Max gave him a solemn smile and stuck out a hand in greeting. DCI Cotton was a slight, wiry man who seemed to vibrate with unexpended energy, like a tuning fork just struck. He had a thatch of thick blond hair springing back from a widow’s peak and the glint of a devil in his gray-blue eyes. They reminded Max of a cat’s eyes in their focused concentration.
Max Tudor on first meeting had liked and trusted him.
“I say, we sh—” began Cotton.
But he was interrupted.
It was Constable Musteile—a weasel of a man. In direct contrast with Cotton, Musteile instantly had provoked Max’s instinctive dislike. Not because he was dishonest—well, not precisely dishonest. He was probably incorruptible, in fact: a Mr. Law-and-Order of the type frequently drawn to the armed forces or law enforcement. He was ramrod straight, unyielding, unimaginative. Profoundly stupid, in fact. A man who followed the rules, and asked no questions as to whether each rule really applied in every situation. Respectable, moral—indeed, holier-than-thou. A bit of a bully, especially when cornered. A dangerous man in every way.
“Hello,” Max greeted him, civilly.
Musteile seemed to enjoy cementing his reputation as a bit of an ass. He ignored the Vicar and spoke directly to his superior.
“Clearly it will be Travelers responsible. I’ll get right on it.”
Cotton regarded him. “Travelers?”
“You know. Gypsies.”
“You’ve spotted a caravan site of Gypsies, have you?”
They were joined briefly by Detective Sergeant Essex, who handed Cotton a report of some type, then walked on. Max had briefly seen her, as well, outside a courtroom in Monkslip-super-Mare. Tiny and extremely fit, with her multicolored strands of hair she reminded Max of a small terrier. A blind man could see she held Musteile in the lowest possible esteem.
“’Course not,” Musteile was saying. “Sir. Only stands to reason, though.” Musteile had caught some of the Zeitgeist in the village, and expanded on it, seasoning it with a bit of his own brand of bigotry.
Over his head, Max and Cotton looked at each other.
“Thank you, Constable. That will be all for now.”
Musteile nodded, all but clicking his heels and saluting. He turned sharply and left them.
As the constable departed, DCI Cotton seemed to reconsider. He called him back: “Actually … I say…” he began. Musteile spun on his heels and stepped smartly back toward them. “Do you know what would be useful? If you could get a statement from the local postmistress. In my experience, that’s the person in a village who always knows where the bodies are buried. So to speak.” Having sent Constable Musteile on this spurious mission, he turned to Max. Relief was reflected on both their faces.
Cotton said, “I’ve taken a room at the Horseshoe for tonight, perhaps longer. I’ll be putting in some long days and I don’t relish that drive home after dark.”
“That sounds a sensible plan,” said Max.
“Mind if I drop by the vicarage this evening? It probably will be late.”
“Certainly, if you think I can be of help.”
The look Cotton gave him was quirky.
“Help? You started this ball rolling. I’d like to hear your reasons,” he said, adding: “Not that I disagree with you.”
CHAPTER 11
Baptizing the Teddy Bear
The cold descended like a sheer curtain that Harvest Fayre night. The autumn sun had quickly dimmed, and the smell of burning firewood now floated over the village in a pine-scented cloud.
Max also had a fire burning in his study, shedding its light on the gilt-framed painting over the mantel. There was a crackling noise as a log collapsed. He grabbed a poker and pushed the log back to safety.
Mrs. Hooser had long since left for home. At the rap of the knocker he went to answer the door himself, Thea close at his heels.
DCI Cotton strode in, in what was apparently his habitual mode of alertness: tightly wound and ready to strike. Apart from a jacket swinging from his shoulders that looked like it might be Armani, he reminded Max of countless men—and women—he had worked with in the past. He somehow felt in Cotton’s brisk presence the push-pull of that past, and was sure that if you were teamed with a man like Cotton, he’d always have your back. Max thought fleetingly of a former colleague, and pushed the thought aside.
“We’ve sent Constable Musteile on a search of Raven’s Wood.”
Max parted the curtains and looked out the window.
“In the pitch dark? Why? Do you expect to find anything there?” asked Max.
Cotton answered him with a wry grin.
Max, catching on: “You wanted him out of your hair.”
“If we’ve a hope of finding out what happened to Wanda, that man is best kept as far away from the scene as possible. We’ll make a fuller search of the woods in daylight hours, of course. It’s not completely a spurious assignment.”
Cotton arranged the razor-like pleats in his immaculate trousers and sat on a chair by the fire. Max joined him opposite.
“Wanda?” he asked delicately.
“They’ve taken her to the police mortuary at Monkslip-super-Mare.”
Max gently persisted. “Is there anything you can tell me? It goes without saying, but it will go no further than this room.”
Cotton readily replied, “She does not appear to have been sexually molested in any way. And she had her handbag with her, with a few pound coins inside, her cashpoint card, and so on. Cause of death appears to be anaphylactic shock.”
Max said, “I thought it must be. She was famously allergic to peanuts. So much for the passing crazed madman theory then. Sex and theft ruled out. So we’re left with—what?”
“That remains to be seen,” said Cotton—rather complacently, Max thought, wishing he were as sanguine. With the obvious motives ruled out, what was there left?
“The Village Hall was unlocked when Guy Nicholls and I went there,” he told Cotton. “It was left unlocked all day, I would imagine.”
“Probably. At least, we are going for now on the assumption that the building was kept unlocked for the day, since access would be needed by so many people—yourself included. Even had it not been unlocked, prying open a window would be easy as winking.”
“No sign of that, though?”
“None whatsoever. But of course Wanda, in the normal course of events, would have a key. Whatever she was there for—to pick up some forgotten or left-behind item, perhaps—it also seems unlikely in the extreme that she would bolt herself inside, doesn’t it? Whatever for? So anyone could walk in while she was there, surprise her … Anyone at all.”
The fireplace made another crackling sound, loud as a bullet in the cozy room. There must be a lot of tar on the wood, Max thought. He rose again to adjust the logs.
“Why was she there?” Cotton, watching him, mused aloud. “Dressing down a volunteer? Surely it was too late or too early for that, and she would be needed elsewhere—or she would believe her presence essential elsewhere.”
Max could only shrug. There was no telling what went on in the windmills of Wanda’s mind. Again seated, he said, “I gather you’ve been talking with people about her. You’ve certainly summed up the essence of the woman.”
“Yes. Rather a self-important type, they tell me. She headed up the Women’s Institute, is that right? That’s a relict of a bygone era, I would have thought … rather dying out.”
“Not really,” answered Max. “In fact, it’s experienced a nationwide revival in recent years, vamping up its image quite a bit. That movie with Helen Mirren only helped, one would have thought. Calendar Girls. Here in Nether Monkslip certainly the WI has grown in influence, and in value given.”
Cotton mused, “A remote village like this … It’s unusual, isn’t it, that a village this size would have a Women’s Institute?”
“Not at all,” said Max. “The WI has an enthusiastic membership here for that very reason—Nether Monkslip has little
nightlife or other entertainment to recommend it. You could say the lack of other options ensures its continued success. They do much good work for charity. And as a whole, the national federation has gone to great lengths to modernize its image.”
“Not all ‘jam and Jerusalem,’ as the saying goes.”
“Correct. Also, things like the Poppy Day collections and the children’s party at Christmas, which might in the past have fallen to the Royal British Legion Women’s Section, now tend to come under the sway of the Nether Monkslip WI. Everything does, now that I come to think of it. Even many things that would have been in the church’s domain at one time. We simply don’t have the resources we once had. And Nether Monkslip may be unusual—and blessed—in having so many businesslike, astute women in the population.”
“And men, presumably.”
“And men. But the power, behind-the-scenes and otherwise—my impression has always been that it belongs to the women. That was certainly my impression in Wanda’s case.”
“A lot of money involved, is there, in all this charitable work?”
Max looked at him with sharp appreciation. “Yes. Not in the millions of pounds, but enough to be tempting. It’s one motive that occurred to me, too. Money changing hands; Wanda in an oversight position.”
Cotton went on to tell him that the police had had little luck in pinning down exactly when Wanda had disappeared (it was more like an absence of noise and strife, noted Cotton, and thus hard to pinpoint), although when she was found was not open to question.
“A priest backed up by a witness,” Cotton said. “You couldn’t ask for more unless the witness was a judge.”
“Not everyone would agree with that assessment these days, but thanks for the vote of confidence,” Max replied.
“However, the Fayre volunteers all seemed to agree they were too busy to notice—and in some cases, it was said, just happy Wanda was leaving them alone,” Cotton went on. “No one exactly sought out her company, I gather. Some kid claims to have heard a commotion around noon, coming from the Village Hall. We’ll put out a general appeal to the public, asking for witnesses to come forward, but I’m not counting on much to come from that effort. The usual crackpots will waste police time claiming to have seen Wanda, looking either wild-eyed, despondent, or deliriously happy—or all three at once—in her last moments on earth.”
“No doubt,” said Max, who had his own experiences of a too-helpful public in his past.
“Just for the record,” Cotton asked, “who had keys to the place? Was it normally kept locked?”
Max made a seesawing motion with one hand: sort of.
“Things tended to operate on a basis of either trust or carelessness, I’m afraid.”
But who had the keys? Max thought: Wanda; her second-in-command, Suzanna Winship; and the maintenance man/cleanup crew/gardener in the person of Maurice, an amiable and rather slow-witted man who did odd jobs around the village. Aloud Max listed them, adding, “These people for a start. Of course, as there was little in the building worth stealing, unless you count that ancient, erratically functioning slide projector, custody of the keys over the years was a haphazard venture at best. She could have been killed by anyone, in fact, if it were a question of someone getting in and waiting there for her—I gather that is the drift of your questions?”
Cotton countered with a question of his own: “Killed? We are talking about murder then, Father?”
“Call me Max, please. ‘Father’ never sat right with me. Yes, to answer you, almost certainly we are, I’m afraid. Unless she snuck off with a peanut biscuit to do away with herself in private in the middle of the Fayre, which is not at all likely, given her personality, for a start. Not at all. No one, in my estimation, was less given to suicidal thought or action than Wanda.”
Cotton said, “An accidental poisoning, while possible, does not explain her excited demeanor when talking with Suzanna Winship at the Fayre.”
Max leaned forward. “Really? Suzanna said that?”
“What Ms. Winship said was that if she didn’t know better, she’d say Wanda looked and acted like a woman headed to an assignation.”
Wanda? Max could not get his mind around the concept. Beneath all the bombast, the corgi-walking ensembles, the scarves, he supposed there did beat the heart of a red-blooded female. Still …
“Accidents do happen,” Cotton was saying.
“So does ‘malice aforethought,’” said Max. “And that’s what I think you’re dealing with here.”
Cotton gave him a thoughtful look. “That’s what the local doctor thinks, too—Suzanna’s brother, as it happens. Serious reservations, he has. He won’t issue a death certificate and has kicked it over to our man in Monkslip-super-Mare.”
Max thought solemnly of the marks on Wanda’s wrists. There really hadn’t been an alternate explanation for those that made sense.
DCI Cotton had rested as long as it seemed he was capable. Now he jumped up and began surveying the contents of Max’s bookshelves. He didn’t pick any up for a closer perusal, for which Max could hardly blame him. The Collected Sermons of Josiah Pentworthy, D.D, 1630-1689 hardly made for riveting reading, even in its heyday.
“Did no one see her, notice her movements?” asked Max of Cotton’s back. “Not see her walking toward the Village Hall? It seems impossible…”
Cotton spun round, in nearly a Fred Astaire movement.
“We’ll be asking everyone that, of course. I’ll be sending my uniforms round house to house with pro formas to catalog everyone’s whereabouts. It all takes time.”
“Door-to-door inquiries. The village will never be the same.” Max sighed at the thought of it. There would be those villagers who were horrified, and those who were titillated by the attention and excitement. But no matter what the individual reaction, the smooth, placid surface of the village had been ruffled and might never again be unruffled.
“Everyone was at the Fayre, or so it seemed,” said Max, drawing out the words as he pictured in his mind the colorful, Bruegel-like scene. “I don’t think you can see the Village Hall from the grounds of the Abbey Ruins, or from Abbot’s Lodge.”
“That’s not going to help much when it comes to eyewitnesses.”
“I know.”
“And there were so many of them in attendance.”
“I know.”
“Including people from outside the village—whoever they were.”
Ordinarily, especially at that time of day, shop owners and other people with jobs and obligations would easily be accounted for, Max reflected. Although, unless they went out for a pub lunch, that wasn’t strictly true. They could be up to almost anything—especially, in the case of shop owners, if they put a discreet little sign on the front door of their shop: BACK IN 1 HOUR.
Bother.
He suddenly realized that in his thinking he’d placed himself squarely on DCI Cotton’s team. Well, that was fine; this matter needed to be cleared up, and quickly. Festering suspicion could only harm the village, the longer the uncertainty went on. His village, as he thought of it.
Both men gazed at the fireplace in mutual frustration, as if the answers would somehow leap out of the crackling flames. Rain had begun to make a faint thudding sound as it struck the roof, echoing hollowly through the chimney into the room below.
“Do you know,” Max said aloud, himself echoing the observation of most of the villagers, “I don’t think we’ve ever had a murder in Nether Monkslip. Not to my knowledge.”
“I can imagine,” said Cotton. “It looks the sort of place where only officially sanctioned killing might have happened, and that, centuries ago. The odd hanging for sheep theft and so on.”
He paused, flipping through his notebook, and Max suddenly thought of Nunswood, of the murder said to have taken place up on Hawk Crest centuries before. He hadn’t thought of that in years. It was probably just a baseless legend anyway, retrieved and embellished by Frank for his book.
“There’s not
hing you can tell us?” Cotton was asking him. “The slightest memory of the smallest thing can sometimes be important.”
“I can only tell you,” Max said, as he combed slowly through his memory, visualizing the scene as he’d been trained for so many years to do, “that the last people I saw before setting out to retrieve the tea from the Village Hall were Awena Owen—the woman who owns Goddessspell—and her assistant, Tara Raine. But that means nothing, of course, because I can’t say where they were all morning. Where anyone was all the morning. Musteile was by the marquee, and Guy Nicholls emerging from it. Again, that means nothing.”
Cotton nodded in agreement.
“You say someone heard a commotion. I wonder if she yelled, ‘Unhand me, you villain,’ or something like that,” said Max, after a pause. “I must say, Wanda strikes me as the kind of woman who would say something old-fashioned like ‘Unhand me.’ Perhaps someone heard her say a name—or say something that would help us.”
Cotton said, “Far too much noise, and far too far away. Taking everyone at their word, they were at the Fayre and the village proper was a ghost town.”
“Except for Wanda and whoever was with her. And taking everyone at their word.”
Cotton said, “There’s a dustbin in a little alley behind the Village Hall. Nothing found there that shouldn’t be there, as far as we know now. Nothing found in the alley, at least, so far. But we don’t know what to look for—if anything.”
He was bouncing now on the balls of his feet. It was not unlike having a puppy in the room. Thea, perhaps sensing this, was nowhere to be seen, Max suddenly realized.
Cotton was in fact so animated Max thought he could see the thrumming of the man’s heart beating in his chest. Then he realized it was his mobile phone.
“Excuse me,” said Cotton, as he fumbled the instrument out of his pocket. He saw who it was from and briefly turned his back, muttering something curt and official-sounding into the receiver.
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