Wild Island (13 page)

'When shall I know that?' enquired Jemima in an equally lazy voice. The fire had died down. The lights were out. The room she knew must be strewn with such diverse objects as buckled shoes (his), green slippers (hers), dark stockings (hers), tartan socks (his), a variety of white underwear, some satin and lacy, some plain and poplin. To say nothing of larger objects like a black kilt jacket and a green jersey dress. The kilt itself had been thrown lightly over both of them by its owner, when he felt for a cigarette, 'Nothing like a kilt for warmth.' It
was
warm. Altogether Jemima felt very warm indeed and secure.

'In the morning of course. No whisky around at that time of day. Come along. I'm going to take you and myself upstairs to that enormous and, as I remember it, very comfortable bed. You'll find out what I'm like in the morning.'

But Jemima Shore never did find out. In the morning, when she awoke, she was alone in the enormous bed. It was Ben Beauregard, not the Colonel, who was bending over her, touching her shoulder.

'Miss Shore,' he was saying. 'I'm terribly sorry to disturb you like this. But where's Dad ? He's completely disappeared.'

CHAPTER
1
3

'I'll be back'

Because it was-for her-early in the morning and because Jemima was not immediately awake, her first thought was a purely feminine pang of regret. Sleepily, confused, she thought: he has gone, but he promised to stay. Morning had come and her night lover had fled as Cupid had fled from Psyche to avoid the dangerous contact of the dawn, and yet he had promised...

Then Ben Beauregard was saying something of more immediate import: 'We think the Red Rose has got him. We found a bunch of red roses on the doorstep of Kilbronnack House this morning. Plus their ridiculous sign: UR2. Ugh, reminds me of some kind of nuclear weapon. And their slogans: Long Live Queen Clementina the First! Down with the Usurper Henry Beauregard! Eilean Fas the Royal Island.'

Her mind began to clear. The Red Rose had struck indeed: not after all at a Princess guarded at Inverness by her police and detectives and minions, but at the hated local laird, the man they regarded as the purloiner of his niece's rights, the murderer of his royal nephew... It all made a kind of hideous sense.

Then her mind cleared still further. He had gone. A new aspect of it all struck her. Where he had gone was one question due to be investigated, but, to be blunt,
when
he had gone was 
now her paramount concern. She gazed at Ben, at his handsome face with its thick crest of dark hair. She did not, for the moment, have the courage to look at the bed beside her.

'He brought me home last night —' she began rather uncertainly.

'Oh, we know that’ Ben appeared to dismiss that episode with carelessness. 'Mum told us that. But you see, it's so unlike Dad not to be home for breakfast. Even if it's a very late breakfast.' He spoke rapidly, almost impatiently, as if this simple fact must be well known to everybody. The picture conjured up by this generalization was more than Jemima felt able to contemplate for the time being.

Then there came the call—' he went on. 'Anonymous. Didn't recognize the voice. But the message was clear enough - "If you want to get back the usurper Henry Beauregard, you had better come over to Castle Beauregard straight away."'

Jemima decided that there were two, no three, things that she needed immediately to fortify her before she faced further shocks to her system. What was it indeed about the north of Scotland that she was constantly being aroused by dramatic events brought literally into her very bedroom? Poor Bridie, Lachlan, Clementina, now Ben, there was scarcely a minute's peace in her Paradise. The first two things were orange juice and coffee. The third was a dressing-gown. Jemima was suddenly aware that beneath the thick hairy blankets of the old-fashioned bed she was wearing nothing at all. At least Clementina had found her in a satin nightdress. She'decided to shoo Ben Beauregard downstairs.

'Look, I'll meet you in the drawing room and tell you all I know. But do you think - possibly - some coffee? And there's some juice in the larder...' Smoothing her remarkably tousled hair back, Jemima smiled beguilingly at Ben. But where Guthrie Carlyle would have leapt to her command-no, to be frank, Guthrie would have already brought the juice, he never ever called her without a glass of chilled orange juice in his hand - Ben Beauregard simply stood there gazing at her.

'Coffee ?' he said blankly. She might have been asking him to grow the stuff. It occurred to Jemima that this fashion-plate of Highland masculine beauty had probably never in his life been asked to perform such a mundane task. She spared a cross thought for the cosseting Lady Edith, whose gift to the modern world was apparently six totally undomesticated sons. As well as being herself a highly understanding wife..-. Although it was a pity that Carrie Amyas, wife of Tom, had never had the accommodating nature of Lady Edith Beauregard. Jemima-the memory of those inevitable if late breakfasts still rankling - wondered for the first time whether it was not possible for wives to be too understanding. Ignoring that line of thought as unprofitable before coffee, she decided it was not part of her business to teach Ben Beauregard what his mother had signally failed to do. Particularly at such a critical juncture.

'Wait downstairs then.'

He went.

It was while Jemima was in the process of tying her dark blue silk kimono tightly round her that she found the note. It was written on a scrap of paper which looked like a fly-leaf torn hastily from an old book. She recognized the handwriting from the note which Clementina had shown her. It said quite simply. I’ll be back. H.B.B.'

And that was all. Which got her precisely nowhere, except to inform her that the Colonel's departure had evidently - if unflatteringly - been voluntary. It was not even all that unflattering if you took into account his avowed intention, not yet carried out, to return. As for his departure being voluntary, that was not exactly a surprise: deep sleeper as she might be, particularly under certain agreeable circumstances, including the unaccustomed draughts of whisky, she could never have believed that Colonel Henry had been abducted literally from her side without waking her.

So why had he gone voluntarily into the power of the Red Rose? And who had summoned him? And how ?

Later in the drawing room, over coffee for two made by

Jemima and drunk happily but not particularly gratefully by Ben, she said, ‘And since then, no word?'

'You were our last hope. Mum said I should check first.' Ben's tone changed. 'He wasn't - of course it sounds silly - I suppose he wasn't taken forcibly from here, was he?' For a moment Jemima did not understand why he sounded embarrassed. She looked down. He was holding one of the Colonel's silver gilt buttons in his hand; he was not exactly extending it towards her, more twisting it in his hand. He had, presumably, found it on the hearthrug or thereabouts.

'No, nothing forcible took place here,' replied Jemima in her most even voice. Their eyes met. Behind Jemima's ironic regard lurked the ghost of a smile. Ben Beauregard returned it.

'Then I'd better tackle my fair cousin Clementina in her castle lair. No, correction, in our castle lair.'

Jemima took a decision.

'No, we'll both do that. I have one or two questions to ask Queen Clementina myself.'

She did not at this point care to mention the commission given to her by Clementina Beauregard, and, it had to be said, tacitly accepted by Jemima Shore: a commission of investigation into the murder of Charles Beauregard in which Henry Beauregard was the prime suspect. Now not only was Henry Beauregard vindicated by his transformation into the victim but, as regards the second local death - the apparently accidental death of Bridie Stuart - Jemima was beginning to have hideous doubts as to whether Clementina herself might not be implicated. The presence of the dog Flora could not be easily dismissed. The girl was surely crazy enough for anything, with her accusations, her obsessions, and now her involvement with the more way-out form of Scottish Nationalism, including a possible kidnapping.

Charles Beauregard had taken drugs; during Jemima's one and only encounter with Clementina, the girl had depended on nothing more lethal than a vast quantity of Rothmans cigarettes in a very short time. That proved nothing. The habit of drug-taking was easily inculcated.

In jeans, brown cowboy boots and a thin cream-coloured jersey under her white Burberry, Jemima hoped she would present a formidable aspect to Queen Clementina.

It was, however, Castle Beauregard which presented the formidable aspect. Seen from the shores of the loch, as they drove up the winding path to its eminence, it began to remind her of the castle in the Disney film
Snow White,
the first film she had ever seen and thus she supposed inevitably one of the, formative visual influences in her life.

Whoever built it had not spared a Victorian/mediaeval detail. Quite apart from the flowering and springing buttresses and turrets, there was even a drawbridge and a portcullis. From the battlements hung a flag together with various other trophy-like objects of indeterminate nature.

'Imagine building this!' exclaimed Jemima. 'One wonders what the original castle looked like.'

'The site of the old Castle Tamh was slightly different. To the north: like all old Scottish dwellings, seeking shelter from the wind, as well as the enemy. Where the garden now is. The old castle itself was knocked down in the sixteenth century. The Frasers or some local despots came and blitzed it during one of their endless feuds. A heap of masonry was all that remained on the site. Bonnie Prince Charlie and Sighing Marjorie are supposed to have trysted in the ruins - before Culloden, when her father was still alive and too busy chaperoning her for any hanky-panky to take place at Eilean Fas. By now all the stones have been used for garden seats and grottoes and sun-dials, etc etc, in the white rose garden.'

He paused and said very angrily, stepping on the accelerator of the Land-Rover,
'Red rose
garden. But it won't be for much longer. We'll change all that. The white roses will be back at Castle Beauregard next summer. Even if it costs a packet to replace them. You'll see.' As Colonel Henry had said, he would be back. The Beauregards had a taste for return.   .

'Tell me about the Beauregard Armoury. Young Duncan mentioned it,' Jemima said to change the subject.

'Collected by my great-grandfather,' replied Ben.
⁴
Worth a fortune.' Jemima noticed with curiosity that the value of absolutely anything was never far from Ben's conversation: the relic no doubt of his poverty-stricken over-brothered childhood. Or was it a Scottish characteristic? But she had never heard Guthrie Carlyle make a single reference to the monetary value of anything - only to the artistic value of anything and, late at night after a good deal of red wine, to the moral value of everything.

'God knows what Clementina and her gang of local layabouts led by Lachlan have done with the guns,' he concluded. 'Sold them no doubt.'

As if in direct and contradictory answer to Ben's offhand remark, there was a sharp crack, and then another, a sound more like an explosion than a bullet. At what seemed to be one and the same moment, the Land-Rover slewed violently to the left and into the ditch beside the narrow road leading up to the Castle. Jemima was jolted violently and ended up falling across Ben Beauregard.

There was the sound of running feet and a group of men appeared, surrounding the Land-Rover. Among them Lachlan was prominent. He went to the driving seat. Another man, whom Jemima vaguely recognized, opened the door of the Land-Rover from the left and made a grab towards her. He had red hair and a thin face, paler than the rest of his associates -or perhaps it was the hair which emphasized his pallor.

The familiar rose-and-bloodstained t-shirts were back in force. But it was symptomatic of the new violence of the occasion that there were no flowers now behind their ears. There was one much older man present, inappropriately dressed in a t-shirt. Jemima suddenly recognized Young Duncan.

At the wheel Ben Beauregard was struggling violently, and so frenetic were his gestures that Jemima was terrified the already listing Land-Rover would heel over completely. Above their heads the portcullis gate yawned; could those heavy iron spikes which fringed it actually be for real ? There was another flag, a placard with something written on it in 
Gaelic, and a dangling heavy object supporting another placard.

'Aye, Lachlan, tie him up and take them both into the Castle,' said the red-haired man in a tone of authority. 'Then we'll pull up the drawbridge.' Jemima suddenly remembered him as the somewhat mysterious figure who had entered and left St Margaret's by the side door on the day of the funeral.

'Leave us alone,' cried Jemima, desperately beginning to struggle in her turn as she saw some hefty ropes being applied - not gently at all - to Ben Beauregard. One of the ropes, intentionally or not, was drawn across his mouth and acted as a kind of gag. 'Leave him alone. You're tearing him. Oh God. Wherever is Colonel Henry ?' she added in a voice more like a wail than a cry. 'Colonel Henry would soon sort you all out.'

'Aye, you may well ask that, Miss Jemima Shore,' commented Lachlan, 'seeing as you have now joined the ranks of his numerous wummin and strumpets.' There was a note of vicious prurience, a horrid gloating delight in his voice. He came around the Land-Rover to her side and, taking her two hands, jerked them quite savagely behind her. His eyes, small, cold and blue, gazed at her in a way which was both disapproving and covetous. The respect he had shown to her on all previous occasions had quite gone. He addressed her, Jemima thought suddenly, in a confused mixed image, as John Knox might have addressed the woman taken in adultery. Half disapprovingly. Half lustfully.

'How dare you touch her?' Ben's voice under the rope was glottal, strangled, but still violent.

'If we were mindful to touch her, which we are not, there's no' a thing you can do about it, Mr Ben Beauregard,' said the red-haired man in a voice full of contempt. 'It's the Red Rose is in power here, not the laird, I'll have ye know.'

'In the absence of Colonel Henry, where is Miss Beauregard herself?' enquired Jemima in the coolest voice she could muster. 'I demand to be taken before her.'

The men exchanged looks. Lachlan whispered with the red-haired man. There appeared to be some form of divided command.

'Aeneas and I agree that we'll take you to her,' said Lachlan.

'And what's going to happen to Mr Ben ?' pursued Jemima.

Lachlan, the man called Aeneas and the rest, even Young Duncan, favoured Berrwith a sardonic quizzical stare. There was a short laugh from someone.

'Him. Aye, mebbe we'll send him to join his father,' said one of them.

'And where might that be?' The pretence of boldness had made Jemima actually feel bolder. By way of reply, Lachlan jerked his thumb upwards.

With a feeling of total nausea, Jemima realized that the heavy object revolving slowly in the wind above them, hanging upright from the battlements, was in fact a body: a body wearing a jacket of black velvet on which no doubt there were silver buttons, a body wearing a kilt. Colonel Henry Beauregard would not after all be able to keep his promise to her to return.