Their Final Act

by Alex Walters

  So where the hell was he?

  She already had a sense that, despite the open front door, the house was deserted. It just somehow felt empty. If he'd been upstairs, even if he'd been in bed with some little tart, she'd have expected to have heard something. She'd made plenty of noise entering the house. He'd have been down by now, even with his trousers halfway round his ankles, at least metaphorically.

  She took another sip of the gin and slumped down on the sofa. Half of her wanted to sit there and never move again. But after a moment, she found herself making her way back out into the hallway. Where the hell was he? He was feckless enough and had been known to miss appointments with people more important than her. But he wasn't usually this useless. Usually, he'd remember just in time to send her an apologetic text, grovelling about his own stupidity and promising to turn over a new leaf. Which would last as long as it took for him to forget the next appointment.

  Maybe something had happened to him. That was a new thought. He wasn't getting any younger, and he could hardly be said to take good care of his health. Maybe it had finally caught up with him. She hurried up the stairs, half expecting that he'd be up in bed at death's door, or maybe even through death's door. Either that, or she'd find him in bed with one of those floozies.

  Their main bedroom was deserted. The bed had been slept in, and a half-hearted attempt made to tidy it up, which suggested to her that Tom might well have shared it with someone else. If so, or even if it was just a possibility, she'd make him drag the bedclothes down to the washing machine. There was no way she was spending a night inhaling someone else's knock-off perfume, let alone any other scents that might have been deposited there.

  The other three rooms, used mainly for guests, were undisturbed. The bathroom, similarly, showed no more than the expected signs of recent use.

  So where the bloody hell was he?

  She made her way down the stairs. The truth was he could be almost anywhere. It was possible he'd headed into the office to deal with some business issue. Tom always liked to think his presence was indispensable even though most of the team were probably more capable than he was. Bugger him.

  She picked up the gin and walked through the kitchen to open the back door. What she could really do with in the unaccustomed warmth was a breath of fresh air. She stepped out onto the decking, enjoying the breeze on her cheeks.

  She recognised almost immediately that there was something strange about the garden, but it took her a moment to work out what it was. It was an oddly designed garden to start with, which was one of the qualities that had attracted her to the house. The lawn rose in a gentle slope from the back of the house then fell in a steep slope at the far side of the garden as the land dropped towards the nearby River Ness. She'd had the slope reconfigured as a series of gentle terraces, dotted with appropriate shrubs and flower plants, and with garden seats at intervals among the terraces. There was no view to speak of, other than the tops of trees and other neighbouring houses, but it provided a shady and welcoming place to sit on a day like today.

  There was a line of shrubs across the top edge of the lawn which marked the boundary of the terraced slope. The two nearest shrubs had both been crushed, as if a heavy weight had been thrust against them.

  She deposited her drink on the picnic table and stared up at the damage. What the bloody hell had he been doing while she was away? Had he had some bloody stupid party out here?

  She strode up the lawn to the summit, peering down into the area beyond. The damage continued down the terraces, shrubs and flowers crushed in parallel lines down the hillside. At the bottom of the garden, wedged against the far fencing, she could see what had caused it. A human body, dressed in black, had been rolled down the terraces to end up smashed against the wooden panels.

  She looked further along the fencing. As the daughter and granddaughter of old-time variety performers, her instinct when uncertain was to cling to showbiz stories. For some stupid reason, as she stared down into the well of the garden, the thought that sprang into her mind was the old tale about the double act playing the Glasgow Empire – Mike and Bernie Winters, was it? Like the heckler from the back of that audience, her immediate reaction was to mutter: 'Oh, Christ. There's two of them.'

  39

  'We're sure about this?' Helena Grant asked.

  'Sure as we can be,' McKay confirmed. 'Several prints on the wine glass. All clearly defined. Full prints, not partials. Perfect match with Elizabeth Hamilton.'

  'A DNA match from the glass too,' Ginny Horton added. 'There doesn't seem much doubt.'

  'Sounds too good to be true,' Grant commented. 'Life's not that helpful. Ours isn't anyway.'

  'That was my first thought,' McKay said. 'And Hamilton may be many things but she's never struck me as stupid.'

  'Some sort of set up then?'

  'Anything's possible. But it would mean someone got hold of a glass with her prints and DNA on it, and then planted it there without leaving any trace of their own contact. The only other traces on there match with Dingwall.'

  'Not impossible.'

  'Not impossible. But convoluted. Seems better to start with the evidence that's in front of us. Occam's razor and all that.'

  'Aye, Alec. You're always the one for the philosophical approach. I hope this isn't just about unfinished business with Hamilton?'

  'We've all got unfinished business with Hamilton. But what else do you suggest? We've clear evidence here. We can't ignore it. We have to start by taking it at face value and seeing what Hamilton has to say.'

  'I hope you're not trying to teach me to suck eggs, Alec McKay?'

  McKay grinned. 'I wouldn't dare. And I'm resisting any of the obvious jokes at this point. But I'm right, aren't I?'

  'Aye, of course you're right. You're always sodding right. Except of course when you're steamingly, outrageously, unbelievably sodding wrong and I have to dig you out of the shite.'

  'Aye, but that's only now and again. So… Hamilton?'

  'I've been trying to track her down. She seems to have gone to ground after the trial, maybe not surprisingly. She gave that one newspaper interview, just to stir up the crap for us. Then she vanished. I've been onto her solicitors.'

  'And?'

  'They started by giving me lots of bollocks about harassment and how they hoped their client wasn't going to become a target for police victimisation.'

  'Oh, for Christ's sake.'

  'Aye. I told them that we had a legitimate need to interview Hamilton in connection with an ongoing murder enquiry and that if they weren't able to help me they'd have to consider their own positions very carefully. It looks as if, after the trial, she went to stay in The Reynold Centre in Inverness.'

  'The Reynold Centre?' Horton said. 'The women's refuge?'

  'That's the place,' Grant said. 'Most of the residents are women who've experienced domestic violence and who need active protection.'

  'So why would Hamilton need to stay there?' McKay looked puzzled. 'I mean, she's a survivor of abuse and violence, and she might well need support, but she's not actively under threat. Not any more.'

  'As far as we know,' Horton said. 'We know she was abused by her father and by Denny Gorman–'

  'Who're both dead. Thanks to her.'

  'Not proven,' Horton said. 'But, yes, both dead. It's possible they weren't her only abusers.'

  McKay made no immediate response but jumped to his feet and made his familiar prowl of Grant's office. 'I suppose that's possible,' he said finally. 'I'm just thinking about what she said about her father.'

  'Go on,' Grant said.

  'Remember she told us her father used to attract these young women as his counselling clients. Then he'd… groom them is the only word, I suppose. Manipulate them and get them infatuated with him to the point where they'd do anything for him. Then eventually he'd get sick of them.'

  Horton nodded, clearly following McKay's thinking. 'Hamilton reckoned he had a network of business contacts, as she put it, who
he used to get them out of his hair. Some of them ended up in new lives working in Manchester and other places.'

  'And we know that some of those ended up dead,' Grant said grimly. 'But we still don't know if there were other victims we've never discovered.'

  'Exactly,' McKay said. 'But maybe some of those "business contacts" of his weren't just there to facilitate a move down south. That's another thought that's been nagging away at the back of my mind but I hadn't recognised till now. Why would these contacts be willing to help Robbins out like that? What was in it for them? Maybe it was just Robbins calling in favours. But maybe…'

  'Maybe we're talking about a network of abusers? And these women got handed to the next in the pecking order. Jesus.' Grant looked genuinely horrified.

  'In which case,' McKay went on, 'there might well be people out there who Elizabeth Hamilton has reason to be scared of. Maybe people who abused her. Maybe people who don't want the full story to come out.'

  Grant nodded. 'I suppose it's quite possible that one of those people might have been Jack Dingwall. He had the history, after all.'

  McKay was still thinking. 'You all know my views on cheap psychology…'

  'We know your views on all types of psychology, whatever the price,' Grant said.

  'Aye. It just strikes me that if Hamilton did kill another of her abusers, she might not be too fussed about concealing her identity.'

  'After all the effort she put into avoiding being convicted for Robbins' and Gorman's deaths?' Grant said.

  'Maybe that's the point. Maybe this was unfinished business. And now it's done maybe she doesn't much care any more.'

  'It is a point of view,' Grant conceded.

  'So is she still in the centre?' Horton asked impatiently.

  'That's the thing,' Grant said. 'I phoned them. They're reluctant to give out any information on the phone. To get any real information we're going to have to go in person, I reckon.'

  'You did tell them this is a murder enquiry?'

  Grant sighed. 'Aye, Alec. Oddly enough, I did think to mention it. But I'm guessing they've heard every kind of claim from abusive men trying to get information on their victims, don't you? I got a firm "I don't doubt you're who you say you are, but even so…" They suggested I go through the formal channels – there's a designated liaison officer, apparently – but it'll be quicker just to turn up on their doorstep with ID.'

  'I suppose that's their job,' McKay conceded. 'You want me to go down there then?'

  'Tell you what, Alec. Why don't you let Ginny ask the questions? I've got a hunch that in this particular case she might handle the sensitivities a wee bit better than you.'

  'You do realise that's sexism.'

  'That so, Alec? I'll take my chances.' She looked as if she was about to offer a few further choice thoughts on the subject when the phone buzzed on her desk. She held up her hand to silence McKay. 'DCI Grant.' There was a long silence as she listened to what was being said at the other end of the line. 'You're kidding me.'

  She held the phone to her chest and looked up at McKay and Horton. 'Now we're really neck deep in the shite. We've two more bodies. Two more fucking garrottings.'

  'Two more?' McKay said.

  'Aye. Two more. Brothers. Tom and Colin Baillie.'

  40

  Jane looked around the room. 'Do you think that's good enough?'

  Alicia was still crouched down, polishing the front of a cabinet that seemed to contain more bottles of spirits than Jane had ever seen even in most of the local bars. She'd lost count of the number of different single malts. Most of the bottles looked unopened. 'I've no idea,' she said. 'Even before we started, this place looked tidier than any room I've ever been in.' She pushed herself to her feet and looked around. 'It smells more of beeswax now, but it looks more or less the same.'

  Jane nodded. 'Aye, that's pretty much how I felt. I couldn't find any actual dust to, well, dust. And I couldn't see anything on the floor even before we'd started vacuuming.'

  'You know Netty has a cleaner comes in twice a week,' Alicia said. 'I'd have said this room's been cleaned already in the last few days.'

  'I don't suppose it gets used very much.'

  'Even so, you'd expect a bit of dust to build up if it was left for any length of time.'

  Jane knew Alicia was right. She couldn't understand why Munro wouldn't give them real tasks to do, rather than these superfluous duties. Jane would have preferred to do something much more arduous, as long as she could have felt it was worthwhile.

  'What do we do now?' Alicia said.

  Jane glanced at the clock on her mobile. It was still only around 11.15am. She didn't expect that Munro and Elizabeth would be back up for lunch till around 1.00pm. That seemed to be the usual pattern for the day. 'We could do another room or two?' she offered.

  'But Netty said not to do any more than the ones we've done,' Alicia pointed out. Munro had implied that the other rooms were either private – including the rooms that were used as bedrooms by Netty herself or by guests such as Henry Dowling – or contained work or other documents that might get misarranged if the rooms were tidied.

  'Aye, you're right. So what do we do?'

  'Should we go and get a drink in the kitchen? Netty told us to just help ourselves.'

  'Why not?'

  Jane followed Alicia through to the kitchen. The back door was open, and there was sunlight glittering on the path outside. The kitchen felt airy, a faint breeze blowing through to counteract the warmth of the Aga. 'Do you smell something?' Jane asked.

  'What sort of something?'

  'Not sure. A burning smell. Something charred.'

  Alicia stopped and sniffed the air, with the appearance of a dog seeking its quarry. 'Maybe. Do you think it's the Aga?'

  Munro had told them that one of the downsides of the Aga – one of the few downsides, she'd emphasised – was that it was difficult to smell what was cooking inside. 'That might be a good thing,' Jane had pointed out, 'depending on what you were cooking.'

  Munro had laughed, but said that she missed the old scent of baking bread from her previous cooker. 'It's things like that. The kind of scents you want filling a house like this.' The odd thing was, she'd added, that because of the way the Aga flue worked, you could sometimes smell those scents more strongly upstairs or even out in the garden than in the kitchen.

  Jane stepped out of the back door and stood breathing in the morning air. There were a few fluffy white clouds drifting across the sky, but otherwise the day was as bright as ever.

  She could smell something, she thought. As Munro had said, it was more detectable out there. A definite smell of burning. Perhaps, she thought, burning bread.

  She re-entered the kitchen. 'There's definitely a scorched smell,' she said to Alicia. 'It's more obvious out there, so it must be something in the Aga.'

  'Do you think we should check?'

  Jane hesitated. The answer was clearly yes. If there was something burning in the oven, then Munro would want to know about it. On the other hand, Jane still felt this was a world she didn't fully understand. Perhaps some things were meant to be left to char. Perhaps if she interfered, she'd be getting it wrong and Munro would be unhappy with what they'd done. 'I suppose so,' she said finally. 'I mean, things aren't supposed to do that, are they?'

  'I wouldn't have thought so,' Alicia said, in a tone that suggested that she was no more confident of the rights and wrongs of the place than Jane.

  Jane crossed over to the Aga and gently opened the hot oven door. As she did so, a cloud of acrid smoke filled the kitchen. 'I'm sure it shouldn't be doing that.' She reached over and grabbed a pair of oven gloves.

  For a moment, she had a disconcerting sense that whatever she was about to pull from the oven would be something truly horrible. Afterwards, she couldn't explain where the idea had come from or why. But, just for the merest instant, she had felt it must be true. It was like a moment in a dream when you know that what you're about to find is something
you're truly dreading, something you've long imagined but now, just at that terrible instant, can no longer recall.

  'It's a loaf, isn't it?' Alicia said.

  It was, or at least it had been intended to be. It was difficult to be sure now, but it seemed to be the remnants of one of Netty Munro's sourdough cobs. Now, it was little more than a charred shrunken boulder. A meteorite that had burnt up on its long journey through the atmosphere, Jane thought, fancifully. She stared at it for a moment. 'That's a pity.'

  'Netty must have put it on before she went out with Elizabeth,' Alicia said. 'It's not like her. She's normally very well organised about that sort of thing. I've noticed it when she's cooked supper for us. It's always amazing how she can juggle all this stuff and know exactly when to get things out of the oven.'

  'Maybe she got distracted by something. It's easily done.' Jane could feel a growing sense of unease. It was connected, she thought, with the odd sensation she'd had a few moments earlier. The sense that she was about to witness something awful, something she'd never seen before. 'Do you think we should throw it away?'

  'I'm not sure. Netty might want to see it.'

  Jane couldn't really think why Netty might want to do that, but she shared Alicia's uncertainty. 'I'll leave it on top of the Aga. I don't think any of it's salvageable but you never know. Do you think we should go and tell Netty?'

  'Can we have a drink first? I'm parched.'

  Jane pulled open the fridge and peered inside. There was none of Munro's home-made lemonade. Even that, in Jane's current frame of mind, seemed oddly significant, as if the few norms she had become accustomed to in the house had already shifted. She pulled out a carton of orange juice. 'This okay?'

  'Fine for me,' Alicia said.

  They found glasses, added some ice from the freezer, and poured themselves each a glass. Alicia's judgement had been sound. As soon as Jane tasted the cool sweet juice, she instantly felt calmer. Perhaps she'd allowed herself to become a little dehydrated, overheated, while they'd been working. Whatever the reason, she hadn't been thinking clearly. Why would anyone care about a burnt loaf? It was a mild irritation, nothing more. Netty would probably just make another one.