The Darkness and the Deep

by Aline Templeton

  Her mother, when Marjory opened the kitchen door, was sitting at the table with a pen in her hand, frowning over a list she was making, but she looked up with a smile when she saw her daughter. She was a sweet-faced woman with plump cheeks and warm brown eyes under a halo of white curls; she greeted her with, ‘Hello, dearie! Well, what have you been doing today?’ just as she had when Marjory was coming in from school with her hair in pigtails. ‘It’s a terrible business, that, about the lifeboat.’

  Marjory sat down opposite her mother and stole a biscuit from the batch that was cooling on a rack on the table. ‘What are you up to?’

  Janet sighed. ‘It was to have been the Knockhaven lifeboat coffee morning next week and I was doing the baking stall. I’m trying to write down all the folk I need to contact to tell them we’re to do the catering at the funeral instead, when the word comes through that it can go ahead. You’d not really want the kind of frivolous things, like chocolate crispies and toffee apples, for a funeral.’

  The macabre combination of ideas was darkly humorous but Marjory managed not to smile. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘No. But Mum, do you know what they’ve decided about the funeral? Is it to be a joint service?’

  Janet looked at her with surprise. ‘My goodness, are you asking me? I’d have thought the police would be the first to know.’

  The jungle drums had been at it again. ‘Nobody ever tells me anything,’ Marjory said bitterly, then heard what she had said. Why was it that whenever she came home she reverted to being fifteen, and touchy with it?

  Her mother said, in precisely the soothing tone she had used then, ‘I expect there’ll be a note coming through to your desk. No, they’d a meeting this morning at the lifeboat shed in Knockhaven and they contacted the families. They’ve all agreed on a service, with private interments later, and all the high heid yins are coming. So us on the Ladies’ Committee’ll need to make sure everything’s just right.’

  Then her face crumpled. ‘But it’s awful sad we’re having to do it. Those poor, poor folks! But you’ll see that whoever did this is caught and punished, won’t you, Marjory?’

  She looked at her daughter with the perfect confidence which only a loving and uncritical nature and an unshakeable belief in the inevitability of justice could bring to such a demand.

  Marjory, with this added burden of maternal expectation, said hollowly, ‘That’s what I’m there to do! Actually, I just dropped in on my way back to HQ. There’ll be some reports I want to read before tomorrow.’

  Janet registered distress. ‘Did you get a proper tea? No? Well, you’ll not leave this house till I’ve made you a nice sandwich. And you’d better take the Tin – I’ll just fill it while you’re eating that. The bairns always like these biscuits, and I’ve a bit of Bill’s favourite fruit cake . . .’

  As Janet bustled about, cutting slices of bread and home-cooked ham, putting baking into the Tin, a battered receptacle which made its journeys out to Mains of Craigie full and came back empty, Marjory sat at the kitchen table, a child again, indulging herself in the foolish feeling that with her mother still there to see to it, nothing could go too badly wrong in her world.

  As Lewis Randall wearily opened the front door of 8 Mayfield Grove, he was assailed by the unusual smell of cooking. He stopped dead, then closed the door behind him with a sigh.

  It hadn’t been an easy day. Not that his patients had been difficult – far from it – but being on the receiving end of so much sympathy and kid-glove treatment was an exhausting business, and all that had kept him going was the promise of a silent house and a very stiff gin. He’d been expecting a call from his mother offering food and solace at The Hollies, which he had decided to refuse; he hadn’t expected to find her making herself at home in his kitchen, though perhaps he should have.

  Like most sons, Lewis had an ambivalent relationship with his mother. They were close, undeniably; he had been the man of the house since his father’s death when Lewis was ten and she had lovingly supported him every step of the long way to a medical degree. Her total belief in him and her fierce devotion had always been there as a bulwark against a hostile world.

  He’d come back to Knockhaven partly for her sake, mainly for his own. Here, on his own patch, he was uncritically accepted, and there was no doubt that, thanks perhaps to his upbringing, he was much more comfortable where he wasn’t constantly challenged to be more dynamic, more pro-active. He liked things the way they were; he was what he was.

  There had never been a problem with his mother. Whatever he had wanted, even Ashley, was all right with her.

  Ashley. Despite their years of marriage and their close working relationship, she had been a mystery to him since the day she had astonished him by accepting his proposal. But then, he hadn’t been looking for a wife who, in the clichéd phrase ‘understood’ him either. His mother’s understanding was quite enough – too much, sometimes. His mother—

  ‘Darling! There you are. Has it been an awful day? Why don’t you go into your study and have a drink? Let me know when you’re ready for supper.’ Dorothy Randall kissed him, then without another word went back into the kitchen.

  He looked after her, a twisted smile on his lips. She had always had this talent for being undemanding, for knowing without his having to tell her what his feelings were. He could sit quietly in solitude with his drink for as long as he needed to, confident that there would be no reproaches that the food had been spoiled; almost against his will he felt a sense of comfort. Food and a mother’s care were so closely linked, it was almost as if the savoury fragrance coming from the kitchen was love made manifest.

  Dorothy was very much on edge, though, he realised as they sat at the bleached oak table in the dining room, so seldom used in his married life. She fiddled restlessly with the cutlery and talked too much, about everything except the thing that was uppermost in both their minds, barely waiting for his responses. At last, when he had refused cheese and they were sitting over coffee, he said gently, ‘Mother, I don’t mind talking about it. We have to, in fact. There are all sorts of details—’

  As if this permission had turned on a tap, it all came pouring out. ‘Oh, Lewis, I’m so frightened! Have they told you – they’ve discovered it wasn’t an accident! And this very morning I had a policeman here, oh, all very nice, very polite, but then I realised he was trying to find out what your movements were! He suspects you, Lewis! You’re the husband, you’re always the first person they suspect when someone’s – someone’s murdered! And when they find out about Ashley and that dreadful man—’

  ‘Mother!’ The steeliness in his tone brought her up short. ‘I wish you would stop being so friendly with Muriel Henderson. She runs to you with every piece of malicious gossip going. That is beneath contempt and I refuse to discuss it.’

  It was a sign of her agitation that even his annoyance did not deter her. ‘But Lewis, you must! We must decide what to do when they come next time, asking these terrible questions. I’ve been thinking about it all day. We must say that we were together last night, that you came up to see me and were here from the time of the rockets going off to just before they phoned you at home. No one will know.’

  He stared at her. ‘You’re not being serious, are you? Lying to the police – that’s madness! If you wanted to create suspicion in their minds, that’s the best way to do it.’

  ‘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?’