by John Burke
‘Once we’ve got some bodies from Ayr, we’ll have to comb that ground between here and the house. Looking for a weapon isn’t going to be easy, unless it was dropped in a hurry to get away. Something simple, like a heavy piece of wood?’
‘Or a metal bar?’
‘Depending on who carries what or works with what around here.’ She glanced back at the tent. ‘One odd thing. If he was struck down and his neck broken so that it got wrenched the way we’ve just seen it, oughtn’t the blood to have run towards the left eye rather than the right?’
‘Might have . . . well, sort of lolled over when he went down.’
‘I’d have thought that once he was down, he was well and truly down and done for.’
Cool morning sunlight slanting across the hillside glinted on soaked grass, showing up ridges and puddles which might be the indentations of recent footprints made by whoever discovered the body — or by the killer? Or they might simply be natural dips in the ground between exposed hummocks of grit and heather. The whole hillside would have to be thoroughly combed, and everyone except the investigatory team kept well away.
McAdam and Calum Brodie made their way up to the house. She knew that some of the sergeant’s superiors, including the DIs in her group, called him Calum. She preferred to stick to Brodie, just as she preferred to be McAdam to her senior colleagues and to herself, though she knew that behind her back the lads made jokes about it being too appropriate — a stony surface and a heart of stone. A few colleagues had tried to call her Jane as she made her way up the promotion ladder, but she had always preferred impersonality. In recent years she had come to think of herself simply by her rank or as McAdam, and early on she had made it clear that from her subordinates she preferred ‘guv’ or ‘chief’ to the ‘ma’am’ they all ventured at first. The name of Jane was slotted away into a rarely used recess at the back of her mind.
She was thirty-two and already showing strands of silver-grey in the dark charcoal grey of her hair, drawn back severely from her forehead and finishing in a small, tight knob like a sailor’s quid of tobacco. Her lips were thin, largely because of her habit of sucking them in and clamping them tightly together. Looking in the mirror as she did her hair each morning, she was sometimes taken aback by the cold severity of her appearance; but she didn’t mind using it to advantage when questioning a suspect.
It was obvious that everyone in Balmuir Lodge had been waiting for them, half apprehensive, half thrilled by what had happened. There were a middle-aged man and woman in the hall, and what looked like a sizeable cluster of folk in a large room beyond. While the DCI was trying to get her bearings, the man stepped towards her.
‘You’re the police?’
Automatically she produced her warrant card. ‘Detective Chief Inspector McAdam. And this is Detective Sergeant Brodie. And you are . . .?’
‘Alec Chisholm. Chet’s . . . Mr Brunner’s assistant. This is a dreadful business. Dreadful.’
‘Unbelievable.’ The woman beside him came dramatically to life. Shivering, she clasped her hands to her face and her eyes widened as if to add emphasis to every syllable she uttered. ‘Quite, quite unbelievable.’ But in spite of her eyes being so restless, they never turned fully in McAdam’s direction.
‘My wife,’ said Chisholm. ‘Queenie.’
‘I gather it was the postman who found the body?’
‘That’s right.’ Chisholm shook his head. ‘Poor Jimmy. A bit of a shock for him. Taking a cut across the edge of the glen to old Mrs McIntyre. Still looking after herself in one of the old estate cottages, and he finds himself nearly falling over that.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Jimmy? Finishing off his rounds.’
‘Surely he’d know that he ought to have stayed here until the police had spoken to him?’
‘Said he had his job to do, and anyone could tell you where to find him.’
‘Damn. Now it’ll be all over the district, and we’ll get the usual horde of ghouls trampling over the ground.’
She moved on into the reception room beyond. Standing by the window, a commanding man in young middle age was tall enough to be seen over the heads of the others. The woman beside him was a few inches shorter, and McAdam glimpsed her only when a few of the group between them moved fretfully. She was sure she had seen that face before — somewhere, way back, in quite a different context.
‘Look.’ An epicene young man with a cluster of gold rings in his left ear fussed up to her. ‘If you have to question us, can you make it quick? I think we’ve all had enough of this place. A pretty badly organized weekend, absolutely not up to the standards we’d been promised. And now this. I really do have better things to do.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but nobody must leave these premises until we have elicited every relevant detail.’
A blonde girl in a low-cut dress which clung to her as if plastered on with the tears she was shedding let out a howl of despair.
DS Brodie approached her sympathetically. ‘Would you be Mrs Brunner?’
‘No, she bloody well wouldn’t.’ The young woman who snapped this out at a pitch uncomfortable to the human ear was, thought McAdam, almost a carbon copy of the other woman. ‘I’m Jilly-Jo Brunner. Mrs Brunner, whatever ambitions that slut may have had.’
‘Mrs Brunner.’ McAdam kept it polite and level. ‘As next of kin, you realize we’ll need you to make formal identification of the body.’
‘Oh, how awful. Does he look too ghastly?’ But her eyes were shining. ‘You want me to go and do it now?’
‘If you’d prefer to wait until the . . . until Mr Brunner has been shifted to the morgue —’
‘Oh, what a frightful word. No’ — she held her head high — ‘let’s get it over with.’
‘Good, if you think you’re up to it. Sergeant, I think the surgeon will still be there. Take Mrs Brunner down there, and give her any help she needs.’
Jilly-Jo looked at the detective sergeant and managed a courageous smile. McAdam would not have been surprised if she had immediately taken his arm and blinked endearingly up at him through her long eyelashes.
‘I’ll come wi’ yer.’ It was a sudden growl from a thick-set, heavy shouldered man with a dark line down his left cheek which McAdam suspected was the memento of a razor attack.
‘Whoever you are, sir —’
‘Tam Hagan, that’s who.’
‘A very good friend of mine.’ Jilly-Jo’s smile switched easily from one man to the other. ‘He was kind enough to bring me back from Glasgow last night.’
‘I think, Mrs Brunner, it would be better to let my sergeant look after you.’
On her way out, Jilly-Jo turned and jabbed a thumb venomously at Georgina Campbell. ‘Maybe you ought to ask her where Chet was last night. He wasn’t here when I got back, and there’s been other times when the two of them went missing.’
‘I was here when you got back. Right in this room.’
‘But what happened afterwards? A special arrangement? And what happened to him when you’d finished?’
‘Why, you —’
‘In due course,’ McAdam assured them both, ‘I shall be asking everybody where they were and what they were doing.’
Suddenly she remembered who the woman near the window was.
‘It’s DC Gunn, isn’t it? We bumped into one another two years ago, over the robbery of some family silver from that place outside Selkirk.’
The tall man said: ‘I’m Nicholas Torrance. This is my wife.’
‘Of course.’ McAdam managed a cool smile. ‘I did hear something about you quitting the Force and going up in the world.’
Behind her, Alec Chisholm said with a hint of reproof: ‘Sir Nicholas Torrance, and Lady Torrance.’
‘Quite so. You’re enjoying the change, Lady Torrance?’
‘I haven’t had much of a chance to assess it yet. We’ve . . . been away.’
On honeymoon, thought McAdam. All too ready to go soft and give up trying to
be a tough enough police officer. Not good enough for promotion, so instead of catching criminals she had caught herself a baronet. Calculatingly — or just letting it happen? McAdam could see how any man could fall for Lesley Gunn. She assured herself she felt no resentment, although no man had ever fallen that way for herself; perhaps because she had never invited the attempt.
‘I certainly never expected,’ said Lady Torrance, ‘to be at this end of an investigation so soon.’
McAdam did not bother to offer a sympathetic smile. ‘You were here last night?’
‘We were,’ said Sir Nicholas, ‘unfortunately.’
‘You were a friend of the deceased?’
‘We used to work together. It was just chance that we realized we were close to his place, and came here. We had a bit of trouble over accommodation, and only intended to spend one night here and then be on our way.’
‘I’m sure that with her past experience Lady Torrance will be the first to understand that I have to ask you to stay and give your version of the events leading up to Mr Brunner’s death, so we can complete our PDFs.’
He looked blank.
‘Personal Discipline Forms,’ his wife explained. ‘Details of friends, business associates, social habits.’
‘As far as we’re concerned, you could hardly call it a discipline. Social, I suppose. We spent some time yesterday watching an old video and discussing the background. Had something to eat, and went to bed. It was only this morning we heard of this business.’
Some of the house guests were sitting down in nervous little huddles, chattering spasmodically. Alec Chisholm stood almost in the middle of the room, as if waiting to be helpful in identifying each person present. Once or twice he touched his wife’s shoulder reassuringly.
McAdam joined them in the centre of the room.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I realize this is a distressing time for you. We have a serious crime to investigate, but I promise you that we’ll be as quick as we can, though you’ll understand we have to be thorough. I shall need to speak to each of you individually, and wherever possible I would hope you can then leave, provided you let us have an address where you can be contacted. And now’ — she turned to Alec Chisholm — ‘as you seem to be in charge of this place, can you tell me where we might establish an incident room?’
‘Incident? I thought we’d already had enough in the way of —’
‘We do need one specific room in which to collate all matters arising from this murder. Privacy for interviews, but facilities for contacting Forensic and the team out there.’
‘I reckon the studio should provide you with anything you need.’
It was clear that Chet Brunner hadn’t believed in doing anything by halves. There were enough computer terminals to provide a virtual reality James Bond movie or connect the police with Interpol or the FBI if they had any such thing in mind.
Which DCI McAdam hadn’t.
She said: ‘Since you’re here, Mr Chisholm, perhaps I could start with you. As assistant to the late Mr Brunner, you’ll be able to give us a full background.’
Behind them Chisholm’s wife came scurrying in. Queenie Chisholm: it was the sort of unreal Christian name which somehow belonged ideally to such a fluttery, dithering type. Quite unable to keep still or to refrain from interrupting, she would be a distraction during any questioning of her husband.
McAdam said: ‘I think it would be better if I spoke to you alone, Mr Chisholm. At first, anyway. Shorten the procedures.’
He got the message. ‘Queenie, darling, those folk out there are tetchy enough as it is. Do rustle up some snacks and drinks to keep them quiet.’
His wife seemed glad of the excuse to scuttle away.
‘Right,’ said Chisholm. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘You can fill me in about the deceased and his background. Who he was, what he did, and what all these people are doing here.’
*
Chisholm was obviously a good organizer, with a methodical mind. His metal-rimmed glasses and wilting little moustache reminded her of the storeman in the Armoury at HQ — an ex-Army NCO whose moustache was more aggressive in width than Chisholm’s and most lovingly waxed, but whose meticulous attention to detail was similar.
Without wasting a word or vaguely skirting awkward topics, Chisholm produced a neat biography of Chet Brunner and his career. Starting in the fleapits of the East End and then more expensive but even seedier establishments in Soho, he had shouldered his brash way into cutting rooms and commercial promotions, scraped acquaintance with a leading cameraman to whom, Chisholm bluntly reported, he had supplied a number of rent boys; and through sheer persistence had raised the money for a number of cheap horror films and then more pretentious films — ‘Which were still pretty horrific but more slickly made.’ He had worked for a while in Hollywood, but made too many enemies and didn’t have enough talent to overcome that endemic Hollywood disease. So he vowed to show the Americans how much better it could be done over here. And cheaper.
The Scottish phase was a late venture. Romantic fantasies set against a background of hills and heather appealed more to an international market, especially the American one, than psychological marital dramas in smart London or drab realism in northern English cities. Also Brunner himself was captivated by the surroundings. He moved all his operations, apart from final editing and production, to the Lowland hills.
‘And it worked out?’ McAdam asked. ‘He could produce enough and make enough profit to continue living here and working from home?’
From what Chisholm was telling her, the surface glamour was becoming more important than the job itself. Like a tatty film, the glitter and hype were more important than the content. But the man still had a knack of gathering useful people around him, by payment or flattery, or both, and keeping them at his mercy by the same methods plus brazen bullying. You could work for him, she calculated, while admiring him enough to sweat your guts out in a desire to please him, and at the same time hating Brunner’s own guts.
‘But things were going off. Chet still liked the big act, the laird of all he surveyed. And then the house party idea — ‘themed weekends’ was a term he had picked up somewhere. People were prepared to spend good money on playing murder games in surroundings like these. But I don’t think it was going to last much longer. I’ve known Chet a long time, and I know the symptoms when he’s getting cheesed off and ready to move on to a new patch.’
‘Which brings us to our latest drama. Tell me what you can remember about last night. What time was Mr Brunner last seen?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. He wasn’t here when I got back.’
‘Got back? From where?’
‘From Brawhill station. Mrs Brunner had rung through to say she had crashed Chet’s Mercedes and would have to come back by train. Chet sent me to meet her. But she wasn’t on the first train, so I waited for the next one. The last one, actually.’
‘At Brawhill station, you said?’
‘Not a very cheery place. I went down into the village and had a pie in the pub. By the time I started back, the skies had opened. Windscreen wipers top speed, and still weren’t coping. I nearly came off the road at one corner. Water running down the hillside and flooding the road. Some nasty bends. I pulled over, listened to the radio. When it slackened off, I set off again. Still pretty treacherous. And then it all started again. I made it eventually.’
‘And what time would it be when you got back?’
‘Around ten-thirty, I think. Didn’t look at the clock. All I wanted was a dram. And then another one.’
‘You didn’t see anything as you came up the drive?’
‘Only the lights of the house. And mighty glad to see those, believe me.’
‘Nothing on the grass that ought not to have been there?’
‘I wasn’t looking for anything. Anyway, wasn’t the body found on the slope round the other side?’
‘You knew that?’ said McAdam sharply.
‘It’s what the postie told us.’
‘Of course, yes.’ Her lips tightened. ‘You had no reason to dislike Mr Brunner?’
‘He paid me my salary, kept me in work, let us have accommodation here.’
‘That wasn’t the question, Mr Chisholm. Did you have reasons to dislike him? Hate him, even? It can happen even in the best paid working relationship, and you’ve been pretty frank about your own view on your employer’s character.’
‘He could be a bastard at times. Could fly off the handle, charge at a thing in a rage — and charge at you, yourself, if there was nobody else about to shout at. But I was used to him.’
‘You have any views on the other people here?’
‘You mean suspicions?’
‘Just any judgement that might be useful.’
Alec Chisholm shrugged. ‘We’ve had one lot of eccentrics and exhibitionists after another. Nothing especially unusual this time round. Except . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I was a bit surprised that Chet had invited Harry Pitcairn. And even more surprised that Pitcairn had accepted.’
‘Why would that be?’
Chisholm looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t like to stir up any false impressions. The lad’s had enough grief as it is.’
‘Grief?’
‘His family used to own all this land. Harry’s dad was Lord Lieutenant of the shire, until he got into some financial trouble. Just neglect, nothing criminal — spending too much time in ceremonials instead of keeping the books straight. Had to resign, and then had to sell up, and hated doing both. And the two of them, father and son, hated Chet for having cheated them, as they saw it, over the sale of the estate.’
‘And did he cheat them?’
‘Chet always drove a hard bargain. Never happy with a deal unless he felt he had scored somehow. And once he’d pulled this one off, he did get a bit bossy. Put up a fence to spoil part of their view. Closed what they claimed had always been a right of way across the top of the estate to the bluebell woods.’
‘And had it been a right of way?’