A Fatal Winter
Page 31
She had already said her good-byes and was turning to go when Miss Pitchford said flatly, “Madness runs in that family.”
Suzanna was nodding. “Bruce always thought so. You know, that’s a bit of a hobbyhorse of his. Madness.”
Miss Pitchford agreed. “They’re all barking, to some degree or other. Daft as brushes.”
“And Max is staying there,” said Suzanna. “With a murderer?”
Numbly, Awena allowed the words to sink in. She was upset, she realized, that Max hadn’t mentioned this plan to her.
And more upset to realize there was no reason he should have done.
“So I hear,” she said.
CHAPTER 29
S.O.S.
Having spent much of the day talking with the suspects, going over old and new ground, Max returned to his room to shower and change, hoping the sluice of water would help rejuvenate his thinking.
Changing quickly into a dark wool jumper and jeans, he took out the notebook he always kept with him to capture the random thoughts that often ended up in his sermons. Using a plastic pen embossed with the Footrustle logo, a guest souvenir, he described as best he could the images that slipped through his mind in a stream-of-consciousness style. Turning to a more analytical mode, he also noted the nagging inconsistencies, but he could draw no connections there.
Frustrated, he flipped the notebook to a new page, as if the sight of a fresh, unmarred sheet of paper might clear up his thinking. Predictably, it only seemed to mirror the blankness of his mind. He kept returning to Lamorna’s passing reference to Esau and Jacob until finally he looked up the passage again. At Genesis 27:41 his eyes fell upon these words:
And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him: and Esau said in his heart, The dayes of mourning for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.
Max read this and thought, Yes, that’s all well and good, and I can’t entirely blame Esau for his anger. Max knew by now that money and inheritance, as is so often the case, were at the bottom of the current situation at the castle as well, but beyond that, where was the connection?
He closed the book, stood, and thought with a sudden fierce longing of Awena. He badly wanted just to see her face. To be in the presence of someone who was the opposite of persons full of guile, greed, and grasping ambition.
He had well and truly had it with the Footrustles and their damnable lusting after money.
He didn’t think beyond that, to what might happen between him and Awena. He just wanted urgently to see her, almost as if he feared for her safety. Yet he knew she was safe, in what must have been one of the safest places on earth. Well, despite the recent unpleasantness, Nether Monkslip was the safest of havens.
There came a knock at the door. It was probably Cotton, he thought, as he twisted the iron door handle—Cotton wanting to rehash some point of the case. Max rubbed his eyes with weariness.
And there she was. He stepped back, doing an almost comic double-take. Awena. What in the world?
But she looked distraught. If it were possible for Awena ever to look haggard, she did, with dark circles under the luminous, deep-violet eyes.
“You know,” she said without preamble, “you really might have told me. They’re worried sick back at the village.” Somehow it seemed safer to present herself as a spokesperson for the villagers and their anxieties. She wasn’t yet ready to admit she was at the castle after succumbing to a gnawing, mind-numbing anxiety of her own. She had to see Max, and see with her own eyes that he was safe.
He stood back from the door to let her pass. “How…?” he began.
“Cotton saw me arrive,” she told him. “He told me where I could find you.”
“You know there’s been another murder.”
“He told me. Lamorna. Good heaven, that poor child.”
He started to correct her, to say, I actually meant, how did you know I desperately wanted to see you? but settled for, “It is very good to see you.”
It was a measure of Cotton’s esteem for her that she was allowed here at all under the circumstances, Max knew. She could be trusted not to get in the way of the investigation, to contribute only when and if asked, and, most of all, to be discreet and keep to her own counsel.
He looked at her delightedly, disbelievingly. Awena’s classically etched face mirrored the transparency of her personality, free from guile, imbued with joy. More than most people, Max thought, Awena was without barriers, her soul translucent as glass, as sheer as a seashell worn by tides and sand. He turned toward her with an embracing movement of his arms, a welcoming embrace that did not touch her, as if he feared this vision might evaporate.
Only a few miles had separated them, but she had stood in his mind like a bejeweled icon of serenity. Now holding her by the arms, he reveled in her presence. He took in the day’s attire, a soft, saffron dress like a bright flame gathered with a wide satin belt. It glittered with embroidery and small, semiprecious stones of every hue.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Max. “Someone very disturbed—something evil is at work here. I don’t want you in harm’s way.” He grimaced briefly at the thought of Awena getting in the path of this horror. He thought of her as vulnerable, given to starry-eyed beliefs, and would have been astonished to know she thought the same of him. “Who saw you arrive?” he asked.
“Only the police, so far as I know. Cotton and Essex. The place is swarming, as you’re aware. A veritable hive of activity.”
Briskly she moved past him. She stood before the fire, warming her hands. She turned to him, those shining eyes drawing him closer. “They’ve cleared the roads at last, or I couldn’t have made it,” she told him. “I call that miraculous. Farther inland the snows have been historic.”
She took a seat on the sofa before the fire and motioned him next to her.
“Tell me, now,” she said. “Why poor Lamorna?”
He sat and turned to face her. “There’s a reason, however mad it may seem.” He noticed that she perceptibly shuddered on the word. “You know the kind of life she led here. It seems to have given her an odd … tendency. A ‘need to know’ that was probably a clinical-grade snoopiness, if you will. Knowledge being power, she went around gathering whatever dribs and drabs of information she could. Somehow this rabid curiosity got mixed up in her mind with an odd religiosity, and the idea that she could protect the status quo by holding whatever she knew over the head of the killer. She simply wanted to be allowed to live on here, protected from the outside world. Not too surprisingly, it led to her death.”
Max scrubbed with the palm of one hand at the day’s growth of dark beard on his face. He’d forgotten to shave, distracted.
Devastated, was the word. Another death he should have prevented and could not. If only he’d been fast enough, made the connections …
“She was the scapegoat,” he said. “The sacrifice. Anyone could see that. I knew that. I should have—”
“‘Should have’?” picked up Awena. “‘Should have’? What kind of rule book are we playing by here? The Omniscient Max Tudor-Slash-Superman Regulations?”
Max, suddenly swamped by memories of Paul, of the friend and comrade whose death he could have prevented, found himself with jaws working but unable to answer her. She laid a hand on his arm, the simple compassion plain on her face, in the clarity of those remarkable eyes.
Max was so much the imperturbable one she touched him as much to be sure the Max she was used to was still there. He, now completely undone by her kindness and wanting to hide as the tears sprang from nowhere, his face contorted in a mask of pain and bleak regret, covered his eyes with one hand. Drawing her to him, he rested his head against her neck. The contact, never sexual in intent, nonetheless acted as a charge, completing a circuit, bridging them together. Max leaned against the one person he knew with certainty would both be strong enough to catch him yet never betray or judge his weakness—or even see this collapse as a weakness.
“Sor—” he began.
“If you say you’re sorry I shall jump up and down and run about the room screaming. I may knock over lamps and throw things out windows. Now, when is the last time you saw Lamorna alive?”
The brisk return to common sense and the need to focus on bringing Lamorna and Oscar’s killer to justice galvanized him, as Awena had known it would. There was work to be done. Max’s training and his very nature came into play.
He talked for some time, and she listened. Listened to the half-formed theories. To his questions about things that had happened. And most particularly, to his question about the one thing that should have happened, but had not.
Awena had again that faraway look in her eyes, eyes that suggested a mariner scanning the horizon. It was a look that belied her lively and active participation in the world, her awareness of every moment. She hung on his words, but in the end confessed she could make no connections he had not made himself.
Finally Max said, “Tell me again about your visit to the castle that day to see Leticia.”
Awena, looking confused by the request, struggled to comply.
“Really, there was nothing to it,” she concluded. “I was here perhaps half an hour, not more. The shallow soil and the nearby sea presented some particular challenges for growing herbs, and I advised her on that. She offered me tea which I refused, and then I left. The bees chased me out, rather. They were a complete menace that day—that summer, really. I told you this.”
Max’s eyes in the shadowy room grew dark, his expression distracted.
Awena leaned back, resting comfortably in the cradle of his arms. She examined his face like a buyer looking for flaws, her hands in his. After a very long while she smiled, and stood.
* * *
Awena had left, taking Max’s heart with her.
Max escorted her to the car park and saw her drive safely down the road that would take her back to Monkslip-super-Mare and from there on to Nether Monkslip. She drove a car of robin’s egg blue that looked like it ran on AA batteries. It had a COEXIST sticker on the back bumper, each letter represented by a symbol for a different religion. Max laughed aloud.
And Cotton watched their good-byes from an upper window, a broad smile on his face.
Max walked slowly back into the castle. A few answers to a few more questions, a very few, and he knew he’d have the solution to the case.
But his thoughts now sprang wide, free to roam in larger, uncharted territory, considering that nearly all the matter of the universe consisted of dark energy and dark matter. Everything mankind knew or believed had to be taken on the blind faith of the heart.
No different from falling in love, Max imagined. Exactly the same.
Whether a woman who followed neopagan beliefs could be considered suitable company for an Anglican priest was very, very much open to question. To him, it didn’t matter. Awena had a depth of spirituality and connectedness to things divine beyond anything he had ever encountered in his life. The official Church might not—almost certainly would not—understand.
It might end with his having to leave the priesthood, and he knew unhesitatingly that was a risk he’d accept.
He supposed he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
CHAPTER 30
Heard in High Places
When Max awoke the next day, it was with the uneasy sense that in his dreams he had been running, charging after some creature, man or beast, so fleet of foot—or hoof—that it had already turned the next corner just as he arrived there.
Lord Footrustle’s murder had clearly been at the hands of a quick, ruthless killer of unshakable nerve. A single deep thrust of the knife, no hesitation, followed up by other, dispassionate thrusts to ensure the kill. A clean killing, if any murder could be thus described. The killing of Lamorna was something else. It had an aura of ruthlessness, and of desperation. Clearly she was in the way. Possibly a witness. And she had been dispatched, apparently without hesitation. Their killer was without conscience, acting on instinct. “Wait and do nothing,” as is often wise in a hostage situation, wasn’t an option here. At least not for long, with the trail growing colder by the minute. Soon, Cotton would have to let the suspects go.
Max reminded himself that only in the abstract was evil frightening. It was the banality of evil, evil when met face-to-face, that was surprising. And that very banality reduced it to a form that could be conquered.
He elbowed a sweater over his head, tightened the bandage around his ankle until he felt he could walk without the crutch, if carefully, and headed downstairs for breakfast.
* * *
Breakfast was set out by the Vladimirovs, again in a buffet arrangement that allowed everyone to choose and settle as they wished. Max noticed the twins taking plates loaded with fruit, bread, and cheese up the stairs either to their rooms or to the drawing room. No one tried to stop them. Indeed, no one seemed to notice them at all, least of all their mother, who apparently subsisted on dry Ryvita and coffee. She smiled wanly at Max when he wished her a good morning.
Max took in the expanse of the Hall and saw Felberta sitting near the fireplace. Today she was wearing an enormous necklace that might have belonged to the chieftainess of a minor Māori tribe. He smiled at her but settled with his poached egg and baked beans at the dining room table.
Cilla came into the room. Today she was in black jean leggings that looked impossible to walk in, let alone sit in—a covering that emphasized the spidery thinness of her legs. Ugg boots had replaced the usual high heels, boots suitable for mushing on the Iditarod. A coiling tumble of dark brown hair, literally her crowning glory, fell about her shoulders.
She was looking at a message on her mobile phone and suddenly emitted a joyful bark of laughter. Max looked up, wondering to himself what had made her laugh, particularly under the circumstances. She turned the screen so Max could see a message sent by someone clearly inept at the art of text messaging. It was a message full of typos, the sender seeming like a foreigner with an incomplete and faulty grasp of the English language. It read, in part: “come form xmas. Moist welcome.”
“My aunt,” she said. “All thumbs.”
It suddenly made him think of the mobile carried on the train by another elderly woman, Leticia. She had said the twins had programmed the phone for her, hadn’t she?
Was it important? He rather thought it was.
“Did you happen to see where the twins were headed when they left here?” he asked Cilla.
She shook her head. “Try the drawing room. They like to cave-dwell in there when the oldies are otherwise occupied.”
* * *
Max walked up to Leticia’s “withdrawing room” and peeked in. The twins were there reading, curled up like puppies on the sofa. Alec looked up at him, heavy-lidded. After nodding hello, he returned his eyes to his page.
“Could I have a word, Alec?”
His reluctance clear, Alec marked his place in his book and followed Max out to the hallway.
“I need to know what you’ve been doing up on the roof.” Seeing Alec’s face, and heading him off at the pass, Max added, “You’re not in any trouble. In fact, you could be crucial to solving the case.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
“But … how did you know?”
“I saw you coming downstairs, dressed for the weather in a coat and scarf. I wondered why you would be indoors but bundled up for the wind and snow. If you’d been headed upstairs from the garden, it would have made sense, but you weren’t. Still, you had to be coming from outside, which could only mean you were coming from the roof. So, what exactly were you doing up there at all hours?”
In unconscious imitation of his cousin Randolph, Alec ran his fingers through his thick shock of hair to get it out of his eyes.
>
“It’s a bit embarrassing.”
“I’m sure. But I don’t shock easily and I’m certain you’ll live.”
“It was Amanda who figured it out. She thinks she wants to write detective stories one day, you know, and she is good at noticing things.”
“Go on.”
“Well. To wire a castle, you have to run the wires up to the roof inside a pipe or tube that runs along the outside of the castle—have you noticed those?”
Max nodded. “I noticed them when I first arrived. For esthetic reasons the wires must be hidden as best as can be, and made to blend in somehow with the stone walls. Then they bring the power into a junction box that routes the electricity through the building. They use the roof because the stone is thinnest there, and they drill a hole through, or lift the slates.”
“How did you know all that?”
“I’m a history buff and I’ve visited a lot of castles.” And had pretended to be a stonemason during one MI5 case where he was keeping an eye on a nob with mob connections, he could have added. “But that doesn’t explain what you were doing up there.”
“Well, that’s where it gets a bit, um…”
“Difficult to explain? Try me.”
“You can listen in from up there, you see. We discovered it one day by accident. Well, we weren’t half bored here, were we? There’s nothing to do. You can also talk to someone through the pipes, depending on what room the other person’s in. It’s really sort of cool.”
“Ah. And what can you hear?”
“I heard something that didn’t make a lot of sense. It sounded like a man and woman, and they were arguing. But I couldn’t tell what room it was coming from—I think it must have been the Great Hall, so it could have been any of them arguing. Even with the app it was hard to hear clearly—I had trouble with the squelch control.”