Eleven Pipers Piping

by C. C. Benison

  She blew out the match and flicked him a glance that seemed to question what he intended to do with the gleanings of this conversation. He didn’t know himself. He felt in an invidious position, his mind deeply resistant to the notion that Caroline Moir, sweet soprano of his choir, angelic in her robes, was drawn to this deceit. But he had to face its implications.

  “Then,” he asked, “would I be correct in presuming you spent Saturday night here, at Thorn Court?”

  “Where else?” Caroline placed the lantern on the table. “I had few options. My car slid through the stop where Bursdon Road meets the A435. I almost hit a lorry, then hit a bank of snow by the lane into Dave Shapley’s farm. The man in the lorry very kindly stopped and we tried for a time to shift the car, but the tyres only dug deeper into the snow. Finally, he offered me a lift into town, but I decided to come back to Thornford—walk back, as it happens, through the snow.”

  “And no one saw you?”

  “No one was out driving on Bursdon Road. It was pitch-black and the snow kept falling. I had my torch, but it was a struggle to walk without slipping or falling.”

  “And you reached the Annex and went to bed.”

  Caroline hesitated. “Shall we sit down? Why don’t you remove your coat?”

  He could sense her searching his face as he pulled off his jacket.

  “If only there had never been this freakish snowstorm, Tom. Everything would be so very, very different.”

  “What do you mean?” He sat down at the other end of the banquette and looked at her face in the flickering light.

  “I was exhausted and freezing by the time I descended into the village. I came down Thorn Hill, which led me by the back of Thorn Court. Rather than trudge all the way around the little memorial garden and up the drive to the Annex, I went into the hotel through the back delivery door to get warm. I have keys.”

  “But that leads into the kitchen, doesn’t it?” Tom frowned. “No one saw you?”

  “It must have been after the haggis was piped in but before you had the curry. I passed the chicken jalfrezi simmering on the cooker. All of you were in the private dining room, including Molly—I presume. Kerra might have been in the serving pantry. I slipped quickly through the kitchen, into the lobby—through the other door, the one nearest the east reception room, not the one that leads to the dining rooms,” she explained, “then outside to the forecourt, and along to the Annex. I was glad I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t wish to be seen.”

  “Why not? I mean to say, Caroline, you wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Why would you be chary of being seen?”

  “But, Tom, I was seen. Though I didn’t know it until later. When I stepped out of the front door into the light from the entrance lamps, someone coming from the garage area took note of me. I didn’t hear anything. The snow was so muffling. And I saw nothing. It was pitch-black all around and I’d aimed my torch towards the Annex, and so—”

  “It was Judith Ingley.”

  Caroline nodded.

  “And yet she said nothing of seeing anyone that night. How peculiar. She might have guessed it might be you. When we were frantic to find Will—when he didn’t come back to table after pudding—and after we found him, here, in this tower room, and couldn’t reach you by phone—she never volunteered that you might—might!—be fifty yards away.”

  “I think she quite quickly got it into her head that she had stumbled onto something … significant. It wasn’t, of course. A conjunction of events she thought meaningful was, in fact, meaningless.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Mrs. Ingley called on me Thursday evening to offer her condolences—at least that was the pretext. I didn’t know the woman, so her visit seemed a bit odd. Nonetheless, I invited her in. She told me her family had worked for mine in the past, and once she told me her maiden name—Frost—I recalled the name being mentioned, though there were no Frosts here when I was a child. Judith had left Thornford before I was born. Her father had died before that …

  “The true purpose of her call, however, began to reveal itself. After some harmless reminiscences, she told me an outrageous story about my father deliberately contriving her father’s death—somehow pushing him off a ladder that was leaning against this very tower.” She gestured towards the smaller, east window. “No one had ever breathed a word of such an incident to me before. I could hardly believe it. Did she tell you this?”

  “Caroline, I’m sorry, you know I feel duty-bound to keep my conversations with others private.”

  “She did tell you.” Her eyes hardened. “I know my father had a certain ruthless streak when it came to business, but this is really too much.

  “ ‘Then why wasn’t he charged and tried?’ I asked her. Deference was still very much alive in those days, she said. A quiet word with the local constabulary, a bit of money thrown the way of this or that person. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe my grandfather would behave so … so sordidly any more than I believe my father would!”

  “People sometimes go to extreme measures to protect those they love,” Tom interposed gently.

  “Are you suggesting my father committed this crime after all?”

  “I don’t know, Caroline. How could I? The information was given to me secondhand.” He hesitated over the next question, for the answer to it would open a road of enquiry he dreaded. “Did Judith say what she thought your father’s motive would have been?”

  Caroline shifted on the banquette. “No. Which made the entire interview even more outrageous. Do you know she insinuated that such conduct was part of my family’s nature, that there was an inborn Stanhope taint. ‘Taint’—her expression, a quaint way of saying members of my family can’t help ourselves behaving atrociously because of some genetic legacy, as if human behaviour were like Huntington’s—you have a fifty percent chance of behaving like a madman, if you inherit a particular gene from one of your parents.” She took a sharp breath. “It’s utter insanity.”

  “I presume she didn’t visit simply to rake over old coals.”

  “No. Her concerns were very much wedded to the present. She was quite candid. It seems she had spent a good part of the week gathering intelligence about Will and me in some fashion or another. She certainly had a good idea of our finances, gleaned in part from the Leitchfield Turner estate agent who was trying to sell her the Tidy Dolly—if, in fact, that’s why she was in Thornford at all in the first place. And of course the village knows our business, doesn’t it? But, more sinister, Tom, she seemed to know about Will’s … health.” She looked at him and lifted an eyebrow. “You’re not surprised.”

  “Well, of course, she trained as a nurse and managed a sunset home. Her own husband died of—”

  “Tom, I know all that. She told me that’s how she was able to make such a quick assessment. She couldn’t have been more than an hour in Will’s presence. I was stunned, of course. No one knew of Will’s prognosis but me. But I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t confirm it. I just told her she was being absurd. Before I told her to get out of my sight, she accused me of poisoning my husband to put him out of the … out of the misery that would shortly be his life.”

  “And did you?” Tom realised too late he had given voice to his darkest thought.

  “Tom! Why would you ask that?”

  “I’m sorry, Caroline, I must tell you I came here fearing the worst. That phone call from Judith’s friend in Australia was deeply unsettling. Since I arrived here this afternoon, you’ve admitted you weren’t in town last Saturday night. You were here at Thorn Court. Which you’ve gone to some lengths to keep a secret, including having Adam lie. I can’t imagine what he thinks you’re doing,” Tom added, watching her mouth open to reply. He held up a cautioning hand. “You’ve told me before about your financial distress. Now I know about Will’s condition, which is truly heartbreaking. All these things Judith knew or suspected. As much as I deplore her coming here and intimidating you with her knowledge, her conje
cture isn’t unreasonable, is it?”

  She regarded him stonily.

  “Anyone with this knowledge,” he continued, hating what he was saying, “might conclude that you somehow contrived Will’s death. With his consent. Or not. I don’t know. In either case, Caroline, it’s a crime, and though I’m not confounded about what action I need take, I feel confounded. I’ve come to know you well enough these months I’ve lived in Thornford. You sing in St. Nicholas’s choir, our daughters are friends, you and Will have dined with us at the vicarage, people in the village think of you as a sort of golden couple—nothing about you suggests a woman who would …” He couldn’t say the word murder. “And I’m disinclined to Judith’s notion that folk are fated to certain behaviours by accident of birth. But I can’t look into men’s—or women’s—souls, however much I may try. I don’t know what desperation may drive them.”

  “Are you intending to go to the police?”

  “How can I not? Not unless you can assure me that you had no hand in Will’s death?”

  She bit her lip. “There’s still formal confession in the Church, isn’t there? I don’t mean the confession we make at the service Sundays. I mean—”

  “Yes, I know what you mean—formal confession under the seal of the confessional. Caroline, to receive absolution, you would have to acknowledge your culpability, which would mean going to the police yourself, first.”

  “I see. Well, as it happens, there’s no need for me to make that acknowledgement. I swear to you that I had no hand in Will’s death—none. I won’t say we didn’t discuss the idea of assisted suicide. We did once—it was a horrible and frightening discussion. Will broached it. There had been something in the papers about a couple going to Switzerland, to one of those clinics that help people with terminal illnesses commit suicide. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see how I could bear to witness Will take his life. There, or here, or anywhere. You see, I hadn’t the courage.”

  Tom studied her eyes, which remained trained beseechingly on him, compelling him to believe her. “Then Will’s death remains a mystery.”

  “Oh, Tom.” Caroline’s expression softened. “It’s no mystery. It’s no mystery at all. Don’t you see? No one took Will’s life.”

  “But—”

  “Will took his own life, Tom. He took the poison himself. He knew I couldn’t help him, knew I couldn’t be a party to an assisted suicide without endangering myself, without consequences to our children, to our home, everything we’d built together. So he … arranged his own death. Do you see now?”

  “Took his own life? How can you be sure?”

  “It’s the only explanation. Once we’d had the assisted-suicide discussion, he must have brooded on … taking his own life himself.”

  “And you had no inkling? People sometimes leave clues to their thinking, their intentions …”

  “Other than that he was unusually loving and attentive the week before the Burns Supper?” Her eyes glistened a deeper blue. “Perhaps that should have alerted me. But I welcomed any lifting of the depression that seemed to come with the onset of the disease. I only realised what he might be planning last Saturday, when I dropped Ariel off at yours, and you said something about you, as their chaplain, being a restraining presence.”

  “Yes, I remember the look on your face—wary, a bit frightened.”

  “It suddenly occurred to me that everything was just so, everything was fallen into place …”

  “Fallen into place to what end?”

  “To disguise his intent. The hotel would be empty of guests because we were closed for renovation. It would be empty of workers because it was the weekend. Ariel would be with you at the vicarage, Adam would be in town, with me. And yet there would be a few people about, a circle of friends and acquaintances, coming and going. There would be plenty of food and drink—too much drink, of course, with memories blurred.” She shivered. “I remember thinking if you were a restraining presence, Tom, then perhaps …”

  “Perhaps Will would change his mind? Caroline, if you thought, at that moment, that you could change the course of these awful events, why didn’t you?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “Is a simple, straightforward answer possible? I don’t know, Tom. An unwillingness to believe it could possibly be true? I think that lay at the root of it, at least in part. You do, in a way, go into … well, I suppose Celia Parry would call it ‘denial.’ That’s the fashionable word, isn’t it? I thought how ridiculous I would be interrupting your supper and embarrassing Will, and all for nothing. And perhaps at a deeper level, I thought that if he were set on doing this thing, if he had made his plans, then I had to honour them.”

  “Caroline—!”

  “No, Tom. I had to. We agonised about the disease, Will and I. I knew what the future held. So did he, and he was determined not to live his mother’s life. I had to steel myself to the belief that what he might do was for the best, for him, for all of us.” She stared hollow-eyed into the dark centre of the tower, then put her face in her hands and moaned. “Oh, God, I don’t know if I believe that! We would have managed … somehow. Or maybe Will would have just found another opportunity. I don’t know. I simply don’t know!

  “Tom, when my car got stuck in the snow and the man in the lorry offered me a lift to town, I nearly accepted, but I changed my mind, thinking I must go back and make sure my fears were baseless. Adam wouldn’t miss me. I presumed he and Tamara were probably stuck somewhere themselves anyway. I couldn’t get a signal on my mobile to find out. So—”

  “But when you got back—”

  “Tom, it all seemed so normal, so ordinary. I crossed the kitchen and I could hear laughter coming from the dining room—like any day in the hotel. Or perhaps I was willing myself to believe nothing was out of the ordinary. I don’t know. I can hardly account for my actions. I just remember passing quickly through the lobby, out the door, and to the Annex, where I gulped down a glass of wine with some cheese and biscuits and went to bed.” She flicked him a guilty glance. “I also took a sleeping pill and was oblivious to the world for the next twelve hours.”

  “Do you normally take something to help you sleep?”

  “Horlicks, occasionally, but rarely a pill. Will had some. He didn’t always sleep well. I wanted to shut out the world.”

  Tom looked away, out the window. From his seat, he could see that the moon’s journey had taken it well above St. Nicholas’s tower; now the crescent was suspended in the black sky, God’s fingernail. A week ago, when he and Roger had walked through the snow to Thorn Court, that moon had been invisible. His mind returned to that evening, to the flow of food and drink, to the sequence of courses, to the comings and goings of the guests. Which of all those moments was the fatal one? Which forkful of haggis or curry contained the poison? Will was the only one to eat from the ceremonial haggis. Had he somehow doctored it earlier, out of view? Or that glass of whisky Will dropped? He had reached for a fresh glass from the sideboard, pouring himself a drink from a new bottle. Was that the moment? Was the taxine stirred into the whisky? Or into the cranachan. Could it be? Or the yewberry tartlets after all. He had had two; Nick had given him his. “Are there nuts in these?” Will had murmured. But how could Will have possibly tampered with those?

  He returned his attention to Caroline. “Then it was Will who asked Mrs. Prowse to provide some of her yewberry tartlets for the meal.”

  She nodded. “I think his plan began that moment a fortnight ago when we all rushed into your kitchen to see if your housekeeper had been hurt when she cried out. The berries were on the table. Her pastries are famous in the village, and though no one has ever doubted her vigilance, the possibility, thin as it is, remained that a damaging seed or two might miss inspection.”

  Tom took a breath to temper his rising indignation. “Mrs. Prowse has been shattered by this, Caroline. Some people in the village think she either set out to poison your husband or was shockingly negligent.”

  “I know,
Tom, but can’t you see how desperate Will was? Everything he did, he did to obscure the fact that he was taking his own life, to divert attention from himself, but not direct it so pointedly on another that he or she would be damaged. I believe he thought of that. Madrun had no animus against Will—everyone knows that—and she was nowhere near here that evening. She was at the vicarage, with the girls, so how could she really be involved?”

  “Then what about the Kaifs? The note Will sent to Mrs. Prowse was on the same sort of violet-coloured paper that Victor’s clinic now uses for its stationery. It’s very unfair to draw them into this. They’ve suffered a terrible loss of their own.”

  She laughed mirthlessly. “Tom, Will is colour-blind, remember? Years ago he caught a cricket ball in the back of the head where the … I think it’s called the occipital lobe rests. The effect is, his colour sense was completely wonky. I don’t think he thought for a moment that the paper had anything to do with the Kaifs. Really, I don’t. He probably thought it was ordinary blue writing paper. I haven’t seen this note, but Ariel brought some violet-coloured paper home the other week.”

  “She brought it from the Kaifs’.”

  “But I’ve also been looking at that colour for our own new hotel stationery. It seems to be the fashion. It was Farbarton’s, the stationer in Totnes, who directed me to it. Will wrote his last instructions on paper that colour, remember? He likely pulled it from Farbarton’s samples down in the office, thinking it was a standard business blue, but”—she cocked her head in thought—“he most likely used a printer at Totnes Library or somewhere other than here to print the note to Madrun.”

  “If you were going to send someone an anonymous note, you wouldn’t use distinctive paper—a paper that could be traced to someone.”

  “But it wouldn’t be distinctive to Will. He probably chose it thinking it might be linked to many people and therefore sow more confusion. Will wouldn’t have set out to hurt Victor or Molly. He was too aware of their suffering. Victor had reconciled with Will—”