Cradle to Grave (50 page)

‘Good,’ Macdonald said, but his mouth relaxed.

‘Any word of Kim this morning?’

He shook his head. ‘I phoned her house, but her mother took the call. She’s along at the home making arrangements.’

‘Right. Maybe someone could liaise with the management there and make sure we know the time of the funeral service,’ Fleming said. ‘Kim’s threatening to come back immediately, you know. I want to be informed at once if she does.’

Macdonald looked horrified. ‘She mustn’t do that! She’ll still be in shock.’

‘You tell her. She wouldn’t take it from me. Thanks, Andy, that’s all. See you at the briefing.’

She had a lot to do before that, but first she phoned Bill. She could hear the relief in his voice when she told him that she wasn’t Badger Black’s intended victim, though he still told her firmly to take care, before she rang off. Well, she would, but she was pretty relieved herself.

Fleming turned back to her screen. Reports, reports – but among them was one that immediately caught her eye. She clicked on it.

They had been checking on Jason Williams and had turned up his bank account. And there, among the other transactions, was a regular payment for a period of several months coming in from, surprise, surprise, one Declan Ryan.

That would be quite something to confront him with later this morning. Ruefully, she accepted that she would have to delegate it. Talking to Cara was more important, and it was likely that she would more readily confide in a woman whom she already knew.

If Tam MacNee hadn’t been such a fool, Fleming would have been leaving the Ryan interview in his capable hands. But he had been a fool, so Macdonald and Campbell would just have to do the best they could.

Tam MacNee had got up early. He hadn’t slept well, at least partly because his bed hadn’t been properly made for days, and he had risen with Fleming’s parting words ringing in his ears, as she looked around his disordered house: ‘You might just think how you’d feel if Bunty’s better and comes back unexpectedly to give you a lovely surprise.’

So, for the first time since Bunty left, he had stripped the bed and put the sheets to wash, then set about purgation of the house. Dogs, ruthlessly bathed, wandered around, uncomfortable at this break from recent routine, and cats, deprived of their bedding, made themselves scarce. At the end of three hours the house at least looked and smelled clean, even if it looked a little like an army barracks.

MacNee made himself a mug of tea and looked around him with satisfaction. Outside, it was a filthy day, gloomy and dark, but with all this physical effort, he felt better than he had for months, more optimistic, less afraid. A clean house was a lot less depressing than a dirty one.

But when he sat down, with the rest of the day stretching ahead of him, his mood darkened. They would all be busy now; Macdonald and Campbell, no doubt, would be embarking on the interview with Ryan that he should have been doing.

And what would he have asked him? First, of course, why had he given shelter to someone he claimed not to have known.

Why, indeed. Williams had come to Rosscarron House fresh from his killing of Alex Rencombe. It had been done on impulse; he had no escape plan so he had come to Rosscarron House for shelter, and cut the phone wires once he got there.

MacNee’s mind was beginning to buzz. Williams, he was ready to swear, had killed Crozier the following day, with Ryan’s connivance. MacNee had seen for himself Ryan’s resentment of his father-in-law; with Crozier dead, his empire would fall to his druggie daughter, and Ryan would at last have the power and the money.

Williams could have expected to carry out his second act of self-protection and then to flee. The unexpected collapse of the bridge had put paid to that idea and he’d had to lie low – very effectively, as it happened. He’d left the headland along with the other campers.

So far, so good. MacNee’s tea cooled in his mug as he scowled in concentration. A fight broke out in the garden between two of the unsettled dogs, but he didn’t even hear it.

Then Williams himself had turned up dead. Had Lisa Stewart lured him to the guest house to kill him? She would have seen him kill Crozier, but after what she believed the man had put her through, she probably wouldn’t blame him much. Certainly that wasn’t any sort of motive.

But what if Lisa had been set up for this? Williams knew where she was, and what could be more natural than sharing the knowledge with Ryan, his co-conspirator? Did Williams know too much – and this offered a chance to neutralise that threat, implicating Lisa at the same time? Everything had pointed to Ryan from the start, but it was only now MacNee was seeing past the alibi he himself had given the man.

MacNee looked at his watch. They’d most likely be in the middle of the Ryan interview by now, so he couldn’t speak to Andy Mac – if he would take his call, anyway. He could phone the boss, though.

He fetched his mobile, rang her number. Infuriatingly, it was on answerphone. She must be out of range already. Out at Rosscarron House, talking to Cara. Tying up the whole thing, probably.

He put it down again, deflated. And when he thought about it, being able to construct a narrative was neither here nor there, and he still had no idea why Williams should have murdered Rencombe, or indeed what the man’s business with him had been in the first place.

Yet again, he found Rabbie’s words to articulate his frustration:

‘One point must still be greatly dark

The moving Why they do it.’

Fleming had gone back to her room after the briefing, ready to leave for Rosscarron once the word came through that Ryan had indeed arrived. When she picked the phone up, however, it wasn’t the message she had expected.

It was Macdonald, in a state of agitation. ‘Kim’s just appeared. She’s looking terrible – sort of blank and unresponsive – and we’ve all said she’s to go home, but she won’t.’

With a sinking heart, Fleming said, ‘I’ll be right down.’

25

The man in the white Vauxhall Vectra, cruising past the end of the narrow street that housed the exit from the police car park, was uncharacteristically nervous. Cool calculation was his stock-in-trade: he liked time to plan, to know the ground, to assess the risks. It was why he had the reputation he did.

But the call he’d had this morning, after last night’s fiasco, was piling on the pressure. He was being paid for a rush job and they thought it should have been done by now – and you didn’t get across clients like that. Perhaps he’d have been smarter to take Fleming out first, but once you’d killed a cop, there’d be a roadblock on every street and he’d never have got the other one. At least that had been a neat operation, one he could take pride in.

This one was proving a bitch. The streets around here were narrow, all double yellow lines, and there were pigs coming and going all the time. He’d been cruising round and round the block, but he couldn’t do that for ever; the woman might not leave the building all day, or she might leave when he was out of eyeshot.

He could feel the stress bubbling up, taste stomach acid in his mouth. If he failed, he’d lose big money. Worse, he’d earn the ill-will of some very dangerous men.

He took off a glove to fumble in his pocket for an antacid. He was getting dizzy going round and round these stupid streets, and sooner or later he’d have to come up with a better plan. It was just that for the moment he couldn’t think of one.

Cris Pilapil’s clothes were crumpled and soiled, and his stubble had begun to form a soft fringe around his face. His dark olive skin was a putty colour, and he was visibly shaking as he sat opposite DS Macdonald and DC Campbell in the interview room.

Macdonald was just about to ask the first question when, to his surprise, Campbell took the initiative. ‘What’re you so scared of?’

Pilapil grabbed both hands together, as if to still their shaking, but his jaw was trembling so much that Macdonald could actually hear his teeth clashing together.

He said reassuringly, ‘There’s no need to get in a state. You’ll be appearing in court later. You’ll get a fine and a six-month driving ban – no big deal.’

The look Pilapil gave him was unexpectedly contemptuous. ‘You think I’m scared of you? You’re the law. In this country, the law is fair, and my boss saw my papers were in order. But I need you to let me go now, before they know you are talking to me. If they find me after that, I don’t know what they will do to me.’

‘They?’

‘The big men. It’s gone wrong and they are worried. Worried and angry. Maybe there was something I failed to do. Maybe they will only think there was – I need to get away.’

‘Who are they?’ Macdonald demanded. ‘Names, addresses – the lot. It’s too late to muck about.’

‘I can’t, I can’t.’

‘Might as well,’ Campbell said laconically. ‘If we know who they are, we might just get to them before they get to you.’

Pilapil shot him a distrustful look. ‘Maybe you are right, but mostly I don’t know. They are Italian, German, French. But Gillis’s two close business partners . . .’ He baulked again, as if with a superstitious fear of mentioning their names.

‘Spit it out,’ encouraged Campbell.

‘Lloyd and Driscoll.’ Pilapil gave a little gasp, as if his own temerity had taken his breath away.

‘Better out than in!’

Macdonald, giving Campbell a quelling glance, said, ‘We’ll get all the details later. What kind of business was it, then?’

Pilapil looked down. ‘I don’t know. It was very confusing – lots of packages, lots of forms. But Gillis dealt with it – I didn’t understand.’

He wasn’t a very good liar, but there was no point in challenging him on it. Fleming had warned them the Fraud Squad was taking care of that end; they’d probably be waiting for Pilapil when he came out of court this morning.

‘All right, I’ll accept that,’ Macdonald said. ‘But what did you know about the job Alex Rencombe was doing for Gillis Crozier when he was killed?’

To his surprise, Pilapil’s eyes filled with tears. ‘He didn’t tell me. I wish he had! He was very upset, so I listened carefully, to help him, maybe. I heard him tell Alex on the phone, ‘‘I won’t meet him. I won’t talk to him. I don’t want to know where he is, even. I suspect it’s a set-up for blackmail, so I don’t want any contact.” Then he said something about not allowing this man to explain what his “proposal” was, but Gillis seemed to have guessed anyway. And Alex knew too. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he seemed to be blaming Gillis for something, because he admitted he was wrong, and something about not really being sane at the time. Maybe he meant he was around when his granddaughter died – he suffered badly, so badly.

‘Then they talked a bit more, and I remember the last thing he said was, “If it’s what we both think it is, Alex, there’s no alternative. Tell him it’s the police, straight away. It’s too risky to do anything else.”’

‘Him?’

‘
I don’t know!
’ It was a wail of despair. ‘He killed Alex, then Gillis, then probably this other guy, and I don’t know who he is! It’s your job to find him. And you’d better find him before I do.’

Macdonald began on a stern warning, but Campbell said, ‘Right, help us, then. Every scrap of information you can think of.’

It was quite some time before Pilapil, looking drained, was taken off for his court appearance.

The detectives took stock.

‘So someone was trying to set up something he could blackmail Crozier with, but we don’t know what,’ Macdonald said. ‘And Rencombe died because he told Williams he was going to the police, on Crozier’s instructions – so from that moment on Crozier was doomed too.

‘If we’re to believe Pilapil – and I’d have to say that so far he’s convinced me – our friend Declan insisted they lie to Rencombe’s girlfriend when she wanted to know why he hadn’t got in touch. That puts him in this up to his neck. How’s he going to explain it when we talk to him?’

Campbell was silent for a moment. ‘More interesting to know what he was paying Williams for.’

‘It wasn’t for killing Rencombe, that’s for sure – that wasn’t planned. And Crozier’s death was opportunistic too.’

‘Paying Williams to spy on Lisa Stewart? Not Crozier persecuting her, but Ryan?’

Macdonald looked at him. ‘Father of the baby, father of the boy who ended up accused. Makes sense. And I’ve got this feeling that nearly all the pieces of the jigsaw are on the table and we only need to fit them together. I might just phone Big Marge before we go into the interview. She might have something to pitch in.’

He dialled, then pulled a face. ‘Answerphone. Must be out of range.’

In Kirkluce the weather had been depressing, with heavy, brownish clouds low overhead and the daylight feeble and grudging. As Fleming and Kershaw went down towards Rosscarron, it deteriorated and now they were driving through fog, making poor speed on the long, twisting road.

The atmosphere inside felt almost as thick to Fleming. Beside her, Kershaw sat, still as stone, staring straight ahead, lost in her terrible thoughts. She had responded, briefly and expressionlessly, to Fleming’s occasional remarks, but eventually it seemed wiser to make no attempt at engagement.