“Have you started the autopsy?” he asked Macaskin.
Clearly, this was the question the Scot had been awaiting ever since their arrival. With the kind of undisguised flourish typical of magicians on the stage, he removed several copies of a perfectly assembled report from one of his folders and passed them out, indicating the most pertinent piece of information: the victim had been stabbed with an eighteen-inch-long Highland dagger that had pierced her neck and severed her carotid artery. She had bled to death.
“We’ve not done the complete postmortem, however,” Macaskin added regretfully.
Lynley turned to St. James. “Would she have been able to make any noise?”
“Not from this kind of wound. Burbles at best, I should guess. Nothing that anyone could have heard in another room.” His eyes went down the page. “Have you managed a drug screen?” he asked Macaskin.
The inspector was ready. “Page three. Negative. She was clean. No barbiturates, no amphetamines, no toxins.”
“You’ve set the time of death between two and six?”
“That’s the preliminary. We’ve not analysed the intestines yet. But our man’s given us fibres in the wound. Leather and rabbit fur.”
“The killer was wearing gloves?”
“That’s our guess. But they’ve not been found and we had no time to search for much of anything before we got the message to come back here. All we can say is that the fur and leather didn’t come from the weapon. Nothing came from the weapon, in fact, save the victim’s blood. The handle was wiped clean.”
Sergeant Havers flipped through her copy of the report and tossed it on to the table. “Eighteen-inch dagger,” she said slowly. “Where does one find something like that?”
“In Scotland?” Macaskin seemed surprised by her ignorance. “In every house, I should say. There was a time when no Scotsman ever went out without a dirk strapped to his hip. In this particular house,” he pointed to the dining room on the floor plan, “there’s a display of them on the wall. Hand-carved hilts, tips like rapiers. Real museum pieces. Murder weapon appears to have been taken from there.”
“According to your plan, where does Mary Agnes sleep?”
“A room in the northwest corridor, between Gowan’s room and Mrs. Gerrard’s offi ce.”
St. James was making notes in the margin of his report as the inspector talked. “What about movement on the victim’s part?” he asked. “The wound isn’t immediately fatal. Was there any evidence that she tried to seek help?”
Macaskin pursed his lips and shook his head. “Couldn’t have happened. Impossible.”
“Why?”
Macaskin opened his last folder and took out a stack of photographs. “The knife impaled her to the mattress,” he said bluntly. “She couldn’t go anywhere, I’m afraid.” He dropped the pictures on to the table. They were large, eight by ten, and in glossy colour. Lynley picked them up.
He was used to looking at death. He had seen it manifested in every way imaginable throughout his years with the Yard. But never had he seen it brought about with such studied brutality.
The killer had driven the dirk in right up to its hilt, as if propelled by an atavistic rage that had wanted more than the mere obliteration of Joy Sinclair. She lay with her eyes open, but their colour was changed and obscured by the settled stare of death. As he looked at the woman, Lynley wondered how long she had lived once the knife was driven into her throat.
He wondered if she had known at all what had happened to her in the instant it took the killer to plunge the knife home. Had shock overcome her at once with its blessing of oblivion? Or had she lain, helpless, waiting for both unconsciousness and death?
It was a horrible crime, a crime whose enormity delineated itself in the saturated mattress that drank the woman’s blood, in her outstretched hand that reached for assistance that would never come, in her parted lips and soundless cry. There is, Lynley thought, no crime so execrable as murder. It contaminates and pollutes, and no life it touches, no matter how tangentially, can ever be the same.
He passed the photographs to St. James and looked at Macaskin. “Now,” he said, “shall we consider the intriguing question of what happened at Westerbrae between six-fi fty when Mary Agnes Campbell found the body and seven-ten when someone finally managed to get round to phoning the police?”
3
THE ROAD TO Westerbrae was poorly maintained. In the summer, negotiating its switchbacks, its potholes, its steep climbs to moors and quick descents to dales would be diffi cult enough. In the winter, it was hell. Even with Constable Lonan at the wheel of Strathclyde CID’s Land Rover, well equipped to handle the perilous conditions, they did not arrive at the house until nearly dusk, emerging from the woods and swinging through the final curve on a sheet of ice that caused Lonan and Macaskin to curse fervently in unison. As a result, the constable took the final forty yards at a respectable crawl and switched off the ignition at last with undisguised relief.
In front of them, the building loomed like a gothic nightmare on the landscape, completely unilluminated and deadly quiet. Constructed entirely of grey granite in the fashion of a pre-Victorian hunting lodge, it shot out wings, sprouted chimneys, and managed to look menacing in spite of the snow that mounded like fresh clotted cream on its roof. It had peculiar crow-stepped gables shaped from smaller granite blocks stacked in a staggered fashion. Behind one of these, the curious architectural appendage of a slate-roofed tower was tucked into the abutment of two wings of the house, its deeply recessed windows bare of covering and without light. A white Doric-columned portico sheltered the front door, and over it trailing wisps of a now leafless vine made an heroic effort to climb to the roof. The entire structure combined the fancies of three periods of architecture and at least as many cultures. And as Lynley evaluated it, he thought that it hardly had the potential to be Macaskin’s romantic spot for newlyweds.
The drive they parked on was well channelled and gouged, evidence of the number of vehicles that had come and gone during the day. But at this hour, Westerbrae may well have been deserted. Even the snow surrounding it was pristine and untouched across the lawn and down the slope to the loch.
For a moment no one stirred. Then Macaskin, casting a glance over his shoulder at the London group, shoved open the door, and fresh air assaulted them. It was glacial. They climbed out reluctantly.
A nasty wind was gusting off the water a short distance away, an unforgiving reminder of how far north Loch Achiemore and Wester-brae really were. It blew numbingly from the Arctic, stinging cheeks and piercing lungs and carrying with it the flavour of nearby pines and the faint musk of peat fires burning in the surrounding countryside. Huddling into themselves for protection against it, they crossed the drive quickly. Macaskin pounded on the door.
Two of his men had been left behind that morning, and one admitted them into the house. He was a freckled constable with monstrously large hands and a bulky, muscled body that strained against the buttons of his uniform. Carrying a tray covered by the sort of insubstantial sandwiches that usually decorate plates at tea, he was chewing ravenously, like an overlarge waif who has not seen food in many days and may very well not see it again for days more. He beckoned them into the great hall and thudded the door closed behind them, swallowing.
“Cuik arrived thirty minutes back,” he explained hurriedly to Macaskin, who was eying him with a disapproval that thinned his lips. “I was juist takin’ this in tae them. Dinna seem they should gae much longer wi’out fude.”
Macaskin’s expression withered the man to silence. Dismay stained his cheeks, and he shifted from one foot to the other, as if unsure about what he should do to explain himself further to his superior.