Murder Most Scottish

by Blake Banner

  Dehan sighed and there was a hint of disappointment in her voice. “Bee, where were you between six and seven this evening?”

  Bee beamed. “Darling! Am I a suspect? How exciting! Let me see. You and I spoke on the terrace. Then you went off with Stone, such a strong name, and poor Charles and the major. I stayed in the drawing room and read a magazine, and after that the major came and joined me, we chatted. Then Charles Sr. came in with Sally, and that’s about it, really.”

  Dehan frowned. “He came in with Sally?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “You heard the doctor shouting at him?”

  “Oh yes, one could hardly fail to, but that was a little earlier. I’m afraid I’m not awfully good when it comes to time. One moment flows, as it were, into another.”

  I nodded a few times, considering the fact that there are few things in this world as slippery as a member of the British upper classes.

  “In your opinion, Bee—and please understand I am only asking for your opinion—who stands to gain from Charles Jr.’s death?”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Well, Pamela, naturally, and me. But only if daddy Charles doesn’t marry again, and only when he dies. Pamela will get everything. She is now, to all intents and purposes, his sole heir. I get a percentage of his estate, I don’t know how much, but I believe it is generous. However…” She shook her head. “All of that could change over night if he gives Pamela the old heave-ho and marries Sally. Then we are all well and truly screwed. Metaphorically. The only one who’s getting screwed literally is Sally, lucky bitch.”

  Dehan smiled. “Bee?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Screwed is a metaphor. Sally is not literally getting screwed.”

  Bee smiled vacantly. “Oh, yes.”

  I took a deep breath. “Is there anything else, Bee, that you feel you need to tell us, or that we ought to know?”

  “Not really. I am sure you are doing a simply marvelous job. I should now like to go to bed. It has been an awfully trying day. And perhaps you could ask that appalling Doctor Cameron to give me something.” She stood and added absently, “They do let almost anyone into the professions these days. It is too bad, really.”

  Dehan went to the door with her, smiling and muttering, “No standards…”

  “None, darling. None at all.”

  Bee left, Dehan closed the door and leaned against it, looking at me. She smiled unhappily. “Some honeymoon.”

  I nodded, then shook my head. “Next time, I choose the destination.”

  “Next time?”

  “You better believe it.”

  She gave a small laugh. “I’d like to talk to Gordon. I’d like to know about his will. He’s the key to all this. Him and his dead father.”

  “I agree. But before we do, I’d like to have a chat with the major.”

  She frowned. “The major? You like him for this?”

  “No, but he is the country manor equivalent of the village gossip. Whatever Bee is hinting at, he has the dope. When we talk to Gordon, I’d like to have the major’s intel behind me.”

  She nodded. “See? That’s why you’re the oldest.”

  She turned, opened the door and leaned out. “Major, could we have a chat?”

  There was the sound of anxious bumbling closely followed by the major smiling apologetically as he hurried in. I gestured him to a chair at the head of the table and he sat. We sat on either side of him and he said, “I suppose you’ll want to know what I was up to between six and eight.”

  I nodded. “Amongst other things.”

  “Of course, we were all in the study together, and he was alive at that time.”

  Dehan smiled. “We would have noticed if he wasn’t.”

  He nodded, frowning. “Oh, most assuredly. No, he was definitely alive then. And after that, well, you chaps went upstairs, Charles stayed in the study, and I went over to the drawing room, hoping for a snifter.”

  “Was there anybody there when you went in?”

  “Yes. Bee was there, reading one of those awful magazines. Offered her a drink and she said, ‘Not half, govenor!’” He laughed out loud, then flushed bright red. “Like a Cockney, you know. She’s a great laugh, old Bee. Aristocracy, you know. Never guess, not toffee-nosed at all. Just an average gal.”

  Dehan nodded. “Yup. Just one of the guys. So, did either of you leave the room after that?”

  “Well, um, ah… I may have um… ahh… you know… um…”

  I drummed my fingers on the table a few times. “Gone to the bathroom, Major?”

  “Quite so, exactly, um, yes.”

  “And Bee?”

  “Yuh, also, perhaps. But other than that, we were there until everyone started coming in for cocktails. Including your, uh, good selves.”

  “Did you see or hear anybody else during that time?”

  “No, only Cameron, making a bit of a spectacle of himself, shouting at Charles. Can’t blame the man, I suppose, bit of a rough deal, when you… When you think about it…”

  He looked embarrassed and turned away.

  I leaned forward. “What is a rough deal, Major?”

  He seemed to bark, like a Scottish terrier. “Well! One doesn’t like to gossip… Man’s private life… but, you know…”

  “I agree, but given that this is a murder inquiry, and that our personal interest in the doctor’s private life is somewhat less than zero, I think you are justified in telling us what the rough deal is.”

  He looked momentarily startled, then nodded. “Yes, I see, quite so, quite so. Um, well, the odd thing is that Bee and I had, just before the shouting started, you understand, had been, as it were, discussing, not gossiping but discussing, more widely, the doctor’s position on the island.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Really? And what did you judge his position to be?”

  “Well… um…” He nodded several times. “Precarious, to say the least.”

  Dehan sighed noisily, like a person putting together a five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, blindfolded. “Would you please explain why you thought that, Major?”

  “Of course. The thing is, he was only aware of half of his problems, which is ironic, considering how things turned out. You see…” He leaned forward, glancing at us in turn with only his eyes. “She wasn’t only seeing Charles Sr. She was also seeing Charles Jr. on the side.”

  “When you say seeing…”

  “Oh, I mean that they were having a… you know… carnal affair, not to put too fine a point on it. Bit of the old one two, if you follow.”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow. “And you are sure of this?”

  “Oh, absolutely. No shadow of a doubt.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Well, he told me.”

  Dehan looked skeptical. “Kiss and tell? That doesn’t sound like Jr.”

  “No! Quite so. You are absolutely right, but you see, I was a bit of a confidant for the poor boy. Bee and I have sort of been around all his life, and he could never really confide in his father, or poor Pam for that matter, so Bee and I sort of stepped into the breach, if you follow. The poor boy wasn’t bragging about a conquest, far from it, he was worried sick about what would happen if his father found out.”

  I said, “Let me see if I have this straight, Major. You are telling us that Sally Cameron was not only having an affair with Charles Gordon Sr., but also with his son, at the same time.”

  “Devil of a thing, hey? Well I didn’t know what to tell the poor chap. I mean, I am a man of the world in that I have traveled just about everywhere on the globe, but tended to keep my nose clean where women were concerned, if you follow.”

  My mind reeled for a moment at the choice of metaphor, but I tried to ignore it and thought about this new angle. The major kept talking.

  “Of course, he didn’t go looking for it. He never did. But from what he told me, she sought him out.”

  Dehan was observing him through arrowed eyes. “How?”

 
The major suppressed a schoolboy laugh. “Went to his room while the old man was snoring! Spirited girl, but a bit naughty.”

  “So he came to you to discuss this because he was worried.”

  “Yes. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he?”

  “What was it, exactly, that he was worried about?” Before he could answer, she preempted him. “I mean, Major, I can see that there are several aspects to that situation that would be worrying, but what I am asking you is, precisely, what was the thing that was worrying him the most?”

  He stared at her for a moment, like he was replaying her question in his head. Then he blinked and said, “Well, what his father would do if he found out. I mean, Charles Sr. is, um…”

  He hesitated, so I said, “A cruel, vindictive man?”

  He held my eye for a long moment, then said, “Yes. Yes, precisely that. A cruel, vindictive man.”

  SIXTEEN

  Dehan pushed the door closed after the major. We were alone in the silent dining room. She stood facing the closed door a moment and then turned and started pacing slowly around the room in her red scarlet dress and bare feet, with her fingers laced behind her neck.

  “The more information we get,” she said, “The further we are from an answer. We need some kind of fixed point: something we can say, ‘This is a cert!’ So I am going to say for now that Pam did not kill her son. With this crowd of crazies you can’t be sure, Stone…” She stopped walking and turned to face me, with her fingers still laced behind her head. She seemed to be very far away, at the other end of the long table. “But for now I am going to take that as a fixed point. OK?”

  I nodded. “OK.”

  She turned and carried on walking. “So, who had motive? Bee seems to have no apparent motive, and on the face of it, neither does the major. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  She reached the end of the room and started pacing back. “Armstrong has reason to hate Gordon Sr., but other than hating the whole Gordon family, seems to have no special grudge against Jr.” She stopped, eyed me a moment. “Dr. Cameron, on the other hand, has a very powerful motive.”

  “He has?”

  She started walking again. “Sure. Relations between Sally and the Doc are strained to breaking point. She is ready to give him his marching orders. They are bad enough that they are having rows in public, and where before she was just having an affair on the side, now she is seriously thinking of giving Ian the boot. They row and out of sheer spite she tells him, not only is she screwing the old man, she’s getting her leg over with Junior too.”

  “I am horrified at your language, Dehan. I should never have brought you to this primal place.”

  “More than that, how about this? Her plan is not to force a divorce between Gordon Sr. and Pam, it is to marry Gordon Jr. and become part of the family.”

  I shook my head. “Mmmnyahh…”

  “Mnyah why?”

  “If she is hitting the hay with Dad, she cannot possibly expect to be welcomed into the family with open arms by him if she then declares she intends to marry his son.”

  She extended her left arm and pointed her finger at me like a gun. “Wrong, Stone, if she intended to continue sleeping with Dad after the marriage. That level of humiliation would have been right up Gordon Sr.’s street. But either way, if she was planning to marry Junior and told Cameron about it, that gives him a motive, which he did not have before.”

  “Granted.”

  “And we know he was in the area at the time, and he has no alibi.”

  “Also granted.”

  She stopped walking and put both hands on the back of the chair opposite me. “Now, let’s get a little darker: Gordon Sr. likes to dish it out, but he doesn’t look to me like the kind of man who likes to take it. So, while he thinks it’s a gas to humiliate his son by seducing his fiancée, when his son hits the sack with the woman he is planning to marry, I figure that could make him real mad. Mad enough to kill.”

  I nodded. “It’s possible.”

  “It’s more than possible. And note where he was when Cameron came in and started shouting at him. Right outside the study, where his son was locked in, doing his accounts, within the window for the time of death.”

  I did a lot of nodding, then said, “All good, solid reasoning.”

  “But?”

  “No buts, just two questions: one, how did he do it? And two: what is the connection between this murder and the murder of his grandfather forty years ago?”

  “Same answer to both.” She spread her hands. “I don’t know.”

  I stood. “Let’s get him in here and ask him.”

  I went to the door, opened it and leaned out.

  “Mr. Gordon, could we talk to you for a moment?

  He stared at me, like an ancient, giant Nordic king. Beside him, still sitting on the arm of his chair, was Sally, watching me with hard, calculating eyes. I wondered for a moment at the woman who had been sleeping with the man who sat dead across the hall with half his head blown away, yet showing no emotion on her face but caution. She held my eye a moment, then Gordon stood, sighed and strode unsteadily across the room to join me.

  Dehan closed the door as he grunted and lowered himself into the chair at the head of the table. “Couldn’t some of this have waited till the morning? Sally is exhausted, and frankly, so am I.”

  “No.”

  I sat. Dehan remained standing, leaning against the wall. He looked at her sourly, then turned away.

  “I need to know everything about your relationship with Sally Cameron.”

  He didn’t look at me. He just stared sullenly at the table. “Go to hell.”

  “I can’t hold a gun to your head, Mr. Gordon. I can’t even point one at you from the fireplace. It’s your choice. But what I can and will do is inform the cops when they get here that after asking me to investigate, as soon as we touched on the subject of your affair with Sally Cameron, you clammed up and told me to go to hell. If you want to draw attention to your affair, that is certainly the way to do it.”

  He grunted again and was then silent for a while. Finally, he said, “It’s not relevant.”

  I shook my head. “No. I decide that. Or you can go to hell and get somebody else to investigate.”

  He fiddled with his thumbs for a bit, then said, “Fine. So I’m screwing Sally. So what?”

  I turned to Dehan. “Let’s go pack and get some sleep. We’ll catch the first ferry once the storm stops and make a statement at the police station at John O’Groats.”

  “OK!” He snarled it at the table top.

  I leaned down and put my face close to his. “Listen to me, Gordon. You are not doing me a favor. I’m doing you one, you understand? All I want is to have my honeymoon with my wife. Now, if you want me to get your sorry ass out of this mess, you had better come clean and tell me what the hell is going on, because I do not intend to get prosecuted by the British cops for concealing or suppressing evidence. So if you want my help, start talking. I want to know everything about your relationship with Sally Cameron.”

  He watched me carefully.

  I sat. “And just remember, I have been talking to other people who have been watching and observing you both. I’ll know if you hold back.” I pointed at the door. “And one more attempt to bullshit me and me and my wife go through that door.”

  He heaved another big sigh.

  “Things have not been good between me and Pamela for some time.”

  Dehan snapped, “Try forty years.”

  He glanced at her, but other than that, showed no sign of having heard. “After my father died I discovered… Somebody told me… that Pamela had been my father’s lover. It embittered me. She was already pregnant with my son…”

  He faltered.

  I stared at him. “Son of a gun,” I said. “You don’t know, do you? You were never sure, and you couldn’t bring yourself to do the paternity test. It probably wouldn’t have been conclusive anyway. So instead you spent his whole life
abusing and humiliating him for his mother and your father’s sins.”

  He didn’t answer. He stared at the wall across the room for a long moment, then blinked and looked back at his thumbs. “When the boy was born, I raised him as my own, though he may well have been my half-brother, as well as my stepson. It was nauseating. I began to have affairs. Whether Pamela did or not, I neither know nor care. And yes.” He looked at me with hard, resentful eyes. “On the rare occasions when Charles entered into a sentimental relationship with some insipid female, I would make a point of seducing her. It was my small act of vengeance against my father and my wife.”

  He stood, crossed the room to the sideboard and poured himself a large whiskey. He sipped it and spoke without turning.

  “But all that changed when I met Sally. I can honestly say that every relationship I have had since Pamela has been an act of cruelty and revenge.” Now he turned, glanced at Dehan and then looked at me, as though he expected me to understand. “Sally was different. With Sally—it may sound adolescent and naïve—but with Sally I began to heal. I began to believe that it is possible to love and trust. She is not like other women.”

  “You fell in love with her.”

  He looked sullen and his face darkened. “You can mock if you want.”

  “I’m not mocking, Gordon. The only bitter cynic in this room is you. So you fell in love, good for you. What else?”

  He frowned at me. “Nothing else. We had discussed it and agreed that she would tell Ian and I would tell Pam, then we would both divorce our spouses and marry.”

  I scanned his face and he scanned mine back. He looked like he was trying to understand what I was getting at. If it was an act, it was a good one. I said, “Where did that leave Pam and Ian?”

  He shrugged. “Pam would get alimony and some kind of settlement, and Ian would continue as doctor in the village. I think the man is an insufferable prig, but I harbor no ill will toward him. I have no desire to see him bankrupt or broken.”

  I waited a moment, watching him carefully. Then I asked, “Was Sally seeing anybody else?”