The Darkness and the Deep (21 page)

‘They wouldn’t know!’ Dorothy protested, high colour staining her cheeks. ‘I could say it with total confidence. You must agree, Lewis, you must! You read all about these miscarriages of justice – I know you didn’t do it and if that’s what it takes to divert their attention away from you I have no scruples.’

Lewis shook his head. ‘I can’t believe that you’re saying that. Anyway, there’s no point. A policeman interviewed me this afternoon and I told him I was here by myself.’

She looked stricken, her colour draining away. ‘Oh Lewis, you didn’t! But then they’ll – they’ll . . .’ She trailed into silence without finishing her sentence.

‘They’ll what, Mother?’

‘Oh – nothing.’ She got up and began clearing the plates off the table. ‘It’s done now, isn’t it?’

11

The temperature had fallen sharply overnight. In Kirkluce High Street, the pavements were rimed with frost and a wind with an icy edge to it was whipping round the corners, savaging the last limp rags of golden leaves and tearing them away to reveal the stark winter anatomy of the plane trees.

Above, at her fourth-floor office window, Marjory Fleming was looking down on the final act of the Rape of the Leaves without seeing it, her fingers unconsciously beating an anxious tattoo on the window-ledge. It was Saturday, but all weekend leave had been cancelled. At the morning briefing she had set up a meeting with Tam MacNee, Tansy Kerr and Jonathan Kingsley; they should be arriving in five minutes.

It was clear already that this wasn’t going to prove an easy investigation. The high profile of the case meant that she had a nervous Superintendent getting more twitchy by the hour, and she couldn’t see there being the straightforward, common motive for the deaths that he would have liked. On her shoulders, too, lay the burden of community expectation which her mother had expressed last night; it was, quite simply, unthinkable that the victims of such an outrage should be denied the justice of a conviction.

Even at the briefing, which had included additional manpower from the Dumfriesshire Force, you could almost smell the anger in the air. When she had asked for suggestions for a convenience name to attach to the perpetrator, a PC had growled, ‘What’s wrong with “Bastard”?’ to a groundswell of approval. They’d settled on the more neutral ‘Wrecker’, but Fleming was uneasy. She could understand their feelings, shared them, even, but anger is a bad master in police work; she’d have to keep a tight rein on this one to avoid some fired-up copper fitting up a suspect without a lot more than ‘Someone must have done it; this is someone; therefore he must have done it’ to go on.

She had outlined the situation succinctly and set out her priorities: she gave a nod to the general grudge theory and arranged for checks to be made at all local lifeboat stations, but she didn’t try to pretend that it wasn’t simply, in her opinion, an elimination exercise; the main thrust of the investigation would be within Knockhaven and its immediate surroundings to the south, the main road north of Fuill’s Inlat having been blocked by an accident at the relevant time.

On a whiteboard she had sketched up a sequence chart, starting from the earlier purchase and preparation of the lamps, then the coastguard’s call at 7.05 p.m. and maroons going off at 7.15, the journey to set up the lights between that time and the wreck of the boat just after 10, the rescue attempts which finished around midnight and the rapid appearance and disappearance of the car at 3.15 a.m.

Very deliberately, Fleming had kept it all short and very much to the point. Heated opinions and wild speculation from the floor were not invited and now they were all being given her list of detailed assignments: checks on the lamps and on craft shops selling glass paint; interviews with visitors to Elder’s houses; follow-ups to the phone calls already inundating the extra lines with information which, with feeling running so high, would probably be even more well-meaning and time-wasting than usual; experiments with maroons to define the limits of the area where they were audible; questions to coastguards and support teams to establish exactly who, outside those limits, might have immediate access to call-out information.

With MacNee, Kingsley and Kerr, Fleming planned to go into the delicate area of suspects and motives. In a situation like this you couldn’t be too careful; the sledgehammer approach might have worked with Nat Rettie but when it came to families who had recently suffered bereavement it was a scalpel job. These were her sharpest operators and she wanted them working together as a team, even if it was a high-risk strategy, with Tam still going stiff-legged as a hostile tyke any time he was around Kingsley. So she’d just have to slap them about, wouldn’t she, until they saw sense. Fun, fun, fun!

The tap on the door came at precisely ten o’clock and Fleming watched with interest as they filed in. It was Kingsley who opened the door and stood back to let Kerr enter ahead of him, then walked through it himself, leaving MacNee to bring up the rear. There were two padded chairs on the opposite side of her desk and several upright ones round a table in the corner; Kerr, glancing back at MacNee, took one of the padded chairs a little hesitantly, and Kingsley took the other with no hesitation at all. MacNee, instead of pulling up a hard chair, perched on the edge of the table, which gave him the height advantage. Kingsley glanced back at him, then rapidly away again, as if registering that he had missed a trick. Such jockeying for position was all very amusing, unless it was your thankless task to make them work together.

Fleming began without preamble. ‘I asked you to come this morning because I want to use you as a task force, working on possible motives and just getting suspects talking – someone else can take formal statements. I want you sharing theories, insights, ideas. The first thing we have to remember, of course, is that Willie Duncan has to be considered as well as the others – in my view, ahead of Luke Smith.’

Was it her imagination, or was that a look of surprise or even irritation on Kingsley’s face? Surely he couldn’t have imagined that he was the only one who would think of such an obvious point? If so, he would have to be disabused of that sort of arrogant assumption, sharpish. For the moment, however, Fleming went on smoothly, ‘In fact, I hope it’s going to be possible to discount Luke completely. No one, including himself, could have known he’d be on that boat. And when I saw the tape of the interview with Rettie yesterday – nice work, Tansy – I had the impression he wasn’t in any position to push a paedophilia allegation.’

‘The girl denies it flatly,’ Kingsley said. ‘And believe you me, he’d have been taking his life in his hands coming on to that one. Tough cookie.’

‘The staff should get danger money,’ Kerr agreed. ‘And a bonus at the end of the week if they haven’t actually slapped her cocky little face.’

Thinking of Cat, Fleming had to swallow hard. ‘Right. I’ll make a note to have someone check out his previous background in Glasgow, but are you satisfied there are no problems at the Academy here, Jon?’

‘Squeaky clean, as far as I can tell.’

‘Then we run all the checks on his personal life and unless that throws up something unexpected we eliminate him quietly from consideration.’

As she paused to draw breath, Kingsley stepped in. ‘So that leaves us with Duncan, Ashley Randall and Rob Anderson.’ MacNee’s lip curled at the younger man’s blatant effort to make his mark as he went on, ‘I’ve spoken to Dr and Mrs Randall Senior, but I’ll admit I didn’t get far. Maybe someone else could take a pop at it – he might be more forthcoming if he wasn’t in his own surgery, perhaps.

‘Quite honestly, I’d like to go after Duncan. Drugs are clearly involved somewhere and I’m up to speed – sorry, no pun intended – on that sort of stuff.’

Fleming’s eyes went to MacNee’s face. She saw the muscles in his jaw clench, then he said flatly, ‘That’s my patch.’

Kingsley half-turned in his chair. ‘I know that. But face it, Tam – you haven’t really got anywhere, have you? We’re not in competition –’
Oh no?
Fleming thought, ‘– and perhaps Operation Songbird needs a fresh eye, a new approach.’

MacNee ignored him, speaking directly across his head to Fleming. ‘It’s up to you, boss. You decide our details.’

Kerr shifted uneasily in her seat – not surprisingly, with verbal bullets whizzing about her head – and Fleming felt hollow inside. She hadn’t expected quite such a sudden shoot-out, though with hindsight she should have.

The worst part of it was that Kingsley was right. Tam had told her yesterday about Willie locking the door against him and it made sense to see if someone else could persuade him to talk. As a friend, she didn’t want to humiliate Tam in front of this pushy young man but as a police officer she had a different duty. She made a split-second decision.

‘Tam, Willie’s not talking to you for some reason. He’s someone who has survived what could possibly have been an attempt on his life and we have to make the most of that. Jon, I want you to have a shot at persuading him to tell you what’s going on, but that’s the limit of your brief. Tam’s still running Operation Songbird. All right?’

She could see MacNee wasn’t happy, but neither was Kingsley, which probably meant she’d got it about right. A left and a right had always worked with her children (‘Don’t hit your sister, Cammie. But you just stop provoking him, Cat’).

After a moment MacNee said, with impressive fair-mindedness, ‘Right enough, I wasn’t getting anywhere with Willie, and “
facts are chiels that winna ding
”.’ Then he added hastily, ‘And I’ve paid for that one already.’

Fleming laughed, with some relief, as did Kerr, but she didn’t make any attempt to explain the joke to Kingsley, who was looking puzzled. A sense of being at a disadvantage might teach him something he needed to learn.

‘OK, that’s settled. Now, Tansy, you spoke to Mrs Anderson at the hospital, didn’t you?’

‘I’m just filing my report, boss. She’s in pieces, poor woman – I’m not sure I’ll get much from her, but I could do a bit of digging round the neighbours.’

‘Anything come out of the interview?’

Tansy frowned. ‘Don’t think so. Apparently he went on a bit about the lights and feeling guilty and that he loved her, that sort of thing. He wasn’t really making sense – muttering about three lights when there were only two, weren’t there?’

Fleming nodded. ‘Yes, two. But hardly surprising that he was confused. And Tam – the Randalls. Have you done a report, Jon?’

‘Not yet. I’ve filed the Kylie MacEwan/Nat Rettie school stuff but I haven’t had time to write up my notes on the Randall interviews.’

‘Fine. Hand your notes over to Tam, and he can take them forward.’

Kingsley would have to learn not to show his emotions quite so clearly; she read resistance in the young face even as he said smoothly, ‘Sure, I’ll get something on paper for him.’

He needed a lesson. Now. ‘Watch my lips, Jon. Hand over your notes to Tam. As they stand. Neither of you has time to waste faffing about and as you said yourself, you’re not in competition.’

He looked as startled as if the chair he was sitting on had suddenly bitten his bottom. ‘But,’ he said, then as he encountered the look from her which had turned better men than he to stone, turned bright red and muttered, ‘Sorry, ma’am. I’ll do that.’

Fleming allowed the pause to lengthen long enough to make sure he was acutely uncomfortable, then said sweetly, ‘Oh yes, I think you will.

‘Now, what I really want you to look for is anything that doesn’t feel right. Behaviour that’s inappropriate, whether overreactive or underreactive. Don’t be afraid to follow your noses. And my nose tells me there’s something about Ritchie Elder. You’re going to be talking to the Randalls, Tam – try and see what you can suss out about Ashley and Elder. Get Lewis Randall out of the surgery, as Jon suggests. Then you just might try for a little chat with Elder’s wife – after all, she can’t have been too happy about it either.

‘The other thing to keep at the back of your mind is that there could be some link beyond the lifeboat. Does anything suggest Ashley was involved in the drugs business with Willie, say? Was she having an affair with Rob as well? My gut feeling is that it’s unlikely, but be alert for any pointers.

‘Thanks, everyone. Report back to me directly if there’s anything you think offers a lead.’

Kingsley left with some alacrity, not waiting this time for Tansy Kerr to precede him. She too left looking as if she couldn’t get out fast enough. MacNee, on the other hand, lowered himself from the table with dignity and no undue haste.

‘Stop smirking, Tam.’

MacNee turned a bland face to her. ‘I’m not smirking! How am I smirking?’

‘You’re smirking inside,’ she accused him, and he grinned, then followed the others out.

The notes MacNee found himself holding – set down on his desk with a bad grace and ‘I’ll want them back tonight’ – were in two sets, torn from a constable’s page-numbered notebook. That was probably a disciplinary offence in itself.

Pages 23–26 had a few lines relating to the visit to Kirkluce Academy, then went on to jottings about an interview with Dorothy Randall which concluded, with suspicious abruptness, on the bottom of page 26. There were then three pages missing: page 33 started mid-phrase, ‘wife to go to meeting’, then continued noting what Dr Lewis Randall had said. It finished half-way down page 36, which went on to dealing with Kylie MacEwan.

So what was Kingsley keeping to himself? A strong lead, presumably, but what was it? It could be something that Dorothy Randall had said. From the tone of the notes, the interview had been coming to an end, but often enough the best stuff came when you were on your way to the door and they’d relaxed.

Against that was the fact that Kingsley had pretty much handed the Randalls to MacNee on a plate and he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t thought he’d gnawed all the meat off the bones already. So had something Dorothy said pointed him in another direction altogether?