by Blake Banner
I paused. They were all frowning.
I said, “It’s a bit of a mess, but let me try and simplify. According to Mr. Armstrong, forty years ago Gordon Sr. stole his inheritance, but Mr. Armstrong did not complain about it for almost forty years. Then, quite suddenly, very recently, he decided he was so mad about it he would not set foot in the house. And no sooner had he decided that, than he went and set foot in the house, according to him, because he had business to settle with one of the Gordons.”
There was a lot of ass-shifting and a lot of glancing sidelong at Armstrong, who was staring sullenly at the floor.
“Dehan and I assumed that he had come to see Charles Jr. in his study. Charles had stayed there to do some work, as he apparently often did, and as Armstrong must have known, having spent many years working here. But in fact, Armstrong had a very different purpose. He knew, as probably the whole island does by now, that Gordon Sr. kept his Smith & Wesson service revolver in his bedroom. How often had you talked about it in your day, Pam? And you, Sally?”
Sally’s voice was a dry rasp. “More than once,” she said.
I nodded. “And the bush telegraph took care of the rest. It had been common knowledge for a long time. And, for reasons I’ll come to in a minute, Armstrong had special reasons for knowing.
“The point is, when we thought he was going in to see Charles in the study, what he actually did, when we had gone into our own room, was to go up to the master bedroom and get the revolver. He then went down to the tool shed, where he had carefully removed four of the bricks from precisely the right place behind the logs, and he shot young Charles Gordon Jr. in the head.
“He took his time replacing the bricks, and the cement, and then came back into the house. He then put on the show for us of shouting and kicking down the door, but of course, before anybody could get to him, he had entered the room, squeezed the gun into Charles’ hand and dropped it by his side. The perfect closed room murder, exactly like his grandfather’s forty years earlier. And like his grandfather, the only possible explanation would be suicide.
“Later, when we had finished taking your statements and I announced that I knew who had committed the homicide and how, it was Mr. Armstrong who deliberately started a row, by accusing you, Sally, of having an affair with both Gordon Sr. and Jr. While the room was in commotion, he took a syringe and what he mistakenly thought was a lethal dose of sedative from Dr. Cameron’s bag. It was daring in the extreme, but Mr. Armstrong is nothing if not daring, and extreme.
“When everybody went up, after Brown had shown him to his room, he slipped back to Pamela’s room and injected her in the sole of her foot, where the mark would be almost invisible. He assumed that the sedative, on top of the tablets she had already taken, would constitute a lethal dose. Fortunately, what he injected her with was Midazolam, a powerful tranquilizer that is non-lethal. He then flushed the tablets Cameron had left her down the can to make it look as though she had overdosed, and he slipped out of the room, taking the syringe with him.
“From there, he went straight to the master bedroom and tapped on the door. When Gordon opened up, he threatened him with the syringe to his neck. I’m guessing you told him it had bleach in it, or some ghastly concoction; or maybe you threatened him with an air-bubble. Either way, you scared him enough to make him climb on his own gun-box and put a noose around his neck rather than try and fight you. Maybe, like most bullies, at heart he was a coward.
“I’m guessing you made him tie his own noose, you made him stand on the box and then you kicked the box out from under him.” I shook my head. “It was outrageously daring, and it almost worked. But you made a few mistakes, and one of them was not to leave the box on the floor where it fell.”
He stared sullenly at me but made no response.
I turned back to the watching faces. “He flushed the needle down the toilet, rushed around to Pam’s room, where Bee was raising the alarm, and dropped the syringe into the bag.” I turned back to Armstrong. “I don’t know if you wiped your prints off. I do know you didn’t use surgical gloves for any of this. The chances are good they’ll get your prints on the syringe, and on Pam’s ankle, and two gets you twenty there are latents on the revolver.”
“But…” It was the major, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “What I don’t understand is, why?”
But outside I had already started to hear the throb of approaching choppers.
TWENTY
It was an air ambulance and a police helicopter. Dehan and I stepped out to watch them land near the driveway in a vast cloud of mist kicked up from the sodden grass by the downdraft from the rotors.
As the whine of the turbines died and the throb slowly stilled, men and women began to spill from the two choppers. From the air ambulance, paramedics in cumbersome, high visibility gear came running with stretchers, followed by a man in a tweed jacket carrying a black leather satchel. I hailed them and as they approached, I pointed back at the house. “You have a possible overdose on sleeping tablets in the drawing room on the left.”
They began to move.
I said, “Listen to me. She was an intended murder victim and was injected with an unknown amount of Midazolam. She had already taken two sleeping tablets before that. Ask for Dr. Cameron. He’s in there with her.”
They took it in and moved toward the house at a steady trot. I turned to the guy in the tweed jacket. “Are you the ME?”
“I am. Who are you?”
“A guest at the hotel and a detective with the NYPD.” I handed him the keys to the study. “You have one body in the study on the right as you go in. Another upstairs in the master bedroom. Downstairs is a .38 gunshot wound to the head. Upstairs, he was hanged.”
I might as well have told him it had rained. He walked away saying, “Och, you’ve had a busy night, then.”
Two cops in uniform and three men in suits were approaching us from the other helicopter. One of the plainclothes looked worried, the other was smiling. He was in his fifties, well groomed and well-built, with intelligent, humorous eyes.
He spoke from fifteen feet away, holding out his hand and laughing. “John Stone, as I live and breathe! Am I in the Orkneys or in some kind of Bond movie?”
“Henry.” I gripped his hand and shook it with pleasure. “When you find out, will you tell me? This is Carmen, my wife and my partner in the PD.”
They shook. “I’m impressed with the NYPD’s latest line in detective uniforms, I must say. Very fetching. This is Inspector Harris, from Thurso, and Mr. Mackenzie of Mackenzie and Hennessy, solicitors, also of Thurso.”
Harris took my hand and shook it vigorously. “Uz et troo?” he asked.
“Which bit?” I asked back.
“That Gordon an’ his bairn are deed?”
I nodded. “Yes, the ME is looking at the bodies as we speak. It was pure luck that Mrs. Gordon was not killed too.”
Mackenzie reached over and shook my hand too. “And they were murdered, you say? In what order? And by whom?”
I smiled and nodded at him. “I thought you’d be asking those questions. We’ll come to all that in due course. Mr. Mackenzie, I want to ask you a favor. If you should happen to see anybody you recognize from your office, please don’t react. Just ignore them, would you? It’s important.”
Henry was watching me closely with narrowed eyes. “But you say that you have not only solved these murders, but also the original murder of forty years ago.”
I nodded. “Yes. I am just waiting for one last person to arrive… Ah, I think this is her now.”
A Ford Mondeo was speeding down the drive toward the house. I said, “Shall we go in?”
Henry turned to Dehan. “What on Earth made you marry him? How do you stand him? He’s so smug.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “You think that’s a problem? This is supposed to be our honeymoon!”
Henry laughed and we made our way back to the stone steps that led up to the door, just as the Mondeo pulled up and
a young woman in her late twenties clambered out. She saw us, looked at Mackenzie and stopped dead. Mackenzie frowned and looked away, mumbling something. She suddenly blurted out, “I’m looking fer Bobby Armstrong. I was told he was here! Is he OK?”
I smiled. “Yes, he’s as well as can be expected. It was me who called you. Please, come this way.”
And we all filed into the drawing room again.
Armstrong went pale and half stood as Lizzie came in. “Lizzie! What on Earth…!” Then he saw Mackenzie. Lizzie rushed to Armstrong and flung her arms around his neck, realizing too late that he was bound hand and foot. He fell back and she staggered, then turned to stare at me.
I turned to Harris. “Perhaps, Inspector, you could have one of your men replace those bootlaces with handcuffs. I left mine in New York.”
“It’s a trap!” she hissed. “You let yourself get bloody trapped!”
Mackenzie coughed. “I think, Mr. Stone, that it is probably high time you explained to us exactly what is going on, and why my secretary is here, with Mr. Armstrong, instead of at her desk, where she belongs!”
Harris nodded at one of his constables, who crossed the room and started untying Armstrong’s bonds. While he did it, I said, “I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Mackenzie. It is, as you say, high time. You’d better make yourselves comfortable, this is going to take some explaining.”
The constables were dispatched to help the Medical Examiner in the study, and Mackenzie and Henry took their seats. Dehan sat in a large armchair beside the cold fireplace, and I sat on the arm of her chair. I looked at Henry and smiled.
“Most of this is simple, logical deduction, some of it is surmise, most or all of it I hope you will be able to prove with what little forensic evidence we have been able to secure.
“This all starts about forty years ago, when Old Man Gordon, a wealthy Bostonian who had become obsessed with his Scottish roots and his family history, moved back to the north of Scotland and bought an island, and a castle, which according to his research had belonged to his ancestors. With time, his obsession grew and I guess he came to see himself as an ancient, Celtic Laird ruling over his island kingdom, owning his subjects and striving to keep the bloodlines pure. And that last point is important because, as I found out from the family library, Old Man Gordon’s late wife had not been a Gordon. She was not from any of the great clans. In fact, she was not even Scottish. Her family, to the old man’s enduring horror, was of English descent. Her name was Sarah Culpepper. I can only assume that his obsession with all things Scottish began to grow after he had married and sired his son, the late Charles Gordon Sr.”
Mackenzie shifted in his chair and gave a small cough. “Are we to understand, then, Mr. Stone, that Charles Gordon Sr. was in fact only half Scottish?”
I nodded. “And half English.”
Armstrong curled his lip. “Well, no’ne’s perfect, eh, Ian?”
Dehan raised an eyebrow at him. “Some less than others, pal.”
“The point is,” I went on, “that the old man became increasingly troubled by what he saw as his son’s imperfection. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Meantime, while Charles was at university in Boston, two things happened. The old man, who liked, as it were, to move among his subjects, met a very young and very attractive Pamela May at the local inn. Presumably he had nothing particularly against commoners who did not belong to the great clans. Especially when they looked like Pam. He didn’t mind sleeping with them, he just didn’t want to marry them and breed with them. She was attractive and had an engaging personality, and he had money and power. They both had something the other wanted, and they started an affair.
“The other thing that happened was that he met Mrs. Armstrong and young Bobby, who at that time would have been just a young teenager. It is somewhat ironic that these two encounters, which were life-defining for him, would ultimately lead to his death and the destruction of what he saw as his dynasty.
“Pam saw Old Man Gordon as a potential way out of an island and a way of life that to her was a prison. But Mrs. Armstrong was, to Old Man Gordon, the answer to his prayers. Here was a woman of pure Scottish stock, descended from Gordons and with a son who carried the blood of two of the great clans. Pam didn’t stand a chance, and Charles, away at university in Boston, was on a very slippery slope.
“When he graduated and came home, it was to discover that he had all but been disinherited in favor of young Robert Armstrong. His father planned to marry Mrs. Armstrong, and when he did, he planned to amend his will.” I gestured at Mackenzie. “Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it, the old man had decided, through some strange sense of propriety, to go through two stages…”
Mackenzie nodded. “That is correct. He felt that until he was married, his estate should go to his own son, so what he had us do was to draw up a will in which his son was the beneficiary of the estate until he died, and after his death it would pass to Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Gordon would effectively hold the estate on trust for Mr. Armstrong. This was never intended to be a long-term solution. He was merely protecting himself until such time as they were married, when he intended to leave his entire estate to his new wife and her son, bar a small endowment to his son.”
I nodded. “Thank you, that was how I understood it. It must have been quite a shock to Charles when he got home to discover that he had gone from being the heir to a fortune to being just like the rest of us. He sought, and found, solace in Pamela May. I am pretty sure he never told her, or anybody else, the exact nature of what his father had done, or Pamela would have dropped him like a hot brick. And at that time, he was pretty sweet on Pamela. Equally, Pamela did not tell him that she had been engaged in an affair with his father.
“Charles decided to marry Pamela. He was in love with her and, after all, had nothing to lose. He had already lost everything. But then, out of resentment and anger, or perhaps because he had inherited some of his father’s craziness, he hatched a plan. We will never know for sure, but I am guessing that he had access to a copy of the will and he studied it in details. Again, correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Mackenzie, but the will said that if Old Man Gordon were to die before his marriage to Mrs. Armstrong, the estate would go to Charles until his death, when it would pass to the Armstrongs.”
“That is correct.”
“So the answer was simple. He had to kill his father and make it look like a suicide. The old man had a reputation for being eccentric, so nobody would be that surprised if he did something crazy like shoot himself. If, in addition, he staged it so that it seemed his father had had some kind of emotional crisis and seen the error of his ways, the suicide scenario would be even more credible.
“What he did next was very ingenious. It had struck me from the start that there was a curious feature to this case: Though the old man was supposed to have shot himself in the study with a Smith & Wesson .38, nobody in the house had heard the shot. A .38 revolver is not quiet! And this happened again when Charles Jr. was killed. The reason was simple.
“There is, where the tower ends and the ballroom begins, a gap between the two structures of about seven feet. I don’t know what its purpose was originally, but now it houses a broom cupboard on the inside, and on the outside a tool shed. The interesting thing is that the tool shed is sunk about four or five feet below ground level…”
Pam spoke for the first time in a voice that was weary and drained of life. She shook her head. “There is no great mystery there, Mr. Stone. Many old houses have something similar. You pick a harvest of potatoes or apples, and you store them below ground level in the dark, they will last the winter that way. There are several such nooks around the house.”
“Well, this one was unique in that the southern wall was in fact the north wall of the study, and one very particular spot gave onto the fireplace.” I smiled at Henry and saw him close his eyes and sigh. “We are least likely to see what is right before our eyes. Just about the center of the fireplace, inside the tool shed
, was at a height of about five and a half feet. Charles took his time, identified the exact spot, and gradually carved away the cement from four of the bricks at just about head height. He left them attached to each other, so that he could slide them out as a single unit. The constant use of the fire meant that any irregularity in the bricks was quickly blackened and covered in soot.
“On the day of the murder, he made a point of telling everyone in the household that he planned to talk to his father about his intention to marry Pam. His father was in the habit of locking himself in the study when he worked. So, when his father was engrossed in his research on the history of his family, Charles went to the tool shed, removed the bricks and shot him in the head. With remarkable coolness, he then put back the bricks, went about the house giving everybody the good news that his father had agreed to the marriage, and went dashing off to tell Pamela.
“He then returned, with the revolver in his pocket, broke down the door, squeezed the revolver into his father’s hand and then dropped it on the floor to make it seem he had shot himself. By this time, a good hour or more since the murder, the fire and smoke had completely erased any sign of the bricks having been removed.