Twelve Drummers Drumming

by C. C. Benison

  An ice age grew up between the sisters beginning then. Lisbeth had viewed Julia’s taking up with Alastair as little more than sibling rivalry run riot. As for Alastair, she had muttered darkly, as they drove back to Cambridge: He was doing little more than exacting a peculiar revenge. With her, with their combined income from medical practice, he would find the perfect village and raise the perfect children in luxury. He had life all figured out for them, Lisbeth had said, but she didn’t want her life all figured out. She wanted, she had declared, turning to him in the car, smiling, a life more messy and unpredictable.

  The ice age began to thaw only when Julia had miscarried a child some eighteen months before Lisbeth’s murder. Tom’s charitable view had always been that Alastair had fetched up with the prettier (by a titch) and more vivacious of the two sisters; therefore he ought to be well pleased with his choice. Indeed, now Julia was living; Lisbeth was not. And yet Alastair seemed to bristle with dissatisfactions unnamed, at least when Tom was in the vicinity. That cool gaze fell upon him still. Mercifully, with Miranda, however, Alastair was transfigured. No longer the prickly in-law, he became the attentive uncle, for which Tom was grateful and in which he could detect no insincerity. He pushed through the door to the colonel’s hospital room and thought, not for the first time since arriving in Thornford Regis: Perhaps if I took up golf …

  Tom studied Colonel Northmore’s ancient head resting against the pillow and the loop of plastic tubing marrying his bared arm to an IV pole. He watched the clear liquid drip into the ampoule then drip into the tubing, where it glided down and disappeared beneath a white bandage fringed by purple bruising on Colonel Northmore’s exposed arm. He felt a pang of pity for the old man. “When I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not”: The psalm passed through his mind.

  Each drop soothed the old gentleman’s pain, but each drop, morphine-laced, clouded his mind so that his speech, uncharacteristically profuse, was uncharacteristically unclear—but for the occasional lucid punctuation. It was these—a name, a sentence fragment, a shout—that would pull Tom from his prayers and return his mind again to the antiseptic room where the afternoon sun, cascading through open venetians, was beginning to spill up the bedclothes. “Lydia,” he heard this time. The colonel’s eyelids remained sealed. His grey lips returned to their mumblings. Lydia had been Mrs. Northmore, gone nearly a quarter century now, lost to breast cancer. Phillip had soldiered on alone; he had been a soldier. Tom empathised for their shared circumstance, widowers both, and imagined though greater age brought greater expectation of separation, greater age did not assuage the suffering. By all accounts, Phillip had been the most uxorious of men, dedicatedly so: His father Edwin, a dashing Edwardian known for his charm and eccentricity, had been not only profligate with the family fortune, so clobbered by death duties after the war that he was forced to sell Thornridge House, but recklessly profligate with his seed. If your great-grandmother had been a servant up at the Big House in the days before the Great War, rumour had it, chances are you had some Northmore blood in your veins.

  “Stop that!” Colonel Northmore interrupted Tom’s reverie with the sort of crispness that attended his contributions to PCC meetings. Then he added, “Catherine.” Must be Cat Northmore, his daughter, an actress of minor acclaim living in America—Los Angeles, most likely. Or was it New York? Madrun had mentioned Ms. Northmore was in a TV program about dead people who seemed to get out and about and meddle in living people’s lives. Or was it busybody angels? At any rate, Catherine Northmore communicated with her father infrequently. Regarding the IV drip once again, Tom wondered if—no, determined that—Cat ought to be telephoned, and soon. Alastair may well be too sanguine about the success of an operation on an advanced octogenarian.

  Phillip seemed to settle back to mumbling and Tom began to question the utility of his presence, other than perhaps a shared, silent communion. At home, myriad tasks awaited: the weekly pew leaflet to organise, wedding couples to schedule, a youth service to plan, a contribution to the parish magazine to write, his sermon to reconsider in light of the recent shock to the village. Not to mention preparation for Sybella’s funeral, which, given her parents’ repute, was going to necessitate liaising with the diocesan press office and organising some crowd control. He needed to put in a call to the archdeacon and have a talk with the funeral director.

  He glanced again at the slumbering figure in the bed, then reached into his jacket pocket for the little case that held his professional cards. He would leave a note for the colonel, saying he had been round to visit. Instead, unthinkingly, he pulled out Mao’s Quotations. Bugger. He’d thought the weight in his pocket had been the card case, not this tiny red-plastic-covered book. He flipped the pages idly and glanced at selected passages.

  Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

  Useful for an inspiring speech to Thornford Regis Football Club, he considered, though identifying the source probably wasn’t on.

  To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.

  How true, he thought. His mind returned to the great disturbance of Thornford’s pleasant rhythms wrought by Sybella’s puzzling death. What had Eric remembered in the pub a few hours earlier? He had remembered that Sybella’s occasional presence in the Church House Inn had coincided with Sebastian’s. And what had Sybella been doing each time? She had been sketching Sebastian—this reported to Eric by an inquisitive barmaid. Hadn’t Tom viewed the results at Thornridge House that morning? He was unsurprised that a young woman should find Sebastian, with his distinguished straight nose and his firm jawline, alluring. Sunday mornings, during the processional through the nave, he’d sensed more eyes lingering on his verger than on him. Sebastian kept his hair long, though usually banded back, but for services, and at other times, he released the band and let his hair fall like a flaxen curtain around his face. “He looks all Jesusy,” he overheard one pew-warmer whisper as he passed; he couldn’t tell if the tone was approving or disapproving.

  What did surprise Tom was Sebastian’s reaction to Sybella’s attentions. Thursday last, Eric reported, in the middle of a slow, rainy afternoon at the pub, Sebastian, who had been seated at the window, thumped his half-filled glass on the table, sprang from his chair, pitched himself halfway across the room, and snatched the sketchpad from Sybella’s hands. Wordlessly, he’d ripped several pages from the pad, torn them into pieces, and thrown them into the fireplace. Eric had been the sole witness.

  “Only time I’ve seen Sebastian lose his famous cool,” the landlord had told Tom.

  “And did Sybella lose hers?” Tom asked.

  Eric snorted. “I think she fancied it. Getting the attention and all. Didn’t say a word, sort of smiled, picked up her bag, and walked out.” He reflected: “It’s the last time I saw her, now I think of it.”

  A sharp report from the colonel’s lips broke Tom’s reverie. He glanced up to see if Phillip had awakened, but the lids remained shut; as before, only tremulous lips suggested the workings of a restless dreaming mind. What was that word he said? Sounded like “omoray.” Moray was a type of eel … and a Scottish district. He and Lisbeth had driven through on a week’s holiday once, early in their marriage. But O’Moray? An Irish name? Wait! There was that old Scottish folk song, Bonnie Earl o’Moray. He remembered his honorary father, the Reverend Canon Christopher Holdsworth, rector of St. George’s in Gravesend, reciting it at some church function. They hae slain the Earl o’Moray / And laid him on the green.

  Colonel Northmore said the word again, this time with more bite. Really, Tom decided, this was getting to be entertaining, rather like deciphering code. Might the injured man be dreaming of Màiri White, the village bobby? Oh, Màiri! Unlikely. A little too passionate for the old duffer, though who knew what lurked in the hearts of old men widowed lo these many years? Tom himself gave a passing thought to PCSO White, then wished he hadn’t. Copper she might be; all kitted out in her stab vest, her bowler hat, and what l
ooked like a hundredweight of police clobber—torch, radio, and such—she looked the very model of a modern police community support officer—prim, on the whole. But off-duty, in mufti, as Màiri White had been at the May Fayre, where he had glimpsed her chatting with some children at the petting zoo, she had looked quite fetching, the pale skin of her arms exposed to the sun and her chestnut hair released from bondage. She had green eyes, too—duly noted when she lent assistance to members of the constabulary at the village hall—and really it was too soon, too soon, much too soon to be thinking about these things. No, acting upon them. Thoughts could not be quelled. Especially those sorts of thoughts. What would Jesus do? Who knew? He was a single fellow. And He didn’t have a child, unless you subscribed to that Da Vinci Code bollocks.

  Okoo. The colonel again. Okoo. That was familiar, yet somehow out of reach. Okoo. Lots of O’s in front of words. O’Coo? Irish? The O’Coos of County Kerry sort of thing? Somehow, Tom thought, the colonel didn’t hold much of a brief for the Irish. Oh! Koo!? Sounded like a West End musical doomed to excoriating reviews and heavy tourist traffic. Didn’t Prince Andrew once have a girlfriend named Koo? Yes, that’s right. Koo Stark. She was in a naughty film. He would have liked to see it, but he had been—what?—eleven, twelve, just on the cusp of adolescence when there was a flap about it. It was all around the time of the Falklands War, he recalled. Videos were only just coming in. Of course, even if it had been on video and even if they had owned a video machine, he would never have got it past his two mothers. Well, Kate might have turned a blind eye. She was American and the more indulgent of the pair. But Dosh was his adoptive father’s sister, and took her in loco parentis role with a certain seriousness.

  Tom blinked and gave his head a sharp shake. He had been drifting off; the room seemed to swim in warmth, as hospital rooms often did. Why was he thinking about Koo Stark?

  Okoo. There it was again.

  So familiar.

  He rose from his chair, partly to shake off his lethargy, partly to more closely examine the colonel, whose agitation had grown in the last minutes. A mask but for the quivering lips, the colonel’s face was now a convulsion of tics and twitches. His eyebrows, rigid as grey cliffs, turned to grey waves, while his deeply scalloped ears seemed to bob beside his motionless skull. And then, as Tom stood transfixed, a keening sound ascended from somewhere below the thin hospital blanket. It mutated into an anguished cry as it escaped his mouth.

  “Oh, no, okoosan!”

  And then his eyes jerked open.

  He stared at Tom unseeing, as if witnessing some private horror. Tom returned the Quotations to his pocket and then placed his hand gently on the colonel’s. He could feel the dry parchment-like quality of his flesh. “Colonel,” he said softly, “you’ve been dreaming.”

  Tom observed the black dot in the colonel’s irises contract as he struggled to take in the novel environment. “Padre?” the old man said with a kind of surprise. Then he twisted his head and let wondering eyes travel up the tube from his arm to the plastic bag dangling at the end of the aluminium pole.

  “Colonel, you’re in Torbay Hospital.” When this didn’t quite register, Tom added: “In England.” Which seemed stupidly obvious, but had an effect. A wave of relief seemed to smooth the furrows in the old man’s face. “You’re home,” he further embellished. Well, near as Bethlehem is to Jerusalem. “You were dreaming.”

  Phillip released a deep sigh. The heavy lids of his eyes sank to half-mast. “I was back at Omori,” he said, his voice thick with phlegm.

  “Omori?”

  Phillip cleared his throat. “POW camp. Near Tokyo. Awful place.”

  Tom nodded, removed his hand. He knew Colonel Northmore had suffered the deprivations of a prisoner-of-war camp and wondered if he was often haunted by dreams of those days. “I had a parishioner once who had been in a Japanese camp. In Singapore, I believe it was. His descriptions of their treatment were grim.”

  “Savages.”

  “Who?”

  “The Japs, of course.” Tom was treated to a stony glance. His former parishioner had been similarly unrepentant in his characterisation. “I can’t forgive them.”

  “I promise you I won’t preach forgiveness this afternoon, Colonel. In any case, it’s something you must come to in your own time.”

  “Not much of that left, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, you’ll be right as rain soon, I’m sure.”

  “No need to jolly me along, padre.” Colonel Northmore’s voice was acid. “If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him,” he murmured.

  “Saint Luke.”

  Phillip opened one eye. “Mmph.” He opened the other eye. “There’s never been a proper apology, you know. Or proper compensation.”

  “From the Japanese, you mean.”

  “When the emperor came to London, I sent my campaign medals back to Buckingham Palace.”

  Tom frowned. He paid little attention to state visits of foreign royalty. This was more Madrun’s bailiwick.

  “It was in ’71,” the colonel added. “You wouldn’t remember.”

  “I was probably little more than a zygote, if that.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s nothing, Colonel. Perhaps you should rest.”

  “Fed us rice with rat droppings in it, you know,” the colonel continued, oblivious. “And they would beat us for nothing.” He pulled his unencumbered right arm out from under the covers and began to weakly slice the air. “The guards would swank about wearing long heavy sticks like samurai warriors, you know, and if …”

  “Yes?”

  “He was mad, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “A sadist. You could see it in his eyes,” the colonel went on, his earlier clarity seeming to descend into a kind of agitated trance. “He took my socks, you know. Lydia knitted them for me. They were the last thing she … and when I took them back …”

  “Yes?” Tom glanced at the IV drip, wondering if it was emitting more drips of morphine.

  “… I felt nothing. I didn’t feel the pain, I was that furious. But I remember the sound. Thwup … thwup … thwup—”

  “Of the stick hitting you?”

  “You were there?”

  “No, Colonel, I wasn’t.” Tom looked into the rheumy eyes. “Now, you really must rest.”

  “Thwup … thwup … thwup …”

  Tom reached across the bed, took Phillip’s arm, which was continuing to slice the air, and set it on the bed gently. The voicings fell to mutterings, then, with a sigh, the colonel closed his eyes and seemed to sink back into the bed. In truth Tom’s former parishioner had told him few of the details of life in a Japanese prison camp. It’s not something I can really tell civilised people about, he had said. So Tom had done a little research and had come across candid accounts—more often by Americans—of the brutality meted out: the beatings, the interrogations, the near starvation. He could only imagine that such horror haunted a man all his life, punctuated his reveries, intruded on his dreams, triggered by who-knows-what—a scent, a sound, a sight. What had triggered the colonel to relive—with drug-induced candour—a particular episode of brutality—over a sock, of all things—might be answered only in the sparking synapses of the brain.

  Tom resettled in his chair, bowed his head, and silently said a prayer for Colonel Northmore’s recovery. Then, raising his head, he glanced again at the resting figure. The colonel’s mouth was hanging slightly ajar, emitting a faint wheeze with each shallow breath. He does look frail, Tom thought. Julia had pointed the colonel out in the street the very first day when he and Miranda visited Thornford the year before, and he had taken note of the robust figure in the brown herringbone jacket and the tattersall shirt, the Jack Russell’s lead in one hand and a silver-topped malacca cane in the other. A year later, greeting the colonel as his church council treasurer, he had thought Phillip less vigorous, a little distracted, apt to go off on a tangent. Rising, he gave a
passing thought to who among the villagers might be an adequate substitute for Phillip on the PCC—no one came to mind—then he reproved himself for contradicting in thought what he had sought in prayer—the colonel’s full recovery.

  As he turned to leave, the colonel’s eyes once again flashed open. He stared at Tom accusingly. “What have you done,” he barked with exceptional clarity, “with my walking stick!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  There wasn’t much he could tell the detectives. Madrun had taken the call at the vicarage while he had been up at hospital and arranged for DI Derek Bliss and DS Colin Blessing from Totnes CID to talk with him at four-thirty, which he was more than willing to do, though—the churlish thought flitted through his brain—it compromised, as events so often did, the precious time he had carved out to make a start on his sermon. The regrettably named duo—Bliss shifted continually in his chair as though plagued by a scorching case of hemorrhoids; Blessing was cursed with an almost transfixing homeliness—plunked themselves down heavily (for they were both heavy men) on the leather armchairs opposite the crowded desk in his study and accepted the tea that Madrun provided.

  The sorts of questions the detectives asked weren’t entirely unfamiliar. Tom had been down this road before. In Bristol, it was he who had found his wife’s body, and the happenstance of being first had brought with it a peculiar reversal, at least to a priest: The first were not last in police hermeneutics; the first were first. As Bristol CID’s automatic prime suspect in the death of Dr. Lisbeth Rose, Tom had been subject to the cold scrutiny of two detectives—both women, as it happened—who dissected his marriage to Lisbeth, their relationships, their backgrounds, their finances, with an almost forensic zeal.