I am so sorry that your mother has been less than kind to you and I am also sorry that I didn’t do more to stand up to her. But you must understand, my darling, that she has suffered too, and although it’s wrong and hurtful to take it out on others, I hadn’t the heart to cause her more grief. I am confident that you can be generous of spirit but, whatever happens, I counsel you not to become bitter or resentful. You have a sweet nature and I love your honesty and your openness. Please don’t allow yourself to become harsh or vindictive.
You made me a very happy man when you welcomed your sister Lena so warmly. I leave this world content that you have each other and that your family ties are strong. I pray to God that, when the time comes, you will marry well. I may not be able to walk you down the aisle in person, but I will surely be with you in spirit. Tell your children of me, my darling. Say that as your father, I loved you with every fibre of my being.
May God bless and keep you.
All my love, Father
Lena had been right. Her father had loved her. Nan had been right too. It was all right. How blessed she was to have been loved by her father and now Lena and Nan. She would go back to them in a minute and say thank you. But for now, clutching the letter to her chest, Milly felt her anger dissolving as she finally gave way to her tears.
* * *
Later that evening, she had ridden Cyril’s bike to the cottage. The chickens needed to be shut in the hen house and the rabbits put into their hutches. If he’d still been there, she would have asked Seebold to give her a lift but – exhausted by all the trauma – he’d already gone back to his caravan. As she arrived, it started raining, so she pulled a raincoat from the hook in the porch. Grabbing a handful of chicken feed to encourage them in, she put on the raincoat, the hood falling over her hair. As she tied the belt tightly around her waist, she didn’t hear the person coming up behind her. The second she knew that she wasn’t alone was when the heavy piece of wood came down on her head, but by then it was already far too late. The door of the cottage closed softly as her lifeless body fell to the floor.
Chapter 38
It was the low blue haze which first aroused curiosity. The driver of the Horsham bus noticed it as he drove past the end of the driveway, but of course being in his cab he was unable to mention it to anyone else until he reached the bus station.
A man on a motorbike turned his head towards the wooded area and smelled the smoke as he rode by. He would have stopped and investigated, but he was already very late for work. If he was hauled in front of the boss again, he’d be sacked for sure. Someone must be having a bonfire, he thought as he journeyed on.
The girls in the riding stables noticed that the horses in the top field were jittery and spooked, but again no one questioned the smoke. Perhaps the gardener in the big house was doing some woodland clearance. Lena hadn’t come in that morning so they couldn’t ask her.
‘Better stick to the bridle path going west,’ the riding instructor told their early morning customers. And when the group got back to the stables, they spoke of hearing the sound of animals in distress somewhere in the woods, which was why one of the girls decided to walk up the driveway towards Muntham Court. She returned a little later, running and shouting, ‘Fire, fire. Lena’s cottage is on fire,’ and that’s when everyone knew something was terribly wrong.
The people from the stables found the cottage well alight. The roof was ablaze, and tongues of fire filled the kitchen area. While someone ran back to telephone for the fire brigade, the other people from the stables set about moving the animals to safety. The chickens were crated up, the rabbit hutches were moved away from the smoke, and someone opened the pigeon loft. The birds flew out en masse and soared over the trees. As for the cottage itself, a couple of the men looked for a way to get in, but it was too risky.
‘Do you think anyone is in there?’
No one had the answer, but a bicycle that they knew to be Cyril’s leaned against the wall at the back. Could he be inside? The fire brigade arrived shortly after and everybody stood back as they turned on the hoses. When one fireman broke through the locked door, he found a body in the porch. They brought it out and covered it with a blanket.
‘Who is it?’ someone asked.
‘No idea,’ said the fireman. ‘But it’s a woman.’
The girls from the stables looked from one to the other, but nobody voiced the question on their lips. Was it Lena? Or Milly?
Someone said, ‘You’d think someone would come down from the big house to see what was going on, wouldn’t you?’ So one of the younger girls ran to the ha-ha and on towards the house. She came back about twenty minutes later.
‘There’s nobody there,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’ve been all round, but the place is shut up. They’re all gone.’
‘Go back to the stables and ring for the police,’ the fireman said. ‘There’s sommat funny going on ’ere.’
Once the fire was under control, his men searched the cottage, but thankfully there was nobody else inside. All they had to do was the damping down and making sure the body was taken to the mortuary. As the sorrowful little group of mourners made their way back to the stables, Seebold’s lorry thundered towards the cottage. He was distraught when he saw the state it was in, even more so when he saw the blanket-covered body being put into a hearse. ‘Who’s that?’ he cried as he tried desperately to fight off the men who held him back. ‘Who’s under there?’ he yelled.
‘We don’t know, lad,’ said one of the fireman. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. The police will handle it from now on.’
The undertaker was driving off.
Seebold put his hands onto his head. ‘No, no, wait a minute. I need to know. Is it Lena or Milly?’
PC Manville, who had biked up from the village, came over to him. ‘Do you know who lives here?’
‘Two girls,’ someone else said. ‘Sisters. Lena and Milly Shepherd.’
They all heard footsteps running along the path, then a woman burst through the clearing and screamed. As soon as he saw that it was Lena, Seebold sank to the floor, completely overwhelmed by his grief.
It had been a long and tiring journey, but when Agatha, Pearl and Freddie arrived at Harwich at eight-fifty in the morning, they hurried straight over to the waterfront. At the end of the previous year, Harwich had been in the public eye when 196 unaccompanied Jewish children fleeing the Nazi terror were brought to Britain for safe haven. It was an unusual place because no locomotives were allowed so, even in this modern day and age, goods were ferried about by horse-drawn trucks. The railway lines themselves went from Harwich Quay up to the Angel public house (a favourite meeting place for naval officers) and then on to Church Street. The Quay itself was the place where day-trippers took pleasure boats from the Ha’penny Pier.
Freddie had arranged that his wife and mother-in-law should have breakfast in the Great Eastern Railway Hotel, a Victorian building which dominated the waterfront. A sprawling edifice with fourteen or fifteen rooms on each of the three floors, the hotel had a dining room, coffee room, smoking room and a billiards room on the ground floor. As soon as his family were comfortably seated, Freddie went to the garage to sell the car, and from there to find their ship. There was plenty of time, he told himself. It didn’t sail until noon.
The chap in the garage haggled the price down. Yes, it was a good car, but it was expensive to run. In the end, Freddie only got a third of the asking price. He wasn’t very happy about it, but he had no other choice.
The whole quayside was teeming with people, so it took a while to find the ticket office. When he finally spoke to the clerk, Freddie had a terrible shock.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said the man, a flattened cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, ‘there ain’t no more ships.’
‘What do you mean, “no more ships”,’ Freddie said indignantly. ‘I have tickets. I booked them all yesterday. Look, look. You told me on the telephone. Sailing at noon.’
‘They’s all been can’sold,’ said the man doggedly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ cried Freddie. ‘They can’t have been cancelled! I only booked them yesterday, I tell you.’
‘Look, there’s no need to get shirty wi’ me, mate. I told you. Everyfing’s been stopped on account of Adolf Hitler. If you ask me, there’s goin’ to be a war, so there’s no way, not never, not no-how that you’re goin’ to get to ’Olland from ’ere.’ And with that, the man pulled down the shutter with a bang.
One hundred and forty miles away in Findon, events at Muntham Court were moving on apace. Although a post mortem had not yet been conducted, the police suspected that the victim had been hit over the head, probably by a piece of fence panel found on the grass near the front door. This, of course, made the cottage a possible murder scene. The body had been taken to the local mortuary, which was a pity because the girl who lived in the cottage turned up a few minutes after the hearse had gone and she might have been able to identify her sister. The chap with the lorry, a man with the inexplicable name of Seebold, agreed to take her to the mortuary, but now that would have to wait until tomorrow. The people from the stables had taken her in for the evening while the police began combing the area for clues.
Inspector Young and Constable Cox had walked up to the big house. It was all locked up and, as there was no sign of a key-holder, they forced the lock on the back door. It was clear that the owners had left in a hurry. Upstairs the wardrobes were empty, the doors flung open wide and articles of clothing scattered all over the place.
‘Looks like they’ve done a runner,’ said Cox. ‘Who lives here anyway?’
