Murder Most Scottish

by Blake Banner

  Dehan pointed and we moved down the broad steps, touched with green here and there where lichen and moss grew in the cracks between the stones, and started across the lawn toward a gap in the hedgerow that grew where the wall had crumbled, at some distant point in time.

  We squeezed through the gap and found ourselves on a broad expanse of grassland that waved and swayed gently in the northerly breeze. In the distance we could see the dark blue of the ocean, hazy with morning mist, and just visible through that haze was the low, dark form of the Isle of Hoy, as Charles had said. I nodded in that direction.

  “That’s west. Let’s go see those stones.”

  The grass was deep, up to our knees, and beneath it the ground was uneven, with thick clumps of moss, small rocks and depressions. We picked our way slowly, and in the humid heat we were soon perspiring. Aside from the occasional lazy bumblebee, it was very quiet. Dehan looked down as she walked and thrust her hands in her back pockets. I had a hunch what was coming.

  “Eliminate the impossible,” she said, “and whatever is left is the truth.”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “So, in the case of Old Man Gordon, what’s impossible is that he was murdered.” She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. “Right?”

  “The trick, my dear Dehan, is to know what is impossible. You might equally argue that it is impossible for him to have committed suicide. In this case, Holmes’ adage helps us naught.”

  She grunted. We had reached a small rise and I stopped to look at the view. It was vast. Now I could see small, dense mountains of dark cloud above the mist on the northern rim of the world. The storm had not gone away, it had merely backed up for a good charge. I inhaled a deep breath, savoring the rich smell of sweet grasses, lavender and ozone.

  Dehan turned to watch me, squinting in the bright sunlight. “So we can say, he must have been murdered because it is impossible that he shot himself at that angle, and also that he didn’t get powder burns or GSR; or, it is impossible that he was murdered because there is no way that anybody could have been inside the room and left, leaving everything locked from the inside. So, it is impossible to eliminate the impossible, because everything is impossible.”

  “Precisely.”

  I stepped down from the small mound and we kept walking.

  “So, given that we have two incompatible impossibilities, which one do we eliminate?”

  “Well, as I said, Little Grasshopper, in this case Holmes’ adage doesn’t help us. We need to do it the other way around. Here we are faced with two apparent impossibilities. So what we need to do is not eliminate the impossible, but include the possible.”

  That silenced her for about five minutes, during which I spotted, about three hundred yards away, the circle of standing stones. It was weird enough to send a small army of frozen ants crawling up my arms and up my back.

  They stood maybe three hundred yards from the edge of the cliff. There were twelve of them, tall, maybe fourteen feet high, slender and irregular in shape, slightly pointed and smoky gray, patched here and there with dark green and black lichen. I paused to stare at them. Dehan stopped too.

  “They look like twelve druids turned to stone.”

  “They are at least five thousand years old. Who the hell put them there, Dehan? And what for?”

  “They are so remote, Stone…” She turned to smile at me, aware of the odd synchronicity, but unable to put it into words. “We’ll never know, and even if we found out, it probably wouldn’t make any sense to us. That’s a true mystery.” She turned back to the stones. “In a situation like that, how do you eliminate the impossible?”

  I nodded. “Each one of those stones must weight twenty or thirty tons. I wonder where they brought them from, and how.”

  She grinned. “You’re not going to go all Mulder and Scully on my ass again, are you, Stone? It was built by aliens who used magnetic stone power.” She came up to me laughing on unsteady feet and flung her arms around me. “You got some magnetic Stone power, big guy!”

  We moved on and slowly the ground leveled off and became flatter, and we began to hear an eerie moan where the breeze played among the megaliths. We moved in among them and Dehan touched them with her hands, as though she might be able to absorb their secrets somehow through her open palms.

  “These are your ancestors,” she said suddenly.

  “I am not literally descended from stones, Dehan.”

  “You know what I mean.” She turned to face me. “Your ancestors did this. You have an actual, physical connection with the men who made these circles. If not this particular one, another one in these islands. He knew how, he knew why and what for, and his genetic code is in your blood. That’s pretty deep, Stone.”

  I nodded. “And Old Man Gordon felt that with a passion.”

  She leaned her back against the rock and slid down until she was sitting on the mossy grass. She plucked a stem of grass and examined it. “It’s powerful stuff for some people: heritage, blood, land, identity. They are all tied together and some people will kill and die for it. It has some kind of, almost…” She raised her eyes to look at me. “An almost mystical power. It’s as strong as religion. Hell! Half the time it’s tied up with religion.” She pointed at the rocks around us. “This is some kind of temple, right?”

  I sat next to her. The stone was warm against my back. “There is a school of thought that says that Ceres, the goddess of the harvest and fertility, possibly the oldest divinity of them all, circle, church and kirk, all have the same etymological root. It’s all the same word, and that the ancient Indo-European goddess of fertility, life, death and the harvest was worshipped in circles like these.”

  We were quiet for a while, looking out at the misty blue sea. Then she asked, “So a man driven by such a deep, passionate love of his land, his island, his history and roots…” She picked another long stalk of grass and looked at it. “His son basically betrays him. Or at least he feels that his son has betrayed him, forced him somehow to abandon his dream of recapturing the ancient glory of the Gordons. He is wrenched, torn between his love for his son and his dream for his little island kingdom. His son leaves to tell the good news to his girl, and the old man takes his revolver and shoots himself.”

  She went quiet. Then after a moment, she held out her right arm to her side, over my legs, with the hand curled awkwardly back, as though she were trying to aim a gun at herself.

  “Usually,” she went on, “when people try to shoot themselves in the temple, the autonomic reflex makes them move their hand at the last second, so they end up blowing off the top of their heads but they don’t kill themselves at all. They just make a real bad mess. Also the recoil is hard to control, even when you have the gun pressed up close. I’m having real trouble trying to understand why a man who takes that step, who decides to shoot himself, would hold the gun in such an awkward position.”

  I nodded, chewing my lip. “And in that position, the recoil would have been impossible to control, so how he hit the target is another mystery all on its own. But in any case, Dehan, the motive for suicide simply isn’t there.” I picked a long stalk of grass with a spear of corn at the top and beat her gently on the head with it. “This man who, according to your theory, was driven to suicide because his son insisted on marrying beneath his class, as a Gordon, was more than happy to disinherit his son and had almost adopted another boy from the village. His passion was not his son, it was this island, the castle, the village, the whole Gordon package. It is hard to imagine that man being driven to suicide because his son married the wrong side of the tracks.”

  “So that is two strokes against suicide.”

  “Dehan?”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  She gave a girly giggle which should have been totally out of character but wasn’t, rested her head on my shoulder and said, “Ah, you know, just playing detective.” Then she added in a mock French accent, “Exersahzing zee little gra
y cells, ’Estings!”

  I fingered her hair absently while I gazed at the horizon. “It’s a pretty little mystery, I’ll grant you that.”

  “One thing would clinch it…”

  She slid down so her head was on my lap and she was squinting up into my face. I smiled down at her and said, “The handkerchief.”

  She frowned. “My god, you are a freak. You do read minds.”

  I laughed. “It stands to reason.”

  “The only way he could have avoided GSR on his hand is if he’d had a handkerchief or something similar over his hand and his sleeve. Is that what you were thinking?”

  “Yup. It fell off after he shot himself and was lying on the floor. It was disregarded as evidence because nobody thought it was important.”

  I made a face and shook my head. “I don’t believe, Dehan, there was any such handkerchief. If he wanted to avoid GSR on his hand, his only motive for that would be to frame somebody. If he was going to do that, he would have left a door or a window open and planted some kind of evidence. But what was done was exactly the contrary. There is no attempt to frame anybody here, unless the person being framed is Gordon. We can check the newspaper reports from the time and see if there are any crime scene photographs, but we’ll find there was no handkerchief or anything of the sort. This was a murder set up to look like a suicide, not the other way around.”

  She sat up and got on her knees in one fluid movement. “So you do think it was a murder.”

  I nodded. “I have never had any doubt.”

  She spread her hands and shook her head in a silent question.

  I echoed her gesture. “It was too impossible. It couldn’t be impossible that it was both murder and suicide, could it? That only happens if somebody is managing the scene. And the scene was managed in such a way that, after scratching your head, you have to conclude it was suicide…”

  I shrugged.

  She nodded. “So it had to be murder. Totally circumstantial, Stone, but I agree with you. The suicide is the impossible.” Then she frowned like she had a headache. “But…”

  I laughed, got to my feet and pulled her up. “Come on, this was just a little gray cells exercise, remember? What do you say we head for the village and have a traditional pub lunch?”

  “I say you are a wise man, Sensei. Lead on.”

  FIVE

  We were approaching the hedge and wall that encircled the castle, on our way to the only road on the island, intending to follow it for the half mile down to the village and the pub, when we saw, about three or four hundred yards away, Bee, sitting on some of the wall’s fallen stones, looking out at the landscape. She was wearing a flimsy white summer dress and a large, white hat with a broad blue ribbon around it. She spotted us approaching and waved, and we made our way toward her. As we drew closer she waved again and called, “Halloo! Hallo, you two! What a glorious morning! Where have you been? I demand you tell me!”

  She beamed at us and Dehan laughed. “We went to the stones. What are you doing out here?”

  She rolled her eyes and raised her hands in mock despair. “Oh, I simply had to get out! I couldn’t take that woman for another moment!”

  I didn’t ask because I didn’t really want to know. Dehan did because she did. “Which woman would that be, Bee?”

  “Well, there is only one.”

  “There were two last night.”

  Bee raised a baleful eyebrow. “Oh, you mean that appalling Sally. No, she is not a guest at the castle, not, at least, in the conventional sense. I refer to Pamela.”

  “You two not pals, huh?”

  “My dear, you have a gift for understatement. I despise the woman and she has the cheek to despise me back.”

  In spite of myself, I frowned and asked, “Isn’t that how it normally works?”

  “Oh, my dear boy, how delightfully American of you. Give me a hand down, will you, I’ll walk you to the gate.”

  I handed her down from the rock she was sitting on and she took my arm. We began to walk and Bee smiled at Dehan. “You chose well. My mother used to tell us, ‘Only marry a man if you feel safe on his arm, otherwise he’ll turn out to be queer or a sissy.’ That’s what they call ‘gay’ these days, and of course it’s all the rage. But when I was young, we wanted men to be men.”

  I smiled and changed the subject. “You have a sister.”

  She smiled up at me. “Had. She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was many years ago. Oh…” She paused and looked up at the sky, calculating. A warm breeze moved her dress and her hair in a sudden gust, and suddenly I could feel the storm in the air. “Oh, it must be nearly forty years ago.” We started walking again. “She was engaged to Charles.”

  Dehan came around and took Bee’s other arm. “Bee, do you mean that your sister was engaged to Charles Gordon Sr.?”

  “Oh yes. Old Man Gordon was all for it, even though we weren’t clan, because they’d be marrying into the aristocracy, albeit minor aristocracy. Would have been the cherry on the cake for him. The title is hereditary, you see. We’ve held it since we backed the Tudors against Richard. It would have given him a legitimacy he could not have dreamt of otherwise.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Maggie, that was my sister, Lady Margaret Butterworth, went out to Boston during his last year at university. Then she came back and he followed after he’d graduated. She was terribly in love with him. He is, after all, a rather fascinating man, isn’t he?”

  Dehan smiled noncommittally. “She was older than you.”

  “I was a mere slip of a girl back then. Barely twelve years old when they met. But even then I was aware of his intensity, the sheer power of the man. He was like his father, but more so. His father could never control him, you know.” She sighed. “To Charles it was only ever a marriage of convenience. But to poor Maggie, he was the love of her life. She was besotted.”

  We were approaching the end of the wall. Around the corner were the gate and the driveway. Dehan was frowning and there was almost a sense of urgency to her questions.

  “So when did he meet Pamela?”

  “Well!” She said it as though it were self explanatory. “Imagine! Accustomed to Boston and New York, moving to live on Gordon’s Soma, he was out of his mind with boredom. He spent some time in London, but his father wanted him by his side. He wanted to infuse him with the same insane passion that he felt for this godforsaken lump of rock.” She sighed again. “But Charles never felt it, and besides, he was a rebel at heart. I believe he would have done anything at all to defy his father. So he began to frequent the pub, where you are about to have lunch, and there he met Pam. She was the publican’s daughter. She was very different back then, I can tell you!”

  We had reached the corner and Bee drew to a halt.

  Dehan asked, “Different in what way?”

  Bee burst out laughing. “Well, for a start she was amusing! She was a very, very naughty girl! She and Charles used to get up to all sorts of outrageous things. She was a hoot! I was really quite fond of her back then. She was just that bit older than me but quite anarchic and, honestly, my recollection of her was that she was always laughing. Always had this mischievous, outrageous twinkle in her eye. And then…” She spread her hands. “Then Charles, foolish, foolish Charles went and ruined everything by falling in love with her.”

  I was intrigued in spite of my better judgment. “How did that ruin everything if he was in love with her, and she was in love with him?”

  She looked at me with big, round blue eyes. “Dear boy, she was not in love with him. She was just having fun. She never for a moment believed that it would lead anywhere. She was the publican’s daughter, for heaven’s sake! He, even though he was an American, was to all intents and purposes the Laird—the Lord of the Manor. She fully expected that they’d have their summer of shagging and then he’d be on his merry way. Instead of that, he proposed to her!”

  I raised an eyebrow. “A fai
ry tale…”

  “Precisely! And it only works in fairy tales. Suddenly this happy-go-lucky live wire was presented with the chance of becoming the lady of the manor. Her life was turned upside down. Of course she went for it, but all her priorities changed overnight. Suddenly she was concerned with appearances, form, manners, behavior!” She grunted. “By the time they were married, she had become the stuck up old prig she is now.”

  I made a face and nodded. “A cautionary tale.”

  “Indeed.”

  Dehan asked, “So, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your sister?”

  She took a deep breath. “She was a frail little thing. Delicate constitution, you know. She became very depressed and died within a few months. They said she died of a broken heart. I think that’s all tosh and nonsense. I believe she topped herself and Daddy hushed it up.”

  Dehan narrowed her eyes. “Topped herself?”

  I said, “Committed suicide.”

  “Wow…”

  Before she could say any more, Bee flapped her hand. “Never had much sympathy, really. It’s a harsh world, Carmen. If you’re not strong you go down. That’s the way it is.” She grinned. “I knew he’d grow tired of Pam before very long, so I hung around in the wings and waited for him to notice me. It didn’t take long.” Dehan’s jaw dropped and Bee started to laugh. “That is why Pam can’t stand me. Stupid woman should be grateful I’ve taken him off her hands.”

  She patted my arm. “I shan’t keep you any longer. You take your lovely wife to lunch. But take my advice, Mr. Stone, don’t let that rake near her. He is insatiable!”

  She turned and made her way up the drive toward the house, with a saucy swing to her hips. We watched her a moment, then Dehan took my arm and we started down the road toward the village.