CHAPTER THREE
Bess pulled back the bedroom curtains, pushed up the sash window and revelled in the fresh air. After three days of showers the sky was blue with wispy clouds that were being dispersed by the warm sun as soon as they wafted into view. She sat on the window ledge and looked out over the grounds. Daffodils dwarfed the snowdrops in the park, and forget-me-nots and crocuses peeped from beneath the hedgerows. Spring had finally arrived.
This time last year Bess had wondered whether she and Frank had taken on too much by agreeing to oversee the building work and refurbishment of Foxden Hall. It had seemed that for every step forward the builders took, turning the Hall into a hotel, they took two steps back. At the end of the summer Bess had serious doubts about the hotel opening at all, let alone on New Year’s Eve.
They had taken a huge risk. Not only had Frank given up his job at the aerodrome, which would have been a job for life, to take charge of the interior maintenance, they had gone into partnership with Lord Foxden, and they had taken out a loan from the bank to pay for more workmen. Even then it was a gamble as to whether the work would be finished on time.
Ena came up from London at the beginning of the autumn to help Bess with the refurbishment. They measured the bedrooms for carpets and curtains and decided where furniture would be best placed to maximise space.
In 1940, when Ena was still working at Silcott’s Engineering, she had helped Bess turn Foxden Hall into a convalescent home for local servicemen coming home from Dunkirk. Then they had cleared the rooms in the west wing for hospital beds and medical apparatus, and had stored the furniture. Now they were bringing the furniture out of storage, cleaning and polishing it, and putting it in newly decorated bedrooms. Anything else they needed after Bess and Ena had refurbished the rooms, they had to buy second-hand from Kimpton Smith’s in Lowarth.
Bess stood up, pulled down the window and left the room. The gamble had paid off. Foxden Hotel had opened as planned on New Year’s Eve. Dave Sutherland turning up was a blot on the celebrations, but thankfully he hadn’t shown his face since.
Bess took two of the four copies of the Advertiser from the reception desk and ran upstairs, depositing one in the library and the other in the smoking lounge. Returning with a bounce in her step, she left reception’s copy on the desk and took the remaining copy into the office.
‘As we’d hoped,’ Frank said, greeting Bess with a smile. ‘Bookings are up on February. The rest of March is looking good and Easter weekend is almost full.’
Bess dropped the paper on the chair by the fire and walked round Frank’s desk. She looked over his shoulder and read the figures he was working on. She exhaled with relief and gave Frank’s shoulders a squeeze.
A loud knock at the door took Bess’s attention. Maeve entered without waiting to be asked. ‘Excuse me, one of the anglers is asking to see you. He says it’s urgent.’
‘Thank you, Maeve. Show him in, will you?’
Frank groaned. ‘What now? The last day of the fishing season and someone’s complaining.’
There was a huffing and a puffing outside the door and a second later Harry Shaw, a local man from the village of Woodcote who had fished the lake since he was a boy, blustered into the room. He was as white as the hotel’s bed linen. ‘There’s a b-b-body,’ he stuttered, ‘in the lake.’
Bess and Frank stood up simultaneously. Bess shot Frank a stunned look, then quickly edged her way from behind the desk to assist the old gentleman. She pulled out the chair from under Frank’s desk. ‘Sit down, Mr Shaw.’ Bess waited while the old man shuffled to the front of the chair, her arms outstretched ready to catch him if he fell. He lowered himself onto the seat. ‘I’ll get someone to bring you a cup of tea,’ she said, going back to the door and poking her head out.
‘Maeve? Would you get one of the kitchen staff to make a pot of tea for three, please? As quickly as you can.’
‘You’re certain it was a body, Mr Shaw?’ Bess asked, when she returned to her seat. ‘It couldn’t have been a log, or--?’
‘What I saw weren’t no log, Mrs Donnelly. My legs might be going a bit, but there’s nowt wrong with my eyes. It were a body all right! It were floating sideways. Like a whale, it was.’ Harry looked from Bess to Frank.
Frank glanced at the clock. It wasn’t quite seven. ‘With a bit of luck the other anglers won’t be here yet. You’re early, aren’t you, Mr Shaw?’
‘I’m down there sometimes as soon as it’s light, so as I get the same spot. Up near the hotel can be noisy with the holiday folk coming and going, and the east side’s too open. I like plenty of cover, where it’s a bit overgrown, as you might say. Serves to keep the March wind off.’
Bess looked at Frank. She knew the answer to the question she was about to ask. She asked it anyway. ‘And where exactly is it that you fish, Mr Shaw?’
‘South of the lake. This side, where there’s long reeds. The fish get caught in them, and you can sometimes net ‘em. I like it down there with Shaft Hill spinney behind me. Gives a bit of shelter see.’
Frank laid his hand on Bess’s arm and she looked up at him. His pale face and lined forehead mirrored what she imagined her own face to look like. ‘I’d better telephone the police station and tell Sergeant McGann what Mr Shaw has told us. I’ll do it from reception, and then go down to the lake, stop any other fishermen setting up near the body.’
‘Sergeant McGann might not want any part of the lake fishing today,’ Bess said. ‘At least, not until he’s seen the body and had it taken away. Even then I expect he’ll have policemen searching the grounds. Tell the anglers that there’s been an accident and ask them to come back tomorrow.’
‘If it is a body, McGann won’t want anyone near the lake until his men have done poking about. I’ll tell them to come back on Monday. The police should be finished by then.’
‘Poor blighter. Drowning’s a terrible way to go,’ Harry Shaw said. ‘I saw a lot of men die that way in the Royal Navy.’ He sat upright and stuck out his chin. ‘The Great War!’ he said, with pride. ‘Watched one of my mates drown in the North Sea.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘That was the coldest and the cruellest stretch of water... He froze to death in seconds, well afore he drowned.’ Tears filled the old man’s eyes. He took a large grey handkerchief from the pocket of his sou’wester and mopped his face.
Frank got to his feet. ‘I’d better get down there. We don’t want anyone else seeing the body.’ He kissed Bess on the cheek, and as he passed the old man patted him on the shoulder.
‘I’ll see where your tea has got to, Mr Shaw. I won’t be a minute.’ Bess followed her husband out to reception. ‘Maeve, I’ll look after things here. Would you pop to the kitchen and ask how long the tea will be? Mr Shaw’s had a terrible shock.’
Maeve left reception straightaway and Frank picked up the telephone. ‘Do you think it’s him?’ Bess whispered. ‘Sutherland?’
‘Why would it be him? If there is a body--?’
‘Of course there’s a body!’ Bess cut in. ‘Mr Shaw saw it.’
‘What the old man saw is more likely to be an animal than a human. But if it is a man’s body, we won’t know who it is until he’s been identified.’
‘I know it’s him, Frank. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve got this horrible, excited, feeling in my stomach. Anyway, who else could it be?’ He was probably killed by one of his fascist cronies and dumped in our lake to take the attention away from Sir Gerald Hawksley.’
‘Or to make it look as if one of us had killed him.’
‘What if Katherine Hawksley killed him on New Year’s Eve? Good on her if she did,’ Bess said, a congratulatory tone to her voice.
‘No one killed him on New Year’s Eve--’ Frank stopped short of telling Bess why. Instead he said, ‘There were too many people about after the New Year party, someone would have seen something.’ He looked up at the clock. ‘You call McGann. I’d better get down to the lake before more anglers arrive.’
Bess picked up the telephone. Her
stomach churned with distasteful curiosity.
As he walked down the drive, Frank came to a decision. If it was Sutherland’s body in the lake, he wouldn’t tell the police Sutherland was alive on January 2nd. If he did, they’d want to know how he knew. And if he told them Sutherland had been blackmailing him, and that the last letter he received was on the second, they would see that as a motive for killing him.
Frank took a deep breath as he neared the place where the old angler said he’d seen the body, and decided that, as he’d got away without telling Bess for almost three months, he wasn’t going to tell her now.
Holding onto the trunk of a silver birch sapling, Frank inched his way down the slippery bank. It was a man’s body, sure enough, but he couldn’t tell whether it was Sutherland or not. His head was turned sideways and Frank could only see the left side of the man’s face. He was unrecognisable. His features looked grotesque with bloating.
Revulsion formed a hard lump in Frank’s stomach. It rose to the back of his throat. He thought he would be sick and turned his gaze away. At that moment, something at the water’s edge, white, and tangled in the roots of a clump of reeds, caught his eye. It was the man’s right hand, and on it was a signet ring. Bringing to mind the black and red crest on the thick gold band when he hit Sutherland on New Year’s Eve, Frank sighed heavily. His worst fears were confirmed. The man floating in the lake was David Sutherland.
The sound of a car in the distance broke into Frank’s thoughts. He looked up. ‘Bess?’ he gasped, ‘what are you doing here?’ Frank scrambled up the bank to his wife who, as if in a dream, stood on the top of the slope staring at Sutherland’s prostrate body. ‘Bess?’ Frank took her arm and tried to walk her away from the horrific scene, but she stood firm.
‘I was right, Frank, it is Sutherland,’ she said, her expression blank, her voice emotionless.
‘Yes, love,’ Frank whispered. He looked towards Mysterton Lane. Sergeant McGann’s black Wolseley was rounding the bend to the drive. ‘Come on, sweetheart. The police are here. Let me take you back to the hotel.’ Holding Bess’s arm with one hand, Frank waved down the police car with the other. ‘If you keep looking at his body it will only upset you, Bess. Come on, love.’
As the Wolseley pulled up, Bess yanked her arm free of her husband’s grip. ‘I want to look at him. I want to be sure that monster will never hurt anyone again,’ she cried, and slumped to her knees.
‘He won’t, my darling. He’ll never hurt anyone again.’ Seeing Sergeant McGann and the constable approaching, Frank lifted Bess’s chin and leant forward until his eyes were level with hers. ‘The police are here, Bess. We must get out of their way, so they can do their job.’
Bess nodded. ‘Let’s go home.’ Frank helped her to her feet and without a backward glance husband and wife, arms around each other, walked back to the hotel.
‘Mr Shaw is in the smoking lounge,’ Maeve told them as soon as they were through the door. ‘I got one of the waitresses to take him another cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg. When she left he was reading the newspaper.’
‘That’s good. Thank you, Maeve. When you have time, would you find the names and addresses of people who stayed here from New Year’s Eve to--?’
‘Don’t worry about that now, Bess,’ Frank said. ‘You look all in. Why don’t you go up and have a lie down?’
‘I don’t want to lie down. Besides, I need to be here. The police are bound to want to talk to us. So,’ she said, with more than a little exasperation in her voice, ‘would you do as I ask, Maeve? Find the names and addresses, and telephone numbers if they have them, of all the guests who have stayed here since we opened and bring them to me in the office?’ She looked at Frank. ‘I want to be prepared.’ Turning back to Maeve: ‘I hope the police will have taken the body away by the time today’s guests arrive. How many are booked in, and what time are we expecting them?’
‘Six. Two double rooms and two singles. Four are booked in for tea and dinner, two for just dinner - both parties arriving this afternoon.’
‘Let’s hope it’s later rather than earlier this afternoon,’ Bess said, going into the office.
‘I’ll go back down there,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll try and find out how long the police will be here.’
‘Where’s my husband?’ Bess asked, as Sergeant McGann strolled into the office.
‘At the lake with Constable Peg,’ he replied. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to ask you some questions?’ Bess nodded. ‘As far as I could see the dead man wasn’t carrying identification. However, your husband said he recognised the man’s ring and his name is David Sutherland, the man you called us out to on New Year’s Eve. The man who was with Sir Gerald Hawksley and his daughter Katherine.’
‘That’s right,’ Bess said.
‘You were at the lake when I arrived today, Mrs Donnelly. Did you recognise the man?’
‘No, his face was too swollen and distorted. Though I thought his coat looked similar to the one Sutherland wore on New Year’s Eve.’
‘New Year’s Eve…’ the sergeant repeated, thoughtfully. ‘Would you tell me about that night again? Tell me the sequence of events in more detail?’
‘I’m not sure I can. It’s almost three months ago, and it all happened so quickly.’
‘What did?’
‘Seeing him. I mean, hearing David Sutherland’s voice in the ballroom.’
‘So you didn’t actually see Mr Sutherland in the ballroom?’
‘No. I didn’t see him. I turned the instant I heard his voice, but the reporter from the Advertiser took a photograph, the camera flashed, and I was temporarily blinded. Sutherland must have left quickly, because when I was able to see again, the chap from the Advertiser was standing where I expected Sutherland to be.’
‘So you decided to seek David Sutherland out, because you thought it was his voice that you’d heard in the ballroom?’
‘I didn’t think it was his voice, I knew it was!’ Bess was getting exasperated. She needed to calm down and get her facts straight - and get the timing in order. ‘It was a few seconds before midnight when Sutherland hissed “Happy New Year, Bess” in my ear.’
‘And you are certain that it was Mr Sutherland who wished you a happy New Year?’
‘He didn’t wish me a happy New Year, Sergeant, he snarled it, menacingly.’ Bess sighed. Not because she had any doubts that the voice she’d heard was David Sutherland’s, but because McGann was talking about the man - who Bess had said on New Year’s Eve was a Nazi sympathiser, and who Margot had said almost killed her friend - with respect.
Bess threw her hands up in despair. ‘To answer your question, yes! I am a hundred percent certain that the voice I heard was David Sutherland’s!’
‘I’m confused, Mrs Donnelly. If you didn’t see Mr Sutherland how can you be certain the voice you heard was his?’ McGann began tapping his pen on the table. ‘Mrs Donnelly, did you know Mr Sutherland before New Year’s Eve?’ Bess swallowed hard. For ten years she had feared, dreaded, that she would one day be asked if she knew David Sutherland. ‘Perhaps he had been one of your circle of friends in London?’
Bess shot McGann a scorching look. ‘I did meet Sutherland in London, but he was no friend of mine, and he was definitely not part of my circle, as you call it. He was a brute and a bully. He was a nasty piece of work then, and by the threatening way he said my name on New Year’s Eve, he hadn’t changed.’
Bess looked straight into McGann’s eyes, tears threatening to tumble from her own. ‘I have already told you that I turned to face Sutherland, the reporter from the Lowarth Advertiser took a photograph, the flash temporarily blinded me and by the time I could see again, Sutherland had disappeared in the crowd.’ She felt weary having to repeat what happened again. ‘Big Ben was ringing in the New Year, and someone pulled me into a circle of people singing “Auld Lang Syne.”’
It had been almost three months since the New Year’s Eve party and although his was the face she
saw in her nightmares, Bess had forced herself not to think about David Sutherland while she was awake. She took her handkerchief from her jacket pocket, dabbed at the tears she could no longer stop from falling, and took an exhausted breath.
‘So, to recap. You didn’t see the man who wished you a happy New Year,’ the sergeant said, almost as if he was speaking to himself, ‘and the room was crowded with people singing “Auld Lang Syne?”’ His head wobbled unnaturally on his shoulders, as if he was weighing one thing Bess had said against another. ‘Hmmm! So, in a crowded room above the noise of dozens of people singing, you are sure that it was Mr Sutherland who--?’
‘Yes! I’m sure!’ Bess snapped.
‘Then why did you need Mrs Burrell to confirm it was him?’
‘Because I couldn’t believe that after ten years that fascist David Sutherland was still walking the streets!’ Bess screamed. ‘Of Germany, possibly, but not here, not the streets of Mysterton or Lowarth.’
‘What the hell is going on?’ Frank shouted, crashing through the door of the office. Sergeant McGann jumped up. His face was red, his mouth turned down at the corners in a sneer. Bess sat behind the desk with her head in her hands.
‘I think you’d better leave, McGann.’
‘I was only asking Mrs Donnelly--’
‘You were not asking my wife anything, you were interrogating her.’ Frank went over to Bess, stood protectively behind her, and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Good God man, hasn’t she been through enough today? Now!’ Frank shouted, ‘I have asked you to leave once, I shall not ask you again!’
The police sergeant put his notebook in the breast pocket of his tunic and slowly walked across the room. He put his hand on the doorknob, but instead of opening the door, he turned and eyeballed Frank. ‘A body has been found in your lake, Mr Donnelly. Does that not concern you at all?’
‘Of course it concerns me. It concerns us both a great deal. An accident on our property, causing the loss of a life, is of the utmost concern. But however tragic it is, it has nothing to do with my wife, or myself - or anyone else at the Foxden Hotel. So, unless you can prove otherwise, I’m asking you for the last time to leave!’
Foxden Hotel (The Dudley Sisters Saga Book 5) Page 4