Murder at the Castle

by M. B. Shaw

  As far as Jock knew, Kathy was still only down in the village, staying with Iris Grey. She hadn’t returned to America yet, so theoretically he could still have driven to see her. Pleaded with her. Tried to explain. But he knew it would be futile. Her letter to him on the night she left had said as much. The love was still there. But without trust, there could be no future for the two of them. Nothing Jock could do would restore Kathy’s trust now. Because the truth wasn’t his to tell.

  The slope leading up to the bothy was steep, and the snow deeper and more uneven through the pines, but Jock didn’t mind the effort. Stopping frequently to catch his breath, sweat pouring down his shoulder blades and chest beneath his fleece-lined Barbour jacket, he picked his way gingerly over roots and animal burrows towards the crest of the rise. There, in the gathering gloom, the first of the grey stones loomed out of the darkness, a random scattering of rubble lining the way to what was left of the building.

  Sweeping aside the settled snow with a gloved hand, Jock eased himself down onto one of the larger slabs, leaning on his walking stick for support. The stick had been his father’s, and perhaps his grandfather’s too. He felt comforted by the connection, rubbing his thumb up and down the grain. The bothy would still have been standing in his grandfather’s day. He wondered if old Rufus MacKinnon had ever stood where he was sitting now, perhaps holding this same stick? Back before everything happened. Before tragedy struck, and then struck again, the blows falling continuously one after another, like a boulder gaining momentum as it crashed its way down a hill.

  Closing his eyes, Jock tried to feel something, but nothing came. He laughed at himself. What had he expected? To encounter the spirits of the dead? The ghosts of Christmas past? To find forgiveness? Redemption?

  You don’t deserve it, he reminded himself. Besides, there were no spirits here. Perhaps they were in Venice, beautiful, light-filled Venice? Perhaps they had escaped this dark place.

  Jock hoped so. He knew that he never would.

  ‘May I sit with you?’

  He turned around slowly, surprised but not startled.

  ‘Of course.’

  Iris Grey was standing at the top of the rise, just a few feet away. In an ugly grey puffa coat and scarf, she looked faintly ridiculous, like a human larva, or a bizarrely shaped balloon. But her expression was open and her voice kind. And Jock was ready to talk. More than ready.

  ‘How did you know I’d be here?’ he asked, clearing a space for her beside him in the snow.

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Iris. ‘But you weren’t at the castle, and I saw that your coat and stick were gone. And then what was left of your footprints in the snow seemed to be heading towards the woods…’

  ‘Quite the detective,’ he said sadly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Iris. ‘There’s still so much I don’t know. So much in the shadows.’

  Jock leaned back, closing his eyes. He looked ineffably tired.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I wish, Iris?’ he sighed. ‘I wish to God that you and Kathy and those dogs of hers had never found those bodies.’

  ‘Do you? Really?’ asked Iris.

  ‘I do.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I wish I’d never invited you here. Never given you that commission. Because without you, Kathy would have let it go. The police, too, in the end. The dead could have remained buried, resting in peace.’

  It wasn’t said angrily, but rather matter-of-factly. Somehow, that puzzled Iris more.

  ‘What on earth makes you think they were in peace?’ she asked him. ‘Dumped in an unmarked grave, unmourned, with their killer still at large?’

  ‘They weren’t unmourned,’ Jock corrected her. ‘I can promise you that. In any case, it doesn’t matter now. The dead are dead and what’s done is done. What matters is that Angus has been charged. And I know he’ll go through with it and plead guilty, because he’s a good boy, an honourable boy. But I can’t sit by and let that happen.’

  ‘You can’t let him keep lying to protect you, you mean,’ said Iris, suddenly finding herself angrier than she’d meant to be, despite Jock’s honesty.

  ‘That, certainly,’ said Jock, accepting her censure without complaint. ‘But that’s the easy part. You see the problem is, Iris, it isn’t only me that he’s protecting.’

  * * *

  Stuart Haley drove around the side of the castle to the stable block, parking his car out of sight of the main house. Then, grabbing his coat, gloves, torch and phone from the passenger seat, he stepped out into the snow.

  It would be dark in less than hour. Pitch-black, in fact. No moon tonight, and too much low cloud even for stars. He prayed that Iris was inside, talking to Jock somewhere in the castle. But all the lights seemed to be off and as far as Haley could tell, the house looked deserted. Not a good sign.

  How the hell had he let Iris talk him into this hare-brained scheme? If anything happened to her… but it wouldn’t. It mustn’t.

  Quickening his pace, he approached the castle doors.

  * * *

  ‘Tell me about Venice,’ said Iris.

  ‘All right.’ Jock exhaled, his breath visible as dragon’s smoke in the cold air.

  Even in the fading light, Iris could clearly see how the strain of the last few months had aged him. His thin face sagged noticeably at the jowls, and for the first time Iris was aware of a slight tremor in his right hand as it rested, knotted and veiny, on his knee as he began slowly to recount his long association with Venice, the city where this all began.

  ‘My first wife, Alice, and I first went to Venice together the spring after we married.’ His rheumy eyes glistened with nostalgia as he cast his mind back. ‘It was a magical place for us both. We didn’t have a lot of ready cash in those days. My father had left the estate with a good deal of debt, so we were working hard to get things back on track. Alice was always good about that sort of thing. She grew up on Shetland, so she was used to making do and mucking in. Anyway, we stayed at some cheap little pensione near St Mark’s Square. Alice loved all the art and the history. I was more interested in the pasta.’ He smiled weakly and it struck Iris that this was a side to Jock she had never seen before. Warm. Funny. Engaged. Was this what he’d been like as a young man, she wondered? If so, something very fundamental had changed.

  ‘I remember I got Alice a framed print of a medieval painting of St Theodore that she’d been mad about, for some reason,’ he went on. ‘Later, when our daughter Mary was born, she hung it over the baby’s crib. I think the saint was supposed to protect her. He did a fairly shitty job, unfortunately.’

  A short laugh indicated that this was meant as a joke, but the pain and bitterness in Jock’s eyes voided it of any humour. Iris sat patiently, waiting for him to continue. Expressing these underlying emotions was evidently important to him, a necessary precursor for whatever confession might be to come.

  ‘After Mary’s death, Alice changed. I suppose we both did. You expect the sadness, you see, but nobody warns you about the anger. The rage that comes with losing a child. I took Alice back to Venice a few months afterwards, to get away. I thought it might help bridge the distance between us, to return to a place where once we’d been so happy. But it was a huge mistake. The beginning of the end.’ He looked away sadly. ‘She left me soon after that. I didn’t handle it well.’

  In the ensuing silence, Iris cleared her throat, deciding to risk a question. ‘Is that when you began your affair with Linda Brae?’

  Jock flinched, then nodded. ‘Yes. I slept with a vast number of women in the months after Alice left,’ he explained bluntly. ‘I wasn’t in my right mind. But Linda was the only constant. I cared about her, actually, although of course I knew it was wrong.’

  ‘Because of Edwin?’

  ‘He was my oldest friend. My brother, really. But I justified it at the time because I was so angry at the world and I felt I deserved whatever shreds of happiness I could find. Also because Edwin was drinking heavily then and knocking Linda around. So I
told myself she needed me.’

  ‘Perhaps she did,’ Iris heard herself saying, moved by Jock’s honesty.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She needed a better man than me. Someone prepared to help her, to rescue her. I couldn’t do that, not without destroying Edwin completely. So like a fool I went and got engaged to Fiona.’

  ‘Why?’ Iris asked. ‘I mean, why the need to marry again at all, but especially so soon?’

  Jock looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  ‘I needed an heir for Pitfeldy, of course,’ he said, as if this explained everything. ‘A legitimate heir. Alice was gone, Mary was dead, Linda could never be mine in that way and Fiona was available. Pretty enough, good family. So I married her, and we had the children, and that was that. I built my own prison, you see?’ He looked up at Iris. ‘I became as trapped as Linda in my own way, and every bit as miserable. Our affair limped on, but it became more sporadic.’

  ‘And at some point during this period, Linda got pregnant with Angus?’ Iris prompted.

  ‘Yes. The year after the twins were born.’

  ‘Was he yours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ asked Iris. ‘Presumably Linda and Edwin still had relations?’

  ‘I assume they did, although we never discussed it. But it didn’t matter because Edwin wasn’t fertile. The doctors had told him as much years earlier. When Linda conceived he just assumed they must have been wrong, or that the baby was a freak occurrence. It never occurred to him that she would dare to have an affair. Least of all with me. Anyway, I knew Angus was mine but I could never confess to it, obviously.’ He rubbed his eyes, frowning. ‘I think, honestly, I’d become quite mentally unwell by that stage. I don’t offer that as an excuse for my behaviour, only as an explanation of sorts. In any event, I abandoned poor Linda completely after the baby was born, I just couldn’t cope with the guilt. Meanwhile, Edwin’s drinking was getting worse and worse. Linda was in an appalling situation. So one day, she left. She wrote me a letter, asking me to take care of Angus. And she just left.’

  ‘Why didn’t she take Angus with her?’ Iris asked the obvious question. ‘Why leave him behind with two men, both patently unfit to care for him?’

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Jock. ‘And I don’t know the answer.’ When he looked up, there were tears in his eyes. ‘She loved him, I know that. I can only conclude that my behaviour had pushed her – between us, Edwin and I had pushed her to the brink. I suppose she simply couldn’t cope, in the end. So.’ With an effort he pulled himself together, sitting up taller on the stone slab. ‘Life went on at the castle. Edwin sobered up after Linda left. Not perfectly, but he was a lot better for the first few years at least. He tried. He brought up Angus alone, but I stepped in as much as I could and always tried to ensure the boy was safe and happy and well cared for, especially when his father relapsed. Edwin loved Angus. We both did.’

  ‘And you had your own family to care for, of course,’ observed Haley. ‘Rory and Emma.’

  Jock’s expression darkened. ‘Fiona raised our children. It’s no secret that my second marriage was an unhappy one, and the simple truth is I have never been close to my children with Fiona. Love can’t be forced, Iris. After my daughter Mary died, something shifted in me. I loved her more than I can express. And later, to my surprise, I have to say, I came to love Angus. But I never felt that way for Rory or Emma.’

  He looked away again, his thoughts drifting to some far-off region where Iris couldn’t follow him. Eventually, he resumed his story.

  ‘I didn’t return to Venice for many years after Alice left me. But at some point, as you and DI Haley managed to work out, I did go back. I stayed at the Danieli with a group of gambling friends from London.’

  ‘Including Massimo Giannotti?’ Iris asked.

  ‘That’s right. Yes.’

  Silence fell, and Iris hesitated before filling it. She knew from Haley that Jock had denied raping Paola Contorini on this trip, but neither of them was sure whether that was the truth. Pressing the point and asking him again risked alienating him, just as he was starting to open up. On the other hand, this was in many ways the million-dollar question.

  In the end, to Iris’s surprise, Jock took the matter out of her hands.

  ‘Paola Contorini was working as a chambermaid at the hotel,’ he said, rubbing his forehead with a gloved hand. ‘I know that now, although naturally none of us knew any of the maids’ names at the time. Nor did I remember any one of them more than another. I do remember several of the maids being very eager to offer wealthy guests ‘extras’ if the price was right.’

  ‘And did you avail yourself of any of those “extras”?’ Iris asked, fighting down her distaste at Jock’s shameless description of the sexual exploitation of impoverished young women by rich, entitled tourists; as if there were nothing wrong with him and his friends treating hotel maids like objects to be bought.

  ‘Yes.’ He looked away.

  ‘Did you rape any of the maids, Jock?’

  ‘I might have.’ His voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, his shoulders began to shake. The tears that had been threatening to come ever since they began talking finally started to roll down his cheeks. ‘The police, Haley, asked me the same thing and I denied it. And the truth, the absolute truth on my little Mary’s soul, is that I don’t remember. If I did, I blocked it out. That’s all I can tell you. We were drunk. The girls all merged into one. When Paola turned up at Pitfeldy all those years later, I didn’t even recognise her.’

  ‘But she recognised you?’ said Iris.

  ‘Not at first. But eventually, yes.’ He nodded miserably and took a deep gulp of air, wheezing audibly as it filled his ageing lungs and coughing as he expelled it. Instinctively, Iris rested a hand on his back, rubbing and patting until the fit had passed. Perhaps she shouldn’t, but she felt sorry for him. It was impossible not to in that moment.

  ‘The whole business with Paola was one of those dreadful, freak coincidences,’ he explained, running a hand through his thinning hair. ‘A real black swan event. One in a million. She didn’t come here because of the rape, you see. Not at all. She came here looking for her daughter.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Iris. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘What happened was this,’ said Jock shakily. ‘Years after my stay at the Danieli, Angus went to Italy for a school art trip. They visited Florence first, I believe, and then went on to Venice. While he was there – only for a few days, mind you – he met a girl, Beatrice, as we now know, and fell in love. An eighteen-year-old’s version of love, anyway. He was obsessed.

  The first I heard about it was months after the fact, from Edwin, who by this time was beside himself with worry. More than worry. Panic. Encouraged by Beatrice, it seemed Angus had secretly applied to study art at Edinburgh University behind his father’s back and been accepted. Edwin found out and hit the roof. Forbade him to go. But for once Angus stood up to him. He took the place, left Pitfeldy for the city, and had Beatrice fly over from Italy and move in with him. Five minutes later, she’s pregnant and they’re getting married. It was all a bit of a mess, to say the least.’

  ‘So it was Edwin Brae who told you all this?’ Iris asked. ‘You didn’t hear it from Angus?’

  ‘No,’ said Jock. ‘Angus was quite secretive about the whole thing, at least at first. It was Edwin who told me. He came to see me up at the castle and asked my advice.’

  ‘And what advice did you give him?’ asked Haley.

  ‘Not to lose his temper,’ said Jock. ‘Which, I daresay, he felt was rich coming from me. But it was good advice, and it seems he took it at first. He went to the university to try and reason with Angus. He was already quite unwell by then, remember, and I didn’t have high hopes for this mission, but miraculously it seemed to work. Edwin kept a level head, and somehow convinced Angus to come home.’

  ‘How do you think he managed that?’ Iris in
terjected. ‘If Angus had ambitions of being an artist, which he obviously did, and he was in love, why would he agree to go back?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him,’ said Jock. ‘Beatrice had lost the baby, and I think they were struggling. But I suspect that was only part of the reason. Angus always had a pronounced sense of duty,’ he observed, a note of pride creeping into his voice. ‘That was one of his strengths.’

  ‘Duty to whom? His father?’ Iris asked.

  ‘Yes, to Edwin. And to the estate. And to me. To his role at Pitfeldy,’ Jock mused.

  My God, thought Iris, he really does live in another world. What about Angus’s duty to poor Beatrice? Or to himself? To his own hopes and dreams and wishes?

  ‘In any event, Angus came back to the castle and at first all seemed well enough. But then a few weeks later, Beatrice showed up on the castle doorstep.’ His eyes darkened suddenly, like a gathering storm. ‘That’s when everything began to spiral…’

  Stretching out his arms, he intertwined his bony fingers and bent back both sets of knuckles with an audible crack.

  ‘Beatrice came to try to convince Angus they should get back together?’ Iris prompted.

  ‘Yes. It was Mrs Gregory who let her in, not me. But my understanding is that she wanted Angus to come back to the city with her, to resume his degree,’ said Jock. ‘He was out working on the estate when she turned up, so she wandered out to find him. She must have come up here.’ He looked around at the desolate ruins of the bothy.

  ‘And she found Angus?’

  Jock shook his head. ‘No. If only she had.’ He looked Iris straight in the eye. ‘She found Edwin.’

  A heavy silence fell. After what felt like an age, Jock said quietly, ‘I don’t think he meant to kill her. I think it was an accident.’