Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  In some shock, I pointed this out to her and she—reluctantly? yes, reluctantly—took the mushroom from her basket and threw it to the ground. I picked it up so some animal or another human wouldn’t be poisoned by mistake. It was very odd behavior on her part indeed. Almost as if she planned to return to the spot once I had gone and retrieve it.

  But this was months ago and nothing has happened since—well, until now.

  All I had to go on even then was instinct. That guilty look on her face. I imagined that I knew what she was thinking. No—correction—I didn’t imagine anything. I know Melinda was up to no good.

  But the path to hell is paved with the bones of people who don’t know when to mind their own business—at least I hope it is. I’m certainly not going to tell the police. Not the least of the reasons for my reticence is a complete distrust of the authorities, of any authority. This DCI Cotton seems like a sound man, but he has a case he needs to close, and he may be under pressure from higher-ups to do so.

  Perhaps I can find a way to learn what the police are thinking. What harm could it do to ask around? It would put my mind at ease.

  I am getting old now, nearing seventy. And there was I, hoping for peace in my old age!

  As much as we think we have learned from living a long life, from long experience of making choices, it only becomes harder to know what is right. Max Tudor would say we see through a glass darkly, a dim reflection of the truth. And he’d be right.

  I must get back to work now. But I think that writing to you, Claude, is what has kept me from going mad. Thank you for being there in spirit, in my spirit. Your presence in my heart is a late gift to me.

  Love always, your Gabby

  CHAPTER 19

  Matters of the Heart I

  Max had lit a fire against the chill that had crept into the afternoon, and now he sat at his desk, making notes for his sermon for Palm Sunday, a few days away. The smell of the burning logs was restorative, a much-needed tonic to the senses. Max had just officiated at the funeral of a middle-aged man in a neighboring village, a man who had almost certainly committed suicide after a long spell of unemployment. The cause of death officially had been accidental overdose, to spare his widow. It might even have been true. The doctor had made that choice, and Max had gone along with it. What earthly difference did it make now?

  Not all that long ago, Max reflected, suicides were given roadway burials at a crossroads to emphasize their outsider status.

  A television documentary program droned forgotten in the background. It had come on the air after a cooking show Max had found himself watching for no particular reason. He admired the skills involved in preparing a meal, and watching someone else do it was almost like having dinner without the work and the calories. It had taken him a while to realize that his meal-by-proxy habit had developed under the reign of Mrs. Hooser and her ghastly cuisine.

  Thea slept before the fire. Done on one side, she had rolled onto her back to toast the other. She slept the sleep of the just, paws and nose in the air, her soft ears fanned out on either side of her head.

  Max, wanting a drink, glanced at his watch. The sun wasn’t yet over the yardarm. No doubt prompted by the day’s sad duties, a memory of his old colleague Paul flashed through his mind, a memory brief but sharp, all the sharper for being so unexpected. But it was a memory of Paul alive, and laughing—they had been drinking together, watching a boat race, and Max had said something, presumably something amusing, and Paul had turned to him, startled into a great shout of laughter. The image came to Max now with the clarity of an old photo found in turning a page of a scrapbook. But with this image in his mind came also the scent of the cold breeze coming over the water, the cheers of the spectators, and the full force of the being that was Paul, alive in that startled laugh.

  Max had tried very hard to crawl permanently into a bottle when Paul had been killed. It seemed the only possible, the only sane response. But even the taste of his favorite single-malt whiskey had become vile, and remained for a long time foreign to his palate.

  Paul’s death—the butchery that was his murder—had been the defining event of Max’s life. He had emerged from what he recognized now as a clinical-grade depression and begun the halting steps toward recovery, a recovery that included a new capacity to measure life not in years, but in moments. Not too long afterward, by a circuitous route that included mindless wandering in Egypt, he had found himself reading theology, studying for the priesthood.

  It wasn’t as if his time with MI5, his time of being a young man, had been sacrificed in vain.

  It was that it was someone else’s turn, he had thought. Someone else’s turn.

  Maybe someone else would do a better job.

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t in the course of his career stopped guys who needed to be stopped—he knew he had. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t saved lives here and there—he knew he had done that also, and perhaps saved hundreds more he didn’t even know about.

  When he’d been recruited into MI5, he’d been enormously flattered, as if he’d been singled out for his brains, his looks, his breeding. How much had pride been part of his enthusiastic response? How much knowledge had he really had of what he was in for—how soon he would be crushed, compromised by the choices he’d been forced to make? He’d been twenty-one, for God’s sake.

  The age when the young everywhere were recruited to causes by the middle-aged, by the old.

  There was a sudden shriek from the telly and he turned to see a creature being devoured by a larger creature. Too much reality, he thought, rising to switch off the set. Thea had rolled over in the instant, alert to predators.

  He scooped up from his desk the pages he’d been working on, forcing his mind to his task, but he again found himself stuck for a conclusion to his Palm Sunday theme. Pacing the room, he picked up the book he had been reading the night before and just as quickly set it aside. A thriller didn’t call to him when there was so much that was thrilling in his own cozy little world.

  So he was in a somber frame of mind, and doing all he could to will himself out of it, when Awena appeared, metaphorically parting the clouds. There was a creak of the door opening into his study, and there she was, a bright flower against the room’s dark paneling. Somehow she had slipped past the guard of Mrs. Hooser.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson had said that nature always wears the colors of the spirit. So, thought Max, did Awena. Springtime yellow and pink were the choices for today’s gauzy, sweeping gown, gathered high at the waist by a wide belt of bronze fabric. She wore thin sandals, which he knew without question were vegetarian, for Awena literally walked the talk. Her toenails had been buffed to a natural pink gloss.

  Max scooped her into his arms and they kissed. After a long while, Max stood back, searching her luminous eyes, touching the face that glowed so pearl-like, the skin incandescent and soft.

  He led her to the sofa, where she rested curled in his arms, her head against his chest. Both were filled with wonder and relief at finding the other sound and whole and unchanged. Slowly, they began to speak of the light nonsense that weaves lives together. How was the course received? Did he get a chance to look in on Mrs. Tribble as she’d asked? Would the rain never stop?

  On they went, talking softly, catching up on each other’s news.

  Awena, of course, had heard all about the murder, but she knew Max would tell her what he could in his own way and time. And eventually, the subject drifted there, Max saying what little he knew as fact, and leaving out many of his suspicions.

  He lifted the hair off the nape of her neck and then watched as it fell back into place, smooth as water.

  “Your hair is beautiful,” he said.

  “I’ve just come from the Cut and Dried,” she said. “Everyone was there. Including Melinda. She often is. And—you know, Max, there was this odd moment.… I’m still wondering what it meant.…”

  “Oh?” said Max. “I…” And here he hesitated. Melinda’s behavior an
d emotional reactions seemed to him to be all over the map, but his moral obligation was to avoid anything approaching gossip. Maybe the grief, so lacking when Max had talked with her and Farley, was finally seeping in. “I hope that’s a good sign,” he said at last. “That she was out and about, doing normal things.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Awena vaguely.

  “What did you mean by ‘odd moment’?”

  “Oh. That had to do with Gabby and Annette, not Melinda. It’s a bit hard to describe, but Gabby was working on a client and I think she may have seen or heard something that upset her. Or Annette did. Or maybe Annette was just reacting to Gabby, because Gabby dropped a bowlful of hair color, you see, and Annette dropped a jar about the same time. There was a lot going on—the place is hopping, with all that’s been going on in the village.”

  “It’s not like Gabby to overreact, I wouldn’t have thought.”

  “Nor I.”

  “What did she hear? Or see?”

  “Do you know, I thought about it on the way over here, and what she seemed to be reacting to was the BBC broadcast. But that makes no sense at all.…”

  Max waited.

  “BBC Radio Four was broadcasting the news headlines,” Awena went on. “It was something about the prime minister and a visit to the U.S.—New York or Washington. He’d be attending a play and having some sort of fancy dinner. I’m sorry to say I didn’t pay close attention because, frankly, it didn’t seem important or even remotely interesting.”

  She sat up, pushing against Max’s chest.

  “Cotton seems to be following up a lead.”

  “Who says?” Max asked.

  “The Greek chorus over at the salon, of course,” replied Awena.

  “I think we can agree on this: Everything said in this village gets distorted by the time it gets to the third telling.”

  “They are so excited to be part of an investigation.”

  Max was trying to envision Cotton attempting to conduct his investigation, exposed to a wave of chemicals, and to women—and sometimes men—with foil and clips in their hair, and with dye painted at their temples.

  “Of course,” said Awena, “it could have been the tattoo.”

  “What tattoo?”

  “The customer Gabby was working on had a tattoo on the side of her neck. She was coloring this woman’s hair, sectioning it off, and as she pulled the hair from the woman’s neck, I saw the tattoo. It may have been that. Unless she heard someone talking about something that upset her. They were all talking at once—a lot of it was Hollywood nonsense.”

  Max said mildly, “Many people feel that way about tattoos, particularly people of Gabby’s generation. They find them off-putting.”

  It was, he reflected, all one with the current trend of piercings and tattoos and other adornments, trends Max himself did not understand. It reminded him too much of slavery and branding, of prison camps. The next generation would probably go back to spats and pocket watches, or whatever would most startle or shock their elders.

  “This was more than dislike. Gabby looked positively ill about the moment she saw the tattoo—drained of color.”

  Max thought back to the dinner party, remembering the look he’d seen, her face going rigid at the sight of the painting.

  What was up with that? He could see no pattern.

  A tattoo. A seascape painting.

  He idly wondered aloud who would have known about the dinner party—known who was invited. It was the only thing out of the ordinary in Thaddeus’s life, so far as he knew, in the days leading up to his death.

  “I think everyone knew about it. I myself mentioned it in talking with Mrs. Watling at the post office.”

  That explains it, he thought.

  Awena again nestled against him. “Oh, and Miss Pitchford was there also.”

  That really explained it. MI5 is the UK’s domestic spy agency and GCHQ is its eavesdropping agency. To Max’s certain knowledge, neither held a candle to the combined might of Miss Pitchford and Mrs. Watling, the local postmistress. It’s not that either of them had too much time on her hands—far from it, in fact, for Nether Monkslip was home to the most industrious group of women Max had ever encountered—but that the pair were so plugged into the village doings that Max sometimes felt every heartbeat was being monitored as on an EKG. They operated out of various headquarters: the post office and local store, of course, and the beauty parlor. When their updates reached the local pubs at either end of the village, the men generally took over the news analysis and dissemination.

  “What was it a tattoo of?” Max asked, circling back to the earlier topic.

  Awena tilted her head, gazing at him from under her exquisitely arched brows. Max wished he had the talent to paint her portrait, just as she was at this moment, the firelight gleaming in her hair and eyes, casting the left side of her face into shadow.

  “Nothing too rare or unusual,” she said. “A dragon or serpent—a very elaborate design. But Gabby couldn’t finish what she was doing, and she said she wasn’t feeling well. Annette covered for her.”

  “Gabby is as strong as an ox,” said Max.

  “I’d have said so, too.” Awena shook her head. “It really was the most enormous tattoo. Why do young people do that to themselves? I will never understand. I guess I’m getting old.”

  “Thirty-eight is not old. You think now it was the tattoo that bothered Gabby?”

  “It had to be that or the prime minister’s plans. Not likely, that. He often surprises us, but not to that extent.”

  “And it was a dragon?”

  “I think so. Some mythical creature anyway. Breathing fire—you know the sort of thing. The flames sort of wrapped around the girl’s neck. It was pretty, in its own way—colored in blue or black, with green and red highlights, is what I recall. Oh, and there were initials, letters, sort of intertwined with the creature’s scales.”

  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, thought Max. Could Gabby have been put off by the image of something that didn’t exist except in fantasy? Something from his MI5 course-work training flashed into his mind. A lecture on—what was the word? Steganography? A lecture that referenced Herodotus, of all people. The ancient Greek historian. And now Max remembered Herodotus had been mentioned in connection with the art of the hidden code, for Herodotus had recorded the story of a man who had shaved the head of his slave, then tattooed a secret message on the slave’s skull. Once the slave’s hair grew back, the message was of course hidden and the slave could safely be used to transmit a warning message of enemy plans to invade.

  Steganography was still used by modern terrorists and very recently by Russian spies. Photos containing hidden text files were uploaded online, and then someone knowing where to look used special software to “coax” the words out. What appeared to be an innocent color photo of a flower, for example, might in fact have every five hundredth pixel changed to correspond to a letter of the alphabet. The human eye could not detect such a change, but of course a computer could.

  During World War II, the Resistance used good old-fashioned invisible ink to send otherwise innocuous-sounding messages. A bill for horse manure could hide the plans for Allied troop movements.

  He wondered: Could it be something like that? Gabby as a spy was hard to reconcile in his mind, but the hallmark of a good spy—as he well knew—was that no one ever suspected him or her.

  “Did she appear to know the tattooed girl?” Max asked Awena.

  Awena lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “She didn’t seem to be a regular customer, no. In fact … hold on.” Awena thought a moment, trying to bring the scene back into her mind. Then, slowly, as if reading from a teleprompter, she said, “The girl said she’d only just moved here. From Swansea, I think it was. From Wales, at any rate, judging by her accent.”

  Awena would know, thought Max. She was herself from Wales.

  “Did she say how she’d come to be at the Cut and Dried? I know some people go to Monkslip-super-
Mare for a haircut and make a day of it.”

  “I’m not sure this girl’s budget would stretch to some of the places in Monkslip-super-Mare. I heard her tell Gabby she’d been recommended by a friend. That was a bit of a laugh, actually, but Gabby took it in her stride—she can do even the wildest haircuts and colors; that doesn’t phase her. She’s very modern in some ways—good at what she does. Anyway, I heard the girl say she lives in one of the council houses. Maybe Mrs. Hooser knows who she is. I don’t know the girl’s name, but I’ve seen her around the village, pushing a baby about in a pram. And Max—”

  He interrupted her, intent on mining her memory while the images were still fresh. “You don’t remember what the initials were, on the tattoo?”

  “I don’t, Max. I’ve been trying to remember. BRT? BRP? It wasn’t a word, if you know what I mean, or it might have been more memorable. It was more like a license plate number. Whatever it was made Gabby jump—that’s true, the more I think about it. She had all she could do to take a deep breath and continue with her work, or try to. Then she said she wasn’t feeling well, and took Annette up on her offer of help. But she was feeling well. I mean to say, she had been fine a few moments earlier, and she was fine a few minutes later.”

  Awena added musingly, “Gabby is what Lucie calls vieux jeu. Old-fashioned, despite her ability to keep up with trends for her work. Not only in her mode of dress and her own hairstyle but in her worldview, too. There is purity about her; I suppose that is the way to express it. She sees the world clearly but wishes things were not as they are. It is surprising. That someone her age could still have that air of … of innocence.”

  Max thought that might be a condition much to be desired, although he could imagine the drawbacks, too.

  Awena said, “I’m going to stop by later with some dried herbs Gabby wanted. I’ll see what I can find out. She would tell me what’s up, I think.”

  Max nodded absently. Then he said, “No.” He screwed up his eyes, thinking hard about dragons. Absently, he added, “No, don’t do that. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. And until we do…”