Bad Blood

by Aline Templeton

  Air became more important than concealment. Choking, wheezing, she emerged, looking fearfully about her.

  There was no one to be seen on the path, but the rising wind was whipping sparks and small burning branches from the trees onto it. Before long one of the trees would fall. Marnie had to take the risk, now.

  The melting frost sizzled and spat as the flames licked at the frozen grass by the side of the path. She tried to dodge the sparks, but the smell of frizzling hair told her she had failed and she beat at it frantically as she ran towards the car park, coughing till she retched.

  But there it was – and as she reached the edge there was the sound of sirens and a moment later the glorious sight of flashing blue lights.

  Marjory Fleming waited until first light to go out to feed the hens. Even for the sake of making sure they would be in plenty of time for the Scotland Under-20 international against a touring Samoan team, she wasn’t going to risk giving the fox that lurked around at dusk and dawn a free feast. The hens, though, were slow to rouse on this cold, wet, windy morning and she muttered at them impatiently. They muttered back.

  At least the weather should give the Scottish team an advantage over lads used to tropical warmth. Level playing field – pah! All she wanted was for Scotland to win – though, to be honest, if Scotland lost but Cammie played brilliantly and scored a try, she’d settle for that.

  Bill was presiding over the fry-up when she got back and Cat, back for the weekend, was putting the coffee mugs down on the table as she padded in on her stocking soles. She gave her mother a cynical glance.

  ‘Well, what do you suppose the odds are against you actually making it to see your son play and not being called back to do something massively, frighteningly important that only you can do?’

  Her father made an exasperated sound, but Marjory said calmly, ‘Very low, in fact.’ Her mobile was lying on the dresser; she picked it up and demonstrated that it was switched off.

  ‘See?’ She pulled a face at her daughter. ‘I’ve told Tam that I can’t be reached today.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Cat admitted. ‘You mean, it might be like being a real, normal family when we can look forward to us all going together to do something?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Her daughter might be a pain in the neck but in the barbed remark Marjory could hear the echo of past disappointments and hurt. And at least it showed that whatever she might say, having her mother there still mattered.

  They left the house just after eight for a twelve-thirty kick-off at Murrayfield.

  Without hold-ups, it should leave them enough time to get the car parked, find their seats and savour the atmosphere before it started.

  Bill was fussing. ‘I hope we’ve left enough time. You know what parking’s like in Edinburgh and the official car park’s just extortionate.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Marjory said. ‘You don’t get a huge turnout for a junior international.’

  ‘If we get held up you can always put on your flashing blue light,’ Cat said.

  ‘You think?’ Marjory said dryly. ‘We’ll be in plenty of time.’

  As they reached the motorway, the car fell silent. Glancing in the mirror Marjory saw that Cat had plugged herself into her iPod and Bill, bless his heart, was sound asleep. He was absolutely exhausted these days; thank goodness Rafael’s ankle was better and Cammie too would be home much of the time. She’d have to see to it that Bill didn’t overdo it for the next bit.

  She quite welcomed the thought of a long, silent drive. It was ideal for thinking, when there would be no distractions and she felt at the moment that she still hadn’t got a proper handle on the case. Perhaps the forensic evidence would clear the fog that surrounded it at the moment, but it would do her good to review what she had already and see if that led her to something she hadn’t thought of so far.

  There was no doubt in her mind that Marnie’s arrival had been the catalyst for Anita’s murder. Perhaps it really was as straightforward as it looked on the face of it: one of Tommy Crichton’s grieving parents couldn’t forgive her for allowing Kirstie’s daughter to come back to spy on the fortieth anniversary and with Kirstie unreachable had taken vengeance on Anita instead. Putting the body in that telltale position might have been something psychologically necessary – or it could have been some sort of double bluff.

  Grant Crichton had an alibi that looked shaky; Shelley had none at all. Fleming had no difficulty in believing that both could have found enough hatred in their hearts to justify what they had done, separately – or even together?

  But then there was Daniel Lee. She thought back to her interview with him: his manipulative charm, his sudden white-hot rage, only just controlled. Certainly a dangerous man, even an evil man. It wasn’t a word she often used; most people who killed were uncontrolled, damaged or frightened. Where Lee was concerned, she could believe he would act with cold-blooded enjoyment.

  What was his background, she wondered suddenly? He had been at primary school in Dunmore; Marnie had known him as a friend of her mother’s. Then suddenly, here he was with a lucrative business – where had the money for a prosperous nightclub in Glasgow come from? That could be the key to the whole thing.

  Morrison was in the mix somewhere. There was a lot going on there too, obviously; if she knew how the consortium had come about the picture might become clearer but approaching them right at this moment would risk jeopardising Nick Alexander’s operation.

  She could only hope that the swoop he had talked about would come sooner rather than later. Rowley was getting extremely restive, even though Fleming had patiently spelt out that unless you had direct witness evidence you had nowhere to go until the lab reports came through – always supposing there was anything conclusive after that.

  It was intensely frustrating. She would have to wait to try to find out what she wanted to know about Drax’s background …

  Oh no, she wouldn’t. Marnie Bruce had known Lee as a friend of her mother’s and with her perfect recall she could repeat every conversation she had ever heard between her mother and Drax, as she called him.

  The interviews with Marnie had all been about the present, even though the questions Marnie was asking had all been about what had happened to her mother in the past, questions that Fleming now realised she herself had dismissed as being unanswerable. Marnie could be a treasure trove of information about Drax’s past.

  And with the thought, she felt a cold shiver down her spine. If she knew that, Daniel Lee – and others – knew that too. If information locked in Marnie’s brain was dangerous, she was only safe as long as no one knew where she was.

  Marnie Bruce was asleep in a corner of one of the waiting rooms when DS MacNee came on duty in the morning. She looked very vulnerable, still clutching a silver survival blanket round her though the room was warm, and there were smears of dirt and soot on her pale face. A frizzled patch of her red-gold hair showed what a narrow escape she’d had.

  The woman PC who had been sitting with her got up and tiptoed to the door. ‘She’s only just dropped off, poor thing,’ she whispered. ‘Do you have to wake her?’

  MacNee beckoned her outside. ‘What’s she been able to tell us?’

  The constable shook her head. ‘Nothing much, Sarge. She was too shocked to make a lot of sense at first, and when we got her calmed down she could only tell us that she’d wakened and seen a car outside. The cottage has been abandoned for years and as far as we could make out she’s been squatting – said she’d lived there once – so maybe she was just scared it was the owner. Anyway it was lucky she got out.’

  MacNee nodded. ‘Right enough. Molotov cocktail?’

  ‘Not official yet, but they think so. The noise woke the people in the nearby cottage and they got the emergency services but they didn’t see anything, like a suspicious car leaving the scene.’

  ‘There’s always occasional cars along the Queen’s Way even at three in the morning,’ MacNee said gloomily. He glanced back th
rough the doorway. ‘Stay with her, let me know when she wakens up, OK?’

  He went back to the CID room, glancing at his watch. Someone had tried to kill Marnie Bruce, and damn nearly succeeded. The boss needed to know about this but she’d told him she’d be incommunicado until after Cammie’s game was over. He couldn’t blame her: she deserved to share in her boy’s moment of glory. If he’d had a son representing his country—

  The old grief took him unexpectedly by the throat. His wife Bunty had cared more that there were no children, certainly, but he’d had his dreams too: a MacNee striker in the Rangers team. There would never be one, and now it didn’t even look as if there’d be a Rangers team either.

  Louise Hepburn got up on Saturday morning feeling ever so slightly smug. The new regime was working: she’d insisted her mother went to bed when she did, and provided they got up at the same time, the natural need for sleep ought to do the rest. She’d brought what was, very probably, professionally inappropriate pressure to bear on Jimmy, the proprietor of a local security installation firm that got quite a lot of police business, and he’d installed a makeshift alarm on windows and doors so she’d been able to have a sound night’s sleep. If Fleur was seized with an ambition to go on a midnight ramble she’d know all about it.

  She wasn’t due in at work today after all. With budgets tight, they weren’t going to draft in extra manpower if things had stalled, as they seemed to have for the moment. She was in her dressing gown, warming up croissants and roasting coffee beans – the smell was a sure-fire way of seeing to it that Fleur didn’t sneak back to bed – when the doorbell rang.

  Louise frowned. Who would it be at ten o’clock on a Saturday? If it was work, they’d phone or text.

  It wasn’t. It was Lintie, a kindly middle-aged neighbour whom Louise had known all her life. She was wearing an anxious frown which cleared when she saw Louise.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you this early, pet, but I know you work on Saturday sometimes and I was afraid you’d maybe be gone if I left it any later. Can I have a wee word?’

  ‘Yes, of course, come in. I’m through in the kitchen and I’m just going to put the coffee on. Mum’ll be down in a minute.’

  Lintie hesitated. ‘It was just you, really,’ she said awkwardly.

  Louise’s heart suddenly sank. ‘What’s wrong, Lintie?’

  ‘It’s Fleur, dear. When you’re out at work, she’s stravaiging all over the place, just wandering around. She doesn’t seem to know where she is, if you speak to her. Is there a problem?’

  Louise felt sick. ‘She’s … she’s just a bit confused. She never quite seemed to get over Dad’s death, you know? I’m hoping with me living here now and able to keep an eye, you know, she’ll get back to normal, given time.’

  ‘You’re a good lassie, Louise. But I wonder if you should maybe make some more arrangements before she comes to harm? Just till she gets better, you know?’

  She shrank from the kindly pity in the woman’s face. ‘That’s … that’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Could you possibly keep an eye out for her meantime?’

  ‘Of course I will, pet. There’s a few of us been worried and we’ll all do what we can, but it’s difficult when she can’t speak the language.’

  Louise managed not to cry until Lintie had left but back in the kitchen, with the coffee making the friendly, familiar sound as it percolated, the tears came. Carers were hard to find anyway, and where could she find one who could speak French? Someone who didn’t might stand in temporarily but her mother would find it even more confusing and it couldn’t go on for ever.

  She knew what that meant: she knew the duty of an unmarried only daughter and love came into it as well as duty. But give up the job she adored, abandon the dream career with all its interest and challenge to spend her life cooped up in the house here with a mother whose decline was inevitable but – and she hated herself for even thinking of it – whose general health was excellent.

  She heard Fleur’s footsteps in the hall. She came in, immaculate as

  always in a camel skirt and a cream silk shirt with a few gold chains round her neck and a camel cashmere cardigan round her shoulders.

  ‘Coffee! Wonderful, my darling!’ She came over, as always, to say good morning with a kiss on each cheek and another for good measure, then looked around.

  ‘Where is your papa? You’d better go and fetch him or his coffee will be getting cold.’

  He’d give Marnie Bruce another half-hour, MacNee decided, then he’d really have to wake her and talk through what had happened last night.

  Meantime, he went to a computer in the CID room and looked through the reports but no blinding flash of insight struck him. He hadn’t expected that it would; it was fairly clear that until they got in the forensic results, there was only more legwork and knocking on doors with a diminishing likelihood of useful returns. There were lads out in the rain doing that now.

  He had a gut feeling, too, that if they could get hold of Vivienne Morrison they’d be able to drag something useful out of her. He didn’t think for a moment that she was concealing anything; she’d seemed a nice, gentle lady and, being reluctantly fair to her husband, had clearly been utterly distraught at what had happened. Morrison couldn’t stall for ever; they’d start getting heavy next week.

  He’d just glanced at his watch again impatiently when one of the FCAs came in with a small package. ‘This has just been handed in,’ he said.

  MacNee took it, glancing at it incuriously. It was only when he saw the label – Curtis and Fairlie, Solicitors – that his gaze sharpened. Someone must be keen, working on a Saturday.

  He opened it. Inside there was a formal covering letter and two envelopes. One was typewritten, addressed to Miss M. Bruce, and the other was handwritten in a light-blue ink, a loopy scrawl with a little circle above the ‘i’.

  MacNee turned it over, even held it up to the light in a pointless attempt to see what was inside. He tapped it on his hand: from the feel of it, at least a couple of pages. Just as well there wasn’t a kettle in the CID room or he’d have been sorely tempted to steam it open.

  So what did he do now? Fleming had said yesterday that she wanted to be there when Marnie opened it, afraid it might be something that would distress the girl even more – and she’d had enough over the past few days, even without the hair-breadth escape from death last night, to need very sympathetic treatment.

  It was time he spoke to her about the fire, at least, but if there was evidence that might be useful in a murder inquiry you didn’t just sit on it. He’d made a vow not to bother Fleming today; he knew she’d had family problems because the job always came first, but reluctantly he decided he had to. She wouldn’t need to come back, just to decide whether it could wait. He picked up his mobile.

  It went to voicemail. Of course, she’d said it would be off during the match. He didn’t know when it would start, but it would be over by early afternoon. The decision could afford to wait until then.

  Marjory Fleming felt her throat close with emotion as the wavering strains of ‘Flower of Scotland’ swelled from the pipe band – a bit of a dirge, certainly, and she sometimes thought the Scottish team would do better if it began the game with something more than nostalgia to stir the blood, but that was her own lad standing on the hallowed turf of the national stadium with a number 8 on his back, singing along with the Scottish team.

  She stole a glance at Bill, rigidly at attention for the anthem, and she could see a tear glistening. Pride – or even envy, perhaps, that he in his heyday had never had that chance? She squeezed his hand and he grinned at her and winked.

  It was so lucky that Cammie had been picked for this game, the only one of the Under 20s fixtures to be played here this year. The crowd was thin but Murrayfield had an atmosphere and glamour all of its own, despite the downpour and chilly wind. It would be a mudbath out there but any rugby-playing Scot was well used to that.

  She joined in
the roar as they took the kick-off then settled back to enjoy the game, inasmuch as any mother could enjoy watching her son putting himself constantly at risk of severe physical injury.

  ‘Marnie?’

  The voice was gentle but at the sound of her name Marnie’s eyes flipped open immediately. She was confused: where was she? There was a terrible crick in her neck and her mouth was painfully dry. She struggled up in the chair.

  The small man bending over her was smiling, sort of. ‘DS MacNee, remember?’ he said and she nodded.

  Of course, she’d been brought here after the fire last night.

  What was that noise? Was it a car outside – does someone know she’s here? She’s out of bed and her heart’s beating a mile a minute and she’s shoving her feet into shoes and it’s cold, very cold. She grabs the jacket by the side of the bed, she opens her bedroom door – car headlights—

  ‘Marnie, you all right?’ MacNee was tugging at her arm, pulling her out of the flashback.

  She licked dry lips and croaked, ‘Yes, sorry. Is there any water?’

  MacNee looked round; there was a carafe and a glass on a side table and he poured out the water and gave it to her.

  Marnie drank it thirstily. ‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘I was a bit confused.’

  ‘I’m just wanting to talk through what happened last night. I know they’ve taken a statement but maybe if we had a wee chat there might be something you’d forgotten.’

  Could she think back without going through the whole thing with pictures and action? Probably not, but she’d obviously have to try.

  ‘There wasn’t much to tell, really. I think the noise of the car woke me – I shouldn’t have been there, after all, and I just wanted to get away before they found me. It was only when I smelt the petrol—’