The Haunted Season

by G. M. Malliet

  “Not if he can avoid it, apparently. He’d escaped from his mother and ran just ahead of us to the church. Anyway, this is when Konstantin really lost it; he turned toward where Tommy had been and shot four bullets in a frame around the face in the wall. The next shot was through the forehead of the face. A lucky shot, given his eyesight—a perfect bull’s-eye, obliterating it. Tommy took the opportunity to run like hell out the door. Fortunately, he’s so small, the pews hid his progress.

  “Of course, Eugenia would not know that six shots fired meant the handgun held one more bullet. Her knowledge of guns came from six-shooters she’d seen on the telly. Awena, the last person to know or care about guns, had no idea, either. She kept her cool, saying nothing to provoke him, and Eugenia stayed hidden. Then Eugenia thought she heard Awena say softly, ‘Please let me go. I have to get back.… Owen … Owen.’ It was, says Eugenia now, like a prayer.”

  “And that’s when you and Max burst in,” said Essex. Like a child hearing a favorite story, she loved the retelling and was anxious that Cotton leave nothing out.

  “That’s right. Just as Eugenia was collecting herself, Max and I burst in. And because she is honing this story for the Mirror, here is the version she insists on telling: ‘I was suddenly overcome with a raging thirst. And all I could think of was the wine flagon on the altar. There was no reason for this thirst. What on earth is wrong with me? I wondered. It was hardly time for a drink. Although, when you think of it, when was there ever a better time?’

  “I think Eugenia may enjoy a tipple or two in a private moment,” Cotton told Essex. “Anyway, ‘in a flash,’ it all was made clear to her. Grabbing the flagon, she threw it straight at the man’s head. Bull’s eye. It didn’t knock him out, but because he couldn’t see it coming—remember his eyesight—it completely startled him. Even better, the liquid connected with the elements in the earphones around his neck. The resulting shock was minuscule, just unexpected enough to jolt him. It was the split second Max and I needed. Max put Owen into the collection basket; I flung myself at the guy, Max flying through the air right after me.

  “But Eugenia reached him first.”

  “Right. It was just chaotic.” Cotton shook his head. “Pure chaos.”

  “And then came the explosion. Max had the gun and was already turning back toward Owen; taking him from the basket, he shielded him from the blast. You, meanwhile, had wrestled the suspect to the ground—both you and he and Eugenia were behind one of the pews. Protected.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And only Awena still sat near the bomb,” said Essex. “The guy had planted it in that makeshift altar beneath the face—an IED hidden among all the flowers and petitions and photos people had left. Perhaps he was hoping it would go off while people were praying there.”

  Cotton breathed a sigh. “Right. But thank God,” he added, “he didn’t use shrapnel. We’d have had a far worse outcome if he had.”

  “Wait a minute. Not that it really matters—we’ve got him for this—but how can we know this was the same guy who killed Max’s friend Paul? We have Max as an eyewitness, sure, but it was ages ago, and he barely had a glimpse of the suspect. I think it was the glasses he remembered more than anything.”

  “There was a security camera near the scene of Paul’s murder. Grainy footage, but good enough. Enhanced, as we can do more and better these days, it will help ID him. It shows him attaching a magnetic bomb onto the car—the car Max would have himself been killed in had Paul not taken his place.

  “But there was more—evidence we at first knew nothing about. Max had a grim souvenir of that day of Paul’s death. Preserved on the top shelf of his closet was the shirt he, Max, had been wearing the day of Paul’s murder, and on it was a spot of blood. Max handed it over to the prosecutors. He had assumed all along it was Paul’s blood on the collar, but it turns out it is not—it is the killer’s.

  “The DNA on that collar is a perfect match for the blood of Konstantin Konstantinov. He managed to injure himself that day; he didn’t run fast enough after planting the explosive.

  “Analysts need only a speck of blood to tie him to the scene. And thanks to Max, we have it.”

  Chapter 28

  FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  One day many weeks later, as the case wound its way through the court system, Essex and Cotton met again, this time over bangers and mash (her) and a vegetarian Cornish pasty (him) in the police canteen.

  “When they searched Konstantin’s flat, they hit pay dirt,” Cotton told her. “Sulfuric acid, nitric acid, phenol, wiring, lab equipment, you name it. A one-way ticket to the U.S., flying under a false ID, of course. He also had some experimental stuff—MI6 is not talking about it, not to the likes of us yokels. But according to Max, who still has his channels, it’s the sort of thing that is not routinely screened by security. Pity is Konstantin didn’t blow himself up long before, but we have him now. He had to have had accomplices, given his eyesight, and that’s where they’re putting the pressure on him, to find out. He’ll talk.”

  “There is the strangest rumor going around,” began Essex hesitatingly. “They say he’s already made a written confession to the whole thing. Helpfully, he’s naming names of some of his worst colleagues.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  “But … Remember he came to Nether Monkslip on a sort of pilgrimage, seeking a cure. For his eyes?”

  “Right.”

  “The face drew him there, and stories of Awena’s powers, and legends of Nether Monkslip as a place of healing. The stories of miracle cures, especially for people losing their vision—the ties with Monkbury Abbey and the nuns and so on. He hung around the pub at the Horseshoe, where he was staying, soaking up the gossip. Of course he heard of Max, and probably recognized him from the news photos. Came to hear all about him, Awena, the baby.”

  “Yes,” said Cotton tersely. He was terse because he was having the most unprofessional thoughts about the case, in rare moments wishing he’d used a little more force on the guy. Just a little more. He’d had him in a chokehold, and … He had talked about this to Max, who did not surprise him by saying, “Paul’s wife has a right to see justice done, in court. As for me, I am satisfied to think of him spending his life in jail, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Besides, think of what he knows, what he might tell us one day.”

  Cotton returned his attention to what Essex was saying.

  “They say his sight has come back.”

  “What?”

  “Konstantin. Our guy. Our bad guy. His sight has been restored. And that’s why he’s confessed.”

  “He had some operation? What?”

  “No, he was cured. A miracle. He says he woke up one morning and his sight was restored. Presumably by the face on the wall.”

  “Impossible.”

  “So the prison doctors say. That’s why he wore those glasses in the first place, to protect what was left of his eyesight. His world was going dark, and so he flailed about looking for a cure.”

  “Impossible,” Cotton repeated.

  “Me, I think he may have been cured by Awena,” Essex continued, ignoring him. “I wish my gran had been around for this; she lost her vision the last few years of her life. Remember Awena sat by him and tried to comfort him, urging him to open himself to what was possible but to be ready to accept what wasn’t possible. Eugenia said she held his hand. There was nothing about this guy that wasn’t scary—the owner of the Horseshoe said he was grubby, dirty and disheveled, and he’d soon been ready to toss him out—but nothing scared Awena. We will never know for sure, will we? What cured him? But something did. Make that Something with a big S.”

  Cotton, who up until now had had little use for the supernatural, still found himself shaken to his core. But he would not let it show. Essex was apparently more easily swayed by reasons beyond this world.

  “Konstantin will end his days in prison,” said Cotton. “So now he’ll have a clear view of those concrete w
alls. On a good day, he might see birds flying free overhead and wish he could join them.”

  He became lost in thought, separating the peas from his pasty with a fork and lining them up into a grid of four across on his plate. He surfaced to hear Essex say, “… Chanel doing?”

  “Hmm? Well, she’ll do a lot better if she wises up and throws Bree into it, but so far she won’t. If Chanel were Bree’s lover, a conclusion we simply leaped to, there might be hope that she’d see the light. But since Chanel is her mother—a mother protecting her child, as she sees it—that whole mother bear thing … well. She may turn, but it’s a much, much longer shot. In a sort of role reversal from the John the Baptist story, it was the mother doing the daughter’s bidding.

  “Max was right, of course. Bree’s maiden name was Porter. Of course, we knew that, but since Chanel was nowhere near to being a suspect, we never made the connection. Never thought to look at Bree’s birth record while we were busy looking up Peregrine’s. But there it was, clear as day. How many Bree Porters born in Wiltshire to unwed teenagers named Chanel can there be in the world? Of course, Chanel later married briefly and became Chanel Dirkson. Even so. She lied about that, by the way: she told several villagers that she’d never been married. I suppose that in pretending that Dirkson was her maiden name, she was trying to bury the fact of her relationship to Lady Baaden-Boomethistle, née Bree Porter. Which suggests she was planning something bad when she moved here. Had probably moved here at a summons from Bree. Otherwise, why lie about something so innocuous?

  “Looking back further, with the help of Interpol—Musteile remains beside himself over that and will not shut up about it—we found Chanel’s birth record in Russia.”

  “I still don’t get—” began Essex.

  “How Max made the connection? That conversation Destiny overheard—part of the problem she was having was that they were speaking partly in Russian, Chanel’s native tongue. Chanel was born in Russia but came to the UK as a young girl when her mother married a Frenchman, later settling in Wiltshire. It was in Wiltshire that Chanel gave birth, as a young unwed mother, to Bree. I wondered at the names, the way they were sort of Frenchified—I mean really, Chanel and Bree?—but Porter in this case is not of English origin, but French.

  “Anyway, the mother taught the daughter what she remembered of the Russian language and they sometimes slipped into old habits as they talked. What Destiny heard as ‘not yet,’ for example, being used in a way that was slightly out of true in English, was nyet, or no.

  “I’d imagine a lot of the garbled language Destiny overheard and couldn’t understand that day had a Russian phrase or two thrown in—this was a sort of private language, a pigeon Russian, if you like, that the pair had adopted. Another example: Destiny heard one of the women say the word obit, used in a strange, ungrammatical way. What the woman actually was saying was ubit. The English obit was close enough in meaning that it made sense, but not quite. The Russian word ubit means ‘to kill’ in English. The woman, probably Chanel, knew someone who could kill for them.

  “And what Destiny heard as ‘duh’ was probably da, or yes.”

  For heaven’s sake, thought Essex. “And Max figured this out how?”

  “I asked him the very same question.”

  Cotton thought back to an earlier conversation with Max: “I know some Russian,” Max had told him. “And there was this dream that lingered in my mind.…” He told Cotton some of the Russian symbolism in his dream—the draft horse, the head with the Tolstoy beard, concluding, “Really, it was obvious, once I thought it through. What cinched it was when Bree told me she saw Chanel in Monkslip-super-Mare, providing her with an alibi for the time of the murder and shoring up her own alibi. Why would she do that—alibi Chanel? I would believe the blameless Elka if she said she saw Bree, but Bree could not have seen Chanel. As we now know, Chanel was busy killing Lord B-B at seven.”

  Cotton had mumbled something that sounded like “for Chrissake” but said merely, “I thought it was Italian you spoke fluently, Max.”

  Max had shrugged modestly. “That, too.”

  He’d gone on to explain, “I really don’t see how I missed it all so badly. Because Bree’s impact was so sexual, I assumed wrongly that she exerted power only in that way. I was wrong. Chanel loved Bree, too, as did many people who should have known better, but of course she loved her in a different way. I think Chanel, a woman of somewhat ordinary beauty, may have been astounded to have created such a perfect beauty, to have brought such physical loveliness into the world. That created a powerful bond, too. A love, of sorts. Perhaps more like a fierce adoration. Whatever. Known for her common sense, Chanel threw all common sense aside when it came to her daughter.” Max had paused and said, “It was a classic case of ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

  Essex was saying now, “And so long as Chanel believes Bree was being abused by her husband … the same way Chanel was abused by her husband, as she claims—this Dirkson fellow…” Essex let the thought drift. Was there a mother alive who wouldn’t have tried to intervene? But a saner mother would have found a saner method. Aloud she said, “Right. In killing Lord B-B, Chanel was saving the beautiful daughter she adored. Avenging the wrongs done to her.” She shook her head. “She’ll never talk.”

  “I can only hope you’re wrong. People have a way of talking in prison, though. Too much time on their hands, you know. I’m thinking of putting a policewoman in there to cozy up to her, get her talking.” He looked at her. “How do you feel about working undercover?”

  “Are you serious?” Essex, who probably weighed a little over seven stone sopping wet and wearing riot gear, didn’t hesitate, for she was fearless. “Yes, of course! I’ll get her talking. When can I go in?”

  “Think about it awhile.” Even though her street smarts would protect her, Cotton feared he might have spoken too quickly. It would be like sending her into a badger baiting, with her the badger. “Anyway,” he said, to change the subject, “as for all the folks at Totleigh Hall, they’ve recovered nicely. People with resources like that always do. Bree is enthroned as the new dowager, and all hint of scandal will be washed away by passing years and amassing money and dignity.

  “As for Peregrine, he has petitioned to be recognized as an earl in his own right—the rightful earl of Lislelivet. For now, he’s still hanging about the village, tootling around on his bicycle, smooth and dapper with a new haircut and clothing, his usual public-school sheen restored.

  “By the way, apparently Peregrine was not the only one attempting a disguise. Chanel’s child-of-nature, organic getup was her attempt to blend in with the folk of Nether Monkslip. Her real style runs more to heels and false eyelashes. Although right now, of course, she’s wearing prison garb.

  “Anyway, Peregrine’s come down from university or been sent down, whatever version you choose to believe. His sister inherited in his place, you know, and, fortunately for him, she is being magnanimous and wise—at least for the moment.

  “The same goes for his grandmother—if it were up to Bree, she would have to fight for her food and shelter, but Rosamund stands as protectress to all, defending against the worst impulses of the old regime. She seems to have taken quite a fancy to the estate manager, by the way. Bill Travis. That certainly will shake things up if she marries him, which I think would be most unwise. However, no one consulted me.”

  “These old families,” said Essex. “Like with heirloom tomatoes, you can get some strange and wonderful varieties.”

  “You sound like Awena. That’s exactly like something she’d say.”

  “What about Father Max?” asked Essex slowly, dreading the answer. “How is he?” A sure sign of her distress was the spiky confusion of her multicolored hair, which seemed to stand on end in sympathetic disarray.

  “Not good,” replied Cotton. “He’s taken some time off to make sure Awena’s completely well and back to normal, but I don’t think there’s enough time in the world…”

&nbs
p; “I know. It’s unthinkable.” She paused, watching Cotton as he sorted small cubes of carrot into a tic-tac-toe design with the peas. “Do you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Max became a bishop himself one day.”

  “I think that’s the last thing Max would want. An archdeacon, perhaps—there is no way they won’t try to promote him upstairs. They probably think he’s wasted in Nether Monkslip.”

  A pause. Cotton moved the salt and pepper shakers on the table into perfect alignment on the checkered oilcloth. He did this sort of thing, Essex knew from long acquaintance, only when he was worried.

  “The explosion?” she asked him. “Did they ever figure out…”

  Cotton looked up from the table and nodded. “The guy had an IED attached to his belt. But he’d removed it and—I told you—left it hidden in that sort of makeshift altar by the face. The idea may have been to blow himself up along with Awena and whoever else was around. But here is the tricky part: The IED was set to a timer, and that timer was attached to an alarm on his mobile.

  “He seems to have forgotten the time change—that is what we think happened. His own wristwatch had not ‘fallen back’ at two A.M. Sunday to become one A.M. But the mobile clock reset itself automatically, of course. He never noticed the discrepancy, and when the explosion failed to go off, he just assumed the bomb was a dud and tossed it.”

  “Fool” was Essex’s brief summary.

  “Most of these guys are. It makes them no less dangerous, but they’re all fools. So perhaps changing his mind, losing his courage, thinking the thing worthless—whatever—he had unstrapped it from himself and thrown it away. And when it went off…”

  Cotton could clearly remember, would remember until the day he died, the sensation of his body being blown back by the force of the explosion, of twisting in the air, and finally coming to a thudding landing in the nave. He’d been knocked senseless for a moment, and when he came to, he was staring straight into a ripped-apart copy of the Book of Common Prayer. The pew had saved him. Him and Eugenia and the wretched Konstantin. Awena, unshielded and nearer the explosion, had caught the worst of it. She’d been knocked completely out, suffering a serious concussion.