Oh, it’s such a jumble. It’s as if the pieces of someone’s life were put in one of those cheap kaleidoscopes we had as children, and shaken. I get fragments of experience, but I can’t make sense of them.”
“I’m not surprised, after what you’ve been through these last few days.” Putting her arm round Hazel’s shoulder, Gemma gave her a brief hug. “But it’s just a dream—”
Hazel was already shaking her head. “I know that shock—and grief—do odd things to the psyche. But there’s an urgency to these dreams that stays with me. I feel her fear— It’s as if there’s something I should do—”
A car door slammed behind them, interrupting Hazel.
Turning round, Gemma saw Pascal getting out of his BMW. He moved stiffly, as he had for a moment the previous evening, but now he looked as if he were in real pain.
Gemma and Hazel hurried towards him. “Pascal, are you all right?” asked Gemma. “You don’t look at all well this morning.”
He grimaced. “It’s my back again, I’m afraid. Yesterday I was helping Heather with Donald’s things. I must have lifted too heavy a box. It’s an insult to my vanity.”
“Have you pulled a muscle?” Hazel asked, sympathet-ically.
“No, I have a bad disk,” Pascal admitted. “Usually, it’s manageable, but sometimes I have to take medication, and I seem to have misplaced my tablets. I thought perhaps I had left them in my room.”
“Duncan and I had that room last night,” Gemma told him. “But I don’t recall seeing anything of yours left behind. We should ask John and Louise—” She broke off as another car came down the drive and pulled up behind the BMW. Gemma recognized it instantly as belonging to Chief Inspector Ross.
“A good day to ye,” Ross called out as he and Sergeant Munro climbed from the car. He sounded too pleasant by half, thought Gemma, immediately wary.
“Something’s happened,” she whispered as Ross approached them.
“Sleep well, did ye?” Ross smiled, showing an expanse of teeth. “Mr. Benoit. Mrs. Cavendish. Inspector James.” He nodded at each of them in turn, as if bestow-ing a pontifical blessing. “And where are the others this morning?”
“Just gathering for breakfast, I should think,” answered Gemma, after glancing at her watch. It was getting on for half past eight. “Chief Inspector—”
“Why don’t we go inside for a wee chat,” interrupted Ross before Gemma could ask any of the half-dozen questions on the tip of her tongue.
Hazel grasped his arm as he turned away. “My husband, Chief Inspector— Have you—”
“I havena heard anything from London yet this morning, Mrs. Cavendish,” Ross said more gently than Gemma would have expected. “Now, perhaps we could impose on Mr. Innes for a cup of coffee.”
Hoping for enlightenment, Gemma glanced at Munro as they followed Ross towards the scullery door, but the sergeant’s long face remained impassive. She had a suspicion that Ross was planning some sort of “gather the suspects in the library” interrogation—but why?
Ross did gather them all together, but in the dining room rather than the library. “I like to think of myself as an economical man,” he explained, sitting down at the table and nursing his coveted cup of coffee. “I thought it would save me repeating myself if I talked to ye all at once—
time management, I believe it’s called.”
Gemma doubted Ross’s imitation of a naive rustic de-ceived anyone. Glancing round the room, she found Kincaid watching the detective with interest, while the others
looked as if they had unexpectedly encountered a cobra among the coffee cups. Pascal had eased himself into a chair. Martin had been seated when they came in, having already started on his cereal, while Louise had been helping John with the cooked breakfast in the kitchen. No one other than Pascal seemed inclined to join Martin and the chief inspector at the table.
Sergeant Munro had unobtrusively occupied the position he’d taken during their formal interviews, in the chair next to the sideboard.
“Now, then,” Ross continued after taking another appreciative sip of his coffee, “there’s been an interesting development since last night. I thought I should have another word with your neighbor”—he nodded at John and Louise—“Mr. Callum MacGillivray, as he was a bit vague as to his movements on the Sunday morning. Just in case he had seen more than he’d led us to believe, ye understand. Now, imagine my surprise this morning when I found, not Mr. MacGillivray forking hay into the horse troughs, but Mr. MacGillivray’s aunt.
“She had just come back from the hospital in Inverness, where her nephew was admitted in the wee hours of the morning.” Ross paused, appearing to savor the fact that he had their full attention. “It looks very much like someone tried to poison him.”
“Poison? How? What happened?” asked Gemma, curs-ing herself for not acting immediately on her instincts.
She’d felt sure that Callum had been hiding something.
“Is he— Is he all right?” Louise put a steadying hand on the sideboard.
“From the doctor’s report, and a quick look round the cottage, it looks as though someone put a hefty dose of opiates in his whisky—a terrible thing to do to a good bottle of Lagavulin.” Ross shook his head disapprovingly.
“The forensics laddies will be able to tell us more when they’ve had a go.”
“But is Callum all right?” said John, echoing his wife.
“Weel, now, that’s verra kind of you to be concerned, Mr. Innes. Especially as Miss MacGillivray told me you and your wee brother here paid a call on Callum early yesterday afternoon . . . and although Callum was out at the time, the two of you availed yourselves of his cottage.”
“But— You can’t think you’re going to pin this on us?
Just because we stopped by his cottage?” Martin leaned forward, a quick flush of anger suffusing his face. “We had nothing to do with—”
“Mr. Gilmore.” Ross turned on him like a terrier after a rat. “It seems you neglected to tell us that you had been recently charged with the sale of illegal substances, ec-stasy, I believe it was. Did ye think we wouldna find it out?”
“But it wasn’t relevant,” protested Martin. “That had nothing to do with Donald’s murder—”
“That’s for me to decide,” snapped Ross. “And what I see is that a man has been poisoned with opiates, and that you had access to drugs.”
“If by opiates, you mean morphine or heroin, I’ve never even seen the stuff. I wouldn’t know where to get that sort of thing even if I wanted to—and it’s a far cry from selling a few X-tabs to friends for a rave.”
“So that’s why you’re hanging about,” said Louise, giving Martin a look that could have curdled milk. “I should have known—”
“You say this man was given opiates?” Pascal interrupted, rising from his seat. “What sort of opiates?”
“I’ve not seen a copy of the hospital’s lab results,”
Ross said. “Why?”
“I take a pain medication, by prescription. It’s hydro-
morphone, a morphine derivative. I came round this morning because I had discovered my tablets were missing.”
“If you mean Dilaudid,” Munro said from his corner,
“that’s stronger than morphine. My wife was given it after a surgery a few years ago. The stuff made her sicker than a dog.”
“Mr. Benoit, when did you last see these tablets of yours?” asked Ross.
Pascal thought for a moment. “Not for several days. I do not take them regularly, you see, but only when the pain is most severe. Last night, after I had moved to Benvulin, my back was very bad, but when I looked in my case, the tablets were not there.”
“But you’re sure you had them here, in this house?”