Death by Marzipan

by John Burke

  ‘I know just the opposite,’ she said, ‘which is why I had the locks changed long ago.’

  ‘Brigid, for the last time, do see sense. You don’t imagine we’d let you finish that book? It’s simply not going to happen.’

  ‘And what exactly is going to happen?’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid you’ll find out.’ He released her arm. ‘You’ll find out very soon.’

  She strolled in search of a cab, musing over that parting threat. There had been a lot of talk about contacts. She didn’t doubt that if he wanted to kill, he would know how to contact a professional killer without ever risking his own involvement. But it was too melodramatic, inconceivable in a city like this, walking along familiar streets like this.

  After a few hundred yards she found a cab to take her to Hector’s club, to agree the wording of an obituary for the notice-board. She accepted condolences with becoming gravity while waiting for another cab to be called.

  Back in Leith, she let herself into the flat, kicked off her shoes, and padded into the kitchen. She was ready for another cup of coffee, even though too much coffee tended to produce prickly heat along her throat and neck.

  She couldn’t help thinking about Veitch in this flat. He had been one of the best. They could have been two of a kind; but she had shied away, sensing his potential as a rival rather than a colleague.

  Brigid laughed quietly, remembering the truth of that remark of his about a good meal, a good argument, and a leisurely hour or two in the bedroom a few yards away; then choked off the laugh as there was a footstep behind her.

  She turned, catching her breath, then demanded indignantly: ‘Just a minute. How on earth did you —’

  The gloved hands closed round her throat.

  14

  Detective Chief Inspector Jack Rutherford looked Lesley up and down and smirked. ‘Hello, Lez. So we meet again.’

  It might amuse him, but it was a meeting Lesley Gunn could well have done without. She had had a bellyful of the DCI on previous cases, and could predict exactly what would happen here. The Eyemouth killings had been settled to his satisfaction — the killer had in fact slit his own throat, which saved the police a lot of paperwork and time wasted in court — and now he was ready to trample through the investigation of another case.

  ‘All right.’ He had taken command of the incident room with his usual assertiveness. ‘You seem to have let two murders occur within much the same family, and in between them a death which you don’t think is suspicious. Quite a score!’

  ‘This last one wasn’t even in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘Bloody inconsiderate, I’ll grant you. But don’t worry your little head. I’m briefed to work in Edinburgh with the Fettes Avenue team, and the high heidyins are already having fun arguing who’ll be liaising with who, and whose toes mustn’t get trodden on. So I’ll be up there, and you’ll be down here.’

  That at least was something to be thankful for.

  ‘But don’t tell me,’ Rutherford ground on, ‘there isn’t some connection with this stately pile here, and that earlier murder. Too much of a coincidence, these bodies lying around.’

  ‘Just who did find Lady Crombie’s body?’

  ‘The family solicitor’s clerk. The boss had tried ringing her about some legal wrangle they’d been having but couldn’t get any reply. In the end, he sent his clerk around. Found the door open. The medic reckons she’d been there a couple of days.’

  ‘With the door open all the time, so anyone could walk in?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? Now, just to start up this great liaison of ours, can I be having your rundown on what’s been going on here, and who smells suspicious?’

  From the moment she had heard that Rutherford was moving in on this case, Detective Inspector Lesley Gunn had hastened to memorise all the people and issues involved so far, and fit them into the categories she knew Rutherford would want them slotted into. In a corner of the incident room she began her summing up. He listened in his characteristic posture, his right shoulder hunched as if frozen in the middle of a disdainful shrug.

  ‘Both the dead people must in some way be linked with what brought me here in the first place,’ said Lesley: ‘the theft of paintings and objets d’art.’

  ‘Hold it a minute, Lez. Word was that you hadn’t made much progress on that front. Why are you trying to manacle ’em all together now? You been holding something back?’

  ‘I was just about ready to ask some awkward questions. Only the person I wanted to get into the interview room is the one who’s just been rubbed out.’

  ‘Look, let’s get the punters in the right order, shall we? From the first murder. Put ’em through their paces.’

  Lesley set about running through the cast list in the nearest she could manage to a logical order. Starting with Gregory Dacre, the dead woman’s first husband, who had been invited here to ghost her memoirs. No criminal record, not even a minor offence.

  ‘Ghost?’ queried Rutherford.

  She explained. His shoulder hunched higher in a twitch of incredulity. It was yet another freak to add to the bulging category of oddities he had encountered in the course of duty. He found it easier to cope with razor gangs and demented husbands wielding blunt instruments or wives putting kitchen cutlery to lethal use.

  Then she trotted out Simon Pringle, the second husband, who had been strangled and then, fuller investigation revealed, had had his head held under water. ‘To make sure, I suppose,’ said Lesley. ‘And there was a smaller intake of water when he was being washed downstream and deposited where we found him.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Lady Crombie and myself.’

  ‘She led you there?’

  ‘We were going over the ground of the burglary. Just strolling. And then PC Kerr called us over to see what he’d found.’

  ‘Just strolling,’ Rutherford echoed sceptically. ‘By pure chance, close to her dead husband. Did she look surprised? Upset?’

  ‘That’s hard to say.’

  ‘Not hard at all. Did she or didn’t she?’

  Lesley was being made to feel that she was under suspicion herself. It wasn’t the first time she had been subjected to Rutherford’s heavy-handedness; she must simply refuse to be ruffled.

  ‘She’s a very tough lady.’ She shivered at the faint echo of what Brigid Crombie herself had said at first sight of the corpse: ‘Or was. Once she’d recognised him, she seemed rather amused.’

  ‘Amused? For Christ’s sake. And she didn’t look particularly surprised?’

  ‘I’ve told you, she was a very tough lady.’

  ‘Do you or don’t you suppose she had a hand in the killing? Maybe hand in hand with that first husband — this Dacre character. I mean, he lets himself be brought here by his ex-wife, comes under her thumb again, could be jealous of the one who hopped into bed after him, and she could have played on that to get him to —’

  ‘If the medic’s assessment is accurate, even with some leeway either way, both Lady Crombie and Dacre were in Edinburgh at the time of the killing.’

  ‘And in their absence, if it really was in their absence, just what might Pringle have been doing in the grounds here?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know. Creeping in to ingratiate himself again, maybe. Because everything I’ve heard suggests he was a wily little creepy-crawly just like that. Or —’

  ‘Seem to be plenty of folk who’d be happy to remove Pringle from this world. Including the Crombie woman herself. But then, who decided to eliminate her?’

  ‘And strangle her,’ Lesley commented, ‘just as Pringle was strangled.’

  ‘You’re with me, then. Not two separate murders?’

  ‘If it all ties in with the thefts —’

  ‘Which we don’t know it does.’

  Lesley had always prided herself that she never got headaches. Problems could prove stressful. Witnesses and suspects could prove stressful. Colleagues could prove even more stressful when you f
ound that instead of working as a team you were engaged in some mutual showing-off or rivalry. Still you coped, and didn’t weaken or give in to neurotic resentments. But right now she was beginning to get a headache. There were too many balls to be juggled here; too many strands like the wires of last year’s Christmas tree lights, obstinately snarling up into ever more complicated knots when you tried to reassemble them.

  ‘And this Lord Crombie himself,’ Rutherford was saying. ‘This woman’s third husband, right?’

  ‘He was her third, yes.’

  ‘All these men. She must have had something. You met her. What was it? Sexy? Rich? Dominating — whips and leather?’

  ‘She didn’t need whips and leather to dominate. She was always in charge.’

  ‘So she could have ordered her third husband to get her second one out of the way when he proved troublesome?’

  ‘Not from what I saw of him,’ said Leslie with a spontaneous glow of respect for Hector Crombie’s memory. ‘No, it’s not on’

  ‘Or got the first one to do it for her?’

  ‘But then,’ said Lesley, ‘who disposed of Lady Crombie herself?’

  ‘Any more bit-part players you haven’t wheeled out on stage yet? Members of staff with a grudge? Other relatives?’

  ‘There’s a daughter.’

  Rutherford pounced. ‘Whose daughter?’

  ‘Lord Crombie’s. By his first wife.’

  ‘Who hated his next wife?’

  ‘Caroline certainly didn’t appear to like her,’ Lesley admitted, ‘but I don’t see she had any reason to rub her out.’

  ‘Where was this Caroline when Pringle was killed? And when her stepmother copped it? Hey, how do you grab this, Lez — wicked stepmother? Real fairy-tale country, now. And how does this local princess spend her time?’

  ‘She works in television. Flits in and out of here. Devoted to her father, but never seemed much concerned with anybody else.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Nobody quite in her class. That’s the way it is in these hard times. And a region like this.’

  ‘Oh, is it now? The Morningside meritocracy nae good enough for her?’ The rasp of his always smouldering peevishness grew more pronounced.

  ‘She’s not married,’ said Lesley flatly.

  ‘And you’ve written her off as a likely killer?’

  ‘I’ve written nobody off,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Good girl. You’ll make a good tough lassie yet.’

  Phones had burped and tinkled through the entire conversation, interrupted only by the crisp, courteous voices of the women officers thanking the caller, asking for details — ‘Slowly, please, madam … now, what was that address again?’ — when one of the operators stood up above her VDU and waved to Rutherford. ‘A call for you, guv. From Fettes Avenue.’

  Rutherford jolted his shoulders into line and groped round the maze of tables. He listened, grunted, and was back within two minutes. Some tasty ingredient had been added to the simmering pot in his mind.

  ‘Right, those boys have been hard at it. You’ll have to put on a good show at this end to match them.’

  ‘They’ve found some prints?’

  ‘Plenty. And also that there was no forced entry into the flat in Leith. Her ladyship could have left the doors ajar when she went in — I mean, both the downstairs entry and her own flat door — but that’s difficult, since the ground floor one shuts automatically the moment you’re indoors. Or somebody else had keys for both.’

  ‘Maybe a cleaner?’

  ‘Maybe. You think that if she was away a lot, like down here at Baldonald, she’d have let a cleaner have a free run of the place?’

  ‘I think she’d insist on it being cleaned only when she was in residence.’

  ‘So who else? Her husband?’

  ‘I’d think so. I gather that when she was working — with Gregory Dacre, for instance — Lord Crombie stayed away from the premises. But they must have gone to a number of formal occasions in Edinburgh and used the flat. So he’d have had a key.’

  ‘But you say that when this chap Dacre was there, his lordship stayed somewhere else?’

  ‘At one of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s flats in Leith. And I believe he had a club in the New Town as well.’

  ‘You suppose this laid the way clear for her ladyship to get laid again? Happy reunions with one of her assorted husbands?’

  Remembering the laird’s lug, Lesley trod warily. ‘Literary collaboration, yes. But I’m pretty sure Dacre at any rate wanted no other kind of reunion. That’s not how I see it.’

  ‘I’ve seen so much that I’m prepared to see anything else if it’s shoved under my nose. Like this Dacre character being egged on to get rid of Pringle, because Pringle had somehow become a pain in the arse.’ He let it stew for the larger part of a minute, then grimaced. ‘But how could he have known Pringle was going to be in this neighbourhood at just that time? The Crombie woman herself knew, and instructed him? Some deal that had gone wrong between them, maybe.’

  ‘But then who killed Lady Crombie?’

  ‘Dacre again? Because he was in it up to his neck by now.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Some scam that misfired.’

  ‘I still feel,’ said Lesley, ‘that it’s all tied in with the thefts from the house, before Dacre ever came on the scene. Brigid Crombie had been flogging family treasures openly to start with. Everything points to her getting rid of a lot more without her husband knowing. Maybe replacing a few with convincing forgeries. And then instigating a theft to clear the place out and claim insurance on the lot. Cashing in twice over.’

  Rutherford nodded, less sceptical this time. ‘And somebody in the scam got alarmed? Wanted her out of the way before she talked too much — to this Dacre character, maybe?’ Before Lesley could interrupt, he hurried on with that greedy snatching at ideas which she remembered so well. ‘Dacre himself, getting close to the truth and spilling the beans to someone who decided she had to go?’

  ‘Dacre was here on the premises at the time of her murder.’

  ‘But he could still have leaked some nasty information.’

  ‘He’d hardly want her murdered, when he was hoping to make money out of ghosting that book for her.’

  ‘But what part did Pringle play in this? One ex-husband up to no good, the second one commissioned to stamp on him and her other enemies. Which one of them decided Lady Crombie’s usefulness was at an end?’

  ‘We can’t grill her,’ said Lesley glumly, ‘or Pringle.’

  ‘And this Lord Crombie — he really did die a natural death?’

  ‘It’s my belief that it was a natural death, but caused by the behaviour of somebody else.’

  ‘Such as?’

  She had half hoped to protect Hector Crombie’s dignity, but the truth had to come out. ‘Could have been what he heard his wife saying through the laird’s lug.’

  She took him to the little sitting-room and then upstairs to the snug, explaining what Crombie could well have overheard.

  ‘I think I’d like a bit of a crack with this Dacre character. He could be in it a whole lot deeper than you’ve cottoned on to.’ Rutherford led the way out of the snug, looked down the stairs, then up the few steps from the half-landing, and opted for the first floor corridor. He strolled along the corridor, opening doors without knocking and peering in. ‘As a matter of interest, where are you based, Lez? Risky to be too close. I’ve already got the vibes of you going native.’

  She explained the Tam Lin.

  ‘Even more dangerous, maybe. The evil distortions caused by alcohol, hey?’ He was making decisions off the top of his head. She must move to police quarters in Selkirk. ‘And now there’s a mobile incident room free, we’ll have that brought in sharpish. Park it in the grounds — but keeping a healthy distance.’ He went to issue instructions to one of the telephonists, then swung back, seething with enthusiasm. ‘And now, before I go off to the big city, let’s get to grip
s with this Dacre character.’

  *

  Greg had to face up to the fact that he was well and truly out of a job now. The only thing that made sense would be for him to call it a day, pack his bags, and head home, perhaps via Kate’s flat to discuss where his next chunk of income might come from.

  He was packed and ready to go when he was summoned to the interview with the DCI which could surely be only a formality.

  He found that it wasn’t.

  And yet again he found himself in the library from which he and Brigid had been driven. Rutherford had dragged one of the tables end on to the wall, and indicated that Greg should sit opposite him, on one of the less comfortable chairs which had been installed for the VDU operators.

  ‘I need hardly tell you, Mr Dacre, that you’re an important factor in this investigation.’

  ‘Is that what I might interpret as a caution?’

  ‘By no means, sir. Have you any reason to suppose that we have reason to suspect you?’

  ‘Suspect me of what?’

  ‘At the moment nothing, sir. Let’s just say that you’re a material witness.’

  ‘I can’t say I recall having witnessed anything.’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever? And you being a writer? I understand you are a writer?’ It was said without any flicker of respect.

  ‘Not of murder stories.’

  ‘But you must have more than an inkling of the ins and outs of these unfortunate events. You must,’ Rutherford fished, ‘have some theories of your own. Ideas of how you would handle a situation like this if you were writing a book about it.’

  Greg tried to maintain a cool detachment, but Rutherford had prodded the right nerve. How, indeed, would he tackle such a subject? Either as a sleuth or a master criminal? The criminal element was the more challenging. As a serial killer, how would he have coped with this interrogation? He narrowed his eyes and tried to look tough and invulnerable.

  ‘Why are you squinting at me like that?’ demanded Rutherford.

  Greg switched to being cool and mysterious as they ran through the events of these past few weeks.

  Yes, he had disliked Simon Pringle, but not enough to commit murder. And in any case — how many more times was he going to have to point this out? — he and Lady Crombie had been in Edinburgh when Pringle was killed.