Murder at the Castle

by M. B. Shaw

  Kathy’s name produced hundreds of search results of its own, all of them considerably more lurid and fascinating than anything relating to her soon-to-be husband. Like Jock, it appeared, Ms Miller had been married twice before. DI Haley hadn’t warmed to her particularly when they had met, although he had to admit she was a strikingly attractive young woman, prettier than all of the other glamorous young things whose pictures had popped up online as rumoured former mistresses of Jock MacKinnon. The artist Jock had commissioned to paint Kathy’s portrait – Iris Grey – would have a job on her hands doing the young lady justice without making her look like a cartoon character or some sort of cheesy Disney princess.

  Haley had liked Iris Grey during their brief encounter. He’d also been impressed by Angus Brae, the gillie. It was funny how instinct kicked in when it came to first impressions. Over the years, Stuart Haley had learned to trust his instincts, but not blindly. It was important to keep an open mind.

  After about an hour, the thought struck him that, if nothing else, there appeared to be an awful lot of young or middle-aged women – women who fit Professor Lane’s ‘twenty to forty’ window – with connections of one sort or another to Pitfeldy Castle’s ageing baron. A lifetime of flagrant womanising on Jock MacKinnon’s part had seen to that.

  Slipping a contemplative forkful of mash and gravy into his mouth, Haley turned his attentions to the other members of the MacKinnon family. Apart from the dreadful son, Rory, whom he’d met, Jock had had two other children, both daughters. Emma, who appeared to have joined herself in matrimony to some other inbred member of the Scottish aristocracy, and another girl by his first wife, Mary, who’d died in infancy over three decades ago.

  Now that was interesting. Was it that tragedy that had ended Jock MacKinnon’s first marriage? Or had Jock’s philandering been to blame, as it had been with his second marriage to Fiona, Rory and Emma’s mother? Not that either scenario was likely to have any bearing on the bodies in the bothy, specifically. But Stuart Haley was interested in what made a domineering cold fish like Jock MacKinnon tick, not to mention what caused him to defend his privacy so stridently. He’d made it very clear yesterday that he wanted Haley’s investigation closed, and the sooner the better.

  By the time he left the pub, darkness was already falling, shrouding the cobbled streets of the old town in a mellow orange-red glow. Haley hadn’t spent much time in Edinburgh since the days of Jean’s illness and the endless trips back and forth to see her oncologist at Western General. Dreadful times, and yet they’d also shared some of their deepest laughs on those trips to the city, bound together by a black humour and a determination not to let cancer defeat their spirits, as well as Jean’s body. Perhaps for that reason Haley still felt a fondness for Edinburgh, and he took his time walking to his car to begin the long drive back to Fochabers.

  His phone rang just as he got back to the NCP car park on Edinburgh Castle Terrace.

  ‘OK. So I ran the samples.’ Martha Lane’s distinctive southern drawl had him holding his breath. ‘Like I said this morning, I can’t be one hundred per cent definitive. But from the evidence available, I believe it’s highly likely that these remains are modern and relatively recent.’

  DI Haley exhaled. A surge of adrenaline coursed through him.

  ‘How recent?’

  ‘I would estimate the bodies went into the ground between ten and fifteen years ago. I can’t get it any narrower than that, because the first skeleton had slightly more signs of deterioration than the second.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ mused Haley. ‘OK. Any ideas why that should be?’

  ‘Not really. Full decomposition in that particular soil would have taken at least eight years, but beyond that there are different microbial factors at play, as well as variations in the degree of animal disturbance. Ten to fifteen is my best guess.’

  ‘Right,’ said Haley. ‘Thank you, Professor Lane. Thank you very much.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ She was about to hang up, but something made her hesitate. ‘I won’t presume to tell you how to do your job, DI Haley,’ she said suddenly. ‘But from a scientific perspective, I’d say the best evidence you have is those teeth from the first skeleton. There were no fillings or crowns, so nothing to positively confirm modernity. But they’re in excellent shape. Very well preserved, in life and post-mortem. Perhaps, if they were to match somebody’s records…?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Haley. ‘We’ll run them through missing persons first thing tomorrow. Thank you again, professor. Goodnight.’

  He started the car, his heartbeat and mind both racing.

  Ten to fifteen years.

  Blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull.

  Two women, buried deep in private woods on the Pitfeldy Castle estate.

  And a near-perfect set of teeth, to get the ball rolling.

  Guiltily, Stuart Haley realised that he was feeling more excited, more energised, than he had in years.

  He had a murder inquiry on his hands.

  Chapter Nine

  Iris dipped her brush into the pale, buttermilk oil paint she’d mixed earlier with various shades of yellow and white, and tried again to capture the light as it played through Kathy’s hair. Bloody hair. For something so incidental to the soul of a portrait it always seemed to take up an inordinate amount of time, at least for Iris. There were too many colours and textures and layers of movement. In Kathy Miller’s case there was also just too much of the damn stuff. Iris must remember to ask her next subject to wear a hat.

  Two weeks had gone by since an official murder inquiry was launched into the ‘Girls in the Wood’, as the bothy skeletons were now being called. During that time, Iris had been up at the castle most days for sittings with Kathy. There had been no more threatening notes. Perhaps having so many police sniffing around had frightened the letter writer off. In any event, with no more attempts to scare her into leaving, Kathy had resumed her laser-like focus on arrangements for her wedding. Most of the talk during her sessions with Iris revolved around make-up artists and the pros and cons of antique veils. But the murders were also a source of endless fascination, with Kathy offering various half-baked theories as to who the mysterious victims might have been. Today, in particular, the Girls in the Wood were on Kathy’s mind, thanks to last night’s televised press conference. It was the second DI Haley had held in as many weeks, earning himself the proverbial nul points from Jock MacKinnon.

  ‘You can’t really blame poor Jock for getting mad,’ Kathy said loyally, running a frustrated hand through her hair and immediately ruining all of Iris’s work of the last half-hour. ‘I mean, Haley as good as implied he was involved.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Iris, who had also watched the press conference and found herself warming more and more to DI Haley. In her view, the man was down to earth, hard-working, bright and, most unexpected of all in Iris’s own limited experience of police detectives, open-minded.

  A few days after news of the bodies’ discovery was made public, Iris’s own name leaked into the press, and the online ‘true crime’ community immediately went into conspiracy theory overdrive. Most people simply remarked on the coincidence of Iris having a connection to both the Girls in the Wood case and the Dom Wetherby murder. But a few of the postings on Iris’s public Facebook page had been less benign, accusing her of involvement in the killings to ‘raise her profile’. A few days ago things reached the point where Iris’s agent, Greta, insisted she call the police.

  ‘It’s one thing to make you out to be Carole Baskin,’ said Greta. ‘It’s another actually to threaten you.’

  Iris agreed, and dutifully forwarded the worst of her online abuse to DI Haley, without expecting much of a response. But, to her surprise, he’d called her back the same afternoon.

  ‘Most of these nutters are all talk,’ he reassured her. ‘But that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to get away wi’ it.’

  The following day, one of the trolls had been arrested.
So Iris was very much a fan of DI Haley.

  Not so Kathy Miller.

  ‘Didn’t you hear his answer to that question about “access” to the castle grounds?’ she protested, still fixated on the press conference. ‘He made a point of stressing that whoever buried the bodies in our bothy must have had “intimate knowledge” of the estate.’

  ‘Well, they must have,’ said Iris. ‘I don’t think he meant to accuse Jock, specifically.’

  ‘Sure he did,’ Kathy insisted. ‘The man’s an out-and-out socialist, did you know that? He hates the landed gentry and everything we stand for.’

  Iris noticed the ‘we’. How disappointed the author of the poison-pen letters would be to know that, in Kathy’s mind, she was already Lady Pitfeldy.

  ‘What were the police like during the Wetherby case?’ Kathy asked her, eager to hear Iris’s ‘inside track’ experience. ‘I mean, is this kind of harassment normal?’

  Iris frowned. ‘What kind of harassment?’

  It was one thing for Kathy to stick up for her fiancé, but another to parrot Jock’s patent nonsense about being harassed.

  ‘This Haley guy was up here again yesterday, asking Jock questions about his first wife. And about Mary, their baby who died. I’d call that harassment. Like, what the fuck does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Iris admitted, her mind drifting back to what Jamie Ingall had said in the pub about Jock’s first wife, Alice, ‘never being seen again’. She’d dismissed it as a joke at the time. Empty local gossip. But perhaps the police – or whoever wrote Kathy the note about Mary – knew something that she and Kathy didn’t?

  ‘I know it must feel like you’re under siege at times,’ said Iris, adopting a more conciliatory tone. ‘But actually I don’t think Haley’s hounding anyone. Until he knows who those women were, the only lead he has is the place they were buried. It’s his job to talk to Jock, and anybody else who had a connection to the estate ten or twenty years ago.’

  ‘OK, but bringing up a dead child?’ said Kathy. ‘I know Jock can come across as kind of brittle. And that a lot of people find him aloof.’

  And downright rude, thought Iris. And snobbish, and self-centred and entitled.

  ‘But he does have feelings,’ Kathy insisted. ‘He could barely bring himself to talk to me about what happened to Mary. And he tells me everything.’

  Iris smiled. For all her outer toughness, there was a naivety to Kathy Miller that reminded Iris how young she still was. No one ever told anybody ‘everything’. Least of all one’s lover.

  ‘Well,’ she said brightly, gesturing for Kathy to resume her former reclining pose as she picked up her brush again. ‘I daresay it’ll all be over soon. I can’t imagine two women could disappear without a trace up here without somebody reporting them missing.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Patting her legs, Kathy summoned her dogs back up onto her lap, gazing wistfully out of the window. ‘All I wanted when I moved in here was some peace,’ she sighed.

  Really? thought Iris, thinking of all Kathy’s battles with Rory and Emma, and the combative, feisty tone she took with any villagers who disliked her or dared to challenge her plans for the estate.

  If peace was what Kathy Miller wanted, she had a funny way of showing it.

  * * *

  Angus Brae was finishing the washing-up and listening to the cricket round-up on Radio 4 when he spotted the slight figure of DI Haley lifting the latch on his front garden gate. Drying the plate in his hands methodically with a tea towel, he set it down on the sideboard and walked over to open the door, trying to shake the automatic feeling of nervousness that seemed to overtake him whenever he saw a policeman, whether or not he’d done anything wrong.

  ‘Afternoon, detective inspector.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Brae.’ DI Haley was all smiles, which helped put Angus at ease. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Haley seemed to like him, as instinctively and wholeheartedly as he seemed to dislike the baron. ‘Do you have a moment for a wee chat?’

  ‘Of course.’ Angus returned the smile. ‘Come in.’

  Haley took a seat on the small, red-checked sofa opposite the fireplace.

  ‘Can I get you anything? A cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Haley shook his head. ‘I shan’t be staying long.’

  This was true, although DI Haley wished it weren’t. With Jock MacKinnon being so relentlessly obstructive and difficult, he’d had high hopes for extracting some more useful information about the estate and its workings from the young gillie. But thanks to the call he’d just had from his boss, Detective Superintendent Kirkwood, he’d have to scurry back to his desk by two to turn up the pressure on the missing persons team.

  ‘It’s been two weeks, and we still don’t know who the victims are,’ Kirkwood bellowed, stating the obvious. ‘Have you run the dental records yet?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Haley explained. ‘No matches yet. But not all of the missing women who fit our age profile had records on file. We’ve been chasing down the missing information –’

  ‘Well, chase it down faster, man!’ boomed Kirkwood. ‘And stop fannying about up at the castle. Am I clear?’

  ‘Sir.’

  Clarity wasn’t the superintendent’s problem. Patience, on the other hand, was sorely lacking. An ability to listen would also have been a refreshing change. No one was more frustrated than DI Haley that they hadn’t found a match to the dental records. But in the absence of that easy win, he’d been working day and night to build up a picture of the tight-knit Pitfeldy community at the time of the killings, in the hopes of unearthing a concrete lead. In two short weeks, besides ‘harassing’ the MacKinnon family, he’d exhaustingly interviewed everyone from the local publican to the vicar, schoolteachers, fishermen and even the drug dealers known to have been working the area back then. One was in prison at HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow, an exhausting four-hour drive from Pitfeldy. The other had found God and had become a social worker in Elgin. Haley had spent over an hour with them both, as a result of which he was only just beginning his research into female migrant workers in this part of rural Scotland. Migrants, and in particular prostitutes, were the most common ‘Jane Does’ in cases like these, where no one seemed to have reported the victims missing. But all of this took time. And while it was true that Haley hadn’t cracked it yet, nobody could have worked harder, or more thoroughly, to turn over every possible stone.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  Settling into his father’s old armchair, Angus’s voice was as gentle and inviting as Kirkwood’s had been loud and angry.

  ‘I’d like to ask you about your father.’ Haley cut right to the chase. ‘He was gillie here before you, is that right?’

  ‘Aye. That’s right,’ said Angus, stiffening slightly.

  ‘So he pretty much managed the estate overall, like you do?’

  Angus nodded. ‘The job’s not changed much. Fewer staff these days, and more of the estate’s sublet than in Dad’s day. But otherwise the same.’

  Haley looked around him at the bright, comfortable cottage, considerably better furnished than his own bungalow. ‘Did he live here, too?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘So you grew up in this house?’

  ‘I was born here,’ Angus confirmed, relaxing again slightly.

  ‘Your parents divorced when you were young.’ Haley looked down at his notes, then up at Angus, whose pale face was impassive. ‘And your mother, Linda Brae, moved away from the area. That must have been hard.’

  A muscle next to Angus’s left eye twitched slightly.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘So it was just you and your father here?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘He never married again?’

  ‘No.’ The faintest of smiles suggested that this idea amused Angus.

  ‘Where is your mother now, do you know?’

  Angus cleared his throat. ‘She lives on Shetland,’ he repl
ied, apparently without emotion. ‘Last I heard, anyway. We’re not in touch.’

  ‘OK.’ Haley nodded understandingly. ‘I gather your father’s living in a care home now, near Buckie?’

  ‘He is,’ said Angus. ‘Dad has Alzheimer’s. It’s pretty advanced at this point, I’m sorry to say.’

  Haley had heard the same story from a number of sources in Pitfeldy. How Edwin Brae had gone from being a sharp, laconic, capable man – albeit a bitter one after his divorce – to a dribbling wreck who couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was, or recognise friends he’d grown up with. It was a shame from Haley’s point of view, as it was really Edwin Brae he would have liked to have quizzed on the comings and goings up at the castle at the time the Girls in the Wood were buried beneath the bothy.

  ‘He was diagnosed young, at fifty,’ said Angus. ‘Early-onset, they call it. That was why he had to give up the job here.’

  ‘And you took over.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How well do you remember life on the estate ten or fifteen years ago, Angus?’ asked Haley, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. ‘The bothy was a ruin back then too, I assume.’