Bitter End Part 25

It didn't occur to him till he was locking the garage door that Fizz's follower could have been waiting for her to emerge. Obviously, if the guy had traced her through her a.s.sociation with Buchanan himself he would look here for her as soon as he lost her trail back at her flat.

Cursing his stupidity, he jumped in the car and pushed his luck all the way to the office in the hope of catching her up. However, he saw no trace of her until he got there and found her happily keeping Beatrice off her work with a report on last night's political debate. He gave them both an equivocal greeting, carefully avoiding any allusion to the fact that he'd already seen Fizz that morning, and got on with his morning's work. 157. Because Fizz now worked flexitime, fitting in her hours between her lectures and tutorials, he was never certain whether she was in the office or not. It would be just like her, he suspected, to scoot off for a meeting with Joseph Rudyard without warning him she was going and to claim, later, that he had okayed her going alone. This made him so uneasy that he was forced to visit her hideout in the filing room and point out to her that he intended to accompany her. She raised no objection, merely commenting that she had expected nothing better of him, and duly presented herself at his desk at three in the afternoon, raring to go.

They found Rudyard in the same kind of mess Buchanan had noted on his last visit. The pa.s.sageway to his office was lined with rolls of paper and the sunbeams that fanned in at his grimy window illuminated a fog of dust particles and an amazing a.s.sortment of spiders' webs.

Rudyard dusted off chairs for his visitors and made apologetic noises which Fizz received with a bright smile.

The maid's day off?' she inquired politely, almost causing Rudyard to twitch his lips.

'You're still sorting out the snags in Vanessa's will, then?'

he whined, slouching listlessly behind his littered desk.

'I'm afraid so,' said Buchanan. 'Just one or two loose ends I'd like to see tied up before I finalise matters. I don't antic.i.p.ate it taking me more than a few days.'

'No rush.' His eyes were compulsively drawn to Fizz's golden halo which was illuminated by the sunlight behind her and he seemed infinitely more interested in the sight than in anything Buchanan had to say. Fizz, meanwhile, returned his regard with a hundred-yard stare as though she were reading a billboard in the distance behind his head. Buchanan held his tongue, letting the silence lengthen until Rudyard noticed it, blinked, and said, 'What was it you wanted to ask me?'

'I just wondered,' Buchanan said, 'if you might remember Vanessa saying anything about what her husband was 158. working on just before the accident. It's my understanding that Mr Gra.s.sick was in the habit of escaping to Brora Lodge when he had important work that he needed to concentrate on, and I've recently learned that he had spent the previous three weekends there. It would be an enormous help if we could discover what was taking him there.'

Rudyard couldn't be bothered thinking about it. He fingered his earring and sighed. 'You should ask Gra.s.sick.'

'But he might not tell us,' Fizz put in with a mischievous, nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of look.

'Not if he was meeting a woman, no, I don't suppose he would. But I wouldn't be likely to know about that, would I? It's not something Vanessa would talk about to me.'

'And what about work?' Fizz persisted. 'Did Vanessa mention anything about Lawrence working at the cottage that weekend?'

'Urn . . .' Rudyard pa.s.sed a hand over his smooth hair and blinked at an unhelpful pot of poster colour on the window sill. 'She may have said he was going down to the cottage but I don't remember her mentioning why he was going.'

'When was this?' Fizz said. 'The week before she died or previous to that?'

'Ah ... I think it must have been some time that week . . . maybe the Monday ... or maybe even the end of the previous week. Actually, I think he spent both weekends at Brora Lodge.'

'Can't you be sure?' Fizz's voice was showing just a trace of impatience.

'Not a hundred per cent,' Rudyard apologised, his nasal whine becoming even more p.r.o.nounced. 'But I'm fairly sure he was there that weekend.'

Buchanan nodded in an encouraging manner. 'That's very interesting, Mr Rudyard,' he said. He had already known that had to be the case but he forced himself to be interested in hearing his suspicions confirmed so that he wouldn't be lying. 'And, I take it, Mrs Gra.s.sick was not 159. averse to spending her weekends on her own?'

'She never said so to me,' Rudyard had gone back to studying Fizz's hair and could spare Buchanan only a flick of his eyes. 'She liked being on her own in the house. Liked the silence. She said that often enough. That's why they had no family. All she needed was her business and her painting and her garden.'

'She painted?' Buchanan asked, wondering why this had never been mentioned before.

'Daubed, that's all.' His mournful eyes took on a sly look and there was a hint of spite in his tone of voice. 'Her draughtsmans.h.i.+p was reasonable but, she admitted it herself, she wasn't really the creative type. It was just a hobby with Vanessa. She did some watercolours of the hills around Chirnside but she didn't usually go down there at all in the winter. It was Lawrence's scene much more than it ever was hers. I guess she only went with him in summertime for the look of things. Very keen on the look of things, Lawrence was.'

Fizz appeared to resist a shudder. Her eyes fell away from Rudyard's face and returned to it, after a moment, only with obvious reluctance. 'So, her visit to the cottage the night she was killed ... it must have struck you as peculiar.'

Rudyard merely looked put upon. Evidently the stress of searching his short-term memory was beginning to weigh on him.

Fizz stood up in a sudden movement that startled him, and began to walk around the walls looking at their covering of postcards, photographs and cuttings. 'Surely you must have thought about it, Mr Rudyard?' She spun round to fix him with a frown. 'Why was Vanessa at Brora Lodge that night? Did she accompany her husband? If so, where was Lawrence when the bomb went off?'

It should have been the funniest thing since Buster Keaton but, in an odd way, it didn't look at all melodramatic.

She wasn't acting. She just wanted to know. 160. Rudyard watched her warily. 'I thought about it but. . .

yes, I suppose it was a little unusual, but she didn't always tell me when she was going to be there over the weekend.

Maybe she decided, on the spur of the moment, to go with Lawrence.'

That seems the most likely explanation,' Buchanan said.

It was the most likely explanation, but that was because it was the only one. The weather over that weekend had been atrocious: certainly not the weather to tempt Vanessa from the comfort of her luxurious Edinburgh home.

Rudyard was chewing at the corner of his bottom lip, so obviously gearing himself up to say something that even Fizz noticed and waited silently for him to get it out.

Finally, he lifted his head and, wearing the expression of a whipped hound, he said, 'Actually, she had planned to be in Inverness most of the weekend. She told me she was driving up on Friday morning, seeing some customers in the afternoon, and staying Friday and Sat.u.r.day night with friends.'

'What friends?' said Fizz. 'What customers?'

'She didn't say.'

'What customers do you have in Inverness?'

For a moment Buchanan thought this was one question too many for Rudyard. He pressed his lips together and tucked in the corners of his mouth in a sullen expression but finally he succ.u.mbed to Fizz's encouraging stare.

Taking his time to it, he spun his chair around to face a pile of junk behind him and, after throwing a leather jacket and a roll of s.h.i.+ny paper to the floor, revealed a computer. It took him only a few seconds to access a half page of addresses which, with a languid wave, he invited Fizz to copy down.

Buchanan watched her scribbling a while and then said, 'I take it that Vanessa didn't inform you of her change of plans?'

Rudyard shook his head. 'I didn't know she'd come back early till Lawrence phoned to tell me about the explosion.' 161. 'What did you think when you heard she'd turned up at the cottage in the early hours of Sat.u.r.day morning?' Fizz said softly, over her shoulder.

He looked at her back with an expression that could only be described as a sneer. 'I thought what you're thinking,' he said unpleasantly. 'I thought she'd gone there in the middle of the night expecting to find him shacked up with another woman.'

'Did she ever hint to you that she suspected her husband was being unfaithful?' Buchanan asked.

'No, but if I'd been Vanessa, I'd sure as h.e.l.l have been wondering what he got up to in Chirnside every weekend, wouldn't you?'

'And if she had caught him out,' Fizz prompted, still scribbling in her notebook, 'what would have been her response? Would she have divorced him? Or was she the type to forgive and forget?'

But Rudyard had exhausted his meagre store of benevolence and didn't care to exert his grey cells any further. All further questions were met with a shrug and an apathetic refusal to speculate so Buchanan gave up on him and kept any further questioning for another visit.

'You looked as if you were enjoying that little tete-a-tete,' he teased Fizz on the way downstairs and she answered by miming a retch.

'That guy is the pits,' she muttered, casting a wary glance up the stairwell to make sure he wasn't listening.

'He's what Doctor Spooner would have called a "s.h.i.+ning wit". I know you said he was no ray of suns.h.i.+ne but b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! -how can his staff suffer him day in day out?

He'd depress a laughing hyena.'

Takes all kinds to make a world,' Buchanan couldn't resist saying, since that was the phrase she invariably quoted when introducing him to her bizarre friends. She was not amused.

'I'm going home,' she announced when they got back to the car. 'I don't give a hoot if Gra.s.sick is having me 162. watched. I'm not likely to be doing anything that he doesn't already know about and, anyway, I've got work to do.'

'I don't think that's a good idea,' Buchanan started to say but she wasn't having any.

'No, I didn't expect you would, but you always were an old fusspot. I don't plan on going out tonight and, if it makes you any happier, you can see me safely to my door.

Once I'm home there'll be two locked doors between me and the world and you won't catch me unlocking either of them.'