Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Where does the phone line come into the house, Cris?’ he asked.

  The young man’s brow furrowed. ‘Phone line? I don’t know. Beside the study, probably.’

  At least he had understood the question, and MacNee believed his answer. The man was too drunk to think quickly, and besides, if Ryan hadn’t cut the wires himself, MacNee was as sure that the slippery sod knew who had, as if he’d confessed rather than trying to cover up.

  He moved on. ‘You thought Gillis Crozier was great, didn’t you?’

  Pilapil’s eyes brimmed. ‘He was my saint. I would do anything for him, anything. He is dead and now I have nothing. What am I to do? Where am I to go?’ Maudlin tears began to fall.

  ‘Whoever killed him was a total bastard,’ MacNee said, his eyes fixed on the other man’s face. ‘Shouldn’t get away with it, should he?’

  ‘I hate him! I hate him to my very soul!’ Angry colour came to Pilapil’s face and he bowed his head over his clenched fists. ‘If I had him here, I would kill him now. No mercy – I would show him no mercy.’

  Just drunken belligerence, or was there more to it? Carefully, MacNee said, ‘You can tell me, laddie. Who was it that did it? Who killed Gillis?’

  Pilapil looked up again, showing a mask of despair. ‘If I knew, you think I would be sitting here, crying? I would have gone after him, found him. I’ll show you what I would do.’

  He got to his feet, walking unevenly, and pulled open a drawer, producing a long, pointed knife with a razor-fine edge. He stabbed and slashed at the air.

  Making no sudden movements, MacNee got up, keeping a wary distance from him on the other side of the chair. The guy was very drunk, high on grief and anger, and waving one of the most businesslike shivs MacNee had been on the wrong end of for a very long time. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

  ‘Now, laddie,’ he said as soothingly as he could, ‘no need to get upset. Just drop it and you sit down again. Here—’ He grabbed the bottle, poured a couple of inches of gin into the glass and held it out, saying mendaciously, ‘You take this and you’ll feel better.’

  Pilapil looked down at the knife in his hand as if he weren’t sure how it had got there. He put it down on the table, keeping it within reach, but took the glass, sat down again and drank thirstily.

  MacNee stepped forward to pick up the knife, but Pilapil’s hand shot out and grasped it again. ‘No! Don’t take it! I need it – for protection.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ MacNee took a step backwards, his eyes never leaving the other man’s face. ‘Who do you need protected from, Cris?’

  The young man looked around him as if he were afraid that someone else had come into the room. ‘They know now, you see,’ he said. ‘Not happy.’

  ‘They?’ MacNee edged nearer.

  ‘It’s nothing – nothing to do with me. Don’t know anything. They can’t say I did. But they’ll ask me. Won’t be able to – to tell them. Angry, maybe.’

  ‘They?’ MacNee said again. He was only a step away now.

  Pilapil seemed to realise what he was saying. ‘Oh – people,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t – mustn’t talk about them.’

  With a swift movement, MacNee made a snatch at the knife. Pilapil’s response was surprisingly quick for someone in his condition; he tightened his hold on it and jumped to his feet, then stumbled. Even as MacNee leaped back, the arc of Pilapil’s flailing arm brought the knife straight towards him, at the level of his heart.

  It struck him, but there was no force behind the blow and it glanced off MacNee’s jacket, leaving a neat razor cut in the leather.

  His life had passed before his eyes, there. In blind rage MacNee smashed the side of his hand down on Pilapil’s wrist, sending the knife spinning to the floor.

  Pilapil gave a cry of pain, then stood swaying, blinking stupidly and rubbing his wrist as MacNee seized the knife. He took a couple of staggering steps and collapsed back into his chair.

  As MacNee’s heartbeat slowed to a healthier pace, he eyed the brainless, drunken bastard with cold fury. He could arrest him; on the other hand, he wanted to know more before the man passed out – and it was clearly a race against time.

  ‘Look, lad,’ he said, admiring his own restraint, ‘you’re needing to calm down. A knife’s no answer to anything. You’ve drunk too much and you’re not thinking straight. Tell me what the problem is and we’ll sort it out.’

  Pilapil gave a half-laugh. ‘Police? Sort it out? You’re – you’re joking.’ The last glass of gin had taken effect: he was slurring his words now and his eyes had begun to roll. ‘Look, I’m tired, very tired. Got to – got to have a rest.’ He fell back in his chair and his eyes closed.

  Sighing, MacNee put the knife in his pocket and left Pilapil to sleep it off. He inspected his ruined jacket, assessing – not hopefully – the chances of a successful claim for a replacement. An expensive accident, that, but, as he slipped his fingers through the slit and felt the beating of his heart directly below, cheap at the price.

  The man with longish brown hair and a row of steel earrings in his left ear parked his elderly Astra in the street near Stranraer Station. He was about five foot eight, thin but wiry, with the pinched look that goes with poor nutrition in childhood. He had no strong distinguishing features, the sort of man who eludes description – a considerable professional asset in his line of work.

  He didn’t look over his shoulder as he walked towards the station, but stole a sideways glance behind him when he stopped to look in a shop window. There didn’t seem to be anyone following him, but at the station he bought a newspaper even so. If at any stage he was uncomfortable, he was to throw it away and the eyes watching him for his own protection would know he’d pulled out. He’d just go home and try again another time. If he could get up the courage to try again.

  He bought his ticket to Glasgow, as he was instructed. He had no idea what he was to do when he got there, but he had a mobile phone in his pocket. He just had to take it all on trust. But he wasn’t a trusting man, though, and when he got on the train and turned to the sports pages in his Daily Record, they were a blur before his eyes.

  As the train pulled out, a man in jeans and a Celtic top turned away and spoke into a mobile phone. ‘On his way. No problem that I could see. Over to you.’

  At Girvan Station, another man, in chinos and a bomber jacket, said, ‘Roger,’ into his phone, and looked at his watch. Time for a cup of coffee before the train came in.

  Lisa Stewart was lingering over her breakfast. The café owner, a cheerful, wizened little man, had topped up her coffee free. At first she thought only about the day ahead, but as she sat there sipping, the question she had pushed to the back of her mind started to nag again. Why had Lee – or Jason, as she should call him – been so insistent that they came to Rosscarron?

  Oh, she’d accepted his argument at the time – that it was the only way they could confront Crozier, make him see that it couldn’t go on. She’d been too stressed to think straight, too desperate to do something – anything! – that would stop her living her life in fear of what the day might bring. And he’d insisted, threatened to leave her . . . She remembered the feeling of panic when he said that.

  Jason liked money. If Crozier had bought him, had he given instructions that she was to be brought up to Rosscarron? Lisa had said at the start that she wouldn’t go – was all the persecution just to drive her to agreement? Up here, on Crozier’s own patch, an ‘accident’ to a city girl, unused to rough country, would be only too easy to arrange, the sort of accident that might even suggest she’d taken her own life in remorse for killing his grandchild.

  But it didn’t quite fit. There’d been plenty of time for Jason to take her on the walk from which she wouldn’t return, but he hadn’t even tried then. And, she remembered with an inward shudder, there was the dead man, the stranger she had looked at so impassively in the mortuary, but who had haunted her dreams since.

  There were still things she couldn’t und
erstand going on, dark, dangerous things that Jason’s death had not resolved. Fear began to seep back into her mind, and the rest of the coffee in her mug had grown cold. She must move, keep on moving, so no one could find out where she was.

  That hadn’t worked the last time, but as a plan it felt, well, familiar, and this time, she told herself firmly, she had reason to believe it would work. Lisa paid, thanked the owner and went out into the street.

  Thinking about it all had made her feel nervous again. But there was no need, she told herself firmly. No one at all could possibly know she was here; even so, she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder to check that there wasn’t someone shadowing her along the street.

  There wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t. She was just being foolish.

  The man in the silver Ford Focus had been reading his local newspaper for longer than one might think its content warranted, and the way he folded back pages from time to time suggested irritation. Wearing gloves made him awkward. Now, quite suddenly, he sat up, threw the paper impatiently down, got out of the car and set off along the street, though at a surprisingly leisurely pace.

  MacNee was still feeling shaken as he put the knife away in the pocket of his jacket and opened the below-stairs door into the hall of Rosscarron House. Ryan was nowhere to be seen, and the house was silent. What now? He paused to consider his next move.

  MacNee had thought he was on to something with his theory about Pilapil – the only one who’d seemed to care about Crozier. And right enough, he’d got it spot on about him wanting revenge.

  The only wee snag was that Pilapil obviously hadn’t done it. He’d been far too drunk to lie efficiently, and given the shenanigans with the shiv, he wasn’t the crowbar type.

  The crowbar. MacNee kept niggling away at the crowbar. It was pure chance he should have known it had been brought to the site, not found there. Maybe it was no more than an effective weapon, but it crossed his mind to wonder whether someone had tried to rig Williams’s murder to fit with the others – a spur-of-the-moment killing, carried out with whatever came to hand, by the same person in a fit of temper? And could the someone being framed be a woman known to suffer from lack of control – Lisa Stewart? Or was he making too much of it?

  ‘Sergeant!’

  The voice behind him made him jump. The voice was no more than a whisper and he hadn’t heard anyone approach, but when he turned, Cara Ryan was at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Oh! Mrs Ryan,’ he said in surprise.

  ‘Sssh!’ She put a finger to her lips as she joined him in the hall. ‘I want to speak to you. Quickly – in here.’

  She moved on tiptoe and opened the door to the conference room with exaggerated care. He followed her as quietly as he could.

  Cara looked nervous, but neither glazed nor manic this morning – midway between fixes, MacNee reckoned, sizing her up with an experienced eye.

  ‘I daren’t be more than a minute,’ she said urgently. ‘I have something to tell you, but Declan mustn’t know, mustn’t guess I’ve spoken to you.’

  He felt a surge of excitement. Was this a breakthrough, at last? ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘There was a man in the house, the night before my father was killed. I saw him. That’s it.’ She turned to go.

  ‘No, no – wait. A man? What kind of a man?’

  Her blue eyes were vague. ‘It was just a glimpse – slim, quite short, spiky hair.’

  Williams, MacNee thought exultantly.

  ‘I saw him going into one of the spare rooms. I didn’t see him after that. Now I have to go or he’ll be looking for me and then . . .’

  Instead of finishing the sentence, she grimaced, then slipped out of the room again before he could stop her. When MacNee went back into the hall, she was nowhere to be seen.

  His mind was racing. Williams had come here – for refuge? – after he’d killed Rencombe, then got hold of a tent and gone to lose himself among the many fans at the rock concert. A bit of a blow for him, when the hoped-for camouflage didn’t materialise.

  Had he then killed Crozier? And why?

  The first thing they needed was a search warrant, and the allegation that Williams had been at the house was good enough grounds for getting one. The rest of the questions could wait till he had time to run through them with Big Marge.

  But it looked as if Cara Ryan might be the key to the whole thing. She’d lost her dad, after all, and if she believed her husband was involved, she might be persuaded to give them the information they needed, as long as she was assured of her own safety. They could easily pull Declan Ryan in for questioning, then come back with a search warrant and talk to her at the same time.

  He was just getting into the car when a stone hit him on the back of the head. Swearing, he turned round and saw Nico Ryan standing grinning a few yards away.

  He didn’t even attempt to run away, which kind of bugged MacNee. It wasn’t unknown for kids to throw stones at policemen, but they usually scarpered when you moved towards them threateningly. Nico held his ground.

  ‘You can’t touch me,’ he said.

  The little bugger was right. That was the problem with modern policing; even at this kid’s age they knew exactly how much you couldn’t do. Still, MacNee moved in close enough to make the boy take a step backwards. He smiled, not pleasantly.

  ‘Ah, well, that’s where you’re wrong, you see. What age are you? Eight?’

  Nico, eyeing him uncertainly, nodded.

  ‘In Scotland, if you’re eight, you’re not just a child. You can go to court and they can lock you up. And you’ve just assaulted a police officer. Not a good idea.’

  A flicker of unease crossed Nico’s face – but only a flicker. ‘It was an accident,’ he said coolly.

  Feeling grateful that he was unlikely to be in the vicinity when this one was a teenager, MacNee said, ‘Like throwing stones, do you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ It was a wary response.

  ‘Your granddad got hit with a stone, didn’t he?’ He tried to make it sound like a conversational remark.

  ‘I didn’t throw stones at my granddad. I’d have got in trouble.’

  Surely a kid couldn’t pound a member of his own family to death, then lie with such assurance – but it was such a calm, slick reply! MacNee said carefully, ‘You wouldn’t, if he didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘No,’ Nico agreed. ‘I’d have had to hide.’

  ‘If you were in that wood there behind him, he wouldn’t notice you.’ Maybe he was crazy to go on with this questioning – the rules concerning minors were strict – but if he got the truth now, he could do the compliance bit later.

  ‘I could have hidden in the wood when he went up to the campsite,’ Nico acknowledged, with what sounded almost like regret, ‘but I didn’t think of it.’

  MacNee caught his breath. ‘You – you saw your granddad going up to the campsite that day?’

  ‘Yes. I was in there.’ The child pointed to the bank of rhododendrons across the drive. ‘I’ve got a den. They don’t know.’ He flicked a contemptuous glance towards the house.

  ‘Can you think back, Nico? Did you see anyone going in after him?’

  Nico shook his head and MacNee’s sudden hope died. Then he went on, ‘But there was a lady in a hood watching him from up there.’

  Now he was indicating the rising ground beside the rough road leading on to Keeper’s Cottage. It was flat at the top and anyone standing there could certainly be seen from Nico’s position here, and could certainly see into the spinney below.

  ‘A lady?’ Lisa Stewart? She had admitted to him that she was out that afternoon, taking the Buchan child for a walk. ‘A lady with a toddler in a pushchair?’

  ‘No.’ Nico was definite. ‘Just a lady by herself. It was funny. She looked just like our old nanny, only our nanny had red hair and her hair was brown.’

  MacNee’s car had just disappeared down the drive when Cara Ryan came hurrying out of the house. ‘Nico! Nico! Oh, there y
ou are! Listen, sweetheart, this is terribly important. Did you take the computer that was in our bedroom under the bed?’

  Nico’s blue eyes were limpid with innocence. ‘No, Mummy,’ he said.

  It was only after she had asked him again another couple of times, got the same answer and gone away that he glanced towards the den. He knew they would search his bedroom once they realised it had gone, but it was safe here. He always sneaked it back in when there was no one about and then he could play with it. He was getting quite good at Grand Theft Auto now.

  Jan Forbes was working at her laptop in the Telfords’ private sitting room where she could be undisturbed. She always spent a few hours in the morning keeping on top of administration, essay marking and emails, and the Telfords were meticulous about not interrupting her.

  Eleven o’clock was coffee time, though, and when Susan appeared with a tray, she was looking worried.

  ‘I gave the cleaners instructions not to go into Lisa’s bedroom this morning so she could have her sleep out, but there’s still no sign of her. I just wondered if I should maybe tiptoe in and see that she’s – well, all right.’

  Jan met her eyes with perfect understanding. ‘Listen at the door, maybe,’ she suggested. ‘If you don’t hear her moving about, you could give a wee soft tap that wouldn’t wake her if she was still asleep and then just put your head round the door.’

  Susan departed, and Jan waited for her return with just a little niggle of anxiety. Stupid, probably, she told herself. Though the doctor had said the sedative he had given her was very mild, it was perfectly possible that it had laid her out. And of course the young had that enviable ability to sleep in for hours that you lost as you got older.

  When Susan came back, it was clear from her face that Jan’s worst imaginings had been unfounded. But she was still looking concerned, and was holding a wad of notes in her hand.

  ‘She’s gone. Taken all her things and just gone. Left the money for her stay, look.’

  ‘Very organised. That sounds as if she’s all right, anyway, though I’d have liked to know where she was going. Still, if she didn’t want to tell me . . .’ Jan shrugged.