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.