The Darkness and the Deep

by Aline Templeton

  Muriel Henderson walked home, still in a bad temper. It was high time something was done about Enid, more than high time. She was barely civil to Muriel these days and once or twice she’d been downright rude. Then walking out like that! It simply wasn’t good enough. As senior receptionist Muriel was due proper respect.

  Of course, if there was hanky-panky going on with her and Dr Lewis – as Muriel was still sure there was – he would stand up for her. Well, if it came to that she’d just have to say it was either Enid or her. That would settle it; without Muriel, the whole practice would collapse into chaos and none of the doctors could afford that. Dr Lewis would have to change his tune.

  She’d speak to Dr Matthews about it tomorrow and put an end to it. An unpleasant smile came to her face as she reached Mayfield Gardens. Enid’s days were numbered.

  The car was still there. Enid looked wretchedly at her watch, for the hundredth time. Quarter of an hour – what if they decided to stay all evening? What if she couldn’t get Katy alone? What if . . . ? Stop it, she told herself. Stop it, stop it!

  It was so unfair, the way it had all turned out. It was to have been her beautiful, elegant, secret revenge for what the Bastard had done to Timmy. He’d got off scot-free; nothing he could have done, the police said, when Timmy came flying out of a side road in front of him on his bike. Nothing he could do? He could have swerved, avoided him, couldn’t he? He’d killed her son.

  Though it was just like Timmy, too – never a thought for the pain his carelessness would cause his mother, though she’d warned him often enough what it would do to her if anything happened to him. The impotent anger bubbled up in her even now: anger against him; anger against the police who wouldn’t punish the man who had ruined her life; against her husband who had, typically, refused to consider a civil case, knowing how important it was to her; anger against Anderson. Above all, against Anderson, the Bastard. Well, he was dead now; he had his rightful punishment at last, but it was all wrong that Enid should be having to suffer too. God knew, she’d suffered enough already!

  She had watched him obsessively from that day on. She knew when he left the Navy, knew when he took up with Katy. Unrecognised, she’d even watched him from the other side of the road coming out of the registry office with his new bride, and mouthed a curse on their happiness. With the help of local gossip, she’d tracked him to the pub in Glasgow where he was working to learn his new chosen trade, then found out from them, oh so casually, where he’d gone, and subscribed to the local paper.

  The advertisement for the medical receptionist’s job – a job she’d done before – seemed like a sign, one of the few pieces of luck she’d had. Her marriage, stormy at the best of times, had collapsed into acrimonious divorce; she reverted to her maiden name, applied and was accepted.

  It was a novel that gave her the idea, shortly after she arrived in Knockhaven, some foolish historical romance about wreckers in Cornwall. The beauty of it was that his death would be an accident, just as Timmy’s had been, and actually, in the final analysis, not even her responsibility. After all, the man at the helm was accountable for the safety of his craft.

  And if fate was kind, who would suspect anything but a deadly misjudgement? She’d taken every precaution, though, in case it didn’t quite work out like that – especially being as unlucky as she was – and she’d meticulously covered her tracks, buying the lamps with cash in a chain store, the glass paint from a DIY warehouse. She’d worn the gloves from the surgery to handle them, and polished them as well, just in case; she’d roamed the shelves at Stranraer Library to find Reid’s Almanac, which a book on sailing had told her gave details of navigational lights, rather than asking a librarian who just might remember her. She’d established the sites for the lamps while apparently scrambling innocently along the rocks, as people often did, admiring the views and peering into rock pools, picking up the occasional pretty stone or shell as an excuse. She’d rather enjoyed the planning, as a matter of fact.

  Enid had no scruples about the others who would die along with the Bastard. She was just a little uncomfortable about the young lad – what was his name? Luke? – though of course that wasn’t her fault; he would never have been there if Willie Duncan hadn’t taken drugs. It was Willie who should have died then; drug dealers were trash, and the world would be a better place without Ashley Randall. Poor Dr Lewis! His wife had been selfishness personified, and if there was one thing Enid hated, it was selfishness.

  A movement caught her eye and she turned her head sharply. A young woman had just come hurrying round the corner and Enid sank down low in her seat; no one would pay any attention to a parked car. She went straight to the door of Katy’s house and rang the bell. Another of Katy’s friends!

  Enid bent her head, catching her breath on a sob. How long must she endure this torture of waiting?

  There was a chilly wind and the woman standing on the doorstep jiggled from foot to foot and huddled her jacket more closely round her as she waited. When Ellie opened the door, the two women hugged.

  ‘Oh, Ellie! Isn’t this awful? Poor, poor Katy! I came round as soon as I heard to see if there was anything I could do.’

  Ellie shook her head. ‘Not at the moment.’ Then, glancing over her shoulder, she lowered her voice. ‘The police are with her just now.’

  ‘Right, I’ll come back later, shall I?’ The other woman turned to go, and Ellie came out to walk down the path with her.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll be long. I’ll tell you what’s been going on later, but I’d better get back to Katy now.’

  Ellie watched her friend go, then with a final wave went back into the house and shut the door.

  Enid brought her fists down on the steering wheel in frantic frustration. For a moment there her heart had leapt, believing they were both leaving, but she should have known better. She never got the lucky breaks.

  The fog that first time was bad luck too, though at least she’d retrieved the lamps, exactly according to plan. The second time, there had been the shock of finding cars there, lots of them, and people about looking round the new houses. She’d almost considered turning back, but once the houses were occupied people would be even more watchful about strange cars lurking around their homes, so steeling her nerves she’d gone ahead, the raging storm and darkness her friend. Indeed, Enid told herself, the other cars were good cover; who could possibly notice an extra car? Her deadly mission complete, she had gone home to wait.

  She knew it had succeeded when she heard car after car racing up the High Street past her little house. She only had the first warning that, in an important sense, her luck had failed her again, when she went out, as before, in the dark of night to retrieve the lamps and found a police car on guard.

  And the terrible thing was, once it wasn’t an accident, the police had to look for a reason. With Muriel supplying one by telling everyone Willie had been the real target, it was plain enough what Enid needed to do.

  Not that she liked doing it. Having to mow someone down, having to see him fall, and scream – horrible! She shouldn’t have had to do something like that. She’d been quite upset about it afterwards, but at least she had been sure she was safe. Until she saw those newspapers.

  She’d felt sorry for Katy’s son, with the Bastard as a stepfather. She’d tried to persuade Katy to build bridges with him; perhaps if she and Nat got close again he’d convince her that her precious Rob wasn’t so wonderful after all.

  But once Enid had realised that the Bastard was trying to reach out from the grave to grab her, she’d had to think quickly. As long as Nat was around, if anything happened to Katy he’d be the first suspect and she knew the police had him on their list anyway; she’d emphasised that, quite skilfully, she thought, when she was talking to the policewoman with the ridiculous hair.

  But after Katy had come into the Medical Centre, full of her plans to sort out her papers, Enid knew she had to act at once. The police would know by nightfall next day, if Katy
couldn’t be stopped; maybe loosening the wheel nuts wasn’t the best plan in the world, but the situation was desperate.

  There was a chance Katy might be killed, though naturally, Enid would have preferred not – she wasn’t some kind of monster, for heaven’s sake – but most likely she’d just be hurt or shaken, and when Enid heard about it she’d go round to sympathise and persuade Katy she needed a nice lie-down. Get her out of the room, even for ten minutes, and she’d have the evidence safe in her bag. Just as she would do now, as long as Katy was prepared to listen to reason.

  It was her unique brand of bad luck that Nat had taken the car – however could she have foreseen that? And what would the police make of it? Vandalism, perhaps. Yes, vandalism; that was certainly more plausible than a careless mechanic. She’d push the vandalism angle to Katy and she could even arrange some over the next bit, to direct their minds that way.

  Oh, the game wasn’t over yet, if luck was with her, for once. If she could just get in to see Katy, on her own. Was the visitor going to stay all night?

  But at last, at last, the door was opening, light spilling out on to the paving strip outside. A woman on crutches appeared – Enid didn’t know who that would be. Then behind her came someone she did recognise, someone with ridiculously streaked red hair. The one on crutches, she saw now, was the inspector who had asked her about Dr Lewis. And the younger policewoman was holding a bundle of newspapers.

  The game was over, after all. Or very nearly.

  23

  The road from Knockhaven to Kirkluce was so familiar now that Marjory Fleming could almost anticipate every corner as Tansy Kerr came up to it at speed and brace herself, which was just as well considering the protests from her over-used ankle. The combination of adrenaline, pain and exhaustion was a powerful cocktail; she was feeling positively light-headed, but there was no way she was going to miss out on the endgame. There had been one police car outside Enid Davis’s house in the High Street as they drove up it to join the main road which crossed it at the top; the other car she’d assigned should have arrived by now and gone with Tam to pick her up at the surgery. With this, and the fatal accident, every copper on patrol duty tonight in the Galloway area was going to be tied up in this one place; she could only cross her fingers and hope that something wasn’t about to break elsewhere.

  Fleming spent the first five minutes of the journey arranging for a search warrant for Davis’s property to be sworn out and giving instructions for the digging team which had been pulled back from Bayview House to be on standby, ready to move in at first light; blood and tissue could often be found in drain traps and joints. Her next phone call was to Superintendent Bailey; it might have been more flattering if he hadn’t sounded more surprised than delighted that progress had been made. Then she sank back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

  ‘Boss,’ Kerr said, ‘can I just ask—?’ Then, glancing sideways, she broke off. ‘Sorry – were you trying to sleep?’

  Fleming sighed. ‘That’s OK. I don’t think I could anyway.’

  ‘I suppose once we’d eliminated everything else, we’d have gone wider and got round to digging into Rob Anderson’s past – even Ashley Randall’s, come to that. But why just now?’

  Fleming smiled. ‘Just a tiny thing, nothing in itself, really, but it caught my eye – you know how discrepancies sometimes do? I was reading your transcript of what Rob said to Katy in hospital, and one thing caught my eye. He was talking about the lights and then he said, “Three of them – too many.” But we know there weren’t three lights, there were two – if there had been another the SOCOs would have found it, and in any case the signal for the harbour entrance is only two lights. He was in shock, of course, but it was only that remark that made you believe he was confused.

  ‘So assume he wasn’t. What was he talking about? What was preying on his mind to such an extent, when he probably knew he was dying? I started to wonder what there were three of. Three crew in the boat, but that was unremarkable. He was still alive so there hadn’t been three deaths – and anyway he said “them”, not us.

  ‘If he’d known the other two had died—’

  ‘He did. Someone at the funeral tea said he’d been told, and how awful it must have been believing he’d caused two deaths because he got it wrong.’

  ‘Right.’ Another piece of the speculative jigsaw slotted into place. ‘And he was racked with guilt – “My fault,” he kept saying. If their deaths were so much on his conscience, I just began to wonder if there could possibly be something we didn’t know about – some third fatality. OK, it could have been a complete red herring. Maybe I was reading too much into the confused maunderings of a dying man, but what had we got to lose? We’d been focusing on the current situation and we were running out of options. He’d an unknown past which would at least bear investigation. And – well, I had a sort of feeling . . .’

  Kerr stifled a smile. Big Marge’s ‘feelings’ were the stuff of police legend.

  ‘He was a naval officer until he went into the licensed trade, so there was no problem accessing his record up to that point. It turns out he’d been serving at Faslane, just along the road from Helensburgh where the accident happened, five years ago. According to his file, he was completely exonerated. He’d actually stopped when the child lost control of his bike and swerved into him – came over the handlebars and cracked his skull on the edge of the roof.

  ‘Of course it needn’t have been connected to this but if it was, there was only one person on the list of suspects – though for quite the wrong reason – who wasn’t living here in Knockhaven long before Rob ever appeared on the scene. It would have had to be quite a coincidence if he had chosen, more or less at random, to come to a place where someone happened to be nursing a deadly grievance against him. But Enid followed him here.’

  ‘Tough for her to accept him being in the clear.’ Kerr pulled out to overtake another car, neatly and safely enough, but Fleming caught her breath. She didn’t like being driven.

  Letting it out again, unnoticed, she hoped, she went on, ‘Demonstrably impossible. And if you were, to use Laura’s word, so solipsistic that your need to punish your son’s killer was all that mattered, it wouldn’t be hard to persuade yourself that taking a drug dealer and an adulteress with a deeply unpleasant personality along with him would be a positive service to the community. And what followed you’d just put down to what Harold Macmillan once called “Events, dear boy, events.”’

  ‘Yes,’ Kerr said slowly, ‘I can see that. But Nat? Why should she want to kill Nat? She described him to me as a thoroughly bad lot, but surely even she—’

  ‘Come on, Tansy, think!’ Fleming said crisply. ‘You can do better than that!’

  Kerr thought for a moment, then bit her lip. ‘Oh – Enid wouldn’t have expected him to be in the car, would she? In fact, she’d set me up – if Katy came to grief I’d be meant to think of Nat immediately. Probably would have, too.

  ‘I’m not starring, am I – not picking up on what Rob said either. Sorry.’

  ‘You recorded it, it was in the files, and that’s your job. It was my job to pick up on it, but if I hadn’t been stupid enough to wreck my ankle I’d never have had the time to analyse the evidence thoroughly. We’d have got Davis in the end, you know, by the long, slow elimination process – but God knows what mayhem she would have felt inspired to cause by then.’

  They had reached Kirkluce; as Kerr slowed down to make the turn into the police car park, she laughed suddenly. ‘I was just thinking, it’s as well she’s not on a mission to improve society. Muriel Henderson would definitely be the next to go.’

  ‘That’s not even funny. We’d better go straight to the CID room – Tam should have Davis safely in custody by now and I want to map out the interview before we start.’

  She wasn’t there. They’d tried the Medical Centre first, but it was in darkness, the outer doors closed and the car park deserted. They went back to the High Street; it
s handful of small shops had shut their doors and in the flats above and the terraced houses between them, lamps glowed behind drawn curtains as their inhabitants settled in for the night.

  But the windows of Enid’s little house were dark, and knocking, ringing and even shouting through the letter-box brought no response, beyond bringing the next-door neighbour out to say, ‘I don’t know what all the stushie’s about but if you’d the sense of a flea you’d know she’s not in.’

  Enid should have been innocently at home, having returned from work half an hour ago. How the hell could she have known they were on to her?

  The sight of two police cars, an unmarked car and five officers was creating a stir. Doors were opening and Tam MacNee, deprived by the presence of the paying public of a bout of cathartic swearing, gritted his teeth.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam. Would you have any idea where we might be able to find Mrs Davis?’

  No helpful answer was forthcoming. ‘Was it her that did it all?’ someone shouted from across the street.

  MacNee ignored that. ‘You lot stay here. I’ll have a scout around the back.’ He jumped into his car and at the T-junction at the top of the hill turned right on to the main road, then immediately right again into an unpaved lane that ran down the backs of the old houses. One or two had doors opening directly on to it while others had small gardens with garages and sheds; Davis could have gained access to her house this way unseen.