A Final Reckoning

by Susan Moody

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Susan Moody

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Titles by Susan Moody

  LOSING NICOLA *

  DANCING IN THE DARK *

  LOOSE ENDS *

  A FINAL RECKONING *

  DOUBLED IN SPADES

  DUMMY HAND

  FALLING ANGEL

  KING OF HEARTS

  RETURN TO THE SECRET GARDEN

  writing as Susan Madison

  THE COLOUR OF HOPE

  TOUCHING THE SKY

  * available from Severn House

  A FINAL RECKONING

  Susan Moody

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9 – 15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Moody.

  The right of Susan Moody to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Moody, Susan

  A final reckoning.

  1. Murder–Investigation–England–Cotswold Hills–

  Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8288-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-443-0 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Until the screams began, the house was quiet, wrapped in an expectant pre-Christmas hush. A sharp ear could have picked up the trembling tinkle of a glass bauble on the decorated tree in the hall, water running, the slump of ash in the big fireplace, voices excited behind a closed door. An even more acute listener might have caught the skitter of mice behind the deep carved skirting, or the chew of beetles in the heavy beams of the ceiling. Even the most alert eavesdropper could not have heard the imperceptible fall of snowflakes drifting through the silent air outside though not yet beginning to settle on the frozen ground.

  Otherwise, there was only silence.

  Until the screams began.

  Terrified, agonized, long-drawn-out and desperate, ‘Mummeeeee,’ as though the person screaming already knew that no help would be forthcoming. At first there were words, high-pitched, hysterical: ‘Don’t! Stop! Mum! Please, Mummeee, oh don’t! Ouch! Owww! You’re hurting me,’ the voice rising to a scream until gradually the frantic syllables gave way to a thick-throated gurgle, ‘Ah, aaah, ohhh,’ and then an ominous silence.

  At the same time, another voice joined in, a voice sure of itself, asking what the hell was going on, before a third voice sounded, low and menacing, ‘You fucking interfering bitch, mind your own fucking business.’

  More shouting, ‘Oh, my God, what the hell are you …’ before the words changed suddenly to a strident note of terror, ‘No, no, have you gone crazy?’ Then a further series of shrieks, a thud followed by two more, and further horrifying silence. Light footsteps, running, running.

  The third voice again, a mad voice, whispering, whispering, ‘You’d better look out, you little bastard. You can run but you can’t hide, you fucking monster, I’ll find you in the end, and when I do …’

  More footsteps, more hideous shrieks, ‘Stop, stop, I didn’t mean to, honestly, I …’ gradually dying away in a series of agonized whimpers. Then silence once more.

  The sharp-eared listener might have heard the distant sound of bare-branched bushes being thrust aside, the inhalation of breath in the bitter air, the wincing run of bare feet on winter woodland. Until once again, silence returned, broken only by the tinkle of the coloured balls on the tree and the tiny sound of a pine needle dropping to the stone-flagged floor.

  One

  Where do you begin a story like this one?

  Do you start with your characters, build up a portrait of them, small accretions added for the reader: who they are, what they do, where they’re going, what they want? She likes Mahler, milk-chocolate, Marmite; he’s afraid of heights, or broke his nose playing rugby when he was at university? That way, you make them known, you provide them with an identity which holds the attention even before you launch into your story.

  Or do you begin in medias res, plunging slap, bang into the defining events from which your narrative springs? This has the advantage of an immediately dramatic situation, but then you have to trust your reader to stick with you while you use flashback to define character and conflict. In my own case, I was thrust into dramatic events long before this story began.

  I was nearly thirteen when my sister died. Small for my age, red-headed, feisty and, like her, very intelligent. All qualities I still possess. (Sorry: I don’t believe in false modesty.) We were living in California at the time, near the Berkeley campus, where my father, Alexander Monroe, was a professor of moral philosophy. That particular day, warmer than usual for the time of year, Dad was in his study, while Mom pottered in some undefined way. As for me, I lounged on the swing-seat in the garden, wrapped in a rug and relishing Le Grand Meaulnes for the fifth time. I was lost in the romantic ideal of searching for the unobtainable. Shrubs bloomed thickly round the garden: red bougainvillea, Ti trees, silk tassel. In my memory of that unforgettable day, the air was thick with the scent of lavender and lilac, cloves and thyme, though I know it could not have been, since it was just before Christmas. But the sky was an intense California blue, and I remember doves cooing somewhere, the vibrating flash of a hummingbird at the feeder, the harsh squawk and flare of the blue jays, three Canada geese picking in a ladylike way at some seed my mother had thrown down for them, though all of that might have been a subsumption of the many summers I’d spent in that garden.

  I remember, too, experiencing one of those ecstatic flashes of happiness at the absolute rightness of things, like electricity exploding over and around me. To be aware of joy when young is a gift, I think, not given to everyone.

  Inside the house, the telephone shrilled. I heard my mother’s voice answering. I heard her give a couple of responses to questions from the other end. There followed a terrible silence. Even I, only dreamily half-attentive, could feel the intensity of that silence. And the sound of the denying shrieks which came after. Th
ey went on and on, filling the garden, the house, the quiet street, the neighbourhood, the world. By the time I had dropped my book and rushed into the sunroom, Mom was in my father’s arms, moaning incoherently, her forehead against his chest, her limbs shaking. It was so obvious that something too dreadful to bear had happened that I didn’t even ask what, just threw my arms around them both, not really wanting to hear any more. Because I knew instinctively that this was the end of happiness, the end of childhood. When she drew back to press her wet face against my cheek, she looked as though she had aged twenty years. Her teeth chattered; her eyes had grown hollow. She was no longer my little French maman, she had become a ghost, all in the space of a few minutes.

  To be explicit, as far as the police were able to reconstruct it, this is what appeared to have happened, though I only learned the details bit by bit. It was two days before Christmas, and my sister Sabine was working for an English family who resided in a small country house called Weston Lodge, about forty minutes into Oxfordshire from London. The other staff had all gone home for Christmas, leaving just one all-purpose employee in place. Also in the house at the time of the atrocity were the owner of the Lodge, the Honourable Clio Palliser, her two sons – Edward and George – and a third boy, a school friend for whom the Pallisers acted as a guardian, his own parents living and working abroad. All three boys were upstairs. Overexcited by the approach of Christmas, and with their father, Harry Redmayne, not yet home from his work in London, they’d apparently behaved pretty badly, had acted up, been disobedient and cheeky. The third boy was absent for the earlier part of the evening, having been invited out for supper with some nearby friends of his parents; on his return, the sons of the house had joined him for half an hour or so at the grand piano in the front hall to practise the carols they were to sing to the family on Christmas Day. Apparently, while he’d been gone, the other two had not only scrawled rude words (FUCK YOU, to be precise) on a valuable painting in the drawing room, they had then tried to burn the manuscript of their mother’s latest book (or article, I was never sure which) in the big fireplace in the hall.

  They were twelve and thirteen; their friend was also thirteen, like me: all three of them were old enough to know better, old enough to be aware of the maliciousness of the damage they were causing. Eventually, they’d been persuaded to get ready for bed. George, the younger son, got into the bath, while the older two played with Lego in their shared bedroom, awaiting their own turn for the tub.

  Sometime after that, the mother (the Honourable Clio) had emerged from her study, discovered the damage to the picture and the manuscript, and had come raging upstairs, brandishing a knife. Before anyone was really aware of what she intended (and how could they possibly have been?), she’d gone into the bathroom, grabbed twelve-year-old George by the hair and slit his throat.

  The sheer horror that boy must have felt, the disbelief as his own mother killed him, is almost too much to contemplate. The temporary mother’s help had come out of her room two doors down from the bathroom to see what on earth was going on, and the mother, by now (one presumes) totally off her head with manic fury, had flown at her, plunging the bloodied knife into her eye, and then into her heart, leaving her lying dead or dying in the passage. Meanwhile, the two elder boys, hearing the screams, had come out of their room and into the passage, and seeing the carnage, had run literally for their lives. The Honourable Clio had gone after them, and found thirteen-year-old Edward hiding in the broom cupboard under the back stairs, had dragged him out, cut off three of his fingers and slit his throat, too. This gave the third boy time to escape, which he did by squeezing through a ventilation gap – a short-cut exit the boys had often used before – in the cold-pantry off the kitchen, and out into the snow, where he took to his heels and ran as far as he could away from the house.

  Later that evening, Harry Redmayne, the father, had arrived home, ready to enjoy the Christmas holidays with his family, only to discover the house splattered with gore, his blood-drenched wife silent in front of the hall fire, three dead and mutilated bodies, and a boy missing.

  Redmayne called the police, and a search was immediately organized, but the third boy wasn’t discovered until early the next day. He had managed to find his way in the dark to a disused shed hidden in undergrowth in the nearby woods where the boys sometimes used to play, and had holed up there. No one knew how he could have survived the cold, but somehow he did – luckily, he had not yet taken all his clothes off when the carnage began. As far as he could, he had given the police an account of what he’d heard.

  There was no difficulty in determining who was responsible for the bloodbath. The Honourable Clio Palliser, who had retreated into what they termed ‘elective mutism’, did not speak or write a single word in her own defence (as if you could defend the indefensible). She was arrested, tried and sent to Broadmoor, to spend the rest of her life under lock and key.

  And what, you might wonder, did any of this have to do with my family in sunny California? Why had my mother collapsed? How had my childhood been destroyed by a single telephone call?

  Because, quite simply, the murdered mother’s help was my sister Sabine.

  Until then, we had been a close-knit and loving family, but Sabine’s death broke us up. She was my elder by seven years (my fragile French mother had lost two babies between Sabine and me) and, in many ways, she, rather than my parents, was the strong core around which we all revolved. Our essence, if you like. That she was away in Europe at all had left us depleted, especially at Christmas, but after obtaining a first degree at Pomona, a small liberal arts college, she had chosen to take a fine arts course at my father’s Alma Mater, the University of Edinburgh. At the end of her first semester, she called to say that rather than come home, she was planning to stay in Europe for the vacation, in order to earn some money. University life was proving more expensive than she’d bargained for, so she’d applied for a job she’d seen advertised in one of the student newspapers, spending a month au pairing in a country house owned by a well-known art dealer and his wife, somewhere in the middle of the Cotswolds.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ my father told her over the phone. ‘You know I’d be happy to pay your fare out here. Call it your Christmas present, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Sabine said, ‘but this could be a real opportunity for me. Not just a good experience, but with this guy being so big in the art world, it might even open doors later, when I’ve got my Master’s.’

  ‘Who is he again?’

  ‘He’s called Harry Redmayne. You can check him out, if you’re worried. He paid for me to go down to his London office for an interview. Very nice, very charming. And obviously a man with good judgement, since he gave me the job.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ my mother said. ‘But I really wish you would come ’ome for Christmas.’ Her French accent was stronger than usual, a sure sign that she was agitated.

  ‘So do I, Mom,’ soothed Sabine. ‘But I’ll come over at Easter, maybe, instead. The thing is, from what he told me, there are masses of marvellous paintings all over his house – I might even find a good subject for my thesis.’

  ‘But what exactly are you going to be doing, chérie?’

  ‘I’m going to be a general factotum.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ asked Dad.

  ‘That’s what Mr Redmayne called it: general factotum. Basically, it means a dogsbody,’ my sister said cheerfully. ‘A bit of this, a bit of that. Driving people around, doing the shopping, keeping an eye on two or three kids, which I can do standing on my head after babysitting Chantal all these years. The mother is some kind of expert on Nordic languages or something, and I got a strong impression from Mr Redmayne that she’s a little short on the mothering gene, which is why he wants me around.’

  ‘Sounds a bit dodgy, sis,’ I said.

  ‘No, she’s trying to get a book finished, so basically they’re looking for an extra pair of hands.’

&nb
sp; ‘Well, chérie, if zat is your decision, we must accept it,’ said my mother. ‘But I am not ’appy about it.’

  ‘We’re really going to miss you over Christmas, hon,’ Dad said.

  ‘And I you.’ Her voice wavered slightly. ‘Turn down an empty glass, won’t you?’

  ‘It won’t be Christmas if you’re not there, Sabine,’ I complained. It would be my first Christmas without my big sister.

  ‘Chérie, please …’ It was my mother again, suddenly sounding agitated. ‘You must come ’ome. I want you to, please.’

  ‘Don’t worry, maman, I’ll write,’ she promised. ‘I’ll call …’

  But she never did. And that was it, until the phone call from England and the brutal realization that we would never see Sabine again.

  You can never get over something like that. But then you shouldn’t expect to. My mother tried, she really did. Remembering her distress during Sabine’s last phone call, I’ve often wondered if she’d had some premonition that things would end badly. Looking back, I think it was not just grief but also guilt that gnawed at her soul. She knew as well as Dad and I did that life moved on and you with it, that time passed, that anguish faded. It was the natural order of things, after all, and to be honest, a lot of the time you didn’t think about it until something came up to remind you, and once again the sharp pain bit at your heart and the tears began to fall in that helpless hopeless way. Oh God … Why Sabine? Why us? Why?

  There was no answer to that. How could there be?

  Whatever age I was when Sabine died, I would have been deeply scarred, but I believe that on that adolescent cusp, no longer a child, not yet an adult, hormones rampant, skin several layers thinner than usual, acutely sensitive to everything and everybody around me, I was more susceptible than I might otherwise have been. With the result that the gash in my personality remained unhealed.

  Time passed. We moved on – or tried to. But my mother couldn’t handle it. She faded away, almost literally, until one day, two years later, Christmas time again, Dad and I came home to find her sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing, holding a little woolly bear in her hand. She turned her head towards us as we came in through the patio door, smiling faintly, said, ‘Sorry, my darlings,’ and fell slowly back against the cushions, while we both watched, astonished and uncomprehending. Dad called an ambulance while we tried to resuscitate her, but she was gone. They called in a verdict of Accidental Death, but Dad and I knew that the cause was, quite simply, a broken heart. My personal opinion? Sounds weird but I think she was more or less dead when we arrived back and had only waited for one last look at us, one final word, before she let go.