Death of an Unsung Hero

by Tessa Arlen

“Yes, Jackson, for that too. You see, Sir Winchell was fishing from the little footbridge on the day Captain Bray was murdered. He was there from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. All he had to do was walk along the footpath to the south gate of the kitchen garden, kill Captain Bray, and return to continue fishing. He has no alibi for those long hours. No one saw him there, no one was with him. All the farmers and their families were busy harvesting.”

  Mrs. Jackson thought about this one for a moment and then she asked the inevitable: “Does Colonel Valentine have any idea why Lieutenant Carmichael was on the grounds at Iyntwood last night?”

  “I don’t know what the colonel is really thinking. I don’t know whether it is his age or the long hours he is working, but he is most distracted, and Inspector Savor is hardly the man to think through any situation with calm logic. It makes sense to them evidently that Sir Winchell murdered both men. And quite frankly, Jackson, you only have to hear Sir Winchell raving away about shooting lily-livered cowards to see that he is far from stable. Was no one at the hospital aware that Carmichael was not in his quarters?” Her ladyship got up and wandered over to the window, pushing the looped swags of the heavy plaid curtain back against its frame. She held it there so she could more clearly stare out at nothing at all. Only the light tapping of her forefinger on the window frame was an indication of her irritation.

  Mrs. Jackson, reluctant to interrupt her ladyship’s annoyance, waited a moment or two before she said, “Lieutenant Carmichael was in the officers’ mess for dinner. I am not sure at all about after that, though. I will ask Corporal West, he was on duty last night. If you will excuse me a moment, m’lady.” She was through the door and before ten minutes were over was back again. “Corporal West says that Lieutenant Carmichael retired to bed directly after dinner. When the corporal checked in on him, at a quarter past ten o’clock, he was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper. We have a curfew here at the hospital, as you know, m’lady: after ten no one may leave the grounds.” Lady Montfort turned from the window.

  “How would he leave the house without being seen?”

  “None of our officers are particularly interested in leaving the hospital or its grounds, so unless their condition is chronic no one really checks up on them. So he probably just walked down the stairs and out of the door. But if Lieutenant Carmichael was shot at eleven o’clock or thereabouts, he had only just left the hospital. He might have just wanted to get some air, or maybe he had an appointment with someone, though goodness only knows who it could have been.”

  Lady Montfort’s gaze wandered back to the window, where she continued to stare at nothing.

  What on earth is going on with her? thought Mrs. Jackson. There’s something she is not telling me. Well, if it’s to do with these murders she will get to it in her own good time.

  She respectfully waited a few moments and then related her conversation with Fuller in the art room.

  “She did what?” Lady Montfort’s incredulous response to Fuller’s love confession was almost gratifying. “I told you, Jackson, that this might be a murder of passion!”

  “Not at all, m’lady, far from it in fact. This unfortunate girl was living in a daydream that she had made up about Captain Bray. First of all, she took his silence as some sort of shy acquiescence that he was in love with her too—or cared for her. But when she actually told him that she loved him, he snubbed her.”

  Lady Montfort started to shake her head. “Poor Captain Bray, how awkward and embarrassing; what is wrong with these modern young women?”

  Mrs. Jackson didn’t say that the upbringing of sheltered girls did not prepare them for hospital life, but continued on with her account of Fuller’s infatuation. “She said that on the morning that the captain was killed, she went to the kitchen garden to pick beans and he walked straight past her from the potting shed back down the garden to his potato rows as if she wasn’t there. So she went and stood under the pergola and watched him, hoping he would notice her there and come and talk to her.”

  “Oh good Lord above!” Lady Montfort put her hand over her eyes. “It actually makes you cringe; what can she have been thinking? But she told you originally that he helped her pick beans. What happened to that story?”

  “It was just a story she made up to impress her best friend Ellis and ended up believing, I suppose. She says what really happened that morning was that she watched Captain Bray digging at the end of the garden, wondering whether to go and talk to him again, then she realized the time and had to pick beans as fast as she could to be back to the hospital on time, which explains why the vines were in such a…”

  “Did you believe her? I am sorry to interrupt you, Jackson.”

  Mrs. Jackson smiled. “I believed her, m’lady. I told Major Andrews her story and he had a talk with her. He said that she is suffering from a form of hysteria: a compulsion to form a romantic attachment with a man in uniform, and in Fuller’s case she was impulsively drawn to heroes. Major Andrews told me that at the beginning of the war they had to enlist special women police constables in some towns near army training camps to enforce a curfew because very young women were behaving so outrageously toward the soldiers that they would run if they saw them. ‘Khaki fever’ they called it. Major Andrews says her condition is aggravated by the shock of Captain Bray’s murder and the fantasy, as he referred to it, of her imagining herself in love. He said it is not unusual for girls of her age to make up stories to sound more interesting, especially as her friend, the much prettier Ellis, is so popular. Fuller is such a young and impressionable girl and is far too suggestible to be working in a hospital like ours. We are giving her some home leave and after that we will decide if she is cut out for this sort of work.”

  “She could not have killed Captain Bray then in that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ sort of way then?”

  “I asked the same of Major Andrews, m’lady,” her expression sheepish as she remembered the major’s rather derisive laughter, “and he said it was most unlikely.”

  * * *

  Clementine walked back to Iyntwood in time for her meeting with Mr. Hollyoak to plan the harvest supper for the local farmers and villagers on the village green.

  “If I may say so, m’lady, it would seem that the barometer is not predicting auspicious weather for an outside supper at the end of the week,” was her butler’s first contribution and it went on from there. Clementine resolved to be firm but patient.

  “I am quite sure we will have brought in the harvest by Tuesday, Hollyoak. So we should plan for the village green, and then if it looks rainy that afternoon we can always move the celebration to the great barn at Brook End Farm.” She could tell by the expression on his face that he didn’t approve of the barn any more than he appeared to like the idea of the village green. Oh where on earth do you want us to have the celebration for heaven’s sake? She wanted to ask him. But this was not the way to deal with elderly butlers whose professional lives had changed so drastically since the war. Hollyoak was pining for the formal celebrations at Iyntwood of two years ago; he brooded alone in his pantry on the grand balls and house parties for forty guests before the war had come and spoiled everything. Any opportunity to flog himself and his seriously depleted staff into the ground to make a grand occasion would be a welcome distraction and an opportunity to polish every piece of the Talbot silver.

  “I particularly do not want to hold the supper here, Hollyoak,” she said cautiously, watching his back stiffen. “It has always been a village occasion. We will provide the food and drink—cover all the costs, in fact, but I don’t want to turn it into a big house event, especially not now.”

  “If I may presume, m’lady, the local people enjoy a big house event. We are the focus of a large community here at Iyntwood.”

  No, it is you who likes a big house celebration, she thought. You seize on any opportunity to overdo the simplest dinner party as its solo performer. Without Mrs. Jackson’s steadying influence on the ol
d man, Clementine was already dreading preparations for Christmas.

  “I want this to be a celebration for our farming community, and an opportunity to include our officers. The farmers’ wives love to show off their best cakes and pies. We will supply cold chickens, hams, and a side of beef to roast, as well as the beer and the cider, and we mustn’t forget lemonade, the fizzy kind, for the children.”

  He looked away, clearly offended that she might think he was incapable of organizing the celebration, and said in a sniffy sort of voice, “Yes, it is unfortunate that Mrs. Jackson is unavailable these days to organize things properly, m’lady, employed as she is by the War Office.” He was clearly determined to suffer from hurt feelings, she realized, and decided that commiseration was not the best course. “Yes, it is a pity, Hollyoak. But there is a war on and we have all had to cut back and expect less. But I need you to liaise with Mr. Golightly at the Goat and Fiddle and make sure that he has everything he needs to lay on a decent supper for all our people. The farmers’ wives will take care of the rest. And if you can scrape up enough players from the villagers to make up a small band, that would be quite wonderful.”

  She got up from her chair and walked toward the door, to signal that their meeting was at an end, and wondered how long it would be before Althea and Harry came back to report on doings at Holly Farm.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “There is someone hiding up at Holly Farm, Mama, we saw him!” Althea cried out as she and her brother came across the lawn toward Clementine. She had taken refuge in the rose garden after tea and as a result was feeling rather overwhelmed at how quickly the weeds had grown back under the rose shrubs. Mr. Thrower was doing his best, but she had noticed that he had more or less retired to the orchid house, where he spent hours fiddling about with rare specimens that he believed could not be abandoned, even with the labor shortage caused by the war. She straightened her back and, taking off a glove, looped back a strand of hair that had fallen from under hat so that she could see them clearly.

  She could not help but smile at the sight of her two adult children marching across the lawn, their faces beaming with enthusiasm. Harry hasn’t even had the time to pour himself a brandy today and Althea is almost over the horror of Lieutenant Carmichael’s murder.

  Her son threw himself down on the freshly cut lawn. “Making polite inquiries with Althea is like running rabbits to earth with a terrier.” He laughed at his sister, who was cutting roses and threading them around the brim of her uniform cap.

  “And what did you find out, my darlings?” Clementine purred as she stirred her son with her foot to organize a wicker chair for her comfort so that she might listen to their report.

  “Althea should go first,” Harry said as he seated his mother and returned to his supine position on the lawn, a grass stalk in one corner of his mouth, his splinted arm across his eyes to shield them from the sun. I hope they weren’t seen; Clementine mentally crossed her fingers.

  “We walked up from Brook End Lane through the wheat field and took the left fork of the footpath; you know the upper part where you can look down on the Holly Farm barn, before you drop down through the woods above the farm?” Clementine had taken the right fork the other morning when she had walked home. She nodded that she knew the route they had taken and, reaching down a hand, adjusted the dark red rose in the front of Althea’s cap so that it sat squarely in the middle of the band. “And by the way, they have made absolutely little to no progress on their harvest.” Clementine waved an impatient hand at infuriating behavior. Drat all Howards, she thought with a flash of her earlier irritation.

  “We must have sat up there for ages just watching the farmyard. Don’t look anxious, Mama, we were hiding out among the trees, they couldn’t see us. How long were we sitting there for, Harry, it must have been easily an hour?”

  “’Bout ten minutes and it is not called watching, Althea, it is called spying.” He rolled away from his sister to avoid a playful cuff.

  “Well, it felt like all afternoon. Anyway, Mrs. Howard came out of her kitchen door and pegged up some washing on the line. Then she came out again and threw a bucket of water down on the cobbles of the yard. It was getting hot and we were thirsty and thinking of abandoning the whole idea. There was no sign of Mr. Howard, his brother, or the two boys.”

  “They were off working the fields on the other side of the river,” her brother said, throwing his grass stalk away. “Tell her about Mrs. Howard. Mrs. Howard—” he started to explain.

  “No, I’m telling this.” Althea sat up. “Mrs. Howard came out of her kitchen with a blue-and-white-checked bundle. She looked around her in a most furtive way.”

  “No, she didn’t, she was behaving quite normally.”

  “She went across the barnyard and into the barn. She was in there an awfully long time—”

  “About three minutes.”

  “And then she came out again and walked back to the farmhouse—but, Mama, she did not have the bundle with her!” All the roses on Althea’s cap were quivering with her excitement.

  “What happened next?” Clementine asked, impatient for a sighting of some man who was no doubt the individual who had conveniently killed Bray and Carmichael.

  “Mama!” Althea exclaimed, taking off her cap and tossing it carelessly to one side. “Think what I have just said. She took a bundle wrapped in a tea towel into the barn and came back empty-handed. I won’t go on until you acknowledge that this was a discovery.” She did not allow Clementine to say a word, though. “She was quite obviously taking food to someone in the barn.”

  “It certainly was a discovery, darling. Well done.” Clementine knew when to be obedient.

  “We decided to walk on down through the wood to the edge of the barn. We hoped that perhaps we would be able to pick our way through the gorse on the north side and peek in through a knothole or something.” Althea turned to her brother and magnanimously commanded him, “Go on, Harry.”

  “Oh, my turn? Righto then. We came up on the barn from the north side completely unobserved. This was about sixteen hundred hours, exactly twenty-five minutes after Mrs. Howard had returned to her kitchen.”

  “Sixteen hundred hours?” Clementine asked.

  “Twenty-four hours in a day, Mama. Sixteen hundred hours is four o’clock; you take noon as twelve and then count forward throughout the last half of the day and toward midnight as twenty-four-hundred hours, saves a lot of confusion.” Clementine didn’t think so but she acknowledged that she understood yet another aspect of how war had changed everything—even how one referred to the time of day.

  Althea had no tolerance for this dull sort of reporting, so she took over again. “Harry and I found largish knotholes and peered into the barn. We had to move up and down that side until we could find a clear view of the lower half of the building. And as we were standing there getting bits of dust in our eyes and being bitten by midges, who do you think came down the ladder from the upper part of the barn? Who, Mama? Go on, guess!”

  Harry sat up; he was laughing as he picked daisies and threw them at his sister. Clementine had not seen him in quite so lighthearted a mood for months. He pelted his sister with daisy heads and bits of grass and taunted, “Althea can’t stand not to be the one to tell!”

  “It was Walter. Walter Howard,” Althea said quickly so that she was not preempted in their great discovery.

  Clementine’s heart sank. “Home on leave?” Oh why does it have to be Walter Howard? Such a mild-mannered, quiet young man, the last person in the world to bash people’s heads in or shoot them in the back. But wait a moment! “What on earth was he doing having his tea in the barn? If he is on leave, why wasn’t he helping his father and his brothers out in the fields? Oh my goodness, he wasn’t home on leave, was he?”

  “If he ever joined up at all. He was conscripted earlier this year. Do you remember how devastated the Howards were when he went off to war?”

  “A deserter—dear God!” Clementine felt
such profound shock at the idea that the Howards’ son had run away that she put her hand up to her mouth to stifle her exclamation.

  “Yes,” said Althea happily. “Explains everything, doesn’t it? Explains why the Land girls are not welcome at the farm, or our officers—or anyone at all who is not family. And poor Mrs. Howard’s shaking and trembling when we dropped in at her farm bright and early and took her by surprise, frying up eggs and bacon for Walter’s breakfast.”

  Clementine looked over at her son, who was gazing out across the lawn to the horizon; his preoccupied expression had returned as he squinted at the clouds coming up in the west. What does he see, Junkers fighter planes in our peaceful skies?

  “Harry,” she said, and he turned to look at her. “What are we to do about this?”

  “Well, we can’t ignore it, and there will be all hell to pay if Walter has deserted. He will be shot. If he didn’t enlist as he should have done, they will come for him and off to war he will go, and Mr. Howard might be sent to prison for hiding him. When the War Office started conscription they meant it. Every one of us must to do our part if we are to win this war.”

  “Poor boy…” Clementine allowed herself to feel some sort of pity for not only Walter but his family. “What on earth made them think they would get away with it?”

  “They didn’t think they could get away with it, they only hoped they could,” said her son. But Clementine was not listening to his answer.

  * * *

  “Mrs. Howard,” Clementine called as she knocked on the door of the farmhouse kitchen. “Good afternoon, so sorry to drop in on you like this late in the day, I didn’t mean to startle you.” She stepped into the kitchen and was immediately stricken by the fearful expression on the face of the woman who turned from her stove.

  “M’lady.” Mrs. Howard bobbed and her eyes shifted to look over Clementine’s shoulder through the open kitchen door toward the farmyard and the barn. “I am afraid he won’t change his mind,” she said, obviously referring to her obstinate husband and not her eldest son’s decision to avoid conscription. “He is quite sure he will be able to get the crops in by Tuesday.”