Frances laughed as she watched him put away his plateful of cod and chips without signs of strain. ‘It’s the famous Scottish air. Sharpens the appetite.’
He took a long swallow from his second lunch time pint of Guinness. ‘Did you finish the book?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then you can tell me. I want some details about the Earl of Bothwell.’
‘All right.’ She sat expectant, her schoolmistress mind confident of its recently acquired knowledge.
‘Well, we know Bothwell killed Darnley by blowing him up at Holyrood. What I want to-’
‘We don’t know any such thing. Holyrood’s still standing. The house where Darnley was staying, the one that was blown up, was in the Kirk o’Field. And anyway, Darnley wasn’t blown up; he was strangled.’
‘Really.’ Charles took it in slowly. ‘Then what about the murder of David Rizzio? Bothwell didn’t do it on his own, I know. Who was with him on the-’
‘Bothwell wasn’t involved in the murder of David Rizzio. Really, Charles, I thought you had a university education.’
‘A long time ago. And I read English.’
‘All the same. My fourth formers could do better. Rizzio was savagely murdered by Lord Darnley, Patrick Lord Ruthven (who rose from his sick bed), Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, George Douglas, um…’ Her new store-house of information ran out.
‘Really?’ said Charles, even more slowly. ‘Really.’ Martin had read History at Derby. If he were in the grip of psychopathic identification with an historical character, surely he would at least get the facts of his obsession correct. Charles began to regret the glibness with which he had assumed that Willy’s death and the bomb were automatically connected.
‘Hello. Everything all right?’ Mr Parker, who owned the hotel and was owned by Mrs Parker, appeared at their table with the glass of whisky that was a permanent extension of his hand.
Charles and Frances smiled. ‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, tapping a stomach that surely could not take many more of these enormous meals without becoming gross. ‘Excellent.’
‘Good, good.’
‘Can I top that up for you, Mr Parker?’
‘Well… if you’re having one.’
‘Why not? I’ll have a malt.’
‘Mrs Paris?’
‘No, I’ll-’
‘Go on.’
‘All right.’
It started to rain again heavily. Long clean streaks of water dashed against the window panes. It was cosy over the whisky.
Charles proposed a toast. ‘To Stella Galpin-Lord, without whom we wouldn’t be here.’
‘Stella Galpin-Lord,’ said Mr Parker, and chuckled. ‘Yes, Stella Galpin-Lord.’
‘You know her well?’
‘She’s been here four or five times. Stella the Snatcher we nickname her.’
‘Snatcher?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps she’s a friend of…’
‘No,’ said Charles in a mischievous way to encourage indiscretion.
‘Well, we call her the Snatcher, short for cradle-snatcher. Let’s say that when she comes here it tends to be with a young man.’
‘The same young man?’
‘No. That’s the amusing thing. Always books as Mr and Mrs Galpin-Lord, but, dear oh dear, she must think we’re daft or something. I mean, I can’t believe they’re all called Galpin-Lord.’
‘It is a fairly unusual name.
Mr Parker chuckled. ‘It’s not our business to pry. I mean, I don’t care about people’s morals and that, but I must confess Mrs Parker and I do have a bit of a giggle about the Mr and Mrs Galpin-Lords.’ He realised that this sounded like a lapse of professional etiquette. ‘Not of course that we make a habit of laughing at our guests.’
‘No, of course not,’ Charles reassured smoothly. ‘But you say it’s always younger men?’
‘Yes, actors all of them, I think. Mutton with a taste for lamb, eh? Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘Hmm. And thanks to her latest actor getting a job, here we are.’
‘Yes.’
‘All the more reason to toast her in gratitude. Stella Galpin-Lord.’
Mr Pilch edged over from the table where Mrs Pilch and the little Pilches were finishing their apricot crumble. ‘Oh, er, Mr Paris. Tam the gamekeeper’s going to take me up the burn to see if we can bag a salmon. With the right sort of fly, of course.’ He winked roguishly at this. ‘I wondered if you fancied coming…?’
But Charles felt rather full of alcohol for a fishing trip. And besides, he wanted to start writing things down on bits of paper. ‘No thanks. I think I’ll have a rest this afternoon.’
‘Perhaps there’ll be another chance.’ Mr Pilch edged away.
‘Sure to be, Mr Paris,’ whispered Mr Parker confidentially. ‘I’ll ask Tam to take you another day. See what you can get. Actually, when our Mrs Galpin-Lord was here last summer, she went off with Tam and they got a fifteen- pounder. Not bad.’
‘And did the current Mr Galpin-Lord go with them?’
‘Oh no.’ Mr Parker laughed wickedly. ‘I daresay he was sleeping it off. Eh?’
The rest of the afternoon seemed to lead automatically to making love, which, except for the Clachenmore Hotel’s snagging brushed nylon sheets, was very nice. ‘You know, murmured Frances sleepily, ‘we do go very well together.’
He gave a distracted grunt of agreement.
‘Do you think we could ever try again?’
Another grunt, while not completely ruling out the idea, was not quite affirmative.
‘Otherwise we really ought to get divorced or something. Our position’s so vague.’ But she did not really sound too worried, just sleepy.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he lied. He did not want to think about the circle of going back to Frances again and things being O.K. for a bit and then getting niggly and then him being unfaithful again and her being forgiving again and and and… He must think about it at some stage, but right now there were more important things on his mind.
The lunch time alcohol had sharpened rather than blunted his perception and he was thinking with extraordinary clarity. The whole edifice of logic he had created had been reduced to rubble and a new structure had to be put up, using the same bricks, and some others which had previously been discarded as unsuitable.
Thinking of the two crimes as separate made a new approach possible. Blurred and apparently irrelevant facts came into sharp focus. Red herrings changed their hue and turned into lively silver fish that had to be caught.
It came back again to what Willy was doing over the few days before he died. The melodrama with Anna and subsequent events had pushed that line of enquiry out of his mind, but now it became all-important and the unexplained details that he had discovered were once more significant pieces in his jigsaw.
He slipped quietly out of the brushed nylon sheets without disturbing the sleeping Frances, then dressed and padded downstairs to the telephone in the hotel lobby.
First he got on to directory enquiries. Then he took a deep breath, picked up the phone again and dialled the operator. London could not be dialled direct, which made his forthcoming imposture more risky, but he could not think of another way. By the time he got through, the Glachenmore operator, the London operator, Wanewright the Merchant Bankers’ receptionist and Lestor Wanewright’s secretary had all heard the assumed Glaswegian tones of Detective-Sergeant McWhirter. If it ever came to an enquiry by the real police, there was a surfeit of witnesses to condemn Charles Paris for impersonating a police officer.
Fortunately Lestor Wanewright did not show any sign of suspicion. When the Detective-Sergeant explained that, in the aftermath of the deaths in Edinburgh, he was having to check certain people’s alibis as a matter of routine, the young merchant banker readily confirmed Anna’s statement. They had been sharing his flat in the Lawnmarket from Sunday 4th August when they had arrived back from Nice until Tuesday 13th August when he’d
