The early shift was almost over and DC Louise Hepburn was finishing off a report when MacNee came back into the CID room. He’d been short with his subordinates all morning – well, him being five foot six (and three-quarters, don’t forget the three-quarters and preferably round it up to five foot seven) made that inevitable, but today something was bugging him and he’d been cutting everyone down to his own size so aggressively that you began to feel you were in an oriental court and obliged to keep your head lower than the king’s.
‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘You’ll do, Louise.’
Mentally kowtowing, Hepburn said, ‘Something you want me to do, Sarge? I’m due off shortly but I’m not in a hurry if you want me to stay on for a bit.’
‘Shouldn’t take long, but thanks for the offer. There’s someone called Marnie Bruce just wandered in off the street and asked to speak to DI Fleming. Find out what it is she’s after and then write it up. There’s no rush on that – the boss is in a meeting all afternoon so tomorrow’ll do fine. Report direct to her – I’m off tomorrow. All right? Thanks, Louise.’
‘No problem, Sarge. In the waiting room, is she?’
Hepburn headed off along the corridor feeling brighter. MacNee’s black mood seemed to have lifted, and after a morning at the computer it was good to have something more interesting to do.
There was only one person in the waiting room, a slight, neat-featured woman. Her hair, feathered round her face, was an unusual reddish-gold and her light-blue eyes had an odd expression, almost as if she were seeing something more than just the room around her.
‘Marnie Bruce? I’m DC Hepburn. What’s the problem?’
This wasn’t the way Marnie had planned it, which threw her. She could remember Fleming vividly – well, of course she could – and she had gone back over the scenes where she had featured in Marnie’s life, looking for any questions arising from them. There wasn’t much to go on, really, but she sensed a hidden agenda and she’d had time on the long journey north to work up a determination to find out what it was.
She’d been prepared for disappointment. The PC Fleming she remembered was likely to have moved, or even left the police years ago, but the receptionist had recognised the name immediately and Marnie had felt a great surge of optimism.
This girl, slightly foreign-looking with her untidy mass of dark curly hair, olive skin and dark eyes, was a let-down. She looked to be in her twenties and certainly couldn’t have any recollection of what had happened.
She said firmly, ‘There isn’t any point in explaining it all to someone else. I wanted to speak to PC Fleming. They said she still works here.’
The other woman’s lips twitched. ‘I’m afraid she hasn’t been PC Fleming for a long time. She’s Detective Inspector Fleming now, so as you can imagine she’s a very busy woman. I’m to hear what you have to say and then I’ll report to her if we can’t sort it out now.’
Marnie frowned. This girl seemed to think she could just fob her off. But there had been another policeman – DS MacNee.
‘Is – is DS MacNee still here?’ she asked, and of course the name triggered the image.
He comes down the ward and sits next to her bed. ‘How are you feeling, lassie?’ he says.
She ignores the question. ‘Where’s my mum?’
She was having to peer through what was running in her head and it was very distracting. She saw Hepburn looking at her strangely. Reckoning she was just another nutter, probably – and perhaps that wasn’t wrong.
‘I’m afraid he’s off duty.’
‘I’ll come back when he’s on duty again, then.’ Marnie made to get up. ‘Tomorrow?’
Hepburn shook her head. ‘He’s away tomorrow. And I couldn’t say when you’d get him – we work shifts and we’re out on calls a lot.
‘Look, why don’t I find a cup of coffee for us and you can give me some idea what this is all about – OK?’
She was out of the room before Marnie had a chance to respond. She sat back on the padded bench and closed her eyes, allowing the interview with DS MacNee play on in her mind. There was, she realised, very little to go on there. He’d just asked her standard questions, giving nothing away, and unlike PC – no, sorry, Detective Inspector – Fleming he’d had no previous connection with her mother. And it didn’t look as if she’d get to see Fleming without talking to this girl. She had resigned herself to it, though with a bad grace, by the time Hepburn came back carrying two paper cups.
‘It’s not great coffee – warm and wet is about the best I can say for it,’ she said cheerfully, setting them down on the low table and producing cartons of creamer, packets of sugar and a wooden stirrer from her pocket.
‘Just black.’ Marnie sipped at the greyish liquid, though she noticed that Hepburn didn’t pick up hers. She put down the cup again, deciding to follow her example.
‘Is it all right if I call you Marnie?’ Hepburn barely waited for her nod. ‘Right, Marnie. Talk to me. What do you want to ask DI Fleming about?’
‘I want to know why I never heard anything after my mother disappeared and I was taken into care all these years ago. I want to know if she’s alive or dead. I want to know whether she chose to disappear or whether somebody killed her.’
She had the satisfaction of seeing Hepburn’s eyes widen in sudden interest, then added, ‘And why there was never an inquiry.’
Having bashed out her report, Hepburn saved it and left the CID room. She picked up her rain jacket from her locker, pulling up the hood after a glance out of the window. There was a steady drizzle and under the leaden sky it was getting dark already.
She paused on the doorstep of the police headquarters to light a Gitane, an addiction acquired during visits to her French mother’s family, cupping her hands round the lighter to shield the flame, then taking a long, luxurious, and yes, faintly desperate draw.
She should give it up. The cost was becoming ridiculous, on her wages, and she was beginning to feel a bit of a sad loser, huddled round the back by the dustbins in her break, with winter ahead. Yes, she should definitely give it up. Just not now.
She was still reeling a bit from the impact of what Marnie Bruce had told her. A kid of eleven, assaulted and abandoned in a remote cottage with her mother gone – and no follow-up? It couldn’t be like that, surely. There must be more to it, but she’d had to be careful that her report didn’t have a hint of criticism since it was obviously a case that Big Marge had worked on in the dim-and-distant. She’d stressed, too, that there was something odd about the woman – not exactly a nutter, but definitely strange. There had been hesitations that suggested Marnie might be hearing voices that certainly weren’t coming through to anyone else.
It was a pity she couldn’t have talked it over with Big Marge today, but she’d had her instructions. She’d just have to go back home now. She inhaled a last lingering puff, then crushed her cigarette out against the waste bin.
Hepburn’s feet were dragging as she walked towards her car. She had a long drive ahead of her and it wasn’t as if she was looking forward to what awaited her at the other end.
Her colleagues assumed she was saving to get on the housing ladder by living at home, on the edge of Stranraer, and she’d let them think that; it sounded so pitiable to be trapped by her family circumstances. Her mother Fleur had declared English an ugly language and flatly refused to learn it and her father, fluent in French himself, had never insisted. Once he died, Fleur had found herself helpless and friendless.
But still intransigent. There was nothing, Louise reflected bitterly, as stubborn as a French mother who declared that at her age it would not be elegant for her to learn English like some little child. Louise could take over her father’s place as social facilitator.
In the first devastation of loss, Louise had given up the flat she’d been renting in Kirkluce and come home. Once the formalities of sorting out her father’s estate had been completed, it seemed fairly obvious that Fleur would return to France. Naturally, it couldn’t be discussed while she was shocked and confused and clinging to her only child, but Louise would be leaving home again once Fleur got back to normal.
Only she hadn’t. The confusion showed no signs of clearing and Louise never knew from one day to the next what she would have to confront when she got home.
The house was a villa, white-harled and standing on the shores of Loch Ryan looking out along the sea loch between the low hills, a pretty house with a pretty view, but Louise didn’t even glance at it.
‘Maman, I’m home,’ she called in the French that was the only language spoken at home, and as her mother appeared from the kitchen at the back of the house Louise was struck, as she so often was, by Fleur’s beauty and elegance. The bloom was fading now but her face was still a perfect oval, with high cheekbones and delicate olive colouring, and she had pansy-brown eyes which even as she approached sixty remained luminous and unhooded. Her long dark hair, without even a thread of grey, was caught up in a clip at the back, with wisps slipping forward becomingly. But she was wearing a nightgown.
‘Darling, you are so late! But I made coq au vin, so it won’t have come to much harm.’
Automatically, Louise glanced at her watch, though she knew it wasn’t three o’clock yet. She felt faintly sick. ‘Maman, it’s not bedtime. It’s still the afternoon.’
A cloud came over her mother’s face briefly. Then she laughed, pointing through a window to the gathering gloom. ‘No, no, it’s dark – look! You work too hard. But come now and have your supper. I’ll have a glass of wine to keep you company and you can tell me what kept you so late.’
She went to the kitchen. As she opened the door the delicious, winy smell of the casserole floated out but Louise really wasn’t hungry – and not just because it was four hours until supper time.
There the cottage was, exactly as Marnie had remembered it, just a bit shabbier, and it had been pretty run-down even back then. The trees seem to have sidled closer, though of course they couldn’t have, really; they were still on the other side of the sagging wire fence. It was just that the great pine boughs had grown longer, as if they were reaching out in kinship to reclaim the wooden house.
It was one of the cottages built for the workforce needed to plant the massive forests of the Galloway National Park, most of them redundant long ago. The bleached shingles that covered it were a dried-out silver-grey now and indeed rotting in places, Marnie noticed.
Her memory of it was entirely accurate, of course; how could she have expected anything different? Yet with all the repetitions that had replayed in her head these last years it had taken on a sort of unreality, and it was somehow a shock to see it there, as if she’d stepped into an old movie she’d watched too many times.
As the service bus pulled away Marnie walked towards it along the side of the main road, the Queen’s Way running from Newton Stewart to New Galloway. The rain, at least, had gone off, but it was damp and dreary and the sky was dark with purplish clouds. Pine needles clumped onto the soles of her shoes as she walked, deadening the sound of her footsteps. Across the track on the farther side of the house, a plantation had been felled leaving a massacre site of stumps and dead branches, making the house look curiously naked.
Marnie had told herself that just going to the house she’d once lived in wasn’t going to achieve anything but even so she’d cherished a slender hope that the occupants might know what had happened after they left. It was something to do, anyway, while she waited for the police to get back in touch.
She reached the five-bar gate. They had never bothered to close it and it stood open still, but rotting at the base and with the hinges rusted. The rough grass round about was untended, with clumps of bracken and nettles and brambles round the edges. No change there, then, and the paintwork round the windows was peeling as if it hadn’t been renewed since they left.
There was no one around and the cottage had a deserted feel. The curtains at the windows were hanging limp and there was a big crack in one of the panes. Even so, she hesitated before she walked through the gate and when she reached the door knocked once then paused, listening.
A couple of cars passed, their tyres swishing in puddles on the road, but there was no responsive movement inside. She knocked again; the sound seemed to echo in emptiness and she stepped aside to look through the sitting-room window on the right, cupping her hand against the pane to break the reflection.
It was weird, as if she’d opened a time capsule. She hadn’t expected the familiar furniture would still be here, yet there was the brown sofa, the wonky standard lamp with the orange shade, the cheap coffee table, now missing a great splinter of the wood veneer. It was the setting her flashback memories always produced – and yet it wasn’t. The familiar, grubby disorder had gone and it was almost clinically tidy and bare. The dissonance gave her a sense of confusion that was close to nausea.
Their landlord must still own it. Who was he? Nothing came back to her, so she presumably had never known; her mother would have looked after all that. Certainly, it looked as if it had been empty for a long time. Who would want a run-down place like this, stuck out in the middle of nowhere?
She wandered round the house. The other windows were too high to look into, and on an impulse she tried the back door – locked, of course. The front door no doubt would be too, but she went back and rattled the handle hopefully. It didn’t yield, but the lock looked as if it hadn’t been changed and a sudden thought struck her.
The stone at the foot of the pine tree nearest the house was embedded in soil and moss but she was determined, scrabbling and tugging at it and eventually seeking out a smaller, pointed stone to use as a lever. As it came up small pale creatures scuttled and squirmed away from the light in panic but there, speckled with rust and earth, was the key they had always kept there.
Marnie brushed it clean then went to the back door and turned the key in the lock. It opened with a squeal of unused hinges and she stepped inside with a stirring of expectation.
The place felt full of ghosts. Images assailed her, one after the other, until she was dizzy and whimpering in dismay, ‘No, no!’ Shaking, she struggled to displace them with some rational insight, opening the doors one after another.
There was nothing here. How could there be? It was just a shabby, gloomy, soulless place and it certainly wasn’t going to tell her anything about what had happened to her or where her mother had gone. She didn’t want to be here any more. She gave a shudder as she left, locking the door behind her.
Marnie hefted the key in her hand, preparing to throw it away into the tangle of scrubby growth at the foot of the forest trees. Then, for no real reason that she could think of, she put it back in its place under the stone and pushed the dislodged earth and the torn moss back round about it.
The meeting had finished early for once. It was just after four when Fleming came out and went immediately to the CID room looking for Hepburn, though without much hope. It would have been good to know what exactly Marnie Bruce was expecting.
Hepburn had gone off duty, of course, and Fleming set off up the stairs to her office with the problem still dominating her thoughts. She’d been far too junior to make decisions at the time – had protested about them, indeed – but those more responsible had left the force. Jakie McNally was dead and Donald Bailey, a DI at the time, had retired as superintendent last year – a nice piece of timing there.
Of course, MacNee had been a DS at the time, while Fleming had been a humble PC, but she knew who Bailey’s successor would look to for explanation and it wouldn’t be him. She quailed at the thought.
Detective Superintendent Christine Rowley had been fast-tracked in Edinburgh to DCI and then had transferred to the Galloway Constabulary to cut her teeth before, as she made all too plain, she returned in glory to the sort of policing that was worthy of her talents. She viewed both the inhabitants of her present patch and her subordinates with a sort of lofty amusement which edged into high-pitched annoyance when things went wrong.
East Coast and West Coast Scotland have never seen things in quite the same light, but Fleming’s attempt to explain to her that the old joke, ‘Glasgow and Edinburgh aren’t speaking’ wasn’t just a joke fell on deaf ears. To Rowley it was incomprehensible that they weren’t grateful for enlightenment when she explained how things were done in the capital. It was putting a severe strain on MacNee’s blood pressure.
She wasn’t popular with anyone. Her affected Morningside accent grated and Fleming had taken care not to find out which of her colleagues had coined the nickname ‘Hyacinth’, after Mrs Bucket of TV fame, but she suspected MacNee was involved. It had become quite hard to think of her in any other way.
Rowley would have fifty fits about the Marnie Bruce case. Fleming had frequently moaned about her predecessor, who had elevated busy idleness to a fine art, but she had taken it all back several times since his departure. At least Donald Bailey had let her get on with the job, whereas Rowley liked playing puppet-master till the strings got tangled and then let everything collapse in a heap which would involve hours of patient sorting out for someone. Usually Fleming.
There was no point in giving a preliminary explanation before she knew just what sort of trouble Marnie Bruce was going to cause, but perhaps it would be wise to trawl the files to see precisely the level of constraint they’d been under at the time, given the situation.
It wouldn’t have been computerised. With a sigh, Fleming turned round and went back down the stairs again to the dusty store where the archives were kept. It could take hours to find what she was looking for, and she wasn’t looking forward to the search.
But it was a visit to Disneyland compared to the conversation she would have to have with Hyacinth tomorrow.
Marnie Bruce glanced at her watch as she went back onto the road. Three-quarters of an hour till the next bus was due – how could she fill the time? She’d freeze if she hung about here, so she’d be better walking briskly towards Newton Stewart in the hope that the exercise would warm her up. She might even manage to hitch a lift from a passing car.
She was about to set off in that direction when her eye was caught by another cottage a couple of hundred yards down the road on the other side, and she stopped. She remembered it but she’d never been inside. They’d had no real contact with their neighbours, except that morning …
He’s standing over her with a gun in his hand, and she thinks she’s going to be sick again, with terror. He’s saying something about foxes then he says, ‘You know me, don’t you? Douglas Boyd, from along the road.’
She latched on to the name while trying to force the memory away. Douglas Boyd. It gave her a fresh purpose and she turned back, towards the other cottage. It was a quaint-looking grey stone building with small windows and a slate roof. There was a little bit of land round about it and a grassy patch in front where there was a child’s swing and a sandpit, muddy and pooled with water at the moment.
Douglas Boyd and his wife would be long gone but perhaps the current owner might know where they were if they were still alive: an old people’s home, most likely, but they might still have something to tell her.
The woman who came to the door looked blank at the name ‘Boyd’. She wasn’t much older than Marnie herself; there was a child screaming in the background and her expression conveyed that a stranger at the door was pretty much the last straw. They’d bought it from some people called McCrae, she said, and shut the door in Marnie’s face.
It wasn’t the girl’s fault that she didn’t know, but she didn’t need to be rude. Feeling irritable and dispirited, Marnie walked aimlessly back past the cottage. What lay ahead of her was a long walk under dark purple clouds that threatened rain, and all this expedition had done was to prompt random bursts of upsetting memories without giving her anything more to follow up.
A silvery glint caught her eye and she turned her head. The trees were thinning now and beyond them there was a glimpse of water, Clatteringshaws Loch. There was a little path leading past the back of the cottage and down to the shore – at least there had been, though it might be overgrown by now. On an impulse she went back into the garden and stepped over the loose wires of the boundary fence.
It was still there. It was some sort of laid path, perhaps a shortcut for the foresters, and it wasn’t completely overgrown, though the sprawl of shrubs was encroaching and she had to duck under snagging branches. It was about fifty yards long and she could see the loch glimmering beyond.
Its wide expanse was steel-grey today under the heavy sky. On a sunny day it would be charming, with the backdrop of green native woodland and the soft surrounding hills hazy-purple with heather, but at this time of year with the trees bare and the heather black and dead it looked grim, even menacing.
The path came out in a little car park beside a tea room and information centre, closed of course. She walked down from the green bank onto the narrow pebbled shore and out of long habit bent and chose a flat stone to skim out across the surface of the loch. It was half-in, half-out of the water, the dry half dull grey, the other half glowing with soft blues and pinks and greens. She’d noticed that before …
She stares at the pebble. How can just water make it look so different? Maybe it’s a different colour anyway? But no, it’s drying already. It’s going back to grey and she loses interest, sending it scliffing across the water – one, two, three, four, then quicker and quicker five, six, seven, nearly eight, and then it sinks, in circles of ripples. She tries another stone or two then she wanders down to—
The Iron Age broch! She hadn’t thought of it until now. It had been a curious structure: a circular drystone wall, overgrown with grass and mosses, with a sort of wigwam of wooden struts added on top to show how they would have lived, that unimaginably ancient tribe who had made their home here, probably to fish in the lake. Perhaps their children had scliffed stones too, maybe even wondered at their colours, as she had done, standing just where she was now. It was a weird thought.
Could it still be there? Marnie was just about to take the path towards it when she was suddenly buffeted by a gust of wind. She turned to look out across the loch and saw the squall coming towards her between the hills, battering down silver spears of rain and ruffling the water into choppy little waves.
She was wearing light rainwear well suited to London showers and had a neat little umbrella in her tote bag, but borne on the wind the rain reached her before she could dig it out and she was soaked through before she could get it open. Once she did, the wind took it, contemptuously blowing it inside out and breaking a couple of its ribs.
The broch would give her shelter – if its roof was still there. Gasping under the shock of the downpour, she ran along the path, her sight blurred by the rivulets pouring down her face. But yes, the roof was there, its timbers blackened by age, and she ducked gratefully under the entrance into the dim interior.
It was smarter than it had been when she was a child, with a neat gravelled floor where once there had been only packed earth, and even a bench. She sat down on it to dig out tissues from her bag to mop her face but rose immediately; there were gaps between the struts and now the seat of her jeans was wet too.
The smell was the same, though – damp, earthy, with an edge of rotting vegetation. She felt a sudden churning in her stomach …
‘Quick, quick,’ Gemma hisses. ‘He’s coming, he’s coming!’ She gives a little squeal of delighted terror as they dash into the broch. They clutch each other as they cower at the back, listening for the footsteps.
She says, ‘They’re getting closer!’ and Gemma mutters, ‘What if he comes in? What’ll we do?’ They’re both covering their heads with their hands, as if that makes them invisible.
Without even a pause, the footsteps go on along the path. ‘That was close,’ she whispers to Gemma.
‘Better wait a minute or two,’ Gemma says. ‘In case he looks back and sees us.’
They know, of course, that he’s just an ordinary man out walking who hasn’t even noticed two silly kids who think it’s fun to scare themselves. And it’s worked; Gemma might be giggling but she’s beginning to feel creepy, as if the ghosts of those people wearing skins and holding clubs resented her being alive when they were long, long dead.
She scrambles up, startling Gemma. She’s desperate to get out, as if something horrible might happen if she doesn’t escape …
Marnie felt the same now. She had the odd prickling down the back of her neck that you get when someone’s looking at you, and even though she knew there was no one there she turned to check. She told herself she was being stupid, but her heart rate speeded up and her breathing thickened. Rain or no rain, she was getting out of here.
It had been too heavy to last long. It was stopping already and as she walked back along the path, mocking her own stupidity, the wind blew a rift in the clouds and a sunbeam lit up the farther shore with golden splendour.
It was the fourth time today that Anita had tried his number, but she didn’t want to leave a message. There was never any guarantee that he would respond.
‘All right, Anita, what do you want?’ he said as he answered the phone.
Caller ID always threw her and she was upset too by his unwelcoming tone. ‘I-I just wanted to warn you about something.’
His voice sharpened. ‘Warn me? What do you mean?’
‘The anniversary,’ she said. ‘It was forty years ago yesterday, and there was a big piece in the Record. Maybe others too.’
‘So?’
Anita hadn’t an answer to that question. ‘Well—’
He cut across her. ‘Just rehashing the old stuff?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Tomorrow’s chip paper, then. That’s all.’
He didn’t even say goodbye and she knew she had, yet again, made a fool of herself. She hated the way she’d sounded. Needy. Pathetic. Hearing his voice had been the sort of fix for her addiction that did no more than keep it alive. She knew she should go cold turkey, yet she also knew the flimsiest excuse to call him would prompt a craving she couldn’t resist, whatever it might cost her.