Elka asked Max to give her a few minutes to look up her address book, then rang back with the phone number he needed. Happily, the other former nanny at Totleigh Hall lived in Staincross Minster, no great distance from where Max was now, and a short tree-lined drive back home.
The woman he now thought of as First Nanny—Elspeth Muir—answered the phone on the first ring. He quickly gained the impression she was one of those people who in their loneliness or general chattiness welcomed interruptions, including the attentions of telephone surveyors, people dialing wrong numbers, and anyone who was not a prank caller. When he arrived at her house, a neat two up/two down in the suburbs of Staincross Minster, she greeted him with a plateful of scones. Inwardly, he sighed: Extra running time and exercise were in his future.
Elspeth proved to be a rounded, spritely body with short gray hair, in her mid to late seventies. She fussed about with a tea set in a routine that was familiar to him from his visits to Miss Pitchford, first shooing an enormous tabby named Helena away from “his” chair. Helena narrowed her eyes at Max and stalked from the room. Max, who was as resigned to cat fur as to extra calories on his pastoral visits, sat down and smiled with every evidence of pleasure, knowing his dark clothing was already attracting hair like a magnet. At least with a tabby, one out of approximately four hairs would match his slacks and jacket.
Elspeth Muir, with a final rattling of teaspoons against saucers and a proffering of paper serviettes with the slogan “Keep Calm and Drink Tea,” settled comfortably into the armchair opposite. Her battery finally having run down, she sat alert and solid as a statue and trained her beady eyes on him expectantly, rather like a hen waiting for the eggs to hatch.
“You’re here about the murder, of course,” she said. “There’s been nothing else in the news since it happened. I knew no good would come of the secrets in that house.” She pronounced it “say-crits” with her heavy brogue, but Max knew what she meant.
“Secrets?” repeated Max, suddenly alive with the hope that this was not all a colossal waste of time.
“Dark secrets,” she assured him.
Are there any other kind? He leaned forward, smiling encouragement.
“I kept their secrets for them,” she told him, setting her teacup into its saucer so she could focus all her attention on her story. His reaction had been that gratifying. Usually, Elspeth liked to spin out a tale and gradually snare her audience, but this time she had gone in for the quick kill. Really, most gratifying it was. Such a fine-looking man, too. Too bad he was not a follower of the true religion.
“Although,” she continued, beaming, “you can be sure it was only after many hours of prayer I agreed to go along with it. I didn’t, truth be told, want the bother. And I knew that made it a sin, in your religion and mine, Father. It weighed on my soul so much, I finally had to leave. ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil,’ my mother used to say. But I thought to myself at the time, you see, What would it gain anyone for me to go blabbing? The wee bairn needed a home, and he got a good home, or at least he wanted for nothing money could buy. Schooling, clothing, a beautiful house.”
“Peregrine,” he said. “Peregrine was adopted.”
She wasn’t asking for forgiveness or for anything resembling it; she was not appealing to him as a religious in any formal way, for he batted for the wrong team as far as she was concerned—he could see that. She might take it up with someone whose opinion she valued in the Church of Scotland, a thought she confirmed in the next breath.
“Now you’ve reminded me, I’ll take it up with my minister.” She eyed him. “I believe you’ve been sent, I do. God works in mysterious ways. True enough, He sent me an Anglican vicar—now there’s a mystery for you. And even though those exact words are not in the Bible, He does His best work in ways that mystify us mortals.” With Elspeth, the capital H was apparent, even in speech.
Max nodded his agreement, in case she was setting him some sort of test of his knowledge.
He was thinking he didn’t want any deception over Peregrine’s adoption derailing the case. What if the media got hold of it somehow? He must, as Cotton would have it, stay ahead of the story.
He thought he must have looked concerned, for she added, “There’s no need to worry. My minister is a sound man and not a bearer of tales. I won’t be naming names, either. I worked for a lot of families in my time, so he won’t have any idea who I mean exactly. I’ll present the situation to him as a moral puzzle, like. A—what do you call it?—a quarry.”
“I believe you mean a quandary.” Max smiled, looking at her. “A moral quandary.” The picture he’d been painted of her as a religious nutter was fading. She was a churchgoer and a moral person; in trying to do the right thing, she had stopped at being asked to carry out a deception that would stretch over decades and have God knew what ramifications.
The family expecting her to take a salary to help them maintain the deception had chosen wrong, that was all.
And of course with the next nanny, the family had learned its lesson. Candice was hired after they had brought the child home and he was already in place. Perhaps in need of good help by that point—help who would not need to be entrusted with any secrets—Lady Baaden-Boomethistle had been even more inclined than usual to overlook the fact of Candice’s centerfold good looks.
“Stepping back for a bit, what do you recall of the household of those days?” he asked.
“Well,” began Elspeth. She might just have been waiting for this opening. “The lord was not above a bit of draughty senior, if you follow my drift.”
From the gentle blush that bloomed across her face as she said this, she could only mean droit du seigneur, a feudal lord’s supposed right of sexual access to any woman subordinate to him.
“I’m interested in Lady Baaden-Boomethistle, the lord’s first wife, particularly.”
“Oooo, she was lovely. Frail. Yes, I would call her frail. Not physically—she was a great athlete, loved riding horses and things. Do they still keep all them horses at Totleigh?”
Max nodded.
“Lovely creatures. My father used to raise them.”
Max prompted: “You were saying she was frail.”
“Mentally frail, I meant,” she said. “Not a lot of stuffing to her, and of course he was such a bully, and a lot to stand up to for any woman. She did want that baby so.… I suppose she didn’t see the lie for what it was and would have told a million lies to have that child be hers. That was part of what made it so difficult, you see. She really did want him and, as I say, he would want for nothing with a mother who was devoted like that. But I did hear she died. I read it in the papers. Horse threw her off, didn’t he? Wild creatures. We only think we can tame them. I suppose Peregrine was nearly grown by that time?”
“Yes,” said Max. “More or less. Peregrine was a teenager when it happened.”
“Peregrine,” she repeated with a sniff. “Fancy name. I dinna care for it.”
“I gather it’s a family name.”
“I had a cat named Pellegrino once,” she said. “I’m teetotal, you see.”
“Ah,” said Max.
“He was Italian. The cat, I mean.” Max decided he was not going to follow her down that path by asking her how in the world she knew the cat’s heritage.
“Was there anything else you’ll be wanting to ask? My ladies’ group meets here this evening. Please take a scone or two with you if you’d like. They are all slimming half the time and I end up making too much for them.”
Max held up his hands, refusing the offer and saying, “I don’t know if you’re aware Peregrine later had a baby sister.”
“There was mention in the paper, yes. I don’t recall the name.”
“It was Rosamund.”
“Ah. That sounds like it. You’re wondering if Rosamund came from the same place as Peregrine? I wondered, too, when I saw the notice. It … disturbed me. Put me in mind of Cain and Abel, for some reason. Yes, it did. Still, it’s so oft
en the way—the adopted baby is followed soon after by the child the couple thought they couldn’t have.”
Max had been thinking much the same thing.
He also had been wondering if Peregrine had found out about the circumstances surrounding his birth. If so, could the shock—the rage, even—at such a deception be a motive for murder?
“It’s stirred it all up again,” she added. “I do think I’ve been careless—not asking my minister’s advice, I mean.”
* * *
Before driving away from Elspeth Muir’s house, Max stopped to look for messages on his mobile phone. It was something he’d gotten more and more into the habit of doing with Awena and Owen in his life.
There was a message from his bishop, the Right Reverend Nigel St. Stephen. Rather, it was from the person in the bishop’s office who organized his calendar. Max’s heart sank. The bishop no doubt had seen the latest news. And he no doubt was alarmed and wondering if and how Max was involved in this latest incident of carnage in otherwise-peaceful Nether Monkslip. Max had been expecting the call, but he had not rehearsed what he might say. The bishop had been understanding thus far, almost viewing these horrendous homicidal incidents as somehow divinely sent, if such tortuous theology could be admitted.
Max himself had come to wonder—was he a catalyst for murder? Had he been sent to Nether Monkslip to root out evil in the village?
And if so, was this ever going to end? Was there a bottom to it?
During his years of training for the priesthood at Oxford, Max had stumbled across a few corpses, and had been involved in solving many of those crimes. He still remembered with a shiver of distaste the clean-cut murderer he’d helped put away his first Michaelmas term. He had never quite realized until now how much crime had dogged him, not just in Nether Monkslip but throughout his adult life. He supposed crime solving might be some special gift or calling, like tap dancing or harmonica playing. Somehow things had gone from no murders happening in Nether Monkslip, at least not in recent memory, to variations on The Murder at the Vicarage.
Max had one further uneasy thought: The bishop also might ask about the baptism for Owen, a question for which Max had no ready answer. He and Awena had not worked out yet, as they had for their marriage, what sort of ceremony might encompass and honor their differing beliefs.
Oh, and there was the further problem of the face that kept reappearing on the wall of St. Edwold’s Church. A man’s face, reputed to have miraculous healing properties, a face that bore a strong resemblance to the bearded face of Jesus on the famous Shroud of Turin. As well as to the face recently discovered—by Max—at the obscure nunnery of Monkbury Abbey.
Coincidence?
There was certainly no shortage of things for the bishop to be concerned about.
Whatever. It was better to get the call over with. Max took a deep breath before punching the reply button, thinking as he did so that he might as well put the bishop on speed dial.
Chapter 11
SUZANNA AND THE WI
Back in Nether Monkslip, Suzanna was rallying the members of the Women’s Institute in preparation for the Harvest Fayre. “Rallying” in Suzanna’s case involved a sort of scorched-earth diplomacy delivered with heavy-handed flattery and exhortation. Now talk of the Totleigh Hall murder had, of course, derailed her agenda, and Suzanna was having a struggle to keep her squadron of forty or so women in line. The harvest and even the looming duck race were minor diversions on the village calendar; the shocking murder was what was happening now. She made eye contact with Chanel Dirkson as she entered in a silent plea for help. Chanel, even though she was a self-help guru, was used to being enlisted in this way—she spent much of the day reading letters pleading for outside assistance. She cooperated now with a loud shushing noise.
“All right, ladies! The Fayre is almost upon us and we’ve a lot of ground to cover today. If you could shut the hell up about the murder, please, we’ll get through this a lot faster.”
There was the usual horrified gasp from Miss Pitchford as she dropped a stitch in whatever fleecy item she was knitting for one of her grandnieces or grandnephews. The rest of them were, to a greater or lesser degree, used to it.
Miss Pitchford was always threatening to resign from whatever group Suzanna was involved with, but she could never bring herself to do so. It would shut her off from everything going on in the parish, and compromise her cherished role at the center of the village grapevine.
Unfortunately, Suzanna enjoyed fanning the flames. She had recently run a photo in the parish bulletin of Miss Pitchford peering out from behind lace curtains as she spied on passing villagers. The fact everyone did this on occasion made no matter; Miss Pitchford had elevated the pastime to a full-time career.
“Put yourself in her shoes,” Max, brought into the fray as peacemaker, had said. “Think how you would feel.”
Suzanna thought for a full minute, then said, “No can do. I cannot for the life of me think my way inside that woman’s shrunken head, nor do I want to be in there.”
“You’ll have to print a retraction. Or something.”
“You can’t retract a photo.”
“An apology, then. Suzanna, she’s elderly, and she has no one. Her status in the village is all she has.”
“She has no one because she’s an insufferable pain in the ass.”
“Suzanna,” said Max, his voice carrying, unusually, a warning note.
“Very well, then. I still don’t see why just because you’re elderly you should expect all this special treatment. You’re the same person you always were, just more wrinkly and in general ten times more obnoxious.”
“Let’s pray you live a long time, Suzanna. Perhaps you’ll change, or you’ll change your mind about your expectations. Anyway, a retraction?”
Some more grumbling, followed by: “I’ll try to think of something. I suppose I could Photoshop her into a scene where she’s actually contributing to the common good. Feeding the poor or hugging Mother Teresa or something.”
Now Suzanna took a deep, calming breath as she surveyed the chattering group before her. There was no question she had lost control of the situation for the moment. Only Lily, the village textiles expert, was paying attention. The shepherdess, as Suzanna called her. Lily’s stall at the Fayre, where she sold hand-knit scarves, hats, and jumpers, was always among the most popular, so these meetings were important to her. She was a purist when it came to her profession, dealing globally now in wools and yarns, and raising her own sheep for their wool, dying the resulting yarn using fruits, vegetables, and plants. She gave each of her sheep a name, for they were more like her pets, and named each of her designs after its former “owner.” Last year she had created the popular Anjelica Ray jumper, which she wore now—an airy confection in harvest shades of greens and dark oranges and brownish reds.
Lily tended to dot her conversation with mystifying terms like back-strap loom, weft, and tabby ground weave. She had recently branched out to create silk slippers with stylized words of inspiration like Love and Hope woven onto narrow strips sewn together to create the shoe face, an idea inspired by an exhibit she had seen about the Silk Road. For a while, her only regret had been that she didn’t have time or resources to cultivate her own silkworms and plant the mulberry trees to feed them. Then she had read a PETA article that informed her that “1,500 silkworms are killed to produce 100 grams of silk,” and that had been the end of her slipper enterprise.
She sat next to Tara Raine on one of the Village Hall’s hard plastic seats. Tara wore her usual yoga ensemble: leggings with batik stripes, and a loose-fitting top in all colors of the rainbow. With her curly red hair tied into a knot at the top of her head, she, and Lily beside her, looked like an ad for New Age herbal supplements. Tara’s mind, characteristically, was not on the murder, for she struggled to banish negative thinking from her mental landscape, but on the wholesomeness of the CleanMind CleanBody retreat she would be offering with Awena next summer in Monksli
p-super-Mare. It had become an annual event, drawing people, many of them celebrities with a newly discovered spiritual inclination, from as far away as London.
These thoughts Tara was having were, however, swimming against what she called “a wee tide of worry” about the sudden long silences of her boyfriend.
She felt a presence beside her and opened her eyes (she had been sneaking in a quick mini-meditation, as advised by Deepak to counter anxiety), to see Chanel Dirkson had quietly moved into the seat to her right. There was a soft rustle of organic fabric, a choice of which Lily heartily approved—this time Chanel wore a tunic of soft yellow over flowing gray wool trousers. Her hair shone from what looked like a recent visit to the hairdresser’s; she wore it tapered to rest on her shoulders in a flattering bob.
Tara smiled, for she liked the older woman, finding her sympathetic but not intrusive. The smile was warmly returned.
Tara decided on the instant to turn the question in her mind over to the expert, for it had to be good karma that had brought Chanel to her side. Tara’s boyfriend of long standing, who lived in nearby Chipping Monkslip, had been showing a distinct cooling of interest in their relationship.
Chanel, much like a doctor at a social occasion, was often asked to take the patient’s pulse, metaphorically speaking. Inwardly, she sighed—why did they always come to her when it was nearly too late to save them? Women—and men, too, of course, but mostly women—could make such messes of their love lives, when a little common sense was all that was called for.
“My best advice,” she said, once Tara had described the symptoms, “is to vanish for a very long time.”
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