Free The Orkney Scroll by Lyn Hamilton Page B

news, and every court appearance, however brief, filled the newspapers with lurid headlines about the Skull-Splitter killer, and much was made of there having been a dispute over a piece of furniture. Stan-field Roberts, the curator at the Cottingham who’d been at Blair’s ill-fated party, was quoted about unscrupulous antique dealers. Fortunately my name didn’t come into it, but that didn’t make me feel any better, as my role, however anonymous in the whole sordid business, continued to rankle. I alternated between being sure I’d been right about the cabinet and being completely down on myself for my ineptitude. It had to be that I was so besotted by either the cabinet or by Blair’s money or Trevor’s charm that I missed something as obvious as the lock. At my age!
    My self-flagellation on the subject of the lock was made worse by my conviction that Blair was not the murderer. It was, as I kept saying to anyone who would listen, just too pat. I also clung to the notion that the saga of the two cabinets was crucial to my understanding of what had really happened. There was absolutely no concrete support of any kind for this feeling of mine, which just made me more upset.
    Various people continued to try to cheer me up; the rest avoided me. I could hardly blame them. I was rather tiresome on the subject. Mention locks, for example, or even a word that rhymed with it, like shock, or bring up the subject of Scotland, or furniture, something it’s easy enough to do when you’re an antique dealer, or heaven forbid, utter the word forgery, and I was off on a little tirade. I did mention to Clive and Moira that I thought there might have been two cabinets, and while they seemed enthusiastic, I knew they really thought I was just rationalizing my mistake, and I only felt worse. Clive went on being nice to me, a situation I found intolerable. Moira tried a lecture or two. “Self worth is not measured by how many antiques you identify correctly,” she intoned. I didn’t retort that lack of self worth might be measured in the number of times you’d got something so wrong another person had been killed because of it, but that was what I was thinking.
    What surprised me was that all of this didn’t affect our business adversely. In fact, business had rarely been better. That was almost entirely due to Desmond Crane, who may or may not have been in competition with Blair for the writing cabinet. Shortly after Blair was charged, Dez, who had never been a customer in the same league as Blair, although he did buy from us occasionally, came into the shop, had a look around, and then asked me if I would consider decorating his daughter Tiffany’s condo.
    “I bought her a little place as a graduation present,” he said. By little, I was soon to learn, he meant about two thousand square feet, which is bigger than my house. “She loves antiques, unlike my son who won’t look at anything designed before the year 2000,” he said. “And she has absolutely no furniture, because she lived at home during her years at university. Will you come and have a look?”
    “I’d love to, Mr. Crane,” I replied. “But you do know I was involved in that business with Blair and Trevor Wylie?”
    He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “And please call me Dez.” I suppose he could afford to be magnanimous, given that his chief rival for all those high profile and lucrative court cases was out of commission. “Let’s make an appointment to meet at the condo. It’s a surprise. She’ll be back from her summer job in about four weeks. Can you do it?”
    Of course I could. It was a huge success, too. It was actually Clive who did most of the work. I find the antiques, but he’s the designer. Tiffany had inherited her grandmother’s china, which her mother, Leanna the Lush, said Tiffany loved, and Clive picked up the colors in that for the walls and the accents. We ransacked our