The Stalking Party Page 24

  ‘It all fitted,’ said Ashy defensively. ‘But when I suggested it to Fergus, he hit the roof and said he wouldn’t have slept with Eliza McNeil if she’d been the last woman on earth. He called her a bloody cradle-snatcher who’d got more than she bargained for, and if she was pregnant it was certainly not by him.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘Oddly enough, yes; but that makes no difference because he doesn’t give a damn what I think. He’s hardly spoken to me since.’

  In his mind, Robb caught an echo of old Catriona’s verdict. ‘Breeks!’ That was the mischief Eliza McNeil indulged in when her man was away. And what had she added? ‘None too choosy who wore them, forbye.’ He had assumed she meant Eliza preferred a bit of rough, but for Fergus to call her a cradle-snatcher gave Catriona’s assessment a very different complexion. How old had Nicky been that wet, dreary winter? Studying for A-level retakes – say seventeen or eighteen? It was by no means impossible.

  Putting that thought aside for the moment, he said, ‘What makes you so sure the baby wasn’t her husband’s?’

  ‘Morag heard her tell him so,’ said Ashy simply. ‘She was in the kitchen with her ears flapping while they were yelling at each other just next door. When Eliza said she was in love with this other man, Morag assumed she meant Fergus, because she’s not only his great-aunt, but his greatest fan as well. But of course if said lover-boy was Alec, it all makes much more sense, because it was when Alec left for America that Eliza got so down in the dumps.’

  ‘You’re surely not suggesting that Alec Forrester killed her? I thought he left for America two days before she died?’

  ‘Shock, horror! Not Alec! Oh, heavens, no! But suppose,’ said Ashy quickly, ‘suppose Eliza had told Ian that she was pregnant with Alec’s baby? Suppose she’d asked for a divorce so that she could marry Alec?’

  ‘I’m not in the business of supposing,’ Robb told her curtly. ‘Now if that’s all you’ve –’

  ‘Ian could have shot Bev,’ said Ashy, ignoring the hint. ‘Don’t forget I met him coming down the path by Loch a Bealach just after I’d pulled the boat over the body. And, of course, Ian was the only person at Strathtorran who knew who Bev really was, and where she had come from.’

  Personal as well as professional experience told Robb that she would go on fabricating her fantasies and twisting facts to accommodate them until he booted her out of the study; knew, too, that this sudden excess of helpfulness was designed to cover her own misdemeanours so deep that they escaped scrutiny, a strategy dear to his own middle daughter.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said, rising to end the interview, but Ashy still lingered with her hand on the door-handle.

  ‘Duncan told me that Ian put some stags in the chiller yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, we heard about that.’

  ‘And he’s always prowling about the river.’ She shivered. ‘I wish I knew where Maya was.’

  Not half as much as I do, thought Robb.

  Chapter Twenty

  SERGEANT WINTER’S SINEWY legs set a cracking pace up the river path, with Donny on his heels and Sir Archie labouring a hundred yards behind. After the younger men had waited several times with ill-concealed impatience for him to catch up, he finally acknowledged that he would have to let them go on without him. Donny was a sensible lad. He’d keep the cop on course and bring him safe back.

  ‘Sorry. I’m holding you up too much,’ he said as he collapsed, panting, on a rock to get his wind. ‘Go on at your own pace, and I’ll meet you back at the car.’

  For a moment Winter looked as if he would object, but Donny said firmly, ‘Verra good, sir,’ and set off without a backward glance.

  Irritated and dejected by this further proof that he was cracking up, Sir Archie watched them power-walk away, and sought consolation in the right-hand pocket of his Barbour.

  ‘Damn and blast it,’ he muttered, fingers encountering unfamiliar shapes and textures. Someone else’s coat had been hung on his peg; further examination of the contents revealed lipsalve, a half-eaten bar of Kendal mint cake, and several plastic bags, unattractively greasy inside, and a small bottle of insect repellent. The long, tubular shape he had hoped was his pipe turned out to be a nine-inch section of antler, hollowed and filled with lead, the hand-made ‘priest’ for giving a salmon the coup de grace which he remembered Sandy presenting to his sister for her seventeenth birthday.

  Marjorie’s coat, then. Why the hell couldn’t she use her own peg? Mint cake was no substitute for tobacco, but he shared the half-bar with his labrador, then turned back along the river path, giving the dog permission to range ahead. Presently she left him, and vanished through the roots of an alder towards the water.

  ‘Here, girl!’ he called after a couple of minutes’ wait. He whistled, and she appeared farther along the path, carrying with careful pride a shining silver salmon balanced in her black velvet mouth.

  ‘Thank you.’ He took it from her with pats and praise and no little astonishment. A beautiful fresh-run fish, still iridescent, with a couple of sea-lice clinging, and a good six pounds in weight.

  The labrador watched, eyes laughing, ears expectantly cocked. He knew that expression well.

  ‘Hey-lorst!’ he encouraged, and she dived down the bank again. Sir Archie followed just in time to see her draw an almost identical fish from under a tree-root. Further investigation revealed a third, and his astonishment turned to outrage.

  ‘This is the outside of enough. This is just too bloody much!’ he exclaimed aloud.

  He examined the fish minutely. Above each tail-fluke, faint but discernible, was the mark of a wire. There was not much doubt in his mind whose work this was, and he couldn’t be far away. Those fish hadn’t been out of the water more than fifteen minutes. If he went quietly down to the wire bridge, there was an excellent chance of nabbing him red-handed.

  ‘Good girl. Clever girl!’ He made much of Linnhe and called her to heel. Cautiously he began to work his way through the rocks and scrubby trees that lined the riverbank, eyes alert for any clue to the poacher’s whereabouts. Getting warm, he thought, spotting a branch bent back, and his heart-rate quickened. Softlee softlee catchee monkee...

  He was still hidden in the trees some fifty yards from the wire bridge when a scream pierced through the steady roar of water. High, thin, terrified.

  Maya! he thought with sick, familiar dread. Slipping and stumbling on the rough ground, he ran as fast as he could towards the sound, with the black dog bounding ahead.

  *****

  Two steps into the swollen brown waters of the ford had been enough to convince Maya that she could not cross there alone. The formerly clear shallows in which every pebble shone distinctly had been transformed by the downpour into a gurgling torrent the colour of milky coffee, and hardly had her right foot gropingly joined her left under its heaving surface, than the borrowed rod was plucked from her grasp and whirled downstream with no hope of recovery. Indeed, her attempt to save it was nearly her undoing. For a long, horrible moment she fought to keep her balance against the relentless thrust of water, and when she managed to splash and stagger the few feet to the bank she was frightened as well as very wet. Archie had called this place ‘untamed,’ and now she saw exactly what he meant.

  That left only the wire bridge.

  With water squelching from her boots, she clambered over rocks and up the shaley bank until she reached the stout tree round which the lower wire was looped, with a hook-and-eye tension adjustment a couple of feet from the trunk. A large metal peg of the kind used to guy marquees secured the upper wires to the rock-face. They felt reassuringly taut when grasped in both hands, and without giving herself time to think what would happen if she slipped, Maya placed both feet sideways on the lower wire and forced herself to slide away from the bank, as she had seen Nicky do.

  Keep breathing, she told herself. Keep moving, don’t look down!

  Five yards, ten yards, fifteen...right foot sideways, left
up to join it, right foot out again; body bent against the wind, hand-wires braced apart for maximum stability. She was doing fine, nearing the middle, no wobbles, no vertigo...

  A tremor ran through the left hand-wire, but she ignored it, sliding her feet in carefully co-ordinated rhythm to minimise bounce, careful not to hurry. Again the wire vibrated, and this time she flicked a glance sideways – just a glimpse from the corner of an eye – and through the veil of rain she saw a man on the bank.

  Nicky! In the swamping rush of relief, she was tempted to wave, but this was the slackest, most perilous part of the crossing, demanding all her concentration. Hard though she tried not to look down, she was well aware how close the bottom wire hung over the turbulent brown torrent.

  Whoops! A gust of wind threatened her balance. For a sickening instant she swung to and fro, feeling fresh tremors in the hand-wire, while the racing, spray-capped water drew her gaze with magnetic force. Dragging her eyes away, she looked full at Nicky, and saw with a shock of disbelief that the vibration came from the hacksaw he was rasping across the wire. As in a nightmare, she saw him seize it in both hands, shaking it as the strands parted, his expression absorbed and intent.

  ‘Cut it out!’ she screamed. ‘Stop it, Nicky. What are you doing?’

  Dumb question. There was no doubt what he was doing, or that he would soon succeed. For ten, fifteen seconds she clung desperately, screaming for help; then just before the wire snapped, she launched herself in a shallow dive, aiming for the slack, scum-topped water beyond the reach of the current.

  The shock of the icy torrent nearly stopped her heart. Down she went, tumbling over and over, and when her head broke the surface at last she was forty yards below the bridge and travelling fast, with her trailing clothes so tangled about her arms that they seemed certain to drag her under.

  ‘Don’t fight it,’ rumbled her father’s deep, warm bass inside her head, just as he had after she tumbled into the river in Colorado when she was eight years old. ‘Lie on your back, arms out to the side, and pretty soon the current will wash you to the bank.’

  But this wasn’t Abner’s Creek on a blazing afternoon in June. A snow-fed Scottish spate river could chill a body into numb helplessness in just a few minutes. If she didn’t get out of the water before that, her chances of survival were slim. Nevertheless, she struggled into the classic cross position, head back and arms stretched so wide that her fingers scraped the water-slick walls of the gorge, but there was nothing she could do to arrest her progress.

  Near the bottom of the gorge the cliffs leaned so close together that an athlete could have leapt from one side to the other, and she saw with horror that Nicky was kneeling there, waiting for her to float past. He must have sprinted across the point, and positioned himself directly above the swirling black water. As in slow motion, she saw him manoeuvre a boulder the size of a case of wine to the lip of the cliff, waiting poised like a cat at a mousehole until she was right beneath him, and then, in the last second before he heaved it over the edge, she glimpsed a black dog bound from the trees and rush up to him, planting paws on his shoulders from behind as it licked at his face.

  Then the boulder was falling, falling, blotting out the light, and a tidal wave of white water swamped her.

  She must have blacked out briefly, because when she regained her senses, choking and spluttering, she was clear of the gorge and cliffs, being borne rapidly between the sedgy banks of the Falls Pool towards the foaming, rock-strewn cataract. She struggled weakly, trying to edge out of the mainstream, but her limbs were heavy and helpless against the powerful suck of the current.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she moaned weakly. ‘What’ll I do?’

  With an enormous effort, she managed to turn on her side and there, in direct answer to prayer, she saw the kammo-clad figure of Ian McNeil bounding along the river path, trying to get downstream of her. She had no time to wonder at his reappearance before he plunged waist-deep in the water, pulled out the hook of an extending gaff, and struck it hard into her trailing oilskin slicker.

  For a long, agonising moment, it was a toss-up which of them would prove the heavier. McNeil had nothing to hold on to, and the weight of water together with Maya’s momentum threatened to drag him over the falls with her.

  ‘Don’t move!’ he yelled above the water’s roar and, terrified that the slicker would rip, she lay like a log while he struggled unavailingly to pull her to safety.

  ‘Catch hold of that, man!’ Donny’s pulling-rope was thrust into Ian’s free hand; and suddenly the empty riverbank became a scene of shouting, splashing and confusion, as three strong men hauled Maya clear of the water and laid her gently on the bank.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘IT WAS AFTER I told him I’d heard Ben and Elspeth fixing up a date at the stag larder that Nicky began pressuring me to go fish with him,’ said Maya in her husky drawl. ‘I was talking to Ashy before dinner, and Nicky was filling glasses. I remember telling him I planned on fishing with Johnny, and he tried to persuade me to go with him instead.’ She paused, shaking her head. ‘You know, I was surprised – but maybe kinda flattered, too – because up till then he hadn’t had a lot to say to me. I thought he might be mad at me.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Robb.

  ‘You know Alec left me his share of Glen Buie? Well, I thought Nicky might not be happy about that.’ She smiled wanly, and laced her fingers through Ian McNeil’s as he perched behind her on the back of the sofa’s faded gold brocade. ‘I guess I was right, too.’

  Warmed through and through at last, Maya had regained her glowing colour and most of her composure, yet Robb sensed strain and kept his questions low-key.

  ‘You say he cut the wire bridge while you were crossing?’

  She swallowed convulsively and moved her head, eyes closing, still scarcely believing that shy, hesitant Nicky could have done his best to drown her. ‘I thought at first he was playing some dumb kind of joke, but when I saw it was for real, I jumped before it snapped. I mean, that wire could have whipped round me. Taken my head off.’

  McNeil’s hand tightened on hers. ‘Don’t think about it.’

  ‘I tell you, I can’t stop thinking about it. I see it over and over.’

  ‘Go on,’ rumbled Robb. ‘You’ll find it helps to talk it through.’

  ‘You sound like a shrink.’ The teasing smile was a shadow of its former self. ‘OK, so there I was in the water, and the next I saw he was rolling this big chunk of rock up to the edge of the cliff. He was planning on dropping it right on top of me.’

  ‘But instead he fell in himself? I suppose he missed his footing – ?’

  ‘Or maybe the dog caught him off-balance,’ said Maya. There was a moment’s silence, then Robb said quietly, ‘What dog?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I just got a quick sight of it running down the slope and jumping up at Nicky.’

  ‘Jumping up?’

  ‘As if it was glad to see him. You know, the way dogs do.’

  ‘Big dog? Small dog?’

  ‘Kind of chunky. Dark.’ She glanced at McNeil. ‘You didn’t see it?’

  ‘Can’t say I did.’

  Too late she caught his warning frown and breathed in sharply. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I just imagined it.’

  ‘Makes no odds,’ said McNeil easily; but of course it did. All the difference between Did he fall? and Was he pushed? The difference between accident and murder. At Glen Buie, dogs did not wander about on their own, and as the police surgeon had already pointed out, the torpedo-shaped contusion above Nicky’s left ear was hardly consistent with a fall into water.

  Pushing the matter of the dog into the mental file marked ‘Pending’, Robb took Maya through the rest of what she had overheard by the serving-hatch the previous morning, and she told him how Elspeth had blamed Ben for getting her sacked, and warned him he was in for trouble himself when Angus Buchan talked to his uncle.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Robb nodded. Time for another word with Sir Archibald, he thoug
ht.

  Thanking Maya, he left the drawing-room, and followed Gwennie’s directions down a long, dimly-lit passage lined with mounted stags’ heads to a small, square work-room adjoining the scullery where, under the glare of an Anglepoise lamp, Sir Archie sat at a carpenter’s bench equipped with a miniature vice. Thread, glue, tweezers, hooks, coloured feathers and fluff in various shades were laid out neatly to hand. In a hinged box beside him, row upon row of home-dressed salmon and trout flies were ranged by size along the underside of the lid.

  A peat fire smouldered in a small basket grate, with grey-muzzled Linnhe’s back pressed so hard against it that she looked in danger of scorching her thick black coat. Even with the shutters closed, the curtains fluttered, and a background roar of surf gave notice that winter was on its way.

  ‘That you, Robb? Come in if you’re coming and close the bloody door,’ barked Sir Archie without looking round; and if he had added And you can keep your bloody sympathy to yourself the message could hardly have been clearer.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Robb squeezed past the bench and stood by the fire.

  ‘You’re not disturbing me, for Christ’s sake! God knows how long I’ve been waiting for you to come and have the courtesy to tell me what the hell’s going on.’ The square face lifted, eyes challenging, defences in place. ‘I gather you’re packing it in? Not looking for anyone else, according to Ashy.’

  Thank you, Miss Macleod, thought Robb. ‘We’ve a few loose ends to tie up, sir, but that’s about the size of it,’ he said equably.

  ‘So it was Nicky.’ A statement, not a question.

  ‘When did you realise, sir?’

  In the silence that followed, Robb waited, watching the averted profile as Sir Archie’s blunt, capable fingers wound strands of yellow floss tightly round the shank of his fly and