Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  The certificate usefully contained Judith’s son’s full Christian names, however, an aid to his task of informing him that his mother had died, which Tom had told the detectives he would undertake, thinking it kinder that the information come from someone who had acted host to her for a week. But it was a cheerless duty, compounded by the violent manner of Judith’s death. As he reached for the mobile that Madrun had found among Judith’s things, his mind slipped unbidden to the grim phone calls he’d had to make in the hours after Lisbeth’s death. How would Anthony Ingley react to this very unexpected call?

  He set aside the mobile and reached instead to remove the teacup from its precarious perch on the book pile. He took a sip, and spent a procrastinating moment over the Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth, as it proclaimed itself. Yes, the date of birth told the tale—about seven months after Judith left Thornford for good. Place of birth was registered as Furness House Nursing Home, Leeds, perhaps somewhere near the hospital where she took her training. Name and Surname of Father: blank. Name and Maiden Surname of Mother: Judith Mina Frost. (Certainly not “Judith Stanhope” formerly Frost.) The date of registration was a fortnight after the birth.

  Copy though the certificate was, it seemed odd, Tom thought, that Anthony didn’t keep it among his own things, though perhaps it was in safer keeping in England, with his mother. Of course, once you’ve proved your bona fides with your birth certificate for your first driver’s licence or first passport, of what use was it? He wondered if Anthony had ever been curious about his natural father? Perhaps not. Perhaps Judith had never told him the man’s name.

  Enough dithering, Tom admonished himself, reaching again for Judith’s mobile. He looked at his watch. He had to get on with this. It must be somewhere close to midnight in Shanghai, he realised. More than relaying tragic news, he might be waking a man to it.

  Judith’s mobile was a slightly vintage model, a flip variety, but in a pink plastic that matched her jacket. He opened the cover to reveal the tiny screen, pressed the CONTACTS button, and scrolled through the names, of which there were many, almost all of them—as was the convention—first names only. The directory was alphabetical, of course, but between Alice and Arthur there was no Anthony, and between Terry and Vera no Tony. A nickname? He scrolled up and down again. Nothing suggested itself.

  Odd, he thought. But perhaps Judith only spoke to her son using a landline. That would make sense, as mobile rates to China were probably atrocious.

  Still, it put a spanner in the works. He scrolled through the names again. One of these people, surely, would know of Anthony’s whereabouts, perhaps have a contact number for him, but who? Of the few entries with last names logged, none were Frosts—Judith’s family was thin on the ground—but neither were there any Ingleys. Of course, relatives, even ones by marriage, didn’t likely need their surnames recorded.

  He was about to phone one at random when the CALL HISTORY button caught his eye. Perhaps Anthony had called her, even briefly, leaving a record of the number. The usual inventory of Christian names greeted his eyes, matching ones recorded in her directory, but most of the newest entries in the log were purely numerical, indicating she had been talking with people who were not among her regular correspondents. Tom recognised the dialing code for his own part of Devon—one number he thought might be the Daintreys’; another looked like the one for Leitchfield Turner estate agents, which always had posters in a display case next to the post office. He recognised the London dialing code. A third code he failed to recognise; he reckoned it might be Staffordshire’s, where Judith had lived. But the most recent incoming calls—four of them, from the same number—had a curious succession of numerals, and more of them. The two numerals at the start were clearly country code, not UK dialing code. But what country? Many on the Continent began with thirty-something. France was thirty-three, but this one was unfamiliar. It had to be China.

  He looked again at his watch. He could switch on his computer and Google the code to make sure, but he felt impatient to complete this unhappy task. He took a breath, highlighted the number, and pressed TALK. The ringtone had a different sequence from the UK’s; four of them passed, and then something happened that, stupidly, he wasn’t prepared for. The call went to message. Well, why wouldn’t it? It was very late in Shanghai. Worse, the voice speaking the generic, uninformative message—genuine, though; English; not mechanical—was female. Somehow he had expected a male voice, Anthony’s. He knew Anthony was married. Judith had said so, but for safety reasons, male voices usually predominated on answer-phones. He hastily pressed the button to end the call, then immediately felt stupid, oddly cowardly. He redialed. This time when the outgoing message came on, he asked the recipient to please call him as soon as possible on a very urgent matter.

  Must be Anthony’s wife, he decided, snapping the phone shut. He could detect a bit of Yorkshire, but a bit of something else, too, that he couldn’t quite nail down. The tone was flinty, efficient—there was something formidable in the workings of that voice’s owner. And oddly, the voice sounded older than he expected a woman of what?—her late forties, early fifties?—to be.

  Doubt rising, he switched on his computer and soon found Internet pages outlining country codes. Bugger! He hadn’t been phoning China, he had been phoning Australia! That accounted for graftings of a nasal twang—she was some English expat, probably, whom he had lumbered unnecessarily with the dreaded phone call in the middle of the night. Wasn’t Australia at least a couple of time zones farther east than China? Whoever she was—and she surely had some connection to Judith, so making the phone call was not completely worthless—perhaps she was a heavy sleeper or switched off her phone at night.

  Tom jerked in his chair. A cat had alit on his lap, claws like needles piercing through the fabric to the flesh of his thighs. They regarded each other with mutual indifference, then Powell—or, possibly, Gloria (as they were both pitch-black with dark gold eyes, the only detectable difference was buried beneath their backsides)—contracted into a furry, resonant hummock, irresistibly strokable—which Tom did, absently running one hand over the warm velvet curve, as he considered whether to simply phone one of Judith’s contacts at random.

  He did. He phoned Alice, as the list had her name first, using the vicarage landline; Judith’s mobile looked to be on its last bar. She answered on the second ring, the tone of her voice shifting from disinterest to curiosity to disbelief to horror in short order as Tom laid out the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  “I can’t take it in.” Alice’s voice came as a gasp. “It’s too shocking. Are they … have they found …?”

  “It’s under police investigation.”

  “Oh … and she just lost Trevor in the autumn. It’s too unfair.” Tom could hear her ragged breath. “I’m sorry, did you say you were in … Thornford Regis? I’m not sure I know where that is.”

  “In Devon.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I have a notion that’s where Judith was from originally.”

  “You didn’t know she was coming here?”

  “No, no idea. I feel dreadful. I’ve been meaning to phone all week. I try to keep in touch, particularly since Trevor passed away, but this has been such an odd week, the snow and all … How can I help? What can I do?”

  “Well, I’m trying to get in touch with Judith’s family—”

  “I’m a cousin, sort of. Trevor and my husband are cousins, so I think of Judith as a relative. George will be shocked—that’s my husband. He’s out walking the dog. We live at Long Compton, a few miles out of Stafford, and often got together—although that was more difficult when Trevor became unwell. Anyway, I’m sorry, I rambling on here. Vicar, I’d be more than happy—well, happy’s hardly the word—to phone relatives and such. Trevor has a sister in Scotland, for instance.”

  “That—”

  “Oh!” she interjected. “This hasn’t been on the news?”

  “I’m not sure, but I shouldn’t be surprised if there w
asn’t something before very long.”

  “So awful to hear it over the television. I must get on it! Thank you—”

  “Alice. Mrs.—?”

  “It’s Ingley, actually. George and Trevor had the same paternal grandfather.”

  “Mrs. Ingley, there is a way you can help. I would like very much to get in touch with Judith’s son. I understand he lives in China, in Shanghai, but I can’t find a number for him on Judith’s mobile, and wondered if you might possibly have it.”

  There was a silence, then, “I’m sorry …?”

  “Her son? Judith’s son, Anthony?”

  “But …” A kind of embarrassed laughter came over the wire. “Judith doesn’t have a son.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Judith doesn’t have a son,” Alice repeated. “She and Trevor were childless.”

  “No son?”

  “No. I’m quite certain. I’ve known Judith and Trevor for … well, nearly fifty years. Goodness, I was at their wedding! Did she say she had a son?”

  “I must have heard her incorrectly,” Tom croaked. “I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “That’s all right.” A certain coolness entered her tone. “I really must get on to phoning round. Thank you for letting me know, Vicar. If there’s more we can do …”

  “You have my number.”

  “Yes, it’s here on the call display.” She rang off.

  Tom dropped the receiver in its cradle, his tired brain spinning. But she does have a son! It’s right here on this document! He lifted the paper from his desktop, disturbing the cat, who lifted its head and growled. He thought back to earlier conversations with Judith. She had talked very little about her son—though perhaps she had to Mrs. Prowse. What did he know? He had assumed since his conversation with Judith in the churchyard Friday that Trevor Ingley had raised Clive Stanhope’s child as his own, and that that child had had some suitable education and eventually moved to China for his work. He had, if he thought about it, sensed an estrangement. She was not voluble about her son, the way most mothers are. There was no mention of his accomplishments or his foibles or mention, say, of grandchildren, which might have come along by now. Little wonder: Judith and Trevor Ingley had lived all their lives as a childless couple.

  His mind turned to his first encounter with Judith at Thorn Court. He had asked conversationally if she had any children. Why didn’t she simply say no? Perhaps he had caught her off guard, obliging her to continue with the fabrication.

  And yet Judith Frost had given birth to a child nearly fifty years ago in Leeds. The boy had to have been adopted, of course, and was still walking the earth somewhere, if there hadn’t been an early, and tragic, death in the meantime. Surely, all her life, she must have wondered what became of this child. Was she now, soon to retire, with husband deceased, plucking an old strand in life’s skein? He looked again at the birth certificate, at its details: date of birth, place of birth. Judith had come to Thornford deliberately, specifically, to trespass upon the Burns Supper, and she had done so carrying with her this document. He stared at its yellowed surface and thought back to the churchyard, to Judith’s interest in his own adoption, and to her musings on the influences on a child’s character, reduced to the shorthand of nature versus nurture. She had seemed, too, somehow resigned to some inevitability, to some sort of loss. Her parents, her husband, he had thought at the time, triggered by the sight of the Frost grave marker. But now, as he pressed his hand along the cat’s back, feeling its knobby spine along his palms, he felt the stirrings of a new and terrible possibility.

  And then, at the moment the cat, vexed at being petted with such ferocity, leapt from his lap, Judith’s mobile sang a song of sixpence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A lurch, a skipped beat. That was all his heart suffered. She was not dead, thank God, though her posture, prone, was an alarming simulacrum of Will’s eight days before. Glimpsing her as he rounded the top of the stairs through the filigree wrought-iron balustrade—a fine architectural detail neither hand nor eye had registered in last Saturday’s tumult—Tom had been struck by dread. He’d raced the last steps, almost losing his footing along the twist of carpet. He was behaving irrationally, of course; Caroline’s delicate features, even in the dwindling light, bloomed with life; her chest, like a gentle bellows, rose and fell, stirring almost imperceptibly under the cream-coloured throw blanket covering her. He studied her face for a moment, loath to disturb her, feeling faintly like a voyeur when her eyes snapped open. She regarded him, hardly surprised; by the sharpness of her focus, he could see that she had not woken from a slumber.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you,” he began.

  “I heard you come up. I was resting my eyes.”

  “You knew it was me?”

  “I knew it would be someone.”

  Tom lent a half-cryptic remark a half-rendered smile. “You’ve been reading,” he said, noting a book that slipped from her hand as she pushed off the throw and sat up. He noted, too, the black high-collared shirt she was wearing and the slim black trousers. “Ariel.” He voiced the title on the dustcover.

  “It most likely landed up here before I was born. Some guest left it behind, I expect. I can’t imagine any member of my family reading poetry.” Caroline took the slim volume in her hand. “I thought if I ever had a daughter I would call her Ariel. I fell in love with the name. It’s printed so boldly on the spine. See? It seemed to leap out at me from the bookcase when I was a girl and stole time up here.” She handed the volume to Tom and rose. “I doubt I read the poems then. Glanced at them, perhaps. I would have been too young to understand them, in any case.”

  “And now?” Tom opened the book at random. “Sylvia Plath lived in Devon, for a time, didn’t she?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And very depressed, I believe.”

  “One gets that sense from her poetry. Yes, I can understand them now. Some of them.” She glanced at Tom, then moved past him towards the window that looked south over the village to the soft hills. “I’m not depressed, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know Sylvia Plath is a patron saint of unhappy women, but she was living in a country foreign to her. I’m not. And I loved my husband. There was no disaffection, no estrangement—”

  “There was for a period, Caroline.”

  “Yes, but we chose not to hold the past against each other. Being able to forgive made our marriage stronger in the end. Remember we talked about this in your marriage preparation course? I’m not sure I ever learned if you had a … an episode in your marriage.”

  “We all have episodes.”

  “You’re not going to spill, are you?”

  “Not today, sorry.”

  Caroline smiled wanly. “Never mind. Come and see how beautiful Thornford is in this light.”

  Tom joined her at the window, still holding the book. He had once, in a despairing moment, stood on the top of St. Nicholas’s bell tower and surveyed the village in its spring raiment, a thatch-and-cob jewel set in a sea of luminescent green, but Thorn Court’s belvedere tower commanded the high view, and that view late on a winter afternoon, as the earth turned its farthest from the sun, was of beauty stripped bare, stark and vulnerable. Dying rays rimmed the horizon with a soft golden light, flaming the feathery maze of naked trees tracing the folds of the distant hills and blazing the low, thin clouds double bright. Above this amber middle band, the ice-blue sky darkened to indigo; below, the village slipped into bronzing, blackening shadows, a little world folded into a bowl.

  “You missed this all the years you were gone.” Tom regarded her in profile.

  “Terribly.” Caroline folded the blanket around her.

  “I had a phone call a little earlier this afternoon.”

  “Yes?”

  “From Australia.”

  “Not from my mother, I trust.”

  “No.”

  “Good, she’s supposed to be on a plane out of Sydney in a
few hours.” Caroline flicked a glance at him. “It’s the middle of the night in Australia. It must have been an important call.”

  “It was … well, it was important to someone.”

  Caroline let a heartbeat pass. “And I have a feeling it has something to do with me.”

  “The call was from a woman named Phyllis Lambert who lives in Melbourne, but she’s English-born. Fifty years ago she was in nursing school at Leeds. She emigrated not long after graduation. It seems she was a very good friend of Judith Ingley’s, and they stayed in touch over the years.”

  “I’m sorry about Mrs. Ingley,” Caroline said, then added when Tom failed to respond: “No, truly. She was a meddlesome woman, and very much had the wrong end of the stick about … well, I think you may well know now, don’t you. But I wouldn’t have wished her dead—not that way.” She twisted her head to study his face. “You must believe me.”

  Tom saw the supplicating shine in her eyes. Sorrowfully, he said, “I’m sorry, Caroline, I’m not certain that I do.”

  Her expression turned bleak. “Tell me what this woman—Phyllis—said.” She spoke without expression.

  Tom thought back to the call, announced on Judith’s mobile by a few bars of “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” He recognised the number; it was the one he had phoned—twice—in Australia. The voice, too, was recognizable. It was the same as the outgoing message, only trembling in anxiety, and it didn’t wait for Tom to proffer the usual greeting.