“We can run the dishwasher now.” Rex loaded the coffee cups from earlier.
Carrying the tea tray, Rex returned to the living room where the chief inspector and sergeant were busy interviewing the guests. He distributed the mugs of tea to the police taking a break in the hall, while Helen offered her oatmeal and raisin cookies. The crunch of vehicles on gravel brought them both to the door. Two vans and a sedan pulled up next to the squad cars. Scene-of-crime officers clad in white and equipped with cases descended first, followed by a middle-aged woman in a parka and sensible shoes carrying a doctor’s bag, and, finally, a couple of male personnel with folded black body bags.
These made the recent events seem all the more real and disturbing. Ken and Catriona Fraser could not have deserved to die.
11
the mournful morn
The guests relocated to the library while investigators took photographs and video footage of areas of particular interest. By four o’ clock in the morning, the statements of everyone present at the party, including Rex’s, had been gone over and validated by the chief inspector. Under haughty protest, Margarita Delacruz had been questioned the longest due to the incriminating and inadequately explained dart in her handbag. If Margarita had not put the dart in her evening bag, why had hers been selected and not one of the others? Had hers simply been the closest to hand?
All but three of the Queen Anne style dining chairs had been brought into the library to supplement the padded leather desk chair, two wing armchairs, and an Edwardian daybed, on which Ace Weaver was installed and covered with his traveling blanket. He should have asked Ace, while the old man was still lucid, if he had noticed anything suspicious during the course of the night, but the police had arrived and taken over.
Rex had implored the Weavers to spend the night at the lodge, or what remained of it, even if the police released the guests sooner. He lit the electric fire in the grate. The library felt substantial and timeless, an effect created by the stained wood-paneled walls, shelves stuffed with excess books from his mother’s house in Morningside, watercolours of local flora and fauna, parchment lamp shades, and antique swivel globe atop a tripod table. He loved to work and read in here cocooned from the world.
“I wonder if the investigators have made any progress,” Flora said after a while. “They’ve been at it for ages.”
“They’re certainly going over everything with a fine-tooth comb,” Drew agreed through clenched teeth.
“Shouldn’t be too long now,” Rex said, though he couldn’t really be sure. Dalgerry was nothing if not thorough.
“That Detective Milner was polite enough, but the statements took forever.” Julie yawned and covered her mouth, stretching her stiletto-booted legs from her chair.
The simulated logs gave off a cheerful glow and radiant warmth, making everyone sleepier still. Professor Cleverly nodded off in a wing chair, while Ace Weaver slept soundly, his face half swallowed by a pillow. His wife, curled on a cushion at his feet, propped her head up on one hand, her elbow resting on the daybed, which had been recovered in russet velvet to match the drapes and faded oriental rug on the hardwood floor.
“I would so love to be in my bed,” Zoe lamented. “Can’t you do something, Mum?”
“The detectives were very apologetic, especially in view of your father’s condition, but they can’t dismiss us until they’re satisfied there’s nothing more we can help them with.”
“They’re just waiting for one of us to crack and confess.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Zoe. That only happens on TV.”
Nerves and tempers were beginning to fray. Rex installed himself behind his desk with a compartmentalized box of trout flies before him. He never tired of looking at the delicate feathery creations—red, yellow, and patterned—fashioned around hooks, and which he purchased from a master fly fisherman in Gleneagle Village. He enjoyed standing on the loch shore or drifting out in his row boat, on rare occasions landing a wild brown trout, its back speckled silver. The flies were about the size of the poison darts. He lifted one out. It was, however, somewhat lighter.
“They must have searched everywhere by now,” John complained as the clock on the shelf ticked away the minutes. “And they frisked everybody.” A female constable had been brought in the lodge for the women. “So it’s not as though any of us could have stuffed anything down our clothes. I really don’t see the point in keeping us any longer.”
Alistair was beginning to answer when he suddenly turned his head toward the door, where steps and voices could be heard approaching in the hall. Those guests drifting off sat up with a jolt when the chief inspector burst into the room with the detective sergeant on his heels. Rex wondered whether there had been a break in the case or if the guests were going to be told they were free to leave at last.
Dalgerry stopped in the middle of the room and spun on Drew. “Mr. Harper, your shoes, please.”
Everyone stared at the house agent.
“You already took an impression of my shoes.”
“Two sets of prints were found on the patio by the kitchen door. One set belongs to John Dunbar. We believe the others to be your dress shoes, but there are many overlapping prints, and we want to verify they’re a match by superimposing them direct.”
“The prints are mine,” Drew expostulated, growing red in the face, but untying his laces nonetheless.
“And what were you doing ootside?”
“Making a call.”
“Rather cold to be on the phone …”
“Overseas call. I wanted to be sure I could get a signal in this remote area.”
“Why not from the front door?”
“Like I said, it was long-distance. I couldn’t hear properly with people still arriving at the house.”
“So you tried calling ootside the front door first?”
“I …no. I just knew it would be difficult to hear. Have you ever made a long-distance call on a mobile phone in the middle of nowhere?” Drew demanded.
“Business?”
“Personal.”
“Care to explain the nature of your call?”
“Not really.” Drew, clutching his shoes, looked ready to chuck them at the chief inspector.
Milner went to retrieve them in a clear plastic bag and disappeared from the room.
“Perhaps at the station, then,” Dalgerry said ominously.
“It was your girlfriend in America, wasn’t it?” Julie accused Drew. “Why don’t you just come out and say it? That’s why you skulked out the back door.”
Drew had the decency to look abashed. He had been no less blunt when attacking Jason over the coin, Rex recalled. “Fine then. My call was to a Dr. Heather McCall in Chicago,” he told the chief inspector. “I made the call around eight to wish her happy new year before the party got underway. We only spoke for a few minutes.”
Julie stared proverbial daggers at him.
“Correct,” Dalgerry said referring to the handwritten phone records in his hand, having confiscated all the phones.
Rex moved around to the front of his desk and, clearing some objects out of the way, sat on its polished mahogany surface.
“Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, to be exact,” Dalgerry informed Drew, clearly ignorant of his re1ationship with Julie. “There are a lot of prints for such a short call.”
“It’s expensive calling the States and it was cold, like you said. I pace when I talk on the phone. Especially in freezing temperatures.”
“Shortly before midnight is when I went to the woodshed and noticed the shoe prints,” Rex stated, deflecting attention away from his guest in his discomposure. “John’s would have been added afterward when he went to search for Ken Fraser.”
“Right,” the chief inspector addressed Rex. “If we can account for all the prints, we can exclude the theory that a stranger c
ame in by that way. However,” he said, dragging out the word for effect, “we did find tyre tracks by the side of the road at the top of your driveway. And muddy footprints. Someone stopped there during the night. The prints are still fresh.”
Everyone sat forward in their chairs except Ace Weaver, warmly tucked up on the daybed. This new evidence pointed to an intruder, a less threatening theory the guests would no doubt prefer to entertain. Rex could almost hear the relieved breath of eleven people being exhaled into the room, and none more relieved than the killer’s, he thought, personally of the opinion that the murderer was still among them.
“A broken-down motorist?” he suggested.
“Any tracks leading down the driveway other than our cars’ and those belonging to you lot?” John asked the chief inspector.
“We are trying to ascertain that at present.”
Rex surmised the police would not be able to ascertain much in a hurry. Too many vehicles had churned up his driveway that night.
“It’s possible someone spotted the suspicious vehicle in passing,” Dalgerry went on, his use of the adjective “suspicious” alerting Rex to the fact that he adhered to the intruder theory. “And hopefully that witness will come forward once we make an appeal to the public.”
Rex hoped Dalgerry wasn’t going to go off at a tangent, as he had been known to do in the past. Hopefully, too, he had more concrete evidence.
“There is another item of interest.” The chief inspector paused while he looked around the room to make sure he had everyone’s attention. His gaze alighted on the daybed where Ace Weaver’s sleeping form alone ignored his presence. His bulging eyes lingered on Vanessa seated at the invalid’s feet. He then began walking about the room assessing each of the guests in turn. He stopped in front of Señora Delacruz and proffered a menacing smile. She recoiled in her chair and turned to Professor Cleverly with a look of entreaty. Humphrey sat up straighter, but said nothing.
“When am I going to get my shoes back?” Drew asked, his arms crossed in defiance, his narrow feet clad in dark blue diamond-patterned socks.
“That depends, Mr. Harper.”
Drew was about to say something, but apparently thought better of it. He simply glared at the chief inspector’s back with undisguised contempt.
“A piece of clothing was found snagged on a tree.” Dalgerry whirled back to face Rex. “Behind your house.”
“Well, then. That underscores the theory of an intruder, doesn’t it?” Julie asked.
“Especially if no one here is missing part of their clothing.” Dalgerry glanced around the room and received puzzled shakes of the head.
He would already know the answer to that since everyone’s clothes had been patted down and looked over. The only procedure not performed had been a strip search, that Rex was aware of. He was growing antsy. The killer would have had hours in which to compose himself or herself by now, and to think and plan.
“What sort of clothing?” John asked, as a paramedic no doubt used to dealing with the police and not afraid to ask questions.
“I’m afraid I cannot divulge that at present.”
A torn piece of material had any number of explanations for being in the woods, Rex reasoned. It could have been blown there or else left by an innocent hiker; or not so innocent, since that person would have had to be trespassing on his land, but that was a negligible crime compared with two murders. Or it could have been deposited by Helen or Julie. However, in that case, he would have heard about some ruined clothing. He really couldn’t tell much without seeing the item.
“How high up in the tree?” he asked.
Dalgerry bared jagged teeth at him in another simulation of a smile. “Perhaps you’d like to step into the hall with me.”
Rex did so gladly, eager to find out what the chief inspector had to tell him in private.
_____
Dalgerry led Rex to the kitchen, where the door leading outside had been sealed off with barricade tape. They sat down opposite each other in the breakfast nook.
“I won’t detain your guests much longer,” Dalgerry said. “None of their statements provided much of interest. Most were just a muddle with a common theme of events: the buffet, the buried gold, the parlor game, the dancing, the power cut, Catriona Fraser falling back into an armchair, the knock at the door after midnight, the search party. But not necessarily in that order, which is mainly based on your statement and that of your fiancée, and of Alistair Frazer and his friend, John Dunbar.”
Once again, Rex was impressed by Dalgerry’s powers of recall.
The chief inspector stretched out his stubby arms. “The bodies have been removed and the crime technicians are almost finished.”
“What was the medical opinion as to cause of death?”
“Fatal paralysis caused by a drug or poison. Dr. Carmichael will know more after performing the autopsies. I told her you thought it might be curare in the entry wounds. She said she’d never had a case like this.”
“I hope we know more soon.”
“I wanted to show you this.” Dalgerry opened a tablet computer that had been sitting on the pine table. He tapped on the screen and turned it around to face Rex. A bird’s-eye view of his property showed the snow-dusted roof of the house, those of the stables and shed, dense areas of treetop, a snaking expanse of gray loch, and contours of hilly terrain.
“The piece of clothing was found here,” Dalgerry said, rising out of his chair and leaning around the wireless device to point with a podgy finger at a spot on the map.
“I’ve used that trail myself. It leads over the glen to Loch Lochy, a five-mile walk. But it’s a bit of a detour from the main entrance to Gleneagle Lodge.”
“Aye. If the motorist came by that way, he would have had to walk up the road half a mile. If he was simply looking for assistance, he would have come down the driveway. You said the lights went oot just after midnight?”
Rex nodded. “Doubtful a motorist who’d broken down would have bothered to walk down the driveway if he thought the lodge was vacant. If he made it to the door and that was the knocking we heard, he must have decided not to stick around for long after the lights went oot.”
“What I’m thinking, Mr. Graves, is that this was no innocent motorist. We think the tyre marks belong to a van, judging by the distance between the wheels. And we got a good impression of the tread. An innocent motorist would have knocked and waited, lights or no lights, having made it that far on foot.”
“Perhaps it was a housebreaker who thought the lodge was empty. And then, walking around the lodge, saw there were candles and a bunch of people inside. I’d drawn the curtains closed on the bay windows, but not on the side window because I was trying to air the room. The would-be intruder would have revised his plan to break in and rob me.”
“Let’s drop the hypothesis of a housebreaker for now and assume it was a person or persons of more sinister intent, who parked their van and came down by the trail, careful to cover their tracks, but leaving a piece of clothing on a spiky branch. They find the side window open and the house in near darkness and climb in unseen while the guests are preoccupied with the knock at the door, which was simply a diversion created by one of the miscreants.”
“Did they wear night-vision goggles when they took aim at poor Ken?” Rex asked facetiously. “And if they went to the trouble of walking down the trail to avoid detection, why park their van at the top of the hill where anyone in a passing vehicle could see it?”
“You’d be surprised how daft some of these criminals are. That’s usually how we manage to catch ’em.”
“I don’t think our killer is daft, somehow,” Rex contended. “How many criminals have you come across who are familiar with curare and can shoot a dart with deadly accuracy?”
“Could be one of them tribesmen you mentioned,” Dalgerry suggested. “All sorts are floo
ding into the United Kingdom since we opened our borders.”
“Did the piece of clothing you found suggest a person from the Amazonian rainforests?” Rex asked with stark sarcasm. “They must find our climate a wee bit cold for their tastes.”
“We found tufts of purple and white wool, but not of sufficient size to distinguish a pattern.”
“Not the most clandestine of colours,” Rex remarked. However, this information gave him pause. The colours for Inverness College were purple and white, he recalled from the brochure Flora had sent him with her joyful letter informing him of her admission to study art. “I see,” he confined himself to saying. “I don’t remember any of my guests wearing a wool garment in those colours.”
“I suspect it was from a scarf or a bonnet, judging from the height you asked aboot.” Dalgerry gave him a knowing wink. “And home knit, by the looks of it, not manufactured.”
“It could have been the trailing end of a scarf, so it doesn’t give an accurate height of the individual, does it? Unless it was from a bonnet.”
“No,” the chief inspector agreed. “Also it was a wee bit grubby. No telling yet how long it was there or if it simply had not been washed in a while.”
“Any prints nearby?”
Dalgerry blew out a sigh. “Unfortunately not. Our perp covered his tracks, like I said.”
“Or else the ‘evidence’ pre-dates the murders sufficiently for time to have erased any tell-tale signs. Or the wool blew into the tree in the gale.”
The chief inspector shook his head vehemently. “It was well snagged on an overhanging branch. It caught, it was not blown there.”
Rex was less convinced. The winds had been strong of late. “I haven’t taken that walk since, let me think … must be late summer. Any other evidence?” Rex asked, trying to contain his impatience. Tire tracks on the road and a torn piece of knitted clothing two hundred feet from his house were not a lot to go on. “Anything inside the house?”
“Too many people and prints. It may take a while for the lab to get back to us with anything useful. But I did mean to ask you … Did you burn anything other than wood in your fireplace?”
Murder at Midnight Page 12
