Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

Did she believe it could be a bull? The position of the wound was against it, and the lack of any further attack. Though certainly, if there was someone else there they might have intervened, distracted the animal before it could do anything else. And of course someone else had been involved, someone who had buried the body.

  Why would you do that, if it was simply a tragic accident? Any serious agricultural injury to an employee had to be reported, of course, and in the case of a fatality the proceedings were likely to be both worrying and expensive, but to go the shallow-grave route instead seemed a hugely disproportionate response. And that was leaving aside the whole question of morality.

  She tapped her front tooth with her pen, a habit she had when she was thinking. Then she reached for her phone.

  ‘Can you try to locate Sergeant Mason, please? He’s on leave at the moment but I want a word with him as soon as possible.’

  ‘Stuff happens.’ Max Mason shrugged. Like Scott Thomson in the same situation, he was leaning back in the dining-room chair, though this time it looked like a calculated attitude rather than a gesture of defiance. His facial expression suggested contemptuous indifference.

  The temptation to say, ‘Don’t care was made to care,’ and wipe it off with a clip round the jaw was strong, but Tam MacNee said only, ‘So the feeling I got that you were knocked sideways when you heard about it wouldn’t be right, then?’

  Max’s reaction had been a niggle at the back of his mind; he wanted to prod him about it before he moved on to the questions he’d been commissioned to ask.

  ‘Well, normally,’ Max drawled, ‘if I’d been told someone I knew had been found decaying quietly in one of our fields I’d have taken it pretty casually. As you do. But you may recall it happened when I’d thought it was my mother and actually I was quite fond of her, strange as that may seem. You haven’t found her yet, have you?’

  He scored with that one; MacNee gritted his teeth. ‘No, we haven’t. You’re still claiming she was murdered by your father?’

  Max shrugged again. ‘It’s more than likely, isn’t it? He killed Diana, obviously—’

  ‘That’s rather less obvious to us than it is to you.’ The snotty little bastard was taking control of the interview; it was throwing MacNee off his stride. Hoping to swing the balance his way, he hurried into an ill-judged question. ‘What if I suggested she’d been gored by one of the bulls?’

  There was no doubt that he’d succeeded in taking him by surprise, but not usefully. Max’s eyes flickered, but he only said, ‘A bull? You could tell that, after all this time?’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised what we can find out. Did she help with looking after them?’

  ‘Diana? Of course not.’

  ‘Would the bulls have been out in the fields then at that time of year – winter?’

  There was a fractional pause, then he said heartily, ‘Oh, certainly. Absolutely. Welsh Blacks are a very hardy breed. That’s why my grandfather chose them.’

  MacNee was kicking himself now. He should have asked that question first; the bull theory was a nice, convenient one and since Mason had said the girl didn’t work with the beasts, the only place she could have come into contact with one was in an open field. Maybe it was a truthful reply – maybe!

  Max was prepared to be expansive now. ‘The field she was in was Satan’s field. He was a big brute with a nasty temper – there was trouble with him before, I’m sure, though I was too young to know the details. Conrad could probably tell you.’

  ‘“Satan” could hardly have buried her,’ MacNee pointed out drily.

  ‘But my father could!’ Max was leaning forward eagerly now. ‘He wouldn’t want a fuss—’

  ‘Seems a bit extreme, surely?’

  ‘He is extreme – anyone could tell you that! He’s not normal – never has been.’

  ‘That’s a nice neat theory anyway, isn’t it, seeing we can’t talk to the man and see for ourselves.’ The son’s eagerness to condemn his father was sickening. ‘So what about your mother, then?’

  ‘My – my mother?’

  At last, a chink in his armour of cockiness. ‘You said he’d killed your mother, and this girl. If he didn’t kill the girl, if it was an accident . . .’

  It was obviously an effort to take up his offhand attitude again. ‘So? Maybe he just drove her out, after all.’

  ‘But she never contacted you, all these years? Can’t have missed you much, can she?’

  Max’s face changed. ‘You can’t say that!’ His voice was rising. ‘She – she would have. I left home myself, she didn’t know where I was—’

  He’d got him on the raw. MacNee said smoothly, ‘A year later, wasn’t it? That’s a long time for a mother to ignore her only son—’

  ‘Shut up, shut up!’ Max yelled. He jumped up, knocking over the chair he had been sitting on, and stormed out.

  MacNee stared after him ruefully. There was such a thing as being too successful in upsetting a witness; he hadn’t covered himself with glory there. He emerged from behind the screens to an ironic burst of applause from the officers working in the dining-room.

  Looking for Thomson, he went through to the bar. There were no lunchtime customers but Thomson was there, reading a red-top newspaper with a glass half-full of whisky on the counter beside him.

  At the sight of MacNee he stiffened. ‘What are you after now? I’ve told you everything I know.’

  ‘Are the bulls at Chapelton brought inside for the winter?’

  Thomson looked surprised. ‘What do you want to know that for?’ Then, as he got no reply, he added grudgingly, ‘They’re not usually. If it went below freezing I’d my orders to bring them in.’

  ‘Right.’ MacNee pondered the answer. If they could find out when, exactly, the girl had disappeared there’d be a record of the weather somewhere. ‘Do you remember a bull called Satan?’

  He wasn’t prepared for the outburst of obscenity, but when the reason for it emerged he could only sympathise. It explained a lot, too, about Thomson’s attitude to his former employers.

  At the mention of an attack on Diana Warwick he only said flatly, ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ and stuck to that.

  MacNee wasn’t having much luck with his interviews today. He tried another tack. ‘Would she have been likely to have any contact with the bulls?’

  For a moment he thought he wasn’t going to get an answer to that either, then Thomson said, ‘She was daft about them, like they all were. Specially that brute. It’s like it was a god, or something. I’ll tell you what Jake Mason used to say: “He’s killed his man.” Like he was boasting about it. What does that say about the rotten bastard?’

  What indeed? The interviews might not have gone according to plan but MacNee had plenty to think about as he drove back to Police Headquarters.

  ‘Of course!’ Conrad Mason had the air of one who has at last seen the obvious. ‘Of course, that would be exactly what happened!’

  Fleming had explained the goring theory, hedging it about with every sort of caution; she was taken aback to find it hailed with such immediate enthusiasm. She raised her eyebrows. ‘It would leave an awful lot of questions unanswered, Conrad.’

  ‘I bet I can answer most of them.’ Mason got up as if he was too excited to stay still. ‘You don’t understand. If it was Satan – that was the bull that always lived in the field you found her in – he was a thousand kilos of dead meat. He’d killed a man already; somehow or other my grandfather saved him that time, probably with huge payouts to the man’s family. But Satan was a champion, a superb example of the breed. He was still a young bull then, worth a fortune in stud fees, but it wasn’t just that. My uncle idolised him.’

  ‘Are you really saying he’d have buried a girl’s body, taken the risk of a long prison sentence, just to save a bull? Hardly a normal reaction—’

  ‘That’s the point.’ Conrad sat down again and leaned across the desk. ‘Look, he was a risk-taker by nature. You don’t do Pamplona bu
ll-runs if you haven’t that sort of temperament. And he simply wasn’t normal where bulls are concerned – perhaps none of us are. Particularly with Satan – he used to follow Jake around like a puppy when he was a calf and he’d still come up to the rail to be petted, right up to the time of Jake’s stroke. You know the way people are about keeping lions and tigers as pets? Well, Jake felt the same about having this incredibly powerful, dangerous animal behaving like a pet lamb. He doted on Satan.’

  ‘Did you say up to the time of his stroke? Is the bull still alive, then?’

  ‘Was,’ Mason said bitterly. She saw the grief and anger in his face; his uncle was not the only one who had loved the creature.

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I do hear what you’re saying, Conrad, but it’s not really as easy to explain away as all that. If a bull gores someone, it doesn’t stop at that. It follows up the attack, tosses the body, tramples it—’

  He frowned. ‘Yes, but if there was someone else there to drive it off – and no one better than my uncle, as I said.’

  ‘Mmm.’ It was plausible, certainly. ‘The other thing the pathologist flagged up as strange was the wound’s position. Right in the front, a wound to the heart.’

  Mason wasn’t so sure about that. Fleming watched him closely. It was his job to deduce what happened from evidence and he was good at it; in this situation, where there was a solution which would clear him of suspicion, he was more than capable of reversing the process. Come to that, it was hardly unknown for a detective to decide on a conclusion and look for the facts to fit it. She waited with interest to hear what he would say.

  ‘The front,’ he said. ‘You’d expect her to be running away, wouldn’t you? I wonder . . .’ Then his brow cleared. ‘Oh God, I think I know what this was about! The bull-running.’

  ‘At Pamplona? What on earth has that got to do with it?’

  ‘You know that was where my uncle met her?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I read it somewhere.’ She gestured vaguely at some papers on her desk.

  ‘I didn’t go that year. My pathetic cousin Max did, and gave himself airs because he’d been with my uncle when he’d rescued Di from some drunken Spaniards. Anyway, Di was always talking about the bull-run – most wonderful experience of her life and all that. She’d actually touched a bull – that’s suicidal. And if she’d tried it out on Satan, thinking that because he was bulky he’d be easy game, she could have got caught out – she’d come up from behind, then he’d whirl round and catch her in the ribs. See?’

  He made a magician’s triumphant gesture, palms uppermost. Perhaps that was the only reason why Fleming felt she had been subjected to a performance. She said stubbornly, ‘It still seems to me an unlikely thing to do. Pamplona’s one thing, Scotland in winter’s quite another.’

  Mason made an impatient movement. ‘Look,’ he said, then stopped as if he had changed his mind about what he was going to say.

  ‘Yes?’ she prompted him.

  ‘I’ve done it myself. When I was a kid, of course, and I wasn’t dumb enough to try to touch him.’

  ‘And you told Diana about this?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. And it’s just the sort of thing she would do.’

  ‘Did she ever say she was going to try it?’

  The hesitation was fractionally too long. In an interview you could often get more idea of what a person was thinking from the gaps than from what they said; Fleming was almost certain he was working out which would be the safest reply. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, of course not. I’d have tried to stop her. Not that it would have made any difference – she was that sort of girl.

  ‘It does hang together, you know,’ he urged. ‘And of course,’ he gave a rueful smile, ‘I really would like to think that even if my uncle was every sort of fool he wasn’t a murderer.’

  Oh yes, nicely calculated little touch of family feeling there. He was waiting for her response, but she could see that he had decided already what it would be. He was going to be disappointed. ‘You’ve suggested one plausible scenario,’ she began, and saw his face change.

  ‘Surely you can see it’s the obvious one?’ he insisted.

  ‘One plausible scenario,’ she repeated. ‘There’s a lot to consider before it’s accepted as the right one.’

  ‘Like?’

  She shot him an icy glare and he retracted hastily. ‘Sorry, boss. That sounded rude.’

  ‘Yes, it did. As I was saying, until it’s accepted you’re still a suspect. This isn’t a professional conference about the case, Conrad. You’ve been in a position to give me very helpful information, I’m grateful and I will consider it. I won’t discuss any other aspect of it with you, and you are still on leave. Officers working on the case have been instructed that you must not be given information about it, so please don’t ask them.’

  He was, she saw, very angry. ‘You can’t recognise the truth when it’s under your nose,’ he said thickly. ‘Or is it just that you can’t bear to admit that one of your underlings is smarter than you?’

  ‘Mason—’ she said, a threat in her voice.

  ‘Oh, I’m going before I do something I really will regret. You’ve got all the cards – I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of busting me.’

  He slammed the door behind him. Marjory put her head in her hands and groaned. Whatever the outcome of the case – and it was undoubtedly a tidy solution, and a cheap solution too, which would certainly appeal to her superiors – he’d blown it now. He was becoming more and more volatile; he had a lot riding on this, of course, but it was alarming that he hadn’t been able to see that she couldn’t possibly simply accept his version of events and move to close the file. He was often right in his deductions, but she had been worried lately that he was increasingly showing a lack of objectivity about his own theories, a serious fault in a detective and the quickest way to miscarriages of justice.

  She’d have to move him on. All being well, he could return to the Force but she’d suggest he went to Traffic. He wouldn’t like that, though – and heaven help the first chippy motorist!

  ‘It’s still closed. What a shame!’

  It was four o’clock; there were lights on now in the other shops, but The Band Box was in darkness. The two women sighed, shrugged and moved away.

  14

  The tap on the door startled her. It was almost dark; Laura had the lamps on as she worked at the table on her laptop but she hadn’t drawn the curtains yet. To anyone outside, it would be like looking on to a lighted stage, and suddenly she was very aware that there was no one at all in the cottages on either side of her. Looking out from the inside, the windows were black and blank.

  The door had small glass panes in the top half and as she crossed towards it she flicked the switch for the outside light and saw that it was Conrad Mason who was standing there. Her face cleared and she opened the door.

  It was raining again, soft, persistent, wetting rain, forming a misty halo round the light. He was wearing a thick navy jacket but his curly hair was starting to cling to his head.

  ‘Goodness, you’re wet!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come in quickly!’

  He stepped inside, shaking himself like a wet dog. ‘Drookit,’ he agreed. ‘And that’s just coming from the car. Still, we should be used to it by now. Just remember to check your feet every night to make sure you haven’t started growing webs between the toes.’

  Laura laughed. ‘There’s a peg there for your coat. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thanks. I just came to see that you’d settled in all right and that no one had found your hideaway.’

  ‘No, I’ve had a wonderfully peaceful afternoon. Would you like one of Mrs MacNab’s scones?’

  He sat down at the table. ‘Can you ask? They’re famous locally. Women at coffee mornings have been known to come to blows for them at the baking stall.’

  The kettle was boiling now; she made tea in a little blue pot and brought it across with a couple of mugs and the celeb
rated scones, then sat down herself opposite.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re allowed to say anything much,’ she said hesitantly, ‘but can I ask you what’s happening now?’

  He made no attempt to conceal his anger and bitterness. ‘Oh, I’m not permitted to know what’s happening in the corridors of power at Kirkluce Police Headquarters. I’m a suspect, you see.’

  ‘A suspect?’ She shouldn’t have been stunned, but she was. That was Max again; somehow his certainty had fixed in her head the notion that the shadowy Jake was the killer. But naturally, Conrad must be a suspect, and Max too, and Scott Thomson, and even, she supposed, Conrad’s mother who had quarrelled with her sister. Suddenly there was a very cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ he laughed shortly. ‘You’d think they’d know—’

  The hammering on the door was such a shock that they both jumped. ‘What the hell,’ Conrad exclaimed, jumping up, then, ‘Oh God, Max! I might have known.’

  The outside light was still on and they could see him clearly, wearing a rakish wide-brimmed rainproof hat and a brown caped Drizabone coat. Laura opened the door to let him in.

  He ignored her. ‘“I’m just going back to Kirkluce now” – oh, sure! I knew this would be where you were going, you lying bastard,’ he greeted his cousin, scowling. He took off his hat, throwing it down on a chair as if it were a gauntlet.

  Conrad had a considerable advantage in height; he used it now to look down contemptuously at the shorter, slighter man. ‘Oh, I think it counts as mere courtesy, Max. The lady didn’t want people to know where she was, so how could I betray her confidence? If I’d known you were following me I wouldn’t have come here. But what took you so long? Missed me turning off, did you? That would be typical incompetence.’

  Max coloured but said only, ‘She didn’t mean me, did you, Laura?’ He put the question with a brief, sideways look towards her but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Laura’s my friend. So why don’t you butt out instead of elbowing your way in, trying to ruin everything for me, the way you’ve always done?’