THE MURDERESS
Jennifer Wells
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About The Murderess
1931
Fifteen year old Kate witnesses her mother Millicent push a stranger from a station platform into the path of an oncoming train. There was no warning, seemingly no reason, and absolutely no remorse.
1940
Exactly nine years later, Kate returns to the station and notices a tramp laying flowers on the exact spot that the murder was committed; the identity of the victim, still remains unknown.
With a country torn apart by war and her family estate and name in tatters, Kate has nothing to lose as she attempts to uncover family secrets that date back to the Great War and solve a mystery that blights her family name.
Contents
Welcome Page
About The Murderess
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
About Jennifer Wells
Also by Jennifer Wells
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Copyright
Prologue
Kate
It happened long ago when I was a child but, every time I close my eyes, I can still see the blood creeping along the iron rail and hear the screams behind me. My life would not be the same after that day, and the years that followed were full of questions and regrets. I never thought that, exactly nine years later, I would return to the place it had happened.
One May morning when I was fifteen years old, my mother woke me early. She laid my new school uniform out on the ottoman and called for her lady’s maid to help me with the fastenings on the blouse and skirt. When I made my way downstairs, breakfast had already been set out in the dining room. We pulled our chairs up close to the window and ate poached eggs and crumpets as we watched the sparrows fluttering over the flower beds, the scent of lilac gusting in from the garden. My mother talked about the weather and the annoyance of the rabbits that ran across the Long Lawn, but then she stopped and her brow became furrowed. She unfastened her necklace with the jade pendant and folded it into my hand.
‘Always remember you are mine,’ she said.
When the grandfather clock in the hallway struck ten, my mother folded up her newspaper and rang for the driver to collect the trunk from my bedroom and to bring the car round to the drive. She drove me along Willow Street, past the village green and down the hedge-lined road to Missensham Station. She bought one single ticket from the office and made enquiries about the next northbound train and the connections to Oxfordshire. Then she instructed the porter to carry my luggage to a cool spot near the station clock. I sat on my travel trunk as she strolled down the platform, stopping to glance at the posters and timetables on the wall.
It was then that a woman approached her, a stranger with a pocket timetable open in her hands. They spoke for a few minutes, moving closer to the track so that they could view the timetable away from the shade of the platform canopy, and I watched as my mother pointed out things on the timetable and the woman nodded earnestly.
Then the track started to hiss with electricity; my mother looked up and saw the train approaching. She glanced at me and smiled, then she turned back to the stranger and pushed her on to the tracks.
I can still hear the screams, I can still see the blood. Things are different now, it is no longer summer and I am grown. There are no more motorcars or lady’s maids, no more poached eggs and crumpets and no more scented gardens and, as far as I am concerned, I no longer have a mother.
Kate
Chapter 1
May 1940
If it had not been for the flowers that he carried, I might never have noticed the man that stood on the opposite platform. He looked like so many other Great War veterans – a red, formal army coat, with the cuffs frayed, and a cap pulled low over his eyes which I imagined he would use to collect coins for begging. But to carry flowers, red peonies too, at half past ten on an average Tuesday in May made me look at him twice.
Did he know what that day meant to me? That on the same day nine years ago I had stood on this platform and watched as my mother had pushed a woman into the path of an oncoming train?
I told myself that the flowers meant nothing, they could be meant for a sick relative or to lay on the war memorial in town – but there was something about the red peonies, their fat heads and the tight swirl of velvety petals that took me back to that day and made me turn and stare at the spot just metres away where the woman had stood with my mother.
I wondered if the man knew about what had happened, it had certainly been in the newspapers. Missensham is a small town where little ever happens and to me it had seemed as if everyone knew – the children in my class at Sunday school who would no longer share their chalks, the women whispering in the high street who lowered their eyes when I passed, and the servants I had once thought of as family who left in the night without warning.
In the beginning, the story had been everything that the newspapers could have wished for – a well-bred woman who had murdered a stranger without reason but, as the weeks went on, the identity of the victim and my mother’s motive remained a mystery. My mother never said a word about what happened on that day; she said nothing to the police and offered no defence in the courtroom. With little to report, the press created an uproar when my mother was sent to Holloway Prison instead of the gallows and, as her silence continued, their stories moved on to my mother’s family home of Missensham Grange – a grand Georgian house, where she lived a life of parties, servants and motorcars. The newspapers had also carried stories about a privileged fifteen-year-old girl – an innocent child with startling green eyes and golden ringlets – the daughter who had witnessed her mother’s crime.
But nine years had passed since then, and I was no longer the schoolgirl with the maids and the motorcar. I was still a young woman but my eyes were no longer bright and my once-golden hair was already starting to streak with grey from the ordeals of my youth. Although I still lived in Missensham Grange, when I returned to the house that evening, it would be to my duties as a housemaid and my lodgings in the basement.
I glanced at the bench beneath the station clock, the timetable on the wall and the colourful knot of tube lines on the map, but there was nothing to show what had happened in this spot nine years ago and I suddenly felt as if the world had been spinn
ing around me and I alone had been left standing here while time moved on.
Then came a murmur from the track; the sound of an approaching train echoing down the metal and the hand on the station clock clicked to half past ten. The rails started to hiss with electricity, the iron clunking with the weight of the carriages. I held onto my hat as the engine wafted the soot from London down the tracks. On the opposite platform, the man lowered his head and I noticed a few petals from his scarlet bouquet fall and spin onto the tracks, where they gusted over the rails like spilled blood.
Suddenly I forgot the years that had passed and, as my memories took over, part of me became fifteen years old again – just a girl in her school uniform sitting on her travel trunk. I no longer saw the man on the opposite platform nor the station clock or the colourful tube map – all I saw was my mother, as she had been on that day, wearing her hat and driving gloves. Then I watched my mother turn as a woman approached her, a woman who was small and delicate but no more than a shadow and I fancied that I could hear their voices, although the words were drowned out by the clatter of the nearing carriages. The woman took a pocket timetable from her bag and they moved towards the track to view it in the sunlight, I thought. Then my mother pointed out some times on it but I did not pay them much attention because behind them I saw the train approaching.
I screamed but the sound was knocked from my mouth by the wind from the train. In my head, I saw it happen again, but this time every second seemed to drag, as if time itself had been slowed – I watched the woman fell down onto the tracks, screaming as she went. Then I saw her, lying across the rails, her body still for just a second before she disappeared under the train.
‘Kate! Kate!’ the train now stood in the platform and the doors were open.
I tried to steady myself. ‘Hello Aunt Audrey,’ I said shakily. ‘Did you have a good trip?’
‘I was calling you for ages, girl, you must have been daydreaming again.’ Aunt Audrey hurled a large carpet bag at me. ‘Could your father not come?’
‘No,’ I said, grappling with the bag. ‘I’m afraid he’s having another of his reclusive periods, having the house empty has let his mind wander back to the dark places—’
‘I could have guessed as much,’ she snapped. ‘You too, I suppose, your skin is sallow at the best of times, but today you’re as pale as a ghost.’
‘No, I just—’
‘Never mind, you will have to do. The porters at Baker Street were awful.’
I was about to point out that, despite her high-heeled shoes, manicured hands and haute couture suit, Aunt Audrey was probably as strong as a station porter and certainly as big, but thought better of it.
She grabbed my shoulder, turned me round and balanced a hatbox on top of the carpet bag. ‘Go on, go!’ she commanded, pushing me towards the exit. She took a few steps after me and then stopped dead. ‘Jemima!’ she shrieked. ‘Where the hell is she?’ She ran back to her carriage and forced the doors back open, her five-year-old daughter, Jemima, toppling on to the platform in a tangle of hair ribbons and skipping ropes. ‘Get up! Get up!’ hissed Audrey. ‘We can’t have people seeing you like this.’ She pulled the little girl to her feet and then dusted her down, as she nodded and smiled to the people leaving the platform then, failing to untangle the child from the skipping rope, used it to pull her towards the station exit. I followed them dutifully.
Without invitation or encouragement, Aunt Audrey began to update me about her stay at her husband’s London residence, the trials of marriage to a successful London psychiatrist and the progress of her twins at boarding school. The threat of the bombs that she had returned to Missensham to escape seemed a minor consideration to her, and I fancied that they would not dare fall when she and Jemima were visiting their Kensington townhouse.
I managed to nod and smile, and answer only minor details about local gossip, of which, there was very little. Audrey seemed undeterred by my curt responses and ambled slowly along the platform, talking excitedly as if tales of cocktail parties and the threat to London couture could not possibly wait until we got home. The other passengers started to swerve round us and the luggage that I carried seemed to become even heavier when I saw the queue that was forming at the gate.
Then the whirr from the track grew loud again and doors and windows started to flash past us as the train gathered speed for the rest of its journey on to Evesbridge and the network of country lines beyond.
As we joined the queue at the exit gate, I turned round to look at the station once more. The man with the flowers was still standing alone on the opposite platform. Then he stood up slowly and stared at the track for a few moments before laying the flowers down by the bench.
Chapter 2
May 1940
‘A disgrace!’ shrieked Aunt Audrey. She slammed a copy of the Missensham Herald on to the coffee table so hard that the cups tinkled.
I pretended to look out the drawing room window as if I had noticed an interesting pigeon on the lawn, but it was useless to pretend that I had not heard her.
‘Well, I shall write to the editors at once and complain! Kate, fetch my stationery and my best fountain pen.’
I rose from my seat obediently but sat back down when I realised that her rant was not over.
‘On the front page again! And look at this headline – “On this day nine years ago”. Well, you would think that these journalists have nothing else to write about!’ She picked up the newspaper again and held her spectacles up to the newsprint and I realised that her outrage was based only on a title and a few skimmed lines of text. ‘“Murder at Missensham Station – Local Woman Commits Murder”. And named too! Here it is, “Millicent Bewsey”. We can’t have your father hearing about this!’
‘I would be surprised if he hasn’t heard,’ I said. ‘He’s only in the kitchen.’
But she didn’t take the hint and didn’t lower her voice. ‘At least they have not mentioned Missensham Grange this time. That was what really got people excited last time, the fall of the Bewseys – the local aristocracy, or the closest thing they had to it.’
‘We were hardly aristocracy,’ I said. ‘We had money and servants but—’
‘Yes, yes, but compared to the common folk of this backwater by 1931 the Bewseys of Missensham Grange had become a family of note.’
‘Maybe people do not know of the Grange any more,’ I said. ‘After all, there is little left for people to recognise. The house is divided now, even more than before the Great War, more of the land is gone. We even have a family renting the old gardener’s cottage – the “undesirables” as you like to call them.’
Audrey glared at me, unblinking, as if this act alone would be enough to scare me into agreement, but I turned my gaze back to the lawn, searching for some little thing, a fallen branch or a rabbit on the grass, to bring about a change in the conversation.
But Audrey could not keep quiet for long: ‘Well, the losses that the estate has suffered are surely down to the ghastly things that those so-called journalists wrote back then. Don’t forget how they treated your father. There were journalists hiding in the stables, scaring off the staff and, despite this, he has always stood by your mother. It was hardly surprising that he lost control of the finances and everything he had worked for was lost. The whole thing broke him. You know that he was quite a formidable soldier in his prime?’
I waited for her to continue, for I knew what was coming next; I had sat through this particular monologue far too often.
‘This was a mess made by my sister’s doing and I was left to salvage what she had left behind. I suppose you know that Jemima and I are not just your average bomb-dodgers! Our rent pays your father’s mortgage. It took a lot of persuasion on my part but, if my selfless husband hadn’t agreed to come to this family’s aid and take the place on, well, I don’t know what would have happened!’
‘We would have lost the Grange, Aunt Audrey,’ I said flatly. It was a fact that she would often remind us
of and a line I had become used to reciting to her. ‘And Dad and I are very grateful to you for letting us stay on downstairs.’
‘And now this rag of a local newspaper just wants to dredge up old memories,’ said Audrey as if she had not heard me.
‘It is only a small section on the front page,’ I said. ‘Three lines. Next to something about a summer fete.’
But she did not listen. ‘I am only lucky that I was already wed and in my marital home by then. Just imagine if I had still been in Missensham and been identified as Millicent’s sister! At least I had little to connect me to such scandal and I was no longer living in this place.’ She waved her hand around the room and I found that my eyes were following it, taking in the peeling wallpaper, dusty lampshades and tired upholstery.
Most of the finery had been sold to pay the bills, with only a few pieces surviving from my childhood – a fine velvet settee which Audrey claimed as a long-overdue inheritance, and a gramophone with a battered trumpet. There was an oil painting too, which hung above the fireplace. It was a portrait of an Irish wolfhound, a long-forgotten pet, but there were no paintings or photographs of my family, as if entire generations had ceased to exist.
I remembered when I had sat in this room as a girl, dressed in satin and frills and watched as my parents danced to the music of the gramophone. The room had been different then; decorated in the latest fashions and full of voices and music. The chairs had always been occupied by chattering guests, the smoke trails from their cigarettes shuddering with their laughter. Cocktails had been served in tall glasses and the guests would dance on the Persian rug, their bodies mingling in the light from the window. But those days were gone, and now I saw only chairs which were empty and a cocktail cabinet that was barren and gathering dust.
‘Why are you just sitting there listening to me?’ said Audrey suddenly. ‘I need to get these words down. Go on! Pen, Kate, Pen!’
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