Cradle to Grave (29 page)

The canteen was busy at one o’clock. Macdonald, sitting at a table with Campbell and their plates of bridie and baked beans, raised a hand to greet MacNee as he came in.

MacNee glanced at what they were eating. ‘I could murder one of those. Keep me a seat.’

He came back from the hatch with a solitary sausage roll and a bitter expression. ‘You got the last one,’ he said accusingly. ‘And the last of the beans. She offered me peas instead – peas!’

Macdonald cleared a space on the table for him. ‘Fancy Maisie not knowing you’re allergic to green vegetables. And no, however hard you stare at my beans, they won’t jump off my plate and on to yours, and I’m not sharing.’

‘Me neither,’ Campbell said, a little indistinctly through a mouthful of greasy pastry.

‘Selfish bastards!’ MacNee sat down. ‘How’s it going, then?’

‘Working through the list of witnesses from the campsite. No sightings so far,’ Macdonald said. ‘But I’ve struck one – Damien Gallagher – who gave me a false number and a fake address. My guess is, we know him under a different name and there’s things we might want to discuss.’

MacNee frowned. ‘What did he look like?’

Macdonald looked at Campbell. ‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’

Campbell paused with the fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Shortish, gelled hair in spikes, brown eyes, ten stone maybe, mid-twenties, Fat Face sweatshirt, flashy trainers – Hugo Boss orange, I think.’ The fork completed its journey.

‘You’re good!’ MacNee eyed him with respect. ‘He’s the one who was with a couple of girls, right?’

‘Certainly was,’ Macdonald said. ‘I spoke to one of them, Stacey, and she’d been trying to contact him too. Bit of a lad, it seems – she hadn’t met him till that day, but he’d definitely pulled.’

MacNee looked pained. ‘Lassies like that should be locked up till they’re twenty. Picks up a villain, the next thing you know he’s beating her up and we get lumbered with sorting it out.

‘But Jamieson. Just because no one saw him, doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. Was there no one even
thought
they might have seen him?’

Macdonald shook his head. ‘Quite honestly, they were all pretty uncertain about where they were when. Drunk half the time, probably. Any half-decent brief could tie them in knots. It’s been a wasted morning, frankly.’

‘Story of our lives,’ Campbell said, getting up. ‘Anyone else fancy a doughnut?’

Maidie Buchan was alone in the kitchen when DC Kershaw arrived. The kennels were empty – Buchan had gone off somewhere with the dogs – and Calum was having a nap upstairs. His grandmother, Maidie explained in carefully neutral tones, had packed her bags and departed the previous night.

Kershaw accepted her offer of a cup of tea and sat down at the chipped Formica table, observing her hostess as she put the kettle on to boil on the ancient Calor gas cooker. Maidie looked as if she was painfully holding herself together, like a character in a cartoon whose whole body was a maze of cracks, needing only the tiniest tap to crumble into rubble.

Racked with pity, Kershaw said gently, ‘It’s really hard for you at the moment, isn’t it?’

The words of kindness were the tiny tap. Maidie swung round with a wail, putting her hands to her face and bursting into sobs, which shook her slight frame. She tried to speak through them, but all Kershaw could hear was, ‘So frightened . . . nowhere . . . Calum . . .’

Putting her arm round her shoulders, she helped her to a chair and Maidie collapsed over the table, crying helplessly. Kershaw looked around for tissues or a kitchen roll, but there was no sign of such luxuries and she had to scrabble in her bag for a pack of Kleenex, then stuffed some into Maidie’s hand.

The kettle was dancing on the stove now, emitting a piercing whistle, and Kershaw snatched it off. She might as well make tea; there was nothing else to do until the poor woman had cried herself out.

She set down a mug beside her and took one herself, not saying anything, just waiting. It was a few minutes before Maidie sat up again, gasping as she tried to stop and scrubbing at her face with the tissues in a way that made Kershaw wince.

‘Do it gently! Your cheeks are looking raw already.’ Then she stopped, looking more closely. There was a dark blue shadow right down the edge of one cheek. She pointed. ‘What’s that?’

Colour came into Maidie’s pale face. ‘Oh, nothing.’ She took a sip of her tea, avoiding Kershaw’s eyes.

‘He hit you, didn’t he?’

Her shoulders slumped. ‘He . . . well, he was angry Ina left. She said now he’d be losing his job she wasn’t going to find herself supporting the lot of us, and anyway what she was getting from me wasn’t worth what she was paying for it. So he was . . . well, angry.’ She spoke as if that was an excuse.

‘Does he get angry often?’

‘Not – not that often. If he’s had a few, maybe, but now, I don’t know. He’s angry all the time now.’

Kershaw’s ex-husband had only once laid hands on her, shaking her till her teeth rattled; that had been the end of the marriage, which had struggled anyway after Debbie had become her first concern. Now she was finding it difficult to control her cold rage on Maidie’s behalf. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘What can I do?’ Maidie’s face was tragic. ‘I’ve nowhere to go. And once Alick loses his job, we’ll be out on the street anyway.’

‘What about your own family?’

She gave a bitter laugh. ‘My family? My father’s freer with his hands than Alick is. He’d take me back as a skivvy – my mother died, worn out at forty.’

Looking at Maidie, Kershaw could see her destined for the same fate, exhausted and brutalised. ‘Look, there’s a women’s refuge I can get you into,’ she said. ‘They’ll give you somewhere to stay, sort out benefits, that kind of thing. No problem.’

Maidie was dubious. ‘Alick wouldn’t let me . . .’

‘Alick wouldn’t have to know. You only have to give me the nod.’

Maidie half smiled; then the tears started again. ‘I’m sorry – this is daft! It’s just the relief, knowing there’s somewhere, if it comes to that, but I’ll wait for now, see if things settle down.’

Kershaw sighed inwardly. Battered women always did. They stayed with drunken bullies, sometimes until it was too late, but there was never any point in arguing. ‘The offer’s always there. Here – that’s my number.’ She gave her a card.

‘But I really came to ask if you could give me any background about Lisa Stewart – Beth, if you like.’

The change of subject seemed to pull Maidie together, but she had nothing to offer. Beth, it seemed, hadn’t been any more communicative than Lisa was. ‘I can tell you this, though,’ Maidie said fiercely, ‘I don’t believe for one minute that she killed that poor wee mite. She was that patient with Calum – he’s really missed her today.’

‘She was acquitted,’ Kershaw pointed out, echoing MacNee. ‘But I did wonder why she would choose to be so close to the baby’s family.’

‘She never said. Just she was living in her granny’s old house – maybe she’d nowhere else. Where’s she staying now? I wish I could help her, but—’

‘She’s fine,’ Kershaw assured her. ‘Staying at the Balmoral Guest House in Kirkluce.’

She went on to her next line of questioning. ‘Alick organises shoots and so on for the people who come for meetings to Rosscarron House, right? How many of them? And do you know who they are?’

‘There’s usually about five or six. Before Calum was born, I used to go sometimes and help Cris at the big house. There were a few foreign gentlemen – one was French, I think, and there was another one told me he was Italian. Then there’s Mr Lloyd and Mr Driscoll, of course – Alick knew them from when they were in the army with Mr Crozier. The three of them played in a sort of band together, he said once. Officers, of course. Alick never had much time for officers.’

A man with a grudge might be a very useful source of information; Kershaw filed that one away to suggest to Big Marge later. ‘Do you know what the business was?’ she asked hopefully.

Here she drew a blank. Maidie had no idea. ‘Made a lot of money, that’s all I know,’ she said wistfully.

Kershaw left it at that. She still had a long drive back to Kirkluce, but there was no briefing tonight with it being Saturday, when they were all on overtime. She’d have plenty of time to look in and see Debbie before she was settled down for the night.

Cris Pilapil came into the conference room, where Declan Ryan was sitting at the table with a shredder and piles of paper around him.

‘Has Alex got in touch?’ he said, without preamble.

Ryan didn’t look up. ‘Not with me.’

‘It’s funny.’

‘Alex’s a maverick. He wouldn’t have been Gillis’s lawyer if he wasn’t.’

‘I’m worried. The girlfriend’s been on the phone again.’ Pilapil came forward to lean on the table, and this time Ryan did look up.

‘You told her he was in Inverness, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but we both know he isn’t.’

‘We don’t, actually. He might be anywhere. You know Alex. Look, Cris, I’m scared about this.’ For once, Ryan was speaking without his usual sneering sarcasm. ‘Alex is key to the whole thing. It couldn’t be more unfortunate that he’s gone AWOL like this, and if the police start sniffing around at that end, we’re all up the creek.

‘I can’t dash off to London when the police have asked me to stay here. Lloyd and Driscoll are keeping at arm’s length from the whole thing and I don’t want them to find out there’s a problem over Alex – they’re likely to overreact.’

‘Yes.’ Pilapil’s agreement was unhesitating.

‘So . . .’

‘OK, OK. If she phones again, I’ll give her some story. At least he told the office he’d be away for a bit – I checked. I just wish he’d get in touch before everything falls apart.’

Pilapil saw his own anxiety, bordering on fear, replicated in the face of the other man as he turned to go.

‘Bill, I want to talk to you about Joss Hepburn.’

There, she’d said it. They were on their own for supper: Cat was out with her boyfriend, a medical student at Glasgow University, and Cammie had been evasive about his plans, but from the smell of aftershave Marjory reckoned that her sports-mad son must have discovered girls at last. So she and Bill had only Meg for company, if you didn’t count the elephant in the room, which they had studiously ignored.

Bill was concentrating on putting sugar in his coffee. ‘Maybe you should wait till Cat’s here. You won’t want to have to go through it all twice.’

‘It’s not the sort of conversation I was planning to have with Cat. Bill, Joss is just someone I knew a long, long time ago. All right, someone I was in love with a long, long time ago. I found out what he was like, I ditched him, and I fell in love with you. This was a casual, unimportant encounter, that’s all.’

‘So unimportant that you didn’t mention it until you had to?’ Bill looked up and she saw hurt in his eyes. ‘Do you think I don’t know that you put it off because you were trying to find the best way of convincing me it was unimportant?’

‘You’re just proving me right, Bill!’ Marjory cried. ‘You’re reacting as if you’re jealous.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. And I can tell you why – because I know exactly what you’d have done if this meant as little as you’re making out. Immediately after you’d told me about the accident, you’d have said, “Bill, the most awful thing! You’ll never guess who’s here – Joss Hepburn, and the last time I saw him, you’d just given him a broken nose! How embarrassing is that?” Something along those lines.’

Marjory opened her mouth to deny it, but the words wouldn’t come.

‘I’m not afraid you’re going to run off with him. You’re an honourable person and you’re not stupid either. But the trouble is, there’s always been something in you that could never be satisfied with life as the wife of a simple farmer – it’s why you need the drama of policework. But just at the moment I think you’re wondering what life would have been like if you’d walked off on the wild side with Joss and there’s a part of you regrets not having had the nerve to do it. And that hurts – of course it does.

‘I’ll get over it. And when he’s gone, the waters will close over him, and though you’ll spare him a thought now and then, that will be all. I don’t see much point in discussing it now when I doubt if you’re being honest with yourself, let alone me.’

Bill had spoken levelly and calmly. But now, as he got up from the table, he said with a sort of anger in his voice that she had never heard before, ‘Just as long as that bastard hasn’t poisoned your pleasure in the life that has made us so happy up till now.’

For the hundredth time, Lisa Stewart consulted her watch. It wasn’t a cold night, but she was shivery with nerves and she had put on the one-bar electric fire in the dingy lounge. She was alone; she’d seen only one other guest, a dispirited-looking man in a tired suit with a battered briefcase, but he had gone to his room, as Mrs Wishart clearly hoped Lisa would. She’d come in a couple of times to check, making plain her opinion of such wanton extravagance with a grudging look at the fire. Eventually she had given up and gone upstairs, telling Lisa to be sure to put off the lights ‘and the fire’ before she went to bed.