[Mirabelle Bevan 08] - Highland Fling

by Sara Sheridan

  ‘I’m not ridiculous. Would you?’

  ‘I’ve said I would.’

  ‘Would you, though? Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s enough,’ said McGregor. ‘I don’t require anything else. Besides, you’re going to have a scar now,’ he touched her bandaged arm gently. ‘So you’re not perfect any more. Which, of course, makes you perfect for me. More perfect, if that were possible.’

  ‘It’s been the worst holiday in the world,’ Mirabelle said.

  McGregor smiled. ‘Terrible,’ he agreed. ‘There would have been fewer bodies if we’d stayed at home.’

  Mirabelle thought about it. ‘There wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘We just wouldn’t have known about them.’

  ‘So why’s all this on your mind?’

  Mirabelle checked her watch. It was time. ‘It’s your cousin,’ she said. ‘He got into the day room and he thinks he’s going to break Eleanor free.’

  McGregor got to his feet. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Would it be so bad if he did?’ Mirabelle asked.

  McGregor didn’t answer. He turned slightly, as if he was about to go and check, when they both heard it – the crack of gunfire, two pistol shots, one after the other. As one, they ran into the hallway. Eddie was still on the phone. He motioned them ahead. The policemen were already in the room with Mrs Gillies, fresh from the kitchen, her hands covered in a dusting of flour. McGregor let out a howl. The Robertsons were lying in the window recess, the overnight bag open and the gun in Eleanor’s hand – an old service revolver. Mirabelle watched in horror as their blood pooled on to the carpet, mixed together and trickled slowly towards the stains from earlier in the day.

  Chapter 20

  Nothing great was achieved without danger

  Eddie alerted the navy. The place name translated to Balanron or, as Mirabelle later learned to say it, Baile nan Ròn. Place of the seals – or Seal Village. A submarine commander called Michael Farquhar-Brown arrested two Russian seamen in the end, one of whom claimed asylum, but Dr Peter Dunn eluded Eddie’s best efforts. For the time being, anyway. That night it was as if the house had been abandoned. The bodies had been taken to the morgue. The policemen had gone. Mrs Gillies walked down to her sister’s for the night and Eddie had left for Inverness.

  ‘What should we do if they drop the bomb?’ Mirabelle asked him before he left.

  Eddie stood absolutely still – like a statue of the perfect civil servant. ‘The advice is to get under the kitchen table but I’ve read the projections. If they drop the bomb, Belle, the best thing to do is end it yourself, before it can incinerate you.’

  ‘Do you think either side will fire their rockets?’

  ‘I think they both would, if we don’t get the balance right,’ he said deliberately. ‘Hitler played a terrible game of chess by comparison with the opposition we’re dealing with these days. The alarm in the media is not misplaced.’

  She was about to ask another question, but McGregor opened the drawing-room door and, instead, Eddie extended his condolences, kissed Mirabelle on the cheek and was off, like a knight on a crusade to get the night train back to London. It was late and he had bigger fish to fry.

  Mirabelle watched him leave, the car lights receding down the driveway into the velvet darkness and turning along the road away from the village before the hill obscured them. She stood outside for a long time. The freezing air smelled of green things stirring and, she thought, of fallen stars – a metallic smell of great fires doused.

  Gillies had left dinner in the kitchen but neither of them had the heart to eat. McGregor sat by the fire in the drawing room. This place was haunted now, she realised. It would be haunted for ever. All the deaths. Nina and Susan and Bruce and Eleanor. Even Jinx. It felt as if nothing would ever break the silence. When McGregor put a record on the gramophone, they let it play; once the music was done, they didn’t put on another.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mirabelle said eventually. ‘I didn’t know Bruce had another gun.’

  McGregor stared at his drink. ‘How could you have known?’ he asked. ‘Besides, I’m not sure he meant them to die. That didn’t seem to be what he was talking about from what you said. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall. Just that last five minutes. Why did they choose death? I mean, they could have run.’

  ‘I don’t even understand how he got in there,’ Mirabelle said.

  McGregor looked at his hands. ‘There’s a secret. A stupid family story.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. A secret room. A tunnel. Maybe that’s how he got in. He had hope, I suppose. The old fool.’

  Mirabelle got to her feet. ‘Come with me.’

  She led him upstairs, picking a torch from the boot cupboard as they passed. McGregor objected when they entered Bruce and Eleanor’s room. ‘Belle, I can’t,’ he said as she snapped on the bedside lamps illuminating the suite in golden light. Tonight, the curtains had been drawn. In another story it might feel cosy. Mirabelle took his hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You need to see this.’

  The dressing room was still in disarray. She opened Eleanor’s wardrobe. ‘This is grim,’ McGregor said. ‘We’ll have to sort it out but not tonight.’

  ‘Give me a moment.’ She opened the drawer and twisted the knob. The back of the wardrobe slid to the side. McGregor’s face remained unexpressive. He moved forward. ‘This is where she hid the alexandrite,’ Mirabelle said.

  Inside the hidden room, she sprang the catch on the wooden book and the door to the tunnel opened.

  ‘This is how she got out the first time. When we thought she’d been kidnapped.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Gillies showed me. She said it was a secret passed down the female line. But it seems like you knew, even if you thought it was only a story.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell Eddie?’

  Mirabelle shook her head. ‘Once I knew how Eleanor had got out, the fact she was wearing her diamond watch made sense and that was what mattered.’

  ‘Come on,’ said McGregor, taking the torch. He stooped, making his way down the rough stones of the staircase between the walls. When they reached ground level, they examined the stonework and found a small lever on the rough clay floor. McGregor pressed it with his foot and, with a click, a low door opened into the day room. On the other side, the opening was concealed by a chinoiserie cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl herons in flight. ‘So they could have got away – why didn’t they just click the switch? I don’t understand.’ Mirabelle slipped her arms around McGregor and hugged him. She suddenly felt so exhausted she couldn’t even cry. ‘Maybe Eleanor just gave up. The countryside was lousy with policemen and Bruce was determined to implicate himself. Perhaps he agreed to a death pact – he adored her.’

  ‘She was like the alexandrite, wasn’t she?’ McGregor said. ‘One thing in one light, quite a different thing in another.’

  ‘I liked her,’ Mirabelle admitted sadly.

  Together they went out, into the hall. McGregor opened the front door and Mirabelle followed him outside. ‘God’s own country,’ he said as the horses stirred in the paddock. It was cloudy now and no stars were visible. With the moonlight only just breaking through, the darkness seemed absolute. When Mirabelle breathed in, the air was so sharp she couldn’t pick up the smell of the grass or the mud or the open sky. She stared at the hill ahead and found herself imagining Nina Orlova walking up the slope in the dark, only a few days before. Then, chiding herself for being gruesome, she gazed at the outline of the emerald-cut pink diamond on her finger, but all she could think was that she couldn’t imagine swallowing it.

  ‘Come on,’ said McGregor. The two of them continued a little way down the drive. Ahead, the horses in the paddock moved and one came as far as the fence.

  ‘They won’t have liked it,’ Mirabelle said. ‘Having so many people around. Horses are flighty. They startle.’

  They turned and looked back at the house,
the lights from the drawing room illuminating the edges of the velvet curtains. ‘I’m the heir,’ McGregor said. ‘Ridiculously. Mrs Gillies pointed it out. Not that I want the stupid thing. But I’m the laird now. Bruce’s closest male relation. Tomorrow I’ll have to contact the family solicitor in Edinburgh and I’ll need to make a plan. Unless you want to be lady of the manor, Mirabelle.’

  Mirabelle shook her head. ‘Not in a million years,’ she said. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Sell it to pay the death duties, I expect,’ McGregor said. ‘It seems a waste – two hundred years of Robertson history. Not that it will sell easily – what with the murders. Who’d want such a big old house these days?’

  Mirabelle imagined for a moment that Eleanor was laughing at her from somewhere far away. She pulled a sugar lump out of her pocket and fed the horse.

  ‘I learned to ride here,’ McGregor continued. ‘Bruce and I learned together. There was a full stable in those days at the back, where Eleanor had her office.’

  ‘What was your horse called?’

  ‘It was more of a pony. Cabbages.’

  ‘You didn’t take it seriously, then?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘You are looking, Superintendent McGregor, at the Hyde Park Stables junior champion of 1928.’

  ‘I might have known. And what was your pony called?’

  ‘Bosco. He was magnificent and extremely badly behaved. I loved him.’

  ‘I will take that as a lesson,’ he said, and she could just make out his smile.

  McGregor took her hand. ‘This means I’ll have to stay on. We were supposed to be gone by the end of the week, but there are the funerals to organise and the estate to wind up. I’ll arrange for you to go back on your own. First class all the way.’

  Mirabelle put her hand on to his shoulder and levered herself on to the fence. She wrapped her legs around him. ‘I’m staying as long as you do,’ she said. ‘Even if all I can do is hold you. Or speak to an estate agent. Or help to choose a headstone. I’ll be here. Whatever you need.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ His voice wavered. ‘You want to?’

  ‘I’m your wife,’ she said. ‘And that’s that.’

  Epilogue:

  Two weeks later. Edinburgh.

  A beautiful woman must expect to be accountable

  He got to show her his home town after all. Once the funerals were over, they left Gillies in charge of the house and engaged an estate agent to deal with the sale. Somebody daubed the gateposts in red paint – ‘Commie bitch’, it said. McGregor had it cleaned and hired a couple of guards to patrol the grounds. The night before they left, it snowed, as if the world was putting down dust covers.

  In the end, it turned out there was more to Bruce’s legacy than McGregor first realised – a portfolio of stocks and shares, a flat on Heriot Row in Edinburgh where they were now staying, and a sizeable sum in cash that was kept in a safety-deposit box in the Royal Bank of Scotland on the Mound.

  Edinburgh was a darker version of Brighton – the familiar Georgian crescents and squares built in granite rather than stucco and a myriad of private gardens coming into bloom with the first of the daffodils, but only snatched glimpses now and then of the sea. In the morning, the haar slipped round the buildings like a sleek, white cat, obscuring the view. Mirabelle found she liked walking up to George Street to buy groceries at Willis’s – milk and bread and butter – and a newspaper at Thin’s. The headlines continued to be ominous, but then, she thought, headlines always were. ‘Berlin Ultimatum’ and ‘Another D-Day for Europe’ and ‘Crucial Talks Continue’. Every time she read one, she heard Eddie saying the words.

  Murdo Kenzie was writing now for the Scotsman, his work on what had become known as the ‘Red Highland murders’ winning him a job on the national paper. Mirabelle refused on principle to read his articles, no matter what they were about. On the way back down the hill she always hoped the mists would clear and she would catch sight of the Firth of Forth – a slash of vibrant blue. The days she did so, it seemed to nourish her. She missed the water, she realised. And she missed Vesta.

  Her arm still ached but it was healing. She was doing better than McGregor, who kept waking in the night. Their second night in town she woke to find him in the drawing room, the long window wide open, with him perched on the sill, his legs dangling outside. ‘I can’t seem to cool down,’ he said. The flat was freezing. Through the open window the thick tangle of the communal gardens stretched black, beyond the reach of the amber streetlights.

  They got dressed and walked for miles through the grand, silent streets of the West End and out on Queensferry Road, past Valente’s dress shop, the mannequins elegant shadows in the dark window. It took an hour to get to Davidson’s Mains where McGregor grew up. The air smelled of fermenting malted barley, carried on the breeze from the breweries to the south. They watched dawn from the crest of a hill scattered with tidy, pale bungalows, and held hands. ‘This one?’ she asked when he hovered outside a house with a newly painted red door, and he nodded. It seemed a million miles away from the Robertsons’ Highland home in all its isolation. A million miles from the bodies.

  Daily, Mirabelle rang Vesta from a telephone box at the top of Dundas Street, and bit by bit explained what had happened. It was, she realised, a kind of recovery. Vesta took notes. Mirabelle could hear her pencil on the paper, could picture the office with its old kettle and chipped cups. The metal filing cabinets and frosted glass door. The gemlike glimpse of the sea that she could spy if she stood at the frame of the window. ‘I picked up a lead,’ Vesta announced, sounding chirpy, the third week Mirabelle was away.

  ‘A lead?’ Mirabelle was momentarily confused. This wasn’t a case to her. Not any more.

  ‘Your physicist. I rang the university.’

  ‘In St Andrews?’ Mirabelle’s heart raced – anybody asking after Peter Dunn would be flagged. Eddie was good at his job – he’d had time to set everything up now.

  ‘Not St Andrews. In Edinburgh. Dunn sat his primary degree in Edinburgh.’ Mirabelle relaxed a little. ‘I said I was his aunt and that he was about to get married. I was preparing a speech for my husband.’ She laughed. ‘Student japes – that kind of thing. I said I recalled something unusual had happened but couldn’t remember the details and could they possibly help.’

  Mirabelle fought her confusion momentarily. This is how it felt for other people when she breezed in and started asking questions when somebody they cared about died.

  Vesta continued. ‘Dunn was in an affray in third year. It was fairly serious – two students broke limbs. He was suspended. Well, they all were. He was relatively easy to find because of that. The lady kindly gave me his address – he lived at 34 William Street. I’m only passing on the details,’ she said. ‘But it might be worth having a look. It seems he was forgiven, by the way – he was quite brilliant, apparently, and people tend to forgive their geniuses. I thought you’d like to know.’

  That afternoon, Mirabelle closed the front door on the drab hallway on Heriot Row while McGregor was at the solicitors. She walked westwards, cut up to Queensferry Street and beyond, on to the two blocks of squat Georgian granite tenements that made up William Street. The row accommodated a public house, a leather workshop and some offices. Sure enough, the bell plate announced Mr Dunn on the first floor. She rang but there was no reply, so she slipped her lockpicks from her handbag and broke into the stair. If the main hallway at Heriot Row was dull with its dusty Wedgwood green paint, the hall at William Street felt like a cave. A curving stone staircase led up to Dunn’s door, of which Mirabelle also made short work, her heart pounding. Inside, the flat was empty – not a stick of furniture, not a scrap of clothing, only a pile of mail – two bills and a circular. Outside, the sun peeped from behind February clouds and brightened the cobwebby corners. He’d gone.

  Downstairs, she loitered, watching the windows before turning back towards town. On the corner of the lane that led to the mews of the grander
houses on Melville Street, she noticed a pawn shop – three brass balls mounted on the stone wall. Idly she wandered across the cobbles towards the window and there it was. Just sitting there on display behind the glass. Eleanor’s burgundy leather briefcase. Quite distinctive. She looked around but the backstreets were deserted at this time of day. Only two blocks from Princes Street, you could almost hear the trams as they trundled along the main road. The closest place to his flat, she thought as she made the decision to go inside.

  A bell sounded as she opened the door and a woman came out from the back, dressed in an ox-blood knitted skirt and sweater that almost matched. Her hair was swept up in a chignon – unfeasibly glamorous for the surroundings. Round her neck she wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on a chain. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’d like to see the bag in the window. Is it for sale?’

  ‘It is. It’s monogrammed, I’m afraid. ER. The same as the queen.’

  She fetched the bag. Mirabelle opened it and peered inside. It was empty. ‘I’d like to buy it,’ she said. The woman seemed pleased. It must, Mirabelle thought, be tricky to sell something initialled. ‘Who did it belong to?’ she asked casually.

  The woman shrugged. ‘An old customer. A nice chap.’

  ‘Were his initials ER?’

  ‘Well, no. He had it from his aunt, I think.’

  ‘He lived nearby, I expect?’

  ‘Just along the road,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Having a clear-out?’

  ‘Going away,’ the lady said. ‘Emigrating, I think he said.’

  ‘Somewhere nice? It’s a terrible time of year for the weather in Scotland.’

  ‘America.’

  ‘Such a big place. I wonder where he ended up?’

  The woman shrugged again, but warmed to the conversation. ‘Are you ER, miss?’ she asked.

  ‘My cousin is,’ Mirabelle replied, and a picture of Eleanor standing by the loch came to her. ‘But if the chap was emigrating, he might have cleared out more of his things. Did the bag come with anything else?’