by John Burke
Nick wondered uneasily whether the whole set-up had been planned more by Chet Brunner, fired by a rage for revenge over Waterman’s theft of Martine, than by Ronnie Waterman himself. The speed with which Brunner’s team got to the scene and did their own photography, ready for dramatic reconstruction later, was suspicious.
As if reading his thoughts, Brunner said above the heads of the audience: ‘The police got quite peevish about us being so quick off the mark. But if we hadn’t been regularly supplying them with our findings about Waterman, they might never have been able to pounce on him.’
And how long had Brunner had to wait, Nick wondered, and what risks did he expose his team to, until he could be sure Waterman himself was in on this heist and in violent mood?
In court, all those involved tried to switch blame to the others. But whichever of the hijackers shot one of the drivers through the head, there was no question that Waterman was in charge and had given the orders to kill.
An out-of-focus face swam up out of a grey smear on the screen. It was a hazy close-up of Ronnie Waterman with his head down, defeated but twisted with rage. Shadows across the lower half of his face darkened the expression and, as he moved, seemed to add a wispy beard to his chin.
Queenie gasped suddenly. As the credits rolled, again with Chet Brunner’s name in large lettering, she slid from her seat and grabbed his arm.
‘Oh, dear. How could I . . . oh, I ought to have realized. How could I have been so silly?’
The lights went up. Some of the audience were making polite complimentary remarks to Brunner. Others looked peevish. They had not come here to sit through a self-congratulatory film show.
Georgina Campbell moved in and brushed against Brunner. ‘Sorry your wife’s been delayed. And in such awful weather, too.’
Nick, standing up, saw Queenie almost thrust the girl out of the way and edge Brunner to one side. The fluttering was gone. She looked frightened and intense. ‘You’ve got to listen to me.’
‘I was only joking about you, back there. Come on, old girl, you know me by now.’
‘It’s serious. There’s something you’ve got to know. Before it’s too late.’
‘What the hell . . .?’
The general buzz of conversation drowned them out. Nick heard no more as Queenie took Brunner’s arm, almost dragging him towards the door through to her own quarters. Georgina watched, not sure whether to laugh or protest. But Queenie was surely not a serious rival.
Young Harry Pitcairn’s voice rose above the general buzz of conversation. ‘Isn’t that just typical? Leaves us high and dry. Doesn’t even follow up that next precious idea of his.’
‘Another game?’
‘The nerve of it. A ghost story. Had the nerve to ask if I’d let you all into our home — the old chunk of a castle where we live now. And I’d be there to let you in and play stupid tricks on you, one at a time. Only he’s never got round even to that. Just a way of insulting me, I suppose.’
‘If you find Mr Brunner so disagreeable,’ said Mrs Godolphin, ‘why did you accept his hospitality?’
‘Because I thought I might find a chink in his armour.’
‘And have you found it?’
‘No, but there’s time yet.’
There was a sway of embarrassment across the group.
Lesley took Nick’s arm. ‘That film of his. It ought never to have been shown. All right, so he did make some pretty cunning points about the sleaze that lets people like Waterman and his thugs get away with things. But that’s not the way the law should be shoved around.’
‘In the world of television, my love, everything out there is up for grabs. Knockabout drama beats plodding facts every time.’
‘He’ll contaminate you if we stay here any longer. Darling, we do have to get out of this dreadful place.’
‘It’s too late to go tonight. And tomorrow night the hotel is still full.’
‘We could find somewhere. Some pub. Anywhere. This place gives me the creeps.’
‘Let’s help ourselves to one of Chet’s drinks, and go to bed early.’
‘I don’t need the drink. But the other bit sounds promising.’
There was a sudden eruption. A woman in a long grey coat with a jaunty fur hood came in, shaking a few drops of moisture from her shoulders and tossing the hood back to reveal a long mane of blonde hair which she fingered into a carefully practised informality. She was flanked by a man in a grey striped suit with wide lapels, squeezed around a large body with improbably broad shoulders and a head too small to be in proportion.
‘Well, at last,’ Georgina piped up. ‘If it isn’t Jilly-Jo.’
‘Hope I haven’t interrupted anything.’
‘Alec found you all right, then.’
‘Alec?’
‘Waiting for you at the station.’
‘Oh, the hell with the station. You don’t catch me queueing for trains. My friend Mr Hagan here was kind enough to give me a lift. Tam Hagan. A real gentleman. Brought me all the way.’
Nick appraised the newcomer as another hoodlum. Just as one crook, Waterman, had walked off with Brunner’s wife Martine, so there was a whiff in the air of Tam Hagan in line for the present one.
‘So Alec’s still waiting at the station?’ said Georgina.
‘More fool him.’ Jilly-Jo looked around. ‘All right, where is he? Where’s Chet? We have some things to talk about. Like a divorce. And the sooner the better.’
Most of the guests looked away or drifted into twos and threes in corners of the room. Georgina twitched so ecstatically that her breasts threatened to escape their flimsy containers.
‘And I see you’re all set to move in.’ Jilly-Jo looked her up and down. ‘Got your picture hung in the entrance hall already. A bit impatient, aren’t we?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Fancy taking my place and being treated the same way? Been taking any other very special pictures of you, has he?’
Georgina went scarlet. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she repeated.
‘For your own very personal, private collection, eh? Only you’ll find he goes for cash rather than confidentiality. Thanks to my friend here, I find that he’s been flogging all my so special, so private, so intimate pictures to porn dealers in Glasgow.’
Georgina tried to look haughty. She was not very well equipped for it. ‘At least I’ve never posed for anything you could call porn.’
‘You’ll be amazed what he knows about trick photography.’
Another disgruntled guest began muttering about starting a game. If the host was neglecting them, that was no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy themselves. Nick had a feeling that he had come prepared with some bright idea of his own, and Chet had probably not let him get a word in. Ruefully you had to admit that the old rogue was a good organizer. A bully and a braggart, but good at shoving people around and keeping them on the move. Once he had lost interest, everyone else was at a loose end.
‘Until he gets back, then . . .’
‘Well?’ screeched Jilly-Jo like a garish, hoarse parrot, ‘where is he?’
As if her screech had triggered it off, the rain came back in a thudding, drumming downpour.
*
Anna was in a hurry to make her escape. She had had more than enough of the atmosphere in this place. She looked around for Stuart, to drive him back. He was nowhere to be seen. She checked in the side lobby. Only a few of the pieces he had brought up with him were still on the shelf. He must have shifted the others to where Chet wanted them — or where he thought Chet would want them.
Irritated, she crossed the path of the awkward but reliable lad from the village whose job it was to carry drinks and canapés around at stated intervals.
‘Mr Morgan? I think he said something about going out for a stroll.’
‘In this downpour?’
‘Och, no. That’d be before it came on again.’
It seemed an odd, impetu
ous gesture. The village was a good distance, and would seem more so in the dark. But then, she had been stand-offish with him, choking him off. He was a febrile, temperamental sort. She hadn’t realized, though, that he had been peeved with her.
Looking up at the gaudy portraits in the hall, she saw what Jilly-Jo had meant. A huge colour photograph of Georgina Campbell, widening her eyes coyly over her bare left arm, curved along a chair back, had been hung between one of a leading lady of doubtful reputation and a beautiful older woman whose reputation was too fine to be jostled by these companions.
Anna turned into the wing to say goodnight to Queenie, but was met only by Cocky, yelping ecstatically and throwing himself up on his hind legs in imploring little leaps. He was determined to go wherever she went, whining an appeal, playing the poor abandoned little pooch with overwhelming sincerity. Queenie was nowhere to be found, and Alec was obviously not back yet. Anna picked Cocky up, gave him a reassuring squeeze, refilled his water bowl, and shut him in the kitchen.
As she braced herself in the doorway, poised to dash through the rain to the Volvo, Stuart appeared out of the shadows, bringing a smell of damp cloth with him.
‘Wherever did you get to?’ she demanded.
‘I wasn’t in the mood for hanging around through all that show-off crap.’
‘So you flounced off and got wet.’
‘Yes, I got wet.’ He edged into the doorway and shook himself the way Cocky would have done, spraying moisture in every direction.
‘You’d better go in and dry yourself off. I’ll wait for you.’
‘No, thanks. Not in the mood for going back in there. I just want to get back to my own pad. Be it ever so humble, and all that.’
‘And make a sodden mess all over my car?’
‘It’s gone through worse than that.’
‘True. All right, brace yourself. Let me get the doors open, and then make a sprint for it.’
She drove slowly out on to the drive, then through a succession of puddles to the main road. The surface here was not much better. Ruts had filled up with water, spurting up under the wheels. Even with the wipers on full, it was hard to see anything but a shimmering curtain of rain distorting the road ahead.
She said: ‘I suppose it was you who put that picture of Georgina up?’
‘Yes. I assumed that was where he wanted it to hang, along with all the others.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘He’d said something about it.’
‘But right away? Didn’t he say something about leaving all the bits and pieces until later?’
‘I thought I might as well get rid of that piece while I was there. Nothing much else to do.’
The headlights picked out a tree trunk with branches dangling dangerously close. Anna swung the car into the middle of the road, hoping nobody else would be out tonight, coming towards them.
‘Quite a smack in the face for Jilly-Jo,’ she said, ‘when she got back.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she could cope.’
‘And Chet?’
‘Oh, I’ve had a bellyful of Chet Brunner.’ It came out in a furious gust through the hiss and swish of the downpour. ‘I don’t know how much more he expects me to take.’
They crawled into the village street. There was not a soul about. A few lights glowed from behind heavy curtains and were repeated in the sheen of water along the pavement.
At the side door behind the craft shop, Stuart said: ‘Thanks. Coming in for a warming night-cap?’
‘Thanks, but I think I’ll be glad to get to bed.’
Another man might have been flippant enough or pushy enough to take her up on that. Stuart merely hesitated a moment as if debating this, then said: ‘Any chance of a lift into Ayr tomorrow morning? I do need to get some more paints and oddments from the craft shop there.’
‘How early?’
‘Half eight?’
‘Suits me. And I want to go into Ayr, anyway, to have words with that infernal agent.’
‘About marmalade?’
‘And a little matter of theft. And some other things.’
‘Right. Half eight then.’ He made a move as if to kiss her on the cheek, then dug into his pocket for his keys, opened the car door, and flattened himself against his own door, fumbling to get in.
There were other subdued lights in the cottages when Anna got back and made her slow turn into the stableyard. Her headlights picked out something lumpy on the slope beside Covenanter’s Cottage. It might have been a shadow distorted by the rain, or a sack of something dumped on the slope beside the clothes-drying carousel. But she knew every shadow here at any hour of the day or night; what tubs and flowerpots there were in front of the cottages; and exactly where the wheelie-bins were positioned behind them.
Parking the car, she took a few steps towards the indistinct gap between the cottage and the remaining stump of a drystone wall. Surely there was somebody crouching, or lying on the small lip of ground?
But the guests in Balmuir Lodge could hardly have contrived a hasty substitute of a game and started it up in weather like this. She wasn’t going to investigate any further in these conditions. Facetiously, she said aloud: ‘All right, I haven’t seen you. I’ll clear off and leave somebody else to discover you.’
As she went into the house, taking her usual backward glance, she saw the door of Covenanter’s Cottage open. A shape that must have been Mr Maxwell looked out. Hastily she went in and shut her door behind her.
*
In the morning, Lesley awoke to noise under the window. Drowsily she turned over to focus on the orange figures of the bedside clock.
‘Good God, look at the time!’
Nick turned over and mumbled an incoherent question.
Outside, a loud conversation was going on, voices lurching over one another, one of them a woman’s rising in disbelief.
Lesley shrugged her dressing-gown on and pulled back the window curtain. The sun was shining, and the air was sparklingly clear. All she could see was the post van parked beside the house. Then the postman stepped back into view as he leaned into his van and reached for a mobile phone on the seat, impeded by Cocky scurrying and yelping round him. Feet were running along a corridor somewhere. Voices rose again, then were cut off as a door slammed.
Behind Lesley, Nick sat up. ‘What’s going on? Not starting some damfool charade at this time of the morning?’
Along the landing somebody was shouting over the banisters, also asking what the hell was going on and was this some sort of joke?
Lesley turned away from the window and opened the door on to the landing. ‘Are we having a fire drill, or something?’
On the turn of the stairs Georgina Campbell in a short see-through nightie was crying and waving her right arm as if desperate for something or someone to grab and hold on to.
‘They’ve found him,’ she howled.
‘Found who?’
‘Chet. He’s been murdered.’
Chapter Eight
Detective Chief Inspector June McAdam arrived at the blue and white tent on the grassy slope to find the police surgeon fidgeting, impatient for her appearance. As she ducked under the phosphorescent tape, each step made a sucking, plopping noise underfoot. The ground was sodden from last night’s rain, and they would all have been better equipped with gumboots.
Her sergeant held the tent flap open for her.
‘Chief Inspector McAdam, doctor.’
‘How d’ye do. Ian Fairlie.’
The corpse, a heavily built man with a heavy jaw, was sprawled face upwards on the grass, its head twisted awkwardly to the left.
‘Cause of death?’
‘A blow to the temple for starters.’ Dr Fairlie indicated a deep gash above the nose, with a smear of dried blood down into the right eye. ‘Some force behind it. Deep enough to crack the skull. And twist the head and break the neck. No doubt when he’s on the slab it’ll be possible to establish the angle of impact, and how much force woul
d have been necessary.’
‘Time of death?’
‘I’d say within the last twelve hours. There again, should be able to narrow it down when we’ve got him on the slab. And folk in the house should be able to pin down when he was last seen.’
‘Identification?’
Detective Sergeant Brodie said: ‘The postie who found him says it’s the owner of the place. A Mr Chet Brunner. Knew him well. And I get the impression he didn’t much like him.’
‘Lining the postman up as our first suspect?’
‘Good Lor’, no, chief. I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘Next of kin?’
‘His present wife should be on the premises.’
‘He’s had more than one?’
‘Fairly well known in these parts,’ the surgeon contributed, ‘as a womanizer. One of those telly people who moves in and thinks his neighbours are only fit for what I believe are called bit parts.’
There were voices outside. The SOCO team of the Kyle and Carrick Constabulary had arrived in a white Transit. Easing themselves into their sterile overalls and overshoes, two made a preliminary circuit of the body while the photographer took shots from every angle, using a zoom lens for close-ups of the surrounding grass so that he wouldn’t need to trample over evidence which might escape the naked eye. Not that there was much to be seen other than a tangle of sodden grass and mud which even the most cautious steps would churn up into a mess worthy of a farmyard.
DCI McAdam backed out of their way and stood outside the tent with her sergeant. They looked down the slope at the old farmhouse and cottages tucked away within a windbreak of larches, and then at the big house to the west. A few men and women came out of the house and went back in again; came out again, stared, looked as if they were going to come closer, and then went back in once more.
