[Mirabelle Bevan 08] - Highland Fling

by Sara Sheridan

  ‘You gave me a fright!’ she snapped.

  ‘Sorry. They aren’t bringing any charges,’ McGregor said, ‘before you ask.’

  ‘Yes, I ascertained that, thanks. Did they actually arrest him?’

  ‘Well, it was difficult to get much out of them because Tash was almost hysterical,’ he said, with a glimmer in his eye. ‘But no. They would have kept him if they’d had grounds, but they probably let him go as quickly as they could to get her out of the way. She’s a firebrand.’

  He took the tray and placed it on a ledge outside the day room, righting the now empty milk jug and dabbing at the milk with a napkin. ‘No use in crying over it,’ he said good humouredly.

  ‘They’ve removed Susan’s body,’ Mirabelle told him. ‘The ambulance went down as you were coming up. And it turns out Nina and Gwendolyn Dougal knew each other before dinner the other night. They were firm friends.’

  ‘Busy afternoon?’

  Their eyes met for a moment. She found his nonchalance provoking. He wasn’t usually like this on a case. ‘If you aren’t going to take it seriously …’ she started but, before she could complete the sentence, the front door cracked open and Eleanor and Bruce arrived, noisily stamping their boots.

  ‘God, that was awful,’ said Eleanor as she hung up her coat. ‘What are you two doing wedged in together?’ she exclaimed as she noticed them in the alcove. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Bruce. ‘A large one.’

  They all trooped into the drawing room. Bruce poured whiskies and downed his straight away.

  ‘We’re all anyone can talk about, of course,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘It’s too too maudlin. We need some good news, that’s the ticket,’ Bruce chimed.

  ‘Sheesh. And then some,’ Tash agreed from the sofa. Niko put down the magazine he was reading and turned to watch.

  ‘Well, when are you two going to tie the knot?’ Bruce said with a smile. McGregor coughed. Mirabelle felt her colour heighten. ‘I mean, snogging in the hallway alcove is all very well but it’s not respectable. Best time for us is around June, old man,’ Bruce continued smoothly. ‘If you want us in attendance, that is. Eleanor and I always spend a week at The Ritz in June. We’re building Eleanor’s jewellery collection. You love Hatton Garden, don’t you darling?’

  ‘I’m learning,’ Eleanor said. ‘But you shouldn’t put Alan and Mirabelle on the spot like that. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Not at all. We need to come down to Brighton.’ Bruce ignored his wife’s objection. ‘There’s a decent hotel, isn’t there?’

  ‘The Grand,’ McGregor said, ‘though it’s not up to The Ritz.’

  Niko eyed Mirabelle across the low footstool that separated the sofas, like a cat watching a goldfish in a bowl.

  Eleanor pressed the bell and the new maid arrived. ‘Ah. Good,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth, isn’t it? Could you bring ice?’

  Mirabelle wondered if the girl regretted taking the job. Between being engaged and taking the position, her predecessor had been found dead. In fairness, she ought to be getting danger money. There was a tang of desperation in the drawing room – a metallic smell, like sweat tempered by the sting of London gin. They’d come on holiday to get away from it all and instead trouble had run ahead of them.

  ‘It’s hardly time to—’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it’s exactly the time,’ Eleanor cut in.

  Everyone waited. ‘June,’ she said. ‘All right.’ She told herself it would give them a few months to buy a house and get things organised. When she got home, she’d enlist Vesta’s help.

  ‘Marvellous! We ought to mark this.’ Bruce’s tone was celebratory. Mirabelle wondered if he’d pushed this on them out of boredom or out of guilt – he’d brought on their fight with his faux pas over breakfast, maybe now he was trying to make it right in a blunt kind of way. He rushed out of the room.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ McGregor asked.

  Eleanor shrugged. He returned a minute later with a portrait in an unwieldy ornate gilt frame. ‘This is for you,’ he announced. ‘Consider her an engagement present.’ He swung the picture round.

  McGregor peered. ‘It’s Mother,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s lovely. But there’s no need to be so generous, Bruce.’

  ‘You should have it for your new place – wherever it is you settle. You and I lost touch for a while and you weren’t at our wedding, but we’d be pleased and proud to be there for yours. Family. If you’d like that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alan said.

  Mirabelle stared at the woman in the picture. The figure was in her mid-twenties, slender with a long, dark plait, wearing a ballet outfit, one foot en pointe, as if about to spring into a pirouette. Her face wore a melancholy expression.

  ‘Was it painted here?’ she asked. ‘In the house?’

  ‘That’s the day room before Eleanor redecorated it,’ Bruce said. ‘It was pale pink. I suppose it must have been done around 1910. The year before she married. The story goes that the pose was considered too racy and Aunt Deidre had to hide it from Granny. It hung in the West Wing for years – the old girl hardly ever went up there. I don’t suppose she had the space for it in Edinburgh.’

  Mirabelle wondered if the woman in the portrait had yet met Alan’s father, and if she knew she would be leaving the estate where she had been born and brought up for an entirely different kind of life.

  ‘I think you have her eyes, Alan,’ she said. ‘Did she paint? I noticed the landscapes upstairs.’

  ‘She did,’ Bruce enthused, glad to have something uncontroversial to talk about. ‘In the summer she’d take her easel and disappear for hours. Perhaps we should give you a couple of her doodles of the old place? Matching set.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Alan. ‘It’s a generous present, isn’t it darling?’

  Mirabelle nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Bruce propped the painting against the chiffonier. It looked as if it belonged there. Mirabelle wondered if Deidre had made a mistake moving to Edinburgh and marrying her Mr McGregor.

  Niko stood up. ‘This is all very nice,’ he said, ‘but it feels as if everyone is trying to ignore the fact that there’s every likelihood of a madman on the loose. Until we know who’s responsible for my sister’s death and for the maid’s, there could be another attack.’

  Mirabelle felt her skin creep. He was right, of course. If there was another murder, the odds were that the victim would be one of the people sitting in this room. There was a momentary stillness as everybody thought the same.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Bruce. ‘I only meant—’

  ‘Well, with that in mind, I’ve been thinking I’d like to borrow a gun – as a priority,’ Niko cut him off. ‘We should be considering protection. Don’t you think?’

  Bruce seemed taken aback. ‘I don’t know, old man. The police are here. Besides, we keep our guns under lock and key.’

  Niko pushed him. ‘I don’t think the normal rules apply now, to be frank. Police or not. We’re clearly in danger and we’re stuck here. They won’t release Nina’s body for another day or two – perhaps longer in light of the girl’s murder. They made that quite clear to me.’

  ‘The police will be concerned you might skip the country. That’s what’s on their minds,’ McGregor said.

  ‘I’d love to skip the bloody country.’ Niko sounded furious. ‘But we can’t leave Nina. We’re not barbarians.’

  Outside the light was failing. ‘All right,’ Bruce decided. ‘I’ll look out a gun for you. Do you know how to use it?’

  Niko stiffened. ‘How hard can it be?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ McGregor sounded definite. ‘This isn’t some Wild West border town. We can’t have everybody armed to the teeth.’

  ‘It’s not your sister that died,’ Niko pointed out. ‘It’s pitch-black here at night. I want to be able to look after Tash. What if somebody comes into the house?’

  ‘Even if they do, you can’t shoot peopl
e just because they’re indoors,’ McGregor said. ‘Get it wrong and you’ll do ten years. You need to know there’s a threat to life.’

  Niko turned his attention back to Bruce. ‘What if it’s Eleanor next? What about that?’

  Bruce nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, and disappeared into the study to emerge with three shotguns – one for each of the men.

  McGregor bristled. ‘We have to be careful,’ he warned the others. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Don’t I get one?’ Tash objected.

  ‘No,’ Niko cut in. ‘I’m in the room next to yours.’

  Tash didn’t remonstrate. Instead she walked out.

  ‘Her temper today …’ Niko said. ‘It’s the pressure.’

  Later, at bedtime, the fires had been lit and the beds warmed. Elizabeth had been busy. Mirabelle sat at the dressing table in her nightgown, turning round on the stool as she brushed her hair so she could see the painting of Deidre McGregor, which had been brought up to Alan’s room. The shotgun was propped next to it. Dinner had been stilted and they had all come up early.

  ‘A lass has to know what she wants,’ she whispered and felt foolish. ‘I hope Niko doesn’t go overboard, now he’s armed,’ she said louder, so Alan could hear her.

  ‘I’ve warned him.’ He appeared behind her in the mirror, still in his dinner suit, tie undone, top button opened casually. ‘I think my mother would have liked you, Mirabelle.’

  Mirabelle did not say that her family would almost certainly have disapproved of him. Though now it had transpired that McGregor had this place in his background, they might not have disapproved quite so much. It saddened her to think her parents were snobbish; that they wouldn’t have liked her life in Brighton, the agency she ran or the people she associated with. Times had changed. They were still changing. Tash was proof of that.

  ‘Bruce railroaded you into a June date, didn’t he?’ McGregor said, falling back and sitting on the end of her bed.

  Mirabelle nodded. She put down the hairbrush.

  ‘Is it OK?’

  She nodded again. ‘Yes. I want to marry you. I do.’

  ‘I’m so relieved,’ he said.

  She didn’t know what more to say. If they were going to get through this, they weren’t going to do it by talking. They watched each other for a moment. It was different now that she understood more about him. She beckoned him with her finger. ‘Come here. I think I want you on your knees again.’

  McGregor dropped his gaze. ‘Hold on,’ he said. He picked up a towel and draped it over the portrait of his mother.

  Mirabelle laughed. ‘Would she distract you?’

  Lasciviously, McGregor ran his eyes across her body as he fell to his knees in front of her. ‘Actually, I’m not sure anything could put me off.’ He drew her close, pulling her down next to him and kissing her neck as he dropped his jacket on to the floor. She tugged the buttons on his shirt, staring at him as his body emerged – the definition of his arms, the wide expanse of his chest and his pale skin with its stray, dark hairs. She unfastened the waist of his trousers. ‘Are you blushing?’ she asked.

  ‘It seems too much.’

  ‘I want to see you, Alan. All of you.’

  She reached out an elegant finger and ran it across his stomach, looking down towards the patch of twisted flesh that was the cause of the trouble. This was a man who had lived with the full weight of his guilt. He had tried to make amends by righting other wrongs. He was some kind of hero, albeit a flawed one.

  ‘Are you sure?’ He sounded nervous.

  She laughed. ‘I’m stripping you naked here on the floor.’ His breathing became heavier, his hands on her skin now, caressing her from her waist to her thigh. ‘You’ve punished yourself enough, don’t you think?’ She wound her leg around his so she could feel the rough flesh on his calf, and stroked the damaged skin with the side of her foot. McGregor’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want me to stop?’

  He shook his head. He smelled of sweat and of the riverbank and of somewhere green and on high ground. Of police stations and paperwork. Of all the confusion he seemed to prompt in her. She kissed him once more, his chin scuffing her with its five o’clock shadow, and then they began to move.

  Chapter 10

  To be prepared is half the victory

  The next morning it was clear they had all drunk far too much. The dining room at breakfast time felt like a library – as if you had to whisper. Mirabelle rather liked it.

  ‘Did you say something to Gillies?’ Eleanor hissed as Mirabelle and McGregor entered the room. ‘She’s in a horrible mood. She asked when you were leaving.’

  Mirabelle poured the tea. There were no newspapers. She wondered what had been written about the murders. ‘Your housekeeper has been withholding information from the police,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  Eleanor heaped jam on to toast and listened eagerly as Mirabelle explained. ‘I didn’t know Nina and Gwendolyn knew each other,’ she said when Mirabelle had done.

  ‘How did you meet Nina?’ Mirabelle asked.

  ‘She was always around New York. I was starting out as a journalist and she asked me if I’d put together a piece saying I’d bought things in some dreary, overpriced shop she was stocking.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I told her I didn’t write about shopping.’

  ‘Only about privilege?’

  ‘I wanted to write articles about things I found interesting – the pay was terrible, of course.’

  ‘It sounds glamorous – bohemian.’

  ‘My life is different now. If you’d told me I’d end up somewhere like this, I wouldn’t have believed you. Shall we go to the cashmere mill this morning? Girls’ outing?’

  ‘Are the police happy with us going out?’

  McGregor put down his cup. ‘I’ll square it,’ he said.

  Mirabelle decided to push her luck. The tea was helping immensely with her hangover. ‘Eleanor, if you don’t mind, I have an idea for a spot of investigation …’

  ‘Oh God. You want to go to the Dougals’ place and visit that ghastly woman, don’t you?’

  Mirabelle smiled. ‘I’m a terrible nosey parker.’

  ‘She won’t have coffee,’ Eleanor complained. ‘You mark my words. It’ll be mid-morning tea and something awful made from oats.’

  ‘I thought you admired the British quality of tolerance.’

  ‘There are limits.’ Eleanor rolled her eyes. ‘Do you think Gwendolyn’s involved in the murders?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So we’re going to snoop.’ Eleanor’s laugh sounded percussive. ‘Next you’ll be telling me Lady Dougal strangled Nina in cold blood.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I’m quite looking forward to you telling me that.’

  Half an hour later, with Tash raised from slumber, the women piled into the car. It was cold. Motherly, Eleanor fixed the angle of Tash’s hat. ‘Better,’ she said. Alan and Bruce stood in the open doorway and waved as Eleanor switched on the engine and turned the car in an arc so wide that the left side slumped off the driveway on to the damp grass. She gestured defiantly at her husband, tooted the horn as she righted the vehicle, and set off at speed. Tash slipped her arm through Mirabelle’s in the back seat and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘Gorgeous morning,’ she commented.

  ‘Miss Bevan has been digging dirt, Tash,’ Eleanor called over her shoulder. ‘And has uncovered the matter of your godmother and Lady Gwendolyn Dougal.’

  ‘Oh. That,’ Tash sounded dismissive.

  ‘You knew?’ Mirabelle said.

  Camera flashes sparked as they speeded through the estate gates, but Eleanor showed no sign of slowing as she swung the car on to the main road with more precision than she had managed at the top of the drive.

  ‘Nina liked people,’ Tash said. ‘But she liked people with titles best of all.’

  Nobody said any more as they hurtled along.
The sky was so clear today that Mirabelle could make out every detail – a flock of rooks dotted a stretch of open farmland and, above them, a scatter of lapwings; they hung elegantly in mid-air, where the cloud thinned to gossamer revealing a giddy slash of blue.

  Gradually Eleanor speeded up, following the road through a stretch of bad bends, until she swerved through a bank of trees which gave on to an unexpected lake. She stopped dead a few feet from the shore, more abandoning the car than actually parking it. ‘Well, we’re here. That’s the loch-ch-ch,’ she announced with vigour. ‘Took me a long time to get that.’

  The woollen mill stood on the water, through a patch of fir trees. It comprised a collection of rough stone buildings that fitted together into a small campus, like a steading surrounded by trees. Between the evergreens, bare branches jutted like skeletons. Behind what Mirabelle assumed were the older, original buildings, an area had been cleared and a tidy array of Nissan huts had been added, corrugated iron furred with thick, green moss. ‘Storage,’ Tash explained. ‘They gave us the full tour when we came before.’

  Eleanor abandoned the keys in the ignition.

  ‘I feel sick,’ said Tash.

  Mirabelle had to concur. The bends were not compatible with the amount of gin she had consumed the night before. Eleanor was oblivious. ‘Come on.’ She led the way down a path into a small reception area. Inside, a worn wooden counter stood unmanned. Behind it, a sign outlined what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Eleanor sighed, as if the staff ought to be in attendance, like the concierge in the reception of a grand hotel.

  ‘There isn’t even a bell,’ she said, testily. ‘I’ve told them a hundred times. There are the tourists to think of.’

  Through the open door, Mirabelle regarded the deserted yard and thought of the route they’d driven without passing a single soul and only one small, handwritten sign pointing the way. She’d have been surprised if there was another living soul in miles and certainly no tourists. From the slate roof, two gulls eyed the women glassily and swooped over the water.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ Eleanor called and, when there was no reply, marched outside and knocked on another door, flecked with peeling paint. This yielded results. A nervous girl, rather younger than might be expected to be in full-time employment, emerged into the yard as if she had received an electric shock. She wore a green tweed skirt and a pale yellow sweater that certainly wasn’t cashmere.