Shade of Violet

By Jackie West

Violet Bellamy is surprised to find herself a ghost because, as a rational person, she doesn’t believe in them. After a life of timid conformity, she now wants influence. She also wants to complicate the lives of people with empty charm and unshakeable self-belief, like her local MP and rising star minister, Maximus Biggs-Dickson. And care manager Verena Crookham, a ruthless seductress who will despatch her sweet-natured stepson to keep their big house for herself.

A Back to Great Britannia campaign has been thrust upon the British, to the alarm of those on the other side of the Channel. There, in Belgium specifically, a beautiful journalist is writing an article: Integrity and Power – Impossible Bedfellows? She has Minister Biggs-Dickson in her sights as an interesting subject for research.

Events align and it will take the interference of someone with nothing to lose to bring them all to a head.

This fast-paced quirky mystery takes a wry swipe at characters with dangerous charisma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803139586

Jackie West

Jackie West grew up in rural Warwickshire and Coventry, lived in Brighton after university and has mostly worked in editing and publications for charities, NGOs and think tanks.She now lives in Belgium with her family and an imperious stray cat. This is her first novel.

Book preview

Contents

Violet

Erin and Callum

Adela-Auguste de Gentissart-van-Hemelen-Solart and Maximus Biggs-Dickson

Ralph and Verena

Ralph and Anil

Verena and Ralph

Maximus, Agnieszka and Peitho the cat

Callum and Verena

Maximus and Peitho

Violet

Erin and Callum

Verena

Callum, Verena and Rufus

Daisy and Maximus

Violet and Josiane

Adela and Olivier

Maximus

Callum, Verena and Erin

Adela and Romain

Maximus and Daisy

Verena and Callum’s headmaster

Verena, Callum and Erin

Violet and Marcia

Erin, Violet, Callum and Ralph

Erin and Linda

Callum and Dr Burman

Verena

Erin

Erin and Rufus

Adela

Rufus and Erin

Verena

Callum and Verena

Verena and the security guards

Daisy, Violet and Agnieszka

Lena and Daisy

Lena and Maximus

Lena and Maximus

Daisy

Olivier and Adela

Verena

Erin, Rufus and Callum

Agnieszka, Maximus, Peitho and Violet

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Violet

Violet Bellamy looked down from the vaulted church ceiling at the dozen mourners gathered below for her funeral. Which came as a surprise to her because she didn’t believe in ghosts. She was a rational person, a former science teacher, and hadn’t even felt that ill. Just in need of a small milk stout.

Yet, here she was now, twenty-odd feet above her (pleasingly slim) willow coffin. Most people were dressed in the traditional black, Violet noticed, and quite right too because they were there to mourn her death, after all, not celebrate her life as though it had been one long carnival.

Still, there were too many empty spaces on the pews below. If asked, people would say hardly anyone turned up. But, since she hadn’t made much effort with her friends and family for a while, she couldn’t really complain about the poor turnout.

The utter relief of lightness now … with no body to weigh her down and all the aches and pains gone. Never again would she have to think about what to wear. In life, nothing ever seemed to be a good fit, or right for the occasion.

Reverend Timothy cleared his throat and smiled at his little congregation. After three years in the job, he knew their attention span would be short. Squinting at his notes, he intoned

‘As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone; and the place there shall know it no more.’

Lovely, Violet thought, perfect choice for her service.

Vicar Timothy would have loved to deliver a fire-and-brimstone sermon and swing an incense thurible down the aisle, but he understood there was little call for that these days, and in any case he was in the wrong branch of the faith to get away with it.

‘Gisela Violet Bellamy …’

What? Who told him to use that name?

Even Violet’s half-German mother had understood that Gisela, her own mother’s name, was not really a good choice for a girl growing up in England, especially in the early 1950s, and had dropped it in favour of Violet when she was about four. Nobody knew her as Gisela after that, just plain, unassuming Violet. The vicar would have known that as well if he’d done his homework. She spotted her granddaughter, Erin, on the front row, frowning and pursing her lips.

Violet strained to hear what came next –

‘… was above all a very private person, a devoted wife, a selfless mother, and a thoughtful neighbour. And yet, Gisela was rather different things to different people. It might be said that very few felt they really knew her. To some she was an exceedingly shy lady – her presence in company discreet, even unremarkable! To others, Mrs Bellamy could be the life and soul of the party. Especially after a few of her favourite Belgian beers …’

The cheeky bugger. As though she was some kind of lush.

She would show him.

As he paused for his congregation to appreciate his comic mention of Belgian beer, his notes flew out of his hands and floated to the ancient stone floor in front of the altar. Which did catch the attention of the assembled mourners because there was no wind. No sudden gust in that church could have lifted the papers. He bent down to pick them up, revealing Nike trainers and fuschia-pink socks under his tight grey cassock. Diamante crucifixes embellished each ankle, the left one sparkling in a shaft of sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass window. Clearing his throat, he composed himself and resumed the service, ignoring titters from the small crowd.

Violet beamed in triumph. Because this must mean she had some kind of power or agency in the material world or even be a poltergeist! As she steadied herself in the stale air above the altar, she tried to focus on what she remembered of her body; the proud shelf of her bosom and her small hands and feet. She had an idea she was wearing her favourite sage-green corduroy dress and zip-up blue slippers when she died. What she saw now had the faintest trace of colour, like watery brush strokes with too little paint, almost translucent, presumably invisible to everyone else. When the funeral and wake were out of the way, she would test out her powers.

When she died, Violet had made a start on organising her graceful decline, choosing what her family would find after her death. Just like Violet to take care of everything herself and spare us the bother, she imagined them saying, fondly. There’d be no mess or sorting through papers, ornaments and old shoes because she would have done it all for them – almost as though she’d never been there at all. Her years on Earth would be like the footfall of a butterfly … the Small Blue or the Cabbage White, alighting for just a second on a lavender stalk. But she hadn’t got very far when her time ran out, before she was ready, and before she’d even finished her nine valedictions. She liked the word because it reminded her of one of her favourite teachers. They rarely boosted your confidence in those days, but he was different.

She was also planning to learn French, write a memoir, travel round Europe, the world even, and sign her name on her own oil painting … As a child she’d heard that her father’s ancestors had come over from Flanders and that the family name, Bellamy was once Bel-Ami. Maybe now was a good time to visit her continental forebears? She’d also been working on a portrait of her granddaughter but couldn’t capture the girl; after numerous rubbings-out and paintings-over, Erin’s expressions would not be fixed in watercolour. She was there on the canvas, somehow, as a slight frame in baggy clothes, wavy auburn hair rebelling against its neat bob, her lovely face only ever a blur.

The valedictions … she had to write them because real life never allowed her to say what she meant. Esprit de l’escalier was what they called it, Violet remembered, the way a riposte only came to you at the bottom of the stairs, when it was too late.

She had been brittle with people, she knew that, and too fond of her own company for years. Yet in her mellower moments, Mackeson stout in hand at perfect room temperature, she’d see how almost everyone had something delightful about them, something that usually went unappreciated and which in the end always wore them down. Some people just had a quiet grace that was impossible to affect. So many people to encourage, she thought, and to cheer on after her.

Other people Violet had erased from her mind for a reason. These were the ones who didn’t need cheering on because they were already endowed with charm and charisma, and that was enough. These people sparkled and beguiled and reeled you in, then later, when it was too late, you would find out that their charm was just empty, and self-serving. They would deflect any criticism that came their way because there was always a more believable version of whatever happened, always. They would move on, shift shapes unburdened and untarnished, owning the world.

Her stepfather came to mind, Frank Clarkson. And then her local MP, Maximus Biggs-Dickson, who even looked a bit like her stepfather from a distance. They both had straight hair the colour of pencil lead and would wink at one person in whichever audience they were talking to. Entitled charismatic types were everywhere, powering the machinery of business and politics, with their unshakable self-belief and their indifference to the truth. But they were fun to be with, that was the thing. People let you get away with anything if you were fun to be with. Violet’s loathing of charmers was undimmed in death.

She thought of the last carer who’d attended to her, a new lady who seemed to be in charge of all the others who’d come round before. She had an unusual presence about her, that one, and spoke with one of those actorish voices that bounced off the walls and allowed no interruption. She was always elegantly dressed, manicured and perfumed. Violet remembered her reaching down into her black leather bag once to take out her usual evening tonic, gold belt buckled tightly round her navy-black dress. Noting that the woman must have a 22-inch waist, she went off to fetch some tea and homemade raspberry and chocolate muffins. The lady flinched. ‘No, no, I’ll have a big dinner soon, thanks,’ she said, without looking up. Violet had long given up squeezing herself into M&S shapewear, the modern version of the whalebone corset, and was quite content with her decision.

The skinny care manager didn’t approve of her valedictions idea either, and was always very strict about diet and tablets. What was her name now, wondered Violet – something unusual, maybe foreign? She had a feeling she’d known her before, decades before and, oddly, she reminded her of her stepfather, Frank. Just something about her. When Violet asked, haven’t we met before? the lady said, no, I never forget a name. Wasn’t it usually faces people didn’t forget?

Anyway, when she fell ill it was easier to have someone come to the house in the evenings, and she didn’t want to make a fuss and bother her daughter. At least the lady didn’t skimp on whatever it was that helped her wind down at night. Her dreary liver complaint must have done for her in the end though, and that was that.

Happily and, as it turned out, without fuss, Violet then found herself … somewhere else. The final passing – that was the right word for it – had been a relief, really. A gentle soaring up through yellow light, carried on warm air like a bird, over the sea and towards the sun.

And now here she was, floating, invisible to all she assumed, above the nave of a small gothic church in Nether Wootton-Welles, in the heart of rural England. A village church restored to its original purpose that day because there was no scheduling clash with the local Sing Along choir, pottery class or jumble sale.

Her daughter, Lois, had put a Family Flowers Only notice in the local paper yet here on her coffin were lilies, freesias, black tulips, forget-me-nots and, in a jolt to Violet’s taste, exotic orange flowers, like birds of paradise with broken wings, trapped and in the wrong part of the world. Who would send those?

One burnt-orange, expensive-looking coat stood out in the pews of sombre hues, its wearer a woman Violet didn’t recognise at first. Then something in her pinched look jogged Violet’s memory; this was the care manager who’d been there at the end. Verena Crookham was her name, but it was all a bit of a blur. Odd that she should bother to turn up for her funeral.

To her right was a young man of about sixteen, Erin’s age, sitting very still, with a gentle air about him. Next to Mrs Crookham, but not really with her. Occasionally, Erin looked up at the ceiling, scanning the shadows with a puzzled frown. She thought she saw a flash of white-blue light up there. She turned to look behind at the boy and Violet noticed a spark of connection between them. Mrs Crookham scowled hard at him.

Another mourner not dressed in black was a woman Violet couldn’t recall at all. Seated away from the others, she wore a purple velvet dress that dwarfed her bird-like frame, studied the service sheet with a frown and looked at no one. Violet searched her memory for a name or a place but gave up.

Right now, though, Violet was excited, spurred on by the small tour de force that had disrupted the vicar’s reading. Was she a poltergeist? That was the only explanation for all this. The possibilities open to her now might be endless. If she could lift a few sheets of foolscap paper by sheer force of will, then the living material world might not be beyond reach after all. She might even be able to cross continents, put thoughts into people’s minds, take other thoughts out, and fan the flames of desire, if she chose to.

Violet knew she had a lot of catching up to do, in her ‘discreet and unremarkable’ way. Her ambition to paint was one thing. More urgent though, as she saw it, was the problem of empty charisma, especially when it was combined with supreme self-belief, as it often was. What her stepfather had put her poor mother through. And now it was charismatic politicians up and down the land that were ruining things for everybody, especially the now the Right Honourable Biggs-Dickson. He had risen the ranks from being an ‘unavailable at this time’ MP in her Warwickshire constituency to being a very available Minister of State, albeit currently without portfolio.

Would she need a plan, she wondered? Aim high at first, then scale back if things went wrong was as good a plan as any. She had to be sure of her powers. Besides, she could just be just passing through, this – space, this vastness, and not have long. An image of other clerics, in black and bearing crucifixes (not on pink socks) came to her mind. She’d sat through The Exorcist years ago and decided not to hang about.

It was becoming clearer to her; she knew whom to visit. Frank Clarkson had long passed away: she could picture him now in some unreachable realm of vainglory, on endless playback loop. No, she would start with charmeur extraordinaire Maximus Biggs-Dickson, and see how she got on.

Erin and Callum

Nearly three weeks after Violet’s funeral, Erin was back in the graveyard, looking round to check she was alone before sinking a dessert spoon into the ivy-tangled ground at the foot of a lopsided gravestone. She would try and make out the name on the stone later. What she wanted now was to lift a clump of snowdrops and replant them on her Nan’s fresh plot in the little churchyard. Her Nan loved snowdrops. Had loved snowdrops. It was early February and the older graves near the red brick wall were carpeted with them this year. Just as she was tugging the bulbs free of weeds, a sound of bike wheels clicking on gravel made her turn her head. Callum, the boy who had sat behind her at her Nan’s funeral, was resting his bike against the brick wall.

‘Hey, Callum!’ she called to him.

He shook his head with a surprised smile and walked over to her, a pair of binoculars strung round his neck, half-tucked into his anorak.

‘Hey! What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Well … I’m just, er, like, borrowing some snowdrops from this old grave to replant onto my Nan’s,’ she said.

‘Cool.’ Callum smiled.

‘How about you?’

‘Ah, just thought I’d say hello to my uncle, you know, the one I told you about. His ashes are scattered over there.’

Callum pointed past the towering yew tree towards the stile at the edge of the churchyard, where the newer residents were laid to rest or scattered among the rose bushes.

‘He used to bring me here sometimes and we’d go birdwatching over the fields.’

He avoided Erin’s eyes but she saw the sadness there.

‘Shall we plant some snowdrops for him as well?’ said Erin.

‘Ah, yeah, he’d really like that.’

Callum brightened a little and slid his rucksack over his shoulder onto the ground.

The two of them crouched down to prise another cluster from the bleached grass, this time from another grave. Callum cleared the flowers of weeds as Erin gently unearthed the bulbs with her spoon. They were glad to have something to do and enjoyed the small transgression, taking it in turns to look round and check no one else was watching.

Erin and Callum were at the same secondary school but since Callum was a year older, they had only known each other by sight until they got talking at the reception after Violet’s funeral. They sipped awkwardly on the fizzy drinks someone thought would be to the taste of young people and non-drinkers, both of whom were in a minority at the small gathering, the last to be held in Violet’s house.

Erin noticed Callum arrive with the elegant woman in the smart orange suit, who began ‘working’ the room. Men seemed to follow her every move. She rewarded those she spoke to with her rapt attention, a wide-eyed smile, head slightly tilted and probably just the right amount of laughter at a wake. Other women seemed to stiffen, Erin noticed, but she disarmed them skilfully by appearing to enjoy their company just as much as that of their husbands. Fascinated, Erin soon found her way to Callum and asked, ‘Is that your mum?’

‘Verena? God no, she’s not. She’s like … a stepmother, I s’pose, or step-aunt, I don’t know. My uncle’s second wife. Ralph, my uncle, like, adopted me when my mum went int …was ill again, and I lived with them from the age of five or something. It’s sort of complicated,’ he laughed nervously.

‘She talked me into coming to your Nan’s funeral so she wouldn’t have to sit there on her own. I’m kind of glad I did come, though,’ he said, looking at his feet.

‘Right,’ Erin smiled. ‘And what about your dad?’

‘Hah. That’s also complicated. He left my mum when she was ill and lives somewhere near London with someone else. I never hear from him now. Don’t particularly want to, to be honest.’

Erin nodded.

‘And then Ralph died suddenly, not long ago while I was on a school trip and I’m still living in his house with her,’ his head turning towards where Verena stood in front of an ornament cabinet.

‘Oh, sorry to hear that,’ said Erin, hoping this didn’t seem like a false, pretend grown-up thing to say. Callum nodded, his resigned smile made him look much older than his seventeen years.

‘She’s not like this at home, you know, Verena. Not at all.’

‘Not like, so friendly?’

‘Yeah. This is one of the acts she puts on, you know, for people she’s trying to impress. Actually she tries to impress everybody.’

‘Mmm. She’s pretty good at it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Callum. ‘At home she can be a real bit…’ he checked himself. ‘She just wants me out. It’s obvious she can’t stand me there.’

‘Why don’t you just go?’ asked Erin, realising after she said it that at Callum’s age it was not possible because, like her, he was legally still a child.

‘I would, but the main reason I’m staying is that I don’t want her to have my uncle Ralph’s house. She’d probably move some lover in straight away, it wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘Really? Did she have a lover?’

‘Well, I don’t know for sure, but she’s been pretty glued to her phone for a while now, and they were always arguing, her and Ralph. Anyway, she says my uncle left the house to her in his will and that she’ll make arrangements for me to go somewhere else, like, a boarding school or somewhere. I dunno. It’s all still being sorted with the solicitor, I think. She doesn’t deserve the house, though, I tell you. What she doesn’t know is that I’m not going anywhere. It’s a really cool place, you know? The best thing would be if she moved out and I got a half-decent guardian to move in with me instead. Someone who cooked normal food.’

Out of the corner of her eye Verena Crookham watched the two of them, noting their complicit amusement as they emptied their drinks. Her glossy smile slipped for a second.

Violet was there too, enjoying the party in her honour and marvelling at how much thick dust had gathered on top of her carved oak cabinet, one she’d inherited from her mother’s German family. She blew hard and powdered Verena’s hair and shoulder,