temperature had dropped, and Gemma fastened a button on her jacket.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Heather, coming to greet her as she got out of the car. “I was just going to ring you.” Heather wore a black trouser suit that made the contrast between her pale skin and dark hair more striking than ever, but on closer inspection, Gemma noticed that she looked almost blue about the lips, and that the hand she held out to Kincaid was unsteady.
“Heather, are you all right?” asked Gemma.
“We had to— I didn’t know he would look like that,”
Heather said hoarsely. She touched her throat with her long fingers. “I’ve never seen anyone dead before, and Donald . . .”
Having shaken Kincaid’s hand, Pascal turned to Gemma. “We had to identify Donald’s body for the pathologist. It was difficult for Heather, but as there was no other family . . .” He shrugged, and Gemma saw that the day had taken its toll on him as well. His button-bright eyes were shadowed, and his round face had acquired unexpected hollows under the cheekbones.
“I’m so sorry,” said Gemma, berating herself for not having realized Heather would be called upon to perform that task. But it was unlikely Ross would have accepted her as a substitute, even had she volunteered. He would have wanted to watch Heather’s and Pascal’s reactions when confronted with Donald’s corpse, because they were potential suspects.
It was a cold-blooded business, policing, thought Gemma, and for the first time, the knowledge that it had to be done did not make it seem more palatable.
“Come in the house, why don’t you,” she added, searching for some means of comfort. “I’m sure John or Louise will make us some tea.” It was the old standby,
certainly, but it fulfilled the human need for activity, and ritual, in the face of shock.
“No, wait.” Heather touched Gemma’s arm when she would have turned away. “I’ve something to tell you.
Giles Glover, the solicitor, was waiting for us when we got back to Benvulin. He’d had a look at Donald’s will. It was dated shortly after Donald’s father died. Donald—
Donald left all his shares to Hazel.”
“What?” Gemma stared at her, not sure she’d heard correctly. “To Hazel? But— Are you sure—?”
“It is true,” Pascal assured her. “They were his, to do with as he wished.”
“He held the majority?” Kincaid asked.
“Yes.” It was Heather who answered, and Gemma sensed the effort it was costing her to keep her voice steady, her face composed. She had given Donald Brodie ten years of utter dedication, and he had not left her a crumb. “It’s a limited company, with the shareholders owning forty-nine percent, so Donald’s was the controlling interest. I’ll have to inform the board, but first, I have to tell Hazel. Where is she?” Heather looked round, as if just realizing Hazel’s absence. “I thought she would be with you.”
“She’s here.” Gemma nodded towards the barn. “She wanted some time on her own while I picked Duncan up at the railway station. Heather, do you want me to tell her?”
Heather hesitated, then shook her head. “No. We’re going to be working together—that is, if Hazel sees fit to keep me. We might as well start as we mean to go on.”
Postmortems always left a bad taste in his mouth. Ross had wondered over the years if the phenomenon was caused by the odors of the morgue permeating his skin—
a fanciful and unscientific notion, true, but he had noticed that it only went away after he’d showered.
He’d had Munro stop at a petrol station on the A between Inverness and Aviemore so that he could buy breath mints, which he disliked, and his mood had not improved by the time they reached the Aviemore Police Station.
The postmortem had told him nothing he had not expected: Donald Brodie had been shot in the chest at near point-blank range with a small-gauge shotgun loaded with bird shot; Brodie had no other injuries and had been in good physical health at the time of his death. The pathologist had judged time of death to be consistent within an hour or two of the time of the gunshot reported by Inspector James, which helped Ross not at all.
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?”