The Green Flash (34 page)

There was no real height behind the house – but once you'd climbed it you seemed on top of the world. It was primeval land; most of the moor probably hadn't been turned over since the wild Duncan courted his dotty wife. Heather and stunted birch and rabbit tracks and small rocks and clumps of Scots pine; and the stream tinkling among the rocks and forming pebbly pools here and there, one at least of which might have been rated as a small loch with an island in the middle covered with spruce and fir.

I said to Coppell: ‘Why no grouse?'

‘Och, there are some, sorr. But all this season I only got a dozen brace.'

‘Why so few?'

‘It is not quite the country. And there has been disease among 'em. More gamekeepers are needed. And there are ower many poachers aboot.'

‘Would it ever be profitable to raise them in sufficient numbers to let off the shooting?'

‘I doubt it would not pay. Neither Dr Malcolm nor Sir Charles ever tried.'

When Coppell had loped off she said: ‘That hillside over there, with the young trees all growing in rows. It is like a knitted pullover drawn across the shoulder of the mountain.'

I picked up a flat stone and skimmed it over the water of the small loch. It hopped a half-dozen times, and some birds rose and flapped away into the next coppice. Cold standing there, not so much the air as the wind, which gimleted its way through.

‘Yesterday,' she said, ‘when we were in Ullapool and you left me in the car to buy that magazine, I heard two men passing by talking Russian. I was so startled that I jumped out and spoke to them. They are here buying herring from the local fishermen to take back to Leningrad. It makes the world suddenly so much smaller!'

‘I thought you looked excited. Did they know you were a lapsed communist?'

‘We did not speak as political people – only as Russians.'

‘You still love Russia?'

‘Of
course
.'

‘So you expect me to feel the same about Scotland, eh?'

‘Not the same, for you never lived here; but, well, yes, I do not think you will be able altogether to resist the pull of your ancestry.'

‘That's what Alison said.'

Unspoken name. ‘Did she.'

‘She's wrong. So are you.' I scratched my head. ‘ Trying to remember some poem I was forced to learn at school. ‘‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, This is my own my native land. Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned as home his footsteps he hath turned from wandering on some foreign strand.'' After that curses are heaped on the poor bastard if he doesn't fairly drool at the thought of porridge and haggis.'

Shona said: ‘I am glad something was beaten into you. No one has ever succeeded in impressing you since.'

‘Except for you, it might be true.'

‘Thank you, dear David.'

‘Incidentally,' I said, ‘ it was news to me yesterday that there was insanity in the family. Though, God knows, I should certainly have had a fair inkling.'

‘Oh, look into anyone's ancestry and you will somewhere sooner or later see the gibbering madman behind the barred window. It is most fortunate when people don't
know
what their ancestors have been.'

‘Well, the drink problem still recurs. I wonder if I had a child whether it would take to the bottle.'

‘The feeding bottle, I am sure.'

I threw another stone. ‘For a Russian you're optimistic.'

‘You have been reading Dostoevsky.'

‘Since I was never beaten to do so I've never opened a book of his in my life.'

‘David, I weep for your education.'

‘Never mind that. Never forget I know a lot about perfume and a lot about cars, and maybe a fair amount about women.'

Shona was staring sternly at some birds high in the sky.

‘Talking of women, perhaps you should marry money.'

I looked at her. ‘That's a little off the beaten track, coming from you.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘ you could always marry me.'

There was a longer silence.

‘This is so sudden,' I said.

‘Well, you could. As you know, you would certainly be marrying money. We should not need to sell the house. We could renovate it – spend a good deal on it. Remove some of those tasteless additions. Rebuild the entrance so that it is suitable to match the old hall. Thin out those plants – they are rhododendrons, aren't they? Your aunt says some of them are fine ones; the Gulf Stream – is it? – makes them possible. We could do good things with the property, together.' Her voice stopped as if suddenly cut off.

‘And John?'

‘We haven't lived together for two years. It should not be at all difficult to get a divorce.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Of course. Never more so.'

I hitched the shoulders of my coat. ‘Those birds you're glowering at – what are they?'

‘Birds? I do not know. Birds of prey.'

‘Hawks or buzzards, I expect. Odd sound they make. Like cats. Mewing.'

‘No doubt they are after the rabbits.'

‘And the grouse – if any.'

We turned and began to walk back. The wind was coming off the sea and it was hard going even downhill. The Gulf Stream didn't seem to be working too successfully just then.

‘One thing I'd never know if I married you,' I said.

‘What is that?'

‘Whether my child would be a drunkard or a lunatic.'

She was silent, walking beside me. We were striding over soft damp moss and it deadened even the sound of our feet. The birds had been blown away and we were quite alone.

I said: ‘Joke over.'

‘What? No matter. It is blunt. What you have said. And it is the truth. Would it be important to you, having an heir?'

‘No.'

‘I think it would be important to you,' she said, ‘having an heir.'

II

Next morning Mrs Linda McNeill, the buyer of Stovolds of Edinburgh, had something private to say. While Shona was making a royal progress towards the general manager's office she drew me aside.

‘Pardon me, Sir David, but we have had a complaint from a customer about a bottle of your Faunus perfume. I have no wish to bother Madame with it if ye could attend to this yourself.'

I followed the stout little body into her office, where she unlocked a drawer and took out a bottle of the perfume. It had been opened and about a quarter used. It was the ½ fluid ounce size which sold for £26. She took the stopper out and handed me the bottle. I sniffed, and made a face.

‘Where did this come from?'

‘It was bought from us, most unfortunately, by the sister of the Lord Provost. It seems last week that they were dining out and after dinner Mrs Grant and another lady had occasion to discuss perfumes. They were, as it happened, both using Faunus, but when they compared the scents there were differences. The other lady had bought her perfume from McLeish's, and Mrs Grant from us. They both agreed that Mrs Grant's perfume was inferior in quality, and she brought it back yesterday.'

‘How did you come by this bottle?'

‘It was – hm – part of a consignment from Hilliers. You know them, I'm sure. They're usually vairy reliable.'

Hilliers were one of the smaller wholesalers. We never, of course, dealt with wholesalers ourselves, otherwise we could not control our distribution.

Mrs McNeill said: ‘ Do you think there has been some error in the manufacture?'

‘No, I don't.'

‘Then what has gone wrong?'

‘Why did you get our stuff from Hilliers?'

She coughed. ‘This was a special offer.'

‘At a discount?'

‘Er – yes. It was – surplus stock. We bought it in really for the January sale but decided to put it in right away.'

‘Where did the stock come from?'

‘I've no idea, Sir David. It was quite a small consignment and Hilliers have always played fair with us before.'

‘Have you more of it?'

‘Yes. I
think
we've kept it separate. We gave Mrs Grant a new box, naturally. She opened it in the shop and seemed quite satisfied.'

‘Can I try another?'

She sent for a couple more of the elegant silver-faced boxes. She opened one and smelled it. ‘I – I think
that's
all right, isn't it?'

I took it from her and sniffed it. ‘ No. It's a much better copy than the one Mrs Grant returned. But it's still a copy.'

‘Copy? D'you mean … But the boxes …'

‘I suppose you realize this could make a nasty scandal if it were brought out into the open.'

Mrs McNeill's fat little face coloured up, ‘This was all done in the greatest good faith, Sir David! Otherwise clearly we should not have drawn your attention to it!'

‘I only hope Mrs Grant got a genuine box this time …'

‘Of course, of course, of course.'

She said it so often I wondered if she was certain.

I didn't say any of this to Shona on the way home. The Scottish visit was petering out on a sour note. However civilized and sophisticated she might be, the fact stood out like a sore thumb that she'd suggested marriage to me and had been turned down flat. And it was a flat that left no doubts as to the cause: she was too long in the tooth. Her lover thought she was too old. So it happened to be true: did that help? Why should it? If her fancy boy had been even halfway in love with her – as he'd once thought he was – his birdbrain would have contrived to smooth over a few rough corners before he loosed off his reply. Instead he had simply come out with the facts of life.

All right, it was done, and as she was honest she would know it was the truth. More than ever if she remembered her phoney passport. But that didn't make it easier going.

I took the bottles of perfume to Stevenage and called in Phil Parker and we put them under the gas chromatograph along with some of our own Faunus. The ‘fingerprints' were quite different. Fingerprints are a series of block charts rather like the things you see showing world population changes. The copy perfume had been made on the cheap to a formula that closely resembled ours, without the costly items. In all perfume you need an expensive fixative. If you don't have a good fixative the perfume loses its ‘note' very quickly. That's why Mrs Grant's first bottle smelled much less right than the equally phoney one just opened by Mrs McNeill. But there were many other economies as well. One of the main ingredients of Faunus was Bulgarian rose absolute – rose petals gathered by the thousand at dawn in Bulgarian fields and costing £2,000 a kilo. This thing had got some synthetic substance in it that had never been near a rose bush in its life and probably cost £2 a kilo.

‘What do we do now?' asked Parker.

‘Find out who supplied Hilliers who supplied Stovolds. I'd like to bet …'

‘What?'

‘That it'll be a paper firm with a good address and nobody there when you call.'

So it was. A company called Moth and Benny Exports, specializing in the buying-up of bankrupt stock, had supplied Hilliers; their address was in Leighton Buzzard, and when I sent Van Morris up to make a few enquiries he found nothing but an accommodation address and bank accounts that had been transferred elsewhere.

I know I should have told Shona at this stage, but our meetings were now very brief and the opportunity didn't come up. As there were no more cases it seemed to me that this was a one-off affair: some crook had got hold of a consignment of our boxes either from a contact in the printing works which produced them or by some other nefarious means. Stovolds were to blame – or rather Mrs McNeill – for trying to get our stuff on the cheap (because the device upped her commission), and I sent an acid letter to her warning her that if anything like it happened again we'd cut off supplies. There the matter ended – or seemed to.

The winter went by, and things went on much the same. Some wag offered £40,000 for Wester Craig and said he wanted to turn it into a hotel. I told Macintyre to advise him to go and jump in Loch Broom.

Then Shona's father was ill again and she had to go and see him. When she came home we had a drink together. Her father was losing strength but the doctor said he had such a tenacious hold on life that he might last for years yet.

All the aggro between us seemed by now to have worn off, and we talked in the old companionable way. We went back to her flat and she played Brubeck and Scott Joplin and we had a last drink together and then went to bed. I suppose I should have known better, but I thought it would be all right.

Later, around eleven, she said: ‘Are you sleeping with someone else?'

‘No, madame.'

‘It would not be surprising, as it is a year now since anything was right between us.'

‘Well, the answer's still no.'

‘If you have found no one else, is it just that you are very tired of me?'

‘I'm not
tired
of you, Shona, These things come and go.' Why so weasel-mouthed, why not come out with it?

‘And now between us they have gone, eh?'

‘I don't know. Who knows?'

She got up, shrugged into her black silk Dior dressing-gown, stood erect beside me but not looking at me. ‘After all, who am I to complain? I went into this with my eyes wide open, well aware of the risks. We have had some splendid years. The danger always existed that I should become too fond of you. I have become too fond of you. You must know this well, for in these last years I have confessed it to you often enough –'

‘And do you think I'm still not fond of you?'

‘– It is not the same thing. I do not believe it to be the same thing. I am getting too old for you and it is becoming obvious. You want a fresh young girl. Perhaps, in spite of what you say, you have one such in view.'

‘No, madame.'

‘Don't keep saying that … But I think in your heart you hanker for some new person, eh? Your mistress is a little
passé
: turn on the light and you may count the wrinkles.'