They took the box back to the kitchen, the only place in the house that had a couple of chairs. Judging by the state of the table, the forensic team had been making use of the facilities while they were here, although McLean wasn’t sure how they’d managed to boil a kettle. The range had a cold, dead feel to it, and the electricity had been cut off when the collapsing back wall had snapped the overhead cable bringing power to the house.
‘Could really do with a little more light,’ McLean said as he carefully untied the red ribbon and took the lid off the box. Rain clattered against the window, and the sky had turned almost black. Harrison dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone, tapping at the screen until the flash on the back lit up. The pale yellow light wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
‘There you go, sir. Hope it doesn’t kill the battery.’
McLean grunted his thanks, then turned his attention once more to the box. Inside lay a collection of papers, photographs, letters written in neat copperplate handwriting, a few ancient invoices and some yellowing newspaper cuttings. He picked up a postcard showing a sepia print image of the seafront at Carnoustie, at least that was what it said it was. Flipping it over, he saw that it had been addressed to C. Slater, the address not Bairnfather Estate, but Burntwoods in Angus. No post code, and the stamp would have excited many a collector – this card had been sent sometime before the Second World War, when Cecily Slater would have been a young girl.
‘Can you read that? My eyes can’t cope.’ McLean held the card up for Harrison to see, relieved that she, too, had to squint to make out the message written in faded ink. He could kid himself he didn’t need spectacles for a little while yet.
‘Not sure, sir. Looks like “Came to . . .” something “you but could not . . .” something.’ She held her phone up to the card, snapped a picture of it, then pinched and zoomed to enlarge the text. ‘Ah, that’s better. “Came to visit you but could not enter the place. Seems my kind are not allowed. Trust you are being treated well by the witches and that you will soon be able to come home. Father and I both miss you terribly. Your ever loving brother, Archie.” Well, that’s as clear as mud. Witches?’
McLean took the card back and stared at the handwriting again. Without the benefit of modern technology, he still couldn’t make out much of what it said, but there was something about that one word that stood out. He ran his finger lightly over the text, feeling for any irregularities, perhaps a sign that something had been erased or altered. A full forensic examination would be more revealing, but he didn’t think it would be a good use of their scarce resources. There was nothing particularly odd about the postcard other than its message, and that might simply have been the way two siblings spoke to each other back when the card had been written. Eighty years ago, give or take. If it was a clue to anything, it was a very cold one.
‘Archie would presumably be Sir Archibald Slater, Tenth Lord Bairnfather.’ Harrison was peering at her phone again, which meant the torch light wasn’t shining in a particularly helpful direction. McLean was beginning to wonder whether there was any point to searching through this box at all, apart from killing some time until the rain eased off.
‘According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1925 and died in 1984. Speculation is it was AIDS, although the family denied it and the rumours he was gay. The current Lord Bairnfather’s his son, so perhaps he swung both ways.’
‘You know half of the stuff on the internet’s made up, right?’ McLean leafed idly through some of the photographs. There were family pictures, black and white and awkwardly posed. A few showed Bairnfather Hall in an earlier era, a massive coach and horses pulled up in front of the grand entrance. A couple were portraits of young women, perhaps Cecily herself. And tucked almost at random in among the others were a series of pictures of a stately home that made Bairnfather Hall look small by comparison. Granted, McLean wasn’t exactly an expert on the nation’s country mansions, but he didn’t recognise this one at all. The photographs were all black and white, or shades of sepia yellow, and nothing in them suggested any kind of modernity. Perhaps, like many of those places, this one had been demolished when it became too big and too expensive to run.
‘Aye, I know that, sir. Wikipedia’s a good enough place to start, mind. And there’s a lot of stuff here about the Bairnfathers I didn’t know.’
‘Did you know much? I only knew the name, and mostly because of the hotel rather than the family. There was some function I was meant to go to a couple of years back. Meet the politicians and their paymasters kind of thing. Don’t think anybody noticed I wasn’t there.’ Idly, McLean flipped over the last photograph of the mansion. None of the others had been written on, but this one had a brief description in soft pencil. Burntwoods – July 1949. He held it up for Harrison to see. ‘You know anything about this place?’
‘Burntwoods?’ The detective sergeant leaned in close to look at the image. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Big old place, isn’t it? How on earth could anyone afford to build places like that? Why on earth would they?’
McLean glanced at the window, aware that the rattle of rain had ceased. The light appeared brighter, as if the heavy clouds had passed over. Time to make a run for the car; he didn’t think they’d find anything more in this cottage.
‘The why of it would be showing off, same as men have always done. See how successful I am. My house is bigger than yours.’ He stood up, put everything back in the box and closed the lid, then tucked it under his jacket to keep it as dry as possible. ‘As to how they could afford to, well a lot of these places were built by rich merchants looking to do something with all their new-found wealth. And most of that wealth came from trade between Glasgow, Africa and the New World.’
Harrison had put her phone away and was zipping up her jacket, better equipped for this outing than McLean. Her expression was one he had come to recognise as her not knowing what he was talking about but unsure whether she should be asking for clarification.
‘Slaves and sugar, Sergeant. These mansions might have been built by Scottish stonemasons, but they worked on the backs of African slaves and Europe’s sweet tooth.’
It didn’t really matter that the rain had stopped and the clouds begun to part. They still got soaked walking from the old gamekeeper’s cottage back through the trees and down to where McLean’s Alfa Romeo was parked. Fat drops of water fell from the branches, and the tips of the pine needles glistened with it. Impossible to avoid brushing up against wetness with every step. McLean had the shoebox tucked under his jacket to try and protect it as much as possible; everything else was thoroughly rinsed.
‘Knew I should have worn a hat,’ Harrison complained as she peeled off her coat and shook it. McLean popped open the boot of the car and placed the box alongside the stout walking boots he’d forgotten to put on before heading up to the cottage. His raincoat and woolly hat might have been useful too, although it was a bit late now.
‘Let’s just get back to the station. I’ll ask a constable to have a more thorough look at that box, but my best guess is it’s a red herring. Reckon we’ll get further following the money, which means we really need to speak with the current Lord Bairnfather. Given my past history with the rich and famous, that should be fun.’
Harrison gave him a look that was half knowing, half incredulous. ‘You think he’d have anything to do with this?’
‘Maybe not him directly. Families can be weird that way though, and rich families tend to be the worst. I don’t know what the set-up with the hotel is, how the Bairnfather Estate trust works. Could be any number of reasons why one beneficiary might want to get rid of another, great-aunt or no.’
‘I’ll get Lofty to look into it. He’s the best when it comes to numbers.’ Harrison folded her coat neatly and placed it in the boot so it wouldn’t stain the leather seats. ‘You want me to drive, sir?’
McLean handed her the keys, not quite sure when it was he’d decided he preferred being chauffeured to driving himself. Perhaps it was the car, with its ridiculously over-powered engine. He found himself unaccountably yearning for the simplicity of his old GTV. Or maybe he was yearning for the past it represented.
Shaking his head at the stray thought, he closed the boot and walked round to the passenger door. Inside, the car was warm and dry, the seat welcome after being on his feet for a while. He pulled the door closed, strapped on the seat belt, and only then noticed that Harrison hadn’t climbed in behind the wheel. She’d opened the door, just a crack, and then stopped.
‘You’re letting the cold air in, Sergeant,’ he said, half joking. Harrison didn’t respond, so he craned his neck forward to see where she was looking, then followed her gaze to a point a few yards off, beside the path that climbed up from the forestry track to the clearing. And then he saw it, sitting still as a statue, staring with that intense gaze that went right through to your soul. A black cat. Not large like Mrs McCutcheon’s cat, who had grown portly on an exercise regime that consisted mainly of sleeping in front of the Aga. It had sheltered as best it could from the rain under a frond of bracken, but even so its coat was slick with wet. As he watched, it lifted a front paw, licked it, and then wiped its face a couple of times.
Not quite knowing why he did so, McLean unclasped his seat belt and opened the car door. As if it had been waiting for his invitation, the cat stopped cleaning itself, stood up and trotted over. It had the decency to shake the worst of the water off its back, then leapt gracefully into his lap. He held out a suspicious hand, but the cat only nudged it once, marking him with its scent, before curling up into a neat black ball.
‘Umm . . .’ Harrison peered in through the now fully open driver’s side door, her uncertainty as evident as McLean’s own.
‘It’s not the first time this has happened to me,’ McLean said. ‘Guess we’ll need to stop off at a vet on the way back to the station.’