18

‘Oh dear,’ Hepburn drawled, as the door closed behind MacNee, ‘is the poor guy in trouble?’

‘Very probably,’ Fleming said, tight-lipped. ‘So what’s this about, Joss? I really haven’t time for playing games.’

‘Of course not.’ His tone was offensively soothing. ‘I just have a couple of things I reckon we should talk about.’

Fleming ignored him. ‘Since you’re here, you can tell me what the “job” was that Rencombe was doing for Crozier.’

‘Ve ask zee qvestions, eh?’ he mocked her. ‘Babe, if I could! Not the slightest idea. Maybe he told Cara or Declan – or Cris, even, though he denies it.

‘Incidentally, Cara wanted to know if you’d figured out that her ex-nanny, the one who killed her baby, was calling herself Beth Brown and staying at the guest house where the camper’s body was found.’

‘How did she know?’

Hepburn laughed indulgently. ‘There you go again, my little Obergruppenführer! Local gossip, I guess – the gamekeeper was at the house yesterday. And apparently Nanny was staying along at the keeper’s cottage just at the time Gillis was killed. Kind of suggestive, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’m always prepared to listen to opinion.’ Fleming half rose. ‘Thank you for yours. Now, I have a great deal to do . . .’

‘Sit down, Madge.’ There was a slight edge to his voice now. ‘I told Cara I would get an assurance from you direct. Can I take it that Lisa Stewart is about to be arrested for murder?’

‘No.’

He looked taken aback at the bluntness of her reply. ‘But at the very least she has to be prime suspect?’

‘She is obviously a suspect. Others are equally under suspicion. You, for instance.’

He gave a brief, humourless smile. ‘You were never one to pull your punches. So you wouldn’t be ready to agree we can all return to London?’

‘I can’t physically stop you, but just at present, that is my firm request.’ Fleming hesitated, then said, ‘I might be inclined to take a more favourable view if I felt you were all being open and truthful in your answers to questioning. For instance, what is the nature of Gillis Crozier’s business?’

‘Ah.’ Hepburn shifted in his seat uncomfortably. ‘That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Suddenly I’m interested. Go on.’

‘If I give you my word that his business has nothing to do with all this, will you drop that line of enquiry?’

‘Your word!’ Disappointed, she laughed in his face. ‘Joss, I’ve known you since you were in your twenties. Don’t be silly.’

‘Touché.’ He was looking acutely uneasy now. ‘Madge, I didn’t want to do it like this. But if you don’t stop snooping into what doesn’t concern either you or the cases you’re investigating, I’m going to go to the tabloids with some choice anecdotes about your past. You can most likely guess which these would be.’

Stricken, Fleming blanched, so that the sickly yellows and blues of the fading bruises stood out starkly.

‘My God, I knew you were a bastard, Joss, but this is something else! This is disgusting! You sicken me.’

Again the small, sour smile appeared. ‘Oh, I don’t like myself much either. But it’s been forced on me, and there it is. The choice is yours.’

‘Get out of my office.’ Fleming got up, walked to the door and held it open. ‘I’d like to think you knew before you said that what my reply would be. Attempted blackmail of a police officer is a serious offence and what you have succeeded in doing is convincing me that my gut reaction’s right – there’s something very wrong about Crozier’s business. And I’m going to find out what it is.’

‘Are you sure you won’t reconsider?’ Hepburn sounded almost pleading.

‘The receptionist will expect you at the door in two minutes. And don’t even try to pull a stunt like this again. You won’t be admitted. Goodbye.’

Hepburn got up. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you can’t see it my way.’ He walked to the door, then looked down at her. ‘But in another crazy way, I’m kind of glad. You’re a great lady, Madge.’

This time, he did kiss her hard on the lips. Then he was gone.

 

Fleming listened to his footsteps clattering down the stairs. She phoned reception, then took a tissue and scrubbed at her lips. She had never realised that moral nausea could make you feel physic-ally sick. Oh, fear was there too, but her overwhelming feeling was one of visceral revulsion.

It shouldn’t have surprised her. She herself had said to the team, only last night, that Joss Hepburn wasn’t to be trusted. Her head knew all about that, but in her heart of hearts . . .

He was her glamorous past. He was powerfully attractive and she had secretly found it both exciting and flattering that he still felt a spark was there. Or had he? Was that all just part of the dirty game he was playing? What was he saying about her behind her back? Her face turned hot and red at the thought.

In a way, she acknowledged, Tam was right. She had dodged another meeting with Joss because she found it so hard to restrict the conversation to entirely professional subjects. A part of her disgust was at her own contemptible ineffectiveness.

And she was afraid too. She had suffered ordeal by media once before, and until you had been through it, you didn’t understand what a terrifying experience it was. It had been unpleasant enough this week when they started rehashing the details of her last case, and she daren’t think what it would be like with ‘revelations’ being published in the tabloids. It would, quite simply, be the end of her career.

She couldn’t even charge Hepburn with the serious crime of attempting to blackmail a police officer and get an injunction. It was only her word against his, which in the Scottish legal system meant there was no case to answer. She was totally at his mercy.

Mercy? From the man she now knew Joss Hepburn to be?

It was perfectly clear what Fleming should do. She should draw a dotted line round her neck, find an axe and a block, and report to her superintendent to be officially terminated. It was a stark choice: warn Bailey what was going to happen and pull her life down in ruins on her own head, or wait for the tabloids to do it for her.

There was no one she could go to for advice. Bill, usually her first choice for support and wise counsel, would never be crass enough to show anything other than sympathy, but she couldn’t bear the humiliation of watching him trying not to think, I told you so, too loudly. Tam? Well, when she’d finished with him today, he’d be disinclined to speak to her, let alone to help sort out her problem. And she had no right to involve Purves in her messy professional life.

She was on her own for this one. She tapped a fingernail on her front teeth, trying to think it through.

Joss Hepburn was holding all the cards. On the other hand, he just might be bluffing. It was years since Fleming had played poker, but this was a no-brainer: follow the rule book to certain disaster, or take the gamble that his had been an empty threat.

She made up her mind: say nothing and tough it out. And damn your black soul to hell, Joss Hepburn!

It was only then that she realised it had not crossed her mind for a second that she might capitulate.

 

‘You’re a crazy man, MacNee,’ Andy Macdonald said, as they headed towards the canteen together after their interviews with Ryan and Hepburn. ‘A complete bampot!’

MacNee had had time for reflection. ‘Aye,’ he agreed hollowly. ‘You ken how it is – seemed like a good idea at the time.’

‘No, frankly, I don’t know how it is. I don’t know how anyone would think, even for a nanosecond, that it was a good idea to break every rule in the book and take a punter in to see Big Marge without an appointment. And I really don’t know why anyone would do it when the punter in question was an old boyfriend, unless they had a death wish.’

‘Maybe I do,’ MacNee grunted, and Macdonald looked at him sharply. But he was going on, ‘I thought perhaps we’d manage to get something out of that pair that I could take to her.’

‘Like a peace offering?’

‘Kind of.’

‘But there isn’t anything,’ Macdonald pointed out helpfully.

‘No need to rub it in.’

Ryan and Hepburn had, in their separate ways, taken up two hours of the detectives’ morning in adding absolutely nothing to the sum of their knowledge. Hepburn had been calm, urbane and anxious to be helpful in a totally unhelpful way. Ryan had snarled and sneered – he had taken delight in emphasising MacNee’s position as his alibi for the time of his father-in-law’s murder – but again had told them nothing they had not been told before.

At least this time the bridie, beans and chips were forthcoming, and MacNee and Macdonald went to sit at an empty table.

‘I had a thought,’ Macdonald said suddenly.

‘Had to happen sometime, I suppose.’

‘Very funny. Anyway, we know who killed Rencombe and we know someone else killed Williams, but all three murders were spur-of-the-moment jobs. Williams picked up the nearest thing to fell Rencombe, someone used a stone to hit Crozier, and with Williams the crowbar was presumably lying beside the car that was being repaired.’

‘No,’ MacNee said. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I questioned Lisa Stewart in that garden. I was looking right at the broken-down car for half an hour. There was a jack, yes, a wrench, yes, a couple of rusty spanners. But take it from me – a crowbar, no.’

‘Right.’ Macdonald didn’t argue: observation was the bedrock of police training and MacNee was famously hawk-eyed. ‘So you’re saying the murderer brought it with him?’

‘Aye. Unless someone took it out in the afternoon to work on the car. But if they did, they brought it out just to put it down. Nothing’s been done to that car for months, if not years. There’s grass growing up round the tools.’

‘So we were meant to think it was lying around?’

MacNee thought about it. ‘Maybe we’re being a bit elaborate. It could just be the weapon of choice – simple and deadly. But of course they could have done a wee quiet recce once Lisa had told Williams where she was staying.’

‘Tell Big Marge that,’ Macdonald suggested. ‘It’s a new thought.’

‘If you think I’m going to mention crowbars to Big Marge, you’re daft. I’m not going to go putting ideas into her head,’ MacNee said, with just a flicker of a smile.

 

Alick Buchan made no attempt to welcome his visitors. As Maidie, with Calum clinging shyly to her legs, made flustered offers of hospitality, he said, ‘You’ll not be staying long enough to drink a cup of tea. What are you after now?’

He didn’t offer Kershaw and Campbell a seat. Campbell unhesitatingly pulled out a chair and joined Alick at the table, where he was sitting with a mug of tea and a local newspaper open at the property pages.

Kershaw sat down too, ignoring his question. ‘Thinking of buying a house, Mr Buchan?’

He smirked. ‘We-ell, maybe not buying just at the moment. We’ll be renting meantime, to see what’s available.’

‘So you’ve found another job?’

‘Not exactly.’ Buchan was definitely looking pleased with himself. ‘I’ve been under a lot of strain lately. I’ll be taking a wee rest.’

‘That sounds good.’ Kershaw turned to smile over her shoulder at Maidie. She was holding Calum, who was looking at the strangers with his thumb in his mouth and wide, wondering eyes. Maidie smiled back uncertainly. The bruising on her cheek was just a yellow shadow now.

‘Mr Buchan,’ Kershaw went on, ‘today I wanted to ask you a little bit about your job here. You were in the army with Mr Crozier, and when he came back to the area, he employed you, right?’

‘Aye.’ The surly scowl had returned.

‘And you would run shoots, fishing and so on for his business colleagues who came here for meetings?’

Buchan grunted agreement.

‘Now, I believe some of these men were old friends of Mr Crozier from his army days – a Mr Lloyd and a Mr Driscoll?’

Buchan sat bolt upright. ‘Who the hell told you that?’

Kershaw heard Maidie’s tiny gasp of fright. ‘Company records,’ she said smoothly. ‘Can you tell me more about them?’

‘No.’

‘You won’t, or you don’t know?’ Campbell asked.

‘If I did, I wouldn’t. But I don’t.’

‘You didn’t get on with Mr Crozier, did you?’ Kershaw had a nasty feeling that they weren’t going to get anywhere on the basis of Buchan’s grudges, but it was worth a try.

Buchan snorted. ‘Look, I took a dram that day I had the row with him. I was out of order – said things I shouldn’t of. But he was all right.’

‘A good boss, then,’ Campbell said. ‘Looked after you pretty well, no doubt?’

For a moment Kershaw thought the fish had taken the bait. Buchan’s eye kindled. ‘Looked after me? Me in this hovel, him in his fine big house, nothing too good for him, nothing to do but give me orders?’ Then he seemed to collect himself. ‘Aye, but that was just the way of it. Gave me a roof over my head, anyway.’

‘And what about the Ryans?’ Kershaw asked, without much hope. ‘They’ll be your new bosses. Or are they selling the place?’

‘Aye.’

‘But they’ll see you right, if you’re made redundant?’

A slow smile spread across Buchan’s face. ‘Oh, aye, they’re seeing me right.’

They were wasting their time here. Buchan claimed to know nothing about foreign visitors, nothing about what sort of business it was.

The dogs in the kennels by the house worked themselves into a frenzy of barking as the detectives got back into the car. As they drove off, Kershaw said to Campbell, ‘Bought his silence, I suppose. And if he’s got money now, poor bloody Maidie will stay with him to get support for her child, no matter what he does to her when he’s drunk. Sometimes I really hate men.’

Campbell felt it wise to remain silent. But then, he hadn’t really been planning to say anything anyway.

 

‘Cara, I made the point to her as forcibly as I could,’ Joss Hepburn said, not trying to conceal his irritation at the woman who had come to meet them in the hall as they arrived back from Kirkluce. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to order police to do anything.’

Cara was twitching and blinking, licking her chapped lips, and she was not taking it well that Lisa Stewart was not about to be charged. ‘She killed my baby! She killed my father! She blackened my son’s name!’ She was screaming now. ‘And the police are on her side, and you don’t care – or you!’ She turned on her husband.

Ryan had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘Cara, it’s upstairs. I’ve put it in the dressing-table drawer for you. Go on. You’ll feel better.’

She looked at him wildly, then ran upstairs as if demons were chasing her. As perhaps they were.

Ryan looked at Hepburn with a defensive shrug. ‘I’ve tried, you know. It’s impossible—’

Hepburn cut him short. ‘I have obviously failed to convey to you how little your domestic problems interest me.’

‘You really are an unpleasant bastard! I can’t wait to get you out of my house.’

‘Your house? Is it? Presumably we have to wait until one of Alex’s colleagues produces the will. You never know what Cris may have persuaded him to do.’

Ryan stared at him. ‘You don’t think he’d leave his estate out of the family? If that little sod has got round him somehow, I’ll break his neck!’

‘Hey, hey! What a bloodthirsty guy you are,’ Hepburn said acidly. ‘I would have thought there were quite enough bodies around already. Anyway, we need Cris on our side, remember? We have to get together now and decide what the hell we’re to do.’

‘When are you going to phone the Sun about Fleming?’

‘When it suits me. But I warn you, it’s too late. She’ll have passed on what she knows already.’

‘Then the sooner the better,’ Ryan said with venom. ‘If I’m going down, I want to have the pleasure of seeing her tortured first.’

 

She still hadn’t sent for him. MacNee was under no illusion that Fleming was too busy, or had forgotten. No, she was just making him sweat – which he was doing, wishing he hadn’t been so bloody stupid. He had to get a grip; he barely knew himself these days.

He gazed unseeing at the computer screen in front of him. The trouble with Big Marge was that she was unpredictable. He’d worked with her closely all these years, yet he still didn’t know what she would have in mind. He didn’t think she’d go down the official disciplinary route; she might, of course, but that took time and he guessed that it would be something more immediately unpleasant.

Like taking him off the case. God, he would hate that! There were so many ideas whirling round in his head, ideas that he’d have liked to throw about with Marjory, one to one, without other people to shove their oar in.

Like Kershaw. If he was out, she would be in, taking his place with the boss – all girls together! He gave a snort, startling the detective working at the next terminal in the CID room.

He could wait to be sent for, get a bollocking, hear his sentence, say nothing and leave, or he could go now, say his piece and apologise. He would feel better then. It wouldn’t be enough, but it just might soften the blow and give him a way back in afterwards. Deliberately seeking out the lion to stick your head in its mouth was an uncomfortable thought, but he got up before he could change his mind.

His knock on Fleming’s door was tentative, though, and when Fleming looked up, he didn’t feel any better. She was frowning and her eyes were unfriendly.

‘Yes, MacNee?’

‘I’ve come to apologise, ma’am.’

‘Apology accepted. I daresay you realise it doesn’t make any difference?’ She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

He hadn’t thought she would. ‘I realise it was a serious breach of security, and that I dropped you in it personally. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m extremely angry,’ Fleming said. ‘Leaving aside the personal angle, and the breach, what you did was put me at a considerable disadvantage with a murder suspect, who now knows that one of my subordinates was deliberately trying to humiliate me. Not clever, MacNee.’

Put like that, it wasn’t. ‘I accept that. I thought you’d maybe get more out of him than we would, but I wish I’d never done it now.’

‘You and me both.’ Fleming wasn’t giving him an inch.

‘I can only say again that I’m sorry, ma’am, and take the consequences.’

‘My first reaction was to drop you from the team, but you are professionally useful and while you have something to offer you have to stay. There are conditions, though. In the first place, you have to stop this childish sniping at Kim Kershaw. I’ve had more than enough of it. Secondly, I’m grounding you. Your job, until I change my orders, is sitting at a desk reviewing all the evidence that comes in. You can make a digest of anything you think significant and present it to me before the afternoon briefing each day.’

MacNee didn’t even try to argue. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘That’s all, Sergeant.’ Fleming turned back to her computer screen.

He hesitated, about to say something, then thought better of it. He was almost at the door when there was a knock and DC Kershaw came in, looking smug.

‘Hope you’re not too busy, boss? I wanted to tell you myself – we’ve got some good new evidence. Lisa Stewart admitted Williams was her partner and claims she found him dead the night before. According to her, he’d texted her to ask her to meet him, so she took his mobile phone from his pocket to remove the link with her. She threw it into the sea after she arrived at Rowantrees Hotel, but Campbell and I went paddling and found it. I’ve sent it off to the labs.’

Fleming’s face brightened. ‘Well done, Kim. That just might be the breakthrough we need. Give me a quick rundown on your interview with Lisa Stewart.’

Kershaw sat down as MacNee left, sick at heart, with his departure unacknowledged.

 

Lisa Stewart sat at the window of her bedroom, looking out over the front garden and Wigtown Bay. She wasn’t seeing the view, though, or even little Rosie playing with her sister in the garden below. She was trying to repair her fragmented self.

Once, she might have been angry about what had happened to her, but somehow now she hadn’t the energy for anger any more. She had stayed perfectly calm at first under the detective’s questioning, safe inside the shell where no one could reach her no matter what they said, but there were dangerous cracks in it now. The toddler this morning had opened up one of them, and Lisa had found herself telling – had wanted to tell – Jan Forbes about her own baby.

And Granny’s frying pan! That had opened up another, as she remembered being a little girl, watching her grandmother make the best girdle scones in the world in the pan that had belonged to her mother, and her grandmother before that.

She hadn’t been able to scuttle back quickly enough. She’d handed herself to the police on a plate. Oh, they hadn’t done anything yet, but they would, in their own time. Lisa had been there before; she knew all too well the slow torture of the process.

She had seen the detectives down on the shore, finding the mobile, which she hadn’t thrown hard enough or far enough. Even so, they wouldn’t be able to read the deleted text message – and thank God, she was so hardened to thinking about Crozier that the shell wasn’t threatened when they got on to that.

But it was all beginning again, the horror. The questioning, the statements, the re-questioning to try to trip you up, the relief when a day or two passed and you thought they’d believed you, then the ring at the doorbell, which set your heart thumping as you realised they were stalking you, wearing you down, until the moment when they pounced.

And now gradually, bit by bit, they would drag everything out, her shell would be shattered, and she would, quite simply, fall apart. Lisa would be back in the dock and this time there wasn’t a jury in the country who would acquit her.

Supposing, just supposing, it didn’t come to that. Suppose they charged someone else instead. What then?

For a long time Lisa hadn’t looked to her future. Getting through each day was challenge enough. Now she looked, it was bleak indeed.

A wail from the garden below caught her attention. Rosie had fallen; her sister was picking her up now and lugging her into the hotel to find comfort.

Tears started to Lisa’s eyes. She would never again be in a pos-ition to kiss it better for a crying child. And who would give her any sort of job, with a past like hers? The road ahead of her, like the one to Rosscarron Cottages, led to nowhere.

And if Gillis could always find her, the Ryans could too. The messages would start again and she would wake every morning with a sick dread of what the day might bring.

What was the point of struggling on? She just wanted it all to stop – she was tired, so tired! She hadn’t the strength to go on. There was no point.

The answer was obvious, once you thought about it. All she looked for was peace, and since she hadn’t found it even in this tranquil, reassuring place, there was only one way to get it. The means was right there below.

Lisa got up. She needed to act before her courage failed her, but then she hesitated. There was still unfinished business. She had lived stigmatised as a murderer; she didn’t want to die with her side of the story untold. And Jan – wise, kind, Jan . . . Lisa owed her the truth.

She had a pen in her bag, but no paper. Sometimes hotels had notepaper and envelopes, so she looked in all the drawers, but there was nothing. The only paper was a sheet lying on the dressing table, detailing meal times and facilities.

It would have to do. She sat down and turned it over to the blank side. She began to write, slowly at first, then faster, writing as small as she could to get all she wanted to say on to that one sheet – her last words.

Lisa didn’t read it over when she had finished. She folded it in four, wrote, ‘JAN,’ on the front of it on top of the hotel information and stood up. She took a deep breath, then walked out of the room.

There was no one in the hall, but she could hear Rosie’s subsiding wails from the hotel lounge. Lisa propped her letter on a little table by the front door, then walked out. As the door closed, a gust of air caught the flimsy note. It wafted off the surface, landing underneath an old-fashioned hat-stand.

Lisa walked down the drive, under the rowan trees, which had not, after all, protected her from harm, then across the road and between the whin bushes on to the shore.

The sea was silky calm today, a dark greyish-blue under an overcast sky. The lapping of the waves was a soothing sound, almost like a lullaby. There was a sweet, coconut perfume in the air from the yellow flowers of the whin.

Lisa stepped into the water, gasping from shock at how cold it was. She was shivering with nerves and her heart was beating so hard that it felt as if it might leap out of her chest. Turn back now? She didn’t have to do this . . .

But tomorrow would be another day of torment, and then there would be another, then another, until— They said drowning was an easy death.

She took a deep, deep breath and then another step into the water, and one more, and one more until she was walking steadily into the sea. The penetrating cold was painful at first, but as she went further and further, she began to feel a curious sort of warmth, and at last the ground dropped away from under her feet.