A Christmas Return

by Anne Perry

  “How do you do? My name is Peter. What is yours?” He offered his hand.

  She took it carefully. “Hello, Peter.”

  “Hello…?” He waited.

  She looked down, then up again. “Francesca, but they call me Fanny.”

  “May I call you Fanny?” he asked. “Although I think Francesca is a lovely name.”

  “You can call me Francesca, if you like?” she offered.

  “I accept. How do you do, Francesca?”

  She giggled, then took his hand, just for a moment.

  Mariah saw a woman standing in the doorway ahead of them. She was handsome, with the same dark chestnut hair as the child.

  “Mrs. Collins?” Mariah asked. “This is very gracious of you. I hope we are not inconveniencing you a great deal. If this were not urgent we would not disturb you without warning, and so close to Christmas.”

  “I understand,” Mrs. Collins said gravely. “Excuse Fanny. She wanted to be the one to welcome you, and show off her dress.”

  “Quite understandable.” Mariah nodded. “And the ribbons. If I had been so pretty, I would wear ribbons too.”

  Francesca blushed with pleasure, and stood a little closer to her mother’s skirts.

  They were introduced to her younger brother, who was far more interested in his train set than in any visitors. Peter duly admired it, quite genuinely. Then the children went to their tea in the large, warm kitchen, and Peter and Mariah were shown into the parlor, where the table was laid for four.

  “I don’t know whether my husband will be home for tea or not,” Mrs. Collins said with apology. “I’m afraid he’s often late. There’s always something, in a village like this. Mostly it’s not crime so much as something lost, even a stray animal. We’ll start without him, if you don’t mind. I know you may have a train to catch, and the last one is not so very late. Although if you need to stay overnight, the inn is quite good, and your tickets will be good for several days.”

  “Thank you,” Peter accepted for both of them. “We have already booked rooms at the inn, just in case.”

  She frowned. “That’s good. Mrs. Fraser said your inquiry is very serious.” Her face lost its warmth and the pleasure of hospitality. She had been a policeman’s daughter, and now a policeman’s wife. She knew there could be tragedy, even in the quietest and most outwardly gentle of places.

  Mariah sat where she was invited, as did Peter, and Bessie Collins offered them anything they’d like from the plentiful table. There was a large baked ham, sliced bacon-and-egg pie with a thick pastry crust, an apple tart, and a jug of cream. There were also two kinds of cake, both clearly home baked. One was a sponge, the other a rich fruitcake, sagging a little in the middle. It was what Mariah’s mother, more than half a century ago, would have called “sad,” meaning it was a little richer and moister than was considered perfect and heavier in the middle. Actually, if you only knew it, that was the best part.

  As soon as they were served, Peter acquainted her briefly with their reason for coming. He did not speak of Durward with condemnation, as if they knew he was guilty—only the barest facts of his trial and Cullen Wesley’s acceptance of his defense, followed by his refusal to continue with it.

  “And you are saying he came here to Brocklehurst the day before he stepped down?” Bessie said.

  “Yes,” Peter agreed. “We know that from the stationmaster. We learned it only yesterday. But time is short.”

  “And now Durward intends to raise the whole matter again.” Her face was bleak. “I’m surprised. He must feel very…confident.”

  “He wishes to marry,” Mariah pointed out. She did not bother to keep the acid out of her voice. “Into money, I believe. He must lay this business to rest before he does so.” She took a mouthful of ham and the delicately flavored potatoes. She chewed and swallowed before continuing. “I am not sure whether it is a matter of striking first, or if he has some reason to believe the matter will arise again if he does nothing. We need to stop him…”

  “Indeed,” Bessie said fervently. “We couldn’t! And, heaven knows, my father tried. I don’t remember it. I was only a child, about Francesca’s age, when your father came, and I was only just born when it happened here.”

  Peter froze.

  Mariah felt the food in her mouth all but impossible to swallow. She did so only with difficulty. “It…?” She hardly dared ask, and yet it was what she had expected. It was the dark certainty that hovered on the edge of her mind. Her own experience taught her that such terrible hungers do not come suddenly out of the night. They begin as imaginings, dreams, then little realities, like the first drops of rain in a squall that will eventually drown everything.

  “We lost a girl too,” Bessie said quietly, all the light gone from her face. There was distress in her eyes. “She was thirteen. They didn’t find her body until a week later. Only God can know what that child endured first. I have days when I look at Fanny, and I can hardly imagine life for Mrs. Catherwood, or any woman who has lost her child.” She laid down her knife and fork, as if the idea of eating was suddenly repellent. “The Catherwoods moved away. I think they might have gone abroad, eventually. I can’t blame them. To look at these woods and fields must’ve been more than they could bear.”

  “I’m sorry to ask you to remember this,” Peter said gently. “But we have to stop him, if we can.”

  “We tried!” Bessie said with a sudden, fierce insistence. “We did everything we knew how.” She pushed her rich hair back from her brow, pulling at it hard. “I say ‘we’ as if I were part of it, but the whole village felt that, even though it was twenty-five years ago now. I saw it in my father’s face as I was growing up. He watched us so tightly I used to lose my temper with him. Of course I didn’t understand. No one told me the real story behind it until just a few years ago. I was a grown woman with a girl of my own before he would tell me.” She stopped.

  Neither Peter nor Mariah prompted her.

  For several moments they ate in silence. It seemed to Mariah almost blasphemous to eat when they were speaking of such things, but not eating would help no one. They needed their strength to think clearly, to keep going beyond weariness or defeat. Losing the will or the clarity of thought needed to fight would be another victory for Durward.

  In the silence her mind slipped back to the other tragedies she had known, particularly the loss of one of her granddaughters to a compulsive, insane mind twisted with guilt and seemingly unable to stop the terrible violence within it.

  “We must stop him!” she said abruptly. “Our own comfort is neither here nor there.”

  Bessie Collins and Peter both looked startled.

  “I’m sorry,” Mariah said grimly. “But one of my granddaughters died at the hand of someone whose mind was obsessed by…desires that were…not acceptable. They don’t go away.”

  Peter put his hand on hers, gently. It was warm, and she felt ice inside her, freezing more dangerously every moment. Did he imagine she was going to speak of her husband? She wasn’t. That was still untouchable in her mind. Peter probably knew nothing of this other violence in her life, this other loss.

  “The man who killed Christina Abbott in Haslemere,” she said with an effort, “from what you say, killed a child here also. They were twenty and twenty-five years ago. Do you imagine that was the end of it?” She met Bessie’s blue eyes and saw the grief in them, and the sudden pity. “I wish I didn’t have to say that,” she added.

  “I know,” Bessie murmured. “I know. Of course you are right. I have no idea if anyone will speak now. They wouldn’t then. Mina Johnson is still here, and I believe she could have spoken. But she denied it. She and her husband owned one of the bigger farms over at the south side of the village. He’s gone, and their sons have it now. She lives in a cottage about half a mile from here.”

  “What could she say? If she chose to?” Peter asked.

  Bessie looked down at her plate. “She said it could not have been Owen Durward who k
illed the girl. Mina was ill, and he came to treat her at that time. It all fitted in…and no one else was ever found to blame. It…it poisoned everything, because we all looked sideways at each other for ages after that, so my father told me. It still nearly breaks his heart that he retired without finding the answer.”

  “Could we speak to him?” Mariah asked urgently. “Just in case in the details there is something. It only takes one thread you can pull hard enough to unravel the whole cloth.”

  Bessie bit her lip. “You don’t give up, do you! I’ll take you to see him, but only if you let me stay with you. I won’t have him upset more than he can take. It twisted him, that. It was the one thing he failed at, that he still can’t forget.”

  “Maybe we can finish it now?” Mariah said. She forged a hope in her voice that she did not feel, a piece of playacting such as she had never forced herself into before.

  Bessie still hesitated.

  “Durward will do it again,” Mariah said. “He may have already, and got away with it.” She thought of adding something about Francesca and decided that was too far.

  “Apple pie?” Bessie offered. “I think I’ll cut a piece for John; then we can take a nice big piece for my father. It’s one of his favorites.”

  “What an excellent idea,” Mariah agreed. “Will he have cream, or should we take a little of that too?”

  Bessie smiled. “You’re a canny one,” she said briefly.

  It was nearly an hour later when the constable came home. Bessie served his dinner and left Peter to talk to him, and she and Mariah put on their heavy coats and took a shopping bag with a jar of thick cream and a very generous slice of the apple pie, still warm from the oven. They set out into the now bitterly cold evening, arm in arm so as not to risk sliding on the ice-rimed pavements.

  The new moon was high in a clear sky and the stars were so low that for a moment Mariah had the illusion that they were actually tangled in the bare branches of the tallest trees. It was easy to believe in Christmas, all the stories and the legends that added to its wealth. Did they sometimes lose the greatest gifts among the smaller ones?

  They did not speak as they walked. It took concentration to keep one’s footing, and the cold air was sharp in the lungs if one breathed in quickly.

  The retired constable lived on the far side of the village, in a cottage that stood by itself in a neat garden. It was without leaves or flowers now, everything gone back into the earth to sleep until spring. Mariah imagined the new growth bursting forth: snowdrops by the end of January, then small irises, dark purple. In March there would be daffodils, then paler yellow primroses on the sloping banks of the fields facing the sun. There would be pussy willows by the streams and hazel catkins in the hedges, then chestnut candles and bluebell woods later. There was nothing closer to heaven than wild pear blossom in the trees before the leaves came, the earth so carpeted with bluebells there was nowhere to put one’s feet.

  She missed all that in the city, but it was all there in her memory. And she now had company and a good garden in the summer. The roses were marvelous, rich and lush, perfuming the still air.

  They walked up the path and knocked on the door. It was opened by an elderly man, grown a little heavy with age, but still upright. His face lit with pleasure when he saw Bessie and the pie and cream. He offered the visitors tea, which was politely declined.

  “Papa, Mrs. Ellison has come about an old case, and I think you will want to hear what she has to say. It’s about Owen Durward.” Bessie bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

  The old man’s face became suddenly bleak, and he regarded Mariah with a cold, judging eye.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Ellison,” he said, now very much the retired policeman. “Tell me, what has brought you here?”

  Mariah accepted the offered seat and told him briefly, almost as if she were making a formal statement to the police. She told him of Cullen Wesley’s acceptance of the case to defend Durward, his visit here to Brocklehurst and his violent death the following day, after he had said he could not continue to represent Durward.

  “I heard of it,” the old man said gravely. “Forgive me speaking of it, but I also heard the rumor that his wife was suspected because of some dalliance she had had, and they had quarreled over it. Someone else defended Durward, and he was found not guilty.” The grief in his eyes and the tightness in his face said more clearly than words what he thought of that.

  Mariah did not answer immediately. She studied his expression, the good nature in him clouded over by his one crippling failure. She also saw that even though he was trying to disguise it, he still had a flicker of hope that things could be righted, even a little. Bessie would not have brought someone to him if there was nothing at all she could do.

  He waited.

  “Do you believe he killed the girl here in Brocklehurst?” Mariah asked finally. “I know you could not prove it.”

  He did not equivocate. “Yes, I do.”

  “And did you tell Cullen Wesley that when he came here the day before his death?” she went on.

  “Yes. I told him all I knew. I’m…I’m sorry now that I did. Perhaps he would still be alive if I had said nothing.”

  That thought had flickered through Mariah’s mind also, like lightning leaving charred trees behind it. But it was too late now. And how would it have changed Cullen if he had obtained Durward’s acquittal, and then learned that he was guilty?

  She said that now to the old man. “And he would not have thanked you for that,” she added. “You gave him the truth you knew, and he acted on it as he believed to be right.”

  He looked at her closely, studying her face as she had studied his. “Why did he retire from the case?” he asked. “Because he believed me, and he thought Durward had done it a second time. The cases were similar in all the wretched details that mattered. He couldn’t defend a man, knowing he had done it before and would almost certainly do it again. We both failed in that. If I had not told him, he would never have known, and he could have defended Durward with a clear conscience, serving just as he was bound to do.”

  “Perhaps he knew something more.” She took his point. “He no longer had the innocence of not knowing. I wonder what he said to Durward, and what Durward said to him that perhaps changed his mind.” She imagined the scene. Durward had got away with it once, and believed he could again. Had he told Cullen as much?

  “Maybe he’d thought of a way of seeming to defend Durward, while actually making certain he lost. He would remain within the law.” The old man was clearly turning over the ideas in his mind.

  “You could have charged him in the first case, if Mrs. Johnson hadn’t said he was with her,” Bessie pointed out. “She was lying, wasn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes,” the old man agreed. “But she never backed down.”

  “What was she like, Mrs. Johnson, twenty-five years ago?” Mariah asked with a sudden flare of interest. “Pretty? Well mannered, happily married, but occasionally maybe a little bored? Was her husband a man who loved her, but sometimes took for granted her contentment, her interests, her need for admiration now and then?” Was that deliberately unkind? At least Peter was not here to understand to whom she was referring.

  “You knew her?” the old constable asked with the very slightest smile.

  “No, but I know women like her.”

  The old man was staring at her now. “Are you saying that is what happened in Haslemere, Mrs. Ellison? Someone was…coerced into silence?”

  “Not exactly,” she replied. If she had not felt the warmth in him, and the gravity, this would have been appallingly different. “I’m afraid it was both better and worse than that. I don’t think…the person in question would have remained silent. Cullen Wesley was killed, and it was made to look as if his wife could have been responsible. Durward actually spread it around that that was what happened.” She took a breath. “Little by little, of course. A word here, a silence there, where an explanation would have closed the matter. She w
as never charged, but the silent accusation never completely went away.”

  “I see. And how can I help, Mrs. Ellison?”

  “Give me more of the circumstances of the first woman who was bullied into lying for him.”

  He shook his head. “She won’t tell the truth now. She has everything to lose and nothing to gain by admitting she lied twenty-five years ago.”

  “Possibly. But please allow me to try.” Should she tell him she would go and look for the woman herself, if he did not help her? It would sound like a threat. “Please?”

  “Do you wish me to come with you?” he asked.

  She considered it for barely a moment. “No, thank you. She knows you and may well care what you think of her. In her place, I would. She does not know me, so what I think will matter nothing to her once I am gone.”

  “There’s wisdom in that,” he agreed. “Very well. I’ll give you directions to her house. I suggest you go in the morning. She keeps chickens and a pony, and she will be up early to feed them. She will care for the animals before she leaves, regardless of whatever else she intends to do for the day.”

  “Thank you.” She stood up. She had done too much walking and she was stiff. “I am sure Bessie will tell you if I have any success. I am much obliged to you.”

  She and Bessie walked back to pick up Peter, say good night to Fanny and her brother, and continue a little more slowly back through the darkness, toward the inn. She was grateful that they had already booked rooms for the night, and she was surprised how glad she was to have a light supper and go to bed.

  In the morning, Mariah woke wondering where on earth she was. The whole room seemed unfamiliar, the heavy curtains, the open suitcase on the ottoman, the wine-colored carpet. It took several moments for her to recall the previous evening. She had been full of determination when she had spoken to the retired constable, whose name she recalled as Harris. Now it all seemed like a hopeless task. No one had caught Durward the first time or the second. Two girls were horribly killed, and Cullen, dear Cullen, whom she had cared for so much, was dead as well—and Owen Durward had walked away free.