by Molly Macrae
“Heartbreaking,” Janet said. “I can’t imagine waking up every morning and facing that loss again and again.”
“But I can imagine a tragedy like that changing someone. What happened at the paper?”
“Why don’t you and Christine go in and let Summer tell you. I’ll be fine here. It’ll be good for her to spew and I need the nearness of books.”
“You’re misquoting that, if you’re doing Charlotte’s Web,” Tallie said. “It’s the nearness of rats.”
“Then let’s hope the rats aren’t nearer than we think.”
“I have a couple of questions, when you get a minute, Rab,” Janet said.
He set down a stack of books she hadn’t expected to see him carrying and came to the desk.
“Do you have any idea who Ranger’s friend over there is?”
“Here’s the only place I’ve seen her, and only this week,” he said.
“Huh. I was sure you’d know.”
“She’s got a nice pair of Nessies, though.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What she’s knitting. Loch Ness monsters. With fins.” He paddled his arms. “Anything else?”
“Two things. We should talk about your hours and the sort of work we expect. And I thought you’d like to know that I gave the letters Rosie found in the kitchen to the police.”
“To Norman Hobbs?”
“Yes.”
Rab looked thoughtful. He took a small pen and scrap of paper from a back pocket, made a note, and returned them.
“Do you know anything about them?” Janet asked.
“Letters unsent.” He shook his head. “Never a good sign.”
He stepped aside to let her wait on customers. She remained busy. When a lull came, she looked for him so they could discuss his hours and duties, but he and Ranger were gone.
“We have motives and possible motives galore,” Christine said toward the end of the afternoon. “We need to zero in on opportunity. We eliminated the renters from our pool of suspects because of opportunity. We need to find out who else we can cross off.”
“Strictly speaking, we didn’t eliminate the Pollards,” Janet said. “Norman did and told us later.”
“We won’t quibble.”
Speaking of opportunity, Janet thought. She saw that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was packing away her knitting—including a flock of neon blue, purple, and green monsters. The old woman hoisted herself from her chair and steadied her legs. Then she put her carrier bag on her arm, nodded and smiled as she passed the desk, and left.
“Trundles,” Christine said. “She actually trundles.”
Janet counted to twenty, told Christine she’d be back, and she went out the door, too. The old woman was just going around the corner. Janet followed, but drawing on her vast experience of watching TV detectives tailing their marks, she hung back until she saw the woman turn the next corner into Sculpay Terrace. Then Janet hurried to that corner and looked around it, arriving in time to see the woman get into the passenger side of a car and be driven away.
The four of them sat down by the fire again that evening. They each had a miniature quiche, thanks to Summer’s need to work off her anger at Una.
“Speaking as a retired social worker,” Christine said, “spinach quiche is a much healthier way of dealing with anger and frustration than murder. I’m glad we had the opportunity to give you this delicious outlet. Now, on to the opportunities our suspects had. Which of our suspects had the opportunity to kill Una? In a shed—true—but both Una and the murderer went there in broad daylight.”
“Opportunity will tell us a lot,” Summer said, “but so will knowing why she was there. And even if we can’t get into her mind, we know some of her actions.”
“So she could’ve been looking for Neil Pollard,” Tallie said. “Maybe she didn’t know they’d moved out.”
“That still doesn’t explain the shed,” Janet said. “‘Opportunity’ and ‘why’ come together at the shed. The dreadful shed.”
“Possibilities,” Christine said. “She was spying on Ian Atkinson. But how could she do that from in the shed? If he didn’t see her, she couldn’t see him. Next possibilities. She was looking for something. She was leaving something. She was meeting someone. That makes the most sense.”
“A timeline,” Tallie said. “Una was here, she got a text, she walked past Jess Baillie’s office, where Rosie saw her—”
“She dropped her laptop at the newspaper office,” Summer said. “So why didn’t she leave the letters there? The desk locked. They would’ve been safe there. Safer.”
“We’re back to the murderer finding the letters on her?” Janet said. “Then we need two opportunities. The murder and planting the letters.”
“Here’s another way to look at opportunity,” Tallie said. “It was broad daylight, but it would be good to know how easy it is to move around there without being seen. Want to take a field trip?”
The four of them got into Christine’s car and stopped first at her house with spinach quiche for her parents’ evening tea. Christine told them she would be back later that evening and left as her mother complained loudly to her father about the au pair who spent all her time out clubbing. They then drove to Argyll Terrace.
“But let’s park at the corner and walk,” Janet said. “We don’t know if the police are there or watching it.”
“If they’re watching it, I would hope they’d notice the four of us creeping up on it,” Tallie said.
They parked at the corner anyway.
“This is only the third time I’ve been here since we arrived in Inversgail,” Janet said. “And each time the circumstances have been unusual.”
“Third time’s the charm,” Christine said.
“If the murderer is someone with the opportunity to come and go without being remarked, that pretty clearly points to Jess or Ian,” Summer said.
“But we don’t know who’s been coming and going while the Pollards lived here,” Tallie said.
“True,” said Summer. “I’m keeping an eye out for Ian anyway.”
Janet pictured the four of them walking abreast down a dusty, high-noon Argyll Terrace toward her house. In fact, they walked two-by-two on the sidewalk and it was early evening, but her senses were alive to the drama. A bird twittered and then sang in the garden next door. A warbler? She didn’t know, but she decided to make sure Yon Bonnie Books carried guides for birders, and maybe some of those book-and-CD sets for identifying birdsongs. She heard a child across the street calling and another laughing.
They stopped and she looked at the front of her house again, at the front door and windows trimmed in the same blue as the sky. She looked at the front garden, not much bigger than a welcome mat, but offering warmth and welcome all the same. A house she loved. Her house.
“I’ve asked Rab to find more of that blue and touch up the door and trim. It looks fine, though, doesn’t it? I’ve missed it these five years. Jess always put a picture of it in her Christmas cards. That was such a nice touch. It’s been like seeing photos of a distant relative.”
They went around to the back, as they’d done Monday evening, opening and closing the garden gate with care, then standing for a moment to listen. They went to the bottom of the garden and stared at the shed.
“It’s not such a bad-looking shed.” Christine tilted her head sideways as if that improved it from “bad” to “not so bad.”
“I’d like to burn it,” Janet said.
“I’ll hand you the match,” said Summer.
“It’s a quiet neighborhood. Walls around some gardens.” Tallie turned in a circle. “Four of us just came in the side gate and didn’t cause a hullabaloo. If someone really tried to sneak in, it’d be a cinch. Standing here, I can see Ian’s windows.” She went to stand at the shed’s door. “Now I can’t see his house, so he can’t see me. And I don’t see any windows in the houses around that would have a clear view.”
“So the murderer knew that?” Su
mmer asked.
“Or Una did. She might’ve picked the spot,” Tallie said. “Considering Lauren’s reaction to the house, Neil and Una probably—”
“Ugh,” Janet said.
“And that is her name,” said Christine. “Ug might have chosen the spot and called her murderer to her. Where are you going?”
Janet didn’t want to look at the shed another minute. “The house. As long as we’re here, I’m going to snoop. See what they’re up to or what they’ve done to it.” She walked up the rise to the deck, and hesitated before putting a foot on it. Creeping seemed to be in order, but she decided against it, for the same reasons they hadn’t crept on Monday. This was her house and she belonged here. She stepped up and crossed the deck to look in the window.
And experienced a moment of the same shock she’d felt Monday morning when she and Christine had looked through the kitchen window—except this time garbage wasn’t the surprise. The lounge was spotless, and there was Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, sitting in Janet’s chair, knitting a neon purple Nessie.
Janet pulled back from the window. Should she knock on the door? But if the woman didn’t speak English, what would that accomplish? Seeing the others about to join her on the deck, she waved them off. She went to join them, and this time she did creep.
“What is it?” Tallie asked.
“The last thing I expected.” She explained the situation to them. Then she called Norman Hobbs. “And come quietly,” she warned him, “so you don’t scare her.”
Janet stood just inside her front door. Norman Hobbs, at uncomfortable attention, stood beside her waiting. She let him wait, not out of spite, but because she needed to calm herself. While she did, she looked at the embroidery hanging above the door. Curtis had loved the coincidence of the house being built in 1880, the same year that William McGonagall, the Scots poet famous for overly dramatic doggerel, wrote his ripped-from-the-headlines poem “The Tay Bridge Disaster.” Janet had embroidered the last lines of the poem on linen and had the piece framed for him. “For the stronger we our houses do build/The less chance we have of being killed.” They’d hung it over the door, half for a joke and half as a talisman.
“My grandmother has always been fond of McGonagall,” Hobbs offered.
“Which grandmother would that be, Norman? Another one? Or Nana Bethia, formerly of Inverness, now knitting Nessies in my lounge?”
Christine, Tallie, and Summer had stayed in the lounge with Bethia Ferguson—Nana Bethia, as Hobbs called her—who was surprised but happy to see everyone. But Janet had insisted Hobbs come with her to explain exactly what he’d done. Explain in private, because she didn’t want to chance losing her temper in front of an apparently blameless grandmother.
“She’s been staying with my sister there, you see,” Hobbs said. “But my sister can’t keep her any longer. We’ve arranged for a sheltered housing flat in Ballachulish, but there’s been a delay. I couldn’t keep her at my place, because—”
“Because you wanted to make the right impression on the Murder Investigation Team. You’re unbelievable.”
“It’s a temporary situation.”
“Unbelievable. Does she speak English?”
“Perfectly. But her dentures are being fixed. In the meantime she has trouble speaking clearly and thinks she looks gormless if she opens her mouth. I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Marsh. I think I must have lost my head.”
“Another temporary situation? If she’s your grandmother, how come no one knows her?”
“That would be due to the myth of small towns—that everyone knows everyone else’s business. If that were true, there’d be no need for police. My grandmother only visited Inversgail once. She didn’t like it.”
“Was that you picking her up on Sculpay this afternoon?”
“I borrowed a friend’s car. I didn’t want to use my official vehicle for private transportation.”
“Of course not. Unbelievable.”
“Would it help for you to know that my father was a distant relative of Stuart Farquhar, who started Yon Bonnie Books?”
“No, that doesn’t help. You’re using my house as a hostel and my shop for elder care. Not that we mind having her in the shop. She’s no trouble and she adds to the ambience.”
“And at least there aren’t any rats in the house, or signs that there ever have been.”
“That does help. Unless you put that idea into Maida Fairlie’s head in the first place to keep me away.”
“It would never occur to me to do something like that.”
“But it didn’t bother you to ask for my keys and postpone the locksmith? Did it ever occur to you to ask me if I would put your grandmother up for a few days?”
“I didn’t feel I knew you well enough to ask.”
“Unbelievable. Ask me now.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind,” Janet said. “The answer is yes. Your grandmother can stay until her space is available in the home. I happen to like her. But she’ll have company, because I’m coming home. And Norman, guess what. You owe me. Oh, boy, do you owe me.”
27
Janet decided against moving home that night. She needed time to decompress. And Hobbs needed time to move his grandmother from Janet’s bedroom into Allen’s old room. But she, Tallie, Christine, and Summer did go back to the bookshop and open the bottle of whisky.
“To our business and our friendship,” Christine said. “Our homes, new and old.”
“And to our new collaboration with the local constable,” Janet said. “I should tell him the story about Una and the slippery slope of plagiarism.”
“And who she might’ve encountered at the bottom of it,” Summer said. “Hey, I think I’m finally getting the hang of whisky.”
“That reminds me,” Janet said. “The whisky was for us, but not the tartan. Kenneth came looking for it today, Christine, and he wasn’t happy. I hate to ask if you’ve cut it already.”
“Thank goodness for procrastination, then,” Christine said. “It’s still in the car. Remind me and I’ll bring it in the morning.”
“He wanted us to raise a glass for him,” Tallie said.
“I’d rather not,” said Janet.
“Me neither. But he also mentioned luck.” Tallie raised her glass. “So here’s to luck in solving this case, and to my sister, Lucy, and luck in finding her.”
“Our friend Norman might be able to help with both,” Janet said, “Sláinte.”
“Am I going to regret my mistake for the rest of my possibly shortened career?” Hobbs asked the next morning when Janet called and asked if he could find Lucy for them.
“Don’t let that thought even cross your mind. Although I guess it just did. But don’t worry, Norman. We’ll help you solve this murder and let you have all the credit. Do the specialists have a suspect or a theory?”
“From what Reddick tells me, they think it’s drugs and they’re looking at someone in Glasgow.”
“Oh. That didn’t even occur to me. Do you think they’re right?”
“I think that’s another part of the myth of small towns—the stranger did it. But they like their modern retelling—the stranger did it and drugs.”
“Interesting that you mention retellings, Norman.” She told him about the plagiarism and the books on Una’s desk. “But it might mean nothing at all.”
“Or something. I’ll let you know what I find out about Lucy.”
“Thank you. How’s your grandmother this morning?”
Hobbs was silent.
“How’s your grandmother? Norman? Does she know I’m moving in? Moving home?”
“She does.”
“But?”
“She thinks she’s staying in an Airbnb. She doesn’t mind more guests arriving, but she doesn’t understand why she should change rooms. I’m sorry, Mrs. Marsh. She’s my grandmother.”
“You left it at that?” Christine asked. “You’re soft.”
“It’s a small thing to do for her,�
�� Janet said. “None of this is her fault and she can move into the facility on Monday.”
“Softhearted.”
Hobbs called back shortly after the bookshop opened. Lucy Graham was a five-year-old special needs child living in a care home in Crieff, about sixty miles northwest of Edinburgh.
“Thank you, Norman. Will Bethia be coming in today? Oh, I see her coming now. Talk to you later.” She hoped she hadn’t just heard him groan.
Janet and Tallie called Allen. They told him the good news about moving back into the house, but didn’t tell him the story of Constable Hobbs and the lodger. Then they told him about Lucy.
“I’ll see if they’ll let me visit her. Maybe even today. It’s gorgeous here. Good day for a drive.”
“Why don’t you and Nicola and the boys come over for the literary festival? I’ll babysit one evening so you and Nicola can get out and about.”
“Sounds like fun. We’ll talk and let you know. It could get tricky if we stay with you and don’t see enough of Maida, though. We don’t want her to feel left out.”
“Of course not.”
“Have you got another minute? Nicola wants to talk to Christine.”
Janet handed the phone to Christine, and her end of the conversation was odd in the way that conversations about toddler behavior can be.
“She’s asking my advice,” Christine whispered to Janet. “Yes, Nicola, still here. Just making Janet jealous . . . Twice is hardly a rash . . . Crying breaks my heart, too, but he’s only a year old . . . Three? But still an infant, really, so it’s not alarming at all . . . Don’t ask him if he did. Tell him you know what happened, and don’t give him the chance to make another mistake by lying . . . He’ll be fine; he has me in his life . . . My love to your wee delinquents.” Christine disconnected and handed the phone back to Janet. “Oh, sorry. I could have let you say good-bye.”
