‘And after that?’
‘He went back to his hotel where he ordered more beer in the guest lounge at ten thirty, and then went upstairs. The hotel staff can account for him up until eleven, or just after. Then the maid at the hotel walked into his room at seven a.m. She was under the impression that he had checked out and the room needed to be cleaned. And there he was in bed. Naked. The officer said he made quite an impression on the girl. Of course, that means he couldn’t have killed Nina. There’s no way he could have got up here, committed the murder and then got back down again for seven. It’s over four hours each way, even driving like the clappers.’
‘So, he’s off the hook?’
‘Not exactly. The officer went on to check Gregory’s assertion that he went to Greenock that morning.’
‘And did he?’
‘First thing. He was in the harbourmaster’s office looking for a shipping clerk at seven thirty, which is impossible.’ McGregor spread his hands, as if he had completed a magic trick. ‘Gregory couldn’t be naked in a hotel room in central Glasgow at seven and then in Greenock by half past. It’s a forty-five-minute drive, perhaps an hour. It’s fishy as hell. The man has two alibis and there’s definitely something wrong with one of them. That’s why they kept him so long.’
Mirabelle considered this. ‘Maybe the witnesses got the time wrong.’
‘Maybe, though they think it unlikely. They’re cross-referencing where they can, but the black man doth protest too much. There’s something wrong. They grilled him for ages but he didn’t crack. I think they only let him go because they know they can take him back in, any time.’
Mirabelle got up and stared out of the window. A flock of ducks flew overhead in a V formation. McGregor joined her. ‘Do you know why they fly fanned out like that?’
‘No.’
‘Geese do it too. They take turns at the front so the birds behind don’t have to struggle through the wind. Geese migrate thousands of miles. That’s only possible because they pull together.’ He put his hand on Mirabelle’s shoulder. ‘Like us.’
She leaned into him. Alan McGregor on holiday, or perhaps Alan McGregor in Scotland, seemed to have acquired a smattering of poetry. It was beginning to feel as if they belonged together.
‘Do you mean work together?’
‘Yes. You are always butting into my investigations …’
‘Helping, you mean?’
‘Look, this isn’t my case and it isn’t your case either. The police are getting nowhere. We’ve been frittering about at the edges of it, but maybe we should team up and solve the damn thing together – as a present for Bruce and Eleanor, if nothing else. You take the front. Then I take the front. And we’ll get further, faster.’ He kissed her shoulder, biting her skin through her silk blouse. She considered his proposition. Everyone said marriage was about teamwork. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Obviously you’re going to have to up your game substantially …’ She pulled a cushion off the sofa and batted him. McGregor laughed. She took off and he chased her around the orangery as if they were teenagers. In fact, Mirabelle thought, she had never done this when she was a teenager. Not once.
He caught her beside the electric fire and they kissed, springing apart as the door opened and Eleanor wandered in with Jinx at her heel. The dog bolted to Mirabelle’s side and nuzzled her hips.
‘Don’t mind us,’ Eleanor said. ‘Bruce sent me. He’s getting jumpy. They’re sitting through there, talking about Susan. Can’t keep off it. It’s terribly grim. We thought we might visit the MacLeods – the girl’s parents – but I can’t face it. So we’re going shooting. Niko needs some practice and this whole thing has rendered Tash positively murderous. Can I be honest?’ Eleanor did not wait for an answer. ‘When I first met you, Mirabelle, I thought you were cold. I didn’t see what you saw in her, Alan. But having you here, I have to say, it’s lovely to have family around.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mirabelle.
‘She’s just English,’ McGregor chipped in. ‘What you’re taking for coldness. It’s just people over the border.’
Mirabelle hit him again with the cushion. ‘That’s enough,’ she said.
But it wasn’t her Englishness, she thought, as Alan took her hand and they followed Eleanor into the hall. It was all those years of the war, living through the Blitz and ending up in Brighton, of all places. Not that she minded Brighton. But when you’d lost everyone and were truly alone, you couldn’t be warm. She’d spent more than a decade, she realised, in a cold kind of coping. Being happy again had felt like a betrayal of the people who’d died. As they slipped into the drawing room, she realised she felt warmer in this cold place than she had in all her time in Brighton. McGregor and his family were heating her through. The room smelled of wood smoke and tobacco. Jinx settled on the rug. Bruce poured drinks.
‘I was thinking we could ring an agent down south and see what they have on their books. They might send photographs,’ McGregor announced brightly. Mirabelle looked blank. ‘Houses,’ McGregor continued. ‘I mean, we’ll need somewhere to live.’
Eleanor clapped Alan on the shoulder. ‘That’s progress,’ she said.
Progress, Mirabelle thought. But her mind wasn’t on houses and weddings any more than it ever was. That wasn’t the kind of teamwork she was interested in.
Nina Orlova had gone to the orangery to meet somebody and it was something to do with this gemstone, or the money it was worth. That’s why she had been killed. And that meant the murderer couldn’t be a prowler. It had always been unlikely, but today’s developments made it impossible. Mirabelle heard Tash’s voice from the night before, as if it was an echo. ‘That means it’s one of us,’ the girl had said, but that wasn’t necessarily true. It simply meant the murder hadn’t been entirely random. Whoever they were, the murderer had either been buying, selling or stealing a large piece of alexandrite.
Chapter 12
Dreams are the touchstones of character
The pressmen looked rattled, and quite rightly. From the roof terrace it would have been easy to pick them off. Bruce clearly relished the possibility. He took aim carefully and fired a potshot at one of the large fir trees close to the gate.
‘Darling!’ Eleanor chided him.
‘I thought there was a pigeon,’ he lied.
‘Now, now, old man,’ McGregor said. ‘Not even in jest.’
The entrance to the terrace wasn’t grand. A door in the upstairs hallway led to a small vestibule, like a cupboard, and up a set of steep stairs that were only just better than a ladder. At the top, cold air kissed their skin and the sky played out its panorama.
The terrace was larger than Mirabelle had imagined when she saw it from the road. She and Tash sat languidly on a wooden bench that was weighted down with bricks so it wouldn’t tumble in high winds. They spread out the velvet cushions they’d brought from downstairs, and half a dozen thick cashmere rugs that Mrs Gillies had passed up to them. ‘This is much more glamorous than when I went shooting in Montana,’ Tash said, her breath clouding in the cold as she settled into a nest while Eleanor set up a picnic of several small pies propped up by a large pile of pickled onions and a bottle of Tio Pepe.
Bruce laid the guns against the slated incline. ‘We should try to bring everything down over the back field. It’ll be tidier for picking up the kill, what with Jinx being a useless hunting dog.’
Mirabelle wondered about the fate of the ducks that had flown overhead. She hoped they hadn’t lingered. The season was coming to a close. If they made it to the end of the month, they’d survive the summer. Eleanor put a pickled onion in her mouth. ‘Pigeons and rabbits,’ she said. ‘Let me,’ she motioned towards her husband’s gun. Bruce helped her to aim and fire. ‘Oh yes, it makes you feel better, doesn’t it?’ she said, ‘even if you don’t hit anything.’
Bruce was a passable teacher. He fitted each gun and took turns to tutor them individually. Mirabelle declined. Tash was, as she had intimated, a natural, bringing dow
n several pigeons and, in error, one crow, whooping whenever she hit anything as if, Eleanor said quietly, she was in the audience at an American football match. Niko found it more difficult to bag his shot, though in the end he had the best kill – a deer that wandered out of the wood behind the house.
‘May I?’ he checked before firing.
‘If it’s on our land, we can shoot it,’ Bruce said, and patted Niko on the back when he brought the animal down.
‘Bruce shot a deer from our bedroom window once. It was just after we got married,’ Eleanor said fondly. ‘It was eating the saplings we planted because I wanted to be able to see blossom from my window. The trees would have died if he hadn’t. He leaned out of the window and kaboom! I thought, “Wow. That’s macho!”’
Bruce’s colour heightened. ‘Deer are a menace,’ he said.
They swigged Tio Pepe to keep them warm.
Around four o’clock the pressmen began to move off and Bruce, Eleanor, Tash and McGregor went to bring in the kill or, as Bruce called it, ‘Go for a walk.’
‘The last time we went for a walk it wasn’t so great,’ Niko smirked when he was invited, so he and Mirabelle stayed on the roof to dismantle the picnic and stack the guns.
‘I’m sorry about Natasha yesterday,’ he apologised once they were alone. ‘She’s very passionate.’
‘Not at all. I’m fond of her.’
‘I hope she didn’t offend you with that snob stuff. Where were you brought up? London?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fewer guns,’ Niko commented. ‘And no need to hunt rabbits.’
‘Hunting has never been my bag. You and your sister were brought up in town too?’
‘The bright lights of New York, New York.’
‘I’m fascinated by your sister.’
‘Nina was an original. You couldn’t shove her into a kitchen and expect her to conform. I could see you two getting along.’
‘I still can’t figure out why she came up to the house that night. I keep getting drawn back to what she was doing here?’
Niko tipped the ash from his cigarette into a green glass ashtray on the picnic table. With his shirtsleeves rolled up, he regarded her slyly from beneath his lids.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked.
‘I like cold. I like the sensation.’
‘What do you think your sister was doing up here?’ Mirabelle pushed him.
‘You know who I think did it.’
‘The Communists.’
‘Sure. They ruined our lives. If the Revolution hadn’t happened, by the time she was twenty-one, Nina would have married a minor aristocrat, and so would I, and we’d be living in St Petersburg with tons of children. Winter in town – balls and parties, summer at the dacha, swimming in the sea.’
‘Would you have preferred that?’
Niko smiled. He was, she thought, extremely handsome. ‘Tash tells me you aren’t keen on marriage. Are you having second thoughts about your hero the hunter? All these displays of … togetherness … I don’t find them entirely convincing.’
‘Your niece is observant.’ Mirabelle tried to stay relaxed. ‘But on this occasion she’s wrong. I love Alan.’
‘So what’s your problem with tying the knot?’
‘What’s your problem, Baron? You haven’t married either.’
Niko laughed. The sound seemed to ricochet off the chimney and disappear into the stack of cashmere rugs. He stared at her lazily, his gaze frank. ‘I almost married once. It’s difficult. I know it sounds crazy, but what happened to my family has scarred our souls, Miss Bevan. It’s terrible to not have a home. It brings to your attention, shall we say, that the real treasures are people. That’s why Tash is so loyal. So fierce. The truth is that giving someone my absolute trust might be beyond me. We lost everything.’
It struck Mirabelle that a certain kind of woman would love this sort of talk. Niko was a potent mix of American, well-to-do businessman and tortured Russian aristocrat. She wondered if Nina had been as dramatic. He leaned in. ‘There’s something almost Russian about you, Miss Bevan. Ice and fire.’
‘My grandmother was French,’ Mirabelle tried gamely, stepping back. ‘Perhaps it’s that.’
Mirabelle stared at him, sensing that there was more. The silence lay between them. Niko held out for about a minute. He lit another cigarette. ‘When the Orlovs came to the States, people thought we’d too much money or we had it easy. They gossiped about whether our family should have retained our title. They questioned if we had betrayed people. Done some kind of deal. The fact that we got out and were OK somehow made us suspect.’ He blew air through his lips to demonstrate the hopelessness of such debate. ‘People judged us. They made assumptions. They thought Nina was flippant. She worked in fashion. She spent her life in and out of shops – the byways of filthy lucre. And then there was her personal life. A single parent, in effect. A woman of …’ he paused, clearly considering how to phrase it, ‘varied tastes. So much of her life was inconsequential. Sinful, even. But my sister knew right from wrong. Since we were children. I suspect that you, Miss Bevan, are more alternative than either she or me when it comes down to it. So, I feel defensive of her. She was misunderstood in life and now—’
Tash appeared at the head of the stairs. ‘Oh god, you aren’t pulling that routine, are you, Uncle Niko? Leave Mirabelle alone,’ she said, stepping on to the terrace. ‘Two unsolved murders and all you can do is flirt!’ Her frame disappeared behind the pile of colourful cushions which, balanced precariously in her arms, wobbled as she swept back downstairs. A trail of lily of the valley lingered in her wake.
‘Have I embarrassed you?’ Niko asked.
Mirabelle shook her head. ‘I don’t normally talk about relationships, that’s all.’
‘You think that was talking about relationships?’ Niko’s gaze softened. ‘Well, he’d be a lucky man, your policeman. If he isn’t going to be lucky, come and see me, won’t you?’
Mirabelle felt herself blush. Niko clicked his heels. Then he lifted the guns in their cases and made for the stairs.
A minute later, Mirabelle flopped on to the bench. She pulled one of the cashmere throws over her coat. Below, the others were returning to the house, the random route they were taking across the field attesting to their drunkenness. She reached for a cigarette and was still smoking when McGregor returned to the terrace.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I think the Robertsons are cracking up,’ she said. ‘It’s probably sinking in that they have to live here once the crime is solved and we’ve all gone home. They’re thinking of pulling down the orangery. Eleanor can’t face visiting Susan’s family. Have you any ideas who did it yet?’
McGregor sat down next to her. ‘Is this whole thing just a jewel robbery, do you think?’
‘A robbery that nobody has reported?’
He pulled her on to his lap, one hand caressing her hip, the other curled around her waist. They sat like that for a while. The light began to dim. It got dark early this far north, but the sunsets were worth it. A peachy glow began to burn on the horizon as a black van drove up the back lane from the gates where the newsmen had finished packing up. The sound of its engine carried on the breeze. Inside the house, lights went on along the first floor as people went up to dress for dinner. Mirabelle was about to suggest they went down. She would have liked a bath. Then a movement at the back of the house caught her eye. A figure shrouded in black came out of the kitchen door and disappeared behind the staff quarters. She got to her feet. ‘Look,’ she said, flicking the butt of her cigarette into the gutter.
McGregor joined her at the railing.
‘Who is it?’
It was difficult to tell from above. Part of the view was obscured by the roof. Mirabelle pulled herself over the barrier and clambered up the slated incline to get a better view. Behind, McGregor let out a loud tutting sound, but he followed her. ‘Is this how you solve crimes at home?’ he asked.
&nb
sp; ‘Sort of. I look for the things that don’t fit.’
‘So in this instance …’
Mirabelle sighed. ‘Who the hell is that?’
They waited. The figure must have stopped somewhere near the staff quarters, exactly in their blind spot.’
‘What else doesn’t fit?’ McGregor asked.
‘Apart from the gemstone in Nina Orlova’s stomach? It’s bothered me from the beginning, actually. Her clothes.’
‘Clothes?’
‘Nina’s outfit. She and Tash had dressed for dinner. Cocktail dresses, Tash said. They stayed up late, they’d eaten and played cards. Then Tash went to bed and Nina got changed. Fair enough, but if I was going rambling up a hill in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t choose a red wool suit. I’d wear trousers and sensible shoes. Feel how cold it is now, never mind at three a.m.’
‘Did Nina ever wear trousers? I don’t recall any in her wardrobe.’
Mirabelle considered this. ‘You might be right. Perhaps she didn’t own any, or at least didn’t pack them. But still, that suit was the kind of outfit you’d wear to a smart lunch. And with heels.’
A worried expression flickered across his face. ‘Really? When you’ve been solving my cases – is this the kind of thing you’ve been concentrating on?’
‘Well, how do you do it?’
‘Police work. I work my way back from the murder. I follow the final movements of the victim. I interview everyone they came into contact with. Most times it’s the most obvious person.’
‘Most times,’ she said, her tone betraying her scepticism. ‘So who’s the most obvious person here?’
‘Annoyingly, the most likely murderer was Nina Orlova, don’t you think? She was the one with the most complicated life. She was the one with the secrets. It feels as if she was aggressive. And yet, she ended up the victim.’
Mirabelle was about to say something about the alexandrite being a secret – someone else’s secret – when the figure emerged from the back of the house on to the lane. It was Gregory. They could both see that now, his distinctive rolling gait, the way he held his shoulders. ‘What’s he doing?’ McGregor asked. He was running – sprinting, in fact, up the lane towards where they’d found Susan – to the spot where the black van had parked in a passing place cut into the hill. The passenger door opened and Gregory got in. Mirabelle and McGregor waited a split second for the engine to start, but it didn’t. ‘Come on,’ McGregor offered his hand to help her down. ‘Our friend Wilbur is up to something.’
[Mirabelle Bevan 08] - Highland Fling Page 17