Cold in the Earth
Page 19
‘I shouldn’t think she’ll want to be “your” friend, after this display. Most women have a preference for adults, not spoiled children who haven’t grown past the toddler tantrum stage. You’ll bear me out in that, Laura?’
‘You don’t know what he’s like, Laura. If you did, you’d tell him to sod off—’
It was almost funny. Almost, but not quite. Even when they were addressing Laura, they weren’t looking at her, confronting each other with their eyes locked like dogs sizing one another up for a fight. The threat of physical violence was thick in the air.
Defusing explosive situations had been all in a day’s work in the Women’s Refuge in New York; she’d never had to do it in her own sitting-room, though, and she would prefer not to have to do it now. With some resentment, Laura deployed her professional skills.
She stepped between them, breaking the locked gaze with her body so that no one had to lose face by yielding. ‘Let’s take this calmly, shall we?’ she said, her voice quiet but steely with authority. ‘This is my space and I don’t choose to have it used for “who blinks first” contests.’
It worked. She saw the rigidity of the men’s bodies relax at the same time and Conrad half-turned in a classic ‘de-escalation of threat’ movement. Max, being the physically weaker, was slower to abandon his defensive pose.
‘I’m sorry, Laura,’ Conrad said smoothly, meeting her eyes this time. ‘I should have known better.’
The faint, mocking emphasis on the word was deliberately provocative and Max was provoked. ‘That’s so like him, Laura, the apology that isn’t—’
It was unbelievable. They were kids who hadn’t left the nursery; they didn’t need a psychotherapist’s skills, they needed Nanny.
‘Be quiet, both of you,’ Laura snapped. ‘Go and sit down and neither of you say another word. It’s my turn now.’ And no kicking each other under the table or I fetch the hairbrush, she was tempted to add. They sat down, looking sheepish.
‘You’re both suffering from arrested development. You come in here and behave as if I was some toy you were squabbling over. I shouldn’t have to spell it out for you that I’m not a thing for someone to possess. I’m a person. I decide. I choose. And at the moment I choose neither of you.’
She had expected them to be chastened; she didn’t expect them to be shocked. Max had turned pale and Conrad’s face was slack with astonishment as they stared at her.
‘What’s wrong? What did I say?’
‘How – how did you know?’ Max stammered but Conrad was quicker to regain his composure.
‘You said what she said. In almost so many words.’
Shaken in her turn, Laura sat down heavily on a dining-chair. ‘Why? Why should she say that?’
The men exchanged glances, almost conspiratorially, as if they found themselves however unwillingly on the same side. It was Conrad who said at last, ‘It got a bit torrid, when Di was around. She sort of played us off against each other so we didn’t know where we were. If she’d preferred one it would have been better, but she didn’t. Or if she did she didn’t tell us. We were all round the table during the morning break – me, Max, Jake and Scott Thomson – and somehow it all blew up out of nothing.’
‘You said—’ Max interrupted, but Conrad silenced him with a look.
‘Whatever. Anyway, she exploded. Set about us all, gave us our characters and then at the end said just what you did.’
‘I hate to agree with him but it’s true,’ Max said. ‘That was the problem.’
Laura seldom lost her temper but she lost it now, seized with a protective fury for a twenty-year-old put in a position like that. ‘And you felt she was obliged to choose one of you? What did you think you had – a sort of collective droit de seigneur? Didn’t it occur to your fat, swollen heads that she didn’t want any of you – that your attitudes made you totally repellent?
‘Or did it occur to you? Did it so affect one of you that you had to go out and kill her as punishment?’
She found she was crying again. ‘Get out, both of you.’ She snatched up the mobile phone which was lying on the table by her laptop and stood up. ‘For some reason, I don’t feel particularly safe in your company. If you don’t leave now, I’m going to call for police protection.’
They rose too, Conrad putting his hands up in a placatory gesture. ‘Of course we’ll go. But may I say one thing? It’s not like that. I was just going to tell you before Max came. I don’t know if they’ve talked to him about it, but they’ve discovered something that could explain it all.’
Max nodded fervently. ‘That’s right. The bull. Let Conrad tell you about it, Laura.’
She was still clutching her phone. ‘All right. Briefly.’
‘The path lab report says she was gored by a bull. She wasn’t afraid of them – probably wasn’t scared enough – and my guess is she tried bull-running with Satan, our champion bull. Very vicious, very cunning, could turn like a polo pony. So he killed her, OK? Then my uncle found her. He’s never been balanced about that animal; he’d have had to have Satan slaughtered if this got out. He couldn’t do anything for Di; she was beyond help and she’d always said she had no family so he took a huge gamble and buried her. If it hadn’t been for the foot-and-mouth, it would have paid off.’
It was so unexpected that Laura was having difficulty taking it in. Max was backing him up now. ‘It all figures, Laura – I can see it happening.’
‘And this – this is the official position?’
‘Oh, who knows?’ Conrad’s bitterness surfaced again. ‘Big Marge Fleming has it in for me and at the moment she’s just enjoying watching me twisting in the wind. But she’ll have to accept it eventually – it’s just so bloody obvious.’
‘It’s exactly the sort of thing the Minotaur would do,’ Max urged. ‘Bull worship, with everything including your own family sacrificed on the altar. Nothing else ever mattered.
‘Well, it’s all going to be so-o-o different in the future. Farm prices may be depressed at the moment, but they’ll pick up before long. When I sell it – sorry, Conrad, when I sell my half—’
‘What?’ It was a bull’s bellow. ‘You can’t do that, you slimy little sod.’
‘Oh, I think you’ll find I can. If the Minotaur would just be obliging enough to give up the unequal struggle—’
‘Bastard!’
Laura had her hands over her ears. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Get out, now, and have your puerile family squabbles elsewhere. Go and kill each other, if you like. Just don’t do it here.’
Shaking with fury, she went to the door and held it open. Max shrugged and left. Conrad, as he passed her, paused. ‘Laura—’
‘No!’
She shut the door behind them, locked it and secured it with bolts top and bottom, then drew its red gingham curtain across. She went round the room, shutting out the night and the men who had so disturbed her hard-won peace.
Could what they had said possibly be true? From what she knew of Dizzy, it was far from impossible, and there was some comfort in thinking of her death as an accident rather than the result of a deliberately evil act. Laura knew, too, about obsession, knew how it could distort someone’s judgement and even perception of reality.
On the other hand, the sick scenario which had emerged this evening was precisely the breeding ground for the heightened emotions which could lead to murder. And it was a volatile family situation; she’d seen that just now with her own eyes.
It was suiting them very well too that the person to be blamed was unable to speak and was soon, judging from what Max had said, likely to die and take the secret of his actions with him to the grave.
If they were his actions. Even if it was true that Dizzy’s killer was now dead, waiting for disposal in a heap of all the other carcasses, who was to say who it was who had buried her?
Suddenly, she remembered the first row between the cousins, in the bar the night she had arrived. Max had been perfectly calm about the proposal to d
ig up the field where they had found her sister’s body. It had been Conrad who was so violently opposed to it. She shuddered.
The sound of their voices outside had stopped and a moment later she heard the car engines starting up. Then silence shrouded the house once more.
Marjory Fleming set the phone down with a sigh. Bill had been monosyllabic, brusque almost to the point of rudeness, and unspecific about when the farm might be declared free of infection. His voice was flat and listless, almost unrecognisable as belonging to the man she loved.
When she had mentioned her fears about suicide to Superintendent Bailey at the start of all this he had been dismissive and she had accepted his point – that Bill wasn’t selfish enough to do that to her and the children. But Bailey had been talking about the Bill he knew, not this man with the toneless voice and the reluctance to communicate.
She had been worried enough to phone Hamish Raeburn, at a neighbouring farm which had so far escaped the slaughter, to ask him to get in touch with Bill to see if he was all right. She had a cool reception; he phoned Bill regularly, he told her, and had met him at their mutual boundary on the day of the slaughter. Yes, he was depressed. They were all depressed. Only an idiot would expect anyone not to be at a time like this.
It was a brief conversation and perhaps she was being paranoid in thinking he had substituted ‘idiot’ for ‘policewoman’ for the sake of courtesy. Still, there was nothing she could do about it until she got back to the farm, and that, please God, would be soon.
She had enough to think about without that. Bailey was away at a meeting today and she wasn’t sorry to have the chance to sleep on Conrad’s theory before she presented it to him. There was little doubt in her mind that the Super would seize on such a neat, swift, cheap outcome; all it would take was a carefully worded statement to the Press and the heat would be off. The file wouldn’t be closed but it would be NFE’d, with orders to keep a watching brief rather than to pursue enquiries further.
Unless another body turned up. The diggers had managed to make a serious mess of most of the field without result; there was still one corner remaining which they would tackle tomorrow. And what were they to do after that – dig up the whole farm?
If Rosamond Mason wasn’t two feet under, where was she? The appeal had gone out for her to get in touch and there had been a photograph in the national newspapers. It wasn’t a very good one, unfortunately; she’d be sixteen years older too, and a woman could change a lot in her middle years, so perhaps it wasn’t sinister that as yet no one had come forward.
Then there was Jake Mason, accused and unable to defend himself. She made up her mind to go to the hospital tomorrow to see him for herself. It was looking as if the police would end up being judge and jury on his case and it was hardly fair that he should be condemned unseen as well as unheard.
Her appointment with Bailey was at eleven; she could drive over to Dumfries in the afternoon. She was phoning to have her diary cleared when Tam MacNee came into the room.
‘We’ve just been told they’ve given the all-clear for Chapelton,’ he said when she put the phone down. ‘The Masons will be able to get back in whenever they want.’
Fleming made a quick decision. ‘Slap an embargo on the information until tomorrow. And get someone to swear out a search warrant for the house. I’d like to go up there myself and try to get a feel for the place without Mrs Mason throwing hysterical fits at me like missiles.’
MacNee grinned. ‘She’s a piece of work, that one. Young Charlotte’s got her knickers in a twist, says you’ll be getting a complaint about police brutality because she asked her if she’d had a row with Diana Warwick. She says the woman’s either aff her heid or as sleekit as they come and has the whole thing worked out. If you’re looking for someone who would have done the girl in before breakfast and still had a good appetite for her porridge, she’s your woman.’
‘She’s not really going to lodge a complaint, is she?’ Fleming was always one to go straight to the essentials. ‘That would be all I need.’
MacNee shook his head. ‘I phoned Conrad. He’ll talk her down.’
‘You spoke to him, did you? Did he expound his theory?’
‘Aye, did he! Wouldn’t let me off the phone till he’d bent my ear for ten minutes.’
‘What did you make of it?’
MacNee considered his response. ‘You can kind of see it, in a way. I mean, the man would have to be daft to do it, but there’s no evidence that says he wasn’t. It’s just a wee bitty convenient, though, to my way of thinking.’
That was exactly what had struck Fleming too, but playing devil’s advocate she said, ‘You have to say it fits the facts very neatly.’
MacNee sniffed. ‘That’s what I don’t like about it. We both know things like this aren’t neat, they’re messy. Real messy, when you end up with someone dead.’
Abandoning her brief attempt at impartiality, Fleming agreed. ‘Conrad was so keen I should accept it, it turned me thrawn and I just dug in my toes. Not that it’s unnatural: if a salmon could speak it would ask you to let it off the hook too.’
‘His wee cousin was pretty taken with the idea as well. Now he’s one that wants watching. Clever beggar – put me right off at the start of the interview with that sort of smarmy, toffee-nosed stuff that gets any honest Glaswegian’s dander up. Then he throws an emotional wobbly when I mention his mother.’
Fleming was interested. ‘There’s something there, you know. He insisted it was his mother’s body we’d found but he seemed quite detached in the morning, helping to calm Brett down, then in the afternoon when Laura appeared he went into complete collapse.’
‘She’d probably be able to give you a list of psychological reasons for that, all with fancy names. It’s probably a syndrome. It always is, these days.’
Marjory gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Oh aye? You know my opinion of psychology.
‘But tomorrow I have to report to Bailey. Guess what his reaction’s going to be to a conclusion that would mean the whole operation could be stood down within days. And maybe it’s right enough. We’ve no hard evidence that it isn’t.’
‘There’s just one thing,’ MacNee said slowly. ‘One of the questions I asked was where the cattle would be at the time. Obviously, if they were penned you’d have to be a maniac to get yourself gored. Now Max said they’d be out in the fields but then I was dumb enough to let him know the context before I asked the question.
‘So I spoke to Scott Thomson after – though mind you, he was pretty edgy about it too – and he said he’d instructions to bring them in if it went below freezing. If we can fix the date, we could check with the Met Office.’
‘We’ve got that somewhere.’ Fleming turned to her computer. ‘There was someone they talked to in the village. She remembered Brett Mason phoning to say she needed her help in the house because the housekeeper had walked out at the weekend. The reason she remembers is because it was the day of her mother’s funeral and all Brett said was could she come in the afternoon, then?’
‘That sounds like our Brett.’
‘Yes, here it is. January twenty-ninth was the funeral so the weekend would have been the twenty-sixth/twenty-seventh.’
‘There’d be a lot of Burns Suppers that night,’ MacNee said fondly, ‘with it being so near Rabbie’s birthday.’
‘Tam!’ Fleming jingled a box on her desk threateningly. It had a pound, a 50p and a 5p in it already.
‘No, no!’ He hastily constructed a cover-up. ‘It’s just you might find someone had an alibi, if he was a keen Burns man.’
‘It would hardly alibi him for the whole weekend, would it, unless he was so drunk as to be incapacitated. And don’t get carried away with the notion that anyone who likes Burns can’t be a villain. The man was a ratbag – his own mother was ashamed of him.’
MacNee rose with dignity. ‘I shall not stay to hear his memory abused. I’ll put the warrant in hand and check up on the weather.’
The cloud base had come down to ground level so that the rain was no longer falling but hanging in the air in tiny droplets which clung to clothes and skin and made breathing like inhaling cold steam. The sodium lights in the hospital car park were fuzzy orange shapes in the grey murk and the windows of the hospital were pale yellow shapes in the dark bulk of the building, its edges blurred by the smoky swirls of vapour.
The woman got out of her car, a Vauxhall Corsa, locked it and set off towards the main entrance with unhurried steps which belied the nervous pounding of her heart. She was bareheaded and within a few steps her blonde hair was covered with a fine, damp film.
She had no idea what might be waiting for her inside, no idea what forces her return might unleash. She wanted to see him alone first, see him without having to explain to anyone who she was or why she was here – wanted, above all, to see him without Brett, his incubus, at his side. How different everything might have been for them if Brett hadn’t fled back home from the ruins of her marriage and set about ruining theirs!
She still loved him. She always had. It wasn’t a choice she had made; indeed, how often she had wished that it was! Real love is not conditional, she had said to him once, love is a condition from which there is no recovery. That was in the happy days when they still talked romantically together, before events, like wedges driven in with hammer blows, split them apart.
The hospital doors swung open as she approached and she stepped inside, blinking at the brilliance of the interior after the darkness outside. She paused, brushing moisture off her hair and blinking away the droplets clinging to her eyelashes. A man, on his way out, smiled. ‘Terrible night out there, isn’t it?’ She smiled back, an unobtrusive figure in her Burberry raincoat.
There was no general board to give her information, as she had hoped there might be. She was forced to invent a friend who was a stroke patient, so that the receptionist would tell her which ward he might be in, before discovering he wasn’t and suggesting he must have been discharged. Then she hung about looking at the WRI shop, now closed, until the receptionist was busy with another query and would not see her going into instead of out of the building.