“I’m not surprised, after what you’ve been through these last few days.” Putting her arm round Hazel’s shoulder, Gemma gave her a brief hug. “But it’s just a dream—”
Hazel was already shaking her head. “I know that shock—and grief—do odd things to the psyche. But there’s an urgency to these dreams that stays with me. I feel her fear—It’s as if there’s something I should do—”
A car door slammed behind them, interrupting Hazel. Turning round, Gemma saw Pascal getting out of his BMW. He moved stiffly, as he had for a moment the previous evening, but now he looked as if he were in real pain.
Gemma and Hazel hurried towards him. “Pascal, are you all right?” asked Gemma. “You don’t look at all well this morning.”
He grimaced. “It’s my back again, I’m afraid. Yesterday I was helping Heather with Donald’s things. I must have lifted too heavy a box. It’s an insult to my vanity.”
“Have you pulled a muscle?” Hazel asked, sympathetically.
“No, I have a bad disk,” Pascal admitted. “Usually, it’s manageable, but sometimes I have to take medication, and I seem to have misplaced my tablets. I thought perhaps I had left them in my room.”
“Duncan and I had that room last night,” Gemma told him. “But I don’t recall seeing anything of yours left behind. We should ask John and Louise—” She broke off as another car came down the drive and pulled up behind the BMW. Gemma recognized it instantly as belonging to Chief Inspector Ross.
“A good day to ye,” Ross called out as he and Sergeant Munro climbed from the car. He sounded too pleasant by half, thought Gemma, immediately wary.
“Something’s happened,” she whispered as Ross approached them.
“Sleep well, did ye?” Ross smiled, showing an expanse of teeth. “Mr. Benoit. Mrs. Cavendish. Inspector James.” He nodded at each of them in turn, as if bestowing a pontifical blessing. “And where are the others this morning?”
“Just gathering for breakfast, I should think,” answered Gemma, after glancing at her watch. It was getting on for half past eight. “Chief Inspector—”
“Why don’t we go inside for a wee chat,” interrupted Ross before Gemma could ask any of the half-dozen questions on the tip of her tongue.
Hazel grasped his arm as he turned away. “My husband, Chief Inspector—Have you—”
“I havena heard anything from London yet this morning, Mrs. Cavendish,” Ross said more gently than Gemma would have expected. “Now, perhaps we could impose on Mr. Innes for a cup of coffee.”
Hoping for enlightenment, Gemma glanced at Munro as they followed Ross towards the scullery door, but the sergeant’s long face remained impassive. She had a suspicion that Ross was planning some sort of “gather the suspects in the library” interrogation—but why?
Ross did gather them all together, but in the dining room rather than the library. “I like to think of myself as an economical man,” he explained, sitting down at the table and nursing his coveted cup of coffee. “I thought it would save me repeating myself if I talked to ye all at once—time management, I believe it’s called.”
Gemma doubted Ross’s imitation of a naive rustic deceived anyone. Glancing round the room, she found Kincaid watching the detective with interest, while the others looked as if they had unexpectedly encountered a cobra among the coffee cups. Pascal had eased himself into a chair. Martin had been seated when they came in, having already started on his cereal, while Louise had been helping John with the cooked breakfast in the kitchen. No one other than Pascal seemed inclined to join Martin and the chief inspector at the table.
Sergeant Munro had unobtrusively occupied the position he’d taken during their formal interviews, in the chair next to the sideboard.
“Now, then,” Ross continued after taking another appreciative sip of his coffee, “there’s been an interesting development since last night. I thought I should have another word with your neighbor”—he nodded at John and Louise—“Mr. Callum MacGillivray, as he was a bit vague as to his movements on the Sunday morning. Just in case he had seen more than he’d led us to believe, ye understand. Now, imagine my surprise this morning when I found, not Mr. MacGillivray forking hay into the horse troughs, but Mr. MacGillivray’s aunt.
“She had just come back from the hospital in Inverness, where her nephew was admitted in the wee hours of the morning.” Ross paused, appearing to savor the fact that he had their full attention. “It looks very much like someone tried to poison him.”
“Poison? How? What happened?” asked Gemma, cursing herself for not acting immediately on her instincts. She’d felt sure that Callum had been hiding something.
“Is he—Is he all right?” Louise put a steadying hand on the sideboard.
“From the doctor’s report, and a quick look round the cottage, it looks as though someone put a hefty dose of opiates in his whisky—a terrible thing to do to a good bottle of Lagavulin.” Ross shook his head disapprovingly. “The forensics laddies will be able to tell us more when they’ve had a go.”
“But is Callum all right?” said John, echoing his wife.
“Weel, now, that’s verra kind of you to be concerned, Mr. Innes. Especially as Miss MacGillivray told me you and your wee brother here paid a call on Callum early yesterday afternoon…and although Callum was out at the time, the two of you availed yourselves of his cottage.”
“But—You can’t think you’re going to pin this on us? Just because we stopped by his cottage?” Martin leaned forward, a quick flush of anger suffusing his face. “We had nothing to do with—”
“Mr. Gilmore.” Ross turned on him like a terrier after a rat. “It seems you neglected to tell us that you had been recently charged with the sale of illegal substances, ecstasy, I believe it was. Did ye think we wouldna find it out?”
“But it wasn’t relevant,” protested Martin. “That had nothing to do with Donald’s murder—”
“That’s for me to decide,” snapped Ross. “And what I see is that a man has been poisoned with opiates, and that you had access to drugs.”
“If by opiates, you mean morphine or heroin, I’ve never even seen the stuff. I wouldn’t know where to get that sort of thing even if I wanted to—and it’s a far cry from selling a few X-tabs to friends for a rave.”
“So that’s why you’re hanging about,” said Louise, giving Martin a look that could have curdled milk. “I should have known—”
“You say this man was given opiates?” Pascal interrupted, rising from his seat. “What sort of opiates?”
“I’ve not seen a copy of the hospital’s lab results,” Ross said. “Why?”
“I take a pain medication, by prescription. It’s hydromorphone, a morphine derivative. I came round this morning because I had discovered my tablets were missing.”
“If you mean Dilaudid,” Munro said from his corner, “that’s stronger than morphine. My wife was given it after a surgery a few years ago. The stuff made her sicker than a dog.”
“Mr. Benoit, when did you last see these tablets of yours?” asked Ross.
Pascal thought for a moment. “Not for several days. I do not take them regularly, you see, but only when the pain is most severe. Last night, after I had moved to Benvulin, my back was very bad, but when I looked in my case, the tablets were not there.”
“But you’re sure you had them here, in this house?”
“Yes,” Pascal answered firmly. “I remember I took one on Friday, after Donald had taken me fishing on the Thursday.”
“Do you know how many tablets were in this bottle?”
“The prescription is for thirty—there were perhaps fifteen remaining. I cannot be exactly certain, you understand.”
Ross looked round the room. “Weel, this puts a slightly different complexion on things. Anyone in this house could have put those tablets in Callum MacGillivray’s whisky, but”—his gaze swung back to John—“it was you and young Martin here who were seen entering Mr. MacGillivray’s cottage.”
<
br /> “I just wanted Martin to see the place.” John sounded desperate to convince him. “I knew Callum wouldn’t mind.”
“Chief Inspector, you still haven’t told us anything about Callum,” said Louise, her face set with determination. She seemed to have decided to ignore Martin for the time being. “I don’t know if you mean to be deliberately cruel, but Callum is our friend as well as our neighbor.”
“I apologize, Mrs. Innes.” Ross gave her his most gracious smile. “I didna mean to keep you in suspense. The doctors seem to think Mr. MacGillivray is out of the woods, but it will be a few hours before they’ll let us question him.”
Gemma was relieved but not surprised, as she’d suspected that if Callum had died Ross would have told them straightaway. She also felt sure Ross had neglected to mention that he would have a guard posted outside Callum’s room, just in case someone decided to finish what they had started before Callum could talk.
“Thank God,” breathed Louise, and Gemma saw John give her an odd look. Did John not think his wife should show such concern over their neighbor? Was there something going on here that she had completely missed?
Just as she was wondering if she and Kincaid could talk Ross into letting them see Callum, or if she could get Louise alone again, her phone vibrated. Excusing herself, she turned away and looked at the caller ID. To her surprise, it was a local number. She slipped from the room and answered the call.
“Gemma? It’s Heather Urquhart here. Is Hazel with you? I’ve come across something I think she should see.” Heather sounded hesitant and puzzled, quite unlike her usual confident self. “In fact, I’d like you both to come over straightaway, if you could manage it.”
Kit had run away once before, from his grandparents’ house, just after his mother had died. He’d come back to Grantchester then, too, searching for something that had eluded him. Why had he thought this time would be any different?
His mum was dead, his house belonged to someone else, and now Ian was gone, too. There was nothing left for him here.
He sat on the ground, inside the yew arbor that ran like a tunnel along one side of Nathan’s cottage. A gate at either end gave the space an enclosed, cavelike feel, and Kit had often come here to think after he and Nathan had become friends.
That morning he’d awakened early, aware of the strange bed, the unfamiliar creakings of the house as it settled around him. A fierce wave of homesickness had gripped him—he’d had no idea how accustomed he’d become to the house in Notting Hill, to the sound of Duncan singing hopelessly outdated tunes in his morning shower, to Gemma murmuring to the animals as she moved about the kitchen, to Toby’s little feet thumping up and down the stairs. Automatically, he reached for Tess, and patted an empty space on the coverlet.
How could he have left Tess behind? It was the first time he’d been separated from the little dog since he’d found her, and he felt as if he’d lost a limb.
Knowing he couldn’t sleep any longer, he’d dressed and slipped out of the house, trying not to wake Nathan. He took the path that led from the bottom of Nathan’s garden down to the Cam. From the morning mist that lay in the dips and hollows along the river, tendrils floated out like ghostly fingers. Reflections of the old trees swam insubstantially in the still surface of the water, and the air smelled of damp earth, and faintly of decay.
Kit walked along the river path until he could see into the back garden of his old house. The cottage’s Suffolk-pink plaster glowed rosily in the morning light, but the grass in the garden was uncut, the patio empty. Perhaps the new family had not yet moved in, he thought, but then he’d heard a door slam, and seen a flash of movement at the uncurtained kitchen window.
For an instant, behind the streaky glass, he thought he saw his mum’s profile and the swing of her pale hair. Then he had turned and run, blindly, back to Nathan’s, hiding himself away beneath the yews, trying to get the surge of his emotions under control.
The gate creaked, and Nathan’s stocky silhouette filled the arbor’s entrance.
“I thought I might find you here,” Nathan said, coming to sit down beside him. That was one of the things Kit liked about Nathan; he never minded getting dirty. “Duncan rang a few minutes ago. He said he let your school know you’d be absent for a couple of days.” Nathan rubbed a yew needle between his fingers, then added, “He also told me about Ian.”
They sat in silence for a bit. That was another thing Kit liked about Nathan; he could sit with you in silence, without telling you what you should think about something.
“I’d been saving all term for that trip to Toronto,” Kit said, when he thought he could trust his voice.
“Rotten luck. Or maybe I should say rotten timing, as far as Ian’s concerned.” Nathan smiled. “You know, Kit, just because people are grown up doesn’t mean they always think through the consequences of things. I’m sure he didn’t realize how much you were counting on that visit.”
“He wants rid of me,” Kit said thickly. “He said he was starting over, with a new life, a new family. I’m sure that’s why he wanted me to have the DNA test.”
Nathan thought about this for a moment. “And you don’t want to have the test, right?”
“Right.”
“But even if what you said about Ian were true—and I don’t think it is, mind you—your life is with Duncan and Gemma now. Are you not happy there?”
“No, it’s not that—well, school’s not all that brilliant, really, but it’s not that, either. It’s just—” Kit rested his chin on his knees, struggling to put something he could barely get his mind round into words.
“Are you afraid the test won’t prove Duncan’s your father? Or that it will?” Nathan added softly, as if he’d suddenly understood something.
A spark of sunlight stole through the yew branches, illuminating the lace on Kit’s shoe with a microscopic clarity. “Yes,” Kit said. “Both. If Duncan’s not really my dad, then I’d have to go away, and I don’t—” He swallowed. “We’re like family, you know. But if it proves that Ian was never my dad, then it means that everything that went before was a lie. Mum, and Ian, and me. This.” His nod took in the cottage down the road, the village, everything that had been his reality for twelve years. “And that makes me…not who I thought I was.”
Slowly, Nathan said, “Kit, no test, no configuration of molecules, can take your past away from you. That experience will always be a part of you, no matter what happens in the future, no matter where you live, or how many times Ian gets married. Those layers of living build up like a pearl in an oyster—you can’t just slice them away…although sometimes it might be easier for people if they could.”
“But what if—If I wasn’t—What if Duncan didn’t want me anymore?” There, he had said it. He felt suddenly lighter.
“Kit, I think Duncan wants to prove you’re his son because he loves you and is proud of you, not the other way round. Does that make sense? But no one can make you have this test. You have to do what you think is right for you.”
“But what about my grandmother?” Kit’s voice rose as the panicked feeling set in again.
“You can go to the judge and tell him how you feel. In fact, you can tell him exactly what you’ve told me. You’re old enough to have a voice in your own future, if you’re strong enough to make it heard. It’s what you want that matters now.”
“Will they charge John?” Hazel asked from the backseat of the Honda as they sped towards Benvulin. Saying that Hazel was needed urgently at the distillery, they had left the chief inspector taking John once again over his visit to Callum’s cottage. Ross had made no attempt to detain them, but when Pascal had offered to come with them, Ross had insisted he stay until he’d completed a written statement about his missing medication.
“He’d have charged him already if he had the evidence,” Kincaid said, turning towards her. “He’s just stirring things at the moment while he waits to see what the forensics team turn up in the car.”
“I
don’t believe it,” Hazel protested. “I simply can’t believe John would have taken Pascal’s tablets and poisoned this man—Callum.”
None of the other options were any more palatable, Gemma thought as she slowed for the entrance to Benvulin, but she didn’t say so. She was increasingly worried over the lack of news about Tim Cavendish. Hazel had spoken to her mother-in-law earlier that morning, and Carolyn had told her she’d had no word from Tim since the previous evening. Was he still “helping” the Met with their inquiries?
Kincaid looked round with interest as Gemma parked the car in Benvulin’s drive. “What a lovely place—more fairy-tale than industrial. Is the design unique?”
“No.” As they got out of the car, Hazel studied the distillery buildings as if seeing them anew. “The twin pagoda-roofed kilns were an innovation of a Victorian architect called Charles Doig, and the design was adopted by a number of Highland distilleries—but nowhere did all the elements come together quite so well as they did here at Benvulin. You can see why the Brodies loved it, sometimes beyond reason, I suspect.”
“And Donald was no exception,” Gemma murmured. She had started automatically for the offices when Heather came out the door of Benvulin House and waved to them.
Heather wore trainers and old jeans rather than smart work clothes. The others changed course, and as Gemma mounted the steps to the house, she saw that Heather had a smudge of dirt over one eyebrow.
“Heather, what’s happened?” Hazel asked without preamble. “Is it something to do with the business?”
“No.” Heather’s manner seemed suddenly hesitant. “I’ve been going through Donald’s personal papers. I’ve made a start on the funeral arrangements, and I was hoping to find something that would tell me what Donald wanted. And in truth”—she looked directly at her cousin—“I’d hoped I might find another will.”
“Heather, you know I didn’t want—”
Now May You Weep Page 29
