by Blake Banner
“Oh!” He stammered a moment. “Well, yes, that was precisely it. She was the daughter of the local publican. Very attractive young woman with a very lively personality. Had a sort of saucy wit, if you follow me. And young Charles was quite captivated by her. Absolutely head over heals.”
Dehan was watching him with narrowed eyes. “This is…” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the dining room.
He nodded, “Pam, yes.” He nodded again. “Well, as you can imagine, Old Man Gordon disapproved violently of the match. He might be sponsoring Robert Armstrong, whom many would consider inappropriate, but at least he was related to the Gordons. But this girl, however delightful she might be, was neither a Gordon nor an appropriate spouse for a Gordon!”
Dehan both frowned and smiled at the same time. “I think I know where this is going.”
The major chuckled. “Don’t be too quick, Detective. It isn’t as simple as it seems. Nobody knows exactly what happened because Charles Sr. won’t discuss it, but one version of the story goes something like this:
“Things came to a head when Old Man Gordon told Charles that if he persisted in his plans to marry Pamela, he would disinherit him and leave his entire fortune to Robert Armstrong. Charles agonized for a full week. He told Pamela he could not see her and he spent seven days either walking the grounds or locked in his room, brooding. Finally, on the seventh day he went and spoke to his father. They spent over an hour discussing the issue, and when Charles came out he was a different man. He was elated. He ran to the kitchen and embraced the cook and the butler and the maids—remember he was an American—and then he dashed off to tell Pam his father had had a change of heart! It was as though a cloud had been lifted from his mind and he had come down to Earth to realize the error of his ways. He gave Charles his blessing to marry whomever he pleased, and he told Charles he would kill the project and contact his brokers immediately to start reinvesting in solid stocks and shares, as he had done for most of his adult life.”
“That’s quite a turn around.”
The major nodded. “It is. It’s not unheard of, but it was dramatic. And I need hardly say, a huge relief for the entire household.”
I nodded. “I can imagine. So, what happened?”
“Well.” He sat forward. “That’s where it began to get very strange indeed. Refill?”
He went away and came back with the decanter. He refilled our glasses and settled back in his chair.
“As I said, Charles had gone straight away to see Pam and tell her the good news. When he’d returned a couple of hours later, he went to see his father, planning to tell him that he and Pam had set a date. He knocked on the door…”
Dehan interrupted. “What door?”
“Of his study, across the hall, in the tower. He knocked, but there was no reply. When he tried to open the door, he found it locked. This in itself was not unusual, he tended to lock himself in his study when he was working. But he failed to answer when Charles knocked and called to him, despite the fact that, through the window, as he had arrived back home, he had seen his father sitting at his desk.
“Concerned that he might be ill, he kicked at the lock several times until he broke it…” He paused and shook his head, gazing at the flames in the fire. “It defied belief. Old Man Gordon was sitting at his desk with a bullet wound in his right temple, and his .38 service revolver lying on the floor beside him. All the windows were locked on the inside, as had been the door.”
I frowned. “He committed suicide.”
The major nodded several times. “That would be the logical conclusion, and it was what the coroner concluded in the end. But the detective who conducted the initial inquiry was never satisfied. Chap from Scotland Yard, came up because of the high profile of the deceased, and because Charles was convinced from the beginning that something was wrong, and frankly, we haven’t got the forensic know how up here to deal with a complex case.”
Dehan asked, “What was it that didn’t satisfy them?”
“Well, you must remember that in the 1980s, forensic science was still in its infancy, but this chap, Inspector Henry Green, he thought that the angle of the shot was all wrong. If you shoot yourself in the head, the entry wound should be horizontal, and there should be a great deal of scorching because the muzzle is actually touching the head. But in this case, though his prints were all over the gun, the entry wound was at a slight, forty-five degree angle, and there was no scorching, as though he had held the gun at a distance, and at the height of his hip, which would clearly be impossible. There was also the issue of gunshot residue.”
“What about it?”
“There was none on his hand.”
I frowned and studied my whiskey for a moment. “So the inference was that he had been shot from a sitting or squatting position, at a distance.”
“That’s right, but it was clearly impossible because, as I say, the windows were all locked from the inside, as was the door. Charles, as I said, had had to smash the lock when he went in.”
Dehan looked at me, frowning and smiling at the same time. “Son of a gun!” She looked back at the major. “And the cops confirmed that the door had been locked…”
“Oh yes, you could see very clearly where the latch had burst through the wood.”
I said, “You were there?”
He nodded. “I was a friend of the family at the time, part-time PA to Old Man Gordon. There was no question but that the door had been locked from the inside.”
I smiled. “Secret passages? Secret doors…?”
“Not uncommon in these old castles, at all. But the police searched high and low and there was nothing. Two walls give onto the outside, a third onto the entrance hall and the fourth gives onto the ball room.”
Dehan gave a little laugh. “A true locked room mystery, whaddya know?” Then she laughed out loud. “This isn’t something you lay on especially for American detective guests?”
He chuckled. “A police variation on the Canterville Ghost! No, no! I’m afraid not. That is exactly how it happened. You can read it in the John O’Groats local papers. It also made the national press, briefly. You can probably find the papers in the library.” He pointed behind him at a door in the paneled wall. “Through that door.”
Dehan grinned. “I might have a look tomorrow.”
I raised an eyebrow at her, then smiled at the major. “We run a cold cases unit in New York. We specialize in unsolved homicides.” I looked back at Dehan, who was still grinning. “But we’re supposed to be on honeymoon, remember?”
The major laughed. “Oh dear! I should have kept quiet, shouldn’t I?” Then he shrugged. “But of course, strictly, this is not a cold case. It was closed, as a suicide.”
Dehan made a face. “And that’s probably what it was. The absence of GSR and burns may have a perfectly simple explanation. Easier to explain that than how the killer got out of a locked room.”
“And an explanation,” I said, setting down my glass, “that we are not going to provide.” I stood. “Come along, Mrs. Stone. I am dead beat.”
And we went up, arm in arm, to our ancient, Scottish bedchamber.
FOUR
We rose early. It’s hard not to when the sky starts lighting up at 2 AM. Dehan luxuriated in her free-standing bath with clawed feet while I showered, shaved and dressed. She wasn’t done by the time I’d finished, so I went down while she soaked.
I found Brown in the hall and he told me breakfast was served in the dining room and when I went in, the sideboard was set with coffee and tea, and hotplates loaded with everything you’d expect of a British breakfast: bacon, eggs—scrambled, fried and poached—kidneys, mushrooms, fried tomatoes and pork sausages, plus bread and an electric toaster.
I helped myself to some bacon and eggs and some coffee and was sitting down to eat when Charles bustled in.
“Ah! Excellent! Good morning!” He gestured at the sideboard with both hands. “I see you found your way to the grub! An Englishman is neve
r served at breakfast! That is true,” he added as he piled food on his plate, “of all Britons, not just Englishmen. Not true, on the other hand, when we go abroad. When in Rome, what!” He sat and didn’t so much start eating as tackle his breakfast. “What are your plans for today?”
I sipped my coffee. “Not a lot. Take a walk, explore the island, maybe have lunch at the inn in the village.”
“Excellent plan. The grouse is good, as is the duck, though technically not in season.” He laughed. “They claim to have it frozen, but it tastes awfully fresh.”
We ate in silence for a moment. Then he dabbed his mouth with his napkin, took his cup of tea and sat back. “I couldn’t help overhearing the major last night, filling you in on our little mystery.”
I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind. Dehan—Carmen, my wife—was curious. We work cold cases back in New York, so it tickled her curiosity.”
“Not at all. My father always swore Grandfather had been murdered, and the chap from Scotland yard… um…”
“Inspector Henry Green.”
He glanced at me. “Yes, how clever of you to remember.”
“I knew him.”
“Good lord! What a coincidence!”
I shrugged. “Not really. I was there for a year and a half. We did a kind of exchange program. While you guys were trying to make your policing methods more American, Giuliani was trying to make New York policing more British.” I smiled. “Our crime stats went down and yours went up. I spent some time at Scotland Yard. They moved me around a couple of times and I got to know a few people. Henry was one of them. He was a good detective. Very intuitive, but he always followed up with sound methodology.”
He was staring at me with wide eyes. “How fascinating,” he said, then blinked. “Well, he was inclined to agree with father, that there had been foul play. But realistically…” He shook his head. “It was simply impossible that there was anybody else in the room with him.”
I smiled. “Eliminate the impossible, my dear Watson, and whatever is left is the truth.”
“Ah, quite so, Holmes! Yes indeed!”
Dehan appeared in jeans and a white T-shirt with her hair tied in a ponytail. She grabbed a slice of toast and a black coffee standing up and spoke with her mouth full. “You weady, big gumph?”
I smiled at Charles. “Big Gumph, that’s me. You see why I married her.”
He laughed politely. “There is, if you’re in the mood for exploring, a rather splendid stone circle over to the west, near the edge of the cliffs—do please be careful!—and magnificent views of Hoy and Flota, the islands, you know.”
Dehan drained her cup. “Sounds just about perfect.”
We stepped out through the French windows in the drawing room onto the ancient stone terrace. All traces of the threatened storm seemed to have disappeared, except the close, humid warmth. The sky was an intense, rich blue. There were no clouds, and swallows circled and swooped around the house like World War Two Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.
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: h
eritage, 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.”