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  Copyright Information

  Scot Free: A Last Ditch Mystery © 2018 by Catriona McPherson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2018

  E-book ISBN: 9780738754512

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Ellen Lawson

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McPherson, Catriona, author.

  Title: Scot free / Catriona McPherson.

  Description: Woodbury, Minnesota: Midnight Ink, [2018] | Series: A Last

  Ditch mystery; 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017045496 (print) | LCCN 2017051434 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738754512 | ISBN 9780738753867 (softcover: acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women private investigators—Fiction. |

  Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Women detectives—Fiction. | GSAFD:

  Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6113.C586 (ebook) | LCC PR6113.C586 S36 2018 (print) |

  DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045496

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

  Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

  Midnight Ink

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  2143 Wooddale Drive

  Woodbury, MN 55125

  www.midnightinkbooks.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  I would like to thank Terri Bischoff, Nicole Nugent, Dana Kaye, Kevin Brown, Bill Krause, and all at Midnight Ink; Lisa Moylett and all at CMM Literary Agency; my wonderful family and friends; the people of California who welcomed me so warmly and who will not confuse Lexy’s views with mine, right?; and most of all, Neil McRoberts, for all the adventures we’ve had since he first looked up and said, “Hey, there’s a job at UC Davis. What d’you think?”

  To the baristas of Mishka’s coffeeshop in Davis, CA,

  and their stand-ins at Starbuckses from Oregon to Edinburgh.

  Truly, I could not have done this without you.

  One

  Outside my window, mortars fired rockets into the darkness and the night was rent by the crack of gunpowder and the screams of children. I flinched at every report and hugged myself, rocking back and forward, trying not to cry. One more hour, one short meeting in this blank little room, then I would be on my way to the airport, on a flight back to Edinburgh. Up and away, a continent and an ocean behind me.

  There was a sudden lull in the shelling and I was sure I could hear footsteps on the stairs, thought I could smell a blast of acrid smoke from someone opening the street door. Then, after two of the loudest bangs yet, a pounding came at the flimsy door to the room where I was hiding, each blow making the cheap lock rattle. Why were they trying to break it down? I was expecting them. They were the reason I was sitting here.

  I crept forward and whispered, “Is that you? What’s wrong?”

  Another bout of hammering began and I heard something split at the hinge side. Then a voice bellowed, “Po-lice! Open up!”

  I scrabbled with the latch and threw the door open.

  “Police?” I said. “Has something happened?”

  “Are you … ?” said one of the cops, frowning at a note in his hand.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s me. Officer, is something wrong?”

  “You skipping town?” said the other one, pointing to my suitcase and roller bag.

  “As it happens,” I said. “Look, why are you here? I was expecting Mrs. Bombaro.”

  “She’s in jail.”

  “And Mr. Bombaro,” I added. “Wait, what?”

  “He’s in the morgue.”

  “What? What did you just—” Then, as a bang like a nuclear bomb went off so close that the ground shook under my feet, I shrieked and threw myself into the arms of the bigger of the two cops, feeling some nameless object attached to his belt hit my hip with a clang.

  “Ma’am?” said his partner, slowly. “What do you know? What’s got you so nervy?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. I knew my voice was shaking. “I just really hate fireworks. I’m not trying to spoil it for you. Happy Fourth of July!”

  Two

  California architects never hew much granite, but the police station was a lot more solidly built than the little suite of offices that rented out rooms by the day. Once inside it, the cracks and fizzes were no more than an irritation, like a guy in the next train seat listening to Motörhead, but with his earbuds in deep. Anyway, they left me waiting for so long, with nothing but a paper cup of tea or coffee (hard to tell), that the fireworks were over by the time they came to interview me. I scraped up what was left of my dignity and interviewed them right back.

  “Full name?” said the big soft cop with the hard things on his belt.

  “Lexy Campbell. Can I see Mrs. Bombaro? I’m her therapist.”

  “Yeah, she said. But that’s not the name she gave.”

  I sighed but tried to do it quietly and rolled my eyes but tried to make it look like ordinary blinking. “Yes, it is,” I said. “Lexy, spelled L-E-A-G-S-A-I-D-H. It’s Gaelic.”

  “Pff,” said the one I hadn’t grabbed, whose consistency I couldn’t pronounce on.

  “I know,” I said. “If we hadn’t been so busy learning to spell we could have had a stock market and a film industry.” But I had lost him.

  “And you had a meeting set up with the both of them?” said his partner.

  “A counselling session,” I said. “You know Mrs. Bombaro is eighty-six years old, don’t you? Have you got her in a … tank? With … meth—crack—Where is she?”

  “Because it looked like you were leaving town.”

  “Yes, afterwards. We all were.”

  “You were planning to leave town with the Bombaros?”

  “What? No! He was leaving and so was she and so was I, but not together. I was going to wrap up our therapy programme and witness their signatures, then I was going to the airport to go back to Edinburgh.”

  “Edinburgh, Scotland?” said the slow cop. He’d caught up.

  “That’s the one. Mr. Bombaro was going to Seven Mile Beach with his—Oh my God, the poor girl must be still be sitting in San Francisco airport!”

  “Seven Mile Beach, Grand Ca
yman?” the slow cop asked.

  “Yep, Grand Cayman.” It stuck in my head because I had always thought John Grisham made it up. Turns out it’s a real place. “And Mrs. Bombaro was headed up to her sister in Bend, O—”

  “Bend, O—?” he tried to ask.

  But I was moving too fast. “—regon. How did he die?”

  “What time was the appointment?” asked Soft Cop.

  “Seven.”

  “And yet you were still there waiting at nine.”

  “I was. It was a big night for the Bombaros, and it was closure for me too.”

  Soft Cop’s lip curled at the word closure. “So,” he said, staring at me, “were you alone there between seven and nine p.m. this evening, Ms. Campbell?”

  “As it happens.”

  “No one saw you?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why are you asking that?”

  “Because Mrs. Bombaro was pretty insistent that you would vouch for her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Well, I can confirm that she’s a sweet little old lady who would never murder her husband, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Exactly,” he said, giving me his first smile. “We don’t believe she could do it alone either.”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “You think I was involved in this? How did he die?”

  “Signatures?” said the slow cop I was starting to think of as the Mills of God.

  “On their divorce papers,” I told him.

  “What kind of therapist are you, exactly?” Soft Cop chipped in.

  “I’m a marriage guidance counsellor,” I said. His lip curled again. “Happy endings,” I added, drawing myself up, “come in all shapes and … Oh, what’s the use?” I was a recently divorced and a squeak less recently married marriage guidance counsellor whose only client had been arrested for murdering her soon-to-be-ex-husband. It was high time I kissed my pride goodbye.

  “So she wouldn’t kill him, but she would dump his ass after all these years?”

  “They wanted to wait until the children were retired,” I said. “That was a joke. They don’t have children. But they were trying to protect the family business. You know what his business is, I suppose? Was, I mean.”

  “Fireworks,” said Mills of God. “Yeah, he’s a local celebrity.”

  “Nothing goes Boom like Bombaro!” I said. “Mrs. B. used to say it was ironic because when it came to their marriage, he needed a rocket up his … ”

  “Did she?” said Soft Cop. “Did she now? She actually said in your hearing that he needed a rocket up his … ”

  My eyes widened. “How did he die?” I said. They didn’t answer. “Oh God.”

  “Yep,” said Mills of God. “Mr. Bombaro went boom.”

  Three

  How did it come to this? Where did it all go wrong? How did I, Lexy Campbell, strong modern Scottish woman, end up homeless, jobless, and broke, thousands of miles from everyone and everything I knew, all my belongings locked in a room with a now-expired keycard, my plane ticket useless because I’d missed my flight, my brilliant attempt at being a witness turning me into a bigger suspect every time I re-opened my mouth, and no one I could call for help except … No! No one I could call for help. No exceptions.

  Because that—the lack of exceptions, the non-helper, the no one—was where it had all gone wrong.

  Bran.

  Bran Lancer, to give him his favoured name.

  Branston Frederick Lancer the Second, to give him his full name.

  Branston Fucking Lancer the Scumbag, to give him the name he’d earned.

  I had looked across a crowded room, seen his face, and taken the first step towards the California cop shop where I sat right now.

  In my defence, I had just boiled my head. I was at Turnberry for the spa. He was at Turnberry for the golf. And he was so … American. So very … un-Scottish. He was tall, brawny, sun-kissed, and clean! He came off the eighteenth green cleaner than I came out of a sauna. His teeth were like a double row of little oblong paint samples (if a DIY outlet would ever have two rows of fourteen samples of the same paint shade: American Teeth). His hair was by Abercrombie, his nails by Fitch, his clothes … His clothes were god-awful, actually. Elvis wouldn’t have worn them to brunch in his Vegas days, but that’s golf for you. And he was soon out of them anyway.

  I took a sip from my plastic cup of tea-possibly-coffee, which had base notes of cocoa as it cooled, and remembered the taste of our first kisses: room-service Champagne and spearmint floss.

  I listened to some over-refreshed patriots being brought into the cop shop somewhere a long way from this interview room and remembered the sound of his honey-dipped voice saying, “The crazy is what makes it so sane!”

  I looked down at the graffiti scratched into the plastic tabletop—You’ll take my gum when you chip it out of my cold dead jaws, which I thought was pretty funny, and Gil is a douche-nozzle, possibly less so—and I remembered seeing the diamond, sitting in its velvet box, big as an ice cube, glinting with the same fire as his eyes.

  It took four months in total from “who’s that” to “I do.” A week at Turnberry, a week in Dundee after he followed me back there, while I saw clients and supervised trainees and he sat in the waiting room flirting with the receptionist and nipping out for nine holes at Carnoustie whenever it stopped raining. Then he gave me the ice cube, mounted his “so crazy it’s sane” argument, and returned to California. Two weeks of Skype sex later, I followed him. My visa waiver allowed me ninety days before I had to get out or go rogue. Day eighty-nine saw us standing in line at city hall. It was so romantic.

  Seriously. American brides might want dyed doves at the Four Seasons, but I was from Dundee and standing in line at city hall had all the exotic allure of gas station coffee, drive-thru burgers (with a U!), and right on red.

  My heart wasn’t listening to my head, and my guts weren’t listening to my heart. My loins were running the show. When my guts finally told my loins to pipe down and my head told my heart to wise up, there I was, drinking gas station coffee that tasted like fried shoes and eating heinous drive-thru burgers flipped by people who could neither cook nor spell. And I was married to a dentist called Branston with colour-coordinated golfing outfits. Right on red is a wonderful thing, but it’s not enough to base a life on.

  “A dentist?” my best friend Alison said, hiccupping from trying not to laugh. “You couldn’t find a traffic warden?”

  “You went out with that road-worker that time,” I reminded her.

  “That saved us both a fortune in taxis,” she said. I remembered: Dead Cat Cabs. Every Saturday night, Jordie the road-worker would call his pals on the backshift and tell them there was a dead cat on the road outside the club. Dogs have to be investigated. Urban foxes can stay where they drop. But, if someone reports them, the local authority always picks up dead cats. Or, as the case may be, Jordie and his friends. “Anyway,” Alison said, “a road-worker is, in essence, an urban lumberjack. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of landscape and masculinities.” She’s a sociologist.

  What I wouldn’t give for Jordie, his high-viz jacket, his intersected masculinities, and his Dead Cat Cab to swoop down on this cop shop right now and take me away, squashed on the bench seat with Alison and the backshift. That was a life I understood. This was Bizarro-world, lit only by the sun shining into the rabbit-hole high above me.

  Bran’s house should have told me. Should have told me something. He hadn’t reacted to my flat in Dundee, beyond asking where the hall bath was.

  “Hall bath?” I echoed.

  “Half bath?”

  “Wouldn’t the water run out?”

  It transpired that he couldn’t shit in the same room he showered in. He went for a walk and hit a caff. But listen! I didn’t know that back then. I mean, if I had heard that, my loins would hav
e washed their hands of him.

  Back to his house, though. The Beige Barn. I was never great with houses at the best of times. I lack the nesting instinct. Either that or I just never found the right nest. I couldn’t have cared less when my mum turned my old bedroom into a study. And I left my rented flat in Tay Street without blinking.

  The thing about Bran’s Beige Barn was it didn’t have any walls. Oh, it had walls separating it from the outside, but inside it had furniture called rooms. He led me, that first night, into a kind of hangar and started pointing. “Kitchen,” he said, nodding at where some units and appliances were lined up and a sink was set in a big block of dark wood like a sarcophagus just sitting in the middle of the floor, right where you’d bump into it when you were drunk. “Breakfast room,” he said, showing me an oval table on the far side of the sarcophagus. I looked at the door on the table’s other side.

  “Through there?” I said.

  “A closet,” he answered. Then he pointed to a bigger table with a candlestick on it. “Dining room,” he said. He showed me a telly on the back wall with a couch in front of it. “Family room,” he told me. Finally two couches facing each other, “and formal parlour.”

  I turned round, looking at all four corners of the one single solitary room. “Right,” I said. And just like that I understood American divorce rates. There are no bloody walls! If your beloved is bugging the shit out of you, there’s no escape. Don’t get me wrong, British couples can’t stand each other either—thankfully, or I’d be out of a job—but they never see one another unless they pass in the kitchen when they both want a cup of tea.

  Bran picked up my suitcase and roller bag and led me through an arch (so close to being a door, but no banana) and along a corridor into …

  “Master bedroom,” he said. He nodded at two armchairs and a magazine rack. “And reading room.”

  No walls, but there was a bed. There was a huge, high bed with banks of white pillows and a snow-scape of a duvet and I was knackered. I stripped to my t-shirt, wriggled out of my bra, Crocodile Dundee–style, and dropped.