Murder at the Castle

by M. B. Shaw

  ‘Oh aye. It’s been in a state for years.’

  ‘Were there any young or middle-aged women who used to frequent the estate during your childhood? Friends or girlfriends of any of the farm workers, maybe. Or even friends of the baron that you remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Angus firmly.

  Haley frowned. ‘Really? None at all?’

  ‘The baron and Lady Pitfeldy had house guests, obviously. Men and women. But I never knew them. There were labourers that came through sometimes, pickers mostly,’ said Angus, rubbing his brow, as if trying to coax the memories back. ‘Bulgarians and a few Romanians. My dad didn’t trust them, but some of the tenant farmers took advantage of the cheap labour. On the side, you know.’

  Haley nodded. He knew. Up until a few years ago, when the Government finally cracked down on it, there’d been a scandalous use of virtual slave labour in parts of rural Scotland, exploiting illegal immigrants and refugees.

  ‘They were mostly men, though,’ said Angus. ‘I suppose I did see the occasional lass looking for work.’

  ‘Prostitutes?’ Haley asked bluntly.

  ‘Maybe, some of them, I suppose.’ Angus blushed and looked away awkwardly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And did Jock MacKinnon?’

  ‘The baron knew nothing about it,’ Angus leaped to Jock’s defence before Haley could even finish his question. ‘He was never hands-on with the estate workers, not then and not now. My dad oversaw all that.’

  It wasn’t what Haley had been about to ask. He was more interested in Jock MacKinnon’s womanising fifteen years ago than he was in dodgy hiring practices at Pitfeldy Castle. But he let it drop. Angus Brae’s unexpectedly fierce and defensive loyalty towards Jock suddenly seemed more relevant.

  ‘You’re close to the baron?’ he probed gently.

  ‘He’s a good man.’ Angus shifted his gaze uncomfortably.

  ‘Is he? Not everybody seems to think so.’

  ‘Look, I’m no’ pretending he’s a saint,’ Angus admitted. ‘The way he treated Fiona was… let’s just say he’s not an easy man to be married to. But he’s always been very kind to me. And to my father, who also wasn’t an easy man.’

  ‘He and your father were boyhood friends?’ Haley asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Angus nodded, ‘they were like brothers.’

  ‘Does Jock visit him, in the home?’

  Perhaps he imagined it, but Haley could have sworn he saw Angus wince at this question, as if it caused him physical pain.

  ‘No.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘There’s no point. Dad wouldn’t know who he was.’

  ‘But you visit?’

  Another wince. ‘Sometimes. Not often anymore, to be honest with you.’ He looked up at the clock above the kitchen dresser. ‘I really ought to be getting back to work.’

  ‘Yes. So should I,’ said Haley, getting to his feet. He would have preferred a longer interview with Angus, but at least today’s initial chat had borne some fruit.

  The prostitute angle might well become more important, especially if they failed to score a dental records match. It had always saddened Haley that the public tended to lose interest in murder cases once it emerged that the victims were sex workers. Or perhaps it wasn’t interest they lost so much as sympathy. It was the same story with addicts. As if falling prey to heroin or being driven to sell one’s body for a living made someone less of a person. Stuart Haley certainly didn’t share this view. But plenty of his colleagues did. If the Girls in the Wood did turn out to have been prostitutes, he knew he would have to fight even harder for resources and access than he was doing now.

  Haley liked Angus Brae, but it rankled that what Stuart considered to be forelock-tugging, self-abasing feudal allegiance to one’s ‘laird’ was still alive and well, even among the younger generation. Was Angus’s affection for Jock MacKinnon based on his view of the baron as ‘a good man’? Or did Angus leap to his defence simply because Jock was his master, and the boy had been raised since birth to think of working on the estate as a kindness he’d been given, rather than a job of work that he was paid to do because he’d earned it?

  It was enough to make DI Haley despair for the future.

  * * *

  Fiona MacKinnon sat at the desk in her Edinburgh flat, carefully smoothing down her Viyella skirt before flipping open her pristine-clean laptop computer. All of Fiona’s movements were measured and thoughtful, as carefully curated as the objects that surrounded her. Never beautiful in the classical sense of that word, she had long taken pride in being considered elegant; a word she felt implied a certain orderliness, not only of mind and body, but also of one’s environment. Thanks to her husband’s cruelty, she’d been forced to exchange a fairy-tale castle for a relatively modest Victorian conversion on Belgrave Crescent. Jettisoned in her late fifties like a piece of rotten fruit, by a man she’d supported and forgiven and, if not loved, then at least loyally tolerated for most of her adult life, she’d had no choice but to swallow this bitter pill.

  Even so, within her new, limited environs, Fiona had created something lovely, something ‘elegant’ that reflected her eye for both beauty and restraint. The flat was neither cluttered nor bare, neither a museum piece nor a dissonantly modern attempt at ‘new beginnings’. Instead, it was a warm, feminine, classically designed space. She felt at peace here, amid her Victorian furniture and Osborne & Little fabrics, with her bespoke Danish standard lamp lighting the lonely evenings and her vintage typewriter adding a discreet touch of nostalgic glamour to her Renaissance-style escritoire – a smaller desk reserved purely for letter writing. Above her main work desk, a small sixteenth-century Venetian oil painting of an Italian noblewoman was one of the few treasures Fiona had brought with her from Pitfeldy. Ironically, Jock had bought it for her as a gift on one of their early anniversaries, but she’d kept it for its beauty and the skill of its execution, rather than for any sentimental reasons. The time for sentiment had long passed.

  Clicking onto her newsfeed, she opened the latest breathless article on the Girls in the Wood, reading each word carefully, several times. No longer having a grand house to run left one with a vast amount of time to indulge in reading. Now that initial shock had faded (when first Rory had told her that two women’s bodies had been exhumed from underneath the old bothy, she’d had to grab onto the kitchen counter to stop her knees from giving way), she was beginning to enjoy following the ins and outs of the investigation.

  Well, perhaps ‘enjoy’ was the wrong word. An inelegant word, at any rate, given that two po0r souls had lost their lives and their corpses hidden away up there to rot. Fiona MacKinnon might be physically alive, but she knew what it was like to lose the life you’d built for yourself and then be stuffed away out of sight. Hidden. Denied. Forgotten.

  Only she hadn’t forgotten. She, Fiona, knew a lot of things that had happened at Pitfeldy Castle. Fifteen years ago. Ten years ago. And much more recently. She’d already had a call from the police, asking her to contact them if she had any pertinent information or felt she could contribute to their inquiries.

  She could. And she would, eventually. But for the moment she was still weighing up exactly what her contribution would be. How could she exact the maximum revenge and destruction on those who had conspired to destroy her, without at the same time hurting her children? Rory still stood to inherit the castle in Jock’s will, and Emma had been left some significant MacKinnon family heirlooms, despite the new slut’s best efforts to grab as much for herself as possible. At the moment, despite their estrangement, Rory was still in charge of drawing up the prenup for his father’s impending marriage. But things could change. Fiona MacKinnon knew that better than anybody.

  She’d half expected Jock to call her once the news about the bodies broke and leave some bullying message, warning her to keep her mouth shut about her years as Pitfeldy’s chatelaine. But he hadn’t. Too besotted, no doubt, with the American she-wolf he’d
installed in her place, even to realise that the wife he no longer loved might be a threat to him. To them.

  Scrolling down, Fiona clicked on a photograph of Iris Grey, the renowned portrait painter who’d apparently discovered the remains. Evidently, Jock had commissioned Iris to paint a portrait of the she-wolf for a six-figure sum, an extravagance he would never have countenanced back in the old days. The picture showed a small, fragile woman with dark hair and wide-set eyes, who seemed to be inordinately fond of beads. Odd that Jock should go for a hippyish type – he’d always loathed them. Perhaps Iris Grey was pretty enough for him to have made an exception?

  There was a lot of nonsense flying around online about Iris’s connection with another murder. Somehow Fiona had managed to miss all the media hype about the Dom Wetherby case. Reeling from her divorce at the time, she’d had little appetite for tabloid scandals. But she was interested now. Interested in Iris, and the Wetherby murder, and the Girls in the Wood. It was surreal to see people openly discussing Jock’s affairs on the Internet. Bloggers had even brought up Alice, his first wife who’d run off after Mary had died, muckraking through Jock’s ‘colourful’ past in a way Fiona knew would enrage him like a stuck bull. Hopefully, to a point where he might do something stupid and lash out.

  Deep down, the person Fiona MacKinnon really wanted to see convicted was that scheming bitch Kathy Miller. If anyone deserved to be buried in Pitfeldy woods, preferably with a stake through the heart, it was her.

  Closing her laptop, she walked slowly over to her escritoire.

  She felt a letter coming on.

  * * *

  Kathy was in her dressing room when she found it, carefully lodged behind her yoga mat.

  Pushing down the sense of dread that momentarily assailed her – she wouldn’t be afraid; she mustn’t be afraid – she picked up the envelope, feeling the familiar texture of the stiff paper as she held it between her thumb and forefinger. She’d only finished her yoga session just before teatime and put the mat back right afterwards. So whoever had left the note had done so in the last few hours.

  Angrily, and more carelessly than usual, she ripped it open and read the note inside.

  Then, closing the door, she rang Iris.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, unable to keep the tremble out of her voice. ‘We need to go to the police.’

  Chapter Ten

  Retired GP Dr Gerald Bowman was a fit, upright old man with twinkling blue eyes set deep into a face as brown and wrinkled as a pickled walnut.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you unannounced,’ DI Haley apologised as Pitfeldy’s former doctor showed him into his handsome Georgian town house. ‘But I happened to be passing, and hoped you might be able to answer a few questions.’

  ‘Of course.’ The old man seemed delighted. He seemed delighted by the unexpected company. ‘I can’t imagine what I might know that would be useful to you, but do please fire away.’

  Walking into the Bowman house was like stepping onto the set of a Richard Curtis film. Everything here was picture-perfect, full of warmth and happiness, steeped in solid but not ostentatious wealth mixed with a certain all-pervasive nostalgia, like a ripe strawberry dipped in chocolate. A fire crackled away merrily in the beautifully appointed drawing room, old-fashioned but lovely in its way with its antique Knowle sofas and battered-leather club fender. Copies of Fly Fishing Today and Horse & Hound littered every side table and bookshelf, and an arthritic Labrador that looked as old as his master lay farting contentedly in a rattan basket by the door. From the kitchen came the sweet smell of freshly baked biscuits, as well as the unmistakable sound of the cricket commentary on Radio 5 Live, which the old man immediately offered to turn down.

  ‘So we can hear ourselves think. We’re playing dreadfully badly anyway, I’m afraid.’

  The ‘we’, along with the resonant RP accent, belied the fact that the old man was not a Scot. But despite this, and despite his self-evident poshness, DI Haley found himself immediately drawn to Doc Bowman. Unlike Jock MacKinnon, he wasn’t a snob. And the elements of the past that he clung to and chose to surround himself with at home struck Haley as endearingly sentimental. Perhaps I’m getting old, he mused. Or maybe it was just a nice change to be spending time with somebody who appeared to be unambiguously happy.

  After a few minutes the two men were ensconced on one of the sofas, drinking tea and helping themselves from a generous plate of shortbread biscuits.

  ‘These are delicious,’ said Haley truthfully, through a mouthful of crumbs.

  ‘They’re home-made,’ said Bowman, ‘not by me, I hasten to add. That’d be your fastest way to an early grave, detective inspector, eating my cooking. No, these were baked by my daughter Cassie. She’s quite the Delia Smith of the family, I can assure you. Anyway, I’m rambling. You didn’t come here simply to eat biscuits. How can I help?’

  ‘I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about Alice MacKinnon,’ Haley asked. ‘She was a patient of yours, I believe? Before she and the baron divorced?’

  ‘She was.’

  ‘You remember her, then?’

  ‘Oh Lord, yes.’ The lines in the old man’s face deepened into crevices as he frowned in concentration. ‘I remember her very well. I saw Alice throughout her pregnancy. And afterwards, of course, when her baby died. Dreadful thing.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Haley asked. ‘The baby, I mean.’

  ‘It was a cot death,’ said Dr Bowman. ‘Which is really just shorthand for “we don’t know”. Of course this was going back to the early eighties. Much of the advice given to new parents then we now know to be wrong. Putting infants to sleep on their stomach, and so forth.’

  Haley nodded thoughtfully. ‘Alice MacKinnon left Pitfeldy shortly after the child’s death.’

  ‘That’s right. Mary, that was the baby’s name,’ he remembered suddenly. ‘The marriage collapsed completely, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Were you surprised by that?’

  The old man’s frown deepened. ‘No.’

  He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, then continued.

  ‘Jock was a patient of mine, too. The little girl’s death hit him very hard, perhaps harder even than it did his wife. Looking back, one can see he was in shock. But at the time, there was just this tremendous well of anger. He was raging at the heavens, really, but it came out in these dreadful flashes of temper towards poor Alice.’

  ‘He hit her?’ Haley asked bluntly.

  ‘I’ve no proof of that but it wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Bowman cautiously.

  ‘She never came in with a black eye or broken bones?’

  ‘No. But she was frightened of him, that much I do know. Jock MacKinnon changed after that child died, detective inspector, beyond all recognition. He went from being a happy, loving young man to a – well, to a bully, I suppose. Angry at everything. Poor Alice was grieving, she needed him, but he couldn’t support her. He was tearing her to shreds. So no, I was not surprised when she left him.’

  Haley took all of this in. Jock the bully required no particular stretch of the imagination. The hard part was picturing him before baby Mary’s death, as a ‘happy, loving’ husband. But he had no reason to believe Bowman was misremembering.

  ‘Did you ever see or hear from Alice again, after she left Pitfeldy?’ Haley asked.

  ‘I used to get Christmas cards for a while.’ The doctor said. ‘But at some stage they stopped. The later ones came from Shetland,’ he added wistfully. ‘Beautiful place, Shetland. I lost track of her after that.’

  Shetland. Haley’s mind raced. Who’d been talking to him about Shetland recently? And losing touch?

  It came to him suddenly. Angus Brae. His mother had left Pitfeldy too, ran out on her marriage to his father Edwin, the old gillie and Jock MacKinnon’s boyhood pal. Linda Brae’s departure would have been a few years after Alice MacKinnon took off. But she’d also fled to Shetland. Was that a coincidence? Or was there a link between these two women, something
that had drawn them both to each other and to these faraway islands?

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember when Alice’s cards stopped arriving, Dr Bowman?’ Haley asked.

  The old man shook his head. ‘Not exactly, no. But a good while ago now. If I had to guess, I’d say about – fifteen years?’

  Fifteen years. Haley felt a dryness in his throat.

  ‘Thank you. One last question,’ he said, looking the old man in the eye. ‘You don’t happen to know the name of Alice’s dentist?’

  * * *

  Back at the station, Haley was immediately ambushed by his sergeant, Danny Spencer. The young man was so excited, and speaking so rapidly, that it took Haley a few moments to understand what he was saying.

  ‘Hold on, Danny, You’re telling me that Kathy Miller called you…’

  ‘Yes, sir. She called first, and then later she drove down to the station and dropped off a wee baggie.’

  ‘A bag containing glass beads?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Beads that one of Ms Miller’s dogs had swallowed at the crime scene and subsequently –’

  ‘Excreted, sir. Yes.’

  Haley rubbed his eyes. Was this what this case was coming to? A little plastic bag of pooed-out beads?

  ‘She does realise that no one’s supposed to be going near that bothy?’ he said angrily. ‘What was the dog doing up there? And is she certain that’s where these damn beads came from? Couldn’t he have picked them up somewhere else?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. According to Ms Miller, the animal ran off while she was out for a walk yesterday and made straight for the bothy before she could stop him.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Haley grunted, unconvinced.

  ‘She said the dog ran under the tape, and when it came out again she could see it had something in its mouth. Something dangling, she said. But by the time she got hold of it again, it had swallowed whatever it was. So then today, when the doggie did his business, she saw the beads, all blue and shining, and she thought maybe they belonged to one of the victims.’