Free Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison Page A

sorry.”
    Northmore’s lips formed a thin line. He said nothing.
    “I’d be happy to stay with you, Colonel, in other circumstances, but I’m afraid I have another appointment. If you’ll all excuse me …” Alastair touched his cap in a salute.
    “It’s Bank Holiday!” Julia protested.
    Alastair gave his wife a tight smile. “Enid Pattimore craves my attention.”
    “Nonsense.”
    “I saw Enid not an hour ago at Liam Drewe’s stall,” Tom added, surprised. “She looked fine.”
    “My service paged me while I was in the car. I can show you both, if you like.” Alastair reached into his pocket.
    “Never mind that.” Julia waved a dismissive hand as Alastair thrust his pager in her face. “There’s someone else you must look at here. Something terrible has happened.”
    “What?”
    “It’s Sybella.”
    Alastair glanced around. “I don’t understand.”
    Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Colm interjected. “Alastair, really, there’s nothing you can do. It’s not necessary to …” He trailed off.
    “Sybella has died, Alastair,” Tom explained. The words were awful to say.
    Alastair blinked. “What? But …?”
    “Her body’s in that drum.”
    Alastair frowned deeply. “I don’t under—”
    “Please, no one touch her,” Colm moaned, lurching on wobbly legs to block the drum. “Please.”
    “Alastair, it’s fine,” Tom said, one eye on Colm, who looked about to collapse. “We’re waiting for the police. Go and attend to Enid. We can … cope here.”
    “But how …?”
    “We don’t know,” Tom replied.
    “I’m very sorry,” Alastair addressed Colm. “If there’s anything—”
    “We’ll be okay, Alastair, really.” Julia lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry to have dragged you here.”
    “Oh.” Alastair looked vaguely startled. “Well, under the circumstances …” He moved towards the door, then turned. “Perhaps someone ought to pick that walking stick off the floor. Before anything else happens.”

    Colm hailed Tom as he was walking his bike by the box topiaries that flanked the driveway between the gate and Thornridge House, a Nash-designed jewel of golden stone that glowed in the midmorning sunshine. Startled out of his thoughts of the previous day’s events, Tom veered down a curving flagstone path past deep beds of boisterous wildflowers towards the rhythmic scrape of chafing metal. Next to the slender pillar of an ancient sundial, Colm—dressed in a straw hat as wide as a sombrero and a pair of jeans so worn the blue had given way to strands of white at the knees and the pockets—was attacking a clematis vine with vigour.
    “You have to keep after these buggers or they just get tangled and monstrous.” He grunted and took a final swipe at a stem, sending it cascading to the pile of cuttings. Tom, who had vague knowledge of gardening gleaned from his two mothers and their passion for their back garden in Gravesend, had a notion that pruning clematis in late May wasn’t the done thing, but thought better of mentioning it. In his years as priest, he had met with many varied responses to the loss of the loved one, of which a brisk workout in the garden was by no means unusual. When he was a curate, he had gone around to the home of a man who had lost his wife and found him feverishly hacking away at a crabapple tree in his back garden. And when he was in Bristol, a woman whose son had been stabbed outside their council house began painting an angel over the bloodstain on the pavement. By the time he arrived, a heavenly host was running up the front door and the neighbours were growing restive.
    “It’s a lot of work,” Tom responded, surveying the expanse of plantings.
    “Well, it keeps me off the sauce.”
    Tom half expected a smile to follow this remark—Colm had been famously off the sauce for years; in the pub, he drank orangejuice or Perrier—but no smile came. Colm took another swipe at the plant. “That should do,” he said, staring