The exchange exhausted me, and I slept for the remainder of the afternoon. The sun was retreating behind the hills by the time I managed to haul myself out of bed and pull on a sweater and jeans. I headed downstairs cautiously, hoping to save Louisa climbing up with yet another tray. When I reached the kitchen, there was no sign of Louisa, but Grant was there, rummaging in a cupboard by the back door.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
“Just looking for Liam….What’s up?”
“Everything’s fine, don’t worry,” he said a bit too quickly.
“I wasn’t worried,” I said, “until now.”
“We’re fine, go on back and lie down. Get some more rest.”
“I feel much better. Really.” I looked around the kitchen. “Where is Liam?”
“Outside.”
“By himself?”
“No, he’s with Luke,” Grant replied. The guilty look on his face made me press him for a clearer answer.
“Where?”
“Running around,” Grant replied without conviction.
“Louisa will know where they are.”
“She had to go to Glasgow this afternoon. Her sister’s ill.”
“So you were in charge and you’ve lost them.”
“I haven’t lost them, they’re out mucking around. We’ll round them up soon.”
“When did you last see them?”
“I took them to the distillery with me when I went to check the stills. I didn’t want them waking you. They were fine. Having a ball playing together up on the hill.”
“Do you mean they’re both out on Drumlinn? Alone?” I nervously looked out the window. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“That fact has not escaped me,” Grant growled. “Sorry,” he said, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Hunter, Cam, and Frank Monroe are out looking now. They may have already found them. I came back to grab some more lanterns and flashlights.”
“I’ll come and help.”
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
I gave him a mutinous look.
“You really should rest.”
“I couldn’t now, even if I wanted to. Not till I know they’re safe.”
Grant gave in with a sigh. “Fine. Come.” He extricated a couple of lanterns from the back of the cupboard, and we jumped into the car and did the short drive to Abbey Glen in tense silence.
There was no sign of Hunter, or the others, when we arrived. I followed Grant up the rocky path that snaked its way along the waterfall’s edge, and was out of breath long before we reached the top. The accident had taken more out of me than I realized.
“Luke? Luke?” I could hear Cam’s voice echoing back from the hill. Convincing Grant to take the high path above the falls since he’d be in a better position to help if it was needed, I set off across the gentler slopes of Drumlinn where numerous large rocks and caves could conceal a lost boy. After hiking the trails with Liam for the last two weeks, I knew the hill pretty well, but I could have used Duff. He was the one who’d spent his youth hiding up here. He’d be the expert on where a young boy would go.
I headed for the largest of the limestone caves. Liam and I had sheltered there a couple of times to get out of the rain. He might have remembered, and led Luke there. The light was fading fast and it would soon be dark. I came to the first cave and called out, but got no answer. I flashed the light around anyway, but saw no signs that anyone had been there recently.
I continued on, almost running now as the darkness closed in. My heart was pounding more than my head, and that was saying something. Please, please don’t let this have anything to do with whoever is threatening me. Not Luke and Liam. That would be more than I could bear. I reached a second, smaller cave and heard a muffled snuffling noise. I stood in the entrance and shone the flashlight into the recesses of the cave, fearful of what I might disturb, but the light hit the shape of a small boy huddled on a ledge in the corner. I felt the relief flood through me as I went down on my knees next to him.
“Luke, what happened? Are you alright?” I could tell he was crying. “Come on, love,” I coaxed, “what’s happened?”
“It was an accident. We were pl-playin’,” he said between shuddering breaths. “Runnin’ round on the hills. Playin’ hide-and-seek. I hide somewhere, and Liam, he comes and sniffs me out. I hid behind a rock, but Liam didn’t come find me. He always finds me. I heard him barkin’, but then he stopped. I came out and started calling for him, but he didn’t answer. I can’t find him anywhere. I didn’t mean to lose him.” Luke dissolved into another flood of tears.
“It’s alright,” I said. “It’s alright. We’ll find him. You’ll see. Were you near here when Liam disappeared?” I pulled him to his feet and put a steadying arm around his shoulder.
Luke nodded, smearing dirt across his cheeks as he tried to wipe away the tears with his fists.
“Okay, then he can’t be far away,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. At least Luke was safe. “Let’s get you back down the hill. There’re a lot of people out here that are worried about you. We’ll get you some food and something to drink, and before you know it we’ll have found Liam. Don’t you worry.”
I kept an arm around Luke’s shoulders and helped him back toward the ridge above the falls. Halfway along, I saw Grant running toward us.
“Where was he?” Grant’s relief was palpable.
“In the small cave near the west side trail.”
“I got scared. It was gettin’ dark,” Luke whimpered.
“You need to get him home,” I said to Grant.
“Of course. Good timing, I was about to call Rothes in. Where’s Liam?” he said, looking around.
I shook my head behind Luke in warning. “He’s still playing hide-and-seek on the hill,” I said as brightly as I could. “We’ll find him soon, but first we need to get Luke home.”
“I’ll get Cam to run him back,” Grant said.
“I’ll go call a bit more, and see if I can get Liam to come out of hiding.”
“I’d rather you wait till I come back.”
“Don’t be silly,” I replied. “I know my way around here by now, and anyway we don’t have that much light left.”
“Alright, I’ll follow you as soon as I can.” Grant took Luke’s hand and helped him maneuver down the rocky path.
I turned and began the climb back up the hill. As soon as I was out of sight of the boys, I broke into a run. I could feel the panic rising in my throat. Liam had to be here somewhere. But the fact that he wasn’t barking was worrying me. If he’d fallen into a crevice he could be injured, even dead, or he could have been grabbed on purpose just to terrorize me. If so, it was working. He was only a dog, and I might complain about his antics, but he’d become such an integral part of my daily existence that I couldn’t imagine life without him.
“Liam? Liam?” I called over and over, my voice getting more and more hoarse. I stopped to listen. I thought I heard something farther along the path. I kept running, stopping now and again to listen, but no bark. No sound of running paws.
It was dark now on the hill. I was relying on the flashlight to guide my feet as I looked for holes in the heather or any sign of disturbance that might show where a large dog could have fallen through.
I called again. This time I thought I heard a faint whine. I kept calling, moving toward the sound. It was coming from below my feet. When I reached the spot where it sounded loudest, I dropped to my knees and began to probe in the heather. At last I found a space in the dense undergrowth and began to pull the plants aside. Underneath was a hole no more than a foot wide, and as I shone my flashlight down into the space I could see Liam lying at the bottom in a stone passageway. He got to his feet when he saw me looking down, leaning gingerly on his right-rear leg.
“It’s okay, boy,” I said. “We’ll get you out of there.” Liam whined. I looked around for signs of an alternate entrance, or even a large stick that could be used to mark the spot so I could go
for help. I was afraid if I moved away I wouldn’t be able to find the hole again in the dark. It’d been tricky enough the first time.
I began pulling at the surrounding heather, working to make the opening larger and more visible. It was difficult. The heather must have been there for decades, and the roots had wound themselves tightly around each other and every rock and stone they could find in the soil. I braced myself on either side of the hole, grabbed a large tuft, and began to pull, leveraging my entire body weight against the recalcitrant shrub. When the roots gave out, they did so in spectacular fashion.
The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor of the passage below, looking up at a hole that was indeed much larger than it had been a moment before. Unfortunately, it was also well out of my reach. Now, not only was Liam stuck, I was too.
Oblivious to our predicament, Liam gave me his usual joyful greeting. He licked my face and whimpered. Once my heart stopped racing, I stood up carefully and was pleased to see the heather I’d pulled out earlier in the process had preceded me down the hole and broken my fall. I’d be bruised again, but nothing was broken.
I retrieved the flashlight from the pile of underbrush and shone it along the stone walls. We must be in one of the tunnels that Duff had described, carved out by the underground streams as they receded farther into the hills over the years. The walls were striated by the flow of the ancient waters and the rock floor was worn smooth. I walked a few yards down the passage in either direction and Liam managed to keep up, limping a little on his injured leg. Duff had said these passages honeycombed the hills above the distillery. I shuddered, torn between a fear of getting lost underground and wanting to look for a way out. In the end, Liam decided for me. He sniffed around the stone floor before setting off at a slow, but determined, pace down the right-hand passage.
I grabbed a rock from the pile of debris on the floor and did my best to make marks on the wall as we went along, hoping I could lead us back to the place where we entered if Liam’s doggie instincts proved faulty.
The passage sloped downward at a gentle angle, and was met in several places by passages cutting in from farther uphill. Liam continued to sniff and showed no hesitation, heading down and to the right. Perhaps he could smell fresh air coming in somewhere. I was glad of his slower pace as the roof of the passageway dipped and rose without warning. My neck was stiff and my head was beginning to throb again as I made my way along, bent almost double in places. We walked for a half hour or more, but I sensed we couldn’t have gone more than a mile with the uneven passages slowing our pace.
Just as I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, Liam slowed and limped into a recess off the side of the passageway, sniffing madly. I shone my flashlight around and found a collection of crowbars along with several buckets and an old kerosene lantern. Most of the supplies looked new and Liam was giving them a thorough going-over, which meant they’d been handled recently.
I set off after my guide dog again in better spirits, confident at this sign of life that a hot bath and a warm drink were getting closer by the minute. I was alert for any sign of a breeze or the smell of outside air. At one point I thought I heard voices, but it must have been my imagination.
The passage was widening out now, and Liam’s pace slowed as he moved toward the archway in front of us, the hackles on his neck rising.
“What is it, boy?” I whispered. I hadn’t thought about what we would do if we found other animals in this underground warren. I straightened up and crept along, brandishing my flashlight like a club. The walls next to me looked brighter as we inched forward together.
Covering the beam from my own flashlight, I could see that there was light emanating from somewhere farther down the passage. Liam reached a decision and ran on, discovering the source of the light before I did. I ducked through the natural archway and found myself in a circular cave. The space was at least seven feet high, and big enough to have housed several large cars.
Liam was standing in the middle of the room, his tail no longer wagging as he looked back and forth between Kristen Ramsey and Nick Bartolli, who greeted our sudden appearance with stunned amazement.
Chapter 24
“What are you doing here?” Kristen and I said in unison. I laughed slightly but noticed belatedly she did not. I looked at Nick in confusion.
“I…I didn’t know you knew each other,” I stammered. It took me a minute to process the fact that finding them together was not nearly as odd as finding them here. I began to back toward the passage from which I’d entered, warning bells going off in my head at last.
I could see a variety of emotions flitting across Kristen’s face as she stared at me—fear, anger, annoyance. “For God’s sake, why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?” she said through clenched teeth.
“What do we do now?” Nick asked with a note of panic in his voice. “This was not part of the plan.”
“Shut up and let me think,” Kristen snapped.
“I can go.” I continued to edge slowly toward the passageway behind me. This permutation hadn’t figured into my wildest imaginings, but whatever was happening I could tell it wasn’t good. Really, not good.
“It’s too late for that,” Kristen said. She tossed Nick a length of rope. “Tie them up in the corner over there.”
I turned to run, but there was nowhere to go, and in my weakened state I wasn’t strong enough to put up more than a token protest. Nick held me firmly as he tied my hands together behind my back, then put a rope around Liam’s neck. Liam came forth with a low, menacing growl I’d not heard before. He bared his teeth and lunged at Nick, who backed away, leaving us tethered to a steel ring set into the wall of the cave.
“Go back to the shed at my place, carefully, and get a couple of shovels and a crowbar,” Kristen ordered. Nick hesitated. “Go,” she insisted.
Liam continued to growl in the back of his throat. He knew this was not the way things were supposed to be, even in this strange subterranean place.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Kristen repeated, rounding on me once Nick was gone. “You’re supposed to be confined to your bed.”
“Liam got lost on the hills,” I said. “They’ve been looking for him and Luke for hours.”
“Luke’s out here, too?” Kristen said in exasperation.
“Not now. We found him, but Liam fell through a hole in the heather, and I came down after him,” I added for no apparent reason. “We were looking for a way out.”
“And now everyone will be looking for you. Damn, damn, damn.”
No doubt they’d be looking for me, but finding me would be the real trick. Even I had no idea where I was. But if Nick and Kristen had found a way in, maybe Rothes and Michaelson could, too.
“Where are we?” I ventured.
“You’re the bright one. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.”
“I have an appalling sense of direction…especially underground.” In the silence that followed, I could faintly hear the roar of water bouncing off rock. “Are we near the waterfall on Drumlinn?” I thought for a moment. “Back behind the rockslide somewhere? Is this one of the caves Furgie talks about?”
“What? Yes, of course…”
I shook my head, wishing my brain was functioning on full power. The combination of painkillers and my cramped trip through the hill had left me dizzy and thickheaded. “Furgie told me they used these caves during the war, but weren’t they destroyed in a landslide in Martin’s day?”
Kristen was still lost in thought. I looked around my surroundings, registering the small barrels of whisky and the crates of bottles lying around, before light finally dawned. “Duff found this place, didn’t he? This is where he was making up the fake bottles of Rose Reserve?”
“What are you on about?” Kristen rounded on me, her eyes flashing. “Is that what Claire Jones told you?”
“Not exactly….She mentioned the labels, but we figured out he gave the fake samples to Ben for his approval
….” My voice trailed away. Kristen. Kristen? How did she know Claire Jones? How did she know Nick, for that matter? Was Kristen helping Duff? Was Nick Bartolli the one providing the liquor for Duff’s fakes? I could see white spots floating in front of my eyes and I took several deep breaths, trying to grasp at the new fragments of information and fashion them into a logical whole.
Kristen looked exasperated. “Good Lord, the bottles Duff gave to Ben weren’t some cheap knockoff of the old Rose.”
I leaned my head back on the wall, taking in the small, dusty barrels stacked near the passage we’d entered through. The room was beginning to sway, but an idea was trying to coalesce in the back of my mind. I should have trusted Grant’s instinct—he couldn’t be fooled and neither could Ben. They were drinking something special. Something very old and rare.
“In the days before the outer cave collapsed, Martin Furguson was storing his personal Reserves back here, wasn’t he?” I said aloud. “Furgie told us he was devastated after the cave-in, sure that the best of his single malts had been lost forever, but he was wrong. Not all of the casks were destroyed, were they? Some of them survived back here, and Duff, who knew these hills like the back of his hand, found them.”
“He was a pain in the arse, but he got that bit right,” she sneered.
I ignored her, focusing on doing the math in my head. “Those casks would be, what…forty years old or more? They’d be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if they weren’t tainted by now.”
“Try millions.”
“So that’s what this is about.” Enough money for someone to justify a few deaths, it would seem. “But I thought this was Duff’s scam. How did you get involved?”
“You didn’t think Duff was bright enough to pull this off alone?”
“I suppose he needed help from someone a bit more cunning.”
Kristen stopped pacing and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Don’t underestimate me, Abi.”
Single Malt Murder Page 25
