A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1)

by Fliss Chester

  Fen sipped the warm brew and let Estelle bubble down to her normal simmer. She could have risen to her jibes against the English, or spoken up about Estelle’s own feelings towards the priest, but Fen knew it would do no good. Crosswords are never solved by screwing them up and throwing them in the fire, after all.

  ‘Do you know where Pierre is?’ Fen said as nonchalantly as possible.

  ‘No, I’m not his keeper!’ Estelle was indeed back to her usual simmer. ‘In fact, I do not know who was coming or going at all after the fête last night. It was as if wraiths and ghouls were letting themselves in at all hours. I even saw one, you know? Last night, in the moonlight. Walking through the vines. But did I make a fuss and scream? No. Estelle is brave like the French army.’

  Fen didn’t want to cast any aspersions on the bravery of the French and decided to stay quiet. She lifted the warm mug to her chest and breathed in the chicory aroma as Estelle continued.

  ‘But then I suppose spirits wouldn’t need to come through a door, so I suspect it was that man, that murderer, who left the door unlocked – it was unlocked, you see, this morning and I am always the first one to open it.’

  Fen thought for a second. ‘I thought I was up before you. Well, downstairs at least.’

  ‘Before me? I was up before dawn getting the wood in and fetching the milk from the early market. Excuse me if I like to wash after that, before you are even out of bed!’

  Suitably chastised, Fen took a few more sips in silence. She couldn’t help it though, she had to say what was on her mind. ‘I don’t think we should assume Captain Lancaster is a murderer quite yet,’

  ‘He had the capsule, didn’t he? So it must be him. It couldn’t be anyone else in this house. Madame Sophie wouldn’t accuse someone she is so fond of without cause.’

  Fen restrained herself from touching on the subject that Estelle herself had been rather cheesed off with the priest when they spoke about him last night. Thwarting lovers could be a strong motive for murder?

  Rising from the table, she washed up her cup and bade goodbye to Estelle, who was now filling a bucket with water in readiness to wash the kitchen floor.

  As she headed up the stairs to their shared bedroom, Fen phrased what she’d heard into a hastily thought out crossword clue, ‘Fourteen across: Spirits walk through a big hostel, five letters… GHOST.’ Not her best work, and Arthur would have laughed at it, but it got her thinking. She was so sure she’d heard James bolt the door last night when he, Hubert and Clément had started their drinking session, and Estelle swore that it was unlocked this morning? Perhaps Estelle had really seen something – or, more likely, someone – roaming the grounds last night, using the moonlight to find their way. And that someone might well be another important ‘six down’ for her. That settled it. She had to find Pierre, and she had to try and talk to James again.

  Talking to James wasn’t going to be so easy though. Never one to look too scruffy, she felt that today of all days, she should represent her co-patriots to the best of her ability. What she had to work with wasn’t tip-top, especially as she hadn’t had a chance to wash out last night’s blouse. However, her finished outfit of a knee-length brown tweed skirt, sensible shoes and a nice cream blouse, covered up by her Sunday-best cardigan, at least looked smart, if not straight out of Life magazine.

  She pouted in front of the mirror and applied her favourite red Revlon lipstick, reasoning that although it may mark her out as a Godless Englishwoman, it may also catch the policeman’s eye long enough to grant her an interview with the detainee.

  She looked over to her nightstand, remembering that she hadn’t put her cameo brooch safely away after wearing it last night.

  ‘What on earth… where is it?’ Fen reached the nightstand in a few steps and swept her hands over it. The brooch wasn’t there. She lifted the oil lamp up, although it was futile to think it would be hidden under it. Then she pulled the bed away from the nightstand to see if it had fallen down the side – but found nothing save a small rusty tin, with an Art Nouveau-style black cat on the lid, that might have once contained pins.

  Fen was right down on her hands and knees peering under the nightstand when she heard the click of the doorknob. Red-faced and slightly anguished, she peered up to see who was coming in.

  ‘Oh Estelle, it’s you.’ Fen pulled herself up from the floor, placing the old rusty tin on the nightstand as she did so.

  ‘What is that?’ Estelle sounded so accusatory that it threw Fen off for a second.

  ‘What? Oh this? I don’t know. Look, I’ve lost my brooch, the little cameo one I was wearing last night. Have you seen it?’

  ‘Give it here.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes.’ Fen handed over the box to the other woman. ‘Have you seen my brooch, Estelle?’ Fen didn’t want to accuse her of stealing it, but the thought was hovering very close to the top of her mind.

  ‘Of course I have seen it. You left it there in plain sight of everyone. So, luckily for you, I hid it before a thief could find it.’

  Fen let out an audible sigh, she was so relieved at Estelle’s words. She followed her across the room like a puppy and watched as the other woman delved into her drawer in the chest. Moments later, the drawer was pushed shut with a sudden shudder and Estelle turned round and handed Fen her brooch.

  ‘Oh thank you, Estelle, I would be so upset to lose this.’

  ‘Remember, do not leave your things lying around.’

  ‘No, of course. Thank you.’ Fen smiled at Estelle as she bustled out of the room and was left there alone once more. She pinned the brooch to her cardigan and smoothed down her skirt.

  In the quiet of the bedroom, two things occurred to her. Why was Estelle obsessed about there being a thief in the house, and why hadn’t she told me she’d hidden my brooch while we were talking earlier?

  A few moments later and Fen was on her way to the gendarmerie. Luckily, she remembered seeing the signpost to the police station when she had first arrived in Morey-Fontaine and knew roughly which direction to take. She followed the château’s terrace down past the vegetable patches, noticing as she went that little blond Benoit and his brother Jean-Jacques were still tearing around, chasing each other. Benoit couldn’t have been that black-haired priest’s lovechild, Fen thought to herself naughtily, thinking back to the night before and Sophie’s possible tryst.

  She waved to the young boys and made a grandiose gesture of pointing at her wrist to indicate that she was still timing them. They waved back but kept chasing each other and their simple joy made her smile.

  She walked towards the Place de l’Église deep in thought. Without anything positive in the way of evidence to hand to the chief of police, Fen was going to have to rely on her womanly wiles alone to ensure she was granted an audience with the prisoner.

  She paused in front of the glass-fronted village noticeboard and checked her reflection. Lips still red… Perhaps it would help if my nose and eyes were a bit too? The policeman might think she was crying over James and maybe the deceit would be a good one; they’d assume the English pair were lovers and, as the French were a passionate bunch themselves, allow her to see him.

  ‘Sorry, Arthur,’ she murmured as she rubbed her eyes and pinched her nose. Darling Arthur, she could feel him so close to her. She was sure the priest might have known something about him, if only he was still alive! The thought crossed her mind that perhaps the two deaths were linked, and the poor priest was killed just as the foreign woman comes along poking her nose into Resistance affairs… But no one in the small town, apart from James, and possibly the dead man, even knew she was looking for Arthur; although even she had to admit that her excuse of being a travel writer had been a rather poor one.

  Perhaps, Fen shuddered as she walked up the steps to the police station, James – the one connection between Arthur and Marchand – is the murderer after all?

  ‘I didn’t do it, Fenella, I didn’t.’ James rubbed his hand over his face as they sat opposit
e each other in the little, exceedingly claustrophobic, interview room. The duty officer had taken pity on – or a shine to – Fen and allowed her no more than five minutes with the condemned man.

  ‘Condemned?’ she’d asked, not needing to fake her concern.

  ‘He’s as good as! I hope he likes jazz, because it is swing time!’ The desk sergeant had laughed as he’d jangled the keys to the cell and opened the door. James had been cuffed and pushed towards the room in a manner that made Fen realise the young policeman really wasn’t joking.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  Fen couldn’t bring herself to agree with him and offer reassurance, not yet, and not while her thoughts of a few minutes ago were still rattling around in her mind. Instead, she acted the advocate and asked him to explain himself.

  He sighed and picked up the story from when he’d left the kitchen immediately after Father Marchand’s death.

  ‘It was cyanide, that was obvious.’

  ‘To you maybe.’

  ‘Look, the capsule that Estelle found was mine all right. It was my kill pill.’

  Fen leant back in her chair, stunned at the frank admission. ‘Kill pill?’

  ‘Standard inventory, special forces.’ He paused, then carried on. ‘When you’re captured, if the enemy try to get more out of you than your name, rank, and Ministry of War number, then it’s an option for you. Having one means you can control the manner of your death, before you’re forced, by torture, to betray anyone or risk the mission.’

  Fen shivered. She desperately wanted to ask James if Arthur had had one too and, horror of horrors, had he been forced to use it? But James, more conscious perhaps of the ticking clock, carried on.

  ‘When I left you all in the kitchen, I had to go and check that mine was in my strongbox. But, of course, it had gone. Stolen.’

  Fen was brought back from her sombre thoughts. ‘So you think you’ve been framed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But…’ Fen tried to work out the possibilities. ‘Estelle was no fan of Marchand’s, she told me that at the fête.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘He refused to marry her and Pascal. Said they were getting hitched for “all the wrong reasons”, whatever that means. Oh, and he’s a chemist, isn’t he? And Hubert was drunk as a lord, but then did you notice, this morning, Marchand mentioned something about him at least “having a clear conscience” as opposed to Hubert?’

  ‘No, I didn’t hear that. Interesting. Carry on.’

  ‘Well, Clément and the boys are above reproach and Sophie was immobile, she couldn’t be waltzing around the château stealing things from strongboxes. But I do think Pierre had the best opportunity to poison the croissants, as he was the only one alone with them at any time.’

  ‘Pierre wouldn’t…’

  ‘Why not? I did wonder if Marchand and Sophie were having an af—’ Fen stopped mid-word when she saw the look of horror on James’s face.

  ‘No, no, no. Look, keep your wits about you.’ James’s eyes broke contact with hers – he’d seen the shadow of the guard at the grille on the door. He spoke quickly, meaningfully, ‘Fen, I promise you, it wasn’t me. Watch out though, because someone in that house is a murderer!’

  ‘Time!’ The young gendarme strode into the poky interview room and picked James up underneath the armpit, hauling him back to his cell.

  ‘It’s to do with the church, Fen! Marchand and Setter.’

  James’s last words hung in the grey, airless corridor and she wanted to cry, she was so confused. All of his words seemed jumbled to her, like the very worst puzzle, where nothing made sense.

  She ran out of the police station, barely able to see through the fog of tears and confusion, she couldn’t work any of it out, but she knew as well, deep down, that James wasn’t the killer, but someone, perhaps someone under the very same roof as her at night, was.

  Twelve

  Fen rubbed her eyes and forehead as she walked back towards the château. She hadn’t even had the sense to ask the young gendarme how long James had before trial and she admonished herself accordingly. She felt sick to the stomach, though, as it seemed that her quest to find out what had happened to Arthur was all at once both tantalisingly within her grasp and yet so close to being stripped away from her. If James swung – a thought that brought her up short and made her sick to the stomach – then she’d never have anything else to go on than ‘look to the church’.

  ‘Better go look there then, I suppose,’ Fen said to herself and walked towards the handsome old stone building that had kept the confessions and heard the prayers of the townsfolk for centuries.

  The vast wooden door creaked as Fen opened it. She slipped in, not wanting the sound to break the unearthly silence within the old church. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she breathed in that unmistakable smell of a Catholic church; the lingering incense mixed with wood polish and dust mites, the wax of candles and the musty fabric of long-ago embroidered altar cloths and kneelers.

  ‘Look to the church,’ Fen wondered out loud, in a whisper, so as not to break the trance-like atmosphere in the building. ‘Well, I’m here and I’m looking.’

  She didn’t close the door behind her, aware of how sacrilegious the scraping creak of the door sounded against the holy quiet of the sanctuary. And the light it let in was helping her see the interior of the church, as many of the windows were boarded up, their glass removed. Or shot out?

  The church itself was large and the artworks within it were vast. All around her were depictions of saints and sinners, some kneeling, their hands reaching up towards the heavenly clouds or pointing in condemnation at their fellow men.

  Fen remembered the churches in Paris that her father had dragged them around on Saturday afternoons and suddenly this country church felt more familiar; the Parisians and Burgundians may be worlds apart in some ways, but the Catholic Church, more so even than the German occupation, united them all.

  She walked down the centre of the nave. There were no pews like in English churches, but there were a few chairs dotted around.

  She glanced over at the side aisles and got quite the start when she noticed Pierre standing there, his back to her as he stood in front of one of the tombs in a little side chapel. His head bent low too, looking like a marionette yet to be pulled up by his invisible strings.

  Fen decided to take her moment and called out to him. His head jerked up and he studied her as she walked towards him.

  ‘Pierre, what are you doing here?’ Fen was glad she’d finally caught up with him, though she was intrigued as to why he was passing the time of day next to a tomb, instead of checking over the grapes and overseeing the harvest with Hubert.

  ‘Mademoiselle.’ His formal greeting reminded Fen that she barely knew the man, with the only thing she’d ever really noticed about him being that he was rather quiet. She hoped he wouldn’t be even more tight-lipped than usual now.

  ‘Monsieur Bernard…’ Fen replied with the same formality and was relieved when Pierre shook his head and gave her a wry grin.

  ‘That is my father’s name… and his father’s…’ The tall, dark-haired Frenchman traced the family name with his finger across the dry stone of the old tomb.

  ‘Oh,’ Fen moved closer to him, her natural curiosity taking over as she found the memento mori of the living man touching the carved names of his dead ancestors desperately macabre, while at the same time fascinating. If only the dead could talk…

  ‘Generations of Bernards.’ Pierre’s voice was calm and Fen relaxed a little; this was no murderer – or at least at this moment she felt he had no murderous intent.

  ‘And you have ensured at least a generation more.’ She thought of the two young boys, probably still playing chase around the topiary and fruit trees.

  ‘But I am the last of this one.’ He paused. ‘My two brothers are buried here. We had to do it at night, so the Gestapo would not see. We had to steal their bodies from the cart on its way to the shallow
grave so that we could give them a decent, Christian burial. Father Marchand risked his life, like always, and helped.’

  ‘Were they Resistance?’

  Fen knew the answer must be yes and the thought tingled that in and among this family’s own sadness hers was also intertwined.

  Pierre nodded an affirmation and then slumped down, his back shaking with sobs, muffled as he hid his face in his arms, resting against the tomb of his brothers.

  She gently placed a hand on his shoulder but made no pointless attempt to shush him. His sobs echoed around the cold stone church and Fen closed her eyes and listened, offering a prayer to the archangels themselves to bring this man some peace. His sorrow spoke to her as clearly as if he’d been making a testament in court; he simply could not be Marchand’s murderer, as he owed a debt to the brave priest, who had helped him bury his two brothers in the most desperate of circumstances.

  Fen was itching to ask him about Arthur, but she couldn’t bring herself to disturb this poor man’s grief. She gently backed away and wiped a tear of her own from her cheek as she left the small side chapel and walked slowly back towards the nave of the church.

  She gave a slight bow of her head as she approached the altar, on which rested the same carved gilded coffer that she’d seen Father Marchand carry through the square the night before. She hadn’t really noticed it then, but one side was made of glass that would have showed its sealed-in contents off to the worshippers who came to pay homage to it. Its lid was open now and, of course, there was nothing within. The relic of the True Cross really had been stolen.

  She’d heard of Herr Hitler’s obsession with collecting religious artefacts; his quest for the Ark of the Covenant had been splashed all over one of the rags that Kitty had brought back to Mrs B’s farmhouse once and it had provided them all with a jolly half-hour laughing at how silly his plan for world domination via God was. It didn’t seem so silly now, and the fact that the Gestapo had forcibly removed this poor village’s piece of the True Cross seemed almost as cruel as the deaths that must have surrounded it.