by Manda Scott
‘Or he’ll just sit tight and wait for us to make it for him.’
‘Thanks, Dr Adams. You just made my morning.’
She raised her mug in a wry toast. ‘Don’t mention it, Dr Stewart.’
And that, of course, is the second problem. The catch in the Catch-22. The angled twist of the double bind.
If it was only murder, we could cope. Or at least, I’d give us decent odds. Even against the kind who gut dogs for the fun of it.
If it was only Laidlaw, we could run rings round him. We’ve done it before and stayed this side of the bars.
It’s the combination of the two that makes life so bloody difficult. If you go looking for trouble, at some point you step over the legal limits. And wouldn’t that just make his day?
‘MacDonald’s pretty good,’ I said. ‘I doubt if he’d want to hand it over. But I think we ought to have a contingency plan. Just in case . . .’
‘You always do.’ Lee leaned back in her chair and smiled. The kind of smile that grows out of a long night on the wards when the charts are all unwritten, there’s a backlog of treatments enough to last through to the afternoon and the consultant is due to hold rounds at some unspecified time in the next twenty-four hours. ‘Suppose we worry about that when we come to it, huh?’ she offered. ‘You never know. If we ignore him long enough, he might go away’
‘And the pigs might fly to the moon.’
‘That too.’ She was smiling still and there was no real point in arguing.
The best-laid contingency plans fail every time.
Lee finished her tea, stood up and rinsed her mug unhurriedly in the sink. ‘If I go into work now,’ she said, ‘I could get Bridget’s post-mortem report finished and out. If they have something in print with suicide written on it, they’re less likely to start thinking of other things.’
‘Thanks.’ I poured myself a fresh coffee. ‘I’ll call in at the library later on, have a look through Malcolm’s old papers. If there’s anything useful, I’ll call you.’
‘What are you going to tell them about Tan?’
‘Just that he’s dead. They don’t need anything else.’
‘What about herself?’ She angled her head towards the living room, where Caroline lay asleep on the sofa bed.
‘I’ll have a word with her. She can let sleeping dogs lie if she has to.’
‘Very funny.’
Lee followed me through the living room to the front door. ‘She thinks I’m a bad influence on you,’ she said, nodding back over my shoulder to the sofa bed.
‘No.’ I held open the door. ‘She knows it’s the other way round.’
Breakfast was . . . different.
I heard Janine’s alarm clock before she did and took her a conciliatory cup of tea. Her big-boned frame lay curled up under one corner of the duvet, the rest of it spilling, as ever, down on to the floor at my side. I don’t steal the bedclothes, she throws them at me. I just don’t throw them back.
Wan September sunlight filtered in slantwise through the gap in the curtains, lighting up flamelets in the massed copper sheet of her hair as it spread across the pillow, stretching flat light over a face blurred into childhood with sleep. Even after two years, she still does odd things to my heart rate.
I put the tea down at a safe distance and drew the corner of the duvet carefully away. One long arm stretched out sleepily towards my side of the bed, searching. I caught it and squirmed in close, tucking her hand round my waist. My free hand explored the rest of her, starting low and stroking lazily upwards to finish somewhere near her neck.
The grip on my waist tightened. I drew small circles along the line of her collar bones with my fingertip and watched her wake, slowly. Memory sketched in the lines on her face and she grew back to middle age. A stressed-out-professional-woman kind of middle age.
‘Hi.’ I picked up her other hand and kissed it. ‘How’s things?’
‘I don’t know.’ The hand stayed in mine, unmoved and unmoving. ‘You tell me.’
Great. I live with a sabre-toothed porcupine.
‘Bridget’s dead,’ I said.
‘I know. You said on the message machine.’
So I did.
Janine slid out of bed and pulled her dressing gown off the door, wrapped it round like an outsize bearskin and lay back down on the edge of the bed. It’s a wonderful garment of chastity, that dressing gown. Completely inaccessible and totally concealing. Even her hands are invisible.
‘There’s tea on the table.’ I offered.
‘I know. I saw it.’ She frowned up at the ceiling, ignoring the offering.
There was a pause and then she asked, ‘Are you waiting for me to say I’m sorry?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
She snorted. Like a horse but with less humour. Her eyes rolled to the ceiling and back. ‘Just for one moment there, I thought I’d finally stepped out of the shadow of St Bridget,’ she said, ‘and, no, I wasn’t sorry at all.’ Her smile turned wry at the edges. ‘Then I remembered that being dead never stopped anyone from attaining sainthood.’
‘So?’
‘So, yes’ – she nodded – ‘I am sorry. At least’ – she tipped her head towards the living room – ‘I’m sorry for her. That is Caroline through there, right?’
‘Right.’
‘The Caroline?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why is she here?’
‘She needed help.’
‘Wasn’t there anyone else?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t.’
There was another pause. The tea on the table-top became steadily colder and the room steadily warmer as the sun moved further across the window.
‘How long is she staying?’ asked my lover, eventually.
‘Not long. A day or two, I should think. A week at the most.’
‘Your timing stinks, Stewart.’
‘I know.’ Story of my life. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Of course.’ She finally turned her head towards me and smiled. An old smile, sad and warm and weary all at once. The kind of smile reserved for lovers past their prime. ‘But I’m sure I can be reasonable if you ask me nicely enough,’ she said.
The dressing gown rippled. A hand emerged from the depths and her fingers looped through mine. Familiar and friendly and still electric in spite of everything.
‘How nicely?’ I asked.
‘This’ll do.’ Her thumb drew a tingling path across my palm.
I leant over and kissed her forehead. ‘Are you sure you have time?’
‘No.’ Her other hand slid out and explored the buttons on my shirt. ‘Any other stupid questions?’
‘No.’
Neither of us touched the tea.
Caroline knocked on the door a while later to ask if it was all right to use the shower and suddenly I was in bed with a professional woman late for work.
Terrifying. It is possible to shower, dress, eat, dress again because the first lot doesn’t look right, blow-dry your hair, find the car keys and get out of the door in ten minutes flat, all without tripping over the visitor in the living room, but it takes a lot of practice. Particularly the last bit.
The visitor in question picked up the dressing gown from the doorway, wrapped it around herself in a defensive cocoon and retired to the safety of the kitchen.
‘Is it always like this?’ she asked, as the whirlwind departed, five minutes over time.
‘Nope.’ I was half-way through a leisurely cup of coffee, still lost in the post-orgasmic glow. ‘That’s life in the fast lane. You should see the bad days.’
‘No thanks. I gave it up for Lent.’ Caroline looked pointedly at her watch. ‘It’s after eight. Do you want me to come and help you feed the ponies?’
I did not. Given the events of the past forty-eight hours, there was no way I was taking Caroline Leader back to the farm until I was sure that it was a great deal safer than it s
eemed. Caroline herself, thankfully, didn’t seem inclined to press the point. She wrote me out a list of all the ponies indexed by name and with their feed rations appended. I, in turn, gave her slightly less ordered instructions on how to operate the security mechanisms to the flat and introduced her to Janine’s computer technology.
By the time I left, she had found her way on to the Net and was browsing happily through the local fringe theatre sites on the Web with the ease of old familiarity. Everyone but me has become a techno-freak these days.
Three
Great Western Road was choked with early-morning commuter traffic crawling through the heavy drizzle from one set of traffic lights to the next. Flocks of students wrapped up in layers of semi-waterproof clothing wove their mountain bikes in and out of the lines of cars and slowed progress to something near a standstill. Under normal circumstances, I would have cut through the side roads and bypassed Anniesland Cross altogether, but I needed time to think. The hypnotic tic of the windscreen wipers obliterated the outside world, turning the car into a thought-cocoon where I could juggle the facts until they made some kind of sense.
Fact: three deaths – Malcolm, Bridget, Tan. In that order. Of the three, only the dog died violently. Very violently. A break in the pattern. Or part of a different pattern. Either way, it was a professional job and they don’t come cheap.
Fact: Caroline was left alive when she, too, could have been dead. Why? It wouldn’t have taken long to turn her into exactly the same state as Tan and paid killers like adding to their body count. So he was paid enough to leave her alone. A warning, possibly, but without any obvious target.
Fact: Malcolm brought chickens to the farm and died. Bridget ate a last meal of eggs before she overdosed. The dog-killer with the knife and the old VW Golf was on a chicken hunt. All round, birds are bad news.
None of it made sense. Like building a jigsaw when all the pieces are different colours and you’ve lost the lid of the box. All I had was a handful of hens and a row of dead bodies. It didn’t make much of a picture.
I drove on, grinding the gears and riding the clutch up the hill towards Bearsden. I never liked jigsaws.
The traffic and the rain both eased on the outskirts of Milngavie and I had a clear, dry road to the farm. A blue police Land Rover waited in the yard, empty, with both doors open.
Inspector Stewart MacDonald was in the barn. His jacket hung on a hook near the door and he was working his way up the horse line in his shirt sleeves, filling hay nets.
His henchwoman sat on a bale near the door, watching him with practised indifference. She rolled her eyes to the heavens as I walked in, giving me the ‘I couldn’t stop him’ shrug: palms out, eyebrows arched. Plucked eyebrows at that.
I leant over the door and waited while MacDonald made a fuss over Midnight and the pony, in turn, tried to undo his shirt. A love affair in the making.
‘You’re late, lass,’ he said. ‘They were starving.’
‘Really? That makes up for the three feeds extra the other night then.’ I took the empty hay nets from the barrow and hung them on a hook by the tack racks. ‘I was going to turn them out anyway. The big paddock’s a good twenty acres and it’s not been mown yet. They should be happy enough on that for a week or two.’ I found the key to the drug cupboard and began dragging out boxes. ‘You can help me worm them first if you like.’
The Inspector took a handful of plastic syringes and walked with me to the end of the line. I put a head collar on the new Connemara filly and held her nose while he slipped the wormer smoothly into the corner of her mouth and squirted the dose on to the back of her tongue. She made a face, mouthing, and threatened to spit the lot on the floor. I gave her a mint to take away the taste and watched until she had swallowed everything before we moved on up the line.
We worked in companionable silence. Grab, squirt, swallow. Move on. An easy, steady rhythm. MacDonald caught on from the beginning. He could have been doing it all his life.
Half-way down the second line he nodded his head fractionally in the direction of the farmhouse and asked, ‘Your friend’s no here today?’
A loaded question if ever I heard one.
‘No. I took her home. She needed a break.’
‘Uhuh?’ He had his face turned to Balder’s neck, pulling knots out of his name. The question hovered between us, waiting for an answer.
I watched the gelding try to spread wormer-flavoured horse spit all over the man’s hair in a gesture of basic equine affection. MacDonald carried on levelling off the uneven ends of the mane, talking irrelevant nonsense in his baritone burr. The ponies trusted him. Pity I’m not a horse.
‘The dog died last night,’ I said. ‘Caroline’s . . . She doesn’t want to stay here for the moment.’
‘Oh?’ His eyes asked more than his voice. ‘What was up with him? He looked right enough when I saw him . . .’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Sounded like a gastric torsion but I wasn’t here when it happened.’
‘You wouldn’t think . . .’ He drifted off. ‘Aye. Maybe. It’s a shame though. He was a grand dog.’
‘He was.’
We left it at that.
The final box was at the furthest end of the barn from his green-eyed, arch-browed minion. It was inhabited by a small bay gelding with a voracious appetite and a predisposition to laminitis. I ran my hands over his feet and tried to remember if he’d ever had a bout as late on in the year as September. I thought not, but I couldn’t be sure. Inspector MacDonald stood at the front and fiddled with the buckle on the head collar.
‘Yon lassie there,’ he said conversationally, ‘WPC Philips. She’s here on secondment from Central. She’ll be going back to the town at the end of the month.’
‘Really?’
I had two spare mints. We took one each, taking time to unwrap them from the folds of paper and silver foil. The pony made a grab for both and missed.
‘Has she enjoyed her stay?’ I asked.
‘Aye, well, I think maybe “enjoy” might be overstating things a touch.’ He adjusted the head collar to his satisfaction and clipped on a lead rope. ‘But she’s just bursting to tell Chief Inspector Laidlaw all about the weird things we rural types get up to when we’re left to our own devices.’
He opened the door and led the bay out, raising his voice to carry. ‘You’ll be wanting a hand to turn out the ponies, aye?’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Under different circumstances, I could get to like this man.
We led out eight at a time, two pairs each, jumping skittishly on the end of the lead ropes, and let them go into the big field at the back of the barn.
A burn straight off the Campsies ran down one edge, providing endless clean water, and the beech wood at the back with its coppery leaves falling into the field gave them shelter from the worst of the weather.
They sprang away from the gate and charged out, tails up and feet flying like foals in their first spring. The first lot had barely settled by the time we let out the second eight and then the whole herd went round and round, carving a race track in the turf at the edge.
The cloud had cleared while we were inside and the day was turning into a perfect West Coast September: clear and brisk, with a sharp nip to the air as an early reminder of impending winter. Under any other circumstances, it would have been entirely idyllic.
I leant against the fence watching Midnight spin and dance with Balder and slid, unthinking, into a backwards drift of memories.
Sun, cold air, the musky smell of horse sweat and the taste of it on skin. Her skin. It gets everywhere, horse sweat. A voice, her voice, laughing. Her body arching, head thrown back, hair dark against the pale grass under the trees, toes dangling in the river. Both of us playing at otters in the pool on the other side of the wood. Drying out on the grass afterwards, beech-leaf shadows dappling skin, blending the curves of breast and thigh with the darker grass of the sidhe mound.
And I knew, now, whe
re Tan was buried.
‘Are you not going to check the fence, lass? There haven’t been horses in here for years.’ Inspector MacDonald. The ever-practical Inspector MacDonald. Back to the real world.
‘I suppose I should. Thank you.’ I unhooked the gate and let myself into the field. ‘And you, I suppose, should go and rescue your young molette. Unless you know where she was last time we went back to the barn?’
The bale by the door had been conspicuously empty as we led the last lot of ponies out. Neither of us had said anything, but the idea of a police snooper wandering around the farm made me nervous. Especially one with plucked eyebrows.
‘Aye. We’d better go and find her, right enough. Can’t have her getting lost in the muck heap first thing in the morning. Just one more thing . . .’ He reached for the inside pocket of the jacket he wasn’t wearing and then snapped his fingers in mock irritation. ‘Oh, blast. It’s back in the barn.’
The man’s a terrible actor.
‘Oh?’
‘I got a fax of the post-mortem report on Ms Donnelly on my desk this morning.’
‘Really?’ Well done, Lee. ‘Did it say anything interesting?’
Aye, well, I think perhaps we won’t be needing to take the fingerprints after all. But we will be needing a word with . . . What the hell . . .?’
Whatever he was about to say next was drowned by a high-pitched shriek and a frantic squawking from the barn. I vaulted the gate and sprinted up the yard after MacDonald, reaching the door at his shoulder. It burst open as we arrived, to disgorge a very dishevelled WPC Philips clutching her inspector’s jacket to her chest. The jacket writhed, momentarily with a life of its own, and then a bright-eyed head popped out of one armpit and squawked loudly.
‘It’s a hen,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘It’s hurt its wing, poor wee soul. There’s another in the hay shed but I couldn’t catch it. It’ll need the three of us.’
I doubt very much if the good citizens of Strathclyde know how their hard-earned taxes are spent. Most of the time it’s as well they don’t, but the odd choice morsel would warm the cockles of their hearts. The story of how the Inspector, his Constable and the Therapist chased a chicken round a barn for half a morning, for instance, would go down well in the bars and back rooms of the metropolis, if only as evidence of the insanity of country living. We caught it in the end, of course. Three adult humans against one unfit bantam hen is no competition, but you might not have thought so had you seen us half-way through.
