Twelve Drummers Drumming (42 page)

“Sebastian, for a moment. He was coming in with some of the doweling to hang the quilts and got tripped up a bit in Bumble’s lead. They talked briefly, though I wasn’t listening. I think I was still in a bit of shock.” She canted her head at Tom. “Why do you ask?”

Tom shrugged. “No reason.”

But, seated with Mitsuko in the churchyard, he had been dissembling, his mind again playing on the binary relationship link between the colonel and Sebastian—the man with no son, the son with the estranged father. If he were to give the faintest credence to the colonel’s role in either Kinsey’s or Sybella’s death, it would be to envision it as a cooperative venture, the younger partner faithfully executing the heavy lifting: burying one body, entombing another. This is why he could not be candid with Julia. To offer up Colonel Northmore as perpetrator—a strange unlikelihood, Mitsuko said, which prevented her from raising it to Bliss and Blessing—was to compromise his pledge to Sebastian to keep his secret. Or was it a pledge worth honouring now? Had wool been pulled over his eyes?

“I’m sorry, Julia,” he said, watching her nibble at the flesh of the lemon sliver. “I can’t say more.”

“I see. Your priestly garb may be hanging in the vestry, but you’re still wearing it.”

“In effect, yes. I’m still wearing my collar, am I not?”

The corners of Julia’s mouth twitched. “You may become the single bulwark in the village against gossip.” The twitch turned to a smile. She plopped the lemon rind into her empty glass and raised it in a toast. “Good luck to you, Father Christmas.”

Tom smiled. “Thank you. Virtue becomes me, don’t you think?”

“Try not to be too saintly.”

“I’ll do my best. Temptation abounds, but I shall keep to the straight and narrow.”

Julia regarded him with a gimlet eye. “You’re a single man—”

“I’m a widower with a nine-year-old child.”

“Which may make you more attractive in some books.”

“Lisbeth has been dead not even two years, Julia.”

“I’m not sure you understand the effect you have on this village in certain ways.”

“That’s not true. I have some notion. I know that some women are attracted to priests. And I know there’s temptation on the priestly side.”

“Abstractly put.”

Tom ignored her. “We do get schooling on this, you know.” He frowned, giving a passing thought to the late Reverend Peter Kinsey. Had he been alive, he might well be accused of taking advantage of vulnerable women—the one sitting before him, empty glass in hand, for one. “Why are you bringing this up?”

“I’ve had two gins and I’m ready for a third.”

“I see.” Tom studied his sister-in-law. He only knew her to down one on Sundays after service. “Don’t you have to get lunch on for Alastair?”

“No point in cooking a roast for one. Alastair’s doing the nine-to-three shift at the health centre. A working weekend.”

“Of course. He popped in to visit the colonel yesterday when I was there.”

“Then I presume he’ll be off golfing.”

“So you’re at a loose end. Come and have lunch at ours. Mrs. P. makes enough food to feed a regiment.”

“I don’t think Madrun approves of me.”

“
I’m
the master of my household.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, not entirely. Mrs. Prowse is certainly a presence. Still,
she’s not going to bar the door.” He took a long finishing gulp of his ale, glimpsing over the rim of the glass a red Astra squeeze into an available space outside the pub.

“We haven’t even had you and Alastair over for a proper meal, it’s been so busy since I arrived in Thornford.”

“Mitsuko will be safe, won’t she, Tom?” Julia pushed her glass to one side and moved to rise.

“She has Liam. And they’re going to talk with the police. They’ve just arrived, I see.”

“I’m not assured.”

Tom grimaced.
Nor am I
, he thought as he watched DI Bliss and DS Blessing step towards the Church House Inn rather than the Old School Room.

“Working on the Lord’s day?” Tom remarked to the two detectives as he and Julia crossed their path on the pub’s stoop.

“No day of rest for us, Vicar,” Blessing responded. “Although we had intended to come to your eleven o’clock service. We were, however … detained.” He cleared his throat delicately.

Tom flicked a glance at Bliss, unable to quash the image of probable cause, the irritable bowel. “I would have been delighted to see you both in church.”

“We thought we might catch Mr. John in his natural habitat—well, one of them, at any rate,” Blessing continued.

“You weren’t able to have a conversation with him yesterday?”

“No,” Bliss barked, scowling deeply.

“Well, he was around.”
When exactly
did
Sebastian up sticks and leave the village?
Suddenly he wondered how long poor Bumble may have been alone at Farthings.

“Sebastian’s under the weather today,” Julia supplied, echoing his own feeble untruth to her earlier.

“I imagine he very much is!” Bliss snapped. He pushed past them into the pub, Blessing in his wake.

“What was that about?” Then Julia frowned. “Tom …?”

Tom sighed. His mind had conjured up antique weighing scales: in one dish, his loyalty, however frayed, to Sebastian; in the other, his duty to seek justice for those wronged. Sybella, for instance, and Colm.
A false balance is abomination to the Lord
, said the Proverb.
But a just weight is his delight
.

What, however
, he asked himself,
would be a just weight?

“Well, whatever it is,” he responded to his sister-in-law, “it’s not stopping them having a pint first.” He took her arm gently. “Shall we put this past week out of our heads for a few hours? I’d very much like it if our goal could be to have an untroubled Sunday afternoon.”

The front door of the vicarage opened so abruptly that Tom, his hand barely grasping the knob, nearly pitched over the umbrella urn in the vestibule.

“We have guests,” Madrun announced in a marvellous tonal aggregation of delight, curiosity, and warning, vigorously working the back of her apron.

“Oh” was all Tom could think to say, as people showing up at the vicarage on some quest or other wasn’t exactly novel.

“They’ve driven all the way from London.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

Fancy!
Tom felt the urge to exclaim. “Mrs. Hennis is joining us for lunch,” he told her.

But Madrun had already whipped off her apron and darted into the sitting room ahead of them, announcing him to some unseen presences. O where were the heralds and silver trumpets? What had got into the woman?

Rising from a seat opposite Miranda at the games board when Tom ushered Julia into the sitting room was a short, slim young woman wearing a shirt of many colours, joined from the couch by a tall, angular young man in plain garb. Both were oddly familiar. And
then he realised he had seen them not twenty minutes earlier walking past the Church House Inn, their intimacy touching him with a certain wistfulness.

The woman spoke first. “I’m Jane Allan,” she said in an accent vaguely American, though nothing like Kate’s Virginia drawl. She offered her hand. “And this is my husband, Jamie.”

“We’re awfully sorry to barge in on you unannounced, Vicar.” The man’s handshake was firm, dry; the hand large. “But we thought you might help us on a matter of some urgency.”

Tom supposed he could declare himself mildly intrigued, if anyone had bothered to ask, but something else was niggling at his brain as Jamie Allan spoke. What was it? And then he remembered too late—too late to warn husband and wife to wait until a private moment could be found. It was their last name, and his looks—a slighter, taller, and less-bronzed edition, but with the same bright blue eyes, the same strong, bony face.

“You see,” Jamie was saying, “we’ve been looking for my brother, John, and we were told he was the verger at your church here in Thornford Regis. We were directed to the verger’s cottage but …”

He stopped and glanced at the others in the room, who were staring at him with varying degrees of consternation. “Have I dropped a brick?”

“No,” Tom replied, though he wanted to shout, yes, one large enough to shatter the cucumber frame in the back garden. “Your brother is known to us as Sebastian, that’s all. Sebastian John—John being his surname.”

“Ah. We were told something along those lines, I think. Jane …?”

“Andrew said John had been using a different name. They’re two of his Christian names, you see, Mr. Christmas. He’s—”

“John Sebastian Hamilton Allan, I know.”

“How do you know that?” Julia interrupted, regarding him with surprise.

“He told me yesterday. In confidence, I might add. But I expect that doesn’t matter now.” Tom frowned. “This is my sister-in-law,
Julia Hennis, who lives in the village, and, of course, you’ve met my daughter and Mrs. Prowse.” He glanced at the latter. Madrun, eyes shining behind her spectacles, had the appearance of someone eager to sprint off on a news-breaking mission to the village pump.

“But how did you know your brother was here in Thornford?” Tom continued after the usual politenesses had been executed.

“Andrew Macgreevy told me,” Jane replied for her husband. “The reporter for
The Sun
,” she clarified. “I understand from the papers you’ve had a terrible week down here.”

“I bought
The Sun
today in dread that he would expose Sebastian.”

“Not yet he hasn’t,” Jane said with a bright, sweet smile that suggested a hidden reserve of steel.

“My wife dances with the devil.”

“Andrew has moments of humanity. You see, Mr. Christmas—”

“Tom, please.”

“You see, Tom, to put it plainly, Andrew Macgreevy owes me one. He knows he owes me one. And he knows what he owes me, should he ever stumble across something oweable, if you catch my drift. He found it here in Thornford Regis.”

“I believe I have caught your drift,” Tom said, full of admiration for a woman, especially one so petite, who had tabloid reporters on a short leash.

“My wife has been useful to Mr. Macgreevy in some instances in the past,” Jamie explained, adding, “Jane is a bit of an amateur detective.”

“
Comme
Alice Roy!” Miranda piped up. Tom had noted his daughter looking at their guest with increasing fascination.

“Oui, un peu,”
Jane said with a laugh.
“Mais je ne suis pas aussi réussie qu’Alice. Tu a lu
Alice Roy
? Combien merveilleux! J’ai une fille a près de ton âge qui l’a lu, aussi.”

“Daddy! Mrs. Allan has a daughter who reads Alice Roy, too!”

“Lady Kirkbride, I think, darling, not Mrs. Allan.”

“Please, none of that. ‘Jane’ is fine. ‘Kirkbride’ belonged to
Jamie’s brother at one time, so”—she shot Tom a meaningful glance—“so we prefer to keep things simple.”

“Sebastian?” Miranda asked, confused, but eager as ever for clarification.

“No, Jamie’s older brother, William.” Jane crouched to the Persian carpet to address her. “William died many years ago. It was very sad.”

“My mummy died,” Miranda confided.

Jane put her arm around the child. “I’m very sorry to hear that.” She glanced up at Tom apologetically. “You have a brilliant father, don’t you? I can tell.”

Miranda regarded Tom shyly, then took his hand, as Jane rose.
“Madame Allan est canadienne,”
she remarked.
“C’est pourquoi elle peut parler français.”

“Now my clever child can discern accents.”

“Silly Daddy. Mrs. Allan told me.”

“I made her guess. She was very good. Only two tries.”

“ ‘American’ being first, I expect,” Julia said.

“We’re a forbearing people, we Canadians.”

“Before my wife begins pouring maple syrup on troubled waters,” Jamie Allan interrupted with some impatience, “I wonder if I might enquire further about my brother? As I said, we did ask someone in the village to point us to the verger’s cottage, but he wasn’t in. And we tried the church, but there was no one there—”

“I expect you just missed me.”

“—and we asked at the village shop …” He regarded Tom expectantly, as a kind of curious silence settled on the room.

Tom realised they were all still standing, gathered about like guests at a cocktail party. Even Powell and Gloria, who had been trailing after Madrun, had stopped in their ablutions. The heavenly aroma of roasting beef wafting in from the kitchen suggested one way of clearing the room of certain people:

“I wonder if you would care to have lunch? Julia is joining us, and
Mrs. Prowse is a superb cook. I’m sure she’d be delighted if you’d stay, wouldn’t you, Mrs. P.?”

“Of course!”

“Well …” Jamie began reluctantly, but Jane caught the nuance in Tom’s invitation and put her hand gently on her husband’s arm.

“We’d love to,” she said.

“Good,” Tom responded. “Miranda, why don’t you lay three more places in the dining room, and I’m sure Mrs. Prowse has some final preparations in the kitchen.”

“Well …”

Tom gave her a penetrating look.

“Of course, yes, I had better look in on the joint.”