In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  “That is your series character, is it?” Max asked, looking about him at the cozy interior nestling inside the old stone walls. The pews and altar had been removed, of course, and what was left was a large, imposing space with a soaring ceiling. The area was broken up by various rugs and sitting groups and tables scattered about. In the middle, in pride of place under a skylight fashioned from the sides of the central steeple, stood an enormous refectory table currently in use as a desk, with papers, pens, and other implements of the writing trade on display. Max saw no laptop or computer, which surely was unusual in this day and age. Carville seemed to rely on writing with the old-fashioned ink of the days when the church originally had been built. Max never ceased to wonder at the masterpieces that had been composed using only quill and ink.

  “I understand you are here working on a new novel,” said Max, adding, with more than a twinge of envy: “What a perfect setup you have for that.”

  “That’s the idea, but you’ve caught me on a slow day. So much going on—it’s hard to concentrate. That girl gone missing, and all the rest … At least, that’s been my excuse today. Tomorrow there will be another.”

  “You’ve been here how long, sir?” Cotton asked him.

  “About a month.”

  “And no laptop to distract you?” said Max. “I’m impressed.” He himself wrote his sermons and saw to parish business on a computer that had been state of the art perhaps ten years previous. Sitting as large as a small refrigerator on his desk, the computer smugly rejected all invitations to update itself, however couched in dire warnings those invitations came from its maker. Max felt there was safety in knowing that only the most inept cyber thief would attempt to hack such a crumbling relict and probably would not have tools old enough even to attempt it. He still used the oldest viable version of Word available and so long as it allowed him to highlight key passages of his narrative and use different-colored fonts he told himself he was content. He also relied heavily on the backspace key when his sermons wandered too far off the path.

  Money for office upgrades always seemed to end up being spent on food or shelter for a parishioner in some temporary distress and so, he felt, it should be.

  “The conditions are ideal, actually,” Carville Rasmussen was saying. “There’s no Wi-Fi signal that reaches out here to the church, which is a blessing. I do have a laptop, but I’ve largely set it aside. People have forgotten what it is to use a pen and paper to write. It slows the thought processes and, I believe, makes for a better book. The people staying at the house all have access to Wi-Fi, and I see them on their phones all day, wasting time that should be devoted to listening to their Muse.”

  “Ah,” said Max, wondering if it also made keeping the book at a manageable size more or less difficult. But they were here on other errands. Cotton, apparently feeling he had used enough soap to soften Carville’s ego by this point, asked bluntly, “When, sir, were you planning to tell us about the true nature of your relationship with Lady Duxter?”

  Carville dropped into a chair, as if his legs suddenly could not hold him, and all the small talk in the world could not shield him from his new reality.

  “How did you find out?”

  “I’ll be happy to share the police report with you if you’d like to read it, sir,” said Cotton. Seeing Carville’s expression, he added, “That was a joke. The point is, we know all about it. You were seen by what I’ll call a reliable witness. The evidence is irrefutable. I would advise you to tell us what you know about this tragic situation. Anything else at this point will be obstruction. Certainly when my sergeant interviewed you, you said nothing about your connection to Lady Duxter.”

  “Of course,” said Carville. “Of course I want to help. I’ll do anything. But you see: I said nothing in the first instance because this suicide business with Colin stunned me. It also just plain confused me. I couldn’t believe she was having an affair with both of us, running two men at once. But was that just my ego talking?” He tugged at the rollneck collar of his dark Hemingway jumper as if suddenly it constricted him.

  It was a self-aware comment from a man who was hardly known for self-awareness, thought Max. But if Carville had known he had a rival for Marina’s affections, how would he have taken it? Probably not well.

  “I said nothing also because it would upset Lord Duxter to no purpose,” Carville continued, “and it would make it sound as if his wife were just, you know, sleeping around all over the place. Why would I want to ruin her reputation and his image of her in that way?”

  “That was considerate of you, sir,” said Cotton, still unfailingly polite. “But your silence wasted police time. We have apparently been haring after the wrong, well, hare.”

  “I know. And I believe that, too: she would not have been with Colin and with me. And furthermore, more to the point, she had just been shopping in London.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She had just been shopping in London for new shoes and makeup. What woman does that as she prepares to kill herself? She showed me the shoes. I couldn’t believe what she paid for them, but that’s beside the point. It proves she was not planning to end her own life. No woman would go out and buy extravagant items one day and then try to kill herself in practically the next instant.” Carville visibly puffed his chest as he said, “I’m an expert on characterization and I tell you, no woman would do that. A Telegraph reviewer said my books leap off the page because of the lively characters, and Kerridge is a man who knows characterization when he sees it. He called Scott’s Bungalow ‘brilliant’ and ‘a staggering work.’”

  Carville warbled complacently on in this fashion, reliving his career highs and lows. He seemed to be able to quote verbatim from every positive review he’d ever received, while questioning the intelligence, morals, and antecedents of anyone who had given him a less-than-glowing review. He seemed to have a particular grudge against some Dubrovnik-based publication called the Publishers’ Clarion, which he condemned as “jingoistic tripe.”

  While he waited for Carville to run out of petrol, in a manner of speaking, Max was thinking that depression was a strange animal. If Marina was bipolar, he supposed she might have done something just that illogical: spend too much on shoes and then, in an emotional crash, kill herself. Illogic might be at the core of the symptoms. But he was willing to admit he was no expert on this topic.

  He also doubted that Carville could possibly be as certain of her motivations as he claimed—author with keen insight into character or no. What worked in a novel might be miles distant from the nitty-gritty facts of real life.

  “What color were the shoes?” Cotton wanted to know.

  “They were blue,” Carville replied promptly. “Blue suede with a very high heel and red undersoles. As I say, hideously expensive.”

  Max knew that Cotton asked the question as a sort of double-check, because Marina had been found wearing such shoes.

  Max noticed that Carville spoke loudly and rapidly, like a man making an awards acceptance speech who was afraid someone was going to come and rip the microphone and the award out of his hands. Possibly he’d had a bad experience or two with this very sort of thing in the past. He was often winning or being nominated for awards for his page-turning, characterization-stuffed novels. And for every author who spends most days toiling alone, such occasions offer a too-brief spot in the sunlight before the author is once again consigned to months of solitude and drudgery. Not to mention the opinions of jingoistic rags.

  * * *

  “Some crime writer,” said Cotton, as the two men walked away, leaving Carville Rasmussen with head in hand, contemplating the twists in the plot of his own life and finding them, presumably, satisfyingly complex.

  “That may be part of the problem,” Max replied once they were safely out of range. “Carville’s always seeing plots where there are none. It’s his job.”

  “A sort of professional paranoia?”

  “Yes, indeed. I saw it all the tim
e in Five. When you live your life jumping at shadows, suspecting everyone … it’s not healthy, and the tendency sort of bleeds at the edges into your real life.”

  Max rarely talked of his former career. Cotton gathered he was much happier away from those constant shadows. Although it had to be said, the county of Monkslip was shaping up to be as full of shadows as his old life.

  * * *

  “I go round and back to how Colin and Marina ended up in that car together and I just can’t see it,” Max said to Awena on his return home that evening. Cotton had dropped Max off at the vicarage with a promise to ring him later. He was keeping tabs on a few things and Max asked to be kept informed as much as possible.

  “Here,” she said, setting a cup of tea before him. “Have some tea while I finish this chapter. I made it from eyebright. It’s an herb that clears the thinking. And it helps you trust in what you already know.”

  He took a sip. “It tastes nice, anyway.”

  “The beta-carotenes in the brew help your thinking processes. You’ll see. Literally, you’ll be able to see.”

  Finishing the tea a few minutes later, he put down his cup and saucer and said, “I think I’ll pop into the church for a minute. I want to make sure all is secure for the night.”

  It was a fact of modern-day life that churches, even St. Edwold’s, could not be left unlocked all day, as once they had been, so people in need of a quiet moment could stop in on impulse. The risk of vandalism was too great, even in Nether Monkslip, which was no longer the tiny backwater it once had been.

  “Yes,” she said, not looking up from her work. “Someone might break in to steal that new stained-glass window.”

  “Please,” said Max. “I’d almost forgotten about it.”

  Max made the short walk over to the church, thinking how grateful he was that despite the village’s small population, St. Edwold’s continued to thrive, at the same time so many churches across England were being closed to worship each year. The Priory Church of St. George where Carville now churned out his masterpieces was a perfect example. Dwindling numbers of British identified as Christians, but in Nether Monkslip the church was a social center as much as a place of spiritual rest and renewal. Max was more than happy that so many of all faiths felt they were welcome there.

  Besides, who would deny the power of belief in healing—mind, body, or spirit? If an hour of contemplation or a visit to any of the world’s shrines heals the believer, what doctor would call the cure bogus? A cure is a cure. Awena’s powers were—he hesitated to use the word supernatural. But they went beyond the reach of most of humankind. He had seen it for himself, experienced it for himself. He disliked the term applied to her beliefs—neo-pagan, an umbrella word covering a wide field of nature- or earth-based beliefs and practices. Certainly she didn’t belong to a group or cult; her beliefs were her own—private and, he gathered, as idiosyncratic and individual as she was. She maintained a dedicated meditation space in their cottage, a space Max regarded as sacrosanct. However, as Awena herself said, there was nothing “neo” or new about the connection to beliefs that predated Christianity. For his part, he cherished her because she was a person nearly devoid of negativity, and her belief in another, better world beyond this one was absolute and unwavering. Unlike Max’s own. He aligned more often than not with those who prayed, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

  Max unlocked the church door, which had duly been locked by the verger, and walked up the nave of the tiny church. It rested gleaming and immaculate in the jewel-like glow cast through the windows by the setting sun. The offending glass was still there, of course, leaning against the wall, waiting for him to deal with it, but he felt he was becoming somewhat reconciled to the artist’s vision. After all, goats were God’s creations, too, and there was nothing firmly against the idea of Christ being a shepherd of goats as well as sheep. The entire story of the Good Shepherd was simply a metaphor for God’s caring, of course. Max even began to see that what had struck him as malevolent in the creature’s eyes now looked all-seeing and wise.

  However, having learned that lesson about the need to be less dogmatic, he still planned to have a word with the artist Coombebridge. Perhaps something could be done. It seemed a far lesser priority at the moment.

  He sat in a pew to the left of the altar and composed himself, giving thanks for what he recognized as his many blessings and replaying in his mind all the events of the day. Autumn flowers adorned the altar in many shades of yellow and gold and orange, all part of the stately procession that marked the seasons. Some of the flowers had been left over from Netta’s funeral, the formal arrangements harvested and refreshed with new blossoms. It was in the spring that the women of the altar guild outdid themselves, bringing flowers from their own gardens, turning the place into a riot of colors. Max had started offering Taize services every spring, at Awena’s urging—meditative singing prayer.

  Last season’s robins had looked harassed, Max remembered: They’d been tricked into spring because winter, like an overstaying guest, would not leave. Instead it came and went, came and went. And then summer arrived seemingly at once, with a cloying heat. Nether Monkslip, usually the most temperate of places, had suffered greatly.

  A phrase from a Shakespearean sonnet came to him: “From you have I been absent in the spring.” He recalled the past spring when he had been absent from Awena, helping Cotton solve a case in Monkslip-super-Mare, and how it did seem like a dark winter, to be yearning constantly for the sight of her and Owen, and to be shot through with a haunting dread he might not see either of them again.

  With the remembrance of spring his thoughts circled round to his sermon, still in half-completed stage; he was beginning to think he needed to put it aside for one of his standby sermons, a sort of generic good-versus-evil evergreen recap that he wheeled out for emergencies. The story of Bathsheba haunted him, being as it was about an essentially good man succumbing to temptation, for no good reason than because he could, power corrupting absolutely. The tale of Bathsheba began in the spring, when the kings went out to battle. Only King David had stayed behind …

  His sermon needed a stirring conclusion about how easily we are misled when we obey only our desires. About the pure selfishness of David, which was so out of character for him, really. And the steep unhappiness his selfishness, his lapse from grace, had brought him.

  Absent in the Spring had also been the title of one of Agatha Christie’s books, one of her rare departures from writing mysteries. In it, a woman briefly discovers her true nature, only to in the end—probably—lapse back into forgetfulness and routine, losing the insights so painfully gained. As Max recalled, whether or not the truth of the discoveries would stay with her, changing her forever, was where the mystery lay. It was a mystery of the heart, then. Of human nature. And mankind’s endless capacity to deceive itself. All of her books concerned the mysteries of the human heart, but none so strikingly as Absent in the Spring. Agatha had said it was the one book she wrote in which she was entirely satisfied with the result. And she’d written it in three days.

  Max, who had struggled endlessly with this Bathsheba sermon of his, could only envy her.

  These reminders of spring pulled him up short. But why now? It was autumn now, and spring had been unremarkable except for the changeable weather—which had become the norm in England, as around the globe. The summer following that unstable spring had been blazing hot, a recent and unpleasant memory Max had no problem calling to mind. How his dark shirt had seemed to smother him, and how his clerical collar had chafed at his neck. But how, too, his happiest moments had been spent with Owen in the swimming pool in Staincross Minster, teaching him to swim. The child took to it naturally, splashing about like a dolphin in no fear of the water, while some of the other children had screamed down heaven at getting their toes wet. Max had been rather smug about his son’s ability, as he so often was bursting with pride of his beloved offspring, but he made up for it by telling the smal
l lie to the other parents that he had been training Owen at home in the bathtub.

  So, spring, summer, now autumn. Suddenly last summer … had something changed with the summer? So far as people attached to the murder investigation were concerned, the biggest life change had been Colin’s, with the move to Saudi Arabia—adapting to a new job in a new culture, and no doubt missing his familiar surroundings. Lady Duxter had gone about her business much the same as always, to all appearances. A bit wan and drifty, nothing obviously startling happening in her day-to-day. The summer was when the writers’ center began opening its doors to what Lord Duxter rather inanely called the deserving poor—the writers who came to him for peace and succor in their labors.

  No, try as he might, Max could not get to the bottom of what was troubling him, but he believed Colin’s sudden absence and equally sudden return in the autumn for his grandmother’s funeral might be the only events of any moment in the otherwise sleepy village.

  Colin’s return had been time sensitive, to be sure, and Lord Duxter had had a hand in making the complicated arrangements for a foreigner who needed quickly to leave Saudi. Netta having died, arrangements had to be made, yes. But his wife Jane was here handling things. Why the hurry to get Colin home practically the next day? People, Max reminded himself, all dealt with grief in different ways. Certainly, if his own mother died, God forbid it, he would want Awena and other members of his family at his side, as quickly as could be arranged.

  One member of his parish had actually organized the funeral of her mother in great haste, so that her brother, who lived at a distance, would not have time to make arrangements to attend. He never understood that—had there been some old score to settle? Some bitter rivalry for the mother’s affections? But ever since Max had fallen for it and gone ahead and held the funeral (the woman had not told him she had a brother), he had been acutely sensitive to relatives who were in any sort of rush over the funeral arrangements.