Carrion Comfort

by Aline Templeton

  Murray didn’t try to defend herself. There wasn’t any point and all she could think about was how angry Strang would be. She’d been determined to show him that she’d learnt her lesson and yet here she was, making exactly the same kind of mistake again. Perhaps he was right to tell her not to use her initiative – but something in her rebelled at that. This was the job, to get information and act on it.

  After all, she’d found Gary Gunn’s grave using her initiative. And from Gabrielle’s reaction, too, there was at least some foundation for the accusation. They just needed to find out the details and having another chat with Mairi might be the answer; if there was gossip going around she’d know what it was, or at least would know a woman who did. That might give them some sort of insight into the feud between Morven and her brother – if she believed, rightly or wrongly, that Gabrielle had killed her son and Niall had stayed best friends with her, it certainly would sour the family relationship. You could develop some fascinating theories from this.

  If she was going to be allowed to. Her heart sank at the thought that Strang could take her off the case – send her back to Edinburgh with a black mark, even. The best she could expect was doing the menial stuff while Strang took Lothian along on the interviews or even Taylor, after this. Strang had been professional discretion itself but she could tell he didn’t rate Taylor any more than she did. He was going to be so mad at her, though, that all her plans for being his go-to officer had crumbled to dust.

  Taylor said, ‘I’m going to go to Thurso before we report in at Forsich. I need to find a chemist’s to get something for the bite – it’s looking bad.’

  She knew that. He had given a progress report on it every few miles, but feeling to some extent responsible she had refrained from making sarcastic replies.

  He parked outside the shop and went to the door. She saw him try the handle, then bend to peer in, then look at his watch. She looked at her own. Twenty to six. Oh dear.

  Taylor was in a towering temper when he got back in. ‘This is all your fault! If you hadn’t insisted on going in to see Mrs Ross I’d have been in time. Now what do I do?’

  ‘Just wash it with soap,’ she said helpfully. ‘And if it’s really sore I can give you some paracetamol.’

  ‘Oh great. If I come down with septicaemia that’ll be your fault too.’ He got back into the car and drove towards Forsich but as they passed the Masons Arms Murray said, ‘Look, there’s the boss’s car. He must be back in the office. We’d better stop here.’

  As they walked through reception Murray was trying to think of the best slant she could put on what had happened. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing his face change as it was explained to him what had happened.

  She didn’t have to. When they went in, Murray for once meekly behind Taylor, it was obvious from Strang’s expression that he had heard at least part of it already.

  DS Taylor got his version in first. DCI Strang listened with increasing anger, compounded by an unpleasant feeling of helplessness. His first instinct was to send Murray back to Edinburgh and ask for a replacement but that would cost money and it wouldn’t be well received. He couldn’t go on using Lothian all the time either: the SRCS would be billed for that too and DI Hay had already made difficulties.

  ‘All right, Constable. Explanation for all this?’

  ‘I screwed up, sir. I’m very sorry.’

  At least she wasn’t trying to make excuses. ‘As I understand it, you heard about the accusation of murder against Mrs Ross before the briefing this afternoon but said nothing – is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She bowed her head.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I … I just wanted to find out a wee bit more about it first. And I did – I went along to the graveyard and found Mrs Gunn’s son’s grave. Gary he was called. And—’ She stopped abruptly, biting her lip.

  ‘Yes? Go on.’

  ‘It’s … it’s only going to make it worse for me when I do.’

  ‘Pleading the Fifth Amendment won’t do you any good,’ he said dryly. ‘What else did you decide not to tell me at the briefing?’

  He saw her look at him under her lashes as if to see whether that could be showing some lightening of his mood. She wasn’t stupid; the abject apology had been the smartest thing she could do.

  ‘There was a bunch of flowers there – roses, I think, and it had been torn in shreds, really viciously – not just the flowers torn off, but all the stems snapped, and it looked as if it had been stamped on too.’

  ‘And from that you deduced?’

  ‘Not exactly a deduction, sir. I just guessed maybe Mrs Ross had put flowers on the grave and Mrs Gunn didn’t like it. Maybe.’

  Strang sighed. ‘Moving on. You both established that the car was left at the centre on the Saturday, so that at least confirms our theory about the time of death. Now let’s go on to the visit you paid to Mrs Ross – a visit which, in view of her obviously fragile state, I had promised her husband would not take place until he got back from the rig.’

  Murray went pale. ‘I didn’t know that, sir! It was just that we’d tried to speak to her earlier in the day when she was out and when I saw the car I thought if I had a word with her it would save time.’

  ‘But as I understand it what you questioned her about was the accusation of murder, in a peculiarly tactless way, presumably to add to this little private case you were building independently?’

  ‘I know I did, sir. I’m sorry, I think I just … Well, you know.’

  He knew, all right. They both also knew what had happened before when she just …

  She was going on. ‘Like I said, I’m really sorry. But, sir, I didn’t just ask about that. I asked whether Aitchison had stopped in at her house on the way to the Visitor Centre, and that threw her.’

  ‘Did it?’ Taylor said. ‘I didn’t see that. She just paused to remember what her movements that afternoon had been.’

  ‘Caught her breath,’ Murray said flatly. ‘Ten seconds before she said “No”.’

  Strang didn’t doubt that she was right. That was the infuriating thing – she had real ability, if only he could rein her in, while Taylor was a waste of space. He took a sudden decision.

  ‘Kevin, I’ll let you go now to see if you can find someone with a first-aid kit who can give you something for that bite. They’re nasty dirty creatures, clegs. Livvy, you stay for a minute.’

  She was biting her thumbnail as Taylor went out. When the door had shut, Strang said, ‘What’s it all about, Livvy? Why are you trying to run a separate operation?’

  ‘I just wanted to prove to you that I’m good enough to do more than filter reports. If I’d been able to come to you and say, “This is what the trouble between Morven Gunn and her brother is all about,” you’d have been impressed.’

  ‘I see. Well no, Livvy, I wouldn’t have been. I’d have been thoroughly irritated. You don’t have to prove to me that you’re observant and you have good ideas. You have to prove to me that you’re not going to suddenly rush off and do something that fouls everything up. There could quite legitimately be a complaint from the Rosses now.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m going to interview Mrs Gunn, who seems curiously keen on not being interviewed. Kevin will be coming with me. You can liaise with Aberdeen to set up interviews with Bruce Michie and the other two fishermen for the day after tomorrow and get Angie to book two seats on the plane from Wick. We’ll have a briefing at eight-thirty. Right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry again.’

  Had that done any good? Strang sighed again as she went out. He wasn’t convinced that it had and he was faced with taking Taylor around with him tomorrow. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about him interrupting with questions he had just thought of. Strang had serious doubts as to whether Taylor thought at all.

  Gabrielle’s moment of rage had fizzled out as fast as it had flared up. Her tea was cold now, with the lemon slice sitting limply on top; she was standing staring at it with
an odd sort of absorption when the panic attack struck.

  She’d felt strangely detached all day; now she was floating, above and away from her body. Her heart was pounding so that she could barely breathe, and she was hot, far too hot, sweating and trembling. She was possessed by a sense that something terrible was going to happen, something even more terrible than what had happened already. She was dizzy and sick; her knees wouldn’t hold her up any longer and she collapsed back into the chair panting while the world spun about her.

  It felt as if she was dying. She could just let go, drop into the dark abyss, into the silence and the blessed peace. But the force of the attack was waning already and gradually it passed. She was still shaking but her racing heart steadied and slowed, and her breathing became at last easier. She was still here, then. She hadn’t escaped. All the problems were still waiting for her and despair, the enemy she had kept at bay for so long, flooded through her.

  But Paddy had bred her to be hard and resilient and she owed it to him not to give way. She had to take back control – of herself, of the betraying thoughts. She closed her eyes, summoning up her strength. She’d always had a talent for shutting her mind to what she didn’t want to think about, a talent that had stood her in good stead recently, but now her hard-won detachment was under siege.

  Of course, Gabrielle knew she and Paddy had been hated in the village and she was scared by Morven – she could still all but smell the stench of the offal. But it had been a shock to be confronted directly with evidence that not just Morven but others in the village, too, still considered her a murderer even after all these years.

  She wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t, and she had vowed long ago not to let them define her morality. For years she had barely thought about it but now she found herself unable to resist the memories that were forcing themselves upon her, clamorous and strident.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She’d been defending darling Paddy, that was the thing. Her heart had ached on his behalf. He’d had so little left, despite all he’d done to set up the business and then to try to save it, not just for himself but for the community who’d invested in it.

  Not that they were grateful. When they’d thought they were going to make money on the back of his hard work, he was a hero; now Gabrielle was getting spat on at school.

  ‘It wasn’t his fault!’ she would cry, but no one would listen. The girls she had thought were her friends whispered in corners and walked away if she approached. They didn’t know how many hours he spent at the computer late into the night to try to find work that could replace the drainage contract after the government decided that saving the bogland for the newts was more important than providing employment for the community. Or how depressed he got when nothing worked.

  And then Malcolm Sinclair had appeared on the scene. How could her mother choose someone so flabby and boring in preference to Pat, all whipcord muscle with a gift of the gab that meant he could make you laugh till you cried?

  As if she didn’t know. Lilian’s dreams of Pat’s success, of the day when they’d have lots of money and could move out of the shoddily built box near the drainage works into something more aspirational, weren’t going to come true now and in her usual cool, practical way she’d moved on.

  Gabrielle despised her. She wasn’t going to be swept off to the glories of Westerfield House along with Francesca, as Lilian had expected. She was fourteen now; she’d always been a daddy’s girl and she certainly wasn’t going to leave him at the moment when he needed someone to be on his side. Anyway, how could she stand the boredom?

  She’d never forgotten her mother’s fury, or the row that followed. With Pat’s reputation in tatters there had been sympathy in the village for Lilian, but one of her daughters choosing to stay with him risked damaging her image of being in some sense wronged – and to Lilian, image was all.

  As the business imploded and went into administration, Gabrielle suffered every indignity along with her father – Paddy, as she’d started calling him. She was fiercely protective and developed her own hard shell when it came to coping with the anger and contempt from the community.

  At the end, Paddy owned the house and some of the original equipment he’d saved for to set up the business, but that was all. Selling the machines and borrowing against the house should give him enough to make a new start in Aberdeen and Gabrielle couldn’t wait.

  She’d stopped going to school. Everyone there was hateful to her and she’d be leaving anyway with Paddy. He’d tried to persuade her to stay with her mother until she got her Highers, but she wouldn’t listen.

  ‘I don’t need Highers. I’ll be working for you,’ she said. It was only later she realised it made her another burden for Paddy, but he never let it show.

  That afternoon she was anxious. Paddy had gone to try to persuade someone to back him for a share in the firm; she’d stayed alone in the house. She didn’t go into Forsich any more because there was so much rage and hatred for Paddy that it frightened her. She’d been inside at the sitting-room window – just where she was sitting now – when she saw Gary Gunn running past.

  Gabrielle knew him from school, though he was younger − thirteen, maybe. She knew too that he was Niall Aitchison’s nephew. Niall had been the only person who’d stayed loyal to her father and when she saw Gary look up at her she smiled and waved. His face contorted into an ugly mask of hate and he gave her the finger and shouted something, then ran on.

  It felt like a slap in the face and she shrank back out of sight, crying, though she should be used to it by now. It took her a few minutes to start wondering why he should have been running past when he lived in the village. The drainage works! Was he going there, planning on some sort of vandalism, perhaps?

  He wasn’t going to get away with it. Grabbing up from the hallstand the old blackened Irish bogwood stick with its thickly gnarled knob for protection, she hurried out of the house but by that time there was no sign of him. It wasn’t far to the drainage site, abandoned now.

  Just as she reached it, she heard a throaty roar and ran the last few yards. Gary was in one of the sheds, sitting perched high in the cab in a tractor with giant wheels. Somehow, he’d got it started – knowing Paddy, the key was probably still in the ignition – and now it was lurching unsteadily out of the shed, across the dried-out ground. The boy was stealing it!

  That mustn’t happen. It was one of the few assets Paddy had left and he needed every penny he could scrape together. Yelling at the top of her voice, she ran after it.

  Gary heard her and replied with the same insulting finger as he trundled slowly on, right across the dried-out, pitted terrain. She drew level with him, then got ahead, but she dared not get too near those massive wheels. She didn’t trust him anyway not to drive it straight at her. In desperation, she hurled the stick, aiming at the windscreen.

  The heavy knob, hard as iron, struck it four-square. It didn’t break but splintered, leaving Gary driving blind. He didn’t stop, though, lurching on, refusing even now to give up his prize.

  Gabrielle turned to see where he was headed, then shouted and waved in frantic warning. The edge where the drainage stopped and the bogland began was a deep ditch, with an expanse of water at the bottom.

  ‘Gary!’ she shrieked. ‘Stop! Stop! You’re going to crash!’ but he showed no sign that he had heard her, bumping forwards with fatal determination. The huge machine went straight over the edge then toppled slowly, almost majestically, into the dubh loch beyond. The engine cut; the only sound now apart from the surging waves was Gary screaming.

  She scrambled down into the ditch, sick with horror, feeling the pull of the bog as she reached the bottom. The great wheels towered above her and the cabin beyond was sinking deeper, deeper into the loch beyond. Even if she could have reached him the door to the cabin was on the underside.

  ‘Push out the windscreen,’ she shouted. ‘You could climb through, Gary! Kick it out!’

  But he was panicking now. �
��Help me!’ she heard. ‘Help me!’

  There was absolutely nothing she could do. His cries faded behind her as she ran to fetch help, though she knew by the time anyone got there it would be too late.

  It really wasn’t her fault. She’d only been trying to stop him stealing what belonged to Paddy when she hurled the stick. Breaking the windscreen was just an accident, really. He didn’t have to drive on when he couldn’t see. He shouldn’t have stolen the tractor anyway. He’d brought it on himself, the whole thing.

  No one ever found the Irish bogwood stick. The inquest brought in a verdict of accidental death but in the village she was blamed. That hardened her determination not to blame herself, so effectively that she had believed it to the point where she imagined that with the passing of time everyone else would believe it too.

  They didn’t. And now, alone in this isolated house, she began to be very afraid.

  On Wednesday morning DC Murray found a cafe in the high street that did a good line in bacon rolls, and the coffee wasn’t bad either. Even if you could get grey bacon and watery coffee in the hotel at Police Scotland’s expense, this was worth £3.50 of anyone’s money.

  When she got back to the hotel she looked into the dining room but there was no sign of DS Taylor. It was still twenty minutes till their morning briefing session with DCI Strang but remembering his cleg bite she had slight misgivings and went up to his room. When she knocked on the door, his ‘Come in’ sounded a bit feeble.

  He was up and dressed, but he didn’t look great, flushed and sweaty, and she could see his arm was very swollen.

  ‘Oh dear! You’re not looking well,’ she said uncomfortably.

  Taylor glared at her. ‘No, I’m not, thanks to you. Didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. I think it’s infected. I’ll go along to the surgery in Forsich when it opens, but you’ll have to drive me. And I certainly can’t work today and the way I’m feeling I won’t be fit for tomorrow either.’