‘Tam, shut it,’ Fleming said firmly. ‘You didn’t hear that, Tansy. Anyway, they’re off Ingles’s case. If we need more manpower at Drumbreck they can pitch in there with Wilson and Macdonald.
‘Anyway, any progress on the hire cars? Did you manage to get hold of Tucker?’
‘Ah!’ MacNee gave a self-satisfied smirk. ‘Not only did I get hold of him, my old pal Tommy came up with the goods. They were going to notify us that Davina Watt hired a blue Corsa just over a week ago – last Wednesday. She was supposed to take it back last Saturday – the firm’s a bit put out that it hasn’t appeared.’
‘That’s brilliant. Tell Tommy he’s a star. You’ve got the registration?’
‘Of course. And I’ve sent out an alert to all patrols.’
‘Trying to be teacher’s pet? Take Tam away and give him a sweetie, Tansy. And what I want done now is to go back through the old case and make a list of who gave evidence and who might have something more to say about Davina. Who might even have sent her the cutting about Ingles’s release – Tam will brief you on that, Tansy. It’s with Fingerprints just now.
‘The other thing I’d like you to find out is whether the partners in Ingles’s law firm in Wigtown were unhappy about him. These firms don’t like scandal; they’d probably have swallowed a loss to stop questions being asked. See if there’s something Davina could have latched on to. And find out who knew her – Drumbreck, Wigtown. Find out if she contacted them in the last couple of weeks. See if they knew of any reason for her to return.
‘Tansy, I want you to concentrate on the Drumbreck end. Tam, Wigtown.’
He scowled at her. ‘What if there’s a link?’
‘Then Tansy will find it, won’t she?’ Fleming said blandly.
But after they had left, she thought about what Tam had said. What if Ingles’s story was true after all? What if someone had tried to incriminate him, knowing that with his history he would be the obvious suspect?
Who?
Christie was on a roll, driving through Wigtown at excessive and unnecessary speed, with lights and sirens.
In the car behind, proceeding a little more decorously, one of the constables said, ‘What’s he on? Never seen him like this.’
‘High on his own importance,’ the other sniffed. ‘Bets that he’s got it wrong?’
But Christie wasn’t in any doubt. He hammered on the door of the house where McLeish lived with his parents, then, as there was no immediate reply, hammered again.
At last McLeish opened it, looking so ghastly that even Christie paused. His eyes were red as if he had been weeping, his face was haggard and unshaven, and he looked as if he had slept in his clothes.
Christie recovered himself. ‘Police,’ he said unnecessarily, flashing his warrant card. ‘Can we have a word?’
‘What is it now?’ His breath made the officer recoil.
‘We want to talk to you about last night.’
McLeish seemed to be finding it hard to focus. ‘Oh.’ He thought about it. ‘Better come in, then.’
He was an incongruous figure in the neat sitting-room, with the smell of Pledge furniture polish in the air and doilies on the side tables. He sank down on to the tweed sofa.
Christie remained standing, Neish at his side and the other two men standing in the doorway. ‘Where were you between the hours of seven last night and midnight?’
‘Drinking.’
‘So I would imagine.’ He had no sympathy: drunks were the bane of his life. ‘Anyone with you?’
McLeish drew his hand down his face. ‘Yeah. People. At the pub. Did I do something?’
Christie pursed his lips. ‘You tell me.’
McLeish gave a short laugh, then winced. ‘You tell
me
.’
They were definitely getting somewhere now. Christie said, in his most soothing voice, ‘Well, why don’t we take you down to the station and talk it through? You help us, and we’ll help you and see if we can try to piece it together? All right?’
McLeish made no resistance. ‘Fine,’ he said dully, and walked to the door, where he turned. ‘Are you arresting me for something?’
Christie sounded positively avuncular. ‘No, no, laddie. Not yet.’
Chapter 16
It was a twenty-five-minute drive from Kirkluce toWigtown, if you weren’t hurrying, and today Tam MacNee had a lot on his mind.
He wasn’t happy. It had given him a wee bit of a lift, right enough, to see Kingsley with his tail between his legs, but that wouldn’t last long. It was all just going to get dirtier. Kingsley was smart, that was the problem, smart and nasty, and he had it in for Marjory. Sooner or later he’d trip her up. The atmosphere around the place was changing already, and Tam didn’t like it.
Oh, he knew fine his hatred of change was pathological, all but. And why wouldn’t it be? As a kid, change never meant better: from indifferent father to abusive stepfather; from poor housing to worse housing, then to a downright slum. His professional life here and his marriage with its comfortable certainties seemed to him a sort of miracle, precious and far beyond his deserving. Any change was alarming; the change that Kingsley was trying to engineer was a threat.
Recently attitudes had begun shifting, with officers he’d worked alongside for years starting to question the principles of policing Marjory so firmly enforced. Even Wilson, a man he respected, had said the other day he thought she was old-fashioned. And there were no prizes for guessing who’d put that idea in his head.
Now Ingles had been arrested, they’d be going all out to find something to make the charge stick, as a matter of professional pride. At least Marjory had the sense not to let Allan and Kingsley back to the site, where the temptation would be just to give the investigation a wee nudge in the right direction. Even so, Tam wished he could be sure there weren’t others who, if they were certain they had the killer, would be ready enough to give justice a helping hand.
Had Ingles killed her? On the balance of probabilities, certainly. Bailey was for ever yammering on about Ockham’s razor, but fair enough, the simple answer was usually the right one. Tansy wasn’t convinced, though, and she’d questioned the man. He rated Tansy.
So perhaps the best Tam could do was talk up the doubts. His colleagues were decent enough men who might jump to conclusions, but wouldn’t want to bang up an innocent man.
Now he was going to have to go and talk to lawyers. That thought depressed him too. Tam didn’t like lawyers. Either they were the criminal’s friend, out to make life difficult for the polis, or they were charging him an hourly rate that should have bought a personal appearance by Claudia Schiffer to hand over the contract. Lawyers weren’t in the business of giving you useful information, but he had his orders.
From reading the file on the robbery, the person he was really interested in was Euphemia Aitcheson. She knew more about what had happened than anyone except Keith Ingles and possibly Davina Watt, and he couldn’t talk to either of them. She could tell him about the whole set-up in the Yacht Club – who was who, who did what. And probably also, given the reputation the place had, to whom.
Yes, a gossipy Euphemia could be key to the whole thing. Maybe it would all fall into place this afternoon. And maybe if Kingsley passed his exams he’d apply for a transfer and bugger off back to Edinburgh.
The thought raised his spirits. And though the straggling bushes by the side of the road were still blowing in a stiff breeze, the sun was coming out now, turning the peaty-brown waters of a little lochan across a field to a surprising deep navy-blue.
It wasn’t all bad. Bunty would be home tomorrow and so far none of the animals had died or killed one of the others. At least, not when he left this morning.
Marjory Fleming could hear crowd noise before she opened the door of her car. She’d parked at the entrance to the hamlet of Drumbreck, in preference to weaving her way slowly through what looked like about fifty men, women and excited youngsters gathered outside the marina, discussing the dramatic events of the day.
DC Andy Macdonald, a solid, square-shouldered young man with a buzz-cut, had spotted her arrival and was making his way through the crowd towards her: ‘Excuse me, sorry, thank you, could you get back there, please, excuse me . . .’
People yielded good vantage points reluctantly, their eyes following him to Fleming and Kerr getting out of the car.
‘Sorry about this, boss,’ Macdonald apologized. ‘We hadn’t reckoned to need crowd control in a place like this but maybe we should have.’
‘Ah! Are you in charge here, then?’ A grey-haired man wearing a navy-blue Guernsey and a discontented expression stepped into Fleming’s path. ‘Perhaps you would care to tell us what’s going on? It’s not good enough that we should be kept in the dark.’ There was a murmur of support from those equally curious but less courageous.
‘I’ll be releasing a statement once I have had a chance to investigate the situation, sir. Which, you may have noticed, it is impossible for me to do while you are standing in my way.’
She stood her ground calmly and the man, still muttering, though under his breath, stepped aside. There were no more interruptions as she walked down to the taped-off area beyond the marina.
It was a bright day, with a breeze setting the halyards on metal masts clinking, and the boats seemed restless in the choppy waves. The tide was going out; there was still deep water around the pontoons but inshore the unsightly, khaki-brown mudflats were being exposed.
‘No Press here yet?’ Fleming asked Macdonald.
‘Not so far, no. You’ll have seen we’ve a car at the end of the road checking incoming traffic, and if you can authorize this statement we’ll see it’s given out whenever they arrive.’
He handed her a piece of paper and she skimmed the scribbled information: it was a bland statement that a man had been found drowned and the police were treating his death as suspicious. She OK’d it and he went off with it back through the crowd.
Niall Murdoch’s body, covered with a plastic sheet, had been laid out on the dock. There were several uniforms in attendance and one, she saw with approval, was logging her name as a visitor to the scene.
‘Good organization, Will,’ she said as DC William Wilson came towards her, huddled into a windcheater and with his curly hair blown into bushy tangles. ‘You and Andy have done well.’
Wilson grinned. ‘Happy to take the credit, boss, but Sergeant Christie’s a canny man. Does everything by the book, he tells me. Every “t” dotted and every “i” crossed – or something like that. He’s away to pick up McLeish. His face fits, seemingly.’
Fleming looked around. ‘The police surgeon’s gone, has he?’
‘Yes. He said he’d better things to do than hang about here. But he confirmed death, obviously, and said the wound on the back of the head didn’t look like accidental injury.’
‘Right. You’d better let me see him.’
Wilson pulled back the sheeting. The man was lying on his back on the dock, his head turned to one side, wearing sodden clothes – a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a navy padded gilet and a worn trainer on one foot, though the other was missing. He was tall, over six foot probably; his face was bloated from immersion, and there was bloodstained froth inside the half-open mouth. His hands were deathly white, swollen and wrinkled, and on the back of his head his dark hair was matted with blood, though there was no depression to suggest a break in the skull.
‘A stunning rather than a fatal blow, you’d think,’ Fleming said. ‘Delivered unexpectedly from behind, knocking him into the water unconscious – job would be done in a couple of minutes. Thanks, Will – you can cover him up again. Where was he found?’
‘Floating here, face down, between the sloop and the ketch. His arm was caught in the sloop’s moorings.’ He indicated two boats, one with one mast, the other two. ‘This is his,
Sea Sprite
.’
‘You seem to know your boats.’ Fleming, a landlubber to the core, was impressed.
‘Used to sail a bit when I was a kid. Haven’t the time or the money now, with two kids—’ He broke off at the sound of an altercation behind them.
A short, fat man with a face like a malevolent cane toad, was swearing at the young constable who was refusing to allow him into the taped area. Two of the uniforms were hurrying across; Fleming reached him a second later.
‘I would strongly urge you to moderate your language, sir.’ There was a cutting edge to her voice, and making use of her superior height, she moved in closer so that she could look down at him.
He didn’t like that. ‘And who the hell are you?’ He had a broad Glasgow accent.
‘This is Detective Inspector Fleming,’ one of the constables said.
He sneered. ‘Part of the sex equality quota, are you?’
‘Name?’ Fleming snapped.
‘Never mind that. I want some answers first.’
Fleming turned away. ‘Take him in. Verbal assault on a police officer, obstructing the police—’
‘You can’t do that!’ The man’s eyes were bulging with rage to the point where she was almost afraid they might pop out of their sockets.