Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Lord have mercy,” he intoned, looking down on the recumbent figure of Will, first at his kilt tidily pleated around his legs, his Charlie jacket buttoned and smoothed, his hands with their elongated fingers resting neatly across his chest, like the figure of a knight on a tomb. Tom let his eyes close before permitting himself a look at Will’s face, and he must have wavered in his stance for suddenly he felt something warm press firmly against his stomach. Startled, he opened his eyes and realised it was the palm of Judith’s hand; he should have felt at least disconcerted, but instead he felt strangely restored.

  “I don’t know why it works, but it does,” Judith told him, withdrawing her hand. “Better?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “It’s the shock, you see.”

  Tom now looked upon Will’s face. The overhead light in the tower room was perfunctory and unflattering; it was a room for daylight hours, but tiny halogen reading lamps had been integrated into the décor, and it was one of these that sharpened the skeletal scaffolding of Will’s cheeks and the pale plain of his forehead where the mop of silver-white hair had fallen back. “Thou most worthy Judge eternal,” he murmured, the familiar words of the petition swiftly on his lips, “suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.” But he thought he saw in the set of facial muscles that very thing—the vestige of some pain of death, some final suffering—and he felt a rush of sorrow.

  “There was some … strain in his face,” Judith said. “But the muscles have begun to relax. I arranged the body—”

  “You did?”

  “Force of habit, I’m afraid.”

  “I see.” Tom imagined few in expectation of death arranged themselves so tidily, though he was surprised at the capabilities of this small and elderly woman.

  “It’s the training,” she explained, as if reading his mind. “When you work as a nurse …”

  “Did he suffer much, do you think?”

  Judith was clinical. “There would have been some suffering, yes. I found him curled in something more of a fetal position.”

  “But Will was so fit. In his late forties, but still … He was an athlete. A cricketer, a runner. How could this happen?”

  “I’m afraid these things can happen to those who appear to be the healthiest of people, Vicar. You’re too young to remember the American James Fixx, who started this running lark in the seventies. He died one day out on his daily run. He wasn’t very old.”

  “Heart attack?”

  Judith didn’t respond. She silently studied the body.

  “You saw signs earlier in Will,” Tom pressed. “We both did, really. This is so awful. We should have done something then.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much we could have done in the circumstances. Is there a doctor living in the village?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “And look at that snow.” She gestured out the window. “I don’t think any ambulance could get through. Not tonight. And I’m sure they’ll be taken up with all kinds of accidents and other emergencies in these strange conditions.”

  “But there must have been something—”

  “Oxygen, if the hotel has any. Had him chew aspirin. If it were a heart attack.”

  “You don’t think it was?”

  “I’m a nurse, Vicar, but not a doctor.”

  Tom looked again at Will’s body with grief. “Why did he come all the way up here?”

  “Perhaps this room held some memory for him.” Judith cast him a faltering smile, then added quickly: “Or perhaps … well, some creatures seek privacy when they sense they’re going to die, don’t they?”

  “Perhaps,” Tom responded reluctantly, though if he had such a foreboding in his middle years, he wondered if he wouldn’t fight death with all the power at his command. Will had been so vital; it seemed so odd for him to retreat in death.

  “I think I should like to offer a prayer,” he said. “Will you join me?”

  “Of course.”

  Tom sensed all eyes upon him as he and Judith stepped into the reception room. Conversation ebbed at the same moment, swallowed up into a ghastly calm with a muted sobbing the only interruption. In the far corner of the room, next to the window, Jago was consoling his daughter, whose pretty young face was puckered with misery. Tom felt almost grateful for Kerra’s reaction, so ingenuous, so apposite, so fundamentally female. Judith had reacted to the death of a stranger as a professional caregiver might; Molly was absent, perhaps in the kitchen. But the men wore their stoic masks, scarlet with drink and heat and tight collars, rigid with suppressed feeling. Only their eyes hinted of troubled depths—shock and grief in most, as was natural, but disconcertingly, in a few, less expected sentiments: Victor, reinstalled by the fireplace, flicked him a glance fraught with anxiety, then turned to jab the dying embers with a poker. John seemed to look through him, as though working out some puzzle in his head. Nick had splayed himself across one of the couches and peered at Tom through half-closed lids, like a lizard sunning on a wall, his expression a disturbing amalgam of indifference and contempt, though possibly—Tom reached for a charitable thought—the man was anaesthetised by drink.

  “It was his heart?” John spoke first. His tone made it plain that Roger and Mark had carried Judith’s conjecture downstairs with them when they relayed the terrible news.

  “It would seem so.” Tom looked to Judith for confirmation.

  “At the end, in any case.” Her mouth fell into a grim line.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can only reiterate,” she responded to Tom, “that I’m not a doctor, so I mustn’t make pronouncements. Now,” she continued briskly, addressing Roger, who was clutching his mobile, “have you tried to get help?”

  “Bless, but there is none, I’m afraid. I phoned triple nine and described what has happened, but the man in dispatch said their resources are pressed to the limit what with all this snow. Some ambulances have even got stuck. This is awful, but they suggested we leave … Will where he is until they can get someone here.”

  “Christ,” a snickering voice said from the couch, “he’ll stink up the place worse than in life.”

  “Mr. Stanhope,” Judith snapped before anyone could protest. “I have no brief for corporal punishment, but I think the sharp crack of a whip against the backside would do you a world of good.”

  “Dead kinky.”

  “Shut it, Nick!” Jago hugged Kerra to his chest.

  Judith moved on: “Where is Mrs. Moir? She’ll need to be told.”

  “Nick tried phoning Caroline just before you got back downstairs,” Roger replied. “It went to message.”

  “I hope you were judicious with your message, Mr. Stanhope,” Judith said.

  “I left the message.” John regarded Nick with something akin to disgust, handing him back his mobile. “I asked Caroline to call me as soon as she got the message.”

  “Caroline is in town,” Tom explained to Judith. “At a performance at the Civic Hall, but surely it’s over by now. Perhaps she went to Noze with Adam and Tamara. It’s closer than Thornford.”

  “We’ve tried to reach them, too, after we tried Caroline,” John said with a nod towards Jago, “but the phone service went off suddenly. The snow may be buggering the mobile towers in the area.”

  “Landlines?” Tom asked.

  “Gone to message.”

  “Bless, but this is sad,” Roger remarked, his face sagging.

  “I’ll go get her.” Nick struggled up from the soft couch.

  “Who?” Tom had a hideous vision of Nick barging into the vicarage to fetch young Ariel.

  “Caro.”

  “You bloody will not!” John glared. “You’re not fit to drive anywhere.”

  “And if an ambulance can’t get in, how do you think you’ll get out?” Mark interjected.

  Nick fell back into the cushions and regarded them sourly.

  “I find the idea of Will being in the tower alone unbearab
le,” Tom said. “I’m prepared to sit vigil.”

  “Bless, Tom, you have two services in the morning,” Roger responded gently. “And what about Ariel? Shouldn’t Caroline be the one to tell her?”

  “Of course. If I’m not home, they’ll wonder.”

  “I can stop here for the night,” John offered. “Then, if Caroline phones—”

  Nick interrupted. “You are not stopping here for the night—”

  “—then I can run up to Totnes or Noze in the morning when at least it’s light out and bring her home.”

  “You are not stopping here for the night,” Nick repeated heatedly. “This is my property. Caroline is my family. If Caro phones I can sort it out. And I can run up to town or wherever.”

  “And what are you driving, Nick?”

  “The MG.”

  “Not your van?”

  “Sorry,” he slurred, “yes, I’m driving the van.”

  John regarded him coldly. “Well, good luck to you in any case.”

  “Gentlemen,” Roger interposed. “I have a suggestion. We’ve had a tragic end to this evening. I wonder …” He faltered. “… I wonder if we might play something, as we had intended to do. But in Will’s memory.”

  Tom pushed the door open against the accumulating snow and stepped onto the hotel’s forecourt. He welcomed a rush of cold air against his cheeks, so sweet and clean that he couldn’t help but lift his face into the night and draw a great purifying gulp deep into his lungs. It was an instinctive animal act, but he felt faintly faithless, as if he were signaling his relief at being liberated from the bright, heated claustrophobia of the hotel and the last terrible hour. Outside, in the hush, the evening felt as holy, good, and peaceful as a prayer, the village below slumbering in vaults of snow, oblivious to the sad news to come. He paused for another faithless moment to savour the cool, then quickly switched on his torch. Judith had preceded him and was pushing purposefully through the drifts towards the garage, disappearing past the glow of the hotel windows into darkness.

  “Wait! We’ll help you with your bags,” he called after her, turning to John, who had followed him out the door. They were the last to leave, but for Roger and a couple of the other men who had kindly volunteered to help Molly and Kerra restore order to the dining room and kitchen.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind my kipping at the vicarage, too?” John switched on his torch and together they traced Judith’s footprints in the snow, the beams of lights crisscrossing.

  “I don’t think it’s worth you getting stuck trying to get to Noze in the dark. Besides, it would be good to have you in church tomorrow as usual. You might as well leave your vehicle here.”

  “I’ll have to wear the kilt in church.”

  “I could lend you some trousers.”

  “Tom, I’ve got ten years and at least a stone and a half on you.”

  “Well, some detractors say a cassock looks like a party frock, so you won’t be the only one in a skirt. Here, let me,” he said to Judith, reaching into the open boot of her car and gripping a valise.

  “Thank you. I’ll take the other.”

  “I can take it,” John said.

  “You’ve got your bagpipe case.”

  “I have two hands.”

  “You do all insist on chivalry.” Judith handed over the case. “Give me your torch, then. I should have thought to bring one. I forgot how dark it gets in some villages. And if there’s a moon, it’s not visible.”

  They all looked at the starless black sky emptying its burden. The falling snow seemed unceasing.

  “I didn’t expect ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to be quite so … moving on bagpipe,” Judith continued after some moments passed. They had reached the gate at the bottom of the garden, still open and now firmly rooted in a drift of snow. “It was the lento, I expect.”

  “We can pull together when we need to.” John grunted, sidling through the opening with the luggage.

  “One person told me I would be pleasantly surprised by the Burns Supper,” Tom added. “And another said I would be simply surprised. I didn’t expect to be so shaken. I can’t think what this will do to Caroline …”

  “Is Mrs. Moir a blonde?” Judith interjected.

  “Yes,” Tom replied, startled. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Oh … I knew her father when I was young. He was very blond, although I suppose for a man I should say ‘fair-haired.’ ”

  “A not unusual hair colouring in these isles,” Tom pointed out.

  “No, I suppose it isn’t.”

  “And with Will being blond … fair-haired, too, they’re … they were a very striking couple.”

  “Odd, whenever I imagine Australians, I always think of them as blond. My good friend Phyllis, in Melbourne—I was at school with her at Leeds—she married an Australian and, of course, he’s blond. Or was, rather.” Judith flashed the torch down Pennycross Road. “Look, the Tidy Dolly! And the Church House Inn! How everything looks unchanged! It’s like a dream.”

  The pub windows’ golden glow beckoned in the darkness. Beyond, at the end of Church Walk, past the lych-gate, the tower of St. Nicholas’s rose above the tangle of the ancient yew, burnished by a floodlight timed to shut itself off by eleven. Tom realised he had paid little heed to the hour, but it couldn’t yet be eleven if the pub was still open. How unimaginably long the evening felt, now that he was just about on the doorstep of his home.

  “I hope Nick doesn’t take a notion to run up to town or to Noze,” Tom said, his mind shifting again to Caroline. That she couldn’t be reached by telephone, that she didn’t know her husband had died, seemed horrible and deeply unfair, but Nick as herald seemed insult to injury.

  “No danger there, Tom.” John gripped Judith’s case under his arm, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a set of keys, which Tom illuminated with his torch. “I took these from Nick’s jacket when I went for my mobile. That young idiot’s not going anywhere tonight.”

  “Wise man.”

  “Is Nick’s mother living?” Judith asked as abruptly as she had earlier.

  “She predeceased his father,” John replied. “I think. Do you know, Tom?”

  “I know very little about Nick Stanhope. Other,” he added grimly, “than what I’ve learned tonight.”

  The illumination from the pub window traced the stone wall separating Church Walk from the vicarage garden. “If the girls aren’t asleep, and—” Tom glanced at the flicker of light against the sitting room window drapes. “—and they may well not be, then we must be very careful what we say and how we behave, for Ariel’s sake.”

  “Poor poor child,” Judith murmured. “Do you have children, Mr. Copeland?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The wooden gate moaned when they pushed it open, eerily amplified in the night landscape. Tom swore he had oiled the hinges before Christmas; he swore, too, it had made no sound when he’d passed through earlier in the evening. Did alien snow and cold have the power to alter such things, he wondered as maddened, muffled barking in the recesses of the vicarage reached his ears.

  Bumble had heard the squeaking gate.

  And Madrun heard Bumble. Tom had barely touched the handle on the front door when the porch light flashed on and there she was, standing before him, gripping a tea towel. It took just one look into her spectacled eyes for him to know that the village drums had already been beating.

  The Vicarage

  Thornford Regis TC9 6QX

  11 JANUARY

  Dear Mum,

  I’ve never written a letter by candlelight before, which I’m doing right now, but then I can’t remember the last time the electricity went out. I was going to try and make my way down to the kitchen in the dark to the fuse box, but I think the whole village is gone out. Usually, if I look out my windows winter mornings, I can see a light from one or other of the cottages up Poynton Shute towards Thorn Hill, but the village is as black as Tobey’s arse bottom, as Dad used to say. My faithful Teasmade didn�
�t wake me, but of course with no electricity it couldn’t very well, could it? so I am a bit behind getting ready for my day. Short note then, Mum, sorry. Though I wonder if any letters will get through if the rest of the country has as much snow as we do? Shame I don’t have a battery radio up here. I’m without news of any sort. I am glad, though, that I haven’t gone and got a computer as Mr. Christmas has suggested. You don’t need electricity to run my faithful old Olivetti! Though you do need ribbons, which I’m almost out of. You’ll have to pardon typing mistakes. Candles aren’t the best light and I don’t want to spill wax on the typing paper. Or set it afire! Anyway, it looks like its it’s going to be a very different sort of Sunday here in the village. The worst news is that we’ve had an unexpected death. Will Moir died of a heart attack last night. It’s such a shock when someone dies well before his time, and Will was very fit-looking, not someone you’d think would die in his forties. It happened at the Burns Supper he and the Thistle But Mostly Rose were having at the hotel. Mr. Christmas is their chaplain. What is very sad is that little Ariel is with us here at the vicarage and doesn’t know what’s happened and we must be SO careful how we behave. I’d only got off the phone last evening with Enid who had called Roger at Thorn Court earlier and learned the dreadful news when Mr. Christmas came through the door—with two unexpected guests. John Copeland was one, and you know about him! The other was introduced as Judith Ingley. What a good thing I always keep the extra bedrooms at the ready! Knowing what had happened, I took Mr. Copeland and Mrs. Ingley into the kitchen for a nice cup of tea, while Mr. Christmas stayed in the sitting room with the girls, who were having that sleepover I mentioned in yesterday’s letter. It hadn’t gone 11 and they were still up watching a DVD and I thought I would just let them go on until they dropped while I played sadukoo sudoku in the kitchen when Mr. Christmas returned. He helped them roast marshmallows in the fireplace and managed to get them settled into their sleeping bags. I wonder if you remember Judith Ingley as she was Judith Frost before she married? Her father’s family worked for the Stanhopes at Thorn Court, but he died young and there are no Frosts in the village now. Judith left the village when I’d barely started primary, so I have no recollection of her. There’s a story there, I’m sure, but I didn’t like to ask as we were much taken up with what had happened to Will. Perhaps Karla knows. Or Venice or Florence Daintrey might, but then they’re always rather short with me, so there’s no point asking. I thought to look through Dad’s history of the village—which I’m nowhere near finished typing out of course—but by the time I got our guests settled into their rooms I was too tired. And, of course, now there’s no light and no time. Good thing we have the old wood-burning Aga or it would be a cold breakfast for everyone on a cold day and no Sunday lunch! I’m doing French toast for the girls, which I can stretch out for the extra guests and for Mr. Christmas who usually only has a bite of toast before rushing out of here for 8:15 Communion at Pennycross, which surely will be cancelled. But what will happen to the refrigerator with no electricity? I hope this is only temporary. At least we have lots of food in stock as who knows how long folk will be staying? We must keep Ariel with us until either her mother or her brother can fetch her. Poor child, losing a parent at such an age, and we don’t dare tell her ourselves. It wouldn’t be right. I can tell, though, that Miranda thinks something is wrong. She gave Mr. Christmas a sort of “look” when he returned last night. She is such a clever girl and she and Mr. Christmas seem to be able to read each other’s moods. Anyway, the sun won’t be up for another hour so I must see what we have in the way of candles. And I wonder if we’ll have enough hot water? I hope you don’t have as much snow as we seem to have! The cats aren’t at all fussy about going out of doors. They’ve never seen snow before! I don’t think Bumble has, either, but he loves it. He tries to get out and roll in it any chance he gets. Love to Aunt Gwen. Hope you have a glorious day in beautiful Cornwall!