Eleven Pipers Piping

by C. C. Benison

  “Molly hadn’t—not really. And unlike Mrs. Prowse, she was present at the Burns Supper.”

  Caroline frowned. “I can only guess that Will thought no opportunity could attach to her. And how could it? I know how food is plated and served at banquets, which the Burns Supper was. It’s almost impossible to direct a particular plate to a particular person in food service of that nature. And Kerra was serving, not Molly. Molly would have left trays of plated food, about four or six per tray, in the service pantry, which Kerra would pick up and take into the dining room, but it would be impossible to say with any assurance which guest would get which plate. If Molly herself had carried a single plate of food and put it in front of Will, then I suppose suspicion would fall on her. But she didn’t, did she? You were there.”

  “No, Molly was only seen when the haggis was piped in. But don’t you see that a cloud hangs over everyone who was there? Your brother, for instance, left the dining room to use the loo, but exited through the serving pantry. Perhaps he tampered with the food. He and your husband were not getting along at the supper.”

  “But, again, Tom, how would that plate arrive in front of my husband?”

  “Victor, John, Mark, too—at different times each left the private dining room on some task or errand.”

  “But people do move about at banquets, don’t they? And that’s why Will decided the Burns Supper was the best chance to meet his end, an event so public that a private act would be lost in the confusion. I asked Nick to take me through the sequence of events. I think Will took a sufficient quantity of taxine during your break after the supper and before the toasts began, and came up here, knowing that by the time you found him he would be … gone.”

  “He looked unwell earlier. Judith remarked on it. Thought it was his heart.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine the stress he would have been under that evening. Surely that affected his appearance. Or perhaps he took some earlier—to test its effect? Perhaps he was acting. You didn’t see his performance in Abigail’s Party. He was very good. He played Laurence, who suffers a heart attack.

  “I regret all this deeply,” she continued. “I think Will was single-mindedly concentrated on what he thought best for me and our children. That any cloud hanging over others in the village was nothing compared with the cross we would bear, the suffering we would endure—the loss of our home, watching him grow slowly mad. I can only presume he thought any inquest would eventually bring in a verdict of accident or misadventure at best, or an open verdict at worst, but that no one in Thornford would suffer unduly, and that Ariel and I could go on living here with some financial security.”

  “And then came Judith Ingley.”

  “The snow and Mrs. Ingley, yes.”

  “Did she threaten you?”

  “She preferred to tantalise, I think. She said she would go the police, if and when it suited her. I have no idea what those circumstances might be.”

  “I’m puzzled. She didn’t want anything from you?”

  “I think she saw herself as some sort of avenging angel. Tom, I don’t think my motive, or combination of motives, to murder my husband mattered to her in the slightest. She said she was only interested in ensuring no Stanhope got away again with murder—the Stanhope being me, in this instance. And of course I couldn’t tell her I was certain Will had commited suicide.” Caroline turned to him. “What will you do?”

  “With what I’ve learned this afternoon?” Tom pinched the bridge of his nose so hard it began to hurt, a pain preferable to what he had to say. “I don’t know how I can do any other than report Phyllis Lambert’s phone call to the police. It’s information that sheds light on Judith’s death, at the very least. I don’t know what to say about this conversation with you. I was shocked at the inquest to learn Will’s death was neither accident nor premature death. Now I’m deeply grieved to learn that he took his own life. I understand his reasons, I do, Caroline, but it’s not the way. You must know that as a Christian yourself. I urge you to go to the police and make a full statement.”

  “I can’t do it. It will ruin us. It will make a mockery of Will’s sacrifice.”

  “But I have to think about the needs of others in the village. Mrs. Prowse is not out of the woods. Bliss and Blessing are focusing on the Kaifs. If you say nothing, and the inquest arrives at an open verdict, then they—and the others at the supper—will always have a cloud of suspicion over them. It simply isn’t fair or right.”

  “Tom, you’re the only person in England other than me who knows about Will’s HD—or the only living person. Can’t you—”

  “But once the police find Nick, it will all start to unravel anyway.”

  “I don’t understand? Why should it?”

  “Nick shot Judith to protect you, surely.”

  “Protect me? That’s absurd. Nick has little thought but for himself. Why would he shoot Judith?”

  “But surely you told him that Judith menaced you.”

  “I’ve seen little of Nick since Thursday morning, the day of the inquest. I can’t imagine how he would know of my conversation with Judith Ingley.”

  “Then how—”

  “It wasn’t me, Mum.”

  The new voice brought involuntary gasps from both of them. Tom’s head jerked towards the shadows at the top of the stairs. Peering through the darkness he could barely discern the contours of a figure in a bulky jacket, and then he saw candlelight glint along the barrel of a shotgun and he leapt unthinkingly to his feet.

  “Adam, darling,” Caroline said, rising at the same moment, “why do you have that out of the cabinet?”

  “I heard voices. I thought—”

  “It’s the vicar,” Caroline continued soothingly, moving towards her son. “We’re just having a little chat.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re talking about Dad and Nick.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “That something will unravel when the police find Nick. Mr. Christmas said it.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes,” he replied with a hint of petulance, stepping into the pool of light afforded by the lamps. Tom glanced at the shotgun, its muzzle pointed to the ceiling, and at the heavy scowl that creased Adam’s face. He’d had his fill of firearms and couldn’t quell the shiver that ran up his spine.

  “Are you sure?” Caroline pressed.

  “Yes, Mother.” The scowl deepened.

  Caroline flicked Tom a glance of relief, adding to her son, “I wish you’d put that down.”

  “I asked Tamara not to talk to him.” Adam jerked his head towards Tom, dropping the shotgun so it rested in both hands.

  “Adam, I know your mother wasn’t in town last Saturday, and, no, Tamara did not tell me—at least directly.”

  “Tom deduced it, darling. I do wish you’d put that thing away. I’ve told him that Mrs. Ingley knew I was here at home the night your father died and that she had been rather obnoxious about it.”

  “Mum!”

  “Adam’s aware of your meeting with Mrs. Ingley?” Tom turned to Caroline in consternation.

  “Well, yes. Adam spent Thursday here. He wasn’t party to my conversation with the woman, but he saw her come and go. He could see I was troubled. I couldn’t not tell him.” Tom could see a horror dawn in Caroline’s eyes as she turned back to her son. “John knows I was here last Saturday,” she murmured, as if in a trance, “but he doesn’t know—”

  “John knows?”

  “He saw me slipping out the front door from the lobby,” she replied absently. “He was coming out of the men’s.”

  “What! He knew Adam didn’t fetch you back? Did you ask John to say nothing?”

  “Yes,” Caroline replied impatiently, her attention riveted on her son. “But John doesn’t know that Judith Ingley also saw me. I haven’t spoken with John since Tuesday. Only Adam knows Mrs. Ingley met me Thursday. Oh, Adam, please tell me you haven’t done anything foolish.” She reached for her son, but he drew
back, alarm flashing in his eyes.

  “Mother, what are you saying …?”

  “You told someone? Please tell me you told no one else. Nick? Was it Nick you told?”

  “No, no. I wouldn’t tell Nick. We don’t talk about that sort of stuff.”

  “Then you told no one?”

  Adam’s lips formed a thin tight slit. He had told someone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Some small animal, its pin-bright eyes briefly exalted in the beam of the headlamps, pulled Tom from his black thoughts. His eyes refocused on the rampart of hedgerows, strobing pale gold as the car hurtled down the narrow lane. A road sign leapt from the darkness then vanished, a cottage wall blazed briefly only to be extinguished. Now well past the village confines, Adam had set his Rover into high gear, but no youthful bravado could account for this reckless acceleration. Helplessly Tom’s foot pressed against an imaginary brake.

  “Killing us both will solve nothing,” he gasped as lights from an approaching vehicle reared up and Adam jerked the steering wheel, slamming them into a bend in the hedgerow. Branches thrashed against the passenger windows. As they lurched forward, Tom glimpsed in the interior glow of the other car a silvered face like a furious moon pressed to the glass.

  “I don’t know why you think John would shoot that meddling old cow,” Adam snarled as he plunged the car back into the endless tunnel.

  It was a variant on the very question he had asked in Thorn Court’s tower not many minutes earlier, only the tone then had been wondering, unbelieving, without belligerence. Caroline had turned her face from her son at that moment, but Tom, who caught her gaze, witnessed a daze of emotions navigate her features—relief, then disbelief, shock, then horror. It had been his task to address Adam and reply with an equanimity that couldn’t be further removed from the tumult of his own emotions.

  “I don’t. We don’t.” He had stumbled over the words. “How could John? The weapon’s been found, it seems, and it appears to be one of Colm Parry’s. Did you not know?”

  Adam had blanched. Caroline whipped her head around. “Adam?” she said querulously.

  “Mum, I haven’t been to Thornridge since before Christmas!”

  A new relief seemed to soften Caroline’s features at that moment. Tom knew what was passing though her mind: If the murder weapon had come from a place as inaccessible as Thornridge House, out in the country, locked and alarmed, then what opportunity would anyone in her circle have to acquire one.

  “You didn’t tell me the shotgun came from Colm’s.” She frowned at Tom. “Surely that absolves—”

  “Caroline, your brother has been working much of the week on a security upgrade at Thornridge while Colm and Celia have been away.”

  Her frown deepened. “I didn’t know that. Did you know that, Adam?”

  The young man shook his head impatiently. “Ariel’s calling for you. That’s why I came over from the Annex. I have to get back to Noze. We have an American syndicate arriving in the morning and I need to—”

  “I’ll come with you,” Tom interrupted. He felt a terrible urgency.

  “But it’s impossible,” Caroline murmured to Tom, her eyes flashing a warning. “The shotgun comes from Thornridge.”

  “I have other things to talk about with John,” Tom replied in a low voice. “Adam?”

  “How will you get back?”

  “I’ll get a ride.”

  “You’ve Evensong in little over an hour.” Caroline extended her wrist towards the lamp and frowned over her watch.

  “I won’t be long. I’ll ask John to drive me back. He sometimes comes to Evensong.”

  “Not this time,” Adam protested. “We’ve got things to do.”

  “Nonetheless. If you don’t mind. My car’s at Jago’s being serviced.”

  Ungraciously, Adam permitted him passage in his Land Rover, one of the estate’s older models. Now Tom was confronted anew with the freighted question.

  “I don’t think John shot Mrs. Ingley,” Tom replied, though he recognised the bluff in his voice. In truth, he prayed fervently that John had done nothing so foolish, so criminal. And yet he couldn’t keep from his mind the ambiguity wrought by an inquest’s open verdict around the death of Regina Copeland, John’s wife, who flung herself off St. Hilda’s tower at Noze Lydiard Castle. Or was pushed. Was John—taciturn, sensible John Copeland—capable of cold-blooded murder? Gamekeepers were familiar with the death and disposal of the unwelcome, shooting foxes, rabbits, and other vermin with a kind of impunity that Tom, who had never held a shotgun, found repellent.

  “I’m seeing John on an entirely private matter.” Tom’s feet once again pressed an invisible brake as the car accelerated dangerously between the hedgerows. “Would you bloody slow down!”

  The car slowed, but only a little.

  Tom glanced at the young man’s profile in the dash lights and noted the grim set to his mouth. “I’m sorry, Adam. I’ve made you angry. That’s not my intent. I know this is probably the worst week of your life.”

  Adam’s response was to grip the wheel more tightly. The car careened around a twist in the lane, its headlamps briefly blazing through a gap in the hedge black winter fields.

  “You’re going to grass me up to the police, aren’t you,” he responded in a sullen tone after a minute.

  “No, why would I do that?”

  “Because you know my mum wasn’t with me last Saturday. Tamara told you.”

  “Tamara said you were with her in Exeter. What she knows of your mother’s whereabouts is what you told her—that your mother stayed over in town at the Seven Stars. Besides, your mother and I have discussed this.”

  “But what if the police ask you?”

  “About your mother’s … movements that evening? They won’t ask me, Adam, because they wouldn’t imagine I had firsthand knowledge of such a thing. What I do know, really, is hearsay.”

  “But they’re not thick. They know you’re friends with my mother. You’re her priest. She talks to you. She doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Your mother has much to deal with,” Tom responded, then realised too late how anodyne the observation was.

  “And I don’t?” Adam snapped. He banged the steering wheel with his fist while a wounded-animal sound, heart-wrenching to hear, seemed to come from the centre of his gut. They were stopped now at the junction with the A435, where Caroline had ploughed into a snowbank the week before. Light from the streetlamp turned Adam’s face a sickly green. “My father is dead!”

  “Adam, I’m so sorry—”

  “Poisoned, murdered! And my mother may have—!”

  “Adam!” Tom cut him off. “It’s not true. It’s simply not true. Your mother is not responsible for your father’s death.”

  “Then why does she want me to lie for her?” Adam turned to face him. In the confines of the cab, Tom could smell the other man’s hot meaty breath. “Why?”

  Tom recoiled instinctively from the eruption of fury, struck by his incapacity to offer balm to Adam’s confusion and grief. The cruel truth of Will’s broken health and plotted death, not his—never his—to disclose, would allay the confusion, but only send the dead man’s son into a maelstrom of grief, worse than any ripping his insides now.

  “I think you’ll have to trust that your mother has your best interests at heart,” he replied, unhappily aware that this unique circumstance squeezed from him again the most threadbare of utterances.

  “What about my interests?” The question came as a shout. “If I say my mother was with me last Saturday, that makes Tamara a liar. If I say I was with Tamara, what will happen to my mum?”

  The shattering blast of a car horn made them both jump. Adam scowled, wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes, and executed a sharp left onto the A435, tyres protesting. After a few feet he turned sharply across the highway onto a new country lane, narrowly avoiding an oncoming car.

  “Stop the car.”

  “What?” Adam seemed blind to
the danger of his driving.

  “I said stop the car. I can walk to Noze from here with less chance of dying along the way.”

  Adam said nothing, but he slowed the car to a speed respectable for a night-shrouded country lane. “You haven’t even got a torch,” he muttered after a moment, and a moment later: “I’m sorry.”

  They travelled in silence through the hedgerows, Tom acutely aware he hadn’t responded to the younger man’s agonising conundrum. What would happen if Adam were scrupulous with the truth about his whereabouts that fateful Saturday? A righteous man hateth lying, wrote the author of Proverbs. Yes, he should do, if he were on a quest for righteousness—and he was, really—but Tom felt himself edging towards the slope of moral relativism. Might truth unraveled bring about a greater suffering? Caroline had lost her husband, and now she would lose her home. Adam had lost his father, and now he would learn of his cruel genetic legacy in the most abrupt way. Ariel had lost the man she called Father; now the fact of her paternity would be brought dangerously near to revelation. It was this that Tom, more even than Caroline, wanted desperately to keep vaulted now that he was certain of Judith’s true mission in Thornford. Was all this worth more than some miasma of suspicion that might trail after those present at the Burns Supper, more than the loss of money to some faceless insurance company?

  “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.”