Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  The sitting room overlooked a walled garden in the back, its boundaries marked by a hawthorn hedge, probably the source of their current drink.

  “We’ll have rain later,” she said to him now, looking out the picture window.

  He followed her gaze to where peace reigned in the moonlight. The silence of Nether Monkslip was one of its qualities he had slowly come to embrace. They were miles from any flight path, and the train stuttered in so infrequently as to cause very little noise. The stillness was total, suggesting a purity of place and people unlike anywhere else on earth. Max, who had been used to uncontained traffic noise in London, had taken some time to grow accustomed to the few night sounds of the village, which struck him as a riotous cacophony of alarming and unwarranted outbursts, each more life-threatening than the last. The snap of a twig was surely a wild animal approaching, of a type long thought to be extinct. The rustle of the trees in the wind, a portent of doom, of the King’s men coming to string up some hapless serf for some unknown, minor offense. His mind had run riot as he tossed uneasily in his bed, uncertain what dangers the countryside might hold.

  But certain he was now, with Wanda’s death, that the dangers were not of his imagining.

  He took a deep swallow of his wine. The chances were good that someone in his bran-muffin-eating, antioxidant guzzling, holistic congregation was guilty of murder. Impossible. But true.

  He raised his glass. “Here’s to rain to make a beauty spot more beautiful,” he said, adding, “It’s easy to believe in God, isn’t it, when we live in such an idyllic village, in such a pretty part of the world. It’s in places like Darfur that belief must be nigh impossible.”

  Awena’s fine blue eyes met his in a graceful, upward movement of her head. A necklace of azure stones set in gold gleamed against her neck. She was one of the most physically attuned people he thought he’d ever met, with the deliberate movements of a ballet dancer or an accomplished actress. “I’d have to agree,” she said. “On the surface, at least, we have it made—living in our own little Eden, untouched by the world’s pain.” She again looked out the window that gave on to the back garden.

  Eden, thought Max. Funny she should mention …

  “You would almost expect to see Wanda out there now, walking across the lawn, wouldn’t you? Coming to collect for something, or to ask for something, or to simply ‘borrow’ something from the potting shed without asking.” She turned to look directly at him. “I’m sure you’re the person to find him—or her. The killer. She would want that.”

  “I suppose she would. Certainly in life, she would let no score go unsettled—that was my impression.”

  “If a death is unavenged, the dead can linger,” Awena said, without emphasis. “You must believe that as well.”

  “Many believe that,” Max said with studied neutrality.

  She gave him a long stare. Suddenly she straightened and said sharply, pointing at the wall behind him, “What’s that?”

  Max, startled, turned to look over his shoulder.

  “Just kidding,” she said.

  Max grinned at her. “Point taken. Very funny.”

  “Look,” she went on. “I know what people think. You have to have a screw loose if you’re not following the ‘traditional’ religious path. But who is to say I’m not doing just that? The worship of God in nature—supplier of everything we need—was around long before today’s established religions. When you look at the healing power of plants, just for instance, medical science is not far behind me and ‘my kind’ in catching up. There is nothing weird or otherworldly about this: it’s common sense. Every seed that produces this miraculous bounty has the code that will heal all ills—and a sprout travels from the darkness toward the light, just as we all must do. We simply aren’t evolved enough yet to understand how it all fits together.”

  “That I grant you,” said Max.

  “Belief in a dimension beyond this one goes hand in hand with these daily miracles,” she went on, refilling his glass. “On the most basic level, a case could certainly be made that my beliefs are the cause of fewer wars than what I would call ‘man’s religion.’ Mine is hardly a radical, or a new, concept. Like you, I concern myself with the great imponderables that possess us all—at least, once we stop long enough to think of them.”

  “Or are forced to stop and think.” He thought fleetingly of Paul.

  She continued, “More people than not are pushed into taking stock. And a vicar tends to be the person they turn to when that day comes. Or someone like me. The scientists—all the sources we’ve come to trust for all the answers, especially in recent decades—in the end they can still fail us. We’re forced to look elsewhere for answers.”

  “Any enterprise that involves humans is going to invoke failure. Vicars, scientists…”

  “All I’m saying is there are Christian successors to all the gods, goddesses, and feasts that came before. Who is to say who is right? All we know for certain is that prayer is powerful. It can heal the sick—you have seen that for yourself. People rebounding despite all the odds.

  “And prayer heals every believer—not just the Anglicans.”

  * * *

  Later they moved into the candlelit dining room, where mirrors in frames of semiprecious stone reflected the gentle light, and where she served him a harvest meal of pumpkin soup, acorn squash spiced with garlic and sweetened with honey, mushrooms sautéed in butter with garlic and cream, salad with lemon and olive oil, and sprouted-wheat bread still warm from the oven. He suspected tofu was involved in the salad—a food item he always thought rather pointless, like marshmallow—but if so, its presence was innocuous. These courses were followed by an ambrosial apple pie with brandy and a three-cheese plate sprinkled with nuts, the whole rounded out by more hawthorn in the form of tea. Meals were often accompanied by a talk on what Awena self-deprecatingly called The Owen Food Laws.

  “The nightshade vegetables have to be eaten in moderation,” she said. Her hands, beautiful and white and plump as doves, fluttered gracefully in the candlelight. She had been approached repeatedly by the WI Cookery School at Denman College to teach a course in cooking with herbs, and the medicinal uses for herbs. “A Pomona Sprout role, if you like,” she had told him. But it would mean leaving Nether Monkslip for weeks on end, which she wasn’t sure she would ever be free to do.

  “Tomatoes were thought to be poison for a long time,” she said now. “There’s a reason for that. Potatoes and eggplant, too. Especially if you have arthritis, you should avoid them. Speaking of your scientists: they often confirm what the ‘folklorists’ have known for centuries.”

  “They are hardly my scientists—I agree with you, in fact. There is a basis for many so-called folk cures, as there is in most religious dietary restrictions and prescriptions.”

  This led him to think of the natural poisons like monkshood (found in abundance in Nether Monkslip), and of allergies, and from there inexorably to think of Wanda.

  “Wanda,” Awena said aloud, in the eerie way she had of tracking his thoughts. “There might have been hope for her in new therapies that introduce the allergy food in very small, very carefully controlled and supervised doses. Hard to believe she would be so careless, knowing her fatal weakness.”

  “She wasn’t a careless woman.”

  That earned him a look of interest, but she said merely, “More tea? Hawthorn is good for the heart. It increases blood flow to the heart muscle itself, you see.”

  She used honey instead of refined sugar, which she claimed not to have in the house. Handing him the glass honey jar, which was shaped like a beehive, she said, “I suppose you don’t believe either in the magic power of bees.”

  “I can’t say I’ve thought much about it. Why, can they pull rabbits out of hats?”

  She sighed, carefully replacing the honey dipper in the jar. “Think about it, Max. If I were as flippant about your religion as you are about mine, would you be happy with me?”

  Abashed,
Max looked at her. After a long moment, he said, “You’re absolutely right. You are one hundred percent correct, in fact. I do apologize.”

  “‘A closed mind is like a closed book,’ after all. I accept your apology—and I will try to be more accepting of your beliefs. We might both learn something.”

  Max, still confounded, merely nodded.

  “Now, what makes you think Wanda wasn’t careless?” he asked. “And I gather you agree she was not.”

  “Actually, in one way, I think she was. She was unpopular with the villagers, in rather a foolhardy way. Careless with people’s feelings, you could say.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Traditionally, someone in Wanda’s position should advise and encourage, not run the show like the ruddy march on Leningrad,” said Awena.

  “Why did the women of the Women’s Institute not break with Wanda?” Max asked. “Oust her?”

  “Engineer a palace coup?” Thoughtfully, she poured brandy into her cup and stirred. Max imagined that would give the hawthorn a jumpstart. “I suppose because the WI provides nearly the whole social life of the village, as you know. No one wanted to fall away or to instigate the kind of rift that could fester for years. Private conversations on the subject—and there were many—often included proposing someone to replace Wanda. But the fact was, no one wanted to go head to head with her. There were several ‘handbags at dawn’ occasions but no one seriously wanted to take her out—out of her position, I mean.”

  “I suppose I can see that.”

  “Life is too short,” was Awena’s summing up. Max thought this typical of her—what he saw as being in the plus column of a life devoted to a smorgasbord of philosophies of dubious lineage. “Nor did anyone want to shoulder the responsibilities Wanda so eagerly shouldered. It’s a pain in the you-know-what, volunteer work, and you have to have the kind of personality that thrives on it. Anyone who doesn’t thrive on public speaking wouldn’t want the job, for one thing. Wanda was good at that, but rather tended to thrill to the sound of her own voice.”

  “She must have had some good in her.”

  Awena arched an eyebrow at this, silently wondering at his limitless capacity to trust. Typical Max, to see the good in everyone, in that baffled, “Why can’t we all be friends?” way of his. It was that religion of his, of course. The older religions were much more accepting of life as it is really lived, full of characters both devious and divine.

  Max caught her reaction: there it was again. This fond belief that Max was some naïve babe in the woods. But he had come to accept that in fact it was this quality, tempered by later experience, that his bosses at MI5 had relied on for some of his undercover roles—a fact he had come to understand rather late in the game. It was a quality impossible to fake, Max’s inclination to look for the good side of everyone he came across, even despite what he knew of the truth from reading their dossiers. It was, strangely enough, a quality that allowed him to excel at undercover work, befriending some of the most repellent people on the planet. By focusing on the good in them, Max could find the common ground, whatever it was—music, fine wines, cars—and play his target for all he was worth. Even a monster can love his dog, his mother, his family; crimes that had been committed in the name of “family values” were in fact too numerous to list. If Max had not been able to look past the negative, he’d probably be at the bottom of the Thames right now.

  “I hear the son is coming back for the funeral,” Awena was saying.

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Only years ago. He was young.”

  “What were your impressions then?”

  She drummed her fingers on the tabletop a moment as she considered her response. “He was intelligent. More intelligent than anyone he’d ever met.” She gave Max a sly wink. “He was, if you’ll please excuse the expression—there is no other that fits—a jackass. He knew it all; he could be told nothing. He was the world’s great unrecognized genius. Irritatingly enough, when it came to his self-assessment of his artistic talent, he was probably right.”

  Max raised his eyebrows; she replied to the implied skepticism.

  “I’m afraid I’m spot on here. Others would tell you the same.” Perhaps, thought Max, not Miss Pitchford, at least not in so many words. Certainly she had been hinting at something the other day, though. “Once he finished school, he hung around the village for a bit, perpetually on holiday, it seemed, in training to become a professional boulevardier, one supposes. He didn’t want to go to university—besides, why bother? He already knew everything. In fairness, all he knew to do well was paint and draw, and instruction can spoil some talents. Then one day he announced he was going to travel the world to study the museums or whatever, and off he went. China, I think it was.”

  Max was not necessarily of the blame-the-parents school of psychological profiling but he felt Wanda and her progeny might be a special case—the exception that proves the rule.

  “I gather there was bad blood between him and Wanda.”

  “Oh, that came later. They were extremely close at one time. Extremely. She was a ‘smotherer,’ I always thought. Well-intentioned mothering, much overdone—much too intense. Well, you can imagine: he was her project. Which is no doubt why he left. You have to escape that choke hold, and distance is the only way sometimes; I can see that.”

  “What happened to him eventually?” he asked.

  “No one knows, but I gather he’s had some success with his painting. The Cavalier grapevine has revealed that he’ll be coming back for the funeral, from somewhere in the Americas. Or was it Europe?”

  “The Major just heard from him. He was in Argentina.”

  She nodded. “The prodigal son, a bit late returning.”

  “Let me ask you what I’ve been asking other people,” he said, in a cards-on-the-table manner. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary going on with her at the Fayre?”

  “Only that her clarion notes tended to drown out all else, including the choir. I saw her by the children’s clothing stall at some point, looking regal but rather giddy and lighthearted with it. Like a queen amongst what she fondly supposes are her adoring subjects—you’ve seen that look on her?”

  Max nodded.

  “Anyway, I would say Wanda was enjoying life that day—absolutely in her element. Until it was all cut short, of course. Seems a shame, doesn’t it, really? I got no sense of a premonition, and I picked up nothing amiss,” she added.

  “No aura about her?” he asked gently.

  “You mock, but I will reply in all seriousness. No. There was nothing to tell me—or her—what was coming. It doesn’t work that way always. You should know that, of all people.”

  “I suppose I should. But you would say there was no—I don’t know … no sort of atmosphere?”

  “With Wanda, you always got atmosphere you could cut with a knife. But nothing in particular that I noticed, no. She was basking at being the center of attention. In her element.”

  “All grievances forgotten, then, among her friends at the Women’s Institute?”

  “All in all, we’re an amiable group,” Awena told him. “The personalities—well, they’re just that, and everyone recognizes that not every one can be the same.”

  “No bun fights at the meetings, then?”

  She grinned. “No. But believe me when I say it came close some evenings.”

  “How did Wanda come to head up the WI?” asked Max, chasing and successfully spearing a wayward slice of cheese. “Not by popular vote, surely?”

  “She achieved prominence in the WI in the way curling became an Olympic sport, I would imagine—through dogged determination, sheer willpower, and that indefinable goofiness of character that is behind so much innovation and change. Quite frankly, no one else wanted it near so much as our Wanda. Meetings in the past had sometimes devolved into either frenzied spectacles or monuments to apathy, and I suppose Wanda, hyperorganized and energetic as she was, saved us from much
of that. Plus, she knew how to squeeze a shilling until it begged for mercy, and that is a good quality to have for someone in that role. In particular, the people over at Totleigh Hall had expressed no interest in seizing the reins, as they would have done in the old days, so Wanda had assumed the leadership to fill a vacuum of indifference from that quarter. But she still had far too little to do with her time, which was probably the start of the trouble. It usually is. Bound to lead to mischief.”

  “Mischief?” echoed Max, caught on the word. “Do you have anything in particular in mind?”

  “I wish I could say exactly. But Wanda was operating on far too small a stage for her gifts, or so she felt, and so she often expressed. How a woman like Wanda might branch out—who can say? I daresay she was not sure herself, and was frustrated and vulnerable. Oh, yes,” she added, off his look, “not a word that first comes to mind with Wanda, but believe me, she was at a dangerous age. With some women, it ends with all their savings going for Botox injections.”

  “Funny. I mean, you’re not the first to mention it. Men have these stages too, of course. Generally involving a blonde and an expensive sports car.”

  Awena nodded appreciatively. “Of course. But I’ve met women like Wanda before, and I’ve often thought their ferocious energy is as much sexual as it is targeted to organizing everyone to within an inch of their lives. Misdirected energy, perhaps, but there.”

  Max thought, carefully setting down his knife and fork. Then he said, “Did you notice any particular conflicts at the Fayre—involving Wanda, or not? Odd moments? Someone there who seemed out of place?”

  Awena said slowly, “We-e-ll. One thing, and I tell you this only because I know you’ll take it with a grain of salt and not rush about making a lot of assumptions. It was this: Frank was guilty that day of lèse-majesté as far as Wanda was concerned. I was passing by on some errand or other and overheard her making fun of those pamphlets of his; the word ‘tripe’ was uttered. Well, his pamphlets are rather … unique. But he just lit into her—really, he was quite angry. You know how touchy writers can be.”