Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  Charlotte Nisbet leaned across the table, her eyes on Thomson, exuding sympathy. ‘It’s tough for you, Scott, I know that. Give a dog a bad name. But you can see where we’re coming from too. Here’s this girl, bit of a babe, come-on look in her eye—’ She turned over a photograph which had been lying in front of her and pushed it across the table. ‘They’re asking for it, girls like that . . .’

  Diana Warwick, her head turned, her smile warming the blue eyes, looked up out of the print. It seemed to shock him. ‘Di,’ he murmured, staring down at it. ‘She was that bonny . . .’

  The two detectives exchanged glances. MacNee, with a jerk of his head, indicated that Nisbet should take it on.

  ‘It’d be hard not to be tempted, really,’ she said softly. ‘Hard to be rejected, because you didn’t have money and a posh accent—’

  ‘No!’ he said vehemently, raising his head then wincing from the pain. His eyes were blazing. ‘She wasn’t like that. Di was the only one treated me decent. That other one –’ he pointed contemptuously at the print-out of his record which lay in front of MacNee – ‘was a bitch playing games. She was asking for it, if you like. Half she told the Fiscal was lies.

  ‘I’ve had hard luck, what with her and those bastards the Masons and now you lot – you’ve been trying to pin this on me right from the start.’ There was a self-pitying whine in his voice. ‘But get this. They’re all mad, the Masons, from the old man down. When Di was there it was like she got them into crazy stuff. If it was an accident with Satan they set it up. They were like I’d never seen them before.

  ‘She never fancied me. I wasn’t her kind – I could see that from the start. But I’ll be honest with you – I never fancied her exactly, except like maybe I’d fancy Britney Spears. And aye, I watched her. I saw her that first night and I kept wondering what she was at – away out in her pyjamas, then back a wee while later. If there’d been someone after her I’d have been down to see what was going on.’

  ‘Had you a night off?’ MacNee asked suddenly.

  ‘Saturday. I’d be away into Kirkluce on a Saturday for the disco at the Green Cat pub.’ He gave a mirthless smile. ‘Used to like a bit of action.’

  ‘So can you remember if she was out that night, after you came back?’ Nisbet asked.

  ‘Fifteen years ago? You’re joking. I’d have had a few bevvies then come back on my motorbike and crashed out. Oh, but officer, I’d be stone-cold sober, mind!’

  MacNee barely noticed the gibe. Maybe the man was lying, but he was sounding good. A jury would lap that up. So all they had on him was a minimal record and he’d said nothing today they could use. They were wasting their time.

  MacNee got up abruptly and looked at his watch. ‘Interview terminated, nine-thirty a.m.,’ he said for the benefit of the tape, and walked out.

  ‘Were-bulls?’ Fleming stared at Laura Harvey. She’d always thought psychologists were flaky but this was something else. Was her sixth sense, after all, as fallible as the other five? She said carefully, ‘Are you suggesting that someone turns into a bull? With horns?’

  Laura waved her hands in frustration. ‘No, no! I’m obviously explaining myself very badly.’ She paused for a second in thought. ‘I’m trying to tell you too much, too quickly. Bear with me while I explain.

  ‘Lycanthropy seems always to have existed, to judge by folk-tales and legends. But even now no one’s quite sure exactly what it is. There are theories, of course, but no one definitive explanation – when you’re talking about the strange ways of the human mind it’s not surprising.

  ‘It could be a hysterical dissociative neurosis, provoked by a deep-rooted sense of inferiority and failure. Taking the persona of a strong, powerful and violent animal could be a form of compensation for the humiliations of ordinary life and even, if it was carried through into action, be a way of projecting guilt on to the animal character.

  ‘Another theory is that it’s some form of paranoid schizophrenia. Drug use quite often seems to be a catalyst which could explain the New Age tone of a lot of the websites I looked at.’

  Fleming pricked up her ears. ‘Or absinthe?’

  ‘Absinthe? Yes, I suppose so, particularly in its old-fashioned formulation. They blamed Hemingway’s mental problems on that.’

  ‘And Edgar Mason’s.’

  ‘Really? Though of course you have to realise there were plenty of people in the Thirties who drank it and didn’t go mad. You’re probably talking about a genetic susceptibility.’

  Fleming’s mind was racing. ‘I can believe that,’ she said grimly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Either way, the subject often has a problem with relationships and sexuality. If these produced fears which overthrew the normal coping mechanisms, violence could erupt.’

  ‘Are we talking about a psychopath?’

  Laura shook her head. ‘Almost specifically not. A psychopath by definition knows no guilt. The lycanthrope has to seek out the excuse of an irresistible compulsion to escape his.’

  ‘I see. At least I think I do. Give me a minute.’

  It was all so extraordinary, Fleming felt as if someone had been birling her round and round so that she wasn’t sure which way she’d be facing when she stopped or more probably collapsed into a dizzy heap. Laura was waiting patiently.

  ‘But surely,’ Fleming said at last, ‘someone would notice, if every so often one of their family started behaving like a wild animal?’

  ‘Most of the time it wouldn’t arise. There are case histories of lycanthropes leading apparently normal lives until some huge personal stress forces their secret life into the open.’ She hesitated. ‘But a couple of nights ago, someone was bellowing outside my window. Oh, I know, I know it sounds weird, but I’d heard it before.’

  Fleming listened to her account, torn between fascination and disbelief. ‘But what on earth would provoke something like that?’

  ‘Frustration? Anger, perhaps, in a context of personal instability?’

  ‘Thinking of the Masons, that doesn’t narrow the field a whole lot, does it?’

  ‘That’s the thing about psychology. It doesn’t give you the answers, only suggests questions it might be useful to ask.’

  ‘Like police work! How extraordinary! It’s only rarely that evidence hands you the solution on a plate, it just points you to an area you should take a look at.’ Fleming was much struck by this.

  Laura smiled. ‘Psychology’s like most things, because it’s about life and observation. It can be useful if you use it properly, pointless if you don’t, and dangerous if you’re clever enough to exploit it for manipulation.’

  Fleming smiled wryly. ‘You may not realise you’re doing a demolition job on a lifetime of scepticism about psychology and all its works?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, don’t land me with that sort of guilt! You know how it goes, “I’m a reputable clinical psychologist, you’re alarmingly neurotic and he’s out of his tree”?’

  Marjory Fleming burst out laughing. Then, suddenly serious, she said, ‘Laura, can you do anything about depression?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, no idea where she could be.’

  It wasn’t often that Superintendent Bailey appeared in the CID room unless he had an official visitor he wanted to impress with his common touch. He was very anxious to see Big Marge; word was that he wasn’t best pleased about the return to Chapelton. There was another big foot-and-mouth protest going ahead which was stretching their manpower and he wasn’t the only officer on a short fuse at the moment.

  ‘Well, tell her I want to see her if she comes in here. I would have hoped that in these days of modern communications it shouldn’t be impossible for me to contact my Detective Inspector when I need to do so.’ He marched out.

  The three detectives in the room waited decorously until he was out of earshot, then guffawed; one of them embarked on quite a plausible imitation of his pompous delivery and got a round of applause.

  ‘Gone AWOL, has she? That’s not like Big Marge
– she’s the keen type. Wonder where she is?’

  ‘I know.’ The woman officer spoke smugly.

  ‘You told him you didn’t.’

  ‘I lied. The Boss drove off from Chapelton with Laura Harvey. The word was she was taking her back to stay at Mains of Craigie but she was being pretty cagey about it so I reckoned she wouldn’t want the Super to know.’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘Well – kind of dodgy, wouldn’t you say, someone involved in a murder enquiry?’

  ‘Harvey was just a wee girl when it happened. There’s nothing wrong, as long as Bailey doesn’t hear about it and go daft – or the Press.’

  ‘You girls must stick together, eh? Well, I promise I won’t squeal to the Super or the Sun.’

  ‘And have you ever known me clype? Telling tales was a capital offence where I came from. Mind you,’ his colleague added warningly, ‘if they offer me a Page Three girl as a bribe the deal’s off.’

  Acting like a hairdryer, the wind from the south had melted the snow and ice with astonishing speed. The roads were running rivers of water and it was a bleak, grey, miserable day, but Laura felt more at ease than she had been for days. Marjory Fleming had taken her concerns very seriously indeed, keeping quiet about where they were going so that the Masons would have no idea where to find her. Laura was grateful and, especially since the offer of hospitality clearly carried some professional risk for her hostess, she hoped she could pay back the kindness.

  She listened sympathetically to Marjory’s emotional account of her husband’s condition as they drove to Mains of Craigie. In the course of her research she’d become very familiar with the torments farmers had gone through and felt she had quite a good understanding of the horrors which plagued their minds – better, even, than Bill’s wife could hope to do, seeing it as she did from the viewpoint of a police officer with a difficult and demanding job of her own.

  When they turned on to the rough farm road and the farmhouse itself came into view, Laura could well understand Marjory’s feelings for her home, so apparent as she talked about it. Its very appearance, simple, four-square and unadorned, suggested security and cosiness.

  ‘How lovely!’ she exclaimed.

  Marjory smiled, but the smile held a trace of bitterness. ‘I used to think of it as “The Last Homely House” – Tolkien, you know – when I came back from work late and tired and the lights were on. It seemed a sort of fortress against the awful things that happen in the world outside. But it wasn’t, was it? It’s turned into a sort of prison for Bill – and I’m scared I could come to see it that way too.’

  Laura was silent for a moment, thinking of the prison of grief she had been living in herself, and when she spoke, she was almost thinking aloud. ‘We all live with comforting illusions. We need to allow ourselves to accept them because the people who strip life to its bleakest core and focus only on that become mentally sick. And of course, most of the time the comfort isn’t illusory: you’ve had years of security and happiness and a few weeks of wretchedness and misery. This will pass.’

  ‘Will it? I just can’t recognise the Bill I knew – so cheerful, uncomplaining, so – so solid.’ Her voice faltered.

  Laura said again, ‘This will pass, I can promise you.’ She wasn’t only speaking to Marjory.

  Ignoring the front door with its porch like a quizzically raised eyebrow, they went round to the back of the house, entering via a glass door what looked like a large cloakroom lined with a clutter of coats, shoes, boots and items of sports equipment, from a couple of mud-splattered mountain-bikes to a pile of tennis rackets of widely differing ages and styles. Marjory, with tension showing in every line of her body, led Laura through it and along a passage, then opened the door on a big, traditional farmhouse kitchen.

  It had a red-tiled floor and a slightly chipped cream-coloured Aga at the far end. There was a dog lying on a brightly coloured rug in front of it and a man sitting in an old, sagging chair at one side. He was a big, burly man with blue eyes and cheeks reddened by wind and weather, but the eyes were sunken and the cheeks gaunt under a ragged growth of beard. The dog, a pretty black-and-white Border collie, got up to greet her politely; the man did not even turn his head.

  ‘Bill—’ Marjory said on a rising note of anxiety.

  Laura put a hand on her arm. ‘Just leave us. You’ve got plenty to do. I’ll make a cup of tea – I’m good at strange kitchens – and we’ll get to know each other gradually.’

  Marjory looked uncertain for a moment, then agreed. ‘I’d better switch my mobile back on. I’ve been pretending to be out of range.’

  ‘Say you were at Burnside Cottages – there’s definitely no signal there, as I know to my cost!’

  Marjory left. Laura went quietly about the business of making tea, found some biscuits in a big tin, then went over to the man in the chair. ‘Tea?’ She held it out and he took it from her hand without looking up.

  ‘I’m Laura.’ She pulled over a kitchen chair so that she was sitting directly opposite him, but he made no response, staring straight ahead as if unseeing. The dog had settled down again at their feet; Laura leaned forward to stroke it then started to talk to it, murmuring soothingly, weaving a pattern of comforting sound. The dog, its head cocked and eyes bright with intelligence, listened as if monitoring a strange code for a recognisable instruction, and Laura thought its master might be half-listening now too.

  She took a sip of her tea, then said very quietly, ‘Did the animals suffer dreadfully, Bill?’

  For the first time, he raised his head and looked at her. He didn’t speak, but very slowly the tears gathered and began to spill down his unshaven cheeks.

  21

  ‘Only the Chief Constable, Marjory, that’s all.’ Superintendent Donald Bailey’s colour was high, his mouth pursed into a prune of disapproval.

  Fleming’s heart sank. ‘But the woman’s a hysteric, boss!’ she protested. ‘This shouldn’t have any effect on the investigation. Even if you have friends in high places it doesn’t mean you can literally get away with murder.’

  Bailey bridled. ‘I trust you are not suggesting that either the Chief Constable or I myself would be a party to any sort of attempt to pervert the course of justice?’

  Glacial pomposity was always a danger sign and this time it was iced, with a wee red cherry on top. Fleming knew she was handling it badly. She just couldn’t see how to handle it well.

  ‘Of course not, sir. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that we’d be making a serious mistake if we try to nail Jake Mason for this—’

  ‘Evidence?’ he barked, then, as she hesitated, continued, ‘I mean hard evidence, as opposed to the prejudice you’ve shown from the beginning against the solution Conrad Mason put forward?’

  Fleming bit her lip. What new evidence did she actually have, besides the websites Laura Harvey had discovered? Not a lot, and she had a nasty feeling that Bailey wasn’t going to be receptive to the were-bull theory.

  He wasn’t. He stared at her for a moment, his eyes almost popping with disbelief. ‘I can really hardly credit that I’m hearing this sort of fantasy from a senior police officer. I’m beginning to wonder if my belief in you has been misplaced, Fleming. There’s the Chief Constable waiting for me to tell him the reason for this hounding of the Mason family and I’m going to offer him horror fiction?

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, really I don’t. I can see you’ve been under a lot of personal stress, of course – perhaps I should have made greater allowances for your domestic situation. Given that you’re a wife and mother.’

  Stung, Fleming retorted foolishly, ‘There are lots of husbands and fathers in the service too, sir.’

  ‘None of whom has ever come to me with a farrago of nonsense like this. There’s no doubt about it, I shall have to consider taking you off this case. At the very least.’ Leaning on the desk, he made a pyramid of his fingers and balanced his chins precariously on top. She could almost see the steam eme
rging from his ears.

  She volunteered, ‘We shouldn’t need to do anything more at Chapelton until we get a report on the soil analysis. We’ve no one there now, in fact.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose. And is the girl – Laura whatever her name is – still out there? If she is, she’d better not do any more snooping.’

  Fleming swallowed. ‘No. No, she’s gone.’

  Bailey was no fool. He looked at her sharply. ‘Gone? Where?’

  There was no point in lying. Cursing her own inability to deliver a part-truth without drawing attention to the missing part, she braced herself. ‘She’s at Mains of Craigie. She was worried about her safety and it seemed the simplest thing to do.’

  She’d expected him to be angry, had almost shrunk back in her seat as she told him. Instead, he seemed nonplussed.

  ‘You must have taken leave of your senses, Fleming. You know that having a personal involvement could compromise the integrity of the enquiry. What would the defence make of that particular entry in your policy book?’

  She didn’t dare to suggest she should leave it out, as she had been planning to do. ‘Yes, sir. Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll have to give this some thought. I’ll send for you later. Meanwhile, I take it I can assure the Chief Constable that the disruption is at an end?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Like a coward, she didn’t add ‘for the time being’. She got up; he didn’t rise and go to open the door for her as he usually did. Feeling sick with apprehension, she opened it for herself and went out.

  After she had gone, Bailey sat lost in thought for a few minutes, his brow furrowed. Then he gave a deep sigh and picked up the phone.

  ‘Could I speak to Mrs Mason, please? This is Superintendent Bailey. Ah, Conrad – that’s you, is it? Now, listen, lad . . .’

  ‘You’re aff your heid,’ Tam MacNee said bluntly, looking at his superior officer with some dismay.

  He had realised when he came in that she was distracted, showing little interest in his account of the interview with Scott Thomson. When he’d finished, she’d only nodded then said, ‘Let me run something past you, Tam,’ before spouting a theory that sounded like something from the Hammer House of Horror Showcase. Which was why he didn’t beat about the bush in his assessment of her mental state.