Murder on the Moor - C. S. Challinor [52]
“Would that be a Rob Roy Beardsley?” Rex preempted. He listened attentively to what the young law clerk had managed to dig up.
Unfortunately, there was nothing to link Beardsley to Moira’s death more than the other guests at Gleneagle Lodge, so they all remained on the proverbial hook for now.
Rex jogged through the sodden grass and down the other side of the glen. The old stone lodge in the valley breasted the rain against a smudged green backdrop of hill and forest. Loch Lown stretched before it, lurking with its secrets beneath a shroud of mist. Would he ever be able to view the loch again without seeing Moira’s body floating face down at the surface?
As he darted across the lawn, he was relieved to count all eight guests through the living room window. Helen, staring toward the loch, gave a sudden movement when she saw him. He shot a finger to his lips. He did not want to announce his presence to the others just yet.
Before entering the house, he took a detour to the stable to ensure Honey was safely inside and not roaming about wreaking more damage to his new plantings. Nor did he relish the prospect of rounding her up. A more ill-natured creature he had yet to encounter outside captivity. She only seemed content when she was munching on something—preferably something of his.
Recovering his breath after the sprint across the glen, he peered through the small window at the near end of the stable and managed to glimpse the pony’s honey-hued rump sticking out from the stall. About to turn away, a gaping white-washed space among the gardening equipment caught his eye. The scythe was missing.
Mr. Dean, the gardener from the village, did not come on weekends. Who then had taken it? Perhaps a logical and innocent explanation existed for the scythe’s disappearance. Instinct, however, told Rex otherwise.
Pulling open one of the double doors to the stable, he penetrated the murky gloom, guided by the snorting of the pony. The electricity had never been connected to the out buildings. On an overcast afternoon such as today, scant light filtered within, and he proceeded with caution. He felt his way between piled bales of hay bundled with twine—in the nick of time avoiding collision with a long curved blade dully gleaming in midair.
With a gasp of fear, he inched backward to the doors and unbolted the other side, admitting enough daylight to lay his hands on an electric torch suspended from a nail on the wall. Beaming it on the scythe, he saw it was resting across a bale, the blade sticking out into empty space. He listened out for another human presence. Honey whinnied and stamped her hoofs in the stall.
He touched his forefinger to the blade. Sharp as a razor. Mr. Dean had sat on the old well in the courtyard just the other day honing it with a whetstone. The ringing scrape it made had almost driven Rex crazy.
A dangerous place to leave a scythe, he mused, right in somebody’s path to the stalls. An unsuspecting person might run into it, or risk decapitation by someone lying in wait. He buried the sickle under the loose hay and went about flushing out the dark corners and recesses of the stable with the glare from the flashlight. A sudden movement under a heap of dustsheets resolved into a hump-backed rodent skittering into the shadows, trailing a long skinny tail. The horse snorted. Then silence.
Without further delay, he closed the stable doors before the grim reaper could discover that his deadly ambush had been foiled—and try something else. With a renewed sense of urgency, Rex crossed to the house, reviewing the identity of the intended victim: A limited number considering the location; who came to the stable? And how did this link to Moira’s death?
Pulling off his boots and anorak in the hallway, he crept to the library and rummaged in one of the built-in cabinets where he kept his Ordnance Survey maps. The grids representing 1 km on the 1:25,000 Series made it easy to navigate in the remotest terrain.He found the location he was looking for along with