Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (34 page)

The only access to the pagan spring was on foot, up the steep, winding trail to the menhirs.

Max and Awena sat together in Awena’s house, snug before the fireplace in the embrace of her comfortable sofa, sipping black coffee, his laced with apple brandy. They had just finished another of Awena’s sumptuous meals—organic, seasonal, locally sourced (much of it very local—from her garden), and vegetarian. Awena’s carbon footprint was very small indeed.

“Have you heard about Frank’s book?” she asked him.

“I’m afraid I have. Lucie says it’s doing very well.”

For Frank had self-published his pamphlet as an e-book, and he was having quite a little flutter of success. An editor at Marcellus Sanders, Ltd., had discovered him, and talk of Frank’s book suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

Critics had been kind, heaping lavish praise on Frank’s eccentric worldview, which they took to be a pastel rendering of a mythical, Tolkeinish past juxtaposed with an invisible, parallel universe much like that of the Harry Potter saga. As Suzanna had been heard to say over a pot of tea at the Cavalier, “When Frank Cuthbert is hailed as a fresh new voice in fiction, you know that we as a nation have strayed completely off the path.”

“One wonders what path that is,” said Max when Awena had relayed all this to him.

“Oh, I don’t know. The path of common sense, I suppose. Still, good for him. Perhaps people were attracted by his pioneering work with the apostrophe. At least he’s got the words all spelled correctly, and most of the grammar is right, so far as I can tell. It’s as if the Internet age were invented for just such as Frank. The last I heard, he was going on a tricounty book tour.”

“I own several copies already, what with one bring-and-buy sale or another. Frank is a tenacious salesman.” And, thought Max, since Frank had recited every morsel of the plot to him more than once, it obviated the need actually to read the book now.

He took a sip of his coffee and said, “I’m surrounded by celebrities. Are you really going to be on the telly?”

“I’m seriously considering it, Max. It may be a way to get people to stop the madness. If I can persuade anyone that a healthier diet is doable—and may help us save our precious planet … This may be too good a thing to pass up.”

“You could finish writing your book and go on tour with Frank.”

Awena laughed. “I think I’d sooner ride a horse naked through Nether Monkslip.”

“I would pay to see that.”

She nudged him. “The whole point with Lady Godiva is that the men agreed not to look.”

“Oh. Well, bless her heart for being one of the early tax protestors, and undoubtedly one of the most effective.”

“Did you know,” Awena asked, “that Bernadina and Doc Winship are seeing something of each other now?”

Max paused, considered. “He certainly seemed taken with her. It would be nice if that worked out. Everyone—the whole world—should be as happy as we are.” He held up his coffee glass against the gleam of the fire, swirling the contents to watch the changing topaz light.

“I’m just so glad,” he said, “that you are here with me, and safe and sound. I realized, way out there on the tip of nowhere with Coombebridge, that you might not have been headed for the Cavalier that afternoon for tea, as I’d assumed, but might be going somewhere less public with Gabby and Melinda. I wasn’t yet clear on how or why, but I was clear that you might be in danger if left alone with either of them.”

He had misread so many clues, he thought, a sure sign he’d lost his touch since his MI5 days. He had, for just one example, misread the meaning of the wallpaper that had so upset Gabby, once he’d figured out the wallpaper
had
held meaning for her. He had thought Gabby herself might have been a prisoner, which is one reason why he became frightened for Awena.

He dialed his thoughts back to the evening in Frank and Lucie’s dining room. Of course, he knew now, the Coombebridge seascape had had nothing to do with Gabby’s distress. It was Lucie’s stylish vertical-striped wallpaper
behind
the picture that had upset her. The abrupt, unexpected, and unbearable reminder of her mother’s suffering.

“I was never in any real danger, Max,” said Awena. “We had tea at Gabby’s flat over La Maison Bleue. And Gabby seemed her usual self. Composed, confident. But then Melinda took ill.…”

“Gabby poisoned Melinda’s meal. Premeditatively. I call that being in real danger, Awena. What if she’d become confused and mixed up the pies?”

“I mean, I was never Gabby’s target. But I suppose I was lucky. Knowing I was having a mushroom omelet later, I didn’t want any quiche.”

Thank God, thought Max, Awena had not been a part of Gabby’s plan. Gabby had helped Awena see Melinda safely home, then had faked illness herself as an excuse to leave. Even then, Gabby’s will seemed to have been unraveling, faltering, with remorse setting in; she could, as she had said, have killed Melinda if she’d really wanted to.

He remembered another odd moment from the dinner at Frank and Lucie’s, a moment to which he felt he should have paid more attention. He remembered that Gabby had talked about her mother as if she’d known her to talk to. Lucie had fallen strangely silent, a puzzled look on her face—for Lucie, whose own mother had grown up in the same convent orphanage as Gabby, would have known that Gabby never knew her mother. The woman had never lived to give Gabby advice on fitness or any other topic.

He had summarized for Awena the contents of Gabby’s letter, and the copies of the e-mails she had left behind. Cotton had told him the police had broken into the e-mail account she’d created, where she wrote letters to her mother as if she were alive, as if her mother had survived the war. The password she’d used was Claude.

“Those e-mails…” Awena began.

“She used them as a sort of diary that could be hidden from prying eyes, but it also was her way of keeping in her life the woman who had been taken from her with such brutal finality.”

“It is strange to think how Melinda got involved in the first place. If not for the time change … I suppose she’ll be in some trouble for this as soon as she’s recovered—as an accessory.”

Max nodded. “The time change was something that dogged me throughout the case—every hour on the hour, in fact, since Maurice generally forgets to ‘spring forward’ and ‘fall back’ the church bells. It was what kept reminding me of the time issue, and I began to wonder if it might come into the equation. Gabby was caught in the act because Melinda anticipated the time change on Saturday night and set her watch forward. Gabby never wore a watch, because her hands were in water and dyes and chemicals all day, and so she vaguely thought she had an extra hour to dispose of Thaddeus and all the evidence. She simply forgot; Melinda could have died because of her own efficiency—an efficiency I’d say was uncharacteristic. Melinda kept quiet about what she knew, but Gabby couldn’t trust such an uneven personality to keep quiet forever.”

“It took a certain amount of daring, didn’t it?” Awena said. “Gabby’s method of killing Thaddeus, of working her way into the confidence of both Thaddeus and Melinda. I suppose we could say she inherited from both parents a certain strain of boldness.”

“And then there was this: Gabby’s day-to-day work often involved mixing chemicals, measuring effective amounts of peroxide and whatnot. She was comfortable in that world. It’s no stretch to think she could work out the right dose to kill Thaddeus—and the right amount of poison to kill Melinda, if she’d wanted to. Although I gather in Melinda’s case she made a slight miscalculation.”

“But … they were good friends,” said Awena musingly. “Gabby and Melinda.”

“They may have developed something like a real friendship, partly because Melinda was so frequently in the shop, but in the beginning Gabby was in intelligence-gathering mode—tracking down those earrings, and learning about Thaddeus’s early life, his current habits, and so on. Eventually Melinda spilled nearly everything to Gabby—her unhappiness with Thaddeus, even details of her relationship with Farley. Gabby knew exactly which way Melinda’s thoughts were drifting, particularly when she found her with those mushrooms. It was highly likely Melinda would botch the job; I somewhat suspect Gabby wanted to make sure the job was done right.”

Awena settled against him, listening to the rumble of this chest as he spoke.

“Otherwise, she’d have let Melinda kill him,” she said. “And maybe—this is a terrible thought, but maybe she wanted to keep that pleasure to herself.”

Max said, “I think you may be right. Anyway, the clues at times were nebulous. When someone—especially someone like Thaddeus—does or says something that makes no sense at all, I look for the reason. There is
always
a reason. Sometimes it’s just that they’re embarrassed to say what the small matter is.” He set his lips grimly together. “And sometimes there’s a darker reason.”

Awena lifted her head to look at him. “I know what you mean. Sometimes they are masking something that would really be no big deal, if they’d just come out with it. But the small lie grows to look like a big one.”

“In this case, I remember that Thaddeus claimed not to remember the war. But he was ten. How credible is it he would be too young at ten to remember anything? The world—his and everyone else’s—was turned upside down.”

“It’s not really possible he just didn’t want to remember, is it? Even though the mind plays tricks…” Awena added wonderingly, nearly echoing Gabby’s words, “That a ten-year-old was capable of this…”

“I’m not sure he saw it as anything more than a bit of mischief. Still, by that age he should have been able to realize the consequences could be fatal. His kleptomania seems to have blinded him to anything beyond his immediate wants. I would imagine that particular form of illness is worse before the impulse control most adults share has fully set in.”

Max added, “There were other inconsistencies, small ones. I was nearly certain Thaddeus was not native to this country, but I tied no significance to that at first. He talked about someone attending ‘
the
New College in Oxford’—no British person would say that. It’s logical but wrong to add that ‘the’ before ‘New College.’ It was an oddity, just something I noticed at the time, nothing more.”

There was a long pause as they sat listening to the crackle of the fire. Raindrops pelted softly against the windows. Awena said, “What do you think happened with Gabby? Was she adopting her mother’s personality? Trying to
become
her? The e-mails…”

“You are thinking of something like multiple-personality disorder? No, I don’t think that is the case, not at all. Gabby knew full well who she was, and who her mother was, and that they were two separate people. She just became obsessed with what had happened to her mother. I think she felt that by absorbing what she knew of her mother’s life and personality and experiences into her own, she could become closer to her somehow, feel what her mother had felt, and, by putting on the mantle of this woman she never knew, fill the enormous void left in her own life, particularly after her husband passed.

“I think Gabby was trying to relive everything she imagined her mother—and all the women caught up in that hellish experience—had gone through. Trying, almost, to become
like
the person she imagined her mother might have become, had she lived. I suppose it’s some form of survivor guilt—I’m not expert enough to say.”

Max thought back to one of the Bible verses Gabby had left for him to find, the Psalm about the orphans. “They slay the widowe and the stranger: and murder the fatherlesse.” Only now he could see how obvious a clue it was to Gabby’s identity. As he and Cotton had discussed, she must have wanted to be caught. She had been orphaned so young, her mother and widowed grandmother both killed. The quote fit the wreckage of her young life, even to the fact the father she’d never known had been a stranger, a sojourner in France who had met his own death trying to escape. Gabby had been engulfed by unthinkable loss, betrayed by the malice of an evil child. Thaddeus may have suffered from his uncontrollable impulses to steal from an early age, but there was a cruelty to his actions that Max thought went beyond his mental illness. He had ruined the lives of innocents for no better reason but that he could—almost as a form of entertainment, like watching a play. Max could easily picture him bringing his secret knowledge to his parents, certain of their approval. Knowledge, then as now, was power.

“I agree. I don’t think she was insane,” Awena was saying.

“Not in the legal definition. She knew what she was doing. She knew her mother wasn’t alive. She simply kept her alive in her own mind. And she killed Thaddeus with full knowledge that killing him was wrong.

“But I could make a long list of mitigating circumstances. Her chance to know her family in the normal way—mother, father, grandfather
and
grandmother—had been taken from her. She’d been robbed of all their lives.
And
of every personal possession, by the way—her home and belongings. We perhaps mourn more intensely over unexpected or sudden losses, or when we can only imagine the loved one, with only a photograph to gaze at, and wonder at what might have been. Losing her beloved husband, that sudden loss … all these injuries she suffered were at a cellular level.

“She learned the details of her mother’s fate not long after her husband died. The timing of these meetings with Annabelle, so soon after his death, probably unbalanced her mind. To learn such terrible details, when she was already bereft—it could send anyone over the edge. Seeing the article about Nether Monkslip—seeing that photo of a woman wearing her mother’s earrings—it all seemed like a sign from God to her, bringing her to this place.

“And there was her enemy, alive and healthy, out enjoying himself with friends, living the life others should have been around to enjoy. Tracking him down gave her a purpose, but I think it finally unhinged her, too. The thought of avenging her mother—avenging all those who had suffered so greatly—these thoughts took over her mind in a ruinous way.