Cradle to Grave (41 page)

Lisa Stewart woke with a start and looked at her watch.

It was just after seven o’clock. She was relieved, having feared it might be later, but then it had only been nine o’clock when sleep overcame her last night, and this morning she definitely felt more alert and refreshed. If she’d had bad dreams, Lisa couldn’t remember them – or perhaps the insight Jan Forbes had given her had exorcised her demons.

But the note she had left for Jan was uppermost in her mind. Without even waiting to dress, she went out in her pyjamas and crept down the stairs.

There was no one about, but the note had gone. With a hollow feeling inside, she returned to her room. She told herself firmly that it didn’t matter; she was going to disappear anyway, but now it was a matter of real urgency.

She had three-quarters of an hour to catch the early bus. Breakfast didn’t start until eight and before that there would only be staff busy setting up. By the time anyone got round to missing her, Lisa would be long gone.

After a speedy shower, she crammed her few belongings into her bag and, doing a rough calculation, left some money on the bedside table. She shut the door quietly as she left the room. There were faint sounds from behind the closed doors in the corridor, but the hall below was empty.

Downstairs, Lisa could hear voices and the clatter of crockery from the breakfast room, but its window was towards the side of the house. Once she was out of the front door, she should be able to reach the road unseen.

It was a depressing day. The air was thick with water vapour, and curtains of silvery rain came sweeping across a grey, sullen sea. There was no view at all now, and even the bright gold of the gorse seemed dulled in the wet, its prickly leaves mud-splashed from the passing cars.

As she walked out between the guardian rowans, Lisa felt a twinge of fear. She was totally on her own now. Jan, the kindly Telfords – they had given her a sense of safety and she was putting herself beyond any help they could give her.

But it wasn’t really safety. They wouldn’t protect her from persecution by the police or the press once they had read her note. She had to vanish.

Lisa pulled up the hood of her jacket and began her trudge along the verge. She couldn’t rely on the bus driver being the obliging Doddie who had stopped for her outside the hotel; she had, according to what Susan Telford said when she arrived, a mile to go to the official bus-stop.

It was a quiet road, but it wasn’t pleasant walking. A car appeared round the corner ahead just as one came up behind her, a silver Ford Focus that was so close to her it actually had to swerve, and even then a fine spray of mud soiled her jeans. She glanced down irritably, but she didn’t bother to brush it off. She’d still quite a bit to walk and no doubt other cars would do the same.

When Lisa reached the bus-stop, she was reassured to see that a small queue had formed already. Sometimes timetables were out of date, but it looked as if hers had been right.

Everyone looked depressed this morning, standing in silent stoicism under the rain. Lisa joined them, and a few minutes later, just as the bus appeared, a man came up to stand behind her. She noticed idly that his jacket and his hair, very dark and growing in a deep widow’s peak on his forehead, looked surprisingly dry. He must live quite close by.

Lisa couldn’t remember where the bus ended up. ‘The terminus,’ she said.

‘Newton Stewart?’ the driver asked, and she nodded, paid and found a seat.

The man who had got on behind her sat down at the front of the bus. He got off again at the next stop.

Newton Stewart. From there, presumably, she could get a bus to Dumfries, then a train to Glasgow. She could even go to earth there for a bit, if the police came after her when they found she’d gone. She was at ease with big cities. No one was interested in strangers, and anyway the only photos of her showed her with distinctive red hair. She’d change her name again too, then stay quietly somewhere till the fuss died down and she could take a train back to London.

Rosie turned away from her parents’ bedroom window where she had been pressing her nose to the glass. She’d waved and waved, but the lady hadn’t paid any attention.

‘Rosie, come on,’ her mother said in harassed tones. ‘We’re going down to breakfast and we’re waiting for you.’

‘Lady gone,’ Rosie said sadly, but no one was listening.

How often did people say, ‘I’d love to be a fly on the wall’? Here, behind the one-way glass, DI Fleming was in that privileged pos-ition as DCs Kershaw and Campbell ushered Joss Hepburn into the interview room.

Spying, you could call it. Fleming was scrupulous about informing her officers when she was to be there, but even so she still always felt a prickle of discomfort. It was definitely useful, though: without the distraction of directing the interview, she could observe its subject minutely for body language, fleeting facial expressions and what gamblers call ‘tells’ – unconscious gestures showing stress. You could miss a lot when you had to concentrate on finding a killer question to ask.

Yes, detachment was useful. And of course Fleming could still have an input: Kershaw was wearing a discreet earpiece.

Hepburn noticed it immediately. Fleming saw his fractional stillness; then his eyes travelled to the blank panel on the wall opposite him. He gave a little nod and a slight, sardonic smile, as if he were looking through it straight into her eyes.

Fleming took an involuntary step backwards. He couldn’t see her, of course he couldn’t, but in some uncanny way he knew she was there. It shook her for a moment.

Duh! He’d really got her spooked. Of course he would guess. He was a man used to studios and to every trick of filming and production: one-way glass would hardly be an unfamiliar concept. Fleming narrowed her eyes and assessed him for signs of tension.

She couldn’t see any. With that half-smile still lingering on his face, he was sitting in a relaxed position, elbows on the arms of his chair, hands hanging loose. There were no jerky movements, no tiny twitches, no protective crossing of his arms. He watched in calm silence as Campbell set up the tape.

Kershaw, on the other hand, was nervous, shuffling her papers and shifting in her seat, as if she were feeling Fleming’s eyes on the back of her neck. Once, she even half turned, then turned back again, as if she’d had to fight an impulse to look over her shoulder.

Campbell returned to his seat and completed the formalities in his usual unruffled way.

‘Mr Hepburn,’ Kershaw began, ‘you made a statement that you, the Ryans and Mr Pilapil were all together all evening on Saturday night.’

Hepburn half closed his eyes and gave a bored sigh. ‘Oh dear. Yes, I guess I did.’

‘So it wasn’t true? Are you now withdrawing that statement?’

‘We-ell . . . not exactly
withdrawing
. Kind of modifying, you could say.’

Fleming couldn’t see Kershaw raising her eyebrows, but she heard it in her voice. ‘Modifying?’

‘Oh, come on, Officer, get real! You’ve seen the house.’ Hepburn’s tone suggested sweet reason. ‘Obviously, we were hardly sitting looking at each other all evening.’

‘So what were you doing?’

‘Mostly sitting in my room avoiding, as far as possible, contact with the Ryans and their unspeakably obnoxious offspring. I guess Cris was doing the same.’

‘Why did you lie about it, then?’ Campbell was reliably blunt.

Good lad! But it hadn’t rattled Hepburn – or if it had, it didn’t show. Fleming couldn’t see any of the signs of stress; the hands were still hanging, relaxed.

‘It kind of seemed rude, to contradict my host, you know? And since I had no reason to figure it wasn’t true, and since I’m not in the habit of suspecting my close contacts of murder, I guess I just went along with it.’ His hands turned palm outwards in the classic gesture of openness.

Now, hit him with the CCTV stuff, Fleming urged Kershaw, though only mentally.

Kershaw needed no prompting. ‘You see, Mr Hepburn,’ she said sweetly, ‘we have evidence that your hired car was in Kirkluce that evening.’

Hepburn raised his brows. ‘Was it? Oh dear, I’m just so careless about my keys! I wonder who borrowed it?’

No indication of shock, or surprise, even. The man was a performer, of course, constantly on stage, and Fleming remembered something suddenly.

‘Ask him if he takes acting lessons,’ she said into the microphone. He’d gone up to Glasgow for coaching every week when she knew him.

There was a hint of surprise in Kershaw’s voice as she put the question and for the first time it provoked a reaction. Hepburn sat forward in his chair. ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ Then he looked towards the panel with a short laugh. ‘As DI Fleming knows, I always did. My job is putting on an act.’

‘You’re good at it.’

Ignoring Kershaw’s acid tone, he went on, ‘Look, this is some kind of farce. DI Fleming is behind that panel. If she wants to ask questions, why doesn’t she cut the crap and ask face to face?’

‘Because I’m doing it,’ Kershaw said sharply. ‘And I want answers. Your hire car was seen in Kirkluce on Saturday evening, as I said. Are you stating that you weren’t driving it?’

‘I’m stating that I’m careless with my keys.’ Hepburn was getting promisingly angry now. ‘And that anyone in the house could have taken them.’

‘Where were the keys, then?’ Campbell again.

At last, they had got to him. ‘I – I can’t recall.’ His jaw, Fleming noticed, had tensed up and his hands had closed round the arms of the chair.

‘Have you driven the car since Saturday?’ Kershaw asked.

‘Until this morning, no.’

‘So this morning, before you drove in, where did you find the keys?’

Hepburn glared at her. Then, with a visible effort, he relaxed again. ‘Hey, this is crazy! I’m an absent-minded guy and suddenly I’m being featured as a suspect for killing some kid I never even met!’

‘Not suddenly. You always were,’ Campbell said, and Kershaw went on, ‘You see, we only have your word for it that Jason Williams was “some kid” you didn’t know. And I can’t see any reason why I should take it.’

Hepburn gave a dismissive shrug. ‘That, I have to say, is a matter of supreme indifference to me. You have evidence that my car was in Kirkluce. I guess you’ve no evidence that I was driving it, or you’d have produced it. Anyway, say I was in Kirkluce? It wouldn’t prove I’d killed anyone, would it?’

He was perfectly right. Kershaw tried, ‘Are you admitting it, then?’ and got the short answer. The interview was running into the sand.

Had he, Fleming wondered, really come in at nine o’clock to do a murder later? And been careless enough to drive along the main street, where there were likely to be cameras? But he had to have had a compelling reason to drive all the way to Kirkluce . . .

A thought struck her. ‘Ask him,’ Fleming said into the microphone, ‘if he was visiting his drug dealer.’

It is hard to ask a prompted question as if you had thought of it yourself, and Kershaw failed. Hepburn gave her a look of contempt, got up and came across to stand in front of the panel, looking directly at the unseen Fleming.

‘I’m not playing games any more, Madge. This is utterly futile. You’re not going to arrest me, so I’m leaving, and if I have to come back, it will be with my lawyer.

‘But I wish you’d think over very carefully what I said to you yesterday. This is important. I really, really want you to change your mind. For your own sake. I’ll even say please.’ He put the palms of his hands together in a supplicatory gesture. Despite the glass, his silver-grey eyes seemed to stare straight into Fleming’s own.

‘Once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made’ had been one of Hepburn’s favourite sayings, but this time, she almost believed he was genuine. Oh, not because of what he said about her, but because of what she could see in his eyes – raw, naked fear.

Hepburn turned and walked out of the room. As Campbell said, for the benefit of the tape, ‘Mr Hepburn has terminated the interview,’ Fleming stood with her hands to her burning cheeks.

‘What did you make of that?’ Kershaw demanded once the microphones were switched off. ‘Hardly a great success, was it? We got absolutely nowhere, and I felt a right idiot. I never did see ventriloquist’s dummy as a fulfilling career.’

‘Hepburn’s right,’ Campbell said. ‘We’ve nothing against him, except an inaccurate confirmation of someone else’s informal statement.’

‘He’s a cold-blooded bastard. I could see him taking out any number of people without disarranging his carefully casual locks. And what was all that with the boss –
Madge
?’

Campbell was never a rewarding person to gossip to. ‘No idea. Better not hang about or she’ll know we’re discussing her.’

You could get tired of driving through the back of beyond in the rain, through all these wee places where only a handful of people lived. If they’d just the sense to get all together and live in a city, or even a decent-sized town, hard-working coppers could get the job done in half the time. DS MacNee looked disparagingly at the passing countryside as he drove to Rosscarron House. It had always been his opinion that when you’ve seen one sheep, you’ve seen them all.