Chapter 21 #2
“What? Never mind. Bunny, I’ve been having some strange . . . symptoms, I suppose you’d call them—I just got proof positive that there’s something wrong with me—and because of that I’ve been far too ready to dismiss other things that I should have taken seriously.”
He’s looking at me polite but bewildered and I can hardly blame him. “Look, I think there’s something amiss about Peggy leaving her house. It’s been my gain but I want to work out what exactly happened and stop it happening again. Will you help me?”
“I should jolly well think I will help you,” Bunny says. “I thought it was fishy all along.”
“Let’s walk into town,” I say. “You can get your newspaper and then we can find a comfy seat in a coffee shop and hammer this out between us. How about that, eh?”
Twenty minutes later, we’ve settled down in comfy seats all right: moulded-plastic Adirondack chairs with footstools outside a chi-chi new café where my order of a latte was almost as old hat as Bunny’s Lapsang tea.
“I want to track down Peggy’s son,” I tell him.
“But you found her,” he says. “Where she’d been, I mean.”
“Indeed I did,” I say. “The Elms, in Kincardine. But now I need Peggy’s son for something else.”
“Really?” Bunny says. “Another one?”
I have no idea what that means and I’m tempted to leave it alone and stick with the thing I’m actually here to find out: Peggy’s son’s address or phone number. Even his first name would be a start. Luckily, instead, I decide to let Bunny sidetrack me.
“What are these veiled hints you keep dropping?” I ask him. “Along with the assurances that you’re not judging me? The more what the merrier? Another one what?”
“Oh, ignore me.” He flaps his hand. “If I could have had young ladies coming and going the way you have men, I’d have been all for it.”
“What men?” I say, feeling my heartbeat begin to quicken.
“Come now, Lindsay. Don’t be coy. The first one was the very night you moved in. He strolled up the drive bold as brass at gone midnight and, as far as I could tell, he let himself in through the front door with a key.”
“Yes!” I yelp. “He did! But you’re supposed to be in the Neighbourhood Watch. Why didn’t you do something?” He starts blustering on about the key again but I interrupt him to ask him how slowly a lock picker would have to pick a lock before he called the police.
“You never said anything about it the next day,” he points out, sulking.
“I thought I was having a bad dream,” I say. “Or a night terror. For half a minute I seriously entertained the idea that the house was haunted.” I take a moment. “I don’t know if it’s better or worse to think there really was someone in there. The very first night!”
“Oh, this was no ghost,” Bunny says to me. “Not that I’m ruling out the existence of a spirit dimension, you understand. But this was a great galumphing sort of fellow. Flesh and blood and plenty of it.”
“No,” I say. “That was the second one. If you’re sure it was two different men and not the same one twice.
” I drop back in my Adirondack chair and let my head rest against the plastic planks.
The server inside the window is watching us curiously.
Morning coffee with your grandad, as she probably thinks, is usually polite conversation, not gasps and outbursts.
“Have I switched them round?” He puts on a fake-quavery voice.
“I’m ninety-six, you know.” I can’t help laughing.
“But the other one was quite a different chap—trust me on that. Oily, I thought. Dreadful posture. And he was smoking a cigarette too. Now, I’ve nothing against old Lady Nicotine per se, but it’s bad form to be puffing away when you let yourself into someone else’s house. ”
“Uh-huh,” I say. I’m busy thinking. Or not exactly thinking but trying to keep my mind wide open to let an idea rise from where it’s lurking, like a trout at the overhanging bank of a shallow river.
“Next, on an evening when you now say you weren’t even there, there were three of them! The first two and another. This last one was a very rough-looking type.”
“Oh Bunny,” I say. “I wish you had told me all this a bit sooner.” Because, of course, with the addition of the “very rough-looking” third man, it’s easy to work out who these visitors were, even though I cannot begin to account for them rampaging through my place.
The ogre was no such thing, for a start.
He was—and I knew this even that night—just a big, solid kind of a man, from Perthshire farming stock, like I’d thought when I met him in the daytime.
He was, in fact, Farmer George, Mr. Walker of Rattray Walker, whose first name I’ve forgotten although John introduced him last night.
And the oily one who was smoking when Bunny saw him was Nicotine Ned, who permanently reeks of tobacco.
Was he Eric Something? And the rough type that made Bunny want to call the police? That was my own dear brother.
And it all seems so very silly. I would almost say they cooked up the midnight visitations, like schoolboys, as a dare.
“Who are they?” Bunny asks.
“They play poker together.”
“A card school? Hardly more respectable than my first guess.”
“But you only saw the three of them?”
“Wouldn’t that be enough!” says Bunny. The server is out wiping tables now, eavesdropping and barely trying to hide it. “I admit I was beginning to wonder how many men friends you had.”
“One,” I say. “But there are four in the . . . what did you call it? Card school? They were a man down last night, but it’s four as a general rule.”
“And who the dickens are they?”
Gently and with a watchful eye on him in case he has a heart attack or a fit of apoplexy, I tell him everything. I lay out how a nursing home manager took Peggy in, and Lord’s Yard disposed of her stuff, and finally the property centre in BofA handled the sale of her beloved house.
Once I’m finished, I go inside and fetch him a glass of water and a sweet biscuit. The server eyes me closely but says nothing. God knows what she thinks is going on out there but she’s definitely on Team Bunny, which I’m very glad to know, considering.
“So,” he says when he’s had a mouthful and also dipped his handkerchief in the glass and wiped his neck and forehead. “There’s a consortium of kidnappers, thieves and fences conspiring to defraud people like me out of their property.”
“It looks like it,” I say. “Peggy might be the first but she just as easily might not be. And it’s all very likely done with the permission of their families, the very people who should be making sure their elderly relatives are looked after.”
“Advocating for them,” says Bunny, nodding vigorously. “Agitating for pavement dips and grab rails. Quite. Indeed. I agree.”
“That sounds personal.” He’s never mentioned anyone.
“Oh, they’re never off the phone,” he says.
“My daughter would love nothing better than to tidy me away into a little flat somewhere, with a warden, but my grandsons have been marvellous. More or less telling the parents that if they put me away then they’d better watch out when it’s their turn.
Don’t worry about that for a moment, Lindsay. I’m well looked after.”
“Peggy probably thought—” I say, then stop myself. I don’t want to make him fret for nothing.
But he’s not thinking about himself. “I should have known she couldn’t have gone downhill as fast as all that,” he says.
“Although she did, didn’t she?” I say. “Just in a different order. Not failing health then nursing home. Nursing home then failing health.” We stare at one another for a long moment.
“I suppose these places are pretty tightly regulated,” I say.
“I mean, the Elms was suspiciously quiet when I was there but she can’t have suffered any actual neglect. Right?”
“No, no, no, none of that,” Bunny says. “They will have had an attending physician apart from anything. In fact, it’s rather hard to see how the plan could function without one.
I’d have said a doctor would be far more use to them than a junk man.
The clearing of the house and disposal of the furniture seems rather trivial compared with what the other two do. ”
“My brother is . . . easily led,” I say. “He’s had his share of troubles and it’s left him . . .”
“The fourth one must be the doctor,” Bunny says.
“Not a very good one, going by Peggy. But the other two aren’t all that great at their bit either, are they? Like we said, she went downhill fast in the home. And as to the sale of the house, I’m pretty sure they could have got more for it than I paid.”
“Perhaps they didn’t dare,” Bunny says. “What did you pay?”
“Seven hundred,” I tell him. “But a top lawyer looked at everything and said it was all above board.”
“Seven hundred thousand?” says Bunny. “For Saint Helen’s? That seems rather scant, my dear, if you don’t mind me being blunt with you.”
“I’ll ask him again,” I say. “My lawyer, I mean. I’ll double-check. He seemed to think it was unremarkable.”
“And where did you find him? This ‘top lawyer’?”
I feel a bit sick suddenly. “You’re right,” I say. “He’s not a property specialist. He’s a . . .” I’ve forgotten again but I’ve still got his card in my wallet and I take it out and show it to Bunny.
“Golly,” he says. “Advocate depute. No, I should think it’s been a while since this chap did any conveyancing right enough. How did you bend him to your will?”
“He’s my one and only boyfriend,” I say.
I have no idea what advocate depute means.
It certainly doesn’t say it on David’s card.
“Have you really never crossed paths with him since I moved in?” I ask.
“Some Neighbourhood Watch you are! You clock the uninvited guests and assume I’m on the game and my legitimate gentleman caller is the only one you never see? ”