Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (26 page)

Beyond that, he suspected he’d have trouble focusing on any sort of story right now, being in the midst of his own. Nether Monkslip seemed to be being tested at every turn lately. Why here? wondered Max. Of all the blameless, innocuous places on the planet, why Nether Monkslip?

Mrs. Hooser knocked, opened the study door, and shouted through that Lucie Cuthbert was here to see him.

And Lucie came in carrying a dripping umbrella. This could only mean Mrs. Hooser had again repurposed the stand by the door. Sometimes she used it as a vase, sometimes to hold her mop and broom as she worked in the kitchen. Max, taking the umbrella from Lucie to set it near the hearth, looked out the window and saw it had started to rain. Umbrellas in bright primary colors bobbed everywhere he looked.

“Have a seat, please, Lucie,” he said, waving to one of the leather chairs flanking the skirted sofa by the fireplace. “And tell me what this is about.”

For a visit from Lucie Cuthbert was unprecedented. Lucie kept her own counsel and made her own decisions, as a rule. And as a rule, they were wise decisions.

“Something happened. I don’t know what to do. I thought maybe you…”

“Go on,” said Max. It must be important, for her to bring him into it. Just not important enough to go to DCI Cotton with.

“It happened the night of the dinner party. As all of you were leaving, there was the usual fuss and confusion in the hallway over coats and umbrellas and things. So I almost didn’t notice, and the chances were against my noticing. And I think he knew that
very
well, the sneak.”

Max waited. Lucie would tell the story in her own way. He didn’t need to ask who “he” was, either, although he supposed it might have been Dr. Bruce Winship who had aroused this little fit of passion.

“It was Thaddeus, you see. Quick as a flash, he reached out his hand; all our backs were turned, and, well I’m almost certain, you see…”

“Yes?”

“He stole it.”

An encouraging nod here.

“He stole a vase.”

“A vase?”

“Yes, a little vase, big enough only for one bud. It is not a valuable vase, but it has sentimental value for me, as it belonged to my mother. I keep it—kept it—on top of the little table in the hallway. You may have noticed it there when you came in?”

He hadn’t particularly noticed it. The little table she mentioned contained a hazardous collection of little breakables, most of them crystal or porcelain. His only reason for looking at it had been to avoid accidentally knocking into it.

“You’re certain it was he?”

She nodded, allowing herself a single dramatic gesture, waving her arms about to demonstrate her outrage. “But of course! As certain as I can be. He was the only one near enough. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

He considered what she had told him, and the word
kleptomania
emerged. Thaddeus was a kleptomaniac? Max turned the idea over in his mind. From what little he knew about the disorder, kleptomaniacs stole items they didn’t need or even want. Both valuable and useless things. It was an impulsive act; the
thrill
of stealing was what mattered.

Max felt there was a stray bit of precious metal in what she had said and he struggled to glean what it was.

Then he remembered Melinda’s telling him her earrings had been stolen. Did that fit into what Lucie was reporting, somehow—a little puzzle piece that not only matched the color of another piece but slotted in beside it? But—would a man steal earrings from his own wife? It didn’t fit any definition of kleptomania he had ever heard of, but he supposed it was possible.

“And you’re wondering what to do,” said Max.

Lucie nodded. “It’s awkward; you do see? Melinda has just lost her husband. I can’t think of a way to say that he stole something from me just before he died and ‘Can I have it back now, please?’ And now she’s talking about moving away. I’m afraid the vase might go with her. She won’t realize it’s stolen. You do see…”

Max did. She didn’t know how to ask for it back from Melinda—and clearly she wanted Max to ask for her.

But he was more taken by what she’d said about Melinda’s leaving.

“Did she tell you herself she was leaving?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding as she pushed back the glossy wave of hair that fell over one eye. “Well, it’s all over the Cut and Dried—and I did panic a bit when I heard. It meant that asking her couldn’t wait forever.”

“Yes, I see,” said Max. “I’m not certain I could intervene right now. But I can assure you she will officially be dissuaded by DCI Cotton from going anywhere until this matter is cleared up. I shouldn’t worry too much in the meantime, if I were you. If there is any way to introduce the topic to her, I will.”

Actually, knowing what he knew of Melinda’s blossoming relationship with Farley, he doubted she would be too cut up by news of her husband’s weakness for taking what didn’t belong to him. Odd as the whole conversation was, he wasn’t inclined to dismiss it out of hand. The problem was, it didn’t go much further toward explaining the motive for the crime. The last thing he would expect from Lucie would be that she’d kill someone over a minor theft such as this. There were dozens of motives that could lead to murder: lust, anger, envy. Even love could be a motive. But these were strong impulses, the unhealthiest of which often were the result of a long, festering process.

Not long afterward, Lucie left the vicarage, looking more relieved and grateful than perhaps the situation warranted. A burden shared being a burden halved, thought Max. Clearly she felt the ball was now in his court.

He was turning toward his desk when Mrs. Hooser, in her abrupt, aggrieved way, announced Bernadina Steed. Max always wondered at this tone she adopted; it wasn’t as if Mrs. Hooser were doing much of anything important, yet she treated each interruption as if she had just been on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough.

Bernadina strode in, hand outstretched in the exuberant sort of greeting perfected by the successful estate agent. She wore designer jeans that defeated the original practical purpose of jeans, since they carried a famous logo that priced them in the three-figure range. She also wore the top half of a bright yellow suit over her open-necked shirt, the jacket boxy in style and with black piping and an inviting nubby texture. Even Max knew it was Chanel.

“Hello, Father Max. I was just driving by and I saw Lucie leaving the vicarage. I worried…”

“Yes?” prompted Max. “Worried about what?”

“About something Lucie may have told you. Something she may have caught wind of. If so, I’d rather it came from me. I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression.”

“Lucie isn’t really a gossip,” said Max. It was true: Lucie was generally too busy running her shop to be caught up in the village gossip stream.

“I know. I meant … Lucie wouldn’t see it as gossip, you realize. To her, it’s just part of life. She is very, well,
French,
you know. They see these things differently. But in these circumstances … when there’s been a murder…”

She sat very still, blushing but unbowed.

“It’s best to come clean.” This had to be about her affair with Thaddeus. Max was grappling with whether to tell her he’d already heard all this from Cotton. Or would she be aware of that? Max’s involvement in anything that looked like a murder investigation in or around Nether Monkslip was getting to be common knowledge. Her coming here might all be part of an elaborate double bluff. It was precisely what an innocent person would do—as would a guilty person pretending innocence.

In the end, after a bit of hemming and hawing, she admitted to the affair in a gush of reminiscence tinged with remorse.

“It was over ages ago,” she told him. “I am not particularly proud of it, I must say. Particularly since he turned out to be the most frightful little creep: It was like he was kissing a mirror the whole time. But it seemed better to be open and aboveboard with DCI Cotton when I spoke with him.”

Max, for his part, was having the strongest sense of déjà vu. Both Kayla Prince and Bernadina Steed. Who else? Thaddeus, despite his years, certainly got around.

Max hoped it would prove to be no one else he knew, someone even more unlikely than Bernadina—for it was starting to look as if Thaddeus had had quite the checkered past, with women from all walks of life.

She added, “Awena would say I was dishonoring my ancestors by my behavior. I have come to believe she is right about that.”

Max almost missed the import of what she was saying.

“Awena knew about the affair?”

“Yes, I confided in her. It worried me when he came to live here, you understand. I was afraid of the awkward meeting. You know the kind of thing. I needn’t have worried. He didn’t care anymore and nor did I. Melinda, if she guessed, certainly didn’t care.”

Max was still struggling with the concept of Awena’s withholding this information from him, when surely she knew it was relevant to the investigation. Bernadina seemed to sense the problem.

“It was women’s business, Max. Something told to Awena in confidence. She would never break a confidence, but she
would
encourage me to tell the truth. Which she did. Which I did—just now.”

Max was slightly taken aback. It was the first sense he’d had of an Awena operating on her own, out of step with him.

*

Bernadina left soon afterward. Max remained in his seat, staring at the trainers on his feet, and thinking. This made two women who’d been involved in some manner of affair with Thaddeus. What were the chances there were more abandoned women in his past? Whoever did the abandoning, breakups were always painful and difficult, and no one’s idea of fun.

Who would be likely to know more? Max wondered. He logged on to the Internet, with its agonizingly slow vicarage connection, did a search or two, and came up with the name of Thaddeus’s agent, and his phone number. A young woman, the agent’s secretary, came on the line on the third ring. Max invoked Cotton’s name and learned the name of the director with whom Thaddeus had most recently had dealings: one Henry Cork. No doubt DCI Cotton’s people had gotten there first, but one never knew.… People talking to the police often left things out—either from nervousness or out of an abundance of caution.

So Max dialed the offices of Henry Cork, where he exchanged words with Cork’s answering machine. The machine assured him that its human checked messages from its mobile phone regularly and would get back to him shortly.

To Max’s surprise, the enormous black Bakelite phone on the study desk rang back almost instantly. He’d told the answering machine that he was arranging the services for Thaddeus Bottle and would like the director to deliver a few words. This was nothing but the truth, so far as it went.

The two men exchanged introductions.

“I’m afraid I’m in the middle of rehearsal, so I’ll have to keep this short,” Cork told Max, who could hear the hubbub of a stage production in the background. In Max’s imagination, the man wore the costume of the auteur: the satin-lined cloak, the hat, the cigarette holder. Then: “Why is the decanter sitting on the chair cushion? And where in hell is Rufus?”

A tinny little voice answered in an apparently displeasing manner.

“Go tell him to take his hands off the prop girl and get his ass out here. He enters stage right, in case he’s forgotten, or thinks we’re going to drop him from the rafters like Tinker Bell.”

Cork returned his attention to the phone call.

“Now, you want me to say a few nice words about the deceased, is that it? Well, this will call on all my skills of diplomacy, I hope you’re aware. But I’ll give it a shot. The old bast—I mean, the old man helped me keep the lights burning for a number of years, in his heyday. It’s the least I can do. That one play of his about the blacksmith … Funny how an irredeemable shit can write such moving prose at times. But he was a sneak, always creeping about, listening at keyholes. And I think he stole my pen once—my good pen. Where is Mary Ann?”

Again, the sounds of consternation and feet thumping heavily across a wooden stage.

“Ah,” said Max, almost as though it were news to him that Thaddeus was not universally beloved. “He could be difficult?”

The man laughed. “Yes, he could be all that. He could be self-involved. All of them are—actors. You won’t find any shrinking violets onstage, to begin with. And the competition for dwindling parts makes all of them worse. That said, Thaddeus had a gift for getting people’s backs up, for the left-handed compliment, if not the outright lie, usually delivered in a roomful of people, so that to respond would make the target of the moment only look foolish or ungrateful. It was subtly done, but the malice behind it was real enough. And that was only when he was feeling charitable. God help you if you really got on his nerves.”

“I see,” said Max quietly. Delicately, he cleared his throat before saying, “I also was rather given to understand he had a roving eye?”

“Got it in one, Vicar. That he did. He coveted his neighbor’s wife, and he coveted his neighbor’s goods, and he coveted his neighbor’s success. How I am expected to turn all that into a comforting eulogy for the grieving widow, I don’t know. Although, something tells me she won’t be grieving long. What was her name—Melissa?”

“Melinda.”

“Right. I don’t imagine that hookup worked out as she’d planned. Somehow, she’d gotten the idea Thaddeus was awfully famous and just rolling in it when they met—at least that was my impression. That was certainly my first impression,” he added, underlining the point. Then once again, he broke off, shouting, “Stage left! Stage left! What do you mean, you can’t? You can walk, even if you can’t act—but do quit shuffling about like someone’s stuffed a goose in your knickers. Well, move the goddamn coffee table, then. Where in fuck has Props got to?”

There was a mumbled response, as from a man underwater.

“Well, go and tell her we do not pay her to talk on her mobile all day with her boyfriend. Get her in here.
Stat!
”

Into the receiver, he said, “Was that all, Vicar?” Max could almost hear him removing the snarl from his face as spoke in (what was for him, anyway) a more modulated and reasonable tone, like a conductor shouting a train arrival.