Eleven Pipers Piping

by C. C. Benison

  Much love,

  Madrun

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Have you got a minute? Come and see the Wassail lanterns the children have made.” Eileen Lennox, head teacher at Thornford Regis C of E Primary, dabbed at her eyes while Tom repacked his old leather magic bag.

  “That last trick was really marvellous,” she gushed, her hand pressed against the large floppy bow at the neck of her blouse. “And so true. Goodness, I must look a mess.”

  “You look fine.”

  Tom had heard from Miranda that Mrs. Lennox seemed to find many things tear-worthy these days and wondered if she was going through a bad patch of some nature. In truth, her mascara was smudged and her lipstick, a rather vibrant red, seemed to have skidded past the usual boundaries. Perhaps, he thought, busy woman that she was, she applied makeup in the car—she lived north of the village—an uncertain task on a grey winter morning.

  “Each snowflake that comes down from above is unique and beautiful, just as each of you is unique and beautiful,” she intoned, paraphrasing part of Tom’s closing remarks to the Friday-morning school assembly of the Tigers and Leopards, Years Three through Six, respectively. Somehow, from Mrs. Lennox’s lips, his words sounded slightly insipid and he wondered if he should revise them before he performed that particular trick again in front of schoolchildren. “However do you do it?”

  “The snow trick?” Tom closed the clasp on his bag.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, Mrs. Lennox. I’m still a member of The Magic Circle in London and they would have my guts for you-know-what if I spilled the beans.” In fact, the snow trick was fairly simple, a combination of special paper, water, and sleight of hand, but it produced a lovely, gasp-making finale to a performance, as a simple cutout paper doily snowflake transmogrified into a shower of snow.

  “I see, yes,” Mrs. Lennox responded. “My husband is a member of the Paignton Rotary and they would have his viscera, too, if he revealed anything of what they get up to.” Mention of her husband seemed to put some starch into her persona. She took a final dab at her eyes, then focused on his. A news story of some Rotary members misbehaving with a stripper at a club in Torquay flitted through Tom’s mind, and the look he exchanged with Mrs. Lennox signaled realisation of a common thought.

  “Anyway,” Tom said quickly, gesturing to the floor, which was littered with a confetti blizzard of white paper. “I am sorry for the mess.”

  “It’s nothing. Well worth it.” She led him from the school hall, which had been exited by the students five minutes earlier. “And apropos given the weather we’ve had the past week.”

  “That’s what put it into my mind.”

  “I hope we don’t see snow like that again for a good long time. It played havoc with our scheduling. Lantern-making was to have been Sunday afternoon, with Nancy Ablett, our itinerant primary art teacher, at the Old School House.”

  “Yes, I know. Miranda was disappointed.”

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Lennox continued, “Ms. Ablett was able to come yesterday afternoon. There’s just some finishing touches to do, and the children all take them home this afternoon and have them in time for the Wassail tomorrow.”

  Long trestle tables formed a square within the square of the light-filled teaching room, itself a modern extension of the Victorian stone building that housed Thornford Regis Primary. Rising above the detritus of paper and paste and scissors and tape on the tables were skeletal frameworks of wicker or willow in shapes both wondrously abstract and ponderously specific, some clothed in translucent paper and embellished with paint or ink or trimmed with strips of coloured paper or stickers or stars or moons, or pricked with tiny holes in flowery patterns.

  “They’re splendid,” Tom remarked, plucking one, a vibrant aquamarine-blue fish with comically oversized fins, from the table nearest him and letting it dangle in the air off its carrying pole. “Though this one has spots.” It did, small purple circles dotted all over its paper skin. “A fish with measles?”

  “I think it’s supposed to be a shark.” Mrs. Lennox frowned at the thing. “But with spots, as you say.”

  “Which one is Miranda’s, I wonder?”

  She glanced around the tables. “I do know, but I think I should let her surprise you later.”

  “Fair enough.” Tom gently returned the shark and continued his inspection of the others. “And are they safe?”

  “Installing little battery torchlights has been considered,” she replied, “but everyone seems to love the candles. More atmospheric, I suppose. See”—she lifted one, an unexceptional pink ball, for examination—“the votive candles are secured very firmly to the frame with string and glue. We’ve never had an accident, knock on wood, and heaven knows it more often than not rains at Wassail, so water is more of a concern than fire.”

  Tom was silent a moment, passing his eyes over the shapes along the tables.

  “I expect you think this is all rather pagan,” Mrs. Lennox remarked, following his glance.

  “What?”

  “I say, I expect you think this is all rather pagan. You were frowning.”

  “Was I? Oh! Well, yes, it is rather pagan. But I don’t expect Thornfordites to suddenly start worshipping Woden, so I’m not too bothered. No, I was noticing a certain … colour theme running through the lanterns.”

  “Oh, yes, the violet, or lavender perhaps, for the trim or decoration. It does seem to be this season’s thing! Whether it’s crayons or jumpers, not a year goes by that the girls don’t have to have something in a certain colour, although I expect Garner Tait put the purple spots on his shark to tease the girls. See, the girls’ ones tend to be bells or stars or hearts.” She lifted one of the hearts, ivory in shade, crudely shaped, covered with smaller purple hearts. “Hearts …” She shook her head. “Wait until they find theirs broken.”

  Tom frowned at her and wondered if he should ask a leading question, then thought better of it. He had another pressing appointment this morning.

  “Who’s responsible for the supplies, for the lanterns?” he asked instead, lifting a piece of the purple paper.

  “Ms. Ablett comes with the tissue paper and willow sticks. But the children are encouraged to come with anything they like for decoration.”

  “Do you know who brought this in?” Tom rubbed the paper between two fingers. “It’s really just notepaper, I think. Not construction paper.”

  Mrs. Lennox’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure. Why? Is it important?”

  “No.” Tom tossed off the response, but he was beginning to think it might be.

  “Actually, I have a notion it might have been Ariel Moir. I can see her—” She squinted as if reviewing the children filing in in the morning. “—carrying a small sheaf.”

  “Ariel? How odd.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh …” Tom groped for a satisfying response. “I’m just … thinking Caroline might have kept her from school.”

  “She wasn’t here Wednesday when school reopened, but she did return yesterday, I expect in part for the lantern-making. Such an awful business! I’m sure Mrs. Moir wants to restore some normalcy for Ariel—well, as much as it can be restored, poor child. We sat the children down and had a little discussion about Mr. Moir’s death, so they would be prepared, but I must say some of them are still a little tentative. Your Miranda is very good with Ariel, though.”

  “Well, as you may know, it’s something she’s gone though herself.”

  “Yes, I had heard.” Mrs. Lennox blessed him with a sympathetic smile.

  A red Astra crossed Tom’s field of vision as he stepped from the path up to Thorn Court and onto the level black asphalt of the hotel’s forecourt. DI Bliss was visible in the passenger seat; he turned his head at that moment, presenting Tom with squinting eyelids in the frame of the window, but he signalled no awareness of his presence. Tom watched the car disappear through the gates and begin the climb up Pennycross Road and out of the village and recalled
for one piercing moment his own sufferance of police intrusion in the midst of crashing grief, the dread at seeing once more the CID, the jolt at hearing yet again their voices on the telephone. He felt curiously allied with Caroline, a woman whose spouse, too, had died suddenly and without warning, who was left with a young daughter to bring up on her own, and who, he suspected, was now, for the police, a person of interest, as he himself had been in the days after Lisbeth’s death. And yet there was no answer at the door to the Annex; nor could he find Caroline when he went next door and wandered through Thorn Court’s empty reception rooms. Hammering and crashing from the floor above sent him upstairs, but a boilersuited, plaster-covered worker there could only shrug at his enquiry for the mistress of the house. Finally, he found Caroline outside, tucked into a corner of the converted stables, in huddled conversation with a large, balding man in a yellow safety vest. A flexible ductwork like a great loopy noodle led from one of the upper-storey windows to the flatbed of a truck; above it clouds of grey dust rose and fell to the tempo of cascading bits of plaster and lathe and carpeting. The parking area contained a number of vans with their purposes emblazoned on them—TAVERNER AND SONS BUILDERS, JTL PLUMBING, further evidence that the hotel renovations had resumed in earnest.

  “I’ll get right on it, Mrs. Moir,” Tom could hear the foreman say as he approached. He noted with amusement the man’s beefy hand sweep towards his forehead, almost as if he were to grasp a forelock and tug it, though hairs were few on the man’s bulldog head.

  After glimpsing Tom and dismissing the foreman, Caroline said, “I’m so sorry, I’ve been delayed this morning.” She shifted the sleeve of her puffa jacket and glanced at her watch. “I knew you were coming at ten thirty.”

  “You had visitors. I saw them leaving.”

  “I don’t know what the police think I can tell them.” Caroline said it with some heat in her voice, leading him back towards Thorn Court’s front entrance. “I wasn’t here Saturday evening. And I didn’t cook the meal. Can’t they understand how awful this is for me?”

  “They must go through their routines, I expect. You mustn’t take it personally.”

  “I don’t know how else to take it.”

  “Well, I mean as a personal attack.” Though saying it, he realised how at times the detectives from Bristol CID had made him feel their questions were exactly that, informed by some inexplicable animus. “I’m sure they’ll come to some resolution before very long.”

  Tom could feel her body tense alongside his. In her eyes, he thought he could read a wariness—worse, a flicker of fear—before she turned her head away; the glimpse troubled and confounded him. She led him through the lobby and around the front desk to the hotel office.

  “It’s warmer here,” she said unnecessarily. “The heat’s at bare minimum in the rest of the hotel. Take a seat.”

  Tom chose one of the well-worn burgundy leather armchairs facing a mahogany pedal desk of late-Victorian vintage, not unlike his own in the vicarage study, and nearest a hissing gas fire set into the recess of a fireplace along one wall. Though small and windowless, the room, with its cream walls and minimal decoration, felt cosy, more like a sanctuary-retreat than the busy office of a country hotel, despite the computer, the printer, the photocopier, and the other apparatus of the modern age. A couch against one wall, covered in the same aged leather as the armchairs and festooned in sagging silk pillows, suggested decades of surreptitious naps—somehow, Tom sized the concavity, by some male figure. The room felt clubby and masculine, missing only the tabaccanalia of an earlier era, though one corner contained a narrow gun cabinet containing, he counted, four shotguns.