She felt a bit sick at the thought of that, but not as sick as she felt about the situation with her mother. She certainly couldn’t be left alone again.
There had been a woman along the road, she remembered suddenly, who had sometimes helped out in the days when Fleur had still held dinner parties for her father’s business clients – perhaps by some miracle she might be free and prepared to come.
She was. She was happy to come first thing in the morning, and Louise put the phone down with a sigh of relief. It wouldn’t be a long-term solution, but at least she could cross that off today’s list.
Then there was Marnie. She wondered if Marnie would mind doing a sort of informal interview with her; she’d been thinking last night anyway that they should try to tap in a bit more to Marnie’s extraordinary memory. If she could think of the right questions to ask her it might be incredibly useful.
Useful – and, it struck her now, dangerous. Louise might not be the only person to think of its potential, if something Marnie had been witness to at some time was incriminating to someone for some reason. Suddenly the attacks on Marnie made sense.
Time she was getting dressed. She stubbed out her cigarette and went upstairs for her shower. There was no sound from Fleur’s bedroom as she passed but she’d have to be wakened for breakfast or her body clock would go all wrong again.
Marnie could be left to sleep, though. Louise was just going into her own room when she noticed that Marnie’s door, further down the landing, was standing ajar. With sudden misgiving, she pushed it open gently.
The bed was empty and there was a note on the pillow: ‘Thanks for what you did. I’m really sorry about your mum – hope she’s OK in the morning. Marnie.’
That was all. When Louise looked out of the window, Marnie’s car had gone.
It was meant to be helpful, no doubt. Marnie had clearly felt that her being there was endangering her hostesses but in going off like this she had really dropped Louise in it. She hadn’t said where she was going and even if she would answer her phone – which was far from certain – she probably wouldn’t say.
Louise had been counting on keeping secret what she had done but if Marnie had gone missing she’d have to confess tomorrow and take the consequences, which might be very unpleasant indeed.
Hoping against hope, she dialled Marnie’s number. The impersonal voice at the other end informed her that the person she was calling was not available and the further calls she made at intervals had the same result. After a long, long day, Louise gave up and went to bed, feeling sick with worry, both about what might happen to her and, more importantly, what might befall Marnie, alone and unprotected.
Marnie had suffered some bad days recently, but yesterday had been the worst. She had left Stranraer in the dark and driven on aimlessly along roads that were empty in the Sunday calm, but she kept checking her mirror with neurotic frequency. When as the day wore on the occasional car came up behind her she found it hard to control her panic, but as she desperately turned down smaller and smaller roads to shake it off it never followed her.
She stopped occasionally – to refill the car, to have something to eat, or just to sit somewhere watching the sea, trying to blank out her thoughts – but when she stopped moving she would start twitching with the almost superstitious fear that Drax somehow would home in on where she was.
When darkness fell she still had nowhere to go. She had a sleeping bag and blankets, though, and she found a track leading into woodland where she could park up. But tired as she was, sleep didn’t come easily and as the night frosts began the car became an ice-box. Pulling her covers right over her head, she managed at last to drop off but she kept waking with a start of fear at the strange little night sounds of the countryside, and the night seemed to go on for ever.
At first light she woke properly, stiff and rigid with cold and hungry. After two broken nights her eyes were burning and she was worn out, too, by the constant onslaught she had suffered over the last twenty-four hours of images that forced their way into her brain: she was back on the landing with Louise’s mother, she was talking to Anita, she was running from the fire, on and on. If this continued it could drive her mad. She craved a quiet mind like a traveller in the desert seeking water. A quiet mind …
She’s walking across to the abbey. It’s very grey and quiet and she can hear the sheep bleating outside, can even hear the tearing sound as they snatch at the grass. The turf’s sort of springy and she’s almost bouncing as she goes to the chapter house. And it’s even quieter inside as if no one has spoken there for hundreds of years so the quietness sort of muffles her ears and even gets into her head.
Glenluce Abbey – she needed to head back to it. She’d been able to think there and after a day of such mental confusion she badly needed to clear her mind.
Down that little quiet road she’d see Drax if he was coming after her. She’d have to wait till it opened but she’d maybe find a café somewhere on the way. Warmth and food and then the peace of the white walls and the grey stone arches – that sounded good, comforting.
She might as well live in the moment. Was there any point in trying to plan a tomorrow that might never come?
‘I spoke to DI Fleming’s daughter this morning,’ DS MacNee said at the Monday morning briefing, ‘and her husband is being operated on as we speak. I’ll give you news when I have it.’
He was feeling nervous, but his audience of officers was concerned and sympathetic. As he went on to outline the tasks for the day, he heard DC Ewan Campbell, sitting at the back beside DS Andy Macdonald, murmur to his companion, ‘Where’s Hyacinth?’
‘Important meeting in London. Much more important than a murder inquiry.’
MacNee swivelled to give them a glare modelled on his old maths master at school. Macdonald tried to look as if he hadn’t spoken.
‘Thank you,’ MacNee said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Not often I get the chance to tell Campbell off for idle chatter. You’re lined up to see Grant Crichton, right?’
‘Right,’ Macdonald said.
‘Nothing from forensics yet,’ MacNee went on, ‘though I’ll be chasing them up later today. In the meantime …’
He gave out details, took questions and suggestions quite effectively, he thought, and finished feeling pleased with himself on the whole. So far so good. He even had a bit of a strut in his step as he left the room.
DC Hepburn was waiting for him. ‘Could I have a word, Sarge?’
A look at her face told him that this was something big, the sort of thing that would normally land on the boss’s desk. She had black circles under her eyes that looked as if they’d been drawn on with a crayon and as he looked at her she bit her lip.
There would be other detectives in the CID room at the moment. ‘Come up to the boss’s office,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some chasing up to do on the forensic reports.’
Hepburn nodded. As MacNee climbed the stairs he thought of possible angles – professional, personal? Personal, he was inclined to think. There’d been something going on with her the last bit – could it be drink? Drugs – not likely: he’d have seen signs before now. Man trouble? His heart sank at the thought. Advice to the lovelorn wasn’t his style.
It felt strange to go into Fleming’s room when she wasn’t there and stranger still to sit down in her chair behind the desk. Hepburn sat down opposite, perching on the edge of the seat.
‘There’s a problem,’ she said.
No point in messing about. ‘Personal or professional?’
‘Well, both.’
‘Oh.’ He ought to say something encouraging but nothing came to mind. ‘Better spit it out, then.’
Hepburn took a deep breath. ‘On Saturday, when Marnie Bruce refused police protection and had nowhere else to go, I – well, I took her home with me.’
‘Lassie, are you daft?’ MacNee was appalled. ‘You know perfectly well that she’s still a suspect in a murder case. Even if you don’t think she did it, and for th
e record neither do I, for an investigating detective to have a personal relationship like that could bring the impartiality of the whole operation into question.’
‘I know. But I was so sorry for her. She’d nowhere to go – that cow in Bridge Street had put her on a blacklist and she didn’t think anyone would take her locally. And even if they did it would have been very public, wouldn’t it? Anyone could find out.’
‘For heaven’s sake, she could have used a false name, couldn’t she?’
‘I – I never thought of that.’ Hepburn looked crushed. ‘Anyway—’
‘There’s more, is there?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Go on,’ MacNee said hollowly.
‘There was a break-in that night at my house. I’d got someone to rig up an alarm system on the doors and windows – you see, my mother …’
She stopped and took a deep breath. ‘My mother is – well, losing the place. I know you thought I was tired because I’d been living it up, but she’s waking up at all hours and she went out in that storm we had the other night and I was terrified she’d die of exposure or something. I’m at my wit’s end.’
Now he felt guilty. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I – I couldn’t. Even telling you today feels disloyal.’
‘Could happen to anyone. Just an illness, that’s all. And you need your pals, eh? OK, I got it wrong but I’d like to think I was still one of them.’
Hepburn smiled wanly. ‘You weren’t to know. But there’s more.’
‘Aye, I was afraid there might be.’
‘The alarm went off about two in the morning. When I went down to the sitting room the window had been broken but there was no one in the house and I heard a car taking off in a hurry. The alarm’s just a makeshift one – there’s no box on the outside or anything, so they wouldn’t have been expecting a problem.’
‘Looking for Marnie.’ MacNee’s face was grim.
‘I guess we must have been followed. She was driving behind me so of course I didn’t notice anything. They’d have had to be watching the station, you know. We were only together for a couple of minutes as we walked to the car park.’
‘So where is she now?’
Hepburn was studying her fingernails. ‘That’s the worst part. I don’t know. She’s disappeared and she’s not answering her phone.’
MacNee swore.
‘I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me,’ Hepburn cried. ‘I’ve completely screwed up. The thing is, I reckon I know why someone’s trying to kill her. She swears Anita Loudon didn’t tell her anything and yes, it could be that Drax thought she had. But if he knows she was here all day, he’ll know that we’d have questioned her till she told us all she knew about that, so killing her afterwards wouldn’t solve anything.
‘If she’s still dangerous to him, it could be because of something else she knows, something about the past, something he reckons we won’t have thought of yet but that she could remember if the right questions were asked.’
There was a certain logic to it, admittedly. But if there was one thing his years of service had taught MacNee, it was to keep an open mind.
‘You’ve decided it’s Lee, haven’t you?’
‘Well, you read the letter.’ Hepburn was defensive now.
‘And he’s a scumbag and you took against him because he was glaikit enough to think you were just a wee woman he could cajole. The incriminating stuff in that letter goes way back before Marnie was even born, so it can’t have anything to do with her memory, right?’
Hepburn accepted the point, reluctantly. ‘So what happens now, Sarge? Do you – do you have to tell the boss once she comes back?’
MacNee knew what the answer should be. He also knew what would happen once the official channels were opened.
‘She’s not here just now. We’ll wait and see. If Marnie gets back in touch and nothing more comes of it, we’ll maybe be able to keep it quiet. Let that be a lesson to you, though.’
Her thanks were heartfelt. ‘I’ll keep trying Marnie. I hope she’ll maybe feel she owes it to me to let me know she’s safe.’
‘We’ll both hope. Now, I’ve a couple of things to do here, but then I want you to come down to Stranraer with me. I want to speak to Shelley Crichton again. Maybe she can tell us she has a rock-solid alibi for the past couple of nights and we can write her off, but until then there’s no way I’m crossing her off the list. Or her ex, either.’
DCI Nick Alexander came into work still smarting. The searches on Saturday had turned up absolutely nothing and they’d made fools of themselves in front of the port authority. He was a proud man and he had found it hard to take the lavish sympathy that didn’t quite hide glee at the elite force falling flat on its face.
The tip-off had come from a highly reliable source, so the shipment must have been called off. They must have got word of it somehow, or perhaps the ‘routine’ inspection of accounts by HMRC hadn’t been so subtle after all. Of course, the plods stamping around on the murder investigation wouldn’t have helped either.
Had Fleming ignored his embargo, gone and leant on Daniel Lee? If she had, he’d go ballistic. He avoided admitting to himself that he was rather hoping she might have since it would be a convenient excuse for failure.
He grabbed the phone but was frustrated by a bland voice telling him she was unable to take his call. He didn’t leave a message; he wanted to catch her before she had time to prepare her self-justification.
The report on the abortive action would have to be written sometime and he was turning reluctantly to his computer when his phone rang.
As Alexander listened to what the woman at the other end was saying his expression changed to one of unholy joy. ‘My God, you’re a star! Did you stay up all weekend working on that?’
She had, it seemed; she’d picked up a thread in the accounts and had been unable to resist following it to its satisfactory conclusion. More than satisfactory; very, very satisfactory.
‘Tell your boss to give you the day off. In fact, tell your boss to give you a week off, staying in a five-star hotel,’ he said extravagantly. ‘Hang the expense.’
He heard her laughing as he rang off, then he picked up the phone. ‘Get in here,’ he said to his senior inspector. ‘Good news, for once.’
It was blessedly smoke-free in DS Macdonald’s car as he drove DC Campbell along to Stranraer. And silent: you always felt obliged to ask about other people’s holidays even if you knew it would provoke a day-by-day recital telling you more about Torremolinos than you wanted to know, so it was refreshing that Campbell’s reply when asked how the holiday went was ‘Fine’.
Macdonald was looking forward to the interview with Grant Crichton. He had taken against the man – and his wife too, come to that – and there was always satisfaction in breaking a witness you’d known was lying.
He briefed Campbell on the situation. ‘So his wife’s changed her story – the alibi she gave him was false and he was out that night.’
‘Think he killed her?’ Campbell said.
‘I think he knows a lot more about it than he’s admitting. But I don’t think he actually killed her, no.’
‘Why not?’
Macdonald paused. Why not, indeed? The man had got his wife to lie for him, he’d clearly been in an agitated state, showing every sign of guilt at the arrival of a policeman. If, like the other members of the community who had gone to Bridge Street, he believed that Marnie had been sent to mock at the anniversary of his son’s death and that Anita had been party to it, he had the classic combination of motive, means and opportunity.
He said, ‘Well, doesn’t seem the type, really.’ He didn’t need Campbell’s cynical sidelong glance to tell him how lame that sounded.
Changing the subject, he told Campbell about the attempt on Marnie Bruce’s life, the evidence of Anita Loudon’s next-door neighbour and the reluctance of Michael Morrison to have his wife interviewed, but when Macdonald said hopefull
y, ‘Any thoughts?’ Campbell shook his head and silence fell again.
Somehow it seemed a long way to Cairnryan today. Whatever he might feel about Louise, quarrelling with her did pass the time.
‘Doing all right, then,’ Campbell said as they reached the ‘Crichton Haulage’ sign and turned into the extensive yard.
It was busier than it had been the last time Macdonald came, and when they went into the scruffy site office and asked to speak to Mr Crichton, the receptionist, a tired-looking woman with frizzy hair, seemed harassed.
‘He’s been very busy today. I’ll buzz his secretary and see if he can see you.’
Saying ‘Oh, I think you’ll find he can’, wouldn’t really be constructive. Macdonald only nodded and after a brief phone conversation she said, ‘He’s got someone with him. You’ll have to wait.’
She indicated a narrow vinyl-covered bench that ran along one wall and Macdonald and Campbell, both big men, perched on it.
‘They don’t go in for the comforts here,’ Macdonald murmured. ‘Truckers don’t merit coffee tables and magazines, obviously.’
‘Reader’s Digest,’ Campbell said with sudden animation. ‘Should have that.’
‘Read it for the jokes, I suppose. So you can entertain your colleagues,’ Macdonald said, but it was never any use trying to wind Campbell up.
It was ten minutes before the phone on the desk buzzed and the receptionist called over, ‘You’re to go through now. Out of the building, turn right and it’s across the yard.’
The reception area in this building was quite different. A potted palm stood in one corner beside a sofa and chairs with stainless-steel legs, upholstered in beige tweed. There was a low coffee table which did, indeed, display magazines though not the Reader’s Digest. Campbell looked faintly disappointed.
The secretary at the smart, dark teak desk was clearly a superior being, with blonde hair swept into a knot at the back, full make-up and perfectly manicured nails.
‘I’ll ask if he can see you now,’ she said, looking as if a bad smell was somehow sullying her pristine space. ‘Do sit down.’
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