‘I shall do without my evening meal,’ Mother Rachel said. ‘It is a good punishment for my earlier unbridled loss of temper. Sister Eunice must follow her conscience, for…’
‘I ate a hearty midday meal at our Farnborough house, Mother,’ the Novice Mistress muttered, and Suzie recalled the passing-out parade at Hendon when the day’s visiting bigwig had told her unit to stand easy and carry on smoking. From the rear Sergeant Mullet, their course sergeant, had murmured, ‘That doesn’t apply to you.’
‘Then, shall we now go down and you can identify the bodies?’ Tommy got to his feet again and gave the nod to Emma who opened the door to reveal Ron Worrall and Shirley Cox waiting outside.
Mother Rachel said something about her convent crawling with police officers and Tommy introduced Ron and Shirley.
Ron carried a thick cellophane bag containing a knife: blood smearing the inside of the bag. ‘Success?’ Tommy raised his eyebrows.
‘It was in the cell where the body was found,’ Ron Worrall told him.
It was a sharp, nine-inch, straight blade with a bone handle. ‘Possibly a kitchen implement,’ Tommy said and asked if the kitchens could be checked for a missing knife.
Mother Rachel assured him that it would be a priority, then together they left for the hospital.
CHAPTER SIX
Suzie and Tommy did not get back to Upper St Martin’s Lane until after eleven that night. Brian drove the two nuns to the hospital, together with Suzie and Emma, leaving Ron and Shirley to talk to a pair of frightened-looking novices in the kitchen, and rake through the knives. Tommy stood watching, not taking part, legs astride and hands clasped behind his back: an invigilator. Nothing was missing and Tommy said they would have to check with ironmongers and places where knives were sold locally.
The nuns were restrained and calm when they viewed the bodies. Suzie was impressed by their total faith in the two novices now being at peace with God. She had even asked them about their conception of the afterlife. ‘Just “being”,’ Sister Eunice said. ‘Just being in a sea of warmth and love, surrounded by those you have known and loved during your time here.’
Mother Rachel was more vivid. ‘Oh, I think it will be an eternal funfair,’ she grinned. ‘Without the vulgarity, of course.’ Then she went solemn and said, ‘I shall have to speak to the sisters tonight. Possibly later, before Compline. They’ll need to be told. That’s only fair.’
‘Won’t they know already?’ Suzie asked.
‘You mean from the other novices who were in their cells when the flying bomb came down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Possibly. They do chatter so. Yes, it’ll be round the convent like wildfire.’
‘Or holy fire,’ Tommy, almost smirking. Then, ‘But they won’t know about the male? The murdered male.’
‘The male in sheep’s clothing? No. No, of course they won’t know. Unless one of them did it and makes a deliberate mistake. That Inspector Hornleigh in Monday Night at Eight seems to think they all make mistakes.’
For a moment they were again surprised by Mother Rachel’s knowledge of BBC wireless entertainment programmes. Inspector Hornleigh Investigates was a regular feature in the Monday Night at Eight programme in which the fictional detective challenged listeners to spot the error made by the criminal.
‘Ah,’ the Reverend Mother explained, ‘we sometimes listen to Monday Night at Eight during our weekly period of general association and leisure which usually falls on a Monday evening.’
Tommy nodded and she added, ‘Between eight and nine. You must consider us very worldly but some of the sisters, out in the world, teaching in schools, have to listen to that dreadful Tommy Handley.’
‘Have to?’
‘They wouldn’t know what the children are talking about if they didn’t. Tommy Handley is pretty much obligatory.’
Back in the Reverend Mother’s office, Sister Eunice came in with two slim files. ‘Here we are. Novice Bridget Mary and Novice Mary Theresa. Both would have taken their vows – be Professed, as we say – in a couple of weeks. Good, intelligent women. I had high hopes for them. They both came to us in 1940, that dreadful summer. They’ve only just come here from our house of the Holy Family, in Farnborough. In fact Mother Rachel and I were there to see them leave, this morning.’
Man knoweth not the day, nor the hour, or something like that, Suzie thought. It all seemed most poignant.
‘Their families?’ Tommy asked.
‘Bridget Mary is easy. Her father’s vicar of St Martin’s near Bedford Park. Her name in the world was Joan May Harding. Father Harding was a true friend of our community, came over every couple of years or so to take a Lent retreat for the sisters who were here in the convent for Lent and Easter.’
Eunice took a deep breath, as if to prepare herself. ‘Novice Theresa is a different matter. More difficult. She came from the village of Churchbridge, on the Severn River, six miles or so from Gloucester, out towards Tewksbury. In the world her name was Winifred Audrey Lees-Duncan. Only daughter of John Lees-Duncan, landowner, so-called gentleman farmer, though he spends more time in big country houses and gambling in his London club, I’m told – or was when I last heard. Held an honorary rank of colonel with some half-baked military outfit during the ’14–’18 show.’ She stopped with a guilty look over her spectacles and cleared her throat.
‘Home is The Manor, Churchbridge, Gloucestershire. Her mother is Maude Lees-Duncan whose occupation appears to be riding and doing good works locally. Winnie – Novice Theresa – had two brothers, one of whom lives abroad, somewhere. In Mexico I think, Michael Lees-Duncan. The other – Gerald – last heard of somewhere in Scotland. That’s how things stood in 1940 anyway.’
‘Ages?’ Tommy asked.
‘The brothers?’
He nodded.
‘Both in their mid- to late twenties.’
‘Not serving King and country, then?’
‘Not when I last heard, but that was four years ago.’ Sister Eunice’s tone turned cold, distant. ‘Novice Theresa came to us against the wishes of her parents. In a very real sense she has been cut off from her family who are against all forms of organised religion. Proselytising atheists, I believe. Very difficult people. When Theresa came to us she brought a legal letter of instruction forbidding us or her to be in touch with them ever again.’ She flourished the letter, handing it over to Tommy who quickly read it and asked if he could hang on to it. ‘Don’t worry.’ He gave them his terrible smile. ‘WDI Mountford has a broad back. She’ll take care of matters in Gloucestershire. We’re the police so this bit of legal shenanigans doesn’t apply to us.’
Suzie’s heart sank.
They went through the question of the man who had been dressed as a novice, but neither of the nuns could add anything.
‘Never seen him before.’ The Novice Mistress shook her head. ‘And I think I would have remembered that face if he had come into the convent disguised as a novice. It’s true that we had three new novices who only arrived here today, but both Mother Rachel and I have known them for a long time as postulants at Farnborough: at our House of the Holy Family. In fact, they only came here, to the Mother House, yesterday. We saw them leave our Farnborough House after breakfast this very morning.’
‘So you can’t possibly say how he got into the convent, this man?’
They shook their heads, sadly it seemed, and Tommy said that this meant they, the police, would have to spend a lot of time here in Silverhurst Road. ‘We’re going to be forced to question every lady who was here this morning. Every sister and every novice, plus whatever other staff were around – your gardening people for instance.’
‘They’re seldom here on a Sunday,’ Mother Rachel told them. ‘But we’ll ask, of course. Is there anything else we should do?’
Tommy said they should try to stay within the bounds of the convent for a few days. ‘We’ll probably be back on Tuesday or Wednesday. You’ll also want the bodies for burial, so we’ll let
you know when they are released from the coroner.’
They tied up some loose ends and Mother Rachel said it was time for her to be in chapel. ‘Compline,’ she explained, ‘during which I shall make these tragic events known to my sisters.’
Tommy told her they’d rather she didn’t mention the male novice, and she said there were bound to be questions.
‘Then you must be like the three wise monkeys,’ Tommy said.
Mother Rachel moved her hands over her ears, then her eyes and finally her mouth, ending by giving him a beatific smile.
‘Perky lot, those nuns,’ Tommy said as they drove back into central London.
Suzie grunted. In her schooldays she’d had a lot of truck with nuns. ‘Personally,’ she told him, ‘I think they’re very tough birds. Tough, sneaky and willing to mislead the police if it’s a question of defending their community against scandal.’
‘And who can blame them.’ Tommy once more smiled his terrible smile.
* * *
Since D-Day and the invasion of Europe, railway travel had become a little easier. A huge amount of materiel and thousands of men had moved from England onto the Continent and, while there were still large numbers of troops stationed in the south and around the major airfields occupied by the RAF and US 8th Army Air Force, the major railway companies were not under the stress that had weighed on them earlier in the war.
Suzie travelled towards Gloucester from Paddington, sitting back in a first-class carriage that was her right as an officer. Two WAAF officers and a male civilian shared the carriage and Suzie, who felt depressed and nervous at the job she was called to do, stared blankly at the passing scenery.
The sun shone and the countryside looked its summer best as they whistled and chugged on their way, stopping at Reading and Kemble, Stroud and Stonehouse, heading towards Gloucester. The views were so peaceful that it was hard to imagine the hell going on across the Channel as the military pushed their way inland from Normandy.
She watched a group of children clustered round the gate of a field giving V-signs at the train, the wrong way, enjoying every minute of the vulgarity. Tommy had once told her that when the Prime Minister first used his trademark sign they’d had to explain to him that he would have to make sure his palm faced outwards. Apparently he’d laughed his head off when the crudity of the two-fingered movement became clear to him.
Suzie remembered what a naval officer had told her about sailing through the Suez Canal: about the groups of little Egyptian boys who clustered around exposing themselves to the ships. ‘Flashing us like cheerio, both front and rear,’ he had said. ‘Didn’t know whether you liked bananas or peaches by the time they’d finished.’ Suzie had been revolted by the thought. And by the young officer. ‘You’re a bit of a prude,’ he had said, so she went silent on him, thinking, yes, she probably was a bit prudish and what was wrong with that?
At Gloucester there was a police car with a sergeant driver waiting for her, arranged by Tommy, and she was whisked out of the city along pleasant roads, through cathedral arches of trees in full leaf and a countryside that seemed unbelievably placid.
The driver was a detective sergeant who introduced himself in a less than jovial manner. ‘Mills,’ he told her in a flat mournful voice. ‘DS Mills.’ Yes, Suzie thought, Dark Satanic Mills, then was worried, wondering if she had said it out loud.
Three times she tried to engage DS Mills in conversation, but he remained silent, knew nothing of the Lees-Duncans or the village of Churchbridge. ‘I came from Berkshire originally,’ he said in a sudden shower of words. ‘Ask me about Berkshire and I can tell you anything.’ But he clammed up once more when Suzie greeted this information with delight, saying that she came from Berkshire also. Newbury.
‘Never had cause to visit Newbury,’ the driver said as they turned into a drive on the outskirts of Churchbridge village and glimpsed a magnificent Queen Anne house, large, imposing, complete with outbuildings and stables.
Even the gravel under the tyres was deep, the crunch sounding expensive, while the house was impressive, the frontage thick with Virginia creeper. Look wonderful in the autumn, she thought, her imagination seeing the layers of creeper turning into flaming blood red.
Like a jigsaw puzzle picture or the top of a box of pre-war chocolates: the house itself huge, done in a weathered red brick with east and west wings leading off from the main house and some forty-odd windows visible along the front elevation, a row of dormers sprouting from the roof.
A tail-coated elderly butler opened the door to her – it was that kind of house – and was unimpressed when Suzie showed him her warrant card. He would, he said, see if Mr Lees-Duncan was at home, and left her in the large hall that smelt of money, dog and leather. After a few minutes the butler returned (Suzie thought of him as ‘Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer’, one of Tommy’s favourite terms for faithful servants) and showed her into a large and quite lovely drawing room. A bay window looked out onto a striped lawn that had been manicured to within an inch of its life, and a rose garden where a young woman worked, in the uniform of her class, a long wide-skirted dress, floppy hat, gloves and a trug. The furnishings of the room were slightly turn of the century, big and plushy; oil paintings of ancestors and horses hung on the walls, there were flowers in large cut-glass vases, and a big blue and white jug full of gladioli stood in a deep fireplace.
John Lees-Duncan was a tall man oozing charm and dressed in worn tailored tweeds. He was fine-looking, in his sixties, sixty-five-ish she reckoned, his face tanned, fit, and with twinkling, mocking grey eyes.
‘Well?’ he smiled, sticking out a hand. ‘You’re not from the Gloucester constabulary are you? See your warrant card?’ She held up the card, making sure he didn’t reach out for it. ‘You auxiliary?’ he asked, pleasant yet conscious of his own commanding presence. His handshake was dry and firm and Suzie thought how well he’d get on with Tommy.
‘I think, sir, you’d best sit down,’ she said, lowering her voice.
‘Don’t think I’ll have people telling me to sit down in me own house.’ Still pleasant, the smile almost bewitching, but the eyes hard as rock and bleak as a winter sea. ‘Look, whatever you’ve come to say, out with it. Don’t suppose you’ve got all day any more than I have.’
If you’re going to be like that, she thought, then here goes. ‘You are John Lees-Duncan?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Father of Winifred Audrey Lees-Duncan?’
‘Yes,’ count of four, ‘I suppose.’
‘Then I have some unpleasant news for you, sir. Your daughter was killed during a flying bomb attack in London yesterday, sir. I’m very sorry.’ That’s what they always advised you to say. That you were sorry.
For a moment, John Lees-Duncan stood with his mouth open. Then his face crinkled and he began to laugh.
‘Winnie’s dead, is she?’
‘She is, sir. The Convent of St Catherine of Siena received a direct hit.’
‘And she was in this convent, was she?’
‘She was, sir. A novice.’
He lifted a hand, his forefinger pointing out of the window. ‘Then who the hell’s that, out there cutting me roses?’ he asked.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She was tall and slender with short, unassisted, old gold hair in a pageboy bob, no fringe, Winifred Lees-Duncan. Suzie thought Tommy would certainly like her if only for the thighs which moved almost salaciously against the thin material of her long, predominantly blue dress. Maybe he’d like the accent as well. Very county: yah, yah.
‘You’d have adored her,’ she told him on the telephone. ‘Kind of subservient blonde fizzer with, I suspect, a delayed timer and a quick-release mechanism. You’d be over the moon for her. She’s a WAAF Flight Officer, or whatever they call them. You’d be shot down in flames as the Brylcreem boys have it.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You do talk a lot of twaddle, heart,’ rather liking the idea of her thinking he was no end of a dog with
women.
‘She has a pet name as well. Nobody calls her Winifred or Winnie…’
‘I bet they call her Wonky. Wonky Lees-Duncan…’ School thing. Old Wonky Lees-Duncan of the Upper Fourth. Good on the lax field, eh.’
‘As a child she couldn’t say Winnie. She called herself Wiltow – you know kids – in time it became Willow. That’s what everyone calls her – Willow.’
‘As in “a willow grows aslant a brook”?’ Tommy asked.
Suzie tried to think of something cheeky to top the Shakespeare. Perhaps, ‘On a tree by a river a little Tom-Tit sang Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow,’ – Gilbert and Sullivan. Decided against it: Tommy would only get vulgar.
She had been talking to Tommy on the telephone, a trunk call from Sheffield – murder of Mrs Doris Butler – because when she got back to Upper St Martin’s Lane there was a note:
Sorry, heart, the Sheffield case blew up again and they need the brains there, on the spot, so I’m taking Ron and Laura. It appears that the late Mrs Butler is lamented by three, possibly five, swains. A situation that poses a problem or four. So, you’re in charge of the Convent Mystery, as Fleet Street will undoubtedly call it – male nun who never was, kind of thing. Ring me. Love for ever and a day, Tommy. Then a little row of Xs indicating kisses: uncharacteristic for Tommy Livermore. Then a PS: Emma, like the poor, is of course still with me and Sheffield, so important to our war effort as the steel capital of Great Britain, is just as it was – dirty, smoky and dingy from the factory chimneys and the steel works.
* * *
So she rang Sheffield nick and was told that Detective Chief Superintendent Livermore was having dinner with Detective Chief Superintendent Berry, Sheffield CID. Emma Penticost was there, though, said the chief was staying at The Royal Victoria, where they’d all stayed at the start of the Doris Butler murder case a few weeks ago. ‘He’s OK, ma’am, and I’ll see that he stays OK,’ she told Suzie who grunted and put down the phone.