by John Burke
Nick sounded very firm and positive. Lesley knew that Anna needed an inarguable decision right here and now, and she loved the confident way he shouldered the responsibility, sympathetic but unyielding. ‘Save it until they get back. It’ll give you time to sort it out in your own mind, and know exactly how much is evidence and how much is speculation. And,’ he finished earnestly, ‘time to decide how much you really need to tell her. If anything at all.’
Anna nodded. She sat quite still for a moment or two, then emerged shakily from her trance. She blinked and looked around. ‘I’ve no business lumbering you with all my woes. I really just came in to see you before you leave. Any problems?’
Now it was inconsequential chat about the cottage, its amenities, the few scraps of food and one unopened bottle of wine the Torrances were leaving for the next tenant or for Anna herself.
When she had gone, Lesley strolled through to the bedroom and dragged her case out of the bottom of the wardrobe.
Nick said: ‘All that talk of dirt on cars — have you had a look at ours in the last day or two? We’ve got a sizeable helping of rural deposits all over it. While you’re doing your bit of packing, I’ll run it into the village. They’ve got a power hose behind the garage there.’
‘Leaving me to do all the last-minute chores here? Very cunning.’
‘Save stumbling over one another as we pack.’
‘You sound very experienced in that direction.’
‘Not at all, my love. Just that I remember you bumping into me every few seconds in that cabin. Pleasant enough experience, depending on which part of your anatomy was doing the bumping, but —’
‘Oh, do go and squirt some foamy water all over the car.’
He kissed her, and went out to the Laguna.
Lesley stood by the window, watching the car swing out of the yard and hearing the familiar purr as it accelerated out of sight. Instead of getting back to her packing, she went on staring out across the yard at the bonnet of Anna Chisholm’s Volvo which she could just see in its slot at the end of the farmhouse. As if by just staring at it she had managed to provoke it into life, she saw it begin moving out across the yard, and turning in the opposite direction from Nick, heading towards Balmuir Lodge.
Long after the sounds of both vehicles had faded, there was a sound scratching at the back of her mind. Something was ringing a bell somewhere, demanding her attention. Where had she seen a bloodstained fragment of sacking? Only of course she hadn’t seen any such thing. She had merely heard of it, somewhere.
Then out of those recesses of her memory she heard McAdam’s voice complaining about the overload of details she had received from examination of Stuart Morgan’s workshop. A reference to sacking in there, too. And a trace of animal blood. Instead of throwing the bloodied corpse of a dog he had just hit into bushes or a ditch beside a road much used by locals, had Morgan decided it was safer to dump it temporarily in his workshop and later dispose of it further down the glen, where it was unlikely to be found or identified? Hastily bundling it into a sack along with all the other items removed from Balmuir Lodge, he intended to get rid of it at leisure.
Had he had time enough for that before he was killed?
Once she had finished her packing, there was nothing to do in the cottage. Even making a cup of coffee would mean dirtying a cup and having to wash it up again. Having tidied the cushions on the sofa in the sitting-room, she absurdly didn’t want to sit down and disarrange them.
The sun was shining. She would have a last stroll. On the last day of a holiday, there was often a brief interlude during which you wanted to have a quick last look at some of the places you had enjoyed, the corners which would linger in your memory. Though, as Nick had said, this had hardly been a holiday. As she went out she glanced at the carousel where Brunner had met his end, and then her footsteps took her up the slope past the spot where he had lain. Not reminiscences which merited any holiday snaps. She continued round the swimming-pool, and in an arc round the Lodge to the Chisholms’ wing.
She had not been aware of the existence of a tiny garden in the shadow of the wing. As she came upon it now, Queenie was standing with her back to her, striking a crooked, stooped pose and holding a small trowel above her head.
Play-acting again, poor dear.
‘Who would have thought the young man to have had so much blood in him?’ She raised the trowel like a monstrance.
Lesley said instinctively: ‘Haven’t you got that wrong, Queenie? Surely it’s ‘the old man’ . . .?’
Beyond Queenie she saw a hummock of freshly turned earth in the centre of the patch, covered with little knots of cut flowers. Some terrible urge drove her past Queenie to stoop over that little mound.
Anna had been worried about bringing sad news to Queenie. Lesley knew with an awful shiver that there was no need to break such news.
Behind her, Queenie’s voice raged with a tragic intensity she had probably never achieved before. ‘Don’t you dare touch! Who asked you to come here? Can’t you leave well alone?’
*
Nick was puzzled, then mildly annoyed before becoming mildly worried. Where the hell had Lesley got to, without leaving even a scribbled note on the coffee table? He strolled over to the farmhouse, expecting to find her chatting to Anna; but there was nobody there. The Volvo was missing, so probably Anna had gone up to the Lodge to wish Alec and Queenie a happy holiday.
Would Lesley have gone with her, in too much of a hurry to leave a note? It was not as if she was particularly close friends with them — less so than he himself was.
He phoned Alec’s number, but there was no reply.
Torn between annoyance and an indefinable apprehension, he went back to the Laguna, sparkling after its bath, and drove up to Balmuir Lodge. At the entrance to the drive he had to swerve on to the verge to avoid a Jaguar coming out into the middle of the road. The driver glared at him; the woman in the passenger seat looked perfectly happy. It appeared that Tam Hagan and Georgina Campbell were leaving Balmuir behind them.
As he got out of the car, Jilly-Jo was standing in the middle of the terrace screaming at anyone who would listen. Unfortunately for her, there seemed to be no audience whatsoever. Queenie’s Fiat was not parked near the Chisholms’ wing, so the holidaymakers must be on their way to wherever they had chosen. Hagan’s Jag, as he had just seen, was on its way to pastures new — if Glasgow could be regarded as coming into that category.
Jilly-Jo came ranting towards him. ‘D’ you know what they’ve done? D’you know what they’ve done to me?’
‘I’m sorry, I came here looking for my wife. Have you —’
‘Locked me out of my own suite. I’ve been cheated by every rotten bastard, every little floozie, every . . . I tell you, this place stinks. I’ll make somebody pay for this. But I can’t get back into my suite to collect my clothes, or my cases, or . . . or anything.’
‘Who’s got the key, then?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe those two. Getting a big laugh out of it.’ Her breasts were heaving up and down, and there was a trickle of sweat forming along her throat. Her breathing slowed gradually, and she tried a completely new approach, switching from raging harridan to helpless maiden in distress. ‘Do you think you could break the door down for me?’
‘I’m sure I couldn’t.’ Nick tried not to make it sound too dismissive.
‘Oh, sod it. Couldn’t you at least come and have a look?’
Reluctantly he followed her indoors and up the stairs. The door to what had presumably been Chet Brunner’s apartment was open. In one wall was a heavy oak door. Jilly-Jo stabbed her fingers at it as if hoping an ‘Open Sesame’ would work this time.
Nick tried the huge brass knob, and shoved hard. The door did not even creak.
‘It’s pretty substantial for a bedroom door, isn’t it?’
‘That’s the way Chet wanted it. The walls are solid stone, you know. And no window. As near soundproof as anyone could wish.’ He avoided lo
oking at her too intently, wondering what sort of noise she and Chet had made that needed soundproofing. ‘Sort of cosy little prison,’ Jilly-Jo went on. ‘Chet liked to think of it as an eastern what-d’you-call-it. You know, a place for his woman to be kept secluded ready for when he wanted to come to her.’ For a moment she was simpering, back in the past with a memory of Chet. Then she came rushing back into the present. ‘The bastard. Treacherous fat bastard.’
Nick pointlessly beat a tattoo on the door with his knuckles.
Were there voices on the other side? Then there was a faint but unmistakable rapping.
‘I think that’s my wife they’ve shut in there.’
‘Why the hell should anyone do that?’ Jilly-Jo was in no mood to have the dramatic emphasis shifted from herself.
Nick set off downstairs again, intent on phoning for someone with the equipment for breaking down that door. On the turn of the stairs he looked down from the window and saw a Volvo in the shadow of the building. Anna Chisholm’s, surely. But when he got down and strode across the hall to the door, there was neither sight nor sound of Anna.
Nor of Lesley.
Had they both been locked in that room?
It took him five exasperating minutes to find a telephone directory and start looking through for a local builder or some shop in the village that could recommend someone for breaking down a door — which would undoubtedly lead to an outbreak of succulent gossip round the village.
Just as he had found the number of the village shop, he heard the sound of a car outside, coughing and hiccuping. He put the directory down and went out, to see Alec Chisholm getting out of the yellow Fiat, gripping the edge of the door to steady himself. His face was ashen, and when he moved away from the car he was staggering as if he had just come off a ship which had been rolling for hours in a terrible storm.
When he saw Nick he came stumbling towards him, starting to weep.
‘We should never have set off. She wasn’t up to it.’
Nick put an arm around his shoulders, and looked past him. It was the second time within a few days that he had seen a woman’s head slumped against a car window.
‘Queenie? Is she all right?’
Alec slipped away from his grasp and slumped down on to the low wall fringing the terrace. He put his head in his hands. When he spoke, still shaking, all that came out at first was an incoherent murmur. Then he forced himself to look up.
‘She’s dead. It was all too much for her.’
‘Alec, I’m so sorry. I thought the holiday was going to be just what she needed. What both of you needed, after all the turmoil.’ He took a step towards the Fiat, but Alec put out a hand to stop him.
‘There’s nothing you can do. She wanted us to turn back. Said she wanted to be near Cocky when it . . . when she . . .’ Again words failed him.
‘She’d been ill. You could see that. I didn’t know how serious it was.’
‘She’d suffered from atheroma for quite a time, and it was getting worse. Deposits of cholesterol in the lining of an artery, you know.’ He had fallen into the plodding rhythm of a recitation. ‘She had several fainting fits before we found what it was. Tried taking anti-coagulant drugs, but they seemed to aggravate it. The specialist kept warning her against emotional stress, since that made things worse. Only when Queenie gets emotionally stressed, of course, she gets stressed, and that’s that.’ He was trying to smile, and trying to get Nick to smile sympathetically with him. Then the smile faded. ‘Oh, Christ. Nick, I’m sorry. The girls — honestly, we didn’t mean them any harm, but we had to have plenty of time to get away.’
‘Get away?’
‘Your wife. And Anna. We were going to phone you when we were sure we were well away, and tell you the key’s in the drawer beside the microwave, in the kitchen.’
‘You mean you locked them in?’
‘Between us. I suppose,’ said Alec pitifully, ‘that stress, on top of everything else, didn’t do Queenie any good.’
Nick stormed away, into the kitchen of the Chisholms’ quarters. It was not difficult to find the key. In keeping with Chet Brunner’s flamboyant tastes, it was a huge piece of brass with a haft of some intertwining Eastern design. He snatched it up, and went back up the stairs two at a time.
Lesley threw herself into his arms and would not let go.
‘How did you find us?’ asked Anna at last. ‘I mean, how did you know about the key, wherever it was?’
‘Alec’s just told me.’
‘Alec? But it was he and Queenie who shoved us in here. They’d already asked me not to tell the police, and when I said they’d have to face up to it, they bundled me in here. And then they rushed your wife in as well.’
Nick held Lesley away from him, his hands biting into her shoulders. ‘You must have been taken well and truly off guard.’
‘The woman was mad. I couldn’t believe how much strength she could summon up. I’ve known some nut cases before who suddenly seemed to have the strength of half a dozen. But yes, Queenie got me quite by surprise. And Alec’ — she forced a tremulous laugh — ‘poor Alec, he kept apologizing.’
‘It’s dreadful,’ said Anna, ‘but you’ll have to tell the police to get after them. And stop them before something else happens. The state Queenie’s in, there’s no telling —’
‘Queenie,’ said Nick, ‘is dead.’
They followed him back into the open air. Alec was still hunched on the low wall, staring at the Fiat but making no move to get up and go towards it.
Lesley said: ‘I’m sorry about Queenie. But, Alec . . . she did kill Stuart Morgan, didn’t she?’
He looked at her and nodded quite calmly.
‘I shall have to ring the police,’ said Nick. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’
‘Of course. And to save you time, that woman detective was in the village as we came through. I nearly stopped, but somehow I felt I had to get here so that Queenie could be near Cocky for the last time. Even though she was past knowing by then.’
Nick went to his car phone and came back to find that Lesley and Anna had joined Alec on the wall, sitting almost companionably on either side of him. It was a bright morning; somewhere two starlings were chattering, and a long way away a dove uttered a plummy, repetitive coo.
In an apologetic tone, as if he felt it a duty to fill in time for them while they awaited the police, Alec began a bald, direct recital of events which seemed too far away for him really to believe in them.
Queenie had always hated Stuart Morgan. Like all Queenie’s moods, the hatred came and went; but its embers were always there, smouldering away, ready to be fanned by a sudden mood or a sudden bit of news, misinterpreted. She was sure Morgan had planned the death of his wife and of Peter. Had fixed Peter’s car somehow. Queenie had been in a few TV thrillers where cars came off the road and burst into flames, and it turned out to be somebody fiddling with the brake cables or something — she was never mechanically minded enough to know precisely what.
She was determined to steer him away from Anna. Quite sure that now he knew Anna was coming into the estate he would be pursuing his campaign to win her. Queenie couldn’t bear the thought. She went round to see him at his workshop, to have it out with him.
‘And she found Cocky.’ For the first time Alec faltered in his narrative. ‘Just dumped there, a mangled, bloody body stuffed into a piece of sacking and left on the floor. Why he hadn’t just thrown it into the bushes after hitting it, God knows. Though I suppose it’s a pretty bare stretch of roadside there, along the edge of the moor. Might have been seen from the road, and traced to him and the Volvo. Do him no good — in trouble, driving without a licence. And Queenie had enough counts against him, without that on top of it all. He was quite right about that.’
‘So,’ said Anna, ‘Stuart wrapped the corpse up and put it in the back of my Volvo, and took it indoors along with all the other items he had collected from the house here. Intending to get rid of it as soon as possible.
But he didn’t get the time.’
‘No,’ Alec continued sombrely. ‘Queenie rolled up to challenge him over his intentions towards you, and the first thing she saw was the remains of Cocky. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand, and stabbed him with it. And then ran out, excited, dithering . . . and came to me. But she didn’t tell me right away.’ He stared wonderingly up at Nick, hardly believing his own words. ‘We just carried on shopping. She was steamed up, but she was often like that. Could get very dramatic over a kilo of potatoes that had what she thought was a bad one in the middle. Or catch a headline in a paper that displeased her, and declaim a ranting political speech until I bought her a bar of chocolate and led her away.’ Now it was becoming too real and vivid. Tears flooded his eyes again. ‘And when she did get round to telling me, we decided we had to get away. I’d been talking about a holiday anyway. Only it was stupid, wasn’t it? We’d never have got away with it.’
‘Too much like the Watermans.’
‘Yes. Only they were innocent.’ Alec shrugged and managed a sad smile. ‘We’d probably have lost our way anyway. Take too many wrong turnings.’
‘It’s been known,’ Lesley agreed.
‘It was Queenie who said she wanted to come back. She was the one who saw that it was hopeless. Said she’d sooner have a last look at Cocky’s grave and then be arrested, and let them do what they liked. But she didn’t even make that.’
A police car was coming down the drive. As if to protect Queenie against the immediate impact, Alec got up and went towards the Fiat. Over his shoulder he said: ‘Maybe it’s best this way. With Cocky dead, she wouldn’t have had much to live for. He was her best audience. Whatever part she played, he adored her. I did my best, but . . . well, she knew that I knew her failings, and I loved her for them, but it wasn’t enough. Cocky didn’t care whether she was a quite good Mrs Mopp or a lousy Lady Macbeth. For him she was star quality all the way.’
He dried his eyes and watched quite stoically as DCI McAdam approached. She halted near Nick. ‘Thanks for your call. Though I did think you’d have been away by now.’