Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Oh, nice,’ Ryan sneered. ‘You’re going to get out, leaving us to carry the can.’

  Hepburn turned on him. ‘See here, my friend, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this place that I don’t get, and I’m not asking you to explain. It’s absolutely nothing to do with me and I really, majorly, do not want to know. But Alex’s murder brought the roof in, and somehow you’re involved. Your problem, not mine. I’m out of here.’

  Roused, Cara said, ‘We – we have to stick together, Joss! Tell the same story! Please, Joss, I need you. I’m – I’m scared.’

  Hepburn looked down at her from his considerable height. ‘No dice, Cara. Declan’s your husband – I guess you must have chosen him, though I might wonder why. Your choice, your life.’

  As he shut the door behind him, Cara sagged back in her chair. Ryan went back to his theme. ‘Nico’s got to tell us where it is.’

  ‘Maybe it was Cris,’ Cara said. ‘Maybe he thinks he can blackmail us. You’d know all about that.’

  Ryan glared at her, but she had a point. ‘We’ve searched everywhere except his room. And paying up would be cheap at the price, if we could be sure it was destroyed. He was completely out of it the last time I saw him, but I’ll try and get through to him – money makes sweet music where he’s concerned.’

  Cara nodded, but her eyes followed him as he went out of the room and she began chewing at her thumbnail without even realising she was doing it.

  Two minutes later he returned. ‘He’s gone,’ Ryan said. ‘He’s taken the runabout and cleared out.’

  Before she drove away from Kershaw’s flat, Fleming dialled MacNee’s number. There was no point in going there if he wasn’t in.

  It rang several times before the phone was picked up and MacNee’s voice answered, a little slurred and – surely not? – heavy with tears.

  ‘MacNee? It’s Fleming,’ had been on her lips, but she said, ‘Tam? It’s Marjory,’ with real concern. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘Er . . . nothing. I’m fine.’

  She could hear the effort as he tried to pull himself together. ‘You’re not,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m on my way.’

  There was a protest from the other end, but she cut him off. There was something badly wrong with Tam and she wasn’t going to allow him to fob her off this time. There was a professional problem to deal with, certainly, but this was obviously personal. Unlike Kim, Tam was an old friend and on this occasion she had no doubt about what she had to do. And if he needed her to cry with him, she’d do that as well.

  The villa where the MacNees lived was on the outer edge of Kirkluce, a little apart from its neighbours in a good-sized garden with fields at the back. The first thing that Marjory noticed as she came up the path was the pots of bedding plants and the hanging baskets in which Bunty, a keen gardener, produced a riot of colour throughout summer. With all the rain, they had become waterlogged and were drooping, blackened and dead.

  Bunty. She’d had an uneasy feeling about Bunty, from the way Tam was speaking about her – or wasn’t, rather. Marjory had got the impression that she was visiting her sister, but judging by the garden, with weeds springing up everywhere, it had been more than a week or two.

  Tam opened the door. He didn’t meet her eyes, and she could smell whisky on his breath, but his hair was wet and the neck of his white T-shirt was damp too, as if perhaps after getting her phone call he had stuck his head in a basin of water to sober up.

  ‘You’d better come in, I suppose,’ he said ungraciously, but his speech was quite clear.

  Marjory followed him in, then had to suppress a gasp of shock. She was familiar with the kitchen, the heart of the MacNee household, with its red-tiled floor always shining and its air of comfort and good housekeeping.

  Now that same floor was muddy with footmarks and paw prints, the surfaces were piled with dirty dishes and the wrappings of ready meals, and there was a sour smell of rancid milk coming from a bottle with a greenish curd in the bottom abandoned on the draining board.

  ‘Sit down, Tam,’ she said. ‘You’re going to talk to me.’

  Marjory had expected an argument, but Tam collapsed into the chair she had indicated as if his legs had suddenly become rubbery. She could see the mark of tears on his face; she’d never known Tam cry.

  ‘It’s Bunty, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Is it . . . is it cancer?’

  Tam shook his head. ‘Not cancer, no. But – but, Marjory, she’s gone off her head!’

  ‘Off her head? What on earth do you mean?’

  Tam produced a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. ‘They’ve taken her away.’

  ‘Sectioned her?’ Marjory was horrified. Bunty MacNee had always seemed to her one of the sanest, most balanced women she knew.

  ‘Not exactly. Just taken her away to the Crichton Royal. She’s been there weeks.’

  ‘What happened?’

  An old white dog came limping in from the garden, sniffed briefly at Marjory, then went to sit down by Tam, leaning against his knee. The man’s hand went out to stroke its head, as if finding comfort in the action.

  ‘She’d to have a hysterectomy, a wee while back. It went fine, but she came home kind of down, crying a lot and that. I could see why, right enough. We’d aye wanted bairns, you know, and that was the end of that. Well, I’d known that long syne, but Bunty just kept hoping.

  ‘And then she stopped crying and just kind of went daft – wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t do anything. I kept talking to her, but she didn’t seem to hear me or see me. I just – wasn’t there.’

  Tears began to gather again in Tam’s eyes. ‘She’s the whole world to me, Marjory. Aye, it would have been great to have bairns, but I wasn’t caring as long as I had Bunty. I’ve never needed anyone but her.

  ‘I thought she felt that way about me too. Oh, women mind more about having weans, maybe, but we’ve been that happy together all these years – you know we’ve been happy, Marjory. She’d the animals to pet. We’d great friends. We’d a good life. But now there was never to be kids, I was nothing to her. Nothing. She even . . .’ He found it difficult to go on. ‘She even – even said she was going to kill herself. It made me feel . . .’ He stopped.

  It wasn’t a phrase Marjory had ever heard from MacNee. ‘Go on, Tam,’ she said softly.

  ‘Worthless,’ he managed. ‘I felt worthless all my life until I met her. Just – just gutter scrapings. And now . . .’

  Her heart wrung with pity, Marjory said, ‘That doesn’t depend on anyone else. You’ve shown your worth again and again. You’re respected . . .’ But she faltered.

  ‘Aye, maybe. Until today.’ His mouth twisted.

  ‘Never mind that just now. I want to know about Bunty.’

  Tam sighed. ‘I made her see the doctor and he gave her pills, but they didn’t make any difference. He said she’d gone daft and they took her away.’

  ‘Tam!’ Marjory protested. ‘I’m quite sure he said no such thing.’

  ‘Oh, he dressed it up in fancy names, but you know me – I’ve always been one to face facts. She wouldn’t let me help her through it. She shut me out and then just – gave up. She wasn’t my Bunty any more. She’s gone not right in the head.’

  Fleming stared at him. ‘I tell you, I don’t know where to start. I think it’s you that’s off your head, Tam. I don’t know what the doctor called it, but it sounds like bad clinical depression. She’d have hormone problems after her operation, which probably triggered it, but even without that it’s not uncommon. Plenty of women who have children find it hard to accept their childbearing days are over, and Bunty’s such a motherly soul it was bound to hit her harder. It’ll take time to get the treatment right, but she’ll be fine.

  ‘How is she now?’

  ‘Her sister’s saying she’s better. But, Marjory, they’re telling me I’m not to see her, that it just upsets her. So that’s it – there’s no point now. I’ve just got to find some way
of coping without her. And I don’t know how.’ The depth of his despair was etched in lines of pain on Tam’s face.

  Tam wouldn’t be the easiest man to live with, Tam with his insecurities and his emotional dependence. He never talked about his childhood in Glasgow, but Marjory knew there was deep damage there. Struggling to cope with the devastating turmoil of her own feelings, his wife – whose very soul was generosity – had needed to be selfish for once.

  She said gently, ‘You said it, Tam – Bunty wasn’t herself. She was locked in with her problems and she couldn’t see a way out. Now she’s got medical help and she’s getting better, but she probably hates you seeing her while it’s still a work in progress. There’s an old saying, “Fools and bairns . . .” ’

  ‘ “. . . should never see work half done,” ’ Tam finished. ‘Are you saying you think she’ll . . . come back, kind of?’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ Marjory said firmly. ‘You’ve talked yourself into this state, going over it and over it inside your head until you’ve got it completely out of proportion. Why on earth didn’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘I – I didn’t want to let her down, telling you she was, well, you know . . .’

  Marjory shook her head, suddenly feeling dispirited. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ she said – and yet, hadn’t she herself kept quiet about her brush with mild depression? And had Kim Kershaw, perhaps, had the niggling feeling at the back of her mind that being open and matter-of-fact about her daughter’s problems would, in some sense, be ‘letting her down’, as Tam had put it?

  ‘Give Bunty time and space,’ she went on. ‘She’s a great lady and she’s giving herself the best chance of recovery by directing all her energies into getting better. And you know what her energy’s like.’

  For the first time, what was almost a smile came to Tam’s face. ‘Oh, aye, I ken that, right enough.’

  ‘You’ll have to be patient, Tam. That’s really all I can say. OK?’

  He said nothing, but gave a slight nod.

  Marjory said reluctantly, ‘But I’m afraid we have to talk about the other problem.’

  His face darkened again. ‘I’m black burning ashamed. I can’t think how I said it, even if there was nothing wrong with the wee girl. It was just the waste . . .’

  ‘Yes. The trouble is, it was said and you can’t take it back. Feeling’s running high, and Kim’s insisting that she doesn’t need time off. The only thing I can think of is that you’ll have to take it off instead, until all this settles down.’

  Marjory could see it was a blow, but Tam took it without protest. ‘I’d apologise,’ he said, ‘but I think maybe Kim wouldn’t want that just now.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she would. In any case, I would hope she’d never hear what you said.

  ‘Anyway, what was the outcome of your visit to Rosscarron House today?’

  Tam looked blank for a moment, then smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! I’d been looking for you when Macdonald told me what had happened and it all went out my head. There’s plenty to tell you. For a start, we need to put out an APB to get Lisa Stewart picked up. She’s run for cover.’

  Fleming returned to her car, then hesitated. Perhaps she should go back to her desk, but it was almost nine o’clock. The alert for Lisa Stewart could be sent out with just a phone call, thorough searches would have to wait till the morning anyway, and now with the Fraud Squad involved, a search warrant for the whole of Rosscarron House would be their responsibility. Declan Ryan could be summoned for questioning under caution first thing tomorrow, and she’d told MacNee she’d go out to Rosscarron House then herself and see what Cara would say when her husband wasn’t there.

  No, she decided, she’d go home. Apart from anything else, her face was throbbing under the fading bruises and she had a splitting headache. It worried her a little: she knew enough about head injuries to be aware that recovery from the initial impact didn’t mean you were safe. A clot could detach days, or even weeks, later.

  But as Fleming headed for Mains of Craigie, there was a more immediate worry on her mind. Was it possible that the hitman Dave had talked about really did have her in his sights? It seemed so far-fetched now, as she drove the familiar road beside the fields and the soft hills with their green fading into grey haze under the overcast sky, past the road ends of farms whose names – Windyedge, Rathskeillour, Broadhaugh, Thirlestane – were as well known to her as the names of friends.

  She had been on the point of telling John Purves and asking him what he thought. She knew what his answer would be: tell the authorities, get protection, don’t take risks. He’d be right, of course, but she still didn’t want to believe it. OK, Hepburn might sick the press on to her, but this was just too – well, dramatic. Criminals took out contracts on other criminals, not on police officers only peripherally involved in an inquiry. And once the Fraud Squad got involved, they would know she wasn’t working alone, so killing her wouldn’t stop anything – on the contrary.

  Reporting her anxieties would have caused an immense amount of fuss, and she’d have looked an idiot when nothing happened. She knew all the security precautions anyway – vary your routine, check for cars following you, watch out for anyone with an odd pattern of behaviour, yadda, yadda, yadda. And formal security wasn’t a safety guarantee anyway – look at what had happened to Kennedy and Reagan, or John Paul II.

  That put it into perspective, somehow. Fleming grinned at the thought of bracketing herself with popes and presidents, and, with only a casual glance in the driving mirror at the empty road behind her, drove on.

  She went back to the line of thought she had been pursuing in the car with Purves before the phone call about Kershaw came in. The last thing the syndicate would have wanted was to have police attention drawn to their operations. The Ryans, Hepburn and Pilapil had clearly been involved, and were equally clearly scared, so Williams’s killing of Rencombe had to have been a personal initiative. Why, then, had he been given shelter and a cover story in Crozier’s house?

  Had Crozier known he was there? Cara, according to what she had said to Tam, had only seen him briefly, slipping into one of the bedrooms. To cut the phone wire? Again, why?

  There was an obvious answer: to prevent communication with the outside world. Who was to be stopped phoning in – or phoning out?

  Rencombe’s killing was definitively reactive. Something happened, something that meant Williams had to stop him doing – what?

  There had to have been a threat of some kind. Physical violence? Unlikely. Rencombe was only a proxy, after all. The threat must have come from Crozier: do this, or else . . . Or – and that fitted better – don’t do this, or else. Had the situation been the other way round? Had Williams presented some sort of threat to Crozier and Rencombe had been sent to see him off?? A rich and powerful man wouldn’t go himself.

  Fleming warmed to the thought. Blackmail of some kind, something Crozier had done that Williams was going to expose – his persecution of Lisa Stewart, perhaps? But that was a go-ahead-and-do-what-you-damn-well-like situation – Crozier had only to say he was unbalanced by grief to get sympathy.

  No, it still didn’t feel quite right. She was convinced she was on to something, but there was still more to it than that.

  And Crozier would reasonably be expecting a prompt report back. If it didn’t come, he’d get on the phone to find out why. Unless the wires were cut.

  Fleming was approaching the turn-off now, but at last she could feel the tingle of excitement that told her she was getting somewhere. She drove past the road end, barely glancing at it.

  A broken phone line would be restored, though. And even if it wasn’t, once Crozier became concerned at not hearing from Rencombe, he would drive off to where he could get a signal. Sooner or later he was going to find out his solicitor was dead, and he would know Williams had done it. So Crozier’s fate was sealed.

  Would they be able to prove Williams had kil
led him too? The labs would be checking all his clothes and his shoes, and analysis would show if he had been in the copse. It wouldn’t show when, though, and it wouldn’t, most frustratingly of all, show why.

  And then, of course, who had killed Williams? The initial forensic reports had been unhelpful. A crowbar was often the weapon of choice, keeping the assailant at a distance from the victim and avoiding clothes contamination, and this one had been meticulously wiped. Fleming sighed. The strong line of thought was beginning to peter out and she was suddenly aware of her extreme tiredness.

  She’d driven almost to Glenluce. She turned in to a side road and set off back, still desperately pursuing her reasoning.

  Had Lisa Stewart, standing on the hill, seen her partner in the act of murder? She had little reason to trust the police, and she was unlikely to feel that Crozier had a right to justice. It would explain, too, why Williams had wanted to meet her later on.

  Had she then taken her chance to kill him? Revenge for his working for Crozier, for his treacherous persecution? But no, Jan Forbes had told MacNee that the idea that her partner could have been Crozier’s spy in the camp had come as a complete shock.

  The argument was beginning to go round in circles. And there was Mains of Craigie now. Fleming turned in to the drive.

  The house was dark, apart from the light over the back door. It felt very empty when Fleming went into the kitchen, though Meg as usual was pleased to see her. There was a note on the table; Bill and the kids had gone to see The Da Vinci Code and would have a pizza afterwards.

  They’d all been planning to go, she recalled, before this hit her. A cheerful family outing – when was the last time she’d had one of those? Bleakly, Fleming went to the freezer. There was nothing there she fancied (why did she buy macaroni cheese, when she didn’t like it?) and she couldn’t be bothered to scramble eggs. Toast, Marmite, a Nurofen and a cup of tea – she daren’t risk a drink with her headache.