great fan of a very strong camphor-scented embrocation that he used unsparingly in the autumn and winter months.
Mr. Newcombe. I just crossed his name through.
Bert Pritchard. Now, Bert did have a bit of a wandering eye—or so I had been told. In his youth he had been considered Little Buffenden’s Lothario, disappointing all the available village maidens when he had married the outgoing Gladys Wilcox, a city girl from Wickham. Who had told me all about the Pritchards in their courting days? Mrs. Glossop, of course.
I wrote her name down. I mustn’t be put off by the fact that Mrs. G. is too tiny to effectively tackle Doreen, Ivy, or Audrey. Our postmistress is particularly judgmental, and sometimes the spry are stronger than we imagine. And she always has been extravagant with the mothballs.
I stared down at my list as I sipped strong tea. There was a pattering of feet and I was joined by Bess. She sprang up into my lap: the tiled floor was ice-cold and there was a penetrating draft coming from the scullery door. I hugged her to me to keep warm.
“I have widened my list of possible suspects, Bessie. All based on smell—something I know you will appreciate.” She wagged her rump and stared at the hardtack we refer to as a ginger biscuit. I handed it over.
“I should ask myself what possible motive any of them could have for killing or wanting to kill three girls.” I looked at the first name on my list. “Could our vicar be a religious fanatic, obsessed with original sin? Perhaps he believed that Doreen, Ivy, and Audrey were wantonly infatuated with Americans?” It was an amusing thought, and that’s all it was. But I did not cross through his name; I put a question mark to indicate that I must follow up.
“Has butchering all that raw meat sent Mr. Angus round the bend? I could see him hacking through joints of meat, seething with rage that no one finds him attractive anymore, as he lusts after young girls—who laugh at him. History has had its fair share of murderous butchers; look at that man who made his victims into pies.” I put an asterisk next to Mr. Angus because he was the most likely of all my suspects, and I must find out where he had been on the three nights in question. It should be easy—especially for the night of the air raid.
“What about poor old Len Smith? Dedicated to the hallowed sanctuary of the church and churchyard. Perhaps he had come across Doreen and her boyfriend behaving outrageously on a gravestone, and before he could stop himself, he killed her. Perhaps Ivy saw something or suspected something, and he had to kill her too.” Clearly the man or woman who had set out to kill three girls was mentally unstable, but Len was as sane as they come. I put a question mark next to his name.
And while I was on the subject of mild-mannered men, I had to include Sid Ritchie on my list. Every winter he slathered on camphorated oil as a preventative against bronchitis. But I hadn’t noticed that he had been reeking of it when he had joined me on the green on the night of the air-raid drill, which would have been after Audrey had been attacked. I jotted his name down. Then I remembered that Sid had been thirty miles away in Wickham doing his Home Guard small-arms training when Doreen had been killed.
I tapped pencil on paper as I considered Sid Ritchie. His dislike of the American Air Force was tedious, but it was also rather obsessive. Did he have what it took to kill the girls he had grown up with? I was tempted to both cross him off and put a question mark by his name. My conversations with him on our patrols convinced me that he was a bit on the neurotic side, but he was too docile in temperament to kill, and completely lacking in imagination to prevaricate so consistently. I put a question mark next to his name.
A sleeping Bess started to slide off my lap, and I hitched her back into place. “You know something, Bess? I think my favorite suspect is Bert Pritchard. He always has had a rather lecherous look about him—perhaps underneath all that professional cheerfulness beats the heart of a predator.” I remembered the night of the air-raid drill. Bert had been very prominent: shepherding people down into his cellar and then standing everyone a drink when the all clear went. Would he have had the time to run up to Bart’s Field and try to strangle Audrey before the drill? It was well-known that Mrs. Pritchard was the workhorse of the Rose and Crown. Bert played darts or disappeared down into his precious cellar to take an inventory and to test his vintage brandy. It was only during the rush at opening time that he would be at the bar playing host. I should check Bert Pritchard’s movements between a quarter to twelve and when the air-raid drill had started at half past. And I should make sure that I checked with Audrey that she was sure of her times, too.
A thought struck me. How had Audrey’s attacker known that she would be up at the lambing hut? She was so cagey I couldn’t imagine that she had mentioned her date with Bill Peterson to anyone. Not even to her mother.
I jotted down my estimated time for Audrey’s movements that night. At seven o’clock she had left the farm to walk up to Bart’s Field. Her attacker, having decided that she would be his next victim, must have been watching the farm and followed her. Just as I had followed Ponsonby. He or she had hidden while Audrey had spent time with Bill Peterson, and at a quarter to midnight, when Bill had left and Audrey was setting off for the vicarage, her attacker had made a move. Would Bert have the time to lurk in waiting from seven o’clock until nearly midnight? I put a question mark next to his name.
Which brought me to the Americans. Of the two men known by Doreen and Ivy, Bud Sandusky and Joe Perrone, Sandusky had been too ill from food poisoning to leave the base on the night Doreen had been killed, and Joe Perrone still wasn’t completely in the clear. He could have left the base via the badgers’ sett and killed both Doreen and Ivy. But he could not have attacked Audrey, because he was locked up in prison. That left every man on the base who had not been flying a mission on the nights of Doreen’s and Ivy’s murders and Audrey’s attack as possible suspects. We had been told before they arrived that the American Air Force population for our new airfield was well over a hundred and thirty men, maybe even more. I had no idea how many of that number had been killed or wounded in action since their arrival, and still less about replacements. And it didn’t matter if the gates to the base were closed every night at midnight, or if their perimeter fence was a mile high; anyone from the base could have used the badgers’ sett to come and go at will, until Ponsonby’s arrest.
My heart rate picked up considerably at my next thought: perhaps Audrey’s attacker was not the same person who had killed Doreen and Ivy. I felt my tired head spin.
Concentrate on one thing at a time, Ilona instructed. Take a nice deep breath and just focus on what you know about Audrey’s attacker. Your problem is you’re a wee bit prejudiced, d
arling, and it’s clouding your thinking. You are aware, aren’t you, that everyone in the village calls you the Yank-lover?
NINETEEN
I heard that you went to Wickham to see Audrey.”
“Mm . . .” I was so lost in my thoughts that I had been nodding along to a string of Sid’s complaints without listening.
“Nice of that American to give you a lift in his car.” His voice was a bit too admonishing for my taste, so I ignored him. Would this rift between our village and the base never resolve itself?
“And why do you invite all of them to lunch every Sunday?”
I sighed, loudly, as a warning that I was fed up with all this anti-Yank business.
“No, really, Poppy, I don’t understand why they are so favored.”
“We don’t invite all of them. We invite some of them and some of the people in our village! And you were asked to come last Sunday, when we invited your mum, so why did you pretend you had another engagement?” He stopped and shot me a look in the moonlight that was so shocked at my curt tone that I reined it in. “Honestly, Sid, you might at least give them a try. Once you get to know them, they are not that much different from us.”
“Yes, they are! They have more money and they never stop splashing it about. And they’re . . . they’re . . .” He racked his brain. “They’re cocky know-it-alls. Mum came back after lunch with them and said they all couldn’t stop bragging about their baseball games and their hot dogs, whatever they are—sounds disgusting to me.”
It was all so ludicrous I knew I shouldn’t take him so seriously. “They weren’t bragging; they were trying to explain why they were called hot dogs.”
But Sid hadn’t finished airing his frustration. “And”—he was scowling at me—“you didn’t tell me you were going around with a Yank. I thought we were friends; I thought we could tell each other everything!”
I can’t remember when I told Sid anything personal. Our conversations were one-sided: he did the talking and I thought of something else. I must have looked annoyed because he was instantly contrite. “Their coming here has ruined our village—nothing’s the same.” His lower lip jutted in protest, and he turned away from me. “We don’t need them to win this war.”
Of course, he was jealous. Unable to join up to fight for his country, he had felt out of place and inadequate. Then Grandad had rescued him by recruiting him into the Home Guard: finally, he could be a soldier and forget the shame of not doing his bit for the war effort. And then the Americans flew in to their new airfield to rescue us from a German invasion, and Sid’s village had been invaded by what he saw as cocky Yanks, splashing their money about and charming all the women. He felt threatened and he believed that the Americans were responsible for the deaths of his childhood friends.
I put out a hand, took his upper arm, and gently turned him to me. “I know what you mean, Sid. It does seem as if terrible things have happened since the Americans arrived. Please try to see that underneath their cultural differences they are just like us. Just get to know them a bit, and you’ll see how much we have in common with them.”
He shrugged off my hand and adjusted his Sten gun. “We’d better get going.” His voice was grumpy. “I’m usually on my way up Streams Lane by now when I’m doing ARP patrol.”
If he was determined to be touchy, then the best thing to do was change the subject. “Audrey sent you her love.” She hadn’t, of course—I only said it to appease—but I was astonished by his reaction.
His head whipped round, and his scowl deepened. “There’s another one,” he said. “Everyone in the village is saying she was seeing a Yank too. I can’t believe it—she was never interested in them, not even when they first came.” Except for Hollywood movie stars and Bill Peterson, I thought.
His voice broke. “But I thought better of you, Poppy, really I did. I thought you cared more for this country and this village. One of those fun-loving Yanks up there”—he nodded his sorrowful head in the wrong direction—“is a mass murderer, and you say there is no difference between us all.”
I felt nothing but exasperation, when all Sid was doing was telling me how he felt. I summoned patience. “But Joe Perrone was put in jail after the slimmest of inquiries, and now it’s quite possible that he is innocent. The only other American who knew Ivy and Doreen was Bud Sandusky, and he had a very strong alibi for his girlfriend’s murder: food poisoning. And are you quite sure that Audrey is dating an American?” I knew she was, but how had the village found out?
“I don’t know.” He looked worried. “But that’s what everyone’s saying, except you.” He paused as he heard himself. “You don’t believe it was one of us, do you?” His face was so incredulous, so shocked at my possible wrong thinking, that if he hadn’t been so devastated about what he believed was happening to us, it would have been farcical. “You don’t really believe that one of us killed Doreen and Ivy and put Audrey in hospital?”
I had never seen him this distressed before. And I realized that he was probably just echoing the sort of rubbish he had heard in the village—from Mrs. Glossop. “Does everyone think this way?” I asked him. “Does everyone think that it was an American?”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “Crikey, Poppy, wake up!”
“No, I mean everyone, not just Mrs. Glossop and your mum.”
This gave him pause. “The Pritchards do; so do the Newcombes and the Wantages.”
“I know Mr. Fothergill doesn’t, and neither do my grandparents, and I never heard the Wilkeses laying blame on the Americans after Audrey was attacked.”
He was shaking his head again. “They may not say it, but they think it. Everyone deep down thinks the murderer is an American. No one can remember a time when there was murder done in our village—until they came. It’s all their fault.” His voice was muffled with emotion. “I can’t understand you, Poppy. I really can’t. How could you think it was one of us? How could you believe that someone we know would want to kill those girls? I wish the airfield had never been built, I really do.”
He was so distressed that I put out my hand to him and he took it. “It’s all right,” he said. “I mean, I’m all right. Really, I am.” He dashed away tears with his free hand. “I just feel so helpless. And I don’t want you to be . . . you know, hurt in any way.”
“Why do you think I would be harmed?”
“Because you are seeing an American.”
“Not in that way; not in the way Doreen and Ivy were seeing Americans. Lieutenant O’Neal just helps me with the Sunday lunch.”
He sighed—a deep, gusty sigh of misery.
“I see every single girl in this village behaving like fools because some American takes her out dancing and to the flicks, and then just when everyone is friends and saying how nice the Americans are, just like that”—he waved his hand in the air—“terrible things start to happen. But I never expected you to act that way. I thought you were different—more sensible.” He turned away, his face stricken.
“I am not behaving foolishly. Neither am I dating an American.”
“Oh, really. Why do you keep saying that when you see him all the time? And if you knew what I knew about him, you’d ditch him pretty quickly.”
I was so shocked by this that I switched on my torch and shone it on his face.
“Who?” I demanded so hotly that he looked almost scared. “Just who are you talking about?”
“Your American.”
“And what is his name, since you know so much about him? Go on, tell me.”
He cocked his head on one side and looked at me as if I were a simpleton. “I can’t remember what his name is. But he drives that red car about—so you know who I mean because he took you to Wickham in it. Even during their midnight curfew I saw him driving that sports car in the direction of Lower Netherton. Now do you see?” He looked miserable. “I wasn’t going to tell you, beca
use I know you like him. I didn’t want to hurt you . . . but I don’t want you to be the next victim.” He looked away. “Now I’ve said it, and I’m sorry, but it is for your own good, Poppy. I couldn’t stand it if you were . . .” He couldn’t finish he was so choked up.
“This is bloody ridiculous,” I shouted, sounding just like Grandad in one of his thunderous moods. “I don’t want to hear another word about Americans, Sid. I think you’ve lost all sense of proportion about them. It’s the shock of what’s happening in the village.” He turned away from me in a huff. “And I don’t want your company if you’re going to sulk. So please pull yourself together.” And of course, it worked. Sid, if anything, was the obedient type—after all, his mum is the village schoolteacher and used to keeping order in crowded classrooms.
On we tramped in silence. Sid kept his shoulder turned away from me like a sullen schoolgirl. The heat in my cheeks cooled and the anger left me, but I kept hearing Sid’s voice: “He drives that red car about . . . Even during their midnight curfew I saw him driving that sports car in the direction of Lower Netherton.”
We turned into Streams Lane, with Bess yards ahead because she hates arguments and raised voices. As we came up to the bridge, I offered up a flag of truce. “You’re twenty-one next week, aren’t you, Sid? I would like to buy you a drink at the ’Sheaf to celebrate.”
“No, thank you, Poppy. I’d rather not. I don’t hold with smoking and drinking, but thanks all the same.”
Despite his refusal to celebrate his birthday, at least he was less sulky. When we got to the narrow bridge, he made a great effort. “After you, Claude.” His imitation of Jack Train on ITMA was flawless, even down to the intonation.