Bad Blood

by Aline Templeton

  Mikey wasn’t pleased. ‘Don’t like this game. I want Mummy. And what’s that?’

  That was Morrison rushing up the stairs. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right. We just have to hide over here, behind the shower.’

  She grabbed him, putting her hand over his mouth. Outraged, Mikey bit it, hard.

  ‘Mikey! Where are you? Where have you gone?’

  At the sound of his grandfather’s voice Mikey gave a frantic wriggle and Marnie, in pain and unused to the surprising strength of small children, didn’t manage to hold him. She heard a woman’s voice shouting ‘Police! Drop your weapon and come down with your hands up!’ just as Mikey shouted, ‘Granddad! I’m in here, in the bathroom.’

  A second later, the door shook under Morrison’s weight. As Mikey stood looking hopefully at it, Marnie heard the sound of a gun being cocked.

  She owed Gemma, who had tried to give her safe haven. And what did she care, anyway, about her rotten life?

  She threw herself at the child, sweeping him aside and as Morrison shot through the lock she felt something in her chest like a heavy punch, then a searing pain, then nothing.

  The thudding metallic sound of a silenced gun being fired brought the officers up short, just below the turn of the stairs which gave them cover. The child was crying, ‘Granddad! Granddad!’ now.

  They couldn’t just stand by, waiting for armed response while the tragedy unfolded. Just behind Fleming on the stairs, MacNee poked his head round and saw Morrison standing on the darkened landing. He wasn’t looking in their direction; he was staring at the door, splintered around the handle, that had his grandson behind it. All he had to do was open it. There had been no sound from Marnie.

  MacNee drew back again out of his sight line. He still had the axe. He hefted it in his hand, wondering whether he could throw it so that the blunt edge would hit Morrison and knock him out. Unlikely, he decided, and too open to disastrous error – if the child came out, say. And if it came to a fight it would be useless against a gun.

  He set it down reluctantly just as Fleming stepped out into full view. ‘Boss!’ he said, alarmed, but she was speaking.

  ‘Michael, can you talk to me just for a moment? You’re suffering and we can help.’ Her voice was steady.

  Courage was one thing, charging down the guns was another. Morrison could simply turn and fire on her; he’d killed already and it got easier. MacNee tensed, poising himself on the balls of his feet.

  The man swung round. The gun was loose in his hand and he was swinging his head from side to side like a wounded animal at bay, baffled by its pain.

  Fleming was going on, having to raise her voice above the frightened wails of the child. ‘You need to put your gun down so we can talk, sort everything out. Put it down, Michael.’

  He was shaking his head now. ‘No, no. Too late.’ He was raising the gun.

  MacNee erupted past Fleming, almost knocking her down the stair. As he leapt the last flight in two bounds and launched himself into a rugby tackle he heard her footsteps right behind him.

  Just as MacNee grabbed his ankles Morrison, with a final roar of agony and despair, shoved the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Fleming was still feeling shaken the next morning. She had seen the mess of brain and blood from suicides before but had never herself been in intimate contact. Even after standing for twenty minutes under a shower at headquarters the night before, and taking another this morning, the memory still made her flesh crawl with revulsion as she and MacNee went to interview Grant Crichton at the Cairnryan police station.

  It would be good if she could wipe out the memory of the aftermath too – of Vivienne Morrison, still in a drugged half-sleep, staggering out to be confronted by something that looked like a scene from the Grand Guignol. At least she had simply collapsed into a faint; the greater problem had been the child struggling to open the bathroom door, the child shut in with at best an injured woman, at worst a corpse. Going in to fetch him, given the gruesome state both she and MacNee were in, would only provoke hysteria.

  Hepburn, mercifully, had paused downstairs to see if there was anything to be done for Gemma Morrison. At the sound of the shot she had raced up the stairs and taken in the situation with admirable efficiency, stepping over Vivienne to fetch the duvet from her bed to cover her husband’s body. Fleming and MacNee removed themselves hastily to let her bring the child out unharmed, though yelling and resisting.

  Then there was Marnie, poor Marnie, who seemed to have taken the bullet that was meant to blast open the door. Perhaps the child, hearing his grandfather’s voice, had gone towards it and she had stepped in to save him? They might never know if that was what had happened: the medical prognosis was poor.

  Gemma, though, was recovering in hospital. Impaired by stress and alcohol, her father’s aim had been wild and the angle suggested that she had actually walked into the bullet by ducking away as he fired. It had skimmed the side of her head, it seemed, without penetrating the skull. Despite a nasty concussion and some blood loss she would make a full recovery, physically. Mentally – that was another question. It was a sad and depressing business.

  On the other hand, Grant Crichton was making life easy for them. He’d sacked his brief and waived his rights to appoint another one and, told of the deaths of his partners, he was singing like a whole aviary of canaries, his unctuous desire to prove himself helpful making Fleming feel she would need another shower.

  ‘The thing is,’ he was explaining, ‘I was always the one who was in the dark. They approached me, you know. They had their business set up and Drax spotted that my haulage company was good cover for them. I never had anything to do with the other side, you know – that was all them.’

  ‘We’re not concerned with that,’ Fleming said. ‘We are investigating the murder of Anita Loudon.’

  ‘So cut the cackle,’ MacNee put in. He was on a short fuse this morning. ‘You’ve admitted already that you went to her house that night and we’ve evidence you were inside there. What went on?’

  Crichton was twisting his hands in his lap. ‘You’ve – you’ve got to understand. As God’s my judge, this is the truth I’m going to tell you.’

  ‘Never mind God – we do the judging here. Get on with it,’ MacNee snarled.

  ‘I wanted to talk to the girl who’d been watching Shelley’s little ceremony. I told you that, remember? It wasn’t a nice thing to do. We’re divorced, but I don’t like to see her made a fool of – and my son.’ His face darkened. ‘That was Kirstie Burnside’s daughter, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Go on.’ Fleming’s voice was cold.

  Crichton gulped. ‘Right. So I wanted Anita to tell me where I could find her, that was all. Not to kill her over it, for God’s sake – why should I?

  ‘When I went round there, I saw that Michael’s car was parked outside. That looked like good news – I knew Anita worked for his wife and I thought he could maybe put a bit of pressure on her. So I just went in – the front door wasn’t locked. I heard Michael swear as I opened it but I couldn’t see him. Then he said, ‘“Thank God it’s you!” and stepped out from behind the door. He was holding this iron bar – crowbar, I suppose you’d say – and when I looked round Anita Loudon was lying on the floor beyond the sofa. Her head …’ He shuddered. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’

  Fleming pulled over the carafe on the table between them and poured out a glass. She handed it to him without speaking.

  ‘He told me what had happened. His wife had come home and told him Anita was in a terrible state. She hadn’t told her exactly what the problem was but there was something she’d done that was bothering her and there were some things she knew about that made her frightened of what Drax might do next. Well, Vivienne’s a nice lady – she’d told her to go to talk to you lot.

  ‘If I’d been Michael I’d have said, just let her tell them—’

  ‘Oh really,’ MacNee said. ‘Just like you did when you had the chance later.’
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br />   Crichton coloured. ‘They’d got me in too deep by then, that was the thing. You see, it was all Drax. He was the leader in everything, though it was Michael who put up the money. He bought him the nightclub as a pay-off for what he’d done before – before I knew them – but Drax called all the shots. And he’d this genius accountant, too, who could make everything look the way it should – we needed her.

  ‘That night, though – well, Michael said we were all in danger from Anita, that Drax had said if she wasn’t eliminated everything would come out, but he couldn’t do it himself because he’d be number-one suspect with his DNA and prints all over the house. Michael would need to do it, unless he wanted the whole thing to blow up.’

  He’d used Kirstie the same way all those years ago, Fleming recalled. It all figured. The puppet-master, pulling the strings.

  ‘I shouldn’t have known anything about it, that was the thing.’ Crichton sounded aggrieved. ‘It was just bad luck – I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could never have done it. But Michael …’ He gave a shudder. ‘From the way she looked he had just gone at her, as if he was too angry to stop once he started.

  ‘So he told me that if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, he and Drax would both swear that I’d confessed to killing her. And he said – I’ll never forget it – “You know what Drax is like, if it comes to disloyalty”.’

  ‘What is he like, Grant?’ Fleming’s voice was gentle, but he reacted as if she had jabbed him with a needle.

  ‘Oh – I don’t mean – he doesn’t like it, that’s all, and he – he can be very, well, unpleasant.’

  Fleming raised her eyebrows but she was more interested in hearing the end of the story.

  ‘I went home after that. I was in shock, I think. I didn’t know what he was going to do with her body and I didn’t want to know. When I heard in the morning where he’d put it, right where Tommy lay, I-I – well, I panicked.’

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped at his forehead, then his trembling mouth. ‘I said it would look as if it was me or Shelley did it, but they said no, no, it was to implicate the vigilantes who’d attacked the girl already – that was the sort of thing they would do.

  ‘I just felt sick. I’ve felt sick ever since. And scared – I realised then that their plan was to drop me in it all along. But I couldn’t come to you, not once all this started.’ He gestured round the Cairnryan interview room.

  ‘Chief Inspector Alexander says the more I cooperate the better it will be for me. And you can say I have, can’t you?’ He leant forward eagerly. ‘I’ll answer any questions you have – anything you want to know.’

  ‘Just the one,’ MacNee said. ‘The fire-bombing of the cottage at Clatteringshaws Loch – did you know where the girl was staying?’

  Crichton’s face went crimson. ‘No, I—’ he began, then under the cold disbelief of both detectives, he changed his mind. ‘I didn’t want to know,’ he cried. ‘Drax phoned and told me. I didn’t know why – not until I heard what had happened and then I knew that was all part of their attempt to fit me up for that too. He knew I was angry with the girl and he hoped I’d go out there and his dirty work would be blamed on me. That’s if he did it – maybe he just set up Michael to do that for him too.

  ‘Well, they’re both dead now, and may they rot in hell for what they did.’

  With a glance at MacNee, Fleming got to her feet. ‘Terminating the interview, 10.38,’ she said for the benefit of the tape and switched it off.

  ‘That’s all, Mr Crichton. And yes, you have cooperated but in this case it won’t do you much good. You’re accessory to a murder and more than that, you have blood on your hands because you said nothing, just to save your own worthless hide. There’s a woman fighting for her life in hospital as we speak and it’s only chance that Morrison’s wife, his daughter and his grandson didn’t die too before he blew his brains out.

  ‘Perhaps they may rot in hell, but I wouldn’t be at all certain about your own destination.’

  She swept out. MacNee gave her a sideways look as he joined her. ‘Well, you certainly tellt him.’

  ‘Foul creature!’ She gave a shudder of distaste. ‘We’d better pop into Nick’s office. I want to suggest they might find there were some instances of Lee’s “displeasure” that Grant hasn’t told them about yet.’

  DCI Alexander was in high good humour. ‘We’ve so much stuff coming in now we hardly know where to start,’ he said.

  ‘An embarras de richesses,’ MacNee said. It was a phrase he had adopted from Hepburn, though without adopting her pronunciation, and the look Alexander gave him was faintly puzzled.

  ‘We’ve discovered that Morrison owned the farm next door and there were almost a dozen illegal immigrants living in a squalid barn, mostly working as virtual slaves in his construction business. The farmer’s decided that cooperating fully is in his best interests.’

  ‘It’s your charm that does it, Nick,’ Fleming said. ‘You’d softened Crichton up for us nicely too.’

  ‘Get what you wanted? That’s good. Last night sounded a bit messy.’

  Fleming winced. ‘You could say. There’s a victim in a very bad way too. Any idea what’s happened in Glasgow?’

  ‘Another good haul up there. They’d a sort of dormitory above the nightclub and it looks as if that was a temporary stopping-off point before they filtered the immigrants into Glasgow. Some, of course, must have gone south, but that was riskier – the busload that was picked up on the M6 was our breakthrough.

  ‘Oh, and there was one quirky little detail. They were running a double set of books, of course, and the accountant working them at the nightclub – top grade, according to our forensic staff – seemed to be in some sort of relationship with Lee. When they fingerprinted her they discovered she was actually Kirstie Burnside – do you remember her? Child murderer, Dunmore’s only local celebrity.’

  For once, Fleming was lost for words. It was MacNee who said, ‘Oh aye, we ken her all right. We’d have dug the place up looking for her body, if we’d had any suggestion where to start.’

  ‘I’m having a dram, anyway,’ Bill said firmly as they cleared up after a supper of poached salmon with green beans and boiled new potatoes. ‘The medication makes allowance for that – in fact, I shouldn’t miss it.’

  ‘So you say. Bed at nine, though,’ Marjory said. ‘And no farm work at all, not so much as a walk round the hill, until you’ve had your check-up.’

  ‘He said I wasn’t to think of myself as an invalid, so stop fussing.’ Bill fetched the bottle of Bladnoch and the heavy crystal tumblers from the cupboard and headed off to the sitting room with Meg the collie importantly leading the way.

  Marjory put a match to the fire that Karolina had laid and sank down into her armchair with an exhausted sigh.

  ‘You’re needing an early night more than I am,’ Bill said as Meg, looking reproachful at the absence of immediate warmth, settled on the hearthrug.

  Marjory took the glass from him. ‘Just a bit depressed,’ she said, then corrected herself. ‘That’s not right – how could I be depressed, when I’ve got you sitting across there looking better than you’ve any right to look, and Meg there by the fire whinging – just be patient, Meg, it’ll get hotter in a minute. And a dram – what more could a girl want? Sláinte!’

  Bill sat down opposite. ‘Still depressed, just the same?’

  ‘My whole world hasn’t fallen apart, thank God, but it’s hard to feel cheerful about the inquiry into Morrison’s death as we tried to arrest him, and the inquiry into defying firearms regulations and not preventing my staff from doing the same hanging over my head.

  ‘And the devastation that solipsistic sod caused! He was too arrogant to accept the humiliation of being exposed for what he was, and conceited enough to believe he was so central to their existence that his family would prefer to die than to live on without him.

  ‘I went to see Gemma today and it was pitiful. She’s going to need a lot of
help; she’s trying to square the loving father she knew all her life with the monster he became and it’s not working – she’s in pieces. She’s a nice girl, Bill, but she’d been kept dependent. He’d never let the wind blow on her and I can’t think how she’s going to weather the hurricane now.

  ‘He thought he was such a big man but really he was nothing more than Daniel Lee’s puppet. I doubt if he’d even have thought of the whole illegal immigration racket if it hadn’t been for Lee – he was definitely the brains behind the operation, along with Kirstie Burnside.

  ‘It’s so strange, Bill – she seems to be very clever, a brilliant accountant, they said when they’d checked out the way the consortium’s books had been falsified. She’d even done a set that clearly the other two partners knew nothing about, which ran all the money-laundering stuff through a separate account in their names.’

  ‘Sophisticated stuff, then. She’ll be wasted where she’s no doubt headed. There’d be banks queuing up to employ her, with talents like that. They’d probably never have found out about the Libor scandal if she’d been in charge.’

  Marjory smiled. ‘Bill Fleming, the cynic! But yes, it makes me very sad to think of the life she might have had, if Lee hadn’t seized on her. It was all about control with him – a psychopath, with all the characteristic charisma and cunning, getting his satisfaction out of operating at one remove.

  ‘I don’t know whether calling his nightclub “Zombies” was deliberately significant, but it certainly wasn’t a random choice. Anita Loudon and Kirstie Burnside were little more than that. They both called themselves his slaves, as if that was a badge of honour.

  ‘There may be more to come out about his operations once they’ve worked Crichton over. The consortium’s treatment of the immigrants is going to be a major investigation, apart from anything else. And I’m happy to say that with no one to share the blame, they’ll throw the book at Crichton.’