Competition Can Be Murder Read online

  “Mrs. Flanery?” I inquired.

  “Yes?”

  I introduced myself and she apologized for the fact that she’d been hanging clothes on the line and had taken so long to answer. As gently as I tried to break the news, there is just no easy way for a mother to accept that her child is on the way to the hospital. After she’d nearly hyperventilated, I asked whether she’d be all right to drive and she assured me that her older son was there and he could do it. I hung up with my fingers crossed that everyone would make the trip without further incident.

  There seemed to be nothing more to do than to tackle the disaster at my feet.

  Well, if I couldn’t put the files back into shape, I could at least clean up the mess. In the bathroom, I commandeered the entire roll of paper towels and began ripping sheets off to blot up the places where coffee was still wet. Much of it had dried, leaving wrinkly brown smudges on everything. The sofa was the worst, where it seemed that pure vengeance motivated the drenching of the pale blue fabric. I pressed towels into the spots and soaked up a lot of it, but much had penetrated the foam beneath and only time would dry that. With luck, an upholstery cleaning service with some good detergent might salvage the thing.

  Trying to organize the paperwork looked like a nightmare to me. I had no idea where anything went. About all I could do was to gather papers into piles and leave it for Meggie in a day or two. Hopefully, she wouldn’t decide that the job was too dangerous and quit, because I doubted Brian Swinney had any clue how his files should be organized.

  I made stacks on the desk, stacks on the file cabinet, stacks in the drawers, and stacks on the floor. Against the wall on the south side, I came across dangerous shards of glass, where the coffee carafe had apparently landed with some force after its contents were gone. I gingerly gathered them and swept up the tiny pieces with a broom I’d seen in the bathroom. I applied more wet paper towels to the brown stains on the walls and re-hung pictures and certificates that had been ripped from their hooks and smashed on the floor. Swept up more glass and straightened the furniture. Drake walked through the door as I was stashing the broom and dustpan.

  “Well, this is a big improvement,” he said.

  “How’s Meggie doing?”

  “Sitting up on an ER gurney waiting for a doctor to get around. Her mother and brother arrived and there was a lot of wailing, but basically I think she’ll be okay. I suggested that she not discuss the incident in great detail with anyone other than the police, or us. Don’t know if she’ll contain herself, but I didn’t think it would be good if everyone in town knew about this just yet.”

  “Want a sandwich?” I asked, retrieving our lunch from the spot I’d hastily dumped it nearly two hours earlier.

  Drake picked up his portion and looked around. “How’s that couch for sitting?”

  “A lot of coffee soaked into the cushions. I don’t think I’d park my butt there yet.”

  He chose a side chair and pulled it up to the desk. The ham sandwiches were about a day and a half away from fresh but at this point I didn’t care. I’d thought I was starving two hours ago. By the time I took my first bite, ravenous was a better word for it.

  “I’d better call Brian,” Drake said ten minutes later as he brushed the last of the crumbs off his shirt.

  “Yeah, we thought we had bad news for him when we left the rig. This is gonna be a double whammy.”

  I located the Rolodex for him and he riffled through it until he came up with a number where he thought Brian could be reached. I puttered, tidying a few last things while he made the call.

  “Brian says he’ll try to get away from London tonight. Meanwhile we should just make everything as secure as possible and not worry about it. He suggested that neither of us make any flights out to the rig alone, though. He knows that union guy, Brankin, and says he could be trouble.”

  I’d come across keys to the file cabinet in Meggie’s desk, so I stacked as many of the papers as I could into the file drawers and locked them. At least they’d have to perform some serious breakage to get in there, or cart the whole cabinet off with them. I suspected they’d already taken anything they really wanted.

  We checked the office’s two windows and made sure the deadbolt locks were secure on the only door. Drake disconnected the batteries on the two helicopters, secured all the compartment doors and locked the passenger doors. It was about as secure as we could make them without putting them into a locked building, and Brian hadn’t seemed to feel that was necessary.

  In the U.S. it’s a federal crime to tamper with an aircraft, and I assumed the U.K. would have the same kind of rules. The only problem was that I didn’t think these thugs were exactly worried about the legal aspects of their actions. It’s also a crime to assault someone but that hadn’t stopped one of them from knocking Meggie unconscious and leaving her.

  It was nearly three o’clock when we climbed into the company car and headed back toward our cottage.

  The grounds of Dunworthy appeared on our left more than a mile before the turnoff to the castle, and the turn to our cottage was around a bend another quarter mile down the road. I debated about stopping in to introduce Drake, remembering Sarah’s casual invitation to drop in any time, but decided a nap before dinner sounded more appealing.

  I awoke in darkness, pulled from leaden sleep by the ringing of the telephone downstairs. My foggy brain registered only that Drake must have answered it because it quit ringing about the time I rolled over. My body said stay; my brain nagged that I really shouldn’t or I would be asleep until about midnight, when I’d become fully awake. Logic finally won the argument and I dragged myself from bed and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom.

  “That was Brian on the phone,” Drake said, nearly scaring the socks off me as I blindly groped for a towel. “He said his mother’s taken a turn for the worse in the last hour and he doesn’t think he should leave just now. He asked me to go back out to the airport and get the aircraft stowed in one of the hangars out there. He’s already called ahead and arranged it.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, I better go. If something happens to them outside and he hasn’t taken ‘reasonable precautions,’ his insurance company’s likely to give him a lot of grief. Apparently these union threats have been going on for some time, but this is the first time they’ve actually done anything. He’s worried.”

  “And you have to deal with it.” I really didn’t want to sound bitter, but an edge crept in.

  “For now.” He pulled me into a close embrace and rubbed my back. “Want to come along? We could get some dinner in town afterward.”

  I gave him a quick kiss and went to look for my shoes.

  The trip to the airport, moving both craft into a hangar—supervised by Fergus, who ‘yes mum’d’ me a lot—and dinner at a decent seafood place took hours, and it was nearly ten o’clock as we approached Dunworthy. Rounding a bend in the road I caught sight of flames leaping high into the air. My heart sped into high gear.

  “The castle! Drake, turn in at their lane.”

  Chapter 9

  The tires squealed as Drake made a hard left turn into the lane. I lost sight of the flames as the heavy canopy of trees closed in, but an orange glow to our right peered through at intervals. We followed the winding lane until we came into the open area at the front of the castle. The flames were still to our right.

  “It’s not the castle, thank goodness,” I said as Drake brought the car to a halt beside the family Bentley.

  “It’s in the direction of our cottage,” he replied tersely.

  We both took off running at the same instant. A fruit orchard covered a couple of acres, beyond which Sarah had told me there were a number of small cottages and a few old buildings from ancient times. We stumbled between the apple and cherry trees, the glow becoming brighter and the heat from the fire already warming the air around us. We emerged into a small clearing past the orchard and saw the flaming structure.

  The
thatch roof of a small building was completely ablaze, with flames shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air. Its stone walls stood invincible, while several people raced around not accomplishing much of anything. I spotted Sarah Dunbar off to one side, wrestling with a fire extinguisher.

  “Sarah!” I shouted.

  She didn’t hear me. I nudged Drake and we headed toward her.

  “Can Drake help with that?” I asked.

  “Oh, Charlie! I’m so glad to see you. Yes, please,” she said, handing the extinguisher over to Drake.

  His look told me he knew the small extinguisher would be useless, but he took it and ran to join the others, pulling the pin from the canister as he went.

  “What happened?” I shouted above the roaring fire and the shouts of the people.

  “I don’t know. We just discovered it,” she said. “Robert’s trying to get the pumper out here.”

  At that moment a garden tractor appeared, with Robert driving, pulling an antique contraption of some kind. It jounced over ruts and onto the unmown turf surrounding the little hut. Men ran over to help him and they were soon unwinding a hose and cranking up a generator. Water pumped from the hose, in fitful spurts at first, then as a steady stream which was at least wet, if not forceful.

  “What kind of building is that?” I asked Sarah.

  “Oh, it’s a crofter’s hut,” she said. “Dreadfully old. Hasn’t been occupied for two or three hundred years, I’m sure. Old thatch ceiling must have been like a candle wick, you know.”

  I guess I gave a puzzled look.

  “They burned peat fires in those huts, fire ring on the floor, meat hanging from the ceiling to cure. Interiors of those places were coated in grease an inch thick.”

  “Well, I can see how that would burn easily,” I said. “Maybe I should see if I can lend a hand.”

  The men worked their way around the sides of the crofter’s cottage, dampening the flames on one side, just to have them flare up on another. I joined Drake, who’d set the fire extinguisher aside the minute the pumper showed up. We helped unwind some extra lengths of hose and then to bear its weight as it filled with water. At last, it looked like we were making some headway. The roaring flames had settled into smaller ones, with thick billowing smoke everywhere.

  “At least we kept the surrounding grass damp enough,” Robert commented as I stepped aside to let the men finish it up.

  “Thank goodness it didn’t spread to the orchard,” I said.

  Robert turned to issue an order to the men.

  I scanned the surrounding forest, contemplating the amount of potential destruction had the fire run unchecked. A slight movement caught my eye beneath one of the trees in the orchard. A man huddled behind one of the thick trunks, watching the scene. In the dying light of the fire, his red-gold hair glowed. It was Ian Brodie.

  “Charlie, here take this,” Robert said, handing me the wrench he’d used to crank open the water valve. “It goes in that toolbox on the other side.”

  I reached out for the wrench and when I looked up again, Ian was gone.

  Now what was that about? I wondered, circling the pumper to put the wrench away. If Ian were this close, why hadn’t he come over to help?

  I remembered Robert Dunbar’s comments yesterday, his suspicions about Ian being the thief who’d stolen his two lambs. Was Ian really at war with the Dunbars? Could he have set the fire? I walked back around the pumper to the spot where Robert stood watching the last of the dousing efforts.

  “Any idea what started the fire?” I asked.

  “No,” he mused. “Canna figure it out. No lightning tonight. That’s usually what does it. Lucky we have old Betsy here,” he said, patting the pumper’s flank. “Closest fire department’s almost all the way to Inverness. Take ’em twenty minutes to get here. Used to have a volunteer fire crew here in the village, but they’re all gettin’ old like me. Canna do it anymore, that gettin’ waked up in the night.” He patted the pumper again. “Betsy here’s old. Think me grandda’ brought her in more than eighty years ago when we pulled her with horses. But she still works.”

  He supervised the rewinding of the hose, then climbed aboard the tractor to drive Betsy back to storage. Sarah came around the corner of the still-standing stone walls to survey the wreckage. Now that the fire was out, the night had turned dark and chilly. Everyone was finding their way around by the beams of a couple of flashlights someone had brought.

  “Oh, Charlie, there you are,” Sarah said. “I’d like you to meet my grandson, Richie.”

  A gangly kid of about fifteen stepped forward. His large hands flopped at his sides, as if they weren’t quite sure they belonged at the ends of those long, skinny arms. His blond hair hung over his forehead, having received a few too many sprays of water to stay in style. He wore baggy black pants and a black pullover that hung halfway to his knees. In his case, I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to be stylish or if virtually any clothing would hang on his skinny frame. He nodded jerkily toward me and murmured a hello that almost made it past his lips.

  “And Richie’s friends, Lewis and Alisdair,” Sarah added, summoning two other boys over. Lewis was a bit more filled-out than Richie, and I noticed that he and Alisdair went for the same baggy clothing. They each gave me a polite nod but I sensed teenage sullenness just under the surface.

  “Let’s go inside,” Sarah suggested. “I’ll make us some cocoa.”

  We trooped through the orchard in a line, one of the torch bearers at the head and one at the end of the scraggly procession. When we reached the castle, three men, presumably grounds keepers, left. Richie and his friends informed Sarah that they were off to town.

  “Now where—” The slamming car door cut off her inquiry.

  Drake and I were now the only ones standing with Sarah. I introduced them and included Robert as he came walking back from one of the outbuildings with a flashlight in hand.

  “I’m afraid we should beg off staying for cocoa,” I told Sarah. “It’s been a very long day. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”

  “Let’s do plan on dinner one evening soon,” she insisted. Turning to Drake, she added, “I understand you have some fascinating stories to tell.”

  I could have almost sworn she winked at him but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m going to figure out where Ian Brodie is leasing land and which cottage they live in,” I told Drake in the car on the way back to our place. “I think I need to pay him a little visit.”

  Chapter 10

  Brodie’s cottage stood among a collection of old barns and wooden-fenced corrals. The land was somewhat hilly with gray-white rocks that jutted up through the rich, green grass. In the distance, a flock of fifty or sixty sheep grazed in a low spot at the base of a rocky promontory. I’d followed the sketchy directions Ian had mentioned when I met him and found the place without any trouble.

  Three grown collies and a half dozen puppies bounded out to meet me as soon as I stopped the car. One of the adult dogs, a female with nipples hanging inches below her belly, sniffed cautiously at my fingers before slowly wagging her tail and giving her tacit approval for me to touch her babies. With acceptance by the adults, I stooped down and became instantly covered in puppies. Their small bodies wiggled uncontrollably as they crawled over my shoes and worked their way up to my knees and lapped at my chin. I got a case of the giggles; there was no way not to erupt in laughter.

  “Sorry, ma’am, there’s not another show until twelve-thirty.”

  “Show?” My confusion must have registered on my face with a look of stupidity.

  “The dog shows? Did you come for that?” The young woman standing in the driveway wore denim overalls and a gray T-shirt that I sensed must have once been white. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail that brushed her shoulders and delicate tendrils of hair framed her forehead and cheeks. I guessed her age to be mid-twenties.

  “No, sorry I didn’t know anything about that.” I stood up and
tucked the tail of my pink T-shirt back into my jeans. “You must be Ian’s wife?” I would have extended my hand to her, but hers were full of baby bottles dripping foamy milk.

  “Yes, I’m Ramona,” she answered cautiously.

  I introduced myself by letting her know which cottage we were renting. “I met Ian outside one day and he suggested I drop by to meet you too.”

  “Well, it’s nice to know a neighbor,” she said with a widening grin. “Hey, want to help me feed a couple of lambs?”

  At my nod, she led me toward one of the corrals. The puppies trailed behind us and the two adult dogs wandered off. Nudging a small metal latch with her knee, Ramona opened a gate. “Catch that, will you?” she said as we walked through.

  I pushed the gate shut, leaving the puppies outside. Two lambs, standing about eighteen inches high, scampered toward Ramona, eyeing the bottles in her arms. She tilted one bottle downward to the nearest baby and handed the other bottle to me. I mimicked her technique with the other lamb. His mouth latched onto the nipple and his little tail went into furious wagging. I had to laugh again.

  “They’re so cute,” I said.

  “Never worked much with farm animals?” she asked.

  “Not really.” I remembered one early field trip to a local dairy when I’d been in first or second grade, but the animals were so huge no one had even suggested that we get near them.

  In about two minutes, both lambs drained their bottles and Ramona handed me a second one. “Just toss the empties on the ground,” she said.

  “Why don’t their mothers feed them?” I asked.

  “These two were orphaned.”

  “Oh? Recently?” I wanted to believe that she wouldn’t lie to me, but couldn’t help but remember the Dunbars just happened to have two lambs of their own missing. I ruffled the ears of my animal but didn’t notice any kind of tag or brand.

  “Yeah, Ian brought them in from the west pasture a few days ago. Said the mother was attacked by a big cat.”