Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  This was ridiculous. She was allowing the atmosphere of the place to cloud her judgement. And that was the first flake of snow; the sooner she got out the better.

  She went back, as she thought, the way she had come, but yet again found herself trapped by thick privet. She really had no time to waste; she decided to force her way through, fairly sure that on the other side was the blind alley she had come along before which would lead her to the gate. It wasn’t easy; the branches were springy and put up brutal resistance; she had scratches on her hands by the time she reached the other side of the hedge. Stepping out of it, she felt a twig snatch at the fabric of her trousers and with some irritation stopped to release herself.

  Bending down, she saw in the heart of the hedge, near the bottom, a small piece of fine chain hanging on a twig. It was black with dirt but when, out of curiosity, she picked it up and rubbed it in her fingers it showed gold. It had a tiny gold charm and a catch but that was still closed; the fragile chain had snapped in the middle. Perhaps it was a bracelet which had caught on a twig, like her trousers, and the owner hadn’t noticed at the time. It didn’t look particularly valuable anyway.

  She was turning away when she remembered suddenly a snatch of the conversation with Laura Harvey: she’d said something about an ankle bracelet her sister had always worn. Fleming fished it out of the hedge and looked at it again.

  Yes, it could well be an ankle bracelet. She’d never had one herself – had always thought they were a bit trashy – but wrist bracelets weren’t usually as delicate as this. And the minute charm, now she looked at it closely, was in the shape of a dolphin. She turned back, frowning, to look at where it had been. If Diana Warwick had been wandering round in the maze, she’d better check it out more thoroughly.

  The slender chain had certainly been there for a long time; the hedge had grown out and round it. And now she noticed too that above, caught in the centre of the hedge, was a small piece of rag, blackened and frayed. Probably a trivial record of some earlier visitor and entirely irrelevant, but given the bracelet, it would be worth following the principle that everything is evidence until you’ve proved it isn’t. She teased it out carefully and folded it in a tissue before putting it, with the broken chain, into her pocket.

  The flakes were getting bigger now and it was nearly twenty to eleven. The maze really needed more thorough checking but she couldn’t spare the time; she’d be lucky even now not to find that she was seriously late for her appointment with the Super.

  Shaken but mercifully unhurt, Laura climbed out of her car into the steadily falling snow and went round to look at the damage.

  Her heart had been in her mouth all the way along the tiny road from Burnside Cottages to where it joined the Glenluce road. It had been like driving on wet glass; she had no experience of conditions like this and she had lost count of the number of times the car had waltzed into the verge so that she had to reverse it out again.

  Staying at home would have been wiser, of course, but Neil MacSporran, the kindly local editor, had arranged two useful interviews for her in Kirkluce and anyway she’d finished Mrs MacNab’s scones and there wasn’t a lot more food in the house.

  She’d thought the Glenluce road would have been gritted so she turned on to it with some relief, only to discover that it wasn’t. A few yards further on, the road went round a corner; the car didn’t, opting instead for the embrace of a ditch and an intimate encounter with a stone wall.

  It was her mother’s old VW Beetle and its nose, once proudly aquiline, was now distinctly retroussé. It wasn’t going anywhere. Dismayed, she looked round about her helplessly. She had her mobile in the car, of course, but what use was that when she didn’t know a number to ring?

  There was an unearthly hush, the thickly falling snow muffling all sound, and there was nothing to be seen but the huge downy flakes against a purple-grey background. The village of Glenluce was, she guessed, probably a mile uphill, the main road two downhill. Should she head in one direction or the other, or simply get back into the car and hope for rescue before it became a snowdrift?

  She glanced down ruefully at her neat fashion boots and her black town raincoat. Flakes were settling on her hair and her clothes and her eyelashes, so thickly that she could hardly see. After only a couple of minutes she was looking like a snowman.

  That settled it. She climbed back into the car, brushing off the worst of it, then ran the heater to warm her icy hands and feet. Only for a few minutes, though, then she reluctantly turned it off to conserve the battery. She had no way of knowing how long it might be before the snow went off or help came.

  In fact, it was barely quarter of an hour later – though a cold, frightening quarter of an hour, watching drifts build around the car – that she saw the headlights coming up the hill towards her. From the outline of the vehicle she guessed it was a big 4x4; after a struggle with the piled-up snow she managed to open the car door and climbed out.

  Her heart sank when she saw the Range Rover’s driver. She had vowed last night to have nothing more to do with any of the Mason clan but it was Conrad who jumped down, exclaiming at her plight.

  Principles were principles but snow was snow. Gratefully she climbed into the snug interior, her teeth chattering, and made only a token protest when he turned at the road-end and headed back the way he had come. She even endured his lecture about appropriate preparations for a journey in adverse weather conditions which included proper clothing and footwear, a spade, blankets and preferably a flask of tea.

  ‘D-don’t suppose you practise what you preach?’ she chittered when he mentioned tea.

  He grinned. ‘Spade, blankets, yes. Thermos, no, but if you look in the glove-compartment you’ll find a hip-flask.’

  Scotland’s national drink had never been a favourite with Laura but she was forced to admit that it was the perfect antidote to the rigours of the Scottish winter climate.

  Conrad laughed. ‘It’s like dock leaves for nettle stings – the local remedy is the most effective.’

  He had, he told her, been on his way to Chapelton, having just been told they could return at last. As luck would have it, the Range Rover belonging to the farm had been in Kirkluce for an MOT which had tempted him to try the journey despite the forecast, but with the worsening conditions he’d been thinking of turning back anyway. He promised to use his influence at the garage to get Laura’s car priority treatment and didn’t mention the scene of the day before, nor the murder investigation. In return she told him about her interviews and her need to lay in supplies, and conversation flowed easily; he was, as she had found him before, good company, pleasant and amusing.

  The mechanic at the garage, while ready to be helpful, could only promise that once the snow stopped he’d try to get up to bring her car in before the snowplough came through and buried it – a horror that had not even occurred to her.

  As they left, Conrad asked, ‘How are you planning to get home?’

  She’d wondered that too, but anxious to assert her independence said airily, ‘Oh – taxi, probably.’

  He looked down at her with some amusement. ‘You just don’t get it about the weather in the country, do you? You’re not going to get a car along that road for another couple of days, if then. Depends what else the snowploughs have to do – keeping the main road clear is the priority and us hicks from the sticks just have to wait our turn.

  ‘I tell you what – you go and see the people you need to see and make sure you’ve got enough food for the next few days, then meet me for lunch in the Galloway Arms. The snow should have stopped by then. It’s getting lighter already and I wouldn’t mind having a shot at getting up to Chapelton later, so I can drop you off.’

  What could she do but agree? And, if she were truthful with herself, she didn’t particularly want to refuse.

  Marjory Fleming knew she shouldn’t have been late. As she looked at her superior officer, at the pursed lips and the folded hands and the thumbs tapping on his comfor
tably rounded stomach, she could tell that he wasn’t going to be receptive to the note of caution she was sounding.

  She had known he would be tempted, naturally. What senior officer, under constant budgetary scrutiny and restraint, wouldn’t jump at a solution to a murder case which would mean wrapping it up in under a week, with no more expensive investigation and not even the administrative nightmare of assembling a watertight case to present to the Procurator Fiscal?

  Bailey would have forgiven her lateness, if she’d been presenting this as an undisputed solution. And if she hadn’t been late, he might have been prepared to listen to what she had to say about the uncertainties: the question mark over the bull’s actual whereabouts, the lack of proof that if it was an accident it was Jake Mason who had buried the body. He might even, in an indulgent mood, have allowed her to elaborate on the gut feeling she and Tam MacNee shared that it was all just too bloody convenient.

  But she’d committed the double crime of keeping him waiting – which suggested she thought her time more important than his – and voicing unwelcome doubts. So now he was saying, ‘Oh, come now, Marjory! You can pick holes in anything if you try hard enough. Can you ever remember a case coming to court where the defence agent couldn’t find something to cavil at? It’s how they make their living – if we ever put up a completely watertight case they’d be outside the station picketing!’

  He laughed, inviting her to laugh with him. It was another black mark that she didn’t, saying only, ‘Couldn’t we hold it for another couple of days? It wouldn’t do for it to look as if we’d just picked on a defenceless man. The tabloids could have a field day with that.’

  It was the right button to press. His smile vanished. ‘You’re absolutely right, Marjory. We have to consider the presentational aspect of this very carefully indeed. Well done. But make it twenty-four hours. Money is simply haemorrhaging away and there’s a limit to what we can spend for the sake of PR.’

  ‘Thanks, Donald.’ She got up. ‘I’m going to the hospital in Dumfries this afternoon to see Jake Mason. Not that I’ll get anything useful – by all accounts he’s in a bad way.’

  Bailey nodded. ‘Good thinking, Marjory. Wouldn’t do for them to pick up that the SIO hadn’t even been to see the man.’

  He rose as usual and went to open the door for her. ‘You know, Marjory, it would be quite a feather in your cap to get this wrapped up now. You’d be flavour of the month with the Chief Constable and that’s no small thing!’

  ‘Thanks, Donald.’

  Why was it, as she walked back to her office, that she remembered something from the Bible, something about Satan, a high mountain and all the kingdoms of the world being offered for only some minor compromise of principle?

  And indeed, what did they have, to set against Conrad’s theory? Tam’s investigation into where the bull had been at the time of the murder. Max’s equivocation. Scott Thomson’s ‘edginess’. Brett Mason’s fevered reaction to questioning. Oh, and a chain which, even if it proved to be Diana Warwick’s, only told you she’d been in the maze once and a scrap of fabric which probably wasn’t evidence at all.

  In twenty-four hours they would be putting out a Press statement accusing in veiled terms a man who could not say a word in his own defence, on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony given by the two people who arguably had most to gain from this informal conviction. The thought made her acutely uncomfortable.

  Sure, further investigation would be expensive, but she’d never heard a definition of justice which featured the words ‘financial expediency’ and she wouldn’t be in the police force if she didn’t believe that justice was what it was all about. She owed it to the accused man to pursue every possible line of enquiry until she was directly instructed to drop the case. It looked as if that would only be twenty-four hours.

  Back in her office, she arranged for a courier to come and pick up the material to take to the path lab in Glasgow, emphasising that this was a priority request, out of – what? A sense of duty? Sheer bloody-mindedness? She wasn’t sure, but she only hoped Donald Bailey’s notorious allergy to balance sheets would mean he never found out about such wanton extravagance.

  She jumped guiltily, though, when the phone on her desk buzzed and it was her boss at the other end. Trying not to sound nervous she said, ‘Yes, Donald?’

  ‘Marjory, I forgot to check with you. Are you back at the farm as of now? I gather Bill got clearance yesterday.’

  She had never understood the expression ‘pierced to the heart’ before; she understood it now. It was only pride which gave her the strength to say lightly, ‘Oh, I’ll have to prise my kids out of my parents’ clutches first! I’ll let you know.’

  She set down the phone and bent over, her arms crossed about her body to contain the pain.

  16

  Her emotions still in turmoil, Marjory called in at the Lairds’ house on the way to Dumfries to tell them that she and the children were able to return home. Perhaps, if her mother had been alone, she might have confided her troubles, but her parents were together in the lounge, her mother darning socks – who but Janet darned socks nowadays? – and her father engrossed in Cammie’s GameBoy.

  He glanced up as Marjory came in, grunted, then went back to it. The sound effects were even more intrusive than his eternal TV had been, though Janet appeared oblivious. Marjory’s news, however, brought his head up. He stopped playing; there was the noise of an explosion, a dying shriek, then merciful silence.

  ‘That’s good news, dear. I’m sure you’ve been wearying for home, and Bill will have missed you all.’ Janet’s tone was dutifully bright but she couldn’t conceal her disappointment.

  Angus said gruffly, ‘Oh, you’ll please yourself, I’ve no doubt. You always have. But if you think it’s a good idea to take bairns like that out into the country with the weather like this, you’re needing your head looked at. Next thing you know they’ll be snowed in and Cammie’ll miss his rugby practice and get left out of the team. It’ll break his heart.’

  Marjory had to stifle a smile. ‘We’ll want them back eventually, you know, Dad.’

  He glared at her. ‘As I understand it, I was doing you a favour, having them here. But if you’re suggesting the boot’s on the other foot, you can take them whenever you like – I’ll be glad of the peace and quiet.’

  She had meant it as a pleasantry; he had taken it as a gibe. The last thing she needed just now was a confrontation, but—

  ‘Och, we’ve plenty time for peace and quiet when this bad weather’s over,’ Janet said placidly. ‘You said yourself, Angus, it’d be daft to take them away out yonder when it’s so uncertain. And anyway, I expect Marjory and Bill would quite like a wee bit time to themselves, wouldn’t you, dearie?’

  Perhaps they would. Perhaps, indeed, it would be wise to give herself time to cobble their marriage together again before exposing the children to the harsh destruction of their way of life. Perhaps, too, she should be mature enough to show her genuine gratitude – what would she have done without their support? – by letting Angus keep his pride.

  ‘If you’re sure that would be all right? I know it’s meant a lot of disruption to your routine but it’s been brilliant for the kids. Cammie told me you’re seriously cool at computer games, Dad.’

  His pleasure showed, though he only said repressively, ‘I’m supposed to think that’s a compliment, am I?’

  Marjory and her mother exchanged smiles. ‘That’s settled, then,’ Janet said comfortably and went back to her darning while her daughter went upstairs to pack.

  Funny, really, that she had never noticed before how regularly her softly-spoken mother achieved precisely what she wanted, leaving everyone else believing their argument had prevailed. Angus had always seemed to his daughter the dominant partner in the marriage, but living at home now as an adult she had seen how seldom his moods and tantrums – so often self-destructive – had any effect. And perhaps there was collusion there: like the dog on the chai
n who snarls and barks threats, secure in the knowledge that it will be restrained, Angus could rely on his wife to stop him going too far.

  Marjorie grimaced ruefully. It was a bit late now to ask her mother for a crash course in how to handle a difficult husband. She’d never had one before; she’d just have to learn on the job.

  The Galloway Arms was a cosy, old-fashioned hotel with tables covered with starched white cloths and a fire burning in the hearth. Its menu was old-fashioned too, featuring such homely fare as lentil soup, Scotch broth and shepherd’s pie, though it was none the worse for that; as Conrad said, it wasn’t really the weather for rocket salad, and laughing, Laura agreed.

  Outside the sun had struggled through and a deep covering of sparkling snow had transformed shrubs and bushes into exotic sculptures and embellished every flat surface with a glittering layer of white candy-floss. It gave an air of unreality to everything, making Laura feel somehow that this moment of time was frozen too, dissociated from both past and future.

  They talked as normal acquaintances do, of likes and dislikes, books, films, interests. Not, however, about family, background or the tragedy which was in both their minds – Laura couldn’t help but notice how gracefully they skated round that. The elephant on the table, in psychological jargon: a huge, major issue which by unspoken mutual consent was ignored completely.

  But, she told herself firmly, all that was on the table at the moment was shepherd’s pie – and very good it was too. She was actually enjoying herself.

  The snow had stopped for the moment at least so there would be no problem, Conrad assured her, about his delivering her back to Burnside Cottages. At the garage, the good news had been that they’d recovered her car, the bad news that it would take two or three days to get it back on the road. Still, she had stocked up with food, drink and reading materials and was looking forward to getting back for a cosy evening with the red curtains drawn, the lamps lit, a glass of wine and perhaps even some pleasantly mindless TV. It was just what she needed – peace and space and time to recover from the bone-deep weariness she still felt from the constant strain of grieving. Even so, she was almost regretful when it was time to go; lunch with Conrad had been surprisingly relaxing.