Wicked Autumn (18 page)

But Noah’s Ark, unlike many of its kind in the trade, sold (when it was open) real antiques, not secondhand rubbish. In his more candid moments, Noah admitted he found it difficult to part with any of the acquisitions he made for his shop.

Max, who had called ahead, now went around to the back of Abbot’s Lodge, as he knew was customary: Noah could more often than not be found “whipping up a little something” for tea or some future snack or meal—although the word “snack” demeaned the whole enterprise. The “little something” would earn five stars in any gourmand’s universe.

Max detoured before he reached the terrace at the back, however, turning his steps toward the Abbey Ruins. He looked up, and then about him. The hubbub that had reigned during the Fayre was gone; it was completely still. A blurry sun sat atop a clump of gray clouds like a portent of the world’s end.

Part of the reason for his visit was to spy out the lay of the land and confirm his belief that the view toward the Village Hall from anywhere in the Fayre grounds was obstructed. He found he was right: the spinney of Raven’s Wood blocked the view wherever he stood in or near the ruins, and the only possible clear view not blocked by Morning Glory Cottage was obstructed by the mound beneath the Plague Tree and the huge old tree itself. His impressions confirmed, he turned back toward Abbot’s Lodge.

Noah, seeing him as he approached the flagged terrace, greeted Max with his customary effusive warmth and then led the way through the kitchen past the enormous refectory table—a table that somehow always made Max think of homemade soup and thick slices of bread lashed with yellow butter. Noah, himself a bit doughy in build, was a dapper and well-groomed man, today wearing trousers and a tailored shirt of the finest wool, with an elegant belt and shoes of matching leather. Balding, he wore glasses in trendy black-and-green rectangular frames. He had a face formed for humor—round, puckish, and often alight with mischief.

The two men headed toward the drawing room (“Too cold now for sitting in the garden—more’s the pity”), Noah carrying an enormous polished silver tray of tea things and homemade sandwiches and biscuits. Max noted that some of these were peanut biscuits, and wondered if they were Noah’s own or if they came from Elka’s bakery. Life went on, he supposed, but he did wonder how often the sight of a peanut biscuit would evoke disagreeable memories in the village. Hungry (Mrs. Hooser would have blamed this on an inadequate breakfast), Max followed Noah and his tray down a long carpeted corridor, the strains of “Le roi s’amuse” in the background. Max was not a connoisseur but this gentle, lively music he recognized.

Both walls of the corridor were lined with oil paintings of inestimable value, and the corridor itself led in shotgun fashion to double-reinforced glass doors through which could be glimpsed the starkly haunting Abbey Ruins. Noah had positioned floodlights throughout the grounds; when he held a dinner party, the beauty of this scene at night took one’s breath away. They passed the door to the dining room with its vast fireplace, prompting Max to recall many a convivial meal in the company of Noah and his numerous gifted acquaintances.

They reached the end of the corridor, and Noah indicated that Max should open the door on the right. Noah carried the tray into the drawing room, which was another inviting room of dark-timbered walls and polished wooden floors with rich rugs scattered everywhere. Here a fireplace large enough for a man to stand in dominated one wall.

Against another wall was a large, built-in cabinet where porcelain Dresden figures, hard at work gathering flowers, and Staffordshire shepherds and shepherdesses were lined up with martial precision, like the vanguard of a Roman army. A painting of one of Noah’s ancestors looked down upon the shepherds from across the room—a man in royal blue wearing the frills and feathers of his day, his rosy face gleaming with smug self-satisfaction. Antique furniture dotted the room; Noah’s collection of teapots filled another matching cabinet.

Max had to hand it to Noah. While extensive repair and renovation had been necessary at Abbot’s Lodge, not to mention modernization to make it all habitable in the twenty-first century, nothing looked glued on or out of place. The house always seemed to shimmer, glowing with the patina of centuries—partly the result of the cunning spacing of windows, it was true, plus the fact everything Noah served was poured into sparkling cut glass and presented on bone china of near-transparent fineness. But Max chose to believe the pervasive glow held remnants of the sanctity of the place itself: close your eyes, and you could almost hear the strains of the monks’ chanting.

Noah indicated a little gilt chair for Max to sit in—a chair whose sale might have helped repair half the church’s roof. These were always the worst moments at Noah’s—everything looked to be of a venerable age and of matchless value; everything looked so fragile and ancient that one felt the slamming of a door might cause it all to disintegrate. Max lowered himself carefully and perched on the edge of the seat, thighs tensed and ready to spring at the first creak of imminent collapse. As often before (for Noah was an inveterate entertainer, and the Vicar was frequently on the guest list), Max felt as if he’d blundered into an exquisite dollhouse and grown extra arms and legs with which to knock things over.

Max had come to know Noah Caraway the previous year, when his mother had died and Noah had come to the vicarage to discuss the arrangements. Max had been struck by the man’s humor, and by his forbearance in the face of what was clearly a primal loss.

Noah sorted out the tea and then, in response to some gentle questioning on Max’s part, began talking of the events of the day of the Fayre. He told Max what he had seen, and had reported to the police, which was Wanda disappearing at the halfway point in the day.

“Nether Monkslip’s own warrior queen,” said Noah, with a grin. “Boadicea had nothing on our Wanda. Anyway, I was taking a little tea break or I might not have noticed.”

“Unusual, wasn’t it? Her disappearing like that?”

“Like a comet giving up the spotlight, so to speak. Yes. Wanda was always one to think her presence essential to the success of any event, if not the very survival of the human race. No meeting on any topic was complete without her ringing input, did you ever notice?” He sighed. “Not since the time of the enclosure riots has there been so much kerfuffle as over this Fayre.”

“Do you have any idea where she got to?”

“Well, apparently, she got to the Village Hall, where she was found dead.”

“Yes, presumably. But did you see her headed that way?”

Noah shook his balding head decisively. His mouth was one long squiggle, like a child’s drawing. “Neither saw nor heard. And with Wanda, it was more likely to be the latter, for miles ’round. No, it would seem she positively
snuck
off. I’ll tell you what else was odd…”

“What was odd?”

“She was excited, hepped up,” Noah replied.

“Well, she usually was hepped up about something.”

“Yes. I guess what was odd was that she looked, well,
happy
. Even rapturously so. You didn’t often see Wanda looking happy. Busy, self-important, yes. Happy, no.”

That struck a chord. What was it Cotton had said? That someone would come forward to say they’d seen Wanda, looking either wild-eyed, despondent, or deliriously happy—or all three at once.

“I do see what you mean. That
is
a bit odd,” said Max.

“Generally she stood, stolid, immutable as Hadrian’s Wall—a talisman against sloth, against the beauty of the wasted, idle hour—when she wasn’t rushing about, haranguing everyone to pieces. Biscuit?” Here he offered one of the plates; Max took a wedge-shaped confection that looked like it might be lemon flavored. Noah made his own chocolate selection and chewed contentedly for a moment. “But, overall, Wanda was at a dangerous time of life, looking down the diminishing horizon as she hurtled toward death, assessing the detritus. Perhaps the passage of time could change even her. In the immortal words of the crooner, ‘Is that all there is?’ It passes through all our minds, does it not?”

“You’re asking a vicar that question?”

Noah smiled. “Of course. It’s practically a job requirement.”

“What was she, about fifty?” asked Max. “It’s a dangerous time for men, too, although hardly an ancient age for anyone in these days.”

“She was always dangerous, if you ask me.” Noah’s expression was one that Max recognized and was willing to exploit in the name of getting at the truth: joy in discussing the doings of the village and the villagers. Noah was an inveterate gossip, and Max was relying on this proclivity.

“You know about the cocktail fiasco?” Noah asked now, wiping his fingers with pretended disinterest on a napkin of starched white linen. He seemed to be near hugging himself with suppressed excitement.

“Only the broad outlines.”

“
Well
.” Noah settled himself more deeply in his chair. “Suzanna got it into her head that the Women’s Institute needed a break from the stodgy, from the mundane, from the tips on how to pickle this and stuff that. So Suzanna suggested they all get pickled with a course on how to mix cocktails. Not really, of course, but that was the result. They had a ‘mixologist’ come in to demonstrate. Wanda never let her or anyone else within earshot forget it.”

“They sampled the mixologist’s wares, I gather.”

“For hours. Drunk as lords, they were. In some cases search parties were sent out. Mrs. Bandy was found asleep hours later on Hawk Crest, much the worse for wear.”

“And Wanda blamed Suzanna.”

“Didn’t she just.”

“How well did you know Wanda?” Max asked. “For example, where was she from originally?”

“Why, do you know, that I couldn’t say, really. Almost no one here is
from
here—I’ve been here yonks but the oldest villagers consider me one of the ‘young’ upstarts who’ve invaded their tranquil village.” Noah, in his forties, waggled his fingers in quotation marks on the word “young.” “But as for the rest of us, the newcomers, we’ve all just come to respect your right to have come from wherever you want, or at least we don’t question that right. Odd, when you come to think of it. I want to say she began life in Yorkshire but I can’t think why—she had a trace of an accent, perhaps, but carefully ironed out. She’d catch herself just in time, saying ‘nowt’ for ‘nothing’ and dropping an h—saying ‘er’ instead of ‘her’—that kind of thing.”

Carefully husbanding his expression to have his question received as neutral, Max said, “You got along well with her, did you?”

The look of surprised outrage on Noah’s face was almost comical.

“Do you know
anyone
who got along with her?” he demanded.

“Apart from the Major, no.”

“Do you think that’s genuine?” Noah asked, then answered his own question: “I suppose when two people have been in harness together that long, it’s a shock to lose the familiarity, if nothing else.”

“Did you?” Max repeated. “Get along with her?”

“Well…”

Max waited, giving every sign of being willing to wait forever. Noah capitulated with a shrug.

“Well, she once got the better of me in a business deal. It doesn’t happen often, I can tell you, and I wasn’t best pleased.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I know.” Wounded professional pride struggled with personal dignity. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

“What happened?”

“She had two chairs she’d inherited from her mother. You know the old battle— the old woman died last year. Wanda wanted to sell them and extorted a ridiculous price. She knew how I was about mahogany Chippendale—mad for it—and she had two chairs she swore had been made by Chippendale himself. I doubted that part of the story very much, but at least I was sure the chairs were authentically from his shop, as it were.”

“And they weren’t.”

“Well, yes and no. Parts of each were real.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Someone had got hold of a real Chippendale and cannibalized it for parts. They’d also got hold of a Victorian copy and taken what they needed from that and cobbled the whole thing together.”

Max’s face reflected his puzzlement. Noah, seeing this, asked the unspoken question: “Why would they do that? Because a set of chairs is much more desirable than a single chair. Victorian reproductions are antiques in themselves, but not to the level of a real Chippendale.”

Warming to his subject, he said, “Now, it is one thing to replace parts of an authentic antique, up to ten percent of the whole, and be honest about the repairs. This was a wholesale mishmash of chair parts—two Frankenstein’s monsters made from one real thing. A tragic, criminal waste by someone unscrupulous enough not to care. This kind of thing goes on all the time, more than ever before, since the number of real antiques left in the world is rapidly diminishing.”

He added, his voice thick with remembered resentment, “It’s the oldest artful dodge in the trade, and I fell for it. It ticked all the right boxes … Maybe I just didn’t want to know.”

“Surely Wanda was unaware…”

“That the chairs were fake? You know, I will never know that for certain. I know only that she didn’t have the skill or tools to perpetrate such a fraud herself. She—or to be precise, her mother—may have been taken in by a dealer with ties to a skilled cabinetmaker.”

Noah stood restlessly—a genial, dapper man of middle years, with a crustless watercress sandwich now gripped forgotten in one hand. Max counted him as a friend, as he had been both generous with his hospitality and staunchly welcoming when lines were being drawn over Max’s selection as vicar. Max pushed these favorable thoughts aside, setting apart his liking for the man, and reverting to old and entrenched MI5 methods: everyone was a suspect, and there could be no favoritism shown. Noah now walked over to the mantel, made a minute adjustment to the position of the ormolu clock which sat there, and turned back to face him.

Max asked him, “Why are you telling me this?” For had Wanda not been murdered, he doubted he would have come to hear of the affair of the chair, which by any standard hardly rose to the level of tragedy. More a tawdry little village episode among, undoubtedly, dozens over the years. Funny how murder pulled back the curtain to expose events—events that might or might not have a bearing.