The Darkness and the Deep (27 page)

He cut round to the back of the pub, then crossed the open area to Baker’s Brae, the steep, cobbled wynd which was a short-cut to his home at the top of the town.

He didn’t see the car, with no lights and number plates obscured by mud, suddenly appear from a shadowed corner formed by the angles of the buildings round the rough square and turn up behind him between the high walls. It was only the sudden roar of the engine that made him turn, and then there was nothing he could do except give one desperate scream of terror, then agony.

A moment later the car, its hideous work done, accelerated away.

Marjory Fleming was very deeply asleep when the phone rang. Her heart pounding in alarm, gasping like a swimmer breaking the surface, she sat up, groping for it in the dark. Her eyes were still closed as she mumbled, ‘Yes?’

A moment later, she was wide awake. Listening with horror to what she was being told, she switched on the light and swung herself out of bed.

As she replaced the receiver, Bill opened his eyes and said groggily, ‘Problems?’

‘Mmm. Tell you tomorrow. You go back to sleep.’

She rapidly found underwear, trousers and a thick sweater and crept out to change in the bathroom, switching off the light as she went. Almost immediately, she heard him start to snore gently.

It felt very lonely in the dark, silent house at one in the morning, faced with disaster. Tomorrow she would have a furious Superintendent and the jackals of the Press tearing her apart for failing to give Willie Duncan round-the-clock protection after what anyone equipped with 20/20 hindsight could see had been an attempt on his life. But worse than that, so much, much worse, was the knowledge that a woman was a widow because she, Marjory, had failed to find the killer in time.

14

Superintendent Donald Bailey’s brow was so deeply furrowed that the creases were running right up into his bald crown, while the lines of disapproval round his mouth extended themselves into his second chin.

‘This is a disaster, Marjory, a disaster! It’ll mean questions, you know, about our fitness for that most fundamental of police duties – the protection of our citizens! What are you planning to do about it?’ Fresh from an uncomfortable phone conversation with his own superior officer, Bailey was working on the pay-it-forward principle.

‘We’, Fleming reflected sourly, would have been a nicer word than ‘you’, keeping up at least the fiction that they were all in this together. The shower she’d had here at six in the morning had been less than wholly effective as a substitute for a proper night’s sleep; her eyes were gritty and her tongue felt thick in her mouth.

‘There’s no simple answer to that, Don,’ she said wearily. ‘As you know. The only thing I can say is that it gives us a bit more we can focus on – we know that the murderer was on the spot this time and we know precisely when.’

‘And with luck, there should be car damage and paint samples to follow up on?’ Fleming did not comment and he went on, ‘As I said to the Chief Constable, at least we know now who was the intended victim, and why. Shocking to think of those three brave souls dying so unnecessarily.’

‘Indeed.’ He had to be right about that, and Fleming had to accept that her own instinct had been wrong. ‘Naturally we’re homing in on the drugs angle.’

‘Naturally. And it might even give us a breakthrough there – the victim being a local man like Duncan, people may be more ready to come forward—’ Bailey was cheering up; he was possessed of an optimistic nature, even if events rarely allowed him to indulge it.

Feeling brutal, Fleming cautioned, ‘It’s hard to say. It could work in the other direction – scare them even more.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’ Gloom returned. ‘Anyway, what’s young Kingsley saying about this? I’m impressed with him – very much on the ball.’

‘I’ll be catching up with him later,’ Fleming said evasively. Not that it wasn’t true. And when she did, she’d fillet him with a blunt knife. She wasn’t amused by constables who didn’t report for duty and switched their phones off. ‘I’m seeing MacNee and Kerr as well and we’ll be heading down to Knockhaven straight away.’ She got up. ‘Unless there’s anything more . . . ?’

Bailey rose too and went to open the door for her. A good sign – it suggested forgiveness.

He said, disarmingly, ‘Good luck, Marjory. Don’t think I underestimate the onerous nature of your position, ground between the upper and the nether millstone. I’ve done the job and my Super was a bastard too. It goes with the territory.’

It was why she could never truly dislike him: every so often a very human aspect popped out, like a tortoise’s head, from within the carapace of his pomposity. She smiled at him but as she walked back to her office the smile faded. Where the hell was bloody Jon Kingsley?

MacNee and Kerr, waiting in her office, had both, of course, heard the news about Willie Duncan, but it was her task to fill in the details.

‘He’d nowhere to go; the lane – Baker’s Brae – runs between two high walls and it’s only two feet or so, three at most, wider than a car. Someone heard him scream and went out to see. Nasty – very, very nasty. From the pathologist’s initial observations, it looks as if he half-turned when he heard the car, then tried to run and slipped on the wet cobbles.’

‘Just went under the wheels?’ MacNee’s face was very sombre.

‘Twice.’ Fleming swallowed, trying to put out of her mind the face, contorted in mortal agony, and the savage remark from one of the SOCOs – ‘Treated like roadkill, wasn’t he?’ ‘Apparently the bastard reversed and went over him again to make sure.’

Kerr shuddered. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Yes. And the other thing is that it doesn’t look as if there was damage to the car, unless by any chance it caught the walls of the lane before or after. No paint samples, nothing needing garage attention.’

‘Nothing a good hose-down couldn’t sort out?’

‘Right, Tam. I couldn’t bear to tell Donald – it was the only straw he could find to cling to. There’s a possibility the make and the tread of the tyres just might be identifiable –’ and she didn’t like to think why – ‘but that’s only going to be useful if we have someone in the frame. I’ve ordered every local car-wash to close for the same reason – if the car has to be washed at home there should be traces on the ground and in the pipe crevices in the drains. But again, that’ll only be useful when we can finger someone. It’s not a lead. And of course, everyone in the village knew what Willie was doing that night – we were all there at the tea when he announced it to the assembled company. So that’s not a lead either. Story of our life, on this case.

‘Now, on another tack, does anyone know where Jon is?’

MacNee and Kerr exchanged surprised looks. ‘We thought he was at Knockhaven already,’ MacNee said. ‘He was there last night, and I reckoned he must have been on the spot when it happened.’

‘Where was he last night?’

‘Ah.’ MacNee paused. ‘I was going to mention that sometime. He was undercover in the Anchor, chatting up some of the likely lads.’

Fleming’s brows rose. ‘He’d no authorisation—’

‘Right enough. And to be honest, it got right up my nose. But I have to say he was good – gelled hair, tattoo, earrings, the lot, and if it’s going to get results you can’t haver on about procedure.’

‘That’s all very well, but it still doesn’t answer my question – where is he? He certainly wasn’t at the scene last night.’

MacNee coughed delicately. ‘Given what I saw of the way he was getting into his part, I doubt he’d not be wanting to drive home.’

It didn’t impress his boss. ‘You mean, he’s down there somewhere nursing a hangover? He’s going to have to learn to hold his liquor or else drink a bit more slowly.’

‘You don’t think anything’s – well – happened to him?’ Kerr broke in anxiously. ‘You said he was hanging around with the druggies, Tam. Maybe he wasn’t as convincing as he looked to you?’

There was an appalled silence. Then MacNee said, ‘The lads he was with were convinced all right. But what may have happened after . . .’

‘Right.’ Fleming grabbed her bag and car keys. ‘We’re on our way.’

The screens were still up, blocking Baker’s Brae at both ends, and men in white coveralls were coming and going from a couple of big white vans parked in the area at the bottom, behind the Anchor Inn.

A crowd had gathered too. The morning after the wreck, the village had been all but deserted, the few shoppers shocked and subdued; today it was buzzing. Almost like a swarm of bees, unpredictable and threatening, Fleming thought as she got out of her car and walked across to give her name to the constable recording visitors to the scene. The hum of talk swelled briefly at her arrival, then died as she moved out of sight behind the screens.

The lights which had been brought in last night were still in place, but all the investigation and photography involving Willie Duncan’s sad, broken body must have been completed, and it was gone. It would be lying now, tagged, on a mortuary slab awaiting the attentions of the pathologist; attending herself, as she would have to do later, was one of Fleming’s most disturbing duties.

A tarpaulin had been spread out to cover the area which would still be showing the terrible evidence of the crime, and the reason for this delicacy became apparent when Fleming realised there were two women standing just to her left with a policewoman she didn’t recognise, most likely from the local station.

The older of the two, with starkly black hair untidily gathered into a bunch at the back, seemed a little more composed than the artificially blonde girl who was hanging on to her arm and sobbing. Duncan’s wife and daughter, Fleming guessed, and bracing herself she turned to speak to them.

‘DI Fleming, the Senior Investigating Officer. Good morning.’

The policewoman spoke first. ‘Good morning, ma’am. PC MacLean. This is Mrs Duncan and this is Karyn. There’s a son, Ryan, as well, but he isn’t here at the moment.’

Fleming shook Jackie Duncan’s hand and Karyn, still crying, held out hers too. ‘I’m so sorry about this – your husband, your father . . .’ She spoke warily; it was never easy to predict the reception you would get following a death. Responses ranged from physical violence to, even more unnervingly in Fleming’s opinion, humble gratitude that you were there. It was the first time she had encountered embarrassment, evident as Jackie’s face, bleak and tearless before, suddenly flared scarlet and her eyes filled.

‘Oh, Inspector, he wasn’t a bad man, really! I’m so ashamed – I know what he was doing was wrong and wicked and I told him he’d be punished for it. But I never thought of this – he didn’t deserve this, being run down like a stray dog in the road!

‘He just wouldn’t listen to me, wouldn’t even admit what he was doing. I used to get angry with his bare-faced lies, but he was angry too, angry for a long time because with them killing off the fishing he’d to take handouts instead of doing a proper job of work. “I’m on the scrap heap,” he used to say – that’s a terrible thing for a proud man.

‘When he went out it was always just for crabs and lobsters, he said, but it was all round the village what he was up to – him and others too. I’ve lost friends because of that, and clients too.’

‘Mum!’ Karyn’s tears had stopped and she was shaking her mother’s arm urgently. ‘You shouldn’t be saying these things – you’re just upset—’

‘Why shouldn’t I? Do you think someone’s going to come after me? At least then I might find out who’s behind it, who did this to Willie, even if all I could do was curse them with my dying breath—’

She broke down. MacLean put an arm round her shoulders and Fleming said, ‘Mrs Duncan, I think you should let Constable MacLean take you back home now. I hear what you say and I promise you we won’t rest until we find whoever is responsible for this. Unless there’s anything more you think you can tell me now that might point us in the right direction –’

‘Oh God, I wish I did!’

‘– I think we should leave it there. Someone will come and talk to you later when you’re not so distressed. And you too, Karyn.’

The girl muttered, ‘Sure,’ without looking up. Fleming raised her eyebrows; she and the constable exchanged glances. As the Duncans went out, Fleming murmured, ‘You’ll pick up on that?’ Then, as the other woman nodded, added casually, ‘Oh, by the way, you haven’t seen DC Jon Kingsley this morning, have you?’

MacLean looked blank. ‘Don’t think I know him, ma’am. There certainly hasn’t been anyone in plain clothes around while I’ve been here.’

‘Fine.’ There was no point in starting a hue-and-cry if Kingsley was quietly sleeping it off somewhere; on the other hand she was beginning to feel it would be a considerable relief when he appeared. And if he’d recovered from his headache by then she’d make damn sure it came back, with a vengeance.

After a brief conversation with the scene of crime manager and the constable whose record, when she asked to glance at it, showed no note of Kingsley either, she turned to go back to her car and heard a screech of brakes. A big 4WD, a Mitsubishi, had come to a sudden standstill. Leaving it double-parked, Ritchie Elder jumped down from it and came across to intercept her.

‘I hoped I might find you here,’ he said roughly. ‘How can you have failed to prevent this latest disaster? There are questions needing answers.’

He looked terrible. She had thought him tired and strained at the funeral, but this morning, unshaven, dishevelled and wearing a thick navy sweater and lightweight brown trousers apparently snatched at random from his wardrobe, he was barely recognisable as the suave and stylish man she had interviewed the morning after the wreck.

‘I have one or two of those myself, Mr Elder. Perhaps we could make use of your office at the lifeboat shed? I can follow you along and you can move your car before it causes an obstruction.’

She walked away from him, well aware that by so forcefully taking control of the situation she was putting him at a disadvantage – not that it looked, at the moment, as if getting the upper hand was going to be a problem.