by John Burke
Nick manoeuvred round the fire engine and wound his window down.
‘Mr Mc Vicar?’
‘Aye.’ The man had a black smear across his right cheek, and dark misery in his eyes.
‘Nicholas Torrance. I had a booking for myself and my wife, but it looks as if —’
‘Sir Nicholas? Lady Torrance?’ Nick had to admire Mc Vicar for the way he tried to look efficient and hospitable. ‘Aye, sir, we were looking forward to welcoming ye. But ye can be seeing for y’self . . .’ He looked over the bonnet of Nick’s car, and for a moment appeared almost cheerful. ‘Och, at last.’
A coach came bumping down the road, taking the bend towards the bridge cautiously. There was a murmur of relief from the huddle of guests.
Mc Vicar said: ‘Heaven be praised. At last. I’ve booked that coach, Sir Nicholas, to take guests without their own transport to another of our group’s hotels in Troon. Splendid cuisine, and golf on your doorstep. Would you be wanting to make your own way there?’
‘Wrong direction for us. Quite the opposite direction. But thanks. We’ll find somewhere along the way.’
‘If I could get my hands on our directory, I’d be phoning ahead on your behalf, Sir Nicholas. Anything I could do. But’ — he waved at the gutted building — ‘that’s all gone up with the rest.’
Nick said: ‘I think I remember a nice place somewhere north of Newton Stewart. We’ll head in that direction.’
‘On behalf of the company,’ said McVicar, ‘I must offer our apologies. Maybe when we’ve rebuilt, I could be sending you our new brochure?’
‘You’ve got to hand it to him,’ said Nick as he reversed, crept past the coach, and drove uphill towards the junction at the top. ‘He does keep up his act no matter what. But now . . . well, I’ll have to try and remember the route down into Galloway.’
‘No problem?’ said Lesley slyly.
They had emerged from the thin pall of smoke, but an evening mist was seeping out of the clefts in the hills and along the line of a hidden burn. After fifteen minutes they arrived at a cross-roads where the road ahead narrowed, but the roads to either side looked no more inviting. There was no signpost. Nick switched on the courtesy light and spread the road atlas across his and Lesley’s knees.
She narrowed her eyes and tried to trace the route they had just come, but none of the names meant anything.
She said: ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’
‘For the moment, yes. But we can’t be far from . . . well, somewhere.’
He switched on his headlights, and on impulse took the left turning. There were some nasty ruts in the road surface, and for several yards at one stage the offside front wheel was dragged into a long, deep channel. As they jolted free and approached a fork in the road, a signpost loomed out of the gathering dusk. It offered no identification to the left; but to the right its worn finger read: Balmuir.
‘Good God,’ said Nick. ‘We’re way off course.’
‘You know where that place is — Balmuir?’
‘Roughly. And I know who lives there.’
‘Another member of the Lowland aristocracy?’
‘Hardly. Chet Brunner.’
‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘An old acquaintance from the studio days. He’s the one who sent us all those videos as a wedding present.’
Lesley remembered them. A lavishly packaged set of videos of films and television series for which Nick had provided musical arrangements and in some cases conducted the recordings. Brunner’s own name, she recalled, had been prominently displayed on the coloured cover of each episode. The name of Nick Torrance had been in a cluster of names of other contributors, all in small type.
‘Maybe we could phone from there,’ said Nick. ‘Even if Chet’s not there, someone must know of a hotel and a phone number — or know a road to Newton Stewart.’
‘Chet? Weird name.’
‘He was probably christened Charlie, but decided that Chet was more cool.’
‘Is it wise to go and see him? You’ve been telling me to forget the years when I was a copper. Are you sure you’re not wanting to have a great nostalgic blether about your own past — play it again, Nick, that sort of thing?’
‘Nothing of the kind. He was never one of my favourite characters.’
But he was swinging the car down the road, past the signpost.
There had been no mileage given on the sign. Lesley peered into the gloom, trying absurdly to force the road to widen by staring at it, and to coax some sign of habitation from the darkness of the trees. It came almost as a personal triumph when she caught the glimmer of a few lights at the top of a rise, and then they were in a village street, passing a lumpy statue of some forgotten local poet or maybe a swashbuckling fighter of long ago. It was not a very large village, and apart from a scattering of faint lights behind the curtains of a single-storey terrace the main illumination was the moon high in the sky. But a mile or so beyond the end of the street was a splash of brightness from a large building set far back from the road. A pattern of windows flickered through the trees, sparked and dimmed, then blazed again as Nick slowed between two gateposts on to a long, gently curving driveway.
‘Looks as if he’s turned the place into a hotel,’ Nick observed as he steered into the only gap in a long arc of parked cars.
Framed in the front doorway at the top of three broad steps, a small man peered out as Nick got out of the Laguna.
‘You’re a bit late. They’ve already started.’ Then he came down the steps with his hand outstretched. ‘Nick! What on earth . . . I had no idea . . .’ Then: ‘Oh, dear. Only it’s Sir Nicholas now, isn’t it?’
‘Not to you, it isn’t, Alec.’
Lesley got out to join her husband, still trying to come to terms with hearing herself greeted respectfully as Lady Torrance.
*
The couple who had booked into Stables Cottage had been sitting for an hour in front of the television without taking in anything of what was going on. As he heaved himself out of his chair, squashed yet another cigarette butt into the ashtray young Mrs Chisholm had reluctantly provided, and opened the cupboard to reach for a half empty bottle of whisky, his wife said:
‘The way you’re going at that, we’ll have to go out tomorrow, even if only to the village shop.’ When he opened the bottle and poured a large measure into a tumbler without replying, she went on: ‘Ronnie, we do have to go out, you know, and size the place up. Isn’t that why we came here?’
‘It’s not that easy. I . . . look, Martine, I haven’t sorted it out in my mind yet.’
‘But I thought you wanted to get out and get at him, after all that time cooped up. You said you were longing —’
‘It’ll take some getting used to. I need to weigh things up. Can’t just walk up to his front door and say ‘I’ve come to shoot you in the guts, Brunner’.’
‘No, come to think of it, you usually gave the orders for someone else to do the violent bits. Shooting, drowning — or that little incident with the power drill. You could have organized someone to do it while you were still inside. Beginning to have doubts about coping on your own?’
‘Look’ — he tried his old confident growl, the way he had been when he swept her off her feet and took her away from that sod Brunner — ‘all I need is time to get my breath back.’
‘When it comes to breath, a breath of fresh air right now will do you more good than any more out of that bottle. Look, let’s go out now. Just for ten minutes. It’s getting good and dark. Even if anybody’s out and about, they’re not going to recognize us.’
Reluctantly he gulped the last drop from his glass and reached for his coat. Outside he paused, looking as if he might turn back and close the door on the evening air. He took her arm, not so much a gallant escort as a little boy afraid of the dark.
‘Sure you don’t want to pack up and forget the whole thing?’ she said.
‘Like hell. I’m going to get him. Tha
t’s all I’ve been thinking of these past bloody years.’
‘Well, then. Tomorrow we’ll have a good walk round and check on the way this place is run, where he goes and when he’ll be around. How you can get at him.’
‘But if he sees us before I’m ready —’
‘With that beard? You don’t look anything like the way you used to. And me with this hair and everything?’
They crossed the stableyard and ventured slowly along a path which led past a few stunted bushes to the remains of what must have been a summerhouse, long abandoned. The way ahead was lit by the moon, before disappearing into the outskirts of woodland.
Suddenly a white shape floated out from the trees, swirling for a moment on the path ahead like a dancer wondering which step came next. Ronnie froze. In the moonlight a pale face heavily overlaid with makeup turned towards them.
‘Oh, shit. You haven’t seen me, right? And I haven’t seen you. Spin it out, OK?’
Then she was gone.
Ronnie’s grip tightened on Martine’s arm. ‘What the hell goes on here?’
Somewhere a dog barked. Then, from somewhere in the far shadows, there was a scream.
‘What the hell was that?’
‘An owl, or something,’ said Martine.
‘Do owls make noises like that?’ He had always been a city lad and then a city hoodlum. The noises of the countryside were beyond him.
They stood very still, waiting for the next sound or apparition.
*
‘There’s no point in you bashing on at this time of night,’ said Alec Chisholm. ‘I know the place you mean near Newton Stewart, but you’re way off course. Queenie and I can put you up reasonably well, and tomorrow I’ll point you in the right direction.’
‘We can’t just drop in on you and cause all that bother,’ said Lesley.
‘It’ll be a wonderful break for us. Talking over old times.’
‘That’s what Lesley’s afraid of,’ said Nick ruefully. ‘She’s got a sixth sense: she saw it coming.’
‘All right, I’ll promise not to reminisce.’
‘But you’ll bring me up to date with what Chet’s up to. That at least I want to know.’
‘You can probably get the drift of most of the scenario.’
They were grouped round the coffee table in a small sitting-room in what Nick guessed had once been the servants’ wing, with Alec busying himself over filling sherry glasses for Nick and himself, and a tumbler of chilled fruit juice for Lesley.
Nick was shocked how Alec Chisholm had aged. All right, so it was quite a few years since they last met, but surely not enough to wear his features down quite so heavily. All the years of working for Brunner must have bitten their way into his skin and his mind. He had always had a flushed complexion and eyes with a faint droop, and bags under them like an amiable bloodhound. Now there were liverish spots across his forehead and into his receding hair, a few blotches beside his temples like dried scars. His once crisp little moustache looked faded and woolly. It remained an amiable face, but one carrying a weight of disillusion to which he probably never admitted.
Nick prompted him: ‘This house, out in the wilds. Not the way one thinks of the Brunner image.’
‘Used to be a hunting lodge, belonging to some absentee duke, and then a local bigwig who couldn’t cope. Been tarted up since Chet bought it.’
There was a scampering of feet across the floor, and a breathless greeting. Queenie seized Nick’s arms, kissed him extravagantly, and turned to spread her arms wide in front of Lesley as if measuring the width of a picture frame. ‘But of course! Just how I guessed she would look. Nick always did have such exquisite taste. How wonderful to see you.’
Unlike her husband, Queenie had hardly aged. The only changes were, as they had always been, in the character she was playing at any given moment. When Alec met her, Queenie had been a small-part actress with an eager, pretty face, star material which never exploded into a nova. She relied for several years on a part in a long-running soap of which Alec had been long-term producer. In real life, depending on circumstances around her, she unselfconsciously slid into the part of Millamant, Mrs Danvers, or Lady Macbeth. You never knew whether you were going to be confronted by a reincarnation of Bette Davis or Betty Hutton. Wariness or unfamiliarity prevented her assuming the persona of any of the modern generation.
This evening, her entrance had suggested Madame Arcati from Blithe Spirit; but when Alec told her that the Torrances needed a bed for the night she was at once insistently hospitable, oozing the fussy motherliness of a Spring Byington.
‘I’ll just run off and make sure the place is decent. Leave you to Alec’s tender mercies. Do give them another drink, Alec, and then show them round. Give me time to smarten things up.’ She blew them a coy kiss, and fluttered away.
‘She’s always been wonderful at coping. I’d never have survived without her.’ He stood up. ‘Ready for a wander round? Or would you sooner stay put and relax?’
‘I’ve always been one for the stately home conducted tour,’ said Lesley.
Alec led them down a corridor and through a door opening on to a large hall. Four stags’ heads looked down on them from the far wall, incongruously interspersed with huge framed photographs of movie stars and would-be stars, glamorous but all too soon forgotten. Crossing the floor of imitation mosaic, Alec opened a door into what in days gone by would have been called the smoking room, with leather armchairs and a large wine cabinet with a humidor on top. Beyond it was a library, lined with glass cases beyond which gleamed a regiment of leather bindings.
‘Not quite Chet’s scene, I’d have thought,’ said Nick.
‘One of his impulses. You know how he is. Decided you don’t need to pay high rents to work in London. Nowadays you’ve got all the technical facilities to work from home — provided the home’s big enough.’
‘Big enough for his ego?’
Alec laughed with a touch of apprehension. Years of working with Brunner had worn him into a man always about to glance over his shoulder to check whether he was being overheard. He went on: ‘Took the place over lock, stock, and barrel. And started making the interior look more like the sort of thing he was used to.’ Alec shrugged. ‘Won’t last, of course. Next year it’ll be another attempt to set up in Hollywood, or Bollywood, or trying to buy out Grundy, or something.’
They crossed a corridor and entered a large studio with a familiar paraphernalia of lights and the usual glass panel with, beyond it, what had once been a gun-room and now was a spread of mixing decks and microphones.
‘And he still leaves it to you to pull all the threads together?’ Nick cupped his palm under Lesley’s elbow. ‘The best of all trouble-shooters, Alec. Put him in charge of a live transmission, and he’ll cut off interviewees when they become boring, then charm them afterwards so that nobody becomes uptight. And if it’s a filmed episode, or a difficult bit of cross-cutting between recorded interviews and live interviews, he can juggle like you never saw. And when it comes to props, he knows every costumier and furniture dealer in the business.’
‘And every starlet Chet wants to get his hands on,’ said Alec dourly.
‘Hasn’t his wife got that under control yet? Martine, isn’t it?’
‘Was,’ Alec corrected. ‘Divorced now. Quite a story there. Got a new one now.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t fancy this one will last, either. Rejoices in the name of Jilly-Jo.’
They moved on into a lounge with several separate tables, each equipped with four chairs and an array of glasses, some of them still half full of drinks of different colours.
‘All those cars outside,’ Nick ventured. ‘But there doesn’t seem to be anybody about.’
‘Some of them hiding away upstairs, or out in the grounds, playing one of his games.’
‘Games?’
‘He throws weekend parties. Or longer than that, sometimes. Playing games with guests. Only it costs some of them a packet to get invited.’
‘Wife swapping?’ said Lesley with distaste.
‘Oh, not necessarily. I mean, that may go on sometimes, but it’s not on the main agenda. Just lately he’s been keen on murder quizzes — runs parties called Murdermind. Often uses them as a basis for some television series he’s trying to flog — pinches plot ideas without the poor mugs realizing what they’re contributing for free. That’s where he is right now. Everybody’s playing a sort of glorified Whodunit, indoors and outdoors, using a whole range of clues to find the corpse.’
‘Definitely not my scene,’ said Lesley. ‘Not any more.’
Chapter Four
The corpse sat up. ‘You’re rather overdoing the screaming, aren’t you? Now everybody will know where I am.’ She ran a hand over her hair to make sure that it was still smooth and had not suffered from exposure to the night air. ‘Still, I must say you’re way ahead of the others. How did you figure it out?’
Anna tried to stop herself shaking. She was angry with herself for screaming like a stock character in a B movie; and angry with being put in this situation. She took it out on Cocky, grabbing him as he made a leaping, slithering circle around them, and growling a threat at him.
‘Just what’s going on?’ she demanded.
‘Aren’t you in on it? I mean, I thought from the way you acted up just then —’
‘No, I’m not in on it. But let me guess. One of Mr Brunner’s ideas?’
‘A game, yes. Called Murdermind. Great fun. You know what Chet’s like.’
Yes, of course, thought Anna. She knew what Chet was like.
The young woman held out her hand. ‘I’m Georgina Campbell. And where do you fit into things, if you’re not part of the game?’
‘I’m Anna Chisholm. From the home farm down there.’
‘Chisholm? Alec’s daughter?’
‘Daughter-in-law.’
‘Sweet man, Alec. Wonderful the way he copes with some of Chet’s ideas. All that off-the-cuff stuff, and he never seems fazed.’ She peered into Anna’s face in the uncertain light. ‘And your husband — Alec’s son, that is . . . He’s a farmer, then?’