A Fatal Winter (40 page)

“Only the police, so far as I know. Cotton and Essex. The place is swarming, as you’re aware. A veritable hive of activity.”

Briskly she moved past him. She stood before the fire, warming her hands. She turned to him, those shining eyes drawing him closer. “They’ve cleared the roads at last, or I couldn’t have made it,” she told him. “I call that miraculous. Farther inland the snows have been historic.”

She took a seat on the sofa before the fire and motioned him next to her.

“Tell me, now,” she said. “Why poor Lamorna?”

He sat and turned to face her. “There’s a reason, however mad it may seem.” He noticed that she perceptibly shuddered on the word. “You know the kind of life she led here. It seems to have given her an odd … tendency. A ‘need to know’ that was probably a clinical-grade snoopiness, if you will. Knowledge being power, she went around gathering whatever dribs and drabs of information she could. Somehow this rabid curiosity got mixed up in her mind with an odd religiosity, and the idea that she could protect the status quo by holding whatever she knew over the head of the killer. She simply wanted to be allowed to live on here, protected from the outside world. Not too surprisingly, it led to her death.”

Max scrubbed with the palm of one hand at the day’s growth of dark beard on his face. He’d forgotten to shave, distracted.

Devastated, was the word. Another death he should have prevented and could not. If only he’d been fast enough, made the connections …

“She was the scapegoat,” he said. “The sacrifice. Anyone could see that. I knew that. I should have—”

“‘Should have’?” picked up Awena. “‘Should have’? What kind of rule book are we playing by here? The Omniscient Max Tudor-Slash-Superman Regulations?”

Max, suddenly swamped by memories of Paul, of the friend and comrade whose death he could have prevented, found himself with jaws working but unable to answer her. She laid a hand on his arm, the simple compassion plain on her face, in the clarity of those remarkable eyes.

Max was so much the imperturbable one she touched him as much to be sure the Max she was used to was still there. He, now completely undone by her kindness and wanting to hide as the tears sprang from nowhere, his face contorted in a mask of pain and bleak regret, covered his eyes with one hand. Drawing her to him, he rested his head against her neck. The contact, never sexual in intent, nonetheless acted as a charge, completing a circuit, bridging them together. Max leaned against the one person he knew with certainty would both be strong enough to catch him yet never betray or judge his weakness—or even see this collapse as a weakness.

They sat together a long time, her small white hand splayed across his back, able to feel his strong heart beat, until his breathing finally began to calm. He lifted his head.

“Sor—” he began.

“If you say you’re sorry I shall jump up and down and run about the room screaming. I may knock over lamps and throw things out windows. Now, when is the last time you saw Lamorna alive?”

The brisk return to common sense and the need to focus on bringing Lamorna and Oscar’s killer to justice galvanized him, as Awena had known it would. There was work to be done. Max’s training and his very nature came into play.

He talked for some time, and she listened. Listened to the half-formed theories. To his questions about things that had happened. And most particularly, to his question about the one thing that should have happened, but had not.

Awena had again that faraway look in her eyes, eyes that suggested a mariner scanning the horizon. It was a look that belied her lively and active participation in the world, her awareness of every moment. She hung on his words, but in the end confessed she could make no connections he had not made himself.

Finally Max said, “Tell me again about your visit to the castle that day to see Leticia.”

Awena, looking confused by the request, struggled to comply.

“Really, there was nothing to it,” she concluded. “I was here perhaps half an hour, not more. The shallow soil and the nearby sea presented some particular challenges for growing herbs, and I advised her on that. She offered me tea which I refused, and then I left. The bees chased me out, rather. They were a complete menace that day—that summer, really. I told you this.”

Max’s eyes in the shadowy room grew dark, his expression distracted.

Awena leaned back, resting comfortably in the cradle of his arms. She examined his face like a buyer looking for flaws, her hands in his. After a very long while she smiled, and stood.

*   *   *

Awena had left, taking Max’s heart with her.

Max escorted her to the car park and saw her drive safely down the road that would take her back to Monkslip-super-Mare and from there on to Nether Monkslip. She drove a car of robin’s egg blue that looked like it ran on AA batteries. It had a
COEXIST
sticker on the back bumper, each letter represented by a symbol for a different religion. Max laughed aloud.

And Cotton watched their good-byes from an upper window, a broad smile on his face.

Max walked slowly back into the castle. A few answers to a few more questions, a very few, and he knew he’d have the solution to the case.

But his thoughts now sprang wide, free to roam in larger, uncharted territory, considering that nearly all the matter of the universe consisted of dark energy and dark matter. Everything mankind knew or believed had to be taken on the blind faith of the heart.

No different from falling in love, Max imagined. Exactly the same.

Whether a woman who followed neopagan beliefs could be considered suitable company for an Anglican priest was very, very much open to question. To him, it didn’t matter. Awena had a depth of spirituality and connectedness to things divine beyond anything he had ever encountered in his life. The official Church might not—almost certainly would not—understand.

It might end with his having to leave the priesthood, and he knew unhesitatingly that was a risk he’d accept.

He supposed he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

CHAPTER 30

Heard in High Places

When Max awoke the next day, it was with the uneasy sense that in his dreams he had been running, charging after some creature, man or beast, so fleet of foot—or hoof—that it had already turned the next corner just as he arrived there.

Lord Footrustle’s murder had clearly been at the hands of a quick, ruthless killer of unshakable nerve. A single deep thrust of the knife, no hesitation, followed up by other, dispassionate thrusts to ensure the kill. A clean killing, if any murder could be thus described. The killing of Lamorna was something else. It had an aura of ruthlessness,
and
of desperation. Clearly she was in the way. Possibly a witness. And she had been dispatched, apparently without hesitation. Their killer was without conscience, acting on instinct. “Wait and do nothing,” as is often wise in a hostage situation, wasn’t an option here. At least not for long, with the trail growing colder by the minute. Soon, Cotton would have to let the suspects go.

Max reminded himself that only in the abstract was evil frightening. It was the banality of evil, evil when met face-to-face, that was surprising. And that very banality reduced it to a form that could be conquered.

He elbowed a sweater over his head, tightened the bandage around his ankle until he felt he could walk without the crutch, if carefully, and headed downstairs for breakfast.

*   *   *

Breakfast was set out by the Vladimirovs, again in a buffet arrangement that allowed everyone to choose and settle as they wished. Max noticed the twins taking plates loaded with fruit, bread, and cheese up the stairs either to their rooms or to the drawing room. No one tried to stop them. Indeed, no one seemed to notice them at all, least of all their mother, who apparently subsisted on dry Ryvita and coffee. She smiled wanly at Max when he wished her a good morning.

Max took in the expanse of the Hall and saw Felberta sitting near the fireplace. Today she was wearing an enormous necklace that might have belonged to the chieftainess of a minor Māori tribe. He smiled at her but settled with his poached egg and baked beans at the dining room table.

Cilla came into the room. Today she was in black jean leggings that looked impossible to walk in, let alone sit in—a covering that emphasized the spidery thinness of her legs. Ugg boots had replaced the usual high heels, boots suitable for mushing on the Iditarod. A coiling tumble of dark brown hair, literally her crowning glory, fell about her shoulders.

She was looking at a message on her mobile phone and suddenly emitted a joyful bark of laughter. Max looked up, wondering to himself what had made her laugh, particularly under the circumstances. She turned the screen so Max could see a message sent by someone clearly inept at the art of text messaging. It was a message full of typos, the sender seeming like a foreigner with an incomplete and faulty grasp of the English language. It read, in part: “come form xmas. Moist welcome.”

“My aunt,” she said. “All thumbs.”

It suddenly made him think of the mobile carried on the train by another elderly woman, Leticia. She had said the twins had programmed the phone for her, hadn’t she?

Was it important? He rather thought it was.

“Did you happen to see where the twins were headed when they left here?” he asked Cilla.

She shook her head. “Try the drawing room. They like to cave-dwell in there when the oldies are otherwise occupied.”

*   *   *

Max walked up to Leticia’s “withdrawing room” and peeked in. The twins were there reading, curled up like puppies on the sofa. Alec looked up at him, heavy-lidded. After nodding hello, he returned his eyes to his page.

“Could I have a word, Alec?”

His reluctance clear, Alec marked his place in his book and followed Max out to the hallway.

“I need to know what you’ve been doing up on the roof.” Seeing Alec’s face, and heading him off at the pass, Max added, “You’re not in any trouble. In fact, you could be crucial to solving the case.”

“Really?”

“Truly.”

“But … how did you know?”

“I saw you coming downstairs, dressed for the weather in a coat and scarf. I wondered why you would be indoors but bundled up for the wind and snow. If you’d been headed upstairs from the garden, it would have made sense, but you weren’t. Still, you had to be coming from
out
side, which could only mean you were coming from the roof. So, what exactly were you doing up there at all hours?”

In unconscious imitation of his cousin Randolph, Alec ran his fingers through his thick shock of hair to get it out of his eyes.

“It’s a bit embarrassing.”

“I’m sure. But I don’t shock easily and I’m certain you’ll live.”

“It was Amanda who figured it out. She thinks she wants to write detective stories one day, you know, and she is good at noticing things.”

“Go on.”

“Well. To wire a castle, you have to run the wires up to the roof inside a pipe or tube that runs along the outside of the castle—have you noticed those?”

Max nodded. “I noticed them when I first arrived. For esthetic reasons the wires must be hidden as best as can be, and made to blend in somehow with the stone walls. Then they bring the power into a junction box that routes the electricity through the building. They use the roof because the stone is thinnest there, and they drill a hole through, or lift the slates.”

“How did you know all that?”

“I’m a history buff and I’ve visited a lot of castles.” And had pretended to be a stonemason during one MI5 case where he was keeping an eye on a nob with mob connections, he could have added. “But that doesn’t explain what you were doing up there.”

“Well, that’s where it gets a bit, um…”

“Difficult to explain? Try me.”

“You can listen in from up there, you see. We discovered it one day by accident. Well, we weren’t half bored here, were we? There’s nothing to do. You can also talk to someone through the pipes, depending on what room the other person’s in. It’s really sort of cool.”

“Ah. And what can you hear?”

“I heard something that didn’t make a lot of sense. It sounded like a man and woman, and they were arguing. But I couldn’t tell what room it was coming from—I think it must have been the Great Hall, so it could have been any of them arguing. Even with the app it was hard to hear clearly—I had trouble with the squelch control.”

“Wait a minute. What app?”

“A sound amplifier app I downloaded for my mobile.” The “of course” was unspoken but his opinion of the inherent dimness of adults was evident. “‘App’ is short for ‘application,’” Alec added helpfully, in case Max was simply too senile to comprehend this difficult point.

Max looked at him. The poem about fog coming in on little cat feet came into Max’s mind, making him smile. Alec had a great career as a cat burglar ahead of him. Or a spy for Her Majesty’s Government.

“I do know what an app is, thank you. So, what was it you heard?”

Alec had kept a lot to himself, having learned early that knowledge sometimes needed to be hoarded for safety’s sake. Somehow it was a relief to tell Max, if it might help. Alec had had no great use for Lamorna but she didn’t deserve to die like that.

“It wasn’t much,” he said apologetically. “Two voices, a man and woman talking—and I wondered, who was the woman? Because they were quarreling, arguing, and the couples around here don’t quarrel—not with
each other.
Not since my parents divorced has there been a ruckus like that … and of course, my father, he’s gone now.” His expression closed down for a moment, then he visibly shook off the melancholy and said, “Lester and Fester are thick as thieves, always. It couldn’t have been them unless they’re great actors otherwise. I could hear phrases like, ‘It was all your brilliant idea’ and ‘So what are we to do about Father Brown being in our midst?’ Then, ‘Quit showing off in front of him. You’re overplaying your hand!’—that part was really loud. Then a door slammed and I couldn’t really hear much more. I think someone turned on the telly then somewhere—or more likely was watching something on a laptop. My father discouraged the telly whenever he could.”