The sea was quiet today, with only that slight breeze ruffling its surface and giving the waves white, feathery tops as they ran up almost to Lisa’s feet, then retreated with a soft fizzing of foam, which left a trail of bubbles on the hard sand. She had to take a hasty step back when a wave, bolder than the others, threatened to soak her feet.
Almost mesmerised by the rhythmic sounds, she stood for a long time, gazing out to sea. The sky was overcast, but suddenly a rift in the clouds appeared and a shaft of light gilded the farther side of the bay with its direct rays. A Bible sky, Lisa’s granny had called it, because it looked as if the heavens had opened. A good omen?
At last, reluctantly, she turned to go, then stopped. Reaching into her bag, Lisa took out the mobile she had hidden under the floor, then threw it as far as she could into the sea.
Walking back across the road, she felt lighter, freer already. Perhaps getting rid of the phone had begun the process of starting afresh, and at the gate of the Rowantrees Hotel she glanced up at the graceful trees as if they might, indeed, be guardians to protect her.
The lobby of the hotel was old-fashioned, with a gleaming wooden floor and dark furniture. A bowl of roses stood on the reception desk, their scent competing with the smell of furniture polish. It felt comfortable and reassuring. And safe. Lisa blinked away exhausted tears.
There was no one about. A little hesitantly, she pinged the glittering brass bell on the counter and a moment later a plump, cheerful-looking woman with greying hair and bright blue eyes popped out from the door under the stairs.
‘Oh, you must be Lisa! I’m Susan Telford. I’m so glad you caught that bus. With the service on Sundays you’d have had a long wait if you’d missed that one.’
‘I just made it. The driver let me off by the hotel.’
She nodded wisely. ‘Ah, that would be Doddie. You were lucky – if it’d been Rab, he’d have gone on to the official stop and you’d have had a mile to walk. Now, let me take you to your room.’
Still chatting, she led the way up a staircase, carpeted in turkey red, then opened the door to a light, spacious bedroom to the front of the house with a shower room off it.
‘I thought we’d give you a nice sea view. Jan said you were needing to be cosseted, after all that’s happened, so we’ll have to look after you.’ Susan smiled at Lisa with great warmth. ‘There’s a tray there for tea, and some of my biscuits in that wee tin there. Now, you just take your time, have a nice rest. When you’re ready, you’ll find Jan down in the sitting room. She’s looking forward to seeing you again. Anything more you’re needing?’
Lisa managed to say no and thank you. When the door closed, she sat down on the bed. The white bed linen smelled faintly of lavender fabric conditioner.
It was so quiet, so peaceful! It felt – that word again – safe.
It was dangerous to relax, to let her guard down. There were times when she’d thought she was safe before and he’d found her. But he was dead now, wasn’t he?
16
The door to the sitting room at Rosscarron House burst open and Cris Pilapil appeared in the doorway.
‘Well, it’s really hit the fan now!’
Declan and Cara Ryan were sitting together on a sofa to his right. Both heads whipped round; both faces registered expressions of shock and alarm. From the other side of the room, hidden by the open door, DS Macdonald and DC Campbell were perfectly placed to observe their reaction.
Pilapil stepped fully into the room. He looked unkempt, Macdonald thought, and his face was pale and puffy around the eyes. He said, ‘I’ve just been on the phone, and—’ then stopped in consternation.
Ryan moved quickly. ‘Never mind the problems with the PR firm, Cris. This is rather more serious. The officers have come to tell us that one of the fans was murdered in Kirkluce last night.’
As an exercise in damage limitation, it was impressive. Pilapil, though, was struggling to follow the lead. ‘Oh – oh, really? That’s – that’s very sad,’ he stammered. ‘What happened?’
‘Sounds like a brawl outside a pub,’ Ryan said. ‘Can’t see it’s anything to do with us, Sergeant, but of course if we can help in any way . . .’
‘That’s not quite what I said, sir,’ Macdonald corrected him. ‘The body was found in the garden behind a small guest house. The gentleman was someone we interviewed here yesterday, before the campers were allowed to leave. He gave his name as Damien Gallagher – does that mean anything to you?’
Pilapil said quickly, ‘I have nothing to do with the campers. Sorry.’ Ryan looked blank and shook his head. Cara was looking blank anyway, sitting back now on the sofa with her hands clasped in her lap.
Perhaps he shouldn’t jump to conclusions – perhaps she was still just in shock after her father’s death. ‘Mrs Ryan?’ Macdonald prompted.
Cara looked at him vaguely. ‘The campers? I don’t know. I didn’t go up there.’
The doorbell rang. Pilapil said, ‘I’ll go,’ and disappeared.
‘Where were you last night?’ Campbell said bluntly.
‘We were all here. As you can imagine, there’s been a hell of a lot to do, sorting things out. We want to be ready to leave here whenever you lot give the OK so we can deal with what will be waiting for us at the other end. Maybe you could get on with that, instead of asking us stupid questions.’
Ryan’s petulant response seemed a little too pat, Macdonald thought. ‘When you say “all”?’ he probed.
‘Cara, myself, Nico of course, Cris and Joss Hepburn – one of the stars of the festival. He’s an old friend of my father-in-law’s.’
‘Perhaps we could have a word with him too,’ Macdonald was saying, when the door opened and Pilapil ushered DS Tam MacNee into the room.
Seeing his fellow officers, MacNee’s face fell. ‘Didn’t know you were here,’ he grunted.
This wasn’t the moment to point out the virtues of simply doing what you were tasked to do, but Macdonald promised himself that this would be a treat deferred.
‘We’ve just been asking Mr and Mrs Ryan about last night,’ he said, allowing his annoyance to show. ‘Everyone was here all the time, apparently.’
Impervious, MacNee turned to Ryan. ‘You’d be sorry to hear about Mr Gallagher.’
Like a dog sensing danger, Ryan stiffened. ‘Sure. But I didn’t know him.’
‘Aye, did you!’ MacNee said. ‘You were having a wee crack with him the first time I saw you, on Thursday. Then again, when we were up together at the campsite later, I saw you and him having a good blether.’
There was a moment of stillness. Ryan’s eyes flickered; then he said, ‘I – I talked to everyone at the site. That was my job. OK, I probably talked to him. So? I didn’t know his name or anything about him. What did he look like?’
Again, it was a clever reply. Macdonald had to oblige with a description and Ryan was able to say immediately, ‘Oh, I know who you mean. Nice guy. That’s really tragic.’
Campbell said, ‘You’ll have his booking form?’
‘I guess. It’ll probably be on the computer that your lot took away.’
Stalemate, Macdonald reckoned, but MacNee wasn’t giving up.
‘So, you were here together all evening, all of you, all the time? Just a cosy, domestic evening.’ There was a sneer in MacNee’s voice.
It was, surprisingly, Cara who rose to the bait. ‘Yes, it was,’ she said fiercely. ‘And anyway, why are you going on at us like this? It’s nothing to do with us. Surely you should be looking at the people who are staying in the guest house?’
Was that an indrawn breath from her husband? MacNee’s eyes, suddenly thoughtful, fixed on her face, but before he could speak, Ryan said, ‘I’m sure they’ll be doing that as well, Cara. Anyway, do you want to check our story with Joss Hepburn? I’m positive he’ll confirm it.’
‘Oh, so am I,’ MacNee said jovially. ‘But one more thing – do you know someone called Alex Rencombe?’
This time, it wasn’t a
moment of stillness. It was the silence of utter shock.
The door had hardly closed behind the officers when the recriminations began.
‘I was trying to warn you!’ Pilapil opened his defence. ‘His secretary phoned to say the police had booked Alex’s car and were trying to trace him. She wanted to know where he was – you’d told me to say we were in touch.’
‘Trying to warn us!’ Ryan snarled. ‘Dropping us in it, more like, you stupid bastard. If you thought a bit more and drank a bit less, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.’
Hepburn, sitting at the farther end of the room as if trying to distance himself, said angrily, ‘Just can it, will you? Running around like headless turkeys isn’t smart, and slagging off Cris won’t help either.’
His eyes were cold and hard. Ryan didn’t even try to meet their challenge, dropping his head and saying tiredly, ‘All right, all right. Sorry. Now what?’
‘Fine. Now, let’s try and sort out this God-awful mess. Where is Alex, Declan?’
‘How the hell would I know? You tell me. All I know is that Gillis said Alex was doing a job for him, unspecified, and since he wasn’t broadcasting what it was, I assumed it was something he’d prefer the police didn’t know about.’
‘Gillis would have preferred the police didn’t know about most of what he did. We all would.’ Hepburn’s languid pose had disappeared; he took a short, nervous drag at his cigarette.
There was a sudden crash overhead, a thud and then a wail. Cara, brooding in the corner of the sofa, sat up. ‘That’s Nico, Declan. He’s hurt himself.’
‘You go,’ Ryan said shortly. ‘I’ve got my hands full.’
‘But he might need you,’ she persisted.
Ryan’s patience snapped. ‘You deal with him. If he’s destroyed anything, I can’t guarantee not to give him something to cry about.’
Cara’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t care, do you? I’ll remember that.’ Her pale face flushed with anger, she got up and stormed out, slamming the door.
Pilapil broke the awkward silence. ‘What are we going to do, then?’
Ryan, who had turned his head to look glumly after his wife, sighed. ‘We can’t afford to have them digging around the business.’ He looked at Hepburn. ‘We talked about it before, remember? Fleming’s got to drop it, before she gets anyone else interested. Call her off.’
Without waiting for a reply, he left the room. Pilapil, not looking at Hepburn, got up to follow him.
Hepburn lit up again. His face was dark, and the hand holding the cigarette was rigid with tension. As he drew the smoke deep into his lungs, he heard Cara’s voice, screaming muffled abuse at her husband. He guessed she must be due her next fix.
As the police officers went back to their cars, Macdonald said, in aggrieved tones, ‘I thought you were meant to be at the Balmoral, not out here, Tam. And how the hell did you know about this Alex Rencombe?’
‘Ah, well, I’d had a wee idea, and then a radio message came through about his car being found,’ MacNee said, sounding smug. ‘The boss had asked them to contact you, but you weren’t answering. I said I’d go and spring it on the Ryans since I was nearby. How did they react to the news about Gallagher?’
‘Him? Cool – too cool, maybe. Her? Well.’ Macdonald shrugged. ‘Broke out at the end, though.’
‘Yes,’ MacNee said thoughtfully. ‘Knew Lisa Stewart was staying there, I reckon – wonder how? But they certainly went into shock when I mentioned Rencombe’s car.’
‘The Filipino lad wasn’t as surprised as the others – the phone call, presumably. But you certainly got your reaction,’ Macdonald admitted.
‘Didn’t do much good, though,’ Campbell pointed out with his usual bluntness. ‘They clammed up.’
Indeed they had, Hepburn too when they called him in. MacNee, on the defensive, said, ‘We found out he was Crozier’s lawyer anyway. And that he wasn’t the dead guy who’d been driving the Lexus. But it didn’t take Ryan long to think of saying the car must have been stolen.’
‘Couldn’t explain why it wasn’t reported, though,’ Macdonald pointed out. ‘Or tell us where Rencombe is now.’
‘In the mortuary,’ Campbell voiced MacNee’s thought. ‘He’s Mr X, obviously.’
The fingerprint information that had just reached Fleming pointed to the same conclusion. Mr X’s fingerprints were all over the Lexus, though overlaid with prints taken from the body at the guest house. And those prints belonged not to a ‘Damien Gallagher’, but to one Jason Williams, with a conviction in London for demanding money with menaces.
Having groped in the dark for so long, it felt almost dizzying to have names and background all at once. How to deal with such riches?
It made up for the disappointing interim report from the computer analyst. It had been entirely straightforward to access the files on Crozier’s PC, all of which concerned the organisation of the festival and the local housing development. There was no record of other business, and there were no personal emails or CDs with extra information. A further search would be done to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, but the professional view was that this was unlikely.
Which, of course, suggested that somewhere there had been a more sensitive laptop, a laptop that had been removed along with the papers from the filing cabinet while Fleming slept the sleep of exhaustion upstairs.
Both could still be in the house, but what chance had she of a general search warrant? There was no evidence that whatever business Crozier was carrying on had any bearing on his death, and sheriffs didn’t issue warrants on the basis of a DI’s gut feeling that something wasn’t right.
Anyway, how could she open up a new front when they were at full stretch already? She’d simply have to shelve all that meantime, and at least now there was solid progress to report, which might get the press off their backs. They were revving up already to take her apart: the details of her last case and her suspension had been rehashed with relish, and Donald Bailey was visibly twitching. She tried to put that out of her mind. After what she had suffered at their hands the last time, it made her feel sick.
Rencombe. Fleming was considering her next move on that when DS MacNee appeared, looking pleased with himself.
‘Tam?’ she said hopefully.
‘Gillis Crozier’s lawyer, that’s who he is. They don’t know anything – allegedly – except that he was doing a job for Crozier, unspecified, and that he was expected at Rosscarron House and didn’t arrive. Presumably he’s our—’
‘Mr X,’ Fleming finished for him. ‘I know. His fingerprints are all over the car. I’ve just been working out where we go from here . . . Formal ID first. Wheel in Ryan and someone else – one of the other men, preferably. Cara would be less than ideal if she’s spaced out.’
‘Pilapil and Hepburn both know him,’ MacNee said. ‘But you’d maybe rather keep Hepburn out of it?’ He gave a suggestive wink.
‘Whichever,’ she said coolly. ‘Something in your eye, Tam? Or are you developing a twitch?’
MacNee didn’t respond.
She went on, ‘Right. I’ve another piece of good news.’
She told him about the identification of Jason Williams, aka Damien Gallagher. ‘We can pretty safely work on the presumption that if he was driving Rencombe’s car, he killed him first. So what’s the connection between them? How did Williams come to be driving Rencombe’s car?’
‘I’ve a wee theory about that,’ MacNee said slowly. ‘I went out to Rosscarron Cottages today.’
‘I did wonder when they said you were going there. Thought you were meant to be at the guest house?’
‘I was, until it was locked up. Then I took that dour besom Lisa Stewart to find out about a bus to the hotel, to get her past the cameras.’
‘I’m glad you did that. There’ll be a frenzy when they realise she’s involved in this. Anyway, you went to the cottages?’
‘It’s a right mess out there,’ MacNee said. ‘If you ask me, they’ll end up level
ling the lot, for the insurance. There was no one actually living there, after all – and would the owners really want to rebuild, out at the end of the road to nowhere? But in number 2 . . .’ He paused. ‘I know you’ve seen the footage, but when I was there, I could kind of see better what would have happened. And what we know now would fit with that. Mr X – Rencombe – was hit on the back of the head, near the door – leaving after a row, maybe. So then Williams panics and goes off in his Lexus.’
‘You’re assuming that Jason Williams, Damien Gallagher and Lee Morrissey are all the same person? That Lisa’s lying about not recognising Williams’s body?’
‘Damn sure of it.’
Fleming was frowning. ‘But what about their own car? They must have had one – where is it?’
‘Ah, that I can tell you. Under a bloody great heap of rubble, where the car park was. Williams maybe couldn’t resist taking the posh car instead of his own.’
‘Fair enough. But Jan Forbes saw Lisa’s boyfriend leave, right? Why did he go if Rencombe was coming to see him?’
‘Maybe Rencombe never said. Just had the bad luck to arrive as he was leaving.’
Fleming considered that. ‘OK, that works. So what had he come to see him about? That’s the key point.’
MacNee shrugged. ‘No idea. What I do know is that if Lisa Stewart told us all she knows, we’d be halfway there. At least.’
‘I’m with you there. I might get Kim to have a go at her, see what she can do.’
MacNee said nothing in a pointed manner, but Fleming chose to ignore it. ‘I want you to phone and break the news to his secretary, once we get a firm ID on Rencombe. But organise that as a matter of urgency.’
Jan Forbes, with her plastered foot up on a stool and her crutches at her side, was sitting in the hotel lounge knitting when Lisa Stewart came hesitantly in.
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