Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  Max breathed a little inner sigh, head bowed as he continued listening, like a man praying or doing penance. He was seated at his desk in the hotel, and he picked up the promotional pen provided by the hotel (“Make Waves with Us”) and began doodling with it on the pad of paper embossed with the hotel’s logo in matching sea-blue ink. The logo involved some sort of stylized representation of a fish and Max began adding fins to it, until he’d created a lionfish of monstrous proportions. Clarice, meanwhile, had arrived at, “This is all her fault. I’ve got reporters calling, you know. Day and night.”

  Max somehow doubted that. Margot’s death, however mysterious and dramatic, would have unleashed little more than a brief media flurry in a town she’d left behind decades earlier. Unless the Kardashians had gone into hiding, the media had bigger fish to fry on any given day. But on the subject of media attention, Clarice sounded as if she might secretly be pleased. At last! A chance to tell her side of the story. Perhaps the media would care to hear her saga of injustice and hardship.

  Poor Margot. No wonder she’d taken the first chance to leave.

  Clarice seemed to be one of those people forever watching a film called It’s All Their Fault, thought Max: As long as that’s the only movie playing in her personal Cineplex, that’s all I’ll get out of her. It’s always going to be someone else’s fault.

  Max managed to insert a question into the narrative, although because he had to blurt out the first thing that came to mind, it might not have been the smoothest or most well-phrased question. In a voice with a desperate edge to it, in fact, he asked, “How did Margot get along with your mother and father, then?”

  A sniff. That had shut her up for a full five seconds. Then, on a deep sigh: “My mother was put upon from day one. She had lost her own sister and brother-in-law in the crash, you know. That was bad enough. Then to be saddled with Margot, who was such a little snot—never grateful for anything. Well.” Sniff. “It nearly killed my mother.”

  “Why do you think that?” Max asked quietly, wondering if the sense of grievance was somehow inherited, passed down from one generation to the next, like tarnished silver. “I mean, did she often complain?”

  “My mother was a saint,” Clarice replied hotly, as if he’d suggested the opposite. “She never complained. Not even after the way Margot brought nothing but disgrace into the family.”

  “I’m sorry,” began Max. “I don’t—”

  She cut him off. It was as if, having led them down this path, she was suddenly having second thoughts about the wisdom of her route. Her mouth had been running too fast, not allowing time for her brain to catch up. “Water under the bridge,” she said firmly.

  Max wondered if he could use her victim psychology to get the story out of her. Make it all somebody’s fault, and the truth might slip out.

  To stall for time, meanwhile, he asked about her health, as the sergeant had specifically warned him against doing. But this gave him at least five minutes to come up with a strategy. It was clear nothing she said about her vertigo and her blood pressure was going to require a response from him; he may as well set the phone down on the desk and go for a walk on the promenade. Or at least focus on drawing his fish scales. Politely, however, he hung on the line, inserting sympathetic grunts and murmurs given half an opening.

  Finally, she began winding down. “But that’s nothing compared to the heart palpitations. I get them all the time now. It doesn’t half frighten you to death in the middle of the night. You ever get that?” She didn’t stop for an answer. “It’s like mice have nested in your heart valves but my doctor says not to worry. I should just take a vacation. If I made the kind of money he makes, the old sawbones, I’d be able to take a vacation, I tell him…”

  Max could think of few careers more frustrating than being Clarice’s doctor. A panda fertility coach, perhaps.

  “… and furthermore, if you’re calling looking for someone to pay for Margot’s funeral expenses, you’ve got the wrong number. Yes sirree. My husband and I are on a fixed income now, you know. Not that he ever made much money. We’re not rich Hollywood types, not all la-di-dah shenanigans like Margot. We’re simple working people.”

  And on that simpering note of piety she finally shut up. Max carpe diem-ed for all he was worth, plunging into the brief opening.

  “And besides, what happened may have been her fault,” said Max, hating himself for it but knowing that was the only chord he could play with Clarice.

  “I’m sure it was. She fell off the boat, right? Three sheets to the wind? ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler.’ That’s in the Bible.”

  “I know.”

  “And now there’s all this fuss. It’s like I told you.”

  “Some people have a gift for causing trouble,” said Max.

  “That’s exactly it!” Clarice exclaimed. This was more like it. Praise the Lord. This man understood her at last. “She walked into the room, and all the men, it was like they’d lost their minds. Even when she was little, and of course it got worse as she got older.”

  “And she didn’t have to lift a finger to get their attention,” said Max. “I’ll bet she didn’t need makeup and things to make herself look attractive.” He wanted to stab himself with the hotel pen for being so double-faced, so duplicitous. It was this kind of thing, this easy playing with people, that had made him want to get out of MI5 in the first place.

  “Oh, but she did!” Clarice insisted. “When my mother said she was too young for makeup and some of the clothes she wanted to wear, slit all up to here and down to there, didn’t Margot just take herself down to the department store, lie about her age, and get herself a job to pay for what she wanted?” (Apparently in Clarice’s world there were working people and then there were people who worked to get what they wanted—a fine distinction at best.) “Then she’d smuggle the stuff into school—leave the house dressed like a Puritan and change into these practically Las Vegas showgirl outfits. Or like a cheerleader from the Dallas Cowboys. She asked for it, yes she did. No man stood a chance up against that.”

  “I can see how that would be difficult. And of course she was lying to your parents.”

  “Yes!” Max had the sure knowledge she would have hugged him if she’d been in the room. “She was a liar and a fantasist, always flirting, looking for ways to ensnare the boys, who were too dumb to see through it.”

  “Boys?” Max inserted mildly. “You don’t mean, your brothers?” Carefully, he put down the pen, listening intently for her answer, willing the gardener, who he could hear clipping hedges down below in the hotel garden, to stop.

  “The boys,” she said, softly, for her. He thought she might have started to cry. “They never stood a chance.”

  Oh, my God.

  Chapter 31

  HOUSE OF HORRORS

  An hour after his talk with cousin Clarice, Max still felt like he needed a hot shower and a scrub with lye soap. He couldn’t wait to try to wash the entire Wackenhut family down the drain, and out of his memory if he could. For now, as he waited in his room for Cotton and Patrice, he skimmed back over the reports on the suspects. The answer must be in there somewhere.

  Cotton and Patrice arrived with news. “They’ve cracked the code of Maurice’s diary already,” said Cotton. “I gather the tech people were insulted to be asked, it was so simple as to be beneath them. But the contents are powerhouse stuff, and not just the entries about Margot. You wouldn’t believe the bits about Dick and Liz. But first let’s hear what you’ve learned.”

  “It seems Margot escaped a house of horrors, poor kid. And she was just a kid, still in her teens when she left. Correction: when she ran for her life from her tormentors.”

  “Clarice just came out with it?”

  “Oh, yes. Her version of it, anyway. The very repulsive thing is, Clarice is so determined to protect her brothers’ reputations even posthumously that once she got going, she spoke quite openly about the despicable and vile exploitation of Margot—
speaking ‘openly’ being the only way to place the blame squarely on Margot. Who was only a child, mind. In Clarice’s telling, Margot was some vampy teenage temptress leading her brothers astray. All the while, Clarice and her parents, her mother in particular, completely ignored the fact that when the abuse started one brother was three years older than Margot and the other brother five years older and technically an adult. And of course they remained older, throughout years of this mistreatment. She was coerced and threatened, you can be sure of it. There were two of them, and only one of her. It’s a crime however you look at it, and her age and vulnerability make it particularly heinous. But Clarice sees it as a ‘boys will be boys’ situation. And then, when it couldn’t get any worse, it did, and Margot fell pregnant.”

  Cotton nodded. “Everyone in town thought she’d just fled gaily to the bright lights of the city. With this creepy family ranged against her, she couldn’t tell the truth about her pregnancy. They would never let the truth come out—never. It explains her estrangement from them—more than that. She hated them and as she was such a threat, the loathing was mutual.”

  “Is it all in Maurice’s diary?”

  “Yes. It’s enough to make you ill, it really is. According to Maurice, Margot was never sure which brother got her pregnant. For Maurice, it was always a matter of sleeping dogs, and of ‘protecting her reputation’—even though she was the innocent party, she never wanted the truth to come out, except to her one confidant. Margot trusted Maurice to keep quiet. He did—he wrote down every word, but he guarded that diary with his life—literally, it seems. Even when Margot got to be such a handful for him—and you can see why she was as disturbed as she apparently was, can’t you?—he kept her secrets. What cousin Clarice told you confirms it, even though, as you say, she is putting her own spin on things. What an unspeakable family.”

  Max shook his head in disgust. “The father was decent to her, but only up to a point. And of course he had died by the time she became pregnant. But if he knew of or even suspected the abuse … Well, for Margot, that must have been the final betrayal. He had loved her like his own daughter, there seems to be no question about that, but he could not see that his own sons were the monsters they were. Neither could his wife accept it: Margot was her blood but not in the way her sons and her daughter were her blood. She had, she felt, to protect her ‘real’ family, and the only way to do that was to get rid of this beautiful, disruptive influence.”

  “Margot had five people ranged against her,” put in Cotton. “Two adults; Clarice, who had always been jealous of her; and two male cousins who would certainly go to prison if the case could be proved against them. It was imperative to crush Margot’s story. This was before DNA could have proven paternity, of course. And even then, it would always be her word against theirs that she wasn’t a willing participant. At the age of thirteen, which was when the abuse started, and with her parents dead!”

  The gorge rose in Max’s throat; his face was suffused with anger as he said, “Margot had to know she wasn’t loved in all quarters by this family. The father, though, had seemed to be honestly, well, fatherly toward her. That he was cowardly enough to turn a blind eye, to just go along—and I do see this as cowardice on his part—that was the final straw. That is what broke her. She washed her hands of them all—just imagine, she was pregnant, frightened, alone. Having to deal with everything, alone.”

  Patrice had remained silent throughout this recitation, as if dumbstruck. The look on her face was one of pure grief—and anger. Max thought it probably matched his own expression. He also thought he saw a tear in the corner of one eye before she roughly brushed it away, her fair face mottled with emotion.

  “So,” she said. “We may never find out which cousin was the father, but she was sexually abused by both brothers in that mad household. No wonder she looked upon Zaki with a particular loathing. Most anyone would, but given her background? Abused at thirteen? It’s a wonder she didn’t try to drown him.”

  “Agreed. We can’t put him aside as a suspect for Margot’s murder. Perhaps they quarreled again, and in a final sort of way.”

  “That is the vilest, most disgusting…” Patrice took a breath to steady herself. “And so, she came to Hollywood. And she quickly found work somewhere. Something to keep her going.”

  “Not in film or theater, of course, although that followed quickly, within a couple of years,” Cotton said. “This also is from the diary, Max: She worked as a waitress to pay the bills, until her condition began to show. This was before the word ‘accommodation’ was part of the employment world. Once she could no longer hide her condition, she had more and more trouble finding work. Meanwhile, however, she’d met Maurice. He used to come into a restaurant where she was waiting tables. He was sympathetic and before long he came to understand what a mess she was in. She didn’t tell him the whole story at once; it came out in dribs and drabs. But he let her stay with him. When the baby was born, she gave the child up for adoption. That, according to Maurice, is when the trouble really began—the drinking, the abusive boyfriends, the whole trauma of her young life catching up with her. Maurice helped as much as he could, put up with it as long as he could, and then eased her out. He felt guilty about it but he shouldn’t have, in my view. He was a true friend, the only friend she’d got, really. He did as well by her as he could while keeping his own boundaries and sanity intact. And certainly he kept her secrets well.”

  “So,” Patrice wanted to know, “what happened to the baby?”

  Cotton, who had been doing some complicated maneuver with his computer, looked over his shoulder and said, “I’ve got some people on it now.”

  “The problem is,” said Max, “adoptions in those days were a big secret. It’s nothing like today, where as a matter of course it is understood that people might want to contact their parents, whether or not the parents want to be contacted. To learn something of their families and medical histories.”

  Cotton said, “Maurice wasn’t there for the birth and claimed not to know where the baby was taken from the hospital. He did know that Margot signed away all her rights to the child—that was the arrangement. There was no question of her raising it herself—she didn’t have the financial resources in those days, and honestly, one has to wonder how she could have overcome her natural, well, revulsion—knowing how the child was conceived.”

  “Right,” said Patrice. “What was she going to do, maybe ask the lunatic Wackenhuts to take the baby into their asylum, to be raised by them? No way. At least with the adoption, she was giving the kid a chance that neither she nor her so-called family could offer.” She shook herself visibly, as if casting aside all thought of monster families. Max wondered if by comparison, her own situation didn’t look shades brighter. It was not a question he could or would ever ask her.

  “I hope this isn’t distressing you,” said Max. “It’s a rotten conversation at the best of times.”

  “Not at all,” Patrice replied stoutly. “It just makes me more anxious to see Margot vindicated, poor woman. Do you think there’s any connection? The creepy Wackenhuts and this whole sad adoption story?”

  Max shook his head. Not sure. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

  “We’ve just got an answer from Hamburg,” Cotton put in. “From that German nob the baron and baroness stayed with. You wanted to know what they talked about.”

  “Yes?” said Max. “And?”

  “Nothing important. What these people always talk about, I would imagine. Hunting, fishing, tax evasion, their ancestors. The Count and Countess von Rother-Magnum are distant cousins of the baron—fourth or perhaps fifth cousins. It would seem they have taken to the study of genealogy in a big way—they had their DNA tested using one of those online kits, and were delighted to learn they are not predisposed to glucose intolerance, for example. It’s all quite boring, the way they tell it.”

  “Tell me more,” said Max.

  * * *

  That evening, while jot
ting down notes at one of the antique desks Cotton had requisitioned for Camp X, Max saw that he’d missed a message from Awena on his mobile. They had spoken an hour previously, when he’d filled her in as much as he could on the state of the investigation.

  He stepped into the hallway, away from various members of Cotton’s team, to ring her back. When she answered he could hear all the usual background chaos of filming taking place in the airy kitchen of their Nether Monkslip cottage—men and women shouting, the director hysterical (“For the hundredth time, can we move the cable so she doesn’t trip over it? Is that too goddamn much to ask?”), the sounds of several mobiles going off at once, creating a symphony of electronic pings and jingles.

  When Awena had first agreed to do the show, the BBC film crew had wanted to take out a wall in the cottage to enhance the ability to wheel large cameras about (“Absolutely not”). Then they had insisted all the filming take place on a set in a London studio (“Sorry, but of course I can’t leave the baby”). A compromise had been reached of using portable cameras in the small space. Awena, acting as her own agent, always seemed to get her way in these matters, using a beguiling blend of steadfast good humor and a take-no-hostages manner. Max pictured her now, wearing one of her trademark embroidered gowns protected by a snowy white chef’s apron, her glossy dark hair perhaps braided into a loop framing her face. He had never known her to be flustered or overwhelmed by her newfound celebrity. Feeling she was providing a needed service, she had quickly established her boundaries: there would be no compromise—not in her time, in the ingredients she used, or in the honest portrayal of how the food was prepared. Max thought of it as cooking with integrity. It went without saying that no animals were harmed in the making of any film that featured Awena and her kitchen.

  The background cacophony faded as she moved into the sitting room and closed the door behind her.