“Well, thank you, Tom. Do you know where your mum is right now?”
“Upstairs.” And before Max could act on that information: “I like it here better.”
“Yes, I know, Tom. But right now DCI Cotton and I have a lot to talk about. Please go and find your mum.”
Chapter 11
THE HANGED MAN
Tom left the door to the vicarage study ajar when he left the room, probably planning a stealthy reentry once the grown-ups were again preoccupied. Max went to make sure the door was firmly closed before rejoining Cotton.
“You’re not thinking murder, are you?” Max asked, resuming his seat. “Or perhaps that Colin was meant to survive, and something went very wrong?”
“I’m not sure what I’m thinking,” Cotton replied, stretching out his hands to warm them over the still-roiling flames of the fireplace. “If not Colin to blame, or Lady Duxter, in a sort of botched attempt that backfired—who do we have?”
“Colin’s wife, Jane, and Marina’s husband, Lord Duxter.”
“Colin’s wife is alibied by the girl, Poppy, as it happens.”
“And, in a way, by Awena,” said Max. He and Awena had of course discussed the news over breakfast.
“Awena? Really? How is she involved?”
“She was having a conversation with Jane in the library at what appears to be the relevant time. I’m sure you’d agree, she is an impeccable witness.”
“Absolutely. I’ll get a statement taken from her but for now, I’ll take it as gold. And going from there, perhaps we can count to when the bodies were discovered. Jane thinks the car had a quarter of a tank of petrol. If we can measure the amount of carbon monoxide Colin inhaled, perhaps we can make a good estimate of the time the car was rigged to asphyxiate them both. But it has to be at some time before dusk. And Jane was with Poppy well before dark.”
“They alibi each other, in other words. And Awena can back that up, as she was with Jane shortly after. There wasn’t enough time for Jane to leave Poppy, do what needed to be done, and get back in time to meet Awena.”
“Correct. As it turns out, though, the thing was done in haste. Otherwise, whoever it was would have hung about to make sure Lady Duxter was dead, as well as Colin.” He paused, thinking. “Try as I might, I don’t see the pair of them—Jane and Poppy—teaming up to do away with the girl’s father. I won’t discount it as a theory just yet, you see many ugly things in this job, but still…”
“Right,” said Max. “That leaves us with Lord Duxter so far as intimates are concerned. I can see him deciding he wants to be free of his marriage to Lady Duxter. That motive is as old as the hills—and a common enough motive for murder. But why kill Colin, too? Is Colin just collateral damage? That stretches the imagination rather far.”
“I wouldn’t discount that possibility either just yet,” said Cotton. “You and I have met criminals with no conscience before. And seen many victims who were caught up in something, unawares.”
“It is so hard to countenance, that level of evil.”
Only for you, Max, thought Cotton. Max always wanted to believe the best of people. It was the chink in his armor, that he was always surprised by man’s inhumanity. Max’s Pollyanna tendencies were legendary among those who knew him well. And whereas Max was saddened and sometimes angered by the knowledge of man’s inhumanity to man, Cotton was simply angered.
“You say they left a note?” asked Max.
Cotton opened the small leather briefcase that seldom left his side, and extracted a single sheet of A4 paper encased in a plastic evidence bag.
“This is Colin’s note. It reads, ‘I don’t think I can go on. Please forgive me.’”
“It’s not addressed to anyone in particular?”
“No. The only prints on it are his.”
Max looked closer at the note. “I think you might find the word ‘on’ was added later—it is difficult to say for certain with only two letters to go on but it appears to me to be by a different hand. Colin evidently left big spaces between sentences. And someone, maybe even Colin for some reason, inserted the word ‘on.’ I think the original may have been, “I don’t think I can go.’ That is quite a different sentiment. ‘Go’ where? To the store? To the seaside? To Saudi Arabia?”
“So he might have written this to Lord Duxter. Or to his wife. But he did go to Saudi in the end.”
“I don’t think I can go on,” murmured Max, casting his eyes around the room.
“Yes?” said Cotton hopefully, after a few moments had lapsed.
“I don’t find that compelling, do you? Even if what he actually wrote was ‘I don’t think I can go on,’ that does not indicate a firm decision to end his own life. ‘I don’t think I can’? And it is a very odd thing to say as one is in the very middle of ending one’s life—you do see? Marina was sitting right there next to him so why not just tell her this? Why write it down? To whom is he writing this?”
“Of course, you’re quite right, Max. It would make more sense to say, flat out, ‘I can’t go on.’”
Max nodded. “It might be a message intended for his wife, Jane. Or his daughter. But I agree he would just say so. Anyway, that ‘I don’t think’ is more the sort of dramatic flourish a person might make in a moment of—oh, I don’t know. Romantic anguish.”
“There was a music CD in the car. Mahler. Dramatic stuff, that.”
“That would fit the situation.”
“So, you are thinking Colin’s wife had something to do with this?” Cotton asked. “If not directly, since she’s apparently alibied, then with an accomplice?”
Max shook his head. “No. Not necessarily. Anyone might have got hold of that note and planted it. Where’s the poem?” Max asked.
Cotton dove into his briefcase again and retrieved another piece of paper.
“This was found beside Lady Duxter. You can handle this one: the original is with the lab people, already dusted, and they confirm the handwriting as belonging to Lady Duxter. Only her prints are on it. What do you make of it?”
Max looked at the photocopied page. The original page had clearly been torn from a book, a daybook or diary at a guess. He read,
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
He handed the sheet back to Cotton. “How sad. Lord Byron, of course. The mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
“One and the same.”
“I always felt that Byron was madly overcompensating for his club foot, don’t you agree?”
Cotton, who had not given the matter any thought, gave a noncommittal nod.
“That he succeeded in making people overlook his disability was commendable but he didn’t quite know when to stop compensating.”
“It’s a theory,” said Cotton neutrally. Sometimes, Cotton was baffled by Max’s tendency to go off on these little philosophical tangents. Cotton now squinted suspiciously at the page through narrowed eyes, as though if he concentrated enough the writing might yield more of Byron’s thought processes. “‘The sword outwears its sheath,’” he quoted. “Is that some sort of sexual reference, do you think? That he was impotent?”
Max suppressed a smile, although he had to admit, it wasn’t completely an off-the-wall interpretation. “He was a young man when he wrote this, as I recall,” he said. “Still in his twenties, but exhausted by a period of debauchery. By one of many periods of decadence, to be precise. But still, it’s a theme of exhaustion for a much older man, don’t you think?”
“Hmm,” said Cotto
n.
“A drink?” Max offered. “Coffee? I need to think about this and it helps the process when I do some mundane task.”
Cotton agreed to the coffee, still not taking his eyes from the page. Max strolled out, Thea at his heels, hoping for a treat, and after a certain amount of clatter and confusion had emanated from the kitchen he returned with a tray and two cups. He poured and let Cotton doctor his coffee with cream and sugar. He sat back in his chair before the fire with his own black coffee, and said, “So what are we to make of this? That Colin was a Byronic figure to her? Personally, I find that awfully hard to reconcile with what little I know of Colin.”
“That was my thought, as well. By all accounts, while he was what you might call Byronically handsome, Colin was just an affable type. Hardly mad, bad, and so on. Sort of a geek—head always in the clouds, trying to sort out some programming knot, or work out some new magic trick.”
“That was always my impression. Still, there is no accounting for where we choose to love, is there? And I think Colin was a decent man, an upstanding sort. Perhaps Lady Duxter found him sympathetic and kind, whereas her husband…”
“Yes. Her husband was anything but, by all accounts,” said Cotton.
“I do wonder if the poem isn’t more aimed at her husband, come to that. ‘We’ll go no more a roving’ is a way of saying good-bye to all that, isn’t it? A sort of, ‘I love you but I’m too tired to go on’ statement.”
“Or, ‘I loved you before you turned into such a jerk.’ But what are you getting at, Max?”
“I guess I’m wondering why Colin didn’t have any words of farewell, for his wife, or advice for his daughter. Something like an explanation would have been nice.”
“I would say that was simply not his style. Lady Duxter was the romantic here. Colin, the analyst. A very different class of dreamer.”
“I’m sure you’re right about that,” said Max. “And then, there’s the notebook itself.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The page is clearly torn from some sort of bound book. A diary, a daybook, or some book where she collected her thoughts, or at least others’ thoughts and expressions that were important to her. Have your people found it?”
“Ah, I see. No, they have not, and of course they had a look through her desk and her belongings, with her husband’s permission, hoping to find some clue to her state of mind.”
“And that’s interesting in and of itself, is it not? That it appears to be missing?”
“I suppose. She may have destroyed it, particularly if it was a diary, full of deeply personal things. Things she wanted to die with her.”
“Yes, many people facing death feel that way,” said Max. “Generally, they don’t want their children to come across what they’ve written and learn how often they’d thought of giving their children away to the next passerby. Or there’s just the sense of wanting to keep our most intimate thoughts from prying eyes.”
“Especially in the case of suicide, when the supposition may well be that people will begin pawing through your things, looking for clues.”
“Quite,” said Max.
“It might still turn up, the diary or notebook,” said Cotton. “It’s early days.”
“Quite,” said Max again. He was clearly not listening.
“Wasn’t Lord Duxter knighted for services to something?” Cotton asked.
“What?” said Max. “Oh, yes. For services to publishing and charity, I believe. Something along those lines. He was made a life peer: Lord Duxter of Monkslip. Ever since then he likes to talk of globalization in the publishing industry and so on. He’s hoping to be invited to Davos, I gather.”
“Chance would be a fine thing; I’d say Davos is more than a bit out of his league. What sort of charity does he go in for?”
“He donates books—returns that would otherwise be shredded—to schools and worthy causes. It costs him very little—it may even be financially to his advantage—and it is useful from a public relations standpoint. He also does something with writers. I mean to say, something intended to benefit writers, especially those who appear to be struggling, which I gather is most of them. He bought the old priory and its church from King’s College. The church was going to wrack and ruin with too small a congregation to justify its existence, and many of the supporting buildings had long since been reduced to just their foundations. The church had been formally closed under the Pastoral Measure of 1983. I’m sure the diocese was relieved to avoid outright demolition of the historic priory by putting it in the hands of someone who would undertake to preserve it. Lord Duxter’s plans to convert the main buildings and the church itself into housing and put it all to worthwhile use as a retreat met with favor.”
“But not a spiritual retreat.”
“Not at all, although I gather they observe silent times each day, when presumably the writers are writing instead of talking about their latest contracts. Lord Duxter runs the place as a sort of bolt hole for writers needing quiet time away from their obligations. I’m told there is little to no internet connection out there, the better to force them to create and to get away from email and social media. Lord Duxter has been quoted paraphrasing Alfred Hitchcock, saying that writers produce their best work when treated like cattle. They just need to be fed and prodded once in a while.”
“And kept away from their Facebook pages. You seem to know a lot about him.”
“In some ways. He is Awena’s publisher. She’s working now on her next book for him: The Pagan Vegan’s Medieval Cookbook.”
“So she knows him well?”
“She’s met him many times, of course, but I think she knows him more by reputation, as she corresponds mainly with her editor at Wooton Press, not with the great man himself. It is pure coincidence Lord Duxter chose this neck of the woods to settle in, unless Awena’s descriptions of Nether Monkslip somehow influenced him. He and his wife did have us over for a dinner party once when they first moved in.”
“And what is his reputation?”
Max made a “so-so” waffling motion with one hand. “He’s to all appearances aboveboard in his business dealings, otherwise Awena wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. But she came to him only when her former publisher was merged into Lord Duxter’s company; she didn’t have a great deal of say in that. There is a fair amount of that merger business these days and in fact the book business seems to be volatile and unstable at the best of times. He’s a bit of a philanthropist, which is admirable, whatever his motivations may be. The writer’s retreat is more an act of charity than a money-making proposition, according to what Awena tells me. He heavily subsidizes it out of his own pocket. Well, if rumors are true, Lady Duxter’s pocket. The big money is hers. I’m sure it’s what keeps the whole enterprise afloat.”
“Well, there’s a motive. They may have quarreled over how the money was being spent.”
“Perhaps that is so. I wonder if he gains or loses by her death, and if so, by how much?”
“We’ve got people covering that angle.”
“Anyway,” Max continued, “Awena told me she was in the archives with Jane at around five-fifteen. She stayed perhaps twenty minutes.”
Cotton made a note. “That helps pinpoint the time. So tell me, how exactly are the lucky ones chosen to attend the retreat?”
“I’m not sure,” said Max. “Awena would know. There must be a vetting process of some kind. A CV. Sample pages of a work in progress. Recommendations from other authors or teachers. The stipend is for a maximum of one month’s stay only, and I think that’s wise, don’t you? Otherwise some people, once dug in, might be difficult to shift. There’s one exception to the rule, that I do know.”
“And how is that? Rather, who is that?”
“Poppy Frost. Awena says she’s always hanging about the place, writing in her notebook.”
“So Poppy as well as her stepmother has ties to the place?”
“In a way. Poppy has a literary bent. She
has apparently shown such talent the lord has granted her free run of the place until she heads to university. Poppy doesn’t live there at the priory, of course, but as good as. I think her home situation isn’t always a happy one and so the arrangement suits and having her there does no active harm. Her mother died when she was quite young and she never quite got over the shock of that. I mean, who could? All of this is according to the village grapevine, which remains almost mythic in its efficiency.”
“You’re referring of course to Miss Pitchford and her minions,” said Cotton. “Well, it may or may not be relevant. Certainly I’ll have to have one of my people talk at further length with Poppy. She may have seen something, heard something, if she’s there so much. I think Sergeant Essex for this, don’t you? The woman’s touch and all that. Besides, she’s closer in age to the girl than anyone else on the team.”
“By the way—just for your information and to aid your researches—Lord Duxter’s name before he became Lord Duxter was David Bottom.”
“Then how did he come to be Lord Duxter? I mean, why not Lord Bottom?”
“It’s not a requirement to keep your ‘real’ name when you’re among the honored. You can style yourself however you want. At a guess, Mr. Bottom seized the chance to acquire a more uplifting name, if you’ll excuse the pun. Ian Paisley is Lord Bannside, for example, not Lord Paisley.”
“And if your last name was Lord you’d be Lord Lord—which, while easy to remember, wouldn’t make a lot of sense, would it?”
“Right. So anyway, our David, Lord Duxter, got a new name and a life peerage. The title exists only so long as he lives; it can’t be passed on to his children. But he has no children, so that’s nicely taken care of already.”
In Prior's Wood Page 9
