Relishing her new role as agent of Her Majesty’s Government, she was sweeping through the doorway of the hotel, calling in loud fluting tones, ‘Mrs Mackenzie! Mrs Mackenzie!’
Under cover of the rhododendrons and the cars drawn up beside the heather beds, I crept to within a few yards of the wide-open front door. I’d warned her not to mention me at all. I could only hope that she wouldn’t be so carried away with her role as stand-in for 007 that she’d forget her instructions. I wanted to stay dead.
‘Coo-ee, Mrs Mackenzie!’ She was clearly enjoying herself.
I heard the sound of a door opening and of footsteps hurrying forward.
‘Who—!’ The exclamation was cut short as recognition dawned. ‘Why, Miss Lannelle… I didn’t expect… My, you are looking… What can I…?’ Mrs Mackenzie gushed, evidently overcome by the embarrassment of greeting a guest resurrected from deadly botulism.
‘Well, of course, I came to collect my things. You have taken care of them, haven’t you?’ I detected a genuine note of anxiety.
The unseen Mrs M murmured reassurances.
Then, ‘If you’ll just let me into my room, I’ll—’ Felicity suddenly let out a squeal of delight, ‘Oh, that heavenly aroma! It’s ab-saw-loot-ly wonderful. What have you got in the oven? My dear Mrs Mackenzie, you must tell me.’
The reply was inaudible, but the tone conveyed a maestro’s pride.
‘Such a combination! And so tricky!’ Felicity sounded genuinely impressed. ‘One wrong move and you’d have a complete disaster. Could I prevail upon you to let me visit your kitchen this very instant and observe the next step? Mrs Mackenzie, I, Felicity Lannelle, gastronome extraordinaire, implore you!’
My relief evaporated. She had so easily managed to find a way to engage Mrs Mackenzie’s attention, but much more of this ham-acting and she’d blow our whole plan sky-high. I hurriedly dodged behind the nearest car, lugging the holdall with me.
I waited. But there was no precipitate exit of Felicity pursued by an irate Morag Mackenzie. Instead, the murmur of voices was abruptly cut off by a closing door. They were on their way to the kitchens. Felicity had done it!
A mature rhododendron shrubbery provides excellent cover for those up to no good. The White Heather Hotel really should have a word with the local Crime Prevention Officer. I lifted a waxy leaf out of my line of sight and assessed my target.
The garage door was closed, as I knew it would be. Ten minutes earlier I had watched Mr Mackenzie’s little blue van turn out of the drive and head off, presumably on its routine trip to Edinburgh. With both the Mackenzies accounted for, the coast should be clear. But I have a rule never to leave anything to chance on a job like this. I made a quick, yet thorough, survey of the scene – no sign of an alarm system, rhododendron cover to within a few yards of the garage door.
It should take me five seconds to reach the bell and give it a long strident ring, five seconds to return to the sanctuary of the rhododendrons, minimum exposure. That’s what I estimated and that’s all it took. I waited. The small access door remained shut. Satisfied, I picked up the holdall. A few tentative probings of my pick-lock and I’d be in…
With a loud click the door shut behind me, its position marked by a faint grey outline of light. I’ve always subscribed to the theory that installing an alarm is as good as pinning up a sign for burglars saying, ‘Here lies Treasure!’ I was banking on the fact that the Mackenzies would share the same point of view. They wouldn’t want to draw attention to what appeared to be an ordinary garage.
The thin pencil beam of my torch swept over the rough concrete of the ceiling. No security devices there. No windows either, so it was probably safe enough to put on the lights. I’d have to risk it, anyway. Time was the important factor.
As the switch came down, the area flooded with light. I blinked. On the surface, it was just your run-of-the-mill garage storeroom, most of it filled with an impenetrable wall of cardboard cartons, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. By the looks of it, the Mackenzies would have no trouble supplying half of Scotland with a tin of haggis. It could only mean that a consignment was ready to move. I’d come just in time.
But something was niggling at the back of my mind, eating like a worm at my feeling of exhilaration. I stared at the boxes, letting my thoughts drift, hoping that the little seed would germinate, blossom into life… Those tins would take a lot of filling… I had a sudden comical vision of Murdo frantically stuffing a round plump haggis into each tin…of Morag furiously ladling in the deadly gravy before the tin was sealed by the…the canning machine. I spoke the words slowly, my voice echoing in the silence. There wasn’t one. Not here in the garage. Nor in their kitchen. Yet there had to be one.
I walked over to the nearest pile of boxes and ran my hand over the smooth cardboard. Say twenty tins to a carton. At a rough guess, there must be at least one hundred and fifty cartons in the garage. Three thousand tins…they couldn’t do it without a machine. I stood there lost in thought.
A muffled plaintive mew from Gorgonzola reminded me that time was passing. I unzipped the holdall. She stretched one leg stiffly, then another. When all four legs had had the treatment, she leapt lightly out of the holdall and walked over to the boxes, each one fitting snugly against its neighbour like the blocks of stone in an Ancient Greek Cyclopean wall. Without much hope, I watched her sniff fastidiously along the bottom row. There was little chance of her picking up traces of drugs on the floor or on the cardboard. Anyway, that wasn’t what really mattered at the moment. Just where was that machine—?
G had stiffened, head down, ears up, frozen into immobility. I tensed. A paw inched forward. Thud. In a gingery blur of movement, she pounced. This was not how she had been trained to behave when she discovered drugs. Natural feline instinct had overcome formal training. Nature had triumphed over Nurture. She had spotted a mouse, been tempted, and fallen. I felt the tension drain out of me. She was now scratching disconsolately at the boxes, hooking her claws on the edge of a small gap in which some defiant rodent was probably thumbing its whiskers. The whole stack juddered, causing the topmost boxes to shift position. A sudden athletic leap upward, a savage swipe at the unseen prey, and she dangled helplessly by the claws of one paw, six feet from the ground.
Her weight and the frantic scrabbling were enough. As if in slow motion, the whole stack tilted, leant forward at a gravity-defying angle, then toppled to the floor with a rumble that echoed like thunder round the confined space of the garage. A cloud of fine dust blotted out the scene.
As it cleared, I could make out the tip of a moth-eaten ginger tail protruding from what was surely her burial mound. For a long moment I couldn’t move, frozen to the spot. Transfixed is not too strong a word. Fifty half-kilo tins to a carton. G hadn’t stood a chance. Then, with the frantic urgency of a rescuer rushing to dig futilely with bare hands at the scene of an earthquake, I dashed forward, desperate to lift the heavy boxes off the little corpse.
Suddenly the pile lurched and shuddered. The topmost carton rolled onto the floor, and Gorgonzola’s eyes, round with fright, peered up at me. She was still alive. A tear trickled down my cheek as I bent, took a firm grip of one of the cartons, and heaved with all my strength. It slipped out of my hands and soared through the air to land with a hollow thud at the other side of the garage. Empty. I grabbed another carton. Light as a feather. A hefty kick sent it to join the other one. All the boxes in that column had been empty.
I gathered Gorgonzola up in my arms and pressed her furry body to my face. In normal circumstances, she would have spurned such a show of affection. On this occasion, she gave me a shaky purr of gratitude and her rough tongue rasped my hand.
‘It was all your own fault,’ I scolded into her ear.
The licking redoubled in vigour. G was apologising for her near-fatal lapse. I stroked her head…
‘You’ve just lost one of your nine lives.’ I set her down gently. ‘If there had been tins in there, you’d be—’
&n
bsp; There was now a narrow, dark passageway in the wall of boxes. Tail aloft, a somewhat tottery Gorgonzola strolled towards it, and like Moses and the Children of Israel, we walked between parted walls to the Promised Land.
But at first it didn’t seem like the Promised Land, that little, dark space at the rear of the packing cases. I played my torch round the small area. I’m not sure what I expected, but I found only a rusty porter’s trolley standing on a threadbare piece of carpet. Just why would anyone want to conceal a trolley behind a stack of boxes? The beam settled on three switches set one above the other on the brick wall. I angled the torch upwards. A dusty, bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling directly above the trolley. One bulb, three switches. Odd. I traced the cable from the ceiling-rose back to the upper switch and pressed it. The dim glow from the overhead bulb revealed a remarkably recovered Gorgonzola sheathing and unsheathing her claws and burying them in the carpet in busy preparation for future victims.
Another switch probably controlled the fluorescent lights in the main part of the garage. I flicked the middle one. The area beyond the stacked boxes was plunged into darkness. So what was the purpose of the third? The cable from it ran down the wall and disappeared into the concrete floor. I stared at the disappearing cable. That could only mean… I pushed the trolley to one side. A tug at the square of carpet brusquely disengaged Gorgonzola from her knife-sharpening act and unveiled a camouflaged trapdoor set into the concrete floor.
I heaved at the iron ring recessed into the centre and the trap easily lifted. Whiskers twitching inquisitively, Gorgonzola joined me in peering over the edge of the trap. A substantial wooden stairway complete with handrail plunged steeply downward into darkness. Before I could stop her, she darted down the steps and disappeared. Scratch. Thump. Then up from the darkness drifted her special drug-detecting croon.
My hand hovered over the mysterious bottom switch. It was more likely to be a light switch than an alarm… I took a chance, pressed it. Light flooded up from below. I went back for the holdall, clicked off my torch and followed G down.
Wheeooo… I let my breath out in a long silent whistle. Two banks of fluorescent lights illuminated a room the size of a large cargo container. Both ceiling and walls appeared to be metal. The floor too. Yes, the secret canning plant for the heroin-haggis concoction was a cargo container, buried deep in the ground. Very clever. Everywhere, stainless steel machinery gleamed in the strong lighting. I reached into my pocket for my camera and methodically recorded everything – the rolls of labels, racks of empty tins, conveyor belts, sealing unit, and two mini-hoppers.
It took longer than seemed prudent, but at last I was finished and shoved the camera back into my pocket. Gorgonzola was picking her way daintily along one of the conveyor belts, a large paw precision-placed each side of the cans lined up ready for filling.
‘Time to leave, G.’ I gathered up the holdall.
Bzzzz bzzzz. The shrill noise reverberated round the metal chamber, skewering me to the spot. A light above the wooden steps winked a red warning of intruders, and through the open trap came the sound of a key rattling in the lock of the garage door. Discovery lay only seconds away.
On an adrenalin surge, I scooped up G and the tell-tale holdall and flung myself up the wooden steps. A widening band of daylight streamed onto the area beyond the piled-up boxes. Thank God I’d left the main lights off. Gorgonzola wriggled violently, twisting out from under my arm. I made a grab for her, but in a misplaced show of independence she leapt away into the garage.
No time to do anything about it. I flicked off top and bottom switches. In the sudden blackness that pressed against my eyelids, pale patterns danced and swirled. My fingers fumbled for the piece of carpet, found it, jammed an edge in the hinges of the trap to hold it in position, and in one swift movement lowered carpet and trap over my head.
Heart thudding, I sprawled on the topmost step, ear pressed against the wood. I had no illusions and little hope. There was no escape and there’d be no mercy. Cargo container, canning factory, metal tomb. I needed one of Gorgonzola’s nine lives right now.
‘Holy shit, Mackenzie! Just getta load of this!’ The long American vowels were muffled but unmistakable. Hiram J Spinks.
‘What’s—?’ Mackenzie’s growl was abruptly cut off.
I heard the thump of boxes being kicked aside, followed by hurrying footsteps. Click. A sliver of light showed round the edges of the trapdoor. Would they notice that the trolley had been moved? My throat was dry, no breath in my lungs.
‘Looks all right, Mr Spinks…’ The voice came from directly above my head.
Hope fluttered.
‘Check it out, Mackenzie. There’ll be hell to pay if someone’s been in.’
Click. The banks of fluorescent tubes flickered and bright light flooded the underground room. Above my head, I heard the scrape of carpet being pulled away from the hatch. I slithered back down the wooden steps in an instinctive effort to hide, then stopped. The slightest sound would betray me. Like a hypnotised rabbit, I stared at the widening gap round the trap as it began to lift…two inches, another two… I saw the scuffed toes of a pair of boots.
‘For Chris’sake,’ Spinks yelled. ‘What’s that?’
The hatch slammed down. A series of thumps and bangs was followed by an unearthly banshee wail, the crash of a heavy object and a string of interesting Scottish oaths.
‘Bloody cat! It’s gone up on top of the boxes somewhere.’
Another banshee wail, suddenly cut off.
‘Mr Spinks? Mr Spinks, you OK?’
I heard Spinks’s voice, raised but indistinct, and growing fainter. Footsteps came closer, hesitated. With a clatter, the trap’s iron ring was lifted, then dropped.
‘Don’t know what’s got into that American bastard,’ Mackenzie’s voice muttered. ‘Nobody’s been here. Bloody cat got in, that’s all. Bastard expects me to search the place for aliens or something when he’s buggered off. Got more to do than that…’
Footsteps receded. The garage door closed with a crash.
I lay there for what seemed a long time, too shattered even to raise my head, but my thoughts busy. Just why had Spinks rushed off like that? Had I been right about him suffering from cat phobia that time back at the hotel, when he’d thrown down his putter? He’d marched off without a backward glance. Gorgonzola had been sitting primly in the middle of the drive. Was she his Achilles heel?
What had happened to G? That abruptly terminated wailing call could have been… Galvanised by the awful thought that she might have been savagely clubbed or kicked to death, and her limp body thrown outside, I pushed up the trap and, on trembling legs, emerged from what had so nearly been my tomb.
In his disgruntled haste, Mackenzie had forgotten to switch off the overhead bulb. In the dim light, the shadows spilt across the floor in black, fathomless pools. What was that? I prodded hesitantly with my foot. It was only a rumpled piece of coarse sacking. At any moment he might have a change of heart and come back, but I couldn’t leave without finding out if G was all right. Fumbling for the sonic whistle, I surveyed the heap of tumbled packing cases. I gave two quick blasts. If she was alive, she’d come…
I lowered the whistle. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. No response.
Now I had to think of my own danger and get out of here while I still had the chance. It was too risky to put on the main lights. I clicked on my pencil torch and made my way through the darkness towards the grey outline that marked the outer door. With my hand on the yale latch, I paused. I couldn’t leave without one last attempt to find G. I swung the beam round in an arc over the wall of cardboard cartons. Nothing. She must be dead.
There was no place for sentimentality in a job like mine, I tried to tell myself. I switched off the torch, and after a pause, eased the door open and applied my eye to the crack. All clear. Or at least, nobody in my field of view. I’d wait twenty seconds before I risked going out.
Fourteen…fifteen… Something had changed.
Those purple flowers hadn’t been in my line of sight before. Imperceptibly, the door was inching open. But I wasn’t touching it. So, this had all been a set-up. Spinks and Mackenzie had realised that there was an intruder in the canning plant. Now they were coming to deal with him. I stared at the ever-widening gap.
Well, I wouldn’t make it easy for them. The element of surprise might just give me a chance. While disposing of me would be easy in the confines of the garage, they would find it much more difficult to kill me in sight of inquisitive guests peering through the decorous lace-curtained windows of the White Heather Hotel.
I dropped the holdall, flung the door open, and hurled myself through the opening. Just as my mind registered that my headlong rush was meeting no resistance, my feet tangled in something soft. I catapulted forward, sprawling untidily on the Mackenzie driveway.
I lay there winded, unable to rise, expecting at any moment a lethal boot to the side of the head. I felt a sudden pressure on my back, then a sharp pain as Spinks ground his spiked golfing shoes into my shoulders. I wrenched away, at the same time rolling to my left and struggling to my knees.
My mind slowly processed the info that I was staring, not at Hiram J Spinks, gangster, but at Gorgonzola, feline Customs Officer. She had pushed open the door, and I’d tripped over her. She stared back, her eyes round and reproachful. I gathered her to me and pressed my face into her soft fur, a lump in my throat. Forgivingly, she submitted to this show of emotion, rubbing her soft body against me. She wasn’t one to harbour a grudge, if I was the one grovelling.
The distant slam of a car door reminded me that I was still in danger. I set her down and scrambled to my feet, casting a quick glance towards the hotel. No twitching curtains, no Mackenzie bearing down on me, intent on GBH. Yet. I’d better shut the garage door and get out of here. I scooped her up, grabbed the holdall, pulled shut the garage door, and plunged into the shrubbery.
No Suspicious Circumstances Page 18