Wicked Autumn (11 page)

Cotton gave him a thoughtful look. “That’s what the local doctor thinks, too—Suzanna’s brother, as it happens. Serious reservations, he has. He won’t issue a death certificate and has kicked it over to our man in Monkslip-super-Mare.”

Max thought solemnly of the marks on Wanda’s wrists. There really hadn’t been an alternate explanation for those that made sense.

DCI Cotton had rested as long as it seemed he was capable. Now he jumped up and began surveying the contents of Max’s bookshelves. He didn’t pick any up for a closer perusal, for which Max could hardly blame him.
The Collected Sermons of Josiah Pentworthy, D.D, 1630-1689
hardly made for riveting reading, even in its heyday.

“Did
no one
see her, notice her movements?” asked Max of Cotton’s back. “Not see her walking toward the Village Hall? It seems impossible…”

Cotton spun round, in nearly a Fred Astaire movement.

“We’ll be asking everyone that, of course. I’ll be sending my uniforms round house to house with pro formas to catalog everyone’s whereabouts. It all takes time.”

“Door-to-door inquiries. The village will never be the same.” Max sighed at the thought of it. There would be those villagers who were horrified, and those who were titillated by the attention and excitement. But no matter what the individual reaction, the smooth, placid surface of the village had been ruffled and might never again be
un
ruffled.

“Everyone was at the Fayre, or so it seemed,” said Max, drawing out the words as he pictured in his mind the colorful, Bruegel-like scene. “I don’t think you can see the Village Hall from the grounds of the Abbey Ruins, or from Abbot’s Lodge.”

“That’s not going to help much when it comes to eyewitnesses.”

“I know.”

“And there were so many of them in attendance.”

“I know.”

“Including people from outside the village—whoever they were.”

Ordinarily, especially at that time of day, shop owners and other people with jobs and obligations would easily be accounted for, Max reflected. Although, unless they went out for a pub lunch, that wasn’t strictly true. They could be up to almost anything—especially, in the case of shop owners, if they put a discreet little sign on the front door of their shop:
BACK IN 1 HOUR
.

Bother.

He suddenly realized that in his thinking he’d placed himself squarely on DCI Cotton’s team. Well, that was fine; this matter needed to be cleared up, and quickly. Festering suspicion could only harm the village, the longer the uncertainty went on.
His
village, as he thought of it.

Both men gazed at the fireplace in mutual frustration, as if the answers would somehow leap out of the crackling flames. Rain had begun to make a faint thudding sound as it struck the roof, echoing hollowly through the chimney into the room below.

“Do you know,” Max said aloud, himself echoing the observation of most of the villagers, “I don’t think we’ve ever had a murder in Nether Monkslip. Not to my knowledge.”

“I can imagine,” said Cotton. “It looks the sort of place where only officially sanctioned killing might have happened, and that, centuries ago. The odd hanging for sheep theft and so on.”

He paused, flipping through his notebook, and Max suddenly thought of Nunswood, of the murder said to have taken place up on Hawk Crest centuries before. He hadn’t thought of that in years. It was probably just a baseless legend anyway, retrieved and embellished by Frank for his book.

“There’s nothing you can tell us?” Cotton was asking him. “The slightest memory of the smallest thing can sometimes be important.”

“I can only tell you,” Max said, as he combed slowly through his memory, visualizing the scene as he’d been trained for so many years to do, “that the last people I saw before setting out to retrieve the tea from the Village Hall were Awena Owen—the woman who owns Goddessspell—and her assistant, Tara Raine. But that means nothing, of course, because I can’t say where they were all morning. Where anyone was all the morning. Musteile was by the marquee, and Guy Nicholls emerging from it. Again, that means nothing.”

Cotton nodded in agreement.

“You say someone heard a commotion. I wonder if she yelled, ‘Unhand me, you villain,’ or something like that,” said Max, after a pause. “I must say, Wanda strikes me as the kind of woman who would say something old-fashioned like ‘Unhand me.’ Perhaps someone heard her say a name—or say
something
that would help us.”

Cotton said, “Far too much noise, and far too far away. Taking everyone at their word, they were at the Fayre and the village proper was a ghost town.”

“Except for Wanda and whoever was with her. And taking everyone at their word.”

Cotton said, “There’s a dustbin in a little alley behind the Village Hall. Nothing found there that shouldn’t be there, as far as we know now. Nothing found in the alley, at least, so far. But we don’t know what to look for—if anything.”

He was bouncing now on the balls of his feet. It was not unlike having a puppy in the room. Thea, perhaps sensing this, was nowhere to be seen, Max suddenly realized.

Cotton was in fact so animated Max thought he could see the thrumming of the man’s heart beating in his chest. Then he realized it was his mobile phone.

“Excuse me,” said Cotton, as he fumbled the instrument out of his pocket. He saw who it was from and briefly turned his back, muttering something curt and official-sounding into the receiver.

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.