Singh was right about Trevor’s shop. It really was a mess. Furniture had been overturned, drawers pulled out of everything. The place essentially had been trashed. Singh and I just stood in the middle of the chaos and looked around.
“I don’t think I can tell you much of anything in this mess,” I said. “There may be stuff missing, but I’m not sure I could say.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “And I guess it doesn’t matter that much with Wylie dead. He won’t be complaining, will he?”
“Does this look like a different thief to you?” I said.
“Hate to think we have two of them,” he said. “But yes, it does.”
“I’m glad mine was neater,” I said. “And you’re right, it’s a good thing the records were removed yesterday or it would be days before we got them straightened out.”
“I know it’s a long shot,” Singh said, “but have a look around.”
As I did so, a piece of paper caught my eye. It was facedown in the middle of the room, but it looked like a check. I picked it up, took one look, and handed it to Singh.
“Tell me again about how Trevor used the money Blair gave him to pay off the guy with the dog, or rather the man called Dog,” I said. The piece of paper in question was a check, dated the day I’d gone to the store with Blair, payable to Scot Free Antiques and signed by Blair, for eight hundred thousand dollars. It was not the first time I’d thought that Trevor had chosen a very stupid name for his store, unless, of course, he planned to give away antiques, but this was not the issue right at this moment.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Singh said. It was beginning to sound like his mantra.
“It does sort of take the edge off the motive,” I said. “If Trevor hadn’t cashed this yet, then why would Blair kill him?”
“He killed him,” Singh said, simply as he pulled out a plastic bag and put the check into it. “Don’t know how we missed this the first time.”
“I expect Trevor hid it somewhere until he could take it to the bank, except that he didn’t get there. It just got dislodged, wherever it was, in the break-in.”
“How long would you hold on to a check like this? It doesn’t do much for your theory that there were two of these desks, either,” Singh said.
“You’re just bitter.” I could hardly wait to rush home and tell Rob that he’d been completely wrong about Blair having illicit cash hanging about in huge piles, and that he had misjudged the man, as had Singh. My small moment of righteous indignation did not last long, however. Despite what I’d thought, the check made Blair look even guiltier, if that was possible. It turned out the check number was out of sequence: in other words, after Trevor was dead and Blair under suspicion, Blair had signed a check and backdated it to the day he’d purchased the cabinet. The two checks with numbers immediately before it were dated after Trevor died. It looked as if Blair had arranged to have someone break into Trevor’s shop and leave it there in a faked robbery. If so, it had been really dumb of Blair not to think about the numbers on the checks, although he claimed, according to Singh, that he had postdated a couple of checks that he was sending through the mail. The trouble with that one was that when the police went through the recycling bin of one of the check recipients, they found the envelope, postmarked after Trevor had died. It seemed incredibly inept for a man of Blair’s obvious intelligence, but once again the police were back to having no record of the transaction.
Anna Chan, who continued to phone me from time to time with questions about Trevor’s paperwork, told me they’d caught the man who’d trashed Trevor’s place, although not mine, I’m afraid. His name was Woody somebody or other, some lowlife Blair had successfully represented on a charge of a particularly vicious house invasion. Apparently Woody’s gratitude extended to planting the check at Blair’s request, but not as far as lying about it when caught. It seemed pretty open-and-shut, as they say, at this point, and a rather inept attempt to subvert the course of justice on Blair’s part.
Percy never showed up again, not even at The Dwarfie Stane. Rendall had promised he’d call me if he did. It was as if he’d never existed.
I tried just to get on with life, to forget it, but that was very hard to do. For one thing Blair’s journey through the justice system was very big news, and every court appearance, however brief, filled the newspapers with lurid headlines about the Skull-Splitter killer, and much was made of there having been a dispute over a piece of furniture. Stan-field Roberts, the curator at the Cottingham who’d been at Blair’s ill-fated party, was quoted about unscrupulous antique dealers. Fortunately my name didn’t come into it, but that didn’t make me feel any better, as my role, however anonymous in the whole sordid business, continued to rankle. I alternated between being sure I’d been right about the cabinet and being completely down on myself for my ineptitude. It had to be that I was so besotted by either the cabinet or by Blair’s money or Trevor’s charm that I missed something as obvious as the lock. At my age!
My self-flagellation on the subject of the lock was made worse by my conviction that Blair was not the murderer. It was, as I kept saying to anyone who would listen, just too pat. I also clung to the notion that the saga of the two cabinets was crucial to my understanding of what had really happened. There was absolutely no concrete support of any kind for this feeling of mine, which just made me more upset.
Various people continued to try to cheer me up; the rest avoided me. I could hardly blame them. I was rather tiresome on the subject. Mention locks, for example, or even a word that rhymed with it, like shock, or bring up the subject of Scotland, or furniture, something it’s easy enough to do when you’re an antique dealer, or heaven forbid, utter the word forgery, and I was off on a little tirade. I did mention to Clive and Moira that I thought there might have been two cabinets, and while they seemed enthusiastic, I knew they really thought I was just rationalizing my mistake, and I only felt worse. Clive went on being nice to me, a situation I found intolerable. Moira tried a lecture or two. “Self worth is not measured by how many antiques you identify correctly,” she intoned. I didn’t retort that lack of self worth might be measured in the number of times you’d got something so wrong another person had been killed because of it, but that was what I was thinking.
What surprised me was that all of this didn’t affect our business adversely. In fact, business had rarely been better. That was almost entirely due to Desmond Crane, who may or may not have been in competition with Blair for the writing cabinet. Shortly after Blair was charged, Dez, who had never been a customer in the same league as Blair, although he did buy from us occasionally, came into the shop, had a look around, and then asked me if I would consider decorating his daughter Tiffany’s condo.
“I bought her a little place as a graduation present,” he said. By little, I was soon to learn, he meant about two thousand square feet, which is bigger than my house. “She loves antiques, unlike my son who won’t look at anything designed before the year 2000,” he said. “And she has absolutely no furniture, because she lived at home during her years at university. Will you come and have a look?”
“I’d love to, Mr. Crane,” I replied. “But you do know I was involved in that business with Blair and Trevor Wylie?”
He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “And please call me Dez.” I suppose he could afford to be magnanimous, given that his chief rival for all those high profile and lucrative court cases was out of commission. “Let’s make an appointment to meet at the condo. It’s a surprise. She’ll be back from her summer job in about four weeks. Can you do it?”