Amanda walked beside him like a model on a catwalk, a completely unnatural stride that involved tipping back from the hips, arms dangling at the sides and feet crossing one in front of the other. He wondered where he’d seen it just recently then realized that, of course, the woman he’d glimpsed in the garden with the sketchbook walked like that. And she, so glamorous and artistic-looking, would no doubt be someone a fourteen-year-old girl would want to emulate.
They skirted an herbaceous border, the gray-green plants thriving even in winter. She led him across to the tower housing the Old Kitchen.
“There’s not a lot for someone your age to do around here, is there?” he asked her. “At least in warm weather, you could go to the beach.”
An expression of grievance flitted over Amanda’s flawless face, like storm clouds on a summer’s day.
“The nearest town with anything like a nightlife is Monkslip-super-Mare, and their idea of entertainment is a pig race.” Max decided not to tell her about Nether Monkslip’s eagerly anticipated yearly duck race. “In the pub they’re taking bets on how many inches of snowfall we’ll get this year. I’ve been bored to sobs, but Mother says we have to stay until all this is sorted. Is that true? She’s seldom the go-to person for accurate information.”
Max had no idea. “I’m afraid that’s probably so. The police have to solve this crime and you’ll need to be available to them.”
They were nearing the entrance to the tower that housed the Old Kitchen, a door of blackened wood, studded, with heavy metal hinges.
“You must miss your father,” Max said. He kept his tone low; it was the unobtrusive voice he used when a parishioner was in particular distress. He might have been calling from a great distance, a mere background to the person’s chaotic thoughts.
But that was a particularly lame thing to say, judging by her expression. “Do you think I must? I barely knew him. I barely can remember him now.”
The studied air of disinterest was convincing, but a very thin membrane separated Max from the rest of the world. He was able to feel others’ joys and sorrows, and adopt their preoccupations, forgetting himself and his own joys and sorrows in the process. This ability to relate, to cohere even to the vilest of lowlife criminal, was what had made him a valuable asset to MI5. The same ability to relate to people of all stripes also made him valuable to the Anglican Church. His sense of Amanda was that she was hiding a world of loss behind the cool façade.
They stood in the shelter of the high stone walls as she gave the round door handle a practiced twist and a downward push. The door creaked open. The sea could faintly be heard in the distance: pummeling, pounding, roaring, eternally seeking entry.
“… ghosts in the castle.”
Max, distracted by the melancholy beauty of the sound, asked her to repeat what she’d said.
“Of course they’ve just joined the ghosts in the castle,” she said. “My aunt, and my father. They haven’t really left.”
“Do you seriously believe that? Believe in ghosts?” Max asked her.
She gave him the Well, duh look patented by teen cave dwellers at approximately the start of recorded history. He might have made the mistake of asking if she thought Justin Bieber was cute.
“There are. You don’t see them, hovering just at the corner of your vision? I do. Then when I turn to look, of course, there’s nothing there.”
They stepped over the threshold and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. Kitchens in those days, he knew, were placed away from the main building because of the constant risk of fire. Max and Amanda passed through an inner door and looked about; much of the room was roped off, undergoing renovations. The windows were set high to draw the heat and smoke up and out; an enormous fireplace with roasting hearth and bread ovens on either side ranged against one wall. Amanda pointed out the serving hatch, where servants would collect the food and carry it across the courtyard to the Great Hall.
“Imagine this job in winter,” said Amanda.
“Or in a sweltering August,” said Max. “Even worse.”
The scullery occupied the ground floor of the next tower over, she told him. It had a drain in the floor which presumably was used to eliminate wastewater.
“But here,” his guide told him, “is what is so cool. I use this as my hiding place, when I just want to read or think and get away from the rest of them.”
She indicated a small doorway designed to knock the taller, modern-day visitor senseless. She motioned him through, and he saw that it opened into a spiral staircase. A panther would have had trouble climbing it, and there were no handrails.
“The general run of tourist is not allowed up here,” she said. Her face became serious, closed off; he nodded in appreciation of the privileged status she had granted him. He followed as she went tripping up the treacherous, uneven steps. Round and round they went in a tight circle, hands extended to brace themselves against the walls, and finally they reached a small room two floors above the scullery.
Pushing open the door, she said, “They think it was a guardroom.” He saw a round room with two-foot-thick walls: Loopholes, wide inside and narrowing to long apertures, offered defense-by-arrow of the outer walls. The openings had long since been glassed in to keep out the cold. The room was furnished, sparingly if with some charm, with a double bed, tables, and rugs, and had been fitted out with a small bathroom.
“Sometimes we let it out to guests,” she said. He noted the “we” and the little throb of pride in her voice. With her father gone she seemed to have assumed ownership of a place from which she effectively had been barred by her parents’ divorce. Not just a “place,” he amended, but a national treasure steeped in history and beauty. Lamorna and Felberta had exhibited similar signs of possessiveness.
Max moved over to a window. He imagined he could see the tops of the trees on Hawk Crest in the far distance. His villagers would all be going about their daily lives; early risers like Lily Iverson would have been up for hours to tend to her sheep, to Dolly and Lucrezia (the black sheep) and all the rest, as mist still hovered over the hedgerows. Awena would be in her shop, dusting or organizing or keeping track of inventory on her computer.
“Do you know what’s strange?” Amanda asked of his back.
“I would love to hear what is strange,” he replied, turning to her.
“I think someone tried to kill my father even before they … they succeeded.”
Of course he knew about the poisoning attempt, assumed by some to have been attempted murder. But she surprised him when she said, “I think they tried to hit him with a stone dropped from the parapets. He was walking around the garden, just as we were now, and he felt something whoosh right by his ear. He turned around and there was this enormous boulder in the path.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “He told me, didn’t he? I thought he was imagining things. Don’t old people make up things to get attention sometimes? Now I wonder—now that this has happened, I wonder…”
“Did he have any idea who had done it?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“Not really. I mean, my mother hated him enough to do it, but she wouldn’t. She just wouldn’t. Except maybe…”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe on a split-second impulse. But it’s not really in her to do that. I would know, wouldn’t I?”
How often had he heard a parent of the worst sort defended by the child who depended on that parent for its own survival. For what it was worth, he filed the information away. Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle, was of course a prime suspect in her ex-husband’s death.
“It was awful, when we lived here,” Amanda was saying. She twirled around one finger a strand of the flaxen hair that had escaped the hat. “Fortunately, I barely remember it. I thought they were both quite mad, my parents.”
Amanda had pudgy little hands like chubby starfish and she waved them now about her ears to show, presumably, how wild and crazy
her upbringing had been.
“Certainly when they quarreled they sounded insane.”
His conversation with Lester fresh in mind, Max asked her about her cousin.
She shrugged. “What’s to say? He’s such a prat. As for that wife of his, Fester—the one who always dresses like she’s covered in algae … All I can say is, love really must be blind.”
“I hear that it is,” said Max mildly. A picture of Awena rose into his mind, but no blindness was in play there. Awena glowed from within with a beauty that was unique to her alone. It was the first time the word “love” had come into his mind in connection with her, though, and he wondered at that. He wondered very much.
“… thing that is remarkable about Lester,” Amanda was saying, “is that even when it looks like he’s doing nothing, he’s actually doing nothing. Which is a thing monumentally difficult to do, when you think about it. He seems actually to be able to empty out his mind, like a man turning out his pockets.”
Max, smiling, reflected that it was difficult to do, if not impossible. Besides, Lester struck him as a man who was always up to something, even if something that seemed squirrelly and pointless to the naked eye.
“And his wife? Felberta?”
“Fester. She’s Australian.”
“Yes, all right. And what else do we know about her?”
“I don’t know … They all like to barbeque.” She tapped the fingers of one small hand against her rose-pink mouth, stifling a small yawn. He saw that she wore a skull-and-bones ring, the sort of thing popular with kids. Such an odd fashion statement but he saw it everywhere.
Was she joking about the barbeque? Max didn’t think so. That probably amounted to the sum total of her knowledge and understanding of Felberta.
But: “Thick as thieves, those two,” she added darkly. Her eyes shone brightly out of kohl-rimmed lids. “I think he’s casing the joint, as they used to say in cop movies.”
“And Simon? What do we know about him?”
“He’s American. You know what they’re like.”
“Friendly and hardworking?”
“Noisy and pushy.”
“From what little I’ve seen of Simon, he’s neither.”
She shrugged. Think what you like, then.
“And he’s fed up with Jocasta,” she said. “Join the club, I say.”
She continued to give him that level gaze. This time there was a certain accretion of goodwill in her eyes.
“I’m glad you’re here. I think with you here we might get it all sorted. Or at least, it won’t get any worse.”
Amanda was fast becoming his new best friend, he realized. She asked, “Do you have any kids?”
The lack of a wedding ring meant nothing anymore, he realized. He surprised himself a bit by saying, “Not yet. But I really would like to have children one day.” In a way, the villagers had become his “children,” and he was content to do as best he could to see to their care. Children of his own he rarely had time to think about. But there it was, what he had said aloud, and it was the truth. One day, he wanted a family of two or three children. He was in his forties—plenty of time biologically. But children deserved a father agile enough to—oh, to save them from drowning or some other calamity. Didn’t they? He was himself mildly astonished that he remained unmarried. It wasn’t through lack of trying in the past. But the person to raise children with him had not appeared in the years when he and Paul were carelessly sampling much of London’s female population. Paul, who had married. Who had had a child. And who had died on his—Max’s—watch.
He shook himself from the reverie and saw Amanda was looking at him curiously. He said, “No time at the present. But one day.”
“I’ll be available as soon as I get through my A-levels,” she said. She smiled to show she was kidding—sort of—and Max let out a bark of laughter.
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. I suppose I should go and find out where DCI Cotton is.”
“He’s in the library. I gathered we’re all to be positively grilled throughout the day. In a way, I wish they’d just leave it alone. Anyway, I must run now. If they’re looking for me I’ll be in the main tower. That’s where we’re staying while we’re here.”
And turning abruptly, she skipped down the stairs. Max took a final look around the room and followed, racing to keep up with her fearless descent, and wondering exactly what she meant by wishing they’d leave it alone. Surely it was in her best interests to learn the truth surrounding her father’s death.
Outside, he came to stone steps with a thin veneer of black ice. He was just wondering how he was going to extend his stay at the castle. He’d have to come up with some story, some excuse to buy extra time, but that would be lying, and a step back to his MI5 days of nothing but deceit, and—
Oh—
Blast and damn it all to hell.
He was on his face in the snow, the top of the stairs was far above him, and his ankle was as sore as if someone had taken a hammer to it. Was it broken or merely sprained? He thought sprained—at least, there were no protruding bones and everything looked attached, if aching.
The castle steps at this time of year offered a kind of double whammy. Worn down to an edge over the centuries like a ski slope, and now covered with invisible ice.
Damn. He should have been more careful. His head was aching, too. He made an effort to collect his thoughts, which seemed to have scattered like marbles across a glass floor. He looked around. Amanda was long gone.
But Lamorna was beside him. Lamorna, possibly the one person one would not want around in an emergency.
“Don’t move!” she shrieked, as if she’d found him planning a decathlon with the injured ankle. “I’ll get help!”
Good, thought Max, gingerly turning his head, not so much immobile as wondering if God really moved in such mysterious ways as to render him sidelined from the investigation. Or was the point to force him to stay where he was and investigate at his leisure? He took the opportunity to wonder how Lamorna had appeared so fortuitously. Had she been following him and Amanda?
Lamorna’s brogues came into his peripheral vision. She wore them with black socks with a subtle pattern of acorns, he noticed. The detail one could glean from ground level!
“Don’t move!” she commanded again.
“I’m not moving,” he told the hard, frozen ground.
“Help is on the way!”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. She hadn’t called an ambulance?
“Look, I’m fine.” He turned over slowly and sat up with great care, as if all his bones might shatter with the effort. Wincing, he examined the offending area. “See? I’m fine. Just a sprain.”
“I’ve sent for the nurse.”
Of course, he’d forgotten that between Leticia and Oscar, both elderly, they probably kept the local nurse practically on speed dial. Max struggled to rise and the pain in his left ankle suggested he not try that just yet. In due course the nurse appeared, a supremely competent-looking soul named Emma Brown with masses of white hair ballooning about her head. She carried a little leather bag of supplies, which included an elastic bandage wrap with tabs to secure it. She first satisfied herself that Max’s own diagnoses were correct. No concussion (“stunned silly for a moment, is all”), minor sprain. She cleaned and bandaged the wound on his forehead and recommended ice and elevation for the rest.
“Were you by any chance called out here for Lord Footrustle recently?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes. He had a bit of a tummy and finally let me look at him. He wouldn’t have the doctor.”
“What did you think was wrong?”
“Didn’t I just say? A bit of tummy. Something he ate that disagreed with him.”
“Could it have been food poisoning?”
She leaned back on her haunches and looked at him.
“I’ve known Doris all me life. No, it could not have been food poisoning. Not by accident or carelessness, anyway.” She stood up. “I’ll b
e right back.”
She returned from her car with a crutch and a recommendation that he go to the hospital for an X-ray, which he knew immediately he would not do. Thanking her for her trouble, he tried walking—hopping, rather—without the crutch but decided overall he’d heal faster if for now he did as he was told.
It was time to find Cotton, while he was still able.
CHAPTER 13
Old Friends
Max reached the library by hobbling down a mercifully few short steps which began near the main staircase off the Great Hall. It was a room which must at one time have been an undercroft of sorts to the main hall. A storage area, perhaps. The original inhabitants of the house, Max imagined, would have had little time for quiet reflection over books of poetry or passionate discussions of stagecraft over tankards of mulled wine.
DCI Cotton was there along with Detective Sergeant Essex.
“Where have you been?” Cotton greeted him. “In a roller derby?”
“It’s just a sprain. Thanks for your concern.”
Sergeant Essex, she of the choppy haircut with its multicolored strands, smiled warmly at him.
“Glad you could join us,” said Cotton, “whatever your condition.”
Max collapsed into a chair, leaning the crutch against the Tudor-style dark paneling. The room, faced by bookcases built into the walls, was gently lighted by wall sconces and warmed by a log fire in the stone hearth.
“Right. So what have we got?” Max asked.
Cotton noted the “we” with a little frisson of satisfaction. Max was fully on board already.
“We haven’t released the crime scene but everyone is free to roam about everywhere except Lord Footrustle’s bedroom and, until we’re certain what’s going on, Lady Baynard’s hothouse.”
Cotton was examining his suit jacket as he spoke. There seemed to be an imperfection in the weave that was troubling him. Dapper and clean shaven, the promise of a dilettantish approach to crime suggested by the obvious care Cotton took with his appearance was undermined by the take-no-prisoners look that stole into his eyes when he suspected a suspect was lying.
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