Lying Dead

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Then I’ll need to—’ Fleming broke off as she pushed open the door and went into the entrance hall. Her heart sank. There, in the reception area, was Susie Stevenson and with her a small child – her son presumably. Fleming knew there was a seven-year-old called Josh; she’d spent the morning cleaning the cottage and hanging Cammie’s discarded Superman curtains in the second bedroom. But this was hardly the place for a child! The Stevensons had been staying with Susie’s parents – surely one of them would have been prepared to babysit?

  Fleming turned to Tam. ‘I’ll have to speak to her. You go on and set the wheels in motion.’

  She walked towards them but before she could get there they stood up and she saw Susie murmur something to the boy and urge him forward.

  Josh was a particularly angelic-looking child, with his mother’s curly fair hair and his father’s dark eyes. He was white with tiredness and strain and his eyes widened with alarm as he looked up at Fleming’s tall figure. He glanced nervously back at his mother, who nodded encouragement.

  He bit his lip. ‘Please – please will you let me have my daddy back home?’

  It was obvious that he had been coached to say this. Fleming felt cold with dismay. She looked across the boy’s head at his mother.

  ‘Susie, what is this?’

  Susie came to stand beside Josh and put her arm round his shoulders. She was a bit above medium height, fair-haired and sharp-featured with a discontented mouth; tonight her eyes were swollen and she was very pale.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t listen to me if I asked you to use your influence. But I thought you might take pity on a little boy who only wants his daddy.’

  Josh’s chin began to wobble. Without replying to Susie, Fleming bent down to his level, signalling at the same time to the duty officer behind the desk. Mercifully it was PC Bruce tonight, the mother of young children herself.

  ‘Don’t worry, Josh,’ Fleming said as reassuringly as she could. ‘I’m just going to have a little talk with your mum and see what’s been happening, and this lady here’s going to find you some juice and a biscuit.’

  ‘No problem,’ Bruce said cheerfully. ‘Come on, pet – we’ll away over to the desk and you can help me phone the canteen. What kind of juice do you like?’ She held out her hand and Josh, with another anxious glance at his mother, allowed himself to be led away to the other side of the hall.

  Fleming turned to Susie. ‘Let’s sit down, shall we?’ Her voice was taut with anger. ‘I don’t think it was very kind to put Josh through that, do you? I know nothing about this, beyond the fact that I happened to see Findlay being taken into custody as I left the trials. What was it – a fight?’

  Susie nodded sullenly.

  ‘Then it will be nothing to do with me. Someone else will be dealing with it and will make any decisions necessary. It won’t even cross my desk.’

  ‘But you’re the boss, you could order them—’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’ It really cost her to sound calm and reasonable. ‘That’s what is known as perverting the course of justice and it’s a criminal offence.’

  Susie looked at her with loathing. ‘Oh, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Getting your own back . . . But I would have thought even you would want to spare poor little Josh!’

  She wailed the last words and Josh came running back to put his arms round her and looked up at Fleming accusingly. PC Bruce came hurrying across.

  ‘Do you want me to take over, ma’am? I know you’ve a lot to deal with—’

  Fleming managed to smile. ‘Thanks. In a minute.’ She turned back to the Stevensons. ‘The only thing I can do is find out what Findlay’s situation is at present. Who was dealing with it, constable?’

  Armed with the information, she made a call from the desk, listened with some relief to what she was told, then came back to speak to the child.

  ‘Well, Josh, I’m happy to tell you Daddy’s fine and he’ll be back in a minute.’ Josh’s woebegone face brightened, and Susie managed to find a smile.

  ‘You see, Josh? I told you – and now say thank you to Mrs Fleming. And I suppose I have to say thank you, too, for arranging that.’ Her expression was more indicative of satisfaction than gratitude.

  ‘No, Susie, I didn’t arrange anything,’ Fleming said, calling on her dwindling reserves of superhuman patience. ‘It just so happened that when I phoned he’d been charged and was about to be released on an undertaking to appear in court.’

  ‘Charged?’ Susie’s face changed. ‘You mean – but it wasn’t his fault! That awful man pushed him beyond the limits! Surely you could have—’

  Fleming had had enough. More than enough. ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said flatly. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a murder to investigate.’

  She walked away briskly. She’d wasted too much time on this already and if Susie wanted to make things difficult for herself, it was her privilege. By the time Fleming reached the major incident room, the problems of the Stevenson family were far from her mind.

  Adrian McConnell stood at the back of the narrow hall of their cottage, a small, slight man whose most distinctive feature was his dark-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a fixed smile and his physical detachment emphasized his distaste for the spectacle of his wife, strapless sequined top only just decent, draped round their male guest’s neck and fluttering her heavily mascaraed eyelashes at him as she said goodnight at the front door. She was oblivious both to the killer looks she was getting from the man’s wife and to the fact that her mascara had run into streaks all round her eyes.

  Kim making a fool of herself was nothing new. ‘Give her a drink and she’s anyone’s,’ he would say mockingly, without really believing it. He always comforted himself with the thought that if she was doing it in front of him, she wasn’t doing it behind his back.

  Adrian needed to believe that. He couldn’t bear humiliation, his sensitivity a legacy from schooldays when he’d been a weedy little four-eyes, useless at football and with an unhealthy interest in studying, the butt of every oaf in the class. He’d had the last laugh, of course: who was on the dole with a drug habit, and who was a partner in a big accountancy firm, rich and successful, with two houses, a Mercedes and a Discovery for the wife and kids? And soon, if nothing went wrong, perhaps even a seat in Parliament. He’d paid his dues to the Labour Party – enough to buy a grin and a handshake from Tony Blair himself – and only a selection panel of people he’d been cultivating for years stood between him and a safe seat.

  Kim released her victim at last, waved her guests down the steps leading to the road, then came back in a little unsteadily and shut the door.

  ‘God, I’m exhausted!’ She slumped against the wall. ‘I don’t think I can face the clearing-up.’

  ‘You’re not exhausted, you’re drunk,’ Adrian said coldly. ‘And if you don’t do it tonight, it will still be there in the morning, and I should think with the hangover you’re going to have, you’ll feel even less like it then.’

  ‘So?’ she pouted. ‘Come to bed, pet. Jusht – just leave it. Kimmie wants a cuddle.’ She undulated towards him.

  He wasn’t in the mood. All he could feel at this moment was revulsion and his response was cruel. There was a big brass porthole mirror on the wall, in keeping with the nautical decor Kim had chosen, and he took her bare shoulders and swung her round to face it. ‘Look at yourself. How do you imagine anyone could fancy that?’

  Kim screwed up her eyes, blinking blearily at her reflection, then, as it came into focus, screamed in dismay.

  ‘Jeez! I look hellish! Why – why couldn’t you have t-told me?’ she hiccupped, starting to cry. ‘You’re such a sod! That bitch will be laughing at me all the way home.’ Her maudlin tears were making pale tracks in her bronzing make-up and puddling the streaks of mascara as she tried ineffectually to wipe them away.

  He really couldn’t take one of Kim’s dramas. ‘Just go to bed,’ Adrian said wearily. ‘Sleep it off. I’ll put what I can in the d
ishwasher.’

  Still sobbing, though he would bet that she no longer knew why, she started to climb the steep wooden staircase, hauling herself up on the white rope looped through brass fixings on the wall. He could hear music playing in the children’s rooms and could only hope it would cover up the noise of their mother’s drunken distress.

  Returning to the kitchen/dining-room they had created out of two rooms, a lobby and a coal-shed at the back of the house, Adrian looked at the dirty plates, glasses and empty bottles with disfavour. This would be only the first of many evenings spent at this table, and at other similar ones all round the bay: the same faces, the same conversations about sailing, house prices, schools and their neighbours, the same performance from Kim, getting smashed and flirting inappropriately.

  Drumbreck brought out the worst in Kim. It was, he had once said to her bitterly, the Torremolinos syndrome: what you did away from home didn’t count. She was a total airhead – not exactly the perfect political wife, but in Glasgow she was mercifully constrained by the demands of their more sedate lifestyle. He had no illusions, but he liked the sex – usually – and he still got a kick out of her effect on people who had expected, from his own quiet and unglamorous appearance, that he would have a correspondingly mousy wife. The Labour councillors always looked at him with new eyes after meeting Kim, and whatever you said about her, she was good at chatting them up.

  But Drumbreck! This was only the start of the summer season and he was sickened by it already: the incestuous atmosphere, the virulent gossip, the scandals, the not-so-secret affairs. They’d come originally when it wasn’t so expensive and they couldn’t afford anything more exotic, but he’d wanted to get away from the place for years now, putting it all behind him. He dreamed of a villa in Tuscany, elegant, peaceful, with an open loggia and a view of some little hill town, framed by the spears of cypress trees piercing a hard golden sky . . .

  But Kim wouldn’t hear of it, of course. Who wanted to spend holidays cooped up with just your family, when all your summer friends would be here? And now Kelly had her own little gang – and what went on there he just didn’t want to think about – and she was equally addicted to the Drumbreck experience. Jason at ten was besotted with his very own Mirror dinghy and Gary – well, Gary didn’t really count. Gary would whinge wherever he was.

  Perhaps, if things had been different four years ago . . . but he mustn’t think of all that now. It was too late now. Much too late.

  Marjory Fleming’s mind was buzzing with plans and arrangements for the next day as she drove the five miles home to Mains of Craigie. It was only as she turned in at the farm gate that she remembered the Stevensons, and cringed. Tonight she was going back to, most probably, a quiet, darkened house – it was after eleven and Bill, with his early start, would be in bed – and she could stand outside for a moment when she got out of the jeep, refreshing her spirit by looking at the stars and the shadowy outlines of the soft hills, breathing the cool fresh air in a silence broken only by the occasional bleat of a sheep or the stealthy rustles of the creatures of the night, going about their secret business. Next week, if she did that, the thought that eyes filled with hatred might be watching her unseen from the cottage two hundred yards away, would taint the atmosphere like a foul smell.

  To her surprise, the lights were still on in the sitting-room, which ran from front to back of the old farmhouse on the right-hand side of the front door – never used – and when she parked at the back and came in through the mud-room, she found Bill dozing in his chair in front of a dying fire. He started awake as Meg jumped up from the hearthrug to greet her mistress.

  ‘Goodness, love, you should be in bed!’ Marjory scolded him, but her mood lifted as she came into the warm, lamp-lit room.

  Bill got up to kiss her, then went over to the tray where a bottle of Bladnoch stood waiting beside two heavy crystal tumblers. ‘I thought you might need this,’ he said. ‘Findlay’s been on the phone.’

  Marjory sank gratefully into the embrace of her arm-chair, which was sagging and under permanent review for replacement, but somehow always got a reprieve. She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh God, Susie! You wouldn’t believe that woman!’

  ‘Fin told me what she’d done.’ Bill came back with their drinks, then threw another log on the fire and sat down. ‘He was terribly embarrassed. I think they’d had a row about her dragging Josh into it. He certainly sent his apologies.’

  ‘His, but not hers, I take it.’ Marjory sipped her malt and sighed. ‘She seems to think we can drop charges on a whim to do a favour for a friend. The only reason I didn’t was because I am a spiteful and malevolent monster.’

  ‘I know, I know. The woman’s a nightmare.’ Bill was visibly crestfallen. ‘And I’ve wished her on to you – I feel really bad about that. I just thought it was being under so much stress at the time and she’d get over it, but I got it wrong, didn’t I? I suppose we could say that in the circumstances moving into the cottage wouldn’t be appropriate—’

  ‘And have her tell everyone who’ll stop to listen that I had them thrown out on to the street?’

  Bill grimaced and she went on, ‘No, I’m just going to have to ignore it. I ought to be used to unpopularity by now and I minded it a hell of a lot more when it was people I liked who wanted nothing to do with me. Susie’s a nasty piece of work and I don’t like her any more than she likes me. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t given the woman a thought all evening.’

  It was the truth, even if it wasn’t exactly the whole truth, about her feelings. But she wasn’t under oath, and Bill looking less miserably guilty was some reward. He was a good man who’d tried to do the right thing and it wasn’t fair to make him suffer for it. Anyway, Marjory prided herself on her tough-mindedness and her pragmatism, so what option did she have?

  She filled him in on the new case as they finished their whisky. ‘It probably won’t be very much to do with us. She was killed elsewhere – Manchester, probably, where she lived – and the killer drove her up here and dumped her body in the most isolated place he could think of. If they manage to finger him, we’ll probably find he has some previous connection with the area – came on holiday with his bucket and spade when he was wee, or something, but until then it’ll be mainly forensic stuff around the site and putting out an appeal to see if anyone spotted a car in the area.

  ‘The partner would usually be prime suspect, but I’ll be gobsmacked if the man I spoke to on the phone had anything to do with it. You see—’

  Bill tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a huge yawn, and Marjory got up, saying remorsefully, ‘Oh – sorry. Come on, you need your sleep and so do I.’

  Meg trotted to the door and Marjory collected the glasses as Bill put off the lights. He paused in the doorway.

  ‘Just one thing – tell me you won’t have time to cook tomorrow. I like to go to sleep with something to look forward to.’

  The trees were singing tonight in a rising wind. The man in the loft bedroom lay awake, eyes wide upon the darkness, barely seeing the shadows of the agitated branches whose wild movements so closely mirrored the turbulence of his own thoughts.

  When he did shut his eyes he kept seeing her, lying in the base of the tree roots – strangely, since he had taken particular care not to look as he left her there. Had she been sheltered from today’s downpour, or was her battered face wet with rain, like tears?

  As if it mattered. Already the stealthy work of dissolution had started. At this very moment it was separating flesh from bone . . .

  A qualm of nausea swept over him and he fought against it until it subsided. He’d got up earlier to be sick but could only retch painfully: he had eaten almost nothing since yesterday morning.

  Fear. Questions. Memories. Questions. Fear. Memories. The thoughts chased one another round and round, the sequence changing but always coming back to memories and, like a stuck gramophone needle, repeating them over and over and over again.

  Chapter 6

  �
��DI Fleming? The Wintour case – you’re Senior Investigating Officer, right?’ It was a man’s voice, pleasant-spoken, very assured – or perhaps that was just the English accent? Receiving confirmation, he went on, ‘DCI Chris Carter, Manchester CID. I’m SIO here and I was hoping you could brief me on the situation at your end.’

  Fleming had been expecting his call. ‘Of course. What do you have already?’

  ‘Body found dumped in woodland, right? And a mobile phone on the body established the link with Wintour. We can confirm she’s been missing since Thursday and that the description your people sent down ties in with her appearance. We contacted the boyfriend last night – distraught, apparently, for what that’s worth. They’re always distraught, in my experience—’

  ‘Extensive, I’m sure,’ Fleming cut in, feeling she was being bounced into endorsing an unwarranted assumption. ‘But as it happened, I was the person who spoke to Brewer last night on the phone. Obviously I didn’t disclose how it came to be in our hands, and his reaction seemed innocent enough to me. He said he’d been phoning her regularly to try to find out where she was – there’ll be records of that, of course – but his attitude suggested that he was unaware anything had happened to her.’

  ‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it?’

  It was a dismissive response and she reacted sharply. ‘My distinct impression was that when he thought initially that he was talking to her, he was both anxious about her and annoyed. And at that stage there was certainly no reason for him to suspect it was a police officer at the other end.’

  Carter was still unimpressed. ‘Might have worked out what was likely to happen, if he left a body lying around. Anyway, we’ve brought him in for questioning and of course we’ve swung into the usual routine – establishing her contacts, asking questions, listening to what people have to say . . .’