Evil for Evil

by Aline Templeton

  Lovatt became more animated. ‘Could we rewind, please? Can I have that moment back, with all the advantage of 20/20 hindsight? I had nothing at all to do with my father’s death. I knew if I told you he was my father and that I had inherited all of the estate because he had not made any claim to it, you would make it your business to go after me. To be honest, I stopped buying into the middle-class idea that the police are our friends quite a long time ago.’

  ‘So you thought lying to us was the answer?’ Macdonald’s response was immediate and fierce. ‘Given the proper information, we would have discovered that your twin was alive. We had information on your father already which might have let us trace her, before there were two more deaths, and nearly one more—’

  ‘Cal.’ Lovatt spoke heavily. ‘I beg you to believe I didn’t know he was my half-brother. I guess he was waiting below when my father constructed his little scenario with the ladder, happy to carry Helen off, to be a jailer – here I’m using Helen’s exact words – on the island, until the fuss died down.

  ‘May I suggest that you talk to him about what happened? I think he knows a great deal more than I can tell you.’

  As they walked back to the car, Macdonald said to Campbell, ‘The boss is worried about him, but I don’t think he’s a suicide risk. He’s making excuses for himself already. He’s just weak, that’s his problem. But you do find yourself wondering what you’d have done, put in a situation like that with your own father.’

  Campbell looked at him in surprise. ‘Shopped the bugger, of course. Would have saved a lot of trouble.’

  Macdonald gave a crack of laughter, but as he was opening the car door he saw a figure striding out along the coast path, walking away from him, buckets in her hands to feed the bellowing stags. Loyal to the last, Christie was. Loyal, and decent – and lost to him.

  The pain he felt was a real, physical pain, somewhere in the region of his heart, as if something vital had been torn away. He couldn’t kid himself that there was any way back, after all that had happened. He could only hope that one day the woman he still couldn’t help loving would find someone worthy of her and that, please God, it wouldn’t be Lovatt.

  Fleming had spent some time preparing carefully for the crucial interview with Elena Tindall. The Supreme Court in London had forced a recent change in policy, in line with English law, which meant that a lawyer had to be present at all questioning after arrest. It was a change which had raised a lot of hackles – after all, Scotland’s relaxed policy on questioning was coupled with a rigid requirement for corroboration that had prevented the forced confession scandals the English system had suffered.

  Having to second-guess what the accused’s brief would take exception to was an art Fleming was only beginning to acquire. As she walked to the interview room, taking Campbell when he got back from the Lovatt interview, she said, ‘I thought we’d start straight in with Eddie Tindall. Elena can claim accident, of course, but that’s her most vulnerable point. Might give us an in to the questions about her intention to murder Lovatt.’

  She glanced at Campbell, but he didn’t seem impressed. She raised her eyebrows. ‘No?’

  ‘Won’t say anything.’

  Campbell’s instinct was her reason for asking him along, rather than the more senior Macdonald. ‘She was coming apart last night,’ she said, a little doubtfully now.

  ‘Won’t be, this morning. Saw her into the van last night afterwards. Cool as the proverbial.’

  Fleming’s heart sank. ‘Oh well,’ she said, as they reached the door of the interview room. ‘Over the top.’

  The woman who had last night been sobbing, incoherent and on the verge of disintegration, was sitting calmly beside her brief, a small, terrier-like man whom Fleming knew as one of the most successful criminal defence lawyers in Glasgow. Elena’s control was awesome: she didn’t look like someone who had spent the previous night in a police cell, with her shining blonde hair smooth and her jeans and white T-shirt looking somehow pristine. She wasn’t wearing make-up, but with skin that good, Fleming thought with just a tinge of envy, who needed it?

  The formalities completed, Fleming said, ‘Eddie Tindall. I wanted to ask you—’

  ‘My client has asked me to state that she deeply regrets the accident that caused her husband’s death. She is, of course, in deep grief and too distressed to answer you herself. I ask you to respect that.’

  Elena Tindall’s dark-blue eyes – so like her brother’s – met Fleming’s impassively.

  She didn’t offer condolences. ‘This wasn’t an accident that couldn’t have been avoided. Mrs Tindall, how did you come to have the darts in your possession?’

  There was no answer. She tried again. ‘Mrs Tindall, you killed your husband. I accept that it was unintentional, but I need to know what you did intend to do with them.’

  ‘My client has no further comment to make.’

  Fleming looked directly at Elena. ‘Look, we are aware of the background. We know what you have suffered. There is evidence in mitigation that we are more than happy to promote, but we need your full cooperation. You killed your father—’

  ‘No comment,’ the lawyer said again.

  ‘Let’s talk about Melissa Lovatt, then,’ Fleming suggested. Elena looked back at her with cold eyes.

  ‘Melissa Lovatt?’ Fleming put more pressure on the name.

  ‘You asked that question already,’ her lawyer said. ‘My client does not wish to answer.’

  ‘The forensic teams are at this moment taking your chalet apart, and I can assure you that evidence will be found.’

  Silence.

  ‘All right, let’s talk about the fire at your brother’s farmhouse. Mrs Tindall?’

  Silence.

  ‘Perhaps you might have something to say about the death of Hugh Donaldson?’

  Fleming saw the name register in a widening of the dark-blue eyes and a tiny shiver. The lawyer was clearly taken by surprise, and he turned towards his client, looking a question.

  Elena shrugged her slim shoulders, and he said, ‘My client has nothing to say.’

  ‘All right. The bottle attack,’ she stressed the words, ‘on Calum Findlay? You may remember that a bottle was used to murder Melissa Lovatt.’

  ‘My client wishes me to state that this was self-defence.’

  ‘Does your client,’ Fleming said, struggling to match Elena’s coolness with her own, ‘have anything at all she conceivably might wish to say about any of the charges we are about to raise against her? You know that an early guilty plea can mean a considerable reduction in sentence.’

  Elena looked at her contemptuously. ‘There isn’t a jury in the land who wouldn’t be on my side.’ She glanced at her lawyer. ‘I assume you can find someone who can make it clear what I went through?’

  ‘Well, of course. Am I right that you have nothing else you wish to say?’

  The incline of her head was positively regal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Cal Findlay didn’t like the look of Detective Sergeant MacNee. Small, cocky, and smiling in a way that made you feel it would be much more reassuring if he didn’t.

  ‘Just a wee chat,’ he’d said, sitting down on the chair beside the bed. There was a girl with him who didn’t say anything, just sat down in another chair in the corner. She looked too young to be in the polis.

  ‘I’ll explain. We’ve a few things we need to clear up. You’re not under arrest, and this isn’t formal questioning – yet. But maybe if we can sort something out between us now, it won’t come to that, eh?’

  There was the unsettling smile again. Findlay sat up straighter on his pillows.

  ‘OK if I record this – just so DC Hepburn here doesn’t get writer’s cramp scribbling?’

  Findlay shrugged. MacNee set a small tape recorder down between them and began.

  ‘We’ve evidence you were involved in Andrew Smith’s murder, and of course your fingerprints were on the knife in Elena Tindall’s chalet.
Have to say it’s not looking good, Cal. So maybe you need to think about getting out your side of the story?’

  Findlay gulped. That chimed with his own idea, but now the moment had come, he wasn’t sure. His head had begun to pound and there were stabs of pain from his aching jaw.

  ‘Tell me about the knife, Cal, just for a start,’ MacNee prompted.

  ‘I know what it looks like, but it wasn’t like that,’ Findlay began. ‘I knew what she’d done, and I knew what she was going to do.’

  ‘Why didn’t you shop her, then?’

  To his astonishment, it was the girl who interrupted, and it was a very aggressive question.

  ‘Look, miss, you don’t understand—’

  ‘Don’t think either of us do,’ MacNee said. ‘We’re asking you to tell us.’

  Findlay began to sweat. ‘I was just trying to … to prevent her killing her brother.’

  ‘That’s “prevent” as in “kill” is it?’ the girl sneered.

  Outraged, he looked at MacNee, hoping he’d pull her into line, but he was smiling faintly. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Findlay cried. ‘I—’

  Then he stopped. He didn’t see MacNee hold up his hand to his constable in a warning gesture, or even notice the silence that followed; he was trying to focus, trying to stop his thoughts jiggling round along with the waves of pain.

  ‘She’s told you her side, hasn’t she? I don’t suppose she mentioned blackmail and coercion,’ Findlay said savagely. He tried to gauge their reaction, but both faces were impassive and he said it again, ‘Blackmail and coercion – do you understand?’

  ‘Oh, we understand what you’re saying,’ MacNee said, with a hint of stress on the last word.

  They didn’t understand. No one understood. No one ever had. The years and years of pretence, and silence and fear; years of a devil’s pact with the mother whose misguided love for a villain had brought him into being, then denied him a life. The thought overwhelmed him.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he burst out, ‘waiting for the knock on the door. I just want it finished with now. It eats into you, you know. Eats through to your very bones.’

  ‘Guilt?’ the girl suggested.

  He turned on her. ‘Guilt? Not guilt, no. I’m angry that I let myself feel guilt for something that wasn’t my fault, because she made use of that. They both used me – first him, then her. It’s the fear that’s destroyed me – fear.

  ‘When she came back just now – that was it. I knew then – finished. Couldn’t control her. Somewhere in it all, she’d gone crazy – calm, quiet, crazy.’

  ‘So your calm, sensible decision was to kill her?’ The bitch wasn’t letting up.

  Findlay ignored her, turning to MacNee. ‘I’m maybe guilty under the law for what we did to Drew, but you’ve got to see it was what she demanded as justice, to make up for what had happened to her. OK, I helped Drew grab his daughter and brought her back here. He was going to marry my mother – like he should have when she fell pregnant and he wouldn’t even acknowledge me,’ he said in a bitter aside. ‘Told us if he got a divorce he’d lose his daughter.’

  ‘What a shame!’ the gadfly in the corner murmured.

  She was really getting to him. ‘Don’t believe me, then,’ he said angrily. ‘But you’d have believed him, if he’d told you. Charm, you know? Oh God, yes, charm.’ His face twisted. ‘And maybe Helen was a victim, but so was I. And my mum too. She’s off her head, you know? And that’s his fault, too.’

  ‘You and your mother, of course, were blamelessly locking up a little girl in solitary confinement, while a search was going on all over the country, with appeals on TV from her weeping mother, no doubt. Watch them, did you, then settled down to congratulate yourselves on doing the right thing?’

  Findlay gaped at her. The detective’s eyes were blazing with anger, and it was as if she’d punched him in the stomach, winding him. He had never been faced with the stark reality before. Even when Elena had confronted him with the truth, she’d had her own reasons for wanting to channel blame in one direction only. He’d been protected by a cocoon of self-pity; now it had been stripped off and he was left naked and squirming as any grub. He stumbled on – what else could he do? – but what he said was beginning to sound hollow even to him.

  ‘I–I swear I–I never knew. I swear it.’ Sweat was dripping into his eyes and he put up a hand to wipe his brow. ‘Didn’t recognise her when she turned up at the front door those years later – well, she was grown-up, skinny and kind of slutty-looking.’

  Findlay broke off. He saw Hepburn open her mouth; saw too the silencing gesture from MacNee once more. At last he said, ‘You’ll know what she told us. My mum went mental – never really recovered.

  ‘She called herself Elena now, not Helen, she said. And she gave me my orders. She didn’t have to spell it out. It was blackmail – blackmail and coercion, like I said.’

  He was making his strongest argument, but even he could hear it sounded weak. He had to do better, let the anger and bitterness he felt come through.

  ‘Look, she forced me to agree – I wouldn’t have done it otherwise, I swear it. Not like that. Though God knows he deserved it for what he did to us – and to her, of course,’ he added hastily. ‘But it was all her idea – said it had to be slow. “He’s got to know, he’s got to suffer at my hands like I did at his. An eye for an eye: evil for evil.” That’s what she said. Word for word.’

  He stopped again.

  ‘Nearly there,’ MacNee said softly. ‘Your turn to tell us what happened – she’s getting hers.’

  ‘Oh God!’ He closed his eyes for a moment. He knew how she could turn things, twist things, how ruthless she was. Truth would be better than the lies she would tell.

  ‘All right. She’d tracked him down in Manchester. I was to bump into him, take him for a drink. She gave me stuff to put in it. He wasn’t exactly pleased to see me, but he couldn’t refuse a chat in a pub. I asked him about Helen, you know. Working in London, that’s what he told me.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘When he started feeling groggy I offered him a lift home. Simple.

  ‘I picked her up, drove up here. I’d the prawn boat by then and it wasn’t hard to land him there. I’d the staples in the cave ready. She hammered them in herself. He came round before we left, and … well …’ His voice trailed away.

  Findlay took another sip of water. ‘She wanted to go back, you know, so he’d think we’d been bluffing, and then leave him again, but I wouldn’t go. That was too much. She was angry, but I still refused.’

  He ignored the chippy little cow’s, ‘You’re all heart,’ comment. ‘Then – well after that I had just to put it behind me, forget about it as best I could.’

  ‘You’re a good forgetter,’ Hepburn said. ‘A-star, I’d say.’

  MacNee frowned at her. ‘Just carry on, Cal,’ he said.

  If he’d been asked to stop, he wasn’t sure he could, now. The words were bubbling up; he was feeling better that now, at last, he was able to tell his story.

  ‘She’d had stuff done when she came back this time. Didn’t recognise her. Then I couldn’t believe the timing – just after his body had turned up. And she knew about what had happened but she still came here, wouldn’t change her plans. I argued with her that it was crazy but she wouldn’t listen – she was hell-bent on revenge.

  ‘Then she’d just vanish. Great! I couldn’t, of course: it would probably dump me right in it.’ He could feel conviction surging back into his voice now; he was unconsciously clenching his fists in rage at the injustice of it all. ‘I told her that, begged her to get out, come back later once the fuss had died down, if she had to—’

  ‘At which point, of course, you’d have called us in and told us all about it?’ the girl needled.

  It was as if she’d slapped him. ‘You going to let her go on like this?’ Findlay demanded, addressing MacNee.

  ‘She’s just training to be a DI one
day,’ MacNee said, and now his voice too was harsh and unfriendly. ‘Give us an idea, Cal – what are you going to put your hand up to? Fire-raising? Killing Andrew Smith? Attempted murder of Elena Tindall?’

  ‘She made me do it – the fire.’

  ‘Made you? A great big man like you, and her half your size—’

  Findlay had stopped listening to her. ‘It was killing his wife, killing her like that – That was wrong, you see. Drew was different. He deserved what happened to him. I’m not saying it was nice but it was justice.

  ‘But Lissa Lovatt – well, she hadn’t done anything. And I knew Elena was going to kill her brother for something he did when he was a little kid. That wasn’t right either.

  ‘Look, I didn’t want to kill her – she was my sister, for God’s sake, but she was beyond reason. If she got away with that, she wouldn’t stop, and—’

  He only realised what he’d said when he saw the look on MacNee’s face. ‘You knew that you’d be next, right? And you couldn’t afford to turn her in because she’d have taken you with her. I’m afraid my ideas on justice are a wee bitty different from yours.

  ‘Calum Findlay, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder and attempted murder. You are not obliged to say anything but anything you do say will be written down and may be used in evidence. Do you understand the caution?’

  Findlay nodded numbly. He had failed to make them see that he’d been a helpless victim, and now he wasn’t even sure he could see it himself.

  MacNee gave Hepburn an amused look as she drove him away. ‘Right little tiger, you are,’ he said.

  Hepburn’s cheeks were still flushed. ‘I was just so angry. That great lump of self-pity, projecting all the guilt he should be feeling on to Elena and his father – not that I’m saying Andrew Smith was anything other than scum and if you’re talking rough justice he probably got what he deserved. But for all he said, Findlay wasn’t talking justice, he was talking self-interest. He knew from the start that what he was doing was wrong. There’s a limit to what Andrew Smith can be blamed for.’