Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  The kitchen at Murano’s sounded like a construction site. Bam bam bam! Someone was making veal scaloppini. I took advantage of the distraction to study my former colleague across the starchy white tablecloth.

  Oscar was the kind of guy who looked like he might have taught surfing or TM somewhere in his checkered past. He wore his hair long, often pulled into a Samurai-type folded ponytail at the nape of his neck. He was thirty-four years old but looked about twice that age—Philip Seymour Hoffmanesque, with everything about him as rumpled as a used paper bag. His shirt today looked slept-in; when he hugged me in greeting, I caught the faint smell of whiskey and cigarette smoke. He wore a tie in a concession to the occasion, loosely knotted. The jacket I’d seen on him many times, an old houndstooth check with what I imagined were real and necessary patches to keep the lower halves of the sleeves from falling off. It was pockmarked with burns from cigarette ash. More than once during our meal he excused himself from the table to stand outside the nonsmoking restaurant for a cigarette. If he’d taken advantage of the break to snort a line or two I wouldn’t have been surprised. He always looked a little too lively on his return.

  He seemed to be emerging from one of his recurring bouts of catatonic stupor, which were interspersed with fits of manic hyperactivity. He had been totally out of place at the BBC, which, despite its finger-on-the-pulse pretensions to the contrary, is conservative to its core.

  Oscar’s brief bursts of genius were the only reason the BBC had continued to employ him long past the date when saner heads would have had him committed. Just as they might be getting ready to give him the heave-ho, he would bring home the scoop every other news outlet had missed, for Oscar could find a story the way a dog can find a cadaver. He knew who to talk to, and who could get him in to talk to the source—the real source. God alone knows why, but people trusted him. It was said he’d been responsible for putting more than one criminal behind bars, and that there was a price on his head as a result. I guess I’d drink, too, if I had to live like that. And do coke: Oscar’s all-nighters were not possible without it, and he was not alone among his colleagues who had discovered better living through chemistry. But truth to tell, if it weren’t for people like Oscar we’d all end our days in some frozen gulag.

  He’d come to the BBC from a rival program that had refused to air one of his documentaries charging corruption in Parliament. I gathered his whole career had been like that: once upper management bowed to pressure from an advertiser or anyone with deep pockets, he’d be gone. It was what I liked about him, of course. What everyone in the trade liked about him, even though the paranoia that stoked his personality could be trying to deal with. He claimed he’d been threatened, which I believed, and that he’d been wiretapped by Buckingham Palace, which I did not. At least, not entirely. His specialty was the time-consuming investigation and he had the patience of a spider, spinning an invisible web and sitting beside it for months or years, awaiting his prey. He’d been barred from more than one news conference for being disruptive—a code word for asking the questions nobody wanted to answer.

  I hadn’t seen him since early summer, when I had called him out of the blue for a lunch date and been surprised to find him available—his assignments often took him overseas. The Monroes had been renovating their patio—Anna had designed, all by herself, an Italian Renaissance addition to her Tudor-style house, which as it turned out required jackhammers to be deployed round the clock. By week two of construction the noise had reduced me to a gibbering mass of creative profanities, most of them suggesting what Anna could do with her jackhammers. The resulting addition to her palazzo was lovely if incongruous, and more than one fence had needed mending once it was done. So Anna had thrown a huge party for the neighborhood. She was like that: do first, apologize later. She always thought she could charm her way out of anything. But by the time her invitation arrived, I’d had enough: I told her I was coming down with the flu, and Will went in my stead. He reported later that Anna had got very drunk on wine—Italian, of course—and that a few people had jumped into the pool in their underwear. I had mixed feelings about having missed that.

  Anyway, because of the construction noise I’d taken to calling up old friends at random, seeing who was available to get me out of the village for a day before Anna came to grievous harm.

  The waiter came to offer a tasting of the wine, and the cork, both of which Oscar waved away. “Just pour,” he said. He turned his attention to me and said, “Weycombe has its own hashtag on social media these days.”

  I waited for the waiter to take himself off.

  “It’s been … unreal,” I said.

  “First tell me, how goes it with his lordship?” he asked. “Are you still finding it worthwhile, selling your soul to the peerage?”

  Oscar did not like Will, and, as I think I mentioned, it was mutual. It wasn’t jealousy, as far as I could tell, even though Oscar had made it clear a few times he would be there to pick up the pieces if I needed someone. It was more a working man’s outlook, a class-hatred thing. Then again, Oscar hadn’t liked Ken, either, my boyfriend just before Will came along.

  “He’s doing well,” I said. “He’s being groomed for promotion. Which is good. We could use the money. I did a lousy job selling my soul, you see. Will is only land-rich.”

  This was true, as it happened. Will had inherited almost nothing when his father passed, apart from a few hand-me-down war souvenirs. I gathered there had been a bit of a sell-off of property to pay death taxes.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. About the job thing—sod the peerage’s land-rich problems. Anyway, I’ve got one ear to the ground for you, job-wise, but nothing has come open. You know I think you got a raw deal.”

  “Thanks.” I took a long sip of wine. It was awkward, because I didn’t much want Oscar championing my cause. A referral from him, in many circles, was more of a condemnation.

  We turned our attention to the lunch menu, both ordering the leek soup served with fresh-baked rosemary bread and topped with a slick of olive oil. We shared a soft buratina tied up like a bag of money with strands of celery. I chose pasta; Oscar ordered the veal.

  It was the kind of place where the service was so unobtrusive you never saw a waiter unless you wanted one, and plates seemed to magically appear and disappear. A reviewer recently had called the place the best Italian restaurant outside of Sicily, and it was jumping with customers.

  I’d told Oscar at the time about Anna and the jackhammers. Now he said, “So. I hear the jackhammer problem has been solved for good.”

  I paused for a moment in spreading about a million calories of cheese on half a million calories of bread. The bread had seeds and nuts embedded in the crust and if I’d been smart, I’d have stopped with one slice. But Murano’s was the kind of indulgence I didn’t allow myself often. Weycombe, for all its five-star foodie posturing, still had a way to go to match London. I’d just walk further and faster the next day.

  Settling my bread knife, I answered him. “You laugh, but you should see the village—hashtag Weycombe. People are terrified.”

  “Why? From everything I know, and a few things you’ve told me, they’re better off without her.”

  “They think they could be next.”

  “Oh, not the serial killer theory. She was a thoroughly selfish woman who deserved to be shot. You said so yourself during the jackhammer jamboree.”

  “I did not,” I mumbled through a mouthful of bread. I paused to wash it down with wine, a red from Palermo, plush with tannins. “I said someone should shoot her. I didn’t offer to do it for them.”

  “No matter. She was strangled. And stabbed.”

  I stopped the glass midway to my lips. “That’s certain, is it?”

  “I thought you were the one who found her.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t, you know, do an autopsy. At a glance she’d been strangled, yes. But she was stabbed?�
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  “Maybe they used a jackhammer.”

  “Please. Would you be serious? Anyway, who is your source? Not the guy who runs the local paper, for sure. He’s still figuring out how to spell her name.”

  Oscar smiled, a slight twist to his cupid’s-bow lips. “You know, you do have a bit of a wicked streak.”

  I nodded, acknowledging the compliment. Coming from Oscar, it was a compliment. “You have someone in the police you’re talking with?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And someone at the coroner’s. An acquaintance from school days.”

  That absolutely figured. Oscar really did know everyone. He told me he had once dated the woman who measured the Queen for her bra size.

  “And?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you which way the wind blows? No way. At least, not yet. My sources will dry up the second they think I’m talking with anyone in the village. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Yes. I see that,” I said obligingly, nodding. I’d get it out of him eventually. That and more.

  “Besides, I saw loads of people murdered in Bosnia that no one gave a shit about. I’m not particularly interested that a village socialite got herself murdered, probably for leaving someone off her dinner party list.”

  “But your readers will be interested.”

  He shrugged. “Which is why I may do a little snooping around. But you really should stay out of it, Jill.”

  This was like talking with Rashima. “Who says I’m into it?”

  That earned me a “come on” look while he paused for a sip of water. He saved his hardest drinking for after hours, but the preliminary rounds started early.

  In spite of which, Oscar was going to be a hard nut to crack.

  24

  Okay,” he said ten minutes later, humoring me. “Let’s shake the snow globe a bit.”

  It was a favorite expression of his, meaning “let’s throw stuff in the air and see what sticks.” He was good at this, as many people had learned to their dismay. I thought of the blameless villagers of Weycombe and for a moment I felt a twinge on their behalf, picturing Oscar swaggering down those cobbled streets in search of gossip. I thought of Will: I was unleashing the hounds on him, for sure.

  “Who were her known enemies?” Oscar asked. He took out a notebook that looked like something he’d retrieved from a shredder.

  I named a few people, male and female. The males were mostly Anna’s ex-lovers and the females their wronged wives or girlfriends. Anna never seemed to go after single men, not that there were many of those of the straight variety in Weycombe.

  At the end of this recital I shrugged and said, “I’m not sure it rose to the level of ‘enemy,’ in every case. It really was on the level of social snobbery—as you say, who was left off the guest list. All of this carried out in accordance with some finely calibrated system of etiquette, or whatever you’d call it, to which only Anna held the key.”

  “You were off the list?”

  What the hell … Oscar, I swear, could read minds.

  “Yes,” I said, “and I don’t mind telling you, and you alone—it was galling to be dumped. If only because, really, who died and put Anna in charge of the fucking book club?”

  Oscar smiled. “People have been killed for less.”

  “But not in Weycombe,” I said.

  “No. Probably not in Weycombe.”

  “You see?” I said, taking another sip of wine. “Now I sound like a moron even to have mentioned it. They count on that embarrassment, people like her. But it stung to find out the club didn’t end, as I was told. It simply carried on without me, at least for a couple more months. Which involved more than a little skulking around, believe me. They were all in on the secret. They had to have been.”

  “Not necessarily. If Anna cut you out, she might just have told the others you’d dropped out due to time constraints, and no one questioned it.”

  I hadn’t considered that. Of course, Rashima would never have been part of this deception—I should have known. She’d bought into another of Anna’s lies.

  “All of which does beg the question of why you were included in the first place.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Because I’m aristocracy. Minor, but with that thrilling aura of glamour. I guess I was included out of curiosity. And then I was found wanting.”

  “You’re right,” said Oscar. “They’re petty little bitches. Let it go. You need better friends, that’s all. Speaking of which, who was Anna’s best friend? That’s always a good place to start when there’s been a catfight.”

  “Funny you should mention … ” I told him about my recent visit to Macy’s manor house.

  “Well, there you have it,” he said. “A lover’s triangle. Or is it a quadrangle? Anyway, between the husband—first suspect, always—and this Macy person, the police will make a short job of things.”

  “A short job of jumping to conclusions, you mean.”

  “They go on statistics,” he insisted. “And if it’s not the husband, it’s a jealous rival.”

  “You’re hearing this from the detectives on the case?” Oscar just shook his head and smiled: Nice try.

  “Alfie would not be up for murder,” I said. “The pure energy required for it. He’s really ill and I don’t think he’s faking it. One look should convince anyone.”

  “Jealously is great at giving you that needed adrenaline surge. What’s he got to lose if he’s as ill as you say? Maybe it’s something terminal and he doesn’t give a rat’s arse anymore. Besides, he may have hired someone to do it for him. Maybe he knew someone from a place where they don’t get worked up about the sanctity of life—not if enough money is on offer.”

  Like Africa? I said slowly, “I suppose Alfie and Macy could have teamed up together.” That was a viable theory, to anyone who didn’t know Alfie.

  Oscar nodded. “There you go. Spoken like a true detective.”

  We hashed over more theories for the snow globe. There was always the possibility Anna had been killed over some financial skullduggery with Barry or some unknown person. A barrister would have an embarrassment of ways to divert a jury if it came to defending almost anyone in this case. The prosecution would need a case much closer to airtight.

  “What about the neighbor who thinks she’s living in a Viking settlement? Or her husband?”

  “Heather? Yes. But I’m sure that’s a non-starter. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Gideon would be involved with Anna or in her death. He’s barely around, for one thing.”

  Still, even as I said that, I began to revise my opinion. Never say never. Gideon probably was a contender. I should mention that our globe-trotting expert on global affairs had a roaming eye. I’d seen it roam over my breasts and I’d chosen to pretend a sort of hysterical blindness, like one of Freud’s early patients. He also had, possibly related, a drinker’s nose. It was Shakespeare who wrote that alcohol paints the nose and takes away the performance. But Gideon had somehow managed to bestow on Heather the miracle that was Lulu, so I guessed things were working in that department.

  Gideon’s survey of my anatomy had happened at a party—I think the Rideouts’ housewarming—when I wore a dress that was cut slightly low in front. Not low enough to drive anyone wild with lust; I’m not well-enough endowed for that. It seemed almost an automatic response on his part, to keep the old libido in tune. You have to wonder if there is an academic anywhere out there whose eyes do not roam when he—or she—is not fighting the good fight over the serial comma. But I always thought they saved that sort of thing for impressionable undergraduates. Heather had been one of his students.

  It was at this party Anna probably had hooked up with her MP. I started to write our MP, but that would imply I voted for him or he was in office for the sake of humanity, and I was fairly certain that was not the case. In the same way Cesare Borgi
a was probably not the best pick to wear a cardinal’s hat, so Colin Livingstone, MP, might have been better employed selling reverse mortgages to credulous old people.

  “Gideon’s a possible, but I can’t really see it,” I said. I looked around, adding, “I think this is the best Italian restaurant I’ve ever been in, including in Italy,” because I didn’t want to waste time on Gideon. I’d keep him in reserve on my list of suspects—there was a case to be made that Anna might have responded to his advances. She didn’t seem to have a highly developed sense of discrimination. My doubt came in more because Anna was twenty years too old to be Gideon’s type.

  We bowed our heads reverently over our main courses. During a pause for water I asked, “Are you still seeing Karen?” Karen McQueen often played the crime victim in Bloody Murder: London, a fact more than one viewer had picked up on. Karen the exhibitionist, the showoff, the makeup expert and player of many parts.

  “God, no. There’s barely room in a relationship for two people, let alone thirty. I swear to God she has multiple personalities.” Oscar paused, staring into the dregs of the wine in his glass. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. I might tell you.”

  “What ever happened to Clarice?”

  “Will’s old girlfriend?” Clarice was one of the anemic blonde bluebloods Will’s mother was always shoving under his nose during our courtship, hoping to distract him from red-blooded me. “I’ve no idea, Oscar. I like to think she couldn’t stand the competition and finally just got out of the way. Will never talks about her. Neither does his mother, thank God.”