Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  The loathing for the terrorists who had killed Paul consumed him except in his sleep, which was dreamless, a total, rapid, and welcome descent into unconsciousness at the end of each day. Clearly the only sane response, he told himself, was to sleep as long as possible—to escape the memories that awaited him, like something alive and coiled to strike, from the moment he woke. Asleep, he couldn’t hear that explosion and the looping play of his last, everyday conversation with Paul leading up to it. Sleep he did, as much as he could, for days stretching into weeks, for in the end, he had taken an extended leave of absence, after first using up all the time off coming to him. Whether he ever intended to return, he was not even now certain. Tough-guy Max, as he’d thought of himself, inured to everything brutal the job could throw at him, simply wanted to pull the covers up over himself, curl up into a ball, and forget.

  * * *

  He nearly said something of all this to Cotton, but found he could not. His throat tightened at the thought. Maybe one day. Maybe one day he could break out of the emotional straightjacket that held him fast.

  In becoming a priest, he had made a conscious choice to head down a path where he could connect with others. Where he could do good on a human level, rather than on a political one. The rational part of his mind resisted the information that “sharing” the most fraught and terrifying of his memories was possibly the first step toward making that human connection.

  He merely answered, “I didn’t suspect. Because of Lydia, we knew something Guy had told us was wrong. An innocent man would—probably—have told me and the police that he’d been in the vicinity of the Village Hall at a crucial time. He did not. Why not? I wondered. An innocent forgetfulness, like Noah? Or something else?”

  “Even so, that alone is not evidence. People lie to me all the time, and for the stupidest reasons,” said Cotton. “Some lie to the police just on general principles.”

  “I know. But then Guy came to the church to find out what I knew, and he dug himself in deeper when he tried to pretend he didn’t know about her allergies. He had told me himself he’d discussed catering a meal for Wanda. The chances she wouldn’t mention this allergy, as I told him, were zero.”

  “A fact the Major confirms,” said Cotton. “He says that of course Guy had been told, ‘had been warned repeatedly’ were his words.”

  “Anyway, as I say, Jasper of course knew all about his mother’s vulnerability—that includes her emotional vulnerability, as well as her physical susceptibility. But Jasper was not on the scene. He could not be on the scene, as suspicion would fall on him immediately, especially if she died soon after he’d returned from his long absence. So…”

  “So, Guy moved here, set himself up, and began ingratiating himself with Wanda,” Cotton finished for him. “Moving in for the kill.”

  “Not long ago,” said Max, spinning his glass between the palms of his hands, “I read of a case where a child nearly died from anaphylactic shock simply by being exposed to molecules of peanut in the air of a café. People who are susceptible can be very susceptible.”

  “And not just to allergies. I wonder,” said Cotton, “how Wanda ever fell for this setup in the first place?”

  “That’s the easiest part for me to understand—now. Imagine her loneliness. She had no friends in the village, and few elsewhere, to all appearances. Her marriage had become a formality at best. Her son, vanished, for all intents and purposes. I should have sensed her aloneness but frankly it was well hidden under all the bombast and busyness. Still, it’s my job to notice these things. I feel that I failed her. I did fail her.”

  Cotton merely looked at him, then shook his head.

  “I don’t think being perfect and all-knowing is in the job description. Leave that to your boss upstairs, why don’t you?”

  Max smiled wanly, looking into the dregs of his beer. As it happened, that was good advice, if very difficult to follow.

  “Let’s see,” Max said. “What else? Oh, yes. That diary of hers. Why put a star in your calendar by some dates—for the dentist, for example—and not others? Some of the dates were a blind. Some were real. As we now know, a star in her diary or calendar meant she was visiting Guy at his place over the restaurant, so seeing the doctor or dentist or hairdresser in Monkslip-super-Mare wouldn’t necessarily and didn’t always match up. Sometimes she would see both the doctor and Guy on the same day. Some days she would have no appointment on the day she said she did; some days she would. Only the star told the truth about her Guy meetings.”

  “Beneath that formidable exterior beat the heart of a romantic,” said Cotton. “She did seem to enjoy the intrigue. Perhaps she saw it as harmless fun. After all, it was a flirtation, a younger man paying her the attention she craved—not really an affair. Guy is adamant about that, and I believe him—I think the whole idea of Wanda as paramour offends his ego.”

  “Poor Wanda. I think you’re exactly right. She was a romantic with a highly developed sense of drama. It was a weakness to be exploited, and exploit it these two did.”

  “There was another romantic touch,” said Cotton. “The figurine on the windowsill at the Village Hall.”

  “He confirmed that, did he? Yes. I noticed it was facing in a different direction from the usual. I can see it from the churchyard, you know. MI5 uses that sort of signal all the time at safe houses. A safe house being, as you know, an ordinary place used by officers to meet agents. Each safe house has a system of signals to indicate whether it is clear to enter—something like an ornament in a window pointing left or right. Sometimes the direction of the ornament indicates the time of day for a proposed meeting, like a clock. If the ornament or figurine is pointed straight ahead, the meeting time is noon. If pointed with its back to the window, that means six o’clock. And so on.”

  Cotton laughed. “No one but you, Max, would have noticed, or attached any significance to it.”

  “But I didn’t piece that bit together until very late in the game—and even then, Guy’s actions were what drew my attention to it: he made a move to straighten up the shepherdess figurine when we discovered Wanda’s body. Wanda and Guy used it as an all-clear signal on the occasions they met up in the Village Hall. It was frequently deserted, at times Wanda would know all about, and so ideal for one of these passionate—or rather, passionless—little trysts she so enjoyed.”

  “You must be right about her loneliness.”

  Max nodded. “I imagine he would flatter her, soften her up. Playing up to her vanity, he made her fall in love with him by painting a picture of the life she thought she was cheated of via marriage to her boring husband. It was a courtly courtship: no doubt she saw his impeccable manners as part of his deep and abiding respect for her and their timeless ‘love’ for one another. Her ego would blind her to the fact that these corny, courtier-like manners masked his repugnance. Maybe even, in his heart of hearts, there was a feeling of self-loathing, knowing what he was going to do to her.”

  “What heart?”

  Max said, with sad resignation in his voice, “You may have a point. Anyway, her son wanted to be rid of her because it might be years before someone of her vitality might die of natural causes, and he wanted all the money she inherited from her parents to go to him. He had begun to fear she might change her mind, and her will, the longer the years of estrangement went on. She might even be able to put an entail on his inheritance via his father. Guy probably got out of her how much money was involved in her inheritance—making sure all this trouble was worth their while.”

  “We have learned one interesting thing on that score,” said Cotton. “There was a young man hanging about the widowed grandmother before her death—your hunch may have been right there. From the description, it might have been our friend Jasper—a neighbor lady didn’t like the looks of things she saw going on across the lane. Funny that if it was Jasper he wouldn’t introduce himself as the grandson, isn’t it? We’ll ask him a few questions on that score, too. Having an eyewitness will be
of inestimable help there.”

  “Is the thinking that they hastened the old woman’s death?”

  Cotton nodded soberly.

  “Good heavens. Even though it occurred to me … it’s diabolical if they really did that. The level of planning involved…”

  Cotton asked, “Do you think there’s a chance Guy may initially have planned simply to convince Wanda to reconcile with her son?”

  “No,” said Max flatly. “I don’t. I think he and Jasper both realized that was a non-starter—and anyway, it didn’t carry the guarantee of inheritance they craved, even if she had agreed to reconcile. Wanda’s mind made up was … well, a mind made up. Utterly unchangeable. No, I think her death was in the cards from the moment the grandmother died and Wanda safely inherited. Oddly enough, the Major intimated to me that things might have swung quite another way. The ‘old lady’ was going to leave much of her wealth to the church but then became disillusioned by her new rector. Wanda’s coming into the lot was almost a fluke.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Cotton, “it was a fluke she broadcast to her son in a moment of braggadocio, perhaps thinking she could dangle wealth in front of him as a bribe, a way to bring him round to being the devoted kind of son she wanted. But all it did was, as they say in melodrama, seal her fate.”

  Max drained his glass, declining Cotton’s invitation for a refill.

  “The more I thought of it,” Max said, “the more the oddest small things fit together. The change in the usual direction of the bibelot—the shepherdess ornament—suggested an assignation. A way to say, ‘I’m here, waiting—the door is unlocked.’ More playing to Wanda’s sense of the drama of the thing, no doubt. As I say, I watched as Guy made a grab for the figurine, to switch it back into position, that day we found Wanda’s body. I thought nothing of it.”

  Cotton said, “Wanda and Guy would always have bolted the door from within for privacy—they were both inside when Maurice tried the door, although Wanda may have been dead at that point, with Guy still there just making sure he’d not forgotten something. But, why was a signal even necessary that day? Why not just murmur a time and place in passing?”

  “As Dr. Winship said,” replied Max, “there was a ‘mash’ of people at the Fayre. Even if you’d had one eye out for Wanda you might not have spotted her to pass a message, to arrange an assignation. This is why the prearranged signal was necessary. There was no way to whisper in her ear or pass notes because finding her was challenge enough. And this was the day Guy had settled on for her death—nothing must go wrong, no slipup in the timing.

  “So, he had her do what they had often done in the past: the direction of the shepherdess indicated the all clear,” said Cotton. “Brilliant.”

  “I do think diabolical is the word,” said Max, a distraught, hard edge to his voice. “Those two, Jasper and Guy—they planned and plotted this crime, literally for years. Probably as sort of a game at first. Then, the more they talked about it, the closer they came to acting it out in reality.”

  “Tampering with the auto-injector was a particularly nasty touch,” said Cotton. “Guy says he did that a few days before, at some other meeting with her.”

  “Yes. Guy stole the auto-injector in advance from her handbag and replaced the contents with water. He had to do it that way because she was never without her handbag with the auto-injector inside. He couldn’t steal the thing outright because she would undoubtedly notice it was missing. Then, once she was dead, he removed the fake auto-injector from the handbag. He later threw it in the lake, where Constable Musteile was instrumental in its recovery.”

  Cotton reached into his ever-present briefcase.

  “I thought you might want to see this,” he said, handing Max a small, flat, square package wrapped in brown paper.

  CHAPTER 28

  Jolie Laide

  Max unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a painting of a woman with tightly curled hair. Max immediately thought of the term jolie laide—it was a face both pretty and ugly. Although abstract in execution, it was unquestionably Wanda’s face—even without the curly hair it would have been recognizably her.

  Max had once visited the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, which had been vandalized by the Puritans in the sixteenth century. The faces of the statues had been mutilated with a criminal ferocity. Of course, in that case, obliteration was the goal, but a few had escaped with their features “merely” damaged, not hammered off entirely. Max wondered how well those men, the destroyers, had slept at night. Probably well. The smug self-righteous always did.

  Wanda’s face in the painting reminded him of this. It was a work of genius, stark and vicious, executed in bold, unhesitating strokes. An evil genius, in this case.

  “Jasper’s work, of course?” he said.

  Cotton nodded. “It was found hidden in Guy’s flat above the restaurant. A gift from Jasper—a picture of their intended victim. Bizarre, is it not?”

  “Everything about these two is bizarre.”

  Max gazed at the painting, at the audacious slashes of black and gray mixed with violent shades of red and deep purple.

  “And Wanda—her reaction to the setup, as well, had the taint of a pathology, don’t you feel?” asked Max. “I think it is possible that Guy reminded her a bit of her son on some unconscious level. There is a logic to that, since Guy has spent many years in the company of her son. His mannerisms, patterns of speech: it’s a commonplace that longtime couples grow to be alike. Her reaction was unconscious, and probably as much maternal as anything else—a reaction to the familiar. This goes in part to explain her unreasoning devotion to a man too young for her, apart from the fact he played to her vanity and her ego. One clue I missed was that she had taken to wearing a great deal of makeup lately. It didn’t necessarily mean she was having an affair, but it suggested something in her life had changed to make her overly concerned with her appearance.”

  Cotton said, “Jasper had at one point been on the receiving end of a smothering love from his mother. He told us this at great length. A more self-involved, sniveling little nub of humanity it would be hard to find. Anyway, smothered he was. At least in the beginning, he was showered with anything it was in Wanda’s gift to give the boy. But her ‘gifts’ of money were always conditional. Jasper’s father, meanwhile, intuited that he had not exactly fathered the prototype of the macho man, but he could not, would not accept that he had fathered a gay man. Don’t ask, don’t tell? Don’t even allow the possibility of opening a discussion of such a topic, in the Major’s view, and in Wanda’s. I think Jasper’s exile may have been self-imposed, but it was also encouraged. Neither of his parents could begin to cope with Jasper’s sexual orientation. His looks, talent, and undoubted gifts were never enough to reconcile them.”

  Max asked, “Has that anything to do with Guy misleading me about Belgium?”

  “Yes. That was a minor thing that loomed large in Guy’s mind. Guy’s specialty seems to be panicking over the details, even though he’s cool as can be when it comes to the big picture. Guy and Jasper were legally married in a ceremony in Belgium some years ago. In Belgium, as of 2003, there are no restrictions regarding nationality in entering into such a contract. Naturally, this formalized relationship is a matter of public record. Guy didn’t want you to put us onto searching records in Belgium, which is where they lived together. So he pretended to you to be most recently from France. It was overkill, really. Clearly he is one to believe the devil is in the details. There was little reason for us to start questioning his orientation, or Jasper’s, and it is irrelevant to the murder, but just in case … He wanted as much opaqueness with regard to their relationship as he could manage.”

  “I did wonder why he felt Belgium was something he should conceal from me. Why do people lie about where they’ve been recently, I asked myself? To get a job, perhaps, when their former employment didn’t end satisfactorily? That’s understandable if a man is desperate for work, to feed his family. I understand that kind of desper
ate, and wouldn’t try to parse the morality of it. But Guy was the restaurant owner, so why lie to me—and then tell you, the police, the truth? Only one reason: because he knew you could and would check what he said about his places of residence, and what he told you had to match up.”

  Cotton nodded. “He didn’t appreciate the danger: you had the old connections to do some verification on your own, if you took it into your head to do so. He thought the MI5 gossip, when he came to hear of it, was just that, and he also didn’t realize at first you would be so involved in the investigation that I would confide in you.” He smiled. “I didn’t think so, myself.”

  “Ordinarily,” said Max, “you would not have shared the background details about a suspect with me or with anyone. As it happened, you didn’t tell me Guy was from Belgium until I asked.”

  Max looked into the fire, casting his mind back over the days of the investigation. Thea nudged his hand until he began gently to scratch her ears.

  “It really was the unrelated details that tripped them up, although I nearly missed their significance, every time. There was an odd moment or two in my conversation with Miss Pitchford—her unusual emphasis when she told me about Jasper’s school friend. I misread her, and thought she was being a social snob—that she felt a friendship with a poor farmer’s son was slumming it for the son of a military family, which in her fine scheme of things would be just a rung above, socially. But no, she was trying to tell me their relationship was outside the limits for her generation—that it went beyond schoolboy friendship. Educated a woman as she was, Jasper’s orientation was not spoken of directly by her age group. The habits of a lifetime are not easily broken.”

  “‘The love that dare not speak its name.’”

  “Certainly not as far as Miss Pitchford is concerned. What I barely noticed in all this was Miss Pitchford telling me that Bombay was a favorite place of Jasper’s. She was using the name she’d grown up with, rather than its modern name of Mumbai. Mumbai, where Guy told me he had lived awhile.”