Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  ‘I know, I know, it would be kinder to put you out of your misery now, but with forensics these days you can’t be too careful. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait but once I’ve got her set up, I promise I’ll make it as quick as I can. I’ve got the vegetable knife from the kitchen, simply covered with her fingerprints. Clever or what?

  ‘Now, shall we go?’

  He sounded so assured – smug, even. His eyes had glittered with pleasure throughout that recital and there was nothing Laura could do to stop him, except hope that in this whole elaborate scheme something would go wrong – and go wrong in time to save her life.

  It was a slender hope, but it was all she had. Stumbling, she was frog-marched down the path to the Range Rover parked at the end of the path. She looked about her hopefully but the landscape was bare and silent apart from the harsh caws of rooks in a tree across the field.

  He pushed her into the back space, then pulled over a stiff, heavy tarpaulin to cover his prisoner. She could feel it being weighed down all round, then heard the slam of doors and the engine starting. As they lurched off along the uneven road there was only darkness and terror, the discomfort of her cramped limbs and her face bumping painfully on the floor.

  ‘Someone’s squealing to the Press,’ DI Fleming said grimly, looking round the circle of innocent faces at the morning briefing, ‘and when I find out who it is, I’ll have their guts for garters.’

  It was an empty threat and they all knew it. There were probably a couple of officers in this very room who acted as stringers for those bastards in the media, and an off-beat story about a cop with murderous delusions, especially with a touch of horror thrown in, was worth good money.

  Fleming hadn’t enjoyed being doorstepped by a reporter with a furry mike and a camera crew on her way into work this morning, hadn’t enjoyed having to say politely, ‘Sorry, I haven’t anything for you at the moment but there’ll be a statement later.’ Thinking about her conversation with Tam about shape-shifting, there were a number of people she’d enjoy sinking her teeth into right now. Grrr! She hastily changed the growl into a cough and brought the briefing to a swift conclusion.

  The good thing was that Bailey, having dragged his heels all through this investigation, was now seized by a sense of urgency, so perhaps the Press had their uses after all. The only problem was that he wanted a neat solution on his plate with a sprig of parsley and a slice of lemon by yesterday at the very latest.

  Still, they’d been fingerprinting the silver mask in house so the results should be through any time. And the tip of one horn, on close inspection, even seemed to have a slight stain; if that did turn out to be Diana Warwick’s blood – the labs had been paid to give it top priority – and there was any sign of Conrad’s prints on it, that might be enough to bump him into a proper confession. They needed it badly; you couldn’t make a charge stick on the basis of a fingerprint on an object in the accused’s house even if it did prove to be the murder weapon – something else that the path lab would have to confirm.

  Reaching her office again, she picked up the phone and dialled the number of the fingerprints department. ‘Any luck?’ she said, without bothering to identify herself.

  ‘Er – Tam’s on his way up now with the report, ma’am,’ was the answer, and she frowned as she put down the phone. Strangely evasive . . .

  When MacNee appeared, she could tell it wasn’t good news. ‘Why do they always send me to do the dirty work?’ he complained as he laid a sheet of paper on her desk.

  ‘Because they think I won’t hit someone smaller than me. Wrongly,’ she said mechanically as she looked at the paper, her frown deepening.

  The mask had been wiped clean – that was to be expected. But more often than not, in circumstances like this, there would be a print, smudged or even partial, on some inner, less obvious surface.

  And they’d found one – two, in fact. That was the good news. The bad news was that they weren’t Conrad’s. They could be anyone’s – a cleaning woman’s, Brett’s, Jake’s – but they certainly weren’t Conrad’s.

  Fleming seldom swore; she swore now. ‘And where does that leave us? No proper confession, no fingerprints, Press baying at our heels, the Super demanding miracles—’

  ‘Just another day in the life of your average copper, then.’ MacNee enjoyed living dangerously. ‘We can start interviewing again, see if anyone can remember anything in the light of what we’ve got now. And if the lab comes back with a positive on blood, at least that’ll be a step in the right direction.’

  ‘If,’ Fleming said bitterly. ‘And the mask won’t even reach them till mid-afternoon.’ She looked with distaste at the paperwork which had been piling up on her desk, then got up decisively. ‘I’m going to grab a sandwich in the canteen, then I’ll drop in on my folks to try and prise the kids out of their clutches. I’m beginning to forget what they look like. Then I’m going out to the hospital to see if I can get permission to try out that theory of Laura’s I told you about on Jake Mason.’

  ‘Why not? “If it does you no good, it’ll do you no harm,” as the Presbyterian said when he got sprinkled with Holy Water.’

  ‘I’m leaving now,’ Fleming announced, ‘and if you’re on a homespun philosophy kick you can eat your pie and beans on your own.’

  ‘Bill’s so much better,’ Janet said approvingly. ‘Quiet still, mind, though of course he was never someone with a tongue hung in the middle and wagging both ends. But he ate a good lunch and we’d even a wee crack about a walk he’d had with Meg.’

  Marjory’s careworn face brightened. ‘That’s really good news. You know, I’ve always thought all this psychobabble stuff was a load of rubbish, but you’ve only to see how much better Bill is. I don’t know what Laura does but she’s a wonder-worker.’

  ‘She’s a real nice lassie anyway. She wasn’t in for her lunch and I was fair disappointed. I was looking forward to a good blether.’

  ‘Oh? She must have taken longer than she expected at Burnside Cottages. Or maybe she took the keys back to Jessie MacNab – and if I know Jessie she wouldn’t let her away again without a bite to eat.

  ‘Now look, Mum, I’ll come in on my way back tonight to see the kids and talk about when they’re to come home.’

  Janet sighed, then smiled bravely. ‘Aye, that’s right. We’ll miss them, mind. Your father’s a Supreme Master or something, Cammie says. I doubt he’ll be needing to buy one of those machines for himself.’

  The sound effects of a computer game coming from the sitting-room had been a background to their kitchen conversation. Marjory laughed.

  ‘I’ll give him one as a thank-you present,’ she promised. ‘Now, I’d better go.’

  Janet accompanied her to the door. ‘What time will we see you?’

  Fleming looked at her watch. ‘Two o’clock – five, half-past, maybe? You know how it is.’

  ‘Oh, I know, right enough,’ Janet said philosophically. This was a mind-set she had to advocate later on to an impatient Cammie, who had a rugby practice at seven o’clock.

  How long had she been in here? It was frightening how quickly you lost count of time; Laura had almost no idea whether it had been one hour or five. It would be hard to say which was worse, the painful cold or the cramp in her limbs, and at first she had cried but now she felt oddly calm – almost detached.

  When the Range Rover stopped and Max had pulled back her tarpaulin covering, she discovered it was drawn up outside a wrought-iron gate, beside the area roughly cleared by the JCB. He had picked her up effortlessly as she blinked in the sudden light and carried her into the concealment of what was left of the maze before he set her on her feet again.

  ‘Now march!’ he commanded.

  She turned her head, tried to speak, but he ignored the mumbling sound which was all that emerged. His eyes were cold and dead, as if there was no one behind them she could reach out to for human sympathy. His hands on her shoulders now, he steered her ahead of him, tracking backwards and fo
rwards through gaps in the hedges until at last they reached the heart of the maze with its massive stone plinth. The great flat stone on top was squint, loosened from the base, and there were chips of mortar lying on the steps. She stopped and Max went forward to pick up a crowbar which had been lying concealed in the long grass. He began to lever aside the heavy stone.

  It was her last chance. She turned to run, looking for the gap in the hedge, then bursting through it as the sharp twigs snatched at her clothes. She looked wildly round for the next gap but before she could reach it he was by her side, swinging her off her feet with contemptuous ease.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said icily. ‘It’s irritating.’

  Back at the centre again he put her down and she watched dully as he continued his task until half the internal cavity was exposed, formed by the walls of the column, about three feet square by four feet deep. As he swung her up she kicked out, but she was helpless against his strength. He dropped her through the narrow gap, forced her down, and then the covering stone grated back into place.

  It hadn’t shifted, despite the desperate attempts she had made, bracing her feet against a wall and pushing up with her head and shoulders. A little light, and air too, filtered through the gaps between the slab and the walls, but these were the only mercies. Muffled moans were all the sound she could make, and even if she could have screamed, who was there to hear her?

  Her shoulders ached with the strain of her pinioned wrists and she could feel her hands beginning to swell. She gave up her struggles eventually, and found the least agonising position, her feet against one wall and her back curved against the other so that her suffering hands could rest on the ground behind. She had begun almost to long for her executioner’s return. No one would find her here and at least when he came back it would mean the end of this torture.

  He hadn’t quite said so, but she guessed he had hidden Dizzy’s body here at some point. It still puzzled her that he had so readily agreed to the digging up of what he surely knew was her grave, and she would have sworn, too, that finding it had come as a shock to him – but then, how could she trust her instincts any more when she had freely opened the door to Dizzy’s murderer – and her own?

  Had Dizzy been dead when he put her into this dank, awful place, or had she still been alive, bleeding to death perhaps as she suffered the torture her little sister was enduring now? Laura found herself talking to her inside her head, just as she had talked to her before in that published letter, when she had still hoped Dizzy was out there to answer her questions.

  ‘Were you in love with him, Dizzy? Was Jake the only decent man in this terrible family? He’s a prisoner now too, you know, shut in his own body. It might even be worse than this is – I know this can’t go on for ever . . .’

  ‘Tam! Come and take a look at this, will you?’

  DC Charlotte Nisbet was staring at the computer screen on her desk when DS MacNee came into the detective room.

  She had called up two sets of fingerprints. The state-of-the-art computerised fingerprinting system was the pride and joy of the Galloway Force, the only piece of equipment it possessed which could be described as being at the white-hot end of the technological revolution. Comparisons between fingerprints, once the territory of experts, were now a matter of pressing a few keys – if you knew which keys, and Nisbet, possessed of an enquiring mind, had made it her business to know.

  ‘What’s the parlour trick this time? Bunty’d a dog once could balance a sugar lump on its nose then throw it up and catch it. We’ll need to get you on to that next.’

  She didn’t rise to the bait. ‘See those fingerprints they got off the mask?’ She expanded the two impressions so that they filled the screen. ‘Now, see these?’ She replaced them with another set, then with a click the screen divided so that they were side by side, enormously enlarged. The match was clear.

  MacNee whistled. ‘Where did you get those from?’

  ‘I knew he’d a record so I went down and dug his prints out from the files and copied them on to the computer.’

  ‘Doesn’t prove anything, mind,’ he pointed out. ‘Still, it’s interesting, no doubt about it. The Boss’ll be wanting a word with him.’

  ‘Is she around?’

  ‘She’s away at the hospital trying to talk to Jake Mason with sign language or something.’ His tone was sceptical.

  Nisbet raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that maybe her clutching at straws?’

  ‘Whole bloody haystack, if you ask me. Still, keeps her off the streets, I suppose. I’ll give her a call now.’

  He had no success. ‘They make you switch phones off in hospital because of all the electronic stuff,’ Nisbet pointed out.

  ‘Right enough. And she was going in to see the bairns after on her way home. Och well, it’ll do in the morning.’

  24

  The ward sister who had so taken against DI Fleming on her last visit was on duty again today, her lip curling as Fleming explained her mission. ‘I couldn’t possibly give permission for experimentation of that sort with one of my patients,’ she said haughtily.

  ‘So who could?’ If pleasantness won’t work, try the alternative. ‘Who’s in charge of this case?’

  ‘Well, the consultant, of course—’

  ‘Then perhaps you could find him for me, nurse.’ As the other woman opened her mouth to protest that you didn’t summon consultants, Fleming said implacably, ‘Now, if you don’t mind.’

  Her face as red as a turkey-cock’s, the nurse gave her a look which would have reduced a lesser woman to a pool of green slime and withdrew to her office to emerge, tight-lipped, two minutes later. ‘He’s with a patient. He’ll come after that.’

  ‘Good. Is Mrs Mason with her husband? I want a word with her too.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Fleming walked off down the corridor. The police guard had gone now and when she looked through the window in the door of Jake Mason’s room she could see Rosamond talking earnestly to the immobile figure, rendered almost inhuman by the plastic tubes and monitoring instruments.

  Was he listening? Fleming noticed that she had positioned herself so that she was in his line of sight and his eyes were certainly open – you would almost swear, watching her.

  Fleming tapped on the door but didn’t go in. Rosamond looked up and seeing who it was, said something to her husband, patted his hand and came over to the door. She was wearing silver-grey today, a polo-necked sweater which looked like cashmere with a double string of large pearls which looked real. Greeting Fleming warmly, she agreed to come to the waiting-area and listen to what she was proposing.

  Fleming gave her a brief résumé of the current situation; when she heard about Conrad, Rosamond bit her lip. ‘I was always so afraid that something terrible would happen, afraid for both of our boys. But poor, poor Conrad – and poor Brett! Whatever will she do, with no one to look after her?’

  It was strange to think of Brett, with her size and aggressive personality, as a helpless creature, while this slim, fragile-looking woman obviously possessed a core of tempered steel.

  ‘Have you been in touch with your son?’ Fleming asked with some curiosity.

  Rosamond hesitated. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘No. He hasn’t come to see his father, and if he doesn’t even have that much family affection there isn’t much point, is there?’ Her eyes were too bright.

  But Fleming hadn’t come here to speculate about the Mason family relationships. Changing the subject, she went on to outline what Laura had suggested, stressing that it was only a theoretical possibility.

  As she spoke, she saw Rosamond start to glow. A smile lit up her face and she was suddenly quite strikingly beautiful. ‘If he could speak to me again, tell me he understands that I still love him, that I always did! It might help me forgive myself . . .’

  ‘You did what you believed was right at the time,’ Fleming said gently, and the other woman sighed. Then a frown furrowed her clear brow.

  ‘Yo
u know,’ she said slowly, ‘I’ve been talking all the time to Jake – someone suggested it was good for him – and of course I’ve told him everything that’s been happening. And when I was talking about that poor girl’s body, I almost thought he reacted. His eyes kept moving to and fro as if he was agitated, but Sister said I was imagining things.’

  ‘Really?’ Fleming was staring at her with sudden hope when a tall, good-looking black man in a well-cut suit appeared, escorted fussily by the ward sister like an ocean liner with a tug.

  ‘Mr Mbele,’ she announced.

  He glanced at Fleming, with some disfavour she thought, but Rosamond greeted him with outstretched hands and he took them, smiling down at her.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘this is Inspector Fleming. She’s come with an idea for Jake . . .’

  He listened, frowning slightly. At the end he said slowly, ‘This has been written up, of course. Doesn’t work a lot of the time and I don’t like raising unrealistic hopes.’ He directed a challenging look at Fleming, who said nothing.

  ‘But surely it can’t do any harm?’ Rosamond said eagerly. ‘It wouldn’t hurt Jake, just to try it, would it?’

  Fleming could read in the doctor’s face that he thought there was very little that would make a difference to Jake Mason’s situation, one way or another. ‘Sure we can try,’ he said, ‘but I’m not authorising a police interrogation.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Fleming said hastily. ‘Look, if I could borrow some paper I’ll draw out the alphabet and you could take charge of it yourself.’

  ‘That would be wonderful, Patrick,’ Rosamond urged, and Fleming could see that, almost against his will, he was interested.

  ‘You have patients waiting, Mr Mbele.’ The ward sister looked as if she might have bitten on a lemon.