Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  It was Kershaw who stepped forward. ‘Are – are you all right, ma’am?’ she asked, making a rather too obvious effort not to look shocked. Campbell, less tactfully, gaped.

  ‘Looks worse than it is,’ Fleming said briskly. ‘What’s happening?’

  Half-a-dozen uniformed officers had been flown in, Kershaw explained, and DS Macdonald was up at the campsite field directing them while explaining to the unimpressed campers that they couldn’t leave until they had all given their details and statements. Telephone engineers had come too and now seemed confident that they would be able to trace the fault.

  ‘How’s MacNee?’ Fleming asked with a considerable feeling of guilt.

  ‘Briefing Macdonald at the moment,’ Kershaw said, ‘but he wanted to know if he could go back with the chopper – problems at home, he said.’

  ‘I know about that. Yes, of course – he must be dead on his feet.’ Fleming turned to the pilot. ‘Are you heading back immediately?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m to stand by for a request to return, always supposing the phone’s back on. If not, I’m to come back in the afternoon anyway, though as I understand it, the army’s been detailed to set up a Bailey bridge once the debris has been cleared.’

  Fleming nodded. ‘Right. I won’t hold you up, then.’

  As the pilot left, Campbell said, ‘JCB’s there now. Saw it as we flew in.’

  ‘That’s good news. Now, I need to be briefed on what’s happening. There’s a sort of conference room here.’

  They were filing in when Pilapil appeared with a tray of coffee and muffins. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, with great dark circles under his eyes, and his skin had a grey tinge.

  ‘I thought you might like something to eat.’ He set the tray down on the table.

  Fleming’s gratitude, as she took the mug of coffee from him, was heartfelt. Then she said, her voice very gentle and her hazel eyes full of sympathy, ‘Cris, it must be hard for you. You were obviously very fond of your boss.’

  Even the mention of Crozier distressed him. ‘He was a good man. A good man, with a sad life. I owe everything to him.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down and tell us about him?’

  Pilapil hesitated for a second, then sat down.

  ‘I’m not wanting coffee,’ Campbell said. ‘Here, take my mug.’

  Absently, Pilapil accepted it, cupping his hands round it, though the room was warm enough. He took a sip, taking time to order his thoughts. At a nod from Fleming, Campbell got out a notebook.

  ‘I was a rent boy,’ he said at last. ‘I was in a bar in London one night with a client and there was . . . a disagreement. He was a frightening man; he was hissing threats in my face and I was afraid. Then a man who had been sitting along the bar tapped him on the shoulder. I’ll never forget what he said: ‘‘Leave the kid alone – you may be bigger than him, but I’m bigger than you.’’ He was too, and he looked as if he knew how to handle himself. The other guy was easily scared – bullies usually are. He only said, ‘‘You’re welcome. He’s trash,’’ and left.

  ‘To be honest, I thought Gillis was just another punter, but at least he had a kind face. He bought me a drink and we talked. He wasn’t trying to pick me up; he was prepared to help me. No one else has ever done that.

  ‘He’d a mate who’d a Thai restaurant, and he said he’d get me work with him. I liked the job, and they let me do a bit of cooking. It’s the first thing I’ve ever been good at – changed my life.

  ‘Gillis is – was,’ he corrected himself painfully, ‘crazy about Thai food and eventually he asked if I’d like to be his personal assistant – cook for him, run the houses, do office stuff if he needed it. He even got me training, so I could. I’ve been with him ten years now and – and I don’t know what I’ll do, now he’s gone.’ Pilapil’s eyes filled with tears again.

  ‘I can understand how you feel,’ Fleming said. ‘Cris, you asked me last night if we were sure your boss’s death was an accident. I don’t know if you’ve heard already, but I’m afraid it wasn’t. Gillis Crozier was murdered.’

  From the look of shock on his face, it was clear he hadn’t. ‘Murdered? I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t really think . . .’

  ‘We’ve got an investigation running now. When did you last see Mr Crozier, and what did you do after that?’

  After Crozier went out, Pilapil had gone to the kitchen to finish clearing up after lunch, then to his own private quarters further along the below-stairs corridor. He hadn’t seen anyone until Declan Ryan came into the kitchen, where Pilapil had gone to prepare the evening meal, sometime after five.

  ‘There was a problem with his gamekeeper, wasn’t there?’ Fleming prompted, and heard the story of the confrontation with Alick Buchan.

  ‘What does he look like?’ she asked with seeming inconsequence.

  ‘Rough. Shaggy grey hair. Walks with a limp.’

  ‘I see.’ Interesting! But she went on, ‘And there were problems with vandalism too, weren’t there?’

  ‘A man called Jamieson made a lot of threats,’ Pilapil said. ‘He was a very angry man, I think – angry about the festival, angry about his house flooding. He came here a lot, shouting. But . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I think his threats were all about getting the police, so . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Any difficulties with anyone else?’

  ‘Apart from Declan, you mean?’ Pilapil’s face flushed with anger. ‘He’s a bad man – a jackal following a lion. He wants to be a partner in the business, but Gillis doesn’t rate him. Takes everything from Gillis, poisons his life in return. Cara has – problems. We all know that . . .’ He looked towards Fleming uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ she said.

  ‘Gillis has been trying to get her into rehab, but she won’t hear of it. Declan gets the stuff for her and it keeps her happy so she doesn’t give him grief. I think Gillis was almost ready to give up. And after the tragedy, when he took a hard line with her, she would simply flip.’

  ‘The tragedy?’ Fleming and Kershaw spoke together.

  Pilapil looked from one to the other in surprise. ‘You mean you don’t know? It was in all the papers for weeks – months, even. Their nanny killed the baby, then found herself a smart lawyer and got off.’

  Fleming frowned, but Kershaw said at once, ‘I remember! Of course – the Ryan baby! It was in London. What was her name? Lisa something . . .’

  ‘Stewart,’ Fleming supplied. ‘I recall the headlines now, though I can’t claim to have followed it closely. I certainly didn’t realise there was a local connection. It was very sad—’

  As she spoke, a phone rang. They all jumped: it seemed very loud and shrill in its unexpectedness. Fleming said, ‘Thank goodness for that,’ and Pilapil got up and hurried to answer it.

  She turned to Campbell and Kershaw. ‘Get most of that, Ewan? Food for thought there, certainly. Now, bring me up to date with the outside world.’

  Up the hill, the murder site had been circled with official tape and under DS Macdonald’s direction uniforms were taking statements while a photographer filmed the area and took shots of the body. A pathologist was standing by, ready to move in once the recording of the site was complete.

  The Sea King had taken off again, bearing a groggy-looking DS MacNee back to civilisation. He hadn’t appreciated it when Macdonald had asked him if he’d enjoyed his wee break.

  ‘See the country?’ he had said bitterly. ‘Next time anyone’s to go outside Kirkluce, it’s you, not me, right?’

  ‘Oh, and here’s me thinking you’d be right at home on the banks and braes like your pal Rabbie.’

  ‘I’ll tell you this. If he’d been stuck out all night on a bank or a bloody brae, he’d have written something different.’

  ‘I think that’s heresy, isn’t it?’ Macdonald called after him, as MacNee, without deigning to turn his head, got into the chopper and was whirled away.

  ‘So we’re waiting for the path report on the body at the Ross
carron Cottages,’ DC Kershaw concluded her report.

  Fleming looked slightly stunned at the thought of so much going on without her knowledge. ‘And there’s a girl still missing, then?’

  ‘Thought you might know where she is,’ DC Campbell suggested.

  ‘Me?’

  Kershaw waited for Campbell to elaborate, but she was learning the unwisdom of conversational expectation where he was concerned and stepped in. ‘Ewan thought she could be at the gamekeeper’s cottage. Dr Forbes, who lived in the next-door cottage, saw her heading off on the path round the headland, and after the landslip there’d be no way back except across the moorland. And how otherwise did the keeper know what had happened and raise the alarm?’

  ‘I didn’t know he had,’ Fleming said. ‘But we need to get to him urgently anyway, after what Pilapil told us. I saw him coming out of the little wood yesterday late afternoon, so he’s definitely in the frame. We need to get hold of Jamieson too. Tam and I went down to the houses, but they were still under water and we decided to leave it until the morning, when we could borrow waders.

  ‘Ewan, get down there now and see if you can raise him. Cris will fix you up with boots. If you can each commandeer a car, you could get along to the gamekeeper’s cottage to talk to the girl, Kim. I’d better make contact with the super and then sort things out here.’

  With some surprise, Kershaw heard nervousness in Big Marge’s voice. And when she thought about it, she really wouldn’t like to be in the inspector’s shoes if Bailey was in one of his more unreasonable moods.

  Beth Brown, too, had felt a lurch in her stomach when she heard the helicopter overhead. It was good in one way – at least she could get out of this dreadful situation – but it was bad in another. Things could go wrong, very wrong.

  She was cramped and sore from sleeping on an old, tatty horsehair sofa in a back room, used more as a store than an office. Its slippery surface made blankets and pillow slide off when she turned over, and the dust from bags of animal feed kept making her sneeze. Anyway, she felt she could hardly breathe with the atmosphere in this miserable little house.

  Alick Buchan had come down to breakfast hung-over and in a filthy temper. Seeing her at the table, he had given an odd sort of half-snarl, almost like one of his own dogs, but said nothing.

  Beth was spared Ina’s constant, unnerving scrutiny since she mercifully expected breakfast in bed, and while Maidie took the tray up to her, Beth helped Calum with his Rice Krispies. He was out of sorts this morning, with a runny nose and a cough, and he crossly pushed away a spoonful, which landed in her lap. She shook her head at him, smiling, as she went to get a cloth. Poor little chap – he was obviously miserable.

  She sat down again and reached for a toy, which she suddenly popped up from behind her back. The child gave a gurgle of laughter and his father glared.

  ‘Get that brat to shut up!’ he demanded, and Beth, directing towards him such a look of cold loathing that he blinked, picked Calum out of his chair and took him over to the sink to wipe his face and hands.

  The sun was shining, though a little uncertainly, and there would probably be rain later. Still, it was worth getting a soaking to escape from the house, and chatting to Calum as they walked would stop her brooding.

  ‘Tell Maidie I’ve taken him for a walk,’ she said, leaving Buchan to his headache.

  It was a glorious day now. From the rough road leading from Rosscarron House to Keeper’s Cottage, there was a view to the sea below and the gannets were diving, white arrows piercing the deep blue. The sky was an innocent turquoise with puffy clouds, though a streak of silver grey far off on the horizon hinted at change to a darker mood.

  DC Kershaw wasn’t admiring it. She was frowning as she drove Alick Buchan’s jeep, struggling to recollect all the details of the tragedy of the Ryan baby. She remembered it pretty well: like many another working mother who had to entrust her child to paid carers, it had sent a shiver down her spine.

  Cara Ryan didn’t seem to have been a good mother – or even a good-enough mother, which was all most women aspired to – but you could only pity her for what had happened.

  The baby, a girl, as far as she remembered, was about three months old when she was discovered lying outside in the garden of the Ryans’ smart house in Putney. It was a cold, wet autumn night and she’d been dead of hypothermia when they found her.

  Kershaw remembered the nanny quite clearly: a red-haired girl, heavy-faced, with round blue eyes like marbles. She had been given a very rough ride by the press, who conducted a trial by media before the case ever came to court.

  But Lisa had come across well, and the evidence given by the Ryans’ cleaner had painted a vivid picture of the baby’s brother as jealous, difficult and possibly even disturbed.

  The jury was convinced, the police blatantly less so. They had taken Lisa’s acquittal badly, describing the verdict as ‘disappointing’ and saying flatly that there would be no further investigation.

  Even so, it had left the baby’s brother stigmatised. That must have been a sickening blow for the Ryans, on top of the loss of their daughter, and it was no wonder poor Cara had chosen to deaden the pain.

  At the time, Kershaw had on the whole been inclined to believe the nanny’s story. There had been plenty of cases in the past that showed that while young children might not have a full understanding of their actions, the capacity for evil was definitely there.

  But that was before the stories had started to leak out about the red-haired nanny’s temper. There had been a backlash, and Kershaw remembered the grandfather uttering threats, which were certainly unpleasant, if understandable. That was Cris’s ideal employer – well, there was always more than one side to a person’s character. Hitler loved animals.

  Crozier certainly hadn’t been universally beloved – not by his son-in-law, not by his gamekeeper, who was now squarely in the frame for his murder, with a witness to testify to his drunken rage and DI Fleming, no less, seeing him emerge from the spinney, where the body was found.

  Her orders were to get Buchan to agree to come in for questioning, since they didn’t have evidence to arrest – not yet, anyway. She’d wait for Campbell to come to pick her up before she tried, but she did hope he wouldn’t be too long.

  It was kind of eerie, plodding in the mud around the deserted houses. DC Ewan Campbell, in thigh-length fishing waders that were a little too small for him, surveyed the depressing scene.

  The water had receded, leaving a thick layer of silt behind, and the stench, wafted on a breeze from the sea, was disgusting. As Campbell walked round the stranded cars, he tried to work out the cost of all this – millions, certainly.

  The doors to some of the houses had burst open under the force of the flood water; these he entered, working his way through a layer of sludge, negotiating the flotsam of furniture – a kitchen table upside down in an entrance hall, a sofa at an angle halfway up a staircase, a huge plasma-screen television face down in a doorway.

  In one house where access to the staircase was clear, he went upstairs and somehow it was even weirder to see everything normal here. He found he was looking guiltily at the footprints his waders had left on the pristine cream carpet.

  Other front doors were still locked, as their owners must have left them. One of these, Campbell noticed suddenly, had a nameplate saying, ‘Jamieson’ above an electric bell. He pressed it from force of habit then, feeling foolish, knocked on the door. There was no answer, no sound of responsive movement from inside.

  He hesitated for only a moment before kicking in the door. In the general chaos here a search warrant seemed an unnecessary formality and damage to the door wouldn’t even be noticed in the massive restoration. After a few well-placed kicks, the lock broke and he pushed the door open against the resistance of the mud, which was a full nine inches deep on the ground floor. He called, ‘Hello! Police. Anyone there?’

  There was no sound, beyond the glooping noise of the rippling mud disturbed
by his entry. He looked about him.

  Here there were signs that someone had done some clearing after the house had been flooded. Tables had been stacked on top of wrecked sofas, every upper surface was piled with belongings and, most telling of all, there were a lot of muddy footprints on the beige stair carpet. Was the owner of the footprints upstairs, refusing to answer, hiding somewhere? He could hardly be unaware of Campbell’s presence.

  It was an uncomfortable thought that someone might be up there, silently waiting for him. Moving cautiously now, Campbell took off the waders and parked them; then, in stockinged feet and on tiptoe, he climbed the stairs.

  The upper floor here, like the one in the other house, had suffered no damage. The doors to a bathroom and three bedrooms, leading off a galleried upper hall, stood ajar, giving glimpses of neat, conventionally decorated rooms. He pushed the doors of the first two open with due caution, waited, then looked around. They were all empty.

  It was a nice house, expensively fitted out and with good-sized rooms. The ones to the front had the sea view that would have been the property’s greatest selling point. Yes, it was very nice; in fact, he could just see himself and Mairi here, with a good bedroom for the wee one, and a room for a little brother or sister as well, and then there wouldn’t be a spare for visits from his mother-in-law.

  The room at the far end was the master bedroom, the largest of them, with windows on two sides and a small en-suite shower room. And here there were definite signs of recent occupation: a kettle, a camping stove, jars and tins, packaging and rubbish in a bin.

  Campbell touched the kettle. If it had been warm, that would have told him something. It wasn’t.

  The bed with its rose-patterned bedspread was neatly made, and there were no clothes lying around. In the bathroom, the basin and shower were dry, but again that didn’t tell him anything. He had no idea how long it might take for drops of water to dry, but on balance the indications were that someone had been living here since the flood, but wasn’t any longer.