‘Got everything?’ Alice enquired.
‘You know, the eldest son, primogenitals… what’s it called, Chris?’
‘Primogeniture,’ the Major corrected.
Mrs Freeman continued. ‘So, James scooped the lot. The house in Moray Place, most of the money, all of the farms…’
‘No, no, we share Blackstone Mains, darling.’
‘Just as bloody well, too!’ she said hotly, drawing deeply on her Silk-cut.
Before her husband had a chance to reply, DI Manson intervened again: ‘Was the Sheriff ever married… did he have any children?’
‘Goodness, no! Far too uptight to form “a welationship” with anyone-any woman for sure-a stranger to “lurve”,’ Mrs Freeman said disdainfully.
‘My brother couldn’t say his “Rs”,’ the Major explained, grinning.
‘When did you last see him?’ Alice asked.
Mrs Freeman answered. ‘Cousin David’s funeral, I think, and that would be over seven years ago… maybe six years ago, what do you think, Chris? It was certainly before you lost that little job with those estate agents, showing people over houses.’
‘Who should we talk to, to get some impression of your brother?’ DI Manson asked impatiently.
‘I really don’t know,’ the Major replied. ‘We communicated largely by letter, Christmas cards and so on, or the odd telephone call. He must have had friends, maybe some of the people at the funeral? Mind you, most of them were old friends of the family, not of him personally. Best try his work colleagues, if any of them are still alive.’
That evening in the cramped back room of the Clearwater Diving School Alice sat next to her friend, Bridget, filled in the register and passed it to the man on her right.
‘Who’s Mrs Norton?’ she whispered to her.
‘Me, obviously.’
‘Why on earth?’
‘I’ll be more mysterious as a divorced woman. I’m too old to be a sodding spinster. I’m not signing in as Miss Norton or Msss bloody Norton. Are you Miss Rice tonight?’
‘Of course. I thought half the point of the classes was to meet available men.’
‘Well, this crew’s much better than the car maintenance lot, I can tell you that for nothing,’ Bridget said. ‘These ones can speak, the mechanics just grunted at each other, and that one… is not bad-looking.’ And she pointed a finger, unobtrusively, on her lap at a man sitting opposite them.
Once they had all changed they were paired-up for manoeuvres in the pool. Alice waddled, practically doubled-up, to the water’s edge, weighed down by a massive lead belt and cylinders and encased in an unflattering skin-tight wetsuit. Tripping on a flipper, she smiled weakly at her companion, a balding surveyor from Leith, as they began to practise the hand signals that they had been taught for ‘OK’, ‘distress’ and ‘danger’, prior to immersion. As she lumbered into the water, she noted through her mask that Bridget had been buddied with the last person to join the group, a man too beer-bellied for any of the available wetsuits and who, when asked to introduce himself to the class, had described himself as ‘a successful entrepreneur in waste management’. While Bridget was flopping into the pool, the man continued talking to her until she disappeared below the surface in a whirlpool of bubbles, swiftly followed by him.
On meeting her friend underwater at the deep end, Alice flourished an ‘OK’ hand signal at her and nearly choked on her regulator when Bridget turned sideways to face her and then, gesturing at the entrepreneur, signalled ‘tosser’ in a speedy hand movement.
Quill played with a piece of greasy wrapping paper on the floor of the kitchen as Alice emptied the remains of her fish supper into the bin. She poured herself a glass of white wine and went to phone her mother.
‘Mum, how are you tonight?’
‘The wound’s still a little sore, darling, but so far so good, no swelling in my armpit and we got wonderful news today. They’ve checked the lymph nodes and they’re all clear, so I’ve only got radiotherapy now, no chemotherapy.’
‘I’m so glad, I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Dad must be thrilled too.’
‘He certainly is, and so am I. We found a bottle of champagne in a cupboard and it’s finished already. I’ll have to go back to the Western in a month or so to get inked up for the radiotherapy, but I’ve only to have five weeks’ worth of doses, so with luck I’ll be all clear by my birthday. How was your first sub-aqua lesson?’
‘Fine. Fun. I’ll persevere and try and get my open water certificate, I think. I don’t know if Bridget will carry on though, she’s already talking about electrical engineering courses.’
4
He brushed the bee, nonchalantly, off his bare hand and lifted the first layer from the hive. Every year the supers seemed to get heavier, and yet, paradoxically, they contained no more honey. Fitting his hive tool between two filled frames, Sir Archibald Learmonth levered one loose and then carefully raised it to examine the white seal covering either side. Nowadays, he strained to see anything through the fine gauze of his bee veil, and he cursed modern beekeeping equipment; it made the beeman’s task well nigh impossible. He swung the frame forwards and backwards in order to see if any honey would escape from the few remaining uncapped cells. No, the sticky fluid remained inside, so he added the frame to his pile for extraction. Next, the checking of the brood boxes to see what the varroa was up to. Picking up his capping fork from the roof of a nearby hive, he raised his trembling hand over an area of drone brood, before stabbing the fork into it and examining the larva impaled on its tines for any signs of the mite. Good, not a single black speck to be seen, those expensive strips had done their business. Carefully, he wiped the whitish goo off the fork onto the bird table. Another treat for the blue tits.
Under his broad hat he gradually became aware of a tapping sound, and looked round to see his wife at the window signalling for him to come in. Blast her! The job was only half done, and he’d just put a new cardboard cartridge inside the smoker; most of it would be wasted now. What on earth could be so important that it could not wait until the whole job had been done? He would have to explain to her, again, that the bees did not like being disturbed, and therefore any operation that had to be carried out on them must be allowed to be completed in order to avoid too many disturbances. Crossly, he re-built the hive, replacing the queen-excluder, stacking the supers, topping the whole with the crown board and the roof. He gathered together his full combs, swept the few remaining bees off with a large feather and headed towards the back door, his morning ruined.
Inside the kitchen of his Heriot Row house, the former Sheriff Principal of Lothian and Borders pulled off his hat and veil and then collapsed into an armchair, extending his legs and allowing his wife, wordlessly, to bend down and pull off his green Wellington boots. Hairy woollen socks encased his legs, and the elderly woman casually flicked a bee off one of them into a glass tumbler, before releasing the creature back into the garden.
Alice introduced herself and the old fellow, now mollified with a cup of tea and a biscuit, turned his attention to her.
‘I’ve come to see you in connection with the death of one of your brother Sheriffs, James Freeman. I understand that he was under you until he retired about ten years ago. I wondered if you could tell me anything about him,’ she began.
The Sheriff nodded benignly, crunching his mouthful of ginger snap, before replying: ‘Perhaps you could be more specific, Detective Sergeant Rice. What sort of thing exactly would you like to know?’
‘Just about anything you can tell me, Sir. His job-was he good at it, for example?’
‘I couldn’t fault him. He was absolutely first rate, always completely reliable, never shirked anything, including the residence stuff or even crime. His judgements were routinely well written and well reasoned, and he was very rarely overturned. Of course, he loathed our administrators, everyone does, but he took his turn on committees and so forth. As you are probably aware, for most of his time in Edinburgh, I was in Perth, but he was one of my Sheriffs for his last three years up until his retiral.’