Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 09 - Now May You Weep

Heather Urquhart’s effort at control as she identified the body had been visible, but again, such a reaction was not unexpected. The Frenchman, Benoit, had been solicitous in a rather formal way that Ross characterized as

“continental,” but not out of the ordinary.

Nor had forensics turned up any interesting trace evidence on Brodie’s clothing or body, or at the crime scene.

The surprise of the day for Ross had come earlier, when he had stopped briefly in Grantown to interview Donald Brodie’s solicitor. Of course, he had seen strange bequests in the course of his career, but that hadn’t prepared him for the fact that Brodie had left his shares in the distillery to Hazel Cavendish, who claimed not to have seen him in a dozen years. And as the distillery owned Benvulin House, the solicitor had explained, that meant that the shares made up most of Brodie’s estate. How, Ross wondered, was Mrs.

Cavendish going to explain this rather awkward acquisi-tion to her husband?

As they entered the temporary incident room at

Aviemore station, Ross saw there were half a dozen officers still working, organizing the results of the various inquiries. The room smelled stale and had begun to acquire its quota of empty soft drink cans and crisp pack-ets—an incongruous complement to the crime scene photos pinned on the board.

The officer in charge greeted him with a stack of messages. The top three were requests from Inspector James to return her call. Well, he thought, irritated, he would deal with her in his own time. What could she want with him, now that her friend had been released, except to tell him how to run his investigation?

Ross sat down at the desk allotted to him, removing someone’s half-drunk cup of tea and wiping with his handkerchief at the damp ring it had left.

Munro had apparently been following his own train of thought. “What if Heather Urquhart thought Brodie had left her his shares?” he asked as he sat opposite.

“Then I’d say she had a verra nasty shock when she heard from Mr. Glover this afternoon. I suppose Brodie could have led her to think she would benefit, as a way of increasing her loyalty and commitment to the distillery.”

“The same would be true of the Frenchman,” mused Munro. “If he thought Urquhart would sell out to his company if she gained control.”

“Aye. But,” Ross said, tapping the pile of statements on his desk, “according to these, both Urquhart and Benoit were still in their rooms when the police arrived. How could either of them have taken the gun, got out of the house, killed Brodie, and got back in without being seen by either of the Inneses?”

Rubbing at the five-o’clock stubble appearing on his chin, Munro said, “I’m beginning tae think it’s like that old Agatha Christie film, where they were all in it together.”

Ross sighed. “Such things dinna happen in real life, man, thank heavens. Imagine trying to put such a case before the Procurator Fiscal.”

“Then I’d put my money on young Alison Grant,” offered Munro. “She’s a tough wee baggage, and she had a good motive, if ye ask me. I’d the impression she saw Brodie as her Prince Charming, and then he let her down.”

“We’ve nothing linking her to the scene, and I think it’s highly unlikely she’d have nipped into the Inneses’ house and nicked their shotgun.”

“We don’t know for certain that it was John Innes’s gun,” said Munro, playing devil’s advocate.

“Then where did she get a gun? A shotgun is not the sort of thing an ordinary shopgirl keeps lying about, especially with a child in the house.”

“From a friend?” Munro suggested. “There’s the bloke who told her about Brodie and the other woman, Callum MacGillivray.” Munro stood and sifted through the pile of reports on Ross’s desk. “Here it is. MacGillivray has a license for a twelve-gauge—what’s to say he didn’t keep another unlicensed gun, like John Innes?”

“And she says, ‘Oh, please, can I borrow your shotgun? I need to kill somebody’?” said Ross, with practiced sarcasm.

Munro was undaunted. “Maybe they were in it together. MacGillivray says, according to this”—he waved the paper—“that he drove to Ballindalloch yesterday morning, but he didn’t arrive there until well after Brodie was killed.”

“That’s verra neat,” Ross said with a smile. “She gets rid of her unfaithful lover; he gets rid of his rival—two birds with one stone, so to speak. I’m beginning to think you’ve got conspiracies on the brain.”

“I suppose it is a wee bit far-fetched.” Munro folded

himself back into the spindly desk chair, his face creased with disappointment.

Ross relented. “We’ll have another word with the lassie. And with Callum MacGillivray. But in the meantime”—Ross pulled the reports towards him again and thumbed through them—“I’m curious about Mr. Innes.”

After Innes’s wife had told them during their initial interview that her husband had been out when Brodie’s body was found, Munro had talked to him again. John Innes had confirmed his visit to the farm shop on a neighboring estate but added that he wasn’t sure exactly what time he’d left the B&B. Ross now saw, however, that when an inquiry team had questioned the clerk at the shop, she’d told them Innes had not come in until almost seven o’clock.

Yesterday Ross had not taken the man too seriously as a suspect, but then he’d had Hazel Cavendish in his sights.

Meditatively, he said, “We know John Innes left the house some time before the body was discovered, because Mrs.

Innes had been working in her garden when Inspector James told her the news. Why did it take him so long to run to the farm shop?”

“Did he do something else, maybe dispose of the gun?” Munro suggested. “If he stopped along the road and approached Brodie through the wood, he could have put the gun back in the car and got rid of it anywhere.”

“Wipe the smile off your face, man,” Ross said crossly.

“That’s a dismal prospect. We canna search the whole of Invernesshire.”

“Aye. Except that, since Brodie was shot at such close quarters, some blood or tissue might have transferred itself to the barrel of the gun—”

“And from there to the car,” agreed Ross. Trust Munro to see the bright side. “It’s worth getting a warrant to

have forensics go over Innes’s Land Rover. But why would John Innes want to kill Donald Brodie?” Inspector James had said she thought the Inneses might have cultivated Brodie for his connections, which matched Ross’s own impression. “Is there some way the Inneses could benefit from Brodie’s leaving the distillery to Hazel Cavendish?”

“That I canna tell ye. But I thought yesterday that the man was nervous about more than the discomfort of his guests.”

“Aye,” Ross said, remembering John Innes’s sweaty agitation, and his insistence on getting back into his kitchen. That, in turn, reminded Ross of his own empty stomach. It was getting on past teatime, and he had begun to think longingly of his dinner and a dram, not necessarily in that order, when another report caught his eye.

“Well, I’ll be buggered,” he said, skimming the page.

“It seems John Innes’s wee brother has a record. Why didna someone point this out to me yesterday?”

He had fixed a beady gaze on Munro when one of the female constables appeared at his elbow. Mackenzie, he thought her name was. She had been first on the scene.

“Sir.”

“What is it, lass?” Ross prompted when she didn’t continue. “I havena got all day.”

“It’s the gun, sir. They found a gun in the river, and it matches the description of Mr. Innes’s Purdy.”