Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Poison?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose.” Tom sighed. Mark’s imagination didn’t really seem to fly above the already at-hand, such as Saturday’s tragedy. “Motive?”

  “Let’s think. Money. That’s always a good one, isn’t it? Say, a wife kills her husband to get her hands on all the insurance money.”

  Tom flicked Mark a sharp glance. Was this at-hand, too? “What brought that to mind?”

  Mark seemed to stare through him. Slowly, a rising crimson tide seeped into his face. “I must have seen it in a film.”

  “Which film?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  Tom turned back to this task. “Well, it’s none of my concern.”

  “You think I didn’t make that up?”

  Tom shrugged. He didn’t wish to hurt Mark’s feelings, but none of his ideas so far would handily illustrate a dictionary definition of sui generis.

  “I didn’t mean to suggest …,” Mark began awkwardly, then stopped. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “And it never occurred to me until a moment ago …”

  “What didn’t occur to you?”

  “And it’s probably nothing anyway. I’m sure it’s nothing—absolutely nothing.”

  “Well, then—”

  “Tom, I know you’re the soul of discretion, so I say this knowing you’d never say a word to anyone, but the thing is—gosh, I feel awful saying this—Will purchased some additional life insurance—for quite a sum—not that long ago.”

  “How would you come to know that?”

  Mark grimaced. “Someone told me. An insurance broker. You know the building I work in …?”

  Tom did. It was a three-storey, Wedgewood-blue structure in the High Street in Totnes, knocked together from two former eighteenth-century merchants’ houses. Tucker, Tucker & Tucker occupied the ground floor, and he knew a dance studio occupied the top. Who was piggy in the middle suffering the noise of tapping feet, he didn’t know. Mark told him: It was the Mayhew Group, a firm of insurance agents.

  “But ought insurance people to be so indiscreet?”

  “No, never. Well, hardly ever. But Elk—Elkanah—Mayhew is a good mate of mine; went to uni together, and he’s a piper with the Thistle But Mostly Rose. You would have met him Saturday if the weather hadn’t been so awful. Anyway, I’d run up to fetch him for a Spinning class before—”

  “Spinning?”

  “Indoor cycling. We go a couple of times a week before lunch. Anyway, Elk was just showing Will out the door. I guess I was a bit surprised to see Will there. Elk told me after, I expect because he was rather surprised that Will had taken out a policy for such a large sum.”

  “For what sum?” Tom couldn’t help asking.

  “Half a million pounds.”

  The Vicarage

  Thornford Regis TC9 6QX

  15 JANUARY

  Dear Mum,

  It was lovely to get your note yesterday. It quite bucked me up. Mr. Christmas is quite adaman sure I have nothing to worry about really. The inquest opens in the v. hall later this morning, but Mr. C says there is no reason for me to attend, as he is sure it will be only a preliminary sort of thing and likely won’t last half an hour. I was quite relieved by this, but when I went to the post office yesterday, Karla said of course it’s only preliminary as the coronorer will be wanting the police to get on with their enquiries and that they’ll reconvene later once they know a thing or two. They’re going to treat it as a suspicious death, she said, and I wish she hadn’t used those exact words. Having our good Prowse name attached to a “suspicious death” makes me feel very downcast. Jago was peevish with me yesterday on the phone wondering why I don’t just buy my soft fruit at Sainsbury’s or Morrisons or even Pattimore’s like everyone else, which of course I do! But I can’t abide the waste of all the local edable edible wild foods. Besides it was Dad who started me on this when he showed me his secret spot to find morels all those years ago—you know where it is, but I daren’t write it down lest someone besides you and Aunt Gwen should read this letter! How Mr. James-Douglas loved my braised chicken with morels and leeks! Anyway, Kerra must have heard Jago carrying on on the phone, so she came around to the vicarage yesterday for a visit and we had a nice cup of tea in the kitchen. Will Moir’s death has shaken her too, I’m sure, and I worry that she is blaming herself for what happened, as she was serving the meal. I asked Kerra if Molly said anything about the pastries I sent over with Mr. Christmas that night, as I can’t think who might have sent me that note and Molly seems likely as she was the cook for the Burns Supper, but Kerra said both of them were so run off their feet that they hardly talked about anything other than getting the foot food served. I asked who laid out my tartlets and Kerra said Molly put one tartlet on each plate with the cranachan, but because only half the Thistle But Mostly Rose reached the hotel in the storm, she put the leftovers on a silver platter, which Kerra put on the table if the men wanted extras. I must admit Kerra and I looked at each other and she wondered out loud if Molly might have tampered with the tartlets, as she is an odd sort of woman, really, and her husband is a homo homeopath and they use all sorts of poisons, but she has had terrible troubles lately with her son’s death and all so I really shouldn’t say this, but then neither of us could reckon how the wrong tartlet would have got into Will Moir’s hands. Molly didn’t tell Kerra to put THIS plate in front of THAT man and when she put the platter down on the table as nice as you please, Molly didn’t say, turn it this way or that way so that a particular tartlet would be near Will’s hand. We are both very puzzled. I’m sorry her first experience serving at Thorn Court went poorly. I thought once it was renovated, it would be a much smarter place for Kerra to work part-time than at the Waterside, although if Nick Stanhope is set to hang about the hotel as he seems to be doing these days, then maybe it won’t be. Kerra said Nick took a liberty with her right in front of her father that night, which Jago was not best pleased about, but then Nick had the cheek to try it on again with her when she came upon him in the serving pantry. You mustn’t worry, Mum. Kerra has a strong will like her father and won’t put with that sort of malarkey. She’s up to her orange belt in karate, she told me, and I think Nick Stanhope felt the benefit of it that night! Serves him right. He’s one of those men who thinks he’s God’s gift and wants taking down a peg or two. Chip off the old block, says our houseguest, Judith, who knew Clive Stanhope when she was young, as the Frosts worked for the Stanhopes, as you remember, of course. My memories of Clive Stanhope are after he’d married that very nice Dorothy Lindsay and they’d had Caroline. Then there was some scandal about some other woman—can you remember her name? I can’t—which sent them off to Australia for a “fresh start”? I think Clive’s father died around the same time. Maybe Karla remembers. I shall ask her when I take this letter to post. Anyway, I was going to say, when I was at the post office yesterday and Karla was going on about Will’s death being “suspicious,” Enid Pattimore came in through the door, took one look at me, and went back out again, as if I were Typhoid Mary. Mum, I wouldn’t say this to anybody else, but I was very hurt, though of course I didn’t show it. I can’t think the last time I felt so cut by someone. Enid has always bought my pastries at the May Fayre and the bring-and-buy bake sale and has eaten them at the Harvest Festival and all those times when Mr. James-Douglas was incumbent, she came with Roger to Sunday lunch at the vicarage, which I cooked! Karla said to pay her no mind as it’s just her hippocon hypocon being so fixated on her health, Enid that is, and getting worse. I suppose I shouldn’t have talked about my worries about the yewberries with Judith, but she could see I wasn’t my usual self after my conversation with Mr. C, so I couldn’t really NOT tell her, could I, Mum? Nice to have someone in the house who likes a good natter. I do miss Mr. J-D sometimes! Maybe Judith thought Florence Daintrey would keep it to herself, but she hasn’t seen Florence in more than 40 years so she doesn’t know what a cow she can be! Or maybe she forgot what
village life is like. Anyway, Mr. C wasn’t quite his usual sympathetic self when he returned from visiting the Daintreys on Tuesday. Hoisted on your own petard, he said to me, or something to that effect, which I thought was a bit unfair as some of the talk I’ve heard in the village has been useful to him in the past! He did relent and say it would all come out anyway, what with this inquest and all. Still, to be cut by one of my oldest friends! Anyway, and you’ll be proud of me, Mum, after a few moments to gather my wits, I marched right across the road to Pattimore’s to give Enid a piece of my mind, but she had shot upstairs and there was only Roger in the shop and he wasn’t going to have his mother troubled. I did get out of him, though, that it wasn’t he him he who sent me the note asking for some baking for the Burns Supper. He said the first he’d learned of it was when he and Mr. Christmas were walking up Pennycross to the hotel last Saturday. I asked him who was on the pipe band’s menu-planning committee and he looked at me like I was mad. Of course, being men, they never think of these things. Apparently, at a band practice in November, someone said what do you fancy for your Burns Supper? and Nick Stanhope plumped for curry and they all agreed. I don’t know why they didn’t simply hire a private room at an Indian restaurant in Torquay, if it’s curry they wanted, but Will had said they could have Thorn Court, and I suppose Molly was the logical choice as chef. My experience is most everybody loves curry, but no one much cooks it, not properly, unless they’re Indian, or like Molly who went a bit native when she married Victor who really isn’t very Indian at all. They might have asked me as I make a very good curry now. Mr. J-D never cared for it, but after Mr. C moaned on a bit a few months back how he hadn’t had curry in ages, I dug out the Madhur Jaffrey I’d bought at a book stall at the May Fayre years ago, and made a prawn berroni biran and rice dish, which he loved. Anyway, best I didn’t do the curry for the Burns Supper as who knows what people would be saying about me now! Well, I mustn’t dwell on this, must I. Worse things happen at sea, as Dad used to say. I’m so glad the weather is warming. The snow has made a good start at melting and Miranda’s snowman in the back garden looks a bit past caring. No banana frown now! Bumble snatched it off the ground and thought it a great treat, though I’m not sure if bananas are suited to dogs. The good news is that the Wassail is going ahead after all Saturday. Miranda says now they can start making their lanterns for the lantern procession! Well, I should wrap this up, as there is breakfast to get on with, as usual. I think Judith is staying on with us a few more days, though the roads have been passable enough that a detective constable from town was able to get through to take a statement from Judith, as she was the first to find Will’s body. Also, an estate agent from Leitchfield Turner is coming from Totnes tomorrow to show her the Tidy Dolly, which she is thinking of buying, but I’m not sure how keen she really is. If you’re retired with a bit of money, why not just buy a cottage in the village, put your feet up, and smell the roses? I asked. I like to keep busy, Judith said, which I understand as I do too. And she has been busy, walking about the village, fetching her car from Thorn Court and driving around the countryside, and she’s been busy on Mr. Christmas’s computer, too, so I think she’s trying to see if Thornford is the sort of place she’d like to stop in, life being circular, ending up in the place you started—a bit like you, Mum! Since she lost her husband a few months back from Parkinson’s, which must have been very hard, she must still be in a bit of a state. Must go. The cats are pleased that the snow is melting, as am I. We are all as well here as can be hoped at the moment. I will be very glad when this day is over, but I hope yours is good. Love to Aunt Gwen.

  Much love,

  Madrun

  P.S. At least the weather won’t keep Karla and me from Tenerife, but now I’m worried this inquest will!

  P.P.S. Letitia Woolnough rides a mobility scooter, by the way. It’s a very distinguished black and it looks quite smart I think.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bloody hell, what did she do? Stuff those flaming pastries with whatever that poison is?” Nick struck a match against the wall of the village hall.

  “Taxine,” Mark supplied brightly.

  “You watch it, mate.” Jago leaned towards Nick, fists clenched. “That’s my sister you’re talking about. And she didn’t bloody stuff anything with bloody anything. Who’s to say you didn’t stuff them with something? You kept going out for a pee.”

  “Get your own self stuffed, Jago.” Nick flicked the match into a patch of snow. “If I wanted to kill a bloke, I wouldn’t waste my time fucking about with poison.”

  “You bloody would, too, if you thought it would work.”

  “Gentlemen,” Tom snapped before Nick opened his mouth to retort. “Enough! This is serious. Will’s death is being treated as suspicious. The coroner said as much not five minutes ago.”

  Everyone stopped and flicked him a cheerless glance, then looked away. With the preliminary hearing of the inquest into Will Moir’s death completed, there was no compelling reason to stand about in the frosty air made acrid with the smell of Nick’s cigarette smoke, yet none of the representative members of the Thistle But Mostly Rose seemed inclined to dash away to resume the rhythms of his day. For Tom, at least, the inconclusiveness of the morning’s proceedings brought little surprise; it was the finer points of the testimony that left him disturbed and confounded—and, if truth be told, somewhat relieved.

  He had arrived early to find Joyce Pike, the village hall custodian, struggling to unfold the ancient trestle table by herself. Silently—as Joyce was little given to conversation—he lent a hand, setting out the old wooden folding chairs so that the smaller of the building’s two rooms resembled a court. Roger Pattimore, who had left his shop in the incapable hands of his mother, joined him in the task, but, as it happened, they underestimated the need for seating and by the time the coroner arrived, some ten minutes late and without apology, a number of villagers had only the back wall to lend their frames support. The air was thick with curiosity, but it was a curiosity left unsatisfied. The coroner, a well-upholstered woman with grey hair swept into a French twist and dark eyes behind wire-frame spectacles, moved briskly and with little formality through the proceedings, as though a much more attractive option—an early luncheon at the Ritz, perhaps—was in the offing. She acknowledged statements taken by police from Judith Ingley, witness to the death of the deceased, and from Adam Moir, who had made the official identification of his father’s body at the morgue. What arrested Tom in the recitation of details to establish the facts of Will’s death was the pathologist’s evidence. The pathologist herself was fetching—svelte frame encased in a smart black two-piece suit, honey-blond hair falling over her shoulders—but Tom lent her his ears rather than his eyes.

  According to cardiac blood samples taken at the time of autopsy, Will died of acute taxine poisoning after ingesting an unknown quantity of plant material of Taxus baccata, the Latinate name for the yew. What the pathologist found more compelling and quite unusual was the evidence provided by an examination of the contents of Will’s stomach. Though very few cases in her career had featured taxine poisoning, all had yielded up observable quantities of yew leaves or seeds in the stomach and duodenum. In Will’s stomach, however, the yew residue was not detectable except by microscopic analysis, indicating that the taxine had been delivered to his system in finely fragmented form—crushed into particles or possibly mashed into a pulp. The poisonous plant material, she said, looking up from her notes for the first time and flicking a glance at the coroner, had been “pre-extracted.” The word seemed faintly elliptical and a moment passed before its meaning—that the plant material had been processed—registered, but when it did, when most realised a deliberating intelligence, not bloody bad luck, lay behind Will’s death, a small frisson of horror, like a jolt of electricity, passed through the room. But before anyone could even let out an involuntary gasp, the pathologist moved quickly to a generalisation with terrible implications: The decisive role in the proces
s of poisoning was the form of ingestion. Yew leaves or seeds or bark by themselves brought a slower toxin release than pre-extracted plant material. The latter ensured that survival after poisoning was relatively unlikely and that death was relatively quick.

  “Bless,” Roger said, breaking the silence, “I can’t wrap my head around it. I know the coroner’s role is only to establish the cause of death, right? But if I understood what I heard, it means that someone at the Burns Supper deliberately poisoned Will. Yes?”

  “I can’t think it’s anything else.” Tom whispered a prayer.

  After the pathologist’s evidence was heard, the coroner adjourned the inquest for the police to make further enquiries. But for the final civilities, the hearing had taken all of twenty minutes.

  “Metric still foxes me.” Roger lowered his voice, glancing at Nick, who had moved away to finish his cigarette. “That pathologist went on about … what was it?”

  “Grams per kilogram of body weight,” Mark supplied. “In Will’s case, then …” He frowned in thought. “… A lethal dose would be between … fifty and a hundred grams of taxine.”

  “Which is what in imperial?”

  “Oh, somewhere between two and four ounces.”

  “Bless, that seems like a lot! Sorry, Tom, you’re thinking me callous.”

  “No.” In truth, the conversation was a little disconcerting, but Mark’s calculations proved illuminating. Surely one of Madrun’s pastries weighed no more, and most likely less, and surely now no question lingered over her culpability in this tragic death.

  “Although someone else could have added the taxine to the tartlets after they arrived at Thorn Court.” Mark directed the remark to Tom.