Eleven Pipers Piping (26 page)

Roger was still squirming in his chair as if imagining his adipose frame hurtling through space over Devon’s patchwork fields, but Tom thought he might be persuaded to jump, or perhaps they might each goad the other. He hadn’t quite realised when he explored the possibility of a parachute jump as a charity fund-raiser that it might involve him—Tom Livingstone Christmas—stepping out into thin air, thousands of feet above the ground—a notion that made him gulp with alarm when Jamie Allan, the charity’s organiser, explained it over the phone. Still, he had to put a brave face on it. It
was
a good idea. If only they could get enough people in the village to agree to jump and sign up lots and lots of sponsors.

Often, particularly when matters were trivial, the members of the PCC would split into two violently opposing camps, emotions would run high, and opinions would fall either side of an imagined Maginot Line. Tom would feel his face stiffening into a mask of benevolent exasperation and the matter would be deferred until the next meeting when some subcommittee, struck in the heat of the moment, would report. At least the church roof engendered little controversy. The last quinquennial report had stated baldly that the roof of St. Nicholas’s was in bad nick and had to be repaired and no argument, lest they want rainwater dripping on their heads in the middle of Communion. There was none. The only argument was how it would be afforded. The cost, according to the estimate, pressed one hundred thousand pounds. Applications had been made for grants from English Heritage and the National Churches Trust, but the rest of the money they would have to find on their own. There were the usual stratagems—the bring-and-buy, the coffee mornings, the carboot sales, the jumble sales, the May Fayre—and
all had been scheduled for the forthcoming months, but a sponsored parachuting looked a novelty that would draw more people, particularly younger ones, perhaps garner some publicity, and generally make a fun day of it for Thornfordites. Something about the spectacle of it persuaded them, at least all who made it to the PCC meeting. Only Karla demurred from this new scheme, which surprised Tom not a whit. Defending the traditions of the village, including its fund-raising customs, was Karla’s bailiwick. Jumping from airplanes wasn’t one of them.

“Then what is the role of the … what are they called?”

“The Leaping Lords,” Tom supplied.

Karla clicked her tongue in dismay. “What is their role in this?” She replaced her spectacles on the bridge of her nose. “And are they life peers or hereditary peers? Some of the life peers are the worst sort. Trades union hacks and so forth.”

“They’ll have their own sponsors, of course, and they put on a show—formations in the sky and suchlike.” Tom answered the first question first. “I’m not sure how they achieved their titles.”
Can it possibly matter?

“I trust none of the Lords Spiritual are engaged in such foolishness.”

Tom couldn’t help his mind’s eye witnessing Bishop Tim hurtling through the air, one hand steadying his mitre, the other holding down his cassock. A smile teased at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It would be rather fun, I think.”

Karla peered at him disapprovingly, then grumped, “Well, I can see I’m outvoted on this. Mr. Chairman,” she continued—she insisted on addressing him thus at PCC meetings—“I would move that we erect a thermometer at the north porch so those coming to services can see how much money is being raised—
however
we raise it,” she added sourly.

“No!” The word was out of Tom’s mouth before he could think.

“No?” Karla raised an inquisitorial eyebrow.

All the reasons why setting a twelve-foot tongue of plywood up the side of St. Nicholas’s with an upturned red plastic bowl for a reservoir, guttering up the middle for a capillary tube, and gradations calibrated in thousands of pounds up the side was not acceptable frog-marched through Tom’s cerebrum: They looked bloody hideous; they attracted vandals; and they soon became an object of derision, particularly when fund-raising optimism went pear-shaped, as it sometimes did, and red paint no more climbed the capillary. Thermometers were sad. They were boring. And he wasn’t having it. But he feared it was the very trivial issue that would bog down the meeting.

“Insurance,” he declared impulsively, pulling a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat. “We’d have to insure it—the thermometer.”

“Why?” Karla frowned.

“Theft, fire, termites—”

“Don’t be silly, Mr. Chairman. We don’t have termites in England.”

“Yes we do,” Fred interjected, picking the raisins out of his biscuit. “Lady had ’em in North Devon a while back. Ate her entire porch.”

“I suppose,” Mark reflected, “if fund-
raising
is our goal, then perhaps we best not be spending money unnecessarily. There would be cost for wood, paint—”

“But
insurance
?” Karla fumed.

“I can look into it,” Mark offered.

“I’d suggest,” Roger said between bites of his biscuit, “we defer this to our next meeting. We don’t have quite a full complement here tonight, so we might want to have other views before we proceed. Besides, should we be fortunate to get money from English Heritage or the like, then we could start the thermometer off with a super-high temperature, couldn’t we?”

Mercifully, after some mutterings yea or nay, that held the day. Tom said a silent prayer of gratitude for things deferred, and thought
as he glanced around the table:
They aren’t such a bad lot, really
. A charity parachute jump took a bit of chivvying, but they all came around in the end, save for Karla, and most of them—very surprisingly—were willing to at least entertain the notion of leaping from an airplane themselves, if it served the church’s needs—though on a winter’s eve, nestled in the Old School Room, the summer looked a long way off, and perhaps they all wanted to appear enormously plucky, he among them, even if they weren’t.

Unbidden, a vision of himself plunging into the cold air from the door of an airplane flashed like a diamond in his brain, and he took a sudden gulp of air. Briony flicked a glance at him, smiled, and resumed her merry typing. Indeed Briony’s fingers never seemed to leave the keyboard, and he wondered if she minuted absolutely everything—
Vicar takes sharp breath
—and only hacked and pruned later. As she couldn’t enter his thoughts, she couldn’t write,
Vicar notes room is faintly redolent of last occupants
, which his nose told him it was. In good weather, on weekday mornings when it was used as a crèche, the Old School Room might smell of little children, of milk and sun-warmed hair; in bad weather, on weekend afternoons, when it was used for meetings of the camera club or the chess club, it might smell of damp wool, dogs, and an illicit cigarette or two. This evening, the Old School Room’s aroma hinted of glue and microwaved popcorn and talcum powder. Scrapbooking, the art of preserving family history in a scrapbook, had lately caught the fancy of some villagers, and the Thornford Scrappers, as they called themselves, commandeered the Old School Room one afternoon a month for their cutting and pasting and drawing. The detritus of their activity rested by a dangerous-looking paper trimmer on a table by the wall over which was placed a
DO NOT REMOVE
! sign: scissors, pens, rubber stamps, stencils, inking tools, and various kinds and colours of papers and card stock. It was the last items that recalled Tom’s mind to the morning’s encounter with Victor Kaif and that sheaf of lavender paper, a stain against the white snow of the memorial garden.

It was, he was certain, precisely the colour of the note Madrun had received asking her to contribute berry tartlets to the Burns Supper. After their conversation in her rooms, she had gone for her coat hanging in the vestibule and found it; she had indeed used the back of it as a grocery list.

The coincidence of colours was, at the very least, a bit startling. Still, he thought, turning to view again the papers on the table of the Old School Room, the lavender might be a stock colour, one that the Thornford Scrappers, too, would count among their items.

He thought back to his encounter with Victor. He had left the Daintreys with a wisp of suspicion about Will’s death clinging like a vapour trail to his more ordinary ruminations—his overdue contributions to the next issue of the parish magazine, his Sunday sermon, writing the service sheets, preparation for the PCC meeting, pastoral visits to come. Bother Florence Daintrey—again!—for putting cheerless thoughts in his head. It was a small matter, surely, this inviting Madrun to contribute a sweet to the Burns Supper. It was someone’s whim, an off chance, the note composed in haste, the signature forgotten, and quickly popped through the vicarage’s letter slot on a flying visit in the midst of other quotidian tasks.

But was it
Victor’s
whim? The coloured paper suggested it might be so. But Victor didn’t strike him as a man who would trouble himself with the minutiae of a banquet menu, particularly when he wasn’t charged with its planning.

And now, as the PCC members shuffled to the next item on the agenda, he wondered if he
should
have asked Victor if he had requested berry tartlets from Madrun. The bush telegraph was swift, but it wasn’t always thorough: Nothing in Victor’s manner or conversation suggested that word of Madrun’s folly had come his way. If he introduced it, referencing the stationery and its distinctive colour, mightn’t he seem accusatory, particularly if Victor queried why he was asking? And would it have been effective? Victor could simply have lied.

Tom sighed. He was feeling a bit ineffective, helpless before the unhappiness that had slipped into his household. Madrun wore a brave face, but her conversation—usually voluble and opinionated—had fallen to low ebb at breakfast and at lunch, soliciting enquiring glances from Miranda. When he returned to the vicarage after his visit to the Daintreys, he had asked to look again at the unsigned note she had received and was troubled to see what hadn’t met his eyes the first time he’d looked at it.

Then, the text alone had held his attention. Now it was the paper itself. The colour appeared to be the same as Victor’s stationery, yes, but could he really trust his colour memory? Soon after he and Lisbeth arrived in Bristol, in a flurry of new-home excitement, they had repainted their bathroom. It had been an ancient shade of turquoise, peeling badly, and Miranda, at age three, was wont to put paint flakes in her mouth. But the new light, creamy neutral—called, bizarrely, “Oak Smoke”—that dried on the walls was not, in Lisbeth’s insistence, the same as the Oak Smoke promised by the paint chart. He, splattered and weary, couldn’t see the difference—it
looked
sort of beigy, neutrally, whatever—until Lisbeth fetched the chart. The difference was subtle, but enough to dissatisfy his perspicacious wife. Back to the paint shop they trotted.

The more troubling aspect of the mystery note, however, began with its dimensions. The paper had the width of standard commercial bond, but not the height. A portion, a top piece—or perhaps a bottom—had been trimmed, most likely by someone scoring the paper against a sharp edge, a ruler perhaps. The effect was not crude: The edge wasn’t ragged, but neither was it crisp, as it would be if cut by machine—or even by a paper trimmer like the one on the Old School Room shelf. Was the sheet a bit of old discard? he wondered. Or—more worrying—had a strip of it deliberately been removed? The portion, say, with the printed letterhead?

Wordlessly, he had handed the paper back to Madrun. She had regarded him over the rims of her spectacles with not a little expectation
and curiosity, but he could only offer her a noncommittal shrug. All he had was speculation, and it was thin and cursory, and might well be without foundation. He didn’t want any of his dark musings speeding along the bush telegraph and causing needless insult and injury. That he couldn’t confide his speculations to his housekeeper brought him no joy. She was the only other adult in his household (
how he missed Lisbeth!
) and a font of information—and wisdom—about the village, but he was uncertain of her abilities in the great circumspection challenge. Perhaps, he thought, it was his own fault. When he had asked her kindly but very firmly in the past to keep something to herself, she had done. When he had been less direct, she hadn’t. And in an instance when it never occurred to him to ask her to keep mum, as it had the day before when he had confided to her Màiri’s information, and assumed she would be too shattered to share it, she had indeed shared it—with Judith Ingley, who had promptly passed it along to the Daintreys. Had Madrun not thought it would go farther? And did she know—he watched Fred inspect another raisin biscuit—that word of the taxine poisoning had got about? Did she not think about who would condemn her, who would doubt her, who would wonder how she could have made such a fatal mistake?

The tongue is afire
, he recalled the apostle James saying.
For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind
.

But the tongue can no man tame
, James continued.
It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison
.

Tom’s eyes wandered to the ceiling. A bright centre light flooded the room, casting short, sharp cruel shadows on the figures around the table. He turned his head towards the two uncurtained mullioned windows overlooking Church Walk, stark black lozenges against the night fracturing and distorting the movements of their heads and shoulders, as in a fun-house mirror. The air seemed close, entrapping. It had been cool when they’d first gathered. Now, gusted
by palpable jets of heat from an electric heater rotating with a tiny mosquito whine, the air felt sultry. Yet despite this, he could feel his skin drawing into gooseflesh. A harbinger of something? Cold or flu. No, he thought. It was what awaited. For days, pummelled by snow and ice, Thornford had been suspended in a limbo of time, very much at the mercy of events beyond any human agency. With no incessant demands of school and work, most villagers had spent stolen days in paradise. For a few, however, the days spent were in hell. But the snowploughs had opened the lanes to Thornford. Through the afternoon barometers rose. The weather vane atop Thorn Court Hotel’s tower veered towards the southwest. In his study that afternoon, beginning work on his Sunday sermon, he had heard the snow slithering from the roof with a rushing sound, and as he walked to the Old School House in the dark he could hear, though not see, rivulets of water trick along the cobbles. The snow was melting. This freakish episode in the village’s history was ending. Thornford would return to its normal rhythms, but for this: After supper, as he was about to leave the vicarage, a phone call came through from Màiri White.
Whatever can this be about
, he thought with a frisson of pleasure, taking the receiver from Madrun, who cast him a gelid eye. But it was no bid to chat. Màiri was between Totnes Police Station and her car and had but a moment to pass along a bit of information: An inquest into Will Moir’s death was set for Thursday morning at ten o’clock.