The Orkney Scroll (8 page)

“I don’t think I can tell you much of anything in this mess,” I said. “There may be stuff missing, but I’m not sure I could say.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “And I guess it doesn’t matter that much with Wylie dead. He won’t be complaining, will he?”

“Does this look like a different thief to you?” I said.

“Hate to think we have two of them,” he said. “But yes, it does.”

“I’m glad mine was neater,” I said. “And you’re right, it’s a good thing the records were removed yesterday or it would be days before we got them straightened out.”

“I know it’s a long shot,” Singh said, “but have a look around.”

As I did so, a piece of paper caught my eye. It was facedown in the middle of the room, but it looked like a check. I picked it up, took one look, and handed it to Singh.

“Tell me again about how Trevor used the money Blair gave him to pay off the guy with the dog, or rather the man called Dog,” I said. The piece of paper in question was a check, dated the day I’d gone to the store with Blair, payable to Scot Free Antiques and signed by Blair, for eight hundred thousand dollars. It was not the first time I’d thought that Trevor had chosen a very stupid name for his store, unless, of course, he planned to give away antiques, but this was not the issue right at this moment.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Singh said. It was beginning to sound like his mantra.

“It does sort of take the edge off the motive,” I said. “If Trevor hadn’t cashed this yet, then why would Blair kill him?”

“He killed him,” Singh said, simply as he pulled out a plastic bag and put the check into it. “Don’t know how we missed this the first time.”

“I expect Trevor hid it somewhere until he could take it to the bank, except that he didn’t get there. It just got dislodged, wherever it was, in the break-in.”

“How long would you hold on to a check like this? It doesn’t do much for your theory that there were two of these desks, either,” Singh said.

“You’re just bitter.” I could hardly wait to rush home and tell Rob that he’d been completely wrong about Blair having illicit cash hanging about in huge piles, and that he had misjudged the man, as had Singh. My small moment of righteous indignation did not last long, however. Despite what I’d thought, the check made Blair look even guiltier, if that was possible. It turned out the check number was out of sequence: in other words, after Trevor was dead and Blair under suspicion, Blair had signed a check and backdated it to the day he’d purchased the cabinet. The two checks with numbers immediately before it were dated after Trevor died. It looked as if Blair had arranged to have someone break into Trevor’s shop and leave it there in a faked robbery. If so, it had been really dumb of Blair not to think about the numbers on the checks, although he claimed, according to Singh, that he had postdated a couple of checks that he was sending through the mail. The trouble with that one was that when the police went through the recycling bin of one of the check recipients, they found the envelope, postmarked after Trevor had died. It seemed incredibly inept for a man of Blair’s obvious intelligence, but once again the police were back to having no record of the transaction.

Anna Chan, who continued to phone me from time to time with questions about Trevor’s paperwork, told me they’d caught the man who’d trashed Trevor’s place, although not mine, I’m afraid. His name was Woody somebody or other, some lowlife Blair had successfully represented on a charge of a particularly vicious house invasion. Apparently Woody’s gratitude extended to planting the check at Blair’s request, but not as far as lying about it when caught. It seemed pretty open-and-shut, as they say, at this point, and a rather inept attempt to subvert the course of justice on Blair’s part.

Percy never showed up again, not even at The Dwarfie Stane. Rendall had promised he’d call me if he did. It was as if he’d never existed.

I tried just to get on with life, to forget it, but that was very hard to do. For one thing Blair’s journey through the justice system was very big news, and every court appearance, however brief, filled the newspapers with lurid headlines about the Skull-Splitter killer, and much was made of there having been a dispute over a piece of furniture. Stan-field Roberts, the curator at the Cottingham who’d been at Blair’s ill-fated party, was quoted about unscrupulous antique dealers. Fortunately my name didn’t come into it, but that didn’t make me feel any better, as my role, however anonymous in the whole sordid business, continued to rankle. I alternated between being sure I’d been right about the cabinet and being completely down on myself for my ineptitude. It had to be that I was so besotted by either the cabinet or by Blair’s money or Trevor’s charm that I missed something as obvious as the lock. At my age!

My self-flagellation on the subject of the lock was made worse by my conviction that Blair was not the murderer. It was, as I kept saying to anyone who would listen, just too pat. I also clung to the notion that the saga of the two cabinets was crucial to my understanding of what had really happened. There was absolutely no concrete support of any kind for this feeling of mine, which just made me more upset.

Various people continued to try to cheer me up; the rest avoided me. I could hardly blame them. I was rather tiresome on the subject. Mention locks, for example, or even a word that rhymed with it, like shock, or bring up the subject of Scotland, or furniture, something it’s easy enough to do when you’re an antique dealer, or heaven forbid, utter the word forgery, and I was off on a little tirade. I did mention to Clive and Moira that I thought there might have been two cabinets, and while they seemed enthusiastic, I knew they really thought I was just rationalizing my mistake, and I only felt worse. Clive went on being nice to me, a situation I found intolerable. Moira tried a lecture or two. “Self worth is not measured by how many antiques you identify correctly,” she intoned. I didn’t retort that lack of self worth might be measured in the number of times you’d got something so wrong another person had been killed because of it, but that was what I was thinking.

What surprised me was that all of this didn’t affect our business adversely. In fact, business had rarely been better. That was almost entirely due to Desmond Crane, who may or may not have been in competition with Blair for the writing cabinet. Shortly after Blair was charged, Dez, who had never been a customer in the same league as Blair, although he did buy from us occasionally, came into the shop, had a look around, and then asked me if I would consider decorating his daughter Tiffany’s condo.

“I bought her a little place as a graduation present,” he said. By little, I was soon to learn, he meant about two thousand square feet, which is bigger than my house. “She loves antiques, unlike my son who won’t look at anything designed before the year 2000,” he said. “And she has absolutely no furniture, because she lived at home during her years at university. Will you come and have a look?”

“I’d love to, Mr. Crane,” I replied. “But you do know I was involved in that business with Blair and Trevor Wylie?”

He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “And please call me Dez.” I suppose he could afford to be magnanimous, given that his chief rival for all those high profile and lucrative court cases was out of commission. “Let’s make an appointment to meet at the condo. It’s a surprise. She’ll be back from her summer job in about four weeks. Can you do it?”

Of course I could. It was a huge success, too. It was actually Clive who did most of the work. I find the antiques, but he’s the designer. Tiffany had inherited her grandmother’s china, which her mother, Leanna the Lush, said Tiffany loved, and Clive picked up the colors in that for the walls and the accents. We ransacked our showrooms and warehouse for furniture and carpets, silverware, art for the walls. What we didn’t have, I went to auctions and found. Clive and I were both there when Dez and Leanna, who reeked of stale booze, brought Tiffany over, and after she commented on what a smashing place it was, we handed her the keys. Tiffany cried, Dez and Leanna cried, and I could have cried, but with relief, too. Even Tiffany’s brother Carter—Clive maintains that Carter’s real name is Cartier and that he and his sister are named for their parents’ favorite places to shop—asked me if I thought he could mix a few antique pieces with his modern furniture. When I said yes, he came over to the store and bought a huge armoire for his stereo system and another for his kitchen. Soon people Dez had referred to us started buying stuff, too.

“There is one small problem with all this business Dez has sent our way,” Clive said.

“We have no merchandise?” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “This is a nice problem to have, I know, but we aren’t going to have stock for the Christmas season, which is not good at all. How will we take advantage of that ridiculous time of year when everyone waits until the last minute to shop and is therefore forced to spend obscene amounts of money at McClintoch and Swain if we don’t have anything to sell? We’re okay on the Asian stuff, but Crane and his friends and relatives have almost cleaned out our European collection. I’ve been over to the warehouse, and it’s practically empty.”

“Relax. It’s only August,” I said. “I’ll e-mail our pickers and agents in Europe and head over there next week, assuming, that is, that Detective Singh will let me go. If I do it right away, there’ll be plenty of time to get it here.”

“It’s too bad you have to make an extra trip,” he said. “I know you did double-duty here while Moira was having chemo.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ll e-mail our people in Italy and France, and maybe Ireland, and see what they can come up with on short notice. I’ll head out as soon as I hear back.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Lara,” Clive said. “I thought we were doomed, but you’ve pulled it out of the bag.

“Mmm,” I said. The truth was that while I was publicly rehabilitated, privately I still felt like dirt. A week or two far away from home seemed like a very good idea to me.

That might have been the end of it, had I not become better acquainted with Willow Laurier, Trevor’s last girlfriend. We’d been introduced at Blair Bazillionaire’s ill-fated cocktail party, and I’d seen her briefly at Trevor’s funeral, but we’d not exchanged more than a few words. Still, I knew her well enough to know that it was she who was sneaking into the alley beside Trevor’s former store at about one in the morning one warm August night.

I’d been working very late trying to get everything organized for my trip to Europe and was locking up and heading for my car when I saw her. She wasn’t good at stealth, obviously, because she stood under a street light for a minute or two looking up and down the street in a rather furtive fashion, before darting into the alley. A few minutes later a dim light, most likely a flashlight given the way it moved through the shop, glowed in the window.

There was only one way out, really, either through the back alley which led nowhere but out to the street again, or the front door which deposited you right on the street. I found myself a perch on a stone wall across the road and waited.

At least twenty minutes passed, and Willow had not yet appeared. Worse yet, the roving light was gone. My imagination, already inclined to the macabre where that store was concerned, started working overtime. What if Willow had fallen in the darkness, was lying there, and would be until the landlord showed up, heaven knows when. Or, and this was a really unpleasant thought, a murderer had been waiting there for her. That was ridiculous, I knew. Blair Bazillionaire had not been granted bail, given the horrendous nature of the murder and the fact that with all his money, he was considered a flight risk. Still I wasn’t convinced Blair had done it, so maybe, improbable though it might be, the real axe murderer had returned to the scene of the crime at the very moment Willow decided to enter it. I did not want to go into the store at night, or any time for that matter. But after almost half an hour, Willow still hadn’t shown up.

Very reluctantly, I went down the alley and tried the back door. It was unlocked, which seemed rather careless of her. I hesitated in the doorway for a few seconds, slid my hand along the wall in a vain attempt to find a light switch. By now my eyes were adjusting. There was some street light filtering through the front window, and much to my regret, a light in the basement, which probably explained why I couldn’t see it from the street. Fighting back nausea, to say nothing of terror, I went to the top of the stairs.

“Willow?” I said. “It’s Lara McClintoch.” There was no sound. “Willow?” I said again. Still no reply. There was nothing for it: I was going to have to go down.

She was standing in the back room where I’d found Trevor’s body, and she was crying. “Leave me alone,” she sobbed.

“Willow,” I said. “I am not going to leave you alone. You shouldn’t be here. First of all, it’s illegal, and furthermore, it is not nice down here. You really have to come upstairs. I’m going to take you for a coffee, or maybe something a little stronger.”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” she said. “Even behind the furnace. I’ve looked for signs the floor has been dug up and new floor put down. I’ve looked in every piece of furniture upstairs. I even looked to see if it would be possible to hide stuff in these pipes.”

“Willow,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

“I thought he loved me,” she burbled on as if I didn’t exist. “He said he did.”

“I’m sure in his way he did,” I said in a soothing tone.

“Don’t patronize me,” she said, turning on me. “I know he was a first-class jerk. What I really want to know is where did he put the money?”

“The money?”

“Look,” she said. “You may think I’m naive, but I’m not. I’m not overcome with grief, either. Even if I might have been, I found his packed suitcase and in it the airline ticket: an around-the-world ticket. You know what those things cost? Thousands! Almost exactly what I lent him a week before he died. I know he was planning to make a run for it. He’d only booked the first leg of it, to Orkney via Glasgow, and after that, parts unknown.”