Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

“Tea time?”

I grinned. “It’s a great institution: tuna and cucumber sandwiches cut into bite-sized triangles, biscuits, rich fruit cake…”

“And tea.”

“And tea. It tastes different when they make it here.”

She was quiet for a moment, watching me. “You ever going to tell me what your connection is with this place?”

“Yup.”

She waited, watching me. Finally she said, “Stone…?”

“While we’re here, I promise.” Before she could answer, I changed the subject. “But you know what? I never heard of Castle Gordon. How did you find it?”

She shrugged and spread her hands. “I’m a detective. I detect. It’s what I do.”

“What did you google?”

“Whiskey, remote, castle.”

“So naturally you wound up with a list of remote Scottish castles converted to hotels.”

“This one was the remotest of the lot. It’s only been a hotel for the last couple of years, though the Gordon family bought it back in 1980.”

I glanced at her, curious. “Bought it back?”

She shifted in her seat, with her back half against the door. “Yeah, it was bought by an American with Scottish roots. His family were from the area and his ancestors owned, and then lost, the castle. His family made a lot of money during the Civil War and the drive west, and he made even more during the ’60s and ’70s, then moved here in the early ’80s and bought the castle, which he claimed had belonged to his great, great whatevers. The place is now run by his grandson, Charles Gordon Jr.”

I was quiet for a bit, enjoying the landscape and the fresh summer breeze gently battering me through the window. After a moment I said, half to myself, “Great, great whatevers. I remember a restaurant in Colorado that specialized in those. They called them Colorado oysters.”

“Funny guy. So how long were you here, Stone? And where and when?”

“I was in London, for eighteen months, about fifteen years ago. It was supposed to be six months as part of an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard. I was in my early thirties. They kept telling me to go back to New York, and I kept finding ways to extend my stay for another six months.”

“Huh.” She was pensive for a moment, suspecting she already knew the answer to the question she hadn’t asked yet. “What made you want to stay?”

I shrugged. “I was enjoying myself. I made some good friends…”

She interrupted, “And you were in love.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I was in love. But that was fifteen years ago.”

“What happened?”

I made a face that told her to stop asking questions and said, “What happened? Fifteen years went by, I met a nosy, wise-ass cop with a bad attitude and married her. That’s what happened.”

She looked away. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

“I’ll tell you.” I shrugged again. “There’s not a lot to tell. There’s no great secret, Dehan. I just don’t want to talk about it on the first day of our honeymoon.”

“I get it.”

We drove on for another three or four hours, had lunch in a country pub and finally reached Gills, at the northernmost part of Scotland, at three o’clock that afternoon. Gills turned out to be not so much a town as a loose collection of houses gathered around an intersection. There was no post office, town hall or local store or pub that I could see. So we wound down a narrow road between rugged, green hills toward a gunmetal gray sea, highlighted with liquid silver, that stretched out cold and deadly toward the Arctic.

We stopped on a concrete quay outside a quaint cottage with chimneys at either end that claimed to be the Ferry Terminal and climbed out to stand gazing at the misty horizon. I pointed out to sea, where large clouds were building in the far north. “Only four hundred miles, Dehan, and you’re in Iceland.”

She gave a small, involuntary shudder. “That’s like from New York to Cleveland.” She glanced up at me. “Isn’t Iceland in the Arctic Circle?”

“Just outside, but you get the midnight sun there in June, and twenty-four hours of darkness in December. Here, in this part of Scotland, it gets dark about midnight, and starts getting light at about two thirty.”

“I guess we went north, huh, Stone?”

I smiled. “We’ve still a way to go.”

We crossed the bare concrete and pushed through the door into the ferry terminal. There was a man in a heavy white sweater behind a melamine counter. He looked like he’d once tried to shave but busted the razor and gave up on a hopeless task. There was the blackened, withered remains of a roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth. He watched us come in with expressionless, pale eyes and waited for us to talk.

I essayed a smile against my better judgment and said, “We’d like to cross to Gordon’s Swona…”

He interrupted me and said something that sounded like, “Tharteh eet poonds fer th’car, suxteen fer the missus an’ suxteen fer yersen.”

I narrowed my eyes, pretty sure I’d understood, nodded and said, “That’s fine.”

He rang it up on his register, with small flakes of ash falling from his dead cigarette. Then he looked at me slow and steady and there was evil humor in his eyes. “Suventeh poonds.”

I glanced at the register to make sure I’d understood and handed over two fifties. He took his time getting my change and handing it back. Then he leered. “Uz et the Gordon Castle yir aweetah?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Yir ferry’ll moor within the hoor, gang t’thend of yon peer an’ll nay be long.”

I nodded again. “Thanks.”

As I turned and opened the door, he added, “Ut was plowetrery thus mornin’ and a haar in from th’east thus afternoon. Tull be mochie afore the gloaming, fer-sure, an’ nay doot there’ll be a fair