Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 09 - Now May You Weep

Chapter Fourteen

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places.

—robert louis stevenson,

“A Gossip on Romance”

I suppose you could say the place has a sort of rakish charm,” Kincaid commented as he and Gemma walked up Aviemore’s main street. His eyes strayed from the ski shops and cafés to the mountains rising beyond the town, formidable even in late spring. He had been to Scotland several times as a child, visiting Kincaid relatives in Strathclyde, and had made one memorable trip to Oban and the Isle of Skye, but he had never been to this part of the Highlands.

“It does grow on you,” agreed Gemma, but her smile seemed to take an effort. Her freckles, he saw, were no-ticeable against the pale background of her skin, always a sign that she was tired, or under stress.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, slipping an arm round her shoulders and giving her a squeeze. “How’s Hazel?”

“Holding up fairly well, under the circumstances.

Have you talked to Tim again?”

“I’ve been ringing him since I got on the train this morning, and I’ve sent Cullen by the house. He’s not answering the door or the phone. I’ve spoken to his mum; they haven’t heard from him since they picked Holly up last night.”

“What the hell is he playing at?” said Gemma, and he felt her shoulders tense under his arm. “We’ll have to speak to Ross, then, as little as I like it.” She shook her head. “I keep thinking of all the times we’ve spent together, the four of us. Tim’s our friend—”

“All the more reason the matter should be out of our hands,” Kincaid told her, more firmly than he felt. “Let the Met—”

“Do you think he’s all right?” Gemma stopped and turned to face him, impeding the flow of pedestrians along the pavement. “You don’t think— I still have a key to the house— I should have gone back— What if—”

“Gemma, you can’t be in two places at once. I’m sure Tim’s fine.” Kincaid didn’t voice the fears he’d been trying to pass off since the previous night. “But we can suggest to the man here that he have the Met send along a couple of uniforms, a welfare call, if they can’t get CID

there right away. Now, where do we find this dragon of a chief inspector?”

“The police station is just past the car park. We can put your bag up first.” They reached the car park a few yards farther along, and she led him to the sleek-looking red Honda and unlocked the boot. Earlier, she’d taken time to extend the car hire.

Kincaid tossed his bag in, then hesitated before closing the boot. With a glance at Gemma, he unzipped the holdall and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Toby sent you this,” he said, handing it to her. “He worked on it all weekend.”

It was the much-embellished crayon drawing Toby had begun on Friday, depicting Gemma and Hazel on the train. He had since added frisking lambs, red long-horned cows, a blue river, and in the background, purple mountains with snowy caps.

“He wasn’t too far off the mark, was he?” Kincaid said, gesturing at the peaks of the Cairngorms, clearly visible through the open space beyond the car park.

With a sudden glint of tears, Gemma folded the drawing and tucked it carefully in her handbag. “Sorry,” she said, sniffing. “You know how I hate maudlin mums. It’s just that with everything else that’s happened—”

“I know.” Kincaid decided he had better take his chance. “Listen, Gemma. There is something I need to tell you— No, it’s all right, the kids are fine,” he added hastily, seeing the panic flare in her eyes. “It’s just that I’ve had a letter from Kit’s grandmother.”

“Eugenia?”

“None other. She’s sent a copy to Ian as well, saying she’s suing for custody. She’s alleging that Kit’s not being cared for properly.”

Gemma gaped at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I am, unfortunately.”

“Well, that should be simple enough to deal with. It’s past time you had a paternity test—”

“Simple, yes, except that Kit refuses to do it. Look, we can’t talk about this just now. But I thought you should know.”

“Why doesn’t Kit want to be tested?”

“I don’t know. He won’t talk to me.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this,” Gemma said, her voice rising. “You were avoiding me over the weekend, weren’t you?” she added. “You didn’t want to tell me.”

“Am I so transparent?” He snapped the boot shut, try-

ing to make light of it. “I didn’t want to spoil your weekend.”

“Spoil my weekend?” She faced him, hands on her hips, her eyes bright with anger. “You can’t keep things from me. Not for my own good. Not for any reason.”

“Gemma, I only wanted—”

“No.” Her voice shook. “Not if we’re in this together—

a family. You have to promise me.”

“But—”

“It’s the crack in the ice, Duncan. Don’t you see? It could happen to us, what’s happened to Hazel and Tim, and that’s how it starts. A little deception, a little something kept back. It could happen to us,” she repeated.

And he did see. She was right—he should have told her. It was a learned habit, sharing, and one at which he had not had much practice. He had been on his own for too many years, but before that, he should have learned his lesson with Vic. “No, it won’t,” he said, and ignoring the stares of passersby, drew her to him. “We won’t let it.”

“Inspector James.” The fair-haired sergeant was on duty again. He smiled at her in recognition, then glanced curiously at Kincaid.

“This is Superintendent Kincaid, from Scotland Yard,”

said Gemma. “We need to see Chief Inspector Ross.”

“He’s out, I’m afraid. If you’ll just—”

“But it’s urgent. If you’ll tell him—”

“He really is out, ma’am,” the sergeant said, apologetically. “He’s in Inverness, at the hospital.”

Of course, Ross would be attending the postmortem, Gemma realized, and she felt a moment’s thankfulness that it wasn’t she performing that duty. “What about Sergeant Munro?”

“With the chief inspector.”

“Can you give the chief inspector a message, then?”

She passed the sergeant her card. “Ask him to ring me on my mobile, as soon as he can. I have some information for him.”

“Is it something I can help you with?” offered the sergeant, his very blue eyes alert and speculative.

Gemma hesitated before replying. “No. I think I’d better talk to Chief Inspector Ross. But ta just the same.”

She flashed him a grateful smile.

When she and Kincaid reached the street again, he grinned wickedly at her. “The man fancies you.”

“What—the sergeant? Bollocks!”

“Plain as day. Unless that’s what they call community policing up here.”

Gemma gave him her most severe look. She knew he was deliberately trying to charm her, to smooth over the difficulty between them, but she was flattered nonethe-less. “It’s too bad my feminine charms didn’t impress Chief Inspector Ross.”

“Shall we wait for him?” Kincaid asked as he reached the car. “I must say I’m looking forward to meeting the man who could resist you.”

“No.” As she slid behind the wheel, Gemma debated bringing up Kit again but decided it would be better to wait until they had some uninterrupted time.

Now she needed to bring Kincaid up-to-date on what she had learned about Alison Grant and her unwelcome suitor. They could pay a call on Callum MacGillivray on the way to the B&B. “No, we can’t afford to put ourselves at Chief Inspector Ross’s convenience. We’ve other fish to fry.”

In spite of the fact that he wore nothing but a kilt and boots, at close quarters Callum MacGillivray was not as

romantic a figure as Gemma had imagined from her glimpse of him on Saturday night.

At the sound of their car bumping down the track to MacGillivray’s Stables, he had come out of the barn and stood watching them, pitchfork in hand. When they got out and approached him, she found he smelled, quite literally, of horseshit. Nor did he seem particularly pleased to see them.

“If ye want to make a booking, ye’ll have to talk to my aunt, and she’s away the noo,” he said curtly. But in spite of the less-than-welcoming statement, he peered curiously at Gemma, as if trying to place her.

Gemma caught a glimpse of Kincaid’s amused expression and knew he would tease her about making another conquest. Making an effort to ignore him, Gemma focused on Callum MacGillivray and found herself staring at his bare chest. Although not a heavily built man, he was well muscled, and his fair skin gleamed with sweat.

Hurriedly, she raised her eyes to his face and said, “No, it’s you we’ve come to see. You are Callum MacGillivray, right?” Kincaid had agreed that they could not identify themselves as police officers—they were courting Ross’s ire even with their unofficial questions—so they’d decided the simplest approach would be best. “We were friends of Donald Brodie,” she explained after giving their names, fudging the truth only a little. “And since your property is next to the Inneses’, we thought you might have seen something.”

“What sort of thing?” Callum leaned on his pitchfork, looking wary.

Kincaid extricated himself from the thorough sniffing administered by Callum’s dog, a sleek black Lab. “Someone doing something out of the ordinary . . . or someone doing something ordinary at the wrong time.”

“And why should I tell ye if I had? The police have been here already, nosing about.”

“I was staying at the Inneses’,” countered Gemma. “I saw you on Saturday night, watching Alison Grant. And I’ve talked to Alison—she says it was you who told her Donald would be there.”

“What if I did? There’s no crime in that.”

“Alison says you were jealous of her relationship with Donald—”

“Och, you canna believe everything the woman says,”

Callum said with obvious exasperation. “She had no relationship with Donald. I only wanted her to see the truth of it.”

“That was a bit brutal, don’t you think?” asked Gemma, in a tone of friendly inquiry.

“I told her time and again. She wouldna listen to me.”

“Did you think she would thank you for it?”

“Aye, weel, I suppose I wasna thinking past the moment,” Callum admitted, with less assurance. He picked up a fleece pullover thrown carelessly across a wheel-barrow and pulled it over his head, as if the cold had suddenly struck him. “I didna realize she’d be angry with me.”

“But you knew she’d be furious with Donald—which she was. Did you not think she might take it further than a shouting match?”

“Alison? I’ll tell ye what I told thon policeman; Alison wouldna hurt anyone.”

“She seemed pretty tough to me.” Gemma raised an eyebrow.

“You havena seen her with her wee daughter, Chrissy.

She’s a good mother.” Callum’s defense was earnest, but so ready that Gemma suspected he had been called on to repeat it more than once. And it might be true, she

thought, but good mothers could be fierce, especially if their children were at risk. Remembering what Heather Urquhart had said about Alison’s daughter being crippled, she wondered if Donald had somehow threatened the well-being of the child.

Kincaid, she saw, had gone back to fondling the dog, making himself inconspicuous so as not to disturb the rapport she’d established with Callum. She knew he was listening intently, however, in spite of his relaxed posture.

“Callum, how was it you knew about Hazel—my friend—coming to see Donald for the weekend?”

“It was when we were fishing, the three of us. I’d never heard Donald talk that way about a woman before. He took them for granted, the same as he did Alison.”

“The three of you?” asked Gemma, curious.

“Aye. Donald and John and me.” Callum looked suddenly uncomfortable. “We would go out, on the occasion.”

“Salmon good along here, is it?” asked Kincaid.

“Nae. It’s mostly the trout.” Callum reached for his pitchfork again, as if to terminate the conversation.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Gemma said quickly, to forestall him. “You and Donald were friends, weren’t you?”

“Aye. Since we were at primary school together.”

“Did Donald know that you were fond of Alison?”

Callum leaned down to stroke the dog, which had come back to his side. “I knew her first, through the shop.

My aunt orders bits and pieces for the trekkers. But when Alison met Donald at a party, she had nae more time for me. A posh bloke, she said, that owned a distillery. It didna take long to worm it out of her.”

“And you didn’t warn Donald off, once you knew?”

Kincaid asked.

Callum colored. “And have him laugh at me, because I couldna keep a girl?”

“There is that,” Kincaid agreed. “But when you told Alison about Donald and Hazel, did you not think it unfair to rat on a mate?”

“He didna need Alison,” Callum said defensively. “I saw him with her—your friend from London,” he added to Gemma. “On the Saturday morning, down by the river.”

Had he been watching, wondered Gemma, when she had seen Donald and Hazel together? And in that case, had he been watching the next morning as well? Carefully, so as not to sound as if she were accusing him, she said, “Callum, do you walk along the river path?”

“Aye. Sometimes.” He answered casually enough, but his hand on the dog’s neck grew still.

“And yesterday?”

“Yesterday I had to go early to Ballindalloch.”

“You didn’t go out along the river?”

“Nae, I’ve told ye,” he said shortly, rising. “And now I’ve the horses to see to, if ye don’t mind.”

Gemma didn’t see how they could push him further.

They had thanked him and turned to go when Gemma stopped. Prompted by something she didn’t quite understand, she fished a card from her bag and turned back to him. “Callum, wait. I came here on holiday, but at home I am a police officer. If there’s anything you . . . remember . . . or you just want to talk, you can ring me.”

She saw the small flash of shock in his eyes, but after a moment he took the card from her with a nod.

Rejoining Kincaid, she waited until they were on the road again before she said, “John Innes would have told him anyway, if they’re friends.”

“If they’re friends,” Kincaid answered thoughtfully,

“he would know where John Innes kept his guns. You said he was at the house on Saturday night; maybe he nipped round to the back and into the scullery while the rest of you were in the dining room.”

Gemma shook her head. “John and Louise didn’t sit down to dinner with us. They were in and out of the kitchen constantly.”

“Early the next morning, then, before anyone was up and about?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Gemma admitted. “But why would he bother shooting Donald when he’d already sabotaged Donald’s relationship with Alison? And how would he have known he’d have a chance to kill Donald before anyone noticed John’s gun was missing?”

“Maybe they’d made an appointment to fish together.”

“Then where’s Donald’s fishing tackle? It wasn’t found near his body.”

“The same place as the gun?”

Gemma smacked the flat of her hand on the steering wheel. “Bloody hell, I hate this! We’d have found the gun, if we’d had access to the crime scene.”

“That’s hardly fair, love. That gun could be in England by this time, for all we know.”

She shot him a look as she slowed for the turn into the B&B. “If you mean Tim, I still don’t believe— Look, that’s Heather’s car.”

Heather and Pascal were just getting out of Heather’s Audi as Gemma pulled up beside it. The other parking spaces, Gemma saw, were filled by a crime scene van and several police cars, so the police had not yet finished their search. A blue-and-white crime scene tape had been stretched across the entrance to the path at the bottom of the garden, its ends fluttering in the rising breeze. The

temperature had dropped, and Gemma fastened a button on her jacket.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Heather, coming to greet her as she got out of the car. “I was just going to ring you.” Heather wore a black trouser suit that made the contrast between her pale skin and dark hair more striking than ever, but on closer inspection, Gemma noticed that she looked almost blue about the lips, and that the hand she held out to Kincaid was unsteady.

“Heather, are you all right?” asked Gemma.

“We had to— I didn’t know he would look like that,”

Heather said hoarsely. She touched her throat with her long fingers. “I’ve never seen anyone dead before, and Donald . . .”

Having shaken Kincaid’s hand, Pascal turned to Gemma. “We had to identify Donald’s body for the pathologist. It was difficult for Heather, but as there was no other family . . .” He shrugged, and Gemma saw that the day had taken its toll on him as well. His button-bright eyes were shadowed, and his round face had acquired unexpected hollows under the cheekbones.

“I’m so sorry,” said Gemma, berating herself for not having realized Heather would be called upon to perform that task. But it was unlikely Ross would have accepted her as a substitute, even had she volunteered. He would have wanted to watch Heather’s and Pascal’s reactions when confronted with Donald’s corpse, because they were potential suspects.

It was a cold-blooded business, policing, thought Gemma, and for the first time, the knowledge that it had to be done did not make it seem more palatable.

“Come in the house, why don’t you,” she added, searching for some means of comfort. “I’m sure John or Louise will make us some tea.” It was the old standby,

certainly, but it fulfilled the human need for activity, and ritual, in the face of shock.

“No, wait.” Heather touched Gemma’s arm when she would have turned away. “I’ve something to tell you.

Giles Glover, the solicitor, was waiting for us when we got back to Benvulin. He’d had a look at Donald’s will. It was dated shortly after Donald’s father died. Donald—

Donald left all his shares to Hazel.”

“What?” Gemma stared at her, not sure she’d heard correctly. “To Hazel? But— Are you sure—?”

“It is true,” Pascal assured her. “They were his, to do with as he wished.”

“He held the majority?” Kincaid asked.

“Yes.” It was Heather who answered, and Gemma sensed the effort it was costing her to keep her voice steady, her face composed. She had given Donald Brodie ten years of utter dedication, and he had not left her a crumb. “It’s a limited company, with the shareholders owning forty-nine percent, so Donald’s was the controlling interest. I’ll have to inform the board, but first, I have to tell Hazel. Where is she?” Heather looked round, as if just realizing Hazel’s absence. “I thought she would be with you.”

“She’s here.” Gemma nodded towards the barn. “She wanted some time on her own while I picked Duncan up at the railway station. Heather, do you want me to tell her?”

Heather hesitated, then shook her head. “No. We’re going to be working together—that is, if Hazel sees fit to keep me. We might as well start as we mean to go on.”

Postmortems always left a bad taste in his mouth. Ross had wondered over the years if the phenomenon was caused by the odors of the morgue permeating his skin—

a fanciful and unscientific notion, true, but he had noticed that it only went away after he’d showered.

He’d had Munro stop at a petrol station on the A between Inverness and Aviemore so that he could buy breath mints, which he disliked, and his mood had not improved by the time they reached the Aviemore Police Station.

The postmortem had told him nothing he had not expected: Donald Brodie had been shot in the chest at near point-blank range with a small-gauge shotgun loaded with bird shot; Brodie had no other injuries and had been in good physical health at the time of his death. The pathologist had judged time of death to be consistent within an hour or two of the time of the gunshot reported by Inspector James, which helped Ross not at all.

Heather Urquhart’s effort at control as she identified the body had been visible, but again, such a reaction was not unexpected. The Frenchman, Benoit, had been solicitous in a rather formal way that Ross characterized as

“continental,” but not out of the ordinary.

Nor had forensics turned up any interesting trace evidence on Brodie’s clothing or body, or at the crime scene.

The surprise of the day for Ross had come earlier, when he had stopped briefly in Grantown to interview Donald Brodie’s solicitor. Of course, he had seen strange bequests in the course of his career, but that hadn’t prepared him for the fact that Brodie had left his shares in the distillery to Hazel Cavendish, who claimed not to have seen him in a dozen years. And as the distillery owned Benvulin House, the solicitor had explained, that meant that the shares made up most of Brodie’s estate. How, Ross wondered, was Mrs.

Cavendish going to explain this rather awkward acquisi-tion to her husband?

As they entered the temporary incident room at

Aviemore station, Ross saw there were half a dozen officers still working, organizing the results of the various inquiries. The room smelled stale and had begun to acquire its quota of empty soft drink cans and crisp pack-ets—an incongruous complement to the crime scene photos pinned on the board.

The officer in charge greeted him with a stack of messages. The top three were requests from Inspector James to return her call. Well, he thought, irritated, he would deal with her in his own time. What could she want with him, now that her friend had been released, except to tell him how to run his investigation?

Ross sat down at the desk allotted to him, removing someone’s half-drunk cup of tea and wiping with his handkerchief at the damp ring it had left.

Munro had apparently been following his own train of thought. “What if Heather Urquhart thought Brodie had left her his shares?” he asked as he sat opposite.

“Then I’d say she had a verra nasty shock when she heard from Mr. Glover this afternoon. I suppose Brodie could have led her to think she would benefit, as a way of increasing her loyalty and commitment to the distillery.”

“The same would be true of the Frenchman,” mused Munro. “If he thought Urquhart would sell out to his company if she gained control.”

“Aye. But,” Ross said, tapping the pile of statements on his desk, “according to these, both Urquhart and Benoit were still in their rooms when the police arrived. How could either of them have taken the gun, got out of the house, killed Brodie, and got back in without being seen by either of the Inneses?”

Rubbing at the five-o’clock stubble appearing on his chin, Munro said, “I’m beginning tae think it’s like that old Agatha Christie film, where they were all in it together.”

Ross sighed. “Such things dinna happen in real life, man, thank heavens. Imagine trying to put such a case before the Procurator Fiscal.”

“Then I’d put my money on young Alison Grant,” offered Munro. “She’s a tough wee baggage, and she had a good motive, if ye ask me. I’d the impression she saw Brodie as her Prince Charming, and then he let her down.”

“We’ve nothing linking her to the scene, and I think it’s highly unlikely she’d have nipped into the Inneses’ house and nicked their shotgun.”

“We don’t know for certain that it was John Innes’s gun,” said Munro, playing devil’s advocate.

“Then where did she get a gun? A shotgun is not the sort of thing an ordinary shopgirl keeps lying about, especially with a child in the house.”

“From a friend?” Munro suggested. “There’s the bloke who told her about Brodie and the other woman, Callum MacGillivray.” Munro stood and sifted through the pile of reports on Ross’s desk. “Here it is. MacGillivray has a license for a twelve-gauge—what’s to say he didn’t keep another unlicensed gun, like John Innes?”

“And she says, ‘Oh, please, can I borrow your shotgun? I need to kill somebody’?” said Ross, with practiced sarcasm.

Munro was undaunted. “Maybe they were in it together. MacGillivray says, according to this”—he waved the paper—“that he drove to Ballindalloch yesterday morning, but he didn’t arrive there until well after Brodie was killed.”

“That’s verra neat,” Ross said with a smile. “She gets rid of her unfaithful lover; he gets rid of his rival—two birds with one stone, so to speak. I’m beginning to think you’ve got conspiracies on the brain.”

“I suppose it is a wee bit far-fetched.” Munro folded

himself back into the spindly desk chair, his face creased with disappointment.

Ross relented. “We’ll have another word with the lassie. And with Callum MacGillivray. But in the meantime”—Ross pulled the reports towards him again and thumbed through them—“I’m curious about Mr. Innes.”

After Innes’s wife had told them during their initial interview that her husband had been out when Brodie’s body was found, Munro had talked to him again. John Innes had confirmed his visit to the farm shop on a neighboring estate but added that he wasn’t sure exactly what time he’d left the B&B. Ross now saw, however, that when an inquiry team had questioned the clerk at the shop, she’d told them Innes had not come in until almost seven o’clock.

Yesterday Ross had not taken the man too seriously as a suspect, but then he’d had Hazel Cavendish in his sights.

Meditatively, he said, “We know John Innes left the house some time before the body was discovered, because Mrs.

Innes had been working in her garden when Inspector James told her the news. Why did it take him so long to run to the farm shop?”

“Did he do something else, maybe dispose of the gun?” Munro suggested. “If he stopped along the road and approached Brodie through the wood, he could have put the gun back in the car and got rid of it anywhere.”

“Wipe the smile off your face, man,” Ross said crossly.

“That’s a dismal prospect. We canna search the whole of Invernesshire.”

“Aye. Except that, since Brodie was shot at such close quarters, some blood or tissue might have transferred itself to the barrel of the gun—”

“And from there to the car,” agreed Ross. Trust Munro to see the bright side. “It’s worth getting a warrant to

have forensics go over Innes’s Land Rover. But why would John Innes want to kill Donald Brodie?” Inspector James had said she thought the Inneses might have cultivated Brodie for his connections, which matched Ross’s own impression. “Is there some way the Inneses could benefit from Brodie’s leaving the distillery to Hazel Cavendish?”

“That I canna tell ye. But I thought yesterday that the man was nervous about more than the discomfort of his guests.”

“Aye,” Ross said, remembering John Innes’s sweaty agitation, and his insistence on getting back into his kitchen. That, in turn, reminded Ross of his own empty stomach. It was getting on past teatime, and he had begun to think longingly of his dinner and a dram, not necessarily in that order, when another report caught his eye.

“Well, I’ll be buggered,” he said, skimming the page.

“It seems John Innes’s wee brother has a record. Why didna someone point this out to me yesterday?”

He had fixed a beady gaze on Munro when one of the female constables appeared at his elbow. Mackenzie, he thought her name was. She had been first on the scene.

“Sir.”

“What is it, lass?” Ross prompted when she didn’t continue. “I havena got all day.”

“It’s the gun, sir. They found a gun in the river, and it matches the description of Mr. Innes’s Purdy.”