“Grand parlor,” I said. “Are those places only used for funerals? It felt like the dust covers were just off.”
Shona laughed. “In the Highlands the best room’s always kept for occasions, Lovejoy.”
“Tachnadray got one too?”
She sobered swiftly. “How much do you know, Lovejoy?” We turned uphill inland.
“This Tachnadray’s where the antique came from?”
“Yes.” She faced me defiantly. Odd. Defiance is for enemies. “I arranged it.”
“But down in East Anglia we’d been told to expect a reproduction.” I cleared my throat, not wanting to seem a crook. “You see, if a genuine antique had showed up we, er, might have only paid you for a repro.”
“And claimed that a reproduction had been delivered.” Shona nodded, getting the point quicker than I really wanted. “And then, Lovejoy?”
“Then?” I said blankly. “Well, I’d have flogged your genuine antique.”
She was so patient. “And then, Lovejoy?”
“I’d have come here to…” I slowed, nodding.
“…to find who was stupid enough to sell off expensive antiques thinking them reproductions.” She gave me a satisfied smile. “You’ve found her. It’s me. It was bait, Lovejoy.”
Expensive bait. “But why?” We’d gone half a mile and already the houses had vanished.
We were on an upland moor and still climbing, the van laboring and coughing.
“Because I need a divvie. Jo had mentioned you. I’d heard of one in Carlisle, but it’s so difficult to trust anyone in antiques, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes, love,” I agreed piously. “Why didn’t you tell Jo to ask me up without all this?”
“It hadn’t to be me that procured you, Lovejoy. You had to wander in on your own. You pretending to be a McGunn simply made it easier for me.”
Therefore she wanted ignorance, which meant I’d have to get a move on to suss her game out. Antiques were at stake. If I allowed her to distract me they’d slip through my fingers. It happens to me every time when women are around. “I’m part of your plot?”
“A plot for survival. We McGunns are a lost tribe, Lovejoy.”
“Here. I thought you’d given up pretending—”
“Be quiet and listen!” She blazed it out fiercely.
For a few minutes she drove, winding us away from the coast into bleak countryside.
Rocks, gullies, a little rivulet or two, heather and a few trees having a desperate time.
There was even a big-bellied bird noshing some heather. Funny life for a pigeon, I thought, though whatever turns pigeons on in Caithness… Shona had cooled enough for her sermon.
“You picked an august name, Lovejoy. We McGunns are Picts, inhabitants here long before the rest of these… people came.” She meant anybody else was a serf. “Yet now we’re dispossessed. The Highland clearances of two centuries gone, the clan rivalries, everything in history has been against us.”
The sky was gray, cloudy. A distant gray house glided along the horizon. Wuthering Heights. A small lorry drove past us towards Dubneath. Shona beeped her horn in reflex salutation. A few sheep watched us, hoping for a lift to civilization. I hid a yawn. Nice place if you were an elk.
“We were driven to the coastal villages,” she continued. “People who’ve heard of Armenians, the Jews and Tasmanians, would think you mad if you classed us with the likes of them.” She shot me a hard glance, waggling the wheel the way women do for nothing. “Wouldn’t they?”
I thought a bit. For all I knew she might be a nut. “Well, yes,” I said. “But it’s life.
Families come and go. Names peter out, get revived.”
“In 1821 we tried,” she said bitterly. “The Clan McGunn formed a society—like those Gordons and Grants.” She spoke with hate. “But our last clan chief died and we were finished.”
“And you’ll reunite the clan and march on Rome.”
“No,” she said, choking down an impulse to chuck me through the windscreen. “But the loyals among us must share some feeling of… pride.”
Odd word, I thought; I’ll bet that sentence was surprised when it ended like that. “By giving away what genuine antiques you’ve got left? Slinging them on the first lorry heading south?”
“You’ll see, Lovejoy.”
For a while she drove us angrily on into ever bleaker countryside without speaking. Just as I was wondering if she’d brought any nosh she screeched us to a jolting stop above a chiseled glen. There was a muddy-looking lake off to the right, seemingly on a tilt.
Can lakes actually slope like that? Trees, clearly unwelcome tourists, clustered around a large gable-and-turret building of gray stone. Ranked windows and disguised chimneys, a long drive with drystone walling, and a bare flagpole. It could have been uninhabited except that the main door stood open and somebody was standing waiting in shadow at the top of the steps. I thought it was a woman. A man with a wheelbarrow near outhouses stood peering up the hillside at our van.
“Tachnadray, Lovejoy. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“The architect read Jane Eyre.”
“During your visit, Lovejoy,” Shona said after a moment with careful coolth, “you’ll refrain from sly digs. Understood?”
“Not really, love,” I said, opening the van door and sliding down to stretch my legs. It was time me and Cousin Shona got a few things straight before hitting the old homestead. “I’ve gone to a lot of bother to get here. Right now I could be out of your hair, and home in peace. I sympathize with your diaspora, but we Lovejoys never had a posh dynasty.”
“So?”
“Explain why you’re Pretty Miss Welcome down in Dubneath, and Boadicea as soon as we see that phony Victorian castle. And,” I said on as she drew furious breath, “why you think you have the right to ballock me as soon as we’re out of Jamie’s earshot.”
She said quietly, “So it’s money you want.”
“Or antiques. Or both.”
“Very well, Lovejoy. You’ll be paid.” Pause. “Enough.”
A minute’s reflection, and I nodded. We rolled as I got in. She nearly took my toes off with the wheel. Our relationship was deteriorating fast.
“The… owner of Tachnadray agreed with my idea of having copies of the antiques made and selling them. We have two men doing it.” She turned us between two tall stone gateposts bearing carved coats-of-arms. “I believe we—Tachnadray—are being defrauded.”
Such disloyalty, I thought, but didn’t say. “And I’m to prove your suspicions?”
“Much, much more, Lovejoy.” She’d recovered her smile. However daft her dreams, she really seemed to come alive again in Tachnadray. She’d recovered all her sparkling good humor as soon as we made the glen. “You’re to prove who’s doing it.”
“Here, love,” I said uneasily. “You’re not wanting anybody buried at midnight in the crypt, are you? Because hunting’s not my game—”
“Here we are, Lovejoy,” she said gaily, stopping the van below the steps. “Tachnadray.”
The woman waiting in the shadows of the main door stepped forward into view. She walked with grave composure to the top step and stood to welcome us. I got out and went forward. For half a step I was a bit uncertain. After that there was no question.
Between the two women the air had thickened with utter hatred. It’s not fair that hunters last longest, or that prey wear out fastest. Somebody should change the rules.
Quickly I stepped to one side, put on my most sincere smile, and went bravely up the steps. This new woman couldn’t give me a bigger pack of lies than Shona.
« ^ »
—— 12 ——
Caithness is one of those places you think of as perfect, full of plain wisdom, isn’t it.
The simple life: dawn porridge, down to the trickling burn to brew up the day’s malt whisky or whatever, then highland reels all evening. Idyllic. Instead here I was ascending these wide steps, grinning hopefully at the elegant older woman smiling down at me, with a lovely bird like Shona smiling away at my side, and me wishing I was in battledress being fired at. It had felt safer.