Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “And rubber. Mineral.”

  “But rubber is made from trees. So vegetable.”

  “That’s right. Well done, you. Besides, you can buy a rugby ball in a shop, and you said whatever it is can’t be bought.”

  “You have ten questions left, Daddy.”

  Tom spotted a gap through the trundling cars and zipped into the speedier fast lane with a satisfied grunt, settling in for uninterrupted passage. The landscape outside the window, winter-drab, a study in denuded trees and lingering patches of snow, offered little cheer, but cocooned inside the car, with the heater’s warm fug and Miranda’s bright conversation, all felt well with the world.

  “All right, something rugby-ball-ish. Is it smaller than a rugby ball?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, I’d asked before if it were smaller than my head, so that was a wasted question, since a rugby ball is bigger. Does it, then, have something to do with sport?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. Is it … useful?”

  When Miranda didn’t answer with her usual swift assurance, he glanced over to see her biting her lip in thought. After a moment, she turned to him, a faintly troubled cast to her features.

  “I can’t answer.”

  Tom frowned and dropped his voice to the spooky range he sometimes used when he’d been The Great Krimboni. “How mysterious.” He paused to set the windscreen wipers to intermittent as a smattering of rain hit the windows. “Is it usually found in the home?”

  “No.”

  “Is it usually found out of doors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would we find it in our garden?”

  “Mmm … no.”

  “Ah! Then might we find it in some other garden in the village?”

  “Yes.”

  Tom let all Miranda’s responses pass through his brainbox. Smaller than his head, spheroid, found in a garden, yet without an aroma. So not a flower. And some ambiguity about its utility? An actual fruit or vegetable? But mightn’t one eat such a thing? That seemed to have utility. “Is it decorative?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a … marrow?” He thought of the vegetables that folk brought to decorate the church for the Harvest Festival.

  “No. One more, Daddy.”

  “Could I eat it?”

  It was the look she shot him that gave him the clue. Solemnity freighted her dark eyes.

  “I can’t answer,” she replied.

  He returned his attention to the road. “Is it smaller than the end of my thumb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it usually red?”

  “Yes.”

  Tom’s heart sank. “Is it … a yewberry?”

  “Yes.”

  The need to merge into a single lane for the sake of some roadworks diverted his attention for the moment it took to slow and join the long queue of cars, but when he turned back to Miranda he could see that she was downcast.

  “I’m so sorry all this has happened, darling. Are you very upset?”

  “I think Ariel doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh.” Tom took a fathoming moment. “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you. She’s just …” It was hard to find the right word. “… confused. It’s because of Mrs. Prowse, isn’t it?”

  “Ariel thinks—”

  “Do you?”

  “No!”

  “That’s good. I know our Mrs. P has her friends and foes in the village, but she has no malice—well, certainly not to the degree of … you know. Besides, if I had the least concern that she might have … you can be sure we’d be making new living arrangements.”

  “But was it an accident, Daddy?”

  “It doesn’t seem so.”

  “Then who …?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. It’s all very, very puzzling.” A certain question had slipped into his mind, as questions do, seemingly unbidden, but, really, provoked by the past. “You asked me the other week if you could have a sleepover with Ariel and Becca and Emily, and I said you could as long as it was fine with Mrs. Prowse, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I seem to recall when we were at Bristol your going to a sleepover—do you remember?—and your not liking it very much. You said you thought it was … gross. I think the people’s house smelled a bit. So was last Saturday’s sleepover your idea or …?”

  “It was Ariel’s, Daddy. She said it would be fun, but we couldn’t have it at Becca’s because … well, because.”

  “Yes, I understand.” The atmosphere at Damara Cottage was too sad.

  “And we couldn’t at Emily’s.”

  “No room at the inn.”

  “And Ariel’s is having stuff done to it. And we have lots of room, so …” She frowned at him. “Why?”

  “Oh …” He didn’t know whether he should speculate on such things with his daughter out loud, but found himself doing so anyway. “It just all seems so … well timed, somehow. Ariel stays over at our house. Mrs. Moir goes into town. If the sleepover was Ariel’s notion, Caroline might have skipped the concert and held the sleepover at the Annex. ‘Stuff’ isn’t being done to the Annex, and it’s big enough for four for a sleepover. I know Caroline said she wanted to leave us men well alone because … well, because …”

  “Because?”

  “Because we mightn’t be on our best behaviour.”

  “Like the boys at school when they’re in a group. They’re terrible.”

  “Well, a bit like that. Only with a lot of drink added.”

  Miranda twisted under her seat belt to regard him speculatively.

  “I was good as gold,” Tom added hastily.

  “Daddy, do you think Ariel didn’t think of the sleepover all by herself?”

  “Well …” He really didn’t wish to reflect out loud on suggestibility of children. “I don’t know. It was just a thought rattling around in my head.”

  “Alice would say if logic doesn’t work, ‘tu dois écouter ton intuition.’ ”

  “Alice Roy?”

  “Oui.”

  “Good old Alice.”

  “Maybe I could ask Ariel at the Wassail, if she still doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Didn’t she talk to you at school yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Leave it be for the time being, darling. Everything will right itself eventually.” Though he wasn’t sure he believed it. For a moment, they motored along, father and daughter, in companionable silence. They were beginning the ascent of Haldon Hill where crusts of snow still edged the motorway. Passing through a patch of shifting mist, Miranda asked a question that so startled Tom he almost braked.

  “Daddy, what’s mercy killing?”

  Unwisely, he allowed himself a few breaths without answering, which set Miranda to repeat the question in a more querulous voice. “Daddy?”

  “Well, darling,” he began, affecting an even tone, “what makes you ask that question?”

  “I saw it on your computer.”

  “What! When?”

  “Yesterday. Before supper. I was looking up ‘mercury’ for Mrs. Lennox’s class because it’s science week next week and it came up as soon as I started typing m and e.”

  “I can’t recall looking that up.”

  “It wasn’t you, Daddy. It was Mrs. Ingley. She didn’t sign out when she was using your computer.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wasn’t snooping!”

  “That’s all right, darling. I know you didn’t mean to. Perhaps Mrs. Ingley was simply rooting around the Internet, the way you do sometimes.”

  “But what is it? Mercy killing.”

  “Well … it’s complicated. It means someone taking another person’s life—deliberately—usually because that person has had a terrible injury that can’t be mended or a terrible illness that can’t be cured, and there seems no other way to end the suffering.”

  Miranda was silent, absently tugging at her braid, which she had pulled around her neck. “Are peo
ple allowed to do that?”

  “No, they’re not. It’s against the law, though some people think the law should change, allowing it in certain circumstances or under certain conditions. When I was a curate in Kennington—this is just before you were born—an elderly man in the parish ended his wife’s life by … it doesn’t matter how—because she—”

  “But how?”

  “Oh, darling.”

  “I’m not a baby!”

  Tom sighed, then white-lied. “A lot of pills,” he said. It somehow seemed less vivid than the truth—Mr. Collins had smothered his wife with a pillow on their marital bed. “She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is very cruel. He might have got away with it, but he felt terrible remorse and went to the police and turned himself in. He was jailed for two years.”

  He flicked Miranda a glance. He could see her concentrated in thought.

  “But when Dolan got really, really old, and couldn’t walk—remember? We were visiting Grannie Dosh and Grannie Kate—they took him to be put down.”

  “I know, but animals can’t tell us very well how much they hurt, and there’s little we can do for them, so sometimes it’s the only thing we can do. When animals suffer, they suffer mutely, but we humans are unique, aren’t we? We’re made in God’s image. He gave us minds so that we would know, and think and make choices, didn’t He? I know, as in Mr. Collins’s case, he felt great compassion for his wife, but we don’t sort out the problem of suffering by doing away with those who suffer. Mr. Collins might have asked for our help, but,” Tom reflected, “perhaps we were remiss in not being more forward in offering help. I don’t know …”

  “Poor Daddy.”

  “Anyway, life is God’s gift to us and it’s not for us to end it.”

  “Someone ended Mummy’s life. Was it God?”

  The question, coming as it did unheralded, shook him. Was it God? Had God capriciously, unreasonably, cruelly, wantonly chosen—no, forced—the moment when Lisbeth’s life should be snatched away? This though he knew God no more set the moment of our death than He micromanaged the trajectories of the dust motes in the universe. At play, as always, mysteriously co-existing with His sovereignty, was the free will of man—a man, in the case of Lisbeth’s end.

  He brushed Miranda’s cheek with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t God who took Mummy away from us, it was someone who offended God.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The sight of Julia, a lone figure in a black wool coat with collar turned up into her dark hair, silhouetted against the entrance of the narrow lane, brought a little blood to Tom’s cheeks and a small fillip to his heart. He could feel it beating now below his skin, but he could excuse high colour with reference to the saturating damp in the chill air rather than to the intricate feelings that his late wife’s sister could rouse. She might have been Lisbeth waiting for him and Miranda, so closely did her posture—the arms folded just so, one foot in advance of the other, head bent—mimic Lisbeth’s in moments of impatience. As he approached, Miranda in hand, and Julia’s face lit with the delight of reconnection, he was seized yet again with the physical resemblance, the high cheekbones, the ink-black glossy eyes, the intelligent intensity of her expression, feeling as if he were approaching Lisbeth in a dream like those that still visited his sleeping hours and left him disconsolate when he rose to the waking world. And when he kissed her in greeting, the sensation was magnified.

  “You’re shivering,” he exclaimed, drawing back to look at her before she bent to kiss Miranda. “Have you been waiting long? I hope we’re not too late.”

  “No, and services never start on time anyway. Rabbi Mendelssohn isn’t noted for his punctuality.” Julia smiled and gestured towards the synagogue door, discreetly set between two Doric columns barely higher than a man’s head. “Are you joining us?”

  “Not this time, I’m sorry. I have some errands that I must do while I have the chance.” He held up a carrier bag containing Tamara Prowse’s shoes. “Lunch, of course?”

  “At mine.”

  “Lovely.” Julia had found a flat in a converted Regency building not far from the city centre. “I’ll be back to fetch you both in an hour or so. Be good and God bless.”

  It had been he more than the sporadically observant Lisbeth, because his faith was so front and centre, who had worried about Miranda’s religious education. There had been no disagreement that she wouldn’t be baptised, that she would be raised as a Jew. “A person who is not baptised is equally loved by God,” he had told his puzzled daughter when she was five and attended the baptism of a preschool friend’s baby brother at St. Dunstan’s, where Tom was part of a team ministry. Faith was often reinvigorated when people became parents, and it was then that Lisbeth began taking Miranda to cheder at a congregation not too far from their home, a pattern that might have ended with Lisbeth’s death, so shattered was he, but for the kindness of a student who shared a flat in a neighbouring house, who fetched Miranda—religiously, you could say—every Saturday morning, until they upped sticks for Thornford Regis. Tom felt blessed that Lisbeth’s sister slipped with ease into Lisbeth’s guiding role, taking Miranda to Exeter to the monthly family services at the synagogue and having them to Friday Shabbat dinners. But he and Miranda had been in Thornford barely four months when Julia ended her marriage to the village doctor and moved to Exeter, another in a string of losses in Miranda’s young life.

  These thoughts swam in and out of Tom’s mind as he made his way towards the High Street, tucking his scarf tighter around his throat. Echoing was a remnant of his conversation with Miranda in the car.

  “Daddy,” she had said, “didn’t Mrs. Ingley’s husband die because he had … something … a sort of …?”

  “Yes, Parkinson’s.” He supplied the name of the debilitating disease, startled by the thought and its possible implication. “Yes, he did.”

  Or so Judith said.

  Why, he worried, as he turned off the High Street, through Broadgate, and began crossing the broad expanse of Cathedral Green, had Judith been researching mercy killing? General information? News items? Surely not a blog. “Why I appeared at your Burns Supper, I can’t tell you,” she had told him the day before in the churchyard. Could she possibly be in flight from Stafford, the subject of a police investigation into her own husband’s death? Yet she had also indicated she had purposely planned to intrude upon the ceremonial dinner.

  He glanced up unseeingly at the sculpted screen of the cathedral’s west front and considered, Was that a feint? Or—and the thought sent a frisson of alarm down his spine—had someone taken Will’s life in the twisted notion that it was in Will’s best interest? Judith? Is it possible? She trained as a nurse. She could administer medicines—or poisons, as the case might be. She could calculate dosages. Yet it was she, in the reception room that night, who had voiced a concern about Will’s appearance. If she had malicious intent, why would she show her hand? And had she not only just arrived at the hotel? She would have had neither time nor chance to tamper with Will’s food. Unless she had arrived rather earlier and been loitering in the hotel longer than she claimed when Tom discovered her gazing at the portrait of Josiah Stanhope in the reception room. But why? She knew nothing of Will to wish to kill him—with mercy or without. If she had any animus—and she did—it was towards the Stanhopes, to whom Will was aligned only by marriage.

  And, of course, why would she be looking up mercy killing on a computer after the fact?

  It was all too loopy. He had set his mind to a few hours of pleasure, with his daughter, away from the confines of the winter village, and damned if he was going to ruin it with further rumination.

  He had reached Briggs-Ellery, the Christian bookshop, set into a pair of timbre-frame, gabled houses of fifteenth-century origin, steps away from the Close. As he glanced unseeingly at his reflection in the window glass, another unpleasant thought intruded: Madrun was alone with Judith in the vicarage and forever inquisitive, of course. Might she ask s
ome needlessly provocative question of Judith? He focused on the books in the window display. He was letting his imagination run away with him. Judith was a woman in her late sixties, little threat to anyone, at least physically. Suddenly he felt unaccountably anxious. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his mobile, but before he could ring the vicarage, he heard someone speak his name. He turned to see a young man and woman, arms interlinked, smiling shyly at him, while his mind fumbled for name, date, and place.

  “I thought you’d be on your honeymoon,” he remarked in as much cheer as relief that his memory hadn’t put him to embarrassment. They were Todd and Gemma, the very pair he had married the week earlier at St. Paul’s.

  “So did we,” Gemma replied, absently sending a hand across the bulging front of her coat.

  “Of course! The snow.”

  “If the reception hadn’t carried on so, we might have got to Exeter—”

  “If your dad—” Todd remonstrated.

  “Never mind about that.”

  “What a great shame,” Tom interjected, hoping to quench the rising bickering. “Barbados was your destination, yes?”

  “We’re still going, Vicar,” Gemma said smiling, “only it’s all been pushed up a week. The tour company was very accommodating. So we’re having our night at the Royal Cumberland”—she gestured to the hotel across the narrow lane from the bookshop—“and flying out of Exeter airport tomorrow noontime.”

  “Lovely.”

  “We were about to nip into Drake’s for a coffee. Would you care to join us? I don’t think we thanked you properly for everything you did for us.”

  “All part of the service,” Tom responded lightly, groping for a suitable excuse, but failing to find one as he himself was headed to the very place. Purchasing ten copies of The Marriage Book, handouts for his marriage preparation course, from Briggs-Ellery, would take all of five minutes, and refusing their invitation seemed churlish. Gemma and Todd seemed like they were practising the niceties of wedded coupledom. “I’d be happy to. Go on ahead, and I’ll join you shortly.” He gestured to the shop. “I have something I must get here first.”

  “We’ll order. What would you like?”