The Murderess: A heart-stopping story of family, love, passion and betrayal

By Jennifer Wells

The Murderess is a heart-stopping story of family, love, passion and betrayal set against the backdrop of war-ravaged Britain. Perfect for fans of Lesley Pearse and Dilly Court.

1931: Fifteen-year-old Kate witnesses her mother Millicent push a stranger from a station platform into the path of an oncoming train. There was no warning, seemingly no reason, and absolutely no remorse.

1940: Exactly nine years later, Kate returns to the station and notices a tramp laying flowers on the exact spot that the murder was committed; the identity of the victim, still remains unknown.

With a country torn apart by war and her family estate and name in tatters, Kate has nothing to lose as she attempts to uncover family secrets that date back to the Great War and solve a mystery that blights her family name.

'Engrossing, un-put-downable and heartwrenching!' Faith Hogan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786691088

Jennifer Wells

Jennifer works in Market Research when not writing. She lives in Devon with her young family and cat. The Secret is her third novel in the series set in fictional Missensham in the Home Counties.

Book preview

Prologue

Kate

It happened long ago when I was a child but, every time I close my eyes, I can still see the blood creeping along the iron rail and hear the screams behind me. My life would not be the same after that day, and the years that followed were full of questions and regrets. I never thought that, exactly nine years later, I would return to the place it had happened.

One May morning when I was fifteen years old, my mother woke me early. She laid my new school uniform out on the ottoman and called for her lady’s maid to help me with the fastenings on the blouse and skirt. When I made my way downstairs, breakfast had already been set out in the dining room. We pulled our chairs up close to the window and ate poached eggs and crumpets as we watched the sparrows fluttering over the flower beds, the scent of lilac gusting in from the garden. My mother talked about the weather and the annoyance of the rabbits that ran across the Long Lawn, but then she stopped and her brow became furrowed. She unfastened her necklace with the jade pendant and folded it into my hand.

‘Always remember you are mine,’ she said.

When the grandfather clock in the hallway struck ten, my mother folded up her newspaper and rang for the driver to collect the trunk from my bedroom and to bring the car round to the drive. She drove me along Willow Street, past the village green and down the hedge-lined road to Missensham Station. She bought one single ticket from the office and made enquiries about the next northbound train and the connections to Oxfordshire. Then she instructed the porter to carry my luggage to a cool spot near the station clock. I sat on my travel trunk as she strolled down the platform, stopping to glance at the posters and timetables on the wall.

It was then that a woman approached her, a stranger with a pocket timetable open in her hands. They spoke for a few minutes, moving closer to the track so that they could view the timetable away from the shade of the platform canopy, and I watched as my mother pointed out things on the timetable and the woman nodded earnestly.

Then the track started to hiss with electricity; my mother looked up and saw the train approaching. She glanced at me and smiled, then she turned back to the stranger and pushed her on to the tracks.

I can still hear the screams, I can still see the blood. Things are different now, it is no longer summer and I am grown. There are no more motorcars or lady’s maids, no more poached eggs and crumpets and no more scented gardens and, as far as I am concerned, I no longer have a mother.

Kate

Chapter 1

May 1940

If it had not been for the flowers that he carried, I might never have noticed the man that stood on the opposite platform. He looked like so many other Great War veterans – a red, formal army coat, with the cuffs frayed, and a cap pulled low over his eyes which I imagined he would use to collect coins for begging. But to carry flowers, red peonies too, at half past ten on an average Tuesday in May made me look at him twice.

Did he know what that day meant to me? That on the same day nine years ago I had stood on this platform and watched as my mother had pushed a woman into the path of an oncoming train?

I told myself that the flowers meant nothing, they could be meant for a sick relative or to lay on the war memorial in town – but there was something about the red peonies, their fat heads and the tight swirl of velvety petals that took me back to that day and made me turn and stare at the spot just metres away where the woman had stood with my mother.

I wondered if the man knew about what had happened, it had certainly been in the newspapers. Missensham is a small town where little ever happens and to me it had seemed as if everyone knew – the children in my class at Sunday school who would no longer share their chalks, the women whispering in the high street who lowered their eyes when I passed, and the servants I had once thought of as family who left in the night without warning.

In the beginning, the story had been everything that the newspapers could have wished for – a well-bred woman who had murdered a stranger without reason but, as the weeks went on, the identity of the victim and my mother’s motive remained a mystery. My mother never said a word about what happened on that day; she said nothing to the police and offered no defence in the courtroom. With little to report, the press created an uproar when my mother was sent to Holloway Prison instead of the gallows and, as her silence continued, their stories moved on to my mother’s family home of Missensham Grange – a grand Georgian house, where she lived a life of parties, servants and motorcars. The newspapers had also carried stories about a privileged fifteen-year-old girl – an innocent child with startling green eyes and golden ringlets – the daughter who had witnessed her mother’s crime.

But nine years had passed since then, and I was no longer the schoolgirl with the maids and the motorcar. I was still a young woman but my eyes were no longer bright and my once-golden hair was already starting to streak with grey from the ordeals of my youth. Although I still lived in Missensham Grange, when I returned to the house that evening, it would be to my duties as a housemaid and my lodgings in the basement.

I glanced at the bench beneath the station clock, the timetable on the wall and the colourful knot of tube lines on the map, but there was nothing to show what had happened in this spot nine years ago and I suddenly felt as if the world had been spinning around me and I alone had been left standing here while time moved on.

Then came a murmur from the track; the sound of an approaching train echoing down the metal and the hand on the station clock clicked to half past ten. The rails started to hiss with electricity, the iron clunking with the weight of the carriages. I held onto my hat as the engine wafted the soot from London down the tracks. On the opposite platform, the man lowered his head and I noticed a few petals from his scarlet bouquet fall and spin onto the tracks, where they gusted over the rails like spilled blood.

Suddenly I forgot the years that had passed and, as my memories took over, part of me became fifteen years old again – just a girl in her school uniform sitting on her travel trunk. I no longer saw the man on the opposite platform nor the station clock or the colourful tube map – all I saw was my mother, as she had been on that day, wearing her hat and driving gloves. Then I watched my mother turn as a woman approached her, a woman who was small and delicate but no more than a shadow and I fancied that I could hear their voices, although the words were drowned out by the clatter of the nearing carriages. The woman took a pocket timetable from her bag and they moved towards the track to view it in the sunlight, I thought. Then my mother pointed out some times on it but I did not pay them much attention because behind them I saw the train approaching.

I screamed but the sound was knocked from my mouth by the wind from the train. In my head, I saw it happen again, but this time every second seemed to drag, as if time itself had been slowed – I watched the woman fell down onto the tracks, screaming as she went. Then I saw her, lying across the rails, her body still for just a second before she disappeared under the train.

‘Kate! Kate!’ the train now stood in the platform and the doors were open.

I tried to steady myself. ‘Hello Aunt Audrey,’ I said shakily. ‘Did you have a good trip?’

‘I was calling you for ages, girl, you must have been daydreaming again.’ Aunt Audrey hurled a large carpet bag at me. ‘Could your father not come?’

‘No,’ I said, grappling with the bag. ‘I’m afraid he’s having another of his reclusive periods, having the house empty has let his mind wander back to the dark places—’

‘I could have guessed as much,’ she snapped. ‘You too, I suppose, your skin is sallow at the best of times, but today you’re as pale as a ghost.’

‘No, I just—’

‘Never mind, you will have to do. The porters at Baker Street were awful.’

I was about to point out that, despite her high-heeled shoes, manicured hands and haute couture suit, Aunt Audrey was probably as strong as a station porter and certainly as big, but thought better of it.

She grabbed my shoulder, turned me round and balanced a hatbox on top of the carpet bag. ‘Go on, go!’ she commanded, pushing me towards the exit. She took a few steps after me and then stopped dead. ‘Jemima!’ she shrieked. ‘Where the hell is she?’ She ran back to her carriage and forced the doors back open, her five-year-old daughter, Jemima, toppling on to the platform in a tangle of hair ribbons and skipping ropes. ‘Get up! Get up!’ hissed Audrey. ‘We can’t have people seeing you like this.’ She pulled the little girl to her feet and then dusted her down, as she nodded and smiled to the people leaving the platform then, failing to untangle the child from the skipping rope, used it to pull her towards the station exit. I followed them dutifully.

Without invitation or encouragement, Aunt Audrey began to update me about her stay at her husband’s London residence, the trials of marriage to a successful London psychiatrist and the progress of her twins at boarding school. The threat of the bombs that she had returned to Missensham to escape seemed a minor consideration to her, and I fancied that they would not dare fall when she and Jemima were visiting their Kensington townhouse.

I managed to nod and smile, and answer only minor details about local gossip, of which, there was very little. Audrey seemed undeterred by my curt responses and ambled slowly along the platform, talking excitedly as if tales of cocktail parties and the threat to London couture could not possibly wait until we got home. The other passengers started to swerve round us and the luggage that I carried seemed to become even heavier when I saw the queue that was forming at the gate.

Then the whirr from the track grew loud again and doors and windows started to flash past us as the train gathered speed for the rest of its journey on to Evesbridge and the network of country lines beyond.

As we joined the queue at the exit gate, I turned round to look at the station once more. The man with the flowers was still standing alone on the opposite platform. Then he stood up slowly and stared at the track for a few moments before laying the flowers down by the bench.

Chapter 2

May 1940

‘A disgrace!’ shrieked Aunt Audrey. She slammed a copy of the Missensham Herald on to the coffee table so hard that the cups tinkled.

I pretended to look out the drawing room window as if I had noticed an interesting pigeon on the lawn, but it was useless to pretend that I had not heard her.

‘Well, I shall write to the editors at once and complain! Kate, fetch my stationery and my best fountain pen.’

I rose from my seat obediently but sat back down when I realised that her rant was not over.

‘On the front page again! And look at this headline – On this day nine years ago. Well, you would think that these journalists have nothing else to write about!’ She picked up the newspaper again and held her spectacles up to the newsprint and I realised that her outrage was based only on a title and a few skimmed lines of text. ‘Murder at Missensham Station – Local Woman Commits Murder. And named too! Here it is, Millicent Bewsey. We can’t have your father hearing about this!’

‘I would be surprised if he hasn’t heard,’ I said. ‘He’s only in the kitchen.’

But she didn’t take the hint and didn’t lower her voice. ‘At least they have not mentioned Missensham Grange this time. That was what really got people excited last time, the fall of the Bewseys – the local aristocracy, or the closest thing they had to it.’

‘We were hardly aristocracy,’ I said. ‘We had money and servants but—’

‘Yes, yes, but compared to the common folk of this backwater by 1931 the Bewseys of Missensham Grange had become a family of note.’

‘Maybe people do not know of the Grange any more,’ I said. ‘After all, there is little left for people to recognise. The house is divided now, even more than before the Great War, more of the land is gone. We even have a family renting the old gardener’s cottage – the undesirables as you like to call them.’

Audrey glared at me, unblinking, as if this act alone would be enough to scare me into agreement, but I turned my gaze back to the lawn, searching for some little thing, a fallen branch or a rabbit on the grass, to bring about a change in the conversation.

But Audrey could not keep quiet for long: ‘Well, the losses that the estate has suffered are surely down to the ghastly things that those so-called journalists wrote back then. Don’t forget how they treated your father. There were journalists hiding in the stables, scaring off the staff and, despite this, he has always stood by your mother. It was hardly surprising that he lost control of the finances and everything he had worked for was lost. The whole thing broke him. You know that he was quite a formidable soldier in his prime?’

I waited for her to continue, for I knew what was coming next; I had sat through this particular monologue far too often.

‘This was a mess made by my sister’s doing and I was left to salvage what she had left behind. I suppose you know that Jemima and I are not just your average bomb-dodgers! Our rent pays your father’s mortgage. It took a lot of persuasion on my part but, if my selfless husband hadn’t agreed to come to this family’s aid and take the place on, well, I don’t know what would have happened!’

‘We would have lost the Grange, Aunt Audrey,’ I said flatly. It was a fact that she would often remind us of and a line I had become used to reciting to her. ‘And Dad and I are very grateful to you for letting us stay on downstairs.’

‘And now this rag of a local newspaper just wants to dredge up old memories,’ said Audrey as if she had not heard me.

‘It is only a small section on the front page,’ I said. ‘Three lines. Next to something about a summer fete.’

But she did not listen. ‘I am only lucky that I was already wed and in my marital home by then. Just imagine if I had still been in Missensham and been identified as Millicent’s sister! At least I had little to connect me to such scandal and I was no longer living in this place.’ She waved her hand around the room and I found that my eyes were following it, taking in the peeling wallpaper, dusty lampshades and tired upholstery.

Most of the finery had been sold to pay the bills, with only a few pieces surviving from my childhood – a fine velvet settee which Audrey claimed as a long-overdue inheritance, and a gramophone with a battered trumpet. There was an oil painting too, which hung above the fireplace. It was a portrait of an Irish wolfhound, a long-forgotten pet, but there were no paintings or photographs of my family, as if entire generations had ceased to exist.

I remembered when I had sat in this room as a girl, dressed in satin and frills and watched as my parents danced to the music of the gramophone. The room had been different then; decorated in the latest fashions and full of voices and music. The chairs had always been occupied by chattering guests, the smoke trails from their cigarettes shuddering with their laughter. Cocktails had been served in tall glasses and the guests would dance on the Persian rug, their bodies mingling in the light from the window. But those days were gone, and now I saw only chairs which were empty and a cocktail cabinet that was barren and gathering dust.

‘Why are you just sitting there listening to me?’ said Audrey suddenly. ‘I need to get these words down. Go on! Pen, Kate, Pen!’

I took the back stairs to the study but I was only halfway down when I heard the jingle of jazz on the gramophone and the thud of footsteps tapping out a tune on the drawing room carpet. In a matter of minutes Aunt Audrey had forgotten about the newspapers’ destruction of her brother-in-law and the ruin of the family, and perfecting dance steps to Duke Ellington had become more important.

I suddenly felt weary. Aunt Audrey might not have been a Bewsey but I was and, while I knew that she would soon move on to some other crisis such as Jemima spilling milk on her cherished settee or a new rabbit hole in the lawn, I would always be stuck with my name, this house and all that came with it.

I bypassed the study and continued on down to the basement, past the old servants’ rooms, which Dad and I now called home, and into the kitchen.

Dad sat in the old armchair, his feet up on the kitchen table that was littered with rusty engine parts. Bits of oiled metal were spread out on crumpled sheets of newspaper, but he held the front page up to his face.

‘Is that the Herald?’ I asked.

He looked up and nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ve already heard that Audrey has seen the story?’

‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘it’s only three lines, it’s hardly a story, is it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose it isn’t really a story any more, not for most people.’

He folded the paper and I saw a ripple of tears across his eyes and he took off his spectacles and rubbed them. ‘I must have been reading for too long,’ he said. Then he stood up shakily. ‘I suppose I had better…’ but then his words trailed off and I fancied that he did not want to stay and draw me into his sadness but knew that, with Audrey upstairs, he had nowhere else to go.

‘Oh come here.’ I put my arms around him, but he felt so frail that I dared not squeeze too hard lest he shatter in my hands. Nine years had changed him and I realised that the shoulders I had once thought broad were now small and hunched, his braces slack over the hollow in his chest.

He stepped back and wiped his eyes again and I realised that his thick spectacles had been hiding yellow tinges around his pupils. He caught my eye and then looked away quickly as if he knew what I was thinking.

‘Is that a fresh pot?’ I said, pointing to the teapot on the draining board.

‘It is, actually.’

He returned to the armchair and I poured two cups of strong tea and pulled a chair up next to him.

‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘I was at the station earlier today. I had to meet Aunt Audrey from the train. In fact I was on the platform when the ten thirty arrived.’

He sat up quickly and leant forward as if I was about to tell him something important – the one piece of information that he had always hoped for, the one that would change everything – and I realised, too late, that my attempt to show him that he was not alone in his suffering had only brought back memories.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘Really, I have no more than that to tell you. In fact, I don’t know why I am saying this. I suppose I just felt like telling someone.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, sinking back into the chair.

‘I just remembered that we said that we would always tell each other everything,’ I said. ‘We’ve only got each other, remember, that is the only way we can get through this.’

He sighed. ‘Audrey was insensitive to put you in that situation.’

‘She didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have occurred to her anyway.’

‘I suppose not,’ he said wearily.

‘It’s funny, though,’ I said after a while. ‘There was a man at the station who looked like he might be a tramp. He was standing on the opposite platform, and he had a bouquet of flowers. They were quite scarlet, and some of the petals fell and, for a moment, I thought that they looked like blood. It wasn’t until then that it all started to come back to me.’

He opened his mouth but the words seemed to catch in his throat.

‘What?’ I said gently. ‘What is it?’

‘A tramp?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A man in an old red army jacket and cap, holding some—’

‘But, Kate!’ He jumped to his feet. ‘This might be something after all. Don’t you remember the witness statements?’

‘No, I don’t remember,’ I said, annoyed at myself for exciting him. ‘It all happened so long ago, why would I remember every little detail?’

‘Well, a couple of the witnesses mentioned seeing a tramp at the station, an old soldier carrying flowers, red ones. Just like the tramp you saw today, he too was stood on the opposite platform. The man could have been another witness but he never came forward.’ The eyes that had appeared dull and yellowed just a few moments before were now alert and so large that they seemed to fill the thick lenses of his spectacles. It was a look that I had seen in him before, but not for many years and I blamed myself for the return of his madness.

‘No Dad,’ I said sternly. ‘Don’t get excited. I was at the station that day nine years ago too and I don’t remember seeing a tramp.’

‘But—’

‘Tramps are ten a penny and they are mostly old soldiers; this means nothing!’

‘But if this was the same man, it might mean that he saw something. He would be the only witness that was stood on the opposite platform. He might have seen things from a different angle.’ He waved an excited finger in the air. ‘He would have seen that the woman fell and was not pushed.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely—’ I began.

‘But you yourself were not sure at the time, Kate!’ he protested.

I felt my face warm a little. The truth was that I had seen something happen and I had seen the woman falling on to the track, but whatever I had witnessed on that day had been echoed in the cries of the waiting passengers and in the renditions I overheard on the platform as the constable wrote hastily in his pocketbook. It was those voices that had stayed with me and somehow those voices had become my own. In the years that had passed I had become unsure of my memories, yet to admit any doubt would have seemed foolish.

‘But mother confessed to pushing her,’ I said firmly.

‘You must remember that a tramp accosted you and your mother just a fortnight before the incident at the station’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that he was trespassing on the estate grounds when he came across you both in the walled garden. In fact he stole your mother’s jade necklace, tore it from her throat!’

‘He tried,’ I said, ‘but I still have it!’ I pointed to the cluster of green stones on my chest. ‘He was just a drunkard looking for a few pennies, nothing was lost. Remember that I saw the intruder in the garden, he was a huge man with a madness about him. I did not see the face of the man on the platform today, but he seemed nothing like the man who attacked mother in the garden.’

But I could not calm him. ‘I’ve often thought that the tramp who attacked your mother and the one that the witnesses saw at the station could be the same man,’ he continued excitedly, ‘and if not, we could at least try to prove that seeing a tramp at the station unsettled your mother. If we could get this man to say that he was at the station nine years ago, then we could claim that your mother had not been in her right mind. I’ve often thought—’

‘Dad!’ I snapped. ‘This is the problem – you have thought about this too often. You are barely making sense.’

‘But if she was in terror of the man who attacked her in the walled garden, then thought that she saw him again, the terror may have returned. Who knows what was going through her mind on that day. Remember, she had incarcerated you in the house since the attack!’

I held up my hands to try and stop him, but the words were coming so quickly that there was barely a breath between them.

‘There might just be a link,’ he continued. ‘Something that the police and Mr Crozier didn’t follow up at the time and…’ But at last he stopped and I saw the heave of his ribs under the thin cotton of his shirt and I realised that his body had been unable to keep up with the frantic paths that his mind was taking.

‘All right,’ I said, desperately thinking of a way that I could lead him out of this maze. ‘It’s been two hours since I was at the station, how would we ever find this tramp again?’

‘Well the stationmaster might remember him.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘The flowers!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Maybe he was heading for the war memorial, it might be an anniversary of

Reviews for The Murderess

[vesper1931 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In May 1931, fifteen year old Kate Bewsey watches her mother Millicent push a woman, a stranger from the station platform at Missensham into the path of an oncoming train. She gives no reason at her trial but as she grows up Kate tries to discover the truth.
An interesting mystery, well-written, and kept my interest.
A NetGalley Book

[kris_anderson-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Murderess is a new novel by historical author Jennifer Wells. The story begins in Missensham in 1931. Kate is being sent away to boarding school by her mother, Millicent Bewsey. It was a last minute decision by Millicent. They are on the train platform, and Kate notices her mum talking to another lady. The next moment Millicent shoves the woman onto the tracks in front of inbound train. Millicent then refuses to say one word. Nine years have passed since that day and Kate’s life has changed considerably (for the worse). Kate happens to be at the train station on the anniversary of the incident and notices a disheveled man leaving behind red peonies on the exact spot where Millicent committed her crime. Kate gets a closer look and there is a card attached that reads “For Rosalie”. Who is Rosalie? Is that the name of the victim? After all these years, the woman’s identity is still a mystery. The man looks like the one that attacked her mother in their walled garden about a fortnight before the terrible train incident. Kate’s father, Arthur receives a letter stating Millicent is up for parole and he wants Kate to write a statement to the parole board. This starts Kate on a quest to get answers. She starts reviewing the details of the case and delving into her mother’s past. What secrets will Kate uncover? Join Kate on her search for the truth in The Murderess.The Murderess contains good writing and a steady pace in the first half of the book. I thought the second part of the story dragged (it needed a faster pace). The story is told from Kate’s (1940) and Millicent’s (1915) perspective. It alternates between them. I thought the characters were bland, and Kate was unlikeable. The main problem with The Murderess is that it was predictable. Early on I was able to accurately predict how the rest of the novel would play out. The ending, though, may surprise many readers. The Murderess is an interesting story, but it needed a more complicated mystery along with a compelling main character. I give The Murderess 3 out of 5 stars.