‘So “Evidence of MC” was evidence of Millicent Crabbe, a secret daughter, and not Millicent Cutter,’ said Banton.
‘Exactly. The daughter that Agnes had to give away but whose name she took from her own mother and then immortalised with the creation of her great fictional detective. And the name Falk was there in black and white too, in Mrs Handibode’s notes. The Falks were great friends of the Gobbelin family and Iris worked for them as a maid. She arranged the adoption.’
‘It all makes sense,’ said Banton. ‘So when Mrs Handibode wrote “ANDREW T – SECRET”, I guess she suspected that Andrew Tremens knew about the baby too. It was the big secret that he was going to reveal in his talk.’
‘But I still don’t see how all of this relates to the murder of Shirley Pomerance,’ said Jaine.
‘Bear with me. We’ll get there,’ said Quisty. ‘We can’t be sure what prompted Agnes to write Swords into Ploughshares nearly fifteen years after the end of the war, but I suspect it was something to do with the realisation that the daughter she’d never known would have been turning sixteen and becoming an adult. Maybe the enormity of what she’d done suddenly hit her. It’s certainly true that she didn’t write anything else for a while after Swords. And when she eventually did, her writing changed direction and she wrote those three dreadful Trayhorn Borwick books. Perhaps she just found it too painful to write about anyone called Millicent.’
‘That’s some amazing detective work you’ve done,’ said Banton.
‘Just following the connections,’ said Quisty, smiling. ‘But, while I’m happy to take the credit, do remember that Mrs Handibode worked it out before I did. She’s the smart one.’
‘Swords into Ploughshares is such a curious book – so different in style and tone to the ones before and after it – and I knew there had to be a reason not accounted for in Agnes’s diaries,’ said Esme Handibode. ‘There’s so much focus on the futility of war and on the importance of children. And then it suddenly came to me . . . what if she’d had a child herself? Of course, I was sceptical. As I say, there’s no mention of a child in her diaries which, otherwise, are very detailed. It would be an extraordinary omission, especially as a diary is, by nature, a very private and personal record. And, besides, how would she keep the child a secret from her mother? Did you know, by the way, that Agnes’s mother was called Millicent?’
‘I remember reading it in The Secret Queen of Crime,’ said Molly Wilderspin.
‘You read that terrible book?’ scolded Mrs Handibode.
Miss Wilderspin nodded sheepishly.
‘It actually wasn’t that hard to keep it secret,’ said Tremens, picking up the story. ‘Her mother had already pretty much withdrawn from public life after she’d lost her husband and son to the war. She took to her bed and didn’t get out of it until she died. It was Agnes’s best friend Iris who helped her with the birth and who shared the duties of looking after the baby. It’s all there in her diaries, even if it isn’t in Agnes’s. The woman was a saint.’
‘So all of those stories of baby-snatching and cannibalism I heard as a lad might have had some basis in truth,’ said Vic. ‘If locals heard the baby crying, for example.’
‘Quite possibly,’ said Tremens. ‘I suspect that Agnes was suffering with depression during her confinement and didn’t leave the house, a behaviour she continued for the rest of her life. That’s maybe why she couldn’t write about the baby, at least not directly. She instead incorporated her grief into Swords into Ploughshares.’
‘I became convinced that she’d had a child but not having access to Iris Gobbelin’s diaries I didn’t know whether the child had died or whether Agnes had perhaps given it away,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘So that’s when I started searching through the parish records.’
‘Iris wrote in her diaries that it was obvious that Agnes wasn’t suited for motherhood,’ said Tremens. ‘She wrote that she formed no bond with her baby and seemed indifferent to its fate. So Iris arranged for the baby to be adopted by a family in Bowcester. She worked for the Falks as a chambermaid and knew them to be a kind and generous family, though childless.’
‘I had an inkling that I was on the right track after finding a Millicent Falk, born in 1916, mentioned in the 1931 census data,’ added Mrs Handibode.
‘So little Millicent Falk grew up just a few miles away from her real mother and wholly ignorant of the fact that she was adopted?’ asked Shunter.
‘Yes. And I’m not sure that she ever found out who she really was,’ said Tremens. ‘Maybe that was another reason why Agnes never mentioned her in her diaries – so that the child would never find out. But Millicent had a lovely childhood in every other way and she eventually married a jeweller called Henry Welter in 1939. They had their first child, a little girl, in 1945.’
‘Who grew up to be Brenda Tradescant?’ asked Miss Wilderspin.
‘No, who grew up to be Shirley Pomerance,’ said Tremens.
‘Oh!’
‘Henry was killed in combat just a few weeks before Shirley was born, tragically near to the end of hostilities, and Millicent’s life started to fall to pieces,’ Tremens continued. ‘All of a sudden it began to mirror that of her mother’s, although she didn’t know that, of course. But she didn’t have an Iris Gobbelin to help her, and she couldn’t cope as a single mum, especially as she had to keep the jewellery business going all by herself. She put Shirley up for adoption at ten months old but it did her no harm to be brought up by the Pomerance clan. They were academics and they brought out the best in her.’
‘But Millicent did keep her second child,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘After she remarried?’
‘That was Brenda, yes,’ said Tremens. ‘She was born in 1947, two years after Shirley. By that time, Millicent – now known as Milly – had married Ivor Tradescant, a coal merchant.’
‘You can just imagine how I felt when I completed assembling the family tree and the awful truth was revealed that one of my chief rivals and critics, and a writer of truly atrocious stories, is the granddaughter of Agnes Crabbe,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘I could have wept. I had nightmares imagining what Brenda Tradescant would do if she ever found out that she was the rightful heir to the Crabbe estate. I saw bookshelves filled with endless badly written new Miss Cutter novels, all carrying some kind of gravitas and authenticity because they’d been written by a blood relative. The thought was too dreadful to contemplate. Of course, I didn’t know then that she had an older half-sister – one who can actually write – and that I needn’t have worried. All I knew was that I had to keep my findings to myself and hope that no one else would find out the secret. But then Andrew did.’
‘So the “S&B” in Mrs Handibode’s notes was Shirley and Brenda,’ said Banton.
‘Quite so,’ said Quisty. ‘But she wasn’t the only person to have figured things out. When Andrew Tremens found the Gobbelin diaries, he realised the magnitude of the story and decided to turn these revelations into a public event. You can see the appeal, can’t you? Agnes Crabbe’s secret baby is adopted and grows up with no knowledge of who her mother is. She then gets married, has two daughters of her own, one of whom gets put up for adoption, and neither child has any idea who their real grandmother was. Then Andrew discovered that Brenda Tradescant also had children who were put up for adoption. Triplets, in fact.’
‘Three generations of adoptions. It’s no wonder the trail was so cold,’ said Banton. ‘So Tremens had the idea to track down Brenda Tradescant’s sons to involve them in planning a splendid jape for the festival?’
‘Indeed,’ said Quisty.
‘Big mistake,’ said Jaine.
‘Very big mistake,’ said Quisty.
‘By sheer bad luck, the first triplet I tracked down turned out to be the bad penny of the family,’ said Tremens. ‘Well, the baddest penny.’
‘Fireball,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘Yes. Fireball XL5 Zodiac Venus Matic Robert Zoonie the Lazoon Savidge to be precise,’ said Tremen
s. ‘I asked him if he would get in touch with his brothers to ask if they would be part of the event. I had no idea that he’d had no contact with them in years and they’d pretty much written him out of the family. Nor did I realise how much he hated Brenda – his birth mother – for having put him and his brothers up for adoption. The Savidges were terrible parents, and Fireball, Thunderbirds and Stingray had a miserable childhood. In the meantime, as a cover, I spread about a rumour that a new Crabbe book called Wallowing in the Mire had been discovered, just to throw people off the scent.’
‘Oh. So it’s not true then?’ said Miss Wilderspin, disappointedly.
‘Well, it might be. There’s plenty of evidence for it in both Crabbe’s and Gobbelin’s diaries. But I haven’t found a manuscript yet. Anyhow, I knew that a rumour like that would sound authentic and bring the crowds in. So, the plan was to run the show in three phases: Phase One – I’d have Shirley Pomerance and the Savidge triplets hidden among the crowd in plain sight, all dressed as Miss Cutter. We’d pull Brenda out of the audience and do the whole family reunion thing with her three sons who she hasn’t seen since they were put up for adoption as babies. Phase Two – we’d bring Shirley out of the audience and do the big reveal that she’s Brenda’s hitherto unsuspected and long-lost older half-sister and aunt to the triplets. And then, after Brenda had got to grips with that, we’d spring the Phase Three surprise on her and Shirley, i.e. the fact that they are both Agnes Crabbe’s granddaughters. It would have been fantastic.’
‘But Fireball spoiled it,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘That is the understatement of the year,’ said Tremens.
‘As I understand it, the young Brenda Tradescant was a bit of a tearaway,’ said Quisty. ‘Her parents both ran businesses and she was something of a latch-key child. And then she got pregnant at seventeen and decided not to have a termination.’
‘Pregnant with triplets at seventeen,’ said Banton. ‘Wow.’
‘They were all born prematurely and suffered oxygen starvation, which may be partly to blame for their behavioural issues,’ said Quisty. ‘And Brenda suffered crippling post-natal depression, which may explain why she chose to have no contact with them after they were adopted. Unfortunately, the Savidges were not the best choice of adoptive parents. Back in the early sixties, they didn’t have the vetting mechanisms for adoption we have today I’m afraid. Mr Savidge senior was, and still is, a nasty piece of work.’
‘It’s extraordinary that the Savidges adopted all three,’ said Banton. ‘That’s a hell of a lot to take on. But then again, I imagine that the boys would have hated to be separated. Twins and triplets have very close bonds.’
‘They were mere babies at the time and probably hadn’t formed those bonds yet,’ said Quisty. ‘And I’m afraid that Mr Savidge wouldn’t have given two hoots about their feelings anyway. All he was interested in was the family allowance and all the other monetary benefits that came with adopting three identical baby boys. He drank it all, of course, and they had a wretched childhood.’
‘No wonder they turned out the way they did,’ said Banton. ‘And Fireball was the worst of the three.’
‘Certainly the least under control. As I understand it, Stingray manages to keep his anger at bay with tablets but has occasional lapses. And Thunderbirds is so drunk most of the time that he barely functions as a vicar.’
‘I hear he’s gone completely doolally since the siege and has had to be shipped off to a psychiatric hospital,’ said Jaine.
‘Poor bugger,’ said Banton.
‘But Fireball . . . well, he’s a different kettle of fish altogether,’ said Quisty. ‘He’s a manipulative, greedy, unrepentant narcissist and he cares about no one but himself. He embraces his bad behaviour; I think he sees it as a gift rather than as an affliction. He’s spent his whole life fighting, whoring, gambling and drinking. He shouldn’t be still alive, the amount of drugs he’s injected or swallowed. And there’s a long, long list of angry loan sharks and drug-dealers who would love to get their hands on him.’
‘So when Mr Tremens told him who his great-grandmother was, all he saw was pound signs,’ said Woon. ‘You don’t have to be an Agnes Crabbe fan to recognise that she’s a gold mine.’
‘And, presumably, this was when he also found out who his birth mother was,’ said Banton.
‘As I understand it, he already knew her name because Thunderbirds had found out years before and told him,’ said Quisty. ‘But he’d never met her. And why would he? She wasn’t of any value to him. And Brenda Tradescant had made it clear that she didn’t want to reconnect with her sons as it would upset her partner, an easily shockable bank manager. But Andrew Tremens didn’t know any of this when he approached Fireball. And the first thing that Fireball did when reunited with his birth mother was try to emotionally blackmail her into paying off his gambling debts.’
‘But Miss Tradescant refused, even after he showed her a threatening note he’d received from loan sharks,’ said Banton. ‘She was adamant that he must sort out his own mess.’
‘Her refusal is why he then blurted out to her that she was Agnes Crabbe’s granddaughter,’ said Quisty. ‘He told her that she could afford to clear his debts because she would soon inherit the estate.’
‘Which is why she went to the village hall to get confirmation from Tremens,’ said Woon.
‘And we all know what happened then,’ said Quisty.
‘Fireball and Brenda turned up at the village hall in his van, just as I was rehearsing the event with Miss Pomerance,’ said Tremens. ‘This would have been around quarter past three. And of course, I hadn’t told either woman about their Agnes Crabbe connection at this point. Then there was the most terrible fight. Fireball was accusing his mother of being some kind of uncaring martinet. And she was shouting at him that he was irresponsible and stupid. So then Fireball effectively scuppered the whole event by telling Brenda and Shirley that they were sisters and both heirs to the Agnes Crabbe estate.’
‘How selfish,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘But then Shirley told him that he wouldn’t get a penny because, as the older of the two sisters, she would most likely inherit the estate and, if she did, she would use the money to set up a charity to help new writers,’ said Tremens. ‘Well, talk about red rag to a bull. Something just seemed to snap inside him. He grabbed up a baseball bat and hit her with it full in the face. She staggered around for a second, pleading for someone to help. She tried to make a grab for Brenda who recoiled but not before Shirley got a grip on her pearls.’
‘Ah! The pearls were hers!’ said Shunter.
‘But then Fireball hit her again,’ said Tremens. ‘I heard bones crack and she went down like a sack of spuds. I thought I was going to be sick.’
‘And this is where you enter the story?’ said Shunter.
‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘I’d mislaid my copy of Swords into Ploughshares and recalled that the last place I’d seen it was on a wall in Handcock’s Alley. So I went back there in the hope of finding it, which I did, thankfully. There’s five years’ worth of research in those notes. Anyway, as I passed by the rear of the village hall I heard shouting. Naturally I was curious so I crept closer to take a look. The rear door was ajar so I popped my head inside and I saw what had happened within.’
‘Oh, how awful for you,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘I can’t pretend that it wasn’t a shock. Miss Pomerance was clearly already dead and Fireball Savidge – I didn’t know who he was then of course – was furiously stabbing her body with a knife.’
‘Why did he do that?’ asked Shunter. ‘She was already dead, surely?’
‘Brenda had grabbed a carving knife from the kitchen area with which to defend herself after seeing what he’d done to Shirley,’ explained Tremens. ‘But Fireball easily disarmed her.’
‘Then he had a kind of fit,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘He started stabbing Miss Pomerance’s body repeatedly with the knife and shouting, “This i
s all your fault!” over and over again while looking at his mother. No one argued with him after that, mark my words.’
‘And that’s why her fingerprints were on the knife handle,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘But his weren’t,’ said Shunter.
‘He had gloves on,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘Anyway, I must have gasped or made a noise or something because he saw me at the window and dragged me inside.’
‘So what about the business of disguising Shirley as his mother by leaving her bag by the body?’ asked Miss Wilderspin.
‘I’m not really sure why he did that,’ said Tremens.
‘I think that was simply a delaying tactic, putting the police off the scent by making them think it was Brenda who’d been killed,’ said Shunter. ‘I also think leaving the note with her body was intended to make us believe that she’d been killed by loan shark heavies.’
‘Ah, the threatening note. It belonged to Fireball of course,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘Yes,’ said Shunter. ‘I think that, in his naivety, he assumed that we’d believe she was Miss Tradescant from the clothes and the handbag. Miss Pomerance was wearing an almost identical Miss Cutter outfit to Miss Tradescant’s for the event.’
‘Anyway, after the stabbing, Brenda went into a kind of stupor, like a walking daze. She just tuned herself out of reality. And I think that Fireball suddenly realised the gravity of what he’d done,’ said Tremens. ‘He tied our hands and frogmarched us to his van and locked us inside. I didn’t dare argue, not with a man who could do such terrible things. Brenda went quietly too.’
‘Leaving the trail of pearls,’ added Miss Wilderspin.
‘Yes, but not Esme. Definitely not Esme,’ said Tremens. ‘She fought and kicked all the way.’
‘Hooray!’ said Miss Wilderspin, clapping her hands with glee.
‘Once we were outside, I thumped him in the tummy as hard as I could and made a break for it and started running up the canal towpath,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘Sadly, I wasn’t speedy enough and he caught me.’
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