Twelve Drummers Drumming (40 page)

“And if she had waited half a minute, she would have seen me turn around and walk back up the lane. But, no, she closes her bloody curtains and only gets half the story.”

“Then you didn’t go into the hall.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I’m afraid, Liam, I was the one who advised Tilly to talk to the police.”

“Well, thanks a bloody lot. I should black your other eye.”

“Liam!” Mitsuko’s tone was sharp. Her arm dropped from his. At that moment Julia stepped from the church and flicked each of
them a cautious glance as she passed. “Will we see you at the pub … Tom?”

“I’ll catch you up,” he called after her. “Give me a few moments.”

“Sorry, Vicar.” Liam’s struggle for contrition led him to study his shoes—black trainers that looked like they’d seen better days.

“Tilly didn’t intend malice, nor did I,” Tom told them. “It’s simply that people in the village don’t feel safe with Sybella’s death unresolved. Or Peter Kinsey’s, for that matter.”

“And everyone thinks because I was once sent down that I’m the one that did it.”

Tom had no answer. If you offend once in such manner, others’ knowledge of it will likely follow you the rest of your days. Instead he said:

“Tilly was surprised to see you in the lane at that time of night. I’ve been here long enough to observe that this village is a place of habits and conventions. Colonel Northmore walks Bumble the same route twice a day. Mrs. Prowse goes to the post office to post a letter at almost the same time every morning. The same schoolchildren walk the same lanes at the same time with their mothers every weekday. I could go on. Anything that breaks that pattern sets curtains to twitching and people’s minds to speculating.”

Liam’s mouth twisted with annoyance. “Mitsuko had left her labels for me to put up in the hall next to her quilts—that’s all.”

“But why so late in the evening?”

Liam shrugged. “The game on telly was crap. Didn’t feel like sleeping. I thought I might go up to Thorn Court for a drink. The village hall’s on the way and I had Mitsuko’s keys so—”

“But I found Mitsuko putting up the labels on Thursday before the Neighbourhood Watch meeting.”

“Never did it, did I.”

“Why not?”

“Because I saw Sybella hanging about outside the door. And I had had enough of her, so I thought fuck this, I’ll do it another day.”

Tom flicked a glance at Mitsuko, then addressed Liam. “You two had rowed earlier.”

“You know, too?” Liam scowled.

“Half the village does, I expect.”

“I’ll tell it,” Mitsuko interjected, flicking her hair impatiently over one ear.

“Leave it!” Liam said hotly.

“Liam, if you can bear the police hearing it, you can bear Tom hearing it. He’s a priest. I’m sure he’s heard worse examples of idiot human behaviour than yours. As I’m sure you know,” she continued, casting Tom a wan smile, “my husband is unreasonably jealous and wants a refresher course in anger management.”

Tom could see Liam stiffen, his face redden. “I am
fine
, once things are explained to me.”

“Things
were
explained to you, but you chose to indulge yourself in some sick flight of fancy. Liam,” she again addressed Tom, “happened to find Sybella and me in … an embrace of sorts in the kitchen on Sunday and in his fevered imagination thought we had been having some sort of … affair. There! That’s what started the row. I can’t believe I said anything so plainly silly, but I expect having had to say it once to the police has got me used to it.”

“You were spending far too much time with her,” Liam snapped.

“I was
mentoring
her. I’ve said!”

“You were practically eating her face.”

“Sybella was having a little triumph,” Mitsuko explained, flicking her hair back again. “Something to do with some man she fancied. I was excited for her, that’s all. We were mates. It was a girly moment. Women aren’t as emotionally constipated as you men, and a kiss—Liam!—does not mean a snog will follow in short order.”

“Did Sybella say which man she was interested in?” Tom asked, though he was sure he knew.

Mitsuko shook her head. “The detectives asked me that, too. I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She was strangely secretive about it. Some boy in Torquay was my thought.”

Tom regarded the couple. They were an incongruous pair. Mitsuko barely came up to Liam’s chest. With her hands now behind her back, her delicate frame clothed in black shirt and black trousers, and her black hair tumbling to her shoulders, she looked like an exclamation mark appended to Liam’s blunt mass in loose jeans and jersey. Her face was oval and smooth; her eyes, fixed on Tom, beseeching, as if willing him to her side, though he found the idea of two women, two close friends, not sharing the name of some prospective lover faintly implausible. Liam had turned his bulldogsquare head towards the lych-gate and Church Walk beyond, his expression sulky and impatient, his arms folded defensively over the Cheltenham Town lettering on his chest. Ill-paired they appeared, but each forceful in his or her own right, Mitsuko the more so, he thought. Together they were a unit despite the habitual quarreling. Was their account truthful? Had Liam turned back from the village hall that night? Had a misinterpreted kiss really fuelled a quarrel? Tom realised these questions would have been more troubling, but for the
frisson
he had experienced not fifteen minutes earlier at Holy Communion.

How to begin?

“I don’t wish to alarm you—either of you,” he began, running his hands down to smooth his surplice, gathering his thoughts, “but I seem to have become possessed quite suddenly by … a very unsettling notion.”

Liam flicked him an irritated glance. “Is this why you asked us to stop?”

Tom nodded, but addressed Mitsuko. “You’ll allow, as you said a moment ago, that Sybella began to see in you a kind of mentor, yes? You were helping nurture her artistic abilities—”

“So she could skive off working at the restaurant,” Liam muttered.

“—and letting her see that life was more than clubbing and drugs and such. That perhaps she had a gift, a talent.”

“Talent to annoy, more like.”

“Liam, then why didn’t you sack her?”

“You know perfectly well why.” Liam’s face reddened.

“Why?” Tom couldn’t help asking.

“Because,” Mitsuko flicked her husband an irritated glance. “As it happens, Colm was paying Liam the cost of Sybella’s wages. Margins are so tight in the restaurant trade, Tom, that it made a difference.”

“Did Sybella know about this arrangement?”

“That was part two of Sunday’s row,” Mitsuko replied. “I didn’t know about it, but Sybella did, it turns out.”

“And she accused me of hiding it from Inland Revenue!” Liam exploded.

“And were you?”

“That’s my bloody business!”

“It was hardly ‘accuse,’ Liam,” Mitsuko intervened. “Sybella was simply being her usual provocative self.” She turned to Tom. “And, no, we didn’t mention part two to the detectives. But perhaps—”

“It has nothing to do with anything!”

“Liam, please don’t go on so.”

Tom said: “Your husband may be right.”

Liam cast him a startled glance.

“This is what I wanted to say to you,” Tom continued. “The first time I met Sybella, at the Waterside, more than a year ago, she was got up a bit like a Goth—you know, the black-lacquered fingernails and heavily lined eyes, the dyed black hair, those odd, lacey skirts …”

“Yes …”

“But when I came to live here this spring, she was much toned down—still the black hair, of course, and the ear piercings—but more in emulation of … well, you. Simple, sort of.” Tom frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not good at explaining women’s clothes.”

“I admired Audrey Hepburn when I was a teenager, you see. Simple, as you say. Clean lines. Classic. A style more enduring than Goth.”

“From the front, you and Sybella look quite different. You, of
course, have Japanese features. Sybella looked more like an English pixie. But from the back—”

“Save it, Vicar.” Liam held up a hand. “We’ve already sussed this one. From the back, Mits and Sybella are almost dead ringers. Why do you think I’m at church? I’m not here for my spiritual health, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m here to make sure no one gets any clever idea about doing my wife in—for whatever sick reason they might have.”

“Oh.” Tom felt strangely one-upped. “When …?”

“Yesterday,” Mitsuko said. “When those two CID were interviewing us at the gallery. Liam happened to remark on it.”

“I noticed it before. Never seemed worth mentioning before, though.”

“And, of course,” Mitsuko murmured, “I can’t see my back, can I? So …”

Tom’s heart contracted with new horror and pity as his mind’s eye travelled the village hall. He could see a shadowy form advance through the soft greying gloom as twilight gave way to black night, the slight figure of a young woman standing silvered by the last strands of the setting sun through the west windows, turned away, perhaps in smiling expectation of an encounter to come. A hand slides noiselessly along the smooth length of one of the wooden sticks arrayed along a table—a
bachi
, perhaps, or Eric’s morris stick, or the colonel’s forgotten walking stick—and swiftly, swiftly, before the woman’s conscious mind can grasp the succession of footfall, rustle of clothing, and the sharp rending of the air and cry out, she succumbs to brutal force at the back of her skull. Despite the late morning’s warmth, Tom felt his blood run cold. Did her killer not see his mistake then? When he pierced the skin of the great drum and bore her body into its pitch interior, did he not notice, in some last shred of evening light, when the strands of black hair fell back from her face, that this was not the face of a woman of East Asian ancestry?

He studied Mitsuko’s grave expression. “You’re worried someone wants to … correct a horrible mistake,” he said.

“Too right I am.” Liam answered for them, indignantly.

Tom kept his focus on Mitsuko. “You had an inkling of this Thursday morning, didn’t you, when you discovered the quilt with the photo of the churchyard had gone missing. You couldn’t remember when you took the picture—simply that it was the day of the last church inspection, more than a year ago.”

A shadow of remorse passed over Mitsuko’s features. She hesitated before replying. “It took me a few moments, but I did remember. I …” She glanced up at her husband. “I remembered the church inspection had been the day before Ned’s funeral and that that was the day Sebastian let me up the church tower to take photographs. But …”

“But …?”

“On Wednesday, Peter’s body was discovered in Ned’s grave.”

“Yes, of course …”

“Well, when you and I were in the village hall on Thursday morning, I remembered a detail about the photograph. In it, at the very bottom of the frame, there’s a figure—a tiny figure, really, from the perspective of the tower—of someone sort of leaning over a freshly dug grave—”

“Good Lord.”

“I gave it little thought when I was running up the quilt. I mentioned to you before that months passed between taking the photographs, then downloading them, then choosing among them for the artworks—”

“Can you identify the figure?” Tom interjected, his excitement mounting.

“No.” Mitsuko moaned. “I’m so sorry. The picture was taken when the sun was very low in the sky. There were deep shadows in the churchyard below. The figure is almost in silhouette, grey-scale, and leaning over, so I couldn’t identify the back of a head when I was making the quilt. I didn’t really pay it much attention at the time
anyway. I knew it was a man, somehow, simply from the general shape, but … I took high-resolution photographs, and if I had my computer still, then the figure could be enlarged, and perhaps …”

“A guess?” Tom pressed.

“At the time, when I was sewing the quilt, I thought it was likely Fred Pike doing some last-minute chores. I even alluded to it in the haiku—‘sexton digs’ were three of the syllables.”

“And you saw nothing else?”

“I was taking mostly panoramas of the whole village. And sometimes I was simply waiting for the light to shift and enjoying the view. At times I aimed my camera down for certain details, but …” She shrugged. “And I could hear very little. It’s windy up there, and the flag hadn’t come down from Easter and was making quite a loud snapping noise.”

Tom frowned. “Why didn’t you say something to me on Thursday?”

Mistuko glanced up at her husband, who responded with a sour look. “I thought …” she began, then sighed and rushed on. “And this is why I lied about that particular haiku label being missing. I thought that the figure in the photo might be Liam, who—”

“I was up to my fucking eyeballs in VAT returns that evening!”

“—who was not at all fond of Peter.”

“I wouldn’t trust him as far as—”

“We shared an interest in art, Peter and I. That’s all. But my absurd husband thought otherwise.”

“Clearly,” Tom spoke quickly to quash further argument, “someone thinks you’re a witness to Peter Kinsey’s murder … or at least his burial—”

“But I’m not. Not really.”

“—hence the theft of the quilt, and then the theft of your laptop and camera—”

“Mitsuko,” Liam interjected, “there’s still your memory, and there’s only one way to steal your memory, isn’t there?”

“But I have no idea who that little figure in the quilt might be.”

“Well, whoever it is doesn’t know that, right?”

Mitsuko’s face sagged. “I can’t bear to think Sybella died by mistake.” She looked off towards the oldest of the churchyard gravestones that lined the path to the lych-gate. “Perhaps the thefts and her death are unrelated. Perhaps she
was
the intended victim, not that that makes
anything
better.”

“Mits, we’ve been through this.
You
were the intended victim. I know it.”

“Did Bliss and Blessing ask you if you thought anyone in the village would have any reason to take your life?” Tom asked her.

“They asked, yes.”

“And what did you tell them?”

Mitsuko hesitated. The glance she flicked at Tom was furtive. “I said I had no idea.”