Death Among the Kisses
R. A. Bentley
Copyright © 2021 R. A. Bentley
First published in England 2021
Copyright © R. A. Bentley
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Chapter One
The cold set in at the end of November. It was bitter. Birds fell dead from the sky, and on Hunger Hill a hare was found frozen where it sat, its ears still erect and alert.
In the Falkners’ yard, dawn brought unwonted silence. There was only the crackle of ice beneath Parsnip’s great hooves and old Jeremy, coughing, coughing, coughing as he brought the cart to the barn. Even Solomon the cockerel had little to say for himself.
High at the door of the hayloft Hannah Falkner tossed down the day’s fodder. Not too much, because it had to last all winter. She didn’t trust the girls with that job — they had no judgement. ‘That’ll have to do,’ she said. She turned as she had a thousand times before, lost her footing, scrabbled for a handhold and tumbled ten feet onto the iron-hard ground.
‘You could hear the bone snap,’ Jeremy told them.
◆◆◆
Alison Falkner sat at her dressing table, brushing out her long, brown hair. It looked well enough, she thought; easy to deal with the grey when the time came. Split ends! That would be the cold, no doubt. It got into your bones, even indoors. The room wasn’t heated, and she had on her outdoor coat until the house warmed up a little. At night she slept under it, throwing it over the blankets.
Gazing in the mirror she wondered again about a bob. It wouldn’t have crossed her mind a week ago but now it had to be considered. She wanted to look youthful and up-to-date, and judging by the illustrations in Woman’s Weekly that meant short, either with a fluff of curls at the sides or with tight little waves, like Helen when she came up last time. The look on Mother’s face!
One of the first things they’d done after the accident was to buy a couple of the despised magazines and study them cosily together at the kitchen table, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be consigned contemptuously to the range. There was education in those pages, a window on the world, and they’d just about read them to bits. They were contemplating buying a Vogue next, when finances allowed.
‘The plaster must stay on for six weeks,’ Dr Absalom had said. ‘They don’t heal so well at that age, and there’s the shock and the bruising. Keep her in bed and if all goes well, she can come downstairs for Christmas. You’ll have to manage without her eventually, you know, so it’ll be good practice.’
‘No doubt we’ll survive,’ Rosie had told him. Rosie was Alison’s elder sister, along with Beatrice and Delia. They also had a brother, Harry, but he didn’t farm anymore. He’d preferred to take his chances with the Kaiser and had escaped.
Six wonderful weeks! There was never a day passed but one of them thanked God for that broken leg. Harry had thanked God for the war and they had thanked Him for a broken leg. Truly He moved in mysterious ways.
It was not that they had it any easier, not with the world’s worst patient banging on the floor at all hours, but for a while they would be able to do things in their own way, in their own good time, and without the constant criticism. It was a little taste of heaven.
Not the least of their new freedoms was to take their personal letters straight from the postman. Before the accident they would have been handed them by their mother, usually opened and probably read. Later, Alison would marvel that the one communication to turn their world so thoroughly upside down should arrive when it did. A day or two earlier and it could all have been very different.
As it happened, it was Beatrice who had greeted Enoch Turner that fateful morning; bringing him, as usual, a steaming mug of tea. She would scarcely have known him, she declared, beneath that heavy old overcoat, muffler and balaclava. Only his postman’s cap, perched on top, gave him away. ‘Treacherous it be, Miss Falkner,’ he’d said, ‘like an ice-rink in the village. And them little beggars a-glurrin’ outside the school gate. I nearly broke me neck. How’s yur poor mother a-doin’? I’ll bet ’er’s like a bear with a sore yud an’t ’er?’
‘How well you know her,’ grimaced Beatrice, casting a jaundiced eye at the bedroom window. ‘Ah! My music, and Rosie’s knitting pattern, and this one’s for you, Ali.’ She frowned, not recognising the hand. ‘Who might that be, then?’
Alison had rushed upstairs with it and locked herself in her room. For a long while she’d sat with the closely written pages on her lap, her heart pounding. Later she had cried.
◆◆◆
‘You do realise there’ll be no question of Christmas now?’ said Hannah, not without satisfaction. Christmas, in its secular aspects, tended to frivolity, even wantonness, and could scarcely be approved of. It was also a great deal of trouble for nothing.
‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Rosie, folding her massive arms. It was Rosie who had singlehandedly carried the stricken septuagenarian up to her bedroom from the yard, and who now patiently supported her from bed to commode-chair and back again as the exigencies of nature required. If push came to shove, Alison always thought, Rosie could probably stand in for Parsnip.
‘What did you say, Rosemary?’ frowned Hannah, scarcely believing her ears.
‘I said, fiddlesticks, Mother,’ said Rosie, standing her ground. ‘Of course we must have Christmas. They’re bringing the children this time. You want to see the children, don’t you? And we might get Cousin Charles, whom we’ve never met, and we always have Cousin Walter, if no-one else. We’ll borrow a wheeled chair for you if necessary, so you needn’t miss anything, and make you up a bed downstairs.’
‘You’ll do not such thing! And who is going to organise this jamboree, pray?’
‘We are, of course,’ said Beatrice. ‘We do everything anyway, so what’s the difference?’
Clutching the blankets to her chin, Hannah looked sourly from one to the other of her four strapping daughters and capitulated, albeit with a bad grace. It was then, Alison supposed, that power passed irrevocably from the management to the workforce, though the former would not be going down without a fight.
◆◆◆
By the week before Christmas the thermometer had risen somewhat, though it was still below freezing most of the time. Once or twice it had clouded over and snowed a little though it hadn’t come to anything. They were up each day before dawn, chopping firewood, airing bed-linen and baking, all in an atmosphere of childlike excitement. A Christmas tree was harvested and decked with Great Grandma’s baubles, and holly and ivy pinned above doors and windows and threaded behind picture cords. They even made some coloured paper-chains for the parlour, further depleting their meagre pocket money. Beatrice held up a sprig of mistletoe, her eyebrows raised questioningly.
‘Might be best to see who turns up first,’ advised Rosie. ‘We might get Liversage.’ Mr Liversage, the Parson, suffered badly from hali
tosis. No-one wanted to be under the mistletoe with that gentleman.
‘Alf is bound to drop in,’ said Delia. ‘He might even come for Christmas dinner again.’
Mr Alf Brown was the handsome and well-built widower who rented from them the greater part of their land. The very model of a successful farmer, his age, fifty-two, made him of interest to all of them. They suspected, however, an understanding between him and his housekeeper, Mrs Florence Gray. She didn’t seem to do much housekeeping, that they could see, and was frequently to be found on his arm, looking smug.
Born in the village, Florence had gone away to London at the age of twenty and married a solicitor, though anyone could see he was consumptive. Having eventually buried him and with little to show for it she had attempted to re-establish herself in the community. In this she had achieved only limited success, being, as Mrs Liversage had rightly said, spoiled for country life. They conceded, however, that she might be counted handsome by those who liked that sort of thing. Shorn and crimped like Helen and therefore deemed “fashionable” she had what Rosie called a town figure and looked as though she’d snap in a gale. She was considered by some to look well on a horse but would, in their opinion, look even better falling off one.
Normal farm work had, of course, to continue during the festive preparations, unfortunately without the help of their sole employee, who had taken to his bed.
Delia accordingly killed and roasted a plump fowl and Alison made her way to Jeremy’s tiny cottage with potatoes, cabbage and generous cuts of breast meat, the rest of it parcelled up for later. Rosie came behind with a great kettle of soup and Beatrice some books and fresh bedding. They found him lying in the dark, with no fire lit and in low spirits. ‘Reckon I’ve ’ad it,’ he said. ‘Me legs won’t answer no more.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Alison. ‘It’s just a touch of bronchitis. A few days off and you’ll be as right as rain. Sit up now and you can have your dinner in bed. How’s that for a treat? And then we’ll get a fire going. My goodness, that’s a cough and a half you’ve got there.’
‘You knows her sacked me?’ said Jeremy morosely.
‘What, Mother?’
‘Leave at the end of the month, her said.’
The women exchanged glances. ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Rosie crossly. ‘What reason did she give?’
‘Called me an idle layabout. Me!’
‘Break the other leg?’ Beatrice suggested, when they got outside.
‘Tempting, isn’t it?’
‘And if you knew what I know,’ thought Alison bitterly, ‘you’d break every bone in her body, if not tear her limb from limb.’
◆◆◆
Alison had been hugging her news to herself for over a week, obscurely feeling that to tell all would be giving a hostage to fortune. She wasn’t, however, accustomed to keeping secrets and on the day when they moved their mother downstairs, she had finally succumbed. She and Rosie had been cleaning where the bed had been. It was surprising how much dust accumulated in the gaps between the boards.
‘I suppose we ought to do the whole room really,’ said Rosie, not with much enthusiasm.
‘Never mind that,’ said Alison. ‘Now she’s out of the way I have something to tell you.’
‘Big something?’ enquired Rosie. Like the others, she knew every nuance of her sisters’ delivery and intonation.
‘A very big something,’ said Alison. ‘You know those letters I’ve been getting? They’re from Albert Little.’
‘Not . . .’
‘Yes!’
‘I thought he’d died in the war.’
‘So did I.’
‘You rather liked him, didn’t you?’
‘Bit more than that,’ said Alison.
‘Really? Gosh! And now he’s writing to you. How exciting!’
‘Yes. He didn’t die, he wasn’t even wounded, and it wasn’t his first letter either. He wrote to me all the way through the war, even while the shells were raining down, as he describes it.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, because I never got them.’
‘Not ever? I suppose that was the censor.’
‘No, it wasn’t the censor. Not that one anyway.’
For a moment Rosie looked blank. You could see the colour draining from her big, square face before flooding blotchily back. ‘Not . . . Mother?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Do you know?’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve wondered once or twice. Not recently but years ago. But mightn’t they just have got lost — a mailbag or something? No, that wouldn’t be any good, would it? Not if it kept on happening.’
‘I might have thought it was something like that,’ said Alison, but then apparently I wrote back to him, telling him I was sorry but I’d met someone else and he wasn’t to write anymore.’
Rosie caught her breath. ‘Ali, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t pretend to be you!’
‘Well, she did, complete with forging my name. And he would never have known it wasn’t me because after he was demobbed, he never came back here – too upset, he says – and it was only when he bumped into Bill Driffield, completely by chance, that he found out I was still single. He’s coming to see me at Christmas. He couldn’t get away before.’
‘Coming here? Gosh!’
Delia and Beatrice sat on Alison’s bed, looking grim.
‘I’m not entirely surprised,’ said Delia at last. ‘I think it may have happened to me, or something very like it. I don’t suppose you remember Terry Frost.’
‘Of course I do,’ said Rosie. ‘He was nice.’
‘Yes, he was, and we were getting on so well. Then suddenly he didn’t want to know me. I never could work out why. That was before he married Jessie Price, and you know what that led to.’
‘That might explain my Peter too,’ said Beatrice. ‘Peter Braintree.’
‘Peter at Stockton’s?’ said Delia. ‘Didn’t he get Head Cowman somewhere?’
‘Yes, Cranfold, and we agreed to correspond. Mother said he was shifty and not to be trusted but she’s always saying things like that and I didn’t take much notice. Anyway, I did write, and I never heard back.’ Tears appeared in her eyes and she took out a handkerchief. ‘I liked him quite a lot, as a matter of fact, and I thought he liked me. Oh dear, it’s rather brought it back.’
Rosie put an arm round her. ‘Bea, I’m so sorry.’ She stood up, looking fierce. ‘I’m going down. I’m going to have it out with her.’
‘We’ll all go,’ said Beatrice.
Delia shook her head. ‘I don’t think we should do that. What would be the point? We’ve still got to live with her and it would be sure to spoil our Christmas, which would hurt us more than it hurts her, since she doesn’t want it anyway. I suggest that from now on we do exactly as we see fit, and if she doesn’t like it, she can jolly well lump it. And for goodness’ sake keep her away from the postman.
Chapter Two
Harry Falkner had not been as cold since the trenches, and that was saying something! He had the car’s heater going full blast but it didn’t seem to make any difference. It had never been a very good one. Helen and his youngest daughter, Lydia, were huddled together in the back, chattering under a travelling rug. They didn’t seem to be suffering too much. Maybe that was where all the warmth ended up.
‘Everyone all right?’ he asked.
‘We’re fine, darling,’ said Helen. ‘Are you tired?’
‘No, just perishing cold.’
‘Never mind, nearly there.’
‘Dad, what are the aunties like?’ asked Lydia. ‘Mum’s no use at all.’
‘You’ve met them,’ said Harry. ‘Can’t you remember?’
‘That was when I was five. I can’t remember from when I was five, can I? Are they frightfully old? I suppose they must be, if the
y’re your sisters.’
Lydia was a somewhat precocious sixteen-year-old, presently “finding her feet” as Helen liked to put it. She was lucky she could even feel them, Harry reflected. As always nowadays he scouted the conversational path ahead for possible quicksand. It seemed solid enough in this instance but you could never tell. Yesterday she’d gone from waxing lyrical about her grown-up cousin Charles, to whom she seemed to have taken a shine, to some rather intimate questions concerning the birds and the bees, all in about five minutes flat. You didn’t want it at breakfast.
‘Well now, let me see,’ he said. ‘I’m forty-six, which as you rightly say is frightfully old, so Alison will be thirty-eight, she’s the baby of the family, Beatrice is forty-two, Rosie is forty-eight and Delia is fifty. And Grandma is a grand old lady of seventy-five. She’s still very active, though. Or was, until she broke her leg.’
‘How did she do that?’
‘I told you. She fell out of the hayloft.’
‘Oh yes, so you did. But what are they like? What are their personalities?’
‘They’re all very nice and kind,’ said Helen. ‘And they like children. They’ll probably spoil you to death.’
‘Except that I’m hardly a child, so it doesn’t apply,’ said Lydia, tartly, ‘and no-one could possibly want to spoil Archie. What else are they like, apart from being old and nice?’
‘Big, jolly ladies, always busy,’ said Harry. ‘They look after the farm; except for Aunty Delia, who does most of the cooking.’
‘How big is big? Big as you?’
‘They’re big ladies,’ admitted Harry. ‘We’re a big family.’
‘I’m not, I’m quite dainty,’ said Lydia, adding, with uncharacteristic generosity, ‘and so is Ethel.’
‘You two take after me,’ said Helen complacently.
‘Is that why they’re not married, because they’re fat?’
Death Among the Kisses (The Inspector Felix Mysteries Book 10) Page 1