The Whisper in the Glen

Book 774: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When Kate forsakes London to join her husband in the North of Scotland, it is more than a journey to an unfamiliar land. The spirit of the Highland village, invested with ancient clan warfare, works its magic on her; and the foundations of her matter-of-fact marriage, and of her being, shift eerily. Kate soon finds herself enmeshed in the tangle of desires, jealousies and darker emotions that run riot beneath the deceptively calm surface of the ingrown little town. Passions rise in the hills; guilty secrets are laid bare in the valleys; and a lonely and ironic death on a mountainside rights old wrongs. 'One of the most haunting, with a marvellously romantic Highland setting ... eminently satisfying and inevitable' Publishers Weekly

Release date: July 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter One

Kate sat in the middle of the almost abandoned kitchen. She sat leaning slightly forward, with her elbows on the table. There was another chair pulled in on the other side of
the table. The two chairs and the table were the only movable furniture left. Richard came and stood in the doorway, looking at her. She did not hear him come and did not see him. She was staring
out of the window, and he was out of her line of vision. They were both tired. Moves were an exhausting business, quite apart from the mental uncertainties. In this case the mental uncertainties
were considerable.

He said, ‘Tired?’ and she turned and looked at him. She knew that he had been watching her for a moment before he had spoken to her, and that now he felt guilty about it. They had
been married thirteen years, and had great respect for each other’s privacy. She knew, too, that her good looks survived the dirty overall and the smear of dust on her forehead, and she
wondered whether, when he looked at her like that, privately, he saw her as other men saw her. But it was one of the questions you did not ask.

She smiled at him. ‘Exhausted,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’

He came in and pulled out the other chair and sat opposite her across the empty table. ‘Pretty well,’ he said. ‘But the end’s in sight.’

He looked, in fact, more tired than she did. He was quite a bit older, for one thing. Also, although they had shared the physical work, he carried almost the whole mental burden. The move was
his idea. For the same reason, Kate was not going out of her way to feel sorry for him. She had demurred when he suggested it, listened to his arguments and agreed. Once she had agreed, she would
have been ashamed to drag her feet. But she was not going to lie awake at night wondering if they were doing the right thing. He could if he liked, and she was fairly certain he had, but that was
up to him. If it turned out to be a mistake, he would have to think again. The thing was presumably not irrevocable. She said, ‘So long as you’re not too tired to cope when you get
there. You’ve still got the drive up.’

He did not like that. She had not meant to gall him, but she should have known. The one suggestion he was not prepared to listen to was that he might have bitten off more than he could chew,
simply with the job. He said, ‘I know that. But I’ll take it slow, and I’ve got a couple of days when I get there.’

‘Well, don’t let Dr Fagan rush you.’

He saw now that her concern was genuine. His moments of touchiness never lasted. He smiled at her. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to drop the Llanabba joke,
or you’ll be making it up there. From what I saw of Haskell, I doubt if he’s got his Evelyn Waugh at his finger-tips, and I’m damned sure his wife hasn’t, but someone may.
Anyway, it isn’t really fair. The school’s not derelict, by any means. Plenty of money, I should think. A bit cranky, but even that’s fashionable in its way.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘we’re all Gordonstoun now. So long as they don’t make you wear the kilt and climb mountains.’

‘Don’t worry. They won’t. They know that.’ He looked at her, a little worried. ‘The place really is lovely, you know. I’ll be interested to see your Highland
blood stirring. You’ll probably insist on being called Catriona before you’ve been there a month.’

She wanted to reassure him now. Even the suggestion of dragged feet appalled her. She sat back and smiled at him. ‘I doubt it, but you never know. Let’s have some coffee. We can
still manage that, at least.’

‘Can we? That’s fine. You make it, and I’ll go and gather up the last few bits.’

He heaved himself out of his chair and went out with determined sprightliness. Kate got up and took the coffee things out of the basket. Catriona, she thought. Catriona Macinnes, born in Bombay
and never been north of Newcastle. She even looked Highland. That was where her looks came from, all aquiline nose and cheekbones, with the fair skin and dark hair and grey-blue eyes. But now she
was Kate Wychett, English on the mother’s side, married to one of the most English men she had ever met and still, after all these years, in reaction against the expatriate extravagances of
her dead father. Oh well, she thought, it would be interesting, anyhow. As for her blood’s stirring, she supposed it still could at thirty-two, but she doubted if a landscape could do it. She
put the water on the stove in the small saucepan and went back to her chair.

Never since Julia, no stirring of the blood over anything, presumably because the blood was plain scared of being stirred. She had never been able to make up her mind whether it would have been
better or worse if they had had other children. They could have, judging by the ease with which she had started and produced Julia. But she had been full young when she married, and they had agreed
not for a few years. Full young, that was her father’s phrasing. Just young, she had been, not yet twenty, and damn all Scots nonsense. She had left it all to Richard, who had obliged with
his usual consideration and efficiency. Not cold-blooded, exactly, because there was nothing wrong with Richard as a husband. She had been a virgin when she married, but he, in a respectable,
unexplained, middle-class sort of way, had not, and she had never had any reason to regret either fact. Then they had decided it was time to start, and started she had at the drop of a hat and to
everybody’s satisfaction. And then when Julia was three, and they were starting to think about a boy to go with her, she had died of measles. Measles of all things, one of those occasional
appalling lapses of a medical efficiency everybody took for granted.

That had been the moment of decision, and they had fluffed it between them. She knew now that she had wanted another child straight away, as people said that if your dog was run over, you should
go straight out and buy another puppy of the same breed. But she had never managed to say so, and Richard, all kindness and consideration, had assumed the opposite, and he was not a man to be taken
off his guard. Then the emotional numbness had settled on her, with the sudden, second-wave unexpectedness of delayed shock, and after that she had left Richard’s assumptions undisturbed.
What he had wanted she did not know. He had been a perfectly good father while his paternity lasted, just as he was a perfectly good husband, but she could not see him yearning for offspring in his
own right; and she herself had wanted nothing. Nothing, anyhow, as emotionally demanding as a child. They were happy in bed, as they were out of it, in a secure, low-keyed sort of way, but they
were giving no more hostages to fortune, and now Richard was forty-seven and she was thirty-two. The question did not arise, but if it had, she would have said they had left it too late for that
kind of adventure.

They were proportionately freer for this kind. Making coffee in a saucepan in a derelict kitchen, because the better stuff was already stored, and the rest, in a couple of days’ time,
would be on its way to Scotland. Free to let Richard go and teach in a school nobody much had heard of, because the colonial administration he had been trained for had died under him, and he was
finding the second-rate administrative jobs open to him at home increasingly depressing. Free to starve in a genteel sort of way on a part-pension if he found he could not teach, even by the
standards of Glenaidon, and he was by then too old to get back into administration. But she was not really worried. It was Richard’s responsibility, and he was a professional worrier. If
there was anything to worry about, he could worry for both of them. She went to the door and called, ‘Coffee!’ and he called, ‘Right!’ in a strange echoing voice from one of
the empty rooms upstairs.

He came down carrying his last gleanings in a cardboard carton which he put down in a corner of the kitchen. He seemed quite cheerful now that the dismantling was over. The early colonists had
probably thrown a party when they had burned their boats on the new-found beach and there was nothing left but the green hills inland. He said, ‘That’s the lot,’ and came and sat
down at the table to drink his coffee.

Kate said, ‘Are you going to wear a gown?’

‘Good God, I shouldn’t think so, not at Glenaidon. Neither a gown nor a kilt. Certainly not both at once, though that would be quite something. Not but what I’m entitled to
wear one. A gown, I mean, not a kilt. Which I expect is more than can be said for some of my colleagues.’

She said, ‘Richard, it’s not all that ropey, is it?’

‘Not ropey at all. I’ve told you. Just not very academic. But who wants to be academic, anyway?’

‘What about the boys, then?’

‘Well, I haven’t seen them yet, of course, but they’ll be all right. No lack of discipline, after all. It’s not that sort of cranky. Less trouble than the Malembos, I
expect. Only of course I didn’t have to teach them history. Anyway, it must be far pleasanter teaching history if you don’t have to worry too much about exam results. I think I’ll
enjoy it.’ He looked at her, a little cautiously. He said, ‘It’s you I worry about.’

Impatience overcame her suddenly, and she put her cup down in the saucer with a small sharp clink. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Look, I agreed to the thing and
I’ve made up my mind to it. I’m not worrying. All right, it may not work. It may not work for you. It may not work for me, though I can’t think how. If it doesn’t work,
we’ll have to look at it again. But give it a chance. If you worry about me, it only makes me feel guilty, and that’s not fair.’

Her impatience always managed to take him by surprise. Even when he ought to have expected it, it disarmed and mortified him. ‘No?’ he said. ‘No, I suppose not, now you put it
like that. All right, I won’t worry about you, I promise. But if you can’t stand it, just sing out.’

‘Sing out be damned. I’ll scream so loud you’ll hear the purple glens replying. But not unless I’ve really got something to scream about. Until I do, take it that my
heart’s in the Hielands, all appearances to the contrary. It may be, yet. I said so just now.’

He let his breath go in a small sigh, and nodded and got up. ‘All right. You pack up the coffee things and I’ll put the rest of the stuff in the car.’ He went out into the
hall, and she heard him discussing quietly with himself what he should take first. When he had made up his mind, he opened the front door and dragged a box against it to hold it open. It had never
stayed open on its own, not all the time they had been in the house, and now the brass doorstop they had always used had gone with the rest of the stuff. He took the first of the waiting boxes and
went down the steps to the car. She gathered up the coffee things and took them to the sink.

With only Richard and herself in the house, she had never been what they called tied, to the sink, but she had spent a certain amount of time there, and it was her province. She was a good and
careful washer up. So was Richard if the need arose, but she preferred to be left to herself. As with so much else, he accepted this but did not trade on it. Now she was there for the last time.
She ought to feel something, relief or regret or even resentment, but she felt nothing at all, or only the usual mild, detached curiosity at her own lack of feeling. She stowed the things in the
basket and went across the hall. Richard was just picking up his last load, and she followed him down the steps and put the basket with the rest in the car. The front door, deprived of its stop,
swung gently shut behind them. It was as if the house, too, had no particular regrets.

Richard went back up the steps, but she stayed by the car. He opened the door, put his hand inside and released the latch-lock. Then he turned and looked down at her. He looked solemn and
slightly baffled, as if the occasion called for some comment, but he could not think what. He made, as he always made, a kindly and distinguished figure, and she wanted to help him out of his
difficulty. She could not think of anything to say either, but she smiled at him. He smiled back at her, relieved. Then he pulled the door firmly shut behind him and came down the steps. He did not
say anything at all.

Only later, when they had had their hotel dinner and retired to their hotel bedroom, he said, ‘I’m sorry about the house.’ He was propped up against the pillows in one of the
twin beds, watching her as she brushed her hair.

She stopped brushing and looked at him, not directly, but in the glass over the dressing-table. ‘Why sorry?’ she said.

He was at a loss again now, as he had been when they were still outside the front door, only this time he had committed himself to speech and had to go on with it. ‘I don’t know.
Sorry to leave it, I suppose. It hasn’t done us badly.’

She went on brushing her hair. She knew his trick of personalising inanimate things. It was a man’s trick, almost entirely. They were detached with people, but treated their possessions as
if they were pet dogs. He did not regret leaving the house; he felt guilty because he had abandoned it. But she did not want to argue with him. She said, ‘It’s done us very well. But we
can’t live there for fun. It was the job that was wrong. It’s the job we’re leaving. The house is only incidental.’

He seemed comforted. He settled down slightly on the pillows. ‘You’re perfectly right,’ he said. ‘So long as you don’t regret it.’

She held her breath for a moment, brushing her hair with a few strokes of unnecessary violence and looking herself firmly in the eye in the glass. Then she said, ‘I shan’t regret it.
Not unless the Glenaidon house is too awful. And you say it’s not.’

‘It’s not awful at all. It’s very different, of course, but it’s rather nice. I think you’ll like it.’

She stopped brushing and put the brush down on the dressing-table. She looked herself over, deliberately and unselfconsciously, in the glass. She thought, ‘I really look very nice.’
It almost surprised her. She turned away from the dressing-table and took off her dressing-gown. She no longer felt unselfconscious. She threw the dressing-gown across the foot of her bed.
‘Let’s see, anyhow,’ she said. When she went up the alley-way between the beds, he put out an arm to her, and she got into his bed, not hers.

They never talked about their love-making. They never had, and it did not seem to matter. He had taught her all he knew, and they had found out more for themselves, but they never talked about
it. Sometimes if he thought he had hurt her, he would say ‘Sorry’ or ‘All right?’, and sometimes she would tell him if her leg had gone to sleep or he had his elbow on her
hair, but they never talked about the thing itself. It would have seemed like an intrusion on each other’s privacy, even if it was the private experience of a shared pleasure. Her body
responded to his love-making in what she took to be the normal way, and unless she was tired or unwell, her body was ready for it when it was offered. If it was not ready, he saw this and accepted
it. There did not seem to be anything that needed talking about.

He was already drowsy when she got out of bed and left him. That was a bad sign, because when he fell asleep too quickly, he was inclined to wake up an hour or two later and be awake the rest of
the night. She stood between the beds, conscious of the colder air on her legs and arms and the inevitable small patch of dampness where she had pulled her nightdress down to save the hotel sheet.
The light was out now, but a reflection of the street lighting came faintly between the curtains with the muffled noise of the traffic. They had opened the window a little because the hotel heating
was too much for them, and now the room was surprisingly chilly.

Quite deliberately, she roused him. . .