Ayrshire Murders

by E R Dillon

  When he was ready, he rolled up the count’s belt and stuffed it into the pouch at his side. He crossed the courtyard to the castle and went up to the count’s chamber. He found the count sleeping soundly and left him undisturbed, since rest was the best remedy for illness or injury.

  He then sought out the officer of the watch to assign three soldiers to him. He sent the first soldier to guard the count’s door, with orders to let no one into the chamber except John Logan or himself. If anyone else tried to gain entry, the soldier was to notify Kyle immediately.

  The second soldier was dispatched with a message to Sir Percy advising of the count’s return, his condition, and that a guard had been posted at his door.

  Kyle took the third soldier with him to the stable to saddle their horses. Together, they rode from the garrison, passing through near-empty streets on their way to where Inchcape stood watch over his captain’s body.

  The Bull and Bear Tavern was a two-story, wood-framed structure situated among the fine stone houses built along Harbour Street facing the River Ayr. An alley on either side separated the public establishment from its well-to-do neighbors.

  The beasts depicting the tavern’s namesakes had been carved into a weathered board, which hung from a signpost out front. Inside the wide gates, a stable on one side and sleeping quarters on the other formed a small courtyard, where travelers could debark from either horse or carriage safely on the tavern’s doorstep.

  Unlike other taverns in the vicinity, which offered a quiet respite to townsfolk at the end of a long workday, the Bull and Bear catered to English soldiers from the garrison who indulged in gaming and drinking, and whose rowdy conduct often led to drunken brawls. The sleeping quarters weren’t all that clean, but they were handy, and the tavern keeper turned quite a profit renting them out by the hour for purposes other than sleeping.

  Kyle and the English soldier with him rode into the Bull and Bear’s courtyard and dismounted. He noticed two men and two women standing together outside the tavern door. From their haggard appearance, he surmised their slumber had been interrupted.

  One of the men, a short, heavyset fellow in a rumpled black velvet tunic and pointed red slippers, broke from the group and hurried over to greet Kyle.

  “It’s not my fault that Southron got himself killed,” the man said, wringing his pudgy hands. “This is a respectable tavern. Always has been.”

  “Are you the keeper?” Kyle said.

  “Aye,” the tavern keeper said. His small dark eyes darted from Kyle to the English soldier, then back to Kyle. “Are ye the marshal from the garrison?”

  “I am deputy to the sheriff of Ayrshire,” Kyle said. “Who are those people?” He indicated the man and the two women who were watching his every move.

  The tavern keeper drew himself to full height, which barely reached Kyle’s shoulder. “They work for me.”

  “I’ll need to speak to each of them,” Kyle said. To the English soldier beside him, he said, “Close the gates and bar them. Let no one in or out, except for John Logan.” His eyes rested on the tavern keeper. “That applies to him as well.”

  “Are ye shutting me down?” the tavern keep said, incredulous.

  “For the time being,” Kyle said. His gaze swept the buildings hemming the courtyard. “Is there another way out of here?”

  “There’s a door to the kitchen out back,” the tavern keeper said. “It leads to the alley.”

  “What about the windows overlooking the alley?” Kyle said, tilting his head toward the sleeping quarters on the second floor.

  “They are quite narrow,” the tavern keep said. He puffed out his chest with proprietorial pride. “I built them that way to keep folks honest.” The mild curiosity on Kyle’s face prompted him to add, by way of explanation, “Patrons cannot climb out the windows, ye see, so they must come down to pay their bill.”

  Kyle acknowledged the tavern keeper’s ingenuity with a nod of approval before escorting him over to where the other man stood beside the two women. That man was middle-aged, with a nose curved like a hawk’s beak under close-set brown eyes. The women, on closer inspection, were adolescent girls, with close-set brown eyes over a less prominent version of the man’s hawklike nose.

  “Which of you discovered the body?” he said, directing his query to all of them.

  “I did,” the tavern keeper said, “but only at the behest of Sergeant Inchcape, and only because I had the keys to open the door to Captain Sweeney’s room. Otherwise, I would still be abed, which is where I belong.” He stifled a yawn to emphasize his point.

  “What do you do here?” Kyle said to the hawk-nosed man.

  “I work in the kitchen,” the man said. “My daughters help with the cooking.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “All night?”

  “I sleep there,” the man said. “My daughters sleep there, too.” He turned a hostile and forbidding countenance on the tavern keeper. “My presence keeps the Southrons from dallying with my girls.”

  “I have no control over those Southrons,” the tavern keeper said, in a whining tone. “Ye should know that by now.”

  “Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary last night?” Kyle said.

  The man shook his head. “Neither did they,” he said, before Kyle could make a similar inquiry of the girls. “They was with me the whole time.” His close-set brown eyes held Kyle’s gaze in an unwavering stare. “In the kitchen.”

  The man was lying, and Kyle knew it. Perhaps Sweeney tried to “dally” with one of the girls, and the man killed him in a fit of rage. He scrapped that theory, however, since anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have fled after committing such a crime, as fear often prompted the guilty to do. Although capable of violence, the man appeared to be the sensible sort who would take flight if necessary, and enough of a parent to bring his daughters with him.

  The thought then crept into Kyle’s mind that the man might have recognized Sweeney’s murderer and was determined to shield him.

  Or her.

  Kyle’s eyes strayed to the girls as possible suspects. The gullibility and innocence radiating from each of them caused him to reject the notion without even giving it another thought.

  “You and your daughters are free to go,” he said to the man. He watched them leave, resigning himself to look elsewhere for the murderer.

  “What about me?” the tavern keeper said.

  “Don’t leave the premises,” Kyle said. “I may need you later.”

  Voices coming from the direction of the gate brought his head around. He started across the courtyard, leaving the disgruntled tavern keeper muttering under his breath.

  “Good morrow, Master John,” Kyle said, drawing near to the older man to whom the English soldier admitted entry. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  John returned his greeting. “Upton told me Sweeney is dead,” he said, dismounting from his mule. His gray hair glistened with early morning dampness. Gray stubble bristled on his chin, unshaved apparently because of his haste to meet Kyle. “He also mentioned somebody got stabbed in the woods. His details were rather sketchy, so perhaps ye can fill me in.”

  Kyle told John about the attack on them during the night and their subsequent retreat back to the garrison.

  John whistled low, shaking his head. “If they had succeeded in killing the French envoy,” he said, “King Philip would no doubt place Scottish vessels under the same embargo he imposed on English ships. That would cripple our trade relations with Flanders. The only thing worse would be if Philip declared war on Scotland. We can ill afford to have both France and England fighting against us.” He started, as though something just occurred to him. “Should I not attend to the envoy’s wound without delay?”

  “I looked in on him earlier,” Kyle said. “He should be all right until you finish here. I won’t keep you that long.” With his back to the English soldier, he removed Count Jardine’s be
lt from his pouch. He lifted the thin leather flap along the inner side to expose the folded pieces of vellum concealed along its length. “I want you to place this in a jar and hide it somewhere in your shop. Seal the cover with wax and sprinkle it with dust so it won’t stand out from the other jars.”

  John took the belt, rolled it up, and shoved it to the bottom of his medicament pouch, burying it under containers of salve and rolls of bandages. “It appears to be documents of some kind. Have ye read them yet?”

  “Nay,” Kyle said. “When Count Jardine is well enough to travel, you must return the belt to him. Until then, let no one know you have it. Don’t even tell me where you put it.”

  “As ye wish. What about Sweeney? Have ye any idea who killed him?”

  “I have my suspicions,” Kyle said. “But first, I’d like you to take a look at his body. I need your best estimate as to the time of death.”

  He led the way into the dark interior of the tavern and up the steep wooden steps against the back wall. At the top of the stairs, light from a tiny window on the landing dispelled the gloom in the long hallway ahead of him. With John trailing behind him, he approached the man standing guard at one of the seven rooms on the second floor. The door to the guarded room was closed, whereas the other doors along the hallway were open.

  The guard was an English soldier, a big muscular man in his forties, with a flat broken nose in a brutish face and a drooping mustache that framed thin lips and a clean-shaven chin. He was completely bald, and when he turned toward Kyle and John advancing on him, light glistened on the oily surface of his skull-like head.

  “Sergeant Inchcape,” Kyle said. “Upton told me you’d be here.”

  “So you’re the sheriff’s deputy,” Inchcape said. The words sounded like the rumble of thunder, so deep was his voice. Calculating eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, swept Kyle from tawny head to booted toe, taking his measure. He seemed to revel in the fact that he was brawnier and taller than the lawman standing before him.

  Kyle took an instant dislike to Inchcape and saw his own sentiment reflected back to him. There was something predatory about the way the man watched him. The two of them eyed each other like a pair of dogs about to scrap over a single bone, hackles up, ready to go for the throat.

  John looked from one to the other. “We’re here to examine Captain Sweeney’s body.”

  “And to investigate his murder,” Kyle said. “Tell me, Sergeant, why did you ask the tavern keeper to open Captain Sweeney’s door earlier this morning?”

  “Because it was locked,” Inchcape said.

  For a brief moment, Kyle wondered if Inchcape was trying to be witty. He dismissed the notion at once, for there was no trace of humor on the man’s face. “Let me put it to you another way. Why did you want to get into his room?”

  “Jack never answered when I called out to him,” Inchcape said. “He came here often, but not too long ago, he had a little run-in with a jealous husband. After that, he liked me to stay close in case there was trouble. I was kind of weary last night, so I sat down outside the door just to rest my eyes. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was morning.”

  “If you were sleeping,” Kyle said, “he might have left without you knowing it.”

  “Not Jack,” Inchcape said with conviction. “He always let me know when he was ready to leave. He never liked to spend the whole night here.”

  “So, you called out to him,” Kyle said. “Then what did you do?”

  “I knocked to see if he was, uh, busy,” Inchcape said. “He never answered, so I called out to him again. He still didn’t answer, and that’s not like him. I roused the tavern keeper and got him to unlock the door.” Color ebbed from his face. “That’s when we found him.”

  “Did you or the tavern keeper touch anything?”

  “We never even went in.”

  “If you didn’t go in,” Kyle said, “how can you be sure the murderer wasn’t still in the room? The tavern keeper bragged that nobody could climb out of those windows.”

  “I didn’t see anybody in there,” Inchcape said, his tone defensive.

  “Not if he was hiding behind the door,” Kyle said, gritting his teeth. “I don’t suppose you posted someone to watch the room while you went to fetch Upton?”

  Inchcape shook his massive head, his expression like that of a scolded child.

  “I didn’t think so,” Kyle said. He took a deep breath and plunged on. “Since you didn’t check his condition, how did you know he was dead?”

  “Oh, he was dead, all right,” Inchcape said. He stepped aside to let them enter the room, favoring his left leg as he did so. “See for yourself.”

  The sight of Inchcape’s limp made Kyle wonder whether the man might have been the assailant on whom he inflicted a flesh wound with his dirk last night. There was no use asking him how he came by his injury because he would only lie about it, as the guilty were prone to do.

  Looking into Sweeney’s murder was more important at that moment, so Kyle brushed past Inchcape to open the door and walk into the small room.

  The metallic scent of blood tainted the air, as he expected. What he saw was totally unexpected. “God have mercy!” he cried, stopping so abruptly that John bumped into his back.

  John leaned around Kyle’s shoulder to peer into the room, only to draw in a sharp breath.

  A stub of a candle burned listlessly in its holder on the bedside table until a sudden draft from the open door sent the flame dancing. Sallow highlights and deep shadows flickered across Sweeney’s body sprawled on the bed, lending to it a macabre animation. The man lay on his stomach, dressed only in leggings, his head turned toward the entryway. His eyes were wide and staring, his lips parted as though in astonishment. The play of light and darkness across his once-handsome face gave the impression that his mouth was moving.

  After recovering from the initial shock of seeing a dead man come to life, Kyle chided himself for overreacting to nothing more than an illusion caused by the wavering flame.

  He let his gaze rove around the room. The furnishings consisted of a bed and a table on which the candle sat, with a pitcher and a bowl beside it. The window in the outer wall was tall enough to admit light, yet its limited width prohibited anyone but a child from crawling through it.

  He noted the stippling of dried blood on the bedcovers around the body and on the wall above the bed. A black puddle stained the floor at the foot of the bed, with long smears in it that reached all the way to the doorway. There were dark streaks on the wood casing and on the door handle inside the room.

  “That’s strange,” he said, frowning down at the dead man.

  “What do ye see?” John said from the doorway.

  “There’s blood everywhere,” Kyle said, “except on the body.”

  John entered the room, picking his way with care around the bloodstains on the floor to cross over to the table. He ran his finger over the last hour-marker scored into the thick base of the candle. “If this was new when he lit it, then he’s been here for nearly seven hours.”

  “When did he die, do you think?” Kyle said.

  John tested the rigidity of Sweeney’s limbs. “I’d say four, maybe five hours ago.” He closed the sightless eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  “That would put the time of death shortly after midnight,” Kyle said. “That’s about when we got back to the garrison last night.”

  John made a cursory inspection of the body. “There are no marks anywhere on his back. Help me turn him.”

  Kyle went around the far side of the bed and put his hands on the cold flesh of Sweeney’s arm. It was then he spotted the purple bruise on the upper right shoulder. “Well, well,” he said to himself. Macalister suspected Sweeney of leading the raid on Ogilvy’s homestead, and here was proof, which he put there with his own battle axe.

  He and John grappled with rolling the body over, its rigid legs extended and its stiff arms raised as though to ward off calamity. The
bedcover came up with it, glued to bare skin with dried blood.

  John peeled back the encrusted fabric, exposing a thin gash on the left side of Sweeney’s chest. “The blade slid between the ribs and pierced his heart. Blood from a wound like that can spurt out with great force.”

  “That would account for the mess up there,” Kyle said, glancing at the dried blood spattered on the wall. He came around the bed to look over John’s shoulder.

  “See that?” John said, indicating the slashed skin under Sweeney’s chin. “A wound like that bleeds profusely. Yet, there’s very little blood here, which means it was done postmortem.” He beckoned for Kyle to lean closer. “Do ye see that old scarring on his neck?” He pointed to the thin white stripes in the mutilated flesh. “Somebody tried to slit his throat some time ago, but he managed to survive it.”

  “I reckon that’s how he earned the name ‘Lucky Jack,’ ” Kyle said. He looked for scratches, especially those made by fingernails, on Sweeney’s arms and upper body, but the bare skin was without blemish, except for the angry red stab wound on his chest.

  He was about to move away from the bed when he saw something on the floor between the table and the wall. He dragged aside the table and retrieved a linen shirt stained with blood. Wrapped within its folds was a solid object that, when he shook it out, clattered to the floor. It was a dagger, with polished gems studding the hilt and a long thin blade caked with dried blood.

  He showed the dagger to John. “Could this be what killed him?”

  John matched the width of the blade against the size of the fatal wound in Sweeney’s chest. “Either it or one just like it.”

  Kyle called Inchcape into the room. “Have you ever seen this dagger before?” he said holding it up for the man’s inspection.

  Inchcape reached for the dagger. “It belongs to Jack.”

  Kyle stayed Inchcape’s hand. “This may be the murder weapon. As such, I must turn it over to Sir Percy. He can then send it on to Captain Sweeney’s family.”

  “Fair enough,” Inchcape said. “Jack’s wife will want to keep it for their son.”