The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  I sat at the table and began to tighten the stitches. I was sure I could fix the bonnet, and maybe Hugh too could be mended with time, for I was sure that he would feel differently once she was born and he could actually see our little Kate.

  From the darkness, Igor watched with big sad eyes.

  Chapter 11

  July 1915

  ‘I’m thinking about Clement,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Clement?’ I echoed.

  ‘Yes, as a name for the child.’ He set his knife and fork back down on the dining table as if what he was saying needed our full attention. ‘I am assuming it will be a boy of course,’ he added. He looked at me but I needed only to open my mouth for him to guess my response. ‘You’re thinking about a girl again, aren’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well I suppose we could always come up with some feminine version just in case that happens – Clementella, Clementina, I don’t know, something like that.’ Then he smiled. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Sorry, darling.’ I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. ‘I’m just happy that’s all; you didn’t seem pleased before.’

  ‘I was pleased,’ he said. ‘Well, what I meant to say is that I am pleased. I suppose it was all just a bit of a shock, what with trying for so long and everything we went through—’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘But let’s not remind ourselves of that just now.’

  ‘You are quite right of course,’ he said. ‘Let’s think of all the positive things – I will have a happy wife and this will be sure to win my mother’s approval at last.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly, fearing that the long-awaited heir to his family line was more important than the child itself.

  ‘And I do think that we can make things work,’ Hugh continued. ‘But with an extra mouth to feed, we may have to sell Sunningdale Farm after all.’

  ‘It is my farm,’ I said, twisting my napkin in my lap. ‘My decision.’

  But he did not seem to hear me. ‘I will ring for dessert,’ he said, reaching for the bell pull.

  I looked out the window and across the Long Lawn and tried to convince myself that it was the baby itself that Hugh was happy about, and not the end that it brought to some of his little inconveniences.

  I tried to change the subject back to the baby. ‘What made you think that Clement would be a good name?’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He grinned. ‘I would hope that any child of ours would be a strong upright fellow like Clement.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said dully.

  I had hoped that we could discuss names together, redecorate the nursery and plan for a christening in a church strewn with white flowers, but already Hugh’s interest had waned and he was talking about the army again and his time in Tibet, about snowy mountains and towering monasteries and feudal villages and natives armed only with pitchforks. There had been a time that I found his stories romantic but now, with the onset of war closer to home, I started to think about the monasteries burned and the villages ransacked and those Tibetan women whose husbands and sons had not returned home to them.

  Even when Rosalie appeared with the crumble and set it out on the table in front of him, Hugh did not even notice and kept talking about Tibetan people and their disobedience and lack of social graces.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said loudly, embarrassed when she walked out without a word.

  ‘Primitive,’ he concluded at last. ‘I found them just so primitive.’

  ‘What about the natives of Missensham?’ I laughed. ‘Are they primitive too? You know, when we have a baby, you may even need to venture into their settlement for me!’

  But he did not see the humour. ‘I know you think I am snooty,’ he said. ‘But the thing is, I don’t mind dealing with people when they know their place.’ He paused as if thinking. ‘It is just when they get demanding that—’

  ‘Demanding?’ I said. ‘When have they ever been demanding?’

  ‘What I mean is, the master of a large house like the Grange is expected to play a role in a village such as this, isn’t he? Buy the bunting for the summer fete, pay for the church roof to be mended, fund the boy scouts…’ But then he stopped as he did not need to say any more and I started to understand the reason for his long stints working in the study, his reluctant trips to the village and his shortness with the locals. He was from a family that was always expected to give and to not do so would be admitting that he had nothing.

  But Hugh had his trips to see the workers on the farm, he met with his old army pals and he had an easy relationship with Arthur. He won Jimmy’s admiration with his tales of foreign lands and, although he did not make an effort with the villagers, he was a man, and if a man starts a conversation with another about cricket or war, they have a bond, if only for a few minutes, but they will always have that in common.

  I had no such company, Rosalie was just a girl and female conversation with the women in town was always about children and on this subject I had nothing to say. I poured more wine.

  I started to think of the baby again, but who I thought of was not Clement but Kate – the girl that I had always wanted. She would be the one to wear the bonnet that I was fixing, the one who would sleep in the nursery. She would be the female company that I had always wanted, the companionship that I had craved since my sister left.

  She was coming at last, but the world had not waited for her – all around me things were changing and now I would have to shelter her from war, an invading army and the other horrors that war can bring upon women. What would happen to her in this harsh world?

  I thought of the names listed in the newspapers’ casualty reports, young lives reduced to lines of text, the recruitment posters showing demonic Hun and flaming battlefields and the boom of the guns over the hills of Evesbridge. I thought of violence, blood and death.

  ‘Darling, are you all right?’ said Hugh, waving his hand slowly in front of my face. ‘You were miles away. You have not touched your crumble, it has gone quite cold.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘Yes, I am fine.’

  I lifted the napkin from my lap but found that I had torn it to shreds.

  Kate

  Chapter 12

  June 1940

  ‘Kate! Kate! We have a visitor!’ Dad rushed into the hallway.

  He seemed so excited that I pocketed the door key and left my bag of shopping on the step.

  ‘I’m so glad that I heard you get in, you nearly missed him.’ He beckoned excitedly, ‘Come on!’

  I started towards the service stairs but Dad stopped me.

  ‘No, in here,’ he said, waving me into the drawing room.

  I grabbed his shoulder. ‘Where are Aunt Audrey and Jemima?’ I hissed.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them, they couldn’t get away fast enough.’

  Afternoon tea for three was set out on the coffee table overlooking the garden, the best china was out as well as the remaining silver teaspoons, but Dad had only managed to find garibaldis in the larder and all of the week’s sugar ration sat in a tiny bowl among the teacups. An old man in a pinstripe suit sat in the chair by the hearth.

  ‘It’s Mr Crozier,’ said Dad excitedly.

  ‘I can see that it is Mr Crozier,’ I said.

  ‘Good to see you, Kate.’ The old man made a move to stand, but on seeing my face seemed to think better of it.

  ‘Hello,’ I said shortly.

  ‘You have grown a lot since I last saw you, Kate.’

  ‘You would expect that over nine years,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have certainly inherited your mother’s tongue!’ But his tone was more humorous than scolding.

  I didn’t know how to reply, so decided that it was best not to.

  Dad ignored us both. ‘Mr Crozier, I must thank you again for your help all those years ago, your advice was such a help to us in our time of need.’ Mr Crozier seemed embarrassed but Dad continued: ‘And for your continued correspondence ove
r the years when we could no longer afford legal fees and—’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Crozier quickly. ‘I am only sorry that I could not have persuaded Millicent to take my representation, to take any, in fact. If I had succeeded there, things might have been very different for her.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that,’ I said, perching on the end of the sofa. ‘She pushed a woman under a train, in front of several witnesses.’

  ‘Kate!’

  ‘But it’s the truth, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘There isn’t a court in the land that would have let her off, legal representation or not.’

  Neither of them spoke for a few seconds, as if they were both hoping that the other would contradict me, but no contradiction came.

  Eventually Dad spoke: ‘But that is not why we are here now, we should look to the future. Your mother is doing us proud at last.’ I noticed he had the letter from the parole board in his hand and he waved it proudly. ‘She has a whole five years of good behaviour behind her, she has found faith. She is a changed woman!’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Mr Crozier, stabbing a bony finger in the air. ‘What we need to do now is to demonstrate that her current behaviour is at odds with what went before. We must re-examine those unfortunate weeks that led up to the incident. We must show that she was not of sound mind back then.’ He turned to me, ‘You are much older now, Kate, you have had time to reflect, maybe to think about the significance of little details that you might not have found important at the time.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t think about it at all,’ I said, trying to sound confident, but I could not deliver the strength that the words needed and Mr Crozier ignored them.

  ‘So, your father and I have established that your mother had been acting strangely in the fortnight leading up to the incident.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would agree with that. You see, up until that point she would never let me out of her sight. Even when I wanted to be alone, I would catch her watching me from a window or hear her breath from behind a door. Then she suddenly decided that I should go to boarding school miles away from home. So, yes, I would call that strange. On top of that she told me that I had flu and locked me in the house when I did not have so much as a sniffle—’

  ‘And all this was immediately following the attack in the walled garden?’

  ‘It was,’ I said, ‘but this is nothing new, the court has already heard this.’

  ‘But now we have your mother’s good behaviour to contrast it with, so we will need to remind the parole board of how troubled she was back then. You see, it must have been very upsetting for her at the time, and then to see a man who she thought her attacker again—’

  ‘I did not see a tramp at the station that day,’ I said, ‘and if this man had been my mother’s assailant, I would certainly have recognised him.’

  ‘But other witnesses saw a tramp there,’ said Dad quickly. ‘Your mother might have seen the same man and got confused.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Mr Crozier. ‘Remember this was just before the…’ He hesitated. ‘The…’

  ‘Murder,’ I said.

  But he did not acknowledge the word. ‘So, Kate, please try to remember what happened that day in the garden two weeks before the incident. Where did you first notice the tramp?’

  ‘In the walled garden,’ I said.

  ‘Please can you be a bit more specific.’

  ‘Sit back,’ said Dad, putting a cushion behind me. ‘Close your eyes, try to think of—’

  ‘No,’ I said sharply, shoving the cushion away. ‘I am fine as I am.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Crozier. ‘If you don’t mind then, I shall try and jog your memory by reading the statement that you made about the attack to the constable.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but I really don’t see any point to this.’

  He sat up straight and cleared his throat as if he was about to recite in church and held a yellowed sheet of paper up in front of him. ‘“Mother and I were sat under the pear tree reading Alice in Wonderland. I heard a noise and I looked up and there was a man standing in the garden.”’

  The words were simple, those of a child, but somehow I could still hear myself in them and then I fancied that I could picture myself as I was that day in the walled garden, with my sun hat and summer dress. Then I remembered the smell of the jasmine and the dapple of the sun on my old, faded blanket and my mother as she looked up at the snap of the twig and rose to stand, the book falling from her knee. I remembered how I looked up and saw him, a big man in a faded work coat, the skin on his face red with jagged scars like frost patterns on a windowpane, one eye milky-white. I remembered how he towered over me as he approached, how his one eye did not move so I could not tell whether he was watching me or if I was hidden from his view. I remembered my breath shortening and how everything around me seemed to stop and I could no longer hear the birds or feel the sun on my skin.

  Mr Crozier looked at me. ‘Are you all right, Kate? You seem to have gone a little pale.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m just listening. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very well then,’ said Mr Crozier. ‘I shall continue. “My mother asked the man to leave, but then he looked at me and said that I was a beauty and he would have me. Then he reached out. I thought he would strangle Mum, he put his hand around her throat, but he just tore her necklace away.”’ Mr Crozier stopped again. ‘But this necklace was not reported as a theft, Kate?’

  ‘There was no need,’ I said. ‘He just broke the chain from round her neck. It fell by her feet. It must have slipped from his fingers.’

  ‘Yet he did not retrieve it? Don’t you think that strange?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose…’ But then I stopped, with everything else that had happened, this was something that I had never thought of.

  Dad’s face brightened. ‘Well, don’t you see? This makes the attack all the more sinister. Why would someone snatch a piece of jewellery and then not take it? It must prove that the tramp was a madman. Millicent must have known this – she must have seen that he was capable of anything.’

  Mr Crozier scribbled some notes in a pocket jotter. ‘Perhaps so,’ he said, ‘or maybe he did pick it up in the confusion or at a later point?’

  ‘No,’ I said, putting my hand to my neck. ‘My mother gave it to me on the morning of the murder, just before she drove me to the station. She told me to always remember that I belonged to her.’ I undid the clasp and handed the necklace to Mr Crozier.

  He took off his spectacles and peered at the necklace through one of the lenses. ‘Do you know the value of the piece?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad, ‘it has never been valued.’

  ‘Well, I cannot be sure, but most jade tends to come from the Far East – China, the Himalayas even.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dad. ‘Tibet.’

  ‘So it would appear to be quite an unusual piece, although the stones are only semi-precious, so I would imagine that it is not of great value.’

  ‘My mother thought it was precious,’ I said. ‘She always said that the pendant would suit me just as well as it did her, because my green eyes came from her.’

  ‘So it held some sentimental value.’ Mr Crozier turned the pendant over in his fingers. ‘Ah, yes, an inscription, just one word, but the metal is tarnished and with my eyes as they are I cannot read it. There is quite an ornate “M” and the last letter is a “y” but, as for the letters in the middle…’ He held it out to me. ‘Will you read it for me, Kate? Your young eyes will do much better.’

  ‘Milly,’ I said, without taking it. I too cannot read all the letters but the word is too short to be Millicent and she spelt Milly with a “y”.’

  ‘Milly,’ Mr Crozier repeated. ‘Well, I suppose we could just claim that it was precious to her, so would have been traumatic to lose. It would just make the attack seem personal to her.’ He placed the pendant carefully on his lap and coiled th
e chain around it. ‘Apologies, I shall continue.’

  And so he did. He read the words from the statement exactly as they were written. His voice was hoarse with age, but the words he spoke were those of a young girl, of me, the young Kate, and I listened intently as I talked of my mother and the tramp as they stood face to face, their eyes locked on one another.

  But there was more to the words than what was written: there was my shock as I saw mother pick up a spade that lay on the soil; the sight of the whiteness of her knuckles as she clenched the handle; the shaking of my legs which meant that I could not stand; the dryness in my mouth which stopped my protests; the feeling of wire coiling in my stomach; the quickening of breath; a fluttering heart, until I feared that I could listen no longer.

  ‘Mercy!’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘Mercy,’ Mr Crozier repeated. ‘It is written here in your statement. It is what the tramp said to your mother when she took hold of the spade.’

  ‘How strange, but I don’t remember that part,’ I said.

  ‘It is what you told the constable.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said. ‘It has been nine years though, I would not be expected to remember everything.’

  ‘What do you remember about what was said?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to think, ‘I suppose that really I remember very little. I remember that they were still talking at that point, I just don’t remember what was said.’

  ‘So it could have been “mercy”?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose it could have been.’

  ‘Do you recall what happened after that?’