Wicked Autumn (20 page)

Max sipped his coffee, which was excellent and carried a slight sweet scent of chicory. Putting down his cup, he said, “She doesn’t appear to have had many friends, people she confided in.”

“Odd you should say that. I was just going to tell you: not she but the Major did confide in me. I was taken aback. You know how he is—the original stiff upper lip. Not a confiding sort at all. Anyway, I used to see him in the village, you know, pottering about, looking important, or trying to. I’d go in there for supplies—the fresh produce from the farms around Nether Monkslip is often better than what I can get here. Anyway, one day I stopped in the Cavalier and there he was. He invited me to sit with him. Well, I didn’t want to really, but I could hardly refuse. He started talking about the son, Casper.”

“Jasper,” corrected Max.

“Jasper. That’s right. Well, I gathered Jasper was trying to find himself and the Major was worried about the length of time it was taking.”

“Many of that generation are,” said Max. “Trying to find themselves, I mean. More so than at any other time in history, is my impression.”

Guy laughed. “Well, if what the Major said was true, he wasn’t trying to find himself through any sort of paid job. The whole time he lived in Nether Monkslip, after he finished school, he wasn’t looking for work, which I gather was the problem for Wanda. Well, all the evidence suggested he wasn’t looking—drawing and painting all day instead. I guess she didn’t see that as work. So Wanda chucked him out one night. And who can blame her?”

“I didn’t realize you knew the family so well.”

“I don’t,” said Guy smiling. “This bit about the chucking out—the Major didn’t tell me that. It was picked up in a mere half hour when I stopped at the Cavalier for tea on a different afternoon. Information has to be pieced together in Nether Monkslip to make the whole sometimes.”

“The village grapevine.”

“God, yes. Isn’t it something? Everybody knows everybody and everything. I’m glad I’m living over here. I miss a lot and that’s fine by me. But there were other occasions. For example, the Major also let some things slip in talking one evening at the Hidden Fox. So I don’t imagine he confided in me especially—I think half the village may have heard him whinging on. He and Wanda were not exactly love’s young dream, you know, and disagreements about Cas—I mean, Jasper—were part of that.”

So, thought Max. The chance to put the Major in the frame as the most likely suspect was known to many, if what Guy said was true. Max imagined it was. “He had, as they say, ‘issues’ with his son’s vocation as well?” he asked.

Guy spread out his hands in a “Who can say?” gesture. “‘Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’—isn’t that the saying?”

“Tolstoy would certainly have known something about that in his own life. Anyway, when was this, when you spoke with the Major at the Fox?”

Guy sighed. “Now you’re asking, it must have been a night when the WI was meeting. I don’t think the old boy would have been off his lead otherwise. Maybe two weeks ago? Three? I had gone into the village and stopped in for a quick half pint. The regular delivery man had failed to show so I was reprising my jack-of-all-trades role. I could look the date up if it’s important.”

Max shook his head.

“I doubt it.” He blew out his cheeks. Apart from the risotto, it hadn’t been time well spent.

*   *   *

An hour later, well after dark, he returned to Nether Monkslip. He was just parking the Land Rover as DCI Cotton was coming out of the police pod. The detective waved him over.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” said Cotton. “Any news?”

“Nothing that gets us any forwarder, I’m afraid. I’ve just come from Guy Nicholls’s restaurant. Apparently, there was some friction between Wanda and the Major.”

“So says half the village.”

“Sorry, I did realize that probably wasn’t news to you. However, I also learned that Wanda and Noah, our local antiquarian, had come to a disagreement.” He briefly explained what Noah had told him earlier that day.

Cotton said, “Noah’s not the only one who had ‘issues’ with her, usually over something of that nature. Something trivial, but maddening if you were on the receiving end. She seems to have been a bit money mad.”

“If that’s another way of saying ‘cheap,’ I’d have to agree.”

“I’m afraid it’s really not much in the way of motive, though, is it? Not something a jury might buy. We’ve talked with everyone about the Fayre—their whereabouts and so on. Their stories are so identical as to be interchangeable. For example, Lily Iverson was selling her knitted goods all day, she says. Dozens of people saw her doing it. That sort of thing. Anyway, I’d like you to look over the Village Hall with me, now forensics have done with it and it’s been restored to order. We’ve had a bit of a break in one direction. We just don’t know what it means.”

There was a constable guarding the entrance to the Village Hall, a young man not too many years away from doing his homework and playing video games.

He stepped aside as DCI Cotton turned the lock on the outer door, and he and Max went into the building.

Cotton turned to him and said, “We’ve interviewed Maurice—he’s some sort of village all-around handyman, I gather?”

“That’s right. And he often deals with repairs and so on around the Village Hall, and the vicarage.”

Max pictured Maurice: a gentle, somewhat backward man who nearly had to be dissuaded from tugging on his forelock, and whose thick, expressive eyebrows gave him an unfortunate resemblance to the crazed author in
The Shining
. He was always to be seen with a toothpick tucked behind his ear. Whether it was the same toothpick or not, Max was never sure.

“Was he able to help you?” Max asked.

Cotton indicated the old-fashioned door lock. “You need a key to get in from the outside, but inside you could simply slide a bolt home. See?”

Max nodded. “Yes, I seem to remember that.”

“Well. Maurice came along about midday during the Fayre and—Get this: he found that the door had been bolted from the inside. There was no way for him to get in, without breaking a window.”

“He’s sure of that?”

“Quite definite. He was annoyed, he says, and shouted for someone to open up. Because, you see—”

“Someone had to be inside. Locked inside.”

Cotton nodded. “Do you notice anything missing from in here?”

Max looked around—the little stage, the windows with curtains undrawn and giving onto the night. He could clearly see the churchyard with its brooding plague tree. “You’re thinking in terms of a break-in. Something stolen…”

“It’s one possibility. She may have interrupted someone committing a crime of some sort.”

“I’m perhaps not the best person to ask,” said Max. “One of the women from the WI might see more than I do. They’re all over the place most days, arranging flowers, rehearsing for a play, and whatnot. Suzanna Winship may be a good choice—I’d say she’s … observant.”

“We’re on it now, asking various people. One other thing: do you know an elderly woman named Miss Pitchford?”

“Everyone knows Miss Pitchford. She taught school. I gather she taught half the village. She’s been retired for years. Knows everyone—and everything about everyone.”

“Well, Miss Pitchford told one of my men she actually saw Wanda just before noon, walking—so Miss Pitchford thinks now; who knows if it’s hindsight—but walking, she says, toward the Village Hall. She was rummaging in her handbag, says Miss Pitchford, and muttering something like ‘Key?’ Or, as she thinks, ‘Oh, key?’”

Max wondered, would anyone say, “Oh, key”? As in “Hello, key”? Possible, but odd.

“Could she have been saying, ‘Okay’?” he asked aloud. He frowned in frustration. The information got them no further.

“We thought of that possibility, too,” Cotton told him. “Of course, her hearing … at that age it might not be at its sharpest.”

“But it’s more likely Wanda had found the door locked herself and was looking for the key in her handbag,” said Max. “Isn’t it? And muttering aloud as she looked? Or, did she
expect
to find the door locked and was looking to make sure she had the key?”

Cotton might have been reading his mind. “I feel we’re making bricks without straw here,” he said. “It’s quite a puzzle either way.”

“I’m to have tea with Miss Pitchford tomorrow,” Max told him. “I’ll see if I can get anything from her that makes more sense than that.”

CHAPTER 20

Miss Pitchford Disposes

The next day, as he had told Cotton, Max was scheduled for tea with Miss Agnes Pitchford, an engagement that had been arranged far in advance—part of Miss Pitchford’s rather diabolical appointment-arranging technique. Max reflected that while one could claim pressing engagements in the coming week or two, it was harder, unless one were planning to be out of the country or on another planet entirely, to find excuses in June for an October meeting. October, one felt, might after all never arrive.

He made slow progress on his way, for he was as usual frequently stopped by people wanting to chat, although Awena, carrying a basket from which obtruded wild flowers, a loaf of French bread, and a newspaper, simply waved and said hello as she glided by. Members of the press who tried to waylay him got the cold shoulder. Among those who stopped him was the Major. The man seemed to have shrunk, his still-large girth hanging on a somehow smaller frame.

“I just got a letter from my son, from Argentina,” the Major told him. “Of course, the postal service being what it is, it was written several days ago. He’s been on the telly, it seems.”

The Major, clearly proud of his son’s achievement, or perhaps just his neat handwriting, handed Max the letter. It was a simple, short note, again thanking the Major for wiring money and helping subsidize his career. It mentioned that he was waiting in a greenroom to be interviewed in the next half hour on live television. He had included a clipping from the local paper about an art show held the day before, complete with a photo showing the young artist standing in front of one of his vigorous, abstract creations. Max, looking at the envelope, noticed that by a terrible coincidence it was postmarked the day Wanda died. “You always understood my art, Dad!” That struck Max as unlikely in the extreme, but it was a nice bread-and-butter note just the same. The letter was signed “Jasper,” and finished with
XOX
, symbols for hugs and kisses. The letter put Max in mind of the long-suffering Theo, brother of Vincent van Gogh, who had kept the genius alive for so many years. Max had often thought van Gogh’s suicide had much to do with Theo’s increasingly turning away from Vincent toward his new young family and adult concerns. That the Major, however, continued to support and care about his son was evident from his pleasure as he reread the letter, then tucked it carefully in his jacket pocket. But his face fell into somber folds as he said: “Needed to talk with you, Padre.”

Max had been told by Mrs. Hooser that the Major had called in at the vicarage while Max had been out on an early walk with Thea. Now the Major said, his voice lowered and his eyes looking left and right to see who might overhear, “It’s all so awkward. They—the police—still won’t release … her. Until. Well, until, you know. Difficult to know what to do.”

Closure, thought Max. What one of his American colleagues at Oxford, a big blond rower from California, would call “closure” was precisely what the Major needed, and could not have. All the bureaucratic niceties had first to be observed, all the forms filled out.

Max nodded understandingly. As always, Max found the Major both affable and difficult to grasp, intellectually speaking. There seemed little to hold on to, and even though the Major and Max shared backgrounds with some similarities, Max always felt himself floundering, trying to find commonality. It wasn’t as if the man left one with a sense of depths left unplumbed. It was more as if the placid surface of the man was all that there was to him. A near impossibility, in Max’s experience. Wasn’t it?

But now, of course, the situation was complicated by the fact that Max had seen the man at his most vulnerable: now there would be that extra English layer of reserve to chip through. Someone of the Major’s background and breeding might feel that some position had been lost and would need to be reasserted.

Max was not disappointed in his guess. The Major now put on a show of hearty bluffness that wouldn’t have fooled a child, and said, eyes stark with loss, “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

Just then Lily Iverson crossed the street to greet them. She wore a heavy fawn woolen coat wrapped tightly against the chill of the day. Her small face peered up at them in turn, beautifully framed by another of her scarves, this one in a fluffy yarn the color of apricots.

Max had noticed several other people avoiding them in the way people will avoid the recently bereaved, and he wondered at her temerity. The normally retiring Lily placed a hand briefly on the Major’s arm, and said, “I am so sorry for your loss. I saw her at the dentist’s all the time, it seemed. It’s so hard to take in what’s happened.” She gave him a small, sad smile; sunlight glinted briefly off her braces. Max knew she was self-conscious about the bands on her teeth, purchased when she started to come into money from her business. He thought they lent a charm to her vulnerability that had been somewhat lacking before. With a parting glance at them both from under her lashes, she quietly went about her business. The Major seemed nearly undone by this kindness, devoid of mawkish curiosity as it was.

The Major then spent several more minutes swapping comments of zero substance with Max, as Max struggled to get down to the question uppermost in his mind. Finally he was given a chance to ask, “Were there any changes in your wife’s habits in recent days? Or concerns over her health, perhaps? Were the allergies worsening?”

“Funny you should ask,” replied the Major. “She’d started seeing a new GP in Monkslip-super-Mare. She’d decided she didn’t trust the local man.”

“Winship?” Max was surprised. It was not the done thing to switch doctors in a small place like this, especially if one weren’t in urgent need of a specialist. It would be bound to cause comment and speculation. He supposed Wanda might not have thought of that, or cared. But Winship himself had painted a somewhat different picture. Why? Professional pride, or something more?