‘Right, old girl,’ she talked to herself as she walked along the dusty track, ‘you know the score. If you’re struggling with your ten across, which in this case is who murdered Pierre Bernard, then you need to fill in your five down,’ she paused and thought. ‘And the answer to five down is that quilt, or at least where is it, who removed it, and could it really have stopped the ventilation working in that winery enough to kill Pierre?’
Fen entered the building, empty now of people, including the lifeless body of poor Pierre. There was something even fishier than the isinglass used to fine the wines going on and Fen had a hunch that she’d find more clues than just her ‘five down’ in this industrial building.
She took a deep breath and walked back into the room where Pierre had died. She double-checked the window, partly to ensure the room was well-ventilated now but also to see how or where the quilt could have been strung up. Somehow, that innocuous piece of fabric, that she’d happened to notice that very morning, was responsible for Pierre’s death, as why else would it have been there then and not now?
She cast her eyes around the room. The barrels were massive and some must have been ten or twelve feet tall. They weren’t like normal barrels, though, not in their proportions or finish. They were wider and less curved from top to bottom. Towards the base of each barrel, there was a little hatch cut into the staves, with a metal door that was firmly shut. Fen trailed her fingers across the smooth wooden surface as she walked around one of these massive structures. It was easy to see how that many grapes, fermenting away in the warm autumn temperatures, could create an overload of carbon dioxide. She subconsciously took a deep breath and filled her lungs. She was about to return to her search for the quilt when she spotted a stepladder.
‘Interesting,’ she said to herself, clocking that a ladder would have been very useful to a potential quilt hanger. She had to admit, though, that a ladder was no evidence of wrongdoing, as it was also legitimately used by Hubert no doubt to look inside the toweringly high barrels to check on the ferment. Still, she hitched it open and checked that it could be used to reach the window. As she pulled it out to its A-frame, a fluttering caught her eye. There it was, now on the floor. A shred of fabric in blue and red.
‘Bingo.’ Fen reached down and picked it up, studying it for a moment before folding it carefully and popping it in her pocket. She pushed the ladder back to its closed position and hid it behind the barrels where she found it.
She was turning to leave when a noise behind her made her stop. Footsteps were heading towards her, albeit soft ones, and although she knew she wasn’t doing anything wrong per se, instinct took over and she darted behind one of the large barrels, praying that she wouldn’t be the second person that day to be overcome by the falling fumes of carbon dioxide.
Fen crouched and listened as the footsteps came nearer. Then they stopped. Fen prayed she hadn’t been seen. Explaining why you’re in a room where someone has recently died was one thing; explaining why you’re now hiding behind a massive barrel in that room was quite another. She tried to hold her breath, but it only made her panic and imagine how Pierre must have felt as he ran out of oxygen.
Hoping her breathing would go unnoticed by the interloper, she risked exhaling and sucking in more air. Any noise she might have made was luckily disguised by a clanking sound. Then a sort of scraping and shuffling. Finally, as Fen’s breaths normalised, there was another clank and she heard a lock being engaged – the sort of tinny lock on ammunition cases or strongboxes – then the swish of fabric and retreating footsteps.
Fen risked being seen and poked her around the side of the barrel she’d been hiding behind. She could see through the open door of the fermentation room the retreating figure of Estelle, her old-fashioned worsted skirt sashaying out of the door.
Fen stretched herself out and let the blood flow back to her feet, now stinging with pins and needles. She adjusted her headscarf and was reaching for her lipstick in her pocket when she noticed what it was Estelle must have come in for. She hadn’t clocked it in the upset and commotion after Pierre’s death, but there, hanging on the wall next to the door that opened back into the main barn with its grape presses and what have you, was a tin cabinet, like that of a first-aid kit. But instead of a green or red cross on it, there was a skull and crossbones in a yellow triangle and the French words that sent a chill down her as she translated them to herself: Warning: POISONS.
Poisons? In a winery? And why had Estelle been helping herself from, or putting something into, the cabinet?
Fen slipped her hand into her pocket and reassured herself that she still had the scrap of fabric. As she felt it, she looked up towards the metal chemical safe on the wall. Another piece of fabric caught her eye, this time it was white and delicate. Fen, in stealth mode, tiptoed towards the old metal box and pulled the scrap free of the ragged corner of the closed door.
‘Of course,’ Fen whispered to herself. ‘It must be from Estelle’s apron, or one of those frilled sleeves of hers.’ Fen pocketed it too. ‘And now to find out where she’s going with whatever is in this horrible cabinet.’
Fen crept out of the building and peered around. Sure enough, there in the middle distance, she saw Estelle with her basket over her arm walk down the track back towards the château.
Fifteen
‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ Fen whispered to the cat as she passed him, almost pausing to try and stop him biffing bees with his furry paws. ‘No time to parlay, I’m afraid.’
She trotted on at pace to try and catch up with her quarry. Estelle kept to the track alongside the château, but instead of going in, she made her way through the gardens, past the orchard and towards the church. But Fen lost sight of her as she turned a corner out of the Place de L’Église.
Fen paused by the church, using one of the large stone buttresses as a shield in case Estelle looked behind her to see if anyone was following. ‘She wouldn’t be wrong,’ Fen mumbled as she watched the other woman head towards the little road that passed as a sort of high street. Unlike in England, where there would have been more of an obvious central trading road to a town, here in France the roads were mostly residential and peppered with commercial buildings. Yes, there was a main square with a cafe and the greengrocer, but Fracan’s boulangerie, again on the square, was sandwiched between two houses, while the butcher was almost on the outskirts of town and the pharmacy belonging to Pascal Desmarais was a few streets away.
‘Of course, the pharmacy!’ If Estelle was heading anywhere into town, perhaps with some chemicals to hand, her pharmacist lover was the obvious port of call.
Fen peered into the glazed noticeboard outside the church. There was just about enough light to see her reflection and she adjusted her headscarf and slicked on a quick dash of Revlon’s finest.
It wasn’t much of a disguise, but at least if Estelle found her ‘following’ her now, she looked less like a furtive investigator and more like a tourist heading for an aperitif before lunch. She tried to walk as nonchalantly as she could down towards the pharmacy and it took almost all her effort to retain her composure when a few yards away from her destination she heard the familiar sound of a shop bell and Estelle came bustling out of the pharmacy, slightly flushed.
‘Bonjour, Fen,’ Estelle greeted her. Was she more flustered than usual? Fen couldn’t decide.
‘Bonjour, Estelle.’
There was an awkward impasse as the two women blocked each other’s way on the narrow pavement.
‘Are you going to see Pascal?’
Fen should have had an answer prepared, though, in her defence, the last twenty minutes or so had mostly been run off sheer adrenalin. Not wanting a repeat of the embarrassing ‘I’m called Churche and like visiting churches’ debacle, Fen hurriedly thought on her feet.
‘You know, Estelle, I’m so terribly upset about the deaths in the château that I’m worried I won’t sleep and I don’t want to keep you awake with my tossing and turning…’ Fen was r
ather pleased with herself for coming up with her instant excuse.
‘Keep me awake? As if I could sleep? It is I who have lost a friend and a priest.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m sure you won’t sleep a wink either. Still…’
‘Of course, of course, please spend your money in Pascal’s shop! Though you are lucky he hasn’t yet closed for lunch.’ Estelle grinned, and it seemed to Fen very unlike the smile of someone who had just lost a friend.
Perhaps there was something truly horrid in that cabinet after all? Thinking about it, Fen subconsciously lowered her eyes to look in Estelle’s basket. Which was a mistake…
‘You know what I said about curiosity?’ Estelle pulled the cloth covering her wares further over the edges of the basket, then, in a quick motion, ran her own finger across her throat before flouncing off, leaving Fen to go into the pharmacy on her false errand. She didn’t know how much sleeping pills would cost, but she’d better buy some in case Pascal was the sort to ignore client confidentiality and spill all to his girlfriend.
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle, how may I help you?’ The tinkling of the pharmacy’s doorbell had barely stopped before Pascal welcomed her in.
Fen reintroduced herself and Pascal nodded in recognition of their last meeting.
‘I was what the Americans call a swell bopper, I think,’ he laughed and did a little re-enactment of his energetic dancing from the night of the fête and Fen couldn’t help but smile at him. He seemed gentle and well mannered, if a bit eccentric.
‘Sadly, dancing’s off the cards at the château now.’
‘Yes, Estelle has just told me of the terrible death of our friend Pierre.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Of course, he was Pierre Bernard, of the family Bernard. But I hadn’t seen much of him lately. Not in a professional sense, in any case.’
Fen wanted to ask why, but she felt like it was too nosy a thing to enquire about. Luckily, much like with his lady friend, the pause led Pascal on and he kept talking.
‘It was poor Madame Bernard that I used to see more often.’
‘Oh really? I hope Sophie didn’t have cause to visit you too often? The boys always seem healthy enough?’
‘Ah, I see you do not understand, Mademoiselle Churche. Madame Bernard used to visit me not for ailments so much, but for the chemicals that I dispense for the winemaking. Now, of course, she is much tied up with the house and children, so I get to see more of my dear Estelle as she runs the errands.’
‘I see. Of course.’ So it was confirmed, both Sophie and Estelle had access to the chemicals. Poisonous chemicals perhaps?
Pascal carried on talking. ‘It is natural, as she’s the one with the degree in petrochemical engineering.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember someone told me that at the fête.’ Fen paused, that someone had been James. ‘Monsieur Desmarais, can I ask your opinion on something else?’
‘Of course, what can I help you with?’ Fen couldn’t help but notice that the pharmacist had developed a light sheen over his forehead.
‘Captain Lancaster is in jail, you know, for killing Father Marchand with cyanide.’
The pharmacist crossed himself.
Fen continued, ‘And I wonder, how long does it take for cyanide to kill you?’
‘What a question!’ Pascal Desmarais took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. ‘And not one a humble pharmacist can answer. But, let me see…’
He disappeared through a doorway behind the counter and was gone a few minutes before he returned.
‘Here, I cannot let you have it, as it’s my only copy, but it’s a guide to gases. We were issued them in the last war.’
Fen leaned over the counter at the tattered old leaflet he had produced. She flicked through it as he peered over her, but one paragraph caught her eye. Prussic acid… Hydrogen cyanide… ineffective in warfare… 1916… She read the information, nodded to show she had taken it in, then Pascal pulled the pamphlet back across the counter and slid it under the varnished wood.
‘Prussic acid…’ Fen pondered the word, ignoring Pascal’s apparent unease as he stood behind the counter. ‘The sound of it, well, it’s almost pretty, isn’t it?’
Pascal looked at her. ‘Prussian blue – the paint colour – comes from it. It is hard sometimes to equate such a beautiful colour with such a lethal chemical. Anyway, mademoiselle, how can I help you? One of our Provençal soaps perhaps, or I can see if I have some lavender oil still in the back?’
With the discussion now firmly back to being a transactional one, Fen asked for something to help her sleep and she was only a little concerned at the sheer amount of options Pascal had on offer. She was sure that many of these drugs would be prescription-only back at home, or not available at all. In the months since Fen had received Arthur’s coded letter, she’d been given Mrs B’s cure-all for insomnia several times: and it was nothing stronger than cocoa laced with some brandy and a strict instruction to count sheep. Now, however, she left the pharmacy with a neat little packet filled with six sachets of powder, each one guaranteed to knock out an elephant.
Sixteen
The next morning dawned and Fen awoke. She’d had to dispose of one of the sleeping powder sachets last night as Estelle had been there to witness her supposedly taking it. She’d made the switch when she feigned having to refresh her glass of water and had flushed the concoction down the lavatory. She had then endured a strained night of pretending to be asleep and keeping utterly still when all she really wanted to do was toss and turn with her troubled thoughts.
Although she had fallen asleep eventually, she woke up with all the same problems dancing a jig around her mind. Where was that brandy-laced cocoa when you needed it!
She rolled over in her bed, aware that the creaking springs could wake Estelle, but she simply had to change position. Once slightly more comfortable and happy that she could hear the heavy breathing of her somnolent room-mate, she got back to the task of thinking things through. There had been one murder already, she was sure of that, and she was also pretty positive that poor old Pierre had been the victim of a rather unsporting plot to finish him off too.
Time to go through the evidence: a couple of scraps of fabric, a handy ladder, an empty ampule that might have contained cyanide, but which was in police custody so she couldn’t even examine it, a furtive housekeeper, if you could class Estelle herself as a clue, and a few more motives besides – oh, and James suggesting she ‘look to the church’. She thought about the church and if there had been anything in the old building that could point to the recent deaths, excepting that of the priest himself and Pierre, who only two days ago she’d seen staring at his family’s tomb. If this was a crossword, she’d be stuck without… well, without Arthur to help her work it out.
Fen sat up in her narrow little bed and pulled the blanket high up around her neck, huddling her knees with her arms underneath it. Without Arthur, the next best thing would be a thesaurus. And when it came to these murders, her thesaurus was going to have to be James. He could help her make sense of some of the clues, surely, and it might give the poor man some hope that something at least was being done to save him from the hangman.
Despite the household being deep in mourning, there was still work to do. Fen washed and dressed and although the temptation was there to run into town straight away and try to see James, she knew that in the long term that would get her nowhere. It simply wasn’t done to leave the grapes mid-harvest and she suspected scary old Hubert would report her to Sophie and then she might lose her lodging as well as any more clues as to what was going on around here. Only yesterday afternoon, once she’d returned to the vineyards, having seen Pascal, she’d had Hubert breathing down her neck.
‘Where have you been?’ His interrogation of her had caught her on the hop. Wasn’t he even the least bit sad about his employer – his friend even?
‘I had errands in town.’ And because she couldn’t resist, ‘Luckily,
no one tried to run me over this time.’
‘Well, if you will walk on the wrong side of the road, what do you expect?’
This had left Fen feeling a bit confused. Had his dangerous driving actually been caused by her lugging her suitcase down the left-hand side of the road? By the time she’d tutted to herself and realised that he was being purposefully obtuse, he had disappeared back into the winery and she’d spent the rest of the afternoon mumbling curses to herself as she picked the grapes.
The evening meal had been a quiet and exceedingly sombre affair, with Sophie taken to her bed and refusing to eat, Clément trying not to cry with every mouthful of dry bread and cheese and the two young children silently chewing on their own portions. Estelle had disappeared off as soon as the young boys were put to bed and only reappeared as Fen was changing into her nightdress.
She left Estelle lightly snoring and was about to descend the spiral stairs down to the kitchen when she heard a sniffling, followed by more of a sob. Tracing the sound back down the corridor, Fen gently turned the handle of the door that she believed the noise was coming from. To her slight surprise, it was the boys’ room and Jean-Jacques and Benoit were both sitting upright in their iron beds, Benoit in floods of tears and Jean-Jacques trying to comfort him.
‘Boys, what’s wrong?’
‘No one has come to wake us.’ Jean-Jacques was obviously trying to put on a brave face in front of his little brother, but Fen could see his bottom lip starting to quiver.
‘Do you usually get woken up? I thought young boys like you were the alarm clocks for the rest of us?’ Fen was trying to sound jolly and thought a joke might cheer up the upset children.
‘Mama, Papa or Essie usually come and help us dress.’ The little boy looked so serious that Fen realised that no amount of joking would cheer him up.
‘Well, you’ve got me this morning. Essie is still snoring…’ She couldn’t help it, she was desperate to see their sad faces smile, and it worked with Benoit, who stopped crying and started honking like a pig. ‘Exactly like that.’
A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1) Page 13