A Fatal Winter (42 page)

Cotton looked mystified, as well he might.

“Surely the question is, why did he have to die at all?”

“No,” said Max. “That is not the question.” Rather annoyingly, he refused to say more. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask of the police doctor. With your permission.”

For Max felt a growing unease. The carelessness of Lamorna’s death—someone had barely had time to escape detection there.

“They are all clamoring to be let go,” Cotton was saying. “And even with Lamorna’s murder I’m running out of reasons not to let them go in a few more days. I think Wintermute put a flea in their ears about their rights in this situation.”

“Lamorna’s murder is problematic in many ways,” said Max.

Cotton said, “Motive didn’t appear to be a big question, until one excluded Leticia—the obvious person to gain by Oscar’s death. It was always possible she was indeed the killer, and struck down in some biblical way for her crime soon after it was committed. Barring that explanation, that it was Leticia who did the killing, it is hard to see money as a motive for killing Oscar. They only had to wait awhile, after all, and so much of his money went to charity.”

“Ah, but who knew that?” Max asked.

“No one who will admit to it now. And of course there is not a shred of evidence to connect Leticia with the killing. Which leaves us with revenge. Or blighted love (unlikely) and/or the good old crime reaching into the past, some misdeed from Oscar’s youth in finance or sexual frolics, which leaves us with quite an old mess to sort out—a mess that might never
be
sorted out.”

“Oh, it will be sorted out,” said Max.

“I’m glad you’re so confident,” said Cotton. “I don’t mind saying I’m not.”

“There’s one more inquiry I’d like you to make.”

Cotton picked up the mobile again. This time the call was to headquarters. He relayed Max’s request.

“They’re on it,” he told Max. “I think we already have that information in our files. It’s just a matter of someone’s searching.”

“I need to call Awena,” said Max.

Cotton, assuming this was a personal call, grinned widely at him, like the Cheshire Cat.

Max powered up his own mobile. Cotton was amused but not surprised to see he had Awena on speed dial.

She came on the line. In the background Max could hear Celtic music playing in the Goddessspell shop. He could picture her surrounded by amulets and talismans, the air rich with the aroma of herbs and perfumed oils and scented candles. She always smelled of the most exotic blend of everything beautiful in the world.

He asked her, “What was Leticia wearing that day you came to consult over her garden?”

“What was she
wearing
?” Awena repeated. “Max, it was ages ago. Let me think.” Finally she said, “She looked like she was in mourning. You know, like someone wearing a beekeeper’s costume, circa 1900—with some sort of a beekeeper’s veil or perhaps a mosquito veil. It’s why she was content to be outside but I was in danger of being stung to pieces and had to leave.”

Max thanked her and rang off.

But first he said, blushingly conscious of Cotton’s amused eyes on him: “I will see you very soon.”

He turned back to his all-ears friend Cotton, who was busy trying without success to smother the smile.

“You will need to search the house and grounds again,” Max told him. “This time, they’re looking for a beekeeper’s outfit. Try the hothouse.”

“You’ve got it.”

When Cotton ended this brief conversation, Max said, “On the day Oscar died, we know Milo found the body. Correct?”

Cotton nodded.

“And Milo went to tell Leticia, but he found her body instead.”

“Correct,” said Cotton.

Max sat for a long moment in thought. He eyed the bowl of fruit. “What I really want to know is, who told Leticia?”

“Hmm?”

“We’ve been thinking she may have died of shock or remorse over Oscar.”

“Yes?”

“But we don’t seriously believe she stabbed her brother to death, do we? There was no forensic evidence on her clothes or body to indicate she’d been involved in some maniacal rampage. But if she died of shock…”

Cotton was now smiling ear to ear. Max could easily imagine the lightbulb going on over his head as in a cartoon. “Who told her…?”

“Precisely. Who told her Oscar was dead?”

CHAPTER 32

Castling

Max’s fine gray eyes met all of theirs in turn. He knew this conversation was not going to be pleasant or easy. He had to plan each move to block in his prey, leaving no way out.

He’d asked Cotton to have them gather together in the library. It was one of Max’s usual unorthodox, Poirot-y procedures but Cotton quickly had learned to give him his lead.

“Servants, too?”

“Oh, yes,” said Max. “Milo hasn’t told us everything yet.”

The lack of a rush to flock to the library told of the suspects’ uneasiness. It took them half an hour to straggle in. Milo and Doris arrived with trays of strong drink and glasses. It seemed like that sort of occasion.

They were soon strewn about the room, sitting in chairs or leaning against the library shelves: Randolph and Cilla. Lester and Felberta. Lady Jocasta Jones and Simon. Gwyn and the Twyns. The Vladimirovs.

“These were audacious crimes,” Max began. “I must say that while I always felt a clever mind was at work, yet still I may have been guilty of underestimating my opponent. There was meticulous planning tied to flexibility in execution of the plan. No rigid thinking here—the ‘mind map’ allowed for improvisation and covered nearly every conceivable eventuality. There were even dress rehearsals and practices. Nothing was left to chance.”

Lester and Felberta exchanged puzzled glances.

“But throughout, too many out-of-the-ordinary things happened that needed to be explained,” continued Max. “Things that could only be explained once I stopped peering through the wrong end of the telescope.”

Max breathed deeply and said, “Let’s start with Oscar’s illness. His poisoning. We can’t ever be sure but I think the Christmas tree is a clue to what poisoned Oscar. Holly and mistletoe won’t kill but they can make a person very ill, especially an elderly one. The point was to make it seem someone was after Oscar.”

Jocasta looked around the group uncomfortably, for every head had swiveled toward her: It was “her” tree.

“I wonder which it was?” Max asked. “Holly or mistletoe? But again, the aim was to spread suspicion to the whole household, in case a doctor was brought in and collected samples for analysis. And then there was at least one other attempt on his life: Amanda mentioned some falling masonry that nearly killed him. These little torments were the lead-up to the main event.

“But what really misled investigators was
Leticia’s
death.”

“My mother’s wasn’t a natural death, after all? I thought so,” said Randolph, as he turned to Amanda, next to him. “I
thought
so! It was too great a coincidence.”

“It certainly was, but not in the way you mean.” Max went on. “There had been an overinsistence throughout the investigation on the idea of Leticia’s dying a natural death, an insistence that had come from the police, from all of those with knowledge and know-how. That very insistence misled me—I was trained to question every clue.

“But sometimes,” he went on, “as Freud famously said, a cigar is just a cigar. The woman had died. And it was her death that had provoked the unnatural death of her brother.”

The group looked at one another, mystified.

“What on earth are you talking about?” demanded Felberta. She began to fiddle nervously again with her necklace.

“Timing,” said Max. “I’m talking about timing. The only reason the police thought Leticia died when she did is because of eyewitnesses who saw her alive, including me. The police doctors would naturally use that as a baseline, a starting point in their calculations. They never questioned it. The deaths were so close together there was no way to tell for certain and
no one questioned it.
Least of all me.”

“You know,” said Lester, starting to get up from his chair. “I’m a busy man. You’ll have to stop talking in riddles or I’ll have to leave.”

“Sit down,” said Cotton, and Sergeant Essex took a step nearer. She had to tilt her head back to stare him down, but Lester sat.

“This was all about the wills of the deceased, Oscar and Leticia,” Max continued. “Leticia had some money of her own to dispose of, just not a lot. But if she outlived Oscar, she’d get a significant amount from him. Probably Oscar was fond of her, with that special bond most twins have. After all, they’d lived together for many years.

“The money she inherited from Oscar would transfer to her heirs—her children—at her death. But it is the
timing
of her death and Oscar’s that made my train ride with Leticia crucial to the investigation. I had seen her
after
Oscar’s death. She had outlived Oscar.”

“Yes. So?” This was Gwynyth. “I saw her leave for the train that day myself. So did Milo. I daresay, so did several of us.”

Max nodded and said, “There were clouds of witnesses, weren’t there? I just kept wishing I’d paid more attention to her on the train. She was such a type, a fossilized scrap of nobility, the sort to be rather a plague to clergymen of all stripes—I’m afraid we tend to avoid the Lady Baynards of the world where possible. They always have perfectly impractical suggestions for how the church—their local church in particular—should be run, although they seldom set foot in church themselves. I tried to dodge her, I’m afraid, but in a tiny compartment there is no escape.”

“Don’t feel too bad. We’ve all run screaming from her at times,” said Lester.

Max went on, “Then I realized, she
was
a type. A
type
, not a person.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jocasta, suspiciously. She’d had more than one critic mention her tendency to play to type.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Max. He lowered the timbre of his voice until it was a rumble, intimate and soothing. “Let’s go back to when Leticia was found dead.
Before
Milo found her dead. Yes, someone else found her, and realized they would have to act fast to kill Oscar, with no more lead-in attempts to kill him and spread suspicion. No more rehearsals. It was time to raise the curtain.”

“Before Milo…?” this from Gwynyth.

Max held up one hand to forestall her. “It didn’t really matter, of course, if one of the previous attempts on Oscar’s life had been successful. It was perhaps by chance the early attempts were not, but there was all the time in the world. Then the day came when it was time to be in earnest.”

“I’m not following this,” said Alec. He turned to his sister. “Are you?” She nodded, a trifle smugly.

Max, who had been sitting in his usual chair, walked over to the fireplace. Resting one arm on the mantelpiece, he turned back into the room. He was enjoying himself now.

“You slipped up in several places,” he said, but he was looking at the hearth rug, not at anyone in the room. “For example: That was not Lady Baynard’s phone I heard on the train. She had a mobile that, according to the phone company records, was seldom used. For example, it did not receive a call on the day of her death. That sort of record can be traced, and I asked DCI Cotton to have someone try to trace it. There was no record.”

Max looked up suddenly. Seeing the trap into which she had unwittingly fallen, one of the group visibly shut down. It was one slipup in an otherwise flawless plan, thought Max.

“You called your accomplice from the station so this person would know you were there, that your presence as Leticia was being witnessed by many people, so your accomplice could now safely act to eliminate Oscar. That was why you had your own phone with you, wasn’t it? The phone with the ringtone that was wholly unlikely and inappropriate for someone of Leticia’s age and background.”

Still Max met no one’s eyes. Cotton and Essex, on the other hand, scanned each face in the room with an ardent, electrified awareness.

Max continued, “I eventually realized my first question should have been whether Lady Baynard owned a mobile phone in the first place. All of you have said how old-fashioned she was, and how resistant to change. She did own one, as it turns out, but it was not the one I heard. When that mobile phone rang it was quickly shut off. Too quickly, I realized later. Why? Because the song was not what an elderly woman like Leticia would set as her ringtone.”

Jocasta said, with evident relief, “Well, don’t look at me. Talking to me about high-tech gadgets is like talking to a rabbit about astrophysics. But what difference does it make? She came back from her shopping, went out into the garden, and died. What’s her phone got to do with it?”

Max said, “It is true that Leticia was found in the hothouse by Milo. The woman on the train spoke to me of her plants, implying that her gardening was uppermost on her mind, and that she would go straight to the hothouse on returning to the castle. There was a reason for that misdirection.

“But first—there were lies told to DCI Cotton here. Let’s clear those up first. For example, Milo claimed never to have met any of the members of this household before coming to work here.”

Milo succumbed to the implied accusation without resistance and without evident concern. “Yes, I knew Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle. Gwynyth Lavener, as she was then. We were both part of the staff on a cruise of the Baltics. In my old country, one did not run about spouting the truth about what one knew at the first opportunity. Of course I recognized her here as one of the ship’s performers. One would recognize her—she is memorable.” Gwynyth visibly preened at this. “I doubt she recognized me. I was meant to be invisible on the ship; there to serve only. Just like here.”

“It was foolish of you to lie to the police.”

“Do you think so, sir? Where I come from, it is foolish to tell them the truth.”

“I do see the problem,” Max acknowledged. “The habits learned in youth are hard to break.”

Milo nodded, looking to his wife, who gave him an encouraging nod.