Twelve Drummers Drumming (19 page)

“Yes, I expect so.” There was a hesitation in her tone. “Normally. If the alarm is on.”

“Who has keys?”

“Well … I do. Liam, of course. Sybella—”

“Sybella?”

“She minds … minded the gallery from time to time, as I said, and sometimes she sketched here when it wasn’t busy. She’s really very good—” Mitsuko’s expression crumpled. “Well, she was … I shouldn’t bang on about my missing computer, should I? when this awful awful thing has happened to Sybella … but all my photographs, videos, graphic experiments, all my documents and accounts—years of work—all of it gone … it’s so unfair.”

Sybella’s death? Or your missing equipment?
Tom thought, but said nothing. His expression must have registered disapproval, for Mitsuko sagged a little on her stool. “I’m sorry. I’m being selfish.”

“Understandable. You’ve had at least a couple of shocks this morning.”

Mitsuko bit her lip. “We were putting together a portfolio so she could apply to art school for fall. Look.” She pulled a few sheets of drawing paper off the worktable. “Her figurative work is superb. She’s extraordinarily gifted. Was gifted, rather.”

Tom glanced at the drawings. “I saw some like these at her father’s yesterday.”

“Here’s one of you.”

Tom grimaced. In the picture, he was on Kinsey’s touring bicycle. His cassock, which he rarely wore outside church, flapped behind him like a raven’s wings. The rendering was accurate, but the posture cartoon.

“I think I prefer the one of me on your quilt.”

“Oh, you’ve seen it, have you?” Mitsuko clucked with annoyance. “It seems like half the village wandered through on Sunday when Sebastian and I were putting them up, and I did lock the door to the large hall afterwards. There’s going to be
no
surprises at the opening tomorrow.” She paused. “
If
there’s an opening tomorrow. Perhaps I should put it off. It seems so frivolous in light of … what’s happened.”

Tom’s inclination, born of his own tragedies, was to see village rhythms restored as swiftly as possible. “What would Sybella have wanted?”

“To defy convention,” Mitsuko replied promptly. For the first time, she smiled. “But in a sort of conventional way, as people do at that age.”

“You might ask her father what he thinks.”

“Of course. I must call him anyway. He must be devastated.”

“He is.”

“You know,” Mitsuko picked up a sketchbook from the table. “I don’t think most people knew Sybella very well.”

Tom glanced at her sharply with a mind to probe the remark, but Mitsuko drew his attention to the new page. “Look at the expression she’s captured in this one. Look at the mouth—sort of defiance and vulnerability all at once—but subtly done. A very well executed self-portrait, I think, for someone so new to the game.”

“For a second there, I thought this was of you. I mean, the hair, the—”

“Tom, you want your eyes examined. I may have been born in the U.K. but there’s nothing British about my ancestry.” She closed the sketchbook. “I’m feeling a bit shattered. Would you care for a coffee upstairs? Or had you had enough at the Waterside?”

“I never quite finished mine.”

“That would be my doing. My apologies for dragging you away.”

“I think I interrupted you when you were telling me who had keys to this place,” Tom said, climbing the stairs behind Mitsuko. He couldn’t help noticing her slight but shapely figure, encased as it was in tight black trousers and short-sleeve top.

“No one, I don’t think,” she replied, stopping to fit her key into the lock to the upstairs flat door. “Well,” she continued, grunting a little as she pushed the door open, “Sebastian has a set … well,
had
a set.”

“Had?”

Mitsuko held the door open while Tom passed through. “Liam and I went to Tunisia for two weeks after Christmas. Sebastian volunteered to water the fig tree and a few plants in the bedrooms and keep an eye on the place while we were away.”

“Not Sybella?”

“No, she was away, too, around the same time—when the school term ended for Declan. Colm and Celia took them to … Cleveland, I think it was.”

“Odd, I didn’t think Colm or Celia had family in the north.”

“No, the Cleveland in America. The one with the rock-and-roll museum.”

Mitsuko moved down a short hall and turned in to a narrow kitchen that ran against the back of the building. Having never been in the Drewes’, Tom was interested to see how the couple lived. His eyes took in a space that was as spare as the studio downstairs was cluttered.

“So Sebastian
had
a set of keys,” he remarked, figuring the Drewes likely took most of their meals at their restaurant. He couldn’t see a crumb or a used spoon.

“Yes, Liam took them back. I didn’t mind Sebastian having them. You know, if there’s any emergency or something. He’s very capable.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed, mildly, sure he detected little daubs of strawberry burst along Mitsuko’s cheeks. “He
is
very capable. But … it seems your husband has another view.”

“My husband,” Mitsuko responded fiercely, her face disappearing behind a stripped pine cupboard door, “has the wrong end of the stick about many things.”

Tom heard a scraping of glass and tins, then Mitsuko’s face, strawberry daubs in retreat, reemerged. “I hope you don’t mind instant.” She held up a jar of Nescafé. “I’m feeling a headache coming on and the cafetière will take too long.”

“Then perhaps I should leave you be.”

“No, please don’t. I …” Mitsuko faltered. “Go into the sitting room, Tom. I’ll be in soon as I get the kettle boiling.”

Tom’s first impression on entering the Drewes’ front room was of one of those showrooms of sleek contemporary furniture. A console table, a coffee table, the shelving—all black—and the couch—an extra-long model, sheathed in black leather—suggested craftsmanship of a particular variety or imagination, since the eye was immediately shocked by a single red pillow among the four black that backed the elongated curve of the banquette. With the exception of the green canopy of a potted fig tree, it was the only spot of colour in the room. The walls were whitewashed, punctuated with framed charcoal portraits, the blinds rolled at the windows overlooking northwesterly over The Square were white canvas, and white goatskin rugs covered the stripped pine floor. The large flat-panel TV and the Bose stereo, Tom suspected, were a concession to Liam, but they were most definitely white. Carefully chosen by Mitsuko, no doubt, not to violate her crisp aesthetic. Only one thing blighted the pristine setting: Next to the television remote control on the coffee table was a midden of lager cans, most of them twisted and crushed, along with several crumpled crisp packets. There was a discernible beery fug to the room. Since he doubted Fred Pike imbibed so openly on the job—installing the Drewes’ new toilet, in this case—only one person could have left this clutter. He lifted one of
the cans and shook it, to see if there was a residual slosh. There was. His mind was sent back to his conversation earlier with Tilly Springett in the Waterside.

“The reason,” she had whispered once Mitsuko had gone into the restaurant’s kitchen and the ladies’ conversation had been reignited, “that I’m at sixes and sevens is that I’m sure I saw Liam going up our road towards the village hall Sunday night. Which really,” she hastened to add, as though embarrassed by the triviality of the observation, “shouldn’t be something to remark on, only Liam’s just not someone I ever expect to see near my cottage at that time of night. You know how busy he is. I’m told he only seems to beat a path between this café and his flat, and I’m not on the way to either—I’m the last cottage in Pennycross Road before the village hall—and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought,” she continued breathlessly, “but for Sybella’s unfortunate … you know …” She looked at Tom pleadingly.

Tom’s brows knitted. “About what time?”

“Well, let’s see.” Her hands fluttered over her cup. “I’d been watching a film on ITV, but couldn’t quite get through it—the plot confused me, so I switched it off, oh, a little after nine-thirty, I think, and went to make a cup of cocoa, and then …”

“Yes?”

“Oh, dear, I wish I’d looked at a clock. Closer to ten, by the time I got to bed, I would think. You see, I was drawing curtains in the bedroom and happened to look out … and saw him … Liam, that is. Oh, how odd, I thought, but didn’t think much more about it at the time.”

“You’re certain it was Liam.”

“Well, it was the back of him, but he does have a strong build, doesn’t he? And I’m quite sure I saw the tattoos.”

“It’s rather dark, though, by ten.”

“Yes, that’s true, but the lamp from the bedroom cast a little light on the road … before I closed the curtains, of course.”

“Did he see you?”

Tilly gave him an apprehensive glance. “I don’t know. This is why I feel like a character in an Agatha Christie. I don’t think he saw me. He had gone past by the time I got to the window. I saw the back of him, as I said. But he might have noticed the light come on when I came into the bedroom and
think
that I—”

“Mrs. Springett, you mustn’t get yourself into knots. It’s most likely nothing, but—”

“—And,” she interjected, leaning towards him, “
and
he was carrying something.”

“I thought you saw the back of him.”

“It was the way his arm—his left arm—was crooked. I’m sure he was holding something to his chest.”

A weapon
. The thought intruded, unbidden. Tom sought to dismiss it then, as he did now in the Drewes’ sitting room, but he couldn’t help the threadings of his imagination, tying a furious row Sunday evening at the Waterside to a peculiar sighting along Pennycross Road to a liquid attempt at anesthetising horror, dread, and guilt.

Or maybe, he thought, glancing over at the Drewes’ huge telly, Liam had merely settled to watch
Match of the Day 2
after a brisk trot through the village and, as the Americans were wont to say, “kick back” with the wife out of the picture. He preferred this view. But to Mrs. Springett, he could no more
not
exercise the moral authority that went with his vocation than he could
not
preside at the prize-giving at school at the end of term.

“You really must,” he’d said to Tilly, regretfully, “take your concerns to the police. They’ll sort things out.”

“Yes, I thought you might say that, Vicar,” she responded, but before he could reassure her that her confidences would be kept—by both him and the police—Mitsuko had whisked him away.

Replacing the lager can with its fellows, Tom moved towards the room’s only cosy feature, a Georgian fireplace surround, painted white to blend with the walls. On the mantel, under a large mirror, a collection of black-and-white photographs in matching silver
frames drew his attention. Family—Mitsuko’s, not Liam’s, he presumed—from the Japanese cast to the faces. He reached for the last photograph, but movement reflected in the mirror alerted him to Mitsuko’s presence in the room. She was carrying a black lacquered tray with two white mugs of coffee, and matching milk jug and sugar bowl.

“Is this your brother?” he asked, lifting the relevant picture from the mantel and turning. “I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

“He’s an ornithologist in America,” she replied, placing the tray on the coffee table. Tom noted her lips form an irritated moue as she took in the pile of ale cans. “You might have seen his picture on the back of a book or two.”

“That must explain it. Dosh—my mother—is an enthusiastic twitcher. She has a couple of his books, I think.
Birds of Eastern North America
and such.”

“Her interests range afar.”

“Her partner comes from Virginia. They travel there from time to time. I’ve been, too.”

“Oh,” Mitsuko responded vaguely. She transferred the coffee things to the table and stacked the cans onto the tray.

“What’s your brother’s name?” he asked over the metallic clatter.

“Hari Oku.”

“Of course. Oku’s your maiden name, then.”

“Tom, I’m just going to remove these to the kitchen.”

Oku
, Tom pondered as Mitsuko bustled the offending detritus from the room.
Oku
. The name seemed to ring in his memory.
Oku
.
Oku-ku-k’joob. I am the walrus!
A childhood memory of Kate crooning Beatles songs to him slipped in and out of his consciousness. No, that wasn’t it. What was it? Oh, yes, it was intermixed in the colonel’s ravings at the hospital the afternoon before. Perhaps he had been hallucinating about Mitsuko, for what was logic to the hallucinating mind?