OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE a cozy murder mystery (Village Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  OLD SOLDIERS

  NEVER DIE

  A cozy murder mystery

  MARGARET MAYHEW

  Village Mysteries Book 1

  Revised edition 2020

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA 1999 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Margaret Mayhew to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ©Margaret Mayhew

  Please join our mailing list for free Kindle books and new releases.

  www.joffebooks.com

  We love to hear from our readers! Please email any feedback you have to: [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-78931-548-6

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  FREE KINDLE BOOKS

  A SELECTION OF BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG FOR US READERS

  One

  The Colonel moved into his cottage at Frog End on a fine day in spring. It was called Pond Cottage, though, as far as he could see, there was no sign of any such thing. The local estate agent – an eager young man in a creased blazer and scuffed suede shoes – had described it as having potential when he first showed him round. Potential, the Colonel had learned later, meant that although the place was dilapidated, it wasn’t actually falling down and, with a lot of work and considerable expense, it could probably be made to look quite passable.

  The survey had been a disaster and he had bought the cottage against all sanity and reason. A bungalow would have been far more sensible – preferably brand new, like the one he had also viewed in another part of the village which was, appropriately, called Journey’s End. There would have been efficient central heating, modern wiring and plumbing, a proper damp course, easy-to-clean wood and vinyl floors, plastic guttering and drainpipes, and rot-proof metal-framed windows. And, outside, there would have been a manageable square plot for a garden – mainly lawn and cement paving, with two small flowerbeds.

  Instead, he had landed himself with a two-hundred-year-old thatched dwelling that had death-watch beetle, rising damp, a falling roof, rot and decay throughout and half an acre or more of impenetrable jungle. There was no proper heating of any kind – unless one counted the ancient range in the kitchen and the ugly little tiled fireplace in the sitting-room – and the wiring was a dangerous disgrace. Wood for the range and coal for the fire had been kept in the claw-foot bath in the scullery and the lavatory was in an outhouse, surrounded by a hostile barrier of nettles. The previous occupant, a tenant, had apparently been an old man who had lived to more than ninety, long after his wife had died, and obviously in some squalor. When the old man’s turn had finally come, the owner, a local farmer, had scarcely waited until he had been carried out, feet first, before putting the place on the market for the highest price that he had had the nerve to ask.

  Why, then, had the Colonel bought it instead of the bungalow? It was much cheaper, but that had nothing to do with it. It was because Laura had once seen it and liked it. Years ago when they had been touring the West Country back on leave one summer, they had driven at random through the Dorset lanes, discovering countryside and hamlets still almost untouched by the twentieth century. Real Thomas Hardy country, Laura had called it, gazing delightedly out of the car window. She used to read all Hardy’s books, and the Brontes, and George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell . . . all that sort of thing. Military history was more his line, and biographies. And a good thriller or detective story when he was feeling more tired than usual and wanted to relax.

  They’d come across Frog End quite by chance. The narrow lane they had taken seemed to lead to nowhere in particular. There had been a pretty little water splash across the road with some ducks paddling about and he’d had to go very slowly while they got out of the way, quacking indignantly. Then he’d driven round a corner and the village had suddenly appeared before them, serene and beautiful in the sunlight . . . at peace under an English heaven. The Colonel was weak on Hardy but he knew his Brooke. The village green had a pond, with more ducks, and a cluster of old stone cottages about it. There was a Norman church and, inevitably, a pub. The Dog and Duck had been a very simple place then, just a couple of rooms with flagstone floors, offering good draft beer and plain sandwiches – cheese and pickle, ham and mustard, and packets of plain Smith’s crisps with salt in a blue paper twist. No-frills fare. They’d sat outside on a wooden bench, and noticed the cottage on the far side of the green. A climbing rose had been in full bloom over the porch, the pink flowers smothering the stone walls. In the sunshine, and from a safe distance, it had looked enchanting. Laura had remarked on it and said that it was just the sort of place she dreamed they’d live in one day when he retired from the army and they could settle down in England. He’d agreed with her. One day, they’d promised themselves, drinking the beer and eating the sandwiches and looking across the green. One day.

  He had forgotten all about the cottage until many years later, after Laura had died. He had gone to stay with old friends in Dorset and on the way had driven round the countryside, trying to retrace some of the places he had visited with Laura. Places they had been together and experiences they had known and shared, brought her back to him, if only for a while. He had managed to find Frog End again, more by luck than anything, as he had forgotten its name. He had stopped for lunch at the Dog and Duck which had gone and tarted itself up since their visit. The nice old flagstones had vanished beneath red and green geometrically patterned carpeting and there was the cheap glint of modern copper and brass and the synthetic shine of plastic. A new extension had been built onto the back, complete with mock beams, where they served full meals now: steak and kidney pie, chili con carne, lasagne, chicken in a basket, scampi and chips, prawn salad – not bad if you didn’t mind the prices. But the beer wasn’t a patch on the draft they’d served that day he’d been there with Laura.

  It had been late autumn and too cold to sit outside, but afterwards he had driven round the green. In pouring rain and under leaden skies the village had not looked quite so idyllic, but he had noticed that Laura’s dream cottage was up for sale. At first he had not recognised it without its pink roses, and, close to, it had proved more of a nightmare. Either distance had lent enchantment, or it had gone downhill badly in the intervening years. Come to that, the whole village had changed since he had last seen it. Apart from the spoiling of the pub there was a raw outcrop of new houses at the far end of the green – one of them the bungalow, Journey’s End.

  He had never intended to go and bury himself in the depths of Dorset. After Laura had died he had stayed on in the small London flat. It was fairly close to Alison – not that he wanted to interfere in his daughter’s life – and it was also where the work was. Or where he hoped it would be. In the same y
ear as Laura’s death he had reached the grand old age of fifty-five when the army retired you whether you wanted it or not. His services had been summarily dispensed with and he had been put out to grass. Unthinkable, of course. Far too young to do nothing but, unfortunately, too old to start a new career, as he had soon discovered. He had lost count of the number of jobs he had applied for: thirty-seven years in the army, apparently, counted for nothing in the outside world. Finally, he had landed the post of bursar in a private day school in Hampstead. The school had progressive ideas on education and even more progressive ones on discipline that were not only baffling to him but a positive affront. The pupils, boys and girls, were the teenage children of the very rich, many of them foreign, most of them spoilt rotten and nearly all of them grossly neglected by their parents. He stuck it out for five long years before resigning when he could stand the laxity no longer. After that, he had spent nearly a year job hunting again before being taken on by a double-glazing company to cold call potential customers. He had got the job, he later discovered, because they thought his voice would inspire confidence. He had lasted for six months before they decided it didn’t and replaced him with a fast-talking Artful Dodger thirty years his junior. After that he had found temporary work on trade stands at exhibitions, as a crowd extra in several film productions and, via that, as the smartly dressed older man in the background for some glossy advertisements for women’s clothing. When, at the age of sixty-five, he had answered a promising, but vaguely worded advertisement and found it was to sell brushes and cleaning materials door-to-door, he had decided to call it a day.

  The question was, where to spend his enforced retirement? London, he had discovered, was not only an expensive place to live on an army pension, but extremely lonely. He and Laura had spent almost all their married life abroad, stationed in different parts of the world, and he knew very few people in the city. Alison had her own life to lead, busy in her PR job, and he had no right to depend on her for company. Marcus, his son, kept urging him to go and live near him and his family in the Midlands but he knew that would be fatal. His daughter-in-law, Susan, would be round with meals on wheels in a flash, driving him mad.

  The visit to his old friends in Dorset had come at the lowest point in his life. Over lunch he had told them about seeing the cottage for sale and they had been enthusiastic. The country would be far better for him, they had said with great confidence. He’d meet people far more easily living in a village, and it would provide him with all sorts of activities to take up his time: serving on the local parish council, perhaps; becoming a church warden; acting as secretary or treasurer to a club; helping with the parish magazine; taking up bell ringing; lecturing on his army travels to Women’s Institutes, and so on. There was quite a long list of options. In the end he had convinced himself that they were right, and, for all its faults, Pond Cottage, had seemed a friendly sort of place. It had a good atmosphere and, fortunately, the young estate agent had been proved right about the ‘potential’.

  He watched the removal men unloading his worldly goods. Two containers of stuff that had been in Harrods Depository since heaven knew when, and another of everything that he and Laura had carted round the world to every posting – pictures, lamps, bedding, books, ornaments, or what was still left unbroken on this final trip. He scarcely recognised some of the items emerging from the Harrods lot – things he had long forgotten about and some he could swear he and Laura had never owned. What was that tapestry wing-back chair they were carrying past? And that spindly little piecrust table? And the large mahogany sideboard perched drunkenly on the lowered tailgate, awaiting its turn? They must have belonged to Laura’s mother and been passed on at her death. He would last have seen them in that gloomy flat in Phillimore Gardens, though he had no recollection of them at all.

  The foreman of the removal team was brandishing the piecrust table by its one leg from the doorway. “Where d’you want this one, guv?”

  He went inside and directed operations. Since his first visit with the eager young estate agent, the cottage had undergone a sea change. The roof had been re-thatched and builders had been in for weeks, tearing down false ceilings to expose old beams, replacing rotten timbers, re-plastering walls, opening up the old inglenook that had turned out to lie behind the tiled fireplace, re-plumbing and re-wiring, installing oil-fired central heating, turning a bedroom into a bathroom, re-fitting the kitchen . . . on and on it had gone through the dark winter months. Then the painters had arrived with large pots of magnolia emulsion and matt white vinyl paint, followed by the carpet layer and a woman from the shop in Dorchester that he had found to do the curtains – chintz for the bedrooms, plain for the rest. He had chosen from a mountain of swatches at random and without any real interest, while she had hovered irritatingly at his shoulder. It was unbearable to think how much Laura would have enjoyed choosing everything, and how well she would have done it. However grim and drear their married quarters had been – and some had been extremely so – she had always managed to transform them. The ornaments and pictures, lamps, cushions and books had been unpacked and put round, the vases filled with flowers and, in a twinkling of an eye, the place was home. It was a gift, he had decided, seeing what other army wives had made of similar places. Or failed to make. It had nothing to do with expensive fabrics and furnishings, still less with trendy interior designers. It was a knack that some women had, and some did not.

  The sideboard was unwilling to make its entrance into the tiny dining room and he took refuge in the kitchen while the men were struggling and cursing over it. Would Laura have approved of what he had done in here? The cabinets were pine, chosen from a catalogue because he thought they looked pleasant, and the sink was made of white porcelain because he could vaguely remember Laura once saying that was the best kind to have. There was no gas in the village and so the cooker was electric. It stood there, sandwiched neatly between two units, gleamingly white and new, and utterly alien to him. In the London flat he had cooked on an old gas stove, though ‘cooked’ was the wrong word. Heated up would describe it better: stuff out of tins, ready-made dishes in foil trays and frozen vegetables. He had bought a small microwave oven, too, because the woman in the electricity shop had kept telling him how useful it would be for baking potatoes and defrosting things. He’d given in more out of politeness than any interest in what you could do with it. In spite of the builders’ head-shaking bewilderment, he had kept the iron range. Somehow he liked the look of the old thing, and he had an idea that Laura would have agreed. It had been cleaned out, de-rusted and black-leaded and stood revealed in all its former glory. He had no practical use for it but, it was far more friendly-looking than the modern cooker and he was glad he’d spared it from the dump.

  He looked out into the hall. The sideboard had evidently surrendered and gone quietly but there were now more muffled curses coming from the direction of the narrow oak staircase. The foreman descended, wiping his forehead. “That bed won’t go up that stairway, guv. Not an ’ope.”

  The bed was the one that he and Laura had bought at the start of their married life and Alison and Marcus had both been conceived in it. It had never occurred to him that there would be a problem in getting it up the stairs.

  “It’s the bend, guv,” the foreman explained with happy pessimism. “Can’t get ’er round it, see. Can’t be done.”

  “Would you give it another try, please?”

  An expressive shrug. “If you want. But like I say, there’s not an ’ope.”

  They grunted and struggled some more, to-ing and fro-ing at the turn halfway up the stairs, and then suddenly up she went and he could hear them bumping about in the bedroom overhead.

  “Bloomin’ miracle that,” the foreman told him when he came down. He seemed aggrieved to have succeeded.

  It was early evening before they had finished and gone off with a handsome tip. The big removal lorry ground noisily away and, left alone, the Colonel stood in the silence of the cottage. Even af
ter ten years, he still could not get used to that silence. Until Laura had died, and for as long as he could remember, there had been other people around – his parents, his brother, his schoolfriends, his fellow officers, and then Laura and the children. There had always been someone there, something going on, never this terrible silence, so total and so oppressive that it was almost audible. Searching for something to break it, he fiddled with the weights and pendulum inside the grandfather clock that the men had deposited in a corner of the sitting-room and, after all its silent years in store, the reassuring tick-tock began again. He hunted for a glass, poured a stiff shot from the bottle of Chivas Regal that he had had the presence of mind to get, and sat down in the wing-back tapestry chair, which turned out to be rather comfortable. As he did so, the clock struck six with quick, silvery chimes. Odd to hear it again. It had belonged to his parents and he knew the sound from childhood. Listening to it took him straight back to the rambling Victorian house in North London where it had stood in the hall, ticking and chiming away as he grew up. He used to play there with his toy cars, scooting them very fast across the tiled floor. If he looked hard, he would probably find the small dents and marks at the base where they had smacked into it. The clock had ticked on steadily through the years, always there in the hall as he came and went from prep school, then public school, then Sandhurst, evolving gradually from the small boy crawling around at its foot to the six-foot-two young soldier who could look it straight in the face.

  The Colonel drank his whisky reflectively. The best way forward now, he supposed, with irony, was to look backward. To settle for living in the past, since the present was so unappealing. Let alone the future.

  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,