Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  Tom sensed the blood pulsing up his neck, which seemed to bulge dangerously against his constraining clerical collar. He was struck by a riotous vision of Màiri naked, and then himself pantless, and then … At the same moment, he felt, on the cusp of his forties, suddenly, horribly, devastatingly middle-aged, and unprepared for this sort of flirtation—if flirtation it was and not simply reportage—and where it might lead. He must have looked like a beetroot with tumid eyes, for Màiri’s head fell back; laughter came in silvery ripples, fading only when Kerra—bless her!—interrupted with a tray bearing two cups of steaming coffee and a plate with two pear-and-chocolate croissants.

  “Mr. Christmas.” She set a cup before him. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Fine,” Tom croaked. “I’m fine.”

  “That’s exactly what Mr. Moir said to me Saturday night and look what happened.”

  Màiri’s laughter ceased abruptly. “When?” Tom asked, startled.

  “After the pudding, when everyone left the dining room for a break. He passed through the kitchen.”

  “Kerra,” Tom said gently, “you’re not to feel badly. A few of us thought he didn’t look well, but he seemed determined to ignore our concern.”

  Kerra received this in silence as she set a coffee cup in front of Màiri. “Adam thinks someone could have done something.”

  “You’ve talked to Adam?”

  “No, to Tamara. She says that’s what Adam thinks.”

  “Oh.” Tom grimaced as Kerra twisted her body towards a woman importuning her at the neighbouring table.

  “Of course, he would share his feelings with his girlfriend,” he said to Màiri. “I saw him earlier this morning at the hotel and he didn’t have much to say. Stoical, his mother indicated. But I expect he’s angry as well as grieved. Odd,” he murmured, a thought suddenly coming to him, “that John didn’t drive Adam back from Noze when he went to get Caroline yesterday.”

  “Sorry about that.” Kerra turned back to them. “Anyway, these are fresh this morning. I hope you like them.”

  “They look brilliant,” Màiri responded, taking a croissant and biting into it as Kerra moved away. “Now, where were we?”

  “I think,” Tom said, reluctant to return to their previous topic, “you said you came down to Thornford on some business.”

  Màiri, taking another bite, didn’t reply immediately. “Tell me about the Burns Supper,” she said finally, licking at a dab of chocolate that had fallen on her finger.

  Tom stared helplessly at her lovely tongue.

  “Tom?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Burns Supper?”

  “Oh, yes, quite. Well, you know the tragic part already.”

  “Indulge me with the rest.”

  “All right,” he began, mildly challenged, his mind roving over the course of the evening, uncertain upon which detail to alight, “let’s see. There was the haggis—”

  “A haggis at a Burns Supper? Fancy that.”

  “Well, it was a novel experience for me.”

  “And …?”

  “It was … interesting.”

  “Tom, that’s the sort of word the Queen uses when something bores her cross-eyed.”

  “Then put it this way.” Tom pulled his croissant in two, better to get at the rich filling. “It wasn’t as bloody awful as I expected, but I still wouldn’t feed it to swine.”

  “I wouldn’t touch it with a caber, either. Haggis is the reason I turned vegetarian.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to eat it! I remember my parents plunking haggis in front of me when I was eight. The reek! I refused. That’s when I announced for vegetarianism. Lips that touch the flesh of poor wee lambs shall never touch mine. But enough of the bloody haggis. What else happened at your doomed Burns Supper?”

  “It didn’t seem doomed at the time. Not really. Although there were undercurrents.” Between sips of coffee and bites of pastry, Tom went on to describe the evening.

  “Interesting,” Màiri murmured when he had finished.

  “Is that a royal ‘interesting’? Or a genuine ‘interesting’?”

  “Genuine.”

  “I hadn’t been to a Burns Supper before, but except for the dramatic and very cheerless ending, I’m not sure it was much different than any other Burns Supper in the realm.”

  Màiri ran her fingers along the rim of her coffee cup. Tom stared at them, at their pink tips and pearly manicure, as he waited for her to respond. Faintly mesmerised, he wondered what it would be like if those very fingers travelled along his … well, really, any part of his anatomy would do.

  “I was having a chat on the phone with my sergeant at Totnes station,” Màiri began after a moment, “sorting out what presence we could possibly have in this weather—which isn’t much—when he happened to say that the postmortem results were in on Will Moir.”

  “Mmm …?” Tom was only half attentive.

  “Will had a heart attack, all right. However …”

  Tom refocused on her face. He saw the muscles settled into sombre lines and felt the first bloom of unease.

  “I don’t have the precise details, but …” She glanced at the other tables and dropped her voice. “Something was found in his system.”

  “Something …?” He leaned nearer to hear her better.

  “Taxine.”

  The word resonated from hospital visits or, possibly, conversations with his late wife. “Isn’t it a cancer drug or the like? Or is it Taxol? Don’t tell me Will had cancer and didn’t tell anyone?”

  “No evidence of that in the PM. Tom, I’m telling you this on the quiet because you may be personally affected by the consequences. Or your household may be.”

  “Now you have me frightened.”

  “Do you remember our first real conversation, last spring, at the village hall, at the opening of the art exhibition?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your housekeeper had prepared some pastries for the event and was helping Kerra serve them. Do you remember what they were?”

  Tom frowned, worried. “Yes …”

  “And did you not have the same thing for afters at the Burns Supper, with the cranachan?”

  “Well, yes … I mentioned them a moment ago when I described our meal.”

  “Tom, taxine is a poison. It’s made from the leaves, bark, seeds, roots—in fact, any part but the berries—of the yew tree.”

  “Oh, God!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It wasn’t a conversation Tom anticipated with unalloyed pleasure. After lunch, after a perfect winter meal of Tuscan bean soup, crusty bread, and Devon Blue cheese, after Miranda drifted away to her room to read her latest Alice Roy and Judith retreated to hers for a postprandial nap, Tom found himself trailing about the kitchen, clearing plates and running a cloth over the cooker, tasks that wouldn’t normally preoccupy him, given the press of church work on any given day—even on a Monday, his usual day of rest.

  But this wasn’t a usual Monday. The entire village, indeed the entire island, was bogged off from its usual patterns of production and consumption and driving around like mad, and though endless paperwork awaited him in his study, Tom felt he could rightly break from his patterns as well. When he asked Madrun if he might lend a hand by loading the dishwasher, she regarded him askance.

  “No, Mr. Christmas, I think it best if you didn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not very good at it, you see.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No, you’re not. I’ve observed you. You need to be more … punctilious. You should always load from the back, thus, with the larger plates first.” She demonstrated. “And then you should nest the cutlery—see, the spoons in this part of the basket and the knives in this. And then …”

  “I am schooled,” he said humbly when she had finished.

  “We had the dishwasher installed in Mr. James-Douglas’s day. For a time he would put in a single cu
p and saucer and then start it running. I had to put a stop to that, of course!”

  “Yes, I agree, a terrible waste.”

  Madrun made a dismissive noise and peered at him. “Would you like me to make you a fresh cup of tea to take away with you?”

  “Tea would be very nice.”

  “Then I shall bring it along to you in your study.” She bustled, reaching for the kettle.

  “Actually, Mrs. Prowse, I wondered if you might join me in a cup?”

  “Oh?” She was arrested plugging the instrument into the socket and frowning at the clock. “It’s only gone two.”

  “Yes, I know it’s not your teatime, but if you would indulge me.” He took a deep breath. “There’s something very important I’d like to discuss with you.”

  Madrun’s eyebrows slipped up her forehead. “Your study, then, in ten minutes, Mr. Christmas?”

  “Unless there’s somewhere else you’d care to talk?” His study—the thought occurred to him—had a sort of intimidating formality, yet the other rooms in the vicarage seemed suddenly too public, easily breached by daughter or guest. He was anxious this conversation be confidential and nonaccusatory.

  Madrun seemed to read his mind. Her features betrayed a flash of concern. She said sceptically, “Mr. James-Douglas sometimes joined me in my rooms when he had something important to discuss.”

  “If you’d like …” Tom responded, a little startled. Thornford Regis’s vicarage had been his home for less than a year, yet he had never been in Madrun’s suite of rooms on the top floor, which seemed somehow inviolate.

  “Take the back stairs, Mr. Christmas. I shall be up in nine minutes.”

  Tom’s searching eyes couldn’t help going first, upon entering Madrun’s aerie, to the mahogany desk and round-back chair by one of the dormer windows where, he was sure, lay the instrument that visited his every daily awakening. Yes, there it was. Red, surprisingly, as red as a pillar box, a colour he didn’t associate with typewriters. And the design was modern, in a mid-twentieth-century way. He had somehow expected an Edwardian contraption with tiny round keys that required a thorough bashing; it was the only way he could account for the clacketty-clack that carried down to his bedroom. He peered closer. OLIVETTI said the raised letters at the back, and above the keytop VALENTINE—the model presumably. This likely accounted for the colour, but had it, too, been a gift with some sentiment attached? This wasn’t the hour for wondering such things. Inserted in the carriage, peeking above the paper guide, was a piece of stationery with THE VICARAGE clearly visible at the top, tomorrow’s letter to old Mrs. Prowse in Cornwall at the ready. Tom grimaced at what it might contain.

  The rest of the desk was a paean to tidiness, like the rest of the vicarage (expect for his own office), with its aligned stack of stationery to one side, pens and pencils gathered in a neat spiral in a Royal Wedding 1981 souvenir beaker, and a set of bronze lion-head bookends squeezing together precisely ranked copies of the Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and, curiously, Black’s Medical Dictionary. There was an ivory box with envelopes, an array of photographs in silver frames, while farther along, on a large blotter, was a pile of spiral notebooks, the cover of the top one grubby with what looked like oil stains. He peered at the crabbed handwriting on the front and thought he could discern THORNFORD REGIS, A PARISH HISTORY, VOLUME VII. This had to be Madrun’s father’s fabled local history, which he’d scribbled between oil changes and brake repairs at Thorn Cross Garage before he died, and which Madrun was dutifully transcribing to type.

  An unenviable task, Tom thought, turning and absorbing an aspect of the room he hadn’t quite noted when he’d crossed it. It was very red, boldly so. The sitting room walls were covered in an unpatterned red silk wallpaper, the chairs in a red fabric. Pillows were red, curtains were red, the highly patterned Turkish rugs and chintz sofa were predominantly red, woven through with a British racing green, the accent colour for the room, most apparent along the wainscoting, mouldings, window sashes, and chimneypiece. He looked back at the Valentine-model Olivetti. The room’s appointments struck a note of professional attention—the handiwork of one of Giles James-Douglas’s many nephews, perhaps?—and he didn’t wonder that the catalyst to artistry wasn’t the shiny red typewriter.

  Tom was still standing by the desk, noting the winter pansies in a goldfish bowl on the window ledge, when Madrun arrived with a tray of tea things, which she set down on a low table between the couch and two Queen Anne chairs opposite.

  “Is everything well with Miranda?” she asked.

  “Yes, I think so.” Tom’s response was automatic. “Why?” he asked anxiously. “Have I missed something?”

  “I watched her make the snowman’s smile into a frown.”

  “Yes, well, she feels badly for Ariel. I expect it’s just her way of …” Tom trailed off. “Actually, Mrs. Prowse, it’s Will Moir’s … circumstances I wanted to discuss with you.”

  Madrun gestured towards a chair opposite and sat on the couch, gathering the folds of her skirt under her.

  “I don’t quite know how to begin,” he said, pausing to watch Madrun’s expert hand move to the milk jug and begin to pour milk into two teacups. She looked up at him enquiringly.

  “It seems Will Moir’s death isn’t quite as … straightforward as it might appear.”

  “He was very young, wasn’t he.” Madrun lifted the knitted cosy off the teapot. “Is there heart disease in his family? Or was he an adopted child. I can’t—”

  “It’s none of that, Mrs. Prowse,” Tom cut in. “It’s this: Some poison was detected in Will’s system. There’s been a postmortem.”

  “Poison?” Madrun looked at him sharply. The spout of the teapot veered from the cup, sending golden, steaming liquid splashing onto the tray. “Oh, dear heavens, Mr. James-Douglas’s best rosewood! But how could there be poison? Food poisoning? Something he ate?”

  It was the very question.

  “Yes, Mrs. Prowse, it was something he ate—something it appears he ate … or ingested in some fashion,” he quickly amended.

  “The curry? Was it very spicy?”

  “No, Mrs. Prowse, not the curry. Or at least most likely not the curry,” he amended again. Certainties beyond that of taxine poisoning as cause of death were pretty much absent.

  “Perhaps the poor man took some medicine incorrectly.” Madrun resumed pouring the tea.

  Tom waited until she had handed him his cup and saucer. “No, not medicine. Well, at least it’s highly doubtful.” He took a polite sip, then replaced the cup. He cleared his throat and said the awful words.

  “It appears, Mrs. Prowse, that Will died from a poisonous substance that is found in most parts of the yew.”

  Madrun was on the point of reaching for her tea, but her arm stopped midair, as if suddenly clamped by invisible jaws. Her eyes shot to his.

  “Mr. Christmas! It’s impossible!” Her features, for a flying moment stamped with incredulity, swiftly hardened to stern stubbornness. She sat up, rigid as a statue. “You’ve seen what I do!”

  “I know, Mrs. Prowse,” he responded gently. He had described Madrun’s method with yewberries to Màiri earlier at the Waterside, how she harvested the red fruit from the lower branches of the ancient tree in the churchyard in the late summer, how she meticulously tweezered out the poisonous stone from each berry, how, as an added precaution, she made an inventory of the stones against the berries, then flushed them. She would let no one help her in this task, refusing even Miranda’s enthusiastic offer, barring Bumble and cats, and turning the kitchen almost into a white-coated laboratory. As he’d said to Màiri, he thought it was mad to expend so much time and energy on something so calorically insignificant. He had even hinted as much to her, but Madrun Prowse, a force unto herself, eschewed cost–benefit analysis in her food preparation. Madrun fancied a forage now and again. She foraged for blackberries, wortleberries, bilberries, tayberries, tummelberries, cherry
plums, elderflowers, wild mushrooms, wild garlic, and a number of other goodies from the fields, woods, and hedgerows around the village and up on Dartmoor.

  “I’m only telling you this,” Tom continued, “because as soon as the roads are passable there’ll be an inquest—and most likely some awkward questions.”

  “But I’ve been making sweet things with yewberries for years and years.” Madrun’s tea sat untouched, its thin vapours drifting into the air. “It’s impossible,” she said again, “simply impossible! It must be something else. How do you know this, Mr. Christmas?”

  “Well—”

  “PCSO White! I saw her coming through the garden this morning down to the millpond wearing those … tennis rackets.”

  “Snowshoes,” Tom amended. “Màiri has impeccable sources for her information, as you might imagine, Mrs. Prowse.” As Madrun opened her mouth to protest, he added, “Her concern was that you be prepared.”

  “For what?”

  For the worst, he wanted to say—helping the police with their enquiries, becoming a person of interest, and other such sugarcoatings. “For questions,” he said instead. “For people’s reactions. It will become publicly known.”

  If he had expected Madrun to collapse in grief and fear and tears, he was relieved she evinced nothing more than compressed lips and a red splotch on each cheek. In his ministry, he seldom found people’s reaction to shocking news to be utterly predictable. Brutish men wept like children at the loss of a pet; sympathetic women turned stony at the loss of a parent. “At least he didn’t take anyone with him,” one woman had remarked to him matter-of-factly after her son had turned a shotgun on himself.

  “Mr. Christmas, this can’t be true. I’m much, much too careful for this to happen.”