In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  Max was bluffing on the latter threat, but it did the trick. Coombebridge’s face fell. He was incorruptible when it came to money, but only because he didn’t need money. It was his ego as an artist that was his Achilles’ heel. Coombebridge was proud of the work he’d labored so long and hard to create, and he wanted the world to see it, not have it be hidden away on a shelf or destroyed.

  In the end, grudgingly and with little grace, Coombebridge agreed to Max’s terms. “But only if you promise to let me paint your portrait one day.”

  “When I have time,” said Max easily, guessing that that had been Coombebridge’s price from the very beginning. And knowing that the day when he had time hanging heavy on his hands would never come.

  “And I’ll take you up on the Purgatory deal, too.”

  “You’ll have to talk with the Catholics about that. Although the last I heard they stopped selling indulgences at some point in the fifteen hundreds.”

  Now Max told Destiny, “He was fine with making a few changes. He actually said it was an easy fix.

  “Really, he was just as gentle as a lamb. I think he’s mellowing.”

  Chapter 24

  AND EVERYWHERE, THE DEVIL

  Lord Duxter also seemed to be a reformed man. Somehow, having learned he didn’t know everything had had a humbling effect, as he confessed to Max.

  He and Max had had many a conversation at both the priory and the hospital since Jane had been apprehended. The lord made daily visits to his wife. Even knowing she now was safe from Jane, he wanted to see for himself that all was well, and that Marina continued to thrive. He had not, he told Max, missed a visiting hour, and would not until she was returned safely home.

  “Who would think any sane person would—?” Lord Duxter caught himself before he could finish the sentence. “Is she sane?”

  “There is every chance she is not,” said Max. “But under the legal standard of knowing right from wrong, she’s as right as rain. She is quite aware she killed two people and wanted to kill four. And for no other reason than that she wanted what she wanted. I’m told by DCI Cotton her only regret is that she was caught. And for that she blames me. That is the usual psychology of the sociopath.”

  “Poor old Netta. They’re sure?”

  “Quite sure. Jane needed a good reason to lure Colin home. A person can’t come and go on a whim from Saudi, and sometimes even a death in the family isn’t enough. Add to that the fact that Colin, according to Poppy, had become reluctant even to be in the same country with Jane, only returning to England when absolutely necessary to see his daughter. It explains why Colin quickly jumped at the chance of a job in a foreign place that would keep him away for so much of the year.”

  “He was dying to get away from her.”

  “With dying being the operative word, as it turned out.”

  “I don’t understand how Colin could have left his daughter with such a woman.”

  “Don’t you? He badly needed the money, for her education, for his family. I’m sure Colin told himself that leaving Poppy with Jane was just a temporary but necessary expedient. Colin may have been weak but he was not an uncaring father, not at all. I just don’t think for a moment he recognized the danger.”

  “He certainly wasn’t alone in that.”

  Max nodded. “Anyway, Jane had to act quickly. Her pregnancy is what altered the dynamic.”

  Max shot a meaningful glance at Lord Duxter, who had the grace to look abashed.

  “If all else failed—with you, I mean—she might still need to seduce Colin into believing the child was his. I admire her confidence, don’t you? Somehow I am certain her confidence in her seductive powers is more than justified.”

  Lord Duxter looked as though he could say from sad experience that it was.

  “All this, by the way, explains why Jane was suddenly all sweetness and light where Colin was concerned, as Poppy claimed—up to a point. Colin must not suspect he was walking into a trap. I suppose a case could be made that she did all this for you, to save your reputation—at least, for as long as it needed to be saved. There is no question her long-range plan was to get rid of Colin and live happily ever after as lady of the manor. Your manor, as it happens.”

  Lord Duxter seemed horrified at the thought. Say what anyone might about Lady Duxter, she had been born into the upper classes. The lord’s innate snobbishness and need to social climb wouldn’t have allowed him to consider Jane as being anything other than another temporary fling. Jane had refused to see that.

  Max wondered: Had she similarly coaxed the malleable Colin into marriage—later trying the same trick on the lord? What worked once might work again.

  “So Jane set up a scheme to do away with Colin and your wife.”

  “Using my wife’s previous attempt on her own life to make it seem believable that she would try again. The cruelty takes my breath away. But she’s a small woman. It is hard to picture how she had the strength to do it.”

  “She was strong and fit from running. And she made sure she had the time, or seemed to. Poppy and Awena both alibied her.”

  Max thought back to something Cotton had repeated to him, which showed the depths of Jane’s callousness. “She was old anyway,” Jane had said to the police, in making a full confession. “Her life was over. My life was just beginning.” But Netta may have had many good years left to her, with proper care, and Max thought it a crime to steal so much as a minute from anyone. After all, a lot could change in a minute.

  “I still don’t know how she got them both in the car with her,” Lord Duxter was saying. “What was the pretext?”

  “That was easier than it seemed. But first, she waited for a day when you were in London, so you would have an alibi. She was protecting you, you see. And when she killed Netta, she made sure she had a cover story ready for herself.”

  “How so?”

  “By trying to pin the blame for some doctored preserves on Poppy. She told Mme Cuthbert that she herself—Jane—had noticed they tasted off.”

  “Good heavens, man! All right. Go on.”

  “She had already invited Lady Duxter to come to the library earlier in the afternoon—say around four fifteen or four thirty—on the pretext of showing her some wonderful find in the archives about the Girl’s Grave, knowing how interested she’d be. Once Marina was there, she offered her a drink—several drinks, doctored. Lady Duxter, already heavily medicated, would soon be unconscious, a dead weight. But Jane had made sure she sat in a chair with wheels. Once she was certain Marina was completely out, she wheeled her into a cupboard off the library. Then she telephoned Colin, who was in the grounds, and asked him to bring their car round to the library, as she now needed a ride. Once he arrived, she drugged him the same way she’d drugged Lady Duxter. Poppy came in briefly around five, before Colin was completely intoxicated. Poppy left for the ATM. Then, complaining that he was now too drunk to drive, Jane said she would drive them both home. But she made sure she walked him outside to the car before he could collapse on her. She couldn’t handle a dead weight the size of Colin. She made him get in the backseat, where he fell completely into sleep, already approaching a state of overdose.

  “She then pushed Marina out the French windows to the car, which was parked outside. She tipped the unconscious woman into the backseat beside Colin. That side of the priory is hidden from view, so Jane had no worries about being seen.”

  “Could she manage even Marina’s light weight?” said Lord Duxter, doubtfully.

  Max said, “Jane was nothing if not determined. She worked in a nursing home, remember, and was used to lifting people far heavier than she was. She knew how to do it without straining her back. The training came in handy with Netta but even handier in arranging a fake double suicide for Marina and Colin. She hoisted Marina out of the chair into a fireman’s carry and shoved her onto the backseat alongside Colin, arranging them in a sort of lovers’ embrace and planting the note and the poem alongside. And that Hanged Man card,
for good measure, to point the finger, if all else failed, at some anonymous Saudi cartel or other.”

  “Diabolical.”

  “But, too—she was a romantic, remember. It has all the earmarks of a sort of overblown plot that spanned continents. Next, Jane drove the car into a secluded spot in Prior’s Wood, where she attached the vacuum hose, which of course she’d readied in the boot of the car, to the exhaust. It so happened she chose the very spot in the woods where she met all that summer with you, Lord Duxter—chosen because she knew how secluded a spot it was. Naturally, she wore gloves the whole time. Probably the white gloves she used to handle old manuscripts in the library. She left the car running and left Colin and Marina to their fates. If the tank of the car had been full, no doubt Marina would have been finished as well as Colin. It was one of several mistakes she made. The car simply ran out of petrol.”

  “Another mistake was with the music,” said Lord Duxter.

  Max nodded. “The music added a ghoulish touch. But she got the music wrong.”

  “And Carville? She set the fire and tried to kill him, too. But, why?”

  Because Carville never knew when to shut up, Max thought. “It must be an occupational hazard,” he said aloud, “wanting to try to script and direct everything. And wanting to put everything that happened to him in a book, a thought that worried Jane greatly. She might have the threat of ‘Tell-a-Tale Carville’ hanging over her head indefinitely. Because, intending to spare her grief at thinking her husband unfaithful, Carville told Jane that he—not Colin—was Marina’s lover. He furthermore confessed to her how he had been mightily confused by this chain of events. How he simply could not understand why Colin would be found in a suicide pact with Marina when he was not having an affair with Marina.

  “Jane realizes that this unforeseen development—she had had no idea Marina and Carville were involved—means the authorities will never buy a suicide attempt and will start to investigate this as a murder. So Jane decides the only thing for her to do is to kill the writer that night by setting fire to his place, neatly getting rid of both him and any diary he was keeping.

  “Her next mistake was in not realizing Carville wasn’t in the St. George Studio that night. She’d advised him not to tell the authorities that he and Marina were lovers, in case the police started suspecting him, as a jealous lover or some such. As it happens, Carville finally did come clean about his affair with Marina, but Jane wasn’t to know that. And luckily for him, as he was returning to Wooton Priory for the night, he was involved in a minor automobile accident that forced him to stop at a nearby inn while his car was taken in for repairs. That minor crash probably saved his life. He was lucky.”

  “I suppose you would say a higher power saved him.”

  “Undoubtedly I would,” Max assured him. “So. Jane knows that Carville knows that the Colin-and-Marina setup is a sham. So she tries to kill him by burning the church down around him.”

  “And the police decided to let the arsonist, whoever it was, think they had succeeded.”

  “Right. That was an on-the-spot decision orchestrated by DCI Cotton. Carville’s life appeared to be in real danger. The police seized the opportunity to keep him out of harm’s way while they gained time to get to the bottom of things. If Jane thought she’d got away with murder yet again, she might start to think she was invincible—and that is when she might slip up. They do say ‘pride goeth before a fall.’”

  “Is that legal?”

  Max shrugged. “More or less. The truth is that any case not cracked within the first forty-eight hours may never be solved. They were getting desperate for a solve, and flushing out the killer was much the best way. Once it was clear there was no actual victim of the fire, they staged the removal of a body from the scene. Jane, triumphant, thought Carville was dead, that she’d succeeded in killing him and destroying whatever he may have been writing—although she put on quite a show of distress at the scene. She felt she’d covered her tracks nicely. No Wi-Fi meant no record had been kept that could be retrieved by investigators. Carville had repeatedly said how wonderful it was to have to revert to pen and paper.”

  “Where did Carville stay all that time? Until he showed up at the hospital, when Jane was apprehended?”

  “The police simply told him to stay put at the inn where he was already staying. Thoroughly shaken but glad to be alive, he did as he was told. But he insisted he wanted to be part of the sting arranged for Jane at the hospital. And DCI Cotton was willing to oblige, so long as he kept completely out of the way and at a safe distance.” Cotton, thought Max, whether he would admit it or not, had inherited a flair for the dramatic from his parents. It went against procedure to have the writer there at all, even standing safely peering in through the small window in the hospital room door.

  “The police, by the way, got the distinct impression Carville may have been coming from the home of one of his former paramours,” Max continued. “You know the type of man he is: he thinks the sun doesn’t shine when he’s gone, and he assumes every old flame will be thrilled to hear from him again.”

  Lord Duxter grunted his agreement. By this time he was very worried his wife might want to continue her relationship with the famous author.

  “Since that was not really our business,” Max continued, “the policeman sent to talk with her didn’t try to force her on that angle. Theirs was a relationship from some years ago and Carville claims it was pure coincidence she lived nearby. He found her on social media, as everyone seems to do these days. But their meeting was to all appearances what he says: a friendly get-together for old times’ sake. Besides—the woman has remarried.” Max noticed that Lord Duxter’s anxiety seemed to increase with this news. Much better from his point of view that the woman be readily available to Carville. “Her husband was there for this reunion and apparently got on famously with the author. He had all of Carville’s books on his bookshelves, and had Carville sign them. I gather the husband is a true fan and this little act of homage definitely won Carville over, probably for life.”

  “What a fathead,” said Lord Duxter, showing more than a trace of residual jealousy.

  “Hmm. Anyway, I think we can safely rule out the idea this old flame was covering for Carville for some unknown reason or was involved with him as an accomplice. I mean, what purpose would it serve? Beyond finding out for certain he was not at home, and that no one seems to have known he was away—that was the sum total of the police findings.”

  Max didn’t mention to Lord Duxter that all Carville did, when he wasn’t talking about his books that night, was talk about how much he cared for Marina. He claimed Marina was the love of his life. And he went on and on about how he knew for certain that suicide setup was just that—a setup. Marina was going to leave her husband for Carville, or so Carville claimed.

  Max didn’t feel Lord Duxter needed to hear that. Once Lady Duxter recovered completely, surely she would make up her own mind what to do.

  Chapter 25

  RESHUFFLE

  With her great-grandmother, mother, and father all dead and her stepmother put away for a long time, Poppy Frost found herself quite alone at the age of sixteen. It was Lord and Lady Duxter who took her in, offering her a home until she could leave for Oxford and the start of her new young life.

  She spent a long afternoon with Max one day as he babysat Owen, talking to the priest in ever-widening arcs and trying to come to terms with what had happened. Owen’s contribution to the conversation was to punctuate any silences with gleeful babble. He was discovering the wonders of picture books, which apparently could be enjoyed upside down as much as right side up.

  “Jane started making all the meals in that house,” she told Max. “I would offer to help and she would shoo me out of the kitchen. She didn’t used to do that—at one time she’d give me all the work to do if she could get away with it. Which generally, she could.”

  “Like Cinderella.”

  “Precisely! But then it changed.
It got so if she caught me watching her as she cooked—well, she’d practically jump out of her shoes. It would completely rattle her. Now, why was that? I wondered. One time she was mixing some herbs into the soup—but only into the one bowl, you know? The individual serving. That, I thought, was odd.”

  “Normally, you’d season the entire pot of soup.”

  “Yes, of course you would. It was that sort of thing, hard to put a finger on. It was more the guilty look on her face that made me afraid. Not a guilty look, actually, but a frightened look.”

  “Afraid of getting caught, she was,” Max agreed. “You should have seen the state she got into when she thought you’d gone missing. You were out of her reach and beyond her control, and she suspected your disappearance could only mean you were getting wise to her. You were afraid of her. And rightly so.”

  Poppy nodded quickly, solemnly. “That’s it exactly. And might she have given Grandmama a little something extra in her soup? To keep her docile, to make her sleep? I began to wonder. And then I wondered if Jane weren’t up to something even more sinister.”

  “Old Mrs. Henslowe’s death was viewed as being from natural causes. No one thought otherwise. Certainly, I didn’t.”

  That earned him a look. That “how can adults be so dense” look that teenagers seemed to hold the patent on.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Of course doctors get it wrong, especially in dealing with the elderly.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “Dr. Winship is better than most. But in this case, he was thinking in clichés and he got it wrong. Anyway, it got so I was afraid to sit down to a meal with my stepmother. No way.” She shook her head and the stylized copper feathers hanging from her ears danced, made to sparkle among the colorful strands of her hair. She’d had something done to it while she was in London, and now yellow stripes were added to the red. “Besides, if she were planning a little accident for me—something unexpected, like, I dunno, an anvil falling on my head—I couldn’t control for everything. I could avoid eating anything she might have messed with but I couldn’t watch her day and night. I couldn’t sleep—what if she tried to smother me in my sleep? It was exhausting, living like that. And I knew no one would take me seriously. I had nothing to go on, no evidence. Just a bad, bad feeling.”