The Complete Kate Benedict Cozy British Mysteries

by Carrie Bedford

  “No rush.” I continued along the hallway towards Lucy’s room. Her door also stood open. I knocked on the frame and called out, but there was no answer.

  Taking a step inside, I called Lucy’s name again, loud enough that she could hear me from the bathroom. An open suitcase sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, spilling clothes out onto the Persian rug. Amidst the pile of silk and wool was a book. With its blue and white cover, it looked like my Short History of Castle Aiten. Had Lucy taken it? Without stopping to consider what I was doing, I hurried over and picked it up. Immediately, I saw that it wasn’t the History after all, but a paperback text book on medieval architecture, the kind of thing I would like to read myself. As I turned it over to look at the back cover, a piece of paper slipped from between the pages. I caught it before it fluttered to the floor and saw that it was a press clipping, a short article in French, with the word Fabergé in the headline. Accompanying the text was a photo of a decorative egg covered in jewels and set on a stand. My French wasn’t very good, but I knew enough to decipher the date, March 25, six months ago.

  Suddenly acutely aware that I was trespassing and looking through someone else’s things, I slid the clipping back into the book, almost certainly between the wrong pages. I had just put the book in its place on the rug when I heard floorboards creaking in the corridor. Three fast strides got me to the door where I took a breath, ready to explain to Lucy that I’d stopped by to see if she wanted to take a walk with me. It was Mrs. Dunsmore, however, not Lucy, and she was carrying a stack of bedding so high she could hardly see around it. I slipped into the hallway.

  “Let me help you,” I offered.

  “Och, thank ye. We’re almost done, but Fiona’s very slow with the vacuuming.” She glanced at Lucy’s door. “Did Fiona leave that door open? I tell her to leave everything as she finds it, but her mind’s on other things. Boys mostly.”

  9

  After depositing the linens in one of the guest rooms under the direction of Mrs. Dunsmore, I wandered through the picture gallery, wondering how long it would be before Josh and Fergus returned. As I passed the top of the main staircase, I saw Lachlan down in the entry hall. Although reluctant to approach him, I knew I needed to talk to him. He’d been on the estate even longer than the housekeeper, and would have good reason to nurse a grievance against Fergus because of the sale. I took a step down as he opened the front door. I didn’t know him well enough to call out to him, so I hurried to catch his attention. He’d gone, though, by the time I got to the bottom step, and had pulled the door closed behind him. I wondered if he was deliberately avoiding me as I hauled it back open, marveling at how heavy it was.

  The storm had passed, leaving behind a blustery wind that bent the bare tree branches and roared around the eaves above my head. I could go after Lachlan, who was marching down the driveway with intent, his rifle resting on his arm, or I could delay that unpleasant interaction, avoid the bad weather and do some more research on the priory. It wasn’t a hard decision to make. Instead, I retraced my steps to the library and my armchair. Thinking of what Mrs. Dunsmore had said, I slid my hand between the cushion and the armrest. Sure enough, my history book was there. I was certain I’d left it on the table, but I must have been wrong.

  Settling into the chair, I opened the book. The title was accurate; the book was short, only fifty pages long. I skim-read the history, which confirmed much of what Josh had told me on the drive up from the airport. The first building on the site had been a wooden motte and bailey construction intended to provide both a residence and a defense against marauders. Built in the twelfth century as a stronghold of the MacArthurs, it had survived for two hundred years before being replaced with a three-story tower castle. I had seen drawings of these structures. Castle Aiten’s was square, about twenty meters in width and length, with stone walls two meters thick and a crenellated battlement. Over the next four centuries, the tower stood, changing hands as land was lost and won in a never-ending succession of battles against the Norsemen, the English, and a range of Scottish clans, including the Campbells. My mind wandered, imagining the clash of swords as armies met on blood-soaked fields to battle over territory, power and religion. We were still fighting over the same issues today, I thought. Only the weapons had changed.

  The tower had endured all those centuries of assault and yet it still survived. As an architect, I often wondered about the lifespan of the buildings we worked on. Would our descendants be admiring a five-hundred-year-old skyscraper or a glass-encased office block? It seemed unlikely somehow.

  Concentrating again, I carried on reading the dry history. The residence attached to the tower had been expanded in the late fourteen hundreds, with further developments made until the mid-1700s, when it was abandoned in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprisings. After standing empty for fifteen years, it had been purchased by Robert MacKenna, a wealthy merchant who’d made his fortune importing sugar. He had repaired the crumbling castle and built two new wings to create a large and elegant country house, completing his estate with the purchase of an additional hundred acres of the surrounding land. His great-grandson had made further improvements in the 1840s, tacking on the east wing to provide more space for the extravagant parties he enjoyed.

  My heart rate accelerated when I came to page twenty-two. The author described a priory, built in 1500 on the grounds of the original castle to house a small community of Benedictine monks. The building was abandoned in the mid-sixteenth century and later restored sufficiently to serve as a shelter for shepherds. At the time of writing, the author said, only a few scattered ruins survived as evidence of the early religious settlement.

  It had to be the place where I’d seen the murder. The man had been wearing black robes and I vaguely recalled that the Benedictines wore black. So that suggested the murder had taken place during the period when the monks were living on the estate, from 1500 to the mid-century. Knowing a rough timeframe for the murder might help me discover more about the woman.

  A voice in my head was telling me that this had nothing to do with Fergus’s aura and that I was wasting time. I leaned back against the chair cushion and closed my eyes, forcing myself to concentrate. What or who was the threat to Fergus? After a few minutes of fruitless thinking, I closed the book and left it on the side table. Josh had mentioned a computer. Perhaps some online research about the estate would yield some clues.

  After a long climb up the stairs to Fergus’s wood-paneled office, I found an old IBM PC on a table tucked away in a corner under the slope of the ceiling. I hadn’t even noticed it on my first visit here. A prehistoric modem was attached to a phone outlet on one end and the back of the computer on the other. The PC’s plastic casing had yellowed with age, and the keyboard was dusty, which made me wonder how often Fergus used it or if it would even work. The tiny monitor lit up as soon as I turned it on, though, and I entered the password that Josh had given me earlier. Sitting on the upright chair that had been tucked under the table, I squinted at the low-resolution screen for a few seconds, listening to the primitive shrieks and squeals of the modem. To my surprise, a telephone icon appeared, confirming I’d connected to the internet.

  Unsure of where to start, I entered the name of the castle into the browser. After a long delay, in which I was sure I could hear the cogs turning in the machine, a screenful of entries came up: a history of the castle, a mention in an environmental survey, confirmation of building permits for the new roof, and a marketing website describing the castle’s Gourmet Dinner and Bed and Breakfast offerings.

  I found no mention of a priory but I soon found a listing of once-extant monasteries going back to the tenth century. A Benedictine monastery about thirty miles from the castle had been founded in the early eleventh century and appeared to have closed in 1500. I searched more closely on those dates and finally found a mention of a small religious community being given shelter on the grounds of the castle in the years 1500 to 1545.

  I sat back and dru
mmed my fingers on the table. The man in the black robes had to have been a monk, with that hood and crucifix. But why did he kill that young woman? Did he retrieve the book she’d been holding? It seemed likely that he had, although I didn’t see it happen. Like a damaged movie reel, the vision had stopped in mid-flow. I only saw the frames to the point where the film broke. Fueled by the desire to know what had happened there, I carried on searching, but found nothing useful, with no results for the book, and no reference to a murder. Of course, why would there be? Huge swathes of British history were well-documented on the Web, but a killing on a remote Scottish moor sometime in the sixteenth century was unlikely to have been recorded, leaving nothing to find its way onto the Web centuries later.

  Disappointed not to find anything to explain my strange vision, I quickly checked my email. There were a few terse messages from my boss, which I ignored. He was a little hazy on the concept of time off. Because he rarely took any holiday time himself, he didn’t expect the rest of us to either.

  About to turn off the computer, I remembered the press clipping that had fallen out of Lucy’s text book. I keyed in ‘Fabergé’ and the date, March 25. A dozen news sites popped up, reporting the recent discovery of a Fabergé egg, missing since the execution of the Russian royal family in 1918. Apparently, a number of the fifty bejeweled Fabergé eggs commissioned by the Romanovs had been seized by the Bolsheviks and hidden in the Kremlin Armory, together with a vast hoard of the Tsar’s jewels, books, paintings, and icons. As the Revolution heated up, Romanov family members had managed to smuggle other treasures to safety. A cache of jewels had been sent by Nicholas II’s aunt to the Swedish Embassy in St. Petersburg, where they lay forgotten in a storage room until they were rediscovered in 2009. Another treasure trove was rumored to be buried in Mongolia. Much of the Kremlin hoard had been sold off during the 1920s and ’30s to raise money for Stalin’s Treasures into Tractors program, with many of the artifacts being acquired by wealthy Americans and Europeans for private collections or museums. Many items went missing, lost forever in dusty vaults, or lying unrecognized on the shelves of antique shops.

  In 2014, a Fabergé egg had been purchased for a song in a junk shop in the USA by a scrap metal dealer. And then a collector had discovered an egg in an antique shop in Paris six months ago. He’d paid just a thousand pounds for an item worth millions. The discovery unleashed a flood of articles speculating where other lost Romanov treasures might be.

  I pushed the keyboard away and flexed my wrists to get the blood moving again. While my little jaunt into the rarefied world of priceless artifacts was fascinating, it was also feeling like a waste of time. Whatever Lucy’s interest in Russian eggs, it had nothing to do with Fergus’s aura or my vision of the killing on the moor. That gory scene kept replaying itself in my head, but it too was a distraction I could do without. I needed to focus on discovering what threatened Fergus. Time was slipping by, and I had no clues yet. A twinge of anxiety sent a pain through my temple. Josh and I couldn’t leave the castle until we were sure Fergus was safe, but I’d used up most of my holiday time already. My boss, Alan, would be extremely unhappy if I didn’t turn up on Monday. But there was no point in worrying about that yet. We still had two more days to save Fergus.

  A glance at my watch told me it was already four-thirty. I looked towards the window and realized that I’d been concentrating so closely on the computer that I’d missed the fact that it had grown dark outside. This far north, the days were short, and sunset came early. Apart from the glow of the computer screen, the room was dim, draped in shadows that hung in the corners. Wind rattled the window and whistled down the chimney. I shivered. Suddenly, the old castle seemed far less romantic and intriguing, far more menacing and bleak. I was overcome by melancholy and a strange sense of being watched. I peered into the shadows. Was someone hiding there? Telling myself not to be ridiculous, I stood and crossed the room to switch on a lamp. I heard a creak, felt a brush of air as though someone had rushed past me. I stopped, feeling my blood chill in my veins. Forcing myself to move again, I fumbled with the lamp switch. The bulb glowed through the yellow shade, banishing the shadows. The tartan sofas looked cheery and inviting. Fergus’s desktop was empty apart from a blotter and a pen. Everything was as it should be. But the door stood half-open. I was sure I’d pushed it almost shut when I came in.

  I hurried to the door and looked up and down the darkened corridor. I felt as though I was standing in a tunnel, black and impenetrable, with a single lamp shining yellow at the far end. I stared at the light for a minute, but saw no sign of movement.

  Convinced I’d imagined the whole thing, I stepped back into the office. My walk across the moor had unnerved me, I decided. First the strange vision, and then getting lost and soaking wet. No wonder I felt jumpy and a little discombobulated, which wasn’t like me. I needed to calm down, focus on practicalities.

  I took a slow tour of the room, picking up ornaments and knickknacks, putting them back in their places, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. Still shaky, I went out to check the hall again. Certain that no one loitered there, I closed the door and returned to the desk where I started opening the drawers one by one. I felt guilty about ransacking Fergus’s office, but convinced myself that my slightly unscrupulous behavior was justified when a life was at stake. The drawers held a typical collection of pens, pencils and sticky notes, and piles of papers that looked like bills and receipts. No bottles of poison, knives or guns, no threatening letters or warning notes, nothing that would give me a hint as to what threatened Fergus.

  The gilt carriage clock on the mantel struck five, reminding me that the meeting with the Americans would probably soon be over for the day. I hoped it was going well. Making sure the computer and the lamp were turned off, I left the office and hurried towards the main staircase where bright lights illuminated the glossy woodwork and carpeted treads. Descending, I arrived in the entry hall just as Lucy came in through the front door.

  “I wondered where you were,” I said. “Have you been exploring again?”

  She smiled. “I planned to, but I found a book I wanted to read and lost track of time.” She rubbed her arms. “God, it’s cold out there. I went to get something from the car and never thought to put a coat on.”

  Through the open door, I saw the lights of Knox’s helicopter blinking red and white down on the lawn.

  “Why is the helicopter here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It landed a few minutes ago. Perhaps that means the meeting is over?”

  As she spoke, we heard voices at the top of the stairs. Fergus led Knox and his team downstairs towards us. They looked cheerful enough, I thought, hoping that indicated the negotiations had gone well. Josh followed, but there was no sign of Duncan. “I’ll leave you to listen to the boring business details,” Lucy whispered. “See you later.” She slipped away into the drawing room.

  Knox and Fergus were chatting, so I joined Josh. “How did it go?”

  “Good. I think it’s going to turn out okay.” He paused. “Aura still there?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “See you around lunchtime tomorrow,” Knox was saying, shaking hands with Fergus. As his two associates put on their coats and gathered their bags, Fergus opened the door, letting in a blast of cold air. We stood on the front step to watch the visitors go. Their modern wheeled suitcases kept getting caught up on the graveled driveway. In the old days, the servants would have carried their travel chests to the waiting horse and carriage. Now, the helicopter's engine throbbed in sync with the pulsing of its lights.

  “They aren't spending the night here?” I asked Josh.

  “Knox wanted to go to Edinburgh, so they’re flying over there. Something came up at work, apparently.”

  “Pierre’s cooking for a crowd,” I said. “He might not be thrilled to have a smaller audience for his pheasant cacciatore.”

  “Pierre?”

  “The chef. Very French and very charming. He
made lunch for me.”

  Fergus touched Josh on the arm. “Where’s your cousin?”

  They both looked around the entry hall. “Wasn’t he with you?” I asked.

  “He was until about twenty minutes ago,” Fergus said. “He needed to use the head, but he didn’t come back to the Great Hall. I hope he’s not ill.”

  “I’ll go find him,” Josh offered.

  Fergus nodded. “Thanks. Me, I need a drink. My head is swimming.”

  “I’ll have one with you,” I said to Fergus. I wanted to keep an eye on him.

  “I’m going to my room to take off this wretched jacket and tie. You catch a minute alone with Josh. And then join me in the library, and we’ll launch another attack on the single malts.”

  Thwarted in my attempt to stay close to Fergus, I followed Josh upstairs and past the entrance to the Great Hall. Halfway along the corridor, we stopped at a white door, and Josh banged on the paneled wood. “Duncan? You okay?”

  When there was no answer, Josh turned the knob and opened the door to an empty loo. “He must have given up on us,” Josh said. “The last half-hour was mostly small talk anyway, and we didn’t cover anything useful.” He closed the door and then pushed it open again. “Actually, as I’m here… We did drink a lot of tea this afternoon. I’ll see you in the library. Tell Fergus I’ll have the Macallan again.”

  When I got to the library, most of the lights were off, and Fergus wasn’t there. Duncan was, however, and he seemed to be searching for something in the semi-darkness. Not a book, I thought, because he wasn’t looking at titles. Instead he was sweeping his hand along the gap behind the serried ranks of hardbacks. I knew I should say hello or cough, do something so he knew I was there, but his behavior was so odd that I couldn’t help wanting to know what he was searching for. He moved on to a different shelf and repeated the sweeping motion. I stepped back into the hall when he moved from the shelves to a chest of drawers near the fireplace. There, he opened each drawer and felt around inside before closing it again. Clearly not finding what he was looking for, he expressed his frustration by slamming his fist down on the walnut surface.