Lamb to the Slaughter (26 page)

It was almost getting to the point where she’d have to go and talk to Ellie herself, persuade her to leave her son alone. Or have Murdoch speak to her, buy her off if necessary. That would be wiser. Ossian would react badly and it would be better if he hadn’t turned against his mother – for his own sake, of course.

That was another crash from upstairs. Respect for his privacy was one thing, dangerous neglect was another. Something should be done.

‘Murdoch!’ she called hopefully, but got no answer to that either. He must be out; he’d said at breakfast there was a corporate booking for a clay-pigeon shoot on Friday so he was probably at the office sorting things out with Dan.

Deirdre hesitated. Ossian could be so hurtful if, with the best of intentions, you did the wrong thing. But supposing there was something terribly wrong, supposing he did something desperate...

Fear lent wings to her feet. She ran upstairs, knocked on his door, then, receiving no answer, took a deep breath and opened it.

The room looked as if it had been ransacked. Palettes and brushes were strewn about, a bare canvas had been slashed, the easel overturned, the pristine white of the walls daubed with red like blood. In the centre of the devastation, Ossian lay on his bed, very still, very white.

For a second Deirdre’s heart stopped. Then she saw that his eyes were open and silent tears were spilling down his cheeks.

‘Ossian! Darling, what is it?’ She stumbled towards him, took his limp hand. For what seemed a very long time, he said nothing, then he turned his head slowly to look at her.

‘He’s moved in with her,’ he said. ‘She’s let him move in with her. What am I to do?’

Deirdre felt a profound sense of relief. ‘Dearest, these things happen. She’s so much older than you – you would be a boy to her. A friend – that’s how she would see you, and you can go on being friends...’

As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, ‘I’m very tried. I want to go to sleep now.’ He shut his eyes.

Deirdre stood back. Tears still seeped from under his eyelids but as she watched his breathing became deeper and in five minutes he was, she was sure, soundly asleep.

That wasn’t natural. She went downstairs, feeling hollow inside. She’d refused to believe that Ossian was in need of treatment, but perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to arrange for him to see Dr Rutherford anyway.

‘Christina Munro flatly denies both murders,’ Fleming said. Detectives and uniformed officers had assembled for the briefing in the incident room with its board showing photographs of Carmichael’s body and the front garden at Fauldburn, and sketches and diagrams showing where traces of his assailant had been found and the angle of the shot. Rows of chairs had been set out between the computer stations.

‘She admits that she fired her shotgun, a .
410
Browning,’ Fleming went on, ‘but insists that this was harmlessly into the air. However, we charged her last night with culpable homicide and the fiscal is going along with that. She was detained overnight, but her brief will no doubt ask for bail when she appears in court this morning, and my guess is that with the Human Rights presumption in favour, she’ll get it.

‘The SOCOs are up there this morning and they’ll no doubt find a cartridge and pellets that will be able to give us more idea about what happened.’

‘Are we assuming it was one shot rather than two?’ Will Wilson asked. He was sitting with Tansy Kerr and Andy Macdonald in the otherwise empty front row of chairs, police officers having the same attitude as schoolchildren to the merits of being safely at the back.

‘Don’t know. She said she only fired one; Burnett thought he heard two shots, but he was pretty much in shock last night so I’m not sure how far we can rely on that. We’ll have to wait till they’ve checked her gun. The autopsy is later this morning so I’ll have more detailed info for you after that.

‘Now, I want a team in her house this morning, looking for any possible connection with Carmichael, and some of you will be checking the papers we’ve taken from Fauldburn House already. Dig out a few locals in their seventies who might have heard of a relationship between them, and anyone else you can think of who’s well up in the local background – your auntie, Andy, perhaps?’

‘Trawls for gossip like a Spanish fishing-boat – nothing escapes,’ he agreed cheerfully. Then, more soberly, he said, ‘But there’s nothing to say definitely that the Colonel wasn’t shot by someone else, is there, boss?’

Fleming could see that he, like her, was having difficulty in reconciling the personality of the woman they had interviewed last night with the ruthless killer of two people.

‘Absolutely. It’s only that I don’t like coincidences – but they do occur. We could be wrong-footed if we go making assumptions, so I don’t want the other enquiries scaled down until we have much more definite information. So there’s follow-up work on what came in yesterday and of course formal statements from the people most closely involved. Details on the board. Any questions?’

There were a few, but nothing complicated, and she was able to send them all off a few minutes later. She asked Wilson, Kerr, Macdonald and, after a momentary hesitation, Ewan Campbell to stay behind.

A faint look of surprise crossed Campbell’s face, but he came to join the others in the front row.

Fleming perched on the edge of one of the desks. ‘OK. Thoughts?’

There was a brief silence, then Wilson said, ‘Supposing she’s right. Supposing the shot she fired didn’t hit him. Could there have been someone else around? After rabbits, say, and getting Barney accidentally?’

‘Seems unlikely, with the noise those kids would be making. There wouldn’t be a rabbit for miles.’ Fleming didn’t notice the annoyance on Wilson’s face as she dismissed the suggestion. ‘Could Christina have seen him lying there from the house? I didn’t think to check the sightlines last night.’

Macdonald shook his head. ‘I doubt it. It’s not a long drive but he was down near the road and there’s a slope in it. There’s bushes and scrub right down both sides too.’

‘Maybe someone could have hidden there deliberately. ­Waiting for him.’ It always seemed surprising when Campbell spoke, and they waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

Fleming considered that. It was certainly more plausible than Wilson’s oblivious poacher. ‘They’ll be able to tell us the angle of the shot, and perhaps where it happened, though of course he could have ridden on for some yards before he fell off. But that would presuppose someone had a motive – and if we exclude coincidence, a motive to kill two people who, on the face of it, have no connection.

‘Anyway, the picture will become a lot clearer after the post-mortem. Meantime, it’s the usual thing – keep an open mind. OK? Know what you’re doing today?’

Wilson said, ‘Tansy and I are going to talk to Dylan Burnett and Gordon Gloag at the school. We thought we’d get the names of some of the kids who were with them last night, before they went to Wester Seton, and have a chat with them, just to get the full picture.’

‘Yes,’ Fleming said uncomfortably. ‘My daughter was one of them, so I daresay you should talk to her. And the other thing you should know – in strictest confidence – is that Tam MacNee went into the motorbike showroom yesterday and tried to warn off the boys by more or less telling them Munro had a gun and might take a pot at them.’

There was a stunned silence. ‘Did he
know
she would?’ Kerr asked, horrified.

‘Of course not. But he did think she might fire a shot over their heads to scare them – she had a loaded shotgun beside her door, and he wanted to stop them going so she wouldn’t be tempted to use it.’

‘If that comes out, we’ve got serious problems,’ Macdonald said.

‘Norman Gloag was sabre-rattling, but I’ve stalled him, if only for the moment.’ She told them of the weapon he had inadvertently put in her hand. ‘He got seriously twitchy and claimed he only heard when it would have been too late. Quiz Gordon about the timing, and if there’s a discrepancy, go and lean on Gloag – that might hold him off for a bit longer.’

Fleming glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll have to go. I’ve a meeting with Menzies and Bailey. Incidentally, I shan’t tell them about Tam until I have to, so see it doesn’t leak out.

‘Andy, are you and Ewan set up for today?’

‘Plenty to do, boss,’ Macdonald assured her, and she hurried out.

Romy Kyle had cried herself to sleep and woke with a start, her eyes sticky and every limb feeling as if it was weighted down. She was still wearing the clothes she had on last night. The other side of the bed was empty and the house was utterly silent. She swung herself slowly out of bed, then sat on the edge with her elbows on her knees, pushing her hands through her hair, shivering as the memories flooded back.

Barney was dead. Pete had gone. She didn’t know what to do, and here she wasn’t talking about the rest of her life. She was talking about the next five minutes. There didn’t seem any reason why she shouldn’t sit here with her head in her hands for days.

But the police would be coming, no doubt. She probably stank; her clothes were crumpled and sweaty. She got up stiffly, peeling them off and dropping them on the floor as she headed for the bathroom. She stood under the shower for what felt like a long time, though it could have been five minutes or half an hour. She didn’t know. Time had gone funny this morning.

Dressing was unexpectedly complicated. She kept crumpling as shafts of pain hit her, and though she sobbed, no tears came, as if she had used them all up last night. She couldn’t think clearly enough to separate grief for her son from grief for her lost lover; she was enveloped in a huge, obliterating cloud of anguish.

At last she got herself downstairs, to stand in the kitchen staring at the kettle as if she had never seen it before. She switched it on at last and made tea, though she didn’t like it much. Tea was what you had for shock, tea with sugar in it. That was what the policewoman had tried to give her last night, and somehow then, when she could still think clearly, she’d thought it was funny.

She stirred sugar into her mug, though, and sat down, collapsed, really, on a kitchen chair, and sipped it tentatively. She shuddered in disgust – she didn’t take sugar in anything – but she made herself drink it.

It did work, in a way. It forced her to get up and make herself a cup of coffee to take away the taste, and gradually her mind began to clear.

Romy had always told herself that if Pete left her, she’d die of misery – a Country and Western emotion, she realised now, in the consuming agony of losing Barney. She’d been permanently pissed off with him lately. He was a right little sod. He’d met his death because he’d been victimising an elderly woman. But whatever he had done, he was
hers
, formed in her body, part of herself for ever. She had been mutilated by his death.

Perhaps it was just as well Pete wasn’t here. She knew he had problems with Barney and she’d have known that, somewhere at the back of his mind, was the thought, ‘That’s one way to solve the problem.’ And when it showed – as it would, because Pete was far too self-centred to be any good at concealment – she’d have thrown him out anyway.

But why had he gone? Why last night? Had he heard about it while she was sitting in the studio staring into darkness – darkness in more ways than one? Pete didn’t do deep emotion: like the banal motto on a sundial, he recorded only the sunny hours, and blotted out the rest.

The woman from Victim Support arrived just as she finished her coffee. Oh, she was well-meaning enough, but Romy had never been one to suffer fools gladly and she took a positive pleasure in telling her that she was just going into the Craft Centre where she had a lot of work waiting to be done. They could find her there when they wanted her to identify the body.

The woman would have to learn not to show quite so plainly that she was horrified, if she was to be any good.

13

Gordon Gloag was not a prepossessing young man. His couch potato’s pallor was in striking contrast to the bright red blotches of acne, his mouth seemed to be permanently half-open and he was unlucky enough to have inherited his father’s small, deep-set eyes. Put a baseball cap back to front on his head and he wouldn’t even need make-up to go on the box as Kevin the Teenager, Tansy Kerr thought as she took her seat on one of the beige leather chairs in the Gloags’ lounge.

This morning he was noticeably shaken, though the look he gave his father when Gloag Senior explained that he had taken the day off to support his son in his time of need, was not one of gratitude.

‘We were hoping to have a word with you, Gordon,’ Wilson explained.

‘If you’re up for it,’ Kerr added. ‘You must be feeling pretty bad this morning. You and Barney and Dylan were good mates, weren’t you?’

The youth gulped. ‘Yeah. What happened – it was gross.’

Kerr got out her notebook. ‘Maybe you could talk us through yesterday afternoon and evening?’ She turned to Gloag. ‘If you don’t mind—’

Gloag glared at her. ‘I have absolutely no intention of leaving you alone with my son. I have had recent personal experience of police questioning, and a most unpleasant experience it was. Gordon is in no fit state to guard his words, as it is clearly wise to do, with the police state that now seems to be operating in this country.