by Molly Macrae
The decorators they’d hired to refurbish the tearoom arrived shortly before Yon Bonnie Books opened for the day. A middle-aged woman in a white bib-and-brace overall introduced herself as Gillian, and the identically dressed young woman and man with her as Chloe and Garth. The three made multiple trips from a panel truck. They carried in ladders, buckets and rollers, drop cloths, and what looked like a corral for small livestock.
“If they bring in sheep I’ll question our wisdom in going with McVitie and McPhee,” Christine said.
“Your father recommended them,” Janet reminded her.
“This morning he asked if I’d like milk in my tea. When I said yes, he gave me a splash of grapefruit juice.”
The corral turned into a low scaffold before their eyes, and Christine accepted a second scone from Janet to ease her stress.
“Are you really that worried by sheep?” Tallie asked.
“Not at all,” Christine said, “once they’ve been made into jumpers.”
Summer checked the paint colors against the samples she’d chosen and double-checked their placement according to her wall plan. The four of them had debated color schemes and finally, in the interest of peace, left the decision in Summer’s hands. She’d told them they wouldn’t be sorry—and promised to repaint the walls herself if they were.
“‘Banana cream’ on the wall straight ahead,” she said, pointing at the wall people would see as they entered from the street. “‘Blushing’ on the wall to ‘banana cream’s’ right.” She moved a bucket of that paint to the base of the wall straight ahead for anyone entering from the bookshop. “Those two will draw people in with mellow, appetite-inducing warmth.”
Garth watched Summer’s every move, mouth not quite hanging open. Or at least the movement of her loose, long, shiny blond hair. Christine nudged Janet with her elbow and nodded her chin toward him.
“Color groupie,” she whispered to Janet.
“On the wall going into the bookshop, we have this complementary yet energetic green,” Summer said. “That’s ‘aqueduct.’ It’s also reminiscent of the classic ‘bookstore’ green, so it’ll put folks in the right frame of mind as they go into the shop, and it works well with ‘banana cream’ to its right. Then, on the wall along the street, it’s another energetic color, ‘candid blue.’ It works well with the other three and brings the blue of the water and sky into the tearoom as patrons look out the windows onto the street and harbor. And with the white trim around the door and windows, we’ve got the blue and white of the saltire flag.”
At the mention of the flag, Janet had to cough and leave the tearoom altogether. Christine followed, and as they unlocked and opened the shop for the day, Janet told her about her evening in the launderette.
“You didn’t ask Rab why he rabbited off the harbor wall like that the other morning?” Christine asked. “Why not?”
“I didn’t like to intrude on the dignity of his Nessie boxers.”
“Good Lord. I should hope not.”
“Besides, we know why he ran,” Janet said. “He knew about the garbage in the house and he felt guilty for not following through when Jess hired him to clear it out.”
“Did he act guilty last night? Uncomfortable? In any way uneasy? At all?”
Janet shook her head at each of Christine’s questions.
“Then we only think we know.”
“That’s good enough for now,” Janet said. “If he’s coming to work for us, let’s not ruffle whatever water he floats on, because that is a man who seems to be totally content with floating through life. And I think it’s a quality that might be useful to us, so let’s keep him on an even keel.”
“What do you expect him to do?”
“You’ve seen sticks and branches and debris floating down the river, or caught in a quiet bend. Or boats moored in the harbor, for that matter. And what do you see happening to them? All kinds of things bump into them—flotsam, jetsam—”
“Rubbish.”
“At least let me finish before you say it’s rubbish.”
“You misunderstood,” Christine said. “I’m agreeing with you. Garbage that’s tossed out or overboard gets caught up on floating objects, too.”
“And that’s what Rab’s like. Bits and pieces of life in Inversgail bump up against him and he floats from place to place. Bits and pieces of information. He looks at them and keeps some and leaves the rest.”
“Aren’t we all like that to some extent?”
“Sure, but I think he’s mastered the art, the way cats have perfected the art of soaking up sunshine. Think what will happen if some engineer somewhere figures out how to harness the solar energy absorbed by cats.”
“Instant Nobel Prize,” Christine said.
“But unlikely to happen because of lack of funding.”
“Besides the cats not cooperating.”
“They would never go along with it,” Janet said. “And all we have to do is convince Rab to share the bits and pieces he collects. With us.”
Pamela and Kenneth arrived during a flurry of pensioners on an outing from Fort William. Although the week of expertise the Lawries had promised wasn’t yet up, Janet hadn’t been sure they would be back. Besides Pamela saying they were ready to go it alone, and then leaving them alone, there’d been the incident with Sharon Davis. But Kenneth came in with his gap-toothed grin and a thumbs-up when he saw the milling crowd.
“They make the trip every few months,” he said. “The tearoom will be just their cup of tea.”
Pamela stood by the postcard display, greeting pensioners she recognized. After the last few had made their purchases, she went across to the sales desk.
“Nice old dears,” she said softly. “That’s why I didn’t like to interrupt with something so unpleasant.”
Janet and Christine were instantly attentive, Christine with the beginnings of a twitch in her left eyelid.
“I saw McVitie and McPhee’s van,” Pamela said. “Are they working in the tearoom?”
“Redecorating,” Janet said. “They came highly recommended. Why?”
“Only, you see, that’s why I’m shocked. They have a fine reputation.”
“What are you talking about?” Christine asked.
“The bags of rubbish they hauled out,” Pamela said. “They tossed them on the footpath along the back, which is both careless and negligent, not to say how it reflects on Yon Bonnie. And then some numpty’s come along and slit them open, and they’re lying out there like five or six fat, black trout—gutted.”
Christine stared at Pamela before saying, “McVitie and McPhee didn’t remove bags of rubbish.”
“See for yourself. It’s like a tip back there. Go on. I’ll watch the books.”
There are no words. Janet didn’t say it out loud, not as she had two mornings before, but she repeated the horrible mantra to herself as she and Christine rushed for the back door. That door, reached through the stockroom, opened directly onto a narrow pedestrian pavement and Sculpay Terrace, the one-way street between the backs of High Street buildings and the backs of those on the next street up the hill. Janet and Christine ran out the door, Janet going left, and Christine right, and then they stopped and stood in the street and stared. There on the pavement, along the back of their building, were the slit garbage bags.
“She can’t count,” Christine said. “There are seven. And where she gets trout from, I can’t imagine. They look more like harbor seals—”
“Don’t,” Janet said. “I don’t want to hear what they look like. This is more of it. This is more of what’s happened at the house. I just . . .” She clutched the top of her head. “There are no words and I don’t even know what to think anymore.”
“Then you don’t want to hear this, either, because I do know what to think. This is a threat.”
11
Janet called Police Scotland’s nonemergency number. The first call handler she reached at the area police service center told her that flytipping was a matter
she should report to her local council, and disconnected. The second call handler Janet reached agreed that bags of rubbish dumped behind a business in Inversgail was terrible, in fact a scourge to be battled across their entire beautiful country, but not police business.
“Murder is police business,” Janet said, with emphasis on “murder”— salacious emphasis, she later told Tallie—and that caught the handler’s attention.
The call handler connected Janet to Constable Hobbs. Hobbs, although giving the impression he thought Janet was overreacting, said he would relay her report to the crime specialists as possibly of interest in their ongoing investigation. He didn’t know when they might arrive, or when he might, but as it was a dry and not very windy day, the rubbish wasn’t likely to disappear before he and they did appear. He said he’d try to be there soon. As it turned out, some of the Major Investigation Team arrived before he did.
“But it took them an hour,” Janet fretted.
“And more’s the pity they’re here first,” said Christine. “At least with Norman we’ve established a certain rapport.”
Janet wasn’t sure what that rapport was doing for them, and she clutched the top of her head again. But then the dismissive inspector from the night of the murder thanked her for reporting the “disturbance” and assured her they were taking this new incident seriously. He was sorry that a key member of their team had apparently been delayed. As had Constable Hobbs. The inspector might have ground his teeth after mentioning Constable Hobbs. Then he turned to another of his officers.
“Have you reached Reddick yet?” he asked.
“No, sir. He left word he was meeting Atkinson at the bothy. In the middle of nowhere, it sounded.”
“Right. We’ll make do without him.”
Janet could forgive the inspector for being abrupt. Part and parcel of doing a difficult job, she assumed. And he did sound sincere. Right up until she heard him muttering to one of his men about “entitled Americans expecting police protection from rampaging bin liners.”
At that point, Norman Hobbs arrived.
“Apologies for not arriving earlier, sir,” Hobbs said, words and posture at crisp attention. “Attending a road accident, sir, on Tha Mo Bhàtafoluaimein Loma-làn Easgannan Road.”
The inspector skewered him with a look.
“Formerly the Mull Eigg Road. It’s the Gaelic road signs, sir. Difficult, but better than the Welsh. Have you and the other specialists made a determination yet as to whether there is a link between this incident and the recent murder?”
Janet thought she detected a bristle of something in Hobbs’s officious words. Possibly sarcasm. From the inspector’s suppressed snarl, she thought he might have detected it, too. The Major Investigation Team hadn’t actually investigated the incident yet, though, so all the officers exited through the front door to do so. Janet and Christine left the books in Pamela’s and Kenneth’s capable and concerned hands, and for the second time that week followed Norman Hobbs toward a crime scene. Hobbs lifted an eyebrow at them, but after glancing at the blue backs marching in closed rank ahead of him, he said nothing to dissuade them. And when they rounded the far corner of their building, they were once again shocked by what lay in front of them in Sculpay Terrace—except this time it was absolutely nothing. The street, the pavement, everywhere they looked. Nothing. Not even a cigarette butt lay abandoned in the gutter.
“Mrs. Marsh.” The inspector stood straight, arms at his sides. His tone of voice, though, crossed its arms and regarded her through a jaundiced, narrowed eye. “Are you familiar with the term ‘wasting police time’?”
“There were bags of garbage here an hour ago. All slit open. Six of them.”
“Seven,” Christine corrected. “I took pictures with my phone.”
“Bless you, Christine,” Janet said. “I didn’t notice you doing that.”
Christine patted her back. “You were in shock.”
“Right,” the inspector said. “Finish up here, Hobbs.”
“Sir.”
“And try to answer your calls more promptly. That way you might not lose the evidence.”
“Sir.”
The blue backs of the crime specialists closed ranks again and marched back out of Sculpay Terrace.
“That was harsh criticism coming from someone who’d barely arrived before you did,” Janet said as she watched the specialists disappear around the corner. “Not to mention that one of his own team didn’t show up at all, and you were at the scene of a road accident, for heaven’s sake. I hope no one was badly hurt.”
“Single car accident. Slight injuries to the driver,” Hobbs said. “He’ll be right in a day or two. There’s a rock wall along there, and where the road turns left he didn’t.”
“Tcha. Distracted driving,” Christine said. “On his mobile, was he? Or was he drunk that early in the day?”
“Now who’s being harsh?” Hobbs asked, but his rebuke was mild. “Distracted, aye, but not by his phone, and not likely to be drinking on duty, or at least not on duty that early in the day. He’d just passed a field full of sheep, and then he saw new twin lambs with their mum on the verge. He was concerned for their safety. Then he saw the dog, but missed seeing the turn.”
“On duty,” Janet said.
“I didn’t reckon officers in the Specialist Crime Division to be so softhearted,” Hobbs said. “Officer named Reddick. He said the sheepdog looked like his own dog. Quantum, he calls him. He was a bit chatty, which might’ve been a result of the rush of adrenaline after the crash. He’s a good man. His second concern was that I not say anything to the inspector before he had a chance to chat with him himself. His first was for the dog and the sheep.”
“Sheep,” Christine said with a shudder. “They’re the woolly fluff of nightmares.”
“Just don’t let the fluff keep you from thinking clearly,” Janet said. “We’ve heard that name, Reddick, before. One of the specialists told the inspector that Reddick was meeting Ian Atkinson at a brothel in the middle of nowhere. That sounds like it could be a significant development. Not a very nice one, though. Constable Hobbs, while Reddick was being chatty, did he let anything useful about his meeting with Atkinson slip?”
Hobbs looked at Janet. “Erm, did you say—”
“She meant bothy,” Christine said to Hobbs. Turning to Janet, she said, “A wee hoose ’mang the heather, dear. A house, possibly a whiskymaking operation. Possibly also a trysting place, but not a brothel.”
“An easy mistake to make,” Hobbs told Janet unconvincingly. “The specialists are talking to Ian Atkinson, but I don’t think they see him as a suspect. More like they’re starstruck. The big crime writer, you see. They probably think he can solve the crime for them. My opinion, anyway.”
“And sound, I’m sure,” Christine said. “I must say, Norman, I admired the way you rattled off the Gaelic for your inspector. He’s obviously not a believer, but you showed him how it’s done. Do you speak it?”
“Sadly, not much more than signpost Gaelic. And the odd phrase.”
“Nor do I,” said Christine. “Funny, though, I don’t recall such a long stretch of Gaelic on the Mull Eigg Road sign.” She looked at him with an inquiring eye.
“Ah.”
“Ah?”
Hobbs considered the sky for a moment, and then looked at them with a sweet smile. “That would be because there isn’t. That was one of the odd phrases I’ve learnt. I’m told by my sister that it means, ‘My hovercraft is full of eels.’ I reckon the inspector and his mates don’t have any more actual Gaelic than I do, and possibly were never fans of Monty Python or John Cleese. Now, about these bags of rubbish.”
The sky Hobbs had so recently considered had turned gray and started dripping, so they went back into the bookshop, entering through the back door.
“You should interview Pamela Lawrie first,” Christine said. “She’s the one who told us about the bin bags.”
“I’ll hear from you and Mrs. Marsh, first,
if it’s all the same to you.”
Janet stopped short in the stockroom. “But here, if you don’t mind, and not in the shop. We don’t want customers overhearing or getting the wrong impression.”
“You don’t think having the entire Major Investigation Team traipse in and out of the shop earlier already did that for us?” Christine asked.
“But let’s not compound it,” Janet said. “Nothing against you, Constable Hobbs, or the police.”
“It’s quite all right. Believe it or not, the uniform doesn’t make friends everywhere it goes.” Hobbs looked left and right at the length of the stockroom. “You’ve a reasonable amount of extra space here, haven’t you? Deceptive from the outside.”
“Like so many things in life,” Christine said, “people included. All right, while you give Norman a tour of packing materials and extra inventory, I’ll go let Pamela and Kenneth know we haven’t given up on the idea of running a shop.”
For all the extra space the stockroom provided, it wasn’t laid out with gatherings in mind. The room was only as long as the building, and fairly narrow back to front. Utilitarian wooden shelves ran along the outside wall. There were several cupboards, a workbench, and a deep sink along the interior wall. Janet and Hobbs waited without speaking, with their backsides resting against the workbench.
“Christine thinks the slit bags were a message. A threat,” Janet said when Christine returned and joined them in leaning against the workbench.
“Hard to know what the threat would be about,” Hobbs said.
“You want more imagination, Norman,” said Christine.
“Oh, aye.”
“Oh, aye, indeed. I’m quite sure if you want to solve a crime like murder, you need to make intuitive leaps. You need to make connections.”
“Constable Hobbs,” Janet said. “The threat might be toward another life.”
“There,” Christine said. “You see? Connect the dots. Rubbish in Janet’s house—dot one. Una murdered in Janet’s shed—dot two. Rubbish behind Yon Bonnie Books—dot three. Now it’s your turn, Norman. Turn it over in your mind to determine the who, the what, the where, and the when of dot four.”
