by Jane Renshaw
He looked out at the snow. ‘It was August. A fine warm day. Liam and me, we finished up clearing fallen timber and came back here to get riggit – to wash and change and that – to go out to the Forbes Arms. We were meeting up with Chris and Gavin to watch a Cup match and hae a bar supper. Chimp had taken the wood off to the depot – he was to see us there.’
‘Is it a regular thing, that you go to the hotel bar on a Friday?’
‘Oh aye, most Fridays a group of us’ll ging. Sometimes the Boss an’ a’ – the Boss as well.’
‘I imagine he’d be entertaining company.’
A smile lit up the gaunt face. ‘He is that!’
‘But he wasn’t there that Friday?’
‘Na. It’s nae that often he’ll come. Friday nicht – Friday night’s box set night with the loon. Damian. The two of them watch aa kinds of trumphery.’ An indulgent smile. ‘Serial killers in Norway freezing folk in massive ice cubes... Just crap, like. But these days, sometimes Damian will be out with his pals or with a quine, and the Boss’ll maybe come to the bar if he’s nae otherwise engaged. But nae that nicht.’
She was going to have to try talking to Damian about this. Not a prospect she relished.
‘But there were a few of you?’
‘Liam and me, we got there just before six. Gavin and Chris were a’ready there. The idle buggers.’ He grinned, then immediately sobered. ‘Nae a sign of Chimp. We tried calling him, texting – We ended up just ordering. Watched the match, had a few jars, stayed till chucking out time.’
If that could be corroborated, it was unlikely any of those men – Gavin Jenkins, Chris McClusky, Liam Watson or Mick Shepherd – was implicated in Chimp’s death. The body had been in the water a week, so the post mortem had produced a wide window for the time of death – any time up to a day after he’d last been seen by independent witnesses in the shop in Kirkton on the Friday morning – but the chances were that he’d died on that Friday evening, in the period between his colleagues’ last sighting of him and their return to an empty Pond Cottage.
If the evidence of Mick Shepherd and Liam Watson could be trusted.
‘Expected to find Chimp back here, but there was nae sign of him at aa. When he still hadna turned up the next day, and we still couldna get through on his phone, we let the Boss ken, and he called the police.’
‘And then a week later... Karen found him?’
Mick shook his head. ‘Aye.’
‘But what makes you think it might not have been an accident?’
He sighed. ‘It was Rangers against Bayerne Munich. Chimp was a Rangers man. Soon as he’d dumped that wood, he’d have been back here, getting his arse in that shower, getting riggit, then he’d be high-tailing it cross-country to the Forbes Arms. There’s a path through the woodie from here, comes out on the road maybe quarter of a mile from the hotel.’
The hotel, she knew, was in the other direction from Kirkton of Inverglass, on its own by the roadside – an old country inn, she assumed.
‘We aye walk it so we can drink, like.’
She nodded. ‘So what you’re saying is, he wouldn’t have gone for a swim in the pond because he didn’t have time? He was keen to see the whole match?’
‘It disna mak ony sense.’
‘So what do you think happened?’
He raised his shoulders. ‘Aye, that’s the question, eh? That’s the fucking question.’
For a long moment the two of them just sat there. She believed him. She believed that this man genuinely didn’t know what had happened to Chimp, but had his suspicions.
Of the Boss?
He sighed. ‘Chimp... He wisna himsel’, that last week, two weeks. He and the loon, they’d made this hide, the other side of the House, for watching the ospreys, and Chimp, he’d sit in there aa the time, even when the fucking birds – sorry – when the birds werena there. When they’d gone off on their migration to Africa or wherever the f... – wherever they go.’
‘So he was... depressed?’
He scrunched his face up consideringly. ‘Nae depressed. It was mair like there was something on his mind.’
‘You don’t think he could have... You don’t think it could have been suicide?’
Mick snorted. ‘Na. And what kind of daftie commits suicide in a pond?’ He shook his head. ‘Somebody kelt him. I’d sweer telt.’ And as she looked blank: ‘I’d swear to it that somebody killed him.’
‘But – who would have...?’
Another lift of the shoulders. ‘Chimp wisna one for claiking. He widna claik – talk much about his past, and I’m thinking there was maybe a reason for that. He’d maybe got on the wrang side of the wrang folk, and they ferreted him oot. That’s all I can jaloose.’ He frowned across the table at Claire. ‘But dinna you be taking on. If that’s what happened, they winna hae nae reason to harm you.’
‘But – have you told all this to the police?’
‘Aye, but it’s all supposition, eh? The Procurator Fiscal’s put it down as misadventure, and there’s an end to it.’
Unless new evidence came to light.
He got to his feet. ‘I hope I hinna scairt ye – scared you all the more.’
‘No, actually I feel better for knowing all that. Thank you.’ And she jumped up too. ‘Oh God! I’m meant to be cooking for that damn dinner party!’ She looked at her watch. It was five o’clock and she had eight bloody pheasants to pluck.
19
It was horribly tempting to take a look in through the windows of the Twatmobile on her way across the courtyard, but that would have been a mistake. The Twat was hardly likely to have left stolen artwork in plain sight. And someone might see her. No. Claire would just have to keep her eyes and ears open and see what transpired.
It took half an hour just to pluck the feathers off the rear ends of the birds. She’d decided to only cook four – too bad if Damian wanted left-overs. And Hector had said one female pheasant fed two people, and a male fed three. Four would be ample.
The birds lay on the kitchen table, their filmy dead eyes looking up at her as if grimly satisfied to be causing so much trouble.
She’d read something on the internet about burning the feathers off. She was going to have to try it.
She took all four birds, a bottle of sunflower oil and a box of matches along the corridor to the scullery. Which sink to use, though? Not the Dirty Sink – not for something people were going to eat. Not the Messy Sink either, but Damian probably wouldn’t appreciate bird corpses being set on fire in the Clean Sink. That left the Cleanish Sink. She dumped the birds into it, poured lots of oil over them, struck a match and chucked it on top.
And staggered back as flames shot up at her.
Oh God! The flames were roaring up higher than her head, and one was licking at the wall... She needed to move the bird at the back of the sink into the middle –
She found a broom in the cupboard and, standing well to the side, pushed the end of the handle into the sink to manoeuvre all the birds to the front, well away from the wall. The heat coming off them was incredible.
The sign saying ‘Cleanish Sink’ was singed to illegibility.
And the smoke was noxious. She was starting to cough and her eyes were streaming. It smelt like when you caught a hair in the innards of the hairdryer, but a thousand times worse, acrid and sulphurous. And the feathers were melting, black blobs forming where the fire was fiercest...
She needed to open the windows, get out, and shut the door on the smell.
Too late.
The piercing noise of a fire alarm assaulted her ears.
◆◆◆
Mrs Mac stood, hands on hips, contemplating the aftermath. The four birds in the Cleanish Sink were a stinking, blackened, soggy mess. There were scorch marks up the wall and on the ceiling. The stink, as Mrs Mac had remarked, had gone right through to the kitchen, although it hadn’t, thankfully, penetrated ‘upstairs’.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Claire repeated. ‘The Icelandic fa
mily I worked for... They used this technique, but of course they put the birds in a fire pit outside.’
It was lucky, she supposed, that Mrs Mac had decided to come down and see if she needed any assistance. Mrs Mac had acted promptly, closing the scullery door on the fire, shutting off the fire alarm and filling a bucket with water at the kitchen sink for Claire to throw over the birds. She’d also assured Hector – summoned by the alarm and full of amused questions – that all was well, as Claire skulked in the background and didn’t meet his eye.
‘Aye, well,’ said Mrs Mac now.
And as they stood there looking at the scorched birds, Claire couldn’t repress a sudden snort of laughter, and thought she saw a twitch of the older woman’s mouth.
‘We can get the breesties aff them and the ither birds – we dinna need the fash o’ plucking them. Cook them in a casserole with some neeps and tatties.’
‘Okay, great!’
On the unburnt birds, Mrs Mac showed her how to pinch up the skin through the feathers and cut into it with a sharp knife. Then you had to peel back the skin to get to the breasts. This was obviously a specialist technique, so Claire didn’t have to pretend she knew what she was doing.
The skin of the burnt birds presented a problem and had to be scraped off, and the meat they got off those breasts was odd – charred on the outside and sort of rubbery underneath. But they didn’t have enough meat to feed eight people without them.
‘Hopefully the casseroling will disguise any, um, issues,’ Claire suggested.
Mrs Mac pursed her lips.
‘How do you usually make a casserole sauce?
‘Gravy granules, and a bittie cornflour mixed in at the end.’
Claire nodded. ‘That’s what I do too. But if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to watch your method – I’m sure it’s better than mine.’
Mrs Mac nodded approvingly.
◆◆◆
Hector heaved the casserole dish onto the trolley while Claire drained the peas and tipped them into another dish. Mrs Mac had left her to ‘see to the rest of it’ after helping her make the casserole – apparently Strictly Come Dancing was on – but Claire had managed okay. She’d boiled the peas for the Google-recommended three minutes. And the starter should have been acceptable. She’d found mackerel pâté in the fridge and spooned it into eight little ramekins, which she’d set on the plates along with watercress and buttered brown bread.
And sure enough:
‘The starter was delicious,’ said the woman who’d helped Hector bring down the empty plates. ‘I was a bit dubious because last time I had mackerel pâté it tasted like old shoes – well, what I imagine old shoes would taste like – but that was absolutely lovely. How do you make it?’
When she’d taken the starters up to the dining room, Hector had introduced everyone, and so she knew that this was the Helen Clack who’d been a witness to Hector killing a man in ‘self defence’, and who’d been described by DCI Stewart as being ‘besotted’ with him. But this, she suspected, was something else Campbell Stewart could be wrong about, because when Hector had introduced the big untidy man with greying hair as ‘Oskar Dafur, Helen’s partner,’ Oskar and Helen had exchanged the sweetest look.
And she seemed more interested in the food than in Hector. Unfortunately.
‘You’d have to ask Loch Torridon Fine Foods.’
‘Ooh good!’ Helen beamed at her. ‘I can just buy it, then, rather than trying and failing to replicate it.’
In the dining room, as Helen helped Claire dole out the casserole and peas from the trolley, Claire surreptitiously studied Perdita and the Twat. Perdita Jarvie was just so thin. She was sitting there like a dancer, poised and elegant, in a simple purple velvet dress with a boat neck and long, tight arms, her shiny chestnut hair held back in a black velvet ribbon. She had the face of a beautiful waif, emphasised by smoky eye make-up and pale lipstick, the effect only marred by those Botoxed lips.
As Hector moved behind her chair, Perdita reached out a graceful arm to catch hold of his jacket and ask if she could possibly have some sparkling water? The Twat, who was seated opposite Perdita, flicked a look at Hector and said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, ‘And do you have the Brise Cailloux?’ He might have been speaking to a waiter. ‘Or have you already squirrelled it away in your cellar?’
Hector opened one of the doors of the sideboard and brought out a bottle of water. He smiled at Max. ‘Brise Cailloux with pheasant? Now that would be living life on the edge.’
Perdita laughed. ‘Darling, the Brise Cailloux would be re-volt-ing with game – it’s a young wine! Thanks,’ as Hector poured water into her glass. ‘I did try to stop him bringing it.’
‘Unlike a fool and his money, I suppose a “connoisseur” and his favourite wine aren’t soon parted,’ said Hector, a hand on Perdita’s back as he added ice to her glass. ‘Don’t worry, Max, I’ll put it in a doggy bag and you can take it home with you.’
Ouch!
The Twat’s smile had hardened.
If the animosity between them was faked, they were putting on pretty impressive performances. But they could hate each other’s guts and still be involved in criminality together. Business was business.
‘Hector knows about wine,’ Perdita added, dismissively, as if knowing about wine was something neither she nor Hector set any great store by. ‘The Vall del Calàs is right for pheasant.’
For this particular pheasant dish, Claire doubted that the right wine existed, unless it was one so pungent it numbed your tastebuds completely. She’d sampled the casserole, and it was pretty bad. Weirdly, all you could taste was burnt feathers, even though no feathers had gone near it. She guessed they must have tainted the meat underneath.
‘Claire, please join us,’ said Hector, rooting in the sideboard and bringing out a placemat. ‘Budge up,’ he told Norrie, and she sat down at the table between Norrie and the elderly man Hector had introduced as Helen’s uncle, Jim Clack.
‘But Harris?’ Norrie was saying. ‘Why would they want to go and bide on Harris? Nae a tree on the place!’
‘Your idea of hell,’ his wife, Scarlett, chuckled.
‘Fiona always liked the Hebrides,’ Helen said. ‘They go there on holiday a lot, don’t they?’
Fiona, the beautiful GP?
‘Aye, fine for a holiday,’ said Norrie. ‘But living there?’ He shook his head.
The Twat put a forkful of casserole in his mouth and chewed, and then his jaw stopped, his eyes widened in shock, and he put his napkin to his mouth and – the bastard – ostentatiously spat what was in his mouth out into its snowy folds. Scarlett gulped half a glass of water. Norrie ate away manfully, as did Hector and the uncle. Helen and Oskar concentrated on the peas. Perdita, presumably practised at this type of deception, poked her cutlery into the food as if she was actually eating it.
Claire was going to have to say something.
‘I’m sorry. I used an Icelandic method of cooking the pheasant which involves burning off the feathers, but they use a special kind of oil and they bury the birds in the soil and obviously I couldn’t do that and – well, obviously it hasn’t worked. I’m so sorry.’
‘Well now, I’m liking it fine,’ said the lovely uncle. ‘I’m aye up for trying something new.’
‘They bury sharks, too, don’t they?’ asked Hector. ‘Icelanders? Bury them in sand to ferment, then eat the bloody things? Did your previous employers have you making that too?’
‘The supply of shark in London is thankfully limited.’ She swallowed the hysteria that was bubbling up. ‘But they used to have the ready-fermented shark sent from home. I served it with a plum sauce, but it was still pretty inedible.’
‘What’s it called?’ said Scarlett.
‘Uh – what?’
‘What’s the Icelandic name for the fermented shark thing?’
God. Think think think. ‘Bagmolt.’
Bagmolt?
‘I thought it was hákarl?’
said Hector. ‘But they probably call it different things in different parts of the country.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’ve been swotting up on Icelandic cuisine, as it seems we’re to be eating quite a bit of it. Apparently the idea with the fermented shark, for the novice consumer, is to hold your nose while you’re eating it to prevent gagging on the high ammonia content.’
‘So is that method recommended for this dish?’ said the Twat.
‘That, or complete facial submersion,’ said Claire. ‘Voluntary or otherwise.’
Oops.
Claire Colley would never be that rude to one of her employer’s dinner guests. But Hector snorted, and Perdita and Helen laughed.
‘Sorry, he’s being an old grumpy-pants,’ said Perdita, ‘because he’s convinced someone tried to kill him last night.’
The Twat stared across the table at her, and Claire felt the room go still.
‘Oh my God,’ said Scarlett.
‘Someone,’ said the Twat, ‘attempted to force me off the road and down the drop at Collienard – but if my fiancée finds that of no consequence, why should I?’
Claire’s heart started to bump.
Perdita sighed. ‘Nobody tried to force you off the road. It was just someone skidding on the ice. That hill’s notorious for it.’
The Twat continued to stare at Perdita.
Had someone really tried to force him off the road? Just like had happened to Hector’s father? Claire looked down at her plate, at the slowly congealing gravy and the tainted meat, and swallowed bile.
They didn’t linger over the main course. Dessert was Tesco raspberry cheesecake, a locally made vanilla ice cream and fresh rasps, and as Claire was putting it all onto the trolley in the kitchen Helen suggested adding some chocolate sauce she’d found in a cupboard.
‘Good idea,’ said Claire. ‘We need all the calories we can get after that fiasco.’
‘Is it too infra dig to have the bottle on the table?’
‘I’m past caring.’ Claire took the bottle and dumped it down on the trolley. ‘Thanks.’
‘You okay?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry, it’s just – stress of a new job.’