The Haunted Season (31 page)

“So how do we catch the killer?” Cotton, leaning in, said. “A confrontation, some deftly choreographed, drawn-out interrogation at the station?”

Max shook his head. “Too risky—too likely to make him clam up, call in counsel, claim he's being persecuted by jackbooted thugs. And all you'd get out of her is that she has an alibi and you're harassing her. And at this point, you would be.”

“So let's do a spot of gaslighting.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Smoke the murderer out. Make him—or her—believe what can't be true is true. Frighten the living daylights out of them.”

“Yes, okay,” said Max, metaphorically taking off his clerical collar. “But exactly how?”

“It shouldn't be hard. The situation at Casa Totleigh is deteriorating. Everyone is ready to tip the next one straight into it, if you ask me.”

Somewhere behind Max's gray eyes, a thought flitted past, too fast for him to capture, leaving behind a strange queasiness and uncertainty. What was it? What was the trigger? Something Cotton had just said? Some word, or some angle of his head as he said it, some light in his eyes? It was there, Max knew, and it was real. And the only way the thought might return would be to let it run wild and then, hopefully, return to him.

There he goes again, thought Cotton. That quizzical, rather fierce look Max got as he made some connection that had eluded all the best minds on his team. Including, thought Cotton, my own.

Trying desperately to hold several strands of thought in his mind simultaneously, Max asked Cotton to repeat what he had just said.

Max listened, and said at last. “Interesting choice of word.”

“What word?” Cotton stood from his chair and restlessly began pacing the room, ending up before the little crèche scene from Monkbury Abbey.

“Interesting,” Max repeated. Cotton spun his lean body around now to look at Max. The DCI knew Max's
ah-ha
tone too well.

“I need to clear my head a bit,” said Max, also rising from his chair. He left the room and returned with two glasses and a pitcher of water. He placed these on the low table before the fireplace, within reach of Cotton, and poured out water from the pitcher. Owen stirred briefly and Thea opened one eye to see what was up. Cotton watched as they both fell back asleep. He felt as if he had walked into the middle of a children's tale and stood now in an enchanted little cottage where children and dogs dozed through the most terrible conversations about murder and mayhem.

Max stood staring at the fire, his head bent and his arms straight out as he clasped his glass on the mantel before him. It was, Cotton noted, nearly an attitude of prayer.

Max turned around and said, “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I've thought of a way to bring the cat to its milk. It will sound absurd, and even the legality of what I propose is doubtful. But when you consider the gullible nature of at least one of our suspects…”

“You mean you've thought of a way to gaslight the mother,” Cotton said happily.

“Language!” But Max was smiling. “Something like that.”

Max thought back to the sermon he'd been working on before all this had happened. “Thy will be done” had looked somehow easier to accept at the time. As for “Do the ends ever justify the means?” he had not known how soon he would come to appreciate the irony.

But God acted through man, and it was up to man to take action. At least so Max reasoned now. Sitting and waiting would not be possible and might let the suspects get away. There was nothing to keep them here, after all. They had nothing on anyone, no concrete evidence. Just one witness to some overheard garbled conversations.

He explained his idea to Cotton and told him what—and who—was needed to put the plan into action.

Cotton tried his mobile. The connection failing, as was often the way in remote Nether Monkslip, he picked up the enormous Bakelite phone on Max's desk. He got through to the headquarters in Monkslip-super-Mare and asked to speak with Sergeant Essex. Max pictured her at her desk, even this late in the day: tough, wiry, and bright-eyed as a terrier, her short hair standing out about her head. She would likely be reading through the case files for the tenth time:
Some
thing would be in there. Something she'd missed.

When Cotton had finished describing to her what was needed (Max could hear her excited questions and yelps of agreement from across the room), he put down the receiver to meet Max's questioning gaze.

“She's thrilled,” he informed Max. “It gets her away from Musteile for the day.”

“I thought she would be. She told me once she grew up around horses.”

“Full of surprises, she is.”

“One more thing,” said Max. “Be sure to keep up surveillance on the summerhouse—the temple or whatever it is.”

“I've had Musteile on it.”

“Try putting someone competent on it. It's important.”

 

Chapter 23

RED HERRINGS

Two days later, DCI Cotton returned to the vicarage. Both Awena and Owen were there with Max.

“It went off well, did it?” Max asked him over coffee and biscuits.

“Like clockwork.” Cotton gently withdrew a finger from Owen's sticky grasp. Max thought the fastidious Cotton would find all the baby effluvia upsetting, but he clearly had made an exception in Owen's case. “But with an added bonus. You were right about Musteile. Once we put someone competent in place to watch the summerhouse, we got results. Maybe not the results we expected, but results.”

“Can nothing be done about him?”

“He's being reprimanded, but it won't stick. He's ‘Someone's' nephew—that's ‘Someone' with a capital
S.
It will take dynamite to get rid of him. His family doesn't want him at home causing havoc, you see.”

“Yes. Much better to let him muck up a murder investigation. Anyway, Destiny was right about the son?”

“Peregrine, thinly disguised as a loser? Yes. We've learned he's taken a turn or two on the stage at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford. It helps that the family spends most of its time in Spain—no one quite remembers what he used to look like growing up. So he shows up in the village looking gauche and undesirable—daft as a brush. He's always to be seen traipsing about, doing nothing much. If anyone remembers him from before, they probably assume some sort of slow decline into dweebdom.”

“And the purpose of this was to throw suspicion off the affair he was having with his stepmother.”

“Right,” said Cotton. “To make him look like the unlikeliest of candidates for the lady's affections. For any lady's affections.”

Owen was making a reach for Max, so he paused to pull him out of Awena's arms and settle him on his lap. As he spoke, he gently ruffled Owen's hair, soft as lambs wool. “When the dowager claimed she was attacked, I paid little attention,” Max said. “It was exactly the sort of self-dramatizing story I felt she would make up. But now I believe there was truth in it, even if she later decided to downplay the danger. I think she
did
know something; I think she saw something going on between Lady Baaden-Boomethistle and the son of the house.”

“And she had a decision to make,” Cotton said, agreeing. “In the end, she felt she had to lie to cover for her grandson, despite having seen him in a passionate clutch with Bree. Why lie? Because she wants her grandson to inherit: He must not be disinherited for any reason. So she creates this fiction of Bree's infidelity with another man—the truth that Bree is embroiled with her own stepson is too ugly a truth to come out, so the dowager tries to push us in a different direction, toward the estate manager, for one.”

“The dowager's claim that someone tried to climb through her bedroom window from outside. Any evidence of that—or was it all a red herring?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Cotton, “we did find a broken branch outside her window. The lab boys and girls thought it may have broken off accidentally when someone stood on it—the wind didn't take down that branch, in other words.”

“So there really was an attempt to warn her off? To frighten her into silence? Perhaps by someone masquerading as one of the ghosts said to haunt the old house?”

“It looks like it—something like that. But if someone climbed that tree, it was clearly an athlete at work. Someone who was fit from, say, horseback riding. Or football. There may be some forensic evidence left—there appear to be some scrapes of shoe leather on the bark. They're looking into it.”

“But,” said Max, “that will only prove someone was up to mischief—trying to scare her off. It may not even have been necessary—her own self-interest may have been enough to keep her quiet.”

“I agree,” said Cotton. “Anyway, the dowager was right to be worried. The butler did report that at breakfast she sort of lost it and said, ‘I saw you!' That made Bree and Peregrine think she suspected or knew they were having affair. She could have been just wildly thrashing about, hoping for a reaction, but in any event, after that they felt they could not entirely rely on her discretion.”

“But,” said Max, “they weren't to know that it was better from her point of view that word of the affair not seep out. The scandal would have been enormous, and costly. I think she was toggling in her mind between the lesser of two evils, and unable to decide. I think she expected fair treatment from her grandson if she played along. But Bree was another matter.”

“We are still left with the question of whether this need for secrecy constituted a motive for murder,” said Cotton. “Would the son kill his own father? Was that just one easy step away from sleeping with his stepmother?”

Max shrugged. “He had a lot to lose. Anyway, her husband's death was so convenient for Bree that whoever did it, she was not going to toss them in it—at least not right away.”

“But she would create as much distance from them as she could.” Cotton paused, thinking. “Because we were so sure to suspect her involvement, guilty or not, she wouldn't want to draw attention to the weak link—the one who might break under pressure. And I think she views all men as the weak link, don't you?”

Max nodded.

“All the rumors about Bill Travis … you think there's nothing to it?” Cotton asked.

“I only know that Bree herself is the one who brought it up, only to hotly deny the rumor in the next breath,” said Max. “Then she seemed to admit to it—almost. No one could be allowed to suspect the truth of her involvement with the son of the house. And if Bree had to drag innocent people into a murder investigation, I don't think she lost any sleep over it.”

“It seems the purest luck for Travis that he had an ironclad alibi,” said Cotton. “He was at some horse show or other in Devon. There's even video footage of him in the crowd—I've just been watching it.”

“Right. Anyway, Bree's dismissive way of talking about Peregrine, calling him an oaf and so on—this was all a blind. An elaborate bluff. Insinuating he was gay—that was meant to ensure we never saw him as one of her romantic conquests, but of course he was.

“She protested too much, portraying him as some sort of aristocratic buffoon, emphasizing his unattractiveness—to either sex, making a joke of it, and of him. Still, what did it mean? Stepmothers and stepchildren can be natural enemies, as Destiny's memories of some people in her old village reminded me. One is seen as a threat to the other. That part was understandable. But Bree's denial of any involvement with other men, like the groom or the estate manager—now, oddly, that rang true. She was indignant—for at a guess, she was aiming much higher. For someone wealthy and, this time, closer to her in age.”

Awena spoke for the first time, lifting her gaze from Owen, now asleep in Max's arms. Apparently he was dreaming, his small fists waving almost comically in the air. Awena might not have been listening, but if Max knew anything about Awena, it was that she was always listening, and seldom dropped a stitch in the conversation.

“I don't follow,” she said. “Was Peregrine involved with the murder or not?”

“I haven't filled Awena in on everything you told me when you rang,” said Max to Cotton. “I thought I'd let you do the honors.”

“Right,” said Cotton, settling back in his chair. “First you must consider that when both parties are risking a fortune by having a completely inappropriate affair, suspicion must be thrown elsewhere. So Peregrine, with his experience as an amateur actor, came up with his rather silly plan to make himself look like an unlikely prospect for romance. He comes down from university acting like a spoiled child, probably to emphasize the difference in age between him and Bree, and looking like a rube. The disguise worked, until he had the bad luck to cross Destiny's path the other night. He was not wearing the glasses he'd adopted, which made him easier for her to recognize, and he had dropped back into his normal walk and demeanor. Apart from the haircut, he was the dashing ladies's man Destiny recognized from photographs of him at university.”

“He may have felt in his arrogance that a rustic audience is easily duped,” said Max, turning to Awena. “Certainly he felt that way about his sister. Anyway, Peregrine also went to some trouble to get me to believe he had a girlfriend elsewhere. Someone he was dying to visit in Italy. But he doesn't and didn't. He's in love with Bree, but of course he can't admit it—is too ashamed to admit it. Plus, would his father have thrown him out if he knew? Undoubtedly.”

“His father did keep him on tight purse strings,” said Cotton. “Peregrine pretended to blame Bree for this. All part of the plan to indicate there was bad blood between him and Bree, when the opposite was true. And by the way, Bree was also kept on an allowance. Not a small allowance by my standards or yours or even the Sultan of Brunei's, but probably by hers.”