Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “I take it you’ve talked with John about your whereabouts last Saturday.” Tom broke the silence as they turned off the lane.

  “When we’re checking the rearing sheds or cutting rides through brambles or the like, we talk a bit. He’s a good bloke. Easier to talk to than my dad of late.” A wide gate discreetly marked with the coat-of-arms of the earl of Duffield loomed before the headlamps. Adam braked the car. “I shouldn’t say that about my dad, sorry. John thinks I should say my mum was with me, if I’m asked.”

  “Does he now.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  Tom took a deep breath. “I think you need to make up your own mind.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Adam, you become a wiser person when you wrestle with your own conscience and come to decisions rather than go through life following other people’s advice.”

  Adam grunted and stepped from the car. Tom watched him move into the light from the headlamps, unlatch the gate, and push it open. He returned to the car, drove it forward past the gate, then got out and closed it behind.

  “I have a question for you.” Off to the right, past Adam’s head, Tom could glimpse in floodlight the ruins of Noze Lydiard Castle on its outcrop overlooking the valley. “Mrs. Ingley indicated to me that your uncle had, in some way, threatened or intimated her—”

  “Now you think Nick shot her.”

  “I’m thinking no such thing.” Not now. “But you were with your uncle last night. Presumably you talked—”

  “But we didn’t talk about some old lady.”

  “What about Thursday? At the inquest?”

  Adam shrugged. “Maybe it has to do with the Tidy Dolly. He said he was thinking about buying it. I heard she was, too.”

  “A tearoom? Your uncle?”

  “He has a notion of turning it into holiday flats. He’s full of schemes, Uncle Nick.”

  Adam slowed the car and turned into a large farmyard, the twin lights sweeping past motley forms and shadows of country-use vehicles—a quad bike, a small tractor, game carts, a couple of trucks—past a few old stone buildings—barns, store sheds, perhaps—and others clearly intended for human occupation, notably a rambling, thatch-roofed structure that was surely John’s. Adam parked next to John’s Rover and cut the engine. The yard plunged into darkness, barely broken by a single security light over the barn—which clicked off as quickly as it had clicked on—barely bested by an inch of brightness peeping through the cottage’s drawn curtains.

  Tom stepped from the car to the furious welcome of dogs—penned, he presumed, as none came dashing along his legs—and caught in the faint breeze a pungent whiff of animal life, of the dogs, and of game birds collected somewhere off in the darkness in sheds or pens. Out of the cocoon of the car interior, the darkness of the yard seemed very nearly impermeable and he felt as if a heavy mantle had descended upon his shoulders impossible to shake off. In Gravesend, in Cambridge, in London, in Bristol—in all the places he had claimed home—he never experienced night the way he did in the deep Devon countryside. In Thornford, caught after sunset well away from the vicarage without his torch, he occasionally experienced a ludicrous moment of panic if no friendly lighted window came into view as he groped his way down into the village, his brushing hands grateful for the Braille of the stone walls lining the lanes. Now with the moon’s crescent vanished behind gathering clouds, the wind rising in short gusts, he felt prickling along his skin an almost atavistic fear of the dark. No wonder that apparitions of wronged women and phantom presences so easily attached themselves to the ruined castle nearby. What he had not detected in the blend of night noises, the crunch of their shoes on gravel, the snap of Adam opening and closing the boot of his car, the now halfhearted barking of the dogs—and what he had not been prepared to hear when the noise stopped—was an unearthly wail, distant yet strident, like that of some creature, a ghost perhaps, suffering fearsome mental torment. His hackles rose in an instant, then subsided as he realised what he was hearing.

  “John likes to practise his pipes before supper.” Adam’s voice came through the dark, followed by a scrape and the dull thud of a heavy object dragged along the cobbles. Torchlight broke the darkness suddenly and Tom could see in backshadow what looked like a bag of animal feed slung over Adam’s shoulder.

  “John’s is over there.” Adam waved the torch. “Take this, if you like,” he added, proffering the torch to Tom. “I know my way around.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said, taking it. “Where do you live?”

  “That way.” Adam gestured into the darkness. Tom directed the torch, which limned a small cob dwelling. “I can drive you back, if you like,” he added contritely. “That’s if John can’t. He’s likely meeting the shoot captain later this evening.”

  “That’s very kind, thank you.” Tom turned and waved the light beam over the cobbles, conscious that Adam was staring after his retreating figure. As he approached the cottage, the skirl of the strange, mad thing amplified, the sound uncannily thrilling, setting the hair to bristling on the back of his neck. “Flowers of the Forest”—he recognised with a start the plangent air, a funeral choice usually. He reached the door, a windowless wooden affair surrounded by a wreath of untrimmed ivy, inky spikes in the blackness, and hesitated.

  “Lord,” he murmured under the drone of the pipes, bowing his head, “make me an instrument of Thy will.” He let another moment pass to quell the thrumming along his veins, then knocked. He waited for the wail to cease, then rapped his knuckles more firmly against the door when it didn’t. The force of his hand nudged the door open an inch; it wasn’t locked, little surprise in the country. He stepped onto the limestone flags of an entrance hall, his torch picking out waxed jackets hanging from pegs, boots and shoes tidily arrayed below a wooden bench, a closet, a metal gun locker, and a glass cabinet filled with colourful rows of shotgun cartridges that looked antique even to Tom’s untrained eye. He moved towards a thread of yellow light spilling across the flags from a door slightly ajar and poked his head through into a large lime-washed parlour, a log-burning hearth with a fire-blacked surround at the farther end. He had half expected the room to express a bachelor austerity, but John was widower, not bachelor. A quick scan suggested furnishings with an origin in a grander house—heavy mahogany chairs, shelves, a desk—and décor guided by a discriminating feminine hand—rose curtains, lamp shades, and pillows, slate-blue sofa and chair covers, united by a faded Axminster carpet. Regina Copeland’s legacy and little changed in ten years, though an absence of china ornaments and silver frames and the presence of a motley assortment of stuffed wildlife, including a stoat and a sparrow hawk, suggested a more recent victory for masculine taste.

  John’s broad back was to him, his legs spread wide in a footballer’s stance, the tenor drone of his pipes pressed almost to his bull neck. In the low-ceilinged room, the primitive sound seemed to fill every corner; it crept like a tick under Tom’s skin and burrowed into his nerves, magnifying a new-minted unease. John seemed lost in concentration. Uninvited, loath to interrupt, Tom could only abide in the shadow of the door well and consider how the next minutes would unfold. The thought came to him unbidden that if John turned, the composition of his face, the subtle shift of tiny muscles around the eyes, would tell him all he needed to know, and he shrank from the possibility.

  But it did not come to pass that way. As John came to the final notes of the dirge, a door on the left opened and a lean woman of middle years with fox-red hair stepped through wiping her hands on a tea towel. John turned his head to her, but her eyes took in Tom’s presence in that instant, and she flinched, dropping the towel. The reed fell from John’s mouth and he twisted around to take in Tom’s presence. His face was unreadable.

  “Please forgive me,” Tom said as the bagpipe released an unlovely squeal. “I didn’t mean to startle.”

  “Tom …,” John began, then looked to the woman, who moved swiftly to his side. “This is Tom Christmas
, the vicar at St. Nicholas’s …”

  “Oh,” she murmured, her eyes suspicious.

  “… and this is Helen Lander.” John finished the introductions without elaboration as he bent to snatch the towel off the floor.

  “You’re likely starting a meal,” Tom continued, advancing into the room.

  “Not … for a bit.” John looked to Helen for confirmation as he handed her the towel, then with furrowed brow at Tom. “I … Is there? … Did we arrange—?”

  “No, you’ve not forgotten anything. I came because I … wanted a word.” Feeling constrained by Helen’s presence, he affected a light tone, though his heart beat a hard tattoo.

  “Jago wasted no time on your car.”

  “Adam drove me. I was speaking with Caroline earlier this afternoon at Thorn Court.” He sensed rather than saw Helen stiffen.

  “Perhaps I should leave the two of you,” she interjected.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think you might have company,” Tom began as she flicked John a coded glance and slipped back through the connecting door.

  “Helen organises the shooting lunches.” John stepped over to the door, pushed it shut, and twisted the knob. “At the lodge. It’s … Never mind, you wouldn’t be able to see it from the road even in daylight,” he added, relieving himself of his pipes, the bag protesting with a feeble wheeze. He placed them on top of a case at the corner of the sofa, and with strong, even strokes straightened the sleeves of his loden pullover. His eyes returned to Tom’s with a brief, assessing squint, then resumed their characteristic imperturbability. “You were speaking with Caroline,” he echoed. “About …?”

  “The events of the last week. May I take off my jacket?” The room seemed to Tom unnaturally warm, though the fire was burning low. He suddenly thought he might be coming down with a cold.

  “As you like,” John responded, moving to a drinks table under a painting of a hunting scene. “Whisky? I was about to have one.”

  “I’ll join you then.” Dutch courage, he thought, not really fancying a drink. He dropped his jacket over the top of a wingback chair.

  “Water? I’ll have to get some from the kitchen.”

  “Neat is fine.”

  John handed him a crystal tumbler with an inch of amber liquid at the bottom. “Caroline?” he prompted.

  The smell of the whisky met Tom’s nose and repulsed him a little. He must be coming down with something. He took a polite sip, which seemed to burn along his tongue, and began.

  “I know, for instance, that Caroline did not spend last Saturday night snowbound here at Noze, as she claimed, or in town. She was in Thornford, at home, though she was out in the storm briefly. You know it, too. In fact, you knew Saturday at the Burns Supper she was at Thorn Court, and I think I know when you realised. You went out for some antacid tablets before the curry course and came back with a strange expression on your face, as if you’d seen an apparition. I recall it clearly. But you didn’t say anything then …”

  John sipped his whisky and shrugged.

  “… and you didn’t say anything the next morning. In church, you didn’t say you had fetched Caroline at Noze, but you left me with the impression you had. Only when I mentioned the absence of tyre tracks did you say that Adam had fetched her back, and, of course, that wasn’t true, either.” Tom ran his finger around his collar. “Why,” he asked, though he felt certain he knew the answer, “did you not mention you’d seen Caroline? You must have witnessed her crossing the lobby.”

  “What if I tell you I don’t know.”

  “I would have trouble believing you.”

  “But it’s true. There was something about the way … I’m not good at this.”

  “At what?”

  “With words. Describing things.”

  Tom frowned. “About the way Caroline—what? Looked? Seemed?”

  John nodded. “I could see her as I opened the door of the men’s—her having come through from the kitchen. She couldn’t see me. She stopped for a second. She looked … like a doe who’d heard a branch snap in the woods.”

  “Frightened?”

  “Maybe. Alert, more. I thought perhaps she’d planned some sort of surprise for the supper, and I didn’t want to spoil it, so I didn’t say anything.”

  “But after, John, when we’d found Will …?”

  “Seemed odd to say I’d seen her hours ago, for one thing.” He shrugged again. “And I thought there being no surprise at the supper after all, what Caroline had wanted was not to be seen in the hotel, so I thought, she must have her reasons …”

  “And then the next morning,” Tom prompted, taking another sip of whisky.

  “The next morning … well, I didn’t need my car, did I? I went to the Annex. I told her … well, after I told her about Will, I said I’d seen her the night before in the hotel—”

  “Her response to that?”

  “Hard to say. She was already shaken by Will’s death. She asked me if I wouldn’t say anything.”

  “And you complied.”

  “If it helped her. It seemed harmless. I didn’t ask why. We didn’t know then there was anything unusual about Will’s death.”

  “But after the inquest, we did. You must have wondered why she sought your collusion.”

  John’s mouth formed a thin line. He set his glass on the mantel and lifted a poker from a rack by the fireplace. “I’m not certain what you’re getting at, Tom,” he said, stirring the logs so they tumbled and flared.

  “John, you recall our conversation in the vestry Thursday. Ariel’s well-being was very much on your mind, and why? At the time, your concern seemed to me outlandish and misplaced. But then I began to see why you—you, the most phlegmatic of men—would rise to such passion. Will, it turns out, had ingested poison last Saturday. At the time, Caroline had been in the hotel, not here at Noze, not in town. At the inquest, I’m sure, it struck you that Caroline may have had a hand in her husband’s—”

  “I never—”

  “And that’s why she sought your cooperation. She knew you had a …” Tom groped for understatement. “… soft spot for her.”

  “I never thought Caroline was responsible.”

  “Wives kill husbands. Husbands kill wives.”

  John’s face flushed. “What are you on about?”

  “John, I’m not referring to your late wife, to Regina. I’m merely saying that spousal homicide is not uncommon.”

  “Caroline wouldn’t have poisoned Will.”

  “Are you quite certain?”

  John looked away. “She’s not the sort,” he said thickly, adding in a defensive tone, “Why? Do you think she did?”

  “What I think won’t matter. What others think will. Once police learn Caroline was at Thorn Court, once they learn she asked people to keep this a secret, she’ll be their prime suspect. Caroline stands to benefit financially from her husband’s death, and it seems half the village knows Thorn Court is in financial peril.”

  He watched John continue to poke at the fire, which now sparked and blazed.

  “John, I went through the hell of a police investigation myself when my wife was killed. So, you told me, did you. I know the police must do what’s asked of them, but I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone who is innocent.” Tom paused. “I think anyone who loved, or was in love with, Caroline wouldn’t wish it on her, either.”

  John looked up from the fire, his eyes steady but now watchful.

  “Caroline is an attractive woman, is she not? And she seems in her way to get what she wants from men. Will left a good job in London to come down here and run a hotel with her. I’m sure it was she who persuaded Nick to lend them part of his inheritance to finance Thorn Court. It can’t have been Will. There seemed little love lost between the two. Adam, too, is prepared to lie about his mother’s whereabouts, even though he is deeply troubled as to why. His mother won’t tell him. But I’m sure he fears he’ll lose her, too. That she’ll be arrested, tried, jailed. And what wi
ll become of Ariel?—your concern to me in our Thursday conversation. But it’s not simply your natural daughter’s fate that worries you, it’s Caroline’s, too, isn’t it? You are, after all, in love with her.”

  “What of it?” John glanced towards the connecting door. “I didn’t poison Will, if that’s what you’re on about.”

  “No,” Tom murmured, “that’s not what brings me here.”

  “Then what does?”

  “John, you weren’t the only person to see Caroline at Thorn Court last Saturday.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do. Judith Ingley saw Caroline come out of the hotel entrance moments after you saw her cross the lobby. Later, Judith made sure that Caroline knew what she saw—”

  “Blackmail.”

  “In effect. Then you do know what I mean.”

  “Yes, all right,” John groused, slipping the poker back into the rack and retrieving his whisky. “Adam did say something about it. I’d forgotten.”

  “Something?”

  “We were out wrapping some sack around one of the barbed-wire fences Friday and he happened to mention it. The lad was a bit upset, needed someone to talk to, I suppose.”

  “And did you tell him that you, too, had seen Caroline at the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “John, there are only two people who knew about Caroline’s disturbing conversation with Mrs. Ingley. One was Adam. I expect Caroline felt she needed to tell her family at least part of what Judith had to say, since they would be the ones to suffer if anything happened to her.”

  “And Nick.”

  “Caroline says not. She had almost no communication with her brother since the morning of the inquest. It wasn’t until Thursday evening that Judith arrived at Thorn Court. John, the second person is you, of course. Adam shared his worry with you. He couldn’t very well with Tamara, since he’s trying to protect his mother, and he couldn’t with Nick, who is hardly a steady, sympathetic character, and his sister is a child—so he told you.”