by Blake Banner
I didn’t have to wait long, maybe only fifteen minutes, but it felt a lot longer in the sodden, muddy soil after the storm. There was a dull grayness in the east, showing through wet, broken clouds that looked like they had been shredded by the wind and abandoned, scattered across the heavens. The light through the leaded windows in the tower looked warm and inviting in the paling pre-dawn. I checked my watch. It was almost three.
Then I heard the soft clunk of the front door. A shadow stepped out and moved swiftly down the steps and into the driveway, then seemed to disappear. For a moment I wondered if I had somehow got it wrong, but after a moment, the same figure moved quickly and silently past the kitchen steps and stopped in front of me. There was a soft rustle, then the clink of a key, then the shadow shifted, moved away and approached the side of the house. I heard the rattle of a lock, the soft squeak of a hinge and the pad of feet descending stone steps into an enclosed space. I smiled, got to my feet and crossed to the open door of the tool shed.
Just inside the door, I could make out the pale glow of worn, stone steps. I sat on the top step and pressed the flashlight mode on my phone. He spun in the glare and stared at me, squinting and shielding his eyes, but all he could see was the glare of light. He moved fast, seizing a pitchfork that was standing in the corner, and took two steps toward me before he heard the click of the Smith & Wesson as Dehan sat down beside me and cocked the hammer.
I said, “Robert Armstrong, I am making a citizen’s arrest. I arrest you for the murder of Charles Gordon Sr., and the attempted murder of Pamela Gordon. You do not have to say anything, and in fact we’d thank you if you didn’t. But if you don’t put that fork down in the next three seconds, I will give my pet rottweiler here permission to blow your balls off. Put it down, Armstrong. It’s over.”
He dropped the fork and raised his hands. I stood and made my way down the steps into the semi-subterranean room. It was like the broom cupboard inside the house, and in fact it ran on from it, but about four and a half or five feet lower in the ground. Behind me, Dehan flipped a switch and a bare bulb overhead came on, filling the long, narrow room with a sickly light. I switched my phone from flashlight to video and handed it to Dehan.
At the far end of the shed there was a collection of spades, shovels and other tools for gardening. On the floor, there were plastic and terracotta flowerpots, bags of compost, coils of hosepipe and a hundred other things a gardener might use. Running the length of the left wall, from the steps to the end, up to a height of about four feet, there were shelves, with everything from balls of string to spray bottles and tins of paint. Above that, the wall was bare brick, aside from a small, free standing bookcase affixed to the wall just above the shelves. It was about three feet square, almost reaching the ceiling. It was made of old, dark wood and held books on gardening.
I jerked my head at it. “Is that it?”
“Fuck yous.”
I reached over, unhooked the bookcase and set it on the floor. Behind it, there was just the bare, red brick wall. I studied it a minute, then began to see where the old cement had been chipped away and new cement applied in its place. It had not yet had time to dry completely. I looked along the shelf and saw the plastic tub where he had mixed it and the spatula he’d used to apply it. I bagged the spatula and pulled my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, then began to remove the wet cement from the bricks. It was a segment of four in total: one above, one below and two sandwiched between them. They were at head height, and as I eased them out of the wall, they revealed a hole, roughly the shape of a plus sign, in which the vertical line is short and fat. The hole, as I had expected, was in the back of the fireplace, directly behind the grate, and would, when the fire was burning, be concealed by the flames and the burning logs.
I turned to Dehan. “So you see, my dear Watson, the killer was never in the room. He took his shot from the tool shed.”
Armstrong was staring at me and at Dehan by turns. “How did you know? How could you possibly have known?” He jerked his head at Dehan. “You were on the phone when I came down. I heard you. How could you have known I was here?”
I smiled. “I didn’t, but I knew you would come here. I figured I’d worried you enough by saying I knew how it was done that you would come down and try to conceal the fresh cement and the tools you’d used to remove the bricks and cement them back in place. All I had to do was wait for you to show while you thought we were calling the cops.” I reached behind him and propelled him toward Dehan on the steps. “Let’s go, the game is over. You’re done killing people.”
We took him past the kitchen steps and back into the house. In the drawing room we put him on the sofa, tied his wrists and his ankles with his shoelaces and sat with him until four, trying the phone at regular intervals. Finally, as the molten edge of the sun began to creep over the rim of a wet and sparkling world, the landline began to buzz, telling us we could phone. Then I took the handset out onto the front steps and made two calls. One of them was to the local Scottish PD to request urgent assistance and to discuss a few details with them.
After that, I went back inside to wake up and assemble the household.
The first to appear were Brown and the two maids. They looked in astonishment at Armstrong and then hurried away to the kitchen to start making breakfast. I stopped Brown at the door.
“Perhaps,” I said, “You could give priority to a large pot of strong coffee and a couple of bacon sandwiches?”
“Oh, yes, naturally, sir.”
He nodded and left. I opened the door that connected the drawing room to the dining room and before long, the major appeared. He was neat and spotlessly groomed as ever, but he had bags under his eyes from lack of sleep and his face was drawn and pale. He poked his head around the door, holding a cup and saucer in his hand and frowned at us.
“Up early…”
I smiled. “We haven’t been to bed yet. We went on a little hunting expedition last night. The cops are on their way, with the ME.”
“Hunting, ay?” He kept narrowing his eyes at Armstrong. He took a few steps into the room and then his eyes widened. “Good Lord, are you bound, man?”
Dehan said, “With his own bootlaces.”
Bee came in next, looking about as lively as the major. She peered distastefully at Armstrong and muttered, “Oh dear…” Then she sat and sipped silently at her cup of tea.
Cameron came down a little later, looking disheveled and as though he had slept in his clothes. He was supporting Pamela who had, it seemed, been given a powerful tranquilizer but nothing more serious than that. Sometimes, I told myself, the victim just gets lucky. And then wondered if she would agree.
Finally, Sally came in, looking about as rough as her husband. They were all assembled, sitting around the room much as they had on that first night, only with two notable exceptions. When we had arrived, the major had told us about the murder of Grandfather Gordon. Now the father and the son were dead too.
They all sat and silently watched me and Dehan, and occasionally they glanced at Armstrong. Nobody asked, so when I had finished my coffee I got to my feet and went and stood over by the fireplace.
“It’s hard to know exactly where to begin. The story goes back more than forty years.” I smiled. “So we may as well start at the end. It’s as good a place as any. Let’s begin last night, when you, Major, and Charles Jr., had finished showing us the study. You went to join Bee, and Dehan and I went upstairs. We were surprised, when we reached the landing, to see Mr. Armstrong come in from the storm. We were surprised because when he had brought us back from the village a little earlier in his taxi, he had dropped us at the gate, claiming he would not set foot in this house on account of the fact that Charles Gordon Sr. was, in is words, a thieving bastard.” I paused. “Yet it turned out that Mr. Armstrong not only frequently set foot in the house, but had done so for many years as the gardener. So, logically, his decision not to set foot here was a recent one, even thought Mr. Gordon’s alleged thieving
had occurred almost forty years ago.”
I paused. They were all frowning.
I said, “It’s a bit of a mess, but let me try and simplify. According to Mr. Armstrong, forty years ago Gordon Sr. stole his inheritance, but Mr. Armstrong did not complain about it for almost forty years. Then, quite suddenly, very recently, he decided he was so mad about it he would not set foot in the house. And no sooner had he decided that, than he went and set foot in the house, according to him, because he had business to settle with one of the Gordons.”
There was a lot of ass-shifting and a lot of glancing sidelong at Armstrong, who was staring sullenly at the floor.
“Dehan and I assumed that he had come to see Charles Jr. in his study. Charles had stayed there to do some work, as he apparently often did, and as Armstrong must have known, having spent many years working here. But in fact, Armstrong had a very different purpose. He knew, as probably the whole island does by now, that Gordon Sr. kept his Smith & Wesson service revolver in his bedroom. How often had you talked about it in your day, Pam? And you, Sally?”
Sally’s voice was a dry rasp. “More than once,” she said.
I nodded. “And the bush telegraph took care of the rest. It had been common knowledge for a long time. And, for reasons I’ll come to in a minute, Armstrong had special reasons for knowing.
“The point is, when we thought he was going in to see Charles in the study, what he actually did, when we had gone into our own room, was to go up to the master bedroom and get the revolver. He then went down to the tool shed, where he had carefully removed four of the bricks from precisely the right place behind the logs, and he shot young Charles Gordon Jr. in the head.
“He took his time replacing the bricks, and the cement, and then came back into the house. He then put on the show for us of shouting and kicking down the door, but of course, before anybody could get to him, he had entered the room, squeezed the gun into Charles’ hand and dropped it by his side. The perfect closed room murder, exactly like his grandfather’s forty years earlier. And like his grandfather, the only possible explanation would be suicide.
“Later, when we had finished taking your statements and I announced that I knew who had committed the homicide and how, it was Mr. Armstrong who deliberately started a row, by accusing you, Sally, of having an affair with both Gordon Sr. and Jr. While the room was in commotion, he took a syringe and what he mistakenly thought was a lethal dose of sedative from Dr. Cameron’s bag. It was daring in the extreme, but Mr. Armstrong is nothing if not daring, and extreme.
“When everybody went up, after Brown had shown him to his room, he slipped back to Pamela’s room and injected her in the sole of her foot, where the mark would be almost invisible. He assumed that the sedative, on top of the tablets she had already taken, would constitute a lethal dose. Fortunately, what he injected her with was Midazolam, a powerful tranquilizer that is non-lethal. He then flushed the tablets Cameron had left her down the can to make it look as though she had overdosed, and he slipped out of the room, taking the syringe with him.
“From there, he went straight to the master bedroom and tapped on the door. When Gordon opened up, he threatened him with the syringe to his neck. I’m guessing you told him it had bleach in it, or some ghastly concoction; or maybe you threatened him with an air-bubble. Either way, you scared him enough to make him climb on his own gun-box and put a noose around his neck rather than try and fight you. Maybe, like most bullies, at heart he was a coward.
“I’m guessing you made him tie his own noose, you made him stand on the box and then you kicked the box out from under him.” I shook my head. “It was outrageously daring, and it almost worked. But you made a few mistakes, and one of them was not to leave the box on the floor where it fell.”
He stared sullenly at me but made no response.
I turned back to the watching faces. “He flushed the needle down the toilet, rushed around to Pam’s room, where Bee was raising the alarm, and dropped the syringe into the bag.” I turned back to Armstrong. “I don’t know if you wiped your prints off. I do know you didn’t use surgical gloves for any of this. The chances are good they’ll get your prints on the syringe, and on Pam’s ankle, and two gets you twenty there are latents on the revolver.”
“But…” It was the major, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “What I don’t understand is, why?”
But outside I had already started to hear the throb of approaching choppers.
TWENTY
It was an air ambulance and a police helicopter. Dehan and I stepped out to watch them land near the driveway in a vast cloud of mist kicked up from the sodden grass by the downdraft from the rotors.
As the whine of the turbines died and the throb slowly stilled, men and women began to spill from the two choppers. From the air ambulance, paramedics in cumbersome, high visibility gear came running with stretchers, followed by a man in a tweed jacket carrying a black leather satchel. I hailed them and as they approached, I pointed back at the house. “You have a possible overdose on sleeping tablets in the drawing room on the left.”
They began to move.
I said, “Listen to me. She was an intended murder victim and was injected with an unknown amount of Midazolam. She had already taken two sleeping tablets before that. Ask for Dr. Cameron. He’s in there with her.”
They took it in and moved toward the house at a steady trot. I turned to the guy in the tweed jacket. “Are you the ME?”
“I am. Who are you?”
“A guest at the hotel and a detective with the NYPD.” I handed him the keys to the study. “You have one body in the study on the right as you go in. Another upstairs in the master bedroom. Downstairs is a .38 gunshot wound to the head. Upstairs, he was hanged.”
I might as well have told him it had rained. He walked away saying, “Och, you’ve had a busy night, then.”
Two cops in uniform and three men in suits were approaching us from the other helicopter. One of the plainclothes looked worried, the other was smiling. He was in his fifties, well groomed and well-built, with intelligent, humorous eyes.
He spoke from fifteen feet away, holding out his hand and laughing. “John Stone, as I live and breathe! Am I in the Orkneys or in some kind of Bond movie?”
“Henry.” I gripped his hand and shook it with pleasure. “When you find out, will you tell me? This is Carmen, my wife and my partner in the PD.”
They shook. “I’m impressed with the NYPD’s latest line in detective uniforms, I must say. Very fetching. This is Inspector Harris, from Thurso, and Mr. Mackenzie of Mackenzie and Hennessy, solicitors, also of Thurso.”
Harris took my hand and shook it vigorously. “Uz et troo?” he asked.
“Which bit?” I asked back.
“That Gordon an’ his bairn are deed?”
I nodded. “Yes, the ME is looking at the bodies as we speak. It was pure luck that Mrs. Gordon was not killed too.”
Mackenzie reached over and shook my hand too. “And they were murdered, you say? In what order? And by whom?”
I smiled and nodded at him. “I thought you’d be asking those questions. We’ll come to all that in due course. Mr. Mackenzie, I want to ask you a favor. If you should happen to see anybody you recognize from your office, please don’t react. Just ignore them, would you? It’s important.”
Henry was watching me closely with narrowed eyes. “But you say that you have not only solved these murders, but also the original murder of forty years ago.”
I nodded. “Yes. I am just waiting for one last person to arrive… Ah, I think this is her now.”
A Ford Mondeo was speeding down the drive toward the house. I said, “Shall we go in?”
Henry turned to Dehan. “What on Earth made you marry him? How do you stand him? He’s so smug.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “You think that’s a problem? This is supposed to be our honeymoon!”
Henry laughed and we made our way back to the stone steps that led up to the
door, just as the Mondeo pulled up and a young woman in her late twenties clambered out. She saw us, looked at Mackenzie and stopped dead. Mackenzie frowned and looked away, mumbling something. She suddenly blurted out, “I’m looking fer Bobby Armstrong. I was told he was here! Is he OK?”
I smiled. “Yes, he’s as well as can be expected. It was me who called you. Please, come this way.”
And we all filed into the drawing room again.
Armstrong went pale and half stood as Lizzie came in. “Lizzie! What on Earth…!” Then he saw Mackenzie. Lizzie rushed to Armstrong and flung her arms around his neck, realizing too late that he was bound hand and foot. He fell back and she staggered, then turned to stare at me.
I turned to Harris. “Perhaps, Inspector, you could have one of your men replace those bootlaces with handcuffs. I left mine in New York.”
“It’s a trap!” she hissed. “You let yourself get bloody trapped!”
Mackenzie coughed. “I think, Mr. Stone, that it is probably high time you explained to us exactly what is going on, and why my secretary is here, with Mr. Armstrong, instead of at her desk, where she belongs!”
Harris nodded at one of his constables, who crossed the room and started untying Armstrong’s bonds. While he did it, I said, “I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Mackenzie. It is, as you say, high time. You’d better make yourselves comfortable, this is going to take some explaining.”
The constables were dispatched to help the Medical Examiner in the study, and Mackenzie and Henry took their seats. Dehan sat in a large armchair beside the cold fireplace, and I sat on the arm of her chair. I looked at Henry and smiled.
“Most of this is simple, logical deduction, some of it is surmise, most or all of it I hope you will be able to prove with what little forensic evidence we have been able to secure.
“This all starts about forty years ago, when Old Man Gordon, a wealthy Bostonian who had become obsessed with his Scottish roots and his family history, moved back to the north of Scotland and bought an island, and a castle, which according to his research had belonged to his ancestors. With time, his obsession grew and I guess he came to see himself as an ancient, Celtic Laird ruling over his island kingdom, owning his subjects and striving to keep the bloodlines pure. And that last point is important because, as I found out from the family library, Old Man Gordon’s late wife had not been a Gordon. She was not from any of the great clans. In fact, she was not even Scottish. Her family, to the old man’s enduring horror, was of English descent. Her name was Sarah Culpepper. I can only assume that his obsession with all things Scottish began to grow after he had married and sired his son, the late Charles Gordon Sr.”
