Eleven Pipers Piping (21 page)

The rest of the desk was a paean to tidiness, like the rest of the vicarage (expect for his own office), with its aligned stack of stationery to one side, pens and pencils gathered in a neat spiral in a Royal Wedding 1981 souvenir beaker, and a set of bronze lion-head bookends
squeezing together precisely ranked copies of the
Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus
, Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations
, and, curiously,
Black’s Medical Dictionary
. There was an ivory box with envelopes, an array of photographs in silver frames, while farther along, on a large blotter, was a pile of spiral notebooks, the cover of the top one grubby with what looked like oil stains. He peered at the crabbed handwriting on the front and thought he could discern
THORNFORD REGIS, A PARISH HISTORY, VOLUME VII
. This had to be Madrun’s father’s fabled local history, which he’d scribbled between oil changes and brake repairs at Thorn Cross Garage before he died, and which Madrun was dutifully transcribing to type.

An unenviable task, Tom thought, turning and absorbing an aspect of the room he hadn’t quite noted when he’d crossed it. It was very red, boldly so. The sitting room walls were covered in an unpatterned red silk wallpaper, the chairs in a red fabric. Pillows were red, curtains were red, the highly patterned Turkish rugs and chintz sofa were predominantly red, woven through with a British racing green, the accent colour for the room, most apparent along the wainscoting, mouldings, window sashes, and chimneypiece. He looked back at the Valentine-model Olivetti. The room’s appointments struck a note of professional attention—the handiwork of one of Giles James-Douglas’s many nephews, perhaps?—and he didn’t wonder that the catalyst to artistry wasn’t the shiny red typewriter.

Tom was still standing by the desk, noting the winter pansies in a goldfish bowl on the window ledge, when Madrun arrived with a tray of tea things, which she set down on a low table between the couch and two Queen Anne chairs opposite.

“Is everything well with Miranda?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so.” Tom’s response was automatic. “Why?” he asked anxiously. “Have I missed something?”

“I watched her make the snowman’s smile into a frown.”

“Yes, well, she feels badly for Ariel. I expect it’s just her way of …” Tom trailed off. “Actually, Mrs. Prowse, it’s Will Moir’s … circumstances I wanted to discuss with you.”

Madrun gestured towards a chair opposite and sat on the couch, gathering the folds of her skirt under her.

“I don’t quite know how to begin,” he said, pausing to watch Madrun’s expert hand move to the milk jug and begin to pour milk into two teacups. She looked up at him enquiringly.

“It seems Will Moir’s death isn’t quite as … straightforward as it might appear.”

“He was very young, wasn’t he.” Madrun lifted the knitted cosy off the teapot. “Is there heart disease in his family? Or was he an adopted child. I can’t—”

“It’s none of that, Mrs. Prowse,” Tom cut in. “It’s this: Some poison was detected in Will’s system. There’s been a postmortem.”

“Poison?”
Madrun looked at him sharply. The spout of the teapot veered from the cup, sending golden, steaming liquid splashing onto the tray. “Oh, dear heavens, Mr. James-Douglas’s best rosewood! But how could there be poison? Food poisoning? Something he ate?”

It was the very question.

“Yes, Mrs. Prowse, it was something he ate—something it
appears
he ate … or ingested in some fashion,” he quickly amended.

“The curry? Was it very spicy?”

“No, Mrs. Prowse, not the curry. Or at least most
likely
not the curry,” he amended again. Certainties beyond that of taxine poisoning as cause of death were pretty much absent.

“Perhaps the poor man took some medicine incorrectly.” Madrun resumed pouring the tea.

Tom waited until she had handed him his cup and saucer. “No, not medicine. Well, at least it’s highly doubtful.” He took a polite sip, then replaced the cup. He cleared his throat and said the awful words.

“It appears, Mrs. Prowse, that Will died from a poisonous substance that is found in most parts of the yew.”

Madrun was on the point of reaching for her tea, but her arm stopped midair, as if suddenly clamped by invisible jaws. Her eyes shot to his.

“Mr. Christmas! It’s impossible!” Her features, for a flying moment stamped with incredulity, swiftly hardened to stern stubbornness. She sat up, rigid as a statue. “You’ve seen what I do!”

“I know, Mrs. Prowse,” he responded gently. He had described Madrun’s method with yewberries to Màiri earlier at the Waterside, how she harvested the red fruit from the lower branches of the ancient tree in the churchyard in the late summer, how she meticulously tweezered out the poisonous stone from each berry, how, as an added precaution, she made an inventory of the stones against the berries, then flushed them. She would let no one help her in this task, refusing even Miranda’s enthusiastic offer, barring Bumble and cats, and turning the kitchen almost into a white-coated laboratory. As he’d said to Màiri, he thought it was mad to expend so much time and energy on something so calorically insignificant. He had even hinted as much to her, but Madrun Prowse, a force unto herself, eschewed cost–benefit analysis in her food preparation. Madrun fancied a forage now and again. She foraged for blackberries, wortleberries, bilberries, tayberries, tummelberries, cherry plums, elderflowers, wild mushrooms, wild garlic, and a number of other goodies from the fields, woods, and hedgerows around the village and up on Dartmoor.

“I’m only telling you this,” Tom continued, “because as soon as the roads are passable there’ll be an inquest—and most likely some awkward questions.”

“But I’ve been making sweet things with yewberries for years and years.” Madrun’s tea sat untouched, its thin vapours drifting into the air. “It’s impossible,” she said again, “simply impossible! It
must
be something else. How do you know this, Mr. Christmas?”

“Well—”

“PCSO White! I saw her coming through the garden this morning down to the millpond wearing those … tennis rackets.”

“Snowshoes,” Tom amended. “Màiri has impeccable sources for her information, as you might imagine, Mrs. Prowse.” As Madrun opened her mouth to protest, he added, “Her concern was that you be prepared.”

“For what?”

For the worst
, he wanted to say—
helping the police with their enquiries, becoming a person of interest
, and other such sugarcoatings. “For questions,” he said instead. “For people’s reactions. It will become publicly known.”

If he had expected Madrun to collapse in grief and fear and tears, he was relieved she evinced nothing more than compressed lips and a red splotch on each cheek. In his ministry, he seldom found people’s reaction to shocking news to be utterly predictable. Brutish men wept like children at the loss of a pet; sympathetic women turned stony at the loss of a parent. “At least he didn’t take anyone with him,” one woman had remarked to him matter-of-factly after her son had turned a shotgun on himself.

“Mr. Christmas, this can’t be true. I’m much,
much
too careful for this to happen.”

“Mrs. Prowse, I want you to know that I believe you are. I know from sharing this house with you that you’re meticulous in every way.” He stopped himself before he got to the damning coordinating conjunction
but—but
accidents happen. Life can change in an instant. Horrible, terrible things can befall you and send your life hurtling down some unforeseen path.

He had a thought. “Do you always make a contribution of your baking to the Burns Supper?”

“What?” Madrun frowned.

Tom repeated the question.

“No.” She shook her head vaguely. “This was the first time.”

“Oh? Well, it was kind of you to do so, a nice addition to the traditional offerings, except for …”

“I was asked to supply some berry tartlets. I don’t think I would have thought to offer them myself. Mr. James-Douglas always said he got so full at the main course, he could barely tuck into pudding, so—”

“You mean someone
asked
you to supply the pastries?”

Madrun nodded.

“Who asked you?”

“I don’t know, really. I thought it was Roger.”

Tom frowned, confused. “I always think the way Roger speaks rather distinctive.”

“No, Mr. Christmas. The request came in the form of a note, not over the telephone.”

“You mean, in the post?”

“Not as such. But it was among the letters in the first post, in an envelope pushed through the letter box … last Tuesday, I think it was.”

“And you weren’t sure whether Roger had written it?”

“It wasn’t signed.”

Tom caught his breath. Unbidden came a sharp memory of standing at his cluttered desk at St. Dunstan’s one spring afternoon in the year that Lisbeth died, telephone jammed between ear and shoulder (he had been talking to the archdeacon), absently opening the post he’d retrieved moments earlier from the church office in-box. Among the letters and flyers, too, had been an envelope, unsealed, unaddressed, unremarkable, really, until he fished out the note within, unfolded it against his thigh, and casually scanned the first sentence, disbelieving scanned it again, his eyes racing over words that followed, the phone receiver, his interlocutor forgotten, slipping from his shoulder and crashing to the desk, along with a fluttering of another paper tucked into the note’s fold. His stomach clutched with disgust at the invective, the blast of pure extruded
hate, the assault on Lisbeth as a woman, as a Jew, as his wife—and its implications. Half blindly, oblivious to his name barked anxiously through the phone receiver, he sank against a rank of filing cabinets, hand groping—with dread—for the other thing, the thing that fluttered, the thing—a photograph—that would, for a time, shatter his faith in their marriage.

“Mr. Christmas?” Madrun regarded him curiously.

“Sorry, I …” Tom pushed the awful memory away. “I was going to say, how odd this is. Did you think it odd at the time?”

“I did think it a bit previous, Mr. Christmas.” Madrun took a more confident sip of tea. “But as the request was for the Burns Supper and as Roger is pipe sergeant of the Thistle But Mostly Rose and an old friend, I assumed he was busy in the shop and dashed off the note and had it delivered … and forgot to sign it.”

“The telephone would have been quicker.”

“There were three twenty-pound notes in the envelope—perhaps that’s why. I put the money in the offertory box in the church.”

“That’s very generous, Mrs. Prowse, thank you.” Tom thought a minute, glancing absently at a cabinet against the wall between the two windows filled with china figures. “But it couldn’t have been a note from Roger. He was curious about the box you gave me to take up to Thorn Court on Saturday.”

A silence descended on the room, broken only by the sound—muffled by snow and the vicarage’s stone walls—of St. Nicholas’s chimes sounding the time, two thirty. Faced towards the south windows, Tom glimpsed through net curtains the pale midwinter light already waning as the sun edged towards the folds of the hills, his mind niggled by this queer departure from the Burns Supper customs, the curry notwithstanding. Who among the Thistle But Mostly Rose so adored Madrun’s pastry he had to have it at the meal, an addition to the traditional cranachan? He glanced at Madrun, whose fingers were worrying the hem of her jumper, her face now as stubbornly inexpressive as an Easter Island statue.

“Was the note handwritten, Mrs. Prowse?”

She blinked. “It was typewritten.”

“Really?” Tom had a notion that typewriters had all kinds of minor idiosyncrasies that could be spotted—cockeyed
e
’s or smudgy
n
’s or wonky
t
’s.

“Not like my Olivetti, mind. More like a page in a book.”

“A computer printer, then,” Tom groaned. The note he’d received that day at St. Dunstan’s had been similarly devised. “The printing’s usually very tidy—although I suppose there are experts who do forensic identifications. Oh, well, perhaps the writer of the note will come forwards at the inquest, though I shouldn’t wonder that he keeps mum.”

“I’m not sure that will help me, Mr. Christmas.”

“No, I suppose not.” Tom bit along his lip. “You didn’t happen to keep the note, did you?”

Not keeping his had been a mistake. Rage had triumphed over shock then. Foolishly—for he could have provided some scrap, some lead, to police after Lisbeth was murdered—he had torn the evil thing to shreds and flushed them down the loo, watching to ensure every bit was consigned to oblivion. But the damning photograph—a drab image on copy paper, surely captured by a mobile phone lens, of Lisbeth in the passionate embrace of another man outside a restaurant on Bristol’s harbourside—he had slipped into his pocket.

“I’m not sure.” Madrun’s brow furrowed. “I remember folding it into the pocket of my apron. No. I did take it out again, and used the back of the paper to make a grocery list.”

“Was there letterhead? Distinctive paper?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Mr. Christmas, what I don’t understand is why Mr. Moir wouldn’t have
noticed
seeds in one my berry tartlets. Yew seeds would be hard on the teeth, I’m certain, and—I gather, I’ve never had one—really quite bitter. And”—she warmed to her argument—“you would need many seeds, many—a tablespoon at least, I should think—for it to be—”

She stopped herself; the word
fatal
hung in the air between them. But Madrun’s contention had been Tom’s, too. How much taxine
did
it take to fell a man the size of Will Moir, surely weighing more than thirteen stone? Màiri didn’t know. The finer details of the postmortem remained undisclosed. But Tom recalled a story from his childhood in which a neighbour girl had ingested some yewberries, seeds and all, and had been rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped. This prompted a warning from his mother about the dangers of noshing on the alluring red berries that formed on the yew in September. “Not even one!” she had warned, though it had taken more than one to make the girl ill.