Twelve Drummers Drumming Read online

  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.