Competition Can Be Murder (6 page)

“What . . .” A little color rose in her face and she began to look less dead.

“Meggie,” I said, “you’re at the office. Charlie and Drake are here. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I looked at Drake as her eyelids fluttered. “Should we call 911 or whatever they have here?” I whispered.

“No, no, I’ll be okay,” Meggie moaned, stirring awkwardly. Her eyes opened and she jerked when she realized Drake was cradling her in his arms. “What happened?” she asked, pulling free of him and sitting up.

“We were going to ask you the same thing,” Drake told her, smiling at her progress. “Get a little frustrated with the paperwork?” he joked.

Meggie propped her elbows on her jeaned knees and held her head. Her eyes focused for the first time on the layer of papers carpeting the floor.

“What!” She reached out and noticed blood on her hand. Turning it carefully, she examined the palm and the back. “What has happened to me?” she queried with frantic eyes.

“We found you here,” Drake said. “We’ve just come in from Platform 6. We left early this morning, before you came in. Someone must have attacked you.”

“That man—” she said. Her eyes darted between Drake and me, then around the room.

“No one’s here now,” I assured her. “Who was it?”

“A man . . . I’m trying to remember . . .”

“It’s okay,” Drake said. “It’ll come to you. Let’s just find you a more comfortable place to sit.”

He helped her to her feet and kept an arm around her waist as she tested her legs.

“Sit over here,” he said, pointing her toward the couch.

“Not there,” I interrupted. “It’s been soaked with coffee. How about the chair?”

I held Meggie’s office chair steady and Drake led her to it.

“Coffee?” Meggie said, as she settled into the chair. “There was . . . I was just making the coffee . . .”

“Do you remember what time you got here?” Drake asked.

“Oh, eight o’clock. My usual.”

Drake and I exchanged a look. Had she been unconscious nearly four hours?

“But I got your message about the extra early flight, so I didn’t make any coffee right away. I—I think I returned some phone calls first.” She pressed her fingertips to her temple.

“We better get you some medical attention,” I suggested. “If you don’t want an ambulance, let me at least drive you to a doctor.”

She nodded. “That man came in . . . I didn’t know him.” Her face went white again and I put my hand on the back of her head and shoved it down between her knees.

“Do you know where there’s a hospital?” I asked Drake. He nodded. “You better drive her to the ER. I’ll stay here and straighten up. Maybe I can find some evidence that will tell us who did this.”

“Lock yourself in,” he said.

Meggie’s color had returned somewhat when she raised her head, but I wasn’t confident that she wouldn’t faint again any minute. Drake and I got on either side of her and helped her to the car. He got behind the wheel while I fastened her seatbelt and reclined the seat to make her a bit more comfortable.

“Wait just a second,” I said. I rushed back into the office and located her purse, apparently untouched by the assailant, and carried it out to her. “She’s bound to need her ID and some kind of insurance card or something at the hospital,” I told Drake.

“Meggie, you just relax. I’ll call your mother and she can meet you there.”

At the mention of her mother, her eyes welled with bright moisture.

“What’s her number?” I asked.

“Two four two nine,” she said.

That meant it was local. The prefixes in the area were all the same. And it meant Meggie probably wasn’t in too bad of shape, if she could call numbers to mind that quickly. I squeezed her hand through the open window.

“Take care. I’ll come along later.”

I watched Drake slowly back the car out of its spot and gently guide it past the speed bumps in the road. I turned back to face the mess in the office.

It hadn’t miraculously gone away, and I wasn’t sure how much help I’d be in getting it straightened out. I had no idea about Meggie’s filing system, but it was a good bet that the intruder had scattered most of it to the wind. I slumped into her chair to reconnoiter the situation. All four drawers of the tall file cabinet stood open, most nearly empty. My guess was that the man had pulled handfuls of folders out and flung them across the room. The floor of the entire office was at least an inch deep in paper. He’d then evidently grabbed a pot full of coffee and flung it as well.

Was Meggie watching all this, or had he hit her first and she lay unconscious on the floor as he ransacked the place? If we were lucky, maybe she’d remember more details and help fill in some of the blanks.

Thinking of Meggie again reminded me to call her family. I punched in the digits and listened as it rang four times, five, six. I was just about to hang up when a breathless woman answered.

“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.”

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.