The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘It’s just coincidence, Dad,’ I said, wearily. ‘Anyway, the station staff don’t know who he is or where he comes from, all we could hope for would be to find him on the same day next year—’

  ‘Still a possibility then!’

  ‘No, Dad,’ I said. ‘Not in the way that you want it to be. Anyway, you would not find out anything in time for the parole hearing.’

  ‘But—’

  I looked at him exasperated. ‘Please, just let it go, it’s probably nothing.’

  ‘No, no.’ he shuffled over to the flowers and took one of the blooms in his hand. ‘I’m sure this is important, I…’ but his voice trailed off.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  But he said nothing more.

  ‘What is it?’

  He had not heard me. He had one of the fat scarlet heads in his hand and his eyes were fixed on it, his face pale, and I could hear the quick hiss of his breaths.

  ‘Dad?’

  At last he muttered something under his breath and shuffled his feet. Then he dropped the flower as if it had burnt him. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I know you said that the tramp had flowers, I just didn’t think it would be these ones.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I told you that it was red flowers. What kind of flowers were you imagining?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said quickly, then added. ‘Well, I suppose that I am just surprised that we found out anything about this tramp.’ Then he smiled and turned to me. ‘You know, come to think of it, I now see that you have been right all along – I think that this is all coincidence and we should not waste any more time on this man.’ He nodded as if in agreement with himself. ‘After all, what use is a detail such as peonies to your mother’s review?’

  ‘Peonies!’ I echoed. ‘I never knew you shared my mother’s love of flowers, Dad. That’s quite unlike you!’

  ‘Oh well, I suppose some of it must have rubbed off on me,’ he said absent-mindedly. ‘I suppose when you have been together with someone for so long you just…’ but his voice faded again as if it was lost under the voices battling in his conscious. ‘The trouble with peonies is that they bloom for such a short time,’ he said at last.

  Chapter 6

  May 1940

  She was a girl but only just; not quite a woman. She sat with her mother on the Long Lawn, an open book resting on the grass between them. Her legs were bent awkwardly, the hem of her skirt exposing an angular knee, and I thought that she must be of the age where her limbs were still lengthening, the brief months before they would start to round with age as she grew into the body of her womanhood. Her shoulders were hunched as though she was conscious of the bud of her breasts glancing the fabric of her blouse, and she ran a hand through hair that was still fair and untrained by pins and lacquer.

  The girl’s lips were moving silently, her finger tracing a line of text. Her mother sat motionless, her face angled towards the book but her eyes closed as if to bathe in her daughter’s voice and live among the words in the story.

  But she was not my mother and the girl was not me. It had been nine years since my mother and I had sat in the garden and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland together. And now I stood, a grown woman, watching two strangers through the kitchen window, my hands in the basin of suds that had turned cold. I thought about the summer of 1931, the scent of my mother’s lavender water and the leaves of the poplar twinkling as they caught in the breeze. I fancied that I could make out the words on the girl’s lips as she talked of mad hatters, Cheshire cats and March hares.

  A shrill whistle cut through my thoughts and the memory was gone. The girl on the lawn turned her head towards the sound and I saw that the skin of her cheek was red and mottled. Her mother opened her eyes and followed her daughter’s gaze, then she stood up slowly, her shawl falling to the ground to show the fabric of her dress clinging to the small but unmistakable swell of her belly, her little family about to become bigger.

  I was not watching my own family but the family from the old gardener’s cottage, the lodgers: Aunt Audrey’s so-called undesirables.

  Then another whistle, louder and closer this time, and a large man forced a wheelbarrow through the long grass, setting it down by the mother and child. He was a tall man, big and muscled, with coarse features and large hands, the kind of man that would have no grace in Audrey’s social circle and now I realised that the girl was squinting at the page, her fingers hovering over the words and I wondered if she could read at all and if the sentences she had been reciting had been from memory. The mother stretched across to where the man stood and held a handkerchief out to him but I saw no glint of a wedding ring on her finger.

  Man, woman and child – these were Aunt Audrey’s unfortunate acquaintances; the scandalous little unit that she secreted away from her husband when he visited from London, the unfortunates that she was only sheltering out of the ‘goodness of her heart’. While she was within the walls of the house, she would complain of her charity towards the woman who was once a friend and had thrown away a good marriage for the sake of a labourer and a waif. She would refer to them as the marriage breaker, adulterer and foundling but, as I watched them, I could see so much more than I had; I saw a family.

  And then they all turned their heads and looked towards the house at exactly the same moment and I fancied that my thoughts had become so strong as to be audible, and I looked away quickly, lowering my gaze back down to the suds.

  When I next looked up, the mother and daughter were heading back to the cottage, the mother with the book in her hand and the daughter with a girlish skip in her step. The man had taken up the wheelbarrow again and was continuing across the lawn towards the stables.

  It was then I saw it – a flash of red among the vines that trailed from the sides of the barrow. I dropped the dish I was holding back into the water and rushed out on to the lawn.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted. ‘Wait, Mr—’

  He stopped as he saw me approaching and set the wheelbarrow down, wiping the handkerchief across his brow. ‘My name is Peter,’ he said and then raised his eyebrows and added, ‘Well, maybe not to the mistress of the house, but it is Peter to you, Miss Kate.’

  ‘Of course,’ I panted, suddenly embarrassed by my sprint across the lawn. I pointed at the mass of red in the wheelbarrow. ‘These flowers are in full bloom,’ I said. ‘Why have you dug them up?’

  ‘It is a bit of a shame, Miss, but it was on Mr Bewsey’s instructions. He’s been reading the pamphlets from the War Office. Says that we should be preparing for war and that he needs all the flower beds to grow potatoes and carrots.’

  ‘But these flowers?’ I said, pulling one of the stems from the wheelbarrow. ‘Where did you get these? I’ve not seen them growing here before.’

  ‘Oh you won’t have seen those ones growing on the beds by the Long Lawn,’ he said. ‘These were inside the old walled garden by the cottage. Mr Bewsey saw them there and took exception to them. He said that they had to be pulled up, every single one of them.’

  ‘The walled garden!’ I said. ‘It is open at last, after all this time? It has been locked for nine years; I thought the key was lost.’

  ‘No, Miss,’ he said. ‘The lock was fair rusted but Mr Bewsey had the key himself.’

  I looked to the high brick wall. The arch was now clear of ivy and the door stood open, the journey of the wheelbarrow still striped in the grass.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘This is very unlike Dad. He used to invest in the garden but it is so unlike him to take an interest in it and to—’

  ‘I thought it odd too,’ he said. ‘I fancied that we could sell the flowers in the village or put them on the war memorial but Mr Bewsey wasn’t having any of it. He said that I should compost them directly. In fact my missus was upset by me taking up all these flowers. She is easily upset at the moment; in the family way, you see.’

  ‘So my father went into the walled garden?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand,
he never—’

  ‘We went in together this morning,’ he said. ‘Mr Bewsey said that he wanted to see if there were any of the old fruit canes still growing but, in the end, all he told me to do was to take these ones out, these—’

  ‘Peonies,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘These red flowers are called peonies.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss. You must know that I’m not a real gardener, my family and I are only here due to Mrs Lawson’s charity. I’m doing the best that I can.’

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I said quickly, realising that I must have sounded harsh.

  ‘It does seem like an old plant. Even I can tell that much, it was well rooted. It’s probably been there for twenty odd years. It was still thriving, though.’

  ‘Is this the last of them?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, for now, but there might have been a few bits of tuber I missed. More may come next year. You can never really get rid of this kind of thing, it always returns.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  He raised the wheelbarrow handles once more and I took one of the flowers from the top.

  ‘Please give your wife my best wishes for the new arrival,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Kate,’

  I watched as he walked to the compost heaps, a slight limp in his step, then I looked back at the stripe that the wheelbarrow had made in the grass on its journey from the walled garden. I set off back to the house but after a few paces, stopped and turned to look back at the wall. The old garden was open for the first time in nine years. I had been a girl of fifteen when I had last walked along its narrow brick paths and sat with my mother under the pear tree and suddenly I longed to relive those days. I followed the stripe of the wheelbarrow back to the walled garden and walked through the open doorway.

  Chapter 7

  May 1940

  I put the peony on the kitchen table. ‘Did you think that I wouldn’t see them?’ I said.

  Dad lowered his newspaper, just enough to glimpse the flower, but then he raised it again and muttered into the pages ‘I just thought that it was time to clear out the flowers. We need the space to grow vegetables for the war—’

  ‘I know what you told Peter,’ I said, ‘but it won’t work with me, I know you well enough to see that something is amiss. This sudden interest in the plants and opening up the walled garden just isn’t like you.’

  ‘Well maybe it’s time for a change,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s about time that I changed.’

  ‘These flowers are exactly the same kind as the ones that the tramp left at the station, and the very day after seeing them, you open up the walled garden and have all the red peonies removed. I went into the garden when I found out it was open. All the poppies and geraniums and brambles are left behind, but the peonies, you had dug up. Why these ones?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘It is for the war, the garden was once productive, profitable even. It was me and your mother’s investments in the garden that got this house through the Great War and it could turn the Grange’s fortunes around again. Another war will soon be upon us, we need space to grow…’ but he stopped when he realised that he was repeating himself and I started to think that his argument sounded rehearsed.

  I put my hand in my pocket, my fingertips tracing the edge of the card that had been left with the peonies at the station. ‘Who is Rosalie?’ I said.

  He was silent, his mouth dropping open just a fraction as if he knew he should speak but not what to say.

  I did not give him any time to feign ignorance: ‘Did a woman by that name have something to do with this house? Did she have some connection to the peonies in the walled garden? These plants were old, the stems are woody and dry. They would have been here for years, maybe even before the walled garden was built.’

  ‘Well, I certainly don’t recall anyone of that name since we’ve been here,’ he said. ‘The grand ladies of this house always had upright names; plain, churchy names like Jane and Anne. That name you said, just then. That sounds like the name of a harlot.’ It was a word that I had not heard him use before, but there was no malice in it.

  I took the card from my pocket and put it in front of him. ‘The woman my mother killed at the station was called Rosalie, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Rosalie!’ but this time he almost shouted it. Then he took the card from my hand and stared at it.

  ‘I found this card tucked in with the flowers that the tramp left at the station, the red peonies,’ I said. ‘He leaves these flowers there every year on the anniversary of the woman’s death, at exactly the same spot. That is too much of a coincidence.’

  I watched his face but there was no movement in his expression but then I realised that he was no longer looking at me but into the distance, his eyes wide and unblinking. Then the card began to tremble in his fingers.

  ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Dad, are you all right?’

  The colour had drained from his face and he did not answer.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ I said, worried that I had been too hard on him.

  I found that the pot on the draining board was still warm. I poured a large cup and added an extra spoonful of sugar, then I ducked into his bedroom and found a clean blanket, but when I returned to him, it seemed that neither tea nor blanket were needed. His eyes were bright again and they connected with mine.

  ‘Thank you, love,’ he said in a voice that was unusually steady. He took the tea from me and raised it to his mouth. But I found that I could not wait for him to finish.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well?’ He laughed. ‘Well what?’

  ‘Who was she?’ I cried. ‘What does this name mean to you?’

  ‘That name means nothing. I was just a bit surprised because this could be something new, but now I see that just like you said about the tramp and the flowers – it is a little detail not worth worrying about.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is not nothing, everything about you changed when I said that name, even before I told you it was the name of the woman at the station.’

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘I believe there might have been a maid of that name serving in this house once, but she left during the Great War.’ He frowned and rubbed his forehead. ‘But, thinking about it, that might have been Rosie or Rosalind even. I don’t really remember much about her.’

  ‘But can you tell me something? There must be something that you do remember!’

  He waved his hand in the air as if to waft away the question. ‘All I remember is that she made a disturbance and upset a visitor, an important one, a chap that your mother was thinking about selling some land to. It put the house in a bad light and the deal did not go through, so the maid had to go.’

  ‘What kind of disturbance?’ I said.

  ‘Oh really, Kate!’ he said, and his tone was the one that he had used when I was a child and had spilt the milk or drawn on the walls. ‘We are talking about over twenty years ago. In a place like this maids come and go. I can’t be expected to remember everyone who has passed through here.’

  But I wasn’t going to let him put me off. ‘Where did she go?’ I said. ‘You can’t have just turned her out on to the streets!’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘She left with a man, in fact the businessman who had been staying in the house at the time. We knew he would take care of her – make sure she found another position, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Which man?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, just some man, I don’t recall his name. I don’t see how all that can be important.’ Then he stood up to show that the conversation was ending, ‘Look, darling, I don’t think that either of us will ever know any more than this. In fact I am starting to think that ten months in which to submit our case is actually no time at all and we are wasting our time on this line of enquiry. Why don’t you forget about finding the tramp and concentrate on writing a statement to contribute to our case? Try and remember some happy anecdotes about your loving mother and her gentl
e nature.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, but doubt was already starting to take hold of me. I no longer trusted my father and I was not even sure if I could trust my memories any more.

  Millicent

  Chapter 8

  May 1915

  It was hidden in the kitchen cupboard under the sink. I found it there when I was looking for the washing soda. It was at the back, concealed behind a bunch of cut flowers – red peonies from the garden. I didn’t know what it was at first, but when I opened the little brown box, I found a long stretch of limp brown rubber and when I held it up to the light it drooped almost to my elbow and I realised it was a long pocket, the shape and size matching that of a gentleman’s member. I dropped it on to the table quickly, but, as I washed the dishes, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  When I was growing up, the kitchen had always been a place for the servants, but as my family’s fortune had started to wane, so the servants had left, one by one and, by 1915, we had to make do with just a maid-of-all work, an aged gardener and a young man who we called the stable boy even though he had just one old horse to exercise and one crippled hound to feed. I found that, as the lady of the house, I was spending more and more time in the kitchen but, somehow, this was still the servants’ place. I felt that I could not chastise them for leaving the object for fear that they would abandon me for positions in better houses.

  I had heard about such things of course, read about them in magazines, and giggled about them in the dormitories at boarding school, but I did not think that I would ever see one. It was part of another world, not something you would see in a respectable village such as Missensham nor a grand house such as the Grange– it was the type of thing that sailors picked up on their travels, or were peddled by shady men in the backstreets of London.

  I might have thought little of it, servants had come and gone over the years and we had often found bits of lost property – old boot laces and handkerchiefs – about the place, but there was something about this object, so personal yet so out of place, and the deep red freshness of the flowers that had screened it, that made me imagine that it had been stashed in haste lest a tryst be discovered.