Lying Dead

by Aline Templeton

  Lying Dead

  Aline Templeton

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Death is my Neighbour

  Last Act of All

  Past Praying For

  The Trumpet Shall Sound

  Night and Silence

  Shades of Death

  Marjory Fleming Series

  Cold in the Earth

  The Darkness and the Deep

  Copyright © 2007 by Aline Templeton

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A Hodder & Stoughton Book

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

  without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living

  or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Epub ISBN 9781848948341

  Book ISBN 9780340922279

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Lying Dead

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  For Ian again, with all my love and thanks

  for support, encouragement, and the title.

  Chapter 1

  The wind had dropped with the sunrise. It was a beautiful May morning, with the soft, pearly light so typical of the south-west corner of Scotland, but it was cool still; vapour clung to the tops of the trees and there was a sweet, damp, earthy smell after a heavy dew. He got up to have a chilly shower – he must see if something couldn’t be done about the hot-water supply – then dressed in his working jeans and checked shirt and went down the rickety staircase and across the living room to open the door.

  The wooden shack, his home since he was freed on licence six months ago, had walls weathered by time and the elements to a soft silvery grey. It stood in a clearing surrounded by rough grass studded with the stumps of felled trees, crumbling and mossy now. Beyond that, a tangle of undergrowth formed a natural enclosure: at this time of year the grass had feathery seed heads and the creamy flowers of hawthorn and cow parsley gleamed against the lush dark green of nettles and docks. From a snarl of brambles, a robin was shouting a melodious challenge to all comers. Sitting down on the dilapidated bench outside the back door, he drank in the peace and freedom which remained a novelty still.

  He enjoyed his work as a forester; his hands were hardened now and his muscles had strengthened so that he didn’t suffer as at first he had from the physical demands it made. He had nearly finished repairing a path for ramblers; after that, he would be putting up owl nesting boxes as part of the Forestry Commission’s wildlife protection programme. When he heard the eerie cries on a moonlit night, he would enjoy thinking that the bird sweeping through the clearing on great, silent wings might have been a scrawny chick in one of his boxes.

  Yes, he was a contented man in this simple, solitary existence, with only his books for company, though he would once have pitied someone who earned a meagre living by the work of his hands and didn’t own a house or a car or even a shower with reliably hot water. But after eighteen months when there had been little else for him to do for hours at a time but think, he had come to the conclusion that serenity came from lack of expectation. Not happiness, no, but that was a luxury he had been forced to realize he couldn’t expect. The nearest approach to it was this pleasure in the warmth of a spring morning and the tranquillity of his solitary world. It was tempting him to linger now, when he should really be getting ready for the day’s work. Just five more minutes . . .

  When the mechanical, insistent call of a mobile phone – a silly, chirpy little tune – broke the spell, his first reaction was one of alarming rage. He had believed himself alone and he was being spied on; it seemed a violation as gross as if he had been sitting on the bench naked. He had been under surveillance for too long to be rational about it.

  Jumping to his feet, he headed towards the sound which seemed to be coming from the edge of the clearing where it joined a forestry road, his hands unconsciously balled into fists, angry enough to take on any intruder.

  But there was no one to be seen. In front of him the track was empty and a moment later the ringing stopped. He looked about him uncertainly.

  Could it be some rambler who had dropped the mobile nearby without noticing? It was a popular walk, winding up through the forest to a panoramic viewpoint. Perhaps, if it went on ringing, he could trace it and restore it to its owner. It wasn’t likely to be far off the track.

  Provokingly, the sound stopped again just as he emerged from the clearing, but it didn’t take long for him to establish its source. There was a woman lying on her front, her head turned to one side, just beyond a screening hawthorn bush at the very edge of the track. She was wearing jeans, a white shirt and a light blue tailored jacket. She was dead.

  It wasn’t hard to tell. The long dark hair veiling her face was sticky with blood and on one side of her head a wound gaped, showing a glint of bone and a mess of tissue.

  He staggered as if someone had struck him. With the random irrelevance of shock, he found himself thinking, That’s why you say, I’m staggered. He shut his eyes as if it might be a bad dream, as if when he opened them a blink would have wiped away the monstrous sight.

  Of course it didn’t. She was still there, still as shocking in ugly death. He had never seen a dead body before. He steeled himself to look directly, to walk towards her. He saw that she was wearing trainers and her clothes were glistening with dew, then his eye travelled reluctantly to focus on the mutilated head. He was beside her now; he bent down and gingerly put out his hand to push aside the curtain of hair.

  The shock this time dropped him to his knees. He knew who she was, though her hair, when last he saw her, had been close-cropped like a boy’s and hennaed red. How could he forget that seductive mouth, the tiny diamond glinting in the side of her nose? – they had tortured him in dreams. But the mouth was sagging open now, the olive skin waxy and discoloured. The huge dark eyes, which had looked at him with what he had believed was love, were closed, one of them puffy and sticky with congealed blood.

  The last time he had seen her was in court, when she had looked at the jury with those same limpid eyes and delivered t
he evidence which had put him behind bars. And if he called the police now, what would they assume? She was lying outside his house; there were his footprints in the dew-wet grass beside her body.

  His world splintered about him. The sun was still shining, the birds were still singing, but it was as if a stone had been thrown at a looking-glass, showing up his tranquil, contented existence for the illusion it was.

  At any minute there might be ramblers. Soon there would be other foresters on their way to a project up by the viewpoint. There could be no concealment then.

  He wasn’t going back to prison. That was his only coherent thought, and moving like a zombie he went back into the house to fetch a tarpaulin he used sometimes when the roof leaked.

  As he walked back out again carrying it, his face was set in hard, emotionless lines. Turning his head aside, he wrapped it round her slight frame, then levered the package, rigid and bearably anonymous now, on to his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. The inanimate body was surprisingly heavy, though, and he faltered a little as he took the weight. Then, regaining his balance, he set off through the belt of undergrowth, ignoring the thorns which snatched at his legs as he carried her in her tarpaulin shroud, the fading sound of the robin’s song from the bramble bush an impromptu requiem.

  It was eerily dark and quiet as he stepped into the green shade of the forest. On all sides, the trunks of the larches rose high above him, bare apart from the jagged spikes of old broken branches, with low cloud still lurking in their canopy of foliage. As he climbed the sloping ground, there was thick soft grass to deaden his footsteps and even when he stumbled on a concealed stone or snapped a twig the sound was muffled. With no scrub for nesting there was no birdsong; the silence, too, added to his sense of unreality.

  This section of the forest was unfamiliar territory. He’d never worked here, or felt tempted to explore; he had no idea how far it might extend before he would come to a track or one of the swathes of ground where timber had already been harvested. His every instinct was to take – it – as far as possible from his own back yard, but fit as he was, his burden seemed to be growing heavier and heavier. He blanked out the thought of how small, how slight she had been; all he was carrying was a dead weight which very soon he would be forced to set down, at least for a rest.

  He could hear a sound now: the soft babble of water over stones which indicated one of the countless little burns running down the steep sides of the valley. He headed towards it, his breathing laboured, and saw that on the other side the trees were thinner, sparser and of more recent planting. He paused.

  On the near side of the burn lay three great fallen trees, their branches dry as tinder and their exposed root systems linked, elaborate as a vipers’ knot, to form a bank. They must have stood at the outer edge of the old plantation, unprotected against the winter storms which topple the giants of the forest as a man might blow down a house of cards.

  Grimacing, he set down his load and sat down himself, leaning his head back against the gnarled root mass and closing his eyes. Despite the cool damp air, he was sweating and his heart was racing with fear as well as physical effort. Time was passing. He checked his watch: in half an hour a truck would come to take him to the project he was working on and by then he must not only be ready, but calm and normal.

  There beyond the burn, the forest was beginning to thin out. This was a fine and private place to spend eternity, with the murmur of water and the guardian presence of the trees. A hollow had formed at the base of the bank of roots and with deliberate lack of reflection he picked up the formless bundle and laid it there. It looked neat, impersonal, a package not a person in its tarpaulin cover.

  The tarpaulin . . . He dared not leave it. There was no reason why they should find – it – for years, until this plantation’s turn for felling came, but he couldn’t take the risk. It must have his prints all over it and there would be traces of his sweat, minute skin cells shed by his hands. In twenty years’ time, thirty, they would still have his prints and his DNA on record. He had to take it with him.

  When he removed it, though, she would become a person again. A person whose face he had seen on the pillow next to him, a person who had transformed his agreeable, respectable – oh yes, and dull, dull, dull – life first into a fantasy of enchantment, then into a horror of betrayal and despair. Circe. Delilah . . .

  She was dead, he told himself. An inanimate body. A corpse. Her soul – if a soul could be discerned – was elsewhere.

  With the resolve of desperation he stood up and with his head averted jerked the edge of the tarpaulin. He pulled it towards him, gathered it up and walked away without looking back to see how snugly she lay on her back, as if the cavity beneath the vipers’ knot of roots had been hollowed out especially to receive her.

  PC Sandy Langlands, his boyish face weary-looking after his night shift, emerged blinking blearily from the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters in Kirkluce just as DS Tam MacNee arrived for duty and got out of his car. It was warm already, early as it was, and there was a sticky, sultry feel to the air.

  MacNee was wearing his customary summer garb of jeans, white T-shirt, black leather jacket and trainers, though the difference between this and his winter gear might not be immediately apparent to the casual observer, since it consisted only of dispensing with the semmit his wife Bunty insisted he don under the T-shirt when the weather was less clement.

  At the sight of his colleague’s haggard appearance, MacNee’s face brightened, his smile exposing the gap between his two front teeth. ‘Man, Sandy, you look like the wrath of God! Heavy night?’

  Langlands groaned. ‘You could say. Lost five quid to Wilson, playing poker. We were on back-up and it was dead quiet. Not one call in from the patrol cars the whole time – the night seemed to go on for ever.’

  MacNee’s grin faded. ‘I blame the weather,’ he said bitterly. ‘A week of this, and everyone’s in a good mood. You know what the high point was yesterday? Two drunk and incapable – you couldn’t even call them disorderly when they were just passed out in the park, not bothering anybody. Four of the lads went to that one and they’d to fight for the privilege.’ He gave a resigned shrug. ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s desk work again today. I tell you, I’d have gone into the bank instead of the polis if that was what floated my boat.’

  The constable greeted this assertion with a certain scepticism. Tam as a bank clerk didn’t really square with his appearance, which was still that of the wee Glasgow hard man he’d been before Bunty, a sonsy lass from Dumfries who punched well above her not inconsiderable weight and had some very old-fashioned ideas about respectability, had taken him in hand. Tam on the other side of the counter with a stocking over his head was an altogether more plausible image, but Langlands refrained from pointing this out. He was too young to die.

  ‘Right enough,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Well, I’m away to my bed anyhow.’

  ‘You do that, laddie. I’ll see what we can drum up to keep you busy tonight.’

  MacNee went on into the building. The reception area was quiet, with only a couple of people in the waiting area who looked as if they might have come to inquire about lost property, and Naismith, the desk sergeant, was showing an elderly lady a leaflet about home security. It looked like being another quiet day and MacNee, with a sigh, went along to the CID room.

  He was surprised to hear, as he reached the open door, the voice of DI Marjory Fleming in full flow. It wasn’t often that ‘Big Marge’, as she was known to her subordinates in recognition of her commanding height and the personality that went with it, came down from the fourth floor to give someone a rollicking in public. Rollickings were usually private and painful.

  ‘And if not, I’ll have your guts for garters,’ she was saying in a favourite phrase. ‘Frilly ones, with wee blue rosettes at the side.’ It was only this unexpected elaboration, and the gust of laughter that greeted it, which made MacNee realize what he was hearing. No one laughed when Big Marge was giving
them laldie.

  The voice was that of DC Jonathan Kingsley, a relative newcomer to the Galloway Force with a gift for mimicry which had proved operationally useful in working undercover to break up a drugs ring. MacNee had heard, with appreciation, his take-off of Superintendent Donald Bailey and suspected that there was a Tam MacNee too, which he hadn’t heard, but he hadn’t known about the Big Marge act. It was pretty good, especially considering Jon’s normal voice had an English accent. Grinning, MacNee went in.

  Kingsley stopped instantly. ‘Uh-oh! Sorry about that. Back to your desks, guys!’

  There were five other officers in the room. Four of them, exchanging sidelong glances, went back to their tasks. Only DC Tansy Kerr, her neat, gamine face flushing, said sharply, ‘There’s no need for that, Jon. Tam likes a joke as much as anyone.’

  ‘Of course he does!’ Kingsley’s voice was offensively soothing. ‘Morning, Tam.’ He too turned away, but MacNee could see his smirk reflected in the expressions of the men facing him.

  It was true, of course, that Tam and Marjory worked closely together. They went back a long way, having been partners from the time Marjory joined as a rookie, and her promotion hadn’t damaged their relationship. Tam had no ambitions to rise to any sort of administrative post: he loved his job with its endless variety, and working with paper in an office on your own held no appeal when instead you could be out on the streets dealing with the public or here in the CID room enjoying the jokes and the cut and thrust that went with being on the team.

  Kingsley was becoming a dangerously divisive figure. He was clever and an effective officer, but he was also arrogant and nakedly ambitious. He didn’t like Tam, which was fair enough in its way since Tam didn’t like him either, and in any group, the clash of personalities is a fact of life.

  But it seemed now as if Kingsley’s objective was to create his own gang, excluding MacNee from the common currency of jokes and complaints inevitably made by lower ranks about their superiors, subtly implying that he’d run to Fleming and clype – he, Tam, who had been raised in one of the rougher parts of Glasgow with an attitude to tale-bearing which made omertà look like a set of recommended guidelines!