In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  Of course, thought Max. The story in the newspaper would be enough to get the conspiracy theorists going immediately. Why wait for proof?

  “He didn’t say anything to her he hadn’t already told the investigators?”

  “No, no. It’s just that Miss Pitchford likes to get her news from the horse’s mouth, whenever possible.”

  “Yes. Very sensible of her.”

  “It’s an odd thing,” Adam began.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was in Prior’s Wood on a few occasions over the summer—it was so hot, you know, and the shade of the trees was most welcome. So I’d pack a picnic lunch…”

  “For just yourself?” Max asked lightly, pretending a sudden keen interest in a display table of gardening books. He picked up one on gardenias and began leafing through the pages.

  “Well, no, of course not. Sometimes—well, every time, if I’m honest—Elka would come with me.”

  Just when it didn’t seem possible Adam could blush a deeper red, he managed it.

  “So, what was odd?” Max asked.

  “Well. Erm. You know the entire place is rather a meeting spot round these parts. A lovers’ lane, for some. That area where Colin and Lady Duxter were found, especially. Rather secluded, hidden. You know. Elka and I actually found a bra hanging from one of the tree branches one time we were there. In the dark, I suppose Lady Duxter or someone just forgot to retrieve it. It was gone the next week, when we came back.”

  “Hmm,” said Max.

  “Should I—should we—tell the police?”

  “I don’t suppose it’s important, do you? But I’ll be seeing something of DCI Cotton, and I’ll be sure to pass that tidbit along. Could you describe it for me?”

  “It was lacy, you know how women’s things are.”

  “All right. Any particular color?”

  “It was red.”

  As red as your face? Max wondered.

  He spent a few minutes browsing before taking his leave. Max could never resist a bookshop, particularly this one. A small fireplace lent a cozy glow along with two Tiffany-style lamps. Books were organized according to a code only Adam understood, but he liked to prominently display his own favorites, on every subject imaginable, in the front window. Used books tended to be put to utilitarian purposes—to hold up a table or prop up a lamp. Adam had acquired a stained glass window from a church about to be demolished and had it installed. It represented the patron saint of writing, St. Francis de Sales, and shards of colored light spilled from it onto a display of mystery novels in one corner. St. Francis, Max noted, looked quite serene, and no goats were anywhere in sight.

  As he was leaving, he saw Jane at the foot of Mermaid Lane on her way to the High Street shops. The sun had made an unexpected appearance, turning the day freakishly warm, and she carried her cardigan slung over one arm along with her shopping bag. She wore a sleeveless dress too large for her; Max thought she might be losing weight from the strain. She raised her free arm high in a friendly wave, but walked briskly on, clearly not wanting to be waylaid.

  Max’s own steps slowed as he turned over in his mind his conversations with Jane, and with Poppy.

  Chapter 14

  TEMPERANCE

  Max was pondering what best to do later that day when Miss Pitchford interrupted his thoughts.

  Every village has a Miss Pitchford. Every town, every city, every hamlet, without exception, has a Miss Pitchford. There is never more than one, for the Miss Pitchfords of the world can never tolerate competition. Nether Monkslip’s Miss Pitchford happened to be the prototype, the mold from which all the rest in every place were made.

  Since she seemed to be immortal, however feeble she might become, there was never any talk of finding her replacement. Once the time came, such a person would emerge to take her place, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s skull, fully grown and geared for battle. A Miss Newcastle or a Miss Wychwood would appear, armed with knitting needles and with a preternatural ability to suss out scandal.

  Miss Pitchford had come that afternoon to beard the lion in his den, as she so often did. She had blown open the door to his study with such stunning force Max’s MI5 training had automatically kicked in. He shot up from the desk and made as if to fling himself upon the frail old woman wrapped in her hand-knitted shawl, recalling himself just in time from an ankle tackle that would surely have shattered her bones.

  “What is it, Miss Pitchford?” he demanded, exasperated, and tapping his heart to make sure it still beat safely tucked under his ribcage. Then, more politely, breath restored, he added, “How may I help you today?”

  “The question is how I can help you, Father Tudor,” she replied. She marched in with that “ah ha!” gleam in her eye that Max had often noticed when she had spotted a typo in the parish newsletter. Whether or not Max was strictly accountable for the typo, he always came to hear of it. Suzanna was in fact the editor and it was true the newsletter became progressively more interesting the more she enjoyed a glass of wine or two in the evening. But also strictly speaking Max had to allow he was responsible for all the content. He was the publisher, answerable, as Miss Pitchford liked to point out, only to God. And, presumably, also to Miss Pitchford.

  She wasted no time in getting to her point.

  “You went to Wooton Priory today,” she announced. Max didn’t trouble to enquire how she knew that. Of course she just would know that. “I believe that while you were there you spoke with Jane Frost. It would be only natural you would console a grieving widow such as she. But of course she would be at the priory, and not at home, as she should be. It wouldn’t have happened in my day, I can tell you that much for a fact.”

  “What is that, Miss Pitchford? What wouldn’t have happened?”

  “Why, all this gallivanting about, of course. Running all about the village, when she should be at home, making preparations.” She pushed back a rogue wave of marcelled hair that had dared escape a tortoiseshell comb.

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “And I felt I must warn you.”

  Max, still processing what Poppy had told him, found himself reluctant even to talk with the gossipy woman carrying her usual tale of gothic woe—whatever it was this time. He would have asked Mrs. Hooser to help him dodge her but he disliked involving his housekeeper in these deceptions. Besides which, she was hopeless at deception.

  “You think she’s plain, don’t you?” demanded Miss Pitchford. “A ‘plain Jane’? Well. You’ve never seen her dance at the Harvest Fayre or the May Day festivities. I have. It’s scandalous, that’s what it is—an absolute scandal, all that jitterbugging about, and it’s an open invitation to … to … all manner of…” Max waited, rather hoping she would say “fornication”—being with Miss Pitchford was so often like talking with a throwback to the Victorian era or someone from the temperance movement—but in the end she settled for something less Biblical.

  “To extramarital relations.” She finished strongly, and Max felt he had to hand this one to her. She had navigated those tricky rapids with barely a slip of the oar.

  He was wondering if someone had attempted to revive the jitterbug at one of the village festivities, but then decided the jitterbug was probably the latest style of dance, apart from the waltz, with which Miss Pitchford was personally acquainted. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re right, but I—”

  “I’m not finished,” she said.

  Again Max waited, an expression of polite expectation and hope pasted on his face. It took all his strength not to glance at his wristwatch or at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “Why else was she always going in to Monkslip-super-Mare?” Miss Pitchford asked scornfully. “To shop? Pah!”

  Max, who had the clearest picture of Jane being generally in the archives at the priory, blowing dust off the old volumes, was intrigued. In spite of himself. For if Miss Pitchford said Jane often went to Monkslip-super-Mare, it was likely true. Her spies were everywhere.

  “Now I know you t
hink I’m an old foolish woman,” she began. She waited for the bleat of protest, which Max duly offered. Baa. “But I have lived a long time and I have kept my eyes open and my ears to the ground.” Max, waiting for her to get to the point, kept himself occupied trying to picture Miss Pitchford posed in such an anatomically challenging way.

  “And I know a lie when I hear one,” she continued.

  “Oh? What lie is that?”

  “Why, Jane Frost never in her life canned a nectarine. For one thing, I don’t know a young woman her age—a Londoner, no less—with the first inkling how to do such a thing. Nectarines are tricky. You don’t want to use the raw pack method—the results are unsightly, to say the least.”

  Max, who had no idea what the raw pack method might involve, nonetheless managed to look suitably aghast.

  “Besides, and more to the point, it was far too late to be canning that variety of nectarine when she said she was. The Terrace Ruby is ready in July, especially given the warm weather we had this past summer. That’s how much she knows about it. She was always lying about where she was and what she was doing. I just don’t know why. If she was lying about that what else might she lie about?”

  Max, puzzled by the implications of what he was being told, said nothing for a moment. Surely all would be revealed in good time. To Miss Pitchford the subject was clearly sacred, so it was hard to tell if anything she was saying carried weight in a world beyond canning.

  “Anyway, wherever she was at the time of my gardening talk to the Women’s Institute, for example—‘Mulch Ado About Slugs’—she wasn’t at home canning nectarines. You do see that, don’t you? Unless canning is a metaphor for something else. Something risqué. I would not care to hazard a guess what. Would you?”

  “When did she tell you this, Miss Pitchford?”

  “Why, she told her tale to all who would listen. At the Cavalier, a few days before Netta died. But I tell you, she was not at home canning, not then or at any other time. Unless I miss my best guess, she was out there in those woods again.”

  To mention your doings at the Cavalier was much like shouting them from every village rooftop. Jane’s homey alibi, if it was meant to be an alibi for what she was actually doing that day, appeared to be false. But could Miss Pitchford be believed, or was she fallible, as she so often was? There was a time when her gossip could be relied on absolutely, but her powers might be fading now with age. And spite, of which she had a wide streak, so often colored facts to suit the carrier of that information. He would ask Awena, the go-to person for all things having to do with canning or pickling, to make sure Miss Pitchford’s nectarine information was accurate for this region. But if Jane weren’t canning—never the tightest alibi, anyway—what was she doing? More to the point, why would she lie about where she was and what she was doing?

  Unless it was a polite excuse for missing the mulch-and-slug lecture—a strong possibility. Still, Max felt he’d been taught a resounding lesson in humility and in the dangers of dismissing the testimony of the old and querulous. Of the busybody who, after all, tended to see all in such a small place as Nether Monkslip and environs. He’d been dodging Miss Pitchford pretty much since he had come to the village, and he should not have done so. She may have held the solution to many a case all along. It was an odd little clue and he wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was decidedly … odd. More odd behavior in Jane’s column.

  “And as for those people at the priory. Well. David—Lord Duxter as he now styles himself—was in his youth a philandering rogue, so I hear.”

  “I think most men go through a stage of sowing wi—”

  “Balderdash,” she said. “Once a rogue, always a rogue.”

  “Yes, in his youth, perhaps he was.”

  “He’s only fifty-two now—hardly too decrepit to get up to all manner of debauchery. He was not born in the purple; his nobility was acquired. It makes an enormous difference, you know.”

  “I hadn’t realized,” said Max. “Fifty-two? He looks older. He’s older than I am, certainly.” He wasn’t sure why he’d said that, and clearly Miss Pitchford wasn’t sure, either. She looked at him suspiciously with her steely, accustomed-to-command gaze (she was a former headmistress, after all). Max felt as if he had somehow admitted to some scandalous personal failure that would cast Nether Monkslip into the tabloid headlines. “Vicar Admits All Manner of Debauchery.”

  As there seemed to be no way to back out of the predicament he’d created for himself, he said quickly, “Of course, you’re right, Miss Pitchford. But moral character has nothing to do with age. Look at Moses.”

  Now she looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “What are you talking about, Father Tudor?”

  Honestly, I’ve no idea. “Moses is a good example of a man who throughout his lifetime behaved with integrity. And he lived to be one hundred and twenty. I just don’t want to condemn Lord Duxter on no evidence except that his age permits him to run around.”

  “I’ve just given you the evidence.”

  Max sighed, the sort of small, inaudible sigh that punctuated most of his conversations with Miss Pitchford. There was, he knew, no point in telling her that what she had shared with him was her opinion. The lord was perhaps not the most popular man but he was always friendly—there was that to be said for him. Although civil might be a better word. He was known, also, for his charitable contributions to good causes. When St. Alphege’s in Monk’s Crossing had needed its roof repaired he had offered to match funds for the drive. Not to mention the fact he’d been honored with that OBE. The Queen didn’t hand out prizes like that lightly, one would assume. Although it had to be said, Mick Jagger was hardly a poster boy for the contemplative life, so perhaps that wasn’t the strongest argument to use. Wisely, he kept these comments to himself, saying mildly, “Let’s wait and see, shall we?”

  “Wait and see. We’ll all be murdered in our beds if that’s the attitude the authorities take.”

  “DCI Cotton is looking into things. You can rest assured it will be all right in the end.”

  “It’s not his first marriage, you know. Lord Duxter has been married before.”

  “I didn’t know that. Well, thank you, that’s very interesting, but surely not germane.”

  “He drove the wife to madness with his infidelities, his casual cruelties. It is said.”

  Max was not taking the bait labeled “It is said.” Surely now they were in the land of rampant speculation.

  “No one has ever seen the lord’s first wife, you know. No one. They assume she’s dead; he tells everyone she is dead. But she is really in an asylum. He divorced her, for madness.”

  It was news to Max that was grounds for divorce, but probably she meant some legal term related to incurable insanity. How horrible for her, if true. For Lord Duxter as well.

  “She was removed from his house, never to be seen again. He had her removed. There was madness in that family. Everybody knew it. Except the lord, poor man. He was duped into marrying her for her money. No one really blamed him if he had a roving eye. I know it’s wrong, but the villagers felt he deserved some happiness.”

  Well, gosh. There was all of Jane Eyre condensed into digest format. Still, Max was astonished that Miss Pitchford could countenance such a liberal attitude toward these things. It was unlike her to look the other way over this sort of carry-on. Max marked it down to the lord’s famous charm with the ladies—all ladies of any age, apparently.

  He supposed he’d have to ask Cotton if any of it were true. The bare bones, probably. Just the bones would turn out to be true.

  Chapter 15

  WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  The next day Poppy officially went missing. Max barely had time to open the study door in the vicarage before Jane burst in.

  “Max!” She wore a long-sleeved dress of a striking color of blue, and it looked as though she’d recently had her hair professionally done, probably again at the Cut and Dried Salon. But her face was a hectic color, and her
eyes looked swollen and red, practically bruised, from crying. This dress also looked as if it needed to be taken in. “Poppy has disappeared. Please, you must do something. I don’t know—” She shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Without her.” The last word was expelled on a sob. But Max sensed fear rather than sorrow in her aspect. This was a woman frightened half to death.

  “Try to stay calm,” said Max. “Here.” And he directed her to one of the low chairs by the fireplace. “Tell me what happened. When did you last see her?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know, you see. I don’t—she left for school at the usual time, I think, but she hasn’t come home. I got back from the salon—” At this she looked guilty, as if she’d been caught in a pub crawl. “I just felt I needed a break, you know? With all that’s been happening. A break! But now none of her friends have seen her.”

  “Stanley?”

  “I rang him first thing. He says they had a fight. He claims he has no idea where she is now. I don’t believe him.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Well, no.”

  “No? But you must.”

  “I didn’t like to do that. She’ll be so upset and angry to know there’s been a fuss made. She’s like that, you know. So proud. Prickly. She would never l—” Jane dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, only making matters worse. Her eyes looked completely inflamed now. “She would never listen to me. But I know a thing or two about the trouble a young woman can stumble into, thinking she’s invincible.”

  “But you are assuming she’s alive and well. Just that she’s taken off on a break of her own, to think things through.”

  “I don’t know, am I?”

  Max was recalling another girl who had gone missing in the woods well over a century before.

  “We must let Cotton and his team know. They’ll find her. She has a mobile phone?”

  “Everyone that age has a mobile phone. They issue them at birth, it seems.”