Twelve Drummers Drumming (12 page)

“There is nothing I can do in such a situation,” Alastair had told his furious wife in a heated whisper that nevertheless managed to travel to Tom’s ears. He was standing not far behind them. “What you do is call an ambulance.”

“That’s what I did.”

“Then you didn’t need to drag me from home, did you? I’d only got in the door—”

“He
is
your private patient, Alastair.”

“—and I was set to watch the Spanish Open on—”

A breeze shifted the direction of their voices. Then, as Tom was reflecting on the strained state of the Hennis relationship and wondering what he might do, he heard Julia utter Sybella’s name. From Alastair came a sigh of exasperation, the words of which Tom couldn’t catch, then a more audible reprise of his earlier defence. “I feel terrible for Colm, Julia, but there’s little I can do in such a circumstance. Doctors can’t bring people back to life.”

Recalling the row and its culmination in Sybella’s name, Tom asked Alastair, “Were you Sybella’s?”

“Sybella’s what?”

“GP.”

“Would that be any of your business, Tom?”

“Sorry. My mind seems to be on yesterday’s misfortunes.”

Alastair’s mouth formed a thin line. “Well, as it happens, yes, I am—or was—her GP. Is this relevant to something?”

“No, I suppose not. Not now. Since it doesn’t appear she died from natural causes.”

“Indeed.”

“You know?”

“Tom, where do you think postmortems are performed?”

“Then …?”

“Then what?”

“How was she killed?”

“Aren’t you a bit nosy for a new-model vicar? Does it matter
how
she died?” Alastair appeared aggressively amused.

“Of course it matters,” Tom responded with some heat. “I expect the people in Thornford might want to know if there’s some sort of deranged individual wandering about that they might wish to protect themselves from in some fashion!”

Alastair glared at him. His rather prominent ears had taken on a red tinge. “It is my understanding,” he responded through strained teeth, “that Miss Parry suffered a subdural hematoma.”

“In other words, someone hit her over the head.”

“It would seem so.”

“It’s certain then.”

“Are you done? May I go? I have other things to attend to this afternoon.”

As Alastair turned sharply towards the staff parking lot, Tom reflected that in the dozen years he had known Alastair even a regular blokeish conversation had somehow eluded them. He had wrestled dutifully with his inability to forge some sort of bond—family ties added obligation to the task—and he had had Alastair in the back of his mind more than once when delivering a sermon on the subject of Christian love, that through God’s grace we can love someone we might not particularly like, but he found that trying to
like
Alastair was at times the spiritual equivalent of having to go to the dentist. It wasn’t his fault that Lisbeth had thrown Alastair over for him, Tom. How was he to blame for the manoeuverings of the female heart?

But blamed he was, though he had not consciously snatched Lisbeth from Alastair’s arms. He knew almost nothing of the man until Alastair appeared at the Rose home in Golders Green one Friday evening arm in arm with Julia, which startled Lisbeth’s
parents—and Lisbeth, who had brought Tom for his first Shabbat. In those days, Alastair had advanced to Cambridge’s reserve crew for the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, looked enviably fit, and radiated a sort of animal confidence that Tom could see—though was loath to admit—would be attractive to women. Seated across from them as Lisbeth’s father recited Kiddush, Tom had sneaked a glance and had thought them a handsome pair, as surely as Lisbeth and Alastair must once have looked a handsome pair in the very seats. Julia had had the grace to let her composure falter when Lisbeth, not her parents, opened the door to her and Alastair (her driving up to London from Cambridge with Alastair had been an impulse), but she’d recovered quickly. Alastair, too, had exhibited similar rue. “Hello, it’s me again,” he’d said with a sheepish grin. But he, too, had quickly righted himself, as if he were permanently entitled to at least
one
of the beautiful Rose sisters. In those early days, yet unattuned to the wars of the Roses, Tom had thought the affection between the pair to be genuine, though he had been uncomfortably aware of Alastair’s cool and critical gaze falling upon him—and Lisbeth—in unguarded moments the rest of that very awkward weekend.

An ice age grew up between the sisters beginning then. Lisbeth had viewed Julia’s taking up with Alastair as little more than sibling rivalry run riot. As for Alastair, she had muttered darkly, as they drove back to Cambridge: He was doing little more than exacting a peculiar revenge. With her, with their combined income from medical practice, he would find the perfect village and raise the perfect children in luxury. He had life all figured out for them, Lisbeth had said, but she didn’t want her life all figured out. She wanted, she had declared, turning to him in the car, smiling, a life more messy and unpredictable.

The ice age began to thaw only when Julia had miscarried a child some eighteen months before Lisbeth’s murder. Tom’s charitable view had always been that Alastair had fetched up with the prettier (by a titch) and more vivacious of the two sisters; therefore he ought
to be well pleased with his choice. Indeed, now Julia was
living;
Lisbeth was not. And yet Alastair seemed to bristle with dissatisfactions unnamed, at least when Tom was in the vicinity. That cool gaze fell upon him still. Mercifully, with Miranda, however, Alastair was transfigured. No longer the prickly in-law, he became the attentive uncle, for which Tom was grateful and in which he could detect no insincerity. He pushed through the door to the colonel’s hospital room and thought, not for the first time since arriving in Thornford Regis: Perhaps if I took up golf …

Tom studied Colonel Northmore’s ancient head resting against the pillow and the loop of plastic tubing marrying his bared arm to an IV pole. He watched the clear liquid drip into the ampoule then drip into the tubing, where it glided down and disappeared beneath a white bandage fringed by purple bruising on Colonel Northmore’s exposed arm. He felt a pang of pity for the old man.
“When I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not”:
The psalm passed through his mind.

Each drop soothed the old gentleman’s pain, but each drop, morphine-laced, clouded his mind so that his speech, uncharacteristically profuse, was uncharacteristically unclear—but for the occasional lucid punctuation. It was these—a name, a sentence fragment, a shout—that would pull Tom from his prayers and return his mind again to the antiseptic room where the afternoon sun, cascading through open venetians, was beginning to spill up the bedclothes. “Lydia,” he heard this time. The colonel’s eyelids remained sealed. His grey lips returned to their mumblings. Lydia had been Mrs. Northmore, gone nearly a quarter century now, lost to breast cancer. Phillip had soldiered on alone; he had been a soldier. Tom empathised for their shared circumstance, widowers both, and imagined though greater age brought greater expectation of separation, greater age did not assuage the suffering. By all accounts, Phillip had been the
most uxorious of men, dedicatedly so: His father Edwin, a dashing Edwardian known for his charm and eccentricity, had been not only profligate with the family fortune, so clobbered by death duties after the war that he was forced to sell Thornridge House, but recklessly profligate with his seed. If your great-grandmother had been a servant up at the Big House in the days before the Great War, rumour had it, chances are you had some Northmore blood in your veins.

“Stop that!” Colonel Northmore interrupted Tom’s reverie with the sort of crispness that attended his contributions to PCC meetings. Then he added, “Catherine.” Must be Cat Northmore, his daughter, an actress of minor acclaim living in America—Los Angeles, most likely. Or was it New York? Madrun had mentioned Ms. Northmore was in a TV program about dead people who seemed to get out and about and meddle in living people’s lives. Or was it busybody angels? At any rate, Catherine Northmore communicated with her father infrequently. Regarding the IV drip once again, Tom wondered if—no, determined
that
—Cat ought to be telephoned, and soon. Alastair may well be too sanguine about the success of an operation on an advanced octogenarian.

Phillip seemed to settle back to mumbling and Tom began to question the utility of his presence, other than perhaps a shared, silent communion. At home, myriad tasks awaited: the weekly pew leaflet to organise, wedding couples to schedule, a youth service to plan, a contribution to the parish magazine to write, his sermon to reconsider in light of the recent shock to the village. Not to mention preparation for Sybella’s funeral, which, given her parents’ repute, was going to necessitate liaising with the diocesan press office and organising some crowd control. He needed to put in a call to the archdeacon and have a talk with the funeral director.

He glanced again at the slumbering figure in the bed, then reached into his jacket pocket for the little case that held his professional cards. He would leave a note for the colonel, saying he had been round to visit. Instead, unthinkingly, he pulled out Mao’s
Quotations
.
Bugger. He’d thought the weight in his pocket had been the card case, not this tiny red-plastic-covered book. He flipped the pages idly and glanced at selected passages.

Useful for an inspiring speech to Thornford Regis Football Club, he considered, though identifying the source probably wasn’t on.

How true, he thought. His mind returned to the great disturbance of Thornford’s pleasant rhythms wrought by Sybella’s puzzling death. What had Eric remembered in the pub a few hours earlier? He had remembered that Sybella’s occasional presence in the Church House Inn had coincided with Sebastian’s. And what had Sybella been doing each time? She had been sketching Sebastian—this reported to Eric by an inquisitive barmaid. Hadn’t Tom viewed the results at Thornridge House that morning? He was unsurprised that a young woman should find Sebastian, with his distinguished straight nose and his firm jawline, alluring. Sunday mornings, during the processional through the nave, he’d sensed more eyes lingering on his verger than on him. Sebastian kept his hair long, though usually banded back, but for services, and at other times, he released the band and let his hair fall like a flaxen curtain around his face. “He looks all Jesusy,” he overheard one pew-warmer whisper as he passed; he couldn’t tell if the tone was approving or disapproving.

What did surprise Tom was Sebastian’s reaction to Sybella’s attentions. Thursday last, Eric reported, in the middle of a slow, rainy afternoon at the pub, Sebastian, who had been seated at the window, thumped his half-filled glass on the table, sprang from his chair,
pitched himself halfway across the room, and snatched the sketchpad from Sybella’s hands. Wordlessly, he’d ripped several pages from the pad, torn them into pieces, and thrown them into the fireplace. Eric had been the sole witness.

“Only time I’ve seen Sebastian lose his famous cool,” the landlord had told Tom.

“And did Sybella lose hers?” Tom asked.

Eric snorted. “I think she fancied it. Getting the attention and all. Didn’t say a word, sort of smiled, picked up her bag, and walked out.” He reflected: “It’s the last time I saw her, now I think of it.”

A sharp report from the colonel’s lips broke Tom’s reverie. He glanced up to see if Phillip had awakened, but the lids remained shut; as before, only tremulous lips suggested the workings of a restless dreaming mind.
What was that word he said?
Sounded like “omoray.” Moray was a type of eel … and a Scottish district. He and Lisbeth had driven through on a week’s holiday once, early in their marriage. But O’Moray? An Irish name? Wait! There was that old Scottish folk song,
Bonnie Earl o’Moray
. He remembered his honorary father, the Reverend Canon Christopher Holdsworth, rector of St. George’s in Gravesend, reciting it at some church function.
They hae slain the Earl o’Moray / And laid him on the green
.

Colonel Northmore said the word again, this time with more bite. Really, Tom decided, this was getting to be entertaining, rather like deciphering code. Might the injured man be dreaming of Màiri White, the village bobby?
Oh, Màiri!
Unlikely. A little too passionate for the old duffer, though who knew what lurked in the hearts of old men widowed lo these many years? Tom himself gave a passing thought to PCSO White, then wished he hadn’t. Copper she might be; all kitted out in her stab vest, her bowler hat, and what looked like a hundredweight of police clobber—torch, radio, and such—she looked the very model of a modern police community support officer—prim, on the whole. But off-duty, in mufti, as Màiri White had been at the May Fayre, where he had glimpsed her chatting with some children at the petting zoo, she had looked quite fetching,
the pale skin of her arms exposed to the sun and her chestnut hair released from bondage. She had green eyes, too—duly noted when she lent assistance to members of the constabulary at the village hall—and really it was too soon, too soon,
much
too soon to be thinking about these things. No,
acting
upon them. Thoughts could not be quelled. Especially those sorts of thoughts. What would Jesus do? Who knew? He was a single fellow. And He didn’t have a child, unless you subscribed to that
Da Vinci Code
bollocks.