Estelle followed the boys downstairs and headed straight to the stove to riddle out the ash and fill it with coal, but not before noticing the letter Fen had been writing and raising one interested eyebrow. Fen surreptitiously folded it up and slid it into a pocket of her overalls, hoping she’d find a few minutes to come back to it later.
By 9 a.m. – terribly late by normal standards but apparently de rigueur in this house after a fête day – most of the family were finally seated around the table in the château’s kitchen. Hubert was sitting there, nursing his head in his hands and Fen smiled to herself, Ha! As I thought. Serves you right!
She was pleasantly surprised when Father Marchand arrived. She’d enjoyed his company last night and surely she’d been reading far too much into the situation thinking that a man of the cloth could be having an affair with a parishioner! Plus, she wondered if, since he knew so much about the disappearance of the relic and the spy network of British and French fighters, he might know something about what happened to Arthur. He was looking distinctly wan this morning, though, and complained of a broken night’s sleep.
Always generous, he put it down to nothing more serious than over-enjoyment of the night before and as Fen sipped her tea, she listened to more of his stories about the locals in the village and their customs. Monsieur Fracan, the baker, for example was beyond reproach in his eyes, with a first-class ticket to heaven, due to the divine nature of his strawberry fruit tarts. ‘Un ange!’ he exclaimed, before deciding he’d overdone it and resting back in his seat.
Estelle rolled her eyes at the priest, obviously still unimpressed at his refusal to marry her and Pascal when they had wanted.
‘I know how you feel, Father,’ Hubert sympathised with the hung-over priest and passed him the jug of ersatz coffee. Father Marchand waved it away with his hand.
‘At least I have a clear conscience though, young Hubert.’
‘What do you mean, Father?’
Before Marchand could explain himself, Pierre returned from the village with a basket of Monsieur Fracan’s almond croissants – and the baker’s angelic status was confirmed. Their appearance was met with much ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ and Fen assumed correctly that they had been a rare commodity in recent years.
Their aroma, mixed with the smell of the chicory coffee, filled Fen with such happiness that for a moment she forgot why she was in the château at all. Even James looked more pleased than usual. The company all politely waited for Monsieur Bernard to tuck in first, followed by his invalid daughter-in-law, who had her swollen ankle propped up on a stool by her chair, and before long the whole party were pulling apart the delightful pastries.
The whole party that was, save Marchand, who, although he agreed that, like Monsieur Fracan’s patisserie, his croissants were ‘manna from heaven’, as a priest and so close to a saint’s day he should surely abstain. Plus, he suggested that he may have overdone it on the wine last night and he felt a little queasy. He sipped instead from his coffee and nibbled cautiously on the end of one of Fracan’s ‘equally as divine’ fresh baguettes.
‘It must be jolly hard, being a priest,’ Fen said to James, as she pulled apart the buttery dough and relished the sweet almond smell of the croissant before popping a chunk her mouth. She hadn’t tasted anything so sweet and luxurious in years.
‘Indeed. And I must say, compared to usual, he doesn’t look that well on it.’
‘Come now, Marchand,’ it was Hubert who was pushing the basket with the last croissant in it towards the priest. ‘You can ask for forgiveness during Mass this afternoon. Go on!’
‘You are a bad influence, Hubert Ponsardine. D’accord, I will try one as Fracan has a gift given by God himself, I think!’
Father Marchand took the last croissant and pulled a face at the two young boys, whose fingers had been edging closer to the basket in the hope of stealing the last one for themselves, but who now giggled at the affable priest. Their laughter was infectious and soon the whole table was chuckling away.
Fen wondered if now was a good time, while the rest of the table were occupied, to ask James some more about Arthur. She turned to him and was about to speak when she realised, at that moment, something was very wrong. She followed the line of James’s gaze to Father Marchand, and then, with almost everyone else around the table, she gasped in shock as the priest’s head fell forward and smashed against his plate. As he tried to raise himself up, Fen could see that his face was reddening and his neck was straining as he choked.
‘He’s dying, help him!’ Sophie shouted, scrambling to get up but falling down in pain herself as she put too much weight on her ankle.
James and Pierre rushed to the priest as his body shuddered. Hubert pushed back his chair so violently that it crashed into the stove and splintered. He joined the other two men who were trying to restrain the uncontrollably fitting priest. There was nothing they could do, however, and in a few moments Father Marchand gradually stopped convulsing and slipped down to the floor, dead.
‘Mon dieu!’ Estelle cried, running from the room.
Sophie, who had clawed her way back to her chair, looked across at the dead man on her kitchen floor and promptly fainted to the ground. Pierre left the body of the priest and went to his prone wife, fanning her face and gently lifting her head off the stone floor.
With Estelle gone, Fen’s thought was of the two small boys, their cheeky little faces now rigid in terror, looking at where the jovial priest had been sitting, telling them stories, only moments ago. Before she could whip them away, their grandfather interceded and pulled them by the straps of their dungarees off their chairs, like kittens being lifted by the scruff of their necks, to get them away from the scene of the death.
Fen then looked up at James and noted how his face wasn’t just set into a grimace of remorse for the dead man, but something much more terse.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘This is all wrong.’ James had interpreted her meaning. ‘This is no natural death. He’s been poisoned.’
‘Poisoned?’ The voice was that of Sophie, restored from her faint by the ministrations of her husband, who was now helping her upright into her chair, her ankle still causing her obvious pain. As decent and competent as Sophie seemed to be, Fen never held much esteem for those who fainted in important moments, although she begrudgingly admitted that Sophie Bernard’s sense of the dramatic was second to none.
Hubert seemed not to hear the accusation and was picking pieces of chair out of the hearth, obsessively finding splinters where there probably were no more to be found.
‘That’s right,’ James continued. ‘And, by the smell of it, cyanide.’
‘Cyanide!’ Fen was shocked and automatically brought her fingers to her throat, remembering the delicious almond croissant that had only moments earlier slid down it.
‘Why cyanide?’ Pierre asked, his voice trembling slightly.
‘The smell is unmistakable.’ James sounded assured.
‘But we were eating almond croissants,’ Sophie pointed to the empty basket on the table. ‘The smell could just as easily be from them? It is almonds, yes? The smell of cyanide?’
‘Yes, but…’ James looked less sure now, a torrent of thoughts crossing his mind as surely as they crossed his furrowed brow.
‘So anyone of us round this table might have been killed?’ Sophie gasped and started coughing, clearing her throat of imaginary poison.
‘Or it could have been administered by anyone around this table,’ Pierre whispered. ‘Anyone.’
‘Or God himself,’ Hubert had found his voice and then crossed himself as the rest of the room fell silent.
‘James,’ Fen caught him by the sleeve as the family turned to go back into the house, having seen off the mortuary cart from the courtyard of the château. It had seemed the most respectful thing to do, with Monsieur Bernard, Pierre and Hubert clasping their flat caps to their chests and James and Fen bowing their heads. Sophie, who had been tak
en upstairs to rest after the horrible incident, couldn’t make it down, recovering as she was from her faint and her poorly ankle.
‘Yes, Fen?’
‘How did you know?’
‘About what?’
‘The cyanide. How did you know so quickly what it was?’
‘It’s the smell. It’s unmistakable, like I said.’ He shuffled his foot in the dry dust and grit of the courtyard.
‘But, as Sophie pointed out, the smell could have been the croissants?’ Fen was still finding it hard to believe that Father Marchand had been murdered, let alone by a poisoner in their midst. ‘And poor Father Marchand may have had a seizure?’
‘Yes and no. Look, Fen, I can’t explain it now. I’ve got to go and…’ his voice trailed off and Fen followed his eyes as he looked up towards the wing of the house where the bedrooms were. ‘Are you OK?’ He looked back at her and briefly touched the top of her arm.
‘Oh, yes. I mean, it’s a shock and terribly sad, but yes.’ She paused. ‘Thank you.’
At that, James left her and strode back into the house. It wasn’t much of a leap to work out where he was headed and Fen wondered why he was so keen to get back up to his attic bedroom.
The answer was made painfully clear to her an hour later when the clanging bells of the gendarmerie’s solitary working van pulled up in a cloud of dust outside the château. The morning had, quite understandably, been a sombre one since the priest’s body had been carted off and, at Sophie’s request, Fen and Estelle were quietly polishing the copper pans in the kitchen, which seemed to Fen now to be even more cavernous than when she first arrived only a couple of days ago.
The noise of the bell, so similar to the ones she’d heard as fire engines tore through Midhurst on their way to fight the fires when Chichester was bombed, startled them both and, within moments, the kitchen seemed filled with men – their flushed faces and nervous jiggling at odds with the quietude the ladies had been working in.
‘Monsieurs?’ Estelle addressed them, taking ownership of the room, to Fen’s relief.
‘There has been a murder and we are here to arrest the murderer!’ The Chief of Police spoke in rapid French, but Fen could understand every word.
Arrest the murderer? How could they already know who had done it?
Estelle blanched and grasped the top of one of the kitchen chairs. Fen thought back to her admission last night… I’ll have his guts for garters… but Estelle steadied herself and answered back to the policeman. ‘Who is it you are here to arrest, may I ask?’
‘The Englishman, Captain James Lancaster.’
‘James!’ Fen blurted out his name, then quickly put her hand to her mouth, but not before she felt all the eyes in the room – the four burly gendarmes, their chief of police and Estelle – all turn to look at her. ‘It’s just… I, well, I don’t see why…?’ Fen quickly shushed herself and watched as the policemen swarmed through the narrow doorway to the tower staircase.
As soon as their backs were engulfed in the tower’s darkness, Fen saw Pierre, carrying Sophie, emerge into the light of the kitchen.
‘Madame, Monsieur…’ Estelle began to explain, but Fen noticed how Sophie and Pierre seemed to be ahead of them, no shock or panic registering on their faces. Pierre, especially, looked incredibly downcast, like he’d been struck in the solar plexus and left reeling.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Fen’s question hung in the air as the gendarmes re-emerged, bundling a cuffed James into the centre of the room. Fen could already see one of his eyes puffing up from what must have been a blow to his head and she reeled in horror suddenly at the realisation of how a person suspected of killing a Catholic priest would be treated in this God-fearing nation. ‘James, they’ve hurt you!’
‘It wasn’t me.’ One of his eyes was split at the brow, but both bored into her.
‘He is the murderer.’ Sophie reached up from her chair and handed over a paper bag to the Chief of Police. ‘Monsieur Inspecteur, here is the brass case and capsule of which I spoke. It is a cyanide capsule belonging to Captain Lancaster. It is broken and the poison used to kill our dear Father Marchand.’ Sophie broke down into weeping snuffles as the bag was taken from her grip.
‘Where did you find it?’ Fen asked on behalf of everyone who was thinking the same thing. Although the other obvious question – And why does he have one? – was left unsaid.
Sophie, who was wiping away her tears with her handkerchief, merely waved Fen’s question away and Fen got the feeling that Sophie might be too overwhelmed by the whole affair to answer. Or perhaps Fen hadn’t been reading into what she had thought of as a tryst too much at all… and Sophie might have lost more than her local parish priest?
‘It wasn’t me… Pierre… Hubert…’ This time, James’s voice, and his entreaties to his fellow men, trailed across the kitchen as the gendarmes took him outside and opened the doors of the black police van.
Fen followed them, unsure of how to feel about everything. It was all so terribly and utterly confusing and horribly sad, but, still, something felt wrong. Something felt out of place. Like the answer to a cryptic clue that comes far too easily.
‘James, I—’
‘Listen, Fen,’ he cut her off and shouted over the heads of the men bundling him into the van. ‘Look to the church. You know what I mean. About Setter… about everything, just look to the church, Fen!’
Eleven
It just didn’t make sense. Why would the priest be murdered by James Lancaster of all people? Why would an officer, albeit an ex-officer who was perhaps a bit rough around the edges, but an officer all the same, want the local priest dead? Also, James had seemed so fond of him… He had said something so odd too, when he was carted off by the gendarmes – ‘Look to the church, Fen.’ The words stuck in her mind. Look to the church. Well, the priest was dead, and his link to the church was obvious. But James had been talking about Setter, who she was sure was Arthur, not the priest.
Could this murder have something – anything – to do with what happened to Arthur? Fen didn’t know, but she did know this; that James knew more about Arthur – her Arthur – than she’d had a chance to get out of him and she wouldn’t get a peep more while he was at the Republic’s pleasure in the local police station. She had to prove him innocent, if indeed he was, to get him free so that they could resume that conversation – or at the very least she had to present some sort of evidence to the desk sergeant that was powerful enough to grant her a cell-bound audience.
But where to start? There was the suspicion of cyanide, that was made clear by James, though admitting it so forthrightly had rather landed him in the soup. Sophie had apparently found a poison capsule – used and discarded by him – and alerted the police, even though she was the one suggesting that Fracan’s croissants could be the root of the distinct almond smell.
‘Right, let’s look at this like a crossword,’ Fen spoke to herself as she sat back down on the old stone bench she’d found earlier that morning. Hubert and his draconian ways in the vineyards could go hang for a bit, for, in Fen’s mind, there was more important work to be done than picking some grapes. ‘Let’s say I’m stuck on my ten across. What do I need? Something solid and definite in my six and seven down, that’s what. And in this case that has to be that we know for sure that Father Marchand was murdered – I suppose the cyanide capsule that Sophie found – we still don’t know where – was proof of that. And the overwhelming smell of almonds, although that could have come from those delicious croissants.’
The château’s resident mouser sought her out again and Fen found herself absent-mindedly stroking him as she pondered her clues. He settled down next to her and she carried on talking to him as if he were Watson to her Holmes.
‘So, the croissants, they’re another definite too. They were so rich with sugared almond paste, Lord knows where Monsieur Fracan found the ingredients… so it’s little wonder that no one spotted any cyanide in them. But that’s another thing, when
did anyone break the capsule? Not while we were all there, surely?’ she pointedly asked the cat.
With no audible reply, she kept her musings to herself. Forgetting for one minute who the capsule belonged to, or where it was found, the only person who could have tampered with the croissants was Pierre.
‘And so we have it,’ she couldn’t help but inform the cat of her breakthrough, ‘a place to start for our ten across. Six letters beginning with P – Pierre.’
The château seemed awfully quiet that afternoon, only to be expected, Fen assumed, after the death of the local priest, but, much to her frustration, Pierre was nowhere to be found. What she did find, however, was a very irate Estelle in the kitchen, with young Jean-Jacques and Benoit running around, in and out of her skirts. Typical of children not to notice the heavy cloud of suspicion and fear in the air – it was just like in the war, when small boys made aeroplanes out of sticks and leaves and made play at strafing each other, running down the country lanes at full pelt, shirt tails flapping in the air, seemingly unaware of the lives lost to the real thing.
Fen knelt down and spoke to little Benoit, urging him to show his elder brother quite how fast he could run around the vegetable patches – she would be timing them, vite vite!
A visibly relieved Estelle didn’t go as far to as actually thank Fen, but in her own way she showed her gratitude by pulling out a chair for her and pouring a coffee for them both. Fen noticed the German branding on the paper package that contained the grains… Ersatzkaffee. A gift from the occupiers, perhaps?
Fen sat down with Estelle at the long refectory table and waited for the other woman to speak. It didn’t take long.
‘In all my days, I never thought I would see a priest killed here in this house! We are cursed!’
‘Oh Estelle, I don’t think it can be that.’
‘What would you know? You are English – you are one of them, like him,’ she thumbed her chin in the direction of the staircase, Fen assumed to indicate where James had last laid his head. ‘Godless!’
A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1) Page 10