Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  However, when she opened his door, Cammie – a big lad now, with his father’s build and his mother’s dark colouring – was lying on his bed, plugged into an iPod and reading a rugby magazine. He looked up with a grin, which changed to concern as he saw her technicolour face.

  Warmed, she reassured him, said goodnight, then dragged herself to bed, sighing with satisfaction as she lay down. It was wonderful to be back in her own room, with the photos of her children on the dressing table and the curtains that were a little faded and the bedside light with the cut paper shade that fell off every so often but which she refused to replace because it was so pretty, and her own bed – not even the expensive mattress at Rosscarron House was as comfortable as her own bed, which had just the slightest hollow where she always lay. And she was safely distanced from the investigation; she wouldn’t have to lock the door and lie wondering who might be prowling in the corridor outside.

  Marjory thrust the thought from her mind as Cat came in and set a tray on her knees. She realised she was very hungry indeed. When had she last eaten? She couldn’t remember.

  ‘Granny’s been here, obviously,’ she said, spooning up the thick Scotch broth. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Oh, she’s having a fine time,’ Cat assured her. ‘Karolina keeps trying to do the housework and stuff that she’s paid to do, but Gran keeps clucking over her – forcing her to go and rest, though it’s months till the baby’s due. Just an excuse to take over, I reckon.’

  Marjory shook her head. ‘She’s an awful woman. Still, if it makes her happy and it isn’t driving Karolina mad . . . Oh, that looks good too, Bill!’

  Bill smiled down at her, setting two glasses and a bottle of Bladnoch on the bedside table. ‘So, tell us what’s been going on.’

  ‘Wait!’ Cat interrupted. ‘I’ve got to know. Did you get to meet Joshua?’

  A mouthful of soup went down the wrong way and Marjory spluttered. Damn! She should have been prepared for that question.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘The weirdest thing, Bill – you know who this “Joshua” turned out to be? None other than Joss Hepburn!’

  Bill, unscrewing the cap on the whisky bottle, froze. ‘Joss Hepburn?’

  ‘Yes. Extraordinary, or what?’

  Oblivious to the atmosphere, Cat stared at her mother. ‘You mean, you know Joshua?’

  ‘Knew,’ Marjory said, too hastily. ‘We both knew him when we were young.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Cat demanded. ‘And how come you knew him, anyway?’

  ‘I’d no idea he was your Joshua. He came from round here. He had a band called Electric Earthquake and we all used to go to the gigs.’

  ‘Oh wow!’ Cat said reverently.

  Bill’s voice was carefully neutral. ‘And how is he?’

  ‘Oh, much the same. Still got a crooked nose.’ Marjory hoped this might raise a smile, but Bill only nodded.

  ‘Tell me what he’s really like,’ Cat begged.

  Marjory simply didn’t feel strong enough for the sort of careful weighing of every word that this conversation would need. She had finished her soup; she gave a huge yawn.

  ‘Quite honestly, I don’t want to go through it all tonight. I’m shattered, and I have to be in early tomorrow. I’m not sure I even want a drink after all, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Bill collected up the unused glasses. ‘You get some sleep. I’ll try not to wake you when I come up.’

  Cat looked wistful. ‘OK. But you promise you’ll tell me all about him tomorrow?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Marjory said. ‘Just put the light off, will you?’

  As they left the room, Marjory heard Cat say to her father, ‘You and Mum had some well cool friends, didn’t you?’ and winced.

  Despite her tiredness, she didn’t sleep immediately. There had been so much else going on that she’d given very little thought to Bill’s reaction to her meeting Joss again, except to reflect fleetingly that, while he might still be sensitive, surely after all these years of happy marriage he could hardly doubt her enduring love. It had occurred to her it might be wise to plan how to present this, but with one thing and another she’d forgotten.

  But she hadn’t forgotten how it had been after that horrible night when Joss showed clearly what he was and when Bill, playing knight in shining armour, had felled him: how she had felt revulsion for Joss and everything he represented, how she had felt almost physically sickened by the squalor of it all. How badly it had hurt.

  ‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.’ She remembered romantically quoting the Song of Solomon to Bill some time later, in her longing for something cleaner, more wholesome, to use that old-fashioned word. He had smiled quietly, and on their next date had brought her the biggest red apple she had ever seen, polished to a brilliant shine.

  ‘But I hope,’ he said, completing the quotation, ‘that you’re not altogether “sick of love”. It would be very disappointing.’

  Marjory had laughed and kissed him, though there was a misunderstanding there. ‘Of’, in the phrase, meant ‘from’; her love for Joss was a malady from which she had not then recovered. But afterwards she did. Of course she did. She had loved Bill ever since then. She had loved him because—

  Should you love someone because? Or was it more in the nature of love to love despite? The rebel thought made her shudder.

  But then, because Joss was a total bastard, being ‘in love’ with him hadn’t been enough – not nearly. And she loved Bill, with all his virtues, despite Joss’s mockery of them, then and now.

  Marjory was into her forties. Her hair, which had once had a riotous life of its own, had long ago been tamed. She wore neat, well-cut trouser suits to work. She wore jeans and sweaters when she was off duty. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done something wild and irresponsible.

  Grown-ups didn’t. But she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to be grown up. Not yet.

  Marjory heard Bill’s footsteps on the stairs, the cautious way he opened the door. The cautious, loving way he was trying not to wake her. She shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  Saturday, 22 July

  The smell in the Balmoral Guest House lounge almost made DS MacNee gag: a smell compounded of stale air, dust and, he suspected, mice. The beady eyes of Mrs Wishart the proprietor were out on stalks, and though she had left after fetching Lisa Stewart from her room, MacNee suspected she was next door with a glass pressed to the wall.

  ‘This is just a wee informal chat,’ he said to Lisa, smiling at her, though not too broadly, MacNee’s gap-toothed grin having been known to have a less than reassuring effect. He had to show her he was on her side, which was, of course, on the basis of his dispassionate analysis of the facts and nothing at all to do with DC Kershaw. He could only hope that in going after Jamieson, Kershaw was being equally scrupulous.

  Lisa didn’t smile back. She sat on the fake leather sofa, just looking at him with those funny, round eyes, which didn’t give any hint of what she was feeling. MacNee began to see what Kershaw meant about the girl being odd.

  He elicited that Lisa was feeling all right, that she’d bought some T-shirts and stuff, and that she didn’t know if her cottage was insured. She gave him the number of Lee Morrissey’s car. She volunteered nothing, only waiting calmly for the next question.

  They could go through the facts again, but MacNee hadn’t time to waste on a repetition of what he knew already. He stood up.

  ‘Is there a garden or anything? The sun’s out for the moment at least, and this room stinks.’

  For the first time, Lisa responded. ‘The whole place stinks, but it’s cheap. There’s a yard out the back – it’s car parking mostly, but there’s a couple of seats and a bit of grass.’

  ‘That’ll do me.’

  As they walked out of the front door and through the passageway at the side of the house, MacNee reviewed his tactics. He needed a story from her, not a statement, but the blea
k yard at the back wasn’t conducive either to a cosy chat. There were a couple of cars parked there, and another half dismantled, being repaired, but judging from the rusted parts and tools scattered about, not recently. As he sat down on a weather-stained white plastic chair on the scrubby strip of grass, kicking aside some litter blown in off the street, he said, ‘I’m going to tell you something, Lisa. We’re not convinced you’ve been telling us the truth.’

  Her hands gripped at the arms of the chair. ‘What about?’

  ‘You said the body you looked at yesterday wasn’t your partner. Are you sticking to that?’

  Lisa looked at him in blank incomprehension. ‘Sticking to it? What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve only your word that it isn’t your partner.’

  She burst into laughter, laughter tinged with anger. ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me that! Lee was twenty years younger than that man, just for a start. And he wasn’t tall, and he had short hair, and— Oh, this is the most stupid thing I ever heard of!’

  ‘Have you a photo of him?’

  ‘I don’t have a camera.’

  ‘What about your mobile?’

  ‘I lost that as well as everything else.’

  The reply came readily enough, but MacNee was almost sure Lisa was lying. Surely bloody Kershaw wasn’t right after all?

  ‘You said there wasn’t anyone who could identify him. That’s kind of odd – not knowing anyone.’

  He sensed her relaxing. ‘Oh, is that what this is about? How ridiculous! You don’t understand – we didn’t get to know people because we kept moving, that’s all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Lisa stumbled over the word, as if it was a question she hadn’t thought he would ask. ‘Well, we – we just didn’t find the right place. If it’s any business of yours.’

  ‘Oh, it’s our business, right enough.’ MacNee abandoned the idea of a cosy chat. ‘We’re investigating the murder of two men. And one, you say, isn’t your boyfriend. Let’s talk about the other one, then. Gillis Crozier.’

  She was pale anyway, but even the slight colour in her cheeks vanished. ‘Gillis Crozier?’ Her attempt to sound offhand was pathetic.

  ‘Oh, you remember him, I’m sure. The grandfather of the baby who died. The guy who threatened to kill you too.’

  His sarcasm produced a flash of temper. ‘Of course I remember him!’ she snapped. ‘But what he said – he was just upset. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘That’s a very mature attitude, Lisa. So all the moving wasn’t an attempt to cover your tracks so he couldn’t find you?’

  It took her a moment to reply. ‘It wasn’t him – nothing to do with him. It – it was the press. And people – I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on Poppy’s head, but thanks to the press, and to the police, like you,’ – she shot him a look of hatred – ‘lots of people still think I did it. I’ve had to dye my hair because if I’m recognised, total strangers will come up and give me abuse. Why do you think Lee and I didn’t get to know anyone? He was the one person in the world I could trust – only I couldn’t trust him, after all. He was – he was using me.’

  Lisa’s eyes had filled with tears. MacNee never liked it when women cried. He said quickly, ‘Right, right. I understand that. There’s a call going out for him now, so maybe he’ll contact us and we can put this one to rest.

  ‘There’s just one more thing I need to ask you. You were hiding from everyone. You were afraid people would be unkind to you. How come you decided to live here, when anytime you went out, you could bump into the family?’

  She floundered. ‘Well, I didn’t think I would – I thought I could just avoid them. I didn’t go out much. Lee did most of the shopping, you see.’ Then, with more conviction, she said, ‘Why shouldn’t I? I had my granny’s cottage and I wanted to live in it. They don’t own the place, however much money they have.’

  Her synthetic indignation didn’t convince MacNee. She wasn’t telling him the truth. ‘I still have to ask you where you were on Thursday afternoon, when Gillis Crozier was murdered.’

  There was a brief silence. She sat back on the grubby plastic chair, as if she were withdrawing from him mentally as well as physically. When she spoke, she sounded detached.

  ‘I don’t know when he was murdered.’

  Neither did they, exactly, MacNee reflected. You’d think by now, with all their grand technology, they’d be able to say, ‘Twenty past five, give or take ten minutes,’ but not a chance. ‘Just tell me what you did between two o’clock and eight in the evening.’

  ‘I was at the Buchans’ cottage except when I took the baby for a walk.’

  ‘Where did you walk to?’

  ‘You don’t walk to anywhere, out there. You just walk about.’

  ‘You could walk to Rosscarron House. To where Mr Crozier was murdered.’ MacNee emphasised the word. It had got a definite reaction last time, but now she just looked at him with cold eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t near the house. You can’t prove I was. Because I wasn’t.’

  MacNee got no further after that. He left Lisa sitting calmly, contemplating a couple of cars and the rubbish. To his intense irritation, he found himself in agreement with Kershaw that Lisa Stewart had only a passing acquaintance with openness and honesty.

  And to quote the wise words of the Bard, ‘There’s none ever feared that the truth would be heard, but they whom the truth wad indict.’

  So that was it, then. The end.

  Douglas Jamieson looked at the hot tap on his bathroom basin, opened to its fullest extent but yielding not a drop of water. The supply from the tank, which had actually lasted longer than he expected, had run out and it was decision time.

  In any case, his neighbours had started to return. From behind the curtains, he’d seen the Watsons next door come ploughing through the stinking mud left behind by the retreating waters. She was crying; he had a comforting arm round her shoulders, but he looked pale and shaken himself. A little later they had knocked on his broken front door and called his name, but Douglas had kept very still until they went.

  He’d seen an official-looking young man with a clipboard at one of the other houses – an insurance assessor, no doubt. Soon the clean-up would start.

  And the police would return too. He couldn’t hide here for ever, not without water. Anyway, what would be the point?

  Douglas had made his preparations already, against the day when he would find he had enough courage to take the only way out. Or rather, when he found he was more afraid of staying alive than of dying.

  He’d reached that point. He could see what lay ahead of him with terrible clarity; to be dead would be better than that. He just didn’t much fancy the process.

  Throughout her agonising illness, Margaret had a shining belief that, in the end, all would be well and they would be together again. Douglas longed for that, with all his heart and soul, but he had never had her gift of faith.

  Suppose she was right about the hereafter. He had been wicked, very wicked, and now he was preparing to take his own life. Suppose her God punished him with oblivion, or worse? But then, how could Margaret be happy in cold eternity without him? Her God, as she saw Him, was merciful. Perhaps . . .

  Anyway, he wasn’t going to huddle here to be flushed out, like a cornered rat. Whisky was an old, familiar friend, and Margaret’s sleeping pills would put him out quickly. They were waiting for him, on the tray on the dressing table.

  Douglas picked them up, with a glass, and went over to the bed. He straightened the covers before he lay down; he could almost hear Margaret’s anxious voice, ‘Did you leave everything tidy?’ His eyes were wet with tears as he took the first handful of pills.

  Campbell had said Jamieson wasn’t at his house, but DC Kershaw couldn’t think where else to start. She had a search warrant in her pocket, and if he wasn’t there, perhaps she could find something to suggest a follow-up.

  As she parked her car, looking with disgust at the sea of
mud, the revolting stench greeted her. She had heavy boots with her, but she wouldn’t much enjoy sharing the car with them afterwards.

  There were some signs of activity at the site: windows open at one of the houses, and a van and another couple of cars beside where she herself had parked. Once she’d had a look around Jamieson’s house, at least there would be people to talk to who might know where he was likely to have gone.

  Kershaw hadn’t wanted to do this, but since she had no alternative she was determined to succeed. MacNee would sneer if she failed, even if there was no way he’d have been able to find the man if she couldn’t. She wondered how he was getting on with his little friend Lisa: giving her the benefit of the doubt, probably, just from spite.

  The door to Jamieson’s house had been kicked in – by Campbell, she guessed, unless some enterprising tealeaf had thought of doing a spot of looting. For form’s sake, she knocked on the door and called, but there was no answer.

  Looking around what had been a trim, comfortable and cherished house, Kershaw felt a surge of pity for the man, whatever he had done. And certainly, if you believed someone’s greed had done this to you – wrecked your dream home, ruined everything you had worked for all your life – you might well be angry enough to sabotage his music festival and hit him over the head. She had to be honest and admit that MacNee was right about that, at least.

  Campbell had said there were signs that the man had been living in the master bedroom at one stage, anyway, so that was where she headed first.

  It was a pleasant room, a bit fussy, with flowery curtains on the bay window and a dressing table with a frilly flounce. And he was there, lying on the bed with a glass at his side, which had spilled whisky on to the rose-patterned cover.

  At first Kershaw thought he was dead, but when she bent over him, there was still a thready breath. She got out her mobile, looked at it, swore, then ran out of the house, back to the radio in the car.

  Suicide was as good as an admission of guilt. Tam MacNee could be right after all. Damn, damn, damn!

  13

  After DS MacNee had left, Lisa Stewart jumped up. She was churning inside, as if the panic she had managed to control was building up and would have to burst out in a scream, like the steam from a pressure cooker. She felt as if she’d been trussed up in sticky threads, a Bilbo Baggins in a Mirkwood of her own making, caught in a web of tiny lies.