Death Will Find Me (A Tessa Kilpatrick Mystery, Book 1)

by Vanessa Robertson

  ‘Hmm. So I see.’

  ‘And look at this.’ Tessa bent over and pointed. ‘The shot came from low down and the bullet exited higher up.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Tessa indicated the angle of the bullet’s trajectory on her own head. ‘I would think that means the killer must be short. A taller man wouldn’t have been shooting upwards like that.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Rasmussen wasn’t convinced, Tessa could tell. Or was it just that he didn’t want to concede that she was actually being helpful and not just interfering?

  ‘And I couldn’t swear to it, but the wound looks similar to the one that James sustained. A Webley or a Browning would make more of a mess on the way in. Less precise you see.’ Tessa noticed that she was standing straight, delivering the information almost as she would to a senior officer. The habit of distancing oneself from horror by means of professional objectivity was ingrained.

  ‘So perhaps a Luger pistol again? That’s a coincidence in a city where we only have a handful of murders each year. And hardly any involve firearms, most are down to drinking and fighting.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as though anything else has been disturbed. Other than…’ Tessa waved a hand in the direction of the very definitely disturbed Mr McKenzie.

  She stepped out into the hallway, her mind racing as she tried to think what James might have had in common with the dead man. Nothing obvious, save what the doctor had said about their regiment. Rasmussen followed her and they looked at each other.

  ‘We need to know what linked them. The way he was shot so accurately, the flat left immaculate. It’s almost like an execution.’ The inspector frowned.

  ‘Yes. I can see that. Shall I go through his papers? See if I can spot something?’

  Rasmussen paused and Tessa knew that he was weighing up the likelihood of her finding something useful against the fact that she was still the nearest he had to a suspect, and that they hadn’t even discussed her alibi for this death. Tessa could see his point, letting her fossick around in McKenzie’s papers was a risk, but she wasn’t about to leave now.

  ‘I’ll start with the bureau, shall I?’ And she whisked off to the sitting room, not meeting the detective’s eye, not wanting to see his suspicion.

  ‘Very well.’ After a moment’s hesitation, Rasmussen turned away, watching the police photographer set up to take their gory snapshots and Tessa, seizing the chance before Rasmussen thought better of it and sent her away, went in search of the desk.

  It was a handsome one, polished oak and with a mechanism that rolled smoothly up to reveal a bank of pigeonholes and drawers. Tessa pulled up a chair and started to sort through the papers lodged there, beginning with the top right slot and working across. Initially, she found only paid bills; Mr McKenzie lived fairly simply, it seemed, although his bank records showed a healthy income. There were accounts from the grocer, the butcher, the fishmonger and a decidedly modest one from the wine merchant. All had been paid promptly. She found a small notebook where Callum McKenzie jotted down all his expenditure and she noted that his frugality also extended to what he paid his daily woman: a mistake given the current difficulty in finding and keeping staff. But stinginess was not a motive for murder. There was a regular donation to a charity that helped ex-servicemen; a generous payment at that. It seemed that he’d come home with an admirable desire to help his former comrades.

  In a nod to sentiment, a small drawer revealed a pile of letters, a couple of dozen maybe, tied in a bundle with a mauve ribbon. She undid the bow and looked at the addresses. They were familiar, the same as she’d written on many envelopes herself when James had been at the Front. The two men had served in the same campaigns, not just in the same regiment and both were majors so were quite probably known to each other. Tessa cast her mind back but couldn’t remember James ever mentioning a comrade living so close by. She moved a couple of the letters and a visiting card fell out onto the desk. It was James’s, with the Heriot Row address on it.

  She called to Inspector Rasmussen as she continued to search the bureau.

  ‘So?’ He sounded impatient. ‘Did they know each other?’

  ‘Yes. Although, as far as I recall, James had never mentioned McKenzie since he came home. Looking at these addresses and postmarks they served together for at least a couple of years. Even if they weren’t close I’d have expected at least to have heard of him, especially as they must have met up at some point. Look, McKenzie had even got one of James’s cards. He only had these printed with this address on a few months ago.’

  ‘Maybe your husband didn’t think it was important to mention meeting McKenzie to you. With respect, there was a lot he didn’t tell you about his life.’

  ‘Thank you for reminding me of that, Inspector.’ Tessa narrowed her eyes at him. ‘It may be though that there’s a reason why they didn’t keep in touch.’

  ‘Quite. It might be the reason both of them are dead’.

  ‘We need to look at their military records.’ Tessa was decisive now. ‘I have James’s so if Bill gets hold of McKenzie’s too then we might be able to see where they intersect.’

  ‘I can ask for them to be sent up.’ Rasmussen spoke firmly, reminding Tessa that this was his investigation and that she shouldn’t even be there in the dead man’s flat.

  ‘That will take too long, and they might not be able to send everything. I’ll telephone Bill and tell him what we need and perhaps he’ll be able to bring it with him and come up from London tomorrow.’

  ‘He won’t be allowed to just take those records with him. I’ll send a telegram and—’

  ‘That will take forever. All that bureaucratic shilly-shallying while people decide what you’re allowed to see and what you can’t. Bill will be able to gain access to far more than your proper channels will yield. And besides, his boss used to be my boss too and he’ll want to help me. I mean, us. You.’

  Rasmussen shrugged slightly and Tessa felt a little sorry for him. He seemed an excellent detective, painstaking and precise, but not used to the interference of women, especially such opinionated ones. But she wasn’t about to waste time while the great bureaucratic machine of the War Office decided what information could and could not be released. Going straight to the general would be far more effective. Telling him that she would telephone Bill the moment she got home and that she would be in touch, Tessa left the rather dazed-looking Inspector Rasmussen and set off on foot.

  It took less than half an hour to walk home to Heriot Row, Tessa’s stride fast, keeping pace with her racing mind, trying to recall if James had ever mentioned McKenzie. What could the link between them be? What had they done? What secret could they have shared that would cause another to kill them both? And were there others with knowledge that the killer would rather keep quiet, more people living with a threat they knew nothing of hanging over them? The sooner she could begin sifting through those records of James’s and McKenzie’s wartime activities the better.

  As she walked, it struck Tessa that Rasmussen had made relatively little effort to dissuade her from accompanying him to McKenzie’s flat. He had made no comment about the unsuitability of her inspecting McKenzie’s corpse, nor questioned her opinions about what had happened. The day before, she’d got the impression that he was still harbouring some doubts about her and she wondered what had happened in the interim to reassure him. She wished that she knew what he thought, one way or the other. The uncertainty of never knowing whether he thought she was innocent or a murderer was wearing.

  Tessa felt sorry for McKenzie, obviously, but his death and the fact that there was nothing to tie her to it, hopefully, exonerated her as a suspect which would mean that the police might now be concentrating on finding the real murderer. And then, only then, could she think about the future. That life, vague and formless as it was at present, beckoned, glinting with opportunities and choices and she couldn’t wait to reach out and grasp it.

  Chapter Fifteen


  The locomotive which pulled the train to Edinburgh was gleaming and polished, hitched to its rattling carriages and already working up a head of steam when Bill Henderson arrived at King’s Cross. The Flying Scotsman service was the pride of the railways. Its engines were the fastest, its time-keeping the most precise and its crew the keenest. Bill’s first trip to Edinburgh had been some ten years earlier and the intervening decade had seen changes. Certainly the first-class compartment in which he settled himself was more comfortable than the bone-shaking affair that he remembered. He was the first person there and he was pleased to be able to secure a window seat.

  Arranging to take leave from his job at the War Office had been surprisingly simple after he’d told his superiors what had happened to James. If he was strictly truthful, he had rather played up the closeness of his friendship with the dead man, the better to justify his trip.

  ‘James Kilpatrick? Married to Tessa Kilpatrick? She was in the FANY?’ The general had snapped to attention at the mention of the Kilpatrick name.

  ‘Yes. She saved my life actually. Fished me out of a bombed-out farmhouse, just as I was starting to think I was a goner. She’s asked me to go up to Edinburgh. Needs my help apparently. Something to do with James’s death.’

  ‘Then you must go. Tessa’s a cracking girl. I met her once in Ypres. There had been some shelling and she and some of her comrades had brought some terribly injured men back. Did her best to patch one chap up while they were still firing but he was too far gone. By the time she got back to the field hospital she was covered in blood and filth, but she didn’t start weeping, just got on with it. Did some sterling work out in Gallipoli too, although that’s rather more hush-hush. Came home injured, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. At the end of 1917. She nearly died. Received the Croix de Guerre although I don’t know exactly what for.’

  ‘Well,’ the general smiled, ‘you don’t need to know, but take it from me, she’s a brave girl. I think at the beginning of the war we all underestimated the women who wanted to do their bit.’ The general made a note on a sheet of paper. ‘Take some time off. You’re owed leave anyway but take as long as you need. If Tessa’s asked for your help it must be important. She probably won’t remember an old chap like me, but do pass on my condolences and my best wishes.’ He looked down at the papers on his desk, and Bill could have sworn the old boy blushed just a little. A crush, perhaps?

  Bill strolled back along the corridor to his own office feeling rather bemused. Gallipoli, eh? That was news to him. What could Tessa have been up to there? Maybe she’d tell him one day. Or probably not. She’d just smile that unreadable half-smile and change the subject.

  He sent a telegram to Tessa informing her when to expect him at Waverley Station. He hadn’t telephoned, at least partly, because he didn’t want to hear that she had thought better of her request for his help, didn’t want to give her the opportunity to tell him not to bother travelling up, or that she didn’t need his help after all. Didn’t want to risk not seeing her again.

  Bill returned to Bloomsbury and spent the evening pottering around his flat. It didn’t take long to get ready for his trip north, although packing civvies was more complicated than just throwing his uniform in a kit bag. Still only half-unpacked from his previous trip to Scotland, he didn’t know what to take this time, having no idea of the sartorial eventualities he might need to cover. So he packed evening clothes and tweeds, shirt studs and stout boots, crisp white evening shirts and Tattersall checks. He ended up with two cases, quite apart from the bulging attaché case of papers from the office and hoped that Tessa’s family wouldn’t think that he was moving in for good. He wondered what they would think of his reappearance. His previous visit immediately after James’s death could be explained, but this would raise eyebrows. Staying in the McGillivray family home would give a veneer of respectability to his visit but it would be a thin one.

  He cooked an omelette for supper; his mother had been amazed to learn that he could cook at all, even if he could only manage fairly simple concoctions. She had sent him a recipe book and he rather fancied the idea of trying some more complicated dishes. Mostly though, if he wanted something more sophisticated, he tended to dine at his club. While he ate, Bill scribbled a note for Mrs Wilson, his daily woman, and said that he would let her know when he would be back. He suggested that she take advantage of his absence to do some spring cleaning although he had rather more optimism than expectation about this. He noticed the dust on the light fitting and knew that he and Mrs Wilson would have to have a discussion when he returned.

  Bill’s was a pleasant enough mansion flat and he liked living in Bloomsbury, close enough to the centre of London that he could walk to most places. The sitting room and bedroom looked out over a garden square filled with cherry trees that would soon burst into frothing, exuberant blossom. The kitchen and bathroom faced a rather bleaker service area. It was a quiet building and after the war it had been a refuge: solitude away from the constant noise and chatter of the Front. A wall of the sitting room was covered in bookshelves, double-stacked in places, and reading by his fire in the evening with a glass of whisky was one of Bill’s great pleasures. His sister teased him, saying that he was becoming too set in his bachelor ways but for now it suited him.

  The compartment was starting to fill up. A woman in her mid-forties boarded, along with a young woman Bill took to be her daughter, and they kept up a constant chatter about clothes and dressmakers and some show they’d seen the previous evening. An older man, with a silver-topped ebony stick and an upright bearing, took the other window seat and two more women, dressed for walking and carrying knapsacks that revealed themselves to be full of maps and string-tied packets of sandwiches, took the seats just along from him.

  The whistling and running of porters became more frenetic and there was a judder as the train stirred itself into action. Bill glanced at his watch. Exactly on time. The train slipped past sidings and goods’ yards; Bill opened his novel and immersed himself in the adventures of the improbable Richard Hannay, just as they reached the beginnings of the ever-growing suburbs which strung out along the tracks.

  Despite Buchan’s best efforts, Bill continually found his mind wandering back to the purpose of his visit. He still couldn’t quite believe that James had been murdered. He’d never thought that things like that actually happened at country house parties, life not actually being a detective novel. And although he thought James an idiot in many ways, not least for the casual way he treated his wife, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to do away with him. Even if a jealous husband discovered that his wife had been up to no good with James, Bill couldn’t imagine things becoming much more physical than a couple of punches being thrown. And then there was Tessa. Bill wondered again at her motivation in asking for his help. Surely it wasn’t simply because she valued his investigative skills.

  Bill had tried to put aside any romantic feelings towards Tessa. By the time they first met, when he’d almost given up any hope of rescue, she’d already married the dashing, titled Guards officer who had swept her off her feet early in the war, back when everything felt urgent and exciting. For the next two years or so, Bill saw Tessa infrequently, sometimes their paths crossing by chance in a railway station or ambulance depot, and once in a London hotel when she was returning to France and he was going home on leave. By then the shine had faded from her marriage and she had realised that marriage to James was unlikely to be smooth sailing. Bill preferred not to think about that night, when their relationship might have changed for ever but would almost certainly have ended badly. He’d almost given up hoping for anything more from their friendship but he’d never wished James harm. Mind you, if he was honest, he would have to admit that he’d entertained the occasional long-range notion of declaring himself, should James not see the armistice.

  When they all came home and settled back into their old lives, Tessa’s letters became less frequent. He knew, from the times
he saw her at social events, that her marriage wasn’t terribly happy, although she’d always been fairly circumspect, preferring to talk about books she’d read, how her health was improving, and the changes that she saw in the country now that the war had ended at last. Tessa was determinedly positive despite the sadness he saw in her eyes.

  He’d seen flashes of the old Tessa in the months before James died, presumably as she realised that he was taking her for a fool, and that last night, when she’d discovered James with Caroline, he’d been silently cheering her on as she told James their marriage was over, delighted to see her rediscover her own agency. The next day she’d sounded and behaved much more like war-time Tessa: determined and capable. When they discovered James’s body and he saw the way she dealt with the aftermath, he knew that the old Tessa was back.

  Several hours later, Hannay had saved the day, the Times crossword was complete and Bill had lunched on a rather glutinous haddock mornay in the restaurant car. As the train passed the guano-covered bulk of the Bass Rock that stood at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, Bill realised they’d be in Edinburgh in half an hour, and he braced himself for seeing Tessa and the wave of emotion that would trigger. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but now was not the time. For the moment, all he could do was to assist her however he could; be the safe harbour she needed and put any romantic feelings to one side as best he could.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Waverley Station was a seething mass of porters and passengers, obscured every so often by a billow of steam from one of the locomotives that were poised at the platforms, whistling and snorting like racehorses ready for the off. Luggage cluttered the platforms and the air was full of shouts and whistles. Among the throng and the chaos, Tessa stood stock still watching platform seven where the London to Edinburgh trains arrived.