Twelve Drummers Drumming (33 page)

His mind returned to the day before, to his exchange with Màiri White outside Thornridge House’s gates. Rounding the stone pillars with Madrun and Julia, he espied Màiri bent into the hedgerow that divided the Big House from Thorn Barton, the former manor farm. She was in uniform, true, but she did present a fetching view as she bowed to her task. Only Madrun’s waspish remark about some folk blithely picking blooms while other folk had lost loved ones saved him from slipping into an indecorous ogle. As they passed down the line of cars, though, he looked back and saw that flowers weren’t the object of Màiri’s attention. Driven—at least in part—by curiosity, he excused himself from Madrun and Julia. Màiri appeared to be pulling at something stuck fast in the hedge, nearly—oh, but only nearly!—stumbling backwards into his arms when that something gave way. It wasn’t flowering hawthorn she’d dislodged, it was cotton batting spilling in a flurry of white from a patch of cloth that was clearly, even at a quick glance, part of the border of a Mitsuko Drewe art quilt.

“Ah!” Màiri murmured to herself. Then her eyebrows shot up. “Tom! I can see it’s a man’s life in the Church of England.”

He put one hand over his bruised eye. “I was defending the notion of women bishops at a boxing match. The other bloke looks worse. I can still see, though, and I can see what
that
is.” He gestured to the colourful fabric in her hands.

“There’s more stuffed into the hedge. Strange place to hide it.”

“Or not.”

“A thief foolish and frenzied, do you think?”

“Or one cool and cunning.”

“This isn’t the most travelled road,” Màiri observed.

“That it is not,” Tom agreed as Madrun and Julia joined them and they began to pluck other scraps from between the hedge’s thorns.

Now he revisited the thought: The road to Thornridge House was as good as private; it led nowhere beyond the gates of the Big House. He could think of few who travelled it besides the Parrys, but with a reluctance bordering on anguish, he found his ruminations settling on one individual who did, almost daily. More than wanting to know, he needed to know, if the truth was to set Thornford free—at least of anxiety.

His fingers dug into the keyboard and a fresh, new marshalling of letters appeared after the
l
. Then he clicked on the search tab and reviewed the results that leapt onto the screen.

Yes, by golly, there was a Lord Kinross. The lords Kinross had been earls in the peerage of Scotland since 1696, according to the top entry, which contained several paragraphs of dense type with an order of succession that reminded Tom of the numbing multiple begats in Chronicles. The ninth earl was a war hero, who had earned the undying respect of his men. The tenth, current, and living—presumably, unless the stroke mentioned by Mr. Macgreevy had proven fatal in the last day or so—earl was Gordon Allan, born 1940, succeeded to the peerage in 1981, a businessman who owned a few bits of Mayfair and Belgravia the Duke of Westminster hadn’t gobbled up, as well as land in Scotland and Canada. He was variously a bloodstock breeder and a bank director, had been schooled at Shrewsbury and at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, and was a patron of this and that charity and sat on the board of this or that institution. There were the usual honours and honorary military appointments—all in all the résumé of a sort of latter-day stalwart
of the British Empire, if the sun hadn’t gone and set on the bloody thing.

Tom ploughed through a few more sites. Lord Kinross had a wife, Hélène, a Canadian, as it happened; three sons, the eldest of whom was deceased; and one daughter. He reflected for a moment on the tragedy of a child predeceasing a parent—he could hardly imagine the horror of losing Miranda—and was set to scroll down to an entry subtitle, when the name of the youngest son caught his eye. He would have checked his pulse, but he found himself only mildly startled. The Earl of Kinross’s third son was the Honourable John Sebastian Hamilton Allan.

A little transposition of names and Bob was your mother’s brother or, in this case, Sebastian was your church’s verger.

Oh, surely.

It had to be.

The birth date of the Hon. was nicely synchronous with the presumed age of the verger in question. And why would that shambolic reporter have otherwise mouthed the name Kinross with so much import if there wasn’t some sort of vital link?

Of course, the question, Tom thought, as he half listened to Miranda’s footfalls on the stair outside his study, was why Sebastian was at such pains to keep his identity a secret. And however, he thought again as he typed “Sebastian John” into Google, could he keep such a secret in a world where anonymity was becoming a passing fancy? Surely others in the village had typed the very name into their very own computers in a similar quest. But “Sebastian John” resulted only in thousands of websites about an American pop singer named Sebastian, John—John Sebastian—who was now well advanced in age. Likely others in the village had felt as daunted as Tom did at the prospect of panning through all these websites with slim hope of a nugget of a different sort.

Tom returned to the entry on the Earl of Kinross and scrolled further down.
Controversy
, said a subhead, followed by
See also: Viscount
Kirkbride murder scandal
. The text was highlighted in blue, inviting him to click on it and bring up a new Web page. He frowned. Now, who was Viscount Kirkbride?

He read on; then clicked to the new Web page. In a moment, he knew, and this time he was more than mildly startled—so much so that he could barely keep his attention on polishing his sermon for tomorrow.

Stepping off the elevator onto the hospital’s third floor, Tom was jolted from his worried thoughts by the sight of Detective Sergeant Blessing. The policeman was standing rather than sitting among the visitors in the cream-walled, hushed waiting room. He appeared to be studying the wall, and because he was absently worrying a welt on his neck—vivid even from ten feet—it crossed Tom’s mind that a dermatology appointment was nigh. But it was a Saturday, and Blessing was wearing a sober suit and he was tapping something as black as the suit’s fabric rhythmically against the side of his thigh, as if to some beat bouncing inside his head. Tom saw it was a notebook, its coiled cover glinting in the overhead light, and realised this was no private medical visit. He found himself suddenly rooted to the tile. In the car, driving up to hospital from Thornford, he had been possessed by warring thoughts. Should he pass along his gleanings to the police or should he question his gleanings before taking such a decisive step? Knowledge he had, but knowledge was not understanding. He thought to slip around the corner to the corridor to Colonel Northmore’s room, but in that moment Blessing turned his head, cast him a vacant glance, then raised his eyebrows in recognition, noting either the dog collar or, possibly, the black eye. There was little choice but to greet him.

“I thought you usually travelled in twos,” Tom said, trying for a light effect, stepping past a bank of empty waiting room seats. He saw that the detective had been studying a print of the millpond at
Thornford Regis, with St. Nicholas’s tower in the background, one of a series of pretty south Devon scenes.

“Usually. But Detective Inspector Bliss has been momentarily detained.”

“Oh?”

“May I count on your complete discretion, Vicar?”

“Er …” Tom hesitated, startled. “Yes. Of course.”

“The inspector has an irritable bowel.”

“Oh. That’s … rather cheerless. I am sorry. Is that why …” he began, thinking to ask about Bliss’s persistent kineticism when seated.

“Is there anything you’d care to tell me?”

“Well, I …” Mystified, sensing he was being mocked, Tom regarded the battered face. “I once had an ingrown toenail.”

“Not really what I meant, sir. I was wondering—unofficially, of course—why you were here in Torbay Hospital on this very pleasant afternoon.”

“I’m about to pay a pastoral visit.”

“To Phillip Northmore? I think you’ll find the old gentleman is very much under the weather.”

“Oh, I’d heard—” Some instinct stopped Tom from further speech.

“Heard what?”

“Well, I expect there are ups and down when you’re in Colonel Northmore’s condition, that’s all.”

“Mmmm.” Blessing’s mouth formed a thin line.

“Was Colonel Northmore at all helpful to your investigation?”

“No, I can’t say he was.”

“I am sorry. I’m sure if he weren’t dazed by medication, his intent wouldn’t be to be uncooperative. He’s ex-military, as you know.”

“That’s as may be, Vicar.” To Tom’s puzzled frown, he added: “Name, rank, and serial number seemed all Colonel Northmore cared to discuss. Or was able to discuss. In effect, sir.”

“Might the reason lie in the subject of your enquiry?”

“Funny you should ask. We were thinking of paying you a visit
on the very subject, Detective Inspector Bliss and I, but here you are. We seem to find our attention meandering to Mr. Sebastian John. Enigmatic fellow, don’t you think?”

“Well …”

“Whereabouts at the time of Ms. Parry’s death uncertain, for one.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if he was having a meal with the colonel at Farthings Sunday evening. He often does.”

“Time of death is well past the supper hour, Vicar. Mr. John told us he left the colonel’s before nine.” Blessing lifted his notebook as if he wished to check something in it. “I should wait for the detective inspector to finish his … ablutions, I suppose—”

“Well, then …” Tom made a move to turn, relieved. “I’m happy to meet you later at the vicarage.”

“—But as you’re here, perhaps
you
can tell me how Mr. John happened upon Thornford.”

“Wouldn’t it be best to ask him?”

“We can’t seem to locate him at the minute. You wouldn’t know his whereabouts?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. And,” Tom continued, praying God to forgive the falsehood, “I really know very little about him. I more or less inherited him when I came to Thornford, as I inherited the choir and the bell ringers and the members of the church council. Sebastian carries out his duties very capably so I’ve never had a reason to ask any more of him than that he carry on in the same manner.”

“He was absent from Ms. Parry’s funeral yesterday.”

“Yes, well, he seemed to have some private reason for not attending.”

“And you didn’t find that … unusual?”

It was on the tip of Tom’s tongue to say he was starting to find
everything
in Thornford unusual. Reluctantly, he replied, “Yes, I did, but there seemed little point in insisting, and as we can perform the funeral rites without a verger …”

Blessing pocketed the notebook. “And the two of you have never
had a chat, over a drink, say, at the pub, about the good old days—yours and his?”

Of this Tom could be truthful. “No. But surely, Detective Sergeant,” he added, “you of all people have the resources to look into someone’s background.”

“We do, Vicar, and we will.”

“Colonel, you’re looking well.”

This time Tom’s lie was white. He leaned over the hospital bed and laid his hand on the old man’s. He realised in an instant it was the wrong thing to say, for the patient shot him such a withering glance from below a grey cliff of eyebrow that he might just as well have melted into the linoleum. Adding force to the lie was a new presence in the room—a cardiac monitor, tracking the rhythm of the colonel’s heart with a slow steady beeping.

“Looking better, rather,” Tom backtracked. This, at least, was the truth. A certain acuity had returned to the colonel’s gaze, though the face over the coverlet was gaunt and the cheeks stubbly. Tom glanced at the tubing connecting his arm to the glistening ampoule dangling below an IV bag on a pole and wondered that the old man’s body had adapted to the morphine, easing his pain, but not clouding his mind as it had on his earlier visit.

“I apologise for not coming sooner,” he continued. “Mrs. Prowse told me on Thursday that you wanted to speak with me. But the week turned rather more … eventful than I would have expected.”