Twelve Drummers Drumming (13 page)

Okoo
. The colonel again.
Okoo
. That was familiar, yet somehow out of reach. Okoo. Lots of
O
’s in front of words. O’Coo? Irish? The O’Coos of County Kerry sort of thing? Somehow, Tom thought, the colonel didn’t hold much of a brief for the Irish.
Oh! Koo!
? Sounded like a West End musical doomed to excoriating reviews and heavy tourist traffic. Didn’t Prince Andrew once have a girlfriend named Koo? Yes, that’s right. Koo Stark. She was in a naughty film. He would have liked to see it, but he had been—what?—eleven, twelve, just on the cusp of adolescence when there was a flap about it. It was all around the time of the Falklands War, he recalled. Videos were only just coming in. Of course, even if it had been on video and even if they had owned a video machine, he would never have got it past his two mothers. Well, Kate might have turned a blind eye. She was American and the more indulgent of the pair. But Dosh was his adoptive father’s sister, and took her
in loco parentis
role with a certain seriousness.

Tom blinked and gave his head a sharp shake. He had been drifting off; the room seemed to swim in warmth, as hospital rooms often did. Why was he thinking about Koo Stark?

Okoo
. There it was again.

So familiar.

He rose from his chair, partly to shake off his lethargy, partly to more closely examine the colonel, whose agitation had grown in the last minutes. A mask but for the quivering lips, the colonel’s face was now a convulsion of tics and twitches. His eyebrows, rigid as grey cliffs, turned to grey waves, while his deeply scalloped ears seemed
to bob beside his motionless skull. And then, as Tom stood transfixed, a keening sound ascended from somewhere below the thin hospital blanket. It mutated into an anguished cry as it escaped his mouth.

“Oh, no, okoosan!”

And then his eyes jerked open.

He stared at Tom unseeing, as if witnessing some private horror. Tom returned the
Quotations
to his pocket and then placed his hand gently on the colonel’s. He could feel the dry parchment-like quality of his flesh. “Colonel,” he said softly, “you’ve been dreaming.”

Tom observed the black dot in the colonel’s irises contract as he struggled to take in the novel environment. “Padre?” the old man said with a kind of surprise. Then he twisted his head and let wondering eyes travel up the tube from his arm to the plastic bag dangling at the end of the aluminium pole.

“Colonel, you’re in Torbay Hospital.” When this didn’t quite register, Tom added: “In England.” Which seemed stupidly obvious, but had an effect. A wave of relief seemed to smooth the furrows in the old man’s face. “You’re home,” he further embellished. Well, near as Bethlehem is to Jerusalem. “You were dreaming.”

Phillip released a deep sigh. The heavy lids of his eyes sank to half-mast. “I was back at Omori,” he said, his voice thick with phlegm.

“Omori?”

Phillip cleared his throat. “POW camp. Near Tokyo. Awful place.”

Tom nodded, removed his hand. He knew Colonel Northmore had suffered the deprivations of a prisoner-of-war camp and wondered if he was often haunted by dreams of those days. “I had a parishioner once who had been in a Japanese camp. In Singapore, I believe it was. His descriptions of their treatment were grim.”

“Savages.”

“Who?”

“The Japs, of course.” Tom was treated to a stony glance. His former
parishioner had been similarly unrepentant in his characterisation. “I can’t forgive them.”

“I promise you I won’t preach forgiveness this afternoon, Colonel. In any case, it’s something you must come to in your own time.”

“Not much of that left, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, you’ll be right as rain soon, I’m sure.”

“No need to jolly me along, padre.” Colonel Northmore’s voice was acid.
“If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him,”
he murmured.

“Saint Luke.”

Phillip opened one eye. “Mmph.” He opened the other eye. “There’s never been a proper apology, you know. Or proper compensation.”

“From the Japanese, you mean.”

“When the emperor came to London, I sent my campaign medals back to Buckingham Palace.”

Tom frowned. He paid little attention to state visits of foreign royalty. This was more Madrun’s bailiwick.

“It was in ’71,” the colonel added. “You wouldn’t remember.”

“I was probably little more than a zygote, if that.”

“A what?”

“It’s nothing, Colonel. Perhaps you should rest.”

“Fed us rice with rat droppings in it, you know,” the colonel continued, oblivious. “And they would beat us for nothing.” He pulled his unencumbered right arm out from under the covers and began to weakly slice the air. “The guards would swank about wearing long heavy sticks like samurai warriors, you know, and if …”

“Yes?”

“He was mad, you know.”

“Who?”

“A sadist. You could see it in his eyes,” the colonel went on, his earlier clarity seeming to descend into a kind of agitated trance. “He
took my socks, you know. Lydia knitted them for me. They were the last thing she … and when I took them back …”

“Yes?” Tom glanced at the IV drip, wondering if it was emitting more drips of morphine.

“… I felt nothing. I didn’t feel the pain, I was that furious. But I remember the sound.
Thwup … thwup … thwup—
”

“Of the stick hitting you?”

“You were there?”

“No, Colonel, I wasn’t.” Tom looked into the rheumy eyes. “Now, you really must rest.”

“Thwup … thwup … thwup …”

Tom reached across the bed, took Phillip’s arm, which was continuing to slice the air, and set it on the bed gently. The voicings fell to mutterings, then, with a sigh, the colonel closed his eyes and seemed to sink back into the bed. In truth Tom’s former parishioner had told him few of the details of life in a Japanese prison camp. It’s not something I can really tell civilised people about, he had said. So Tom had done a little research and had come across candid accounts—more often by Americans—of the brutality meted out: the beatings, the interrogations, the near starvation. He could only imagine that such horror haunted a man all his life, punctuated his reveries, intruded on his dreams, triggered by who-knows-what—a scent, a sound, a sight. What had triggered the colonel to relive—with drug-induced candour—a particular episode of brutality—over a sock, of all things—might be answered only in the sparking synapses of the brain.

Tom resettled in his chair, bowed his head, and silently said a prayer for Colonel Northmore’s recovery. Then, raising his head, he glanced again at the resting figure. The colonel’s mouth was hanging slightly ajar, emitting a faint wheeze with each shallow breath. He does look frail, Tom thought. Julia had pointed the colonel out in the street the very first day when he and Miranda visited Thornford the year before, and he had taken note of the robust figure in
the brown herringbone jacket and the tattersall shirt, the Jack Russell’s lead in one hand and a silver-topped malacca cane in the other. A year later, greeting the colonel as his church council treasurer, he had thought Phillip less vigorous, a little distracted, apt to go off on a tangent. Rising, he gave a passing thought to who among the villagers might be an adequate substitute for Phillip on the PCC—no one came to mind—then he reproved himself for contradicting in thought what he had sought in prayer—the colonel’s full recovery.

As he turned to leave, the colonel’s eyes once again flashed open. He stared at Tom accusingly. “What have you done,” he barked with exceptional clarity, “
with my walking stick
!”

T
here wasn’t much he could tell the detectives. Madrun had taken the call at the vicarage while he had been up at hospital and arranged for DI Derek Bliss and DS Colin Blessing from Totnes CID to talk with him at four-thirty, which he was more than willing to do, though—the churlish thought flitted through his brain—it compromised, as events so often did, the precious time he had carved out to make a start on his sermon. The regrettably named duo—Bliss shifted continually in his chair as though plagued by a scorching case of hemorrhoids; Blessing was cursed with an almost transfixing homeliness—plunked themselves down heavily (for they were both heavy men) on the leather armchairs opposite the crowded desk in his study and accepted the tea that Madrun provided.

The sorts of questions the detectives asked weren’t entirely unfamiliar. Tom had been down this road before. In Bristol, it was he who had found his wife’s body, and the happenstance of being first had brought with it a peculiar reversal, at least to a priest: The first were not last in police hermeneutics; the first were first. As Bristol
CID’s automatic prime suspect in the death of Dr. Lisbeth Rose, Tom had been subject to the cold scrutiny of two detectives—both women, as it happened—who dissected his marriage to Lisbeth, their relationships, their backgrounds, their finances, with an almost forensic zeal.

Bliss and Blessing, by contrast, were almost matey. Blessing, clearly the older of the men, though junior in rank, took the lead, asking the questions and scribbling in a notebook, while Bliss twitched and occasionally barked a question. Chorea? Tourette’s? Tom had wondered, realising belatedly that he was being drawn in sympathetically by their deficits, which may have been the strategy of this strange partnership: Sorry for them, one might easily blab all, simply to bring a little cheer to their blighted lives. He wanted nothing more than a speedy solution to the mystery of Sybella’s death. But burned once and not entirely sympathetic to a breed that had yet to find his wife’s killer or killers, his default was to hone to the line between verity and hearsay. Yes—again, they noted, having looked a little into his background—he had been the first to find the body, but—lucky old you, grinned Blessing—you weren’t alone this time. Indeed not, Tom had observed, grimly, and relayed his version of the events of the May Fayre afternoon.

And then followed what Tom thought of as the inkling question—about his own movements late Sunday.

“We’re obliged to ask,” Blessing said, setting his cup on the edge of Tom’s desk.

Tom studied the expression on his interlocutor’s face, the matter-of-factness projected by the slightly twisted mouth and the steady gaze. He felt his hand slip across the smooth wood to grip the pencil he used for jotting notes. “There’s no question then that this is—”

“We’re treating this as a homicide, sir.”

Tom’s eyes travelled past Blessing, unseeingly, to the mahogany bookcase with its jumble of coloured spines and silver-framed pictures opposite. His thoughts were assaulted by a corrosive and unexpected
spurt of rage: He was suffering, as he suffered in the days and weeks after Lisbeth’s death, anger’s powerful allure. He was angry now, blindingly angry, not only that the life of a young woman of his parish had been stolen, that her father had been left bereft, but—and he recognised his self-servingness—that the sweetness of this sweet village, this haven he had sought for his Miranda, had been horribly tainted. He shut his eyes. He would not be corrupted by anger. In Bristol, he had battled anger with prayer. Needs must again, and it was only an abrupt snapping noise, like a footfall in autumn leaves, that returned him to the presence of others in the room.

“Vicar?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I—”

“Are you all right?”

Tom straightened in his chair. “Yes.”

“Good.”

Puzzled, Tom followed Blessing’s downward glance and saw the pencil broken in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I think I’ve been willing myself to believe that no such great evil had been visited on this village. It’s the shock.”

“Perfectly understandable, sir.” Blessing said it perfunctorily. “Now, as to your whereabouts …?”

Tom took a cleansing breath and replied that Sunday he had been nestled in the bosom of his family; otherwise he had not been inside the village hall since Wednesday last when he had addressed a meeting of the Mothers’ Union.

“Do you know of any reason why anyone would wish to take Ms. Parry’s life?” Bliss brushed biscuit crumbs from his tie.

“ ‘Wish’?” Tom repeated. “You’re referring to intent? To be precise, to murder?”

“Manslaughter is a possibility, but we’re considering all possibilities.”

“No, none at all,” Tom replied numbly. Eric’s story of Sebastian’s
pique over Sybella’s sketching him in the pub flitted across his mind, but it was hearsay and it was trivial.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea why her body was placed in the drum?”

“None, I’m sorry to say.”

“Seems a daft thing to do,” Blessing speculated, needlessly wetting the tip of his pen with his tongue.

“Likely planned to remove it at a later hour,” Bliss added conversationally, studying the contents of his teacup. “Perhaps he was about to be caught in the act.”

Still numbed, Tom interjected slowly, “Are you supposing that someone from
Thornford
planned to kill Sybella?”

“Early days, Mr. Christmas, but it’s a possibility, isn’t it?” Blessing responded. “The drum suggests temporary lodgings. Very temporary. If it were some stranger happened across her, you’d think he’d just leave her body on the floor.”