Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Coming in for a drink?”

  “Good God, no,” Tom responded brusquely, taken aback, then realised how ungracious his words sounded. “Sorry. I’m wanted back at the vicarage for lunch.”

  “Suit yourself.” Nick, his hands full, shouldered the door closed. The rich clunk of wood on wood resounded through the muffled landscape.

  Tom took a purifying breath and turned to retreat down the path, but the view from Thorn Court’s rise arrested his step. See, amid the winter’s snow, born for us on earth below—the lines of the Christmas hymn slipped unbidden into his head. The village amid the winter’s snow appeared transformed, the sharp edges of its cottages and boundary walls softened into curves. It was as though someone had poured castor sugar over the village and let it settle into satiny valleys and peaks. How unblemished and pure it all looked—at least from a distance.

  And then he glanced down at his feet, and noted how that implacable purity could be so quickly blemished. There were his own footprints up the central path, combined with Caroline’s and Ariel’s, and presumably John’s and Caroline’s made earlier, creating a hard, crude trail down to Pennycross Road. And there, to his right, was another crude path, a diagonal extension of the central one, veering to the Moirs’ residence. It crossed through a couple of sets of deep, parallel ruts, evidence of recent vehicular traffic. To his left, however, the snow was still blissfully untrammeled, beautiful in its simplicity, a blanket stretching to a series of pristine, snowy mounds that could only be smothered cars.

  It was only some time later that he realised how peculiar that was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No throaty outburst from the kitchen accompanied this Sunday’s lunch. As usual, Madrun backed into the dining room with her trusty serving cart, its top tier crowned with the joint resting on a platter and accompanying sauce boat, the second tier with an assortment of covered serving dishes, which contained the roast potatoes, vegetables, and anything she considered complementary to the main affair. All seemed bright and beautiful, and smelling heavenly, until she turned to them, her long, straight face stamped with disappointment.

  “Oh, Mrs. Prowse, not again!” Tom was standing, holding the carving knife, preparatory to doing his masculine duty, but let it drop to its silver rest.

  “I simply can’t understand how this could happen twice, and in a row! I’ve done everything the way I’ve done it for years … forever!”

  “Pauvre Madame Prowse.” Miranda regarded her dolefully, her elbows improperly on the table propping up her head.

  “Whatever is the matter?” Judith looked wildly about the room.

  “A dropdead,” Miranda said.

  “A what?”

  “Mrs. Prowse has been having a spot of bother lately with her Yorkshire pudding.” Tom lifted the knife.

  “Hardly a spot, Mr. Christmas! The pudding hasn’t risen, not a titch.” She addressed Judith. “Today, nor last Sunday.”

  “Oh, is that all,” their guest remarked, glancing into her lap and adjusting her napkin. “I thought somebody had died.” She looked up sharply, instantly conscious of the effect of her casual remark in light of events of the last twenty-four hours. “Sorry!”

  Miranda shot her a puzzled frown.

  Madrun remained oblivious to the nuance. “Quite all right.” She lifted the meat platter, then paused in reflection. “Perhaps I should have Fred look at the Aga again.”

  “And yet the roast appears to be done to perfection.” Tom rather wished Madrun wouldn’t hover about holding the thing. Hangover worn away, he was surprisingly hungry.

  “Do you make your batter earlier and refrigerate it?” Judith asked.

  “Always. The night before.”

  “There’s your answer, then.” Judith reached for her water glass. “With the electricity off, the fridge and its contents have been getting warmer.”

  Enlightenment flashed in Madrun’s eyes. “Yes …”

  “Mrs. Prowse—”

  “Perhaps that is the reason.”

  “Mrs. Prowse,” Tom began again. “The roast might find a place here, in front of me.”

  “But the electricity worked last Sunday,” Miranda pointed out.

  One of Madrun’s eyebrows rose. “That’s true.”

  “I’m sure it tastes like manna, even if regrettably horizontal.” Tom moved to take the meat platter from his housekeeper’s hands. “I’ll carve and you go fetch it, Mrs. Prowse. Wouldn’t we all like some anyway?”

  “Oui, s’il vous plaît,” said Miranda.

  Judith nodded, remarking when Madrun had left the room, “I confess I’ve used a packet Yorkshire mix for years. It seemed to work well enough, though perhaps the result was a trifle dry.”

  “I think Mrs. Prowse regards any food in a packet with the gravest scepticism,” Tom said, lifting the carving knife once again. “At any rate,” he continued, anxious to leave the agony of the Yorkshire behind, “I’m not sure you said what brought you back to Thornford after all these years.”

  “Oh, didn’t I? Sorry, it was Madrun I must have told, while I was peeling potatoes. Anyway, what brought me was a bit of a whim, really. As I told you last night, my husband died last autumn. I’ve decided I’ll retire this spring, and I’m going to sell the care home Trevor and I owned. Expecting I might be at loose ends, I’d been looking for a little business to run—in the West Country, I thought, as I was from here. I was looking through some estate agents’ sites on the Internet and saw that the Tidy Dolly Tea Room in Thornford Regis was for sale. Or the Tidy Dolly Internet Tea Room, as it’s now called.”

  “Everything’s up to date in Thornford Regis,” Tom intoned, helplessly riffing on Oklahoma!, the musical his mother Kate was particularly fond of. “They’ve gone about as far as they can go. I mean to say”—he cleared his throat—“the Tidy Dolly’s entered the twenty-first century.”

  “I hope not too much. The estate agent’s site said all chattels included in the sale, and not much looked changed in the pictures posted.”

  “I can assure you it’s little changed.” Tom sliced into the beef, which curled tenderly onto the plate. In fact, he found the atmosphere of the Tidy Dolly almost shudderingly mimpsy-pimpsy: the tiny tables, the lace tablecloths, the flower-pattern china, and, of course, the dolls, everywhere, large and small, blond and brunette, white and white-ish, staring at you with emotionless eyes while you sipped tea or ate a light lunch. He’d tried to steer his Wednesday Holy Communion service flock to the Waterside Café down at the millpond for their coffee morning. The food was inventive and excellent and the décor plain and pleasant, even if the proprietor, Liam Drewe, was irascible. But he couldn’t be seen to favour one village institution over another and since almost all of Wednesday morning’s flock were women and thought the Tidy Dolly delightful, he found himself on too regular a basis passing through its etched-glass doors and noshing on fairy cakes with coffee in translucent cups and saucers, often as not the only male in the place and feeling faintly gargantuan.

  “The girls like it, I think.” Tom glanced at Miranda, who responded by scrunching up her face. She had dragged him through the doors early on their arrival in Thornford and had seemed delighted then, but children’s tastes change.

  “I wonder what the Tidy Dolly would be like with only candles for light?” Miranda responded, staring into the lit tapers on the table. With electric light absent and daylight feeble, the dining room glowed golden with candlelight and flames from the fire built to defend against the vicarage’s growing chill.

  With different company, Tom mused, this could be the setting for a romantic meal, then immediately expelled the poignant thought to respond to Miranda: “A little disturbing, I expect.”

  “Macabre.” Miranda let the sound roll over her tongue in her excellent French.

  “New word, darling?”

  “Je l’ai lu dans le nouveau Alice Roy—Alice et la poupée chinoise.”

  “En anglais, Miranda. Alice Roy is a kind of Fren
ch Nancy Drew.” Tom addressed Judith as he passed her the meat platter. “If you’re familiar with the American books about the teenage detective.”

  “Not really.” Judith’s response was clipped. “Anyway, as I was saying, I loved the Tidy Dolly when I was a girl and thought it might be just the ticket.”

  “To what?” Miranda asked.

  Judith looked up from the platter. “Well …” She cast Miranda an exasperated frown. “… to new life, I suppose.”

  “Poppy Cozens, who owns the Tidy Dolly, is holidaying in California, I’m told.” Tom reached for the sauce boat and passed it to Judith. “She has a friend there.”

  “Well, my notion had been to take a quick look, then treat myself to a night or two at the Seven Stars in Totnes and contact the estate agent if I think the Tidy Dolly worthwhile. At worst, this would have been a pleasant little getaway.”

  “And then came the snow.” Tom watched Madrun reenter bearing the lacklustre Yorkshire.

  “Yes, then came the snow.”

  Tom found Miranda among the drifts deep in the back garden, standing with utter stillness in front of the snow-laden woodpile. Her stance, her head bent almost as if in reverent prayer, her dark hair fallen forward, seemed to demand caution, and so, when he stepped up to join her, he whispered, “What is it?”

  “Regarde, Papa.”

  Tom looked. At first, against the dun and tawny colour of the aged logs he didn’t see the shape of the tiny bird. And then he did: It was one of the brave wrens that made the woodpile their home, despite the patrolling vicarage cats. Its eyes, two perfect black beads, stared unseeingly; its feet, two tiny pale brown twigs, poked into the air in a way both tender and comic.

  “Poor thing.” He put an arm over Miranda’s shoulder and drew her to him, feeling her warm cheek against his.

  “Est-il parce qu’il fait si froid?”

  “The cold? I expect so.” Or old age, he thought. Or possibly both. This tiny casualty of bitter weather reminded Tom that the village might experience other casualties if the electricity didn’t return soon and snow didn’t cease floating down from the heavens. Who had heat and who didn’t? Who was able to make a hot meal and who wasn’t? Who needed to get out of the village, to Totnes or Torquay, to a medical appointment? He expected some of the answers—and an action plan—would be found at the pub. But first there was something to tell Miranda.

  “Shall we give him a decent burial?” he asked. “Probably best. Powell or Gloria won’t be respectful, should they ever manage to brave the weather.”

  They found a spot near the bottom of the garden, where Madrun cultivated white roses, now thorny clots of denuded branches swallowed in snow. Tom made a clearing with the garden spade, then pierced the ground, overturning clots of rich red soil until he had created a hole sufficiently deep. Miranda fashioned a bier of a loose piece of bark and solemnly scooped the tiny corpse, a mere handful of feathers, into its arc. She is not squeamish, Tom observed, watching his daughter carry the small frame down the garden path; a legacy, perhaps, of her mother, who’d been unfazed, as a doctor must be, by the squish and squash of corporeal existence. Miranda bent onto her haunches, gently let drop the wren into its modest grave, then rose and reached for Tom’s hand. Together they passed a moment’s silent reflection to the tiny lifeless creature, then Tom asked, “Shall I say a prayer?”

  “May I, Daddy?”

  Pleased and delighted, Tom replied, “Of course you may.”

  “Amen,” he echoed her when she had finished her simple invocation. He took up the spade and returned the soil to its place. Miranda made a rough circle of stems and leaves around the edge of the tiny mound.

  “Come, let’s sit on the swing a minute. I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  “I think I know,” Miranda said when they had brushed the snow from the old oak seat and squeezed in side by side.

  The roped swing, which Tom suspected his predecessor Giles James-Douglas had installed for his own pleasure, and not—because of its seat length—for any child’s, groaned under their combined weight. He glanced up at the brawny branch askance and asked worriedly, “Do you?”

  “Last night you looked like you did after Mummy died.”

  “Oh.” Downcast, Tom pushed off and they began to swing gently. “I’m sorry, darling. We couldn’t say anything in front of Ariel. We had to find Mrs. Moir first. It’s something she must say to her daughter, as I once said to you. Do you see?”

  Miranda was silent a moment, then asked, “Will they move away?”

  “The Moirs?” Tom said, startled by the question. “I don’t—” And then he did understand. Displacement had followed upon Lisbeth’s death; it must seem an inevitable consequence. “Do you miss Bristol?”

  “I miss Mummy.”

  “Oh, my darling girl, so do I.” He watched the trail his longer legs were carving through the snow and held Miranda closer. “So do I.”

  A formidable wall of anoraks, waxed jackets, and damp tweed met Tom’s eyes as he stepped into the Church House Inn and stamped the snow off his shoes. The pub was as packed as a rush-hour railway carriage.

  “Usual?” Eric Swan, the licensee, shouted into his ear when Tom had squeezed through the last knot of folk and collapsed against the bar. Without waiting for a reply, Eric pulled a pint of Vicar’s Ruin and slid it across the bar’s damp surface.

  “I would describe you as wreathed in smiles.” Tom lifted the glass.

  “The muscles in my cheeks feel tighter than my wife’s brassiere.” Eric stretched both arms expansively to enfold the universe into his bosom. “This boozer hasn’t had a day like this since … since …” His arms fell and the good cheer vanished from his expression. “Well, never mind.”

  Tom grimaced. A curious murder in Thornford the spring before had attracted undesirable numbers of day-trippers with nothing better to do than dabble in crime tourism. Of course, after filling their metaphorical boots gawping at this or that site, they all ended up at the pub. This had a beneficial effect on revenues that, by ancient custom, were shared with St. Nicholas’s, but it was an unintended consequence of evil that filled Tom with despair.

  “At least it’s only a natural disaster this time that’s bringing the punters in. That’s a good thing. Here, have a sausage roll.”

  “Unless this is a consequence of global climate change, which means we humans are to blame—a bad thing.” Tom bit into the flaky crust.

  “The trouble with you, Vicar, is you think too much.”

  “Being the moral conscience of the village is my trade.”

  “It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.”

  “These aren’t half bad, you know. Have you got Belinda up to her elbows in pastry in the kitchen?”

  “No. Roger sent them over. Seems things in the shop’s freezer are starting to thaw. This keeps up and I can serve everything else he’s got.”

  “Your cooker works, then. Are you not having too many problems? It’s decently warm in here.” Tom turned to look into the lounge bar at the glowing logs on the hearth heating the space between kippered ceiling and stone floor.

  It felt like a cosy cave with a primordial fire. Some faces, red with drink and heat and exertion, flickered in shadows cast by the flames from the fireplace; others were anchored in the cool light filtered through the window mullions.

  “I really came in to see what might be being done for those who haven’t got any heat or can’t make a hot meal,” Tom said.

  “If they’ve no heat or meat, they’re probably here, and what with the hotel closed there’s no place—other than the Waterside.” Eric swiped a damp rag across the bar. “I was very sorry to hear about Will Moir, by the way. John Copeland was in earlier and told me. You were there at the dinner, too.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Hardly credit it, can you? I should be the one popping my clogs before I’m fifty.” Eric grasped his considerable belly with his meaty hands and gave it a jiggle. “Didn�
��t see Will in here much—he’s got a boozer of his own—but he always looked fit as a fiddle to me. Just goes to show, I suppose. This is going to be hard on Caroline.”

  “Well, the death of a spouse …”

  “That, yes, of course. But I was thinking about Thorn Court. I couldn’t manage this place without my wife. The hotel’s an even bigger operation.”

  “There’s Nick Stanhope.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Vicar. I don’t know how he’ll get that home security business of his up and running without cocking it up. Besides.” Eric leaned so close to Tom, the latter could pick out the red hairs in his nose. “Half the village knows Thorn Court’s been struggling lately. Meanwhile, they’re doing all these renos, which must be costing a bob.”

  “Spend money to make money?” Tom suggested.

  Eric shrugged. “It’s getting the money in the first place that’s the trick. Banks aren’t giving it away these days. Look”—he moved to serve another customer—“if you’re wanting to see what’s being done for folk in this storm, you might check that lot out over there. Thornford Winter Emergency Response Party, they’re calling themselves. What’s it called when you take the first letters of each word and—”

  “Acronym?”

  “Right. That’ll give you a clue.” He pointed to several people grouped nearest the fireplace. “There’s talk of making the rounds to see who’s short of rations or warmth or the like, but they look fairly tucked in. Funny, if Will were alive, he’d be in the thick of organizing something, wouldn’t he?”

  After another protracted cha-cha through the madding throng, Tom managed to squeeze into a seat in the inglenook next to Old Bob, as much a fixture of the Church House Inn as the three-hundred-year-old mummified cat in a glass box on its wall. Old Bob undoubtedly had a last name, but probably only the postman and the parish clerk worried about knowing it. He was short, thickset, his nut-brown face a deep crisscross of lines that spoke of a life spent out of doors—fishing, in the days when commercial fishing was viable along the river, farm labouring, in season, and whatever else he could turn a hand to in between. Most arresting, however, was his eyewear: It wasn’t simply that the thick lenses magnified his irises—a cloudy blue—to an alarming degree, it was that the frames were indecently large, as rectangular as a department store window, and pink. If you thought he’d snatched up his wife’s spectacles from her night table, you’d be wrong: He had no wife, nor ever had.