Murder on the Moor (5 page)

“Hamish was pestering Moira
,” Rex explained to Helen at the foot of the stairs. “Cuthbert’s up there offering assistance.”

“Why don’t you go up and join the adoring throng?”

“I just wanted to make sure she was okay. She is, after all, a guest in our house.”

“Our house,” Helen repeated wonderingly.

“Aye, and whether we like it or not, Moira is, for now, a part of our lives.”

Helen sighed in desperation. “Oh, I know that. It’s just a bit unnerving when she pops up out of the blue. At least Clive has the good manners to stay away.”

Clive was the mathematics teacher Helen had been dating before she and Rex met. She and Clive used to go skiing in Aviemore, a winter resort not far from Gleneagle. “Well, he still teaches at your school, as far as I know,” Rex pointed out.

“As far as you know.” Helen shook her head. “That says it all. If you were the least bit jealous, you
would
know. You would have asked.”

“Why would I be jealous? You said you found him boring.”

“I did not!” Helen exploded. “You just assumed he was boring because he teaches mathematics.”

“And drinks micro brews. And presumably won’t get on his bike without one of those stupid helmets that make cyclists look like aliens on wheels.” Rex laughed—until he noticed Helen’s angry expression, and realized he had gone too far.

Suddenly she dissolved into laughter too. “You’re right. What a dweeb!”

No voices came from upstairs now. Rex draped an arm around Helen’s shoulders and guided her down the hall. He went into the kitchen and set the dishwasher in motion. “Don’t worry about the glasses,” he told the Allerdice women. “I’ll take care of them in the morning.”

After locking the kitchen door to the outside, he bid them goodnight and climbed the stairs with Helen, glad to finally get to his bed.

She followed him into the room and shut the door. “It’s past midnight. Should we set the alarm for tomorrow?”

Rex groaned. “I’m not getting up before seven. Fortunately, it’s a solid old house so we shouldn’t hear too much noise. In any case, I’m so tired I could sleep through anything.”

He brushed his teeth and got into bed. A creaking floorboard and muffled voices reached him from next door, where Estelle and Cuthbert Farquharson were staying. He expected the wall would be thicker. He’d never had overnight guests before, other than Helen. Then the old water radiator started clanging as though struck repeatedly with a tire iron. Rex bunched a pillow against his ear. Just as he closed his eyes and murmured good night to Helen, an urgent knock rapped at the door. He thought about ignoring it.

“Rex!” Alistair’s voice reached him in a fierce whisper. “Are you awake?”

With a deep groan, Rex threw off the covers and went to open the door in his pajamas. Alistair was still dressed in his suit. Closing the door, Rex stood with his colleague on the landing.

“What’s the matter?”

“I turned on the late night news in the library,” Alistair recounted, his face strained and shadowed in the light from the hanging lamp. “It’s happened again.” His words broke off in a strangled choke.

“What has?”

“There’s been another Moor Murder!”

“A child?”

“A seven-year-old girl from Muiredge.”

With a quick glance at the four closed bedroom doors, Rex led Alistair back downstairs. He did not want to upset his guests and worse, have them all get up again. However, Shona was still about, he saw with surprise. She looked up from the front door, where she appeared to be hiding something in her coat.

“All right, hen?” Rex asked, using a Scottish endearment reserved for women.

“I was just getting a bit o’ air to clear my head. I had a wee bit too much to drink tonight,” she added with an artificial laugh.

What an odd creature Shona Allerdice is
, Rex thought. Yet he was too concerned with his friend to pay her much mind. Once they were in the library, he splashed whisky into two tumblers. The television, housed in an armoire with retractable doors, was set on low volume. Alistair stared at the screen as the clean-cut news anchor reiterated the details of the case.

“Melissa Bates was abducted from her cottage late this afternoon,” he relayed in somber tones. “She was in the care of a baby-sitter, nineteen-year-old Gail Frith, who had left her playing in the front garden while she answered the phone. She did not report Melissa’s disappearance immediately, hoping to find her before the parents got home. She knocked at the neighbours’ doors. When a small boy mentioned seeing a green van with no windows in the back driving slowly down the road, Gail alerted the police. The surrounding moor was scoured for three hours before a police dog led authorities to an isolated spot seven miles from Muiredge. The girl’s body was dredged from a bog near Loch Laidon. Heavy rain has impeded further investigation for the time being. If anyone has seen a green van in the area …”

Rex muted the volume. Alistair continued to gaze at the screen.

“This is my fault,” he said, loosening his cravat. “I feel sick. I’m going to find Collins.” He made purposefully for the door.

Rex held him back. “The police will already have picked him up for questioning. They’ll round up all the pedophiles in a fifty-mile radius. They’ll widen the net if they have to. Nobody wants to catch this monster more than the Bill.” Or the parents, Rex thought. “This may be the crime that gets him convicted.”

“The rain will have washed away all the evidence. It’s a miracle the police found the body.”

“I imagine they gave the dog an item of the girl’s clothing and the animal was able to track the scent in spite of the rain. That dog deserves a medal.” Rex was aware he was waffling on, but he could see how devastated his colleague was that he had not been able to put Collins away—if indeed Collins was responsible for the murders. It was, granted, a huge coincidence that no abductions had been reported while he was in custody. “It’s amazing they found the body at all. Seven miles is a lot of ground to cover in such a short time, considering the rugged terrain.”

“The wee boy was able to give the direction in which the van took off. He was looking out his bedroom window, wondering if the rain would stop for his birthday tomorrow.”

“Lucky break.”

“Collins got a lucky break when I was called upon to prosecute him,” Alistair said bitterly, swirling his Scotch. “I wish Britain would bring back the death penalty for child killers. Oh, God, if I could just get a hold of him, I’d wring his neck with my bare hands.” He flexed his long, pale fingers, a look of pure hate disfiguring his handsome features.

“Same M.O. as the others?” Rex asked reluctantly, dreading the answer.

“They haven’t released specifics yet. And they may not.”

Certain details of the Kirsty MacClure case had not been divulged to the press. Only the police and those involved in the trial knew about the means of strangulation and nature of the molestation. In the previous cases, other than ligature marks around the neck, no other evidence of physical trauma had been found, even though the victims had each been found stripped naked from the waist down. In the MacClure case, it had been determined that the little girl’s elasticated undergarment had been used to asphyxiate her.

Rex wondered if an examination of Melissa Bates would reveal an escalation in the perpetrator’s behavior.

“I tried calling Dalgerry,” Alistair informed him. “But he’s not answering his phone.”

“He’ll be busy with this new case. Just let the chief inspector do his job, Alistair. There’s nothing you can do tonight.”

“The poor parents!”

“The poor babysitter,” Rex added. “Think how guilty she must feel. I wonder how long she was on the phone.”

“She said only a few minutes, but she admits she was talking to her boyfriend, so who knows? Phone records will probably show it was twenty minutes or longer.”

“I wonder what subterfuge the murderer used to lure the wee girl into his van. A kitten? Sweets? Oh, no,” Rex exclaimed, noticing a water stain on the ceiling. “This place leaks like a sieve. Looks like it’s coming from the guest bathroom.” He tuned in again to the rain drumming on the eaves beyond the drawn curtains. “Now I’ll have to get the roof looked at. It’s like pouring money into a bottomless well.”

“Didn’t you get an inspection done?” Alistair asked in self-
defense. He was, after all, the one who had notified Rex of the sale of Gleneagle Lodge and highly recommended the solicitor.

“I did, and there was a lot of deferred maintenance on the place which I was made aware of. I just did not expect everything to go wrong the moment I signed the papers. It should have been called The Money Pit.” Rex shrugged helplessly. “And it needs to be properly winterized before I can use it for skiing holidays.”

“It’s a great investment,” Alistair insisted. “You have all these acres and your own loch, for goodness sake.”

“Aye,” Rex conceded. “I like the place just fine. It’s a great place for nature-walking.”

“And skiing, eventually. Much better than paying those outrageous prices for lodgings in Aviemore.”

“All right, you’ve convinced me, Alistair.”

“I wish the little boy could have got a glimpse of the man,” his colleague muttered, his attention reverting to the muted television set, which showed shots of rainy moorscape and an area of bog cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape.

“Wishes are futile,” Rex cautioned Alistair. “Try to get some sleep. We’ll call the police in the morning and see if there are any developments.”

“I’ll never be able to sleep.” Alistair slumped into an armchair and put his head in his hands.

Rex went back upstairs to see if he could find a sleep aid. “I’m surprised you’re still awake,” he said, seeing Helen sitting up in bed reading a paperback novel.

Covering her mouth, she yawned deeply. “I was waiting for you. You’ve been gone twenty minutes.”

“Won’t be long now.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked when he came back out of the bathroom. “I heard you ransacking the cabinet.”

“Alistair needs something to help him sleep.”

“Is he okay?”

“Aye, he’s just a bit uptight about work.”

“In my wash bag. I always travel with a few pills.”

“Thanks, lass.” Rex returned with the bag and sank down on the bed. He felt bad about lying to Helen, even if it was only by omission. The last time he had done that, it had almost cost him his relationship with her. But he didn’t want to upset her with this new development.

He doubted he could sleep either after what he had seen on TV about the Melissa Bates murder. It made him glad his son, Campbell had reached age twenty without any serious mishaps in his young life. A broken toe and the removal of his tonsils was all. It also made him hesitant about seriously considering the possibility of having another child. Helen was still of child-bearing age and had mentioned a couple of times how she had always wanted a daughter. In light of the Moor murders, the prospect sent a shudder through his core.

“Rex?” Helen held out a couple of tablets in the palm of her hand.

“Aye?”

“You seem very pensive.”

“I was having one of those philosophical moments when you weigh life’s pleasures with the reality of the world we live in.”

“You think too much.”

“There’s been another child abduction out on Rannoch Moor,” he confided at last. “Alistair saw it on the news tonight. The police have recovered the body.”

Helen clutched at the neck of her negligee. “Oh, my God! Poor Alistair. Is that why he can’t sleep? Does he know the child?”

“No, but he was the prosecutor in the Collins trial. He thinks if he’d done a better job and got a guilty verdict, he could have prevented this latest murder.”

“But Collins was acquitted because he had a watertight alibi for the exact time of Kirsty’s death.”

“Exact time of death can be very hard to pinpoint,” Rex told her. “And Collins’ girlfriend could have been lying for him, credible as she was on the witness stand. I just don’t know. All I do know is that Alistair is a damn fine advocate and, if he doesn’t get a grip on himself, it’ll ultimately cost him his career. I’ve seen it happen before when barristers lose their nerve.”