Single Malt Murder

by Melinda Mullet

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I mean, Duff found this treasure, and look where he wound up.” If Kristen could murder Duff, what else could she be capable of? My own position was looking grimmer by the minute.

  Kristen ignored the allusion. “Duff may have stumbled on the casks while he was exploring the tunnels, but I’m the one who knew what they were and what they could be.”

  “But why would he come to you and not Ben?”

  “We were old friends, Duff and me,” Kristen said with a faint smile. “So handsome, so enthusiastic. Such a pleasant diversion on my weekend trips to Edinburgh.”

  I must have looked a bit surprised.

  “Ten years isn’t that much difference in age these days,” Kristen argued.

  “Whatever you say,” I murmured. I watched Kristen pacing back and forth as I tried to weave together the scattered threads of the story. “I suppose you weren’t sure if the whisky would be any good after spending so many years in an underground cave.”

  Kristen stopped pacing and turned to me. “Always the reporter, aren’t you? But this is one exclusive you won’t be printing.” Kristen seemed to have reached a decision. “The stuff could have been rancid for all we knew, but it was Duff’s idea to bottle up a few samples and label them as one of the vintage Fletcher’s Reserves.”

  “The Rose…”

  “I told him to give Ben a bottle at Christmas, but no, he gave him half a dozen. They were worth a small bloody fortune.”

  “Could be he felt he owed Ben something since you were essentially stealing from him,” I pointed out.

  “He didn’t have to live with the guilt for long,” Kristen said with a faint smile.

  “So you made up some samples of the Rose, and Duff got lucky. It was more than good, it was fabulous,” I prompted, stalling for time as I tried to figure out my next move. Kristen was speaking freely now, which could only mean that she had no intention of letting me leave this cave alive. I had to keep her talking and give myself time to think.

  “The faux Rose was money in the bank. He started looking for a buyer. I’ll admit he was more than savvy when it came to selling the stuff. He’d made the right contacts at the Society. He knew exactly who to approach.”

  “The Bartollis,” I said, shaking my head at my own stupidity.

  “Nick’s father is a passionate collector. He was over the moon at the prospect of being able to get his hands on a rare, unreleased Fletcher’s Reserve. It would be singular. Unique. Something that no one else would have. One taste and he was ready to buy the whole lot.”

  “But what was he going to do with it? If that many bottles of forty-year-old Reserve suddenly appeared on the market, people would be suspicious. Ben would’ve been bound to hear about it.”

  “I told you Bartolli’s mad when it comes to his collection. It’s like art to him. He’d pay millions and hide it away to drink himself. If he sold any of it, he’d do it a few bottles at a time, to other discerning collectors, just to let them know how clever he’d been.”

  “So where do you fit into all this?”

  “Are you kidding? Without me Duff would have ended up selling the stuff for a fraction of what it was worth. He needed me.”

  I wondered if Duff shared that view as time went on.

  “Besides,” Kristen continued, “he’d already shown me where the whisky was hidden. If he didn’t cut me in, I could have sold that information to Bartolli for a handsome sum and Duff would have been cut out of the deal.”

  “So what went wrong?” I pressed, listening for the sound of Nick’s return.

  “Ben went wrong. Before we finalized the deal with Bartolli, Ben died.”

  So I was right about that at least. “With Ben gone, Bartolli was in a position to go after the distillery itself and cut out the middleman. He’d always liked the place, and now he could have it and Martin’s Reserves as well. Even better, those vintage casks would be his legally.”

  “Clever girl. Bartolli was anxious to get his hands on the place before too many other potential buyers started nosing around. The bastard cut a deal with Duff. Recruited him to sabotage the distillery and send the nasty notes to scare you into selling. You didn’t have a clue. Grant was hurt and angry, and Cam was always there keeping an eye on the place. It was so easy to make them look guilty.”

  “And Maitland?”

  “Easiest of the bunch. Just wind him up and point him in the right direction. Few words in his ear about Rachel and he was off trying to undermine Grant and lure you in the direction of him and his pals. The rest of the bunch are so quirky it was easy to keep you running in circles while the Bartollis kept their distance.”

  “And what was Duff getting out of all this?”

  “Bartolli told him they’d put him in charge of the Glen and give him a percentage of the sales of Martin’s malt on the open market. Duff was blinded by the money. He couldn’t see he was being played.”

  “By everyone, it seems.”

  Kristen ignored me. “Duff was so obsessed with taking care of Siobhán and paying off the mortgage on the pub. I couldn’t make him see we could’ve had so much more. We were in the driver’s seat. He and I were the only ones that knew where the whisky was. Without that information the Bartollis could dig up half the county and never find what they were looking for. Duff sold out for a pittance, but not me.”

  Kristen’s voice was becoming louder and more shrill. She kept looking toward the passageway, waiting for Nick’s return. I tried to wriggle my hands free and did my best to keep distracting her with questions, hoping some reasonable plan of escape would come to me.

  Kristen rounded on me. “That whisky is my ticket out of this godforsaken place, and no one, not even you, is going to get in my way.”

  “And you killed Duff to keep him from telling Bartolli where the whisky was hidden.” I felt sick thinking about it.

  “I told you when you found the body, Duff’s death was an accident,” Kristen insisted. “But you didn’t believe me.”

  “I still don’t. Duff wasn’t alone that night. Someone else was with him. Someone dumped his body in that washback.”

  “True, he wasn’t alone. He met Nick after the reception at your place. They were supposed to be finding a way to sabotage the main still without going too far, but as usual they were bickering. Duff felt betrayed when I hooked up with Nick while he and Bartolli senior were negotiating the terms of the deal. Silly boy.”

  “But what happened to Duff?” I demanded.

  “He took a swing at Nick, but Nick ducked. Strong sense of self-preservation, that one. Duff was drunk, and he stumbled at the top of the stairs and fell. It wasn’t Nick’s fault he hit his head on the corner of the spirit safe, but it was over in a flash. Nick panicked. He tried to make it look like an accident by tampering with the hinges on the washback lid before dumping the body and coming to get me. It would have been pretty slick if he’d remembered to leave the hinge pins behind, but he’s not the brightest bulb in the box.”

  “Convenient. Duff’s out of the picture, and you covered for Nick, so he owes you. But what about Claire Jones?” I demanded. “Was her death an ‘accident,’ too? She’d seen the labels, and once you saw her talking to me she had to go.”

  Kristen smiled. “Rothes says she overdosed on barbiturates and booze. It happens all the time. Funny old world, isn’t it? But as it happens, I have an alibi. I was at the Caledonian having dinner with Nick. We were getting engaged.”

  I must have looked stunned. I followed Kristen’s erratic path around the cave, trying to form an appropriate response to that piece of news.

  “Oh yes,” Kristen smirked, “it’ll be announced in the next day or so. Somehow he’s under the impression that I have DNA evidence that could link him to Duff’s murder. Not the most romantic way to catch a man, but it worked. Nick came to the sensible conclusion that marrying me is a far more appealing sentence than a stint in jail. He’s convinced his father that it’s true love at last. Papa Bar
tolli’s quite chuffed. He was sure it would convince you that AXB is the best bet for Abbey Glen. But now, of course, you won’t be around to sell.”

  That possibility had been looming large in my fevered attempts to envision a way out of here. I tried not to show the panic and terror that were taking hold of me. “Getting rid of me won’t help. You’ll never get Abbey Glen. If I die right now, she goes to Grant, and he’ll never sell.”

  “Don’t be too sure. Losing another woman he cares about might just be too much for him.”

  “The only woman he cares about is Abbey Glen.”

  “If you believe that, you’re more of a fool than I thought.”

  Was that true? Did Grant care about me under that external layer of Scottish permafrost? I shook my head. Hardly relevant at the moment—I was facing much more pressing problems.

  “None of that matters, anyway,” Kristen said. “Nick and I have relocated the casks one by one. There’s only a few left. The rest are safe and sound in the cellar at my place. You see, I win no matter who ends up with Abbey Glen.”

  “Glad this is working out for you.”

  “It could’ve been fine for you, too, if you’d sold up and cleared out right away. I was sure you’d turn tail after you figured out Duff was murdered.”

  “I’m tougher than that.”

  “True. That’s why I liked you. Really, I did,” she said as I gave her a disgusted look from my position on the floor. “Under different circumstances we could have been great friends.”

  Liam began to growl again, and I could hear Nick clanging down the passageway. He appeared with the shovels and the crowbar, looking flustered.

  “About time,” said Kristen. “Come on, we have to be quick.”

  She and Nick disappeared into the next cave and I pulled frantically at the remaining knots around my wrists, but my fingers were stiff and I couldn’t loosen them enough to break free. Kristen and Nick returned in a matter of minutes, sliding two more small wooden casks through the narrow opening.

  “Thank God that’s the last of them,” Kristen said to Nick. “We’ll hide them down the south passage and come back when everything has calmed down. The hills must be crawling with police by now.” She nodded in our direction. “Bring them.”

  Nick untied our ropes from the ring in the wall. I tried to twist away, but Nick was wiry and stronger than he looked. Liam sank his teeth into Nick’s calf as he dragged me into the adjacent cave. Nick howled, and Kristen picked up a spade and struck Liam on the side of the head. I screamed as he staggered and fell to the ground, motionless.

  Nick wrestled me to the ground and secured me to a rusted metal rack that was once used to support the barrels, retying my hands and undoing my painstaking efforts to loosen the restraints. The new cave was smaller and darker than the one we’d been in, and I could feel the walls closing in around me.

  “Tie the dog up in case he comes around before we’re done, then tape her mouth shut and start moving rocks,” Kristen barked over her shoulder as she headed back to the cave beyond.

  Nick found a cloth and a roll of duct tape and covered my mouth. He got bitten again, by me this time, but managed to get the job done anyway. Then he began to follow Kristen’s lead, piling large rocks into the doorway, grumbling as he worked. They kept going until the opening was more than half covered. Nick continued complaining as they shoveled smaller rocks onto the top of the pile.

  “I don’t like this. It’s not right. Duff was one thing, but this is too much.”

  “You didn’t mind taking the risk when you forced her off the road. You didn’t mind taking the risk when you broke into the Haven. If you’d done a better job of scaring her off we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Kristen said. “Now stop fussing and dig. We’ll bury them back here and no one will ever find them.”

  “It’s not right,” Nick muttered.

  “Neither was dumping Duff’s dead body in a vat of malt,” Kristen pointed out, “but that’s our little secret for the time being. You think this is bad, see how you like prison.”

  Nick scowled, but went back to shoveling rocks with a tad more vigor.

  Liam was beginning to whimper softly. I prayed he would stay quiet until they left. I didn’t want him to be hit again. Soon the pile of rocks was over Kristen’s head and the two grabbed pickaxes and began chipping away at cracks in the roof of the cave adjacent to the doorway. Before long, they succeeded in causing another small slide of dirt and limestone, which came down from the ceiling and cut off the last of the light from the cave beyond. Claustrophobia overwhelmed me. We were trapped and alone in the dark.

  After a few minutes, I heard their voices fading away down the passage. I wanted to yell as soon as they were out of earshot, but I knew it was pointless, even if I could open my mouth.

  In all my journalistic training on how to respond to kidnapping and hostage situations, there had been a conspicuous lack of instruction relating to subterranean caves in rural Scotland. I needed to keep calm and find a way to free my hands before I could do anything else. My fingers were numb, but I pushed myself to feel along the edge of the rusting barrel stand, looking for a rough spot. Once I found one, I began the laborious process of rubbing the ropes back and forth across the jagged patch on the metal framing.

  As I worked on the ropes I kept a close eye on Liam. He hadn’t tried to stand yet, but he sat up and shook his head back and forth a couple of times before lying down and looking up at me with his plaintive brown eyes. I wanted to comfort him, but I couldn’t reach. It took a good hour to make any headway on the ropes. I kept at it, still barely able to fathom how wrong I’d been. I’d made a rookie mistake. I was as bad as the men around here—I hadn’t even considered Kristen because she was a woman. I automatically presumed she was on my side.

  Her words had come to me clearly enough: isolated, determined, and astute. Good qualities in a doctor, but just as good for a criminal. She was astute. She could rapidly assess people and situations and find the right treatment, but she could also see how to turn people to her own advantage. She was a master, and Nick was the ideal pawn—empty, decorative, and infinitely malleable. He had no backbone to stand up to her with. And poor Duff. Enough knowledge to lead him into danger, but not enough to recognize when he was out of his depth. Too young and naïve to take on Kristen and Bartolli.

  The circulation in my fingers was almost gone by the time I managed to sever the rope. With my hands free, I ripped the tape from my mouth and went to Liam. I dug the flashlight out of my pocket. There was a large bump on the side of his head, but no blood. He’d have a doozy of a headache, but he should be okay. If we could get out of here, that is.

  I shone the light around my prison. There were a few rotting barrels and a crate or two. Other than that, the space was empty except for the stones that sealed the doorway. It was impressive handiwork, considering how little time they’d had.

  Dislodging the rocks would be almost impossible with bare hands. I pulled at some stones that looked loose, but more came down to fill in any spaces I opened. In the end, I made no real dent in the wall in front of me, and my hands were a bloody mess. I was forced to sit down, exhausted and dehydrated. The day’s adventures on top of the accident from the night before had left me weak. Tears began to roll down my cheeks, and Liam came to lick them away. He whimpered in my ear, not understanding why we weren’t leaving this dark place.

  “I know, boy-o,” I said, burying my face in his fur. “I don’t know where we go from here.” I leaned against the wall of the cave and shut my eyes. I was so exhausted I began to drift off.

  I came to with a start at the sound of another shower of rocks from the doorway. Liam had been following my lead and digging near the base of the pile, dislodging some of the rocks and causing a mini landslide. I caught his collar and pulled him away from the falling debris. A few more stones had made their way into the cave on our side, and a small breach had opened up at the top of the entranceway. It couldn’t have been m
ore than eight inches square, but it was a start and the fresher air was a relief. I tried in earnest, but I couldn’t shift any more of the rocks around the opening. The second slide had wedged some of the larger rocks in tighter than ever.

  Liam sensed the change in the air and kept barking up at the opening. “You’re too fat, boy,” I said. “No way you’d get through.”

  But Liam wouldn’t stop standing on his hind legs and sniffing the air coming in through the small opening. “Look, I’ll show you,” I finally said, dragging an empty wooden crate over from the far side of the room. I heaved Liam’s fifty-pound bulk up in my arms and put his head near the space in the rock. Liam sniffed and grabbed on with his paws, trying to wriggle out.

  “You’ll get stuck like Pooh leaving Rabbit’s house,” I said as his front end disappeared through the hole. “You’ve got the wide bit left to go, you idiot.”

  As usual Liam ignored me and kept wriggling and clawing until his backside disappeared through the narrow hole into the cave beyond. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.

  “Liam? Liam? Are you alright?” I knew it was a ridiculous question, but I took comfort in hearing no answering yelps of pain. “Liam,” I called again, and got a reassuring woof. He paced back and forth on the other side of the rock wall, whining, no doubt wondering why I wasn’t following him. I called out, “Home, boy. Go home. You can’t stay here.”

  Liam woofed again. “Run home,” I ordered again, doing my best to sound firm. After a few minutes I heard the sound of his claws retreating down the tunnel. He was free and had some chance of finding his way out.

  But now I was alone.

  Chapter 25

  I must have finally drifted to sleep out of sheer exhaustion, and vivid dreams came roiling up from my subconscious mind, visions of falling like Alice down a twisting hole into the depths of the Earth. When I awoke, the batteries in the flashlight had died and I was in total darkness. I had no way of knowing what time it was, or even what day. I wondered if Grant and Cam were still out on the hills looking for Liam and me. Had they called in Rothes? Were they waiting for daybreak, or had it come and gone?