Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  “You didn’t realize…” Max began delicately.

  “It’s a California king-size bed,” she said. Incredibly, there was a certain thrill of pride of ownership in her voice. “I always sleep on the side of the bed nearest the door. I had done this a hundred times, a thousand—just slipped in quietly so as not to disturb him.”

  She had followed Max as he made his way toward the house, scuttling along in fuzzy bedroom slippers with kitten heels, Max loping ahead. It was clear she was in no hurry to return to the house anyway. Max had at this point realized she could never keep up and had left her on the High Street to follow as quickly as she could, first asking if she’d left the door unlocked. Jogging past the train station, Max made a left into the dirt-turning-to-gravel lane leading up to the house. His shoes squelched as he sponged his way down the sodden path.

  The Bottles’ house had once been named, with blinding optimism, Happy Ending, but it had been renamed—absurdly and with the lack of humility that characterized its male owner—King’s Rest. Its remodeling, under whichever name, had caused a commotion in the village, and Max, as he made his approach, was reminded of all the reasons why. The addition to its back side was too big, incorporating all that was ugly and inconvenient in the modern for the sake of making a showy statement. It now harkened back, absurdly, to what could best be described as a blend of Tudor and Mayan architecture, and Max thought it the perfect embodiment of all that Thaddeus stood for—all look-at-me flash concealing a flimsy foundation, shoddy workmanship, and cut-rate amenities. The man who originally had remodeled the place had become famous for business practices consisting of offshore accounts and ghost companies, and he had last been spotted on a private beach a few miles from Majorca, avoiding the attentions of the courts and the media, and in the company of others of his kind. For a while, he had tried to interest various of the villagers in his schemes but, unfortunately for him, cooler business heads had prevailed—he had made the mistake of forgetting most of them were canny, and honest, businesspeople, with long histories among the financial cognoscenti of London. He was soon sent packing with his beach umbrella.

  The Bottles’ dog, a beagle, greeted Max at the door with a frenzied, worried barking. Jean, he thought its name was. Max stood quietly, waiting for the dog to calm down. Finally, Max offered the open palm of his hand for inspection, as a sign he came in peace, and Jean allowed him to pass inside.

  The home of King Thaddeus and his consort, Melinda, still bore the traces of their recent move-in. Boxes were piled in every corner, some half-unpacked, all marked vaguely if optimistically with words like bath or hallway. Max knew from experience that the labels had no bearing on the contents; that the box marked “kitchen” would contain books and the contents of a medicine cabinet and a woolen coat, but in the interests of verisimilitude and truth in packaging, it might also contain a single spoon.

  “You go,” a voice whispered at his shoulder. Melinda had caught up with him in the foyer. “I can’t … stand … to look at him again.” She flipped a switch at the foot of the stairs. It illuminated the landing above via an old-fashioned overhead globe.

  Melinda gazed somberly at the handsome priest. She saw that Max’s dark gray eyes were nearly opaque in the strange solo light.

  Why had she thought of going to him first? She supposed it was that sense of calm competence he carried about him. In a crisis, you wanted someone like Max.

  You also wanted someone who wouldn’t judge too harshly.

  As Melinda waited below, Max took the steps two at a time, the dog following. Max poked his head in various open doorways before finding the master bedroom toward the rear of the house. The door was only partially closed, and he easily slid his lean body into the opening. When he saw in the faint starlight a form sprawled on the bed, he closed the door on the dog to keep him out of the room. He reached out a hand to operate the light switch by the doors. Years of training and instinct had him pulling down the sleeve of his jacket to cover his fingertips as he did so.

  Thaddeus lay facedown on top of the bed clothing, which remained neatly tucked in on that side of the bed. The body was fully clothed in a shirt and trousers. It looked as if he had fallen at a forty-five-degree angle to the low mattress, so that the toes of his shoes rested on the floor, an awkward balancing act. A slight redistribution of the deadweight would have sent him toppling to the floor.

  Max crept over for a closer look. Thaddeus’s face was turned toward the windows, which opened out onto a small balcony overlooking the garden in back. Max could see his blank expression clearly, but to be sure, Max placed a hand against his neck, fingers touching the area behind Thaddeus’s ear. No pulse. Max removed his hand and, as he did so, noticed the dark stain. Blood? In the glaring overhead light—it was on a dimmer stitch, but Max had turned it to full blast—it was a confused impression, but something dark and moist was on his fingertips.

  He stepped outside the room, again carefully shutting the door behind him, and made the call directly to the private line of DCI Cotton.

  CHAPTER 7

  You Again?

  “You again?” said Cotton on seeing Max at the door of King’s Rest.

  “It sort of goes with the territory,” Max said, shrugging as he stepped aside to admit the DCI from Monkslip-super-Mare.

  “Right,” said Cotton. “I suppose calling the police in an emergency has gone completely out of style. Around here, they’ve learned to call in the vicar first. Of course.”

  “I did call you,” said Max.

  Despite the early hour, Cotton was immaculately dressed and with not a blond hair out of place. He strode into the room as if he were there to show off the latest in men’s fashion. He carried the leather briefcase—so omnipresent, it seemed welded to his side—in the way most women would not set out without a pocketbook. What was in there, like the actual contents of Her Majesty the Queen’s handbag, might never be known. His only concession to the hour was that he wore a turtleneck and slacks instead of a suit and tie. He carried a jacket hooked dashingly from his thumb and thrown over one shoulder, like a politician on a hand-shaking, baby-kissing mission. Unlike many politicians, Cotton was one of the handful of men whose integrity Max had always found to be unfailing, his moral compass unwavering.

  “Why not call Musteile?” he asked now, spinning to face Max.

  Max looked at him stony-faced as he waited for Cotton to answer his own question. Constable Musteile was the local bobby, a silly man held in near-universal contempt by the villagers for his inflated sense of self-importance. He had recently somehow gotten himself issued a bulletproof vest, which provoked great hilarity in the village as he rode about on his bicycle, the ridges of the vest ostentatiously visible beneath his tight shirt. He was the type of official for whom the slogan “Question Authority” had been created. Fortunately, the generally peaceful village of Nether Monkslip gave him little scope for exercising his worst tendencies. Musteile’s attempts to hold Neighborhood Watch meetings so villagers could report suspicious incidents had become noisy social occasions complete with wine and appetizers, and a peeved Musteile had canceled any further attempts at portraying Nether Monkslip as a hotbed of anything resembling crime.

  Besides, no one would report anything short of the apocalypse to Musteile if they could help it.

  “Well, okay, you’re right,” admitted Cotton. “Musteile is the last man you’d want on the job. It would be like asking the village idiot to investigate. Why HQ puts up with him, no one knows.”

  “Oh, I think they do,” said Max.

  “Right again! He sucks up to the higher-ups, that’s why, casting himself as the simple man of the people keeping the crime rate in check: They have only to look at the low crime statistics to see what a fine job he’s doing. They’re very big at HQ on presenting themselves as being in touch with the local farmers and herders and so on, although most of the brass would run a mile if presented with anything that didn’t have a saddle or a sail attached to it. As i
f there were anything like real crime going on in these parts to begin with. Well, except for the occasional murder … Uhm … I mean to say, there’s not a lot for Musteile to do, in the normal run of things.”

  “I’m not sure this is murder,” said Max. “But…”

  “But you’re not satisfied. Right. So show me.”

  And they walked up the stairs leading from the showy stone hallway, which seemed, as Cotton commented, simply to cry out for tapestries and battle-axes. Max led the way toward the master bedroom door, behind which lay the supine, extinguished form of Thaddeus Bottle.

  They stood looking at the body, Max hanging back in the doorway. Cotton took in the framed photo on the dresser.

  “Married?”

  Max nodded. “It’s his wife who found him. I left her in the kitchen with a cup of tea.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “Well, let’s see. Thaddeus Bottle is, or was, a character actor—a stage actor, primarily—who dabbled in writing plays. He also did some work in film, I gather.” Max watched Cotton closely as he told him this. Cotton’s background included having done his homework—when someone had remembered to put him in school—late at night in his hippie/rock star mother’s dressing room, waiting for her to come off the stage. It had been part of the chaotic and peripatetic upbringing, being the child to a woman not unlike the Patsy Stone figure in Absolutely Fabulous, that had made him long for nothing so much as stability in his life. He was one of those men for whom bringing order out of chaos was a personal necessity—a question not of honor so much as of survival—and his reaction to an untidy upbringing had been to enter a profession where order was the, well, order of the day. Fortunately, he was very good at it.

  Cotton especially noticed furnishings and fashions, the props and decorations of a man’s or woman’s life. Max’s working theory was that Cotton’s only nod to the flamboyance to which he had been exposed in childhood was this awareness, and his own sartorial choices.

  Right now, Cotton seemed to be taking the news of Thaddeus’s arty career in his stride, so Max went on. “He and his wife moved into the village about six months ago, maybe a bit more, causing quite a flutter of excitement.”

  “You were immune to the fluttering?” Cotton asked, picking up on Max’s dry tone.

  “I knew who he was, but in the vaguest terms. Those who follow the arts more closely than I seemed at least to recognize him on sight.”

  “Did you get any sense of what kind of man he was? Offstage, I mean?”

  Max thought carefully before speaking. “He was rather full of himself. He also seemed to me to be awash in a sea of insecurities. The two things so often go together.”

  “They are all insecure,” said Cotton. “Actors.”

  “Even the nice ones?”

  “Sure. Especially the nice ones. They’re the ones who get trampled to pieces repeatedly. You’re saying he wasn’t nice?”

  “Not to his wife.” Realizing he’d just unwittingly chucked Melinda into it, Max added, “Not to anyone, really. You’d have to have more awareness of others to be nice to them, and Thaddeus struck me as having been born without that side to him.” Max glanced over at the body lying on the bed, maintaining its precarious balance, half on and half off. If there had been any hope for Thaddeus’s coming to an improved understanding of his fellow man, that hope was finally extinguished now.

  Cotton paused, considered.

  “You really think it’s another murder? Here?” Cotton, looking around him, swept out an arm to indicate the entire village, as if they stood not in Thaddeus Bottle’s ornate Versailles-style bedroom but in an enchanted clearing where no harm could ever befall them. Fairies and green elves would soon appear, crawling out from beneath the toadstools of Raven’s Wood.

  “I’m not sure,” said Max. “There’s an odd bit of bleeding at his neck, as if he’d been stabbed, but it’s quite a minor wound, and I wouldn’t think deep enough to kill him. I’d feel better if your doctor took a look, though.”

  Cotton shook his head somberly. “Please God, let it not be a murder—not again. Even equine crime in the area has fallen one hundred percent since the Monkslip Horse Watch was established. Roger Mathews had his tack returned to him—a thief with a guilty conscience; wonders never cease. We’ve gone from less than no crime to this—to some sort of killing spree.”

  Since he seemed to be peering closely at Max, as if searching him for concealed weapons, Max felt compelled to say, rather defensively, “Well, don’t look at me. I feel exactly the same way you do.”

  “It’s like you’re a magnet or something,” said Cotton. “Since shortly after you came to live here, people have started dropping like flies.…”

  “It’s pure coincidence,” said Max somewhat testily. “We will probably find that the seeds of this crime were sown long ago and far away. If I were you, I would start by talking with every actor appearing for the past thirty years in a performance in London’s West End. Then I’d talk to every director, stagehand, and fellow playwright. Thaddeus Bottle was hardly a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was quite a contrarian individual, opinionated and brusque to the point of rudeness. Ask anyone.” And he called me “Rev” after I’d asked him not to, thought Max, but he didn’t add this aloud.

  “Oh, we shall,” said Cotton. “Ask anyone, I mean. Meantime, Max, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me some insight into Thaddeus’s relationships in the village.”

  “You’re quite sure I’m not a suspect?” Max asked drily.

  “Of course not. You’re simply a magnet. Or perhaps some sort of catalyst. Go on, now. Dish.”

  “Let’s do this downstairs, shall we?” Max turned and began walking away, with Cotton following. They reached a small front room below, a formal sitting room. It had a door that could be pulled shut. Melinda was nowhere about, but presumably she was in the kitchen, staying put, as she’d been told to do.

  “Apparently, the man was notorious—had made his presence felt in a remarkably short time,” began Max. “I don’t like saying it, but since the spouse is always the first suspect…”

  “You think she’s a likely candidate for this misdeed.”

  “If she could pull herself together long enough to plan such a crime, yes. Personally, I don’t think she could. But certainly, with Bottle’s offhanded treatment of her, she wouldn’t be human if she never reacted to his abuse in some way. I gained the impression that her drinking may have been an attempt to drown out the voices suggesting she’d be better off without him.”

  “Why do you think she stuck around?”

  “That, you’d have to ask her. She is many years younger than he is, or was. Attractive in a—oh, I don’t know. In a sloshing about sort of way. Provocative low-cut dresses, flashy costume jewelry, very high heels—it’s a wonder she didn’t break her neck in those. It all seemed designed to prove something—heaven knows what. That she was attractive to someone, I suppose. Or maybe it was some pathetic attempt to get her husband’s attention. In which case, she had her work cut out for her. Sad to say, Thaddeus seemed to keep all his attention in reserve for himself. He was a man for whom the word humbug was invented.”

  A flourish of flashing lights outside the window announced the arrival of Cotton’s team. He had alerted them after talking with Max on the phone. It would be highly unlike the priest to involve him without good reason, and so Cotton had acted on the assumption foul play would need to be investigated.

  Cotton went to get everyone sorted on their various tasks. He returned shortly—they didn’t need to be told what to do.

  So while all the photographing and examining of the body were taking place upstairs, he and Max went to talk with Melinda, Thaddeus’s widow, in her extravagantly padded, tufted, and embroidered sitting room at the back of the house. Max, taking a seat, felt he might sink and disappear into a quicksand of puffy fabric. The room opened off the kitchen, and it was obvious this was where the real living took place, not the more formal roo
m at the front. In pride of place over the mantelpiece was a flat-screen television.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Bottle,” said Cotton. The words, while too commonly used by someone in his line of work, were spoken with sincerity.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I don’t understand—why are there all these people in my house? It was a heart attack or something, wasn’t it?”

  “There were,” said Cotton smoothly, “some indicators we need to look into. It may mean nothing, but obviously, if your husband did not die of natural causes, it—”

  “It must have been a professional killer,” said Melinda, interrupting. In the next moment, she seemed to realize this abruptness was not fitting, that the occasion called for befuddled sadness, and she made a show of using a tissue to dab at the corner of one eye.

  Professional killer—a term Max had always found somewhat bizarre, as if such people had their own logo, newsletter, and Web site, or maybe a secret handshake and Masonic-like rites of initiation. Maybe a bowling team.

  Cotton looked skeptical but had learned to dismiss nothing as ridiculous until it could be proved to be ridiculous. Melinda stood and began drifting about the room in a distracted manner, actually bumping into a small side table, as if to suggest her distress made it difficult to navigate. She picked up a photo of herself and her husband. It happened to be a wedding photo of the pair of them standing before a registry office, Melinda, the bride, in a pastel dress, clutching a bouquet of spring flowers.

  Melinda’s disorientation seemed real enough, but Max wondered at the cause. Heartbreak and grief didn’t seem to be in the cards, but a sense of bewilderment and worry would be normal given the circumstances.

  “What would make you say that?” he asked her. “About the professional killer? Did your husband have any connections with underworld figures?”

  “Well…” she said, and paused to moisten her lips. She had sharp little incisors, almost as if she’d filed them to a point. She sat back down on the tufted sofa across from the men. She said, much as if this were a topic she’d been dying to bring up, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”