The lights were on in the Stevensons’ cottage. It looks pretty, Marjory told herself. The fact that Susie could be at one of those windows, watching her now with ill-wishing eyes, was no reason for not relaxing, enjoying this precious, peaceful moment at the end of the day.
And it didn’t spoil it, not really. The silence could still calm her mind; she stood a little longer before, with a deep sigh, she turned away, fetched her case from the car and went inside.
‘Bill!’ she called as she came out of the mud-room, but got no response, and when she opened the kitchen door, there was only Cat, sitting in the broken-springed armchair beside the Aga reading a book with a cover whose colour could only be described as fluffy pink.
She looked up. ‘Oh, hi, Mum! Did you have a good time?’
‘Not quite how I’d put it.’ Marjory set down the case and went over to drop a kiss on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘But the bathroom in the hotel was sensational.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He and Fin went out with the dogs – some rambler phoned to say there was a sheep on its back in a burn.’ She went back to her book.
‘Where’s Cammie?’
‘Weight-lifting, need you ask?’
‘Well, he might have been doing press-ups. Better than doing nothing except playing computer games, anyway.’
Marjory picked up the pile of mail on the dresser – catalogues and bills – then put it down again, and looked round the kitchen for indications as to what might have happened while she was away. The most obvious of these – apart from a number of pans ‘soaking’ in the sink – was a home-made chocolate cake, with thick icing, sitting on the kitchen table. Or, to be more precise, what was left of a chocolate cake; the raggedness of the remains suggested that Cammie had been allowed a free rein with a blunt knife.
‘Where did this come from?’ Marjory asked.
With an almost audible plop, Cat detached her eyes from the page. ‘Oh – that was Susie. She brought it across when she heard you were away.’
‘That was nice of her,’ Marjory said, neutrally, she hoped, but her daughter wasn’t fooled. Cat’s eyes narrowed.
‘She said she was afraid you wouldn’t like it, but it was a shame we should miss out all the time because you were always too busy to do fun family things, like baking.’ Her voice had a reproachful note and Marjory, too tired to be sensible, reacted.
‘Oh, did she? Well, as a matter of fact some of us don’t think that baking cakes is vital to a happy family. There’s nothing wrong with the kind you can buy – and at least they don’t put the icing on with a trowel.’
She knew it was childish, and Cat, as she put down her book and came over, had a long-suffering look on her face. ‘Look, Mum, Susie told me that you and she had a row. But she’d had really, like, a hard time with losing the farm? And of course having to live in the cottage, with you going, “I’m not going to forget about it” all the time—’
There was a tone in her voice which reminded Marjory of one of her schoolteachers who had never delivered a rebuke without making it a sermon. And Cat was continuing.
‘You’re always saying to us “Can’t bear grudges, let bygones be bygones, have to understand the other person’s point of view,” right? So why don’t you do that? Susie’s nice, she could be a good friend if you let her—’
Something snapped. ‘You know absolutely nothing about it! And when I need lessons in social conduct from my daughter, I’ll ask for them.’
The crusading light in Cat’s eyes died. ‘Fine,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I was only trying to help.’ She picked up her book and walked to the door. ‘And you can shut up your stupid hens yourself.’
‘Cat – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
The only response was the slamming of the door. Marjory sank miserably into the chair her daughter had vacated. Was she the worst mother in the world? Had her own mother ever said to her something she would have given anything to take back a moment later? Marjory couldn’t remember it, if she had. Probably not; her mother, like Bill, was a saint. She was surrounded by frigging saints, and it got trying, sometimes. Perhaps that was why she had got on so well with Chris Carter, who had no aspirations towards beatification.
Susie Stevenson certainly was no saint. Susie was – but there was no point in letting this latest underhand attack get to her, and the hens needed shutting in.
She was in the orchard when Bill, with Meg at his heels, came across the yard and spotted her. He leaned on the dry-stone dyke and called down to her.
‘Good to see you home, love. Tough day?’
‘You could say.’ But at the sight of him, her spirits lifted; it was a gift he had. ‘I won’t be a minute – just one chookie with suicidal leanings to round up, then I’m with you.’
‘Thought Cat was meant to be doing that. Anyway, I’ll get out the Bladnoch, shall I?’
‘Oh, what a good idea!’
He laughed at her heartfelt tone, then disappeared. Marjory shooed the last hen safely home, then stuck her head into the henhouse to make sure they were all accounted for. Some were roosting already, some crooning drowsily, and she smiled as she bolted the door. Oh, Susie or no Susie, it was good to be home.
There was a light on in one of the steadings as she went back across the yard and she could see Fin putting some rope away. His younger dog was trotting round him; the new one was lying on the threshold, watching.
He was, as Bill had said, very like Moss, though Moss had had a white blaze on his nose, while this dog’s muzzle was black. But he had the same wide head, and one prick ear—
Marjory stopped, a dreadful suspicion forming. Without attracting Fin’s attention, she altered her course to pass close behind the dog. ‘Moss!’ she said softly and the dog’s head immediately swivelled, eying her suspiciously. She walked away.
Bill had put the lamps on in the sitting-room, which meant that the dust didn’t show, and with the summer fire screen concealing the ashes in the grate the room looked welcoming, even if Meg was making a loud silent protest about the lack of a fire. And the whisky Bill was holding out to her – that did look good. Marjory took the tumbler and sat down.
‘Bill,’ she said unhappily, ‘tell me about Fin’s new dog.’
Bill, filling his own glass, didn’t turn. ‘Oh, Flossie! Shaping up very well.’
‘Flossie. Or Floss, as I expect he calls it when it’s working, Flossie being rather an odd name for a male dog.’
He turned with the guilty expression of a schoolboy who knows rules have been broken but blames the rules not the perpetrator.
‘Look, I know he may have kidnapped the animal, but I’ve played along. I know it probably legally belongs to Murdoch, since I know Fin’s too short of money to buy it back. But you saw yourself what Murdoch had done to Moss; the man’s not fit to own a dog. And Fin told me a couple of days ago that Murdoch was going to have it destroyed if he didn’t get the money.
‘I know you have to uphold the law – of course you do – but can’t you just turn a blind eye? No one else knows it’s here. I bet the police don’t waste too much time on prosecuting people who remove unwanted stuff from skips, do they?’
For the second time since she came home this evening, Marjory felt like an outsider. ‘No, of course we don’t,’ she managed to say levelly. ‘Have you watched the news this evening, Bill?’
He looked at her sharply. ‘No. Did I miss something?’
‘Only that Niall Murdoch has been murdered. Fin is on a charge already for having attacked him, the shed where Moss was being kept has been burned down and Moss – curiously enough – seems to have disappeared.’
Marjory took a certain bitter satisfaction in his stricken look. He sat down heavily in the chair opposite.
‘You’re not saying—’
‘No, of course I’m not!’ she said impatiently. ‘I’m not making any assumptions of any kind. This is the very start of a murder inquiry. There are, quite literally, thousands
of questions to be asked. There are other suspects – one of whom is even now “helping with inquiries”, though I’m not convinced.
‘But perhaps you’ll understand if I say that I can’t treat this in quite the same way as if Fin had helped himself to a suite of wicker furniture for his conservatory.’
Bill’s head was bent over his glass. ‘No. No, I see that.’
She let a silence develop. It was a family joke that Bill’s mind, like the mills of God, ground slowly, but the finely processed result was often worth waiting for.
This time, what he said was, ‘I understand what you feel you must do. But Marjory, please – can I ask that you aren’t the person to question him? It probably isn’t realistic to hope it can be presented in such a way that they don’t realize where the information came from, but if you could at least be distanced from it in some way . . . otherwise things here will become intolerable.’
Marjory felt as if he had slapped her. Her voice was icy as she said, ‘I don’t normally go out on preliminary inquiries myself anyway. But you’re making it sound as if, because he’s living on my doorstep, I should somehow feel guilty because he’s a suspect in a murder inquiry. Of course the position is intolerable. It’s been intolerable all along, only you haven’t noticed.’ Her eyes were stinging as she took a gulp of whisky.
‘Of course I’ve noticed!’ Bill was impatient in his turn. ‘Susie’s a devious besom. I found her having a very cosy chat with Cat, which I didn’t think was at all healthy. There’s nothing I’d like better than to see Fin with a better job and them both off the premises. But I like the man, and he’s someone who’s had a very hard time that looks as if it’s about to get even worse.
‘Can I ask you – do you really think he’s a murderer? Honestly?’
She wasn’t going to cry. ‘No, I don’t think he is. But whether I do or not, it doesn’t matter. I have a job to do – and there are times when it feels a bloody lonely job.’ She drained her glass and got up. ‘I’m sorry, I’m very tired. I’m going to bed. I’ll do my best to take a back seat on this, but I think you’ll find I’ll be blamed anyway. See you upstairs.’
‘Marjory—’
She shut the door. No one understood the job, did they, except other cops – the hard, painful, demanding, isolating job which was, even so, the only one she had ever wanted to do.
Chapter 18
‘I’m coming round to your way of thinking about the deaths, you know that?’ Marjory Fleming said to Tam MacNee.
With little incentive to linger at home, she had been at her desk early this morning, and on it was a huge sheet of paper with, at the centre, two names circled, other names round about and a lot of annotations and arrows.
She tapped the paper. ‘Davina Watt. Niall Murdoch. She’s the local tart. He’s the local stud. You’d guess that just might have brought them together.’
‘Shared interests? Might have made for some interesting conversations.’ MacNee squinted at the mind map without enthusiasm. ‘Never see what good this does, to be honest.’
‘Clears out the jumble inside my head and puts it where I can see it,’ Fleming said absently. ‘Now, start here with Ingles. He had contact, obviously, with Davina and presumably with most of the people at the Yacht Club. Lafferty and Mrs Aitcheson didn’t like him, his solicitor colleagues did.
‘What we know for sure: he tried to kill Aitcheson, he didn’t kill Murdoch. What we don’t know: whether he killed Davina before, as he admits, he moved the body. If he did, there’s a second killer out there. If he didn’t, it’s a fairly safe assumption that there’s only one, who left Davina there for Ingles to find. Who, and why?’
‘Framing him, of course – that’s why. But you could be wanting him put away for good, or you could have a body to get rid of, and him an obvious suspect.’
‘It’d have to be two birds with one stone. I don’t buy the notion that you’d kill Davina to get revenge on Ingles. Davina wasn’t a passive personality and there was a lot of anger in the way she was beaten up. She got herself killed for something she did—’
‘Like blackmail.’
‘Exactly. So – Ingles again. What was there she could blackmail him for? Squeaky-clean at the office, served his sentence, nothing much to lose in terms of respectability – hard to see what he would have to lose that would make it worth killing her.’
‘So it’s not blackmail. So she comes back, hoping to take up with him again? He loses his temper, and suddenly – bang!’ MacNee smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand.
‘Possible.’ Fleming tapped her front teeth with her pen, considering. ‘Right. Let’s move on.
‘Blackmail. Who is going to be vulnerable?’
‘Usual suspects – married men, people with a position they don’t want exposed. Normal stuff.’
‘You’re seeing Mrs Aitcheson this morning, aren’t you? Get her blethering – cleaners always know all about their employers. Brian’s given you enough to prime the pump. See if you can come back with a list.’
‘From what he said, there’ll be a powerful lot of names on it. Keep the uniforms tied up for the next three weeks, going round them all.’
Fleming frowned. ‘OK, so we say she tried to blackmail an old flame and he flipped. Killed her, dumped the body to frame Ingles, against whom, say, he has a grudge. Then he decides to kill Murdoch too? Why?’
MacNee shrugged. ‘Got a taste for it? Murdoch’s been shagging his wife, say, and owes him money as well? Life’s cheap, in some parts of Glasgow.’
Then he sat up. ‘Here – life’s cheap, right enough. Drop a few hundreds in the right quarter, no need to soil your hands, and Bob’s your favourite uncle.’
Fleming underlined Lafferty’s name. ‘Hold that thought. But we’ll need to take it pretty cannily.
‘The others we have to check out are the husband of Tansy’s lovelorn lush in the Yacht Club – that can’t have made him exactly happy. It would certainly give him a motive for Niall’s killing; the way they all seem to have gone on in Drumbreck, it might be instructive to find out if he was in the game of Pass the Parcel with Davina too.’
‘Left holding it when the music stopped and found it was ready to blow up in his face? Could be.
‘Tell you who hasn’t figured, though – the widow,’ MacNee added. ‘We all know the rule – it’s the spouse as done it. And she can’t just have been exactly happy with his goings-on.’
‘Certainly wasn’t, according to Christie. Can’t fault his paperwork – his report was in the system when I came in. Says she was quite open about their bad relationship. He sounds a bit shocked that neither she nor the daughter shed a tear.’
‘He’s still hung up on the vandal – what’s his name?’
‘McLeish. Rab McLeish.’ Fleming told him about the girlfriend’s abortion, and MacNee winced.
‘Ay, that would figure.’
‘And there’s a rather garbled story about a man all in black being around just before the shed was fired, which could certainly be McLeish – though Christie’s inclined to doubt the witness. There’s no connection that I can see with Davina, so we’d only be considering him if we accept that Greg and Jon are right about Ingles.
‘And if so, there’s another little problem I’d rather not have to deal with. All a bit too close to home.’
MacNee listened to the next instalment in the Stevenson saga. ‘A wee thing tricky, that,’ he said.
‘Oh, you think? The woman is only trying already to turn my family against me – and making a good job of it, with a bit of help from my own stupidity – so can you imagine the hell that will break lose when she finds I’ve grassed on her husband and he’s now a suspect in a murder inquiry?’
‘Better get a hard hat.’
‘You think you’re joking! I’ve decided to send Jon and Tansy to the farm instead of Drumbreck – strict instructions to be tactful.’
‘Make him feel better if he’s to be arrested with kid gloves?’
MacNee cocked an eye. ‘Not all sweetness and light there at the moment?’
‘No,’ she said again. ‘And if you want me to be absolutely frank, I’m pissed off. Oh, I’ll get over it, but I’m better keeping myself out of the way until I do.’
‘“Alas! Life’s path may be unsmooth! Her way may lie through rough distress,”’ MacNee began, and Fleming held up her hand.
‘Hold it right there. Things are bad enough without that.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time for the briefing. Come on.’
‘We’re packing up to go back to Glasgow today.’ Adrian McConnell, coming in from checking that his own Contessa and Jason’s Mirror were battened down and secure on their moorings, found his family in the kitchen at the back of the house.
The room was in a squalid state, with congealing leftover food, dirty dishes and pans cluttering every surface. Gary, strapped into his high chair, was smeared with gunk which looked like dried-on cereal and he was banging a spoon rhythmically on his tray. Kelly, oddly overdressed for this time of the morning, was eating a yoghurt, and Jason, eyes closed, was plugged into a Blackberry. Kim wasn’t dressed; wearing a slightly grubby green dressing-gown, she was heavy-eyed and very pale. She was staring into a cup of black coffee; beside it was an empty glass showing the white powdery traces of Alka-Seltzer.
Kelly looked up. ‘Fine. You go. I’ll come back on Sunday with Chazz.’
Behind Adrian’s heavy glasses, a muscle twitched and he put up his hand to still it. ‘You’ll come home with your family. I’m not having you stay here with someone who’s five years older, and I certainly don’t trust his driving.’
‘But there’s a party tonight—’
‘There’s been a party every night. No buts, no arguments, that’s it.’
Kelly jumped up. ‘Oh, sure – that’s it! Just take orders, like I’m your slave! No way! They’d all be, like, “Silly little kid, has to go home ’cos Daddy says!” Mum, I can stay, can’t I?’
Kim looked up. ‘Oh, better do as he says. What’s the point, anyway? It’s all ruined here, ruined.’
Lying Dead Page 27
