The Moonlit Murders: A historical mystery page-turner (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 3) Read online

  The Moonlit Murders

  A historical mystery page-turner

  Fliss Chester

  Contents

  Books by Fliss Chester

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  A Dangerous Goodbye

  Hear More from Fliss Chester

  A Letter from Fliss Chester

  Books by Fliss Chester

  Night Train to Paris

  Acknowledgements

  Books by Fliss Chester

  The Fen Churche Mysteries

  A Dangerous Goodbye

  Night Train to Paris

  Moonlit Murders

  The French Escapes Romance Series

  Love in the Snow

  Summer at the Vineyard

  Meet Me on the Riviera

  Available in Audio

  A Dangerous Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)

  Night Train to Paris (Available in the UK and the US)

  ‘Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

  For those in peril on the sea!’

  —William Whiting, 1860

  1

  Paris, November 1945

  Dear Mrs B, Kitty and Dil,

  It’s time to come home. Dashing this off to you as we wait at the French Line company’s offices, trying to book passage. The ships leaving Le Havre are all so full of troops being repatriated that it’s hard to find cabins, though there is a very smart-looking one leaving in a few days and fingers crossed we’ll get on it. James says he’s going first class; I don’t think my purse quite stretches that far, sadly, but I’m so happy to be heading home I don’t mind if I’m bunking with the boiler men!

  After what’s happened recently, I’m feeling quite ready for a cocoa and chinwag over the kitchen table with you both – although James seems restless and in need of another adventure. I’ll bring him to the farmhouse to meet you when we’re home, which should be—

  ‘Numéro vingt-deux!’

  Fen stopped writing and looked up as the cashier called out her ticket number. She had been scribbling away while sitting in the rather gracious, wood-panelled waiting room of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, or the French Line as it was more popularly known, as she and her friend Captain James Lancaster patiently waited for their turn with the booking clerk.

  Fenella Churche, Fen to her friends, was on her way back to England, having travelled across northern France to find out what had happened to her fiancé in the war. Late fiancé… her grief at Arthur’s death caught her unawares at times, knocking the breath out of her while she gradually brought herself back to the here and now.

  ‘Mademoiselle Fenella Churche?’ the cashier called out again, and James nudged her in the ribs as she put the cap back on her pen and pushed her writing paper into her handbag. She got up, smoothed down her woollen skirt and approached the desk.

  ‘Coming!’

  The lady behind the counter peered at her over the top of her pince-nez glasses. Her short hair was styled into tight, glossy curls and her regulation company blouse was buttoned up high to the pie-crust collar. Fen wondered how she must appear to this tightly curled and highly polished woman, her own chestnut hair being much less well-kempt, bursting out of the hastily curled victory rolls she’d pinned in that morning.

  Fen wasn’t a naturally messy person, far from it, she was usually the first to be seen checking that her lipstick was just so and her hem straight, but weeks away from home with a limited wardrobe, save for farming clothes and hand-me-downs, had left her less polished than she would have liked.

  ‘Fenella Churche,’ the lady spoke again, once Fen was seated in front of her. Another cashier called out the next number and Fen saw from the corner of her eye James sit himself down at a neighbouring desk.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Fenella, F-e-n—’ Thanks to her youth spent in Paris, Fen was able to speak in perfectly fluent French to the cashier, who was having trouble with her very British name.

  ‘F-e-n,’ Miss Pince-nez, as Fen had decided to call the cashier, looked up at her over her small glasses. ‘Fen Churche, like the London station? Fenchurch Street?’

  Fen took a deep breath and was about to speak, but decided a simple nod would do. She had lost count of the number of times people, strangers, had made that connection and she often wondered if her parents had really thought through the implication of naming her after her great-aunt on her mother’s side, however interesting a lady she had been.

  ‘Documents please, Mademoiselle Churche,’ Miss Pince-nez demanded, not even looking up at Fen any more.

  Fen placed her passport in the woman’s outstretched hand obediently.

  ‘We have a few options left within your budget, but the De Grasse is very popular.’ Miss Pince-nez made her point by raising her eyes and sweeping them across the busy waiting room.

  ‘I quite understand, I think I’ll take this one, please.’ Fen pointed at a line on the sheet of paper in front of her – the line that stated the price of a second-class cabin.

  ‘Very well, second class, full board, Le Havre to Southampton,’ Miss Pince-nez confirmed and printed in the appropriate details on the booking form before stamping it with the French Line’s official rubber stamp. ‘The De Grasse will be operating a slightly different tiered system to the usual, in that first and second class will be sharing dining rooms.’ Miss Pince-nez looked as if the admission of this pained her in some way and she touched the curls nearest her forehead as she spoke, as if to comfort herself before she carried on. ‘The lower decks, third class and steerage, are mostly full of soldiers, just so you know.’

  Fen nodded and signed the form that Miss Pince-nez pushed towards her. At the bottom was the amount in francs that she needed to pay. Fen produced enough money to cover her ticket and handed it over, noticing as she did so that James seemed to be handing over considerably more at the desk next door. Although she couldn’t hear what he had asked for, due to a rather beautiful engraved-glass and mahogany wood partition between them, she assumed first class must be extravagantly superior to require that much more cash.

  As they’d sat in the waiting room earlier, James had offered to pay for her to upgrade too, but she had refused. Fen wasn’t embarrassed at her inability to afford first class herself, or indeed too proud to accept help when it was truly needed, but she didn’t feel that it was proper at all for her to accept James’s very generous offer. They were only friends after all, and nothing more than that.

  ‘All done?’ James asked as Fen walked up to him by the waiting-room door.

  ‘All done. It feels strange in a way to be leaving France. So much has happened since I set out from Mrs B’s farmhouse in September…’ Fen trailed off, and James gently put a hand on her shoulder. She had met him in Burgundy when she’d been trying to discover what had happened to her fiancé Arthur Melville-Hare, only to realise that he and James had been good friends.

  Theirs was a partnership forged as they both worked as secret agents for the Special Operations Executive, a top-secret part of the British war effort. After finding out about Arthur’s death, Fen and James had found a certain comfort in each other’s company and she was pleased at least that he was coming back to England, too. Much like her, he had lost loved ones in the war and had more recently been used by a gold-digging young Parisienne intent on becoming his wife. England – home – would hopefully be a salve for the wounds the last few weeks, let alone the war years, had inflicted on them.

  ‘Come on, let’s get some lunch and you can tell me all about the formidable Mrs B…’ James patted down his jacket pockets, checking he had his wallet with him.

  Fen looked up at him, his blue eyes so different to Arthur’s, yet more often than not possessed of a very similar twinkle.

  ‘Formidable… she’d like that.’ Fen laughed, thinking of her former landlady as she secured her headscarf under her chin. ‘Though don’t you dare tell her I said so!’

  The café they found just round the corner from the French Line offices in Paris’s Opera district was offering a set-menu lunch and Fen allowed James to order a steaming crockpot of hunter’s chicken for the both of them. Paris hadn’t suffered as much in the way of food sho
rtages as the rest of France, or indeed England, as it had been home, for most of the war, to the occupying German army. The Nazis had overrun the streets of Paris, but their presence had done nothing to influence the food in the bistros and cafés, which was still as succulently and deliciously French as always.

  Fen tucked into the chicken chasseur with gusto and didn’t put up too much resistance as James ordered a carafe of good red wine to go with it.

  ‘We need something to toast Paris with,’ he justified himself to her. ‘Here’s to the City of Lights, even if it was home to murderers and thieves.’

  ‘Oh, James,’ Fen shook her head. ‘I don’t think we can blame dear old Paris for her inhabitants. But here’s to new adventures.’

  As they clinked glasses, the sun came out from behind a dark grey cloud and illuminated their table.

  ‘New adventures indeed,’ James repeated and held her gaze as he took a sip of wine. The cloud moved and the sunlight faded. James put his glass down and picked up his knife and fork.

  Fen took a sip from her own glass. New adventures… Then tucked into the casserole again.

  2

  ‘Come on, slowcoach,’ James called out to Fen, who was still waiting for her sturdy old brown leather suitcase to be taken off the bus. It was the day after they’d booked their passage in the smart French Line offices in Paris and now, after a trip that had started before dawn that morning, they had arrived in Le Havre, the port from where the ship would be sailing.

  ‘It’s not me who’s being the slowcoach,’ Fen half said, half whispered, hoping the driver of the old charabanc wasn’t in earshot. He had driven them carefully and sedately to the coast from the cathedral city of Rouen, which was as far as the train from Paris could take them before the line had become too damaged. Fen had felt, or indeed endured, each bump and pothole in the road through the barely padded metal springs in her seat.

  The copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that she’d picked up from one of the second-hand booksellers by the Seine in Paris had lurched and juddered in front of her eyes, so much so that she had had to rest it on her lap and lay her hands on top of it, closing her eyes until she’d got over the bout of motion sickness. James, sitting alongside her, had mumbled that a bit of speed could sometimes be a good thing, skimming the wheels over bumps and lumps rather than ponderously hitting each and every one.

  Fen had nodded and clutched her book to her with one hand and held onto the metal bar at the top of the seat in front of her with the other to brace herself against the rocky ride. The Nazis had a lot to answer for in this neck of the woods, though Fen had to admit to herself as she’d bounced along that failing to maintain, and indeed purposefully destroying, some of the main roads to the ports was one of their lesser crimes.

  James was now eager to find a café for lunch but Fen was inclined to send him on his way alone as her stomach was so churned from the journey that she wasn’t sure she could cope with anything to eat quite yet. Plus, her suitcase was still very much jammed at the back of the luggage compartment beneath the old bus.

  ‘Embarkation begins at four.’ James was looking at his watch, his own suitcase and a duffel bag resting beside him. He’d added to his wardrobe, it had seemed, while in Paris, and although Fen wasn’t sure what he’d bought, he’d managed to fill a whole new case with clothes, and his army-issue kitbag was dwarfed by the new sturdy case.

  ‘Here we are.’ Fen accepted her case from the driver and nodded a thanks to him. ‘Ready. Though if you offer me anything more exciting than a dry cracker, I might—’

  ‘I get the picture.’ James laughed while raising a hand to stop her in her tracks. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll eat for the both of us. Something about sea air always makes me ravenous.’ He patted his stomach. ‘The De Grasse better have a decent chef on board, as being that close to the ocean, I’ll be on ten meals a day!’

  Fen laughed at him. James was definitely in better spirits than she’d seen him recently. Better really than she’d ever known. He’d been understandably circumspect when they’d first met, not understanding why she had appeared and worried that she’d possibly scupper his own investigations into Arthur’s death.

  Then in Paris more recently he’d begun to open up, but he’d been distracted by the allure of a beautiful, if fundamentally treacherous, young woman. Being duped like that had knocked the wind out of him and it was only after they’d booked their passage at the offices of the French Line shipping company that she’d noticed a renewed spring in his step. Perhaps James was happy to be on his way home too, after all?

  ‘We’ll only be on the ship for a matter of hours, barely enough time to fry a tomato, James, before we’re back in Southampton.’ Fen put her case down, flexing out her fingers as she spoke.

  James merely raised his eyebrows at her and then picked up his bags. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I’m going to fill up on as much decent French food as I can before we board. Don’t say I can’t tempt you with one last medium-rare entrecôte with some fried potatoes before we’re back to eating the boot-leather of good old English beef?’

  Fen smiled at him. Her nausea from the journey had subsided and her stomach was beginning to rumble. All of a sudden, seizing the chance to indulge in one last delicious French meal didn’t seem like such a bad idea. ‘Lead on, MacDuff!’ She picked up her battered old case again. ‘Or should that be Le Duff?’

  ‘I’d swap you a haggis for a steak haché any time.’ He chuckled at her and led them both away from the bus, towards the sea.

  Much to James’s disappointment, there wasn’t much left of Le Havre, let alone a bustling street of shops and cafés. He kicked some rubble down what would have been a road and Fen sighed. What had they expected? They’d been spoiled in Paris as, although it had been bombed, it hadn’t been obliterated like this once beautiful port town had been. All that was left was the odd boulevard of burnt tree trunks, buildings torn apart like dolls’ houses with their fronts wide open and piles of crushed stone around them.

  Working parties and their building-site shouts replaced the noises one would have expected to hear in a busy town centre. There was no rattle of a tram or chatter of a marketplace. Only the rhythmic thud of stone being moved and the splintering of wood as any useful pieces were pulled from heaps of yet-to-be-cleared ash. There had been no sign of a proper bus terminal even, it having been obliterated no doubt and now temporarily replaced with a prefab hut.

  ‘Festung…’ James said as he kicked at a broken brick, barrelling it into a pile of its fellows.

  ‘What’s festung?’ Fen asked him, as she placed her suitcase down and sat on it while waiting for an answer. Picking over rubble made walking harder, especially while lugging a suitcase, and, after the early start this morning and lack of food, she was quite weary.

  ‘I knew about it, of course, but I had never imagined…’ James trailed off, but copied Fen’s idea and sat himself down on his own, much newer suitcase. ‘I thought there might be at least one café left.’

  ‘James? Festung?’

  ‘It means “fortress” in German. We heard about it via the Resistance listening stations – coded memos that went backwards and forwards between German high command and the last officers left here as the Allies advanced. Le Havre was meant to be defended like a medieval fortress, last man standing and all that. Hence the bombing of it last year. We did this, you know.’ He nodded his head in the general direction of the desolation.