Read Online Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison - Free Book Online Page A

had not mentioned ThePriory, the well-known drug and alcohol treatment centre. By doing so, she’d laid down a track. The conversation could proceed in only one direction, and it would, unless stopped.
    “Oh, it must be drugs,” his housekeeper said, reaching for the cafetière to pour Tom another cup, stepping around Powell and Gloria, who were slinking about on a quest for dropped food.
    “Not necessarily.”
    “Nonsense, Mr. Christmas, it has—”
    “Mrs. Prowse, shall we talk of other things?”
    “I’m not a baby, you know,” Miranda interjected. She was regarding them both candidly.
    “Of course you’re not, darling,” Tom responded reflexively. “But it’s not like it was with Mummy. There’s no sick man in the village who hurt Sybella. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Prowse?”
    “Yes, of course.” But Madrun had been arrested in her coffee pouring. Tom looked up and noted a strange, alert look in her eyes. He realised at that moment that he had given voice to an awful possibility that his mind had held shuttered: No youthful folly or accident or self-destruction had ended Sybella’s life. Some outside agency, gone now to shadow, had brought about this destruction—an echo of his own wife’s death so acutely painful that he had to catch a breath so that his coffee cup wouldn’t shake and spill. He cursed himself for planting the seed of speculation in Madrun’s mind—she’d be down at the post office with her letter to old Mrs. Prowse nattering with Karla Skynner and anyone else queued up for a stamp—but then realised he was probably being naïve. Half the breakfast tables in the village were probably preoccupied with similar worrying thoughts.
    That’s when Miranda suggested they play “Where in the World Is the Reverend Peter Kinsey?” Its genesis had been his offhand explanation to her the year before about Kinsey’s no-show at Ned Skynner’s funeral. He had told her that Kinsey was probably having sundowners with Lord Lucan somewhere in Africa, which Miranda didn’t understand, but nevertheless embellished with a tangentialsuggestion about him visiting Babar in the jungle. When they were driving home to Bristol after their stay with the Hennises, they continued the game, which seemed perfectly innocent then. Though the village had been rife with speculation when they’d left, Tom assumed Kinsey would eventually reappear with some perfectly decent explanation for his absence. They weren’t to know that before any great passage of time, he would be officially classified as a missing person.
    “What made you think of that?” he couldn’t help asking, wondering if she was reacting in some oblique childhood way to anxiety.
    Miranda shrugged.
    “Well, all right then,” Tom responded reluctantly. “Where in the world
is
the Reverend Peter Kinsey?”
    Miranda regarded the bit of ham on her fork. “
Le curé est parti en Espagne pour … devenir matador
,” she said, flicking a glance at Madrun, who, as usual, discomfited at the introduction of French, turned away.
    “And what would Alice Roy do?”
    Miranda slipped the piece of ham off her fork and let her arm drop beside her chair.
“Alice demanderait à Madame Prowse si le curé était très très … friand de la paella.”
She giggled.
    “What?” Madrun turned, responding to her name in the thicket of French. Her eyes went to Gloria’s greedy jaws. “You’d best not be feeding my good ham to that cat.”
    Tom laughed. “Miranda imagines that the Reverend Mr. Kinsey decided to become a matador in Spain. And that a good detective like Alice Roy would ask you, Mrs. Prowse, if he was … fond …?” Miranda nodded assent. “… fond of paella.”
    Madrun harrumphed, still eyeing the cat. “Then you also might imagine him performing in denim trousers and getting shut of red capes.”
    Tom was reminded that many parishioners found Peter Kinsey a divisive figure after so many years of the amiable Giles James-Douglas, who