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

by Vanessa Robertson

  ‘Clear?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Tessa stepped out from the wall and walked towards him, shaking her head in frustration. The barn stood on its own and unless their prey was still inside, he must have slipped away unseen across the fields. She crossed to the fence and looked around but no-one was close. The only signs of life were a shepherd and his collie in the far distance and a tweedy woman with her dog about to disappear around a bend in the lane. Neither seemed agitated or at all curious and Tessa doubted they’d even heard the shot. She turned back towards the barn, less concerned now that she could be in a sniper’s sights and more concerned about what awaited them inside.

  Ignoring the heavy double-height doors intended to allow a hay wagon to drive in, Rasmussen had slipped in through a smaller door at the side. Bill and Tessa approached. The lack of any noise was concerning. Had the killer escaped, or caught the inspector by surprise and was now waiting their chance to pick off Tessa and Bill? If the latter, Tessa was relieved that she hadn’t heard a gunshot. That might give them a chance. Still holding the coiled belt, ready to spring, she stood back a little while Bill pushed open the door.

  Before them, in the vaulted space in the centre of the barn, where beams of sunlight shone in through gaps in the slates to illuminate the scene, Inspector Rasmussen stood over the body of a young man, a spreading red stain on his chest giving all the explanation necessary.

  ‘It’s all right. There’s no-one else here. Whoever did this managed to get away.’

  ‘They must have been quick. And lucky we didn’t see them.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘He’s definitely…? There’s nothing we can do?’ Tessa took a step towards the crumpled body. Bill put out an arm, catching her around the waist.

  ‘Afraid so. No-one can help him now.’ Rasmussen looked around at them for the first time. He was ashen. But she knew that there was no point in wishing they’d foreseen this, that they’d been just a minute or two earlier. She’d done enough of it in her time and all it led to was guilt and recriminations. They were not responsible for the actions of the killer. ‘Henderson, take Lady Tessa back to the house and ask them to alert the Melrose police. I need a couple of constables here as soon as possible.’

  ‘What shall I do? I’m quite capable you know.’ Tessa felt herself start to shake, the shock of another death taking hold, and she knew she needed to take some sort of action to focus.

  ‘Oh, I’m well aware of that.’ Rasmussen came back to them, his face grim. ‘People talk to you in a way they don’t talk to me. They’re not as wary of you. So talk to all of them – the people McNiven worked with, to Mrs Gray, to anyone you see. Ask if they saw anyone unfamiliar hanging around or if the boy said anything that implied he knew someone was after him.’

  ‘Do you think someone knew we were coming to see him? It seems a coincidence.’

  ‘Who knows at this stage? Hardly anyone knew our trip was planned so I doubt they have inside information. It seems that these men are being picked off methodically for whatever reason. It might be that McNiven was next on the list and he was just unlucky that we arrived a little too late.’ Rasmussen shrugged.

  ‘You think the killer’s got away?’ Tessa looked around, still searching for a possible hiding place.

  ‘If they’ve got any sense they’re well away by now. They’ll be trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. When you’ve telephoned for the constables, go to the station, Henderson, and see if the stationmaster has noticed anything. You never know.’

  Tessa and Bill turned and started back up the track towards the stable yard, walking briskly this time rather than strolling along as before. She felt cold despite the sunshine. Three men were now dead and they had no idea of a motive. Who would be next? How many more? She shivered and quickened her pace, keen to find out whatever she could.

  Back at Boswall House, the news of McNiven’s death, although broken as gently as possible, inevitably caused a hue and cry. Bill managed to use the telephone to place a call to the police station and the sergeant, shocked as only a man who normally dealt with nothing more serious than a spot of sheep rustling could be, despatched men to the barn to assist Rasmussen. As instructed, Bill then went to the railway station, driven by one of the Gray sons. Mrs Gray, who had been finding country life quite dull without her forays into Edinburgh, became quite frantic at such excitement on her own doorstep, and Tessa, trying to think of some practical activity to keep the older woman busy and to keep her from dashing down to the barn to see what had happened, instructed her to man the telephone in case Bill rang with news.

  Meanwhile, Tessa returned to the stable yard to talk to the grooms, hoping that they had seen a stranger and could give a description. They couldn’t. Busy with the hunters, they had taken little notice of what was going on outwith their yard. In fact, the only person to have left the yard, since they’d begun the daily routine of grooming and mucking out, had been the hapless McNiven when he’d gone to catch up the Clydesdales.

  Extending her informal questioning, conversational in manner and remarkably effective, to the gamekeepers and farmhands who gravitated to the stable yard as they heard news of the shooting, elicited no more information. Most of the people who had been seen around the estate were known by name. The few strangers who had been seen had not attracted any particular attention. Someone had spotted a woman in tweeds walking her dog; the same woman that Tessa thought she’d seen, and a motorist had been seen tinkering with his engine at the side of the lane. One of the lads had offered him a hand but the man had rudely told him to get lost. Less usefully, the boy could give no description of the man save that he had dark hair, an Edinburgh accent and the car was black. Not terribly helpful, but the nearest they had to a suspect.

  After a while Tessa gave up and trudged back down to the barn to tell Rasmussen that she had absolutely no useful information for him. As she walked, the weight of McNiven’s death fell upon her, a life snuffed out so soon and so pointlessly. It was another link in a tragic chain that had begun in a trench years ago, and despite the way that the world was trying to heal itself and look to the future, that chain remained unbroken. It needed to be snapped before anyone else was killed but what if they were too late to find Bartlett and Forrester? And what of McNiven’s mother, so thankful to have her boy home? The heaviness in Tessa’s chest swelled, tears of frustration threatening to fall.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Tessa had taken on the task of informing Mrs McNiven of her son’s death, but despite her attempts to break the news gently there was no way of softening the blow of his death. She had sat in the kitchen holding the woman’s hand and listening as she told of her son’s optimism as he went to serve his country in 1914, the letters home where he tried to sound cheerful and never mentioned the cold and the rats, and the fear that he felt.

  Like so many sisters, mothers and wives, Mrs McNiven had felt such relief when he returned safely. She told Tessa she had never considered that anything might happen to him now he was back home. Worse, when she asked what had happened, Tessa had no answers for her. All they knew at that point was that he’d been shot, at close range with a handgun. No-one had noticed any suspicious strangers, no-one had heard anything, no-one knew of any arguments that could have provoked such violence. All she could do was make tea and listen, and let Mrs McNiven weep on her shoulder while she offered useless platitudes about how the police would be making every effort; detectives from Edinburgh were on their way to investigate; they would know more once the pathologist had done his tests; and she was so very, very sorry.

  The engine’s roar made conversation impossible on the drive back to Edinburgh and for that Tessa was grateful. The thought at the forefront of her mind was that if the court martial was the reason behind these murders then the only other men involved in it were the third adjudicating officer, Forrester, and the officer who’d given evidence, John Bartlett. One of them was marked as missing, presumed dead, whi
ch covered so many eventualities, and the other as injured. It could well be that neither of them had survived the war.

  Rasmussen was deposited at Torphichen Police Station, and the three of them arranged to convene at Royal Circus the following morning to discuss their next steps. Finding out whether Bartlett or Forrester had survived was at the top of the list. If neither had, Tessa feared that they might be at a dead end.

  It felt strange to be going home to her new house rather than to Heriot Row, but she also felt tremendous relief that she would be alone with her thoughts for a while without the fussing of her mother.

  Bill and Tessa entered through the garden and the back hall, and she saw that the kitchen was tidy, all the deliveries that had been arriving over the last few days having been safely stowed away. At the foot of the stairs, Tessa picked up the letters on the hall table, flicking through to see if there was anything of interest. She turned to Bill, and saw the concern in his eyes.

  ‘It’s been a rather grim day. Do you think we should still go to the party this evening? You wouldn’t rather skip it?’

  ‘No.’ Tessa considered his question. ‘We should go. We can do nothing for the McNiven boy this evening. Tomorrow we’ll start again, but tonight we should enjoy ourselves if only because we can and so many don’t have that option. We’ll leave at seven – the Inveries have never liked their guests to arrive late.’

  Upstairs, Tessa looked around her new bedroom with its rather stark, white walls. She made a mental note to visit some galleries and find paintings that pleased her, and felt no guilt at her decision to send her grandmother’s ghastly and gloomy oils of stags at bay and the like to Sotheby’s.

  Going through to her dressing room, she opened one of the wardrobes and gazed at the dresses that hung there, slippery satin and lush velvets, bought out of a feeling of bravado during her marriage and left unworn as her confidence was crushed by it. She took out the red Fortuny dress she’d worn on the evening when she’d discovered James in the library with his mistress. Tessa had worn that dress, precisely, because it was unlike the dull dresses she had been wearing of late. Dull dresses that she hadn’t even brought to her new house. The red dress had been a signal, as much to herself as the rest of the world, that she was no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to the emptiness of her marriage – she was drawing her line in the sand. She had taken the dress to other house parties before that and returned with it unworn. Finally, she had worn it like armour, feeling fearless and strong, the woman she used to be.

  Now, she stroked the silk of the red dress and thought about the evening before her, which would require her to feel just as resolute in the face of Edinburgh society. There would be talk: whether because it was deemed too soon after James’s death to be going to parties; whether because people thought she had in fact murdered him and was going to get away with it because she was too clever to leave any clues; and whether she had done away with James in order to conduct an affair with Bill on whose arm she would – scandalously – be arriving. The dress might be a lucky charm in some ways, but revealing herself to be a literal scarlet woman in a red dress was too blatant, and so she replaced the gown and moved along the rail, looking for something that would be more discreet.

  What she chose was at least appropriate in colour for a widow to wear, if in no other way. It had been a gift from Aunt Ishbel, arriving out of the blue from France the previous autumn. Tessa lifted the dress from its box, watching the black silk uncoil itself. It was perfect and would make her feel confident rather than apologetic. There would be no backsliding to the tentativeness of a few weeks ago in this dress. Smiling, she laid it out on her bed along with the embroidered, diaphanous robe that she would wear over it, and went to draw her bath.

  After Florence had helped her dress, Tessa looked at herself in the glass. The dress, a sleeveless high-necked column of pleated silk, fell to her ankles, demure in its length if not in the way that the pleats clung to her body. A loose belt encircled her waist and the robe, a transparent Kimono-like garment embroidered in gold, softened the starkness and rendered the scars on her arm less visible. She wore evening gloves to hide the fact that she was no longer wearing a wedding ring, and added diamond earrings and a diamond necklace with a robin’s egg ruby droplet at its centre. Her hair was still short enough to upset her mother, although that length was becoming more fashionable in some circles. Its rich brunette tones looked well with the black dress but to avoid looking too washed out, she had added some of the face powder and lipstick that had also been sent by Ishbel. She knew that she wasn’t conventionally pretty but in a good light she felt that her cheekbones and high forehead gave her face some distinction, if an uncompromising one. Although not a vain woman, Tessa knew that she looked modern and stylish. Florence regarded her with pride, pleased at having had the opportunity to act as lady’s maid for a change.

  ‘What do you think? I clean up rather well, don’t I?’

  ‘You look lovely, Miss Tessa. Major Henderson is waiting in the hall, I believe.’

  ‘Really?’ Rather than putting on the heavily embroidered velvet evening coat that Florence was holding, Tessa left her room and started down the two flights of stairs, holding up her dress with one hand so that Bill caught a glimpse of high heels and silk-stockinged ankle as she descended.

  ‘Good evening, Major Henderson.’ Tessa paused on the last turn of the stairs and Bill put down the copy of Country Life he’d been flicking through. She was pleased to see his eyes widen as he looked her up and down.

  ‘You look…’ His voice died away. ‘You look stunning. Utterly beautiful.’

  ‘Don’t go overboard, darling, but thank you.’ Tessa turned, allowing the smiling Florence to slide her coat onto her shoulders. ‘Is there a cab waiting?’

  ‘There is. Are you ready?’

  ‘I’m ready to leave. Am I ready to spend an evening being the focus of gossip and speculation? Not nearly, but let’s go anyway.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Moray Place was one of the grandest parts of Edinburgh New Town. Four terraces surrounded an iron-railed garden in the centre where nurses pushed their charges in magnificent perambulators and elderly dowagers walked their terriers.

  The houses were some of the largest in town. Built to rigid specifications, many of the houses were a little different inside, but on the outside at least none were permitted to upstage the Earl of Moray’s Edinburgh residence, the focal point of the whole design.

  The Inverie house, less grand than some but still impressive, was on the east side, lights shining from every window and illuminating the guests as they stepped from their carriages and motor cars. The cabbie pulled up a few houses away, the horse alarmed by the clatter of an engine, and Bill handed Tessa down. She stood in the darkness looking at the bright lights; the laughter and conversation already audible.

  ‘I see the Inveries are making the most of their new electricity. I’m surprised Lord Inverie isn’t going around turning off lights. He’s a notorious skinflint.’

  ‘I hear music too. A band, do you think?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Surely not. I can’t imagine that he’d have musicians in the house. Degenerates, the lot of them in his eyes. I imagine it’s a gramophone, although that’s probably a rather modern contrivance in his opinion.’ There was a brittleness in her laugh that even Tessa could hear.

  ‘You’re nervous.’

  ‘Very. This is my first social event since James died. Some people will think it’s too soon for me to be out in public and others probably still think that I murdered him. Especially as we haven’t managed to pin it on anyone else yet… And I’m arriving with you, which rather emphasises that I’m not quite the grieving widow that I should be. People will think that you and I have a history.’

  ‘We do have a history. You saved my life.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. We should go in though.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tes
sa, who had faced so much real and terrifying danger with aplomb and steely determination, was surprised how intimidated she felt. ‘What the hell. Let’s go.’ She turned towards the house, adopted her best social smile and took Bill’s arm. The important thing, whether behind enemy lines or facing a tricky social situation, was never to let one’s nerves show.

  ‘The Dowager Viscountess Kilpatrick and Major Bill Henderson.’ After handing their coats to a footman, Tessa and Bill entered the hall where Lord and Lady Inverie were receiving their guests, and they were announced by Arbuthnot, the butler. Tessa winced inwardly and made a mental note to make sure that she was never referred to as a dowager again.

  As she stepped forward to greet her hosts, perfect smile still in place, Tessa was aware of a lull in conversation and of heads swivelling on the stairs and in the hall as people turned to look at the tragic widow, out socialising in public so soon, and at the man she’d arrived with. It was noted by most of the women there that Major Henderson was very handsome. The same women, and many of the men, also noted that with a dress like that and Major Henderson beside her, Tessa clearly was not crying herself to sleep every night.

  ‘It seems that we’re quite the centre of attention this evening.’ Tessa murmured as, standard greetings made and received, they moved up the stairs towards the drawing room, voices and music growing louder as they climbed.

  ‘So who are all these people?’ Bill caught the eye of a footman with a tray of champagne glasses and handed one to Tessa.

  ‘In the main, this is Edinburgh’s high society. Not so much the great and the good, but the rich and the titled at any rate. Those people over there are the eldest son of the Duke of Aboyne and his wife. And over there,’ she nodded almost imperceptibly at a ruddy-faced man of about thirty and a rather equine woman, ‘is the new Lord Crail and his wife. Poor man survived the war but has been nearly done for by death duties.’