In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  “That could have meant nothing, of course. Millions of women might own such a garment … including Lady Duxter.”

  “But it was odd—a garment glaringly at odds with Jane’s demure outward appearance, for one thing. And seeing her just then, it did make me start to wonder if I shouldn’t err on the side of too much caution.”

  “For if Jane was having a rendezvous in those woods, it certainly wasn’t with Colin. He wasn’t even around.”

  “Precisely. Jane and Lord Duxter were almost certainly the couple little Tom saw in the woods. Also, once I realized Poppy’s alibi for Jane was shaky … Poppy thought she left the library at a little after five o’clock and made a withdrawal from the bank at five twenty-five. But she dawdled on the way: it was actually five fifty-five, and the time disparity initially made us suspicious of her.

  “I soon realized it could have been almost any time, though—she had her watch on upside down, so the digital display could not be trusted. I had a similar make of watch and more than once I put it on upside down after my shower, not realizing until the time showed as jarringly wrong. However, 5:05 and 5:25 and a few other times look identical when read right side up or upside down. It completely throws you off. I asked Poppy if she took the watch off to bathe. She looked at me like I was mad but she told me that although the watch was supposed to be water-resistant, she always took it off to bathe or shower. And besides, she didn’t wear it all the time, except when she planned to do a lot of walking that day. So she wasn’t completely used to wearing it, in other words.

  “I realized that once Jane learned what had happened, Poppy would become very disposable, her alibi useless to Jane. In fact, it completely muddied the waters, just when Jane had been so careful to think of every contingency.”

  “The best-laid plans…”

  “And then there was Carville, who also knew too much,” Max continued. “He knew Colin was not Marina’s lover. He was Marina’s lover. Worse luck for Jane she didn’t know that or she would have ditched the suicide pact idea. Instead she had to race around, covering up like mad. She attempted to kill Carville by setting fire to the studio while she thought he was inside as he should have been, sound asleep in the early morning hours. She also knew he kept a diary—because he told anyone who would listen he kept a diary. In pen and ink, but also on his laptop. What were the chances he wasn’t telling his “Dear Diary” about his affair with Lady Duxter? The chances were zero. A writer like Carville never shuts up, anyway. That evidence had to be destroyed.”

  “He never heard of saving files to the cloud?”

  “There was no wireless out there, remember.”

  “Ah. Another masterpiece lost to the world, then.”

  “When last seen, he was trying to rewrite everything from memory. I think he was as upset about the loss of his writing as about the attempt on his life.”

  Cotton sat back, and surveyed the polished tips of his shoes. “Come on, let’s have it all now: When did you begin to suspect Jane?”

  Max shrugged. “Not soon enough. Once I began to think Netta might have been murdered, it changed everything. But I never considered that possibility until the death of Colin and the attempt on Lady Duxter’s life. Netta was so old any thought of her being killed for an inheritance made little sense. The murderer could almost be certain no one would realize she had been murdered.”

  “And no one did.”

  “No. Dr. Winship was called in, and he’d been treating her for years for all manner of ills. She’d had several heart attacks, and a mild stroke just last year. He assumed this attack was the one that finally carried her off, the last in a long string of events that had weakened her defenses. Any doctor in his position would have thought the same. What would be the point of an autopsy when every indication was of a natural death?

  “Still, when Colin died, along with you I kept coming back to the possibility of murder, and I kept circling back to ask why anyone would kill an elderly woman who was already dying? There were three possible reasons.”

  “Apart from simple hatred, a murder committed in a spurt of sudden rage.”

  “Correct. But this murder was carefully organized to look like a natural death—sudden rage didn’t enter into it. So one reason would be that you were in a hurry to inherit her money because of a looming debt. Or reason two: because you were unaware that she was in such poor health she was sure to die soon. Or reason three: because her death would trigger a funeral, and a funeral is the surest way to lure home a close relative.

  “It would seem that this time, a funeral really was for the living.”

  Chapter 23

  THE FLESH

  The sun had long since set. Max made coffee, and got out the apple brandy and two snifters.

  “Three options,” he continued. “Now, the first option was a possibility, but Netta didn’t have all that much money. Assuming Jane or even Poppy was the killer, surely waiting for Netta to die a natural death was the least risky way of inheriting, through Colin, what she did have.

  “Then there was option two. But according to Dr. Winship, Jane and Poppy both knew Netta had a dicky heart. Just one look at her prescriptions, to which Jane had ready access, would make that clear. So again, it becomes a matter of just waiting out the natural course of things. Netta surely would die soon.

  “Option three became the most interesting possibility, once Poppy told me Jane was running through pregnancy kits practically by the case. Why would any woman do that, I wondered? Because she was afraid of becoming pregnant? Or because she wanted to become pregnant and wanted—needed to have—the results as soon as possible?

  “Lord Duxter goes into a panic when he hears her glad tidings: for him, there was no time to be lost in getting Colin home. So Jane, wanting to be helpful and perhaps ‘prove’ her love, killed Colin’s grandmother.”

  “And Lord Duxter, seeing only that his wants were falling into place quite nicely, never realized that Netta’s death was not just a helpful coincidence.”

  “Right,” said Max. “It was something, in fact, that Jane may have had up her sleeve all along. To get Colin back—but not so people would assume he was the father of her child. She wanted Colin back so she could kill him, so she could be free to be with ‘her’ lord. Lady Duxter must die, also, to free up Lord Duxter.”

  “We are still asked to believe Lord Duxter had nothing to do with Colin’s death? My super thinks he must have known or suspected.”

  “I don’t believe he did. Psychologically, it won’t mesh. Jane was seething that Lord Duxter wouldn’t fall in line with her plans and own up to his responsibilities, but she pretended to go along and agreed she would make Colin think the baby was his. But what Jane had in mind was far more diabolical. She had to be rid of her husband and of David’s wife, so she could become Lady Duxter. If you are able to follow her crazed logic, it of course made perfect sense. So by the time of Colin’s return, she was ready to launch the second phase of her plan. The death of her husband and Marina.”

  “Three people had to die, not counting Carville.”

  Max shrugged. “Three people stood in the way to her happiness. I don’t think she saw them as people.”

  “Lady Duxter in particular. Who had never done her a moment’s harm.”

  “Jane was quite aware of Marina’s tendencies—half of Monkslip had heard the stories of Lady Duxter’s depressive episodes. Lord Duxter used to say it was like living with Virginia Woolf—he never knew when her spirits would plunge and she might do something to harm herself. She was on medication but too often the wrong prescription either makes no difference or makes matters worse. Or the patient starts to feel better and stops taking the needed medicine. So when she and her ‘lover’ Colin were found in a suicide pact, no one was that shocked. Jane put about the story of this tragic love affair between Colin and Marina, dropping hints of her suspicions that the affair was one of long standing. Tongues were already wagging at the Cavalier—something must be up with Lady Duxte
r.

  “But where it all went wrong was that only one of her victims died, leaving the other behind to perhaps one day tell the tale of what really had happened, and even to say who the killer was. For Jane, the thought of Lady Duxter’s surviving, waking up one night in hospital and starting to talk, was unthinkable. Jane started to go into a decline, herself. She was frantic with worry. When she heard—when I told her—that Lady Duxter was showing signs of recovery … well. That was all she needed to hear. She raced to the hospital to make sure Lady Duxter’s recovery was stalled—permanently. I offered to escort her to make sure Jane wasn’t left alone in the hospital unattended to do her dirty work.”

  “Of course I put the chief in the picture,” said Cotton. “So long as Marina was in no danger—was in fact surrounded by policemen and policewomen dressed as doctors and orderlies—it seemed the best and only way to lure Jane out of her pretense of brave widowhood.”

  Max held his glass up to the fireplace, watching the play of the light through the amber liquid. He poured them both another drink.

  “One odd thing…,” he began.

  “It’s all odd. What else?”

  “I asked Awena to bring home a deck of tarot cards from her shop and of an evening I sat looking idly through them. Since we weren’t by then playing with a full deck, as it were, with those two cards missing from Poppy’s deck, I wanted to get the whole effect—see what was missing. And I saw that what was missing was the Star card. It depicts a naked woman. A naked woman kneeling by a pool of water.”

  “You think Jane got the idea for this seduction from the cards?”

  Max shrugged: Who knows? “It can be a lucky card. A sign of renewal. But it also can mean a leaving behind, a following of a new path, and being guided by your own star and none other.”

  “How do you know all this? Awena, I suppose?”

  “No, I looked it up on some website called Tabitha’s Tarot. But I couldn’t help but wonder if Jane had seen that depiction, looking through Poppy’s deck of cards.”

  “And been inspired by it, somehow. Or maybe Colin or someone read her fortune, and she became convinced of her ‘true destiny.’ Well, we’re agreed, she was the mastermind here.”

  “So it would appear. And a passable actress. That day she showed up at the vicarage, dripping with concern for Poppy: Every time she touched her handkerchief to her face, her eyes got redder and redder. I did wonder if there weren’t some irritant on the handkerchief that was making her ‘cry’ more.”

  “Well, that’s an old actor’s trick,” said Cotton. “My mother used it in her performances. God knows, natural ability was lacking so she had to resort to strategies like that.”

  Max nodded, his eyes absently roaming the shelves of the book-lined room with their dozens of versions of the Bible. “As with most women, we don’t really hear from Bathsheba in the Bible. After this I have to wonder: Was she more a willing participant in the undoing of her husband—in sending him off to die in battle—than the old story leads us to believe? Now Lord Duxter claims Colin was brought home in part to protect Jane’s virtue, just as David did in the Bible. And so a husband might be tricked into thinking the child was his. It didn’t work out well for the biblical David and it didn’t work out for this one, either.”

  Cotton said, “Be that as it may. Our David, Lord Duxter, wanted most of all not to be saddled with this woman who he was perhaps beginning to sense was crazy.”

  “And he didn’t even realize she’d already murdered Netta.”

  “Ah,” said Cotton. “So, whatever he felt at one time for Jane, he came to his senses and wanted out.”

  “King David had stooped to treachery and, effectively, to murder to get himself out of his own trap. But our David’s first thought was to foist Jane back onto her husband, Colin, never dreaming that he couldn’t just hand her back over, as if he were returning a lawn mower. She didn’t want to go back. She’d tasted a bit of the high life, in her roamings about Wooton Priory, and she saw riches and prestige in her future. She wanted all that she’d ‘worked’ for to continue.”

  “She wasn’t going without a fight.”

  “Not ever. Not Jane.”

  * * *

  Destiny came for dinner the next night with Max and Awena, Cotton having settled back in at Monkslip-super-Mare with his own young family. Naturally, the table talk turned to the murder. But the two women had a slightly different take on the situation from that of Max and Cotton.

  “It took me so long to see it,” Max was saying, passing the homemade bread and offering wine.

  “See what, Max?” Awena asked.

  “That Jane was a cold-blooded manipulator. People tended to talk of her in clichés—if they talked of her at all—as the plain little librarian no one notices and everyone underestimates. With her hair in a low bun and her big wide eyes and her small stature, she always reminded me of a sort of Jane Eyre type—she even has the name. An intelligent young woman who has been told all her life that she was nothing special.

  “What was it Brontë called her heroine? Obscure, plain, and little? Something like that. It summed up Jane Frost—but it summed up her outward appearance, merely.”

  Still, Max thought, this woman had at least one man in thrall to her. As with Wallis Simpson—no one could ever understand the king’s fierce, nearly irrational attachment. History had repeated itself with Camilla and Prince Charles. Absurd rumors abounded of the ways Wallis kept the immature and strangely unworldly prince in thrall. But the fact was, Max thought, he trusted her. He simply grew to trust her. A man in his position, surrounded by sycophants and self-seekers, no doubt sank gratefully into her web with an enormous sigh of relief. To the devil with duty and with what the world thought.

  “Shame on me that I couldn’t see it,” said Max. “What a complete conniver she was. She told me she’d seen Colin slip something from the archives into his knapsack, something he said was ‘dynamite.’ That was of course a red herring, a lie told to make me think Colin might be the target of outside forces.”

  “Funny,” said Awena, with a glance at Destiny. “I don’t think there was a woman in the village who couldn’t see it. No one thought she’d stoop to murder or we’d have caught on sooner, of course. Well, Miss Pitchford thought she would—stoop to murder, I mean. But she thinks that of most people so no one pays her any mind.”

  Destiny took a sip of her wine, nodded her approval, and added, “She always struck me as sly, Jane. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. You know the type: Whenever she saw me coming down the High, it was all, ‘What time is Morning Prayer, then, Mother Chatsworth?’ No one, absolutely no one, calls me Mother Chatsworth, at least not with a straight face. It makes me sound like someone on trial for witchcraft in The Crucible. Or it would be, ‘Oh, I should love to donate something to the Fayre. I’ll bring my special apple fritters then, shall I?’ As if I’d care. But it was an act. I knew it was a performance of some kind, but I could not for a moment figure out why she would go out of her way to impress me with her piety. Let alone her fritters.”

  “Nor me,” said Awena. “Perhaps she was collecting the character witnesses she knew she might need one day. Except, Max, I always rather thought it was a way of getting to you.”

  Max was astounded. “To me? Whatever for?”

  The two women again exchanged glances, and they both sighed. One of Max’s most winning traits was his obliviousness to how attractive he was to women; it was his blind spot. While it was a card he could easily have played all his life to get whatever he wanted out of almost anyone, he either didn’t recognize it as an option or he chose not to use it. And that sense of fair play, as it were, of course only trebled his attractiveness.

  “Never mind,” said Awena and Destiny together.

  “Why did you not say something before now?” Max asked, not unreasonably.

  It was Destiny who replied. “We thought she was a conniver. A schemer. At worst a seductress. Not a murderess, I tell you. I neve
r dreamed she killed anyone.”

  “Nor I,” said Awena. “That was too big a leap to make. Now, try some of the wild mushrooms. They’re growing like mad all over Prior’s Wood now.”

  “Thank you,” said Destiny. “And now, what about the stained glass, Max? Has Coombebridge decided to see reason? About the goat?”

  Max had driven out to the artist’s cottage again just the other day. He thought back to the conversation he’d had then with Coombebridge.

  “About that goat,” he’d begun.

  “Oh,” said Coombebridge—from his expression, much enjoying the thought of the hubbub he’d created. “You noticed.”

  “Of course I noticed. And I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to change it into something more orthodox. Like a lamb. And the Good Shepherd needs to be made to look, well, normal.”

  “You can’t do that.” Coombebridge was smug, sure of his footing. “The family commissioned the work, not you or the Church.”

  Oh, yes I can. “You’ll have to change it,” Max said again.

  “What’s in it for me if I do?”

  “Reduced time in Purgatory,” said Max. “Let’s say I knock one hundred days off for you.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “No. But I’ll see to it that your payment for your work is withheld. Poppy will have the final say now, you know. And I think she’ll enjoy exercising her authority in such a good cause. Once I’ve explained the situation to her.”

  “I don’t care about money,” said the artist. “I’m rich.”

  “Then I’ll not permit the work to be installed. It will sit in a cupboard where no one will ever see it. Or, better yet, I’ll tell the rubbish men to come and recycle it.”