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

by Fliss Chester

  Then there was Sophie Bernard. But neither of them had shown any love for the Germans…?

  Or was it someone completely different altogether?

  Still, in crossword terms, she had that all-important clue now – a proper capital letter to slip into her answer. Holding that thought, she crouched down by her bed and pulled her suitcase out. Tucked into the silk lining of the lid, in a little pocket, she remembered she had a pencil. She took it out and stashed her case away. Sitting back down on the creaking bed, she studied the letter. On the back of the envelope she started writing out a few words, crossing them over each other as if they were in a crossword grid. When she finished, it looked like this:

  Fen heard the church bell clang the hour, so she folded up the envelope and slipped it into her pocket. Estelle started to stir and Fen wasn’t at all surprised that her own stomach was noisily demanding something to eat. She went to her drawer and slid it open. She pushed her underclothes and a woollen jumper out of the way and, much to her relief, her hand rested on the cameo brooch that her mother had given her. She wrapped her fingers around it and held it to her chest. Oh, how much did she wish she were home right now, and not in this murderous château. But she knew what her parents would say if she cried on their shoulders. Finish what you’ve started…

  ‘Or you can’t move onto the next thing,’ she whispered the end of the phrase to herself.

  As she closed the drawer, she noticed the packet of sleeping draught sachets. It was slightly opened and Fen fished it out and opened it up properly. She counted the sachets: one, two, three, four… she was sure there had been six in there when she’d bought them and she was also sure she had only flushed one down the lavatory. She looked over to Estelle, who was now rubbing her eyes.

  Yesterday morning had been a different story, though, hadn’t it; Estelle had been very late to rise. If she’d stolen one of the sachets and taken it after Fen had fallen asleep, it would have still been having an effect come morning.

  Before Estelle could start quizzing her on what she was up to, Fen closed the packet and lodged it at the very far back corner of the drawer. She placed a bunched-up woollen sock in front of it, in such a way that if the box were moved, the sock would be too, and closed the drawer. With her back to Estelle, Fen quickly got the envelope out and added another word alongside the grid before putting it back, safely, in her pocket. The word was D R U G G E D.

  The next few days passed by, accompanied by a certain numbness for Fen. She got up, dressed and worked in the vines and harvested the grapes and emptied her hod and stopped for lunch and then did it all again in the afternoons before heading back to the château to wash, change and sit at the table, nodding along to the chatter from Estelle and the boys and smiling at Sophie and Clément when she could bring herself to smile at all.

  All the time she was awake, she looked at the places where Arthur had been. He’d sat at this table, he’d hidden in these vines, he’d spoken to these people and he’d laughed with his new-found friends as they’d plotted their ingenious ways to foil the Nazi occupiers. He’d been a secret agent after all. She should have guessed from his way with clues. And even his letter to her. No wonder his code name was Setter.

  By the evening of the third day since Pierre’s death, the glum crowd were sitting around the old wooden kitchen table having supper. Sophie was still limping, her ankle swathed in bandages, and she winced every time she was expected to move it, even for her elderly father-in-law to sit down or for her boys to scramble onto her lap.

  ‘You should call Dr Laurens to look at that, it might be broken,’ Clément urged his daughter-in-law.

  ‘I don’t want a fuss, it’ll heal in its own time, I just haven’t given it a chance to rest. I’ve been talking to Father Coulber…’ she went on to describe the new priest, who had miraculously agreed to take on Morey-Fontaine along with his own parish, that of Vougeot, which bordered it. ‘He is a very pleasant man,’ she said to the table, her face a picture of pure martyrdom as she moved her leg from its stool so that she could lean over and help herself to more bread.

  ‘I have heard very good things,’ agreed Clément. ‘He’s no Marchand though.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m only saying that he is a pleasant man and he will do Marchand and our Pierre a very good joint service.’

  ‘He should not be dead.’ Clément lamented. ‘And all my sons, my three strong boys.’

  Fen felt awkward and wondered if she and Estelle should make eye contact and mutually agree to leave the grieving pair to it, but Estelle wasn’t looking anywhere near Fen’s direction, instead she was chewing loudly and helping Benoit to some more gratin.

  ‘Clément,’ Sophie continued, ‘do not forget that you still have me, and my sons. Your grandsons. They are your boys now.’ She leant back away from him.

  ‘Yes, yes, dear boys. They are so young though.’

  ‘They will learn from you as Pierre, Thierry and Jacques learnt from you. They are bright boys and they will be your heirs.’

  Fen looked over at Benoit as he shovelled gratin into his mouth and then glanced at Jean-Jacques, catching him mid nose-pick enjoying a particularly satisfying excavation. A lot to learn indeed.

  ‘The funeral plans are all set,’ Sophie seemed to have changed the subject. ‘Tomorrow at ten. My poor darling Pierre…’ Her shoulders shuddered and it was Clément’s turn to lay a comforting hand across them. And so the meal carried on, awkward silences giving way to staccato bursts of planning, with Sophie making sure by the end of the evening that they all knew to meet in the kitchen at 9.30 a.m. in their Sunday best, ready to give Father Marchand and Pierre their heroes’ send-off.

  The church of SS Raphael and Gabriel was heaving with townsfolk the next morning. Fen had given up her seat multiple times to those who looked more in need, or at least more in mourning. Old ladies crept into the church hunched over their sticks, supported by their daughters, or some with sons and grandchildren, their mourning-clothes-clad backs as black and bent as the carapace of beetles.

  Clément and Sophie greeted them all at the door, only proceeding to the front row of chairs as the large wooden doors were closing and the service about to start. Father Coulber had been every bit as pleasant as Sophie had said and after the service she had taken his arm as he walked her to the side chapel, where the Bernard family tomb had once more been opened. Fen saw the tears in Clément Bernard’s eyes and thought she heard him mouth, ‘one, two and three’ as the coffin was taken down into the vault, the entrance to which was next to the tomb.

  After the interment, Father Coulber helped Sophie limp to the church door, where she and Clément and the young boys were greeted by the autumn sunshine and various members of the community. Pascal Desmarais the pharmacist and Sylvestre Fracan the baker were both there – Fen still wondered if the latter was culpable for poisoning the croissants – and his name did begin with an S… She also noticed how many mourners were carrying the same types of flowers that Estelle had left in the church the other day: blue asters, white cosmos and reddish dahlias.

  A few townsfolk had roses, in white or red, and there was one woman with a lovely blue hydrangea head. They’re showing their respects to them as patriots as well as friends. Fen was just thinking what a touching display it was when she saw, crushed on the floor next to where Sophie was now standing shaking hands with Monsieur Martin, the local clockmaker, a bunch of dead blooms, wilted and broken-stemmed. They were in the same colours as the flowers of the other mourners, yet they were obviously days old and almost rotting. Who would have dropped those there? And so close to the grieving widow? Fen was about to flit over and pick them up before Sophie could notice them when she heard a familiar gruff voice in her ear.

  ‘What ho, Fen.’

  ‘James!’ Fen was relieved as hell to see him and, in an uncharacteristic display of affection, flung her arms around his neck. ‘Gosh, I’m so glad to see you! They let you out?’

  ‘I think your taunt ab
out the Vichy government swung it.’

  ‘So that was you I heard laughing down the corridor?’

  ‘Yes, gallows humour, to be sure, but actually I think you were on to something. I think someone in a higher place might have had a word.’

  Fen instinctively looked towards the church.

  ‘Not that high, but something like it.’ James nodded towards the retreating back of Father Coulber, who was climbing into a smart, black Citroën.

  ‘Well, He moves in mysterious ways and all that. I’m just so relieved that you’re free.’

  ‘Me too. Look, let’s get out of here. We need to talk.’

  James led Fen past the church towards the small orchard of fruit trees. They walked in silence for a few moments until James stopped and looked around. They were alone under the trees.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I knew Arthur.’

  Fen looked up at him. She couldn’t work out if his face, tanned still from the summer in the fields after the war, but tired now, from too many days in a cold cell, comforted her or not. He was a real and living link to Arthur, but she was jealous that it was him, and not her, who had spent Arthur’s last days with him.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ she asked.

  James looked at his feet, scuffing them into the dirt of the terrace. ‘We’ve met before, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ Fen looked puzzled. Her powers of recognition were usually pretty strong, and she cast her mind back over the last few years – even into her youth – but she couldn’t place him. ‘I’m afraid I don’t recognise you at all.’

  ‘Well, I say “met”, it was more of a crowded dance hall. And the odd occasion when I would pick Arthur up and take him back to our digs.’

  ‘You were in Sussex…?’ The straw-haired man in the Land Rover… ‘Of course, now I remember!’

  ‘That night at the Spread Eagle in Midhurst, when you met—’

  ‘You were there too?’

  ‘We were training together. There were a few of us, Elsie and Jack, and then Arthur and me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I suppose I…’

  ‘… Only had eyes for Arthur? That’s OK.’ James rested a hand on Fen’s shoulder. ‘That’s how it’s meant to be, isn’t it, when you fall in love.’

  Fen’s lower lip started to tremble. Since when did gruff old James Lancaster turn into some Hollywood screenwriter with his way with words? She took in a deep breath and sighed it out, trying desperately not to start crying again.

  Luckily, James pulled his hand away, shoved both of them into his pockets and kept talking. ‘It was called the Special Operations Executive, the SOE. Though we rather brashly called it the Stately ’Omes of England as we were all based in some rather decent digs. Down that way, near you. I think Arthur wanted to recruit you into our circuit at one point, what with your language skills, but—’

  ‘But I used to make it pretty clear that I felt my duty was in the fields.’

  ‘Yes. He said if you mentioned the Crisis in Paris one more time, he was going to ship you back there with a sack of turnips for the poor.’

  Fen snorted, she remembered their many discussions about how the underclasses were always the worst affected by war and subsequent financial depression, and how she felt duty-bound to help them.

  ‘You must have thought I was a real old goat!’ Fen looked up at James and saw him smiling too.

  ‘Maybe, but Arthur loved you for it.’

  Fen wanted to cry those wracking great sobs again, but settled for a hiccough as she tried to stay focused on all the information James was giving her. She drank it in, news of Arthur, even just talk of Arthur, like a desert traveller finally finding an oasis.

  ‘Why didn’t you trust me, when I first arrived, I mean? If you recognised me?’

  ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you. I simply couldn’t fathom what you were doing here. It takes a certain amount of bravery, and a whole lot of crazy, to travel all this way through… well, through war-torn lands to find your fiancé.’ James’s foot was scrubbing all the dirt off one of the paving slabs that began the pathway back to the church as he spoke.

  ‘Not my usual style, to be sure,’ Fen said gently.

  ‘Ha, Arthur was right, you would have made an excellent agent. Although not if you go around insulting the Vichy government to every jobsworth junior officer of the Republic!’

  Fen huffed out a sort of laugh. It was true, her Land Army work aside, would she really have lasted two minutes out in this very different sort of field?

  ‘Plus, and don’t get cross with me here for not saying anything before, but I’ve been tasked by the powers that be to find out who betrayed Arthur. And suddenly having his betrothed turn up from back home… well, you put a real spanner in the works. I had to keep my distance a bit, sorry.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Fen wasn’t sure it was entirely fair, but then cringed at the thought that her grand plan of finding out what had happened to Arthur had actually gatecrashed official and much more subtle investigations. Still, onwards…

  ‘I need you to keep all this a secret: our connection through Arthur, everything. I can’t tell you more right now, but promise me. Service as usual, yes?’

  Fen sighed. She felt quite deflated, what with expending so much of her energy recently trying to get James freed – only to find him now pulling rank on her like this. After speaking to Clément, she knew Arthur was dead, but she hadn’t come all of this way not to find out who had betrayed him and why. Not to mention the recent deaths. What choice did she have though but to work with James now?

  ‘Fine, yes.’ Fen thought for a moment. ‘It might be too late though. There’s someone in the house who knows I’m poking my nose in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the concern playing across James’s face was clear to see.

  ‘A few days ago this was pushed under my door.’ From her pocket, Fen removed the letter written in German, still in the envelope she was using to write her word grid on, and passed it to James.

  ‘Interesting…’ he scanned it quickly and handed it back to her. ‘Thoughts?’

  ‘Not really, only that someone might have been more friendly with the Germans than we thought. But there’s no date, this could be decades old. Or it could be faked, or it could be from, or framing, anyone with the letter S in their name: Sophie, S for Estelle Suchet, Sylvestre Fracan…’

  ‘Best keep it to yourself for now.’ James frowned. ‘All of it, like we just discussed.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Fen wasn’t sure who she would talk to about it all anyway except James.

  ‘Good. Thank you. Look, I have to dash. See you around.’

  At that, he briefly touched her on the shoulder and then turned and strode into the château.

  ‘How rude,’ Fen mumbled to herself, not really meaning it this time. Her interest was piqued, and even though she and James were supposed to be nothing more than recent acquaintances, she felt the subterfuge would be worth it, or at least she hoped so.

  Eighteen

  It was a day of mourning, to be sure, but it was also mid-harvest and, in honour of Pierre, the team of workers from Château Morey-Fontaine went back to the vines that afternoon. Fen was surprised when Hubert, instead of pointing her in the direction of the fields, tasked her with cleaning the winery. She’d been in there, of course, since Pierre was found, but still, the fact that she was sluicing down the floor where his body had lain was very much giving her the heebie-jeebies.

  She kept glancing up to the window, checking it was open and the room was well-ventilated and it crossed her mind more than once that perhaps Hubert had a murderous reason for asking her to work in the room of death. Luckily, the comforting sounds of winery life around her calmed her and Fen even managed to cheer up a bit when she discovered there was a little mirror nailed to the wall by the fermentation barrels and she could check her headscarf was just so. She knew looking her best wasn’t her priority at the moment, but there was a reassurance in the fam
iliarity of checking one’s appearance, habitually adjusting one’s headwear and reapplying one’s rouge, that Fen really appreciated.

  Her washdown complete, Fen stashed her mop and bucket away and was about to leave the winery when the white metal cabinet that she’d seen Estelle take something from a few days ago caught her eye. And, what’s more, it was very slightly open.

  Fen closed her eyes and took a deep, decision-making breath. Before she had even opened her eyes again, she knew what she was going to do. Yes, it might be none of her business, and yes it might be cat-killing curiosity, but she was damned if she wasn’t going to take this opportunity to see what was inside that cabinet.

  She moved towards it as naturally as possible, keeping an eye on the door to the main pressing room as she went. Checking once more that she was alone, she opened the door. Fen had been prepared to find boxes of chemicals perhaps, even those chillingly macabre hexagonal brown and blue poison bottles, and she did indeed find all of those in the cupboard. More intriguingly, though, she found a tortoiseshell hair clasp, a small silver frame with… yes, that was who it was, a photograph of Pascal Desmarais in it, a curled-up length of red silk ribbon and a silver cigarette case.

  Fen gingerly picked up the cigarette case, praying that it might be what she thought it was. She turned it over in her hand and opened the clasp. There were three cigarettes in it and the elastic that held them in place was the exact colour she’d remembered it being when she’d last seen Arthur take a cigarette out and put it to his lips. She ran her fingers over the case and there it was, in small, modest type, A M-H in the bottom right-hand corner. Arthur Melville-Hare.

  She held the case so tightly that her knuckles whitened and then she brought it to her lips and closed her eyes. Two breaths later and the case was back in the cabinet and the door was back to being slightly ajar, just as it had been when she’d found it. She’d known in an instant that she couldn’t take the cigarette case. Whoever had placed it there, stolen it from Arthur even, would know she’d been snooping. And although she had a good idea who that someone was – someone who framed a photograph of their lover perhaps – she didn’t know to what lengths that someone was going to at the moment to protect their secret.