I Saw Him Die

by Andrew Wilson

  I listened out for signs of disturbance in the house, but the hours of darkness seemed to pass without incident. I took advantage of the quiet to read through the pages I had taken from Simkins’s room. It looked as though the butler had been trying to compose a blackmail letter. Certain sentences had been written down—“If you do not do what I ask, then there will be consequences for you”—before being reworked and reworded—“Serious consequences will result from a failure to meet my demands.” But to whom had he been writing? I searched through the fragments of sentences for a clue, but there was no hint of a name.

  I flicked through my notebook and saw the jagged edges of the missing pages wrenched out by Simkins. Fortunately, I didn’t think I had written anything too revealing on them. I continued to read my observations about the case. I scribbled down a few random thoughts and used a series of arrows and question marks to help visualize the complex puzzle that lay before me. I wrote down the possible motives for each of my suspects. Once more I studied the nursery rhyme of “Who Killed Cock Robin?” My mind went over the facts of the murders and how they fitted into the tale. I thought of all the different birds and creatures in the story. Cock Robin—that was the first victim, Robin Kinmuir. The sparrow was, by virtue of her name, Vivienne Passerini, the killer. Then there was the fly, who had witnessed the crime. That surely had to be old Mrs. Kinmuir, who, before her own murder, had said those words to me: L’ho visto morire. But she had been blind and could not see.

  What was it that I could not see? I felt there was something so obvious, just out of reach, sitting on the edge of my peripheral vision. I closed my eyes, making myself blind to the world. Darkness shrouded me. Faces loomed out of the gloom, a grotesque lineup of people who had come to Dallach Lodge. The Frith-Stratton sisters. Simon Peterson. Vivienne Passerini. All of them had said they had wanted to see Robin Kinmuir be punished and been drawn to Skye to witness his suffering. Mrs. Buchanan. Dr. Fitzpatrick. I had discovered they were bound by something that had happened in the past relating to the death of Kinmuir’s first wife, Catherine. Inspector Hawkins’s family had a historic hatred of the Kinmuir clan. James Kinmuir, the man who had shot his uncle, would only inherit an enormous debt. Rufus Phillips had nothing in his past to connect him to the Kinmuirs other than his friendship with James. And then there was Simkins, who had more or less admitted he knew something of the murders.

  I thought of Vivienne Passerini, locked up in that cell in Portree. Hawkins had her down as a cold-blooded killer. I was keen to clear her name, believing that she had been framed for the murders. But what if she was behind the crimes all along? Had she planted false evidence which would clear her? After all, if she stood trial and was then acquitted, she could never be found guilty of the murder again. What were the other possibilities? I ran through yet more permutations, but none seemed to make sense.

  I desperately needed sleep but knew I could not risk it. I walked over to the open window to get some fresh air. In the distance, across the water from Skye, the dawn was breaking, sending delicate shards of pink light across the black mountains of the Knoydart Peninsula.

  I went over to check on Mr. Peterson. He opened his eyes and asked for a sip of water. The effects of the emetic were beginning to wear off, but he knew that he would have to play his designated role, that of a dead man, for some time yet. Soon, as we had agreed, Dr. Fitzpatrick would announce to everyone in the house that, in the early hours of the morning, Mr. Peterson had passed away. Of course, nobody—not even the inspector—would be allowed in to view the body. The doctor had his story ready. Dr. Fitzpatrick would tell them that the corpse was in no fit state to be seen. In an effort to save Mr. Peterson, he had had to perform a number of procedures which had left the body in a rather distressing condition. Also, he could not guarantee that anyone stepping into the room would be immune from picking up something nasty, possibly even a trace of the poison itself. Mr. Peterson’s death throes had been particularly violent, and, if people really wanted to know, he could detail the unpleasant nature of the man’s final moments.

  I went over to Dr. Fitzpatrick and placed my hand on his shoulder. The doctor woke up immediately and apologized for having fallen asleep.

  “It’s time,” I whispered. “You need to tell everyone that there’s been another murder.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I opened the door to find the inspector’s chair empty. The doctor followed me out of Simon’s room and I locked the door behind us. The house was quiet and it seemed everyone was still sequestered in their quarters. I wondered what Davison had been doing during the hours of darkness.

  Weak light started to creep through some of the east-facing windows of the house. Even though it was August there was something of a chill. I should have brought my shawl with me, I thought to myself, as a shiver played up my spine. I walked down the stairs, but there was no one there.

  “Inspector?” Dr. Fitzpatrick called out. “Hawkins—where are you?”

  One of the maids, up early to clean the rooms, appeared and told us that the inspector had left the house by the front entrance about ten minutes before. The two Labradors had followed him and Hawkins had said that he would take them for a quick walk. Since the death of their master, the dogs had been at a loss. They spent the day wandering around the house, whining, no doubt hoping to catch a glimpse of their master. But Robin Kinmuir was never coming back. The only time they seemed to perk up, their faces full of hope, was at breakfast when James Kinmuir would give them a piece of sausage meat from his plate. How I wished, as I peered into their sad black eyes, they could tell me what they had seen that day. They were dumb witnesses to the crime, full of knowledge but unable to communicate what they knew.

  After I retrieved my coat from the hall I stepped out into the early morning air. Mist swirled around the sea loch, and as I stood there, putting on my gabardine, I admired the beauty of the view. The next thing I knew I felt the skin on my neck begin to itch. An insect had bitten me. I recalled that fateful morning when a midge had played its part in the death of Robin Kinmuir. He had taken the top off a midge bite while he was shaving, and the curare on the razor blade had seeped into his bloodstream. Shortly afterwards, while on his walk across the moors and after being accidentally shot by his nephew, he collapsed and died. As I scratched the bite on my neck, I tried to recall who else had mentioned midges. Yes, that very first night I remembered the Frith-Stratton sisters talking about the problem. And one night at dinner, when we were discussing South America and its exotic snakes and spiders, Isabella had said, It’s bad enough here with these midges. Even if I lived here, I don’t suppose I would get used to them. The late Mr. Kinmuir was a sufferer, I believe.

  The explanation could be a simple one—she was merely repeating something Kinmuir had said—but could this also be a clue that Isabella had played some part in his murder? After all, the person behind the crime—the one who had smeared the curare on that razor—would have had to have known that Robin Kinmuir had been bitten on the throat by a midge. The Frith-Strattons confessed that they had a motive: the ruination of their father by Robin Kinmuir. But was this the whole picture? Did that confession not mask another, darker story? For all their frumpiness and pathetic attempts to win romance where none existed, there was a strange blankness to the two sisters, particularly May. I thought back to some of my conversations with her and realized that she often said things not in a spontaneous manner but by rote, as if she had learnt her lines off by heart.

  “Have you been bitten?” asked Dr. Fitzpatrick as he saw me scratch my neck.

  “Yes, but let’s start walking; we need to find the inspector,” I said, using my hand to fan away any other flying insects that might be lurking.

  “Hawkins!” cried Dr. Fitzpatrick.

  “Over here,” answered the inspector.

  We ran towards the sound of his voice and found Hawkins standing by the door to the old stable block. The dogs had been tied to a post, but there was a manic look in the
ir eyes as they struggled to free themselves. When the inspector saw me, he raised a hand to indicate I should not proceed. He gestured for the doctor to enter the stable.

  “I’m afraid to say that Peterson hasn’t made it,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick.

  “Oh, damn,” said Hawkins.

  “We did everything we could to save him, but it was no use,” said the doctor.

  “I hope he died an agonizing death,” said Hawkins. “After what he did, he deserved to.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Peterson was the one behind all of this, all the deaths,” said Hawkins. “I would have liked to have seen him punished for his crimes, but at least it’s over now.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.

  “The answer’s inside this stable and it’s not something a lady should see.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s Simkins,” said Hawkins. “He’s hanged himself.”

  Although Hawkins tried to stop me, I pushed my way into the stable. The space was dark and gloomy and faintly smelt still of the animals that had once been kept there. Hanging from one of the beams was the body of the butler. His face was bloated and ugly and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. I turned away, not needing to see any more. Simkins was an unpleasant man, no doubt a blackmailer. But he didn’t deserve this.

  “I was about to cut him down when I heard you calling,” said Hawkins. “Here, Fitzpatrick, could you help?”

  The two men cut the rope and laid Simkins on the ground, next to an empty whisky bottle.

  “I found this on the floor near the body,” said the inspector, holding a sheet of paper. “It’s Simkins’s suicide note.”

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “Let me read it to you,” said Hawkins, clearing his throat.

  “It’s all too much. I can’t go on. I can’t carry on living like this, knowing what I’ve done. I hope by poisoning Peterson I can bring an end to this living nightmare. I wish I had never set eyes on him. I should never have taken his money.

  “He told me that all he wanted to do was give Mr. Kinmuir a bit of a shock. He said that the stuff I was to put on his razor blade was just something to make his face swell up. He wanted the master to be made to look a fool in front of his guests. And he said he would pay me handsomely for it, a sum of two hundred pounds. I didn’t know that what I had put on his razor would kill him.

  “I tried to argue with Peterson. I told him I would go to the police. But he said that I was the one who had put that poison on the razor blade. And I would be the one who would hang for it. And so I kept quiet. But when he went on to kill old Mrs. Kinmuir, I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. What had she done to hurt him? But Peterson said he wanted to wipe out the whole lot of the Kinmuirs. He hated the family for what Robin Kinmuir had done to his father. He talked about something in the past in some foreign place that resulted in his father’s death. And he said young Mr. Kinmuir would be next.

  “And then that nice Miss Passerini was arrested for the murders. Peterson pretended to love her, but he framed her for the crimes. He placed an earring belonging to Miss Passerini in Mrs. Kinmuir’s room and hid that paper knife, the one that had been used to stab the old lady in the back of the neck, among the young lady’s things. That was a wicked thing to do. And I couldn’t let Miss Passerini hang for a crime she never committed.

  “And so I took the matter into my hands. I couldn’t live with myself for what had happened. And I couldn’t let Peterson commit another murder. I found the poison I put down for the rats and I slipped some of that into his food. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being saved and so I slashed the tires of all the cars at the lodge, bashed in the bottom of the boat, and cut the wire of the telephone.

  “I hope he dies. I hope he rots in hell. He deserves to for what he did. And so do I.”

  When Hawkins finished, he looked up with an expression of finality. It seemed that the letter had explained everything. “It certainly throws light on why Simkins was in such a state when I saw him with you and Mr. Davison yesterday,” said the inspector. “No wonder he was drinking. After poisoning Peterson, he must have known what he had to do. There was no turning back.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “He was in a very delicate frame of mind.”

  “So I suppose this is an end to it, thank goodness,” said the inspector.

  “It certainly seems like it,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick, continuing to play his part well. “I suppose the man’s conscience got the better of him.”

  “And Peterson certainly had me fooled, that’s for sure,” said Hawkins. “All that nonsense of him pretending to care for Miss Passerini when in truth he was framing her. And all for what? Something that had happened in the past.”

  “I suppose Peterson must have gone insane,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick. “I’ve read about such cases.”

  “Sins of the father and all that,” said Hawkins rather gloomily. “Anyway, we can’t stand around here. There’s lots to do. Someone needs to walk to the nearest house and get a message to Portree. The bodies will have to be taken away. And, of course, Miss Passerini will be freed from her cell.” He paused as he acknowledged that had it not been for Simkins’s actions against Peterson and his suicide note, Miss Passerini would probably have hanged. “I’m going to have to issue a fulsome apology to that young lady. I hope she’ll understand that I only went on what the evidence seemed to suggest.”

  “I’m sure she’ll come round to your point of view,” I said. “But I suppose she has to come to terms with the greater pain of knowing that she was deceived by someone whom she thought cared for her: Simon Peterson.”

  “Yes, that’s going to be a hard blow to take,” said Hawkins, folding up Simkins’s suicide note and placing it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Inspector,” I said, “could I have a quick look at what Simkins wrote?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, taking it out and passing it over to me.

  The note was written in black ink on a sheet of thick, cream-colored writing paper, probably taken from the desk in the library. I read through it once more. On the face of it, it all made perfect sense. Simkins’s account explained the motives for the crimes and how everything fitted together. There were, of course, a few facts that the inspector could not be aware of: it was I who had administered the poison to Mr. Peterson, but the poison was not arsenic, merely an emetic, something to make him sick; and, most important, Mr. Peterson was very much alive.

  The one thing that surprised me about the appearance of the note was that its style was messy, with some words trailing off into a scrawl and a most distinctive, curved capital letter I. It was the opposite of Simkins’s hand, which was, I knew, neat and tidy and ever so precise.

  I had to do everything in my power to keep the surprise from registering on my face. For the suicide note appeared as though it had been written by me.

  “Anything the matter?” asked the inspector as he untied the dogs and pulled them away from the stable block.

  “No, nothing at all,” I said. “A very sad state of affairs. But as you say, at least it’s over now. And Simkins’s confession has come just in time to save Miss Passerini’s life. It would have been awful if she had hanged and become another of Mr. Peterson’s victims.”

  Hawkins held his hand out for the letter. I hesitated slightly before giving it back. Even if Hawkins was the killer, there was no way he would destroy the suicide note, because it cleared him of every last trace of guilt.

  Whoever was behind the murders no doubt thought that the note—and that “suicide”—was a masterstroke. But in fact, I was convinced that it would prove to be the killer’s biggest mistake.

  I ran through the sequence of events that had occurred at the lodge. At last, it was all beginning to make sense.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Just then we heard the sound of a car approaching the lodge. We
rushed to the front of the house and saw Mr. Glenelg, the solicitor, and his two assistants emerging from the vehicle. The lawyer who had read Robin Kinmuir’s will had returned to undertake the inventory.

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am you’re here,” said the inspector as he greeted the lawyer. “The phone line has been cut and the tires on all the cars have been slashed.” Hawkins then gave his précis of the events of the night, ending with the revelation that Mr. Peterson—the man the inspector believed to be behind all the murders—had been killed by his blackmailer, Simkins the butler.

  The elderly Mr. Glenelg listened to the account with a certain amount of dispassion, but even he, a man whose entire professional life had been spent in the law, was finding it difficult to contain his shock.

  “So you mean there have been two more deaths?” asked the solicitor.

  “Yes, that’s right, but I’m pleased to say we can finally draw a line under the whole sorry business,” said Hawkins. “We have a suicide note from Simkins which explains everything.” The inspector related how Simkins had slashed the tires on the cars, smashed the bottom of the boat, and cut the telephone wire. “I made a terrible mistake in arresting Miss Passerini and I need to ask you something. It’s essential I take your car to get back to Portree. Not only do I need to oversee the release of Miss Passerini, but I also need to send an ambulance to retrieve the bodies.”

  “My, what a night you’ve had,” said Mr. Glenelg with understatement. “Yes, of course you must take the car. I can start the inventory of the house with MacBrayne and Braes and we should be finished by the end of the day. You’ll be back by then, I trust?”

  Hawkins assured him that he would. “And while you’re doing the inventory, could I ask you to avoid the stable block where Simkins hanged himself and the room on the first floor? Yes, that one there,” he said, pointing to the room at the front of the house, which still had its window open. “Peterson died in there. Once the bodies have been removed, you can come back and check the rooms.”