Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  “Were in, is right. The club disbanded some time ago. It happens. In fact, it happens quite a lot.”

  “Disagreement over the canapés,” put in Attwater, with a knowing nod. What was she, some kind of idiot? Milo seemed to think so. He shifted a little way away from her. Now I was thinking I should send her over to talk to Heather, where they could swap recipes and poison one another with homemade preserves.

  “We couldn’t agree on what to read. That was all.”

  I didn’t want to tell them the whole story. I thought it might be better to give someone else a chance to spread the gossip.

  Milo asked me to name the members of the club. There were eight in all, give or take, but the faithful core consisted of me, Anna, Heather, Rashima, and Macy.

  “They had a son, Jason,” said Milo. “Anna and her husband.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I treated it as such. “Anna’s stepson. Yes.” I hoped my reluctance to talk about him showed. I was still holding Jason in reserve.

  “Living in London.”

  “That’s right. As I mentioned, I think he lives somewhere around Catford Bridge or Ladywell.”

  “It’s Shoreditch, actually.”

  Fine. Shoreditch. Why ask me then?

  “That’s a nice area these days,” said Attwater.

  I remember thinking if I were ever murdered, I hoped Attwater wouldn’t be put in charge of the investigation.

  However, it was news to me that Jason had moved to Shoreditch, which was in those days a bit of a hipster haven. Not all that long before, I’d lived there myself. The Brick Lane Market near my old flat was where I could be found on a treasure hunt most weekends. Escaping for a few hours from Ken, my boyfriend at the time.

  “Did they get along? The boy and Anna?”

  “Aren’t most stepchildren just crazy about their stepparents?” I asked. “Seriously, I think they got along better than most. Mostly because Anna left Jason alone as much as possible. She didn’t bug him, I mean. She was considerate that way.” From the tiny smirk at the edge of Milo’s lips, he didn’t buy it. I didn’t expect him to. Anna left Jason alone because she couldn’t stand the sight of him, and the loathing was mutual. I guessed Milo had already met Jason.

  Attwater looked confused, as if she’d missed something. I would bet she wore that look a lot. I could have added that Jason was hardly a boy, but apart from the drug use and the fact he liked to sunbathe, that was nearly the sum total of my knowledge of him. My second-floor dining room window (first floor, in Brit-speak) overlooked the Monroes’ back garden, so I knew they had a pool no one but Jason seemed to use—Jason and the pool cleaning services guy, a sort of dim bulb who had let a summer job become his life. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he was Jason’s supplier as well. I only had visits from the Orkin Pest Control man to liven my days, a slender Somalian, unfailingly polite, but I would have traded a few spiders for a dip in that pool on a scorching hot summer day. England did have them, alternating with monsoon-style flooding, more and more as the planet seemed to tilt the wrong way on its axis. Anna had never invited us over for a swim.

  Jason had spent some time as a teenager in South America, volunteering as part of a school project in some place flattened by a hurricane. He came back fluent in the language, so it wasn’t a total waste. He also came back addicted to something or other. To a lot of somethings. He soon found a home in the drug world, bought into its warped paranoid philosophies, and set out to do its bidding. I had seen my own brother start down the same path, so this was nothing new. I have always hated drugs, pushers, users—the whole scene.

  Milo must have been a mind reader. “How did you and Jason get along?”

  “Fine. I seldom saw him.”

  Again with the skeptical look. It was clear Jason was prime suspect material.

  Along with Colin Livingstone, MP. But they never asked about him and I didn’t tell. I was saving that bomb for when—if—something really needed shaking up.

  Milo and Attwater left about a half hour later, taking with them my assurances I would call if I thought of anything else. They thanked me politely for my cooperation but you could tell they’d been hoping for more. I, on the other hand, felt I had gained a good sense of where they were in their investigation. It had been a morning well spent.

  I put their coffee mugs in the sink, combed my hair and put on a cardigan, and went in search of Elizabeth Fortescue.

  St. Chrysostom’s Church had existed since the days when Sundays drew such big crowds they’d had to enlarge the building, twice. It was sad, given how much the Church had once been the center of all things British, to watch it waste away. Even a nonbeliever such as me could feel the weight of history and beauty in the monuments and crypts.

  I searched the side chapels for Elizabeth as apostles and lambs followed my progress from stained glass windows. I found her arranging flowers in enormous Grecian urns on two pedestals near the altar. She held aloft a stem of gladioli like a scepter as she turned at my approach.

  Elizabeth fit right in with the tomb art. She had a long, el Greco-ish face with a receding chin and an elongated figure, all wavy distorted lines, as if some giant had grabbed her by her head and feet and pulled hard. I suppose I was most reminded of Virginia Woolf, she of the hooded eyes and a nose that went on a fraction of an inch too long. I almost wondered if Elizabeth could be some distant relation to the writer. Her countenance simply blazed with intelligence, so much so it was hard not to want to avert your own gaze. It was as if she could beam those eyes like torches to see through you.

  That intelligence made me hesitate. How to start asking questions that I had no business asking? But her concerns were apparently more spiritual and having to do with the state of my soul. After we had exchanged the preliminary greetings and I had given her a sort-of explanation for my presence, she asked, “You’re not a member of our church, I take it? At least, I don’t recall seeing you here before.”

  “No, no,” I said, adding, “I was raised without any religion in particular. I’m told I was baptized in the Episcopal Church but I was never confirmed. My grandmother was quite religious and I think that was sort of a trial to her—that no one apart from her was observant.”

  As if she hadn’t heard the “no, thanks” in that speech, Elizabeth said, “If you want to become a member, just submit a copy of your baptismal certificate to the vicar. Nothing to it.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no record of the baptism. The church burned down a few years later and all the records were lost.”

  She was staring at me with such a peculiar look in her eyes, perhaps thinking the rules and procedures in the US were vastly different from here. This sort of sloppy carryon would never be allowed to happen with parish archives in England. In the event of a fire, Elizabeth would no doubt hurl her body on top of the records in hope of saving them.

  “We weren’t religious,” I emphasized, hoping she’d drop the subject. I would no more allow myself to be confirmed at St. Chrysostom’s Church than I would volunteer to join the Chinese army. Or the Women’s Institute. “My father wasn’t around much, and my mother was too busy.” That was the short story for public consumption but I realized as I said it how perfectly it summed up my childhood. My mother was always working, or always worried about losing some stupid little job on some assembly line—we moved so often that was the only kind of work she seemed to be able to find. She was nervous by nature, and in a way that I thought almost guaranteed she’d be caught up in the next round of layoffs. They can smell fear, these corporate bully types. Ability and knowledge, it seemed to me then and now, had nothing to do with it. And of course what confidence she had ever possessed had drained out of her with age. My father saw to that.

  “Too busy. I see,” Elizabeth said in her sharp way, but not unkindly, and clearly deciding to skip any homilies about how God is never too busy for us. Which i
s good, because I’d be prepared to argue the opposite any day. “So. How can I help you?”

  “Actually, it was Heather Cartwright who suggested you might be able to help. I was thinking of getting involved with volunteer work. Give back, you know. Now that I have some free time. And she seemed to think you were someone who could point me in the right direction.” I was winging it, of course, as I’d learned in Improv classes, and I think I said it because I knew instinctively she would approve. She was the type of earnest good-body who would devote most of her boundless energy to good causes and could not see why everyone didn’t follow suit. “I even thought of joining a political campaign—helping someone else get elected, I mean. Not me.”

  Did I imagine it or was there a sudden frost in her voice as she said again, “I see.” Perhaps she thought, and rightly, that politics were not a worthy cause, and was hoping for something more along the lines of wrapping bandages for soldiers or feeding the poor.

  “I’ve always thought Heather Cartwright was rather a ninny,” she said, out of nowhere. Since that of course exactly matched my own sentiments, I warmed considerably to Elizabeth. She spoiled it by adding, “God forgive me.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “I suppose you have in mind Colin Livingstone,” she said. “Our local MP.”

  Softly now. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but we’d arrived at the object of my visit. I decided to play my foreigner card.

  “I don’t really know the system too well,” I said. This was certainly an understatement. The electoral college back in the US was a model of logic and transparency compared with British politics, to my mind and many others. Only cricket could compete for its ludicrous rules of order. But I couldn’t pretend not to know something of whatever it was the man stood for.

  “Ah,” she said. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I admire what he’s done for the preservation movement. Anna Monroe used to speak most highly of him.”

  “Ah,” she said again, but this time with a far more weighted emphasis.

  “Poor Anna,” I added.

  “Hmm.”

  There was condemnation in that hmm, in the lift of one dark eyebrow that accompanied it, and in the sharp stab of the next chrysanthemum into the vase, but she was not going to be drawn into speaking ill of the dead, not she. If Elizabeth Fortescue thought Anna, too, was a ninny—or, more likely, a slut—I was not going to hear it from her. At least, not directly. Fortunately, she had fewer qualms about commenting on how the living were managing their lives, as she began to reveal with her next sentence.

  “He went through the discernment process at St. C’s,” she said. “Years ago.”

  “What’s that?

  “It’s a vetting procedure they put religious candidates through. In the case of clergy, they can’t be too careful who they let in. There are all sorts of steps to discernment.”

  “And?”

  “And I guess they discerned he was—unsuitable.” Had it been anyone but Elizabeth I would have sworn she was about to say “an asshole.” She smiled a secret little smile that highlighted the creases around her eyes. “At least I never heard any more about it. The next thing I did hear, he was running for parliament. Where he could be among his own kind.”

  It was interesting that someone besides me, someone with obvious brains and some authority, felt that way about Colin Livingstone. I began to think I might look into joining St. C’s myself one day if this was the caliber of bright spark it attracted.

  “What exactly did they discover?”

  “Discern. And I tell you, I have no idea. I’m only on the vestry. Word gets around but no one ever confides details like that.”

  Well, it hadn’t been a fondness for choirboys, not if his relationship with Anna was anything to go by. “You didn’t like him either, I gather.”

  “No. And it was nothing I could put my finger on. If I could I would say. You can’t be in public office and not expect people to comment on your suitability to govern.” She paused, considering, and finally said, “It’s so subtle, what he does. So nebulous, it’s difficult to come up with an example. He liked to tell people this story about his being at a child’s funeral. A four-year-old who’d died from a rare blood disorder. And how God spoke to him, to our Colin, right then and there and told him he could alleviate suffering like what these parents were going through. That was when he said he’d got the call to serve—first in the church, and then when that didn’t work out, in public office. Oh, I’m not telling this right. But Colin is the last person you’d want to talk with if you’d just lost your child. His tendency was to make himself the middle of every story.”

  “Including being blinded by the light at a child’s funeral.”

  “Precisely. Like he was the Virgin Mary or St. Paul or something. You do see?”

  I did. I felt I’d come across that brand of narcissism before. Mostly, it was benign, and in the case of someone bitten by the religious bug it could at least be put to good use, given certain strict parameters and a watchful committee or two. But there was a line that could be crossed, unwittingly, without anyone noticing until it was too late. People started to believe they could heal, or raise the dead, or found a new church, or whatever loony thing they thought God was calling them to do. In the case of someone with political leanings, it would not require much of a leap. Having failed in one arena, the political showground would beckon even brighter. Much more money and power and prestige involved there, anyway. A clergyman is seldom offered the best table at a restaurant, when you think about it.

  I was just collecting my things to leave when she said, “You could ask Macy Rideout.” From the knowing Miss Marple twinkle in her eyes, Elizabeth knew exactly what I was after. And who would likely have no qualms about speaking ill of the dead.

  13

  The next morning I stayed out of Will’s way, pretending to be asleep until I was sure he had left to catch his train. Then I jumped into the shower, a hedonistic black-tiled cave with multiple water jets that tempted you to linger far too long. Will once had called it our secret Victoria Falls. We’d stay in there until both Will and the hot water ran out.

  I didn’t linger, for I had work to do. I washed and towel-dried my hair, fluffed out the curls, pulled on jeans and a cowl-neck, and headed for the Rideout place for my pre-arranged chat with Racy Macy. I decided against taking the car; it was by my standards a short walk to her house. It was, besides, a beautiful day. The odd thing about Anna’s murder was how lighthearted it made me feel—just grateful to be alive to see another sunny day. Soon snow would pelt the windows of the darkened houses, and the lights of Rashima’s kitchen across the crescent would glow like a safe harbor for me and all who sailed on the good ship Weycombe. It would be beautiful then, too, in its way. Weycombe was never not beautiful.

  My grandmother used to drag me to this place in West Virginia, a religious retreat in the woods that became a camp for kids during the summer. For very little cash you could stay in a rundown log bunkhouse, eat starchy food in the main lodge, and listen to lectures in the woods about the nature of the Trinity. Needless to say, I hated it. It was like The Hunger Games with camp counselors.

  The most marginal kids imaginable were there—kids no self-respecting teenager would want to be caught dead with. And they made us do “spiritual exercises” like walking the labyrinth. At night that became a metaphor for something else among some of the older kids. But one day as I was tracing a path between the rocks I very nearly got the point. My heart lifted up and I saw my brother. He was right there, hovering just at the edge of my line of vision, standing with his hands on his hips, the usual know-everything smirk on his face.

  I wasn’t frightened; I’d never been afraid of him in life and I wasn’t afraid of his ghost. I remembered running back from the car the day he died, my breath coming in ragged gasps, reaching him
too late, too late to save him.

  That day I stood stock still under the sun in complete and utter peace, and I knew I was forgiven. I had failed to save my brother—from himself, from our parents, even from me—but that was okay: I forgave myself. And as far as the universe was concerned, it didn’t matter, anyway.

  It was the only experience of my life that could remotely be called spiritual. It was also my first step on the road to freedom—a leaving behind of everything adults had told me I must believe. I knew then with certainty the universe had no system of checks and balances. Except for the parts I could control myself, it was completely random.

  It had been unseasonably cool on Nerd Mountain, and the weather in Weycombe that had called it to mind as I walked to Macy’s was likewise flawless—a perfect autumn day. Sunny and warm and the air as crisp as apples.

  I could see a plucky paddleboarder, far out on the river. In winter the water would freeze, sometimes becoming thick enough to skate on, and even now a paddleboard was optimistic, pushing the season. At least in a kayak your feet and lower body had some protection from the elements.

  Was I unfeeling about Anna? Hardly. I was disturbed by her murder, and sorry it had happened, a regret shared by the many people she’d shafted, I’m sure.

  But if I’m honest, I have to say before long I felt a ripple of excitement at something this huge unfolding right in front of me. I think most people feel this way about murder. It’s why crime novels are so popular. People want to be a part of something bigger than they are, bigger than their petty lives. Something more epic.

  My life in Weycombe until Anna was killed had been circumscribed by the boundaries of what was, however upscale and prettified, just a poky little village. I had been reduced to noticing which workmen had been called in to repair a leak, and who was planting tulips already, and wasn’t that the Myers’ dog, the one developing a limp?