Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Judith, are you okay? I was woken by the priest you’re staying with. He thinks you’re my mother, which is so odd, I thought I’d call you first to see if he’s unhinged. Actually, I tried a couple of times yesterday to get hold of you. I found the information you wanted! Judith?”

  It had been no easier relating the circumstances of Judith’s death to Phyllis Lambert, as she was named, than it had been to Alice Ingley. Indeed, the bonds of affection between the two women ran deeply, as Tom learned in a call so lengthy he thought the phone’s battery would die and cut them off before she was finished. They had written faithfully for years; then, when long-distance rates no longer crushed the pocketbook, they phoned with regularity, later adding a little email, though neither cared for its impersonality. She had been planning a summer visit to England. She hadn’t been back in nearly fifty years. Her husband, dead two years, hated to fly—they’d emigrated to Australia by boat—and now that Judith had buried her poor husband, so sick, you know, with Parkinson’s, well …

  She burst into sobs. “In fact,” she sputtered through tears, “that was our last conversation.”

  “What was?” Tom had asked, bewildered.

  “About Parkinson’s and such illnesses, the strain they can put on a marriage. Any road,” she’d continued, when she’d recovered her voice, “she asked me to look into something for her, as I nursed for many years all over the country. Ken—that’s my husband—was often transferred with the bank he worked for. She wanted to know if I could take a peek into something in the medical records here that pertained to someone living in your village. She was a bit mysterious about it, actually, and I was reluctant, as it meant me violating confidentiality, but Judith seemed to think it was to some good purpose, so …” He could hear her blowing her nose. “I’ll tell you, Vicar,” she added adenoidally, “I’m sure I can trust in your discretion and perhaps it will do some good after all.”

  Tom’s thoughts returned to the present, prompted by Caroline’s reiterating the question, “What did Phyllis Lambert tell you?”

  He tapped the book of poems absently against his chest. “You never knew your mother-in-law, did you?” he asked instead.

  “No. As I think I said on a previous occasion, I met and married Will in Melbourne some time after she died, and soon after we were here in England.”

  “What did Will say his mother had died of? He must have mentioned it.”

  “Of course.” Caroline tightened the blanket around her. “He said she had died of an embolism, a sudden, horrible, freakish twist of fate.”

  “Which you never questioned.”

  “I had no reason to. We were young, in love, soon to return to England, looking to the future. Who would I have asked anyway? His father he never knew. He had done a runner years earlier. Will had almost no other family—and I’m sure you understand why, now. We wed in front of a JP. My mother and a girl I went to school with stood up for me. Will brought a couple of mates from his old college team. I doubt they knew. Well, I know they didn’t, because years later I asked Will if they did. He had gone to some pains to keep his secret from me.”

  “May I ask when Will’s birthday is?”

  “He would turn forty-nine October twenty-seven, if …” Caroline’s brow knitted. “Why?”

  “I just wanted to assure myself of something. It’s not important.” He paused, then asked, “When did you learn that Will wasn’t an adopted child, as he claimed to be?”

  “Can’t you guess?” Caroline shivered, despite her warm wrap. “At your marriage preparation class, we did mention a brief period of separation, about ten years ago, remember? We weren’t forthcoming about the reason—we could never be forthcoming about the reason—but the point was we overcame it.

  “You see, we had had Adam early in our marriage, but I wanted another child. I simply assumed we would have one, as there were no complications conceiving the first one. But years went by and nothing happened and I began to worry something was wrong. I suggested we be tested, then urged, then insisted. I became rather obsessed about it, I’m afraid. Hell to live with, though I didn’t much care at the time.” She flicked Tom a glance. “Finally, I had made an appointment for us at a private fertility clinic in Harley Street, and had Will believe we were meeting for a late lunch in Portland Place—he was at Sport England then. But as soon as he read the brass plate on the clinic door, he bolted. We sat on a bench in Regent’s Park and he told me he had been … snipped years earlier, after Adam was born—and he told me why. He told me the woman he claimed was his adoptive mother was, in truth, his birth mother. I don’t know why I never twigged. I’ve seen a picture of her. The resemblance is quite marked.”

  She paused. “I presume Mrs. Lambert told you Will’s mother died from nothing so out of the blue as an embolism?”

  Tom nodded grimly.

  “As you might imagine, my world was turned upside down. You know, don’t you, that anyone with a parent with Huntington’s disease has a fifty–fifty chance of having it himself? That there’s no cure? I didn’t know at that moment in Regent’s Park, but Will told me.

  “Suddenly,” she continued bleakly, “I was faced with the prospect that not only might my husband be struck down by this cruel disease in the prime of his life, but my son might one day, too. I think I lost my mind for a time. Will told me this a few days before I was to attend a hospitality conference in Torquay. I went early, fled really, and stayed a week after the conference was over, taking long country walks, making a nostalgic visit here, trying to decide what to do. I had a ten-year-old boy at home in Toot Hinton, whom I loved, and despite the deceit and the awful shock, a husband that I still loved. There was nothing to do but carry on.”

  “Stiff upper and so forth.”

  “In effect.” Caroline smiled weakly.

  “There are tests that determine—”

  “Will refused to be tested. Ignorance allowed for hope, he said. Even inventing his own adoption was a way of distancing himself. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want the idea of a death foretold to colour his life. But it did, in its way. Thinking that his life might be shorter than most is why he lived so intensely. Why he worked so hard on building up this hotel, and threw himself into sport, into the cricket he loved so, and running, and being in the amateur dramatic society, and in the Thistle But Mostly Rose, and on the parish council. It’s what made him so …” Her voice broke. “So …”

  “Wonderful?” Tom supplied. Caroline nodded mutely, her face crumpled with restrained tears. Tom let his eyes drift to a rook ascending, a black thing losing itself in the darkening sky. He could think of instances in the recent past when Will had shown himself less than wonderful.

  “We carried on,” Caroline continued, wiping at her eyes. “You do, don’t you? Look at you. You’ve carried on in the wake of your wife’s death. Life seems a meaningless succession of days and nights as you crawl your way out of something you didn’t think you could bear, doesn’t it? And then the pain lessens. Will accepted my pregnancy by another man. I think he was not unhappy that I had somehow evened the score—somehow matched his great hurt to me. He knew that this child would escape the disease’s shadow. The years went by—Ariel’s ten now—and after a time it doesn’t seem possible that anything could seriously alter your happy life. HD symptoms usually begin to show in your late thirties or early forties. Will was in his late forties. We thought we had been spared. And then, one day, suddenly, everything changes.”

  “Suddenly?”

  “Yes, although your mind refuses to believe it when it happens—at least mine did. One day more than a year ago Will cut himself shaving—”

  “A common enough occurrence.”

  “It was more than a nick, though. And he told me it was the way his hand trembled holding the razor that caused it. He had come back from the bathroom, ashen. When I questioned him, he replied, ‘It’s beginning.’ He looked … I can’t quite describe it—haunted, I suppose, stunned, frightened. I dismissed
it, of course, as you do. Laughed it off. As you say, a man cutting himself shaving is a common enough occurrence. But then other signs started to appear—a tic in the eyelids, a hand tremor, episodes of clumsiness, and he was not a clumsy man. More frightening were the changes in mood. Will could be forceful, he could get angry—don’t we all at times?—but his was a clean anger, a squall that would pass swiftly. But now he would brood.

  “Then there were these sort of mood lurches, a new irritability, and then came one or two episodes of rage, which he seemed helpless to control, and which afterwards filled him with such remorse. It was like he was watching himself undergo transformation, and so quickly. His mother’s decline had been swift.

  “Of course, the worst of these was the incident with Victor and Molly’s boy. Will had lit into Adam over something at one point, but Adam is a man. But Harry’s death, and the thought that his outburst might have precipitated it, shook Will to the roots of his soul. Well, you know all this, of course. You gave him good counsel.”

  “Caroline, if Victor and Molly had known that Will’s outbursts were involuntary, they might not have blamed him so—”

  “I know, I do know that,” she interrupted him softly. “But Will didn’t want to be excused. He wanted to believe he was in control of himself. But more, he didn’t want to be pitied. He didn’t want anyone to know, as I said. And there were … there were practical considerations. We have yet—I have yet—to tell Adam that he may have … distorted genes. We maintained the fiction that Will was adopted. It’s what we had told him when he was a child. We—Will and I—decided to wait until he matured before telling him. Will’s mother told him when he was fourteen. It was too soon, he said, a terrible shock, much too much a burden for a teenager to bear. He would reproach his mother for giving birth to him at all, then watch over her like a hawk for signs. We both wanted Adam to grow up without those sort of worries.”

  “But he’s grown now, Caroline.”

  A shadow crossed her face. “While Will was healthy, there never seemed a good reason to tell Adam. There was always the fifty percent chance that Will didn’t have Huntington’s, and if he didn’t have it, he wasn’t a carrier, and the chain would be broken. We let ourselves live in a bubble.”

  “But Will, you say, has been exhibiting signs for what—?”

  “More than a year.”

  “Adam’s in a relationship with a young woman, Caroline. They could have—”

  “I do know that, Tom. I do worry about it, very much. It’s just that …” Her eyes wandered the room, now almost engulfed in shadow. “It’s that there have been other complications.”

  “It’s money, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.

  Caroline’s eyes found his. “Isn’t it always? Isn’t it most often money worries that tear away at a marriage?” She looked away. “You know we’re in a spot over money. When Daddy died, he left just enough for a down payment on this property. We borrowed from the bank, and Nick lent us part of his share of Daddy’s money. He was in the army then, and didn’t seem awfully concerned about how he would invest his inheritance. Perhaps we took advantage of him, I don’t know. But now he has his own business ambitions, of course, and he owes money to some dubious characters because I’m afraid he’s found Torquay’s gambling culture more alluring than is good for him—or good for anyone trying to launch a new home security firm. He’s been adamant that we accept an offer from Moorgate Properties to invest in the hotel.”

  “Invest? I thought—”

  “That’s the rub, Tom. Moorgate offers loans at decent rates, they affect to be helping you out, caring about local business and so forth. There’s proper contracts, it’s all very aboveboard, but then there’s the fine print. If you don’t meet certain conditions, pay back the loan in a timely fashion, they give you the chop and you’re forced to sell up. And you end up selling to them or one of their subsidiaries. Will saw enough of it when he sat on the parish council to know what their scheme is, and in this instance, their scheme is to tear down this wonderful building, my home, plough under the beautiful gardens, and turn it all into squalid little cottages. I’d rather give Thorn Court to the village for a park than see it end this way.”

  Caroline shivered.

  “But the web is more tangled,” she continued. “And now that you know about Will’s condition, you can probably guess. In our arrangements with financial institutions, banks, insurers, we gambled—foolishly, it turns out—by not disclosing the … genetic time bomb in Will’s family medical history. I’m as much to blame for this. I didn’t insist on telling the truth. The savings in our premiums, for instance, was much too tempting.”

  “Will purchased additional life insurance recently, I understand.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m afraid someone let it slip.”

  “I think I can imagine who.”

  “Mark meant no malice, Caroline. And it would have gone no farther, except for the extraordinary events in the village this week. I can only ask whether you knew Will had done this.”

  She gave him a flinching smile. “We’ve each bought additional insurance. It’s a normal business practice when you’re renovating and increasing the value of your business property. Nothing to really raise a red flag here, Tom.”

  “I see.” Tom bit his lip. “But, of course, it’s not unknown for the death of one spouse to financially benefit the other.”

  “A truism that hasn’t completely eluded those two detectives. Though I understand they’ve concentrated their attention on Molly. I suppose they think I lacked the opportunity, even if I had a motive.”

  Tom opened his mouth to respond, but Caroline turned to him with shadowed, exhausted eyes. “Do you think I poisoned my husband?”

  Startled at her bluntness, the very question an echo of his own thoughts, he struggled for an even tone: “Caroline, very frankly, from what I know now—or what I think I know—I simply don’t know what to think.”

  Caroline remained silent a moment, then said, “That day, ten, eleven years ago, in Regent’s Park, when Will confessed his secret, he told me he would never, ever endure the suffering that his mother endured.”

  “ ‘Would never’?”

  “ ‘Would,’ not ‘could.’ He said he wouldn’t let himself become so enfeebled, slip into dementia. He … would never put his family through the suffering he endured while his mother suffered.”

  “But, Caroline, isn’t it the sort of thing people say when they’re young and healthy and witness the debilitating death of a loved one? In the end, most people, however profoundly they are disabled, vote for, yearn for, life. Life holds all sorts of possibilities, including a cure. Surely, Will was very much one of those people.”

  Caroline turned her face towards the window. Tom followed her gaze. Colour no longer stained the horizon. With the sun dropped behind the folds of the hills, the sky had turned leaden, the few thin clouds sombre smudges, while below, in the vale of the village, the contours of tree, wall, and cottage blurred to black, pricked here and there by small, bright squares of curtained window. Towards the eastern extremity of their view, their eyes were drawn by a cascade of light flaring St. Nicholas’s square tower and spilling over to the crown of the ancient churchyard yew visible above the dark cluster of cottage roofs along Poacher’s Passage. The waxing crescent of the moon, pale in the vanquishing floodlight, seemed to brush the crenellations of the tower as it made its slow passage higher into the night sky.

  “It doesn’t really have a Gothic shape.” Caroline broke the silence.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The yew tree—or at least our yew tree. In one of her Ariel poems, Sylvia Plath describes a yew as having ‘a Gothic shape.’ ”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “We need some light. There are candle lanterns.” She looked to a pair on a nearby shelf amid the books. “They lend a lovely atmosphere. We would come up here, sometimes, Will and I, if we had a moment—
which wasn’t often—and have only that for illumination. Have you a match? I didn’t think so. There are some in a drawer somewhere.” She moved away.

  “Caroline …”

  “Tom.” Her voice floated to him out of the shadows. “Will did vote for life while he could live it to the full, but he would not vote for life as a state of being barely above a breathing, demented vegetable.”

  “You talked about the advance of the disease, yes? You talked over what you might do …?”

  “We discussed everything, Tom. Of course, we did.”

  Homely sounds followed in rapid succession, the soft scrape of an opening drawer, a rustle through papers, the scrape of glass against metal, the rasp of a match.

  “Caroline,” Tom said, watching the match head flare, colouring for a moment the pale contours of her cheeks. “Forgive me if this is abrupt, but you didn’t pass last Saturday night in town, did you?”

  “Damn!”

  The flame vanished. The acrid smoke curled into his nostrils.

  “I dropped the match.”

  “There are halogen lights. We used them—”

  “No, I don’t want that. Candlelight is more … soothing.”

  The rasp of a match sounded and again brought a flush of warmth to Caroline’s face. This time, she held the match and pushed it into the neck of the lamp. The wick flickered then flamed, casting dancing shadows around the tower room.

  “No, to answer your question.” She regarded him doubtfully. “I wasn’t in Totnes at all. How did you know? Did someone tell you?” she added with a touch of bitterness.

  “No, not as such. I was getting petrol at Jago’s Thursday, and he said your car had been towed in from the lane leading to Upper Coombe Farm, which seemed to contradict what others were saying. And yesterday, when I was in Exeter, I met Tamara. She told me the snow stopped her and Adam from making their way out of the city. I thought the snow had only trapped Tamara. So you were with neither your son nor his girlfriend that night. I suppose you might have made your way into town somehow—got a ride from someone in a more snow-worthy vehicle on the A435—but where would you have spent the night?”