Bareback

by John Burke

  Rutherford got to his feet. ‘We won’t distress you any more today, Mrs Ferguson. But when you feel stronger, perhaps we might get you to tidy up any points which may arise during our investigations.’ His tone was not meant to sound reassuring.

  ‘Just find who killed my Archie. That’s all I’ve got to say.’

  It was the sort of pathetic remark any grieving widow might be expected to make in the circumstances. But it rang so false that when they were back in the street Rutherford said: ‘Just what sort of a household was it, really?’

  ‘From all I’ve heard, she treated him like dirt.’

  ‘Hated him enough to kill him?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s a bossy character, all right. But not the sort to commit murder, I wouldn’t think.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a murderous type. You should know that by now, Les. Oh, but of course, I was forgetting. You’re the expert on dead masters, not dead solicitors.’

  ‘One thing did occur to me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She said Ferguson had a snack before going off to the meeting.’

  ‘Nothing unusual in that. A quick nibble before you go and sit round a table having the pants bored off you.’

  ‘The pathologist,’ Lesley reminded him, ‘reported that the stomach contents suggested Ferguson hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast on Friday.’

  He stopped on the kerb beside their car. ‘Shit. One up to you, Les. But meaning . . .?’

  ‘She might have been out of the room, paying no attention to him or even bothering to get his supper, or snack, or whatever.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or she wasn’t there at all.’

  ‘Then where was she?’

  *

  Rutherford sent a uniformed constable off to the local garage to make enquiries about tyre treads, having suggested that next on Lesley’s list should be Dr Hamilton.

  Hamilton was outraged: not at being interviewed once more, but stiff and uptight – a word he would not have known, but could demonstrate in his every movement – at the mere idea of such melodrama in the community. Traditions of Border killing were splendid in romantic history; they had no place in today’s world.

  ‘There can be no doubt that it’s a case of murder? Not some dreadful accident?’

  ‘Not some accident, Dr Hamilton, no. Unquestionably murder.’

  ‘Deplorable. Who would want to murder Archibald Ferguson?’ He sounded like a deep baritone echo of Hannah Ferguson and Miss Elliot. ‘Who would want to?’

  ‘Dr Hamilton, you convened an emergency meeting of the Common Riding Committee on Friday evening. Was anything said which might have disturbed Mr Ferguson – or sparked off any unpleasantness between him and any other committee member?’

  ‘Mr Ferguson was not at the meeting.’

  ‘Not at it?’

  ‘As I mentioned to Sir Nicholas Torrance when discussing the outcome of the meeting, Mr Ferguson did not attend. Nor did he send any apology for absence.’

  So, thought Lesley, he hadn’t been killed on the way back from the meeting because of any internal wrangle there.

  ‘Everybody else was present?’

  ‘Except for Dunbar, whose wife was ill. And Brown did arrive a bit late, but then he’s always been rather slipshod.’

  ‘Arrived late? How late?’

  ‘I would say eleven minutes.’ The Convenor was more attentive to such niceties than Hannah Ferguson had been. ‘We were, naturally, waiting for Mr Ferguson, as Secretary, to join us. I was therefore keeping my eye on the chamber clock.’

  ‘So in the end you went ahead without Mr Ferguson?’

  ‘After precisely a quarter of an hour, I decided we must proceed.’

  ‘And the meeting lasted how long?’

  ‘There was a great deal of discussion. Two hours and ten minutes.’ He was the sort of witness you could rely on to be exact in every detail, usefully confirming the whereabouts at a crucial time of most of the dead man’s regular associates.

  By the time she met up with Rutherford again, the whole town knew about the murder. Women gossiped with happy horror on shop doorsteps. Waiting time at the supermarket checkouts extended as the day wore on.

  Rutherford said: ‘The girl in the garage is sorting out a list of cars they’ve serviced this last year. The mechanic most likely to know is out collecting a new car from Kelso. Back later today.’

  ‘Something’s occurred to me.’

  ‘Good. Another brainwave?’

  ‘Mrs Ferguson again. There’s something I don’t like there.’

  ‘That makes two of us. The woman’s too bad to be true. But what’s bugging you? That business about the man’s supper?’

  ‘More than that. The way she floundered over that bit about going out shopping early on Saturday. And yesterday she wasn’t in when we first went to break the news, and it was late when she did get in touch. She must have been out a hell of a long time, doing her Saturday shopping.’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  Asking Kilstane shopkeepers a direct question was no way of getting a helpful response. Even if it was about their own particular line in goods, they would avoid giving a straight answer in favour of discourses on the difficulties of maintaining supplies from incompetent English wholesalers, their crippling business rates, the inadequacy of the town’s rubbish clearance, and the craziness of a jack-in-office’s plans for traffic calming which would make it impossible for customers to park outside the shops.

  Instead of asking if the butcher, the grocer, or anyone else had seen Mrs Ferguson on the Saturday, Lesley bought a Scotch pie in the butcher’s and a packet of oatcakes from Ian MacKenzie, and waited for them to ask how the investigation was proceeding. She regretted not being able to reveal certain leads they were following, and turned the conversation smoothly to poor Mrs Ferguson, and what a blow it must have been to her – which produced no outright laughter but a few quiet murmurs. And when she asked the women eagerly listening at her elbow how they would have felt if they had been out doing their usual weekend shopping and then got home to have news of their husband’s murder broken to them, it gradually emerged that nobody – shopkeepers or customers – could remember seeing Hannah out shopping that day.

  So where had she been? Still at home? In which case, how could she possibly not have queried Archie’s continued absence?

  ‘I don’t know if we’re far enough on,’ said Rutherford to Lesley Gunn as they stared up forlornly at the windows in the incident room, ‘but we’re going to need a search warrant for that house.’

  ‘You can’t believe she might bash her husband over the head with a rock, and then cart him up to the cairn? All the signs are that the murder was carried out on the spot.’

  ‘I’d say that woman’d be capable of anything in a fit of temper.’

  Lesley found this hard to argue with. ‘But if she did have a corpse to dispose of, how would she shift it?’

  ‘Do the Fergusons have a car?’

  ‘I suppose they must have. It’s probably still in their garage. Unless,’ she speculated, ‘it’s the one that made those tyre marks near the cairn.’

  ‘And got driven back home again? Let’s go and have a look.’

  *

  Hannah Ferguson greeted them with a mixture of anticipation and disdain which must have been running like a cocktail of stimulants through her veins. Rutherford led brusquely into his main line of questioning. It had been raining heavily the evening of the murder, so presumably her husband had taken the car to the meeting?

  She couldn’t remember. He had gone out, and she supposed he could have taken the car: like they said, it had been raining. She hadn’t bothered to go out in that downpour to see him leave.

  ‘May we see the car?’

  ‘Well . . . I mean, I hardly ever use it myself. Haven’t even been in the garage there since . . . oh, goodness knows when.’

  Her haughtiness was growing strident.

  Kirsty,
lounging in the doorway, said: ‘It’s not there. I noticed through the side window it had gone.’

  Rutherford flexed his fingers as if he could feel them tightening around the throat of a victim. ‘Have you any idea where it might conceivably be, Mrs Ferguson?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. He could have taken it that night. Yes, you must be right – it was raining, he must have taken it. There was all that wind and rain. I wouldn’t have heard him leave.’

  ‘Then where is it now?’

  ‘How should I know? Must have been stolen.’

  ‘By whoever murdered your husband?’

  ‘Oh, God, no. No, that’s not possible.’

  ‘What makes you so sure of that?’

  ‘No, I don’t . . . I mean, none of it makes any sense.’

  ‘Perhaps you can let us have the make and registration number.’

  ‘I never pay any attention to things like that.’

  Another unlikely claim, thought Lesley.

  Kirsty was only too glad to oblige with the fact that it was a blue Metro, and also reeled the number off by heart. Her mother looked hostile rather than grateful.

  ‘We’ll go and set things in motion.’ At the door, Rutherford stopped. ‘D’you suppose we might find those missing papers in it? Might solve several problems.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any papers.’

  Outside, Rutherford said: ‘And if the tyre pattern fits . . . where does that take us?’

  ‘Right now, we need to know where that car’s been taken.’

  ‘I’ll start them on a PNC check.’

  ‘Where?’ said Lesley. ‘And then by whom?’

  ‘It could have been Ferguson himself as far as the cairn.’

  ‘But certainly no further. Who took over from there?’

  Chapter Ten

  Summer had come down suddenly on the fells. Intermittent rain of an unreliable early June gave way to sunshine, turning the eastern wall of Black Knowe to a mellow gold in the morning – a gold which eased its way round the tower throughout the day and then by evening began edging up the western wall on shoulders of shadow, until only the parapet was still touched by brightness.

  A television cameraman and a thin girl interviewer arrived midmorning. They had heard that the Ridings would now not proceed in spite of the rediscovery of the quaich, so the tale of the Bareback Lass and her Callant could not be re-enacted? They wanted a picture of Sir Nicholas and the disappointed Lass against the background of his ancestral pile. Before Nick could argue, Fiona appeared on cue, as if she had been waiting in the wings. Her white silken shift could have been the perfect costume for a stage production of the traditional legend.

  Accustomed to the endless retakes of film and television scenes, and the reworking and crimping of background music, Nick nevertheless found himself growing impatient as the pair insisted on shot after shot, using up film to be edited down later into a few minutes’ transmission time. It had been commonplace in his old life. It didn’t belong here.

  ‘Perhaps the two of you by the entrance to the cairn, Sir Nicholas. That’s where it was all supposed to happen, right?’

  ‘That’s where it did happen. Recently. A bloody killing.’

  ‘Yes, but what a contrast! An old romance. And a modern murder. You do see what a super angle it’ll make?’

  By the fifth shot, Nick had had enough. But when he began to protest, he found that Fiona was willing them to go on. Following the interviewer’s directions, she was leaning against him, her bare arms cool but her body warm through the flimsy shift. She would come out on film like a gossamer dream. Here beside him, she was no wraith but a woman whose forearm against his was pulsing a vibrant rhythm.

  ‘Miss Robson, could you just look up at Sir Nicholas? You know, the man who has just saved you from a fate worse than death? The Bareback Lass and the aristocratic Callant.’

  She obeyed and looked up at him; and nestled closer under his arm so that his hand fell across her right breast; and under the silk he felt her nipple hardening.

  ‘That’s great. Terrific. Can you hold it another minute?’

  Her eyes were conveying what they had asked her to convey. Her face was clear of any makeup, but the nakedness of her lips and eyes was one of stark sensuality. What could never be transmitted to the screen or into anyone’s living-room was the warm honeyed smell in the corner of her throat. Or the faint, rhythmic movement of her thigh.

  Nick was almost tempted to wonder if Hannah Ferguson’s outburst at the Ball, asking if she really was a virgin, was not as outrageous as it had sounded at the time.

  Her eyes mocked him as if she had read his thoughts, and didn’t care. She was still laughing to herself as the interviewer and cameraman wrapped it up, and with the faintest drift of her hand down Nick’s arm she floated away indoors.

  The session had scarcely finished when DCI Rutherford and DI Gunn took their turn to show up at Black Knowe.

  Nick set three glasses on the coffee table and took a bottle of Pinot Blanc from the cooler he had set into an old fireplace.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Lesley Gunn quickly. ‘I’m on duty.’

  He wondered whether this indicated a wariness in the presence of her superior officer. DCI Rutherford himself did not look quite so reluctant.

  ‘I’m sure one glass won’t impair your deductive faculties, Detective Chief Inspector . . .?’

  ‘Kind of you, sir. I think we can hold our liquor.’

  It was clear to Nick that there was no real need for two officers to carry out the interview. It was simply that Rutherford wanted to meet him and size him up. ‘Just to put me in the picture, sir, the night that the deceased went missing, you didn’t hear anything from the direction of the cairn?’

  ‘No. There was a high wind, blowing rain against the windows.’

  ‘And you can’t think of any reason why the deceased should have your bowl in his possession?’ The DCI used the word ‘bowl’ with a slight sneer, refusing to have any truck with fancy names.

  ‘It makes no sense to me. I’ve already gone over the theft of the quaich with your colleague here.’

  ‘But that was before the murder.’

  ‘True. But it’s still part of the same puzzle.’

  ‘Anyway, you can have the thing back in a few days.’

  ‘It’s told you anything?’

  Rutherford nodded at DI Gunn, condescending to let her contribute her bit to the conversation.

  Rutherford wore brown cords and a brown suede jacket, with a tie far too loud for the ensemble. Lesley was dressed more casually than when Nick had last seen her. Perhaps it was considered good form to become less of an art expert and more like one of the lads when a whole team was assembled: black leather jackets, slack pullovers and jeans were almost a uniform. She looked very sturdy, a finely shaped real live woman. Nothing ethereal about her.

  But Fiona had been real enough, almost too alive.

  Nick tried to concentrate on what was being said.

  Lesley’s voice had settled into a sort of official incantation. ‘Forensic have extracted some woollen fibres and dried herbs from the cracks between the staves. The herbs were flecks of heather and pink, the sort of thing you get in wardrobe sachets. The fibres could have come from a pullover or a shawl.’

  Nick spluttered into his glass. ‘A shawl?’

  Rutherford pounced. ‘That means something to you, Sir Nicholas?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to jump to conclusions. I’d hate to be landing someone under suspicion on a vague memory.’

  Before Rutherford could speak, Lesley was looking at Nick in a coaxing way which he thought could make her more lethal than the too obvious DCI. ‘I know we went over as much as you could remember of the Pipers’ Ball,’ she said equably. ‘But if you’ve just remembered something that didn’t occur to you then . . .’

  Nick found himself conjuring up the scene. The quaich on the table where he had left it instead of replacing it in its locked
case. The lights going out. Groping about in the dark, bumping into people to get to the keyboard and unplug it. Lights back on again. He had already told Lesley that he hadn’t thought to check on the quaich still being where he had put it down.

  Now he took a thoughtful sip of wine, and faced the bench in the embrasure where the quaich’s empty case stood. What came back into his field of vision was the memory of a large, gaudy shawl lying for part of the evening at the end of the bench.

  ‘Archie Ferguson dumped his wife’s shawl right over the quaich.’

  ‘And scooped it up again at the end of the evening?’ Rutherford was jubilant over a cut-and-dried solution. ‘Just picked up the bowl inside the shawl, and slunk out?’

  ‘Not Ferguson. His wife was the one who grabbed it up and made a big thing of marching out in a huff.’

  The phone in the turret alcove began ringing. Rutherford and Lesley Gunn put their heads together as he went to answer it.

  It was a call from Quentin in London, flapping madly as usual.

  ‘Nick? Thank God. We need you urgently. That rejig on the insurance commercial has to be finalised by the end of the week.’

  ‘I handed that over before I left,’ Nick protested.

  ‘The client wants the solo voice to have a choral backing – heavenly choir, that sort of thing. As of yesterday.’

  Nick could smell the usual self-indulgent panic down the line. All for the sake of an insurance company whose top man insisted that the theme of being prepared for life-threatening eventualities should be spelt out by a girl wandering over the hills and singing on the edge of a deep tarn. Commonsense suggested that if she were to stop singing and lower her soulful gaze from the heavens, she would be in less danger of plunging into the water and wouldn’t need that extra insurance cover. Or a heavenly choir.

  ‘You still there, Nick?’

  ‘Yes.’ And if I have any sense, this is where I’ll stay.

  Then he glanced back at the two detectives and wondered if it might not be better to get away and leave them to it. He might return to find that the whole mystery had been solved and sewn up, and he could settle down to a more rational pace of life.