“Michelle,” Duncan warned, too late.
I said, acting driven to the brink, “Then we sell up.”
Outrage. Horror. The lackey almost dropped the coffeepot. Duncan almost swallowed his pipe. Michelle gave a Gallic squeal of turmoil-powered indignation. Shona paled.
Even Elaine’s smile wilted somewhat, a case of needle reversed. Robert would have inverted me in the nearest souffle.
“At an auction. Here, in Tachnadray.” It was my turn to smile now. “We sell every damned thing. Even,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “even some things we haven’t got.”
Well, what works for Sidoli’s traveling fairground can work for Tachnadray’s immobile gentility, right? Elaine looked and said nothing. The rest tried to argue me into the ground. They hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I’d said, so I just noshed, nodded, muttered “You’ve got a point there” sort of responses, and started working out the scale of the operation. Barefaced robbery, lies, and immoral usury are the tools of the work world’s greatest auction firms. They’d be just as useful in Tachnadray.
Because of Elaine’s telepathic swiftness in mind guessing, I carefully didn’t think of my other scam, which was to find this oh-so unimportant cottage and raid the damned thing.
Theft, I often say to myself, is often in a good cause. It’s especially beneficial when it happens to somebody else. Oh, I don’t mean the great Woburn Abbey silver haul, though even that netted mind-bending reward money when those two workers found the cache in that Bedfordshire water-pumping station. Somebody always does well out of it, even when theft goes wrong. One problem is Finance Law, the great rip-off of modern times. Those lucky enough to be in on it—police, lawyers, estate agents—are of course all for it and want us, the oppressed majority, to join in their hearty approval.
We don’t. Reason? Because the Law costs us a fortune. All we can do is try to exist in spite of it.
That evening, aware now of the strong differences of opinion around the table, we separated with Elaine saying she’d “take advice” and that we’d have a conference about it all in a day or so. Money was obviously Tachnadray’s old battleground where Shona and Michelle fought daily. Very serious stuff. Solvency’s a perennial laugh, though a rather moaning sort of laugh, at Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. But I’ve always managed by having friends I can rely on, borrow from, or otherwise sponge off, and Tachnadray only had this gaggle of clan innocents.
Up in my converted garret I easily worked out the solution, how to hold an important auction sale of the many valuable antiques we hadn’t got. The idea wasn’t new, but the actual sin would have to be. In immorality, freshness is always important, like in fruit. I shelved it, and settled down to examine the Ordnance Survey map I’d brought. This cottage Hector had mentioned was niggling.
Scattered thinly among the colors and contours of the uplands round Tachnadray were black rectangles that indicated buildings. The mansion was clearly marked. I’d work outwards, and start with the cottage on the valley road. I’d noticed it standing maybe a mile beyond the end of the drive.
Which is how I wasted a couple of hours that night, stumbling along the driveway in virtual pitch-darkness and trudging the Dubneath track to find a miniature collapsed ruin. Some giant bird—at least, I hope it was only a bird —swished past my head and frightened me to death as I felt the fallen stones of the old crofter’s cottage. Maybe the gatehouse, a retainer’s place from the estate’s grander days? Nothing there, anyway.
The bird mooed and swished me again, so I cleared off. One bare porch light was always left burning, on Elaine’s instruction, so returning was less problematic. I just followed that lovely civilized glimmer down below, and made it safely.
A cross mark on the map to show which building I’d investigated—leaving about a dozen isolated buildings within about a five-mile radius of Tachnadray—and I was ready for bed. Nobody had followed me, I thought. I was quite confident.
Some people have a politician’s mind. They’re always highly dangerous because politicians, remember, have a vested interest in doom. Robert was like that. I mean, just because I was up early next morning and strolling a couple of miles across the uplands he decided to follow, obviously longing for me to turn out to be a traitor. Me! I ask you.
There was a light drizzle on a long breeze. It was only when I turned to shake the water off my mac hood that I saw the suspicious swine. He was perhaps a mile off, but covering the ground at a hell of a lick, his enormous hairy redhead topped by a bonnet and nodding like a horse does at each pace.
He saw my pause and stopped. Casually I went on, giving a glance back down the hillside. He started up after me again. I paused. He halted. I moved, and he came on.
No use continuing in these circumstances, so I made a curve along the hill’s contour and fetched up on the Dubneath track about a mile from where I’d started. Robert, by then higher up the hill, realized my intention and stopped to watch me without any attempt at concealment. He simply held the skyline looking down. I gave the hearty wave of the dedicated dawn-rambler, and cheerily whistled my way back to the big house for breakfast.
The building I’d wanted to inspect was over the hill’s shoulder, about two miles off.
Robert was proving a nuisance, especially as it was his terrain, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that if I found that cottage I’d find Joseph. Predecessors are always a nuisance in any job. Predecessors who prove elusive and taboo are even more disturbing.
“Och, the poor wee thing,” Mrs. Buchan said, noisily brewing up. She was the serf-factotum, red-faced, plump, and breathless. I watched fascinated amid the din. All kitchens look like pandemonium to me, but Tachnadray’s was special. It was a vast long hall, sort of Somersetshire-ninepin-bowling-alley-shaped but with huge iron ranges along one side. Mrs. Buchan rushed everywhere. I’d asked about Elaine.
“Can’t the doctors do anything?”
“Don’t ye think they’ve tried, you daft man?” Mrs. Buchan sang, trotting her large mass from table to oven with raw bread. “It was that horse. A stupid great lummock. I’m against horses, always was. But do people listen?”
“Why aren’t you a McGunn, Buchan?”
The far door opened and Robert entered. He sat without a word. With me at one end of the long table and the red-bearded giant glowering at the other, we were a gift for a passing jokester.
“Morning, Robert. Breakfast presently.” She sprinted to the copper porridge pan, panting, “I am. Before Buchan
