The Wrong Rite
Authors: Charlotte MacLeod
The Wrong Rite
A Madoc and Janet Rhys Mystery
Charlotte MacLeod writing as Alisa Craig
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
Affectionately dedicated to Peg and Bill Logan… with special thanks to the ghost of Uncle Tommy; to Peggy Emmerson for her inspirational tea and Welsh cakes; and most gratefully to Donald Daniel of Wales, for his inestimable help and patience in checking this book through its various drafts and ramifications.
All the characters and their doings, even some of the place names, are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events may be attributed either to coincidence or to sorcery.
His immediate Family
Huw, his son and heir apparent, a sheep farmer
Elen, Huw’s wife
Owain, their son, Huw’s assistant
Mavis, Owain’s wife
Their five children
Sir Emlyn Rhys, Knight, Sir Caradoc’s nephew
Silvestrine, Lady Rhys, his wife
Their children:
Dafydd, a tenor
Madoc, detective inspector, RCMP
Janet (Jenny), his wife
Dorothy, their daughter Gwendolyn, a clarinetist
Bob Rhys, a distant cousin, a friend of the lesser demons
Mary, Bob’s sister, a gem-cutter and fire-leaper
Dai, their nephew, the sorcerers’ apprentice
Lisa (Mrs. Arthur) Ellis, widow of a murdered man Tib, her young daughter Tom Feste, her visiting stepbrother
Iseult Rhys, an actress
Reuel Williams, her scriptwriter
Iowerth, butler and poet laureate
Betty, cook and housekeeper
Megan, Alice, her nieces who help out
Danny the Boots, shoeshine boy and general factotum
Padarn, a superannuated sheepman
Footmen, sheepmen, et al.
I
T WAS A DARK
and stormy night.
A filthy night to be robbing a corpse. Particularly a corpse of one’s own dispatching. One did wish this beastly rain would quit dripping down inside one’s collar. One was not nervous, exactly. It was unlikely that the gendarmerie would be so tactless as to come poking around the alley behind Madame Fifine’s high-class bawdy house, for surely she must pay them well. There was, however, the possibility of being accosted by some other person of less elevated principles. One did not want to be mugged and robbed oneself, not after all the bother one had gone to.
Hunting down these black silk gloves, for instance. So pleasant on the hands—one did like the feel of real silk. One supposed one ought to get rid of them somewhere afterward. Poke them down a grating, wasn’t that the standard procedure? One ought to observe the conventions, particularly with so distinguished a stiff as Arthur. Arthur had always been punctilious about the conventions.
Where the bloody hell had he stashed his little budget of boodle? One had always been given to understand persons in his profession let the things roll around loose in their pockets. Not Arthur, unfortunately. Taped inside his socks, perhaps, or stuck into his navel. No, that wouldn’t be Arthur’s way. Navels were uncouth.
A money belt around the waist, more likely, or a chamois bag around his fat—aha!—neck. On a neat, braided thong reaching all the way down to his—tut-tut, Arthur! More to you than had met the eye. One must hope the thong was not connected to a midget burglar alarm.
Leave the engraved calling cards and the no doubt paid-up credit cards scattered artistically about the body, make it easy for the
flics.
Leave the cash, too; one wouldn’t be needing it again. Take the money and walk, don’t run. Resist the temptation to hail a taxi; one mustn’t gamble on getting a driver with a short memory. One had been so very careful, so astounding clever; one must forgo small comforts for great gains. One wouldn’t squander any of Arthur’s money on the morning papers; one would hear soon enough about the prominent gem dealer found robbed and slain.
Or slain and robbed, as the case might be.
Tant pis,
Arthur.
Addio,
Arturo. For once, one didn’t mind at all being left to hold the bag.
1
“I
S IT A CUP
of tea you will be having to drink?”
Betty the Cakes must have put the kettle on the stove as soon as she heard the gate squeak; Betty had ears like a hare. Madoc Rhys, who’d known Uncle Caradoc’s cook all his life, gave her a bear hug and a smack on the cheek.
“It is the baby we will be needing to change, Betty
fach,
and the bags to take upstairs.”
“Ach; Danny the Boots will carry the bags, and we will change the wee one here by the warmth of the fire, God bless it and the devil miss it. Let me give you a clean towel on the table for her to lie on, Mrs. Madoc. She has your sweet mouth, but her taddi’s dark eyes. And it is Dorothy you named her?”
“After my mother.” Janet Wadman Rhys didn’t at all mind hearing her baby’s name pronounced Torothy, here where Madoc was Matoc. “I’ll bet my husband’s had his nappies changed on this very spot.”
“Indeed he has, and many the time,” Betty answered, “I have changed him myself, when his fine English nanny would let me. Sit down, lad, and keep out of the way. This is women’s work.”
“Not at our house.” Janet was dealing capably with her firstborn. “I don’t hold with these disposable diapers as a rule, but they’re handy for traveling.”
“She is young to have come so far.”
“Eight months on the day before yesterday,” said Madoc. “We could hardly expect Uncle Caradoc to postpone his ninetieth birthday till Dorothy grew up. Anyway, she was good as gold all the way.”
Flying first class had been hideously expensive, but worth the difference. It had been a long journey from New Brunswick, Canada, to a place in Wales that barely rated a dot on the map. Once off the plane and through the nightmare of Customs, there’d been a train. Then Madoc’s elder brother, Dafydd, had met them in an elderly but sumptuous borrowed Daimler with a bar in the back and a blonde of Wagnerian proportions in the front.
Going off with blondes seemed to be a hobby of Dafydd’s, though he could manage with a brunette or a redhead and, according to international rumor, often did.
He’d be around for the birthday but would have to sleep down the road at the house of a distant cousin named Lisa Ellis. Ancestral piles didn’t come all that big in Wales as a rule. Sir Caradoc hadn’t enough rooms for everybody who’d asked to come, and Dafydd was merely a world-famous opera star.
Madoc was a policeman, a detective inspector in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This was a rank seldom attained by anybody at all, let alone a soft-spoken wisp of a chap still in his thirties; but Madoc had been training for it all his life. In Canada, he was something of a legend. Over here, he’d been merely an amiable younger son who’d sought no special attention and got no more than his relatively meager due.
But last time around, he’d boosted his stock by showing up with a blushing and beautiful bride. Now, with the addition of a lawfully begotten baby daughter, he was getting the full red-carpet treatment. Quite literally, in fact; he and Janet were to have the red room, right next to Uncle Caradoc himself. Danny the Boots had already carried down the ancestral cradle from the box-room for Dorothy to sleep in and kindled a fire to warm her infant toes, Welsh weather being what it was even on the next-to-last day of April.
But first there was to be tea. Already an infinitude of cups had been set out at the far end of the table. The loaf and the knife were on the breadboard, the butter in a lordly dish, softening up to be spreadable. The Welsh cakes, fresh-baked and smelling wonderfully of currants, were heaped upon the big pewter salver from which they’d been served since time immemorial; the milk was in the pitcher and the sugar in the bowl. Janet had barely managed to get Dorothy comfortable and Betty to fill the pot when some atavistic tribal instinct alerted Rhyses one and all that it was time for tea.
People who live in great houses, and even in houses not so great, are supposed to have their tea served to them in drawing rooms or libraries by butlers, footmen, parlormaids, or some tasteful combination thereof. At Sir Caradoc’s, everybody piled into the kitchen and helped himself. Madoc’s sister, Gwendolyn, led the pack.
“You’re here! Why didn’t that idiot Dafydd let you off at the front door so we’d see you coming? Aunt Elen and Uncle Huw can’t come to dinner, but you’re to pop up to the farmhouse tomorrow morning without fail. They’re itching to see the baby. Is this my angel niece? Come and give Auntie a great big kiss.”
“Watch out for your
embouchure,”
Madoc cautioned. “She’s got a tooth.”
“Ah, she wouldn’t bite her Auntie Gwen. Would you, precious? Look, Jenny, she’s smiling at me. Does she remember me, do you think?”
Gwen, a clarinetist with the Albert Hall Symphony, had been in Canada on tour three months previously and managed to sandwich in an overnight visit to Fredericton. Janet smiled and lied.
“Of course she does, why wouldn’t she? When did you get here, Gwen, and how long are you staying?”
“I’ve a whole fortnight, isn’t it lovely? How about you?
“Madoc doesn’t have to be back till the twelfth, so that gives us lots of time to visit. You’re looking marvelous, as always.”
“So are you.”
Marriage and motherhood had done well by Janet. Orphaned at twelve, she’d been living on the family farm in New Brunswick with her married older brother and his family when Madoc had first met her, thin, pale, and badly scared. While trying to recover from a ruptured appendix, she’d come upon two murder victims and been justifiably concerned as to whether she herself might become a third. He’d thought her lovely even then; now she was beautiful. There was a serenity in her face, a steadiness in her hazel eyes, a dignity to her carriage, a note of quiet amusement in her gentle voice that fooled some people into thinking she was a pushover, but not for long. Janet could pack more clout into a quiet word or a quelling glance than even Madoc’s father, a choral conductor who seldom spoke above a pianissimo and could cow a whole mixed chorus and orchestra with one lift of an eyebrow.
Sir Emlyn was in the kitchen now, kissing his daughter-in-law, smiling at the son whom he loved in spite of the fact that Madoc couldn’t carry a tune in a basket, and demanding quite aggressively, for him, that Dorothy come to Grandda. The young lady was pleased to oblige; she enchanted her grandpa with a cascade of fairly melodious gurgles, then flung herself cheerfully into the eager arms of Madoc’s mother.
Lady Rhys took full credit for Dorothy’s existence. It was she, after all, who’d proposed on her son’s behalf after she’d eaten three of the then Miss Wadman’s homemade lemon cheese tarts. She didn’t mind a bit that the baby hadn’t been named for her. Silvestrine was not a name to be wished on any innocent child and her parents might have known she’d wind up being called Sillie, a nickname wholly out of keeping with her husband’s position. Position was important in a Welsh village; Janet had been relieved to learn on her previous visit that, as Mrs. Rhys the Mountie, daughter-in-law to a knight whose uncle was a baronet, she rated right up there with Mrs. Doctor Jones.
Surnames in Wales are shared by many members of its relatively few families, so everybody gets a nickname. Dafydd was the Song. Tom Feste, who owned the Daimler (and, for all Janet knew, the blonde) and had something to do with the cinema, was Tom the Flicks. Tom’s stepsister, the widow with whom he and Dafydd were staying, was Lisa the Tortoise, not from any slowness of locomotion or thickness of carapace, but because she wrote and illustrated a highly successful series of children’s books about a very with-it tortoise named Tessie. An old man called Padarn the Dogs trained the collies and corgis that either assisted Sir Caradoc’s several shepherds or were assisted by them, depending on whether you regarded the matter from the shepherds’ or the dogs’ point of view.
All of them sang, as the Welsh always do; some tunefully, some just loudly. A fair number wrote poetry; the rest recited it, dissected it, and argued about it with a fervor that in Canada would have been reserved for hockey or the government. Right now the poets and singers were clumping in from the fields and the barns, having first kicked their boots clean of mud and manure on the stone steps outside because Betty ran a tight ship. The stately Silvestrine was cutting them slices off the big loaf; Gwen, all sparkles, was pouring milk in the cups for their tea. Janet sat like a queen with Dorothy on her lap, accepting their homage while Betty refilled the big brown pot yet another time. It was lovely, just lovely, to be here.