The Haunted Season (11 page)

The shortest way to the village from here would be to cut through an opening in the hedgerows, some of which dated to Anglo-Saxon times. While the lord of the manor might have the right to restrict access to his land, in practice the bad feeling this engendered made active enforcement not worthwhile for the old family. Sheep and cows were driven across any available opening, as had been done for centuries, and schoolchildren found their way home in much the same way.

It was getting dark, and he wished briefly he'd thought to bring a torch with him. All he had was a small promotional torch attached to his key ring, something he'd picked up at a religious conference. “Shine a light,” it read, beneath part of a verse from John 8:12.

He called for Thea, no longer wishing to meander, but now in haste to get home to his wife and child. At the thought of them, a breeze stirred, carrying that heady mix of sea and forest smells, and joy coursed through him in one of the many exquisite moments of grace he'd been granted since Owen's arrival.

Which was why he jumped and turned, heart pounding, when Thea sent up an unearthly howl, a sound he had never heard from her before. It was a sound that startled birds from the trees and scattered whatever small wildlife had been in hiding, waiting for her to leave.

What in the name of—

Max fumbled the small torch out of his pocket as he broke into a run, leaping into the forest in the direction of the sound, jumping over rocks and tree branches fallen in the winter storms long past. He plunged into an area where the trees grew closer together, impeding his progress, as no moonlight could penetrate here. All he had to go by was Thea's unearthly howling, reduced to a fretting whine as she heard him approach and realized help was on the way to sort out this event, unprecedented in her experience. He skidded to a halt on a mat of wet fallen leaves that nearly tipped him on his backside.

Thea had found Lord Baaden-Boomethistle, or a significant part of what remained of him, which was his decapitated head. Its eyes, thank God, were closed.

Of all the things Max might have expected to see on this serene evening, it would never have been this.

He called Thea sharply to his side to keep the area undisturbed, for surely where a head was, a body would be nearby. He pulled her lead from his pocket and attached it to her collar, for in her agitated state he didn't entirely trust her not to run from him, to start helpfully looking for the remains of this poor human.

The canopy of tree branches parted at this spot where the head lay, giving Max a moment's clear view of the area. Looking around and craning his neck, aiming the small torch upward, he saw a worn spot on the tree trunk nearest him, a rubbing away that exposed raw wood, looking exactly as if someone had used a garrote on it. Training the light directly across the narrow path, he saw a corresponding cut.

Someone had tied a sort of trip wire across the trail, and then later removed it, for there was no sign of the wire now that he could see. Whether they had done it in recent days or hours could not be said, but what were the chances? This exact spot where Lord Baaden-Boomethistle had died showed signs of a recent booby trapping. Since he had to have been traveling at some speed, it was natural to assume he had been on horseback, taking the exercise he had mentioned to Max. The question was why the killer, whoever it was, hadn't just left the wire in place, but perhaps the thinking was that it might contain evidence, DNA or whatnot, and that it was safer to remove it than leave it to be tested.

As Max turned away, his torch chanced upon the gleam of a gold object at the base of the same tree. He hunched over for a closer look. It appeared to be an engraved hair ornament of some sort. He left it undisturbed for the police.

It was a ghastly crime, suggesting a villain with an iron, if reckless, will, someone waiting, and plotting, and, having seen the success of his or her reprehensible deed, coolly removing all traces. Certainly this death was no accident.

Max had the inconvenient and unwelcome thought that his bishop might see this as the last straw, for wherever Max Tudor went, the bishop could not help but notice, murder was sure to follow. This just seemed a bizarre escalation of the crimes the priest had witnessed to date. The bishop appeared in his mind's eye as Max had last seen him, racing across the courtyard of his magnificent palace, flushed by the exertion, red hair flying about his face and purple robes billowing around his legs. The man had been marvelously patient and understanding, but surely …

There was nothing for it now but to call the authorities and worry about the bishop's reaction later. If Max were some sort of murder magnet, after all, sending him away from Nether Monkslip would surely be to send the problem of murder along with him.

 

Chapter 7

DCI COTTON TAKES THE CASE

“Another body, Max? It's like you're becoming the grim reaper of Nether Monkslip—and parts beyond.” DCI Cotton, impeccably suited, looked around him at the forested area, over to the forensics team going about its grisly business, and added, “Where's the horse got to, then?”

“He's probably headed back to the stables. Isn't that what you would do in his shoes?”

Cotton glanced down at his own Italian leathers and said, “I'm not really a mind reader when it comes to horses. If I were, I might take up betting at the races.”

It was some time after Max had called the station in Monkslip-super-Mare, asking to be put straight through to DCI Cotton, wherever he happened to be. Cotton had been interrupted at his dinner in front of the telly in his spartan apartment, a place of polished chrome and gleaming bare surfaces. Max had done a preliminary search while waiting for the authorities to arrive, finding only a summerhouse nearby. At first glance, it had looked forgotten, frozen in time, like something from a children's tale, a Victorian relict of days when ornate follies were all the rage.

The decedent's body, its hands bagged and accompanied now by its head, had been removed by the mortuary attendants, and the chorus of the experts in the art of death also had vanished, taking with them the usual accoutrements for investigating an untimely passing—in this case, a messy and unseemly one. It had taken the videographer and photographer, for example, much longer than normal to document the scene, and the blood-spatter expert much longer than usual to document the carnage. Scenes of crimes officers, even with their search aided by artificial light, were hampered in finding evidence or samples by the dense undergrowth around the trees. They were further hampered by not knowing what, if any, evidence they were looking for. Even though the ground was cooperatively moist, given all the leaf fall there were no footprints, only the horse's hoofprints to show them the path he had taken home.

Now a lone constable stood watch, waiting for what, it was not clear. He represented some sort of swipe at the concept of crowd control, Max supposed.

The police doctor also remained behind. He was packing up his paraphernalia at a safe distance from the crime scene area, and he had begun carefully removing the outerwear that had shielded him as he went about his job. He was a man who looked ridiculously young to be responsible for such a momentous task, one with so many large responsibilities. He wore glasses and the supercilious smirk of the know-it-all, made more aggravating by the fact that he did, usually, know far more than his police audience.

Now returned to his usual civilian attire, jogging pants and a black T-shirt, he walked over to the two waiting men, one blond and one dark-haired. He was used to seeing Max Tudor at scenes such as this, and had early on begun treating him as part of the investigative team.

He nodded to each man in turn. “Hullo, padre. Howdy, Chief.” Max thought the doctor's name was Sprottle, but before he could confirm this, the young man had moved on past the niceties. “Before you ask, no more than three hours dead. Closer to one hour. I'll know more when I've got him on the table.”

Max told him about the planned meeting with Lord Baaden-Boomethistle, for which he had inexplicably—until now—been stood up.

“And you're quite certain this was he? The corpse's head, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Max curtly. It was not a sight he'd soon forget.

“Someone really wanted to send a message to this guy,” said the doctor, “but God alone knows what the message was. ‘
Sic semper tyrannis,
' maybe, or whatever the peasants shouted as people were taken to the guillotine. I can tell you this, you're not looking for an animal lover.”

“How do you mean?” Cotton asked him.

“Too risky: The animal could have been injured if it had lifted its head at the wrong moment, or been frightened by something and reared up entirely on its hind legs. It's also a very dicey way to kill someone. Even though—and this is what is interesting here—even though I'm betting the wire was arranged to strike precisely at the neck of a rider of the exact height of the victim. His height as he sat, I mean. He had a rather long torso, so he was, you could say, riding high. And the wire was strung precisely at the spot where the path started to slope steeply downward, mitigating the risk
some
what. The risk to the horse, I mean.”

Max nodded. “The path up to that point was wide and clear for some length, so the rider would have been getting up some speed.”

“It was probably an old green path used to drive cattle, sheep, what have you.”

“Yes, I was on a similar path that runs almost parallel.”

“But at the spot where the path narrowed, the rider would have been forced to slow down from a full gallop. There's a bit of a turning there, too, so you wouldn't see what you were headed into and you wouldn't have time to pull up if you did. Then there's that dip in the road there where it slants downward.”

The three men were silent, picturing the unthinkable.

The doctor continued: “So the rider's body and head would momentarily have been angled back—no longer at a ninety-degree angle as he sat. It was finely calibrated to work and it seems to have gone off like clockwork.”

“
God,
” whispered Max.

“I doubt he even knew what hit him, if that makes you feel better. I'm just going to see if they found the horse. I need to take his measure, too. But I think I'll find my hypothesis is right. This was planned down to the half inch.”

“It's like something out of a spaghetti Western,” Cotton observed.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Very dramatic, and as I say, outside of the cinema, a very chancy way to do away with someone.”

“Could the horse have been the target?”

“You mean for the insurance or something? Well … same problem. You'd be as likely to kill the man as the horse. Which is what did happen, of course. But there's no way any insurance company would see this as an accident. With horses, that is much easier to arrange without the neon sign of a wire across the path. I should think you'd want to avoid the sort of lengthy insurance investigation this would cry out for.”

“So it's murder—the willful taking of a human life. And a coldly calculated murder at that. Okay.” Cotton turned to Max. “It's all
so
dramatic. Maybe we're looking for a film fan.”

“Maybe we are,” agreed Max. “Some people believe whatever they see on the screen, putting aside all sense of what it really takes to kill someone. Unstable people, that is.”

“So this unstable person got lucky, in a manner of speaking.”

“And the victim did not. By the way, I had a look around, well away from the crime scene, while I was waiting for your lot to arrive. There's a grove over there with a sort of summerhouse—a garden temple in the middle of it. A clearing in the trees with this small stone-and-wood structure tucked inside. It looks like a nice spot for a rendezvous of two like-minded people.”

“A temple?”

“Well, as I say, a summerhouse or gazebo of some kind, but with a small altar and a statue of a Hindu goddess inside. A goddess of love—Parvati. That's what made me think
temple.
It's well-hidden, private, if you take my meaning.”

“I believe I do. Are you suggesting Lady Baaden-Boomethistle…”

“I'm suggesting nothing, really. But it's not abandoned, as I first thought. It looks clean and well kept up, not overgrown, as you might expect. And it was built with luxury in mind, rather than being a site of worship, to my eye. The statue is window dressing, with no offerings or candles before it. The structure itself is rather difficult to find if you don't know where to look for it. Even then, if I hadn't been wandering, rather at a loose end, I might never have found it. It's hidden in a dense thicket of trees, with only the narrowest footpath to it. The path has, however, been used often enough that it is well trodden.”

“Got it. We'll have someone take a look.”

“There was also some sort of small golden object near the crime scene. A hair ornament, I thought.”

Like a conjurer, the doctor produced a paper evidence bag and opened it for them to peer inside.

“Do you mean this? It's engraved with initials—B-B. You're right in thinking it's a hair ornament. There's a strand or two of dark hair caught in the little clasp—you see?—that might help us by providing DNA, but only if the root of the hair is intact.”

“Useful. Do you need me any further tonight?” Max had rung Awena after he'd called the police, to let her know he'd be delayed, but that had been hours ago. He had not given her the terrible details, except to let her know there had been another death in peaceful Nether Monkslip and that he had been the one to discover the body. That seemed enough for her to know, although by early morning the news would be everywhere, as the folk of Nether Monkslip tended all to be early risers. There was no way all the commotion would go unnoticed for long.