Twelve Drummers Drumming

by C. C. Benison

  Stepping off the lift onto the toneless corridor of the orthopaedic ward, Tom was assailed—not for the first time, nor, Lord knows, for the last—by the sickly sweet brew of hospital aromas, unvanquished by disinfectant, but his old notion to pipe in the fragrance of garden centres, clean laundry, and baking bread fell quickly from his mind, as he glanced in passing at the knot of sturdy pink women in loose blue uniforms at the nursing station, absorbed in private conversation. One of them, the ward sister, gestured to him.

  “He had a difficult night,” she said without preliminary. She was thickset and starchy in bearing. Tom recognised her from his Tuesday visit. “And he was quite agitated earlier, confused and incoherent in speech. We could just make out that he wished to see you.”

  “Japanese words mixed in?”

  “Possibly. I only recognised ‘Gladstone.’ ”

  “The late prime minister?”

  “I suspect he was referencing the bag. Quite fixated on it.” The tilt of her eyebrows indicated that the ramblings of medicated patients were of little practical use to her. “You may not find him very responsive now. The doctor increased his sedative.”

  “He seemed so clear yesterday.”

  “Much can change at his age and in his condition. I can have Dr. Vikram speak to you. He’s the attending physician on the ward this weekend, and should be along shortly.”

  “Will the hip operation be going ahead?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to speak with Dr. Vikram about that.”

  Colonel Northmore’s room was at the tunnel end of the ward’s long corridor, its door slightly ajar. Tom hesitated a moment outside, his attention diverted momentarily by a sharp, anguished cry—a woman’s cry—from a nearby room which pierced his heart, but which stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving only the distant squeak of wheels being pushed somewhere and the faint hum of hospital machinery leaching from the walls. No one raced to the woman’s aid. He pushed the door on its silent hinges and stepped into the colonel’s room, now rendered in twilight, blinds drawn, a single soft lamp high above the bed acting as pale moon. So concentrated was he on the still and craggy visage limned by its feeble light that he failed at first to notice the other figure in the room.

  “Alastair.”

  The head turned sharply. Eyes flicked him a wary glance. “Tom. What are you doing here?”

  “The colonel’s asked to see me,” Tom replied evenly, dropping his Communion set on a nearby chair and moving to the bedside, of necessity pushing his earlier disquiet about Alastair from his mind. The colonel’s transformation shook him. How frail he looks, he thought, noting even in the shallow light the grey skin, the wrinkled liver-spotted hand above the white sheet pierced by the IV drip line. The colonel’s septum was now clipped by an oxygen feed that hissed faintly. His mouth, with lips dry and cracked, was open, his breathing a barely audible wheeze.

  “Colonel,” Tom pushed the food trolley aside, leaned towards his ear, and spoke calmly. “It’s Tom Christmas. Can you hear me?” His hand absently reached for the colonel’s. He registered the loose papery skin, its limpness, its warmth.

  “Tom, would you mind stepping from the room?” Alastair said. “I’m attending to the colonel.”

  Tom glanced at the beeping cardiac monitor, seeking some truth about the patient’s condition in the glowing green lines, but the patterns appeared rhythmic and regular.

  “Tom?” Alastair said impatiently. He was dressed casually, as if he was on his way to or from the golf course.

  “But—”

  “I won’t be a minute.”

  Tom dropped the colonel’s hand and retreated into the hallway. Again, a tortured cry assailed his ears; again, no one responded. He frowned. Precipitated by a troubling thought at the edge of his consciousness, he edged towards the narrow window set into the door to glimpse Alastair going about his business. Alastair’s back, however, was to him, blocking the IV pole. Despite the room’s low light, he could make out Alastair’s movements: a hand reaching into a pocket, then disappearing in front of his chest, the motion repeated, upper arms shifting minutely. The top of the pole, a few inches above Alastair’s head, stirred slightly. Alastair was engaged in some sort of adjustment to the colonel’s medications, presumably, though what else it could be, besides the sedative Dr. Vikram had ordered, Tom couldn’t imagine. Then, the troubling thought half slipped past the border of his conscious mind and his stomach lurched. Something was amiss. What could it be? It was as if his brain were unwilling to fully grasp what his eyes were seeing. And then, when it did, when the sound—faint, but perceptible—of the cardiac monitor kicking into frantic staccato bursts penetrated the thick door, his blood ran cold.

  “Stop! Stop what you’re doing!” He pushed through the door to see the lines on the screen bursting into wild patterns, then plummet. Tom reached the colonel’s bedside in time to see the old man’s lids suddenly fly open and his head jolt towards Tom, as if to take in his presence. His eyes stared, as if at some unseen marvel; his mouth rounded, as if in astonishment, and then the animating light in his eyes, once so fierce and vivid, vanished. The colonel now stared with empty eyes. The cardiac monitor emitted a single solid tone. Shocked, gasping for breath, Tom turned to Alastair, who had moved towards a container mounted on the wall.

  “You are an unchristly monster.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “You heard me. Doctors don’t administer drugs into IV lines, which is what you were doing. Nurses administer drugs, on doctor’s directives.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “My wife was a doctor—”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “—and I’ve paid many hospital visits, Alastair. I know the protocol.”

  “What on earth makes you think I was putting anything into his drip?”

  “I think if I examine what you’ve put into that … thing on the wall over there, I’ll find a needle and a vial of something.”

  “I’m his doctor. The colonel’s treatment is none of your business.”

  “You’re not his doctor.”

  “I am bloody too his doctor.”

  “Not when he’s in hospital for orthopaedic surgery. You’re his GP, that’s all! You have no medical reason for being here.”

  “I’m a doctor, I’ve been the colonel’s GP for a number of years, and I have every right to look in on his well-being.”

  “You were killing him, Alastair!” Tom banged his fist on the food trolley. “Deliberately.”

  Alastair’s eyes narrowed. His voice was sharp and indignant. “I’ll have you for slander if you keep on with this.”

  “No! I’ll have you for—”

  But Tom found his words cut off as the door suddenly opened into the room and the ward sister bustled in. Wordlessly, she checked the colonel’s pulse and breathing; grimly satisfied with what she found, she closed his eyelids and moved around the bed to switch off the cardiac monitor. The machine’s insidious tone stopped.

  “If you two gentlemen would care to leave …” She gestured towards the door. “I’ll have Dr. Vikram make the declaration.”

  “Sister.” Tom fought to calm his voice. “Dr. Hennis and I need to have a private conversation, so I wonder if you might leave us and come back in a moment or two.”

  The nurse bristled. “This is most inappropriate.”

  Alastair ran his hand through his hair. “Leave him with me, Sister. I think Father Christmas here”—he injected the honorific with a note of disdain—“wishes to say a few prayers for the departed. You see, Phillip Northmore was a great character in our village. By the time you find Dr. Vikram,” he ushered her towards the door, “we’ll have finished up here.”

  “Nurses—bloody cows, the lot of them,” he remarked through his teeth when the door had barely closed behind the woman. “Now, what the fuck are you on about, Tom?”

  “You’ve deliberately taken Colonel Northmore’s life.”

&
nbsp; “This is an outrage. You simply happened to walk in at the moment of his death.”

  “You were administering something—”

  “I was not!”

  “—an overdose of something into his IV. Potassium, I’ll wager. I learned a thing or two from Lisbeth.”

  “Again, you’re outrageous. I was merely checking his IV out of professional habit. His death was merely coincidental.”

  “Bollocks! His death is the direct result of your actions.”

  “He’s ‘Do Not Resuscitate.’ ”

  “I’m aware of that. It makes no difference. You’re the agent of his death, and there’s a test that can prove it. I know that from Lisbeth, too.”

  Alastair shrugged. “Well, I suppose electrolyte measurement might indicate high levels of potassium in the colonel’s bloodstream, but such a test will never be ordered.”

  “Not if I don’t go to the police, it won’t.”

  “Tom, after all your years with Lisbeth, surely you’ve picked up that the medical profession is a club, and the club would quickly close around and resist any intrusion in this area. The dirty little secret of the health care system is that elderly and frail patients with numbered days are often eased painlessly into death. It’s a great kindness to them and to their families. That you happened to arrive in the room when Colonel Northmore was—perhaps, maybe, who’s to say?—being eased into his, is little more than—as I suggested earlier—interesting timing.”

  “Then you admit it.”

  Alastair shook his head, as if the misunderstanding of laypersons was unfathomable.

  “Colonel Northmore may have been elderly, but he was not that frail.” Tom gestured towards the corpse.

  “He was very old. His hip was broken. The orthopaedic consultant would be telling him tomorrow that he was not a candidate for a hip replacement. I can say that for certain because I asked him about it. Phillip would have had to go into some form of care or assisted living. His wife has been dead for years. His daughter in America ignores him. Lacking opposable thumbs, Bumble would have been quite useless. Phillip would have had absolutely no quality of life. And,” he paused to take a breath, “as it happens, we had a conversation yesterday—he and I—in which he signalled his wish not to carry on should he not be able to carry on, as usual, at Farthings, stiff upper lip and all.”

  “You left this room before I did yesterday.”

  “I came back.”

  “I don’t believe you had this conversation with the colonel, Alastair. And I don’t believe you eased him into death. You killed him to silence him.”

  The air in the room seemed to condense and crackle with electricity. Tom could sense tiny shocks tripping along his skin; his heart raced. It was out. He had said it. Alastair reddened. He stared at Tom, nostrils flared. He snapped:

  “Silence him over what, for fuck’s sake?”

  Tom pushed the trolley aside. “Over Peter Kinsey. The colonel and I were discussing his death yesterday. You trailed in at the end of it. I think he became conscious, when we were all talking, of something he hadn’t put together before. I could see it in his face, though it didn’t seem important at the time.”

  “How mystical.”

  Tom continued, “The colonel sought your corroboration yesterday about seeing him in the road the evening before Ned Skynner’s funeral. You said you’d been up to see Enid Pattimore and you were on your way out of her and Roger’s flat when you bumped into him.”

  “And so I was.”

  “You left Westways at around six-thirty—I remember that because Miranda and I were staying with you and Julia, and the news had just come on—”

  “Yes,” Alastair said impatiently.

  “And the colonel said he met you in the road shortly after seven—”

  “Yes, yes, what of it? There’s not much to attend to with Enid Pattimore. The woman’s neurotic. Give her a pill, stuff some cotton wool up her nose, pat her little hand, and she’s happy as Larry.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with her brain. She told Mrs. Prowse, who told me barely an hour ago that you didn’t arrive that evening until Coronation Street was more than half over, which would be about seven forty-five—an hour and a quarter after you left Westways. And I’m sure Roger was at home with his mother and could confirm. Just after seven o’clock, you weren’t coming out of the Pattimores’. But you weren’t going in either. What were you doing between six-thirty and seven forty-five other than loitering outside the Pattimores’ for a few moments?”

  “Christ!” Alastair exploded. “I was probably having a bloody drink in the bloody pub!”

  “No, you weren’t. I think you’ll find Eric has a decent memory of that evening.”

  “Then I have no idea what I was doing on an evening more than a year ago.”

  “And yet yesterday you managed to recall meeting the colonel in the road when he prompted you.”

  “I was indulging him. I repeat: What are you on about? What does Kinsey’s death have to do with me?”

  Tom studied his sister-in-law’s husband, the man who had once courted his wife, who had been thrown over for a mere theological student and all the promise of a parson’s stipend … and who he now believed to be a murderer. But the anguish Julia had poured out on the lawn at Thornridge House—about her affair with Kinsey and the termination—was not his to reveal. Alastair, Julia had said, knew nothing of either.

  She was wrong. He was sure of it.

  “You couldn’t,” he said slowly, “go up to the Pattimores’ flat that evening, the time you bumped into the colonel, because”—the truth now burst forth like a diamond in his mind’s eye, unearthed by the colonel’s ramblings—“because you didn’t have your black bag with you. Your medical case. The one …” His eyes searched the room. “… you usually carry, at least when you’re doing house calls. Your Gladstone bag, as the colonel would call it.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Of course!” Tom persisted, oblivious. “You had left it in the church somewhere, hadn’t you? Probably in the vestry. It was only yesterday, when the colonel was fretting about that evening, that he realised what he had seen. As with any good magic trick, the eye doesn’t see what it doesn’t expect to see. The vestry is a tip, as everyone says. You wouldn’t expect to see a Gladstone bag amid all the rubbish. And the colonel didn’t. He was only there for a moment—long enough to witness Peter sprawled on the floor, but his unconscious mind took in the whole room.

  “You said you were seeing a patient—Enid Pattimore—and yet you weren’t carrying your bag. And then yesterday the colonel not only remembered that, he remembered where he had seen your bag that evening.

  “Because,” Tom’s mind leapt ahead, “when the colonel saw you outside the Pattimores’, you hadn’t buried Peter yet, had you? It was only just seven when the colonel ran into you in the road. Your house call to Enid wasn’t until some forty-five minutes later.”

  Alastair glared at him, his arms folded tightly across his chest. “I’m afraid,” he said, jerking his head towards the colonel’s body, “you’ve got no one to corroborate this nonsense now, do you?”

  “I suppose Enid might also recall, if prompted by the police, the state of your clothing or your hands,” Tom countered. “It can’t be the tidiest work burying someone at twilight, even if the grave’s largely been dug for you. At any rate, all this will give those detectives something they might work with.”

  Alastair’s face was now flushed. In the half light, Tom could see the marvellous working of the jaw muscles in that heavy face. The door opened before either could speak again.

  “I really must—” the ward sister began but Alastair cut her off. He thrust his arm towards the door.

  “You haven’t got Dr. Vikram, have you? Leave! We’re not done here.”

  The nurse recoiled, as if slapped. She glanced with misplaced fury at Tom, who said, to mollify her, “If you wouldn’t mind, Sister. Another moment or two.”

  “
And that’s all you’ll get,” she warned, departing. “I won’t have this on my ward.”

  Alastair stared after her, then looked at Tom, warily this time.

  “It’s interesting,” Tom added, “that when Julia called you to attend the colonel after his fall, you didn’t bring your Gladstone bag. Have you spent the last year making sure the colonel didn’t see it? You should have bought a new—and different-looking—one.”

  “It was a gift from my parents,” Alastair murmured. He appeared lost in thought. His eyes roamed the room, falling last on the colonel’s body. His mouth sagged a little. When he spoke again, it was in the tone of one brought to the brink of a new understanding.

  “I should like to make a confession.”

  Startled, Tom asked: “A confession or an admission?”

  “A confession.”

  “I see.”

  “A proper confession.”

  “A formal confession, you mean? Under the seal of the confessional?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “I can’t say I’ve seen you in church, Alastair.”

  “I did attend when Giles was priest.”

  Tom’s heart and mind seethed. Private confession was a rare request, and he had taken none so burdened with corruption as this one. His impulse was to simply shop Alastair to the police and be done with him. He could now barely look the man in the face, a face now watchful with beseeching eyes.