In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  “They didn’t report it, I suppose?”

  “They felt it was better to say nothing,” said Max. “It’s not a country where you’d jump at the chance to get involved with the bureaucracy, if you get my drift. Or to find yourself detained until their inquiries were complete. Jane told the crowd at Elka’s that it made Colin desperately want out of there. And she was relieved to have her instincts validated like that. She had taken flak from some of the villagers for not being at his side over there.”

  “And then his grandmother died. Do you see some sort of conspiracy here? A conspiracy against Colin?”

  “We can’t discount the idea, I suppose. Far-fetched as it seems. Some wide-ranging, lingering grudge?” asked Max doubtfully.

  “Didn’t Jane hint that Colin might have found something hidden in some ledger in the archives?”

  “She did. But unless it was a long-lost Shakespeare play or something, it’s difficult to see such a find resulting in a plot against his life.”

  “Colin was a cybersecurity expert,” mused Cotton. “That alone might make him a target. But Lady Duxter?”

  “Collateral damage,” said Max promptly. He had known that sort of tragedy to happen often enough. “If we put aside the suicide theory, then she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If someone really had it in for Colin, Marina was simply in the way. Professional kidnappers and assassins wouldn’t have any scruples about that.”

  “Was Colin really that important?”

  “He didn’t act as though he was important, but it’s hard to say. Certainly what we’ve learned from his employers doesn’t indicate he was anything out of the ordinary, but I doubt they would admit he was more.”

  “A spy of some sort, you mean.”

  “Yes. In the employ of—God knows. Or, he was just the humble and unassuming man he appeared to be. But we can’t forget that in his head were all the secrets to evading detection if someone were plotting sabotage of the oil fields. Who would choose to try to kidnap him, as apparently happened that day he was run off the road, we can only imagine. Politics in that region are even harder to grasp than those in Whitehall.”

  “And investigating a crime out of that region? I wouldn’t know where to start, if I’m honest. This might be a case for MI6.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Max, “bring them in just yet.”

  * * *

  An hour later Max could be found sitting in the front pew of St. Edwold’s, watched closely by Luther from his usual resting place on the altar.

  How old was the cat? No one knew. Luther had been hanging about at least since the day Max took over as vicar of St. Edwold’s. He seemed no older, no slower in his movements, if perhaps he was getting a bit gray around the muzzle. Certainly he was able to jump on and off the altar with alacrity, although Max also had watched him fail to stick the landing on the altar cloth and slide clean across to fall off the other side, quite unharmed. It was like watching a cat in a cartoon. Max wished Luther wouldn’t leave the mice he caught for Max to find in the vestry, but he supposed it was a blessing Luther was only in it for the kill, not for the meal. Max would find the little bodies laid out almost reverently next to the altar vestments.

  Max had slipped into the empty church—empty save for Luther—for a quiet moment of prayer. He saw that the Carson twins had been drawing on the backs of the pews with crayons again. He knew it was the Carsons because they’d helpfully signed their names to their artwork. GERALD and LILY—that “GERALD” written with a backward-facing letter “E.”

  He’d baptized both children soon after they were born. Gerald had been as good as gold in his father’s arms, seemingly fascinated by the proceedings; Lily had fussed throughout, her desperate screams reaching a crescendo as Max drizzled baptismal water on her forehead. As he’d handed the child back to her mother, she’d said jokingly, “You keep her.”

  He opened the Book of Common Prayer he’d brought with him. He tended to use the book as a sort of day planner and holder of random scraps of paper. Out from its pages fell the scattered notes for his Bathsheba and King David sermon.

  The sound of the door opening pulled him from his reflections.

  Destiny came to sit beside him, the light shaded by stained glass catching the tips of her hair. They glowed as if on fire, turning the strands multicolored. “I’ve been thinking about the sermon you’ve been working on. The one that’s given you so much trouble.”

  Max, his mind still sifting through the clues in the case, emerged slowly into full awareness. “What’s that you said?”

  “I was talking about your sermon. I said, when all is said and done, David was not always the hero of legend, was he? He couldn’t live up to all the hype, I guess. Imagine the pressure: king, poet, athlete, musician. But he became ruthless in taking what he wanted.”

  “He certainly paid for it when his son died.”

  “Yes.” She looked closely at him. “What is it, Max?”

  “‘The Lord gives everything and charges / By taking it back.’ That’s Jack Gilbert.”

  “Oh. Nice. It’s a poem, is it?”

  “‘Like being young for a while,’” Max continued thoughtfully.

  He wasn’t really there with her at all, Destiny could tell. She gave him a minute before prodding him to continue. “That’s quite sad, somehow.”

  “Yes. ‘We are permitted / Romantic love with its bounty and half-life / Of two years.’”

  “Oh, my. Do you think that’s true?”

  Max, again struggling to rejoin the conversation, said, “Of romantic love? Oh, yes. It has a short shelf life. Then it becomes something deeper, something finer. Or it vanishes altogether. There doesn’t seem to be a middle way.”

  “I have a feeling you’re saying all this for a reason.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Max.

  A beat, as she sat with hands clasped hopefully at her breast. Then, “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what the reason is?”

  He smiled. “I’m not sure. Better to say nothing until I’m sure.”

  “Very well.” She sat another moment, still hoping to break him. No luck. “Actually, I came in to tell you we’ve run out of gluten-free wafers again.”

  Max sighed. “If we can’t get a better supplier, let’s go back to having Elka bake them. She was more than happy to—”

  “What is it, Max?”

  The cat, playing with something on the altar, suddenly caught the object in his claws and batted it high into the air. Whatever it was went sailing onto the floor nearby. Max went to retrieve it before Luther could pounce, saying, “Luther, scat.” Luther’s green eyes glowered, but reluctantly he obeyed. Like an obedient dog, thought Max, only … not.

  It was, Max could see now, a tarot card. He picked it up carefully, using his handkerchief. It was labeled “The Moon” and it illustrated a night scene with a wolf and a dog sitting near a body of water, howling at the sky. A sea creature with claws was half submerged in the water. The moon wore an angry expression.

  “What does it mean?” Destiny asked him.

  “No idea. I’ll ask Awena before I hand it over to Cotton. It h—”

  “Max?”

  He had stopped talking, midsentence. Grimacing, he placed a hand against his cheek.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid it’s my tooth. It’s been acting up. I don’t think I can ignore it much longer.” Of all the times, he thought. Although, there was never a good time for a dental emergency.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. In truth, while she was upset to see a friend in any discomfort, however small, she was more upset to see Max, whom she regarded as somewhat superhuman, suffering from something so ordinary, so mundane, so very human and boring, as a toothache.

  “Just when I’m so busy.”

  “Isn’t it always the way? ‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,’” Destiny quoted.

  “I’m not dying,” said Max. “At least, I hope not.”
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br />   “Of course you’re not. It’s just … I think we all hate going to the dentist so much because it reminds us of our mortality. Decay and all that. Even more so than a routine visit to the doctor, don’t you think?”

  In general, Max agreed with her. But he liked Dr. Denton and the only drawback to going to him was that his office was in Monkslip-super-Mare, some distance from the village. Being in the care of such a jovial person, it was impossible to think of the statistics that placed dentistry at the top of the lists for suicide risk. Dr. Denton was fun loving, good at his job, and in the main happy with his chosen profession. He had told Max that fishing was his hobby, and when the stress of his occupation got to be too much—demanding patients, the extreme perfectionism the job required—he’d cancel his upcoming appointments, hang a sign in the window, and go fishing. He always, he assured Max, threw his catch back in the water. They served as therapy, not as food.

  There had been another dentist not many years before who had not been so wise as to develop an innocuous hobby. He had instead turned to adultery and murder to occupy his off hours.

  The memory of that old case nagged at Max as, minutes later, he picked up the telephone in the vicarage to make an appointment.

  Chapter 20

  THE MOON

  A week passed with few advances in the case, except that the fire had been confirmed as arson with petrol used as an accelerant. Max spoke daily with Cotton but there were no new developments, no solid clues, no fingerprints found where they shouldn’t be, no confessions made. The case would soon grow cold.

  There had been one major lead but as things stood, investigators were unsure where it led. Max had been right in one of his theories about the jar of preserves. They had been purchased at Mme Lucie Cuthbert’s shop and returned there when Netta found fault with them. They were grape preserves made from special vines grown only in France.

  “Our now-missing Poppy returned them,” Cotton told him. “And Mme Cuthbert was very huffy about the whole episode. I happened to speak with her myself. She was insulted to be accused of selling shoddy goods.

  “‘Poppy,’” Cotton relayed in a passable French accent, waving his hands in an expression of indignation, “‘was at the mercy of that querulous old woman. Not to mention at the mercy of her stepmother. I felt sorry for her. Such a sweet, pretty child. She will outgrow the silly outfits and then we will see emerge une belle femme. But you must find her. This outrage cannot continue!’” And more words to that effect. Anyway, Mme Cuthbert had agreed to replace the offending jar with a new one but she held on to the opened jar Poppy had returned to her. “‘But of course I kept the jar. There was nothing wrong with the preserves no matter what anyone said, so of course I kept them. That Netta, she liked to stir trouble.’”

  “And you’ve tested the contents, of course.”

  “Yes,” Cotton replied. “Laced with sedatives, they were.”

  “Enough to taste bad, then, but not enough to kill Netta outright. Not if she was still around to have Poppy return the jar. It is lucky Mme Cuthbert didn’t do a taste test herself on her morning toast. Were there fingerprints?”

  “There were, mostly smudged,” said Cotton. “They may turn out to be only Lucie Cuthbert’s but the lab is taking care to preserve them. If you had tampered with the jar, wouldn’t you have the sense to wipe your fingerprints off of it?”

  “Yes. And, of course, Poppy’s prints are sure to be on there. We know now she handled the jar in returning it to the shop.”

  “Right. And Jane’s prints could be there, too, since she lived in the house. And those of any number of visitors to the cottage, I suppose. It may be pure luck Jane and Poppy didn’t sample from the jar.”

  “Still, it’s revealing. It looks as if there is no question Netta was drugged—poisoned. The drugs in the jar may not have been enough to work well, but someone may have tried again, with greater success, having figured out the better dose to use.”

  “We’ll have to find out for sure.”

  “Of course.”

  Then finally, the word they had been waiting for came from the hospital. Cotton stopped by the vicarage to deliver the news.

  And Max rang Jane Frost right away.

  “I am headed for the hospital,” he said. “It seems Lady Duxter is coming round, but slowly. I want to be there if and when she does come to. And I wonder if I could ask you a rather large favor. Could you come with me, and drive my car back so Awena will have it in the morning? I can’t leave her and Owen without transportation and this may be a long night for me there at the hospital. They keep a guest room for visiting clergy and such, and I may end up staying the night.”

  She didn’t hesitate. Had Lady Duxter truly been Colin’s paramour, her response might have been different, but Max had assured her that was not the case. Her husband was a victim and almost certainly a blameless one.

  “Of course,” she said. “Whatever I can do to help. And with everyone gone—I’m so glad of the excuse not to be here. I just start to stew and worry about Poppy, left on my own. I’ll just grab my purse and I’ll be right with you.”

  “I thought you might feel that way. Good. Thank you.”

  “Is she going to be all right? Lady Duxter?”

  “They don’t know. They say the last thing Marina remembers is going to meet someone. In the forest, she thinks—she can’t remember who and she can’t remember where. She may be remembering a different day entirely. It’s going to be a long road back but the doctor is optimistic.”

  Max thought back to his conversation with Cotton, who had told him, “Lady Duxter is starting to remember everything.”

  “Starting to remember?”

  “As usual in these cases, it’s a process of small flashbacks growing into larger flashbacks that paint a more coherent picture. Right now she says she remembers ‘someone’ ringing to ask her to come over. She remembers being in the woods, so she thinks someone wanted to meet her in the woods. She also thinks she remembers being driven somewhere in a car. After that, it’s a blank.”

  “And she doesn’t know who it was? Male, female? Old, young?”

  Cotton shook his head. “As Dr. Winship told us from the beginning, she might recover in quite a dramatic fashion, and recall everything. Or there may be gaps in her memory that last forever. There was the shock of someone’s having tried to kill her—that’s one element. The other is the carbon monoxide itself. The experts don’t really know how deep the damage may run.”

  “Of all the rotten luck,” said Max.

  “I know, but at least there’s this. She’s alive. And she is adamant she didn’t go into the woods to kill herself. She’s not entirely sure she went out there to meet Colin—or to meet anyone else for that matter.”

  “Like Carville.”

  “Precisely. But in this case, where there’s life, there’s a great deal of hope. The doctors are working with her, not pressuring her, letting her recover on her own.”

  “And not planting any false memories, one would hope.”

  “They’ve got a specially trained psychologist making sure that doesn’t happen. One of the best around, I’m told. Lord Duxter insisted and has been most generous in making sure his wife is well cared for.”

  The two men looked at each other and as one said, “Guilty conscience.”

  “I would imagine,” said Max, “he feels horribly guilty. For not having seen the setup was all wrong. For doubting her. For—for a hundred reasons.”

  “We’ll get at the truth, Max.”

  “The truth—as elusive as the moon on a cloudy night,” said Max, who thought he knew the truth now but was unwilling to face it. As always, the perfidy of his fellow man astonished and dismayed him. What people would do for love or money. “It’s there, the truth—it’s always there—we just can’t see it.”

  He thought of that card in the church, that moon that looked so peeved, the dog, and the wolf. Awena had told him, “The moon card is always about illusion and dec
eption. Things that are not what they appear to be.”

  “Well, I think we knew that much already.”

  “Yes. There’s been a great deal of deception and misdirection, hasn’t there? Someone is playing games with you, and with the authorities. With Cotton.”

  Max said, “To leave this on the church altar for me to find is a sort of sacrilege, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t, but you would be expected to think so, Max. At a guess, you’re looking for someone with no religious background in the traditional sense. Or someone who has rejected religion outright. Perhaps someone angry with God, for prayers that went unanswered.”

  “Or prayers that were answered.”

  “As in, ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ Saint Teresa.”

  “There could be another interpretation, and that has had me worried all week. It could be a sort of calling card. Giving notice that there is going to be another killing.”

  “It might be a woman who is to be sacrificed, then.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The moon always represents a goddess, not a god.”

  Max’s heart skipped a beat with anxiety, thinking of Poppy.

  Was someone planting these cards? he wondered. To implicate someone else?

  To implicate Poppy?

  Wasn’t it Alan Kay who had said the best way to predict the future was to create it? Colin would have heard of the brilliant computer scientist. He might have idolized him. Poor Colin.

  As if tracking on the idea of predictions, Awena said, “But all any of this tarot business means is that while fate and fortune play a part, we are still the ones in charge.”

  Well, thought Max, someone needed to come right out with it because he was not getting this obscure message. What he needed was solid proof to catch a murderer. And he also thought that, with Cotton’s help, that could be organized.

  He drove over to Hawthorne Cottage to collect Jane as fast as the law allowed, rehearsing what he might say to her. For Cotton had told him an exhumation and autopsy would be performed on Netta’s body as soon as could be arranged, a fact Max thought he would spare Jane knowing for now.