In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  In the end he decided he might go and have a talk with Jane tomorrow, to try to get a sense of what her husband had been feeling about the changes in his circumstances. What his life in Saudi Arabia had been like. Had he been doing well at his new job? Had he adapted to the place or had he found it all to be too big a culture clash? The death of his grandmother must have been upsetting, if not unexpected. How any of this could lead to death by his own hand, however, Max wasn’t able to decipher. Or to murder, for that matter. What was odd was that Colin had been away so much—hardly ideal circumstances in which to conduct an affair. Perhaps that had been part of the problem, the vast distances, once love had struck.

  Max wondered when the affair had begun. If it had begun. That was hardly something he could come right out with and ask Jane Frost, was it? Not if he expected an honest reply.

  Luther the church cat came padding out from where he’d been hiding and did something he seldom did: he came and sat by Max, as if to offer comfort. Together they sat staring at the altar flowers, those flowers in remembrance of Netta.

  Chapter 17

  THE DEVIL

  The next day Max was at his desk balancing the parish accounts, but within five minutes into the “outgo” columns he was interrupted. It proved to be one of those days when he felt he needed a revolving front door on the vicarage.

  It was Lord Duxter—the man, it seemed to Max, at the very heart of what had happened. Up pops the devil. The thought rose unbidden in Max’s mind.

  David, Lord Duxter, had blown right past Mrs. Hooser to enter the room unannounced. Mrs. Hooser got her revenge by making a rude gesture at the lord’s back. She left without offering to bring tea and somehow Max thought it better not to ask her for any.

  He and Lord Duxter quickly settled in the low chairs before the fireplace. Max had come to think of the place as his confessional.

  “I am deeply troubled, Max,” Lord Duxter began. “And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Over your wife’s situation, of course. Naturally, you are. But there is hope, isn’t there? There is always hope. I pray daily for her full recovery. What do the doctors say?”

  Lord Duxter ignored the question, rushing on to pour out what was in his mind. “Yes, of course, but more—I’m more upset at the manner in which she was found. The circumstances.”

  Found with another man dead beside her, her apparent lover—yes, that idea would take some getting used to for a grieving spouse. But Max sensed that was not entirely what was on Lord Duxter’s mind.

  “My wife was … a very disturbed woman, Max. Highly strung, given to these episodes of depression for which there seemed to be no cure. I say episodes but really, they were epic plunges into despair. There is no question that she was a challenge to live with. But do you know, I loved her in spite of it all.”

  “Of course you did,” said Max. “Do,” he corrected himself.

  “No one will believe that, especially now, but it’s true. She was a romantic, but quite intelligent with it—someone along the lines of Virginia Woolf, I always thought. But solid underneath it all, do you understand? Underneath all the, well, the drama and silliness? And quite, quite loyal to me. I never doubted her on that score: her faithfulness.”

  Max, who had had quite a different impression of Marina, held his tongue. This was the man’s wife, and his view might be as valid as anyone’s, if not more so. But Max having been her confessor, in a manner of speaking, this entire conversation rather put him in a spot. She had never confessed to an affair, to be sure, but her unhappiness in her marriage was no secret, certainly not from her vicar. Wan and wraith thin, she had sat where her husband sat now, using Max as a sounding board as she debated how to cope with what she perceived as her husband’s titanic indifference. She knew, or believed, that her husband had married her for her money. That he had in fact been forced into the match by his father, “the greedy old sot”—her words.

  “So when she was found with Colin,” Lord Duxter went on, “I was flabbergasted. Absolutely floored. I tell you, I never saw any sign that anything like that was going on. She was devoted to me utterly. So this affair with Colin—what nonsense. It can’t be true, you do see. Because, she would never do that to me. Not to me. The scene must be staged somehow.”

  “Staged.”

  “Yes, man. Staged.” He pounded the arm of his chair for emphasis, turning red and looking like Owen when he wanted to be released from his high chair. “He was murdered and someone attempted to murder my wife, and that’s all there is to it. Or Colin murdered her or tried to or thought he had and then took his own life.”

  Well, that was a theory, and it was not without some interest to Max or the police, who had got there long before. But as evidence or proof of anything it was a theory full of holes. For here was Lord Duxter’s ego on full display. It was almost as if another person had come into the room, someone dressed in cloth of gold and a cloak of peacock feathers, like some potentate from a bygone day. His wife could not have killed herself because she adored her husband. And she adored her husband because he was so adorable.

  Max didn’t discount altogether what Lord Duxter was saying, but it would need a lot more “proof” than that this man’s ego had been bruised.

  And didn’t this ego business sound familiar—didn’t it just? Why do women always seem to fall in love with the same type of man, over and over again? But at least the writer Carville had had the humility to wonder if his ego had been involved in Marina’s downfall. Unlike David, who seemed to assume his very wonderfulness shielded him from the charge.

  Now Lord Duxter was saying, “And there’s something more. We were told at the inquest that Marina and Colin had been listening to music in that car, but later I was told it was Mahler. Marina hated Mahler, and no matter how depressed she got, she would never choose that to be the last sound she would hear on earth. And I doubt if someone like Colin had ever even heard of Mahler. I knew something was up but the cop I was talking to was a bit of a booby, and I wasn’t sure he’d pass along the word. So I rang DCI Cotton. Sound man. He said he’d look into it, that they were considering every angle.”

  Max thought this bit about the music was a telling point but difficult to prove after the fact. He was almost afraid to ask, but: “Why would Colin do that? Stage a suicide?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, do I, dammit?” Lord Duxter thundered. “Do you think I haven’t asked myself that over and over? That’s for the goddam police to sort out. The man liked doing magic tricks. Maybe this was just one more. He was an IT type, a techie—their minds work that way. Never the straight path, oh no, not when some circuitous route will do. I’m just telling you what I know is true. And you can believe it or not. But tell your friend Cotton from me: my wife certainly did not have an affair with Colin”—his voice dripped with distaste at the name: Co-lin—“and she most certainly did not try to commit suicide, either.”

  Max had noticed before that Lord Duxter could not bear to have anything he said questioned. And to do so was to provoke this sort of explosive reaction. Poor Marina, having to live with this. He remembered the rumors had gone round—still were going round at Elka’s, like sifted flour floating in the air—that Lord Duxter had “sent” Colin overseas to get rid of him. In fact, to get him away from his wife. That the pair of them had been found together in a suicide pact certainly lent credence to the rumors. Their love had been thwarted. Colin had had no choice but to accept the job, having been unemployed for so long. But it meant distance from her for long stretches at a time. As Cotton had theorized, they simply saw the futility of their liaison: Lady Duxter had access to little of her own wealth, thanks to her husband using her money to keep his publishing empire afloat. So for the two lovers, for the time being, for the foreseeable future, these long separations would be the norm. And that had tipped an already unstable woman over the edge.

  It didn’t entirely explain Colin’s tipping over with her, but according to his known family history he had his ow
n issues with instability. Which was why he had lost his job and been unemployed for so long in the first place—if those rumors were true. That downward spiral that caught so many in its coils.

  Max thought it through. According to what Cotton had told him initially and in later conversations, the two lovers were found to have been drugged by one of Marina’s many prescription drugs. The coroner had determined they had attempted to commit suicide, one of them successfully, using the drugs and the carbon monoxide to make sure one or the other, or both factors together, would prove fatal.

  The lord stood abruptly and, placing his hands on the mantelpiece, stretched his arms out, standing back to view the flames. Turning suddenly, he said, “Truly, I am flummoxed. I suspected my wife was slightly infatuated with Colin, if you want the truth.” That would be nice, thought Max. “But I didn’t realize it was reciprocated to this extent. Not at all.”

  “This came out of the blue, then, did it, sir?”

  It was here that Lord Duxter stumbled from his former barbed confidence. “I can’t say it was a complete surprise—the affair, I mean, not the—you know. The attempt. Not all this.”

  “She never said? Never asked for a divorce, expressed her unhappiness, demanded that you pack and leave?”

  “I? Why should I go anywhere? It’s my house.” Paid for with her money, but never mind, thought Max. “Oh, she expressed her unhappiness all the time. It was a sort of generalized thing. My wife was a depressive, I tell you. It’s an illness like any other, like gout or hives or something. I learned to live with it as best I could. I did love her in my way. I do love her. But it wasn’t always easy, living with someone like her, with an illness like hers.”

  “Who was treating her? Dr. Winship?”

  “No, no. She was a private patient of Dr. Prothmeyer in Monkslip-super-Mare. He’s a specialist in treating diseases of the mind.”

  Max decided to go for broke, watching carefully for the man’s reaction. He had only Poppy’s word to go on, and Poppy was hardly a disinterested witness to her stepmother’s goings-on.

  “Is that how your affair with Jane started?” he asked bluntly. “When Lady Duxter appeared to be slipping into madness?”

  He braced himself for a barrage of disavowals, but those pregnancy tests needed an explanation, and Lord Duxter was in close proximity to Jane every day. The man who, like King David, had arranged to send her husband away. There weren’t any other candidates that fit the bill so precisely, and Carville was out of the running. But Max was still puzzled by the lord’s attraction to Jane. Max berated himself for thinking in clichés, but since Max had first known her, Jane was no one’s idea of a femme fatale. She only recently seemed to be coming out of her chrysalis, taking extra care with her appearance. That blue dress, the hair appointments.

  He watched as the lord struggled with the easy denial. Full of bluster at all times, he was at the same time a terrible liar, his face reflecting a cascade of emotions, with embarrassment finally winning out. Lord Duxter had certainly been put through the wringer by recent events. Would he emerge a changed man? Or would he, like Agatha’s character Joan in Absent in the Spring, soon forget the insights gained?

  There are, Max reflected, liars who lie to make themselves or their children—extensions of themselves—look good. Then there are liars who lie to damage others. The false witnesses—these are the most destructive. Although the first brand leave a mark, too, especially on their children. Max thought Lord Duxter was of this first brand of liar. Faint praise, indeed.

  “Tell me how it started,” Max prodded, realizing he’d hit the bull’s-eye. “You and Jane.”

  Slowly, the truth came trickling out. Lord Duxter’s face was the red of a sunset as he said—quietly, for him: “Perhaps I was bewitched. Do you believe that is possible? Well, perhaps you do. Not that your wife is a witch, not exactly, but you know what I mean.”

  “Awena is a Wiccan,” said Max steadfastly. “She does not practice witchcraft. Wicca is a pagan religion, an earth-based faith.” So many people had harebrained ideas about what that meant in reality. Any religion that wasn’t strictly mainstream, that didn’t involve steeples and temples or mosques, was dismissed outright, which always made Max bristle with annoyance.

  “Anyway,” said Lord Duxter, “if you saw Jane at night beside that lake, you would understand my reaction.” His expression was that of a man entranced at the memory. “I saw her by starlight, you see. From the turret.”

  Starlight. Well, that explained it. “Go on.”

  “She was in Prior’s Wood, by the pond. It was a clear, moonlit night and she was kneeling by the water, as if in prayer,” said Lord Duxter. “I had the odd conviction that was exactly what she was doing—praying, or performing some sort of incantation, making some offering. Perhaps reviving some ancient rite that had long been banished by the forces of Christendom. I know that sounds … odd, but that was the effect this had on me. She wore a robe of deep blue, some shiny material embroidered with arcane symbols in silver thread. She scattered about some leaves or herbs she took from a bowl and plunged her hands in the water three times. All I knew was that it was something pagan, a ritual from prehistory. I became convinced—I still am convinced—that before writing or representational art, before the Church or any sort of sanctioned religion had taken hold in Monkslip, women had come to this forest to perform this ritual. And later, much later, when it was dangerous to do so, they came in secret. At least, that was my fanciful thought. I tell you, I was bewitched.”

  “What sort of ritual was it?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it and she never would say. Does it matter? It was some sort of hocus-pocus. She had that much in common with Colin. Colin and his parlor tricks.

  “Anyway, I was mesmerized. Hypnotized by the grace of her movements—she has the most beautiful way of carrying herself, you know, her steps as graceful as a dancer’s. Her movements force the eye to follow. And the stars shone in the sky around her. Only around her. It was as if she were an actress on a stage. I was transfixed. The light from the moon had an almost greenish tinge to it that night—it was a full moon that first night I saw her, and it fell in a stripe on the water, did I say? It was at the comet end of that strip of light that she made her offering or whatever it was. Meanwhile one star, one star in particular—well, it was so bright it had to have been not a star but a planet, and it seemed to crown her in glory. To anoint her.

  “She took down her hair and it fell in wavy curls around her shoulders and down her back. Mermaid hair, she has.”

  Is he serious? Max wondered. Apparently he was. Lord Duxter continued, caught up in the glorious, transformative memory: “And then she stood and let the robe slide from her shoulders. She stood naked underneath that canopy of stars, and she held up her hands to the sky in some sort of—I don’t know. A benediction. I was captivated, besotted—whatever you want to call it. I’ll admit it. She was gorgeous. Stunning, I tell you.”

  Ah, thought Max. I believe we’ve reached the core of the matter now.

  “I know it sounds absurd and rather sordid and voyeuristic but it wasn’t,” Lord Duxter rushed on, anxious to be understood. Max thought he understood all too well. “Night after night for a week this went on.”

  “And you just watched her.”

  “Yes, at first. I didn’t plan to—you know, do anything about it. I hadn’t sought her out, but I also didn’t chivalrously turn my back once I saw her. I fell under her spell, right then and there. To think this lovely creature had been before me all along, hidden in plain sight. Her model’s figure hidden under shapeless suits and dresses, her eyes behind those hideous glasses, too big for her face. I asked her—once we were lovers; so quickly we became lovers—and I asked her why she hid herself. Why she didn’t flaunt herself more, she was so gorgeous. And the answer she gave made perfect sense—once you realized what she really looked like. ‘I grew tired,’ she said, ‘of the attentions of men.’
But then she added, ‘Until you.’ What man could resist that sort of thing? It’s the oldest story in the world, isn’t it?”

  Oh, thought Max, yes. It certainly was. There were many variations to this story, too.

  “And then the spell was broken, when she … when she…”

  Max wasn’t going to force him to finish the sentence: when she became pregnant. All this put what Poppy had told him under a clear light, and it was looking more and more as if she had been telling the truth—allowing for certain embellishments based on her dislike of her stepmother.

  Lord Duxter added fuel to Max’s theory of Poppy’s veracity when he said, practically spluttering in frustration, “Jane told me she was on the pill, and now I think—oh, God. I should have realized, with Colin gone so much, the pill wouldn’t really have been the logical choice. The first time we … you know … she told me not to worry, it was all taken care of. I took her word for it. She had always been nothing if not reliable—hyper-reliable, neurotically so, if I may put it that way. I depended on her entirely. So when it came to this—this quite different matter—I didn’t draw a distinction. She must be telling the truth.”

  “Perhaps she was.”

  “Oh, come on, Max. You don’t really believe that, do you? This was no accident.”

  “We could argue the point either way, but what you are left to deal with is that you may have fathered a child on Jane. Those are the facts now. So the only question is, what do you propose to do about it?”

  Lord Duxter stared at the floor, shaking his head back and forth in frustration. He was not entirely a bad person, thought Max. Few people are bad through and through. But despite his business acumen he was a silly man and a weak one, easily blinded by his immediate wants.