Eleven Pipers Piping (33 page)

“And why curry at a Burns Supper?”

“Good heavens, Inspector, everyone loves curry. It’s the national food of England.”

Bliss frowned deeply.

“DI Bliss much prefers fish-and-chips,” Blessing interjected, flicking a glance at his superior. “I think the question is, why curry at
this
Burns Supper? Who decided for curry? If you’d all fancied Chinese, who would have cooked your meal?”

“I get your point, Sergeant.” Tom sighed. “It’s all a question of opportunity. What better food to disguise a poison than a spicy curry? And who had the best access to that curry? The cook, of course. And who was the cook? Molly Kaif. But isn’t it all a bit unsubtle? If she seriously wished to harm Will, wouldn’t she take care
not
to make herself the obvious suspect?”

Not if Molly had lost the balance of her mind
, Tom thought, worrying the edge of his fingernail as both detectives favoured him with noncommittal stares. He cast his mind over the previous Saturday evening, as if viewing it through the lens of a speeded-up movie. He said, “Gentlemen, you’ve a daunting task sorting out the Burns Supper. All the people, all the moving about the place—”

“You’d got us to the dining room earlier, sir, in your description,” Blessing interrupted, flipping back in his pad, “twelve of you. And you all remained there for the course of the meal?”

“Well … no.”

“No?”

“Let me see.” Tom strained his memory. “Of course, there was the piping-in of the haggis, so after the soup course Victor left to fetch his bagpipes, as he was the designated piper—”

“Left …?”

“Through the door to the corridor that leads to the lobby. There are two doors on the—let me think—east side of the dining room, one to the corridor, one to the serving pantry. I remember Nick Stanhope popping out for a pee early on, possibly before Victor went for his bagpipes, although—”

“Although?”

Tom felt as if he were shopping Nick to the police; worse, he was taking some guilty pleasure from it. “Although he took the serving pantry door.” To Bliss’s inquisitorial eyebrow, he added, “possibly by mistake. He was fairly legless early on.

“And then … I remember John Copeland going to fetch some antacid tablets, which would have been after the haggis course.”

“But before the curry?”

Tom nodded. “I’m not sure about the movements of others down the table, though. Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, there’s me. I headed to the loo after the curry course.”

“Yes?” Bliss appeared weirdly pleased.

“I have no trouble digesting curry.” Tom glanced at Blessing, who was snapping back the pages of his notebook.

“Which would be when you say you encountered … Judith Ingley,” the inspector said.

“Yes, I was crossing the lobby and glimpsed her in the reception room.”

“So she had already checked in.”

“No, no, I already said: Because of the renovating, Thorn Court wasn’t taking guests. Mrs. Ingley didn’t know that.”

“Didn’t check online or phone?”

Tom shrugged. “Country hotels aren’t awash in guests after
Christmas, I wouldn’t think. She probably assumed a room would be available.”

Bliss’s face twitched. Whether he was unconvinced or suffering the agonies of irritable bowel, Tom couldn’t tell.

“So,” Blessing said, taking a cue from his superior, “you came upon her in the reception room—”

“Yes, she said she had tried the desk, but as we were all in the dining room and being quite noisy, she couldn’t make herself heard.”

Blessing paused, took a sip of coffee, then looked past Tom down the High Street, which seemed to be drawing in on itself in the growing gloom.

“Then you don’t know how long she had been in the hotel before you found her, do you?” He returned his eyes to Tom’s.

Tom thought back to the figure he had encountered in Thorn Court’s reception room. Judith had not removed her jacket, but that meant little as the fire was embers by that time and the room had cooled, and her cheeks had a rosiness to them, as if she had just slipped in from the outdoors, but then they remained rosy through the rest of the evening and all the days after, an effect of her makeup—or makeup itself.

“No,” he replied slowly, “I suppose I don’t.”

B
y about the fifty-seventh slide—this one of the Reverend Hugh Beeson, vicar of St. Barnabas in the village of Noze Lydiard, all seventeen stone of him, emerging from what appeared to be a concrete tepee in a place called Holbrook, in Arizona—Tom’s eyelids were feeling the wrench of gravity. It had been very kind of Hugh to come to Thornford to fill in as guest speaker at the St. Nicholas’s Men’s Group—though, Tom thought, squeezing the tiny muscles around his eyes in an effort to keep his lids from descending, perhaps he was being kind in thinking that Hugh was being kind. After Tom had mentioned on the phone only hours before his disappointment that Brian Plummer, the well-known Rugby League coach, had to cancel his appearance last-minute due to something that sounded like little more than a tummyache, his colleague in the neighbouring benefice had fairly leapt at the opportunity to come and show his pictures, now ten years old, of the journey
he and his wife had taken down Route 66, a highway in America that, according to a song he’d blasted out of a CD player to open his presentation, “wound from Chicago to LA.” Hugh, Tom suspected, was happy for any opportunity to display the flowerings of his great avocational enthusiasm.

Which was motorcycles. Hugh adored them, in a fashion that struck Tom as faintly idolatrous, but then Hugh wasn’t a lone figure in this mania. There was a little clack of priests in England who received press attention for their affectation and who parlayed their helmeted, leather-clad presence, singly or collectively, into charitable fund-raising deeds. This was a good thing, though. And, he supposed, Hugh’s enthusiasm was a useful thing, as well. Tom counted himself fortunate to have only two churches in his benefice. Hugh had four—four small congregations scattered about the countryside, which meant Sunday-morning services were a bit of a tear. What more efficient way to get from St. A to St. B then by skirting through and around traffic on a marvelous rocket machine? The Holy Hog, Hugh called it.

Hugh had been an almost alarming sight sauntering into the Church House Inn on a winter’s eve, squeezed into black leather, helmet in the crook of his arm like a severed head, until he pulled the snaps back from his bulging neck to reveal his straining clerical collar. But this walking medicine ball could relieve the regular punters slumped in their chairs of their dull conversation. Tom had fetched him to the pub’s upper reception room where grub was laid on, and a screen, like a stiff white flag, was scrolled into place in front of a projector, a device now as quaint as a typewriter, miraculously unearthed by Joyce Pike in the recesses below the stage of the village hall.

Hugh shucked his leathers and entertained with brio, taking them through the stations of this modernist, unsanctified pilgrimage. Spicing the show and keeping the men alert was the presence in
nearly half the photographs of Mrs. Beeson, the second Mrs. Beeson, as it happened, a woman fifteen years Hugh’s junior and gamer than Vicar’s Wife Mark I to suffer the skin-searing, hair-flattening effects of a two-thousand-mile cross-country tour from motorcycle sidecar. As the Beesons travelled from cool, grey Chicago to the sun-drenched climate of the American Southwest, Mrs. Beeson seemed to shed layers of clothing—
there’s Holly at Cadillac Ranch—
revealing a figure remarkable for shapes and curves somehow stifled in England. Tom had met Holly, of course. Ten years had passed since these projected photos, but she appeared little changed today, her heart-shaped face still smooth as a doll’s, her breasts, he suspected, still voluptuous somewhere under the sensible cardies she wore at the vicarage in Noze Lydiard. She was a bright thing, to boot, an accomplished artist who taught theatre design—and Tom, glancing with drooping lids from the bright screen to the shadow enveloping the bearded, rotund figure working the projector, couldn’t staunch a prickle of envy.
You’ve done well, you old goat
.

But even the vixen charms of a younger Mrs. Beeson—
there’s Holly at London Bridge, Lake Havasu
—couldn’t keep Tom’s mind from going walkabout. The room was thick with warm air, dark but for the jewel glow of sky and tree on the screen; the pint of Vicar’s Ruin had glided nicely into his veins and now breached his cerebral cortex. Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino were all very pleasant, but he found himself drifting to a place nearer to hand, to The Nosh Pit in Totnes, where Detective Inspector Bliss and Detective Sergeant Blessing had planted their bottoms and held him prisoner to a mushroom-shaped table and a rather decent cup of coffee. Perhaps it was Hugh’s mention of a bout of food poisoning at a diner in Albuquerque that recalled Tom to the earlier conversation.

“A woman’s weapon, poison, don’t you think, sir?”

Tom had looked up from his coffee, wondering at being asked to speculate, but saw that Blessing was addressing his superior, who merely grunted in response and said to Tom, “According to the report
we received, Mr. Moir’s body was found in Thorn Court’s tower. Do you know why he would have gone up there?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. It seems an odd thing to do, and I’ve thought about it since. I can only speculate that he felt ill and didn’t want to trouble us—his guests. People who feel unwell often fall into a kind of denial. Shame and embarrassment can be powerful forces, Inspector.”

Bliss looked unconvinced. “But why the tower? The hotel is full of bedrooms if he wanted to lie down, and the Moirs’ residence is right next door.”

“We realised at one point that he couldn’t have gone next door. One of us—John Copeland—looked out and saw no footprints.”

“Fresh snow could have covered them.”

“Not that quickly, I don’t think.”

“Another question is
when
he went up the tower. He didn’t leave in the middle of the meal.” Blessing flipped back in his notebook. “You had your sweet, complete—” He paused to lend emphasis. “—with berry tartlets.”

“The programme was to include various toasts and speeches, and some bagpipe music, too, I think.” Tom sipped his coffee. “But after the meal, we broke away to get some air and so forth. Some of us went into the lobby or the reception room. After about fifteen minutes we reassembled in the private dining room.”

“And no Will Moir.”

“No.” Tom paused. “We waited for a bit, but then his continued absence seemed strange—at first—and then worrying. So after a time, we sent out a search party.”

“Then Mr. Moir was out of everyone’s—presumably everyone’s—sight for …?”

“More than half an hour, I would say. Perhaps forty minutes.”

Bliss squinted at the ceiling. “And in that time, he never tried to come downstairs, never sought help, never declared he felt unwell—Odd.”

“Sir,” Blessing interrupted, “his precise time of death can’t be pinned down. He may have only reached the tower when he collapsed, and couldn’t move to get help.”

Bliss appeared to consider this. “The search party consisted of whom?”

“Besides me, Mark Tucker and Roger Pattimore … and Judith Ingley. It was Judith who found Will’s body, which I think you know.”

“I’d wondered about that. You’d only known her an hour and yet she was already part of a search party.”

“Mrs. Ingley is a nurse,” Tom explained. “We thought—without saying it, of course—that she might prove useful. You see, Inspector, when she first arrived, I brought Will out to the lobby to meet her to let her know that there was no room in the inn, so to speak, and she thought he looked a little unwell then.”

“And this is
after
the curry course.” Blessing looked at his notes.

Tom nodded.

“And what made her think of the tower, do you suppose?”

“We had eliminated all the other possibilities, so she went up.”

“
She
went up. Alone?”

“I know what you’re thinking, Inspector, but we didn’t send her up. She had gone up on her own before we three arrived at the bottom of the stairs.”

“But you did go up.”

“Yes.”

“And …”

“Well, Inspector.” Tom felt a surge of sadness. “In the low light, you might have thought Will was resting.”

“Presuming the body hadn’t been moved,” Blessing muttered.

“Judith is a small elderly woman and Will was not a small man,” Tom remarked, adding, “But she told us she did arrange the body.”

Tom’s body gave an involuntary jerk. His eyes snapped open and
he blinked to readjust his sight to the glowing screen and its new images. Yes, there was Holly, in sunglasses, waving to the camera in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. And there she was again in front a bronze statue of Bugs Bunny on the Warner Bros. lot. And there were the two of them—both waving this time—as an attendant strapped them into the seat of a Ferris wheel. This, explained Hugh, was Santa Monica Pier, the real and symbolic end of Route 66. Tom attempted to suppress a yawn, but someone turned on the coach lamps ringing the paneled room at that very moment, catching him with his mouth stretched wider than the west door of St. Nicholas’s.