Twelve Drummers Drumming (35 page)

“But he must have realised you could take your concerns to a higher authority or possibly the police. How could he think he would get away with it?”

“He was wicked. I said.”

“Still, why didn’t you have a word with the rural dean or the archdeacon?”

“Padre, how could I?” The old man regarded Tom truculently.

It took a moment for Tom to decipher. Of course. If you killed the vicar who was fiddling sums, you couldn’t very well report the sum fiddling without dire personal consequence over the issue of motive. This would also explain the colonel’s later unhelpfulness to the police over the mysterious sum in the Exeter safe-box. Nonetheless, Tom didn’t believe for a moment Colonel Northmore had killed Peter Kinsey, and he said so.

“Well, I did,” the colonel responded.

“In anger, I suppose? Without malice aforethought?”

“Yes.”

Utterly unconvinced, Tom thought to test him: “What did you kill him with?”

“The verge—the verger’s staff. It was lying on the vestry table.”

“And how?”

“Hit him. Back of the head.”

Tom bit his lip. The murder weapon was unspecified, and might remain so, but the colonel’s last answer was correct. Eyewitness account or lucky guess? Had the colonel got wind somehow? Màiri White had told him, Tom, the postmortem results in confidence, but that didn’t mean the knowledge mightn’t seep out in other ways. Who had visited the colonel in hospital in the last few days? Madrun. Sebastian. Alastair. Perhaps others. He looked at the colonel and met defiant eyes.

“All right, Colonel, I’m willing to believe you killed Peter Kinsey,
as you say,” Tom white-lied again, “but I have trouble believing you … dragged his body or … carried his body through the churchyard and rearranged Ned Skynner’s grave to accommodate him.”

“Wasn’t a large chap.”

“So I understand. Nevertheless, not to make too fine a point, you’re not in the flower of youth.”

“I was in the grip of strong emotion, padre.”

“Colonel, I haven’t known you long, but this doesn’t seem at all like you. Even if I allow that in the grip of strong emotion you did kill Peter, I can’t believe you wouldn’t do the decent thing.”

“Didn’t do the decent thing at Omori, did I.”

“That was different.”

“Oh? How?”

Tom could feel his patience growing thin. He didn’t fancy a philosophical discussion. “Why are you telling me this at all?”

“On my conscience.”

“But why now?”

“On my way out.”

“Nonsense, you’ll be right as a trivet once you’re fixed up with a new hip.”

Phillip made no response. He turned his head away. His lids sank over his eyes. Tom studied the figure under the hospital blankets, the bruised hand where the intravenous needle entered, the ancient visage with its bloodless lips, the thin, lank hair, at the tangle of monitoring wires disappearing into his chest.
Yes, old boy
, he thought,
you probably are not long for this world
. He felt a pang of sadness for that, and then, following like the sun upon the rain, the bliss of a tiny epiphany. He smiled as he said, “Colonel, you realise you’ve unburdened your conscience to me outside of the seal of confession. Colonel?”

Phillip opened one eye.

“I could go to the police with this information.”

“Do what you must, padre.” He closed his eye and crossed his hands over his stomach.

Tom lifted himself from the hard plastic seat. “By the way, Colonel, by any chance, did you serve in the war with—now let me think—the ninth Earl of Kinross?”

Phillip opened the other eye. “Yes.”

Tom allowed his smile to widen. “I see.”

“Bit off topic, isn’t it?” The colonel opened both eyes and regarded him warily.

“Colonel, at the risk of being repetitive, I don’t for a moment believe you hit Peter Kinsey over the head. Nor do I believe you put his body in an open grave. In fact, I’ll wager you weren’t anywhere near St. Nicholas’s the evening in question.”

“Was, too!” was the colonel’s heated and uncharacteristically childish response.

“Was too what?” said a voice. “I trust you’re not upsetting the patient, Tom.”

Tom looked over his shoulder. The door to the room had opened on silent hinges and Alastair was slipping a clipboard off the edge of the bed. He frowned at it, then moved bedside, opposite Tom.

“I just thought I’d pop up to see how you were,” he addressed the colonel.

“I’m surprised you’re not golfing on this lovely Saturday afternoon,” Tom remarked.

“I will be shortly,” Alastair muttered. “I’ve just come off a shift at the health centre.” He looked at Tom more fully. “Nice work on that eye. Should I ask what happened to the other guy?”

“Surely Julia told you.”

“Actually, she did.” Still smiling, he turned back to his patient. “How are you feeling, Colonel?”

“Dr. Hennis saw me.” Phillip glowered at Tom.

“I saw you when?” Alastair responded, shifting to study the IV line.

“Colonel Northmore is fretting about Peter Kinsey’s death.”

“Mmm …”

“Doctor, you greeted me in the road. You had been up in the Pattimores’ flat.”

Alastair snapped his fingers against the ampoule. “What are we talking about here?”

“The period of Peter Kinsey’s disappearance,” Tom explained.

“You greeted me in the road,” the colonel repeated to Alastair urgently. “It was a Monday evening, about seven. Remember?”

Alastair frowned. “Are you asking me to remember what I was doing on an evening … what? thirteen, fourteen months ago?”

“Well, even I remember, Alastair,” Tom said. “It was the end of the first full day of my and Miranda’s visit with you and Julia. You had a house call to make. I think your service paged you. I remember the news was just starting on ITV when you got it, about six-thirty.”

Alastair’s eyes roamed the room then landed on the two of them. “All right, yes. I do recall. I think.” His frown grew deeper. “I’d been attending to Enid. I was just stepping out of their gate when you passed by, Colonel. You seemed to have something on your mind, now I think about it. I can’t recall you returning the greeting. And then—this I do recall—Charlie Pike nearly knocked me over on one of those bloody skateboards.” He paused and regarded Phillip. “Is this important?”

Tom looked to the patient, thinking that being seen on Poynton Shute that evening, around the corner from Church Walk, a few hundred feet from St. Nicholas’s, hardly supported his contention that he had done away with the Reverend Peter Kinsey. Still, he expected an expression of complacency from the old man, but none came. Instead, the colonel’s pupils dilated and a brooding, watchful intensity settled for a moment along the folds and creases of his face. And then he turned his head to the wall.

“T
he usual?”

“Make it a pint.”

Eric’s eyebrows, red and thick as foxtails, twitched almost imperceptibly, but not so imperceptibly that Tom didn’t know that Eric sussed that some planet was wobbling in its orbit. Publicans were sussers of information and keepers of secrets—not unlike priests, in their way—and therefore mindful to be open to soul-barers without sending out engraved invitations.

“Don’t often see you in here of a Saturday afternoon.” Eric closed the copy of the
Daily Mail
he’d been perusing and reached for the pump handle. “No weddings?”

“Only one. Strange—usually they’re queued up four deep this time of year.”

“It’s been a strange week.”

“That would be understatement.”

“We haven’t had a day like this since Thornford won the Cup final five years ago.”

Tom frowned, not understanding. Eric placed a pint glass of
Vicar’s Ruin in front of him and jerked his head in the direction of the saloon. Tom turned and glanced over the rim of his glass. He’d driven back from Torquay, parked the car at the vicarage, popped in to see if Miranda had returned from Exeter with Julia, had a brief and probably too candid conversation with Madrun, then hopped it to the Church House Inn, paying only half a mind to the crowded benches outside the pub, reasoning that it was a magnificent day in May at the end of half-term and why wouldn’t people lounge about outdoors with a drink? He’d made a beeline to the bar and hadn’t really noticed, as he did now, quite how sardine-tinnish the place seemed. Worse, a number of the punters had paused in noisy conversation and were looking at him. This he was accustomed to in church, and had welcomed on stage, when he’d been The Great Krimboni; still, it was rather disconcerting being gawped at in the pub, especially by strangers.

“You’ve seen the papers, yes?” Eric muttered, wiping the damp spot where Tom’s glass had enjoyed brief congress with the polished surface.

“Glanced at them,” Tom replied. And glance was all he had done. He’d been too distracted that morning with getting Miranda ready for Julia to take to synagogue in Exeter, Googling, and polishing his sermon to pay close attention to the coverage of Sybella’s funeral. Madrun had raced from the post office to the vicarage weighed with every newspaper in the realm and plunked them on the kitchen table, but Tom’s only interest had been in
The Sun
’s coverage—in Andrew Macgreevy’s reportage, its omissions rather than its commissions. He’d quickly flipped past the picture of himself on page six, predictably of Oona’s elbow growing out of his eye, under the sub-headline “Oona Funeral Fury,” right through to the sports pages at the back, and was both startled and cheered to see no reference to his absent verger. If Macgreevy knew what he, Tom, now knew, why wasn’t it in print?

“ ’Ow’s yer oi, Vicah?” A large man with a face red as a beetroot held his glass up in a toast.

“Never better,” Tom replied, with a theatrical wink of the afflicted
orb. “Have they driven down from London for
this
?” he murmured to Eric.

The publican shrugged. “I shouldn’t like to see the state of your churchyard.”

“This is terrible. Sybella’s headstone isn’t even in place.”

“No fear. By Monday, they’ll have moved on to something else.” Eric folded the
Mail
and stuffed it under the bar. “At any rate, I hear Sebastian’s got Fred doing crowd management down at the church.”

So, Sebastian is back
, Tom thought, gulping his ale while Eric shuffled down the bar to serve another customer. Wherever had his verger spent the night?

He, meanwhile, had taken Miranda and Emily Swan to the Apollo in Torquay Friday after the funeral reception to see some American film about high school students putting on a musical, a cinematic bonbon which thrilled the girls to bits, but which was so excruciatingly insipid Tom had ample opportunity to half-write his sermon in his head and ponder the week’s harrowing events. After returning the girls to Thornford, he’d walked over to the verger’s cottage, resolved to have a chat, but there’d been no response to his knock. He’d tried again an hour later, with no luck.

“Eric,” he began, calling the publican over, “how would you assess your memory?”

“Depends on what you want me to remember.”

“An early evening thirteen months ago.”

“You want me to remember something thirteen months back—?”

“I’ve heard that once today.”

“—then not bloody likely.”

“What if I pegged it to an event?”

“ ‘Where were you in the Great Storm of ’87’—that sort of thing?”

“Something of less national significance. Where were you the evening before the day of Ned Skynner’s funeral?”

Eric shrugged. He reached back to pull a packet of crisps off a nearby rack. “I was here. Where else?”

“Exactly.”

“But it was a day like all days. Which is what I told the coppers when they were asking a year ago.”

“Was it?”

Eric slid the packet down the bar to a young woman in a blazing pink sundress. “Ned was absent, of course, being dead and all, so we were still getting used to not having someone droning on about the inevitable fall of capitalism. It was a Monday. Early April. Just a few regulars.” He paused in thought. “Jago Prowse came in for a quick one. Told the detectives that. Didn’t usually see Jago at that time.”

“What time?”

“About six-thirty? If the bugger had bothered to tell anyone he’d driven down from Thorn Cross and dropped the vicar off, then we wouldn’t have spent three days wondering where the vicar’s car—and the vicar with it—had got to. We could have got on to the local constabulary faster, not that any of this matters now. Is this why you’re asking? About Peter’s disappearance?”

“Yes. It’s been on my mind.”

“I see.”

Tom smiled wanly. “You and I are similarly fixed, Eric. People tell us … things. The question is, what to do with what they tell us?”

“My policy is to keep
stumm
. It’s all my job’s worth.”

“Mine as well—much of the time. But there are moments …” Tom drained his glass. “You didn’t happen to see Colonel Northmore about that time?”

Eric’s expression betrayed a flash of curiosity, swiftly suppressed. “Cops didn’t ask me that one.”

“Did you see him?”

“He didn’t come in for a drink, if that’s what you mean. I usually only see the colonel here after services on Sunday, when he comes in with you and some of the others from church. But I did see him that evening, now you mention it. Happens I glimpsed him out the window when I was clearing one of the tables. And I’m only remembering because it wasn’t a time of day—it had to be after seven—when
you saw the colonel out walking. Pretty regular he is—early morning and mid-afternoon. And he wasn’t walking Bumble.”