[Peter and Georgia Marsh 05] - Murder in the Mist

  MURDER IN THE MIST

  A Marsh & Daughter Mystery

  Amy Myers

  Copyright © Amy Myers 2008

  Amy Myers has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved.

  First published in 2008 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  This edition published in 2020 by Lume Books.

  Table of Contents

  MURDER IN THE MIST

  Author’s Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Author’s Note

  Kent has many literary connections, but the Fernbourne Five are fictional, even though they have become so established in my own mind that I expect to find Fernbourne and the King’s Head ready to greet me (or otherwise, as you will see after reading this novel) whenever I go to the part of Kent that Jane Austen knew so well. Three of the Fernbourne Five wrote poetry, amongst their other talents, but this is not a talent of my own. The short quotations from their work that appear in this novel, therefore, are either my own, which fall sadly short of what the Five could have produced, or adaptations based on two poems by Edward Thomas and one by Benjamin Gough, a nineteenth-century Kentish poet.

  I would like to thank Amanda Stewart and Sheena Craig at Severn House for their help over this novel, together with the rest of the impressive Severn House team. As always, my thanks go also to Dorothy Lumley of the Dorian Literary Agency for her unwavering support and guidance.

  One

  ‘Poisonous, of course,’ Peter remarked.

  ‘You’re thinking of larkspur,’ Georgia pointed out. ‘That’s love-in-a-mist. Look at it.’ There were pockets of tiny blue flowers as far as she could see, and here and there in this wilderness of a garden a stray poppy or hollyhock peered through the tangle of weeds.

  ‘Whichever it is, we’re still lost,’ her father said crossly.

  ‘This is Kent, not the Australian outback,’ she joked. ‘And we’re merely temporarily mislaid.’

  An understatement. They had come through a maze of lanes, most of which were single track with occasional passing places – if they could be called that, since they seemed to begrudge having to yield an inch more than necessary. This particular lane appeared to have given up completely on its purpose in this world; ahead, it degenerated into a grass track across a field, and so turning into this gateway was their only option.

  On a late August day, the silence and beauty of the fields and woods around them were a tranquil contrast to taking the A2 back via Canterbury to their homes. Rather too tranquil if you were lost, however, and for no apparent reason the stillness here was beginning to get to Georgia. It should be a rural idyll, but somehow it fell short of that. Idylls drew you towards them, but this garden was sending a different message. It was signalling ‘leave me alone; stop right there’.

  It had once been lovingly tended, but now flowers fought for air and on closer examination even the mass of blue love-in-a-mist that had first caught Georgia’s eye looked frail, as though another year would see them disappear too.

  As a child love-in-a-mist had been her favourite flower, and in defiance of her instinct to get the hell out of here, she got out of the car and walked over to look at them. She was aware of Peter’s disapproving eye, however. Too late, she recalled how fond Elena had been of love-in-a-mist, and no doubt her father was recalling that too. Her mother was living in France with her second husband, and few such English country flowers would adorn her garden there.

  Beyond the garden Georgia glimpsed the peg-tiled roof of the house, which must lie tucked behind the sprawling shroud of laurels. ‘I’m going to take a look,’ she shouted over to Peter. ‘Someone might be living there.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ was the unexpected reply, and he promptly began to manoeuvre himself into his wheelchair. She and Peter were returning from a visit to his sister Gwen, and had driven over in Peter’s adapted car.

  The path curved round to the house and as they approached it, Georgia saw that it was larger than she had first thought, although it still ranked as a cottage. The nearer they got, the stronger her impression that it was unlived in became. A climbing rose over the red brick struggled in its death throes with ivy as it fought for possession of the front of the house. A cobwebbed nameplate by the door announced that this was Shaw Cottage. The latticed windows looked bare and, peering through them, she could see no furniture or carpets. There were radiators, however, and the house looked in reasonable repair, with no broken windows or rotten wood. It would fetch a tidy sum on the market – so why was it left empty? A legacy dispute, perhaps?

  Having negotiated their way round the outside of the house, which proved to be an unusual L-shape, Georgia left Peter nosing about at the rear, and decided to push her way through the overgrown sloped garden to see what lay at its foot. Her initial instinct put aside, she felt almost indignant at the thought of this garden left to its own devices. There were signs that it received the occasional attention, perhaps with weeds and grass being scythed, but it had been without tender loving care for many a year. Once this had been a lawn, and once this could have been a path she was stumbling along. Every so often there was the occasional clump of love-in-a-mist, as if marking the way, and yet she felt she was journeying into the unknown.

  Like Rick, she thought with a shiver. Her brother had disappeared in France on a warm late summer’s day such as this, thirteen years ago, when he was twenty-one, and there had been no clue since as to what had happened to him.

  The trees and bushes she could see at the foot of the slope suggested a stream. As she grew nearer she saw that she was right and the water was running rather than trickling. There were overhanging willows, and by the stepping stones that led to the far bank was another patch of love-in-a-mist, preening itself in the sunshine. Across the stream there were woods, undergrowth at first and then a dense mass of trees and bushes. Perhaps in spring there might be bluebells but the woods looked too thick even for them to flourish. At one point they came right down almost to the stream’s edge, with a large oak tree stretching its boughs out towards her.

  And then it happened. Her stomach seemed to turn over, and despite the sun she was shivering with irrational fear. It must have been thinking about Rick, she tried to tell herself. Both she and Peter still had such reactions to his disappearance, as the past reached out its powerful hand. But these willows and that oak tree had nothing to do with Rick. Shakespeare’s Ophelia had drowned herself in such a place. ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook …’ Not here though; no one could have drowned here, surely. And yet … She couldn’t follow the thought through and hurried blindly back to join Peter, as if the stream and trees were actively pushing her from their presence.

  ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’ Peter looked concerned.

  ‘Yes.’ She had to force herself to continue. ‘There’s a stream down there.’

  ‘So?’ And when she couldn’t continue, he added gently, ‘Georgia, tell me.’

  ‘Something awful must have happened there.’ At least her father would understand what she meant by this.

  A silence. ‘Can I get this prison down there?’ he grunted.

  She shook her head. The ground was too rough for wheelchairs.

  ‘Are there fingerprints?’ he asked.

  She felt
relieved now that Peter had put her irrational fear into words – their words. Such ‘fingerprints on time’, their code for the stamp left on the atmosphere by violent crimes or injustice in the places where they had occurred, were the key to their working partnership. If they both reacted in a similar way, they looked into it further in the hope of providing some sort of resolution to unfinished business – for that was surely what these cries from the past implied. Such resolution depended on facts, however, not tenuous theory, not least because Marsh & Daughter recorded them in a series of true-crime books.

  Many such fingerprints proved groundless, and this stream, she now told herself, must surely be one of those. Perhaps it was seeing the love-in-a-mist that had brought back memories of her mother so strongly and it was that, rather than the stream, that had upset her. But she suspected this wasn’t the answer. Somehow this neglected garden had touched her on the raw and the fact that it was wheelchair inaccessible made it all the worse as Peter would be unable to confirm it.

  Inaccessible? She should have known better. She’d only turned away for a moment, and there he was lurching towards the stream. Knowing that he would hate her interference, she forced herself to wait, expecting a grumpy request for help at any moment. It didn’t come though, and it seemed an unbearably long time before he reappeared up the gentle slope.

  ‘Gold medal performance,’ she called out. A weak joke in a wobbly voice and she was hardly surprised that he didn’t respond.

  All he said as he reached her was: ‘You were right, Georgia. Something very much amiss there. I wonder—’

  ‘What?’ she cut in more sharply than she had meant to. Had the tenuous connection with Elena occurred to him too? He had not seen her since she walked out after the accident that had paralysed him, and Rick’s disappearance. Georgia herself had only met her on one or two rather stilted occasions.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked, looking surprised. ‘Let’s look at that map again. It’s large-scale, so this house and stream should be marked.’

  She felt safer once back in the car, although she knew that was ridiculous. Apart from the stream, what threat was there from a neglected house? There was an active burglar alarm winking, so there must be a caretaker of some sort, although who would hear the alarm in this remote place?

  Peter was studying the map. ‘Chillenden, Adisham, Goodnestone – and Godmersham not that far. We’re in Jane Austen territory. Her brother married a daughter of the family living at Goodnestone Park, didn’t he? And then they lived at Godmersham? Jane was always popping over on jaunts.’

  ‘I doubt if she’d have lingered here long,’ Georgia said with feeling. ‘Let’s get going.’

  ‘We seem to be here.’ Peter’s finger stabbed the map triumphantly. ‘We took a farm track instead of the lane. If we go back to this fork –’ he showed her – ‘we can go on to the village of Fernbourne. Now why should we know that name?’

  At first it meant nothing to her. Kent was like that; it had its public face and its private face, and the latter had countless byways leading to tiny communities still so far off the beaten track that she had not even heard of them. Nevertheless there was something about the name that was beginning to ring a bell.

  ‘The Fernbourne Five!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Quite,’ Peter said smugly. ‘Hoo-ha in the press. They seem to be going through a revival.’

  ‘Of what?’ Georgia asked. Then that too came back to her. ‘Weren’t they a sort of Bloomsbury Group in the late 1930s?’

  ‘Right. And it went on after the war too, through the late forties, lingering into the fifties. Then the group must have fallen out of favour, because I don’t recall much after that, until recently. One or two of Gavin Hunt’s novels have been reissued, Fanfare and Shadows. Read them? Dilemmas of the young living through the war.’

  ‘Like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms?’

  ‘In a way, though Hunt’s were about the Spanish Civil War. Deep philosophical delvings. And not long ago I remember reading reviews of an exhibition of Clemence Gale’s work at the Academy. She’s chiefly a portrait painter, and was married to Hunt.’

  ‘Did they have such interesting and varied private lives as the Bloomsbury Group?’

  ‘Not sure. But something’s nagging at my mind – it’ll come to me. I was too busy growing up to take much notice myself in the 1950s, and it’s not a side they stressed at the exhibition, from the reviews I read.’

  ‘Is this the road to Fernbourne?’ she asked, peering at the almost invisible signpost.

  ‘The physical or the figurative one?’

  So Peter was assuming that the cottage was something to do with the village, perhaps even the Fernbourne Five. ‘The physical one will do for the moment,’ she answered. ‘It’s more likely to have a cup of tea available.’

  ‘Done. Although …’ He hesitated. ‘Fernbourne looks less than a mile as the crow flies, but it looks a lot further than that by car. Do we want to do this?’

  So now it was Peter who was holding back.

  ‘Why not? Someone might know about that cottage, and neither of us can resist unanswered questions,’ she replied lightly. This was a hard card to play, in view of the black hole of doubt still dogging them after Rick’s disappearance. Nevertheless, Georgia told herself, if she grasped this nettle firmly, it might help staunch the deeper wounds. After all, that’s what Marsh & Daughter was all about: dealing with unfinished business to compensate for not being able to find the answer to Rick’s.

  Perhaps Peter thought the same, because he nodded without comment. Once he was driving – or rather bumping – back along the track to the point where they had gone wrong, she felt better, and the journey with golden fields on either side of the unfenced road began to have the feel of a progress rather than a retreat.

  Fernbourne proved to be a small and sleepy village. Even though it had a church, it still looked only the size of a hamlet, and didn’t even possess a sign to indicate its name as they entered it. The road bypassed the centre of Fernbourne, which consisted of a gravelled square off to one side. The road itself was lined with cottages and a village shop, which possessed a post office sign, a rarity now. Perhaps the village was so buried that it had escaped notice. It was even possible for Peter to park easily so that they could explore the interesting square. This was pleasingly uniform with red-brick eighteenth-century cottages, a pub, church and formidable gates to a drive that presumably led to the village’s Big House, whatever form that might take.

  ‘Pub or shop first?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Shop,’ Georgia decided. Shops could give you the feel of a community.

  Its post office section had a firm ‘closed’ sign on it, so Fernbourne hadn’t escaped that modern tendency; it was part-time service only. The food section was well stocked – and for the well-heeled from the look of it, Georgia thought, spotting some of the prices. Nevertheless it carried a good general spread of both luxuries and basics, and she decided to stock up for dinner that evening.

  Time to open up discussion as she took her purchases to the counter. Peter was clutching a purchase of his own – a book, entitled The Freedom Seekers, which mystified her until she read the subtitle: ‘The Story of the Fernbourne Five’.

  ‘We were almost lost for good on the way here,’ she began. The woman behind the counter, a fading blonde with a worried look and a false smile, which sat oddly together, began to add up Georgia’s purchases.

  ‘Easy for strangers to do round these lanes,’ was the perfunctory and loaded reply, as if such foolish people drove through the village at their peril.

  Georgia decided to establish her credentials as a true-born Kentish citizen. ‘We’re only from Haden Shaw, the far side of Canterbury, but it’s amazing how quickly one can get lost. In our village all roads lead promptly to the A20 or the A2.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  Not promising, and Peter took over. On the basis that it’s harder to be rude to someone in a wheelchair, he often rushe
d in where Georgia feared to tread.

  ‘We saw a most attractive house out in the wilds. Shaw Cottage, I think it was called.’

  He was fixed by a steady glance. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It seems to be empty. Is it for sale, do you know?’

  He was eyed narrowly, to Georgia’s amusement, as though any information given might lead to Peter whizzing off straightaway to vandalize any remaining assets.

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Is there a caretaker?’

  ‘That’ll be twelve pounds fifty.’

  That ended the conversation, especially as the door to the private quarters opened and a young girl in jeans and flashy tank top marched through the shop, displaying the confidence and condescension bestowed by youth and beauty – extreme beauty in this case. Long blonde hair framed an exquisite oval face, from which dark blue eyes looked disdainfully upon the world.

  ‘See you, Mum.’

  ‘Got yer mobile, Emma?’ enquired her mother.

  ‘Yeah.’ A heavy sigh.

  ‘Then use it. Your pa will pick you up.’

  ‘Adam’s bringing me home.’

  ‘Your dad said …’ But the girl had already gone.

  The brief encounter must have humanized her mother, since as Peter paid for his book, she volunteered, ‘Mrs Elfie’s place, that was. Keep away, that’s my advice. Most do.’

  ‘Why’s that? Ghosts?’ Georgia enquired, but a sour look was the only answer.

  ‘I’m shaken, not just stirred,’ Georgia admitted ruefully as Peter manoeuvred the wheelchair outside. ‘This Mrs Elfie must have been as weird as her name.’

  ‘Then a drink is most certainly in order.’ Peter set off for the pub in determined fashion. Georgia hesitated, aware that they were still being assessed through the shop window by Emma’s mum, but followed him to the square and into the King’s Head. The flowering baskets hanging outside had made the place look more promising than the interior proved. The public bar was dark, given over to a snooker table, slot machine and in one corner an ancient game of Devil among the Tailors. The licensee was one Robert Laycock, so a bronze plaque over the door read.