Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  Max spooned a mountain of sugar into his tea and said quietly, “What can you tell me, Major, about your wife, and what she was doing that day? Do you have any views on what led her to the Village Hall?”

  Here the Major thought, and thought hard.

  “That inspector chap asked me the same thing, more or less. Well, she was president of the Women’s Institute, of course.”

  Yes, yes, we know that. Max smiled encouragingly as the Major engaged the gears.

  “She was of course a presence in the village, an important one, and thus expected to lead in the area of charity work and so on, so forth.”

  “And in her personal life? Would you say she was happy?”

  The Major looked perplexed, as if Max had asked him to estimate the square footage of Istanbul.

  “Yes. I would say so. Yes, definitely. Wanda’s mother died last year, as you know. It was only to be expected. The poor old thing was ninety and had been fading for some time. But Wanda took it hard for a while. Quite naturally—they were close.”

  “Yes. Quite.” In fact, Max had forgotten. Given the average age of his parishioners, and the nature of his calling, he heard quite often of a parishioner’s losing one parent or another. It was difficult to keep so many passings straight in his memory.

  Max saw that a beautiful Persian cat had entered the room as they talked and sat on a deeply cushioned chair in the corner—clearly it was Her Chair. She gazed with regal, cross-eyed contempt on the conversation, no doubt wondering how far the death of her mistress would go toward interrupting prompt mealtimes at Casa Batton-Smythe.

  “She had no … enemies?” Max asked the Major. Softly, softly here. Max had little solid reason for his question, still less reason to upset the man unnecessarily.

  “Enemies?” repeated Major Batton-Smythe bleakly. “Enemies! Why, Wanda was one of the most beloved of women. The very milk of human kindness flowed—”

  Catching Max’s mild and unintentional look of skepticism, quickly suppressed as it was, the Major said, “Oh, Wanda had standards. And people who won’t or can’t toe the mark may have resented having that brought up to them.”

  I’ll just bet.

  “But anything like a real enemy? Impossible.”

  Warming to his theme, the Major added, “She was a woman of great passions, Padre. Firm in her beliefs. Unstoppable.” His voice broke on the last word.

  Max, who felt there were many in the village who could testify to that—except that someone had finally stopped her—merely said, “A woman in a million, Major.”

  The Major nodded.

  “Stood by her principles—that was Wanda’s way. When she felt the hairdresser here in the village was overcharging for her hair treatments, she began going into Monkslip-super-Mare instead.”

  Thank heaven, thought Max, that we still have people willing to take a firm stand on the important issues. But he gave the Major a wan, approving smile.

  The Major suddenly burst out, banging one fist on the arm of his chair, making the cat jump: “How in Hades did this happen? How in Hades? Oh, beg pardon for the language, Padre.”

  Max, whose everyday vocabulary and that of his colleagues in his former MI5 life could have scorched the earth, waved his hands munificently.

  “Full of life, she was. Here we were, in the middle of planning a catered dinner party … She so loved to entertain in style … She loved people so. And who will there be to entertain the carol singers at Christmas? Think of the loss to the village.”

  Max imagined this was the biggest benefit of matrimony—to have someone who admired you without qualification, who made your slightest charitable impulse into a sacrifice of Mother Teresan proportions. Wanda was a subject which the Major would never be able to see in an undistorted way, that much was clear. Max asked a different sort of question now: “When did you first meet your wife?”

  “We were both in the army, didn’t you know? She was quite a different person in those days,” the Major told Max. “Softer, perhaps. Always … rather straightforward in her thinking, of course. But Jasper’s growing up and leaving—it changed her. It was a normal process, of course, but … it changed her completely. Empty nest, what? It was from that point, as I saw it, that the need for … control crept in.”

  Max waited quietly. He judged it not the time for further questions. The man would come to it in his own time and in his own way.

  “We were happy here. Sometimes we forgot we were happy. All married couples do. But we were happy here.”

  It was a near-poetic sentiment for the Major, and Max felt the man’s loss intensely, his attitude belying Max’s earlier impression of there being no there, as it were, there when it came to the Major. Even he, who did not live in Morning Glory Cottage, could sense the emptiness of a house suddenly deprived of Wanda’s spirit. How the Major was going to fill that vacuum Max could not imagine. The usual diversions—drink, women, bird-watching—seemed outside Max’s prior experience of the Major. He was a man of no known hobbies or interests, apart from a little golf, gardening, and local history. Would that prove to be solace enough?

  “Your son?” he asked, tentatively, returning the Major to the subject he’d only skirted the edges of before.

  “Yes, the one good thing to come of this. I’ll get to see him. Perhaps I can talk him into staying for more than a few days.”

  “He was your only child, is that right?”

  “Yes,” the Major said briefly, leaving Max to wonder if that were by medical chance or by design, and if the latter, by design on Wanda’s part or his. Quite right for him to be brief on the subject, thought Max, it’s really none of my business. And how it could be connected to the murder anyway he could not begin to fathom.

  But the Major surprised him with an uncustomary breaking down of the barriers, allowing Max a peek at the man behind the bluster and the “Dress right, dress” habits of thought.

  “He was a single child and the only one we were likely to have,” he said. “The thought of his loss terrified me sometimes. Would it be better if I had had two children—the heir and the spare—or would that just make me worry twice as much?”

  “I have the idea it can’t be quantified, that kind of love,” said Max.

  “Yes,” came the distracted reply. The moments passed, with only the soft tick-tick-tick of the ormolu clock on the mantel to disturb the deep quiet of the room. The clock featured Napoleon astride his horse, a nice accompaniment to the basic militaristic theme of the Batton-Smythe’s existence. Just then it chimed the hour, and the Major, coming momentarily out of his stupor, noticed Max’s regard.

  “He’ll be coming for the funeral, whenever they release the … the … her. Wanda,” the Major said. “That’s one thing good come of this sorry mess,” he repeated, bitterly this time. “I haven’t seen Jasper since his grandmother died.” He indicated the mantelpiece with a vague toss of his head. “Left us that clock, she did.”

  Max avowed that the item was beautiful, then once again gently changed this subject back to the Major’s son. There might be solace coming from that department, if he could keep the Major focused.

  “He’s done a bit of this and that,” said the Major in reply to Max’s gentle probing. “He’s exhibiting some paintings in Argentina at the moment, but I know he was in Italy several weeks ago. He’s moved around Europe a bit, and further afield. Africa. The Far East. He found a girl at some point and that settled him. It comes to us all in the end.” Apparently forgetting his grief for the moment, he gave a har-har, man-of-the-world laugh. “Before that, footloose and fancy free,” he continued.

  “You’ve never met her?”

  “No. Perhaps she’ll come with him to the … the…”

  “Yes,” Max said. “Perhaps she will.”

  The Major picked up a letter lying on one of the little tables in the room.

  “This is from him. About a month old. Before…”

  Max took the letter and envelope, which bore an Italian stam
p and postmark. The letter was conventional in its phrasing, thanking his father for some money he’d apparently wired to his son.

  Unsure how to act, scriptless for this kind of personal loss, the impulses flitted across the Major’s face now like images on a faltering television screen. Finally, as something of the finality of the situation seemed to penetrate his understanding, he suddenly gave way to wracking sobs. This display came to Max, who had been expecting a militarized version of the British stiff upper lip, as a relief. Grief was normal. Energy expended in buttoning it up was not. His face folded into an expression of compassion, Max comforted the man as best he could, giving him several resounding thumps between his shoulder blades, the standard macho expression of heartfelt sympathy. “There, there,” he said. “I’m so frightfully sorry this has happened to you.” Max knew instinctively that his human impulse to take the Major into his arms like a child would have been a gesture too much for the man to bear. When the Major’s sobs began to subside, Max said, “We’ll figure this out. Don’t you worry.”

  He wasn’t himself entirely sure what he meant by that. Figure out this grief? Figure out who killed her? Or wasn’t it all part of the same process—of putting the horror of loss to rest?

  Max didn’t feel this was an act, unless the Major was far more cunning and duplicitous—not to say intelligent—than he had ever credited him with being before. It was clear to Max that the man had adored his wife—the contrast with her general loathedness in the village was a conundrum.

  Grief was a curious thing that had no rules. Sometimes, as Max knew, it sent you into a tailspin. When you awoke, you might find yourself halfway around the world.

  * * *

  Coming out of Morning Glory Cottage some time later, Max ran into Awena walking along St. Edwold’s Road. She told him she’d just come from giving a statement at the Bobby Pod, and as if reading his mind, informed him, “I told them it was bollocks to suspect the Major. He’d never have done away with her in such a sneaky way. Doesn’t have the brains for it. A cosh to the head in anger, maybe. But the fact is, he adored her. Thousands didn’t, but he really did, the poor old bugger. Oh, sorry, Vicar. Pardon my French, if you will.”

  She bustled off in a swirl of opulently embroidered fabric. Watching her departing back, he realized the sturdy set of her shoulders reminded him of no one so much as Wanda herself. Another woman, albeit of a much different type, who would brook no interference.

  He was recalled to his current mission, to find out what he could about the events surrounding the demise of the woman who would brook no interference. The woman, he thought, who liked to stir hornets’ nests. Until someone stopped her.

  Where to start? It seemed to Max that a return to the setting of the Harvest Fayre would be in order. Surely whatever had prompted someone to kill Wanda, the site of the Abbey Ruins was where it had all started—sadly, at the scene of what was meant to be one of her greatest triumphs.

  CHAPTER 17

  At Home

  The death of Wanda Batton-Smythe affected everyone in the village, some more than others. Lily Iverson, expecting to feel something like relief, found her life surprisingly unchanged. There was always something to worry about, after all. Wanda was just one less thing.

  Lily lived just outside the village proper in a farmhouse she’d inherited from her uncle—an old farmhouse fallen into disrepair that she had proceeded, in nearly miraculous fashion, to rescue from ruin. The ground floor, where she sat watching the news, was really one large room, with a kitchen occupying one end; at the other end she’d marked out a large living area with a colorful rug, a sectional sofa, a large square coffee table, and a refectory table she used as both dining table and desk.

  A typical man of his generation, Lily’s uncle had taken one look at her knobby-kneed, wiry-haired self, aged twelve, and privately predicted she would never marry unless a female-targeting plague killed off every other woman on the planet. Untypically for a man of his generation, he felt no contempt for a woman of single status, and set out to ensure she would at least have a roof over her head for her lifetime. That the roof in question leaked sporadically did not detract from the kind intent behind the bequest.

  Lily gradually had turned the ramshackle farmhouse into something resembling a cozy and welcoming home—in the hours not filled to capacity by her burgeoning business. She had paved the narrow dirt track leading to the building, replaced mean little windows with larger ones to allow the sun to spill onto the old wooden floorboards, and generally applied a coat of paint to everything until the whole place shone like a showcase.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms, one holding Lily’s double but virginal bed, headed by a brass Victorian bedstead purchased from Noah’s Ark; the other held a double walnut bed for guests that never arrived. (Lily’s uncle, long a widower, had been her last living relative, and she had few ties to her old life in London.) Both beds were covered in knitted bedclothes of colorful and wondrous design, and appliquéd with flowers and animals, starbursts and sunbursts. Between the rooms, down a narrow hallway, Lily had had installed a bathroom gleaming with modern fittings. When she had arrived, the only convenience had been an outhouse, the only source of water an old hand pump at the kitchen’s stone sink.

  Between the kitchen and living area on the ground floor, where Lily spent much of her days, were an old spinning wheel and a loom she had found in the attic—objects that had once belonged to her aunt. Necessity being the mother of discovery (for Lily had been underemployed most of her life, and even living rent-free she needed spending money), in playing around with the equipment, Lily had come to realize that her real talent was to take wool and make from it uniquely beautiful creations in a riot of design and frill and color. Originally she had begun by purchasing wool from a neighbor’s farm, spinning and dying the wool herself. Then she became particular about which sheep the wool came from, ascribing to the lambs as they grew different personalities and traits, and from there it had been a short step to buying the sheep themselves—complete artistic control.

  She began labeling every new sweater design with a sheep’s name. The Dolly model was so popular, especially in lavender, she could barely keep it in stock.

  A boutique in Nether Monkslip had begun carrying her work; now Lily’s creations and the licenses to reproduce them were much in demand: clothing and home furnishing boutiques in London, Paris, and Milan carried her designs. She also sold a great many to select customers over the Internet. More than enough to have moved into one of the fine Georgian houses in the village, for on occasion Lily felt her isolation keenly, but then where would she keep the sheep? And she was already looking into raising goats, too.

  It was her isolation behind a gnarl of hedgerows that made her membership in the Women’s Institute so important to her. Dolly and Co. were her friends but sometimes one needed human contact. And the threat that Wanda posed, all unawares, by her sheer awfulness was a threat that the timid, such as Lily, felt keenly.

  But apart from that isolation, Lily was happy—for Lily. The care and feeding of the sheep was ridiculously satisfying, probably because they made so few demands and were unconditionally glad to see her. She even liked the smell of the well-ventilated barn, which she kept so spotless, and filled with sweet-smelling hay and straw bedding, that it was hard to believe farm animals were anywhere nearby. She had the outlet for creativity in her design work, the work itself, and the reward of running a successful business—these things, most days, were enough. She tried not to remember or dwell on the other days.

  For Lily had always been an anxious, highly strung personality, her mind like a channel tuned permanently to the emergency frequency. For many years she had been nearly anorexic, not because she feared gaining weight, but because she feared food. Everything was potentially contaminating, everything a potential health threat. If she couldn’t boil it herself, she didn’t eat it. Since her inheritance of the farmhouse, with its promise of fundamental security, however, many of these sym
ptoms—as her uncle had hoped—had gone into remission.

  But she remained the type of precise, neatly hemmed woman who would run her recyclable tins and bottles through the dishwasher before throwing them away. Turning off the telly and taking her empty plate and glass into the kitchen, she started to do this now, having emptied a container of mushy peas in preparing her meal. Then, catching herself (for she had sworn to try to loosen up, just a bit), she decided, just this once, to go wild. In a what-the-fuck gesture, she merely rinsed the tin in hot water for several minutes before tossing it into the recycle bin.

  Half an hour later, she came back, retrieved the tin, and put it in the dishwasher.

  * * *

  Suzanna Winship was in her bedroom at her brother’s house, touching up her French manicure while planning what to cook for their dinner. She and her brother had quickly fallen into stereotypical, sexually assigned household roles, but Suzanna didn’t mind. Bruce was providing her a refuge—rent-free—while she sorted through the worst financial debris of going through a divorce. (There didn’t seem to be a lot of emotional debris: her ex had been a faithless jerk and that was that as far as Suzanna was concerned.) If her presence in Nether Monkslip meant her brother got three square meals a day and unobtrusive, mildly entertaining company, she considered it a fair trade. She had begun helping him keep the books of his practice balanced, as well: being a doctor was 90 percent paperwork these days, it seemed.

  What she was going to do in the future wasn’t certain, but for now, this life suited her perfectly well—except for occasional tiny glimmers of boredom in the late afternoons. What a pity the Vicar didn’t seem to be taking the bait.

  It really was too bad, she thought, how Wanda had taken over the show at the Women’s Institute. Of course, all that had changed now. And not a moment too soon, in Suzanna’s estimation.

  Suzanna had a wide competitive streak that had served her well in the thrust and parry of London life. While overall she was finding Nether Monkslip a blessed relief, she also had a vague sense of something missing, of mental muscles gone too long unused. The WI was chicken feed, of course, but it was what was available. Suzanna had enough self-awareness to realize that she didn’t care much of a toss about the WI; the real fun would be in seizing the reins now that Wanda had been sent to her reward. In a way, she was sorry to have been cheated of seeing the look of outrage as Wanda was toppled from her throne at last.