“Edward, they’re from the police.”
“Mr. Miller,” said Gemma, “we need to speak to you about Reagan Keating.” She told him their names, but she wasn’t sure he’d taken them in.
Agatha took charge. “Why don’t you take the visitors into the office, Edward. I’ll bring in some tea, yeah?” She put a hand on Edward Miller’s arm and he nodded slowly.
“Thanks, Ag,” he said. To Gemma and Kerry, he added, as if he owed them an explanation, “Administrative assistant, Agatha. Runs the place.” His eyes, Gemma saw, were red-rimmed and puffy. She had to assume that Nita Cusick had given him the news about Reagan.
He led them into the room he’d vacated so hurriedly and sank into the chair behind a paper-littered desk. Behind the desk was a serving cabinet which held a bottle of each of the liquors Gemma had seen in the display room, as well as some clean tumblers.
The only other seating was a short sofa in front of the desk, so that Gemma and Kerry Boatman were forced to sit side by side in sardine fashion. “Sorry,” said Edward. “Usually we have our meetings out there, or in the garage. But . . .” He trailed off, looking at them blankly, as if having trouble remembering why they were there.
After a glance at Kerry, Gemma took the lead. “Mr. Miller, we understand you were friends with Reagan Keating. You do know that she’s dead.”
Grimacing, he nodded. “Nita called me. I still can’t believe it.” He shook his big head.
Edward Miller was good-looking, Gemma thought, with strong bones and, rather incongruously for a big man, a slightly upturned nose. She guessed that he was not that much older than Hugo Gold. But where Hugo seemed like a boy, Edward Miller looked very much a man. As if to prove it, he seemed to make an effort to recover himself.
Swallowing and giving his head another shake, he said, “Why are you here?”
“We need your help,” Gemma told him. “You can start by telling us when you saw Reagan last.”
Edward thought for a moment. “It was after the garden party. So Monday last, I think.”
“Had you spoken to her since then?”
“Yes. I was—we were going to get together on Friday night. I had a distillery event—we often have tours on Fridays—but Reagan said she’d meet me after. She had to—this is awkward—” He stopped as Agatha came in, carrying a tray with a mismatched assortment of mugs and a chipped teapot. She poured for them, efficiently, giving Edward a concerned glance.
“Thomas rang,” she said. “He’s coming in to deal with the run. So you can go home as soon as you like.”
“And do what, exactly?” he snapped at her, then immediately apologized, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ag. It’s just—I can’t—I’d rather be here.”
Agatha seemed unoffended. “Well, think about it, anyway.” She gave Gemma and Kerry a nod and left them to their tea.
“Thomas is your brother?” asked Gemma.
“And my partner. He’ll be— Oh, Christ, Ag will have told him, then, when she rang him. He’ll be gutted, too. He’s—he was—fond of her.” Edward pushed aside his untouched tea and rubbed at his face.
“You’ve known Reagan for a while, then?”
“Since she came to work for Nita. Nita helped us get off the ground here, when everyone thought we were crazy.” He stood, restlessly, taking a bottle from the cabinet and sloshing the liquid into one of the tumblers with a shaking hand. “Best medicine,” he said, raising his glass to them before taking a swallow. “Would you like to try some?”
Gemma caught the sharp, clean scents of juniper and citrus, and intriguing hints of spice. “We’d better stick to tea, but thank you,” she said.
“But in spite of predictions, your business has been successful,” said Kerry, straightening her back and shifting her thigh away from Gemma’s, obviously finding it a struggle to seem professional when squashed into such intimate contact. Kerry was on a tack, and Gemma waited to see what it was.
“Yes. More than we ever imagined.” Edward managed a smile. “We thought we were crazy, too. Now we’ve got two more stills ordered.”
“You distill here on the premises?”
“Yes. We have one still now, our original copper-pot still.”
“And you use strong alcohol in your distilling process?”
Edward frowned at her, as if he thought the question a bit daft, but he didn’t seem concerned by it. “Yes, of course. We start with good-quality grain spirit—ours is barley—which is about sixty percent alcohol by volume. That goes into the still with our combination of botanicals. It macerates at an even temperature overnight, then the next day we distill it, slowly, so that the botanicals come off in layers.” From Kerry’s expression, he might have been speaking Greek. “That’s why it’s called ‘small batch,’” he said. “It’s nothing like the gin you get from the big distillers, which is made using concentrates—”
Kerry waved him to a stop with her free hand. “All to put in a glass of tonic?”
“Well, you can do a bit more than that.” From the flash of amusement in Edward’s face, he’d realized he was talking to someone likely to prefer bathtub to boutique.
Although Gemma thought Kerry wanted to know more about the alcohol, she said instead, “You were telling us about Friday night. You were supposed to meet Ms. Keating. What happened?”
Edward shrugged. “She didn’t show up.”
“Surely you called her, or texted her?”
“Of course I did.” Edward’s face went blotchy, the unbecoming blush of the very fair-skinned. “No response. Some of the chaps were still here, checking on the next day’s run. So I waited, and after a bit I texted her again. A few minutes later, I got this weird text back, and I thought she was blowing me off.”
“Would you mind showing me?” asked Gemma. “Just her reply,” she added, sensing his deepening embarrassment.
With a reluctant shrug, Edward scooped the mobile from his desktop and tapped the screen a few times before coming round the desk and handing it to Gemma. The text was highlighted by a pop-up box and tagged with a tiny photo of Reagan, which made her seem suddenly, eerily alive. Gemma read it aloud for Kerry’s benefit. “‘Sorry, headache, can’t make it.’”
“And that was it?” she asked, looking up at Edward and resisting the temptation to scroll backwards or forwards on the screen.
Edward nodded, taking the mobile back and sitting again at the desk.
“And did you try to get in touch with her after that?”