Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  He rang off, and told Max, “There will be a postmortem. No surprise. I’m expected to be there.”

  Max felt a small frisson of revulsion course through his body. He’d always been loath to know too much about the necessary machinery of investigating a suspicious death. Custom did not stale its power to repel even as he applauded the advances in forensics that could help the police unmask the guilty, and exculpate the innocent.

  Cotton went on, “I have some routine matters to clear up. Wanda’s my priority, but I have to hand off everything else I was working on. If you need anything in the next few days, I’ll be at the pod, or someone there will know how to reach me. Or you can try the Horseshoe.”

  Cotton, patting the mobile back into his pocket, then carefully straightening his pocket handkerchief, added, “Since the circumstances are unexplained, there will be an inquest as well.”

  Max nodded. I know. There would always be an inquest under these conditions.

  “Did you notice her particularly today?” Cotton asked.

  Max shrugged.

  “Yes. And no. She was here and there; everywhere and nowhere. She would grind to a halt periodically to admonish or chastise someone, then spin off again in new, seemingly random directions.”

  “Have you yourself noticed anything unusual—say in recent days leading up to the Fayre? Strangers in the village, anything like that?”

  “Just the villagers themselves, being no stranger than usual. They’re a close-knit bunch, in some ways. One would almost say inbred, but that was centuries ago—if it happened—and of course not true in the case of the new arrivals, which many of them are. In other ways they’re … competitive.”

  “Like family, given to differences.”

  “You could say so. But … petty differences, grudges held over trifles—grudges quickly relinquished in the event of a real crisis, a neighbor in real need. Nothing on this scale. Nothing approaching murder. It’s unfathomable. If you knew them as I do, you’d see how incredible this all is.”

  Cotton regarded him thoughtfully, the solemn, good-looking man with the dark gray eyes. “Perhaps you wouldn’t be the one to notice someone plotting evil in the village—would you?” he said. “You are trained to see only the good in people.”

  A part of Max’s mind immediately rose up in revolt at this Pollyannaish view of himself and his nature, as if he were some good-natured, feeble-minded rube, easily gulled. He may have been stung even more by the fact that he suspected the Pollyanna side of himself was true and, worse, ineradicable. He did tend to want to see the good in people, despite all the evidence at his command that men and women—all of them—were capable of the worst cruelties.

  But he said, rather sharply, “I was with MI5 for nearly fifteen years, and trained, if you like, to see the evil in those around me.” Despite himself, he felt better after this somewhat childish outburst, particularly when he saw the gleam of new respect in the other man’s eyes.

  “No shit,” Cotton said slowly, wonderingly. Then: “Erm, I mean, gosh. Wow.”

  “But,” Max went on, “I have to admit: whatever is going on here, I do not understand it at all.”

  Cotton had actually stopped jiggling about for a moment, Max noticed. The shifting firelight, playing tricks, carved deep hollows beneath Cotton’s brows and cheekbones; his eyes glittered the color of pale rum. Cat’s eyes. The two men might have been swapping ghost stories.

  In this shifting light Cotton again brought to mind Paul, someone Max had tried very hard to forget.

  * * *

  In their young days together at university, he and Paul had cut a wide swath through the female population of London. There had been wine and women, a certain amount of never-missed opportunity for both. He didn’t remember any singing, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told him there had been. They had been good days. But on the particular day that was etched in his memory forever, the two of them were nearly fifteen years older. Paul had recently married. They were into day three of a detail that involved tracking the movements of a Russian multimillionaire with suspicious ties to his homeland.

  Under ordinary circumstances, they would have been elsewhere. But there had been in the preceding months an increase in terrorist chatter picked up by those whose job it was to listen, to visit Web sites, to intercept mail, to pretend to be what they were not so they could gather information. A covert listening agency, one of many dozens worldwide, had picked up what sounded like a plot to hijack an Air India plane flying out of Mumbai (using shards of broken pottery souvenirs as weapons) and had shared that information with MI5 and others. That was all that was known, a suspicion of a plot, but it was the impetus for an immediate reorganizing of personnel and priorities, and eventually a raising of the UK threat level from “substantial” to “severe.” Normally, Max and Paul would not have been assigned to the Russian detail, for it was a gumshoe type of task below their usual level. The Russian knew he was being watched; they knew he knew he was being watched, and it was more a matter of letting the man know this would be a bad time to pull anything while the camera lens was metaphorically pointing right at him. If it had been a proper surveillance job, there would have been two teams of four officers just to follow the guy on foot: two ahead, two behind, four additional for backup. Not just him and Paul.

  But the people who had originally been assigned to the Russian job had some prior, unique experience with the branch of al-Qaeda that wanted to take down the Air India plane, and everything was reshuffled.

  The whole setup was outside the norm.

  Backup, Max told himself repeatedly, would have made no difference.

  * * *

  Cotton was still looking at him in that assessing, thoughtful way. “Your help could be invaluable,” Cotton said at last. “If only in gaining the cooperation of the members of your parish.”

  “Baptizing the teddy bear,” said Max, nodding.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s what I call baptizing the teddy bear. When a child being baptized is old enough to be afraid of or nervous about the baptism, I have been known to baptize the child’s teddy bear first. Show them it doesn’t hurt.”

  “I see,” said Cotton, smiling. “Yes, then, something like that is needed. Perhaps it would be wisest to wait until after the preliminary inquest for you to do more than simply keep one ear to the ground. Probably Monday, if we put a rush on it. Despite the clerical collar, or maybe because of it, people may confide in you in the meantime. But no need to stir up the populace until we’re quite sure what we have here. If you have time, that is,” Cotton added.

  In point of fact, Max didn’t have time. Although he resided in Nether Monkslip, he was shared with two other villages in the surrounding area—Chipping Monkslip and Middle Monkslip. This spreading thin of resources was an all-too-frequent occurrence in the modern-day church of dwindling vocations.

  There were countless calls on his time, and he said no to no one if he could help it. In a village, despite the social services that in theory met every possible human need, the village clergyman was often considered the better, more tactful, answer to complications related to illness, death, marriage, or simply an unspecifiable crisis of the soul. The only way to be effective was by the time-consuming business of home visits. Max was stretched thin on that score, in fact functioning as a one-man Citizens Advice Bureau.

  But looking at Cotton, he felt that old, familiar pull, and immediately began reassessing his calendar. He needed to see Mr. Whippet, he who was almost certainly dying this time, but that was the only appointment that could not be delayed. There was his routine visit to Mrs. Dorman, a very old lady who admitted to ninety-something and kept what she called her anti-Taliban kit at the ready in a basket by her front door—batteries, distilled water, and the like. That the elderly—and others—had been reduced to this sort of mindless fear was the sorrow of life in the twenty-first century, but Max knew his presence alleviated her concerns, at least until
the next news broadcast. He was often tempted to unplug her telly while he was there.

  He also in the coming week had to take assembly at the primary school in Monkslip-super-Mare, filling in for an absent rector who was minus a curate for the task at the moment. There were matters of budget to attend to, the upkeep of ancient St. Edwold’s being in effect an expensive and eternal DIY project.

  But certainly he could put off his impending meeting with the future Cudwells, the very tall, middle-aged couple who were coming to him for premarital counseling. They would be holding hands when they entered the room, and holding hands when they left. They would sit before him the whole time holding hands like two very large children in a fairy tale. Presumably they uncoupled for meals or to get dressed, but he wouldn’t have taken bets on it.

  So the ideally suited Cudwells could wait; their coming to him was a formality only. Here was a new case, a wrong to be righted. A problem to be solved. A villain to be outwitted. A blight on the village to be eradicated.

  He’d admit it to no one but himself, but the pull of his former life remained strong, and he suspected it would never leave him entirely. The qualities his superiors had praised, in words that now sat encrypted somewhere on an MI5 server—words praising his dogged temperament, his fierce curiosity, his almost atavistic need to pursue justice—these qualities sprang, with a surge that was palpable, to the fore. He was the proverbial hound who had scented the fox.

  “Plenty of time,” he told the policeman.

  CHAPTER 12

  Legend

  Max’s life revolved around Sundays, as did the lives of all parish priests. A person could name a date of any month—the nineteenth, for example—and Max would instantly think, That will be two days after the Sunday. An occupational hazard, he imagined, like an accountant totting up figures without really having to think about it.

  This Sunday was unlike any other in his experience, of course. He preached a sermon of healing, of blanket forgiveness, injecting a reminder that we are always in the midst of death, to record-breaking attendance. But he knew this surge in his popularity had nothing to do with an expected uptick in the quality of his sermon—in fact, he hardly knew what to say to the villagers. They had learned—somehow—that there would be a preliminary inquest, and that no funeral would be held until that and other bits of officialdom were taken care of. So the Sunday service was the next best thing—a placeholder until the main event. A trailer, as it were. Lydia, his usually competent young acolyte, seemed in particular to be nearly beside herself, lighting the altar candles with an air of distraction that risked setting her robe on fire.

  Looking out over the congregation, he saw that Tildy Ann Hooser was wearing a rhinestone tiara, dark sunglasses too large for her face, and a big-buttoned red coat with stand-up collar. It was disconcerting, like having a tiny Audrey Hepburn in the audience. Her mother, as usual, sat oblivious to the fact that her other child, Tom, was systematically building an unsteady fortress of hymnals and prayer books that was close to collapse. It was Tildy Ann/Audrey who made him stop, lowering the sunglasses only long enough to aim at her brother a lethal, basilisk gaze.

  Despite the noise of the large crowd scuffling about in their seats, noticeably missing was Wanda’s booming contralto voice during the singing, as the congregation bleated its way uncertainly through the hymns. Say what you might, Wanda was a leader in many ways, even if her voice tended to drown out everyone else. Max noticed all this as he struggled to focus on the service. People were here for comfort, he knew, as well as from curiosity. He prayed for the grace to allow the tone of his own voice to calm their fears.

  After the service would be the usual mingling in the churchyard, the weak sun struggling to warm the gathered faithful. He would normally have stood chatting amiably with the members of his congregation as they filed out of the church, stopping to greet him and comment on the sermon, the weather, the economy, the crops. More people here than last week, Max might think, with the part of his mind not engaged in swapping platitudes.

  This day, of course, was different. Max, braced as he was for the flood of curiosity on the day following Wanda’s death, was almost amused by the varying attempts to hide (or not even bother to hide) avid interest, almost cruelly thwarted by his stern refusal to be drawn into conversation with the villagers about the only thing on their minds—the murder of Wanda Batton-Smythe. Since it was well known that Max had discovered the body, there were many eager attempts to glean facts that could be examined, polished up, and passed along to the next purveyor. Nether Monkslip was too small to sustain a newspaper of its own—in most weeks, there was not enough news or even gossip to bother printing, and what there was could more efficiently be shared by word-of-mouth. The days following Wanda’s demise would of course prove to be the exception. The Monkslip-super-Mare Globe and Bugle—aka UK Yesterday (as a visiting American wag had dubbed it)—would have to print extra copies daily to keep up with demand.

  “Great sermon. By the way, I hear the police are paying you late-night visits,” said Frank Cuthbert, Author. Max smiled wanly. Was that meant as an accusation? Probably not. Cheated of their chance to speculate (Max dodged all attempts at sounding him out, subtle or otherwise, by saying the police had forbidden him to speak of the discovery of her body), they did the next best thing, and lingered for close to an hour swapping theories with one another. Max quickly left them and went to change in the vestry. Then, sneaking with furtive steps out a side door, he went for a walk in the village.

  But it was hopeless. Whoever had not been in church waylaid him now. He noticed several strangers walking about, knocking on doors—plainclothes policemen all, as well as a handful of uniforms. There must be a barber in Monkslip-super-Mare that all the policemen went to, so similar did the men look.

  There were other strangers in the village, as well—some going door-to-door, others buttonholing people in the streets, lanes, and alleyways. Judging by their generally scruffy-looking demeanor they were not police, unless they were police gone so far undercover as to be irretrievably lost to humanity. Going native, it was called. But no—Max recognized them, from long experience, as newspaper reporters. He saw that one of them was talking with Constable Musteile. Oh, my: too late to warn Cotton. Damage done. As he watched, a van made its way down the High, a BBC logo painted on its sides, with giant receiving equipment affixed to the top. The telly news had arrived.

  No …

  Max quickly set his feet in the direction of the path that led up to Hawk Crest, not wishing to be pinned down in the vicarage if he returned there, as he almost certainly would be. Thea would never forgive him if she knew he was headed for their special walking-and-exploring place, but he’d give her a good long outing later. He needed to be completely on his own.

  And the BBC van couldn’t make it up the path.

  * * *

  He had successfully avoided thoughts of Paul for so long that their return hurled him straight back into the past, to the days when he could hardly look in the mirror—which, if he’d thought about it, was probably just as well. It had been obvious from the fit of his clothes that he was rapidly losing weight, and, despite all the sleep, he had felt more like something very old that had been excavated than someone who was well rested and ready to rejoin the human race. Officially, the working theory was that Paul had been killed by underlings wanting to impress the Russian—hoping for promotion if they caught his eye. Max knew there was little hope of catching such small, nameless, unimportant fish.

  On the seventeenth day, bored, mind blank and unable to focus even on a television show, let alone a book or crossword puzzle, he had gone for a walk in the park near his flat. His steps led him past a Thomas Cook shop, with its span of glossy posters in the window, and its notices of cheap flights to Spain and Portugal: HURRY, ONLY A FEW SEATS LEFT AT THIS PRICE! He found himself walking in, fishing for the credit card in his wallet as he went, and signing up for the first poster that had actually caught his eye: E
GYPT, the letters written in some jagged typeface undoubtedly meant to suggest hieroglyphics, scrawled against a scene rendered in an Art Deco style, surely as if Hercule Poirot would be joining the party.

  Max was a seasoned traveler, or so he thought of himself, his father a career diplomat. Another civil servant like himself. From a young age he had roamed the world with his parents, his mother being unwilling to deposit him in boarding schools except when it was completely unavoidable. He’d be left behind for safety’s sake, while she followed his father to some remote posting or other, most often in Africa and later in the Far East. He thought later that his touristy trip to Egypt was perhaps an attempt to re-create that sense of adventure cushioned by the security, false or real, of Her Majesty’s government having their backs at all times.

  His father’s diplomacy seemed to him now a matter of repressing his deepest-held beliefs and feelings. He would hold it in all day, but some days, when he came home, would stop on the mat outside the front door and say, quite clearly, “That asshole,” never realizing Max could hear him from his room window above. Then his father would turn the handle and walk in, all smiles, to kiss Max’s mother and inquire what was for dinner. It wasn’t until much later, after his father’s first stroke, that Max realized the stress this “double life” had been causing. It wasn’t a lesson he had thought applicable to his own life.

  * * *

  Adventuring as a young man, Max had gone on an ill-advised solo trip through Western Africa. The object had not been to frighten his parents, but of course it had done. At one of the worst points in the journey, in Equatorial Guinea, he had traveled from the island of Malabo to Bata on the mainland on a Ukrainian boat called Djiblho. There, overnight, among thieves and strangers, as he lay awake to ward off the pickpockets, one woman had died as another was giving birth. He was dehydrated and disoriented himself at that point, but he later was sure he had felt fingertips of ice brush his cheekbone as the old woman died.