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the sole of her foot, where the mark would be almost invisible. He assumed that the sedative, on top of the tablets she had already taken, would constitute a lethal dose. Fortunately, what he injected her with was Midazolam, a powerful tranquilizer that is non-lethal. He then flushed the tablets Cameron had left her down the can to make it look as though she had overdosed, and he slipped out of the room, taking the syringe with him.

“From there, he went straight to the master bedroom and tapped on the door. When Gordon opened up, he threatened him with the syringe to his neck. I’m guessing you told him it had bleach in it, or some ghastly concoction; or maybe you threatened him with an air-bubble. Either way, you scared him enough to make him climb on his own gun-box and put a noose around his neck rather than try and fight you. Maybe, like most bullies, at heart he was a coward.

“I’m guessing you made him tie his own noose, you made him stand on the box and then you kicked the box out from under him.” I shook my head. “It was outrageously daring, and it almost worked. But you made a few mistakes, and one of them was not to leave the box on the floor where it fell.”

He stared sullenly at me but made no response.

I turned back to the watching faces. “He flushed the needle down the toilet, rushed around to Pam’s room, where Bee was raising the alarm, and dropped the syringe into the bag.” I turned back to Armstrong. “I don’t know if you wiped your prints off. I do know you didn’t use surgical gloves for any of this. The chances are good they’ll get your prints on the syringe, and on Pam’s ankle, and two gets you twenty there are latents on the revolver.”

“But…” It was the major, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “What I don’t understand is, why?”

But outside I had already started to hear the throb of approaching choppers.

TWENTY

It was an air ambulance and a police helicopter. Dehan and I stepped out to watch them land near the driveway in a vast cloud of mist kicked up from the sodden grass by the downdraft from the rotors.

As the whine of the turbines died and the throb slowly stilled, men and women began to spill from the two choppers. From the air ambulance, paramedics in cumbersome, high visibility gear came running with stretchers, followed by a man in a tweed jacket carrying a black leather satchel. I hailed them and as they approached, I pointed back at the house. “You have a possible overdose on sleeping tablets in the drawing room on the left.”

They began to move.

I said, “Listen to me. She was an intended murder victim and was injected with an unknown amount of Midazolam. She had already taken two sleeping tablets before that. Ask for Dr. Cameron. He’s in there with her.”

They took it in and moved toward the house at a steady trot. I turned to the guy in the tweed jacket. “Are you the ME?”

“I am. Who are you?”

“A guest at the hotel and a detective with the NYPD.” I handed him the keys to the study. “You have one body in the study on the right as you go in. Another upstairs in the master bedroom. Downstairs is a .38 gunshot wound to the head. Upstairs, he was hanged.”

I might as well have told him it had rained. He walked away saying, “Och, you’ve had a busy night, then.”

Two cops in uniform and three men in suits were approaching us from the other helicopter. One of the plainclothes looked worried, the other was smiling. He was in his fifties, well groomed and well-built, with intelligent, humorous eyes.

He spoke from fifteen feet away, holding out his hand and laughing. “John Stone, as I live and breathe! Am I in the Orkneys or in some kind of Bond movie?”

“Henry.” I gripped his hand and shook it with pleasure. “When you find out, will you tell me? This is Carmen, my wife and my partner in the PD.”

They shook. “I’m impressed with the NYPD’s latest line in detective uniforms, I must say. Very fetching. This is Inspector Harris, from Thurso, and Mr. Mackenzie of Mackenzie and Hennessy, solicitors, also of Thurso.”

Harris took my hand and shook it vigorously. “Uz et troo?” he asked.

“Which bit?” I asked back.

“That Gordon an’ his bairn are deed?”

I nodded. “Yes, the ME is looking at the bodies as we speak. It was pure luck that Mrs. Gordon was not killed too.”

Mackenzie reached over and shook my hand too. “And they were murdered, you say? In what order? And by whom?”

I smiled and nodded at him. “I thought you’d be asking those questions. We’ll come to all that in due course. Mr. Mackenzie, I want to ask you a favor. If you should happen to see anybody you recognize from your office, please don’t react. Just ignore them, would you? It’s important.”

Henry was watching me closely with narrowed eyes. “But you say that you have not only solved these murders, but also the original murder of forty years ago.”

I nodded. “Yes. I am just waiting for one last person to arrive… Ah, I think this is her now.”

A Ford Mondeo was speeding down the drive toward the house. I said, “Shall we go in?”

Henry turned to Dehan. “What on Earth made you marry him? How do you stand him? He’s so smug.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You think that’s a problem? This is supposed to be our honeymoon!”

Henry laughed and we made our way back to the stone steps that led up to the door, just as the Mondeo pulled up and a young woman in her late twenties