Murder Most Scottish

by Blake Banner

  Mackenzie shifted in his chair and gave a small cough. “Are we to understand, then, Mr. Stone, that Charles Gordon Sr. was in fact only half Scottish?”

  I nodded. “And half English.”

  Armstrong curled his lip. “Well, no’ne’s perfect, eh, Ian?”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow at him. “Some less than others, pal.”

  “The point is,” I went on, “that the old man became increasingly troubled by what he saw as his son’s imperfection. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Meantime, while Charles was at university in Boston, two things happened. The old man, who liked, as it were, to move among his subjects, met a very young and very attractive Pamela May at the local inn. Presumably he had nothing particularly against commoners who did not belong to the great clans. Especially when they looked like Pam. He didn’t mind sleeping with them, he just didn’t want to marry them and breed with them. She was attractive and had an engaging personality, and he had money and power. They both had something the other wanted, and they started an affair.

  “The other thing that happened was that he met Mrs. Armstrong and young Bobby, who at that time would have been just a young teenager. It is somewhat ironic that these two encounters, which were life-defining for him, would ultimately lead to his death and the destruction of what he saw as his dynasty.

  “Pam saw Old Man Gordon as a potential way out of an island and a way of life that to her was a prison. But Mrs. Armstrong was, to Old Man Gordon, the answer to his prayers. Here was a woman of pure Scottish stock, descended from Gordons and with a son who carried the blood of two of the great clans. Pam didn’t stand a chance, and Charles, away at university in Boston, was on a very slippery slope.

  “When he graduated and came home, it was to discover that he had all but been disinherited in favor of young Robert Armstrong. His father planned to marry Mrs. Armstrong, and when he did, he planned to amend his will.” I gestured at Mackenzie. “Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it, the old man had decided, through some strange sense of propriety, to go through two stages…”

  Mackenzie nodded. “That is correct. He felt that until he was married, his estate should go to his own son, so what he had us do was to draw up a will in which his son was the beneficiary of the estate until he died, and after his death it would pass to Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Gordon would effectively hold the estate on trust for Mr. Armstrong. This was never intended to be a long-term solution. He was merely protecting himself until such time as they were married, when he intended to leave his entire estate to his new wife and her son, bar a small endowment to his son.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, that was how I understood it. It must have been quite a shock to Charles when he got home to discover that he had gone from being the heir to a fortune to being just like the rest of us. He sought, and found, solace in Pamela May. I am pretty sure he never told her, or anybody else, the exact nature of what his father had done, or Pamela would have dropped him like a hot brick. And at that time, he was pretty sweet on Pamela. Equally, Pamela did not tell him that she had been engaged in an affair with his father.

  “Charles decided to marry Pamela. He was in love with her and, after all, had nothing to lose. He had already lost everything. But then, out of resentment and anger, or perhaps because he had inherited some of his father’s craziness, he hatched a plan. We will never know for sure, but I am guessing that he had access to a copy of the will and he studied it in details. Again, correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Mackenzie, but the will said that if Old Man Gordon were to die before his marriage to Mrs. Armstrong, the estate would go to Charles until his death, when it would pass to the Armstrongs.”

  “That is correct.”

  “So the answer was simple. He had to kill his father and make it look like a suicide. The old man had a reputation for being eccentric, so nobody would be that surprised if he did something crazy like shoot himself. If, in addition, he staged it so that it seemed his father had had some kind of emotional crisis and seen the error of his ways, the suicide scenario would be even more credible.

  “What he did next was very ingenious. It had struck me from the start that there was a curious feature to this case: Though the old man was supposed to have shot himself in the study with a Smith & Wesson .38, nobody in the house had heard the shot. A .38 revolver is not quiet! And this happened again when Charles Jr. was killed. The reason was simple.

  “There is, where the tower ends and the ballroom begins, a gap between the two structures of about seven feet. I don’t know what its purpose was originally, but now it houses a broom cupboard on the inside, and on the outside a tool shed. The interesting thing is that the tool shed is sunk about four or five feet below ground level…”

  Pam spoke for the first time in a voice that was weary and drained of life. She shook her head. “There is no great mystery there, Mr. Stone. Many old houses have something similar. You pick a harvest of potatoes or apples, and you store them below ground level in the dark, they will last the winter that way. There are several such nooks around the house.”

  “Well, this one was unique in that the southern wall was in fact the north wall of the study, and one very particular spot gave onto the fireplace.” I smiled at Henry and saw him close his eyes and sigh. “We are least likely to see what is right before our eyes. Just about the center of the fireplace, inside the tool shed, was at a height of about five and a half feet. Charles took his time, identified the exact spot, and gradually carved away the cement from four of the bricks at just about head height. He left them attached to each other, so that he could slide them out as a single unit. The constant use of the fire meant that any irregularity in the bricks was quickly blackened and covered in soot.

  “On the day of the murder, he made a point of telling everyone in the household that he planned to talk to his father about his intention to marry Pam. His father was in the habit of locking himself in the study when he worked. So, when his father was engrossed in his research on the history of his family, Charles went to the tool shed, removed the bricks and shot him in the head. With remarkable coolness, he then put back the bricks, went about the house giving everybody the good news that his father had agreed to the marriage, and went dashing off to tell Pamela.

  “He then returned, with the revolver in his pocket, broke down the door, squeezed the revolver into his father’s hand and then dropped it on the floor to make it seem he had shot himself. By this time, a good hour or more since the murder, the fire and smoke had completely erased any sign of the bricks having been removed.

  “When everybody arrived at the scene just moments later, it was to find a suicide. My good friend Henry spotted the inconsistencies, the lack of GSR on the old man’s hand, the trajectory of the bullet, the lack of scorching around the entry wound. But following the Holmesian dictum, eliminate the impossible…” I shrugged. “It seemed that the impossible was that it was murder, therefore, however unlikely, by some fluke the GSR had been blown away from the hand and the gun’s recoil had altered the trajectory of the slug, yadda yadda, in short, it was suicide.

  “But in fact, the impossible was that it was suicide. And if it was impossible for the murderer to have been in the room, then the murderer had to be outside the room. That meant he shot through a hole which he later covered up. Once you accepted that, it was not hard to see where that hole had been, because, as you correctly deduced, Henry, the shot came from the fireplace.”

  Henry did a lot of slow nodding, then smiled at Dehan. “I’ll ask you again, Carmen, how do you tolerate him?”

  She offered him a lopsided smile. “He takes me on these amazing holidays.”

  Inspector Harris was scratching his head. “But, hold on there a munit, are you sayin’ that Mr. Gordon Sr. mardard his own father and his own son? An’, if so, why is Mr. Armstrong in cuffs?”

  I shook my head. “No. Mr. Gordon killed his father and inherited the estate on the terms of the will, as you have described them, holding it on trust for the Arm
strongs. But Mr. Armstrong did not know the terms of the will, and Mr. Gordon was not about to tell him.

  “Now, Mr. Armstrong was the gardener. He was familiar with the tool shed and he had no doubt about how his employer had pulled off the murder. The thing was, he would never be able to prove it, and so he he had no choice but to accept almost forty years of humiliation—and Charles Sr. did enjoy inflicting a bit of humiliation on those around him—working as a gardener in the house that he knew the old man had intended to be his.

  “Then, almost forty years later, he hooks up with a young lady who works as a secretary at the very law firm where Gordon’s will is safely stashed away. Now, if Old Man Gordon was obsessed with his heritage, so was Robert Armstrong, but in a very different way. It is not long before he tells his girlfriend, Lizzie, all about it, and she says to him, ‘Why don’t I sneak a look at the will and see if there is anything in it that we can use to claim your inheritance?’ But what she finds is a bombshell. What she finds is that as soon as Charles Sr. dies, the estate passes to the Armstrongs.”

  I looked at Armstrong and Lizzie. “They found exactly what Gordon had found all those years before, that the only thing standing between them and a fortune was another man’s life. And Armstrong already knew how Charles Sr. had done it. All he had to do was repeat the exercise.

  “But, there was a hitch, that safety clause that the old man had put into the will—if Old Man Gordon were to die before marrying Mrs. Armstrong, and upon his death his son were still alive and in residence at the castle, then the estate would go to his son.” I paused and nodded, looking at Pam. “But, of course, it was rumored all over the island, and nobody knew for sure whether it was true or not—that both Charles Sr. and Charles Jr. were Old Man Gordon’s sons. It was even odds that they were not father and son, but half-brothers. So they both had to be eliminated. Did you ever have his paternity checked, Pam?”

  She shook her head. “They were both as bad as each other. Charles was my son, not theirs. He was good and kind and gentle, nothing like either of them.” She stared at me a moment. “If he did it, why did he always maintain it was murder?”

  I shrugged. “What better cover?”

  She sighed, then looked at Mackenzie. “So what happens to me now? Do I lose everything?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. Old Man Gordon was very concerned not to be taken advantage of. He was as canny as a Scotsman, even if he was an American. He had it written into the will that if he or his son were murdered, the trust would fail and the entire estate would go to his immediate next of kin. That would be you, Mrs. Gordon.”

  Armstrong leaned forward on the sofa, his face crimson and the veins in his head swollen and pulsing. He screamed, “Ut’s mine, you filthy, whooring bitch! Ut’s mine! D’ya hear! Mine!”

  She didn’t flinch. She watched him coolly and when he’d finished, she softly shook her head. “No, Bobby Armstrong. It’s mine.”

  EPILOGUE

  “It’s the Gulf Stream,” I said. “It comes all the way from Mexico, bringing warm currents and warm air.”

  The full moon was sitting about four inches above the horizon, laying a deceptive path of liquid light across an inky ocean to a soft, sandy shore, where small waves spilled onto the beach and then sighed as they withdrew back into the deep.

  Dehan pulled the bottle of white wine from the ice bucket we had stuck in the sand between us and refilled my glass and hers.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “England is supposed to be foggy and rainy, with cute red phone boxes and big green hedgerows. It is not supposed to have palm trees and white sandy beaches.”

  I shrugged. “This is Cornwall. Cornwall is different.”

  She sipped. “This is a weird island.”

  “It’s a weird archipelago.”

  “Good weird, but weird.” She was quiet for a moment, then said, “So Pam is paying for this?”

  “She insisted. She wanted to honor her husband’s commitment.”

  “So you thought you’d go for a two-week tour of five-star hotels in a self-drive classic car at two thousand bucks a week.”

  “It’s an Aston-Martin DB6, like the one James Bond drove. I thought it was fair. I ruined my tuxedo to save her castle, it was the least she could do.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder and we both sipped. “You’re about as weird as this archipelago, you know that.”

  “It’s why you like me. You’re as weird as I am.”

  “You never did tell me what your connection is with this place.”

  “Nope, but I will.”

  She sighed. “So where to tomorrow?”

  “I thought we’d stay at the Old Parsonage in Oxford and then move on to the Ritz in London. There we can go to the opera at Covent Garden before flying back on Friday.”

  She was quiet for a while, then said, “Back to the Bronx and the 43rd Precinct.”

  I nodded. A cool breeze blew in off the sea and touched our skin. I kissed the top of her head.

  “It’s the same moon, you know, here and there.”

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