Wicked Autumn (31 page)

Max drained his glass, declining Cotton’s invitation for a refill.

“The more I thought of it,” Max said, “the more the oddest small things fit together. The change in the usual direction of the bibelot—the shepherdess ornament—suggested an assignation. A way to say, ‘I’m here, waiting—the door is unlocked.’ More playing to Wanda’s sense of the drama of the thing, no doubt. As I say, I watched as Guy made a grab for the figurine, to switch it back into position, that day we found Wanda’s body. I thought nothing of it.”

Cotton said, “Wanda and Guy would always have bolted the door from within for privacy—they were both inside when Maurice tried the door, although Wanda may have been dead at that point, with Guy still there just making sure he’d not forgotten something. But, why was a signal even necessary that day? Why not just murmur a time and place in passing?”

“As Dr. Winship said,” replied Max, “there was a ‘mash’ of people at the Fayre. Even if you’d had one eye out for Wanda you might not have spotted her to pass a message, to arrange an assignation. This is why the prearranged signal was necessary. There was no way to whisper in her ear or pass notes because finding her was challenge enough. And this was the day Guy had settled on for her death—nothing must go wrong, no slipup in the timing.

“So, he had her do what they had often done in the past: the direction of the shepherdess indicated the all clear,” said Cotton. “Brilliant.”

“I do think diabolical is the word,” said Max, a distraught, hard edge to his voice. “Those two, Jasper and Guy—they planned and plotted this crime, literally for years. Probably as sort of a game at first. Then, the more they talked about it, the closer they came to acting it out in reality.”

“Tampering with the auto-injector was a particularly nasty touch,” said Cotton. “Guy says he did that a few days before, at some other meeting with her.”

“Yes. Guy stole the auto-injector in advance from her handbag and replaced the contents with water. He had to do it that way because she was never without her handbag with the auto-injector inside. He couldn’t steal the thing outright because she would undoubtedly notice it was missing. Then, once she was dead, he removed the fake auto-injector from the handbag. He later threw it in the lake, where Constable Musteile was instrumental in its recovery.”

Cotton reached into his ever-present briefcase.

“I thought you might want to see this,” he said, handing Max a small, flat, square package wrapped in brown paper.

CHAPTER 28

Jolie Laide

Max unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a painting of a woman with tightly curled hair. Max immediately thought of the term
jolie laide
—it was a face both pretty and ugly. Although abstract in execution, it was unquestionably Wanda’s face—even without the curly hair it would have been recognizably her.

Max had once visited the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, which had been vandalized by the Puritans in the sixteenth century. The faces of the statues had been mutilated with a criminal ferocity. Of course, in that case, obliteration was the goal, but a few had escaped with their features “merely” damaged, not hammered off entirely. Max wondered how well those men, the destroyers, had slept at night. Probably well. The smug self-righteous always did.

Wanda’s face in the painting reminded him of this. It was a work of genius, stark and vicious, executed in bold, unhesitating strokes. An evil genius, in this case.

“Jasper’s work, of course?” he said.

Cotton nodded. “It was found hidden in Guy’s flat above the restaurant. A gift from Jasper—a picture of their intended victim. Bizarre, is it not?”

“Everything about these two is bizarre.”

Max gazed at the painting, at the audacious slashes of black and gray mixed with violent shades of red and deep purple.

“And Wanda—her reaction to the setup, as well, had the taint of a pathology, don’t you feel?” asked Max. “I think it is possible that Guy reminded her a bit of her son on some unconscious level. There is a logic to that, since Guy has spent many years in the company of her son. His mannerisms, patterns of speech: it’s a commonplace that longtime couples grow to be alike. Her reaction was unconscious, and probably as much maternal as anything else—a reaction to the familiar. This goes in part to explain her unreasoning devotion to a man too young for her, apart from the fact he played to her vanity and her ego. One clue I missed was that she had taken to wearing a great deal of makeup lately. It didn’t necessarily mean she was having an affair, but it suggested
something
in her life had changed to make her overly concerned with her appearance.”

Cotton said, “Jasper had at one point been on the receiving end of a smothering love from his mother. He told us this at great length. A more self-involved, sniveling little nub of humanity it would be hard to find. Anyway, smothered he was. At least in the beginning, he was showered with anything it was in Wanda’s gift to give the boy. But her ‘gifts’ of money were always conditional. Jasper’s father, meanwhile, intuited that he had not exactly fathered the prototype of the macho man, but he could not,
would
not accept that he had fathered a gay man. Don’t ask, don’t tell? Don’t even allow the possibility of opening a discussion of such a topic, in the Major’s view, and in Wanda’s. I think Jasper’s exile may have been self-imposed, but it was also encouraged. Neither of his parents could begin to cope with Jasper’s sexual orientation. His looks, talent, and undoubted gifts were never enough to reconcile them.”

Max asked, “Has that anything to do with Guy misleading me about Belgium?”

“Yes. That was a minor thing that loomed large in Guy’s mind. Guy’s specialty seems to be panicking over the details, even though he’s cool as can be when it comes to the big picture. Guy and Jasper were legally married in a ceremony in Belgium some years ago. In Belgium, as of 2003, there are no restrictions regarding nationality in entering into such a contract. Naturally, this formalized relationship is a matter of public record. Guy didn’t want you to put us onto searching records in Belgium, which is where they lived together. So he pretended to you to be most recently from France. It was overkill, really. Clearly he is one to believe the devil is in the details. There was little reason for us to start questioning his orientation, or Jasper’s, and it is irrelevant to the murder, but just in case … He wanted as much opaqueness with regard to their relationship as he could manage.”

“I did wonder why he felt Belgium was something he should conceal from me. Why do people lie about where they’ve been recently, I asked myself? To get a job, perhaps, when their former employment didn’t end satisfactorily? That’s understandable if a man is desperate for work, to feed his family. I understand that kind of desperate, and wouldn’t try to parse the morality of it. But Guy was the restaurant owner, so why lie to me—and then tell you, the police, the truth? Only one reason: because he knew you could and would check what he said about his places of residence, and what he told you had to match up.”

Cotton nodded. “He didn’t appreciate the danger: you had the old connections to do some verification on your own, if you took it into your head to do so. He thought the MI5 gossip, when he came to hear of it, was just that, and he also didn’t realize at first you would be so involved in the investigation that I would confide in you.” He smiled. “I didn’t think so, myself.”

“Ordinarily,” said Max, “you would not have shared the background details about a suspect with me or with anyone. As it happened, you didn’t tell me Guy was from Belgium until I asked.”

Max looked into the fire, casting his mind back over the days of the investigation. Thea nudged his hand until he began gently to scratch her ears.

“It really was the unrelated details that tripped them up, although I nearly missed their significance, every time. There was an odd moment or two in my conversation with Miss Pitchford—her unusual emphasis when she told me about Jasper’s school friend. I misread her, and thought she was being a social snob—that she felt a friendship with a poor farmer’s son was slumming it for the son of a military family, which in her fine scheme of things would be just a rung above, socially. But no, she was trying to tell me their relationship was outside the limits for her generation—that it went beyond schoolboy friendship. Educated a woman as she was, Jasper’s orientation was not spoken of directly by her age group. The habits of a lifetime are not easily broken.”

“‘The love that dare not speak its name.’”

“Certainly not as far as Miss Pitchford is concerned. What I barely noticed in all this was Miss Pitchford telling me that Bombay was a favorite place of Jasper’s. She was using the name she’d grown up with, rather than its modern name of Mumbai. Mumbai, where Guy told me he had lived awhile.”

“They met in Mumbai originally,” Cotton told him. “Guy was traveling about, and Jasper was simply looking for a cheap place to live where he could stretch out the money his parents sent. Interesting, that. He would play one parent off against the other, at least until Wanda pulled the plug, and neither parent knew the other was sending him money. It’s a game you might call ‘Double Your Money.’ Double-dipping—hitting both parents up for money, and swearing each parent to secrecy about it.”

“The cynicism is breathtaking,” said Max.

“Isn’t it just? Apparently, he hated both of them. I have the idea—a dead certainty, in fact—that the Major might not have lasted long after he inherited from Wanda. Not long at all. I’m sure the Major was their next intended victim, after Jasper’s mother. The rich pathology of this family hardly bears scrutiny.”

“I’m afraid you are quite correct about that,” agreed Max. “What no one told me was how much both parents adored Jasper—each, perhaps, in their own way. And in Wanda’s case, up to a point. But the sentiment wasn’t returned.”

“No, it was not,” said Cotton. “The whole point being the money he and Guy coveted so much—for this restaurant of Guy’s, for one thing, to keep it afloat. And for their travels, for another. I gather they’d run through quite a bit of cash, via one scheme or another—never thinking two days out, especially in Jasper’s case. Guy, with his business experience, seems to have been somewhat of a stabilizing influence. Jasper was always the dreamer. And the big spender.”

“So,” said Max. “Mumbai is where Guy met up with Jasper in his travels. Possibly where their evil plot was conceived. Certainly where like soul called out in recognition to like soul.”

“Guy described it to me as being hit by a thunderbolt,” said Cotton.

“He went out of his way to present himself to me as heterosexual to almost a parodic degree—ogling the waitress, drooling over Suzanna. Tara says he went out with her a couple of times, but there was nothing doing, and she rather wondered why he’d bothered. And Jasper’s coming here, dragging that poor Clementia with him, was more of the same kind of blind.”

Cotton nodded. “We never thought in terms that were not stereotypical. Jasper, we were told, had a love interest. That love interest must, therefore, be female. How hard it is to think outside of these stereotypes.”

“A drawback in both my profession and yours, I would say.”

“You were right about the key business, by the way,” Cotton said. “Guy says Wanda always preferred to use the more romantic French pronunciation in addressing him.
Guy
—rhymes with
key
.”

“So what Miss Pitchford heard—or rather misheard—as ‘oh, key’ was Wanda saying his name: ‘Oh, Guy.’ Presumably in some breathy, adoring, distracted way. She was probably looking for her compact, her lipstick—it could have been any number of things. But Miss Pitchford heard ‘key’—or thought she did—and linked the word, quite naturally, to the sight of a woman scrabbling around in her handbag. I sat there in Miss Pitchford’s sitting room, where the works of Guy de Maupassant are ranged on her bookshelves. Something about the name caught at my mind at the time—‘Guy’ pronounced in the French manner of course rhymes with ‘key.’ It wasn’t until much later that I made the connection.”

“Is it possible,” Cotton asked tentatively, “that Miss Pitchford is a bit hard of hearing, as well?”

“I suppose it is. She’s somewhere in her eighties. And when I spoke with her the other day, she did ask me to repeat something I’d said. She’d misheard ‘food’ as ‘mood.’”

“I really never thought to ask her about her hearing. She is so completely sharp and canny in every respect.”

“Something tells me she might not have ’fessed up to it if you had asked. She’s rather proud, our Miss Pitchford, and I don’t suppose she likes getting older any better than the rest of us do.”

“Still, it sure beats the alternative.”

“You think?” Max asked. “Not in my book.”

Epilogue

Max sat at his desk sipping hawthorn tea as he ruminated over his next sermon. Mrs. Hooser came in with the vicarage mail, which had arrived several hours before. Although it was not raining, and had not rained for days, she had managed to get the circulars, bills, and assorted rubbish soaked through with water.

Water, he thought, sighing, was becoming a recurring theme in his life.

The water stain, painted over twice now, had reappeared on the wall of the church, despite all Max’s attempts to fix the leak in the roof, or to at least divert the tide that would descend at the next rainfall. During a recent Sunday service, little Tom Hooser had said loudly, “Looks like Jesus,” only to be shushed immediately by his sister. All heads swiveled to look, and an excited buzz rose from the congregation.

Max, walking over after the service, joining the others for a closer look, saw what the boy had seen: The stain, growing darker, its outlines and contrast more pronounced, was beginning faintly to resemble the face on the shroud of Turin, something the boy had no doubt seen on a recent telly documentary. A negative image of a gaunt, bearded man with longish hair, eyes closed as if in sleep. The resemblance was slight, but definitely it was there. Max, far from being enthusiastic, felt immediate twinges of panic. This was not something he would welcome at St. Edwold’s—the rubberneckers, the curious, the devout, and the crazy would all crowd in if word got out. He had seen this kind of thing before—crying statues that turned out to be crying because of some weird, one-off juxtaposition of the atmospherics, the climate, a malfunctioning boiler, and the humidity in a church. He’d have to get it repainted. He reached for his phone to call Maurice again.