Th is is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in

this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

a thomas dunne book for minotaur books.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

a fatal winter. Copyright © 2012 by G. M. Malliet. All rights reserved. Printed in

the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com

Endpapers map design by Rhys Davies

ISBN 978- 0-312-64797-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250- 01825- 0 (e-book)

First Edition: October 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 chapter 
Ticket to Ride
DECEMBER 13MOR NING

Max Tudor, returning to Nether Monkslip from a routine mis-

sion on a bitterly cold but beautiful December day, was not to
know he would be pulled into the investigation of strange events
at nearby Chedrow Castle—an investigation that would haunt
many of his future nights.
At the little self-service kiosk at Waterloo station, Max’s big-
gest concern was what to eat to fortify himself for his hours-long
journey. He hesitated over a slice of marzipan cake tightly wrapped
in cling film. It made him think of the Battenberg sold by Sains-
bury’s, a sponge cake with not so much icing as a thick slab of
sweetened concrete which had not completely set. That cake had
been one of his guilty pleasures ever since he was a child. This
imposter of a cake had the concrete yellow icing but not the pink-
and-yellow-checkered pattern to its layers. Reluctantly, Max
passed it by.
He scanned the display of food for something marginally
more nutritious, but this particular outpost of British Rail offered
the kind of sandwich that left you wondering if an ambulance
could bully its way through the crowded London streets in time
to save you.
He was returning from a symposium in London, where he’d
37
g. m. malliet

delivered a short, well-received talk on the need to preserve Brit-

ain’s churches. English Heritage had recently launched an initiative
to save such Grade I and Grade II listed structures and somehow
Max’s name had come up as someone having experience in these
matters. Roofing and timber and masonry repairs to churches in
Great Britain were endless and ongoing, and the skilled workmen
needed to make the repairs dwindling in number. Worse, in some
cases, the lead and copper from roofs were being stolen, so the ven-
erable old edifices were being demolished piece by piece.
As the vicar of a small church steeped in antiquity and un-
paralleled beauty, Max felt he would be negligent not to exploit
every avenue to funds to pay for its upkeep. If becoming some sort
of expert within the inner circle of preservationists would help, so
be it.
Although the symposium had gone well, he soon found him-
self longing to return to his isolated little village with its little
frictions. Well, he thought (here hastily pushing aside the mem-
ory of a recent murder in the village) mostly little frictions.
For London seemed to be slowly turning into a madhouse.
Almost, it seemed, in honor of his first foray into the city in months
MI5 had raised the terror alert level to severe. Which meant not
a lot these days in the face of ongoing threats from more than one
group in more than one part of the world. A general acceptance of
the fact the world had forever changed on 9/11 seemed the best
that could be hoped for from a public worn cynical and wearied by
a stream of heightened precautions. Besides, a recommendation for
extra alertness seemed de trop when Max by nature was seldom not
alert, watching, waiting—for what he could not have said.
He had stayed at a London hotel booked for him by the diocese
with an eye on the bottom line—very bottom—as if left to his own
devices Max might stop at Claridge’s and order jeroboams of cham-
pagne sent up to his suite. The place chosen for him did not even
pretend to have once been a star in the galaxy of the hospitality
industry; no deposed barons of even very minor baronetcies were to
be found taking tea in the lobby. The place had always been shabby
38
 a fatal winter

about the edges and now was unapologetically shabby through and
through. He had been greeted by the receptionist, a gum-chewing
girl of surly disposition obviously forced to work beneath her level of
unrecognized genius. It may have been a job she held for the school
break, although she had the look of an actress between jobs, all
sparkly mascara and languorous, studied movements. There had
been a certain accretion of interest in her eyes as she took in the
handsome features of her new guest. The gum chewing stopped
abruptly, only to be resumed as she cogitated the question he put to
her. No, she didn’t think they had a room with a view. She’d check.
She began flapping her long painted nails about on a keyboard and
came up with the expected answer: All the rooms with views were
full up.
At least, he reflected, the hotel had a plain, old-fashioned lift
with deeply padded sides—none of these modern horrors made
of glass, apparently conceived as a trial for people who are afraid of
heights. The last time he’d had reason to stay in London, the hotel
lift had been made of stainless steel with water cascading artisti-
cally down the sides—it was like being hoisted aloft in a high-
tech colander.
Max, on seeing his forlorn, seedy London hotel room, longed
momentarily in an all-too-human way for something gilt-edged and
dripping with crystal chandeliers. But in par ticular he longed for
the cozy if fussy and old-fashioned study of his vicarage, which he
told himself now was at least rich in character.
Instead he was in an ancient London hotel whose lack of ame-
nities in no way inhibited the management from charging an exor-
bitant amount for a dollhouse-sized room with no view. It was an
amount that should have lent itself to luxury terry cloth robes and
shower caps folded into little boxes and shampoos from the official
Shampooers to Her Majesty, and yet Max was grateful to have
been provided a postage stamp-sized bar of soap made from, ap-
parently, tar and ground pepper. The room boasted a bed with a
single thin mattress that might have been stuffed with straw, and a
radio so old it had probably first been used by someone listening to
39
g. m. malliet

King Edward VIII’s abdication speech. It had dials as big as scones

and speakers covered in a dusty open-weave fabric like burlap. The
hot water in the bathroom was as close to nonexistent as made no
difference, and the breakfast the next morning made him long for
the homey, calorie-laden canteen offerings of his housekeeper Mrs.
Hooser, a sure sign that something in his universe had gone badly
awry.
He’d had a further bad experience in London that made him
eager to return to the shelter of his village. He’d seen—he could
swear he’d seen—a man in the street who had been involved in
the death of his MI5 colleague, Paul. At any rate, it was a man of
roughly the same physical type, wearing the same weird blue sun-
glasses with white frames, that Max had seen hovering near the
crime scene that day. He couldn’t be certain—indeed, couldn’t be
certain the man he’d seen the day of Paul’s death was involved in
the killing. But Max had been sure enough that he’d spun around
in the push and shove of pedestrians to follow the man, thinking
as he hustled after him that his clerical collar offered the perfect
cover for tailing a suspect. He followed him for many blocks,
thinking how well he’d retained his training from those old days.
And then, somewhere a few streets away from Pall Mall, he lost
him. He looked frantically left, right, and even overhead. And
then he’d pounded his fist against a wall, scraping his knuckles in
his rage.
He called the sighting in directly to his old boss at MI5, dial-
ing his private line, and ended up having dinner with George
Greenhouse that evening. It was a bittersweet occasion—Max had
always held the man in esteem, but he knew how disappointed
George had been by Max’s decision to leave the life behind for the
priesthood.
He learned a few things at that dinner in Covent Garden.
One was that MI5 had decided someone besides Paul and Max
had been injured by the car explosion that killed Paul. For the man
with those strange glasses Max had described to investigators had

40
 a fatal winter

been recorded on one of the ubiquitous London security cameras

shortly after the explosion, and he was holding his arm as if in-
jured.
“But he didn’t go to any hospital in London despite his injuries
and that’s further evidence it’s him,” George told Max. Whether
he was supposed to share this information was doubtful, but then
George hadn’t gotten where he was by being a company man.
Nerveless, famous for his bravery, he also had more integrity than
practically anyone Max had ever met.
Midway through the main course George had stunned him
by saying, “She’s remarried, you know. Sheila. She got married
again recently.”
Sheila—Paul’s wife. Max had barely known her, hadn’t seen
her since the funeral, which she’d attended, against all advice,
clutching their young son, hers and Paul’s—grimly holding the
blue-swaddled bundle to her. She’d stumbled through the ser vice
looking as numb as Max had felt.
Max was brokenhearted by the news of her remarriage but
struggled to hide it from George. What had he expected, though?
That Sheila would go into some form of purdah forever? Life had
gone on. But something about this permanent move on Sheila’s
part made him realize how much he himself had stayed in the
past of that terrible day.
He wondered—idle, stupid thought—why he hadn’t been in-
vited to the wedding. And realized that in some completely mad,
irrational way, this bothered him, even though he barely had known
Sheila, and his presence at her marriage would have been down-
right odd. Then he hoped—to heaven—that it wasn’t because she
blamed him, Max. For Max blamed himself, and a world of invita-
tions wouldn’t change that. Paul wouldn’t have been the one killed
that day if he hadn’t switched places on the job with Max.
Paul’s death had changed Max’s course in life completely, for
it was not long afterward that he began training for the priest-
hood. It wasn’t as if he believed—not really believed—that his life

41
g. m. malliet

that day in London had been spared by Divine Providence. He

refused to see Paul as some placeholder for himself, simply un-
luckier than he. They had exchanged schedules, he and Paul, as
they often had done in the past, in the chaos of a crisis elsewhere,
not seeing the danger in front of them. That the blast had hap-
pened that day, at that moment, was almost a coincidence. The
next day would have worked as well, for the purposes of the thugs
with whom they were dealing.
And yet, his escape had forced Max to slow down, to stop,
and to think. It had led directly to the 180-degree change he had
made in his life.
Yet . . . and yet, in the furthest corner of his mind, wasn’t
there a voice, a small voice that might start to jabber if he granted
it freedom, a voice that said he’d left his old life behind not be-
cause of some high-flown need to serve his fellow man, but be-
cause otherwise he might die young, in the same senseless way his
comrade Paul had died. This voice had a name, and it answered to
either Coward or Reason, depending on the given day.
So now Paul’s wife had remarried. On the rebound, or so
Max would always think. Remarried to a man he would try hard
to like, recognizing his instinctive dislike had little to do with
Sean’s—his name was Sean—with his shortcomings. It was that
Sean was there only because Paul had gone.
Later that night as Max removed his clerical collar he thought
of a different collar—a collar with a stain on it, a pinprick of red
against the white linen. He’d never been able to throw away that
shirt, stained on that day by a small drop of Paul’s blood. It sat
now, undisturbed and wrapped in plastic, on the top shelf of his
closet at the vicarage.

So it was with a sense of relief that he began the first leg of his
journey back to Nether Monkslip. He would take the Great West-
ern from Waterloo, change trains, and eventually catch the short
spur on the Swanton and Staincross Minster Steam Railway con-

42
 a fatal winter

necting to his village. He would not be traveling first class on the

initial stages of his journey, of course. But on the seven-mile home
stretch to Nether Monkslip he would ride a gloriously restored
train, where all the seats were first class. This refurbished train, at
one time for the village squire’s private use, had been donated to
the village in the squire’s will with a fund to keep it in good repair.
It only went as far as Staincross Minster where more modern
connections could be made to the wider world. The train was sel-
dom crowded even though it was small and the ser vice infrequent—
there were easier ways for the general populace to travel to
Staincross Minster without going via such an obscure place as his
village. So difficult was it to get to and from Nether Monkslip, in
fact, it was difficult to say quite what the village was doing there.
Apart from the presence of the river, significant in terms of early
commercial transport, how and why the village had evolved was
lost in the mists of time.
Since few people knew of Nether Monkslip’s existence (which
was how the villagers liked it) the little mahogany-paneled con-
veyance suited the villagers’ purposes exactly. It had a tea trolley
(dining cars being nearly a thing of the past) but ser vice was in-
termittent, and the ride was too short to warrant much more than
intermittent.
Nothing was as it once had been, Max reflected sadly. Hotels,
trains. And George had looked to be getting on in years, the
movements of the old warrior now stiff, fraught with effort. Ar-
thritis, probably . . .
As Max stood in this brooding manner waiting to board at
Waterloo, he failed to notice the woman who had actually stopped
dead in her tracks to stare at him. Her expression seemed to say:
There must be a God if he’s got vicars like you.

43
 A  FATAL  WINTER

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