A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  The investigation into his murder, which might at least have been diverting, was another closed door. They, the suspects, had all been told to stay out of the crime scene and to speak when spoken to. There were a lot of officious-looking people huffing about the place, taking samples of this and that, and dusting the already dusty place. Xanda had yet to be interviewed in any meaningful way except by a humorless young constable her own age, who offered zero romantic prospects.

  All this because her father, in a throwback to the dark ages, wanted his soul prayed for. He also wanted to dictate the terms of the new guesthouse. It was just how he did business. Cash on the barrelhead. She wondered, and not for the first time, how he reconciled his religious leanings with all the people put out of jobs when he folded up their companies—the faceless people who were just, to her father, numbers on a spreadsheet.

  Xanda made a face at the one cow who kept staring at her, pulling her lips wide in a clown mask. No reaction. Big duh.

  In a distant field, one of the nuns was walking, maybe gathering something—probably nettles or weeds for another wholesome lunch. The cows ate better around here. No, wait, the nun seemed to be reading from that little black book they all carried with them. From the back Xanda couldn’t see who it was. The nun walked with a swift unbroken movement, her legs and feet hidden by the long draperies of her woolen skirt, which dragged unheeded over the grass. She might have been on a conveyer belt, or a carved wooden figure gliding in and out of the face of a cuckoo clock. What a life.

  Xanda realized, not for the first time, that they were sort of interchangeable figures, these nuns. They always walked with their heads bowed, concealing their faces in church behind their cowl-like headdresses. It must be like wearing blinders. They couldn’t really see. They couldn’t really be seen.

  Again, what a life. Not for her. She wanted—not children, that was for sure, smelly, puking, clingy little things. But she wanted the freedom to go where she wanted and certainly to dress as she pleased. Coming here had been a mistake, and now here she was, good and stuck.

  Xanda had enough self-knowledge to realize her predicament had been brought down on her own head by her own self. She had come along for this ride in the vain hope that Derek back home would notice her absence, a fact she had never shared with her parents. That continued a long tradition of never sharing anything with them. After years of the religious thing at home, she had as a teenager become adept at finding escape routes, and the easiest was pretending to go along with their hair-brained religious beliefs.

  As. If. The trick was to pretend to volunteer for some do-gooder thing Mom would approve of, then ask to borrow the family car. For a few months she had pretended to work serving meals at a homeless shelter. This was less than satisfactory since the organizers of these meals tended to be adults, and adults tended to talk with one another. The chances were huge that some old dork would tell her mother how her daughter was leaving the soup kitchen almost as soon as she showed up to “work.”

  Then Xanda had stumbled upon the youth group meetings at the local church, via a big poster at the church that was headed, no kidding, “Jokes ‘n’ Jesus.” It went on to describe how the church hall was given over on Thursday nights to these naff events of an indescribable dullness, aimed at keeping the teens off the street and out of trouble. They had no idea. While all the LOO-sers congregated to pray and watch movies about mission work—gack!—she and her friends would take the car for a smoke and a whirl around town. It was harmless fun, but her mother would never see it that way. All right, she had to lie to her mother about her whereabouts, but lying was better than having no life at all whatsoever. It had set the course of their relationship for life, both of them sailing in diametrically opposed directions.

  Oh, God. Here comes Paloma. What do you call that color she’s wearing? Spoiled asparagus? At least she’s not with Piers, as per usual, but with that librarian nun. The pretty one. What an odd couple they made.

  Xanda jumped off the fence and scuttled into the forested area, hoping to avoid detection. The cow watched her go.

  * * *

  “That was Xanda just now, wasn’t it?” said Dame Olive to her companion as they approached the spot Xanda had just vacated.

  “Had to be. No one else within a hundred miles has hair like that,” said Paloma.

  “I need new glasses,” said Dame Olive. “You spend all day staring at a computer screen and then one day you realize your distance vision is going, too, along with your reading vision.”

  “Try the laser surgery,” said Paloma. “Worked for me.”

  Dame Olive was surprised, and realized she should not have been. Paloma’s eyes would have been the only parts of her body that hadn’t felt the surgeon’s knife, from the look of her.

  “I think it’s just eyestrain,” Dame Olive replied. “All the planning for the guesthouse took a lot of research. And then to see it all snarled up like this. Even before the questions about money arose, there were difficulties. Building in stone is no longer practical.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Paloma. “These old walls have stood for centuries.”

  “I mean, it would be prohibitively expensive, even if you could find trained stonemasons, which you hardly can anymore. In Italy, maybe.”

  “Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about?” Paloma asked her. Paloma, away from Piers, was edgy, wondering what he was up to. Even though they were in a nunnery, still … leave it to Piers to find the action wherever you plunked him down. It was the downside to having a lover so much younger than yourself. You always knew in your heart he’d leave you the first chance he got. You just didn’t know when. She’d made the appointment with the plastic surgeon for next week, so it was really important they get out of here before then.

  “… think did it?” Dame Olive was saying. Her tone was conversational, but only someone as distracted as Paloma could miss the tension in her voice.

  “Hmm?”

  “Who do you think did it? Killed Lord Lislelivet?”

  “Beats me. I just know it wasn’t Piers,” she said, protectively. “Or me,” she added.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he was with me all night.”

  In flagrant disregard of the nunnery’s rules, thought Dame Olive. Well, if I’m meant to be shocked, I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking. These two weren’t the first, if the guest-mistress were any guide. Still, it was a good enough alibi—and it worked both ways, for both of them.

  Dame Olive eyed her companion. Today it was animal-print tights worn with lace-up booties and a plunging neckline. At her neck was a necklace that looked like bottle caps sewn onto a crocheted doily. She wore a low-cut green shirt but had pinched a little black sweater across her outsized breasts—this in concession to Dame Tabby, who had had a word with Paloma about appropriately demur attire for a convent setting.

  Dame Olive was tempted to warn Paloma about Piers—in fact, he was one reason she had invited Paloma on this walk. With police running about asking questions, this did not seem a good time for Paloma to be offering an alibi for Piers that perhaps was not true. Besides, in the nature of things, Paloma couldn’t really provide an airtight alibi for him for the whole night. Unless one were to believe neither of them slept a moment.

  And in the nature of things, thought Dame Olive, neither could Piers offer Paloma an airtight alibi.

  She had nothing to go on but an inherent dislike of the man—of the type of man he so clearly was. She’d seen him trying to flirt with the postulant the other day—simply outrageous behavior. Dame Olive knew Piers would twist her instinctive dislike into a manifestation of some psychological failing of her own if she started issuing warnings with no proof to back them up.

  But Piers was lying about something. That was as certain as the sun’s coming up.

  He was lying about something.

  * * *

  This was going to play havoc with his schedule, Dr. Bar
nard thought. Not that that was the first consideration, but he was champing at the bit to get back into routine now. And someone had to feed his dog. Surely the neighbor or his nurse would figure out he had been delayed.

  As expected, the road had washed out with the rain. The nuns never seemed to understand that maintenance of the road at the bottom of the mountain rested with them, not with the government. More likely, they didn’t care.

  This morning he’d looked in on Dame Meredith, and that done, with no one else on the premises showing signs of illness, he had nothing else to do. The police might have used his help, but since he was, technically, a suspect, he supposed that wasn’t going to happen. Nothing to stop him from having a few words with that DCI Cotton and bandying about a few theories he’d come up with, though.

  He sighed, running his hands through his hair and straightening his tie in the mirror in his small, cramped room. How the nuns stood this confinement, he couldn’t imagine. It was what he had liked about America—all those wide, open spaces, once you got out of New York. The endless horizons. How he missed it. Maybe once this was over …

  It was taking a damnably long time for the police to get around to interviewing him. And Dr. Barnard was not a man who liked to wait.

  * * *

  Max was headed toward the crime scene. He had planned to spend the morning offering the Communion service before going over his notes, adding his impressions from his dinner with the abbess. He’d thought he might work on his weekly sermon in his little cell-like room as he waited for the nuns to finish their mandatory Chapter House assembly. All best-laid plans that now had gone awry, of course.

  At dinner he had, however, asked and been given permission from Abbess Justina to speak with the women in her care, a need more urgent now that a murder had been committed. The abbess had seemed agreeable, even anxious, that her nuns be seen in their usual, day-to-day activities. Probably the sting of accusation from Lord Lislelivet still rankled, and she had felt it was in her best interest to eagerly cooperate with the bishop’s emissary. Max wasn’t going to treat the murder as a chance for her to withdraw her permission—quite the opposite.

  Passing the kitchen of the guesthouse, he saw Piers Montague boiling a cup of Nescafe in the microwave. He decided to have a word.

  He had seen both Paloma and Piers mooching about, hugging the walls of the monastery, he looking ever-so-trendy and ironic, she looking like a Vegas showgirl whose feathers were starting to droop. What, Max wondered, did they find to do here all day? Probably they would have left right about now, but of course DCI Cotton had forbidden it.

  In truth Cotton would have to let them go sooner or later—today, tomorrow. Paloma could quite rightly say she had a business to run. He could claim—oh, who knew what? That the place was stifling his creative impulses.

  “This is one for the books,” said Piers to Max as he walked in. “But I’m being philosophical about it, for now.”

  “How is that?”

  “Oh, just that there is inevitability about Lord Lislelivet’s being taken out like this. It’s like the sun’s burning out. You know scientists predict it will happen, but there’s nothing you can do. God is definitely running that show.”

  Max hadn’t suspected the man of harboring this sort of long-view thinking. Let alone this sort of patience. He’d rather expected him to be on the phone to someone on high, complaining about mistreatment. Then Max realized that in all fairness, that was more the sort of pose Clement Gorey might be expected to adopt.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Max. “My experience has been that the good, the bad, and the ugly often live to a ripe old age.”

  “I guess.”

  Today Piers wore blue jeans and a tweed jacket over a plain black T-shirt; his wavy dark hair curled nonchalantly over the jacket collar. He looked more the image of a trendy university professor than an artist. He might have been one of Rodrigo Borgia’s sons teleported into the twenty-first century.

  He was very tan, but only on one side of his face. Max commented on this, saying, “You must have been driving about a good deal lately.”

  “What a positively Sherlockian observation. What makes you say that?”

  “Lorry drivers get that look. It is of course from sitting behind the wheel day after day. Only one side of your face catches the sun.”

  “Oh. Of course, yes, you are quite right. I have just returned from a two-week trip driving alone around Britain. Didn’t I say? Scouting locations for a fashion shoot. Not my usual thing or, at least, not the thing I love doing the most. But it pays well.”

  Yes, thought Max. Hanging around gorgeous models all day must be such a trial. And to be forced to accept money for it. Darn. He smiled affably.

  “I thought you were looking at building sites,” said Max. But Piers might not have heard him.

  “I will be allowed to go soon, won’t I?” Piers asked him. “I’m pretty much booked solid this year and this delay will play havoc with my schedule.”

  Max heard him saying “I” and “my” but not “our.” His friend Paloma was as inconvenienced as anyone. And certainly Lord Lislelivet was more inconvenienced than anyone. But not too surprisingly, Piers’s concern seemed to be for himself alone.

  “Early days,” said Max. “And it is strictly up to DCI Cotton.”

  And to me, he added, silently. It will take me at least a day to gauge your true north, Mr. Montague.

  Chapter 25

  AT THE CAVALIER

  The kitcheness may be said to have the most joyous of tasks, for food is a sign of God’s bounty and love, and its preparation is an occasion for joy.

  —The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

  The Cavalier Tea Room and Garden back in Nether Monkslip was alight with the news of Max’s mission to the nunnery, news broken with customary efficiency and relish by Miss Pitchford, who had broken all land records trying to get to the Cavalier the moment Elka hung out the OPEN sign. To her chagrin, the usual suspects had already gathered.

  “But I forgot my mobile back at the shop,” Awena was saying. “I’ll need it in case Max tries to call. There’s been an incident at Monkbury Abbey.”

  “Yes, I heard about it on the BBC,” said Suzanna. “Max is there?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What a complete waste,” said Suzanna, shaking her head in disgust. “Max Tudor in a nunnery.”

  Suzanna could not get her head around the whole monastic ideal. To give up the chance of a family life was just conceivable, she thought, if you could pardon the pun. Here a significant glance at Awena, now close to term. To give up sex, no. And shopping? What about the pure pleasure of a white sale skirmish at Debenhams? Of a little refined scrapping over the last set of four-hundred-ply sheets? For that matter, having to give up the indulgence of sleeping on four-hundred-ply sheets?

  “I would say the same about DCI Cotton,” said Elka. “He’s in charge of the investigation, I hear.”

  “I would second that,” said Suzanna. “He’s also quite a dishy person.”

  Adam said, looking up from his crueler, “What do we really know about Cotton?”

  “Really, not much,” said Suzanna. “Wedded to his job, apparently. I do know his mother died after a long battle with hypochondria.”

  Elka, not really listening, said, “That’s hereditary, is it?”

  “I was joking. It was a joke, Elka. I meant that she complained all the time about her health.”

  Suzanna returned to her earlier line of thinking. Aloud she said, “What sort of life do those women at the abbey have? What trouble could they get up to in a convent?”

  “Apart from the murder, you mean?” asked Awena.

  “That surely has nothing to do with the nuns. Someone broke in, perhaps looking for silver chalices and things like that.”

  “Max would say the passing tramp theory of murder is passé. Certainly in literature it is. In fact…” Awena hesitated. “In fact I rather think he is starti
ng to believe these cases he keeps getting involved in are related somehow. That they are not random.”

  “Why would he think that?” Suzanna pressed the tip of her index finger, its nail expertly painted in silvery pink, onto remaining pastry crumbs, and transferred the tidbit to her mouth. “Elka,” she called across the room, “the blueberry scones—delicious.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Awena. “Something the Bishop of Monkslip said to him, I think. And maybe something he has started to feel himself. Of course, don’t we all know that nothing is random? That there is a great net connecting all of us in this life?”

  “Hmm,” said Suzanna neutrally. She was not always able to follow Awena down the more esoteric of her New Agey byways.

  “Let’s just hope,” said Suzanna, “he returns in time for the next issue of the Herald. What a story he’ll have to tell.”

  Chapter 26

  DOSSIERS

  Remember that it is commanded thou shalt neither steal nor even covet another’s goods.

  —The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

  “I am just not getting it,” said Cotton to Max. “I am starting to wonder if I’m the wrong man for the job.”

  He and Max had once again convened to discuss the case, this time in the room granted to Cotton for his use while he investigated the death of Lord Lislelivet. It was a room even more Spartan than Max’s, but if the detective noticed it he said nothing. More likely he felt right at home, thought Max.

  Cotton looked over at Max, sitting in the one “easy” chair in the room. Cotton, trying it out earlier, thought it might be stuffed with pinecones and nettles; he watched as Max shifted his weight uncomfortably before giving up and perching on the window ledge.

  “I mean, I think it is a wise man who knows his limitations, don’t you?” Cotton continued. “I’m not a religious person—at least, not in the sense people mean when they use that word.”

  Nondenominationally raised Cotton, whose mother belonged to the church of It’s All About Me, found great comfort in Max’s presence. There was old film footage of Cotton’s mother dancing naked at a rock concert that still haunted him—occasionally it would show up on a BBC documentary on flower power or free love or the peace movement. Cotton never knew quite what to make of his childhood, raised as he was by a largely absentee dancing mother, whether to curse it or be thankful. School had been a particular nightmare—his mother’s antics had made him such an easy target. But it also had made him resilient, tough, resistant to intimidation, and hyperaware of his surroundings, giving him all the skills needed to be good at his job now.