The Fethering Mysteries 06; The Witness at the Wedding tfm-6

by Simon Brett

  “And I gather Howard would also sometimes shoot with Michael Brewer too?”

  “Yes. He was often one of the party. But then, I don’t know, they fell out. Howard I think took advantage, went shooting somewhere without Mick’s permission perhaps.”

  That tallied with what Carole had reported from her conversation with Robert Coleman. “And I heard that Howard was shooting the night Janine Buckley was killed. He alerted the police to the burnt-out car.”

  The old lady did a small, quintessentially Gallic, shrug. “That is quite possible. I do not know the details. All of that period is a blur of great unhappiness. With my dear husband dying and – I was very ill,” sheadmitted. “For a long time I was very ill. There is much from that time that I have done my best to forget.”

  “Grand’mère,” asked Gaby, “if you knew Michael Brewer so well, were you surprised when you discovered that he was a murderer?”

  “But of course. You do not expect this from anyone, least of all from a family friend. But I do not claim to understand the workings of evil – what drives someone to do something of that nature. Only the good Lord can give an explanation of such terrible things.”

  “But you knew Janine Buckley too, did you?”

  “Oh yes. She was a very close friend of Marie. She was often in the house. They were two very lively girls, so high-spirited, so talkative, so naughty.”

  “Naughty?” echoed Jude.

  “Yes, she was always supposed to be doing her school homework, supposed to be behaving like a good Catholic girl, but her head was only full of thoughts of pop music and of boys.” The disapproval in Grand’mère’s voice was strong. “Fortunately, Marie behaved herself in that respect. She knew what was expected of a good Catholic girl. Sex before marriage is always wrong.”

  Gaby’s eyes evaded the stern look that accompanied this. Grand’mère sighed. “If only poor Janine had remembered that. I often think, if Janine’s parents had brought her up as a better Catholic, she would still be here with us today.”

  Jude, with Gaby’s tacit approval, continued the questioning. “Given the fact that Marie was so high-spirited and lively, wasn’t it rather a surprise when she suddenly gave up on her A-levels and married Howard?”

  “Perhaps, in one way. In another way, it made perfectly good sense. I don’t think you can understand, Jude, what it was like for all of us after the murder of Janine Buckley. A terrible shock. We all felt it. Poor Robert had to be so strong. He was the one who held the family together at that time. My husband died very soon after the murder. I was distraught and had to be hospitalized, but Marie also was totally shattered. It changed her personality entirely. At that age, you think only about having fun, you don’t have a care in the world, you think perhaps that you can have relationships with boys with freedom, with no strings. Even though this is wrong, that is what a lot of young people think.

  “And then this thing happens in your life. Suddenly you’re in the real world. It is brought home to you that sex can lead to pregnancy. Even worse, you discover that, in extreme circumstances, pregnancy can lead to murder.”

  Had Carole been there, she would have recognized Grand’mère almost echoing Robert Coleman’s words.

  “So for Marie,” the old lady went on, “it was a terrible time. She had no security. Her father was dead, her mother in hospital. Everything she had believed in had been proved to be false. And there was Howard, a good man who had been holding a candle for her for a couple of years. He loved her and wanted to marry her. For Marie, he represented security, and a chance to get away from Worthing.”

  “Did you approve – and would your husband have approved – of Howard as a husband for your daughter?”

  Another little Gallic shrug, with an equally characteristic ‘Phwoof’ noise. “We had always known he was an honest man, and a good Catholic. He had been in the shop working with us for a long time. It was maybe a surprise when Marie said she wanted to marry him, but she was happy about the idea and it seemed a good solution.”

  “And do you think it continued to be a good solution?” It was Gaby who asked this question, and, from her lowered voice, Jude got the feeling it was the first time she had talked to her grandmother about the state of her parents’ marriage.

  “Howard was a good man and a good Catholic. I think he made your mother as happy as anyone could have done. After Janine died, Marie – well, she shut off so much of her personality. She was never really complete after that.”

  Jude heard a discreet cough behind her. A uniformed nurse stood in the doorway. “I am sorry, but I am afraid I must take Madame Coleman now for her bath.”

  Gaby’s offer to help her grandmother into the wheelchair was politely rejected. The indignities of age were to be witnessed by professional carers, not by family members.

  As they were leaving – with promises that they’d be back the following morning – Gaby noticed a photograph in the array on Grand’mère’s dressing table. She and Stephen smiled out, caught in a relaxed moment at some friend’s wedding. “Ah, I’m glad to see we’ve made it into your gallery.”

  “But of course you have. Your fiancé is a fine-looking man. A little serious perhaps, but I think you can be relied on, my dear Pascale, to lighten him up.”

  Jude would have been impressed by the accuracy of this assessment, had her attention not been distracted by another framed photograph in the display. This showed a considerably younger Howard and Marie Martin, standing outside an open front door. Howard was less bulky than in later years and almost handsome in his old-fashioned way. Marie looked washed out, but triumphant. In her arms she bore the source of their pride, a tiny, shawl-swaddled baby.

  Across the white strip at the bottom of the photograph was handwritten: “Pascale comes home – 27 May 1974.”

  Jude, intrigued by the lack of symmetry in the spaces between the ‘27’ and the ‘May’ and the ‘May’ and the ‘1974’, looked more closely.

  ∨ The Witness at the Wedding ∧

  Thirty-Three

  Carole had done a big Sainsbury’s shop that afternoon. On her return to High Tor, Gulliver treated her as though she had been absent for a decade. She told him not to be silly, which rather offended him, because he knew that, as a Labrador, it was his God-given mission in life to be silly.

  The answering machine registered a couple of messages, but when Carole played them back, there was just the click of contact and nothing else. She checked 1471 for the last caller. The call had been made from a mobile she did not recognize. Probably a wrong number.

  It was unsettling, though.

  Jude enjoyed her food. She was not pretentious about it. She could wolf down fish and chips out of the paper or the Crown and Anchor’s dish of the day cottage pie with as much relish as a gastronomic menu, but she was a great believer in trying whatever was on offer. So when Gaby said she knew a rather good restaurant in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Jude was very definitely up for it.

  The interior was of stone and felt as though it had once been part of some monastic foundation, an impression which was reinforced by the thick bare wood of the tables and the heavy wrought-iron chandeliers. But any image of gloomy austerity was quickly dispelled when they opened the menu.

  Over a convivial kir royale, they ran through the gastronomic possibilities. They felt the panic of people with only two days to do justice to the entirety of French cuisine. Lunch that day had been a wasted opportunity, a snatched sandwich in transit from the airport. Lunch the next day was doubtful. Gaby had entertained the possibility of taking Grand’mère out somewhere with them, but the old lady’s frailty precluded that. So really they only had the two evening meals for certain, and then they’d be back in England.

  With this in mind, neither stinted herself on the ordering. As a starter, Gaby went for the Feuilleté d’Escargots au Beurre Vert Bordelaise, while Jude chose the Terrine de Foie Gras de Canard Röti tout Natural Cuit en Terrine with a Confiture d’Oignon au Vin Vieux. Their main courses wer
e, respectively, Poitrine de Pigeonneau Rôti, les Aiguillettes au Foie Gras, Poêlée de Girolles and Filet d’Agneau Rôti à l’Ail Confit, Mongettes de Vendée Facon Cassoulet. The wine list was familiar territory to Gaby, and she homed in on a white and red Bordeaux from a château Jude had never heard of and would never have found unaided. The choice proved excellent.

  Jude had things she wanted to say to Gaby, but not on this gourmet’s hallowed ground. In deference to the fury of the patron when another guest’s mobile phone had trilled, she switched hers off, determining to ring Carole when she got back to her hotel room.

  She and Gaby settled down to enjoy the meal, and to talk about any subject in the world that didn’t involve murder.

  The telephone rang as Carole was washing-up after her austere boiled-egg supper.

  “Hello?”

  The male voice at the other end sounded surprised. “Who is this?”

  “My name’s Carole Seddon. Who did you want?” The man rang off.

  Carole stood for a moment by the phone in the hall. This was very stupid. She was getting paranoid. Just a wrong number. And no, the voice hadn’t sounded like the one she’d heard on Gaby’s mobile outside the Crown and Anchor the previous week.

  Still she lingered. Inspector Pollard had given her all his contact numbers. But no, this was no reason to bother him. It was nothing.

  Be good to tell Jude about it, though. Jude would advise her whether she should do anything. And Jude might have something to tell about her encounter with Gaby’s Grand’mère. Yes, call Jude, that was the answer.

  But the mobile was switched off. Carole was given the option of leaving a message, but she couldn’t think what to say that wouldn’t sound melodramatic or hysterical. And Carole Seddon had always had a great aversion to sounding melodramatic or hysterical.

  She replaced the phone and went to wash down the kitchen surfaces. Then she’d have to take Gulliver out to do his business on the bit of rough ground beyond her back garden.

  “Gaby,” said Jude, when they reached the landing of their small hotel, “I want to talk.”

  The girl looked at her watch. “I was just about to call Steve, but we’re an hour ahead, he’ll be up for a while yet. So, fine.” And she meekly followed Jude through into her bedroom. Her manner suggested that she’d been expecting this, that she’d enjoyed their wonderful meal in the knowledge that it was an oasis in the bleak landscape of reality, and that they could only stay there for a limited time.

  She sat on the bed, and looked across as Jude closed the door and lowered herself into a wicker chair.

  “What is it then?”

  Jude looked her straight in the eyes. “Gaby, how long have you known that Howard Martin was not your father?”

  Gaby put her hands to her face, then swept them back and upwards, as though she were wiping it clean. But she wasn’t crying. Her voice was steady as she replied, “I think I’ve always had my suspicions. Particularly growing up with Phil. We were so different physically, apart from anything else. People at school kept saying, ‘I really can’t believe you two are brother and sister.’ And I always said, ‘Well, we are.’ Because then I thought we were.”

  “And when did you know for certain that you weren’t?”

  “Seven, eight years ago.”

  “When Howard had the bowel cancer.”

  Gaby nodded. “I was desperately worried about it. You know, cancer. The Big C. I read up quite a lot on the subject, and the evidence was there in black and white. Something called HNPCC, I particularly remember. Stood for Hereditary Non-Polyposis Colonic Cancer. But basically, if there’s a family history of bowel cancer, then the chances of getting it go up by some horrendous percentage.”

  “So you told your mother about your anxieties?”

  “Yes. And she saw the state I was in, and she knew that she could remove my anxieties instantly. So, rather than let me suffer any more, she swore me to secrecy, and divulged the secret she had kept for more than twenty years.”

  “And did the knowledge change your attitude to your father – to Howard, that is?”

  “No. In a way, it made sense of a lot of things. He had brought me up like his own, and he loved me – in the rather undemonstrative way he had of loving. In many ways, it was good for me to know. I stopped feeling guilty about the lack of instinctive closeness I felt to Howard – and to Phil, come to that.”

  “That, of course, was the other thing that told me you weren’t Howard’s child.”

  “What?” asked Gaby.

  “It was something Stephen reported to Carole. And then I checked it with you yesterday.”

  “Did you? I didn’t realize I was being checked out.” But she didn’t sound too affronted.

  “When your father – or rather Howard’s – body was found, there was talk of it needing to be identified by a DNA match.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “And you said that might have been a problem because that night Phil had gone missing. You never even thought that you yourself might be able to supply a sample, because you knew that you and Howard didn’t share any DNA.”

  “Ah.” Gaby clapped her hand across her mouth in mock-horror. “What a giveaway. Dear, oh dear. Thank God I’m a theatrical agent, and have no aspirations to be a criminal mastermind. I’d be really crap at that.”

  Jude grinned, not so much because the joke was funny, more to put the girl at her ease, before she asked, “Do you know if Howard knew you were not his?”

  Gaby screwed up her lips in doubt. “I’ve really no idea. It all goes back such a long way. And the subject wasn’t one that was going to spring up spontaneously in that family set-up. You’ve no idea how uptight my mum can be. It was very rarely that we talked about family matters, and as soon as she’d given me one scrap of information, she’d clam up.

  “Still, I have no complaints. Howard Martin was a good man. And, in a way…this sounds an awful thing to say, but it’s true, so I’ll say it.” She looked defiantly at Jude. “The fact that Howard was not my father has made the last few weeks easier, you know, since his death. I mean, I’ve felt shock and all that – and pity for what happened to him – but I haven’t felt as emotionally bereft as I would if he really was my birth father.” She seemed to have shocked herself by what she’d said. “Maybe the impact just hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t know. But, in all the ghastliness that’s been going on for the past few weeks, I haven’t really missed him.”

  Gaby grinned, as if levity could somehow take the seriousness off their conversation. “Of course, it casts an interesting light on my mother, too, doesn’t it? Puts rather a big question mark over her, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. There is another thing too, Gaby…”

  “Oh God, I don’t know how many more ‘other things’ I can take. I’ve had a bellyful of ‘other things’ over the last few weeks.”

  “You know you were born premature?”

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “Have you ever looked at that photograph on your grandmother’s dressing table, of you as a baby with your parents, outside your house in…Worcester, I suppose.”

  “Well, obviously I’ve seen it, but it’s been part of going to see Grand’mère for so long that I can’t really say I’ve ever given it very close scrutiny.”

  “When you came to see me about your back, Gaby…”

  “Yes?”

  “…you gave me your date of birth.”

  “Twenty-fifth of March 1974.”

  “Exactly. But that photograph of your grandmother’s says you came home from hospital on the twenty-seventh of May 1974”

  “OK. Two months in the premature baby unit – that’d be about right.”

  “Except that wasn’t what had originally been written on the photograph.”

  “What?”

  “A little piece of paper has been stuck over the month after the first two letters – ‘M’ – ‘A’. I’d put money on the fact that under the paper you’d find
the ‘R – C – H’ of ‘March’.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yes. Your grandmother’s eyesight’s so bad she would never have noticed the change to the date. But what it means is that that photograph was taken two days after your birth.”

  “No!” This revelation had been news to Gaby, and she was slowly trying to piece together its implications. “So…?”

  “So when you were born, you were a healthy, full-term, baby. The story of you being premature was only put about to explain the length of time between Marie and Howard’s wedding and your birth.”

  “Just a minute, just a minute. You’re going too fast. So what have I got here? Not only was Howard not myfather, but also my mother was pregnant by another man when she married him – is that right?”

  “Yes, Gaby. That is exactly right.”

  ∨ The Witness at the Wedding ∧

  Thirty-Four

  It was dark but still warm when Carole took Gulliver out through the back garden gate on to the scrap of rough ground behind her row of cottages. When they went by this route, the dog was always gloomy. He knew that the excitement of lead-rattling was not the precursor of a proper walk, just a quick functional trip out for him to empty his bowels.

  This he did with quiet efficiency, and Carole was about to take him back to High Tor when a tall figure stepped out of the shadows between her and her garden gate.

  “Sorry to interrupt you.” The voice was rough and unmistakably familiar.

  “Excuse me,” said Carole, in a voice of steely gentility. “Could I please get back to my house?”

  “Yes. But only to leave the dog. Then I’m afraid you must come with me.”