The Haunted Season

by G. M. Malliet

  He explained his idea to Cotton and told him what—and who—was needed to put the plan into action.

  Cotton tried his mobile. The connection failing, as was often the way in remote Nether Monkslip, he picked up the enormous Bakelite phone on Max’s desk. He got through to the headquarters in Monkslip-super-Mare and asked to speak with Sergeant Essex. Max pictured her at her desk, even this late in the day: tough, wiry, and bright-eyed as a terrier, her short hair standing out about her head. She would likely be reading through the case files for the tenth time: Something would be in there. Something she’d missed.

  When Cotton had finished describing to her what was needed (Max could hear her excited questions and yelps of agreement from across the room), he put down the receiver to meet Max’s questioning gaze.

  “She’s thrilled,” he informed Max. “It gets her away from Musteile for the day.”

  “I thought she would be. She told me once she grew up around horses.”

  “Full of surprises, she is.”

  “One more thing,” said Max. “Be sure to keep up surveillance on the summerhouse—the temple or whatever it is.”

  “I’ve had Musteile on it.”

  “Try putting someone competent on it. It’s important.”

  Chapter 23

  RED HERRINGS

  Two days later, DCI Cotton returned to the vicarage. Both Awena and Owen were there with Max.

  “It went off well, did it?” Max asked him over coffee and biscuits.

  “Like clockwork.” Cotton gently withdrew a finger from Owen’s sticky grasp. Max thought the fastidious Cotton would find all the baby effluvia upsetting, but he clearly had made an exception in Owen’s case. “But with an added bonus. You were right about Musteile. Once we put someone competent in place to watch the summerhouse, we got results. Maybe not the results we expected, but results.”

  “Can nothing be done about him?”

  “He’s being reprimanded, but it won’t stick. He’s ‘Someone’s’ nephew—that’s ‘Someone’ with a capital S. It will take dynamite to get rid of him. His family doesn’t want him at home causing havoc, you see.”

  “Yes. Much better to let him muck up a murder investigation. Anyway, Destiny was right about the son?”

  “Peregrine, thinly disguised as a loser? Yes. We’ve learned he’s taken a turn or two on the stage at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford. It helps that the family spends most of its time in Spain—no one quite remembers what he used to look like growing up. So he shows up in the village looking gauche and undesirable—daft as a brush. He’s always to be seen traipsing about, doing nothing much. If anyone remembers him from before, they probably assume some sort of slow decline into dweebdom.”

  “And the purpose of this was to throw suspicion off the affair he was having with his stepmother.”

  “Right,” said Cotton. “To make him look like the unlikeliest of candidates for the lady’s affections. For any lady’s affections.”

  Owen was making a reach for Max, so he paused to pull him out of Awena’s arms and settle him on his lap. As he spoke, he gently ruffled Owen’s hair, soft as lambs wool. “When the dowager claimed she was attacked, I paid little attention,” Max said. “It was exactly the sort of self-dramatizing story I felt she would make up. But now I believe there was truth in it, even if she later decided to downplay the danger. I think she did know something; I think she saw something going on between Lady Baaden-Boomethistle and the son of the house.”

  “And she had a decision to make,” Cotton said, agreeing. “In the end, she felt she had to lie to cover for her grandson, despite having seen him in a passionate clutch with Bree. Why lie? Because she wants her grandson to inherit: He must not be disinherited for any reason. So she creates this fiction of Bree’s infidelity with another man—the truth that Bree is embroiled with her own stepson is too ugly a truth to come out, so the dowager tries to push us in a different direction, toward the estate manager, for one.”

  “The dowager’s claim that someone tried to climb through her bedroom window from outside. Any evidence of that—or was it all a red herring?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Cotton, “we did find a broken branch outside her window. The lab boys and girls thought it may have broken off accidentally when someone stood on it—the wind didn’t take down that branch, in other words.”

  “So there really was an attempt to warn her off? To frighten her into silence? Perhaps by someone masquerading as one of the ghosts said to haunt the old house?”

  “It looks like it—something like that. But if someone climbed that tree, it was clearly an athlete at work. Someone who was fit from, say, horseback riding. Or football. There may be some forensic evidence left—there appear to be some scrapes of shoe leather on the bark. They’re looking into it.”

  “But,” said Max, “that will only prove someone was up to mischief—trying to scare her off. It may not even have been necessary—her own self-interest may have been enough to keep her quiet.”

  “I agree,” said Cotton. “Anyway, the dowager was right to be worried. The butler did report that at breakfast she sort of lost it and said, ‘I saw you!’ That made Bree and Peregrine think she suspected or knew they were having affair. She could have been just wildly thrashing about, hoping for a reaction, but in any event, after that they felt they could not entirely rely on her discretion.”

  “But,” said Max, “they weren’t to know that it was better from her point of view that word of the affair not seep out. The scandal would have been enormous, and costly. I think she was toggling in her mind between the lesser of two evils, and unable to decide. I think she expected fair treatment from her grandson if she played along. But Bree was another matter.”

  “We are still left with the question of whether this need for secrecy constituted a motive for murder,” said Cotton. “Would the son kill his own father? Was that just one easy step away from sleeping with his stepmother?”

  Max shrugged. “He had a lot to lose. Anyway, her husband’s death was so convenient for Bree that whoever did it, she was not going to toss them in it—at least not right away.”

  “But she would create as much distance from them as she could.” Cotton paused, thinking. “Because we were so sure to suspect her involvement, guilty or not, she wouldn’t want to draw attention to the weak link—the one who might break under pressure. And I think she views all men as the weak link, don’t you?”

  Max nodded.

  “All the rumors about Bill Travis … you think there’s nothing to it?” Cotton asked.

  “I only know that Bree herself is the one who brought it up, only to hotly deny the rumor in the next breath,” said Max. “Then she seemed to admit to it—almost. No one could be allowed to suspect the truth of her involvement with the son of the house. And if Bree had to drag innocent people into a murder investigation, I don’t think she lost any sleep over it.”

  “It seems the purest luck for Travis that he had an ironclad alibi,” said Cotton. “He was at some horse show or other in Devon. There’s even video footage of him in the crowd—I’ve just been watching it.”

  “Right. Anyway, Bree’s dismissive way of talking about Peregrine, calling him an oaf and so on—this was all a blind. An elaborate bluff. Insinuating he was gay—that was meant to ensure we never saw him as one of her romantic conquests, but of course he was.

  “She protested too much, portraying him as some sort of aristocratic buffoon, emphasizing his unattractiveness—to either sex, making a joke of it, and of him. Still, what did it mean? Stepmothers and stepchildren can be natural enemies, as Destiny’s memories of some people in her old village reminded me. One is seen as a threat to the other. That part was understandable. But Bree’s denial of any involvement with other men, like the groom or the estate manager—now, oddly, that rang true. She was indignant—for at a guess, she was aiming much higher. For someone wealthy and, this time, closer to her in age.”

  Awena spoke for the
first time, lifting her gaze from Owen, now asleep in Max’s arms. Apparently he was dreaming, his small fists waving almost comically in the air. Awena might not have been listening, but if Max knew anything about Awena, it was that she was always listening, and seldom dropped a stitch in the conversation.

  “I don’t follow,” she said. “Was Peregrine involved with the murder or not?”

  “I haven’t filled Awena in on everything you told me when you rang,” said Max to Cotton. “I thought I’d let you do the honors.”

  “Right,” said Cotton, settling back in his chair. “First you must consider that when both parties are risking a fortune by having a completely inappropriate affair, suspicion must be thrown elsewhere. So Peregrine, with his experience as an amateur actor, came up with his rather silly plan to make himself look like an unlikely prospect for romance. He comes down from university acting like a spoiled child, probably to emphasize the difference in age between him and Bree, and looking like a rube. The disguise worked, until he had the bad luck to cross Destiny’s path the other night. He was not wearing the glasses he’d adopted, which made him easier for her to recognize, and he had dropped back into his normal walk and demeanor. Apart from the haircut, he was the dashing ladies’s man Destiny recognized from photographs of him at university.”

  “He may have felt in his arrogance that a rustic audience is easily duped,” said Max, turning to Awena. “Certainly he felt that way about his sister. Anyway, Peregrine also went to some trouble to get me to believe he had a girlfriend elsewhere. Someone he was dying to visit in Italy. But he doesn’t and didn’t. He’s in love with Bree, but of course he can’t admit it—is too ashamed to admit it. Plus, would his father have thrown him out if he knew? Undoubtedly.”

  “His father did keep him on tight purse strings,” said Cotton. “Peregrine pretended to blame Bree for this. All part of the plan to indicate there was bad blood between him and Bree, when the opposite was true. And by the way, Bree was also kept on an allowance. Not a small allowance by my standards or yours or even the Sultan of Brunei’s, but probably by hers.”

  Max nodded. “And there’s your motive. So, Awena, everything she said about Peregrine was bluff—that he had no potential in her eyes. She was trying to toss red herrings in my path and succeeding for a while. She saw lots of potential in Peregrine—he was her means to an end.

  “She liked to emphasize the difference in their ages, and certainly she was the more mature of the two—her upbringing was not cosseted as his was—but she was only five years his senior. Even so, it’s like the difference between human years and animal years. He couldn’t possibly keep up.”

  Cotton said, “According to the boy, who broke quite nicely once we’d frightened him out of his skin—thank you for the idea, Max—their affair started not long after her marriage to his father. He was a teenager and she was just out of her teens and finding herself tied for life to a very old man.”

  “Something she might have noticed before she married him,” Awena remarked.

  “Oh, she did,” said Max. “I believe she certainly did. It was her bargain with the devil, and she went into it with eyes wide open, or so she thought. She wanted to escape the past, and her looks were her ticket out. But she was marrying into one very unhappy family. And Lord B-B could be bit of a brute.”

  “Tolstoy was right, although he couldn’t have reckoned on this lot,” said Cotton. When, Max wondered, did Cotton find time to read the classics? The remark made Max remember his disturbing dream of the severed head with the long Tolstoyan beard.

  Max said, “I suppose having an affair is a lot like being a spy. All the skulking about, all the lying and passing coded messages, and varying your route in case you’re followed.”

  “Maybe that is part of the appeal for some people. For a certain type of person. They enjoy the secrecy, the danger of being caught.”

  “And for others, the secrecy does them in,” said Max. “The guilt overwhelms them. I do not get an overriding sense that was a drawback for Bree, do you?”

  “Not at all. Lady Baaden-Boomethistle is a very cool customer. And the son is not exactly wallowing in guilt at betraying his father.”

  “I will grant you remorse is not in Bree’s repertoire,” said Max. “But Peregrine might be caught up in a web of several emotions. I am not sure we can write him off entirely, even though he nearly was tempted into patricide. He was the means Lady Baaden-Boomethistle first tried to use to get what she wanted.”

  “Which was what, precisely?” Awena asked.

  “Apart from the money? Freedom—much the same thing in her mind, I would imagine. The freedom to do exactly as she pleased, when she pleased, and the money to do it with. To buy horses and ride horses and travel the world, following the sun.”

  “And this she couldn’t do with him alive?”

  “Not with him controlling the finances for both her and the boy. And according to her prenup, if she left Lord B-B, she’d leave with not much more than the clothing on her back. She was not well advised by lawyers, perhaps. In fact, she seems to have signed the papers without giving it a thought. She was young and maybe not as smart in the ways of the world as she became later. That would breed anger, too—that her youth and inexperience with lawyers had been taken advantage of.

  “So she may have started by leading Peregrine on, perhaps out of boredom and a taste for revenge as much as anything, not really sure he would do anything so mad as to kill for her, but trying nonetheless to turn him into the unthinking instrument that would extricate her from this marriage. It was fun. It was, if nothing else, a challenge.”

  “But she failed.”

  “She might have succeeded over time—my money is absolutely on her in that regard—but then she came to know she was backing the wrong horse, to continue the racing metaphor. And that’s when she decided to try elsewhere. She needed someone without the emotional complications of a son’s guilt. Someone more mature and steady, whose love for her was primal, beyond question. Certainly that is what she had in Chanel.”

  “Chanel?” said Awena.

  “Yes, didn’t we say?” said Max smoothly.

  “No, Max, of course you didn’t say!”

  Chapter 24

  CONNECTIONS

  “Once Cotton got someone capable of staking out the summerhouse over there on the property, whom did they see?” Max asked. “The son, yes—we expected that. But the surprise was Chanel, meeting up with Bree to discuss what happened next. Taking time out from her busy day of advising others how to live, writing books stuffed with good advice, to engage in a spectacularly ill-advised scheme.

  “The two women organized the times for their meetings by using the hymn board. I did wonder why Bree had taken a sudden interest in the church, when none was evident before.”

  “The hymn numbers. Three forty-five. Of course!” Awena said.

  “Once I saw the usefulness of that board to people wanting to set up a private meeting, it made surveillance of the summerhouse a bit easier—I made the assumption that any secret meetings around Totleigh would take place there, and now we knew when to keep an eye out. Generally, the board is changed late Saturday afternoon for the Sunday services, so it doesn’t matter what numbers appear there during the week, when services aren’t accompanied by music. Generally, the old numbers from the week before stay in place. If they were messed about, no one would notice, and it didn’t matter anyway. Kids playing, people would think. The pair avoided anything as risky as sending a phone or text message or letter, which could too easily be discovered or seen by prying eyes. Eugenia was spot-on when she said she saw Chanel Dirkson changing the numbers.”

  “It was clever of them,” Cotton put in. “Anything digital would be too easily tracked in the mobile records.”

  “The old-fashioned methods are so often best for anyone wanting to escape detection,” agreed Max. “That is why bin Laden successfully communicated via courier and got away with it for so long.”


  He felt he’d been looking at the truth the whole time and missing it. It is said that when your eyesight degenerates, it can be like that. You can look straight at someone’s face but see only the trees behind them. It all made him think of Monkbury Abbey and miracle cures, and missing the forest for the trees. How could he have been so blind?

  “It’s like something out of a spy novel,” said Cotton.

  “The ultrasecrecy was essential. Imagine the lord’s reaction if he’d suspected—and I think he did suspect something was going on. He just didn’t know the exact nature of what was being planned. That may have been why he called me to the manor house that night to talk. From his manner, I knew something was troubling him.

  “Anyway, it was Chanel, with her deep voice, and Bree, with her similar voice, whom Destiny overheard that evening—these names! It all sounds more and more like one of the dowager’s plots, doesn’t it?”

  “Tame by comparison,” said Awena. “So Chanel…”

  “Was another of Bree’s conquests, in a way. Another person under the spell of Bree’s charm and beauty. She was being ‘groomed,’ so to speak, to do what Bree wanted. Manipulated and lied to, pressured to act on Bree’s behalf, yes. A team united—at least Chanel thought they were. Partners in crime? Oh yes.” Pair they were, something Max felt he should have realized. That conversation Destiny had overheard, conducted miles from here, in a place of privacy. That location suggested—could only mean—a close bond between two women. It had nothing to do with Peregrine or any other male. And their conversation proved this was more than two women friends idly chatting.

  “Partners in crime,” repeated Awena. “So Bree is the killer?”

  Max and Cotton exchanged glances and sighed. “Bree is certainly responsible—I would say directly and indirectly—for her husband’s death. Did she goad Chanel? Insinuate? Inveigle? Make promises and paint a beautiful picture of their glorious future together? I think she did, and I think she’s guilty as sin as a sort of instigator.”