by Blake Banner
I nodded. “Then one of two things happened: either his killer overpowered him and strung him up, which seems very unlikely given Gordon’s weight and strength, and…” I looked around. “The absence of any sign of a struggle; or they had a weapon and threatened him with it. They forced him to tie the rope, put it around his neck and gave him a shove.”
Cameron stood. “There’s a third possibility yer no considering, Stone, an’ that’s that his conscience got too much for him. He saw what he had done to the people around him, an’ how all the fuckin’ wickedness of his way of life had come back on him, an’ he took his own life. Bear in mind, in one single night, he lost his son and the woman he thought loved him. No many men could get over that.”
I heard him out, then said, “It’s an obvious and logical possibility, Doctor, but when we cut him down, his toes could barely reach the mattress. Which means that he was standing on something that the killer rather foolishly removed after killing him.”
Cameron frowned. “Why would they do that?”
Dehan shrugged with one shoulder. “They were in a rush, in a panic. Maybe Bee had just started shouting for everyone to come. Hard to think clearly in a moment like that, especially if you are improvising. Perhaps he was afraid whatever it was would be fingerprinted, and he had no time to wipe off his prints.”
I nodded. “It’s possible. We’re dealing with a very tight timeframe.” I glanced around the room. “He came up the stairs. When everybody had retired to their rooms he went in, dosed Pamela, emptied the pill bottle down the toilet, slipped out and came ’round to Gordon’s room. He knocked…” I trailed off and pointed at a wooden box on top of a tallboy against the wall.
I went and had a closer look. There were slight impressions of dust on the surface, but it was hard to be sure. I shrugged. “It will be interesting to see what forensics gets off this box.”
I turned. Dehan was frowning. “So there’s a second weapon?”
I nodded.
She shook her head. “I don’t like that, Stone. It’s messy. Where from? If he had a weapon, why’d he need to steal the old Smith & Wesson? Where’d he get it from? All that time when everyone was in the drawing room…” She shook her head again. “What? He stepped out of the drawing room and found a pistol somewhere? I don’t like it.”
Cameron was watching us. “Yous keep talking about a man. It could just as easily have been a woman.” He pointed at Gordon. “He has no premortem or perimortem bruising. He was not physically forced to hang hi’self. Either somebody held a gun to his head or he committed suicide. An’ frankly, my money is on that. Frankly, I think you’re both full o’crap. It is plainly obvious what happened.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow at him. “It is? Care to enlighten us?”
He pointed at Gordon. “Nobody stole his gun. He took it down hi’self. This bastard killed his son because he found out that he was shaggin’ my wife, his mistress. After you told everyone you had solved the murder, he believed you, came upstairs, and in a final act of malice and rage he killed his wife and then went and hanged hi’self.”
I sighed. “I just told you he couldn’t reach.”
“How fuckin’ hard would it be tu pull hi’self up, hold on to the frame with one arm an’ slip the noose around his fuckin’ neck, then let go?”
“Pretty hard. Will you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Have you got surgical gloves?”
“Of course.”
“Do you buy them on the island?”
He squinted at me like he was trying to fathom the depth of my stupidity. What?”
I gave him a moment, trying to hold on to my patience. “I’m not going to repeat the question, Cameron. It was very clear.”
“No! I don’t buy them on the fuckin’ island. What kind of a fuckin’ stupid question is that?”
“Have you got a pair with you?”
“In mah bag. Why?”
I held out my hand. He stared at it a moment, then sighed laboriously, reached in his bag and pulled out a sealed pack with a pair of surgical gloves in it. I tore the wrapper and pulled on the gloves, then I hunkered down, pulled over his bag and started going through it slowly and meticulously. After a moment, I said to Dehan, “You still got those freezer bags?”
“Yeah.”
She stepped over. I heard a rip and she squatted down next to me holding an open bag. I held up a syringe and looked up at Cameron. “You always keep your syringes lying around in your bag out of their packaging?”
He went pale. “Never. I have no idea how that got in there…”
I dropped it into the improvised evidence bag and smiled at Dehan. “There’s your weapon. The needle is down the can on its way to the bottom of the North Atlantic.” I looked back at Cameron. “I’m prepared to bet that if the ME looks hard enough among all the bruising caused by the rope, he’ll find a needle mark on the right side of Gordon’s neck.”
Dehan stood. “That’s why there was no syringe in Pam’s bedroom. He brought it with him, knocked on the door. Threatened Gordon with it, made him climb on the bed, probably on the box, then pushed him off, and replaced the box when Bee started screaming…”
“He flushed the needle, made his way to Pam’s room, and when the Doc arrived, he dropped the syringe back in his bag. If we’re lucky, we may get prints from it.” I stood and looked at Cameron, who was staring at me with his mouth open. “You want to get off my case now, Doctor?”
Dehan said. “Our pool of suspects is very small, and the Doc is right. It could just as easily be a woman.”
I nodded. “Doc, will you leave your bag there and join the others in the spare bedroom, please?”
He was shaking his head. “Och, no, you cannot believe that I did thus…”
“You want to tell me why?”
He fumbled and stammered, “I might have had reason to want the old man dead, but why would I kill young Charles? An’ Pam?”
Dehan shrugged. “To frame somebody else? The whole damn household heard you threaten Gordon. Your exact words were, if I remember rightly, that you would make him pay and you would destroy him. Killing his son and his wife, and then him, and make it look like he did it himself seems to me to be a pretty comprehensive way of destroying him, Doc.” She nodded at his bag. “And you own the weapon.”
His face cleared. “I was with Brown! He’ll tell yous. I was with him!”
“When?”
“When…” He faltered.
I shook my head. “It’s a very small window, Doc, but we don’t know exactly when he was killed. Hold on to that thought. And my advice, for now, keep your mouth shut. You’ll do everyone a favor. Now, please, leave the bag there and get into the spare bedroom with the others.”
He left the room and I stood in the doorway, biting my lip and watching him make his way down the passage. I turned and faced Dehan and we stared at each other for a long moment. It was a strange habit we had fallen into shortly after we met. It made other people uncomfortable, but it helped us to think. After a moment, she blinked and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Well, at least we know it wasn’t Gordon or Pamela.”
I frowned at her. “I wasn’t kidding, Dehan. I know who did it. I should have seen this coming. Our killer is crazy and almost unbelievably daring. This…” I gestured at Gordon. “This, while people were just feet away in the corridor—it is reckless to the point of insanity. But there is also a coldness to it, a clarity of thinking that, if we are not very careful, will lead to the killer being acquitted. There will be no evidence to convict them. The problem is not who did it, or even how. Both of those are obvious. The question, Dehan, is how do we prove it?”
NINETEEN
Sally was lying down with her forearm across her eyes. Bee was sitting next to her, holding her knees up to her chest and staring vacantly at the air six inches in front of her nose. The major was in an armchair by the window, watching her quietly. Cameron was on the floor, echoing B
ee’s position, but with his arms laid across the top of his knees and his forehead on his arms. In the corner, Armstrong lay curled in the fetal position, snoring softly. Outside the door, the red-haired maid sat asleep in a chair. Beside her, Brown sat in another, drawn and anxious, watching me and Dehan.
I leaned on the doorjamb, and after a moment Bee turned to look at me. “Do you really, seriously think that one of us did these terrible things, Mr. Stone? Don’t you think that your theories have perhaps gone a little astray?”
Dehan came up beside me, leaned on me and rested her head on my shoulder. After a moment, I nodded. “No to the first and yes to the second, Bee.” I jerked my head at the window, where the sky was already turning pale. “The storm has pretty much blown over. Phones should be working again soon.” I shrugged. “I thought I’d cracked it, but the fact is I hadn’t. And you know what? My wife and I came here on honeymoon, not to conduct a pro bono investigation, and frankly, if I’m honest, we are both pretty tired of getting insulted, sneered at and put down for no other reason than we are Americans and work for the NYPD. We tried to help, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
Cameron looked up at us. His eyes were resentful. “I told you from the start you were on the wrong track. It was Gordon. It had to be.”
Dehan snapped, “How! How’d he do it?”
“I don’t know, but…”
“When you do know, talk. In the meantime, why don’t you keep your mouth shut!”
Bee sighed. “It would be a relief if you did, Doctor.”
I said, “The fact is, everybody has an alibi for the time of Gordon Sr.’s death. So either it was somebody who was not a member of the party in the house, or it was suicide, as the doctor says. Either way, Dehan and I are washing our hands of the case. We will call the cops as soon as we have a signal, we will preserve the crime scenes and we will pass on our findings, such as they are, when they get here. But other than that we are done. I do recommend, though, that you all lock your doors when you go to bed. There is at least a chance that there is a killer at large on the island, if not in this house.”
With that I turned and made my way downstairs, with Dehan by my side. Above, I could hear them all leaving the room. We crossed the hall, I undid the padlock on the study door, stepped inside and I pushed the door to behind us. I checked my cell. “Still no signal.”
She picked up the landline and shook her head. She waited a moment, then started to dial and after a moment started to speak in a loud voice, as though she was talking to the cops. I moved quickly to the bay window, opened the left panel and climbed out. Then I sprinted around the side of the house, past the steps down to the kitchen and in among the rosemary bushes in the orchard garden. There I lay flat, watching the side of the house, and waited.
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 lo
oked 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.”
