Chapter 12 #2
Roberta and Moore raised their eyebrows at each other.
‘Albert?’
‘You know: the gamekeeper-slash-handyman? Albert Nairn? Old bloke, nose like a shark humping a sack of wrinkles?’
‘Ah.’ The tweedy old man who’d found her in the long grass that morning.
‘I know we’re all meant to be confined to barracks, but you’d let him out to shoot somethin’ for dinner, wouldn’t yez? I mean, it’s not like anyone’d notice he’d gone, is it? How could you tell?’
Sergeant Moore looked up from scribbling in his book. ‘How could we tell?’
‘Well, he doesn’t live in the hotel, does he? Lucky sod’s gorra tied cottage in the woods. Can come and go as he pleases and who’d ever know?’
The mysterious stranger who disappeared into the woods: it was the bloody gamekeeper, out and about when he should’ve been in and not.
‘Tell you what, let us know how to find his cottage and we’ll go ask him for you.’ Roberta pushed off from the stovetop. ‘Sergeant Moore can take the details.’
Took a while, but eventually the chef had sketched out a passable map in Moore’s notebook, complete with arrows and dotted lines and things.
Soon as it was done, Gérard went back to his ’Allo ’Allo accent. ‘Zut alors, madame gendarme, eet ’as been my pleasure!’ Then he grabbed her hand, bent, and kissed it.
Urgh . . .
It was like being tongued by a slug.
Roberta vwwwwwwipped up her high-vis’s zip and stood, staring through the hotel’s front doors at the miserable rain. The puddles out there had spread and deepened, the sky darkened to bruised concrete. They’d have to build an ark at this rate.
Sergeant Moore struggled into his fluorescent-yellow jacket, pulling a face. ‘Is yours all clammy? Mine is all clammy.’
Yeah. And so were her socks – the water leeching out of her squelchy trainers right through to her rapidly wrinkling toes. Trousers still hadn’t dried out either. Going to catch her death of mildew at this rate.
A rumble of thunder growled in the distance.
‘Sounds like my stomach.’ She produced a pilfered carrot from her pocket and crunched off a bite.
‘Going to get soaked, aren’t we?’
Crunch, chew, chew, chew. ‘Already done that three times today. Don’t fancy another go.’
Moore had a rummage behind the reception desk, coming out with a little photocopied map. ‘You think it might be him? Our killer?’
‘With this lot? Might be anyone.’ She cracked off another carroty nugget. ‘If he’s the gamekeeper-slash-handyman, he’d know where those big ladders were, wouldn’t he?’
Moore nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘He comes and goes as he pleases, has access to weapons, and I bet he’s got keys to every room in the hotel too. In case they need fixing. I’d say he had to be pretty high up the suspect list.’
Sergeant Moore plucked a couple of hotel brollies from the stand by the doors and stepped out onto the gravel beneath the portico, skirting one of those spreading puddles in his sodden socks and soggy shoes.
‘Shame you didn’t bring the wellington boots in from the Landy.
Would’ve come in handy right about now.’
She stared at him. ‘I traipsed across half the Highlands in my only dry shoes, and there were wellies in the Land Rover?’
That was it, it was official now: next time she got her hands on PC McKinnon, she was going to bloody well kill him.
Fifteen minutes from the hotel and the woods thickened around them like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Dark and damp and deep, the canopy filtering-down the never-ending rain to plops and dribbles that pattered into the leaf litter coating the gloomy forest floor.
And, swear to God, it felt like the trees were watching them. Tiny little eyes in the darkness, staring as they made their way along the winding path, past jagged tangles of barbed-wire brambles and great drooping ferns.
Every now and then a drip would thunk into the fabric of her brolly, reverberating unnaturally loud in the arboreal silence.
Something clicked in the undergrowth – off to the right, where the shadows had congealed to almost total darkness – and Roberta froze. Beside her, Sergeant Moore did the same, and they stood there, listening. And listening. And listening.
Just the patter of those filtered raindrops.
Moore’s voice was barely a whisper: ‘You ever see The Deer Hunter?’
‘More like bloody Deliverance.’
What if it was Nairn, the gamekeeper? Out there stalking them like they were a couple of deer. Just waiting for the best time to start shooting . . .
A minute passed. Then another one.
OK, they weren’t dead yet, so it probably wasn’t him. Just a badger or something. Nothing to worry about.
Ahem.
She hurried on, following the path. ‘So, a wee birdie tells me your ex-wife liked to put it about a bit?’
You could tell Moore was forcing the words out between gritted teeth, they had that kind of strangled sound. ‘I’m not talking about this.’
‘Come on, tell your Aunty Roberta all about it.’ Because someone else’s troubles were always a lot more fun than your own.
‘And you can tell Constable Michael McKinnon, next time he shoots his mouth off about my personal life I’m going to park that Land Rover up his backside!’ And with that, Sergeant Moore marched off at double speed, leaving her behind. Cos Susan wasn’t the only world-class sulker.
Roberta stood there, grinning as his high-vis figure got smaller. ‘WAS IT SOMETHING I SAID?’
‘You sure we’re no’ just going round and round in circles?’
Sergeant Moore slogged on. ‘Maybe?’
If anything, the woods had got darker and deeper. The path had narrowed too, reducing them to shuffling along in single file. Moore in the front, Roberta bringing up the rear.
‘If there’s no gingerbread cottage at the end of this, I’m going to be really hacked off.’
He paused and checked their sketched map. ‘Should be round about here, somewhere . . .’
And on they squelched.
Moore looked over his shoulder at her. ‘You done many of these? Murder inquiries?’
‘Millions of them. Well, at least fourteen, anyway. Maybe sixteen? Kinda lose count after a while.’
‘Wow.’ Genuinely looking impressed.
‘You hear about the Flesher case? I worked that.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Couldn’t eat sausages for a month. Absolute torture.’
The path jinked around to the right, and as they followed it the woods opened out into a clearing of ropey grass dotted with the stumps of long-dead trees – their dark bloated wood peppered with pale pustulant mushrooms.
Sergeant Moore just stood there at the edge of the clearing, mouth hanging open.
Couldn’t blame him. Because if you were looking for grade-A creepy, this was the mother lode.
A cottage sat in the middle of the clearing, its steep roof sagging around a stone chimney – pale smoke curling away into the low grey cloud.
Mean little windows glowered out from beneath the eaves, the wooden cladding festered with lichen.
It looked . . . malevolent. Like the kind of place a serial killer would skin his victims. Then eat them.
A porch ran along the front, complete with rocking chair. A wood shed caught in the act of slow-motion collapse. What was probably an outhouse just visible at the back of the mouldy property.
But that wasn’t what made Roberta stare.
It was the bones. Big bones. Small bones.
Some on their own, some joined together in bundles.
Here and there they made an almost complete skeleton – skull, spine, ribs, and pelvis, with only the limbs missing.
Deer, dogs, badgers, you name it. All trussed up and dangling from metal poles driven into the clearing floor.
She huffed out a breath. ‘Wow . . . Talk about a “fixer-upper”.’
‘Or a “stay-the-hell-away-from-er”.’