Dead in the Water

by Aline Templeton

  Sylvia was visibly weary when she returned to Tulach House. Marcus saw her hands shaking as she propelled herself along the hall. He went to kiss her, feeling concerned and responsible, even.

  ‘Darling, what have they been doing to you? I shall have to set about them. You look exhausted!’

  Sylvia summoned up the famous smile. ‘No, no, of course you mustn’t! They’ve been clucking round me like mother hens. And your make-up girl has a magic touch. I’m thinking of putting her on a retainer – it was only when I took the stuff off that I started looking my age!’

  ‘Nonsense, not a day over fifty-nine,’ he said robustly, though wondering whether he had pitched it low enough to be flattering, without being so low as to be blatantly insincere.

  Sylvia gave her throaty laugh. ‘You’re a liar, and I love you for it. But oh, God! It’s a sad day when being told I look sixty is a compliment. Still, take what you can get, say I!’

  ‘Sylvia, most women of thirty can’t even dream of looking as good as you do now. Now, what can I get you? Mrs Boyter’s still around if you haven’t lunched – she’d love to whip you up an omelette.’

  ‘Heaven forbid! They were practically force-feeding me. I had to shut my mouth like a toddler when I’d had enough, and even then I was afraid they’d start making aeroplane noises and try to buzz in the next mouthful. But darling, if you did happen to have a tiny bottle of champagne – I know, I shouldn’t, but it’s such a wonderful pick-me-up.’

  Marcus sketched a bow. ‘Your wish is my command. Now, go into the drawing room and keep warm, and I’ll fetch champagne and a couple of glasses. I’m not scheduled today, so we can have a lovely relaxing afternoon.’

  He had left the door behind her open and she did not hear him return. She was stooped over, as if sitting upright was an effort, and she was clumsily shaking what were probably painkillers out of a bottle into her twisted hand. His throat constricted as he looked at her, remembering her great beauty and glamour.

  Sylvia dropped one of the pills, and swore. He came forward. ‘Let me help you,’ he said, and she jumped.

  ‘I didn’t know you were there. Damn! I hate being seen taking pills – so old-making!’ She had straightened up, but with a betraying wince.

  Marcus released the cork with a gentle sigh of vapour. ‘Swallow them down with this and you’ll feel better. Was it a tough morning?’

  ‘My stupid old legs, darling – just couldn’t get into the old banger they found, without pushers like they have on Japanese trains. Not quite the image we’re looking for, so they’d stuff to rework. Lots of retakes.

  ‘But let’s not talk about my boring problems. I’ve been longing for a proper chat. Tell me about you and darling Jaki – what a sweet, talented girl!’

  Marcus smiled at her. ‘You’re always so generous – but yes, she is. I think she’s definitely working herself into a permanent slot in Playfair.’

  She gave him a stern look. ‘Not what I meant, and you know it. How are things between you?’

  ‘Sylvia, you’re worse than a mother!’ he protested, but without heat. ‘We’re calling it a day, but keeping up appearances at the moment – you know what the gossip’s like. We’re still friends, but that’s all. I should have known she was too young for me, but somehow—’ He shrugged.

  ‘Oh, put it all behind you! The mid-life crisis – it does terrible things to your judgement. You should be looking for a nice girl with a bit of money who’ll love the house and have lots of beautiful little boys just like you.’

  ‘Sylvia, for heaven’s sake—’ he said with amused exasperation.

  Sylvia reached out to take his hand. ‘But darling, much more important – tell me all about this business with the police. What was that about? You seemed quite stressed.’

  Marcus really didn’t want to talk about that, but he couldn’t snub her. He said as lightly as he could, ‘It was a sad thing that happened twenty years ago. A pregnant girl was murdered, then dumped in the sea, but they never got the man who did it. They’re reopening the case, and they’re asking questions. That’s all. I couldn’t really help them.’

  She wasn’t to be deflected. ‘But why you? You were with them a long time.’

  He sighed. ‘We had a brief romance as teenagers. We broke up before I went to Glasgow, and I never saw her again. When she died, and indeed at the time she got pregnant, I was in the States. I told them, and showed them Papa’s old scrapbook with the programmes in it. End of story.’

  Sylvia frowned. ‘I still don’t understand why they’d come to you now, not having seen the girl for years. Surely—’

  There was no alternative. ‘Someone accused me of her murder – her mother’s my guess. She probably had a grudge against me because I dumped Ailsa, or something. All right?’

  ‘All right!’ Sylvia began working herself into a state. ‘It’s terrible! You can never trust the police! Look at all these miscarriages of justice.’ She embarked on a long story about a friend whom she claimed they had fitted up, although to Marcus it sounded as if his activities had been, at the very least, deeply suspect.

  At last he snapped, ‘Sylvia, leave it. It’s a damned un-pleasant thing, being accused of murder, and I’d rather not dwell on it.’ He saw the wounded look come into her violet-grey eyes which any of her fans would immediately have recognized from For Ever, and weakened.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound short with you. I know you’re just concerned for me.’

  ‘Concerned for you? My sweet, now Laddie’s gone you’re the one important thing in my life. You’re too trusting, too honest. It takes an old cynic like me to see things clearly.’

  Marcus groaned. ‘Perhaps you’re right. It’s a nasty habit you’ve always had. But if the police have it in for me, there’s not a lot I can do about it, is there?’

  Jean Grant did not sit down again when she came back. ‘Will that be all? There’s nothing else to tell you.’

  Tact took time and she didn’t have it. Fleming said bluntly, ‘I expect you know your husband was suspected of your daughter’s murder.’

  No trace of emotion showed. ‘He was here all that evening.’

  ‘Yes, I know you and your son said that. Will he be in shortly?’

  ‘No. He’s away at the cattle sales in Carlisle.’

  That was disappointing: she’d hoped she might get more out of him than she had from Jean.

  ‘Suspicion arose about your husband because there was a report of family rows. You said yourself that they weren’t on speaking terms.’

  Jean gave a grim smile. ‘Oh, there were rows, right enough. I’d been angry with her myself, for holding herself so cheap, and I told him if she wouldn’t tell me, she wouldn’t tell him because he yelled at her, but he always knew best.’

  Without much hope, Fleming pressed on. ‘You see, since your daughter was dead, you and your son might have protected your husband, feeling it would only bring further disaster to your family.’

  Jean looked at her with contempt. ‘You think that if he’d murdered my daughter, I’d have protected him?’

  It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Fleming answered it. ‘I don’t know, Mrs Grant. From the way you spoke of your husband, I got the impression that relations between you weren’t good, but that may only have happened after Ailsa’s death. Was your marriage happy before that?’

  Temper flared in the woman’s face. ‘I’ve listened long enough. I don’t care if you’re police, you’re an impudent besom, asking questions like that. I’ve had enough.’

  She held the door open and Fleming had no alternative but to leave.

  ‘A right waste of time, that was,’ Tam MacNee grumbled as he and Tansy Kerr came into the canteen, looking for a late lunch.

  A golf competition was showing on the TV in the corner, and two uniforms on their break were sitting watching it. One looked round as MacNee spoke.

  ‘Story of our lives,’ he said cynically. ‘You should be used to it by now.’
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  MacNee ignored that. ‘Drove all the way to Stranraer and the guy had been picked up already.’

  ‘Pointless,’ Kerr chimed in, sounding thoroughly fed up. ‘Drive for hours, then drive back. What a way to spend your life, pretending we’re detectives when they’ve left behind a bag with their address on it. Brain dead, like most of the poor sods we’re after.’

  ‘Lucky they are, or we’d never get them,’ said the cynic on the sofa.

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ MacNee returned to his grievance. ‘But then we’d to be polite to the solicitors whose office he’d done over. Went against the grain, that.’

  ‘Now, Tam, we’re all servants of the majesty of the law,’ Kerr said sententiously, then spoiled it by adding, ‘allegedly.’

  MacNee was surveying what there was on the counter without enthusiasm. ‘No bridies, and nothing but cheese and pickle sandwiches left. Why do they make them, when no one likes them?’ he demanded of the long-suffering woman serving.

  ‘Don’t ask me, pet. It’s just what we’re sent. But there’s a lettuce and tomato as well, look.’

  ‘Lettuce!’ There was horror in MacNee’s tone. ‘Do I look like a rabbit?’

  ‘Don’t answer that, Maisie,’ Kerr advised. ‘I’ll have that, and a cup of coffee.’

  MacNee, settling grudgingly for cheese and pickle, drifted over to the TV.

  ‘Daft game, that,’ he said conversationally. ‘Can’t think what you see in it. The ball’s standing still, for God’s sake! Now, if you had it coming at you at an angle from a header—’

  ‘MacNee, we’re watching this,’ the other uniform said. ‘Why don’t you go and talk football somewhere else?’

  ‘All right, all right, if you’re not up to the intellectual challenge. Anyone seen Big Marge?’

  ‘She was in looking for you a while back. Go and annoy her instead of us.’

  ‘I’ll do just that,’ MacNee said with alacrity, stuffing in the last of his sandwich and heading for the door. ‘Tansy, you’ll get that written up, OK?’ he said indistinctly.

  Kerr pulled a face at his retreating back. ‘You can have enough of this job, you know that?’

  It was late when Marjory Fleming left her office to drive back to Mains of Craigie, but she’d cleared her desk. She’d arranged for MacNee to check that Stuart Grant would be in if they drove down to Balnakenny tomorrow; she was keen to keep up the momentum, but it would be a long way to drive only to find him out.

  Reaching the farm, she remembered that this was the day of Cat’s screen debut, and she smiled. Bill, like Stuart Grant, was away overnight at the Carlisle sales, buying stock to fatten over the summer, but her mother’s car was in the yard, and that was good, since she felt that Janet needed company. Cat would doubtless have told her grandmother about her day already but she’d probably be happy enough to go through it again.

  But when she reached the kitchen Janet was sitting in the sagging armchair by the Aga, alone except for the collie Meg, who on seeing her mistress leaped from her basket to greet her, her tail wagging in circles of delight. Meg was always bereft when her master was away.

  ‘Where’s everybody?’ Marjory asked, patting Meg, then going to kiss her mother. ‘Early for them to be upstairs, surely?’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Janet got up and started to fuss with pots and pans. ‘Cammie’s through watching TV, but Cat – she’s fair upset, poor wee soul.

  ‘They weren’t wanting nice, decent girls like her and Anna. It was just to be a clamjamfry of ill-faured bairns throwing stones at a car, if you can credit it! Small wonder there’s all the problems today.’ She was almost bursting with indignation.

  Marjory began to laugh. ‘You’ve lost me there. I gathered you weren’t impressed with the type of child they chose, but clamjamfry?’

  ‘Think shame to yourself, Marjory Laird!’ In moments of emotion, her mother tended to revert to her daughter’s maiden name. ‘Do you not know your own language? You could say bad-mannered rabble, I suppose – but that’s a poor, pathetic phrase by comparison.’

  Marjory could only agree meekly, and Janet went on, ‘I’m that sorry for Cat, her looking so pretty in her nice clothes! She went up a wee while ago. She was going to phone Anna and then go to her bed, so you’ll need to away up and see her.’

  ‘I’ll leave her to lick her wounds meantime. Anyway, I’m starving, and something smells good.’

  Janet looked pleased. ‘Och, I knew Bill was away and you’d likely be late, so I came up to be here for the bairns when they got back from the school. And I’d time on my hands so I made broth and stovies – they were always a favourite with you.’

  ‘Indeed they are, but you’re an awful woman! Here’s me trying to get you to take things easy, and you go looking for work.’

  ‘Oh, away you go! I enjoy doing it fine.’

  As Marjory ate, they talked about domestic concerns, but afterwards she broached the subject on her mind.

  ‘Mum, you know we were talking the other night about Marcus Lindsay and his father?’

  ‘Laddie Lazansky – oh yes. Quite took me back.’

  ‘Do you remember a murdered girl they found in the sea down at the Mull of Galloway, about twenty years ago?’

  ‘I mind it fine! Your father was first there after the helicopter brought her in. She was in trouble, you know, poor lassie, but he would always have it they’d made a big fuss about nothing.’

  How much, Marjory wondered, had he ever told Janet about his position? Delicately, she asked, ‘Were there problems about that? Him not agreeing with them, I mean?’

  Janet smiled. ‘You knew your father! Didn’t matter what they said, he always just went his own way. They were used to him.’

  It would be like Angus to be too proud to mention the blot on his record. If he hadn’t, it wasn’t her place to tell Janet now. ‘The thing is,’ she went on, ‘no one was ever charged and I’ve been asked to take another look. I wondered if there was anything you could remember that might be helpful.’

  ‘Dearie me! It’s a long time back, and my memory’s not what it was once.’ Janet started a little hesitantly. ‘You’ll maybe mind your father and I both grew up in the South Rhins? Your father was a bitty older than me and Robert Grant was in his class at the school.

  ‘They didn’t have Balnakenny then. Robert’s father was the postie – it was Jean’s family were farmers, so it would have been from that side they’d get the farm. But we never saw him after we came to Kirkluce, and I never knew Jean – she was a good bit younger.’

  ‘What was Robert like?’

  ‘Like? Och, I don’t know. He was only a laddie at the time.’ Janet looked uncomfortable: it was not in her nature to be unkind.

  ‘You didn’t like him, did you? Be honest – I’m not asking from idle curiosity,’ Marjory said, and Janet sighed.

  ‘Oh well – he was always kind of sullen, and a bully too, sometimes. He and your father were quite pally at the time, though, but they never kept up.’

  Was that why Angus Laird behaved so uncharacteristically in letting Ailsa Grant’s body be taken home – out of loyalty to a long ago friendship? She admired loyalty – and perhaps, with suspicion centring on Robert, it explained too why Angus had wanted to believe the young woman had chosen to die.

  ‘Do you remember hearing Jean Grant had accused Marcus Lazansky of killing Ailsa?’ Marjory went on.

  Janet frowned for a moment, then said, ‘It’s all coming back to me now! Yes, there was talk, with the Lazanskys being who they were, and Flora being from a county family.

  ‘But it was all just haivers – the laddie was in America the whole time, your father said. But it’ll not be very nice for him if you’ve to stir it all up again.’

  ‘No,’ Marjory agreed, ‘it isn’t. Not very nice for the Grants either, I’m afraid, but it has to be done.’

  ‘If the poor lassie’s to rest in peace, I hope you find out this time who it was,’ Janet said heavily. Then she added, ‘Even if h
e’s dead.’

  7

  The Cross Keys in Ardhill was packed to the doors this evening. Norrie the barman was under siege, not only from the production team of Playfair’s Patch, but from young locals who planned either to chat up the glamorous strangers or to ensure that the glamorous strangers remained strictly off limits to anyone already spoken for.

  Marcus Lindsay recoiled as he and Jaki Johnston pushed open the door, not without difficulty. Condensation was running down windows and walls, there was a sweaty fug and the noise was deafening.

  ‘It’s as bad as a nightclub,’ he bellowed to Jaki, hesitating on the threshold. ‘Would you prefer—’

  She wouldn’t consider retreat. ‘At least you’re spared the music. Come on!’ She grabbed his hand and plunged into the sea of bodies, heading for the corner where she could see Barrie Craig and Tony Laidlaw had installed themselves next to the bar.

  There were cries of welcome and Barrie, who had pressed a lavish tip into Norrie’s hand earlier, procured a vodka and tonic for Jaki and a pint for Marcus with impressive speed.

  The arrival of the stars of the show had produced a buzz and even created a little space around them to make it easier to get a proper look at the exhibits and pass comment without being heard – almost. It came through that there was general agreement on him being shorter than you’d think and her being tiny, and Jaki plunged herself into conversation so she wouldn’t hear the next bit which would doubtless be that she didn’t look nearly as good off screen.

  The men started discussing the best way to rejig the timings after overrunning today, while Jaki turned to look for the other members of the cast. They were in a cheerful group at the other end of the bar and she was just contemplating working her way over there when a voice spoke in her ear.

  ‘Hey, sexy!’

  Jaki turned. The specimen of manhood in front of her, flanked by two sniggering friends, was not appealing. He was very skinny, with a shaven head, and round his neck, exposed by a purple V-neck in shiny lycra, was tattooed a dotted line. He looked as if he might well have ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on his knuckles, and he had very bad teeth. Jaki involuntarily took a step back from the blast of beer and bad breath.