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

rock and slid down until she was sitting on the mossy grass. She plucked a stem of grass and examined it. “It’s powerful stuff for some people: heritage, blood, land, identity. They are all tied together and some people will kill and die for it. It has some kind of, almost…” She raised her eyes to look at me. “An almost mystical power. It’s as strong as religion. Hell! Half the time it’s tied up with religion.” She pointed at the rocks around us. “This is some kind of temple, right?”

I sat next to her. The stone was warm against my back. “There is a school of thought that says that Ceres, the goddess of the harvest and fertility, possibly the oldest divinity of them all, circle, church and kirk, all have the same etymological root. It’s all the same word, and that the ancient Indo-European goddess of fertility, life, death and the harvest was worshipped in circles like these.”

We were quiet for a while, looking out at the misty blue sea. Then she asked, “So a man driven by such a deep, passionate love of his land, his island, his history and roots…” She picked another long stalk of grass and looked at it. “His son basically betrays him. Or at least he feels that his son has betrayed him, forced him somehow to abandon his dream of recapturing the ancient glory of the Gordons. He is wrenched, torn between his love for his son and his dream for his little island kingdom. His son leaves to tell the good news to his girl, and the old man takes his revolver and shoots himself.”

She went quiet. Then after a moment, she held out her right arm to her side, over my legs, with the hand curled awkwardly back, as though she were trying to aim a gun at herself.

“Usually,” she went on, “when people try to shoot themselves in the temple, the autonomic reflex makes them move their hand at the last second, so they end up blowing off the top of their heads but they don’t kill themselves at all. They just make a real bad mess. Also the recoil is hard to control, even when you have the gun pressed up close. I’m having real trouble trying to understand why a man who takes that step, who decides to shoot himself, would hold the gun in such an awkward position.”

I nodded, chewing my lip. “And in that position, the recoil would have been impossible to control, so how he hit the target is another mystery all on its own. But in any case, Dehan, the motive for suicide simply isn’t there.” I picked a long stalk of grass with a spear of corn at the top and beat her gently on the head with it. “This man who, according to your theory, was driven to suicide because his son insisted on marrying beneath his class, as a Gordon, was more than happy to disinherit his son and had almost adopted another boy from the village. His passion was not his son, it was this island, the castle, the village, the whole Gordon package. It is hard to imagine that man being driven to suicide because his son married the wrong side of the tracks.”

“So that is two strokes against suicide.”

“Dehan?”

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

She gave a girly giggle which should have been totally out of character but wasn’t, rested her head on my shoulder and said, “Ah, you know, just playing detective.” Then she added in a mock French accent, “Exersahzing zee little gray cells, ’Estings!”

I fingered her hair absently while I gazed at the horizon. “It’s a pretty little mystery, I’ll grant you that.”

“One thing would clinch it…”

She slid down so her head was on my lap and she was squinting up into my face. I smiled down at her and said, “The handkerchief.”

She frowned. “My god, you are a freak. You do read minds.”

I laughed. “It stands to reason.”

“The only way he could have avoided GSR on his hand is if he’d had a handkerchief or something similar over his hand and his sleeve. Is that what you were thinking?”

“Yup. It fell off after he shot himself and was lying on the floor. It was disregarded as evidence because nobody thought it was important.”

I made a face and shook my head. “I don’t believe, Dehan, there was any such handkerchief. If he wanted to avoid GSR on his hand, his only motive for that would be to frame somebody. If he was going to do that, he would have left a door or a window open and planted some kind of evidence. But what was done was exactly the contrary. There is no attempt to frame anybody here, unless the person being framed is Gordon. We can check the newspaper reports from the time and see if there are any crime scene photographs, but we’ll find there was no handkerchief or anything of the sort. This was a murder set up to look like a suicide, not the other way around.”

She sat up and got on her knees in one fluid movement. “So you do think it was a murder.”

I nodded. “I have never had any doubt.”

She spread her hands and shook her head in a silent question.

I echoed her gesture. “It was too impossible. It couldn’t be impossible that it was both murder and suicide, could it? That only happens if somebody is managing the scene. And the scene was managed in such a way that, after scratching your head, you have to conclude it was suicide…”

I shrugged.

She nodded. “So it had to be murder. Totally circumstantial, Stone, but I agree with you. The suicide is the impossible.” Then she frowned like she had a headache. “But…”

I laughed, got to my feet and pulled her up. “Come on, this was