A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  “No, he was being evasive about the whys and wherefores, but I could read between the lines all right. Oscar was getting ready to meet his maker. You don’t just leave your money to a bunch of people you’ve rarely met, do you?”

  “And I don’t suppose you’d telegraph the fact that the people in question were being auditioned, in a way. Given the once-over to assess their suitability.”

  “Precisely,” said Lester. Oozing earnestness and goodwill from every pore, Lester leaned forward to say, “He loved to spy on people, you know. Gather information. Catch them at their worst. It’s how he earned his crust on Fleet Street.”

  “So, how do you think everyone measured up, in his eyes?”

  Lester smiled another of his would-be ingratiating smiles. “Some better than others, to be sure.”

  Lester reminded Max of the type of politician who keeps getting returned to high office, despite the best, most determined efforts of the populace to vote him out. As with such men, there was the whiff about him of failure, but perhaps not quite enough failure for the common good.

  “You got along with him well, did you, sir?” This from Sergeant Essex.

  Lester clearly considered the merits in lying, and decided there was too much evidence to refute any protestations of abiding familial love.

  “One got tired of being blown up all the time,” he finally said. “He didn’t seem to approve of anyone, and it got worse the older he got. Very judgmental, was my uncle. And with a touch of paranoia.”

  “You quarreled with him, did you, sir?”

  “Not openly. I avoided him as much as possible, if you want the truth.”

  “It’s why we’re here, sir,” said Cotton. “To get the truth.”

  Max twinkled appreciatively at the new, improved, debonair detective. It was like having Lord Peter Wimsey lead the interrogation.

  “And Lady Baynard,” Cotton continued. “Was she happy with Lord Footrustle’s arrangements for the holidays? Would she have had any hand in the invitations going out?”

  Lester let out a sudden, loud guffaw, the sort of sound made by a large zoo animal. He seemed to realize he sounded somewhat lunatic, for he quickly apologized for the outburst. “It’s just that the very idea of Leticia’s inviting us is impossible. It just wouldn’t happen. She wouldn’t actively turn us away at the door if we showed up but it would be a close thing. Well, she might make an exception in Jocasta’s case but after all, Jocasta was—is—Oscar’s own flesh and blood.”

  “There was some estrangement there, was there?” asked Cotton. “Between Jocasta and her father?”

  “Yes. No one was invited to her wedding to Simon out in Las Vegas, just to give you some idea of the state of affairs. Essentially, they eloped. Simon is much too much younger than Jocasta, if you follow, a fact we only gradually became aware of and a fact I rather think she wanted to hide. Simon is totally in Jocasta’s shadow. Or, if you ask me—and I take it you are asking me—he was totally in it for the money and connections, while they lasted, since it’s so easy to make her believe her charm and beauty have anything to do with his interest in her. She’s extremely high maintenance—if you haven’t gathered that yet you will. And she’s a bit of a hypochondriac.”

  “That seems to be a family trait,” put in Max.

  Momentarily forgetting his role as eager provider of useful information, Lester gave Max a bellicose look that didn’t hold much gratitude for the observation.

  “Yes, well, I didn’t inherit the gene but Jocasta did. If you told her swallowing live bait prevents wrinkles or would help her to lose weight, she’d do it without hesitation.”

  “You got along well with your mother, did you, sir?” This from DCI Cotton, looking up from behind his desk. He’d been looking at some document or other on his laptop but now he closed the lid. “There was no sense that she favored your brother over you, anything like that?”

  Lester ran his tongue slowly across his upper lip, clearly thinking hard. “Wa-a-l-l,” he said a last. “No. Not really.” He gave Cotton and Max a momentary glance each, then gazed with intense fascination at the faded Aubusson rug, which hardly merited such scrutiny. When Cotton pressed the issue, Lester’s roving eyes, which he finally raised to meet his interrogator’s, seemed clouded over.

  “Not that it has any relevance to the matter at hand,” he grudgingly conceded. “But the firstborn is often the favorite. It’s just the way of the world.” His resigned acceptance was belied by the flush the topic had brought to his face, and would have been more convincing if he had not been practically dancing with impatience in his chair.

  Max privately thought the way of the world was that the youngest was often the favorite, but he said nothing. Lester, for all his occasional puppyish enthusiasm, was too conflicted a personality to be anyone’s favorite.

  “I’ve had a word with Wintermute, the family solicitor,” said Cotton.

  Max sensed an abrupt buildup of tension in the already tense figure.

  “Oh, yes?” said Lester, with elaborate casualness. “Sound man, Wintermute.”

  “He says you called him yesterday morning.”

  “Yes.” Definitely an increase in tension now.

  “Your mother and uncle had only just been found dead.” He let the unspoken question hang in the air.

  “What of it? What if I did call Wintermute? This is neither the time nor the place to discuss it.”

  “It’s a murder investigation,” said Cotton. “I’ll decide the time and the place.”

  “I rather think this is a private family matter,” said Lester.

  Cotton’s patience was thinning in the face of the man’s imbecilic intransigence. Gone, Max noticed, watching from the sidelines, was the sophisticated urbanity he had come to appreciate, this new aristo tool in Cotton’s arsenal of weapons. One could almost see the policeman taking off the gloves. He blew past Lester’s stonewalling and said coldly, “In a murder investigation, nothing is private. Wintermute found your questions premature, to say the least. Now, what did you find to talk about within hours of your mother’s demise?”

  Lester, head bowed, muttered something into his chest.

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to repeat that.”

  Lester lifted his head defiantly. “I said, I wanted to know the terms of her will.”

  “And what were the terms?”

  Sulkily: “She left everything to my brother and myself. Naturally. She even left a few quid to Lamorna. Now, there was a surprise.” Lester turned in Sergeant Essex’s direction. “Are you getting this down or should I speak more slowly?”

  Essex bristled, already on alert for the next bit of condescension. She wouldn’t have long to wait.

  “That tallies with what Wintermute told me,” said Cotton.

  “Then why bother asking me?” said Lester.

  “When did you arrive at Chedrow Castle?” Sergeant Essex asked, out of annoyance asserting herself into the conversation.

  “I’ll be glad to answer questions so long as they’re coming from DCI Cotton,” said Lester.

  Big mistake, Lester, thought Max.

  “The very question I was going to ask,” said Cotton to the man he was privately starting to think of as “that pompous nitwit,” but reverting to his dulcet, gentlemen’s club tones. “How long have you and your wife been here?” As an afterthought, he added, “Sir.”

  “We arrived at the end of November or beginning of December. I couldn’t tell you the exact date.” Lester expanded his small, scrawny frame into the sofa.

  “Quite an extended visit, then.”

  “We had a lot of catching up to do. And a flight to and from Australia is not lightly undertaken.”

  Cotton noticed a look of puzzled discontent on Max’s face. He felt he was becoming familiar with that look. Max was the embodiment of the maxim “Look before you leap.” Any doubts had to be allayed in Max’s mind before he would accept what to anyone else was the obvious conclusion. It made him a brilliant p
riest—sympathetic and thoughtful, not prone to quick or harsh judgments. It made him an even better investigator, in Cotton’s view.

  “What about the terms of Lord Footrustle’s will?” Max said at last.

  Lester, even when seated, seemed to be in motion. Max detected the merest shuffling of his feet, as if he couldn’t wait to be away, for it was clearly an unwelcome question. This energy of the highly strung he had in common with DCI Cotton, if not much more.

  “You’ll have to get the details from Wintermute,” said Lester, now with affected patience. “I only had any business asking about my mother’s will, I felt, so I couldn’t help you.” The postscript “even if I wanted to” was plain but left unsaid.

  * * *

  The door had closed behind Lester Baynard with a resounding gothic thud. Sergeant Essex, not expecting to be overheard over the sound by the two men remaining in the room, muttered, “What a load of balls.”

  Cotton gave her a warning look. She lifted her shoulders in silent apology. But she didn’t look sorry.

  “His statements would carry more weight if he struck me as someone who had ever actually pulled his own weight,” she said. “A complete drain on society, that one.”

  Cotton, well acquainted with Essex’s class consciousness, stood and began moving in a graceful swooping motion, back and forth across the room, thinking.

  “So, what do we know about Lord Footrustle?” Cotton asked at last. “According to everyone we’ve spoken with, including Lester just now, he was a secretive man. He’d made much of his fortune in Fleet Street ventures possibly because he knew everyone’s secrets and I guess could keep a few of his own. There’s a squint in his bedroom he used to—”

  “I’m sorry, sir. A what?” This from Essex.

  “A squint. A little opening in a stone wall. There were two of them, in fact. One faced the outside; one overlooked the Great Hall. He liked to spy, to keep an eye on things and people. According to the butler, he spent an inordinate amount of his time, especially once he was retired, doing just that.”

  “So you think he may have been killed for what he saw,” said Max. “That he saw something he shouldn’t have.”

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility, and a likely one. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes. I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.”

  “I suppose we can’t avoid talking with Jocasta Jones much longer,” said Cotton. “And I rather think the perspective of Oscar’s eldest daughter might be useful.”

  He went to pull up some information on his mobile and was frustrated in the attempt. He walked over to confer with Essex on some fine point of using the device.

  Max, content to leave the digital future to people like Cotton who seemed to have more of an affinity, turned again to the books stacked on the table at his side while Cotton scrolled away on his little machine.

  “No!” said Sergeant Essex. “Not that button. That’s the del—”

  “Where did it go?” said Cotton. “Where in hell did it go? It just disappeared!”

  Essex sighed. It seemed she and Cotton had been round this block before. “Let me have a look, sir. I should be able to recover it.”

  Max, flipping through the pages of the books, many of them recent publications, felt it was hard to say who might have been responsible for their purchase. There were potted royal biographies, fleshed out with unsubstantiated scraps of scandal. There was a copy of Royal Nursery Tales by some royal nanny of the distant past, and a copy of The Life and Loves of Prince Albert. Somewhat surprisingly, he found a thin biography of the Middletons, hurriedly produced once the royal engagement had been announced, called Life of the Party Pieces. Max suspected that might have been a guilty pleasure of Lady Baynard’s. He recalled her comments in the train about commoners and felt there might have been a morbid fascination at work, along the lines of, “First Gwynyth, now this.” Something to chew over at dinner with her similarly minded friends.

  In another stack beside a bowl of fruit there were some history books and a sprinkling of Evelyn Waugh, but nothing that otherwise caught his eye as germane to the case. Lord Footrustle or someone seemed to like paperback thrillers with historic or religious overtones, however doubtful the research on which the books had been based. The Knights Templar, so far as Max was aware, had never journeyed to Vancouver.

  They—both Cotton and Essex—had quite forgotten Max was there, and he in his turn gave every appearance (quite deceptive) of having tuned out the conversation in favor of perusing the titles on the spines of the leather-bound books ranged on a shelf beside him. They forgot him, so much so that when he spoke, they both jumped and Sergeant Essex’s biro went flying. Max retrieved it for her from behind a potted plant.

  “Sorry,” he said. He held a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in his hands, by the look of it an original edition. “I was just wondering about the business of the food poisoning, if poisoning it were. How would you go about introducing poison into Oscar’s diet, if you were so inclined?”

  “The whole subject is tricky,” said Cotton. He leaned back in what could be mistaken for a relaxed pose, but in Cotton might be a prelude to a sprint for the door. “We don’t know if we’re talking about salmonella or what, and we can’t say for sure when he was exposed to the poison, or even if he was. It could have taken hours or even days before he complained of illness. Toxic mushrooms are just one possibility. His age was a factor, making him more vulnerable to rapid onset. But the event was far enough in the past there was no trace of whatever it was left, since he survived the poisoning attempt—if attempt it was.”

  “Hmm,” said Max. “But I find it suggestive, don’t you? I would call it an attempt to pin the blame on the cook. Then with both Oscar and Leticia found by the butler … well.”

  They talked awhile about the attempts on Oscar’s life, including the attempt Amanda had told Max about.

  The three sat for some moments, taking this in. Finally, Sergeant Essex said, “Shall I go and find the next one?”

  “Stay here and find that file for me,” said Cotton. “I’ll send one of the constables to locate Jocasta. And to organize some coffee. Be right back.”

  Essex watched Cotton don his jacket, shoot his immaculate cuffs, and stride out of the room, up the stairs to the Great Hall.

  “I don’t know how he affords it on a policeman’s salary,” Essex said to Max.

  “Have you seen his flat?”

  “Of course not! Why would I have seen his flat?”

  “I just meant, there’s no money wasted there, so I guess it all goes for clothing. I had to pick him up one day when his car was in the shop. You’d need to invent a new word for ‘Spartan’ to describe the place. It’s positively Zen.”

  Max had just found a large, photocopied Footrustle family tree tucked into the pages of Brideshead Revisited. He unfolded the paper, spreading it out on his lap. It was a beautifully rendered tree, drawn in pen and ink, going back approximately four centuries, and updated within the past few decades.

  Max, seeing it laid out before him, was struck by the fact of the—what was it? The lack of cohesiveness of this present-day family. When looked at clinically in a “cold” diagram, the nearness of the relations was evident. Why so little family feeling, then? Was there just something wrong with the Footrustles, and the Baynards? Something amounting almost to a genetic disorder?

  The family tree hinted here and there at consanguinity—a dangerous intermarrying of persons too closely related. A practice that could lead to birth defects, and to illnesses both physical and mental.

  It was a practice that led quite frequently to madness.

  CHAPTER 16

  A Star Is Born

  Cotton stood, his backside to the fire, reading from a sheaf of notes.

  “Jocasta and the twins Alec and Amanda inherited quite a few pounds from Oscar—nicely judged to be enough to keep them quiet, but not what they would have seen otherwise. The solicitor seems to have known what he was doing
. The lion’s share went to Oscar’s sister: to Leticia, Lady Baynard.”

  He peered at Max over the top of the pages.

  “I’ve asked the solicitor, Wintermute, to drop by sometime today,” Cotton said. “I’m hoping you get a chance to talk with him.”

  Max’s mind was elsewhere. He took a sip of the fragrant coffee, which had been delivered and poured out by Milo, and replacing his cup carefully on the saucer said, “You would think Jocasta and Randolph would have something in common, apart from being cousins. She’s spent her career in front of the camera, and he behind it.”

  “Or it would guarantee hostilities between them. Those jobs require differing personalities. Who can say? In any event, there is no shortage of suspects, within the castle walls or without. Oscar has been called the Voldemort of Fleet Street by both friends and enemies. He was apparently ruthless in all his business dealings.”

  “What do you know about the knife used to kill him?”

  “Only that it came from the kitchen—a long, thick blade, a sort of all-purpose butcher knife.”

  “All-purpose, indeed,” said Max, sadly shaking his head. “Including the purpose of butchering a man.”

  “My team found it in the garden, in one of the topiaries—a heart-shaped topiary,” Cotton told him.

  “A clue, perhaps hinting at unrequited love, or a broken heart?” wondered Max aloud. “Or a blind? Or simply the most expedient way to lose the most incriminating item? A quick nip out to the garden on the pretext of an invigorating stroll, and a quick thrust of the knife in among the tightly packed branches.”

  “Hmm. Something like that. The team didn’t find it until late yesterday afternoon, just as they were getting ready to pack it in because of darkness.”

  Cotton turned back to the pages he’d been riffling through, now propelling his lean, restless frame toward a seat near Max. “So, we have Lady Jocasta Jones née Footrustle, by Oscar’s first wife Beatrice Briar. Then, completing the family tree on that branch, there are the twins (and they seem almost universally to be called The Twyns) who are Alec, Viscount Edenstartel, and his sister Lady Amanda. Jocasta is of course their much older half sister.”