4 A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  Then silence fell. A flash of light, perhaps from the dying rays of the sun, came flickering from the windows of the nun’s dormitory. The church service had ended and the nuns had returned to their cloister.

  By the time Max returned to the guesthouse, the nearly full moon had nestled like an opal into a deep indigo sky. The summer solstice approached, a holy day in Awena’s book. He could imagine the cooking and preparation in anticipation, for Awena’s gift was her awareness that everything was sacred, every great and small moment of the days and passing of the seasons worth marking and observing.

  No less than the Handmaids of St. Lucy, he supposed, did Awena hallow the sanctity of days.

  * * *

  Some time later, the bells for Compline rang out over Monkbury Abbey, and the place fell into even deeper stillness than before, like an enchanted castle in a fairy tale. It was soon the time of the Great Silence, and Max, reading in bed, had drifted toward a dreaming sleep. He dreamt he saw the nuns walking down the church nave in a candlelight procession, their faces shrouded by their cowls, each of them carrying a small jeweled casket. The sleeping Max, sitting in a pew in the middle of the church, counted them as they passed. Counting sheep, thought his dream self. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.

  Thirty-two.

  Wait. There should only be thirty-one.

  The last figure to pass turned back to him and smiled. Max saw through a shock of icy fear it was not the gentle face of any of the Monkbury nuns he had come to know, but the hideously decayed face that haunted his nightmares. The face of the man who had killed his friend, his MI5 colleague Paul, although this face was unrecognizable as anything human. It was, the dreaming Max realized, a stone gargoyle come to life, blood dripping from its mouth. And now in the way of dreams he noticed that the face beneath the cowl wore the ridiculous sunglasses with their white frames and blue lenses, the sunglasses Max had seen the killer wear the day Paul died.

  Lights from an automobile flashed briefly into Max’s room, startling him awake. At first he thought it was part of his dream, or a flash of lightning, for in the distance he could now hear the thunder of a summer storm.

  It was a late arrival. Very late by monastery standards. Dame Hephzibah would be inconvenienced. The light interrupted Max’s sleep but momentarily, for he had walked a long time that day in the rarified air of the abbey grounds, and was tired. He started to drift back to sleep, but the anxious, edgy feeling prompted by the nightmare clung to him. It was as if he had walked into a cobweb. Max rubbed at his face.

  And then a heart-rending scream jolted him fully awake. The book Max had fallen asleep reading flew from his hands and landed with a great thud on the floor.

  And at that moment the monastery’s generator gave out, and the small light in Max’s room was extinguished.

  That doesn’t sound like any Great Silence to me, thought Max, jumping from the bed. Looking for his clothing by the moonlight streaming into his room, he finally found his jacket and threw it on over his pajama bottoms. He pulled his phone from the jacket pocket and located the torch app. The thing might be useless out here as a phone, but the app helped him navigate the room and find the larger electric torch.

  Max set off in the direction of the cloister, for his senses told him the sound had come from that open area. The light now was better; votive lights had been set on small stone projections jutting at precise intervals along the hallway, probably in anticipation of the routine unreliability of the generator. The effect was rather like a landing strip. It was the sort of setting designed for ripples of ghoulish, maniacal laughter echoing down the corridor rather than for the drifting notes of religious chant.

  He started toward the kitchen where there was a door into the cloister, then remembered that there was no entry to the cloister directly from the guesthouse, particularly at this time of night. He went to the gatehouse, where Dame Hephzibah was stirring, bewildered, clearly startled awake and wondering whether it was safe to leave her post.

  “You heard it, too?” he asked. “Could you tell where the cry came from?”

  Shaking her head, Dame Hephzibah pressed both her hands against her mouth in a monkey-speak-no-evil gesture. She pulled a pen and paper from her pocket and wrote down her dilemma. Max read the page she turned to him. Her crabbed handwriting was nearly illegible, but after a bit of thought he managed to translate what looked like, “I need persimmons to spark with you during the Solstice” to its more likely cousin: “I need permission to speak with you during the Silence.”

  Max nodded in understanding. Had ever, he thought, an investigation been more hampered from the outset than this one, by witnesses who were not even allowed to speak except at certain times?

  But right now, the immediate problem was that otherworldly scream.

  “Dame Hephzibah,” he said. “I will square it with the abbess. It’s all right for you to talk with me. Just this once. A human life may be at stake.”

  She nodded, eyes wide and dark with confusion. She was trained to obey, and clearly an ordained Anglican priest trumped an abbess in the pecking order of her small, enclosed little world.

  “It came from the cloister,” she said. “Near the center—the well, I think.” Struggling with a mass of old iron keys, she unlocked the door leading into the cloistered part of the nunnery.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll fetch the doctor.”

  Max turned at that.

  “Doctor?”

  “He drove up just now—you must have seen his car. He asked for a room for the night so he could see Dame Meredith first thing tomorrow.

  “She’s taken a bad turn. He’s worried about her.”

  * * *

  The moonlight helped, as did the torch. The darkness was otherwise near total. Just avoiding tripping at an unexpected dip in the terrain, he reminded himself that the cloister was not a flat, smooth plot of land, but that it fell in cascading ridges, following the natural lines of its setting. The silence remained absolute. It was a time for goblins and witches and for the ghosts of nuns long dead to be prowling the area, saying their beads. He shooed away the superstitious thought—really, it was impossible in this setting not to have such ideas. He hurried toward the well.

  And aiming the torch down into its center, he saw what should not have been there. The soles of the highly polished, Italian leather shoes of Lord Lislelivet, far below. Still wearing the shoes was the lord, his eyes open and reflecting the light, like an animal’s captured by headlamps. But from the expression, an expression of outrage and surprise, it was clear he was dead.

  Max shone the torch around the area, training his dark gray eyes on the ground. The grass outside the wellhead was undisturbed except for what might have been drag marks of the sort left by the heels of highly polished, Italian leather shoes.

  Uttering a mild curse, he went to rouse the nunnery, and to call for needed help to travel the long uphill road to Monkbury Abbey.

  * * *

  “There was plenty of money to fix that generator,” Clement Gorey was saying. “That’s why I want to know where the money really went.”

  Max had rounded up all the inmates of the guesthouse, commanding them to gather in the guesthouse kitchen, for there had been a murder, that was almost certain, and Max wanted a clear head count. From the kitchen he could keep watch over the well in the cloister and see that it remained undisturbed. He had instructed the abbess, roused from her sleep, to similarly command her charges: Nothing must be touched.

  The guests were all accounted for: the three Goreys, Paloma Green and Piers Montague. The one new addition was the doctor, Barnard, who had arrived only moments before Max heard the hellish scream—probably the last sound Lord Lislelivet made on earth.

  “I think we might want to focus a bit on the murder that took place around the time the generator went out,” said Max.

  Clement Gorey looked abashed, but only for a second. He rebounded quickly.

  “Don’t you see? There may be a co
nnection? Where—I say where—did the money go? Lord Lislelivet had the same questions about the finances around here that I did.”

  The same thought had of course occurred to Max, but he merely said, “It is too soon to speculate, Mr. Gorey.”

  “If not now, when?” he demanded.

  Max wondered if the man realized he was quoting Rabbi Hillel. Somehow he doubted it.

  “Now, actually. Just not us. Meaning, rampant speculation won’t get us very far. I’ve got a call in to the police. They will do whatever speculating is required. We don’t want to be in their way.”

  In fact, Max fully intended to speculate and get in the way wherever he felt it might be necessary, but he did not relish the prospect of having Clement Gorey play Watson to his own investigation.

  “I will most certainly be having a word with whatever detective guy they send out here—you can be sure of that.”

  “I would imagine we all will.”

  And what a mess that will be. The silence and peace of the cloister ruined by the clomp clomp clomping of DCI Cotton and his team. Something had to be done to get the entire matter cleared up as soon as possible, or Monkbury Abbey might not survive.

  And he wondered if that possibility had occurred to the murderer.

  If in fact that had been the aim all along.

  PART VI

  Vespers

  Chapter 21

  NIGHTHAWKS

  Each sister shall take a turn keeping the night watch, and in awakening her sisters in time for Dawn Prayer. Only the abbess and the cellaress are exempt from this duty. It is better that the night watch be kept in pairs.

  —The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

  An hour had passed. They were essentially just waiting for the arrival of the police and all the specialists in the art of murder most foul. Any chance Lord Lislelivet had simply fallen into the well on some random nighttime stroll about the monastery grounds was out of the question, at least as far as Max was concerned. For one thing, it had to be explained how he had gotten into the middle of the cloister at night—the very heart of the nunnery, really, from which sprang the cloistered parts of the abbey, including the nun’s private cells. Someone had to have admitted him to the area.

  Xanda had volunteered to make coffee to keep them awake while they waited, and the room had immediately split into British versus U.S.A. factions. The British all wanted their cuppa, and Paloma rose competently to the challenge of putting a kettle on the boil for a proper British brew, while Xanda found filters and drip coffee. The debate over the pros and cons of the caffeinated beverages seemed to divert them from thoughts of murder, if only momentarily. Finally, once they all had their drinks and a plate of chocolate biscuits had been passed around, Max, who had been watching all of them closely, said, “What do any of you know about the system of bell ringing that goes on all day here? Is there one person in charge?”

  “What? Is there a point to this question?” demanded Clement Gorey.

  “Daddy…” said his daughter, warningly.

  “I won’t know until someone answers me,” said Max amicably. “I suppose that to be put in charge of waking everyone for the early morning services you have to be very low on the totem pole. It strikes me as the sort of job for the postulant—the job nobody wants. But it may not be important.”

  “I think they all take turns,” said Oona Gorey. “Sort of spreading the misery around.”

  “Ah. I’m sure you’re right,” said Max. Turning to Dr. Barnard, he said, “I was surprised to see you here. I thought you had left yesterday after seeing Dame Meredith.”

  “I did leave,” the doctor replied, stirring sugar into his coffee. “But I was worried about her as I drove away and I realized, frankly, that something was wrong. She seemed agitated, despite the rather heavy dose of drugs I’ve been prescribing, trying to make her comfortable. So I thought I should return, to be here in the morning and make sure she was all right. Besides, there looked to be a storm brewing, and the roads can be hazardous in the best weather.

  “Anyway, maybe it was just time to change her prescription, but I wanted to talk with her again before I went to keep my appointments in Temple Monkslip for the day. I often do that—stay in the guesthouse. They keep a spare room for the last-minute traveler, even when the guesthouse is otherwise full up. Always that one room is kept back. In case the solitary traveler is Christ himself, you know—instant transport to heaven if it does turn out to be Christ, I suppose. Proper honor must be shown to all—particularly to anyone who looks down and out and basically unwashed and hungry. I don’t usually fit that description, but it’s one of their nicer philosophies, don’t you think?”

  “I see,” said Max. “It was just as you were pulling in that I heard the scream—the cry for help, cry of alarm or panic or pain, whatever it was. Did you hear it?”

  The doctor shook his head. “It wouldn’t have carried to where I was, just getting my bag out of the car in the parking lot.”

  “I heard it,” declared Xanda. “All the way in my room.”

  “Was your impression that it was a man or woman crying out?”

  “Well, a man, I suppose. It had to have been Lord Lislelivet, didn’t it?”

  Max turned again to the doctor. “You had a bag with you?”

  “Always,” he said “I keep a spare bag packed. The byroads in this part of the world are unreliable—last summer half of them washed away. I never know what to expect when I’m out on a call. So I’m always as prepared as I can be.”

  Max turned to the others. “Did any of you hear anything?”

  They all solemnly shook their heads.

  “See anything?”

  “I did see Dr. Barnard arrive.” This from Clement Gorey, and said in a way that implied a major concession. “He came out of the gatehouse, walking toward the guesthouse.”

  “This was just before all the hubbub?” asked Max.

  “It was during.”

  “I saw him, too,” volunteered Piers Montague. Incredibly, Piers was wearing a smoking jacket of the sort made popular by Nick and Nora Charles movies. He needed pomade and a cigarette holder to complete the look. Clement Gorey wore an enormous gray T-shirt bearing a Harvard logo. His wife had stayed true to her all-black wardrobe, and had a black chenille number knotted tightly at the waist. Paloma Green wore something suitable for a performance of Madame Butterfly; Xanda wore gray sweatpants topped with a “Pierce the Veil” T-shirt. Max gathered that was some sort of rock band. Nice. The excitement seemed to be making the spiky hair on her head stand even straighter; yesterday’s makeup pooled darkly beneath her eyes. She took a slurp of her coffee under the disapproving eye of her mother.

  “Sorry,” said Xanda. “Can we go back to bed now?’

  “Not just yet,” said Max. “The police will be here any min—”

  A crunch of gravel outside announced that several police cars, whirligig lights no doubt ablaze, were in the parking lot. The sanctuary and peace of Monkbury Abbey had been breached.

  The only question was how long before the nuns could return to the relative serenity of the eleventh century. The answer: perhaps never.

  * * *

  Max had earlier phoned DCI Cotton, using the satellite phone in the cellaress’s office. All this activity had involved raising the alarm all over the nunnery, of course. But many seemed to have been awoken by Lord Lislelivet’s dying cry. The habit of sleeping lightly must have become ingrained in most of them.

  Max briefly explained the situation to the constable on the desk in Monkslip-super-Mare, and then waited for Cotton’s return call. It was not long in coming.

  Cotton explained that his men would set up headquarters in Temple Monkslip for the duration but that he, Cotton, would join Max right away.

  “But be my ears on the ground until I get there, Max. We’re already looking into histories and backgrounds, although some things will have to wait for daylight hours. The abbey doesn’t lend itself to this sor
t of official raid, nor does it have anything like the connectivity we need to run a full-scale investigation. Besides, I think we’ll learn a lot more with the softly, softly approach. I want you to stay on in your quasi-official capacity.”

  “All right,” said Max. He was chafing to get home, but in all good conscience, what else could he do but see it through now? Lord Lislelivet had been killed on his watch.

  Cotton sighed. “I suppose I didn’t take the poisoning thing seriously enough. It seemed so ludicrous somehow.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” said Max, who was busy blaming himself. “Lord Lislelivet has a reputation for creating a tempest in a teapot. And if he’d had any sense at all, he’d have stayed a mile away from the place.” Max paused. “I wonder very much why he ran the risk.”

  “I did advise him that staying away was the best course.”

  “I suppose I should have tried to talk some sense into the man. But in fact I barely spoke with him. I thought there would be time…”

  “Every jam and jelly and berry in the place will all be analyzed now,” Cotton told him. “Along with all the fruitcake that predates the lord’s visit last fall.”

  “That wasn’t done before?” Max asked.

  “Would you really expect us to have the manpower for that?” Cotton asked. “It wasn’t murder before.”

  “Of course you’re right. I’m not sure even now you’ll find it feasible. There are berries and things strewn about all over the place, including in the guesthouse kitchen.” Max paused, considering. “All of that inventory will have to be destroyed.”

  “I know. Even though that’s not how he was murdered, that is where the whole thing started.”

  “It would be quite an effective way to wreck the place financially, wouldn’t you say?” Max asked.

  “Yes, I’ll be looking at that as a motive. It seems insane—that a group of nuns could arouse such animosity.”

  “Not the nuns themselves, perhaps, but what they represent. Religious fanaticism comes disguised in all sorts of ways. And unfortunately their very innocence makes them a tempting target for a certain type of person who sees such purity and wants to destroy it.”