by Jane Renshaw
She went down the line of heads, stroking and murmuring, tears running off her face.
They called it being ‘spelt’. The farmer who had the fields round their house at home had told her that once. When the calves were taken away from their mothers, they were ‘spelt’. It happened every year. Sometimes, if the calves were being ‘grown on’, they were taken from their mothers temporarily to wean them and would be returned eventually to the herd. But often it was a permanent separation – they were taken away to be sold or killed.
Did the mothers remember from when it had happened before? All through the months they were together, while they were nuzzling their calves, and watching them playing and having fun, at the back of their minds did they know that they would be taken away and there was nothing they could do about it?
‘You okay, love?’ Baz. He came across the byre and peered at her. ‘Jesus, you’re soaking wet. You must be literally freezing!’
She nodded, shivering, shaking, swiping the tears from her eyes.
‘Poor things, eh?’ He rubbed one of the cows between its eyes. ‘They don’t understand what’s happened.’
‘Maybe they do.’ She put an arm round the nearest cow’s neck and pressed her face into her. She smelt of straw and warm cow and dung.
Baz patted her shoulder. ‘Come on back inside. There’s no point. They won’t be comforted.’
She shook her head, and when she eventually turned round, Baz had gone.
She sat down on a bale of straw and folded her arms across her shivering body and looked down at her wellies which still had splatters of blood on them while the mooing rose all round her, rose up to the rafters, bounced around the stone walls. And she thought suddenly of Mum, of what it must have been like for her when Karen just up and went, and how worried she must be because basically Karen was living with a load of randoms.
Ade had killed the six amigos and it hadn’t bothered him one bit.
And suddenly the daily inspection was in her head. The daily inspection, for God’s sake! Why did she go along with that? Why didn’t she tell him where to stick his body-shaming crap?
Why had she said those awful things to Damian?
What was wrong with her?
When she was little, Mum was always having to tell her not to say x, y or z. Like after the accident, when they’d gone to see Damian in a private hospital in Aberdeen, Mum had told her not to say anything about his leg being chopped off. When she’d seen him lying in the bed with the covers sticking up around the cage thing over his legs, she’d wanted so much to say something, to ask about it, to ask to see it. But she hadn’t. She’d just stared and stared and stared. Which had probably been worse.
Everyone had been talking about squirrels, and how they could see them out of the window of the room, and then Hector had put his hand on Damian’s arm, and Damian had looked as if he couldn’t hear any of them, as if none of them were there, not even Hector.
They won’t be comforted.
And now she was thinking about Wilkins being poked and pawed by horrible Benny. And about Damian, seeing the space in the cabinet where Wilkins should be, and realising that Karen had taken him.
And now Chimp, telling her the story about the frog.
Tears were plopping off her face onto her soaking wet coat.
When Ade came back tonight she would pretend she was asleep. Then in the morning she was going to get Wilkins back. And then she was going home. And then she was calling the police and telling them the truth about the rescue phone.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wailed to the cows. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’
◆◆◆
Claire was in the scullery at the Cleanish Sink, running hot water into a pot to steep, when the men passed the window, Gavin Jenkins and Mick Shepherd, and she heard just a snatch of their conversation:
‘... in the kitchen, if Claire’s not there.’
She turned off the tap and scooted along the passage to the kitchen.
A hiding place.
She needed a hiding place.
The cupboard where they kept mops and stuff – it was a fair bet that the two men weren’t going to look in there at any point. She hauled open the door and stepped inside, clattering against a broom handle which caused a chain reaction with the other stuff in the cupboard. Wincing, she grabbed at the handles to still them, and pulled the door closed.
There were large holes at intervals along the top of the door, for ventilation, she supposed. She would, she hoped, be able to hear what they said. Unfortunately the holes were too high up for her to see through them.
Two minutes later they arrived, stomping across the flagstones.
‘Coffee, aye?’ said Mick.
‘Please,’ said Gavin. ‘If Claire appears, we’re looking at the floorplans for Corgarff. Just out of interest. There’s no name of the place on here, so she’s not to know any different.’
There was a rustling of paper and a scraping of chair legs on the floor.
‘KitKats or oaty buggers?’ said Mick.
‘Oaty buggers.’ Gavin was presumably now sitting at the table. ‘But get plates.’
Silence for a while, then:
‘I agree with the Boss that the door’s unlikely to be alarmed,’ Gavin said. ‘The man’s not going to want the cops anywhere near that room. He’d rather crims had the whole collection away rather than alert the authorities to its existence. But the lock – or locks plural – is likely to be a humdinger.’
‘Na it’s nae. Fit’s he needing a state-of-the-art lock for on a secret fucking door to a secret fucking room?’
‘Belt and braces.’
‘Aye, well. There’s nae a lock invented the Boss canna deal wi’.’
Interesting.
‘Could take a while, though.’
‘He’ll hae aa nicht.’
‘Yes, but the forecast for tomorrow night is for more snow. Wouldn’t be ideal if he got stuck and had to call out the AA.’
They both laughed.
The kettle boiled, and there was the clink of crockery. Claire’s heart was bumping. She assumed this was some billionaire’s place they were talking about, with a custom-made hidden room for his illicit art collection. She was out of her depth. High-end crime wasn’t her area of expertise.
‘Okay so there’s an anomaly here,’ said Gavin. She wished she could see what they were looking at. ‘But it could just be a mistake in the plans.’
‘Aye, could jist be a family legend, right enough,’ said Mick. ‘Like my grunnie ayeways said she was the illegitimate dochter of Edward the fucking Seventh. A secret torture chamber – it’s likely jist a yairn. I widna be surprised if Black John was a douce enough lad who’s had a bad press.’
‘Well, we’ll find out soon enough. If the room’s there, I bet the Twat couldn’t believe his luck.’
35
‘He might not be that much of a creature of habit,’ said Anna, picking a raisin out of her scone. ‘Especially not the day before Christmas. He’s probably... wrapping presents or something.’
They were in the café across the road from the granite Victorian tenement where Benny lived – Karen, Susie, Anna and Eve. Karen had called Eve last night to arrange an emergency Christmas Eve shopping trip into Aberdeen – Eve had got her licence a couple of months ago – and only when they were on their way, the four of them crammed into Eve’s Mini, had she told them what she was actually intending to do. She wasn’t wild about Susie and especially Anna being along for the ride, but she’d impressed on them that this was serious and they had to get with the programme, and Susie at least seemed to have taken this on board. She’d been unusually quiet all the way in.
Karen sighed. ‘He always goes to the betting shop at 11:30, and then the pub for lunch. That’s where he meets a lot of the dodgy people who sell him stuff.’
‘Like you, you mean,’ said Eve.
Eve was drinking green tea, sitting straight-backed, her eyes boring into Karen. Susie would usually be the
one to step in when Eve got like this, but she seemed to have tuned out. Probably worrying about the breaking and entering part of the itinerary, and Karen wasn’t too wild about that herself. Anna, on the other hand, was loving it. Staking out a fence’s flat preparatory to burgling it was presumably excellent material for her novel.
But Eve probably didn’t want to be Karen’s friend any more.
‘Yeah, like me,’ Karen huffed. She opened her bag and took out the knife she’d brought from Kinty.
‘Oh my God, what’s that for?’ said Susie.
‘For the Yale lock. Don’t stress, it’s just a dinner knife.’ Karen put it down on the table. ‘You couldn’t even cut your finger on it.’
Anna grabbed the knife and turned it this way and that. She was practically bouncing up and down. ‘Can you remember how to do it?’ She was wearing a fluffy pink jumper, and with her chubby rosy cheeks and bright eyes, she could have come straight out of one of those feel-good adverts all the retailers put out at Christmas.
Although Four teenagers burgle a fence’s flat probably wasn’t going to feature as a storyline in any of them any time soon.
‘You just shove it in the crack between the door and the architrave,’ said Eve. ‘And wiggle it. While jiggling the door.’
One rainy day about a year ago, when they were all round at the House and bored, Damian had shown them how to open a Yale lock without a key. An ordinary dinner knife was better than a credit card: one with a thinnish, flexible blade, like this one.
‘How difficult can it be?’ giggled Anna.
‘You can stay here,’ said Eve. ‘Keep a look-out in case he comes back unexpectedly. Call us if you see him.’
Anna’s face fell. ‘But I want to do the burgling!’
‘Shh!’
‘Someone has to keep look-out,’ said Karen. ‘And you’re the most observant.’
Anna sighed, and ate a piece of scone.
‘What if he’s locked the mortise?’ said Eve.
‘Apparently he never does. Ade and Baz joke about it. They’re always saying that it would serve him right if he was burgled himself.’ That reminded her that she needed to tell the police about the rescue phone and where she really found it. Would DCI Stewart be working on Christmas Eve? If not, she supposed she could leave a message.
All her loyalty to Ade had evaporated, to the extent that she was seriously contemplating the possibility that he had killed Chimp; that her first reaction, when she’d first met him in the boathouse and run for her life, might have been instinctively right. How could she ever have thought she was in love with him? ‘Can I borrow someone’s phone?’
‘There he is, there he is!’ yelped Anna, making Karen spill her coffee. ‘Is that him?’ she added.
‘Shh!’ hissed Eve. And to Karen: ‘Is it?’
It was Benny the fence, hunched down into his parka, coming out of Number 25 and scuffing off along the pavement, almost tripping over a mound of dirty snow.
‘Yep. Let’s go.’
It was easy enough to get into the stair. They just buzzed all the buzzers until someone let them in. They didn’t even have to trot out their story about having come to deliver a Christmas card.
Benny’s flat was on the second floor. The stairwell was grubby and not improved by a flickering fluorescent light which immediately took Karen back to the dairy and the six amigos. Ade. That bastard.
She pushed at the door of Benny’s flat to expand the crack between it and the surround, and shoved the knife in, trying to wheek it over the lock-y bit as she remembered Damian showing them.
‘Let me try,’ said Eve eventually, and of course the door came open immediately.
The flat stank so much of cigarettes that breathing its air made you feel you were going to choke. She’d been here once before, but she didn’t remember it being this bad. There was a massive ash tray on the coffee table in the living room full of cigarette butts, next to a load of greasy plastic trays crusted with the remains of curries.
‘Gross,’ said Eve. ‘Where does he keep the stuff, then?’
‘How should I know?’
‘We’re looking for silver, mainly, and Wilkins?’
‘And some Eighteenth Century china. And two pocket globes. And some portrait miniatures.’
‘God, Karen.’ Eve was picking her way across the room. The carpet was super-manky, and there was what looked like mouse droppings under the coffee table. The mice probably hung out there getting the fall-out from the take-aways.
‘I know, okay?’
Actually it only took them five seconds to find Wilkins, wrapped in newspaper in one of the carrier bags piled on the greasy sofa, along with some of the silver.
‘Bit of a culture shock for you, isn’t it, Wilkins?’ said Eve.
Three more carrier bags contained the rest of the stuff Karen had taken from the House.
‘Thank goodness,’ she said. ‘I thought he might have already moved some of it on.’
In the other carrier bags there was loot she didn’t recognise – a little bronze head of a child and a wooden box and some other things.
‘Come on then,’ said Eve, putting stuff into the bag she’d brought.
‘It’s okay, little guy,’ Karen told Wilkins, tucking him into the pocket of her fleece. ‘You’re going home.’
‘Should we take the other stuff? Hand it in to the police?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘We could do it anonymously.’
The bag Eve had brought was a big square shopper, and it held a surprising amount.
‘We can just carry the rest in the carrier bags,’ said Susie.
‘Radical,’ said Karen.
And then her phone buzzed.
‘He’s coming!’ Anna yelled in her ear. ‘He’s coming back!’
◆◆◆
Claire had had a horrible restless night, and had spent most of the morning with Mrs Mac, preparing the House for the invasion of carol singers that apparently happened every Christmas Eve. But she couldn’t put it off any longer. She’d returned to Pond Cottage to make the phone call. She had to make this call. She had no option. But she found herself delaying it – making herself a cup of tea, deciding to clean the bathroom...
It felt like such a betrayal.
But she was a UC, and she knew that the target was intending to burgle a property. Tonight. She couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Fantastic!’ was DCI Stewart’s response when she told him what she’d overheard. ‘Oh, well done, Claire. Drumdargie Castle. Yes, I know it, on the Aucharblet Estate. But my God – Hector’s planning to burgle a property belonging to his own godfather?’
‘Well, apparently Balfour Jarvie has given Drumdargie to his daughter Perdita as a wedding present. From what I could make out, the – Max Weber is using a secret room of some kind in Drumdargie to house a collection, presumably an art collection –’
‘Aah!’
‘The place isn’t habitable yet, so there’ll be no one there. And Hector knows that. I don’t know what he’s intending to take –’
‘Irrelevant. As long as we can catch him in the act, it doesn’t matter if he’s stealing a Rembrandt or a packet of biscuits. This is good work, Claire. I’m impressed.’
If only he knew.
‘Are you going to alert Weber and Perdita Jarvie?’ she asked.
‘Not at this point. Perdita Jarvie’s an old friend of Hector’s. Might well tip him off. No, we’ll stake the place out tonight and await developments. I’ll call Phil and let him know what’s happening. Great stuff, Claire. Great stuff.’
‘Oh, sir, one more thing – did Chimp – John – ever mention an Adrian or Ade Cottingham in any of his reports? Karen DeCicco has shacked up with him at Moss of Kinty and I suspect the phone could be his. He’s a very dubious character.’
‘No,’ he said, distractedly. ‘The name’s not familiar. Why should the phone be his?’
‘I think Karen could be lying about finding it on t
he drive here.’
As she ended the call and deleted it from the history, it hit her.
This was it.
Tomorrow, she’d be gone.
Hector would be arrested. Charged. Held, probably, on remand.
Convicted. Jailed for years.
What would happen to the Pitfourie Estate? What would happen to all the people who worked here, the tenants, everyone? Mrs Mac? Damian?
Oh God.
What had she done?
◆◆◆
‘Okay, don’t panic,’ said Eve, gathering up the bags.
Karen couldn’t think. She couldn’t think what to do. ‘We need to hide?’
‘Not in here. Come on.’
Susie grabbed the remaining bags, and she and Karen followed Eve out of the flat.
Eve reached back round her to pull the door to. ‘We can go up to the top landing,’ she said. ‘Then when –’
There was a click and a sort of scraping from below, and the sound of traffic. The main door to the street had opened.
And now there were footsteps on the concrete, echoing up the stairwell, and the outer door clunked shut on the spring.
They ran up the last flight of steps to the top landing, which had a banister across the side that was open to the stairwell. He would be able to see through that! He was going to see them!
‘Get down into the corner,’ Eve hissed, squatting with the bags in the corner of the landing furthest from the stair.
And thank God, when she squatted down next to Eve and Susie, Karen couldn’t see down to the landing below – which meant he wouldn’t be able to see them. But he would hear her breathing, surely. She couldn’t stop gasping air. She pulled her scarf up over her face and shut her eyes.
Footsteps, coming up the stairs.
They stopped on the landing below. A key scraped in the lock and then the door slammed shut.