Eleven Pipers Piping (40 page)

“I ask,” he said, “because Mrs. Prowse received an unsigned note last week asking her to send some of her yewberry pastries to Thorn Court for the Burns Supper.”

“Yes?”

“It was written on paper the same colour as the one you used to line those two crowns.”

Molly blinked, first with consternation, then with dawning apprehension. “But Victor brought that paper home.”

T
om? Vicar?”

Tom focused on the face in front of him, at the red fox-tail eyebrows in interrogatory lift, at the large, ruddy face with its anchoring goatee, a pruning of his former full beard, streaked with incipient hairs of white.

“Yes?”

“Down a rabbit hole, were you?” Eric Swan, the Church House Inn’s licensee, regarded him askance. “I was wondering if it were the usual you were after.”

The notion of a large brandy flitted through Tom’s mind, but as the sight of the parish priest pouring spirits down his throat middayish might spark undue prattle in the village, he gave Eric an assenting nod to a libation more modest and predictable. He had indeed been down a rabbit hole, of sorts, having left Damara Cottage, thinking, as Alice had, that it would be so nice if something made sense for a change. Molly’s confession was surely nonsense,
the outburst of an angry, grieving, attention-seeking woman. Even the police seemed unwilling to countenance this, at least for the time being. But was Molly adept at some sort of double bluff?

“Busy day?” he asked, hoping for the distraction of ordinary conversation as Eric placed a half of Vicar’s Ruin in front of him.

“Well, might be busier if we had another natural disaster.”

“Instead of a human one?”

“Will’s death’s still testing your mettle, I see. At least,” Eric continued, pulling a folded newspaper from below the bar and twisting it round in front of Tom with a flourish, “it’s only getting local notice.” He plunked a pudgy finger onto the relevant column. “Not that Will wouldn’t deserve national attention, of course.”

Tom favoured Eric with a censorious lift of eyebrow. The murder in the spring of Sybella Parry, the nineteen-year-old daughter of St. Nicholas’s choirmaster, Colm Parry, had attracted the national press in part because the victim, her body found entombed in a Japanese taiko drum in the village hall, was crowned with the aura of secondhand celebrity: Colm had been a pop star of middling fame once upon a time and his ex-wife, Sybella’s mother, a model of more than middling fame, though now more renowned for disgracing herself in public in one fashion or another. Unfortunately, the circus allure pulled in the punters, which sickened Tom, and topped up the Church House Inn’s till, which, at the very least, filled Eric with mixed emotions.

“And I say ‘national attention’ ”—Eric held up his hands in mock surrender—“because Will was a fine fellow.”

Tom let his eyebrow fall and his eyes drop to the passage in the
South Devon Herald
. Page three, top, was a squib with the headline in a type size several picas shy of shock-horror:
MOIR INQUEST OPENED, ADJOURNED
.

“By the way, those coppers were in here earlier, grumpy as hell.”

Tom glanced up from the reportage, which was cursory, a distillation of whowhatwherewhenwhy. “I’m not surprised. I can’t imagine
how they’ll come to a resolution. I can’t figure how the poison got into Will’s food. Or when it did.”

“Or why it did?”

“Well …”

“Nick Stanhope was in here earlier with those property developer blokes.”

“Interesting conversational transition.”

“Is it?”

“Okay, then how do you know they’re developers?”

“Seen them before, haven’t I. They’ve been sniffing around Thornford for years.” Eric picked up the bar towel and began absently wiping at the ring of moisture Tom’s glass had left. “Belinda says they always look like they’re measuring the village for curtains.”

“Roger mentioned overhearing a couple of men in his shop speculating about turning Thorn Court into housing.”

“That’s probably them, then. Moorgate Properties.”

“Will was very much against
any
new development. And Caroline would never bend to a scheme to sell Thorn Court and see it torn down. She’s enormously sentimental about the place.”

“But Nick isn’t, is he?”

“How do you know?”

“I
know
. This boozer is the very nerve centre of the village.”

“I thought the post office was the nerve centre.”

“Depends on your sex—or gender, as I was corrected by my wife not long ago. This is the blokes’ nerve centre. Look.” Eric lowered his voice. “My sources—”

“Your
sources
?”

“All right, my great flapping ears have picked up that Nick has a little gambling problem. Owes a bob or two to some shady characters in Torquay.”

Tom regarded the publican with interest. The conversation overheard between Caroline and Nick earlier in the week flitted through his mind.
Look, Caro, I need some bloody money and I need it soon, do
you understand? It’s a matter of life and death!
Caroline had dismissed her brother’s melodrama, and so had Tom, really. But then Màiri had hinted that something not quite kosher about Nick had the power to scupper her chances of being accepted for training to be a full police officer.

“Put it this way,” Eric continued. “With Will out of the picture, Nick benefits. Most of the business folk in the village know that Nick loaned money out of his inheritance for his sister and Will to buy Thorn Court. Either he gets paid back out of the insurance money—there has to be insurance money—or he bullies Caroline into selling the hotel to someone like Moorgate Properties.”

“I don’t think Caroline is easily bullied.” Tom’s eyes wandered over at the chalkboard on the wall by the bar with its list of lunch specials, then wandered back. “And I somehow can’t imagine—”

“Nick doing the deed?” Eric smiled. “That’s what I said to Belinda. Something womanish about poisoning someone, I said, and she tore a strip off me for that.”

“You’re not the only one to make that observation.”

“Somehow I imagine Nick with a shotgun.”

“Hardly subtle. You’d have to be at least a bit subtle to take someone’s life and make it either look like an accident or appear so confusing that the court throws up its hands in despair.”

“Nick’s hardly subtle, from what I’ve seen.”

“Unless desperation drives you to subtlety. What an odd idea,” Tom reflected. “Usually desperation drives folk to some blunt action.”

“Are you ordering something to eat?”

Jerked from his thoughts, Tom’s mind went to the vicarage refrigerator, crammed with victuals, some of them still left over from Christmas.

“Your Madrun not on the job this dinner hour, then?” Eric ran a towel over a glass and placed it on an overhead rack.

“She’s gone to town—Torquay, I think. Something about needing
new clothes for her holiday in Tenerife.” Tom caught the flash of amusement light up Eric’s blue eyes and understood its source.

Eric shot him a semi-apologetic grin. “Coppers might not be best pleased if she leaves the country.”

“Mrs. P has no argument with the Moirs,” Tom protested. “She was devastated when I told her about the taxine.”

“But the Stanhopes used to swank about this village in days past, they say. Who knows if they didn’t run roughshod over the Prowses?”

“Now you’re talking nonsense.” Tom noted the twinkle in Eric’s eye.

“I thought that might wind you up.” Eric stroked his goatee. “But seriously, Tom, those two coppers are going to have to come up with something for their lords and masters. Prove they’re on the job and all. By the way, your houseguest was here taking her lunch.”

“Oh, yes?” Tom regarded Eric blankly, then shrugged. “Well, what with Mrs. Prowse being in town …”

“She was having a good long natter with Old Bob.”

“Really?” Tom realised, too late, that his voice held too much curiosity.

Eric responded predictably: “Something going on?”

“Not really,” Tom retreated. “Mrs. Ingley is, I suppose, just reconnecting with old friends in the village.”

“She’s been with you awhile. After three days—well, you know, fish and relatives begin to …”

“She’s neither fish nor relative. Anyway, she’s been no trouble. Keeps to herself to a certain extent. I think her plan is to leave early next week. She wants to attend tomorrow’s Wassail and she’s having a meal or something with John Copeland on Sunday. I’m not sure if she intends to buy the Tidy Dolly or not, though.”

“Funny not paying a visit for fifty years. Stafford’s not so far. You’d think you’d come and put a few blooms on your parents’ grave once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose.” Tom gave a passing thought to the last time he’d put flowers on Lisbeth’s grave.

“Actually,” Eric continued, “you’d think if you arrived after fifty years, you’d get to your parents’ grave in short order.”

“You wouldn’t have seen it for the snow a few days ago, Eric.”

“Anyway, she’s doing her duty this afternoon.”

Tom raised an enquiring eyebrow.

“She said. We had brief chat when she blew in. Got a holly wreath and all. By the way, she’s won no favour with one person in the village—your houseguest, I mean. Though Nick doesn’t live in Thornford, does he? God knows he’s been here a lot lately—”

“Eric …?”

“Sorry. Any road, when Mrs. Ingley left, Nick jumped up from his meeting with those two Moorgate blokes and chased after her. I could see him out the window giving her a right rollicking. Couldn’t hear anything, though.”

“Was there some provocation?”

Eric shrugged. “She didn’t look bothered. I thought to go out and take Nick by the scruff, but it appeared Judith was giving as good as she got.”

Tom frowned. “Did the police witness this?”

“They’d only popped in for a swift half. They were gone before either Nick or Mrs. Ingley arrived. Now, are you noshing or not? Steak and kidney pie is on special—Belinda’s mother’s recipe, as it happens.”

Tom felt his stomach growl at the mention, but the ale had fueled another desire. “Sounds delicious,” he said, raising his glass high to drain it, “but I have something I need to attend to.”

Crossing St. Nicholas’s chilled nave from the north porch, Tom glanced up at the memorial window erected in the south aisle in memory of Rupert Stanhope, Caroline and Nick’s great-grandfather, who had perished in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, a young man
leaving his child bride and baby boy, Arthur, to manage the family holdings. The window, glowing faintly in the winter light, depicted a rich man dispensing alms, a pious and, Tom wondered, perhaps deceptive choice of subject, the attitude in which the rich liked to see themselves rendered. Perhaps the Stanhopes had been a font of charity in the village (he would have to find out), but perhaps the Great War and its sacrifices had altered the family as it had transformed society, hardened it to new realities. Arthur—Caroline and Nick’s grandfather—grew up to reshape the private idyll of Thorn Court into a commercial enterprise. He spawned Clive Stanhope, who probably deserved the epithet
black sheep
, but somehow evaded scrutiny. Tom thought, too, of those who had laboured for them, thought about the bitterness of servants of times past, their helpless rage, in the days of deference to one’s presumed betters.

He pushed open the heavy oak south door and felt the icy air brush his cheeks. The churchyard was bathed in the pale metallic light of a midwinter afternoon. He could see past the bare branches of the copper beeches to the still-frozen millpond and past that to a stark tracery of denuded trees on the far side, punctuated by dark green conifers rising like sentinels into a wavering wreath of mist. Except for rooks cawing, all was calm, the graveyard empty of life but for a small, still figure, wrapped in pink, near the bottom of the southeast terrace, a little distance from the rag stone wall, edged by sloping drifts of snow, that marked the boundary with the vicarage garden. Tom hesitated on the stoop, composing himself for the interview ahead, then stepped onto the pea shingle path.