A Fête Worse Than Death

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  He frowned at the ashtray beside him. ‘I’m not sure how she got her claws into Whitfield. Probably the most obvious explanation is the correct one, for he was fairly ornamental and sure to attract her attention. She’d known him in England and the affair might have started here, but once in France I imagine that Whitfield, the staff officer, was simply too useful to give mere crumbs of information. She wanted hard facts and once he’d supplied them, she had him nailed. Then came a real crisis; Boscombe discovered the tunnels. Now this spelt Trouble with a capital T. Not only did it give us an unparalleled chance to break through the line and take the Augier Ridge, it would also mean the discovery of Mrs Verrity’s activities. That western tunnel was far too convenient to be overlooked, and she wasn’t the sort of woman who would keep mum about her confederates. It’s a good guess, as well, that the Germans had records in their HQ of where their information had come from and, lo! Whitfield’s name would lead to all the rest. He had to stop us from reaching the chateau. When the news came through his first action would be to inform Mrs Verrity and then it was up to him. He went to the farm and took control of the second party.’

  Haldean glanced at Tyburn. ‘You had already gone into the tunnels, sir, and met with a warm reception. The Germans, alerted by Mrs Verrity, were waiting for you. Boscombe managed to crawl away and hide in the nearest tunnel, where he lay while Whitfield’s party went past. From his perspective the second party were also attacked by the Germans who had killed his comrades, and the next thing he knew was that Whitfield was running back down the main tunnel. Whitfield saw him and Boscombe relates in his book how he thought Whitfield was going to shoot him. He was right, of course. Then the third British party turned up and Boscombe was saved. Whitfield, as we know, went on to perform some entirely imaginary heroics, artistically stretching as far as a few minor wounds and placing himself in the rubble. It was, as far as he was concerned, a happy ending. He was awarded the VC, acclaimed as The Man Who’d Saved The Western Front, and only he and Mrs Verrity knew that his gallantry consisted of blocking the tunnel and making sure none of his men survived the frontal attack by shooting them in the back as they faced the enemy. Not nice, is it?’

  Tyburn’s hand tightened on Marguerite’s. ‘I thought he was a traitor, but I had no idea he was a murderer as well.’ His face was grim. ‘Those people were my friends.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Why did he pick on me to carry the can?’

  Haldean took another sip of brandy. ‘It wasn’t so much why as how you came to be dropped in it that puzzled Ashley and myself for a while. It was Boscombe’s book which gave us the clue. There’s a bit where he’s in hospital and Mrs Verrity tells him she’s had his things brought over. The implication is that she had access to the officers’ and men’s belongings. They’d all have been piled up together and she could have slipped the papers into your kitbag then. She had to choose an officer to make it credible that he would have access to enough information to be a spy, so she chose the highest-ranking man who had been in the tunnels. It wasn’t, if you like, personal.’

  ‘It felt personal,’ growled Tyburn.

  ‘I daresay it did,’ agreed Haldean. ‘Of the men who survived, two decided to write down their experiences. Boscombe in the form of a highly polished memoir and Petrie as a war diary. We haven’t been able to find the diary, so what follows is pure speculation, but I think we’re on the right lines. Petrie was in the second party, the one Whitfield attacked. Now, although in the confusion of the attack Petrie wouldn’t have known who was shooting at them, he would have realized there was an enemy behind. And that, much, much later, gave Boscombe, who was a bright boy, cause for thought. Because, you see, Boscombe knew there were no Germans behind the British. If they had entered the tunnels he would have seen them. When Boscombe read Petrie’s diary, which had been left to his friend, Reginald Morton, his mind was full of the war because of writing his book. But if the Germans hadn’t attacked Petrie and the rest, who had? The man who had given him such a fright in the tunnels, of course, our hero, Richard Theodore Whitfield. And Boscombe, as he put it to me afterwards, saw an opportunity for private publication . . .’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Isabelle, her nose wrinkling. ‘Why are you so sure Petrie’s diary didn’t just name Whitfield?’

  ‘Because Morton, who owned the diary, and Boscombe were in it together. If it had been as simple as that, they wouldn’t have needed each other to put the squeeze on. And Morton let his girlfriend read it. By itself, you see, it was harmless.’

  Lady Rivers put down her coffee cup. ‘I can’t get over Mrs Verrity being so ruthless, Jack, to say nothing of her keeping up a pretence for so long.’

  ‘She was a ruthless woman,’ said Haldean, ‘and a very credible one, too. I think, you know, that she’d been playing a part for so long it came as second nature to her. It might reflect something of her love of power. People would only know exactly what she wanted them to know. She was in control of their reactions, you see, or thought she was.’

  Lady Rivers put her head on one side. ‘I think you’re right. It’s odd how often I sensed something artificial around her, but it was her surroundings, not her, that seemed slightly out of key. I must admit I felt very sorry for her at one point. I thought she really cared about Colonel Whitfield.’

  ‘The funny thing is, Aunt Alice, that you may be right. Yes, I’d love some more brandy, please, Uncle. Thank you very much. I must admit I’m guessing here,’ Haldean continued, picking up his refilled glass, ‘but it’s a guess which fits the facts. Anne-Marie Verrity was used to having her own way with men. As well as being a real corker in the looks department, she had . . . well, It. Pure S.A. Any man, me included, simply couldn’t help looking at her. Now although Whitfield had presumably started off by falling for her, I think the gilt wore off the gingerbread pretty quickly, and our Anne-Marie wasn’t used to having her boyfriends turn sour on her. Those letters from Vienna make fascinating reading. I think he grew to hate her and she resented it. So, not being able to obtain his uncritical adoration, she decided to have the next best thing, which was his attention.’

  He paused. ‘She – well, she wasn’t a kind woman. She’d have loved getting under his skin and it was very much to her advantage to keep an eye on him, because although she knew some pretty damaging facts about him, by the same token he also knew some ruinous things about her. She ensured his silence by blackmail.’

  Gregory Rivers raised his eyebrows and whistled. ‘Blackmail, Jack? Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. You tell them, Ashley.’

  ‘We were able to get at both Whitfield’s and Mrs Verrity’s bank accounts,’ explained Ashley. ‘Whitfield had been paying about fifty pounds a month out to cash ever since the war over and above his legitimate expenses and Mrs Verrity had been raking in the same sum. Apart from the money, it must have made her feel very secure. It gave her the upper hand, you see.’

  ‘And that arrangement looked set to continue indefinitely,’ said Haldean, ‘when along came Boscombe and Morton. They really put the cat amongst the pigeons. They demanded seventy-five pounds a month and Whitfield had to pay up. Although the stables had never really flourished after the war – and no wonder – from October onwards they started going downhill fast. Salvation, as far as Whitfield was concerned, arrived in the shape of you, Marguerite, at Christmas. If Whitfield could get his hands on your money he’d be safe.’

  She swallowed. ‘Was that really all there was to it?’

  Haldean shrugged. ‘It’s never easy to say, is it?’ His voice was gentle. ‘I don’t believe he had any real feelings for you, no. I’m glad to say there are far better men around than Whitfield, and you’ve got to remember he was desperate. He saw his stables going to rack and ruin while Mrs Verrity spent money like water. But that’s a question I can’t really answer. Marrying you must have seemed a very agreeable way of obtaining some money and he must have been flattered by your feelings for him. Anyway, Boscombe upped the ante by getti
ng greedy. Like many another, he found his expenditure kept pace with his income, and so he applied, as you might say, for a pay rise, without mentioning it to Morton. Whitfield, stretched to the absolute limit, couldn’t brass up. Now at this point I rather think we can see Mrs Verrity coming into the picture. She was in as much danger as Whitfield. If Whitfield cracked and the truth became known, he would make pretty damn sure that she shared in his downfall. Boscombe came down to see Whitfield to apply a bit of personal pressure and, by doing so, signed his death warrant. For, although he didn’t know it, he had come up against Anne-Marie Verrity.

  ‘It was a shock for everyone when Boscombe arrived at the Red Cross fête at Thackenhurst. Boscombe, to his delight, saw not only Whitfield, but you, Mr Tyburn. He couldn’t get to you directly but used the opportunity to screw some more money out of Marguerite. If he had lived, you would probably have received a billet-doux from him in fairly short order. Mrs Verrity, who had a very French grasp of practicalities, realized that the quickest way out of the dilemma was to kill Boscombe. Now here’s where, if I had been paying attention, I could have got to the bottom of things. It worried me that Boscombe was shot, because who on earth takes a revolver to a fête? The answer is no one, of course – after all, this is Sussex, not the Wild West – but Mrs Verrity had by far the best opportunity to get a gun. After all, all she had to do was walk into her own house. I should have realized that, you know.’

  ‘And so did Mrs Verrity shoot Boscombe?’ demanded Isabelle. ‘I don’t see how she could have done.’

  Haldean grinned at her. ‘Perpend, old thing. I think the original plan was for Whitfield to do the deed as and when the opportunity arose. But his best chance, which was when Boscombe, who by this time was bottled and sleeping it off in the fortune teller’s tent, was ruined by the vicar arriving wanting to talk about ponies. D’you remember Whitfield’s reaction, Greg? He was pretty shirty about it and went off with very bad grace. Then you met up with him, Uncle Philip, and escorted him back to the cake competition stall where he finally managed to see Mrs Verrity. You saw them, Belle, if you recall, round the side of the tent. You said they seemed to be having an argument. I bet they were! It ended with Mrs Verrily taking back her gun and deciding to tackle Boscombe’s demise herself. She knew from Whitfield that Boscombe was laid out in Mrs Griffin’s tent, so decided to get Mrs Griffin out of the way by awarding her first prize in the cake competition. That meant no one would go in the tent until Mrs Griffin returned so, unless Boscombe decided to move, which was unlikely in view of his condition, he was safe for the time being. Then she walked back with Mrs Griffin, in order to congratulate her the better. Credible, isn’t it? For otherwise we just might have wondered what the sophisticated Mrs Verrity was doing in the fortune teller’s tent at the village fête. And then came the master stroke which I didn’t spot and deserve kicking for. I helped her, you see. She laid a trap and I fell right in.’

  He smoked his cigar down to the butt and crushed it out in the ashtray. ‘Mrs Griffin went into the tent and came out giggling about “the gentleman” being drunk. Now Mrs Verrity didn’t have to ask who “the gentleman” was. She realized straight away it was Boscombe, which should have rung some alarm bells. I’m ashamed to say it did nothing of the kind. She took command and marched into the tent to ask him to leave. All of us, Mrs Griffin, Belle, Greg and myself, crowded in after her. D’you remember what she did? She looked down at Boscombe, started, fixed us with a glance and asked us to get out and fetch help.’ He paused. ‘Belle, you were there. What did you think had happened?’

  ‘I thought he was dead, of course. I didn’t know until afterwards that he’d been shot.’

  ‘Bang on. And Greg thought he was dead and so did I. He wasn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  Haldean leaned forward. ‘It was so simple. She contrived to have herself left alone with Boscombe, who was too drunk to know anything about it, and when we left, she shot him.’

  ‘Good God.’ Rivers looked at him with wide eyes. ‘She shot him after we’d seen him? Are you sure, Jack? I mean, I could see we wouldn’t hear a shot beforehand, because of all the noise and not listening out for one, but surely, surely, she was taking a terrible risk afterwards.’

  ‘She was taking a calculated risk,’ agreed Haldean. ‘And that’s where my little friend, Sally Mills, came into it with her doll. Sally had put the doll, cot and pillow down and when she came back the pillow had been taken. She told me afterwards she and her mother had looked everywhere for it. I don’t know how she struck you, Belle, but she seemed a most determined child to me. I couldn’t help thinking that if the pillow was there to be found, she’d have found it. When we met her the other day it occurred to me that although the doll, cot and blanket were found, the pillow had gone for good. But why should anyone take part of a child’s toy? What could it be used for? And then a glimmer of light dawned. It’s a nice, handy shape, a doll’s pillow, and stuffed thick with flocking, or whatever it is they use. Just the right size to be hidden in a handbag or a pocket, for example, and just the right thickness to be used as a silencer on a gun. I put the idea to Ashley, and he did some experiments with the .22 in his possession.’

  ‘It wasn’t a bad silencer,’ agreed Ashley. ‘Despite what people think, you can’t silence a gun completely, but you can cut down the noise dramatically. And although we could still hear the shot, it would be faint enough to pass unnoticed at the fête, especially with all the other racket there was going on. If you’d heard anything, you would have probably thought it was a crack from the air rifles or the trap-shooting. The fact that she’d used the pillow as a silencer explained why there were no powder burns on the body. Naturally there weren’t. All the burning was on the cloth. It would have taken a real crack shot from the tent walls to plug Boscombe in the temple like that. If he was shot by someone holding a gun to his head it was easy. I liked the idea and the more I thought about it the more I liked it. It took all the mystery out of the affair, you see. We didn’t have to wonder how some unseen man had parted the tent walls and shot Boscombe so accurately. Instead you’d had a murderer who walked up to their victim as bold as brass and pulled the trigger.’

  Haldean nodded. ‘It felt right, didn’t it, Ashley? And, of course, once we’d got that far with Boscombe’s murder, it led us on to Morton’s. That was tough, because no one knew he was in the Talbot Arms. So why did Mrs Verrity go there?’

  ‘She wanted to search Boscombe’s room,’ said Isabelle, slowly.

  ‘And the Talbot Arms is the only place you can stay in the village,’ put in Greg.

  ‘Absolutely. And Boscombe’s key was in Boscombe’s pocket, with his room number on it. So that gave Mrs Verrity his room number on a plate, so to speak. After Whitfield’s poor showing at the fête I can’t see her trusting him to break in and search the room without making a complete pig’s ear of it. I think she simply slipped into the office and took the spare room key without anyone knowing. I managed to do it, so it was perfectly possible. Then, of course, she went up to Boscombe’s room and found Morton, waiting for Boscombe’s return. As we know, Mrs Verrity had a fairly short way with anyone who crossed her path. She shot him and disappeared with the diary. You believe she burnt it, don’t you, Ashley?’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he agreed. ‘I can’t see her keeping it. It’d be far too dangerous.’

  ‘Horribly dangerous.’ Haldean took another cigar from the box. ‘But an even bigger danger to her was Whitfield. When he found out the police were looking for someone who had been blackmailed, he went up like a flushed pheasant.’ Haldean carefully examined his cigar. ‘I can’t blame him, either. As someone who had been blackmailed for years, he must have thought his position delicate, to say the least. And, of course, he’d recently been presented with what he referred to as “a bombshell”.’

  He looked at Marguerite. ‘When you told him who your father was and said there was a chance he was still alive, it must have been like a nightmare.
That meant that not only was there one man who knew that Tyburn wasn’t a traitor but that same man probably had a jolly good idea of who the traitor was. But he still desperately wanted to marry you because of your money. He needed that as much as before to keep Mrs Verrity satisfied. He tried to kill me, you know,’ said Haldean, reaching for the cigar clippers. ‘Compared to the other murders it was a clumsy affair, but it nearly came off. If he’d been lucky, he’d have got us both with that great brute of a horse. As it was . . . well, our luck held, didn’t it, Ashley?’

  ‘Thank God. It was a close-run thing though, Haldean. I didn’t realize the risk I was taking by leaving you at Mrs Verrity’s.’

  ‘No, although I was probably safer there than almost anywhere else. Mrs Verrity knew I mustn’t suffer a fatal relapse or you and the doctor would ask some very searching questions. Perhaps, if she’d been in it by herself, she might have seen me off and brazened it out, but she couldn’t trust Whitfield. Even though it meant the loss of his blackmail money, he had to go.’

  ‘Didn’t she have any affection for him, Jack?’ asked Isabelle. ‘After all, they had been close, if I can put it like that.’

  ‘I think what she liked was power, and you must remember how dangerous he was to her. He was drinking like a hydroptic fish, and might at any moment spill the beans about the whole business. And she didn’t like –’ he nodded towards Marguerite – ‘saving your presence – the company he was keeping. The very day Whitfield tried to ride us down, she’d been round digging away about you, Mr Lawrence. Boscombe had said that Tyburn was alive and I think she left convinced in her own mind that you either were Tyburn or knew far more about things than you should. You’d threatened to look into his past life if Whitfield persisted in attempting to marry Marguerite and she certainly didn’t want that to happen. All in all, it would be a healthier world for her if both you and Richard Whitfield ceased to exist.’