Authors: Aline Templeton
‘Look, Louise, it’s quite straightforward. Get him picked up and then Big Marge can grill him in the morning. Where is he?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop mucking about. This is a safety issue. Do I need to remind you what happened last time?’
‘No, of course you don’t. I put it on record that I was very thankful you saved my life – still am. Permanent debt of gratitude. OK? Now could we take it as read?’
She always had the power to get under his skin. ‘I never wanted thanks,’ he said coldly.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you didn’t. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. It’s only that I’m so keen to take this opportunity because he could just disappear again. And this time I promise you that I’m not going to be caught off my guard – as I’ve told you before, he’s a pussycat. Talks a good line but I’ve known him since he was eighteen and that’s all it is – a good line.
‘He’s not really even a suspect. It’s just it would be nice to get him ruled out, and anyway, I wouldn’t be going on my own. If you come with me you can guard my back.’
‘Why not wait till tomorrow and clear it with the boss? Much more sensible.’
‘Because he’ll be gone by then. I told you.’ He could hear the exasperation in Louise’s elaborately patient voice, as if she was having to explain to a dim-witted six-year-old. ‘He’s agreed to talk to me
tonight
and if you won’t come with me I’ll go myself. I promise
you I’ll be fine – just don’t tip off the uniforms to intercept me or I’ll never speak to you again.’
She really was the most infuriating woman! But the horror of seeing her collapsing, fighting for breath, was still vividly in his mind and there was no doubt she meant what she said about going on her own. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if anything happened to her.
Andy groaned. ‘Oh, all right then. You’ll have to pick me up and I warn you I’ll be reeking of beer.’
‘That’s all right. I’m much more tolerant than some people are about others’ personal habits,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’
Andy went back to the party to make his excuses to his mother, pleading tiredness. She trilled, ‘No stamina, you young folk,’ and went back to her dancing. They were on to ‘Hi Ho, Silver Lining’.
He went outside to wait. It was typical Louise, coming up with something like this, but when he considered it calmly he didn’t think it was actually dangerous – certainly not with the two of them to conduct what would be just a standard interview.
And she was right – the latest developments had all but cleared Randall and scoring him off the list would save hassle in the long run. He was just an irritating nuisance. Anyway, Andy had to confess to some mild curiosity about what sort of story he would come up with to explain why he’d been hiding when the whole of the Force was after him – and where.
When Fleming reached her desk there was a note waiting for her. The SOCOs at Balcary Bay had found a stone that was showing traces of blood and tissue. With its rough surface they had as yet failed to find fingerprints but they were hopeful that more detailed forensic investigation might produce evidence from it later.
The hire car had a superfluity of prints, but the victim’s were on the steering wheel and the handle of the car door, so the perpetrator might not even have been in it. They were taking tyre moulds from a muddy puddle in one area of the car park but there was, of course, nothing to indicate that this had any relevance.
Fleming sighed. Not much to go on there, and even forensic magic would struggle to lift fingerprints from a rough surface like stone; DNA was more likely, but getting it would take days if not weeks.
She wasn’t ready to consider that case anyway. Her mind was busy with her new idea, making – yes – connections. She’d learnt her lesson, though; an idea wasn’t enough to go on.
She switched on her computer eagerly and scrolled through to find the labelled files she wanted. There was a huge number of them – probably more than she could even skim through now, unless she planned to spend the night at her desk. Her spirits sank. Tomorrow she could set everyone on to it, but she’d been so impatient to get some results tonight.
But when she opened the first one, a message came up. It was from DC Campbell, who must have gone back to his desk after she’d dismissed them earlier, and it said, with his usual laconic style, ‘Tagged a couple of things. Worth checking out.’
She clicked on them, and there, before her eyes, was exactly the kind of evidence she had been hoping to find. Trust Ewan – always one step ahead.
There were gaps that needed to be filled in but as her mind raced she could see how it might fit together. Mentally reviewing the evidence they already had, piece after piece slotted into place. It was a whole new angle for the investigation, following a line they’d dismissed before.
Then, with a sudden chill her own words came back to her. That conversation with Louise after the last briefing: she’d answered her
question carelessly, with her mind not fully engaged – too busy with her obsession about Jen.
She’d agreed with Louise’s assessment that Randall was out of the frame, even said that if he gave a satisfactory account of himself they’d be able to rule him out of their enquiries. And now she thought about it, there had been something odd about the response she’d got.
Louise, who had form for impulsively taking matters into her own hands, had said – what was it? Never believed it was him, something like that. Could she have taken their conversation as giving tacit permission to try to contact him herself? Now she thought about it, Louise certainly had his phone number and though official attempts had been made – and ignored – he might answer if it was her.
She could be putting herself in deadly danger. She had to be warned off immediately. But when Fleming phoned it rang briefly then went to voicemail.
She tried to tell herself that it was of no significance, that there were lots of reasons why Louise might have her phone switched off, that she was only being neurotic, but that was one more reason for setting off for Ballinbreck immediately. She stood up and scrolled down to MacNee’s number as she went to the door.
‘Tam? I’m coming to pick you up. I think we’re on to something.’
‘So it’s Ballinbreck?’ DS Andy Macdonald turned to look at DC Louise Hepburn as she drove out of Kirkcudbright and took the A711. ‘Hiding in plain view, is he? I think you could afford to tell me exactly where we’re going.’
She had told him what little she knew, except that last detail. Now she grinned. ‘I think it’s safe enough now. I didn’t trust you not to tip off the uniforms. And I switched off my phone so if you had grassed to Big Marge she couldn’t order me to stop.’
‘Oh, I know better than that,’ he said wryly. ‘So …?’
‘The decor shop – you know, where their business is. Just off the High Street, he said.’
‘I’ve been there. Very posh – room settings all laid out, everything costing a week’s wages. So are we to think now his mother was shielding him, after all? She sounded as if she didn’t like him much.’
‘I never got the impression they were close, certainly. He may just have thought it was a discreet place for us to meet – out of the way, and he’d have the keys I suppose.’
‘I certainly can’t see where he could have been hidden while we
were there, and I think the uniforms checked it out at the time too. It’s just a big warehouse with an office up a stair – and he wasn’t hiding under the desk while we interviewed her. If she really was protecting him, I have to say her attitude of indifference fooled me.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to matter anyway. Big Marge clearly reckons Jen Wilson’s going to give her the answers and for all we know it may be done and dusted by now. How much do you bet she’s been arrested for murder?’
Speculating on the outcome kept them talking until they reached Ballinbreck and Macdonald was able to direct Hepburn to the warehouse. The car park at the front was empty when she turned in, but Lindsay, she said, had told her to go round the back. There was only a narrow, weed-grown path along the farther side of the building but it was wide enough, just, to allow a car to pass through to a sort of paved yard. There was another car there: Lindsay’s car, with the number plate they had all been told to look out for.
Macdonald gave a low whistle. ‘Been here all the time, do you reckon? Hoping to bunk up till we’d all forgotten about it?’
‘Not very smart, if so.’ Hepburn parked the car and got out. ‘Look, let me go to the door to talk to him first. I don’t want him to think we’re just going to burst in and arrest him.’
That seemed fair enough. He walked with her to the end of the building and then hung back.
It was very dark now. The street lamps from the High Street were a glow in the sky but there was no moon and in the pale starlight the scrubby bushes round the edge of the car park waved in the night breeze, casting shifting shadows. As he watched Hepburn cross confidently to the door, Macdonald moved from foot to foot. He was feeling edgy – just the atmosphere, he told himself, since there was nothing to worry about. He wasn’t going to let Hepburn go into the place alone.
He could see the door opening now, but no light spilt out. She had stepped forward so that she was blocked from his view and he didn’t hesitate. She could have been pulled in, attacked – he was across the car park in a few strides.
She turned her head to scowl at him. He didn’t see Lindsay just at first, standing in the darkness of the warehouse, but as he reached Hepburn’s side the man stepped forward.
Macdonald would hardly have recognised him. When last he’d spoken to him he’d been arrogant, sneering. This man was unshaven and dishevelled; he looked desperate and, with the sixth sense for trouble that police officers develop, Macdonald stiffened. He didn’t like it; a cornered rat has nothing to lose.
‘So – you lied to me,’ Lindsay snarled at Hepburn. ‘You said you weren’t going to turn me in.’
Really! Hepburn thought, with extreme exasperation, why couldn’t Andy have waited long enough to give her time to explain before he appeared? To protect her, presumably, and that was frankly patronising. She gave him a dirty look.
‘Randall, let me explain,’ she said. ‘I haven’t lied to you – this isn’t a raiding party. We just want to interview you and two officers is standard procedure. All we want is for you to explain why you went into hiding and then we can probably sort things out. All right?’
She was crossing her fingers. They could, of course, go down the arrest route but that would mean lawyers and all sorts of complications.
Lindsay looked from one to the other. After a long pause, he said, ‘Do I have an alternative? Oh, you’d better come in, I suppose.’
Hepburn followed him as he picked his way across the pitch-dark showroom. She could just make out the white-painted railings of a staircase as Lindsay started up it and behind her she heard Macdonald swear as he bumped into something.
Lindsay opened a door at the top and went forward to switch on a table light on a desk; this must be his mother’s office. There was some dark fabric draped across the window to conceal the light and the air was heavy with the stale smell of cigarettes. Hepburn tried not to think about that, even when Lindsay reached in a packet that lay on the desk and lit one. His hands, she noticed, were trembling.
‘Have you been here all the time, Randall?’ She tried to make it sound as casual as a social enquiry as she sat down on a neat little sofa and Macdonald took a chair.
Lindsay didn’t sit. He was pacing to and fro taking nervous drags at his cigarette as if he couldn’t keep still.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I only came late last night.’
‘Where were you before?’ Hepburn asked. ‘Why did you take off after the party?’
He turned on her. ‘Because I was sodding-well fed up, that’s why! My mother was treating me like a slave and when I was absolutely wrecked the morning after the party she told me to go out there and clear up litter as if I were a binman. I wasn’t going to put up with it. All right?’
‘It hadn’t anything to do with trying to strangle Louise the night before, by any chance?’ Macdonald’s tone was coldly cynical.
Again, Hepburn glared at him. She wanted Lindsay chatty, not defensive. Now all he said, with a touch of his old loftiness, was, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re talking about,’ and she had no idea whether he was telling the truth or not.
‘So – where did you go, then?’ she said.
‘Went to stay with a mate in Glasgow, that’s all. For obvious reasons I didn’t tell my mother where I was going and it wasn’t until
I was driving back here yesterday that I heard on the radio that everyone was looking for me.
‘You don’t know what it’s like, do you, being hunted – when I
hadn’t done anything! So I just parked up out of the way, lay low till it was dark. I didn’t know what it was all about, didn’t know what to do. Then last night I phoned my mother and she said I was in trouble – you were looking for me, that my room had just been searched, that they were asking questions about Julia—’
‘Oh yes, Julia,’ Macdonald said. ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened with Julia?’
‘Andy!’ Hepburn muttered in a furious undertone. ‘Let me take this—’
‘Julia? Nothing happened with Julia. We worked together, that’s all.’
And now she was sure he was lying. She felt a cold chill; perhaps this hadn’t been such a straightforward, ticking-the-boxes exercise as she had thought. At least she had been wise enough not to come alone.
‘She can’t have been your favourite person though, could she? She was going to get you sacked for dishonesty. Prosecuted, probably.’ Macdonald was determined to needle him.
She’d never have asked him along if she’d known he was going to take over like this. Before Lindsay could reply, Hepburn cut in, ‘What happened after you contacted your mother?’
‘She said if I managed to get here without being picked up she’d let me stay, just for a bit, to decide the best thing to do. So I drove here then hid the car round the back and slept on one of the showroom beds. Then I was stuck hiding in the office all today, just wondering what would happen next.
‘I told her you’d contacted me and she said talking to you would be a good idea, to tell you to come here so I could explain and we could get everything straightened out.’
There was something about the way he said that – almost as if it had been memorised – that made the hairs stand up on the back of
Hepburn’s neck. Perhaps, after all, this wasn’t the smartest idea she’d had all year.
Macdonald had noticed it too. She saw him sit up straight, quietly moving nearer the edge of his seat. Unobtrusively, she uncrossed her own legs so that her feet were flat on the floor in case sudden action was needed.
Lindsay was sounding more confident now. ‘You see, this is all a wild goose chase. I’ve had nothing to do with this, start to finish. I know I was a fool not to contact you immediately, but—’
Macdonald was on his feet. ‘What was that?’ he said sharply.
Hepburn had heard nothing. As she started to get up Macdonald said, ‘Back in a minute,’ and went out of the door.
Philippa Lindsay let herself out of the back door of Ballinbreck House, shutting it quietly behind her even though Charles, in his study upstairs with the TV on, wouldn’t have heard her if she’d slammed it.
She was wearing dark trousers and a black jacket and she walked across the lawn, a shadow herself in the shadow cast by the trees, towards the door by the garage that opened on to the scrubland on the other side of the high wall. There was a rough path through fields and a copse behind the houses on the street that would take her directly to the warehouse; she enjoyed the walk there on sunny mornings.
Tonight, though, it was dark and the path was rutted and muddy but it wasn’t overlooked and she couldn’t risk the quicker route along the main street; even in quiet Ballinbreck at this time of night there were people moving about and if she was seen it would be the end of everything.
Philippa ought to have been feeling nervous but she wasn’t. She felt totally cold and calm, perhaps because she hadn’t allowed herself to feel anything since Will had had to die. It shouldn’t have happened, she should never have been in this position. God knew she’d begged
and begged him to leave it alone … But he wouldn’t, and she knew who to blame – that silly little bitch Skye. And the police spy too, with the threats she posed. She’d got Will spooked and now—
She daren’t let herself think about it, let the waves of grief and bitterness pour over her. Philippa had a job to do – a simple enough job, in all conscience, and provided she kept calm, did it quickly and neatly, and her idiot son played his part, it would work perfectly. She smiled grimly.
She allowed herself one neurosis – patting her pocket to check that what she needed was there, even though she knew it was.
There was the warehouse now, its bulk dark against the night sky. She could see light seeping from round the square of her office window and frowned. She’d impressed on Randall that the place needed to be absolutely dark and he couldn’t even do that – typical! Probably it wouldn’t matter.
At the gate she stopped by the board that stood there. ‘Etcetera: Interior Design by Philippa Lindsay’, it read She had taken so much trouble over choosing the colour of the paint, the style of the lettering. She had really loved her business.
Philippa gave a deep sigh, then keeping in the shadows she walked the length of the building and looked round the corner. There were two cars there, Randall’s and another she didn’t recognise.
With a nod of satisfaction she walked back and opened the door. She winced as it gave a little creak, but it didn’t matter. There was no way back now.
‘You’ll tell me if I’m getting carried away by my theory this time, won’t you, Tam?’ Fleming said. ‘I don’t want to go making a fool of myself again.’
‘I wonder you have to ask me,’ MacNee said dryly. ‘When have I ever been backward in coming forward?’
‘Ah, but I know how it goes against your shy and bashful nature. Anyway, this is what I’ve turned up.
‘I went back to Sea House, just to get myself grounded again after the Jen Wilson fiasco. I was looking round the sitting room and I suddenly noticed an ornament she had – a lovely thing, a sculpture of a seal in polished stone. I’d seen these in Philippa Lindsay’s shop so that had to be a connection – worth following up, at least.
‘I went back to the station to go through the notes and found that Ewan was ahead of me. He’d flagged up two things for me to look at: the interview he and Andy had done with Philippa where she’d said Eleanor was “an acquaintance” – natural enough, why not?
‘But then he’d spotted that the day she was killed Eleanor had made a phone call to Philippa. Eleanor didn’t make many phone calls – just hairdresser, doctor, routine things. She didn’t seem to have many friends, apart from Bridget James.’
‘Aye, Mrs James thought she didn’t have any locally. Was Philippa the only one, maybe?’
‘She certainly didn’t say that in the interview – stressed it was only a very casual acquaintanceship – and this was the only call listed to her number. So what I want to know is what Eleanor talked to her about in that call.’
‘Hmm. I can tell you what she’ll say, if you ask her.’ MacNee was sceptical.
‘Oh, I know – that Eleanor wanted to know if there was a new shipment of sculptures or some such thing. But they knew each other, and the timing of the call could be significant.
‘These are the only two pointers we’ve got and you don’t need to tell me they’re flimsy. But I have a scenario I want to run past you. Shoot it down in flames if you want.
‘We know Skye dropped the letter when she was staying at Sea House back in April. Now, if Eleanor had found it then, why didn’t
she mention it to her friend Biddy in one of their many phone calls?
‘Supposing she didn’t find it immediately. Suppose she finds it later – on the morning she died, say. She reads it, she’s shocked, of course. And suppose she decides to phone Philippa to ask her if she knew anything about this? She knew her slightly and she’d certainly have known about the connection with the Cyrenaics from the inquest.’
MacNee grunted. ‘Reaching a bit, there.’