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  The helicopter’s passenger door was shoved open by a short, plump figure, muffled like a mummy from head to toe in what looked like someone’s old brown carpeting. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lonan decided. She threw down the steps the way one would fling a rope ladder over the side of a tree house, pitched out three pieces of luggage, which hit the ground with a thud, and plopped herself after them. A man followed her. He was very tall, very blond, his head bare to the cold, a well-cut cashmere overcoat, a muffler, and gloves his only capitulation to the subfreezing temperature. He would be Inspector Lynley, Lonan thought, the object of Strathclyde CID’s particular interest at the moment, considering how his arrival had been manipulated by London from beginning to end. Lonan watched him exchanging a few words with the other officer. She gestured towards the van, and Lonan expected them at that point to join him. Instead, however, they both turned to the helicopter’s steps where a third person was slowly negotiating his descent, one made awkward and difficult by the heavy brace he wore upon his left leg. Like the blond, he also had no hat, and his black hair—curly, far too long, and wildly ungovernable—blew about his pale face. His features were sharp, excessively angular. He had the look of a man who never missed a detail.

  At this unexpected arrival, Constable Lonan mouthed unspoken words of awe and wondered if Detective Inspector Macaskin had been given the news. London was sending in the heavy artillery: forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James. The constable pushed himself off the side of the van and marched eagerly to the helicopter, where the arrivals were folding the steps back inside and gathering their belongings.

  “Have you ever given thought to the fact that there might be something breakable in my suitcase, Havers?” Lynley was asking.

  “Packing on-the-job drinks?” was her tart reply. “If you’ve brought your own whisky, more the fool you. That’s a bit like taking coals to Newcastle, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That has the sound of a line you’ve been waiting to use for months.” Lynley gave a wave and a nod of thanks to the helicopter’s pilot as Lonan joined them.

  When the introductions were made, Lonan blurted out, “I heard you speak once in Glasgow,” as he shook St. James’ hand. Even inside the glove, Lonan could sense how thin it was, yet it gripped his own with surprising strength. “It was the lecture on the Cradley murders.”

  “Ah, yes. Putting a man behind bars on the strength of his pubic hair,” Sergeant Havers murmured.

  “Which is, if nothing else, metaphorically unsound,” Lynley added.

  It was obvious that St. James was accustomed to the verbal sparring of his two companions, for he merely smiled and said, “We were lucky to have it. God knows we had nothing else but a set of teeth prints gone bad on the corpse.”

  Lonan itched to discuss all the quixotic convolutions of that case with the man who four years ago had unravelled them before an astounded jury. However, as he was winding himself up to hurl a dagger-like insight, he remembered Detective Inspector Macaskin, who was awaiting their arrival at the police station, no doubt with his usual brand of tense, hall-pacing impatience.

  “Van’s over here” replaced his scintillating observation about the distortion of teeth marks kept preserved on flesh in formaldehyde. He jerked his head towards the police vehicle, and, as they gave their attention to it, his features settled into a non-verbal apology. He hadn’t thought there would be three of them. Nor had he thought they would bring St. James. Had he known, he would have insisted upon driving something more suitable in which to fetch them, perhaps Inspector Macaskin’s new Volvo which, if nothing else, had a front and rear seat and a heater that worked. The vehicle he was leading them towards had only two front seats—both belching forth stuffing and springs—and a single folding chair that was wedged in the back among two crime-scene kits, three lengths of rope, several folded tarpaulins, a ladder, a toolbox, and a pile of greasy rags. It was an embarrassment. Yet, if the trio from London noticed, they didn’t comment. They merely arranged themselves logically with St. James in the front and the two others riding in the rear, Lynley taking the chair at Sergeant Havers’ insistence.

  “Wouldn’t want you to get your pretty topcoat dirty,” she said, before flopping down on the tarpaulins, where she unwound a good thirty inches of muffler from her face.

  Lonan took the opportunity of getting a better look at Sergeant Havers when she did so. Homely sort, he thought, surveying her snubby features, heavy brows, and round cheeks. She certainly hadn’t got herself into this kind of exalted company on her looks. He decided that she had to be some sort of criminological wunderkind, and he gave serious consideration to watching her every move.

  “Thank you, Havers,” Lynley was responding placidly. “God knows a spot of grease would reduce me to uselessness in less than a minute.”

  Havers snorted. “Let’s have a fag on it, then.”

  Lynley obliged by producing a gold cigarette case, which he handed to her, following it with a silver lighter. Lonan’s heart sank. Smokers, he thought, and resigned himself to a bout of stinging eyes and clogged sinuses. Havers did not light up, however, because hearing their conversation, St. James opened his window and let in a sharp waft of freezing air, which struck her right in the face.

  “Enough. I get the picture,” Havers groused. She pocketed six cigarettes unashamedly and gave the case back to Lynley. “Has St. James always been this subtle?”

  “Since the day he was born,” Lynley replied.

  Lonan started the van with a lurch, and they headed towards the CID office in Oban.

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Ian Macaskin of Strathclyde CID was driven in life by a single fuel: pride. It took a number of distinct and unrelated forms, the first being familial. He liked people to know that he had beaten the odds. Married at twenty to a seventeen-year-old girl, he had stayed married to her for the next twenty-seven years, had raised two sons, had seen them through university and on to careers, one a veterinarian and the other a marine biologist. Then there was physical pride. At five feet nine inches tall, he weighed no more than he had as a twenty-one-year-old constable. His body was trim and fit from rowing back and forth across the Sound of Kerrera every night in the summer and doing much the same on a rowing machine he kept in his sitting room all winter long. Although his hair was completely grey and had been for the last ten years, it was still thick, shining like silver in the fluorescent lights of the police station. And that same police station was his last source of pride. In his career, he had never once closed a case without making an arrest, and he expended considerable energy making certain that his men could say the same about themselves. He operated a tight investigations unit in which his officers ran every detail to ground like hounds after a fox. He saw to that. As a result, he was omnipresent in the office. Nervous energy personified, he bit his fingernails down to the quick, sucking on breath mints or chewing gum or eating sacks of potato crisps in an effort to break himself of this single bad habit.

  Inspector Macaskin met the London party not in his office but in a conference room, a ten-by-fifteen-foot cubicle with uncomfortable furniture, inadequate lighting, and poor ventilation. He had chosen it deliberately.

  He was not at all happy with the way this case was beginning. Macaskin liked to pigeonhole, liked to have everything put in its proper place with no muss and no fuss. Each person involved was supposed to act out his appropriate role. Victims die, police question, suspects answer, and crime-scene men collect. But right from the beginning, aside from the victim, who was cooperatively inanimate, the suspects had been doing the questioning and the police had been answering. As for the evidence, that was something else entirely.

  “Explain that to me again.” Inspector Lynley’s voice was even, but it carried a deadly tone that told Macaskin that Lynley had not been made party to the peculiar circumstances that surrounded his assignment to this case. That was good. It made Macaskin decide to like the Scotland Yard detective right on the spot.

  They ha
d shed their outer garments and were sitting round the pine conference table, all save Lynley, who was on his feet, his hands in his pockets and something dangerous simmering behind his eyes.

  Macaskin was only too happy to go over the story again. “Hadn’t been at Westerbrae thirty minutes this morning before there was a message to phone my people at CID. Chief Constable informed me that Scotland Yard would be handling the case. That’s all. Couldn’t get another word out of him. Just instructions to leave men at the house, come back here and wait for you. Way I see it is that some highbrow at your end made the decision that this would be a Yard operation. He gave our chief constable the word and, to keep things on the up and up, we cooperatively put in a ‘call for help.’ You’re it.”

  Lynley and St. James exchanged unreadable glances. The latter spoke. “But why did you move the body?”

  “Part of the order,” Macaskin answered. “Blasted strange, if you ask me. Seal the rooms, pick up the package and bring her in for autopsy after our medical examiner did us his usual honour of proclaiming her dead on the scene.”

  “A bit of divide and conquer,” Sergeant Havers remarked.

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” Lynley replied. “Strathclyde deals with the physical evidence, London deals with the suspects. And if someone somewhere gets lucky and we fail to communicate properly, everything gets swept under the nearest rug.”

  “But whose rug?”

  “Yes. That is the question, isn’t it?” Lynley stared down at the conference table, at the stains created by myriad coffee rings that looped across its surface. “What exactly happened?” he asked Macaskin.

  “The girl, Mary Agnes Campbell, found the body at six-fifty this morning. We were called at seven-ten. We got out there at nine.”

  “Nearly two hours?”

  Lonan answered. “Storm last night closed the roads down, Inspector. Westerbrae’s five miles from the nearest village, and none of the roads were ploughed yet.”

  “Why in God’s name did a group from London come to such a remote location?”

  “Francesca Gerrard—widowed lady, the owner of Westerbrae—is Lord Stinhurst’s sister,” Macaskin explained. “Evidently she’s had some big plans of turning her estate into a posh country hotel. It sits right on Loch Achiemore, and I suppose she envisaged it as quite the romantic holiday destination. Place for newlyweds. You know the sort of thing.” Macaskin grimaced, decided that he sounded more like an advertising agent than a policeman, and finished hastily with, “She’s done a bit of redecorating and, from what I could gather this morning, Stinhurst brought his people up here to give her a chance to work out the kinks in her operation before she actually opened to the public.”

  “What about the victim, Joy Sinclair? Do you have anything much on her?”

  Macaskin folded his arms, scowled, and wished he had been able to wrest more information from the group at Westerbrae before he had been ordered to leave. “Little enough. Author of the play they’d come to work on this weekend. A lady of some letters, from what I could gather from Vinney.”

  “Vinney?”

  “Newspaperman. Jeremy Vinney, drama critic for the Times. Seems to have been fairly thick with Sinclair. And more broken up about her death than anyone else, from what I could tell. Odd, too, when you think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her sister’s there as well. But while Vinney was demanding an arrest that very minute, Irene Sinclair had absolutely nothing to say. Didn’t even ask how her sister had been done in. Didn’t care, if you ask me.”

  “Odd indeed,” Lynley remarked.

  St. James stirred. “Did you say there’s more than one room involved?”

  Macaskin nodded. He went over to a second table which abutted the wall and picked up several folders and a roll of paper. The latter he smoothed out on the tabletop, revealing a more than adequate floor plan of the house. It was extraordinarily detailed, considering the time constraints that had been put upon him at Westerbrae this morning, and Macaskin smiled at his finished work with real pleasure. Weighing it down at either end with the folders, he gestured to the right.

  “Victim’s room is on the east side of the house.” He opened one of the folders and glanced at his notes before continuing. “One side of her was the room belonging to Joanna Ellacourt and her husband…David Sydeham. Other side was a young woman…here it is. Lady Helen Clyde. It’s this second room that’s been sealed off.” He looked up in time to see the surprise on all three of the London faces. “You know these people?”

  “Just Lady Helen Clyde. She works with me,” St. James replied. He looked at Lynley. “Did you know Helen was coming to Scotland, Tommy? I thought she’d planned to go to Cornwall with you.”

  “She begged off the trip last Monday night, so I went alone.” Lynley looked at the floor plan, touching his fingers meditatively to it. “Why has Helen’s room been sealed?”

  “It adjoins the victim’s room,” Macaskin answered.

  “Now there’s a piece of luck,” St. James said with a smile. “Leave it to our Helen to get herself booked right next door to a murder. We’ll want to talk to her at once.”

  Macaskin frowned at this and leaned forward, placing himself squarely between the two men to get their attention with a physical intrusion before he went on with a verbal one. “Inspector,” he said, “about Lady Helen Clyde.” Something in his voice arrested the other two men’s conversation. Warily, they looked at each other as Macaskin added grimly, “About her room.”

  “What about it?”

  “It appears to be the means of access.”

  LYNLEY WAS STILL trying to understand what Helen was doing with a group of actors in Scotland when Inspector Macaskin imparted this new piece of information.

  “What makes you think that?” he asked at last, although his mind was taken up mostly with his last conversation with Helen, less than a week ago in his library in London. She’d been wearing the loveliest jade-coloured wool, had tasted his new Spanish sherry—laughing and chatting in that light-hearted way of hers—and had rushed off promptly to meet someone for dinner. Who? he wondered now. She hadn’t said. He hadn’t asked.

  Macaskin, he noted, was watching him like a man who had things on his mind and was merely waiting for the right opportunity to trot them all out.

  “Because the victim’s hall door was locked,” Macaskin replied. “When Mary Agnes tried to rouse her without success this morning, she had to use the master keys—”

  “Where are they kept?”

  “In the office.” Macaskin pointed to the map. “Lower floor, northwest wing.” He continued. “She unlocked the door and found the body.”

  “Who has access to these master keys? Is there another set of them?”

  “Only one set. Just Francesca Gerrard and the girl, Mary Agnes, use them. They were kept locked in the bottom drawer of Mrs. Gerrard’s desk. Only she and the Campbell girl have keys to get into it.”

  “No one else?” Lynley asked.

  Macaskin looked thoughtfully down at the plan, moving his eyes along the lower northwest corridor of the house. It was part of a quadrangle, possibly an addition to the original building, and it grew out of the great hall not far from the stairway. He pointed to the first room in the corridor.

  “There’s Gowan Kilbride,” he said pensively. “A kind of jack-of-all-trades. He could have got to the keys had he known they were there.”

  “Did he know?”

  “It’s possible. I gather that Gowan’s duties don’t generally range to the upper floors of the house, so he’d have no need of the master keys. But he might have known about them had Mary Agnes told him where they were.”

  “And might she have done so?”

  Macaskin shrugged. “Perhaps. They’re teenagers, aren’t they? Teenagers sometimes try to impress each other all sorts of silly ways. Especially if there’s an attraction between them.”

  “Did Mary Agnes say if the master keys were in their norm
al place this morning? Had they been disturbed?”

  “Apparently not, since the desk was locked as usual. But it’s not the kind of thing the girl is likely to have noticed. She unlocked the desk, reached into the drawer for the keys. Whether they were in the exact spot she had last left them, she doesn’t know, since the last time she put them in the desk she merely dropped them inside without a second thought.”

  Lynley marvelled at the amount of information Macaskin had been able to gather in his restricted time at the house. He eyed the man with growing respect. “These people all knew each other, didn’t they? So why was Joy Sinclair’s door locked?”

  “Argie-bargie last nicht,” Lonan put in from his chair in the corner.

  “An argument? What sort?”

  Macaskin shot the constable an aggrieved look, apparently for lapsing into colloquialism, something that his men were obviously not supposed to do. He said, apologetically, “That’s all we managed to get from Gowan Kilbride this morning before Mrs. Gerrard strong-armed him away with the order to wait for Scotland Yard. Just that there was some sort of row involving the lot of them. Seems some china was broken in the midst of it, and there was an accident in the great hall with liquor. One of my men found bits and pieces of broken porcelain and glass thrown into the rubbish. Some Waterford also. It looks like quite a set-to.”

  “Involving Helen as well?” St. James didn’t wait for an answer. “How well does she know these people, Tommy?”

  Lynley shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know she knew them at all.”

  “She didn’t tell you—”

  “She begged off Cornwall with other plans, St. James. She didn’t tell me what they were. And I didn’t ask.” Lynley looked up to see the change in Macaskin’s expression, a sudden movement of his eyes and lips, nearly imperceptible. “What is it?”