A Fatal Winter (43 page)

“Then there were some misleading statements made about how you all came to be here,” said Max. “Those were less serious lies. But for one of you to gin up a fake e-mail—you, Lester—that might have been over the top.”

“I did not.”

“You were the only one to receive such a message. It is inconceivable that Oscar would single you out for special treatment like that. If anyone got such a message, it would have been Randolph.” Lester began reasserting his denial, and Max interrupted him: “Remember, that sort of thing is traceable.”

“I didn’t want to seem like a party crasher,” Lester finally muttered. “That’s all.”

“For me the question remains,” said Max, “of why he invited
any
of you here—especially since it led to his murder. I think Oscar wanted to get a sense of you, to decide once and for all on the disposal of his fortune, to remind himself of who and what you all were. Perhaps you’d changed. He got a sense all right, and soon made an appointment with his solicitor to change his will. I think a few of you would have been out of things soon.”

Max added, “There was a further reason Oscar invited you, and this is the real shame of the situation. I do think there was this element: He was lonely. After a lifetime of ignoring all of you, he was lonely.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but he invited me because he was dying to see me,” said Jocasta. She fluffed out her petticoats. “I don’t know what it is about me; people positively throng about wherever I go in the world.”

She gave the group a sunny smile. Felberta aimed a look at her, then turning to Lester said, without bothering to lower her voice, “I really am starting to think madness runs in this family.”

They all exchanged glances, perhaps thinking the same thing.

Max cleared his throat and said, “Let’s talk about another element I noticed—perhaps was meant to notice. There was a bit of a secret romance going on, wasn’t there? Between Randolph and Gwynyth.”

Those two exchanged glances. It was Randolph who said, “I fail to see how that’s any of your business, even if it were true.”

Judging by the look she gave him, it struck Gwynyth as news it was not true.

“Do you? You’re experiencing a failure of belief? Very well,” said Max. “Let me see if I can explain why it’s my business.”

He let a pause hang in the air, a pause timed with exquisite precision. It was only Lester, predictably, who began to squirm. There was an appreciable accretion of stiffness in the poses of the rest of them, as they waited, slowly freezing into a tableau.

“We’ve had large and small lies,” said Max. “But through all of them I wondered why the story of Esau and Jacob was so much on my mind. It was on poor Lamorna’s mind, too. It was a story of an enormous, cold-blooded deception. And it was a story of twins.”

Amanda and Alec exchanged glances. With their special telepathy, they shrugged simultaneously, their expressions reflecting each other’s.

“We had two sets of twins in this situation: Oscar and Leticia; Alec and Amanda. I put my fixation down to that. Twins often run in families, so there was nothing strange about it, and I tried to dismiss it from my reasoning as the minor point that it was. But what did factor in here is that Oscar was minutes older than his sister Leticia, just as Alec is a few minutes older than Amanda. And unfair as it may seem, it made Oscar’s, and his son Alec’s, position as the heir to the Footrustle title and entailed heirlooms unassailable.

“In leaving his ‘liquid’ fortune, his money, Oscar had a little more leeway in deciding who got what.

“But the
real
point of the tale of the twins Esau and Jacob was not precisely that they were twins, but the trickery used to secure an inheritance. Deception and disguise used to gain an inheritance.

“This type of trickery was what Cilla employed, posing as Lady Baynard.”

CHAPTER 33

One Bad Apple

Max, turning to Randolph, said: “Your flirtation with Gwynyth, which you were careful to carry out in my view, was a decoy. The real love interest here is Cilla.”

Gwynyth was actually startled out of her chair. She stood as if to flee. Cotton motioned her down.

“Don’t be absurd,” Cilla said, by contrast with Gwynyth completely unruffled. “I’m engaged to be married. I told you that.”

She might not have spoken. Max went on: “Again, this is a story of deception. Of impersonation. I recalled how Cilla had imitated Lamorna as we sat talking after dinner. Cilla is a gifted mimic—as is Amanda, by the way. But someone realized this mimicry could be a clue for the police, her ‘showing off’ of this gift that played such a large part in the murder plot. Alec happens to have overheard this conversation, right, Alec? A couple arguing: ‘Quit showing off’ and ‘You’re overplaying your hand.’ Why would anyone make such an issue of it? I think because it could give the whole game away.

“You, Cilla, and Randolph kept your close relationship secret because Cilla would remain unsuspected only if she did not seem to profit, if she was ‘only’ an assistant. Meanwhile, Randolph played up to Gwynyth, to mislead me and others. You two, Randolph and Cilla, worked out a story in advance, a story that Cilla was going away with her fiancé to a new job with an American photographer. All that checked out with the police. But you, Randolph, planned to join her. In New Mexico, where the chances were no one would connect you with this tragedy, especially if you lived in a remote part of the state, perhaps altered your appearance slightly. You’d be free to spend your money. Perhaps one day, after a few years of lying low, you’d be free to move on, to Europe or wherever you chose to live.”

Randolph examined his nails and said casually, without looking up, “And your proof for this is—what again?”

Again, Max might not have heard. “I remember Jocasta’s saying at dinner something about the actor Lon Chaney. The ‘Man of a Thousand Faces.’”

Jocasta nodded earnestly. They were on to a topic about which she knew a thing or two. “He used makeup techniques that were revolutionary for the time. He was a genius.”

“This conversation about Chaney came back to me,” said Max, “as I pondered the fact there were two deaths in the family very close together, and why that was significant. It had to be significant but I couldn’t put it together. Until I began to think in terms of disguise. If Lon Chaney could become the Phantom of the Opera, how hard would it be for someone skilled with makeup to make herself look older, helped by the recent fashion for ladies’ veils?”

Cilla had been staring straight ahead, but she blinked almost imperceptibly on his last word.

“Now I asked myself who could pull off such a charade. Jocasta, the actress, was the obvious choice, but this was a role calling for subtlety, nuance, and fine shading, not the more bombastic style that is Jocasta’s specialty.”

Jocasta seemed to take this as a compliment, or perhaps was not really listening, preening and fussing as she was with the sparkly bracelet at her wrist. Or perhaps she didn’t know what bombastic meant.

“It couldn’t have been Lamorna,” Max went on. “She was too large a person for the role. Padding out a thin person is possible but shrinking a large one—there are limits. The woman I sat with on the train had a small, cinched-in waist. Felberta was also the wrong build.

“That left Gwynyth and Cilla, Amanda being much too young to be a candidate for the role. Gwynyth was a possibility, although this was a specialized performance. She had been a dancer of sorts, but nothing in her background suggested the ability to act or impersonate.”

“‘Of sorts’?” Gwynyth interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘of sorts’?” Her face hardened, losing its usual ingratiating simper. “I was ruddy good. Ask Milo.”

Max said, “And that is when I recalled Cilla was a stylist, who worked doing hair and makeup in places such as Hollywood. Where they specialize in such special effects as aging—making stars look decades older. The way Brad Pitt in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
was made up to age backward in time. At dinner it was you, Cilla, who mentioned
Benjamin Button
. It won an Oscar for best makeup. Someone in your field would understand perfectly the reasons why. Possibly the mention of that movie was another of your little slipups that angered Randolph so.”

Randolph gave Max a look of twisted scorn. “You’re mistaken, Father Brown,” he said.

“Not at all am I mistaken,” Max said coldly. “Now, Gwynyth could have been made up by Cilla to play the role, a possibility I played with for a while. But the ‘why’ eluded me—the ‘why’ of their connection to each other. And again—you must pardon me, Gwynyth—this role would not call to your particular talents. It wasn’t until Alec told me of an argument he overheard between a man and woman, and I considered that it might have been Cilla and Randolph quarreling, that the nature of their relationship became clearer. More than ‘boss’ and ‘assistant.’ Much more. It was not just a lovers’ quarrel, either. The stakes were higher than that.

“The disguise was brilliant and thoroughly professional, Cilla, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Max. “For example: Few people remember someone’s eye color unless it’s a startling color.” An image of Awena’s unusual violet eye color flashed from his memory. “But I did recall the color I could just glimpse through the veil—a striking blue. Cilla’s eyes are a deep brown, and that threw me off. That she was the impersonator, much less that there
was
an impersonator, didn’t occur to me as I spoke with her.”

Max looked at them singly. “But wouldn’t a clever killer use contact lenses? Yes, of course. And what does that tell you?”

It was Amanda who answered. “It tells you that she had lots of time to plan and prepare. There was nothing spur of the moment about what she did.”

“Precisely what I thought, too,” said Max.

“Nonsense,” said Cilla. “A lot of people just like a change of eye color, just for fun.”

Max, knowing he was right, didn’t stay to argue the point.

“Do you know how to knit?” he suddenly asked her. She hesitated, clearly churning over how best to respond.

“Really, it’s a simple question,” said Max. “Yes or no. Do you know how to knit?”

“Yes, I do. Of course. So what? Most women know how to knit.”

“I don’t think that’s actually true, you know. Nor do most men necessarily know how to change a tyre.”

Doris piped up. “I never learned how to knit. Never tried to learn. Ruddy waste of time when Marks and Sparks has such nice woolens.”

“The woman I met on the train was knitting some white, fluffy thing,” said Max. “A blanket.”

Cilla arched an eyebrow and looked pointedly at him. “So? First contact lenses, now knitting. Is this what you call evidence?”

“So, nothing,” Max said, still with the same calm yet insistent demeanor. “It’s just one more piece in the puzzle. The police found Leticia’s knitting in the drawing room. You remembered to replace it. You thought of everything. Nearly.”

He went on, Cilla watching him closely now. But he spoke to the group. “The woman I saw on the train wore a hat and scarf. The compartment was cold but really those items were just part of the disguise. Also, Cilla had something on her neck to hide: a butterfly tattoo. And of course she wore a gray wig. It was an impersonation that was not very difficult for an accomplished makeup artist.”

“Leticia always looked ten years younger than she was, anyway,” said Jocasta. “Have you ever noticed how often that is true of very difficult, selfish people? It’s almost as if, having sucked all the life out of everyone around them, they erase years of wear and tear on themselves.”

Simon looked at his wife with ill-disguised wonder: The lack of self-awareness was total.

Max was saying, “I talked with one of the experts in disguise at MI5, who is an old friend. She says nothing too dramatic like a complete latex mask would be required to achieve the appearance of an older woman—a ruse with a complete mask that has been attempted in recent years, by the way. Not too long ago a young man boarded a plane with a false ID, wearing a mask of a very elderly man. Only his hands gave him away. In this case, our imposter even thought to wear gloves. But the disguise technology today has improved beyond measure, so I’m told. Here, in this case, maybe a touch of latex was glued on to create wrinkles about the eyes, but mostly some shadowing, and a change in coloring, were all that were needed. Particularly since I had never met the original Leticia. Cilla used a wig, a scarf to cover her neck, and gloves for her hands, as I’ve said—always the main giveaway, says my expert: the hands. Cilla even pretended to have Leticia’s cold, which came in handy—she could obscure her face with a handkerchief if she thought I was looking at her too closely.

“So Cilla, tell us: Precisely what was your job again at Ealing, and Pinewood, and in Hollywood?”

She paused for a long moment before answering. “Hair. Makeup. The same job as it is now. Prepping people to be photographed.”

“No. It was a lot more than that. I asked DCI Cotton earlier for a little more detail on your job description. It wasn’t just hair and makeup. Drucilla Petrie specialized in the rarified field of special effects.”

In a Florentine gesture of operatic surprise, Jocasta threw up her hands and tossed back her head (Janne Endive,
What the F**k Was That?
—a film title that had reviewers competing to guess what other titles had been rejected in its favor).
“Special effects!”
she gasped. It was the insane type of performance perfected in the days of the silent film, thought Simon. One wondered how cretinous the audience in those days had to have been, how starved for diversion—any diversion. He smiled and patted his wife’s hand. It was best to keep her calm if possible.

Max waited until the other eruptions of astonishment and outrage died down. He turned to the others one by one as he spoke. “Cilla—Drucilla—was in the makeup department. She was understandably a bit vague when talking with the police about what she did at the studios. But her job did not involve making people look pretty for the camera, as it does now, but aging them or otherwise altering their appearance drastically—attaching horns and snaggleteeth to monsters and so forth. The person I spoke with at MI5 called it the zombie department, because it’s where they zombie-fy the characters. It’s more lucrative than what she’s doing now for Randolph, requiring extraordinary levels of training and expertise, so I wondered why she gave it up. It sounds as if she was pushed rather than jumped—she ‘had artistic differences’ with several of the directors—and was a bit at loose ends when Randolph took her on. Maybe even then he saw the possibilities—foresaw a day when she might be useful. Who knows? Maybe they planned to put Lady Baynard in the frame for the murder, by having her—or Cilla dressed as her—be seen fleeing the scene. I’d say that’s likely but proving that will be the very devil. All we can say for certain is that the best-laid plans and hopes of Randolph and Cilla went awry when Lady Baynard died first, and they had to act quickly—put Cilla into the long-ago prepared costume, and send her out as Lady Baynard, while Randolph stayed behind to do the real dirty work of stabbing his uncle. Stabbing a defenseless old man while he slept, I might add. It really
was
a dirty job, a despicable act.