Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (11 page)

“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 room 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.”

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

“Not
ev
idence, 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.