Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  But the paperwork! More by the month, it seemed, never mind the year. Down at the charge bar it took thirteen separate forms just to admit a drunk to the cells to sober up. And try that in triplicate for the work up here on the fourth floor.

  She hadn’t really analysed at the time why she had felt so driven to get first her sergeant’s stripes and then promotion to inspector. It had taken Bill to suggest, with his usual shrewdness, that it might have something to do with her need to prove to her father she could do just as well as the son he’d always wanted. But it hadn’t worked, had it?

  Angus Laird, ‘Sarge’ to generations of Galloway police officers, had made himself a legend in the Force, as much by length of service as by his abilities. He had stayed on long past the time when he could have collected his pension because in his own eyes he was the job; he saw himself as an old-fashioned copper, keeper of the flame, a one-man bastion against the touchy-feely revolution which had ripped the guts out of the Force. The top brass said all the right things, but with a certain relief, when he went at last into bored and frustrated retirement.

  Marjory didn’t tell him when she applied to join, but on her first day in the job had presented herself to him in uniform, much as a labrador puppy would hopefully offer a trophy to its master. She might have fared better with a half-chewed slipper. He made it clear she was only a token woman who would never make more than a second-rate contribution to a man’s world.

  Her elevation to sergeant and her impressive work in the CID didn’t change his mind either. ‘Whatever you do, it won’t be enough,’ Bill always warned her when she agonised over it, but somehow she couldn’t just let it go. Her promotion to inspector followed in record time.

  ‘He can hardly say I haven’t done well now,’ she had said triumphantly to her husband as she prepared to go and tell her parents of her success at their retirement bungalow on the outskirts of Kirkluce, about five miles from the farm.

  Bill was a quiet man who weighed his words. He hesitated now, before saying gently, ‘You do realise you’ve totally blown it? He’ll never forgive you for achieving what he failed to achieve for all his years’ service.’

  She stopped, stricken. Of course he wouldn’t.

  Still fiercely erect at seventy, with a shock of pure white hair, Angus Laird’s eyes had narrowed with what she recognised in dismay as jealousy and even hatred.

  ‘It’s a sad day for the Force I was always proud to belong to, when they’re stopped from appointing a man to do a man’s job. Or it would be, if it was a man’s job any more.’

  That was all he said, while his wife Janet, plump, warm-hearted and uncritically admiring of both members of her family, had exclaimed at Marjory’s extraordinary cleverness and said how proud she was. Which, unfairly, had meant very little to her daughter.

  Marjory sighed. Today was one of her days for looking in on them on the way home; her father, as always, would be sitting watching television while complaining that there was nothing worth watching these days, and her mother would ask her, just as she had done when Marjory came home from school, ‘What have you been doing today, dear?’ She knew better than to mention paperwork, which would only provide a focus for her father’s scorn.

  Anyway, sitting brooding wasn’t going to get it done. She was reluctantly picking up her pen again when there was a tap on the door. ‘Come!’ she called, setting it down with alacrity and looking up expectantly.

  ‘Got a moment, ma’am?’ PC Sandy Langlands was a young officer with dark curly hair and a cheery countenance and Fleming’s face brightened.

  ‘Come away in! You’re a welcome sight.’ As he took the seat on the other side of the desk, she added, indicating the disorder of papers on her desk, ‘But don’t let it go to your head. Hannibal Lecter would be a welcome sight right now. If we put in the hours we spend number-crunching to keep civil servants sitting on their fat backsides drawing their fat pay-packets we could get the crime figures down without any daft government targets – but don’t get me started. What can I do for you?’

  Big Marge was famed for not mincing her words. Langlands grinned. ‘Mostly social, actually.’

  She took note of the word ‘mostly’ as he went on, holding up a wodge of tickets. ‘Burns Supper. It’s on Saturday . . .’

  She looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Did DS MacNee put you up to this?’ she demanded.

  He was taken aback. ‘Well, yes, he did, right enough.’

  Fleming groaned. Tam MacNee was her senior sergeant in the CID who quoted Burns in and out of season and treated as heresy her low opinion of the man who was the locality’s greatest son. Allegedly. She leaned back in her chair.

  ‘Listen, laddie, I’ve nothing against haggis and neeps and tatties. I’ve even got nothing against the man’s poetry. It’s this mindless praise of the man himself sticks in my craw. If he’d been writing today he’d be working for Loaded. He’s got that phooarr! love-’em-and-leave-’em mentality and schmoozing was his other favourite activity – specialised in sucking up to the toffs and then stabbing them in the back when they got tired of being exploited. You’d have to put me under restraint to get me to sit and listen to that hypocritical bastard being drooled over by maudlin honest men and simpering bonnie lassies.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?’ he said demurely.

  ‘With those powers of deductive reasoning we should have you in the CID. Right, we’ve sorted that. Now, what was the other thing?’

  Langlands looked startled. ‘The other thing? How – how—’

  It did her no harm to have a reputation for mind-reading. ‘The thing you really came in to see me about.’

  Flustered, he said, ‘Well – it’s a bit tricky. Off the record, if you don’t mind, ma’am.’

  Fleming grimaced inwardly. The ‘bricks without straw’ game, as she called it privately, was one of the curses of police work, when you were expected to take action without using the evidence you’d been given to justify it. ‘Mmm,’ she said, not committing herself. ‘As long as you understand that if it’s unofficial it may tie my hands.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. It’s just – well, it’s a problem with one of the DSs and I thought a word from you could maybe stop it ending up a formal complaint to the Super.’

  ‘Fair enough. I appreciate that, Sandy.’ She did, too. A formal complaint about a subordinate was a procedural nightmare. ‘Let’s have it, then.’

  The constable cleared his throat nervously. ‘It’s – it’s DS Mason.’

  Not the biggest surprise since her Christmas stocking. ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘PC Jackie Johnston – do you know her? Just started three weeks ago.’

  ‘Can’t put a face to her, I’m afraid.’ As DI her responsibilities were on the crime side, and she didn’t have a lot to do with officers in training.

  ‘Right enough, she’s a quiet wee lass and just between ourselves I’m not sure she’s cut out for the job. She was about hysterical after he’d finished with her, just because he asked her to administer the caution and she hadn’t got it off pat. She’s never going to win through if someone with fifteen years’ seniority on her and fully twice her size loses it and yells at her.’

  Fleming sighed. The Mason temper: she could think of three generations of that family who’d had it, and it wasn’t the first time Conrad had indulged the family vice. He wasn’t all that popular with his colleagues anyway, but as MacNee had once said, ‘He’s maybe gallus but at least he’s got smeddum,’ and she couldn’t help but agree: there was a bit too much of Jack the Lad about him, but he had that spark of lively energy called in Scots by the name of an ancient insecticide, guaranteed to make fleas jump. She was reluctant to lose him for the sake of a lassie who, to use another Scots word, was so fushionless that she wasn’t effectual enough to have mastered a basic professional requirement. Still, harassment was harassment, especially in modern employment law.

  Langlands was waiting expectantly. Fleming made a pyramid of her fin
gers and propped her chin on it, considering. Then, ‘Right,’ she said. ‘He’s due for appraisal soon and we’ll talk anger-management courses. I’ll warn him now that if there’s any formal complaint his career’s on the line. That’ll put his gas on a peep and I think you’ll find he’s sweetness and light to your baby copper. Will that cover it?’

  The constable’s face cleared. ‘Sort of “deferred sentence to allow him to be of good behaviour”? Thanks very much, ma’am.’

  He was on the way out when she said, ‘Fancy her, do you?’ and had the satisfaction of seeing his cherubic face turn bright scarlet.

  Once he had gone, though, Fleming grimaced. They were an odd lot, the Masons. Grandfather had gone off to join the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got in tow with Hemingway – all that Thirties stuff with bullfights and roistering and Being a Man. He’d come back obsessed, called his son and daughter Jake and Brett after characters in one of the novels and set up a pedigree herd of Welsh Black cattle. Brett was Conrad Mason’s mother and to this day you heard of them going off to Spain for the corrida. Marjory’s sympathies were all with the bull, and she couldn’t hack it with Hemingway either. She’d had to study him for Higher English and had got into terrible trouble for writing that his women were so compliant they might as well be inflatable.

  She could remember hearing about incidents involving the Mason temper – there was something about Conrad’s Uncle Jake at the bull sales once – but the details escaped her. She knew her patch, was famous for it even, but her father still had the edge; she could ask him about it this evening. He always enjoyed the chance to show off his vast local knowledge – and pathetically, perhaps, she still found herself anxious to please him.

  Marjory picked up her pen again, though her mind was running on the Conrad Mason problem. She’d been there before and it was a bit like domestic abuse; he was apologetic, self-abasing and totally plausible in his promises never to do it again. Until the next time.

  And she didn’t have much time for psychology generally. Anger management, counselling, personal development – they all seemed to her scams designed to keep more people in comfortable desk jobs. Still, she’d recommend Mason for the course since that was what you were supposed to do. She just wouldn’t be betting her hen-money on a successful outcome.

  2

  ‘Oh, my dear, I shall miss her so terribly! She was never too busy, always had time to listen . . .’

  ‘I simply don’t know where the choral society will be able to find another pianist like her!’

  ‘Did anyone ever have a better neighbour?’

  The ladies with their soft, pink, crumpled faces and pastel tweeds clustered round like a swarm of cooing bees. Laura, too thin in black wool challis, smiled and smiled and pressed the gnarled, wrinkled hands. They patted at her with nervous goodwill and then at last set down the sherry glasses meticulously on coasters protecting the French-polished furniture and began to drift away, still murmuring their gentle lamentations to one another as they went down the path in the grey drizzle.

  The woman who still lingered had a sharper face; her long nose quivered slightly as she spoke and behind gold-rimmed glasses her eyes were bright with intrusive curiosity. She indicated a photograph on the grand piano, an informal shot of a laughing young woman, her profile with its chisel-tipped nose and her blonde hair very like Laura’s own.

  ‘Such a pity your sister never came back – well, your half-sister, I suppose I should say, only I expect it was much the same thing really, wasn’t it?’ Her gums showed when she smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura.

  ‘It would have meant so much to poor Jane. You never hear from her, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’ Laura felt the eyes scan her face with a sweep like a searchlight, registering the dark circles, no doubt, and the puffiness of recent tears about her grey-blue eyes. In a calculated gesture, she held out her hand decisively. ‘So good of you to come, Mrs Martin.’

  That left the woman with no alternative but to accept the hand and her dismissal; being a psychologist did have some practical uses. Mrs Martin set down her sherry glass reluctantly, directly on the rosewood surface of the piano, and then she too was gone.

  With a tension headache pounding, Laura closed the door behind her, thankful to have the ordeal of the funeral formalities over, yet when she returned to the empty sitting-room it seemed oppressively quiet without the hum of hushed voices. She could hear the wheezy tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, the whisper of flames from the fire in the basket grate which she’d lit in a vain attempt to lift the gloom of the weather and the occasion. Listlessly she cleared away the sherry glasses, her own untouched; she’d never so much as taken a sip of the stuff since she was eight years old when Dizzy, having smuggled a bottle out of the drinks cabinet, gave her a couple of glasses. Laura had been so sick that her mother had sent for the doctor, but even then she didn’t tell. She’d always kept Dizzy’s secrets.

  The kitchen was neat, orderly, just as her mother had left it. She washed the delicate cut-crystal glasses carefully, polished them with a glass-cloth, then carried them back to the sitting-room and put them away in their allotted space in the cupboard, just as if the next person to handle them wasn’t going to be a dealer, clearing the house.

  Tick, tock, tick, tock. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Years. Wasted years. As Laura sat in her mother’s favourite Victorian tub-chair, looking round the sitting-room with its evidence of a pleasant, tranquil life filled with friendships and hobbies – the piano, the tapestry frame, the invitation cards still tucked into the mirror above the fireplace – she knew it for a sham. Her cultured, elegant mother had lived with a hell of inner despair as agonising as that of any of the desperate women Laura had counselled in New York.

  Not knowing for all these years, that was the awful thing. She could see herself now, a leggy, skinny eleven-year-old, sitting miserably on the stairs, her arms wrapped round her bony knees, eavesdropping as best she could because her parents were in the sitting-room talking to a strange man about trying to find Dizzy. It hurt badly that her sister hadn’t told her where she’d gone; she knew she could have trusted Laura not to give her away.

  She’d adored Dizzy. Dizzy – Diana – was nine years older than Laura, beautiful and zany and casually affectionate to her little half-sister. Her father had abandoned his wife and child for a career as a professional hell-raiser, drinking himself to death not long after; Dizzy was sufficiently his daughter to want to raise a bit of hell on her own account, doing wild things which drove their mother and Laura’s solicitor father into fits of grown-up rage and anxiety and which, as recounted by her idol in whispers later, made Laura laugh so much that she cried.

  Dizzy had done all the exotic things Laura longed to do – and still hadn’t, somehow. Equipped with a secretarial diploma and the ability to fry an egg, she’d gone off to backpack her way round the world, picking up casual work on Australian cattle farms and South American ranches. She’d swum with dolphins and run with the bulls in Pamplona. She’d even joined a circus for a bit, until she got alarmed about the ringmaster’s intentions – men always fancied her – and came home only when the money finally ran out.

  It hadn’t been easy for anyone, having an adult, fiercely independent Dizzy living at home. Then one day there had been the row to end all rows, with shouting and slammed doors and tears of rage. Laura had kept well clear, waiting for the storm to blow over; she never remembered one quite as bad as this, but sooner or later everyone would presumably calm down. Even when they discovered she’d gone, leaving a note saying she was going to live her own life, thank you, Laura hadn’t worried – and nor, she thought, had her parents, really. There had been a phone call three weeks later, a brief phone call saying that she was fine and she had a job, then ringing off without giving her mother time to say more than ‘Darling—’

  It was the last word she spoke to her. Jane Harvey had died after fifteen years of living with the dreadful alterna
tives that her daughter was dead or that she cared so little for her mother as to let her spend the rest of her life in that anguish of uncertainty.

  And there was worse. As she sat on the stairs, six months after Dizzy had gone, Laura had heard them talking about her to the strange man. She was old enough to guess he was a private detective; the police had taken no interest in a twenty-year-old who had quarrelled with her parents and left home. She heard him ask if he could have a photograph and her mother saying she would fetch one; guiltily, Laura fled to the upper landing as the door opened and her mother went to the study where the photo albums were kept.

  Then Laura heard the man say, ‘While her mum’s out, just between ourselves – try something on with her, did you?’

  Laura couldn’t see her father, of course, yet when she thought of it now she could picture Geoffrey Harvey’s face as clearly as if she had – his austere, scholarly face set in lines of shock, eyes wide behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘I, Mr Wilkinson?’

  Wilkinson jerked his head to a framed photo on the piano. ‘A looker, isn’t she? Can’t say I’d blame you—’ She could remember the man’s hateful, suggestive titter, a fraction of a second before her father’s uncharacteristic roar of rage.

  ‘Get out of my house, now, this minute! I won’t sit here to be insulted by your vile insinuations—’

  ‘Have it your own way,’ Laura heard the man saying, and leaning over the banister railing saw him come out of the sitting-room, smirking, unhurried. Then she saw her mother in the doorway of the study, standing transfixed, and knew that she too had heard it all.

  Her father slammed the front door behind his visitor, then turned and saw his wife. The angry colour was still in his cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. I found him very unpleasant. I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else if you think it’s worth pursuing.’