Murder at Midnight (9 page)

“
Everything seems to be in order here,” Rex said, preparing to give the bag back to the owner, when his fingers encountered a small
bulge in a zipped pouch tucked inside. He opened it and found
secreted in the silk lining a dart identical to the one Vanessa had allegedly picked up earlier that night. His throat went dry, his heartbeat quickened.

A second dart in a second bag? This, indeed, was progress.

_____

Without a word he went down the hall to his study and compared the dart to the original he had locked away in his desk. He returned to the living room and found the same shocked silence as when he had left, everyone rigid and casting furtive eyes about, no one yet daring to accuse the lady who sat calmly taking puffs of her cigarette, her head tilted in an attitude of remote contemplation. Rex waited for her to tell him she had found it somewhere, just as Vanessa had come by hers, though he felt less inclined to believe her if that was the case. It would be too much of a coincidence.

“Well, Margarita,” he prompted. “Can you give us an explanation
as to why this dart was found in your possession?”

“Is it not obvious?”

“Is it?” Out of politeness and caution, he felt reluctant to ask her outright if she had murdered the Frasers. The tension in the room was palpable. Seconds passed away, the steady tick-tock of the clock interrupted only by the percussion of a log cracking apart in the fireplace and the symphony of wind blowing outside.

“What is obvious?” Rex tried again.

“That someone put it there.”

“Oh, I see.” Evidently, he was not going to get a ready confession. “Are you saying someone framed you?”

“That is correct. You cannot possibly think I would be so foolish as to hide a poison dart in my bag if I were the killer.”

“That pocket is well hidden. I almost missed it.”

“The police would have found it.”

“If it were not got rid of first. Perhaps you did not have the opportunity after Vanessa’s dart was found and the bags were being watched.”

“You believe Vanessa and not me?”

Rex scratched an ear. “Vanessa was able to supply a reasonable explanation as to why a dart was found in her bag. Not that your explanation is without merit,” he hastened to add. “Someone could have planted it.” He looked around the closed expressions of those present and got the impression they all found her guilty. And why not? She was the most enigmatic person among them, and she was, after all, from a part of the world whence similar darts originated.

“I can’t believe Margarita had anything to do with this,” Cleverly protested somewhat belatedly, and more out of gallantry, Rex suspected, than conviction.

“Am I supposed to have murdered the poor man in the hall?” she demanded of Rex. “I was never in the hall. At least, not since I first arrived. I have been in the living room all night.”

“You could have shot at him with a pipe,” Jason said.

“Ridiculous.”

“Do we know for sure when Ken left the room?” Alistair asked Rex. “He was here for “Auld Lang Syne,” but I can’t remember what everyone was doing during those moments when we were discussing who might be at the front door. Or after that, and before we started looking for him. Can anyone recall?”

Most everybody shook their head and redirected their attention to Margarita Delacruz. Was she strong enough to have dragged Ken’s stocky build into the broom closet? Rex assessed her lithe frame and decided it was improbable.

“I was by the fire,” she protested. “I was trying to stay warm. Brrr,” she said, hugging herself in her black cashmere shawl. “The weather in this country!”

“It was dark,” John said. “Anyone could have been anywhere.”

“Humphrey took a candle and went to answer the door,” Rex said, replaying the sequence of events in his mind. “No sign of Ken then, or when I entered the hall shortly afterwards to fetch the oil lamp from the kitchen. I brought it to the living room and stoked up the fire. When I went back into the hall to check the fuse box, I ran into Jason returning from the cloakroom, and he said he hadn’t seen Ken either. Beyond that, details are a bit vague. And, as John said, it was dark.”

Vanessa Weaver leaned forward in her armchair. “Margarita, dressed as she is all in black, could have slipped out of the room unnoticed.”

“I’m wearing black too,” Helen said.

Margarita gave her a grateful look and turned one of scorn upon Vanessa.

“Excuse me,” came Ace Weaver’s quavering voice from the wheelchair. “The lady was near me after the dance. She asked me, ‘Is that someone at the door so late?’ I explained about our Scottish tradition of first-footing. ‘It is strange,’ she said. ‘It felt just now as though someone walked over my grave.’ She gave a violent shiver. I remember it vividly. I asked her if she was all right, and she said she would take a brandy and asked if I would like one too. She went over to the drinks cabinet and poured us each one. I recall her telling me she didn’t like the taste of whisky. She brought me some shortbread too. We exchanged toasts. Our glasses are here on the table. Hers has the lipstick on it.”

Rex picked up the glass and examined it. It did indeed match the shade of red on her mouth. And there were shortbread crumbs down the front of the old man’s flannel shirt beneath his sweater and cardigan. Rex was struck by the clarity with which Ace had recounted the scene. He glanced at Vanessa, who did not seem pleased with her husband, whereas Margarita looked triumphant at being vindicated.

“You are not to drink alcohol without my knowledge, dear,” his wife reprimanded. “You are on medication.”

“I have not taken my medication today. It makes me confused.”

“You are incorrigible,” his wife said, failing to cover her irritation.

“It’s Hogmanay, after all, Mum,” Zoe said in defense of her father.

Rex wondered how reliable Ace Weaver’s memory was. He addressed a questioning look at Vanessa, which she apparently understood, since she proceeded to inform him that her husband did remember the most recent of events and those from his distant past. The main difficulty seemed to be in recollecting what happened in between, when it all became a bit hazy.

“It’s true,” Zoe confirmed. “Dad’s mind is very sharp unless he’s been asleep for a long time, like overnight. Then he’s a bit disorientated first thing in the morning. I don’t think he should be taking all those pills.” She stroked her father’s cheek, her hair glowing the color of flame in the firelight.

An endearing scene, Rex acknowledged while reflecting that, if the recent memory of a ninety-odd-year-old man was to be trusted, and Margarita had not left his sight, she could not have poisoned Ken Fraser. That left Flora and Jason, Vanessa, Zoe, Alistair, Drew,
and perhaps Jason unaccounted for. When the knocking had sounded
at the front door, he had discussed with Helen, Julie, Humphrey, and possibly John, the question of who might be calling so late. Rex thought it was John’s voice he had heard, but he couldn’t be sure. It could have been Jason’s.

“Who was it that said a tall dark stranger was good luck as opposed to a redhead?” he asked the gathering.

“That was me,” John said. “It’s common knowledge.”

“Rubbish,” said Cleverly.

Time was running out, and though he now had a second piece of evidence, he was only one step closer to identifying the killer—by eliminating Ace and Margarita from the list of suspects, at least for the murder of Ken Fraser.

“Why use a dart?” Drew inquired of no one in particular. “Why not just poison the chocolates, for instance? Lord knows, I almost choked on one of those things.”

“Curare is not harmful if ingested,” Professor Cleverly supplied. “And it has a very bitter taste.”

“But what if it isn’t what you say?”

“It may not be,” the professor conceded.

“Have you had first-hand experience with this particular poison?” Alistair asked.

“Only second hand, through my research.”

“If the Frasers were targeted specifically,” Alistair said, “the killer had to be sure the poison got to the right people. Chocolates would be more hit-and-miss.”

“And if the killer knew about the chocolates, he or she would have to be one of us, which I still refuse to believe,” Zoe stated, folding her slim arms across her décolleté.

Rex could not see how the girl did not freeze in her diaphanous green gown. It made him chilly just to watch her. As though reading his thoughts, Vanessa again told her daughter to put on her cardigan unless she wanted to catch her death of cold. At this unfortunate choice of words, a few pairs of eyes slid toward the bodies of Ken and Catriona Fraser. Rex had not wanted to move them out of the room before the proper authorities examined them. They had only removed Ken from the closet so John could look him over more thoroughly.

“Who brought the chocolates, anyway?” Drew asked.

“I did,” Vanessa replied tartly. “And they haven’t been tampered with, I assure you.”

“They were greatly appreciated,” Rex hurriedly put in, to unruffle her feathers.

However, no one seemed inclined to have any more chocolates.

“There’s another bag here,” Zoe announced, reaching behind the armchair occupied by her mother, and pulling a large leather pouch up by the strap. “I only just noticed it when I was looking for my cardigan.”

“It must be Catriona’s. I forgot she would have brought one.” Rex had qualms about looking inside the dead woman’s bag, but it was necessary to leave no stone unturned if he hoped to find her killer. However, he only found the usual contents, plus a plastic L-shaped inhaler.

“Catriona had asthma,” Professor Cleverly explained. “She suffered an attack when we were walking up to the castle one time. Do you remember, Drew?”

Nobody said anything, no doubt feeling the pathos engendered by the deceased’s now redundant inhaler.

“Did Ken have a coat?” Rex asked, trying to remember what Mr. Fraser was wearing when he arrived. The Weavers had pulled up just ahead, and his attention had been taken up by assisting Vanessa and John to get the old man out of the station wagon and into the house.

“Perhaps he hung it up in the cloakroom instead of on the coat stand in the hall,” Alistair suggested, getting up and moving in that direction with his flashlight.

He returned with a heavy trench coat and began going through the pockets, turning out keys, a wallet, a twisted gas station receipt, a packet of tissues, a bar magnifier, a bottle of eye drops, and a half-eaten Cadbury candy bar in its wrapper. This concluded the search of personal items, which Rex had been inventorying in his notebook—unless something was concealed on a guest’s person outside their pockets. And he wasn’t going to presume so far. He would leave that to the police.

Nor did he wish to subject the darts to further handling. Perhaps he could experiment with a similar missile composed of one of his fly fishing lures of similar size and weight. He consulted the guests regarding potential dart launchers and soon a collection of items cluttered the coffee table, including Ace Weaver’s rubber-ended walking stick. This had been Flora’s suggestion, which no one took seriously, although it was certainly long enough and was apparently hollow. At this stage Rex didn’t want to rule anything out.

The old man had propelled himself closer to the table to watch the proceedings. The empty plastic pen Jason had produced when they were getting ready to write down their resolutions consumed most of Rex’s attention, as did Margarita’s cigarette holder. Only, the señora had not killed Ken Fraser, if Ace Weaver’s alibi was true. She continued to maintain a stoic silence in the face of being shunned by the other guests.

What other device would serve to dispatch a fatal dart? “Ken’s pipe?” Rex wondered aloud.

“Won’t work,” John said. “I pulled it from his trouser pocket when
I was examining him. Even if the bowl screws off, the stem’s curved.”

In any case, Ken would have kept it on his person, Rex reasoned, and therefore it was unlikely the killer improvised with it. Before he could make further headway with his experiment, he heard the wail of sirens through the wind gusts, and could not decide if he was disappointed or relieved.

10
clan blood

Rex opened the front
door. The sleet had stopped, the storm was windin
g down. He welcomed Chief Inspector Dalgerry into his home and excused the lack of lights. The detective, squat in build, did indeed put Rex in mind of a British bulldog: pug nose, jowls, and all. He wore a dark, ill-fitting waistcoat beneath an open overcoat, suggesting he had been
celebrating Hogmanay in style.

“More murders then,” he said without preamble. “Bit of a death magnet, your Gleneagle Lodge. Sure they are dead?”

Two blue and yellow-on-white squad cars with flashing roof lights
delivered their passengers into the windy night.

“We have a medic on hand who’s a guest. The ambulance never came. I suppose someone cancelled it when we realized the victims were dead.”

“He checked pupils and pulse?” Dalgerry wiped his shoes on the mat and moved into the dark hall. Rex left the door ajar for the new arrivals.

“Of course.”

“Where are the bodies?”

“In the living room.” Rex pointed down the hall to the dimly lit doorway.

“Poison, you said on the phone. You sure?”

“We found what appear to be two poisoned darts. Two bodies. Ken and Catriona Fraser. Not sure how the darts were administered yet.”

“Perhaps they were jabbed into the bodies direct?” Dalgerry
suggested.

“Just seems an elaborate plan if you are going to be that close to a victim, to use a dart in the first place.”

“Aye. Why not some run-of-the-mill rat poison in the whisky or tea?” The chief inspector sighed heavily. “Aye, verra strange. Well, let’s get on wi’ it,” he said as a wiry man in plain clothes reached the doorstep carrying a high-intensity flashlight. Dalgerry introduced him as Detective Sergeant Milner. He told him to look at the victims in the living room and to ask the guests to remain where they were until they could be interviewed.

Flora passed the detective sergeant in the hall. Looking over her shoulder, she gave the chief inspector a brief timid stare before disappearing into the cloakroom, where a candle had been deposited for the guests’ benefit.

“By the way, Happy Hogmanay to you and yours,” Dalgerry said. He appeared to bestow this blessing without any hint of irony, and Rex wished him likewise.

“We were entertaining at home,” the chief inspector informed him. “Big bash. Ah, well.”

After jotting down the sequence of events leading up to the murders per Rex’s recollection, he gave further instructions to Milner, who had come back and confirmed the lifeless status of the two victims. Meanwhile Flora emerged from the cloakroom and returned to the living room.

The uniformed constables spanned out from the front door in a search of the courtyard while Milner assigned one officer to examine the side window of the living room from outside. He sent another to the patio off the kitchen door, where Rex remembered seeing shoe prints. No one but the crime scene technicians and emergency personnel were to be allowed on the property. A constable equipped with a logbook was given the unenviable task of stationing himself at the end of the floodlit driveway to carry out this directive.

Detective Sergeant Milner seemed disgruntled to be on duty as he shouted out orders, sounding like a drill sergeant hurling insults at privates. “Watch where you put your feet, you dunderheaded clodhoppers!” rang out loud and clear from outside. Rex closed the front door as much to shut out his voice as the penetrating cold.

“So, no sooner was ‘Auld Lang Syne” sung than murder came calling,” Dalgerry said ponderously. “Aye, verra strange case, indeed.” He asked to see the bodies, expressing his displeasure at Ken Fraser having been moved from his original position.

“I don’t suppose he was killed in the broom cupboard,” Rex contended, opening the door to the cramped space under the stairs. “I think the killer moved him in there to hide him.”

The chief inspector looked inside and nodded. “We’ll get this photographed and sketched in due course. How did you find him?”

“Drew Harper, a guest, was looking for him downstairs while I was searching outside with Alistair Frazer and John Dunbar, the medic. Drew told us he had found him. Ken Fraser was sitting against the back wall. At first we thought he had passed oot, not passed away.”

“This Drew Harper, he didn’t touch him or disturb anything?”

“Not to my knowledge. At least, not before he helped remove him. John went in to check Ken first.”

“So, we shouldn’t expect to find any other of the guests’ fingerprints in there unless it’s the killer’s?”

Rex thought for a moment. Had John removed his mittens before looking Ken over in the closet? Probably, but he couldn’t recall. “Only Drew’s and John’s,” he confirmed.

“And the woman. She’s the deceased’s wife, right? What aboot
her?”

“We heard her gasp and tumble back into an armchair. It was dark. We thought at the time she had tripped and then fallen asleep on the spot. Both guests had partaken of a fair amount of alcohol.”

“You mean they were drunk?” Dalgerry asked as he followed Rex in the direction of the living room.

“Ken, possibly. Catriona Fraser was in good spirits and a wee bit clumsy.” Rex felt obliged to protect the deceased woman’s reputation as far as was truthful.

“Drunk,” Dalgerry restated.

“Not quite,” Rex qualified.

“But enough not to be in full control of their fate, either of them?”

“Aye, they would have been vulnerable at the hands of a vicious killer.” Aside from possible impairment of reaction from alcohol, they were neither of them fit by the looks of it, and Catriona had been almost blind in her right eye, according to what her husband had said when she recounted her fall at the Glenspean Lodge hotel. He mentioned this detail to Dalgerry, who scribbled in his notepad, his flashlight tucked under his armpit, grouching all the while at the added difficulty of being without light.

“What do you know about the couple?”

“Well, not that much. I invited them because they were neighbours. That’s their ancestral castle up on the hill.”

Dalgerry looked skeptical. “You don’t mean to say they had moved in there? It’s a pile of old rubble. They’d have been more comfortable in your old stables!”

“I don’t know if they intended to renovate the place, although they implied they might if they came into some money they hoped might become available.”

“Money? Now we may be getting somewhere. ‘Money, money, money,’” the chief inspector chanted. “Isn’t that a song?”

“Something about it being a rich man’s world? It was by the Swedish group ABBA. If that’s the song you mean.”

Dalgerry gave a rare chuckle. “ABBA. Och, aye. Takes me back. I met my missus at a disco. Her favourite song was ‘Dancing Queen.’ She could dance, my Kirsty.” A warm glow of reminiscence infused the inspector’s round brown eyes as he gazed at the wall.

Rex had difficulty envisioning the thickset chief inspector tripping the light fantastic, and wondered exactly how much whisky he had consumed for Hogmanay.

“Aye, well,” Dalgerry collected himself. “Best take a look at the bodies and find oot what’s what. Dr. Carmichael should be here shortly. She’ll be doing the post-mortems. So I’ll only take a quick gander for now.”

“What’s she doing coming oot here?”

“Likes to see them before they land on the slab. Said it gives her a better perspective.”

“I admire her work ethic.” Rex wondered what she’d been doing on Hogmanay.

“Married to her job,” Dalgerry said as though in answer to his thoughts. “I’ll wait for her before I contact the PF.” The procurator fiscal, a public prosecutor or coroner, investigated all sudden and suspicious deaths in Scotland.

They proceeded into the living room and he pulled back the sheet. In the semi-darkness Ken Fraser looked as though he were lying in somnolent repose on the sofa.

“Och, aye, that’s a nasty deep puncture on his neck,” Dalgerry said examining the wound, which Rex had exposed by pulling down on the gray and white checkered scarf. “No other injuries?” he asked sweeping the body with his powerful flashlight.

“None that I could see without removing more clothes.”

“Well, we’ll find oot soon enough. And the female victim. I don’t see a mark on her neck.” Dalgerry bent over Catriona Fraser, holding the flaps of his open coat pressed to his body with one hand. His jowls wobbled as he looked her over from head to foot.

“It’s on her thumb.” Rex peeled back the sticking plaster. “She cut herself on a piece of broken glass. I think the killer used this point of entry to facilitate absorption of the poison into the bloodstream, or else so he could hide it, as he did with the scarf on Ken.”

“You say ‘he,’ ” Dalgerry said straightening himself fully upright. “You suspect one of your male guests?”

“Not necessarily. These murders could have been committed by a woman, I suppose.”

“Do you have any ideas as to who might have done this?”

“I don’t.”

“So, the killer maybe knew aboot the cut on her thumb,” Dalgerry said with an astuteness that possibly belied Rex’s earlier impression that he had been at the whisky that night.

“So it would seem.”

Dalgerry asked when the accident with the glass had occurred.

“Around nine.”

“What poison did you say on the phone?” The chief inspector consulted his notes. “Not sure I got it down right.”

“Curare.”

“Sure aboot that? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s how Professor Cleverly identified it. He lectures in history at Edinburgh University, but he’s an avid anthropologist. He said the compound, a brown sticky substance, is made out of poisonous bark found in the Amazon rainforest and used by the natives to kill their prey. It paralyses them and, though death can take up to half an hour in humans, the victim cannot use any of their muscles to alert anyone of their predicament. They cannot blink, point, or speak. They can only suffer in silence.” Rex had questioned Humphrey further about the effects of curare in the final moments before the police arrived.

“Good God. What happens then?”

“They end up suffocating.”

“Hm, verra interesting. But perhaps a wee bit far-fetched?”

Rex confessed that it was. “The totality of the circumstances is bizarre. A double poisoning of the last known survivors of a branch of the Fraser clan, heirs to an old castle reputed to be harbouring a cache of gold—”

Dalgerry shot him a look of surprise.

“I stress the word ‘reputed.’ It could all be nonsense, but the Frasers believed that part of the Loch Arkaig Treasure is buried there.”

The chief inspector stamped his foot and turned around on the spot. “The Loch Arkaig Treasure belonging to Bonnie Prince Charlie? Och, man, ye canna be serious!” Incredulous astonishment had rendered his Highland Scots all the more pronounced. “That’s been lost for centuries. Why should it turn up now in your neck of the woods? I canna believe it! Any of it.”

Rex toyed with the idea of revealing the existence of Jason’s coin, but decided against it for the time being. He would prefer that the lad tell the police himself. It had been his find, after all. Of course, without Drew Harper’s intervention, none of them would have been any the wiser. If Jason had kept quiet about it since the autumn and not told his girlfriend, chances were he never would have confessed.

“What can you tell me aboot these people before I go over?” Dalgerry spoke in a low voice, glancing across at the weary group by the fireplace. “How well do you know them?”

“You’ll remember my fiancée Helen from the Moor Murders Case. And Flora Allerdice.”

“Aye, I thought I recognized the lass when she passed in the hall.” She now sat with her back to them. “Brother Donnie, right? A bit slow.”

“A good lad.”

“How’s your son Campbell doing?”

Rex was impressed he remembered his son’s name. “He’s in
Florida.”

“Never followed in your footsteps, did he?”

“No, his passion is marine science.”

“Ah, well, neither of my lads joined the police force. As you were saying …”

“Ehm, Helen’s friend from Derby, Julie Brownley, is staying with us for a few days. She teaches at the school where Helen works. They’ve known each other for years. Drew Harper, the man sitting beside her, is a local house agent. He helped me look for a place in the Highlands. Alistair Frazer is another face you’ll recognize from my summer housewarming party.”

“A colleague of yours. I mind him clearly.” Dalgerry made notes in his pad. “Any more from your previous party? Not planning on having any more, are you?” he asked, a bushy gray eyebrow raised in a circumflex.

“Not for the time being. Helen and I plan to hold our wedding in Edinburgh.”

“Probably a good idea.”

“John Dunbar was a medic in the previous case,” Rex continued with the list. “That’s how he and Alistair met.”

Dalgerry stared across the room, where the two men sat together. “So a total of four, besides yourself, who were here that other time. Right. Go on.”

“The lad next to Flora is her boyfriend, Jason Short, also a student of art at Inverness College. Let’s see. Vanessa Weaver in the purple dress was my interior designer for this place. She brought her husband and daughter. Ace Weaver is the gentleman in the wheelchair.”

“Is he ambulatory?”

“Aye, but only with difficulty.”

Dalgerry continued to make notes with his short yellow pencil on which the eraser was worn flat as a nail head.

“That leaves Margarita Delacruz, the professor’s guest,” Rex said.

“She must be the foreign-looking lady. Spanish?”

“From Venezuela, I believe. I found currency from that country in her evening bag.”

“Searched them all, did you?”

“That’s how we found the darts. They were in the ladies’ bags, hers and Vanessa’s.”

“What is the professor’s full name?”

“Humphrey Lawrence Cleverly.”

“And how well do you know him?”

“We were at university together, and then lost touch for many years. We ran into each other recently at a town and gown function in Edinburgh.”

“And can you vouch for all these people?”