Lying Dead

by Aline Templeton

  ‘At least I wrung out permission to access the computer. Macdonald can come down later – she’s going to keep Mirren out of the way.’

  The car was parked in front of the Yacht Club again. As they reached it, Kerr looked back round the sweep of the bay, with the pontoons and the pretty boats. The tide was on the turn, but the mudflats hadn’t been exposed yet and under the cloudless sky the water shimmered blue. There was a swan with its wings half-raised in the sunshine and terns were fishing out towards the estuary, the strong light silvering their plumage as they folded their wings in kamikaze dives.

  ‘You know something? I really don’t like this place – gives me the creeps. Something about the atmosphere, I suppose—’

  ‘There isn’t an atmosphere,’ Fleming said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with it. A lot of people use it for acting out a sort of fantasy life – expensive hobbies and parties and drink and sex and probably the smarter drugs too – and when it looks like trouble, they leave instantly. That’s not a community, that’s a stage set. And just at the moment, it’s a set with the flats falling down.’

  As they drove off, Kerr said, ‘I asked Mirren about the evening of the fire, just in the context of the dog, and she said the only time she’d gone out of the house that evening was to feed Moss, and the way she said it, I believed her. I can’t see how she could have had anything to do with Niall’s death.’

  ‘Yes, it’s probably true. There’s just one thing. I was thinking about the pathologist’s verbal report when she did her initial assessment of Niall Murdoch’s body on the dock there.

  ‘When a body’s been in water it’s notoriously difficult to fix a time of death. She wasn’t prepared to state anything officially until she’d had time to do proper calculations based on the body temperature and the temperature of the water – presumably that’ll come with the main autopsy report next week. But she did say that off the top of her head she’d be inclined to favour an earlier rather than a later time of death.

  ‘It struck me when I was talking to Jenna. We’ve based the early limit on Niall phoning home at seven – but we only have her word for it, after all.’

  Chapter 23

  Tam MacNee seldom went to Glasgow unless he had to. It was his past, and even if the series of slum flats he’d lived in, with their stinking shared cludgies on the stairs, had been torn down to make way for tower blocks where they used the lift instead, he still felt uneasily that somehow he might blunder into a time-warp and find himself back in the part of his life he had done his best to forget.

  It was a smart city now, Glasgow, a City of Culture, no less, with glittering shops and galleries and posh restaurants, but underneath he could always sense the raw, raucous heart of the place, still even feel the tug of his tribal loyalty to Rangers. He’d only to hear the strains of ‘Billy Boy’ coming out of a pub and his mind would run on wading in Fenian blood.

  Because somewhere, under the accumulated layers of respectability and police service, the old Tam was still there. He would never quite trust himself to go off into the narrow streets and alleyways which he knew like the back of his hand, to the spit-and-sawdust bars where the hard men he’d shared those streets with still drank – the ones who weren’t in Barlinnie or scattered from an urn on the Rangers’ pitch. He told himself he knew how they’d look now – sad and seedy, locked into a cycle of violence and ill-health – but he couldn’t purge his mind altogether of that warped image, the glamour of a life lived on the edge of danger. Nothing in his life now came close to the heart-stopping thrill of escaping disaster by the skin of your teeth, because you were quicker and smarter. It was an addiction; you didn’t recover, you just had to keep clear of the people pushing it.

  Today, though, he would be headed for the Southern General Hospital, where Adrian McConnell had been taken after his suicide attempt in his posh house in smart Bearsden, where folk talked with a plum in their mouths and ‘sex’ meant what the coalman brought the coal in. He’d taken care to arrange to meet Sheuggie for a drink afterwards in a bar run by a chain nearby, where they’d taken out all the atmosphere before they brought in the red velvet benches and the fake oak tables.

  Adrian McConnell’s letter had been duly faxed through, along with the message that the man had recovered and was prepared to talk. MacNee had left it on Fleming’s desk, along with a note to say he’d left for Glasgow.

  MacNee swung the car into the inside lane of the motorway. The signs for the city centre were coming up now.

  It was a pathetic missive, Fleming thought, picking it up off her desk and reading it again. Pompous, self-pitying, cold – and yet there was that hint that he would have wished to be other, if he could.

  Dear Kim, I know that the first thing on your mind when you find that I am dead will be money. You can rest assured that I am not lost to all sense of duty. You and the children will be well provided-for, and you will be free to fall into bed with the next man who comes along, or else to drink yourself to death without anyone trying to stop you. The choice is yours.

  Naturally, with the daily humiliations heaped upon me by you and the children, I have considered divorce. But what would be the point? I might escape from you but not from them; they would forever have a place in my life, and it became borne in upon me that to pursue a political career with that sort of baggage would be to invite more public and more excruciating humiliation.

  I had a chance of escape a few years ago, and I have only my own lack of courage to blame that I did not take it. Afterwards, I told myself there would be a second chance and this time I would let nothing stop me. The man who killed Davina killed my dream too. That dream was hope and without hope existence has no point.

  Adrian

  How would a wife feel, getting a letter like that as her husband’s last words? And how would they deal with it, when the death attempt failed and they had to meet each other over the breakfast table?

  Still, the confession in his letter wasn’t the one she and Tam had been hoping he’d make. Tam would question him, of course, but this looked like yet another blind alley.

  She’d have to get on up to the forest where the search was going on, about five miles from where Davina’s body had been found. At least you could get vehicles up there and it wouldn’t mean another hike, but the whole thing was probably an exercise in futility. She’d been hoping for evidence that this was where the woman had been killed, but so far at least the SOCOs hadn’t come up with anything.

  A quick check showed that her e-mails were unpromising – and there was the one from Chris Carter, unanswered. She certainly didn’t have time even to think about that at the moment.

  MacNee didn’t like hospitals. They smelled of despair to him, and when he went into the ward where Adrian McConnell had been taken he averted his eyes from the men in the other beds, lying unnervingly limp and still or with tubes and wires attached to them, as a nurse led him to the screened bed in the farther corner.

  Adrian McConnell was sitting up, his hands folded in front of him. He looked very small and neat, wearing striped pyjamas buttoned up to the neck and dark-rimmed glasses; he was propped against pillows under a neatly turned-down sheet and white cotton blanket, like a little boy who’d been tucked in by his nanny and told not to mess up the bedclothes. His eyes were bloodshot but he was quite composed, and it was hard to imagine him as the recent survivor of a dramatic brush with death.

  MacNee introduced himself. ‘How are you?’

  ‘All right, thank you.’ McConnell had a small, prim mouth and a very precise way of speaking. ‘I’m to be discharged very shortly.’

  MacNee sat down on one of the bedside chairs. ‘You’ll understand we need to ask you some questions. The police have, of course, seen your note.’

  ‘I imagined you would. But I should have thought it self-explanatory.’ He spoke as if MacNee was a tiresome and unintelligent child.

  ‘Not just entirely, sir,’ MacNee said with, he felt, commendable patience. ‘You seemed to
suggest you had an affair with Davina Watt?’

  ‘We had an affair, yes. Quite briefly, a bit over four years ago.’

  MacNee might have been asking the man when was the last time he’d had his car serviced. ‘And why did it end?’

  ‘I covered this, I thought, quite adequately in my letter.’

  ‘You wouldn’t leave your wife and family for her, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I – hesitated. Yes. And then it was too late.’ For the first time, he was showing signs of emotion. He was pleating his fingers as he added, with real bitterness, ‘But I’ve paid for it since.’

  ‘Too late? You mean she was off as usual to find some other sucker when you wouldn’t play ball?’ MacNee was deliberately offensive.

  A spark of anger appeared in the pale eyes behind the spectacles. ‘She was hurt,’ he corrected him. ‘She told me if I didn’t love her enough to want to be with her for ever, she couldn’t go on, risking more pain. “I’m ending it now,” she said, and walked out. Fool that I was, I didn’t go after her.

  ‘I keep asking myself, why not? Cowardice, I suppose. She was someone entitled to big gestures, not pathetic consideration of the practicality of this or that. I wasn’t man enough.’

  He was talking fast now and colour began to appear in his cheeks. ‘But I knew what to do if I got a second chance. I didn’t think she’d ever come back to Drumbreck – after the unpleasantness with Ingles, you know – but I believed, somehow, that we’d meet. I was convinced that one day, fate would bring us together – on the tube in London, in an airport. I’ve run after half-a-dozen girls, thinking I recognized Davina – then they’ve turned, and I’ve had to apologize.

  ‘You can’t imagine my family life, getting worse and worse as my children become monsters of selfishness and ingratitude.’ He was oozing self-pity now. ‘What I had with Davina was – was unique, precious, and I threw it away. When they suggested I might run for parliament, do you know what I thought? I thought she’d know where I was and she might find it in her heart to give me a second chance.’

  ‘You were running your life round this – this fantasy?’ MacNee looked at him with incomprehension mingled with contempt.

  McConnell had been animated; now it was as if all the life had drained out of him, and he sagged back against the pillows. ‘It was the only time I have ever felt properly alive. I go through life wretched, half-dead – I might as well be dead, now that lawyer bastard’s killed her.’

  ‘You believe it was Keith Ingles?’ It had fleetingly crossed MacNee’s mind that if he’d believed Niall Murdoch had killed his fantasy lover, vengeance would have come easily to this man.

  McConnell stared at him. ‘Don’t you?’

  There wasn’t an easy answer to that. ‘Did you know she’d come back?’

  ‘Not until I heard that – she was dead.’ He bowed his head.

  ‘She didn’t get in touch with you? Try to tap you for money? It seems to have been the only thing she cared about.’ It was intentionally brutal.

  McConnell’s drooping posture changed. He sat up again, rigid with indignation. ‘That’s a filthy thing to say! Why would she, when I would have laid all I possess at her feet?’

  ‘Ah, but she’d have had to take you as well as the money, wouldn’t she?’ MacNee had taken a real scunner to this guy’s delusional self-indulgence. ‘Seems she was maybe doing a bit of blackmail on the side – and with you with your political career—’

  McConnell pressed the bell at the side of his bed. ‘I’ll have the nurse escort you out. I would not have agreed to talk to you if I’d known you were going to try to sully Davina’s memory.’

  MacNee didn’t get up. Nurses these days didn’t come running when you pressed a bell. He had one last try. ‘And you didn’t mind Niall Murdoch having it off with your wife?’

  McConnell’s face twisted in an expression of disgust. ‘Not in itself, no. But it was all part of what informed my decision last night.’

  That was one way of describing taking an overdose. Frankly, MacNee reckoned that if he’d been Kim McConnell he’d have waited a wee while before dialling 999.

  But he had to believe the man had nothing to do with either death. As he left, he asked with genuine curiosity, ‘What will you do now?’

  The prim little man was sitting as he had been when MacNee came in, hands folded on the smooth sheet. Behind the spectacles his eyes were blank. ‘Try again. And succeed, this time. Now mind your own business, and leave me alone.’

  The drive to the forest along the Queen’s Way was slow today. On this sunny May morning, the tourist buses were out in force and overtaking one would only land you behind another. Or worse, a caravan.

  It wasn’t a hardship to have time to look at the scenery, at the vast tracts of heather-purple moorland dropping away to the south, with the pylons Fleming always thought rather magnificent striding off towards a hazy horizon, at the greens and browns and greys of moss and bracken and stone, and the dense tapestry of trees rising on the left-hand side of the road. A pair of buzzards were soaring in lazy, sweeping circles, as if they too relished the warmth of the sun on their wings.

  A police car parked at the foot of a broad Forestry Road alerted her to the turn-off and an officer in a white summer shirt waved her through. There was Commission land on both sides now: new plantations of young trees still in the tubes that protected them from nibbling deer and rabbits; mature trees, growing towards a harvest in ten or even twenty years’ time; great areas already untidily cleared, looking like a bone yard for trees with stumps of trunks and the whitened corpses of long-dead branches left where they fell. Firebreaks between them, with their rows of wire brooms, were a reminder that even in this climate a spell of sunny weather could have the place tinder-dry.

  A makeshift sign on a stake directed her on to a smaller, rougher track and now the planted aisles of trees were crowded closer. Ahead of her Fleming could see a recovery truck, parked beside a side turning where there was a wide dead end, roughly cleared. She drove past it and stopped beside a police minibus and a white van, then walked back. There was no breeze up here; the air had a sultry feel and though the sky was still clear she thought there would be rain later.

  They were just hoisting the blackened, windowless shell of the burned-out car on to the truck as she arrived. A scorched area of ground showed where it had stood; there were signs of smoke damage, too, to the nearest trees, but mercifully no more than that. Remembering how hot and dry it had been at the time, she winced.

  Half-a-dozen officers in blue dungarees were working the area, two dragging and prodding at the undergrowth with long poles and four on their knees, moving backwards in parallel lines. They’d covered a lot of ground and without shade it was hot work; they were swiping constantly at the small flies attracted by the smell of their sweat. As Fleming appeared, they seized the opportunity to sit back on their heels, swigging at water bottles and wiping brows and cheeks with the backs of their hands, leaving grimy smears. The men with the poles too stopped for a breather.

  ‘Any joy?’ she asked, though not hopefully.

  ‘Couple of drinks cans, a plastic bag, KitKat wrapper – might prove the key to the whole thing, ma’am,’ one said.

  ‘You certainly never know, constable. Nothing that might have been the weapon?’

  ‘We-e-ell—’ He gestured round about. There were stones and small rocks everywhere, the sort of thing the pathology report had suggested could have been employed. ‘Plenty that could be used that way, but none we’ve checked seem to have been moved.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She bent down to look at a stone that looked as if it might comfortably fit the hand and lifted it experimentally. The earth below clung to it; as she forced it up, a dozen small creepy things scuttled away leaving a tiny writhing earthworm uncomfortably exposed. Taking pity on it, she dropped the stone again and stood up, dusting her hands. ‘I see what you mean. Never mind – you’ve nearly covered it. Good work.’

&n
bsp; Two white-overalled SOCOs were supervising the loading of the wreck and one of them came over to speak to her. She recognized the man: he’d worked on the wreck of the lifeboat last October.

  ‘It’s just the two of us here today. We got the bulk of it done yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘And—?’

  He pulled a face. ‘We’ve taken ground samples all round to check for evidence of blood, but if you ask me the car was driven here after the body had been dumped. We’ve gathered up bagfuls of glass fragments to take back and test for DNA – the windows, of course, would blow out with the heat – but the testing will take weeks, months, even.’

  Fleming looked round ruefully. ‘Bit of a waste, really, getting them up here, but the boxes had to be ticked. Still, at least it’s a pretty small area and it shouldn’t take much longer. It’s all overtime, though.’

  ‘That’s what we all have to think about nowadays, isn’t it? But we’re just finished here, right, Alison?’ he called to the woman who was talking to the mechanic at the truck, now ready to drive off. She nodded and gave a thumbs-up sign.

  Fleming drove back down slowly behind the truck. She hadn’t expected this to yield much – hoped, perhaps, but not expected. Macdonald’s expedition to check out the Murdochs’ computer – that was different.

  When Kingsley came back into the CID room, Allan was there alone. He was reading a girlie magazine, which he swiftly slipped out of sight into a drawer. Kingsley grinned.

  ‘Relax, it’s only me. Any developments?’

  ‘MacNee’s gone haring off to Glasgow. McConnell – you know, him with the wife that puts it about?’

  He nodded. ‘The one Tansy interviewed. What’s he done?’

  ‘Tried to end himself but they got him in time. There’s a copy of the suicide note in the file there but if you ask me it’s nothing to do with us.’

  ‘So it’s just a wild goose chase?’ Kingsley’s satisfaction was obvious. ‘I’ve been round asking to interview Susie Stevenson, but she’s to have psychiatric assessment. And if she’s not fit to plead—’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, we’re going to have to live with it. At least we can make a coded statement that’ll get the Press off our backs and keep the Chief Constable happy.’