Murder at Midnight

by C. S. Challinor

  “Most sensible,” Rex approved, thinking that some of his other guests could take a leaf out of the young couple’s book. “We have soft drinks in the refrigerator. Just help yourselves.”

  “So kind of you to invite us. And thanks also for the wedding invitation.” Flora suddenly looked worried. “Have you drawn up a list of preferred gifts yet?”

  “Och, don’t bother with that. I know how difficult it is for students financially. And at our age we have more toasters and fruit bowls than we know what to do with. Save your pennies—please!”

  “Still, we’d like to get you something,” insisted Jason, a sandy-haired and freckled lad.

  “Well, how aboot one of your pictures, Flora, to hang at the lodge? We’d really appreciate that.”

  She brightened at once. “Jason can frame it! He’s very handy.”

  “That’s settled, then. Well, I’d better go and see to the fire. Scots pine burns quickly and it’s almost oot. Not too cold, are you?”

  Flora, wrapped in a deep blue knitted shawl, shook her head no. The lad wore a thick sweater and, with the build of a rugby player, did not appear susceptible to the cold, even though Rex could feel a draught sneaking through the window. Behind the frosted panes, the wind continued its wailing and moaning lament.

  “Oh, and keep the wedding invitation under your hats. We want to make it a small affair, and you know how these things can snowball.”

  “Will do, sir,” Jason assured him.

  Rex went to place a pine branch on top of the smoldering embers, the resinous needles, dead and dry, flaring abruptly. The old man stirred in his wheelchair, nodding off again before Rex could offer to fetch him something to drink, or apologize for waking him up with his fire-building activities. The pine smelled sharp and fresh. He watched the flames blaze for a moment before becoming aware of a presence behind him.

  Margarita Delacruz, ramrod straight in her black calf-length dress and high heels, stood examining the painting of a red stag hanging above the mantelpiece as she lit her cigarette with a match from the box lying there.

  Rex refrained from asking if she liked the picture, which was a fine copy of Monarch of the Glen, an oil on canvas by Sir Edwin Landseer, a protégé of Queen Victoria. It had replaced a real deer head staring mournfully down from the wall, a best-forgotten reminder that his house had once been a hunting lodge. He preferred to think of his valley retreat as a sanctuary, and enjoyed taking long walks through the pinewood forests and studying nature through a pair of binoculars rather than through the lens of a hunting rifle.

  “Humphrey and I go far back,” he offered conversationally. “As I’m sure you know.”

  With a graceful turn of the neck, Margarita Delacruz redirected her attention to him. She was pale-skinned, unnaturally so, with contrasting dark eyebrows and scarlet lips painted in the shape of a bow.

  “We were students together at Edinburgh,” Rex pushed on. “I was studying law and Humphrey was a few years ahead of me, but we were on the same debate team.”

  “Yes,” she said with a small smile, and took a long draw on her cigarette. It would have to be a long draw, Rex reflected, since the nicotine had to be inhaled all the way through the narrow holder. Furrows appeared above her mouth as she did so.

  She exhaled with a delicate lift of her chin, the motion performed as though with long-practiced art. Sweetly tanged tobacco smoke curled through the air. Rex, unusual for him, was at a loss as to what to say next. He tried another gambit.

  “Have you been back from South America long? Ehm, where exactly in—”

  “Not long,” she said, waving a wisp of smoke away from her pale face. She might as well have been dismissing his words with the same gesture.

  He felt he could hardly object to her cigarette since the fireplace was emitting its fair share of smoke. And no one else seemed to mind, even when Ken Fraser filled his pipe and lit it. The mood was jovial and made all the more cozy by the contrasting frigid fury raging outside. Just then, the wind howled in the chimney, sending the flames flickering wildly.

  “What a night!” he declared to his reticent guest. “Well, let me know if you need anything!” he said in retreat, with all the blustering good cheer of the perfect host.

  He caught Helen’s I-told-you-so look from across the room and winked back at her. “Can we say Greta Garbo?” he murmured in passing, leaving his fiancée to chat with Alistair’s partner, a dark-haired paramedic in his late twenties, with whom she was discussing drug overdoses. A student counselor at her high school, this would be a topic of interest for her. He left them to it.

  “Who does the castle belong to now?” Alistair was asking the Frasers as they stood in a small group by a bay window pairing the one in which the students sat.

  Rex’s colleague cut a dashing figure with his chiseled nose and broad brow, his shaggy hair brushing the collar of an expensive wool suit. Rex had donned corduroys and a comfortable tweed jacket elbowed with leather patches, his attire de rigueur at the lodge. Even in their court wigs and black robes, Alistair managed to project an image of nobility, whereas Rex looked merely judicial.

  “Gleneagle Castle belongs to us,” Kenneth Fraser boasted.

  “Really? I knew your name was Fraser but I thought it was a coincidence. So you’re the heirs apparent.”

  “The castle was in our family until a hundred years ago. Cat and I were able to reacquire it, along with the wee bit of land that abuts Rex’s property.”

  “But what do you plan to do with it?” Alistair asked. “It’s a ruin!”

  Catriona hastened to agree. “But it was in the family for generations before it was lost in a gambling debt. Red Dougal built it in fifteen hundred and forty-six. We felt we had to get it back and uphold the family honour.”

  “Red Dougal?” Alistair inquired.

  Catriona’s husband took up the history of their ancestor. “Of Clan Fraser. One part of the clan, under Red Dougal, refused to fight against the Camerons and the MacDonalds of Clanranald at the Battle of the Shirts, leaving their kin outnumbered two to one. The battle took place here in the Great Glen, at the head of Loch Lochy. The few Fraser survivors disowned their cowardly kin and chased Red Dougal and his defecting band from Inverness-shire. But they returned and took refuge in these glens, where they hunted and fished, and, according to family lore, made enough money from plundering outlying villages to build the modest castle you see up on the hill.”

  “Dougal MacNoodle,” Alistair murmured in Rex’s ear, a move facilitated by the fact that at six two he stood only a couple of inches shorter than his host. “What guff !”

  Rex shrugged noncommittedly. He generally took people’s family history with a grain of salt. However, he was not thrilled by the prospect of immediate neighbors, although making the old castle habitable would surely be cost prohibitive.

  “Are you going to renovate it?” Vanessa Weaver asked the new owners, honing in on the conversation with covetous interest.

  Catriona and Ken glanced at each other mischievously. “That depends,” Ken said.

  Rex wanted to ask what it depended on, but Vanessa beat him to the punch. “I’m an interior designer, you know. I’ve done historic homes and grand hotels … Let me give you my card.”

  While she fluttered off to fetch one from her handbag on the table, Rex plied the Frasers’ glasses with the Speyside whisky, going slightly easier on Catriona’s.

  She beamed at him beneath her graying auburn hair. “What a lovely party,” she said. “And it’s so nice to get acquainted with our neighbours.” She declined the chocolates Helen offered, by way of explanation patting the extra padding around her waist.

  Rex, for his part, selected a dark chocolate square from the confection-scented box, hoping for nougat or a creamy soft center. He would start on his diet tomorrow, on the first day of the coming year.

  For the own
ers of a castle, the Frasers were pleasantly unpretentious, he reflected. Catriona’s husband, in no way distinguished in bearing or looks, was growing tubby like his wife. He wore a navy blue fisherman’s sweater over black dress pants and a gray and white checkered muffler around his neck.

  “So how did the castle end up back in your possession?” Alistair asked, his prosecutorial brain ever anxious for the knotty details. “Drew was telling me there was a complex law of inheritance involved.”

  “And so there is,” Catriona said. “We’re distant cousins, Ken and I, the only surviving heirs of Red Dougal. There’s an aunt Maighread to my first cousin, who sadly died of leukaemia, but no one’s heard of her in a quarter of a century. And the law of inheritance, as it stood before the castle was lost, stipulated that the successor had to be not only a clan member but married within the clan, to ensure the property stayed within the family.”

  Alistair nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds like mortmain, a legal term from the French meaning ‘dead hand,’ which limits the granting of land outside an entity, in this case your Clan Fraser. Such a law often places a financial burden on the devisee, who is legally bound to keep the property.”

  “Well, that’s the whole point,” Catriona exclaimed. “The castle had to stay within the clan and couldn’t be sold. The successive owners were unable to maintain it, and it fell into disrepair.”

  “But,” said Ken, “an unscrupulous or skillful solicitor—depending on how you look at it—was able to transfer the castle out of the Frasers’ hands by some consideration that did not involve actual money, for the satisfaction of a gambling debt. The case got convoluted, to say the least, but a judge finally ruled in our favour and we were able to get the castle back. The usurping owners only wanted it so they could boast they had a castle. They never did anything with it, as you can see.”

  “‘Dead hand’ is an apt description for restricting the transfer of property,” Alistair opined. “You can just feel the weight of the dead hand controlling the destiny of the castle from the grave.”

  “Like a curse.” Catriona Fraser nodded solemnly. “Red Dougal’s dead hand.”

  “Aye, most interesting,” said Rex, who normally liked nothing better than discussing the ins and outs of anachronistic legal terminology, but the tone of the conversation was turning morbid for a New Year’s Eve party. Dead hands rising from the grave were better suited to Halloween.

  _____

  He racked his brains for a more cheerful topic.

  Ken Fraser raised a finger and spoke before Rex could think of one. “Moreover, it was a thorny legal point whether the old inheritance law still applied once the property had been forfeited. But to make a long story short …”

  “Thank goodness,” Vanessa Weaver said under her breath, apparently waiting for a pause in the conversation so she could present her business card.

  “The law was upheld. Catriona and I were happy to wed and comply in every respect.”

  “The old law didn’t take into account what a family of profligates the Frasers were,” his wife remarked.

  “They really were,” Ken added with relish. “I could tell you some stories—”

  “Perhaps later,” Alistair cut in, to Rex’s relief. Ken Fraser was a windbag of the first order, as he had already demonstrated during the course of the evening.

  “You’re a Fraser, aren’t you?” Helen asked Alistair.

  “Frazer with a ‘z,’” he specified. “It’s possible, even probable that way back when, before clan lineage was properly recorded, we belonged to the same clan. In the olden days there was one member in every clan community who was the official genealogist and could recite for hours on end who was the son of whom, and so on down through the generations. It can’t always have been a reliable source.”

  “A sort of bard,” Helen ventured.

  “Exactly,” Alistair said. “And hangers-on and servants often assumed, or were attributed, the chief’s clan name, to add to the confusion.”

  “There would have been epic tales of exploits and derring-do, especially around the time of the Jacobite Rebellions,” Ken Fraser enthused, adding ruefully, “before Bonny Prince Charlie fled ‘over the sea to Skye.’ ”

  “I visited the island of Skye as a child,” Helen said. “I never realized its historical significance at the time. Didn’t Prince Charles return to France afterward?”

  “He returned briefly to Scotland first,” Ken replied. “But when all hope of putting him on the British throne was lost, he took a ship back to France; though he did send a spy to Scotland in seventeen fifty-three to find out where all his gold had disappeared to. The French had sent a fortune in payroll for his army,” he explained, speaking mainly for the benefit of Helen, who might not have been so familiar with Scottish history, being English. “Spain also wanted a Catholic monarch in Britain and likewise shipped a vast amount of gold over to these parts to fund the Forty-Five Rising against the protestant Elector of Hanover.”

  “But much of it went astray,” Professor Cleverly interjected slyly, smoothing down his bald pate. He’d had hair in college, quite a bit of it, recalled Rex, who had retained his, though the passage of time had faded the red to a more ginger hue.

  “The treasure was entrusted to various clan chiefs,” Cleverly continued in a professorial manner, peering through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles perched upon his beakish nose. “Some of it was buried close to here,” he informed Helen. “At Loch Arkaig just north of Fort William, and never recovered.” He winked at the Frasers and said no more.

  Rex looked at the couple expectantly. “Care to share what you know?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s really quite exciting,” Ken took up again. “And it’s mainly thanks to Humphrey that we are in possession of a valuable clue.”

  “A clue to the whereabouts of the treasure?” Cleverly’s guest, Margarita Delacruz, exclaimed, her dark figure appearing as out of nowhere. It was the longest string of words Rex had yet heard her speak, and she delivered them with barely an accent.

  “Now it must be said,” Ken Fraser continued, as though wrapped up in the sound of his own pedantic voice and oblivious to her question, “that most of the clansmen took the secret of its location to the grave, even under dire torture. One of the chiefs had his tongue cut oot!”

  “How could he divulge the secret if his tongue was cut out?” Helen asked sensibly.

  “The money was to go to helping Charlie’s supporters escape the English Duke of Cumberland, known as The Butcher, and to aid those who’d been wounded at Culloden and dispossessed of their property. The survivors of the battle, which took place near Inverness, incidentally, hid oot in caves in the Highlands, and the loyal clansmen got money to them at great risk to themselves. The rest of the French gold was buried by the south banks of Loch Arkaig.”

  Rex was still waiting for the clue, which Ken, by design or distraction, was not being forthcoming in supplying.

  “So, what was the clue?” Julie asked for him. She and Drew had been listening in on the conversation. By now, even the two lovebirds in the window seat were eavesdropping, as was Zoe, though pretending not to as she sat on the arm of a chair, swinging her foot beneath the hem of her green chiffon dress. Alistair’s young partner had gravitated toward the group with his tumbler of twelve-year-old malt and stood beside the black-clad figure of Margarita Delacruz, who struck a theatrical pose as she listened intently to Ken, her black lacquer cigarette holder extended in one slender, manicured hand. Only Ace Weaver remained by the hearth, asleep in his wheelchair.

  “I’m getting to that,” Ken snapped, clearly wishing to proceed at his own pace and hold the floor for as long as possible.

  “Sorry I asked,” Julie retorted.

  “Not all the Jacobites were as honourable, however. A Fraser, one of ours, I regret to say, was spying on the diggers and absconded with thousands of French g
uineas and gold bars, about ninety pounds’ worth in weight, which he hid in a couple of beer kegs.”

  “Which was very ingenious,” Catriona said. “Our ancestors were known to like their booze, so this was the perfect decoy!”

  Everyone laughed except her husband, who attempted a smile but seemed annoyed by the interruption. “Fortunately the thief died of gout before he could spend most of it. In a deathbed confession to his priest, he revealed that he had reburied the treasure he’d stolen from the loch.”

  “But where?” Alistair’s partner asked, eyes wide with curiosity.

  “Ah, John, we did not ken that until the priest’s writings turned up in an estate sale last year. The family had kept the old papers in an antique chest, not thinking there was anything remotely important in them. Most of the stuff was in Latin and Gaelic. But Humphrey here, erudite historian that he is, was able to acquire them, at least temporarily, and translate them. The name Fraser came up in the priest’s diary along with a description of the deathbed confession, and there was a poem in the collection, as well. The diary entry referred to a riddle that the dying Jacobite recited before he gasped his final breath.”

  “Well?” asked Margarita throwing up her hands in a Latin gesture of impatience. “Tell us the clue!”

  “Humphrey, would you do the honours?” Ken asked pompously. “After all, you translated the poem.”

  “How thrilling,” Julie all but squealed.

  Cleverly cleared his throat. “I’m no poet,” he warned. “I took a few liberties with the Gaelic to keep it in rhyming verse, but I didn’t change anything of substance.” He cleared his throat again and paused. The room stood quiet in a brief respite from the storm, except for the crackling of the fire and the ticking of the mantelpiece clock, where the hour hand pointed to ten. Everyone held their breath, waiting for the professor to begin. Rex too was swept up in the historic tale of guilt and greed. The whereabouts of the Loch Arkaig Treasure remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of Scotland. Was it possible the people in this room were on the brink of discovering what had become of part of it?