Death Stalk

Book 180: Murder Room

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The small Hebridean island of Alsaig is facing a crisis. It is famous for its only export, a particularly fine malt whisky, upon which most of the islanders depend for their livelihood. But the distillery is threatened with a takeover by an American firm, which would not only make many of the workforce redundant but also adulterate the product. But owner Alisdair Matheson is refusing to sell, despite threats of sabotage and an attempt on his life. The situation is complicated further by an actual murder on the island, which the locals believe to have been committed by American Mike MacDonald. Tension mounts as storms lash the island, isolating it from the outside world and locking the killer in with the islanders.

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 192

Sample

THE GIRL’S BODY lay crumpled in the heather, a few feet from the road that ran along by the sea. Her dress, drenched by the rain which had fallen
during the night, clung to her, showing the outlines of her prominent bones and the immaturity of her figure. It had been ripped open at the neck, leaving one of her shoulders bare and the skirt
was rucked up almost to the tops of her thighs. She had been wearing nothing underneath it.

A man driving along the road had caught sight of the body and braked his battered Land Rover to a noisy halt. Leaping from the driving seat, he ran and bent over the girl’s body. Her eyes,
staring in the frozen grimace of death, and the colour of her face told him at once that there was nothing he could do for her. He knelt by the body and saw the bruises on the insides of her
thighs, the purplish black swelling on her lower lip and the congealed blood at one corner of her mouth.

Without knowing why, he reached out and touched her face. His fingers did not recoil from the cold, damp flesh, for he was a gamekeeper, hardened to death by long familiarity. Instead they
lingered on her cheek for a few moments, an inarticulate sign not of affection but of lust now frustrated.

In the heather not far from the girl lay a bedraggled white cardigan and beside it a red plastic purse that must have fallen from one of its pockets. Opening the purse the man looked inside and
found, in addition to a large key and a few coins and other odds and ends, three new ten-pound notes.

Standing up abruptly he looked along the road and the field beyond it to where the roof of a house was just visible among the trees on the lower slopes of Cnoc na Moine. Although at that hour of
the morning there would be no one to hear him, he shouted above the noise of the gale that was sweeping the island.

‘Matheson, you bastard, I’ll kill you for this!’

When he awoke, MacDonald did not at first open his eyes. He wished also that he could shut his mind to the unwelcome sensations that were becoming depressingly familiar in the
mornings: the dull ache behind reddened eyes, the parched mouth, the nausea, the self-reproach and, worse than all these, the yawning chasm in his memory. The loss of recollection which often
followed an evening of heavy drinking still frightened him, even though to the best of his knowledge he had never lost control and done anything reckless or dangerously stupid during the hours of
oblivion. He did not wish to think about the previous evening but, as he lay on the bed, he found himself feverishly searching the void, looking for a half-remembered image, a fragment of
conversation, anything that might tell him how and with whom he had spent the missing hours.

His only reassurance was to know that he was on Alsaig. In Los Angeles there were anonymous bars and clip-joints, and faceless women and their pimps to strip a man’s pocketbook as
thoroughly as his memory. On a tiny Hebridean island there was no stupidity he could perpetrate to cause him serious harm and always someone who would pick up the incapable drunk and take him home.
On Alsaig they had sympathy for a man who had taken a dram too many.

When at last he abandoned as fruitless his attempts to recall any of the events of the previous evening, he opened his eyes and sat up, and found that he was fully clothed except for his shoes
which he had kicked under the bed. Retrieving them he put them on, deciding after inspection that they would survive another day without being cleaned.

He went into the kitchen of the cottage and filled a kettle. The water ran brown from the tap as it always did after rain. When he had first arrived at the cottage and had drawn a bath, he had
let the tap run for several minutes, thinking that the discolouration of the water was rust in the pipes after months of disuse. Now he knew it was colour from the peat through which every burn on
the island ran. Always a pale yellow, the water turned to brown when the burns were high. After putting the kettle on the stove, he went out for air. The air was the finest thing on Alsaig, fresh
and more invigorating than thrusting one’s head under a cold tap.

Outside the cottage the day assaulted his senses. The wind had swung to south-easterly, driving a cold rain into his face. Alsaig, like most of the Western Isles, was never without wind, but
mostly it came from the west and his cottage was sheltered by the towering height of Beinn Laimsdearg. Today there was no protection from the ferocity of the gale, which was the strongest he had
known since coming to the island, and the sea beyond the rocky promontory on which the cottage stood had been whipped up into an angry, swirling mass. Low clouds, racing across the sky, hid the
summit of the mountain and more than a thousand feet of its upper slopes.

Back in the living-room of the cottage, as he drank his instant coffee, he looked at the small stack of reference books, the ring-folders filled with the fruits of four years of research in
American libraries, and the portable typewriter. They were the reason why he had come to Alsaig on a year’s sabbatical, at the suggestion of his university, to write a book. He tried not to
look at the packet of typing paper, opened but unused except for the top half-a-dozen sheets which at spasmodic intervals had followed each other crumpled into the biscuit tin that served him as a
wastepaper basket, for it was an irritating reminder of his inadequacy.

He had finished his coffee and had taken the empty mug back into the kitchen when Mrs Anderson, the woman who came in every morning to clean the cottage, arrived. He heard her knock on the front
door. She always knocked, even though the door was never locked, and waited for a few moments before she came in. The door opened directly into the living-room and MacDonald supposed the knock was
meant as a warning so that she should not find him in an embarrassing situation. The thought made him smile. How many beddable women were there on the island he wondered.

When he returned to the living-room, Mrs Anderson had already begun to dust and tidy. As soon as she saw him she stopped work and pulled a sheet of paper from the pocket of her apron.

‘There are a few things I need for cleaning, Mr MacDonald,’ she said, holding the paper out towards him. ‘Polish, household soap and so on. Also you’re running short of
some groceries. See, I’ve made a list for you.’

‘That was kind of you. Thanks.’

‘I can get them for you if you like. I’ll be away to the village to do the messages when I finish here.’

‘That’s all right, thank-you, Mrs Anderson. I have to go into Carrabus myself anyway.’

She went into the kitchen and started working, energetically and noisily, washing the few dishes he had used since the previous day and then cleaning the sink and scrubbing the stone floor. Mrs
Anderson always worked energetically, attacking every household chore with an aggressive urgency, and when they were all done she would put on her coat and leave the cottage with an air of regret,
as though she wished she could start all over again. MacDonald was sure that even if there had been a vacuum cleaner or an electric floor polisher or any other labour-saving device in the place she
would have refused to use them.

Suddenly she reappeared in the living-room. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said casually, as she might tell him that a tap in the kitchen needed a new washer. ‘The Campbell
girl’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

MacDonald had to think for a second before he decided whom she meant by ‘the Campbell girl’. There were at least three unrelated Campbell families on Alsaig. Then he realized from
the disapproval in Mrs Anderson’s voice that she could only be speaking of Sheena Campbell. There were few females on the island who, without stretching latitude too far, could be described
as girls, for more often than not young people left Alsaig as soon as possible after they had finished their schooling to live and work on the mainland; and Sheena was probably the only one who
provoked the disapproval of the normally tolerant islanders.

What puzzled him was that he could not visualize her as a corpse, a small heap of inanimate flesh. Instead he saw a different picture, vague and diffuse like the recollection of a dream yet
strangely haunting, of the girl’s face, slightly larger than life, looking at him, laughing, mocking.

Jake Thomson stood by the window of his office on the 23rd floor of a concrete and glass prestige building that stood on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets. Beneath him
he could see St Bartholomew’s Church and, a little further along, the Pan Am building. Neither the bizarre architecture of the church with its pseudo-Byzantine stonework nor the monolithic
structure which stood astride the tracks and platforms of Grand Central station interested him, for he was obsessed by his own frustrations.

His desk, a massive composition in glass, rosewood and stainless steel, created specially for him by an Italian more famous for avant-garde sculpture, dominated the room in a way that Jake,
short and burly, would never do. Returning to sit at it, he picked up a bound report, expensively produced by a firm of management consultants, the cover of which bore the title OPERATION INFILTRATE, with underneath in smaller, scarlet letters TOP SECRET.

The title was a code name of Jake’s own choice. Books about the Second World War—the memoirs of generals who had fought it, of politicians who had directed it and of journalists who
set out to destroy the reputations of both—were his favourite reading, and he was impressed by the sense of importance and secrecy which a code name imparted even to a relatively minor
military operation. The name he had chosen was also misleading, for the report was not in any sense a plan but a comprehensive survey carried out by the consultants of a privately owned Scotch
Whisky company, George Matheson and Sons, Limited.

He flicked through the pages of the report, not bothering to read them because he knew all the facts that mattered to him. George Matheson and Sons were the owners of a malt whisky distillery on
some island off the west coast of Scotland. Jake Thomson had never been to the island and, although as a boy in Tennessee he had earned his first dollars trafficking in Moonshine, he did not care
much for whisky. But he had made up his mind that he was going to buy Alsaig distillery, and the reason for his irritation was that, in spite of the grossly over-generous offer Thomson Distillers
had made, George Matheson and Sons were refusing to sell.

He was still flicking through the pages of the report when Bud Schweizer, the Senior Vice-President of the Thomson Distillers Corporation came into the room. Schweizer was an attorney by
training and a product of Harvard who ten years previously had been working as personal assistant to a very important Senator and had been considered in Washington to be one of the smartest young
men in North America. Now, after ten years as Jake’s right-hand man and trouble shooter, he looked a good deal less young but was a good deal richer. This morning he also had the grey, drawn
look of a man who had spent the night in a jet aeroplane crossing the Atlantic.

‘How did it go?’ Jake asked immediately.

‘No dice.’

Jake swore savagely, using the crude expletives of the southern states, and Schweizer continued, ‘The company’s fireproof and so is this guy Matheson. I spent
a whole day with those Glasgow attorneys going over all the financial information they had been able to pull together and the reports of the private detectives they had hired. Those stuffed-shirt
attorneys looked down their noses at me, I can tell you, but they’ve done a good job.’

‘What about the son-in-law?’

‘He’s in hock with the bookies but only for about sixty grand. Anyway Matheson wouldn’t bail him out. It seems he doesn’t like the guy and would be as pleased as hell to
see his daughter’s marriage collapse.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Fraser still thinks he can persuade Matheson to sell. He says his old man and Matheson were buddies way back. He crossed over to the island yesterday.’

‘Do you think he can talk Matheson into doing a deal?’

Schweizer shrugged his shoulders. ‘Could be. These Brits are all hung about family friendships and the old school tie and all that crap.’

‘Fraser’s a born loser. We can’t rely on the man.’

‘I agree. I have another plan, but there can be no harm in letting him have one more try.’

‘Maybe you should have told him that his job is on the line. Either we get the distillery or he gets the bullet.’

‘I did.’

‘WHAT DID ANGUS Murdoch want at this hour of the morning?’ Una Darroch asked her husband as she poured out his
tea.

‘The Campbell lass has been murdered.’

‘I know that.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Dugald, when he brought the milk. The whole island must know by now.’

They were alone in the dining-room, for the few guests staying in the small hotel had finished their breakfast and had left to shoot or fish on the Colville estate, or to make their business
calls if they had not come to the island for pleasure. Darroch always breakfasted late, for he believed he was entitled to run his hotel in the manner of a landed proprietor living on his estate
and allowing others, in his case his wife and three elderly women from the village, to do the work. He justified this laziness by saying that he was often up late working in the hotel bar, which
was true because he did not feel obliged to observe licensing hours as there were no police on the island to enforce them, and the bar closed only when the last customer decided he did not wish to
drink any more or was too drunk to do so. Today he was even later than usual, for he had been roused from his bed when Murdoch, the distillery manager, had called to see him and they had talked for
a long time.

‘It’s as well that the girl was not working in the hotel,’ Mrs Darroch remarked as she began laying the half-dozen tables in the dining-room for lunch.

This was her way of reminding Darroch that eighteen months ago he had engaged Sheena Campbell to work in the hotel as part waitress, part chamber-maid, part kitchen help. It was an arrangement
which she herself had brought to an abrupt end when she noticed Darroch’s eyes following the girl around hungrily.

Darroch let her remove his empty porridge plate and replace it with one loaded with eggs and bacon and mushrooms before he spoke again. ‘It was Hamish who found her.’

‘Aye. Who else would have done?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘It can only have been Hamish who killed her.’

Mrs Darroch banged four glasses down on a table in quick succession, one for each place setting. She and Hamish Grant were distant cousins and she knew Darroch had only brought Hamish’s
name into the conversation to repay her for her barbed remark about Sheena. Even so she did not feel obliged to defend a man who had brought enough disgrace on her family already.

‘And why should he do that?’ Darroch asked, not because he believed what his wife had said but because he was interested to know how she would answer.

‘Who else on the island would have killed her? Hamish has been hanging around her for this past twelvemonth, like a dog panting after a bitch on heat. And she young enough to be his
granddaughter. I suppose she teased him once too often. You’ll not be forgetting how he used to beat poor Jean when they had not long been wed.’

Darroch wiped his plate clean with a piece of bap before he remarked: ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What do you mean, disappeared?’

‘Just as I say. He took the girl’s body to the doctor’s house in his Land Rover and has not been seen since. As you know Mrs Colville has a shooting party up at Ardnahoe
waiting for him, but he’s not arrived.’

‘The police from Kilgona will be here soon enough to take him,’ his wife said, picking up his empty plate.

‘They’ll not be here this morning.’ Darroch pointed beyond the windows of the dining-room which were spattered with rain and driven spray from the Atlantic waves. ‘Angus
was expecting a lorry load of casks. They telephoned him from Kilgona to say the ferry won’t be sailing in this gale.’

As he walked along the road in the direction of the village, MacDonald had to lean forward into the gale with almost the force that a man would need to push a broken-down car.
He had put up the hood of his anorak but the rain, slanting into his face, stung his cheeks. In the seven weeks that he had spent on Alsaig he had never before experienced really bad weather.
Throughout September and early October there had been fine days punctuated only occasionally by others when a light drizzle, little more than a mist, hung rather than fell over the island, and it
had been warm even when the wind blew, which it did more often than not. Now, struggling against the gale, he felt something not unlike satisfaction. This was what he had been unconsciously hoping
to find on a Hebridean island: a challenge from the elements and, by the standards of an American campus at least, discomfort and hardship.

He had to resist a sudden impulse to turn off the road and start climbing the slopes of Beinn Laimsdearg which stretched up into the clouds on his right. When he had decided to come to Scotland
he might well have chosen one of several islands on which to live and he had been attracted to Alsaig partly by its size and remoteness, but equally by the mountain which, with its stark beauty,
dominated the island, and which symbolized for him the romance and turbulence and savagery of Scotland’s history.

‘Laimsdearg’ was a corruption of ‘Laimh’ the Gaelic word for a hand and ‘Dearg’ meaning blood-red or bloody and according to legend the name ‘Mountain
of the Bloody Hand’ could be traced back to the tenth century. It was at about that time that Norse invaders had landed on Alsaig. They had not conquered the island and subjugated its
inhabitants, as they had some others of the Western Isles, but had settled on it as colonizers, living peaceably and intermarrying with the Gaels. Legend had it that one of the Norsemen, a prince
in his own right, had fallen in love with and married the beautiful daughter of a Scottish clan chief. The marriage had been long and idyllically happy, so much so that the Norseman had been
accepted as a member of the clan. When he died his wife decided that his body should be burned and its ashes scattered from the top of the mountain they had both loved. A piper, reputed to be the
finest in the isles, led the sad procession up the mountain and as the ashes were thrown to the winds played a pibroch so poignant and so haunting that all who heard it were moved to tears. The
widow, distraught with grief, swore that the lament the piper had played was too beautiful ever to be heard by human ears again and on her command a clansman had drawn his sword and cut off the
man’s hands.

Now, looking towards the mountain, MacDonald saw that the red deer had come down from the upper slopes and were standing in groups not much more than a hundred yards away from the road. They did
not usually come down so far until the winter had set in, and he wondered whether some sixth sense told them that in that weather they would be safe from the stalkers’ rifles. By the latest
count there were over 2,000 deer on Alsaig, eight times as many as the people living on the island and far more than the lean sheep which grazed the scant grass happily side by side with them.

From his cottage to the village of Carrabus, the only village on the island, was a walk of almost exactly three miles. The road, a single track with passing places marked by black and white
posts, ran for the most part close to the sea, separated from the large grey pebbles of the shore by a narrow strip of grass and rocks. At one point it cut inland to round a small cove in which the
ruined buildings of a disused distillery stood, and MacDonald had just passed them when a car horn hooted behind him.

Stepping aside to let it pass, he saw it was a Volvo with a young woman at the wheel. She stopped the car and, not wishing to open her window, pointed first at MacDonald and then at the empty
seat next to her, raising her eyebrows as she did so to ask him whether he wanted a lift. His first impulse was to decline her offer. Although his jeans were soaked through and clung to his legs,
numb. . .