by Blake Banner
MURDER MOST SCOTTISH
Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
EPILOGUE
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
LAST CHANCE
BOOK TWELVE PREVIEW
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ONE
We’d touched down in Edinburgh at 7:10 AM local time, collected a large, characterless vehicle from the Car Hire Centre and, resisting the temptation to explore Edinburgh, we took the M90, crossed the Firth of Forth over the spectacular Forth Road Bridge as the sun climbed over the North Sea, and headed north, toward the wild and remote north coast of Scotland, in the Scottish Highlands.
I drove first and Dehan sat back and watched the strange, conflicted landscape that was at once gray, drab and post-industrial, and wild and green and timelessly Celtic. Pretty soon we were outside town and driving through picture-book rolling fields and hedgerows under very blue skies with lazy, whipped cream clouds.
Dehan was staring this way and that with slightly narrowed eyes, her aviators perched on top of her head. She said, suddenly, “Somebody shrunk New England.”
I smiled. “Your first glimpse of the world outside the U.S.A., Dehan.”
She frowned at me. “You know, if you keep calling me by my surname, you’ll have to call me Stone. We’ll have to call each other Stone. That could become confusing.”
I was quiet for a bit, smiling to myself. “I won’t deny,” I said, “that I get a foolish kick out of calling you Mrs. Stone.”
She raised an eyebrow and smiled too.
I continued, “I know people don’t get it, but I figure that’s their problem, not mine. Either way, and even if it seems contradictory, you will always be Dehan.” I shrugged. “That’s just who you are to me.”
“It is contradictory, but that’s cool. How long is this drive?”
“Six or seven hours, through some of the most remote, beautiful landscapes this side of the Atlantic. That gets us to John O’Groats…”
“John O’Groats. That is some name.”
“The most northerly part of Great Britain. Mid summer they get only a couple of hours of darkness at night. From there we drive west for four miles to the ferry at Gills, and from there…”
“The ferry to the island of Gordon’s Swona, another eight miles by sea. And from there, another mile by road to the castle. So total…?”
“Maybe nine hours. We should arrive at tea time.”
“Tea time?”
I grinned. “It’s a great institution: tuna and cucumber sandwiches cut into bite-sized triangles, biscuits, rich fruit cake…”
“And tea.”
“And tea. It tastes different when they make it here.”
She was quiet for a moment, watching me. “You ever going to tell me what your connection is with this place?”
“Yup.”
She waited, watching me. Finally she said, “Stone…?”
“While we’re here, I promise.” Before she could answer, I changed the subject. “But you know what? I never heard of Castle Gordon. How did you find it?”
She shrugged and spread her hands. “I’m a detective. I detect. It’s what I do.”
“What did you google?”
“Whiskey, remote, castle.”
“So naturally you wound up with a list of remote Scottish castles converted to hotels.”
“This one was the remotest of the lot. It’s only been a hotel for the last couple of years, though the Gordon family bought it back in 1980.”
I glanced at her, curious. “Bought it back?”
She shifted in her seat, with her back half against the door. “Yeah, it was bought by an American with Scottish roots. His family were from the area and his ancestors owned, and then lost, the castle. His family made a lot of money during the Civil War and the drive west, and he made even more during the ’60s and ’70s, then moved here in the early ’80s and bought the castle, which he claimed had belonged to his great, great whatevers. The place is now run by his grandson, Charles Gordon Jr.”
I was quiet for a bit, enjoying the landscape and the fresh summer breeze gently battering me through the window. After a moment I said, half to myself, “Great, great whatevers. I remember a restaurant in Colorado that specialized in those. They called them Colorado oysters.”
“Funny guy. So how long were you here, Stone? And where and when?”
“I was in London, for eighteen months, about fifteen years ago. It was supposed to be six months as part of an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard. I was in my early thirties. They kept telling me to go back to New York, and I kept finding ways to extend my stay for another six months.”
“Huh.” She was pensive for a moment, suspecting she already knew the answer to the question she hadn’t asked yet. “What made you want to stay?”
I shrugged. “I was enjoying myself. I made some good friends…”
She interrupted, “And you were in love.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I was in love. But that was fifteen years ago.”
“What happened?”
I made a face that told her to stop asking questions and said, “What happened? Fifteen years went by, I met a nosy, wise-ass cop with a bad attitude and married her. That’s what happened.”
She looked away. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
“I’ll tell you.” I shrugged again. “There’s not a lot to tell. There’s no great secret, Dehan. I just don’t want to talk about it on the first day of our honeymoon.”
“I get it.”
We drove on for another three or four hours, had lunch in a country pub and finally reached Gills, at the northernmost part of Scotland, at three o’clock that afternoon. Gills turned out to be not so much a town as a loose collection of houses gathered around an intersection. There was no post office, town hall or local store or pub that I could see. So we wound down a narrow road between rugged, gree
n hills toward a gunmetal gray sea, highlighted with liquid silver, that stretched out cold and deadly toward the Arctic.
We stopped on a concrete quay outside a quaint cottage with chimneys at either end that claimed to be the Ferry Terminal and climbed out to stand gazing at the misty horizon. I pointed out to sea, where large clouds were building in the far north. “Only four hundred miles, Dehan, and you’re in Iceland.”
She gave a small, involuntary shudder. “That’s like from New York to Cleveland.” She glanced up at me. “Isn’t Iceland in the Arctic Circle?”
“Just outside, but you get the midnight sun there in June, and twenty-four hours of darkness in December. Here, in this part of Scotland, it gets dark about midnight, and starts getting light at about two thirty.”
“I guess we went north, huh, Stone?”
I smiled. “We’ve still a way to go.”
We crossed the bare concrete and pushed through the door into the ferry terminal. There was a man in a heavy white sweater behind a melamine counter. He looked like he’d once tried to shave but busted the razor and gave up on a hopeless task. There was the blackened, withered remains of a roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth. He watched us come in with expressionless, pale eyes and waited for us to talk.
I essayed a smile against my better judgment and said, “We’d like to cross to Gordon’s Swona…”
He interrupted me and said something that sounded like, “Tharteh eet poonds fer th’car, suxteen fer the missus an’ suxteen fer yersen.”
I narrowed my eyes, pretty sure I’d understood, nodded and said, “That’s fine.”
He rang it up on his register, with small flakes of ash falling from his dead cigarette. Then he looked at me slow and steady and there was evil humor in his eyes. “Suventeh poonds.”
I glanced at the register to make sure I’d understood and handed over two fifties. He took his time getting my change and handing it back. Then he leered. “Uz et the Gordon Castle yir aweetah?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Yir ferry’ll moor within the hoor, gang t’thend of yon peer an’ll nay be long.”
I nodded again. “Thanks.”
As I turned and opened the door, he added, “Ut was plowetrery thus mornin’ and a haar in from th’east thus afternoon. Tull be mochie afore the gloaming, fer-sure, an’ nay doot there’ll be a fair gailleann by t’morrah.”
Dehan blinked furiously at him. I nodded one last time, thanked him and returned to the car.
“What was that, Stone? Was that English?”
“With a liberal dose of Scots Gaelic. I think he said there’d be a storm tomorrow.”
“You understood him?”
I didn’t answer, instead I fired up the car. Fortunately the signs were in plain English and I drove to the loading point where I figured the ferry would dock, then stopped and thought for a moment.
I turned to her. “Tull be mochie afore the gloaming. It will be muggy before dusk. An’ nay doot there’ll be a fair gailleann by t’morrah. And no doubt there will be a fair gale, or storm, by tomorrow. Weather here is pretty unpredictable.”
She stared at me for a long moment without expression. Then she said with a hint of disapproval, “You’re a remarkable man, Stone.”
The sea was flat and almost milky in consistency. The crossing took an hour and was unremarkable, except that the views from the deck, of the Isle of Stroma to the west and Okney to the north, were extraordinary. There was a desolation about the beauty of the place that was not quite like anywhere else. At one point Dehan shook her head, squinting into the sea breeze, fingering her long hair from her face. “I never imagined England like this…”
I laughed. “Don’t let them hear you say that. This is not England. Scotland is a country in its own right. In some ways it is closer to Scandinavia than it is to England.”
She frowned and shook her head. “It’s so… remote!”
“Yup. And you have brought us to the most remote part, of the remote part.”
She took hold of my arm and squeezed it. “Good. No inspector, no Mo, no distractions, no cold cases for two long, wonderful weeks.”
We stood like that for a while, enjoying the strange, peaceful desolation. It had turned warm and close, and Dehan ran her fingers over her brow. Then she gave a small laugh. “He was right!”
I smiled at her. “Hm?”
“The guy at the terminal. He said it would turn muggy in the afternoon…”
I did a fair imitation of his brogue. “Tull be mochie afore the gloaming, an’ nay doot there’ll be a fair gailleann by t’morrah.”
She looked up into my face. “So we’ll have a storm tomorrow? That means breakfast in bed and hot toddies in front of the fire.”
“I’m not complaining. Bring it on.”
We sighted Gordon’s Swona twenty minutes later. It was a wedge-shaped island that rose dramatically out of the sea mist. The narrow end consisted of high cliffs and a relatively flat tableland towering some hundred and fifty or two hundred feet above the waves, and then sloping gently for about a mile and a half, or a little more, toward broad, rolling grasslands and white, sandy beaches. On the tableland, at the top of the cliffs, a spectacular castle stood silhouetted in the coppery, afternoon light.
As we stood staring, the note of the engines changed and we began to slow, churning the water and nosing toward the beach where we could now see a small port with a long pier that had been built out of wood and concrete. Eventually, after some careful maneuvering, we eased to a halt, the apron ramp was dropped with a huge, metallic clang that threatened to take off the end of the dock, and, amid a lot of shifting, drifting and grinding, we rolled out of the cargo hold and onto the concrete pier.
And then we stood by the car and watched as the ramp was raised, clattering and clanking, to its closed position. The ferry reversed away from the dock, turned, lumbering, and slowly took off north, toward the distant shadow of Orkney on the horizon.
Behind us, in the south, the mainland was no longer visible, but before us the road wound through gentle hills of green pasture, meadow flowers and heather, where sheep and goats ruminated and watched us with saurian eyes, to a broad forest, perhaps a mile away, that climbed the slopes for perhaps another half mile toward the hazy silhouette of castle on the hill. All around us, the air was rich with the smells of aromatic grasses and herbs—maybe lavender, rosemary and thyme. It seemed very still. The only sounds were the lapping of the small waves on the shore and the lazy buzz of bees among the grass and flowers.
Ahead, about halfway up the slope, half a mile from the castle, we could just make out a small village among the woods by the road. It seemed to consist mainly of stone cottages and tall chimney stacks poking up among the trees.
I glanced at my watch. It was six o’clock, and though the light was definitely coppery and there was a feel of evening to the sultry air, the sun was still a good four hours or more from setting.
I smiled at Dehan. “Let’s go.”
It was a fifteen minute drive, because though the speed limit on the island was 25 MPH, the road wended and wove in big loops, and in many parts was rough and pitted. When we passed through the village, we saw that it consisted of a village green, a handful of houses, a two-story post office and a picturesque pub called the Gordon Arms; and a moment later we were in the woods again, winding our way up the steep hill through tall pine trees that cast an eerie green light, until at last we broke out of the forest and onto the broad, flat, grassy tableland. There the road went straight, and ahead of us, tall and ancient, stood the castle, brooding, lowering over the dark expanse of the North Atlantic toward the Arctic Circle, and the heavy, dark clouds that were gathering there.
As we drew closer, we could see that Castle Gordon was encircled by an ancient, stone wall, perhaps eight feet high. But in many places that wall had crumbled over time, and where it had collapsed, leaving great gaps in the masonry, it had been replaced with hedges and trees, giving the vagu
e impression that nature was slowly winning in a war of attrition against Man.
The road entered the grounds of the castle through a large, iron gate that stood open, and from the gate onward the road became the driveway. On either side of that drive there were well-tended lawns, formal gardens, and to the left a large topiary maze.
A butler in traditional dress and a page were waiting for us at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the main door. When we pulled up, the butler opened the door for Dehan and welcomed us to Gordon’s Soma while the page took my keys to open the trunk, unload our luggage and park the car. While he did that, I stood back and had a good look at the building. You could have described it as a horrific mixture of styles thrown together with a total disregard for esthetics or proportion, a monstrous affront to architecture and a grotesque stone pile. You could very well have described it like that, if you’d had no soul.
On the right hand side, at the front, there was a massive, square, four story solid stone tower with castellations at the top and narrow, gabled windows on the second, third and fourth floors. On the ground floor, a leaded bay window overlooked yellow and red rosebushes, while dense ivy swarmed up the wall as far as the second floor.
The central body of the building was granite, with a gabled portico supported on ancient stone pillars, and a gabled slate roof with tall chimneypots. To my uneducated eye, it looked as though the tower was Victorian mock Elizabethan, where the main body was maybe two hundred years older, maybe 17th century. On the far left there was another wing in paler stone, running at right angles to the house. It was only three stories high, with small, narrow windows and battlements up top. That, I guessed, was what was left of the original castle. The overall effect was that of a messy jumble of rocks and styles, but somehow it came together and became a beautiful, ancient work of art.
“You coming?”
Dehan was standing on the granite steps smiling at me. The butler was at the door, holding it open, as though there was nothing else in the world he needed to be doing right then. The sun was bright and the scent of the roses was strong on the air. For a moment it was a perfect, timeless scene. I smiled, said, “I’m coming,” and stepped toward her, and as we climbed the steps together, a cloud moved across the sun, casting a deep shadow over the castle, and a clammy, muggy breeze touched my skin.