Bad Blood

by Aline Templeton

  The other officer got up as she approached, spoke briefly to the patient, then came to meet her, yawning as she put her hat back on.

  ‘At last! I’m really needing my bed.’

  ‘Sorry! Everything’s about at a standstill with the roadworks coming in. How is she?’ Fleming nodded towards the girl in the bed, lying staring at the ceiling.

  The other woman pulled a face. ‘Not saying much, apart from asking when her mum will be coming. I’ve stalled her so far, but she’ll have to be told something soon. They’re saying she’s fine and they need the bed. Any progress?’

  ‘Car’s gone and mother’s just disappeared. They’re going through the house just now and there’s details out talking to the neighbours. If she’s feeling chatty I can encourage her but I’ve been warned it’s just guard duty. If I question her before the fancy-pants CID get here they’ll have my guts for garters.’

  The constable laughed, smothered another enormous yawn and left. Fleming turned to watch her go, nerving herself to approach the girl. She hadn’t been entirely open with her colleague; there were reasons for that but it made her uncomfortable.

  She couldn’t put it off any longer. She took off her hat and jacket, laying them on one of the chairs at the bedside, then sat down.

  ‘Hello, Marnie. Do you remember me?’

  The girl had a bandage round her head and her red-gold hair was still matted with dried blood. She was lying back against the pillows as if she lacked the energy to sit up but as Fleming spoke she turned to look at her, blue eyes vivid in her white face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice was thin and shaky. ‘You come to see my mum sometimes. The last time you were wearing a raincoat and it had brown buttons and you had an orange and browny-green jersey and jeans and tan boots. You said, “Hello, Karen, just coming for a chat, all right?” And she said yes and then you both went into the sitting room and shut the door.’

  Fleming was amused. ‘My goodness, you do have a good memory, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marnie said flatly.

  ‘How are you feeling? That’s a seriously impressive bandage.’ It sounded phoney, even as she said it, the result of her own unease. The girl was too old – ten, eleven, perhaps? – to be jollied along.

  Not surprisingly, it was ignored. ‘When will my mum be here?’

  ‘Sorry, Marnie, I’m afraid I don’t know. She’ll probably be along later.’ She hated saying something she didn’t believe to be true but she had no authority to say anything else.

  ‘You’re in the police. Something’s happened to my mum, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Possibly’ was the answer, and if Fleming were to be truthful that wasn’t the worst-case scenario. She deflected the question.

  ‘Something happened to your head. That’s why I’m here. We’re trying to find out what went on last night.’ She risked adding, ‘Do you know?’ hoping that this wouldn’t be stepping on CID toes. She didn’t want to wreck her chances before she even got round to applying to join them.

  ‘I-I don’t know. I just can’t remember. I don’t understand it – I can’t remember!’

  Marnie was getting distressed and Fleming hurried to reassure her. ‘You’ve had a head injury. That’s what often happens – you find you’ve got a blank about it. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn’t.’

  She saw her assimilate that, then after a moment Marnie turned her head to meet her eyes squarely.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?’

  ‘We don’t really know anything, just at the moment.’ That, at least, was true. She changed the subject. ‘What about your dad? Will he be coming to see you?’

  Marnie turned her head away. ‘Don’t know.’

  An uncomfortable area, obviously. Would pursuing it be acceptable chatting or the forbidden questioning? Fleming hesitated, but only for a moment. It was her insatiable appetite for answers that made her so keen to join the CID.

  ‘Does he live with you, your dad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Marnie still wasn’t looking at her, perhaps uncomfortable at having to admit that.

  The instinct to probe the sore spot was too strong to resist. ‘Would you like us to try to find him – tell him you’ve been hurt so he could come and see you?’

  ‘No!’ The response was too vehement and Marnie winced.

  There were more questions Fleming itched to ask but she could see that risked going too far. ‘Does your head still hurt?’ she asked instead.

  ‘A bit. But it’s OK. I just want to go home with my mum.’

  ‘The doctor will have to decide. You’ll be getting a day or two off school, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I like school. Nothing to do at home and Mum doesn’t like me having friends coming round.’

  Fleming was opening her mouth to ask the follow-up ‘Why?’ when she saw DS Tam MacNee coming down the ward towards her: short, wiry, walking with his usual jaunty swagger and wearing his unvarying uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, trainers and a black leather jacket.

  She gave a guilty start, but her face brightened too. MacNee had only recently joined the CID and before that had been her sergeant and mentor since she joined the force. She got up and moved away from the bed.

  ‘Just having a wee chat, were you?’ He raised an eyebrow and she blushed.

  ‘I wasn’t interrogating her, I swear. She just started telling me about her mum – didn’t like having people round the place, apparently.’

  ‘She wouldn’t, would she? Mmm. Anything else the lassie “just started telling you?”’

  Fleming ignored his cynical look. ‘She doesn’t know where her dad is and she’s sensitive about it.’

  ‘Oh, you’re the wee girl! We’ll have you in the CID before long, no doubt about it. Maybe not right this morning, though. I’ll take over now. Anything else?’

  ‘Just wants to know when her mother’s coming.’

  ‘You’ve not said anything about it, have you?’

  ‘Instructed not to.’

  He sighed. ‘Well, I’m not wanting to do it either. You know what they’re thinking?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know,’ Fleming said heavily. ‘You’re not going to tell her that, though, are you?’

  ‘I’ll have to tell her there’s someone from social services coming to take her into care. But apart from that …’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll just say we don’t know. And that’s God’s truth.’

  The little man who said he was a detective kept asking her questions. What was the point of them? He was wanting to know where her mother was – like she didn’t? – and he seemed to be expecting her to tell him. There was something about the questions, too, that made her uncomfortable.

  Had they had a row last night?

  That started it, the spool unrolling in her head as if she was watching a film …

  She puts on a coat before going into the sitting room to cover up what she’s wearing. Mum’s in one of her moods at the moment, ready to go mental at the least thing and she’ll go radge if she sees the skirt. She’s sitting smoking and just staring straight ahead, and she’s opened a bottle of white wine.

  ‘I’m just off into the town, Mum.’

  Her mother looks at her across the cigarette, eyes narrowed against the smoke. ‘What for?’

  She holds up her witch’s hat and mask. ‘Just guising. Halloween, you know?’

  Weirdly, her mother looks sort of horrified, staring at her and even choking on her cigarette. ‘No! I won’t—’ Then stops and there’s a long moment when she doesn’t say anything and her eyes are stretched open wide.

  ‘Won’t what, Mum?’ She feels uneasy.

  ‘It’s, it’s …’ Mum’s groping for words, then she says, ‘It’s not safe, hanging around the streets on your own.’

  ‘I’m meeting Gemma.’

  She knows it’s the wrong thing to say even before she says it. Her mum hates it when she has anythi
ng to do with Gemma – something to do with business and her father. Her mum kicks off.

  ‘I’ve told you before to steer clear of Gemma—’

  ‘You tell me to steer clear of everyone! You’d rather I didn’t have any friends at all, in case they want to come out here. What’s with you, Mum? What have you got to hide?’

  Her mother jumps up, white with anger. ‘That’s it, Marnie. You’re staying here. You’re grounded.’

  ‘I’m not, Mum. I’m going and you can’t stop me.’ She jinks out of the door but not before her low-cut T-shirt and miniskirt has been noticed.

  ‘You’re not to go out looking like a slapper,’ her mother screams after her, sounding angry, but as she runs out of the house and walks along to the place where the bus will stop she can hear the sound of crying. It makes her feel guilty and she hesitates, but then the lighted bus is coming round the corner and she shrugs her shoulders and lifts her hand to hail it.

  The policeman was sitting patiently, watching her as he waited for an answer. As she focused on his face again, he smiled at her, showing the gap between his two front teeth. He’d looked nicer when he wasn’t smiling.

  ‘A row?’ he prompted her.

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Marnie said. ‘She didn’t want me going into town to meet my friend. Wasn’t anything out of the usual.’

  ‘How do you get on with your mum generally?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’

  She felt as if his eyes were boring holes in her, but she wasn’t going to say anything else about that. None of his business. She volunteered, instead, that she could remember coming home, but nothing after that.

  And then it all starts again.

  She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home. She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, and with the row they’d had, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto a chair. The fire’s not quite out so Mum must just have gone to bed. Great – she only needs to shout through the bedroom door and go to bed herself.

  She stands in the hall. ‘I’m back, Mum,’ she calls and goes on into her bedroom and—

  Then the reel snapped and Marnie was back looking at the policeman. He asked her some more questions but it was making her head sore and she turned away and shut her eyes.

  She heard him say, ‘A lady’ll be coming soon to take you somewhere you can stay till we find your mum, OK?’

  Marnie knew what that meant – taken into care. Her mum had told her long ago that if she said something silly to a teacher about being left alone in the house or anything else, that would happen. Tears formed and trickled out from under her closed eyelids. All she wanted was her mum to come back and take her home. It wasn’t great, living with her mum, but it was all she knew. Surely her mum couldn’t have walked out on her?

  The terrible thing was, she wasn’t absolutely sure that she wouldn’t. But if she hadn’t, where was she? Marnie started to feel sick again.

  Superintendent Jakie McNally was under pressure this afternoon. The chief constable, no less, was making waves and McNally was old school. What the CC wanted the CC got and what he wanted was the Marnie Bruce business wrapped up before too many people started asking questions, so he could do without one of the most junior of the PCs doing just that. She was sitting in front of him now, her bright-eyed eagerness both a threat and a reproach.

  ‘PC Fleming, you know the background as well as I do. You were sworn to complete confidentiality when you took over monitoring from MacNee.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but I—’

  He talked across her. ‘You know that there is absolutely no sign of an intruder or a struggle, and no evidence that there was anyone in the house that evening apart from Marnie and her mother. You know they’ve combed the woods and there’s nothing. You know the missing car was found in the station car park in Dumfries and they’ve checked it out – nothing.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Fixing her with a look, he went on, ‘You and I both know why the outcome isn’t surprising, surely?’

  ‘Of course I do, sir.’ Fleming had taken a deep breath to be ready to power through. ‘I know it’s a possibility, but I think it’s only fair to the child—’

  That was as far as she got. ‘It was, mercifully, just a knock on the head and she’s well on the way to a full recovery. We’ll be looking for the woman quietly, of course, but if we go public on this, perhaps you could explain to me in what way this would be “fair” to the child?’

  Silenced, Fleming bit her lip.

  McNally relaxed. ‘You see, Marjory – it is Marjory, isn’t it? – policing isn’t only about exposing the brutal truth. Sometimes it’s about tempering justice with mercy.

  ‘All right? That’s a good girl. Run along, sweetheart.’

  Seething with anger, PC Marjory Fleming went back down the stairs from the inspector’s office, wishing she’d had the courage to say that in her view, what justice was being tempered with was not mercy but expediency.

  PART TWO

  2013

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marnie Bruce walked slowly up Oxford Street in the autumn dark, late October starting to tip towards bleak November. The air was damp and heavy with the hint of fog splintering the light from the street lamps and cars and buses into brilliant shards. The shops were closed but the shop window displays cast bright patches of light on the pavement, slicked with damp.

  Waves of people swept past her so that she felt almost buffeted in their wake, people who had homes to go to or friends to see or plans for theatres or restaurants or parties, people who weren’t walking huddled round the misery inside which felt like a great sharp stone, weighing you down and cutting into you at the same time.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, just that it was somewhere to go, and she glanced aimlessly into the windows of the shops she passed: clothes she couldn’t afford, gadgets she didn’t want, souvenirs of a London that bore no relation to the city she lived in. And skull masks, plastic skeletons, witches’ hats, bats on nylon strings, swooping across under green and orange light.

  Halloween next week. October 31st, All Hallows’ Eve. Her mother would never let her celebrate it, and after what happened the one time Marnie had, she didn’t like it either: the Day of the Dead, when restless souls stirred from their sleep, awakening heedless mortals to their duty of memory.

  Marnie needed no reminder. She never forgot anything. That was the problem.

  ‘You’re freaking me out!’ he cries suddenly. He’s putting his hands up to cover his face, groaning. ‘I can’t take this any more. It’s doing my head in.’

  She is still high on the satisfaction of being right, sitting across from him in the tiny rented flat above a Chinese takeaway that they’ve made so nice. They keep it nice too; she hates mess.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She is feeling the adrenaline ebbing away. ‘Don’t be stupid, Gary. It’s just an argument, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he says bitterly. ‘It’s not an argument. It’s a demolition job.’

  ‘Gary, it’s just that you said you’d told me yesterday that you were going to be late and you didn’t, and I—’

  ‘Yes, you played me back the whole evening, every sodding word. You know how people talk about CCTV cameras spying on them in the street? Try living with one.’

  She’s beginning to feel panicky, as if someone has put a hand round her throat. ‘Sorry, Gary, sorry! I won’t do it again—’

  She has to stop another clip starting to run in her head, the one when they’re out in the park and she’s saying, ‘Sorry, Gary, I won’t do it again.’ There are others waiting to follow; she talks over them fiercely.

  ‘I know I’ve said it before—’

  He gives a harsh laugh. ‘Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? I expect you can tell me every single time, with a description of where we were and what I was we
aring and what the weather was like. The thing is you can’t help it, no matter what you say.’

  She’s crying now. ‘It’s a disability, Gary. You wouldn’t blame me if I couldn’t walk, or if I was blind.’

  He looks down at her – he’s tall, Gary, and not specially hot or anything, but she thinks he’s nice-looking with brown eyes and a kind smile. He isn’t smiling now.

  ‘It wouldn’t be weird if you were in a wheelchair or you couldn’t see. I’ve tried, but this is getting to me so it’s messing with my brain. I’m sorry, girl.’

  And then Gary had been lost, like everything else, including the little flat she loved possibly even more than she’d loved Gary. It had been a proper home, a place where she belonged. She’d never felt she belonged, before.

  She couldn’t afford to stay on, not on her wages, and she felt upset all the time, looking around knowing she’d have to leave. So tonight she had walked out too. Gary could settle up with the landlord. He wanted this; she didn’t.

  She hadn’t cried. It was pointless, crying. If your mother disappeared when you were eleven and you went into something that was unconvincingly called a home, then if when you were sixteen even that support was removed and you were all on your own, you knew that the only thing crying did was give you sore eyes to add to your problems.

  Instead you just tried to shut out everything you had the option to forget and took the misery inside you and carried it around like a stone in your heart until its weight began to seem normal. One day, though, as more and more miseries were added, there would be one that brought you to your knees. It could be this one.

  Marnie didn’t know where she was going to spend the night. In one of the darker doorways she passed there was what looked like a heap of rags, but then she caught the glint of the woman’s dark eyes and long, dark, greasy hair; she had a baby shawled up to her and she held out her hand, saying something in a language Marnie didn’t understand.