by John Burke
She rang the Northern Constabulary, and was transferred from one office to another before reaching an officer who had been in the patrol car which spotted the hire car in the lay-by overnight and next morning, and stopped to investigate. Yes, it was routine. Logged the times they had checked on it, and a note of the contents when they took charge of it.
‘And there was only an overnight bag?’
‘That was all, miss. Name and address of the owner in a leather tag. And then of course we related it to the news about the body being found.’
Beth had a vision of Luke leaving the office to join that earlier trip, and then the one with old Jamie himself. As ever, like a violinist refusing to be parted from the precious instrument in its case, it was impossible to visualize Luke without his laptop. Particularly on that drive to Achnachrain with the old man himself.
So inseparable that he would have carried it down the slope of Inchbeath, and still had it under his arm when he plunged to his death? He must surely have intended to leave the car for only a few minutes, and if there was anything to record he would have done it when he got back into the driver’s seat, not out on that windy hill-side.
She asked: ‘Wasn’t there a laptop somewhere in the car?’
‘Hold on a minute.’ There were a few mumbled comments and a rustle of paper at the other end, then: ‘No, sorry. Not according to the report here.’
Dorothy had been trying to look as if she wouldn’t dream of listening to somebody else’s conversation; but as Beth rang off she blurted out: ‘If it was something to do with Lukie’s work, one of those computer things or whatever, I’m sure we wouldn’t want it. Dad might, just to stop anyone else getting it. But we wouldn’t really know what to make of it.’
‘No, probably not. But where is it?’
*
Lesley took clothes from her wardrobe and laid them on the bed. A shaft of sunlight over the rooftops opposite Drovers Court stabbed down to show up the stains on her fawn slacks. She must leave them with the cleaners, and remember to pack another pair and some more tights after the weekend.
There was a tap at the door.
‘Ah, Lady Torrance.’ Simon Ogilvie came into the room with a deferential sideways movement, but with an almost masterful gleam in his eye. ‘Just in time. Save you some wasted journeys.’
‘I’m only going to Black Knowe. Home for the weekend, as usual. Or do you need me to help with all these things going on?’
‘Not at all, no. Just the opposite, in fact.’ He cleared his throat, and his tone became that of a Rotary chairman summoning up platitudes to thank a guest speaker. ‘We’ve all been very appreciative of the invaluable work you have put in on our project. But rather than take up any more of your valuable time, it has been decided that we should terminate the arrangement with you. It would be greatly appreciated if you could let me have a list of any extra expenses you have incurred in addition to the agreed fee. And of course you will sign our usual confidentiality clause.’
‘I understood I was still expected to advise on the placement of the material we’ve accumulated. After my visit to Achnachrain, I’ve been sketching some plans for —’
‘Lady Torrance, we have all learned so much from you. And of course you and Sir Nicholas will be invited to the formal opening. But it has been decided that the time has come for us to assume full responsibility for implementation of the rest of the programme.’
Lesley stared into that smug little face. It has been decided … She was not going to demean herself by asking: decided by whom?
17
Nick Torrance looked affectionately at the back of his wife’s neck as she glared into her computer monitor, stabbed her fingers down at the keyboard like a pianist tackling a complex toccata, and then let out a wail of frustration.
He said: ‘Do you want me to tell Mrs Robson to put lunch back half an hour?’
‘No. I’ve done enough for one day. But I could do with a drink.’
‘Come away from that fiendish machine and sit somewhere comfortable.’
They settled in the lounge with its view down the hillside towards the roofs of the town. Sun glinted on the church spire and the sham crenellations of the sheriff court. For a moment the picture was blurred by the recent memory of light slanting into her Drovers Court room, while Ogilvie delivered that smooth yet offensive dismissal. Damn them, it had all been so abrupt, so irrational. What lay behind it? Because there had to be something — maybe some remark she had made, some casual aside that meant more than she had realized. But what?
‘Hey, m’lady.’ Nick was offering her a glass of amontillado. ‘Come back home, will you? Right back home, this instant.’
‘Sorry.’ She took the glass and risked spilling it as she kissed him. ‘I’m still half there.’
‘Having been shoved out, there’s no point in you trying to keep one foot wedged in the door. Or pounding away at that machine as if it were some fortune-teller who might come up with the right predictions.’
Lesley knew he was right. She had done the work that was required of her, and if the employers who had commissioned it decided they had no further requirements, she ought to be glad to ease back into her home and her own routine.
‘But there’s something wrong.’ It was still nagging at her. ‘I don’t know quite what they’re up to — or even who’s the main mover — but there’s something.’
Nick sighed. ‘The old hunches? Detective Inspector Gunn shedding the disguise of Lady Torrance and sniffing out misdeeds that nobody else has even noticed?’
‘Oh, my darling, I’m a bore, aren’t I?’
‘Never. But a bit of a worry. And a worrier over things you ought to have ditched. How long’ll it take before you’re really back home? A week? Ten days?’ He slid on to the couch beside her and put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Anyway, one thing I do know.’
‘Tell me. It may be the one thing I need.’
‘I know,’ said Nick, ‘that after lunch you’ll be back in front of your soothsaying screen doing battle with it for the rest of the afternoon.’
Over lunch she tried to draw him out on estate matters and the question of the windfarm. After ten minutes he said: ‘You’re not hearing what I’m saying, because you’re still way up in the Highlands. Come on, what’s really bugging you?’
‘It’s a silly bit of speculation. All because of one throwaway remark.’
‘Ah. One throwaway remark? Enough of a spark to start a fire?’
‘That thing that Luke Drummond came out with. ‘The wrong Rosses.’ That’s what I’m trying to get at through the computer. If only I could link it with his own — in the office, or that laptop of his that’s gone missing — then I might get a glimmering of what he’d stumbled on.’
‘Is it really of any consequence?’
‘Luke seemed shaken up. Something which maybe wasn’t obvious earlier, because of scattered documentation. Only now all those records are being sorted out and gradually brought together and analysed online, so the real pattern can be picked out.’
‘You’re not eating. Be a good girl and finish off your greens, or I’ll tell Mrs Robson you’re to get no treacle tart.’
His prophecy proved true. As soon as they had finished, she was back in front of the monitor, calling up one Ross reference after another, seeking the threads which could form a coherent pattern. There were gaps; but by mid-afternoon she was beginning to suspect that Luke had been on the track of something that could prove catastrophic for the long-held beliefs of old James Fergus Ross.
Many courageous Rosses had indeed tried to stand up against the greed of their landlords and clan traitors. The womenfolk of Strathcarron had stood their ground against repeated baton charges until they were bloodied and trampled on; yet still they and others maintained resistance until they were utterly exhausted. Their cause was taken up and later recorded in grisly detail by another Ross, a Glasgow lawyer who wanted the world to learn the truth.
Hundreds of men,
with Malcolm Ross of Alladale in the forefront, launched a counterattack, rounding up six thousand of the invading sheep and driving them south, aiming to chase them out of the Highlands and restore the crofters to their rightful homes. The army was called in, the sheep were chased back, and the landowners called on the magistrates to inflict vicious punishment on the rebels. A courageous young advocate, Charles Ross, put up a spirited defence, but the power of the lairds ensured that the Highlanders were sentenced to transportation, banishment from Scotland for life, fines which they could not pay, and to long gaol sentences.
James Fergus Ross could be proud of such an ancestry. Defeated they might have been, but their descendants had lived on, scattered throughout distant lands, never forgetting where their true roots lay buried deep. But with the pride, could there be lasting hatred — a bitterness so intense it had gone on living unabated?
‘Congenital diseases can lie latent, skip generations. Porphyria, haemophilia, that sort of thing. D’you suppose old resentments can simmer below the surface of other obsessions — job, family, everyday life — until something triggers off what’s been lying dormant so long? Something or somebody, breathing on embers and making them blaze up?’
She realized she had been talking to herself, aloud. And was interrupted by the remembered voice of Luke Drummond, now plucking at her attention.
The wrong Rosses?
There had been other families, other influential players on the scene. Twenty minutes ago Lesley had extracted the name of a procurator fiscal, a Hugh Ross, who had been a keen supporter of the Duke of Sutherland’s ruthless factor, Patrick Sellars. Then there was a vice-president of the Association of Gentlemen Farmers and Breeders of Sheep, a Sir Charles Ross of Balnagowan, intent on putting as much as possible of Ross, Sutherland and Caithness into the hands of well-to-do graziers from the Lowlands and England.
In the middle of the afternoon Nick brought her a pot of tea and two pieces of Mrs Robson’s shortbread.
‘Having fun?’
‘I’ve stumbled across something that’ll interest Jack Rutherford.’
‘The Ferguson murder? It was old man Ross after all. Got his ex-wife to let him into the house, wrestled Ferguson to the ground and then beat him up with —’
‘Do shut up. Sometimes I wonder why I married you.’
‘You found it easier for me to make you a lady than for them to make you up to chief inspector.’
‘I learnt they did have every intention of doing just that.’
‘So I’m glad I snatched the trophy away from them just in time.’
‘In time for what?’
He let his fingers slide down and caress the back of her neck. ‘For lots of things. And still more to catch up with when you can spare me some — what’s the current jargon? — quality time.’ His hand moved back up to tug a handful of her hair. ‘But you’re still miles away, faithless hussy. What’s all this about inflaming Rutherford’s passions?’
‘The Macdonalds,’ she said. ‘And the Chisholms.’
‘What about them? Come on, the suspense is killing me. Oh, and your tea’s getting cold.’
‘Morwenna Ross’s maiden name was Chisholm. And that chap she was seen following on the building site in Leith was a Macdonald.’ She nodded at the screen. ‘I just happen to have stumbled across a snippet of information while I was looking for family connections. Chisholms and Macdonalds have been at feud for centuries over some grazing and harbour landing rights. Did Morwenna go looking for Angus Macdonald — or, more likely, see his name on the shop and decide to stalk him, to see if she could stare terror into him?’
‘They all sound bonkers. And they’re beginning to infect you.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Look, next week I’m off for a few nights to that Travel Association shindig in Stirling. Come with me. Help me deal with present cock-ups, it’ll take your mind off the dead and gone.’
‘But are they? Gone, I mean. I’m sure poor Luke was on to something. And I think my ex-guvnor’ll be interested, too.’
‘Ex, yes. Remember I’m the boss now. And’ — before she could raise an objection — ‘I love you, and I know it’s time you stopped fretting over other people’s obsessions.’ Nick sighed dramatically, and left her.
She tried phoning Rutherford, feeling disloyal as she did so. The fact that he was out could be taken as a symbolic hint. But Nick was right, damn him: she was still fretting. In the end she tried Beth Crichton.
‘Is it all right for you to talk, now I’m no longer on your payroll?’
‘Some question’s arisen — or you’ve left something in the building?’
‘It’s just that I’ve been trying to follow up that odd remark of Luke Drummond’s. About ‘the wrong Rosses’. Do you know if he ever got any further with that before … before his accident?’
‘Not so far as I know. Certainly there was something bothering him, but he didn’t confide in me.’There was a wistful note in the words.
‘He didn’t do a print-out of anything that might be relevant?’
‘If he did, it hasn’t shown up. Not that anybody’s looking for it, as far as I know. There might be something in his laptop, but that’s still missing. Why, what are you thinking?’
Lesley said, as casually as possible: ‘I keep stumbling across oddities. One nasty tale, for instance, about a Ross who kept well in with the factor who was throwing all his relatives out. The young man was allowed to stay on in his croft, telling the clearance teams in advance what sort of defence his fellow crofters were planning to put up against their eviction. One or two instances of traitors like that. Sometimes they got what was coming to them — after helping to evict their friends, they eventually got chucked out themselves, and then they were unwelcome anywhere else at all.’
‘You’re not suggesting that Mr Ross’s ancestors weren’t who he thinks they were?’
‘I’m wondering if that was what young Drummond was worried about.’ Lesley waited for a reply, but there was none. Everything about Luke’s death was probably still too close and painful for Beth to sort out her own confusions, let alone any that Luke might have had. She changed tack. ‘And another thing. I’m trying to get in touch with the police about that theft from the Ferguson home. I think I can identify that wall hanging. You remember? It was there when you and that young man went round the place, but gone later.’
‘There was some talk of it being the Ross Tapestry.’
‘Nothing of the kind. From what I vaguely remember, and allowing for it being displayed in the Native American room, I’d say it was an Indian ghost dance shirt. Part of a cherished old ritual. Any dancer who wears it can see his ancestors in their next life, and call on them to help him restore the tribal lands stolen by the white man.’
‘But what on earth has that got to do with the Rosses?’
‘It just seems such a weird parallel. Reclaiming stolen lands …’
Lesley was suddenly aware of a resonance too slight to be an echo or a voice in the background. Not even a sound of breathing. But somebody else was listening in on their conversation. Just an extra dimension, something she had known from past experience: no more than a tremor, a hinted harmonic below the pitch of their voices; but once experienced, never forgotten.
‘All a bit bizarre,’ she said brightly. ‘But not really any of my business. Must get back to my own work.’
Nevertheless the parallels continued to fascinate her after she had rung off. Once you got down to it, there was so much interaction between Scots and the Indian tribes. Some of the settlers got on well with the natives of the new country. Some exploited the local tribes, some were exploited by them. A branch of the Ross family traded so amicably with the Cherokee that one of them married into the tribe, and his son Ross eventually became chief of the Cherokee, fighting with them against more rapacious white settlers. And along the way she had dug out fragments of a sept of the Gunn clan which had reached Ontario and then gone on to Dakota, where the Ojibwa tribe employed them as �
�hewers of wood and drawers of water’, and took them across the plains hunting buffalo.
Until the incomers considered themselves strong enough to turn on their hosts and drive them off their lands. The disheartening pattern repeating itself, thousands of miles away across the world. No escape from that predestined repetition?
And now the struggle had returned to its old homelands. Or was she reading too much into it?
She really longed to turn her attention to a query she had had from the Art Loss Register in London. There were awkward puzzles there, too; but she would be back on her own ground, unstable as that might sometimes be. She knew where to begin, whom to consult, and where to tread carefully. Yet still her mind refused to let go of the complexities of the Ross set-up. Way out front were Morwenna Ross and Jacques Hunter. And her abrupt dismissal rankled; but more than that, it provoked questions she could not dismiss as being no longer her concern.
Was it too melodramatic to conceive that those two were maybe planning that all the excitement of the Achnachrain venture would give old Ross a heart attack, so that they could take over the whole organization? Or were they subtly working against each other, each manipulating the old man to strengthen their own ambitions?
And did they have any plans for dealing with the unexpected reappearance of the younger son? Suppose Randal Grant decided to become David Ross again, and let his father coax him back into a seat at the top table?
*
Beth said: ‘All right, what’s the game? Just where do you stand?’
‘If you care to move over to the couch, I’ll demonstrate.’
‘It’s not funny. Nothing’s funny any more.’
‘Getting disillusioned with the Ross campaign?’
‘It’s all gone … well, sour. I did believe in the whole concept, and it felt great, going along with it. But now there’s something shivery about it all.’
‘Including me?’ Randal tried to put his arm round her, but she edged away, tempted to run out of the studio and down the stairs, out into the street, back to … well, where? Her office, no longer a place where she felt confident of herself and what she was doing? Back to her flat, alone, still haunted?
