“A while.”
“You were very quiet.”
“I was thinking.” She leaned in towards Tom’s chair and looked up at Sebastian shyly.
“About what?” Tom asked.
“Stuff.”
Always a satisfying answer. “What stuff?”
“Madame Drewe. J’avais raison, Papa. Au hall de village, il y avait un absent …” She frowned and put her hand up to her mouth.
“Daddy’s French has its limits, darling.”
“Édredon,” Sebastian supplied.
Tom raised an eyebrow. Sebastian’s education evidently encapsulated more than tourist French, and the loss of the quilt—for that was what édredon could only mean—had already, it seemed, reached his ears. And Miranda’s. The bush telegraph was in top form.
“Yes, you’re right about there being a quilt missing. You’re very clever. You must be my daughter.” He gave her an assuring squeeze, and glanced at his verger. “Now, Daddy was having a private talk with Sebastian. You know what I mean by ‘private,’ don’t you? It means that we’ve talked about things we want to keep to ourselves. You know because I’m a priest I sometimes hears confession from people, don’t you? They tell me things and I must absolutely keep them to myself. It’s a bit like that now. There are times when it’s best to keep things you’ve heard or seen or know to yourself, because if you didn’t, it might be very very hurtful to someone.”
Miranda’s mouth twisted. “But what if you think someone’s done something very bad?”
“Well, that’s different. Then you tell someone—me or Mrs. Prowse or your teacher or Aunt Julia.” He bent so her face was nearer his. “Is there someone you think has done something very bad?”
Miranda glanced away, towards Sebastian, who seemed oblivious to the creature struggling in his arms. Tom followed the glance. He frowned, puzzled.
“No,” she replied, but there was a shade to her tone that sent his parental radar twitching.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Daddy.” Miranda slipped from her father’s grip just as the cat tore from Sebastian, shredding the fabric of his shirt along the shoulder.
“Looks like cats aren’t fond of you, either,” Tom observed. “I’m sure Mrs. Prowse will be happy to mend that, if you like.”
But Sebastian was studying Miranda, who crouched to pet the sulky cat and straighten its madly twitching tail.
“Bon chat, bon petit chat,” she cooed. “Mais que dirais-tu de l’édredon absent de Madame Drewe?”
“You mustn’t worry about Mrs. Drewe’s quilt, darling. It’s probably just misplaced. It’ll turn up somewhere, I’m sure.”
“Oh, Daddy, don’t be silly. It’s been stolen.”
“Oh.” So hard to mollify a clever child. “Well, then,” Tom sighed. “What would Alice Roy do if this was ‘The Case of the Missing Quilt’?”
“Alice would look for a clue.”
“Ah, a clue. What kind of clue?”
“Je ne sais pas.” Miranda rose off her haunches as Powell scuttled out of her reach. “Je devrai penser cela.”
“Well, while you’re thinking about it, perhaps you should see if Mrs. Prowse would like any help preparing supper.”
“She’s making salmon en croute.”
“Good God. Lisbeth and I could barely manage that if we had a dinner party.” He watched Miranda dash after the cat then veer towards the door to his study. “You wouldn’t care to join us, would you, Sebastian?”
“Very kind of you to ask, but I have something at home.”
“You mustn’t worry about Miranda, you know. She’s good as gold. And I’ll have another word with her after supper.”
Sebastian nodded.
“Sit a minute. Miranda’s concern about Mitsuko’s artwork brings me to something I want to ask you. Do you know which piece was stolen?” he asked, as Sebastian resumed his seat.
“No, I don’t. All I learned in the pub at noon was a quilt had gone missing. Why? Do you?”
“It was of a view over the churchyard towards the millpond. Do you recall it?”
Sebastian looked away from him, studying Powell’s huffy march across the lush lawn. “I’m not sure. I … It was tricky mounting the quilts. My attention wasn’t much on their content.”
“It’s odd anybody would take a quilt, to begin with. As Mitsuko pointed out to me this morning, it would soon get about the village if someone had an interesting new coverlet on their bed. And it’s difficult to imagine someone coming from afar to nick a quilt. In addition, there was so little opportunity. You and she put it up Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning it was gone. I can only assume someone who was in the village hall Sunday afternoon—someone who saw it—must have taken it later.”
Sebastian’s expression tightened. “Do you mean me? Is that what you wanted to ask?”
Tom was taken aback. “No, actually, I wasn’t thinking of you at all.” He regarded Sebastian curiously. Ought I to be? he wanted to ask. “It’s just that I can’t help associating this theft with Sybella’s death. It’s too much of a coincidence that sometime late Sunday evening or early Monday both a murderer and a thief were busying themselves at the village hall.”
“You mean the thief and the murderer were one and the same person.”
“Precisely.”
“I’m not sure I can be of much help.”
“Well, as I said, the picture Mitsuko chose for the missing quilt was one of a series she took of the churchyard, with views towards the millpond and towards the village and such. There’s only one vantage point from which she can do this—atop the church. It’s the highest point in the village. She tells me she got the idea because the church architect had been in town one afternoon and the church tower was unlocked right to the top. She said that you let her up.”
“Yes, I expect I did. It’s … I’d sort of forgotten …”
“I asked her when this was, but she said she couldn’t remember. Anyway, I have the quinquennial inspection report somewhere in the piles of paper in my study, and I was going to root around to find it and see what the date of the inspection was, but it seems just as easy to ask you since you’re here—and since you were there, opening up the church and guiding the architect and the like. Was the inspection before Peter went missing, or after?”
Sebastian shifted in his chair. The wicker squeaked.
“Sebastian?”
“Before.”
“Did Peter not meet with the architect?”
Sebastian hesitated. “No,” he said finally. “I told the architect what he ought to look for and what problems we were having with the building.”
Tom frowned, thinking it rude for a priest not to meet the church architect. He came only once every five years.
“You see,” Sebastian continued, “the architect came on a Monday, and Peter always took Mondays as his day off and always went somewhere out of the village.”
“I see. Then do you remember which Monday the architect arrived?”
Sebastian did. And the date he supplied set Tom’s brain alight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Third time today.”
“What?”
“I say, it’s the third time today we’ve run into each other.”
“Hardly ‘run into.’ ” Màiri White eyed him, sipping something pale from a plastic flute glass. “The first two were scheduled events.”
“That’s true,” Tom responded awkwardly to this blunt truth. “But somehow I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Oh, aye. ‘What’s the plod doing at a cultural event?’ you ask yourself.”
“That’s not it at all.” Tom was dismayed “I just thought … I don’t know what I was thinking … that you live over at Pennycross? That …?”
That you have a husband/boyfriend/partner/four cats/three dogs/two children/and a budgerigar in a pear tree—all of which so absorb your off-hours you don’t have a moment to catch a rerun of The Bill, much less swill pinot grig
io at an art opening.
“… That … that …” he continued stammering.
A smile plucked at the corners of Màiri’s mouth. “You’re an earnest bugger, Tom Christmas. I’m no stranger to the odd art opening, and I think Mitsuko Drewe’s a clever lass, and I like to see what she’s up to, but I’m mainly here to keep my eye on you lot in this murderous village.”
“Hardly mur—”
“Keep your eyeballs in your head, Vicar. No one can hear us.”
It was true. The village hall’s large hall had a herring-barrel quality to it this Thursday evening, with folk edging and twisting around each other for advantage in art inspection and nosh acquisition, ratcheting up the volume into a range more hubbubby than murmurry, with only the hanging quilts acting as damper. It seemed like tout le village—as Ghislaine might have said—had come out.
“It’s a bit of a crowd, isn’t it?” Màiri said.
“You’re not in uniform,” Tom observed, noting her light blue jumper and neat black trousers over her slender hips.
“I don’t live in the bloody thing, you know. Not like you.” She gestured towards his neck. “You’ll asphyxiate yourself.”
Tom ran his finger around his dog collar and let his tongue hang unfetchingly outside his mouth. “It’s my housekeeper’s cooking. I think she’s fattening me up for market.”
“What market?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied, though the marriage market flitted through his head as an implausibility. He thought he discerned a certain cunning in Madrun: Perhaps her intent was to transform him into a ball of butter, so unattractive no woman would ever think to displace her in the vicarage.
“I don’t recognise some of these people.” Tom changed the subject, looking over Màiri’s shoulder. “Of course, I haven’t been in Thornford long enough to know everyone. And not everyone comes to church.”
“I think there’s one or two who aren’t here to appreciate the art.”
“You mean—?”
“Takes all sorts,” she murmured darkly.
Tom grunted. He was familiar with the voyeuristic response to crime. After Lisbeth’s death, he had observed a few strangers in the sanctuary, gazing not at the stained glass or the memorial plaques, but at the stone tiles near the south porch that had once been stained with blood. And his first Sunday returned to the pulpit, though he had felt a tide of sympathy wash towards him from the crowded pews, he’d been sickened to note here and there as he preached eyes glittering not with sympathy but with remorseless curiosity.
“Pardon me,” brayed a voice behind him, breaking into his thoughts. A whippet-thin man whose face had the pallor of London slush pushed past him, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.
“And then there’s the professionally morbid.” Màiri gestured towards the figure departing through the hall doors into the early evening sunshine.
She didn’t need to spell it out. The mien, mettle, and desperate need for a fag stamped the man as Press.
“Are there more of them?” Tom asked, glancing around. “Reporters, I mean.”
“There’s one over there.” Màiri nodded towards a tall figure casting a gimlet eye over the assembled. He caught their assessing glances, realised he’d been rumbled, and turned, pretending to be fascinated with the quilt behind him—one that depicted the lantern procession at the wassailing evening in the Old Orchard.
“In search of local colour, I suppose,” Tom mused, giving an unhappy thought to what might fill the Sunday papers.
“More likely looking for a chance to slip into the small hall to view the crime scene, the creep. But Liam Drewe’s in there preparing nosh. I can’t imagine him standing for any bother. Is that Enid Pattimore?” she continued, turning towards the quilt nearest them.
“Looks like it.” Tom surveyed the photographic spread in the middle of Mitsuko’s quilt. In it, Roger was standing behind the counter of the village shop, serving a customer whose Barbour’d back was to the camera. Roger’s mother was peeking around the door to the back storage.
“Poor woman. She looks like she has a wee set of antlers growing out of her nose.”
Tom looked closer. “Enid gets rather prodigious nosebleeds. Well, among other ailments. Alastair—Dr. Hennis—regularly fetches over to fix her up.
“It’s a nose clip of sorts,” he clarified, as Màiri leaned towards the quilt. “Staunches the flow. Sometimes she wears it to Sunday ser vice.”
“You could hang a Christmas ball from it.” Màiri moved to the next quilt. “And this must be you.”
“And that’s Julia Hennis—my late wife’s sister—with me.”
“… who teaches at Hamlyn Ferrers and started Twelve Drummers Drumming. Dr. Hennis’s wife. Yes, I know her.”
Tom snatched a glass of something red off a tray from a passing youth—Kerra Prowse, Jago’s daughter, it looked like.
“How did you become a vicar, then?” Màiri turned from the quilt.
“Oh, the usual way. Spent some time at the vicar factory. Ordination. Curate for a bit.”
This time Màiri laughed. “No, I meant what brought you to the Church? You were a professional magician, weren’t you? So said the parish magazine some months back.”
“The Great Krimboni of blessed memory, yes. Sleight of hand for all occasions. I had a great passion for magic when I was young. When I was about ten, I saw a magician at the carnival they have every year at Gravesend, where I grew up. I must have spent four hours that day watching him. He had these enormous silver hoops that he could link together, then unlink. But I examined them—he showed the hoops to me—and they were seamless. I couldn’t understand how he could link them together. At any rate, I was utterly hooked. Kate—one of my mothers—”
“You have more than one mother?”
“Four, actually.” Tom counted on his fingers. “There was my birth mother, who remains a mystery. My adoptive mother, who died in a plane crash—”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I was barely two. I have no memory of her. My father’s—my adoptive father’s—sister then adopted me. My father died in the same plane crash, you see. And my aunt, as she was, lived with her partner. So that makes four mothers. But Dosh and Kate were the mothers major.”
“I’ve no doubt they doted on you.”
Tom regarded Màiri as she sipped her wine. Her interest in his background seemed genuine, but her eyes kept roving past his shoulders towards the nether parts of the room.
“I’m not looking for a better conversation prospect, if that’s what’s passing through your cerebellum,” she said, which was exactly what he had been thinking.
“Of course. I just …” Tom was faltering over the word “dote.” In truth, Dosh and Kate had doted on him, each in her own way—from indulgent Kate, it was more Eponymous prezzies than the neighbour kids and lots of holiday trips to America on her pass (she was a flight attendant); from exacting Dosh, it was extra tutoring in any subject he was deficient in, and permission for more than one dog, provided provided! he was responsible for their care (she was a veterinarian). By reckoning, as an only child, Tom should have been fairly spoiled. But maybe it was being knocked about as a kid for having two mothers in the first place, and maybe it was the steadying presence of the third anchor in his life, the daughterful but sonless Reverend Canon Christopher Holdsworth, rector of St. George’s in Gravesend, Dosh’s church, who came to his football matches, helped him build a doghouse, and taught him fly fishing in Scotland, that kept him on the straight and narrow. Still, even as a child, he had felt slightly at a remove from other children—marked out, as it were, by the unconventionality of his circumstances: twice orphaned, twice adopted, raised by two women. Being marked out stayed with him; it waned through adolescence, when being one of the crowd was the imperative, but it reasserted itself, and in a way wholly unexpected, on a cruise ship plying the Mediterranean, when he was twenty-six.
His thinking was racing ahead of his con
versation, but he had this inexplicable urge to tell this attractive young woman, this police person—of all creatures; after being womanhandled by Bristol CID he wasn’t awfully fond of the police—everything about himself. He looked at his glass of wine. He’d hardly had a sip.
“At any rate,” he began again, “Kate went up to Davenport’s in London and bought me a ‘World of Illusion’ magic kit, and that was that. By fifteen, I was a table magician at a hotel in Gravesend and while I was at university—the first time—I gigged in pubs and bars around Canterbury doing close-up magic for extra money.”
“Did you ever figure out the ring trick?” They had moved on to a quilt depicting several pensioners at the bus stop near Thorn Cross. Màiri leaned in to read the haiku next to it.
“Oh, yes.” Tom smiled. “I had a set of five golden rings—well, they weren’t really gold, just gold-coloured—that I used to amuse and confuse. But by then I had got a bit more serious about magic as a career. I’d read religious studies at the University of Kent, which made me eligible to be a tea boy on British Rail, and had busked around Europe for a year or so working street cafés and local festivals. When I got back, I improved my skills with a master conjurer, developed The Great Krimboni persona, started doing large parties and corporate gigs, and even a few stints on a cruise—”
He stopped. He could see Màiri’s attention had been drawn away. He was boring her!
“Shall I intervene, do you think?” she asked.
“What?” Tom turned. He followed her gaze towards the south end of the hall, opposite the stage, where a cleft had opened in the multitude and the din had fallen to a whisper. The pallid London reporter, who must have slipped back into the hall post-fag, was being escorted out again. Karla Skynner had his left ear pinched firmly in her right hand. “Such language will not be tolerated at a public event in this village, Mr. Macgreevy,” she could be heard barking above his helpless cursing. Tom noted the other reporter in the room blanch.
“My question was rhetorical,” Màiri said, as Karla pushed the outside door open with a swift kick. “She’s remarkably forceful for such a wee thing.”
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