Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (12 page)

“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.

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.

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.