Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (46 page)

Tom had allowed himself to be once again distracted by the figure lower down the slope. This time Jamie followed his glance, his brow furrowing as if deciding: friend or foe? The man by the horses appeared almost a silhouette, a study in hiker’s khaki, head hooded, rucksack hoisted on one shoulder, walking stick in one hand. He might be anybody, but his posture, his aspect, his hand movements as he calmed the horses, were utterly recognisable. It flitted through Tom’s mind, as he glimpsed Jamie grasp the full meaning of what he was witnessing, that movement, like voice, could be so very distinctive.

“Oh, my!” Jamie’s voice filled with a kind of wonder as he got off his knees.

“Darling, what—?”

“It’s John! Look! Down by the horses.”

Jane’s head twisted. Gaunt’s hand slipped from hers. A small cry escaped her lips.

John had turned towards one of the horses, his face disappearing into his hood. Then, as if alerted by sudden movement, he glanced up. Jamie didn’t run, as Tom half expected, but rather moved swiftly down the puddled incline with a kind of ferocious intent, oblivious to the water splashing around his legs.

“John!” he shouted into the rain and wind.

Would the other man step forward to meet his brother halfway? No. Tom was keenly aware of the stubbornness of the man he’d known for several months in Thornford as Sebastian, who’d served as his verger but slipped away from the village. John held his stance, leaning on his stick like a beardless prophet, and seemed, as Jamie approached, to bend from the waist, almost imperceptibly, with an air of something like supplication, as if conceding he could run no more. From a distance, under the dull skies, Tom could see little of the brothers’ reunion. The meeting of James Allan, Viscount Kirkbride, and his younger brother, the Honourable John Sebastian Allan, after many years, appeared a model of restraint.

“Jane, go.” Tom could sense her desperate indecision. “We can’t do anything now but wait.” He acknowledged her regretful glance and admonition to keep the patient conscious and watched her speed down the slope.

“Gaunt.” He leaned into the man’s ear, thinking talking the best, the only, method. “What do you last recall?”

Gaunt moaned. “Helping my wife in the kitchen after luncheon.”

“You don’t recall returning to the Gatehouse later with Mrs. Gaunt?”

“No.”

“Do you recall having a cup of tea in the Gatehouse this afternoon—with someone other than your wife?”

“No.” He groaned.

Tom studied the man’s wet, streaked face closely. Did he truly not remember? Or did he choose not to? Had the last three hours vanished from his memory?

“Gaunt. Gaunt!” He raised his voice as Gaunt’s eyes rolled into his head. “Your wife told me you believed for years Oliver—Lord Morborne—was responsible for your lover’s death, for Kimberly’s.”

Gaunt’s eyes rolled back. He released a long groan. “He would come around to Lowndes Square—”

“Where the Arouzis lived?”

Gaunt tried to nod.

“Don’t move your head. You must keep still.”

Gaunt groaned again. “From time to time, he would come. That whistling—”

“It is distinctive, but—”

“And … they talked … young Mr. Arouzi and Lord Morborne—Viscount Aldermyre, then. And Lord Kirkbride … not—”

“Yes, I know, you mean Jamie’s older brother, who died.”

“Staff …” Gaunt released a long agonised moan. “… overhear.”

“An air ambulance should be here any minute.” Tom scanned the skies.
Where is the bloody thing!

“Young Mr. Arouzi was there.”

“What? At Kimberly’s assault?” Tom was taken aback, then remembered: “Mrs. Gaunt says you told her there was another boy, darker-skinned.”

“I didn’t tell her it was Kamran. He wasn’t … a part of it, the rape.”

“But a bystander? It’s too—”

“A boy, bullied by his friend … memory of it affected him badly … drink, drugs … the Arouzis despaired of him … suicide. Morborne seemed only to thrive, to go from success to success. You would read about it in the papers … intolerable … unfair when Kimberly died … that way.” Gaunt ran his tongue over his lips and said with sudden clarity, “I loathed Morborne. I’ve wanted him to die.” The effort cost him. His groans deepened as he gathered breath. “… went into the Labyrinth yesterday morning.”

“Your wife said you asked her to lie about—”

“… bad sleep … lightning, thunder woke me … I heard whistling outside … went to catch him before he returned to the Hall.”

“But it was still dark, Gaunt. How—?”

“Torchlight … from the Lab …”

“Labyrinth. Don’t move your head. You saw Lord Morborne?”

Gaunt croaked: “Yes.”

“You entered the Labyrinth …”

“Yes.”

“When you arrived …”

“Dead. He was dead.”

Extraordinary, Tom thought: Not many minutes after
sighting him, standing, living, at the heart of the Labyrinth, in the time it took Gaunt to round the Labyrinth, Morborne was fallen to the ground, dead?
Is he lying? Or forgetting?
He looked into the strained face. Gaunt’s eyes were shut now, whether against pain or memory, it didn’t matter. He must stay conscious.

“Gaunt, listen to me. Listen!” He tapped at the man’s cheek. “Once, when you were a young man, you left undone something you should have done—Kimberly Maddick’s murder, you should have reported it then, yes? You’re not that young man anymore. You must have seen someone—
something
, heard something in the Labyrinth. It’s not like this.” He gestured towards the thrumming rain. “Sunday morning was quiet.”

“Dead,” Gaunt muttered.

A new sound dwarfed the rain’s. Tom glanced towards the northern sky to see a helicopter emerging from the clouds above Hryre Tor.

“Why go after Lord Morborne at all yesterday morning?” he asked quickly before machine noise beat all into submission.

Gaunt’s eyes opened only a slit, but in them Tom saw a glimmer of exultation. “… had him … bang to rights … make him suffer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Had his deen …”

“His dean?”

“… nay.”

“His—? You mean … his DNA?”

Gaunt groaned horribly.

“But—” Tom pressed his ear near Gaunt’s mouth as the helicopter blades whipped the air. “I don’t—”

“Cigar butt … other things … collecting.”

“Yes! From the lawn Saturday night.” Tom was shouting now. “I don’t understand.”

“… could prove …” Gaunt fought for breath “… that Morborne had murdered my Kimberly.”

“But how? How? You would need …”

Gaunt’s words were almost lost in the roar. But not quite.

The helicopter lifted slowly, as if burdened by weight, its blades hacking the air, whipping the drenched grasses around them, blasting wet wind into their faces. Tom sheltered his eyes with his hand and watched it ascend into the sky like some sinister black locust, wings thrumming, and bank into the northeast sky curdling above them still, though less violently than before. The aerial drama had passed by, now moving swiftly southwest towards the Channel where lightning now strobed weakly from the blanket of fraying cloud and thunder echoed distantly. The storm was spent. But this brought Tom only faint relief. The emergency workers who had rushed from the helicopter and attended to Gaunt with practised hands could offer no assurance that the man hadn’t suffered life-threatening injury. And he remained without assurance that Gaunt was innocent of Oliver’s death—and Roberto’s. As he waited for the helicopter to touch down, Gaunt
had grown incoherent, slipping in and out of consciousness, his voice a whisper against the machine’s brutal rattle, the words lost, until finally his eyes glazed and he lost all sensibility.

Cold and wet and weary in mind and spirit, Tom found himself unable to greet John Allan—the man he had known as Sebastian John—with full gladness of heart.

“St. Nicholas remains in want of a verger,” he said, feeling his smile thin and affectless.

“Would I pass the criminal records check in this instance, I wonder?” John’s tone was light, but his eyes glinted with challenge.

The question was charged, and he understood John’s intent: Tom had more or less inherited him as verger when he was appointed to the living of Thornford Regis the spring before, learning only later that an arrangement between a previous incumbent and an elderly but forceful parishioner had eased John into the position without the proper vetting. John was asking now if Tom thought him culpable of a more recent crime that would exclude him from service to the church.

Tom met John’s eyes. Gaunt’s declaration about Oliver buzzed in his brain:
He was dead
. “I don’t know. Where have you been the last two days?”

“With the Benedictines at Hexham Priory.”

“Would they be able to vouch for you?”

“Tom?” Jane interposed.

“I’m sorry, but you must see that if Gaunt—who loathed Oliver—is not responsible for these crimes, someone else is. Roberto’s another one who loathed Oliver. But
he’s
dead.
You’re another, surely, Sebastian … John? Especially after what you’ve come to know about your cousin this week, and what he’s done.”

“Tom, I’ve been trying—”

“Someone might find it interesting that, well, here you are, on the moor, at the very time as Gaunt. One might think you were shadowing him, as if—”

“I’ve been at Hexham Priory, truly.”

Tom realised he was projecting his feelings of guilt over Gaunt’s dangerous condition onto his former verger and struggled with them as he struggled against the damp intractability of his trouser pocket for his mobile. “Mrs. Gaunt needs to know of her husband’s condition. And,” he added, tapping in the number she had given him, “we can expect, I’m sure, to be met by some very unhappy policemen.”

T
he needles of hot water pricking his skin felt of ecstasy, and for a moment in the shower—only for a moment—Tom’s worries and fears vanished. They had ridden back to Eggescombe swiftly, wordlessly, John taking Jane’s horse, Jane riding with her husband. As Tom predicted, at the moor gate they had been met by a response car that conducted them not to the stables, as he would have thought, but to the Hall. It felt in an odd way like being marched to the headmaster’s office. And indeed, when they stepped through the great oak door into the foyer, it was neither Hector nor Georgina who met them, but a glowering Detective Inspector Bliss, arms folded across his chest like a figure of Doom. He answered their anxious questions in clipped fashion: Yes, Dowager Lady Fairhaven, the children, and a woman from the village—who had no bloody business being on the estate!—had travelled from the dower house to the Hall. Of course, they were bloody
safe! Yes, Mrs. Gaunt has been informed of her husband’s condition. No, we’ve had no new word about that condition. Yes, you can put on some dry things—if you must!—but I want you all in the drawing room in short order. And you, Mr. Christmas, I want a word with you.

Bliss’s word—word
s
—had not been kind. Tom thought about them now as he turned his face to the showerhead and let the water blast his skin. They were words of blame. Alerted by the police ambulance to the activity on Dartmoor, Bliss had gone to Ellen Gaunt, who crumbled before his onslaught. Bliss learned what Tom had been told, but worse, he was less sanguine than Tom of Gaunt’s innocence: He (Bliss) had a solid account of Gaunt witnessed by the stables that very afternoon. If Tom had gone to the police—despite Mrs. Gaunt’s protestations—and had not gone haring off into the moors after Mr. Gaunt, their suspect would not be dangerously close to death.

Tom received this dressing down humbly. He had been wrong to take Gaunt’s affairs into his own hands. The horrible sequence of events on the moor played through his mind. If he had left it to the proper authorities, Gaunt would have been found wandering in his fugue state, but unharmed other than lashed by wind and rain, suffering from exposure. Silently, as the water belted down, he sent up a prayer for Gaunt’s recovery and for God to forgive his own lapse of wisdom.