by John Burke
The round-up began with motor sport along forest roads, and then a feature on deer-stalking. Hector settled down to watch, making it clear that he’d be offended if everybody else didn’t do the same.
Automatically Lesley concentrated on sizing up the presenter. Caroline had done a voice-over for the motor rally, but was very much on screen for the deer-stalking item. Her voice became instantly more intense, lilting with enthusiasm.
She spelt out the difference between the old tradition of encircling for shooters, and the skill of individual stalking. It had once been customary for sportsmen to locate deer and then form a tight semi-circle known as the tinchels, driving the quarry towards a narrow valley or a man-made enclosure, the elrig, where the guns were waiting to shoot them down. Then in the nineteenth century came a new, subtler sport. It was found to be more exciting, and a lot more demanding, to use primitive instincts and skills to approach the quarry stealthily without frightening it off, and kill it with one clean shot instead of loosing a whole fusillade.
A professional gamekeeper and a keen amateur stalker demonstrated the technique. Caroline then went through the same sly approaches, followed by the zoom lens of a cameraman perched uncomfortably motionless in a tree. Each of the professionals had got within a hundred yards of the stag before it became aware of them and bolted. Caroline, like a sleek cat easing her way through the undergrowth, paused, advanced a cautious paw, froze again, and then reached out with the other forepaw. She got within fifty yards before the stag sensed her and bounded away.
At the end of the programme, Lord Crombie stared admiringly up at his daughter. ‘We must have a day out together, when we’ve got this other damn business settled.’
Lesley said: ‘None of those animals actually got shot?’
‘You’d have liked to see some bloodshed?’
‘No, but I gathered that the whole idea was to finish things off with one accurate shot.’
‘It was a programme about stalking technique, not marksmanship. A lot of viewers would have protested if we’d shown them an actual killing.’
‘Mm. Very impressive. Well,’ said Lesley, ‘I think I’d best be off to see this gentleman friend of Mrs Dunbar’s.’
‘Pathetic,’ said Brigid. ‘I’d leave him be, if I were you.’
Caroline reached for the remote control, and the screen went blank. ‘I still think Dunbar ought to go. She’s let us all down.’
Her father began grunting an objection. Lesley left them to it, and headed towards the hall.
The cellar door was open, with a feeble light filtering up from below. She peered down the steep stone steps. A clinking sound rose from below. Young Drew was down there, carrying out another of his regular tasks. When she went down to join him, he looked startled for a moment, but in control. This was part of his own world. He was carefully taking four bottles of whisky from a rack against one wall and putting them in the compartments of a sturdy wicker basket.
‘Stocking up for the day?’ said Lesley.
‘That’s right, miss. It’s a dreich day. I reckon His Lordship will want to keep warm.’
‘He favours one particular blend?’
‘Two BNJs,’ said the lad. ‘And two single malts. He likes a choice.’
Against the longer wall a terrace of wine racks looked like small caves in a hillside. Most of the openings were empty.
‘The burglars helped themselves here, too?’
‘No, miss. That’s the way they were.’
‘The laird isn’t a great wine drinker?’
‘There were some tastings, a year or so back. But they gave them up.’
‘And never replenished the stock.’
‘No, miss.’
Lesley slid a bottle from its opening, and turned it carefully in her hand. She remembered working with Sir Nicholas Torrance in his Kilstane tower house, and remembered his reverence towards good clarets and a great Chablis. This sample in her hand looked like a good chateau bottling; but the label was peeling away at one corner, and even in this muted light she thought it looked odd. The picture on the front was a typical chateau, and the lettering suitably restrained in dark brown print. Yet it was almost too neat.
She was getting suspicious about everything and everybody. Time to be on her way.
Young Drew waited for her to go back up the steps before following and putting out the light.
Emerging, Lesley found Lady Crombie watching her speculatively.
‘Looking for anything special, inspector?’
Lesley hadn’t the faintest idea what she was looking for. Off the cuff she asked: ‘You used to have wine tastings, but I gather you gave them up.’
‘It doesn’t work out here in the sticks. We tried a series of tastings tutored by an expert, but he charged too much, and there weren’t enough people attending the evenings.’
‘A long way to come, especially if they had to drive home afterwards?’
‘Exactly. Hector had been persuaded to lay in a large stock for his cellar, and for a while he tried running it off his own bat. Turned out to be drunken parties rather than tastings. And his cronies usually finished up back on the hard stuff.’
‘It did strike me that there was something fishy about the labels. You don’t suppose he would have tampered with them, if he felt so contemptuous of the whole thing?’
‘That’s outrageous.’
‘Lady Crombie, I do have to follow up every possibility. And then rule out anything I can possibly rule out.’
‘You can rule that notion out, for a start. That’s not Hector’s style. But he wouldn’t have a clue if he’d been supplied with duds by some shyster wine merchant.’
‘Who did supply the wines?’
‘Some firm in Edinburgh. Hector will have some receipts somewhere. If he hasn’t mislaid them.’
‘I might follow it up in due course. It’s hardly a priority at the moment.’
‘I was about to say that,’ said Brigid tartly.
Lesley settled back in her Astra and headed for Ettrickbridge.
*
There were few cottages on the winding road, and it was easy enough to find the one Mrs Dunbar had described.
There was nobody at home.
Next stop, the Forest Enterprise office in the woods. Even before she drew up outside the neat wooden hutment, Lesley felt she could predict the answer she would get. No, no tree surgeon by the name of Ross worked for them or ever had worked for them.
She would have to find the name of the agency handling the few self-catering properties in the area, and see if a cheque or a credit card could give a lead on Mr Ross. It was unlikely. Anyone who had taken the time to win Mrs Dunbar’s favours, learn from her exactly when the family would be away, and keep her occupied over that crucial period, would have been careful to cover his tracks.
Yet how could he have predicted when, even within a space of weeks, there was a possibility of the owners being away? How far ahead had this thing been planned? How long would he have been prepared to pleasure Mrs Dunbar before giving the signal for his mates to move in on the house?
By the time Lesley got back to Baldonald House, the rain had stopped. Lady Crombie approached the car on the drive and waited for Lesley to get out, shoes squelching on the water-logged gravel.
‘Just been down to discuss clearing out stocks in the refreshment room,’ she said. ‘Until we know whether we can get back to the old routine, no point in letting food just sit there.’ She strolled on to the grass. ‘And how did you get on?’
Lesley told her.
‘Might have guessed.’ It was as though the matter no longer concerned her in the least.
The burn roared as they approached.
Lesley wondered how someone so direct and determined as Brigid could be so vaguely wandering across the damp grass on a drab day like this with no apparent goal. Perhaps she wanted to talk, out of doors and without family constraints. Taking a chance, she said: ‘Your daughter Caroline —’
&
nbsp; ‘Stepdaughter.’
‘Of course.’ Many a woman would have preferred to let people know that, so far as she was concerned, her husband’s daughter had by now become her daughter rather than, pedantically, a stepdaughter. ‘She has her own suite on the premises?’
‘Not any more. She used to have what’s known as the Master’s suite. Meant for the older son, but there was never any son. So she lived there until …’
‘Until?’
Brigid shrugged. ‘You may as well know. Not that it has any relevance. Last year I was close to doing a deal with the National Trust for Scotland. Letting them take the place over and pay for the upkeep, with us living in one wing.’
‘It fell through?’
‘My husband was none too happy, but I could have persuaded him.’ Lesley had few doubts about this. ‘But,’ Brigid went on waspishly, ‘Caroline got at him, and had a fit of tantrums, and persuaded him we couldn’t let ourselves do that.’
‘I suppose it would feel a bit of a comedown, squatting in one corner of what had been one’s own property.’
‘If they’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have been responsible for looking after those paintings and all the rest of it. We wouldn’t have had all this hassle. It would have been somebody else’s responsibility. But they wouldn’t listen.’
Lesley brought it back to the main subject. ‘So Caroline moved out.’
‘Very moody. You never know when she’ll fly off the handle, or just go into a black mood and never show up for weeks on end.’
‘Staying at home in Linlithgow?’
‘Oh, she’s told you. Handy enough for Glasgow and Edinburgh. But as you see, she comes back when it suits her. Says she wouldn’t dream of living here any longer … but she can’t help snooping around. In and out. Sometimes I think she’s debating whether or not to move in again and bend her father’s ear. Then she’s off again. But,’ said Brigid with sudden breeziness, ‘she’s not the type to steal family treasures. Wouldn’t want you to get that impression.’
‘Or remove them to safe keeping?’
‘What d’you mean, safe keeping?’
Lesley trod warily. ‘Not likely to do something impulsive, like removing family heirlooms to what she would consider a suitable place? Where she could have them all to herself rather than see them being sold off.’
‘She’s been complaining that I’ve sold things off?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘As I said, she’s very moody. I could go for the idea of her acting on impulse. But I don’t see her having the organising ability to carry out an operation like this one.’
Lesley stopped in the entrance to the walled herb garden and looked back at the house. Someone must have cased the joint beforehand to know exactly where to go — what to choose and where it was. A very knowledgeable selection. And then get it out fast, while Mr Ross commanded the attention of Mrs Dunbar. Had the McKechnies or the authoritative Mr Murray remembered the same face or faces appearing among the visitors twice running?
A brief spurt of moisture dripped from the arch on to her shoulder. She moved back on to the path.
‘The house isn’t open every day, is it?’
‘Saturdays from noon till five, Sundays from two o’clock, and Wednesdays from ten till five. For the time being we’ll tell the tour operators to keep us off their list. After all, half the things in the brochure aren’t here any more.’
Under the lee of the wall, the gravel was not so much squelching as crunching. Thinking of yesterday’s newspaper, Lesley asked:
‘Nothing was missing from your study — the library?’
‘Not that I can see. These must be art thieves, not the sort who want to flog electronic equipment in some back street.’
‘You don’t suppose it’s all a cover? I mean, what they really wanted was the typescript of your memoirs, as far as they’ve gone!’
‘Nobody knew about the memoirs until yesterday, after that stupid woman had blathered to the press. In any case, by Saturday we’d taken all the stuff to Edinburgh with us.’
‘They weren’t to know that.’
‘They couldn’t even have known it existed.’
‘Unless your friend Miss Vaughan-Smith has been showing off around town before it ever reached the newspaper.’
And would any interested party then be able to hack into the Crombie computer or whatever device her ghost was using? A top operator in a top company might have ways of dialling up and getting through the protective ‘firewall’, or working out a devious access through a rogue program on the Internet. It wasn’t Lesley’s own speciality. When she keyed in to HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, for a record on recent art thefts and maybe a detectable parallel modus operandi, she would have to ask for advice on this as well.
Or if they couldn’t hack in, they would risk a raid right into the house itself.
Only they apparently hadn’t touched the equipment.
‘It’ll be interesting to know what Gregory has to say when he gets back.’ Brigid Crombie’s tone was almost threatening.
Lesley wondered what it would be like to work for a woman like this; and didn’t fancy the idea. Not that Brigid Crombie, or Brigid Weir, whichever incarnation she happened to be in at any given time, needed to be too bullying. She somehow had enough inner force to dominate everyone, everywhere she went. Simply a centre of human power. You felt that, like a badly earthed transmitter, if you stepped too close you would reach a position when you could no longer drag your tingling feet out of the force field. By which time you didn’t really want to, anyway: she had snared you.
PC Kerr appeared from the bushes. He managed to look horrified and jubilant at one and the same time. He was unsure which woman to address first: Her Ladyship, or the detective inspector. In the end he spluttered: ‘Ye’d better come and see what I’ve found.’
On a rocky twist in the downhill course of the burn, a body lay draped half across the bank, half in the bubbling water, where a jagged finger of rock had snagged into its sodden clothes. Kerr indicated they should step carefully round the man’s head, to see his profile resting on grass as wet as itself.
Brigid stooped; and gasped. ‘Christ.’
‘Someone you know?’ said Lesley.
‘You’ve met my first husband.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Gregory Dacre. The one who’s gone off to London.’
‘Your ghost? I hadn’t realised he was your —’
‘And you’ve met my third.’
‘Lord Crombie. Of course.’
‘This is my second,’ said Brigid. ‘Or was.’
8
Kate was still arguing as she set the burglar alarm in the hall and went in search of her shoulder bag. ‘There’s no reason why I should have to tag along.’
‘Moral support,’ said Greg.
‘Moral?’ She glanced wistfully back up the stairs to the bedroom. ‘Not really my role. And anyway I’ve got this other urgent job to attend to.’
‘More urgent than my needs?’
‘I’ve just satisfied one of your needs. Let someone else have a share.’
‘Such as whom?’
‘I’ve simply got to see Tom Archer at Schwartz’s. About rights in a book on the sex life of that pop singer who died of an overdose last month. Some spicy stories are coming out in a rush. Got to get it published quickly, before some of the other roadies cash in.’
She rang for a cab. After she had finished speaking, he said: ‘Some drug-sodden screecher is more important than —’
‘More profitable,’ said Kate.
‘Only in the short term.’
‘And what am I likely to get out of you,’ she asked, ‘in the long term?’
‘All right, I’ll go round on my own, without the moral backing. Mind if I use your phone and fix a time?’
‘You ring the Vaughan-Smithie first,’ said Kate knowledgeably, ‘and she’ll be in a meeting, or off to see a mos
t important author, or something. Or down with flu. Better to go without warning and haul her out. And we’ll tackle Cowan while we’re there.’
‘We?’
‘Oh, I give in. You know darned well I couldn’t let you shove your head in there alone.’
‘Moral support?’
‘Provided you agree not to be too morally uptight when we get back here.’
The cab arrived. The driver waited with an ill grace, raising his eyes to the heavens, as Kate went through the complicated ritual of locking the front door.
The girl at Clement & Cowan reception carried a gilt tag on her left breast identifying her as Janetta. Her hair was auburn, except where a swathe of mousy brown showed through, and she had treated her face to a chalky covering which was probably advertised in women’s magazines as Natural Dusk.
She exuded courteous insincerity like a waft of over-applied perfume. ‘Welcome to Clement and Cowan. May I help?’
Kate said: ‘We’ve come to see Penelope Vaughan-Smith.’
‘I’m afraid she’s not in today.’
‘Frightened of the backlash after yesterday’s paper?’ said Greg.
‘Sorry …?’
‘The news story. The unauthorised leak about Brigid Weir’s memoirs.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on that. All I can tell you is that Miss Vaughan-Smith’s not in today.’
‘Can you tell me where she is?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ The sweeter the tone, the more transparent the indifference.
‘Then we’d better see Mr Cowan. Tell him Gregory Dacre’s here.’
The boss’s name produced a faintly more deferential response, but there was an undertone of gloating. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dacre, but Mr Cowan’s in the States, sewing up a film tie-in.’