Death of a Kingfisher (6 page)

He inserted it in the lock, twisted it, and the door swung open. He switched on a light. There were shelves stacked high with gold and silver ornaments: watches, epergnes, statues, clocks, snuff boxes, and various other precious objects. Glass cases held what seemed to be rare old maps. Fern Palfour had enough in here to kill for, thought Hamish.

The banker had taken out a thick inventory. ‘I will need to make sure everything is here,’ he said. On a table in the middle of the room was a large leather case. He approached it. ‘I will start by checking Mr Colchester’s jewellery.’

‘We’ll leave you to it,’ said Jimmy, turning away, but Mr Braintree had flung back the lid and let out a horrified gasp. Jimmy swung back. ‘What’s up?’

‘All the jewellery has gone,’ cried Mr Braintree. ‘I checked the inventory two months ago and it was all here.’ He waved the inventory in the air in his distress.

‘Give me a rough idea of what’s missing,’ ordered Jimmy.

‘A necklace of rubies and diamonds said to have
belonged to the Empress Josephine, a diamond tiara and necklace, rings, bracelets, all precious, all worth millions. And at least four Fabergé eggs.’

‘There must be another key to this room,’ said Hamish. ‘Did Mrs Colchester say she had another key?’

‘No, never!’ he gasped. ‘She was quite clear on that point. When she lodged the key with us, she said it was the only one.’

‘Where did she live before coming up here?’ Jimmy asked Ralph.

‘In London until just before Christmas. She lived in a big house in Eaton Square. She was originally from the Hebrides and she said she missed Scotland.’

‘I’ll need to get on to the Yard,’ said Jimmy. ‘Do you know the name of her bank in London?’

‘Yes, it is the Grosvenor Merchant Bank. Her money and shares and so on are still there. She put only a small amount with us along with the key to the strong room.’

‘Who drew up the previous will?’ asked Jimmy.

‘We did,’ said the lawyer. ‘She said it was her first will. In it, she left everything to her daughter.’

‘I want that will contested,’ said Fern furiously. ‘Mary Leinster got to her some way.’

‘I don’t see that Mary Leinster can gain personally from the money,’ said Hamish. ‘It will go to the trust, is that not the case, Mr Braintree?’

‘Yes, that is so.’

‘We’ll leave you to the inventory,’ said Jimmy. ‘Mr and Mrs Palfour, if you don’t mind, I wish to take statements from both of you.’

He turned to Hamish. ‘I like that idea of a test site. See what you can find.’

Hamish felt quite sulky as he drove off with Dick. ‘I would have liked to stay for those interviews,’ he complained at last. ‘I don’t like being sidelined.’

‘Well, that’s what you get for being the village bobby,’ said Dick cheerfully. ‘Where do you think of looking first?’

‘Perhaps that old quarry outside Craskie. They’d want something with a bit o’ height.’

‘They?’

‘I’m sure that more than one person is involved.’

‘What about Mary Leinster and her brothers?’

‘Why them?’ demanded Hamish sharply.

‘Well, her millions go to Mary.’

‘Not to Mary. To the trust.’

‘Books can be fiddled.’

‘Don’t be daft, man. Jimmy and his detectives will have thought o’ that one. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’

They searched the quarry, but there weren’t any signs of sinister activity. Hamish sighed. ‘There’s another one, off the Drim Road.’

‘I’m hungry,’ complained Dick.

‘You’re always hungry,’ snapped Hamish. Dick had put him in a bad mood by talking about Mary. Was he letting his feelings for her cloud his brain? Well, he would need to go on as usual, suspecting everyone. It was another rare
sunny summer day, with the air dry enough to keep the horrible biting Scottish midges at bay. The mountains had that comforting blue look about them. It was only when rain was about to arrive that every detail stood out sharply as if on a steel engraving.

They reached the quarry outside Drim. Hamish let Sonsie and Lugs out and then filled up their feeding bowls and water bowls.

Dick muttered something under his breath about Hamish caring more for his pets than one hungry
policeman
. Hamish had parked on the lip of the quarry. He began to make his way carefully down the side with Dick stumbling and cursing after him. The roads that trucks had once used to enter the quarry were now made impassable with a thick carpet of brambles and gorse.

‘I’ve got something,’ called Hamish from the floor of the quarry. Dick came panting up to join him. ‘See, there’s a sort of cradle here that might have held a rocket, and there are scorch marks on the ground. I’d better phone Jimmy and get forensics on to this.’

‘Now can we eat?’ asked Dick plaintively.

‘Aye, we’ll go into Drim. I want to ask Jock Kennedy who runs the local shop whether any strangers have been seen around.’

Jock said that one of the locals, Andy Colluch, had said he thought someone was blasting in the old quarry a week ago but when Andy went there the next day he couldn’t see anything. They got directions to Andy Colluch’s croft. Dick dug his heels in and demanded food first. Ailsa, Jock’s wife, took pity on him and said they sold hot snacks and she could let them have a couple of mutton pies.

Hamish waited impatiently until Dick had gulped down the last of his pie and said sharply, ‘Let’s go.’

Dick wondered what had happened to the usually
laid-back
Hamish. But Hamish was feeling driven. It was the
sheer malice and wickedness of the death of Mrs Colchester that was getting to him. She could have been strangled, poisoned, or hit on the head. Why go to this elaborate means of murder?

Andy Colluch, a wizened old crofter, volunteered the information that as he was driving back from Strathbane a week ago, he thought he saw lights over by the old quarry and heard an explosion. He had gone up the following day to check whether someone was opening up the old quarry but had not seen anything.

Hamish phoned Jimmy with what he had found out, and Jimmy had said he would send a team over as soon as they had finished with the house. ‘We’ve found out something else,’ said Jimmy. ‘From the bits of the wreckage, it looks as if the engine of the stair lift had been tampered with and a more powerful one put in.’

‘When could all this have been done with people in the house?’ demanded Hamish, exasperated.

‘You’ll never believe this,’ said Jimmy. ‘The day before, two men with cards claiming to come from the chair lift company said they had come to give the thing an overhaul. It wasn’t a day for either of the cleaning women. The Palfours had taken the children out for a run in the car. Mrs Colchester went to her room. She came down the stairs later under her own steam, saying she was not sure whether the men had finished.’

‘Why didn’t they tell you before?’

‘Because they didn’t know,’ said Jimmy, ‘and I didn’t know until the shepherd, Gale McBride, who runs his sheep on the grass there saw the men leaving and asked them what they had been doing. Bad description. Baseball caps pulled down over the eyes, answered in grunts, drove a pickup but Gale didn’t get the registration.’

‘But it may mean someone inside the house was
working
with them,’ said Hamish.

‘How do you make that out?’

‘The superglue on the safety belt. If it had been put on earlier, it would have dried hard. Someone had to creep out of the shadows and doctor it just as she was about to make the ascent.’

‘Worse than that, we seem to have the world’s press camped out up here. The Fairy Glen is coining it.’

‘What!’

‘Aye, naturally the press want a look at the place and that Mrs Timoty is right there at the turnstile to charge them, along with all the other ghouls, and along with every teenager from miles around who hopes to be discovered by a television camera and become an instant celebrity. We’ve told Mary Leinster to close the place down for a week. We can’t work with all this circus. We’re getting auditors to go through the Glen’s trust fund to look for anything odd, and when they get their millions, believe me, the audits will go on.’

‘Are the Palfours still going to contest the will?’

‘They’ve got enough out of that strong room to set them up for life. I don’t think they’ll bother. But folks seem to have gone fairy mad. They’re saying the fairies did it.’

‘Mrs Colchester said the day afore she died that she had something to tell me,’ said Hamish. ‘Maybe someone wanted her stopped.’

‘Could be.’

‘What does Annie Williams make of the children?’

‘She says they have been traumatized.’

‘That precious pair! They didn’t give a rap for their grandmother and openly wished her dead.’

‘She feels it’s something that happened to them afore they came up here but our Annie was aye softhearted. Stay where you are until the forensic people arrive.’

Dick and Hamish sat down on flat rocks in the quarry and waited in the sunshine. Sonsie and Lugs had disappeared somewhere. Hamish told Dick the latest news.

‘Highly technical fairies,’ said Dick. ‘I didnae think folk would still believe in them.’

‘They don’t talk about it but the superstition runs deep. They’re supposed to be little men, mischievous and
resentful
. Some say that maybe one time there was a smaller race of beings driven into hiding in the rounded hills by a stronger race. They mostly wear green and live in green hollow hills. They dance by moonlight, leaving marks of circles on the surface. They often ride in invisible
procession
, and all a man can hear is the shrill ringing of their bridles. They do not, as far as I know, run around fixing up stair lifts.’

‘It all comes back to Mary Leinster,’ said Dick.

‘What does?’

‘Whichever way you look at it, she benefits. Even after all the search for the murderers has died down, people will still be pouring into that glen. I bet she’s already
putting
it about that old Mrs Colchester offended the fairies. Her husband and brothers are builders. The two wardens are builders. They could all have combined to kill the old woman.’

Hamish thought of Mary’s blue eyes and felt saddened. There was an awful logic in what Dick had just said. Then he wondered if Elspeth Grant had been sent back up to report on the latest.

When the forensic team at last arrived, Hamish whistled for his pets and he and Dick went back to Lochdubh. Dick headed straight for the deck chair in the front garden, and Hamish went into his office to go through his notes.

The phone rang. It was Jimmy again. ‘I’m taking Mary Leinster in for questioning.’

‘Why?’ asked Hamish with a sinking heart.

‘The day before Mrs Colchester met her death, she told a Mrs Vance who works in the environmental department that she, Mary, had just had an attack of the second sight
and had seen Mrs Colchester in the sky, flying up against the moon.’

‘If the woman was guilty, she’d hardly want to advertise a murder,’ said Hamish.

‘Some of thae psychos can be very cunning. Anyway, I’m taking her in. Annie’s going to call on you to talk about the children.’

Hamish hung up and sat frowning.

Second sight, or Dlama Shealladh as it was called in the Gaelic, was always impossible to prove. There was a
superstition
that if you talked about any foresight, then you would lose the ability to see things in the future. And the people who did talk, about foreseeing the death of
someone
for example, always talked about it
after
the event. He heard Dick’s voice from the garden. ‘Go round to the side door, Annie.’

He went through to the kitchen to meet her. ‘I gather you’ve come to talk to me about the children,’ he said.

‘Yes, they’ve been bothering me. They’re not normal.’

‘Come in. Sit down. Do you want tea or coffee or
something
stronger?’

‘I could murder a whisky.’

Hamish took a bottle down from the cupboard and poured her a measure.

‘So, sit down, lass, and tell me what’s troubling you.’

‘I was worried about them before the murder,’ sighed Annie, taking off her cap and leaving it on a chair beside her. ‘My, but it’s hot. There’s something wrong there. It’s as if something really nasty happened to them. They’re closed in. They rely on each other because they dislike and distrust the whole human race. I wanted them to see a shrink but their parents turned that down flat. After they leave, there’s not much I can do. Maybe there was abuse of some sort at that school they go to.’

‘They seemed anxious enough to get back to it, up to the point of wishing Granny dead,’ Hamish pointed out.

‘Maybe you could have a try, Hamish.’

‘I won’t be allowed to speak to them without the parents around.’

‘They didn’t bother about me because they thought I was just playing with them to keep their spirits up.’

‘You mean try the same thing?’

‘The parents have gone off to Strathbane to the lawyer’s today. Mrs Dunglass and Mrs McColl, the cleaners, have said they’d keep an eye on them.’

‘Let’s go, then,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

He left Dick asleep in his chair in the garden and set off for Braikie with Annie following in her car. The weather was still fine but there was a dampness in the air. He glanced up at the sky. Mare’s tails were spreading their long fingers in from the west, harbingers of a change in the weather. There was not a ripple to disturb the mirror surface of Lochdubh. People were standing in groups talking. It was all so peaceful. He had a sudden longing to turn round, go back and join Dick in the garden, and forget about the whole thing.

But instead, he accelerated out of Lochdubh and up over the moors and hills to Braikie.

Two policemen on duty opened the gates to the hunting lodge for them as they eased past the assembled members of the press. Not quite so many, he thought. The rest must be down at Strathbane.

Bertha Dunglass answered the door to them and said the children were in the garden.

They walked round the side of the building to the back. Olivia and Charles were sitting side by side, staring into space.

Hamish went over with Annie and sat on the grass next to them. There was a long silence. Then Hamish decided to take a gamble. ‘Tell me,’ he said softly, ‘why were you so anxious to go back to a school where you were both so badly treated?’

They looked at him, shocked expressions on their faces. ‘How did you find out?’ asked Charles in a choked voice.

‘Well, Annie here, she thinks something bad happened to you afore you came up here and it has nothing to do with the murder. What is the name of your school?’

‘Billhead Hall, in Barnet,’ said Olivia, her voice barely above a whisper.

‘And it’s sort of progressive, which means not much
discipline
. Now, in my experience,’ said Hamish in his soft lilting Highland voice, ‘that can lead to lack of supervision, and that leads to bullying and all kinds of nastiness. Now, Olivia, answer me and remember I’ll believe every word you say. Were you raped?’

‘Charles stopped it in time,’ she said, her face whiter than ever.

‘Go on.’

‘It’s the art teacher, Mr Smithers. He was always asking me to wait after class and stroking my hair. I got nervous. Charles hid in a cupboard in the art room. Smithers had me against the desk and was forcing me back, he had a hand up my skirt. Charles jumped out of the cupboard and struck him in the head with a vase. The police were called in. No one would believe us. I had a nasty medical examination. Nothing was found. Mr Smithers said he wouldn’t charge us. We were sent for sessions with the school shrink who told us that children of our age had vivid imaginations. It was like a nightmare. Even our own parents didn’t believe us.’

‘When did all this take place?’ asked Hamish.

‘Near the end of last term.’

‘So why were you so reluctant to go to a comprehensive? You’d have been away from that awful school.’

Charles said in a flat voice, ‘We were going back to kill him.’

‘I didn’t hear that,’ said Hamish quickly. ‘If that gets out, they’ll start thinking you murdered Granny. Why didn’t your parents listen to you?’

‘Mum’s snobbish,’ said Olivia. ‘A lot of titled people send their kids there. They board them and then forget about them.’

‘What is Smithers’s first name?’

‘Jeffrey.’

‘With a
J
?’