‘No, but how did youdothat? How did you know he was Job?’
She gave the door a good battering. ‘POLICE! OPEN UP, OR WE’LL HAVE TO FORCE ENTRY!’
His face went a shade of shaky grey. ‘I don’t think we can just...’
She tried the handle – it turned. Not locked. Fair enough.
Roberta opened the door and stepped inside. ‘Come on, then.’
‘... or maybe we can.’
It was a sitting room, the kind of place estate agents called ‘well appointed’, ‘spacious’, and ‘boldly decorated’, with lots of velvet curtains and the obligatory tartan carpet, tartan cushions, and a tartan three-piece suite too.
The curtains were open, letting in that thin rainy light. Good view, though: down an avenue of oak trees, to the lochan at the bottom. All of it whipped by the wind and crackling rain.
Lightning flashed in the distance, followed a few seconds later by another roll of thunder.
A couple of doors led off the room, one on either side.
Roberta ran a finger along the dust-free top of a sideboard – where a platter of fruit was displayed next to an unopened bottle of Veuve Clicquot in an ice-free ice bucket. ‘All right for some, isn’t it?’
She tried the nearest door.
A HUGE bathroom lurked on the other side. A large roll-top bath sat in the middle of it, surrounded by weird pipes and nozzles and taps, as if the hotel had got Heath Robinson blootered on mescal and asked him to design a shower. Fancy tiles on the floor and walls, lovely view of the rain-lashed estate from the window. Even had a bidet, because who didn’t love a clean bumhole?
She closed the door and tried the other one, while Sergeant Moore just stood there fidgeting, like someone had filled his Spider-Man PJs with burning ants.
The curtains were drawn, but just enough light oozed in around their edges to make out a gargantuan canopied bed, antique furniture, and a Corby trouser press.Trèsswanky.
A woman lay on her back, on top of the duvet, wearing asilky nightdress and a frilly eye-mask. Grey hair all wrapped up in curlers. Arms crossed over her chest. Clearly going for the Bride-of-Dracula look. Or, in this case, Mother-of-the-Bride-of-Dracula.
An expensive Rolex-looking watch sat on the nightstand beside her, a matching white stripe on her right wrist cutting through the exotic tan to show where it usually lived.
Lady Bradbury-Scott.
Roberta sniffed. ‘Bleeding heck, smells like a tart’s knicker drawer in here.’ She edged towards the bed. ‘Hello?’
Nothing from Dracula’s mother-in-law.
Sergeant Moore shuffled his feet again. ‘She’s not dead too, is she?’
‘Don’t be so damp.’ Roberta inched closer to the bed. ‘Wakey, wakey?’
‘Oh, Lord, she’s dead as well.’ He paced up and down at the end of the four-poster. ‘It’s a disaster...’
‘Will you shut up?’
‘We’ve got a serial killer, roaming the castle, picking off the landed gentry!’
7
Roberta reached out and put a hand on Lady Bradbury-Scott’s leg. Gave it a wee shake. ‘Hello?’
‘See! She’s dead. And you know who they’re going to blame, don’t you?’
Two corpses in one day...
Roberta moved further up the body, till she was standing next to its head. Was bad enough when a wedding featured a drunken punch-up, never mind a pair of murders. That said, there didn’t seem to be a mark on her, so maybe this was your basic murder-suicide pact? Lady Bradbury-Scott catches her husband, the scumbag, pinching other people’s wives’ arses and does away with him, impales him on the big stag, and comes back here to overdose on whatever pills she’s got packed in her toilet bag.
