Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  They argued, but in the end, Cotton could hardly keep a priest from sitting in his own church—all night long, if he felt like it.

  Max had come to this point in his reflections, with a sure and growing conviction as to how Wanda had been killed, when he heard the main door into the church open, and the whispery sound of soft-soled footsteps brushing the stone floor. Max didn’t have to turn to know who was there.

  And he was certain it wouldn’t be Jasper.

  “Guy,” he said. “‘Rhymes with High.’ Or would you prefer to stick with the French pronunciation?”

  * * *

  That threw him; the slow, confident steps halted for a moment. Then Guy resumed his walk up the center aisle.

  “Exactly what stories has that girl been telling you?” he asked.

  “Lydia saw nothing,” Max told him, his gaze still on the altar. “I thought perhaps she had, but she was preoccupied that day, the day Wanda was murdered. What a shame she couldn’t help us: Lydia would have been the only witness to who had gone near the Village Hall when they should not have been there—when they had pretended not to have been there.”

  “You’re lying,” said Guy at last. “Padre, you really need to learn not to meddle.” He sat in the pew directly behind.

  After a brief internal struggle, for he hadn’t thought the try-on would work, Max turned to face him, one arm resting on the back of his pew. “I’m out of practice,” Max acknowledged. “I thought it was worth a shot to try to protect her from you, but lying is an art that requires frequent rehearsal. I’ve been away from MI5 too long. She saw you that day, at the Village Hall, where you and I know you didn’t belong, but she didn’t recognize you until the funeral. She’d never seen or met you before then. She’d have been in school on many of the occasions when you’d come to Nether Monkslip for supplies. She thought the man she’d seen that day of the Fayre was just a visitor from another village. Which, as it turns out, he was.”

  No need to mention Lydia’s boyfriend, thought Max. At least he could keep one of them out of it.

  “If you hadn’t come to the funeral,” he went on, “this might not have unraveled for you so quickly. But how were you to know Lydia would be assisting at the service, and would have a front-row view, as it were, of the entire congregation? What really threw her was that she recognized your face, but when she saw you at the Fayre you had white hair. A wig, of course—a disguise to hide your distinctive haircut and color, just in case you were seen. A wig long since consigned to the fire, I’d be willing to bet. From a distance, the disguise worked. But only from a distance.”

  Guy might not have been listening. “MI5,” he said. “I didn’t really believe the talk about your background, you know.”

  “That was wise,” said Max. “It is all much exaggerated. They like to have a little story to tell about their vicar. Gives them bragging rights in the other villages, I would imagine. So, let me tell you what I know about how you pulled this off. You can fill me in on the why. How’s that? Fair enough?”

  Guy just looked at him steadily. Only a slightly ragged edge to his breathing betrayed his agitation.

  “When we found Wanda,” Max said, “you raced over to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Thus obscuring your role in causing her death. Should anyone have thought to test the saliva in her mouth there was a perfect explanation if your DNA was found. You thought of everything, didn’t you?”

  Could they separate his DNA from Wanda’s? Max was certain they could. Scientists could do almost anything these days. What was important was, Guy had thought so. He’d thought of every way to eliminate any trace of his involvement—just in case.

  Max said, “I knew with near-certainty she was dead beyond hope but I have … a familiarity with death. It didn’t occur to me that there was another reason for your persistent attempts at revival. I just knew in good conscience we had to try. Miracles do happen.” He smiled. “I have it on the highest authority.”

  Guy’s rapid breathing was becoming more pronounced, but Max judged that his adversary was not ready to strike—yet.

  “When I asked myself what had happened in Nether Monkslip in recent weeks or months, what had altered, at first I drew a blank,” he went on ruminatively. “Nether Monkslip is what it is—unceasing, unchanging. That’s why we like it. But in fact, one inhabitant had experienced a life-changing event—a loss, in fact, of the most basic kind. Wanda. Her mother had died. And as a result Wanda came into a substantial amount of money and property. That is what had changed.”

  There was a gaping, Pinterish pause as Guy evidently considered his options.

  “Okay, look,” Guy said, looking incrementally less sure of himself than before. “It was an accident. I didn’t know about her allergy.”

  “That is a lie,” said Max, all traces of cordiality gone from his voice. “You knew perfectly well she was allergic. She was planning a catered dinner party and you were to be the caterer. The chances were nil she wouldn’t mention she was deathly allergic to a particular type of food as you were going over menu choices with her. People who had practically never met Wanda knew of her allergies, that’s how obsessively she worried about an accidental ingestion. The Major has already confirmed this—he was there—so you can stop lying and start telling me the truth.”

  “All right,” said Guy, with the air of a man making a huge concession. “You may as well get the full picture before you go.” This was said softly, the threat only implied. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. That would be … creepy.”

  You might well be the authority on creepy, thought Max.

  Guy said, “We weren’t having a full-blown affair—are you kidding me? With Wanda?—but a rather heavy-handed, old-fashioned flirtation. It pleased the old cow to engage in this coy, tortuous type of romance—the kind of thing women’s magazines peddle by the page. Moonlight and roses. It was ‘our first kiss.’ Touching, eh? Actually, it was disgusting. That old woman. That silly, stupid old woman. I could hardly bring myself to touch her, let alone—”

  He used several Anglo-Saxon words and phrases to express his revulsion for Wanda. Max could forgive any witticism, however crude, however sprinkled with four-letter words, so long as it was actually witty. This was not. His face hardened with distaste.

  “If you were finding it all so distasteful, so upsetting to your aesthetic sensibilities, you could have backed out of the scheme. You could have let her live in peace, talked her son out of this. You’re the strong one in the relationship, after all. The brains. Not Jasper. You. Anyone can see that.”

  Flattery, in Max’s experience, often worked. The stupider the criminal, the more likely it was to work. What was more, Max believed what he said to be true. The older man of the pair had a talent for deception that required a mature intelligence—an emotional intelligence that Jasper, less able to mask his feelings, lacked. No doubt this failing had contributed to the decision to keep Jasper well out of the picture until the deed was done. Guy was the leader of this folie à deux.

  But the expedient of flattery was not going to work this time, Max realized.

  “Do you have any idea how much money is really involved? Don’t you be stupid. Father.” The last word came out as a scornful sneer—familiar to the believer confronted by a nonbeliever. Too much to hope, thought Max, that he’d have stumbled across a murderer with some vestiges of childhood religious training—relics of some superstition, even, that might make him hesitate to attack.

  Guy moved suddenly, and Max saw he was carrying a knife, sharp from his kitchen. On his face, a vicious smile.

  “Kilo!” Max shouted, standing. The agreed-upon code word for the choice of weapon. “K” for knife. Max had known there would be one.

  Suddenly there was a huge crash, the sound of a dozen votive candles tumbling against the stone floor, and DCI Cotton and several of his team erupted from the Lady Chapel. Guy turned momentarily in the direction of the distraction. A moment was all Max needed.

&
nbsp; The pew stood between him and Guy, otherwise Max would have grabbed his wrist and twisted his own body around, using the momentum to force the knife from Guy’s hand. As it was, he could use the pew for leverage: Max grabbed the arm holding the knife, and used it to pull Guy toward him until he was hinged over the back of the pew. A knee to Guy’s nose took him out, but still he clung to the knife; a chop to the wrist made the knife clatter to the floor.

  It was over.

  CHAPTER 27

  At the Horseshoe

  “Imagine the cavernous rage required to plot this murder,” said Max. “A murder at secondhand against one’s own mother.” Did the distancing make it more or less cold-blooded? Max couldn’t decide.

  “Followed by a carefully calculated display of public, crocodile-tear grief,” added Cotton.

  Max nodded. They sat before two pints of ale in the Horseshoe’s saloon bar. It was midafternoon on a cold day, and they—along with Thea, who napped at Max’s feet—had the run of the place. The landlord had served them at their table by the fire and discreetly slipped away. Then, just as discreetly, he had slipped back. Max had rather thought he might: this was too good a chance to be in on the ground floor of the scoop villagers would crowd in later to hear. Cotton had politely but firmly told him they needed to be left completely alone.

  “That’s the worst of it,” said Max. “Jasper did it rather well. He probably rubbed something like salt in his eyes to make them red. I can just picture him rehearsing his demeanor over and over, in front of a mirror, or with Guy. Going over his lines, the body language. Suzanna said something about Banquo’s ghost. I thought she was intimating that Jasper was a manifestation of his father’s feelings of guilt or something like that. But she now says Jasper reminded her of an actor she and her brother had once seen on the stage. She had picked up on the fact that what we were watching was a performance. As a former stage actress herself, even amateur, she saw what we missed. It was all a performance by Jasper, and by Guy.”

  “But really, there was no disguising Jasper’s core personality. It was Guy who was the real performer here.”

  Max nodded. “They must have realized they were in dead trouble when they saw Lydia’s reaction in church, and saw me going to see her. If I’d realized the danger at that point, of course, I’d not have gone there. Afterward, I knew you’d need to station your people in front of her cottage. We couldn’t risk either of them trying to eliminate this witness against them. But that couldn’t go on forever. Of course, her boyfriend, Greg, would also need to be eliminated, if they learned he was also a witness. Where it would have ended, heaven knows.”

  “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time—at the right time for us, as it turns out.”

  “Meeting her young love by the Plague Tree, long a village courting spot. She saw Guy coming from the Village Hall. If what Jasper’s old school friend said were true, and Jasper was behind this, Jasper had to have had an accomplice. But we didn’t know for certain who that was until I asked Lydia to describe this man she saw.

  “She only later realized in comparing notes with her boyfriend that because of the timing, Guy had to have been leaving Wanda—leaving her body, that is. At the Fayre Lydia had been, for one thing, too preoccupied with her own assignation, and with not getting caught herself, to have been paying much attention. When she saw Guy in the church congregation she recognized his face, and being so young she wasn’t able to mask her reaction quickly enough. His own look told her he had caught her start of recognition. I had my back turned, but it was impossible in any event to say what or whom she was staring at before she fainted. It could have been any of the suspects—the people who had some sort of history with Wanda—who were all sitting more or less in the same area.”

  Max glanced around him. The pub, living up to its name, sported a horsey theme—whips, saddles, and similar equine paraphernalia hung on the walls, along with a few hunting prints and a staggering collection of old horseshoes. The place always had the not-unpleasant smell of polished leather mixed with hops.

  “I’m not sure what it was that chummed the water for me,” Max went on, “but in thinking of the crime, I felt the psychology of it was striking. There was something sneaky about it, as I think you and I discussed. A betrayal of trust, on a large scale. It was several things, really, that set me off, beginning with the thought of contamination and poison. Which is really what happened to Wanda, of course, a form of poisoning.”

  “This is one for the books,” Cotton said, settling back into his chair, fingers woven together across his flat stomach. “Literally the kiss of death. He was hoping to make it look like accidental ingestion, he says. He’s singing like the proverbial down the nick, and happy to drag his partner in crime, Jasper, into the frame at every step. That plan—to make it look like an accident—fell apart almost immediately when she struggled, but, undaunted, I think he hoped—they hoped—to pin the crime on the Major if it came to that. Jasper could tick two boxes that way—get rid of two people who stood in the way of what he wanted.”

  Max nodded and said, “The Judas kiss is what really put me on the trail to Guy. Thinking of that. Perhaps it was what inspired these two, also. One thought led to the next step of wondering where she was most vulnerable. Of course, Jasper knew all about where his mother was most vulnerable.

  “The aggravating thing is,” he continued, striking one fist against the arm of his chair, unintentionally disturbing Thea’s rest, “a copy of Caravaggio’s The Betrayal of Christ hangs in my study. I’m kicking myself because it’s something I see every day, that painting, where Judas Iscariot greets Christ with a kiss, to point him out to the soldiers waiting to capture him.” It was, he realized, a classic case of what he thought had happened not having happened at all. Had he really forgotten so much of his life in MI5—that hall of mirrors where almost nothing was ever as it seemed?

  “Once I began to suspect how the poison was administered, I looked around for likely partners for Wanda, including the Major, of course. At least I felt certain I could eliminate the women of the village, which narrowed the field considerably.”

  “What made you suspect Guy?” Cotton asked.

  Maybe it was years of pretending to be someone I was not, Max thought. I could spot a phony; I was one. That he nearly hadn’t spotted this one bothered his pride more than he cared to dwell on. He may have hoped that in coming to Nether Monkslip, he could simply throw off his past, like shedding an old garment. But Guy’s deceit—nearly successful—chilled him. He had vowed he would never again be the reason anyone walked into danger …

  * * *

  It was so routine a matter—so beneath their skill levels—that he and Paul relaxed. Nothing to worry about: we’re covered. If anything, Max was annoyed by the assignment, while easygoing Paul just accepted it as part of the job. And now Max was even leaving early to meet a date, having taken over part of the earlier shift from Paul, who was on night duty at home with his newborn son. They would sort it all out later. Then it would be the weekend, and the Russian was leaving, to go back to his unsuspecting family in Moscow (the man seemed to have half a dozen mistresses in London). He and Paul could handle this with their eyes closed.

  It was his own arrogance that he later found so appalling, so unforgivable.

  Paul earlier had flipped open his wallet and turned the photo in its clear plastic frame toward Max: a red-faced gnome in a blue hospital hat, eyes not quite yet fully open, fists clenched in outrage at the many liberties taken.

  “Paul II,” Paul I said, proudly.

  Max made the required noises of wonder, although Paul II, like all newborns, had the look of something that had been soaked too long in beet juice.

  “That’s great, man. Really great. How proud you must be. Look, I’ll see you back at the office. Get Randolph to spell you if need be—that lazy sod owes us.”

  Paul, gazing transfixed at the tiny photo, might not have heard him.

  “What?” Paul said at las
t. “Sure thing.” He turned to get into the official, anonymous silver car Max had left parked in an alley. “You need a lift? Drop you somewhere?”

  Max shook his head and, thumping his stomach, said only, “Exercise.” He turned, and the last thing he heard before the blast threw him on his face was the sound of Paul starting the car.

  After the explosion, he could remember very little through the haze of his concussion to help the investigation in any real way. There had been, five minutes earlier, a man standing around wearing sunglasses. They had white frames and blue lenses, making him look like an alien visitor from Hollywood or Mars, and Max remembered thinking he had appalling, juvenile bad-boy taste. But none of this was much help to the investigators. They suspected who was to blame—and one group of jackals had taken credit for it. They’d probably let them get away with it for now: that happened to fit with the policy of the moment.

  He had tried to carry on as usual. Then he noticed, days after his release from hospital, a tiny stain as he pulled the linen shirt he’d been wearing that day from the laundry hamper. A pinprick of color against the white collar. It might have been anything, come from anywhere. He’d probably cut himself shaving. Or it might have been the catsup he tended to spray all over himself when opening one of those individual tear-packets for a sandwich. It probably was that, he told himself. Of course, no more than that. One of life’s daily little irritants. But he knew with a terrible certainty that it was Paul’s blood. He couldn’t wash the garment, or even throw it away, knowing that. He didn’t see what use the lab would have for it even in their grim task of re-creating what had happened, so he couldn’t somehow turn the horror into a useful tool to ram it home to the murdering bastards. In the end he folded it into a plastic bag and stuffed it into the furthest recesses of his closet. But first he wept into the fabric, as lost and heartbroken as a grieving child.