A Fatal Winter (18 page)

Max was wondering how much the women knew about the crime scene. “I’m sorry if this is upsetting in any way, but did you happen to see the body following the attack?”

Jocasta’s hand fluttered, as if she might fly away from the memory. “The blood, the blood!” Max was not to know it, but this was a line from a mid-career Jocasta film called
Did You Hear That?
She had played Rondella Rosemont to loud gasps of laughter and disbelief from the audience. “But did I see—him? Why, no. Of course not! No. But anyone with a shred of imagination can just
pic
ture the scene.”

“Have you actually watched yourself in any of your own films, Jocasta?” Felberta asked with studied casualness. “Some of us were wondering the other night.”

“Of course not,” Jocasta said again. “It is best not to look back. When one is a true professional such as I, one only sees where one could have done better.”

“Sometimes one would have done better to appear only on the cutting room floor,” said Felberta quietly, but not quietly enough.

“What precisely do you mean?” Jocasta asked, ice dripping from each word.

Max thought it might be time to intervene.

“I can think of few professions requiring more courage,” said Max. “You really have to put yourself on the line every time, don’t you?”

This earned him a brave, the-show-must-go-on smile.

“Live theater, especially, is
such
a torment. But it is and remains my first love.” Her lower lip trembled in a nicely gauged show of emotion. It was certainly more emotion than she had shown at the thought of her father’s death, or her aunt’s.

Max wanted to ask the question that had been in his mind since yesterday. He had heard of Lord Footrustle—no one could read the
Financial Times
without spotting that distinctive name in its columns—but he was not clear how he’d come by his fortune, which was said to be vast. He broached this question with the delicacy required of such monetary questions. Felberta answered readily enough:

“Uncle Oscar had inherited wealth, and then he ‘did something’ in electronics. Invented some gizmo and held the patent for it. Or was it telecommunications? Anyway. The patent set him up nicely. He used the money to buy a few newspapers that were going for a song, and that was the start of his Fleet Street career—the career for which he’s best known. Then, well—he didn’t
invent
the Internet but he was one of thirty people on the planet who didn’t positively
gush
money during the dot-com bust. He didn’t trust any company run by puppies, he told me. He was canny in his way, was Oscar. Excuse me—Lord Footrustle.”

He had noticed that it generally was plain “Leticia” and “Oscar” as far as Felberta was concerned. Australians tended to take a more relaxed view when it came to titles.

“He was also cheap,” put in Jocasta. “That helped. I prefer to put my money to use.”

“Yes. You really should think about changing the family motto to ‘Spend Faster.’”

“I would if it were up to me,” said Jocasta. Her voice held more than a trace of bitterness. Max realized that Alec, although decades younger, would likely be the one in charge of the family fortunes. He made a mental note to get what he could out of Cotton and the solicitor he’d mentioned on that score.

“It’s certainly a thought,” he said neutrally, treating their conversation as playful banter, in a diplomatic voice and bearing honed to a knife edge during many hours with the more fractious of his parishioners.

“So tell me,” said Jocasta, “and
please
don’t take this the wrong way, but how long are you planning to stay?”

Max at first thought this was aimed at her evident nemesis Felberta but as he looked up from buttering his toast he saw she meant him.

“I honestly couldn’t say,” said Max vaguely. “I need a word or two with Inspector Cotton. It’s rather up to him.”

This was patent nonsense but it seemed to mollify her. He realized she was hoping he would extend his stay, a fancy that was confirmed when she fluttered her false eyelashes and said, “I do feel
so
much safer now you are here.”

CHAPTER 10

Down the Garden Path

Max decided he’d like a talk with the twins, if he could still find them. They seemed very much alone and while that may have been their choice, they surely under the circumstances were in need of reassurance or at least acknowledgement from the adult world.

The day had dawned mild, and a fitful sun had begun holding its own against the overcast sky, although clouds in a leaden horizon sagged with the weight of snow. As he opened the door to the winter air and the garden, he was remembering what Doris had said of Lady Baynard’s devotion to her plants. It all reminded him of Dmitry, a man from his MI5 past he hadn’t thought of in years.

Max once had been pretending to broker a deal for a sailboat with a terrorist named Dmitry. MI5 had started tracking people wanting to buy sailboats, once they’d learned how explosives were being brought into Great Britain, away from the watchful eye of customs officials. Dmitry’s old sailboat had run aground in a storm and MI5 knew someone would be looking to buy and fast, with money being no object.

Many of the lies Max had told in the course of his career had led people to their deaths, people who had come to trust him. This was what Max had in the end found among the hardest of things to bear, this view of himself as the insinuating, smiling fraud.

He had tried to relay some of this to George Greenhouse at the time. He, a commonsensical sort, hardened by decades in MI5, had said, “Max, the guy was a complete scumbag. I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. The world’s a better place without him.”

Max had almost said, “But he was
my
scumbag”—which would never have been understood. What he meant was, he had spent months trying to find some trait in the man that made it possible for him, Max, to deal with him at all. Often his target would have children, a family, something normal that Max could cling to, but this particular man was famously a loner who trusted no one enough to form a human attachment. In the end, what good quality Max had been able to discover was the man’s passion for orchids, of all things—a Nero Wolfe-like obsession with the rare, the strange, the compellingly beautiful—the jolie laide of the plant kingdom. With a focus, of course, on the most expensive plants available. The man was close to being a billionaire from his illegal trafficking, and could demand the best of everything. Max had seen Dmitry croon over these plants as they emerged from their bulbs like a mother with a newborn, this same man who devoted his days to smuggling in uranium, thorium, explosives, wiring, and other components of the dirty bombs with which he hoped to blow up central London. Or rather, which materials he was content to sell to others so they could pursue their warped ideology to its bloody conclusion. Dmitry also did a brisk business in phenol, and in sulfuric and other acids used to make explosives. The man himself never touched the stuff—it was offloaded from sailboats onto private land near Cromer, just up the coast from Great Yarmouth, often by men with no idea of the true nature of the materials they were handling. From there it would be unloaded into a small van, then transported to waiting barges headed inland into fen country.

Max, dealing with Dmitry, had only been able to smile, to laugh, to look this monster in the eye by focusing on the one area of the man’s life devoted to, well,
life
. To growth and beauty and the love of creation. Max had cultivated Dmitry’s trust the way Dmitry cultivated his precious orchids. Max found it unconscionably hard at the end to separate himself from the investment he’d made in finding something—anything—lovable in Dmitry.

For Dmitry was the kind of man to send back pieces of an enemy or a hostage until he got what he wanted. But how his eyes would light up as he was crooning over orchids. He would tell Max about how to raise the plants, sun exposure, etc. How they liked strong light, but not too strong. How they liked water, but not too much. How air must be allowed to flow around the roots. It all sounded to Max as if they were the “Princess and the Pea” of the plant world.

When surrounded at the end, Dmitry committed suicide with one of his imported grenades.

*   *   *

Max entered the garden through an archway in the inner courtyard. It was an area quiet and secluded, closed off on all sides by a high hedge or by the castle’s curtain wall, which stood well over twenty feet high.

It was like finding oneself in the center of a maze, sheltered from wind and for the most part from prying eyes. When in full leaf the pleached trees would create the occasional private oasis, although in the naked gray of winter Max could view much of the area of the knot garden. He now saw there also was a rose garden and, tucked farther away, what looked to be an herb garden. All were wearing a fluffy blanket of snow.

Max noticed the bare remnants of herbaceous borders which would be in top form in June, and without which no English garden could be truly English. He threaded his way through several distinct areas which followed the principles of the formal Italian garden, as far as the soil of the coast would allow. On his way he recognized old familiars like holly and rosemary; in summer, there would be blooms, bright reminders of nature’s annual triumph, ranged against the stark, cool gray walls.

Passing the walled kitchen garden, he came to an area of trees and bushes set in geometric patterns. Beneath one gnarled old specimen an octagonal bench had been built to fit around its trunk. The tree had widened in girth enough to impinge on the bench, much like a belt that has grown too tight for a man’s waist. A slender, dark woman he had not yet met sat there with a sketchbook and pencil, engrossed in her work. She did not look up or seem to notice his passing but as he watched, she closed the notebook, stood, and walked away from him and toward the house, her stride long and catlike in its grace. She was dressed all in black—close-fitting slacks and a turtleneck sweater. She had still given no indication she’d seen him.

He chanced upon the hothouse where Lady Baynard had been found, hidden behind a hedge for aesthetic reasons, and now roped off in blue crime-scene tape. The door was shut and he could not get close enough to the windows to see inside without crossing under the tape. This he wouldn’t do without Cotton at his side. The windows were fogged up in any event.

It was by the pond in the rose garden, frozen at its edges in a lacy, doily-like effect, that he found the twins. Amanda sat on a bench, staring sullenly into the distance.

Max watched as Alec kicked a stone lining the walk, hard, until it was dislodged from its carefully ordained place. Max suspected the lad would not have been so bold had Milo been there to see the minor vandalism.

Max heard Amanda telling her brother how bored she was. Bored? He could hardly believe his ears. But grief, he reminded himself, wears many disguises, especially at an age when emotion could run the gamut from grief to exhilaration within the space of an hour. “It’s not as fun as I thought it would be,” she was saying, “being in the middle of an investigation. It’s not like on the telly. I want to go back to London.” Alec, his eyes gleaming from under the hood of his sweatshirt, like a wild thing peering out from the undergrowth, saw Max approaching from outside her line of sight, and he loudly called out a hello to shush her.

Max introduced himself and asked how they were keeping. They grinned meekly and shrugged in unison. Max gained the impression they had loped for a while around the gardens, at a loss for entertainment that did not involve a wireless connection. The trees, the sea, the sky were seen as poor substitutes, although the girl, Amanda, was reading a book.

Max looked from one to the other. Alec had the pale, translucent skin one associated with particularly tragic, troublesome yet dashing poets of the Romantic era—a blond Lord Byron. On her it was a pallid prettiness, her eyes enhanced by early experiments with makeup.

The boy gave Max a long glance that recorded the dark hair and eyes, the collar, the good-but-worn jacket, and the trainers, a look up and down and lingering, especially on the collar. Max began to wish he’d dressed this day in mufti—the collar put many people at arm’s length. The boy surprised him by saying, “How are you liking those trainers? I nearly bought some myself and then the clerk talked me up to the next price point.”

Price point. How glibly the sales terms fell from his youthful but jaded lips. They talked for a while of sports, and jogging. In the lapses in their conversation, Max thought he could hear the sound of cattle lowing and sheep bleating in the far distance, perhaps the flock that included his own stray.

“I used to jog more, in my MI5 days,” said Max. “I still try to keep in with it, but strangely, I have much less time since I became a priest.”

“You were MI5?” Clearly, Alec was enthralled by this news. Max had intended he should be. As an ice-breaker, especially with the young, he knew it was an effective gambit. “I’ve always wanted to be a spy,” Alec added.

“Me, too,” said Amanda.

“Since when?” said Alec with the special scorn brothers seem to reserve for sisters.

“Since always,” she replied.

“Be careful what you wish for,” said Max.

“MI5, really?” Alec repeated, wonderingly. “What made you leave?”

Max shrugged. “I rang the bell.”

“Hmm?”

“To leave the French Foreign Legion, you ring the bell—literally. This says you can stand no more and you want out. This is what I did. Figuratively speaking.”

“Why?”

“Reasons of my own.” It was a dismissal, but kindly done. Alec seemed to accept that they had reached a
DO NOT TRESPASS
sign and changed the subject.

“Got it. Top secret,” he said, and wrenched his mouth into a line suggesting gravity and maturity. “But you’re here officially, aren’t you?”

The boy was nothing if not persistent.

“I’m no longer on a need-to-know basis with MI5.”