Cradle to Grave (40 page)

But there was a stone on the ground just beside him. He was quite good at throwing stones. He picked it up and hefted it in his hand, eyeing the oblivious creature. He threw it with all his force, but the bird caught the movement and with a screech of alarm flew off in a clumsy flurry of feathers.

Stupid, stupid bird! He turned away discontentedly and went back inside.

He could hear the grown-ups were talking in the sitting room as he went through the hall. He wasn’t going in there. It was boring, like everything else. There wasn’t even any music playing now and the house felt weird. Nico liked really loud music, played through the speakers.

He drifted upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. He hadn’t been allowed in there by himself since he spilled some of his father’s expensive cologne on the carpet, so it was good they were out of the way. He made a picture on the mirror with his mother’s make-up, then noticed a pair of scissors on the dressing table.

Snipping them together experimentally, Nico looked around. There was a soft red and blue rug with silky fringes on the floor by the bed, and he sat down, deciding to cut them off. Then he noticed something.

Under the bed, there was a laptop. If he took it to his room, he could play with it whenever he liked, even after he was sent to bed at night. He put the scissors back where he had found them and wiped off the mirror picture carefully so no one would know he had been there, then carried the laptop off in triumph to his own room.

MacNee reread the report that had just come in. It had looked the dull sort of thing he’d not have paid much attention to, if he hadn’t been stuck here, but it was dynamite. Maybe there was something in doing a desk job after all – not that he was going to admit that to Fleming.

The risk was that she might decide he was more use where he was. On the other hand, she would have to know about this, and it had a lot of implications they’d need to discuss. If he went and told her face to face, it could be quite like old times.

‘You again, Tam?’ Fleming greeted him. ‘Another useful bit of digging?’

‘Bit of a strange one come in, boss,’ MacNee said, sitting down. ‘I thought you’d maybe like to know before the briefing tonight. Gives the whole thing a twist.’

Fleming’s ears pricked up. ‘Good twist? Bad twist?’

‘Hard to say. You know how the phones were cut off at Rosscarron?’

‘Oh, I remember, Tam. Believe me, I remember,’ Fleming said with feeling.

‘The linesman’s report just came in. The phone line for the area goes to Rosscarron House first, right? And someone cut it. It hadn’t broken.’

‘We knew that. Poor Jamieson, presumably, as part of his revenge for his ruined life.’

‘We thought that, aye. Seems we were wrong,’ MacNee said with dramatic satisfaction.

‘I don’t need entertainment, just information,’ Fleming said tartly. ‘Take the rabbit out of the hat before it escapes.’

‘The line was cut at Rosscarron House. Not just at, but where it could be reached from a window. So unless someone went and put up a ladder against the house without anyone noticing, it was an inside job. And we know that Jamieson didn’t have a ladder.’

Fleming’s brain was racing. ‘So someone in that house wanted to cut off the phone and the Internet. Now why would they do that? To isolate them from the rest of the world? But they couldn’t have known the bridge would be sabotaged. The struts were definitely sawn through with Jamieson’s chainsaw.’

‘Aye.’ MacNee scowled in concentration. ‘So was that just a wee bonus for them?’

‘Or didn’t it matter? What mattered was the phone being out. Was there something on the Internet that Crozier shouldn’t see, for instance?’

‘Something to do with that business no one wants to talk about? Stinks like a Glasgow close on a Saturday night.’

Fleming, he thought, looked uncomfortable. ‘I have a nasty feeling that it does. But I can’t see how to get at it.’

‘We’ve questions we’re needing to ask them, anyway. Here – say you and me go out there tomorrow?’ MacNee looked at her hopefully and she laughed.

‘OK, Tam. Hepburn’s coming in first thing. I’ll sit in on that from next door, then I’ll commute the desk sentence. You’re only out on licence, mind you.’

‘Rowantrees Hotel,’ Susan Telford said into the phone. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Could you put me through to Lisa Stewart, please?’

It was quite a coarse voice; some instinct made her hesitate. ‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Just a friend of hers.’

That settled it. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have anyone of that name staying here. There’s a place called the Rowans in Kirkcudbright – you could try there.’

There was a pause; then he said lightly, ‘Oh, never mind. I must have made a mistake.’ He rang off before she could put the phone down.

Susan went through to the lounge, where Jan Forbes was alone, sitting by the window again, knitting. She looked up when her friend came in.

‘That’s the elephant finished,’ she said, holding up her handiwork. ‘Isn’t he a handsome fellow?’ Then, seeing the look on Susan’s face, she said, ‘Oh dear! Something’s happened?’

‘I think so. We were expecting the press to catch up with poor Lisa, and I think they have. There was a man on the phone asking if she was staying here. Of course I said no, but I hesitated at first and I’m not sure I convinced him. I’m not a very good liar.’

‘It was bound to happen,’ Jan said. ‘If they’re on to her, they won’t stop till they find her.’

‘Should we warn her, do you think?’

Jan considered that. ‘Do you know, I think we should leave it for the moment. She’s in a very fragile state, and she has us to protect her. If they turn up here, you can always turn them away.’

Susan gave her a cynical look. ‘And you expect they’ll go? Still, the doctor’s given her something to make her sleep and she’ll be feeling stronger tomorrow, poor lamb.’

The man in the silver Ford Focus, parked in a side street in Kirkluce, switched off his mobile with a small, grim smile of satisfaction. He looked at his watch. Seven o’clock – time for a pie and a pint. Or a half-pint, anyway, since he never ran the risk of being caught by the breathalyser.

He chose one of the shabbier pubs, which was already busy. On this sort of job you never wanted to draw attention to yourself. He had to wait a few minutes at the bar to get his drink, then carried it and the wooden number for his order over to a table away from the window. You never knew who might be passing in the street.

He didn’t see a slightly built man with longish brown hair and a row of steel earrings shrink back into the further corner of the bar with an expression of shock, or notice him slip out of the pub, attaching himself to a noisy group who had just got up to leave.

He didn’t know that outside, tucked out of sight in an alleyway, the man was making a phone call with shaking hands.

20

Tuesday, 25 July

It was drizzling again this morning. When Marjory Fleming had set out to feed her hens, it hadn’t looked heavy enough to warrant a jacket and hood, but it was the soft, wetting stuff that soaks you through almost unnoticed. As she came back into the farmhouse kitchen carrying a bowl of eggs, she shook herself like a dog.

‘I should have taken the shampoo out with me instead of washing my hair in the shower,’ she complained.

Bill, just finishing his mug of tea, smiled. ‘I was out earlier, but I was smart enough to put on a jacket, so I was all right, wasn’t I, Meg?’

The collie, lying by the Aga, twitched her tail in response.

Marjory pulled a face. ‘Smug isn’t pretty, is it, Meg? We may both have got soaked but we think it’s pretty pathetic of you to need a jacket for a wee bit rain like that.’

Bill smiled again, then rinsed out his mug and set it upside down on the draining board. ‘I don’t care what she says, Meg – only a fool doesn’t know how to be comfortable.

‘I’m just off, then. You’ll be late again tonight, I suppose?’

‘Probably. Have a good day.’

As the door shut behind her husband and Meg, Marjory sighed. That had been the familiar sort of light-hearted exchange, but she’d noticed that increasingly they were involving the dog in their conversations, almost as if it was safer to be in company than alone. They were both being very civilised, but she didn’t want to have to be civilised. She wanted the old natural, loving relationship back, which had seemed so easy that she’d never given much thought to how it was achieved. If Joss Hepburn carried out his threat, if the newspapers represented her youthful follies in the ugliest possible way – as they would – might the damage it caused to her career be the least of her problems? The ringing of her mobile was a welcome relief from her unhappy thoughts.

It was John Purves. She listened for a moment, her brow furrowed. ‘What on earth for?’ Then she said, ‘Right. I have to monitor an interview first, but I can clear time after that.’

She ran upstairs. Catriona, in an early-morning trance, was on her way to the bathroom.

‘Don’t forget to tell Cammie to change his sheets today, will you?’ her mother said. ‘I’m going in now. I’ll probably be late back.’

‘How unusual!’ Cat yawned. ‘Remind me who you are again?’

Ignoring her daughter’s sarcasm, Fleming went into her bedroom and opened her wardrobe door. What on earth would a woman who ran a builder’s yard wear when she was checking out an applicant for casual labour?

Debbie had been very sleepy this morning too. Kim Kershaw’s mind was on her daughter as she drove towards work in Kirkluce from Newton Stewart. She had again looked in on her way to work and wakened her with a kiss, but Debbie’s eyes had opened only briefly, then closed again.

It was early, admittedly, since Kershaw was on a seven-to-three shift, and the carer said she’d had another restless night so it wasn’t surprising Debbie wanted a lie-in. And after the bad turn she’d had, it wasn’t surprising either that she was taking some time to recover, but as ever fear for the child’s health gripped Kershaw like an iron hand twisting her inside.

She couldn’t afford to think about it. There was a busy day ahead – a challenging day too.

There’d been a lot of gossip among the lads – fairly ribald, some of it – about Big Marge’s relationship with a pop star like Joshua, of all people. Kershaw wasn’t a reader of celeb magazines herself, but according to those who were, he certainly wasn’t the kind of guy you’d take home to meet the chief constable. Still pretty fit, though, even at his advanced age; she’d found herself looking at the boss with new respect.

Fleming was going to be watching the interview from the room next to the main interview room, with its one-way glass panel. It made Kershaw a little uneasy; she’d had superior officers do that in the past to check up on her technique, sometimes without telling her. Fleming had been open about it, though, and said she’d prompt any questions that occurred to her.

Kershaw would have said Big Marge wasn’t lacking in courage, but rather than checking on her subordinates, could she be ducking out of doing the interview herself? Her reaction to Tam MacNee’s extraordinary breach of procedure in springing Joss Hepburn on her had resulted in MacNee sitting in front of a computer terminal in the CID room all day, acting like a Rottweiller with a migraine if anyone spoke to him.

Whatever you said about the job, it wasn’t dull. And this morning looked like being even more interesting than usual.

MacNee was early today too. He came into the CID room with a spring in his step. There was nothing like a day stuck at a desk to make you appreciate getting out to do the hands-on job that was real policework to him. The rest of the stuff inflicted on them was just fantoosh – all the unnecessary frills and bows of form-filling and writing logs and going on diversity courses. At the thought of the last, he gave a small, involuntary shudder. Lucky Big Marge hadn’t thought of that or he’d be marked down for one right now.

Fleming, unusually, was there talking to Ewan Campbell. She turned when she saw him.

‘Morning, Tam. I was hoping you’d be in early. Change of plan – I’ve got another commitment today.’

MacNee’s face fell. His ‘Right, boss’ was very flat.

Fleming smiled. ‘Oh, don’t panic. I want you to go anyway, just on your own. Do a spot of sniffing around at Rosscarron House and see what you think.

‘I was so impressed with what you came up with when you went through all the reports that I’m asking Andy Mac to do a trawl this morning, but he’ll be available if you need back-up. Ewan, I’ll see you and Kim after the briefing to discuss the Hepburn interview. OK?’

MacNee felt a faint pang of jealousy. At least he was free to do what he did best, but that was one he’d have liked to be in on. He was wondering, too, what it was Fleming was doing later that took precedence over driving on the inquiry. She’d normally say, ‘A meeting,’ or, ‘A conference,’ often pulling a face about the hoops she had to jump through. But ‘A commitment’?

His nose told him there was something going on. She wasn’t wearing one of her usual smart trouser suits this morning, and the jeans, casual shirt and zip jacket suggested she wouldn’t be spending time in the office. He hated being out of the loop, but he’d only himself to blame. And he hated that too.