Twelve Drummers Drumming is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Douglas Whiteway
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benison, C. C.
Twelve drummers drumming : a mystery / C. C. Benison.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33983-0
1. Vicars, Parochial—Fiction. 2. Widowers—Fiction. 3. Single fathers—Fiction.
4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.B37783T94 2011
813′.54—dc22 2011000924
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: Marietta Anastassatos
Jacket illustration: Ben Perini
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Cast of Characters
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Vicarage
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
The Vicarage
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
The Vicarage
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
The Vicarage
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
The Vicarage
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
The Vicarage
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
The Vicarage
Dedication
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Cast of Characters
Inhabitants of Thornford Regis
The Reverend
Tom Christmas
Vicar of the parish
Miranda Christmas
His daughter
Florence Daintrey
Retired civil servant
Venice Daintrey
Her sister-in-law
Liam Drewe
Owner of the Waterside Café and Bistro
Mitsuko Drewe
His wife, an artist
Julia Hennis
Music teacher
Dr. Alastair Hennis
Her husband
Sebastian John
Verger at St. Nicholas Church
Penella Neels
Co-owner of Thorn Barton farm
Colonel
Phillip Northmore
Retired banker
Colm Parry
Organist and choirmaster at St. Nicholas Church
Celia Holmes-Parry
His wife, a psychotherapist
Declan Parry
Their son
Sybella Parry
Colm’s daughter
Roger Pattimore
Owner of Pattimore’s, the village shop
Enid Pattimore
His mother
Fred Pike
Village handyman and church sexton
Joyce Pike
His wife
Charlie Pike
Their son
Madrun Prowse
Vicarage housekeeper
Jago Prowse
Her brother, owner of Thorn Cross Garage
Tamara and Kerra
His daughters
Karla Skynner
Postmistress and newsagent
Tiffany Snape
Her assistant
Tilly Springett
Widow
Eric Swan
Licensee of the Church House Inn
Belinda Swan
His wife
Daniel, Lucy, Emily,
Their children
and Jack
Violet Tucker
Young mother
Mark Tucker
Her husband
Ruby Tucker
Their daughter
Anne Willett
Neighbourhood Watch chair
Visitors to Thornford Regis
Colin Blessing
Detective Sergeant, Totnes CID
Derek Bliss
Detective Inspector, Totnes CID
Màiri White
Police Community Support Officer
The Vicarage
Thornford Regis TC9 6QX
26 MAY
Dear Mum,
When I sat down to write this morning’s letter, I couldn’t help but think about that May Fayre 30 years ago when I moved back to Thornford R from London, you all dressed up as always in that red shawl Dad found that time at Newton Abbot market and your pink brocade turban with Grannie’s ruby broach stuck in. I remembered when I was little I thought you looked like the Queen of Persia. Everyone who’s old enough in Thornford says the May Fayre never had a more beautiful fortune-teller than you. I still have our old golf goldfish bowl you would turn upside down to make a crystal ball. It’s sitting on my window ledge right now picking up the sun which has now climbed well over the hills. I put heliotrope and white roses from the vicarage garden inside it. The blooms look to be glowing. So pretty, I think. No sense putting goldfish in the bowl as Powell and Gloria, being cats, would make a meal of them in a minute! Funny that bowl surviving what happened that terrible day. Perhaps, now I write this, I shouldn’t stir memories of the last time you told fortunes at the May Fayre. The sudden storm that year was like nothing on earth and of course, Mum, I know you’ve always thought you and Venice Daintrey’s husband were being punished, but really it was only chance Walter pulled the Death card from your tarot pack and then got struck dead by the same lightenin lightning that made you deaf. If only he had listened to you and stayed inside! Well, I really mustn’t go on about that now, must I. It’s so long ago. The weather report says we’re to have sun all day today and as it is the new vicar’s first May Fayre we wouldn’t want anything to spoil it. I don’t think there’s anywhere lovelier than Thornford in May! When I pushed my head out my bedroom window earlier to take in the smell aroma of the late blooming lilacs, I looked down on the garden and the dew was shimmering on the grass near the border of pinks and making all these perfectly wonderful miniature rainbows. There were two larks singing a duet in the sky over the copper beeches near the millpond and the sparrows were splashing away merrily in the birdbath—that is, until they spied Powell slinking towards them. He’s such a clever cat, although I do wish he wouldn’t pick on the birds so. I fear Mr. Christmas may wake again to a nasty surprise in his bed as Powell and Gloria are much taken with him and like to offer him little treats. I’m not sure the feeling is recep shared, but Mr. Christmas does try to accommodate himself to our little country ways. So good to have a proper vicar back in the vicarage after all these months. And someone who likes my cooking! It’s been very dull me preparing
meals just for me. But with little Miranda we are now three! I wonder if we shall be four ever? I read somewhere once that everybody knows it’s acknowledged everywhere universally that a widower in possession of a very nice cottage—or a decent stipend (sorry, I can’t recall what exactly)—must be in want of a wife. We shall see with Mr. Christmas. When he was appointed and his picture went into the parish magazine, it caused a bit of a stir among certain folk in the village. But the last vicar caused a stir, too, for the same reason and look what happened to HIM! Anyway, Mum, I mustn’t rattle on. Today promises to be very busy and eventful at Purton Farm. They’ll start putting up the tents before very long and getting everything ready. There’s one new thing this year. Japanese drummers instead of the pipe band! The drummers aren’t Japanese, though. They’re a dozen students of Mrs. Hennis’s. It’s the drums that are Japanese and a couple of them are enormous! Anyway, must go and start getting breakfast ready. Cats are well. Love to Aunt Gwen. Glorious day!
Much love,
Madrun
CHAPTER ONE
“Thinking of stealing that book, Father?”
The voice at his shoulder startled Tom Christmas. He looked down to see Fred Pike, the village’s elfin handyman, smiling at him with a kind of manic glee.
“What?”
“Stealing that book?”
Tom blinked at Fred, then snatched his hand from the book. Steal This Book was the title. Someone named Abbie Hoffman was apparently the writer. The cover said as much.
“Despite the title’s invitation, I don’t think so,” Tom said, running his finger between his neck and his dog collar. He put the book down next to a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, which was being offered for thirty pence. In the middle distance, between two rows of stalls, a hefty lad he recognised as Colm Parry’s son Declan, all got up like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, was struggling to push a large drum on a trolley across the lawn towards the stage. Another lad, similarly dressed, was pulling at the other end.
“Thou shalt not steal,” warned Fred.
“Yes.” Tom nodded agreeably. “I’ve heard that.”
Grinning, Fred passed on towards the display of cider-making machinery, near the stage where the two boys were still struggling with the drum. Tom scratched his head, then turned to look at the other titles, all of them political in nature. He picked up a small volume with a red plastic slipcover. Quotations from Mao Tse-tung. Well-thumbed, it opened at a page that proclaimed, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Gently, Tom replaced the book. The other bookstalls were a sea of used Jeffrey Archer and Barbara Cartland, but this was a stall of another colour. He thought he knew whose books these once were. But who in a village nestled in the South Devon hills could be enticed to buy them? Even at prices many pence shy of a pound?
“This is quite the collection,” he said to Belinda Swan, the publican’s wife, who was minding the stall. She reminded him of the Willendorf Venus, fleshy and voluptuous in a way that would have stirred a skinny hunter-gatherer, only attired in the modern way: sealed in stretch trousers and miraculously buttressed beneath a deeply scooped blouse.
“Not very Christian, are they?” she responded, picking up Confessions of a Revolutionary and regarding it askance. “We did wonder, but as it’s for the church, we thought you wouldn’t mind, Father.”
“I wish you wouldn’t—”
“Vicar, I mean.”
“Tom is fine.”
“Right. Tom it is. I’ll remember this time. But with your family name, you know, sometimes we can’t—”
“Help it,” he said, finishing her thought. It was a bane of his existence. Once, as a teenager, he’d gone to a fancy-dress party kitted out as Father Christmas, all white cotton-candy beard and hair and itchy red wool, and the honorific—or gibe—clung to him ever after. At the vicar factory at Cambridge he was Father Christmas. As curate in south London he was Father Christmas. In his ministry in Bristol he was Father Christmas. This though he wasn’t High Church. The mercy was his late wife hadn’t been named Mary. His adoptive mother had been, but she had wisely retained her maiden name.
Belinda picked up the Quotations. “I think Ned was the last person in the world who still cared what whatsisnamehere, Mao Tse-tung, thought about anything.”
“What about a billion Chinese?”
“Oh, do you think? I thought the Chinese had rather gone off all this rigmarole.” She opened the book at random and read aloud: “ ‘We must always use our brains and think everything over carefully.’ ” Her well-plucked eyebrows went up a notch. “Hard to argue with that. Maybe I should have my kids read this instead of Harry Potter.”
“I take it these books are all Ned’s.”
“Yes, his daughter said to take the lot. ‘Take them, I don’t want to look at them,’ she said. ‘You can burn them,’ she said. Well, book burning didn’t seem very nice, so—”
“I’ll buy that one then.” Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out a pound coin.
“Are you sure?”
“To remember Ned, then.”
“But you never met him.”
“Not in the corruptible flesh, no.”
“Of course,” Belinda said, taking the coin and counting out seventy-five pence change. “That’s how you came to us, isn’t it? In a roundabout way. Fancy old Red Ned having a Christian burial. I expect he’s still spinning.”
By chance—or perhaps by design, though arguing the latter was a bit teleological—Tom and his daughter Miranda had been visiting Thornford Regis the week of Ned Skynner’s funeral, staying with his wife’s sister Julia and her husband Alastair. A music teacher at a Hamlyn Ferrers Grammar School outside Paignton, Julia filled in occasionally as organist at St. Nicholas Church and had been called upon to do so for Ned’s funeral that day in early April just over a year ago. Julia had looked at him askance when he’d volunteered to accompany her to the ceremony.
“The expression ‘busman’s holiday’ comes to mind,” she’d said with a smile, though her eyes telegraphed a deeper concern for him, unnecessarily attending a morbid rite for a complete stranger, five months after his wife’s homicide. But Tom was just as happy not to be left with his brother-in-law Alastair, whose disapproval seemed to fall on him like fine rain whenever circumstance threw the two of them together. Besides, funerals, intermittent or in clusters, were part measure of a priest’s life; his professionalism demanded he suspend his own grief to ease the grief of others, and he had done so: Twelve days after Lisbeth’s funeral at the synagogue in St. John’s Wood Road in London, he had taken a funeral at St. Dunstan’s, for a child, no less, and had managed—somehow, just barely—to keep his own heart from breaking.
And, if he had been looking for another reason to accompany Julia, a more frivolous one, he had it: He had not seen the interior of St. Nicholas Church, the grey weather-beaten Norman tower he had glimpsed the day before as he’d driven down into the village. There had been only one impediment. He couldn’t very well take his nine-year-old daughter, to—of all things—a funeral, not so soon after her mother’s death. But Alastair, who had taken the day off from his medical duties, volunteered to abandon plans for his own round of golf and take Miranda to Abbey Park in Torquay to play crazy golf. Tom hadn’t been sure if Alastair wanted to avoid his company or Julia’s. Good manners prevailed before guests, but no central heating could thaw the icy atmosphere between husband and wife that week.
What he would never have known is that he would wind up taking the funeral. The incumbent vicar, the Reverend Peter Kinsey, who had had the living for a mere eighteen months, had failed to appear. Everything else had been at the ready. Ned, at his daughter’s insistence, had been delivered to the lych-gate in a less-than-proletarian mahogany box with brass handles. Julia was at the organ gently working her way through “Ave Verum,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and “Morning Has Broken.” There was a lovely display of lilies, forsythia, and iris, with daffodils in separate vases. And there w
as a decent turnout, Tom later learned, not least because many of the old villagers were amused to see Ned, who had spent four decades declaring religion to be the opiate of the masses from his seat in the pub, getting a send-off from one of the opiate manufacturer’s franchise operations.
Impatience had turned to puzzlement, then to consternation when, after about twenty minutes, the vicar didn’t appear. A call round to the vicarage produced no vicar; nor did it produce the vicar’s housekeeper, Madrun Prowse, who had gone to visit her deaf mother in Cornwall. The Reverend Mr. Kinsey wasn’t at the pub, where the wake was to take place, nor was he at any of the other public places in the village. His mobile was switched off, too. One or two villagers thought someone might have called one or two female parishioners on the off chance, but they kept that to themselves out of respect for Ned’s big send-off. Finally, someone realised that Kinsey’s Audi was missing. It was a Tuesday. Vicar’s day off was Monday. Perhaps he’d gone away for the day and got waylaid somewhere.
Though he might have phoned, someone groused.
It was a chilly April afternoon and the temperamental heating system in the church—adequate, Tom was to later learn, for a fifty-minute Sunday service—was less so for a congregation that had been waiting ninety minutes for the show to begin. The verger might have taken the service, but he was down with flu. The funeral director was able, but Karla Skynner, Ned’s daughter and a churchwarden, determined to sanitise her father’s history in a blaze of Christian piety and learning there was a vicar in the house, beseeched—well, it was more “commanded”—Tom to step in. To Julia’s horror he did—though dressed in corduroy trousers and a battered Barbour, he didn’t feel he would quite fill the contours of the role. Never mind. The vestments were hanging in the vestry, including a purple chasuble. He acquitted himself well enough. He mounted the pulpit and intoned the familiar words: I am the resurrection and the life. As he did so, in this little country church, with its freshly lime-washed walls, its slightly crooked aisle, and its aromas of wood polish, old books, and gently disintegrating woolen kneelers, he felt unaccountably at peace, in a way he had not since that awful autumn day when he had found Lisbeth lying in a pool of blood in the south porch of St. Dunstan’s. It was as though he had come home. As he looked past the faces of the mourners in the front pews to the shifts of light streaming through the Victorian stained glass, he found himself almost brimming with gratitude for the unexpected gift of this moment.