A Passion So Deadly

Thirteen

Two days later there was a tragic accident near Chalmpton Peverill. Freddie Lange was killed outright at the wheel of his beloved old MG roadster. The Taunton police inspector, accompanied by a woman sergeant, who had landed the unenviable job of breaking the grim news to Freddie’s widow, arrived at the Lange farm just before 2.00 a.m.

Constance had obviously not yet been to bed. She opened the door fully dressed, almost as soon as the police car swung into the yard. Inspector Barton was not surprised. She would have been waiting up for her husband, starting to worry because he was late, trying to assure herself that everything was fine, that he had just been delayed somewhere or had car trouble. Inspector Barton knew the drill. He had been through it all enough times before, after all. And the expression on Constance Lange’s face told him quite clearly now that he hardly need speak. The very sight of him meant that she already knew.

‘I’m so terribly sorry...’ he began.

Wordlessly Constance Lange opened the door wider, stepped back, and let the two police officers into the house. In just a few seconds she seemed to have aged twenty years, the Inspector thought.

‘Your husband died at once, that might be some comfort to you,’ said Inspector Barton gently.

Constance Lange still did not speak. The Inspector had hoped that learning her husband was unlikely to have suffered might soften the blow. He knew all about the Langes. They were a respected long-established Somerset family, good people. Why was it always the good ones who went young, he asked himself, not for the first time.

He went through the motions of explaining the details. The accident had happened shortly after midnight on an open stretch of the A38 just five miles from Chalmpton Peverill. There had been no other vehicle involved. Freddie’s car appeared to have crashed into a stone wall at full speed. It concertinaed.

Mrs Lange seemed barely to be listening. She sat silently at the kitchen table. The woman sergeant set about making a pot of tea and then asked her if there was anyone else who should be informed, anyone who could be with her.

Constance at first shook her head. The woman didn’t seem able to function at all.

‘But you have a married daughter, don’t you, Mrs Lange?’ Inspector Barton asked in what he hoped was a soothing, coaxing sort of voice. ‘Shouldn’t she be told? She lives here in the village, doesn’t she?’

Constance stared at him blankly for a few seconds, then nodded. As if she were being operated by some strange kind of remote control, she reached out for the kitchen phone, rejecting the inspector’s offer that he or the sergeant would break the news if she preferred.

‘Charlotte has a phone by the bed,’ she remarked rather curiously, Inspector Barton thought, almost as if that made everything all right.

The phone seemed to be answered quite swiftly. Mrs Lange did not waste any time or words, just told her daughter briefly and clearly, although in a small, very tired voice, what had happened.

Across the room the inspector could hear a shriek of despair and shock coming from the receiver. Mrs Lange’s expression did not change. Distractedly she replaced the receiver in its cradle, walked back to the kitchen table, sat down again and continued to stare unseeingly into the distance.

Charlotte, her face already stained with tears, arrived within minutes, accompanied by her husband, Michael, a sensible, kind-looking young man who gave the impression, Inspector Barton thought with some relief, that he would be a solid fellow to have around in a crisis.

Certainly the inspector was very glad to see them both. It was not the first time he had broken the news of a sudden bereavement, and he knew from experience that it was often the ones who appeared to take it calmly and quietly who were actually taking it the worst.

Charlotte, sobbing quite openly, wrapped her arms around her mother, but seemed to get little more response from the older woman than had the policeman. Constance merely carried on staring straight ahead, her face drawn but her eyes dry — and blank to the point of being almost uncomprehending.

Inspector Barton thought there was something chillingly unreal about Mrs Lange’s reaction. He had seen all sorts in his time, but this was different, no doubt about it, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on how. He found it very disturbing indeed.

The Lange family withdrew into itself, closing ranks against outsiders. Helen was still in the Musgrove Hospital — kept there for observation although she had been recovering well and the original meningitis diagnosis had definitely been wrong — when her father died. It was Charlotte, thankful that she had married such a supportive man, who in the morning went to the hospital with Michael to break the news to her. And it was Charlotte who lavished her shocked and tearful sister with the comforting love she so needed. Constance, previously always so warm and so strong, this time did not seem to have the strength or the inclination to give solace to anyone — not even her seventeen-year-old daughter.

Constance appeared to be inconsolable and completely disinterested in anything other than her own misery. Michael and Charlotte brought Helen home from hospital straight away. She had in any case been due for release and they thought that the girl needed more than anything else to be with her family, particularly her mother. But Constance, although she went through the motions of taking Helen in her arms and uttering a few words of comfort, continued to act as if she were not really a part of all that was going on around her. She spent only a few curiously distant minutes with poor Helen before saying that she wanted to spend the rest of the day alone in her bedroom. She didn’t want any food, she didn’t want anything. She was unable, she said, to cope with people, even her own family.

Practical as ever, Charlotte did everything she could to help.

‘I’ll take Helen home with me tonight, mum,’ she said, aware that her sobbing sister was now quite bewildered as well as distraught.

At first Charlotte saw nothing particularly amiss in her mother’s reaction, accepting that she must be in deep shock — after all, everybody knew how close, how in love still, Constance and Freddie had been.

William returned from agricultural college later that day, and he seemed to be a completely different person from the wayward boy who had been temporarily suspended for bad behaviour three months earlier. He looked years older for a start, Charlotte thought, and it was William who provided the calming assurance the Lange family had always previously sought from Constance. Out of character, Charlotte rather disloyally considered, but welcome nonetheless.

William’s grief was obvious in his strained and tense appearance. But there was also about him a grim determination. It was William who immediately took over the plans for the funeral and began checking at once that the farm was continuing to run as it should. This was indeed a greatly changed William.

He had been home for several hours — and had refused to allow his mother to be disturbed — when Constance finally emerged. She wandered into the kitchen looking almost as if she did not know quite where she was.

William was leaning against the Aga talking to Charlotte, who was standing alongside him making tea for the umpteenth time that day. Helen, exhausted by weeping, was asleep in the old armchair in the corner. Under other circumstances it would have been a cosy family scene.

As she walked aimlessly into the room Constance spotted William and her face broke into a big smile of welcome. She began to move more purposefully across the kitchen, arms outstretched as if she were about to embrace him. Charlotte felt instant relief. She had grown up knowing that her kid brother was her mother’s favourite, in spite of Constance’s valiant attempts to hide it, and had never minded. Her mother had always had more than enough love to go around. Perhaps William was going to be the tonic their mother needed. But then Charlotte saw Constance stop abruptly as she drew close to her son, the smile, which had perhaps been automatic, freezing across her face, her eyes, at first open and expectant, clouding over again. It was as if she had suddenly remembered something momentarily forgotten, Charlotte thought. She looked at her brother then. He was showing none of the warm response she would have expected. No compassion. No love. No emotion at all, in fact. His bearing was stiff and forbidding. He did not smile or stretch out a hand to Constance. Nothing. No wonder her mother pulled back.

Then Constance uttered a strange wailing sound and began to weep, the tears at last falling freely. And her previously detached, rather eerie calm, turned into a kind of hysteria. She cried out, her voice almost a scream, full of anguish.

‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault...’

William spoke then, breaking the quite icy silence he had maintained since Constance had entered the room.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, mother,’ he said. His eyes were very cold, his voice impersonal. Charlotte couldn’t believe it, he sounded almost as if he were threatening his mother.

‘For goodness sake, William, what on earth is wrong with you?’ she shouted at him. ‘Can’t you see how upset Mother is?’

Charlotte rushed to her mother’s side and took her in her arms. Constance continued to sob hysterically. At the same time Charlotte became aware that her sister had woken up, unsurprisingly in all the mayhem, and was no doubt confused and frightened by what was going on.

‘At least look after Helen,’ she snapped at her brother.

Obediently then, William went to his sister, muttered some desultory words of comfort and led her from the room.

‘Come on, sis, let’s leave Charlotte to it,’ he said.

Charlotte returned her full attention to her mother who was still quite hysterical. She would never have thought Constance would react to anything like this, but then, her mother had been acting strangely even before her father’s death. At least, thought Charlotte, she was weeping now — for the first time since they had heard the news, her face had not looked remotely as if she had been crying when she came down from her room. Maybe a good cry would release the demons for her.

But this was not to be. Constance remained inconsolable throughout the four-day period between Freddie’s death and his funeral. All Charlotte’s best efforts to console, comfort and even just to calm her, were to no avail. The doctor was called but Constance refused medication, demanding just to be left alone.

She spent most of the four days in her bedroom and often would not let either of her daughters in. She would not even let Josh in, and the dog spent hours at a time lying on the landing outside, his nose pressed against the small gap between the bottom of the door and the carpet, as if desperate to get as close as he could to his mistress.

Charlotte begged her mother to make an effort for Helen’s sake, but to no avail. When she did see her daughters it was as if she were not really with them at all, her eyes were wild, her clothes crumpled as if she were sleeping in them, her hair unwashed. She was, it seemed, a completely broken woman.

‘It’s like...’ an exhausted Charlotte anxiously confided to Michael on the eve of the funeral, ‘...It’s like she’s been driven out of her mind.’

The funeral was enormous, a typical country affair. Freddie Lange had been a pillar of the local community, farmer, parish councillor, joint master of the local hunt. In rural areas you still pay homage to your dead. Two thousand people turned up at Chalmpton Peverill Church and the service was broadcast on a sound system — set up outside the pretty little Norman building which held a maximum of only five hundred — to the mourners who braved the winter chill in the churchyard.

Early that morning William had visited his mother alone in her bedroom — only the second time he had seen her since his father’s death. And whatever he had said to her seemed to have had some kind of effect.

To the surprise of all her family, if not to William, she arrived downstairs shortly before the funeral party was due to leave, looking, superficially at least, pretty much the old Constance. She was immaculately turned out in a well-tailored black coat and hat, her hair clean and tidy, perfectly made up.

William was quickly by her side. ‘You and I will walk together, mother, of course,’ he said. ‘That is what is expected.’

Constance had flashed him a quick anxious glance and then nodded almost imperceptibly in agreement.

From that moment on William appeared to orchestrate his mother, telling her how to behave. Yet at no time did he seem to make any attempt to give her any comfort, to show her any affection.

Marcia Spry noticed this, of course. She’d noticed all of it. Somehow she had even learned how Constance had shut herself away from her family and how she had been virtually hysterical all week.

She didn’t look hysterical, now, Marcia had to hand her that. She looked every bit the well-bred grieving widow, putting on a good front, keeping her tears for later, for private. But, sure as eggs is eggs, said Marcia to herself, there was something wrong between Constance Lange and that son of hers.

Fleetingly she wondered if William had turned out to be a wrong ’un like that other lad. Gay, they called it nowadays. Marcia sniffed her derision. In her day village fetes and dances had been gay. Not men, if you could call ’em that.

The family party were walking away from the grave now and Marcia again watched William and Constance — close together, not touching, almost going out of their way not to touch. By golly, there was summat going on. But it couldn’t be that gay thing. That wouldn’t worry Constance Lange a bit, that wouldn’t. Marcia sniffed again.

Her thoughts turned to a wider arena. There was something fishy about that accident too, if you asked her. Smelt like a kettle of herrings, it did. Why should a careful driver like Freddie Lange end up smashed into a wall? He worshipped that silly old car of his, nursed the thing like a baby, never drove it at the sort of speed he must have been going the night he died, Marcia was sure of it. And there’d been no other vehicle involved either — so what had really happened, that was what she wanted to know. And she’d heard the police wanted to know, as well.

Marcia was quite right — Inspector Barton and his team were bewildered.

There was no obvious cause for Freddie’s accident. The possibilities that Barton had initially considered included Freddie suddenly losing consciousness — a heart attack perhaps — his being drunk, or the car suffering mechanical failure. But there had been a post-mortem examination, routine in the case of sudden accidental death, and the autopsy had shown that Freddie was in perfect health when he died and that there had been no trace of alcohol in his blood — unsurprising to his family as Freddie had always been far too responsible to drink and drive.

And a thorough inspection of the wrecked MG revealed only that the car had been meticulously maintained. It appeared to have had no defects at all and indeed had been serviced and passed its MOT test only two weeks earlier.

Marcia Spry somehow contrived to know all of that well before it should have become public knowledge and saw it as vindicating her own theories concerning the accident.

‘What did I tell ’ee?’ she asked anybody who would listen. ‘Summat mighty fishy going on, there be, I’m sure of it.’

Inspector Barton, although he would not have cared a jot for Marcia Spry’s views had he been privy to them, was, however, becoming increasingly more inclined to a similar opinion himself.

He allowed the funeral to pass without further bothering the Langes. After all, they were an eminent Somerset family and Inspector Barton was the kind of man who was not quite able to ignore that sort of thing. Not that he would let his respect for the family stand in the way of any enquiries he thought were proper, but nonetheless he proceeded with perhaps a little more caution than he might otherwise have done.

Ultimately he decided that the grieving widow had to be confronted. Inspector Barton didn’t like loose ends and the death of Freddie Lange was about as loose an end as he had ever had to deal with. And so, at around midday on December 17th, the second day after Freddie’s funeral, the inspector called unannounced at Chalmpton Village Farm. Having made his decision to confront the grieving widow, he was quite blunt in his approach to her.

‘Can you think of any reason, madam, why your husband might have taken his own life?’ he asked Constance.

Mrs Lange had escorted him into the drawing-room, the first time he had been anywhere in the farmhouse except the kitchen. The room was beautifully furnished in traditional country style with big squashy chintz-covered chairs and sofa, the colours all gentle blues and golds, relaxing, easy on the eye. A log fire blazed in the big open fireplace and a weak wintery sun streamed through the windows, its pale light reflected in the gleaming pieces of brass and copper which stood on the mantelpiece and on either side of the grate. A fine grandfather clock dominated one corner of the room, and the silence between him and Mrs Lange was so intense that its ticking sounded as loud to the inspector as if a drum were being methodically beaten inside his head.

The newly widowed woman returned the policeman’s gaze steadily. She certainly seemed to have recovered well enough now, on the surface at least, thought Inspector Barton. But then, he supposed that was only to be expected of a woman like her. She was, after all, Mrs Constance Lange. Whatever Mrs Lange was really feeling, now that the initial shock was over, she was unlikely to let it show to anyone and certainly not to a policeman. He was both impressed and a little unnerved. If Constance Lange was hiding anything, he didn’t reckon she was going to give herself away yet. And the inspector proved to be dead right.

Constance was quite controlled. Only the tiniest tremor in her hands, folded neatly in her lap as she contrived to sit quite upright in an easy chair opposite the policeman, indicated that she might be suppressing any emotion. She regarded Barton coolly.

‘No reason at all, inspector,’ she replied eventually. And her voice was quite without expression.