Twelve Drummers Drumming

by C. C. Benison

“Do you think I could give the rest of my breakfast to Powell and Gloria?” Miranda whispered, regarding him hopefully.

  Tom glanced at Madrun, who had bent over the dishwasher, and whispered back, “Just eat a little more.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tom was glad when Miranda suggested they reprise “Where in the World Is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?” At the breakfast table, he tried to keep Madrun from further speculating about Sybella’s death, going so far as to feign interest in the other announcements in the Court Circular, but to little avail. Answering any more questions about Sybella reminded him only too vividly of telling Miranda—the evening of the sombre, rain-filled autumn afternoon when he’d found Lisbeth lifeless on St. Dunstan’s cold stone floor—that her mother had died.

  So stunned by horror in the hour after Lisbeth’s death, he had let his daughter slip from his mind until a police constable’s question jolted him to the very circumstances of his wife’s being in the church at all: It had been a Wednesday, Ghislaine’s day off. By custom, Lisbeth left her surgery early and walked Miranda back from school, but this Wednesday she had phoned him and said she would first nip into Toad Hall Toys, buy the Barbie doll Miranda was so craving for her birthday, then leave it with him at St. Dunstan’s for safekeeping. “She would guess what’s in the bag, darling” were among her last words to him.

  Frantically, blinded by grief, he had phoned the school, but no Miranda was to be seen. He phoned home, then a neighbour’s, then Ghislaine’s mobile, all to recorded messages. Finally, he had peeled himself away from the tumult of police and ambulance and shocked church staff and raced through Miranda’s path from school. He found her at last, mercifully, at home, little perturbed, quite competently having made herself a snack of bread and jam and settling in to watch The Sarah Jane Adventures on TV.

  When her mother didn’t appear, she explained, regarding him with a faintly guilty frown, she had made her own way home after a detour to the Cheltenham Road Library. He was so relieved, all he could do was crush her to him. And then, after a little time had passed, he steeled himself for the awful task. Then, he could speak—just barely—the language of death to his child; he had had to; there was no other way. But he could not make himself speak the language of murder; that is, until some pitiless older child’s school taunting of Miranda left him little choice but to address the greater horror.

  Yes, Mummy died very suddenly when she was coming to meet Daddy at the church, but police think she saw a man doing something bad and he didn’t want her to tell anyone what he was doing, so he took away her life. No, he was a very sick man. No, police don’t know who he is, but they’re looking very hard for him. Yes, Myleene—for that was the gormless schoolmate’s name—is right, the police think it may have had something to do with drugs. No, not like Paracetamol. This sick man was using very hurtful drugs. Mummy would never have prescribed anyone such drugs.

  One unintended consequence was that Miranda remained chary of anything she thought was a drug, including the erythromycin she had been prescribed when impetigo had coursed through her classroom. “Will this hurt me?” she now always asked, examining intently any bottle of pills.

  Which was why Tom wished Madrun had not mentioned The Priory, the well-known drug and alcohol treatment centre. By doing so, she’d laid down a track. The conversation could proceed in only one direction, and it would, unless stopped.

  “Oh, it must be drugs,” his housekeeper said, reaching for the cafetière to pour Tom another cup, stepping around Powell and Gloria, who were slinking about on a quest for dropped food.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Nonsense, Mr. Christmas, it has—”

  “Mrs. Prowse, shall we talk of other things?”

  “I’m not a baby, you know,” Miranda interjected. She was regarding them both candidly.

  “Of course you’re not, darling,” Tom responded reflexively. “But it’s not like it was with Mummy. There’s no sick man in the village who hurt Sybella. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Prowse?”

  “Yes, of course.” But Madrun had been arrested in her coffee pouring. Tom looked up and noted a strange, alert look in her eyes. He realised at that moment that he had given voice to an awful possibility that his mind had held shuttered: No youthful folly or accident or self-destruction had ended Sybella’s life. Some outside agency, gone now to shadow, had brought about this destruction—an echo of his own wife’s death so acutely painful that he had to catch a breath so that his coffee cup wouldn’t shake and spill. He cursed himself for planting the seed of speculation in Madrun’s mind—she’d be down at the post office with her letter to old Mrs. Prowse nattering with Karla Skynner and anyone else queued up for a stamp—but then realised he was probably being naïve. Half the breakfast tables in the village were probably preoccupied with similar worrying thoughts.

  That’s when Miranda suggested they play “Where in the World Is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?” Its genesis had been his offhand explanation to her the year before about Kinsey’s no-show at Ned Skynner’s funeral. He had told her that Kinsey was probably having sundowners with Lord Lucan somewhere in Africa, which Miranda didn’t understand, but nevertheless embellished with a tangential suggestion about him visiting Babar in the jungle. When they were driving home to Bristol after their stay with the Hennises, they continued the game, which seemed perfectly innocent then. Though the village had been rife with speculation when they’d left, Tom assumed Kinsey would eventually reappear with some perfectly decent explanation for his absence. They weren’t to know that before any great passage of time, he would be officially classified as a missing person.

  “What made you think of that?” he couldn’t help asking, wondering if she was reacting in some oblique childhood way to anxiety.

  Miranda shrugged.

  “Well, all right then,” Tom responded reluctantly. “Where in the world is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?”

  Miranda regarded the bit of ham on her fork. “Le curé est parti en Espagne pour … devenir matador,” she said, flicking a glance at Madrun, who, as usual, discomfited at the introduction of French, turned away.

  “And what would Alice Roy do?”

  Miranda slipped the piece of ham off her fork and let her arm drop beside her chair. “Alice demanderait à Madame Prowse si le curé était très très … friand de la paella.” She giggled.

  “What?” Madrun turned, responding to her name in the thicket of French. Her eyes went to Gloria’s greedy jaws. “You’d best not be feeding my good ham to that cat.”

  Tom laughed. “Miranda imagines that the Reverend Mr. Kinsey decided to become a matador in Spain. And that a good detective like Alice Roy would ask you, Mrs. Prowse, if he was … fond …?” Miranda nodded assent. “… fond of paella.”

  Madrun harrumphed, still eyeing the cat. “Then you also might imagine him performing in denim trousers and getting shut of red capes.”

  Tom was reminded that many parishioners found Peter Kinsey a divisive figure after so many years of the amiable Giles James-Douglas, who had been content to hone to traditions established many years earlier. A new broom in modern dress, Kinsey had shifted worship times to make room for a modern family service, decided to take out some pews so people could gather for coffee and a chat after services, removed pictures from the Lady chapel, and was musing about moving the altar before his disappearance. Shifted from their comfortable pews—literally, in a few cases—some churchgoers felt they were being pushed a bit too far. A few welcomed the changes. However, Kinsey wasn’t around long enough to have really put his mark on things, and so the fabled “demographic”—so much the concern of forward planners—hadn’t changed significantly. They’re like ripe fruit, the bishop, a wintry fellow, had mused to Tom between bites of sultana cake as he surveyed the flock at the reception in the village hall after Tom’s induction service: Pretty soon they would begin to drop off the branch. The message was clear: Innovate to draw new blood into the church. But, added the bishop, givin
g him the gimlet eye, try not to shake the branch too vigorously. That message was equally clear: Don’t be an overeager arborist like your predecessor. Softly, softly, Mr. Christmas.

  One of Peter Kinsey’s legacies was a splendid new bloodred Thorn Sherpa touring bicycle, the sort you might buy if you were thinking of cycling by way of France, Turkey, and Iran to India. It was a bit flash for a vicar, and rather expensive, but Tom, applying bicycle clips to his ankles, suspected his predecessor had merely to say “carbon footprint” and all qualms—his and others’—would vanish. Well, it was true. A bicycle was a greener way to get about. But some used model would have done just as well, if a little village was the four corners of your cycling world. So, too, would a biro from the corner shop instead of a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or a pair of Boots sunglasses instead of Oliver Goldsmith’s, both of which had been overlooked at the vicarage when Peter’s effects were packed away pending resolution to his missing person’s file. The archdeacon told Tom that Peter’s parents, wealthy farmers in Zimbabwe, had been killed and their land seized just before his ordination, leaving Peter, their only child, with virtually nothing more than his stipend. That didn’t seem to stop him from acquiring the finer things in life, Tom reflected, as he waved at Miranda, who was holding one of the cats in the sitting room window, and pedalled out into Poynton Shute, with its row of stone cottages opposite. Looking down Church Lane towards the lych-gate, he glimpsed Sebastian John, keys in hand, preparatory to opening the church for the day, and gave a passing thought to hailing him and asking after Colonel Northmore’s condition. But the bike seemed to have a mind of its own and it whisked Tom onwards, past the Church House Inn and along towards Pattimore’s shop and the post office.

  Or perhaps he was attributing agency to the bicycle to avoid talking with his verger. Sebastian seemed to live in silences, approaching conversation as if it were a necessary, but not wholly welcome, obligation. Likewise, his expression often lacked animation, as if he had learned to rid his face of emotion, though occasionally, at church council meetings, say, when Karla Skynner was on her high horse about something, a gush of inner light would illuminate his deep-set blue eyes and a faint smile would curl the corners of his mouth, illuminating the suppressed intelligence. It was the infrequency of these emotional punctuations that made his entrance into the village hall the day before all that much more remarkable. Sebastian had burst through the doors, panting slightly, a line of perspiration against his hairline, as if he had dashed from the other end of Purton Farm. Tom had assumed his concern was for Colonel Northmore. He knew from Madrun that the colonel had interceded with Giles James-Douglas to secure Sebastian the verger’s position, which suggested some sort of prior relationship between the men, though try as she might—and Madrun had tried—she couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Too, Sebastian spent many hours tending the gardens at Farthings, the colonel’s home near the entrance to Knighton Lane, and sometimes took his dinners there. They were almost like old priest and acolyte, Tom thought, occasionally seeing them together in one of Thornford’s lanes, usually with Bumble at the end of a leash. But Sebastian, his bronzed face drained of colour, had eyes ony for the o-daiko drum.

  “Is Sybella …?” he managed to utter.

  They all stared at him, waiting for him to complete the question. No words came. Finally, with a regretful glance at Colm, Tom murmured:

  “I’m afraid Sybella has died, Sebastian.”

  “Sybella,” Sebastian had repeated in a wondering tone. He had looked at them, one by one, as if seeking confirmation. Finally his eyes settled on Colm. “I’m so very sorry,” he said. His face shifted through sympathy to its normal, impassive mien. Though thinking about it now, as he rolled down the pavement past Pattimore’s shop towards Fishers Hill and the turn towards the adjunct road that would take him to Thornridge House, Tom was possessed by the worrying notion that it had been relief, or something akin, that he’d glimpsed in those cobalt blue eyes. No one at the fayre had known that Sybella was anything but asleep in the drum. Yet somehow Sebastian had intuited the most cheerless of scenarios. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask his verger if he had some intelligence on the tragedy, but a moan from the floor had redirected everyone’s attention.

  “Phillip,” Sebastian had said, the surprise in his voice detectably genuine. “What has happened to you?”

  “I’ve had a fall, my boy.”

  “Some of the boys were fighting and one of them knocked Colonel Northmore over,” Julia corrected. “And, yes, an ambulance is coming,” she added as Sebastian, kneeling by the colonel’s side, looked up at her enquiringly. “I’ve asked Alastair to come, too … oh, and here he is now.”

  Julia and her husband exchanged cool glances, after Alastair, dressed as if he’d just blown in off the course, in a blue and green striped golf shirt and matching golf cap, had pushed through the door. Quickly, wordlessly, he bent down across from Sebastian and twisted the bill of his cap to the back of his head. “Old Course St. Andrews,” Tom found himself reading. Alastair lifted Colonel Northmore’s arm, pushed the shirt cuff back with one hand, and felt along his wrist.

  “Your pulse is strong,” he commented.

  “It’s the colonel’s legs, Alastair,” Julia snapped. “He’s had a fall.”

  “Do you mind? I’m the doctor here.”

  “Where’s your bag?”

  “It’s at the club. Old Mr. Gill had a seizure of sorts in the locker room.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Julia, that I forgot my bag in the locker room after I’d examined Gill. I’m quite capable of examining someone without it.”

  Alastair ordered the colonel to try moving his right leg, then his left. Northmore’s features shuttered with pain as he attempted to shift the latter. “Ten,” the colonel gasped when Alastair asked him the level of pain he was feeling on a scale of one to ten.

  “Is something broken?” Sebastian asked.

  “You’re in my way. Move!”

  As Sebastian shifted off his knees, Alastair moved to the colonel’s right side, turned his suit jacket aside, and palpated alongside his hip with his hands. After a moment, he, too, rose.

  “Well …?” Julia said.

  “Well what?”

  “Perhaps the colonel would care to know your diagnosis?”

  Alastair jerked his cap back the right way. “Colonel,” he responded, readjusting his shirt over an incipient paunch, “an X ray will tell us more, of course, but I expect that you’ve broken your hip. I’m very sorry.”

  Northmore’s lips formed a thin line. He said nothing.

  “I’d be happy to stay with you, Colonel, in other circumstances, but I’m afraid I have another appointment. If you’ll all excuse me …” Alastair touched his cap in a salute.

  “It’s Bank Holiday!” Julia protested.

  Alastair gave his wife a tight smile. “Enid Pattimore craves my attention.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I saw Enid not an hour ago at Liam Drewe’s stall,” Tom added, surprised. “She looked fine.”

  “My service paged me while I was in the car. I can show you both, if you like.” Alastair reached into his pocket.

  “Never mind that.” Julia waved a dismissive hand as Alastair thrust his pager in her face. “There’s someone else you must look at here. Something terrible has happened.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Sybella.”

  Alastair glanced around. “I don’t understand.”

  Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Colm interjected. “Alastair, really, there’s nothing you can do. It’s not necessary to …” He trailed off.

  “Sybella has died, Alastair,” Tom explained. The words were awful to say.

  Alastair blinked. “What? But …?”

  “Her body’s in that drum.”

  Alastair frowned deeply. “I don’t under—”

  “Please, no one touch her,” Colm moaned, lurching on wobbly legs to block the
drum. “Please.”

  “Alastair, it’s fine,” Tom said, one eye on Colm, who looked about to collapse. “We’re waiting for the police. Go and attend to Enid. We can … cope here.”

  “But how …?”

  “We don’t know,” Tom replied.

  “I’m very sorry,” Alastair addressed Colm. “If there’s anything—”

  “We’ll be okay, Alastair, really.” Julia lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry to have dragged you here.”

  “Oh.” Alastair looked vaguely startled. “Well, under the circumstances …” He moved towards the door, then turned. “Perhaps someone ought to pick that walking stick off the floor. Before anything else happens.”

  Colm hailed Tom as he was walking his bike by the box topiaries that flanked the driveway between the gate and Thornridge House, a Nash-designed jewel of golden stone that glowed in the midmorning sunshine. Startled out of his thoughts of the previous day’s events, Tom veered down a curving flagstone path past deep beds of boisterous wildflowers towards the rhythmic scrape of chafing metal. Next to the slender pillar of an ancient sundial, Colm—dressed in a straw hat as wide as a sombrero and a pair of jeans so worn the blue had given way to strands of white at the knees and the pockets—was attacking a clematis vine with vigour.

  “You have to keep after these buggers or they just get tangled and monstrous.” He grunted and took a final swipe at a stem, sending it cascading to the pile of cuttings. Tom, who had vague knowledge of gardening gleaned from his two mothers and their passion for their back garden in Gravesend, had a notion that pruning clematis in late May wasn’t the done thing, but thought better of mentioning it. In his years as priest, he had met with many varied responses to the loss of the loved one, of which a brisk workout in the garden was by no means unusual. When he was a curate, he had gone around to the home of a man who had lost his wife and found him feverishly hacking away at a crabapple tree in his back garden. And when he was in Bristol, a woman whose son had been stabbed outside their council house began painting an angel over the bloodstain on the pavement. By the time he arrived, a heavenly host was running up the front door and the neighbours were growing restive.