She reached the five-bar gate. They had never bothered to close it and it stood open still, but rotting at the base and with the hinges rusted. The rough grass round about was untended, with clumps of bracken and nettles and brambles round the edges. No change there, then, and the paintwork round the windows was peeling as if it hadn’t been renewed since they left.
There was no one around and the cottage had a deserted feel. The curtains at the windows were hanging limp and there was a big crack in one of the panes. Even so, she hesitated before she walked through the gate and when she reached the door knocked once then paused, listening.
A couple of cars passed, their tyres swishing in puddles on the road, but there was no responsive movement inside. She knocked again; the sound seemed to echo in emptiness and she stepped aside to look through the sitting-room window on the right, cupping her hand against the pane to break the reflection.
It was weird, as if she’d opened a time capsule. She hadn’t expected the familiar furniture would still be here, yet there was the brown sofa, the wonky standard lamp with the orange shade, the cheap coffee table, now missing a great splinter of the wood veneer. It was the setting her flashback memories always produced – and yet it wasn’t. The familiar, grubby disorder had gone and it was almost clinically tidy and bare. The dissonance gave her a sense of confusion that was close to nausea.
Their landlord must still own it. Who was he? Nothing came back to her, so she presumably had never known; her mother would have looked after all that. Certainly, it looked as if it had been empty for a long time. Who would want a run-down place like this, stuck out in the middle of nowhere?
She wandered round the house. The other windows were too high to look into, and on an impulse she tried the back door – locked, of course. The front door no doubt would be too, but she went back and rattled the handle hopefully. It didn’t yield, but the lock looked as if it hadn’t been changed and a sudden thought struck her.
The stone at the foot of the pine tree nearest the house was embedded in soil and moss but she was determined, scrabbling and tugging at it and eventually seeking out a smaller, pointed stone to use as a lever. As it came up small pale creatures scuttled and squirmed away from the light in panic but there, speckled with rust and earth, was the key they had always kept there.
Marnie brushed it clean then went to the back door and turned the key in the lock. It opened with a squeal of unused hinges and she stepped inside with a stirring of expectation.
The place felt full of ghosts. Images assailed her, one after the other, until she was dizzy and whimpering in dismay, ‘No, no!’ Shaking, she struggled to displace them with some rational insight, opening the doors one after another.
There was nothing here. How could there be? It was just a shabby, gloomy, soulless place and it certainly wasn’t going to tell her anything about what had happened to her or where her mother had gone. She didn’t want to be here any more. She gave a shudder as she left, locking the door behind her.
Marnie hefted the key in her hand, preparing to throw it away into the tangle of scrubby growth at the foot of the forest trees. Then, for no real reason that she could think of, she put it back in its place under the stone and pushed the dislodged earth and the torn moss back round about it.
The meeting had finished early for once. It was just after four when Fleming came out and went immediately to the CID room looking for Hepburn, though without much hope. It would have been good to know what exactly Marnie Bruce was expecting.
Hepburn had gone off duty, of course, and Fleming set off up the stairs to her office with the problem still dominating her thoughts. She’d been far too junior to make decisions at the time – had protested about them, indeed – but those more responsible had left the force. Jakie McNally was dead and Donald Bailey, a DI at the time, had retired as superintendent last year – a nice piece of timing there.
Of course, MacNee had been a DS at the time, while Fleming had been a humble PC, but she knew who Bailey’s successor would look to for explanation and it wouldn’t be him. She quailed at the thought.
Detective Superintendent Christine Rowley had been fast-tracked in Edinburgh to DCI and then had transferred to the Galloway Constabulary to cut her teeth before, as she made all too plain, she returned in glory to the sort of policing that was worthy of her talents. She viewed both the inhabitants of her present patch and her subordinates with a sort of lofty amusement which edged into high-pitched annoyance when things went wrong.
East Coast and West Coast Scotland have never seen things in quite the same light, but Fleming’s attempt to explain to her that the old joke, ‘Glasgow and Edinburgh aren’t speaking’ wasn’t just a joke fell on deaf ears. To Rowley it was incomprehensible that they weren’t grateful for enlightenment when she explained how things were done in the capital. It was putting a severe strain on MacNee’s blood pressure.
She wasn’t popular with anyone. Her affected Morningside accent grated and Fleming had taken care not to find out which of her colleagues had coined the nickname ‘Hyacinth’, after Mrs Bucket of TV fame, but she suspected MacNee was involved. It had become quite hard to think of her in any other way.
Rowley would have fifty fits about the Marnie Bruce case. Fleming had frequently moaned about her predecessor, who had elevated busy idleness to a fine art, but she had taken it all back several times since his departure. At least Donald Bailey had let her get on with the job, whereas Rowley liked playing puppet-master till the strings got tangled and then let everything collapse in a heap which would involve hours of patient sorting out for someone. Usually Fleming.
There was no point in giving a preliminary explanation before she knew just what sort of trouble Marnie Bruce was going to cause, but perhaps it would be wise to trawl the files to see precisely the level of constraint they’d been under at the time, given the situation.
It wouldn’t have been computerised. With a sigh, Fleming turned round and went back down the stairs again to the dusty store where the archives were kept. It could take hours to find what she was looking for, and she wasn’t looking forward to the search.
But it was a visit to Disneyland compared to the conversation she would have to have with Hyacinth tomorrow.
Marnie Bruce glanced at her watch as she went back onto the road. Three-quarters of an hour till the next bus was due – how could she fill the time? She’d freeze if she hung about here, so she’d be better walking briskly towards Newton Stewart in the hope that the exercise would warm her up. She might even manage to hitch a lift from a passing car.
She was about to set off in that direction when her eye was caught by another cottage a couple of hundred yards down the road on the other side, and she stopped. She remembered it but she’d never been inside. They’d had no real contact with their neighbours, except that morning …
He’s standing over her with a gun in his hand, and she thinks she’s going to be sick again, with terror. He’s saying something about foxes then he says, ‘You know me, don’t you? Douglas Boyd, from along the road.’
She latched on to the name while trying to force the memory away. Douglas Boyd. It gave her a fresh purpose and she turned back, towards the other cottage. It was a quaint-looking grey stone building with small windows and a slate roof. There was a little bit of land round about it and a grassy patch in front where there was a child’s swing and a sandpit, muddy and pooled with water at the moment.
Douglas Boyd and his wife would be long gone but perhaps the current owner might know where they were if they were still alive: an old people’s home, most likely, but they might still have something to tell her.
The woman who came to the door looked blank at the name ‘Boyd’. She wasn’t much older than Marnie herself; there was a child screaming in the background and her expression conveyed that a stranger at the door was pretty much the last straw. They’d bought it from some people called McCrae, she said, and shut the door in Marnie’s face.
It wasn’
t the girl’s fault that she didn’t know, but she didn’t need to be rude. Feeling irritable and dispirited, Marnie walked aimlessly back past the cottage. What lay ahead of her was a long walk under dark purple clouds that threatened rain, and all this expedition had done was to prompt random bursts of upsetting memories without giving her anything more to follow up.
A silvery glint caught her eye and she turned her head. The trees were thinning now and beyond them there was a glimpse of water, Clatteringshaws Loch. There was a little path leading past the back of the cottage and down to the shore – at least there had been, though it might be overgrown by now. On an impulse she went back into the garden and stepped over the loose wires of the boundary fence.
It was still there. It was some sort of laid path, perhaps a shortcut for the foresters, and it wasn’t completely overgrown, though the sprawl of shrubs was encroaching and she had to duck under snagging branches. It was about fifty yards long and she could see the loch glimmering beyond.
Its wide expanse was steel-grey today under the heavy sky. On a sunny day it would be charming, with the backdrop of green native woodland and the soft surrounding hills hazy-purple with heather, but at this time of year with the trees bare and the heather black and dead it looked grim, even menacing.
The path came out in a little car park beside a tea room and information centre, closed of course. She walked down from the green bank onto the narrow pebbled shore and out of long habit bent and chose a flat stone to skim out across the surface of the loch. It was half-in, half-out of the water, the dry half dull grey, the other half glowing with soft blues and pinks and greens. She’d noticed that before …
She stares at the pebble. How can just water make it look so different? Maybe it’s a different colour anyway? But no, it’s drying already. It’s going back to grey and she loses interest, sending it scliffing across the water – one, two, three, four, then quicker and quicker five, six, seven, nearly eight, and then it sinks, in circles of ripples. She tries another stone or two then she wanders down to—
The Iron Age broch! She hadn’t thought of it until now. It had been a curious structure: a circular drystone wall, overgrown with grass and mosses, with a sort of wigwam of wooden struts added on top to show how they would have lived, that unimaginably ancient tribe who had made their home here, probably to fish in the lake. Perhaps their children had scliffed stones too, maybe even wondered at their colours, as she had done, standing just where she was now. It was a weird thought.
Could it still be there? Marnie was just about to take the path towards it when she was suddenly buffeted by a gust of wind. She turned to look out across the loch and saw the squall coming towards her between the hills, battering down silver spears of rain and ruffling the water into choppy little waves.
She was wearing light rainwear well suited to London showers and had a neat little umbrella in her tote bag, but borne on the wind the rain reached her before she could dig it out and she was soaked through before she could get it open. Once she did, the wind took it, contemptuously blowing it inside out and breaking a couple of its ribs.
The broch would give her shelter – if its roof was still there. Gasping under the shock of the downpour, she ran along the path, her sight blurred by the rivulets pouring down her face. But yes, the roof was there, its timbers blackened by age, and she ducked gratefully under the entrance into the dim interior.
It was smarter than it had been when she was a child, with a neat gravelled floor where once there had been only packed earth, and even a bench. She sat down on it to dig out tissues from her bag to mop her face but rose immediately; there were gaps between the struts and now the seat of her jeans was wet too.
The smell was the same, though – damp, earthy, with an edge of rotting vegetation. She felt a sudden churning in her stomach …
‘Quick, quick,’ Gemma hisses. ‘He’s coming, he’s coming!’ She gives a little squeal of delighted terror as they dash into the broch. They clutch each other as they cower at the back, listening for the footsteps.
She says, ‘They’re getting closer!’ and Gemma mutters, ‘What if he comes in? What’ll we do?’ They’re both covering their heads with their hands, as if that makes them invisible.
Without even a pause, the footsteps go on along the path. ‘That was close,’ she whispers to Gemma.
‘Better wait a minute or two,’ Gemma says. ‘In case he looks back and sees us.’
They know, of course, that he’s just an ordinary man out walking who hasn’t even noticed two silly kids who think it’s fun to scare themselves. And it’s worked; Gemma might be giggling but she’s beginning to feel creepy, as if the ghosts of those people wearing skins and holding clubs resented her being alive when they were long, long dead.
She scrambles up, startling Gemma. She’s desperate to get out, as if something horrible might happen if she doesn’t escape …
Marnie felt the same now. She had the odd prickling down the back of her neck that you get when someone’s looking at you, and even though she knew there was no one there she turned to check. She told herself she was being stupid, but her heart rate speeded up and her breathing thickened. Rain or no rain, she was getting out of here.
It had been too heavy to last long. It was stopping already and as she walked back along the path, mocking her own stupidity, the wind blew a rift in the clouds and a sunbeam lit up the farther shore with golden splendour.
It was the fourth time today that Anita had tried his number, but she didn’t want to leave a message. There was never any guarantee that he would respond.
‘All right, Anita, what do you want?’ he said as he answered the phone.
Caller ID always threw her and she was upset too by his unwelcoming tone. ‘I-I just wanted to warn you about something.’
His voice sharpened. ‘Warn me? What do you mean?’
‘The anniversary,’ she said. ‘It was forty years ago yesterday, and there was a big piece in the Record. Maybe others too.’
‘So?’
Anita hadn’t an answer to that question. ‘Well—’
He cut across her. ‘Just rehashing the old stuff?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Tomorrow’s chip paper, then. That’s all.’
He didn’t even say goodbye and she knew she had, yet again, made a fool of herself. She hated the way she’d sounded. Needy. Pathetic. Hearing his voice had been the sort of fix for her addiction that did no more than keep it alive. She knew she should go cold turkey, yet she also knew the flimsiest excuse to call him would prompt a craving she couldn’t resist, whatever it might cost her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marjory Fleming set her mobile into the hands-free slot before she set off home to Mains of Craigie. She didn’t always remember but today she was anticipating a phone call – had hoped for it sooner, in fact, and she kept glancing at the phone as she drove as if by the power of the human will she could not only force it to ring but make it say what she wanted to hear when it did.
When at last it obliged, she answered it instantly. ‘Cammie?’
‘They’ve picked me. I’m to be in the team on Saturday, Mum.’ His voice, securely bass for years now, was so high with excitement that he sounded suddenly thirteen again.
‘Oh darling, that’s fantastic! Well done! What—’
‘Can’t talk now. Speak later.’
As she drove on, Marjory couldn’t stop beaming. The Scotland under-20 team! Playing for his country had been Cameron’s dream since he learnt there was a game called rugby and a national side, aged about three; the baby present his father had brought Cammie in the maternity ward had been a miniature rugby ball, not a teddy. Bill would be – she didn’t want to say ‘over the moon’, but somehow it was the only phrase that covered it. He’d been no mean player in his own day and she knew that it had cost him to turn his back on the game for the sake of the farm and the family, but then Bill would never have sacrificed anyone else for his own ambitions. She wished
she could say the same for herself – though not so much, she had to admit, that she’d do something about it.
She knew Bill would be putting a bottle of champagne in the fridge even now, but Cammie was staying with friends in Edinburgh tonight so perhaps it had better wait till he got back. There was something faintly sad about a celebration that involved only two people and more than a couple of glasses of champagne always gave Bill indigestion anyway.
No doubt Cammie would be away a lot more now. Hoping for just this, he’d taken a gap year doing farm work before going to agricultural college. Mercifully the veggie phase had passed as the charms of Zoë of the soft brown eyes had faded.
The Darby-and-Joan life lay just ahead of them. Catriona was back in Glasgow studying social work, her planned career as a vet abandoned. Cat seemed very busy with her life up there and with the evening bar job she’d taken on to help pay the bills; they didn’t see much of her.
Marjory tried not to see it as an estrangement, though her conversation with Cat about her choice of a new career had given her the sinking feeling that at least part of its attraction was to be able to take the side of criminal clients against the wicked police. Bill with his usual calm good sense had told her she was being paranoid: she might be, but it didn’t mean her daughter wasn’t gunning for her.
She wasn’t going to let thoughts like that cloud her happiness for Cammie today. Her eyes misted a little as she thought how quickly the funny, affectionate little boy had become this six foot five giant, broad with it, who towered over his tall mother and made even Bill, a very respectable six foot one, look puny.
That was Mains of Craigie now. As she went up the drive she could see that Bill had draped the blue-and-white saltire usually pinned to Cammie’s wall out of his bedroom window, and as she got out of the car sheep scattered in the near field as ‘Flower of Scotland’ blasted out at ear-splitting level.
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