Eleven Pipers Piping (10 page)

“I’ve never been to a Burns Supper before,” Judith remarked, watching Roger pour coffee into her cup from a silver pot. “What happens now?”

“The toast to the immortal memory, for one,” John explained.

“Which is John’s task,” Roger said.

“Toasting the immortal memory of Robbie Burns, I presume.” Judith lifted the creamer.

“Yes, and then there’s a toast to the lassies. To Molly, who cooked our fine meal, and to Kerra, who served it. And bless, to you, too, now. That’s my job.”

“How kind. But I’ve done nothing but intrude.”

“We must toast Her Majesty first,” Mark interjected, reaching for the whisky decanter. “I’d better top up.”

“That’s Will’s job, as host,” John explained, glancing at the empty chair to his left. “Where is Will, by the way?”

“Will!” Nick roared.

Jago jerked his body away as if hit. “Christ! Would you
stop
it!”

“Get your Aussie arse back here!” Nick continued, oblivious, grinning at his own wit.

“There’s a lady in the room, you idiot,” Jago snapped.

“Sorry.” Nick appeared uncontrite.

Conversation faded around the table as guests poured themselves coffee or whisky and reached for cheese and biscuits, which had been left on the table. Soon an expectant silence fell, broken only by the hiss and crackle of the burning logs and the gentle ping of china cups nestling on china saucers. After a few moments, Tom was certain he could hear a faint humming of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Soon it grew louder. Then, like a dam bursting, several at the table, led by Nick, began again to chorus loudly, “why are we waiting, we could be fornica—”

“Is Will in the kitchen with you and Molly?” Jago interrupted loudly, leaning around Nick to address Kerra, who had arrived with a fresh pot of coffee.

“Not now, Dad. He came in for a minute after you broke before coffee, but otherwise …”

“Odd,” Roger remarked. “Perhaps he’s in the hotel office. Could you look in, Kerra?”

But she was back in a minute with no joy.

“Odder still.” Roger’s hands travelled under the table into his sporran, then reappeared with his mobile. “Bless if Mother hasn’t called four times.” He frowned at the screen, then listened to the messages. “Weather reports. Heavens! They might even close the airports if this keeps up. Anyway …” He punched in a number and waited. “Can anyone hear a phone ringing in the hotel?”

Everyone strained to listen. “We’re a bit insulated back here, Roger,” someone remarked.

“Yes,” Judith added. “None of you could hear the front desk bell when I rang it.”

“Gone to message,” Roger said after a moment, closing his phone. A thoughtful look settled over his fleshy features.

“Will probably switched his mobile off, if he’s even carrying it.” John reached for the cream.

“He’s probably bladdered, is what he is,” Nick sneered. “Fell over something. He’s been doing a bit of that lately anyway.”

“I don’t think he’s had any more to drink than most of us—excepting you,” Jago snapped.

“Perhaps he’s gone next door,” John suggested. The Moirs lived in the Annex, the gatehouse of Thorn Court when it was a private residence, converted and enlarged. Though semidetached, it had a separate entrance, accessible only from the outside. “Shall I go and look?”

But he, too, was gone only a moment. “I looked out the door.” He brushed wet flakes from his black jacket. “But there’s been much
snow in the last hour and there are no new footprints. He has to be in the hotel somewhere.”

Tom glanced around the table and sensed in that instant that everyone shared the same premonition, that something was terribly wrong. He could see it in the drawn brows and arrested movements. Even Nick, whom he expected to be loudly dismissive, had fallen to silence. Tom’s eyes fell on Judith’s. A certain intelligence passed between them.

“I think,” he said, pushing his chair back with more force than he intended, “we’d best go and look for him.”

I
t’s really the only place left.” Tom’s eyes travelled the narrow, carpeted staircase, which disappeared into darkness above.

“Bless, why would he go up there?” Roger voiced the question on all their minds.

Three—Mark, Roger, and Tom—had delegated themselves to find Will. Tom had invited a fourth—Judith—reasoning, but not worrying the others at the table, that her medical skills might prove useful. Nick tried to bully his way into joining them—he produced the master key to the rooms from the hotel office—but his bellicose shouting of Will’s name finally drove amiable Roger to steer him back to the private dining room.

Many of the bedrooms and suites on the first floor needed no keys, as there were no guests. Bed frames, wardrobes, chairs spilled awkwardly into the hallway, a concession to renovations, presumably, for the rooms Tom entered—and he entered with trepidation, switching on the light with foreboding—all were empty but for an
amorphous shape or two covered in tarpaulin, a ladder, or a nest of tools. Workmen had not penetrated the smaller chambers on the second floor—once upon a time servants’ quarters, now single rooms with single beds—but many of the doors were unlocked, too, suggesting that renovation was nigh. Dark turned to light with the flick of a switch, but no cry of discovered horror came from any lips.

And now the three men were gathered on the landing of the hotel’s central staircase, attenuated in its rise to the belvedere tower above.

“Will?” Roger leaned against the wall and twisted his head upwards. His call held hope more than expectation. “Olly olly oxen free!” He turned back to them, his features falling. “I thought perhaps …”

He met silence. Will wasn’t the type for this sort of game, Tom thought. If hide-and-seek were the evening’s entertainment, he would have organised it properly.

“What
is
up there?” he asked. “I’ve never been past the ground floor.”

“Nor I,” said Mark.

“Never,” Roger added. “Odd, given how long I’ve lived in Thornford.”

“I have.” Judith’s voice came from above their heads. “A long time ago.”

They turned to see her standing at the top of the staircase, bathed now in a soft light that poured along the walls. She had been in the tower room and had needed no key. Tom studied her face, but her expression telegraphed nothing. He had heard no yelp or muffled cry from above as they had searched the second floor; neither had Judith dashed down the steps calling for them to come quickly. Each little indicator in its way filled Tom with a new hope. It was absurd to be worried, he told himself.

“Is Will up there?” Mark asked the question on all their minds.

Judith descended a few steps and rested her hand on the banister.
“I’m so very sorry,” she replied, “but it’s the worst you might imagine.”

Tom felt his feet as weights as he climbed the stairs behind Judith, his heart contracting with pity, his mind flown to Caroline, somewhere in Totnes, or perhaps gone to Noze, where her son, Adam, lived, and to Ariel innocently tucked up in her sleeping bag before the fire in the vicarage sitting room with his daughter and the other girls, all three Moirs unaware of this shattering change about to overtake their lives. When he entered the chamber, he felt the chill immediately. The windows on each of the four sides were opened to the night. They framed the ceaselessly falling snow, drawing in the icy air. His eyes were first taken by the unconventional seating, a chocolate-brown banquette around three of the sides, peppered with bright pillows and blankets, punctuated at each corner with a floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase untidily crammed with books of all heights and thicknesses. He envisioned for a moment the pleasure of retreating here on a rainy afternoon, letting his eyes run from the page of some beloved text to a contemplative view of the garden below or over the roofs of the farther cottages towards south Devon’s soft hills. But then he willed his eyes to travel towards the very human shape lying in shadow under the south window, and felt pity anew.

“Lord have mercy,” he intoned, looking down on the recumbent figure of Will, first at his kilt tidily pleated around his legs, his Charlie jacket buttoned and smoothed, his hands with their elongated fingers resting neatly across his chest, like the figure of a knight on a tomb. Tom let his eyes close before permitting himself a look at Will’s face, and he must have wavered in his stance for suddenly he felt something warm press firmly against his stomach. Startled, he opened his eyes and realised it was the palm of Judith’s
hand; he should have felt at least disconcerted, but instead he felt strangely restored.

“I don’t know why it works, but it does,” Judith told him, withdrawing her hand. “Better?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“It’s the shock, you see.”

Tom now looked upon Will’s face. The overhead light in the tower room was perfunctory and unflattering; it was a room for daylight hours, but tiny halogen reading lamps had been integrated into the décor, and it was one of these that sharpened the skeletal scaffolding of Will’s cheeks and the pale plain of his forehead where the mop of silver-white hair had fallen back. “Thou most worthy Judge eternal,” he murmured, the familiar words of the petition swiftly on his lips, “suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.” But he thought he saw in the set of facial muscles that very thing—the vestige of some pain of death, some final suffering—and he felt a rush of sorrow.

“There was some … strain in his face,” Judith said. “But the muscles have begun to relax. I arranged the body—”

“You did?”

“Force of habit, I’m afraid.”

“I see.” Tom imagined few in expectation of death arranged themselves so tidily, though he was surprised at the capabilities of this small and elderly woman.

“It’s the training,” she explained, as if reading his mind. “When you work as a nurse …”

“Did he suffer much, do you think?”

Judith was clinical. “There would have been some suffering, yes. I found him curled in something more of a fetal position.”

“But Will was so fit. In his late forties, but still … He was an athlete. A cricketer, a runner. How could this happen?”

“I’m afraid these things can happen to those who appear to be the healthiest of people, Vicar. You’re too young to remember the
American James Fixx, who started this running lark in the seventies. He died one day out on his daily run. He wasn’t very old.”

“Heart attack?”

Judith didn’t respond. She silently studied the body.

“You saw signs earlier in Will,” Tom pressed. “We both did, really. This is so awful. We should have done something then.”

“I’m not sure there’s much we could have done in the circumstances. Is there a doctor living in the village?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“And look at that snow.” She gestured out the window. “I don’t think any ambulance could get through. Not tonight. And I’m sure they’ll be taken up with all kinds of accidents and other emergencies in these strange conditions.”

“But there must have been something—”

“Oxygen, if the hotel has any. Had him chew aspirin. If it were a heart attack.”

“You don’t think it was?”

“I’m a nurse, Vicar, but not a doctor.”

Tom looked again at Will’s body with grief. “Why did he come all the way up here?”

“Perhaps this room held some memory for him.” Judith cast him a faltering smile, then added quickly: “Or perhaps … well, some creatures seek privacy when they sense they’re going to die, don’t they?”

“Perhaps,” Tom responded reluctantly, though if he had such a foreboding in his middle years, he wondered if he wouldn’t fight death with all the power at his command. Will had been so vital; it seemed so odd for him to retreat in death.

“I think I should like to offer a prayer,” he said. “Will you join me?”

“Of course.”

Tom sensed all eyes upon him as he and Judith stepped into the reception room. Conversation ebbed at the same moment, swallowed up into a ghastly calm with a muted sobbing the only interruption. In the far corner of the room, next to the window, Jago was consoling his daughter, whose pretty young face was puckered with misery. Tom felt almost grateful for Kerra’s reaction, so ingenuous, so apposite, so fundamentally female. Judith had reacted to the death of a stranger as a professional caregiver might; Molly was absent, perhaps in the kitchen. But the men wore their stoic masks, scarlet with drink and heat and tight collars, rigid with suppressed feeling. Only their eyes hinted of troubled depths—shock and grief in most, as was natural, but disconcertingly, in a few, less expected sentiments: Victor, reinstalled by the fireplace, flicked him a glance fraught with anxiety, then turned to jab the dying embers with a poker. John seemed to look through him, as though working out some puzzle in his head. Nick had splayed himself across one of the couches and peered at Tom through half-closed lids, like a lizard sunning on a wall, his expression a disturbing amalgam of indifference and contempt, though possibly—Tom reached for a charitable thought—the man was anaesthetised by drink.