He stoops over her and his face is dark again. ‘Not scared, are you – a big five-year-old like you behaving like a baby?’
It isn’t nice to be called a baby. ‘I’m not scared,’ she says, and then he’s smiling again.
‘That’s my girl.’ And he’s picked her up and she’s suddenly standing on the ledge and there’s a drop on the other side all the way down into the car park. She’s not scared, she’s terrified, and she’s shaking and clinging to the upright.
‘Come on, now,’ he says, and there’s that nasty edge to his voice. ‘I want to see you’re not a coward, Marnie. I wouldn’t like that.’
She takes a step, and another wobbly step. She mustn’t look down, away, away down to the car park below. She mustn’t – but somehow she has to, just a quick glance. She’s feeling dizzy, shaky, as if it’s sort of pulling her—
There’s a sudden scream. She screams herself, and her balance goes. She’s falling!
Somehow she manages to throw herself inwards and not down, down. She lands hard on the concrete, though, grazing her knees and her elbows and her hands and she’s wailing.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Mum is screaming at him. ‘She could have been killed!’
He’s shrugging, walking back into the flat already. ‘Of course she couldn’t. She wanted to try and it was safe enough. I was ready to catch her.’
He wasn’t, though. She knows he wasn’t. And everything hurts. ‘Mum!’ she sobs.
Mum looks down at her and sighs. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. What on earth made you do that? Now I suppose I’ll have to clean you up – come on.’
The door opening behind her brought Marnie back with a start.
‘Sorry to take so long,’ Anita said cheerfully. ‘I think I need a new electric kettle. Now tell me, how is your mum these days?’
Marnie picked up the photograph, and turned. ‘Who is this?’ she demanded and saw Anita’s face slowly turn a deep, dark crimson.
‘I may be called down to London for the security meetings at MI5, of course,’ Detective Superintendent Rowley said. Her rather sallow skin was a little flushed with the excitement of it all, and she put up her hand to her dark bob in a grooming movement as if to be ready for the summons if it came at this very moment.
‘They’re extremely concerned about illegal immigration, and of course the upsurge in Irish Republican activity too. I hadn’t quite realised how much of a front line we had up here, on the border with Ireland – a large and important entry point into the UK. The Cairnryan Special Branch have their work cut out, Marjory. I’ve assured them that any help they needed would automatically be given top priority.’
‘Of course,’ Fleming said gravely. The lads down at Cairnryan had obviously played a blinder. She could almost hear Hyacinth purring; it seemed a shame to have to spoil her fun.
But now Rowley was saying, ‘Anyway, what was it you wanted to see me about? I hope it’s not going to take too long – I’m due to lunch with the chief constable at one.’
She had been so busy talking that she hadn’t noticed the bulky file Fleming had brought, and when the inspector put it on her desk, she gaped. ‘What on earth is that? Oh really, I can’t think there’s time just now to discuss something like this.’ She looked at her watch impatiently.
Fleming stood firm. ‘I’m afraid it can’t wait, ma’am.’
Rowley’s lips tightened. With a bad grace and another pointed look at her watch, she said, ‘Very well. What’s the problem this time?’
Controlling her irritation, Fleming said, ‘Do you remember the Dunmore murder case?’
‘Well, not vividly, I have to say. But of course it comes up every time there’s a child-on-child killing anywhere – the ‘Cradle of Evil’ village.’
‘It was forty years ago.’
‘That explains it, then. At the age of one I was perhaps not quite as au fait with the big news stories as I should have been.’
The sarcastic, patronising tone grated on Fleming like a knife scraped sideways on a plate. ‘I don’t remember it either, obviously. But about twenty years ago when I was a rookie Kirstie Burnside, who killed Tommy Crichton, came to live on this patch. She was calling herself Karen Bruce by then.’
‘Surely she shouldn’t have been allowed to return to the area?’
‘It’s actually more than an hour away – she was living up by Clatteringshaws Loch. But yes, you would have thought it was a mistake.’ Fleming opened the file at one of the marked places. ‘Here, though, you can see that it was questioned and they found there wasn’t anything forbidding it. And she seems to have been very determined – threatened to create all sorts of mayhem if they tried to remove her. And here, you see,’ she flipped to another marker, ‘there really is an injunction to say that nothing must be done which could in any way threaten to reveal the new identity she’d been given. So our hands were tied.’
Rowley barely glanced at the papers. ‘So? Look, Marjory, this was all a very long time ago. If there’s an immediate point—’
Fleming hurried on. ‘I was detailed to visit her from time to time, just routine, never any problem. She’d been taught bookkeeping in prison and somehow or other she’d got a job in some office in Newton Stewart. There was a child, Marnie. She was a ward of court but the assessment was that Karen was a “good enough” mother and there was no real reason to take her away. When she was about ten or eleven she was found in their cottage with a head injury and her mother gone.’
‘She’d attacked her own daughter?’
‘No one could ever prove it. Marnie had concussion and didn’t know what had happened, but there was no sign at all of a disturbance inside the house, nothing in the immediate area and the car was found later at Dumfries station. She’d just disappeared and the child was taken into care.’
Rowley pursed her lips. ‘With her record, you’d have to assume she’d just lost her temper again. So what was the follow-up?’
This was the hard part. ‘I was a PC at the time so of course I have no idea of the discussions that went on. But Superintendent McNally told me he was hamstrung by the identity injunction and since the child had recovered after a night in hospital he didn’t want to start a witch-hunt.’
The superintendent was looking sceptical.
‘Yes, I know,’ Fleming said. ‘The thought of another rerun of the whole Cradle-of-Evil thing was probably part of it. She was released on lifelong licence, of course, so presumably he informed the appropriate authorities that she’d broken her parole but they’d be reluctant to admit that they’d somehow lost one of the most notorious killers in Britain.’
‘I can see that. Realpolitik, Marjory – sometimes it’s impossible to do things by the book. So – has she turned up again?’
‘That wouldn’t be so much of a problem – she wouldn’t want to draw attention to herself. No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that. Her daughter Marnie has turned up demanding to know what steps were taken to find her mother and why she was told nothing at all after she was taken into care. I haven’t spoken to her myself, but I gather Marnie thinks her mother was murdered.’
Rowley groaned. ‘Causing trouble?’
‘Certainly wanting answers.’
‘So we give them to her – why not? If she doesn’t know who her mother really is it may come as a shock but—’
Fleming was shaking her head. She tapped the file in front of them. ‘We can’t, not until we can get legal permission for an exemption from the injunction.’
‘That could take weeks!’
‘Yes. And meantime, if we aren’t in a position to give Marnie the information she wants, is she just going to go away quietly or is she going to decide we’re covering up and contact the press?’
‘An immediate injunction to stop her,’ Rowley suggested. ‘That would be quick enough.’
‘A gagging order?’ Fleming said doubtfully. ‘The press tend to get very interested in those.’
Rowley obviously rea
lised she was right. ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ she snapped. ‘You were in at the start of this – I wasn’t.’
Even though she had known perfectly well what the bottom line would be, Fleming still felt aggrieved. If she’d been in charge, instead of being a humble PC, she’d have – well, what would she have done then? She didn’t know, and certainly she didn’t know now.
‘All I can suggest is that I talk to her, give her as many facts as I legitimately can and try to persuade her that we did our best at the time and thought it wasn’t in her interests to start a public hunt.’
‘I suppose so.’ Rowley didn’t sound impressed, but she was looking at her watch again. ‘I’ve got to go – I’m late already.
‘Do try to keep all this under wraps, Marjory. It’s really very tedious.’
As she swept out, Fleming pulled a childish face at her retreating back.
Shelley Crichton was sitting on the sofa in Janette’s front room, still hiccuping a little as she sipped at a glass of cooking brandy. Two of the other women had come back with her and were drinking white wine, being less in need of such robust stimulus
Lorna Baxter was well into her second glass. She was a big, bulky woman who always had high colour and now her cheeks were red as poppies with the combination of alcohol and outrage. ‘It’s disgusting, coming like that to gloat. That Kirstie must have sent her to report back – that’s what it would be! She knows there’d be a lynching if she turned up herself.’
Janette frowned her down. Lorna wasn’t a friend of hers – ‘coarse’, was her private opinion, and the family, from the social housing at the bottom of the hill, weren’t what up here on the hill you called ‘respectable’. She was a good ten years younger than the rest of them but she’d been part of the vigilante group that had driven Kirstie Burnside’s dysfunctional family out of Dunmore after the trial and ended up in court herself. Perhaps it had been a mistake to ask her to join them at the park, but almost everyone was out at work or busy and Janette had wanted Shelley to feel supported.
‘I’m sure that’s absolute nonsense,’ she said repressively, but Shelley ignored her, sitting up eagerly.
‘Do you think so? Do you think that’s what it was? How could anyone be so cruel, so wicked?’
Janette exchanged an anxious glance with Sheila who was a real friend, a nice, sensible woman, and she stepped in.
‘Don’t be daft, Lorna. You don’t know that’s even any relation of Kirstie’s. It was just a lassie with reddish hair and blue eyes – there’s plenty of them about. You’d have passed her in the street if it hadn’t been the coincidence of her coming along just when we were all thinking about poor wee Tommy.’
Lorna bridled. ‘Oh, you think so? I tell you, that girl was the very image of her mother as a bairn. She shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, that’s what I think.’
Shelley’s face was becoming flushed too and Janette was starting to regret that she hadn’t been more careful about the amount of brandy she’d tipped into the glass.
‘She went into Anita Loudon’s house.’ Her voice was shrill. ‘You can’t deny that Anita knew Kirstie at the time it happened—’
‘Of course she did,’ Janette said, a little desperately. ‘Everyone went to that wee school. It doesn’t prove anything.’
She knew she was struggling, though. Right enough, it would be quite a coincidence for a complete stranger who was a lookalike for Kirstie Burnside to drop in on one of her best friends, but it would do Shelley no good at all to believe that a malevolent Kirstie was still somewhere in the picture, mocking her grief. What could she do about it anyway, except put herself through another nightmare frenzy of publicity? Oh, she certainly shouldn’t have invited Lorna – troublemaking wasn’t so much a hobby as her business in life, and now she was demonstrating that she was determined not to be deflected from it.
‘That girl’s needing to be told what we all think of her for what she’s doing, and what everyone thinks of that murdering besom, her mother, as well. We were never given a chance to tell Kirstie that straight – she’s been protected all her life, with her fine new identity that no one’s allowed to know and all her “rights” – well, this is the result.
‘She’s needing stopped, and Anita too – what’s she doing, getting involved in this? It was probably her told the girl Shelley’d be at the park.’
Shelley was clinging to the now empty glass. ‘That’s right, Lorna. That’s what needs to happen.’
‘You don’t know that Anita was expecting her, or that she’s Kirstie’s daughter,’ Janette argued, though without much hope. ‘There may be cousins—’
‘There aren’t,’ Lorna said triumphantly. ‘There was just a brother, and he’s gay – lives in Inverness with his partner.’
Shelley stood up. ‘I’m not letting her get away with this. I’m going to look her straight in the face and find out what all this is about, if Kirstie put her up to this … this disgusting cruelty. And if Anita’s been helping her to do it she’s just as bad – worse in some ways, because she knows what we went through. When Grant hears about this—”
Grant Crichton’s short fuse was legendary. ‘Do you need to tell him?’ Janette bleated. ‘It’ll only upset him.’
Shelley rounded on her. ‘And why shouldn’t he be upset? I’m upset. He ought to be told what that woman’s still doing. And the police too …’
‘That’s right, Shelley.’ Lorna set down her empty wine glass and came across to link arms with her. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll come with you and we’ll give her laldie, eh?’ She was almost smacking her thick lips.
With a glance at Sheila, Janette reluctantly got up. ‘If the two of you are determined to go, we’ll come with you. You need to be careful nowadays, you know. If you start in on someone it could be you in trouble with the police. You don’t want to end up in court.’
She didn’t say ‘again’ but the venomous look Lorna directed at her as she and Shelley went out of the door, still arm in arm, showed that the barb had gone home.
Anita set down the tray on the coffee table with exaggerated care, waiting for her burning cheeks to cool. She handed Marnie a mug saying casually, ‘Oh him? Milk, sugar? Help yourself to biscuits.
‘That’s an old friend of mine. Haven’t seen him in ages. Why? Does he look like someone you know?’
‘Yes, he stayed with us quite often when I was little.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, dear.’ Her voice sounded hollow, even to herself. ‘You were down in England then and he lives in Glasgow. I expect it’s just a chance resemblance. You can’t remember very clearly when you’re small.’
‘I remember everything.’ Marnie stated it as a fact.
‘Oh, I’m sure you have a very good memory.’ Anita achieved a light laugh. ‘But nobody actually remembers everything.’
‘I do. I mean it. I have something called hyperthymesia.’
She’d never heard of it. Was it a case for ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Congratulations’? She raised her eyebrows.
‘I told you – I remember everything,’ Marnie repeated. ‘That’s what it is. It’s a condition that means I have complete recall of everything that’s ever happened to me.’
Anita stared at her. Everything? Surely that had to be nonsense. Please, that was nonsense. She couldn’t possibly – but now she was proving that she could.
‘Would you like me to tell you what you were wearing that time you and Mum took me shopping in Dumfries? You had on jeans and a pink mohair sweater. Your stilettos were cream-coloured with peep-toes and the varnish on your toenails was pink but your fingernails were red. You had a glass pendant with a rose sort of drawn on it.’
The etched crystal pendant was lying in a drawer upstairs. Her expression seemed to amuse Marnie; she gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘I can view it like a film, you see. Want any more? You said to my mother, “That so-called sale was just cheap rubbish bought in—”’
‘No, no, that’s enough,’ Anita sai
d. She could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck. If the child had remembered all that, what else might she have remembered?
Marnie wasn’t a child any more, though, and the disconcerting woman she had become was studying her with her mother’s ice-blue eyes and a cool, measuring look that was all her own.
‘So I remember the man in the photograph, right? Drax, my mother called him. I didn’t call him anything. What’s his name?’
Anita moistened her lips. ‘Daniel Lee.’ When was the last time she’d said that aloud?
‘So why Drax?’
‘Oh, it was just a stupid joke among us kids. He was allergic to garlic so we called him Dracula, Drax for short, and it stuck, somehow. Silly, really.’ She gave a little, self-conscious laugh. ‘He was just this guy your mum and I both knew from when we were at school, that’s all. Nothing sinister. I’m sorry if I made some sort of mystery out of it – I just thought it wasn’t likely you would have remembered him.’
That was better. She’d managed to sound calmer, more relaxed.
‘Was he my father?’
That threw her again. ‘H-how would I know?’ she stammered. ‘What did your mother tell you?’ Then, with sudden inspiration, ‘Why don’t you ask her about it?’
Marnie’s eyes widened. ‘You mean – she’s still alive? Where is she?’
‘Don’t you know?’
She saw the animation die out of Marnie’s face. ‘I never saw her again after I was injured that night at the cottage and was taken into care. I was hoping you might know what happened afterwards.’
Anita gave a little shrug. ‘I didn’t even know you’d had an accident, dear. All I know is that I tried to phone your mother and when I got no answer I went out to the cottage. There were police tapes around it and no one was there so I tried to find out what was going on, but the police wouldn’t tell me anything.’
She spread her hands wide. ‘I’m so sorry. It must have been very upsetting for you and I just wish I could be of more help.’
‘I … see.’
Struggling with disappointment, Marnie looked much more vulnerable now, younger than her years and more like the child Anita remembered. Struggling not to wince at a piercing shaft of shame, she said, ‘It’s all a long time ago now, of course. It must have been very hard on you, but you’ve obviously made your own life. Where are you living now?’
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