Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “The important part was that you were able to forgive each other, yes?” Tom asked Caroline.

  She nodded.

  “And you were happy in your marriage? You always seemed happy. Many have remarked to me what a loving couple you always appeared.”

  “Yes.” Caroline blinked, her eyes glistening. “Yes, we were happy.”

  “Then that’s all that matters.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Paying a pastoral visit, Vicar?”

  “Not really. I’m returning this.” Tom pulled a small torch from his jacket pocket to show to DI Bliss. “Molly’s daughter must have left it at our place last weekend. My housekeeper found it rolled under the sofa this morning.”

  “Pity. I think you’ll find that Mrs. Kaif is in want of a pastoral visit, or something along that line.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Welcome to our world.”

  “I’m not sure that enlightens.”

  “Mrs. Kaif has confessed to poisoning Will Moir.”

  “What! But how … then why …” Tom stumbled over his words. He glanced sharply at Damara Cottage, past the arresting swirl of colour, flowers, and doodles emblazoned on the cob exterior to the front window where Molly Kaif stood, the pulled-back curtain in her hand.

  “If you’re asking why we aren’t escorting her to Totnes station to further help us with our enquiries, all I can say is, we’re giving it a bloody good think. A quick resolution to Mr. Moir’s untimely death would certainly make our lives easier. Then we could get back to the important work of tracking down lead-roof thieves.”

  “Are you sure you should be telling me this?”

  “That we are telling you this is an indication of how seriously we’re taking Mrs. Kaif’s confession.”

  “I’m detecting equivocation.”

  Bliss grunted ambiguously. “Coppers we may be, but we do know Mrs. Kaif has been in some distress since the death of her son. On the other hand—”

  “On the other hand, motive, means, and opportunity,” Blessing interrupted grimly.

  Tom looked from one to the other. “Do I understand you two to have divergent views?”

  “We are as of one mind, are we not, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And of course, Vicar, we rely utterly, as always, on your complete discretion.”

  Tom watched them retreat to their car, tucked next to the gate to Damara Cottage, wondering a little at Bliss’s candour, chattiness, and, possibly, compassion. Perhaps his bowels were in decent running order this morning.

  “And a word of warning, Vicar.” Bliss turned as he fit his key into the car lock.

  “Yes?”

  “Avoid the tea.”

  “Tea, Vicar?” Molly led him down the corridor to the kitchen, which, unlike Damara Cottage’s riotous exterior (censured by the parish council for insensitive use of masonry paint colours), exercised a little decorative restraint. He had intended only to hand over Becca’s torch, but his hostess had seemed intent on having him in, going so far as to take his hand and almost pull him over the doorsill.

  “Well …”

  “I brewed it for my two … visitors. It isn’t fully steeped, if you’re wondering. It benefits from a long stew.”

  “Then I guess a cup wouldn’t go amiss.”

  Tom watched her lift the cosy, knitted patchwork with an orange bobble top, from a large grey earthenware teapot on the kitchen sideboard, which was painted a bright sunshine yellow. The kitchen walls, he noted, as they blazed against his retinas, were tomato red, the cabinetry sky blue, and the slate floor a mossy green, giving the space a peculiar fun-house feel. Molly, dressed in Sunday’s rust jeans, a paisley shawl tossed over a black turtleneck, seemed taut, almost vibrating, as if barely able to contain some neat little triumph. The teapot shook as she lifted it and poured the liquid, which was as grey as its container, into a mug emblazoned with a stylised lion she had chosen from a wooden tree.

  “You’re a Leo, yes?” She frowned, handing him his tea.

  Tom’s mind pinged about for a confused second or two. “Oh, you mean astrologically. How did you know?”

  “I put out a call to the universe.”

  “Ah! Well, the universe answered correctly.” Tom raised the mug and was assaulted by the aroma rising with the steam. “Good that the universe is so forthcoming.” He let the mug hover before his lips. “I pray to God daily, but find the line is often engaged. Still—” He gulped as the edge of the mug hit his lips. “—I don’t give up. Goodness!” The hot liquid thrashed against his startled taste buds. “That’s … different.”

  His kidneys had had thorough flushings of tea in his time, in church halls and at parishioners’ homes, at meetings of the Afternoon Club, Friendship Club, Garden Club, Art Club, Mothers’ Union, and Women’s Institute, in hospital waiting rooms and at funeral receptions. He had drunk black tea and green tea and white tea, and concoctions of herbs and grains and flowers and fruit, but never anything quite like this. The taste was compounded of damp grass, prawn casings, and iron filings with boiled liver notes and a dishwater finish. Nasty, in a word. The very haggis of teas.

  “It’s rhubarb-celeriac-barley infusion. It’s good for digestion. I brewed it for Detective Inspector Bliss, though he had very little. I can tell he has some sort of elimination trouble.”

  “Really?” Tom replied noncommittally, wondering if DI Bliss’s irritable bowel was public knowledge or if Molly indeed had an intuitive sense of others’ well-being, born perhaps of having naturopaths for parents or a homeopath for a husband. (Or—the horrible thought dashed across his mind—was Bliss slumped dead on the dashboard of his car at this very minute?)

  “I saw you talking with them.”

  “Bliss and Blessing? Yes, I do seem to run into them now and again, hither and yon.”

  She pushed her curtain of red hair over her shoulder and gave her head a finishing shake. “Come through to the dining room. I’m nearly done with the crowns.”

  “Crowns?” Carrying his tea, Tom followed her to a room dominated by a round kaleidoscopic mural with mythical creatures that seemed to be feasting on the gap that was the fireplace.

  “For the Wassail. For the king and queen.”

  “You mean the Wassail crowns aren’t permanent fixtures, like the ones in the Tower?” He glanced from the startling artwork to two golden cardboard circlets set amid an untidiness of crafts materials on a large round table, each with neatly trimmed cross pattées and fleurs-de-lis.

  “The kids like to keep theirs, so we make new ones each year. Or someone does. My turn this year on the mothers’ rota.” Molly reached into a mound of greenery so glossy it could only be plastic, plucked out a seemingly endless strand of ivy, and wrapped it around the base of one of the crowns. As she took up her scissors, Tom noted the crown’s interior, lined with paper of another colour. It’s that same bloody variant of purple, he thought, watching Molly as she snipped the vine to fit. He looked at her concentrating on her task fastening the vine with dabs of glue, wondering if the two detectives had interviewed her in this room. He could only presume they hadn’t—or were colour-blind.

  “My Harry was Wassail king four years ago.” Molly replaced the glue bottle on the table. “The picture’s on the sideboard. Have a look, if you like.”

  Tom spotted the photo amid a nest of framed pictures. “Is that Amber Sherwill?” he asked, parking his mug of tea to lift the photo and examine it.

  “Yes. She was queen that year.”

  Amber had been in Tom’s confirmation class the previous spring, and he had despaired of her evident boredom and garbled syntax. But at Harry’s funeral in September, she had somehow cast off her chavvy mien and spoken of her friendship with the dead boy with surprising eloquence. He looked at their sweet young faces under crowns not unlike the ones Molly was finishing, their cheeks blushed with cold, glowing in the golden light of a lantern in Harry’s hand. Amber’s eyes gazed slightly askance at
the jug of cider in her hand, the sacrament of the Wassail, but Harry was captured in a moment of tender regard for his friend, startlingly almost the expression of a lover, if they had been of the age of lovers, in a last year before the agonies of adolescence would begin. Harry looked most like his mother, twinkle-nosed and small-chinned, though with his father’s deep brown, watchful eyes. His was an elfin face, and it remained so; he was not blooming to manhood in the few months Tom was acquainted with him, the way Amber, though a year younger, was to womanhood with a plurality of curves.

  Tom looked past the frame to see Molly studying him. In her eyes, he saw a mixture of entreaty and pain, but, more disconcerting, a flash of defiance. “He was a beautiful little boy” was all he could think to say, suddenly pierced by the thought of Miranda spoken of in the past tense.

  “He liked to dress up in those days.” Molly snatched the frame from him. “Capes, hats, robes, costumes.” She frowned. “By the way,” she said, gesturing impatiently to his untouched tea, “did they tell you I poisoned Will? Those detectives?” As he dutifully lifted the mug to his lips, she continued, “Well, I did.”

  Tom allowed a little time to pass. “Molly,” he responded after a tentative sip and passing thought to pouring it onto the plants in the window, “you must know that’s not wise. They could take you at your word and charge you. Or at the very least they could have you for wasting police time.”

  Molly made a dismissive noise through her nose as she snipped another length of plastic ivy. “Shall I tell you how I did it?”

  “Did you tell the detectives how you did it?”

  “Tweedlebliss and Tweedleblessing? No, I didn’t tell them. I told them they would have to figure it out for themselves and when they did—if they can!—they could come and handcuff me or whatever it is they do.” She flashed him an oddly coquettish smile. “I might tell you, though.”

  “Molly, if you tell me, then I’m duty-bound to go to the police. Will’s death can’t go unpunished.”

  “Oh, can’t it!” Molly’s voice rose as she slapped the scissors onto the table next to the photograph. “Well, Harry’s death went unpunished, didn’t it. Didn’t it!”

  “Molly, don’t you think perhaps you’re trying to punish yourself?”

  “That’s what Celia says.”

  “Yes, you said you’d been seeing Celia.”

  “She’s very kindly been giving me the benefit of her wisdom. She thinks I may be engaging in unwise strategies. I think strategies was the word.” Molly trailed the length of ivy around the crown.

  “But mightn’t bear-baiting Detectives Bliss and Blessing be an unwise strategy?”

  “It’s not unwise if it’s true.”

  “But it’s not true.”

  “Well! Then perhaps I won’t tell you how I did it.”

  “Yes, please don’t.”

  “But you’re a priest. Don’t you have to listen to me?”

  “No. I do not, Molly. I would only hear your confession under certain conditions, and one of those conditions would be that you go to the police. Anyway, I don’t believe you poisoned Will.”

  “Why not? I’ve the best motive in the village. I’m sure half of everybody thinks I did it anyway, poor mad Molly. Why wouldn’t they think such a thing? I cooked the meal. As soon as Victor said the Thistle But Mostly Rose craved curry, I thought, this is my chance to avenge the death of my sweet little boy.”

  “Then, Molly, you’re telling me pretending not to tell me. You’re being perfectly obvious. You tampered with the curry.”

  “Perhaps I did. It’s the perfect food to disguise a poison, don’t you think? So hot and spicy. Or I might have put it in the cranachan, with those sweet berries, or even the haggis—”

  “But you didn’t serve any of the food. Kerra did.”

  “Untrue. I helped serve the curry.”

  Tom was jolted by the memory. “So you did. But, but,” he added, “Kerra served Will. How could you possibly ensure that Kerra would serve Will a poisoned dish of anything?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the genius of my scheme, isn’t it? That’s what those clever dicks will have to discover for themselves. Not that they’ll ever be able to—”

  “Molly, you’re talking nonsense—and you’re courting disaster. You have a husband and a child to think about.”

  “Oh, Vic doesn’t care. He’d like to be shot of me, I expect.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. But Becca certainly needs you. You’re her mother.”

  Molly grew silent. He was dismayed at having to remind someone of the feelings of others, especially loved ones; he recalled Miranda saying Molly often forgot to fetch Becca from her piano lessons outside of the village. He looked past Molly’s shoulder out the window into the Kaifs’ back garden, brown and bare in the January light, towards the property’s border, a yew hedge, and wondered if it were possible. Might she have done this horrible, foolish thing after all? By making a claim so outrageous, one that she believed people—even the police—would dismiss, was she diverting attention from her genuine offence?

  “Molly,” he began, setting the tea down, “you might also have put the poison in Mrs. Prowse’s yewberry tartlets, mightn’t you?”

  “Yes, I might have.”

  “In fact, the tartlets were ideal, as everyone would think Mrs. Prowse’s pastries would be to blame.”

  “Well, I thought it might be a useful little diversionary tactic.” Molly smiled conspiratorially.

  “And did you not think how this might alarm Mrs. Prowse? I know she puts on a brave face, but I think she feels as though half the village regards her with some misgiving. And do you not see how unfair it was to draw her into this? She had no animosity towards Will Moir.”

  Molly remained silent a moment, her mouth a thin, unhappy slit. “Well, actually”—she pushed back her hair with an impatient gesture—“I didn’t ask Madrun to send over any of her sodding tartlets. I don’t know why they were there. Roger handed them to me while I was simmering the haggis. I thought I might as well put them out on the plates with the cranachan, since we didn’t have shortbread or the like. Berry tartlets with cranachan seemed a bit redundant, but …”

  “You’re sure you didn’t ask Madrun to contribute some of her baking?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Tom stared at her profile. She looked down, fiddling with the ivy around the second crown. He had no idea if or when she was lying. But there was one way to find out, though he would have to disclose information known only to him, Madrun, the police, and—oh, surely—Will’s killer.

  “I ask,” he said, “because Mrs. Prowse received an unsigned note last week asking her to send some of her yewberry pastries to Thorn Court for the Burns Supper.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was written on paper the same colour as the one you used to line those two crowns.”

  Molly blinked, first with consternation, then with dawning apprehension. “But Victor brought that paper home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tom? Vicar?”

  Tom focused on the face in front of him, at the red fox-tail eyebrows in interrogatory lift, at the large, ruddy face with its anchoring goatee, a pruning of his former full beard, streaked with incipient hairs of white.

  “Yes?”

  “Down a rabbit hole, were you?” Eric Swan, the Church House Inn’s licensee, regarded him askance. “I was wondering if it were the usual you were after.”

  The notion of a large brandy flitted through Tom’s mind, but as the sight of the parish priest pouring spirits down his throat middayish might spark undue prattle in the village, he gave Eric an assenting nod to a libation more modest and predictable. He had indeed been down a rabbit hole, of sorts, having left Damara Cottage, thinking, as Alice had, that it would be so nice if something made sense for a change. Molly’s confession was surely nonsense, the outburst of an angry, grieving, attention-seeking woman. Even the police seemed unwilling to countenance this, at
least for the time being. But was Molly adept at some sort of double bluff?

  “Busy day?” he asked, hoping for the distraction of ordinary conversation as Eric placed a half of Vicar’s Ruin in front of him.

  “Well, might be busier if we had another natural disaster.”

  “Instead of a human one?”

  “Will’s death’s still testing your mettle, I see. At least,” Eric continued, pulling a folded newspaper from below the bar and twisting it round in front of Tom with a flourish, “it’s only getting local notice.” He plunked a pudgy finger onto the relevant column. “Not that Will wouldn’t deserve national attention, of course.”

  Tom favoured Eric with a censorious lift of eyebrow. The murder in the spring of Sybella Parry, the nineteen-year-old daughter of St. Nicholas’s choirmaster, Colm Parry, had attracted the national press in part because the victim, her body found entombed in a Japanese taiko drum in the village hall, was crowned with the aura of secondhand celebrity: Colm had been a pop star of middling fame once upon a time and his ex-wife, Sybella’s mother, a model of more than middling fame, though now more renowned for disgracing herself in public in one fashion or another. Unfortunately, the circus allure pulled in the punters, which sickened Tom, and topped up the Church House Inn’s till, which, at the very least, filled Eric with mixed emotions.