Cradle to Grave (34 page)

‘So, you were here together all evening, all of you, all the time? Just a cosy, domestic evening.’ There was a sneer in MacNee’s voice.

It was, surprisingly, Cara who rose to the bait. ‘Yes, it was,’ she said fiercely. ‘And anyway, why are you going on at us like this? It’s nothing to do with us. Surely you should be looking at the people who are staying in the guest house?’

Was that an indrawn breath from her husband? MacNee’s eyes, suddenly thoughtful, fixed on her face, but before he could speak, Ryan said, ‘I’m sure they’ll be doing that as well, Cara. Anyway, do you want to check our story with Joss Hepburn? I’m positive he’ll confirm it.’

‘Oh, so am I,’ MacNee said jovially. ‘But one more thing – do you know someone called Alex Rencombe?’

This time, it wasn’t a moment of stillness. It was the silence of utter shock.

The door had hardly closed behind the officers when the recriminations began.

‘I was trying to warn you!’ Pilapil opened his defence. ‘His secretary phoned to say the police had booked Alex’s car and were trying to trace him. She wanted to know where he was – you’d told me to say we were in touch.’

‘Trying to warn us!’ Ryan snarled. ‘Dropping us in it, more like, you stupid bastard. If you thought a bit more and drank a bit less, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.’

Hepburn, sitting at the farther end of the room as if trying to distance himself, said angrily, ‘Just can it, will you? Running around like headless turkeys isn’t smart, and slagging off Cris won’t help either.’

His eyes were cold and hard. Ryan didn’t even try to meet their challenge, dropping his head and saying tiredly, ‘All right, all right. Sorry. Now what?’

‘Fine. Now, let’s try and sort out this God-awful mess. Where is Alex, Declan?’

‘How the hell would I know? You tell me. All I know is that Gillis said Alex was doing a job for him, unspecified, and since he wasn’t broadcasting what it was, I assumed it was something he’d prefer the police didn’t know about.’

‘Gillis would have preferred the police didn’t know about most of what he did. We all would.’ Hepburn’s languid pose had disappeared; he took a short, nervous drag at his cigarette.

There was a sudden crash overhead, a thud and then a wail. Cara, brooding in the corner of the sofa, sat up. ‘That’s Nico, Declan. He’s hurt himself.’

‘You go,’ Ryan said shortly. ‘I’ve got my hands full.’

‘But he might need you,’ she persisted.

Ryan’s patience snapped. ‘You deal with him. If he’s destroyed anything, I can’t guarantee not to give him something to cry about.’

Cara’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t care, do you? I’ll remember that.’ Her pale face flushed with anger, she got up and stormed out, slamming the door.

Pilapil broke the awkward silence. ‘What are we going to do, then?’

Ryan, who had turned his head to look glumly after his wife, sighed. ‘We can’t afford to have them digging around the business.’ He looked at Hepburn. ‘We talked about it before, remember? Fleming’s got to drop it, before she gets anyone else interested. Call her off.’

Without waiting for a reply, he left the room. Pilapil, not looking at Hepburn, got up to follow him.

Hepburn lit up again. His face was dark, and the hand holding the cigarette was rigid with tension. As he drew the smoke deep into his lungs, he heard Cara’s voice, screaming muffled abuse at her husband. He guessed she must be due her next fix.

As the police officers went back to their cars, Macdonald said, in aggrieved tones, ‘I thought you were meant to be at the Balmoral, not out here, Tam. And how the hell did you know about this Alex Rencombe?’

‘Ah, well, I’d had a wee idea, and then a radio message came through about his car being found,’ MacNee said, sounding smug. ‘The boss had asked them to contact you, but you weren’t answering. I said I’d go and spring it on the Ryans since I was nearby. How did they react to the news about Gallagher?’

‘Him? Cool – too cool, maybe. Her? Well.’ Macdonald shrugged. ‘Broke out at the end, though.’

‘Yes,’ MacNee said thoughtfully. ‘Knew Lisa Stewart was staying there, I reckon – wonder how? But they certainly went into shock when I mentioned Rencombe’s car.’

‘The Filipino lad wasn’t as surprised as the others – the phone call, presumably. But you certainly got your reaction,’ Macdonald admitted.

‘Didn’t do much good, though,’ Campbell pointed out with his usual bluntness. ‘They clammed up.’

Indeed they had, Hepburn too when they called him in. MacNee, on the defensive, said, ‘We found out he was Crozier’s lawyer anyway. And that he wasn’t the dead guy who’d been driving the Lexus. But it didn’t take Ryan long to think of saying the car must have been stolen.’

‘Couldn’t explain why it wasn’t reported, though,’ Macdonald pointed out. ‘Or tell us where Rencombe is now.’

‘In the mortuary,’ Campbell voiced MacNee’s thought. ‘He’s Mr X, obviously.’

The fingerprint information that had just reached Fleming pointed to the same conclusion. Mr X’s fingerprints were all over the Lexus, though overlaid with prints taken from the body at the guest house. And those prints belonged not to a ‘Damien Gallagher’, but to one Jason Williams, with a conviction in London for demanding money with menaces.

Having groped in the dark for so long, it felt almost dizzying to have names and background all at once. How to deal with such riches?

It made up for the disappointing interim report from the computer analyst. It had been entirely straightforward to access the files on Crozier’s PC, all of which concerned the organisation of the festival and the local housing development. There was no record of other business, and there were no personal emails or CDs with extra information. A further search would be done to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, but the professional view was that this was unlikely.

Which, of course, suggested that somewhere there had been a more sensitive laptop, a laptop that had been removed along with the papers from the filing cabinet while Fleming slept the sleep of exhaustion upstairs.

Both could still be in the house, but what chance had she of a general search warrant? There was no evidence that whatever business Crozier was carrying on had any bearing on his death, and sheriffs didn’t issue warrants on the basis of a DI’s gut feeling that something wasn’t right.

Anyway, how could she open up a new front when they were at full stretch already? She’d simply have to shelve all that meantime, and at least now there was solid progress to report, which might get the press off their backs. They were revving up already to take her apart: the details of her last case and her suspension had been rehashed with relish, and Donald Bailey was visibly twitching. She tried to put that out of her mind. After what she had suffered at their hands the last time, it made her feel sick.

Rencombe. Fleming was considering her next move on that when DS MacNee appeared, looking pleased with himself.

‘Tam?’ she said hopefully.

‘Gillis Crozier’s lawyer, that’s who he is. They don’t know anything – allegedly – except that he was doing a job for Crozier, unspecified, and that he was expected at Rosscarron House and didn’t arrive. Presumably he’s our—’

‘Mr X,’ Fleming finished for him. ‘I know. His fingerprints are all over the car. I’ve just been working out where we go from here . . . Formal ID first. Wheel in Ryan and someone else – one of the other men, preferably. Cara would be less than ideal if she’s spaced out.’

‘Pilapil and Hepburn both know him,’ MacNee said. ‘But you’d maybe rather keep Hepburn out of it?’ He gave a suggestive wink.

‘Whichever,’ she said coolly. ‘Something in your eye, Tam? Or are you developing a twitch?’

MacNee didn’t respond.

She went on, ‘Right. I’ve another piece of good news.’

She told him about the identification of Jason Williams, aka Damien Gallagher. ‘We can pretty safely work on the presumption that if he was driving Rencombe’s car, he killed him first. So what’s the connection between them? How did Williams come to be driving Rencombe’s car?’

‘I’ve a wee theory about that,’ MacNee said slowly. ‘I went out to Rosscarron Cottages today.’

‘I did wonder when they said you were going there. Thought you were meant to be at the guest house?’

‘I was, until it was locked up. Then I took that dour besom Lisa Stewart to find out about a bus to the hotel, to get her past the cameras.’

‘I’m glad you did that. There’ll be a frenzy when they realise she’s involved in this. Anyway, you went to the cottages?’

‘It’s a right mess out there,’ MacNee said. ‘If you ask me, they’ll end up levelling the lot, for the insurance. There was no one actually living there, after all – and would the owners really want to rebuild, out at the end of the road to nowhere? But in number 2 . . .’ He paused. ‘I know you’ve seen the footage, but when I was there, I could kind of see better what would have happened. And what we know now would fit with that. Mr X – Rencombe – was hit on the back of the head, near the door – leaving after a row, maybe. So then Williams panics and goes off in his Lexus.’

‘You’re assuming that Jason Williams, Damien Gallagher and Lee Morrissey are all the same person? That Lisa’s lying about not recognising Williams’s body?’

‘Damn sure of it.’

Fleming was frowning. ‘But what about their own car? They must have had one – where is it?’

‘Ah, that I can tell you. Under a bloody great heap of rubble, where the car park was. Williams maybe couldn’t resist taking the posh car instead of his own.’

‘Fair enough. But Jan Forbes saw Lisa’s boyfriend leave, right? Why did he go if Rencombe was coming to see him?’

‘Maybe Rencombe never said. Just had the bad luck to arrive as he was leaving.’

Fleming considered that. ‘OK, that works. So what had he come to see him about? That’s the key point.’

MacNee shrugged. ‘No idea. What I do know is that if Lisa Stewart told us all she knows, we’d be halfway there. At least.’

‘I’m with you there. I might get Kim to have a go at her, see what she can do.’

MacNee said nothing in a pointed manner, but Fleming chose to ignore it. ‘I want you to phone and break the news to his secretary, once we get a firm ID on Rencombe. But organise that as a matter of urgency.’

Jan Forbes, with her plastered foot up on a stool and her crutches at her side, was sitting in the hotel lounge knitting when Lisa Stewart came hesitantly in.

She had always been pale, but the girl was paler than ever now, with a crop of angry spots on her chin and dark rings under her eyes. Shocked by her appearance, Jan held out a welcoming hand.

‘My dear, it’s good to see you. Come away in and sit down. We’ll have the place to ourselves. Susan’s got a couple of families staying, but they’re always out during the day. I’ll enjoy having company – the Telfords are much too busy to waste time blethering.

‘Are you all right? You’ve been having a dreadful time – I’m so sorry.’ Behind the glasses, her grey eyes were warm with sympathy.

Lisa came forward and took her hand in a sort of awkward handshake, as if she weren’t quite sure what to do with it, then sat down opposite.

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said in a flat, listless tone that gave the lie to the words. Then she added, almost grudgingly, ‘Thanks for suggesting this place. It’s – it’s really nice.’

Her voice faltered and Jan wondered for a moment if she was going to break down, but Lisa went on, ‘It was the reporters. They’ve probably told you – I’m Lisa Stewart. There was a trial . . .’

‘I remember the trial,’ Jan said gently. ‘You were acquitted.’

Lisa gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, yes, though you’d never know it. Everyone still thinks I did it. I might just as well have been found guilty.’

‘I don’t think you’d have enjoyed prison.’

‘I suppose they’d have given me a hard time. They don’t like child killers and it wouldn’t have made any difference that I wasn’t one.’ Lisa’s voice wobbled and she stopped, biting her lip. ‘Sorry. I’m being stupid. Just tired, probably.’

Just on the verge of falling apart, in Jan’s opinion. Always practical, she said, ‘You’re probably hungry too. I know Susan would heat up some soup and make a sandwich.’

‘I’m all right.’ Lisa’s reply was brusque, as if she regretted having allowed emotion to show.

‘Are you sure? It’s always very good soup.’ Jan hesitated, then said, as delicately as she could, ‘You probably found yourself with nothing, after the landslip. If money’s a problem . . .’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Lisa got up and went to the door. ‘I’m just going up to my room for a rest.’

Jan picked up her knitting again, a red and blue sweater with an elephant on the front for the Telfords’ grandson. She liked knitting; it gave you something to do with your hands while you were thinking.

The girl was farouche, certainly. It would have been gracious at least to acknowledge Jan’s offer of help rather than walking out of the room.

But under her abrupt manner Jan could see a frightening level of strain. Lisa was trying desperately to keep control and Jan was afraid of what she might do when she failed, as she most certainly would.