‘Oh, we’ve only been covering one angle there,’ Marjory said. ‘There are others – the hit man employed by the Glasgow mafia, Murdoch’s wife and daughter who are behaving very strangely—’
‘And your friend Susie Stevenson,’ Tam said slyly.
‘Susie Stevenson?’ Laura asked. ‘Marjory’s told me about the problem with her – but is she involved in this?’
‘It’s just Jon Kingsley flying a kite,’ Marjory began, then, remembering suddenly – and with a certain unreasonable resentment – his link with Laura, added, ‘Oh, he’s very smart, of course, and he’s picked up on something there. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but Davina was so badly beaten up before she was killed that I can’t imagine a woman being at the heart of it.’
Tam was less sensitive. ‘Here, Laura, you and him – have you clicked?’
Laura coloured. ‘No, Tam, we haven’t “clicked”, as you so elegantly put it. If you want a full statement about the extent of our acquaintance, I went out with him in his boat last Sunday and then he took me for a pub lunch – in Wigtown, though I’m sorry I’m afraid I can’t remember the name of the pub. Then he came in for a drink after they’d arrested Keith Ingles and didn’t stay because he’d to go back to work. All right, Tam?’
Tam looked abashed, and she relented. ‘Actually, I wasn’t much impressed then. I’ve told him I’m considering whether or not I want to see him again.’
Tam chortled. ‘Deferred sentence to allow him to be of good behaviour, eh? That explains it.’
‘Tam!’ Marjory reproved him as Laura looked at him with a certain frostiness. ‘It’s just that Jon asked me to tell you he was being a good boy.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Laura said, though she didn’t sound entirely displeased.
‘I must be going,’ Marjory said getting up reluctantly. ‘I’m going to call in to see if there’s anything more at HQ, then I must get home. And so must you, Tam. Don’t give him another drink, Laura. He doesn’t deserve it.’
Tam rose with dignity. ‘Wasn’t even thinking of accepting the offer. How could I, with a wife, two dogs, three cats and six kittens expecting me back any minute?’
The women laughed, and he left. Marjory hung back. ‘There’s just one thing that keeps nagging at me, Laura. It’s against the run of everything we’ve said tonight, but – children who are single-issue fanatics. Could they really kill?’
Laura was taken aback. ‘Children? Yes, of course they could. If they get into manipulative hands, nothing easier. They can be more callous than adults. Think of boy soldiers in these militias.’
‘Yes,’ Marjory said heavily. ‘I was.’
It was once again around seven o’clock when Jon Kingsley knocked on Laura’s door.
‘Care for a bite to eat?’ he greeted her. ‘I was just passing on my way home.’
There was a chop in the fridge waiting to be grilled, but suddenly that seemed rather sad. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Let me get a jacket, and I’m with you. Once the sun goes in it won’t be linen weather.’
As they walked to the High Street, she asked him how it was going. He made a balancing motion with his hand.
‘I think I’m on to something. But I’d appreciate your input.’
Yet again, Laura had the impression that his interest in her was more professional than social. ‘My consultancy fees are very high,’ she said lightly, and he laughed.
‘I wasn’t thinking of the chippie. I booked the Vine Leaf, on the off-chance.’
The Vine Leaf was seriously expensive, which made her uncomfortable. It had been a casual invitation; of course she hadn’t expected a chippie but a cheap ’n’ cheerful Italian would have been more appropriate. It was as if he was trying to buy her into his team – or perhaps he just had a problem with social nuances. He wouldn’t be the first man to suffer from that.
A very elegant young man welcomed them in and led them to a table with a white porcelain vase holding a single pink orchid. Laura looked around the minimalist chic of the decor and raised her eyebrows.
‘My goodness, they must be paying coppers well these days,’ she said dryly.
‘It’s “because you’re worth it”,’ Jon said, indicating quotation marks.
Laura looked at him with revulsion. ‘That’s the cheesiest line I’ve heard in years!’
He smiled smugly. ‘I thought you’d like it. It was a toss-up between that and, “This time next year, I want us to be laughing together.” You may remember our first discussion about chat-up lines?’
She did, and was amused. ‘You are a sod! I thought you were serious.’
‘It’s a talent I have. Now, let’s order. Places like this take forever – confuse “taking a long time” with “doing a good job”, but we can always hope.’
It came across as a bit ‘city-sophisticate-slumming-it-in-the-sticks’, but she was prepared to make allowances. And he did start by asking her, with apparent interest, how the new book was going; when he got round to saying, ‘Would it be a bore if I asked your advice about the case?’ it felt more natural, in the context of talking about each other’s jobs. And anyway, she did have some curiosity to see how his take on it would differ from the one she’d heard earlier from Marjory and Tam.
‘This is between ourselves, OK? I think I’m on to something. I don’t know what Marjory’s said to you—’
He glanced at her, but one of the first lessons she learned as a psychotherapist was to show no reaction other than calm interest. So he went on, ‘There’s this woman, Susie Stevenson. She and Marjory have some sort of feud that goes back to the foot-and-mouth business, but for some weird reason she and her husband are living at Mains of Craigie. Findlay, the husband, has an obsession with a collie Niall Murdoch was threatening to put down. He stole the dog back the night of Murdoch’s murder, but that’s not the point.
‘The point is, we’ve discovered she’s lying to us about a couple of things. The most significant is that she said she hadn’t seen Murdoch for years, but two of the staff can speak to her having a blazing row with him the day before he was killed. And years ago Davina Watt almost sabotaged their engagement; it could be that she was trying to wreck their marriage, or that if Susie knew she’d returned, she thought she was. Does that work, psychologically, as motivation for murder?’
‘Well, yes, of course it does.’ She leaned back to allow the waiter to put down a plate of scallops in front of her. ‘But surely, in police work, evidence of motivation isn’t enough?’
‘No, no, of course not. Motive isn’t even something you have to prove, to get a guilty verdict, provided you have hard evidence. But you see, in these two cases it’s hard to know how much hard evidence we’re likely to get. She – or he – has been pretty clever about that.
‘If we don’t find something soon, we have to work towards a rock-solid theory that convinces us we know who did it. Keep the case open, wait and hope for confirmation. And you see—’ He looked down, playing with the stem of his wine glass. ‘I screwed up, last time. I helped my sergeant bang someone up for it who, quite honestly, I don’t now think is guilty.
‘Oh, I believed it at the time. You may remember how excited I was, last time I saw you – but there was someone that very evening, committing the next murder.
‘So I’ve blotted my copybook. In the Force, you’re only as good as your last conviction, and despite what I’ve achieved in the past, if I don’t come up with the answer on this one, that’s what they’ll think of when they’re looking to make up the next sergeant.’
He was very intense about this. Laura chose her words carefully. ‘You don’t think, perhaps, you’re trying too hard? That without real evidence you could be in danger of picking on the wrong person again?’
‘The evidence we do have seems to me to suggest Susie Stevenson. However—’ He shrugged, then changed tack. ‘What’s Marjory thinking about this?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Laura parried.
‘I don’t suppose she’d tell me. She’d tell Tam, of course, and Tansy maybe. But I get left out of the loop all the time.’
The waiter came to remove their plates, and Laura had time to think about that. She could see there was a certain justice to his claim.
‘As far as I know,’ she said carefully, ‘she’s still got an open mind, looking at everything that comes in.’
Jon’s face brightened. ‘She’ll probably go for the Stevenson angle, then. It would suit her pretty nicely, from all I can see, to have the woman carted off to jail instead of fouling her doorstep.’
‘Jon, Marjory wouldn’t work like that!’ Laura protested. ‘She’d fall over backwards to make sure she wasn’t looking at it with personal bias.’
‘Of course, of course.’ He looked round. ‘Ah, here comes your lamb and my steak. I did them an injustice about how long they’d take.’
It was a welcome interruption. Laura didn’t want to go back to the subject of Marjory; she asked him instead about
Blackbird
and his yachtie enthusiasm saw them through the main course. She refused pudding, and over coffee he went back to the subject of crime. In her experience, police officers were unable to keep away from it for long.
‘Psychological profiling,’ he said. ‘If you were asked to do a profile for these two cases – assuming it was one killer – what would you say?’
‘Don’t know enough about the details,’ she parried. ‘It’s a science, not newspaper astrology.’
‘Of course not. But off the top of your head?’
‘I suppose – someone with an uncontrolled temper. I know Davina was beaten up, and the suggestion in the Press has been that Murdoch was bashed over the head too. Yet you tell me they’ve done a good job of covering their tracks, so it’s someone who can think quite coolly and clearly afterwards. And someone with a lot to lose. Or,’ she added, aware of having Marjory’s final remarks in her mind, ‘someone who doesn’t see killing in quite the normal way.’
He didn’t pick up on that, but he looked pleased with what she had said. ‘Most of that would fit with Susie Stevenson, wouldn’t it? She’s calculating enough to look us straight in the face and lie; she’s certainly got a temper. Her husband almost had to hold her down this morning. Thanks, Laura – you’ve been brilliant.’
‘Hope you feel it was worth the fee,’ she said as the waiter brought the bill.
‘It was my pleasure. We must do this again soon.’
Marjory arrived back at the farm feeling, as her mother would have said, trauchled: not just tired, but worn down by cares.
At HQ, though Kerr had gone home, her report had been left on Fleming’s desk and it hadn’t made cheerful reading. Susie Stevenson was involved in this somehow, and even if Marjory still couldn’t believe – especially after the talk with Laura – that these were a woman’s crimes, the lies Susie had told meant this would have to be taken seriously. Tomorrow they’d be pulling her in for questioning.
She wasn’t sure, either, how Bill would have taken to the morning’s interviews; Tansy’s report had been circumspect, but reading between the lines Marjory had picked up that Jon had been heavy-handed. Probably just because she’d asked him not to be, she thought wearily. Despite having told Laura he’d been a good boy, she’d seen precious few signs of changes in the leopard’s spots.
The family were all in the kitchen eating supper when she went in. Bill came over to give her a hug and she responded, grateful that yesterday’s tensions hadn’t lingered.
‘Had a heavy day?’ he asked. ‘Bad luck. Sorry – I didn’t know you’d be back and there’s nothing left. You know how it is when Cammie’s around.’
Cammie registered a formal protest, then went on to impart the important news that he’d been selected for the district training squad. Marjory listened, with suitable exclamations, as she fetched a macaroni cheese ready-meal and put it in the microwave.
Cat, on the other hand, was finishing her supper in silence, and when Marjory asked what she’d been doing, said only, ‘Hanging out with Fiona.’
‘They arrested Findlay about that dog! Did you know, Mum?’ Cammie went on to the second most newsworthy event of his day.
‘Of course she knows,’ Cat said witheringly. ‘I expect she ordered it.’
‘I didn’t, as a matter of fact.’ Marjory tried not to sound too defensive. ‘The officers who came to investigate made that decision after Fin had admitted stealing it.’
‘But you know what was going to happen to Moss, if he hadn’t,’ Cat argued. ‘And they just dragged Fin off, in front of poor Susie. She told me, this afternoon.’
‘That’s not actually true, Cat,’ Bill corrected her. ‘I saw him get into his own car and drive off behind them with the dog. Susie’s exaggerating, as usual.’
‘You just have it in for Susie, don’t you!’ Cat cried. ‘You’re as bad as Mum. She’s a nice person – and anyone would be a bit confused, with their husband being arrested.’
‘I will admit, I didn’t take to your Jon Kingsley myself,’ Bill said. ‘Aggressive young man – but Tansy’s sharper, you know. She was the one who put me on the spot.’
The microwave pinged and Marjory fetched out the macaroni, peering at it unenthusiastically as she put it on to a plate and sat down at the table. ‘I tell you what – let’s pretend I’m off duty and talk about something else. I saw Laura today, Bill. She’d been in to see Mum, and—’