The Darkness and the Deep

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Right.’ Joanna’s expression was thoughtful. ‘I’d better contact my lawyer immediately to safeguard my interests. So what do you want to know?’

  Kerr had been debating the first question. The most important one – could she confirm her husband’s alibi? – suggested itself, but she had a feeling the woman could be led on to talk about her husband and it seemed unlikely she’d want to do him any favours. It was chancing her arm, but . . . ‘Was your husband having an affair with Ashley Randall?’

  This wasn’t the best position for conducting an interview. It was easy for Joanna, lying down, to turn her head, as she did now, and look straight in front so that Kerr could not easily see her expression. The length of the pause before she spoke, though, told its own story of calculation.

  ‘He – might have been, I suppose. My cleaning ladies “felt I ought to know” – people are always so helpful that way, aren’t they? – and yes, I should think they were right.’

  ‘Was he in love with her?’

  Joanna didn’t turn her head away this time, meeting Kerr’s gaze with wide, innocent eyes. ‘Goodness, of course not! It was hardly the first time. I’ve just learned to accept that ours is that sort of marriage; he comes back to me in the end.’

  ‘But it won’t be such a happy ending now, will it?’ Kerr slipped the knife in.

  Joanna’s eyes narrowed. ‘It depends what happens, doesn’t it? If you lot can’t prove anything—’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find we can. You don’t think we’d have charged him if we couldn’t?’

  ‘Right,’ she said again, but she accepted Kerr’s uncompromising reply with impressive coolness. ‘Well, before you ask, I knew nothing about it. I never saw bags of curious white powder lying around the house, we didn’t have carloads of dubious people ringing the bell after dark. I’ll be astonished if all your searching comes up with anything around this house, unless it’s on his computer – my ladies clean every corner. And believe me, at this stage I’d tell you anything I knew.’

  Kerr had no brief for the scum who dealt in death, but this was a fairly breathtaking level of callous disengagement. ‘You wouldn’t feel you maybe should “stand by your man”?’ She indicated the quotation marks ironically.

  ‘If he was drug dealing? Dear me, no.’

  Was that a moral position, or had the phrase ‘and got caught’ somehow been omitted from her statement? It was hardly a question to which Kerr could expect a truthful answer. Time to change tack and go for the big one. ‘Mrs Elder, your husband said he was here at home with you all last night. Can you confirm that?’

  ‘Last night? Oh – Willie Duncan,’ she said slowly. ‘You – you have him in the frame for that too?’

  ‘It’s simply a routine check on people’s movements. Was he here?’

  Joanna shrugged. ‘He might have been. I wouldn’t know. I was here, but we don’t see much of each other these days. He’s sleeping in one of the spare rooms at the moment.’

  Kerr wanted to punch the air and cry, ‘Yes!’ Instead, she said calmly, ‘Do you mean you didn’t see him all evening?’

  ‘I saw him around seven. I asked when he wanted to eat but he said he wasn’t hungry, that he’d grab a sandwich later.’

  ‘But you didn’t hear him leave the house, or take his car out, or anything?’

  ‘I was in the sitting room at the back, and then I went up to our bedroom which looks out that way as well.’

  ‘Where did you think he went, after you saw him?’

  ‘I don’t know – to his study, probably. That’s at the other end of the house.’

  ‘And did he seem on edge?’

  Joanna laughed with what sounded like genuine amusement. ‘On edge? My dear girl, Ritchie has been a neurotic heap since the day the lifeboat was wrecked.’

  It was said so innocently that it took Kerr a moment to realise that her attention was being very skilfully redirected. This needed a blunt response; she wasn’t going to start playing games. ‘Mrs Elder, are you telling me you think your husband was behind that too?’

  ‘Behind what? The wreck? Good God, no – do you think I’d have been prepared to share my bed with a murderer?’ Her outrage was beautifully done.

  ‘Of course not,’ Kerr said soothingly – though of course, by her own admission Joanna hadn’t been sharing a bed with him anyway. ‘But leaving that aside, you’re saying you can’t confirm he was in this house between, say, seven-thirty and twelve-thirty last night?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, no.’ She screwed her face into a small, regretful pout.

  Kerr briefly imagined it framed in fur, wearing just that expression as the troika rattled over the rutted snow and Joanna Elder pushed her husband off the back to be torn apart by the waiting wolves. ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ she said, getting up.

  As she started her car, Tansy could see Joanna, stripped off again and heading towards the gym area. That was one fit, determined lady.

  Elated at her success, Tansy drove back to Kirkluce. At last she felt she would be able to make a real contribution to the investigation; while the lack of confirmation of Elder’s alibis didn’t prove anything, at least it meant that there could be no possible objections to their taking his entire life apart. And to a limited extent she agreed with Jon – once you looked hard enough, in the right direction, sooner or later you found what you were looking for.

  Fleming was running late for the autopsy, but she really had very little incentive to hurry. They all knew, only too well, what had happened to Willie; it would have been different if useful information was likely to emerge, but as it was she was content to be as late as possible. The less time she had to spend in the mortuary, the happier she would be.

  So when Tam MacNee accosted her in the corridor on the way out she was quite prepared to be further delayed, not least since she wanted to satisfy her curiosity about his stifled objection.

  ‘I was on my way to see you to tell you they managed to intercept Sheriff Dobbie on his way home to his tea and got the warrants sworn out, and the mobile guys are going to get to work on tracing the coastguard call now.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, sure. Now tell me what you were really coming to say.’

  He shrank back dramatically. ‘“She shook baith mickle corn and bear, And kept the countryside in fear!” Witchcraft!’

  ‘That’s ten pence.’ She held out her hand. ‘We’re getting quite a nice wee collection. It’s going to the first charity I can find that supports single mothers – that seems appropriate, somehow.

  ‘So – tell me what it was you didn’t want to say in front of Jon.’

  MacNee was indignant. ‘I should be getting a gold star for good behaviour,’ he protested. ‘There’d been a bit of a stushie already when I didn’t go right along with him and I didn’t think you’d be best pleased at another one.

  ‘But the thing is, you know what Kingsley said about citric acid?’

  ‘That it’s used along with drugs? Yes.’

  ‘You don’t need to go to a dealer for it. You can buy it in quantity on the Internet if you don’t fancy drawing attention to yourself at the local chemist’s. It’s used at the point when someone’s preparing heroin to inject, and if Elder’s mainlining, he’s the first Mr Big I’ve known who’s daft enough to take what he’s selling.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Fleming said slowly.

  ‘The thing is,’ MacNee persisted, ‘Kingsley took that as more or less final proof of his guilt, but it’s actually a link to drug taking, not drug dealing. And the man claims he’s got an alibi, anyway.’

  Fleming winced. ‘Don’t say that, Tam! You don’t believe he’s the Wrecker, do you?’

  ‘Since you ask me, no. And,’ he said shrewdly, ‘if you ask me, neither do you.’

  She put up a feeble defence. ‘Maybe his alibi will collapse. And being in the drugs trade, there could have been someone around him doing drugs—’

  MacNee gave her a pitying look. ‘And him do
ing his craft work with glass paint on the lanterns at the time? Do me a favour!’

  ‘So where do you go from there? Start looking for someone who brews home-made wine, like Tansy suggested?’

  ‘Or,’ he said with heavy emphasis, ‘look for someone connected to the case who might well be doing a bit of H on the side?’

  Fleming stared at him. She had no difficulty in following his reasoning, but it didn’t make her happy. ‘You think we eliminated him from enquiries a bit too soon? But Tam, if Rob was the intended victim and Ashley and Luke and Willie were killed for no other reason than to divert suspicion, and the Wrecker has any reason to feel threatened again . . .’

  ‘Aye. Who’s next?’

  Shaken, Marjory said, ‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Tam. Tansy may come back with evidence that his alibis don’t stand up, and looked at objectively, the citric acid isn’t really evidence one way or another. Just for the sake of argument, the lamps could have picked up traces from a surface that had been used by an addict previously.

  ‘Anyway, I’d better go. I’m calling in at the mortuary – briefly, I hope – then going straight home. I’m going to have a long, scented bath to try to get the smell of the place out of my nostrils, and then I’m going to pretend I have the sort of job that you sometimes don’t think about for a whole evening.’

  17

  Refreshed after a bath which she almost felt had cleansed her mind as well as her body, and wearing her oldest, softest jeans and a mohair sweater retired from front-line duties, Marjory came downstairs to the farmhouse kitchen. Her mother, heaven bless her – and she must make time to phone her for a chat this evening – had been out yesterday and left a casserole Marjory had put into the Aga when she came in, and already there was a wonderful smell coming from it. She’d only had to add baked potatoes for the main course, and when she’d looked in the Tin there were even some meringues there for pudding.

  Cat’s favourites. That was good. There had been far too many evenings lately when Marjory had not been there to see for herself exactly what her daughter was – or wasn’t – eating. To her anxious eyes, the child was looking thinner, though today when Cat came in from school she was wearing an outsize cardigan nicked from her mother’s wardrobe, so it was hard to tell. Bill had said he was sure she was fine, but then Marjory hadn’t specifically spelled out her worries to him. And perhaps this was making too much of it – a function of her own guilt at her absences, perhaps. Her mother always noticed everything; she could ask her about it when she phoned. She’d probably just say, reassuringly, that the child was ‘off her food’, a phrase Marjory remembered being used in her own childhood.

  She was whipping up some of the rich yellow cream they always got from the Raeburns when Cammie, declaring himself ravenous as always, came in and started raking about for biscuits to stave off the pangs in the interminable interval between now and the moment when his supper would hit his stomach. His mother opened her mouth to say he would spoil his appetite, then realising that he wouldn’t – fat chance of that! – shut it again. You had to yak on often enough about the important things; it was pure masochism to nag when you didn’t have to.

  Through the window Bill came into view, crossing the yard and raising his hand in greeting. He came into the kitchen with Meg at his heels; she trotted across to sniff wistfully at the oven door and her master, too, snuffed the air as he padded across in his stocking-feet to kiss his wife.

  ‘Now here’s a treat – all four of us in for supper, and better still, it’s Granny’s cooking, eh, Cammie?’ he said disloyally.

  ‘Traitor!’ Marjory accused him. ‘How do you know this isn’t just a little something I whipped up when I came in from work?’

  ‘Because I saw her leave it in the fridge, covered with foil.’

  ‘And anyway, if you’d made it, Mum, it wouldn’t smell that good.’

  ‘Cheeky brat! Why don’t you learn to cook yourself? They have cookery classes at school.’

  ‘They’re for girls,’ Cammie said with chauvinistic scorn.

  ‘I’ve told you before that you can be a pukka chap and make loads of money too as a chef but even I’m getting bored with going on about Jamie Oliver.

  ‘Where’s your sister? Go and give her a shout, Cammie, while I dish up.’

  Even so, Cammie was half-way through his heaped plateful before Cat appeared, still in the enveloping cardigan, and sliding into the room in the way she had developed lately, as if by staying close to the wall she might become invisible.

  She took her place at the table and said to her mother, waiting by the stove, ‘Not too much for me, Mum, OK? I’m not feeling so great – there’s this bug going round at school.’

  ‘It’s a long time since lunch. You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat,’ Marjory said firmly, but she spooned out a small helping; if, for whatever reason, you weren’t very hungry a brimming plate was very off-putting. ‘I’ll just give you half a potato,’ she compromised, ‘but I want to see you eat it.’

  ‘Can I have the other half?’ Cammie said quickly. ‘And please can I have some more stew?’

  Shaking her head, Marjory took the dish out of the Aga again. ‘All right, bring over your plate,’ she said. ‘And I expect Dad probably wants some more too.’

  Bill and Cammie had embarked on an animated discussion about Scotland’s prospects – dismal, it appeared – for the new international rugby season, and when Marjory sat down with her own food she noticed with some relief that Cat had eaten quite a lot – not much of the potato, but most of the stew seemed to have disappeared. Then, when the meringues appeared, she saw Cat look at them hungrily and watched her demolish every mouthful. As the children disappeared, allegedly to do their homework, and Bill went out again to finish up some chores, she relaxed in her chair. She’d been making a mountain out of a molehill after all.

  And then she realised where Meg, who had gone out with her master, had come from. At mealtimes Meg always lay by the Aga patiently keeping a weather-eye open for any delicious leftover that might come her way. She hadn’t been there tonight; she’d been under the table, sitting by Cat’s place. It was a strict rule that no titbits were given at mealtimes and Meg would have had to be encouraged, probably over a matter of days, to expect to be fed. Marjory was alarmed all over again – but on the other hand, Cat had definitely eaten the meringue; she decided not to say anything to Bill until she’d talked to her mother.

  She’d often suspected that her mother was telepathic, so when the phone rang she wasn’t surprised to hear Janet’s voice at the other end. Not wanting to worry her, Marjory had planned to wait before introducing the subject of Cat being ‘off her food’ in a non-alarmist way. She didn’t have the chance. After the briefest of greetings, her mother said, ‘I’m so glad you’re at home tonight, pet. I’ve been getting awful worried about Cat.’

  Marjory’s heart sank. ‘Cat?’ she asked hollowly. As if she didn’t know.

  Katy Anderson, too, was heating up a casserole for supper. Shamed by Joanna Elder’s ill-concealed distaste at the state of the sitting room and almost more by Enid Davis’s kindly offer to stay on and help her tidy everything away, she had taken up the reins of her household again. They felt strange in her hands, but she realised she must move on to the second, almost more painful stage of grief: accepting that life continued, even in this mutilated form when you had lost half of yourself.

  She opened the windows in the sitting room, picked up the scattered newspapers and untidy bundles of memories to sort through and put away tomorrow, then vacuumed and dusted and polished. In the kitchen, she washed up the dishes Nat had left, threw out dead flowers and watered thirsty pot-plants, putting away the kindly offerings from her neighbours (and Joanna’s almond-stuffed olives and balsamic vinegar). At the end of it she was feeling tired, but to her surprise hungry too. Enid’s casserole, a sort of all-in-one hotpot, must be almost ready. Perhaps she’d open a bottle of wine and see whether the the
ory about a new beginning, which had sounded plausible at the time, would work.

  Katy had heard Nat come in earlier and go straight across to his room. When she called him he came in looking surprised, his eyes flicking round the now orderly kitchen. He was wearing jeans with a hole in the knee and a V-necked T-shirt and he looked grubby, with a fluff of adolescent beard; she’d always had to nag him to shower and shave.

  ‘Oh – feeling better, then?’ he said, going to sit down.

  ‘Well . . .’ It was oversensitive to feel he was suggesting grief was like flu, to be got over in a week. ‘I thought we ought to get back to proper meals. A friend of mine handed in this casserole.’

  Nat peered at it distrustfully as she brought it to the table. ‘S’pose it’ll do.’

  Don’t react, she told herself. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’

  ‘Any beer?’

  ‘Not up here, no.’

  ‘Oh, whatever.’

  Katy served the food, opened the wine and poured out a glass for each of them; he drank his in two mouthfuls, then, unasked, helped himself to another. That alarmed her; perhaps wine hadn’t been such a good idea after all. His father had been a mean drunk.

  He was eating in silence. ‘What have you been doing, then?’ she asked, feeling foolish but unable to think of a less banal way to open the conversation.

  ‘Nothing much. School – the usual. Having to look after myself.’

  She ignored the implied reproach. ‘Was everyone talking about what happened to Willie? I can’t bear to think about it – on the way back from helping me out in the bar, just being kind. Did – did you see anything?’

  Nat’s eyes flickered to her face for a moment, then back to his plate. ‘Nuh.’

  ‘Nat, think about it! Your room looks out that way – if you noticed anything, a car parked in a funny place, say, or anything, however small, you should tell the police.’

  He set down his knife and fork and leaned across the table towards her, scowling. ‘Look, I said I didn’t see anything, OK?’