Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  Cradle to Grave

  Aline Templeton

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Marjory Fleming series

  Cold in the Earth

  The Darkness and the Deep

  Lying Dead

  Lamb to the Slaughter

  Dead in the Water

  Stand-alone novels

  Death is my Neighbour

  Last Act of All

  Past Praying For

  The Trumpet Shall Sound

  Night and Silence

  Shades of Death

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Aline Templeton

  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.

  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 9781848947153

  Book ISBN 9780340976975

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Cradle to Grave

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  To the memory of Robbie Robertson: a good man

  1

  Wednesday, 19 July

  She had no idea how long she had been walking, though such light as there was had begun fading into an ominous twilight. Her flimsy trainers, caked with mud, were squelching and she had lost count of the number of times she had slipped and almost fallen. There was a bloody bruise on her ankle and a deep graze on one hand where she had clutched at a boulder to save herself.

  But Beth was unaware of her injuries, unaware of anything, really, except the depth of her wretchedness. She’d always hated rain, ever since that dreadful night two years ago. That dreadful night . . .

  The garden had looked strange and unearthly in the cold blue light from the street lamps. The trees were dripping and there were wet leaves on the path, slippery under her hurrying feet. And the trees dripped, dripped, dripped, on and on through the horror of her dreams afterwards. Oh, she hated rain.

  Now the downpour that had drenched her hair and soaked right through her inadequate parka seemed as much a part of her as the tears she had shed.

  The rocky track, starting at the cove, where a few cottages huddled into the shelter of the low cliff behind, led right round the headland, then circled back, following the rising ground to the top of the bluff itself, from which a precipitous path dropped down to the cove again. The viewpoint there had often been Beth’s refuge, a place where no one could come upon you unawares, where sitting on the old wooden bench, you could be alone with the sky and the sea, and look out to the limitless horizon, dreaming of freedom from the cage of your circumstances. That had been Lee’s promise to her – freedom.

  Today, as she walked following the line of the coast, there was no horizon. Sullen sea and leaden sky merged in an indeterminate, lightless grey. The colour of despair.

  She had been angry when she left the tiny house. ‘Red angry’, she called it: when rage possessed her so that she could hardly think, or breathe, even. She had yelled at him so much that her throat still hurt.

  She wasn’t angry now, though. The relentless pounding of the rain had doused the spark of fury and the greyness had seeped through her, through the pores in her skin, through into the core of her being.

  The path had begun to rise sharply and she realised with a sense of shock that she was almost back at the bluff above the cove, a circuit of several miles, and the surge of adrenaline that had driven her to this fierce, pointless activity was long gone. She must have been walking for hours: her leg muscles were starting to twitch and she was breathless with exertion and stress. It was almost completely dark now too; the street lights outside the cottages had come on.

  Suddenly she was very, very tired. Too tired to scramble down the path to the cove. Too tired to deal with what awaited her below. Later, she would have to. Just not yet.

  The bench, ‘her’ bench, stood only yards from the edge, where a ramshackle fence with sagging wires and a weathered, barely legible notice warned against intrusion on to the eroding ground. Not even pausing to brush off the water collected on the seat, she sat down heavily and put her head in her hands. The hiss of the rain and the low moaning of the sea below seemed almost a cry from her own spirit.

  It was cold, though, now that she’d stopped moving. The rain was heavier than ever, coming down in silver rods to flay her defenceless body. It would soon be too dark to see her way down. She would be forced to go back—

  The noise assaulted her without warning, the air round about her reverberating with a sound like a clap of thunder directly overhead. But it went on and on, not overhead but beneath her feet. The ground was shaking, shifting, and the terrifying groaning grew and grew.

  Screaming, she leaped up and fled back the way she had come, in a stumbling run, until the ground felt stable under her feet once more. She turned and saw that the bench where a moment earlier she had been sitting was slipping away from her, faster and faster, until it disappeared, along with the edge of the cliff, in a final apocalyptic roar.

  ‘What’s she like, then?’ The woman who spoke was perching on the edge of a table in the CID room in the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters in Kirkluce. She was in her late thirties, neat and competent-looking, with a no-nonsense bob and make-up that suggested that when she expended time and thought, it wasn’t on her appearance. Her grey trousers and wrap-top were smart but unobtrusive.

  There were only three of them in the room. A demonstration was taking place outside the council offices to protest about the summer floods which had devastated houses in several areas, and the officers not on crowd control had gone along to hold a watching brief.

  She had addressed DS Tam MacNee, but he didn’t reply immediately. His swarthy, acne-pitted face took on a jaundiced look; he sucked in air through the gap between his front teeth, then said briefly, ‘Just don’t mess her about. That’s all.’

  ‘Big Marge,’ DC Kim Kershaw persisted, reflecting on the nickname commonly in use for DI Marjory Fleming. ‘Hunky with it, is she?’

  MacNee rose to his full five foot seven – well, six and a bit, but when it came to MacNee, no one was counting. Not out loud, anyway.

  ‘She’s all right. And as of tomorrow she’s back as my super
ior officer as well as yours. So keep a civil tongue in your head.’

  He picked up the black leather jacket hanging on the back of his chair and shrugged himself into it, then with his hands stuck into his jeans pockets went out, leaving an awkward silence behind him. Kershaw looked after him uncomfortably.

  DS Andy Macdonald, who was in his early thirties, tall, dark, with a buzz cut and an instinct for self-preservation, had wisely kept out of it. He took pity on her now. ‘It’s like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. The atmosphere lingers long after Tam’s left the room. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Can’t get it right with him, can I? Oh, probably I will get used to him, or he’ll have to get used to me. One or the other, or preferably both. We don’t have to like each other – this is a place of work, not a dating agency.’

  She saw that Macdonald’s brown eyes were looking at her doubtfully. ‘Oh, I don’t mean I want to cause trouble, just the opposite. I want a good professional relationship, but with him it doesn’t seem to work. I daresay we’ll rub along. “Yes, Sarge,” when it’s an order – I can manage that. But for God’s sake tell me what I need to know before I go putting my size sixes in it again. Pals, are they, him and the boss?’

  Macdonald hesitated. ‘It’s a bit complicated. They go back a long way. He was her sarge when she was a rookie, but he never wanted promotion to a job that would mean more time at his desk. Not exactly a details man, our Tam. They work together pretty closely – worked together,’ he corrected himself. ‘She’s clever – brilliant at reading the evidence – and he’s got seriously good gut reactions. Great combination. But the suspension . . .’ He sighed. ‘Let’s put it this way. He was on the side of the authorities. He thought she got it wrong. Big time.’

  ‘Someone died, didn’t they?’

  ‘Someone died. Let’s leave it at that. It was a misjudgement and media politics were involved. We all get our calls wrong sometimes and it’s over now. If the tribunal’s decision had gone the other way, I’d have handed in my badge.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Kershaw raised a deeply sceptical eyebrow.

  Macdonald met her look squarely. ‘I’m not kidding. Oh, not as some sort of loyalist support. I just wouldn’t trust them. If it was her today, it could be me tomorrow.

  ‘She was the first woman in Galloway to make promotion to DI, and if there were people who thought that was a man’s job, they don’t think it now. She’s honest and she’s fair-minded, and she’s a good officer. She’ll back you to the hilt unless she thinks you’re not trying.’

  Kershaw pulled a face. ‘Very touching, Sarge. Has she got the place bugged, then?’

  ‘Too smart. She’s not interested in what we say about her behind her back. She’s clever enough to know that’s a good safety valve. Watch what you say to her face, though.’

  ‘Thanks, Andy. That’s useful. I always like to have a dossier on the boss. But to go back to the original question – what’s she like, Big Marge?’

  Macdonald grinned. ‘Oh, like Tam said, don’t mess.’

  Darkness was thick about Beth and it was still raining, though less heavily now. There was no track to follow, only miles of rough grass and moorland, and she was struggling through heather and stumbling over hidden rocks. Then boggy ground would suck at her feet until she thought she would be dragged down, down, down, and though there was no one to hear her, she screamed out loud as she fought herself free.

  It was the dark of the moon, and with the heavy cloud cover there wasn’t even a star showing through. Screwing up her eyes to make out what lay ahead in the murk, Beth sometimes wasn’t sure she was going in the right direction. Her only guide was the sound of the sea – keeping it to her left meant that she had to be heading back along the peninsula and sooner or later would strike the road – but it was hard to make herself take the risk of going close enough to the edge to hear it.

  After the landslip, it had all gone deathly quiet. Beth had listened for sounds of distress and heard none, but she had been too scared to go near enough to look down. She knew what she’d see, anyway – the cottages obliterated under tons of earth and rocks. She had reluctantly lived for a month in the one she’d inherited from her grandmother and there were three others in the little row: one empty, one belonging to a woman she’d taken care to avoid and one a holiday let. At least there was no need to consider Lee, but she’d seen a young couple there this week, with their baby – oh dear God, the baby! Bile rose in her throat and she retched, feeling acid burn her gullet. The baby, and the rain . . .

  Then it had been London rain, though, just dreary, persistent, depressing. It was her night off and she’d been going out with a friend to have a few drinks, cheer themselves up. Only she wasn’t, because they’d changed their plans and she was stuck in the house, angry and resentful and not feeling patient. It would all have been different if they hadn’t gone out . . .

  Beth jerked her mind away from that obsessive thought, which ran on a loop in her brain, only needing the slightest trigger to set it running. Her present situation was bad enough without dredging up the past.

  She had fumbled for her mobile phone, in the pocket of her parka with her purse and a comb – all she had left in the world now, presumably – in the hope that up here on the headland she might pick up a signal, but it was obstinately dead. There was nothing to do but stumble on.

  Every movement was painful now. She was black and blue all over from her frequent falls. Once, when she had blundered across a grouse, which had whirred up into her face with an unearthly cry, she’d thought she would die of fright. Her tired muscles were screaming for relief, but if she lay down and fell asleep here in this rain, she would die of exposure. She had reason to know that, all too well.

  There would be no rescue parties setting out unless she summoned them herself. She was the only one who knew what had happened there at the end of the road, which led nowhere, except to Rosscarron Cottages.

  Beth heard the dogs barking before she saw the keeper’s house. They had heard her first, obviously, and were working themselves up into a state. Fear seized her: she wasn’t used to country life and she had no idea whether they were caged or running free – or even whether their master would come out with a shotgun to defend his isolated homestead against strangers appearing out of the darkness.

  Even so, she headed towards the sound and saw a square of light appear, as if floating on the darkness. Another light came on immediately below it. A moment later one was switched on outside too, revealing a house, some outbuildings and, as a door opened, a man with a shotgun. The dogs’ barking rose to a frenzy and he switched on a torch, its rays probing the darkness.

  Beth stopped, her heart pounding. But what was the alternative? To stagger on blindly to certain death, once her legs literally couldn’t carry her any more and she collapsed? Plucking up her courage, she screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Help! Help!’

  Somehow, he heard her above the din. She could see his surprise. He swung the torch until the beam found her and she stood exposed and helpless. Then, to her intense relief, she saw him break his gun and come towards her with a halting gait.

  ‘Quiet!’ he snapped at the dogs, and, as obedient silence fell, shouted, ‘Who’s there? What’s wrong?’

  Sobbing with thankfulness, she blundered across the last few yards towards a five-bar gate, opened it and fell on her knees.

  He hurried across to her, looking shaken. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I could’ve killed you, for God’s sake! Thought it was the fox after the chickens again. Well, I suppose you’d better come inside.’

  She didn’t notice the grudging response. He helped her to her feet and, stumbling and sobbing, she crossed the yard past the gundogs to Keeper’s Cottage.

  From their runs, two spaniels and a black lab watched, then, the entertainment over, went back into their kennels.

  ‘The phone’s dead. The lines must be down.’ Maidie Buchan, her dark, wiry hair tousled from sleep, came back into the
kitchen.

  It was a gloomy room with a small window covered by thin faded curtains that barely met. An elderly Calor gas cooker stood in one corner, and the only storage was provided by a press and by cupboards under a Formica sink unit. A range on the end wall was cold and dead, and the plastic chairs round the kitchen table, also blue Formica, were unmatched, as if they had been picked up in sales here and there. It was immaculately, almost painfully clean, though, with patches scrubbed away on the old vinyl floor. On one of the shelves on the back wall there was a display of cheap, bright glass ornaments and plates in cheerful colours.

  Maidie was in her thirties, thin and tired-looking, wrapped in a tartan wool dressing gown that had seen better days. She cast an anxious glance at her husband as she broke the news.

  ‘That’s all we need!’ he snarled, looking unenthusiastically at the crumpled figure sitting slumped over the kitchen table. ‘Where do we go from here? The woman’s not making sense.’

  Alick Buchan was almost twenty years older than his wife. An accident with his gun during his time with the army in Northern Ireland had left him with a limp and confirmation of his earlier conviction that the world was against him.

  ‘She’s in shock. She’s freezing cold too.’

  Maidie went to put an arm round her unexpected guest. Her hands were rough and work-hardened, but her touch and her voice were gentle. ‘Look, I know you’re shattered, but you’re needing out of those clothes before you catch your death. I’ve switched on the immersion and there should be enough hot water for a bath. If you come through the house, I’ll get you some clothes and a towel.’

  She managed to coax the girl to her feet, though Beth was moving like an old woman and needed Maidie’s support to cross the kitchen. ‘She’ll want a cup of tea when we get back,’ she said to her husband. ‘Can you put on the kettle?’