Twelve Drummers Drumming (8 page)

“Much good The Priory did that girl,” Madrun sniffed, snapping the
Telegraph
shut and snapping Tom out of his reverie. Her glasses dropped from her nose and bounced against her ample bosom.

“We can’t assume anything,” Tom remonstrated vaguely. He wasn’t sure why. Drugs, abused or mishandled in some fashion, seemed the ready explanation for Sybella’s death, given her history, which two years ago had reached its crescendo on the pages of
The Sun
and the
News of the World
. High as a steeple, she’d been racing her car through Camden at four in the morning, transporting a couple of similarly addled car surfers on the hood. After the car met a streetlamp, the surfers met the pavement, and Sybella met her airbag, the court—in a foul mood, keen to make an example of the spoiled children of spoiled parents—ordered a £3,000 fine, a year’s driving disqualification, and rehab at The Priory in lieu of jail. Thornford’s curtain twitchers still pegged Sybella for a druggie, but Tom, who had seen his share of wasters on the streets of Bristol—and Kennington and Southwark before that—was pressed to find any recognisable sign.

“Do you think I could give the rest of my breakfast to Powell and Gloria?” Miranda whispered, regarding him hopefully.

Tom glanced at Madrun, who had bent over the dishwasher, and whispered back, “Just eat a little more.”

T
om was glad when Miranda suggested they reprise “Where in the World Is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?” At the breakfast table, he tried to keep Madrun from further speculating about Sybella’s death, going so far as to feign interest in the other announcements in the Court Circular, but to little avail. Answering any more questions about Sybella reminded him only too vividly of telling Miranda—the evening of the sombre, rain-filled autumn afternoon when he’d found Lisbeth lifeless on St. Dunstan’s cold stone floor—that her mother had died.

So stunned by horror in the hour after Lisbeth’s death, he had let his daughter slip from his mind until a police constable’s question jolted him to the very circumstances of his wife’s being in the church at all: It had been a Wednesday, Ghislaine’s day off. By custom, Lisbeth left her surgery early and walked Miranda back from school, but this Wednesday she had phoned him and said she would first nip into Toad Hall Toys, buy the Barbie doll Miranda was so craving for her birthday, then leave it with him at St. Dunstan’s for safekeeping.
“She would guess what’s in the bag, darling” were among her last words to him.

Frantically, blinded by grief, he had phoned the school, but no Miranda was to be seen. He phoned home, then a neighbour’s, then Ghislaine’s mobile, all to recorded messages. Finally, he had peeled himself away from the tumult of police and ambulance and shocked church staff and raced through Miranda’s path from school. He found her at last, mercifully, at home, little perturbed, quite competently having made herself a snack of bread and jam and settling in to watch
The Sarah Jane Adventures
on TV.

When her mother didn’t appear, she explained, regarding him with a faintly guilty frown, she had made her own way home after a detour to the Cheltenham Road Library. He was so relieved, all he could do was crush her to him. And then, after a little time had passed, he steeled himself for the awful task. Then, he could speak—just barely—the language of death to his child; he had had to; there was no other way. But he could not make himself speak the language of murder; that is, until some pitiless older child’s school taunting of Miranda left him little choice but to address the greater horror.

Yes, Mummy died very suddenly when she was coming to meet Daddy at the church, but police think she saw a man doing something bad and he didn’t want her to tell anyone what he was doing, so he took away her life. No, he was a very sick man. No, police don’t know who he is, but they’re looking very hard for him. Yes, Myleene
—for that was the gormless schoolmate’s name—
is right, the police think it may have had something to do with drugs. No, not like Paracetamol. This sick man was using very hurtful drugs. Mummy would never have prescribed anyone such drugs
.

One unintended consequence was that Miranda remained chary of anything she thought was a drug, including the erythromycin she had been prescribed when impetigo had coursed through her classroom. “Will this hurt me?” she now always asked, examining intently any bottle of pills.

Which was why Tom wished Madrun had not mentioned The
Priory, the well-known drug and alcohol treatment centre. By doing so, she’d laid down a track. The conversation could proceed in only one direction, and it would, unless stopped.

“Oh, it must be drugs,” his housekeeper said, reaching for the cafetière to pour Tom another cup, stepping around Powell and Gloria, who were slinking about on a quest for dropped food.

“Not necessarily.”

“Nonsense, Mr. Christmas, it has—”

“Mrs. Prowse, shall we talk of other things?”

“I’m not a baby, you know,” Miranda interjected. She was regarding them both candidly.

“Of course you’re not, darling,” Tom responded reflexively. “But it’s not like it was with Mummy. There’s no sick man in the village who hurt Sybella. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Prowse?”

“Yes, of course.” But Madrun had been arrested in her coffee pouring. Tom looked up and noted a strange, alert look in her eyes. He realised at that moment that he had given voice to an awful possibility that his mind had held shuttered: No youthful folly or accident or self-destruction had ended Sybella’s life. Some outside agency, gone now to shadow, had brought about this destruction—an echo of his own wife’s death so acutely painful that he had to catch a breath so that his coffee cup wouldn’t shake and spill. He cursed himself for planting the seed of speculation in Madrun’s mind—she’d be down at the post office with her letter to old Mrs. Prowse nattering with Karla Skynner and anyone else queued up for a stamp—but then realised he was probably being naïve. Half the breakfast tables in the village were probably preoccupied with similar worrying thoughts.

That’s when Miranda suggested they play “Where in the World Is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?” Its genesis had been his offhand explanation to her the year before about Kinsey’s no-show at Ned Skynner’s funeral. He had told her that Kinsey was probably having sundowners with Lord Lucan somewhere in Africa, which Miranda didn’t understand, but nevertheless embellished with a tangential
suggestion about him visiting Babar in the jungle. When they were driving home to Bristol after their stay with the Hennises, they continued the game, which seemed perfectly innocent then. Though the village had been rife with speculation when they’d left, Tom assumed Kinsey would eventually reappear with some perfectly decent explanation for his absence. They weren’t to know that before any great passage of time, he would be officially classified as a missing person.

“What made you think of that?” he couldn’t help asking, wondering if she was reacting in some oblique childhood way to anxiety.

Miranda shrugged.

“Well, all right then,” Tom responded reluctantly. “Where in the world
is
the Reverend Peter Kinsey?”

Miranda regarded the bit of ham on her fork. “
Le curé est parti en Espagne pour … devenir matador
,” she said, flicking a glance at Madrun, who, as usual, discomfited at the introduction of French, turned away.

“And what would Alice Roy do?”

Miranda slipped the piece of ham off her fork and let her arm drop beside her chair.
“Alice demanderait à Madame Prowse si le curé était très très … friand de la paella.”
She giggled.

“What?” Madrun turned, responding to her name in the thicket of French. Her eyes went to Gloria’s greedy jaws. “You’d best not be feeding my good ham to that cat.”

Tom laughed. “Miranda imagines that the Reverend Mr. Kinsey decided to become a matador in Spain. And that a good detective like Alice Roy would ask you, Mrs. Prowse, if he was … fond …?” Miranda nodded assent. “… fond of paella.”

Madrun harrumphed, still eyeing the cat. “Then you also might imagine him performing in denim trousers and getting shut of red capes.”

Tom was reminded that many parishioners found Peter Kinsey a divisive figure after so many years of the amiable Giles James-Douglas, who had been content to hone to traditions established many years earlier. A new broom in modern dress, Kinsey had shifted worship times to make room for a modern family service, decided
to take out some pews so people could gather for coffee and a chat after services, removed pictures from the Lady chapel, and was musing about moving the altar before his disappearance. Shifted from their comfortable pews—literally, in a few cases—some churchgoers felt they were being pushed a bit too far. A few welcomed the changes. However, Kinsey wasn’t around long enough to have really put his mark on things, and so the fabled “demographic”—so much the concern of forward planners—hadn’t changed significantly. They’re like ripe fruit, the bishop, a wintry fellow, had mused to Tom between bites of sultana cake as he surveyed the flock at the reception in the village hall after Tom’s induction service: Pretty soon they would begin to drop off the branch. The message was clear: Innovate to draw new blood into the church. But, added the bishop, giving him the gimlet eye, try not to shake the branch
too
vigorously. That message was equally clear: Don’t be an overeager arborist like your predecessor. Softly, softly, Mr. Christmas.

One of Peter Kinsey’s legacies was a splendid new bloodred Thorn Sherpa touring bicycle, the sort you might buy if you were thinking of cycling by way of France, Turkey, and Iran to India. It was a bit flash for a vicar, and rather expensive, but Tom, applying bicycle clips to his ankles, suspected his predecessor had merely to say “carbon footprint” and all qualms—his and others’—would vanish. Well, it was true. A bicycle was a greener way to get about. But some used model would have done just as well, if a little village was the four corners of your cycling world. So, too, would a biro from the corner shop instead of a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or a pair of Boots sunglasses instead of Oliver Goldsmith’s, both of which had been overlooked at the vicarage when Peter’s effects were packed away pending resolution to his missing person’s file. The archdeacon told Tom that Peter’s parents, wealthy farmers in Zimbabwe, had been killed and their land seized just before his ordination, leaving Peter,
their only child, with virtually nothing more than his stipend. That didn’t seem to stop him from acquiring the finer things in life, Tom reflected, as he waved at Miranda, who was holding one of the cats in the sitting room window, and pedalled out into Poynton Shute, with its row of stone cottages opposite. Looking down Church Lane towards the lych-gate, he glimpsed Sebastian John, keys in hand, preparatory to opening the church for the day, and gave a passing thought to hailing him and asking after Colonel Northmore’s condition. But the bike seemed to have a mind of its own and it whisked Tom onwards, past the Church House Inn and along towards Pattimore’s shop and the post office.

Or perhaps he was attributing agency to the bicycle to avoid talking with his verger. Sebastian seemed to live in silences, approaching conversation as if it were a necessary, but not wholly welcome, obligation. Likewise, his expression often lacked animation, as if he had learned to rid his face of emotion, though occasionally, at church council meetings, say, when Karla Skynner was on her high horse about something, a gush of inner light would illuminate his deep-set blue eyes and a faint smile would curl the corners of his mouth, illuminating the suppressed intelligence. It was the infrequency of these emotional punctuations that made his entrance into the village hall the day before all that much more remarkable. Sebastian had burst through the doors, panting slightly, a line of perspiration against his hairline, as if he had dashed from the other end of Purton Farm. Tom had assumed his concern was for Colonel Northmore. He knew from Madrun that the colonel had interceded with Giles James-Douglas to secure Sebastian the verger’s position, which suggested some sort of prior relationship between the men, though try as she might—and Madrun had tried—she couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Too, Sebastian spent many hours tending the gardens at Farthings, the colonel’s home near the entrance to Knighton Lane, and sometimes took his dinners there. They were almost like old priest and acolyte, Tom thought, occasionally seeing them together in one of Thornford’s lanes, usually with Bumble at
the end of a leash. But Sebastian, his bronzed face drained of colour, had eyes ony for the
o-daiko
drum.