The Carol Concert

It is a fact universally accepted in Lower Pibbleton that the church is never colder than at the Christmas carol concert, and it was during the third verse of "In the Bleak Midwinter" — a verse that always feels a touch too autobiographical, sung in that church, in that draught — that Mr. Gideon Crewe began to die. Tilly Marsh did not see it happen. She was in the fourth pew with her hymn sheet and her good gloves, between the verger's wife and a Brattle child who could not be trusted near a hymn sheet unsupervised, and her attention was where attention belongs during a carol, which is to say partly on the words and partly on whether the radiators would last the evening. So the first she knew of any trouble was a sound from two pews back — not a cry, nothing so dramatic, but a sort of heavy interruption, the sound a person makes when they sit down faster than they meant to. The singing thinned. Then it stopped, in patches, the way a fire goes out, and then the Reverend Pinch's voice came down the church saying, "Is everything — would somebody — is there a doctor," in the rising register of a young vicar discovering that his evening has changed its plans. There was a doctor. Dr. Hartdale was three pews back, in fact, very near the trouble, and she was already on her knees beside Mr. Gideon Crewe, and Tilly, who had taught thirty-one years of children and knew the precise weight of a silence, understood from the shape of Dr. Hartdale's shoulders, well before any announcement, that the carol concert was over and something a good deal longer had begun. Now, it must be said plainly, because Lower Pibbleton was certainly saying it within the hour: Gideon Crewe was not a man the village would miss with its whole heart. He had been a builder by trade and a litigant by temperament, and over the years he had been to law with his neighbours over a wall, a tree, a strip of verge eleven inches wide, and the precise hour at which the Hartleys' cockerel was permitted to express itself. He had threatened the parish council with a solicitor so often that the parish council had stopped flinching. He was the sort of man whose absence from a room raised the temperature of it, and the church, Tilly thought — kneeling now herself, helping to clear the pew, because someone had to and she had never in her life waited to be asked — the church had just got, in every sense, a little warmer. But that was not a thing one allowed oneself to enjoy, and it was certainly not a thing that excused what Tilly Marsh's eye had already, against her wishes, noticed. On the little table at the end of Mr. Crewe's pew stood a cup. The church served mulled wine at the carol concert, from a great steaming urn at the back, ladled into the parish's mismatched collection of cups, and this cup — Mr. Crewe's cup, half drunk, set down at the angle of a man who had set it down in a hurry — this cup did not smell, when Tilly bent close on the pretext of moving it somewhere safe, entirely of mulled wine. Underneath the cloves and the orange and the warm red sweetness of it, there was something else. Something sharp. Something bitter and chemical and wrong, the smell of a thing that the parish's mulled wine recipe, which Tilly had helped write, did not contain and never had. She straightened up. Her knees, as ever, had a comment to make about it. And she stood in the cold of the church, among the abandoned hymn sheets and the murmuring and the Reverend Pinch saying everyone should stay calm and absolutely nobody staying calm, and she looked down the length of the building at the great brass urn of mulled wine, gleaming under the Christmas candles, from which the entire village had that evening been served. The whole village had drunk from that urn. Only one man had died. Which meant — and Tilly Marsh felt the thought arrive with the awful tidy click of a thing fitting exactly into place — that it had not been the urn at all. It had been the cup. Someone in this church, this evening, between the first carol and the third, had carried a particular cup to a particular man, and had watched him drink it, and had then stood and sung "In the Bleak Midwinter" while it did its work. "Tilly." It was Dr. Hartdale, at her elbow, her voice very low, pitched for Tilly alone. "Tilly, I'm going to have to telephone Constable Dabb, and I'm going to have to tell him not to let anybody leave. And I find I would rather not be the only person in this church who has worked out why." "You're not," said Tilly Marsh, and she drew her good gloves back on, finger by finger, in the way she had, the village knew, only ever done before a great deal of trouble. "You're not the only one, Margaret. Telephone the constable. And ask him to hurry — because it is very cold in here, and a guilty person who is cold and frightened does not stay still for long."