Eleven Pipers Piping (55 page)

“Well, of course, she trained as a nurse and managed a sunset home. Her own husband died of—”

“Tom, I know all that. She told me that’s how she was able to make such a quick assessment. She couldn’t have been more than an hour in Will’s presence. I was stunned, of course. No one knew of Will’s prognosis but me. But I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t confirm it. I just told her she was being absurd. Before I told her to get out of my sight, she accused me of poisoning my husband to put him out of the … out of the misery that would shortly be his life.”

“And did you?” Tom realised too late he had given voice to his darkest thought.

“Tom! Why would you ask that?”

“I’m sorry, Caroline, I must tell you I came here fearing the worst. That phone call from Judith’s friend in Australia was deeply unsettling. Since I arrived here this afternoon, you’ve admitted you weren’t in town last Saturday night. You were here at Thorn Court. Which you’ve gone to some lengths to keep a secret, including having Adam lie. I can’t imagine what he thinks you’re doing,” Tom added, watching her mouth open to reply. He held up a cautioning hand. “You’ve told me before about your financial distress. Now I know about Will’s condition, which is truly heartbreaking. All these things Judith knew or suspected. As much as I deplore her coming here and intimidating you with her knowledge, her conjecture isn’t unreasonable, is it?”

She regarded him stonily.

“Anyone with this knowledge,” he continued, hating what he was saying, “might conclude that you somehow contrived Will’s death. With his consent. Or not. I don’t know. In either case, Caroline, it’s a crime, and though I’m not confounded about what action I need take, I
feel
confounded. I’ve come to know you well enough these months I’ve lived in Thornford. You sing in St. Nicholas’s choir, our daughters are friends, you and Will have dined with us at the vicarage, people in the village think of you as a sort of golden couple—nothing about you suggests a woman who would …” He couldn’t say the word
murder
. “And I’m disinclined to Judith’s notion that folk are fated to certain behaviours by accident of birth. But I can’t look into men’s—or women’s—souls, however much I may try. I don’t know what desperation may drive them.”

“Are you intending to go to the police?”

“How can I not? Not unless you can assure me that you had no hand in Will’s death?”

She bit her lip. “There’s still formal confession in the Church, isn’t there? I don’t mean the confession we make at the service Sundays. I mean—”

“Yes, I know what you mean—formal confession under the seal of the confessional. Caroline, to receive absolution, you would have to acknowledge your culpability, which would mean going to the police yourself, first.”

“I see. Well, as it happens, there’s no need for me to make that acknowledgement. I swear to you that I had no hand in Will’s death—none. I won’t say we didn’t discuss the idea of assisted suicide. We did once—it was a horrible and frightening discussion. Will broached it. There had been something in the papers about a couple going to Switzerland, to one of those clinics that help people with terminal illnesses commit suicide. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see how I could bear to witness Will take his life. There, or here, or anywhere. You see, I hadn’t the courage.”

Tom studied her eyes, which remained trained beseechingly on him, compelling him to believe her. “Then Will’s death remains a mystery.”

“Oh, Tom.” Caroline’s expression softened. “It’s no mystery. It’s no mystery at all. Don’t you see? No one took Will’s life.”

“But—”

“Will took his own life, Tom. He took the poison himself. He knew I couldn’t help him, knew I couldn’t be a party to an assisted suicide without endangering myself, without consequences to our children, to our home, everything we’d built together. So he … arranged his own death. Do you see now?”

“Took his own life? How can you be sure?”

“It’s the only explanation. Once we’d had the assisted-suicide discussion, he must have brooded on … taking his own life himself.”

“And you had no inkling? People sometimes leave clues to their thinking, their intentions …”

“Other than that he was unusually loving and attentive the week before the Burns Supper?” Her eyes glistened a deeper blue. “Perhaps that should have alerted me. But I welcomed any lifting of the depression that seemed to come with the onset of the disease. I only realised what he might be planning last Saturday, when I dropped Ariel off at yours, and you said something about you, as their chaplain, being a restraining presence.”

“Yes, I remember the look on your face—wary, a bit frightened.”

“It suddenly occurred to me that everything was just so, everything was fallen into place …”

“Fallen into place to what end?”

“To disguise his intent. The hotel would be empty of guests because we were closed for renovation. It would be empty of workers because it was the weekend. Ariel would be with you at the vicarage, Adam would be in town, with me. And yet there would be a few people about, a circle of friends and acquaintances, coming and
going. There would be plenty of food and drink—too much drink, of course, with memories blurred.” She shivered. “I remember thinking if you were a restraining presence, Tom, then perhaps …”

“Perhaps Will would change his mind? Caroline, if you thought, at that moment, that you could change the course of these awful events, why didn’t you?”

A shadow crossed her face. “Is a simple, straightforward answer possible? I don’t know, Tom. An unwillingness to believe it could possibly be true? I think that lay at the root of it, at least in part. You do, in a way, go into … well, I suppose Celia Parry would call it ‘denial.’ That’s the fashionable word, isn’t it? I thought how ridiculous I would be interrupting your supper and embarrassing Will, and all for nothing. And perhaps at a deeper level, I thought that if he were set on doing this thing, if he had made his plans, then I had to honour them.”

“Caroline—!”

“No, Tom. I had to. We agonised about the disease, Will and I. I knew what the future held. So did he, and he was determined not to live his mother’s life. I had to steel myself to the belief that what he might do was for the best, for him, for all of us.” She stared hollow-eyed into the dark centre of the tower, then put her face in her hands and moaned. “Oh, God, I don’t know if I believe that! We would have managed … somehow. Or maybe Will would have just found another opportunity. I don’t know. I simply don’t know!

“Tom, when my car got stuck in the snow and the man in the lorry offered me a lift to town, I nearly accepted, but I changed my mind, thinking I must go back and make sure my fears were baseless. Adam wouldn’t miss me. I presumed he and Tamara were probably stuck somewhere themselves anyway. I couldn’t get a signal on my mobile to find out. So—”

“But when you got back—”

“Tom, it all seemed so normal, so ordinary. I crossed the kitchen and I could hear laughter coming from the dining room—like any
day in the hotel. Or perhaps I was willing myself to believe nothing was out of the ordinary. I don’t know. I can hardly account for my actions. I just remember passing quickly through the lobby, out the door, and to the Annex, where I gulped down a glass of wine with some cheese and biscuits and went to bed.” She flicked him a guilty glance. “I also took a sleeping pill and was oblivious to the world for the next twelve hours.”

“Do you normally take something to help you sleep?”

“Horlicks, occasionally, but rarely a pill. Will had some. He didn’t always sleep well. I wanted to shut out the world.”

Tom looked away, out the window. From his seat, he could see that the moon’s journey had taken it well above St. Nicholas’s tower; now the crescent was suspended in the black sky, God’s fingernail. A week ago, when he and Roger had walked through the snow to Thorn Court, that moon had been invisible. His mind returned to that evening, to the flow of food and drink, to the sequence of courses, to the comings and goings of the guests. Which of all those moments was the fatal one? Which forkful of haggis or curry contained the poison? Will was the only one to eat from the ceremonial haggis. Had he somehow doctored it earlier, out of view? Or that glass of whisky Will dropped? He had reached for a fresh glass from the sideboard, pouring himself a drink from a new bottle. Was that the moment? Was the taxine stirred into the whisky? Or into the cranachan. Could it be? Or the yewberry tartlets after all. He had had two; Nick had given him his.
“Are there nuts in these?”
Will had murmured. But how could Will have possibly tampered with those?

He returned his attention to Caroline. “Then it was Will who asked Mrs. Prowse to provide some of her yewberry tartlets for the meal.”

She nodded. “I think his plan began that moment a fortnight ago when we all rushed into your kitchen to see if your housekeeper had been hurt when she cried out. The berries were on the table.
Her pastries are famous in the village, and though no one has ever doubted her vigilance, the possibility, thin as it is, remained that a damaging seed or two might miss inspection.”

Tom took a breath to temper his rising indignation. “Mrs. Prowse has been shattered by this, Caroline. Some people in the village think she either set out to poison your husband or was shockingly negligent.”

“I know, Tom, but can’t you see how desperate Will was? Everything he did, he did to obscure the fact that he was taking his own life, to divert attention from himself, but not direct it so pointedly on another that he or she would be damaged. I believe he thought of that. Madrun had no animus against Will—everyone knows that—and she was nowhere near here that evening. She was at the vicarage, with the girls, so how could she really be involved?”

“Then what about the Kaifs? The note Will sent to Mrs. Prowse was on the same sort of violet-coloured paper that Victor’s clinic now uses for its stationery. It’s very unfair to draw them into this. They’ve suffered a terrible loss of their own.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “Tom, Will is colour-blind, remember? Years ago he caught a cricket ball in the back of the head where the … I think it’s called the occipital lobe rests. The effect is, his colour sense was completely wonky. I don’t think he thought for a moment that the paper had anything to do with the Kaifs. Really, I don’t. He probably thought it was ordinary blue writing paper. I haven’t seen this note, but Ariel brought some violet-coloured paper home the other week.”

“She brought it from the Kaifs’.”

“But I’ve also been looking at that colour for our own new hotel stationery. It seems to be the fashion. It was Farbarton’s, the stationer in Totnes, who directed me to it. Will wrote his last instructions on paper that colour, remember? He likely pulled it from Farbarton’s samples down in the office, thinking it was a standard business blue,
but”—she cocked her head in thought—“he most likely used a printer at Totnes Library or somewhere other than here to print the note to Madrun.”

“If you were going to send someone an anonymous note, you wouldn’t use distinctive paper—a paper that could be traced to someone.”

“But it wouldn’t be distinctive to Will. He probably chose it thinking it might be linked to many people and therefore sow more confusion. Will wouldn’t have set out to hurt Victor or Molly. He was too aware of their suffering. Victor had reconciled with Will—”

“Molly hadn’t—not really. And unlike Mrs. Prowse, she was present at the Burns Supper.”

Caroline frowned. “I can only guess that Will thought no opportunity could attach to her. And how could it? I know how food is plated and served at banquets, which the Burns Supper was. It’s almost impossible to direct a particular plate to a particular person in food service of that nature. And Kerra was serving, not Molly. Molly would have left trays of plated food, about four or six per tray, in the service pantry, which Kerra would pick up and take into the dining room, but it would be impossible to say with any assurance which guest would get which plate. If Molly herself had carried a single plate of food and put it in front of Will, then I suppose suspicion would fall on her. But she didn’t, did she? You were there.”

“No, Molly was only seen when the haggis was piped in. But don’t you see that a cloud hangs over everyone who was there? Your brother, for instance, left the dining room to use the loo, but exited through the serving pantry. Perhaps he tampered with the food. He and your husband were not getting along at the supper.”

“But, again, Tom, how would that plate arrive in front of my husband?”

“Victor, John, Mark, too—at different times each left the private dining room on some task or errand.”

“But people do move about at banquets, don’t they? And that’s
why Will decided the Burns Supper was the best chance to meet his end, an event so public that a private act would be lost in the confusion. I asked Nick to take me through the sequence of events. I think Will took a sufficient quantity of taxine during your break after the supper and before the toasts began, and came up here, knowing that by the time you found him he would be … gone.”

“He looked unwell earlier. Judith remarked on it. Thought it was his heart.”

“I can’t begin to imagine the stress he would have been under that evening. Surely that affected his appearance. Or perhaps he took some earlier—to test its effect? Perhaps he was acting. You didn’t see his performance in
Abigail’s Party
. He was very good. He played Laurence, who suffers a heart attack.

“I regret all this deeply,” she continued. “I think Will was single-mindedly concentrated on what he thought best for me and our children. That any cloud hanging over others in the village was nothing compared with the cross we would bear, the suffering we would endure—the loss of our home, watching him grow slowly mad. I can only presume he thought any inquest would eventually bring in a verdict of accident or misadventure at best, or an open verdict at worst, but that no one in Thornford would suffer unduly, and that Ariel and I could go on living here with some financial security.”

“And then came Judith Ingley.”

“The snow and Mrs. Ingley, yes.”