The Time and the Place

by Jane Renshaw

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I woke a few times and you weren’t there.’

  ‘Ah. I’m afraid I had – digestive problems. Spent rather a lot of time in the bathroom. I’m not casting aspersions in any particular direction...’

  ‘I gave you food poisoning? That’s what you’re saying? I didn’t even cook for you last night.’ What a bloody cheek!

  ‘The lingering effects of the pheasant Islandais, perhaps.’ And he smiled down at his toast.

  ◆◆◆

  Mrs Mac handed her a floury list in her spidery writing: a list of things Claire had to do in preparation for the country house party at Aucharblet, which the Pitfourie ‘staff’ would attend to help out. They would stay there, Claire and Karen, until Thursday. Like they were stuck in an episode of Downton Abbey.

  ‘Best make a start,’ said Mrs Mac, going back to rolling pastry on the kitchen table.

  The first item on the list was ‘Press dinner suits, dress shirts and waistcoats’. Next, ‘Polish dress shoes.’ A bit of ironing and polishing should be easy enough. The problem was that obtaining the items was probably going to involve interaction with Hector.

  ‘Is Damian around?’ Maybe she could ask him to get her Hector’s stuff as well as his own.

  ‘Aye, he’ll be somewhere.’

  She left Mrs Mac in the kitchen and went upstairs. She had a list of her own to get through.

  1. Photograph at least ten high-value antiques and/or paintings and email the images to DCI Stewart.

  2. Find out what’s up with the tracker. Is it still in place? If not, find it.

  3. Check out the forestry headquarters where Chimp was just before he died.

  4. Talk to Damian about the accident.

  5. Talk to Jim Clack.

  6. Search Hector’s study.

  7. Talk to Karen about her boyfriend.

  She would start off with photographing stuff, carrying a duster in her hand as cover. In the drawing room, she snapped on the lights. It was a gloomy day, the sky out of the windows an oppressive mass of white and grey clouds smudged over each other. The novelty of the snow was wearing off, and she shivered as she looked out at the expanse of white that blanked out everything it covered: lawns, hedges, trees, fields, the distant hills.

  Or maybe she was just projecting her own dark mood.

  Come on, Claire.

  Looking around the room, she said a silent thank you to Grannie for educating her about art and antiques. She knew that, although the little watercolours of Scottish – local? – landscapes were pretty, they were unlikely to be worth more than a couple of hundred pounds. The small oil painting by the door, though, could be a find. It was a rather angular still life of oranges in a blue bowl on a white table cloth, with a window in the background showing the bare branches of a tree and a city terrace. Glasgow? Could it be by a Scottish Colourist? She squinted at the signature – and sure enough, the squiggle at the bottom left was ‘Peploe’ – Samuel Peploe.

  She took a few photographs of it on her phone, emailed them off to the DCI, and returned to the kitchen. Mrs Mac was stirring something in a pot – it smelt rather like feet. Sitting by the Aga, Claire pulled on her walking boots and gaiters while Mrs Mac took her through the recipe for venison, cauliflower and cabbage pie.

  ‘I hope it tastes better than it smells!’ Claire smiled.

  Mrs Mac regarded her stonily.

  ‘Okay, I’m off to get some holly. To decorate the pictures with.’

  Mum always liked to buy lots of fresh greenery at Christmas – holly to place on top of pictures and lots of leafy frondy stuff to put in vases with flowers. It was really nice, in a London flat without a garden, to bring nature inside in winter. Claire hadn’t had the sort of country childhood where they all went out collecting it from the woods, but how difficult could it be? She took one of the big wicker baskets hanging from hooks in the scullery and a pair of big scissors from the kitchen, and headed off into the snow, feeling like Little Red Riding Hood.

  By the time she’d found the collection of buildings in the wood that were the centre of the estate’s forestry operations, she had quite a haul in her basket – boughs of holly with their cheerful ruby-red berries, some lichen-covered twigs, a few cones.

  The forestry depot consisted of a wide clearing with a couple of lorries in it and the inevitable Land Rover, and a collection of buildings: a run of sheds with gaps between the planks of their walls seemed to contain firewood, and another – from what she could see through the windows – was workshops, with a circular saw, presumably for cutting up the logs. There was a cabin too, with a cute porch like those she’d seen on Victorian cottages in the area, with knobbly tree trunks, stripped of their bark and painted, forming the uprights. Its windows were warm yellow rectangles in the gloom of the forest.

  If Hector was in there –

  If Hector was in there, what would she do?

  She didn’t know. She couldn’t even predict her own actions any more, so how the hell could she be expected to second-guess his? She had no idea whatsoever what was going on with him. What it was, between them. What he was thinking about her.

  If he was thinking anything at all.

  She peered through a window.

  Norrie was sitting at a desk, phone to his ear.

  ‘That’s a gey good haul you’ve got there,’ he said as she entered the cabin, putting the phone down.

  Claire contemplated the basket. ‘I’m going to Christmas up the House. Well, the hall, anyway.’

  He nodded at the only Christmas decoration in the room – a tacky plastic Santa on the windowsill. ‘We’re mair at the tat end of the spectrum here.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Ach, poor Suntie!’ he grinned. ‘You’ll hae a cuppie?’ He stood, indicating a table with a kettle on it and a canister of instant coffee.

  ‘Thanks, that would be lovely.’

  He opened the back window and pulled in a carrier bag with a carton of milk in it. ‘Nature’s refrigerator.’

  As they sipped their coffee and demolished a couple of Breakaways, Claire said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work. This is going to sound really ridiculous, but as I was walking through the wood, I kept thinking someone was following me. So when I saw the lights on in here...’ She took another glug of coffee. May as well use the same script with which she’d had success with Mick and Damian. ‘I think I’m getting a bit paranoid.’ She paused. ‘Mick was saying he doesn’t think what happened to Chimp was an accident.’

  He sucked in a breath. ‘Aye, it was a terrible thing, but the Procurator Fiscal’s verdict –’

  ‘Yes, but Mick can’t understand how Chimp could have drowned accidentally. And he’s sure he wasn’t suicidal.’

  A long silence.

  Then: ‘Na. He had something on his mind, I’d say, but nae copping himself. I’m sure o’t.’

  She pounced on that. ‘You saw him? That day?’

  ‘Aye. I was here when he came in aboot.’

  ‘In a boot...?’

  ‘In about,’ he said with a smile. ‘When he appeared. I helped him unload the wood and stack it.’

  ‘And you thought he had something on his mind?’

  ‘Aye, but he wisna suicidal.’ He snorted, and tossed the biscuit wrapper into a waste paper basket. ‘Said he’d something to take care of and then he’d see us all in the Forbes Arms for the match. The football match. Hector said I shouldna tell the police, mind, that I was the last to see him. So if you could keep that to yourself...’

  All she could do was stare at him.

  Chimp had said he had something to take care of –

  ‘If I’d had anything to do wi’t, I wouldna be letting on to you I’d seen him, would I?’ Norrie Hewitt said, a firmness coming into his voice.

  She shook her head. ‘No, of course not. But why would Hector tell you not to say you’d seen him?’

  ‘That Campbell Stewart’s an affa lad for jumping to conclusions.
If he knew I was the last to see Chimp, God himself knows what he’d make of it. That was Hector’s worry.’

  ‘So – Hector also thinks it wasn’t an accident?’

  Norrie shook his head. ‘Ach, it was a terrible thing.’

  And he changed the subject to Pond Cottage and how she was settling in.

  ◆◆◆

  Walking back to the House through the snow, Claire moved like an automaton, hardly conscious of where she was. Before she knew it, she was standing at the edge of the pond, looking out over its frozen expanse – completely frozen, now – with no memory at all of striking off the main path to get here.

  Hector had told Norrie to withhold information from the inquiry. Vital information. The information that Chimp had said he had ‘something to take care of’. Did that mean... Could that mean that Hector really did kill him? Chimp had been onto something and Hector had killed him? Why else would he tell Norrie to keep schtum?

  Her phone buzzed.

  DCI Stewart again?

  ‘We’ve had a break. Damian Forbes has handed in a Nokia phone which was apparently found in a ditch by Karen DeCicco. There’s a text message on it from John received on the day we think he died. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘The phone is Hector’s? But why would Damian –’

  ‘We haven’t established whose it is yet.’

  She breathed out.

  ‘Do you know anything about it?’ he repeated.

  ‘No. I know Karen found a phone... She was drying it out in the kitchen a few days ago, to see if it was usable.’

  ‘We’re on our way to question her now. If you can contrive to sit in as a responsible adult, that might be useful.’

  ‘What did the text message say?’

  ‘“OK see you at 6 at boathouse.” If John did meet someone there, obviously this is hugely significant. Whoever owned this phone may well be his killer.’

  The boathouse. The boathouse she was staring at now, its silvery old wood furred with frost. She climbed the steps to the verandah. In the thin panes of wavy glass in the windows on either side of the door, her own wide-eyed reflection looked back at her, distorted and fractured and strange. Did what Chimp had to ‘take care of’ involve a meeting with someone here? And who else would that someone be, but Hector?

  Two pieces of the jigsaw had aligned, as often happened. Everyone on a case would be floundering around and it would seem no one was getting anywhere, and then suddenly, often on the same day, two bits of evidence from different sources would come in and it would immediately be obvious how they slotted together, how they aligned to point to the answer.

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should be at the House in fifteen minutes. Can you be there?’

  She should tell the DCI what she’d just found out. About Chimp having something to take care of. About Hector not wanting that to get back to the police.

  But: ‘Yes,’ was all she said.

  27

  Karen shoved the hoover back and forth across the expanse of parquet flooring in the Terrace Room, shivering in the cold air that seeped in through all those big windows. This room was always like an icebox, unless you lit a fire in the huge stove. And as a servant she wasn’t, of course, allowed to do that. It was like class privilege extended to who got to be warm and who had to freeze their tits off. The hoover wasn’t even working properly. It wasn’t picking up the dirt and it was making a horrendous noise. Hector had probably a million pounds in the bank but he was too tight to spend a few hundred on decent equipment for the minions?

  She unplugged it and pushed it along the corridor to the hall.

  Damian was probably at the police station at Inverurie now, where the team that had investigated Chimp’s death were based. But there was no point stressing about it. She had stuff to do. She had to return the silver fork with its incriminating family crest – yet another example of upper class inconsideration. It should be simple enough to put it back in the cupboard in the butler’s pantry, unless Mrs Mac had locked it again and taken away the key.

  She may as well do it now. There was no one about.

  She plugged the hoover into a socket under a window in the dining room and did a bit of token back and forth with it. Then she switched it off, removed the fork from her pocket, and opened the door to the butler’s pantry. The key was, thankfully, still in the lock of the cupboard. She opened it and tucked the fork at random into one of the cloth rolls.

  ‘Ms DeCicco?’ said a deep voice behind her.

  Her hand jerked up and whacked on the inside of the cupboard as she whipped round.

  A big man and a skinny woman were staring at her. She recognised them from before, from when she’d had to give a statement about finding Chimp’s body.

  She blinked at them.

  Fuck!

  What was Ade going to say when he found out she’d been caught pretty much red-handed? And there was fucking Claire, lurking behind the cops! Had she rumbled Karen and dobbed her in?

  The fucking bitch!

  Claire said, ‘Karen, this is DCI...’

  ‘Stewart,’ the man supplied. ‘And DS Melissa Gardiner. You might remember us.’

  ‘I found it on the carpet,’ Karen gabbled.

  ‘What?’ said the man.

  ‘The fork. When I was hoovering. I was just putting it back.’ Her heart was thumping so hard she was sure they could see it banging against her fleece.

  ‘These police officers need to talk to you about that phone you found,’ said Claire, and turned to the man. ‘Maybe you could use the library upstairs?’

  Oh my God! Fucking Damian!

  ‘I’ll sit in with you if you like, Karen,’ said Claire, a hand on her arm.

  Karen could only nod.

  In the library, she and Claire sat on the big purple sofa and DCI Stewart and DS Gardiner took the wing chairs on either side of the fireplace.

  ‘Damian Forbes has told us,’ said DCI Stewart, ‘that you found the phone but didn’t want to hand it in yourself because you have PTSD and wanted no further involvement in the investigation into John Cameron’s death. Is that correct?’

  Karen shrugged.

  ‘PTSD?’ said Claire.

  No one else filled the silence, so in the end Karen said, ‘Yeah. I found Chimp’s body.’

  ‘Oh! Oh God!’ Claire rubbed her arm.

  ‘Is what Damian Forbes has told us correct?’ persisted the cop.

  Karen sighed. ‘I thought you might think it was suss that I found his body and then I found this phone... With a text message from Chimp on it.’

  ‘Where exactly did you find it?’

  ‘On the drive. Well, in the ditch by the drive. It was in a carrier bag. I picked it up because, well, litter... Then when I saw there was a phone inside I thought, maybe it still works. Can you, like, analyse it and get fingerprints or DNA off it?’

  ‘We’re putting it through a forensic analysis, yes. For which we’ll need your fingerprints for elimination.’

  ‘Does this mean you think Chimp was definitely murdered?’

  ‘We’ll be looking into this new evidence. That’s all we can say at this point.’ He shook his head at her. ‘You really should have brought this to us immediately.’

  ‘How was I to know it was anything to do with Chimp? God!’

  ‘When you did realise...’

  ‘You’ve got the phone now,’ Claire intervened. ‘Surely that’s the important thing. Is that all you need from Karen?’

  ‘I think that’s about it for now,’ said the cop. ‘DS Gardiner will write out a statement for you, Karen, based on the answers you’ve just given us, and if you could check it over and sign it... And then you can show us where exactly you found the phone.’

  Karen took them to a random place on the drive. DS Gardiner had stupid thin trousers and suede boots on and she tiptoed along trying to keep out of the deep bits of snow. DCI Stewart just forged ahead like a big bull, snow spraying up f
rom his shoes as he went.

  ‘I think it was about here,’ she said. ‘Close to that little tree. Obviously it was before there was snow on the ground, so I can’t be sure exactly.’

  DS Gardiner started taking photographs, and she and Claire left the cops to it.

  As they walked back up the drive, Claire said, ‘Your boyfriend doesn’t like you having your own phone?’

  Karen sighed. Damian had obviously got to her. ‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘I don’t want a phone. It’s, like, totally pathetic the way everyone is so dependent on them.’

  ‘So if you don’t want a phone, why did you “rescue” the rescue phone?’

  ‘Because it was a total waste, throwing out a perfectly good phone. God! What has Damian been telling you about Ade?’

  ‘Damian’s worried that he’s showing signs of... controlling behaviour. Okay, okay, I know, it’s none of his business, or mine either. But –’ She stopped, and touched Karen’s arm. ‘When you’re... attracted to someone, when you have strong feelings for them, it’s all too easy to... to get sucked in. To ignore the warning signs. To kid yourself that totally unacceptable behaviour is perfectly fine.’

  Karen pulled her arm away and kept walking. ‘You’ve never even met Ade!’

  ‘No, but –’

  ‘Butt out, Claire!’

  She started to run, up the drive and in at the front door. Why were people so fucking judgemental? Damian had met Ade once, and apparently that was enough to decide that he was some sort of evil monster who had her in his power. And thanks to Damian, the chances were that Ade was going to find out about the rescue phone. What was she going to say? What reason could she give for why she hadn’t immediately come to him with it?

  She supposed she’d better finish the hoovering. She chucked her coat onto a chair and lugged the hoover from the dining room through the billiard room, which was hardly ever used, so she’d not bother with it. She opened the door into the sitting room at the end.

  Damian.

  Standing by a window looking at her with that I know what you’re thinking expression she’d always found so irritating, and which now made her want to slap his face.