Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  “As a friend of Jasper Batton-Smythe’s, I would imagine. Yes.”

  “Come along into the vestry for a moment, then. We can talk there in private. I gather this is a private matter?”

  Max couldn’t in all honesty have said why he felt that, but there was something diffident about Larry’s manner. “Furtive” would have been too strong a word. But he was not in any event surprised when Larry nodded in the affirmative.

  * * *

  The vestry was within the church, and was one of the oldest portions of the original building to have survived completely intact. The church as a whole had escaped the mania for gothic ornament that had gripped the Victorian age, for which mercy Max had daily to be thankful. Now he led Larry Hawker into the room, which was lined with cabinets, drawers, and shelves for the various vestments and other items used in worship, and indicated a chair for him to sit on. Max himself perched on top of one of the low cabinets.

  Larry looked as if, having initiated the conversation, he needed prompting.

  “It’s about Jasper,” said Max.

  “Yes.”

  “I noticed just now he seemed in no hurry to speak with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen or heard from him since you both were in school?”

  “No. We both went our own ways soon after. Of course, my family moved away. Jasper went on to bigger and better things than Nether Monkslip.”

  Max looked at him.

  “I gather your parting wasn’t amicable?”

  Larry gave him a smile of rueful remembrance. “No, it was not. But that’s not what I wanted to talk with you about. Or rather, that is why I hesitated to talk with you. It’s just that, I want someone—someone in the village—to know my thinking here. And you look like a sound chap.”

  “Thank you, but if you have anything in mind that has to do with the…” (he hesitated to say murder) “… the demise of Mrs. Batton-Smythe, the police are the people you should talk with.”

  Larry shook his head decisively.

  “Going to them would be gossip, pure and simple. And worse, seen as spiteful gossip, designed purely to cause trouble for him. Here is the thing: I feel I knew Jasper, at the time, and his relationship with his mother, better than anyone. I always sort of knew what he was thinking. I read how she was murdered in the paper—some papers were cagey about it, but they as good as said it was murder. And…”

  “And?”

  “You see, it’s just this. He hated her so. From the moment I heard, I felt Jasper had something to do with this.”

  Max, knowing Jasper had been put in the clear by various disinterested eyewitnesses, just looked at the young man. His face and his manner were vehement, full of conviction.

  “But that is not evidence,” Max said mildly.

  “Exactly,” Larry replied. “My certain knowledge is not evidence. I wasn’t here. I haven’t lived here for years. How could I go to the police? I’d look like I was just fanning the flames of some old rivalry. Some old jealousy.”

  “I see. A friendship gone wrong. Yes, the appearances could—”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s more than that, Father. We were lovers.”

  * * *

  The day had grown overcast, the sky purple with heavy dark clouds. They squatted soberly on the horizon like a hung jury as Max set out to check on the well-being of Lydia Lace.

  Max reflected as he walked that while what Larry had told him was interesting, it had nothing to do with Wanda’s death. Larry spoke of Jasper with a livid dislike he barely bothered to conceal—a dislike that seemed to have its roots in Jasper’s belief that he was socially a cut above a poor farmer’s son. “One day,” Larry had reported, “he just stopped talking to me. There was no quarrel, no rift. He’d simply had enough—it was ‘time to move on.’ I suppose he’d taken up with someone else. But … I was crazy about him, as you are at that age. Crazy. You don’t just dump people who care about you. But Jasper did. That was Jasper all over.”

  But Jasper had been in Argentina around the time his mother died, being interviewed on live television about his art in advance of an exhibition there, a fact DCI Cotton had confirmed. It had been a live, not a taped, appearance—an unbreakable alibi. There was no question that Jasper could have been anywhere near the United Kingdom at the time of his mother’s murder. Max was glad the young man had come to him, not to DCI Cotton, for Larry’s instincts were right: his opinion regarding Jasper and what Jasper was capable of was no more than that—opinion—and opinion tainted by a failed love affair that Larry admitted had ended in poisonous rancor on both sides.

  Max wondered if Miss Pitchford had been alluding—in her blushing, genteel, old-world way—to the true nature of the relationship between her two former pupils. Looking back, he realized that what she had expressed was skepticism regarding the existence of a girlfriend in Jasper’s life. Max was not of the school that felt love between adults could or should be regulated, and he got by in his profession by actively avoiding debates on the subject. There was so little in the way of real and abiding love in the world that it seemed to him a miracle if two people of whatever persuasion found each other and formed an attachment.

  But Larry—disgruntled and disillusioned though he may have been by the end of his affair with Jasper—had been unwavering in his opinion.

  “I know him, you see. I know what he’s capable of, the greedy, sewage-minded little—I know what he’s capable of, that’s all.

  “And I know he did this.”

  * * *

  Lydia Lace lived not far from Miss Pitchford in one of the old cottages along the river, converted in the 1990s into an estate agent’s dream. The prospect of selling such an abode frequently led said agents to their most orgiastic levels of praise (the word “stunning” was often evoked). Still, there was no escaping the fact that such dwellings, while as charming as something out of a fairy tale, were little more than dollhouses barely large enough for two modern adults, however small.

  Max tapped at the door knocker of Trout Cottage and Mrs. Lace appeared in the open doorway. She smiled as she invited him in. He remembered just in time to duck his head—he had on more than one occasion in visiting the cottages nearly knocked himself silly on a low lintel. Stunning, indeed.

  “Could I have a brief word with your daughter, Mrs. Lace?”

  “She’s having a lie-down in her room. I’ll just fetch her.”

  “Let me talk with her alone, please. I’ll leave the door open but I’d rather you let me speak with her in private, at least at first.”

  Mrs. Lace, seeming to understand there were things a girl would tell Max Tudor but would not say with a mother present, and not resenting this fact in the least, merely nodded.

  He was shown into a room covered in taupe wallpaper with a green design, like mold viewed under a microscope. Lydia was at that awkward age, torn between idolizing teddy bears and rock stars. Her room reflected her interest in both, with Kid Rock edging out Paddington Bear at two-to-one.

  She was currently covered up to her eyes in a duvet. Those eyes were closed, although Max could tell she was not sleeping. Her brown hair, held back in a band that circled the crown of her head, was fanned out on the pillow—she looked like a Pre-Raphaelite illustration of the Lady of Shalott. As he pulled up a chair beside her, she looked up at him, relief at his presence written plain on her face.

  “I was worried,” he said simply. “Are you all right?”

  An explanation for Lydia’s sudden faint had occurred to him, one which he hoped very much would turn out not to be the correct explanation. It was a concern she immediately put to rest.

  “I’m not—you know.”

  “Pregnant?”

  Embarrassed, she seemed to look everywhere in the room but at him.

  “Tha’s right,” she mumbled. “I’m fine. It’s not that.”

  The words hung in the air so long he wondered if she had said all she was going to say. But suddenly she burst ou
t, “I remembered him, you see. And I’m so frightened, Father.”

  “Him? Him who?”

  But the direct approach seemed to have been a mistake. Eyes wider than before, she stared at him, clearly wrestling with the question of whether to share what she knew. Would it make her safer, or more vulnerable? She liked Father Max, everyone seemed to, but …

  “Maybe I should tell the police?” she asked tentatively. “But … could they really protect me?”

  A cold fear clutched at his heart. She could only be referring to something in connection with Wanda’s death. What did the child know?

  “Lydia, absolutely, positively. If you know anything, you have to tell.” Thinking of his talk with Larry just now, he said, “If you don’t feel comfortable telling the police, if you think they won’t believe you, perhaps, tell me first. Then we’ll decide together what’s best to do.”

  She mumbled something into the duvet.

  “Speak up, please, Lydia.”

  “They’ll believe me—why wouldn’t they?” she asked, with the hubris of the very young. “It’s not just me, you see, though, who’ll be dragged into it. And my mother … my mother will kill me.”

  Max doubted that, but there was a killer loose in the village who might very well kill the child. “Tell me,” he urged. “We’ll get it sorted out with your mother. But tell me.”

  And here the story came tumbling out. It seemed that Lydia had a boyfriend who lived in nearby Chipping Monkslip. He had come to the village of Nether Monkslip to be with Lydia during the Fayre—her disapproving mother being otherwise occupied, Max gathered, reading now between the lines.

  “Greg was to meet me by the Plague Tree in the graveyard, which he did. There was no harm in it, Father. We were just talking.”

  Max, going by her demeanor and the deepness of the blush that flooded her face, wondered about that.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Go on.”

  “That was it. We met in the graveyard, and we … we talked. Greg had to get back home—he’d just snuck out for a bit. His father was punishing him, see, for staying out late the past weekend. Greg’s father is really such a prat, he—”

  “Greg left you in the graveyard and was heading home to Chipping Monkslip,” Max prompted. “And…?”

  “He had to pass near the Village Hall as he left the village.”

  “What time?”

  “Noon. Just around noon.”

  Max was struck by a sudden image from the day of the Fayre. Recalling the moment of Wanda’s distraction as she stood with him by the trestle table, and the trajectory of her distracted gaze, he took a guess.

  “Did Wanda by any chance spot the two of you together, earlier?”

  “Yes,” said Lydia. Her mouth set in a thin line at the memory. “And she wasn’t half shirty about it. Like it was any of her business. She threatened to tell my mother. ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ she said. Pompous silly cow.”

  He left a suitably long pause, allowing for the flush of outrage to pass.

  “Sorry,” she said at last. “I just didn’t like her. But I’m sorry she’s dead.”

  “What were you going to do?”

  “I hadn’t decided yet. Then…”

  “Then she was killed.”

  “Father Max, I’m scared.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  “Because as I was starting to walk back toward the Fayre, I looked back—I was, you know, hoping for a last look at Greg. Hoping he’d turn and wave. He’s ever so handsome and I really think he—”

  “And you looked back and saw … what?”

  “Yes, I looked back. And that’s when I saw … I saw a man coming from the Village Hall. I didn’t know who it was, and I didn’t actually see him leave the hall, just come from that direction. It wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before. I thought nothing of it then—I thought it was just someone from another village coming to see the Fayre—you know how many strangers were in the village that day. But then, this same person was in church today, at the service—and he recognized me. You could tell he recognized me. And you should have seen the look in his eyes. Stared right at me, he did—for a flash second, looking like a devil, I swear it. And then I recognized him—I might not have noticed him otherwise, you see. And I knew. This was the man who killed Mrs. Batton-Smythe.”

  She began to wail. “The person who killed Mrs. Batton-Smythe saw the look in my eyes, and knows. He knows I know. What am I going to do?”

  “How can you be so sure of that? That he killed her?”

  “Because Greg heard a shout.”

  “Greg heard a shout,” he repeated. “An argument?”

  “Might have been,” she replied. “He said he wasn’t sure—just that he heard a shout. He told me this after, you see. It didn’t mean anything at the time. We didn’t put it together, you see. He heard a shout—so what? People were shouting all over the Fayre that day, half of them drunk. I didn’t hear anything—I couldn’t, not from where I was. But I saw a man coming from the area of the Village Hall. Even then, so what? When I saw the man today, it was the way he looked at me—that shocked look on his face. Only for a second, but he recognized me all right.”

  “No harm will come to you,” said Max. “I promise you. Calm yourself now.”

  “But don’t you see? The only reason I’m alive is I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know there was anything to tell. Now I do know something. How can I ever leave the house now? Even to go to school?”

  School was the least of her worries, but Max didn’t tell her that.

  Still, there was something odd about her story. The murder had been the talk of the village, and she and Greg were only now reliving it?

  “Why did it take so long for you two to compare notes? Any particular reason?”

  She sniffed. A down feather escaping from the duvet seemed to capture her rapt attention.

  “Lydia-a-a? You’re telling me the whole story, aren’t you?”

  She sniffed again, and looked up at him from under her lashes. “Sorry. He started seeing another … another woman, didn’t he?” she said, with one of her odd forays into the adult world.

  Oh, for the love of—

  “You mean you had a lover’s quarrel, so you didn’t see him to talk to?”

  “That’s right. I have my pride, you know. Now he says he’s sorry. We’re trying to work it out. But he told the police at the time what he’d heard, he says. So that’s all right.”

  Really. OK then. That’s all right.

  Greg could only, he reflected, be the kid who heard a commotion coming from the Village Hall—the one DCI Cotton had told him about earlier, at the beginning of the investigation.

  Max stood up, restless, seized by a desire to pace the room. I’ve been around Cotton too much, he thought.

  He then asked Lydia a pointed question, to which she replied firmly in the negative.

  “No. I know who Noah is. Everyone knows Noah. This man had white hair.”

  The beat of his heart quickened. Oh, my good Lord. “Tell me. Everything you remember.”

  She complied as best she could, but with frequent, lurid reference to the evil and devilish aspect of the man she had seen. Max patiently sifted through the embellishment, then proceeded to issue a string of warnings, all of which Lydia swore she would heed.

  After he left, Mrs. Lace went into her daughter’s room with a cup of tea. She sat waiting until she had Lydia’s full attention. No question about it—Lydia had been hiding something. No doubt to do with that no-hope boy from Chipping Monkslip—the boy Lydia fondly believed her mother knew nothing about. Finally, she asked Lydia what she’d told Max. At Lydia’s reply her mother looked satisfied, as if some of her worst suspicions were confirmed, but also very frightened. How much did this put her child in danger?

  Outside the cottage, Max was doing what he could to keep his promise to Lydia that she would come to no harm. He walked over to the river to a spot where he was sure he could not b
e overheard, and put in a call on his mobile to DCI Cotton. He got his voicemail and asked that the detective call him back immediately.

  As he waited for a response, he reflected on what a short time it had been since he had found Wanda dead, and had witnessed the—as it transpired—already hopeless attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The kiss of life, a technique discovered centuries before for reviving drowning victims.

  Kiss of life. Kiss of death. Judas kiss.

  Sealed with a kiss.

  He felt his skin prickle.

  At Oxford, he’d met many theologians who were at odds with the new ways of the church—the place tended to be the strangest combination of innovation and clinging to tradition he’d ever come across. He thought now of a particularly unruly professor he hadn’t thought of in years—a peculiar man even by the standards of Oxford dons, many of whom seemed to revel in their reputations as lunatic crackpots. This man would blow his nose before offering his hand for the exchange of peace, as a way of showing his contempt for all the “newfangled tampering” with the service. In a different century he might have been burned at the stake, but as it was his fellows merely gave him a wide berth, as if he were the walking embodiment of contagion.

  Contagion. Now, why…?

  Just then, his mobile rang—Cotton returning his call. They had a tense, wide-ranging conversation that lasted several minutes.

  But the first priority, both agreed, was getting a guard posted at the front of the Laces’ house.

  CHAPTER 26

  Revelations

  The church that had so recently held the mourners and the curious at Wanda’s funeral was hauntingly empty that afternoon. Max sat in a pew near the altar, to all appearances deep in thought. Unlike DCI Cotton, Max had an endless capacity for the still, silent vigil. His notebook and pen rested at his side. He needed all his attention focused outward.

  In speaking with Cotton outside Lydia’s cottage, Max had relayed the suspicions of Jasper’s old school friend.

  “Evidence, Max. We need evidence,” said Cotton.

  “That,” Max told him, “is precisely why we’re setting a trap. I’ll draw off the poison—direct it away from Lydia and her friend Greg. Whoever shows up is by definition our man, frantic to know what Lydia told me. Agreed?”