Her next instinct was to clean up after him, but as she went to the sink for a cloth, realization hit her. If there had been something wrong with the whisky, she shouldn’t touch anything. She saw the green glass bottle on the tabletop, and on the floor beneath it, a pottery mug tipped on its side.
She’d never known Callum to drink much, and certainly not to the point of being insensible. God, why hadn’t she listened to Chrissy? Callum was daft, and aggravating, but he had never lied to her—he’d only shown her things she didn’t want to see.
Why had she thought he would invent an illness just to get her sympathy? He’d called her for help, and she’d refused him the kindness she’d have given freely to a stranger in the street.
If he died, she would never forgive herself. Worse yet, Chrissy would never forgive her.
Chapter Eighteen
It’s ill to break the bonds that God decreed to bind, Still we’ll be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O, it’s still for you and me That the broom is blowing in the north countrie!
—robert louis stevenson, from a poem written to Katharine de Mattos,
with a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Gemma pulled herself from Kincaid’s arms reluctantly, loath to leave the cocoon of rumpled sheets and the scent of sleep-sweet skin for the harsh reality of day.
But a cold, gray light shone mercilessly in through the window, and the house was stirring around them.
“What is it about holiday beds?” she asked, yawning.
“It’s never so hard to get up at home.”
Kincaid regarded her seriously. “It probably has something to do with the fact that you kept me up half the night.”
“Me?” She threw a pillow at him. “It was you kept me up!” When he covered his face with it in mimed sleep, she retaliated by snatching the duvet right off the bed.
“Hey, what do ye think ye’re doin’, hen?” he grumbled, in fair Scots.
She stared at him in surprise. “Where did you learn that?”
“I’m a man of hidden talents.” He grinned at her, re-claiming the duvet. “And you haven’t met my father. We really should remedy that someday soon.”
Gemma sat on the edge of the bed. “We should. I’d like to see your mum again. And Kit would love it—Toby, too, of course.” She hesitated, then added, “About Kit . . .
Will we ring him this morning and make arrangements to get him home?”
Kincaid sobered. “I’ve been thinking. This business with Ian is not something I want to discuss with him over the phone—it needs to be face-to-face. If it’s all right with Nathan, I think we should let Kit stay there for another day or two, until I can pick him up on my way back to London. We’ll have to let his school know, of course.”
“Um, right.”
He must have detected some lack of enthusiasm in her response, because he sat up, frowning.
“What? You don’t agree?”
“No, it’s not that. But when are we going to get home, if something doesn’t break on this case? Our hands are tied in every direction. We’ve no idea what’s going on with Tim, and Ross is focused entirely on John Innes—”
“Can you blame him, considering the fact that Innes’s gun seems to have been the murder weapon? Not to mention his dodgy alibi.”
“No,” she said, grudgingly. “I suppose not. But that doesn’t mean I buy John as the shooter. I’ll give you method, and opportunity, but not motive. Why would John Innes have killed Donald?”
“The truth is that you like John, and you don’t want to consider him as a suspect.”
“So?” Gemma countered. “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Flawless logic, love,” Kincaid told her, grinning. “But as it happens, I’m inclined to agree with you. I did make a little headway with John last night. After half a bottle of Scotch, he announced that since he didn’t shoot Donald, he wasn’t going to dig himself another hole just to provide the chief inspector an alibi.”
“Is that all?”
“After that he descended into the maudlin. He told us at great length what a good friend Donald had been to him, and that he didn’t see how he was going to manage without him. Martin and I had to help him up to bed.”
“Would keeping an affair from Louise be worth the risk of being charged with murder?”
“People have killed for less,” Kincaid reminded her.
“Maybe Donald threatened to tell Louise that John was having an affair,” suggested Gemma. “But why would Donald have done such a thing? And I still can’t see John as the Casanova type. He’s much too domestic.”
“You think men who cook don’t have affairs? That’s very sexist of you.”
Gemma refused to take his bait. “None of this is getting us any further forward.”
“So what would you do if you were Ross?”
Gemma considered for a moment. “I’d have another word with Callum MacGillivray. There’s something not right there, although I’ll be damned if I can see what it is.
But for one thing, he was very slippery about what he was doing on Sunday morning.”
“Then why don’t we pay him a call, first thing after breakfast?”
*
By the time they had taken turns squeezing in and out of the tiny shower, Gemma could hear the hum of conversation from downstairs, and the tantalizing smell of frying bacon had begun to drift in under their door.
Not having packed for more than a weekend, she stared at the meager selection in her bag, attempting to decide which of her outfits to recycle. She had glanced out the window, trying to assess the temperature, when she saw Hazel in the back garden.
Pulling on a nubby, oatmeal-colored pullover without further deliberation, she told Kincaid she’d meet him in the dining room. She wanted to have a word with Hazel before breakfast.
Hazel stood at the edge of the lawn, looking out over the wood and, beyond it, the meadow where Donald had died. The crime scene tape still fluttered in the chill little gusts of wind, and the clouds massing in the west were the color of old pewter. Hazel clasped the edges of her cardigan together, as if she were cold.
“The weather’s changing,” Gemma said as she joined her.
“The Gab o’ May. That’s what they call it in the Highlands—the return of bad weather in mid-May.”
“It’s not unusual, then?”
“No. I can remember snow in the Braes in May, when I was a child.” Hazel turned to her. “Gemma, I had the dream again last night. Well, not exactly the same dream, but the same sort of dream.”
“The one where you were at Carnmore?”
Hazel nodded. “But this time there was a man, as well.
It wasn’t Donald, but there was something about him . . .
Oh, it’s such a jumble. It’s as if the pieces of someone’s life were put in one of those cheap kaleidoscopes we had as children, and shaken. I get fragments of experience, but I can’t make sense of them.”
“I’m not surprised, after what you’ve been through these last few days.” Putting her arm round Hazel’s shoulder, Gemma gave her a brief hug. “But it’s just a dream—”
Hazel was already shaking her head. “I know that shock—and grief—do odd things to the psyche. But there’s an urgency to these dreams that stays with me. I feel her fear— It’s as if there’s something I should do—”
A car door slammed behind them, interrupting Hazel.
Turning round, Gemma saw Pascal getting out of his BMW. He moved stiffly, as he had for a moment the previous evening, but now he looked as if he were in real pain.
Gemma and Hazel hurried towards him. “Pascal, are you all right?” asked Gemma. “You don’t look at all well this morning.”
He grimaced. “It’s my back again, I’m afraid. Yesterday I was helping Heather with Donald’s things. I must have lifted too heavy a box. It’s an insult to my vanity.”
“Have you pulled a muscle?” Hazel asked, sympathet-ically.
“No, I have a bad disk,” Pascal admitted. “Usually, it’s manageable, but sometimes I have to take medication, and I seem to have misplaced my tablets. I thought perhaps I had left them in my room.”
“Duncan and I had that room last night,” Gemma told him. “But I don’t recall seeing anything of yours left behind. We should ask John and Louise—” She broke off as another car came down the drive and pulled up behind the BMW. Gemma recognized it instantly as belonging to Chief Inspector Ross.
“A good day to ye,” Ross called out as he and Sergeant Munro climbed from the car. He sounded too pleasant by half, thought Gemma, immediately wary.
“Something’s happened,” she whispered as Ross approached them.
“Sleep well, did ye?” Ross smiled, showing an expanse of teeth. “Mr. Benoit. Mrs. Cavendish. Inspector James.” He nodded at each of them in turn, as if bestow-ing a pontifical blessing. “And where are the others this morning?”
“Just gathering for breakfast, I should think,” answered Gemma, after glancing at her watch. It was getting on for half past eight. “Chief Inspector—”
“Why don’t we go inside for a wee chat,” interrupted Ross before Gemma could ask any of the half-dozen questions on the tip of her tongue.
Hazel grasped his arm as he turned away. “My husband, Chief Inspector— Have you—”
“I havena heard anything from London yet this morning, Mrs. Cavendish,” Ross said more gently than Gemma would have expected. “Now, perhaps we could impose on Mr. Innes for a cup of coffee.”
Hoping for enlightenment, Gemma glanced at Munro as they followed Ross towards the scullery door, but the sergeant’s long face remained impassive. She had a suspicion that Ross was planning some sort of “gather the suspects in the library” interrogation—but why?
Ross did gather them all together, but in the dining room rather than the library. “I like to think of myself as an economical man,” he explained, sitting down at the table and nursing his coveted cup of coffee. “I thought it would save me repeating myself if I talked to ye all at once—
time management, I believe it’s called.”
Gemma doubted Ross’s imitation of a naive rustic de-ceived anyone. Glancing round the room, she found Kincaid watching the detective with interest, while the others
looked as if they had unexpectedly encountered a cobra among the coffee cups. Pascal had eased himself into a chair. Martin had been seated when they came in, having already started on his cereal, while Louise had been helping John with the cooked breakfast in the kitchen. No one other than Pascal seemed inclined to join Martin and the chief inspector at the table.
Sergeant Munro had unobtrusively occupied the position he’d taken during their formal interviews, in the chair next to the sideboard.
“Now, then,” Ross continued after taking another appreciative sip of his coffee, “there’s been an interesting development since last night. I thought I should have another word with your neighbor”—he nodded at John and Louise—“Mr. Callum MacGillivray, as he was a bit vague as to his movements on the Sunday morning. Just in case he had seen more than he’d led us to believe, ye understand. Now, imagine my surprise this morning when I found, not Mr. MacGillivray forking hay into the horse troughs, but Mr. MacGillivray’s aunt.
“She had just come back from the hospital in Inverness, where her nephew was admitted in the wee hours of the morning.” Ross paused, appearing to savor the fact that he had their full attention. “It looks very much like someone tried to poison him.”
“Poison? How? What happened?” asked Gemma, curs-ing herself for not acting immediately on her instincts.
She’d felt sure that Callum had been hiding something.
“Is he— Is he all right?” Louise put a steadying hand on the sideboard.
“From the doctor’s report, and a quick look round the cottage, it looks as though someone put a hefty dose of opiates in his whisky—a terrible thing to do to a good bottle of Lagavulin.” Ross shook his head disapprovingly.
“The forensics laddies will be able to tell us more when they’ve had a go.”
“But is Callum all right?” said John, echoing his wife.
“Weel, now, that’s verra kind of you to be concerned, Mr. Innes. Especially as Miss MacGillivray told me you and your wee brother here paid a call on Callum early yesterday afternoon . . . and although Callum was out at the time, the two of you availed yourselves of his cottage.”
“But— You can’t think you’re going to pin this on us?
Just because we stopped by his cottage?” Martin leaned forward, a quick flush of anger suffusing his face. “We had nothing to do with—”
“Mr. Gilmore.” Ross turned on him like a terrier after a rat. “It seems you neglected to tell us that you had been recently charged with the sale of illegal substances, ec-stasy, I believe it was. Did ye think we wouldna find it out?”
“But it wasn’t relevant,” protested Martin. “That had nothing to do with Donald’s murder—”
“That’s for me to decide,” snapped Ross. “And what I see is that a man has been poisoned with opiates, and that you had access to drugs.”
“If by opiates, you mean morphine or heroin, I’ve never even seen the stuff. I wouldn’t know where to get that sort of thing even if I wanted to—and it’s a far cry from selling a few X-tabs to friends for a rave.”
“So that’s why you’re hanging about,” said Louise, giving Martin a look that could have curdled milk. “I should have known—”
“You say this man was given opiates?” Pascal interrupted, rising from his seat. “What sort of opiates?”
“I’ve not seen a copy of the hospital’s lab results,”
Ross said. “Why?”
“I take a pain medication, by prescription. It’s hydro-
morphone, a morphine derivative. I came round this morning because I had discovered my tablets were missing.”
“If you mean Dilaudid,” Munro said from his corner,
“that’s stronger than morphine. My wife was given it after a surgery a few years ago. The stuff made her sicker than a dog.”
“Mr. Benoit, when did you last see these tablets of yours?” asked Ross.
Pascal thought for a moment. “Not for several days. I do not take them regularly, you see, but only when the pain is most severe. Last night, after I had moved to Benvulin, my back was very bad, but when I looked in my case, the tablets were not there.”
“But you’re sure you had them here, in this house?”
“Yes,” Pascal answered firmly. “I remember I took one on Friday, after Donald had taken me fishing on the Thursday.”
“Do you know how many tablets were in this bottle?”
“The prescription is for thirty—there were perhaps fifteen remaining. I cannot be exactly certain, you understand.”
Ross looked round the room. “Weel, this puts a slightly different complexion on things. Anyone in this house could have put those tablets in Callum MacGillivray’s whisky, but”—his gaze swung back to John—“it was you and young Martin here who were seen entering Mr.
MacGillivray’s cottage.”
“I just wanted Martin to see the place.” John sounded desperate to convince him. “I knew Callum wouldn’t mind.”
“Chief Inspector, you still haven’t told us anything about Callum,” said Louise, her face set with determination. She seemed to have decided to ignore Martin for the time being. “I don’t know if you mean to be deliberately cruel, but Callum is our friend as well as our neighbor.”
“I apologize, Mrs. Innes.” Ross gave her his most gracious smile. “I didna mean to keep you in suspense. The doctors seem to think Mr. MacGillivray is out of the woods, but it will be a few hours before they’ll let us question him.”
Gemma was relieved but not surprised, as she’d suspected that if Callum had died Ross would have told them straightaway. She also felt sure Ross had neglected to mention that he would have a guard posted outs
ide Callum’s room, just in case someone decided to finish what they had started before Callum could talk.
“Thank God,” breathed Louise, and Gemma saw John give her an odd look. Did John not think his wife should show such concern over their neighbor? Was there something going on here that she had completely missed?
Just as she was wondering if she and Kincaid could talk Ross into letting them see Callum, or if she could get Louise alone again, her phone vibrated. Excusing herself, she turned away and looked at the caller ID. To her surprise, it was a local number. She slipped from the room and answered the call.
“Gemma? It’s Heather Urquhart here. Is Hazel with you? I’ve come across something I think she should see.”
Heather sounded hesitant and puzzled, quite unlike her usual confident self. “In fact, I’d like you both to come over straightaway, if you could manage it.”
Kit had run away once before, from his grandparents’ house, just after his mother had died. He’d come back to Grantchester then, too, searching for something that had eluded him. Why had he thought this time would be any different?
His mum was dead, his house belonged to someone else, and now Ian was gone, too. There was nothing left for him here.
He sat on the ground, inside the yew arbor that ran like a tunnel along one side of Nathan’s cottage. A gate at either end gave the space an enclosed, cavelike feel, and Kit had often come here to think after he and Nathan had become friends.
That morning he’d awakened early, aware of the strange bed, the unfamiliar creakings of the house as it settled around him. A fierce wave of homesickness had gripped him—he’d had no idea how accustomed he’d become to the house in Notting Hill, to the sound of Duncan singing hopelessly outdated tunes in his morning shower, to Gemma murmuring to the animals as she moved about the kitchen, to Toby’s little feet thumping up and down the stairs. Automatically, he reached for Tess, and patted an empty space on the coverlet.
How could he have left Tess behind? It was the first time he’d been separated from the little dog since he’d found her, and he felt as if he’d lost a limb.
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