He came in, looked at the table with its unspoken message and went to the fridge, taking out eggs and a packet of bacon.
Josh’s eyes brightened. ‘Oooh, can I have some?’
‘Of course you can, son,’ Findlay replied at the same moment as Susie said, ‘You won’t have time. You’re supposed to be going to play with Peter and I’m far too busy to hang around waiting for you today. Go and fetch anything you’re taking with you.’
Findlay exchanged a complicit glance with his son. ‘Run upstairs now, Josh, and get everything together. It’s in the pan now – it’ll be ready when you come down.’
Josh needed no second telling. Susie, with exactly her mother’s mannerism, compressed her lips, but she knew when she was beaten. ‘I thought we agreed you would be here today, helping sort out the house,’ she said coldly.
‘I know. I’m sorry, but I’d a chat with Bill last night. He’s keen to buy in some stirks as soon as possible and there’s quite a bit of maintenance needing done first. It was the least I could do – there’s plenty time for the house when I finish this afternoon. You only need to make a list of what you’d like me to do.’ The bacon was sizzling now; he cracked a couple of eggs into the pan.
‘If you’re at all interested in knowing what I want you to do, you can put giving up your stupid idea of getting Moss back right at the top of the list. Murdoch gave you your answer yesterday; now you need to forget about the whole thing.’
Findlay prodded the contents of the pan with unnecessary violence. ‘No, Susie, I won’t. I’ve told you how I feel, and I’ve made up my mind.’ He turned to face her. ‘If he won’t settle for what I’ve offered, I’m just going to have to borrow the rest. I don’t care what you say. It’s a matter of principle.’
‘Borrow!’ Susie screeched, setting down her mug with a bang. ‘After all the trouble your borrowing got us into before, reducing us to – this?’ She gestured round the small, cheaply furnished kitchen. ‘Over my dead body, Findlay Stevenson. I’ll do whatever it takes to stop you. I’m not going to let you ruin our lives even more than you have already. Think about poor little Josh, if you don’t care about me!’ She finished on a wail, bursting into tears.
Josh, returning at speed, opened the door, then stopped in dismay, looking from his sobbing mother to his father’s white, furious face.
Findlay lifted a plate and tipped the contents of the pan on to it. ‘There you are, Josh, it’s all yours. I’m not hungry any more.’
He walked out, leaving Josh staring uncertainly from the mountain of food – half a dozen rashers of bacon, two eggs – to his mother.
She was no comfort. ‘Well, you’d better eat it,’ she sniffed. ‘You wanted it.’
Then Susie got up and walked to the window, looking after her husband’s retreating back with an expression of loathing on her face. It was going to drive her mad. She had to stop this, somehow.
There was a curious atmosphere in the Incident Room where officers had gathered for the morning briefing, Marjory reflected. Six months ago, after the Knockhaven lifeboat had been deliberately wrecked on a stormy October night, she had entered to a silence so strained that she had almost felt she had to push her way through it; today it took a moment for the talk and even laughter to die down as she made her way to the board which ran along the side of the room. Someone Else’s Problem indeed, as Tam had said.
He was there, in the front row, with Tansy sitting beside him. The other members of the CID, Fleming noted uneasily, were all sitting together in the centre of the room further back, grouped around DS Allan, who had saved a seat beside him, for Kingsley, presumably. Jon wasn’t there: he’d had a meeting with the Super earlier which had obviously overrun.
‘These are the facts as we know them,’ Fleming began, and took them through what they had: Natasha Wintour lived in Manchester with her partner Jeff Brewer, she had been dead at least thirty-six hours – possibly more – before the body was found and she had been murdered with repeated blows to the head, probably from something like a stone. She had been found lying on her back, but from the evidence of post-mortem lividity the pathologist had been able to confirm that her earlier position had been lying on her side.
‘Not surprising, really; it was obvious she’d been moved and we’ve been assuming that the body would have been brought in a car, and whether it was covered up on the back seat or placed in the boot, it wasn’t likely it would have been lying flat out, as we found it.
‘I’ve got the SOCO’s report now too, but all they’ve really come up with is negatives: they confirm that she wasn’t killed at the scene, which we knew already, and that it wasn’t raining when the body was put there, but given the time of death we knew that too. They can’t find anything to indicate how the body was transported – you have to remember the ground was baked hard after the heatwave so you couldn’t expect footprints, for instance. But there’s nothing to suggest that our hypothesis, that it was brought up the track here from a car parked by the road, is wrong.’ She traced its course with her finger on the large-scale Ordnance Survey map fixed to the board.
‘The Manchester police are pursuing the investigation at their end. Our job is simply to check here for any possible sightings of the car and of course get on with a fingertip search of the area. Yes, Ryan?’
One of the younger PCs had put his hand up. ‘Is it a popular spot, ma’am?’
Fleming shook her head. ‘Not at all, so it’s pretty clean. Probably almost the last people walking round there would be the foresters planting the trees twenty years ago or so. Anything at all that is found is likely to be significant.
‘The other thing we’re hoping for is info from the public, but as I understand it there hasn’t been much – right, Jock?’
Sergeant Naismith, detailed to bring a record of calls, said gloomily, ‘Couple of nutters and the usual attention-seekers. Nothing useful.’
MacNee had been looking thoughtful. ‘I’ve just been wondering – can we be sure she was dead when she arrived in the area? If she was killed in Manchester and dumped from a car, the chances are no one saw anything. Middle of the night – you could go hours without a car passing along the Queen’s Way.
‘But if she was alive – well, she was a wee smasher. If we circulated the photo round hotels, bars, petrol stations, someone would remember her.’
Tansy Kerr chimed in, ‘And if we didn’t have a sighting after all that, we could be pretty sure she wasn’t alive when she got here.’
‘Right,’ Fleming approved. ‘I’ve got the photo here.’ She took it from its envelope and put it on the board beside the map. It was a shot which had clearly been carefully posed, showing a glamorous young woman with a cloud of dark hair and long-lashed, dark brown eyes, half-turned and smiling back provocatively at the camera.
There was a muted ‘Phoo-arr!’ from somewhere in the group around Allan and a few sniggers. Fleming frowned. ‘Think of her with a hole bashed in her head and you won’t find it so funny. You’ll see the video and stills tomorrow,’ she said tartly, but she was aware that, though faces had straightened rapidly, one or two sidelong looks were exchanged. There was a situation developing in the CID that she was going to have to tackle sooner or later, and she wasn’t temperamentally suited to later.
Capitalizing on what she knew to be a widely held belief that when Big Marge sounded sweet she was at her most dangerous, she said silkily, ‘Greg, I’d like a word with you afterwards,’ and saw the man sit up nervously as he said, ‘Yes, boss.’
‘So, Jock,’ she went on smoothly, ‘can you arrange for copies of this to be run off and distributed? Thanks. And I’m just posting a detail now for the fingertip search, but in view of the fact that we want to get this cleared off our patch as quickly and efficiently as possible, I think we can spare a few detectives to help. With the robbery wrapped up and the house-breaking lower on the priority list, there’s nothing that won’t wait. You’ll get overalls when you arrive.
‘OK? Any questions? No? Fine.’
Fleming scribbled the extra names on the list and stuck it up, aware of the sullen silence in the centre of the room, but aware, too, of discreet amusement among the uniforms. It wasn’t exactly a secret that detectives considered mundane physical police work beneath them, and it would give them a lesson about the unwisdom of tangling with Big Marge. She was heading for the door when it opened and Jon Kingsley came in, stopping as he saw her.
‘Oh – you’ve finished! Sorry, boss. The Super kept me talking about the petrol station case.’
She did wonder whether Donald Bailey, a stickler for proper procedure, had been made aware that Kingsley was expected elsewhere, but said only, ‘All right, Jon. I was just assigning details for the investigation of the Natasha Wintour case, but you’ll see the list up there.’ She indicated. ‘All the signs are that once we finish the search at the scene of crime we can hand over to Manchester.’
But Kingsley was looking past her to the board where the photograph was displayed. He said blankly, ‘What’s that doing there?’
‘It’s Natasha Wintour.’ Fleming was puzzled by his reaction. ‘Jeff Brewer brought it.’
He looked uncertain. ‘Is it not Davina Watt? Lives in Wigtown – or at least she did, a few years ago.’
A silence had fallen on the room. Fleming said, ‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Well,’ he took another look. ‘She’d short hair then, and I didn’t know her very well, but I’m pretty sure . . . I think she worked for a solicitor – they’d be able to tell you definitely. But yes, I’m sure it’s the same woman.’
With hypotheses crashing about her ears, she acted decisively. ‘Right. Tam, Tansy, Greg – my room. Come on, Jon.’ She swept out, hearing the buzz of astonished speculation rise in her wake.
Chapter 9
‘It’s only him that’s standing in my way,’ Rab McLeish said exultantly. ‘I reckon she’d be willing to talk. And maybe after another couple of wee hints—’
‘Rab,’ Cath Dunsire said despairingly, ‘you’re mental! You’ll get in trouble with the police.’
They were standing on the doorstep of the bookshop in Wigtown where Cath worked. The shop wasn’t busy; it was still too early in the day for the visitors who made Scotland’s Book Town a place of pilgrimage, and there were only a few people browsing among the yards and yards of shelves.
Rab laughed. ‘You think they’re going to want folk to hear there’s a problem? You know all the things that have happened already – kept quiet enough about them, haven’t they?’
‘You’re pushing your luck. And anyway, there’s no time for a campaign.’ She produced a copy of the
Galloway Globe
, folded open at the ‘To Let’ page, where she’d circled an advertisement in red. ‘There’s this one in Station Road – it’s not big, but it’s all we would need. And then later—’
He was shaking his head stubbornly. ‘Later’s no good. If we let up on them, later only means they would sell for so much that the next one’ll go for far more than I could ever pay, and then we’ll never be able to get back. I want the best for my kid, not some rubbish flat. And I’m making good money – you know that.’
‘I never said you weren’t,’ she cried. ‘But it’s not the sort of money they can make in Glasgow just by picking up the phone and making a deal. I know, I know,’ she went on as he opened his mouth to release a tirade, ‘it’s not fair. It’s not as if they had to work for it, like you do. They can go into a posh office and sit there all day and come back to their family at night when you’re sleeping behind your cab with two more days before you see your own front door again. But get real! There’s nothing –
nothing
– you can do about it.’ She was shaking.
Rab grinned, the macho male making light of the little woman’s worries. ‘Oh yeah? Stick around!’ He walked away to where the lorry was parked on a double yellow line.
‘I meant exactly what I said, Rab,’ Cath said quietly.
He turned as he swung himself up into the cab. He was still smiling. ‘Trust me! I’ll be back tomorrow.’
Cath stood on the doorstep watching him drive away, her hands folded miserably across her stomach. She had been sick this morning, as quietly as she could, but even so she thought her mother had given her a strange look when she came in for breakfast. Fortunately the phone had rung and she’d managed to empty a pot of yoghurt and a cup of coffee down the sink without her father, watching the sports news on breakfast TV, noticing what she was doing. She couldn’t rely on that every day.
It wasn’t going to work out, was it? She’d tried to get through to Rab and she’d failed. If she, and their future child, counted for so little compared to his stupid obsession, it wasn’t going to be much of a relationship. It was as if she’d been wearing distorting spectacles and now she had taken them off she could see the whole thing clearly.
He was totally unaware of what he had just done. He’d be back tomorrow evening, and she’d tell him then that this was the end. Of everything. And no matter what he said, she wouldn’t change her mind.
Cath went back into the shop. ‘Would it be all right if I took a few days of my holiday leave?’ she asked the owner.
‘Sure. It’s still early enough in the season – we won’t start getting really busy for another couple of weeks. But I thought you and Rab were going to Tenerife next month?’