She towelled her hair vigorously with a bright green towel that matched the decor, peeping up at him provocatively. ‘At least, if I’m to be subjected to still more police interrogation, the standards have improved. Come and sit down. Would you like me to send for some coffee?’ She stretched out on one of the loungers and patted the one next to her invitingly.
‘No thank you, Mrs Elder.’ Kingsley made no attempt to sit down. He didn’t want a nice, cosy, manipulative chat; from their reports, she’d done that to both Tam and Tansy. He planned to see what a bit of aggro could do and looking over her was quite a good start.
The smile disappeared but she said lightly, ‘Fine, Constable, let’s do it your way. What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know why you lied to DS MacNee.’
‘Did I?’ The perfectly groomed eyebrows rose in a quizzical arch.
‘You told him you didn’t know your husband was having an affair with Ashley Randall. What other lies have you told?’
Joanna gave a gasp of outrage. ‘Just because I chose not to admit to having heard what was, after all, only a rumour, you’re suggesting—’
‘You see, Mrs Elder, you told MacNee that just after the wreck of the lifeboat when we were looking into motives, and knowing about the affair with Ashley would have given you quite a powerful one, wouldn’t it? It was only after Willie Duncan was killed and your husband was charged with drug dealing that you admitted to DC Kerr that you did know, after all. It’s a question of timing, you see: at that point you might reasonably have thought it was safe to assume your husband would be charged with the murder as well. Not only that, you made a point of telling her that you couldn’t confirm his alibi.’
Joanna had been leaning back, in ostentatious relaxation; now she sat bolt upright, her face pale and the muscles in her jaw visibly tense.
‘I told her I didn’t believe he was a murderer!’ she protested.
‘Not entirely convincingly, as I understand it. Though of course it transpires you were right, so we’re now looking elsewhere.
‘What precisely were you doing on the night of October tenth, between the hours of seven and ten? And again, on the twentieth, between eleven and one?’
‘The tenth – the night of the wreck, presumably?’ Her voice was steady enough; she had swung her legs to the floor now and was sitting looking up at him, her head back in a defiant pose. He noticed, though, that her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, had fingernails which were not manicured like her toenails; they were raggedly bitten to the quick.
‘The best I can offer you is to say that I was here, by myself, as I am most evenings unless my husband and I have a social engagement. I expect I had supper, exercised, then watched television. That’s what I normally do. Then, of course, Ritchie came back, absolutely distraught, and told me all about it.’
‘You have no children?’
‘No.’
The reply was flat, but somehow Kingsley had the feeling he might have touched a nerve. He persisted. ‘No visitors? No long, chatty phone calls with girlfriends?’
Her thin smile suggested contempt rather than amusement. ‘I’m not that kind of woman, Constable. No.’
‘That’s a pity. Leaves you sort of exposed, doesn’t it?’
‘You reckon a judge would accept the physical possibility that I could have been there as proof of guilt?’ she said sarcastically. ‘The dock could get fairly crowded, on that basis.’
‘Absolutely. But you see, it’s a starting point. If you’d been able to prove you were here, there’d be no purpose in pursuing our enquiries, would there? Since you can’t . . .’ He shrugged. ‘And then of course, there’s the twentieth—’
‘I was here, with my husband,’ she said quickly, then stopped.
‘Yes, of course. It cuts both ways, doesn’t it? You didn’t see him; he didn’t see you. Such a pity.
‘Do you ever make your own wine, Mrs Elder?’
‘Make wine? Are you mad? My husband has a cellar—’
‘You deny it? Thank you. Have you ever been to Argos, in Dumfries?’
She was getting flustered now. ‘Argos? I – I don’t know, I might have. I think I bought a heater there once—’
‘Do you have the receipt?’
The agitation she was displaying could be the normal confusion such apparently random questioning might produce. Or not. ‘My – my husband might have it filed somewhere. Why do you want to know?’
He ignored that. ‘Have you ever used craft paints?’
Joanna got up, shaking visibly. ‘I don’t understand what this is all about, but you seem to be trying to trap me somehow. No, I have never used craft paints. But if you are going to go on asking me questions like this I shall refuse to answer until my lawyer is present.’
‘Just one more. Mrs Elder, did you arrange the wreck of the lifeboat, then kill Willie Duncan?’
She burst into tears, jumped up and ran out.
‘He doesn’t seem to be in school today,’ the headmaster said, consulting his computer screen. ‘Is there a problem?’
MacNee grimaced. ‘Hard to say. I can probably get hold of him at home this evening but there’s a few things he could maybe clear up for us and I’d hoped to get it done this morning. Unless he’s likely still to be in Knockhaven?’
Peter Morton shook his head. ‘Not if his mother’s at home. She’s a nice woman, always very concerned about his education.’
‘Any idea where he might be?’
‘He’s got a poor attendance record anyway. Better lately – this is the first absence in the last couple of weeks – but I don’t know what he does when he’s not here. Hangs out with some of his mates who’ve decided to bunk off as well, I’d guess. If the parents are out at work you get the house to yourself – TV and video games and a few cans of beer, bit of a laugh with your mates . . . Could fancy it myself sometimes, instead of coming in here.’
‘Me and all.’ They both laughed as Morton checked what he called ‘the usual suspects’ but he drew a blank. ‘Oddly enough, they all seem to be subjecting themselves to the risk of learning something this morning. Sorry.’
‘What about the girlfriend?’
‘Kylie MacEwan? Yes, that relationship’s definitely a problem. Her social worker’s very stressed about the child. The family background isn’t exactly ideal – mother has three children by three different partners – and they’re trying to get the father involved. He’s living in Lanark now in a stable relationship according to the reports and at least he’s making concerned noises. Ah!’ He pointed at the screen. ‘There! She’s off as well.’
‘Right. So Nat could be at her house, maybe?’
‘Could be. But Mum’s on the dole and Granny lives there too – not that they’d make a fuss about truanting but the house wouldn’t be empty, which kids usually prefer.’
‘If you can give me the address I’ll away round there and see.’
‘I’ll get my secretary to find it for you.’ He phoned through the request then said hesitantly, ‘Would it be in order to ask how the enquiry’s going? We have a particular interest in it because of poor Luke.’
‘Luke. Yes.’ They’d tended to forget about Luke. ‘There was absolutely no way Nat Rettie, or anyone else, for that matter, could have known he’d be on that boat. He was just an accidental victim.’
‘That pretty much sums Luke up,’ Morton said sombrely. ‘He was bent on killing himself anyway, wasn’t he, thanks to Rettie? I know he’s my pupil, I know he had a difficult start in life, but I could find it in me to hope that this can be laid to his account. It might stop his talent for destruction ruining someone else’s life.’
After the detectives had gone, the house fell silent, apart from the crackling of the logs in the fire and the soft creaks and sighs old buildings always make in a low-voiced conversation between stone and timber. Marjory almost felt like an intruder as the tinny waking-up music of her laptop interrupted their tranquil exchange. She had switched o
ff her phone, though; she’d collect the inevitable messages later, but having been forced to take this day off she was determined to make the most of it.
Not that it was easy. Her head was aching as well as her ankle and she had that light-headed, unslept feeling. What sleep she had got the night before had been made hideous with dreams of struggles with mountainous waves and deep darkness, and of a woman raking her face with her nails until the blood welled up in the scratches. Somehow, in the way of dreams, she knew this was a distraught mother – Luke’s perhaps, or even Lewis’s, though she looked like neither. Lying awake had been preferable.
Where to start? Turning to the table at her side, her eye caught the glistening mother-of-pearl shell with a tiny hole in the middle which Tansy Kerr had taken out of her pocket and put there just as she left, saying, ‘That’s for luck, boss.’ Fleming touched its smooth surface with one finger. She was certainly going to need all the luck she could get.
She flipped through the file which contained some of her own rough notes, reports that hadn’t yet found their way into the system and the famous jotter, with a follow-up report from Sandy Langlands attached.
He’d done a good job. He’d tracked down the prospective buyers and eliminated their arrival and departure times from the list; the unattributable arrival time, 7.23, was consistent with someone hearing the maroon and driving out immediately from Knockhaven. The unaccounted-for return was at 7.31: time enough to park, place the lanterns in their pre-determined places and drive back up.
At least it confirmed that they needn’t look further than Knockhaven. The road to the north, of course, had been blocked by that accident and anyone coming from beyond Knockhaven to the south couldn’t have reached it in the time available. Except, of course, Joanna Elder. The first call from the coastguard had been to the house at 7.04, before they reached Elder on his mobile. Fleming made a note of that, with a star, on the pad at her side.
Langlands had also highlighted Elder’s visits to the site in the evenings, which were consistent with his claim of taking Ashley to the showhouse: each time another car either directly preceded or followed the Mitsubishi – Ashley’s own, presumably, described in one of the entries as ‘sporty’.
Fleming flipped back to the beginning of the book. The first two entries, which were logged on the same date though some hours earlier than the first recorded visit by Elder and Randall, detailed a car which had gone down to Fuill’s Inlat and returned nine minutes later. A comment in the margin read, ‘Much too fast – in fog!’ What would someone have been doing there for nine minutes? The Wrecker had taken eight, on the 10th . . .
Fog! She remembered something about a rescue in fog. She accessed the RNLI website; it wasn’t difficult to find the account of the Maud’n’Milly’s previous call-out, to rescue a boat adrift in fog. And the date tallied.
Had this been a trial run, or a first attempt, thwarted by the thickness of the fog which would have meant the cox steering on radar, even in these familiar waters?
There was no note, though, of a car returning to retrieve the lanterns, as surely it must have, so presumably this had been late in the night. And of course there was the car that had appeared at three in the morning after the wreck – to do just that, they had reckoned – and then swiftly disappeared. She’d almost forgotten that car.
It didn’t feature in the jotter. Since the good lady seemed to have recorded every one of the passing rescue vehicles, she had probably collapsed exhausted into bed to sleep the sleep of the smugly self-righteous.
Fleming scribbled a rough timetable. It all hung together, which was always useful when you were constructing a case to present to the Procurator Fiscal. The only problem was that you were talking alibis again. Been there, done that.
The feeling of making progress waned as the hours passed. She had been so sure that analysis would yield a new focus for the operation, yet the more she read the more she felt it was all slipping away from her. She had a few notes to show for her morning’s work, but what she still didn’t have was a feel for the sort of person behind it. Most crimes, even the most trivial, fitted a pattern of one sort or another, had a signature that defined their perpetrator, but these contrived to be anonymous, leaving a blank where the personality should be. It made her realise the extent to which she always relied on her skill in reading that signature.
If she hadn’t that instinctive feel for direction, she knew the alternative. Boring, plodding police work, sifting through the evidence more meticulously each time, riddling it first, then sieving it and finally using that thing her mother had for sifting icing sugar. With a groan that was only partly because of the pain in her ankle she settled down to it.
21
Yet again, Tansy Kerr was feeling on the outside of things, like she was sitting at home on a Saturday night with the party going on somewhere else. The only consolation was that she didn’t think anyone else was at the party either. She hadn’t seen Tam, admittedly, but she’d seen Jon Kingsley, on his way back to HQ to work on the drugs case, and he didn’t seem to have got much further with Joanna Elder than she had herself, though he was talking it up like he always did.
She’d done her interview with Enid Davis in the staffroom at the surgery, feeling guilty because the old bag who worked there too had almost wet herself with excitement at her co-worker being under suspicion.
Awkwardly, Kerr apologised for it all being so public, but Enid had said only, with a sort of tired distaste, ‘If you’d come to my house in disguise in the middle of the night she’d have asked me tomorrow what you were wanting. I suppose this is to do with what she’s been saying about me and Dr Lewis?’
‘That’s right.’
Enid sighed. ‘Look, I think Lewis Randall is a lovely man. I thought his wife was a complete bitch who didn’t know how lucky she was. But I’m not kidding myself that she was somehow standing in my way. If she was Dr Lewis’s taste in women, I’m not exactly the obvious next choice, am I? Oh, don’t feel you have to make a polite protest. After my divorce I decided I’d had enough of marriage – more than enough – and I’d more important things to do with my life than look for another man.’
The pain of that divorce had obviously gone deep. There was enough feeling in her voice to convince Kerr that it had the ring of truth, but even so she persisted, ‘I have to ask you—’
‘I know – what was I doing when these things happened? I was at home – I usually am – but I certainly can’t prove it.’
Kerr jotted that down. ‘You’ve said you disliked Dr Ashley. Why?’
‘Oh – how long have you got? None of us could stand the woman. Poor Dr Matthews – he was always having to cover for her lifeboat absences if Dr Lewis couldn’t but she was never grateful. She treated her husband like a servant, she was snooty to the patients, and she behaved to the rest of us, even Muriel, as if we’d come in on the sole of her shoe. Always giving orders, with never a please or a thank-you.’
Kerr had dutifully recorded that as well, though it didn’t seem the strongest motive for killing not just your boss but another three people as well. If it was, there’d be a serious shortage of sergeants in the police force.
All in all, she didn’t feel she’d made much progress. There was only one thing; just at the end of the interview, Enid had said hesitantly, ‘I don’t know if I should mention this, but—’
Kerr’s ears pricked up. ‘Definitely,’ she said firmly.
‘It’s probably stupid. But I’ve got to know Katy Anderson since all this happened. She’s a nice person and I’m just afraid I’ve given her bad advice about that son of hers. I’m on my own now; to have a son . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, perhaps I’m a bit inclined to see it through rose-coloured spectacles. She’d been having difficulties with Nat and wanted to send him away and I convinced her not to – a stepfather’s always hard for any child to adapt to, I said, and this would be her chance to put things right. But I’ve heard a lot more about him since and I’m very w
orried. I think she’s actually afraid of him, but I can’t exactly ring her up and say, “Sorry, I was wrong. Your son’s a bad lot,” can I? But maybe you could sort of check up?’
Kerr had made soothing noises and written that down too; she’d pass it on to Tam, though it would be confirmation rather than news to him. She’d left hoping that she hadn’t spent long enough with Enid to give Muriel Henderson more food for gossip, but judging by the look on the woman’s face as Kerr left it was a vain hope.
Now she had to tackle Mrs Randall – a right old battle-axe, according to Tam and Jon, who’d be happier drowning innocent folk than having them in her house asking questions. Jon had obviously had his money on her, trying to push the boss into letting him give her a going-over, though he seemed to be wavering after talking to Joanna Elder. Kerr couldn’t see it, herself – a woman in her sixties scrambling about on rocks in the dark! Sixty was really old. You got your bus pass at sixty.
On the way into Dorothy’s sitting room she changed her mind. There were a number of photos on a side-table – you could learn a lot from photos and Kerr always clocked them when she went into a room – with among them one of a slightly younger Mrs Randall doing some vigorous crewing on a sailing boat and another two which looked quite recent: one of her on top of a hill with her son and one with her in tennis whites in a ladies’ team.
‘Do you still play?’ Kerr asked, gesturing towards this last one as Dorothy Randall escorted her in, doing a good impression of someone with a bad smell under her nose, despite the fact that Kerr had on her best jeans today and a very respectable top her mother had given her for Christmas which she’d never liked much.
‘Not at the moment, obviously. In the summer, yes.’ The way she said it suggested that, recognising a sadly limited intellect, good manners forced her to be patient.
Don’t give me that, you stuck-up old bat? Well, perhaps not. ‘That’s a very careful answer, Mrs Randall.’ Kerr could do heavily polite with the best of them. ‘But why I’m here is because you weren’t quite so careful about what you told us before.’
The Darkness and the Deep Page 31
