Eleven Pipers Piping (50 page)

Tom bit his lip rather than reply. Indeed, he had thought of little else during his fitful sleep. Of course, Nick, of the three in possession of a shotgun at the Wassail, had the best opportunity to shoot Judith. The call on his mobile that had taken him away from the orchard: a setup of some nature? Adam had reported Nick’s “smile” at the time of the call. Was Nick smiling in anticipation of a rendezvous with Oona? Or because some plan of his was about to commence? And what motive? Colm asked. Tom could only assume Judith posed some threat to Nick, though she had dismissed his threat to her. And now means. What shotgun had Nick been using? He assumed, as Nick had been a Gun at the Wassail before, that he possessed his own firearm. But only an impulsive fool would use his own traceable weapon. Nick was impulsive, but not a fool. Perhaps
there was method in his leaving Thornridge House unlocked and unalarmed. If the weapon used to shoot Judith Ingley were ever found, if it wasn’t weighted and thrown into the millpond, and it turned out to be one from Thornridge House’s gun room collection, Nick could claim someone, anyone, could have come and helped himself—or herself—to it.

And then, a coincidence. Thinking about it later, Tom preferred the word
coincidence
. In this instance, he didn’t wish to use the godly word
providence
. Colm was about to part company for the choir vestry, but the sound of the stout south porch door creaking open on its hinge (most arrived for church through the north porch) caught their attention. And then, before they could carry on to their next tasks, a new and horrifying sight: Miranda stepping up St. Nicholas’s crooked aisle in her green wellies and her crimson jacket. On her hands was a pair of remarkably bright yellow gloves reaching well up into her coat sleeves. And in her outstretched arms, carried like a lamb to sacrifice, was a shotgun.

T
he couch was soft and fat and a few inches too short to accommodate Tom’s height—six feet, one inch—or length, when he was supine (or very nearly), as he was now. The choice had been: elevate the feet (over the armrest) or the head (against the other armrest). Even to lie down any which way for a moment was to invite the sleep that his body craved, but the sight of the couch, a marshmallowy confection of blue-and-white-striped chintz, was as tempting as the bed of Delilah and so he was settling upon its gentle surface for a minute—
for just a minute!
—taking care to elevate his head (not his feet) so that he wouldn’t sink under the waters of Lethe. Madrun had laid a fire in the grate. It crackled slowly, sending a golden glow over the carpet. Outside, the rain continued in its mizzly fashion, pit-pit-pitting against the panes of the French windows that on warm days opened his office to the vicarage garden. On an ordinary Sunday afternoon, he might have repaired to the sitting room couch or to his bedroom, flopped down, unfolded
The Observer
, cast his
eyes over its columns with great intention, and then slipped, without guilt, through postprandial torpor into sleep full-stop. But this troubled Sunday afternoon, his racing mind countermanded his weary body and
The Observer
fell to the floor. Out in the garden, his garden, amid the shrubs and the very last of the snow, scene-of-crime officers were mucking about looking for some shred of evidence of a killer’s presence. They had been concentrated on the Old Orchard in the early morning. It was Miranda’s discovery that refocused their attention.

The mental picture of his child bearing a firearm jolted him anew, but at the time, as she moved through the transept, Tom felt constrained to hide his horror and revulsion behind a mask of delight for her initiative. Bumble, scrabbling through the remnant of a snowbank, dissolving in the rain, against the boundary wall between the vicarage garden and the Old Orchard, had laid bare the trace of a curious object, sending Miranda, discerning reader of Alice Roy novels, racing to the kitchen for a pair of rubber washing-up gloves.

“
Regarde ce que Bumble a trouvé, Papa
, she beamed, straining to raise the instrument, heavy in her child’s hands. “
Mais ne le touche pas! Il pourrait y avoir …
fingerprints!”

The French word eluded her, which was just as well. Tom had instinctively moved to grab it, desperate to remove the dangerous thing from his daughter’s grip. Mercifully, the choir members were at the back of the church in the choir vestry robing themselves; the bellringers were one floor above, busy shadows behind leaded glass. Besides Colm, only Fred, John, Russ, and—inconveniently—churchwarden Karla Skynner bore startled witness to this spectacle, the last entering from the north porch as Miranda entered from the south and casting Tom a glare so censorious he rushed to usher Miranda to the vestry.

“Do you think Mrs. Ingley was killed with this?”

Her bluntness shook him. His heart, already racing at the proximity to this instrument of death, an obscenity in the house of God,
gave an uncomfortable thud, and the worry pierced his mind that Miranda was becoming tempered to violent death.

“Darling,” he began gently, pulling her to him, “we won’t know until the police look at it.” He glanced at Colm, who was leaning over the table examining the shotgun. “But I’m sure they’ll think you’re brilliant.”

Colm had phoned the police on his mobile. “I can only presume it’s mine,” he said to Tom, “and I very much wish it weren’t.”

While the congregation was singing “O Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness,” Tom noted Detective Sergeant Blessing step into the church and take a pew near the back, next to Tilly Springett, who shot him a glance of startled recognition. The sergeant sang heartily—Tom could hear his bass-baritone rumble below the reedy voices of his flock—ending the Epiphany hymn with a full-blooded chord that set a few heads turning. The sergeant appeared to listen, too, with rapt attention to Tom’s sermon, or at least he affected the ability to look attentive, which was more than some did, such as Adella Sainton-Clark, who spent his sermons filling in the sudoku challenge cut from
The Sunday Times
as if she didn’t think he could see what she was doing. Attendance had been heartening, however; in part—he theorised—a fallout from last Sunday’s storm-stayed multitude; in part, too, a visceral response to the sensation and menace of the last week, though he would have preferred villagers drawn simply by the Christian message.

The text for this second Sunday of Epiphany was John 2:1–11, the marriage at Cana, wherein water became wine, the first of Jesus’s recorded miracles, the inauguration of His ministry, an opportunity to reflect on the power of Jesus to change things that are ordinary and commonplace into things that are rich and inspired. But as the week unfolded, and as Tom reflected on the dilemmas and tensions of the Kaif and the Moir marriages, he found his mind wandering more and more literally to the institution itself. Were there limits, he
wondered, to those declarations at the marriage service to love, comfort, honour, and protect? There was, he thought, to the last.

Later, after the Dismissal, great was the lingering of parishioners in the frosty air outside the north porch remarking on the service (ostensibly), but in reality (Tom noted the furtive glances and rubbernecking aimed past the door) more interested in the dark-suited figure who remained inside, known to a few of them—then, within whispered moments, all of them—as a police detective. “He’s come to see a dog about a man,” Tom joked to deflect their curiosity, breaking away at last, and stepping back into the empty nave.

“And where’s Inspector Bliss this morning?” he asked, leading DS Blessing towards the vestry.

“In the pub.” Catching Tom’s frown, he added, “He’s a martyr to his bowels, as you know, sir, and just between us, of course.”

“Of course,” Tom murmured, leading the sergeant past Colm, who had been defending the door against a vexed Karla Skynner who was insisting on knowing why a little girl had brought a shotgun into the church.

Blessing flashed his warrant card, informed her he was present on police business, and told her, couched in a kind of officialese, to get on her bike. Inside the vestry, where more than two was a crowd, Blessing scowled at the shotgun glistening coolly in the light from the single lancet window, pitched his eyebrow up a notch at Colm, who reiterated his possible ownership, and said, “Someone from the team will bag it and tag it, and we’ll have it tested, of course.”

“I can’t say I’m anxious to have it back,” Colm said after he had explained the security system cock-ups at Thornridge House. “But the paperwork’s at home, Sergeant, if you need it. I think everything’s Bristol fashion.”

“And the last person—or most likely the second-last person—to fire this shotgun, would be you, Mr. Parry?”

“Never fired one in my life, Sergeant. The last person who—” Colm stopped and flicked a dismayed glance at Tom. “My collection is serviced by Adam Moir, so—”

“Who was one of the Guns at last night’s Wassail, yes?”

“Yes,” Tom replied, “but—”

“But?” Blessing echoed.

Tom had shrugged at that moment. He wanted to say that Adam participating in a violent act seemed unlikely, but he remembered Penella and Adam having words about Adam wandering off for an alleged pee before the fatal shot. Colm had taken his leave, to remove his robes in the choir vestry, and Tom had been left alone with Blessing, who favoured him with a discerning glance.

“Fine sermon, Vicar.”

“Just following the lectionary, Sergeant.”

“Of course, the lectionary.”

“Churchgoer?” Tom removed his stole.

“My work often makes that impossible, as you can see. Mrs. Blessing attends with some regularity, however. St. Mary’s, Totnes.”

“Then there is a Mrs. Blessing.”

“Is there some reason why there wouldn’t be?” The sergeant shot him a challenging frown. “Anyway, I thought your aside that the resolution in the wedding vows to protect might bump up against the law interesting. I wondered if you had anyone in mind?”

“I may have.”

“I see.”

“Has your interest something to do with the recent deaths in the village?”

“You’ll learn soon enough, I expect,” Blessing grunted. “The inspector and I will be paying another visit on the Kaifs.”

“Are you … visiting them with a warrant in hand for one or the other?”

“At the moment, Vicar, we’re merely pursuing our enquiries. No warrant. Not yet, at any rate.”

“Could you get a warrant? Would a magistrate issue one? I can’t see that you have much evidence against Molly. Or Victor, for that matter. But, of course”—Tom struggled out of his surplice—“you likely know much more than I do.”

Blessing lifted a hymn book with a torn spine from a pile on a chair. “Finding someone with a persuasive motive to poison Will Moir is a bit of a trick,” he said, absently turning the pages.

“So your intent is to bother the Kaifs without good reason?”

“Look, Vicar.” Blessing snapped the book shut. “The coroner’s report says Will Moir was poisoned. There’s little evidence it was an accident, so we’re obliged to follow whatever leads there are, thin as they are, wherever they are.”

“I can understand your frustration, Sergeant, but surely these two deaths—Will’s and Judith Ingley’s—are connected somehow. I can’t see how that connection would turn through Molly or Victor Kaif. I can’t imagine either of those two very familiar with a firearm, for instance.”

Blessing tried pressing the hymn book’s torn spine into place, to no avail. “The only connection is that Mrs. Ingley happened upon the Burns Supper, which Mr. Moir also attended.”

“And at which Mr. Moir died, if you recall. As I told you last night, Judith came to Thornford, to the Burns Supper, for a specific reason.”

“Which she wouldn’t tell you.”

“That’s true, but her past has a tragic link to the Stanhopes.”

“Yes, so you said, but that link is with Clive Stanhope, who has been dead for five years. Even if he did murder Mrs. Ingley’s father, there’s nothing that can be done about it now—it took place half a century ago and all the principals have dropped off their perches. And if she were bent on some sort of—I’m not sure what, revenge?—after all these years, then it’s difficult to understand how
Will Moir comes into the picture. Will
married
a Stanhope, but he
isn’t
a Stanhope.”