“But Awena never wears a watch.”
“That’s right. Awena never wears a watch. Jane knew this very well. It goes against Awena’s spiritual practice of living in the moment and not allowing herself to get too caught up in time constraints. Awena went by the old clock in the library—Jane would find an excuse to point out the time if Awena failed to notice it herself. But Jane had altered that clock to allow herself time to commit murder and provide an alibi for herself. This took careful planning. Almost nothing could be left to chance.”
“What if she had failed, I wonder?”
“If she failed in this attempt, she simply would have tried again. She is relentless. And she was already into murder so deep.”
“That would make a great title for a book,” said Cotton, who was always planning to one day document his exploits with Max.
“Possibly,” was Max’s only acknowledgment. He knew full well how Cotton’s mind worked. “Anyway. Jane invited Awena to come over to the library that afternoon, on some pretext of showing her something Jane had found in the archives. The next day, when I spoke with Jane, she was again at the library, pretending to work off her grief. More likely, hoping for a word with Lord Duxter. The clock’s time was correct when I saw it. Of course, the first thing she would have done once Awena left would be to reset the clock to the correct time.”
“She’d been planning all this for ages, hadn’t she? Not just this closely timed murder, but the longer strategy.”
“Yes,” said Max. “Certainly for weeks and months. There are a few gaps where we have to make an educated guess, but it went pretty much like this: Colin is sent to Saudi Arabia, with the help of Lord Duxter. Either David wanted Colin gone because he wanted him out of the way so he could seduce Colin’s wife—unlikely—or he was simply and unwittingly doing Jane’s bidding, thinking he was helping an unemployed man get a job. She had been complaining rather loudly that Colin was underfoot all day and needed to be put to work. So one day at his London club Lord Duxter runs into a man he knew who said he needed a cybersecurity expert in his Saudi Arabia office, and Lord Duxter at some point puts in a word for Colin.
“Colin probably thought this was all Lord Duxter’s doing and all his idea. The lord in his rather fatuous way thinks it is his idea, too. He is rather like that, seizing credit from Marina for her work in establishing the writers’ retreat, for example. But I think it was Jane who instigated the whole plan in order to get her husband sent away.
“That may have been all she had in mind at the time—a little freedom—but I believe she dreamt of more. Much more. Anyway, the benefit for her of being such an unremarkable woman was that she could do as she pleased most of the time, with no one the wiser, no one taking particular notice of her whereabouts. We have all noted her quality of blending in behind the scenes and seen it as a virtue. But in this case she used her wallflower qualities to help her carry out a particularly cruel plan.
“Colin had been unemployed nearly a year—he, his wife, and daughter had been living off the good graces of Netta, his grandmother, and the situation was becoming untenable. Netta had been grateful for the company at the start of her widowhood but soon enough she wanted her privacy back. Besides, they were a larger financial burden than she’d counted on. It wasn’t until her health began to fail and Colin went overseas that Jane, and Poppy, started to become permanent features in the household. Meanwhile, Jane chafed at being a sort of unpaid companion to a difficult older woman. Jane wanted out.
“Again, Lord Duxter may not have had designs on Jane in getting rid of Colin for her. He may have had only the motive of helping her financially by helping her husband. It was certainly less expensive than offering to help support her and her family by giving her a huge rise in pay.
“Anyway, by August the affair between Lord Duxter and Jane was in full swing. But what had changed from the spring into the summer? Very simply, he saw Jane bathing au naturel in the pond from the roof of his manor house. Do you remember how hot that summer was? It reached thirty-one degrees one day. If you recall how unseasonably warm it was it comes as no surprise that Jane and possibly others in the village would choose to go skinny dipping.
“Jane did what people have done for centuries when they were tempted by that pond. She took her clothes off and went for a swim. And I gather that there is nothing plain about Jane in the nude. Lord Duxter, able to spy on her from the tower of Wooton Priory, was mesmerized. She played him to spectacular effect.
“And he was smitten—overcome with lust for this woman he had long ignored, seeing her as a plain, dull Jane. As someone in his employ who knew her way around the Dewey decimal system—nothing more. By the way, I think she knew full well she was on view by that pond—that she was well aware of her beauty and the effect she could have on men. But I only think that because I am certain she was the instigator from the start. It was she who wanted to be Lady Duxter, and she who orchestrated this whole series of tragic events.”
Max mused, “The Bible’s David went to great lengths to rid himself of a rival. He effectively sent Bathsheba’s husband out to be killed. He ended up marrying her, although that soon came to grief. Anyway, our own David, Lord Duxter, was infatuated with Jane for a fleeting second and then woke up to see how unsuitable she was to someone of his age, his married state, his station in life, and all the rest. His feelings may not even have risen to the level of infatuation. No, we are probably looking at a simple case of lust, which has even a shorter shelf life than romantic love.”
Max said, “What we had here, I finally realized, was the story of Bathsheba and David—but with a twist. On a hot summer day a woman bathes in the nude in the pond by Wooton Priory. The lord of the manor—Lord Duxter—sees her from the rooftop through binoculars that he kept to hand. Let’s assume for a moment an innocent reason for those lenses. Possibly he was into bird-watching, right? But there was no other way to observe her from a distance, except from that roof. In any season, she would have been able to hear someone’s approach through the forest. But at any time but high summer, she would not have gone swimming in the nude. We can practically pinpoint the time when the affair started from these facts alone. We also have Jane’s subsequent pregnancy to narrow the time frame.
“One could argue that Jane may have thought she was alone and unobserved in those woods. That she was the victim here, or at the least, that she was swept off her feet into a situation beyond her power to control. But she knew that house and surrounding grounds well—she treated the place as her own and was free to roam. She would have seen the binoculars up there on the roof just as I did, exploring the place on a whim. Guessing what they were for, or at least how she could put them to good use, she set a trap for the unwary. For Lord Duxter. Knowing she was being watched, she put on a show for him. She went bathing at a spot and time of day when she knew he would be on the manor rooftop and would see her. She knew he went there with his nightly nightcap when the stars were out and the scene was spectacular. How spectacular David, the poor sap, was only coming to know.
“Day after day, throughout that warm spell. Within a week, he was by his own admission completely smitten. Jane in her quiet way was a knockout. The old cliché of the librarian letting down her hair and revealing the beauty hidden behind the heavy spectacles—it all happened to come true for Lord Duxter.”
“Until reality struck.”
“Correct. The affair lasted well into the autumn, and continued up to the day Jane’s husband was found dead. Then she had to go into ‘mourning’—briefly. Her plan of course was to take up with Lord Duxter again at the earliest opportunity. The part of her plan that went wrong was that Lady Duxter was still alive. Well, that, she must have thought, could easily be remedied.
“Anyway. That is when Lord Duxter’s foolish infatuation began, as he watched Jane from the tower of the priory. Much as David spotted Bathsheba bathing, from the roof of his palace, and was overcome with desire, leaving common sense behind. Really, I should
start paying closer attention to my own sermons.
“Their baby was conceived that summer. Now, thinks Lord Duxter in a panic, this woman has thrown them both in it. We may never know if the pregnancy was deliberate on her part—I think it was, but I would take it as one hundred percent given it was not part of Lord Duxter’s plans.
“Still, she believed that given time she could convince him to marry her—she’d had her own way from the start, after all. But this was quite a different equation, and quite obviously, Lord Duxter wanted to wash his hands of her. He did not get into this affair for the long term. He convinces her, or he thinks he does, that she must get her husband home immediately so that Colin can be tricked into thinking the baby is his.
“She may have anticipated this would be the lord’s initial reaction, so she stayed calm and pretended to do as he asked. She would work him round to her way of thinking in time.
“And what does she do? She gets her husband home by killing his grandmother. But not so she can make Colin think the baby is his—no. She gets him home so she can rid herself of him once and for all. It’s an insane plan, which leads one to wonder how sane Jane actually is. She may be quite mad, not knowing right from wrong.”
“I think so, too,” said Cotton. “But of course, I just don’t like her, so that colors my view. Jane wanted Lord Duxter to herself, and step one in that process was sending Colin off to a job in Saudi Arabia. Step two was killing him and Lady Duxter. Step three would be marrying Lord Duxter. The woman has ice in her veins.”
“I pray for her, now she’s been sent to be mauled about by the court system. It’s all I can do.”
Pray for her? Cotton thought he would never understand Max. Cotton personally wished Jane Frost put away for a long, long time in the dankest prison Her Majesty could provide. The prison system always needed librarians.
“Anyway,” Max continued, “when by September, Jane tests pregnant—she’s been using pregnancy test kits repeatedly, according to Poppy—Jane has to get Colin home, stat. She assures Lord Duxter she’ll pin the pregnancy on Colin, but again, I don’t think she had the least intention of doing that. She wanted Lord Duxter for herself and this was her way in. Any maternal consideration for the child was, shall we say, noticeably absent. Jane saw it as a minor inconvenience that her intended was already married to Marina, and that she, Jane, was married to Colin. That, she thought, was easily taken care of with a staged double suicide.”
“A twofer,” said Cotton. “Problem solved.”
“Precisely. The two people standing in the way of her happiness done away with at once, in one fatal blow. There was a case not long ago of a British dentist who did something similar—he set up his wife and his lover’s husband in a fake suicide pact. I believe the pair didn’t even know each other. And he got away with it for years, until guilt got the better of him. After a run of bad luck he broke down and confessed. I was reminded of it when I had to make an appointment with my own dentist in the middle of all this. Those things are always most inconvenient in their timing, aren’t they? Or maybe, they are heaven-sent.”
Cotton, who had no opinion on this fine theological point—to him a toothache was just a toothache—smiled encouragingly, waiting for Max to continue.
“Anyway, immediately Jane knew she was pregnant, she swung into action, killing her grandmother-in-law—eighty-year-old Netta.”
Cotton nodded. “Once we exhumed Netta’s body, an autopsy revealed an overdose of sleeping tablets. No doubt a high dose of her own prescription. But she actually died of asphyxiation. The coroner now believes someone simply drugged her into submission, and held a pillow over her mouth until she was dead. Smothering someone is not as easy to do as it looks in films. You have to be determined, ruthless, and utterly without a conscience. It does help if your victim is a feeble elderly woman who is passed out from an overdose.”
“The poor woman had probably over time come to trust her ‘Angel of Mercy,’ for Jane was the consummate manipulator,” said Max. “Suspicious as Netta was by nature, she’d have taken whatever Jane told her to take, and eat and drink whatever was prepared for her. Probably Jane played up to Netta’s tendency to treat her like a servant. The role came to be useful to Jane.
“Colin had told Dr. Winship that his grandmother had been getting confused and forgetful about taking her doses. Poppy, and of course Jane, confirmed this when Netta died. Nowhere in the world does anyone look closely at the death of such an elderly person unless their body is riddled with bullet holes and stab wounds. It is assumed the person died of natural causes.”
“So,” said Cotton. “Jane did all of this in her cold-blooded way to get her husband sent home by his company on some sort of hardship leave. Netta died simply because Jane found she was pregnant and it was necessary—from Lord Duxter’s standpoint—to get her husband home and into her bed quickly so he would think the child was his. Colin, the poor mug, duly returns to attend to arrangements for his grandmother.”
“Poppy told me her father slept on the sofa each night,” said Max.
“I’m going to suppose Jane thought it might be helpful if Poppy could testify to that, if any questions of paternity ever came up. Jane wanted there to be no doubt that this was Lord Duxter’s offspring.”
Max nodded. “So, that’s the nutshell version. The lord is guilty of adultery, of course, but not of murder. Besides, he was in London at the crucial time.”
“We were asked to believe that Colin took up with Lady Duxter, or resumed a relationship with her, and became involved to the extent that weeks later he became her partner in a double suicide attempt. Jane tried to spread the word at Elka’s that he and Marina had been together for ages, but in fact, there is only her word for that. For a lot of things.”
“And in this area, believe me, Miss Pitchford or someone very like Miss Pitchford would have picked up on news of an affair of long standing,” Max said. “I think Jane put that about because it was very hard to believe Colin would kill himself over a woman he’d been involved with such a short time.”
“She was clever about that.”
Max said, “Jane was clever about a lot of things. She never claimed that Colin suffered episodes of full-blown depression, like Lady Duxter. But she hinted to all who would listen at a rather dark, Dickensian childhood for him, with a neglectful and possibly suicidal mother. I see now she was saying that Colin was so damaged he was a clear candidate for suicide himself, and that however surprised she claimed to be by his death, she was not all that surprised. That Colin’s uncle had died of an overdose which most thought to be deliberate played wonderfully into her planning, suggesting as it did an even stronger case for an inherited tendency. Jane made sure to scatter references to that ugly event, to remind everyone, and to keep it planted in everyone’s mind that there was a history of mental illness in the family. To include Poppy, of course.”
“You think Poppy was next in her planning?”
“I do.”
“It’s all just so ruthless. And then of course Lady Duxter’s struggles with mental health were widely known.”
“Yes. That Marina had a well-documented history of depression and had in fact attempted to end her life just the year before—it all folded in nicely. Jane had found two perfect victims for her awful plan. They’d been handed to her, in a way. By being around the priory all day, she had access to that diary of Lady Duxter’s. And then there was the note Jane left beside Colin’s body.”
“It was authentic,” said Cotton. “Our examiners said the handwriting was almost certainly his.”
“It was no doubt something he’d written to Jane during one of their frequent breakups when they were courting, or that he’d written following an argument about his going to Saudi. She’d saved it, who knows why or for how long. That is how her mind works; it is a sort of by-product of her training. She is a librarian, an archivist, and nothing written ever goes to waste. She may always have been thinking long-term about getting rid of Colin.�
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“She may have kept the note as a tender keepsake of their courtship.”
“But that doesn’t sound much like her, does it?” said Max. “Knowing how she really felt about Colin. Poppy actually told me she wondered if Jane planned to poison Colin too—if that’s why she suddenly starting cooking meals for him—or trying to: Miss Pitchford distrusted very much her knowledge of food preparation. But the double suicide plan was much neater and much less likely to arouse suspicion, since Netta had just died and no one yet suspected that death involved a poisoning or overdose. With two similar events in a row people were bound to ask questions. So Jane came up with a new plan.”
“And how near she came to getting away with it.”
“‘The world, the flesh, and the devil,’” Max quoted. “Here were all three, a trifecta of temptations: Jane’s hunger for status; Jane’s physical lust for David and his for her, overriding all good judgment; and some devil whispering in her ear, oh so convincingly, that she could have it all, she could have everything she wanted. All she had to do was kill, or attempt to kill, three innocent people.”
“And then Carville makes four. Or would have, if he’d stayed at home at the St. George Studio that night.”
Max nodded. “One wonders where she would have stopped. If she would have stopped. Poppy was afraid for her life, and with good reason. Poppy knew too much about what went on in Hawthorne Cottage. She also stood in the way of Jane’s inheriting everything Colin left behind. That was why we had to get Poppy out of the way to a safe house in London—with Stanley along to make it look like a true runaway situation. Just in case.”
“And the case proved true.”
“Yes. And there was that business of the bra Adam Birch told me he and Elka had seen, hanging from a branch in Prior’s Wood. Just as I was leaving his shop, Jane happened to cross my field of vision. She was wearing this shapeless dress too big for her and when she lifted her arm to wave I couldn’t help but see a flash of bright color—the side of her bra. It was red, and lacy, such as Adam had just described to me.”
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