A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  “It’s ruddy freezing in here. How expensive could it be to install proper heating?”

  “We’re not in California anymore,” said her husband mildly.

  Max noticed that her wedding band, in contrast to her usual overblown style, was a plain band of gold to match Simon’s. Perhaps, thought Max, she had gotten the expensive baubles out of her earlier marriage or marriages; he suspected Simon’s charms had not included sacks of gold he’d brought into the partnership. What he did bring was easy to guess. Max wondered if Simon rued the bargain he’d made: Jocasta looked very high-maintenance. That the irresistible sexpot ship was slowly but surely leaving the port seemed not yet to have dawned on her.

  She sipped steadily from her wineglass, which her husband kept steadily filled, and stared with glassy-eyed concentration at the tapestries ranged about the stone walls.

  Not knowing quite how they ought to act, the assembled company tried on a succession of masks and attitudes. Worry. Apprehension. Grief of the kind natural when a relative of any degree of nearness dies. And here and there, the merest soupçon of pity for the departed.

  Underlying it all, thought Max, was a sense of excitement at the novelty.

  As often, Jocasta said what no one else would.

  “Well, they were very old, weren’t they? No use crying over spilt milk.”

  “I hardly think murder falls into the same category as spilt milk,” said Randolph sternly. “As to their ages—Oscar was a vital man, taken before his time was up. She may well have been, too, if it’s the shock of his death that finished her. That’s simply not right, however one looks at it.”

  Jocasta might not have noticed the tone, as indeed she had not. Many a movie director had experienced this same peculiar tone-deafness and could have warned Randolph not to bother trying.

  “It’s just like Leticia to hog the spotlight by dying right on top of my father,” she said.

  “Are you completely mad?” asked Randolph. “As if either of them had a say in what happened. For heaven’s sake, Jocasta. And please remember we’re not alone now.” This last was said with a significant nod in Max’s direction. Max, in fact all ears, pretended not to have heard.

  Jocasta pushed back a lock of auburn hair, a typically theatrical gesture that she happened to share with her cousin Randolph, saying, “The problem with Leticia was she’d been on the brink of death for decades, to hear her tell it. It’s hard, when the brink has been—what, brinked so often?—to know quite how one is supposed to feel when faced with the reality. No disrespect intended—it’s just that we’ve been in dress rehearsal for this occasion for positive eons.”

  Max reflected how much like Lady Baynard she was beginning to sound. Jocasta turned her head with its mound of hair slightly away from him and Max realized for the first time she was wearing a wig: A line of sparse gray hair showed briefly along the back of her neck, beneath the dark reddish-brown, as the wig slightly slipped its moorings. Max had known the bright color must be a dye job, but not that the hair itself was false. He found something about this inexpressibly sad, and was sorry to have been let in on her secret—that her hair was thinning so much as to require a wig. He wondered if perhaps she had been ill, but overall she seemed to be in robust health.

  “Oh!” she cried now in reply to some further remonstrance from Randolph. “You are horrid. It was horrid growing up here. So gloomy, so full of … well, gloom!”

  Lamorna, meanwhile, could be overheard quoting at Cilla one of the more apocalyptic Bible verses of the sort Lamorna seemed to favor. Jocasta continued talking in her Kabuki-theater way, eyes and gestures wide. Suddenly she regarded Max with the flickering blink of eyelids that with her seemed to pass for intense concentration. He suddenly realized that although her posture was upright Jocasta was extremely drunk; she had to have been drinking for a few hours before dinner to have achieved this condition. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her slide suddenly from her chair onto the floor.

  She had moved on to the topic of her early days in film, and about her star turn with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

  “Cleopatra? Really?” said Randolph, suspecting a fabrication. “Which part did you play? One of the crowd scenes, was it?”

  “No, I was … I was a priestess.”

  “A high priestess?” whispered Lester to his wife, with assumed innocence. “It was the sixties, after all.”

  “I heard that,” said Jocasta. “Anyway, I was too young for the role of high priestess. And Elizabeth had her little jealousies where Richard was concerned.”

  “Do tell.”

  But Jocasta, realizing her mistake (she would have been just out of diapers when Cleopatra was filmed), and sensing she had wandered too far into unrehearsed territory, subsided into a haughty and dignified silence. The conversation went from there to recent Oscar winners like The King’s Speech, with Cilla arguing for the overall brilliance of Benjamin Button.

  Max tried without success to capture Lamorna’s attention, if only to rescue a polite and patient Cilla.

  But the situation had been kindled and now was set to erupt.

  CHAPTER 23

  We Are Family

  Over dessert of cranberry tart with clotted cream, Max brought the subject round to the investigation of Oscar’s murder and Leticia’s death. They all began speaking at once, to all appearances delighted to be of help. As usual in such circumstances, comments were vague and lacking in specifics and particulars. There were a great deal of “I simply can’t believes”s and “She was the picture of health”s and “Murder? Impossible”s.

  So all were in agreement with the general trend of these sentiments, which essentially covered the waterfront of the more genteel reactions to murder. Indeed the word, when uttered for the first time by the police, had sent a frisson of something approaching excitement down all their spines, for knowing something in one’s heart is not the same as having that knowledge confirmed by officialdom. “Killed” leaves open the possibility, however absurd, of freak accident. “Murder” removes that possibility.

  Finally they simmered down into a deep silence, thoughtfully sipping their drinks. Lester began making a slurping sound with his until he became aware of the hostile stares emanating from his family. Sheepishly he stopped, only to begin drumming his fingers against his armrest.

  At length he said, “Obviously it was a roving gang of marauders.”

  Randolph lowered his chin and aimed at Lester a look of exaggerated patience, like a lord listening to the tale of a credulous and rather smelly peasant. “I believe the police have overruled that suggestion. Nevertheless your opinions, however preposterous they may be, are welcome. We need to explore every possibility to get to the bottom of this. So long as the police are here, we’ll never be able to resume our normal lives.”

  “You mean you think it was one of us,” said Alec.

  Randolph seemed to weigh Alec’s young age in his reply. The truth was harsh. But Alec wasn’t the type who could be shirked off with a half-truth.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Randolph. “It had to have been, don’t you see?”

  His voice held the talking-to-infants tone that had failed to endear him to people of all ages. It was the same voice that had presaged many an unruly family dinner discussion. Tonight was to be no exception.

  A memory flashed into Max’s mind of a scene he had witnessed one day at the beach, in Brighton or somewhere ordinary like that. A mother had been haranguing her young daughter, giving her a public dressing-down that had gone on several minutes too long over some minor infraction. Perhaps it was that the child had not washed the sand off her feet and legs as instructed—yes, that was it. There was a mutinous look on the child’s face as she went into the water to do as her mother had commanded. The mother, busy packing up the beach paraphernalia, missed seeing it. A thought had flashed unbidden into Max’s mind: She’ll bide her time and when she’s bigger, she’ll get even with you.

  Lamorna’s contribu
tion to the discussion had been to repeat several times her theory of divine retribution, interspersed with little outbursts of “frightful” and “my goodness gracious.” There was a ragged edge to her voice, but she was dry-eyed. They all were. Cilla, the most personally unaffected by the disaster, was if anything glowing with allure and energy.

  An intensely nervous Lester insisted, “Well, it couldn’t have been one of us. Someone got in from outside.”

  “I’m afraid the police do think that is quite impossible,” said Max.

  Lester rejected police thinking with an airy wave of his hand. “Nothing is impossible,” he said. “And I wouldn’t believe a word the authorities said, if I were you.” He cited an article he’d read in one of the tabloids where a space alien’s ossified remains had been found somewhere in a desert but the CIA was as usual covering it up.

  Unable to stop himself, Max asked, “Why on earth would the CIA do that?”

  “Simple,” replied Lester complacently, expanding under the attention. “So they have time to train one of their own operatives, altering his appearance surgically so they can use him as a decoy for when the aliens return.”

  “But, why—?”

  “Never ask a question when you know the answer is going to be too stupid for words,” said Randolph.

  “Are you calling my husband stupid?” Felberta turned on Randolph, protective instincts aroused.

  “No, I’m calling him brain-dead. Stupid would imply he was showing signs of sentient life.”

  Felberta, not sure what sentient might mean, sat a moment with her mouth working, then said, “I think you’re vile. Vile and grasping.”

  “No doubt. Better vile and grasping than to go through life believing anything one sees in print must be true just because it’s in print.”

  “I see you’re picking up the snobby banner so recently left behind by our mother,” Lester fumed.

  “Who are these people,” said Amanda, a shade too loudly, in clear imitation of her aunt. “And who are their people?”

  Cilla, as if hoping to divert the escalating argument, joined in, also in faultless imitation of Leticia’s crystallized accent. “And, more importantly, who are their people’s people?”

  Alec laughed loudly. The other adults turned toward the pair in disapproval. But the moment had passed, for everyone but Felberta, who said, hoping the twins would overhear, “Those children are nothing but pawns in Gwynyth’s campaign to inherit. Besides, do they look anything like Oscar to you?”

  “Given that he was in his seventies and they’re fourteen years old, would you really expect to be able to see a resemblance?” said Randolph.

  “Oh, come off it. You know what I’m saying.”

  “I do,” hissed Randolph. “And I’m not saying you’re right or wrong. I’m saying there will be a time to start flinging allegations like that around, and that time is not now.”

  Felberta sniffed, fluffing the collar of her blouse and adjusting her strange, unwieldy necklace.

  Lamorna now sat quietly, her eyes downcast, no doubt withdrawn into her tiny, holier-than-thou world of sentimentality steeped in dark judgment and brutal remonstrance. She might have been Bloody Mary awaiting the happy news of the execution of her cousin Lady Jane Grey.

  Jocasta leaned over her plate to stare down the table with the intense focus of the inebriated. Her red lipstick had smeared, an unhappy reminder of her vampire movie career. Max heard her say, slurring her words, “I wouldn’t worry about any of this if I were you, Gwynyth.” The “th” in Gwynyth’s name gave her particular trouble. “You weren’t in her will.”

  “I was!” said Gwynyth. “I was so too in her will.”

  “And you know this, how?”

  “She told me so. She said I was a major ben—bennie—what do you call it? Beneficiary.”

  “She told me the same thing,” chipped in Lamorna.

  They all looked at each other.

  “Well, it sounds like she’s been up to her old games,” said Gwynyth, putting her fork on her plate with a clatter.

  “It hardly matters now,” said Jocasta. She paused to empty her wineglass. “It’s time you found a job, anyway.”

  Gwynyth glared at her. “How dare you say that to me? When have you ever held a real job? Playing a bimbo vampire, please note, is not a real job.”

  “Bimbo?” spluttered Jocasta, every word a slurred effort. “Look who’s talking.”

  “If the Manolo fits, wear it,” murmured Randolph.

  Well, zing! thought Max. Tension crackled like lightning through the room. He felt it as a rise in his own body temperature, a faint beading of sweat across his brow.

  Jocasta kept reaching for the wine bottle in the middle of the table, stretching her body across whatever and whomever was in her way to reach it. More often than not it was Lester, who sat to her left.

  “Steady on, old girl,” he said, on the third or fourth reach.

  “Mind your own beeswax.”

  “Do people still say that?” Randolph wondered, with exaggerated innocence. “Isn’t that expression simply ancient?”

  “Like me, you mean?” Jocasta asked, pouring the wine with elaborate drunken care, a chemist on the verge of a major discovery that would both alter mankind’s perception of the universe and the layout of the periodic table. “I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking,” she added.

  “What a perfectly idiotic saying, I’ve always thought,” said Simon, sensing a brewing conflict and determined to save Randolph, if he could, from needless immolation. “Who, apart from certain of our elected officials, actually looks like a cabbage?”

  “Felberta, for one,” said Jocasta. She aimed an elbow at the table and missed. Wine sloshed onto her hand.

  “At least,” snapped Felberta, setting down her own glass none too steadily, “at least I don’t dress like I’m opening a third-rate vaudeville show.”

  At that, the vaulted ceiling seemed to press in on them with the weight of centuries. It wasn’t the first quarrel in that room—one had ended with a dagger through the heart of one of the then-earl’s vassals—but there were echoes of the past in every face and gesture.

  “How dare you,” Jocasta snarled, red lips taut as wire.

  Max noted with interest that it may have been the first time he’d seen the mask drop. She was clearly not acting now.

  He was a peacemaker by nature, and conflict of any size sparked an overwhelming need in him to intervene, to quell the disturbance. Max now called on all his acquired skills in calming troubled waters. After all, he reminded himself, he had faced down a variety of rancorous church committees, not to mention the notoriously cranky Nether Monkslip Book Club, whose members often came to grief in deciding on the monthly read. Dealing with this dysfunctional family, a murderous psychopath among them, should be easy by comparison.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “May I remind you of your recent losses? Let’s show some respect, if you would, for the deceased. Besides, a united front might be your best defense right now. As I’m sure you’re aware, the police are watching your every move closely.”

  His words—particularly the latter part of his message—quieted them all, but the shift in mood effectively signaled that the dinner was over. They slowly stood and made their ways with varying degrees of stability and focus toward the stairs. Jocasta overshot the exit and made a beeline toward a door into the garden. She had to be led to the stairs, with elaborate solicitousness, by her husband.

  Lester hesitated, clearly wanting a private word with Max. He began to say something and then thought better of it. He swerved off, his wife at his heels. Lamorna walked out without a word.

  Soon only three were left: Max, Randolph, and Cilla. The family tension seeped like vapor out of the room. Max thought it was a wonder they didn’t all drink like Jocasta.

  CHAPTER 24

  After Dinner

  Randolph, followed by Cilla, slouched his lanky way over to the arrangement of chair
s and sofas by the great stone fireplace. Nearby was the elaborate Christmas tree with its artistic flourishes of holly and mistletoe attached by purple and gold metallic bows. Randolph, looking up, followed Max’s gaze and said, “Jocasta ordered it in from the local florist. A typically extravagant, impulsive gesture. She’s rather like a child, I’ve always thought.”

  Max stood, waiting to be invited to join them, waiting to be noticed. The squabbling he’d witnessed during dinner had disturbed him. There were strong undercurrents there. He felt he had missed something.

  But it was Cilla with her preternatural awareness who had smiled first in polite greeting, including him in. Her response reminded him of Awena, whose insight—and company—he missed already.

  “Join us,” she said. “We’re trying to digest all that’s gone on. Wine as good as this, as I am sure you will discover, helps. We can’t let it go to waste.”

  Randolph then motioned him over. Minutes later the three sat huddled near the fire like regulars at a pub, Cilla curled up in her chair like a question mark. Before them on a low table were glasses of wine in varying stages of fullness. Accompanying the Côtes du Rhône was a cheese plate supplied by Milo. Max helped himself to an excellent bleu on a wafer-thin slice of toasted French bread.

  “What must you think of us?” said Randolph. “Somehow I feel I owe you an apology, although none of them are my doing. You mustn’t mind Alec, for a start.”

  “Not at all,” said Max. “He’s still creating himself, and one way teenagers do that is to argue with the oldies. It helps them to tease out what they actually do believe.”

  Randolph harrumphed. “Alec seems to regard himself as representative of his generation and is given to making blanket pronouncements about the thinking processes, likes, and dislikes of everyone within that generation. However, one has to take into account that he only represents a tiny fraction of the privileged segment of the population at large, so his opinions may be flawed, at best. The rest of the people his age have more mundane concerns about earning a living, getting into a good school, and so on. For Alec, it has been handed over on the proverbial plate, with garnish. For all his mother’s grousing about money, he’s well set up compared with most.”