‘You don’t agree, Mrs Lovatt?’
She fluttered. ‘Oh … oh yes, of course, of course. Lovely girl. But it’s not easy – things you do automatically, so hard to be definite. And of course she’s had all these … problems. But if she says she did, well, I’m sure …’ Her voice trailed off suggestively, and her husband gave her a look of irritation.
‘Christie’s both competent and collected. I don’t believe she would forget to shut the gate.’
‘So,’ Macdonald said, ‘someone with a grudge?’
Lovatt looked rueful. ‘You could say. I wanted to farm the land myself, you see. The tenant’s lease had elapsed and I refused to agree a new one with his son.’
‘The Donaldsons?’
‘I’m afraid so. There have been niggles over the years but recently I fell out with Derek Sorley, who was up by the graves with a metal detector. I was afraid the next thing would be digging them up, so I banned him from the island. He didn’t take it well.’
‘We’ll have a word with them. Anyone else?’
Again, like Christie, Lovatt seemed to hesitate, before he said quickly, ‘No, not specifically, though they’re not very fond of us generally in the village.’
Lissa sighed. ‘But Matt was determined we would come to live here, Sergeant.’
Stung by the implied criticism, Lovatt retorted, ‘You wanted it too, Lissa, don’t forget.’
She fluttered again. ‘Oh, of course, I didn’t mean …’
Lovatt didn’t look at her. Macdonald suspected he was afraid his eyes would betray his anger; the air felt thick with it.
As they left, Campbell said, with surprising venom, ‘Poisonous woman!’
‘Poisonous? I’ll give you manipulative, but a bit pathetic, I thought.’
‘That’s the worst kind. Meet my mother-in-law.’
‘Mmm,’ Macdonald said. Perhaps he was biased, but he thought there could be stuff going on under the surface with Lovatt that wouldn’t be very pretty in the light of day. His wife could have reasons for being the way she was.
At the Smugglers Inn, Georgia Stanley was, as always, welcoming. The bar was quiet, with only one or two tables occupied. She had, she said, some leftover cooked sausages and Campbell beamed at the promise of a sausage butty with ketchup.
The sandwiches, though, were all she had to offer them. She’d never heard stories about the island being haunted, and she had never heard anything herself. Georgia was eager, though, to put the knife into the Donaldsons and their crony, and had no doubt that they’d released the stag.
‘And I’m warning you, it’s not going to stop there.’ She was very serious. ‘There’ll be more trouble, and last night it was only luck that the woman wasn’t worse hurt. Or killed, even.’
Macdonald grimaced. ‘We can hardly set up a protection unit, but I hear what you say. We’ll duff them up a bit when we talk to them. But about the ghost stories – who could we talk to that might know?’
Georgia looked surprised that they were persisting, but gave it some thought. ‘Best just knock on doors, quite honestly. There’s some holiday cottages and two or three houses with newish people like the Drummonds, but the rest have been here for ever.’
Macdonald groaned. ‘That takes care of our afternoon. Hurry up and finish that, Ewan.’
Reluctantly, Campbell obeyed, saying thickly, ‘Great sandwich,’ as he followed his sergeant out.
‘We’ll start at the far end,’ Macdonald instructed. ‘There’s a house up there, look, on the hill round the bay. There’s the track, off to the left.’
From its isolated position, above a steep drop to the shore, it looked as if it had been a traditional croft house: grey stone, sturdily built but with small, deeply recessed windows and an upper floor with dormers. There was no sign of any farming activity now, and when Macdonald knocked the door was opened by a grey-haired woman in a pink overall.
He showed his warrant card. ‘Are you the householder?’
‘Och no,’ she said. ‘I’m just one of the carers. It’s Mrs Findlay owns it, her and her son.’
‘Either of them in?’
‘Just her. And she’s not exactly – well, you ken what it’s like.’
‘Would she be able to talk to us?’ Macdonald asked.
‘Oh, she’ll talk to you, right enough. It’s just it’ll not maybe make much sense.’
Campbell said, with unbecoming eagerness, ‘Oh well, then—’
But she cut him short. ‘Och, she’d like fine to see visitors for a wee change, I’m sure. Gets awfy dull for her, never seeing anyone but us and her son.’ She gave a disapproving sniff. ‘And not much of him either. Come away ben.’
Macdonald, feeling not a lot more enthusiastic than his constable, followed her into the front room to the left. As he entered, he had to control his recoil from the frowsty atmosphere, compounded of overheated air, stale human sweat and a faint tang of urine – the smell of old age. He heard Campbell cough behind him and guessed that he, too, was trying not to gag.
There was a neatly made bed in one corner. By the window, a woman was sitting in a lug chair on a rubber sheet; there was a framed photograph of a man on the small chest of drawers beside her. She was grossly fat, with an unhealthy purple tinge to her complexion and though she looked at them, her eyes were vague.
‘Help me, oh help me!’ she moaned, sending a chill down Macdonald’s spine.
‘She does that even on, but it doesn’t mean anything,’ the carer said reassuringly. ‘We’re all here to help you, dearie!’ She raised her voice and patted Aileen Findlay’s hand. The woman pulled it away petulantly.
Macdonald cleared his throat. ‘We’re from the police, Mrs Findlay. Just wanting a little chat.’
She became visibly agitated. ‘Police!’ she cried. ‘Oh God, no! He didn’t. It was wickedness. Evil. Evil. Pretty, too. Cruel, cruel. Wrong! And he was a liar!’ Her voice rose. ‘A liar, I tell you! I couldn’t – but I should. Wrong, wrong! Evil! Wickedness!’ She was screaming now, at the top of her voice.
The carer, alarmed, said, ‘You’d better go. You’re upsetting her – I maybe shouldn’t have let you in. But—’
‘That’s all right,’ Macdonald said hastily. ‘We’re on our way. Hope you manage to get her settled down again.’
Campbell was out in the hall already. As they left, the wild shouting died and again they heard the wail, ‘Help me, oh help me!’
Macdonald said, ‘Well, what do you make of that? What’s been going on there?’
Campbell was shuddering as he started the car. In an unusual burst of loquacity, he said, ‘Don’t even want to guess. Let’s do these calls quickly. I don’t want still to be in this place once it gets dark.’
As they drove on through the village Macdonald said in rallying tones, ‘Come on, Ewan, don’t come over all fey on me. She’s just a daft old woman and you’re letting the ghost stories and the Hammer House of Horrors setting get to you.’ He gestured as they passed the abandoned church with its tumble of gravestones.
‘It’s not the dead folk bother me,’ Campbell said. ‘It’s the living ones.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
All the computer terminals in the CID room were in use. With a practised glance around, DS MacNee homed in on one of the younger DCs and tapped him on the shoulder.
He looked up, dismayed. ‘Aw, Sarge! Ten minutes, OK? I have to get this—’
MacNee shook his head. ‘Hop it, sonny boy,’ and the detective logged out and got up, muttering under his breath about abuse of power.
Grinning, MacNee said, ‘Kind of the point of being a sergeant, ken? That and the money.’
‘It’s us should get paid more for getting kicked around by you lot,’ his victim grumbled.
‘You could be right there, laddie. I’d pay for the privilege, myself,’ MacNee said genially, sitting down in the vacated seat. He called up the figures for drug offences broken down by district, and looked at Borgue’s first.
Contr
ary to his expectation, it seemed there had been fewer arrests, not more. OK, the numbers were small, but the past two years showed a marked drop. Frowning, he scrolled down to the returns from the comparable small police office in the Machars, on the other side of the Galloway area. Here, with minor fluctuations, there was a slow increase, pretty much in line with general trends.
Maybe, after all, this was more about himself than about Brodie. Perhaps the man was clean – but MacNee’s gut was telling him different. He sat back in his chair, thinking. The dispossessed DC looked up hopefully, but seeing the sergeant’s expression thought the better of any attempt at reclamation.
MacNee brooded. There were other criminal activities Brodie could be engaged in – other kinds of smuggling, even. There was a thriving black market in cigarettes, for instance … Yet with what he knew of Brodie’s background—
A thought struck him and he went back to the screen. Brodie would be savvy enough to keep his doorstep clean – indeed, he might easily have swept out the dealers operating there before, which would explain the figures. Kirkcudbright was next door; their stats might be more revealing. Eagerly, he accessed them, along with the earlier returns, and made the comparison.
These, too, told a remarkable story. Up to three years ago, offences had shown the same depressing rise that marked the war against drugs being slowly but surely lost across the country; after that arrests had suddenly fallen, and the improvement had been maintained.
Good policing? The lads out there, nipping it in the bud, keeping the dealers off their well-patrolled patch? Maybe. But they’d all tried that, and no one else had succeeded. And as MacNee scowled at the screen, a face came to mind – a narrow face, with sharp, watchful eyes. Ogilvie.
Sleekit, had been MacNee’s immediate verdict on the man: sly, not to be trusted. The FCA was pretty much running the Borgue office, with PC Tait’s complacent approval. Certainly, he’d been interestingly reluctant to discuss the drugs scene, and he’d be party to information about ops being mounted in the area; a few phone calls would be all it would take to make sure no one had unexpected visitors.
But MacNee had nothing to go on, and the Kirkcudbright lads might take it unkindly if he challenged the sort of figures that would have the chief constable beaming and directing them to share best practice. Still, what else could he do? MacNee yielded the computer to the hovering DC and found a phone in a quiet corner.
He had been tactful – in as far as he ever was – and was unprepared for a blast of rage from the normally equable Inspector Michie.
‘Drugs figures! Don’t talk to me about drugs figures!’
‘Sorry!’ MacNee was startled. ‘I suppose everyone’s asking how you do it.’
‘How we do it?’ Michie gave a bitter laugh. ‘Tam, we’ve had an explosion in drugs use this last bit. We’ve had more petty offenders slapped on the wrist with an unrecorded fiscal fine than ever before. It’s becoming a hotbed, but we make fools of ourselves every time we launch an operation. They always know we’re coming, and I can’t find out who’s tipping them off.’
MacNee could feel the warm, satisfying glow which usually came from a good malt spreading right through him. ‘Well now, Graham,’ he said cordially, ‘I think I can maybe help you there. Try again, but this time, just make sure that none of the information gets through to Borgue.’
‘Borgue? PC Tait?’ Michie was frankly sceptical.
‘Not Tait. An FCA called Ogilvie, who’s being allowed to run the shop. And what’s more, I could maybe give you a wee steer about where to look for the big man.’
It was raining now, slanting silver spears making tiny pockmarks on the surface of the rock pool at Cal Findlay’s feet. Sitting on the promontory below his house and staring out across the bay, he barely noticed he was getting wet.
The tide was going out. Below, a chain of rocks was becoming exposed, dark and jagged, draped with seaweed; in an hour or so they would form a rough causeway out to the island. Over there the trees were on the turn, green giving way to pale yellow and brown, waiting for the first frost to turn the leaves blazing scarlet and gold. It was autumn, just as it had been summer and would be winter: the unalterable pattern of the seasons, the eternal landscape, the inescapable routine of daily life – you came to feel nothing could ever change.
It could, though. A cliff could fall, a hurricane could tear in and level every one of those trees. Cal felt as if he was in the teeth of one now, with the wind rising to a shriek that almost deafened him.
He had come here looking for peace and silence to clear his head, but even now, with the only sound the quiet hiss of rain and the rattle of stones being drawn back by the retreating waves, he couldn’t think straight. He too was being sucked back into the past, a past never forgotten, but suppressed with a sort of dogged desperation, like someone with an ugly symptom hoping if not believing that it can be safely ignored. He couldn’t ignore it now. Now, it was unimaginably worse than his worst imaginings.
The rain was getting heavier, soaking him through. He shivered, only partly with cold, and stood up feeling bleakness seeping into him like the grey veil that was obscuring the landscape in front of him. There was no point in trying to think of a way out, because there was none. It was too late. Ten years too late. Or longer than that – yes, much longer.
With leaden steps he climbed back up to the house and the daily horror of living with his mother. His mouth twisted in an ironic smile at the thought that going on in the same soul-sapping way was the best he could hope for now.
To his surprise the carer’s car was still there. He’d seen it when he’d parked his own, before walking down to the shore. Usually once whoever was on duty had given his mother her tea, she would leave, only returning when it was time to put her to bed. But today she was looking out for him, opening the front door before he could.
‘Oh, there you are! Oh, Cal, I’ve had just an awful job with your mum this afternoon!’ Then she broke off. ‘Dearie me, what’s happened to you? You’re drookit!’
‘Went out for a walk and got caught in it,’ he said tersely, stepping past her into the hall. He could hear the moaning from the front room. ‘Sounds much the same as usual. What’s the problem?’
The woman was still distracted. ‘Are you wanting a towel, or something?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Controlling his irritation with difficulty, he said again, ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘Well, I maybe did the wrong thing,’ she admitted. ‘Thought it’d cheer her up a wee bit to see some different faces, ken? So when the polis came chapping on the door—’
‘The polis?’ He thought his heart would stop, but somehow he managed to say, rather than scream, ‘What were they after?’
The woman frowned. ‘Oh, I never thought to speir what they wanted. Just said could they talk to Aileen.’
‘And you let them in?’ This time he did raise his voice.
She became defensive. ‘How was I to know she’d go daft? You never said no one was to be let in to see her.’
Tight-lipped, he asked, ‘What did she say?’
‘Och, just a whole load of blethers about evil and wickedness – rubbish like that. You know Aileen gets kind of thon way sometimes. They were only a few minutes before they realised, but I thought I’d better stay on and warn you – she’ll quieten down for a while and then she’s off again.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
Thanks for nothing, his tone said, and the carer became huffy. ‘No need to take that tone with me, Cal. It was maybe a mistake, but we all make them, don’t we?’
He didn’t reply, and she flounced off to fetch her coat. He opened the door of Aileen’s room, then stopped dead. Without turning, he said, ‘Where the hell did that photograph come from?’
She peered past him. ‘Oh, that? It was there when I came in today. She must have had it in a drawer. I’ve never seen it before.’
‘OK.’ Cal stood rigid in the doorway, not moving until he heard her car
drive away.
His mother turned her head. ‘Help me, help me!’ she cried. ‘The wickedness! Cruel, cruel!’
He was at her side in two strides, snatching up the photograph on the chest of drawers.
‘You evil, dangerous old bitch!’ he screamed at her. His hand, almost of its own accord, swung back to hit her, but he stopped himself. Bruising that would be reported by whichever carer came to settle her down tonight would hardly improve the situation.
Cal stormed out of the room, out of the house. The rain had stopped; there was a brisk wind now, whipping the clouds across the sky. He threw the photo to the ground, smashing the glass, then stamping the frame to fragments.
The man’s face looked back at him, distorted by the angles of the shards, muddied with footmarks, yet still that same face with its dark, flashy good looks and the slick, arrogant smile.
Risking his fingers on the broken glass, Cal picked the photograph out then shredded it into strips, lengthwise, then across, into tinier and tinier scraps that fluttered to the ground. He bent to gather them up then walked to the retaining wall above the cliff at the edge of the garden. He tossed them into the air and watched the wind take them, fluttering down towards the rocks below.
You couldn’t describe the evening as a success. It was unfortunate; Cammie’s Zoë was a delightful girl, bright and thoughtful and very, very pretty with a creamy complexion and huge brown eyes. And sensitive, too. That was the problem.
When Marjory Fleming went to welcome her, the brown eyes were brimming with tears, which Zoë was doing her best to blink away.
‘Oh dear! Are you all right?’ Marjory asked, concerned.
‘Sorry – yes, yes of course, Mrs Fleming.’ Zoë bit her lip.
Cammie, whose face showed agonised embarrassment, said gruffly, ‘It’s just the stirks. She asked if they were going to be milking cows and I had to tell her.’
Evil for Evil Page 18
