His voice softened, like an indulgent uncle. ‘You can keep her if you like. I can always make another.’
She stared at the mouse, then at Sergeant Moore, then at Albert Nairn, then back to Moore again, eyebrows creeping further and further up her head.Help!
Moore took out his notebook. ‘Mr Nairn, you were familiar with Sir Reginald Bradbury-Scott, were you not?’ All formal.
The smile vanished from Nairn’s face. ‘Never does to befamiliarwith the aristocracy, they don’t like it when the lower classes get ideas above their station.’
Roberta blinked.
Did she really look like that?
I mean, it was flattering... in away. A very weird and disturbing way, but still.
‘I take it you didn’t like him very much?’
‘Oh, the man was an absolute shite, but that’s his prerogative as a knight of the realm.’ Nairn went into his toolbox for a sort of hooked tool, a saucer, and another mouse – afresh one this time. Digging away at its insides. Making sticky red screlchy noises. ‘Not my business to like him or not.’
No one had ever made a taxidermied statue of her before. Or if they had, they’d kept it to themselves.
‘Where were you last night between the hours of eleven and six a.m.?’
‘It’s the natural order of things, isn’t it? Some folks is above other folks, some folks is beneath.’ He pointed a chunk of hooked-out mouse at another shelf. ‘Your sea eagle eats the fox, the fox eats the weasel, the weasel eats the mouse, the mouse eats worms and bugs. There’s anorder, it’s how nature works.’ More digging.
Roberta shook her head, breaking eye contact with the teeny her. ‘Aye, but only because the worms can’t take up arms and overthrow their sea eagle oppressors.’ A frown. ‘Because they haven’tgotany arms.’ Looking around at the cut-and-paste-animal horror show. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘Mr Nairn, I need to know where you were between eleven last night and six this morning.’
A chunk of innards splotched into the saucer. ‘Does a body good to know who his betters are.’
‘Nah.’ She settled back in her seat. ‘The class system exists for one reason and one reason only: to keep people like you and me down. And it only works because dafties buy into the fiction that some buggers reallyareinherently better than others just because of who their mum and dad are. It’s like Tinkerbell: only exists if you believe in it.’
Sergeant Moore put his pen down. ‘Is anyone listening to me at all?’
‘Clap if you believe in the upper classes, children!’
Nairn gave a long, slow clap. ‘And don’t pretend you’reanythinglike me. You’re not working class.’
Roberta stiffened. ‘Don’t tell me I’m no’ working—’
‘You’re adetective chief inspector.You told the Laird to go to his room, and he did. You think someone “working class” could do that?’ Nairn pointed his hook at the shelf again. ‘You’re not a sea eagle, but maybe you’re a fox or a weasel?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Or mebby a grey wolf.’ Back to digging. ‘Me and Sergeant Moore here? We’re worms.’
‘Speak for yourself.’ Moore chapped on the tabletop. ‘Now, where the hell were you last night?’
Nairn pulled the last gobbet of innards from his mouse and wiped the hook clean on his sleeve. ‘Once the wedding guests had gone, I stacked all the chairs in the ballroom and came home.’ His eyes drifted over Sergeant Moore’s shoulder. ‘Been working on a special project and wanted to get the ears done.’
Somehow that managed to sound even creepier than everything else.
Roberta turned in her seat and stopped.
OK... Just when you thought Albert Nairn couldn’t get any odder.
A hideous man-animal thing lurked in the shadows beside a bookcase full of owl parts. It was only about a third finished, but the framework had to beat leastsix foot six. God knew how many species had contributed to the repulsive melange, but it was a lot of them. Stag’s antlers reached up from either side of its head, with curling ram’s horns beneath them, spines of bone making a line down its back. There was something primitive about it. Something that made the air taste metallic andgreasyall at the same time. Nairn hadn’t got around to putting the eyes in yet, but the empty sockets of whatever he’d used for the skull still stared back at her. Hostile and judging.
A shudder rippled its way across her shoulders, making the hair on her arms stick up.
Whatever the hell Nairn was making, it was wrong insomany ways.
That strange pride-and-awe sound was back in the old freak’s voice. ‘Cernunnos: the Horned God!’ A happy sigh. ‘The secret is to use only thefreshestof roadkill.’
