by John Burke
‘She gave me the impression that you would know more about the financial implications.’
‘She did, did she?’
‘I do need your help,’ Lesley Gunn persisted. ‘About the running of the house as well. Who does what, who comes and goes, anything suspicious or out of the ordinary — anything that will give us a lead.’
‘I wasn’t even here when it happened. I was in Edinburgh.’
‘Even so, you must have ideas about … well …’
Their attention was distracted by Caroline arriving with two bottles, each carried carefully in a wine cradle. She opened a cupboard and took out glasses while her father slowly drew the cork from one bottle.
‘Not much choice, really,’ she said.
‘Hm? What?’
‘You said there was plenty of choice. Not many bottles in the racks, actually.’
‘They’ve taken the wine as well?’
‘Most of it. Or have you been running stocks down? You did say the whole wine tasting programme had been a flop.’
Her father looked confused. ‘Maybe. Yes. But I thought there was plenty left.’
He wasted no time in any act of sniffing and swirling the plum-red liquid around in the glass, but took a long gulp.
Caroline sipped and made a face. She bent over the label. ‘I thought you were supposed to have some noble vintages down there.’
Brigid looked over her shoulder. ‘That’s a premier cru. What’s wrong with it?’
‘Tastes like something you’d knock back on some Italian hillside when you were too sun-drunk to notice.’
‘All tastes the same to me,’ confessed her father.
‘Are you sure you weren’t taken for a ride by that grotty little wine snob?’ She studied the label again. ‘Or has someone been topping these up from a tanker?’
‘Tastes perfectly good to me,’ Brigid insisted.
Her husband had another slurp. ‘Dacre, what d’you make of it?’
Greg knew very little about wine, but was ready to put on a reasonable performance. As the ghost of a qualified vintner, he swirled the wine gently, held it up to the light, sniffed, and took a sip, then a larger gulp.
‘It’s a bit on the tart side,’ he admitted.
Brigid glared at him. ‘Since when have you been …’
There was a sound of tyres on the gravel outside. Caroline went back to the window.
‘Oh, no. It’s a coachload. Turning into the yard.’
DI Gunn joined her and looked out. ‘You’re open to the public on a Sunday?’
‘Saturdays, Sundays and Wednesdays in the season. Forgot all about it, with this flap going on. Why on earth didn’t Mrs Dunbar think of it?’
Hector Crombie tipped the bottle towards his glass. ‘Damn-all for them to see. Half the things in the booklet are missing.’
Brigid helped herself to another slice of cold roast duck. ‘We’ll have to put up a notice. Closed until further notice.’
Caroline hurried out of the room.
People were already walking towards the stable block to buy tickets and be tempted into the gift shop or the refreshment room. It was a pattern all tourists took for granted, part of what holidays were about: coach trips, pac-a-macs, pubs, souvenir shops and stately homes.
‘They’ll be trampling all over any evidence there might be.’ DI Gunn set off after Caroline.
McKechnie strode in. ‘We’ve only just realised, your ladyship —’
‘Yes,’ snapped Brigid. ‘So have we. Do get out there and turn them away. And then we’ll have to notify the tourist offices. Closed until further notice,’ she repeated.
*
Lesley Gunn caught up with Caroline, who was being freezingly polite but firm with the coach driver. His passengers had paid their money for the tour, they had been told that the historic Baldonald House was on their itinerary, and he wanted to know why he’d been allowed to get all this way without being told the place wasn’t open.
Lesley stood to one side while the Hon. Caroline apologised in a haughty way which managed to make the complainant feel somehow guilty of something himself, without knowing what it was.
When he had finished reluctantly shepherding his passengers back towards the coach, explaining but grumbling along with them, Lesley stopped him before he climbed up into the driver’s seat.
‘Was it one of your parties which came here yesterday afternoon?’
‘No, that it was not.’ He climbed on to the second step.
‘As Miss Crombie has explained to you, there has been a serious crime committed here. We need to question anyone who may have been on the premises, or near them, at the time.’
‘And who might you be?’
She held her warrant card up to him. ‘Detective Inspector Gunn.’
‘You’re not accusing me or one of my mates of … look, d’ye see us carrying a whole load of pictures and that kind of thing out under the eyes of a whole load of passengers like this lot?’
‘If you or any of those mates of yours think of anything you’ve noticed, not just this weekend but a week or two ago, that might tie in with what’s happened, we’d be glad of the information.’
‘Aye,’ he said, sliding across to his seat and making the door hiss and clank shut.
Lesley turned back to Caroline. The two of them watched the coach depart. Lesley said: ‘Miss Crombie, you were the one who discovered that things were missing?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘Were you expected here yesterday?’
‘Expected?’
‘You don’t live here full-time, I believe?’
‘Not any longer. I have a pad in Linlithgow. Handy for Glasgow and Edinburgh, but a good escape from either of them. I do come back here often enough, though.’
‘To unwind?’
‘To see my father, and see how he’s getting on.’
‘But,’ Lesley repeated, ‘were you expected yesterday? I mean, I understand Lord and Lady Crombie had been in Edinburgh all week. Hadn’t they notified you they’d be away?’
‘We don’t consult one another every hour of the day, or even every day of the week. I just felt like coming down after a hectic recording session, and I came. That’s the way it is, nine times out of ten.’
They went back indoors. Lesley headed for the phone to check with the butcher whether he had in fact been delivering yesterday, in spite of assurances from people on duty that he had not. Someone might have overlooked a last-minute arrangement to deliver something. Everything had to be checked.
It was Sunday, and the butcher’s answering machine was on. Just as she had finished recording a message for him, there was a click, and a man’s drowsy voice said that he’d just heard what she was on about, and no, of course he’d never been near the place. Never did on a Saturday. And this particular Saturday, his van had been to and from the fête at Langholm all morning and afternoon. He sounded as if it had been quite a celebration, and he was only just recovering.
*
While the panic over the coachload was being dealt with, Greg meandered at a loose end along the corridors. Ahead of him on the second floor he heard Brigid’s voice, and slowed down rather than catch her up. He had heard it all too early that morning, just after the first wail of the bagpipes as young Drew fulfilled his duties, and Brigid had howled: ‘Not this morning, for God’s sake.’ Now her tone of voice was just as exasperated: ‘Do stop prowling, Hector.’
Greg waited, then resumed his own prowl, like a ghost thinking himself not into a living author but into the persona of some past Crombie who had been Keeper of the Forest, home after despatching a few outlaws and showing mercy to a poor serf caught poaching.
‘Dacre!’ Hector Crombie’s gruff voice came out of the snug like a command from a loud hailer. ‘Do come in and have a dram.’
Greg was about to make a polite excuse, then realised there was no need: there was nothing else he could contribute to anyone else in the household. He went in and sat d
own, while his host poured considerably more than a dram into a large tumbler.
‘Well, what d’ye make of it all?’
Greg wondered if he could insinuate himself into the mind of a master criminal, planning the coup and carrying it out, and finding somewhere to hide out while arranging for distribution of the loot. Ghosting the memoirs of an art thief, where would he begin?
‘I haven’t a clue what could have happened,’ he confessed. ‘It must be one hell of a blow for you.’
‘Aye. Not just the value of some of the things. No collector myself, ye ken. Just inherited the stuff. Perhaps my wife’s right: the insurance’ll come in handy. But there are some things …’ He coughed, grunted, and took a large swig of whisky, coughing more loudly over that and reaching for his handkerchief in a pretence that the drink had made his eyes water.
‘Personal connections,’ said Greg.
Crombie nodded. ‘That portrait of my wife. My first wife. Brigid hung it in a rather dark corner. I didn’t go out of my way to … well, no point in getting maudlin. All the same …’ He took another massive swig and fumbled for words, none of them coming easily. ‘Dammit, it belonged here.’
There was a rustling sound which Greg thought at first came from Crombie’s throat. Then it grew louder: a fitful spattering against the small window at the end of the snug. Rain was beginning slowly, but even as they talked it swelled from a whisper to a tattoo on the glass.
With the glow of Highland Park warming his throat, Greg was courageous enough to prompt his host. ‘This place means a lot to you, sir. Will your daughter be able to take over in due course?’
‘She’s a capable lass. Och, if maybe she could have found the right partner and the two of them … hm. But she’ll have to sort things out for herself. Or with a good friend. I fancy she has one she can rely on. That’s what I’m hoping.’
Greg felt that one of them was getting fuzzy from the drink. He didn’t follow the line of reasoning. ‘Some man she’s … well, nowadays they call them partners, not husbands or wives?’
‘No. Brigid’s daughter. Such a douce lassie. Such a pity.’
A chill stabbed down Greg’s back. ‘You mean Ishbel?’
Hector was embarrassed. ‘Oh, damme. Of course. Forgot.’ He reached for the bottle and topped up both their glasses. ‘You’re the father, aren’t you? Damn thoughtless of me.’
‘What about her? What’s Ishbel got to do with it?’
‘Pity she had to fall into that wretch’s hands.’
‘Who?’
‘Sorry, old chap, I’m no’ very good at explaining things, am I? My wife’s second husband. I mean, the one that came after you and before me.’
‘Yes, I know. Simon Pringle. But you’re not saying he got up to something — not again? Not with Ishbel?’
‘Such a shame. Things were going so well, until then. Damned impertinence. Coming and hanging around here, pretending he had some rights. Coming between her and Caroline. When the two of them had been such good friends. So close. She was like another daughter to me. And when the two of them were here at the same time, it did brighten this old place up. Until that vermin Pringle got to work on her.’
Greg drained his glass and stormed off in search of Brigid. She was in the library, unhurriedly turning over the pages of the Sunday business supplement. She seemed unperturbed by the comings and goings of the detective inspector and Caroline. By the look of it, the library had been untouched. Greg could only suppose that the intruders had been specialists in the art field. No ordinary thief would have passed up the chance to take the VDU and its associated hardware, which would be so easily and profitably disposable.
He wasn’t that madly interested. All he had to say right away was: ‘What’s this about Simon and Ishbel?’
‘Oh, God. Hector’s been getting dewy-eyed, has he?’
‘You let Simon take over our daughter? You were married to him, and you let him —’
‘At least he didn’t marry her,’ she said stonily. ‘Just had it off with her. Par for the course.’
‘But how could she have let him? How could you let it —’
‘All right, you shouldn’t need to be told. You knew Simon. Your dear old mate. He got up to his old games. Sly innuendoes, snickering gossip, and of course the terribly understanding friend so ready to listen to one’s troubles. Only not with me any longer. That had ceased to amuse him. No challenge any more. So just for the fun of it, it had to be my daughter.’
Something tightened in Greg’s stomach. A terrible pang clutched him. ‘Our daughter? Ishbel?’
‘So you do remember her.’
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid. What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m her father. You should have let me know.’
‘But you hadn’t been her father for a long time. You were too busy being somebody else. Very successfully, I’ll say that.’
‘But what the hell were you doing? What did you do?’
‘I suppose I was away too often, expanding operations here and Glasgow and London. It was a long time before it dawned on me that he was sniffing around Ishbel. He was incapable of not cheating on anyone close to him.’
‘And when you did find out?’
‘I finished him,’ said Brigid with lethal quietness. ‘Divorced him, threw him out.’
‘And the job you’d found for him?’
‘The firm had been having a rocky few months. I recommended a company doctor and told him what to look for. Took a few months, with Simon wriggling and twisting. But I had him out. Forever.’
‘And Ishbel?’
Brigid was so tense, so close to choking in silence as he had been a few moments ago, that he was almost tempted to reach out and take her hand. But there was too vast a gap between them.
‘The stupid little thing took pity on him,’ said Brigid at last. ‘He came sniffing around her again after I’d married Hector, putting on his sad, misunderstood act. And she believed it, and moved in with him.’
‘And after your own dose of Simon, you still let it happen?’
‘If you’d been around, you think you could have stopped it? But then, you hadn’t been around for a long time, had you?’
‘I thought we’d agreed on that. Just one thing we did agree on. Better not to complicate things. You wanted Ishbel under your wing. Or under your foot. Clean break, that’s what you persuaded me was the best for Ishbel. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to reappear at intervals and —’
‘You didn’t make the effort to do any reappearing, did you?’
‘Clean break, that’s what you insisted on,’ he repeated.
‘And you let me get away with it? What sort of father does that make you?’
She hadn’t altered. In any argument with Brigid, it was heads you lost, tails you lost.
‘You were always somewhere else,’ she raged on. ‘Somebody else. In America or Moscow or God knows where.’
‘You didn’t like me to start making a success of things on my own, did you? More fun to go on wallowing in all that crap from Simon.’
‘Not all of it.’
‘Just the bits it tickled your fancy to believe.’
‘He could be amusing. Until one got down to it and found out what he was really like.’
‘By which time it was too late.’
‘What about you?’ He remembered all too well how her voice levelled out rather than being raised when she had something scathing to say. ‘He was supposed to be your friend. You’d known him for years. Why didn’t you stop him before it was too late?’
‘By the time it dawned on me what he was up to, it was too late.’
‘And I wasn’t worth the effort?’
‘Not by then. If you enjoyed sniggering with him and egging him on, then no, you weren’t.’
‘Did you ever love me?’ She might have been an interviewer throwing a key question at him.
‘I suppose I must have done.’ It was all he co
uld bring himself to answer.
‘Until …?’
‘Until I found out who you really were.’
‘Oh, no. No.’ Her voice was even lower and more intense. ‘You never did find that out. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing now. Only this time you’re getting paid for it. Are you sure you’ve got the guts to go ahead with it? Really collaborate?’
‘I thought that’s what we’ve been doing anyway.’
‘I mean really collaborate.’ Her opal eyes were azure with excitement again. ‘I mean really get down to it. Get our own back.’
‘On whom?’
‘On treacherous bastards everywhere. The ones who buggered things up for me — and the one who buggered it up for both of us.’
In spite of the glossy veneer, she was still the same Brigid Weir deep down inside. She still felt herself, as she always had done, the ill-done-to centre of an outrageous storm, buffeted by winds of stupidity and misunderstanding which only a woman of her calibre was talented enough to survive.
‘And me?’ he asked.
‘Haven’t you ever wanted to get your own back on slimy Simon?’
‘So you did notice at last that Simon was slimy? That’s not the way you used to talk about him. Used to have such great fun, listening to him belittle me and cuddle up to you and lie to you. And of course one of the things about Simon is that he not only likes cheating on a friend — or a wife, eh? — but has to make sure the friend finds out. For him that’s the biggest thrill of the lot. Just as when he simply had to let me know he was at it with you.’
‘I was wrong.’ How had she managed to utter those words?
‘A bit late to discover that.’
‘You ought not to have let him get away with it.’ She was petulant again. ‘He was your friend. You introduced us. You ought to have known.’
Greg laughed out loud. First the grudging admission, then the hasty attempt to switch the blame. ‘And after that, you ought to have known. Where is he now? Where’s Ishbel? Where are they?’
‘From what I’ve heard, living in squalor in Portobello.’
‘From what you’ve heard? Haven’t you tried to follow up? Do something for Ishbel?’
Before Brigid could answer, Caroline came in with another of the Sunday newspaper’s voluminous sections, this time the books and media supplement. She flapped it towards Brigid like a matador provoking the first attack.