Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

To Max’s surprise, the enormous black Bakelite phone on the study desk rang back almost instantly. He’d told the answering machine that he was arranging the services for Thaddeus Bottle and would like the director to deliver a few words. This was nothing but the truth, so far as it went.

  The two men exchanged introductions.

  “I’m afraid I’m in the middle of rehearsal, so I’ll have to keep this short,” Cork told Max, who could hear the hubbub of a stage production in the background. In Max’s imagination, the man wore the costume of the auteur: the satin-lined cloak, the hat, the cigarette holder. Then: “Why is the decanter sitting on the chair cushion? And where in hell is Rufus?”

  A tinny little voice answered in an apparently displeasing manner.

  “Go tell him to take his hands off the prop girl and get his ass out here. He enters stage right, in case he’s forgotten, or thinks we’re going to drop him from the rafters like Tinker Bell.”

  Cork returned his attention to the phone call.

  “Now, you want me to say a few nice words about the deceased, is that it? Well, this will call on all my skills of diplomacy, I hope you’re aware. But I’ll give it a shot. The old bast—I mean, the old man helped me keep the lights burning for a number of years, in his heyday. It’s the least I can do. That one play of his about the blacksmith … Funny how an irredeemable shit can write such moving prose at times. But he was a sneak, always creeping about, listening at keyholes. And I think he stole my pen once—my good pen. Where is Mary Ann?”

  Again, the sounds of consternation and feet thumping heavily across a wooden stage.

  “Ah,” said Max, almost as though it were news to him that Thaddeus was not universally beloved. “He could be difficult?”

  The man laughed. “Yes, he could be all that. He could be self-involved. All of them are—actors. You won’t find any shrinking violets onstage, to begin with. And the competition for dwindling parts makes all of them worse. That said, Thaddeus had a gift for getting people’s backs up, for the left-handed compliment, if not the outright lie, usually delivered in a roomful of people, so that to respond would make the target of the moment only look foolish or ungrateful. It was subtly done, but the malice behind it was real enough. And that was only when he was feeling charitable. God help you if you really got on his nerves.”

  “I see,” said Max quietly. Delicately, he cleared his throat before saying, “I also was rather given to understand he had a roving eye?”

  “Got it in one, Vicar. That he did. He coveted his neighbor’s wife, and he coveted his neighbor’s goods, and he coveted his neighbor’s success. How I am expected to turn all that into a comforting eulogy for the grieving widow, I don’t know. Although, something tells me she won’t be grieving long. What was her name—Melissa?”

  “Melinda.”

  “Right. I don’t imagine that hookup worked out as she’d planned. Somehow, she’d gotten the idea Thaddeus was awfully famous and just rolling in it when they met—at least that was my impression. That was certainly my first impression,” he added, underlining the point. Then once again, he broke off, shouting, “Stage left! Stage left! What do you mean, you can’t? You can walk, even if you can’t act—but do quit shuffling about like someone’s stuffed a goose in your knickers. Well, move the goddamn coffee table, then. Where in fuck has Props got to?”

  There was a mumbled response, as from a man underwater.

  “Well, go and tell her we do not pay her to talk on her mobile all day with her boyfriend. Get her in here. Stat!”

  Into the receiver, he said, “Was that all, Vicar?” Max could almost hear him removing the snarl from his face as spoke in (what was for him, anyway) a more modulated and reasonable tone, like a conductor shouting a train arrival.

  “I think so,” said Max. “I’ll have someone let you know the date for the service.”

  The phone rang as soon as Max put the receiver back in its cradle. It was Cotton, calling to tell him the coroner, following up on his wild idea for what had been the actual cause of Thaddeus’s death, had hit the jackpot.

  Several minutes later, when Max rang off, he was more puzzled than before.

  He opened the leather-bound copy of the King James Bible that always sat on his desk; it had been a gift from his mother on his ordination. He turned the pages to the Book of Job, looking for the quote he knew was somewhere in there—the quote printed out in the first letter he had received through the mail slot. There it was, in Job, chapter 20. The quote about the poison was sandwiched in between verses fifteen and seventeen:

  He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly.

  He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper’s tongue shall slay him.

  He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter.

  In their focus on poison, had he and Cotton missed other clues, clues as to motive? Max read on. Lines eighteen and nineteen read:

  That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down: according to his substance shall the restitution be, and he shall not rejoice therein.

  Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not …

  Well, that made no sense at all. So far as he knew, Thaddeus and Melinda had bought their hideous big house in the normal way. With a sigh, Max closed the book, leaving a bookmark at the passage. Something might occur to him later.

  He heaved himself up out of the chair, throwing his arms wide with a stretch.

  Then the idea struck him, stopping him, arms still flung wide. A tantalizing hint tugged at his mind. He thought it might be related to the conversation at Lucie’s dinner party.

  Max decided to take Thea for a walk by the river. A spot of fresh air might help him think things through.

  CHAPTER 21

  Matters of the Heart II

  Several girls from the local soccer team walked by Max and Thea. They wore neon lime green socks, and were apparently on their way to or from practice. Several sneaked a peek at Max from under thick mascaraed lashes, and one of them managed a shy, whispered “Hello.” Max distractedly returned the smile.

  The river this morning wore gray on gray, shimmying its way to the sea like a fashion model down a runway. A mist that carried the smell of metallic rain washed his face. He stopped and closed his eyes a moment, breathing deeply of the reviving scent.

  When he opened his eyes, it was to see Dr. Winship headed his way. He’d come out the back gate of the garden of his house and office, which led into River Lane.

  “I was just on my way to see you,” began Max, but the approach of a good-humored, if pompous-looking, man from the direction of Vicarage Road stopped his thoughts. Marching to the sounds of a military band only he could hear, the Major beamed at both men in turn, then said, “No need to ask what you’re talking about. The village is on fire with it, what? The scuttlebutt around the canteen says Thaddeus Bottle was poisoned.”

  How the devil, thought Max, had word of that got around so quickly? Had someone overheard his conversation with Cotton, or one of Cotton’s conversations with his team? Actually, Max realized, there were a dozen other ways Miss Pitchford or one of the trained assistants she kept on a string could have sniffed out the story. He’d have to warn Cotton.

  “And by a poisoned arrow, no less,” added the Major. “Fiendishly clever. I knew a fellow once who’d been in North Africa with Monty. Now there was a chap who had seen it all and lived to tell about it.…” And the Major launched into another of the thundering war stories he so loved, stories that managed to imply he had been engaged in constant hand-to-hand combat on the front lines, when, in fact, great effort had been expended to keep him behind a desk, where he could do as little harm as possible.

  Max was torn. Was there any point in trying to squelch the wildest versions of the stories? Did it matter? They’d have poor Thaddeus being eaten alive by crocodiles before too l
ong.

  He decided on a more subtle tack—an appeal to the Major’s tendency to follow anything that could be couched as an order.

  “Major,” Max said, interrupting the fusillade of memories, “that is, as you know, highly confidential information. I cannot impress on you enough the importance of keeping all this sub rosa, as it were. Eyes only—you know the sort of thing. However you came to hear of it, you must tell the person responsible that DCI Cotton will deal most severely with anyone passing along these reports.”

  “Shot at dawn?” said the Major, delighted. He actually tapped the side of his nose, winked, and said, “Leave it with me, Padre. Loose lips sink ships, what? I’ll soon put a spoke in the rumor mill.”

  Max doubted that very much, but it was a start. The fewer embroidered stories going around the village, the better the chances the truth might emerge.

  On occasion, the Major had been known to say something useful, without meaning to. This, apparently, was not going to be one of those times.

  “I assume Interpol has been notified?” he asked, lowering his voice, and meeting the eyes of the other two in man-to-man fashion. He breathed the name Interpol with the sort of awe reserved by low-level functionaries for that holy of holies in the bureaucratic temple.

  Max, who was dying to ask “Why would Interpol be interested?” said instead, “They’re on it. Lyon is standing by for further instruction.”

  “Ah, good,” said the Major. “That’s well in hand, then. They always get their man.”

  “That’s the Mounties, isn’t it?” asked Bruce. Max gave him a furious nudge, but it was too late.

  “Yes, you’re quite right,” said the Major. “Do you know, that reminds me of a chap I met once, a captain in the Mounties. Sterling chap. Terrible lisp, though. His horse was a direct descendant of Seabiscuit.…”

  Max made ready to make his escape, leaving Bruce, who had stirred that particular pot, to deal with it alone. Thea, having sat patiently at Max’s side for hours, was starting to look exasperated: This was not much of a walk.

  “Of course, it’s the Frenchies who saved his bacon during the war,” said the Major. “The resistors.”

  “The French Resistance, yes,” said Max.

  “Brave people. Barking mad, of course, to have taken the chances they took.”

  “We need more barking mad people, then,” said Max.

  “It all puts me in my mind of the Peloponnesian War.” He was on to his favorite topic, wartime strategy. Max’s heart sank, all hope lost.

  Just then, Lily Iverson came into view. She was leading a lamb by a rope around its neck. Max knew no lamb of Lily’s would ever be headed for the slaughter, but what she might be doing other than exercising the animal it was difficult to say. It might be a show-and-tell offering for the knitting circle.

  Also knowing the Major’s tender spot for Lily, Max unabashedly made use of it now.

  “Look,” cried Max. “It’s Lily. She was telling me she’d like a word with you, Major.”

  Lily actually had said something like that months ago, Max reasoned.

  “Did she now?” The Major, already standing at full attention, drew himself a little taller, tugged his jacket firmly over his wide belly, and very quickly indeed walked away, without another word.

  “Whew,” said Bruce. “That was close. If I had to listen to one of his Falklands tales again, I think I’d scream.”

  “Actually,” said Max, “I wanted some medical advice from you.”

  “It’s that ankle again, isn’t it? I told you so. I’ll have Suzanna make an appointment for you in Monkslip-super-Mare. You’re going to need X-rays.”

  Max nearly said, “What ankle?”—so thoroughly had Awena healed whatever had been wrong with it. The swelling and redness were completely gone.

  “No,” he said, “it’s not that. I was talking with DCI Cotton earlier. As the entire village seems to have heard by now, he had mentioned strophanthin as a likely culprit.”

  “In connection with Thaddeus’s death, of course.”

  “Yes. This was meant to be in confidence, you understand. At least until he’s called his own press conference to supersede Miss Pitchford’s. And even then I don’t think he’d want all the details out there. It’s just been confirmed by the coroner.”

  Bruce Winship’s face was alight. “Ah,” he said. “Now, that’s interesting.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I must say, the Major wasn’t entirely on the wrong track. First of all, strophanthin is made from Strophanthus seeds. It’s a plant, you see—a climbing plant. And it’s one of these things that occur in nature that appear to be little short of miraculous. You’d appreciate miraculous, wouldn’t you, Max? God’s divine plan, and all of that. Awena would certainly agree, and she would know all about Strophanthus. Anyway, when it first came to notice in the UK, physicians were very excited by it because it seemed to improve the body’s circulation. Well, it did improve the circulation. The Strophanthus genus of plants was one of the wonder drugs of its time. Rather like digitalis, which, of course, is also found in nature, and is also a cure and a curse.

  “The Scottish physician Fraser was a big promoter of Strophanthus. The isolation of purified strophanthin—yes, it all caused quite a stir. This was a hundred years ago or more—late nineteenth century. The explorer David Livingstone knew of it, too. However, the dosage had to be just so, and the method of delivery just so, and there were different varieties, and because it is fast-acting, one had to be extremely careful, you know.”

  “And why is that?”

  Bruce regarded him over the top of his glasses. “Obviously because it’s deadly poisonous, my good man. Deadly! A bitter and highly toxic glycoside. Nothing to lark about with if you don’t know what you’re doing. Ghanaian healers knew what to do, even if the colonials didn’t, and the healers guarded their secrets carefully. What you do is mash the stems and boil them, steeping them into a sort of fermented alcoholic tonic. But the dosage had to be just right, or you’d kill the patient. Heart failure.”

  “What if you wanted to kill the patient?” asked Max.

  “You’d inject him with it. And for choice, you’d use an arrow. Grind up the seed, you see. That’s where you get to the heart of the matter, so to speak—in the seed.”

  “Poisoned arrows,” said Max, barely able to contain his skepticism. He had dismissed the idea because it came from the Major, who was living proof that even a broken clock is right two times a day.

  “Poisoned arrows aren’t a myth, Max. They’re absolute fact. Knock your enemies flat out with a bit smeared on the tip of your arrow, you would. Once it entered the bloodstream, your enemy wasn’t going to cause you any more trouble.”

  “But is it still in use today?”

  “Of course it is. Once something like that is discovered, it can’t be undiscovered, if you know what I mean. And it has its legitimate uses, as I’ve said.” The doctor cleared his throat, always a sign with Bruce, as with the Major, that one was going to receive possibly more detail than one wanted.

  “It all puts me in mind of a notorious murder case from the late 1940s, in Australia,” Bruce began. “You’ll like this, Max—it’s a spy thriller, really. A man was found on a beach, nearly unconscious, but able to move about slightly. People thought he was drunk and they left him alone. He was dressed in a suit—flawlessly dressed, in fact. When at last people realized he was dead—the next day—it was too late, not that much could have been done to save the poor beggar anyway. There was an autopsy, which concluded he’d probably died of poisoning. Digitalis and strophanthin were the leading candidates, but all they had to go on then was the condition of the body, you see. His eyes, spleen, and liver all showed abnormalities. Repeated testing showed no trace of poison, however. Too much time had passed, and strophanthin back then was as close to being an undetectable poison as you can get.”

  “Why do you say it’s a spy thriller?”

  “They never did figure
out who he was, or exactly how he was killed,” Light from the river glinted off Bruce’s glasses, and the eyes behind sparked with intense interest. Max sometimes wondered whether Bruce’s fascination with crime was entirely healthy. “No one ever came forward to claim him,” Bruce Winship went on. “Sad, that. Someone had removed all traces of anything that might help identify him. At the main railway station, they found a piece of abandoned luggage that, for various reasons, seemed to have been his, but anything identifiable had been removed. They couldn’t even say for certain if it was a case of murder or suicide.

  “Finally, John Cleland, an expert at the University of Adelaide, was brought into the examination. And he found a concealed pocket in the dead man’s trousers that other investigators had missed. Inside was a scrap of paper torn from the Rubáiyát; translated from the Persian, the words meant ‘It is ended.’”

  “I am remembering this story now,” said Max slowly. “Months later, the rare book from which the words had been torn was found. There was a code written inside.”

  “A code that could only be seen under ultraviolet light. No one could ever break the code, neither experts nor amateurs. They couldn’t trace that particular edition of the book, either. One possibility was that it was a ginned-up copy and the code was some kind of key. There also were potential witnesses who refused to cooperate. It’s a mystery, Max, but almost certainly he was a spy.”

  Max was thinking that was how spies too often ended up: murdered.

  “Did you notice,” Max asked Bruce at last, “that Gabby had a strange reaction to that painting on the wall, that night we had dinner at Lucie and Frank’s house?

  Bruce shrugged. “Maybe it was the wallpaper,” he said. “I thought it was ghastly, but Suzanna tells me I have no fashion sense. Do you know, Suzanna said something rather interesting to me just now, about the case. She said, ‘Why didn’t the dog bark?’”

  Max looked at him. “Did she mean the Bottles’ dog?”

  “Yes. She said it put her in mind of that Sherlock Holmes story.”