Wicked Autumn (27 page)

Max gained the strong impression that wardrobe for the occasion had been given a great deal of thought by many of the women apart from Suzanna. Awena Owen was resplendent in a dove gray robe accented with amber at her ears, wrists, and throat; on her feet were embroidered slippers with small, transparent heels. Tara Raine sat beside her, looking transcendental in a dress of dark saffron and a short netted veil springing from a black bow atop her head. Elka Garth had put aside her usual workaday, flour-dusted clothes and found an old dress for the occasion; it might have been a dress better suited for a tea party on the lawn, but Elka, judging by her expression, felt her presence at the service was sacrifice of time enough. Miss Pitchford wore a deep lavender suit, the matching plumed hat tilted at a rakish angle over one eye. Lily Iverson was dressed somewhat festively in a knitted navy blue suit embroidered at the neckline with bluebells and cherries. Mrs. Hooser, having left the children with a sitter, wore a confection of beige lace that Max knew had been purchased for the recent wedding of a cousin. He supposed it was as well she had not been the bridesmaid, or something even more clingy and inappropriate might have made an appearance.

Max also spotted Guy Nicholls, and Frank and Lucie Cuthbert, but it was hard to see everyone in such a crowd, and some were half hidden behind the church pillars.

However, the young man and woman sitting by the dark-suited Major in a front pew were impossible to miss. The word that best summed up the young man was trendy: he wore glasses with rectangular lenses and thick frames, and sported a soul-patch beard. The eyes behind the glasses, however, were rimmed red as if he had been crying earlier. His dark hair, slicked back, accentuated the square angle of his jaw, although the child he once had been still shone clear on his face. This had to be Jasper, the son of Wanda and the Major. Many, unabashed, turned fully round in their seats for a better view when he walked in, late, to join his father.

There was a sardonic cast to the young man’s features, despite the red eyes. Max repressed the instant doubt that rose within him, knowing that prejudging never created anything but obstacles. Perhaps the fact that this was his first sighting of the young man was an irritant in itself—surely he could have arrived days earlier? He feared Jasper might be a supercilious little snit, given normal circumstances. A Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead—spoiled, but lacking the charm that had saved that fictional character, at least for a while. Now he simply looked awkward and out of place—probably, at his age, unused to funerals, and looking very much as if he wished to be elsewhere, a not-uncommon and understandable reaction.

Next to him and holding his hand sat a wisp of a girl with stringy blond hair that looked as if it had been randomly glue-gunned to her scalp. This must be the girlfriend with the unusual name. Clementia. The one on whom the Major had pinned his hopes of being able to settle his footloose son down at last.

Clementia looked to be as different from Wanda as could be imagined, and perhaps that was the attraction. But the pair seemed somehow ill-suited, and Max wondered if it would last.

*   *   *

As he intoned the age-old words from the Book of Common Prayer, he had the illusion of his congregation caught in a freeze-frame. There was Mrs. Hooser, pulling surreptitiously at a bra strap. And Clementia, trying to look grief-stricken or at least interested in the proceedings, but succeeding only in looking bewildered; Clementia was, he decided, possibly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Frank Cuthbert, scribbling a note onto his hand, and probably hoping there would be a few stiff rounds in the Hidden Fox afterwards. In the midst of life …

Suzanna was thinking: The flowers are all wrong. Too jammed together in the vase. I’ve never liked mums, anyway. They remind me of funerals—that mothbally smell. Of course, this
is
a funeral, but still …

Awena thought: White chrysanthemums. They stand for truth and honesty. I wonder whose idea
that
was? Well, Wanda was nothing if not truthful, even if it was like being hit over the head with a claw hammer.

Elka thought: I shouldn’t have come. I feel like a fraud. A hypocrite.

Lily thought: Is it warm in here? I’m going to faint. I know I’m going to faint … I hated her so, but now …

Max thought: How quickly and easily I fell back into my old role of investigator—just when I thought my life had changed, that
I
had changed. Now, instead of trying to empathize and comfort, I’m looking at all of them for flaws, second-guessing them, viewing everyone as a suspect.

Suzanna leaned over to her brother and whispered, loud enough for Max to hear, “Did you see his face?” Dr. Winship nodded. “I’m thinking: Banquo’s ghost.”

They rose to sing “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” Again, without Wanda’s strong voice to carry the congregation, the song meandered. For the first time some were moved to realize the gap her passing had left.

Then Awena got up to say a few words. She had offered to speak because no one else was willing or able to find a few empathetic words for the deceased, and Wanda’s husband and son had declined to do so. She spoke with moving generosity and forgiveness of Wanda, transforming her faults, in death, into virtues. It was a virtuoso performance.

Max was in the middle of his sermon—on the words “life beyond death”—when he heard, following a faint gasp, the most amazing
thunk!
as of something fallen onto the floor from overhead. He turned and saw Lydia, the young acolyte, fallen into a heap of cotton robe just behind him and to his left. She had dropped sideways—fainted dead away. He gestured to Mr. Stackpole to go to her aid, and, distracted, tried to continue. The parishioners all twisted their heads toward the disturbance like a flock of turkeys.

The acoustics of the church were excellent, and Max could hear someone whisper, “Happens every summer.”

But it wasn’t summer.

Several people ran to scoop up the fallen Lydia, and Max returned to what he could remember of his prepared remarks.

*   *   *

At the end of the service, he thought,
Go with God, Wanda.
Then he surprised himself by adding, in a sudden rush of anger,
I’ll find whoever did this to you.

For he had a sense just then of a shadowy figure out there, in the congregation, gloating, remorseless. And the thought made him livid. No one should be allowed to get away with such a sneaky crime. The jury could return all the open verdicts it wished. This was murder.

He wasn’t sure he subscribed to Dr. Winship’s view that a killer, having once killed, would find it easier to kill again, like someone on a slimming regime being increasingly unable to resist the fried potatoes. What was it he had said? That a murder prompted by hatred was likely to be repeated? Surely, in most cases, murder would only become
harder
to commit—the killer burdened with a sense of pressing his or her own luck in getting away with it even once. But here he realized he was thinking of the more “intelligent” breed of killer, not the professional thug who had too often been his quarry during his days in MI5.

So Max was at the moment less interested in preventing another crime than possessed by the creeping, disagreeable sensation of a killer out there exulting in his or her cleverness—
that
he couldn’t abide.

But what if, after all, Winship were right?

He came to himself with a start. His parishioners all gazed up at him from their pews like obedient children, expectant, trusting, mildly concerned that their normally dynamic pastor stood before them blank and unmoving. Favoring them with a weak, apologetic smile, he pulled himself together and said the words of dismissal. The organist struck up “I Vow to Thee My Country” (a special request of the Major’s), and the church began to empty.

CHAPTER 25

After the Funeral

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”

Max stood at graveside in the St. Edwold’s churchyard, intoning the words intended to bring Wanda to peace at last, and to bring some comfort to the Major, who truly looked to be close to a nervous breakdown. All trace of the hearty, inane bluster that was his signature trait was gone, subsumed by a stark, whey-faced despair. Jasper Batton-Smythe did not look as if he would be much of a prop to his father in the coming days; distracted, he was all but checking his watch as the lengthy service wound on. It might be just as well, thought Max, if Jasper returned to his peripatetic life as soon as decently possible—if not before …

“… earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

He spoke the familiar words, tossing earth upon the casket, his mind in two places …

“… this thy servant, whom thou hast delivered from the miseries of this wretched world…”

Why did the acolyte faint?

“… in the place where there is no weeping, sorrow, nor heaviness…”

Why did Lydia faint?
Max’s mind kept returning to the question. Although it was close inside the church, it wasn’t summer, when the trapped and stifling heat could make the young and old drop like flies. Nor, although the weather had taken a sudden plunge in temperature, was the church overheated against the chill—given the age of the heating apparatus, there was fat chance of that ever happening.

He concluded the burial service and left the body in the care of the gravedigger. The crowd of mourners began to disperse—Elka Garth had organized an informal wake at the Cavalier. Max went over and spoke a few words to the Major, who nodded, clearly not hearing. Max turned to Jasper and said, “Your father needs tea, hot sweetened tea, and lots of it. Probably something to eat as well, if you can talk him into it.” But Max had little hope that Jasper had taken in the seriousness of his father’s condition, or cared overmuch. He still seemed mentally to be checking his watch—more so now that the service had concluded and freedom beckoned. It was an impression confirmed by his next words: “Actually, I’ll be leaving soon,” he said, adjusting his glasses. The jewelry that adorned his hands and wrists gave off an expensive, platinum glitter. “Obligations elsewhere, you know. Plane to catch. So…” Just then, a young man approached him, and Jasper, barely bothering to hide the rudeness of the act, turned away, brushing past to speak with another mourner. The choice of this mourner seemed to Max entirely arbitrary, the person randomly glommed onto. Incidentally, this sudden move left Jasper’s friend, Clementia, rather at a loose end as well.

Max was wondering what to do. He hadn’t planned on going to the Cavalier, but someone needed to stay with the Major. Clementia didn’t look responsible enough for anyone to leave a cat in her care. Fortunately, Lily Iverson had overheard the exchange.

“I’ll take care of it, Max,” Lily said, at his elbow. She took the Major by the arm and murmured something inaudible but soothing as she led him away.

Max, meeting her eye, nodded his thanks and set off to change in the vestry, planning to go and make sure Lydia was all right. He had taken only a few steps when a tap on his shoulder waylaid him. He turned and saw a sturdy, well-built man, perhaps in his thirties, tanned and good-looking, if beginning to run to a slight paunch. He had an open, honest countenance that could be the sign of an easy conscience, or of a born con artist. It was the young man who had just now tried to capture Jasper’s attention and been brushed aside.

“Father,” he said, holding out a hand, “my name is Lawrence Hawker—Larry. I wonder if I could have a word?”

“Really, I’m in…” Max started to make an excuse, but he was caught up by the name. Where had he recently heard it before? He allowed himself to be sidetracked: Lydia was undoubtedly safe at home now with her mother; a few minutes more wouldn’t matter.

“Miss Pitchford,” Max said, with the air of a man having solved a difficult puzzle. “You were one of her pupils. She mentioned you the other day.”

“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…”