Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  ‘So it’s probably nothing to do with the mother’s disappearance at all. And what does that say about our chief suspect? There’s no more reason for it to be Jake than it is for it to be Max or Conrad, or anyone else who might have been around at the time, if it’s not his wife.’

  ‘Unless,’ MacNee volunteered helpfully, ‘she’s there too.’

  Fleming stared at him in horror. ‘Oh, God. Serial murderer – that’s all we need. We’ll have to dig up the whole field, won’t we?’

  ‘Maybe she’s got family who know where she is.’

  ‘If she has we’d better find them right away before we blow the budget looking for non-existent bodies. Get the Press on to it – they love being offered a cloak of social responsibility as a cover for the usual muck-raking.’

  ‘Right, boss. I’m on my way.’

  ‘The girl.’ Fleming was tapping her teeth thoughtfully with a pen. ‘How soon is she going to be fit? If we could just get a DNA sample from her today and compare it to one from the body we could have the results within twenty-four hours – forty-eight at worst. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy – they’d have enough material to run the standard test.’

  ‘I’ll find out. She’ll be as anxious as anyone to move things along. We’d better leave interviewing her till tomorrow though.’

  ‘Bring her in here. Nicely, of course, using your unique brand of persuasion – and I don’t mean the Glasgow Kiss.’

  MacNee gave his gap-tooth grin, making a head-butting gesture. ‘You’re just a wee spoilsport, so you are.’

  ‘I want to sit in on this one,’ Fleming said more seriously. ‘I need to get a handle on the case. She was pretty economical with the truth when we spoke to her and I want to see to it we get the whole story this time. She’s a psychotherapist – she must have known what she was doing.’

  MacNee snorted. ‘I think you’re reaching, there. Most of the ones I’ve come across have been raving nutters.’

  She smiled. ‘Well – you know my views. Thanks, Tam.’

  When he had gone she went back to her computer, highlighted all she’d written this morning and pressed delete. She’d have to start again from scratch with notes for the conference. And she’d have to see Conrad Mason.

  If the victim was a young woman, that put both Mason cousins squarely in the frame along with Jake. She wanted to tell Conrad herself before he went to see his mother at the Glen Inn and heard what had happened; seeing a reaction was always useful. She was picking up the phone to arrange it when she remembered – Bill!

  She’d tried to phone him yesterday to tell him what was going on and do her best to make her peace but she hadn’t got through and then with the demands of the day she’d forgotten about it until she was leaving the office at half-past eleven and it was much too late.

  She dialled the number but when he answered he sounded totally unlike himself. For a moment she wondered if she’d got a wrong number.

  ‘Bill? Bill, is that you? Are you all right?’

  Marjory heard him sigh. ‘They’re coming today. There’s nothing wrong with the sheep, nothing at all. But they’ve got it over at Windyedge and their boundary touches ours. So they’re going to kill dozens of healthy animals. And there’s nothing I can do to stop them.’

  He spoke in a flat monotone, as if showing any emotion at all would make him fall apart.

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ she faltered. ‘That’s – that’s awful!’

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t know what to say. What could she say – and what use were words, anyway? She should be beside him, to hold him, to give him the strength to cry if that was what he needed to do. ‘When will they let me back home?’ she asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ The heaviness in his voice lifted slightly. ‘You could come back now, Marjory. It doesn’t matter if you bring in infection – the poor beasts are doomed anyway. You’d have to stay until they gave you the all-clear, but it wouldn’t be more than two, three days maybe. They could spare you that long—’

  She closed her eyes in despair. How could she tell him? And what would it do to their marriage, when she did?

  ‘Bill, you probably haven’t heard, but yesterday they found a body buried at Chapelton. It’s a murder enquiry and I’m Senior Investigating Officer. There’s no way I can get leave at the moment.’

  His silence was long and eloquent. Then he said, ‘No. Of course not. Fine.’

  ‘Oh, darling—’

  ‘By the way, I’m sorry—’

  Marjory wouldn’t let him finish. ‘About the other day? I should be apologising. I can’t think what made me put the phone down like that. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that.’ He sounded cold, indifferent. ‘I’m apologising because I forgot to shut up the hens last night and the fox got them. Sorry.’ The line went dead.

  Her precious chookies! Marjory buried her face in her hands. She had seen before the wholesale slaughter which was the fox’s sickening trademark. It was all the more obscene because somehow there was something so innocent about hens, their squawking silliness and their crooning contentment, their simple needs and petty squabbles, and the thought of such savagery made her feel physically sick.

  Her own happy, loving, secure and yes, in its way, innocent home life had been savaged too, by dislocation and misunderstanding and tragedy and cruel, ugly death.

  And she still had a murder investigation to conduct and a briefing meeting in half an hour, and Conrad Mason to see before that. She swallowed hard, squared her shoulders and went back to her computer.

  DS Mason had managed not to lose his temper yesterday when she had told him her decision, but only just. Today he looked completely self-possessed, upbeat, even, as he came into DI Fleming’s office. She suspected it was because he thought she had summoned him to put him back on duty; how, she wondered grimly, would he take the news not only of indefinite leave but the shortening of the odds on him in the suspect stakes? Well, she could only hit him with it and find out.

  ‘Sit down, Conrad. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news about your return to active duty.’

  She saw his brow darken but when he leaned forward in his chair it was to make a sweetly reasonable appeal. ‘Look, you must see that this is ridiculous. We’re badly under strength at the moment and here I am going stir-crazy sitting in someone’s front room. Of course I can see I couldn’t have anything to do with investigating my aunt’s murder, but—’

  ‘It seems that it probably isn’t your aunt. We’re working at the moment on the likelihood that the body is that of Diana Warwick who was, I understand, employed for a time at Chapelton some years ago.’

  Watching him closely, Fleming tried to read the flickers of reaction crossing his face. Shock, certainly, but that could be for all sorts of reasons. Alarm? Perhaps. Then he bowed his head, which could be emotion but could also be the calculation of an experienced interrogator who knew how easy it was for your expression to give you away.

  When he looked up his face was blank. ‘Diana Warwick,’ he said soberly. ‘Di. I remember her quite clearly – she had the sort of personality you wouldn’t forget. Oddly enough, her sister’s staying at the Glen Inn at the moment – did you know that?’

  ‘She identified a necklace found with the body as being her sister’s.’

  ‘I see. Yes.’ He wasn’t about to elaborate.

  Fleming glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. I’ll get someone to take a proper statement from you – everything you can remember, you know the form. And don’t decide to go and top up your sun-tan in the meantime.’

  She tried to deliver the prohibition lightly but he had no illusions as to its implication. ‘I’m a major suspect for this one, inevitably. A real suspect, not just a theoretical one.’ He looked up to meet her eyes squarely. ‘I didn’t do it, of course.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who would have had reason to?’

  ‘My mother!’ He gave a sharp crack of lau
ghter, then added hastily, ‘I didn’t mean that. It was a joke. It’s just she was the only one who famously didn’t get on with Di. To be honest, my mother doesn’t really get on well with anyone.’

  ‘Why Di particularly?’

  ‘Oh, mostly house stuff. Di was a decent enough cook but she wasn’t so hot on the cleaning side. My mother doesn’t like to lift a finger but she has high standards and a Victorian attitude to staff. Di would give as good as she got when Mother yelled at her, which was lèse-majesté or something. And then of course . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t want this to sound as if I’m boasting or anything, but Di did have a bit of a crush on me at the time and Mother’s always been very possessive.’

  Recognising false modesty, Fleming made a non-committal sound. He went on hastily, ‘But we’re not really talking a motive for murder here. Anyway, you’ve met my mother – can you see her out in a field in the dead of night digging a shallow grave?’

  Certainly, it conjured up an interesting picture. Fleming glanced again at her watch; she had to leave it there.

  As she went along the corridors to her meeting, she tried to sort out her immediate impressions.

  The news had undoubtedly shaken him, but that was to be expected. He had been almost immediately on his guard; again, any policeman would not be slow to understand what was at stake and she’d seen evidence before of a strong element of calculation in Conrad Mason’s make-up, except when he lost his temper.

  That stuff about his mother – what was that about? She’d asked him what he would certainly recognise as a very standard ‘whodunit’ question; had he reckoned that turning it aside with a preposterous suggestion was a good way of playing for time while you considered who you could most plausibly finger to further your own interests?

  Always supposing you were guilty, of course. Fleming found that she had no difficulty with that concept. But then, his cousin Max – there was something about him that rang wholly false too. This one could run and run.

  12

  Laura Harvey’s eyelids were thick and heavy, her nose was red and swollen and her eyes so sticky with tears that this time cold water had little effect. She had wept through the hours of darkness, as if the death of the sister she had still in her heart believed was alive had released grief for other deaths, insufficiently mourned: the death of her father, her mother, her marriage, her career. Her life.

  The police had talked about counselling, had suggested that the ineffectual young policewoman who had taken down Laura’s statement should stay with her, but she had refused both offers. She didn’t want professional hand-holding, although later, alone in her room when she’d managed to get rid of Max, she had tried to think of someone she could talk to who would not be embarrassed by her extreme distress. Her friends in London? New York? There wasn’t one who wouldn’t be bewildered, lacking the explanations she was too distraught to give. Since her marriage ended, she couldn’t think of a single person with whom she had shared her innermost thoughts and fears.

  You didn’t need a training in psychology to realise that it was unhealthy to have, among a host of pleasant acquaintances, not even one close friend, especially when you had no home or family. If she had been looking at her own case professionally, she would have concluded that the obsessive nature of her hunt for Dizzy had been less about finding the sister she hardly knew than about attempting to establish some focal point in the desolate emptiness of her life.

  It was a weary night. She found herself longing for dawn with the atavistic instinct which associates a lightening sky with a lightening of sorrow or pain, and drew back her curtains hopefully, but the winter sun rises late in Scotland. It was only just up when there was a tap on the door and Lisa Thomson appeared with a tea-tray.

  She looked at Laura’s ravaged face with sympathy but said only, ‘Here’s a wee cuppie for you. And you’d maybe like your breakfast up here? It’s not awful comfortable in the lounge anyway and there’s policemen all over the dining-room.’

  ‘You are kind! Tea’s just what I need, but I don’t want anything to eat, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll be needing your breakfast before the day’s over.’ It was an instruction, not a suggestion. ‘I’ve some nice morning baps the baker’s just delivered and there’s my mother’s home-made marmalade too.’

  Laura was touched. ‘You’ve enough to do without having to go up and down with trays. I’ll get something later—’

  ‘Och, it’s no bother. With them all needing snacks and coffees all the time I’ve been able to get Dawn up from the village to help, a real sensible lass, and I’m fine now.’ And indeed, she did look much better this morning, busying herself in pulling over a table to put the tray on. ‘You just enjoy your tea and she’ll be up with your breakfast in a wee while.’

  The kindness of strangers! Laura found her eyes filling again with weak tears but she blew her nose fiercely, determined not to lapse back into misery.

  After tea and a shower she felt much better. She would, as Lisa had pointed out, need all her strength for the day ahead and when she tasted the freshly baked rolls with pale farm butter and dark, bitter, chunky marmalade she found she was hungry after all.

  They had taken a DNA sample from her yesterday but clearly there was little doubt in their minds that the body so long interred was Dizzy. She mustn’t let herself dwell on the ghastly realities of that horror; how merciful that her mother had been spared it! How sad, though, that she couldn’t have known it wasn’t lack of love on her daughter’s part that had given rise to those cruel years of silence.

  Today Laura was to be collected to go into the police headquarters in Kirkluce, ‘just for a wee chat’ as the detective with the broad Scots accent had said, but for all he made it sound innocuous, she was worried about it.

  She was well aware that, while she had told them the truth in answer to their questions, it had been very far from being the whole truth. It had seemed at the time unnecessary, indeed distracting, to involve her whole family history.

  Max had been so certain! And might there have been an element of subconscious denial, too, because she so wanted Dizzy to be out there somewhere, alive? Or perhaps it was simpler than that: she had gone to bed late and exhausted, with her head full of Max’s problems.

  He had talked for hours about his dysfunctional family, about the difficulties there had been, about his father’s autocratic bullying. ‘She probably stood up to him for once and he lost it with her,’ Max had said. ‘The Mason temper. It’s a curse in our family.’

  And, from the way he spoke, a source of pride as well, which was most likely what perpetuated it. And certainly, the vast majority of women murdered were killed by their partner, often in a fit of uncontrollable rage.

  ‘How did you get on with your mother?’ she asked.

  As always, when she faced him with a direct question, she sensed withdrawal. Then he shrugged. ‘Hey, I was a teenager! But she loved me – I never had the faintest doubt about that.’

  It had interested Laura that he said, ‘she loved me’ not ‘I loved her’, which would have been the appropriate answer to the question asked. She didn’t miss the implication that she would never have left home and abandoned the son she loved.

  Women did, though, and now it looked as if this woman had. Which meant that in failing to tell the police about Dizzy Laura had withheld vital information. Was that an actual offence? She couldn’t remember and even if she had been able to, the laws here in Scotland were different. She felt distinctly uneasy.

  She hoped it wasn’t the woman inspector who wanted to see her today. She’d felt skewered by her uncomfortably shrewd gaze the last time; this time she was afraid she might be barbecued as well.

  There were sixteen e-mails Marjory Fleming hadn’t opened yet this morning and it was eleven o’clock. She’d had constant interruptions, phone calls, summonses to meetings, and she had the uncomfortable feeling of being strapped to a bolting horse.

  Last night she’d made a poin
t of going back to her parents’ house for supper to touch base with her children; she hadn’t seen them at all the previous day and she was still worried about Cammie. But when she went in, to her astonishment, she found her father with the GameBoy in his hands and Cammie sitting on the arm of his chair urging, ‘Go on, Grandpa, collect your ration pack now!’ When Marjory appeared, he barely took time to say, ‘Hi, Mum,’ and tell her that Cat was at hockey practice before he went back to his excited encouragement.

  Smiling and shaking her head, she went through to the kitchen where Janet was engaged in the intricacies of making a pastry rose for the top of the steak pie. ‘I see diplomatic relations have been re-established,’ Marjory said.

  ‘Och well, you know men,’ Janet said comfortably. ‘Often they’re just needing a wee excuse not to go on being daft.’

  ‘That’s pure domestic magic! How on earth did you do it?’

  She dimpled demurely. ‘Did you not know a magician’s never allowed to let on to anyone how the trick’s done?’

  So that was all right, then. Marjory’s phone call to Bill, though, had been brief and entirely unsatisfactory. There was really nothing she could do at the moment except keep phoning until he told her the farm had been cleared. Then she would simply move herself and the children back in, whatever he said, and start making some sort of pretence at normal life. As normal, anyway, as it could be, in the middle of this investigation.

  The result of the DNA tests was expected in the afternoon and after that she would have to give a statement to the media; so far, the discovery of the body had been an inside-page item, only a few lines in the tabloids, but this – a blonde, glamorous young woman missing for fifteen years and found in a shallow grave – would promote a feeding frenzy.

  Fleming was determined, though, to sit in on the interview with Laura Harvey, scheduled for half-past eleven. Her first impression of her had been of someone very cool, very controlled, calculating, even; surely someone like that would have worked out that another missing woman would have, at the very least, been of interest to the police? Tam was interviewing her along with DC Charlotte Nisbet; he was always reliable and she didn’t miss much – a quick-minded, able young woman with a can-do attitude and a good sense of humour, working already for her sergeant’s exams – but even so, if Harvey was holding out on them, her own formidable presence could make a significant difference. With a hunted glance at her watch she began popping open e-mails as if she was shelling peas.