Pascal Passion

Book 4: The Falconer Files

by Andrea Frazer

Genres: Cozy Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Shepford Stacey is an unassuming little village, its greatest asset being its small but excellent Church of England Primary School. This delightfully old-fashioned establishment of only two classes, one of infants, the other of juniors, has been run by the same pair of ladies for decades. It is in the year that the headmistress, Audrey Finch-Matthews, is to retire, that the smooth running of this long-established educational establishment is interrupted by murder. When Detective Inspector Harry Falconer and Detective Sergeant Davey Carmichael of the Market Darley Police arrive to investigate, they discover a host of motives, both past and present, and grudges that reach right back through the years. As the Easter weekend grinds inexorably on its way, Death stalks the village again, and it suddenly becomes imperative that the murderer is caught before there are more fatalities. Falconer soon realises that this is not the work of an opportunistic psychopath passing through, but of someone within the small community itself, taking lives at will, and there is no indication that the slaughter will stop here.

Release date: October 25, 2013

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 177

Sample

Chapter One

Thursday 31st March

I

‘Good morning, Imogen. You know where the cake tin goes, don’t you, Charlotte?’

‘Good morning, Spike. Yes, I can see that Mummy’s been busy in the kitchen. Isn’t that lovely?’

‘Use your handkerchief, Milo dear, not your sleeve. Not a problem, Mr Snoddy. I can understand how difficult it is for you, living in a caravan like that. Why not hang on at the end of school and buy something delicious as a treat?’

‘Yes, Mummy will be cross if you scuff your lovely new shoes, Mercedes. Pick your feet up, dear, and walk properly. What a grown-up boy you are, Austin, carrying that big plastic box. In the foyer, Mrs Allington. The table’s just on the right.’

‘Angus MacPherson, don’t you let me hear you use that word again, or you’ll be staying in at playtime for the third time this week.’

‘Isaac Borrowdale, I want that chewing gum straight in the bin when you get inside. Do you understand? Straight away! I will not have a repeat of what happened on Monday.’

‘Don’t worry, Lorcan. I expect it’s the chilly wind. Thank you so much, Mrs LeClerc.’

She called into the school foyer, ‘Mrs Chadwick, do you think you could let Imogen see herself into the classroom? Lorcan here has had a little accident. Spare pants in the usual place. Thank you.’

As the children were delivered to the school door, many of the parents shot through the doors with tins or plastic containers, for there was to be a bake sale that day, as the school was breaking up for the Easter Holidays, and breaking up very late, for today was Maundy Thursday, the double Bank Holiday weekend almost upon them.

Thus did Audrey Finch-Matthews, long-since widowed headteacher of Shepford Stacey Church of England Primary School, welcome her charges to school, and call her thanks to the contributing mothers, on the last day of the spring term. As she cajoled and upbraided the youngest of the pupils, she patted her dark brown (dyed) curls into place and allowed herself a moment of smugness. Hers was a popular school and, although numbers were low at the moment, she had not an ounce of worry that it would close. The vicar had recently opened a waiting list, allowing children from other villages to apply to attend the school, and they should be packed to the rafters in September.

On the other side of the entrance, Harriet Findlater, fifty-seven-year-old spinster of this parish and teacher of the upper school class (seven- to eleven-year-olds), held court with the mothers delivering their offspring to school on this bright spring morning. Her mind was also on the school and its future, for Audrey Finch-Matthews would reach her sixtieth birthday this year and Harriet hoped, with a burning fervour, that she would retire and give her a chance to run the school, before she had to retire herself.

‘Come along, Sholto, and stop pulling on Mummy’s arm so. If you don’t get a move on you’ll be late, and then where would we be, eh?’ Audrey asked, seeing India Bywaters-Flemyng struggling to insert her son through the school gates.

Picking up his pace, the five-year-old stopped in front of Mrs Finch-Matthews and asked, ‘Where would we be, Miss? I expect you know, ’cos you’re a teacher,’ his face a mask of innocence.

‘Sholto! Mind your manners! I’m sorry, Mrs Finch-Matthews, but we do encourage him to be inquisitive and ask questions,’ Mrs Bywaters-Flemyng explained, a sly smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.

‘Hm! Well, perhaps you ought to teach him the difference between a genuine enquiry and an enormous piece of cheek. Young as he is, I’m convinced he’s bright enough to tell the difference, even if Mummy isn’t,’ the head teacher answered, being completely un-enamoured of India’s superior ways and attitude to others. She wasn’t the only one around here with a double-barrelled name, and she was just going to have to live with the idea.

Really, the cheek of the little imp, and his mother hadn’t upbraided him with even a look of disapproval. Whatever was the world coming to? When she was Sholto’s age she would have been awarded a clip round the ear for such facetiousness, followed by another one, when her mother heard about what had happened. How times had changed since she herself had started school.

There was not usually impertinence of this kind from the pupils: it was something that had arrived with Sholto Bywaters-Flemyng and, if she had anything to do with it, would end with him too. She had always been very strict about respect for adults, and that pint-sized chancer and his arrogant mother were not going to change anything.

‘What extraordinary names the children have these days, don’t you agree, Harriet?’ she asked, as they entered the school after the last of their pupils, and closed the doors on the outside world for the last time this term.

‘Oh, I do agree, Audrey. It was all Susans, Lindas, and Jennifers in our day: and good old Steven, John, and Peter for the boys. Life was so much simpler then, like the names.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, Harriet. Just look at the Allingtons. Their six-year-old (bless her cotton socks) is called Mercedes, and their two-year-old is called Austin. Have they got some sort of subconscious car fetish, or is it just me, unable to keep up with the times?’

Treating this as a rhetorical question on her own part, she continued, ‘Do you remember those pretentious parents who sent their ghastly precocious twins here a couple of years ago? And we had to take the extraordinary step of permanently excluding them, the little devils?’

‘Castor and Pollux,’ confirmed Miss Findlater.

‘I always thought of them as Bastard and Bollocks, I must admit,’ confessed Mrs Finch-Matthews in a stage whisper.

Blushing at this unusually strong language, Harriet contributed, ‘I understand they go to that private school on the other side of Market Darley, now – as boarders, I believe.’

‘I presume they have a psychiatric dorm, if they’ve taken those two,’ opined the head teacher, lifting a wry eyebrow. ‘Now, let’s see if we can locate Charlotte Chadwick to get her to put these cakes into some sort of order, and get prices on them.

‘Which reminds me: the decorators are arriving just before we close for the term, so we’d better get Charlotte to brew an urn of strong tea; they always seem to need so much of it. Well, they’ll just have to pour their own, and be grateful that we even have such a thing as a tea urn. Hmph!’ she concluded, with a rebellious expression on her face.

*……*……*

II

An aerial view of Shepford Stacey would have revealed a number of individuals moving away from the school premises and off and away to attend to their business for the day.

Maura MacPherson and Martha Borrowdale walked together, living next door to each other just across Back Lane from the school, in Creepers and The Vines respectively. Martha Borrowdale was thirty-six years old, determined to be happily married, and had three children. Isaac, her five-year-old, she had just dropped off at the school, along with Jacob, his ten-year-old brother who was in the upper class. Maria, her two-year-old, obediently held her mother’s hand as they strolled slowly back home.

Martha was overtly respectable, and was viewed as a terrific snob, a wife who spent a lot of time ignoring the shortcomings of her husband, who was no stranger to the inside of a police cell, although all that had been a long time ago. She kept her nose in the air, and constantly kidded herself that people had either forgotten all that business, or had never even heard of it. If only she could keep him on the straight and narrow, she could live the life she pretended she was already living, but she was often in a state of low-grade fear, that something else would jump out of the woodwork at her, concerning either his past, or his far from crystal-clear present.

He was supposed to be working from home at the moment, but at what, she had no idea. She just knew he spent an inordinate amount of time on the computer, and had files on that Machiavellian machine that she had no access to, and this fact existed as a low-grade worry at the back of her mind. But she didn’t want to be distracted by thoughts like that now, and brought her thoughts back to the present with considerable effort, tuning in again to what Maura was saying.

Maura and Cameron MacPherson had only the one child, Angus, who was also five, and their house was only half the size of the Borrowdales’ residence – but one would never have guessed if one had listened to Maura MacPherson. Given her endless monologues on the trials she had bringing up her one ‘wee chick’, and the amount of labour she expended on her home, one would have thought that she had a brood as large as Victoria and Albert’s, and a residence to rival the size of any of those inhabited by Victorian royalty.

Adrian Snoddy wandered slowly up Sheep Pen Lane to the caravan he shared with his wife, Pippa, and their five-year-old son, Milo. He was not in any hurry to get back to the doubtful comforts of the caravan that they had lodged on the site of the old monastery gardens, and rather doubted his sanity when they had decided to have a year-long adventure, living as travellers. Both had moneyed parents, and he was losing his conviction that one should try to live as others live for a while, to give one a balanced view of life.

He’d just decided that he would inform Pippa that they would see the school term out for Milo’s sake, and then return to their familiar familial roots, when he heard his name called from across the road, turned, and saw Gabriella LeClerc waving at him. ‘Do you fancy a coffee before you go home?’ she called, holding her hands one either side of her mouth in the way of an improvised megaphone. ‘The kettle’s on, and I’ve got Jammie Dodgers.’ How could he resist?

Turning on his heel and heading across the road in the direction of Chimneys, he waved to indicate his consent, and a smile lit his previously gloomy countenance. He’d have coffee and Jammie Dodgers with Gabriella, then he’d go back to the caravan and inform Pippa of his decision about their living arrangements. If she didn’t like it, she could stay in that clapped-out old biscuit tin on her own. He didn’t see why he had to be part of realising her gypsy-life dream any longer.

In Forsythia Cottage Stevie (née Stephanie) Baldwin had just got back from dropping off her son Spike at the school. She would be returning there after the school day was over, to give it an extra-thorough clean as it was the end of term, but before that, she had her shift behind the bar of one of the two local pubs.

She was a single mother, only twenty-two, and she lived, still, with her parents and grandmother, who all lent a hand in Spike’s upbringing, and were very generous with their time while Stevie went to work. Patsy and Frank Baldwin had not exactly been delighted when their only daughter had informed them, at the age of seventeen, that she was pregnant, and had no plans to marry the baby’s father, but since Spike’s birth, they had doted on him, as had Frank’s mother Elsie, who was now eighty years old, and thoroughly enjoying the amount of waiting-on to which her age seemed to entitle her.

‘Shall I get the cakes at the school sale?’ Stevie called, hanging up her jacket and slipping off her shoes in preference for a slipper. She had need of only one, for comfort. ‘I can get there a few minutes early and get the pick of the selection. I can give them to you to bring home, Mum, when you collect Spike, and we can all have a nice little treat before I go into work this evening, can’t we?’

‘Nice one, Stevie,’ called her mother, re-boiling the kettle for tea, now that her daughter was back from the school run. ‘Go and give your grandmother a shout, and tell her I’ve got the tea made, and she’d better get a move on getting down here or all the chocolate biscuits will be gone.’

In Paddock View on Four Stiles, Hartley and India Bywaters-Flemyng were taking an overview of the bookings for both the riding school and the holiday cottages; a terrace of refurbished properties called Blacksmith’s Terrace and located on Forge Lane.

‘We’ve got number one vacant until after Easter,’ Hartley stated, he being the one who was responsible for the bookings and maintenance of the little cottages. ‘The Cliftons in number two are taking advantage of the extra days free at Easter, so they won’t be off until Tuesday, and then I can get that prepped for the next visitors. The Smithers and Mrs Course don’t go until Tuesday either – that’s three and four – and I’ve got a couple arriving anytime now for number five – staying for the long Easter weekend and through to the following Friday. What’ve you got?’

‘No lessons after today till Tuesday, then I’m just about booked up,’ replied his wife India. ‘You know how the little ankle-biters love their ponies and horses, and I’m up to my eyes in extra lessons. There’s also a booking for Wednesday for a group from Fallow Fold to go hacking for the day. That’s a nice little earner, and it’ll help to make up for the four days without my regular customers.’

They were a tall handsome couple, she, twenty-nine years of age, he thirty-five, but they were not popular. They exuded an air of superiority and arrogance, and the little exchange India had had with Audrey at the school entrance was typical of their relations with the other residents of the village. They had no friends locally, and didn’t socialise, deeming themselves of superior breeding to the local turnips who had lived there all or most of their lives, never having left to get a university degree, as they had done, and they did not differentiate for any newcomers either.

Their aloofness alienated them, but as their main aim was to make a success of their twin businesses, they neither noticed nor cared. That part of their aloofness stemmed from the fact that Hartley suffered from a serious stammer, they were reluctant to admit.

III

In The Rectory, now that their daughter Dove was safely in school, Rev. Septimus (‘Child number seven – don’t ask!’ was his usual response to enquiries about his name) and Ruth Lockwood were having a full and frank – in fact, frankly, loud – discussion about the change in the rules for admissions to the school.

‘I don’t care how you try to justify it, it’s going to ruin yet another one of the village schools with just a couple of classes – they’re dying out and will soon become extinct. And you want to admit children from other parishes? You know what it’s been like here, with all and sundry buying up the properties, and turning up at church for a couple of weeks, then expecting to get a place for their child in the school, as if it’s their right.’

‘Ruth, you have to understand that if it’s not opened up in some way, the school will close, and that’ll be even worse. We’ve got less than thirty pupils registered, and that’s covering ages five to eleven. There’s no way we can remain open if numbers don’t improve. I’ve told you, it’s been discussed with the school staff, the parent governors, and at Diocesan meetings and, if we want the school to survive at all, we have to be less narrow in the criteria of our admissions system.’

‘It’s awful enough as it is – all those pretentious women with their ghastly children’s names, making register sound like it’s for some mini-RADA. They only come here so that they can get the sort of education their children wouldn’t be exposed to if they went to an ordinary state school. They’re getting the good quality of a private education, without having to pay for a private school, and I think that’s cheating. If you want your child to go to a Church of England school, then you should be a practising Christian.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ruth. What has the Christian religion got to do with anything in this country any more? Tell me that! Our beliefs and traditions have slowly been whittled away, to the point that virtually no child starting at a local authority school has the faintest idea what a Christmas carol is – the nearest they can guess is ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Slade.

‘Do you know what one woman said to me the other day? She said that the likes of us shouldn’t go about trying to ruin the fun of Christmas with all that religious clap-trap, and what was the point of it all anyway? I tried to point out to her that without the ‘Christ’ there would be no ‘-mas’, but she told me it quite upset her little grandchildren to have to be hauled off to the kiddies’ nativity service, and miss all the cartoons on the telly about Santa Claus and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. At her age, she should have been setting an example, and I can tell you, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to giving an otherwise sweet, grey-haired old lady a ‘fourpenny one’ right on the nose.

‘And as for the Easter message – I absolutely give up. For most families now, it’s just about ‘bunny-wunnies’ – or that ghastly American Easter Bunny, I should say – cakes with little chicks on, and chocolate eggs.’

‘So that’s more reason than ever, then, to keep the intake just to those who live in the parish and att. . .