by John Burke
Suddenly Queenie was at it again. ‘I’m so sorry. I ought to have said something before, but I thought I was imagining things, only after what’s happened it looks as if I wasn’t. I mean, I saw her in the village, and somehow I got that queer feeling, but I had so many other things on my mind that I —’
‘Do hush, Mum,’ said Anna. ‘It can’t be helped now.’
‘Of course it had a lot to do with you, dear.’ Queenie turned and gripped McAdam’s arm. ‘I didn’t want to get Anna into any trouble over letting that cottage, you see. So I told myself I must be mistaken. Only I wasn’t, and it was Martine, only she must have dyed her hair, so I couldn’t really be sure at first sight. Dyed it a sort of dark bronze. Used to be blonde. Chet always went for blondes.’
McAdam said: ‘But you did get round to telling Mr Brunner your suspicions. Warning him.’
‘Oh, if only I hadn’t. He wouldn’t have gone marching off like that and . . . and . . .’
‘You think he just went off, on his own, knowing that Waterman wanted to kill him?’
‘He was quite capable of that,’ said Anna. ‘Or maybe to do a bit of snooping first. Looking in through the side window to check on what was going on. Seeing if he could recognize them both. And then just going in bald-headed, hoping to take Waterman by surprise and beat him up. That’s the more likely idea. Too conceited to be frightened.’
McAdam fidgeted. ‘I don’t think there’s anybody there. We’re just wasting time. Mrs Chisholm, do you have a spare key for the door?’
‘I don’t carry keys around with me,’ Queenie objected. ‘I only collect them when I’m helping Anna out. And I don’t know it’d be right to —’
McAdam turned to Anna. ‘I meant you, Mrs Chisholm.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Anna took a ring with two keys on it from one of the hooks along a shelf of the kitchen dresser.
Sergeant Brodie said: ‘I’ll go, chief.’
‘We’ll both go. From opposite sides.’
The front door was not even locked. Inside, the keys lay on the coffee table. An empty whisky bottle jutted from the kitchen bin. There were two unwashed plates, cups and saucers, and half a loaf, on the draining board. In the bedroom, the bed had been left unmade. McAdam looked around, disappointed. She could hardly have expected to find the murder weapon here — they had probably taken it with them — but there ought somehow to have been something significant, some trace of the occupants which would spark recognition.
Brodie came in from the back. Yes, the hummock behind the carousel had a few lumpish ridges up it which could have been made by somebody dragging a corpse away from the place where it had been killed. Quite a struggle, getting it the rest of the way up the slope to where it was found. But the footprints already detected of two people could probably be traced from here upwards.
‘I think we’ll check with the people in Stables Cottage.’
‘I’ve already done that. That’s what you sent me down to do,’ Brodie reminded her. ‘They didn’t hear a thing.’
‘I’d still like a word with them, just in case.’
The door was answered by a youngish middle-aged man who, even as she was holding out her warrant card, said: ‘Oh, not again?’
‘I gather from my sergeant that you didn’t hear anything suspicious last night?’
‘I’ve already told him that.’
‘And this morning? Or even during the night? Any little thing you might just remember. For example, you couldn’t tell us what time the occupants of that other cottage drove off?’
‘Sorry, no. Didn’t hear a thing.’
‘Except that damned rain.’ A young woman in a striped blouse and white slacks edged out beside him. ‘Couldn’t get a wink of sleep, with that rain pissing down on the roof.’ From the way she was scowling in his direction, she seemed almost to be blaming her companion for the Scottish weather.
There was nothing else to do but put out a call giving a description of Ronnie and Martine Waterman and their car, and alerting Stranraer and Cairnryan ferry terminals and Prestwick airport. It was barely completed when a van arrived, disgorging two police officers bulging with protective armour and guns. They looked mildly peeved at being deprived of their target practice.
*
After Walter had closed the door, Sharon said: ‘Look, we’d better get out of here. If there’s going to be police swarming around —’
‘We’re not doing anything illegal.’
‘We’re not doing anything much at all.’
‘Think of it! Last night, someone gets bumped off, right close to us, and we never heard a thing. And they haven’t told us exactly how he got done in.’ He was hoarse with a mounting excitement. ‘Bloody murder, right on our own doorstep.’
‘It wasn’t on the doorstep. And we don’t know if it was bloody.’
‘From what that sergeant said, it was pretty nasty.’
She stared at him. ‘You’re getting all worked up about it, aren’t you?’ As he moved towards her, she took a step back. ‘Honest, that’s disgusting. How you could think, after hearing . . . I mean, thinking about it . . . I mean, kinky, that’s what you are.’
But when he began tugging at her blouse and she was saying, ‘No,’ and ‘a pervert, that’s what,’ she stopped backing away, and her own hand reached for the zip on his trousers.
His first thrust drove her against the brass handles of the side-board drawers. She howled, and tried to push herself away, but he held her with a firm pressure which surprised and delighted him — good, great, this’ll show her — and then put his hands round her neck. ‘Like to die in a passionate embrace, eh? Rape and then murder — how does that grab you?’
‘Kinky,’ she gasped. ‘Kinky, that’s what.’
But she wailed with dismay when it ended, and he slowly sagged away from her. Now her hands reached for his neck, and she forced him down to the floor and climbed on to him and her fingers moved down from his neck and tried desperately to force him back to life.
There was a banging on the door.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. What do they want this time?’
Wally groped for his trousers, but one leg had been pulled inside out when Sharon wrenched them off, and he was still struggling when she grabbed her green silk dressing-gown from the hook behind the door and clutched it loosely around her as she opened the door.
The man outside was saying over his shoulder: ‘Maybe it’s the other cottage.’ Behind him, in the middle of the yard, a television camera was lining up on the front of the building. There was an appreciative whistle as Sharon appeared. The man at the door looked back at her, and eyed her up and down. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you could tell us anything about the dramatic events of last night? The police statement says something about the folk in one of these cottages. Obviously not yours, I suppose?’
The camera was zooming in on her. Sharon could not help smiling back at it. She had always wondered what it would be like to be on the telly.
‘You out of your mind?’ Wally’s hand was on her shoulder. The dressing-gown slithered under his fingers, and her bare shoulder glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. There was a faint groan of disappointment outside as he dragged her in and slammed the door.
*
DCI McAdam had finished giving instructions for wrapping up in the incident room and was gathering the guests for a statement when the TV crew arrived at Balmuir Lodge itself and started asking for a statement for viewers as well. Anxious to be done with the whole thing, she decided to let them watch and take whatever shots they needed while she told the guests they were now free to go.
‘And about time, too.’
The interviewer said: ‘Might we say these good people have been suspects until now?’
‘No, you may not. They have simply been helping the police with their enquiries.’
‘While you let the murderer slip away under your nose?’
‘He won’t get far, believe me.’ She raised her
voice and continued. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we already have your names and addresses in case we need to call you as witnesses. If you haven’t already given them, please have a word with Sergeant Brodie before leaving.’
Several of them looked incapable of making up their minds. Everybody felt let down, yet at the same time tingling with the leftovers of excitement.
‘What a day!’ gasped Felicity Godolphin. ‘Edwin and I, we’re quite exhausted.’ She ogled the camera. ‘But we do prefer activity holidays, you know. We’ve been on so many literary and cultural cruises. But nothing like this. So dreadful. So absolutely ghastly.’
‘But we did come here for a murder game,’ said her husband, ‘and it has to be admitted that we got our money’s worth.’
His wife gave him an arch nudge in the ribs. ‘What an awful thing to say. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. But it’s true.’ She returned to her moment of stardom on camera. ‘It really has been a remarkable experience. It just has to give my husband an idea for his next book. He’s Edwin Godolphin, you know.’
They would have so much to tell their friends when they got home, thought McAdam.
‘And you don’t have to worry about me.’ Jilly-Jo was not going to stay out of the limelight. She half turned towards the camera, as if caught unawares while talking frankly to somebody nearby, knowing which half-profile showed her at her best. Her eyes were bright with sincerity, attentive to whoever she was supposed to be speaking to at the time. When attention was off her, they would go completely dead. ‘I belong here, and here I stay.’
Sir Nicholas and Lady Torrance were more subdued, but suggested that for many of them it was too late to get anywhere tonight. There were murmurs of agreement. They would all leave first thing in the morning.
Alec organized a supper, under orders from Jilly-Jo, playing the grande dame, bravely bearing her sorrows and giving the orders now. One of the first of them to be ordered out was Georgina Campbell.
‘I’m staying.’ Georgina, too, was playing to the camera. She would be only too glad to create some viewable drama.
‘This is my home,’ said Jilly-Jo, ‘and I don’t want a slut like you in it.’
‘No way is it your home. Chet wanted me in it.’
‘Wait till we find out about his will. Whatever you’ve been trying to squeeze out of him, he won’t have had time to alter it yet — unless you’ve been a sight sharper than I think.’
Tam Hagan, who had been standing well back in order not to interfere with her act, came to life. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘You can’t, really.’
‘Can’t what?’
‘Yer can’t throw the lassie out at this time of night. She’s not doing any harm.’
Jilly-Jo glared at him suspiciously. Georgina simpered.
McAdam became aware that Sergeant Brodie was whispering in her ear. ‘Quite an act, isn’t it? I remember her in that horror film a couple of years back. The Bride of the Monster. Only a remake of an old film with Elsa Lanchester in it, and of course there was no comparison between them, but she was still pretty creepy.’
‘When you’ve finished doing your film critic’s column, sergeant, perhaps you’d be good enough to check you’ve got all those addresses. And see that that girl at the VDU has been told she can get back to HQ. Then we’ll get out of here.’
Watching the crowd of them shuffling to and fro, some swapping reminiscences of things they had guessed about Brunner right from the start, and some complaining about the collapse of the whole programme, McAdam felt drained. She ought to be glad that the investigation had been wrapped up so quickly and neatly. All the thought she had given to the possible suspects, all the theories she had juggled with, all of it meaningless now. So many of those present had behaved so oddly and suspiciously, yet in the end there were no subtleties. Whatever silly complicated murder games Brunner and his hangers-on might have played, real-life murders were usually straightforward, brutish killings with a gun, a knife, or a blunt instrument.
Ronnie Waterman had done time because of what Chet Brunner had revealed about him, and after years inside brooding about it had come here to murder Brunner. And he had succeeded, the job was done, and he had cleared off.
As simple as that.
Chapter Eleven
Nick felt the front wheels of the car slither to the left, and coaxed them back carefully. The sky ahead looked brighter, but with a sullen sheen rather than any promise of sunshine out of a blue heaven.
‘Thank heavens we’re on the move,’ said Lesley. ‘I can still feel the atmosphere of that place. It clings. Like the smell of bad drains.’
‘Exaggerating a bit, aren’t we?’
‘No, we’re not. Even before the murder, there was something about the house that gave me the creeps. Your friend Brunner most of all.’
‘Well, now he’s gone, maybe somebody will fumigate the place.’
They went over a ridge and on a winding course down towards an overflowing burn. Clinging moisture in the shallow gully was breathing a thin steam, from which you almost expected ghosts and elves of the glen to appear. Instead, a local bus with a mud-coated number-plate came lumbering out of the cloud wraiths. It proclaimed itself SCHOOL BUS, but there were no children in it. Presumably they had been dumped somewhere over a hill, in a village hidden from what could hardly be called a main road.
After a while Lesley said: ‘It’s a pretty nauseating concept, isn’t it, when you come to think of it?’
‘What concept do we have in mind this time?’
She laughed, inviting them both to ease off and enjoy their release from Balmuir Lodge. ‘All those women he seems to have had. What sort of lover do you suppose he would have been?’
‘A heavyweight one, most likely.’
‘Yes, that’s just about what I mean. How could even a greedy little tart like that awful Jilly-Jo —’
‘And the equally awful carbon copy, Georgina —’
‘Exactly. How could even those two put up with that great fat slob crushing down on them?’
‘The weight of money and influence is quite tolerable when the casting couch is padded well enough.’
‘You speak from personal experience?’
He glanced at her with a mock scowl, then braked for a sign indicating twists and turns ahead. Why should they have bothered to put it here, when all the rest of the road had already been like a snake in intricate contortions?
‘Never,’ he said.
Now that she had raised the subject, he couldn’t help letting his mind wander over the disgusting picture. Subtle foreplay would never have been something you’d associate with Chet Brunner. Bang, bang, and that was it. One could only hope that for the women the expensive trimmings were worth it.
Lesley broke into his thoughts. ‘So there was quite a cast of convincing suspects.’
‘Just a minute. Hold it. We know who had the strongest motive of the lot, and the whole script points to him doing it and then making a run for it.’
‘It’s too neat.’
‘Are some things too straightforward for an ex-copper? You prefer some complexities and an intellectual challenge? Your speciality, as I recall, was stolen artworks and fakes. Subtle, complicated stuff. In cases of violent crime, isn’t it usually something pretty crude and straightforward?’
‘Mm, yes. Not playing contrived games like Brunner and his hangers-on. Blunt and brutally obvious.’ But still she was uneasy. ‘Most of the time.’
‘So what’s different here?’
‘I can’t put my finger on it. Just that I’ve got this weird feeling it’s all too pat.’
‘For heavens’ sake, how many times do I have to remind you you’re not in the job any more? You don’t have to spin cases out in order to clock up the overtime. Straightforward this time. Brutal murder, killer immediately identified, case solved. And it’s somebody else’s job to catch the killer. Which shouldn’t be all that difficult.’
‘No. Not even for that snotty DCI.’
‘Jealousy? Wishing you could be in her shoes?’
‘I’d have been a lot more thorough in questioning some of those folk. About those games they were playing, for a start. How can we be sure that Brunner’s own murder might not have been part of a game gone wrong — or cleverly contrived?’
‘But there wasn’t any game going on at the time he got killed. We were there, remember? And everyone was at a bit of a loose end, and grumbling about it.’
‘Couldn’t that have been part of it? Brunner and someone else devising a cunning ploy? Only for Brunner it went wrong. Became the real thing. Which he wasn’t expecting.’
‘And who did you have in mind as the guilty party?’
‘You want me to run through them?’
‘Be my guest. Show me how the mind of a sleuth works.’
‘Quite a few people in that house had good reason for detesting Brunner. Whoever it was, they might not have been planning a murder, but then the opportunity suddenly presented itself. Remember that phone call? Everybody in the place was informed that Ronnie Waterman was on the loose.’
‘Not everybody. Brunner’s wife, Jilly-Jo, hadn’t got back.’
‘True. But any one of the others might all at once have seen Waterman on the prowl as being a perfect cover for a killing. Who else was in the room at the time?’
Nick thought for a moment. ‘I think that gushing couple, the Godolphins, were there. And that young man with a chip on his shoulder about Brunner in his old family home. Oh, and the chap who seems to wander about with Alec and Queenie’s daughter-in-law.’
‘And what about your friend Alec himself? He was the one who brought the glad tidings. He and his wife were maybe reaching the end of their tether. And Alec knew more about Brunner’s goings-on than anybody else. Faithful house dog finally turns on its owner.’
‘Oh, come off it. Alec and Queenie wouldn’t have it in them to smash someone in the face and break his neck.’
‘You never know what people will do when they’re pushed. I’d guess Brunner had given them a hard time of it over the years. And Queenie did realize it was Waterman in that cottage, and kept quiet about it until after the deed was done.’
