by Wendy Holden
‘Is pelmets, hmm?’ Lulu’s voice came sadly out of the darkness.
‘Curtains, madam. Let us hope not.’
‘I agree. Roman blinds much better. Or maybe plantation shutters, hmmm?’
Eventually, after considering a range of soft furnishing options, Lulu dozed off.
Vlad, meanwhile, kept watch. Her vigilant ear now caught a faint noise, a clang and rattle, very distant. Was someone coming to rescue them?
Or to finish them off for good?
Vlad could hear, in the dark, a faint snoring that meant Lulu was sleeping. She would face whatever was coming alone, the butler decided. She stood up, trying not to exclaim at the pain of her stiff limbs. The Pilates had been murder on her glutes.
The footsteps were coming down the same passage that Vlad and Lulu had walked down themselves, so many days ago, it seemed. The butler stood on tiptoe, trying to peer through the iron grille for the first glimpse of whatever it was. She could make out a moving shape and was relieved to see that it was small rather than tall, and seemed shuffling and old. But it might well mean harm, and she was taking no chances. Her hand crept stealthily down the side of her trousers, lifting the bottom and reaching for the trusty Estonian army-issue pistol in her sock. She pulled it softly out and primed it. It made the very faintest of clicks, one only a trained ear could detect. Some shuffling old git would have no chance, the butler reckoned.
The shuffling stopped abruptly. Fast, decisive footsteps followed. They stopped on the grille above Vlad. There was a sliding, metallic sound and something poked through the ironwork.
Vlad realised she wasn’t the only one armed. Her expert eye told her she was looking at the business end of a Mauser. A vintage World War Two one at that.
She held her hands up immediately. A small, piercing light was switched on from above and the dazed factotum saw a wrinkled face looking down at her with very bright eyes. The ancient visage was surrounded by an absolutely impeccable grey bob.
‘Les des sont sur le tapis!’ the old woman rapped out, fixing the gentlewoman’s gentlewoman with a meaningful stare.
The butler did not miss a beat. ‘Il fait chaud à Suez,’ Vlad answered, recognising immediately the phrases sent by the British to the Free French before D-Day. This woman had been in the Resistance.
The gun disappeared from the overhead grille. The torchlight showed the old woman stowing away her weapon in her handbag. ‘How do you do?’ she asked politely. ‘I’m Mimi de Rochfort. I’m actually looking for the loos but this putain castle doesn’t seem to have them. I’m with my friends on a tour from a cruise ship – we just pulled up in our coach on the off-chance.’
Vlad did not miss a beat. ‘The nearest lavatories are back up the stairs, madam. Just by the kitchen, first on your right.’
‘Merci.’
‘You’re very welcome, madam. Oh, madam?’
‘Oui?’
‘Perhaps you might be so good as to release us before you go?’
Chapter Thirty-three
Laura had no idea how long she had been in the trunk. Perhaps she had actually passed out. After the first few, endless hours things had just begun generally to drift. She now no longer knew nor cared who had shoved her in here, or why. It could have been just about anyone in the castle, after all.
But now someone had come. The echo of something loud seemed to hang in the air. A banged door. Something smashing.
Crash! There it was again. It sounded as if the door at the end of the room was being stoved in. Laura crouched in the chest, her painfully thudding heat apparently amplified by the confined space. Was this a rescuer? Was it Harry? Hope soared through her so violently she felt she could split the trunk apart just by pushing.
Laura could hear wood splitting, wrenching, cracking. Then came the slam of the door against the wall. Heavy footsteps followed, crunching over glass and china. There was the slither of books being kicked out of the way.
‘Harry!’ yelled Laura, now convinced that it was her lover. With anyone else it would be hopelessly far-fetched, but he had form at rescuing her from disaster in the nick of time. ‘Over here! In the trunk!’
The footsteps hurried over and stopped. There was a rattle of keys. Where had he got those from, Laura wondered. The padlock banged against the sides and thumped as it hit the floor. Then a creak, and a rush of air as the heavy lid opened.
‘Harry!’
But it was Struan smiling down at her. ‘Och, your ordeal’s over noo, Miss Laura, uh-huh.’
Laura stared at him, confused. Wasn’t it him who had pushed her in in the first place?
But he was smiling at her quite benignly.
A large gun was slung about his tweed-jacketed shoulders. One of his reddened hands was on its barrel, one thick red finger stroking its trigger.
‘Do you think I could get out?’ Laura asked nervously.
His round, grass-coloured eyes, reminding her of the other green-eyed monster in her life, Clemency Makepeace, looked kindly into hers. ‘That would be fine, Miss Laura, uh-huh. Take my hand, uh-huh.’ He extended the one not caressing the gun.
Trembling, Laura allowed him to pull her gently out of the trunk. Starved of blood for so long, her legs had turned to jelly and she fell against him heavily. One hand still stroked the trigger; would the impact push it forward? Laura screwed up her eyes, bracing herself for the almighty blast which could pitch her into the afterlife.
It did not come, however. Instead, Struan tucked her arm reassuringly into his. Together, slowly, they approached the wrecked doorway. It looked quite horrible; pieces of split and broken wood hanging round the frame like smashed teeth.
‘This way, Miss Laura, uh-huh,’ Struan said.
They descended the attic stairs together, her arm still tucked into his as if going out for a Sunday walk. She dared not speak, although her eyes flicked constantly about, looking for possible escapes.
Perhaps he detected what she was thinking, because once they reached the main landing he swung her round in a swift movement. Suddenly Laura was in front of him with his gun pressed into her back. ‘Put yer hands up!’ came the growled command, with the inevitable suffix. ‘Uh-huh?’
Laura’s mouth was open and she could hear herself whimpering. She shut it. Fierté! Espoir! Courage!
‘Downstairs,’ growled Struan, prodding the end of the rifle in her back. Laura hurried along, struggling to believe any of it was really happening, let alone why. She was a journalist on a glossy magazine. She had only been trying to help the old owner and she knew the castle’s new one. Just why was she in this situation? Just what had she done wrong?
‘Over there,’ said Struan, prodding her across the wide hall floor. His boots crunched heavily behind her on the unyielding stone. The gateway to the dungeons loomed. Laura swallowed. Was that where he was taking her?
She glanced at the walls. The pistols, rifles and daggers still hung as Lulu had arranged them. Or did they? The designer logos seemed less well-executed than previously. Laura could see large gaps in the designs.
Oh, where was Lulu? Down Under, really? Or maybe she had snuck back to Kensington and vowed never to go near Glenravish again. Writing off an entire estate would not bother Lulu. She was easily rich enough. The thought squeezed Laura’s heart. Lulu had no idea she was here, after all.
She bent her head, expecting to be shoved through the iron gate and down to the eternal oblivion of the dungeons. But then the rifle barrel indicated a right turn. Laura found herself stumbling towards the passage that led into the kitchen.
‘Go on with ye, uh-huh,’ muttered Struan, prodding her hard again.
A solid wooden door stood at the end. Struan, edging past her while keeping the gun still trained to her back, pushed it open.
‘Don’t move!’ someone yelled. ‘One more step forward, and I’ll shoot!’
Struan, behind her, swore under his breath. Laura, for her part, felt a sense of enormous relief. He was here, after all.
&nbs
p; ‘Harry!’
He stood in front of her in the dear, familiar, battered black leather biker jacket, his dark hair tousled and his handsome features tense. Like Struan, he held a gun in his hand and it too was pressed into someone’s back.
The someone was Mordor MacRavish. He was bound hand, foot and red trousers to a chair facing the doorway Struan and Laura now occupied.
‘Don’t move,’ he urged Struan. ‘He means it.’
‘I mean it too,’ growled the stalker, waggling the gun in Laura’s back. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘So we reach stalemate, MacRae,’ Harry said levelly. He had still not acknowledged Laura, but she sensed that to do so would distract him and break his concentration. The potential consequences of that were obvious enough. She swallowed and willed her knees not to buckle.
Fierté! Espoir! Courage!
‘Not stalemate, no,’ Struan said, his tone light and triumphant. ‘If ye look behind ye, ye’ll see the entire estate staff pointing their guns right at ye! Uh-huh?’
Laura’s glance shifted to the window above the kitchen sink. Net curtains covered half of it, but above that Laura could plainly see a gaggle of estate staff gathered outside in the entry. Wee Archie, Big Kenny, Fat Ishbel, Young Tommy, Big Oonagh. All with muzzles loaded and pointing straight at the back of Harry’s head. It was now clear where the missing guns on the hall wall had gone.
‘Aye, they’re all crack shots,’ Struan went on. ‘Even Wee Archie’s the Pitlochry International Small Bore Champion, uh-huh.’
Harry glanced at Laura now for the first time. To one who knew him less well, he seemed utterly calm. But Laura could see the tension in his jaw. He looked down on Mordor’s smoothly brushed side-parting. ‘You won’t get away with this, MacRavish,’ he said.
A nasty smile crossed Mordor’s deceptively boyish face and his blue eyes glittered icily. ‘I will get away with it and I have,’ he sneered. ‘You’re all about to be shot, so there will be no witnesses. And Glenravish will be mine, as I’ve always wanted.’
‘Yours?’ indignantly demanded Struan from behind Laura. ‘But we agreed that we’d split it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Mordor cut in impatiently. ‘We’ll discuss the detail later.’
Laura didn’t understand this exchange. She was still trying to work out the first bit, about him always wanting Glenravish. ‘You said it was a hell of a hard sell,’ she burst out accusingly. ‘You called it a haunted turd.’
Mordor shook his head in ironic wonderment. ‘Can you believe it? So I did. But I didn’t mean it. Glenravish is neither haunted nor a turd.’
Laura glared at Mordor. ‘Yes it is haunted. Why else would the electrics go off all the time?’
Mrs MacRae now appeared from a doorway that Laura remembered led to the pantry. ‘Because I kept switching them off,’ she said. She wore her usual neat black dress and her hair was as well-styled as ever, but her apple-cheeked face was twisted in a snarl and in her hands, instead of the usual ladle of warming stew, was a gun.
‘But why pretend it was haunted?’ Laura demanded, trying to stop her voice from shaking. She might be about to be shot, but her journalist’s curiosity still demanded satisfaction.
‘To stop that moron of a cousin of mine selling it, of course,’ Mordor snapped. ‘With your help,’ he added venomously to Laura, ‘and that of your pathetic magazine.’
Laura let the insult pass. There were important facts to discover. ‘Want to tell me why?’ Now, finally, they were getting down to brass tacks. ‘I have a right to know, if you’re about to shoot me,’ she continued, seeing that the estate staff outside were starting to get restless. The bloodbath they had evidently been promised was taking its time.
Struan’s gun burrowed even further into her back and she gasped with pain. Harry tensed. Mordor threw Struan a look and the barrel edged backwards slightly. ‘You’re quite right, my dear,’ Mordor said, reasonably. ‘You do have a right to know. The reason that Glenravish is very far from being a haunted turd and actually extremely valuable is its position.’ He paused importantly. ‘Do you know what caledonium is?’
Laura nodded. ‘It’s a mineral used in green technology.’
If this was what all this evildoing was about, at least it was good for the environment.
Mordor went on, ‘It’s extremely rare and therefore very—’
‘Valuable?’ Laura had that rushing feeling in her head which meant that everything now was suddenly going to make sense. ‘Let me guess. You found out that Glenravish was sitting on a seam of this stuff.’
‘Actually, my team found out,’ said the housekeeper, whose voice had changed, Laura now realised. She was speaking with a strong South African accent.
‘My real name is Professor Gloria Wilderbeest,’ Mrs MacRae continued, ‘and I head up the Applied Geology department of Jacob Zuma University. My students and I,’ she waved a hand to the group outside the window, ‘were doing field work in the Highlands when we came across the caledonium. A few feet of it would have been valuable enough.’ She paused, and her eyes sparkled with greed.
‘But,’ Mordor said, with an evil smile, ‘the entire estate is caledonium.’
Professor Wilderbeest cleared her throat. ‘Having discovered the size of the deposit, I went straight to Mr McRavish with a proposal. We divide it up and we all get a cut.’
‘Why didn’t you go to Sandy?’ Laura demanded. ‘The estate belonged to her.’
‘Because we’ll have to blow up the castle to get to the stuff and she’d never allow that in a million years. Family history and all that,’ said Mordor, just as if, thought the furious Laura, he had not exploited that very same history to his own ends. ‘But that’s outrageous,’ she gasped. ‘You were intending to cheat Sandy out of what’s rightfully hers!’
Professor Wilderbeest snorted. ‘We were planning to do a lot more to her than that, believe me.’
‘Murder her, you mean?’ The thought was too awful for words. Thank goodness Sandy had escaped.
Harry cleared his throat. ‘Sandy McRavish is only the latest in a long, long line, believe me.’ He nodded at Mordor. ‘We’ve been on the trail of this guy for years. The caledonium’s only the start – but hopefully the end – of the scams and frauds he’s behind. He’s wanted by everyone.’
Laura was still piecing it together. Sandy had escaped by selling the estate to Lulu. But where was she now? Had this murderous bunch already got rid of her? ‘Where’s Lulu?’ she yelled, furious and terrified in equal measure.
‘She’s going to die in the dungeons along with that ridiculous Jeeves of hers,’ snarled Mordor.
Despair swept over Laura. It all made sense now of course, Lulu’s mysterious trip Down Under. The castle dungeons, in other words. The housekeeper’s remark about the gloom was now explained as well. It had not been tactful, but a cynical joke.
‘Puir wee child,’ put in Prof Wilderbeest, briefly lapsing back to her Scottish accent.
Sheer fury at the insincerity of this remark restored Laura’s courage. She felt hot fury roar through her. She was about to let rip, and damn the consequences, when suddenly all hell broke loose.
Chapter Thirty-four
Struan suddenly released Laura and fell backwards. There followed an almighty blast, and then a thump, as of a body hitting the floor. Laura whirled round and found herself staring at a familiar wrinkled face set off by a super-smooth grey bob.
‘Mimi!’
The old lady lifted a finger, one of several holding a pistol. In her other hand she held the stalker’s rifle.
‘What…?’ Laura stared at Struan’s inert body.
‘He knocked himself out.’ Mimi pushed past.
‘Not that! How come you’re here?’
‘We’re on the Hebridean Princess. Cruising round the Highlands and Islands. Complètement magnifique. We just stopped at the castle for a comfort break on our coach tour. Quelle coïncidence! But I can’t talk now, chérie. I must go and help Ginette and Ernest.’
Laura tried to remember what he had told her about his youth. Ernest was Mimi’s junior by a decade at least and so had missed the war. But Laura was pretty sure that, de temps en temps, she had heard mention of the Foreign Legion. Whatever the truth, Ernest was no stranger to fisticuffs, as anyone who attempted to disrespect him on the Montmartre corner where he drummed up business was liable to find out.
Meanwhile Ginette, the octogenarian who ran the bar downstairs from her grandmother’s flat, was showing Fat Ishbel and Big Kenny some of the kung fu moves she had been taught by her Far Eastern customers. She seemed to have already felled the man-mountain that was Wee Archie.
Yells were also coming from the pantry, back into which Vlad had dragged Professor Wilderbeest. She was now dispensing righteous justice between the jars of piccalilli and tins of beans.
Laura’s attention, however, was on Harry. He stood opposite her, tall, manly and resolute, his gun still thrust into the back of Mordor McRavish’s jacket. She felt a flood of deep emotion. ‘You’re amazing,’ was all she could say.
‘You were pretty brave yourself,’ he said, with one of his sexy half-smiles that always made her catch her breath. ‘I’m impressed.’
Laura rushed into his arms, or the arm not holding the gun into Mordor’s back.
‘Yuk,’ said Mordor, turning his head away. ‘I hate the sloppy bits.’
Eventually, they came up for air. ‘When I met you on the beach…’ Laura began.
‘I was on McRavish’s trail, but I couldn’t say so, obviously. And that’s why I had to leave you in London too.’
Laura looked down. The way he had disappeared without a trace was painful to remember, even now.