Highland Fling Episode 47

Mcgregor spread his hands, as if he had completed a magic trick. “Gregory couldn’t be naked in a hotel room in central Glasgow at seven and then in Greenock by half past. It’s a 45-minute drive, perhaps an hour. It’s fishy as hell. The man has two alibis and there’s definitely something wrong with one of them. That’s why they kept him so long.”

Mirabelle considered this. “Maybe the witnesses got the time wrong.”

“Maybe, though they think it unlikely. They’re cross-referencing where they can, but the black man doth protest too much. There’s something wrong. They grilled him for ages but he didn’t crack. I think they only let him go because they know they can take him back in, any time.”

Mirabelle got up and stared out of the window. A flock of ducks flew overhead in a V formation. Mcgregor joined her.

“Do you know why they fly fanned out like that?”

“No.”

“Geese do it too. They take turns at the front so the birds behind don’t have to struggle through the wind. Geese migrate thousands of miles. That’s only possible because they pull together.” He put his hand on Mirabelle’s shoulder. “Like us.”

She leaned into him. Alan Mcgregor on holiday, or perhaps Alan Mcgregor in Scotland, seemed to have acquired a smattering of poetry. It was beginning to feel as if they belonged together.

“Do you mean work together?” “Yes. You are always butting into my investigations...” “Helping, you mean?”

“Look, this isn’t my case and it isn’t your case either. The police are getting nowhere.

“We’ve been frittering about at the edges of it, but maybe we should team up and solve the damn thing together – as a present for Bruce and Eleanor, if nothing else. You take the front. Then I take the front. And we’ll get further, faster.” He kissed her shoulder, biting her skin through her silk blouse.

She considered his proposition. Everyone said marriage was about teamwork.

“All right,” she said. “Obviously you’re going to have to up your game substantially...”

She pulled a cushion off the sofa and batted him. Mcgregor laughed.

She took off and he chased her around the orangery as if they were teenagers. In fact, Mirabelle thought, she had never done this when she was a teenager. Not once.

He caught her beside the electric fire and they kissed, springing apart as the door opened and Eleanor wandered in with Jinx at her heel. The dog bolted to Mirabelle’s side and nuzzled her hips.

“Don’t mind us,” Eleanor said. “Bruce sent me. He’s getting jumpy. They’re sitting through there, talking about Susan. Can’t keep off it. It’s terribly grim.

“We thought we might visit the Macleods – the girl’s parents – but I can’t face it.

“So we’re going shooting. Niko needs some practice and this whole thing has rendered Tash positively murderous. Can I be honest?’

Eleanor did not wait for an answer. “When I first met you, Mirabelle, I thought you were cold. I didn’t see what you saw in her, Alan. But having you here, I have to say, it’s lovely to have family around.” “Thanks,” said Mirabelle.

“She’s just English,” Mcgregor chipped in. “What you’re taking for coldness. It’s just people over the border.”

Mirabelle hit him again with the cushion. “That’s enough,” she said.

But it wasn’t her Englishness, she thought, as Alan took her hand and they followed Eleanor into the hall.

It was all those years of the war, living through the Blitz and ending up in Brighton, of all places. Not that she minded Brighton.

But when you’d lost everyone and were truly alone, you couldn’t be warm. She’d spent more than a decade, she realised, in a cold kind of coping.

Being happy again had felt like a betrayal of the people who’d died.

As they slipped into the drawing room, she realised she felt warmer in this cold place than she had in all her time in Brighton.

Mcgregor and his family were heating her through. The room smelled of wood smoke and tobacco. Jinx settled on the rug. Bruce poured drinks.

“I was thinking we could ring an agent down south and see what they have on their books. They might send photographs,” Mcgregor announced brightly.

Mirabelle looked blank. “Houses,” Mcgregor continued. “I mean, we’ll need somewhere to live.”

Eleanor clapped Alan on the shoulder. “That’s progress,” she said.

Progress, Mirabelle thought. But her mind wasn’t on houses and weddings any more than it ever was. That wasn’t the kind of teamwork she was interested in.

Nina Orlova had gone to the orangery to meet somebody and it was something to do with this gemstone, or the money it was worth. That’s why she had been killed.

And that meant the murderer couldn’t be a prowler. It had always been unlikely, but today’s developments made it impossible.

Mirabelle heard Tash’s voice from the night before, as if it was an echo.

“That means it’s one of us,” the girl had said, but that wasn’t necessarily true. It simply meant the murder hadn’t been entirely random.

Whoever they were, the murderer had either been buying, selling or stealing a large piece of alexandrite.

Not even in jest

The pressmen looked rattled, and quite rightly. From the roof terrace it would have been easy to pick them off.

Bruce clearly relished the possibility. He took aim carefully and fired a potshot at one of the large fir trees close to the gate. “Darling!” Eleanor chided him. “I thought there was a pigeon,” he lied. “Now, now, old man,” Mcgregor said. “Not even in jest.”

The entrance to the terrace wasn’t grand. A door in the upstairs hallway led to a small vestibule, like a cupboard, and up a set of steep stairs that were only just better than a ladder.

At the top, cold air kissed their skin and the sky played out its panorama.

Nina Orlova had gone to the orangery to meet somebody and it was something to do with this gemstone

More tomorrow.

Copyright © Sara Sheridan 2020, extracted from Highland Fling, published by Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, at £8.99