Lamb to the Slaughter (29 page)

So the halo was still intact. ‘What about when they were young? Before he was married, even?’

She pursed her lips. ‘I don’t like to cry someone down, but Christina was never bonny, even in the old school photos, and my mother always said she wasn’t sociable either. And with the Colonel being sent away to school, and then Sandhurst – how would he even have known her?’

‘It’s what I’d have thought myself, Annie,’ MacNee said with satisfaction. ‘Thanks – that’s what I wanted to know.’ He got up.

‘Here!’ Annie protested. ‘You’re never away without telling me what’s going on?’

‘No use asking me. I don’t know any more than you’ve heard on the street. I won’t have an inside track till I’m back to work.’ At least the second statement was true.

She looked at him shrewdly. ‘Aye. And I ken fine what’ll happen then – you’ll say you’re not allowed to tell me. Och, away you go!’

‘Thanks,’ DI Fleming said, her voice flat. ‘I’m sure you did all you could. I’ll speak to you later.’

She’d known it would be a close call, and it hadn’t worked out in her favour. For once the security service had been ­efficient and Christina Munro had been collected from custody and delivered to the court promptly. She had been charged with culpable homicide and had made no plea or declaration: the case had been ordained for further examination. The fiscal had resisted bail, but taking into account the circumstances – an elderly woman and a first offender unlikely to repeat the offence – as well as the guidelines on granting bail wherever possible, the Sheriff had allowed it. Christina would even now be on her way home.

Earlier, when Fleming had first arrived at the morgue, the pathologist had greeted her cheerfully. ‘Well, good news! You won’t have the report from ballistics yet, of course, and I doubt if even they will be able to swear the shots were fired from the same gun, but what I’ve taken out of the wounds is identical.’

It was good news, certainly, but it meant that her gut reaction about Christina Munro – and Andy Mac’s too, she rather thought – had been wrong. Oh, she’d been wrong before, of course, but surprisingly often her gut had been right.

‘I can tell you that the gun was loaded with buckshot, and though I couldn’t be sure, my money would be on a
12
-bore—’

‘What did you say?’ Fleming said sharply. ‘
12
-bore?’

The man looked surprised. ‘Weren’t you expecting that?’

‘Not a .
410
?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘You couldn’t be wrong about that?’ Then, as the man looked offended, she added hastily, ‘It’s just that the gun we’ve recovered is a .
410
.’

He went across to the trolley beside the body which was still covered by a green sheet and picked up a steel bowl where a small, bloodied mass of fibre lay. ‘The shots were both fired at close range, so the wadding was embedded in the wound. See this? The way it’s constructed, it peels back on impact to form four “petals”, look. If it had been from a .
410
cartridge, there would only have been three.’

He was going on to explain the other differences but she barely heard him, struggling to assimilate the news. Christina Munro’s gun couldn’t have fired the shot. The house had been searched and there was no other gun. So she hadn’t killed Barney, and she hadn’t killed the Colonel, but any minute now she was going to be charged with culpable homicide, on Fleming’s say-so.

‘Excuse me,’ she had said to the surprised pathologist. ‘I’ll have to get hold of the fiscal. You get started on the autopsy – I’ll be with you in a minute.’

But she’d failed. And now, she would have to go back in and watch as the grisly procedures were carried out to tell her what she knew already: that Barney Kyle had been shot dead by a person unknown.

‘They’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, aren’t they?’ Will Wilson said to Tansy Kerr. ‘Dylan, the school kids – hey, Big Marge’s daughter’s quite fit, isn’t she? Sulky, though – bet she’s a bit of a handful!’

‘She’s fourteen,’ Kerr said. ‘Girls are always horrific at fourteen.’

‘But look how they improve later.’ Smiling, Wilson moved up closer to her on the bench seat.

They had driven the twelve miles to Newton Stewart to find a pub where they weren’t likely to run into anyone who knew them. Having a sandwich and a Coke – a Diet Coke, in Tansy’s case – wasn’t exactly compromising, but going to such lengths to avoid their colleagues so they didn’t have to be careful all the time certainly was. They hadn’t had lunch in the canteen for weeks now, ever since – it – started, and they’d hardly gone to the same pub twice in case they got recognised as regulars.

Kerr was starting to get nervous. She hadn’t wanted to come so far today and now she said, ‘Will, they’re going to start talking about us if we’re not careful.’

He took her hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. ‘Nonsense! Everyone always thinks other people are interested in what they do, but in fact most of us are so caught up in our own lives we don’t even notice.’

‘I only hope you’re right.’

‘’Course I am.’ He pulled her closer and turned her face so that he could kiss her.

‘Oh, Will...’ As always, she melted, returning his kiss, then said wistfully, ‘But I do so hate all this secret stuff. Where are we headed, Will?’

He made a rueful face. ‘Headed? I don’t know, love. We’re happy just now, aren’t we? And that’s all that matters.’

Kerr wasn’t at all sure that was true, but she agreed anyway. What else could she say? They had stumbled from comradeship into love and they’d made themselves a little, perfect, secret world, but he was the one who would have the big decisions to make and it was still early days. Before you broke up a marriage, even if it was one like this that was dead already, you had to be absolutely sure you were doing the right thing, for the sake of the children. She shied away from the thought of the children.

Wilson, with just a hint of impatience, was changing the subject. ‘So what do you reckon? Dylan was pretty definite about there being two shots so I think we can assume he was right. Did she think she was firing over his head and got the angle wrong – hit Barney square in the back?’

‘A tragic accident? But of course, you suggested that this morning – an accident with a poacher,’ she reminded him helpfully.

‘That was top-of-the-head stuff,’ Wilson said stiffly, frowning. ‘I didn’t mean it as a serious suggestion – just thinking aloud who else might be around with a shotgun.’

She could have kicked herself for lack of tact. She remembered now that the boss had rubbished it at the time, and Will had been miffed, especially when Ewan Campbell’s idea of an ambush had been taken seriously. She went on hastily, ‘Absolutely. So what about the Colonel? Another accident?’ Not that she thought for a moment it could be, but he would enjoy telling her why not.

‘Hardly!’ Wilson, restored to good humour, flicked her nose. ‘Do keep up! How could she accidentally shoot someone at their own front door like that? No, you’d have to suppose that unless a connection emerges – and I’d put money on that it doesn’t – the whole Munro business is a complete irrelevance. It’s the sort of accident that’s just waiting to happen, now you can’t take neds like Kyle and Burnett round the back and explain the law to them in the only language they understand.

‘It’s different with the Colonel. There’s plenty people might want him dead.’

‘Ossian Forbes-Graham, for a start. If he thought the old geyser was having it away with the wondrous Ellie, he’d gun him down without a second thought. They’re all inbred, his class, and he’s barking.’

There was bitterness there, and Wilson looked quizzical. ‘Not still thinking about your rugger-bugger, are you, Tansy?’

‘Of course not,’ she protested. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. I just think it stands out a mile. And I’ll tell you something – if I were Ellie Burnett, I’d be paying for protection.’

As she spoke, her mobile phone rang; a moment later, so did Wilson’s. He got up and walked away to take his call as she answered hers.

They both finished at the same time. ‘Well!’ they said simultaneously as he came back to the table.

‘Back to HQ, immediately?’ Kerr said.

‘What’s that about? Someone confessed?’

‘Better step on it going back, or they’ll start wondering what took us so long, when we’re supposed to be in Kirkluce.’ She was edgy.

Wilson gave her an exasperated look. ‘We were in the middle of talking to someone, right? No one’s going to put a stopwatch on us anyway.’

Fleming was frowning. ‘Where are Will and Tansy? I gave instructions that they were to be told to drop everything and come straight back. It shouldn’t have taken twenty minutes.

‘What were they doing?’

Campbell, as usual, said nothing as Macdonald shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Interviewing the Gloags and Dylan Burnett, I think. Plus talking to some of the kids at school.’

‘Were they in the canteen at lunchtime?’

‘No.’

Fleming’s unease about Wilson deepened. Could there, she wondered suddenly, be something going on there? That would be all she needed. But Will, with three kids under six – and even if he would, surely Tansy wouldn’t...

She drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘I’m reluctant to start, and then have to recap the whole thing for them. I’ll give them three minutes.’

She’d had to go through it all once already for the superintendent’s benefit. When she’d briefed Bailey and the Chief Constable this morning, she’d stressed that there was absolutely no proof as yet of a connection between the two murders, but though they had nodded gravely, she’d sensed she wasn’t taking them with her. Menzies had only stayed ten minutes, then gone off to Glasgow to catch a flight to London, and she’d heard him say to Bailey, ‘Sounds as if you’ve got this wrapped up, once you sort out the details. My wife will be pleased – she’s been most distressed about poor Andrew.’

So Bailey had been at first incredulous – ‘You don’t mean to tell me she couldn’t have killed the boy, even by accident?’ – then agitated. ‘I’ve had the CC’s wife on the phone thanking me for clearing it up so efficiently,’ he said.

‘Then she was seriously premature,’ Fleming said tartly. ‘It certainly didn’t come from me. You heard what I said this morning.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Bailey said testily. ‘But where do we go from here, Marjory?’

‘You’ll be the first to know, Donald, once I know myself.’ She got up. ‘I’ve this and that to do. Like prepare a statement for the press officer.’

He went pale. ‘Oh God, Marjory, the press—’

But she hadn’t waited to hear his lamentations. ‘Haven’t time to go through that,’ she’d said – but now here she was, wasting that precious commodity on two junior officers who needed a good kicking.

‘I suppose we’d better get on with this,’ she was saying, as there was a knock on the door and Wilson and Kerr appeared, she looking flustered and he, after a glance at her face, sullen.

‘Didn’t you get the message to return immediately?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Wilson said, with a glance at Kerr which Fleming interpreted as a warning to let him do the talking.

‘So? What kept you?’

‘I’m sorry. We were talking to someone and I didn’t quite realise you meant us to break off in the middle of an interview.’

Kerr’s eyes were lowered and her arms folded. Fleming was all but certain this wasn’t true. She pressed him. ‘Useful interview?’

‘Sadly not. A member of the public stopped us and said he’d information about the murders, but what he meant was he had theories.’

‘And you couldn’t have cut him short?’

Wilson was looking at her very directly, his eyes wide and innocent. ‘We did. Once we realised.’

Now she knew he was lying, but today she didn’t have the luxury of time to deal with it. ‘I’ll leave it there – for the present,’ she said coldly. ‘Sit down.’

Kerr slid into a seat with obvious relief; Wilson took a moment to greet the other two men before he took his place. Fleming recognised it as a small gesture of defiance, but wasn’t unwise enough to be drawn.

‘We’ve had very unexpected results from the autopsy,’ she began, and saw the astonishment in their faces as she told them.

‘You mean,’ Kerr said at last, ‘that there really was someone hiding in the bushes, like Ewan suggested?’

‘Seems so. From the angle of the shot, it looks as if it was fired at fairly short range from behind and to Kyle’s right. Incidentally, the pathologist also thinks it likely the trauma was such that he would have collapsed almost instantly, though given the momentum of the bike he’s not prepared to state categorically that he couldn’t have been carried on. Anyway, I’ve asked the SOCOs to do a focused search in that area of the farm track.

‘The other thing is that the gun that shot them both had been loaded with buckshot. You wouldn’t use that for ordinary rough shooting, or shooting at clays. It’s what you’d need to bring down a deer, say, which suggests the killer had his targets in mind when he bought the ammunition. But what is there to link the Colonel and Barney Kyle?’

‘And a dead sheep,’ Macdonald said.