Frozen in uncertainty, Gina’s mind raced through responses. ‘Why does that matter?’ was out, as was, ‘Why did you throw your weight around in the first place, then?’ Her last attempt at calming him down had been disastrous; get it wrong, and the next whisky glass could break in her face.
She changed the subject. ‘They’re asking questions about Niall’s death.’
‘Never!’ he sneered, but at least he hadn’t flared up again.
‘And you should know this.’ Gina edged backwards, nearer to the door, just in case. ‘I met Shirley Clark, shopping in Wigtown this afternoon. She’s told the police that you and Niall had a flaming row in the club last week. She said that it had been her duty to inform them. I think she enjoyed telling me that.’ She held her breath.
He wasn’t going to hit her. He went very quiet, alarmingly quiet. ‘She did, did she?’ The hand that wasn’t clasped round the glass tightened into a fist, then slowly relaxed again. ‘I don’t like busybodies. Tell her that from me next time you see her.
‘And naturally, when the black bastards turn up here, asking questions, we can be totally open with them, can’t we, babe? I was with you all last night, and you were with me.’
‘Yes,’ Gina said. ‘Yes, of course.’
Jenna Murdoch made herself another cup of coffee. She’d lost count of how many cups she’d had today; probably enough to ensure that she wouldn’t sleep, despite having been up most of last night.
She didn’t particularly want coffee, but it was something to do. Unless you were prostrate with grief, it was hard to know how to pass the time. After the police left, there had been the visits from neighbours, of course: people who had barely spoken to her in a year had come to her door to express their shock and sympathy, some using the fig-leaf of a ready-meal from their own freezers to cover their naked curiosity.
It still left a lot of hours to be got through. There was plenty of work needing done in the flat upstairs but it wouldn’t do, exactly, for such a recent widow to appear with a paintbrush in her hand. And TV entertainment seemed callous when your husband was lying, presumably, on a mortuary slab. Jenna would, they had told her, be required to go and identify him tomorrow. She didn’t want to dwell on that. She’d picked up a book, but her thoughts kept drifting.
At least the dog hadn’t burned to death. The investigators had been quite definite: either the fire-raiser had taken pity and let it go, or in its panic it had managed to slip its collar and bolt. She wondered what had happened to the poor thing – living rough somewhere, presumably. She hoped, in a general sort of way, that someone would find it and give it a good home.
It was odd that Mirren hadn’t been more concerned about that. She’d told her, of course, when she heard the good news from the police, but the child’s reaction had been as muted as her reaction to the news of its horrible death had been in the first place. But then, shock affected people in very strange ways.
And there had been a lot for Mirren to cope with today. She had lost her father; whatever their recent relationship might have been, that would knock any child off balance. The thing was, though, she couldn’t see any sign of it. Mirren had gone about everything quite calmly, watching the police activity, appearing at mealtimes to eat with good appetite. She had been silent, certainly, making only the briefest replies to Jenna’s anxious inquiries, but that wasn’t unusual.
There had always been a curious detachment about Mirren. She had been her own, self-contained person from the time she was old enough to free herself from an unwanted embrace and toddle away to something which interested her more. She was passionate about animals, of course; had her father’s ill-treatment of the dog destroyed all the normal affection you would expect a daughter to have?
Children were, in any case, less developed emotionally than adults liked to think. Oh, everything being well, they responded to love and tenderness by returning it. But there were enough cases in the newspapers, when you thought about it, to show that when things went wrong, there was something in children, some instinct for self-preservation, perhaps, which allowed them to be astonishingly callous.
So perhaps Mirren, receiving so little affection from her father, had shut down her own response. It was logical enough; Jenna could perfectly understand it. Whether, in later years, Mirren would be lying on a couch somewhere, paying to have herself unscrambled, was a whole other question.
It was more her reaction to the dog that baffled her mother. Perhaps the fury and despair Jenna would have expected had only been postponed, but Mirren hadn’t gone blank, hadn’t seemed anything other than – well, normal. After supper just now she’d asked if she could go and play computer games, which seemed fair enough. They couldn’t sit at the table staring at each other all evening.
Her coffee was cooling. She sipped it, pulled a face, and had just got up to pour it away when she heard her daughter’s hurrying feet. She hadn’t played games for long, then – and when Mirren opened the door it was clear she was in distress. She was trying to conceal it, though, sniffing hard, wiping away tears with the back of her hand.
It was almost a relief that the backlash had started. Jenna came towards her. ‘Mirren, dear—’
‘Can I go out?’
Jenna glanced at the window, the lights inside making it a black square. ‘It’ll be dark soon! Of course not. Why do you want to go out anyway?’
The tears fell faster. ‘It’s Moss,’ she wailed. ‘He’s out there somewhere. He must be lost and frightened. Something could happen to him – he might be run over, anything! I have to find him.’
Her mother was bewildered. ‘Yes, I know. I told you he must have run away. The police know that too, and they’ll have been looking out for him. He’ll be miles away by now, probably. There wouldn’t be any point.’
Mirren went to the door. ‘But he knows me! He could be hiding somewhere, afraid to come out. If I called he’d come, I know he would.’ She wrenched it open and ran out. Jenna could hear her calling, ‘Moss! Moss!’
She hurried after her and caught her arm. ‘I tell you what. We’ll walk round together, along the bay, and then back the other way along the road for a bit, and you can call him. If he doesn’t come, we’ll see about putting up a notice and offering a reward tomorrow. All right?’
Mirren barely seemed to hear her mother. Shaking herself free, still sobbing, she trotted down the road. ‘Moss! Moss! Oh, Moss!’
Marjory Fleming parked her car in the yard and got out, arching her aching back, glad to have reached the end of the long day. It wasn’t dark yet, quite: it was a fine, mild evening and the landscape was still bathed in the soft gloaming light as the sun slowly took its leave. The first star, low in the sky, was just visible and as usual she walked across to look out over the quiet hills, taking a deep breath of the cool air. Below her in the orchard, under the pink and white blossom on the trees, a few of the hens were still enjoying their freedom before darkness brought danger.
The lights were on in the Stevensons’ cottage. It looks pretty, Marjory told herself. The fact that Susie could be at one of those windows, watching her now with ill-wishing eyes, was no reason for not relaxing, enjoying this precious, peaceful moment at the end of the day.
And it didn’t spoil it, not really. The silence could still calm her mind; she stood a little longer before, with a deep sigh, she turned away, fetched her case from the car and went inside.
‘Bill!’ she called as she came out of the mud-room, but got no response, and when she opened the kitchen door, there was only Cat, sitting in the broken-springed armchair beside the Aga reading a book with a cover whose colour could only be described as fluffy pink.
She looked up. ‘Oh, hi, Mum! Did you have a good time?’
‘Not
quite
how I’d put it.’ Marjory set down the case and went over to drop a kiss on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘But the bathroom in the hotel was sensational.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He and Fin went out with the dogs – some rambler phoned to say there was a sheep on its back in a burn.’ She went back to her book.
‘Where’s Cammie?’
‘Weight-lifting, need you ask?’
‘Well, he might have been doing press-ups. Better than doing nothing except playing computer games, anyway.’
Marjory picked up the pile of mail on the dresser – catalogues and bills – then put it down again, and looked round the kitchen for indications as to what might have happened while she was away. The most obvious of these – apart from a number of pans ‘soaking’ in the sink – was a home-made chocolate cake, with thick icing, sitting on the kitchen table. Or, to be more precise, what was left of a chocolate cake; the raggedness of the remains suggested that Cammie had been allowed a free rein with a blunt knife.
‘Where did this come from?’ Marjory asked.
With an almost audible plop, Cat detached her eyes from the page. ‘Oh – that was Susie. She brought it across when she heard you were away.’
‘That was nice of her,’ Marjory said, neutrally, she hoped, but her daughter wasn’t fooled. Cat’s eyes narrowed.
‘She said she was afraid you wouldn’t like it, but it was a shame we should miss out all the time because you were always too busy to do fun family things, like baking.’ Her voice had a reproachful note and Marjory, too tired to be sensible, reacted.
‘Oh, did she? Well, as a matter of fact some of us don’t think that baking cakes is vital to a happy family. There’s nothing wrong with the kind you can buy – and at least they don’t put the icing on with a trowel.’
She knew it was childish, and Cat, as she put down her book and came over, had a long-suffering look on her face. ‘Look, Mum, Susie told me that you and she had a row. But she’d had really, like, a hard time with losing the farm? And of course having to live in the cottage, with you going, “I’m not going to forget about it” all the time—’
There was a tone in her voice which reminded Marjory of one of her schoolteachers who had never delivered a rebuke without making it a sermon. And Cat was continuing.
‘You’re always saying to us “Can’t bear grudges, let bygones be bygones, have to understand the other person’s point of view,” right? So why don’t you do that? Susie’s nice, she could be a good friend if you let her—’
Something snapped. ‘You know absolutely nothing about it! And when I need lessons in social conduct from my daughter, I’ll ask for them.’
The crusading light in Cat’s eyes died. ‘Fine,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I was only trying to help.’ She picked up her book and walked to the door. ‘And you can shut up your stupid hens yourself.’
‘Cat – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
The only response was the slamming of the door. Marjory sank miserably into the chair her daughter had vacated. Was she the worst mother in the world? Had her own mother ever said to her something she would have given anything to take back a moment later? Marjory couldn’t remember it, if she had. Probably not; her mother, like Bill, was a saint. She was surrounded by frigging saints, and it got trying, sometimes. Perhaps that was why she had got on so well with Chris Carter, who had no aspirations towards beatification.
Susie Stevenson certainly was no saint. Susie was – but there was no point in letting this latest underhand attack get to her, and the hens needed shutting in.
She was in the orchard when Bill, with Meg at his heels, came across the yard and spotted her. He leaned on the dry-stone dyke and called down to her.
‘Good to see you home, love. Tough day?’
‘You could say.’ But at the sight of him, her spirits lifted; it was a gift he had. ‘I won’t be a minute – just one chookie with suicidal leanings to round up, then I’m with you.’
‘Thought Cat was meant to be doing that. Anyway, I’ll get out the Bladnoch, shall I?’
‘Oh,
what
a good idea!’
He laughed at her heartfelt tone, then disappeared. Marjory shooed the last hen safely home, then stuck her head into the henhouse to make sure they were all accounted for. Some were roosting already, some crooning drowsily, and she smiled as she bolted the door. Oh, Susie or no Susie, it was good to be home.
There was a light on in one of the steadings as she went back across the yard and she could see Fin putting some rope away. His younger dog was trotting round him; the new one was lying on the threshold, watching.
He was, as Bill had said, very like Moss, though Moss had had a white blaze on his nose, while this dog’s muzzle was black. But he had the same wide head, and one prick ear—
Marjory stopped, a dreadful suspicion forming. Without attracting Fin’s attention, she altered her course to pass close behind the dog. ‘Moss!’ she said softly and the dog’s head immediately swivelled, eying her suspiciously. She walked away.
Bill had put the lamps on in the sitting-room, which meant that the dust didn’t show, and with the summer fire screen concealing the ashes in the grate the room looked welcoming, even if Meg was making a loud silent protest about the lack of a fire. And the whisky Bill was holding out to her – that
did
look good. Marjory took the tumbler and sat down.