Wicked Autumn (25 page)

“Presumably she had a will?”

“Yes. She had a will leaving everything to her husband—as I say, he inherits the lot. A few charities mentioned, but mostly he inherits.”

“A recent will?”

“Yes, in fact. Dated this past summer. What makes you ask?”

Max answered indirectly. “Can you get hold of the previous will?”

Cotton nodded. “Her solicitor is in Monkslip-super-Mare. She didn’t use the local man.”

“That’s not uncommon. People assume, rightly or wrongly, that they’ll enjoy more anonymity if they use someone not in the village.”

“I’ll get someone on it. Why do you think it’s of interest, though?”

“Not to leave anything to her son is strange. Very strange indeed.”

“Is it? Presumably she would feel her husband would simply leave everything to the son, when the time came. No need for a special, separate provision.”

“Why change the existing will, though?” Max asked. “Let’s see if there isn’t a separate provision for the son in the old will—a provision that she had removed. I suspect there is.”

“In a way,” said Cotton, “we have gathered a lot of evidence. How it all fits together, we just don’t yet know. But we will—I hope.”

Max had earlier passed along what Miss Pitchford had told him of Lily Iverson’s disappearance from her stall. “She wanted to buy a tea cozy from her, Miss Pitchford said. But it’s not much in the way of evidence, is it? Lily’s temporary disappearance was, I’m sure, being replicated by others, throughout the day. A call of nature, that kind of thing.”

“Interesting, though,” said Cotton. “When I asked Ms. Iverson about it, she said she’d just forgotten to tell us earlier, but she looked scared to death. For all we know, she’s another Madame Defarge, knitting coded names into her sweaters of all those who won’t make it out alive come the Revolution.”

“Lily always looks scared to death,” said Max equably. “Perhaps she’s telling the simple truth, though.”

“There is no simple truth in a murder investigation. As you know.” Musingly he added, “I still say poison is generally a woman’s weapon. And of course, effectively Wanda was poisoned.”

Max shook his head, trying to take in the idea of the timorous Lily as poisoner. Her timidity seemed endemic, but he supposed it was just possible. Anything was possible. But her motive? Hurt feelings over the Fayre Chairs? There had to have been more to it than that.

“Lily is another ‘newcomer’ to the village, like me,” he said finally. “Like all of us who weren’t born here.”

Cotton flipped through his notes. “Yes. Born in Yorkshire. Moved about a bit. Pitched up in London at some point.”

“Yorkshire?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason, really. Lots of people are born in Yorkshire.”

“What is it you know? Out with it.”

“I don’t know, really,” said Max. “I just was talking with someone who thought Wanda might have been from Yorkshire.”

Cotton nodded. “That person might have been right. It was years ago, but she did live there. It came up in the routine we ran on her.”

“Doesn’t even count as coincidence,” said Max. “What’s the population of Yorkshire? Chances would be well against the two of them ever meeting.”

“Same as with all of the villagers—most are from somewhere else. Madame Cuthbert, of course, is French. She and her husband, Frank, lived in Paris for a time before settling here. Guy Nicholls was from Belgium, and—”

“Belgium?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“He indicated he was from Paris most recently. He didn’t actually say that but I gained the impression…”

Cotton shook his head. “Belgium.”

“But…” began Max. “Why would he mislead me?”

“He didn’t want you to know he’d been in Belgium, obviously. But he didn’t mind me—the police—knowing where he’d been, so it can’t be for any reason he’d want to keep hidden, like trouble of an official nature involving my French-speaking colleagues. Drugs, theft, or the like. Can it?”

“No reason I can think of,” Max said slowly.

“I’ll get in touch with our friends in Belgium. If anything emerges of great interest, we may have to send someone over there.” He smiled. “Strange, but it’s always easier to find volunteers to travel over to Europe than to—oh, say, Milton Keynes, for example.”

Max held up the bottle, offering the last few sips, which Cotton accepted.

“Your instincts are good,” Cotton said. “Who do you suspect?”

Max could only shrug—he suspected everyone. He supposed it was a legacy of his MI5 days. The Major, Lily Iverson, Frank Cuthbert—the list was long of people who were at the Fayre, but whose exact presence was not accounted for at the crucial noon hour? No matter how suspicious he might be, he could not see any of these people committing murder. And yet it must be one of them, or someone just like them. The Fayre attracted every sort of person from miles around, but no one who would have stood out as a homicidal maniac. More was the pity, of course. It was going to make finding whoever was responsible deuced hard.
And
finding proof that they did it.

“I told you I saw the Major the other day,” said Max, “and he told me his wife was not using the local GP.”

“Right. And he showed you that letter from his son. The contents of which we verified, by the way: he was where he said he was. Which reminds me: along with the calendar, we found a stash of letters to Mumsie from the son, Jasper. I have them here.”

“Really. Could I see them?”

Cotton fished for the briefcase at the side of his chair.

“Go carefully, there,” he said, handing over a small stack of letters inside a clear plastic bag. “We didn’t bother to bag them all separately. Here, put these on.”

He handed over a pair of disposable plastic gloves for Max to wear.

The letters, Max saw, were nearly identical in style and type with what Jasper had written to the Major—asking for money or thanking for money, effusively—and addressed to only one parent, not both. The last was dated in May.

“The husband hid them from the wife and vice versa—is that it? More strangeness in that family,” commented Max. “We’re absolutely sure, are we, that the son is in the clear?”

Cotton nodded emphatically. “Passport control confirms it. The media in Argentina confirm it. No way he was anywhere near the scene.”

They chewed over the evidence, the inconsistencies, and the possible motives for another few minutes, but little of useful note emerged.

“Where to now, Max?”

“I need to think a bit,” Max replied. “And I do that best at St. Edwold’s. Right now, there’s a pile of images and puzzle pieces in my head—nothing quite fits together.

“But it will. If I sleep on it a bit, and pray on it a lot. For the first time, I’m starting to believe it will all come together.”

CHAPTER 23

St. Edwold’s

The next day saw a return of a brisk wind, this time from the south, pushing before it heavy white clouds. It gave the illusion, as Max approached, that St. Edwold’s was moving, somehow being born aloft against the clear blue of the sky.

Words from the Book of Common Prayer similarly floated across Max’s mind: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” Was some similar selfish impulse—so often a precursor to murder—behind Wanda’s death? The words mirrored those in the sermon he had been working on, so long ago it seemed now—James’s “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.”

His late conversation with Cotton had raised more questions than answers, although with so many facts to tie together, Max felt he must be gaining on the killer. He had the fanciful idea he was stepping on his or her shadow.

DCI Cotton appeared just then, coming from the direction of the Horseshoe. He paused just long enough to wish Max a good day. Frank Cuthbert, accompanied by the faithful Sadie, came into view as Max parted from DCI Cotton at the lich-gate to the churchyard.

Frank lurked (it was the only word for it), watching closely and waiting as Cotton crossed the High to the police pod near the Village Hall, where the ceramic shepherd and shepherdess peered blindly out on the scene from their respective windows. Max, wanting to hear Frank’s own version of his run-in with Wanda at the Fayre, could see no sideways approach to the matter, but Frank, as if reading his mind, saved him the trouble.

“I was just on my way to see your DCI,” Frank told him. “Best to make a clean breast of things.”

It would be too much to hope, thought Max, that Frank was confessing to the murder—things were never that simple. As it transpired, Frank only wanted to be sure the police heard of the incident with Wanda before a version reached them—a version that tainted his silence with suspicion. It seemed Wanda had tried to get Frank moved to a less prominent spot, saying the public had seen enough of his “stupid books.”

“Stupid!” Fairly spitting, a flush of remembered anger washed over Frank’s already hectic complexion.

“It’s a minor thing,” said Max soothingly, “but I do feel telling Cotton up front would stand you in good stead.”

Frank, with a tip of his beret, said, “Minor, is it? Damn the woman. As much trouble in death as in life. Always the corrosive influence around here. And she wouldn’t know a good book if it bit her.”

But, seeming to gather together the shreds of his authorial dignity, Frank turned and followed in Cotton’s steps over to the pod.

*   *   *

Max opened the lich-gate, which was rusting about the hinges and making an unnerving, Boris Karloff–type creak whenever anyone touched it. He’d have to get the sexton on it. Even though such things were best left to Maurice, there was a weird proprietary game being played between the two men with regard to the church, and Max wasn’t sure he knew all the rules as yet.

Skirting the churchyard, Max opened the church door and stepped through the narthex and into the nave. The murk was at first blinding, and he nearly tripped on the flagstone floor, which had been scooped and worn into a veritable pothole by centuries of worshipers. It was as good a reminder as any of life “everlafting,” as the old plaque inscriptions in the church would have it.

Visitors who took the trouble to find Nether Monkslip never failed to be amazed when they stumbled upon the jewel of a church that was St. Edwold’s. To all appearances, from the outside it was just another squatty little Norman church of not particularly inspired execution. Inside, the stained-glass windows caught and scattered light in a way designed to transfix. The few entries in the church’s guestbook usually fell back on words like, “awesome,” “breathtaking,” and “peaceful,” invariably followed by a row of exclamation points. For while England had many lovely old churches, St. Edwold’s, through some divine trick of light, or cunning artifice of its builders, seemed to shimmer and glow in the patina of centuries. People swore it was a holy place on holy ground, and Max could only agree.

*   *   *

In the days and nights that followed his “conversion” in Egypt, he had puzzled to pick out the thread in his reasoning. Why the Church of England? Why not go the whole hog and join, say, a Tibetan monastery? It was not merely the pull of the familiar, although that played a part: one of his aunts, his father’s sister, had become an Anglican nun. He could recall, as a small child, walking between his parents on the way to church, each of his small hands clasped in one of theirs, his body nearly suspended, his feet barely touching the ground. This was before his siblings had come along. Like all only children, he gloried in having his parents to himself. As much as they had traveled during his nomadic childhood, the Anglican Communion, the local church with its predictable rituals, had been his consistent home.

Even in adulthood, when he was an occasional churchgoer at best, he would have questioned his own sanity had he suddenly taken up a religion about which he knew next to nothing. It seemed to him it almost didn’t matter, the outward form a religion took—the prayers and rituals. What mattered was the near-universal agreement throughout mankind’s time on earth that we weren’t here, on this lonely planet, alone. These were views he kept quiet about while reading theology, especially from the more kneejerk conservative of his instructors. Like a magpie, he selected from their teachings what made sense to him, what brought him comfort, and hid from them his more elastic views.

There was beyond all this, of course, the question of joining an institution that to all appearances was foundering, rocked by scandal and nearly toppled by indifference. Why the C of E, beyond habit? Perhaps because at the end of the day it was Max’s church—the selfsame church that had taught him right from wrong, however far he might later have steered from the path.

He looked about him in the glowing silence of the building that had awed and humbled so many strangers, of all faiths. It helped that the sexton who maintained the church building (and did double duty in the office of verger, assisting at services) was a punctilious and conscientious man who seemed to regard the place as his own property and its care a divinely appointed task—hence the open rivalry with Maurice. Mr. Stackpole was a dour, humorless man Max had inherited from his predecessor. While the sexton was always polite—just—he seemed to regard Max as an upstart interloper; his narrow figure, like something out of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
, exuded condemnation for the way the world was turning. He was one of the staunchest preservationists in the village, and while Max agreed in theory with much of what he stood for, his inability to see both sides of any issue made him a difficult person to deal with.

Max always felt that he himself was on trial with the sexton—a normal ordeal for any incoming parish priest to go through. But in this case, Max believed that no matter how exemplary his conduct and personal habits, Mr. Stackpole would always find him wanting when measured up against the conduct of Walter Bokeler of sainted memory.

The truth, Max suspected, was that Mr. Stackpole (he insisted everyone address him as “Mister”) had trouble categorizing Max theologically, and the lack of easy labels made a man like Stackpole uneasy. Especially in an age where it was felt the church was circling the drains, some people clung to whatever looked certain and solid, making them less able to handle ambiguity and apparent contradiction. Stackpole wanted firm answers. Max did not have firm answers to give, only hope and abundant good will. This, Mr. Stackpole seemed to feel, was simply
not good enough.