Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  As if answering his unspoken questions, Bruce Winship said, “When you come to think of it, murder is prompted by two things. Mainly: desperation and hatred. Desperation can stem from a lack of food, fear of exposure—any number of things. A lack of love, too, I suppose. Hatred, though … A murder prompted by hatred is the crime that may be unforgivable. Also, to my mind, that is a crime committed by the type of killer who, having once killed, would find it easier to kill, again and again. Although I suppose all that’s more in your line, Padre.” Like the Major, Bruce Winship had a military background but always used the colloquial phrase more lightheartedly. “More whiskey? I barely gave you enough to wet your whistle.”

  Max distractedly held out his glass. He thought, I wonder if the taking of a human life is ever justifiable. All those years of theology and I still don’t know the answer. In man’s eyes, yes (and he thought here of people like Paul, blown to small pieces for the latest political cause, the most recent cut in religious fashion, or simply to impress the boss), but did God not ultimately regard each fragile life, having been created, as worth saving? Was murder ever justified in God’s eyes?

  “We’re not going to agree on the causes,” said Max. “Since the causes aren’t known.”

  “Genes or environment?” said Dr. Winship musingly. “We’re as far from getting this right as we’ve ever been—you are correct about that. If there’s a gene marker for genius or ambition, believe me, we’d be busy manipulating it. If there’s one for cold-blooded killers, we’d be busy suppressing it.”

  “I still wouldn’t discount the Devil…” said Max.

  “Back to ‘the Devil made me do it?’” The doctor finished his own whiskey and stood to fetch more from the drinks tray. He lifted the bottle in invitation.

  “It can’t be ruled out,” said Max mildly, shaking his head.

  “I prefer the scientific method.” Dr. Winship poured another inch of the liquid into his glass and lifted it in a toast. The whiskey shone like liquid amber in the firelight. “Each to his own.”

  “I’ll say a big amen to that,” said a sultry feminine voice. Suzanna Winship stood in the doorway.

  CHAPTER 14

  Temptation

  Suzanna gazed at Max with frank interest, a gaze he returned with what bug-eyed equanimity he could muster. “I’ll just go put the groceries away and join you,” she said, indicating the shopping bags she held in each hand. Her brother having no objections, Max felt he could hardly protest. Returning minutes later, she sat down, shedding her cardigan in the somewhat overheated room to reveal a matching blue sweater.

  “What do you think of all this, Vicar?” she asked him, smiling through her lip gloss.

  “I can’t begin to know how to think of it,” he replied. “It’s impossible for this to have happened, here in Nether Monkslip. And yet it did.”

  “Of course, it’s nonsense to think this is connected with the Fayre nonsense,” she said, adding (Max thought somewhat guiltily), “Isn’t it?”

  “What exactly was that particular nonsense about?” asked Max. Although he thought he knew in general terms, it would be interesting to hear the specifics from someone who’d been in the forefront.

  “There was a screwup over the order for the chairs—oh, sorry. Is it all right to say screwup?” Max, having no idea, shrugged.

  Suzanna crossed her legs, the firm, fleshy thighs encased in black tights. She was unquestionably an attractive woman. Feline features, eyes tilted, mouth with a curl at the corners, jaw coming nearly to a point on a triangular face. Thick, wavy hair the color of Devon cream. She looked at Max, taking in his gray eyes and black hair, and all but purred.

  “Wanda, who had the heart and soul of a Head Girl, went on and on about it. I heard someone call her a cow during the last meeting, under her breath, of course,” (here she adopted a self-deprecating grin, which showed her dimples to full effect) “but whoever did it would never own up to it now, in light of subsequent events.”

  A married attractive woman, he reminded himself. Max’s first thoughts on hearing Suzanna was separated from her husband, however, had been an unclerical blurt of Anglo-Saxon derivation, for which he immediately sent an apology heavenward. Suzanna was a complication he felt he didn’t need.

  Separated, but married. Irretrievably married for all he knew. And as unsuitable as a consort for a small village priest as could be imagined. Vicar’s wives (and in his position, a lawfully wedded wife it would have to be) seemed to him rather standard issue, with drab hair and clothing and an earnest demeanor. Even if Suzanna were available for the role, the very idea that she could be persuaded to tamp it down to suit the villagers was preposterous. And wrong to ask her to hide her light under a bushel, so to speak, of gray worsted wool and sensible shoes.

  For something to distract him from these unprofitable thoughts, Max gazed about him at his surroundings. The furniture in the doctor’s sitting room was teak and Scandinavian in a style that had been popular in the middle of the last century. Max thought some of it was collectible now but imagined it had been inherited rather than collected, Dr. Winship not striking him as a man to pay overmuch attention to his environs. But Suzanna looked like a sultry fifties siren against the backdrop; she might have been on a stage set.

  “Anyway,” Suzanna was saying now, smoothing her skirt over her knees, a modest gesture that somehow only drew further attention to the magnificent legs, “Wanda had no business making it into such a cause, embarrassing … people … that way.”

  “People?”

  “Well, Joyce Carol Goats mainly,” said Suzanna. Off his look, she added, “Sorry, it’s rather an affectionate nickname around here for Lily. But I suppose Elka, as well, became a target. And Awena. Wanda on a mission meant sooner or later everyone was stuffed.”

  Max sighed inwardly. It was too true.

  “Also,” Suzanna continued, “you mustn’t overlook the various tradesmen and farmers involved with the Fayre in one way or another, if you’re combing our bucolic countryside looking for suspects. Most had been told off by Wanda—completely given the rounds of the kitchen—in the lead-up to ‘her’ big day. Notice I say ‘her’—she did act as if she owned the whole parade. You should have seen her when she waylaid poor Guy Nicholls in the High. He would have agreed to anything to get away from her, and he did. It was her usual technique.”

  “Sounds as if the Fayre brought out the worst in her,” put in Dr. Winship.

  “You know as well as I do, there was a lot of worst to bring out,” said Suzanna. “Wanda—now, nil nisi bonum, but … Wanda was the sort of woman who exemplifies what is wrong today with the Women’s Institute. There’s a WI in North Yorkshire offering its members pole dancing lessons. Now, that’s more like it—bringing the light of the twenty-first century into the stodgy WI.”

  “Is this the same WI as did the nude calendar?” Bruce asked.

  “No, this is actually a different one.”

  “Makes one wonder what is going on in Yorkshire.”

  Max, feeling the conversation could be brought back into more productive lines, merely said, “It is hard to see how Wanda’s … bossiness could have led to her death.”

  “You find it hard to see, do you? Well, you are a dear man. Wanda had a gift for the wounding remark. I was the recipient of more than one, before you ask.”

  “Really? Such as…?”

  “Such as what was I really doing in Nether Monkslip? Was I fleeing some scandal in London? Conjecture such as that.” Her chocolate-brown eyes snapped dismissively. “Well, let me tell you, if I were the walking scandal of London, I’d like nothing better than to hang about and see how it all played out. Oh, and was Bruce really my brother? Wanda would wonder aloud, eyes wide and aglow with malice.”

  “You’re joking,” said Max, looking over at the doctor, who shrugged resignedly.

  “Not at all,” said Suzanna. “Is that outrageous, or what? I suppose we should have threatened her with a solicitor or two. But I s
imply didn’t care what Wanda thought, and if anyone believed her nonsense—well, so what? I told her more than once to go wax her you-know-what and leave me alone.”

  Max, genuinely puzzled, asked, “Her floors?”

  Suzanna smiled. “No. Not her floors.”

  Bruce, horrified, said, “Suzanna!”

  She looked at her brother. “What? Anyway,” she continued, “others were unable to develop the rhinoceros hide required for dealing with Wanda.”

  “Lily, for example.”

  “For example. But there were others. Our Lily is simply less able to hide it when the arrows hit home. Very highly strung, she is. Of course, her uncle was barking—the one who left her the farm. People like Lily never learn to guard their expressions. Botox has taken care of that for so many nowadays.”

  “Still,” put in the doctor, “still, there was no reason to think Wanda might not have gone on forever, mixing her clichés and metaphors with reckless abandon.”

  Suzanna nodded. “So true. God moves in a mysterious way.”

  Didn’t God just, thought Max. But in this case, he thought not. Man moved in a mysterious way, and often a terrible way. There was a lot of rivalry in a small village, Max had learned. Some cases of mutual loathing went on for years—rather like the typical feuds between MI5 and MI6. Something of the sort must be behind this, as incredible as it seemed.

  Suzanna was saying, “I suppose we’ll be blessed by a visit from the son now.”

  “Yes,” said Bruce Winship. “I wonder if he’ll bring the girlfriend? Wanda was telling us about her—or was it the Major? We had them over for bridge one night.”

  “Yes,” said Suzanna. “And what was her name, the girlfriend? Something unusual. Clementia?—something like that. I remember thinking at the time it sounded like some kind of feminine complaint. Still, if one is burdened with an unusual name like Jasper, I don’t suppose one can complain.”

  Max regarded her. She was observing the play of light on her whiskey glass. As he watched, she threw back her head and drank the dregs, displaying the long white stem of her lovely throat. Now she looked at him; her catlike gaze suddenly made him think of DCI Cotton. She struck Max as completely city bred, and as out of place here as … well, as people had thought him once. He then wondered aloud why Suzanna had joined the Women’s Institute in the first place. “It doesn’t seem your style, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  The doctor laughed and said, “I told her the same thing. It’s a slippery slope; the thin edge of the wedge. Join the WI one day, join in the gossip at the Cavalier the next.”

  Suzanna, not offended, said, “There’s bugger all to do in Nether Monkslip. And frankly, if you are not in the WI around here, you are totally out of the loop on all things. And what precisely is wrong with the occasional tea and bun at the Cavalier, anyway?”

  The night was drawing in. Suzanna rose to close the heavy lined drapes against the night, stretching as she pulled the fabric ends together across the top. Max averted his eyes and trained them steadily on the mantel clock, as if he’d never seen such a mechanical marvel in all his days.

  “You were a reporter once, weren’t you?” asked Max when she was again seated. “Must be a bit of a sea change.”

  “Oh, yes. Glamorous, right? Actually, it was a job I likened to going to work in a rice paddy every day. Although I knew that was an unfair comparison. The rice paddy didn’t have my boss, the overpaid fuckup, in charge. It was basically a job rewriting press releases, so in theory it was easy. This guy spent most of his time walking over to see what I was doing, which was annoying in the extreme, since he himself never did anything. This seemed to be his full-time job, when he wasn’t busy trying to look down the intern’s dress, or mine, which explained (only partly—the content-free condition into which the paper had fallen may have had something to do with it) why the paper was in a constant state of financial crisis. Until it folded, which was a mercy for its readers, if not the staff.”

  Really, thought Max. With Suzanna one had to master the art of the bland expression that registered nothing.

  “But then I moved here to our Brigadoon,” she continued. “The rest you know.”

  Her look implied he could know so much more. So much.

  “Well,” he said, slapping his knees, as if preparing to leave. “Interesting. That’s just so, erm … interesting.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said. Again, the slow smile, the white teeth and the lip gloss gleaming. “Have you ever noticed how many of the villagers are transplants? Some of them have similar stories to tell—redundancies, retirements. Few people are from here. Which is going to make the police’s job jolly difficult, I would think. Bad enough no one honestly seems to recall where anyone was during the Fayre, themselves included.”

  “And during the Fayre, you yourself were…?”

  Suzanna laughed, a tinkly sound that ran up and down the feminine scale.

  “Oh, you don’t seriously think I slunk off to do in poor old Wanda, do you? I think I find it almost flattering that you think me capable of such skullduggery.”

  Seeing that her flirtatious manner was not being all that well received at the moment, she reined it in. “I did see Wanda here and there that morning, and mark my words: she was up to something. Practically hugging herself with excitement at times. But mostly I was trapped behind a stall helping to sell children’s clothing. Someone would have seen me,” said Suzanna, with the confidence of a woman people did tend to remember seeing.

  No alibi at all to speak of then, thought Max. People, even men, couldn’t have positively stared at her every second of the day.

  “And you?” he said to Bruce, more out of a sense of inclusive thoroughness than anything else.

  “Where was I? Well, you’ve got me dead to rights. Sorry, no pun intended. I was generally dogsbody—here, there, and everywhere. I did see Wanda steaming around earlier, being officious with the hoi polloi yet condescendingly gracious to any well-dressed visitors. Oh—and earlier, I saw her running around shouting ‘Action stations, everyone!’—she might have been rallying some paramilitary force instead of our wretched band of volunteers—but that was early in the day.”

  “What sort of time was this?”

  The doctor waggled one hand, a bird uncertain in flight.

  “Rallying the troops was early on—say nine. You yourself were there being drafted for various tasks, as I recall. Then the lady-of-the-manor act came later. Noonish? Say, before noon and once things were well under way.”

  Well, that nails it down, thought Max.

  Reading his expression, Bruce said, “It was a mash of people and even if I’d had one eye out for Wanda, I might not have spotted her. Anyway, no alibi for me. Sorry.”

  But he didn’t look sorry. He looked like a man who didn’t care one whit what anyone thought. A good quality to have, really, thought Max, to keep one from being at the mercy of the world.

  Or was it a dangerous one, for a doctor?

  CHAPTER 15

  The Baker

  It was Monday night, following his visit with Bruce and Suzanna Winship and the inquest of earlier in the day. Max, trying to relax, had been watching a BBC show on the Great Wall of China, back-to-back with a reprise of the Medici reign, a comparison which served to highlight both man’s inhumanity to man as well as his endless inventiveness when it came to headgear.

  When the Medici show was over, the news came on. He had for years been unable to watch the world news without wondering what untold story lay behind it. The further he got from MI5, the more he was falling out of that loop. The adjourned inquest into Wanda’s demise was given a brief summary which highlighted the role of the WI and tried inanely to draw a cause-and-effect along the lines of “jam and scandal.” Finally, the broadcasters wound up with a scolding little cautionary tale featuring Prince Harry, doing his best to fill the royal party-animal role vacated by Edward VII, Princess Margaret, and the Duchess of York.

  Another knock
at the door. This time, somewhat to his surprise, it was Elka Garth who stood there. She was looking over her shoulder in a way that suggested she was worried about being observed. Nearly as soon as he opened the door, she barreled in.

  Max, following her into the study, did not have to guess at the cause for her visit.

  She declined anything stronger, so they talked for the next half hour over a strong coffee that he prepared in the French press. Max took the occasion of fussing over cups and spoons to look at her: gray-threaded hair that cried out for a rinse or whatever it was women did to liven the color. Makeup haphazardly applied, but not thickly enough to mask the dark circles under her puffy eyes, just enough to settle into the surrounding creases. Her thick glasses magnified the sad effort at concealment, turning the creases into hills and gullies. The aging skin of her neck was starting to sag in origami folds.

  Strange how worry and guilt produced the same corrosive effect on people’s faces. He of course knew the trouble she had with her son—that he was a constant worry, and of little help or comfort. He also knew she was one of the hardest working women in the village, juggling, in effect, two shops where one would have been a full-time job, as well as operating her online store, which he supposed counted as a third shop. (The village was becoming so hi-tech even St. Edwold’s had a Web site, but so far Max had firmly resisted all attempts to give the church a Twitter feed or a fan page on Facebook. Max had recruited a computer genius, aged twelve, to build the site and put the parish magazine online, and thereafter had induced him to remove the somewhat risqué avatars he had created for the churchwardens.)