The Darkness and the Deep

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Oh yes, your lawyer. Well, perhaps he’s familiar with the old saying, “You can’t take the breeks off a Highlandman.” You’d be better phoning your mother to see if she can find a job for you in the shop.’

  It was only then she began to cry and he could view her tears now with total detachment. ‘There’s just one other thing. You didn’t confirm my alibi for the night Willie was killed.’

  ‘How – how could I? I – I didn’t set eyes on you, after seven o’clock,’ she sniffed.

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But then, that means I didn’t see you either, doesn’t it? You might have been tucked up in bed that night, or again you might not. And while I can still hope that they’ll find I really couldn’t have put the lanterns in place on the night the lifeboat was wrecked, I would question whether you can produce an alibi. What were you doing, Joanna, that night?’

  Her tears forgotten, she spat, ‘Bastard!’

  ‘You said that already.’ He was almost enjoying himself. ‘And do you know what they’re doing out there? They’re digging up the drains to see if they can find traces of Willie Duncan’s blood left there, washed off a car. You know, just like they did with Dennis Nilsen house.’

  Elder realised he had lost her attention. She was looking over his shoulder.

  ‘They’re not,’ she said. ‘They’re going away. What’s that about?’

  He turned to look. Then he said, with sudden conviction, ‘They’ve written me out of the script.’ He laughed harshly. ‘And they haven’t written you in yet.’

  Perhaps he only imagined that under the glow of exertion she had turned pale. The truth was, he didn’t really care any more.

  18

  It was clear, from the moment that PC Langlands opened the door to Fleming’s office, that he was pleased. His eyes were bright, his tail was wagging – no, no, of course it wasn’t.

  She liked Sandy Langlands. His resemblance to a Labrador puppy might be so pronounced that you started looking for doggie treats, but enthusiasm was all too rare in a police officer and seldom lasted.

  ‘Sandy.’ She smiled at him. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He beamed back. ‘Well – I think I’ve found something that’s really important, boss.’

  Was she sure she didn’t have a Bonio somewhere? ‘Tell me about it.’ She waved him to a seat.

  He was clutching a brown jotter, which he handed across the desk to her. ‘There was this woman,’ he said, ‘in the cottage at the top of the road to Fuill’s Inlat . . .’

  She leafed through it while he gave her the back story, and suddenly she wasn’t feeling flippant any longer.

  ‘You think this is accurate?’ she said slowly.

  ‘I checked when she’d logged me in on my way down the road this morning, and it was spot-on. And you see, if you look at what she has marked, “Boss’s big car” on the night of the tenth—’

  ‘Went past at 7.19, with the comment, “Driving far too fast”—’

  ‘That’s right. And the girls in the office were absolutely definite that he went into their office at 7.20.’

  Fleming ran her finger down the list, written in a firm if old-fashioned hand. ‘And then she has him coming back up at 7.22. It’s a pity she doesn’t appear to have known anything about cars – Elder’s is the only one she seems to identify apart from lorry, van – then big car, small car sometimes. And no numbers, of course, just the occasion rude comment about their driving. She’s logged fifteen cars coming down to the site that evening from 6.15 on – two close together at the earlier time, then the rest at intervals.’

  ‘That would be the two girls arriving to open up the houses,’ Langlands suggested eagerly. ‘There were eleven couples viewing, then Ritchie Elder. That’s . . .’ He paused to calculate.

  ‘Fourteen,’ Fleming supplied. ‘It isn’t news, of course. We know already that the Wrecker had to have driven down that lane. But we could get a time-fix on him from this.’ Tapping her pen on her teeth, Fleming considered. ‘Right, Sandy. Get back to the people who were there legitimately. Let’s hope they can remember when they arrived at the site.’

  Langlands was on his feet already. ‘They were interviewed the day after it happened so they probably will. I’ll get right on to it, boss.’

  As he left with a spring in his step, Fleming looked down at the flimsy notebook on her desk. Was she going to change the whole thrust of the enquiry on the evidence of a cantankerous elderly lady with a bee in her bonnet? When it chimed precisely with her own unease, and Tam’s, and considering the cost of the operation going on at this moment at Bayview House, you’re damn right she was.

  The atmosphere in Galloway Police Headquarters was charged when Tam MacNee came in, so charged that he could hardly believe that there were actually members of the public sitting peacefully unaware in the waiting area. They must be brain-dead, or cyclists, maybe, reporting the theft of their push-bikes. Or one of their anoraks. MacNee was politically incorrect on the subject of cyclists.

  ‘Tam!’ Jock Naismith hailed him from behind the front desk. ‘What’s going on? Big Marge has pulled everyone back—’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ MacNee walked briskly through the hall, left his notes in the CID room, then took the stairs to the fourth floor two at a time.

  Fleming glanced up when he came in, then said abstractedly, ‘Take a seat. Be with you in a second.’ She had a big sheet of paper in front of her and she was scribbling on it with a frown of concentration.

  One of her ‘mind-maps’ – that was what she called them, something she’d picked up at one of the training courses he had always avoided when he could. His first sergeant, God rest his black soul, had warned them all to be careful of the sort of thing they might pick up on residential courses.

  At last she looked up. ‘OK, Tam – what have you heard?’

  ‘All I know is that when I passed the CID room Jon Kingsley was sitting alone at a desk looking as if someone taken his Saturday penny. So whatever it is, it can’t be all bad.’

  She gave him a quelling look. ‘I had to tell him before it became general knowledge. Take a look at this.’ She pushed a brown jotter across the desk and while he flipped through it went back to frowning over the scribbled sheet in front of her.

  It didn’t take him long. ‘If this is accurate—’

  ‘I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be. And the Super agrees.’

  ‘He was jake with this?’

  ‘Not exactly. He – er – whimpered a little.’ She couldn’t resist adding, ‘I think it helped that when he’d called Jon in for a pat on the back yesterday he’d felt patronised.’

  ‘Go on, what did he say?’

  She wouldn’t be drawn. ‘He agreed, that’s all. You know, Tam, I should be feeling depressed – and after Don and the Chief Constable see tomorrow’s headlines I probably will be. After all this time the only progress we’ve made has been negative, but somehow I feel liberated.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’ She indicated the paper in front of her. ‘One of the good things Jon’s done is have the drug samples he picked up in pubs around the area analysed, and what they’re telling us is that they’ve all come from the same source – Ritchie Elder’s operation. He didn’t have rivals in the area who might have taken out Willie in a turf war, which was something that had crossed my mind. So if it isn’t drugs behind this, someone, in all probability, killed Willie to make us believe it was.

  ‘So I’ve been focusing on the other deaths. Luke, poor lad – there’s absolutely nothing suspicious. Which leaves us with either Ashley Randall or Rob Anderson as victim.

  ‘Of course we have to dig deeper. But looking here,’ she pointed to a circle with the name Ashley Randall at its centre, and lines coming from it, ‘what catches my eye is this – the figure in the shadows.’ She tapped Lewis Randall’s name. ‘Jon’s talked to him, you’ve talked to him – neither of you came back with anything to say.’

  MacNee grimaced. ‘Funny
bloke. Either there’s nothing there, or under that cool exterior there’s a seething mass of passions.’

  ‘That’s almost poetic, Tam. See, you can do it yourself – you don’t have to quote Burns. And it’s cheaper. Anyway, there are the women to consider too in that area. Dorothy Randall, Joanna Elder, Enid Davis.’

  ‘Enid Davis?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘No one’s talked to her yet. Oh, I know what you said about Randall’s attitude to her, but if he’s a seething mass he may be secretly harbouring a passion for her – the most improbable people inspire timeless love. Look at Camilla Parker Bowles. And if Enid could be sure that only Ashley stood in her way—’

  ‘OK, OK, Enid. And Dorothy, if you ask me, would cheerfully strangle anyone with her bare hands if they so much as looked at Lewis sideways—’

  ‘And Tansy says Joanna would auction her grandmother for ten pence on her maintenance cheque,’ finished Fleming. ‘Do you reckon it could be a woman’s crime, Tam?’

  He shrugged. ‘Why not? But aren’t you forgetting someone?’

  ‘Nat Rettie,’ she said slowly. ‘No. No, I’m not.’

  ‘Maybe we need to pull him in again.’

  ‘I’ll give it some thought. What I need is some space to think this through, and I won’t get it here at my desk so I’m going to take off. I want to have a chat with Laura too, if I can get hold of her.’ She glanced out of the window; the sky was clear and white clouds, driven by a brisk breeze, were scudding by. ‘Maybe she and Daisy would fancy a walk on the beach. I’ve a couple of things I want to ask her advice on.’

  MacNee looked at her sharply. ‘Bill all right?’

  ‘Oh, Bill’s fine. We’re working our way back to where we were and I reckon we’ll make it. No, it’s – it’s Cat. I think I told you she’s far too chummy with Kylie MacEwan.’

  Nat’s girlfriend. MacNee nodded. That maybe explained Marjory’s hesitation about him.

  ‘There’s something upsetting Cat and she’s not eating properly. And I can’t get her to tell me what the problem is.’

  ‘Laura’s just the lass you need to talk to, then.’ He was one of Laura’s big fans.

  ‘That’s what Bill said, when I told him last night.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Tam had detected a certain constraint in Bill’s attitude to his wife’s friend; Marjory would be pleased if Bill was coming round. ‘Away you go, then. Say I was asking for her.’

  Her eyes watering in the wind, Marjory Fleming pulled up the zip of her weatherproof jacket as far as it would go, and sank her chin into it. Laura Harvey’s small figure beside her was bundled up in a pink wool coat with a striped beanie hat pulled down over her ears and a matching scarf wound three times round her neck, while Daisy raced in circles round them on the hard sand below the tideline, her ears blowing back like small furry pennants.

  Laura sneezed, then laughed. ‘It’s this air! It tickles the inside of my nose, like the bubbles in champagne.’

  Marjory looked about her. ‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ Her gesture took in the wide majesty of the sky, the deserted beach, the spits of rock running down into the sea, the low, wind-barbered shrubs on the other side of the road where their own parked cars were the only vehicles in sight. Above their heads, seabirds leaned into the wind, with the occasional keening cry.

  Laura paused to stare out to the empty ocean with its white-capped waves foaming in, to vanish in a flurry of spent bubbles in the coarse sand. ‘Alone in the universe!’ she declaimed.

  ‘I wish!’ Marjory said with feeling, and her friend turned to look at her.

  ‘How’s the case going?’

  It was a measure of Marjory’s maternal disquiet that she waved aside the investigation which had been occupying most of her waking hours. ‘I do want to ask you about that later, but what’s worrying me most at the moment is Cat.’

  She filled in the background, then went on, ‘We haven’t been happy about Cat’s friendship with this girl, even before all the worrying stuff about Nat Rettie came out. But it’s only very recently she hasn’t been eating. Last night I think she fed her supper to the dog when no one was looking and then when I’d comforted myself with the thought that she’d eaten a meringue, I smelled sick in the bathroom. Mother’s worried too. You know how it is with adolescent girls.’

  ‘Anorexia nervosa.’ Laura nodded. ‘And you’re right to be concerned – it’s a psychological cliché that it often afflicts conscientious, well-behaved girls like Cat.’

  ‘Not at the moment.’ Marjory laughed shortly. ‘You should have heard what they said at her Parents’ Evening! I tried to talk to her about it at bedtime last night, and she just denied it flatly. She doesn’t seem to have lost a lot of weight yet, but I don’t understand, Laura – what’s it about? What can we do?’

  ‘The nervosa bit indicates that it’s got an emotional rather than a physical origin. Sometimes it can happen when the family – especially the mother – has an obsessive attitude to food, dieting or not eating anything that isn’t specifically “healthy”.’ She caught Marjory’s eye and they both laughed.

  ‘Not exactly Cat’s problem,’ Marjory said ruefully.

  ‘Nonsense. You’re perfectly in proportion for your height,’ Laura said robustly. ‘The other theory is that it’s sexual, a subconscious fear of having to deal with the problems of being a woman. Extreme weight loss means you don’t menstruate, effectively becoming a child again. From what you’ve said, it wouldn’t be at all unlikely that she’s feeling threatened by her friend’s precocity. There must be a lot of conflict between what she knows is right and sensible, and loyalty to her peer.’

  ‘So how do we tackle it?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Cat has to sit down to meals – you’d be astonished how many children don’t – so you’ve spotted it before it’s had a real chance to affect her physically. I don’t believe this is an on-going family problem; I think if we tackle the situation she’s in at school, try to take away the pressure she’s feeling, it would sort itself out.’

  Marjory sighed. ‘I feel so guilty – she had such nice friends, before all the foot-and-mouth fuss. She says they talk to her quite pleasantly again now, but of course she’s cut herself off by her friendship with Kylie.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her to walk round tomorrow after school and have tea with me? I might manage to get her talking. Say I wondered if she’d like to see Daisy.’

  ‘She’d love to. She and Bill were both wondering how she was getting on. Thanks, Laura.’

  ‘No problem.’ The dog, perhaps hearing her name, had come panting back to her mistress’s feet and Laura bent to pick up a seaweed root to throw for her. ‘So – what about the case? Everyone’s talking about it, of course. The rumours in this place fascinate me – it’s like a flock of starlings, all wheeling one way and then for no apparent reason wheeling round all at the same time and heading in the opposite direction.’

  ‘What’s the latest?’ Marjory asked with interest.

  ‘Ah! The latest but one was that Willie had gone around saying definitely he wasn’t a target, so his death had to be just to divert suspicion. But then, with Ritchie Elder being arrested, they’ve decided Willie was wrong.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how relieved I am that they’re not up-to-date yet with the latest development. I was beginning to think they had my office bugged.

  ‘Keep it to yourself, but we’ve got evidence that Elder couldn’t have set up the wreck of the lifeboat. So I’m going to assume, at least for the moment, that he didn’t kill Willie either.

  ‘Laura, I need you to talk me through it, from a psychological point of view – did I ever think I would hear myself say these words? But the thing is, we just can’t get a proper handle on it – tiny bits and pieces of information are coming in, but painfully slowly, and all that any of them seem to do is prove a negative.’

  ‘If you’re talking psychology, actually having a negative instead of a wishy-washy maybe this, maybe that, w
ould be a rare treat. Oh God, Daisy’s found a dead bird! Daisy, drop it!’ Laura rushed ahead to drag the reluctant dog away from her trophy.

  Marjory followed her, arguing. ‘Yes, but no one expects you to bring someone to court at the end of a therapy session, do they? Bear with me. There isn’t the faintest shred of evidence to suggest that for all his personal problems, poor Luke Smith wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If what we’re talking about is the deaths of Ashley Randall and Rob Anderson, a group of suspects suggests itself.’ She outlined them, then added ruefully, ‘Of course, if we manage to eliminate all of them, Knockhaven has a population of around two thousand who could have heard the lifeboat being called out and decided wrecking it would be fun, but at that point I resign from the Force and start doing farmhouse B&B instead.’

  Laura smiled, but her brows furrowed in concentration. ‘You said the last time that you believed the killer thought the wreck would be put down to an accident – but once it wasn’t, to be so determined to protect yourself that you’d mow another person down in cold blood . . . Though of course, the idea was probably suggested by the stories flying round about Willie saying it was meant to be him.

  ‘It’s not hands-on stuff. It’s not psychopathic killing for the perverted pleasure of direct violence. The methods suggest a sort of dissociation, a reluctance to get your hands dirty, squeamishness, even. The wreck, for example – you could almost persuade yourself that you had invoked outside agencies to achieve the execution. And even the car – that’s at one remove too. Sort of, “I don’t like what I’m doing, so if I pretend I’m not . . .”’

  ‘But if you felt like that, how could you kill innocent people?’

  ‘Certainly, it would present problems for anyone who wasn’t a full-blown psychopath. Unless you somehow convinced yourself that the others weren’t innocent – or I suppose the way you could square it might be by arguing that killing someone who in your eyes was fit to die unfortunately resulted in collateral damage, like dropping a bomb. The second death – to continue the military image, you’d class that as shooting someone in self-defence. But all I’m doing here is thinking aloud. Were you leaning particularly hard on any of your suspects at that time?’