Paradise Walk

by Mary Malloy

  Lizzie thought about the two lenses in the Becket reliquary. “There is a lens,” she said. “William Kent, Alison’s father, left two lenses in his house.” She tried to remember what had been inscribed on them, but couldn’t. “We need to go to Bath and get them,” she said eagerly.

  “And come back here on December 29?” Kate said. “No, there must be another way to figure out where the beam would point.”

  They went back into the church and studied the window again. There was a tomb in front of it with a carved marble back panel that stood against the wall of the church. “I could climb up to the hole on that,” Kate whispered to Lizzie, gesturing at the tomb. “There are just enough places to grab onto.”

  “And then what?” Lizzie said. “You could reach it, but you couldn’t look through it in the right direction.”

  The two women were silent until Kate turned to Lizzie with a look of excitement. “I think I have a star laser pointer in my pack! I don’t think I took it out after my last trip on the ship.”

  Lizzie had gone several times with Kate and her students to study constellations and knew the tool she was talking about, a green laser pointer with a beam strong enough to point at stars.

  “If I can secure it in the hole somehow,” Kate said, thinking aloud. “The diameter of the hole is bigger than the shaft of the pointer, and that is going to make it inexact, but at least we should be able to narrow the possibilities on the floor to a few of the memorial stones.”

  “That guy is not going to let you climb up on that tomb,” Lizzie whispered, nodding at the guide.

  “He will need to be distracted,” Kate whispered back.

  The other couple in the church were now in the vestibule.

  “Get your laser,” Lizzie said to Kate, moving toward the door of the chapel. She told the guide that she would like to know more about the explosion in the gunpowder factory, and asked him if he would show her where the factory had been. The other couple, hearing the question, followed them outside. As soon as the guide began to expound on the Vale of the Chilworth, Lizzie slipped away.

  Kate was already climbing the tomb when Lizzie returned to the scene. With one foot balanced on the head of an angel she put her hand up to the hole. “There’s a ridge up here where you could put a lens in,” she said as she turned on the beam of her laser pointer and pushed it into the shaft of the hole. She gently rolled the pointer back and forth inside the tunnel in the stone, and the green beam made an arc on the floor of the church at the edge of the center aisle.

  Lizzie ran to the spot. There were four stones intersecting within the arc. They all looked to have been carved at about the same time. Three of them had death dates in the 1940s, but the fourth was completely anomalous:Brother Osbert Giffard

  Monk of Canterbury

  1167-1538

  Kate climbed down from the tomb and joined Lizzie at the stone. “That can’t be right,” she said, pointing at the inscription with her toe. “He’d have to be, what, three hundred seventy-one years old.”

  “Obviously, this is a clue to something,” Lizzie said, the frustration clear in her tone. “But I have no idea what. Could this possibly have anything to do with the Weaver and her pilgrimage?”

  She took a picture of the stone and of the window with the camera of her cell phone, and then dialed Alison’s number. There was no chance to tell Alison any of what she had learned, however.

  “The police from Oxford are looking for you,” Alison said as soon as she knew it was Lizzie on the line. “Dante Zettler’s death has been ruled a homicide. He was poisoned.”

  Chapter 28

  The news of Dante Zettler’s murder had already reached Boston. Soon after Lizzie ended her conversation with Alison, Jackie called to tell her that she had been contacted by the Oxford police department, who wanted to conduct an interview with her by video conference at Boston Police Headquarters.

  “Apparently the poison that killed him has a pretty specific time line. They think he ingested it at the dinner we ate together or in a cocktail immediately preceding it.”

  “Is there any chance that it was accidental?”

  “The guy that spoke to me didn’t seem to think so.” At the other end of the line, Jackie cleared her throat. “I hope you don’t mind, but I gave them this number. They told me they wanted to contact you.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” Lizzie responded. “It’s not like I’m a suspect. I don’t even see how I can help them.”

  “You don’t think anyone overheard me giving him the business about the rapist in the Wife of Bath do you?”

  “Oh Jackie!” Lizzie said, suppressing a laugh. “Even if they did, his being stupid did not give you a motive to kill him.”

  “In my experience that is one of the best motives there is!”

  Lizzie reassured her friend. “I’m sure they just need to talk to everyone who had contact with him that night.”

  Lizzie and Kate walked into Guildford and rented a car to drive to London. Kate’s flight was the next morning and they booked a hotel near Heathrow Airport. The Oxford Police called and asked Lizzie when she could come in to make a statement, and she made an appointment for the following afternoon.

  “Is this the end of the pilgrimage?” Kate asked as they stashed their backpacks in the car.

  “I hope not,” Lizzie answered. “It certainly isn’t the end of the project. We have found so much new material! The tapestry, the offerings to the churches, it’s all really astonishing stuff.”

  “How much is left to do?”

  “Well, I will need to visit Westminster Abbey in London and see if I can find anything there, and then the road to Canterbury as described by Chaucer, and the Cathedral there.”

  “What about the clue we found at St. Martha’s?”

  “The first thing is to describe it all to Alison and see if she can help us figure out what it means. I’ll go to Hengemont from Oxford to talk it over with her.”

  It was a sad parting for both women the next morning.

  “I hate to be leaving just as things are heating up,” Kate said as Lizzie dropped her at the airport curb. “Do you want me to stay and go with you to the police interview?”

  “No, but thanks. Edmund called late last night to tell me that he will meet me there, and he insists on bringing along a friend who is a solicitor—which seems completely unnecessary to me.” Lizzie gave her friend a hug. “You might like to go hold Jackie’s hand, though. She is likely to start ranting, and she’ll have a captive audience of police officers on both sides of the Atlantic.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t keep her from getting herself charged with murder.” She handed Lizzie an envelope. “Here, I don’t want you to think Jackie is the only one who can find just the right literary passage for a special occasion. Think of me when you are next on the road.”

  Lizzie missed her friend as soon as the door to the terminal closed behind her. She drove directly to Oxford from the airport and was there in plenty of time to park and find the restaurant Edmund had suggested for lunch. She was about twenty minutes early for their rendezvous and she opened the envelope Kate had given her. Inside was a poem by Tennyson and message: “You will be missed by your friends, who are jealous that you walk on without us!”

  I climb the hill: from end to end

  Of all the landscape underneath,

  I find no place that does not breathe

  Some gracious memory of my friend;

  No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

  Or low morass and whispering reed,

  Or simple stile from mead to mead,

  Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;

  “Perfect!” she said softly. She missed both of her friends, and wondered if any part of the week to come would match the pleasures of the last two.

  Edmund and his friend were right on time. The solicitor seemed to feel, as Lizzie did, that his participation was superfluous and kept a low profile both during lunch and the interview that follo
wed.

  The first questions were very straightforward: when had she arrived in Oxford? when did she meet Dante Zettler? how well did she know him? what was her perception of him? There were only a few questions of how their work overlapped, and though the Oxford police seemed very conversant with the competitive nature of the academic world, they had already deduced that Dante’s work on Chaucer was probably not worth killing for.

  “We understand from several sources that your work was likely to eclipse his,” a sergeant said to Lizzie. “Is that so?”

  Lizzie explained that it wasn’t her own work, that she was employed as a researcher and collaborator with Alison Kent, but yes, the project they were working on would definitely eclipse the work of Dante Zettler.

  They then asked about the seating arrangements at the dinner in minute detail. How had she come to sit with Dante and had each of them sat at the place marked with their place card?

  For the first time Lizzie remembered that Jackie had switched the cards so that Dante would be between them. She told that to the officers.

  “Had anything been served when you sat down?” the sergeant asked.

  Lizzie thought hard, trying to picture the place setting on the table when she arrived. It was a complex affair with multiple forks and other cutlery. “There was a roll on the small side plate,” she said, “and a glass of red wine was already poured.”

  “Did Professor Zettler drink his wine or eat his roll?”

  “He certainly drank at least some of the wine, we made a toast. I don’t remember about the roll.”

  Edmund made a sound to catch Lizzie’s attention and when she turned to look, saw an expression of concern.

  The sergeant continued with his questioning. “I understand you were involved in a car accident two weeks ago.”

  She acknowledged that she was and described it at his request.

  “Did you know the driver?”

  “No, but my employer did. He was apparently a friend of Alison Kent’s father.”

  They returned to the work that Lizzie was doing for Alison. Was it possible that Hockwold Bruce had tried to stop it by violence?

  Lizzie explained the nature of their project, the journal, the Weaver’s gifts to various churches, and explained that much of what she knew now she had learned since she was at the Chaucer conference with Dante Zettler. “I can’t imagine any objection Hockwold Bruce could have had to any of it,” she said. “If anyone would suffer by it, it would be Dante Zettler.”

  “Is there anything else that seems unimportant, but might lead us to information?”

  Edmund spoke from behind her. “Tell her about the list with Bruce’s name on it.”

  She described the list and the three names on the last line: Alison’s father, Hockwold Bruce and Frederick Wickersham. “All of them are dead,” Lizzie said. “Though Wickersham apparently has a grandson with the same name here in Oxford.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No, I’ve never met him.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

  She shook her head.

  The policemen left the room and Edmund came to sit beside her.

  “Lizzie,” he said, softly but intensely, “you must realize that they think you might have been the target.”

  She looked at him with astonishment. “Don’t be absurd, Edmund. I haven’t done anything to make any enemies here.”

  He took her hand. “I’m sorry to have to remind you of this, but my brother tried to kill you over a secret that he thought you might uncover in the course of your research. Is it possible that you have stumbled onto something more here? Something you don’t even realize yet?”

  She quickly told him about the window and the gravestone in St. Martha’s church. “There were clues leading to it, but they were so obscure—and they were put there by Alison’s father sixty years ago.”

  “And yet you found them.”

  “But I honestly have no idea what they mean.”

  “Are you going to tell the police about them?”

  “Should I? I can’t believe it’s relevant.”

  When the officers returned, the only questions they asked were where she would be in the days to come and if she wanted protection.

  Edmund answered that she would be at his father’s estate in Somersetshire and that it would not be a bad idea to have local police check on the place.

  “Are you sure, Edmund?”

  The police sergeant concurred. “It can’t hurt to have the locals make a presence at the house,” he said. “I assume you will be staying at the same location as Professor Kent?”

  When she said that she was, it settled the matter. She and Alison were officially considered to be potential targets of one or more killers.

  The solicitor spoke for the first time, asking if he could be kept up to date on the investigation, and was told that he would be. Through him, Edmund told Lizzie, they would know what was happening.

  As she drove to Hengemont with Edmund, Lizzie expressed her stunned confusion at the strange turn of events. “I still think this is all a big mistake,” she said. “I simply can’t believe that there is any plot against me.”

  “What about Alison?”

  “It is more likely that she has enemies here than I, but even so, it is very hard to think how these threats could be related in any way to our project.”

  “But you have to admit that her enemies might have become yours since you started working so closely with her.”

  She had to concede that was possible.

  She wanted to speak to Martin about it and as soon as they reached the house she called him. “This will sound like a strange echo of last year,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “but once again things are happening around me that I can’t explain.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked quickly.

  She assured him that she was, and recounted her interview with the Oxford police.

  “I’m glad you’re coming to Newcastle,” he said. “I miss you and no one will find you here.”

  “I’m glad I’ll be seeing you in a few days,” she said. “And I can’t wait to see the mural.”

  “Should I come there?” he asked.

  “No!” she said emphatically. “You need to finish the work. I know that this is no time for you to be leaving it with the dedication so close. Alison and I just need to put our heads together for a few days to see if we can’t figure out what her father was up to sixty years ago, and then I am heading your way.”

  “Can you assure me that you are safe?”

  “Of course I’m safe. I think there is a lot more being made of all this than is warranted.”

  Though it was late, the time difference allowed her to call Jackie when she finished her call with Martin, to tell her about her interview with the Oxford Police.

  “My impression,” Lizzie said, “is that they think that by switching those place cards at dinner, you saved my life.”

  “Someone meant the poison for you and not for Dante Zettler?” Jackie said, the surprise obvious in her voice. “But who?”

  “That part isn’t at all clear and I’m still dubious about the whole thing. I’m not convinced Dante couldn’t have taken the poison in a drink or something else earlier that evening.”

  Jackie wanted to be thanked for saving Lizzie’s life anyway, which Lizzie did with appropriate gratefulness.

  “Believe it or not, being told that someone might have attempted to murder me was not even the weirdest thing that has happened since you left here.” Lizzie described the whole of the day at St. Martha’s with Kate.

  “Let me grab a pen,” Jackie said, “and then repeat all the names and dates you just mentioned. And send me whatever pictures you took in the church as email attachments. I’ll see if I can add to what you know.”

  “Thank you, as always.”

  “Take care of yourself, Lizzie,” Jackie said with a rare note of seriousness. “St. Pat’s is a rather dull place witho
ut you, and Rose Geminiani is looking forward to a good story when you return.”

  “Even without knowing how this part of it will end, I think I can guarantee that.”

  Chapter 29

  The first thing you need to know are these dates,” Jackie wrote in an email the next day. “Thomas Becket was murdered on December 29, 1167; his bones/relics were translated into a new shrine on July 7, 1220; and the shrine was destroyed in September, 1538 (I haven’t been able to find the precise day). It can’t be a coincidence that Brother Osbert Giffard’s memorial stone has the year of Becket’s death followed by the year his shrine was destroyed. Have you asked Alison yet what her father’s Becket connection was, beyond having some of his relics?”

  Lizzie printed out the message and brought it to Alison, who was propped up comfortably on an upholstered chair in the library at Hengemont. This was a familiar room to Lizzie, since she had worked there almost the whole month of January the previous year.

  “It is wonderful to be able to see this garden coming into bloom rather than covered in frost,” she said, walking to the tall windows. She turned when Helen Jeffries came into the room with a tray of coffee, another familiar sight from that previous visit.

  Helen was always more formal when someone else was in the room, but she and Lizzie exchanged a warm look.

  “I’m not sure what your friend Jackie means here when she asks what my father’s Becket connection was,” Alison said as she read the message.

  Edmund had retrieved the Becket reliquary from the bank vault at Lizzie’s request, and she had printed out the pictures she took of the window and the memorial stone in St. Martha’s church.

  She laid out two lines of evidence along the table. The top row had everything that related to the Weaver’s pilgrimage: the journal, and photographs of the tapestry, the tomb in Wells Cathedral, the chalice at the Ashmolean that Jackie had linked to Shaftesbury Cathedral, the drawing of the window at Salisbury, and the image of Becket’s shrine from the manuscript at Winchester. Lizzie briefly reviewed each piece for Alison, and for George and Edmund, who came into the room soon after she started.