A Fatal Winter (6 page)

Instead he was in an ancient London hotel whose lack of amenities in no way inhibited the management from charging an exorbitant amount for a dollhouse-sized room with no view. It was an amount that should have lent itself to luxury terry cloth robes and shower caps folded into little boxes and shampoos from the official Shampooers to Her Majesty, and yet Max was grateful to have been provided a postage stamp-sized bar of soap made from, apparently, tar and ground pepper. The room boasted a bed with a single thin mattress that might have been stuffed with straw, and a radio so old it had probably first been used by someone listening to King Edward VIII’s abdication speech. It had dials as big as scones and speakers covered in a dusty open-weave fabric like burlap. The hot water in the bathroom was as close to nonexistent as made no difference, and the breakfast the next morning made him long for the homey, calorie-laden canteen offerings of his housekeeper Mrs. Hooser, a sure sign that something in his universe had gone badly awry.

He’d had a further bad experience in London that made him eager to return to the shelter of his village. He’d seen—he could swear he’d seen—a man in the street who had been involved in the death of his MI5 colleague, Paul. At any rate, it was a man of roughly the same physical type, wearing the same weird blue sunglasses with white frames, that Max had seen hovering near the crime scene that day. He couldn’t be certain—indeed, couldn’t be certain the man he’d seen the day of Paul’s death was involved in the killing. But Max had been sure enough that he’d spun around in the push and shove of pedestrians to follow the man, thinking as he hustled after him that his clerical collar offered the perfect cover for tailing a suspect. He followed him for many blocks, thinking how well he’d retained his training from those old days. And then, somewhere a few streets away from Pall Mall, he lost him. He looked frantically left, right, and even overhead. And then he’d pounded his fist against a wall, scraping his knuckles in his rage.

He called the sighting in directly to his old boss at MI5, dialing his private line, and ended up having dinner with George Greenhouse that evening. It was a bittersweet occasion—Max had always held the man in esteem, but he knew how disappointed George had been by Max’s decision to leave the life behind for the priesthood.

He learned a few things at that dinner in Covent Garden. One was that MI5 had decided someone besides Paul and Max had been injured by the car explosion that killed Paul. For the man with those strange glasses Max had described to investigators had been recorded on one of the ubiquitous London security cameras shortly after the explosion, and he was holding his arm as if injured.

“But he didn’t go to any hospital in London despite his injuries and that’s further evidence it’s him,” George told Max. Whether he was supposed to share this information was doubtful, but then George hadn’t gotten where he was by being a company man. Nerveless, famous for his bravery, he also had more integrity than practically anyone Max had ever met.

Midway through the main course George had stunned him by saying, “She’s remarried, you know. Sheila. She got married again recently.”

Sheila—Paul’s wife. Max had barely known her, hadn’t seen her since the funeral, which she’d attended, against all advice, clutching their young son, hers and Paul’s—grimly holding the blue-swaddled bundle to her. She’d stumbled through the service looking as numb as Max had felt.

Max was brokenhearted by the news of her remarriage but struggled to hide it from George. What had he expected, though? That Sheila would go into some form of purdah forever? Life had gone on. But something about this permanent move on Sheila’s part made him realize how much he himself had stayed in the past of that terrible day.

He wondered—idle, stupid thought—why he hadn’t been invited to the wedding. And realized that in some completely mad, irrational way, this bothered him, even though he barely had known Sheila, and his presence at her marriage would have been downright odd. Then he hoped—to heaven—that it wasn’t because she blamed him, Max. For Max blamed himself, and a world of invitations wouldn’t change that. Paul wouldn’t have been the one killed that day if he hadn’t switched places on the job with Max.

Paul’s death had changed Max’s course in life completely, for it was not long afterward that he began training for the priesthood. It wasn’t as if he believed—not really
believed
—that his life that day in London had been spared by Divine Providence. He refused to see Paul as some placeholder for himself, simply unluckier than he. They had exchanged schedules, he and Paul, as they often had done in the past, in the chaos of a crisis elsewhere, not seeing the danger in front of them. That the blast had happened that day, at that moment, was almost a coincidence. The next day would have worked as well, for the purposes of the thugs with whom they were dealing.

And yet, his escape had forced Max to slow down, to stop, and to think. It had led directly to the 180-degree change he had made in his life.

Yet … and yet, in the furthest corner of his mind, wasn’t there a voice, a small voice that might start to jabber if he granted it freedom, a voice that said he’d left his old life behind not because of some high-flown need to serve his fellow man, but because otherwise he might die young, in the same senseless way his comrade Paul had died. This voice had a name, and it answered to either Coward or Reason, depending on the given day.

So now Paul’s wife had remarried. On the rebound, or so Max would always think. Remarried to a man he would try hard to like, recognizing his instinctive dislike had little to do with Sean’s—his name was Sean—with his shortcomings. It was that Sean was there only because Paul had gone.

Later that night as Max removed his clerical collar he thought of a different collar—a collar with a stain on it, a pinprick of red against the white linen. He’d never been able to throw away that shirt, stained on that day by a small drop of Paul’s blood. It sat now, undisturbed and wrapped in plastic, on the top shelf of his closet at the vicarage.

*   *   *

So it was with a sense of relief that he began the first leg of his journey back to Nether Monkslip. He would take the Great Western from Waterloo, change trains, and eventually catch the short spur on the Swanton and Staincross Minster Steam Railway connecting to his village. He would not be traveling first class on the initial stages of his journey, of course. But on the seven-mile home stretch to Nether Monkslip he would ride a gloriously restored train, where all the seats were first class. This refurbished train, at one time for the village squire’s private use, had been donated to the village in the squire’s will with a fund to keep it in good repair.

It only went as far as Staincross Minster where more modern connections could be made to the wider world. The train was seldom crowded even though it was small and the service infrequent—there were easier ways for the general populace to travel to Staincross Minster without going via such an obscure place as his village. So difficult was it to get to and from Nether Monkslip, in fact, it was difficult to say quite what the village was doing there. Apart from the presence of the river, significant in terms of early commercial transport, how and why the village had evolved was lost in the mists of time.

Since few people knew of Nether Monkslip’s existence (which was how the villagers liked it) the little mahogany-paneled conveyance suited the villagers’ purposes exactly. It had a tea trolley (dining cars being nearly a thing of the past) but service was intermittent, and the ride was too short to warrant much more than intermittent.

Nothing was as it once had been, Max reflected sadly. Hotels, trains. And George had looked to be getting on in years, the movements of the old warrior now stiff, fraught with effort. Arthritis, probably …

As Max stood in this brooding manner waiting to board at Waterloo, he failed to notice the woman who had actually stopped dead in her tracks to stare at him. Her expression seemed to say:
There must be a God if he’s got vicars like you.

CHAPTER 2

Upper Crust

The waiting area at Waterloo had been, for some reason, full of young parents with their caffeinated children; he might have been in Disney World. Now contentedly settled in for the longest stretch of his journey, all was blessed silence except for the soothingly mechanical noises of a train in motion, and he watched mesmerized as the winter-barren landscape rolled past. Max loved above all the wail of a train whistle—a mournful sound that still somehow lifted the heart with hope and anticipation. Anticipation of what, he could not say. Adventure, perhaps, of which he had not been in short supply, before and during his tenure as parish priest.

Robert Louis Stevenson had written something about the heart being full of the stillness of the country, and that was what Max felt on a train. Even short delays en route didn’t bother him. So long as he had something to read or something to gaze at out the window, he was renewed in spirit by the enforced stillness, even though his mind might be racing.

They reached Staincross Minster where the last part of his journey by steam engine would begin. There a group of four Japanese tourists walked by, two couples, part of the chaotic scrum of passengers sheltered by the wooden canopy. God only knew what they were doing in this part of the world. Nether Monkslip was a hidden treasure of South West England, although more and more intrepid tourists seemed to find their way there. If these tourists were headed to Nether Monkslip (and there was little point in being on this obscure train route otherwise) then they were in luck: The Horseshoe could just accommodate two couples in its cramped, ancient rooms, provided the couples didn’t take up much space. Max inadvertently tripped up one of the men in the group as he was getting on and with the exquisite politeness of the Japanese, the man apologized, presumably for walking where Max’s foot should not have been. They exchanged little bows and “so sorry’s” and forgiving smiles, and the man rejoined his group, now spilling down the corridor and into one of the antique compartments.

Max walked on to the next compartment, which happened for the moment to be empty. He was soon followed by an elderly woman struggling with a string bag and an old-fashioned Gladstone large enough to secrete half the contents of the British Library. Max, jumping to offer his aid, discovered it was heavy enough to have actually been used for this purpose, and wondered how on earth the old lady had managed to drag it this far. It was becoming harder each day to find a porter. But once free of her burden she carried herself erectly if stiffly, with the caution of one whose old bones were becoming fragile.

“Thank you so much,” she brayed in an upper-class accent from behind the netting of her rakishly tilted black hat, which matched the rest of what Max was sure she would call her travel costume. The hat was in fact recently back in style because of the fondness of royalty for these creations, particularly at weddings—a hat with a dotted veil, attached to her head by an ebony hatpin. He’d seen a hat much like it on the head of one of the royals as he’d perused the magazine racks at the station’s newsagent stand. This lady had just managed to avoid the Mad Hatter look the royal family went in for on formal occasions.

She had a frilly woolen scarf knotted under her chin against the chill of the under-heated compartment. Her jacket with matching skirt was a smart affair—smart for sixty years previous—of tailored wool, cut close to the waist, flared at the hips, and slightly fraying at the cuffs. She carried a lambswool coat slung over one of her fine leather-gloved wrists.

She was a woman tightly corseted and bound, whose visage brought unavoidably to mind the term “battle-axe.” Perhaps the corseting had something to do with her look of chronic dyspepsia. But she brightened visibly at the sight of Max, standing up a bit taller. She adjusted her round glasses for a closer inspection, and her blue-eyed glance as it alighted on him seemed to say,
What luck, a vicar!

“How wonderful,” she said aloud, settling in a seat opposite his, with a nod in the direction of his collar, “to share my journey with a clergyman. It seems rather providential.”

Max, seeing the look, smiled politely, said “Hullo,” and seized his day-old newspaper with a show of rabid interest, as if it contained news of no less import than the Second Coming. He rustled it open to an inside page—a page which happened to hold the table tennis news. The rest of the paper seemed to be taken up with intelligence regarding the upcoming royal nuptials—the engagement had been announced mid-November. The new couple apparently were busily preparing for a shared life of ship launchings, hand wavings, sporting events, and tree plantings interspersed with wild nights at members-only nightclubs. An old friend of Max’s from SO14—the Royalty Protection Group of the London Metropolitan Police—had told him watching over the royals was like watching a rugby scrum with carriages.

But Max well knew the signs his companion was giving off, and although the journey in miles was short the old train would creep along like a geriatric tortoise. The woman didn’t take the message telegraphed by his own body language, of course.

A young man came down the corridor and peered in the etched glass of the carriage window, a man with large earrings visible, and a tattoo or two that wasn’t, Max imagined. He wore a leatherette jacket; the thinning hair slicked back on his head and the compensatory thick mustache gave him the look of a walrus with an addiction to television shopping. He had wires running from his ears into his music player. Max could see that the earplugs were a gumdrop design. Clever the toys young people had these days, he thought, and wondered exactly when he’d begun to think of himself as outside that group.

The woman gave the young man a glare and he moved briskly along, having changed his mind about entering the carriage.

There are certain topics that inevitably arise when a clergyman is forced into close confinement with a member of the curious public for longer than ten minutes. The tale of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes was one. The tangible existence of a hell for sinners in the afterlife was another. But most popular of all was the question of the place of household pets in God’s grand design, invariably accompanied by tributes to a particular pet’s beatific nature. So, expecting the woman to ask if her cat Fortesque Tiggy-Boots might be waiting to one day reunite with his mistress in heaven, Max was surprised when she said, “I imagine it’s
quite
difficult being in your line of work, in this day and age.” With a delicate cough, she raised a handkerchief to her nose. “So sorry. I seem to have come down with a
dread
fully bad cold.”