Eleven Pipers Piping (54 page)

“Invest? I thought—”

“That’s the rub, Tom. Moorgate offers loans at decent rates, they affect to be helping you out, caring about local business and so forth. There’s proper contracts, it’s all very aboveboard, but then there’s the fine print. If you don’t meet certain conditions, pay back the loan in a timely fashion, they give you the chop and you’re forced to sell up. And you end up selling to them or one of their subsidiaries. Will saw enough of it when he sat on the parish council to know what their scheme is, and in this instance, their scheme is to tear down this wonderful building,
my home
, plough under the beautiful gardens, and turn it all into squalid little cottages. I’d rather
give
Thorn Court to the village for a park than see it end this way.”

Caroline shivered.

“But the web is more tangled,” she continued. “And now that you know about Will’s condition, you can probably guess. In our arrangements with financial institutions, banks, insurers, we gambled—foolishly, it turns out—by not disclosing the … genetic time bomb in Will’s family medical history. I’m as much to blame for this. I didn’t insist on telling the truth. The savings in our premiums, for instance, was much too tempting.”

“Will purchased additional life insurance recently, I understand.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m afraid someone let it slip.”

“I think I can imagine who.”

“Mark meant no malice, Caroline. And it would have gone no farther, except for the extraordinary events in the village this week. I can only ask whether you knew Will had done this.”

She gave him a flinching smile. “We’ve each bought additional insurance. It’s a normal business practice when you’re renovating and increasing the value of your business property. Nothing to really raise a red flag here, Tom.”

“I see.” Tom bit his lip. “But, of course, it’s not unknown for the death of one spouse to financially benefit the other.”

“A truism that hasn’t completely eluded those two detectives. Though I understand they’ve concentrated their attention on Molly. I suppose they think I lacked the opportunity, even if I had a motive.”

Tom opened his mouth to respond, but Caroline turned to him with shadowed, exhausted eyes. “Do you think I poisoned my husband?”

Startled at her bluntness, the very question an echo of his own thoughts, he struggled for an even tone: “Caroline, very frankly, from what I know now—or what I think I know—I simply don’t know what to think.”

Caroline remained silent a moment, then said, “That day, ten,
eleven years ago, in Regent’s Park, when Will confessed his secret, he told me he would never, ever endure the suffering that his mother endured.”

“ ‘
Would
never’?”

“ ‘Would,’ not ‘could.’ He said he wouldn’t let himself become so enfeebled, slip into dementia. He … would never put his family through the suffering he endured while his mother suffered.”

“But, Caroline, isn’t it the sort of thing people say when they’re young and healthy and witness the debilitating death of a loved one? In the end, most people, however profoundly they are disabled, vote for, yearn for, life. Life holds all sorts of possibilities, including a cure. Surely, Will was very much one of those people.”

Caroline turned her face towards the window. Tom followed her gaze. Colour no longer stained the horizon. With the sun dropped behind the folds of the hills, the sky had turned leaden, the few thin clouds sombre smudges, while below, in the vale of the village, the contours of tree, wall, and cottage blurred to black, pricked here and there by small, bright squares of curtained window. Towards the eastern extremity of their view, their eyes were drawn by a cascade of light flaring St. Nicholas’s square tower and spilling over to the crown of the ancient churchyard yew visible above the dark cluster of cottage roofs along Poacher’s Passage. The waxing crescent of the moon, pale in the vanquishing floodlight, seemed to brush the crenellations of the tower as it made its slow passage higher into the night sky.

“It doesn’t really have a Gothic shape.” Caroline broke the silence.

“What doesn’t?”

“The yew tree—or at least our yew tree. In one of her Ariel poems, Sylvia Plath describes a yew as having ‘a Gothic shape.’ ”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“We need some light. There are candle lanterns.” She looked to a pair on a nearby shelf amid the books. “They lend a lovely atmosphere.
We would come up here, sometimes, Will and I, if we had a moment—which wasn’t often—and have only that for illumination. Have you a match? I didn’t think so. There are some in a drawer somewhere.” She moved away.

“Caroline …”

“Tom.” Her voice floated to him out of the shadows. “Will did vote for life while he could live it to the full, but he would not vote for life as a state of being barely above a breathing, demented vegetable.”

“You talked about the advance of the disease, yes? You talked over what you might do …?”

“We discussed everything, Tom. Of course, we did.”

Homely sounds followed in rapid succession, the soft scrape of an opening drawer, a rustle through papers, the scrape of glass against metal, the rasp of a match.

“Caroline,” Tom said, watching the match head flare, colouring for a moment the pale contours of her cheeks. “Forgive me if this is abrupt, but you didn’t pass last Saturday night in town, did you?”

“Damn!”

The flame vanished. The acrid smoke curled into his nostrils.

“I dropped the match.”

“There are halogen lights. We used them—”

“No, I don’t want that. Candlelight is more … soothing.”

The rasp of a match sounded and again brought a flush of warmth to Caroline’s face. This time, she held the match and pushed it into the neck of the lamp. The wick flickered then flamed, casting dancing shadows around the tower room.

“No, to answer your question.” She regarded him doubtfully. “I wasn’t in Totnes at all. How did you know? Did someone tell you?” she added with a touch of bitterness.

“No, not as such. I was getting petrol at Jago’s Thursday, and he said your car had been towed in from the lane leading to Upper Coombe Farm, which seemed to contradict what others were saying.
And yesterday, when I was in Exeter, I met Tamara. She told me the snow stopped her
and
Adam from making their way out of the city. I thought the snow had only trapped Tamara. So you were with neither your son nor his girlfriend that night. I suppose you might have made your way into town somehow—got a ride from someone in a more snow-worthy vehicle on the A435—but where would you have spent the night?”

Caroline placed the lamp on one of the corner tables and moved to light a second one. “I thought when I heard your footsteps on the stairs it might be one of those two detectives—Bliss or Blessing—having given up on poor, befuddled Molly Kaif, newly armed with fresh speculation about me. I have one of the oldest motives in the world to have away with my husband, don’t I?—but what I seem to lack was opportunity. I said I was with my son. He said he was with me. The police are concentrated on those who were here at Thorn Court for the Burns Supper, not those who weren’t. But if they had taken the trouble to check Adam’s story, they would have learned what you learned, that Adam was in Exeter with Tamara, not in Totnes or Noze with me. I thought Tamara might have spoken with them.”

“She has no reason to. I said nothing to her that would make her speculate about your whereabouts that evening.”

Caroline scratched the match and lit the lantern. “Adam told her I booked a room at the Seven Stars. Of course, if need arises, that can be easily checked, can’t it?”

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, meaning
less
.”

“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.”