Twelve Drummers Drumming (41 page)

“And were you being truthful?”

“Not completely.”

“T
he Drewes not with you?” Julia removed one unshod foot from its resting place on the chair opposite.

“No.” Tom set his half pint of Vicar’s Ruin on the table and slipped into the emptied seat. He glanced past his sister-in-law’s shoulder out the pub window and watched an attractive young couple walk by the old red phone box and continue up Church Walk hand in hand. He was conventionally dressed in light summer trousers and a dark blue shirt, but her top was eye-catching—wildly colourful, batiked, vaguely African. Tom felt a pang: he and Lisbeth in an earlier day.

“Fancy seeing Liam, of all people, in church for a Sunday service, football jersey and all,” Julia remarked, wriggling her foot back into her shoe. Tom could feel the force of her curiosity. “You were gone a long time. I nearly gave up and set off for home.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Bad morning? You look more troubled than when I found you outside Sebastian’s.”

“I think I can fairly say I’m very troubled.”

The mention of Sebastian reawakened the quandary of the hour before the service: to go to the police with news of Sebastian’s flight or not to go? Much depended on whether he believed Sebastian responsible for the murder of one, if not two, people in the village. Tom had put his face up to the window of the Old School Room when he’d passed from the church to the pub, but the space had been dark. The door when he tried it was locked. Perhaps like God (but unlike priests), the detectives rested on the seventh day. What, he wondered, would he have done if the lights had been on and the door open?

There was the phone. He might ring DI Bliss and DS Blessing, but simply sitting here in the pub over a half made him realise how resistant he was to the notion. On the other hand, if he delayed, he might rightly be accused of withholding vital information. Yet on still another hand—if, Shiva-like, one were permitted more than two—to shop Sebastian was to expose his identity and, if he were to be believed, expose him to some unspecified danger. Prayer would be the thing, but as Tom gave his mind over to this felt need, he could hear the cautioning voice of the woman who could maintain a medical practice, raise a child, chair committees, sing in a choir, and pull together dinner for six at a moment’s notice—his wife:
“Life is a practical task, Tom. Fine to ask God’s advice, but never wait for the answer.”
Sharing his dilemma with Julia would be another thing. She was like Lisbeth in many ways, but not in a vital one—she was perhaps less wise in judgement.

“Then what are you troubled about, Tom?” Julia affected a smile. “Other than perhaps me? Or everything that’s happened this week … or …” The smile faded. “Please … I don’t think I can bear any more bad news.”

Tom glanced around the pub. Fortunately, the corner that some members of the congregation normally commandeered after church had emptied. Sunday lunches beckoned. Still, he lowered his voice. This he could share with someone. It would be public knowledge before long. “I had a sort of revelation in church.”

“Really? Are you on the brink of dementia?”

“Julia, I’m serious.”

Julia looked faintly aghast.

“I don’t mean I was visited by the Holy Ghost.” Tom hastened to clarify. “I mean, I came to realise something—something devastating. But then so did Mitsuko and Liam, so I can’t say it’s a revelation unique to me.”

He explained. As he did, he watched wonder and horror advance in Julia’s dark eyes. When he had finished, her face crumpled. “Colm! He lost his child because …”

“Because of mistaken identity.” Tom finished the thought, worrying his fingers around the edge of his glass. “Perhaps. It’s only conjecture, but it’s a conjecture shared. Oh, let it not be true. If it is true, it’s beyond heartbreaking.”

“And Liam comes to church acting as bodyguard because he thinks his wife is not safe.”

“They’re going again to the police, Mitsuko and Liam.”

“Then the questioning will start all over again.”

“Yes, I expect so,” Tom responded miserably. He looked past Julia again, through the window, alerted to the earlier couple, now turning down Poynton Shute. He noted the woman’s dark hair pulled into a ponytail with the same colourful material of her shirt. He said without thinking, and then with immediate regret: “Mitsuko is less bothered about her safety than Liam, though.”

Julia plucked the sliver of lemon from her glass. “Really? Why?”

“Oh … no reason. It’s just …”

“I have a feeling you’re not telling me something.”

Tom regarded his sister-in-law.
A talebearer reveals secrets
—the proverb flitted through his mind—
but he who is of a faithful spirit keeps a secret
. But was it a secret? Mitsuko had banished Liam, it was true. “You’d better get back to the Waterside,” she’d urged him. “Kerra Prowse can’t cope all by herself, not on her fourth day of work. I’m perfectly safe with Tom.” When Liam objected in his demanding way—“What do you mean you’re not being completely
truthful?” he’d snapped at his wife. “Who in the village would want you dead?”—she’d snapped back, “It’s
nothing
! I want to have a private conversation with my priest. Go! Begone, husband! For heaven’s sake, Liam, no one is going to do me in in broad daylight.”

Liam clamped his jaw shut and departed, his footfalls crunching furiously on the shingle. A certain gravity had settled along Mitsuko’s fine features as she studied the back of her husband. Abruptly, leaflike, a tremble passed through her slight figure.

“You’re shivering,” Tom had said.

“At a memory,” Mitsuko responded, “but some sun would feel good.”

They took the path from the shadowed north porch around the east window to a bench near the south porch dedicated to Lydia Northmore, which the colonel had had placed many years before to afford a meditative view of the churchyard.

“It happened last Sunday,” Mitsuko began, recoiling a little at the brass plaque before settling onto the curve of the wooden seat, “when I was installing the memory quilts. Colonel Northmore wandered in with Bumble. I expect he was drawn by the activity setting up for the fayre and all, and hadn’t thought he would find me there. Not that he goes out of his way to avoid me, but I rarely get more than a polite, but strained, nod if we pass in the road. Will you sit?” She looked up at him, shading her eyes against the sun with her hand.

“Sorry, yes. I was just—” Tom felt the warmth seep through his surplice and cassock into his back as he sank onto the bench’s sun-bleached wooden slats.

“—looking at Sybella’s grave,” Mitsuko finished for him. She turned her head towards the lowest terrace, where a mound of fresh earth proclaimed the recent burial. She shivered once again, despite the warm air. “It’s so horribly unfair.”

And then for the first time in Tom’s presence, silent tears fell down Mitsuko’s face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I managed to get through the whole week without this happening, but …”

“It’s not your doing, Mitsuko.”

“But I feel somehow as if I caused this …”

They sat in silence a moment. Then Tom prompted her gently: “About the colonel …”

Mitsuko wiped at her eyes. “He’s never come into my gallery—at least when I’ve been there.” She sniffed loudly. “And I don’t recall Sybella ever mentioning him visiting. Of course, my very features offend him at every turn. I understand why, Tom, though I think it unjust. I’m not personally responsible for the horrible things that happened to him in the war.”

“I expect the colonel has moments of Old Testament wrath. Sins of the father and all. Though that’s not to excuse him.”

“Have you guessed, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t the verse something about visiting the sins of the fathers on the children and the grandchildren and so forth?”

“Yes. Exodus. God does not leave the guilty unpunished. He visits
‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.’
Are you suggesting the colonel decided to assume God’s agency?”

Mitsuko met his startled expression with utter seriousness. “I don’t know.” She wiped at her eyes again. “What I do know is this: He’s never come into my gallery, so he’s never seen my work. If he had, he would have noticed how I sign my paintings, or he might have picked up a card or brochure. Everyone in the village refers to me as Mitsuko Drewe. And so I am—I took my husband’s name when I married. But I sign my work with my maiden name—Mitsuko Oku. Even though Liam and I have lived in Thornford for almost four years, the colonel has not been aware of this.”

“How would you know?”

“Because when he came into the village hall last Sunday, I gave him a copy of the brochure I’d designed and printed for the exhibition. I happened to have one in my pocket. I was trying to build a friendly little bridge—the memory quilts feature Thornford. They
aren’t screens with Shinto temples and cherry blossoms! I thought it might appeal, but—”

“When I visited him in hospital Tuesday, he was hallucinating,” Tom interrupted, certainty dawning on him. “He’d been given morphine for the pain from his damaged hip. But it was a word that sounded like
oku
that he kept banging on about. Do you mean to say, Mitsuko, that he was hallucinating about your name the whole time?”

She hesitated. “This is very difficult to talk about, Tom.”

“I understand,” Tom responded, though he didn’t really.

“It’s never been discussed within our family. My parents don’t know that I know. I gather these things are simply not discussed in Japan, either.”

“What things?”

“My brother, Hari, who I told you about—the ornithologist at the Smithsonian—looked into our family history. I think he was curious that it was so little discussed. There was always this … 
atmosphere
when we were growing up in Bridgend if any of us asked our father about the Okus—”

“You mentioned an estrangement between your father and your grandfather earlier, but you didn’t seem to know its nature.”

Mitsuko flicked him a guilty glance. “Well, I do. Or at least I think I do. We do—Hari and I, though we haven’t broached it to our little sister, and of course we’ve never confronted our father about it.”

“
‘It’
being …?”

Mitsuko lowered her head, her black hair descending like a shuttering curtain. “It being,” she replied in a near whisper, “that our grandfather Ichiro Oku was the notorious commandant of a prison camp outside Tokyo in the Second World War.”

“Omori?”

“Yes.” Mitsuko pulled back a length of her hair and regarded him with misery. “How did you know?”

“The colonel told me a little of his experiences when I visited
him in hospital.” Tom paused in thought. He glanced at a couple of noisy rooks settling along the branches of the beeches at the bottom of the churchyard. “Did you know the colonel had been in Omori?”

“No. I only knew that he had been in a camp somewhere in Japan or Singapore or some such place. There were many of them, I’ve learned. It never occurred to me that Colonel Northmore would have been at the very one that my grandfather—I can’t even think of the word—ran? managed? administered? None of them are adequate. My grandfather was a beast. When Hari presented the evidence I felt so thoroughly ashamed.”

“Mitsuko, none of it was your fault.”

“Nevertheless …”

But Tom’s thoughts were now racing ahead. He could feel a gnawing dread in the pit of his stomach. “So when you handed your brochure to the colonel in the village hall …”

Mitsuko regarded him with pinched eyes. “He said nothing at first. He stared at it for a moment, then he lifted his eyes and stared at me with … with
such
profound hatred that I was paralysed, unable to speak or move. I could feel this intense fury surge from him and sweep over me like a wave. I must have gone into shock. I couldn’t understand at first—it was so much more than his usual vague disinterest in me—and then he said—in a sort of flat, controlled way—‘Is Oku your maiden name?’

“And then I knew … knew that he had not been simply at
some
prisoner-of-war camp. He had been at
that
camp, my grandfather’s.”

Tom groaned. “Lord …”

“I must have nodded yes. I can’t remember speaking. He said nothing more. He simply handed the brochure back like it was something nasty, turned and left. He left his walking stick behind. He’d put it on the stage when I handed him the brochure, but I didn’t want to take it to him, you understand.”

Unbidden, Tom’s mind summoned up the colonel’s face when the taiko drum had been found slashed—the fleeting, gratified smile. He had thought it a response merely to the violation to the
Japanese instrument, but had it been more? He put his hands up to his face. Oh, God, surely not. Justice for POWs, not revenge, had been the colonel’s passion.

And then he thought of another person who had come into the village hall in the minutes after Sybella’s body had been discovered. “Mitsuko—did the colonel speak to anyone on the way out?”