The old woman with the Labrador touched Martin on the arm as if they were old acquaintances. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “Who would have thought, it’s so quiet around here.” Martin rubbed the moth-eaten dog’s head behind its ears. It stood foursquare, immo-bile, only a faint quiver in the tail indicating enjoyment. The dog reminded him of the push-along dogs on wheels that children played with. He and his brother, Christopher, had one when they were little, some sort of generic terrier. Their father tripped over it one day and was so enraged that he picked it up by the handle and flung it as hard as he could, through the living room window. That was regarded as acceptable behavior in their home. Not home-“home front” was what their father called it. That had been a dress rehearsal for his throwing their real dog, a mongrel, through the window of the living room in married quarters in Germany. The toy dog survived, the real dog didn’t. Martin remembered throwing his laptop yesterday, was there something in him that had enjoyed that aggressive moment? Something, God forbid, of his father in him?
“And to think, no one heard a thing,” the old woman with the Labrador said.
“Heard what? What happened?”Martin asked her, glancing at the policeman, wondering if he was allowed to ask, if there wasn’t some great secret here that he wasn’t allowed access to. Perhaps they’d discovered Richard was a terrorist-unlikely, given his complete lack of interest in anything that wasn’t Richard Mott. Richard! Had something happened to Richard? “Richard Mott,” he said to the police-man, “the comedian, he was staying with me, has something happened to him?”The constable frowned at him and spoke into his radio again, more urgently this time, then he said to the woman with the Labrador, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to move away, madam.”
Instead of moving away, the old woman shuffled closer to Martin and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Alex Blake, the crime writer-he’s been murdered.”
“I’m Alex Blake,” Martin said.
“I thought you were Martin Canning, sir?” the policeman objected.
“I am,” Martin said, but he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.
An earnest man introduced himself to Martin as “Superintendent Robert Campbell” and walked through the house with him as if he were an estate agent trying to sell a particularly troublesome property. Someone gave Martin what looked like paper shower caps to put over his shoes (“Still an active crime scene, sir”), and Su-perintendent Campbell murmured softly, “Tread carefully, sir,” as if he were about to quote Yeats.
In the shambles of the living room, Martin glimpsed a couple of crime-scene technicians still at work-studious and unremark-able people, not glamorous and good-looking like the characters on CSI. There were no technicians of any kind in Martin’s nov-els, crimes were solved by intuition and coincidence and sudden hunches. Nina Riley occasionally resorted to asking advice from an old friend of her uncle’s, a self-styled “retired criminologist.” “Oh, dear old Samuel, what would a poor girl do without a brilliant mind like yours to call on?” Martin had no real idea what “criminologist” meant, but it covered a lot of gaps in Nina Riley’s education.
The criminologist lived, in fact, in Edinburgh, and Nina had just been to visit him in his house near the Botanics. She was currently on page one hundred fifty, on her way back to the Black Isle, hanging from the Forth Bridge while the Edinburgh-to-Dundee train “thundered like a dragon” above her. Did dragons thunder? “Well, Bertie, this is quite a scrape we’ve got ourselves into here, isn’t it? Thank goodness that wasn’t the King’s Cross-to-Inverness express train, that’s all I can say!” From his living room there drifted the scent of offal. Was Richard still in there? Martin twitched, he found his left hand was shaking. No, no, Superintendent Camp-bell reassured him, the body had already been removed to the po-lice mortuary. The house had been polluted by the living Richard Mott, and now it was being polluted by the dead one. There was no reality, he reminded himself, only the nanosecond, the atom of a breath. A breath that was scented like a butcher shop. He was glad now that he had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch.
“How did he die?” Did he really want to know?
“We’re still waiting for the results of the autopsy, Mr. Canning.”
Martin was waiting for the right moment to say, “I’ve just spent a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun,” but Camp-bell kept asking him if he could tell if there was “anything missing”from the house. The only thing Martin could think of was his watch, but that had disappeared the day before yesterday.
“A Rolex,” he said, and the detective raised an eyebrow and said, “An eighteen-carat oyster Yacht-Master? Like the one that Mr. Mott was wearing?”
“Was he? Do you think Richard was killed in the course of a burglary that went wrong? Did someone break in thinking the house was empty [because I was spending a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun] and Richard came downstairs and took him by surprise?” Martin could hear himself talking like a Crime-watch presenter. He tried to stop, but it seemed he couldn’t. “Did he disturb an intruder?”
“It has all the hallmarks of an opportunistic crime,” Campbell said cautiously, “a burglar surprised in the act, as you say, but we’re keeping an open mind. And there was no break-in. Mr. Mott ei-ther opened the door to his killer or brought him home with him. We estimate his time of death to have been somewhere between four and seven o’clock this morning.”
A uniformed policewoman passed them on the stairs. There were strangers everywhere in his house. He felt like a stranger himself. The policewoman was carrying a large plastic box that reminded Martin of a bread bin. She was holding it carefully away from her body as if it contained something dangerous or delicate. “Crossing on the stairs,” she said cheerfully to her superintendent, “that’s bad luck. And all those broken mirrors downstairs,” she added, shaking her head and laughing. Campbell frowned at her levity.
“We haven’t found the murder weapon,” he said to Martin. “We need to know if there’s anything missing from the house that might have been used to kill Mr. Mott.”
It seemed ridiculous to be using words such as “weapon” and “kill” in his lovely Merchiston house. They were words that belonged in Nina Riley’s lexicon. “So you see, Bertie, the murder weapon that killed the laird was actually an icicle taken from the overhang on the dovecote.The murderer simply threw it in the kitchen stove once he had used it-that’s why the police have been unable to find it.” He sus-pected he had stolen this plot device from Agatha Christie. But didn’t they say there was nothing new under the sun?
“We can’t discount the fact that this might have been personal, Martin.” Martin wondered at what point he had segued from “sir” into “Martin.”
“You mean that someone came here intending to kill Richard?” Martin said. Martin could understand that, Richard could provoke you into murderous thoughts.
“Well, that, certainly,” Campbell said, “but I was thinking about you. Do you have any enemies, Martin? Is there anyone who might want to kill you?”
A miasma of Usher-like doom seemed to suddenly rise up and fold itself around the house like a wet shroud. Death had stalked its rooms. He had a terrible headache. Death had found him. It may not have taken him, but it had found him. And it was coming to exact retribution.
Robert Campbell escorted Martin to “his friend’s room.” Martin wanted to say, “He’s not my friend,” but that seemed cruel and heartless, considering what had happened.
Martin hadn’t been in the room since he had first shown Richard into it, saying, “If there’s anything you want, just say.” Then, it had been the “guest room,” with a pretty blue-and-white toile de Jouy on the walls, a cream carpet on the floor, and a neat pyramid of white guest towels on the French sleigh bed, with a copestone of Crabtree and Evelyn’s lily-of-the-valley soap. (“Are you always this anal, Martin?” Richard Mott laughed when he walked in the room. “Yes,” Martin said.)