There were a couple of files, bulging with reports, on one of the desks and she picked one up and sat down with it. Officers were all meant to be up-to-date with what they contained, and this was a good opportunity. Much of it she skimmed, but when she came to Sergeant Christie’s accounts of his interviews with Jenna and Mirren Murdoch she began to read more carefully.
They were clear, meticulous reports. She frowned over Mirren’s reaction to her father’s death – such an odd thing to say! – and then, reading Kelly McConnell’s statement and Mirren’s response to it, frowned again. She re-read them both.
Still thinking about it, she went on through the file and stopped again when she came to the statement from James Ross. The way he sounded, she didn’t exactly take to him, but she’d had a sneak in her class at school – Beryl, she was called – and in her experience their intelligence was always deadly accurate.
She needed to know what Andy had found. Could he be back yet? She glanced at her watch. If she went back to the CID room, ghastly Greg might be there on his own – but she could always go off to the canteen.
‘Call that beer?’ Tam MacNee’s pal Sheuggie, thin-faced and swarthy, looked disparagingly at the thin liquid in the glass in front of him. ‘I’ve tasted stronger tea in the canteen.’
‘OK, I know I’m owing you. Would a nip help it down?’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’
Tam fetched it and set it down, saying wistfully, ‘It’s jake for some. I’ll have to take my beer neat.’
Sheuggie gave his evil grin. ‘Shouldn’t have left Glasgow, where you could walk to your work.’
‘Aye, right!’ But Tam could never have joined the Glasgow polis. He and Sheuggie might have been at the same school, but they’d never kept the same company. It wasn’t a comfortable thought; he changed the subject, catching up on family news then slipping into shop talk.
‘You’ll be back at the McConnells’ before long,’ Tam warned. ‘Carrying him out feet first, this time.’
‘Hell-bent on it, is he?’ Sheuggie was unperturbed. ‘Pity we caught him this time, then – waste of money.’
‘Waste of time too. He’s not our man. But Lafferty, now – give me a wee bit of the dirt on Lafferty.’
‘Ronnie? Oh, we know all about Ronnie the Puddock.’
‘I know toads that’d sue for that,’ Tam protested.
‘Aye, likely. We know who his friends are, we know what he’s doing, and he’s a link with some nasty stuff. But just try pinning it on the bugger.’
‘There was talk of someone lurking around the night Niall Murdoch was walloped over the head – dressed in black, something over their face. Balaclava, most like. And it just made me wonder . . .’
‘It would, wouldn’t it? Put out a contract, it’d cost you – oh, £200, max – that’s for the de luxe version. And I can think of half-a-dozen of his toe rags who’d think it was a rare tear to do something like that. A blunt instrument, though – beneath them, I’d have thought. A blade or a gun, more like.’
MacNee sighed. ‘I thought that too. Oh well, just keep stodging away with the routine, I suppose. Still, I’ll away back and give him another grilling, just to get his dander up. Haven’t even started checking on his movements when the girl was killed, so that should be enough to get him going. Gets riled easily, Lafferty – was daft enough to try it on with my boss, and she slapped a charge on him.’
Sheuggie set down the glass he was holding with a bang. ‘
What
did you say?’
‘Charged him – breach of the peace. Verbal assault on a police officer, obstructing the police . . . Open and shut case.’
‘Oh, you wee dancer!’
For a terrible moment Tam thought Sheuggie in his ecstasy might rise and embrace him.
‘We’ve been wanting his fingerprints these last five years. If we don’t get a match with the ones on that Securicor heist at the very least, I’ll take the wife shopping when Rangers are playing a Cup Final.’
The sun disappeared behind great livid clouds as Fleming drove back to Kirkluce. As she got out in the car park, the rain started: great, fat, heavy drops that soaked her even as she ran to the entrance.
She came in, shaking herself like a dog, and running her hand through her hair, curling now in the damp. She was on her way to the stairs when the desk sergeant called her back.
It was the motherly Sergeant Bruce who was on duty; she tutted over Fleming’s injuries, then said there was someone demanding to see her.
‘I tried to stall him, ma’am – told him you were out, offered to get DS Allan, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It was only you he would speak to – terribly important, he said. And he was certainly in a right state – frantic, almost.’
Fleming’s heart leaped. Was this, could it be the breakthrough they so urgently needed? But she said lightly, ‘It’s probably just some householder who reckons it’s a waste of his valuable time to take his problems to anyone under the rank of inspector. Did he give a name?’
Bruce glanced down. ‘Stevenson. Findlay Stevenson. I’ve put him in the waiting-room.’
She was unprepared for that; shocked, even. Either he had come to make a confession himself, or it was something significant to do with Susie – or at least, he believed it was. ‘Oh,’ Fleming said, then, ‘Oh, right.’
She was aware that Bruce was looking after her curiously as she went to find out what the distraught man had to tell her.
Chapter 24
Greg Allan was by himself in the CID room when Tam MacNee returned, tired, hot and irritable after an interminable journey which seemed to have consisted mainly of traffic jams and road works with a 40 mph limit. Allan was studying a spreadsheet, looking even more surly than usual, and only grunted in response to MacNee’s greeting.
Stuff him. MacNee wasn’t exactly brimming over with goodwill either. He took his jacket off, slung it on the back of a chair and sat down. He’d tried to be upbeat about a Lafferty contract killer, tried to argue with himself on the way back: a man like that, mixed up in something like this – why wouldn’t it be him, rather than some middle-class woman with a hysterical temperament, or even a kid, for God’s sake? But Sheuggie’s words, ‘a blade or a gun’, kept echoing in his brain. Bashing someone over the head simply wasn’t a hit man’s crime. It was just that report about the sinister figure . . . but maybe it was like the Murdoch girl had said – invented to get attention.
Realistically, he’d come to two dead ends today. And there was no assurance that they were anywhere near a result elsewhere either. Marjory, he reckoned, was inclined to think it was the kid; Jon Kingsley – who, for all he disliked him, wasn’t a fool – was certainly plugging Susie. Those were, he had to say, the strongest leads they had, which meant they were right back at the point where they hadn’t even decided if they were looking for one killer, or Ingles + AN Other.
Maybe, as Marjory had said at the briefing – though more to keep up morale than because she believed it, was his cynical assessment – the boffins would come up with something, fingerprints or fibres or the Holy Grail of a DNA sample. But supposing they did, what they wouldn’t do is tell them who it belonged to.
So back to the routine stodging, as he’d said to Sheuggie. Read the reports, tackle what’s on the desk. He was on the point of picking up a printout when he noticed the plastic envelope on his desk with the outlined cutting about Ingles’s release last October which they now knew Murdoch had sent Davina. MacNee took it out idly and read it.
It didn’t say much. Local newspapers didn’t really go in for rehashing background scandals and sensationalizing. His eyes wandered to the other items on the page: someone was getting up a petition for new public lavatories in Newton Stewart; vandalism at a children’s playground – at least, one of the swings had been broken. Riveting stuff.
He turned it over. The masthead told him this was the front page – and suddenly, he froze. He looked up, staring straight ahead of him, his eyes blank. Maybe the Super had been right for once in his professional lifetime. He put the cutting away, thinking furiously.
It all started falling into place. There were obvious difficulties – but as tumbler after tumbler clicked into line, there was only one missing for the jackpot. And he thought he knew how he might be able to nudge it into place.
He jumped up, pushing his chair back so violently that it fell over.
‘What’s bitten you?’ Allan said curiously, but was ignored.
MacNee righted it, grabbing his jacket and making for the door, without a word. He flung it open and almost cannoned into Tansy Kerr.
‘Hey, watch it, MacNee! Where are you away to in such a hurry?’
‘I need to speak to Euphie Aitcheson,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I may be some time.’
Kerr looked at Allan, who shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me.’
‘Do you know if Andy Macdonald’s back yet?’ she asked. ‘I wanted to speak to him about something.’
‘Haven’t seen him, if he is.’
‘I’ll be in the canteen. Tell him, would you?’ She left, and Allan directed an obscene gesture at the closed door.
He did wonder, though, what it was that had galvanized Tam like a cattle prod up the backside. He’d been looking at something from an evidence bag . . .
It took him a minute or two to find it, since it was buried under a pile of papers, but when he opened it out he couldn’t see what the fuss was about. It had an outlined report about Ingles’s release, and even when he turned it over, it was just the front page of an old
Galloway Globe
. He studied it for a minute, but it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already and he went gloomily back to take out his girlie magazine again.
Even after last night, she hadn’t believed in Susie’s guilt. Fleming paused in the corridor leading to the waiting-room, trying to collect her thoughts. Susie had, as Cat had pointed out, had a very hard time – losing the farm which was her home, having to beg her parents for a roof over their heads, finding herself eventually in a farm labourer’s cottage and suffering, as she saw it, ‘charity’ from the woman she hated. Susie’s temperament was volatile, to say the least of it, and her husband being arrested not once but twice would be enough to push anyone over the edge, into a breakdown.
But
murder
? And not just one, but two murders – murders where you had covered your tracks carefully enough to leave no traces, where you had done your best to cover your guilt by implicating someone else – she hadn’t believed Susie capable of that, and it wasn’t only that she had an inbuilt prejudice against any theory of Jon Kingsley’s.
But then, she couldn’t see Findlay in that role either. She liked him; he had always seemed to her a decent man.
Fleming took a deep breath and opened the door. Stevenson was sitting with his head in his hands, shaking. He looked up when he saw her, his face as grey-white under the freckles as the plastic carrier bag he was holding on his knees. He struggled to stand.
‘No, no,’ she said, hastily going to take the seat next to him. ‘Sit down before you fall down. Findlay, it’s bad, obviously. Tell me now. Get it over with.’
She could see him try to speak, but he was literally unable to frame the words. Instead, he held out the carrier bag. Fleming took it, looking at him questioningly, then peered inside.
There was a small, neat black handbag, a bag of quilted leather with a gold chain and linked Cs on the catch. Fleming didn’t touch it. She knew what it must be.
‘Davina Watt’s bag.’
Stevenson found his voice. ‘Y-yes. I opened it, to see – I knew Susie didn’t have a bag like that. And there’s her name on things inside.’
‘Where was it?’
‘In – in her car. I’d packed up her things at the cottage and brought them down to her parents. They’d – they’d said they’d look after Josh, so I took him in too. Bill – Bill said he was coming in to see your mother and he’d give me a lift back.
‘She’d boxes and stuff, so I was unloading them and carrying them in. And then when I came to get the last box, I saw this carrier bag, stuffed in a corner. It didn’t seem to have much in it, so I checked, and saw . . .’
He faltered. Wrung with pity, Fleming touched his arm. ‘It’s awful for you.’
‘Oh God, have I done the right thing? I told Bill – he said it was all I could do, and I know that, really, but to betray her like this – it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life.’ He groaned, putting his head in his hands again.
With a heavy heart, Fleming said, ‘Yes, Findlay, you did. You couldn’t have done anything else.
‘Now, I can’t actually deal with this. I’m too personally involved. Wait here. I’ll get someone to bring you a cup of tea – and I really think you should drink it – while I make the arrangements.’
With the bag in her hand, she left, and heard Findlay’s racking sobs as she shut the door behind her.
‘Greg said you were looking for me?’ DC Andy Macdonald came into the canteen, carrying a file which he put down on one of the side tables.