Skinner's Round (38 page)

`Maybe not them, love, but the household at least. And I don't know if Bob's ready for that!'

Sixty-five

Bracklands was a bustle of activity as Skinner and Martin entered the great hall, for the second time that morning, just after 8.30 a.m. On this occasion, Mr Burton was dressed in his customary dark suit as he held the door open.

`Good morning gentlemen,' he said. 'You wish to see Lord Kinture, I take it.'

`That's right,' said Skinner, 'but we'd like to see him alone, away from the guests.'

`Very well. In that case, please follow me to the library.' He led the way out of the hall, through a door to the left, which opened into a high, wide chamber which seemed to extend to half the length of the great house. 'This is the music room, gentlemen. The library is beyond it.' Their footsteps echoed as they walked across the polished wooden floor. Skinner had counted off eighty paces before they reached the double doors towards which they strode.

The library was more modest in its scale, but was still an impressive room, with high-tiered shelves, lined with leather volumes, and with windows on three sides, offering views to the front, right and rear of Bracklands. 'If you wait here, gentlemen, I shall advise Lord Kinture.'

He withdrew, leaving the double doors slightly ajar. More than five minutes later they swung open, and Hector, Marquis of Kinture, wheeled himself into the chamber, the plumes of white hair flying back like wings from his temples, and an irascible gleam in his eye.

`What's all this, Skinner? Big day today, y' know. Haven't got time for nonsense, so this better be important.'

Skinner leaned against the mahogany desk which was positioned in front of the central window, and looked down at the nobleman. Something in his eye made Lord Kinture's attitude change, slightly but subtly. In an instant his belligerence disappeared.

Òh, it's important all right, My Lord. We've come to talk to you about six murders, an attempted murder, piracy, high treason; you name it, we've come up against it in this investigation. Before I'm finished I might even throw in wasting police time, but we'll see about that later.' He pushed himself off the desk and walked across to the window which looked out on to the gardens at the rear of the house. He glanced back over his shoulder.

'Have all your guests turned out for breakfast this morning?'

Kinture looked puzzled. 'All but Morton, he didn't come down. But he's a funny bugger, and rather persona non grata around here just now, so I left him to get on with it.'

`Mmm,' said Skinner turning once more to face the wheelchair. 'Except he isn't getting on with anything any more. He's dead.' Kinture reeled back from his words.

Dead!'

`Remember that fire you reported last night. The one you assumed that vandals had lit? That was him. Someone lured Morton to a meeting last night, on top of Witches' Hill, overpowered him, handcuffed him to a tree, piled wood around him, and set it on fire. The poor bastard was immolated. We identified him from dental records half an hour ago. Another burning, a fourth murder on that old hill, four centuries after the first three.'

Kinture sagged in his chair, as white as a sheet.

The thing that surprises me was your notion that the fire was a simple piece of vandalism.

Especially after that bloody stupid note to the
Scotsman
last Monday morning. Didn't you realise what it had started, when Masur was murdered? But then you didn't know that there was a second note, did you? We kept that quiet, just as we're keeping Morton's death quiet until this bloody event of yours is over.

`That half-arsed note gave someone a great idea. "By the blade, said Agnes", indeed! It gave someone with an imagination a great idea to keep the police completely off balance, while some scores were settled.

`Did you send that note, Hector? Wasn't this event giving your new club enough world-wide publicity? Did you decide to use Michael White's murder to your own advantage by building a little mystique around it? That was all it was, wasn't it? A wheeze to bring in a few extra bookings from the ghouls, the cranks and the curious. I'll bet it's worked too. I'll bet the bookings have been flooding in to young Mr Bennett ever since Monday.

`Haven't they!' The sharp anger in his voice startled even Martin.

`Who delivered the note for you? Susan?'

`No!' said Kinture vehemently. 'You're wrong, Skinner. I didn't send the letter. My mother did.'

Skinner was rarely taken completely by surprise. 'Your mother!' `Yes. I knew at once that she had done it, and she admitted it.'

`But why?'

`Ma is a traditionalist. She wants everything to be as it always was. She hated the concept of Witches' Hill from the outset, the idea of people sporting themselves on the family estate.

When I told her about poor Mickey's murder, she actually smiled. Burton delivered the note for her.'

`Mr Burton, eh,' said Skinner. 'That's loyalty for you, running the risk of getting himself charged with bearing false witness, wasting our time, and anything else that I might decide to throw at him, and at the old Dowager for that matter.

`The only thing is, they'd probably get off. You see, they didn't waste our time. The letter set us off on what turned out to be a completely different investigation into another series of crimes, just as heinous as anything we've seen here this week.

Ì won't bore you with how we did it, but we uncovered the whole story of the Witch's Curse; we found Lisa Soutar, who carries it today; we found the King's Bible which your ancestor gave to Matilda Tod in 1598, as her reward for her complicity in the murder of her awkward sister.'

Kinture sat, head still bowed, but Martin stared at Skinner in complete astonishment. 'Yes, Andy. It's a hell of a story, but Henry Wills and Maggie Rose have taken us to the truth of it after all this time.

`You see, four centuries ago, to this very year, James Carr, an ancestor of the noble lord here, and heir to what was then an earldom, exercised a slightly premature
droit de seigneur
upon the body of one Agnes Tod, a well-brought-up, educated young woman who was the daughter of Walter Tod, his father's factor. I expect that the young lady was flattered. Perhaps she even had ambitions of becoming a countess.

`What she did become was an unmarried mother, of a girl child. No offer of marriage seems to have been forthcoming from the Honourable, or rather the dishonourable James. So Agnes, not with its father, but with the two women who had attended the birth, Christian Dunn and Mary Lewis, a midwife and a maid, took her child to the minister in Longniddry, and had her baptised, in her father's name, and entered into the parish records. In other words, she had her legitimised and made into a person, a Carr, and if not a threat, at least a public mbarrassment.

`Maybe Agnes still had hopes, but if she had, they were dashed. The very next year, James Carr married a French woman of birth as noble as his own, and a Catholic to boot. Imagine, a Catholic in the heart of reforming Scotland. Imagine too, here is James, with a new wife, and yet with a spurned mistress and her child, bearing his name, the two of them living in his own village on his own estate.

`But the story goes on, and grows even darker. A few months after the marriage the old Earl dies, and James succeeds to the title.

Ànd later that same year, 1598, a very strange thing happens. King James VI, five years away from the Union of the Crowns, a religious reformer who is in line to succeed Elizabeth as Defender of the Faith, is sailing down the Forth towards Leith when, just off Aberlady Bay, a great storm springs up. One of his escort ships is sunk, and the King is landed down the coast at Port Seton. From there, he's loaded into a coach and taken not to his palace, Holyroodhouse, but to Edinburgh Castle, up on its rock, and impregnable even then, taken to the King's Citadel, to which he retreated when he was under threat.

`Because you see, what I believe had really happened was this. You might not think it now, as you look across those sand-flats at low tide, as some of us who live here like to do, but in those times, before the bay was silted up, Aberlady was a port; the port of the Earl of Kinture.

And on that day, as the royal fleet sailed past, in bad weather, the Earl, with his new Catholic wife, and his new alliance by marriage with France, sent his men to sea, to attack James Stuart, the future King of England, where he was at his most vulnerable, and to kill him. They almost succeeded, but in the confusion, the King's ship escaped, and he fled for his life, back not to his unprotected palace, where his own father once murdered his mother's favourite, but to the safety of his citadel. Not to have a party to celebrate his lucky escape, but to defend himself against any renewed insurrection.' Skinner punched the air with a finger to emphasise his words.

Kinture sat unmoving, head bowed, in his wheelchair as the policeman continued. 'So there was the Earl, right in the noble shit. The King was a slow thinker, and he might not have known for certain where his attackers came from, but eventually he'd work it out.

`But, on the other hand, the last thing that James wanted at that time, with old Elizabeth on her last legs, was for the English kingmakers to see any sign of weakness in Scotland, or in his position.

`That, Lord Kinture, was when James Carr, the King's namesake and your murderous ancestor, had his brainwave. He summoned the local clergy and announced that the King's ship had been attacked by diabolical forces, and that a storm had been raised against his life by the power of witchcraft.

Ànd he denounced as the head of the coven Agnes Tod, and with her, Christian Dunn and Mary Lewis, the witnesses to his daughter's birth. So these women, these good women, who had wee Elizabeth baptised in Christ, were taken. Agnes, with her fatherless child, was already a figure of scorn, so there was no outcry by the people. The women were put to the torture. They confessed, of course. They'd have confessed to anything to stop the inquisitor's boot from crushing their feet. And James, the local judge, jury and executioner, sentenced them to a witches' death on an old hill on his land which had been a centre of local superstition since time immemorial. They were dragged up there, tied to trees, strangled and burned. With a single, brutal act, the Earl of Kinture had rid himself of a problem, and built himself a barrier against the possible vengeance of the King.

`But there was one other thing to be done. Agnes had a sister, Matilda. The Earl secured her compliance, by fear perhaps, but no doubt by bribery too. Matilda was given Elizabeth, to bring up. And she was given something else. The Bible, gifted to the Earl's grandfather by the King's grandfather, his friend. Finally, just in case the King was not mollified by Kinture's resolute defence of the royal person, he and Matilda invented the Witches' Curse. They wrote it in that fine Bible, and Matilda passed its secret on to Elizabeth as the truth, with the strange injunction that it should be revealed only to Kinture, the man who made it up, or to the King, the man it was invented to fool.

Èlizabeth did as she was told by her aunt and the story passed into legend, to dominate the lives of the women of her line through generations, until twenty years ago, when the latest of them told her story to a tape recorder.'

Skinner leaned back against the desk. 'You know,' he said, `Darren Atkinson thinks that detecting is like golf, about keeping your nerve and concentration when things get tough. It can be, but it's a team game too, and I've got some very good players. Good enough to uncover the crimes of your ancestor, four centuries ago, and — who knows — to set history right.

`They've put together the story of the Kinture treason and of the murder of Agnes Tod which covered it up. Most of it can be proved categorically, the rest would stand up beyond reasonable doubt in a modern court of justice, if there were any point to it.'

Kinture looked up, with tears staining his white face. 'I can prove the rest for you,' he croaked.

Ìn 1977 a mad old woman came along from Longniddry, in a taxi, to see my pa. She was rambling; she went on that the curse had been betrayed; that it had been told to a common outsider. The old crone believed that she was a witch. She said that she would call down her powers against the outsider, but that Pa must do everything in his power to keep the secret.

Èventually Pa realised that the old woman was in deadly earnest. Mad or not, she believed everything she was saying. He mollified her and delivered her back home. Then he searched our family records, and he found a deathbed document, written and sealed by James Carr himself, confessing to the events you have just described, with the curse written down in full.

`Pa told Ma and me the story. The three of us decided that some things are best left undisturbed. So the old lady's secret was kept, and James Carr's confession was hidden once more. I still have it, though.' He wheeled himself over to the mahogany desk, and opened a drawer. He reached inside and pulled a lever. Slowly, a leather panel in the centre of the desktop swung up to reveal a secret compartment. Kinture took out a thick, folded document, yellow with age and with a broken red seal, and handed it to Skinner. 'Here, take the damn thing. Do with it what you think best.'

The policeman looked at the Marquis, long and hard. Twice, Martin thought that he wanted to speak, but found the words caught in his throat. But finally, he reached out his hand and took the paper. 'Thank you,' he said. 'I know exactly what I'm going to do with it. There's a man at Edinburgh University who deserves some glory, and a young woman in Germany who deserves to be relieved of a burden.' He paused. 'One thing, though. Don't go trying to reclaim the Kinture Bible. The Soutar line have earned the right to it.'

He looked across at Martin. 'So, Andy, that's one of our two investigations at an end. The trouble is, it seems to have absolutely bugger all to do with the other one. James Carr's been dead for over three hundred and fifty years, but in the here and now there's another murderer about on his land, and he has to be caught too, before he's one day older!

Ànd in that, My Lord, from having been a bloody nuisance up till now, you have a chance to help! So has Arthur Highfield, if he's here. Could you ask him to join us, please? There are a few things he may be able to tell me.'