Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  Victor grunted.

  “—and Molly’s getting some counselling from Celia Parry, which seems a good thing.”

  “She told you that, did she?”

  “Have you thought of—”

  “No!” Victor’s eyes flashed. “I have my own way of coping with these things, and that includes my working and getting on with my life and not … not hanging about the house, talking and crying and arguing all the bloody time.”

  Tom bit his lip. The expectation, he thought, is that the loss of a child naturally binds a man and wife together in grief. But the dismal reality, as his pastoral work had taught him, was too often the opposite: Grief tore people apart with all the heedless abandon of a tempest. He recalled vividly—because it came only a fortnight after Lisbeth’s death—a funeral he had taken at St. Dunstan’s for a three-month-old boy. So devastated were the young parents, whom he had wedded not thirteen months before, by the cot death of their newborn (their first real encounter with profound loss), their marriage cracked like a dry branch. Derrick and Zoë had made the traditional vow at the altar—Till death us do part—but the words resonated in his heart in a new way when he learned of their separation.

  And now he wondered, glancing at Victor’s choleric expression with dismay, if a death would part Victor and Molly. He wanted to say that even the most loving couple may each pull away from the other in time of grief, but with mutual forbearance and understanding, they could restore the intimacy and kindness of an earlier time in the marriage. But it sounded a bit of a bromide in his head, and as Victor didn’t appear awfully receptive, Tom reached for something more concrete: “Molly ventured out to cater a big supper for more than twenty men. That seems a good sign.” He added a hopeful smile.

  The blaze vanished from Victor’s eyes. Hopeless frown met hopeful smile. He tugged at his case and turned to go. “I wish,” he said to Tom over his shoulder, “I thought that were true.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Are you suggesting that we jump?”

  “I’m simply saying that I thought it might be a good thing if we—I mean those of us on the PCC—took a leadership role. But of course you’re not expected to jump, and you needn’t jump, if you don’t wish to. I recognise it is a rather daunting prospect.”

  “Mr. Chairman.” Karla Skynner cast Tom a withering glance from across the table. “I can’t think of any circumstance in which I would be persuaded to fling myself out of an airplane. None.”

  “You’ll be wearing a parachute,” Fred Pike, the assistant verger, piped up. He was studying a raisin biscuit he’d taken from a platter Madrun had sent over with Tom to the parochial church council meeting in the Old School Room. Tom wished people would stop examining food that came from the vicarage kitchen.

  Karla shot Fred a look that would have scorched the fur off a small rodent, then turned back to Tom. “You, of course, will be jumping.”

  “Of course,” Tom replied, drawing from some well the sort of feigned enthusiasm he’d mustered in his days as The Great Krimboni when confronted with a surly audience indifferent to his feats of magic. “I think it will be great fun.”

  “Absolutely!” Mark Tucker chimed in.

  “I’m sure Colm will join in.”

  “He’s not here to say, is he, Mr. Chairman?” Karla snapped.

  “Well, no. But I think Colm’s sort of the type.”

  “The type for what?”

  “… adventure?”

  “And John, too,” Mark added, then frowned. “Well, perhaps. I’m not sure about the others not in attendance this evening.”

  “I can’t think why John couldn’t be here tonight.” Karla reached for a biscuit and did not examine it. “I hear he was the only one able to drive out of the village on Sunday, and now that the lanes are cleared of snow, there’s no excuse.”

  Tom looked around the table. “I’m certainly not pressuring any of you to take part in the jump. I’m sure it will be challenging to both body and spirit, and many of you may feel you’re not … up to it.”

  “I’m not dead yet, Vicar,” Jeanne Neels, the matriarch of Thorn Barton, the former manor farm, declared. She was a woman in her late sixties and lean, with masses of greying hair tied in a loose bun. “And I’ve got one good hand to pull the rip cord.” She held up one hand, her right—she had been born without her left—and pushed at a few strands of hair that had worked loose to dangle across her face.

  “I’m not dead yet, either,” added Russ Oxley, a semi-retired archaeologist who had moved to Thornford two years before. His face, covered in a hundred minuscule wrinkles, bore what looked like a permanent mahogany tan visible from the top of his open-necked shirt to a line three-quarters of the way up his forehead.

  “And of course you know I did my National Service in the Parachute Regiment.” Michael Woolnough, MBE, puffed out his chest. “Saw action in Cyprus in ’56.”

  Tom didn’t know, but considered Michael the least likely on the council to participate, given his age, closing in on eighty. Though he seemed in excellent health, except for incipient deafness.

  “Bless, I feel faint simply thinking about it. You’re hurtling through the sky at some ghastly speed, aren’t you? What if your parachute doesn’t open?” portly Roger Pattimore asked.

  “I’ve been assured,” replied Tom, “that your odds are much greater being struck by lightning.”

  “That doesn’t assure me in the least.” Karla removed her glasses and began polishing them against her sleeve. “Lightning has had quite a deleterious effect on some people I can think of in this village.”

  “I’m willing,” said a squeaky voice on Tom’s left. “I’ll get everyone at GoodGreens to sponsor me.”

  “Lovely, Briony, thank you.” Tom glanced down at her nimble fingers dancing over the keys of her little notebook computer. The last PCC secretary took notes in a shorthand of his own devising and presented minutes at subsequent meetings that shot fairly wide of the mark for accuracy. Briony’s were letter-perfect and swiftly approved at the next meeting, saving the council half an hour’s worth of amendment aggro. So good to have some folk on the council not old enough to vividly remember when President Kennedy was shot or when England last won the FA cup. Briony Hart was twenty-three, plain as suet, and lived with her mother up Orchard Hill. Tom suspected her recent church attendance might be part of a net cast wide in a husband-hunting strategy—decent blokes went to church, didn’t they?—but as long as he wasn’t the fox in this instance, he didn’t mind. He hoped Briony lasted on the PCC. Unattached men of marriageable age at church were often a scarce commodity; most of the unattached tended to be widowers, like John Copeland, or the never-married-and-not-bloody-likely types, like Roger Pattimore. He worried a little that Mark Tucker, his new treasurer, might be the fox. Briony was swift to agree with anything he said, but Mark, bless his soul and his wife and child, remained sweetly oblivious to many and any a nuance—which reminded Tom of the task that Violet Tucker had set for him.

  Roger was still squirming in his chair as if imagining his adipose frame hurtling through space over Devon’s patchwork fields, but Tom thought he might be persuaded to jump, or perhaps they might each goad the other. He hadn’t quite realised when he explored the possibility of a parachute jump as a charity fund-raiser that it might involve him—Tom Livingstone Christmas—stepping out into thin air, thousands of feet above the ground—a notion that made him gulp with alarm when Jamie Allan, the charity’s organiser, explained it over the phone. Still, he had to put a brave face on it. It was a good idea. If only they could get enough people in the village to agree to jump and sign up lots and lots of sponsors.

  Often, particularly when matters were trivial, the members of the PCC would split into two violently opposing camps, emotions would run high, and opinions would fall either side of an imagined Maginot Line. Tom would feel his face stiffening into a mask of benevolent exasperation and the matter would be deferred until the next meeting when some subcommittee, str
uck in the heat of the moment, would report. At least the church roof engendered little controversy. The last quinquennial report had stated baldly that the roof of St. Nicholas’s was in bad nick and had to be repaired and no argument, lest they want rainwater dripping on their heads in the middle of Communion. There was none. The only argument was how it would be afforded. The cost, according to the estimate, pressed one hundred thousand pounds. Applications had been made for grants from English Heritage and the National Churches Trust, but the rest of the money they would have to find on their own. There were the usual stratagems—the bring-and-buy, the coffee mornings, the carboot sales, the jumble sales, the May Fayre—and all had been scheduled for the forthcoming months, but a sponsored parachuting looked a novelty that would draw more people, particularly younger ones, perhaps garner some publicity, and generally make a fun day of it for Thornfordites. Something about the spectacle of it persuaded them, at least all who made it to the PCC meeting. Only Karla demurred from this new scheme, which surprised Tom not a whit. Defending the traditions of the village, including its fund-raising customs, was Karla’s bailiwick. Jumping from airplanes wasn’t one of them.

  “Then what is the role of the … what are they called?”

  “The Leaping Lords,” Tom supplied.

  Karla clicked her tongue in dismay. “What is their role in this?” She replaced her spectacles on the bridge of her nose. “And are they life peers or hereditary peers? Some of the life peers are the worst sort. Trades union hacks and so forth.”

  “They’ll have their own sponsors, of course, and they put on a show—formations in the sky and suchlike.” Tom answered the first question first. “I’m not sure how they achieved their titles.” Can it possibly matter?

  “I trust none of the Lords Spiritual are engaged in such foolishness.”

  Tom couldn’t help his mind’s eye witnessing Bishop Tim hurtling through the air, one hand steadying his mitre, the other holding down his cassock. A smile teased at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It would be rather fun, I think.”

  Karla peered at him disapprovingly, then grumped, “Well, I can see I’m outvoted on this. Mr. Chairman,” she continued—she insisted on addressing him thus at PCC meetings—“I would move that we erect a thermometer at the north porch so those coming to services can see how much money is being raised—however we raise it,” she added sourly.

  “No!” The word was out of Tom’s mouth before he could think.

  “No?” Karla raised an inquisitorial eyebrow.

  All the reasons why setting a twelve-foot tongue of plywood up the side of St. Nicholas’s with an upturned red plastic bowl for a reservoir, guttering up the middle for a capillary tube, and gradations calibrated in thousands of pounds up the side was not acceptable frog-marched through Tom’s cerebrum: They looked bloody hideous; they attracted vandals; and they soon became an object of derision, particularly when fund-raising optimism went pear-shaped, as it sometimes did, and red paint no more climbed the capillary. Thermometers were sad. They were boring. And he wasn’t having it. But he feared it was the very trivial issue that would bog down the meeting.

  “Insurance,” he declared impulsively, pulling a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat. “We’d have to insure it—the thermometer.”

  “Why?” Karla frowned.

  “Theft, fire, termites—”

  “Don’t be silly, Mr. Chairman. We don’t have termites in England.”

  “Yes we do,” Fred interjected, picking the raisins out of his biscuit. “Lady had ’em in North Devon a while back. Ate her entire porch.”

  “I suppose,” Mark reflected, “if fund-raising is our goal, then perhaps we best not be spending money unnecessarily. There would be cost for wood, paint—”

  “But insurance?” Karla fumed.

  “I can look into it,” Mark offered.

  “I’d suggest,” Roger said between bites of his biscuit, “we defer this to our next meeting. We don’t have quite a full complement here tonight, so we might want to have other views before we proceed. Besides, should we be fortunate to get money from English Heritage or the like, then we could start the thermometer off with a super-high temperature, couldn’t we?”

  Mercifully, after some mutterings yea or nay, that held the day. Tom said a silent prayer of gratitude for things deferred, and thought as he glanced around the table: They aren’t such a bad lot, really. A charity parachute jump took a bit of chivvying, but they all came around in the end, save for Karla, and most of them—very surprisingly—were willing to at least entertain the notion of leaping from an airplane themselves, if it served the church’s needs—though on a winter’s eve, nestled in the Old School Room, the summer looked a long way off, and perhaps they all wanted to appear enormously plucky, he among them, even if they weren’t.

  Unbidden, a vision of himself plunging into the cold air from the door of an airplane flashed like a diamond in his brain, and he took a sudden gulp of air. Briony flicked a glance at him, smiled, and resumed her merry typing. Indeed Briony’s fingers never seemed to leave the keyboard, and he wondered if she minuted absolutely everything—Vicar takes sharp breath—and only hacked and pruned later. As she couldn’t enter his thoughts, she couldn’t write, Vicar notes room is faintly redolent of last occupants, which his nose told him it was. In good weather, on weekday mornings when it was used as a crèche, the Old School Room might smell of little children, of milk and sun-warmed hair; in bad weather, on weekend afternoons, when it was used for meetings of the camera club or the chess club, it might smell of damp wool, dogs, and an illicit cigarette or two. This evening, the Old School Room’s aroma hinted of glue and microwaved popcorn and talcum powder. Scrapbooking, the art of preserving family history in a scrapbook, had lately caught the fancy of some villagers, and the Thornford Scrappers, as they called themselves, commandeered the Old School Room one afternoon a month for their cutting and pasting and drawing. The detritus of their activity rested by a dangerous-looking paper trimmer on a table by the wall over which was placed a DO NOT REMOVE! sign: scissors, pens, rubber stamps, stencils, inking tools, and various kinds and colours of papers and card stock. It was the last items that recalled Tom’s mind to the morning’s encounter with Victor Kaif and that sheaf of lavender paper, a stain against the white snow of the memorial garden.

  It was, he was certain, precisely the colour of the note Madrun had received asking her to contribute berry tartlets to the Burns Supper. After their conversation in her rooms, she had gone for her coat hanging in the vestibule and found it; she had indeed used the back of it as a grocery list.

  The coincidence of colours was, at the very least, a bit startling. Still, he thought, turning to view again the papers on the table of the Old School Room, the lavender might be a stock colour, one that the Thornford Scrappers, too, would count among their items.

  He thought back to his encounter with Victor. He had left the Daintreys with a wisp of suspicion about Will’s death clinging like a vapour trail to his more ordinary ruminations—his overdue contributions to the next issue of the parish magazine, his Sunday sermon, writing the service sheets, preparation for the PCC meeting, pastoral visits to come. Bother Florence Daintrey—again!—for putting cheerless thoughts in his head. It was a small matter, surely, this inviting Madrun to contribute a sweet to the Burns Supper. It was someone’s whim, an off chance, the note composed in haste, the signature forgotten, and quickly popped through the vicarage’s letter slot on a flying visit in the midst of other quotidian tasks.

  But was it Victor’s whim? The coloured paper suggested it might be so. But Victor didn’t strike him as a man who would trouble himself with the minutiae of a banquet menu, particularly when he wasn’t charged with its planning.

  And now, as the PCC members shuffled to the next item on the agenda, he wondered if he should have asked Victor if he had requested berry tartlets from Madrun. The bush telegraph was swift, but it wasn’t always thorough: Nothing in Vi
ctor’s manner or conversation suggested that word of Madrun’s folly had come his way. If he introduced it, referencing the stationery and its distinctive colour, mightn’t he seem accusatory, particularly if Victor queried why he was asking? And would it have been effective? Victor could simply have lied.

  Tom sighed. He was feeling a bit ineffective, helpless before the unhappiness that had slipped into his household. Madrun wore a brave face, but her conversation—usually voluble and opinionated—had fallen to low ebb at breakfast and at lunch, soliciting enquiring glances from Miranda. When he returned to the vicarage after his visit to the Daintreys, he had asked to look again at the unsigned note she had received and was troubled to see what hadn’t met his eyes the first time he’d looked at it.

  Then, the text alone had held his attention. Now it was the paper itself. The colour appeared to be the same as Victor’s stationery, yes, but could he really trust his colour memory? Soon after he and Lisbeth arrived in Bristol, in a flurry of new-home excitement, they had repainted their bathroom. It had been an ancient shade of turquoise, peeling badly, and Miranda, at age three, was wont to put paint flakes in her mouth. But the new light, creamy neutral—called, bizarrely, “Oak Smoke”—that dried on the walls was not, in Lisbeth’s insistence, the same as the Oak Smoke promised by the paint chart. He, splattered and weary, couldn’t see the difference—it looked sort of beigy, neutrally, whatever—until Lisbeth fetched the chart. The difference was subtle, but enough to dissatisfy his perspicacious wife. Back to the paint shop they trotted.

  The more troubling aspect of the mystery note, however, began with its dimensions. The paper had the width of standard commercial bond, but not the height. A portion, a top piece—or perhaps a bottom—had been trimmed, most likely by someone scoring the paper against a sharp edge, a ruler perhaps. The effect was not crude: The edge wasn’t ragged, but neither was it crisp, as it would be if cut by machine—or even by a paper trimmer like the one on the Old School Room shelf. Was the sheet a bit of old discard? he wondered. Or—more worrying—had a strip of it deliberately been removed? The portion, say, with the printed letterhead?