Page 22 of Death on a Scottish Train

“Have you spoken with anyone who works with him?” I asked. I found more lip balms and put them in an evidence bag and marked them on the log Henry was keeping. “Also, I’m taking these to the lab for Abigail to check. I marked them on the evidence log.”

He nodded. “I spoke with his partner, Mr. Burns. He is in Edinburgh for an event. He left early last week to take some vacation. He’s speaking at the event but plans to come back in a few days.”

“OK, so he wasn’t here when his partner died. Still doesn’t absolve him from possibly tainting the lip balms.”

“True. But he wasn’t the one who put him in the closet at the train station. I followed up on his alibi, and it’s solid.”

“There is that.”

Ewan had mentioned something earlier that made me curious. “What if it’s an angry client?”

“We’re looking into that,” Henry said. “In addition to being an accountant, he did a lot of family planning and financial advising. There is a chance if he lost money for one or more of his clients, they could have wanted him dead.”

“True. Money is …”

“One of the top motives.” He finished my sentence.

I’d said the same thing earlier. Great minds and all that.

I continued to go through the desk. There was something weird about the spacing of the top right drawer. The drawer from the outside looked larger than the inside actually was.

I took everything out and found a false bottom.

“That’s strange,” I said.

Henry turned toward me. “What did you find?”

“A secret space in this top drawer.”

“Anything interesting?”

I pulled out a stack of letters that had been rubber-banded together.

I took the band off. Then I opened one of the letters.

My eyebrows rose.

“What is it?”

I turned the first letter so Henry could see it.

The message was typewritten.

You stole my money. You will die.

“Well, that looks like motive,” he said.

“If only they’d taken the time to sign it,” I joked. OK, it wasn’t funny but it was true.

Henry grunted.

I opened a few others. Many of them were the same tone. Someone was quite upset with the victim.

“I wonder if we’ve found our killer?” I’d just said the words when there was a noise in the front office.

Henry pulled out his baton as he inched to the door of the victim’s office. He held out his other hand to tell me to stay.

He needn’t have bothered. I was frozen to the chair.