Wicked Autumn (16 page)

He spotted the photos on a sideboard tucked toward the back of the room. Max interrupted his task to walk over for a closer look. There was one recognizably of Wanda standing with the Major, she holding a small baby as her husband looked on, an expression of proud astonishment on his face. Max was himself astonished to see how lovely Wanda had been, before lines of dissatisfaction had etched themselves into her face. There was a more recent photo of two more elderly people—grandparents on one side or the other, more than likely. A picture taken at the seaside, with the Major looking fit and youthful and holding a small boy by the hand. A photo of what must be the son in his teenage years revealed him to be the spit of his father, albeit two stone lighter, and with an extra inch of dark rather than white at the hairline. The same dark eyes with perhaps a whit more of resolve in them gazed out of the photo, and presumably the boy’s complexion was pale rather than gray (it was a black-and-white photo). Any resemblance to Wanda was not in evidence.

“I’ve forgotten the sugar,” Max told the Major. This wasn’t true, he had forgotten it on purpose, but he wanted a chance to inspect the room unobserved. Dutifully, the Major trotted out on this specious errand.

Max looked at some of the photos more closely, then looked about him, taking in the dull and utterly respectable décor. The only touches of reckless gaiety were a hammered-brass table and a matching pair of Japanese courtesan vases that had been converted into lamps. Both had no doubt been picked up during Wanda’s travels as an officer’s wife. The rest of the room was of a Laura-Ashleyish theme of prints and patterns of coordinating colors and contrasting patterns, a style so irredeemably British as to be impossible to eradicate from the Jungian collective design unconscious. Stretched across the width of the room was a blowsy, chintzy sofa for which it looked a thousand rosebushes might have been sacrificed. A surprising touch were several original oil paintings, accomplished and abstract in execution, and drawn from a bold palette. The colors clashed badly, however, with the already overheated color scheme.

Little upholstered stools and varnished tables were scattered about, cruel traps for the unwary, and Max had threaded his way carefully through them with the tray to reach the florid haven of the sofa. Becalmed before this sofa was a reddish brown, kidney-shaped table of fifties vintage and stupendous awfulness. Everything was scrupulously clean and neat, however, or had clearly been so in the time of Wanda’s reign. But it was a cleanliness that was dispiriting rather than comforting or peaceful. It smacked of rules and rigidity, and, for all the Major’s military background, it must have been rather a trial to live with. Or perhaps, Max reflected, he was merely extrapolating from what he knew of Wanda’s character.

Near the sideboard were vintage stereo equipment and a collection of records. Max noticed the musical choices, which consisted, in part, of romantic hits of the halcyon days of the Batton-Smythes: “Turn the radio up for that sweet sound. Hold me close, never let me go…”

Not what he would have expected. What he would have expected he could not have said. John Philip Sousa marching music, or opera hits of the uber-bombastic type, perhaps.

The curtains were a focal point, and were of a fulsome wine red velveteen looped and draped and tied back with gilt-edged rope, a fitting frame for a production of
Figaro
more than for the normally mundane comings and going of the Nether Monkslip villagers. Max noted, however, how well situated was the window for anyone with more than a glancing interest in her neighbors’ doings, and somewhat revised his opinion as to the appropriateness of the curtains. All the world was indeed a stage and Wanda had had a front-row seat.

The Major returned. He’d put some sugar in a coffee mug with a large tablespoon to ladle it out. Finding the sugar bowl was apparently beyond his capacity. Holding the mug, he gestured vaguely toward the window. “I haven’t ventured out much. No one out there seems to understand.”

Max nodded, sure that was true. The room was uncomfortably warm—heat from a gas fire mingled with the sun streaming in from the window. African violets would have thrived here. The Major didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was at the age where too much heat was welcome for aching joints. What was he?—over sixty, surely. Maybe sixty-five. Forever “the Major,” a higher rank having escaped him due to a stunning ineptitude not quite amounting to treason, although it had been a very close thing. At least, so Max had been given to understand. The people in charge had put him in administrative positions of increasingly lessening responsibility where, it was hoped, he could do only quiet harm. To Max, the Major seemed an innocuous man, to be found contentedly puttering in his garden, deferential to his wife (but then, like so many villagers, it seemed, having no choice in the matter).

He had served on the parish council, which is how Max had met him, but without distinction other than having the punctuality of Big Ben and near-perfect attendance. His fellows on the council treated his contributions with a mild contempt at which he seemed to take no offense. Max wondered if this was because he received worse at home, and so was used to worse. An unimaginative man, requiring orders to get through the day. And hadn’t he married the perfect woman for that?

Because of a temporary defection of the Batton-Smythes to the church in Monkslip-super-Mare (Wanda preferred her church high), Max didn’t feel he knew the Major all that well, however. There had been a certain awkwardness—on their side—following their defection and return. Not shamefacedness (Wanda was too brazen for that) but a sense that they’d been caught out in foolishness. Max, for his part, didn’t care, except that it now left him feeling ill-equipped to cope with the Major in his grief.

He looked at the Major closely, guiltily, having spent much of his pastoral time until this point trying to avoid him.

Apart from the red nose that could light London, which was perhaps his most prominent feature, everything about the Major otherwise suggested a man bleached of character into a bland uniformity, whether because of his military duty or marriage to Wanda, Max could not have said. His other distinctive characteristic was a walrus mustache designed for twirling, each hair neatly marshaled into line. It was an embellishment of such luxuriant, glossy precision one could not help but be reminded of the famed little Belgian detective. His bushy white eyebrows normally were shellacked to within an inch of their lives into a roguish updo. As a result he perpetually looked happy and smiling, as if someone had just handed him a prize. Today, however, the mustache drooped and the eyebrows, freed of their usual constraint, veered wildly off in all directions.

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.