Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery Part 33

"Why go after Lord Morborne at all yesterday morning?" he asked quickly before machine noise beat all into submission.

Gaunt's eyes opened only a slit, but in them Tom saw a glimmer of exultation. "... had him ... bang to rights ... make him suffer."

"I don't understand."

"Had his deen ..."

"His dean?"

"... nay."

"His-? You mean ... his DNA?"

Gaunt groaned horribly.

"But-" Tom pressed his ear near Gaunt's mouth as the helicopter blades whipped the air. "I don't-"

"Cigar b.u.t.t ... other things ... collecting."

"Yes! From the lawn Sat.u.r.day night." Tom was shouting now. "I don't understand."

"... could prove ..." Gaunt fought for breath "... that Morborne had murdered my Kimberly."

"But how? How? You would need ..."

Gaunt's words were almost lost in the roar. But not quite.

The helicopter lifted slowly, as if burdened by weight, its blades hacking the air, whipping the drenched gra.s.ses around them, blasting wet wind into their faces. Tom sheltered his eyes with his hand and watched it ascend into the sky like some sinister black locust, wings thrumming, and bank into the northeast sky curdling above them still, though less violently than before. The aerial drama had pa.s.sed by, now moving swiftly southwest towards the Channel where lightning now strobed weakly from the blanket of fraying cloud and thunder echoed distantly. The storm was spent. But this brought Tom only faint relief. The emergency workers who had rushed from the helicopter and attended to Gaunt with practised hands could offer no a.s.surance that the man hadn't suffered life-threatening injury. And he remained without a.s.surance that Gaunt was innocent of Oliver's death-and Roberto's. As he waited for the helicopter to touch down, Gaunt had grown incoherent, slipping in and out of consciousness, his voice a whisper against the machine's brutal rattle, the words lost, until finally his eyes glazed and he lost all sensibility.

Cold and wet and weary in mind and spirit, Tom found himself unable to greet John Allan-the man he had known as Sebastian John-with full gladness of heart.

"St. Nicholas remains in want of a verger," he said, feeling his smile thin and affectless.

"Would I pa.s.s the criminal records check in this instance, I wonder?" John's tone was light, but his eyes glinted with challenge.

The question was charged, and he understood John's intent: Tom had more or less inherited him as verger when he was appointed to the living of Thornford Regis the spring before, learning only later that an arrangement between a previous inc.u.mbent and an elderly but forceful parishioner had eased John into the position without the proper vetting. John was asking now if Tom thought him culpable of a more recent crime that would exclude him from service to the church.

Tom met John's eyes. Gaunt's declaration about Oliver buzzed in his brain: He was dead. "I don't know. Where have you been the last two days?"

"With the Benedictines at Hexham Priory."

"Would they be able to vouch for you?"

"Tom?" Jane interposed.

"I'm sorry, but you must see that if Gaunt-who loathed Oliver-is not responsible for these crimes, someone else is. Roberto's another one who loathed Oliver. But he's dead. You're another, surely, Sebastian ... John? Especially after what you've come to know about your cousin this week, and what he's done."

"Tom, I've been trying-"

"Someone might find it interesting that, well, here you are, on the moor, at the very time as Gaunt. One might think you were shadowing him, as if-"

"I've been at Hexham Priory, truly."

Tom realised he was projecting his feelings of guilt over Gaunt's dangerous condition onto his former verger and struggled with them as he struggled against the damp intractability of his trouser pocket for his mobile. "Mrs. Gaunt needs to know of her husband's condition. And," he added, tapping in the number she had given him, "we can expect, I'm sure, to be met by some very unhappy policemen."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

The needles of hot water p.r.i.c.king his skin felt of ecstasy, and for a moment in the shower-only for a moment-Tom's worries and fears vanished. They had ridden back to Egges...o...b.. swiftly, wordlessly, John taking Jane's horse, Jane riding with her husband. As Tom predicted, at the moor gate they had been met by a response car that conducted them not to the stables, as he would have thought, but to the Hall. It felt in an odd way like being marched to the headmaster's office. And indeed, when they stepped through the great oak door into the foyer, it was neither Hector nor Georgina who met them, but a glowering Detective Inspector Bliss, arms folded across his chest like a figure of Doom. He answered their anxious questions in clipped fashion: Yes, Dowager Lady Fairhaven, the children, and a woman from the village-who had no b.l.o.o.d.y business being on the estate!-had travelled from the dower house to the Hall. Of course, they were b.l.o.o.d.y safe! Yes, Mrs. Gaunt has been informed of her husband's condition. No, we've had no new word about that condition. Yes, you can put on some dry things-if you must!-but I want you all in the drawing room in short order. And you, Mr. Christmas, I want a word with you.

Bliss's word-words-had not been kind. Tom thought about them now as he turned his face to the showerhead and let the water blast his skin. They were words of blame. Alerted by the police ambulance to the activity on Dartmoor, Bliss had gone to Ellen Gaunt, who crumbled before his onslaught. Bliss learned what Tom had been told, but worse, he was less sanguine than Tom of Gaunt's innocence: He (Bliss) had a solid account of Gaunt witnessed by the stables that very afternoon. If Tom had gone to the police-despite Mrs. Gaunt's protestations-and had not gone haring off into the moors after Mr. Gaunt, their suspect would not be dangerously close to death.

Tom received this dressing down humbly. He had been wrong to take Gaunt's affairs into his own hands. The horrible sequence of events on the moor played through his mind. If he had left it to the proper authorities, Gaunt would have been found wandering in his fugue state, but unharmed other than lashed by wind and rain, suffering from exposure. Silently, as the water belted down, he sent up a prayer for Gaunt's recovery and for G.o.d to forgive his own lapse of wisdom.

But was Gaunt Oliver's murderer? He had cause, he had opportunity, and, Tom knew now, from the last agonizing moments below Hryre Tor as the helicopter descended, he had means. Everything pointed to his culpability, reinforced now by Bliss's eyewitness, who had seen Gaunt at the stables this very afternoon. He believed any man could be driven to the most heinous and messy of crimes, even the punctilious Gaunt. But he said he had found Lord Morborne already dead. Truth or lie? From the door of the shower, Tom glanced at the pile of wet, muddy clothes he'd dropped in a heap on the tiles. At home, at the vicarage, Madrun couldn't abide finding soiled clothes strewn in a heap. There was a basket for such things, thank you very much. But what would he do with them here? Stick them into a bin liner and take them to Dosh and Kate's? Have Madrun make use of Egges...o...b..'s laundry? Much, he reckoned, depended on how many more days he and Miranda might remain Egges...o...b..'s unwilling guests.

Odd thing about having a think in the shower. Was it the ozone? Was it the seclusion? The flow of blood to the brain? Because, suddenly, with a tiny fillip of excitement, he saw in his mind's eye the sequence of events as it had occurred in the Labyrinth that early morning-and a certain telling sequence in the aftermath. It felt a little like that moment on a certain Boxing Day, when he was nine: He'd retrieved the Rubik's Cube from the back garden, where Kate had thrown it Christmas Day in a fit of frustration, and solved the puzzle within the hour. Satisfying. And simple, once you'd got the knack. He thought back to bits of conversation the last two days. Lucinda by the pool: Good old Gaunt. Hector in the chapel: The redoubtable Gaunt laundered that robe yesterday. Ellen Gaunt in the Gatehouse: My husband is practised in antic.i.p.ating every need. And he was, exactingly so.

But on whose behalf had Gaunt been so punctilious?

Tom's hand hovered over taps, preparatory to turning off the water: The evidence could simply be handed over to the police, but would that do the trick?

Likely not. Too many hands had spoiled the cloth.

Trick.

A trick!

Yes, a trick would be the thing to flush the killer from the ring of suspects. He turned off the water and quickly stepped out of the shower. He had to solicit the cooperation of one-no, two-people before they reached the drawing room. Which would be easy. Then he had to get the agreement of two others. This would be rather more difficult.

Tom ran his finger along his clerical collar and surveyed the drawing room. It appeared devoid of life at first glance, until he noted in the mellow evening light pa.s.sing through the French doors the silhouette of a man, hands behind his back, gazing, apparently, past the terrace towards the line of trees sheltering the rain-dampened detritus of Sat.u.r.day's fete. Sebastian-would he ever think of him as "John"?-had cut his long flaxen hair from the days, only last year, when he had been verger at St. Nicholas Church in Thornford. Staring at his back in its denim shirt, he recalled the suspicion that had surrounded John after a young woman, the daughter of St. Nicholas's music director, was found murdered. That he had vanished like a thief in the night from the verger's cottage before the murder's resolution had not stood him well. And when Tom thought about him in the aftermath, he made every effort to allay his disappointment at the abandonment and at the nuisance of seeking a replacement, trusting there had been good cause-some peril, some threat. John hinted as much then. Tom knew now that it was so.

He stepped into the room, placing a certain red velvet bag he'd carried with him on a table near the door. With the cast boot missing his weakened foot grazed the Aubusson, loud enough to take John from his reverie.

"No Inspector Bliss?" Tom said lightly as John turned.

"No. He escorted me here, then left rather abruptly."

DI Bliss's irritable bowel flitted through Tom's mind. He said, "He didn't seem surprised to see you earlier."

"He recognised me. We met last year in Thornford, you recall." His blue eyes focused on Tom. He looked as though his thoughts had taken him far away. "Anna's in the library, apparently, with Marguerite, Max, and your daughter. I don't know where the others are."

"At supper, perhaps. Have they been told, I wonder?"

"About me, their cousin, living under their very noses? Yes, according to the Sergeant Blessing who poked his head in."

Tom nodded as he paused to consider the effect on the family. "Look, Sebastian ... John, I mean ... I wanted to say I'm sorry for my ... abruptness earlier on the moor."

"Understandable, Tom. Everyone's on edge."

"I should have better appreciated that this week has been a kind of h.e.l.l for you. A new h.e.l.l, perhaps it would be fair to say."

"We've lived for some few years knowing that David wasn't my brother's killer. But we've also lived looking over our shoulders. A red-haired man clocked David that day at Tullochbrae. We never knew if a moment would come when ..." He let his hand caress a Chinese vase as he drew nearer to Tom. "But Oliver as Boysie's murderer never, ever entered our minds. And now he's David's killer, too."

"Are you certain-?"

"Would I have been justified in killing Oliver, do you think, Tom?" John seemed not to hear.

"You know the answer to that."

"But on the moor you thought I might have."

"I did. And, I'm sorry to say, for more than that moment. Anna told us about your mood. She said you frightened her terribly. And then, of course, you vanished. You wouldn't have been justified, but only a pious idiot would see that you weren't horribly provoked." Tom paused over a new thought. "Anna's known where you've been all along, yes?"

"She knows I go to Hexham Priory, of course she does. We live together, but I need solitude and private prayer from time to time. She was protecting me, that's all. And"-his blond eyebrows arched-"in this instance I've not been good in protecting her. I left her in the village with a b.l.o.o.d.y killer, didn't I?"

"Oliver."

"Pure selfishness on my part. But I was filled with ... with a sort of loathing and fury I've never known, Tom. Not even after Anna visited me at Ford Prison and I learned I'd gone to prison to protect ... a stranger, a ginger-haired man. I had to get away from Abbotswick before I lost my mind. It's really only chance that I came upon you and my brother and Jane by Hryre Tor. Father Harrowell, the abbot at Hexham, knows my story. Silence is the rule, as you know, but as abbot he gets some word of the world outside the walls and will share it if he feels it necessary. After radio reports of a second suspicious death at Egges...o...b.., he came and told me." John looked to a bronze clock on a sideboard as it struck half past the hour. "I was praying for the courage to ... take on Oliver, which would mean shattering my family-again-but that chance has gone. Perhaps I should be grateful, relieved, that this cup has been taken from me."

"What cup?" Jamie stepped into the room with Jane, who was slicking damp hair back behind her ears. Tom was pleased to see he was wearing a dark lounge suit, the one he'd worn to the Old Salopians do in Exeter.

"We were talking, Tom and I, about restorative justice, I suppose you could say." John frowned at his brother's attire. "At Hexham I had been praying for guidance. We've lived in welcome anonymity for a long time, Anna and I, but if I brought accusations against Oliver, it would change our lives utterly. We'd have to give up any hope of a private life, at least for a time. All the unhappiness of the past would be dredged up. It would appall and shock our family further. You know what Father can be like. And there would be enormous doubt. Because an accusation would be based on what? A text message between a mentally challenged man and a well-known-what was Oliver? an impresario of sorts? A lie about attending a funeral? Flimsy stuff, on the surface of it. Oliver would be a formidable enemy."

"You know how Mummy and Father suffered over Boysie's murder and your confessing to it. In sacrificing yourself, you also sacrificed them-all of us, really, me, Jane-"

"It was my choice at the time, Jamie."

"But your choice also meant Oliver could go on being the b.l.o.o.d.y murderous b.a.s.t.a.r.d that he is! Was, rather."

"Jamie." Jane put her hand on his arm. "Not now. The prodigal's returned."

"Then where's the b.l.o.o.d.y fatted calf? I could use some supper. And where is everybody? I thought Bliss wanted us here sharpish."

"And what did you decide, John?" Jane ignored her husband.

"To recant my confession of years ago to Boysie's death. To make a charge, and take the consequences."

"Good." Jane put her arm into John's. "And you would have had our full support. You know we never believed you responsible for Boysie's death. It's more than a dozen years ago, but there will be records, witnesses-something that places Oliver at Tullochbrae in the days after our wedding. And David's death: It's fresh. We have a lead. It seems impossible this crime can't soon be traced to Oliver."

"But we'll never see Oliver in the docket." Jamie walked over to the drinks table. "I'm helping myself. Hector won't mind."

"Not seeing Oliver in the docket is what I was saying to Tom."

"You can't leave this undone," Tom said. "Take heart. You have your loving family's support."

"So incredibly good, such a great relief, to have you back." Jane transferred a wide smile from Tom to her brother-in-law. "You're so brown! All that outdoors! Your mother will approve."

"I almost called Mummy to tell her the good news." Jamie brandished a whisky decanter. "Anyone else? But-"

"But I stopped him." Jane interrupted. "I thought-"

"Thank you," John said.

"Was that to a whisky?"

"No, Jamie, to your wife. But I will have a drink. I need to speak to Anna before I-"

"Yes, where is Anna?" Jamie let the whisky splash into the gla.s.s. "And, I repeat, where is everybody?"

"But will we ever know why Olly did such an unforgivable thing to Boysie?" Jane asked. "That's what's so incomprehensible. Jamie, you've always said they were like brothers when they were at school."

"I think I know." John took the gla.s.s from his brother. "It's quite simple. Oliver always had a pa.s.sion for music, didn't he? Couldn't play a note, I don't think-"

"Not at all," Jamie snorted, pouring another drink. "Tom? Are you sure? Darling? Jane? Drink?"

"I need a clear head," Jane replied, glancing at Tom, who thought to echo her sentiments, but changed his mind: Dutch courage.

John frowned. "Clear head? Why? And Jamie, why are you dressed like that?"

"I've run out of things to wear."

"No you haven't."

"It's my wife. She tells me what to wear."

"If only," Jane remarked.

"Never mind! My wife has an important question, and you seem to have the answer."

"Yes, as I was saying, Olly and music-"

"He thrashed about on a guitar, I recall, that year he was living with us at Bridgemary." Jamie handed Tom his drink. "I always suspected Father of tying the b.l.o.o.d.y thing to a rock and drowning it in the pond. It seemed to disappear one day.

"I suspect the real attraction of music, at least of that sort, for Oliver was-what would you call it, the scene?-the women, the excitement, the drugs. He was sent down from Oxford for some sort of disgraceful behaviour, and I think he only suffered the military to please Uncle Fred. Once he was discharged, he was off like a rocket into the thick of whatever it was in those days-organising parties at various clubs, sound-system raves in the woods, pilgrimages to dance on the beach in Brighton and in disused film studios in London, and that sort of thing. I remember Father saying to me once that Olly was a gamekeeper who wanted to be a poacher."

"I'm not sure I understand," Tom said, sipping at the amber liquid.

"He meant-and you must understand, Tom, that our father's very much from an older generation-that he thought Olly was sort of a traitor to his cla.s.s."

"That's a bit strong, Jamie." Jane frowned.