hirty minutes later, most of the family were gathered in the library. There was still no sign of Holmes. We had the laird stretched out on a sofa and my medical bag was brought down from the room. Charles paced, distraught and impatient. ‘Donal. My God, Donal!’ He seemed more angry than shocked. Isla McLaren watched him dispassionately.
Alistair entered the room with the news that the royal party had all departed in haste. ‘Who can blame them?’ said he. ‘And in case you are interested, Charles, your wife has been put to bed by her maid – with something to calm her nerves.’ He moved to a sideboard and poured himself a whisky.
He held up the glass, smiled ruefully at the golden liquid, then downed it. ‘We are finished.’
His own wife, standing at his side, nodded.
‘Ridiculous!’ exclaimed Charles. ‘This is merely a setback!’
‘You are an idiot,’ said Isla McLaren. ‘No one will ever touch a McLaren whisky again. Ghosts may frighten some, but an actual corpse sealed in one of our casks? There could be no better recipe for ruin.’
‘She is right,’ said Alistair. ‘I have summoned the police. No way around it given our visitors.’
‘That is unfortunate,’ said Mrs McLaren.
‘I will handle them when they arrive,’ said Alistair. ‘And the laird’s doctor has been summoned as you asked, Doctor Watson.’
Meanwhile my patient showed no signs of regaining consciousness.
Charles had begun pacing in frantic despair.
‘But our stock! What are we to do?’ he cried.
‘We will end up selling off the lot anonymously to be combined into some insipid Southern blend,’ said Alistair bitterly. ‘And then our doors will close. A fine finish after more than a hundred years.’
‘Gentlemen, your brother lies pickled. Perhaps that should be your concern,’ said Isla McLaren in a sharp tone.
‘Donal’s body has clearly been there for years,’ said Alistair. ‘No doubt since the night of his party. But who put him there?’
‘Did you see Coupe? He knew what was in the cask,’ said the lady.
But it occurred to me that with the exception of the laird, none of the family had expressed sadness or outrage at Donal’s grisly fate. I looked around for Holmes and my worries increased.
A moan came from the laird. His eyes fluttered and I called for brandy. Isla McLaren had it in my hand instantly. He spluttered and choked as I held it to his lips. His eyes opened halfway and immediately squeezed shut again. His pulse was stronger.
‘Sir?’ I said. ‘Sir Robert, can you hear me?’
Then he shouted, a terrible cri de coeur, ‘Donal!’
In five more minutes I had him up and seated, with the family drawn around him in a grim circle. He sat pale and rigid, his eyes blinking as if seeing the world and everything in it for the first time. I was unsure of his level of awareness or whether he had sustained invisible damage. ‘Sir Robert, can you hear me?’ I tried to engage him, to get him to follow my moving finger with his eyes, but he was unresponsive. ‘Can you tell me your full name, sir? Where are we? What is this room?’
He did not reply, merely repeating ‘Donal’ several times.
‘What is his state, Doctor?’ asked Isla McLaren. ‘Can you do something?’
‘I cannot yet tell. I am fearful of a stroke.’
Charles soon got up and paced nervously in front of the fire. Alistair slipped out of the room. His wife remained at the laird’s side, attentive but at the same time remote – watching, listening, evaluating.
But slowly the patriarch seemed to rally. ‘We … we … oh my God. How?’ he slurred.
‘Cameron Coupe had the skills and access to the unfilled casks, Father,’ said Isla McLaren evenly. ‘Clearly Donal was put into an empty cask the night of the party, or soon after, and it was later filled and has rested in the warehouse since. Which means he never went to India. Or the Sudan. Never served at Khartoum. And judging by what we saw tonight, Mr Coupe put him there.’
Mrs McLaren, it seemed to me, showed remarkable level-headedness given the sensational character of unfolding events.
The laird blinked at her. I am not sure he understood.
‘How can you know what happened at the party, Isla? It was before your time here,’ said Alistair, from in the doorway. He came in and stood before his father. ‘No police, yet,’ he added.
‘The lady is correct,’ said a sharp voice from behind Alistair. ‘Her logic is sound.’ Holmes stood at the door, dabbing at a cut on his forehead, his hair in disarray, his clothing torn.
‘Holmes!’ I cried.
‘Mr Cameron Coupe is being held in the next room. He admits placing Donal’s body in the cask. But he is not the murderer. Nor did he switch the casks to cause the events of tonight.’
‘Someone else planned tonight? Not Coupe?’ demanded Charles.
‘No, of course not Coupe. Did you not see his reaction?’ snapped his sister-in-law.
‘Holmes, you said Coupe placed Donal into the cask! The murdering scoundrel!’ exclaimed Alistair.
‘I said nothing of the kind,’ said Holmes with a schoolmaster’s asperity. ‘He did hide the body, but as for the killing, Coupe was only a witness, or what we might term a principal in the second degree.’ Noticing confusion in the room, he added, ‘Donal was killed by another.’
‘I say Coupe killed my brother!’ shouted Charles.
Holmes had taken a position in front of the fireplace, holding his hands slightly behind him to warm them. ‘Cameron Coupe says not. And I am inclined to believe him.’
Sir Robert stared up at Holmes. ‘I do not understand.’ His eyes focused, then went opaque, then grew sharp again. He was struggling for full consciousness.
Holmes turned to me. ‘Is he compos mentis, Doctor?’
‘I am not sure, Holmes. He is only intermittently lucid. He may have suffered a stroke.’
Holmes stared hard at the laird. ‘Sir Robert? You are a strong man. I am going to presume you can hear and understand me. It is time that you learned some hard truths, sir. You wanted answers today. Well, I have a great many of them for you now.’
Holmes moved to one side of the fire and positioned himself in front of a large bookcase. He appeared to lean on it for support. I rose in some concern but he waved me off. Instead he took out his pipe and lit it, forcing everyone to wait. Charles snorted impatiently.
Holmes looked up and took in everyone in the room. He finally locked eyes with the laird. ‘Sir Robert, I now know how both your son Donal and your daughter Fiona died, and at whose hands.’
‘Daughter?’ cried Charles. ‘Fiona?’
Alistair laughed sharply. ‘Oh, of course!’ I turned to look at his wife. Isla McLaren was perfectly still, her face a mask. Had she known?
‘Daughter?’ said Charles again. His voice dropped to a whisper as the implication settled around him like a coal fog over London. ‘Fiona was your daughter? Our sister?’
‘We shall discuss Donal first,’ said Holmes. ‘I have examined the body. Donal McLaren was stabbed in the chest with a small, serrated knife blade. The body was well maintained in the high concentration of alcohol over all these years. Even as the percentage of alcohol declined due to evaporation, it was enough to preserve the corpse in near perfect condition. He was no doubt killed the night of his going away party and in view, or with the knowledge of, Cameron Coupe. Coupe then offered to hide the body for reasons he will have to explain to you. But he is prepared to do so.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked the laird. It was clearly an effort for him to speak.
‘That the murder was the night of the party? Yes. When I visited your warehouse, Sir Robert, you noticed me examining the floorboards behind the row of casks set out as tasters. There I found some evidence of a long ago struggle, and a stain which I found suggestive. Using my pocketknife, I scraped a small sample from a crevice in the floorboards which in my room I later identified as blood. As Watson knows, I frequently carry with me the chemical means to make such an identification. As this area of the room was difficult to access it is likely to have remained more or less undisturbed since the time of Donal’s departure celebration. It was probable that this dried residue dated from that time. Coupe only confirmed my theory.
‘Next, the murderer. You mentioned that you arranged for Donal to have a safe posting to the Guards, but a less propitious placement for his friend in the artillery. I have two observations there.
‘You were correct about this young man. The name August Bell Clarion is well known to me personally from school days. While this is hardly proof, I know it was well within his ken to commit such a murder in a sudden act of pique at Donal McLaren.’
‘Why yes, of course!’ I cried, thinking of what I had learned at Fettes – but had not had time to discuss.
Holmes threw me a puzzled look, but went on.
‘As to motive and timing, consider this. Clarion was a violently jealous sort, easily provoked. Your son was handsome, blessed with rich life prospects at the distillery, admired by women, and about to leave with a generous and relatively safe commission. Any one of these things could set off this vicious man, but in concert they offered a sure motive. I suspected that he was Donal’s killer, and now we have proof in that Cameron Coupe witnessed the act and confirmed it. Your son was stabbed by Clarion on the night of the party.’
‘But how did Donal’s body end up in the cask?’ asked the ever-practical Isla McLaren. ‘And perhaps more pertinent, how did that cask become singled out as the one to open tonight?’
‘That you must all hear first-hand,’ said Holmes. ‘Bring him in.’
Coupe was dragged into the room by two burly servants, his hands bound behind him. He, too looked the worse for wear, his face bruised and bleeding. He was brought forward and now stood, pale and stoic before the laird.
‘Cameron Coupe!’ said the laird, as if seeing him, too, for the first time. ‘I trusted you as I would trust my son.’
‘Not so, my laird,’ said Coupe softly. ‘I was never family to you.’
‘Why?’ said the laird. ‘Why do that to Donal? And to leave him there—’
‘Ach!’ Coupe’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I did not kill him, sir, but … there is not an excuse that will send me easy to my grave.’
‘I thought better of you, Coupe,’ said Isla McLaren. ‘Why did you participate in this atrocity?’
‘Mrs McLaren, if you please.’ Holmes placed a hand on her sleeve and she recoiled in surprise. He turned to Coupe. ‘Mr Coupe had plenty of reason to hate Donal McLaren. He had been promised the running of the distillery by the laird. Is that not so, Mr Coupe?’
At Coupe’s sullen nod Holmes continued. ‘But what happened that night to change things?’ he asked.
‘The laird announced that Donal would be given the running of the place upon his return,’ said Coupe.
‘Announced, you say, on that night?’ asked Holmes.
‘Yes,’ said the laird. ‘But to run it with you, Cameron Coupe, at his side. You and Donal were friends!’
‘Nae, sir. You did not know your son,’ said Coupe.
The laird looked poised to object but stopped before speaking. The weight of the room was against him. He sank back.
A silence ensued. Suddenly Isla McLaren’s clear voice rang out. ‘But if Donal died that night who wrote the letters from the wars?’
Holmes turned to her with a grim smile. ‘Excellent question. August Bell Clarion was a master of forgery. I knew him at school, where he earned pocket money by writing papers for other pupils. More than once he caused trouble for others with this talent. He clearly took Donal’s commission and proceeded in his place, using his name.’
‘Then it was his bad behaviour that resulted in Donal – or who we thought was Donal – being sent into battle,’ said Alistair.
‘Correct.’ Holmes turned to the laird. ‘August Bell Clarion, posing as your son, was simply unable to keep his nature in check. His actions were dire enough to propel him out of the safety of the posting you had secured for Donal and onto the front line.’ Holmes looked sharply at the laird whose face had crumbled with regret. ‘Ah, I see you had a report of this event, whatever it was.’
The laird looked down, ashamed.
‘And you believed it, sir. That tells me you knew your son’s real character. Perhaps you were being generous in your earlier description to me, which truly has been of no help at all.’
‘But we understood that Clarion died in battle in 1883,’ said Isla McLaren.
‘That was reported in the papers, yes,’ said Holmes. ‘Having some small history with the man myself, I investigated the report when I read of it. It was reliably corroborated. However, I now realize that whoever died in El Obeid on the ill-fated Hicks Expedition was not Clarion, but must have been some unfortunate soul whom the clever fiend induced to take his place.’
‘I will kill this scoundrel,’ swore the laird, rising unsteadily to his feet.
‘Sit, Father,’ said Alistair, taking the laird’s arm and guiding him back to his chair.
‘The war has done that for you, Sir Robert,’ said Holmes. ‘It was Clarion who served in Khartoum in the place of Donal, and he who died there. Watson has just returned from Edinburgh today with proof that Clarion was in Khartoum. He is pictured in a photograph of Gordon’s men, identified by Watson’s friend as Donal. No British survived the slaughter of the Mahdi’s dervishes.’
The laird stared ahead, taking all this in with difficulty. ‘But all the time, Donal was still here, in the—’ The room was quiet, with only the sound of the crackling fire. A log fell further into the fire and sparks flew from it in Holmes’s direction. He edged away slightly from the swirling embers, brushing at his trousers.
‘But then what happened this evening, Mr Holmes?’ Isla McLaren’s cool voice cut through the silence. Alone amongst her family she seemed bent on stringing together a coherent narrative.
Holmes turned to the cowed foreman. ‘Mr Coupe, here is your one small chance at redemption. Explain what you saw eight years ago, and what transpired this evening, exactly as you did to me in the distillery some minutes ago.’
The man raised his handsome face up to the light and took a deep breath. ‘The night of the party, I came upon Clarion and Donal. They were fighting. Some girl I think, or the commission. Clarion said you had bought him a death sentence.’
‘I bought that boy a way out of gaol!’ cried the laird. ‘But my son?’
‘Donal laughed at Clarion, and so the fiend snatched a knife – that self-same blade which had just been given to Donal by his mother Lady Elizabeth – and he stabbed his friend in the heart. I witnessed the whole thing. Clarion looked up and saw me. He recognized instantly that I was … that I did not—’ Coupe looked down, ashamed.
‘You were what?’ asked Holmes.
‘I was not so terribly shocked.’
‘Perhaps relieved,’ Holmes suggested quietly.
Coupe could not deny it. ‘Clarion then came over and embraced me, wiping blood on my shirt and hands as he did so. He told me I was in with him now, and if I told what I saw he would implicate me, but if I cooperated he knew I would have the running of the distillery.’ Coupe turned to the laird, eyes blazing. ‘Then later, after Khartoum, once again you overlooked me and gave it to Charles.’
‘But back to that night,’ prompted Holmes. ‘Clarion had you then, and he asked you to dispose of the body.’
‘I told him I would take care of it. And I … I—’
‘You hid the body in one of the casks being filled shortly after. That took some doing, but you were trained as a cooper. You noted the number. It was 59, I believe,’ said Holmes.
‘I did. God forgive me. It seemed a fitting end for Donal McLaren,’ said Coupe.
‘Donal was your friend!’ roared the laird, rising to his feet and swaying there, his arms raised as if to throttle Cameron Coupe. He stepped forward, but stumbled and was caught again by Alistair.
‘Sir,’ said Coupe, ‘your Donal was not the man you took him to be. ’Twas he and not Charles who bombed a neighbour’s distillery not so long before he left.’
‘I am no cowardly bomber, Father, how could you think so?’ said Charles.
‘Ha,’ said Alistair, ‘that is exactly what you are. Montpellier, Charles? I happen to know your idiot plan with that Frenchman, Jean Vidocq, to blow up Dr Janvier’s laboratory. I have the letter proving it.’
Sir Robert turned to face Charles. ‘Is that true?’
‘Not precisely,’ corrected Holmes. ‘I now have the letter in my possession. It is my opinion that the bomb was intended for a deserted laboratory, and at lunchtime, virtually ensuring no one would be there. A gesture rather than a terrorist plot. Am I right, Charles?’
Charles looked from Holmes to his father in helpless guilt. ‘I was doing what any businessman would do. Protecting our investment. Advancing our cause. No one was to be hurt. We planned it most carefully … I thought you would be proud—’
Sir Robert’s gaze lingered for a moment on Charles, then he turned to Holmes, focusing his red-rimmed, penetrating stare on my friend. ‘I hired you to find a killer and instead you destroy my family.’
‘I have no desire to destroy anyone,’ said Holmes. ‘Only to reveal the truth.’
The laird turned on Cameron Coupe with sudden ferocity. ‘And you! You vile beast! Liar! You betray my trust and besmirch my dead son’s reputation—’
Coupe looked around the room in defiance.
‘Sir Robert, you have not yet heard the worst of Donal,’ said he. ‘Little Anne! When Donal was six years old. She was only three when she vanished. Her brother Donal threw her down the medieval cistern at the end of the nursery hall. Four storeys down to an unimaginable end.’
A collective gasp echoed throughout the room. Even Holmes looked surprised at this.
‘No!’ shouted the laird, staggering back. ‘Say it is not so!’
Coupe choked out the next words with difficulty. ‘He told me so himself! Bragged of it, even.’
The laird shook his head in bewilderment and horror. ‘Anne!’
Charles stepped forward in a new show of bravado. ‘Father! Do you not remember? I tried to tell you, but you did not believe me.’
The laird turned to Charles, aghast. ‘You were four. You could barely speak.’
‘But I saw it. I saw Donal do it,’ said Charles.
‘And you have stayed silent ever since?’ asked Isla McLaren. ‘Why?’
Charles looked ashamed. ‘Donal told me he would do the same to me if I told.’
‘Your son Donal was a monster, sir,’ said Coupe. ‘I will admit that thinking of him in the cask, though I did not kill him myself, gave me no small pleasure over the years. This whole family is cursed!’ Coupe suddenly spat at the laird’s feet. Years of pent-up hatred found their release in this moment.
Holmes nodded to me and I gently but firmly led the laird back to his chair and sat him down. The older man was shaking, with rage or shock I was not sure. His pupils were pinpoints.
‘I will now relate what happened to Fiona, at least most of it,’ said Holmes quietly. ‘There is one small detail that eludes me.’
‘My God,’ mumbled Charles. ‘Our sister.’
‘Mr Holmes! Tell us what you have found!’ said Isla McLaren.
‘Your plan was ill-conceived from the start, Laird Robert,’ said Holmes. ‘Fiona had an admirer who kept his feelings secret. That was Cameron Coupe, was it not?’ Here he turned to the foreman, whose face revealed the truth of that statement. ‘Perhaps you can imagine just how painful this made your assignment to him, Sir Robert. And yet he carried it out. Tell us why, Mr Coupe.’
The man still stood, hands bound behind him. He seemed to have shrunk in grief and guilt. And yet he retained a flame of righteousness. ‘It is true. I loved Fiona,’ said Cameron Coupe. ‘You asked, Mr Holmes, if she might have wandered into the distillery, met with some of the workers. I made sure that did not happen, though I had to be much on my guard as she was an adventurous girl. But I could do nothing about what went on in the castle. I knew that there, she had been sorely used. Charles had taken advantage and would soon discard her, like so much rubbish. It is his way.’
‘You know nothing of this, Coupe!’ shouted Charles.
‘I knew why the laird wished to discourage all the attention. I naively thought it would work. And that she might – I do not know – be humbled, or made sensible. And then, perhaps I could—’
‘You might comfort her? And thus gain her favour?’ exclaimed Isla McLaren. ‘My God, you men think the world of yourselves!’
Coupe was white with shame. ‘You are right, Mrs McLaren. But oh, how smart that girl was. Even though the other servants teased her when she came back without a hair on her head, how they goaded her, making her think it was ghosts, all the time that clever girl was thinking, thinking. And then she found, in my room, I stupidly kept—’
‘You kept what?’ asked the laird.
Holmes nodded to Coupe.
‘I kept her hair. Foolish, but—’
‘You imbecile!’ cried the laird.
‘When she discovered it, she knew at once it was I who had done the deed,’ said Coupe. ‘She attacked me! I tried to talk to her, to explain, but she was in a rage. She flew at me and we struggled. I was being so careful, but she was wild. I took her arms to stop her but she wrenched away, and she fell. She fell and hit the back of her head and then she was still.’
Coupe turned slowly to face Holmes. ‘But how, sir, how did you know?’
‘I examined your rooms earlier and found evidence of a struggle, and the torn shirt which you attempted to repair. And then, upon examining her body tonight, I found a matching piece of this torn shirt clutched in her hand. You are careless, Coupe, with your crimes.’
A silence fell over the room.
A single tear coursed down the face of the disgraced foreman. ‘She was dead, sir, and no one unhappier than myself.’
‘But what then?’ cried the laird. ‘How did her body come to be found in the icehouse, and her head delivered to the South of France?’
Coupe hung his head, unable to speak.
‘I can answer the first part,’ said Holmes. He turned to Coupe, repeating what he had told me earlier. ‘The ground was frozen and so you could not bury her. There was no easy place to hide her body above ground where it would not be found. You had to act quickly. And so, the idea came to you to use the icehouse, which once filled, is not accessed in the winter. This must have been, in your mind, only a temporary measure. Am I right, Mr Coupe?’
‘Yes, sir. It is as if you witnessed my every move.’
‘Just as you thought of the cask of whisky ten years past. You thought. You thought—’ stammered the laird.
Cameron Coupe looked down at the ground, filled with remorse.
‘But you have two more things to tell us, Mr Coupe,’ said Holmes. ‘First, why and how was Fiona’s head delivered to the Grand Hôtel du Cap?’
Coupe opened his mouth to speak, and stopped suddenly at the explosive retort of a gunshot. He looked down in utter surprise to see a bloom of crimson appear on his chest.
The laird had drawn what I had taken to be only an ornamental pistol from the front of his velvet dress jacket, and had fired point blank at Cameron Coupe.
‘Sir Robert!’ cried Holmes, and leapt upon the man, wrenching the gun away.
Coupe staggered back and fell.
Holmes confronted the laird, his face terrible with anger. I rushed to Coupe’s side. Everyone else in the room was motionless, pinned by shock.
Coupe lay bleeding on the floor. ‘Release his hands,’ I cried. Alistair did so as I knelt beside the fallen man, took a pillow from the sofa and pressed on it to staunch the wound. My doctor’s bag was already in the room and without a word, Isla McLaren brought it to me.
The laird stood blinking at his wounded employee. I glanced up to see him sink to his knees with a moan. Alistair helped him into a chair, placing a hand on his shoulder to restrain him if needed. He nodded at Holmes.
Choking back his fury, Holmes knelt beside me. ‘Watson?’
I shook my head. The prognosis was dire. The bullet had entered Coupe’s upper left chest between the heart and the shoulder. If it had hit the subclavian artery he would have less than two minutes to live. But if it had missed that critical vessel, there was a chance. I pressed hard on the wound.
‘Coupe. Coupe!’ cried Holmes, turning to the prostate man. ‘Can you speak?’ But Coupe was insensible.
Holmes leapt to his feet, and growled in frustration. ‘That was a foolhardy move, Sir Robert. I knew Coupe was the culprit in Fiona’s death, before I entered this room. But still we do not yet know how the head was sent to the South of France, nor how the cask came to be the one opened tonight. I am quite sure that this man, culpable as he was in other respects, is not personally responsible for all these things. He had more to tell us.’
‘One might almost think the ghost of August Bell Clarion has been at work,’ said Charles.
‘There are no ghosts,’ said Isla.
‘No, there are no ghosts. And Clarion is dead,’ said Holmes. ‘I am sure of it.’
Given my friend’s history with August Bell Clarion I could well appreciate his thoroughness in this matter.
‘Then who switched the casks?’ asked Isla.
‘I had hoped Coupe would have a theory. Now we may never hear it, nor how Fiona’s head travelled to the Grand Hôtel du Cap. Both were perpetrated by someone who wished to destroy the McLaren family,’ said Holmes.
‘Perhaps just a madman,’ said Charles.
‘No,’ said Holmes. ‘This is far too planned, too carefully orchestrated. This family has a knack for seeding resentment. Look to someone on the property.’
A groan arose from Cameron Coupe, as Holmes said these words. Holmes turned to him eagerly, but the man was beyond words. Holmes sighed in frustration.
‘I must attend to this bullet wound urgently,’ said I. ‘And the laird also needs care. Get me some men to transport them to a place I can see to them! I will need boiled water and clean sheets.’ A servant was called in and dispatched at a run.
‘That man killed Fiona,’ cried Charles, pointing to Coupe. ‘No matter what he says, I think he cut off her head and took it down south. He will rot in gaol!’
‘No,’ said Holmes. ‘Her death was an accident. And no, he did not send the head. He was away at a meeting of master distillers at the time when he would have to have done that. It was not Coupe.’
‘One of the workers, then?’ suggested Isla.
Alistair stepped forward. ‘Yes, one of the workers must have been involved. There is one, a badly disfigured man, who works closely with Mr Coupe. That is, I saw them frequently in company. A remarkably ill-tempered individual, whom I recommended we let go. But Charles would not have it.’
‘It is not up to you to run this company,’ said Charles. ‘It is up to me. I am the master of the McLaren Distillery. And things will be very different from this day forward.’
‘You are master of nothing now,’ struck in Isla quietly. ‘The McLaren Distillery is finished. You will be lucky to avoid gaol yourself.’
‘My wife is correct,’ said Alistair. ‘I have you for planning the bombing in Montpellier. As Isla says, gaol awaits. Come, Mr Holmes. Let me point out this man to you.’