The Third Sin

by Aline Templeton

  Something the mermaid had dropped, perhaps? Something, even, that might give a clue to her identity? Her curiosity freshly aroused, Eleanor unfolded it then realised that she would need her glasses to read what it said. She tucked it in the pocket of her skirt, gave a final flourish with the Hoover and took it back downstairs.

  The paper seemed to be a letter. It was heavily creased, as if it had been folded and refolded several times. Reaching for the glasses she kept beside the Aga, she put them on and read what was written on it.

  It was lucky she was near her chair. Her legs went as if she had been poleaxed and she dropped into it struggling for breath, with her heart racing. Fighting for calm, she closed her eyes but she could still see the words she had read, as if they had been written on the back of her eyelids in letters of flame.

  What was she to do? The police – but did she really want to start that up all over again? What difference would it make? She hadn’t even attended the inquest. Julia would still be dead and she had been so much the author of her own destruction that any desire for what was now fashionably called ‘closure’, but used to be known as revenge, had left Eleanor long ago.

  She’d talk it over with Biddy when she arrived. Biddy’s advice was always very sensible. She must just put it to the back of her mind.

  But somehow she couldn’t. There was a question that niggled and niggled at her. She made scones for Biddy’s tea, but she forgot to put in the baking powder and they came out of the oven looking more like pancakes than scones.

  She looked at them despairingly. She needed an answer and until she did she was going to think of nothing else. There was no point in going on until she’d ruined the Victoria sponge as well.

  She went to the phone and dialled Biddy’s number. There was no answer and she didn’t leave a message; Biddy would be on the first leg of her journey now. She’d see her soon enough.

  But oh, she did quite desperately want to know whether that was what had really happened to Julia, even if she never did anything about it. She wasn’t sure she could bear to wait.

  ‘Breakthrough, sir!’ DS Duncan was smirking as he came into DI Len Harris’s office in the Dumfries headquarters.

  Harris eyed him warily. Duncan, in his experience, was a smartass whom Harris suspected of being behind the muttering campaign about lack of progress and there was something about that smirk that suggested to him the breakthrough in question might not be altogether good news, for him at least.

  ‘Spit it out, Duncan,’ he said.

  ‘There’s two men come forward after the newspaper appeal, sir. They didn’t come sooner because they were embarrassed—’

  Harris wanted to put his hands over his ears, scream, ‘La-la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you!’ He felt sick as Duncan went on with his report.

  Yes, the men had been driving a silvery-grey car through Annan at the time in question. Yes, they had been having a screaming row. One had accused the other of pocketing his winnings from the betting shop and the other had denied it, but in the end it had all been sorted out.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Duncan finished.

  ‘Book them, for a start,’ Harris snarled. ‘Wasting police time.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, turning to go.

  His alacrity rang alarm bells. If the details of the amount of police time they had wasted came to the attention of the media, Harris would be hung out to dry.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just give them a bollocking and leave it. Don’t want to discourage citizens who come forward with information, however long it takes them to get round to it.’

  ‘So what’s the focus of our enquiry now, sir?’ The sergeant was all innocence.

  ‘You’ll hear at the appropriate time. I want those statements on file before the afternoon meeting.’

  When Duncan had gone, Harris put his head in his hands. He’d known he was getting nowhere, had realised that days ago, but he hadn’t been able to see what else to do. It had actually been a bit of a relief when Fleming was called in; he’d hoped he might find some way of picking her brains that meant he could still present new lines of enquiry as his own initiative. Until she came up with something fresh he’d just had his officers relentlessly marking time – and they were getting restive.

  He’d accepted, with some bitterness, that the time and money spent had been wasted but in the general confusion of a difficult case it could be airbrushed out. Even in his worst moments he hadn’t thought that he would be proved so definitively wrong.

  That didn’t mean she was right about the car, though. As long as there wasn’t evidence to prove her theory, he could muddle through – and having allocated two little airheads to the search and ordered that the search stopped at the border with Galloway it would be cruelly unlucky if anything turned up.

  But now he’d have to go and tell Taylor. He was feeling sick again: humiliation always affected him that way.

  ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ DC Weston said as they turned on to the road that looped down to Balcary Point, along the bay and then on through Ballinbreck.

  No one could argue with that. The tide was ebbing so that the sand flats showed through, golden against the blue of the Firth under a wide, wide sky with only a few fluffy clouds. On the shore there were drifts of orange-brown wrack among grey rocky outcrops and as they watched a heron took off, flapping low up the estuary on its majestic way.

  ‘Yeah, great,’ Jamieson agreed, then looked at her watch. ‘How far to Kirkcudbright now? I’m needing my coffee.’

  ‘Not far,’ Weston said with a sigh. ‘Then I suppose we’ll have to give up.’

  ‘Too right we do. You promised. Aah! Lizzie! What the hell are you doing?’

  Weston had slammed on the brakes. ‘Look at that!’

  The side of the road sloped down gently towards the shore. There was scrubby growth all along the verge, bushes and alders wind-shaped and stunted by the salt air. Where Weston had stopped there were broken branches, a hawthorn uprooted and beside it two deep tracks heading down on to the sandy foreshore.

  ‘That’s it,’ Weston said. ‘We’ve found it. I can’t believe it!’

  Jamieson was impressed. ‘You could even be right. What do we do now?’

  ‘Go back and tell Harris. Forget your coffee.’

  ‘You think he’s going to be pleased?’ Jamieson was doubtful. ‘He told us to stop at the boundary.’

  Weston was driving on, looking for a place to turn. ‘I don’t care whether he’s pleased or not. This is evidence.’

  Weston and Jamieson were actually excited, the stupid little cows, bouncing into his office looking for a pat on the back.

  ‘Tell me where it was you found it,’ DC Len Harris said.

  ‘About four miles short of Ballinbreck, two miles off the main road.’ Weston frowned. She’d told him that already.

  ‘And where is Ballinbreck? Remind me.’

  Jamieson gave Weston a warning look but Weston didn’t notice. ‘On the Solway, sir. You turn off at Auchencairn.’

  ‘And where is Auchencairn?’

  She was with it now. She dropped her eyes. ‘In – in Galloway, sir.’

  ‘And what were your orders, Weston?’ His voice had risen.

  ‘To stop at the boundary.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So what have you done?’ He was yelling at her now.

  ‘Disobeyed orders, sir.’

  ‘And what’s the penalty for disobeying orders?’

  ‘Being – being charged, sir.’

  ‘Yes, being charged.’ His eyes were bulging and his face was bright red as if he might have a stroke at any moment. He jumped up from his chair, unable to sit still.

  Weston cringed, as if she were afraid he would strike her, but however much he might like to, he wasn’t crazy. He went past her, stamping across to the window and staring out blindly, his back turned as he took deep, calming breaths, trying to control himself. He couldn’t afford to l
ose it completely.

  When he turned back, he was trembling with the effort to sound reasonable. ‘I’m prepared to overlook it, this once. I daresay you thought you were using your initiative, but there’s a time and a place for that. I’ll go down and evaluate this myself. That’s all. You can go.’

  He could hear the relieved exhalation from them both.

  Jamieson said, ‘I’ll get the report to you immediately, sir.’

  ‘No need for a report. I’ll report on it myself.’

  As they went out he wiped the sweat from his brow. This was a disaster and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d managed to contain it. They’d looked at each other as they went out.

  ‘I really thought he was going to hit me there. Pity he didn’t. I’d have had him.’ Weston’s voice might be shaky, but she was still defiant.

  ‘Mmm,’ Jamieson said.

  ‘He’s not going to pass it on, is he?’

  ‘Probably not. Look, Lizzie, it’s above your pay grade. It’s his decision. This has got us into big trouble and that’s it, as far as I’m concerned. Just leave it, OK?’

  ‘It’s important evidence! How can we just ignore it?’ Weston’s face was mutinous.

  Jamieson stopped. ‘Do anything else and you’re on your own,’ she said and walked away down the corridor.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DI Fleming glanced at her watch as she drove into Ballinbreck. ‘Just over an hour – not bad,’ she observed with satisfaction. ‘Who’s first on the list?’

  MacNee consulted the notes. ‘Skye Falconer. Staying at Jen Wilson’s house.’ He gave her directions.

  ‘Nice wee place,’ Fleming said, looking up and down the High Street. ‘Haven’t been here for years. Hard to imagine it having been a hotbed of drugs and decadence.’

  ‘Probably still is,’ MacNee said darkly. ‘It’s the same with folk – the quiet ones are the worst.’

  Fleming laughed, pulling up outside the cottage. ‘Now, let’s hope she’s in this time.’

  She was. The woman who admitted them greeted them with a nervous smile. She was small and slight, her hair piled up into an untidy knot on the top of her head. Her eyes were striking, blue-green, rimmed with dark lashes, and she had neat, pretty features, though Fleming noticed with interest that her face seemed pinched and drawn, as if she was under some sort of strain.

  Fleming made the introductions and Skye led them through to the kitchen at the back of the house and they sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m sorry I was out when you came yesterday, but I didn’t know to be in.’ She spoke airily, but her hands were gripping each other tightly.

  She’d been looking straight at them. As she finished the sentence, she looked down and off to the left; if she was right-handed, that was a classic psychological indicator of lying. At the same time, her right thumb stroked her left several times.

  Fleming didn’t believe her. And it was useful to learn a witness’s ‘tells’ early on: it told you what to look out for.

  She began, ‘I expect you’ve heard what has happened to Connell Kane? Right. Did it come as a shock?’

  ‘We’d all thought he was dead. Anyone would be shocked by what’s happened.’

  A very careful reply. ‘Were you close to him at the time of Julia Margrave’s death?’

  ‘Not really. Julia was the only one he was close to. Randall knew him quite well too. He was around, of course, but …’ She shrugged.

  ‘Know where he got the drugs from?’ MacNee asked and Skye bit her lip.

  ‘Look, I’m ashamed of what happened but I wasn’t in deep, like Julia. I’ll admit to the odd spliff but that was the extent of it. I’d no idea about suppliers or anything.’ Her hands fluttered innocence.

  Fleming wasn’t ready yet to put the boot in with ‘That’s what they all say’. Instead, she asked, ‘Did you have any contact with him, either immediately after his pretended suicide or more recently?’

  She wasn’t halfway through the question when Skye suddenly looked round as if she’d remembered something and got up. ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said over her shoulder, then, ‘I’m sorry – I should have offered you coffee before. Would you like some? I made a fruit loaf yesterday.’ She switched on the kettle – using her right hand, Fleming noticed with interest.

  MacNee, always a sucker for home baking, brightened but before he could speak Fleming said, ‘Thanks but no thanks. We’ve several interviews to do this morning. Do you know where he was, what he was doing? Why he came back?’

  Skye’s eyes went down and left again. ‘No idea,’ she said.

  She wasn’t at all a good liar. ‘I think you do,’ Fleming’s voice was gentle.

  Skye’s eyes went wide in panic. ‘Why should you think that? I told you, I didn’t know he was alive, so how could I know where he was?’

  ‘Know any of his contacts?’ MacNee put in.

  ‘No! No! I told you I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ Fleming said, then softened her voice, leaning forward encouragingly. ‘Look, we’re not accusing you of anything. It’s just that someone you knew has been murdered, and I think you may be able to help our investigation. You probably know that withholding information is an offence.

  ‘I’m going to ask you again: did you know anything about Connell Kane, his whereabouts or his contacts over the last two years?’

  It didn’t work. Skye said flatly, ‘I told you I didn’t. You can ask me as many times as you like but that’ll still be the reply.’

  She was steelier than Fleming had thought. ‘If that is your considered response I will have to accept it. For the moment. You disappeared yourself for a long period of time, leaving your parents to instigate a police enquiry. Where were you?’

  Skye hesitated. ‘Is this relevant?’ The hands were gripping each other tighter than ever and the thumb was twitching again.

  Playing for time, Fleming thought. Skye hadn’t expected that question. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s – well, it’s complicated. I was all over the place – France, Spain – I was in Spain for quite a long time. Italy too. I just had a sort of double gap year, picking up casual jobs and getting away from it all.’

  ‘And why have you come back to it all now?’

  ‘Oh – tired of living out of a rucksack, I suppose. You can’t go on being a bum forever. And I was starting to think about that when I picked up an email from Jen telling me about the Homecoming party and I thought it would be a good way to get back in touch.’

  Skye had spoken fluently, her eyes wide and fixed on her questioner. Liars often believed that a straight gaze was convincing. Fleming wasn’t convinced.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Then we have to ask you where you were on April 14th?’

  ‘Sorry – dates don’t mean anything when you’re constantly on the move. Still in Spain, I think, or maybe France.’

  ‘When did you get back here?’

  ‘Last week. I just descended on poor Jen out of the blue to scrounge a bed.’

  ‘I see.’ Fleming got up. ‘We’ll leave it there.’ The third degree could come later. ‘Thank you, Miss Falconer.’

  As they got back into the car, MacNee gave a low whistle. ‘How much of that did you believe, then?’

  ‘Not a lot. Easy enough to check up on her if we need to – not smart to say you were out of the country if you want to cover your tracks. But people have different reasons for lying, Tam, not necessarily linked to murder.’

  MacNee sniffed. ‘Maybe. But as Rabbie said, “There’s nane ever feared/ That the truth would be heard/ But they whom the truth would indict.”’

  Philippa Lindsay had a cup of coffee waiting for them in her very posh kitchen. No home bakes here, MacNee thought sadly as he accepted a cup of the kind of posh coffee that made your mouth pucker.

  Her son, slouched at the table looking sulky, was wearing the sort of clothes that posh people wore that in a better-ordered world would have folk pointing at you in the stre
et and laughing – red cord trousers and a pink shirt. Comfortable with his own sartorial choices of jeans, white T-shirt and a black leather jacket, MacNee was finding it hard to stop his lip from curling visibly.

  Philippa was being very gracious. ‘What’s this about, Inspector? If you want to interview my son first, I’ll make myself scarce.’

  Randall, MacNee was interested to see, gave her a look of loathing as Fleming said, ‘No, there’s no need for that. A lot of the ground we want to cover concerns you as well, Mrs Lindsay.’

  They both went very still. Then Philippa said smoothly, ‘Of course. I’m delighted to help you in any way.’

  ‘You knew Connell Kane, I understand.’

  ‘Yes.’ Philippa’s response was guarded; Randall looked definitely taken aback.

  ‘Have either of you seen him recently?’

  ‘How could we? He’s dead.’

  ‘He is now,’ MacNee said. ‘Seen the news today?’

  ‘My dear man,’ Philippa said lightly, ‘I haven’t had time to think about anything other than this Homecoming party for a week. Perhaps you could explain.’

  MacNee’s hackles were rising and on the whole he was grateful for Fleming’s hasty intervention to explain. It didn’t do to go into attack-dog mode too soon.

  ‘Good gracious, how absolutely extraordinary! Didn’t the police suspect he might have faked his death to escape justice at the time?’ Philippa raised her carefully groomed eyebrows.

  ‘I can’t comment on that,’ Fleming said. Her hackles seemed to be rising too. ‘Can I take it that you are saying you knew nothing about this?’

  ‘Well, of course I didn’t.’

  MacNee looked at Randall. ‘What about you – laddie?’ he said, as revenge for ‘my dear man’.

  He didn’t rise to the provocation. He sat up, saying with heavy irony, ‘Oh, am I allowed to say something too? I thought Mummy was going to do all the talking for me. No, as far as I was concerned he was dead. I saw him at the inquest but that was the last time.’