“I hope you’re not telling me you and my sister were having it off in a graveyard.”
“Sorry, I didn’t put it very well. I meant to say that Miranda was conceived while we were in Grasmere.”
“Then what’s the significance of you walking backwards and Lisbeth forwards?”
“It’s a fertility ritual,” Tom replied, struggling upright. “Which is what I expect Mrs. P. was nattering on about just now. It’s said fertility is achieved for a woman if she walks forwards around the yew and for a man by walking backwards.”
He was so preoccupied dusting off the back of his trousers that at first he didn’t pay attention to the low keening that challenged the chirruping birds in the churchyard, but when he turned back to Julia, he was startled to see her face crumpled with misery, her mouth biting the fleshy part of her hand between thumb and forefinger in an attempt to suppress the piteous sound. But it didn’t work, for as he reached out instinctively to hold her in her distress, her hand fell away and a raucous sob escaped her lips. Her face only inches from his, she stared at him despondently. But before he could ask her what in heaven’s name was the matter, she turned and darted out through the lych-gate and into Church Lane, turning not towards Pattimore’s but towards home.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rather than turn left into the small hall as everyone else was doing, dutifully obeying the arrow on the sign, “Neighbourhood Watch Meeting,” Tom turned right to the large hall, following Mitsuko Drewe, who was carrying a lumpy padded envelope. He had some information for her. He stepped into the village hall’s larger room just in time to hear Mitsuko release a sound that fell somewhere between a shriek and a gasp. Jesus wept, he thought, glancing back at Watch chairperson Anne Willett to see if she had heard—she had, and gave him the sort of judgmental frown he expected she’d once used when she’d been principal of Thornford Regis Primary. Two distressed females in one morning, he thought, with a sinking heart.
For not unlike Julia, whose sightless staring at the yew tree had augured distress, Mitsuko was looking intently at the wall. Her body, in black vest top and matching knee shorts, was rigid.
“Mitsuko?” he ventured. He hoped he would have more success with Mitsuko’s unhappiness than with Julia’s. He had considered chasing after her earlier, but he doubted he could be useful, and falling down had temporarily hobbled his backside, making any chasing, in the literal sense, painful.
Mitsuko kept her eyes on the wall. “There’s a quilt missing.” Her voice was heavy as lead.
“Then Miranda was right.” Tom joined her. “She said there ought to be one there. I think I mentioned we were in here looking at your artwork on Monday afternoon,” he explained when she turned a puzzled frown to him.
“So it was gone by then.”
“Apparently.”
“This is so unfair!” Mitsuko exploded. “I’ve spent a year preparing this exhibit. And it’s set to travel to Dartington this summer and Exeter in the fall. And this on top of having my computer and camera stolen!”
“I can imagine someone being keen on one of your quilts,” Tom soothed. “They’re exceptional.”
“They’d be welcome to buy one!”
“Yes, there is that.”
“If it’s someone from the village, they’re not going to get away with it for very long—people will notice if you’re hanging one of my quilts in your sitting room.”
“If your missing quilt wound up covering someone’s bed, then perhaps it could be kept secret.”
“It’s art! It’s not intended to cover a bed.”
“Of course.” Tom had a notion of purchasing one for Miranda’s bed, since she had been so taken with them, but apparently he was a philistine.
“It must be someone from outside the village.”
“But who from outside the village would have known you were hanging these quilts last Sunday?”
Mitsuko twisted her mouth in thought. “No one,” she said, after a moment. “At least that I can think of.”
“Then …?”
“Maybe someone at the fayre?”
“But with so many people about?”
“They’re only lightly filled with batting, Tom. They do fold up.”
“Still, it was gone missing by the early afternoon, when I was here with Miranda. And she had been viewing your work earlier with Emily Swan. And there was a fair bit of traffic in and out of the village hall, all day. Many of the women don’t care to use the port-a-loos outside, for one thing. And,” he continued, ticking off items on his fingers, “there were the Twelve Drummers Drumming kids going in and out. And there were some setup crew here after nine, adding the finishing touches. Any number may have decided to have a sneak preview of your work.”
“I would have insisted this room be kept locked, as I paid to have it for a fortnight, but the same key opens all the doors in the village hall, so it would have been futile.”
“You need to report this.”
“The police didn’t take a blind bit of notice when I phoned yesterday about my computer theft. All I was given was a report number for my insurer. And I’m sure my art will get short shrift given the events of the—”
“Unless …”
“What?”
“Unless someone came through on Sunday afternoon when you were installing these quilts, took a fancy, then came back later.”
Mitsuko said testily, “You’d think people would be home digesting their Sunday lunches. Really, I don’t know why I’m bothering to have an opening. Half the village seems to have wandered through here one day or the other.”
“The opening is still on?”
“Yes, Colm’s insisted.” Her temper eased. “He’s being very gracious.”
“Can you recall who passed through on Sunday?”
Mitsuko tapped the envelope against her cheek. “Well, Sebastian was very kindly helping me. It took much more time than I’d thought it would to install these quilts. You can see,” she explained, pointing, “how wires had to be hooked to those rafters to hold the doweling rods that hold up the quilts. Anyway, Fred stepped in early on—this was before the toilet crisis—with his son. Charlie was due at the Twelve Drummers rehearsal next door …” She paused. “Fred!”
Tom shook his head.
“No, you’re right, of course. Not his thing.”
“Fred does have your extra set of keys to your flat,” Tom said. “Which was what I came to tell you. I asked him about it yesterday in the pub. However, he has no particular intelligence about your alarm. Sybella switched it off for him on Sunday, as you told me earlier, and it was off when he delivered the toilet on Tuesday.”
“Liam says he has no memory whether it was on or off Monday. Off is my guess. Our insurer won’t be pleased.” Mitsuko sighed noisily. “Anyway, who else was through here Sunday afternoon? Well, there was Liam. He showed up with my mobile and a message to phone my mother. I’d left my mobile at the Waterside and he couldn’t get through to me on the village hall phone because the drums were so loud no one could hear it ringing.” Mitsuko paused in thought. “And Colonel Northmore walked in with Bumble—I think to register a complaint about the peace of the Lord’s Day being ruined by the drums, though I don’t know why—Farthings is well out of earshot, I should think. Or maybe it was to talk with Sebastian. I don’t know. As I say, it was hard to hear at times. Anyway, the colonel came in here and looked around—in that disapproving way of his, of course, and then when—”
“When?”
“Oh, nothing.” She looked away. “He’s a silly old man.”
“Is that everybody?”
“The Daintreys poked their heads in, I recall. And Alastair came in, near the end of rehearsal. He was waiting for Julia. They had some golf club do to get to. That’s it, as far as I know. Of course, sometimes I was up a ladder or otherwise distracted, so someone else might have wandered in.”
Tom absently ran his forefinger over the rim of his dog collar. A little shiver travelle
d his spine. There couldn’t possibly be two malefactors wandering through the village hall in a single evening, surely? He looked at Mitsuko. Her face remained stamped with irritation. Hesitating to broach a connection between the missing quilt and Sybella’s death, he said instead:
“You’re not thinking of running up a replacement on your sewing machine?”
Her glance told him she thought he was thick for asking. “I haven’t the time or the material. And, of course, all the Thornford pictures are stored in my computer, which has also gone missing.”
Tom looked over at the nearest quilt. The scene was the forecourt of the primary school, complete with clumps of bright-coloured children at play. In the left corner he noticed a detail that had escaped him when he’d viewed the quilts with his daughter. Mitsuko had incorporated into her design the date stamp the digital camera imprinted on every picture, if programmed to do so. It was an autumn scene, and if the touch of rust on the trees hadn’t given it away, the date did: October 24 of last year.
“What is the subject of the missing quilt?” he asked her.
“I was particularly fond of that one,” Mitsuko responded sulkily. “It was lovely—a view over the churchyard towards the millpond and the river taken in the early evening.”
Tom frowned, trying to visualise it. “But how—?”
“From atop the church tower.”
“Really? It’s so inaccessible. How did you get up?”
“The church architect had been scrambling around one afternoon. Sebastian had been accompanying him. So I asked if I could go up the tower after they were done. Sebastian said it was okay.”
“When was this?”
Mitsuko’s eyes telescoped, as if she were viewing some inner landscape. “I … I can’t remember. I took absolute mounds of pictures over nearly a year. Of course, you can with digital.”
“You captured Julia and me coming out of the pub the day of Ned’s funeral. That was”—he stepped down the hall to the relevant quilt and peered at the bottom left corner—“April 6. And this one is”—he stepped to the next one, a scene at the quay—“is July 19. And this one, a grey day, it looks, is, yes, November 13—of course, Remembrance Sunday. There’s Colonel Northmore laying a wreath at the memorial in The Square. You did record rather a lot of … Mitsuko? Are you sure you can’t remember when you took the churchyard picture? Mitsuko?”
She shuddered. “I’ll try to remember, if you think it’s important,” she said impatiently. She put her hand into the envelope and drew out a roll of masking tape. “Look, I really must put these labels up—”
He watched Mitsuko push the tape roll up her arm, then pluck from the envelope what appeared to be a white card, about six inches by three, mounted on, and framed by, black mat board. He glanced at the pool of lettering in the middle.
“How interesting!” he exclaimed. “It’s a little poem.”
“A haiku.”
“Three lines. Seventeen syllables. Very …”
“Japanese?”
“I was going to say ‘unusual.’ ”
“It was Liam’s idea.”
“Really?” Tom hoped he didn’t sound too incredulous.
But Mitsuko had tucked the envelope under her arm and was concentrated on ripping a piece of tape off her roll. “I thought it might be a trifle stereotyping, but I did enjoy writing haiku as a teenager, so I thought, well, why not? Of course, it might have helped if Liam had installed these as I’d asked him to. There’s so little time for everything …”
But Tom’s attention had become gripped by the envelope. He stared at it, his mind roiling.
“Are you all right?” Mitsuko flicked him a glance.
“Oh … just a little heartburn,” he white-lied. “Mrs. P. thought I needed to fortify myself with a full English this morning, given yesterday’s events.”
Mitsuko grimaced, whether in response to the notion of a greasy fry-up or the reality of Peter Kinsey’s disinterment was unclear.
“I was actually sort of wondering,” he began lightly, “why you didn’t put these cards up on Sunday.”
“Well, that was my intent, of course,” she responded, applying the tape to the back of the card. “But the installation took more time than I’d expected. So I said I’d have to come back in the evening, as I was going up to Bridgend in the morning, but then my mother called in a state, so …” She pressed the card to the wall next to the quay-scene quilt. “… So I left this stuff and my key to the village hall at the Waterside and asked Liam if he could please find a moment during my absence to stick these things up on the wall … or get Sybella to do it. And, of course, when I get back to Thornford, the envelope hasn’t travelled any farther than our flat. Liam said he didn’t have the time.”
Tom murmured sympathetically. But his mind had sped elsewhere, to the details of Tilly Springett’s conversation with him at the Waterside: Liam walking towards the village hall Sunday night, holding something to his chest—not a stick of some nature, but a padded envelope and, more important, a key. A key to the village hall. He studied the punctilious woman before him, painstakingly applying tape to the back of another card. Liam had said nothing to her about travelling farther than their flat with the envelope Sunday night. Nor did she know that Tilly Springett was a witness. Tilly had held her tongue. At least with other villagers. So far.
“You haven’t had Bliss and Blessing pay you a visit, have you?” he asked.
Mitsuko pushed the second of the cards against the wall. “Not yet. Liam has,” she replied, stepping back and frowning at her handiwork. “Perhaps they think I’m still in Bridgend. Why do you ask?”
“No reason, really.” Tom watched her hand dive into the envelope again. “Might I have a look at the haiku you wrote for the quilt that’s missing?”
Mitsuko turned. Tom was surprised at the wariness in her eyes. “Okay,” she agreed after a moment. She pulled all the cards from the envelope, hugged them to her chest, and rummaged through the lot. “Funny,” she said, “it doesn’t seem to be here.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tom paid less mind to the Neighbourhood Watch meeting than he probably ought to have. In an ordinary week, he was sure, Watch meetings probably pulled fewer than a dozen villagers from their routines. But this was an extraordinary week, and villagers seemed out in force, coalesced into a buzzing hive of worry and outrage, whose pulse he felt surround him as he perched on one of the blue plastic chairs marshalled before a table of village worthies in the small hall. Said table was for table tennis, dragged from below the stage in the large hall, unfolded, and net removed, surely because it was the only thing the Watch executive, parish council members, and police representatives could possibly crowd behind without looking like they were wallflowers at a dance. DI Bliss and DS Blessing weren’t in attendance. They were, explained a detective superintendent, a smoothie dispatched from Middlemoor, Devon & Cornwall Constabulary headquarters near Exeter, engaged in the very real day-to-day work of the investigation, though Tom wondered if HQ either was reluctant to trot out the untelegenic duo to an audience or was somehow unhappy with their progress.
Tom’s heart went out to the villagers. Many seemed wont to believe some malign force from outside the village bore the blame for shattering their tranquillity. The gathering seemed more an exercise in jollying everyone along, as much as anyone could be jollied in the circumstances. The DSI proferred nothing more than what Tom—and, he suspected, half of Thornford—already knew, which wasn’t a great lot.
Instead he found his mind going walkabout: Julia’s worrisome behaviour, Mitsuko’s latest disappointment, funeral arrangements for Sybella, his unfinished Sunday sermon, the sadness of being in the small hall three days after finding a young girl’s dead body in it—all had a brief audience with his frontal lobes. However—and he could barely explain himself to himself, other than to think that he needed some distraction from worry—he found rather more lizard-like portions of his brain to be active and engaged, and foc
used on the other uniformed person at the front of the hall: PCSO Màiri White.
The local police community support officer, PCSO White had stopped by on her electric bicycle as he and Miranda were moving into the vicarage two months earlier. At the time, surrounded by partially opened boxes, the detritus of a life interrupted, and one small, vivacious child, he had paid scant attention to the uniformed figure with the Scottish accent. It had been a courtesy visit and he’d observed the courtesies. Glimpsing her sans uniform at the May Fayre three days earlier, however, had been somewhat of a revelation. He had a notion she might be unattached, knew she lived at Pennycross St. Paul, site of the other church in his benefice, and was aware she hadn’t attended any of his services.
A little earlier, after leaving Mitsuko and joining the villagers stepping into the small hall, he’d noted Màiri White and found himself wondering if she had had a partner (what brought her to Devon?). As she approached him (she was wearing her uniform, damn), he wondered what she looked like naked.
“A change from Monday, I expect, Vicar,” she observed, turning to survey the room, before he could register anything in her eyes, which were the blue of … something poetic, he thought. Cornflowers? Lisbeth would have sniggered at a reference so impossibly wet.
“ ‘Tom’ is fine.”
She turned to him, her brow crinkled slightly. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “I’m pleased to hear it, but … do you commonly refer to yourself in the third person?”
Tom felt a blush creeping up his neck. “I meant, you may address me as ‘Tom.’ ” As soon he said it, he realised he sounded a complete prat. “May address” indeed, he groaned inwardly as he watched her smile gather force.
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