Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Florence, these speculations are making me weary, and they’re most unkind. I don’t think it would be at all fair to ask Dr. Kaif about what quantities of … whatever! it could take for someone to die.”

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with your sister-in-law,” Tom said to Florence. “Perhaps we should talk of other things.” He clicked his fingers. “I’m reminded to give you a copy of the parish magazine.”

  Florence handed her empty teacup absently to Venice, who received it meekly and enquired if she wanted more. But Florence didn’t respond. Instead she addressed Tom. “But he was at your Burns Supper—Victor, I mean.”

  “So was Molly, come to that,” Tom responded with some exasperation, then immediately regretted the imprudence of saying so.

  Florence cast him a probing glance. “Really? As a what? Did she dance a Highland fling?”

  “No, she cooked the meal.”

  “Where’s Thorn Court’s chef then?”

  “On hiatus, along with the rest of staff during the renovations.” Tom set the copy of Thornford Regis News next to the tea tray.

  “Of course, I forgot. But Molly? I thought she had finished with that catering lark of hers. She was only ever showing off!”

  “Molly did a splendid job. We had wonderful curries—”

  “Ha! I’m not completely surprised. I think she must have gone native when she married Victor Kaif.”

  “Really, Florence.” Venice cast a worried eye at Tom. “You’re not fit for human company.”

  “But she is the most peculiar creature, Ven, gadding about in those pajamas or whatever they are and wearing saris to the May Fayre and such. You must agree. Molly’s as English as God!”

  “Perhaps her husband likes her in those clothes. Besides, I think it’s a refreshing change from the usual cardies and anoraks. Well, it was. She seems to be dressing more conventionally these days.”

  Florence shifted her leg and winced. “Victor only married her because her parents own those GoodGreens shops. Probably gets a discount.”

  “Flo, that’s outrageous. You know no more about the Kaifs’ relationship than you do the Moirs’.”

  “Hmm, curry, you say.” Florence ignored her sister-in-law. “What an odd choice for a Burns Supper.”

  “No one cared much for haggis, although we did have a taste of it,” Tom said.

  “Can’t say I blame you.” Florence wrinkled her nose. “You could doctor up curry quite nicely, couldn’t you, if you had a mind to. It being so hot and spicy, you’d never know there was something tucked inside. I expect taxine tastes rather unpleasant. What do you think, Vicar?”

  Tom felt a respite from thinking might be in order. In Florence Daintrey’s presence, he felt a little like a battlement under bombardment.

  “I don’t know what to think, really,” he responded, placing his empty teacup on the tray. He added a note of caution: “Probably best not to speculate too much about all this in public. And now I really must leave you two. Thank you for the tea and—”

  “There’ll be an inquest, of course,” Florence interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps I’ll attend.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’re going anywhere in your condition.” Venice looked mildly horrified. “Tom, I’ll see you out.”

  “No need.”

  “Nevertheless.” Venice struggled from out of her blanket as Tom retrieved his coat, his backside relieved to be out of the very lumpy chair.

  “Lovely to see you, Vicar. Call again,” Florence called after them as Venice closed the door to the sitting room. Tom welcomed the relative coolness of the air in—and the unclaustrophobic atmosphere of—the hallway.

  “I do apologise for Florence,” Venice told him in a low voice. “She’s always been … outspoken, but she seems to be getting worse.”

  “I expect being confined is getting on her nerves. She is all right?”

  “It’s only a mild sprain. I took a St. John’s course years ago and I was able to fix her up. We’ll have the doctor in when the roads are cleared.”

  “Rorie the postman says we’re not so cut off now. Roads are ploughed. Look, there’s post.” He pointed to the hall table.

  “Oh …”

  “Is there something else?”

  Venice appeared to be in the throes of a decision. “I do wonder at times,” she said, “if Florence has had, oh, perhaps the tiniest stroke or something. As I say, she’s always been outspoken, but she seems to be becoming less restrained, and I can’t account for it, really.”

  “I am sorry. Perhaps the doctor …?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s come to that. I mustn’t worry you, Tom. And perhaps you’re right. It’s just her being confined. She likes to be active, so when she can’t be, bees start buzzing in her bonnet. She’s been reading that novel all morning and become fixated on the sadness at Thorn Court.”

  “I’m sure it’s on villagers’ minds in one way or another,” Tom responded, reaching for the door handle.

  “I can only imagine what Flo might have said to you. It’s she who’s so taken against the Prowses. She won’t even let Jago service her car. She and Walter were twins, you see, and so I think she’s always taken his loss harder than I.” She shook her head. “It’s all so long ago now anyway. But you know the past—it seems to do nothing but intrude on the present, doesn’t it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tom stood outside Uphill Cottage’s gate, looking unseeingly down the road he had climbed with Rorie the postman’s help little more than an hour before, his thoughts stirred by Florence’s provocations. He found himself unaccountably resistant to the notion of Will’s death being anything other than a deeply regrettable misadventure. Even at the Waterside the day before, when Màiri White had given him the unhappy news, conversation had not strayed into other, darker realms of speculation—though now he wasn’t sure why, unless Màiri was sparing him pain, and he, for his part, preferred the safe harbour of denial. But surely his reaction then, and now, was natural and customary; to think otherwise was to entertain the appalling notion that the village sheltered a scheming intelligence, prompted to homicide by mischief or malice.

  But a notion acknowledged cannot be unacknowledged.

  There was but a single boon, he decided as his mind refocused on the practical task of getting down icy Thorn Hill: Madrun would surely be absolved from any culpability. She couldn’t possibly hold malice towards Will Moir or any of the men at the Burns Supper, unless some buried secret will out (but surely not!) and she was certainly incapable of mischief, even of the most trivial sort. He couldn’t imagine her even as a child shorting a bed or making a prank phone call.

  He studied the road, a narrow shute bordered by stone walls, wishing he had the piece of cardboard he had used yesterday at Fishers Hill with Miranda. Hugging the walls, stepping carefully, and gripping gateposts along the way looked the best means of descent without suffering Florence’s fate, until he considered that the rubbery bottom of his boots, useless for going up anything slippery, might be just the thing for going down. Certain he was unobserved, he crouched slightly, so that his weight settled along his thighs, then led off, letting the ice whisk him down the road. It worked! It was a merry experiment in locomotion, unhappy thoughts of loss and grief seeming to peel away as his new smiling face sliced through the breeze. If he kept his balance and manoeuvred with some grace, he could spin around the point where Thorn Hill met Pennycross Road, then continue his descent into the village, like a skier at Klosters, though Pennycross, on second thought, was decently salted and would force a stop.

  A stop, however, was forced sooner. A figure in a sombre overcoat and bowler hat stepped from the shadow of the stone stairs that offered pedestrians a shortcut from one ascending road to the next, his head bent to the breeze. Tom shouted, but it was too late. Like a car meeting a light-dazed deer, Tom careened into the man, sending him sprawling face-forward into a snowbank by the tiny wedge-shaped mem
orial garden, and sending the black case he had been holding soaring into the air. Tom, landing on his back, watched the case crash onto the garden’s low stone wall and burst open at the latch, flinging some of its contents onto the snow and ice, and some onto stone with the unpleasant tinkle of shattering glass.

  Oh, bugger, was Tom’s first unhappy thought. His victim was no mystery. Only Victor Kaif wore a bowler hat, and he wore it when he was on the job, either in Totnes, where he shared a clinic with another homeopath, a naturopath, and an iridologist, or when making house calls in the village, which of course he was doing—the road from his bungalow in Orchard Hill to the Daintrey cottage ascended the very set of roads Tom was descending. Why Victor favoured a bowler hat—headgear few had worn, even in the City, for generations—remained a mystery to Tom (he didn’t like to ask), though established Thornfordites were long past noticing or caring. Duelling eccentricities, he postulated: Molly appropriated bits of Indian dress, her part-Indian husband appropriated English dress. Whatever the reason, the fact was—as Victor probably knew—he looked uncommonly handsome in the hat, which matched his jet-black hair and set off his sharply cut features, his fine straight eyebrows, and his dark, bluish brown eyes. Though not without suggesting a certain rakishness, his attire projected self-possession and respectability—perhaps, Tom mused, a deliberate counterbalance to homeopathy’s dubious reputation. Anyone else wearing a bowler in a village in the twenty-first century would be branded a nutter, but Victor somehow carried it off—with aplomb.

  “I’m very sorry, Victor,” Tom said, pulling himself up and brushing snow off his battered wax jacket. He plucked the bowler hat from its landing place by the forsythia that dominated the tiny garden. “Victor?”

  Tom experienced a moment’s panic as he bent to attend to the fallen figure, but Victor chose that moment to roll over.

  “Hardly ‘bump.’ ” The homeopath shielded his eyes, though the noon sun was a pale disk in a pale sky.

  “ ‘Hit,’ then.”

  “ ‘Collide,’ I would say. ‘Crash into.’ ”

  “Victor, it wasn’t my mission this morning to knock you over in the road. Are you all right? Nothing broken? You really should get up. The snow is rather wet, and it won’t do that coat of yours any good.”

  “I think I’ll just lie here awhile.”

  Tom stood over Victor with his bowler in hand, feeling very much like a gentleman’s gentleman. “It might have been a car coming down the hill, you know. You weren’t exactly looking when you stepped off the stairs.”

  “I was somewhat preoccupied, if you must know.” Victor jackknifed his body upwards like a spring, then rose with elegance to his feet—which, Tom noted with wonder, were shod in polished black wing tips with no evidence of traction-making aids.

  “I was preoccupied, too, actually. Sorry, I was sort of blaming the victim, wasn’t I?”

  Victor silently took the hat from Tom and settled it on his head, angling it ever so slightly. He flicked Tom a worried glance. “What’s preoccupying you, then?”

  “At the moment? Will Moir.”

  Victor looked away, at his bag, which lay at an ungainly angle in the snow, and at the scattered glass vials. “What about Will? Tom, look at what you’ve done.”

  “His … stoicism.” Tom wondered if word of the taxine poisoning had reached the man’s ears. “I am sorry about this, Vic. Here, let me help you.” He bent to pluck a glass vial from a patch of snow.

  “Bloody hell, some have broken!”

  “Sorry.” Tom apologised again. “Really.”

  “Never mind!” Victor retrieved his case and took the vial from Tom’s hand. With his foot, he pushed the glass shards against the base of the garden’s stone wall. “What do you mean, his stoicism?”

  “Will must have known he wasn’t well, but he didn’t ask for any help.”

  “A heart attack can come on suddenly.”

  “Then why did he go up the tower?”

  “Perhaps he wanted a lie-down. Makes sense, if he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “There are couches in the reception rooms, bedrooms on the first floor.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Victor said with evident pique, stooping to collect scattered vials. “There’s not always an accounting for other people’s behaviour, is there?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Tom plucked another vial from the road. The label read AGARICUS, which sent his mind like a rocket to tedious hours in fifth form under Mr. McKechnie’s tutelage declining Latin nouns. Agaricus, agarici, agarici, agaricarum reverberated through his brainbox. It was probably the wrong declension. “What’s this for?”

  “Disorders of the nervous system.” Victor snatched the vial from Tom’s hand and gave it a quick study before shoving it back into his case.

  “Ah,” Tom responded noncommittally, picking up another vial, this one labelled ANTIMONIUM TARTARICUM. He had no argument with homeopathy, though the notion that patients could be healed through the administration of the substances that caused their symptoms, diluted to the point where the remedies contained barely a molecule of the original product, seemed, on the surface, a damp squib.

  “I expect Will wasn’t one of your patients, was he?” he asked Victor.

  “No, he wasn’t. Although you phrase it oddly.” Victor frowned. “Is there a reason why he wouldn’t have been?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest he wouldn’t see a homeopath. Will wasn’t that old, so I can’t help wondering about the state of his health.”

  “Difficult to know. As I say, he wasn’t my patient.”

  “Lisbeth—my late wife, whom I’ve probably mentioned—used to say that she envied homeopaths and naturopaths and the like because they seemed able to take so much time with their patients, talk to them, and really get to know them, whereas the NHS always seemed to pressure her to get through as many patients as she could in a day.”

  “But if you’re asking me if I had some understanding of Will’s underlying health, I can’t say that I did.”

  “But you observe, surely. You and my wife, for instance, because of your training, can read things in faces or mannerisms or speech. I’m told optometrists can read your health in the backs of your eyes.”

  Victor moved impatiently onto the garden’s flagstones and set his kit down on the top of a bench that offered sitters a view down Pennycross Road’s descent into the village. Fastening the latch, he said, “I think there was something not quite right about Will.”

  “Saturday evening? I thought he looked a bit peaky much earlier in the evening.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention to him Saturday.” He looked away. “No, I mean longer than that. His temperament was changed—as you know.” Victor’s lips formed a grim line.

  Tom did know. Though he had decided not to watch the “Coach Goes Mental” YouTube video, the anonymous posting of which he thought intrusive and cruel, the episode at the cricket pitch had been well described to him by several parishioners who had watched it.

  “He and Caroline have some challenges in their business, as you know,” he said. “The economy is pressurising people for one thing. Money woes often put a strain on a marriage.”

  “That might be it.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  Victor shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tom. I do have worries of my own.”

  “Yes, of course, I don’t mean to be a bother. Might I ask you in turn what’s preoccupying you?”

  Victor cast him a penetrating glance, then looked away. “Oh, it’s nothing, really.”

  “Well, if you ever think I can be of any help,” Tom responded. “That must be yours, too,” he added, noting a burst of colour against the grey stone and white snow. It was a bound sheaf of paper that must have flown over the wall and landed in the garden. “It’s got a bit damp, I’m afraid,” he continued, retrieving it, shaking a clump of clinging wet snow from its surface. He was about to hand it off to Victor, but then snatched it back. Something abou
t it caught his attention, its colour and texture strangely evocative. He frowned over it, staring, and then he remembered and felt a momentary chill that owed nothing to the winter air.

  “Are you going to give me that?” Victor said to him impatiently.

  “Sorry. I was … admiring it,” he lied lamely, passing it to Victor. “A prescription pad, of a sort?”

  “Of a sort.” Victor’s deep-set, dark eyes regarded him. “It’s multipurpose. I’ll write a scrip on it, for instance, for a patient to take to GoodGreens or Boots to get it filled.”

  “It’s certainly distinctive,” Tom added.

  It was. Lisbeth’s prescription pads had a number of clever security features—VOID would appear if anyone tried to photocopy a prescription, for instance—but superficially the paper looked unremarkable: plain and white, the lettering sans serif, brisk and businesslike. Victor’s, he noted, was more like the letterhead he used at the vicarage, with address at the top in a pleasing script and no other markings. Victor’s, however, was not a discreet white or pale blue. It was a delicate shade of lavender.

  “Certainly not my choice.” Victor shoved the pad into a pocket lining in his case. “We moved the Totnes clinic to new premises on Castle Street in November, so new cards and stationery and scrip pads were in order. One of my colleagues chose this. Only a woman would pick such a bloody ridiculous colour. Hardly dignifies the profession, does it? Bloody women,” he muttered.

  Tom felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth, pushing out thoughts of the pretty paper.

  “What’s so amusing?”

  “You, Victor. You’ve had a row this morning with your wife, yes?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You show not untypical signs—misdirected anger, laddish misogyny—”

  “Then you try living with Molly!” Victor’s voice and the case’s clasps snapped simultaneously. “I’m not sure how much longer I can.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this, Victor. I was praying that with time—”