The Stalking Party Page 25

  secured it with a dab of glue. At last he sighed, removed his half-moons, and turned.

  ‘I didn’t want to see what was staring me in the face,’ he growled. ‘You hear of parents shopping their delinquent children to the police when they find they can’t cope any more, but it’s not something I could bring myself to do. Besides,’ he added bitterly, ‘I thought I could cope. If it had been only Beverley, I’d have kept my mouth shut and dealt with my conscience alone, but when we found those children –’ he paused, closed his eyes momentarily, and went on harshly – ‘I thought: that’s it. This can’t go on.’

  About time too, thought Robb. Though his expression did not change, Sir Archie caught the thought and said irritably, ‘Sit down, man. Don’t hover over me like a damned hen-harrier. Blood’s thicker than water, as you know very well.’

  Robb took a chair as the grumbling voice went on, ‘I blame myself, of course. I should have known better than to send a boy of eighteen up here to work on his own, out of season; but I was angry with him for messing up his exams though sheer bloody idleness, and I thought it might concentrate his mind to see how the other half lives. Wrong! Instead of getting down to his books, what must he do but fall head over ears for Ian McNeil’s wife, Eliza. Ian was in Ulster. Eliza was lonely and bored. Nicky was bored and lonely... Work it out for yourself.’

  A simple equation. Robb said, ‘So...?’

  ‘Old Catriona McNichol’s as sharp as a knife. She saw what the form was and made no bones about letting me know, but like a fool I told her not to worry. It would blow over.’

  ‘Do you think your son and Mrs McNeil were lovers?’

  Sir Archie shrugged. ‘That’s more Ashy’s territory than mine. She’s always full of theories. In my view, Eliza was just amusing herself while Ian was away. I doubt if Nicky meant much to her, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t above making use of him – or of his money. She still owned half that catering business she ran with that bloody woman.’

  ‘Gentlemen’s Relish?’

  ‘That’s right. It was in low water at the time, but Eliza got Nicky to bail it out, so they could sell it as a going concern. He never had any sense about money.’

  ‘So that was how he met Beverley Tanner?’

  ‘Initially, yes. But of course once she had her hooks well in, poor Nicky was sunk. Good causes, bad causes, downright frauds – whatever she wanted money for, he was expected to ante up. Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.’

  Abruptly he rose and went to open a cupboard. ‘Hark at that wind! Time for us summer raiders to be going home. Come on, man, have a dram and don’t give me any bullshit about being on duty.’

  A glass in the hand would make it no more difficult to listen, and probably easier for Hanbury to talk, thought Robb, accepting the heavy tumbler.

  ‘So – where were we? Beverley,’ said Sir Archie with revulsion. ‘She was soaking Nicky for all she was worth. I could see that the moment I set eyes on her. But Gwennie and I completely misread the situation. It never occurred to us that he hated her more than we did. She’d trapped him into marrying her –’

  ‘You knew that, sir?’

  ‘Ashy told me – but only after they’d pulled Beverley from the river. No: during the week she spent here, we were at our wits’ end trying to keep Nicky in the family fold without appearing to freeze her out. Ironic, really, because according to Ashy he was breaking his brains trying to work out how to get rid of her.’

  ‘Why did he bring her here in the first place?’

  Sir Archie said sombrely, ‘I suppose he reckoned that it’s easier to set up an accident in a wild, empty place like this than it would be in SW1. He’d be on his own patch. He’s been coming here every summer since he was eight years old, and he knew the forest like the back of his hand.’

  ‘And she came because she thought she could make money out of it?’

  ‘She thought he’d bankroll her plans to turn the whole peninsula into a theme park,’ said Sir Archie with bitter scorn. ‘Of course, Nicky knew that was a complete non-starter. Torquil Strathtorran may be struggling, but he’d never sell the land.’

  ‘Yet Lady Strathtorran was interested, I understand?’

  ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Poor girl!’ he added unexpectedly. ‘I don’t suppose she had much say in the matter, but if she did encourage Beverley to think she was in with a chance of buying Strathtorran, she played straight into Nicky’s hands.’

  ‘So – let me get this straight – in the event of your death, Nicholas would have inherited Glen Buie? What about Mrs Forrester’s share?’

  ‘I expect he thought she’d be glad enough to let him buy her out, or –’ a spasm crossed Sir Archie’s face – ‘maybe today’s accident didn’t happen on the spur of the moment. We’ll never know. Maya has only a life interest in Glen Buie, you see. On her death Alec’s property reverts to his mother, my wife –’

  ‘So Nicholas could expect to inherit that as well?’

  Sir Archie nodded, and said wearily, ‘Beverley must have thought she’d got Glen Buie in the bag, but she still needed Strathtorran. As I see it, Nicky encouraged her to go and stay with them, and check in to report to him what she was doing each day. He must have set up that RV at the Prince’s Rock on Tuesday, and shot her when she walked back to see why he wasn’t waiting there. Of course, he was gambling that we’d be so relieved to be rid of her that we wouldn’t give a damn where she’d gone or what she was up to.’

  He brought his fist down on his knee in a gesture of exasperation. ‘And that’s precisely what would have happened if Ashy and Everard – blast them – hadn’t fouled up his plans.’

  He took a swig from his tumbler and leaned forward. ‘But when Everard fished her out of the river, I did begin to wonder...’ His voice died away with the sentence incomplete.

  ‘Wonder what, sir?’prompted Robb.

  ‘Who felt threatened enough to bump her off. As we’ve all been telling you, she had made herself thoroughly disliked in the short time she’d been here, but your pathologist chap insisted she’d been killed last Tuesday, and that put most of this party’s marksmen in the clear.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Gwennie and Priscilla were together all day, and Marjorie joined them in the afternoon. I could vouch for Johnny, Sandy, and Ashy. Everard and Fergus cancelled one another out, so who did that leave? Answer: Nicky. And where was he? Allegedly giving young Benjamin a lift into Tounie.’

  ‘You mean he didn’t take him there?’

  ‘I mean he took him there, but he didn’t bring him back.’

  ‘You think Benjamin drove himself back? A boy of what – fourteen? Fifteen? Surely the ferrymen would have noticed?’

  ‘Not if he drove back round the end of the sea-loch,’ said Sir Archie. ‘It’s all of thirty miles as opposed to three from the ferry terminal, but as I said, Ben was always mad about cars. The longer the drive the better, from his point of view.’

  Robb nodded slowly. ‘So what you’re suggesting is that he and Nicky went across together on the car-ferry, but returned separately?’

  ‘I can’t prove it,’ said Sir Archie heavily, ‘but that’s how it looks to me. Why would Nicky want to kick his heels in Tounie all afternoon? No: I guess he gave Benjamin the car-keys, and came back himself on the foot-ferry, which docks just behind the fish-farm.’

  Carrying his rifle concealed in his golfing bag, thought Robb. Yes, it was feasible. Sheds at the fish farm were unlikely to be locked. He probably knew that Ian McNeil kept a mountain bike behind the office. Then two miles up the road to the forestry track, leave the bike at the junction with the Prince’s Path, and Nicky could have been lying in wait on the shoulder of Ben Shallachan when Beverley popped up like a startled rabbit at the sound of Everard’s shot.

  He’d have to get Winter to check it out, but it felt right to him.

  ‘And Elspeth?’ he prompted, tying up loose ends. ‘She was at the concert, too. I know she w
as late back that night.’

  ‘She was indeed. According to Angus Buchan’s wife, watching from her sick-bed, after the sports car skidded, a red-haired lassie jumped out. She said they stood in the road, arguing, then the young lad drove off and left her to walk. Chivalry!’

  ‘And the car is a two-seater.’ Robb nodded. That clinched it for him. While the wind soughed in the chimney and the labrador whined and paddled in her sleep, he visualised Nicky shouldering his rifle and climbing the Prince’s Path, each long stride diminishing the distance between him and his quarry. To a marksman accustomed to stalk wild and wary deer, an unsuspecting human – a townie, at that – was a laughably easy target. How long had he followed her? How many times had he taken aim then decided to wait for an even better chance?

  Everard Cooper had had four misses that day before shooting his Royal, and Nicky could have used any one of those shots to camouflage the sound of his own. Ashy had discovered the body still warm, still wearing an expression of outraged surprise. Had Beverley recognised her killer?

  Unprofitable speculation: no hard evidence, nothing to convince a jury, and now with the murderer himself in the Tounie mortuary, no need to make a case against him. What did it matter that he, Robb, was privately certain that Nicky had died by his father’s hand? Sergeant Winter was a natural bureaucrat who would feel duty bound to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, but as a pragmatist Robb knew that in police work more than many other areas of life it sometimes made better sense to play the Advantage Rule.

  Now that he had completed the jigsaw to his own satisfaction, he felt inclined to let matters rest.

  Sir Archie took out his pipe, knocked it against the grate, then returned it to his pocket. With his tweezers he picked up a tiny barred hackle, measured it against the shank of the salmon-fly under construction in the vice, and delicately bound in the quill with thread, expertly using hands and teeth to secure the ends before finishing off with a blob of varnish.

  ‘There!’ He removed it from the vice, blew on the varnish, examined the fly minutely through his half-moons, and held it out for Robb’s inspection. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m no judge, but it looks good enough to kill a few fish, sir.’

  ‘Keep it.’ A moment’s pause, then he went on evenly, ‘I expect you know the medic’s told me to stop stalking? I’ve asked young McNeil to take charge here until I can sort out something permanent. Turn the poacher into gamekeeper, eh? It’s what I meant to do after my stepson Alec died, but my wife insisted it would be wrong to bypass Nicky. I wish I hadn’t let myself be persuaded.’

  ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, sir,’ said Robb bracingly; but if he hoped to forestall further confidences, he was disappointed.

  ‘Nothing to do with hindsight, Inspector. I’ve known for a long time now that my son would never come up to scratch. Animals have more sense than we do. If there’s a wrong ’un in the litter, out it goes and there’s an end to it. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but it’s more merciful than human justice, when all’s said and done.’

  Why must these people pretend they don’t give a damn? thought Robb, studying the rigidly-controlled features. ‘Boys mustn’t cry,’ his parents probably said to little Archibald as they abandoned him at prep school. Part of his trouble might be that he still believed them.

  ‘Was Nicholas a wrong ’un?’

  The wide mouth tightened, as if the teeth behind were clenched, but Sir Archie’s tone was almost casual as he replied, ‘My wife and I – both my wives and I – tried to treat him like any other child, but yes. He was never really right. People sensed it, made excuses for him, tempered the wind, you know? “Poor Nicky,” they would say. They could tell there was something wrong. Something... missing.’

  With an air of finality he rose and poked the sullen fire, showering the labrador with grey ash. ‘Well, old lady, if you must lie there... How about a refill, Robb? A parting glass?’

  Recognising the dismissal, Robb made his excuses and left, muttering about paperwork, though Winter and Peg would deal with most of that. There was no need to fill them in on the past half-hour. In days gone by his superiors had done the same to him, and now it was his turn to chest his cards if he pleased. Winter could like it or lump it.

  Squeezing behind the Land Rover’s wheel, he drove under Catriona McNichol’s curtained window, feeling the wind rock the vehicle as he turned along the track bordering the sea-loch, past the Glen Buie boat-house, and on to the headland. As he switched off the engine and doused the lights, the sky still looked pale, with a high, hazy moon. Ragged black clouds were flying south-east to merge with the dark bulk of hills behind the lighted windows of the Lodge.

  Forty minutes passed. An hour, and Robb got out, shivering, reaching into the back for his Barbour. Presently he began to walk back the way he had come, treading softly.

  As he neared the boat-house, a deep voice said, ‘Buck up, old lady. Come on, if you’re coming,’ and he heard the scrabble of claws on wood. A moment later he made out the dark outline of a boat gliding backwards out of the building’s shadow, bobbing as it met choppy water beyond the slipway. Nose to wind, tail outstretched, the silhouette of a dog in the bows formed a figurehead. In the stern, a bulky figure bent over the outboard.

  I ought to stop him, thought Robb, but he did not move.

  Twice the engine choked and died; then it caught, and settled into a steady putter. The boat swung round and headed down the path of the moon, black against shining pewter, steadily diminishing. As it reached open water, the dog left the bows and moved to sit on the stern thwart beside her master.

  Was it to this craggy headland vantage-point that the shawled, barefoot women and ragged bearded men would creep

  to watch the Viking longships set sail into the wind-whipped autumn waves? Robb strained his eyes into the salt-laden gloom until he could no longer make out that moving black dot. Almost unconsciously he raised a hand in salute. The last of the summer raiders was going to his long home.

  Buttoning his collar and digging icy fingers deep in his pockets, he turned away from the sea and trudged back to the car.

  THE END

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