Twelve Drummers Drumming (28 page)

T
om pulled cassock and surplice from the vestry closet and readied himself for the next few hours. He was alone—or thought he was—and grateful for the silence, his mind skipping over the order of service as he eased himself into a prayerful attitude. Then he heard the scrape of a shoe along the stone floor of the short passage around the organ frame into the vestry. Expecting Dickie Horton, his verger at Pennycross St. Paul, he turned, to see a face of some little familiarity. The muscles along the mouth and cheeks were pressed into an attitude of supplication but the eyes were needle sharp. At first Tom thought it was the man from Thompson’s, whom he had met at Ned Skynner’s funeral. Then he realised the encounter had been much more recent.

“May I help you?”

“Possibly.”

Tom frowned at the vague reply. “Didn’t I see you at the village hall last night?”

“Yeah, I did drop in. Interesting work.”

“I seem to recall you being shown the door.”

“Occasionally I meet people who don’t appreciate the free exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of a democratic society.”

“Which paper are you with?”

“The Sun.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr.…?”

“Macgreevy. Andrew Macgreevy.”

“… The diocesan press office is handling all enquiries.”

“So they are.” The reporter’s eyes roved the interior of the vestry.

“And I don’t think you’ll find anything interesting here,” Tom insisted, wondering that the promised constabulary presence seemed a little lacking.

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“It’s simply a vestry—a small annex with much clutter.”

“Yeah, it is a bit of tip,” Macgreevy agreed cheerfully. “But, I ask myself, who are you likely to find in a vestry?”

“A priest, for one,” Tom responded with rising asperity, trying to remember that newspapermen had souls, too.

“True. But I thought I might find the verger here.”

“You might. But he’s coming down from Pennycross and hasn’t arrived.”

“From Pennycross? I was sure your verger lived in this village. I thought I saw him come out of a cottage clearly marked ‘Verger’s Cottage.’ ”

“I have two churches, Mr. Macgreevy.”

“Then you have two vergers.”

“I can see your fine education has not been wasted on you.”

Macgreevy scowled. “I was hoping to talk with the man who calls himself Sebastian John.”

“Regrettably, Sebastian has been called away and won’t be with us this morning. Perhaps I can take a message to him …?”

Macgreevy’s scowl began to curl into a smile.

“Mr. Macgreevy …?”

The reporter raised a cautionary finger. Seconds later, Tom heard the sound of a key scraping the lock of the vestry’s outside door. And
then Sebastian was in the room, dressed in jeans, carrying a small rucksack. His hair was loosened from its band.

“Tom, I’ve had a call from Dickie’s sister. He’s … well, under the weather, I suppose you could say, and can’t be here this morning. I’m very sorry that—”

Sebastian hesitated, as if sensing Tom wasn’t wholly concentrated on him. He followed Tom’s eyes.

“Hello, Sebastian.” Macgreevy’s smile grew wider.

“I didn’t realise you had a visitor, Tom.” A wariness had stolen into Sebastian’s eyes.

Intruder, more like
, but he let the thought pass as he introduced the reporter to Sebastian.

“I’m not commenting on this tragedy,” Sebastian replied evenly, turning to leave.

“I’m not asking you to,” Macgreevy said.

“Tom, I’m sorry about this complication with Dickie. I really must go—”

“Perhaps, Sebastian,” Macgreevy interrupted, gripping the edge of the vestry door, “you might like to know that Lord Kinross has had a stroke.”

Baffled, Tom watched as Sebastian stared hard at the reporter. Then the verger yanked the door from his hand and stumbled backwards over the step to the gravel path. He heard a pained exclamation in a female timbre, followed by a hasty apology in Sebastian’s voice.

“Whatever’s got into Sebastian?” Julia stepped into the vestry. “I thought Dickie was substituting … Oh, hello,” she added, noting the stranger in the room.

Tom had been studying the look of satisfaction that lit Macgreevy’s thin features during his brief exchange with Sebastian and felt a chill of foreboding. He, too, had experienced the sensation of a life—his own—made unrecognisable by journalists with inscrutable scripts. The Bristol
Evening Post
had callously exhumed an old quote of his supporting a safe-injection room for Bristol drug-users,
juxtaposed it with police speculation that a thwarted drugs transaction lay behind Lisbeth’s homicide, and implied that he shared in the blame for his wife’s death. “Vicar Said ‘Yes’ to Drugs” had been the headline. He addressed Macgreevy:

“Do you think you could be persuaded to leave sleeping dogs—or at least sleepy villages—lie?”

“Not if there’s a good story, mate.”

“I see. But will your ‘good story’ serve some common good?”

“I leave philosophical speculation to my betters.” Macgreevy rubbed his knuckles along the edge of the door. “Do you vet your vergers in this sleepy village?”

Tom flicked a glance at Julia and was rewarded with a mystified frown. Beyond the vestry, he could hear subdued voices echoing in the sanctuary. The choir was arriving. Reaching for his cassock, he told Macgreevy:

“I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. We have a funeral to prepare for.”

The journalist’s response was to flash him a tight smile and retreat back into the nave. Tom noted the choir’s chattering halt momentarily, and then resume.

“Do you know of a Lord Kinross?” he asked Julia.

She shook her head. “Scottish peer?”

“He seems to know something about Sebastian.”

“Lord Kinross?”

“No, that reporter. Macgreevy. He writes for
The Sun
. If you’d been at Mitsuko’s opening at the village hall yesterday you would have seen Karla give him the heave-ho.”

Julia groaned. “Alastair decided he’d rather golf. I didn’t feel like going alone.”

“Oh, well. The quilts are up for the next ten days or so.” He frowned. “What is it, Julia? Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing. Really. It’s … the thought of some Grub Street hack nosing into village affairs. Bad enough the police, though I know they have to do their job.”

“Have they talked to you, the police? I meant to ask you earlier.”

“Someone took a statement from me on Tuesday. A detective constable, a young woman. There wasn’t much I could say, other than what I told you about finding the village hall unlocked Monday morning. I didn’t know Sybella well enough to be of much use.”

“I’m afraid we’re all rather in for being poked and prodded, aren’t we? By police or press. What with Sybella’s cruel death and Fred finding Peter’s body … although,” Tom added, fastening his cassock, “I don’t understand Mr. Macgreevy’s particular interest in Sebastian, do you?”

He had asked it rhetorically, but when he looked up he was disconcerted to see Julia’s face grown pale above the collar of her black suit.

“Julia? Do you know something about this?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know why a reporter would have some particular interest in Sebastian. He’s a bit of a mystery to us in the village, but …”

“But?”

Julia’s face crumpled. Her beautiful eyes, ineffably sad, returned to his. “Oh, Tom! Surely the old rumour has reached your ears by now.”

“What old rumour?” he asked, bewildered.

The question seemed to hang suspended in the air.

“The rumour,” Julia replied at last, dropping her voice, “that Sebastian and I were having an affair.”

Tom stared at her, shocked as much by a sudden wrenching of his heart as by the notion of his sister-in-law’s faithlessness. Without thinking he mouthed the words: “And were …?”

“No, Tom,” Julia responded with some vehemence, pushing the door to the sanctuary closed. “Sebastian and I were
not
having an affair.”

“Sorry, I really didn’t mean to suggest …” Tom backtracked, ashamed that his mind found the coupling so believable, flustered by his sudden, unbidden jealousy.

“It’s stopped now—the rumour, that is—but a couple of years ago, people would fall into a hush in the post office when I came in. Or there would be a titter behind my back if Sebastian and I happened to be in the pub at the same time. Finally, Belinda Swan took me aside.”

“But what in heaven’s name put the notion into people’s heads in the first place?”

“Mrs. Prowse, that is what! She saw me come out of the verger’s cottage one afternoon, and gave me what I can only describe as a ‘look.’ ”

“I see,” Tom responded, not quite seeing. Evidently, what might be a commonplace bit of social intercourse in the city could be fraught with import in a village. “And you think any reporter sniffing around Sebastian will dig this up.”

Julia nodded. Tom found himself almost wanting to laugh with relief. Affairs and rumours of affairs were happening up and down the country. Surely they could be of little concern to any but the protagonists and their nearest and dearest. But Julia appeared worryingly on the verge of the sort of tears she had exhibited the day before, under the yew tree, and he wondered, not for the first time, if she was about to have a nervous collapse.

“But, Julia,” he began softly, “I know it’s unpleasant to be the subject of unfounded rumour, but I can’t imagine
The Sun
—or any newspaper—being terribly interested, even if it were true you and Sebastian … Does Alastair know none of this?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Tom, Alastair works, he golfs, he watches sport on TV. He’s not the subtlest of men. He’s not terribly good at detecting ‘atmospheres.’ But he doesn’t like life to be untidy. If he had heard the rumour, I doubt very much he wouldn’t have said something to Sebastian … or to me.”

“Yes, I expect so.” Tom reached absently for his surplice. “I’m assuming, however, that Sebastian wasn’t oblivious to these rumours.”

“No.”

“Then why didn’t he tell the rumourmongers to naff off? I’m surprised at him. I thought he had more integrity.”

“Oh, Tom, you don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what?”

“I’ve said far too much.” Her face now ashen, she turned to the door. “Look, I must get to the choir vestry.”

“Julia!” Tom grabbed her arm. Touching the fabric, a part of his brain registered that it was the same suit she’d worn at Lisbeth’s funeral. “You’re clearly in some form of distress. The yew tree yesterday and now this. I’m worried about you. I’m your family. I can’t say I’m your priest, but I wish you would tell me what’s troubling you.”

Ten minutes later, Tom positioned himself within the shadow of the lych-gate, clasped his hands in the folds of his surplice, and lifted his eyes, first towards Pennycross Road in the middle distance, down which the cortège would soon make its slow descent into the village, and then to the black-clad figures massed nearest him on the river cobbles of Church Walk. Framed by a burst of ivy tumbling over the short span of stone wall that turned into Poachers Passage, Colm’s face was pale with strain, the skin around the eyes bruised and blue. He was staring sightlessly past the vicarage wall, beyond the tops of the apple trees in the Old Orchard towards the cottages that curled up Thorn Hill, one hand pressed onto the shoulder of his son, whose own face appeared to struggle for some composition suited to the moment, at once frowning, distracted, curious, bored, then—abruptly—pained. Tom noted Celia pluck her husband’s hand from Declan’s shoulder and give them both a tight, reproving smile before giving a sideways glance to a slender figure a cautious three yards distant squeezed into what looked curiously like Victorian bombazine embossed with a pattern of lace and scored with fasteners of no evident utility.

So this was Oona Blanc, Tom thought, trying not to stare. He allowed his eyes to pass over her as he looked down Church Walk to the silent mourners, those closest young and dressed either sharply chic or morbidly Victorian—London friends, presumably, who had arrived too late to find a place in the church—those farther, villagers of mixed age in unremarkable attire. Oona’s face, under a black straw pillbox with a wisp of a veil, was alabaster, the skin taut over high cheekbones, her full lips silky with scarlet lipstick. Yet the face was unreadable. Giant sunglasses lent her the impassive faceted stare of an insect. Only her posture, her body bowed, her hand grasping the arm of an angular young man with a trimmed three-day growth of beard, suggested strong emotion.