“I—I’m not sure.” Hazel felt suddenly reluctant to say.
“I thought . . . there was someone buried here, a long time ago.”
Louise knelt and poked a finger into the hole.
“Bones?” She looked up, her eyes wide. “You’ve found another body? Well, hasn’t this been a week for revelations?” Standing, she picked up the spade Hazel had abandoned and raked the tip over the soil.
Hazel put out a hand. “Louise, don’t—”
“Possessive about this one, too, are you?” Louise stopped, leaning on the spade.
“What— I don’t understand.” Hazel’s heart began to thud.
“Not everything belongs to you, Hazel. Did you know that? Did it ever occur to you that other people deserve a share? That other people have feelings?”
“Louise, what are you talking about?” Hazel whispered.
“Did you never think, all those years ago, how I might have felt?” she hissed, her voice full of venom. “Louise, the invisible. Louise, the third wheel. I watched you together, and you never noticed. I loved him, and you never saw it. And then you threw him away, as if he were so much rubbish, and left me to patch up his wounds.”
“Louise, it wasn’t like that at all—”
“You discarded him and moved on to the next one, as if you were changing shoes. But I kept on. I loved him, and I waited. I married John, because he was available, and I waited a little longer. I chose the property here, the
closest to Donald I could find. I thought he would see . . .
if I gave him enough time . . . if I could show him what he was missing.
“And then, you came back, picking up where you left off, and he was so blind he didn’t see you would do the same thing again.”
“But, Louise, I didn’t—”
“But you did. I told him that morning, told him that you had packed and gone, without even telling him good-bye. He didn’t believe me.”
“You . . . saw Donald?”
“I was out walking. Someone had left John’s little gun in my potting shed, and the rabbits had been into my garden, so I took the shotgun with me. I wanted to think; I was so happy when I saw you drive away, but I knew I couldn’t show it, not yet. I didn’t know Donald was out, as well, until I saw him coming across the meadow.
“He met me with a smile. He wanted to share it all with me, your joyous reunion, his plans for the future. I had to tell him, then, that you were gone.
“He didn’t believe me, at first.” Louise shook her head, as though his stubbornness still surprised her. “When it began to dawn on him that I was telling the truth, he wanted to go after you. That was too much, after everything you’d done to him. I couldn’t bear it.
“I told him he was a fool. I told him that you would never really care for him, not the way I did.” She fell silent, and Hazel waited, too sick with horror to speak.
When Louise did go on, her eyes seemed to have lost their focus. “He laughed at me. I told him I loved him, and he laughed at me. He thought I was joking, at first.
And then, when he realized I meant it, he looked at me as if I were something nasty, an insect found under a log.
“ ‘I wouldn’t have you if you were the last woman on
earth, Louise,’ he said. ‘You’re a wee cold spider, always watching, always waiting, always looking for your advantage. You should watch yourself—you’ll be lucky I don’t tell your husband what you’re up to. Now, let me go.’ He shook my hand off his arm.”
“What— What did you do then?” Hazel asked hoarsely, in spite of herself.
“I didn’t think,” answered Louise, with an air of wonder. “I just raised the gun and pulled the trigger. He looked so surprised.”
Hazel took an involuntary step back, stifling a sob.
“Louise, why are you telling me this?”
“Because Callum MacGillivray didn’t die, and I have no doubt he’ll be telling Chief Inspector Ross that he saw me that morning.”
“You— You poisoned that poor man?”
Louise didn’t seem to have heard. Her gaze had focused on Hazel again, fully intent. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” she asked, as if the possibility had not occurred to her. “I told you, I only came here to talk . . . but then, it all comes down to you, doesn’t it . . . And I have nothing to lose.” Louise smiled, tightening her grip on the spade, and Hazel’s blood ran cold.
Leaving Tim in the interview room, Kincaid went out into the corridor and rang Gemma from his mobile phone.
“Gemma!” he said with undisguised relief when she answered. “Listen, I’ve just talked to Tim. He was there over the weekend, all right, and he did take the gun from the cabinet. But he says he didn’t shoot Donald Brodie. He left the gun in the potting shed. In which case—”
“Louise took it.”
“You knew?”
“I talked to Callum. He saw her, walking through the meadow with the gun. That’s why she poisoned him.”
“Have you told Ross?”
“I left him a mess—” The phone signal broke up.
“Gemma, you don’t mean to talk to Louise yourself?” he asked, with dawning dread. “You realize that if this woman shot Donald, and poisoned Callum, she’s capable of anything.”
A garble of static came back to him, interspersed with a few intelligible words. “. . . no choice . . . Hazel . . .
gone after her . . .”
“Gemma, where are you?” he said, only realizing he was shouting when a passerby in the corridor looked at him oddly.
“. . . pole in . . .” he thought he heard her say, and then very clearly, “. . . the Braes of Glenlivet.” Then the phone connection went dead.
The rain had turned to snow as Gemma passed through Tomintoul. Fat, white flakes splattered the windscreen like stars, then vanished beneath the wipers. As visibility diminished, she regretted the time she’d taken to drive to Innesfree, but she had hoped against hope that Louise had not followed Hazel to Carnmore.
But when she arrived at the B&B, she found not Louise, but Pascal, fuming. Ross had had him driven to Aviemore to make a formal statement, and when he’d returned he’d found both Louise and his car gone. “I left her the keys,” he explained, “in case she needed to move it. I had not parked this morning with the intent to stay.”
“We’ll have to hope courtesy is its own reward,” Gemma told him, patting his arm. “What about John and Martin?”
“Still at the Aviemore Police Station. I think they were waiting for the return of John’s car.”
“Come on, then. I have to drive back past Benvulin. I’ll drop you.” She had explained the situation briefly on the way; then, after leaving Pascal at Benvulin’s gate, she called Ross again and this time left a detailed message.
Perhaps Kincaid would try to reach him, she thought as she made the turning at the Pole Inn. She’d pulled over for a moment in the pub’s car park and tried to ring Kincaid back, but she’d lost her mobile phone signal, and she didn’t want to take the time to use the call box.
The snow grew heavier as she crawled along the track that led into the Braes, her sense of urgency mounting.
By the time she reached Chapeltown, she could see only a few feet in front of the car, but she kept going along the farm track that led up towards Carnmore. If she got stuck, she would worry about it later.
But her luck held, and when she could make out the more solidly white shapes of the distillery buildings, she stopped the car. She slipped out, careful to make no sound. A few feet on, when she recognized both Heather’s Audi and Pascal’s BMW, she hesitated. As Kincaid had said, Louise had shown herself to be capable of anything, killing, or attempting to kill, both with fore-thought and without.
She went back to the car and, quietly popping the boot, took out the tire tool. It was the best she could do.
The snow cloaked her and muffled her footfalls as she neared the distillery. She could see that the door of the old warehouse stood open, so
she approached it obliquely, then stood just at its edge, listening with increasing dismay as Louise matter-of-factly related murdering Donald.
Hesitating, torn between the desire to let Louise talk and the fear that she might act, Gemma almost left it too late.
Hearing an odd note of excitement in Louise’s voice, Gemma charged in, tire tool raised, shouting, “Put it down!
Put the spade down!” just as Louise swung hard at Hazel’s head.
Hazel ducked, her reflexes saving her all but a clip across the top of the scalp, and then Gemma was on Louise with a fury she hadn’t known she possessed, screaming at her as she pushed her to the ground, pinning her across the chest with the tire tool.
Louise went still as Gemma sat astride her, panting.
“Two against one,” Louise said. “That’s not fair. But then life’s always bloody unfair, isn’t it?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Peaceful bounty flowing
Past like the dust blowing,
That harmony of folks and land is shattered.
Peat fire and music, candle-light and kindness . . .
Now they are gone
And desolate these lovely lonely places.
—douglas young
Gemma had managed to bind Louise’s hands with a frayed bit of rope Hazel had found in the barn when they saw a pulse of blue light through the snow. The Northern Constabulary had arrived.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Gemma said a half hour later, as she and the chief inspector watched Louise being shepherded into the marked car. Ross and Munro had driven behind it at a furious pace all the way from Aviemore, he’d told her, afraid the snow might shut down the road altogether.
“I’ve been in this job long enough to know the truth when I hear it, lass, though I’ll not easily forgive ye for stealing a march on me with Callum MacGillivray. I was on my way to hospital when I got your message.”
“He might not have told you, ” Gemma said, feeling comfortable enough now to tease him a bit.
“Oh, aye, there is that. I suppose there is a place for the feminine touch. But that one . . .” Shaking his head, he watched the car holding Louise pull away. Gemma had related to him Louise’s revelations, as well as describing her murderous attack on Hazel. Hazel, still bleeding freely from a scalp wound, was being ministered to by a very competent Sergeant Munro. “With that one,” Ross continued, “it’s a fine thing ye had your wits about ye.”
“I only hope you’ll find some physical evidence to back up what she told us.”
“Don’t ye worry, lass. We’ll find it, now that we know what we’re looking for,” Ross had assured her.
The next day the police search team had turned up Louise’s gardening gloves, buried in the carrot patch in the garden. The gloves tested positive for gunpowder residue and, under forensic examination, revealed minute traces of human blood and tissue—Donald’s.
The snowstorm had ended almost as quickly as it had begun, and by Thursday, the day of Donald’s funeral, even the slush had vanished. The May sun shone out of a clear, blue sky, and the birds sang blithely as Donald Brodie was laid to rest in the Grantown churchyard. Standing between Hazel and Heather, Gemma found that she was glad she had known him, however briefly. A complicated man, neither saint nor sinner, but a man whose passion for life, for the whisky he made, and for one woman made him well worth mourning.
As for the bones in the warehouse at Carnmore, Ross had authorized a forensics team to remove them from the site. A DNA sample had been taken from Donald’s body;
if the remains were found to match, Rab Brodie would be buried beside his great-great-grandson.
On Friday morning, Hazel took Gemma to the railway station in Aviemore. The little wooden building looked more than ever like a gingerbread house, and the still-snowcapped peaks of the distant mountains were as crisply white against the blue of the sky as those in Toby’s drawing. It was a beautiful country, thought Gemma, the sort of country that got into your blood and stayed.
They sat together on the platform bench, waiting for the London train in companionable silence, until Hazel said, “I’ve been thinking about John. He suspected, didn’t he, that it was Louise? He knew she took the gun out occasionally, and he knew she’d been behaving oddly. No wonder he seemed terrified.”
“What will he do now, do you know?” asked Gemma.
“He told me he meant to sell the farmhouse. Legally, Louise owns a half interest in the property, and he told me he couldn’t bear to share anything with her, even if only on a piece of paper.”
“But he’s worked so hard. It was what he’d always wanted.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about that, too.”
Gemma glanced at her friend, recognizing an earnest-ness in her tone of voice. “You have an idea.”
Hazel smiled. “It would depend on Heather’s agree-ment, of course. But you’ve seen Benvulin House. It’s a drain on the business as it is, and there’s no one wants to live in a place that size—why not turn it into an elegant small hotel? There are other distilleries that have done the same thing successfully.”
“And you’re thinking the hotel would need a manager?”
“Something like that. There might even be a place for Martin.”
Gemma patted her arm. “It’s a kind thought. Some good should come of this.” She still couldn’t think of Louise Innes without a shudder. “But what about you, Hazel? What are you going to do? That’s the real question.” She knew that Hazel had at last talked to Tim but not what had passed between them.
“I don’t know,” Hazel said slowly. “For now, I’ll stay on a few more days, as much as I miss Holly. I’ve arranged it with Tim so that I can ring her every day.”
“Will she be all right with Tim?”
“I think so, yes. For the time being.”
“Hazel—”
“There’s your train.” Hazel stood as the diesel locomotive came into view, braking for the station. “Don’t worry, Gemma. I’ll ring you. You go home, look after Toby, and Kit. And, Gemma”—Hazel hugged her quickly, then kissed her cheek—“thank you. You’ve been a good friend.”
“Mummy, are you still angry with Callum?” Chrissy had pulled a stool up to the kitchen doorway and perched where she could watch her mother cooking. It was her favorite position, Alison realized, when she had something she wanted to discuss.
Alison turned the sausage in the pan and checked the potatoes before she answered, giving herself time to think.
“No, baby,” she said slowly. “I don’t suppose I am.”
She’d heard from Mrs. Witherspoon—who’d heard it from Janet MacGillivray—that Callum had been released from hospital, but he hadn’t rung her.
“And it wasn’t Callum’s fault that Donald was killed?”
asked Chrissy, her small face intent.
“No.” Alison answered this one more easily. “It didn’t have anything to do with Callum at all.”
Chrissy nodded once, as if settling something in her mind. She watched Alison in silence for a few minutes, but Alison knew her daughter well enough to guess she had more to say.
“Does that mean I can take riding lessons, after all?”
“Christine Grant, do ye never think of anything but the horses?” Alison said, half laughing, half exasperated.
“Sometimes.” The corners of Chrissy’s mouth turned up. “Especially when I’m hungry. So can I, Mummy, please? Callum said we wouldn’t have to pay.”
“We’ll not be accepting charity from Callum MacGillivray,” snapped Alison, singeing her finger on the pan. “And ye know we can’t afford—” The sight of her daughter’s face brought her to a halt—the disappointment quickly marshaled, the round, gray eyes suddenly expressionless. Was her pride worth that high a price? Alison wondered. “Well,” she said slowly, “maybe we could accept a wee discount, from a friend.”
“Are you and Callum friends, then?” asked Chrissy, with a hopeful note.
“Aye. I suppose we might be. But, mind you, baby, don’t be expecting anything more. Callum and me, we’re . . . well, we’re as different as chalk and cheese.”
“It’s okay, Mummy.” Chrissy’s serene smile held an unnerving hint of satisfaction.
The long, flat miles between Cambridge and London slipped away, as they had so often in the past, Kincaid thought as he watched the landscape recede in his rearview mirror. He had brought Tess with him when he’d picked Kit up at Nathan’s, and now, after an ecstatic reunion, both boy and dog were quiet.
Glancing into the backseat, he saw Tess stretched out full length, breathing the short, whuffly breaths of doggy
dreams. In the front, Kit sat back with his eyes closed, but Kincaid didn’t think he was sleeping. They hadn’t yet had a chance to talk, although Nathan had rung Kincaid from his office and related his own discussion with Kit.
Opening his eyes, Kit said suddenly, “Are Tim and Hazel going to get a divorce?”
Kincaid had given Kit and Nathan a sketchy version of the events in Scotland, but Kit had obviously read between the lines. “I don’t know, Kit. I suspect things are going to be difficult for them, and sometimes . . . sometimes things don’t work out even when people want them to.”
“What about Holly? Will she stay with Hazel?”
“I think that’s most likely, yes,” Kincaid said uneasily.
He hadn’t really thought about how Hazel’s situation would affect Kit, but he saw now that it was another prop gone in the structure of Kit’s existence. “Kit, we won’t lose Hazel and Holly, no matter how things work out.”
Kit looked at him, accusation in his blue eyes. “You can’t promise it.”
“No.” What Kit wanted, Kincaid realized, was a guarantee against fate, and he couldn’t give it. Kit had been buffeted by life, thrown like a football from one family to another, from one possible future to another, with no power to choose anything for himself.
Kincaid thought back to his conversation with Nathan.
Nathan had tactfully suggested that Kit be allowed to decide whether or not to have the DNA testing, and although Kincaid had disagreed at the time, now he began to wonder if Nathan had had a point.
Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 09 - Now May You Weep dk&gj-9 Page 33