The Third Sin (5 page)

With a bad grace he topped steak and ale pies with puff pastry, put them into the oven, set the timer, then turned to the small, frazzled looking woman who was chopping vegetables.

‘The onions for the lasagne, Maggie – where are they, then?’

She put up a hand to wipe her streaming eyes. ‘Sorry, sorry, not quite finished yet, Logie. Won’t be a minute.’

He glared at her. ‘No, you won’t be, will you? Nearer ten, judging by the pile that’s waiting. Heaven send me patience!’

With an exaggerated gesture of despair he swung round to fetch the mince from the huge industrial refrigerator and he was leaning into it when his wife Kendra came into the kitchen and greeted him. He didn’t turn round.

‘Kendra – good. Grab a chopping knife, will you? Maggie’s on a go-slow, apparently.’

Maggie made an incoherent protest as Kendra said, ‘Oh darling, I would, of course, but I’m just on my way to a hair appointment in Castle Douglas. Sorry face, look!’ She made a little moue and pointed to it.

He surveyed his wife as he brought the meat back to the working surface. She wasn’t classically pretty but her vivacity was very attractive. Her hair, slicked back into a neat brown bob, looked as it always did.

‘Doesn’t look as if it needs it to me,’ he muttered.

‘Darling, if I waited until you noticed that it needed it, I’d be having people pointing at me in the street,’ she said, laughing. ‘See you in the afternoon sometime.’

‘Oh, fine.’ His tone was grudging. ‘Is that brother of mine lounging about next door, then? Tell him he can come and give me a hand to earn his keep.’

Kendra turned in the doorway. ‘Oh, sorry again, love. Will’s cadged a lift with me. He’s got an appointment with the bank – something about transferring money from Canada. Bye!’

Logie grunted, then turned his attention to the unfortunate Maggie. ‘For God’s sake, are you not finished yet? Give me what you’ve done so I can get started with this.’ He grabbed a handful of onions and tipped them into the oil in the frying pan.

His mind, though, was on other things. He hadn’t exactly shed tears when Will had announced he was emigrating. As a founder member of the Cyrenaics Logie had, of course, endorsed the pleasure principle, had been as ready as anyone to take advantage of the joys of sexual freedom – but he had drawn the line when it came to his wife and his own brother.

They had assured him, laughing, that they – well, couldn’t. ‘He’s my
brother
– well, all but,’ Kendra had giggled. ‘Ugh!’

It was what Logie wanted to believe so he’d accepted it at the time, fighting down the inclination to start watching them, counting the ‘brotherly’ hugs and affectionate exchanges. Affection worried him; that was very different from the casual pleasure that was the Cyrenaics’ creed.

The scandal that had followed Julia’s death changed everything. They’d all grown up suddenly, avoiding each other, living it down as best they could. And if they felt that life now was dreary and flat, after the rich excitement of those heady days, they didn’t talk about it.

Bizarrely, it had done wonders for the business; the ghouls had come to gawp and then gone away spreading the word about his cuisine. He’d planned to redecorate the private dining room upstairs with its sombre walls and silver-framed mirrors but it had proved so popular he couldn’t afford to, even though marketing decadence seemed sordid now. The other benefit was that Will had gone to Canada and he could relax.

Now Will was back. He hadn’t changed in those two years, years in which Logie had grown stouter and balder and wearier with the punishing hours a chef has to keep.

He tossed the onions in the pan and glanced irritably at his helper. ‘Finished the onions? Hallelujah! Bring the rest over and then get the cheese out of the fridge and start grating.’

The tantalising aroma followed Kendra as she tripped out to the car. Will, taller and considerably leaner than his brother with a clever, humorous face, was leaning against the car. He straightened up as she reached him.

‘All right?’

Kendra smiled up at him, her brown eyes sparkling. ‘Fine. I’m all yours.’

Detective Superintendent Taylor had obviously asked to be alerted when they arrived, appearing just as they sat down in Harris’s office in the smart, modern Dumfries Division headquarters.

From the look on his inspector’s face he was about as welcome as sleet at a barbecue but he ignored that, greeting Fleming and MacNee
warmly and asking if Harris had ordered coffee for their guests.

‘Just about to,’ he said stonily.

‘Tell them an extra cup, will you? I’d like to sit in on this.’ He pulled across a seat from the farther end of the room. ‘Marjory, any thoughts?’

It wasn’t the way Fleming would have chosen to handle it but perhaps this was all to the good. However tactful she was, Harris was going to be resentful; spending time on smoothing ruffled feathers was a luxury they couldn’t afford and he might be more inclined to cooperate in the presence of his senior officer. Might be.

‘It seems to me we need to widen the scope of the enquiry. The investigations round Newbie have been carried out very thoroughly, of course,’ she attempted a half-smile at Harris but got only a cold stare, ‘but since that hasn’t yielded anything useful and since we can’t be sure that this was where the car went into the water, I suggest that we consider playing the man instead of the ball. We could—’

‘We’ve tried that,’ Harris interrupted rudely. ‘There’s no trace of Kane that we can find, since the suicide note.’

‘I thought perhaps we could take it back to the time before he disappeared – who were his contacts and so on. There are quite a number we can readily follow up because of the investigation following Julia Margrave’s death.’

‘Have you done that?’ Taylor asked Harris.

It was clear that he hadn’t, hadn’t even remembered the woman’s name. ‘Not in that sense,’ he said.

As MacNee opened his mouth, clearly to ask him in what sense he had, exactly, Fleming shot him a quelling glance and he subsided.

‘We’ll have all the reports on file,’ she said. ‘I can send them over to you, of course.’

‘Excellent!’ Taylor was beaming.

‘Can’t see the point,’ Harris said stubbornly. ‘As far as everyone’s
concerned, he was dead, wasn’t he? They won’t be able to tell us anything useful.’

The man was impossible. Taylor was shifting in his seat and Fleming was biting her tongue when the Force civilian assistant came in with coffee, giving her a chance to consider how she was going to take this forward. By the time the business with milk, sugar and biscuits was over she had made up her mind.

‘I’m sorry, Len, that’s not a helpful attitude. Your approach has resulted in the investigation running into the sand and I can’t help if you are simply planning to be obstructionist. And I’m going to have to ask you, Tom, to decide who is in charge. I have to have the authority to direct operations.’

Harris’s face reddened. ‘That’s an outrageous suggestion! I’m the senior inspector here and while obviously I have to consider ideas you put forward, you have to convince me that they have merit.’

‘No,’ Fleming said flatly. ‘I take charge, or I withdraw. Tom?’

Taylor looked from one to the other, his discomfort evident. ‘Len, Marjory’s a very successful and experienced senior investigating officer. We’re extremely grateful to her and to DS MacNee for coming in and I’m sure you’ll cooperate.’ He directed an anxious smile at Harris, but getting no response he went on, ‘You see, since our own SIO – that’s DCI Brotherton, Marjory – is signed off sick for a spell, technically we need one to run this, at least until she returns.’

It was less than the ringing endorsement Fleming had been hoping for and she wondered what would happen the next time Harris got Taylor round the back of the bike sheds.

His face rigid with anger, Harris said, ‘Until she returns.’

‘Good,’ Fleming said. ‘With DSI Rowley’s permission I can get my team on to interviews that fall within the Galloway division, though I think you might have to have a conversation with her about budgets, Tom.’

Taylor smiled ruefully. ‘No doubt. Still, cooperation’s much simpler now than it used to be when we had our own little fiefdoms.’

MacNee, who had been held uncharacteristically silent by the power of his superior’s eye, snorted. ‘Not quite sure our super sees it that way, sir.’

Harris had been simmering behind his desk. ‘And what am I supposed to do meantime?’ he burst out. ‘Sit twiddling my thumbs, until you graciously solve the whole thing on the basis of feminine intuition?’

There was a silence, as Fleming waited for Taylor to intervene. He didn’t, only looking from one to the other with a sort of nervous despair.

Before Fleming could stop him MacNee said, ‘Why not? Getting out a crystal ball wouldn’t be a lot more useless than what you’ve done already.’

Fleming could only hope that Harris had taken his blood-pressure pills that morning since from the colour of his face it looked as if apoplexy might be imminent. She said coldly, ‘I don’t think this sort of exchange can help the progress of the investigation. Could I suggest that as well as the further plans you have no doubt formulated, you could get teams to check the low roads round the Solway coast, to see if there’s any indication of damage where a car might have gone in. If we could establish that it would give us a better focus for enquiries.’

‘An excellent idea,’ Taylor said heartily. ‘I’m sure you can get that moving, Len.’

‘It’s your call, if you think it’s a good idea wasting time on that nearly three weeks after it happened.’

The words ‘And whose fault is that?’ hung in the air but Fleming and MacNee resisted the temptation to utter them.

She got up. ‘I’ll get on with this, Tom. I’ll let you know what progress we make.’ She nodded coldly to Harris and they left.

As they walked back to the car, Fleming said ruefully, ‘Well, that was a train crash, wasn’t it? I didn’t do very well, getting drawn into dramatic confrontation.’

‘Och, rubbish! You gave him his head in his lap and his lugs to play with, as the saying goes, and he was needing it. A fine performance.
From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs,
eh?’ MacNee was grinning as he quoted his beloved Burns.

‘No,’ Detective Superintendent Rowley said. ‘Oh no. If Tom Taylor thinks he can just breeze in and appropriate my officers to boost his clear-up rate – which, I may say, is very far from impressive – he has another think coming. I’ll take it up with the Chief Constable, if necessary.’

Afraid this would happen, Fleming had rehearsed her argument carefully before she took it to her superintendent on Wednesday morning. In Christine Rowley’s head there was a sort of mental score sheet: will this boost my chances of professional promotion, or not? If the verdict was negative, she’d block this at every turn.

Admittedly the case didn’t fall within the old constabulary boundaries but those weren’t supposed to exist any more, and if Harris was left in charge it was likely to remain unsolved unless the perpetrator turned up holding his hands out for the cuffs. Now Fleming had got her teeth into it, seen a way forward and made plans for the next steps, she was very reluctant to give it up.

‘I think,’ she said delicately, ‘that perhaps this is just the sort of
cooperation the CC is keen to encourage. He’s been very insistent about it and I’m sure he’d be impressed that the Galloway Division was so ready to support his ideas.’

Rowley hesitated, still unconvinced. ‘And suppose you can’t get a result any more than they can? It’s an unnecessary risk to my excellent record, Marjory. I admit you’ve done quite well in the past—’

‘Thank you,’ Fleming murmured, quite overcome by this encomium.

‘But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t come unstuck on this one. No, I shall phone the CC and explain the situation.’ She paused, struck by a sudden thought. ‘I suppose I could point out that you’re coming to it after they have failed and very likely made a successful outcome impossible. That way he could see I was keen to implement his policy but any failure would be Taylor’s fault. Yes, that would do.’

Amazed yet again at the unselfconscious transparency of Rowley’s ambition, Fleming found it hard to know what to say but Rowley, having established a strategy, was going on. ‘So, what steps will you be taking?’

On the principle that the less she knew, the less able she was to interfere, Fleming said, ‘Now you’ve given it the nod I’ll go and sort out the details. I’ll be wanting my own team on this – Macdonald, Campbell, Hepburn and MacNee, of course – and I’ll brief them later. Fortunately we’re not at full stretch for once, and the Dumfries team will be doing a lot of the legwork for us.’

‘So I should hope. And we’ll be billing them for our time as well. I’ll get on to the CC just now and as long as his reaction’s favourable I don’t see why you shouldn’t go ahead. But remember, Marjory, this is very important. I need to be able to show continued successful outcomes, so don’t let me down.’

On the way back to her office, Fleming gave herself a stern
talking-to. It was immature even to entertain the thought of making blunder after deliberate blunder, just to wreck Hyacinth’s career.

Randall Lindsay walked into the hall of Ballinbreck House and called, ‘Hello! Anybody in?’

There was no answer. They were probably at the warehouse at the other end of the village where there was storage and office space for their online home decor business, along with a shop.

It had been set up with the last of his father’s family money and it was Philippa’s eye for stylish and unusual home accessories that had made it a thriving business, though since the downturn things hadn’t been going well. That gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Randall went up the stairs two at a time to his bedroom. It was still a shock when he went in, even though he knew his mother had expunged all trace of his childhood when he left home. The room was now an elegant guest room with French-Grey walls and white bedlinen, piled with vintage lace-trimmed cushions instead of the bunk beds and bookshelves and pin boards he still saw in his mind’s eye.

With a petulant movement he threw the cushions on the floor and lay down at full length on the bed, not taking his shoes off. They were probably muddy – it was pouring today – but he didn’t care. God, he hated this place!

He glanced at his watch. Half past four. It would be half past five in Paris and he’d be making an assessment of how much more he needed to clear from his desk before he could pop round to the cafe that was their local for a pastis before they decided where to eat. His gut twisted at the thought.

He heard the front door opening and then his mother’s commanding tones. ‘Randall – you’re home? Where are you?’

He heaved himself off the bed. ‘Yes, Mother. I’m upstairs.’

‘Come down, then. I’ve got a list of things I’ll need you to do. I’ll put the kettle on.’

What about, ‘Welcome home, lovely to see you?’ He swore, then glanced at the smears of mud on the pristine white cover. He seized the corner and used it to wipe the rest of the mud off his shoes.

Why was it that at the sound of his mother’s voice he became a sulky schoolboy again? He was an adult, he didn’t have to take her pushing him around any more. He could just walk out of the door and go—

Go where?
a nasty little voice inside his head murmured. Trying to ignore it, he thrust his hands into his pockets in an attitude of nonchalance and went into the kitchen.

The kettle was singing and Philippa was standing at the island unit in the Smallbone kitchen that wasn’t quite so designer smart after fifteen years: he could still see the scar on one of the cupboards he had secretly kicked in a fit of impotent rage on his last visit home and there were chips on one or two of the drawers as well. It wasn’t like Philippa to tolerate imperfection and he felt another qualm.

When he came in she was frowning over a clipboard and looked up, smartly blonde, carefully groomed and with that familiar cold blue gaze. It was presumably his imagination that the temperature in the house had suddenly dropped.

‘Get some mugs, will you? I want to go over the list with you.’ She took it over to the table and sat down as, seething, he made tea and brought it to her.

He looked round. ‘Where would I find biscuits?’

‘Biscuits? Oh, there aren’t any. Your father and I don’t eat them.’

And of course, it never crossed your mind to make any provision for me?
he thought but he wasn’t looking for aggro just at the moment.

‘Right,’ Philippa said. ‘The first thing is the flower beds round the lawn. They’re a bit out of hand and though we can’t assume it’ll be a good day we’ll want to shove people out into the garden if it’s possible.’

‘Why can’t the gardener do it?’

‘Gardener – what gardener?’ Philippa gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Laid off last year. You’ll just have to get your hands dirty – unless you’d care to spend some of your lavish salary on getting him back?’

It had all gone, along with what they’d paid him to go. Gritting his teeth, Randall said, ‘Ha, ha. Funny. I suppose I’d better give it a shot.’

‘Oh yes, you’d better. And then I want you to clear the hall and the drawing room – get all the good furniture out to the barn before the peasants get drunk and start falling on it. Get your father to help with the bigger stuff. And clear the shelves too – I don’t want any of my bibelots falling prey to sticky fingers.’

‘What’s all this about, anyway – what’s in it for you, going to all this trouble?’ he said sulkily but she ignored his question, only flushing slightly and making an impatient noise. ‘All right, then. Clear the garden, clear the house – anything else?’

She gave him a tight-lipped smile. ‘Oh, very likely. How long are you staying, anyway?’

He felt himself tense up. ‘Not sure. I’ve got a bit of leave piling up so I’ll probably hang around for a bit.’
It’s my home, it’s where I grew up
…

‘Oh.’ Philippa’s voice went flat. ‘Well, I suppose we can find something for you to do for your bed and board after Saturday’s over.’ She had been studying her list; now she looked up sharply. ‘Everything’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That’s good. Hurry up with your tea and I’ll take you out and show
you what needs doing.’ She got up and looked at him impatiently. ‘Come on, then.’

Randall drained his mug then followed her, feeling drained himself, empty, a hollow shell of misery.

With all their different assignments, it was mid afternoon by the time Fleming was able to assemble her team in her fourth-floor office in the police headquarters in Kirkluce.

She always kept three chairs in front of her desk, with another two set beside the table in the farther corner. There were usually four officers in the team she liked to work with but the arrangement gave her officers a choice of where to sit – something she found instructive. Perching on the table was sometimes evidence of a desire, probably subconscious, to use its height to dominate the meeting; taking one of the other chairs when there was one by the desk available was usually a sign of disengagement.

She studied them as they came in: Louise Hepburn, bright, vivacious and untidy as always, came in chattering to Tam MacNee. They sat down in front of her just as Andy Macdonald arrived. He was a sound man, Andy, if a bit unimaginative. He must be hitting forty now, though with his dark buzz cut he still looked a lot younger than that. Fleming stifled a sigh as he ignored the vacant chair next to Hepburn in favour of one nearer the table, it was an indication of the friction within the group.

She had tried banging their heads together, but the best she had achieved was only a sort of armed neutrality. She was very reluctant to split up the team; they were both valuable to operations and their abilities were complementary, so however irritating their infantile spats might be she just had to accept it, ignore it and keep them out of each other’s hair as far as possible.

DC Ewan Campbell, slight, red-haired and freckled, was last and
with a sideways glance at Macdonald, took the seat next to Hepburn.

Fleming explained the background to their latest assignment. ‘Our immediate priority is to trace the people here who were involved in Julia Margrave’s death. I’ll circulate a copy of the inquest proceedings.

‘Briefly, the situation was that she worked for a merchant bank in Edinburgh but came down to Galloway most weekends to stay with her mother who has a house on Balcary Bay. She was into drugs and her death was ascribed to a combination of cocaine and Ecstasy.’

Hepburn pursed her lips in a silent whistle. ‘Not smart.’

‘No,’ Fleming agreed. ‘Drug-taking seems to have been standard in this group that called themselves the “Cyrenaics” – does that mean anything to anyone?’

‘Louise is the long-dead tongues expert,’ Macdonald said. ‘She’ll know.’

It was the sort of joking remark anyone might have made – Hepburn’s degree had included law – but she coloured at the sneer in his voice.

‘I do, as it happens,’ she said coldly. ‘They believed that physical pleasure was the only good and maximising it was the only rational purpose of life. Drugs nowadays, I suppose, but then sex, good food, good wine—’

‘See their point,’ Campbell made one of his rare interjections.

MacNee grinned. ‘Not just sure they were thinking of a Scotch pie and a wee half at the time, Ewan. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.’

‘It’s pretty much a list of the Seven Deadly Sins, isn’t it,’ Macdonald said.

‘Certainly the third one,’ Fleming said thoughtfully. ‘Greed, that’s what this is, really – greed of every kind and in this case the consequences certainly were deadly. But we need to ask ourselves what relevance all that had to the reappearance of Connell Kane – if
any. There may well be none, but what we are trying to establish is whether anyone knew where Kane was over the past two years.’

‘If he was a dealer he’d have contacts,’ Macdonald said. ‘Easy enough for him to disappear.’

Hepburn picked up on that. ‘With friends like that, they could be behind his death as well, if he put a foot wrong. If a cosh was used it’s a pointer in that direction – not the sort of thing you get on the shelves at Homebase, is it?’

‘Good point,’ Fleming agreed. ‘DI Harris has run checks but only locally. It would be instructive to find out if any of the Cyrenaics knew where he got supplies from – it could be Glasgow, say—’

‘Or Edinburgh.’ MacNee bristled, as usual, at any slight on his native city. ‘Plenty of big boys in Edinburgh too.’

Fleming stifled a smile. ‘Of course. So that’ll be our first line of attack – though they may not know—’

‘Or won’t tell.’ Campbell’s remark was, as usual, to the point.

‘Could be afraid to incriminate themselves,’ Macdonald said. ‘When it comes to drugs, what most people do is distance themselves as far as possible. “I didn’t know anything about it, just took a puff occasionally on someone else’s joint.” You can write the script.’

Hepburn looked sceptical. ‘One of their mates died from drugs – you could probably find one or two people who held that against Kane. Might be happy enough to give us chapter and verse.’

‘Didn’t do it at the time, did they?’ Macdonald pointed out, but Hepburn was ready to argue.

‘Too dangerous then. You said it yourself – they’d try to show they’d nothing to do with it. Now they’ll know we won’t try to prosecute for possession for private use and might be more ready to talk.’

‘If you say so.’ Macdonald crossed his arms, a shut look on his face.

Fleming sensed MacNee moving impatiently in his seat and said
hastily, ‘Either of those may be true. It’s also possible that some of them won’t be happy that he’s been killed. To us he was a drug dealer, scum, but they could have seen him as a friend.’

‘Or it could have been one of them killed him,’ Campbell said.

‘A friend of Julia’s, say.’ Hepburn picked up on the idea. ‘But how did they get to him? And what brought him back to the area?’

‘Business?’ Macdonald joined in. ‘For all we know, he may have still been operating in the drugs trade quite close by—’

‘And if someone who wanted revenge for Julia discovered that, they could have seized their opportunity, arranged a meeting—’

‘They were friends, after all, he wouldn’t necessarily suspect anything. You could get him in a car, say you were taking him to the pub or something—’