I Saw Him Die

by Andrew Wilson

  “I can understand that there’s been a great deal of distress here,” said the inspector. “But I’m afraid we have to face some rather brutal facts.” He paused as he asked a servant to call for Mrs. Buchanan. As he waited for her, he summarized what Mr. Glenelg had just told us. It was obvious that he was preparing to address some of the questions that were in my own mind. “Mrs. Buchanan, please come and sit down,” he said when he saw the actress by the door. She made a suitably dramatic entrance and, with her head held high, walked across the drawing room and took her seat.

  “As you know, we now believe Mr. Kinmuir’s death to be murder,” he continued. “As you’ve all heard, Mr. Kinmuir’s nephew, James, will only inherit his uncle’s debt, not a fortune as some believed. It has also come to light—and further tests are being carried out as we speak—that Robin Kinmuir’s death was not due to the gun fired by James Kinmuir. The wound to the leg caused some bleeding, yes, but it was not responsible for his death.”

  James Kinmuir’s expression remained impassive, suggesting that he had already been informed of this piece of news. However, as the information snaked its way into the minds of the guests, the implication of Inspector Hawkins’s statement began to spread its sinister poison through the group. But if he didn’t do it, then who was it? Could it be him? Or her? Eyes began to flicker with distrust. Heads turned, but so minutely and delicately that the movement was barely noticeable. Suspicion seeped into the air like an invisible but deadly gas. Each of the guests was consumed by fear. Then an ice-cold blast of logic tried to calm their feverish nerves. But why would a stranger want Kinmuir dead? The whole idea is ludicrous. There must be some reasonable explanation. The inspector must be mistaken. The man must have had a heart attack or some kind of stroke brought on by that gunshot wound. Then the hot tongue of fear licked the back of the neck and the whispers began again. Is there a killer in the house? I was sure X was behaving oddly. What has Y got to hide? I will be certain to lock the door to my room tonight. Or would it be possible to leave the house today?

  All this and more went through the minds of the guests of Dallach Lodge. But none of us was going anywhere.

  “And of course,” said the inspector, “I’m afraid all of you must continue to stay here until the investigation is complete.”

  SEVEN

  Over the course of the next few days, while we waited to hear news of Dr. Fitzpatrick’s postmortem examination, Davison and I tried to make some preliminary inquiries into the case. We did not have much to go on and what we did have did not seem to make sense. A man hit by a gunshot but not killed by it. A next of kin accused of the crime and set to inherit only debt. A mistress with a taste for the dramatic, keen to cast suspicion on a seemingly innocent man.

  We approached the mission with stealth and at tangents. There was no point in advertising our real presence at the house. It was easy enough to make light conversation about the subject. After all, each of the guests seemed keen to share their theories about the death of Robin Kinmuir. Once the initial shock had worn off, no one apart from Mrs. Buchanan seemed to mourn the loss of the laird of the lodge. The actress spent most of the days that followed in her room, occasionally leaving her quarters for a walk by the loch. She dressed in shades of black and gray—selected from her extensive wardrobe—and often sported a pair of very elegant sunglasses. She behaved at all times like the famous actress she was. But how did any of us know what she was really thinking?

  Simon Peterson and Vivienne Passerini continued to enjoy a light flirtation. Their conversation, if transcribed, would seem innocuous enough: talk of travel, ports around the world, both the sightseeing and the squalor. The real meaning of the depth of their attraction was signified by a series of looks, gestures, and sudden heightened charges of what can only be described as electricity.

  Certainly, they made a handsome couple—he with his matinee idol looks, she with her exotic beauty. However, Isabella Frith-Stratton was not pleased by this development, probably because she had assumed, rather foolishly, that Mr. Peterson would be hers. As far as I could make out, Mr. Peterson had only shown a polite interest in her, nothing more. And so she took it upon herself to be rude to Miss Passerini, cutting her down in mid-conversation and turning her head whenever the young woman started to speak.

  When Isabella was not being discourteous to Miss Passerini, she could be found gossiping about the crime with her sister. It started innocently enough: Perhaps Robin Kinmuir had been killed by an adder? They were sure they had read about the risk of the snakes in Scotland. But then their suspicions became darker. Maybe the butler wanted to do him in? After all, Simkins, they said, looked just the sort of servant who would kill his master. His breath smelt of whisky. He was a good-for-nothing sort of man. They had once caught him complaining about doing duties expected of a housekeeper. And did you see the way he looked when that solicitor announced he was going to be given a sum of fifty pounds in his will? He wasn’t at all pleased. He would have liked much more. And would he even get that money now that it had been revealed that Kinmuir had died in debt? How had he frittered away his money? There was a rumor, founded in truth, they said, that Kinmuir used to be a heavy drinker. And no doubt with drink came other vices too—if not gambling then almost certainly women, and women of the worst kind. If there was one expression they used more than any other when discussing the murder it was this: There was no smoke without fire. The sisters repeated it enough to establish the fact that they believed that Kinmuir had brought his death upon himself. That he deserved it.

  James Kinmuir and Rufus Phillips remained reserved and aloof from the rest of the group, but not in a standoffish manner. This had more to do with the unspoken traditions of mourning and the quiet dignity that came with a death in the family than anything resembling arrogance. The two of them avoided the moor, the scene of Kinmuir’s death, and mostly spent their time indoors reading, working through the funeral arrangements, or looking at some of the dusty paintings that hung on the walls. I remembered Rufus telling me of the portrait that he had been working on of Robin Kinmuir. I mentioned to him my interest in seeing it—I told him that I was thinking of commissioning a portrait of my new husband—and, one drizzly afternoon four days after the murder, Rufus showed me into one of the attic rooms that had served as his studio. As I stepped into the bare room I noticed that the air smelt of turpentine. The floorboards were covered in daubs of paint and an easel had been turned to face the wall.

  Rufus Phillips hesitated as he followed me into the room, his eyes fixed on an empty comb-back Windsor chair. “I’m sorry, it’s just that… that’s where Mr. Kinmuir sat when I was—” He broke off as he fought to control his voice. “It seems so odd to see it without him sitting there, telling some wild story.”

  “I can imagine it must be strange for you,” I said. “You know, I would have loved to have been a painter.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes, training oneself to really see, not just with the eyes but with the mind, too. And then to capture the essence of a person. It must be wonderful.”

  “I often think that my work is really just an exercise in failure,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that I’m always disappointed in what I achieve. I get terribly excited by the planning, the preparation, studying a person’s face, working out the dimensions of the portrait, doing the sketches and suchlike. But somehow there’s always a gap between what I see in my head and the finished thing.” He considered what he had just said and gave me a sardonic smile. “I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this. As you might have gathered, I’m hardly a good salesman for my own work.”

  “I’m just the same—when it comes to writing, I mean,” I said. “Sometimes at night I scribble away in my notebook, thinking I’ve had the most thrilling idea, but the next day when I sit down to write the words on the page they feel leaden and forced.”

  “Perhaps it’s the nature of the artistic condition,” he said i
n a mock-pompous voice.

  “Oh, I don’t see myself in such grand terms,” I said, laughing. “I’m just a storyteller—nothing more, nothing less.”

  “I wouldn’t be so self-deprecating,” he said, taking up one of the brushes that stood in a pot of liquid and drying its bristles with an old cloth. “You need to take more pride in your work.”

  “Have you read any of my stories?”

  As he blinked I noticed again the length of his eyelashes. I got the impression that he knew the power of his attractive appearance. I was sure that he had already broken more than a few hearts in his short life.

  “No… no, I haven’t,” he said. “But I’d like to. I’m sure I’d find them—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know they’re not for you.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know what I like?” Was there a note of flirtation in his voice or was I imagining it?

  “Let’s have a look at the portrait,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone. I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. He was beautiful, certainly, but not for me. Besides, soon I would be marrying for the second time.

  Rufus Phillips walked over to the far wall and stopped before he turned the easel to face me. “It’s not quite finished. Normally, I wouldn’t let anyone see a work that was still in progress. But somehow… well, because of what happened, I feel that this serves as a kind of tribute.”

  “Yes, I can understand that,” I said, smiling at the fresh-faced, well-meaning boy. “Did you know Mr. Kinmuir well?”

  “Not really,” he said. “We didn’t have long conversations, if that’s what you mean. But working on a portrait like this, just spending time with someone, I feel that… I don’t know… that I do get a glimpse into…”

  “Into their soul?”

  His eyes lit up and he nodded. “Yes, into their soul.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “With Mr. Kinmuir? Look for yourself.”

  He lifted up the easel and slowly turned it around. I stepped closer to view the painting, which at first sight looked like a series of blocks of color: blacks, reds, beiges, and grays. Then I made out the shape of a man dressed in a pale brown jacket. Here were his hands, his hair, his face. There was his nose, his chin, his cheeks, his jaw. But in the spaces where his eyes should have been, there was nothing but the color of the canvas peeking through.

  “As I said, I’m afraid it’s not very good; and, of course, it’s unfinished,” said Rufus Phillips.

  “I find it fascinating,” I said, grasping for words. Indeed, the portrait was not without its elemental power. The artist had man-aged to capture something about the personality of Robin Kinmuir, but what? There was an air of decadence, of vague corruption, even degeneration about it. Here was a man who had loved and who had suffered, perhaps a little too much on both scores. But it was the absence of the eyes that really unsettled me. Was this because Rufus Phillips had not yet put the finishing touches to the portrait? Or was he trying to suggest something else? “Of course, I’m immediately drawn to the eyes—or the lack of them.”

  He started to laugh. “You mean, you want to know whether that’s a deliberate decision on my part or whether I hadn’t got round to painting them?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I do,” I said.

  He smiled enigmatically. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Well, that’s hardly fair.”

  “That’s as much as you’re going to get, I’m afraid,” he said mischievously.

  A portrait without eyes. What did that mean? A man who could not see—either literally or metaphorically—what was before him? Was Rufus Phillips trying to capture something in Kinmuir’s personality—a certain blindness—or was it something more banal, the simple fact that he hadn’t yet completed those parts of the picture? Or was he trying to make some kind of grand statement about the perilous state of modern society? Any of these was possible, and, maddeningly, the painter refused to discuss the issue.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Yes… yes, I do, very much so,” I said, not quite telling the truth. “I think you really managed to capture something of Mr. Kinmuir. It must have been a fascinating process. You said he told you some wild stories?”

  “Did I?” he said absentmindedly as he studied the portrait as if seeing it for himself for the first time. “Oh, a load of nonsense. Stuff about letters written in invisible ink, cryptic clues written on glass with a silver point, which are then made visible with a special solution made up of God knows what. I didn’t take him seriously.”

  I had to mask my surprise. “That sounds interesting. I wonder what he was talking about.”

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” Rufus Phillips said, stepping away from the portrait. “He went on and on about some chaps he knew—now, what were they called?—Tinsley and Cameron. One, he said, was a scoundrel who was partial to a bit of blackmail. Actually, blackmail on what sounds like a grand scale: he had fleeced two hundred thousand pounds out of some companies in Holland by threatening to put them on a list that said they had dealt with German firms during the war. The other, this Cameron fellow, was locked up after pulling off some fraud involving a pearl necklace. Apparently he took the blame for it when really it was the fault of his wife, a woman who was addicted to morphine.”

  “Gosh, that does sound rather wild,” I said.

  “Robin was adamant that all this—and more—would make good material for his memoirs.”

  “Really?”

  “And that he saw no reason why he shouldn’t follow the example set by… now who was it?… a chap called Dukes, who had written about his life in a series of articles for the Tatler.”

  I remembered the pieces written by Sir Paul Dukes, a master of disguise who had been knighted for his services and celebrated for his ability to infiltrate a wide range of Bolshevik and communist organizations. Yet, when the features had appeared in the magazine earlier that year, they caused something of a stir. I recalled Davison reacting with horror. Even though Dukes had not given away anything of any particular import and had not placed his colleagues at risk, there was a sense within the Secret Intelligence Service that his actions were unforgivable. There was a code of silence that should never be broken.

  As Rufus continued to talk about his sessions with Robin Kinmuir—about how difficult it had been to capture his personality, his choice of colors for the portrait, the size of the canvas, and so on—I began to wonder about the manner in which the man had been murdered. If he had not died due to the shotgun wound, then how had he been killed? And if James Kinmuir was innocent—as Inspector Hawkins seemed to believe—then who was behind the death? Could someone have heard Kinmuir talking about his exploits to Rufus? What if the Secret Intelligence Service knew that Kinmuir intended to try to write his memoirs? Would they go so far as to try to silence him—perhaps even kill him?

  As these questions circled through my mind I began to feel a little dizzy. I walked over to the window and opened it a few inches. The fresh air helped restore me. However, there was one uncomfortable thought that continued to unsettle me. Another person had been up there on the moor when Robin Kinmuir had died. He had slept in the man’s dressing room the night before the murder. He had the knowledge and the ability to kill someone using a wide array of methods and techniques. That person was Davison.

  EIGHT

  Davison was, I felt sure, avoiding me. Whenever I tried to catch his eye, his gaze seemed to drift away from me or he would focus on another person in the room, initiating a conversation about the weather, touring in the Highlands and islands, the various old myths surrounding Skye—in short, anything but endure an encounter with me. After dinner, unable to tolerate his resistance any longer, I waited for the house to go to sleep before I stole along the corridors and knocked on the door of his bedroom. There was no answer.

  “Davison, it’s me—Agatha,” I whispered. “I need to talk to you.”

  I heard footsteps appro
ach the door. “I was about to get into bed,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s important.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m afraid it can’t.”

  Davison turned the handle and allowed me into the large room. As I entered he turned his head from me like a guilty child who knows he has done something wrong. I didn’t say anything, hoping that the silence would prompt him into talking to me.

  “I thought you said you had something you wanted to say,” he said, turning up the collar of his red silk dressing gown. “Have you discovered something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Rufus Phillips showed me the portrait he was painting of Robin Kinmuir.”

  “Any good?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a little too modernistic for my liking. All blocks of color. Sharp angles. Fragmented lines.”

  “So definitely of the non-realist school, then.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “But I doubt you’ve come to talk to me about the style of Mr. Phillips’s art.”

  “No,” I said, sighing. “Rufus told me a little of the conversation that took place between him and Robin Kinmuir during their portrait sessions together.”

  “And?”

  “It seems as though Robin Kinmuir had rather a loose tongue.”

  “Insofar as?”

  “His work with the Intelligence Service.” I let the meaning of the words sink in. “But presumably you must have known this—that Kinmuir was thinking of writing his memoirs?”

  “Ah, that,” he said. “Yes, Hartford mentioned something along those lines.”

  I’d had arguments with Davison before, the most heated of which were about this very issue: how much, or how little, he chose to tell me of a specific case. I knew there was no point in losing my temper. Not only was it late at night, and I couldn’t risk waking up the other guests, but Davison was not the kind of man who responded to a raised voice or a cross word. Instead, I let my silence speak for itself.