A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  He went on: “We’ve taken statements from everyone concerned—meaning, everyone in the castle—but I’ll be talking with all of them again. I’d like you to sit in on these sessions, Max. I’d like to know your impressions.”

  “I’m happy to oblige, but as you know…”

  “You’ve no official status. Well, actually you have. I’ve asked you to be here. If anyone objects we’ll deal with it then. They’re a rum bunch, I’ll say that for them.”

  Cotton had stopped worrying his jacket to twirl a biro around the top of the desk, clearly deep in thought. He had a laptop on which he began to tap out a few notes. He was, to Max’s certain knowledge, a man in perpetual, dynamic motion. Max took the moment to lift his left ankle onto a footstool. Finally Cotton sat back and said, “So, Max, you’ve had a little time to meet some of them. Let’s have your first impressions.”

  Max’s first and second impression had been of a household vastly on edge, but that was understandable, with a recent murder very much at their feet. Max had the feeling this edginess was of long standing, however. All this he said to Cotton and Essex, ending with, “I suppose we have to start with motive.”

  “Motive?” Cotton shook his head mockingly. “To hear the public, we officials never bother with motive. But here we have motive aplenty. Money—the obvious driver, since there’s so much of it—isn’t the entire story. There’s a well of ill feeling. A sense of “getting even” pervades this case, if I’m right. If you’d seen the body you’d agree.”

  “Overkill.” Max nodded. “I am sorry to hear it, poor man. But Lady Baynard’s death…”

  “It was a natural death, so far as the experts can tell.”

  “Was it? Maybe she’d been poisoned over a long period—someone using arsenic, like all the Victorian poisoners seemed to use back in the day.”

  But Cotton told him that was one of the first things they tested for. “Those metallic-based poisons—frankly, no murderer worth his salt would use arsenic anymore. But overall a tox scan can take forever and never be successful unless they know the poison they’re looking for. There is no such thing as an untraceable poison, just one the lab fellows haven’t thought to test for.”

  He made another note on the laptop, then added: “I got them to call in a Home Office pathologist.”

  “Ah. A forensic pathologist—a specialist in the art of death by criminal means. Called in for both Leticia and Oscar, then?”

  “Yes. He is likewise adamant the woman died of natural causes. He said he’d make sure and run a few more tests beyond the standard set, but unless we’re hoping for ‘some nonsense like a new and undetectable poison from South America’—his words—she died because she’d reached a certain age and she had a certain condition. Nothing unnatural about it.”

  “The condition being?”

  “She apparently died of an abdominal…” He paused to consult his computer screen. “An abdominal aortic aneurysm.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Generally, there are none. Pain is the only symptom, and I gather she never complained of abdominal or back pain. The kind of pain we’re talking about would definitely have alarmed her. She seemed in the days before her death to be preoccupied only by a simple head cold. No sign of anything as dangerous as this. ‘She’d have been screaming bloody murder,’ is how one of the suspects put it, if she’d been in any real pain.” Max thought that was probably Doris. “There is speculation Leticia’s fatal symptoms emerged out of shock or remorse but…”

  “Remorse for killing her brother, you mean?”

  “Precisely. It’s not completely impossible that guilt triggered a condition that was set to go off.”

  “And Lord Footrustle? Apart from what obviously killed him, did he have any symptoms in particular in recent months?”

  “You mean the attempted poisoning, or accidental food poisoning, don’t you? Well, Oscar was in poorer health, comparatively speaking, and the odds were he would go first, despite Leticia’s complaints about her own condition. She was, by all reports, a bit of a hypochondriac, worse than he. Of course, what she complained of most was not what she died of. The doc says she probably had no symptoms whatsoever. That’s typical of this aortic whatsis.”

  Max was remembering that one of his parishioners had had much the same condition. “It’s some sort of silent killer, isn’t it? Unless one is specially tested for it.”

  “A screening test is available, but it’s not widely used unless they’re trying to track down a specific complaint. And according to the family,” Cotton added, “that must be the one potential illness she never mentioned. I understand she could have gone on for years with the symptoms she complained about—most of them imaginary: headaches and palpitations and so on.”

  “I see.”

  Cotton said, “So we’re looking at an open verdict here. Meaning, the jury won’t be satisfied, but they will be hamstrung by the limits set. In truth, there is nothing we could present to a jury that would lead them to find anything suspicious in Lady Baynard’s death, except that a man had been murdered on the same day in close proximity. And everyone on the jury would have heard about that already.” He closed his eyes, projecting himself into the room where he had so often given evidence. “You would be able to see it in their faces, this earnest desire to get at the truth, to see justice done if justice needed doing, but for now the facts we have establish a case of death by natural causes.”

  “How are we on time of death?”

  Again, that “we.” Lovely. “The police doctor who first examined him says the time of death for Lord Footrustle was eight A.M., give or take two hours. He was found by the butler, so that puts an end time to the range. But more than likely, he’d been dead at least a couple of hours by then.”

  He added, “Let’s call them Oscar and Leticia, for the sake of convenience, rather than Lord This-and-That or Lady So-and-So. They’re neither of them around to object to the informality.”

  Max had met the police doctor on numerous occasions. He was a man extremely competent and extremely young. Max was always tempted to ask him if they’d let him off school for the day to perform the autopsy.

  “A range of several hours,” said Max. “Poor man. One would like to be discovered right away, somehow, don’t you think?”

  Cotton and Essex both nodded solemnly. Essex had her head bent over a large illustrated tome she’d pulled from one of the shelves. She was a small, compact woman, and the heavy book entirely covered her lap.

  Max said, “I’ve spoken with Lamorna Whitehall, the granddaughter. She presented me with a salient motive, or at least an explanation for the atmosphere here at the castle.” Max repeated what Lamorna had told him about her grandmother manipulating people with stories of what they’d inherit from her.

  “That could have made one of them want to kill her—providing them a motive if she was up to silly game-playing like that,” said Cotton. “Again, we’re keeping our options open in case something turns up. The police doc is still running tests.”

  Cotton had resumed his tapping at the computer keys. Max looked at him. “Why do I have the idea you think it was murder?”

  Cotton looked up from his task.

  “I do think Leticia was murdered, yes. Yes, I do. It’s my gut instinct, but I can’t prove it. I’ve instructed my team to keep their minds very open on that score.”

  “Always wise,” said Max. “Let’s get back to motive for a moment. Oscar had to have made enemies in his time. Especially on Fleet Street, I understand, that is not difficult to do.”

  Sergeant Essex spoke up. “He may have aroused the wrath of the ‘have-nots’—people not born to title and money, or people not having the Midas touch to create wealth.”

  Cotton nodded and smoothed his tie.

  “So we’re looking at enemies as suspects? Or inheritors?”

  “Both,” said Max. “Either, or. We can’t discount either approach.”

  Cotton said: “We have to collect a
ll the evidence we can for the inquest, in as orderly a fashion as we can manage. And as quickly. The real work is finding out who did this, which may take days or weeks of sifting, interviewing witnesses, and so on.”

  “You’ve ruled out an intruder?”

  “We’re ruling out nothing just yet, but the geography of the house as good as eliminates that possibility. We’re sitting on top of a cliff that drops straight to the sea. So there’s no access from that direction but we did send investigators out to make sure. The main entrance to the house is fronted, in thoroughly medieval fashion, by an insurmountable wall on all sides.”

  Max asked, “What about security at the castle?”

  “Security.” Cotton smiled. “Well, the butler locks up the castle at eleven every night, whether it needs it or not. He sets a burglar alarm that is connected to the security company. Presumably the company would contact us if it were found someone had tried to break in or set fire to the place. The police might even arrive at the castle in time to prevent the stolen items being put up for sale on eBay.”

  “No cameras? No motion detectors?”

  “No. Instead, they seem to have had vast stores of optimism and hope that no one would attempt a serious break-in in such a remote spot. This belief carried them happily through the dawn of the twenty-first century.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  Cotton scoffed at fingerprints. “You know as well as I do, Max. Nobody commits a crime like this without wearing gloves. They’ve all watched the forensics shows on television, you know.”

  Max moved his left foot slightly to test it for readiness. His ankle announced sharply that it was too soon for that sort of thing.

  Cotton was saying now: “We’ll ask that the inquest be adjourned so we can make inquiries. But the press will catch on that there’s something afoot—sorry, Max, bad pun. So far, they haven’t caught on but seem to be playing up the coincidence angle. This will have them speculating about Lady Baynard’s death being tied to Lord Footrustle’s. Well, let them speculate. We can’t stop them anyway.”

  Cotton grabbed some pages from the desk, stood up, and began striding around as he talked.

  “As I mentioned, we’ve had a look round the rooms and have had to allow everyone back into their assigned places,” he said, flipping through pages. “There is nothing suggestive to report. Not unless you count ‘several hundred little pots of makeup in Jocasta’s room,’ as one of the officers notes,” said Cotton. “‘And enough boas and scarves to launch her own costume drama.’”

  “That would be PC Detton’s comment,” said Essex. “He’s a frustrated scriptwriter. It tends to show in his reports.”

  “So,” said Cotton. “What’s the drill for today? I suppose we should start with the eldest first. Let’s have Randolph in here. For the record,” he said with a nod toward Essex, “that would be Randolph, Viscount Nathersby. He’s actually the Eleventh Earl of Gravening, the title inherited from his father, but he’d made a name for himself as Nathersby and seems to have stuck with that for all but the most formal occasions.”

  Sergeant Essex waggled her head and raised her eyebrows in an almost imperceptible la-di-da manner. She hadn’t had much truck with nobs before and she wasn’t inclined to be impressed by them now. Max watched as the haze of contempt wafted over her eyes. She said nothing but went to find the man she had privately taken to calling Viscount His Lordship.

  “Does anyone have an alibi for the time in question?” Max asked Cotton when she’d left.

  “Nothing that would hold up to scrutiny. Everyone was either asleep or wandering about the castle and grounds. It’s such a big place it’s entirely possible that it’s true. You could disappear for weeks here.”

  Abruptly he stopped pacing. He turned to face Max, the papers bunched roughly in his hands.

  “This is an unspeakable crime,” he said. “The old guy didn’t stand a chance. Maybe if he’d been younger I’d feel differently. Or even if he’d been awake.”

  Max nodded. “I agree completely.”

  “Right,” Cotton said. “Let’s start the show.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Heir …

  While they waited, Cotton flipped open a file, this time one on his mobile phone, and summarized what he found there: “Randolph, Viscount Nathersby. Pretty much what you’d expect. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he read art history. Somehow went from there to a career as a photographer in fashion and theater—that may be one of the many jobs where having the right connections keeps you from flat-out starving. He lately has made a bit of a name for himself as a portraitist of the great and the good, but in a small way—Lord Snowdon had snapped all the truly great by the time Randolph came along. You know the sort of thing: photos of minor royalty and their dogs and horses—sometimes all three together, almost like family portraits, what?”

  Here Cotton turned the phone toward Max so he could see a photo of a man in formal hunting attire astride his horse, the pair surrounded by a swirling brown sea of hunting dogs. “Married and quietly divorced,” Cotton continued. “No children. His ex-wife appears to bear no grudges and lives in isolated if aristocratic splendor with a new husband somewhere in Portugal. Right. Let’s get him talking a bit more about his nearest and dearest. He was a bit reticent yesterday.”

  And here he was, the nob himself. It was almost as if he had been awaiting the summons. Randolph, AKA Nathersby, strode into the room, trailing Sergeant Essex like a retainer.

  Cotton thought: punctuality. The politeness of kings.

  Randolph, tall and lanky, was somewhat folded in on himself in the way of many tall people. Cotton was struck anew by his resemblance to his uncle Oscar—he had much the same refined features as the old man. His trousers fell in a stylish woolen puddle around his highly polished leather shoes, no doubt shoes from some Savile Row-like establishment, where the wooden casts of his feet would be preserved in perpetuity. Messrs Bullfinch and Ryestone still held the models of Cotton’s own feet, but it had been years since he’d indulged in the luxury of handmade shoes. Besides, the ones he already owned, well-tended, had held up well for decades. He resisted the urge to take a peep at the polished toes, hidden beneath the desk.

  Sergeant Essex took in the tall nobbish frame, the thick dark hair with its nobbish, deliberate messiness, and the confident, nobbish voice as it greeted DCI Cotton. Was it her imagination, or did he reserve for Cotton the sort of “there’s a good chap” tone he’d use to ask a stable boy to saddle his horse? She thought, altogether, he did.

  Max for his part was wondering why it was that upper-class men always seemed in need of a good barber.

  A cravat had been tucked with care at Randolph’s open shirt collar. Max wasn’t sure he himself owned a cravat, or ever had. It was one of those male adornments that seemed to have gone out with period dramas like Poldark. He thought Randolph otherwise looked rather like van Gogh’s paintings of a sinister-looking Gauguin, all dark, sharp planes to his face and a pointy beard. Especially given the excess consumption of absinthe, one knew just looking at these paintings that Vincent was not going to get along with Gauguin in the long run. It was all going to end in tears. Max thought Randolph might be rather too intentionally going for the sensitive artist look.

  Cotton rose to shake the man’s hand and indicated a chair across from the desk where he should sit.

  “Thank you for agreeing to talk with us again, sir. I just had a few more questions.”

  Just then there was a bloodcurdling shriek outside the window. Given the recent events at the castle, all four people in the room jumped. Sergeant Essex threw down her notebook to crank open the window for a look.

  “It’s the children. Those two white-haired twins. They’re only playing.”

  Randolph swore: “The little buggers,” followed by the obligatory apology to Max for the lapse in language. Max, who still struggled to clean up the vocabulary of his MI5 days, brushed the apology aside.

  “The twins seem t
o be bearing up all right,” Max said. “The only worrying note is that their father’s death doesn’t seem quite to have sunk in.”

  “Yes, that may well be so,” said Randolph, in a magisterial tone of voice. “Too bad their mother isn’t taking more of an interest. I’ve tried speaking with them but you know—in their eyes I’m so ancient”—here a self-deprecating smile—“I couldn’t possibly say anything useful.”

  Cotton sat behind the desk, first carefully hitching up his own trousers so as not to disturb the crease. Cotton loved clothes, and in another life might have done something in a sartorial way in London. On a policeman’s salary he maintained an impeccable if spare wardrobe of bespoke shirts and suits that he made last for years. He eyed Randolph’s hand-sewn shirt and glossy silk tie with an appreciative, envious gaze and said, “Let’s talk about that situation, sir. My understanding is that Gwynyth, Lord Footrustle’s former wife, came along a dozen or so years ago?”

  “Fourteen. Actually, in conversation, Gwynyth would be called Lady Footrustle, even though she and Oscar were divorced,” Randolph corrected him, but with a friendly smile. Sergeant Essex, dripping irony over in her corner, made an elaborate correction to her notes. “Almost no one extends her this courtesy except Lamorna, who cares deeply about this stuff, no matter how much she pretends otherwise. Gwynyth’s maiden name was Lavener, if for some reason you need to know that.”

  “How extraordinary. I think I’ve heard the name,” said Max musingly. “Gwynyth Lavener. Some sort of entertainer.”

  Randolph tossed a glance in his direction. “You may well have done—have heard of her. Yes, that was nicely put: She was some sort of entertainer. I gather she’s been trying, rather fitfully, to restart her singing and dancing career. On the Internet.” (Here an exaggerated shudder at the unspeakableness of this plan.) “Imagine if you will Leticia’s pleasure at hearing that news. It was then I think Leticia, however briefly, joined forces with Gwynyth in wanting Gwynyth to get more support money from Oscar. To save us all the shame of having yet another performer swinging from a branch of the family tree.”