Twelve Drummers Drumming (39 page)

Now, ten minutes later, he was again at the verger’s cottage door,
the useless
Sun
refolded untidily under his arm, his anxiety amplified. Yesterday, up Knighton Lane, where the canopy of trees ended abruptly as the path descended sharply to the water below, he had witnessed, for the first time, the intimation of a fissure in Sebastian’s stoic bearing.

“But now that I know who you are and what you’ve done,” Tom had said to him, his eyes fixed on the dog’s lead, which Sebastian was pulling as if straining to snap it, “what shall I do with the knowledge?”

“Might I ask you to respect my privacy?”

“There are two people dead, Sebastian. The village is in an uproar.”

“I’m not responsible.”

“So you say. But you have had a conviction before.”

Sebastian turned sharply. “If you think I’m a murderer, Tom, you were taking a chance coming to the end of this lane with me. There are no witnesses here.”

Tom studied Sebastian’s profile. He recalled sitting in the vicarage garden with him two days before. “It’s something to do with you and a butterfly, I think. Of course,” he went on as Sebastian continued to worry the dog lead, “I’m not the first idiot to mistake a gesture for character. I could be dead wrong about you. But I don’t think you’re a complete fool. There may be no witnesses to Kinsey’s or Sybella’s murders, but a few people noted us walking through The Square and up Orchard Hill.”

“Will you talk to those detectives—Bliss and Blessing?”

“Much will depend on the questions posed—if they pose more questions to me. I didn’t live in the village when Kinsey was murdered, so I can offer no illumination on that score. As for Sybella … I can only tell them what I know to be true, what I’ve experienced. It’s not my job, I don’t think,” he added, bitter memories of the Bristol CID interrogation lingering, “to speculate
to
and
with
the police, but you must understand I don’t want someone to get away with murder. Does that help?”

Sebastian was silent. He glanced at Bumble, who was scrambling back up the path.

“But,” Tom pressed on, “all this is for naught if
The Sun
exposes you. Or if Detectives Bliss and Blessing put two and two together first.”

“Then I will be gone.”

“Is whatever you’ve mixed up in really this fraught?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a chance that reporter may do nothing.” Saying it, Tom didn’t believe it, but he continued, “If you leave Thornford suddenly, police attention will most certainly turn to you.”

“And if I stay, and a story about me appears in the press, the same thing will happen. The only thing I can do, Tom, is stop in the village until something appears in
The Sun
or whatever newspaper, after which I must take my chances.”

And they left it at that bargain. Now, at the brown lacquered door of Sebastian’s cottage, Tom’s mind roiled with fresh and worrying possibilities. Macgreevy had written no story. But maybe the journalist had spoken to someone, unwisely, unwittingly perhaps, and through an awful sequence of events some creature had slipped into the village, in the black of Thornford’s night, down unilluminated lanes, and penetrated Sebastian’s cottage. Tom was conscious he was letting his mind race towards some pitiless horror. But he also knew that this sensation held no novelty. In the seconds before he had stumbled across Lisbeth’s body, a presentiment of tragedy had raced inexorably along his nerves—some animal instinct in play before his mind caught up to grasp its full meaning. His hand darted up over the door. Thornfordians, he knew, lived in cloud-cuckoo-land where—until recently—break-ins and home invasions were the unpleasantnesses only of England’s great conurbations. Julia had said Sebastian kept a key tucked above the frame. But his groping fingers found none. Nor under the mat. He shifted the pot of hostas next to the door. Only a scurrying insect met his gaze. His hand went to the door handle, some notion of forcing the door with his
shoulder playing along his mind. There was little time. The bellringers would be tripping along Church Walk shortly; Julia, too, to ready herself to play the organ in Colm’s absence. His fingertips slipped along the cool metal of the doorknob. Miraculously, it turned. Tom pressed gently against the door, and it opened. It had been unlocked. And that in itself was unnerving.

And now, he was inside. He let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. No lamp was switched on; no fire flickered from the grate. “Sebastian?” he called out. He took a deep breath, as much to still his thrumming heart as to detect the pheromonal trace that had attended Lisbeth’s lifeless body—and Sybella’s, in that coffin-drum. Mercifully, the air was redolent only of dust, worn oak, and paper. And yet, he thought, as he passed through to the kitchen, past the low table, now limned in the feeble light, with its books and magazines of the day before, no morning aroma lingered in the air—no blend of toast and coffee, or of bacon or eggs. A few dishes occupied a rack next to the sink. He touched the dishcloth that lay over the rack, but it was stiff and dry. He retraced his steps back to the sitting room, then hesitated before the stairs leading into the shadows above. “Sebastian?” he called out again. He strained for some aural evidence of human occupation—a drunken snore? most unlikely—but was conscious only of the tapping of his shoes along the uncarpeted stairs as he passed upward.

The stairs led first to the unlit recesses of a book-lined room at the back with a single chair and a standing lamp. Drawn to the bright square of the window, Tom looked past a tiny garden towards the back courtyard of the Church House Inn, where he glimpsed Belinda Swan busy hanging laundry. He exited this private library and moved down the dark passageway, past the bathroom to the last remaining unexplored room. He hesitated by the door. Partially open, it emitted a thin wedge of light onto the floorboards. “Sebastian?” he said in a low voice, then taking another deep breath he pushed the door inward and prayed God for mercy. For a moment,
the light dazzled his eyes. South facing, its window looking towards St. Nicholas’s tower, the room glowed with new June light. And then he looked at the bed, pressed against the eastern wall, and felt a cleansing surge of release. It was empty, made up, like a hotel bed awaiting a guest. No horror lay in wait.

Now puzzled, he surveyed the room more carefully. As on the ground floor, the furniture was simple and anonymous, personal accoutrements nonexistent. There was a bureau, but nothing occupied its surface. Likewise, the bedside table, but for the lamp. On the bed, the blanket was pulled taut over the pillows. Then he glanced at the wardrobe, a plain affair, white melamine. One door had been left swung open on its hinge. He moved to close it and then released a little groan of dismay. The wardrobe was empty, but for a few hangers that rattled along the rail at his unbelieving touch. The bureau drawers, too, he quickly ascertained, were bare. He raced downstairs and saw what he hadn’t noted before by the doorway. Backpack, jacket, hat, boots—all were missing. Sebastian had gone.

Tom felt a sudden spurt of anger. Sebastian had broken their pact and bolted, perhaps planning his escape even as they had walked Knighton Lane. He had no car. How far could he get? A walk to Pennycross? A taxi to Paignton? But the last train was at ten and stopped at Exeter overnight before proceeding to London. It was unlikely he had yet reached the capital, or Heathrow, if that was his destination. Or perhaps his intention was to slip into another small community and concoct a new identity. Tom reached into his trousers pocket for his mobile, then hesitated over the keypad. Perhaps Sebastian’s flight had been motivated by the proximity of some unnamed menace, which had come in the night after all. If he shopped Sebastian to the police as a suspect in Kinsey’s and Sybella’s deaths, was he, Tom, putting an innocent man in some sort of peril? Some instinct—it was not reason—made him snap the phone shut. He turned to leave; then noted, his eyes now sharpened to the dimness, familiar outlines on a table near the door—final testimony to
Sebastian’s flight. There was the ancient key to the north porch door, of which the verger was the keeper; copy keys to the vestry, to the church tower, to the verger’s cottage itself; and a key that he’d seen Sebastian use the day before to enter Farthings. And there was a note.
“Tom,” it
said,
“please take care of Bumble.”
He had signed it simply,
“S.”

He lingered over this for a moment, his heart troubled; then stepped out of Sebastian’s cottage as Julia was rounding past the lych-gate and into Poachers Passage, her organists’ surplice billowing.

“I was delegated to fetch Sebastian,” she remarked to Tom, pushing her arm through her winged sleeve to tidy a loose strand of hair. “I’ve never known him to be … Is something the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Where’s Sebastian?”

“Under the weather,” Tom found himself explaining, closing the door behind him, averting his face. “I’ve got the keys.”

“Oh,” Julia responded. She glanced over his shoulder to the bedroom window above, then back to his face. Her expression was one of uncertainty. “Never mind, then. I expect we can carry on without him.”

It was during Holy Communion, as he intoned the familiar words to those kneeling along the altar rail, that Tom again had the sense of presentiment, of something febrile burrowing at the edge of his consciousness, hinting of some small illumination. He had been delighted to see so many new faces, and for a split second wondered if he’d forgotten it was some special day in the liturgical calendar before realising the chaos and sensation of the last week were the forces more likely driving villagers to the church, as trouble and danger had done in the past. The choir had sung with extra fervour, he thought; Julia seemed to mine a new, rich vein in the old organ; and he sensed his sermon attended to with particular concentration, and
not because the yellow crescent emerging from the bruise under his eye was a point of local interest.

“This is the time,” he had concluded, taking in their alert faces, “to recall Jesus’ words to Simon Peter:
‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword.’
They are words of caution for those who may be tempted to take matters into their own hands. And for all of us, they are words of assurance that ultimately justice will be done.” Gratified to hear several murmured “
amen
s,” he had felt his uneasy spirit slowly lift, then soar—a little—through the Creed and the prayers and the giving of Communion—until the moment at the extreme end of the altar rail, as he was wiping the chalice with the purificator and happened to glance at the back of the last departing communicant as she made her way back down the aisle, stepping from the shadow of a pillar into a hazy shaft of light streaming through the south window. In that instant, his mind bloomed with a sensibility that had been nascent since that moment in the churchyard, before Oona blacked his eye.

Of course
, he thought, and nearly tripped over the step in the chancel as he returned the chalice to the altar. But there was no pleasure in knowing; rather, this epiphany did little more than present a new horror. In the short silence after the Communion, he tossed permutations and combinations in his head, the way he had in his days as The Great Krimboni tossed five golden rings in his hands. Then he had amazed and amused; now the rings lay in a metaphorical heap about his feet. He wished he could end the service this moment and found himself growing impatient through the final hymn and almost rushing through the Dismissal. There was one parishioner he needed to speak with at once.

“Mitsuko,” he called out a few moments later, having reached the church door, espying her and Liam moving down the path towards the lych-gate. “Would you mind staying a moment?”

He felt Tilly Springett grab his absently outstretched hand. Members of the congregation, murmuring decorously, milled about in the shadow of the north porch. “I talked with the police,” Tilly
whispered, leaning towards him. Tom could see little particles of dusting powder around her excited eyes. “They were
most
interested to hear about—”

“Splendid.” Tom raised his voice to cut her off. “We’ll talk later, shall we?”

Surprise replaced excitement in her eyes, then alarm as Liam, with Mitsuko, hove into her view. She released a muffled shriek and Tom’s hand at the same time, and stumbled backwards into Florence Daintrey, who grabbed her arm and led her down the path.

“What’s she on about?” he overheard Liam grouse to his wife as they waited for Tom to process the line of voluble parishioners. After a few moments in receipt of gratifying comments about the service, Tom was able to turn his attention to the pair.

“It’s good to see you in church.” He addressed Liam with a feint at good cheer, though the man seemed to be scowling over some interior rumination.

“She’s the one who bloody grassed me up to the police, isn’t she?” Liam suddenly snapped his head towards the lych-gate, which Tilly was well past. “It had to be her. Hers is the last cottage before you get to the village hall.”

“Someone reported seeing my husband going up Pennycross Road last Sunday night,” Mitsuko told Tom. She placed a calming hand along Liam’s meaty, multicoloured forearm, exposed beneath the short sleeves of a red football jersey.