Vow of Adoration/Vow of Devotion/Vow of Fidelity

by Black, Veronica

  ‘It’s nothing to do with poaching,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘You have a Finn Boswell in camp.’

  ‘Hettie Boswell’s youngest, yes.’

  ‘You were out on the moor last night looking for him.’

  ‘Aye, for a bit. I spoke to Sister Joan, up near the convent wall. She couldn’t answer since it was the silence time.’

  ‘And then you called off the search? You didn’t tell the police?’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘Weren’t no need, Sister. Luther came along and told us the lad was safe. Out doing a bit of mischief like lads will.’

  His eyes, black and sharp, moved from one face to the other.

  ‘I’m afraid something has happened, Padraic,’ Sister Joan said, glancing at her companion. ‘I need to talk to Mrs Boswell.’

  ‘She’s over there, building her fire.’ Padraic pointed. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘We found Finn Boswell,’ the detective said, his voice and face carefully neutral.

  ‘Found him?’ Padraic stared at them, eyes narrowing.

  ‘He’s dead. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Dead? How?’

  ‘He was killed by someone – we don’t yet know whom,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Someone must tell his parents and identify the body later.’

  ‘Killed? Murdered you mean?’ Padraic passed a hand over his greasy, greying-black curls. ‘But Luther said—’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to Luther,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Who knows where Luther gets to?’ Padraic said. ‘I don’t understand it. Luther came and told us that Finn was all right. We called off the search. Luther may be a mite addled betimes in the head but he knows the difference between all right and dead!’

  Someone had to tell Finn’s parents. As Sister Joan looked past the two men towards the caravan where a woman in a flowered overall was bending over a pile of firewood, Padraic said, ‘It’s best if the sergeant gives the news, Sister. They’d want it official as if they were important like.’

  ‘Yes. I understand.’ Sister Joan nodded and turned back towards the car. In life little Finn Boswell had been one among many. In death he assumed stature which his parents would wish to dignify with an official announcement.

  She was too restless to sit in the car and so walked past it, her eyes lowered because when one was in a state of turmoil it was a shield to keep custody of the eyes in approved conventual style.

  One of the guests at the retreat had killed Finn Boswell, just as they had killed Patricia Mayne, and Bryan Grimes, and possibly Sally and Serge too. Five deaths that had to be connected somehow. Six deaths! She had forgotten momentarily about Johnny Clare. One thread connected them all. She took the tie-pin out of her pocket and looked at the glittering initials. It was her clear duty to hand it over to the police. Of course she would do so. But her fidelity to her old friends wasn’t some chimera to be wiped off the mirror of her mind. First she had a few questions to ask. Old friends deserved the chance to offer an explanation at least.

  ‘Sister! You need more apples picking?’

  Luther had loped from behind one of the heaps of firewood piled about the straggle of caravans and trailers.

  ‘Not today, Luther.’ She repressed a slight start. ‘Today is Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday.’ He considered the word for a moment, then nodded. ‘No poaching on Sunday,’ he said virtuously. ‘I telled Finn.’

  ‘You told Finn not to go poaching?’

  There was no use in displaying the least flicker of excitement because Luther was apt to take fright and vanish.

  ‘Last night,’ he said. ‘We were looking for him. All the men seeking on the moor. I gave them the message.’

  ‘From Finn?’

  ‘From Finn and his friend,’ Luther said. ‘Finn said he going to the convent with his friend to see the sisters and he’d come home after breakfast. I was to tell that to his mam so she’d not fret.’

  ‘Finn was with a friend?’

  Luther nodded.

  ‘Did the friend speak to you?’

  Luther shook his head.

  ‘You said you had a message from both of them?’

  ‘Finn spoke for his friend,’ Luther said, obviously cudgelling his memory. ‘Finn said his friend had the toothache. It’s nasty is the toothache. I had a toothache once and Mama Sarah gave me cloves to burn out the pain and—’

  ‘What did Finn’s friend look like?’

  She had spoken too vehemently. Luther’s face had gone blank, only his eyes shifting.

  ‘I’ve not done nothing wrong,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘No, of course you haven’t,’ Sister Joan reassured. ‘You’ve remembered the message very cleverly. Was Finn’s friend a little boy?’

  ‘No, Sister!’ Luther spoke with a sudden flare of energy. ‘It’d not be right to leave two young ’uns out at night! He was a man grown, but he’d a scarf round his mouth for the toothache.’

  ‘And Finn said?’

  ‘“Tell Mam I’m going up to the sisters and will come home after breakfast.” Then he said, “Come on, Colin”,’ Luther said, in the singsong tones of remembering. ‘And then they went away into the dark.’

  Eleven

  ‘I’ll run you back to the convent, Sister,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said as she rejoined him.

  Within the caravan from which he had just emerged she could hear the high-pitched keening of grief. To have offered to give comfort would have been an impertinence.

  In the car he sat for a moment in silence before starting the engine. Another police car had driven up and two constables were preparing to take statements from the group of Romanies who had congregated, the women wailing, the men hard-eyed. It would be better for the killer if the police caught him first.

  ‘What did Luther have to say to you?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Ducking away as I came out of the Boswell vardo. You wouldn’t be holding back any information in the mistaken belief that you owed some kind of faithfulness to your old friends, would you?’

  ‘I have one or two questions to ask first and then I’ll have some useful information, I hope. Can you give me a little time?’ she asked.

  ‘Officially I can’t give you any time at all,’ he said. ‘Unofficially I shall give you until tomorrow morning. By then we’ll have the preliminary pathologist’s report, statements from the lad’s people. I’ll come over at ten to have a few words with the guests at the retreat. If anyone suddenly decides to leave call me. I’ll be at the station.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said soberly.

  ‘It has to be one of the guests.’ He spoke broodingly, following his own train of thought. ‘Johnny Clare, Patricia Mayne and now Finn Boswell all had their throats cut. There’s a link. Has to be!’

  ‘I’ll find out what I can.’

  They had reached the convent gates where he slowed and stopped. At a little distance a yellow tarpaulin flapped in the breeze over the pile of branches. The ambulance had gone. Constable Petrie was talking to a man with a camera.

  ‘Be very careful, Sister.’ Detective Sergeant Mill spoke without taking his eyes from the driving mirror. ‘I’m bending the rules for you.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’ She threw him a swift smile as she got out of the car, and walked at a brisk pace through the gates without looking back. In her pocket the tie-pin felt red hot.

  Sister Perpetua met her at the back door.

  ‘Brother Cuthbert borrowed the van and went off to find Father Malone,’ she said. ‘They’ll both be giving what comfort they can, though that’s precious little compared with the death of a child. Miss Ford insisted she was all right and went off to the postulancy to lie down for a bit. The others are still in the garden. I’m afraid it wasn’t possible to keep the news from them. They’d heard the police cars and the two gentlemen walked down to the gates to have a look.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister.’ Sister Joan crossed the yard ag
ain and took the path that led between the high shrubbery to the tennis court.

  Barbara wasn’t lying down. She was pacing the court, hands thrust in her pockets, her head bent. She swung round as Sister Joan reached the steps and stared up at her.

  ‘What happens now?’ she demanded. ‘Do we all get grilled by the police or what?’

  ‘Only by me,’ Sister Joan said mildly, seating herself on the top step. ‘You were Johnny Clare’s mother, weren’t you?’

  A flash of time lengthened into a long moment. Then Barbara sat down on the lowest step, twisting herself sideways with her back against a stray piece of fencing.

  ‘How did you find out?’ she asked.

  ‘An intelligent guess. You left college halfway through the second term because your father was sick? Then he recovered, remarried his nurse and you all three emigrated to New Zealand? Your father was killed in a gliding accident in the year he was supposed to be recovering from a serious illness. So you left for another reason. The only one I could think of was pregnancy. Twenty years back we didn’t take such things as lightly as people do today. And you were quiet, rather shy. You didn’t sleep around.’

  ‘Johnny was born in New Zealand on the tenth of August, 1975,’ Barbara said tonelessly. ‘Dad had been killed a couple of months before and I had no family except for a cousin in New Zealand who invited me to join her. So I went.’

  Another of the dates written on the old newspaper was clarified.

  ‘And Johnny was adopted out there?’ she asked.

  ‘Not through an official adoption agency,’ Barbara said. ‘The Clares were neighbours of my cousin and they offered to take him. Henry Clare was an engineer and he and his wife could provide a loving, stable home for a child, so I was glad to agree.’

  ‘He didn’t know you were his mother?’

  Barbara shook her head.

  ‘They told him he’d been specially chosen – you know, the way people do. In the summer of seventy-eight, just before Johnny’s birthday, they came over to England.’

  ‘On the third of June, 1978,’ Sister Joan murmured.

  ‘Somewhere around that time,’ Barbara said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Serge left a pile of old newspapers in his flat,’ Sister Joan said. ‘He’d written some dates down the margin of one.’

  ‘Then he did have—’ Barbara broke off abruptly, pulling up a tuft of grass and turning it over and over in her hand.

  ‘Was Serge collecting dates – evidence of some kind?’ Sister Joan asked.

  ‘Evidence, yes. I wasn’t sure what proof he had,’ Barbara said. ‘He never would say.’

  ‘Proof as to who murdered Johnny?’

  ‘He had theories,’ Barbara said, throwing the grass away and dusting her hand over her trousers. ‘Serge loved mysteries.’

  ‘Was Serge the father?’

  ‘Serge? No, not Serge.’ Barbara gave a dismal little laugh. ‘Serge was handsome. He could have any girl he chose. It wasn’t unlikely he’d have looked twice at mousy old me! No, Bryan was the father.’

  ‘You and Bryan?’ Sister Joan shook her head slightly. ‘I didn’t know you even dated.’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Barbara said wryly. ‘The truth is that Bryan was shy with girls. He was more at ease with his own sex. But we got stuck together at the Christmas party, and everybody else was pairing off or going on somewhere, and one thing led to another. You know what it’s like!’

  ‘If I remember rightly I spent that particular Christmas being bored to death by a second-year student who believed he was the reincarnation of Gauguin,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Did Bryan know about the baby?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him,’ Barbara said. ‘At least not at first. We weren’t in a position to get married and Bryan was a nice person. He’d have fretted. I figured it was my own problem. My dad was very supportive, but then Dad was killed in the flying accident and Phyllis, my cousin, invited me to stay with her.’

  ‘When did you tell Bryan?’ Sister Joan asked.

  ‘I wrote to him,’ Barbara said. ‘The Clares had kept in touch and I wrote to Bryan, to tell him that I’d had a child. All right, so it was a silly thing to do! Johnny had been adopted, so why tell Bryan about something that was over and done? I don’t know why – impulse, I suppose! Anyway he wrote back, asking me about Johnny. It was a nice letter. He seemed interested – not just in the fact that I’d had a baby but in me personally!’

  ‘You thought you might get together?’

  ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’ Barbara grinned ruefully. ‘Eight years after I’d had our child adopted I wrote to tell him all about it, when it was too late for him to do anything at all. He wrote back – such a nice letter, asking me all about Johnny. I hadn’t seen Johnny for years but the Clares kept in touch and I told Bryan everything I knew. There was never any idea of claiming him back, but it was nice to be able to tell him that he’d fathered such a nice, bright little boy.’

  ‘And then Johnny was murdered,’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘I was never brought into the case at all,’ Barbara said. ‘The adoption had taken place in New Zealand. There was no reason to connect me with Johnny and the Clares said nothing. Anyway in the beginning he simply vanished. Someone who wanted a child might’ve taken him.’

  ‘Bryan?’

  ‘No, Bryan didn’t want to settle down with anything resembling a family. At heart he was a loner, and the Clares knew that I was making a good career for myself. My life has no room for a child in it. I’ve worked on my image, got rid of my mousiness.’

  ‘Very effectively,’ Sister Joan said. ‘I hardly recognized you.’

  ‘They found Johnny’s remains six years later.’ Barbara’s voice had sharpened, speeded up as if she wanted to reach the end. ‘In a field outside Maidstone.’

  ‘Where Dodie lives.’

  ‘Where Dodie lives,’ Barbara repeated tonelessly. ‘Dodie and I were in contact again, and when I read in the newspaper – I confided in her about my having had a child and who the father was and what had happened. She was very sweet to me, very sympathetic indeed. She has two adopted children herself so she knows—’

  ‘Dodie’s children are adopted?’

  ‘Yes. Hasn’t she told you?’ Barbara bit her lip. ‘Look, don’t say anything! She likes to pretend that they’re her own natural children. They were adopted in the usual way. I met them once. Nice children.’

  ‘And you tried to find out who’d killed Johnny?’

  ‘No, why should we?’ Barbara said. ‘I thought it was one of those random murders, some crazy pervert. You read about them in the papers all the time. Sooner or later they’re caught and tried and locked up at the taxpayers’ expense for psychiatrists to examine. I thought it was someone like that.’

  ‘And then?’ Sister Joan sat very still.

  ‘Then a couple of years after Johnny’s body had been found I had the note from Sally, saying she wanted to meet me in town. It was obvious she had something on her mind.’

  ‘Did Sally know you were Johnny’s real mother?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never said anything to her, but Dodie may have done. They saw each other occasionally.’

  ‘And Sally fell out of the top storey of a multistorey car-park,’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘Before she’d had the chance to tell me what was on her mind.’ Barbara rubbed her forehead with her clenched fist. ‘Derek rang me and told me what had happened. He was distraught, really shattered. He really loved Sally. They’d been happy. He was dependent on her for all the practical things.’

  ‘Did he know she was coming to meet you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t mention it. I mean he knew we met now and then.’

  ‘It could have been an accident,’ Sister Joan said consideringly. ‘There were two witnesses in the street below who saw her fall and said she was quite alone.’

  ‘As far as they could tell,’ Barbara said impatiently. ‘Look, there were boards up at the aperture with warning notices on them
. Not fixed boards so it was possible to step round them and lean out. There could have been someone there.’

  ‘And then Bryan was killed.’ Sister Joan rose and began pacing herself, her face sombre.

  ‘We wanted to remind everybody of the reunion,’ Barbara said, joining her. ‘We hoped that when we were all together again someone might shed some light on why Sally died, on what happened to Johnny—’

  ‘You thought it was someone crazy.’

  ‘We thought Dodie might know something,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Dodie! Dodie wouldn’t—’

  ‘No, of course not! But Johnny’s remains were found within a quarter of a mile of Dodie’s house, and there’s something else.’ Barbara paused, biting her lip.

  ‘You may as well tell me,’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘Henry Clare was—still is—an engineer. Dodie’s husband is an engineer too. They’d actually met. When Dodie contacted me she said that she felt dreadful about what had happened to Johnny because her husband, Colin, had met Henry Clare on business on several occasions. She thought it was a strange coincidence.’

  ‘And you and Bryan thought it might be something more?’

  ‘We didn’t know!’ Barbara spoke with a kind of dreary ferocity. ‘We simply didn’t know!’

  ‘And then Bryan was knocked down and killed.’

  ‘And the negative of the group photograph taken from his pocket. At least I don’t know that for certain but it’s the only thing that makes sense!’

  ‘And where did Serge fit into all this?’

  ‘He went to Bryan’s funeral,’ Barbara said. ‘I went out for a meal with him afterwards and we talked. I told him about Johnny and Johnny’s death and Sally’s death, and it seemed to us both there was a link. Serge said that he’d do a little ferreting around and after that we parted company.’

  ‘You kept in touch?’

  ‘From time to time. Serge said that he was trying to build up a case. He said that if we found some evidence we ought to bring you in on it. He’d read somewhere that you’d solved a case involving the murder of a child down here in Cornwall.’