by John Burke
‘Sorry, but I’ve no idea.’
‘Bugger it. I’ve got some urgent work for him. Can’t get down to the village myself. Not right in the middle of this game. But I need some bits and pieces for the next one, and I want him to get cracking. Do try to find him, there’s a girl.’
Typical of the man. Always expecting you to drop whatever you might be doing, and go running his errands for him.
Shaken into wakefulness now, she abandoned the paper and was making herself a cup of coffee when Stuart came sauntering past the window and tapped at the kitchen door.
‘Fancy a walk?’ he said. ‘Once the new batches have been tucked away in their hutches, everything goes a bit flat, doesn’t it? I’ve been out wandering. Thought you might care for a natter.’
She told him about Brunner’s call. His face, always a rueful mask accentuated by the slant of his lazy left eye, puckered into a sour grin of resignation. ‘Par for the course. Saturday afternoon.’
‘You could always just go on with your walk. I won’t tell him that I’ve seen you.’
‘No. Should be used to it by now. Anyway, it settles the question of the post-changeover boredom, doesn’t it?’
‘I’ll run you up there.’
‘No, I’ll walk. It won’t do him any harm to be kept waiting just a little bit longer.’
They went out into the yard. Anna looked across at the two cottages. The curtains of both were drawn tightly shut. ‘A right weird batch we’ve got this week,’ she said. ‘None of them showing their faces out of doors. Maybe they can’t read.’
‘You’re not running a seaside boardinghouse. There’s no notice in the cottages saying the occupants have to be off the premises by nine in the morning and not come back until six in the evening.’
‘No, what I meant was, what’s the use of providing them with all those brochures about the Carrick and Galloway countryside if they don’t set foot on it? And on a fine day like this. Not as if it’s pouring with rain.’
‘Give ’em time. They’re probably still unpacking the muesli and the marmalade pots. Or maybe they’ve got something more interesting to do.’
‘I don’t see the Maxwells as having a passionate reunion, even if he has only just come out of prison. But the Robinsons . . . well, yes. If that’s their real name. His, maybe. Hers, I doubt.’
Stuart looked at her for a moment as if he were about to risk some personal question. Then he set off towards the end of the yard and the beginning of the sketchy footpath which led over the brae towards the loch.
Maybe there was a touch of something underlying the gesture of petty defiance in keeping Brunner waiting. Stuart still hated having to be dependent on other people. And hated having to be driven anywhere. Most of all, perhaps, he dreaded having to be driven past that corner of the twisting road between here and the big house where that first accident had taken place. At least the short cut across the estate would keep him away from that memory.
She watched him until he went out of sight behind a cluster of gorse, but in her mind could follow each step of that familiar route, round the loch to the terrace of Balmuir Lodge, and along to the side door and in to face the booming demands of Chet Brunner.
They all owed too much to the unpredictable Brunner, and he was happy to keep them aware of it. Peter had taken it less submissively than the rest of them. His temper snapped more easily and he grew too easily fretful with the day-to-day running of everything.
Stuart, perhaps crushed by that prison sentence and by Peter’s treacheries, seemed to have found a way of adjusting. Maybe he would be more comfortable to live with than Peter had ever been.
She tried to stop wondering about him and about herself, and so went on wondering all the more.
He was always there at her side, attentive, helping as if to make up for all the things that had gone wrong in the past. He sometimes kissed her goodnight — a peck of a kiss — before going back to his bed above the workshop. She wondered when his hand on her arm might perhaps tighten, and his lips become more demanding. Really, he was too much a part of the everyday scenery. Yet it would be so neat, so tidy. Neat . . . tidy! A makeshift relationship.
She had a sudden searing memory of Peter and their Sunday afternoons in bed before they were married, and sometimes afterwards — before some of his afternoons were occupied by somebody else.
She couldn’t decide whether to be envious or cynical about what those two in Covenanter’s Cottage must be up to right at this moment.
*
Sharon sat glumly on the edge of the bed, staring at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Walter’s hand crept over her shoulder and clawed at her left breast. She shrugged him off. He sank back on to the bed with a groan.
Sharon said: ‘I only hope Richard’s salmon are a lot heftier than what I’m getting.’
Walter heaved himself up again to kiss her shoulder. She jerked away.
‘Sharon, my darling. Gorgeous. I’m sorry.’
She jerked away. ‘So am I. Flaming sorry I agreed to come away with you.’ She stood up, flaunting her naked body at him to make it clear what he was missing. ‘I thought it was going to be . . . I mean, Christ, the way you talked. Rogering me to death, this way and that. It made me go all . . . but it was all talk, wasn’t it?’
He tried to look resolute, but it was difficult when the rampant organ of which he had promised her so much was drooping so dismally. ‘Look, love, it’ll be all right later.’
‘It had better be.’ She groped across the floor for the scarlet and gold tissue lace thong she had bought specially, hiding it away from her husband, and discarding it with such a flourish only ten minutes ago. ‘And this room. I mean. Pretty pictures and cute little table-mats. As bad as my Auntie Jessie’s.’
‘It’s all clean enough.’
‘Not exactly a luxury hotel, is it? No four-poster bed — for all the good that would be. No gold taps on the bath, or bottles of gorgeous shower gel. And no bottles of champagne cooling in an ice bucket.’
‘You know darned well that would have been too risky. We might have bumped into . . . well, anybody.’
‘Not likely to bump into anybody round here, I’ll give you that.’
‘That was the whole idea.’
‘Was it? I thought the main idea was for you to —’
‘It’s all that nervous stress. All that business of getting organized, and then worrying if we were being followed here, watching our backs.’
‘I thought it was my front you usually had your eyes on.’
‘Look, we’ve only been here a few hours. We need time to relax. And then it’ll be marvellous. I’ll show you.’
‘You’ve already shown me. Three bloody goes, and so far nothing to make a song about.’ As she wriggled the thong up over her ample, creamy thighs, she said: ‘Be funny if Richard walked in now, wouldn’t it?’
‘No, it wouldn’t bloody well be funny.’
‘Finding he’d got nothing to be jealous of.’ She bent to pick up the bra he had gropingly unfastened from her and tossed across the room in an echo of her own flourish with the thong. Dismally she put it back on again. ‘Give him a hell of a laugh.’
*
Anna stood back and stared again at the half-finished painting on the easel. She was tired of rowan berries, bluebells, and clusters of thistles. Sales in the village shop were a welcome addition to her income, especially as Peter had left her nothing but a sprinkling of debts. Tourists couldn’t get enough of her watercolours. But Anna was beginning to feel she had done more than enough of them.
Anyway, the light was fading and she would only make a mess of things if she struggled on. She washed her brushes and put them away, and looked out of the window up the long slope to the ridge.
The grass was all in shadow now, but the sky was still smudged yellow from a sun retiring in no great hurry beyond the hill. Clouds were streamers of charcoal grey, stretched out like long shreds of torn fabric across the fading glow. Even
in the few moments it took her to move the easel back against the wall and finish the glass of spring water she kept on the old mantelpiece, the light had ebbed away except for a glint in the very top of that infernal mobile phone mast which had been stuck on the edge of the spruce plantation.
She wandered from her makeshift studio into the kitchen, wondered what to have for supper, and aimlessly went on into the sitting-room. She watched the first twenty minutes of a TV wildlife programme about Namibia. Towards the end of it there was an intrusive snuffling and barking which at first she thought must be part of the programme. It stopped; and then, after a few more minutes, there was a rapping on the kitchen door at the side of the house.
The moment she opened it, Cocky sprang in, yelping and wagging his tail.
‘This dog has been scratching at our door. I thought the only thing to do was to bring it over to you.’ The woman from Stables Cottage was already turning away as if she had grudgingly done what had to be done and was in no mood for conversation.
‘Mrs . . . er . . . Maxwell, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how he came to be running around here. He . . .’
The woman was on her way back into the cottage.
Cocky frisked about, leapt up at Anna, and did several brisk turns around the kitchen and into the sitting-room.
Anna groaned. Either Queenie had taken the dog for a walk — which was unlikely, at this time of the evening — and he had run off; or he had taken advantage of an open door to set out on a walk on his own. She phoned. No reply. Chet Brunner had presumably, as usual, called Alec and Queenie into the big house to listen to him holding forth on one of his crackpot schemes, to look at the bits and pieces he had summoned from Stuart, or to make suitable noises in what he liked to call his brainstorming sessions.
Anna could have got the Volvo out to take Cocky home. But it was not really worth that. She could do with getting out of here and out of herself for a little while. A pleasant evening, with only the faintest breeze. Might as well walk up, just as Stuart had done.
Cocky ought to have been able to find his own way home, but he enjoyed company. He liked showing off, chasing shadows of imaginary rabbits which he could never hope to catch, snuffling about in tufts of heather, and bouncing back for a word of approval. When he reached home, tired out, he would twitch in his sleep, in dreams which would allow him to catch every rabbit or hare that crossed his ken.
They climbed the gentle slope to the ridge, which spread out for their benefit a world of sudden different brightnesses. The moon was up, glinting on an inlet of the Solway Firth far to the south-west. All the windows of Balmuir Lodge on the other side of the ridge were lit up as if it were a luxury hotel at the height of the season. As Anna followed Cocky down the slope to the faint moonlit shimmer of the tiny loch which Brunner had converted into a swimming pool, a keener light in the sky might have been a star or a satellite.
Cocky went rushing ahead as if determined to plunge into the pool, though he was more in the habit of standing on its edge and barking furiously at nothing whatsoever.
Anna whistled. He was going round the wrong way. The ground on the south side was spongy and led on to a tangled thicket. The footpath up to the wing where Peter’s mother and father lived made a curve around the northern rim of the pool.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ Anna hissed it under her breath, and then called more loudly. ‘Come back here, Cocky.’
But Cocky was making a beeline for the little shed of changing cubicles at the water’s edge. He whimpered, then backed away.
Anna peered into the confusing shimmer of light from the water and the lumpish shadows of the shed and an overhanging rowan tree. There was a dark shape crumpled under the overhang of the shed.
Anna took a cautious step forward, stooped, and tried to control her shuddering breath.
In films and television series, you could always laugh in anticipation of the heroine screaming at the sight of a dead body. Anna didn’t laugh. She backed away. And she screamed.
Chapter Three
The cruise liner slowed round the headland and dawdled even more slowly towards the quayside as if reluctant to return home after the halcyon days at sea. Then she seemed to take a deep breath and, with a sudden furious churning of water as her bows swung a few degrees towards the waterfront, the whole vessel shuddered like a child in a tantrum because the holidays were over. Passengers leaned on the rails and stared down at the men and cables below, waiting for the faint jolt of a nicely calculated contact. When it came, the figures below burst into well-practised activity.
Sir Nicholas Torrance put his arm round his wife. ‘Well, back to reality.’
‘That last fortnight was pretty real. As honeymoons go, it was quite something.’ She kissed him.
‘You’ve got terms of comparison? Previous honeymoons?’
‘I’ve always thought the word was a silly one. Sickly and sentimental. But I’ve changed my mind.’
Even as messages began booming out through the speakers, they were reluctant to move away from the rail. Clinging to it was like clinging to the last, lingering, salty taste of the fjords and the mountains and the light of northern skies. At last they went down and stood by their luggage, waiting for the gangway to slot into place.
Lesley caught Nick’s arm. ‘Look! What did I tell you?’
‘You’ve told me a lot of things. It’s one of your more endearing habits.’
‘That four-wheel drive down there. Thumping great thing. I told you there’d be something like that waiting for our booming fat friend.’
Every cruise ship has its blustering bore who wants to take over every social activity. This one had been no exception. And at that moment the very man came pushing his way through the cluster of passengers to position himself at the rail and start a wild tic-tac to the driver standing beside the car. A dark shape leapt and squirmed in the back.
‘See?’ said Lesley triumphantly. ‘And a Doberman in the back, just the way I told you it’d be.’
‘And I’ve told you that you’re no longer in the fuzz. You’re a lady now. And there’s no such thing as promotion from Detective Inspector to Lady Chief Inspector.’
‘Sorry. I really will have to stop looking at people and sizing them up.’
‘Yes. I get a bit worried sometimes, the way you look at me as if you’re trying to analyse possible criminal elements in my make-up.’
‘Mm. Sexual maniac, perhaps. I can vouch for that. I don’t think you’ve got the time for anything else. Not that I’m complaining.’
They moved forward into the crush of disembarkation.
Nick’s Laguna was waiting in the corner of the ferry terminal car park: symbol of their return to normal things and places. They stacked their cases in the boot, took one last look at the hull of the ship glowing in the low, slanting sunlight of early evening, and then he turned the car along the waterfront to join a dual carriageway. Neither of them spoke until they turned off on to a road winding its way into the Ayrshire hills. Then Lesley said:
‘I wonder how our conversion’s going. Think they’ll really be finished by next Friday?’
‘Young Kerr didn’t envisage any problems.’
‘They never do, in the Borders. It’s always ‘nae problem’ — meaning that it’s no problem to them whether they finish on time or collapse from exhaustion halfway through.’
‘All that police training has made you too pessimistic about your fellow human beings.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
Nick caught a last glimpse of the sea in his mirror as he passed a sign warning of a hidden dip. He felt relaxed and happy. All their plans had worked splendidly so far. They were happily married, the cruise had left on time and returned on time, and in between there had been some shore excursions which all went at a leisurely, sensibly timed pace. Back home at Black Knowe, the builders and decorators would be putting the finishing touches to the bedroom and to Lesley’s new sitting-room and office. She would never have be
en content simply to be the laird’s wife. She had turned down the offer of a transfer to the police Arts and Antiques section in order to marry him; but there was no way she could bear to let all her forensic expertise go to waste. She would advise all their friends and neighbours on care and maintenance of their heirlooms and personal treasures; and on how to protect them. And the moment word got round that she was leaving her CID post, an alert publisher had commissioned a book from her on art and antique thefts, ways of guarding against burglars, and how the network of thieves, fences, and unscrupulous private collectors worked.
In the meantime, to break their return gently and give them time to unwind, there would be five nights in the secluded hotel which Nick had picked out of a glossy brochure.
He glanced at the dashboard clock. Nice timing. Another ten miles to go. Everything going to plan, just the way it should.
After another nine miles, with patches of woodland darkening to either side and then being stripped away again to reveal the shoulders of green-tufted hills, a rift of mist blurred the valley immediately ahead.
‘Getting a bit murky,’ said Lesley.
‘No problem.’
‘Nick, darling, please don’t say that. It’s tempting fate.’
‘We’re nearly there.’
The mist was tinged with puffs of blackness, and as they descended a shallow slope into it, the smell seeping into the car was that of burning.
They came suddenly into a pocket of clear air. Smoke drifted lazily around the offside of the car and behind it. Immediately ahead, the hotel came into view in its larch-ringed glade, with a burn sparkling its way towards a hump-backed bridge. Water from the burn had probably been used by the fire engine beyond the bridge in an attempt to quench the flames in the hotel. It had not been very successful. The flames were out, but all that remained was a smouldering shell, still puffing out little gusts and streamers like a reflective pipe smoker.
A huddle of people were sheltering under the trees. A man in a dark jacket and kilt was talking into a mobile phone, glancing apprehensively from time to time at the disconsolate guests.
