Twelve Drummers Drumming (47 page)

“Where is it?”
Alastair spat.

“Not such a lucky tee, really. Is it?”

Alastair’s hand dived towards the pocket of Tom’s jacket. Jerking back to avoid the intrusive fingers, Tom tipped off the chair, landing on the floor, his head cracking nastily on the cold stone. His eyes seemed to roll in his head and he watched, as if from a distance, in collapsed time, two Alastairs leap upon him, then swiftly resolve into one thrashing figure with a face in flame bordered by the ribs of the church’s vaulted ceiling. One hand pushed hard against his neck, while another rummaged over the pockets of his jacket and trousers. Legs widespread pinned his arms on either side.

“Where the fuck is that tee?” Alastair snarled.

Struggling against the weight, gagging as the hand squeezed his windpipe, Tom managed to jerk one arm from its confinement. He felt a sharp pain shoot through his wrist as it hit the metal base of the pricket stand. The stand swayed and toppled towards them. Alastair released the hand pressing Tom’s neck to shield himself, but hot wax from the single candle spattered against his face. He cried out and twisted his body away, sending the stand crashing against the altar, giving enough purchase for Tom to release his other arm. With all his force he pushed at Alastair with both free hands, sending him sprawling backwards onto the floor. Alastair scrambled to get up, but not before Tom leapt on him in turn and pinned his arms to the floor. He could feel the fierce beating of Alastair’s heart along his knees.

“This is not how we hear confession, Alastair.” Tom gasped for breath.

“Give me back my property.”

“I’m sensing very little contrition. A young woman was killed a week ago and the evidence points to you.”

“What evidence?”

“The tee, for one.”

“It’s spurious. Circumstantial. Found by a
child
.”

“Then why are you so anxious to have the thing back?”

Alastair glared up at him. He bucked his midsection in an effort to throw Tom off, but Tom pushed down harder.

“Confession, Alastair, is supported by mutual trust. You trust that I will keep your confidences—and I shall, absolutely, without equivocation—and I trust that you will unburden your conscience so that you may receive the benefit of absolution. Do you want to reconcile your soul to God, Alastair?
Do you?
” he shouted, finding in himself a sudden fury that he hadn’t felt since the hours after Lisbeth’s death.

Alastair’s face flinched as though hit by a fierce wind. The glare
melted, and his eyes glistened with incipient tears. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry
. I was just trying to make everything right again.”

Tom looked hard into Alastair’s eyes and thought he detected in them a measure of defeat. He released the pressure on the man’s arms, sat up, and scrambled to his feet. He extended a hand to Alastair, who took it.

“I didn’t plan it.” Alastair rose awkwardly and wiped at his eyes. “You have to believe me. It wasn’t any more planned than it had been with Kinsey. I only knew I had to remove that quilt before the whole village saw it. I didn’t expect there to be anyone in the village hall that late.”

“Why take the trouble to deny your culpability?”

“Because it was bloody stupid of me, that’s why.” He peeled off a bit of wax that had cooled along his cheek. “It was as you say: In the dark I thought I was looking at the back of Mitsuko. It was only when I sliced open that drum, and lifted her to put her in, that I saw it was Sybella Parry. Bloody, bloody stupid.”

Tom snatched at the pricket stand, righting it, anger simmering. Some of Lisbeth’s student colleagues at Cambridge flashed through his mind—the male ones, almost exclusively, infected with an overweening hubris, Alastair not the least of them. Most of these peacocks sought glory as surgeons, which Alastair might have done, and pleased his surgeon parents in the bargain. But Alastair lacked imagination—he’d entertained no career besides Mummy and Daddy’s—and, as Lisbeth had shared with Tom one evening at Cambridge over stir-fry at a nearby noodle bar, not long after that awkward weekend with the Roses in Golders Green, he was scholastically too indolent for the rigours of specialised medicine. Nonetheless, she’d continued, “rather like those buggery big cats in Africa lazing about the savannah who let the lionesses do all the running and yet are somehow admired by all the world,” his narcissism remained vibrant. And so, taking Sybella’s life was not a mortal sin; for someone like Alastair Hennis, who always thought life would go his way, murder was mere folly.

Tom asked: “You struck Sybella with one of the
bachi
, the taiko sticks?”

“No, actually. I thought the place was empty, though the door was unlocked—”

“Then how were you planning to get in?”

“Julia leaves her keys on a peg in the hall at Westways, so—”

“Ah.”

“—so I went first to the large hall to get the quilt, but then I heard a noise coming from the small hall, so I went to investigate. I couldn’t have a witness to my taking the quilt. There was just enough moonlight to pick out a walking stick—I think it was Northmore’s—on the table in the lobby.”

“Joyce must have moved it sweeping up when Mitsuko was done,” Tom said absently.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter. So, you left the stick in the small kitchen when you were … done, went back to the large hall to remove the quilt, and then …” He frowned. “You must have had your bag with you.”

“Of course. I’m a doctor making a late evening house call. My bag contains a set of scalpels, and it was a useful carrier bag to stuff the quilt in. Gladstone bags are surprisingly capacious.”

“Then on Monday, you stuffed the quilt into the hedgerow near Thornridge … why there?”

“Secluded. And the whole village was at the fayre.”

“Then later that day you broke into Mitsuko’s studio.”

“I didn’t break in. I found keys on Sybella’s body. I thought one of them might be to the Blackbird as she works there from time to time. Found letters addressed to
The Sun
and some of the other tabloids, too.”

Tom’s brow furrowed.

“Something about Sebastian. It made no sense and I burned them. Anyway, the alarm was switched off at Mitsuko’s. That would have been the tricky bit, and I was prepared to take a chance—again the whole village was at the fayre—but I had a stroke of luck there.”

“And what did you do with Mitsuko’s computer and camera?”

“I think it best I tell the police.”

Wearily, though he was certain he knew the answer, Tom asked finally:

“Why did you put Sybella in the drum?”

“I couldn’t very well take her out onto the road, could I? The village is pitch at night, but someone might have come along with their beams on. I expected her body wouldn’t be found for hours, by which time a roomful of kids would have trampled any evidence I’d been there. Not that anyone would suspect me. I’m a doctor, after all. And I was right.” He extended his arm and wriggled his fingers. “But for one thing—that tee.”

Tom looked past Alastair through the latticework of the rood screen towards the old stone font, which sat like a splendid toadstool at the rear of the church. This was nothing like any private confession he’d ever heard. He could not detect if Alastair’s loathing of his sin was even half formed, much less complete. Perfect contrition seemed elusive.

“Are you sorry for this great suffering that you have caused?” he asked.

“Yes, of course I am.”

“Are you prepared to take further spiritual counsel and advice?”

“Absolutely.”

Tom paused, then folded his leg behind him and reached into his shoe. He plucked the tee from its resting place, jabbing into the soft tissue near his heel.

“Very clever,” Alastair muttered as Tom dropped it into the outstretched palm before him.

“It matters little now,” Tom responded, moving past Alastair and stepping down from the Lady chapel, the very air of which now seemed tainted. He could hear someone rattling the north door from the outside, likely some unhappy tourist.

“I’ll unlock these doors, then I’ll go with you to the Old School
Room,” he added, glancing back at the figure following him down the north aisle.

“I don’t need someone to hold my hand,” Alastair said witheringly, and Tom thought he noted in his eyes a flicker of the old disdain.

T
he hatch felt resistant against the pressure of his palm, and at first Tom fretted that he had made his corkscrew journey for nothing, to be frustrated at the end by some impenetrable latch or absence of key that only Sebastian knew the whereabouts of. He had grazed the top of his head passing through the Lilliputian door in the choir vestry to climb the first set of steps up St. Nicholas’s tower to the ringing-chamber. He nearly tripped over the stoop into the darkness of the second set of steps winding to the clock chamber (cutting his finger against a sharpish bit of stone while fumbling for a light switch), then found himself beading with anxious sweat as his feet sought purchase in the dark along the third set, a stone staircase with slender treads that narrowed as it coiled to the belfry above. Charging ahead, he had somehow missed the toggle to flick on the string of fairy lights, but his hand brushed each tiny glass globe as he climbed. He was grateful to come upon a thin slit in the stonework here, and then here, that admitted a stab of light and a draft of fresh air, a mercy against the aroma of dust and damp mortar. He was more grateful still when his questing hand groped a
wooden trapdoor above his head. It opened easily enough with a push, and he emerged out of the atavistic blackness into the soft grey shadows of the bell chamber. Relieved, Tom hauled himself onto one of the heavy beams of the bell cage to catch his breath, shaken a little by his moments of claustrophobic panic. Licking his wounded finger, noting a slight ammonia pong in the air—bat urine? pigeon droppings?—he let his eyes roam the silhouettes of the great slumbering bells and the rims and spokes of the wheels. The chamber felt brooding, ominous, the mood relieved but barely by sunshine stripes cast from the slatted windows of the old Norman tower.

Climbing the church tower had been at first notional; then it became a craving. The couple that crossed Alastair’s path as he left by the north door eagerly affixed themselves to Tom, noting his dog collar and assuming, despite his protestations, that he was the fount of knowledge of St. Nicholas’s and Thornford Regis. Late-middle-aged and voluble, they were from Peterborough. Her great-grandparents, Chubb by name, had been farm labourers in the Thornford area and were buried somewhere in the churchyard. Tom led them to the gravesites register and map deposited on the shelf in the south porch. He unbolted the door, and slowly disentangled himself from their questions and company as he ushered them outside, citing a pressing obligation. He felt a crushing need of solitude. If he hung about the churchyard or the nave, or even deposited himself in the vestry, he could still be got at. As he turned back into the church, his eyes went to the west end of the nave, through the mullioned glass, to the bell-ringers’ platform perched on the second story of the tower, where six bell ropes vanished into the ceiling above, and where he, too, might vanish.

But now the hatch door to the roof was proving resistant. It was only with force, clinging precariously with one hand on a wooden rung of a short set of steps, that he was able to push it back on its hinge and feel a blast of light and heat on his face. From darkness to gloom to sunshine, he thought as he stepped onto the leaded surface. A rook squawked and fluttered off one of the pinnacles as he
gripped the empty flagpole in the centre to steady himself in the wind, which was startlingly constant and ever-present. He could bawl, shout, scream into this wind. He felt like doing so. He wouldn’t be heard.

He advanced to the mossy parapet that overlooked the sprawling roof of the church, a grey massing like a ship’s prow parting invisible waters. He gave a passing thought to the church architect’s report, which he had finally found, and read. Roof repairs were among the action items ticked off, and he envisioned the intensification of jumble sales, car boot sales, bake sales, bring-and-buys, and raffles, to raise the necessary funds. If there had been one benison in this fateful day, it had been Jamie Allan’s offer of help. He and nine other peers of the realm spent part of each summer parachuting from airplanes raising money for various charities. St. Nicholas’s was not unworthy of their efforts, Jamie said, advising Tom to get in touch for the year following. Reflexively, Tom raised his head to the sky, as if expecting a parachutist to descend through the armada of clouds. Instead he glimpsed a jet, a silvery cross scoring a patch of blue at the highest reaches as if marking the line where the heavens were to be pulled apart.

A little earlier, he had opened the north door to the cheerfully inquisitive holidaymakers from Peterborough, who had burst in, as oblivious to his absence of vicarish bonhomie as they had been to the figure who had shouldered his way between them and stepped onto the path. Tom ignored the visitors, stared after Alastair, prayed for him as he passed through the lych-gate onto Church Walk, waited for him to turn to the door of the Old School Room and give himself over to those inside.