In the kitchen there was plentiful evidence of neighbourly concern: there were boxes and tins piled up and potted plants and flowers everywhere, some faded, still in their cellophane wrapping. There was no heating on and the lounge, with the electric fire on, had been very warm. Katy, her arms wrapped across her chest as if in protection, shivered as she watched Joanna set down the elegant arrangement on the dresser.
Joanna noticed immediately. ‘My dear, you’re cold. I’m sure you can’t be sleeping properly and I did wonder if you felt able to eat? I hope you won’t think it’s impertinent, but I’ve got soup here, and sandwiches. I haven’t had my lunch either.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Katy said again, managing to smile. Joanna took off the smart little coat to reveal a gilet – real fur, this time – over a caramel-coloured sweater and trousers and draped it over the back of a chair. With a swift glance round the kitchen she found a pan and tipped in soup from the Thermos flask in her basket, then while it was heating set some exotic-looking packets and jars on the table and unwrapped a very professional-looking pile of sandwiches. Katy mutely fetched a tray, plates and mugs while Joanna chattered on.
‘Ritchie’s been so worried about you – well, we both have, of course – and he wanted you to know he’s there for you, if there’s anything he can do. I’ve been meaning to come before this, but you know how it is – it’s been bedlam, with the police and the Press and all the arrangements.’ Then she too shivered. ‘Goodness, it is cold in here, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry. It didn’t seem worth heating the house when I’ve mostly just been in the lounge with the fire on.’
‘Then we’ll take it in there, shall we?’ Joanna said briskly, and Katy led the way across the landing.
Seen with a stranger’s eye, the room looked untidy and sordid. The contents of her memory boxes were spread out over the chairs and floor; the dust of neglect filmed the surfaces and there were even dirty mugs and plates from the coffee and toast she had been living on. Katy looked about her helplessly. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve just been . . . going through things.’
‘Not to worry!’ Joanna set down the tray on top of one of the less cluttered tables, cleared an untidy pile of papers off one of the chairs beside it and sat down, handing Katy a mug and a sandwich. Dutifully Katy sipped at the creamy mushroom soup and was surprised how good it tasted and how hungry she felt.
‘I promised Ritchie I would look in to see you today, to see if you were all right after this latest ghastly business. Right on your doorstep, too!’
‘That was very kind.’ Again, the all-purpose phrase.
‘It’s such a dreadful thing – poor Willie! We just couldn’t believe it – couldn’t believe all this could happen in Knockhaven!’
‘I don’t want to believe it,’ Katy said slowly. ‘It seems like, if it’s true, then my time with Rob was just sort of a bad joke, to kid me on that life could be good and happy. It isn’t, is it? I was right before and Rob was wrong. It’s cruel and ugly. All Willie was doing was helping me out, and this happened to him.
‘Rob tried to tell me it wasn’t, that bad stuff happened but you coped and things would get better again. But this won’t ever get better, as long as I live. And it’s the same for Jackie Duncan.’
‘Yes. Poor Jackie.’ Joanna’s eyes went to the window at the back as she spoke. ‘Did you—?’ she said, then broke off as the doorbell rang again. ‘Oh, are you expecting someone?’
Katy shook her head, putting down her mug to go and answer it, but Joanna was on her feet. ‘Let me get that for you,’ she offered, and went out without waiting for a response.
Enid Davis was on the doorstep and looked surprised to see Joanna. ‘Oh – I didn’t know you would be here, Mrs Elder! I spoke to Katy at the funeral and after yesterday – I just brought her a few things—’
‘Come in, we’re upstairs. I had the same idea myself – we’re just having some soup. Ritchie made me promise to come and see her today. He was very worried about her, with all this on her doorstep—’
‘I know. It’s all so dreadful. I keep thinking it must be some sort of bad dream and we’ll all wake up soon.’
‘It beggars belief. And what’s going to happen next? It’s a horrible feeling.’ She glanced at the bag Enid was holding. ‘Do you want to put that in the kitchen?’
‘I’ve just made a casserole for her to heat up – they both have to eat and she probably doesn’t feel up to cooking for him.’
Joanna stopped. ‘Oh yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I’d forgotten. There is that boy – her son, not Rob’s?’
‘That’s right, Nat. I can’t help feeling sorry for him, even if he has been in trouble. You know how difficult it is when there’s a step-parent. Katy’s all on her own now – she’ll need his support.’
From what Joanna remembered of the boy she had seen a couple of times this seemed unlikely. But, ‘I’m sure,’ she said diplomatically, then led the way to the lounge.
There was no mistaking Katy’s pleasure at seeing her guest. ‘Enid, how nice of you to come,’ she said warmly, holding out both hands. Enid took them, then went to sit beside her on the sofa. She had to displace a bundle of old newspapers; she picked them up, looking helpless.
‘Oh, just dump them on the floor. Sorry – I’ve been trying to sort things out.’
‘Mmm,’ Joanna said, and Katy coloured. She hadn’t asked the woman to come here and start disapproving.
Enid said, ‘Oh, Katy, it must have been so dreadful for you, all this last night on top of everything else! I could have come then, if I’d heard.’ She sounded genuinely distressed.
‘I didn’t know anything about it until the morning. The doctor’s given me pills and I just crash out. My bedroom’s to the front anyway – it’s only Nat’s at the back here.’
On the other side of the room, Joanna looked almost excluded from the conversation. She doesn’t like not being the centre of attention, Katy thought as Joanna said loudly, ‘Oh dear! Did he see what happened?’
‘How is Nat?’ Enid asked. ‘He must have been very upset too.’
‘I don’t think he was there at the time. I heard him going out before I went to bed myself and he never bothers to open his curtains anyway. But I don’t know – I haven’t spoken to him yet.’
Enid hesitated. ‘Look – perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but he’s all you have left!’
Katy sighed. ‘I know what you’re saying, Enid, and you’re right, of course you’re right, but Nat’s – difficult. He really hated Rob and he was quite threatening to me. I was really thinking about seeing if his grandmother would have him for a bit—’
‘You know your own son, of course. But you know, from a psychological point of view he probably felt he’d lost you when you remarried. You could build bridges now, surely, but if you send him away—’
Joanna got up. ‘I’ll leave you two to chat. Katy, if you’ve any problems on the business side do let Ritchie know – he’s very good on that sort of thing. No, don’t bother to show me down. I’ll pick up the Thermos and the basket on my way.’
It was with some relief that Katy saw her go. She’d never found Joanna easy and her Lady Bountiful act seemed somehow phoney, though perhaps she was being oversensitive. Anyway, it was a help to talk to Enid about Nat. She didn’t want to suspect her own son, of course she didn’t.
The conflict of emotions raging within her was familiar to Marjory Fleming. She had experienced it every time one of her children didn’t appear when they were expected to: a violent rush of relief from terror, thankfulness that they were unharmed and pure, incandescent rage. It overwhelmed her when the door to her office opened at half-past two and DC Kingsley appeared. She jumped to her feet.
‘Kingsley! How dare you put us through all this?’ she yelled. ‘Do you realise I was right on the brink of announcing a public search for you? Can you imagine it – you breezing in ten minutes later, everyone cracking up because Galloway CID can’t find on
e of its own detectives?’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ With his hair in its normal style and his person innocent of any metal attachment, though showing a suspicious-looking patch of blurred colour on the side of his neck, Kingsley stood to attention in front of her desk. His impression of someone truly penitent was not entirely convincing.
‘Don’t try to apologise – I haven’t finished with being furious with you yet.’ She sat down again. ‘Explanation?’ she said icily.
‘Yes, ma’am. May I stand at ease?’
‘No.’
‘It’s sort of a long story.’
‘Oh, I have all the time in the world, Constable.’
‘You see, I was following up on Operation Songbird.’
‘The brief I gave to Tam. Yes.’
He reddened. ‘I suppose I should have cleared it through him. But anyway, I’d got the undercover bit all worked out and I thought I’d try it in Knockhaven before the gossip mill caught up and it was all round the place who I was.’
‘Tam told me.’
‘Yes, I was pretty sure he’d recognised me.’
‘That, you see, was why we were so worried. You’d been in the town already working as a policeman so there was no guarantee that Tam was the only one to see through the disguise. You were in the company of known drug-users, you must have been asking questions, then you disappeared.’
‘Oh! Sorry, I never thought of it like that.’
Dear God, it was like explaining to a teenager why you might be anxious if they missed the last bus and decided to walk home! Heaven send her patience!
‘So here you are, in the pub, undercover. Take it from there. Oh, and I suppose you can sit down.’
‘Thanks, boss,’ he said with marked relief. ‘Really, I mean it – I am sorry it caused so much trouble.’
‘So am I. OK – but this better be good.’
His eyes lit up. ‘It is, I promise you! It was all going pretty well last night. I told them I’d just come to the area, doing IT work locally, and where could I get hash – the usual line. Actually, I’ve done it in two or three pubs all across the area over the last bit, picked up some heavier stuff as well – thought we could run comparisons on whether it seemed to be coming from the same source.’
He was certainly cutting corners, a high-risk strategy, but just at the moment she wasn’t going to worry about playing it by the book. ‘Go on.’
‘It was just luck that one of the lads I’d fallen in with was Ryan Duncan – Willie’s son, you know? And when his old man kicked us out at closing time we bought a few more beers and went back to this lad Dale’s house. Smoked a bit of pot – which, incidentally, to coin a phrase, I didn’t inhale – then sat around, talking football mostly. They were all pretty drunk by then—’
‘You, of course, were stone-cold sober?’
He grinned. ‘I’ve got quite a good head. Evidence of a misspent youth. Then suddenly Ryan’s sister came in, hysterical, saying what had happened to her dad. And I have to say, people sobered up pretty quickly. Ryan went off home and I was left with the rest of them.
‘They were all shocked rigid. There was a lot of talk about what Willie had said originally about being a marked man and I noticed one of them, Dale, was keeping pretty quiet. When the others decided they’d better go, I asked if I could doss down on his sofa – the place was going to be crawling with cops and I didn’t want to lose my licence, I said. Actually I think he was glad of the company.
‘I led him on a bit after that and he and Ryan were obviously in on it through Willie, though the rest of them weren’t. He was scared, but he was angry too, not angry enough to name names, but I stoked it up, went on about how the big men had it all and didn’t take the risks and reckoned everyone was expendable, told him the best revenge was to shop him so everyone else would be safe . . . That sort of stuff.
‘But I didn’t push it – he was still edgy, so I just said I needed to crash out. Then when I woke up – a bit late, I’ll admit that – he offered me breakfast and I didn’t want to go off to make a call and lose the momentum.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll accept that.’
‘Thanks. We were going back over it all when Ryan appeared. He was looking terrible and he wasn’t best pleased to find I was still there, but I just sort of went quiet and made coffee and toast in the background while he and Dale started talking.
‘After a bit they almost forgot about me. Dale said, “Are you going to let him get away with it?” and Ryan said, “No, I’m effing not.” Then it got pretty obvious who they were talking about. There’s a network outside the area, of course, but here he’s a one-man band, runs a tight operation with just himself and men like Willie who distribute.’
‘Ritchie Elder?’
‘You were on to him already?’
‘Only suspicion. But if we’ve got those two lads, we know who to lean on—’
‘Better than that.’ Kingsley’s face broke into a triumphant smile. ‘I’ve got them downstairs.’
‘They’re ready to talk?’
‘Better than that, even. If you can persuade the Super to do a bit of horse-trading with the Procurator Fiscal on the question of charges, they’re ready to sing, just like canaries.’
For the third time, the phone rang and rang until it rang out. Dorothy Randall, who had been tapping her fingers on the table as she listened, set down the receiver with an impatient sigh. She looked at her watch: ten to one, and Lewis should have been home for lunch just after twelve-thirty.
She had always been scrupulous about not phoning him during working hours. She had always been sensitive, too, to the faint sigh of irritation, the slight furrowing of his brow, that indicated he felt she was crowding him. As a result, theirs had been a close, happy relationship; she needed to be careful that in this time of anxiety and stress she did not jeopardise it. Dorothy had already made the mistake of going to his house, uninvited, to cook a meal for him, but she hadn’t done it twice.
However, she badly needed to talk to him, after last night. If he wasn’t coming home for lunch, she’d just have to phone him at the surgery after all. She’d give it one more try.
This time, her persistence was rewarded, though Lewis’s ‘Hello?’ at the other end of the phone sounded almost tetchy.
‘Lewis, it’s me.’
‘Yes, I thought it might be.’
She was immediately apologetic. ‘Darling, I’m sorry to interrupt. Is that you only coming in for your lunch now?’
‘Yes. I looked in on Jackie Duncan on my way home.’
It gave her the opening she wanted. ‘It’s quite shocking, isn’t it? Lewis, I really need to talk to you—’
‘Mother, I have to be back at the surgery in half an hour. Surely this can wait?’
She backed off hastily. ‘Oh yes, of course.’ Then she added, with artistic hesitation, ‘It’s – it’s just I’ve had a little heart flutter that’s been worrying me this morning . . .’
She couldn’t hear the sigh, but there was an appreciable pause before he said, ‘I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.’
‘Oh but Lewis – your lunch! That’s too bad. I could make you a sandwich—’
‘Don’t bother. I have some.’
He wasn’t pleased, but at least he was coming. Going into the sitting room to wait, Dorothy caught sight of herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. She was looking gaunt, her eyes were heavy from lack of sleep and her face looked blotchy. She’d always taken pride in keeping herself fit, but even leaving aside the imaginary heart flutter, she didn’t feel particularly well, and with a twinge of alarm she reflected that it wouldn’t do any harm to have Lewis check her over. At her age, this level of stress could be positively dangerous.
When he saw her, it was clear that Lewis thought the same. There was no sign of annoyance now as he opened his medical case and took out the sphygmomanometer he had taken for Jackie Duncan. But when he had completed the test and sounded her heart he sat back on his heels
saying with some relief, ‘Your blood-pressure’s up a bit, but not badly – nothing to worry about. It’s been an upsetting time – you just need to take it easy. Stop running round after your son, who’s really perfectly capable of looking after himself.’
He smiled at her, and she smiled back. ‘That’s my pleasure. But Lewis, this awful business about Willie Duncan—’
‘You’ve obviously heard all about it. Were you out this morning? Oh no, let me guess. Muriel phoned.’
He didn’t sound pleased. Dorothy said, ‘Oh, I know what you think of her. But she does keep me in touch with what’s happening.’
‘And quite a lot of things that aren’t,’ he said dryly.
‘What’s poor Jackie saying?’
‘She’s sobbing, mostly, and still in shock, of course. But she knew the risks he was running, getting involved with drugs, though her worry I think had mainly been about prosecution rather than something like this.
‘And terrible as it is, I can’t say it isn’t a relief that this will draw a line under Ashley’s death – and the others’, of course.’
‘But Lewis!’ She leaned forward urgently, putting her hand on top of his. ‘That was what I wanted to speak to you about. Don’t you see – it hasn’t?’
Shock was evident in his face. ‘What nonsense is this, Mother?’
‘We can’t afford to be caught off guard. Muriel says that Willie’s death could easily be a blind. Willie said himself that he wasn’t in danger, and everyone knows that if there wasn’t a drugs connection the police would be looking for someone else. So if you were the killer and you wanted to throw them off your scent, you’d have to kill Willie, wouldn’t you?’
Lewis got up. Dorothy couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her son angry, but he was angry now. ‘That woman is pure poison! I don’t want you to have anything more to do with her. Her one aim in life is to cause trouble.’
‘Lewis!’ She was on her feet too. ‘You don’t see, do you? Oh, I know what Muriel is. I don’t trust her, I only believe ten per cent of what she tells me, but if she’s thinking that way, sooner or later the police will too. And then you’ll be back under suspicion again. Don’t think you won’t be!’
The Darkness and the Deep Page 23
