Cradle to Grave

by Aline Templeton

  ‘They’ll come looking for them.’

  ‘No they won’t. Someone phoned and I said they’d left an hour ago.’ Cara sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

  Ryan’s mind, the quick mind he was so proud of, was racing round and round like an animal frantic with fear. Supposing he went and let them out. Cara couldn’t stop him, but he knew what would happen then. The person on the hit list wouldn’t be Marjory Fleming; it would be him. And even if what he’d been accustomed to thinking of as the worst happened, they’d be waiting for him in prison too.

  He looked at the glass in his hand. Might as well blot it out. There was nothing else he could do.

  Fleming turned away from the door she had been banging, trying not to feel crushed by the disappointment. She had heard the voices in the hall and reasoned that the Fraud Squad ought by now to have sworn out a warrant. Clearly they hadn’t. It was just Ryan coming home, presumably, and of course he would be in on this as well.

  Kershaw was still slumped on the floor in her fugue of grief. Fleming had, in the least alarmist terms possible, explained the situation, but she wasn’t sure how much had sunk in. She wasn’t even sure that in Kim’s condition the idea of sudden death mightn’t be appealing. She was on her own – battered, terrified and on her own.

  There was a current of air coming through a grid on the back wall, providing cool ventilation for the larder – and indeed it was cool, not to say cold, with the dank air seeping through it. The grid was small, but not, she thought, impossibly small; if it could be dislodged, she with her larger frame might have difficulty but Kershaw, who was slight, should be able to get through – though the question remained, how much use would she be once she got to the other side?

  Fleming checked it out, but it had been embedded in cement round the aperture by workmen who intended it to remain in place for the next few hundred years, but if she used the penknife she always carried in her bag, she just might be able to loosen the mortar. It would take time, though, and she had no idea how much time they might have. Not much, probably – and now she remembered that she had left her bag in the sitting room.

  Don’t panic. Face facts. Decide what you do when that door opens and a man is there who has come to kill you. Two of you could overpower him, but it was hard to believe that Kershaw could react. No back-up, then, and the added problem of protecting a helpless colleague.

  Fleming was seriously chilled already. There was a damp film on the stone floor and she had to chafe her hands to try to get more feeling into them. Kershaw was shivering – Fleming really needed to get them both moving or their limbs would stiffen up.

  She didn’t hear voices or footsteps. Suddenly the door opened and she was taken by surprise, completely unprepared.

  27

  Tam MacNee’s spirits rose when his phone rang and he saw the number. The boss must be at home; she’d taken her time to phone him, but he’d forgive her.

  When he answered it, though, it was Bill Fleming’s voice at the other end. He liked Bill; they didn’t meet often enough. It crossed his mind, as Bill made the usual polite enquiries, that Marjory might have mentioned his enforced time off and this was a kindly gesture. Well, he was always on for a pint.

  But Bill didn’t sound like a man making a social call. He sounded concerned as he asked whether Tam knew where Marjory was today.

  MacNee looked at his watch. ‘I know where she’ll have been,’ he said. ‘She said she’d be going to Rosscarron House in the morning, but she’d be back by now.’

  ‘That’s just the thing. She isn’t. I’ve been trying to get through on her mobile, but she’s not answering, so I phoned the station, but she wasn’t there. They even tried Rosscarron House for me, but they said she’d left.’

  It wasn’t like Bill to get worked up about his wife’s whereabouts. ‘There’s lots of places where there’s no signal,’ MacNee said soothingly. ‘She’ll likely be back for the briefing at six.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bill said, but he sounded unconvinced. MacNee thought he was going to ring off, but then he said, ‘Tam, I know she would kill me if I made any sort of fuss, but you know this Glasgow hitman that’s been seen in the area – Badger, she said they called him?’

  Suddenly MacNee went very still. ‘Hitman? No.’

  ‘Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Go on, Bill. You can’t stop there.’

  ‘That girl, Lisa Stewart. She was killed yesterday in a hit-and-run – you knew about that maybe? Well, Marjory had been a bit worried before because that Hepburn creature had threatened her to try to make her drop some enquiry she was making about Crozier’s business, and she was scared they might have taken out a contract on her. But she told me this morning the girl seemed to have been the target after all and it was nothing to do with her. She was embarrassed, said she’d been overreacting, but it struck me—’

  ‘I can guess. There might be more than one target.’ MacNee’s face was grim. ‘I’ll get right on to that.’

  The larder door didn’t open fully. Before Fleming could launch herself at it, Nico’s face appeared round the corner.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said, with curiosity rather than surprise. ‘I heard you banging on the door.’

  Fleming drew a deep breath, trying to slow her thumping heart. ‘Just waiting for you to let us out,’ she said. ‘There’s a sort of prize for doing that, if you do it the right way.’

  Nico’s eyes narrowed. ‘What?’ he said.

  Her mind went blank. ‘What do you like to do best?’

  ‘Play computer games. They’re cool.’

  ‘If you don’t tell anyone you’ve let us out, you can choose the best computer game you can think of and I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘How do I know you will?’

  Despite the cold, Fleming could feel sweat beginning to bead on her brow. ‘I promise. I’m a police officer, and if we don’t tell the truth, we get put in jail.’ And how overcrowded would the prisons be if that passed into law?

  He still looked unconvinced. She tried again. ‘So if you don’t get it, you can go to see my superintendent and he’ll arrest me.’

  Nico smiled. ‘That’ll be good. All right.’

  He stood aside. Grabbing Kershaw’s arm and pulling her to her feet, Fleming walked out of their prison. ‘Where are your mum and dad?’ she asked.

  ‘In the sitting room. I heard them talking.’

  ‘The deal is that you don’t tell them you saw us.’ Fleming closed the door and turned the key in the lock again. ‘OK?’

  Nico nodded. ‘OK. They’re stupid, anyway.’

  ‘Is there a back door?’

  He pointed, and still holding Kershaw’s arm to propel her along, Fleming hurried along the passageway and opened the door on fog and blessed freedom. Now all they had to do was work their way round the house unseen and back to the car. If they met Black on the way down to the bridge, they’d just have to—

  Using what for car keys? Fleming stopped in dismay. They were in the shoulder bag she had left in the sitting room where Cara and her husband would be sitting even now.

  As the black Toyota took the twisting road towards Kirkcudbright and Rosscarron, the fog grew thicker and thicker. It was low cloud now, really, implacably thick and on this windless day not even swirling into occasional clear patches so you could see to overtake. Black was prepared to take risks, but when you came up behind an elderly Allegro with what looked like an equally elderly driver, you were trapped. You couldn’t overtake unless you had a death wish.

  He was beginning to have a bad feeling about this one. It was as if someone was trying to tell him something, and if it had just been the money, he’d have bailed out, but it wasn’t. You didn’t tell men like his paymasters that you’d changed your mind, especially when he knew from the money they were paying him, and the target, that this was serious stuff.

  Time was passing. If Cara got it wrong, if she hadn’t managed to keep Fleming there until he arrived . . .
He swore impotently, then started banging on his horn to force the driver in front to make way.

  Deaf as well? He came up close, nudged the bumper once, twice – at last the car pulled in and he swept on, ignoring the shaken fist and the angry tooting.

  After that he made better time. That was Kirkcudbright now. About ten minutes to the turn, Cara said.

  A quarter of an hour later Black began to wonder if he’d missed it. Twenty minutes later he stopped and looked at the map. Swearing violently, he turned and retraced his route.

  Fleming had never been round the back of the house before and it took her a moment to orientate herself. They were in a sort of sunken yard, an area of a few square feet between the house and the hill behind. The house itself blocked them to the left; if they followed the path to the right, it would take them past the sitting-room window.

  They would have to scramble up the hill. Kershaw was staring around her. ‘What – what’s happening?’

  ‘No time to explain. Up here.’ Fleming grasped Kershaw’s hand and started dragging her across the yard.

  The slope was steep but with plenty of footholds and Kershaw, Fleming saw with relief, was climbing mechanically. With the short perspective near the house, the fog had seemed thinner, but at the top, they emerged into a sea of white.

  The fresh air seemed to be clearing her head and fog could be their friend, as long as they watched where they put their feet. It would give them cover to go down through the camping field and access the road to the bridge, but to take the road was danger. That was the way Black would come – if he hadn’t arrived already. Fleming’s heart lurched at the thought.

  Every instinct was screaming to get as far away from the house as fast as possible, but that was what they would assume she would do. She had to out-think them to survive.

  To her left and below, she could dimly see the shapes of the straggly trees in the little wood where Crozier had died. From its cover, she could check whether there was another car outside the house, in which case the hunt would be on immediately. If not, they would have an indeterminate period of grace before it started. And then what? Fleming didn’t know yet, and she hadn’t time to think now.

  ‘This way,’ she said, heading down the hill, struggling to keep her balance on the slippery, muddy path, with Kershaw behind her.

  It was weirdly silent, in among the trees and bushes. The fog blanketed sound and distorted direction, so that a twig that snapped under Kershaw’s feet had Fleming peering all about her in alarm for a moment. She turned her eyes away from the flattened area, where blue-and-white tape still hung, and tried not to feel that the chill was even deeper here.

  ‘Cold – I’m very cold,’ Kershaw said, through chattering teeth.

  ‘Sssh!’ Fleming hissed, then realised that she too was soaked to the skin. Neither had an outdoor jacket and the air was saturated with water particles. ‘We’ll have to keep moving,’ she whispered.

  They reached the bottom, where the track led across to Keeper’s Cottage. With a pang, Fleming saw her own car, locked and useless, and the Discovery, but the executioner didn’t seem to have arrived.

  The shrubbery began directly opposite, but as a precaution Fleming headed a little way up before running across the track, keeping low, then into the bushes from there. She checked anxiously over her shoulder for Kershaw, but she was keeping up.

  The towering rhododendron bushes with their branches thickened with age formed vast banks here, a barrier to progress. They had to force their way round them; the great leathery leaves spilled water on them from above, icy cold, and Fleming felt a jutting twig catch at the sleeve of her jacket. It tore, and when Fleming looked down, there was a streak of bright blood welling up along the scratch. But gradually, through a maze of small gaps, they worked their way along until they were past the house and a little way down the road.

  There was still no sign of Black’s car, or sound of it either, though in these conditions you might not get warning until it was right on top of you. Fleming paused to take breath, and to think.

  Her first objective must be to get across the bridge as quickly as possible. Once they discovered their captives had fled, they would block it to trap her on the headland. She couldn’t risk the road, though; she’d have to get to the bridge by way of the rugged headland behind her – rough terrain, which would be slow going through heather and bracken and gorse, and over boggy, uneven ground, especially when you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you. And there would be sudden drops – into the sea, even – if they got lost and disorientated. She realised that even through the fog she was hearing it now, a low moaning sound off to her left.

  They wouldn’t get disorientated. And they would be very cautious. And quick too, in her court shoes and Kershaw’s – she glanced – smart flats, while not, of course, panicking. And any minute now a pig would fly down and rescue them.

  ‘Come on, Kim,’ she said, as if she felt confident about what she was doing, and with her constable silent and shivering behind her, she set off on to the moorland veiled in its pale shroud of mist.

  Tam MacNee too was suffering from frustration as he drove down to Rosscarron. Even the wipers on their highest speed weren’t keeping the windscreen clear and visibility just got worse and worse; he knew the road, and there were sharp corners and unexpected cambers, which meant that only a daftie would try to speed in these conditions. Most of the drivers ahead of him obviously weren’t dafties, but of course their cautious driving irritated him too.

  With anxiety churning inside him, MacNee was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and muttering under his breath. He was wrestling too with the decision whether or not to press the panic button. Suppose the boss had gone from Rosscarron to do follow-up interviews in yet another of the areas around here with no mobile coverage – what would she say then, after she had specifically said to Bill that she’d been wrong in thinking she was threatened?

  She wasn’t responding to radio messages either, though. He’d got them to check that. It was certainly odd – not just odd, worrying.

  And Lisa Stewart was dead, it seemed. Poor bloody kid! He remembered the tense, brittle woman whose resistance to questioning had left him grinding his teeth in frustration – and remembered, too, the brief pretty smile she had given him once. Yes, poor bloody kid. Never had a chance.

  He had decided the best thing to do would be to go to Rosscarron House, where Fleming had been this morning, and check it out for himself. They might know where she had been headed.

  He was through Kirkcudbright now, and there was the turn-off. MacNee was just signalling to turn on to the coast road when he saw in his mirror a black Toyota come up behind him. It overtook dangerously, forcing him to brake, and swung in left on to the road ahead of him. If MacNee hadn’t had other things on his mind, he’d have gone after him for that. Some folks had no sense at all when it came to fog.

  The man in the black Toyota didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all, and when he got to the small, narrow road signalled Rosscarron he liked it even less. A single track – a serious threat to the ‘quick in, quick out again’ rule. And the Bailey bridge was the last straw. No one had told him about the Bailey bridge.

  The road he was on went up past the bridge, along the bank of the river, though he had no way of knowing if there was a way out at the other end. It looked as if it could peter out in some farmyard miles on. He drove a little further, then found an open area to draw the car off the road, turning and parking it so that it was facing back down the hill. He’d go the rest of the way on foot. If there was trouble, you could easily vanish in these conditions, and the car wouldn’t be blocked in.

  There was a sense of unreality about all this, Fleming thought, as she struggled through heather and bracken. Perhaps this was just another nightmare – the wet cold, the roots that snatched at her ill-shod feet, the hidden rocks that could trip you, the grazes and scratches and bruises, the light-headedness and pain persisting af
ter her head injury. She was gasping with effort, and she could hear Kershaw’s uneven breathing behind her too. Once or twice, when she looked over her shoulder, she knew a moment’s fear when she didn’t see Kershaw, but then she would appear, having fallen perhaps, or gone a long way round an outcrop. She wasn’t crying now, just huddled with her arms wrapped round her body for warmth and tramping with an expressionless face.

  Fleming was used to hill walking, but not in conditions like these. You would have to be insane to go out in weather like this, because in featureless hill country it was so easy to walk in a circle when you believed you were walking straight.

  Was that what they were doing now? It had been all right at first, keeping a straight path somewhere parallel to the road, but you couldn’t walk straight when rocks rose in your path, or when the ground fell sharply away. She had hoped she would be able to keep the sound of the sea to her left, but with the effects of the blanket of fog, the monotonous sound seemed to be all around her.

  She was having to fight debilitating panic. It was hard to know how much ground you were covering, but how far could it be to the bridge from the house? A mile at most. Surely, if she had been going in anything like a straight line, they would be heading steeply downhill, approaching the Carron? They weren’t. Not that their problems would be over when they reached it; it was fifteen miles to the police station at Kirkcudbright and she was beginning to worry about exposure. She had no feeling in her hands and feet any more, and the stiffness in her limbs was slowing her down. And she mustn’t think that behind her someone could be stealthily tracking their every movement.

  She hadn’t heard Black’s car arriving and surely, even in this situation, she would have heard the engine? That was good, that had to be good, she told herself. And he could have been coming from a distance; they could be safely away before he reached Rosscarron and the Ryans found that the cupboard was bare. She just had to shut her mind to any other possibility, or she wouldn’t be able to think straight. If she was thinking straight anyway.