Chapter 13
The path snaked its way between the bone offerings to the cottage’s ratty wooden porch.
Roberta grimaced. ‘Aye . . . don’t know about you but I’m promoting our sinister gamekeeper to Suspect Number One.’
‘Right.’ Moore squared his shoulders. ‘Let’s go rattle the bugger’s cage.’ He marched along the path, back straight, head up. Hotel umbrella held high and proud.
She stayed where she was, watching him go.
This, right here, was the start of pretty much every horror movie that ended up with everyone dead and eaten. And she was far too pretty to end up in some fusty old git’s casserole dish.
But it wasn’t as if Sergeant Moore could cope on his own, was it? Man was about as useful as a chocolate soup bowl.
Which meant, like it or not, she had to follow the daft bugger into the monster’s lair.
‘Bah.’ She squelched along after him, rain thuddering against her brolly, cascading off the brim in teeny waterfalls.
Up ahead, Sergeant Moore came to a complete halt halfway down the path, as bottle-tops and empty tins rattled on either side of him. Was that a tripwire wrapped around his left ankle?
Yeah, that wasn’t suspicious at all.
He backed away a couple of paces, shaking his foot free of the line. ‘Maybe we should—’
The cottage door banged open and the gamekeeper stepped out, face a collection of hard angry wrinkles, the shotgun pointing right at them. ‘What do you want?’
Roberta picked her way past Moore – putting herself between him and the gun – and treated the old psycho to a nice unthreatening smile.
‘Albert? Albert Nairn? Police.’ Just so there was no confusion, she grabbed Sergeant Moore’s shoulders and spun him around to show off the word ‘POLICE’ picked out in reflective silver letters on the back of his high-vis jacket.
Nairn raised a hairy grey eyebrow. ‘Oh aye?’
‘Any chance we can come in out of the pishing rain? Only I left my gills at home.’
He narrowed his eyes, mouth pinched like he was trying to suck something out of his dentures. Then he harrumphed, turned, and headed back inside, leaving the door open behind him.
Moore turned the right way around again. ‘Bet he’s got a banjo in there.’
‘At least he didn’t tell you you’ve got a pretty mouth.’ She climbed up onto the porch and stepped inside.
OK, that was . . . different.
The cottage was all one room, with a bed in the corner, a rocking chair by the fireplace, and a kitchen table with three wooden seats.
No TV, no radio. A trio of storm lanterns hung from hooks in the ceiling, lending the place a septic-yellow glow that wasn’t anywhere near bright enough to banish the gloom.
But more than enough to really add to the horror-show vibe Albert Nairn was clearly going for.
There were probably more dead things in this one room than there were in the whole of Skirivour Castle Hotel. Only where the hotel’s collection of taxidermy was fairly standard, the stuffed menagerie in here was a lot more . . . creative. And less bound by anatomical and evolutionary constraints.
Every wall was lined with shelves, and shelves, and shelves, all groaning under the weight of dead things in various stages of finish. More hung from the ceiling, between the lanterns.
Albert Nairn had let his imagination run rampant.
One ceiling-dangling monstrosity was part fox, part hare, and part badger.
A salmon-squirrel hybrid stared at Roberta from its shelf, with glittering black-glass eyes.
What probably used to be a border collie had been merged with a goat and an eagle .
. . And there were dozens and dozens of other pick-’n’-mix monsters: all different, all weird.
He’d arranged some in semi-natural poses – or whatever passed for semi-natural when you had the back end of a wildcat, the front end of a fawn, and the head of a duck – but the really freaky chimeras were the ones doing people things.
Strange day-to-day tableaus, like the half-raven-half-stoat, wearing a tartan miniskirt and loading a miniature tumble drier.
Roberta blinked at it for a bit. But it really was there, stuffing teeny red socks into the machine. ‘OK . . .’
Nairn gave her another harrumph, propped his shotgun against the wall, and sat at the rickety table with his back to her. Fiddling away at something.
Sergeant Moore slipped in from outside and closed the door. Then stood there, gawping at Dr Moreau’s petting zoo. ‘Well, this is . . . homely.’
‘Hmph.’
‘We need to have a word.’ Roberta ducked under a twelve-legged foxipede, on her way to the table.
Soon as she drew level with it, Nairn slid an empty chair out for her with his foot – the wooden legs screeching across the bare floorboards.
She settled into it. ‘So, Albert. Bert. Bertie?’
He fixed her with his yellowy eyes. ‘“Nairn” is fine.’
‘Right, Nairn, we need to talk to you about . . .’ And that’s when it finally registered what the old man was actually working on. ‘Oh.’
It was a tableau of the morning’s jolly discovery, rendered in weird-as-hell taxidermy.
He’d replaced the stag statue with a stuffed squirrel.
Only the squirrel had little antlers and hooves on its back legs.
The part of Sir Reginald Bradbury-Scott was played by a mouse, impaled on the squirrel’s ‘antlers’, just like the real-life version.
The mouse was even wearing a teeny pair of tartan pyjamas – the bottoms down around its ankles.
Nairn turned his creation, so she could get a good long look at it.
‘Lot of people’ll tell you about the Jackalope, but that’s a Yank creature.
’ He pointed at the squirrel-thing with a strange mixture of pride and awe in his voice.
‘Feòrag a ’Bhàis stalks the glens and moors of Scotland, and if he catches your soul when you die, before you can flee this filthy world, he buries it beneath an ancient oak tree, where the twisted roots will feast on it and claim you as their own. ’
‘Right.’ Mad as a sack of hedgehogs. She shared a quick look with Sergeant Moore, trying not to make it too obvious. ‘And did you make this today? Because it’s a lot of work since this morning.’
A smile blossomed on that wrinkly face, followed a moment later by a high ringing laugh as Nairn swung a finger up, pointing at a shelf behind her.
And when she turned, there they were: a whole chorus line of antlered squirrels, all just waiting their turn to shine in some exciting frieze.
He lowered the finger. ‘Now this was more challenging.’ Bending over, he guddled about under the table, emerging with a small wooden box about the size of a cigarette packet.
He lifted the lid and pulled out another mouse.
This one was white, wearing blue trousers and teeny stripy red-and-black socks.
And a grey bra that was a pretty accurate representation of Old Faithful.
The mouse even had a miniature chamber pot in one hand.
He’d made a little her. A dead mouse mini-me.
‘Eeek . . .’
‘Had to glue three kinds of badger fur to its head to get the hair right.’ Nairn stroked the shock of greys up into random spikes, then placed Rodent Roberta on the table in front of her. It stood there – or at least balanced on its own two . . . paws – looking up at her with shiny glass eyes.
‘Well, that’s just . . . It’s . . . I . . .’
His voice softened, like an indulgent uncle. ‘You can keep her if you like. I can always make another.’
She stared at the mouse, then at Sergeant Moore, then at Albert Nairn, then back to Moore again, eyebrows creeping further and further up her head. Help!
Moore took out his notebook. ‘Mr Nairn, you were familiar with Sir Reginald Bradbury-Scott, were you not?’ All formal.
The smile vanished from Nairn’s face. ‘Never does to be familiar with the aristocracy, they don’t like it when the lower classes get ideas above their station.’
Roberta blinked.
Did she really look like that?
I mean, it was flattering . . . in a way. A very weird and disturbing way, but still.
‘I take it you didn’t like him very much?’
‘Oh, the man was an absolute shite, but that’s his prerogative as a knight of the realm.’ Nairn went into his toolbox for a sort of hooked tool, a saucer, and another mouse – a fresh one this time. Digging away at its insides. Making sticky red screlchy noises. ‘Not my business to like him or not.’
No one had ever made a taxidermied statue of her before. Or if they had, they’d kept it to themselves.
‘Where were you last night between the hours of eleven and six a.m.?’
‘It’s the natural order of things, isn’t it?
Some folks is above other folks, some folks is beneath.
’ He pointed a chunk of hooked-out mouse at another shelf.
‘Your sea eagle eats the fox, the fox eats the weasel, the weasel eats the mouse, the mouse eats worms and bugs. There’s an order, it’s how nature works. ’ More digging.
Roberta shook her head, breaking eye contact with the teeny her. ‘Aye, but only because the worms can’t take up arms and overthrow their sea eagle oppressors.’ A frown. ‘Because they haven’t got any arms.’ Looking around at the cut-and-paste-animal horror show. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘Mr Nairn, I need to know where you were between eleven last night and six this morning.’
A chunk of innards splotched into the saucer. ‘Does a body good to know who his betters are.’
‘Nah.’ She settled back in her seat. ‘The class system exists for one reason and one reason only: to keep people like you and me down. And it only works because dafties buy into the fiction that some buggers really are inherently better than others just because of who their mum and dad are. It’s like Tinkerbell: only exists if you believe in it. ’
Sergeant Moore put his pen down. ‘Is anyone listening to me at all?’
‘Clap if you believe in the upper classes, children!’
Nairn gave a long, slow clap. ‘And don’t pretend you’re anything like me. You’re not working class.’
Roberta stiffened. ‘Don’t tell me I’m no’ working—’