A Fatal Winter (14 page)

“Well,” said Max. “That was hardly flattering, was it?”

“I got used to it.”

She further struck him as the type of individual who was compelled to tell the truth, even when telling the truth was neither wise nor kind. Odd as it might sound from a priest, Max knew that the type of person who couldn’t dissimilate, who could not tell a lie if only to spare feelings—her own or another’s—could be a dangerous type of personality.

“Why don’t you tell me a bit about the others?” he said. “It would help me understand some of the dynamics here.”

There was an intensity in her expression as she listened that suggested someone hard of hearing, or slow to understand. Max, remembering she wore a hearing aid, began to enunciate more slowly.

“I’m not sure what to tell you. I don’t notice much. I stick to myself.”

Well,
that
is a lie, thought Max. He would be willing to bet she noticed everything, if only because nobody noticed her watching them. There was a stillness, a quiet but alert watchfulness to her manner. He actually recognized some measure of that quality in himself. In another life, with a personality less strange and less riddled with odd religiosity, she might have made a good candidate for MI5.

He said aloud some version of what he’d been thinking. “I think, Lamorna, that in fact very little gets past you.”

She sniffed and gave him that odd sideways look, but with a shade of a smile this time. Max thought she might be beginning to thaw toward him.

“Well, there’s Gwynyth, for a start,” she said. “Her proper name is Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle—despite the divorce she gets to keep the ‘Lady,’ you know. Gwyn and the Twyns, we call them. That’s T-W-Y … oh, never mind. Anyway, they came to stay. And stay. And stay. Somehow they seem to be becoming a part of the household.” Her voice was studiedly neutral but her eyes were burning with ill will. “I don’t mind the twins, I practically raised them, you know. When I remember them as cute babies … well, it’s different. But not her.”

“They were invited?”

“So Gwynyth says.” Lamorna might have been sucking on lemons, so pinched with disapproval was her expression. “Now, why would he invite her here—Lord Footrustle? He couldn’t stand the sight of her before. But I guess he couldn’t invite the children to stay without their mother dragging herself along. I don’t hold with divorce and I’m certain you don’t, either, Father. But in this case I saw it was necessary. She was in show business when he met her, you know. Lady Baynard was outraged and for once I could only agree.”

It was as if she collected her grievances in a bowl and would paw through them, turning first one, then another, to the light. He wondered how much of her time was spent in this manner. With Lady Baynard gone, she would have too much time for that sort of thing.

“Gwynyth kept leaving the twins with us when they were little,” she said now. “With
me,
that is. Whenever the last nanny quit. So she got free babysitting, too. I never got a word of thanks for it.”

“I see,” he said neutrally, trying and failing to imagine a worse caretaker for small children than this bitter woman.

“Then there are the Americans,” said Lamorna. “Lord Footrustle’s daughter Jocasta and her husband, Simon.” She paused dramatically and actually tapped her index finger against the side of her nose. “From California. And you of all people must know what that place is like: Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Max decided to breeze right past that one. “Surely Jocasta is British?”

“Her mother was American. And Simon is American. And Jocasta’s been there so long the taint of sin is upon her now, never to be washed away. But what you should know is this: I’ve seen them wandering about at all hours. Up to
no good
at three
A.M.
”

“What were they doing?” asked Max.

“They were looking
very suspicious
,” said Lamorna. With a significant nod, she parted her lips in a wintry smile.

“Quite likely they’re jet-lagged,” said Max. “I well remember how upsetting long-distance travel is to the eat-and-sleep cycles. At three
A.M.
here they would be expecting their dinner back home. Or their stomachs would be expecting it.”

While he thought this was likely true, he made a mental note to have Cotton ask about these nocturnal wanderings. They—or one of them—might have seen something the rest of the house had not.

“You don’t find their behavior suspicious?” Lamorna demanded. Clearly he had lost points with her for being such a thick nincompoop. “Given what’s happened? Given that just days after their arrival—three days, in fact—Lord Footrustle was poisoned?”

Cotton had told Max what little he knew of this episode.

“I’m not sure that’s significant,” said Max aloud. “The timing of their arrival.” In fact, he thought it as likely the poisoner—if poisoner there were—waited until the entire family had gathered so as to throw the net of suspicion as wide as possible.

“It is significant,” she pronounced. “There was no love lost between Jocasta and her father. To become an actress! It’s as if she chose the one profession most likely to upset him.”

That Lord Footrustle had himself later married a woman in show business seemed to have escaped her for the moment.

“I gather you were here when he married Gwynyth. How did Jocasta take that?”

He expected a rebuke for asking such a nosy question. In fact, he couldn’t have said why he asked it, but it seemed to release a flood of pent-up emotion.

“Hah!” she said. “How did she take it?
I’ll
tell you how she took it. She didn’t like it any better than I did, but my dislike was based on moral reasons, as you shall hear: The pair of them weren’t married two minutes before those twins came along. Not two minutes! If you ask me Alec and Amanda escaped the curse of illegitimacy by a hairsbreadth! Never doubt”—and here she raised a finger heavenward—“never doubt Lord Footrustle was shanghaied into that marriage. Gwynyth is nothing but a brazen hussy.”
Sniff
. “No better than she should be.”

She was reminding him an awful lot of her grandmother by this point. He wondered if there were a gene marker for blatant snobbery. At least Lady Baynard seemed to have missed the religious nutter gene. But here Max pulled himself up short, for he’d been forgetting Lamorna was adopted.

“But as to how they all came to be here,” she said. “I’m afraid they don’t share that kind of thing with me. As I told you, I’m here on suffering.”

The truth of that was becoming undeniable. She was a member of the family, in fact, but also an outsider. This could be useful to the police—she might see an angle the others might miss. That this angle might be skewed and distorted, however, he didn’t doubt for a moment.

“Tell me about your grandmother. How did you get on?”

“Lady Baynard? She came back to the castle when her husband died.” He noticed she’d ignored the second half of his question.

“Lord Baynard.”

“Yes.” She seemed strangely reluctant to pursue this topic. She began worrying a button on her sweater. The thread holding it had begun to shred.

“Wouldn’t,” he said, “wouldn’t it be more usual for a widow of her station in life to have remained living at her husband’s ancestral home?” He reached for the old-fashioned word. “In a dower house, perhaps?”

“Usual,” she mused. “Yes. Except that her husband was a rotter.” The
really
old-fashioned word surprised him so, he struggled not to laugh. “He
gambled
,” she went on. “They had to sell his ancestral pile to some American actress and her husband—and
he
was some sort of singer.”

Well, the disgrace of it all. She said this the way others might mention a drug dealer and her consort.

“It was her own fault, of course, for choosing him,” said Lamorna now.

“What do you plan to do?”

“I plan to do what I’ve always done,” she said, a look of faint surprise on her face. “I’ll stay on, look after things, lead the occasional group through on tour.”

“Will Viscount Nathersby … erm …
will
he need help, do you think?”

“Randolph? He won’t want to live here, and he never has. Why wouldn’t he want me to stay on and help? Besides, it’s Alec who inherits the title from Lord Footrustle. It’s not really Randolph’s business.”

Max thought he was beginning to see the situation from her side. There would be free room and board as there always was, but without the fetch-and-carry that her grandmother had subjected her to, and the contempt her granduncle had subjected her to. It was a motive for murder, certainly, and a powerful one. People had killed before to ensure their own safety and security, keeping a roof over their heads.

“He may have other plans,” said Max carefully. “You should ask him, ask them both, once things are a bit … quieter.”

At the thought of leaving, or being cast out, fear stretched across Lamorna’s face, pulling the skin tight around her eyes.

She suddenly burst out, “Lady B was a manipulative liar. She told people stories about how much they would inherit from her, thinking it would make them be nice to her. But I—I didn’t care.
I
have no use for money.” Then she diluted the impact of this righteous statement by adding, “Besides, her husband ran through so much of it before he died.”

“I see,” said Max. “Randolph has a brother, as I understand it. Lester. And Lester has a wife.”

This immediately brought down her scorn.

“The Australians,” she said. “I hadn’t seen either of them in years. You can be sure they’re interested only in money. Lester ‘does something in finance,’ or so I was told. Again, why would Lord Footrustle do this? Bring all these people here? Strangers, really. Upsetting everything.”

“It may have been simple loneliness,” said Max. “The castle is isolated, and I don’t know how many social outlets he had left. Don’t you think it may have been a desire for companionship?”

“No, I don’t. He had me and Lady Baynard for company. He never could stand any of the rest of them, so far as I could tell. That’s not surprising, is it?” She began to speak with a nervous and erratic intensity. “Heathen!” she cried. “That’s what they are. It’s what they all are.”

“He was getting older, Lord Footrustle,” said Max. “It makes a difference, and they
are
his family.”

Too late, he saw the trap he’d sauntered into.

“And I’m
not
?” she snapped.

“Of course you are,” he said quickly, placatingly. “Yes, of course. Every bit as much as they are.”

She didn’t look convinced because he wasn’t convinced himself. Everything he knew of her situation—and he trusted Awena’s version in particular—painted her as an unwanted outcast. Family by law but not by love.

“It couldn’t have been easy for you,” he said. “After your parents died.”

“A motherless orphan. That was me,” she said. “Like
Jane Eyre
—that show on the telly last year. Handouts, hand-me-downs.” She adjusted her glasses, pinching the frames on both sides to push them to the bridge of her nose, where they promptly slid down again. Sisyphus glasses.

No mention of being fatherless as well. Max reflected that Lamorna’s view of herself—labels like “orphan” and “hand-me-downs,” however accurate, said much of what he needed to know of her personality. Self-pity was easier than trying to change her fate, and was a trap Bronte would never have allowed her heroine to fall into.

“I used to hear them talking, Lord Footrustle and Lady Baynard,” Lamorna said now.

Max wondered, not for the first time, at this insistence on using their formal names.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said, with an emphasis that suggested that was precisely what she had been doing. “But I heard them. ‘If there’s money involved you’ll find them perfectly polite, even sober.’ Lord Footrustle said that.”

Max nodded encouragingly. The recent deaths seemed to have loosened her tongue—he doubted very much she’d have felt as free to share with him her views even a week before. Anything that could add to his store of knowledge of what had happened in the days and weeks leading up to the murder would be helpful.

“He said that, you see, because Lady Baynard was worried about spiteful goings-on with all of them here. Fights and quarrels, you see.”

Max did see.

“Was she worried about any one of them in particular?”

Did he imagine it, or was she was tempted to mention a particular name? After a pause she just shrugged and said, “She was worried about all of them.”

“That’s very helpful,” said Max, smiling.
No, it wasn’t.
“Anything like that you can think of to tell me, please do so. Right away.”

“It’s all just frightfully inconvenient,” pouted Lamorna, sounding more than ever like her grandmother. “We had all these strangers in the house—that was bad enough—and now we have dozens more, snooping and prying and asking questions.”

“Yes, that is the worst of an unpleasant incident such as this.”

“What happens now?” she asked worriedly.

“The DCI from Monkslip-super-Mare will want to talk with everyone, sometimes more than once. You must be patient. You do want to find out what happened to your grandmother, and to your granduncle, don’t you?”

“Not really.” Clearly realizing how cold that sounded, she adopted a look of simpering piety, in imitation of one of the angels adorning her walls, and added the platitude, “It won’t bring them back, will it?”

She was hapless, thought Max, listening to Lamorna. Without hap, whatever that meant. Without happiness, presumably.

Now she pressed the edge of one fist against her mouth in a sudden paroxysm of worry.

“They’re all jealous of each other, you know. It reminds me of Jacob and Esau, the envy. That’s a venial sin, isn’t it? But it seems so much worse.” Then she added, “Please stay until this is sorted. I don’t feel safe around the others.”

“I can’t promise you it will be sorted,” he said. “I can promise to learn what I can, to try to set things right. And you couldn’t be safer with a house full of policemen.”

That earned him a baleful glance. “They’ll only make things worse, you know. They couldn’t possibly begin to understand.”