[Mirabelle Bevan 08] - Highland Fling

by Sara Sheridan

  Behind them the door opened. It wasn’t Eddie, though. It was Bruce. Thank God, Mirabelle thought. Someone who doesn’t know the way things work. ‘I say …’ he started, ‘is everything all right?’

  ‘Fetch the police,’ Mirabelle snapped. ‘We need to arrest this girl.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bruce bumbled. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Stop.’ Eleanor’s voice was clear as a bell. Mirabelle loosened her grip on Elizabeth, who pushed her away as if she had freed herself. Slowly, Eleanor raised the gun.

  ‘Don’t!’ Mirabelle sounded horrified as she realised what Eleanor was about to do, but Eleanor didn’t stop. Instead she hit the girl hard on the head with the butt. Elizabeth crumpled on to the carpet, a thin trickle of blood seeping through her hair.

  ‘My God!’ Bruce said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Eleanor directed her husband. ‘Come in, Bruce.’

  ‘But darling …’

  ‘Come in now and close the door properly.’ Eleanor raised the gun as if she would use it. Silently, Bruce entered the room, his expression pained, as if he simply couldn’t understand what was happening. ‘Well, this is a mess, isn’t it?’ Eleanor gestured.

  Mirabelle checked Elizabeth – relieved to see the girl was breathing. She rolled her on to her side for safety but there was no time to apply first aid. ‘Eleanor …’ she started, standing up again.

  ‘Oh you’re all I need. I mean, this whole thing is twice as bad because of you,’ Eleanor snapped. ‘When did you realise?’

  ‘Just now,’ Mirabelle admitted. ‘Some of it. Gregory said follow the money and I thought there wasn’t any but then it dawned on me …’

  ‘The alexandrite.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Bruce asked, confused.

  ‘Quiet!’ Eleanor sounded increasingly irritable.

  Mirabelle waited a moment before continuing. ‘You can’t get away,’ she said. ‘There are policemen all over the grounds.’

  ‘I’ll find a way,’ Eleanor replied. ‘I did before.’

  Mirabelle’s eyes flicked to the window. ‘You won’t get far,’ she said. ‘Green is not go, Eleanor. Not this time. That won’t work again.’

  Eleanor sighed. ‘I didn’t take you for an extremist,’ she said.

  ‘You’re the one making deals with the Russians. You are, aren’t you?’

  She noticed Eleanor’s hand quiver. It was a small movement but it demonstrated that the shock of being shot was settling in. The shock of hurting Elizabeth too, if it came to that. Adrenalin was unpredictable. Mirabelle made to move, but Eleanor pulled herself together and raised the gun once more. Mirabelle took a measured breath, her heart fluttering.

  ‘Stop right there,’ Eleanor directed.

  Mirabelle took one more step and Eleanor fired, pointedly, into the skirting, past Mirabelle’s leg.

  ‘I said stop,’ she said.

  Mirabelle complied. She took a deep breath. She’d talked her way out of worse, though her hands felt clammy as she started. She just had to engage Eleanor, that was the thing.

  ‘Nina was your first problem, wasn’t she?’ she said, keeping her tone smooth – almost soothing. ‘She made a link that set this whole thing in motion. Brought it to a head, I mean.’

  Eleanor let out a puff of air, as if to blow Mirabelle’s words away. ‘God, she was awful. She always had been. A bitch with a bone.’

  Relief flooded Mirabelle’s limbs – Eleanor wanted to talk. That was good. ‘That’s why you accommodated her in the lodge.’

  ‘I couldn’t refuse her – I mean, she was buying stock for some great places. But I wasn’t going to have her here. I hoped she’d just pay for her cashmere and go home. I mean, that’s what she came to do. But she had a nose for money like you wouldn’t believe. I’d forgotten. I should never have let her stay.’

  ‘She realised about the alexandrite, then?’

  ‘I was unlucky. She walked into my dressing room while I was sorting things out. An absolute fluke. She recognised it immediately, of course.’

  ‘More than just that one stone?’

  Eleanor laughed. ‘Yeah. She was delighted.’

  ‘And what were you doing with it? The alexandrite, I mean?’

  Eleanor ignored the question.

  ‘Darling,’ Bruce cut in. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Eleanor shot in his direction. ‘You’re a sweet man, but you have no idea.’

  ‘Give him an idea, Eleanor. He deserves that. We all do.’ Mirabelle encouraged her. ‘Seems like extremism is the thing you dislike the most. Am I right?’

  ‘Yeah – McCarthy and his witch hunt back in the States. I’ve seen what extremism does. What it leads to.’

  ‘And that’s what you liked about Britain? Our more level-headed approach?’

  ‘At first it seemed more tolerant here.’

  ‘But recently?’

  Eleanor sighed. ‘People get scared. All this warmongering. Both sides are as bad as each other. When people are scared they look for black and white and stop seeing grey. They can’t see that we’ve done bad things – just as much as the other side.’

  ‘And you wanted to stand up against that?’

  Bruce still wasn’t getting it. ‘But we won the war, darling. We’re the good guys.’

  Eleanor looked as if she might cry. ‘Really? People don’t realise what’s going on in front of their eyes – not least you, Bruce. The famine in Bengal in ’43 was down to Churchill. He as good as said the Indians deserved it. Hitler killed six million and he was a beast. But about half that number died in India at the hands of your leader – the guy everyone seems to revere. I mean, the Nazi death camps were terrible, but they were an extension of a British model. You’re the better guys, not the good guys, darling. That’s what I’ve come to realise.’

  ‘I agree. Churchill isn’t the god the papers make him out to be,’ Mirabelle said, hoping that Eleanor didn’t detect the personal experience in her tone.

  ‘No. He isn’t,’ Eleanor continued. ‘He’s a grey figure. And Stalin was a monster, that I will allow, but Khrushchev, I don’t know yet. It seems to me that instead of gearing up for war, with both sides locked into a race to develop the best bomb, for Christ’s sake, shouldn’t we open dialogue? Be brave enough to look at the grey in what we did, and in what they’re doing. But that’s considered too dangerous. You can’t have sympathy for the grey areas. It’s a capital offence, and they give all kinds of nasty names to people who want to be honest about the bad as well as the good. They call us traitors and name what I did treason. They insist we’re 100 per cent fantastic and the other side are devils. It’s just nonsense. I have to get out of here.’

  Mirabelle stepped into Eleanor’s path. ‘Move,’ Eleanor said.

  Mirabelle shook her head. ‘I’ll speak for you,’ she offered. ‘Let me testify on your behalf. Whatever you’ve done.’

  ‘You think they’ll let me off on your say-so?’

  ‘I don’t know. You still haven’t been clear about the detail of it, Eleanor.’

  Eleanor shrugged. ‘I built bridges.’

  ‘Alexandrite bridges?’

  ‘I passed stones to people they wanted to support – for research, for science. I helped them sell some of it – it’s worth a fortune but they can’t trade on the open market. The Brits are not going to let me off with a caution for either of those things.’

  ‘No,’ Mirabelle said sadly. ‘They won’t. What did they pay you?’

  ‘Pay me?’ Eleanor seemed genuinely bemused at the notion. ‘I wasn’t doing this for money. I was doing it because they aren’t all bad and we aren’t all good. You’d better get out of my way.’

  ‘No,’ Mirabelle repeated.

  Eleanor nudged the muzzle of the gun into the soft flesh of Mirabelle’s stomach. But before she could make a decision about whether to fire, both women were distracted by a loud sob.

  Behind them tears spilled dow
n Bruce’s cheeks. ‘Is this why you married me? Because you’re a spy? Have you always been a Communist?’

  Eleanor didn’t turn her head. ‘I’m not a spy, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been a spy. Or a Communist. I married you because I love you, you idiot.’ Eleanor moved sideways but Mirabelle continued to block her path. ‘Jesus!’ she burst out in frustration. ‘Do you want to be shot?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to shoot me.’

  ‘Oh no?’

  ‘I want to know what happened, Eleanor, and so does Bruce – we deserve that. You know why Nina was killed, don’t you? You said she caught you with the alexandrite. What happened then?’

  Eleanor snorted. ‘She tried to blackmail me. For her silence, she said. I gave her one of the stones but she wanted more. That was what she was like. I said she could have what I’d offered and stay quiet or I’d take the damn thing back and she could hazard her chances trying to prove what I had been doing.’

  ‘Could she have proved it, Eleanor?’

  ‘She didn’t have any real intelligence beyond me having a quantity of alexandrite that could only have come from one place. I wasn’t going to end up beholden to her for ever. I knew if I didn’t draw a line in the sand, she’d just keep going. So I figured it was better to draw the line early. I didn’t mean for what happened to happen.’

  ‘Do you mean you killed her?’

  ‘I know you won’t believe me, but I didn’t intend to. I lost my temper. I’m sorry for that. But, for the record, if she wasn’t black and white, that woman was a very dark grey. A proto-fascist. An authoritarian.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I did what I said I’d do. I tried to take the stone back. We fought. At first we were like girls in the schoolyard. She grabbed me by the hair. Honestly. Then it got out of hand.’

  ‘She swallowed the stone?’

  ‘Russian aristocrats know a hundred places to secrete valuables. Yeah, she swallowed it. She smiled and said I couldn’t get it back now, and that we were doing things her way. She wanted more before she left.’

  ‘So you strangled her? Jesus, Eleanor!’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I was furious. It was a cat fight. I grabbed hold of her stupid silk scarf. I thought it would tear but it was stronger than I reckoned. She was a fucking Nazi, Mirabelle. You were at Nuremberg. If anyone should understand, it’s you.’

  ‘You’d never killed anybody before?’

  ‘Of course not. The balmy days before I was a murderer? Last week.’

  ‘An assassin more like.’

  ‘She’s the assassin.’ Eleanor nodded towards Elizabeth, still unconscious, lying between Mirabelle and the door. Mirabelle thought it was a good thing Eleanor hadn’t killed the girl. Apart from anything else, Elizabeth trying to kill her backed up her story. ‘What happened to Susan MacLeod?’ she pushed.

  ‘That wasn’t me.’

  ‘Was she a blackmailer too? What did she want to talk to you about that day in your office?’

  ‘I don’t know. Poor kid. She never came back. I’ve been trying to figure it out. I guess it was her.’ Eleanor gestured towards Elizabeth. ‘Or someone with her. I mean, they had to get Elizabeth into the house, to get rid of me and retrieve their goods, I suppose. So they removed the existing maid. They don’t call it the Cold War for nothing.’ Eleanor was right, Mirabelle thought, or close at least. That sounded right. It explained the Russian gun that had been found near Susan’s body. Dropped in the retreat. Those frantic moments after a kill. The tall, dark man in the navy jacket.

  ‘But I went to see the MacLeods,’ Bruce murmured in disbelief. ‘I sent them your condolences.’

  Neither woman replied. ‘So it wasn’t planned,’ Mirabelle said.

  ‘God. No. It’s been hell. Does it seem as if all this was planned?’

  Mirabelle shook her head. ‘And then you were trapped. Stuck in this house with Tash and Niko who were mourning the woman you murdered. When it came down to it, no wonder you couldn’t face visiting the MacLeods. God, it must have been awful. And then someone came after you. Elizabeth, I suppose with that pin in the chair. The Russians. The real Russians. The ones you think are so reasonable.’

  ‘People get scared.’

  ‘Scared?’

  Eleanor shrugged. ‘Great cover. I mean, who suspects the maid?’

  ‘It’s usually the butler. The murderer, I mean.’ Mirabelle smiled.

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘On stage. Women are a far more intelligent proposition, don’t you think? I mean, we’re less likely to be suspected because men underestimate us all the time. Anyway, Jinx took the poison for me. Poor Jinxy.’ She began to cry. It was odd, Mirabelle thought, that it was Jinx that seemed to have broken her. Jack used to say murderers often cared more for their animals than for people.

  ‘But why would the Russians want to kill you if you’d been helping them? And when you ran, where did you think you were going? Back to Moscow?’ Mirabelle asked. Tears flooded down Eleanor’s cheeks now. She shook her head. Mirabelle’s brain was whirring. No – that was wrong. The Russians had wanted to kill Eleanor, so, of course she couldn’t head into their territory. ‘I don’t understand, if you were loyal, what went so wrong?’ she continued.

  ‘I’ve never been to Moscow,’ Eleanor sniffed. ‘That’s the ridiculous thing. I would have liked to see it.’

  ‘And who tied you up? Because these people want you dead, clearly,’ Mirabelle gestured towards Elizabeth, grappling with the parts of the story she hadn’t figured out.

  A carriage clock on a side table chimed the half-hour and Mirabelle started. Eleanor used the moment’s distraction to regain her sense of purpose. She surged forwards and Mirabelle tried to block her. Eleanor raised the gun, as if to shoot, and in that split second Mirabelle’s heart missed a beat as she launched herself towards the other woman. She anticipated a shot, but the gun didn’t fire – not even the dull thud of the silencer. There were no bullets left. Mirabelle tackled Eleanor to the ground. The weapon went flying. Eleanor landed a punch on Mirabelle’s cheek as Mirabelle tried to pin her to the floor. In desperation, Eleanor sank her teeth into Mirabelle’s injured arm. Mirabelle heard herself scream, saw her own blood on the other woman’s face. She kicked Eleanor’s injured foot, then manoeuvred her body round and finally managed to hold Eleanor in place.

  ‘I have to get out of here,’ Eleanor snarled.

  Bruce picked up the gun. ‘Bruce,’ Mirabelle said, ‘could you fetch Eddie, please?’

  For a moment she wasn’t entirely sure what Bruce was going to do. Then, slowly, he moved towards the door. ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I don’t either. Not entirely. But do you think I could explain what I know afterwards?’ Mirabelle tried to smile.

  ‘If you love me, Bruce, you’ll knock her unconscious,’ Eleanor snarled.

  Bruce hovered between the women and the exit. Mirabelle held her breath. When he disappeared through the frame, Eleanor let out a frustrated growl and Mirabelle made sure to keep her grip steady. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so grateful.

  Chapter 18

  No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow

  Detective Inspector Cameron seemed exasperated by the morning’s events. It was, in fairness, something of a turnaround. He arranged for Elizabeth to be taken to hospital under guard – the girl regained consciousness, but she was woozy and incoherent. The medics said it would take some time before she could be usefully questioned. Eleanor had hit her hard. The ambulance attendant examined the gunshot wounds and left Mirabelle in Mrs Gillies’s care. Because Eddie refused to allow Eleanor to be taken out of his orbit, the man prescribed a strong painkiller and performed a swift field operation on her foot. The leather of Eleanor’s walking boots had held the wound tightly, which meant she hadn’t lost much blood. ‘You’ll have a limp,’ he pronounced, ‘but I got the bullet out.’ Eleanor simply shrugged.

  Then Insp
ector Cameron, under Eddie’s instruction, formally arrested her. She remained detained in the day room, recovering. Two men were posted to guard the window and two more on the door – what Eddie described laconically as ‘policemen to watch policemen’. ‘Just until we can remove her somewhere more secure,’ he promised. ‘I’m not finished with this house yet,’ he said as he disappeared into Bruce’s study to make some calls, muttering something about Khrushchev, which Mirabelle didn’t catch.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Gillies dressed Mirabelle’s wound. ‘There, lass,’ she said, stony-eyed. ‘Just a graze. Not as bad as the mistress.’

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ Mirabelle said.

  Gillies nodded, but didn’t reply, and Mirabelle realised the old woman was processing what had happened. She had liked Eleanor, after all. And so had Mirabelle, it dawned on her with some confusion. Eleanor was right. The world was too black and white, even if the best way to counter that wasn’t to collude with the Soviets.

  Gillies made tea but Bruce was the only one to drink it, sitting at the table like a child, both hands clutching the cup for warmth. He kept staring at Mirabelle and then at the floor. The police were still working. They removed the shotguns from the study and rummaged through Eleanor’s bedroom again but didn’t find the Green Lady who, after all, had eluded discovery for centuries. It was a clever kind of catch, Mirabelle thought, and wondered if her own fingers would have found it, had she searched the room without knowing.

  Around half past eleven, Gregory slipped into the kitchen and took his place at the table. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.