Murder at the Castle

by M. B. Shaw

  ‘Amazing,’ said Iris truthfully. ‘Oh yes, this is definitely going to work. Is it your room?’

  ‘It is now,’ said Kathy archly. ‘Fiona, Jock’s ex, put it together.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Iris, her face falling.

  ‘She used to practically live up here, apparently,’ said Kathy, ‘locked away like the mad old woman in the attic. And she wonders why her husband ran off and found someone else.’

  The comment was said more wistfully than spitefully, Iris thought, but even so, it was a remarkably insensitive thing to say.

  ‘If it has those associations, then perhaps it’s not the right setting for your portrait?’ Iris ventured. ‘I do think it’s vital that this painting represents you.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Kathy brightly, brushing aside Iris’s concerns. ‘And it will, trust me. This is definitely the room I want. Come on, I’ll help you bring up your things.’

  Iris couldn’t quite determine whether Kathy was actually blind to the message she was sending by using her predecessor’s sanctuary, or whether her choice of room was a deliberate act of territorialism. On the whole, she suspected the latter. Either way she was left with an unpleasant taste in her mouth, and a small knot of anxiety in her chest where before there’d been only joy.

  You’re a professional, she reminded herself twenty minutes later as she set up her easel and sketchbook. Draw what you see and keep an open mind.

  ‘I’m only doing preliminary drawings today,’ Iris explained. ‘We’ll try out different poses, see what feels most natural, and I’ll take some photographs to assess the light. Later, if you decide you want to change your clothes or wear your hair in a different style, we can do that. But once you decide, you must stick with it.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Kathy. ‘Once I make a decision I always stick to it. I’m not a big one for doubts, or for changing my mind once I’m set on something.’

  No, thought Iris, I bet you aren’t.

  ‘Can my babies be in it?’ Kathy gazed adoringly at the two white pom-poms asleep at her feet. ‘I’m sure they’ll be good,’ she added in the high-pitched baby voice she often used around her dogs, which made Iris want to pull out her own teeth. ‘Won’t you, my boo-boos?’

  ‘Of course, if you’d like,’ Iris replied with a sinking heart. She hated painting animals. They never sat still, or listened. Then again, that probably applied to a good half of Iris’s human subjects. ‘But today I’d like to focus on you, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kathy.

  ‘So tell me a little more about yourself. How did you and Jock meet?’ asked Iris. Usually when subjects started talking about themselves they relaxed and began to look more natural. Necks and arms softened, faces became more animated and more ‘true’ to the person inside. Kathy Miller was no exception.

  ‘At a party in London.’ Her face lit up. ‘The Orangery in Holland Park, to be precise. I was there with my last husband, Warren, and Jock was with some old friends from Cambridge.’

  ‘Your “last” husband?’ said Iris. ‘How many have you had?’

  ‘Only two,’ replied Kathy, without a hint of irony. ‘Jock’ll be my third.

  ‘I met my first husband, Brandon, at eighteen, and we married a year later. That lasted three years. Then I left him for Warren, and we were together nine years, mostly in New York. And then I met Jock.’

  ‘What happened with Brandon and Warren, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Iris, who couldn’t help but be a tiny bit impressed by the way Kathy ticked off her ex-husbands like mere footnotes to her life story. It had taken Iris three miserable years to summon the courage to divorce Ian, but this woman spoke about her former marriages like buses that one could get on or off at will without any problem at all.

  ‘Nothing dramatic,’ said Kathy, bending double and grabbing her bare feet for a moment in an impressively limber yoga stretch. ‘With Brandon, we were too young. Also his dad was a billionaire and he took too much coke.’

  ‘Which was the problem?’ Iris laughed. ‘The billions or the drugs?’

  ‘Both, in the end,’ said Kathy, deadpan. ‘Plus we were living in Tennessee, which is where his dad’s gas stations were. I was nineteen. I was so bored.

  ‘Warren was different.’ She smiled fondly at the memory. ‘He wasn’t as rich as Brandon but he was still rich, and ten years older, and he had a Wall Street job and was, like, super- smart. We moved to Manhattan and of course I loved that after being stuck in the south – can you even imagine?’

  Iris could. Sort of. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ said Kathy. ‘I mean, he kind of wanted children and I definitely did not. So that was maybe brewing for the future. But I did love Warren. I probably would have stayed with him if I hadn’t met Jock.’

  Iris tried and failed to imagine how a gruff, moody, elderly Scots landowner like Jock MacKinnon had wooed a young woman like Kathy away from a handsome banker husband she purported to love.

  ‘I actually thought I’d have to stay in that marriage another year,’ Kathy confided happily. ‘Because, you know, ten years used to be the threshold for a fifty-fifty split of marital assets. It still is in LA, where I grew up, but in New York it’s seven, so’ – she shrugged – ‘I had nothing holding me back.’

  Except your marriage vows, thought Iris.

  ‘Don’t look so horrified,’ Kathy teased her. ‘Life is all about phases. New chapters. People think I fell for Jock for the money, but that’s baloney. I already had money. Besides, his son is drawing up a prenup.’

  ‘Rory’s doing his own father’s prenup?’ Iris’s eyes widened.

  ‘Yup,’ said Kathy. ‘And it’s gonna be tighter than a virgin’s ass, not that I care.’

  Iris couldn’t help but laugh at her turn of phrase.

  ‘Jock offered me love and safety. That’s what I fell for. And, you know, adoration. I mean, he literally carried me off to his castle. How romantic is that?’

  Iris looked at her intently as she sketched away. What a total enigma this woman was. Money-driven, yet romantic. Hard-headed, but childlike, too, in need of adoration and a fortress and a man to ‘carry her off’. Fascinating.

  ‘The point is, I choose not to see either of my divorces as failures,’ said Kathy. ‘To me they were beautiful, loving chapters that came to an end.’

  ‘And you and Jock – is that a chapter too?’ asked Iris, making an effort to keep her face neutral.

  ‘A long one, I hope. But sure. Everything’s a chapter.’ Kathy smiled beatifically as she bestowed these words of wisdom.

  She was like a cross between the Dalai Lama and the Runaway Bride, Iris thought.

  ‘You don’t believe in “happy ever after”, then?’ she mused, unconsciously biting her tongue as she struggled to capture the curve of Kathy’s left shoulder.

  ‘I believe in living for the moment,’ said Kathy, her body stiffening. ‘And in relying on yourself. And in looking forward, never back. I learned those lessons the hard way as a kid.’

  Sensing she was on the brink of confiding something more, Iris paused and leaned back, waiting silently for her to continue. Patting her legs and summoning her dogs into her lap, Kathy bent low over them, breathing in their comforting scent before going on, keeping her eyes fixed on the dogs and averted from Iris.

  ‘My dad died when I was twelve.’ Kathy’s voice was calm, emotionless. ‘He jumped from the roof of his office building in LA, right onto Santa Monica Boulevard. June twelfth, the same day he filed for bankruptcy.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ breathed Iris.

  ‘Yeah. So was I. I thought he was happy. I thought we were all happy – him, me and my mom. But it turns out I was wrong. We lived in a big house in Brentwood Park. That was the life I knew. Dad drove Ferraris, Mom shopped in Paris. We had a boat.’

  Her eyes had glazed over. Iris realised she was back there, a child, seeing it all again.

  ‘Dad made his money in real estate but then h
e over-leveraged and it all came crashing down. He knew we’d have to sell the house, knew we’d be poor – or at least not rich. So he checked out. But I didn’t know. My mom didn’t know. He never warned us, never prepared us, never made any kind of plan. He just left us to deal with all of it: the funeral, the grief, the creditors. It was awful.’

  ‘You’re angry,’ Iris observed, treading carefully.

  ‘No,’ said Kathy, not sounding offended. ‘I was at the time, but not anymore. Like I say, chapters. That was a difficult chapter, but it made me who I am. I just feel sad for my dad now. And my mom.’

  ‘How did she cope with it all?’ asked Iris.

  Kathy laughed bitterly. ‘She didn’t. I mean, really, she just didn’t. She was so depressed. She drank a lot. Self-medicated, the whole bit. It was as if she had died, too. She was so dependent on him.’ Bewildered, she looked at Iris. ‘How could that happen? It was like he was her oxygen or something, like she couldn’t breathe once he’d gone. Watching what happened to her, I decided that I would never be like that. I would live for the present. Rely on myself.’

  And make sure you got rich and stayed that way, thought Iris, because people who lost all their money wound up dead.

  It seemed to Iris that Kathy Miller had been building herself a fortress long before she ever met Jock MacKinnon. And that whoever was sending her those notes was determined to breach that fortress.

  ‘I’ve been thinking more about those notes you showed me,’ she said, putting down her pencils.

  ‘Oh?’ Kathy brightened.

  ‘I still think you should show them to the police,’ said Iris, earning herself a scowl and a headshake from her sitter. ‘But, as I can see you aren’t going to, I wondered if you could let me borrow the envelopes.’

  ‘Just the envelopes?’ asked Kathy. ‘Not the letters themselves?’

  She was delighted that Iris had decided to play ball and help her unravel the mystery of the poison-pen letters, but she was baffled by her methods.

  ‘Just the envelopes,’ said Iris. ‘For now.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kathy, shooing the dogs off her lap and opening a drawer in what must once have been Fiona MacKinnon’s writing desk. ‘The others are downstairs in the library, but I can give you this right now. I found it in my laptop case this morning.’

  She passed Iris another note, exactly like the others.

  Iris read it aloud: ‘ “Ask Jock what happened to Mary”.’

  She looked up at Kathy. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Who’s Mary?’

  Kathy looked at her blankly. ‘No idea.’ Then, with a smile, she added, ‘but you will help me find out, Iris, won’t you?’

  * * *

  Iris spent the afternoon back at her Airbnb in the village, unpacking. Murray House was a sturdily built town house a few streets from Pitfeldy harbour. It was to be Iris’s home until Kathy’s portrait was finished. Yesterday, when she’d returned from the fair, she’d started opening boxes, but there was still a long way to go. Crucially, she’d only just begun unpacking her beloved dolls’ house and its occupants, a labour of love that wouldn’t be completely finished for weeks.

  Iris had collected miniature furniture for over three decades – her shoebox from the Pitfeldy fair had turned out to be a rare hoard – and had always found a quiet pleasure in arranging and rearranging the tiny rooms of her treasured 1920s dolls’ house. Yes, it was a bit weird. Potentially a bit ‘mad cat lady’. But it made her happy and, especially since her divorce, happiness had become a bigger priority on Iris’s agenda.

  She’d made good headway with the boxes yesterday – Iris had never believed in travelling light, and certainly never went anywhere for more than a week without her precious dolls’ house collection – but, dear Lord, it was exhausting. As she bent down now, her mind wandering back to Kathy and the notes and the mysterious ‘Mary’, her lower back throbbed with pain, like that of an arthritic eighty-year-old after a particularly nasty car accident. She decided to run a hot bath later and sink into it with a large glass of wine.

  Iris’s landlady, Mrs Rivers, was right. Iris did ‘faind’ Murray House to be extremely well appointed. Not least among its charms was the plentiful supply of hot water that gushed out of the taps and showerheads in a powerful, clear stream that put Pitfeldy Castle’s rickety plumbing to shame. The kitchen was also a thing of beauty, spanking new and full of appliances so white and sparkling and modern and brilliant that Iris had no idea how most of them worked.

  As for the rest of the house it was a pleasant but twee mixture of antique features and an aesthetic that Homes & Gardens magazine would probably have described as ‘Highland Chic’. This translated as lots of heavy-weave woollen carpets and taupe sofas, offset by tasteful hints of tartan: a cushion here, a bedspread there. Mrs Rivers had clearly thrown caution to the wind in certain rooms and gone wild with a stag motif wallpaper, or curtains in a tongue-in-cheek Highland Games fabric, depicting pipers and kilted figures tossing the caber. But overall the house was welcoming, spotlessly clean and quiet. The bed in Iris’s room was also ridiculously comfortable, so while Murray House might lack the charm of Mill Cottage back in Hazelford, Iris was still definitely filing the rental as a win.

  Popping two ibuprofen for her back, Iris spent a solid two hours carefully unwrapping more of her dolls’ house things, before the call of a plate of Hobnobs and a cup of tea became too strong to resist. Sinking down into the overstuffed embrace of the living room sofa, she laid Kathy Miller’s envelopes carefully out on the cushion beside her, before lifting and inspecting each one.

  Iris was no expert, but even to the untrained eye it was clear that the single handwritten word ‘Kathy’ was identical on each of the three envelopes. Not only was there a distinctive, squashed look at the top of the initial ‘K’, but the slight purplish tint to the ink made it plain that they had been addressed by the same person.

  An easier clue to follow would be the envelopes themselves. They too were identical, small and very stiff, like formal invitations. And on the back, below the line where Kathy had torn each one open, Iris had noticed a small round imprint. Very faint, halfway between a watermark and an old-fashioned seal, you could barely make it out without a magnifying glass. But after much squinting, Iris decided that the design was of a thistle flower.

  Idly, she opened Google on her phone and searched for ‘stationery, thistle logo’ but nothing useful came of it. Still, the envelopes were distinctive, which was a start. Given that each one had been delivered by hand, and inside the castle, the first obvious step would be for Kathy to see if there was a packet of them in a drawer somewhere – if not in Jock’s office, then perhaps in one of the guest rooms or in the staff quarters.

  Iris would suggest it at their next sitting, she decided, laughing inwardly at herself as she walked back into the kitchen with her empty mug. Poison-pen letters? Threats and clues and mysterious Marys? She’d only been here a few days. How did she keep getting dragged into these things?

  She was standing at the sink, staring blankly out of the kitchen window, when suddenly she started.

  ‘Hey there! Iris? Helloooo?’

  It was Jamie, the distractingly attractive trawlerman from the fair, waving at her animatedly from across the street and miming ‘open-the-window’ gestures with his hands.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he shouted, loud enough for passers-by to stop and stare. ‘Is this where you’re living, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iris shouted back. ‘I’ve just moved in.’

  ‘Very nice.’ Jamie whistled approvingly, before crossing the road to approach the house. Leaning out of the open kitchen window, Iris was only a few feet away from him.

  ‘I’m still unpacking,’ said Iris, conscious of the mess of boxes behind her, not to mention her sweaty, make-up-free face as she pushed her hair back out of her eyes. ‘It’s going to be a long job, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’d offer to help but I’
m off to play football just now,’ he said, regretfully. ‘The lads are expecting me.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t fishing,’ said Iris, mortified, feeling more like a tragic cougar than ever.

  ‘We should go for a drink some time,’ said Jamie, either oblivious to her embarrassment or ignoring it. ‘Now that I know where you live, I’ll give you a knock.’

  And with a friendly wave, he was gone, before Iris even had a chance to answer the question.

  Come to think of it, was it a question? Or yet another assertion? Those seemed to be Jamie Ingall’s speciality: ‘We should have a drink’, ‘I will give you a knock’.

  Smiling to herself like an idiot, Iris returned to her boxes, not sure exactly what had just happened.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Jock?’ Reaching over in bed, laying a slim brown arm across his chest, Kathy Miller looked into her fiancé’s eyes beseechingly. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  Propping himself up on his elbow, Jock MacKinnon gazed down at the miracle that was Kathy, wondering for the hundredth time how on earth he had got this lucky so late in his life. How this goddess, this sweet, stunning woman, had come to choose him. He was going to Edinburgh later after breakfast to attend to some business, only for one night, but the thought of being away from her already hurt him like a physical pain, like a pin jabbed into the flesh and twisted cruelly.

  ‘Of course.’ Clasping her hand, he pressed it to his lips. ‘Anything.’

  Kathy cleared her throat nervously. ‘Who’s Mary?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Other than a slight narrowing of the eyes, Jock gave no hint of his shifting emotions.

  ‘Mary,’ Katy repeated. ‘Was there ever an important “Mary” in your life? I mean…’ She blushed, realising belatedly how odd and paranoid the question must make her seem. ‘Does the name Mary have any special significance for you?’

  ‘Why are you asking me this?’ His voice was gentle, and he even tried to smile, but it was clear she’d hit a nerve. Tension tightened all the muscles in his face like pulled strings on a puppet.