Highland Secrets (English Edition) (14 page)

I really did try to stay out of Adam’s way and when he turned up at the picture gallery a number of times and observed silently how I ignored him, he gave up and went to the distillery. I felt relieved when he left the house and I no longer felt haunted by the feeling that he was close to me. I had felt a tingling sensation down my spine the entire time he was there. Now I could relax a bit and concentrate better on my work. Before I could continue working, I had to search for the brush I had thrown at Adam first.

When I had returned to the room after our
brief interlude, I noticed that my clothes had disappeared. I assumed that Molly, the tireless fairy of this estate, had cleared them away.

I looked behind the desk and
under my work things, but I couldn’t find the brush. I went down on my knees and knelt under the desk, but there was no brush there either. While I was crouching underneath the table, I deliberated how I had thrown the brush and where it could have fallen. I crawled to the glass window behind Adam’s work space, but it wasn’t here either. Perhaps Molly had picked it up whilst cleaning, I would have to ask her. I couldn’t carry on working without this brush. When I reemerged, my gaze met a bright pair of light blue silk panties that were lying on the table and hadn’t been lying there before. Where had it come from all of a sudden?

I lifted the
m up. They weren’t a pair of my panties, but the brush I was looking for was underneath. I looked around confused. I ran into the corridor, but there was nobody to be seen. Maybe Adam was back and was trying to annoy me. Just why did he think that rubbing it in by putting a pair of another woman’s underwear on display was a good idea?

I felt a little uneasy
. I shook my head and went down the stairs with somebody else’s underwear in my hand. Adam wasn’t there. Nobody seemed to be home. I called out to Molly and looked for Alfred and there was no answer. Where was everybody and where had these panties suddenly appeared from? Maybe one of Adam’s playmates had left them there and Molly assumed they were mine. But why hadn’t she put them in my room?

I walked around the wide staircase because I had heard noises from the basement.
A quiet wimpering sound and then a moan. My heart froze in panic. Adam had only just slept with me and now he was getting it on with another woman in the basement? I wanted to turn around, run up the stairs and lock myself in my room. But something made me go back to the door.

“Are you looking for me?
”, I heard from behind me.

“
Molly, there you are. I heard noises in the basement.”

“In the basement? I don’t think so. Nobody is down there. Maybe the noises came from our room.” Molly pointed to the door next to the door of the basement. “Alfred sometimes watches the television a little too loudly. He is not
the youngest after all.”

I raised m
y eyebrows taken aback. It was possible that I had got it wrong. The doors were right next to each other, but was the old man watching porn films? I suppressed the bashful smile on my face. Poor Molly.

As Molly was still staring at me as if I had tried to snoop around, I decided to step away from the basement door, closed it and went out the front door to stretch my legs and to see if Adam’s car was there.

It wasn’t in the garage or in the driveway. Adam had gone out. Maybe Alfred was actually watching television. The old letch, I thought again. Behind me I could hear the sound of stones crunching under the car tires and I turned round. However, it wasn’t Adam coming up behind me, it was the police. I waited in bewilderment until the car stopped right in front of the front door. Four policemen got out of the car. Two younger men who looked at me smiling, a middle-aged woman with an amazing figure and a stocky older man who must have been around fifty.

This man came directly towards me, removed the hat on his head and held his hand out to me in greeting. “Benson. And you are?”

“Sands, Linda”, I said in exactly the same way with squinting eyes. I found the man to be really grumpy.

“Is Adam MacLeod home?

“No, he’s gone to the distillery.”

“At the weekend?
”, enquired the woman.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“
Professor MacLeod summoned me here.”

“Ah, you’re the restorer"
, said the police woman and grinned. “At least you’re not Adam’s type. You should be glad.”

First, I wanted to
clear up that I was indeed Adam’s type, but I decided it was better to keep quiet.

The door was
flung open from the inside and Adam stood in the entrance. I stared at him in shock. I then turned away from him in anger. I had just thought that Alfred was too old to watch porn films. Maybe it was Alfred who had gone out in the car and Molly just didn’t want me to see what was going on in the basement. My heart threatened to jump out of my chest out of jealousy and disappointment. I felt really queasy.

“
Adam MacLeod, we would like to talk with you at the police station.”

“Again”, moaned Adam
in a bored tone.

“Another person has gone missing and according to the information we have you were the last person to have seen her alive.”

Adam came down the stairs and looked at the police patrol car with an ice cold stare and a smile on his face. “Shall we go”, he said and got in.

The two younger offices sat down to the right and left of Adam.
He looked at me through the front windscreen, but I couldn’t feel sorry for him right now. No, I was so angry at him that it made me happy to see the police car driving off the estate with Adam inside. When the car had disappeared, I looked down to see that I was still holding the pair of panties in my hand that didn’t belong to me. Angrily, I threw them in the rubbish in the kitchen. This stranger should go home without her underwear after her hot interlude in the basement.

Without saying anything about what had just happened,
Molly put down my dinner in front of me. Haggis, the most traditional Scottish dish. I had heard a lot about it, but I had never eaten it before. That would change today. Haggis was made up of kidneys, liver, heart and oats cooked in sheep’s stomach. And it looked just as disgusting as it sounded. But as always, my good upbringing made it impossible for me to say no. I therefore decided to at least have a few bites. Thankfully, the haggis was very heavily seasoned which meant that the taste was to some extent overshadowed by the spiciness.

About an hour later, I knew exactly why the Scottish author Paul Harris had written about the recipe: “The following recipe is not for the faint hearted!” My stomach was rebelling so severely that I hastily disappeared upstairs to bed and Alfred brought me some
camomile tea.

“You don’t look very well”, mumbled the old man and held my hair back while I was sick in a
plastic bucket. He remained sat on my bed for some time and held my hand or dabbed my forehead which was covered in cold sweat. When his wife came to dispose of the content of my stomach, she gave him a furious glance. Maybe she was angry because he had stopped working to attend to me

“Feel free to go.
You don’t have to sit next to me”, I said distressed. Alfred nodded uncertainly. Sometimes I felt as if he was even a little scared of his wife.

At some point, my nausea turned into
chills and in between I kept trying to get back to sleep, I was sick, freezing and sweating. Either that or I was groaning from the worst stomach ache you could imagine.

“
Haggis is not for everybody”, said Adam. He was stood in the doorway with his arms crossed in front of his chest and he looked at me motionless. Despite being angry at him and suffering from stomach cramps, I was happy that the police had let him go. Adam may have been a womanizer, but he wasn’t a murderer. He looked tired and exhausted. The police officers had held him for a few hours. He didn’t say anything, so I decided not to broach the subject either.

“By the way, I was planning to leave tomorrow”, I said in
stead and I put as much indifference in my voice as I could under these circumstances.

“Are you already finished?
”, he asked in amazement and lifted himself up. He stepped into the room and put both his hands in his trouser pockets. However, I could see that his fingers were blue. His fingerprints had been taken. If it was even possible, my stomach was tossing and turning even more. Adam looked at me with that ice cold glare and it sent a shiver down my spine.

“No, but its better if I go after everything that has happened today.”

Adam casually shrugged his shoulders. “You definitely won’t be able to go in that state.” He then turned round and slammed the door behind him.

I swallowed painfully and sank down into the pillows. As much as I wanted to get away from Adam, I would barely be able to make it out of this room. Was he just exhausted from the police interrogation or was he just being
evasive with me like this because he had got what he wanted. I sobbed and fought back the tears, but I couldn’t stop them from running. I thought it would be like this and yet I had still let myself in for it. But who was I trying to fool? The anger and frustration was eating me up inside. My upset stomach was nothing compared to that.

My cell phone was vibrating next to me on the bedside table. I reached out for it assuming that my grandmother had sent me a message. It wasn’t Alice. Somebody had sent me a video. A video which showed Adam taking off a
woman’s bright light blue silk panties and then putting them in the back pocket of his jeans. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but I clearly recognized Adam. My chest started to tighten. I looked for the number from which the video had been sent, but it just read anonymous. My heart was racing in panic. Had Adam sent it? Why would he do it? Who else would have sent it? That meant he filmed himself having sex with the women. A silent cry for help could be heard in my throat.

For the first time since I had been here and heard about the murders
, I started to doubt Adam. Pure fear crept up my spine and paralyzed me for a few seconds. I didn’t want to believe that Adam was to blame for the deaths of the women, but what if it was him? Was a video like this sufficient to condemn Adam as the murderer? Somebody else could have done it. I didn’t really want to find out who it was. I wanted to go home. Immediately. I got out of bed frightened and I had barely got up before I fell to the floor. My cell phone fell out of my hand and made a loud bang.

“Where are you going?”
Adam looked at me angrily. Had he been standing in front of the door? He took two steps and came towards me, grabbed me roughly under both arms and hauled me back into bed. “I said to you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. You look like death warmed up” The tone of his voice was still frosty. However, he reached for the pot of tea and poured me a cup.

“My cell phone”
, I said with a trembling voice. I tried not to draw attention to my fear and confusion and hoped he would put the trembling down to my physical weakness.

And I couldn’t look at Adam, because then I saw him with that other woman. Was she the woman who I had heard in the basement whining with pleasure? How could I still be jealous after having just received that video?

Something wasn’t quite right here. Women who had slept with Adam were dying. Somebody had sent me silk panties and sex videos of these women. And now I was also on the list of potential victims, because I couldn’t keep my hands off Adam.

Adam
picked up the telephone, looked at the display discontentedly and put it down on the bedside table. “The display is broken. It’s not working anymore.”

I took a sip of the tea, but didn’t let Adam out of my sight.
I found it difficult to think of him as a murderer. However, there were some signs that indicated he might be guilty. Even if I wouldn’t have considered it as evidence a few hours ago, I had now changed my opinion. Adam had slept with all the victims. In the video, he put the pair of blue panties in his jeans pocket. And, as if by magic, it was suddenly lying on top of the desk which I had just crawled around under. And the video itself must not be forgotten either. The simple fact that the video existed made Adam a suspect. Had Adam just waited for me to sleep with him to start playing his perverse games? My stomach started to cramp up again. I pressed my hand against it and grimaced.

Suddenly Adam appeared next to me, took the cup of tea
out of my hand and lifted me out of the bed.

“What are you doing?
”, I asked in panic and wriggled in his arms.

“I’m taking you over to my room.”

“What?” No! I fidgeted even more. If he took me to his room, I would have no chance of getting away from here. But I barely stood a chance anyway. At least not today. My cell phone was broken and wandering around in the middle of the night was also not an option. What would happen if Adam wasn’t actually the ripper and I ran outside into his arms?

Adam
held me tighter and I stopped trying to defend myself. For now, I couldn’t do anything except hope that Adam wasn’t guilty. After all, the police had let him go. Didn’t that mean he was actually not guilty?