Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  It was as he was leaving that he found the sheet of paper with the Bible quote. Someone had slipped it through the mail slot in the front door, folded in half.

  Max read “He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper’s tongue shall slay him.”

  He recognized the quotation as being from the Book of Job. Underneath it was typed, in a separate paragraph, “… with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips.”

  He thought that last was from an epistle to the Romans. The typing had been generated by a computer printer, using a Gothic-style font, and printed on A4 paper, the ordinary kind to be found in any office-supply store.

  He turned the paper over. Nothing on the back. Nothing out of the ordinary about it apart from those thundering Bible quotes.

  Well, he thought, the references to poison certainly confirmed his suspicions. Too late now, but in the unlikely event there were prints, he used his shirttail to hold the letter by one corner. Then carrying it into the kitchen, he retrieved a plastic food-storage bag from a drawer and slid the page inside. He rang Cotton and asked him to send a PC over right away to pick it up.

  “This is nice,” said Cotton. “The killer is going to spell it out for us, is he?”

  “Or she. It’s unsigned, of course. That would make your job a little too easy.”

  “For a change. But the whole thing seems like a double bluff to me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You nearly said it yourself. This kind of poison-pen letter—if you’ll excuse the pun—this kind of letter is usually a woman’s weapon. You know that as well as I do. Unfortunately, so does half the population—anyone who has seen a crime show on the telly knows we’d suspect a woman first.”

  Max was nodding; he’d had the same thought. “Certainly. But notice that this isn’t exactly a poison-pen letter—at least not in the usual way. The target of the letter, presumably Thaddeus, is already dead. And it’s not the ‘I saw what you did’ sort of thing sent to a living person, with an implied blackmail threat. It was sent to me. This is almost, if not an apology or a mea culpa, a rationalization. To be precise, it is the killer—or whoever sent the message—explaining why Thaddeus had to die. I think we have to say this letter came from the killer. I mean, who else would send it other than, perhaps, an accomplice? Thaddeus, the writer is telling us, was a wicked man. Not just an unpleasant and vain man: a wicked one. A liar. The first quotation is from the Book of Job—one of the more unsavory passages. It also talks of vomit and bowels and so on.”

  “Puh-lease.” Max could picture the pained expression on the fastidious Cotton’s face. “These Bible authors really had a way with words, didn’t they? Well, as I say, it could be a double bluff. A man hoping we’ll think it’s a message from a woman.”

  Max was busy wondering why the missive had been sent at all. Most killers who went in for this sort of thing were hoping to be caught. There were ways to track down where the letter had come from, apart from fingerprints. Perhaps the killer didn’t realize it, but computer printers had their own unique identifying characteristics. Once a suspect was in view, the police would need a search warrant to do a comparison test against the suspect’s printer, but if they found a match, the evidence would be nearly irrefutable.

  So there was something just that bit mad and reckless about sending such a message. It seemed an unnecessary risk for the killer to take—apart from anything else, it was just possible that Max’s correspondent had been spotted at the vicarage door, leaving the missive. It spoke volumes about the killer’s state of mind. Max spoke these thoughts aloud to Cotton.

  “I agree. We’ve already been moving fast—the lab has orders to prioritize the samples taken at the scene. But we’ll have to move faster in talking with the villagers.”

  * * *

  Preoccupied as Max was by Bible passages and the death of Thaddeus, there was one incident that morning that drew him away from disturbing questions surrounding the finding of the body and into the present of his pastoral duties. It happened as he was leading the service at St. Cuthburga, which service he sang, exuberantly and slightly off-key, blissfully unaware of how much his parishioners enjoyed these Britain’s Got Talent performances.

  It was a full house. Tom and Marie O’Day, a handsome and well-suited couple who were mainstays of the community, sat in the front row, singing the responses with matching energy. The Tailors’ two-year-old was learning to talk and chose the middle of Max’s sermon as the time to hone this new skill. Still, Max had officiated at the Tailors’ wedding and took vicarious pride in the vocal result, which result he had also baptized. The rite of baptism was one of his pleasanter duties as vicar, although he had been peed on several times and poked in the eye once by a walnut-size fist.

  Mr. Baker, a new widower, had what sounded like a serious cold, and he harrumphed and coughed his way through much of the service. Max made a mental reminder to call on the man at the first opportunity, knowing how easily people in mourning succumbed to serious illness. The most annoying of platitudes was that God never sends you a burden you cannot bear. That simply wasn’t true. Max had seen many people broken on the wheel of chance, and the Bakers’ marriage had been an extraordinarily close one. But he also had witnessed that the people who survived were rewarded down the road in some wholly unpredictable way—with a sudden windfall, loving grandchildren, treasured friendships, or some other compensating factor that seemed designed to illustrate the mysterious ways of their Creator.

  With part of his mind on what he had seen and heard that morning at King’s Rest, he began to pace through the service as if going for his personal best. He forced himself to slow down and focus on the meaning of the words he was saying—words that generally acted as a balm to his soul.

  Then Mr. Brainard dropped the collection plate, causing a scramble to retrieve the coins that rolled down the aisle. All in all, it was one of Max’s more chaotic services.

  As he administered the Eucharist, he could not help but notice a young girl as she swayed up to the altar rail behind her parents. He wasn’t sure of their names but thought they might be the Brandywine family. The girl was wearing a mere suggestion of a skirt and a low-cut blouse that barely covered a shelflike bra she wouldn’t actually need for a couple more years. She was in full makeup and perhaps twelve years old.

  Outside St. Cuthburga’s after the service, the men and women gathered in time-honored fashion, stopping to greet and shake hands with the vicar at the door. The women, Max had noticed, had started wearing hats again, strange confections of feathers and lace that sometimes covered one eye, and with matching pocketbooks and shoes.

  Max finally managed to take aside the parents of the girl as their daughter flirted loudly with whatever portions of the local male population, young and old, drifted past. The father was a portly middle-aged man, beaming with the sort of half-witted geniality of the born enabler; the mother was of approximately the same age, wearing a tight-fitting costume she had somehow poured herself into, and a shellacking of tangerine makeup.

  Max exchanged the standard pleasantries and then quietly said to them, “What your daughter is wearing today—I feel it’s unsuitable attire for church. You and she are, of course, most welcome to attend services whenever you like, but she needs to be dressed appropriately. What she wears outside of church is, of course, up to you.”

  He was thankful to be spared their denials and any pretense they didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You’re a prude,” the mother said.

  Max, who felt he’d slept with a large percentage of the female population of London in his time, said, “Hardly.”

  “Yes, you are,” put in the father, loyally taking sides.

  Remembering his recent night at Awena’s, which had ended in the wee hours, Max repeated, “Hardly. I’m not asking that you shroud your daughter head to toe in some medieval religious costume. I’m asking that you guide her in dressing in a manner appropriate
to the occasion. She is dressed appropriately for a disco or a nightclub.” Or perhaps a night on some oligarch’s yacht, he thought, but did not say this aloud. “She was not dressed appropriately for a house of worship, joining others in showing respect for her Savior, theirs, yours, and mine.”

  They stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “You will need to teach her that, as those wiser than I have said, ‘to everything there is a season.’ She is precisely, I would suggest to you, at a time in her life when she needs to hear the occasional, the reasoned and calm and rational ‘No.’ And the answer to her inevitable ‘Why not?’ has got to be ‘Because I am your parent, I know more than you, and I say so.’”

  There was a flicker in the father’s eyes that told Max he was making a bit of headway there. Less so than with the mother, who, he suspected, placed—misplaced—a high premium on her daughter’s sexual attractiveness as being a reflection on her own.

  “You’re just worried about what the men will think,” she said.

  “And you’re not? As her mother?”

  As there was no answer to that, she simply regarded him warily from her small greenish eyes, made smaller by being encircled with thick lashings of black kohl.

  “I’ll be complaining to your bishop, then,” she said.

  “That is, of course, your privilege. He has raised four daughters, so I think you may find he agrees with me.” Max added more gently, “Men need women to help set the boundaries—not the other way around. Just as she needs you to do the same for her.”

  He left them looking in equal parts mystified and outraged by his presumption. From experience, he knew they would not come back to the church for a while. They would repeat the tale of their conversation to anyone in the village who would listen, and with any luck, the reactions of the people they spoke with would exert its own pressure. He could see he was not the only one to notice the girl’s Las Vegas showgirl attire. When the parents did come back—and he was certain they would—it might be without the daughter, which in itself would be a sign that something he had said had penetrated. Deprived of her weekly outlet for seducing the local swains, the daughter might eventually accede to her parents’ request that she tone it down a bit.

  He felt the inclination to deliver a further little homily to the daughter herself, but he stifled the idea as overkill, for the moment. Instead, he attended to the usual weekly business around the church, setting up appointments with various parishioners needing his attention. Then he put his old Land Rover in gear and drove away.

  The entire incident had made him think of Melinda, who so clearly had no identity or resources beyond her attractiveness, an attractiveness that in her case depended too much on a fast-disappearing youth.

  How far, he wondered, would that lack of self have taken her in a wish to break free of her overbearing husband?

  * * *

  Back at the vicarage, he phoned Awena. Her cooking class continued through the weekend, as many of her students had full-time jobs outside the home. He doubted she’d heard the news about Thaddeus Bottle but was surprised—why was he surprised?—to learn the tendrils of the Nether Monkslip grapevine had stretched to reach her at the cookery school of Denman College.

  “Tara phoned me,” she said. “Melinda was a regular customer of the yoga studio and Tara has been quite concerned about her.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way. Her weight, for one thing. Her mental state overall. She is far too nervy, and far too thin. Tara was trying gently to wean her into the holistic frame of healthy mind, healthy body.”

  “That’s good. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends here.”

  “She’s friendly with some of the women in the class. Gabby Crew from the salon and the estate agent, Bernadina Steed, are often in the same class with her. How is she doing now—Melinda?”

  “Not really well. She’s in shock, I’m sure.” Max, remembering that Melinda had lain next to a corpse in bed, thinking it was her living husband, appreciated how utterly disconcerting that would be.

  All of that supposing she hadn’t herself been the one to turn her husband into a corpse.

  They talked awhile longer, and then Max had to rush to take the next service, this one at St. Edwold’s. He started to sign off, hesitated, and said, “I love you.” How odd that sounded, coming from him. And how completely true. “Please hurry back.”

  “And I love you, Max,” she said. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you to not get too involved in this investigation. Let Cotton do his thing.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll have just a few conversations about the village. That’s all.”

  * * *

  As he was ringing off with Awena, the bells of St. Edwold’s sounded outside the vicarage window. Automatically, Max checked his watch and gave it a little shake. Then he realized Mr. Stackpole, the sexton who maintained the church building, had slipped up. More likely, because he didn’t hold with all this tampering with the God-given time, Mr. Stackpole was delaying getting around to making the adjustment needed to “spring forward.” The church bells were automated these days, since the demise of peasants willing to ring the hour. They ran off of some ancient, precomputery mechanism that had to be reset and programmed by hand.

  All of which reminded Max of his upcoming appointment with his bishop. He would have to travel to Monkslip Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of Monkslip, and have what was certain to be an awkward conversation in the bishop’s palace. Max was sure that, given the current situation, he’d get much the same advice from his bishop as he was getting from Awena: Stay clear of the investigation.

  But there were other topics Max felt were of more importance to discuss than his involvement in the investigation. His burgeoning relationship with Awena, for one. People might make mild jokes about her mash-up of vaguely neopagan, druidic, and Wiccan leanings, but to Awena, of course, this was no joke. Any belief system looked at dispassionately seemed a bit mad—even, he had to admit, his own. How to bring this into the conversation with the bishop was beyond him.

  And should he even mention the weirdly reappearing image on the wall of St. Edwold’s? It was little Tom Hooser who had noticed the resemblance to the face on the shroud of Turin, one day blurting out the likeness to a full congregation. And Tom, Max recognized, was no doubting Thomas: To him, the face was quite real and it was the face of Jesus, which face he recognized from seeing the shroud on a BBC documentary. Tom had several times repeated this assertion, usually in the middle of the most sacred and solemn part of the church service. Max had desperately wanted to shush him from the altar, but of course he could not. Generally, his sister, Tildy Ann, would elbow him or stomp on his foot and that would resolve the matter until the next time.

  Would the bishop want to hear about the image? Surely not. Besides, it would be taken care of by the roof repair, for clearly the image was just a water stain. Repairs would get under way once the village was safely past the time of the spring showers.

  Max decided that the next day he’d start his investigation of the Bottle case. His attendance at tomorrow’s meeting to discuss the children’s Easter egg hunt was not required, and he found he was glad to avoid this particular chore this time. Of all the topics to evoke strong feeling, this was possibly the strangest. The hunt had “always” been held, or so some maintained, in the St. Edwold’s churchyard, among grazing sheep. There had arisen a faction that held this practice was too morbid for the smallest villagers. Thaddeus Bottle, Max recalled, had been among the most vociferous of the traditionalists.

  Max felt a slight tinge of guilt at dodging this particular bullet, and vowed to make up the lapse at the first opportunity. There would always be another committee in need of mediation.

  He left the vicarage and walked to the church vestry to put on his vestments for the service.

  Subject: NEWS!

  From: Gabrielle Crew (gabby@TresRapidePoste.fr)

  To: Claude Chaux
(Claude43@TresRapidePoste.fr)

  Date: Monday, March 26, 2012 7:42 A.M.

  Claude—Forgive me for not writing yesterday, but you will understand when you read this: I awoke Sunday to the news that Thaddeus Bottle had been murdered—at least the police have been called in, so it clearly is not being treated as a natural death. More to come on that subject “as it develops.” I am not yet completely part of the village grapevine, but it would appear the media will be taking an interest in our small community, and I will be closely following their updates. I’ll e-mail you the links to anything of interest.

  I read somewhere once that Her Majesty’s government reads all our e-mails. Did you know that? It should make us all feel important. One wonders how they have the time, but I suppose they have machines that scan everything for them, looking for key words like bomb or kill. I should ask the vicar—he’s a former MI5 agent. At least that’s the rumor that goes around about him. He never talks about it. That wouldn’t be his style at all. So modest, so blindingly handsome—if only I were thirty years younger! But then, there’s not a woman in this village who hasn’t thought something along those lines. There was a lot of competition before Awena came along and scooped him up, apparently without even trying.

  You’d think a man like that would be bored in this little village where nothing ever happens (usually), but he seems quite content, precisely like a man who has found his true vocation at last. A bit like me, really—I found my niche late in life. It helped that I inherited my abilities from you and grandmother, for there was little call for a hairstylist in Sierra Leone. Clean water and food were the priorities.