by Blake Banner
Dehan said, “So he rushed in, found his father, and how long transpired then before you and the staff arrived, Major?”
“Oh, not more than a minute, probably less. When I got here, the butler had already arrived and Charles was just standing there, by the desk, staring down at his father. Terrible thing for a young lad to see. Shocking.”
“And the lock was busted.”
He glanced over at the door, as though to confirm it had been busted, and nodded. “Yes.”
Dehan scratched her head. “So in that scenario, while your father was away talking to Pam, somebody came into the study, took your father’s gun, shot him, arranged it to look like suicide, slipped out and used some thin pliers or a similar tool to turn the key from the outside.”
Charles raised his eyebrows and nodded. “If you’re right, and it was murder, that would seem to be the only way it could be done. I can’t see any other.” He frowned, shook his head and gave an incredulous laugh. “But who on Earth…? It would have to be one of the staff, the major here or Bee!”
The Major goggled in alarm at Charles. I smiled and shook my head. “Not necessarily. There are actually a number of potential candidates for prime suspect. But we can discuss that later if you’re inclined. It’s actually another question that’s playing on my mind.”
Charles looked worried. “What’s that?”
“Did your grandfather keep his revolver in his study?”
He made a face and shook his head, then turned to the major. The major had gone very serious and was staring at the window. “Reggie?”
He shook his head. “No. Kept it in his room.”
I nodded, then looked at Dehan. “It’s not like the States here, Dehan. People don’t keep weapons for self defense or home protection. Especially in a place like this, am I right?”
Charles nodded. “Absolutely. Unheard of.”
I went on. “If you held on to a weapon like that, you’d have it as a souvenir, and you’d keep it unloaded. You wouldn’t have it lying around in a drawer in your study.”
“But the old man wasn’t British. He was from Boston.”
I nodded and smiled. “Not Texas. In any case, the weapon was in his bedroom. So whoever brought it down and shot him with it knew where to look for it.”
Suddenly the major stood. He was scowling and his face had gone scarlet. “Look here!” he said. “This has got a bit out of hand, hasn’t it? Next thing we’ll be accusing…” He stammered a moment, then changed tack. “The case was closed and the coroner found it was suicide. They must have known what they were talking about!” Now he met my eye. “No disrespect or anything, but we don’t need you Americans coming over and telling us how to investigate a… a… suicide!”
And with that, he marched across the room, wrenched open the door and stormed out.
Charles’ cheeks were flushed. “I am so sorry. You must think us awfully rude. I can’t apologize enough…”
I shook my head. “No need, I assure you.”
“I can’t think what came over him. He’s normally such a…”
I interrupted him. “I met Robert Armstrong. He drove us back from the pub, as far as the gate.”
He looked confused. “As far as the gate…?”
“He said he wouldn’t set foot in here, and he might have a surprise for you. How serious do you think he might be?”
He laughed. “Old Bobby? That’s ridiculous! He’s been our gardener for donkey’s years!”
“How long, exactly?”
“Oh, exactly? Um, over thirty years. Since before my grandfather died. My grandfather adored him, cared for him and his mother like family. Well, he thought they were family. Got a temper mind, like most Scotsmen, but I wouldn’t pay too much attention to him. Probably just in a huff.” He hesitated. “Well, I have a few things to attend to before dinner, so… Thank you so much, it has been most, um…instructive…”
TEN
We left him in his study and stood a moment in the darkened hallway. Outside, the sky had grown dark and a wild wind was making the house groan and the doors and windows creak and bang. Brown, the butler, emerged from the drawing room and made his way silently toward the kitchen with a tray of dirty cups and plates. We had missed tea. I looked at Dehan. She was staring across the hall at the glass panes in the door. Through them you could see the tall pines bowing and tossing under the gunmetal clouds.
I turned away and looked behind me. Under the arch where the staircase divided to climb toward the east wing of the house were the broad, double doors that led into the ballroom, and just before them there was a smaller, single door in the wall. I moved over to it and opened it. It was six or seven feet across and a good twelve feet deep. It held buckets and mops, brooms, a couple of vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher, and along the back wall and all along the right-hand wall there were shelves holding refuse sacks, cloth dusters, cans of polish, feather dusters and myriad other things you need to keep an old castle looking neat. Behind me I heard Brown’s voice.
“Can I help you, sir?”
I nodded, then turned to look at him. “These shelves, the ones along the side here, how long have they been up?”
He looked startled. “For as long as I can remember, sir!”
I smiled. “And how long would that be?”
His eyes seemed to glaze, “I am sixty-two, sir, and my mother worked at the Castle before the first Mr. Gordon bought it. The shelves were there when I was a small boy, so well over fifty years.”
“Do you mind if I have a closer look at them?”
He frowned but said, “Not in the least, sir. The light switch is there, on the left. Can I help in any way?”
“I don’t think so.” I snapped on the light and made a careful examination of the fell length of the bottom shelf, and then the middle shelf. When I’d finished, I emerged, closed the cupboard and gave him another smile. “You’ve already been very helpful. Thank you. I think we’d like to see the ballroom, if that’s OK.”
“By all means, sir. It’s through there.”
He indicated the door. I opened it and followed Dehan in, closing the door behind me. It wasn’t palatial, but it was big and largely empty. The floor, like the entrance hall, was black and white checkerboard. It was roughly thirty feet across and a good forty or forty-five deep. The ceiling was high and domed, with a spectacular crystal chandelier suspended from the center, A small dais against the right wall allowed for an orchestra or a band, and the far wall was taken up by two sets of broad French windows that gave access to a rear stone terrace with steps down to the gardens. Gardens which a couple of hours earlier had been bathed in warm sunshine, but were now engulfed in shadow while a dark, North Atlantic gale moaned among the chimneystacks and gables. Dehan sighed loudly.
“You have all this, and you still find reasons to kill people.”
I smiled and turned my back to the French windows. As I spoke my voice came back at me with a hollow echo. “Enough of this weather might drive me to murder.” I started pacing slowly across the room, studying the wall. “Sidartha, Gotama Buddha, said that everything in this world is always unsatisfactory.”
Dehan crossed the floor to look out the windows. Her voice reverberated down at me out of the dome. “I bet he was invited to all the parties. Didn’t they cast him as Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh?”
I kept smiling to myself and nodded. “Yup!”
We both turned. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised. The silver, pre-storm light lay silvery blue across the planes of her face, making her look oddly like a Norse daemon. “They did?”
“No.” There was a small couch beside a potted palm up against the wall. I sat on it and considered her where she stood, half in shadow, half ghostly silver-blue. “He said that we are driven by craving and aversion. We perpetually either need something we haven’t got: a wife, a husband, a castle, a fortune, freedom… Or we want to be free of something we have but don’t want: a wife, a husband, a father, a mother, a prison
, poverty… You know. All those things people kill for. He called it ‘dukkha’ and said it was the source of all pain and suffering in the world. It was one of his four basic truths.”
She made a face, then shoved her hands in her pockets, turned her back to the windows and fell into darkness.
“So if you want to be happy, all you have to do is stop wanting good stuff and stop caring about the bad shit that happens in life. Good luck with that.”
“There is something wrong here, Dehan.”
Her disembodied voice said, “What do you mean?”
I chewed my lip and shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Cool.”
“Walk through it with me.”
“Weren’t you the one saying we were on honeymoon?”
“Mm-hm…” I nodded absently, not really listening. “Who gained from his death?”
She paced away from the window, deeper into shadow, looking down at her feet. “The obvious prime suspect is Charles Gordon Sr. He had the most to gain. Freedom to marry the girl he loved and inheritance of a major fortune.”
“But?”
She stopped, still staring at her feet, and nodded slowly, then shrugged. “But he didn’t really love her, though he married her anyway, and by all accounts he had resolved his conflict with his father. He was still the heir.”
“Who else?”
She turned and paced back toward the silver-blue glow from the French windows. She said simply, “Pam.”
I nodded. “She stood to gain a lot from marrying Charles Sr.”
She glanced at me, then back at her feet. “But I think it’s a bit more complex than that.”
I smiled. “You picked up on that, huh?”
“She was playing them both. While Charles Sr. was away at college in Boston, she was playing Laird and Lady with the old man. I figure she was thinking that if the son was only along for the ride, if you’ll excuse the pun, daddy, with his love of all things Scottish, might just jump at the chance of a young, beautiful wife. But then Charles graduates, comes back to the castle and his daddy tells him she is the wrong class and not from one of the great clans. Bombshell. So she decides to eliminate the old man.”
“Hmm…”
“And there’s another thing.” She pointed at me. “If she was a frequent visitor to the master bedroom, she might well have known where he kept the revolver.”
“It’s a nice theory, but there is one flaw in it.”
“What?”
“Charles had just told her that the old man had given him the green light to marry her.”
She nodded. “That is not such a big flaw, Stone. In the first place, by now she knows what a temperamental son of a bitch the old man can be. There is no telling when he’ll change his mind again. Add to that the fact that she must have known, as everybody did, about the old man’s love affair with the Armstrong family, and you have two powerful motives for murder: one, that he might at any time disinherit Charles and her with him, and two, jealous anger. Two gets you twenty that the old man was involved with Mama Armstrong, and as you have said more than once, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“That is a very compelling theory, Dehan. Who else?”
“Bee has to be up there.”
“You think so?”
She frowned at me and nodded, then began pacing into the shadows again, toward the dais.
“I had a chat with Bee before I joined you in the study. She’s been in love with Charles Sr. since she was a kid. But, get this, she also had an affair with his dad. In fact, according to her, his dad warmed the sheets with just about every woman Charles Sr. was involved with.”
I sighed. “I can’t say I’m all that surprised. If Oedipus had lived in this house, he would have needed a shrink. But explain to me how that would give Bee motive to kill him?”
She sat next to me on the small divan and put her elbows on her knees. “Revenge. For giving the man she loved permission to marry…” She shrugged with one shoulder, “Not just marry, but marry a publican’s daughter. It was the ultimate rejection and humiliation, the ultimate insult to her and her sister. Her sister was the right woman for Charles. With her dead, Bee should have stepped into her shoes. But instead…”
I nodded. “But instead he allows him to marry this slapper.”
She frowned. “Slapper?”
“A London term for a loose woman. You have a point. And revenge gives us one more suspect, perhaps two.”
“Mother Armstrong and her son. But that is a lot of speculation, Stone. We don’t know how close they really were.”
I made a face that was skeptical. “How old would you say Armstrong was? Fifty-six? Fifty-eight? That makes him about sixteen or seventeen at the time of Old Man Gordon’s murder. If he heard about the old man’s change of heart, which he might well have done if he was working here as the gardener, that gives him a powerful motive…”
She nodded. “True.” She nodded again, raising her eyebrows. “Especially if he thought the old man had already changed the will.”
I pointed at her. “That will. That will is at the heart of all this, Dehan, and I’ll tell you something else. It is still a powder keg. I have a bad feeling. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t put my finger on it, but I have a prickling at the back of my neck that says…”
I hesitated.
Her frown deepened. “What?”
“Dehan, I have a bad feeling. I think there is going to be another murder.”
“What? C’mon! You’re suffering from a combination of work deprivation and Scottish brooding.”
I laughed. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to change for dinner, I’m going to slip into my ravishing red with the split up to my hip, we are going to have martinis before dinner and we are going to forget all about Old Man Gordon and these crazy people. And tomorrow…” She leaned across and stabbed my chest with her finger. “As soon as this storm has blown itself out, we are going to take that ferry and spend a day visiting distilleries and remote towns and thinking about something that is not a cold case.” She spread her hands. “Honeymoon, right? And these guys have Scotland Yard. It was called that for a reason, you know!”
I laughed out loud.
She laughed too. “To deal with crazy Scots murderers!”
“You’re right. Hey, you want to dance?”
“Now? Without music?”
“I have a respectable baritone and I can hum a Strauss waltz with the best of them. But you have to put your feet on mine so I can guide you and not tread on your toes.”
We did a couple of circuits of the ballroom, with Dehan standing on my feet and laughing helplessly while I twirled and pranced and hummed the Blue Danube, and the gale did its best to drown out my respectable baritone. After the second circuit, the door opened and a large figure stood silhouetted, watching us. I came to a halt, Dehan stepped off my shoes and turned to look, still giggling quietly.
I couldn’t make out his features, but I could see it was Charles Gordon Sr. After a moment he spoke.
“My son tells me you’ve been inquiring about my father’s death.”
“As a matter of fact, we were. We run the cold cases unit at our precinct and we were curious. We didn’t mean to intrude.”
He remained immobile. It was unsettling not to be able to see his face or his expression. After a moment, he said, “It’s not a cold case. It was ruled suicide.”
“So I understand. As I say, it was just a passing interest.”
He took a step into the room. “You think it was not suicide?”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. I took a step toward him, partially blocking Dehan. I kept my voice level. “There are details that are hard to explain: the absence of powder burns, the absence of gunshot residue, the angle of the shot…”
“You don’t need to
convince me, Stone.” He took another step closer and now the gray light from the French windows touched half his face. One eye peered at me, hard, calculating. “I said it was murder from the start. The inspector agreed with me. But he was overruled. They closed it as a suicide.” He shook his head. “My father would not have committed suicide, not in a million years.”
I nodded, then shrugged. “Well, as I say, Mr. Gordon, we just had a passing interest because of our work back home…”
Dehan stepped forward. “Did you ever suspect anybody?”
“Mrs. Stone…” For a moment it sounded like an answer to his question and I frowned, confused. Then he said, “Yes, I had my ideas, but I was never able to confirm them. You know what they say…” He shifted slightly in the shadows, and I knew he was looking at me again. “Keep your lovers close, but keep your enemies closer.”
He turned and moved back to the open door. There he paused and spoke, out into the hallway. “We’ll be dressing for dinner.” Then a poisonous smile leeched into his voice. “The Camerons will be joining us again. Such a charming couple.”
He disappeared toward the stairs and we heard his heavy tread climbing toward the upper floor.
I scratched my head. “You think we could cross to the mainland this evening? I’ll take my chances with the storm.”
She leaned her forehead on my chest, laughing softly. “Stone! Where have I brought us? What are they like?”
“Come on, let’s go get changed. I need a drink. And tomorrow we go spend a day back in the real world. Maybe when we get back, this lot will seem a bit more normal.”
She looked up at me and nodded. “I guess it was our fault for asking questions in the first place.”
“I guess.”
I gave her a kiss and we made our way into the hall. The storm had graduated from moaning and groaning to the occasional scream and wail. We had just reached the landing, where the stairs divided and climbed to the east and west wings, when behind us the door burst open and the howl of the wind filled the hall, and throughout the house we head doors bang and slam. We turned to look. I was surprised to see it was Robert Armstrong. He wrestled the door closed, then stood watching us a moment. Finally he said, “Ah’ve buznezz wuth Gordon.”