“In the middle of the conversation,” Coombebridge continued, “she said something about having a visitor. I could hear a knock at the door, and she said, ‘Just a minute, Lucas,’ and she put down the receiver. She must have gone to open the door because next I heard her say something like, ‘Oh, it’s you. The door’s on the latch. Did you get the preserves?’ And someone probably nodded because I didn’t hear the response. Or perhaps it was a rhetorical question. Then Netta said, ‘They had better be an improvement over the last batch. I was taken ill from that jar, I tell you.’ Then she rang off.”
“That’s all she said?”
“Well, I think she said good-bye, or see you around, or something like that. This wasn’t like in film or on the telly where people simply ring off without a by-your-leave.”
Which was exactly what Coombebridge had done, after having demanded Max’s appearance at the cottage. But with Lucas Coombebridge, rules were meant for other people.
“And she said the door was on the latch,” Max said slowly. “As if to say, you could have just walked in, the door was closed but it wasn’t locked.”
“Do you know, I never stopped to think it through. And that’s because I thought it couldn’t possibly be important. Not until she was killed. I’ve no time to waste, Vicar. Not like some I could name.”
Max ignored this. He was used to the man’s brusqueness. His running joke was that Max didn’t work for a living if, as Max claimed, everything was already in God’s hands.
“Why do you keep saying she was killed?”
“Perhaps because she was living with two women who wanted her dead?”
That was opinion that barely rose to the level of hearsay and tittle-tattle. Netta was given to paranoia as she grew older, as all the village well knew. And Coombebridge’s misogyny would certainly extend to stereotypes about three women living in the same house. Still, Max found he couldn’t dismiss this information out of hand. Perhaps all three women—Netta, Jane, and Poppy—found a lot to quarrel about, living in close quarters as they did. Leaving the cap off a tube of toothpaste or repeated failure to put the dishes away were the sorts of crimes that could have fatal consequences.
“So the day before she died someone brought her preserves because the last batch made her ill. What more do you want? If she thought someone was trying to kill her, she was right, as it turns out. Even paranoids get it right sometimes, you know.”
“All right,” said Max. “Perhaps. But from what you say, this sounds as though a stranger may have come to the door. Jane and Poppy would have no need to knock. It was their house, too.”
“You’re the detective,” said Coombebridge, turning away, losing interest. Talking to Coombebridge was sometimes like talking to a four-year-old. “Figure it out.”
Max was realizing that, on second thought, the simpler explanation was that Poppy or Jane had not been able to open the door because their hands were full of packages from their shopping.
“What time of day was it, this visit?” Max asked.
“Around six or six thirty. I was losing the sunlight so I was anxious to get off the telephone and back to my painting. And I could hear the news going off on her telly in the background. That silly introductory music they play, like the world’s coming to an end every night.”
That would be six o’clock straight up, then, thought Max—if the time mattered. “You gained no impression of who her visitor was?”
“I didn’t think about it at the time, no. Is it important?”
“Male? Female?”
“Really, how would I know? She called whoever it was ‘poppet.’”
Poppet? A term one would use for a young girl, but not exclusively for a young girl. Max supposed a woman Netta’s age might say it to a young man. It was simply a term of endearment.
“Are you sure she didn’t say ‘Poppy’?”
Just last week at St. Edwold’s Max had asked Mr. Ferrar if he would help out and do the offering during the service—pass the collection plate, in other words. Ferrar had misheard him. “Would I do the laundry?” he’d said, understandably confused by the request. Coombebridge was getting to an age where many people start to have trouble with their hearing. He might have misheard “poppet” for “Poppy.” Max hoped he was wrong in thinking that.
“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” said Coombebridge. “She called whoever it was ‘poppet.’”
But even if it had been Poppy, Max wondered, couldn’t she simply have been making a delivery on behalf of someone else?
“I didn’t hear a voice, if that’s what you mean,” Coombebridge continued. “There was no way to be able to tell if it was male or female. Although, if we can stereotype for a moment, it would be more usual for a woman to carry around a jar of preserves, wouldn’t it? It’s just not something men do, is it? So I guess I assumed it was one of the old biddies in the village come round for tea, her shopping basket swinging from her arm. Maybe she was returning a jar she’d borrowed.”
A used or opened jar of preserves? That seemed to Max unlikely in the extreme. Max would of course ask Cotton if a jar had turned up when his team turned out the house. Although it sounded as if Netta was suspicious enough of the contents of the original jar she may have thrown it away herself. Anyway, there were probably half a dozen such jars in the house, so it might be a pointless exercise. Still, prints on the jar might mean something. And poison or drugs in the jar would mean more.
* * *
Max passed along Coombebridge’s words to Cotton, pulling over on a byway to use his mobile as he headed back to Nether Monkslip.
“It wasn’t being treated as a crime scene, so of course there are no photos,” Cotton told him. “And if she was poisoned or doped somehow, surely the killer has removed all traces from the house by now. Nothing would be easier than to drop by for a condolence visit and have a rustle through the fridge on the pretext of making tea or something.”
“I know,” said Max. “It’s just one more piece of the puzzle. We don’t know if or where it fits in. I could ask Awena or one of the women at Elka’s about preserves and such, but it seems a very long shot anyone would know or remember anything like that in connection with Netta. If anything, she generally would make her own preserves—she was famous for it. I doubt she’d be much interested in someone’s bringing her their own jar. Although…”
“Although what?”
“If these were store-bought preserves, might she not have returned them to the store? Sent Jane or Poppy out to exchange them for a new jar? I can almost hear her saying, ‘Waste not, want not.’”
“Well, that’s easy enough to check into,” said Cotton. “I’ll get someone on it. It would have to be the village store or Madame Cuthbert’s shop, wouldn’t it? La Maison Bleue?”
“Most likely,” said Max. “Almost certainly.”
But that night, a new concern stepped on the heels of the old when Max was awakened in the early hours by the phone ringing beside his bed. It was Lord Duxter, and he was in a state, his voice booming down the line like an explosion in Max’s ear.
“Someone’s set fire to the old church, Max. Look out your window and you might even be able to see the flames from there. What in hell! What the devil is going on? Marina, and now this?”
Max quickly pulled on some clothes, kissed an alarmed Awena good-bye, and raced down the stairs. Thea trotted hopefully beside him but, not knowing what he was headed into, he told her she must stay. He left her by the front door, a dejected heap of brown-and-black fur.
When he pulled up to the St. George Studio in the Land Rover, Cotton and his team were already there, standing with a wretched-looking group of six or so poets and other scribes from the writers’ retreat. They stood huddled in blankets to watch the firemen dowse the flames of the old church, no doubt already mentally composing sonnets or essays about the conflagration. Despite the hour, people from nearby villages started to arrive and showed no inclination to move on until they, too, had extr
acted every last drop of drama. They were not disappointed by their wait. Before long, they saw Cotton’s team removing a body from the embers, a human form covered head to toe by a white cloth.
Standing at the edge of the crowd and peering through the blinding smoke, Max turned at the sound of a familiar voice. It was Jane Frost, once again crying hysterically.
“Oh, no, not Carville!” she cried. “No!”
Why on earth, Max wondered, was she that upset over Carville?
PART IV
The World and the Flesh
Chapter 19
THE HIGH PRIEST
To round off Max’s frantic morning, at ten on the day of the fire Mrs. Hooser threw open the door to his office to announce that “his bishop” was on the telephone, meaning the Right Reverend Bishop Nigel St. Stephen. “He sounds annoyed,” she assured him. She looked at Max suspiciously, this renegade priest who was always in some form of trouble, ecclesiastical or otherwise. The days when he had been dating Awena paled by comparison for scandal.
But whenever people pointed out the murder rate in Nether Monkslip had shot up alarmingly with Max’s arrival in the village, Mrs. Hooser defended him with a blind devotion. He was her vicar, and despite her many failings and shortcomings as a housekeeper, he had shown her nothing but kindness. She would not hear a word said against him. There was surely a good explanation for the trail of corpses he left littered behind. Her reasoning was that there would have been more murders without Max around to solve them.
Max was hopeful. With any luck, he thought, the bishop was only calling because he’d heard about the stained glass. Miss Pitchford or one of her associates surely had got wind of the goat situation by now, in a manner of speaking.
But Max soon realized he should have known better. It was unlikely the bishop would embroil himself in such a matter. A depiction in glass of a nude Adam and Eve, perhaps. A goat with a crazed-looking protector the bishop would let Max sort out for himself.
The bishop had clearly been reading the news in the Monkslip-super-Mare Globe and Bugle. Clive Hoptingle, reporter, had come to specialize in coverage of Max, whom he had dubbed “the sleuthing priest,” among other things. Clive, with his bombastic writing style and loose acquaintance with truth-telling, was clearly a fan of Max’s investigative outings with DCI Cotton. He had taken to following Max about with a camera during investigations, popping up at the most inconvenient times before scuttling off to make his nightly deadline. Max had not seen him in recent days but that was not to say he wasn’t even now planning an ambush of the vicarage.
“Not another murder, Max? And now a fire?”
“I’m awfully afraid it is so, Bishop. And the church didn’t make it. I mean to say, it burned to the ground.”
“With no one inside, it is to be hoped?” Without stopping for an answer, he added, “Max, I’ve lost count of the number of murder investigations in which you’ve been involved. Have you … I mean, has this always been … Have you always been so surrounded by murder?”
“Have I always carried this cloud around with me, like Pigpen, do you mean?”
“Well, yes, something like that.”
“I suppose I have, yes, now that you mention it, Bishop. At university, there were a few instances, a few occasions, where I felt I could point out some clues the authorities seemed to be overlooking.” He didn’t like to remind his bishop that Nether Monkslip had been a peaceable little backwater of a place until he had come along. He supposed he was afraid the bishop might pull him from the area and give him another church in another village. Whether that wouldn’t simply be spreading the problem like malaria to a new location Max didn’t dare speculate. Surely all this was just coincidence, this spike in the murder rate around these parts?
Or was he in fact becoming a clerical lure for murder?
“So, tell me what is going on,” said the bishop. In the background, Max could hear a state-of-the-art printer spitting out pages at fifty per minute. The bishop was calling from his office at Monkslip Cathedral, a place that was an homage to high tech gadgets and the tenets of Marie Kondo, the famous Japanese organizing consultant. The bishop was using his stern voice, but Max discerned more than a touch of avidity in his tone. Like Max, the bishop was a fan of the golden age of mystery, in particular the books of Agatha Christie, and in truth he took a vicarious pleasure from Max’s involvement in these cases.
“So, what is it this time, Max?”
There was much that he might have kept back to shorten the tale, but not from his bishop. It was the only way Max could reconcile the dichotomy of his life. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Priest.
While Max was not officially the Bishop’s Eye, he seemed to be serving as a sort of conduit. Most fortunately, the bishop had never come near saying, with Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
“I’ll know more after I hear from DCI Cotton,” said Max. “But here’s the gist.”
The bishop listened closely. At the end of Max’s recital, he said, “Well, buildings are replaceable. Only humans are unique. Still, I’m sorry to see this one go. You know of course that for centuries it was ours, before Cambridge got hold of it. There were modern-day protests when the church was deconsecrated and the lot sold to Lord Duxter. Letters to the editor—‘Whither England’ and so on. But the Church is cash-strapped and many fine old properties that cost the moon to maintain have come on the block. It’s often the only way to save them from demolition: find a buyer with deep pockets and an abiding love of the old architecture.”
Or, Max thought, find a buyer whose wife had deep pockets.
* * *
“So the arsonist was someone not connected with the retreat, is that the thinking?” Max asked Cotton. “Someone not staying at the main house?” It was later in the day and Max had made short work of his clerical duties, determined to focus on the apparently escalating crisis taking place so nearby. Poppy’s absence made him feel the clock was ticking; he couldn’t suspend animation indefinitely while the investigation proceeded. The child’s absence put a special pressure on investigators; the press couldn’t leave it alone, of course. Readers were treated daily to hand-wringing interviews with her school companions. Without exception, they described her as “lighting up every room she entered.”
“Not necessarily,” said Cotton, speaking from his mobile. “Although the writers for the most part alibi each other.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Precisely. Apparently they’ve been having a high old time over there. Passions ignited or rekindled into the wee hours—that is true of at least one couple that met at a book fair. It’s a wonder any of them gets any work done, however. The rest say they sat up drinking into the wee hours. The old church where Carville was staying was tucked well away from the main house, hidden behind some trees. That was the attraction, that the writer could have some peace and quiet in which to work. But that also means no one was particularly aware of Carville until he turned up for meals. I gather that on those occasions, he could scarcely be avoided, try as one might to avoid him. He would show up waving his bookmarks and going on about the size of his latest book contract. No one believed him on that subject, apparently, or perhaps it was that they didn’t want to believe him, but that didn’t shut him up.”
“Are we certain that Carville was the intended victim?”
“Well, yes. What is it you’re saying? Who else might it have been? He was no more or less annoying than the other writers, or so I’m told, just more successful and well-known.”
“Fire is a—well, an indirect way to kill someone,” Max pointed out. “With guns and knives, you can be fairly certain you’ve hit your target.”
“I do see what you mean. It’s the same with poison, isn’t it? There’s no guarantee it will work when you want it to. Well, it’s difficult to say who else may have been the target. Carville had been living there alone, quite blamelessly—no overnight guests so far as anyone was aware or will admit
to knowing. So unless whoever set the fire thought someone else was in there asleep, or asleep with him…”
“A case of mistaken identity, perhaps.”
“It could be,” admitted Cotton. “Or perhaps someone had simply had it up to there with Carville and his bookmarks and his bonuses and awards. They tell me he’s also known at writers’ conferences as a bit of a microphone hog but that would be a rare reason for wanting to kill someone, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say with any certainty. Returning to the case of Lady Duxter and Colin: By the same token, perhaps the police should look at separate motives—meaning, someone wanted only one of them gone—Lady Duxter or Colin. But in order to achieve the death of one, both had to die.”
“Okay,” said Cotton. “That’s very possible. What happened in Colin’s life recently that might account for this? What changed?”
“Apart from his grandmother’s dying? Not a lot. Except…”
“Except?”
“Well, interestingly, Colin apparently had a near escape from death over in Saudi Arabia.”
“Really?” Cotton was already thinking that getting Interpol in on this one would be uphill work.
“Yes, we had the story from Elka Garth and the people who like to hang about the tea shop,” said Max. “A car tried to run him off the road. He thought it was an attempted kidnapping. I suppose it’s just possible someone followed him to England from there, to finish the job properly this time.”
“A stranger in the village would be noticed,” said Cotton. “Within five minutes. Most particularly a Saudi. They’d bring it in under thirty seconds with a Saudi.”
“I don’t think Colin said it was a Saudi. Still, we can’t discount the incident, although trying to follow up on it would be the very devil. But his colleague was with him at the time and confirms it happened: a car came flying out at them from nowhere and tried to force them off the road. Fortunately, Colin’s driver was trained in evasive driving. But in the panic of the moment no one could identify the car or the driver.”
In Prior's Wood Page 18