Twelve Drummers Drumming (16 page)

“Mr. Christmas!”

“I was merely invoking the deity, Miss Skynner; I am a priest,” Tom gasped, hopping on one foot.

“Mind how you pick that up,” Karla cautioned, making no move to do so herself. “A shard may slip out onto the floor.”

As he indulged himself by caressing his shin, Tom surveyed the litter of papers, the old parish registry records and magazines, the towering piles of old hymnals, the limp drapery, the jumble of cleaning supplies, the boxes of candles. He muttered: “This vestry really is a tip.”

“I don’t disagree, but I don’t think we should be throwing things out, do you? We might have need of them.”

How typically Anglican, Tom decided, bending to lift the artwork
off the floor. The dust on the frame edge adhered to his fingers. “Mr. Kinsey was wont to throw things out,” Karla continued. “But I was able to prevail upon his better sensibilities to at least store them in here for the time being.”

“Such as this picture, I presume.” Tom gingerly slid it under the vestry table. Mercifully, the glass remained secure, though it would have to be replaced if the picture was to be returned to the sanctuary. It was a reproduction print of Saint Nicholas—presumably—ministering in some fashion to three children squashed into a wooden bathing tub, a garish and syrupy Victorian portrait that he was just as happy to let remain tucked in the vestry.

“A number of pictures and other things were taken down from the Lady chapel when the church was repainted a year ago … well, a little more than that—before my father died.” Karla slapped closed the records book she was looking in. “Mr. Kinsey preferred a simpler aesthetic, and I can’t say I disagreed, really—the place was a bit of a hodgepodge. Phillip and Roger wanted everything put back up, of course. They’re both rather sentimental in that regard.”

“You could have put them back up, I suppose, once Peter had—”

“Having a missing vicar rather concentrates the mind elsewhere, Mr. Christmas.” Karla turned to him, her mouth set thin and bloodless. Her hair was pulled so tightly into a grey bun that her face was reined to the smoothness of tautly drawn cotton. Tom wondered, not for the first time, whether she ever let her hair down. Perhaps it fell—literally and metaphorically—on her annual January holiday with Madrun in Tenerife.

“Quite,” was all he could think to say. He had been made aware of the commotion that ensued. A priest leaving is one thing; a priest vanishing is very much another. He looked again at the picture. “Anyway, I expect everyone’s got used to the way things are now. No one has mentioned to me the notion of restoring this”—he wanted to say “treacly thing,” but didn’t—“picture to the church.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t mind if this one went up,” Karla declared, perversely.
“It’s been in the church for over a hundred years, I believe. I was less fond of the other two.”

“What other two?” Tom asked, glancing around the melancholy little room. Perhaps some new lighting, he thought, raising his eyes to the low-raftered ceiling with its single fluorescent light.

“They were rather … 
Romish
.” Karla reset her glasses to peer at him. “One, I believe, depicted the Immaculate Conception, which I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Vicar, is not quite the thing in the Church of England.”

Tom sighed inwardly.
How these things mattered to some people
. Instead he said: “But Mr. James-Douglas was a bit High Church, was he not?”

“A bit, I suppose you could say.” Karla’s lips set a disapproving line. “But he was really just being kind to old Mr. Northmore.”

“The colonel?”

“No, no, Vicar.
Old
Mr. Northmore. The colonel’s father. I’m sure someone’s told you about old Mr. Northmore’s reduced circumstances in the years after the war. Mr. James-Douglas bought the paintings from old Mr. Northmore, I think, just to help him along financially. Mr. James-Douglas was a very kind man,” she added and flicked him a glance to suggest that perhaps he wasn’t, or at least lacked the potential to be. “Anyway, I remember the two paintings going up in the Lady chapel when I was, oh, not quite a teenager. There was a little ceremony, I seem to recall.” She paused and tucked an errant hair into her bun. “But as you say, Vicar, people get used to things. After a time, no one gave them a second glance.”

“Where are they now?” Tom buttoned his cassock.

“I expect they’re here somewhere. They weren’t anywhere near as big as the Saint Nicolas portrait.”

Tom watched her glance around as he reached for his surplice, then noted a look of enlightenment cross her face.

“I’m wrong,” she said, and Tom thrilled to the words: So nice to hear them from the lips of a churchwarden, particularly this one. “Mr. Kinsey sent them out for cleaning … or restoration. Or both.”

Mildly surprised, Tom said: “Then he must have been reconsidering them for the Lady chapel.”

“Possibly.”

“The restorers are certainly taking their time.”

“Possibly,” she said again. “But then I know very little about art, Mr. Christmas.”

“Nor I.”

“But I do know what I like. What a good thing you bumped into that Saint Nicholas. Being as its back has been to us all these months, I’d quite forgotten about it, but now that I see it …” Karla sidled past him towards the door that connected to the sanctuary. “… I think we ought to put it up, don’t you? We’ll need to send it off to those restorers to fix the glass.”

“And would you know who they would be?” Tom gave a passing thought to leaving the outside door to the vestry unlocked. Perhaps art thieves with poor taste might be glad of an opportunity.…

“I don’t. There must be a record somewhere.”

Tom looked at the vestry’s paper middens and thought about the middens in the vicarage office. Somewhere indeed.

T
he south porch of St. Nicholas Church opened to a pea shingle path that descended through a terraced lawn to vanish into a shadowy border of trees that stood sentry along the millpond. To the east and to the west, gravestones—those nearest the church lichened, worn, and as irregularly set as wobbly teeth; those in the farther corners of the churchyard straight-edged, upright, and as evenly set as dentures—were a spectral counterpoint to the surround of sunlit blue and vivacious green. Adjusting his eyes to the brilliance of the midmorning, waiting by the porch’s door for his tiny flock to pass and make their way along the downward path, Tom espied Fred Pike, a spade over his shoulder, standing above—just barely, it seemed, given his height—the new gravestones at the far southwest near the churchyard’s high stone wall.

It was Sebastian who kept the grass between the gravestones closely mown and maintained the grounds, but by long-standing tradition, grave-digging duties were given over to Fred, rather than the funeral director’s contractor, because he seemed to relish the
task. Although Tom wondered why a man of his age—or any age—would willingly shift great clumps of Devon’s red soil on a warm day all by himself. Fred took great pride in his tidy excavations, though Tom considered the pride a bit misplaced. He had taken only one funeral in Thornford to date—it had been Ned Skynner’s, more than a year earlier—and he’d thought when he’d glanced down into the cavity just before the coffin was lowered that he’d seen better spadework. He wasn’t badly placed to adjudicate these things—who, other than priests, sextons, and funeral directors’ contractors, spends much time gazing into open graves?—but he allowed that perhaps country standards were less exacting.

He had a notion to ask after Fred’s son. The previous evening, he had pulled a couple of umbrellas from the hall stand and accompanied Charlie down Poynton Shute and Orchard Hill to his parents’ small wisteria-wreathed cottage. His unexpected presence at their door, he was assured to know, was the spur that sent the Pikes to the police.

“Vicar?”

The ladies—and they were all ladies—stood like birds in a flock at the top of the first terrace, regarding him inquisitively.

“Coming,” he shouted, turning back momentarily to push shut the south porch door, thinking as he did so of the door to the village hall, and one of the last questions he had for Charlie as they tramped down Orchard Hill the evening before: After he had escorted Sybella into the hall, had he left the front door latched or unlatched? Did he turn the key partially—which opened the door but left it locked once it closed behind—or did he turn it fully—which left the door unlocked? Charlie couldn’t remember, simply couldn’t remember. And Tom could only imagine that in the excitement and fear he wouldn’t remember. Too bad. But if the boy left it unlatched, anyone could have wandered in. If latched, then whoever Charlie had heard come in had had a key.

And who, as Eric had mentioned, had keys to the village hall?
Far too many people, most of them unaccounted for, just as too many people, many of them unaccounted for, likely had keys to the church—a circumstance that warranted scrutiny.

He stepped down the path, his feet crunching the gravel. The only other sounds came from bees, busy among the bluebells poking through the lawn between the gravestones, and the breeze brushing through the canopy of sycamore and alder trees. Fred, he noted, had placed his spade in the shadow of a great copper beech and had begun measuring along an untrammeled patch of grass. Several of the ladies followed his glance and by the time he reached them, they were all turned solemnly towards the southwest corner as though it were Mecca.

“Poor child,” someone murmured.

“So wretched for Colm.”

“I can hardly believe something like this has happened in Thornford.”

There was a hubbub of agreement, then a weighted pause, pierced by the call of gulls over the millpond.

“Did you hear?” Someone broke their silence. “Colm’s having this black choir come for the funeral.”

“Oooh, never! Really? How interesting! What do you think, Vicar?”

“Anything that gives him peace of mind,” Tom replied evenly, sensing a rising tide of tittle-tattle as they resumed walking, passing down through the canopy of trees to the millpond path.

“And Oona!”

“Won’t that be something!”

“She’s ever so thin, you know. It’s the drugs.”

“Yakking up in the toilet, more like. They don’t eat, of course.”

“She must be well past her sell-by date as a model, surely.”

“Who else do you think is coming? Do you think Cliff Richard will be here?”

“Oh, Enid, don’t be silly.”

“You’re showing your age, Enid. Sir Cliff was big in the sixties. Colm was a star in the eighties.”

“For about
two
minutes.”

“Who’s Cliff Richard?” asked Violet Tucker, at twenty-three by far the youngest of the party.

“Good people,” Tom interrupted in his best “good people” voice. He had been casting his eyes over the millpond waters sparkling in the sunshine, half his mind on the day he and some fellow ordinands had hired a punt at the Mill Pond in Cambridge. Some smartarse standing on the Clare College Bridge had reached down and grabbed the top of his pole, tipping him into the water. Shallow as the Cam was, not being able to swim was Tom’s secret shame. As the punt drifted unguided under the bridge, he had panicked. Sitting on the bordering lawn reading had been medical student Lisbeth Rose. Her senior swimming certificate and her St. John’s Ambulance first-aid course had proved most useful.

“Good people,” he said again. “Remember, a young woman has died.”

“We’re not gossiping, Vicar,” Florence Daintrey boomed in the voice that commanded the WI. Added her more demure sister-in-law, Venice: “We’re simply very … concerned.”

Tom was hard-pressed to see the distinction.

“
Very
concerned,” Venice repeated for emphasis. “We’ve been double-bolting our door the last two nights.”

“Me, too,” Marg Farrant piped up.

“Do you think it’s someone from the village?” Enid glanced tentatively at Tom. She was overdressed for the warmth of the day in a purple anorak and mincing along the path, as though each step required consideration.

“There was blue and white tape around the hall yesterday,” Marg interjected before Tom could reply. “And these people wearing transparent overalls and boots going in and out and such.”

“That would be scene-of-crime officers, dear.”

“I
do
watch television, Flo,” Marg responded witheringly, patting the braid knotted into a crown on the top of her head.

“But do you think …?” Enid began again.

“That it was someone from the village?” Florence finished her thought. “Oh, surely not. Isn’t there a Gypsy caravan over at—?”

“I thought it had to do with drugs?”

“Gypsies
sell
drugs, Ven.”

“This is highly speculative, ladies.” Tom managed to get a warning word in.

“But if it isn’t someone from—”

“Well, who, Enid?” Flo interrupted with her carrying voice. “Sybella wasn’t the most charming child in the village, but who would want to hurt her so?”

In the pause Tom thought he could see little thought clouds hovering in wooly bunches over his flock’s heads. They were nearing the turn where the millpond path curved to join the walkway along the quay. Early season visitors sat on wooden benches, some with children (this being half-term) nearby feeding the geese.