A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  “What?” he said aloud. He raised his eyes. What is it? He read the entire chapter slowly and then he put the book aside. He stood and walked to the east-facing window. As before, a movement caught his eye. Was it?—yes. A dark shape moving among the shadows—a black shape against a black wall. In the sea fog coating the garden, the shape floated free under a sky pocked with stars, making footless progress in the direction of the archway leading to the back regions of the garden. He’d have missed it altogether but that the shape, momentarily washed by moonlight, turned to look back toward the castle for a flash of an instant, and Max saw a countenance dimly lit—gray with dark sockets, an indentation for nose and mouth. That was all he could have sworn to have seen. An impression, merely. Then the face, the mask, turned away. It was as if nothing had ever been there.

  He knew if he tried to follow the figure would be long gone, with a hundred places to hide, so he stood awhile, waiting for it to reemerge, hoping for a better glimpse of the face in the changeable blue snowlight of the half moon. It never reappeared.

  No less quiet in his mind, Max undressed for bed.

  * * *

  Max in the long watches turned over restlessly, burrowing deeply into his high-count cotton sheets smelling of lavender and soap. The wind outside howled as he dreamt that leprechauns with tiny metal mallets were pinging away at his swollen ankle. Their pounding grew louder, more insistent. Coming fully awake, Max bolted out of bed. Someone was at the door.

  He allowed a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, for fear of walking into some massive, immovable piece of furniture that had stood rooted to the floor since the fifteenth century. Fortunately he had left the curtains undrawn—there was no need for privacy as there was no one who could see in from below.

  And above the sound of the wind, he heard a scream. It was a scream worthy of the worst of Jocasta’s movies—high-pitched, shrill, and frenzied, it seemed to go on forever, until it was silenced by a tremendous thud of something heavy coming up against something immovable.

  The knocking at the door began again, a furious pounding. Through the thick wooden door he heard a muffled cry.

  He recognized Lester’s voice.

  Cautiously, he inched open the door. And there was Lester peering back, a picture of stark panic.

  “Did you hear that?” he demanded. “That scream?”

  Max, already on the move, nodded. “One second.” He felt his way to the light on the bedside table, then threw on a thermal jacket over his bare chest and drew running pants over his pajama bottoms. He slipped his feet sockless into his trainers and flung open the oak door, which had creaked its way half shut, and rushed into the corridor, colliding as he did so with a brown bear. His heart gave a colossal leap, but the bear was Lester, wearing the kind of fur hat with earflaps favored by Russians during their long winters, as if he’d planned a stop-off in Siberia after his visit to South West England.

  “What on earth was that?” asked Lester. He carried an electric torch that seemed to need new batteries.

  What in hell, more like, thought Max. Aloud he said, “I think it came from the servants’ staircase.” No need to say what “it” was. There was nothing about that sound that portended finding a whole and healthy person at its source.

  The light directly over the main staircase was turned off, and the corridor had only feeble electric light from the faux-medieval sconces on the wall. These seemed to cast shadows more than they did light.

  Max and Lester sped down the long passage as quickly as the darkness would allow, then hurtled through the stairwell’s oak door, which stood open. They began an ungraceful descent, Max hampered by the ankle, and Lester by an overwrought imagination and an incapacitating case of nerves.

  Max, thinking there might be a need for silence, was grateful that at least stone stairs do not creak. There was no banister or handrail. He edged his way down the steps, the dim, narrow lighting of which did not allow for headlong galloping downward. The stone steps, worn to a high and deadly gloss over centuries, could as easily catapult an agile man to the bottom as permit him a graceful if sporty descent.

  Lester, behind him, had started to jabber in his ear.

  “I followed Lamorna earlier, you see. To see what she was up to. And I was following her again just now. I decided to keep an eye on things tonight, because before dinner I saw her, you see? And she was skulking as only Lamorna could do. Why is she skulking about, I asked Felberta. What is she up to?”

  Yap yip yap. Max shook his head, turned, and held one finger to his lips in a shushing motion.

  Lester scuttled on behind Max, his bowlegged gait adding to the impression of a spider’s locomotion. As awkward as Max was nimble, Lester might have been a groundhog lumbering along behind a panther. A flop of curly hair corkscrewed over his brow. He finally was saving his breath, which was jagged from panic and exertion.

  Max thought he had heard something—a scuffle? A cry? But he couldn’t be sure with Lester’s rasping breath in his ear. Again, Max swiftly held up a hand for silence. There. It was a cry of astonishment, weak with shock and fear, all encapsulated in a brief inarticulate outburst, and followed by the most thunderous sound, as of a heavy weight falling a great distance. The spiral staircase magnified the sound.

  The cry interrupted Lester in the middle of a reverie in which he starred, Walter Mitty-like, as the savior of the situation. He froze momentarily as Max spun into action, propelling his trim, muscular body as fast as it could go down the stairs, pain forgotten.

  Lester, fearing being left alone, resumed his scuttle. “Shouldn’t we wait? Call someone? Hmm? Father?”

  Max, ignoring these little bleating sounds, forged ahead.

  As for Lester, his heart and stomach had taken on lives of their own, distinct from the rest of his body. His heart in particular thrummed against his rib cage, demanding exit. For the first time, Lester thought of his mother’s death and wondered if it had been painful. Certainly, if it had been anything like this, it had been frightening. He barely fought off the impulse to cling to the back of Max’s jacket. He hung back, then recalled his fear was greater of being left alone on the stairs. He resumed his downward progress.

  They found her at the base of the spiral stone stairwell. Max first saw her hand, unmoving, sticking out of a deeper shadow, a shadow improbably shaped like the Eiffel Tower.

  Lester was now making the sounds of a man who has unexpectedly stepped in a pool of quicksand. His white face, lit by the torch which flickered in his trembling hand, was a picture of terror. Now he began to emit little squawks of panic, complete with a flapping of both arms.

  “Do be still. There’s a good man,” said Max mildly.

  Lester squared his rounded, scrawny shoulders as best he could. Lester, whose heart was dancing to the beat of a mariachi band, and whose stomach seemed to be playing host to a tiny Olympics gymnastics team, now managed to squeak out a tiny sound of acquiescence, an “Okay” that a mouse standing on his shoulder would have had trouble hearing. He breathed deeply and patted his chest in a desperate attempt to calm himself, eyes wide beneath the ridiculous hat.

  Max widened his own eyes to let in as much light as possible as he gazed at the body. The quote flitted through his mind: “My bones are not hid from thee.” He knelt before Lamorna, sat back on his haunches, and raked his fingers through his hair. She was no longer hidden by the darkness; he supposed that was why he had called up the familiar old words. Only later did he come to know the true reason. Automatically, he sent up a prayer for the soul of this woman who seemed to have gone through life unfriended and unloved.

  She would have to have been kicked and shoved down the staircase, he realized, as it was so narrow, just narrow enough for a single person to pass, and the walls, as someone flung her against them, acted as weapons in themselves.

  Lamorna’s face, which Max could see had sustained serious injuries, thankfully was hidden from Lester’s full view by Max’s body. As with most he
ad wounds, there was a lot of bleeding. Blood covered her face. Poor soul.

  Lester didn’t look like he could take much more, and was only a heartbeat away from running for his life from the castle. He now emitted a sound that could best be described as a high-pitched yodel. Max spoke sharply to him and again he seemed to collect himself, but with effort. “How?” he began. “How did…?” Again, his vocal cords seemed to be shutting down under the strain.

  Max looked closer, but without touching the body. It looked like in addition to the head injury, the neck had been broken. Max, peering through the dim light, could see the outline of a torch. It was presumably hers: If it had belonged to her assailant it would almost certainly have been used as a weapon, and covered in blood. It was turned off.

  “She was pushed,” Max told him.

  “How can you be so sure of that—that she was pushed? It’s dark as a tomb in here. No pun intended.”

  “I can’t be positive,” said Max, “but think about it. She’s lived here for years. She knows these stairs are dark, and she knows to bring a torch to go down them. Why isn’t it switched on?” He stood and peered around at the stone walls.

  Lester stared mulishly at the body, as if willing it to rise and quit playing possum.

  “The fall knocked it into the off position,” he said at last.

  “Why would she fall if she had the torch switched on?” Max asked, reasonably.

  “I don’t know, do I?” the man nearly cried. “We just can’t have any more of this, I tell you!”

  “The police may be able to tell us more. I think those are signs of a scuffle, but we need better light in here to be sure. For now, it’s a crime scene and we’ll need to treat it as such.” Max pointedly stared down at Lester’s feet. “Move back, please.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake. Fine. Fine! Play the big action priest-detective if it makes you happy. I’m tired of being a suspect! I’m tired of being held in this place. The killing has to stop!” He held his stomach as if it had given him a small kick, as if politely to suggest now might really be a good time for him to leave. “I want to go home!”

  “Not happening anytime soon,” said Max. His eye had caught on something. “Is that paper?” he asked.

  Lester dragged his mind back from the volcano ledge of horror and said, “Sorry. What?”

  Lester stood sheltering at Max’s side, his chin nearly resting on Max’s shoulder as he stood on tiptoe to peer cautiously at the body.

  Just then they heard, as if from a great distance, the approach of footsteps. Could hair actually stand on end, Lester wondered? His felt as if someone had sprayed his scalp with dry ice. He forced himself to turn his head round to look back up the stairs. He let out a whinny that even he seemed to realize sounded absurd, since he immediately clamped a hand over his mouth to contain the noise.

  Doris Vladimirov came into view around a turn of the spiral staircase, a near-Victorian vision in a ruffled nightgown and chenille bathrobe. On her feet were what appeared to be enormous caterpillars.

  She uttered a small cry of astonishment that hardly rose to the strangeness of the occasion.

  “Heavens above,” she said.

  “It’s Lamorna,” said Lester.

  His voice was still keyed up several octaves, minutes away from melting into gibberish. The sudden appearance of the cook may actually have stopped his heart.

  “I see that,” she said placidly. Bodies in the stairwell might have been a weekly occurrence. Max almost expected her to wonder aloud who was going to clean up this mess.

  Max’s gaze returned to the body. Lamorna seemed to have something clutched in her hand. A scrap of paper.

  “Shine that light over here a moment, will you?”

  Lester’s hands were shaking so, Max finally took the torch from him.

  What he could see of the note said, “Meet me at the OK at midnight.” It was signed with what looked like a letter D.

  He looked at Doris but said nothing. Let Cotton handle it when he got here.

  CHAPTER 26

  Family Conclave

  Max sent Lester to rouse the household, on the theory that giving the man something to do would calm him. Given the timing of the finding of the body, he didn’t think Lester could have had anything to do with Lamorna’s death.

  “Tell them to meet me in the Great Hall,” said Max. “Ask Milo to get the fire going.”

  Max found some matches in the sideboard and lit the candelabra on the dining room table. Eventually they began to emerge like moles from the dark stairwell, blinking in the quavering candlelight. He did a head count as they arrived.

  Max had already put in a call to Cotton after finding Lamorna. He planned to issue strict instructions to everyone not to move from the spot, then set out to wait for Cotton’s arrival.

  Jocasta had fluttered into the room in a bright kimono, scarves trailing (red and orange, this time), her arms waving to telegraph her distress to the cheap seats. Diamonds twinkled at her ears. What sort of woman wore scarves and diamonds to bed? Max wondered.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. “Whatever next?”

  Simon was with her, tying an elegant silk men’s dressing gown around his waist. They were soon joined by Felberta in a woolen gown over her nightdress and a white cotton sleeping cap. Tufts of her unruly brown hair peeked out around the edges. She looked like an illustration for a children’s tale, only lacking a candlestick for the full effect.

  Milo and Doris wore matching bathrobes. “I heard someone cry out,” Milo told them.

  “It was the ghost,” Doris said matter-of-factly.

  Eventually they were all there, Randolph and Cilla, Lady Jocasta Jones and Simon, Felberta. Gwyn and the Twyns. The Vladimirovs. The company was completed by Lester, clearly relishing his role as sheepdog, nipping at a thoroughly irritated Randolph’s heels. Max started to go and await Cotton and his team, but not before Jocasta erupted. She sucked in her cheeks and began to breathe in and out of her nostrils like a horse (Beulah von Blatt, I Scream My Head Off). “Here we are, waiting about like lambs to the slaughter!” she cried.

  Lester shook his head decisively. The thick locks of his hair bounced energetically, taking on a life of their own.

  “No way,” he said. “You’ll be just fine. I’ll see to it.” Lester put one arm around his wife. He was in his element now: protector and defender of women. Hadn’t he been the one to discover the body?

  Jocasta snorted dismissively. She looked round in something like triumph at the assembled family.

  “I told you something like this would happen.”

  “You most certainly did not tell us anything of the sort,” said Randolph testily. Cilla, in black satin, looked ready to chime in but perhaps, as often, felt her “otherness” as being not part of the family—and thus not free to comment on the more trying of their imbecilities.

  “It’s a curse upon this family.” Jocasta raised both hands in classic silent-cinema fashion to illustrate her shock and revulsion.

  “Oh, do shut it,” said Felberta. “You’re starting to sound like Lamorna.”

  Jocasta drew back. “I resent that,” she said. “I really do.”

  “Yes,” said Randolph. “Let the poor girl rest in peace—there’s no need for character assassination now.”

  Jocasta in full flood was not to be stopped. “Call me psychic if you like, but I tell you I knew something was going to happen.”

  No one looked like wanting to address her supernatural abilities. In fact, from behind her, Alec rolled his eyes at his sister and clutched his throat in a parody of gagging. The rest of the group turned to Max as someone who might be the voice of reason in this particular situation.

  Felberta fed her husband his lines. “You said you found Lamorna? How did you come to find her?”

  “I saw her out the window, walking about,” said Lester importantly. “And I just knew she was up to something. So I followed her. Then there was a scream.” An afterthought: “Father Max her
e helped. I needed someone to hold the torch.”

  “Surely you could have done something to prevent this,” said Gwynyth to Lester. She was in pink silk and what Max thought were called mules—fuzzy pink high heels. “You couldn’t have been following her all that well.”

  “Me?” said Lester, an expression of confusion on his face. He flapped his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “How was I to know what she was up to? The ingratitude of this family. It’s breathtaking. I’ve probably just saved all of your lives.”

  The tremor of fear running through the room was real enough, at least in Jocasta’s case, but no one could be said to be in mourning for Lamorna.

  It made Max angry—so angry he needed a moment to collect himself.

  He turned to look out the window beyond the screen and saw that snow had now hardened into something dense and wet that coated the windowpanes with a slushy curtain.

  Jocasta exhorted everyone to remain calm, in a loud voice guaranteed to spike everyone’s blood pressure. She looked set to say, “The show must go on,” and then, in an all-too-rare lapse into good taste, seemed to think better of it.

  Max said to her, “I saw someone in the garden, very late last night after dinner. Did you?”

  “Me? Of course not. Bloody freezing out there at night, isn’t it? I was doing my vocal exercises, then I went to bed early. I was exhausted after that excruciating dinner.”

  “Anyone else?” said Max. But no one did, or no one would admit to it. The fact remained someone had seen Lamorna, someone had followed her back inside, and someone—there seemed no reason to doubt it—someone had killed her.

  “If you are hiding anything, any information at all, this might be a good time to mention whatever it is. Because Lamorna knew something, and you can see where it got her.”

  Was it his imagination, or was there a slight shuffling or disturbance at the outer fringes of the crowd? He thought it might be coming from one of the twins, who stood behind their mother, who sat on the sofa, but when he looked directly at them, they stared back, both the picture of blue-eyed innocence.