Highland Fling Episode 69

The room smelled of dust now. Both women stopped as they heard Bruce leave the main bedroom and pad along the hallway towards the stairs. At least he’d managed some sleep. ‘I shall tell them we were discussing dinner, if they ask,’ Gillies said. ‘Do you have any instructions about what to serve?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of issuing you with instructions, Mrs Gillies. You fire ahead with whatever you think best. Mr Brandon will probably be joining us.

‘Before you go, can I ask, do you like Mrs Robertson?’

‘Like?’ Gillies looked for a moment as if she was considering if she had ever liked anybody.

‘Yes,’ Mirabelle persisted. ‘I mean, Eleanor’s fun. Lively. Good for Bruce. She was a breath of fresh air around here, wasn’t she?’

‘I was glad that Mr Bruce married,’ Gillies allowed herself to say.

‘And politically she was quite a change. Do you support that change?’

‘I’m not a Communist, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘But I’ll bet you’re glad Eleanor is your mistress and not, say, Gwendolyn Dougal.’

Mrs Gillies sniffed. ‘Our boys died,’ she said simply. ‘And Nazi sympathisers like Lady Dougal never paid for what they did – they encouraged the Germans for years before the war started.’

‘I think Gwendolyn Dougal would be more accurately termed a conservative,’ Mirabelle said.

Gillies’s eyes sparked. ‘That’s what they call it now. But let me tell you, the Earl of Erroll had a sporran with a Nazi insignia – his valet told me.

‘The Duke of Buccleugh was an appeaser. In 1939, the Duke of Hamilton wrote a piece in The Times about Germany’s right to take Poland. We all read it.

‘And they got away with it. Every one of them. And our boys died fighting.

‘Those people sided with the enemy and kept quiet about it afterwards – they can call themselves whatever they like now, it makes no difference to me. I know who they are.’

‘Our boys?’

‘My nephew,’ Gillies said.

‘So you lost your husband to the Great

War, and your nephew in the second? I’m very sorry.’

Gillies gave an almost indiscernible shrug. ‘I recall serving at table in this house and a guest remarking that the first war was necessary,’ she said.

‘To keep the power on the right. To stop Britain becoming a Communist state – as if that was ever our way. Afterwards I was sick. All those lads dead and it was for nothing. General Haig should have been strung up.

‘None of us want it to be pointless, but it was and that’s the truth.’

‘I take it, you’d heard Eleanor talk about politics and you’d agreed with her, more or less?’

Gillies acquiesced. ‘You asked me if I like her. I’d say she’s a good woman, at heart. Better than most.’

‘And the current situation, Mrs Gillies? The Cold War?’

‘The rockets, you mean? My sister says the hills will act as a shield if the Russians launch a strike.

‘One thing’s for sure, they’re not aiming at old women like me, Miss Bevan.’

Mirabelle nodded slowly. ‘Thank you for trusting me, Mrs Gillies, I won’t say a word.’

Mirabelle headed back to the drawing room. It would never have struck her that the Highlands was so political or, for that matter, principled.

In Brighton, morals had become more lax since the war. There was no doubt of that. Young people didn’t care as much as her generation had – they wanted something new. Something more free.

If anything, that’s what they’d fight for. She’d had the expectation that up here it would be the same as Brighton, but this was a different country.

If many people thought like Mrs Gillies, Macmillan and his government wouldn’t be able to count on Scotland’s vote, she thought. Not that that kind of thing was her business any more.

Bruce had joined Mcgregor and Eddie in the drawing room and was giving a short lecture about the estate’s layout. Eddie had lit a cigarette.

‘It’s not a kidnap,’ Mirabelle announced. ‘It’s not what we thought it was. None of it.’

‘Do you know where she is?’ Eddie asked. ‘I know she left of her own free will.’

‘What makes you say that?’

She’s working to her own agenda and people generally run to somewhere they know

‘The watch,’ Mirabelle replied, because that made sense now.

‘No kidnapper lets you don jewellery before he takes you.

‘Eleanor only ever wore it in the evening. It’s a dress piece. It wasn’t on her wrist when she left the drawing room yesterday afternoon – she had her little gold strip – so if she dropped the diamond watch once she’d left, it means she fetched it before leaving. She knew she was going to go.’ ‘It wasn’t a kidnap.’

‘I realised when I was upstairs. She went up there. She changed – probably into suitable clothes to travel.

‘She removed her valuables – the watch and who knows what else, but certainly any alexandrite there might have been. And then she ran.’

‘Look here,’ Bruce started to object. Mcgregor put a hand on his cousin’s arm. ‘We need to figure this out to find Eleanor. Go on, Mirabelle.’

‘But she wouldn’t leave me,’ Bruce said. ‘She couldn’t.’

Everyone ignored his comment and Mirabelle continued.

‘We don’t know what Eleanor was running from, or indeed what she might be running to.

‘But if we know it wasn’t kidnap, it makes her marginally easier to follow.

‘She’s working to her own agenda and people generally run to somewhere they know.

‘There are no cars missing. The horses are in the paddock.

‘That means it’s likely Eleanor’s on foot. Bruce, could you fetch the walking maps?’

Bruce hesitated a moment and then disappeared out of the room.

More tomorrow.

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