“No. I mean, yes, they did. It seems to have been a … a finely calibrated crime. With one intended victim only.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have any thoughts about what happened? Any theories at all? Did he have any reason to fear for his life? Had he been anxious or worried about anything lately?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly with either concentration in forming her answer or suspicion of Max’s motive in asking the questions. Again, small white teeth nibbled at her lower lip. In truth, Max didn’t know why the questions about fear had occurred to him, but past experience had taught him there was often a clue in the way his thoughts were trending—if only he could fathom what it was.
“He was a powerful man. Powerful men make enemies,” she said at last. This was a somewhat cleaned-up version of what she had told Cotton. Perhaps she had taken a moment to ponder the wisdom of being so frank with the authorities.
“I see.” He paused a moment to see if she’d say more. “Well, I am, of course, willing to help you with arranging the services for your husband,” he told her. “Perhaps his son…”
“Would wish to be consulted? I suppose. Maybe.”
“They were not close?”
“It was not a strong relationship, no,” she replied. “Most parents care about their flesh and blood children simply because they are flesh and blood. Some care only about their legacy—their children as their legacy. A reflection of themselves.” She stopped, as if something had just occurred to her. “Peregrine is Lord Baaden-Boomethistle now. I suppose Pater Baaden-Boomethistle would be pleased by that, if he were still around.” She paused, adding, “Or perhaps not. His father thought Peregrine wasn’t living up to his potential.”
“And you?”
“I never thought he had any potential.”
Ouch. “Really?
“He’s rather a fatuous young man. It remains to be seen if he’ll outgrow that, if the added responsibilities of his title will bring him up to the mark. But he’s been protected and cosseted and spoon-fed all his life, programmed into becoming the vapid, mindless oaf you see today. I don’t believe the rumors he is gay. He has always struck me as rather a gloomy sort of person. A gloomy oaf. Anyway, his gayness is anybody’s guess, but overall, I think not. He seems to be neither here nor there, and it is far more likely he is unpopular with members of both sexes.”
Ouch, thought Max again. Peregrine thus disposed of, she returned her attention to the horse. He was taken aback by her harshness, by the hard words emerging incongruously from the petal pink, childlike lips. The initially demure manner had slipped. Certainly Peregrine, from what little he knew of him, would not win any awards for intellect, but even so—
“How do you and your stepdaughter get along?”
“I can stand her in small doses.” She paused and added, “I daresay she feels the same way about me.”
Again she turned away from Foto Finish to look at him. “Actually, she’s not around that much. And he—generally he’s away, too, of course, but even before that … He’s a strange boy. Given to mooching about on his own. I never know quite what he’s up to. His father allowed him to take his meals alone, in his room.”
That struck Max as a sad commentary right there. This kid on his own all day and even during the dinner hour, when most families manage a passing check-in with one another. And then there was the comment that he was given to mooching about. Looked at another way, a lot can be seen and overheard when one mooches about on one’s own. A lot of trouble gotten up to, as well.
He did not fail to notice she had switched the conversation away from Rosamund and back to Peregrine. And he wondered why.
“I did hear there was sometimes sparring at mealtimes.”
“Oh, I suppose. There was a bit of business at breakfast the other day. No worse than the usual. Peregrine had done something his father disliked. Between us, I think he was about to be sent down from university. In fact, he seemed to have intercepted a message from his tutor to that effect—the tutor and my husband were great friends.”
“But there was already something of an atmosphere before Peregrine arrived home?” Max was fishing, but this kind of rancor generally thrived in a preexisting atmosphere.
“Was there? I don’t recall particularly that there was.” She looked up at him, calmly assessing, a look of mild humor on her face. “You are thinking I am too hard on him,” she said. “You don’t know him as well as I do, Vicar—some people bring trouble wherever they go. So you mustn’t rush to judge me.”
They were words of annoyance but spoken in that silky, insinuating voice, so that the listener was not quite sure where he stood.
“You seem, if you don’t mind my saying so, a bit hostile toward him.”
“You’d be hostile, too, if he’d slandered you to anyone who would listen. He and Rosamund, and that floozy grandmother of theirs. I’ve always been in a bad position, all of them running their mouths against me. Accusations…”
“I wasn’t aware—”
“I’ve had nothing to do with the estate manager,” she rushed on hotly. “With Bill Travis. That slandering, horrible woman.”
He could see how tiresome her position was. No one enjoyed being disliked, especially when accusers were stacked three against one.
“Yes, the standards are exacting for being a member of this family,” she said. “But if you are thinking I killed my husband to get out from under, I was in Monkslip-super-Mare at the time it happened. I have an alibi: shopping, having lunch, followed by more shopping—with witnesses. I ran into some people from the village while I was there. First it was Elka Garth. Then I saw Chanel Dirkson. We chatted a long while. You know how it is with the villagers. You can’t just say hello; you have to stay and have a real chin-wag. This was around seven in the evening. Then I stayed the night in Monkslip Parva. With a girlfriend and her family.”
“Yes, DCI Cotton told me you had an alibi.”
“You don’t believe me?” When he did not reply, she added sulkily, silkily, that pretty pout cushioning her words, “You seem to be very chummy with the DCI.”
“We go back a long way. We first met when I was appearing as a character witness in court, for a young lad who’d gone astray with some bad companions. DCI Cotton was there, representing the forces of law and order.”
“Did it work?”
“Hmm? The character witnessing, you mean? Yes. The lad was let off with a warning. And when last seen, he lives surrounded by people who care about him. He’s been luckier than most, and more important, he has the wit to realize it.”
“I see.” She did not elaborate on what she saw. She had been brushing Foto Finish’s mane; now she began to separate strands of hair, weaving them into a braid along his neck. Max had never seen this done before. Again he wondered at the love and pampering that went into maintaining this particular horse, probably all the horses here. Did they spoil from the attention, like some people, or did it make them into better horses? The trifling thought led him back to the subject of the young lord of the manor, Peregrine.
“You and Lord Baaden-Boomethistle had been married five years, is that right? How did Peregrine react initially to the marriage?”
“How did he react?” She stopped her work, almost as if pausing to consider the subject for the first time. She seemed to settle on truthfulness as an answer, reasoning quite rightly that Max already knew or could soon find out the truth. “He was almost violently opposed to the marriage, especially at first. I suppose we hadn’t prepared him for it—my husband was not one to ask permission or input, particularly from his son. We didn’t exactly poll everyone for their views, you know. We were in love.” Again that insistence, Max noted. “So we had … some bad weeks. Finally, Peregrine agreed to see a shrink. He went weekly for well over a year. It seemed to calm him. I think what really made the difference was that he simply grew out of the bratty stage and came to realize his father had a right to a happy life, too, like anyone else.”
“Would you tell me the name of the doctor he visited?”
She named a Harley Street specialist of great renown. Max had actually met him at a religious conference once—something about the nation’s spiritual crisis and the effect on mental health. There were many people in search of a church or simply something to believe in; many more who had given up on religion entirely. The majority of the latter felt the need to talk about their lack of religion, which Max and the doctor found interesting in itself. Weren’t those people just protesting too much?
The doctor had struck Max as being saner than many of his colleagues. He wondered at the ethics of trying to get him to talk about Peregrine, but he realized the chances the man would be willing to breach patient confidentiality were a million to one against. Max would pass along the information to Cotton and let him worry about it.
“And the dowager?” He could guess the two got along like the mongoose and the snake, but he left the question open-ended.
“I think she couldn’t get through the day if she didn’t first give everything a base coat of romance” was the silky reply. “In my case, though, she seems to have suspended her usual methods. For me, we are treated to the paranoia and dark worldview of the suspense author. She would be better off focusing her suspicions on Peregrine, but of course she can’t allow that into her dollhouse-size mind.”
She turned to concentrate on beautifying Foto Finish, at moments nuzzling her face against the horse’s cheek. Trying to hide her expression? wondered Max. Or simply overcome by her rather cloying affection for the horse? She exuded such an air of playacting, Max would have bet the former. For she was hiding something; no one could be as untouched as she appeared to be about her husband’s death—whether or not she were responsible for it. Her world had just been turned—if not turned upside down, then reshaped and molded into an entirely new form and future. Again she busied herself stroking the animal’s neck. Even Foto Finish seemed to tire of this extravagant display of fondness, and, snorting, he suddenly threw his head back, stepping away from her.
“You aren’t suggesting that Peregrine had anything to do with this, are you?”
She looked straight at Max now. He held her gaze, waiting, wondering if she was trying to toss the boy completely into it. Remembering she herself was not much more than a girl didn’t help the dislike he felt for her.
“That in fact is one of his theories. That I’m tossing him into it. He is full of … theories. Peregrine believes the earth was populated by aliens. Seriously. So whatever he’s telling you, take it with a grain of salt. Or Kryptonite.”
Max knew Peregrine liked to hang out at Awena’s Godessspell shop, which drew an eclectic crowd at times. “There’s no harm in him, Max,” Awena had told him. “He thinks aliens built Stonehenge and are trying to communicate with us using crop circles, but so do a lot of people. He’ll outgrow it.”
Max found Bree’s manner so disconcerting, he decided on a gamble, trying to shake her seemingly unshakable poise.
“I am afraid I have heard the other rumors,” he said. “About the estate manager, for one example.”
A flicker of apprehension crossed her face, like the flash of light through tree branches blown by the wind. He remembered the indistinguishable voices he’d heard as he’d approached the stables earlier. But she collected herself and said with every appearance of coming clean, “My husband and I were happy together for a very long while. Happier than most, I daresay.”
“And then?”
She shrugged.
“And then we weren’t.” She looked as if she might go on and then decided against it. She closed her mouth so tightly, he would not have been surprised to see her pantomime turning a key in a lock. As it was, she looked defiant, but scared.
“This is rather bad timing for you, isn’t it?” said Max, not entirely without sympathy. “Apart from losing your husband, the timing of losing him is a bit awkward, I mean.”
She relaxed her shoulders and rubbed a hand across the back of her neck in a gesture that spoke of tensions being released.
“I am sorry,” she said, surprising him. “I didn’t mean to make it sound as if that’s my first concern. Of course losing my husband is awful; he was good to me. He gave me a good life. But this all looks rather … you know.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes, too convenient. And it is anything but. The police are bound to look at the whole thing with suspicion. We’ve all seen those shows on the telly. The spouse is the first suspect.”
“Or in this case, the spouse’s lover.”
“Oh my God, Max. What am I going to do?”
Max, was it now. The appeal to the man, not the priest. But again, he was not without sympathy. If one believed in divine punishment and retribution, here was a doozy of an example. In the midst of a reckless affair, her husband is killed, and she and this man are thrown right into the lineup of suspects—put right at the head of that line. But Max knew there was a certain class of criminal that never considered or cared about appearances. There was a type of personality that believed it was immune and could get away, literally, with murder. He had met many such in his MI5 days, many of them sociopaths.
And Lady Baaden-Boomethistle was in a special category, bestowed by her God-given looks—there was no question. Possessed of a natural, flawless, and effortless beauty, she must be so used to having men open doors for her and rush to do her bidding that she wouldn’t give it a second thought. The way one takes health for granted until one’s health fails. Thus would Lady Baaden-Boomethistle go through her days, finding the universe organized to her liking, until old age caught up with her at last.
Such thoughtless, innate beauty might make one come to believe one was invincible.
As for getting men to do one’s bidding—might that even include murder?
There was a great rectangle of hay just outside Foto Finish’s stall, and now, as if suddenly tiring, she moved to sit atop it. She removed her boots and tucked her stocking feet beneath her. It was a casual movement, a strangely intimate one, as though she were in her bedroom, preparing to change for dinner. Max felt this sort of unconscious act on her part was part of her charm. She was not being rude, never that; she was simply following whatever impulse came into her head. It was a gesture that reminded him of someone, and then he realized that just so did Awena sometimes sit, graceful and relaxed and serenely unaware.
He didn’t reply, and she continued to gaze at him, although with a certain lessening of favor. With a slight change of gears, and a certain edge to the little-girl tone, she said, “When can we arrange for the … how do you say it? Celebration … of his life?” Had the pause in her last sentence gone on a bit too long?
For celebration was clearly the key word as far as she was concerned.
“I’ll be in touch,” Max told her. Relenting a bit, for his tone had been abrupt, he added, “‘Jesus, Son of Mary,’ number three sixty-three, is a favorite with many.”
She looked as if she couldn’t care less if they sang ABBA’s greatest hits. Then she surprised him by saying, almost shyly, “I always liked ‘I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.’ Could we have that, do you think?”
He smiled. “Of course. You may choose whatever you like.”
* * *
Bree watched Max’s back as he walked away, out of the stables, headed toward the main house. Really, she thought. Such a dishy man; it was just ridiculous. But she had not been brought up in religion and she had no use for religious people. Although she found them wonderfully pliable, particularly the men, she trusted none of them.
And so she found the several small untruths she had told Max bothered her not at all.
A dark figure emerged from one of the stalls at the back of the stables.
“That was perfect.” Foto Finish pricked up his ears at the sound of the deep, warm voice.
“Perfect,” the voice repeated. “You played him brilliantly.”
Chapter 20
&
nbsp; MAX AND THE DOWAGER
The Dowager Baaden-Boomethistle received Max with a show of pleasure, tempered by a nicely calculated recognition that while he was not to the manor born, he was the village vicar and his office must be accorded respect. She established this fine distinction by addressing him as Father Maxen and pointing him into a low seat before her own place on the sofa. Max ignored the gesture and sat in the chair nearest her.
“Please call me Father Max,” he said. “Or Vicar, if you prefer. I am most deeply sorry for your loss, Lady Baaden-Boomethistle.”
“It is dreadful. Simply dreadful. To lose an only son. And in such a common way.”
“You mean … for him to have been killed in such a way.”
“Murdered!” she said.
Max reflected that there was in fact a long tradition of those in the upper classes getting themselves murdered. While he had never seen statistics to back up the premise, certainly the nobs put themselves in the way of offending people, and perhaps more often than did those in the lower classes. After all, they had wider scope and opportunity to give offense.
She had taken a handkerchief from inside the long sleeve of her low-cut black dress and was now dabbing at her eyes. The handkerchief came away spotted with black goo, the makeup she liberally applied to her false lashes. He also noticed that one corner of a false lash had come loose, giving her a startled, cockeyed appearance. He reminded himself that while snob she might be, she was a mother mourning her son.
“I am so sorry,” he repeated.
She nodded, taking this as her due. She also was busy taking Max’s measure: tall and striking, she thought, her romantic writer’s brain automatically flipping through the pages of her internal dictionary. A dashing, heroic figure, utterly, meltingly masculine, hard-bodied and with the slightest and most attractive hint of the rogue playing at his edges. And those gloriously penetrating gray eyes! If, she thought, I were twenty years younger. Even ten years younger! And not in mourning. And if he were not married. Well. Not that the married part had always been an impediment, but now she had her position to consider. That business with Lord Stag-Hazen did follow her around so, his rather ill-bred wife kicking up such a tiresome fuss, and she—
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