‘Wow! That was quite a story,’ Hepburn said as she and Macdonald at last escaped Ivy Gordon’s clutches. ‘But what has it all got to do with Marnie?’
‘Who said it does? You’re obsessed with the woman.’ Only one more day after this, Macdonald told himself; he could take it for one more day. Campbell, thank God, would be back on Monday. ‘She was talking about Anita’s background, that’s all.’
‘I don’t buy that. Marnie comes back here, tracks down Anita to try to find out about her mother and suddenly all hell breaks loose. There’s all that back story that Ivy tells us – what does that say to you?’
‘It says to me that Marnie Bruce is right up on the list of suspects, like I said. Oh look, there’s the boss. We’d better go and have a word.’
They went up to the edge of the cordon and waited while Fleming and MacNee talked to the SOCO on the doorstep, struggling out of their protection suits. MacNee, gathering them up to put in a plastic sack by the door, noticed Macdonald and Hepburn and said, ‘Boss,’ with a jerk of his head. Fleming glanced round, finished her conversation and came down the path towards them.
‘Anything useful?’
‘Couple of things,’ Macdonald said. He gave the five-minute version of their hour with Ivy Gordon, finishing with what she had said about Daniel Lee, and saw Fleming look at him sharply. ‘Know him, boss?’
Fleming hesitated, then said, ‘I suppose it could be the Daniel Lee who’s in a local consortium. I’ll get someone to check.’
If that was why she knew the name, she’d had a remarkably strong reaction to it, Macdonald thought, but she was going on.
‘There’s another thing. Louise, you had some contact with Marnie Bruce, didn’t you?’
Macdonald saw Hepburn stiffen slightly. ‘Well, I interviewed her, yes.’
‘But you haven’t been in touch with her since?’
Fleming and MacNee were both looking at her with a curious intensity and Macdonald wasn’t surprised when Hepburn sounded defensive in her reply. He’d have felt defensive himself if they’d looked at him like a couple of vivisectionists working out where to make the first incision.
‘Not personally, boss, apart from when we interviewed her after the Bridge Street incident. You said you would phone her.’
‘Mmm. So you’ve no idea where she is at the moment? She didn’t say where she would go when she left the B & B in Bridge Street?’
Macdonald and Hepburn both shook their heads.
‘That’s unfortunate.’ Fleming hesitated, as if trying to make up her mind about something, then went on, ‘Look, this isn’t for general release so keep it to yourselves. There’s a copy of a will among Anita Loudon’s papers leaving everything to Marnie Bruce.’
Hepburn flinched. To his credit, Macdonald didn’t turn for a triumphant look at her. It wasn’t easy.
Fleming went on, ‘I’ve tried her phone but she’s not picking up. I left a message, but obviously we need to pick her up. Get back to the station and find the tourist board list of B & Bs in the area and grab anyone you can find to work through them. Tell them we need to talk to her because she visited Anita Loudon recently. Just that, OK?’
Macdonald agreed politely, though he thought she’d be lucky if the rest of the lads swallowed that story. Followed by the crestfallen Hepburn, he went back to the car.
As they drove away, she said defiantly, ‘I know you think that shows you’re right, but there’s no proof. Marnie might not even have known about the will. And I still believe Anita Loudon was lying.’
He could afford to be magnanimous now they were heading back and would probably be in the office for a fair bit of the day too. ‘I certainly won’t argue that there’s still a lot we don’t know,’ he said.
It was only then it struck him: they’d be working overtime tomorrow, without a doubt. And over the weekend too, quite possibly. Three more days, then. He could bear it. Probably.
Marnie’s phone rang then gave a ‘ping’ as she was driving up the A77 towards Ayr. A text message: she ignored it. There was so much going on in her head that she wasn’t sure she could have a coherent conversation with anyone.
‘I think he said they’d lost touch,’ Anita is saying. She knows Anita’s just trying to get rid of her but she’s not leaving till she has the address—
Blot it out – concentrate on the road! It was clear now; she edged out, then put her foot down and passed the lorry in front.
‘No, I can’t go to the parents’ night,’ Mum says. ‘Drax needs me, we’re busy just now.’
She feels tears come to her eyes. She knows there’s no point in saying that everyone else’s mum will be there because her mother won’t pay any attention but she says it anyway.
Mum’s angry and like always when she’s angry she goes into attack mode. ‘What’re they going to tell me – that you’re not working hard enough, that you’re useless?’
‘Yes, probably,’ she says in the hard voice she puts on at times like this, as if she doesn’t care.
‘What’s the point, then? Anyway Drax has a job for me tonight.’
Desperate to stop the flood of unrelated images, Marnie turned on the car radio. Perhaps that would help.
She had the heater on full too, though she still felt as if the cold had gone right through into her bones. She hadn’t slept till the early hours and then had wakened feeling cramped and stiff, with the hot-water bottle she had gone to sleep clutching acting as an ice pack instead.
It was a glorious day, though, and even in her troubled state the scenery as she drove on up the coast made her catch her breath. The strange, volcanic hump that was Ailsa Craig was on the horizon now and the sea around it was dark blue, sparkling in the sun. Low in the sky there was a single pale cloud, like a winged dragon, Marnie thought fancifully. It would have been good just to stop and stare at it, blank her mind out, let the beauty and the peace wash it clean …
The voice on the radio, which had been burbling in the background unheard, suddenly penetrated her consciousness. ‘—small village of Dunmore in Dumfries and Galloway. The woman’s body was found in a children’s play park by a passer-by and police are treating the death as suspicious.
‘There was more bad news on the economy—’
Marnie didn’t hear the rest. She slowed down dramatically, earning a blast on the horn from the driver of the car behind, which swept past as he held up his finger in a rude gesture that she didn’t notice. There was a sign for a lay-by half a mile ahead and she drove there and pulled in.
The phone. It was lying on the seat beside her; she shrank back as if it were a snake that might strike. She had to force herself to pick it up, and her fingers were clumsy as she opened the text.
It was from DI Fleming. What was Marnie to do now? ‘As a matter of urgency’ – the phrase was chilling. She sat back in the seat and shut her eyes.
She wasn’t going to call back. She was invisible, remember? She was going to go on and do what she had planned, once she was calm enough to drive safely.
She opened her eyes again. There were gannets diving out there, white arrows entering the water with barely a splash. Round the foot of Ailsa Craig she could see tiny white ripples where the waves were breaking. The dragon cloud looked more like a horse now.
At last her hands stopped shaking, she put the car in gear and drove on up the road to Glasgow.
Vivienne Morrison’s shop was shut when DI Fleming and DS MacNee arrived.
‘News travels fast,’ Fleming said. ‘Have we an address for her?’
‘Here somewhere.’ MacNee leafed through some scribbled notes. ‘Yes – it’s a farmhouse on the edge of the village.’ He gave her directions and they drove off up the hill.
‘So do we reckon it’s the lover or the beneficiary?’
Fleming gave him an exasperated look. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t start picking sides! We’ve got enough of a problem already with Louise and Andy.’
‘At least Louise didn’t jump the gun and get in touch with her and it doesn’t look as if our Marnie’s answering the phone.
‘But this “Drax”? What sort of a man would have a name like that?’
Fleming glanced at him. ‘You don’t remember? Oh, I suppose I’ve had my memory refreshed recently. He was one of the child witnesses at Kirstie Burnside’s trial. He was around when Tommy Crichton was killed.’
‘Oh,’ MacNee said flatly. ‘Don’t think I wanted to hear that.’
‘I saw that a Daniel Lee was one of the directors in that local consortium but I didn’t make the connection till Andy said that. Strangely enough, Grant Crichton is one of his co-directors. You’d think it would be an uncomfortable reminder for him, but I suppose business is business.
‘And there was a Michael Morrison on the list too. Vivienne’s husband, do you reckon?’
‘What is their business?’
‘Not sure. The super’s been on this rant about illegal immigration – I told you I’d got lumbered with it. That was one of the local firms operating through Cairnryan but I haven’t had time to check out the details.’ Her face brightened. ‘That’s one good thing – at least I can say that I definitely don’t have time for it now.
‘Is that the farmhouse up there? Not our sort of farmhouse, evidently.’ As Fleming turned off up the metalled drive, she glanced across the neighbouring acres with a knowledgeable eye. ‘Looks as if the farmer put his feet up after he sold off the house. Lots of farm buildings over there but he’s not working the fields.’
MacNee followed her gesture with an incurious eye. To him they looked like fields always did – green and a bit messy. His lawn at home, now – he’d begun to take quite a pride in it recently, though when he’d mentioned it to Fleming she’d looked at him as if he’d announced he was getting a Zimmer.
A young woman answered the door. She was blonde and very pretty, but the pleasant social smile she had greeted them with vanished when they introduced themselves and asked to speak to her mother.
‘Oh dear, it’s this awful news about Anita, isn’t it? I’m her daughter, Gemma. You’d better come in.
‘I can’t believe it, not here! We don’t even bother to lock the doors half the time.’
She led them across the hall into a sitting room straight out of Country Living – three sofas with cream linen loose covers drawn up to form a square with the fireplace, a sofa table behind one of them with a large but very tasteful arrangement of silk flowers and, yes, a stash of what Fleming always thought of as property-porn magazines in neatly squared piles. She was pleased, though, to notice on one of the sofas what looked very like an unnoticed smear of chocolate at child level.
‘I’ll go and get Mummy,’ Gemma said. ‘She’s lying down. Please can you be very gentle with her? She’s in a terrible state.’
As he always did, given the chance, MacNee prowled round the room checking it out. A tabletop was devoted to happy family snaps, the majority featuring a fair-haired child. ‘Fond grandparents,’ he said.
Fleming pointed to one of the many scatter cushions on the sofas. ‘“If we’d known grandchildren were so much fun, we’d have had them first”,’ she read out.
MacNee surveyed them, snorting at hearts and flowers and the Union Jack – not to his taste – then with a grin picked up one which suggested ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.
‘Maybe I could just hold this up,’ he was saying as the door opened. He dropped it hastily.
Vivienne Morrison did, indeed, look in a dreadful state. Her eyes were puffy with tears and she was visibly shaky; her daughter had an arm round her waist as she helped her to sit down and took her own place beside her, holding her hand.
She managed a travesty of a smile. ‘I’m sorry, do forgive me. It’s just been … such a shock.’
‘Of course,’ Fleming said. ‘We’ll keep this as quick as possible. I know our officers interviewed you and Anita Loudon at the shop yesterday.’
Making an obvious effort to control her voice, Vivienne said, ‘Yes, but it started as just a normal day. We’ve worked together for years and years—’
She stopped, biting her lip. Fleming said gently, ‘You’re obviously very distressed but I know you’ll want to give us any help you can so that we can find out who did this to Anita. Was there anything, anything at all, that she said yesterday to suggest that she was worried, that something had happened?’
Vivienne broke down. ‘Poor, poor Anita,’ she was saying, when the door opened and a tall man with greying fair hair, good-looking still, if showing signs of comfortable living, appeared saying, ‘I thought you were lying down, darling!’
His face darkened at the sight of the officers.
‘It’s the police, Dad,’ Gemma said.
‘I imagined it must be.’ He came into the room, holding out his hand to MacNee. ‘Michael Morrison. This is a sorry business.’
‘I’m DS MacNee. This is DI Fleming.’
He covered up his assumption that the man would be the senior officer quite smoothly. ‘Yes, of course. I imagine you want to question my wife and I know she’ll want to give you every possible help. But as you can see she’s really in no fit state to talk to you. I’ve phoned the doctor to come and I’m sure he will confirm that.’
Fleming couldn’t really argue. All she could do was say, ‘If she could possibly just tell us whether Anita said anything that could be of help—’
‘I’m sure she gave us a very full account when we were talking about it earlier,’ Morrison said. ‘Isn’t that right, darling?’
Vivienne’s shoulders were heaving but she managed to nod.
He had got the officers on their feet already – deliberately, Fleming wondered? – and now moved to hold the door open very purposefully.
‘Thank you for your help, anyway,’ she said, then as he escorted them to the front door she added, ‘Perhaps I can just ask you how well you knew Anita Loudon yourself?’
Morrison shrugged. ‘Hardly at all, really. Of course, I knew her as someone in the village but the shop is my wife’s business, not mine, and we didn’t socialise. She seemed a pleasant lady, though, and my wife was very satisfied with her as an employee.
‘So – have you any idea who might have done this?’
Was it just her imagination, or was there tension in his attitude as he waited for her reply. She prolonged the pause deliberately before she handed out the usual response about promising lines of enquiry.
No, it wasn’t imagination. Food for thought.
‘She’s disappeared,’ Macdonald said, coming into the CID room. ‘That’s the last on the accommodation list checked out, and she’s not in any of them.
‘Have you tried her phone again?’ he asked Hepburn, who was sitting at a computer terminal.
She didn’t look up. ‘Three times.’
‘How soon do we decide it’s deliberate and start looking for her in earnest?’
‘Give her a chance! There’s lots of reasons why you might not be taking calls besides trying to do a runner. And maybe she just decided to go back to London, after all that had happened.’
She spoke absently, looking at what had come up on the screen in front of her at the same time.
Macdonald’s curiosity was piqued. ‘What are you doing? Thought you were supposed to be writing up the Ivy Gordon interview?’
‘Done that. Now I’m just checking out the press coverage of Tommy Crichton’s murder.’ Hepburn scrolled on down, then suddenly sat back in her chair, staring at it. ‘Oh my God!’
‘What have you found?’ He came round to look over her shoulder.
Hepburn pointed to the photograph inset into the newspaper article, a family snap of a girl with strawberry-blonde hair and striking blue eyes. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Marnie Bruce as a child,’ he said slowly. ‘Only it isn’t, is it? That’s Kirstie Burnside, child murderer.’
‘No wonder Marnie got a reaction when she strolled into Dunmore, looking like that. And,’ Hepburn said with triumphant emphasis, ‘it shows she was telling the truth that she couldn’t understand what happened. She has no idea who her mother was.’
‘It’s plausible, I suppose. Kirstie would be given a watertight new identity after her release and full legal protection afterwards, so even if a persistent journalist got on her trail there’s no way anything could be published.’
‘It’ll all come out now, though, surely?’
Macdonald considered that. ‘Not necessarily. The press won’t have a photo of Marnie to compare it with, and even if someone tells them that someone who looked like Kirstie Burnside was in the village – well, so what? We’re certainly not going to make them a present of the connection.’
‘And,’ he said, triumphant in his turn, ‘it explains why Big Marge and Tam have been so cagey with you. Not a cover-up – an injunction protecting Kirstie.’
Hepburn conceded the point. ‘But anyway, what happens now? If we want to find her, we’ll have to put out an alert. And you know what will happen then.’
‘I certainly do.’ A general alert to find a police suspect was like ringing a bell to summon the press for a feeding frenzy. ‘But if they manage to put two and two together, will they be banned from reporting on Kirstie’s child too? You did law, didn’t you?’
‘Only as a subsidiary.’ Hepburn gave it some thought. ‘I’d guess there might have been an injunction but probably with an age limit – up to 18, maybe. They’d be unlikely to impose a whole life ban like her mother’s, so as long as they didn’t bring Kirstie’s whereabouts into it Marnie could be fair game, legally at least. The only problem might be that it would expose the surname Kirstie had adopted, though of course we don’t know whether Kirstie’s alive or dead. If she’s dead the rules would be different.’
‘You’re taking me out of my depth there. Anyway – what now?’
‘I’m going to tell Big Marge I know – get things out in the open. Do you think she’s back yet?’
Macdonald glanced at his watch. ‘Probably not. And even if she is back she’ll have to report to the super and maybe take a press conference – unless Hyacinth wants to take it.’
‘What do you think – that she’s going to resist the chance of taking the limelight? And anyway, the boss will have to task us – they said we’re all on overtime for today at least.’
‘I’m going to grab some lunch while I can. What about you, Louise?’
It was the longest amicable conversation they had ever had. It had been in Hepburn’s mind to rub it in that she’d been right about Marnie Bruce, but she thought the better of it.
‘Fine, Andy. Just let me close this down.’ You couldn’t spit on an olive branch, even if you did think it was likely to wilt before very long.
Fleming’s mobile rang as she and MacNee got back into the car outside the Morrisons’ house. She glanced at caller ID and pulled a face as she answered it. ‘Fleming.’
MacNee studied his nails as the voice at the other end crackled on. He couldn’t make out what it said, but the expression on the inspector’s face told him all he needed to know.
‘Yes, I appreciate that you’re keen to have a press conference as soon as possible,’ she said, ‘but I have some things to tie up here and I can’t afford the time to drive to and from Kirkluce again today.’
The voice crackled again, even at second hand sounding aggrieved.
‘Yes, I quite understand. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Hyacinth not just jumping for joy?’ MacNee said sympathetically as Fleming rang off.
‘You could say. Leaves me pushed for time. Still, at least she stopped short of ordering me back immediately.
‘Right. Marnie’s in the frame, and Daniel Lee. And given the symbolic positioning of the body, Tommy’s parents. I’d rather see them myself than leave it to a routine interview, but I can’t see us fitting in both of them – I’ve got to prepare for the super’s statement and the afternoon briefing as well.’
MacNee cleared his throat. ‘I’m not maybe the best one to visit Grant Crichton at the moment. I’d a wee chat with him yesterday after the stramash in Bridge Street and I’m not sure I’m just his favourite wee boy. He seems kinna sensitive, ken?’
‘I think this is probably something I don’t want to know about,’ Fleming said with resignation. ‘All right, I’ll leave him. There’s no evidence at the moment that he’d any recent contact with Anita so I’m more interested in Shelley right now – she seems to have been at the centre of all this.
‘According to Janette, she’d been talked into accepting Anita’s story that the girl they saw was nothing to do with Kirstie – if we can believe her. Not sure I do. It’s such a strong resemblance and there were certainly people convinced enough to go and make trouble for her that night.
‘And Shelley clearly has a streak of violence – she flew at Marnie on the spot when she saw her. If she thought Anita was in league with Kirstie, could it just have got out of hand again? Got her revenge putting the body where Tommy was found?’
‘Kind of a giveaway, you’d think.’
‘That’s why I’d like to see her myself. Would the payback motive be so strong that she didn’t even consider the implications?’
MacNee looked sceptical. ‘And you think you can tell that just by meeting her? Respect!’
‘Sarcastic isn’t pretty, Tam. No, I don’t think that, especially when we’re unlikely to surprise her, given that the local drums will have been beating. She probably knows more than we do about what’s happening at the moment and she’ll be expecting us.
‘But you know as well as I do that there’s always something you can pick up on, however hard they try to give nothing away. Oh, perhaps Shelley Crichton is totally open and transparently truthful – she’d be unusual, though I daresay it’s possible. But if she’s a bit more normal, I want to see for myself what she’s incapable of covering up.’
The Glasgow traffic, to someone unfamiliar with the area and an inexperienced driver, was terrifying. Marnie lost count of the number of times someone blasted their horn at her as she tried to read road signs and get herself into the appropriate lane. She didn’t have a satnav and trying to read the instructions she had printed out from the computer in the Kirkluce library was an added complication.
Sod’s Law was operating too: the industrial park where she would find Daniel Lee’s nightclub was on the far side of Glasgow. After one particularly alarming near-miss, Marnie took to driving off the city bypass until she could stop, then memorising the next batch of instructions and returning to it. This made it a slow process but at last the traffic started thinning out and the signs she needed to follow became more obvious.
When she drew up at last in the car park, she was sweating. The sun, so bright earlier on, had disappeared; the air was bitter when she stepped out but she lingered, letting it cool her flushed cheeks. She wanted to be calm, poised and in control before she encountered Daniel Lee. Always supposing he was here. And that he would see her.
A busy road ran alongside the sprawling building. There was something scribbled in neon across the front but it wasn’t switched on and it took her a moment to make out that it was the name she’d been given – Zombies. It must have been a warehouse to start with and all around were industrial units – an ugly setting, though it would look better when the lights were flashing and darkness concealed the litter that gathered at the corners in wind-blown heaps.
Marnie’s knees felt shaky as she walked across the car park, trying to avoid the potholes and puddles. It must have been raining here earlier. The only entrance she could see, apart from a fire exit at one side, was a great industrial-style door with a smaller door cut into it.
She turned the handle. It opened onto a sort of lobby, with a huge, dark cavernous space beyond. She took a deep breath, then stepped over the threshold, trying not to hear the voice inside her head that was murmuring, ‘Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly …’