Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  The man looked uncomfortably towards Fleming and she nodded.

  ‘There’s a grey-haired male had an accident up there by the campsite. Around six foot, late fifties probably. He seems to have fallen and hit his head. I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  The colour drained so quickly from Pilapil’s face that Fleming moved forward instinctively to catch him if he fainted, but he spun round and with his hand to his mouth half ran across the hall and disappeared through the below-stairs door.

  Fleming, looking grave, crossed the hall and the others followed her into another white, soulless space with the obligatory abstract above the fireplace, set up as a conference room with a long table and chairs. As MacNee shut the door she looked towards the other man.

  ‘And you are . . . ?’

  ‘DS Pete Hay. Drug Squad. Glasgow.’

  ‘We might have guessed. What’s the position?’

  ‘Two girls found the man, lying on a path at the edge of that group of trees and bushes in the corner of the campsite near the toilets. Bashed his head on a big stone, as far as I could see. It’s pretty muddy underfoot – just got unlucky, by the looks of it. They didn’t know who it was and I haven’t seen him before.’

  ‘Gillis Crozier,’ Fleming said heavily. ‘He was expected back in the late afternoon and he didn’t appear. They seemed to think he might have gone to see his gamekeeper about something unspecified, but I was beginning to wonder.’

  At least it was an accident. It was almost a relief, after her initial fears. She’d allowed the atmosphere to get to her, that was all.

  ‘What do we do now, ma’am?’ Hay asked. ‘Don’t suppose—’

  ‘No, the phone’s still out. We’d better get up there and take a look. Tam, can you find Cris and ask him for torches and the keys to the Discovery? Oh, and see if there’s a tarpaulin or something like that.’

  MacNee had taken one of the chairs and was slumped forward over the table in an attitude of depression. He ran his hand down his face. ‘Right,’ he said dully, and went off.

  Fleming and Hay went into the hall to wait for him. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what did you make of the older couple with the camper van who seemed to go to an improbable number of pop festivals?’

  Hay pulled a face. ‘Oh, dealing without a doubt. There seemed to be some negotiation going on with the blond guy who came up from the house. But they were on to me. I’d expected to be able to disappear into the crowd, but with so few people I was a bit obvious.’

  ‘We noticed you too – a man on his own. They should have sent a woman officer as camouflage.’

  ‘She was meant to be coming tomorrow – trying to save on the overtime budget as usual.’

  ‘We all know about that,’ Fleming was saying as MacNee returned, carrying a couple of powerful searchlight torches and a set of car keys, with a thick plastic sheet over his arm. Pilapil appeared behind him, shaking and tear-stained, and clearly finding it hard to control his sobs.

  ‘Can I – can I come?’ he faltered.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Fleming said. ‘I’m so sorry. This is obviously very difficult for you, Cris. You’re clearly very shaken, but you know the family well – would it be best if you broke the news, or do you want me to do that?’

  That seemed to steady him. ‘Oh, I’ll do it,’ Pilapil said, and there was bitterness in his voice. ‘They won’t care much. Cara would happily have sold him down the river to get her next fix, and Declan will find it hard not to smirk. I suppose you’re sure it was an accident?’

  Breaking the news to the family was a duty any police officer was happy to relinquish, but Fleming almost stepped in. He had gone down the passage to the sitting room already, though, and she didn’t feel she could run after him and grab him to stop him. Anyway, her own observation of the family suggested that his assessment would prove hideously accurate.

  It was still not entirely dark. The sky was a deep, velvety blue, almost cloudless, and the pale thumbnail of the new moon had appeared, along with the brighter stars. Cool, damp air rose from the grass as Fleming, MacNee and Hay got out of the Discovery and walked over to the Lawtons’ van. It looked as if all the campers had gathered there under the awning, in a pool of light from a couple of electric lanterns.

  The side of the van was open and Angela, presiding again over a large teapot, was filling mugs and handing them out. Behind her, the two girls were sitting with their hands wrapped round mugs and blankets round their shoulders. In the dim light they looked very pale and shaken and much younger than the bouncy, confident teenagers they had been earlier.

  Angela called over her shoulder, ‘You all right, my loves?’ and got wan smiles in response. Fleming would have been quite impressed with her motherly concern if she didn’t suspect that Angela’s normal habit was to supply more than tea and sympathy.

  The murmur of hushed voices ceased as the officers stepped into the circle of light. Bob Lawton stepped forward.

  ‘Am I glad to see you, Inspector! Let no one ever say there’s never a policeman around when you need one. An appalling thing, this. Poor guy – I just can’t believe it.’ Indicating incredulity, he shook his head so hard that his jowls flapped.

  ‘We’re just going to drive up there to take a look,’ Fleming said. ‘I need to ask you all to stay away from the area. I understand the toilets are nearby, but please use the ones at the far end.’

  In the van, Melanie shuddered. ‘Wouldn’t go near it if you paid me. When can we get home, that’s what I want to know.’ At her side, Stacey nodded vigorously.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t know that as yet. We’ll just have to be patient for the moment.’

  From the back of the group, a belligerent-looking young man pushed forward. ‘That’s not very impressive, is it? My girlfriend’s in a state, just wants to get out of here, and all you can say is, you don’t know and we’ll have to be patient?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fleming said, showing, she felt, exemplary patience herself. ‘I can fully appreciate your feelings, sir, and as you can imagine I’m unhappy about it as well. But at the moment, with no phone connection, there’s nothing we can do. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’

  Ignoring the indignant ‘That’s just not good enough’ and the muttered support from several others, the officers returned to the Discovery and drove up to the edge of the field. Fleming parked it so that the beam of the headlights illuminated the area, and carrying one of the torches, she got out. MacNee and Hay hung back as she went to investigate.

  It was definitely Crozier. He lay only yards from the edge of the little wood of straggling trees, mainly stunted birches and elders, with a thick undergrowth of bushes and bracken. The light from the torch caught his wide-open, glassy eyes, giving them a macabre life, and Fleming hastily redirected its beam.

  The stone his head was resting against – about a foot by nine inches in size, she estimated – lay on the grassy edge of the rough path leading down to the garden of Rosscarron House. The centre of the path was worn down and with the rain it was now treacherous, churned-up mud. It would be easy enough to slip, though he must have come down very hard to get an injury like that. Poor, unlucky bastard.

  Fleming shone her torch back down the path, looking for the marks of slipping that would tell the story of his fall. He’d probably tried to save himself and come down heavily and awkwardly.

  There were none that she could see. Frowning, she cast the beam back down the path, then played it along the verges. Still nothing, apart from a muddle of footprints in the mud.

  Fleming stiffened. Oh God, surely not . . .

  She returned to look at the injury. There was blood on the stone, certainly, but as she bent to look more closely at the mess of bone and brain material, it became clear that this wasn’t the result of a single contact. There were three separate, though connecting, injuries, and when she played her torch on the undergrowth nearby, there was another smaller stone, also marked with blood.

  For most of this inte
rminable day, she had been struggling with pain and light-headedness. Now, a wave of dizziness and nausea overtook her and she had to grab at the trunk of a nearby sapling to steady herself. She dropped her head, taking deep breaths.

  ‘Boss? Are you all right?’ She heard MacNee’s anxious voice and looked up to see him starting down the path towards her. Somehow, she managed to shout, ‘No! Stay where you are. I’m coming up.’

  The fewer people who went trampling around a murder scene, the better.

  Kim Kershaw stood at the front door of her ground-floor flat in Newton Stewart, trying to steady her shaking hands enough to fit the key into the lock.

  Stupid! she scolded herself. It was all right now; she’d stayed until she’d seen Debbie comfortably asleep, and for a little longer while she breathed a thankful prayer.

  It so nearly hadn’t been all right. It had been one of Debbie’s worst fits, and she knew from the strained expression on the doctor’s face that he was worried too. But they’d brought her through, and now Debbie was all right.

  All right, she told herself again, as she opened the door into the neat, silent flat. Until the next time.

  MacNee was fighting to keep his eyes open. It was a long time since he’d been on watch through a night shift, and he’d had kind of a heavy day too, one way and another. His shoulders were sore, his back was sore, his arms were sore, and he wanted his bed.

  He mustn’t let himself sleep, though. He’d tried the car radio to keep him awake, but it was only tuned to channels playing rubbish music and he couldn’t find any sport. At last he got out and took a walk around.

  Even if it was July, it was pretty chilly at two in the morning and he huddled inside the borrowed Barber jacket he’d put on over his own leather one. It was very, very still. At the bottom of the field, where the tents were, there were no lights or sounds of voices. Bob Lawton had come up to the toilets about half an hour ago, but now everyone seemed to be asleep. Except him.

  MacNee had never liked the country. Oh, it was bonny enough – he cast a disparaging look at the black night sky, with its galaxies of brilliant, wheeling stars – but there was something uncanny about silence in the country. It started pressing in on your ears until it almost hurt, and every rustle, every cracked twig made you jump, even though you knew it was only some night creature going about its business. He didn’t like that thought – all these animals you couldn’t even see. And an owl had gone by too, not long ago, looming without warning out of the darkness, silent on its muffled wings. MacNee didn’t like owls either: unchancy creatures, owls, reminding him that his only human companion was lying still and silent, with the night-dew gathering on his plastic covering.

  MacNee shuddered. Burns’s words unhelpfully came to mind: ‘That night, a child might understand, The de’il had business on his hand.’

  Marjory Fleming had offered to spell him, but he’d refused to let her. She’d been deathly white and not even steady on her feet, and as he’d pointed out brutally, she’d be useless when she was needed in the morning if she didn’t get some sleep now. It told him how bad she was feeling that she didn’t overrule him.

  He wouldn’t have wanted her out here on her own anyway. Someone had all but killed them at the bridge this morning; someone actually had killed Gillis Crozier. The same someone? And did he have anything else in mind? It was an unnerving thought and had him looking nervously over his shoulder.

  Still, rescue was close. Once the authorities heard what had happened, they would pull out all the stops and he ought to be back home by mid-morning at the latest. The pets might not be happy, but at least they wouldn’t have starved.

  DS Hay should be well on his way by now. It was fifteen miles to Kirkcudbright after you got yourself across the Carron, but Hay did that kind of thing for fun – triathlons, apparently. The river would be a lot lower by now, but even so MacNee, his mind on the tug of the current this morning, wouldn’t have fancied it. These hearty types had their uses after all.

  A louder crack, and a shuffling somewhere in the spinney, raised the hairs on the back of MacNee’s neck. Then a low, sturdy shape appeared, its striped head swivelling as it sniffed the air.

  MacNee retreated. He’d seen film of badgers, of course, but he hadn’t realised they were as big as this. If it took against him, he’d a feeling it could do him a nasty mischief. He made shooing gestures and the animal scuttled back into the undergrowth.

  Even so, he climbed into the Discovery again. Maybe he could find something a bit better on the radio. He pressed buttons and at last heard a song he recognised – Johnny Mathis singing ‘Misty’. He caught his breath.

  They’d played it the first time he met Bunty – there’d been a film, or something, and you heard it everywhere that summer. It had been at a disco on a blind date one of his pals had arranged. He’d held her close, she had snuggled up to him, and that had been it, really. ‘Misty’ had always been their song.

  Bunty. She meant the world to him. He sat listening to the music, tears welling up and running down his cheeks.

  Fleming couldn’t sleep. It had been a real struggle to get herself upstairs and into bed, but now she was wide awake. What made it worse was that it was her duty to sleep; as Tam had pointed out, she would be needed more in the morning. At this rate, she might as well be up the hill, taking her turn and giving Tam a rest, though realistically she knew she wasn’t fit to do it.

  Why couldn’t she sleep, when she was so wretchedly tired? Painkillers had helped her headache, but her mind was doing its hamster-in-a-wheel act, going round and round and getting nowhere.

  Fleming had never encountered a situation like this. It was one thing to investigate a murder in your official capacity and then go home to normality—

  Home! Her mind skittered off to think about Bill: he’d have phoned the station to find out what had happened, probably. He wouldn’t be lying awake worrying about her, that was for sure. Bill didn’t do lying awake.

  Normality. Everything about this was weird – the isolation, the house, the dysfunctional family – and she was, quite possibly, under the same roof as a murderer.

  However much she told herself that they had a suspect already in a man who’d nearly caused her own death, she kept going back to the way she had felt when Pilapil’s summons came: she’d expected evil, and she had found it. She’d never been cursed with second sight; her premonition had been a reaction to the atmosphere in the room. So what did that tell her?

  Fleming shivered and pulled the duvet more closely round her. She wasn’t cold, though; she was just plain scared, there in the darkness, with only the line of light around the bedroom door from the corridor outside. She shut her eyes and tried to switch off her overactive brain.

  Then there were footsteps outside, and she could hear a low-voiced conversation. Her eyes shot open and went to the door, which unusually for a private house – though not perhaps for an informal conference centre – had a proper locking device. She had made sure it was secured, but that was an illusion; there must be master keys. Did the handle turn, or had she only imagined it? She didn’t know: her vulnerability was playing havoc with her thought processes. Murder as a professional challenge was one thing; having to live with it was quite another.

  Who— But no, she must take a grip. If she started considering suspects and motives, sleep would never come. She needed to think of something else.

  Like the problem of setting up a murder inquiry without resources. She knew all too well that this was the time, when memories were fresh, that statements should be being taken. Or what if something else dreadful happened overnight, when she should have been on watch in the house? She’d had to tell them all what had happened; then she’d instructed Cris to lock Crozier’s study and bedroom and bring her the keys, which had taken her to the limit of her physical endurance – but how sympathetic would her superiors be to excuses if it was a botched investigation? In her current position, as Bailey had warned her, she needed to show she wa
s on top of the job.

  That wouldn’t do either. She was getting herself more and more worked up. Fleming turned over on to her other side, but that left her with her back to the door. She turned round again.

  And what if Joss were the killer? Joss, who could still make her question— But she wasn’t going to go there either. It was bad enough that her connection with him would be a great story for the newspapers, and she wouldn’t trust him not to tell them. She could see the headlines now—

  Stop it! She raged at herself. Relax. Do deep breathing. Count sheep. Count backwards, in threes . . .

  Bailey, oddly enough, had come into her bedroom. It seemed strange, but then she realised it wasn’t her bedroom but his, and she had to explain that she had got things wrong . . .

  At last, Marjory Fleming was asleep.

  9

  Friday, 21 July

  It was the noise of a helicopter directly overhead that woke her. Marjory Fleming sat bolt upright in bed, somehow knowing instantly that she had overslept. Though a jolt of pain reminded her that sudden movement was still unwise, at least her head was clear. She looked at her watch – half past nine.

  Half past nine! She could never sleep later than seven, even when she wanted to on an off-duty day. She sprang out of bed in a panic, though surely if there had been developments overnight someone would have called her?

  From the small window in her bathroom, which looked towards the back of the house, she could see a Coastguard Sea King hovering above the hill, making to land in the camping field. That gave her, probably, ten minutes to get downstairs before they could arrive at the house.

  But it was morning. She wasn’t alone, in the dark, feeling threatened. Whatever happened today, the night was over.

  She cringed as she looked in the bathroom mirror. The bruising had spread, taking on technicoloured hues, and without make-up of any kind there was nothing she could do about it. She employed the packaged toothbrush and comb so thoughtfully provided and, after the sketchiest of ablutions, flung on her clothes and hurried downstairs. She reached the hall just as Cris Pilapil opened the door to admit a helicopter pilot along with DCs Campbell and Kershaw. Pilapil gave no sign of the agitation that would suggest problems overnight. He acknowledged Fleming, then disappeared below stairs.