A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  Randolph examined his nails and said casually, without looking up, “And your proof for this is—what again?”

  Again, Max might not have heard. “I remember Jocasta’s saying at dinner something about the actor Lon Chaney. The ‘Man of a Thousand Faces.’”

  Jocasta nodded earnestly. They were on to a topic about which she knew a thing or two. “He used makeup techniques that were revolutionary for the time. He was a genius.”

  “This conversation about Chaney came back to me,” said Max, “as I pondered the fact there were two deaths in the family very close together, and why that was significant. It had to be significant but I couldn’t put it together. Until I began to think in terms of disguise. If Lon Chaney could become the Phantom of the Opera, how hard would it be for someone skilled with makeup to make herself look older, helped by the recent fashion for ladies’ veils?”

  Cilla had been staring straight ahead, but she blinked almost imperceptibly on his last word.

  “Now I asked myself who could pull off such a charade. Jocasta, the actress, was the obvious choice, but this was a role calling for subtlety, nuance, and fine shading, not the more bombastic style that is Jocasta’s specialty.”

  Jocasta seemed to take this as a compliment, or perhaps was not really listening, preening and fussing as she was with the sparkly bracelet at her wrist. Or perhaps she didn’t know what bombastic meant.

  “It couldn’t have been Lamorna,” Max went on. “She was too large a person for the role. Padding out a thin person is possible but shrinking a large one—there are limits. The woman I sat with on the train had a small, cinched-in waist. Felberta was also the wrong build.

  “That left Gwynyth and Cilla, Amanda being much too young to be a candidate for the role. Gwynyth was a possibility, although this was a specialized performance. She had been a dancer of sorts, but nothing in her background suggested the ability to act or impersonate.”

  “‘Of sorts’?” Gwynyth interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘of sorts’?” Her face hardened, losing its usual ingratiating simper. “I was ruddy good. Ask Milo.”

  Max said, “And that is when I recalled Cilla was a stylist, who worked doing hair and makeup in places such as Hollywood. Where they specialize in such special effects as aging—making stars look decades older. The way Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was made up to age backward in time. At dinner it was you, Cilla, who mentioned Benjamin Button. It won an Oscar for best makeup. Someone in your field would understand perfectly the reasons why. Possibly the mention of that movie was another of your little slipups that angered Randolph so.”

  Randolph gave Max a look of twisted scorn. “You’re mistaken, Father Brown,” he said.

  “Not at all am I mistaken,” Max said coldly. “Now, Gwynyth could have been made up by Cilla to play the role, a possibility I played with for a while. But the ‘why’ eluded me—the ‘why’ of their connection to each other. And again—you must pardon me, Gwynyth—this role would not call to your particular talents. It wasn’t until Alec told me of an argument he overheard between a man and woman, and I considered that it might have been Cilla and Randolph quarreling, that the nature of their relationship became clearer. More than ‘boss’ and ‘assistant.’ Much more. It was not just a lovers’ quarrel, either. The stakes were higher than that.

  “The disguise was brilliant and thoroughly professional, Cilla, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Max. “For example: Few people remember someone’s eye color unless it’s a startling color.” An image of Awena’s unusual violet eye color flashed from his memory. “But I did recall the color I could just glimpse through the veil—a striking blue. Cilla’s eyes are a deep brown, and that threw me off. That she was the impersonator, much less that there was an impersonator, didn’t occur to me as I spoke with her.”

  Max looked at them singly. “But wouldn’t a clever killer use contact lenses? Yes, of course. And what does that tell you?”

  It was Amanda who answered. “It tells you that she had lots of time to plan and prepare. There was nothing spur of the moment about what she did.”

  “Precisely what I thought, too,” said Max.

  “Nonsense,” said Cilla. “A lot of people just like a change of eye color, just for fun.”

  Max, knowing he was right, didn’t stay to argue the point.

  “Do you know how to knit?” he suddenly asked her. She hesitated, clearly churning over how best to respond.

  “Really, it’s a simple question,” said Max. “Yes or no. Do you know how to knit?”

  “Yes, I do. Of course. So what? Most women know how to knit.”

  “I don’t think that’s actually true, you know. Nor do most men necessarily know how to change a tyre.”

  Doris piped up. “I never learned how to knit. Never tried to learn. Ruddy waste of time when Marks and Sparks has such nice woolens.”

  “The woman I met on the train was knitting some white, fluffy thing,” said Max. “A blanket.”

  Cilla arched an eyebrow and looked pointedly at him. “So? First contact lenses, now knitting. Is this what you call evidence?”

  “So, nothing,” Max said, still with the same calm yet insistent demeanor. “It’s just one more piece in the puzzle. The police found Leticia’s knitting in the drawing room. You remembered to replace it. You thought of everything. Nearly.”

  He went on, Cilla watching him closely now. But he spoke to the group. “The woman I saw on the train wore a hat and scarf. The compartment was cold but really those items were just part of the disguise. Also, Cilla had something on her neck to hide: a butterfly tattoo. And of course she wore a gray wig. It was an impersonation that was not very difficult for an accomplished makeup artist.”

  “Leticia always looked ten years younger than she was, anyway,” said Jocasta. “Have you ever noticed how often that is true of very difficult, selfish people? It’s almost as if, having sucked all the life out of everyone around them, they erase years of wear and tear on themselves.”

  Simon looked at his wife with ill-disguised wonder: The lack of self-awareness was total.

  Max was saying, “I talked with one of the experts in disguise at MI5, who is an old friend. She says nothing too dramatic like a complete latex mask would be required to achieve the appearance of an older woman—a ruse with a complete mask that has been attempted in recent years, by the way. Not too long ago a young man boarded a plane with a false ID, wearing a mask of a very elderly man. Only his hands gave him away. In this case, our imposter even thought to wear gloves. But the disguise technology today has improved beyond measure, so I’m told. Here, in this case, maybe a touch of latex was glued on to create wrinkles about the eyes, but mostly some shadowing, and a change in coloring, were all that were needed. Particularly since I had never met the original Leticia. Cilla used a wig, a scarf to cover her neck, and gloves for her hands, as I’ve said—always the main giveaway, says my expert: the hands. Cilla even pretended to have Leticia’s cold, which came in handy—she could obscure her face with a handkerchief if she thought I was looking at her too closely.

  “So Cilla, tell us: Precisely what was your job again at Ealing, and Pinewood, and in Hollywood?”

  She paused for a long moment before answering. “Hair. Makeup. The same job as it is now. Prepping people to be photographed.”

  “No. It was a lot more than that. I asked DCI Cotton earlier for a little more detail on your job description. It wasn’t just hair and makeup. Drucilla Petrie specialized in the rarified field of special effects.”

  In a Florentine gesture of operatic surprise, Jocasta threw up her hands and tossed back her head (Janne Endive, What the F**k Was That?—a film title that had reviewers competing to guess what other titles had been rejected in its favor). “Special effects!” she gasped. It was the insane type of performance perfected in the days of the silent film, thought Simon. One wondered how cretinous the audience in those days had to have been, how starved for diversion—any diversi
on. He smiled and patted his wife’s hand. It was best to keep her calm if possible.

  Max waited until the other eruptions of astonishment and outrage died down. He turned to the others one by one as he spoke. “Cilla—Drucilla—was in the makeup department. She was understandably a bit vague when talking with the police about what she did at the studios. But her job did not involve making people look pretty for the camera, as it does now, but aging them or otherwise altering their appearance drastically—attaching horns and snaggleteeth to monsters and so forth. The person I spoke with at MI5 called it the zombie department, because it’s where they zombie-fy the characters. It’s more lucrative than what she’s doing now for Randolph, requiring extraordinary levels of training and expertise, so I wondered why she gave it up. It sounds as if she was pushed rather than jumped—she ‘had artistic differences’ with several of the directors—and was a bit at loose ends when Randolph took her on. Maybe even then he saw the possibilities—foresaw a day when she might be useful. Who knows? Maybe they planned to put Lady Baynard in the frame for the murder, by having her—or Cilla dressed as her—be seen fleeing the scene. I’d say that’s likely but proving that will be the very devil. All we can say for certain is that the best-laid plans and hopes of Randolph and Cilla went awry when Lady Baynard died first, and they had to act quickly—put Cilla into the long-ago prepared costume, and send her out as Lady Baynard, while Randolph stayed behind to do the real dirty work of stabbing his uncle. Stabbing a defenseless old man while he slept, I might add. It really was a dirty job, a despicable act.

  “You, Cilla, used the train to create an alibi, because despite the eccentricities of the local train schedule, the stationmaster at least always notes the time of departure and arrival. I imagine you even created some sort of commotion, an official complaint about the service, so you’d be remembered.

  “So, Lady Baynard was ‘alive.’ Her distinctive hairstyle and the netted hat and traveling garb made her easy to impersonate. People see what they expect to see. It was your good luck to run into me, but it didn’t really matter. You only needed someone reputable and you would have latched on to anyone vaguely fitting that description.

  “Leticia had a reputation as a bit of a recluse because she avoided the villagers. However, she entertained lavishly when it was someone she deemed important, Doris told me. Meaning: Someone from London. But she’d feuded with the villagers in the past and as far as they were concerned she kept to herself; no one could have sworn to her exact recent appearance.

  “You, Cilla, even talked with me on the train about the hothouse since you knew that was where the body already was, and where it would be found later, once you’d safely returned and gotten out of costume.”

  The others, one by one, had inched their faces around to look at her, taking in her general size and appearance. Those who knew Leticia best seemed slowly to be admitting the possibility of what Max was saying: “It is possible for a younger woman to imitate an older one. Impossible for an older woman to imitate a much younger one, especially the walk, the spring in the step. It is easy for a younger woman to imitate an older one who walks with difficulty. I should know—I felt and looked one hundred years old using that crutch.

  “But covering all the bases, you used Awena for your dress rehearsal. An habitué of the sound stage and the theater, you wanted a dress rehearsal, didn’t you, Cilla? A dry run. If it didn’t work, the impersonation could all be passed off as a joke.

  “Again, anyone would do for your purposes. But it was Awena who met you on your dry run on the train. You actually invited her to the house—that could have been a step too far, but it came off beautifully, reinforcing the idea in Awena’s mind that she had met Lady Baynard of Chedrow Castle. When I compared notes with Awena, our descriptions of the person we met matched. Of course, neither of us had met the real Leticia.

  “So Cilla arranged for Awena to visit Leticia on a day Leticia was gone, or perhaps bedridden with one of her ailments, ostensibly so Awena could share her renowned knowledge of plants, particularly medicinal. Why wouldn’t Awena believe Lady Baynard had it in mind to plant a special garden of such plants and wanted to take Awena’s advice? But your idea was in part to reinforce that the imposter—you, Cilla—were the real Lady Baynard so later descriptions from people like me, from those outside the family, would match more closely. It was a risky ploy, even an unnecessary gilding of the lily, but you were using Awena as a practice witness. Randolph, who is clearly the more cautious of the two of you, may also have been angry with you, Cilla, over this ploy which he saw as unnecessary and risky. And this was a part of the argument Alec later overheard.

  “But once you set this in motion, Randolph had to play along to ensure that you weren’t caught out. Randolph escorted Awena to the garden where he introduced her to the fake Leticia. Again, this was to establish what ‘Leticia’ looked like for future use. Cilla dressed as Leticia wore gardening gloves and a veil to blur her face.

  “As to alibis: What mattered were alibis for the time of Oscar’s murder. Now, Cilla would make sure she was in the clear for that. I’m sure she showed herself as herself in Staincross Minster, then slipped back into her Leticia disguise. This explains in part why she was traveling with such a large bag—she had to carry around a change of clothing. But Randolph had no alibi for the time of Oscar’s death. That was the risk he had to take—no one else had an alibi for that time, either. So long as he left no incriminating evidence to link him to the crime, the authorities could not legally single him out.

  “But you two also gave yourselves some leeway with the time of death. It would be warm and humid in the hothouse, affecting the coroner’s estimates. You probably hid her body under a tarp, just in case of anyone’s walking by and peering in the window. This had the bonus effect of helping keep her body warm, making her death appear to be more recent, and fudging the time of death for investigators.”

  “I’m not hearing anything that sounds like proof,” said Randolph.

  “Ah,” said Max. “I’m so glad you asked. Now we arrive. When I was with the fake Leticia, she had a little mishap with her belongings, and the contents of her shopping spilled everywhere. One apple inadvertently ended up in my pocket. Earlier I sent the police to fetch it from the vicarage, and mercifully it was still there and undisturbed. That is to say, the fingerprints on it were undisturbed: It’s a good thing for us you were wearing gloves after you first handled it, Cilla.”

  They all looked at each other, mystified. But two of them, Max noted, had turned a whiter shade of pale.

  “You see,” said Max, “the imposter did not have time actually to shop, not with all the changes of costume she had to deal with in the ladies’ room at the station, and so she carried shopping with her from the castle and onto the train.

  “Let’s trace the sequence of events. The impersonator has gone by taxi to Nether Monkslip, and from there by train to Staincross Minster and back again. Since ostensibly she was shopping, she carried from Staincross Minster an old-fashioned string bag full of a mixture of things from the chemist’s and other shops. But she has brought those items with her—stuffed into her pockets as she left the castle, or into that large bag. But the fake Leticia did not visit the shop she claimed to me to have visited. She simply did not have time. Not if Cilla had to make a point of showing herself around as Cilla, to establish an alibi.”

  “You could not possibly know who bought what where,” said Cilla, starting to rise. “I’m not going to sit and listen to more of this.”

  Sergeant Essex stood. “Actually, you know, I think you are.”

  “Your downfall was an apple,” said Max. “And this is why and how: The apple I picked up on the train had a sticker label on it—one of those bar codes. Those numbered codes reveal a date and place of origin of the apple. You can even look it up on the Internet. You, Cilla, had taken fruit from the bowls that Doris set out at the castle—either from breakfast, or from the bowl kept in here.” He indicated
the glass bowl by the armchair. “The date on this particular label on this particular apple showed it was an apple that had gone on sale a week ago.”

  “You have got to be kidding me…” said Cilla, but her expression was increasingly wary. For the first time, she stole a glance at Randolph.

  “The store mentioned by the fake Leticia on the train was Fast Freddie’s Market. Now, as it happens, Fast Freddie’s had sold out of its apples the day before, and on the morning of the murder had received all new stock. Cilla, where you put your foot in it was by claiming to have gone to Fast Freddie’s Market, which was nearest the station. That apple came not from Fast Freddie’s but from somewhere else. And we can prove it.”

  Doris piped up: “I would never shop at Fast Freddie’s. They sell rotten fruit coated in pesticides.” She clearly took umbrage at the very idea. “I only shop for produce at Manfree’s. They sell fine, fresh produce. Organic. Local grown.”

  “The apple that fell out of your bag,” said Max, “the apple I picked up on the train, was sold by Manfree’s.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Cliff-hanger

  A dead silence seeped into the room. Someone coughed, a gentle cough that reverberated against the vaulted ceiling, echoing back into the quiet room.

  It was Lester who finally spoke. “What’s all this got to do with Lamorna’s being killed, then?”

  “What do you think?” said Amanda. “Lamorna never could mind her own business. And she didn’t have the sense to stay out of something as dangerous as this situation was.” She turned to Max. “Am I right?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Max. “Lamorna’s snooping about had everything to do with her need to control things and people. If she could keep tabs on what was going on, she felt more secure in her little universe. This is true of all of us, but Lamorna was such an outsider, she felt spying and prying were the only way to gain the control she craved.