Fire in the Blood (Scott Cullen Mysteries)

by Ed James

  "What about him?" asked Cullen. "He's a bit of knob, but I can't see anything pointing to him killing Iain. He seems upset by it more than anything."

  Bain grunted. "He's still a suspect for me," he said. "Seems like a dodgy bastard."

  Cullen hadn't got the energy to press the point. "What do you want us to do then?" he asked.

  "You pair go and see this Marion woman," said Bain. He looked at Murray. "You'd better go find someone who knows about the Tanner's Arms while I try and work out a nickname for you. And a steak sandwich from Subway would be nice."

  eighteen

  Cullen and Caldwell stood outside the house of Marion Parrott, Iain Crombie's widow. She lived in a modern development at the east end of Gullane, the opposite side of the town from Alec Crombie's house. Her house was a reasonably sized brick semi on a quiet back street. The street was quiet - the only noise came from a couple of cats fighting on a stone wall at the end of the street, hissing at each other.

  Cullen looked up at the clouds sweeping in overhead. It had been a glorious morning with no clouds in the bright blue sky, rare for a Scottish summer. Cullen figured that the weather would no doubt settle back into the usual rhythm of clouds and rain.

  "Mind I told you about us looking at moving to Garleton a few years ago?" said Caldwell. "Well, we'd looked at moving to Gullane as well."

  Cullen knew very little of the town but it did seem to have a dual personality - split between the average commuter, and the upper crust. Marion Parrott was in the former bucket, though the house wouldn't exactly have been cheap. "You mean Gillen," he said, grinning.

  "Och, not you as well," she said.

  "I'm only joking," said Cullen.

  "Morningside on sea," said Caldwell, referring to the notoriously snooty district of Edinburgh and the distinct similarities it shared with Gullane.

  Cullen smiled and rang the doorbell.

  "She'd better bloody be in," said Caldwell.

  A sullen looking teenager answered the door, eighteen in Cullen's estimation. He was wearing the sort of preppy look that was popular in that part of East Lothian - skinny jeans, shirt, jumper, messy hair. He was tall and solid, the skinny jeans not coming anywhere near to working with his tree trunk legs - Cullen saw him as a victim of fashion, rather than a beneficiary. "What?" he said, his voice deep.

  "Is your mother in?" asked Cullen.

  "Who is it?"

  "It's the police," said Cullen.

  The boy looked at him for a few seconds. "Just get her," he mumbled, before heading off inside the house.

  Eventually, a woman in her early 40s came to the door, her expression fierce. To Cullen, she seemed to have aged well but her eyes were surrounded by dark grey patches. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail - there were no traces of grey but Cullen thought that it might be a few shades too dark for her skin, a telltale sign of a dye job.

  "Can I help?" she asked.

  Cullen showed his warrant card and introduced them.

  "Do you know why we're here?" he asked.

  She scowled, an intense look in her eyes. "Has there been some news?" she asked.

  "We're here to speak about your ex-husband," said Cullen.

  "Iain?"

  "Is there more than one?" asked Cullen.

  "No," she said, with sigh. "Come on through the back."

  She led them through the house, decorated in a bright and garish manner, most of the walls splashed with primary colours, usually clashing with the adjacent rooms. They went through the kitchen - it looked like a kids breakfast bomb site waiting to be cleared. Cullen checked his watch - it was half one, a good few hours after breakfast.

  As was typical with new build houses, in Cullen's experience, the garden was small - a patch of grass, some neglected flowerbeds and a tiny patio, a concrete square four slabs by four, almost a token gesture.

  Marion gestured for them to sit down at the patio table, an expensive-looking metal contraption. An ashtray and packet of Marlboro Lights sat on the table at Marion's place. The lunchtime sunlight caught the patio perfectly, though Cullen hoped that the clouds wouldn't obscure it while they were still out there.

  "Do you mind?" she asked, holding up a cigarette and lighter.

  In Cullen's experience, people who were smoking while talking to the police tended to be more honest than if they were hankering after a fag. Withdrawal could often be used as leverage later, though he hoped it wouldn't come to that in this case. "Go ahead," he said, with an open-palmed gesture.

  Marion sparked the cigarette alight then took a deep drag. "So has he turned up?" she asked, looking at Cullen with cold eyes.

  "Not exactly," he said.

  She frowned. "What do you mean, not exactly?" she asked, her voice hard.

  "A body of a young man was found in Dunpender Distillery this morning," said Cullen. "A worker found it in a barrel that was processed in 1994, we believe."

  She closed her eyes. "So it could be Iain?" she asked.

  "It could be," said Cullen. He thought of Bain standing at the whiteboard, hands on hips, trying to conjure some inspiration out of his doodles. "There is at least one other avenue that we are actively investigating. We want to focus on it being your husband. Can you recall the events around his disappearance?"

  Marion sat staring into space for almost a minute. "It came as a shock when he didn't come back," she said. "Fraser said that he'd stayed on partying. Iain could do that, get lost in a good piss-up. But he just didn't come back. They were scouring the entire country at the time, looking for him. They had the police in Glastonbury and Bristol out as well." She took a deep drag. "It tore me apart."

  "We believe that Iain was declared presumed dead in 2001," said Cullen. "Did you benefit from it?"

  She sat back and folded her arms. "What are you suggesting?"

  "We have to consider every possibility in a case like this," said Cullen. "If you were seen to have gained financially from this, then we would have to consider you a suspect."

  Marion leaned forward and pointed at Cullen, the cigarette burning away in that hand. "The only good thing that came for me out of Iain being declared dead," she said, "was that I could legally remarry."

  "So you weren't able to cash in on any life insurance contracts or anything like that?" asked Cullen.

  "Let me be clear," said Marion, stabbing the finger at Cullen, "that family ripped me off. They just cut me off, excluded me from anything and everything they could." She took another drag. "When Iain didn't come back, I was two months pregnant."

  Cullen watched Caldwell raise her eyebrows. He started to wonder if the pressures of pending fatherhood had pushed him over the edge in Glastonbury.

  "What happened to the child?" asked Caldwell.

  Cullen wondered if it was the boy who answered the door, but he decided to let it play out.

  Marion looked at Caldwell, her expression softening. "That witch of a mother of his told me to get an abortion," she said. She gave a bitter laugh. "Most other people would have been pleased that their flesh and blood were living on into another generation. Not the Crombies, though, they just didn't like me."

  "You were married, weren't you?" asked Caldwell.

  "Aye, well, it wasn't a marriage that was exactly blessed by them, put it that way," said Marion. "We were only nineteen when we got married. We were young and Iain was a real romantic. He was really headstrong. It was just a Registry Office affair, though his Dad had enough money to hire Edinburgh Castle out. Iain had these mad ideas in his head about us running the distillery as an old couple with loads of kids, and another generation of Crombies behind them." She brushed away a tear. "Never happened, though, did it?"

  Caldwell smiled. "Did you get anything from them or from Iain's estate?" she asked.

  "There wasn't really one to speak of," she said. "They totally controlled Iain, down to the last penny. He got hardly anything in his salary, but they used to give him cash to see him through. That way they kept absolute contr
ol over him - his pay barely covered our rent, but he was cash rich. He never had any life insurance or savings. He didn't have any equity in the company, either." She took a final drag and then crumpled the butt in the ashtray as she exhaled. "He wasn't very financially astute, not like his brother. They both had trust funds. Fraser still had his by the time Iain died. Iain had spent his - I've no idea on what. He had a Nintendo thing he used to play." She still held onto the cigarette end in the ashtray. "Let me know if you want to see his documentation. I've got a box full of stuff in the attic - bank statements, photos, that sort of thing."

  Caldwell grimaced - Cullen was only too happy for her to lose an afternoon running through Iain Crombie's financial affairs while he did something more productive. "Thanks, that would be good," she said. "Do you get any money from the family for your child?"

  "They paid me a few grand at the time when I didn't have the abortion," she said. "That was the end of the matter. I could have progressed it, I suppose, going through the courts. I got money every Christmas, but that's it."

  "Did Iain know about the baby?" asked Cullen.

  Marion nodded. "We had actually been trying for a few years," she said. She rubbed at her eyes. "We had already lost one, so as soon as we knew I was pregnant, Iain wrapped me up in cotton wool."

  Cullen struggled to reconcile the caring would-be father with the whisky-fuelled young man, away sowing his wild oats at a music festival.

  "What happened to the child?" asked Caldwell.

  "I kept him," said Marion. "Young Iain is off to University next year."

  "Was that who answered the door?" asked Cullen. He suddenly connected the boy's deep voice with the 'family trait' that Alec Crombie had been so keen to impart.

  She smiled. "He's like his father in so many ways," she said. "I'm not much of an academic but he is." She fiddled with the lighter. "I got together with my husband when Iain junior was three. As I said, we had to wait a few years to get married, of course." She looked away, wistfully. "It was a guy I was at school with. He'd just come back to Gullane from Glasgow Uni, had a job set up for him in Edinburgh. We met one night at the old Clubhouse pub."

  Cullen jotted that down. He wondered about the family, disowning their own flesh and blood like that, excluding Marion from their future. "Does Iain ask about his father?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said, curtly. "He's become obsessed with his Dad's disappearance. It's only natural, I suppose. I told him about his real father on his seventeenth birthday, three months ago. Since then, he's spent a lot of time speaking to people and putting together a story of his life. I was cleaning his room recently and I found a journal he'd been keeping. It was a paper one, which surprised me. I'd expected him to keep it on the computer, but then I suppose his father might find it. Craig's been really good to Iain, you know, treated him like his own son. It's been hard on him for the last year but he still loves Iain."

  "Who has he spoken to about this?" asked Cullen.

  "His grandfather, his uncle," said Marion. "A few others that knew Iain and some that worked with him."

  Cullen noted it all down. He decided that he didn't want to press it too hard - her expression had hardened, from a particularly tough starting point. "Iain was at Glastonbury festival just before he disappeared," he said, "is that correct?"

  "It is, aye," said Marion. "He loved his music. Him and his brother wanted to see Spiritualized, as much as take in the festival atmosphere." She sniffed. "Fraser told me that Iain had met someone else there. It really broke my heart. I almost had that abortion." She stabbed the stub in the ashtray, moving it around. "Going to Glastonbury was a good chance for the two of them to get away," she said, looking at the sun. "There had been all that bad blood between them."

  "What was it about?" asked Caldwell.

  Marion picked up the ashtray and gently tilted it, sending the ash rolling around. "Iain and his dad had this romantic notion of being the biggest independent distillery in Scotland," she said. "That's turned out amazing, by the way - they can barely make ends meet by all accounts. The only thing that's keeping them going is the whisky sitting in the basement."

  "Fraser was against the sale, wasn't he?" asked Cullen.

  "That's right," she said, looking at her packet of cigarettes. "He wanted to sell out to Scottish Distillers. They were sniffing around at the time, looking for small distilleries to buy. It's funny - I think they got bought out by Scottish & Newcastle a few years after. The Crombies would have made a good amount of cash out of a sale, that's what Iain reckoned."

  "So, other than romanticism," said Cullen, "why were the other two so against it?"

  "Fraser hadn't been to University," said Marion. "Iain had got a good Degree. All Fraser and his father had done was make whisky. They didn't have an alternative career. Alec would have made a packet out of it, but it wouldn't have left the family idle rich, put it that way. Fraser said that they should go for senior roles in Scottish Distillers, take the cash and the jobs. Iain and Alec believed that they could make the distillery work. Some dewy-eyed sentimentality."

  Cullen finally had something concrete about the argument that he could hang his hat on. He started to see Fraser Crombie in a more calculating light, thinking about the bigger picture rather than the quick buck. "So what happened to Fraser?" he asked.

  "He got demoted from Managing Director long before they went to the festival," said Marion. "Alec made him the Chief Cooper. He said he wanted him to learn some discipline."

  "How did he take it?" asked Cullen.

  Marion took another cigarette out and lit it. "He wasn't exactly pleased," she said, through a breath of smoke. "He was a spoilt child. Those titles were a joke, by the way. Alec expected his boys to grow into them, mind. He liked to take them out of their comfort zone. He could be very hard like that."

  "Did Fraser ever talk about leaving the company, do you know?"

  "No."

  "Why not?" asked Cullen.

  "I've no idea," she said. "Loyalty to his father? I really do not know."

  "What happened when they patched things up?" asked Caldwell.

  She tipped the ash from the end of the cigarette into the ashtray. She looked at Caldwell, then back at Cullen. "I don't know if either of you have brothers or sisters," she said, "but it's hard to be angry with them for that long. They just got fed up of arguing."

  The number of times Cullen'd had stupid arguments with his sister as they grew up and since. "You said that he was made the Master Cooper," he said. "What about Doug Strachan?"

  "What about him?" asked Marion, frowning.

  "Wasn't he the Master Cooper before Fraser?" asked Cullen.

  "He was," said Marion, before taking a deep drag. "He could make a solid barrel if you ever caught him sober."

  "Was he an alcoholic?"

  "Still is, as far as I can tell," she said. "I bumped into him in the Tesco in North Berwick last year. He had a trolley full of cheap whisky. I'm surprised that he's still able to work."

  Cullen jotted it down. "How did Iain get on with Doug?" he asked, not looking up.

  "Fine," said Marion. "They had a bit of a run-in once. Iain caught the old idiot stealing whisky."

  "Did he not sack him?" asked Cullen.

  Marion shook her head. "No, Iain wasn't like that," she said. "He believed in people being forgiven. He could be a bit of a hippie."

  "Assuming that it's him that we've found, do you have any idea about who could want to kill him?" asked Cullen.

  She shook her head again. "None at all."

  Cullen was running out of questions, only a few left. "Do you still see Fraser these days?" he asked.

  She took a deep drag of the cigarette and held it in her lungs for what felt to Cullen like hours. "We meet up every year," she said. "We go for a drink in a pub in Gullane on the anniversary of Iain's disappearance in July - the old Clubhouse has got too expensive these days, so it's been the Golf the last few years. We are supposed to meet up in a few weeks."
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  "How does he seem about it?"

  "About Iain?"

  Cullen nodded.

  Marion took another long puff and spoke through the exhale. "He misses him," she said. "Fraser's not the warmest of people, you know, but losing his brother really changed him."

  "We believe that while they were away on the trip to Glastonbury," said Cullen, "Iain was phoning you every night. Is that correct?"

  "Every night," said Marion, before she wiped her eye. "Kept asking how the bump was. It wasn't even a bump then, but that's what we called Iain junior. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the bump." She sniffed. "I've had two kids since with Craig, my husband, but neither of them had that same thing that I had with Iain junior."

  Cullen jotted it all down. "Did you know a Paddy Kavanagh?" she asked.

  She furrowed her brow for a few seconds. "Vaguely rings a bell," she said. "Who was he?"

  "He worked at the distillery," said Cullen. "He's the other potential victim."

  Marion closed her eyes. "I keep forgetting that it might not be Iain in there," she said.

  Cullen smiled. "I understand," he said. "I'm sure that this has come as a big shock."

  "I think Iain had been out drinking with this Paddy guy once or twice up in Garleton," said Marion, "but that's it. If I remember correctly, he used to come home even more pissed than usual."

  Cullen closed his notebook. He glanced at Caldwell - she shrugged. He got to his feet and handed her his card. "If you think of anything, please feel free to give me a call at any time."

  Marion finished the cigarette and ground it into the ashtray. "Do you want that box of Iain's?" she asked.

  "That would be good," said Caldwell.

  "I'll be back in a few minutes," said Marion.

  Caldwell turned to Cullen once she'd gone. "That's my afternoon disappearing," she said.

  nineteen

  "Cullen, I should not fuckin' be the one tellin' you to stop focusin' on only one potential victim," barked Bain, his eyes glaring, "especially after all that shite you put me through last summer."