Eleven Pipers Piping (25 page)

“I was somewhat preoccupied, if you must know.” Victor jackknifed his body upwards like a spring, then rose with elegance to his feet—which, Tom noted with wonder, were shod in polished black wing tips with no evidence of traction-making aids.

“I was preoccupied, too, actually. Sorry, I was sort of blaming the victim, wasn’t I?”

Victor silently took the hat from Tom and settled it on his head, angling it ever so slightly. He flicked Tom a worried glance. “What’s preoccupying you, then?”

“At the moment? Will Moir.”

Victor looked away, at his bag, which lay at an ungainly angle in the snow, and at the scattered glass vials. “What about Will? Tom, look at what you’ve done.”

“His … stoicism.” Tom wondered if word of the taxine poisoning had reached the man’s ears. “I am sorry about this, Vic. Here, let me help you.” He bent to pluck a glass vial from a patch of snow.

“Bloody hell, some have broken!”

“Sorry.” Tom apologised again. “Really.”

“Never mind!” Victor retrieved his case and took the vial from Tom’s hand. With his foot, he pushed the glass shards against the base of the garden’s stone wall. “What do you mean, his stoicism?”

“Will must have known he wasn’t well, but he didn’t ask for any help.”

“A heart attack can come on suddenly.”

“Then why did he go up the tower?”

“Perhaps he wanted a lie-down. Makes sense, if he wasn’t feeling well.”

“There are couches in the reception rooms, bedrooms on the first floor.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Victor said with evident pique, stooping to collect scattered vials. “There’s not always an accounting for other people’s behaviour, is there?”

“No, I suppose not.” Tom plucked another vial from the road. The label read
AGARICUS
, which sent his mind like a rocket to tedious hours in fifth form under Mr. McKechnie’s tutelage declining Latin nouns.
Agaricus, agarici, agarici, agaricarum
reverberated through his brainbox. It was probably the wrong declension. “What’s this for?”

“Disorders of the nervous system.” Victor snatched the vial from Tom’s hand and gave it a quick study before shoving it back into his case.

“Ah,” Tom responded noncommittally, picking up another vial, this one labelled
ANTIMONIUM TARTARICUM
. He had no argument with homeopathy, though the notion that patients could be healed through the administration of the substances that caused their symptoms, diluted to the point where the remedies contained barely a molecule of the original product, seemed, on the surface, a damp squib.

“I expect Will wasn’t one of your patients, was he?” he asked Victor.

“No, he wasn’t. Although you phrase it oddly.” Victor frowned. “Is there a reason why he wouldn’t have been?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest he wouldn’t see a homeopath. Will wasn’t that old, so I can’t help wondering about the state of his health.”

“Difficult to know. As I say, he wasn’t my patient.”

“Lisbeth—my late wife, whom I’ve probably mentioned—used
to say that she envied homeopaths and naturopaths and the like because they seemed able to take so much time with their patients, talk to them, and really get to know them, whereas the NHS always seemed to pressure her to get through as many patients as she could in a day.”

“But if you’re asking me if I had some understanding of Will’s underlying health, I can’t say that I did.”

“But you observe, surely. You and my wife, for instance, because of your training, can read things in faces or mannerisms or speech. I’m told optometrists can read your health in the backs of your eyes.”

Victor moved impatiently onto the garden’s flagstones and set his kit down on the top of a bench that offered sitters a view down Pennycross Road’s descent into the village. Fastening the latch, he said, “I think there was something not quite right about Will.”

“Saturday evening? I thought he looked a bit peaky much earlier in the evening.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to him Saturday.” He looked away. “No, I mean longer than that. His temperament was changed—as you know.” Victor’s lips formed a grim line.

Tom did know. Though he had decided not to watch the “Coach Goes Mental” YouTube video, the anonymous posting of which he thought intrusive and cruel, the episode at the cricket pitch had been well described to him by several parishioners who had watched it.

“He and Caroline have some challenges in their business, as you know,” he said. “The economy is pressurising people for one thing. Money woes often put a strain on a marriage.”

“That might be it.”

“But you’re not sure.”

Victor shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tom. I do have worries of my own.”

“Yes, of course, I don’t mean to be a bother. Might I ask you in turn what’s preoccupying you?”

Victor cast him a penetrating glance, then looked away. “Oh, it’s nothing, really.”

“Well, if you ever think I can be of any help,” Tom responded. “That must be yours, too,” he added, noting a burst of colour against the grey stone and white snow. It was a bound sheaf of paper that must have flown over the wall and landed in the garden. “It’s got a bit damp, I’m afraid,” he continued, retrieving it, shaking a clump of clinging wet snow from its surface. He was about to hand it off to Victor, but then snatched it back. Something about it caught his attention, its colour and texture strangely evocative. He frowned over it, staring, and then he remembered and felt a momentary chill that owed nothing to the winter air.

“Are you going to give me that?” Victor said to him impatiently.

“Sorry. I was … admiring it,” he lied lamely, passing it to Victor. “A prescription pad, of a sort?”

“Of a sort.” Victor’s deep-set, dark eyes regarded him. “It’s multipurpose. I’ll write a scrip on it, for instance, for a patient to take to GoodGreens or Boots to get it filled.”

“It’s certainly distinctive,” Tom added.

It was. Lisbeth’s prescription pads had a number of clever security features—
VOID
would appear if anyone tried to photocopy a prescription, for instance—but superficially the paper looked unremarkable: plain and white, the lettering sans serif, brisk and businesslike. Victor’s, he noted, was more like the letterhead he used at the vicarage, with address at the top in a pleasing script and no other markings. Victor’s, however, was not a discreet white or pale blue. It was a delicate shade of lavender.

“Certainly not my choice.” Victor shoved the pad into a pocket lining in his case. “We moved the Totnes clinic to new premises on Castle Street in November, so new cards and stationery and scrip pads were in order. One of my colleagues chose this. Only a woman would pick such a bloody
ridiculous
colour. Hardly dignifies the profession, does it? Bloody women,” he muttered.

Tom felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth, pushing out thoughts of the pretty paper.

“What’s so amusing?”

“You, Victor. You’ve had a row this morning with your wife, yes?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You show not untypical signs—misdirected anger, laddish misogyny—”

“Then
you
try living with Molly!” Victor’s voice and the case’s clasps snapped simultaneously. “I’m not sure how much longer I can.”

“I’m sorry to hear this, Victor. I was praying that with time—”

Victor grunted.

“—and Molly’s getting some counselling from Celia Parry, which seems a good thing.”

“She told you that, did she?”

“Have you thought of—”

“No!” Victor’s eyes flashed. “I have my own way of coping with these things, and that includes my working and getting on with my life and not … not hanging about the house, talking and crying and arguing all the
bloody
time.”

Tom bit his lip. The expectation, he thought, is that the loss of a child naturally binds a man and wife together in grief. But the dismal reality, as his pastoral work had taught him, was too often the opposite: Grief tore people apart with all the heedless abandon of a tempest. He recalled vividly—because it came only a fortnight after Lisbeth’s death—a funeral he had taken at St. Dunstan’s for a three-month-old boy. So devastated were the young parents, whom he had wedded not thirteen months before, by the cot death of their newborn (their first real encounter with profound loss), their marriage cracked like a dry branch. Derrick and Zoë had made the traditional vow at the altar—
Till death us do part
—but the words resonated in his heart in a new way when he learned of their separation.

And now he wondered, glancing at Victor’s choleric expression with dismay, if a death would part Victor and Molly. He wanted to
say that even the most loving couple may each pull away from the other in time of grief, but with mutual forbearance and understanding, they could restore the intimacy and kindness of an earlier time in the marriage. But it sounded a bit of a bromide in his head, and as Victor didn’t appear awfully receptive, Tom reached for something more concrete: “Molly ventured out to cater a big supper for more than twenty men. That seems a good sign.” He added a hopeful smile.

The blaze vanished from Victor’s eyes. Hopeless frown met hopeful smile. He tugged at his case and turned to go. “I wish,” he said to Tom over his shoulder, “I thought that were true.”

A
re you suggesting that
we
jump?”

“I’m simply saying that I thought it might be a good thing if we—I mean those of us on the PCC—took a leadership role. But of course you’re not expected to jump, and you needn’t jump, if you don’t wish to. I recognise it is a rather daunting prospect.”

“Mr. Chairman.” Karla Skynner cast Tom a withering glance from across the table. “I can’t think of any circumstance in which I would be persuaded to fling myself out of an airplane.
None
.”

“You’ll be wearing a parachute,” Fred Pike, the assistant verger, piped up. He was studying a raisin biscuit he’d taken from a platter Madrun had sent over with Tom to the parochial church council meeting in the Old School Room. Tom wished people would
stop
examining food that came from the vicarage kitchen.

Karla shot Fred a look that would have scorched the fur off a small rodent, then turned back to Tom. “You, of course, will be jumping.”

“Of course,” Tom replied, drawing from some well the sort of feigned enthusiasm he’d mustered in his days as The Great Krimboni when confronted with a surly audience indifferent to his feats of magic. “I think it will be great fun.”

“Absolutely!” Mark Tucker chimed in.

“I’m sure Colm will join in.”

“He’s not here to say, is he, Mr. Chairman?” Karla snapped.

“Well, no. But I think Colm’s sort of the type.”

“The type for what?”

“… adventure?”

“And John, too,” Mark added, then frowned. “Well, perhaps. I’m not sure about the others not in attendance this evening.”

“I can’t think why John couldn’t be here tonight.” Karla reached for a biscuit and did not examine it. “I hear he was the only one able to drive out of the village on Sunday, and now that the lanes are cleared of snow, there’s no excuse.”

Tom looked around the table. “I’m certainly not pressuring any of you to take part in the jump. I’m sure it will be challenging to both body and spirit, and many of you may feel you’re not … up to it.”

“I’m not dead yet, Vicar,” Jeanne Neels, the matriarch of Thorn Barton, the former manor farm, declared. She was a woman in her late sixties and lean, with masses of greying hair tied in a loose bun. “And I’ve got one good hand to pull the rip cord.” She held up one hand, her right—she had been born without her left—and pushed at a few strands of hair that had worked loose to dangle across her face.

“I’m not dead yet, either,” added Russ Oxley, a semi-retired archaeologist who had moved to Thornford two years before. His face, covered in a hundred minuscule wrinkles, bore what looked like a permanent mahogany tan visible from the top of his open-necked shirt to a line three-quarters of the way up his forehead.

“And of course you know I did my National Service in the Parachute
Regiment.” Michael Woolnough, MBE, puffed out his chest. “Saw action in Cyprus in ’56.”

Tom didn’t know, but considered Michael the least likely on the council to participate, given his age, closing in on eighty. Though he seemed in excellent health, except for incipient deafness.

“Bless, I feel faint simply thinking about it. You’re hurtling through the sky at some ghastly speed, aren’t you? What if your parachute doesn’t open?” portly Roger Pattimore asked.

“I’ve been assured,” replied Tom, “that your odds are much greater being struck by lightning.”

“That doesn’t assure me in the least.” Karla removed her glasses and began polishing them against her sleeve. “Lightning has had quite a deleterious effect on some people I can think of in this village.”

“I’m willing,” said a squeaky voice on Tom’s left. “I’ll get everyone at GoodGreens to sponsor me.”

“Lovely, Briony, thank you.” Tom glanced down at her nimble fingers dancing over the keys of her little notebook computer. The last PCC secretary took notes in a shorthand of his own devising and presented minutes at subsequent meetings that shot fairly wide of the mark for accuracy. Briony’s were letter-perfect and swiftly approved at the next meeting, saving the council half an hour’s worth of amendment aggro. So good to have some folk on the council
not
old enough to vividly remember when President Kennedy was shot or when England last won the FA cup. Briony Hart was twenty-three, plain as suet, and lived with her mother up Orchard Hill. Tom suspected her recent church attendance might be part of a net cast wide in a husband-hunting strategy—decent blokes went to church, didn’t they?—but as long as he wasn’t the fox in this instance, he didn’t mind. He hoped Briony lasted on the PCC. Unattached men of marriageable age at church were often a scarce commodity; most of the unattached tended to be widowers, like John Copeland, or the never-married-and-not-bloody-likely types, like Roger Pattimore.
He worried a little that Mark Tucker, his new treasurer, might be the fox. Briony was swift to agree with anything he said, but Mark, bless his soul and his wife and child, remained sweetly oblivious to many and any a nuance—which reminded Tom of the task that Violet Tucker had set for him.