A Fatal Winter (23 page)

Max decided that beneath the suave façade, the relaxed posture, and the jocular urbanity, Randolph was covering over a small case of nerves, perhaps even a mild state of shock. The recent occurrences would do that to anyone. Which was a good sign. Anyone not nervous under the circumstances would be a complete sociopath.

“You’re referring to Jocasta Jones?” Cotton asked him.

“None other. Although would I go so far as to call her an enter
tain
er, like Gwynyth?” He paused, as if to give the idea due reflection. “It’s a point of view, certainly. But on the whole, I rather think not. The word ‘performer’ suits Jocasta better.”

“Are you suggesting, sir, that she may not be entirely transparent when being questioned during our investigations?”

Randolph looked shocked at the idea. “Certainly not. I’m sure she wants this situation resolved as much as we all do. The whole thing is frightful—just doesn’t bear thinking about. I was merely saying that you will get a lot of fluffy, over-the-top drama mixed in with her version of events. And good luck to you sorting it all out. She seems to suffer more than ever from the personal delusion that the next phone call will be the one that restarts her career. She does this while failing to notice she never had much of a career to begin with, on the stage or in film.”

“I found her to be somewhat a brassy person, yes,” said Cotton mildly.

“I used to think her time in America had something to do with it,” said Randolph. “I was forgetting that Jocasta has
always
been like that. She is British by birth, of course, and brassiness like that cannot be learned, no matter how many years she’s been in the U.S. How long?” he answered the unspoken question. “Since she was in her late teens, so over thirty years. No, I’m afraid, that metallic sheen to her personality is an inborn trait. Jocasta has always been Jocasta.”

“I found her rather interesting,” put in Essex. “In bits.”

Randolph swiveled in his chair. It was as if a mouse had spoken and he wished to witness such a sight. Clearly he had forgotten the sergeant’s existence.

“Did you? How interesting. One never gets her in bits, though, does one? It’s the full course with Jocasta, or nothing. Wait—come to think of it, ‘nothing’ is not on the menu, either.”

“You almost sound,” put in Max, “as if you don’t know her that well. She is a first cousin, isn’t she?”

Randolph smiled, saying, “We grew up in different households, you see. I hardly knew her as a girl—of course we were all away at school. But now I must say it’s taken me no time at all to become fully aquainted. One always feels with Jocasta she might be better employed announcing the shoppers’ specials at the supermarket.” Randolph, when he chose to display it, had a wide, inviting smile that lit up his usual somewhat saturnine aspect and assured the listener his words were all in good fun. “She has a flamboyant acting method likened most frequently by those reaching for comparisons with Lassie fetching rescuers for little Timmy.”

“She acted in Hollywood films for a number of years, as I understand it.” This from Cotton.

“Yes, as I say, if we expand the definition of ‘acting’ to include all manner of wild gesticulations and weird grimacings. I forget how many years she has lived in Hollywood, or how she came to meet her toyboy of a husband, Simon. Jocasta isn’t due to bore us with any more of her memoirs until dinnertime. I could ask her then.”

Sergeant Essex was shocked but struggling not to show it. Her own cousins were numerous and varied, and misunderstandings were frequent—family reunions could be like bloodbaths with Bisto gravy instead of blood—but she’d never talk about them to outsiders the way this man was doing.

Cotton for his part was ready to move on, convinced he had extracted all the juice possible out of Randolph on the subject of Jocasta. It was undoubtedly true he didn’t know his cousin very well, and had simply formed bad opinions of her that he was now repeating. It hardly amounted to evidence.

“With regard to Lamorna Whitehall, sir. Your sister’s daughter was—”

Randolph interrupted. “Lea’s adopted daughter. That is correct.”

“What exactly happened to Lamorna’s parents?” Cotton asked.

Randolph replied, “Sadly, no one knows. My brother-in-law Leo was piloting a plane that vanished over the Alaskan bush. My sister was with him. Their bodies were never found. Todd Palin with a dogsled couldn’t find a downed plane in that territory. Nor could Sarah Palin, for that matter. Lamorna, who had been adopted to begin with, now officially became an orphan twice over. My mother took her in but seems to have regretted the burden. Lamorna wasn’t related by blood, and blood tells.”

Ouch
, thought Max. Aloud he said, “Who invited them all here for Christmas?”

Randolph swiveled his head ninety degrees to take in Max, who sat unobtrusively a few yards away. “Isn’t it,” he asked, turning back to Cotton, “isn’t it a bit unusual to have a Father Brown-style detective sitting in on all this?” He smiled at Max to take the edge off his words, but his mild irritation was plain. “It’s highly irregular, isn’t it?”

In truth, Cotton would have a difficult time explaining Max to any of his superiors who did not know Max, and who had not seen him in action. As with Hercule Poirot, so often at the epicenter of an investigation, one had to wonder what the little detective with the gray cells was actually
doing
there, telling Inspector Japp, or whoever it was, what to do.

But, different from both Father Brown and Poirot, Max was interested in both sin
and
crime. Which made him a potent, double-barreled investigative force. Cotton almost wanted to warn Randolph of the danger of underestimating him. He looked across the room at Max, who sat smiling beatifically, angels practically dancing on his shoulders. Cotton nearly laughed aloud.

Cotton slowly adjusted his tie, decided a white lie was in order, dusted with a bit of bluff. He said, “Father Max Tudor, because of special … insights and connections, has been seconded to the investigation. However, if you’ve an objection, here is the number for the station. Ask for Superintendent Penhallow. Sound man.”

Like he’ll care
, thought Cotton, still smiling the smile of the reasonable and friendly public servant, eager to offer his help to a grateful taxpayer.

It worked. Randolph subsided from a boil to a simmer.

“I won’t talk to him officially—the vicar—without your being present. I hope that is understood.”

Cotton knew it was his parting, final shot—the man didn’t seem to realize he had just agreed to that which he’d objected to in the first place: having Max in the room during the interview. Cotton was happy to oblige.

“Certainly, sir. Now, if you would answer Father Tudor’s question.”

“I couldn’t say. Oscar—Lord Footrustle—invited me, not my mother. I assumed because he was old and wanted to make amends. My mother was less happy about having everyone come over—especially ‘the Americans,’ Jocasta and Simon. Oscar did admit to me the other week that he treated his first wife shamefully, and ignored a daughter he disliked mainly because he grew to dislike her mother. He was getting old, that’s all. Remorse creeps up on us more the older we get—I suppose because there is more to regret with every passing year.”

“Did your mother try to influence her brother? Try to stop Jocasta from being invited?” Cotton hardly knew why he asked the question, but he was finding the family dynamics so strange he wanted to learn more.

“I only know Leticia, who knew what Jocasta was like, held her fire once Jocasta and the rest of them were here—for the most part. After all, my mother reasoned, maybe it was a chicken-or-egg situation and Jocasta couldn’t be held accountable for being, well, Jocasta. She might have turned out better with a more stable upbringing.”

“Your mother didn’t welcome having her own family near for the holidays? You, and your brother?”

Randolph smiled, shook his head, and said, “Only in a way. I asked Leticia once, ‘Don’t you feel the loneliness? The isolation?’ ‘It’s the price one pays for being discriminating,’ she replied. ‘There are fewer and fewer people of quality around these days.’ That was my mother, to the core.”

There was a pattering sound as Sergeant Essex tapped her biro against her notebook, looked at Randolph, and seemed to be thinking,
This
apple didn’t fall too far from the family tree.

“Yes, I know what you must be thinking,” said Randolph, in that voice of calm urbanity that seemed to be his trademark. Thus would he coax the reluctant portrait sitter to loosen up, to relax, to regard the camera as his friend. “I loved her dearly but she was a dying breed, to be sure.”

Interesting choice of words, thought Max.

“
And
I had the highest respect for my uncle. The loss to all of us is incalculable.”

Max acknowledged the customary expressions of loss with a solemn nod. “Did you see your mother on the morning of her death?” Max asked him.

“Only in passing. She was coming down a corridor of the castle, on her way to the garden hothouse.”

“Coming from her own room?”

Randolph hesitated. It was barely perceptible, but the missing beat was there. “Now you mention it, no. She was coming from Cilla’s room. That’s Cilla Petrie, my assistant.”

“Oh? Were the two women particularly close or friendly?”

Randolph nodded, as if the unlikelihood of this was something he’d already thought of. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he couldn’t bear not to be the one first to think of something.

“They weren’t close,” he said. “I am not certain you could say they were friendly. But they weren’t hostile to each other, insofar as I’m aware.”

Again the cool manner. He crossed one leg over the other, pausing to straighten the knife-edge crease of his trousers. He had the air of someone being interviewed for television. Of course, thought Max. He was used to the business of posing—of getting others to pose. Max supposed some of that technique must rub off on the coach, as it were.

“But why,” asked Max mildly, “would she go to Cilla’s room? Surely that was the sort of cozy informality that was foreign to your mother?”

It was clear Randolph regretted having brought up the whole topic. He said, with an air of ill grace and condescension that had Sergeant Essex itching to throw something heavy at him, “If you must know, she wanted to reassure herself that my relationship with my assistant was nothing more than that of employer to employee. She’d gotten a bee in her bonnet that I was going to taint the family bloodline by marrying a commoner.”

“Were you?” asked Cotton. Max noticed that Cotton’s own tone had changed, becoming noticeably more upper class, as if he were trying to out-suave Randolph by putting on a home-counties twang. “Planning to marry Ms. Petrie? We would of course treat that information as confidential, if so, unless it proves relevant to the investigation.”

This earned him a well-bred sneer.

“Of course not,” Randolph said. “Haven’t I just explained? If I do remarry, which is not bloody likely, I shall marry someone of my own class.”

Sergeant Essex wrote this sentiment down, word for word.
Lucky girl.

*   *   *

“I wouldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw him,” said Sergeant Essex to the closed door. “Too smarmy by half. ‘If I do remarry, I shall marry someone of my own class.’ Right. Did you believe him, sir?”

“Do I believe he had a great fondness for either of his elders and betters, now sadly lost to him?” asked Cotton. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. I think he protests too much. But I don’t think he’s alone in that. There’s a good chance he’s our man but it’s early days, early days.”

Essex seized on that “our.” She seized, in fact, on any sign that she was an equal partner in any investigation. Tough, smart, and capable, Essex was also easily flattered at being included or treated as an equal by the men—years on the force, which remained macho to its core, had rather worn down her starry-eyed initial expectations of a bias-free experience. She hated herself for it but she knew in some corner of her mind she was seeking their regard and approval. The hand that rocked the cradle might rule the world but the hand that wrote the evaluations determined the pay level, and for the most part that hand still had rough cuticles and dark hair growing on its knuckles.

Even though DCI Cotton in his dealings with his subordinates was scrupulously fair—blind for the most part to sex, race, or color—she was well aware that Cotton was the exception that proved the rule.

None of her thinking showed in her expression now. She nodded curtly and flipped over a page in her notebook. She sat with biro poised, her small back ramrod straight.

“What did you think?” Cotton asked Max.

“Suave. Cordial. Intelligent, to a point.”

“You didn’t like him, either.”

“Not really. No.”

“Where to next?”

“I think Lester Baynard, Randolph’s younger brother, is worth a closer look,” said Max.

“So do I,” said Cotton. He sent Sergeant Essex on another exploratory mission.

“This may take awhile,” she told them as she left. “This place is as big as the National Portrait Gallery.”

“And with as many paintings,” said Max.

CHAPTER 15

… And the Spare

The two men chatted as they waited for Sergeant Essex’s return.

“I don’t know a blind thing about the travails of the upper classes. Or the lack of travails, as it were,” said Cotton. Max, a diplomat’s son, had some secondhand knowledge, but couldn’t claim to be an expert. He told Cotton so.

“Still, you’re a better authority than I am,” said Cotton. “What I get from the situation is that essentially the younger son is, well, stuffed, in terms of titles and so forth. Although I gather that the title on the Baynard side of things is a hollow honor—Randolph and Lester’s father, that would be the Tenth Earl of Gravening, ran through the money needed for the upkeep of the estate. Of course the daughters of these families are valued more for the price they might fetch in marriage—their ability to catch a grand title.”