Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  “But you have no evidence for believing someone with a grudge might take the opportunity to, well, get even,” said Cotton.

  “Not evidence, no. But … he was not always as popular offstage as he was onstage, if you know what I mean.” She seemed again to remember the occasion called for at least a show of grief, and, plucking another tissue from a box on a side table, she dabbed tenderly at one dry eye.

  “Was there drug use? I mean, did he use drugs, or hang about with people who did?”

  “No,” Melinda said decisively. “He thought drugs were bad for the complexion—aging, you know—and he’d never touch them. He took a prescription drug for his heart, like many men his age, but he wouldn’t go near anything illegal. In the theater, though, you’re around the occasional drug user—all the time, really. I mean, the type of person who uses drugs recreationally. It’s just part of the, you know … the creative thing they do.”

  “I see,” said Cotton. None of this sounded like the sort of thing that could be construed as a drug-related episode gone wrong. An image of an actor showing up in full Kabuki-style makeup to avenge some imagined wrong or another flashed through Cotton’s mind. An actor angry with Thaddeus for upstaging him or her.

  He glanced at Max, who seemed to be grappling with some puzzle of his own. What now? Cotton wondered. He didn’t have long to wait.

  “I wonder,” said Max, “why he didn’t cry out if he were in trouble?”

  Melinda shrugged. She didn’t have an answer for that. It was odd, because Max had the inescapable sensation she had been expecting the question. As Max let the silence lengthen, she finally said, “Maybe he did and I just didn’t hear him. It’s a big house. I was asleep.”

  Max paused again before trying his next question. What he wanted to ask was whether she and Thaddeus had been getting along.

  “Was there anything else that might have been weighing on your husband’s mind?” He kept his face neutral, his voice calm. He might have been asking her to recommend a good chimney sweep.

  He again let the silence draw out. One badly timed word and she would clam up. Trust, Max knew, was as intricately built yet fragile as a spider’s web. Once, when he had been part of a hostage-negotiation team, a coach sitting next to the primary negotiator had sneezed. Since the sneeze had been clearly audible in the background, they’d had no choice but to admit to the kidnapper there was someone else listening in. The incident had stalled negotiations for days.

  Trust was always at the heart of these situations, and trust slowly accrued over days or even months could be lost so quickly, sometimes forever.

  The bluntness of Melinda’s eventual answer surprised him. “There was very little on my husband’s mind, if you want the truth, beyond his immediate needs and wants.”

  Cotton, who had begun to stroll about the room, abruptly stopped his forward motion. He had been scrutinizing the contents of a glass-fronted cabinet full of expensive-looking gewgaws, thinking what deplorable taste these people had. Suddenly, he turned to Melinda, all ears.

  “There was trouble between you?”

  This earned him a squawk of protest, followed by a heated denial. “Not at all. I just knew him well. I’m simply saying he could be, like most actors, self-involved.”

  Cotton nodded understandingly.

  “Had anything unusual happened lately, to you or to your husband?” Max asked her. “Anything at all? Any change in routine, for example?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Well, if you’re including the really trivial things, I mean, one odd thing did happen, but it’s not worth mentioning.”

  “Go on,” said Cotton.

  “It’s just been on my mind, you see,” said Melinda. “I’m sure it’s not relevant. It’s that I lost a pair of earrings a few weeks ago. Thaddeus had given them to me as an engagement present, actually. They weren’t worth a lot, but they were pretty. Antique—a sort of stylized design. Art Deco. Quite unique. It was a bit odd. I suppose the clips came loose and I lost them. They were my favorites, apart from my butterfly earrings.”

  Max, no matter how he tried, could not see how to elevate that to the list of unusual happenings, but he filed it away for future reference. He had, after all, asked her to remember even small things that had been out of the ordinary.

  “A bit unusual to lose both at once, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “I was carrying them in my purse for a while. I’m not used to clip-on earrings, and they can start to hurt. So maybe they got caught up in something else in my purse, like a handkerchief, and I dropped them without realizing. That’s what I thought at the time. But is it important?”

  Max shook his head. “I don’t see how.”

  She turned expectantly to Cotton, as if hoping the questioning might be over now, but she was to be disappointed.

  “So,” said Cotton. “Your husband decided to retire to Nether Monkslip? It’s hardly a mecca for those in the performing arts. Why here?”

  “First of all, he didn’t retire, exactly.” Lazily, she scratched one thin arm with her long red fingernails. She was still wearing the extravagant white negligee and robe, looking like a thirties film star, and Max wondered if the ostrich feathers, still a bit droopy with moisture, tickled her skin.

  “No?” Cotton asked.

  “He announced he was leaving,” she said. “When no one begged him to stay, he started talking about moving here. Downsizing to a simpler life—you know the sort of thing. The next thing you know, he was talking about getting in some chickens and things—thank God nothing more came of that idea. But he was hoping to finagle an interview with a reporter and he thought a back-to-nature angle might entice her. I tried to tell him he wasn’t the ruddy Prince of Wales—imagine how much he welcomed that opinion.”

  Cotton’s raised eyebrows took in the fancy-schmancy chairs and lamps and other appointments in the room and he wondered, if this was supposed to be the simple life, how complicated their life must have been in London.

  “The parts simply had dried up, you see,” Melinda explained. “And requests for rights to produce his plays dried up about the same time. The stuff he’d written was all rather dark, unhappy, and Pinterish, but unlike Pinter’s plays, Thaddeus’s gloomy twaddle had gone out of style. It happened suddenly, really, which was upsetting for him. As well as embarrassing, once he’d made his big announcement. He had to leave, you see. He’d closed out his other options. The West End no longer was returning his calls.”

  She sounds as if she’s apologizing for Thaddeus, Max thought. As if she’s excusing the man’s behavior, which, from what Max had seen, was really inexcusable. His career failures had probably been both preventable in some cases and unavoidable in others, but what was nearly certain was that they’d had nothing to do with Melinda. She’d been simply handy as a shock absorber. He’d seen it too many times in marriages where a change of circumstance, particularly financial, created stress for fair-weather couples. The Bottles did not appear to be hard up, not judging by all the froufrou, but Thaddeus had struck him as the type of man whose entire ego, and how he defined himself, would be caught up in his career. With diminished prospects for a career, the ego took a beating. And so, sometimes, did the wife. Max made a mental note to talk to Melinda on her own and in private.

  “I see,” said Cotton. “But, why here? It’s not exactly a well-known area.”

  “Oh, didn’t I say? He was the son of the village saddler—of course, that was yonks ago, when his father lived here, and when people kept saddlers in constant business. I mean before everyone drove cars everywhere. Long gone now—the father and his shop, of course. And his mother. This house is where his family lived, you know—Thaddeus’s family. Of course, it was mostly torn down to build all this.”

  Her hand swept out, Marie Antoinette showing off the Petit Trianon.

  “Nice,” said Cotton. “Your husband had no wish to continue in his father’s business then? As a young man, I mean?”

  Melinda looked
at him as if he were mad even to ask. The hand holding the tissue, which had been raised to dab at her eyes again, was stilled in mid-flutter.

  “Thaddeus knew nothing about that sort of business,” she said. “He wanted from an early age to be an actor. From the way he told it, he got out of the village the first chance he got.”

  “Which was when?” asked Cotton.

  She was picking at one of the feathers on her robe and didn’t seem to have heard him. Max thought she might be in a state of mild shock. Over her head, he gave his own head a little shaking motion. Cotton caught his meaning but ignored him for now, apart from softening his voice by a notch as he repeated, “Which was when? You say your husband got out of here at the first opportunity.”

  “When?” she repeated. “He was eighteen, maybe nineteen. He went to study drama, didn’t he? He wasn’t going to follow in his father’s footsteps. And who could blame him, really? It was a business he had no interest in, and it was largely a dying business anyway. What used to be the village saddler’s is now a shop selling handbags and belts made of recycled materials. I’ve had my eye on a satchel they’ve designed. It’s really quite pretty.…” She seemed to realize she was rambling off the path and resumed her plucking at the robe.

  “And then he had some success on the stage,” Cotton prompted.

  “Yes,” she said. “He really was marvelous in his heyday, you know. But then, somehow … He got older. Things just changed. His leaving hardly left a void in the West End; he could easily be replaced by any number of other actors. Thaddeus was hoping to be recognized in the Queen’s New Year Honours list—for services to literature or some such. I can’t imagine who or what put such an idea into his head. So far as anyone is aware, the Queen had no idea Thaddeus was alive. I think he was getting senile, personally.”

  “Really?” Cotton asked, again interrupting his perambulations around the room. “What makes you say that?”

  “He had memory lapses, especially when he’d just woken from a nap. He’d often be confused, disoriented. It went beyond misplacing the car keys and things. There would be these big … sort of blanks … in his thinking.”

  That was quite common as people aged, Max knew. He looked around him from out of the folds of his puffy chair, wondering, Could there be a reason beyond sentiment that Thaddeus wanted to move to this house? Did it conceal a crime? A skeleton? Some event from his youth?

  Or was it just his ego at work? Much more likely, that explanation: the triumphant return of Thaddeus Bottle, to a bigger house than his parents had been able to provide for him.

  One question among many remained unanswered for Max—apart from the question of who had killed Thaddeus. “You’re still in your nightclothes,” he observed. “How did you change from day wear without noticing your husband on the bed?”

  “There’s a dressing room off the bedroom,” she answered promptly. “I never went into the bedroom itself. I just changed into something comfortable and then went back downstairs to watch the telly.”

  * * *

  More than two hours had passed. They heard the sound of many pairs of feet clomping down the stairs, followed by more pairs of feet. That large herd, thought Max, would be the photographer and forensics team leaving, followed by the police doctor. Cotton slipped in and out of the room, collecting reports, while Max sat on, keeping Melinda company.

  Max wondered if Thaddeus was being taken away now. He would have to leave soon himself (thankfully under his own steam). But this was Sunday—for a vicar, a major day in the week, and he couldn’t hang about.

  Max recalled being at the scene of another death a few weeks before. He had happened to be on a home visit when the man, to all appearances nicely recovering from surgery, collapsed from what turned out to be a fatal blood clot. The clot had moved with swift and deadly precision toward his heart even as Max punched 999 into his mobile.

  “Please, make him live,” his wife had said. She’d said this to Max, she’d then said it to the ambulance attendants when they arrived, and she’d repeated it like a mantra as the emergency crew worked frantically to restore the spark of life to her husband. Max could see it was already too late.

  The woman’s eyes had darted between Max and the attendants the whole time. To whom had she been directing her plea? Not to God. Not “let him live,” but “make him live.” As if to say, You’re the professionals: Do something, medical or miraculous, or both. Do something.

  Looking at Melinda now, he wondered: Had she loved Thaddeus like that, perhaps at some level that was like a faded image of the original fondness, gratitude, or attraction she once had felt for him? It didn’t seem possible, but certainly her sadness and confusion seemed genuine, if somewhat overplayed. Max chastised himself—no one knew what went on between two people in a marriage, or what was the glue that held them stuck to each other.

  As they waited for Cotton to return from another consultation with his team, Max’s thoughts drifted inexorably to Awena. In his undercover days, Max had on several occasions pretended to be married. The pretense had helped him avoid tricky situations where he was being invited to party with the bad guys. He’d often been tested but had found that establishing the rules early on made his later refusals believable. The worst criminals had instantly understood when he said he loved his wife, a fact that had astonished Max every time it happened. They would not have believed him if he’d claimed ethical scruples, of course, but love was the great universal, even for men who dealt in piping the sewage of terrorism into the country.

  No “civilian” woman he’d dated had ever had an inkling he worked for MI5, a reality that had struck him with full force on the death of Paul, his partner. Talking to a girlfriend about his life, telling the truth, would have been to breach the code that Max had sworn to uphold. The reality was that with Paul gone, he had had no confidants, no peers, no one who knew anything of him beyond what appeared on the surface.

  Part of Max’s recruitment process, once he had been talent-spotted by one of his Oxford professors, had been to undergo EPV, or “enhanced positive vetting.” It was the highest level of clearance, and it had included questions about his private life of the most intrusive nature imaginable. Questions about his sex life had predominated. He’d been a very young man, and not all that experienced in the ways of the world, or the scrutiny might have been unendurable. He might also not have passed the test except for that relative inexperience, he realized now.

  There hadn’t seemed to be a great deal of point to that interview, and Max had come away from it wondering if female recruits were subjected to the same intense scrutiny of this area of their private lives. Somehow he’d suspected not, but he couldn’t have said why that was so.

  This questioning had been followed by further examinations by all manner of MI5 types, male and female, and psychologists—ditto. There had been written tests and endless interviews, designed to fulfill what purpose, he had never been sure. Testing his consistency, most likely. His ability to tell the same story, over and over again.

  Max thought back to his time at Thames House, the home of MI5. Those who worked there called it “the Ice House,” because its predominant color scheme consisted of whites and pale blues and grays. There had been lots of glass, he remembered—sheets of glass everywhere. A real house of mirrors, it had been.

  In his later years in the service, Max had rarely been inside the building—it wouldn’t have done for him to have been seen going in and out the front door. The back entrance was as closely guarded a secret as the Queen’s dress size. It had been a world of codes and drops and bombs and things not as they were, but as MI5 wanted them to be perceived.

  Max had the patience and watchfulness of a spider, as one of his superiors had written in his personnel file, but he lacked the venom. This was not, it had been added, meant as a criticism, but as a description of the usefulness of his personality to the service. People trusted Max, even crooks. MI5 had others to provide the venom.

  Max,
after the murder of his colleague Paul, had been looking for the soul pipe that would allow him to escape the sordid underworld he had inhabited as an MI5 agent. And he had found Nether Monkslip.

  At least he’d thought he had escaped that world.

  Cotton poked his head in the door and signaled for Max to join him in the hallway.

  “The doctor agrees with you,” he said once they were safely out of hearing. “There’s something fishy here.”

  Max nodded somberly. Here we go, he thought.

  “I’m going to ask your help again, Max. You know these villagers. You know Melinda, even, better than I do.”

  “You’re taking it as given it’s Melinda?” Max asked. “That she had something to do with this?”

  Cotton shook his head. “Don’t know, now, do I? But you know the people who know her, and who have interacted with her and Thaddeus over the past months. I’m just asking for a little of your … unique insight.”

  Max hardly bothered to feign reluctance. It never seemed to fool Cotton anyway.

  When he had been with MI5, he had felt as if he were protecting the entire world. Defending it, even helping save it from destruction. His scope of influence had been broader than in Nether Monkslip: very broad indeed.

  He rarely admitted to himself that sometimes he missed those days of glory—or vainglory.

  Now, with the death of Thaddeus Bottle, he was once again being called on to defend a very small corner of the realm. It felt familiar. It felt right.

  “I could probably squeeze in a visit or two,” he told Cotton.

  CHAPTER 8

  Routine

  Max, having two village churches in his care in addition to St. Edwold’s, had a full Sunday schedule. On returning to the vicarage, he showered and shaved, then quickly prepared a boiled egg on toast to go with his black coffee. He stole a glance at the headlines of the Globe and Bugle and saw that Kate and William had once again pushed the rest of the world off the news radar. The Duchess of Cambridge must have gone shopping again. Perhaps it was as well—the daily diet of wars, plagues, and riots could use some leavening every so often. Max sent up a prayer for the couple’s continued happiness and, while he was about it, for world peace as he waited for his egg to boil. Mrs. Hooser had left him a small paper bag full of mushrooms, a departure from her usual caloric offerings; the rain must be helping to bring them out in Raven’s Wood. He fried them in a thimbleful of olive oil. After breakfast, he would set out in the Land Rover for Middle Monkslip and the small church of St. Cuthburga.