‘They’re just old bones, Marjory. You know how tight the budget is this year, and we can take our time over this one.’
She hadn’t argued. Door-to-doors in such a small place wasn’t labour-intensive; there would be a lot of fiddly stuff for the civilian staff, following up records of owners and visitors to the caravans and chalets, but that could wait until they knew the timescale. The pathologist had confirmed the skeleton was adult and male but refused to speculate further in conditions like these, so they hadn’t much to go on as yet.
The photographer had done his stuff, though, and on the huge whiteboard on the back wall his blown-up shots of the pathetic skeleton in its shackles, with the watch, that final refinement of torture, hanging from the arm bone, had produced shudders of distaste as the officers gathered.
‘I’ve glanced at reports from the door-to-doors so far,’ Fleming told them. ‘It’s a close-knit community and it’ll need low-key, persuasive interviews. And a couple of names suggest a follow-up and I’ll be getting on to them today.
‘Apart from that, I can’t see much more to be done until we start getting forensic stuff. Any questions?’
A female DC put her hand up. Hepburn: fairly new; young, sharp-eyed with olive skin and very dark curly hair that looked as if she’d been pulled through a bush backwards.
‘Is there any particular angle you’d like us to concentrate on?’
Genuine enquiry, Fleming wondered, or the sort of ‘sucking up’ question to get attention that every teacher is familiar with? Giving her the benefit of the doubt, Fleming said, ‘Just use your initiative. Anything else? No? Then the other areas I want covered today …’ Fleming went on briskly to detail them, then finished the meeting.
At the end she called over Andy Macdonald who, to her surprise, she had seen sitting with Tam MacNee and Ewan Campbell.
‘Thought you were on leave,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today, Andy.’
‘Reckoned I might as well come in, boss. Didn’t fancy getting the third degree every time I went round the pub, and stag weekends tend to run out of steam anyway.’
Fleming couldn’t resist asking, ‘And what about your lady friend?’ Andy had a bit of a reputation for putting them through his hands.
Macdonald pulled a face. ‘Don’t think she ever was, and she certainly isn’t at the moment. But …’ He paused, as if afraid of saying too much.
‘But?’ Fleming prompted, intrigued. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell Tam.’
‘I’ll see him later. Anyway – well, I’m not giving up. She’s quite a girl.’
Smitten, was he? She didn’t let her amusement show. ‘Good for you! But listen, Andy. You obviously spent time in the place. Any useful contacts?’
Macdonald shook his head. ‘Hardly even met the locals, except the man who used to run a Johnnie-a’-things. He’d a range of the most lurid sweeties you’ve ever seen – we were probably high on E-numbers all summer. But it closed long ago and I don’t think he lived there anyway. The kids I knew all came from the caravans and chalets.’
‘Too much to hope for. No point in you coming down to Innellan, then – there’s just two or three people I want to see at the moment and Tam and I can cover that. Make the most of your day off. Away you go and have Sunday lunch at your mum’s.’
‘Oh, help me! Help me! Don’t go!’ Aileen Findlay sobbed. ‘Don’t leave me! Stop him, stop him!’
She was propped up in bed, grossly overweight with straggly grey hair and demented eyes. The carer, a scone-faced girl in a pink overall, looked helpless, her jaws rotating as she chewed gum.
Her son didn’t conceal his exasperation. Cal Findlay’s swarthy complexion and dark eyes made him look dour at the best of times and now there was a line of temper between his brows.
‘I’ve got to go. Just carry on with the routine.’
Doubtfully, the girl approached the bed, but Aileen slapped at her with a hand like a wet fish. She stepped back, out of reach.
‘Don’t think she wants me. Maybe if you—’
‘She doesn’t “want” me either,’ Findlay snapped. ‘She hasn’t a clue who I am. She’s just unsettled this morning. She’ll be fine once I’ve gone.’
He left, shutting the door on the carer’s protests, and drove to Kirkcudbright harbour in a black mood. At least today he could nurse it on his own in the small boat, checking lobster pots – he’d a strict quota for the prawn fishing.
Yes, his mother was unsettled. She’d seen the police from the chair by the window where she spent her days and had started rambling, blurting out the random thoughts, disconnected and dangerous, which were all she had nowadays.
She’d been like that for ten years – years of pure purgatory for her son, which wasn’t to say that theirs had been a good relationship before that. They were bound together in a devil’s embrace of need and past events.
Findlay parked then walked to the pier, giving unsmiling nods in response to greetings from acquaintances. He knew they thought he was a moody sod. He didn’t care. He had a lot to be moody about.
He’d come back from working on trawlers on the Cumbrian coast to live at home, buy his own boat and be his own boss; if the fishing hadn’t been kneecapped by the EU, he’d have had his own place too. But here he was, heading for fifty, still at home with his mother, barely able to service the loan on his prawn boat and pay a deckhand, inheriting the house when Aileen died his only hope for the future.
She’d still been in her fifties when dementia struck. Sometimes Findlay wondered if it was a punishment for her actions – or perhaps, more realistically, a result of them. He knew his mother had suffered from guilt, and so she should.
She’d have been in a home long ago, if he hadn’t known she’d be made to sell up to pay for it. So she had to be there in the house, her presence seeming to suck light and even air out of the place, however determinedly he ignored her – sitting in another room, sleeping in the most distant bedroom with earplugs in. Oh, he’d thought of the pillow over the face, but he wasn’t a fool. It would be a sure way of letting her ruin his life from beyond the grave.
Yes, she was his mother. But yes, he had reason to hate her. She had used him when he was too young to understand, had condemned him to the sort of half-life he was leading now. Once he’d had a young man’s dreams; now all he wanted was peace and security – and a mind free from the fear that had stalked him all these years. Once he had thought of it as a figure on the distant horizon, easy enough to ignore; now it was a presence at his shoulder, dogging his steps.
The police wouldn’t have got much out of yesterday’s questioning. Innellan was a place of closed doors and closed mouths when it came to outsiders. But if you put a stick into a muddy pond and stirred the water, there was no telling what would come bubbling up.
Findlay cast off, started the motor and headed out into the Solway Firth. He wouldn’t be going towards the islands today.
‘Thick as thieves,’ Georgia Stanley had said when Fleming and MacNee consulted her, having failed to find Sorley at the run-down chalet. ‘They’ll be together.’
And that, indeed, was where Sorley was: at Steve Donaldson’s house. It had clearly been a labourer’s cottage, a meanly proportioned box built of concrete slabs. There was a traditional croft house nearby, presumably still occupied by Donaldson Senior.
An unsavoury-looking crew, Fleming thought, as she and MacNee joined Sorley and the Donaldsons, father and son, at the kitchen table where they were drinking coffee. The table looked as if it had come down in the world, too large and expensive-looking for this narrow, basic room.
At Sorley’s suggestion Steve’s wife Josie, a wispy woman with an embittered expression, left after setting mugs of instant before the officers with a bad grace. It had been made with cooling water and little undissolved grains floated on top; Fleming pushed hers away, though MacNee didn’t seem to have noticed and was drinking his with no evidence of distaste.
They had rece
ived a cautious welcome and preliminary questions were answered readily enough: they knew nothing of the cave, they had no suggestions about identity. But Sorley, with an eager expression on his weaselly face, was keen to enlarge on his theories.
‘Like I told the officer yesterday, it all fits now. I could tell there was something, the way he wanted to keep folks off the island, when it’s our right by law to go where we like in our own country. Anyone could go anywhere in your day, eh, Hugh?’
Sucking his remaining teeth, Hugh Donaldson agreed. ‘Funny thing, that, right enough. What’s he got to hide? And he’s been like that, right from the start. This deer farming nonsense – he’ll never make it pay, and I made plenty for the old woman, I can tell you that. So what call did he have to refuse my boy the lease? Something funny there, you’d have to say.’
‘Funny’s not what I’d call it.’ His boy, sitting slumped over his paunch, suddenly flared up. ‘The bastard screwed me. I’m not used to living like this, you know.’ He made an angry gesture round the cramped room. ‘I’d a job and a good house and a future. Gave up the lot to come here and farm, going to build a new house and all.’
Fleming, having heard the story from the invaluable Georgia, cut his lamentations short. ‘Why do you think he was trying to keep you off his property?’
‘You’ll have to tell us that, Inspector,’ Sorley said. ‘But in the light of what’s happened, maybe there was someone he wanted rid of, and knew the right place to put him.’
‘Who?’ MacNee said. He made no attempt to disguise his scepticism, and Sorley bridled.
‘You lean on him and maybe you’ll find out. But what I can tell you is what happened to me. I went over, just walked across at low tide. Next thing I know, there he’s threatening me with that wolf. And that’s another thing you want to look at.’ Sorley was warming to his task, his scrubby ponytail bouncing up and down to emphasise his points. ‘Keeping a wild animal – shouldn’t be allowed.’
‘We have that in hand,’ Fleming said.
‘Do you think maybe it was the vandalism made him a wee bit unfriendly?’ MacNee drawled. ‘What do you know about that?’
The blank looks on their faces might have been more convincing if Sorley hadn’t changed colour and Steve Donaldson’s hand hadn’t gone up as if to loosen the already open collar of his checked shirt.
‘You see,’ MacNee went on, ‘I’d be downright antisocial myself, if there were folk around putting graffiti on my wee baby’s headstone.’
Hugh Donaldson’s watery eyes met MacNee’s unflinchingly. ‘Who told you that? Never heard anything about that. It’s likely a story Lovatt put around to cover himself.’
Admittedly, Georgia had got the story from Kerr Brodie, but to Fleming it had the ring of truth, especially after meeting the pond life. Having established the accusations against Lovatt were prompted by spite not evidence, it was tempting to leave and find a hot, cleansing bath. Still, they were in a position to give her information Georgia didn’t have.
‘Mrs Lovatt Senior,’ she said. ‘What was she like?’
‘Toffee-nosed old bitch,’ Steve Donaldson said.
His father’s eyes were cold as a snake’s. ‘She was a mean, grasping, greedy old besom. Bled me dry with rent over the years, then cut out her own son when it came to her will.’
‘You know him?’ Fleming asked with interest.
‘He’s a good lad – grew up here, but I haven’t seen him for years. They never got on – she threw him out, told him he was never to come back. I thought maybe when she died Steve would get a better deal on a new lease from him, with us being pals. But oh no! The old bitch saw to it she’d carry on buggering up our lives, even once she’d gone.’
It was an interesting example of the sort of feud Georgia had said Innellan specialised in. This one looked set to run for a generation or two. At the very least.
With a glance towards MacNee, Fleming got up. ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ she said formally. ‘That will be all for the moment, though of course there may be more questions later.’
As they walked back down to Innellan, MacNee said, ‘Nice guys, eh? See what’s wrong with the law in this country? We can’t lock them up and throw away the key just because we’d all be better off without them.’
‘If you ruled the world, Tam, there’d only be about three people left at liberty and I’m probably flattering myself that I’d be one of them. And your friend Brodie – he certainly wouldn’t be, would he? I’ve been meaning to ask you, what was that about? Has he previous?’
MacNee grunted. ‘Not that I know of.’
His manner was discouraging, but Fleming persisted. ‘You obviously know something about him, though.’
‘Aye. All of it bad.’
‘Tam, if I enjoyed pulling teeth I’d have gone in for dentistry. What sort of bad?’
With a sigh, MacNee said, ‘You know how, if you buy a stick of rock in Rothesay, it has “Greetings from Rothesay” all the way through? That kind of bad.’
She wasn’t going to be brushed aside. ‘How do you know?’
‘He lived in the same tenement as me. He was in with some bad stuff.’
Remembering MacNee’s earlier reaction, Fleming said, ‘Guns?’
‘They never pinned anything on him. But guns, aye, and the other stuff that goes with them. That’s all. OK?’
Fleming was sure that wasn’t all, but from the shut look on MacNee’s face, she was also sure it was all she was going to be told. She changed the subject.
‘Where, I wonder, is Tony Drummond?’
‘Drummond? You want him?’
‘No, I specifically don’t want him. I want to go to his house when he’s not there, officially to hear directly from his son what happened. In reality, I can’t think there’s anything useful either he or the other boy, Craig someone, could tell us.’
‘So? Why do you want to see him, then?’
‘I want to find out more about this story of the island being haunted – who told him, where the rumour started. And I don’t want a headline “DI seeks occult explanation for mysterious death”.’
‘Right,’ MacNee said slowly. ‘Think someone’s used scare tactics, then?’
‘Frankly, we’re clutching at straws here. Sorley’s was the only interview yesterday that offered anything to follow up.’
‘See them?’ MacNee jerked his head towards the village they were approaching. ‘If you dangled a treacle scone in front of their noses, they’d be afraid to take a bite at it in case a word slipped out.’
Fleming laughed. ‘So what is it they’re afraid might slip out?’
‘Maybe they don’t know themselves. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe someone brought the man from somewhere else completely and dumped him here to die,’ MacNee said gloomily.
‘I know why I bring you along. It’s to keep me cheerful and motivated. That’s the Drummonds’ house there, and there’s no car in the drive. Any chance he’s away and the family aren’t?’
Elena Tindall shivered as she came out of the chalet. Last night’s honeyed warmth had disappeared, and though the sun was still shining there was a sharp breeze and her cheap jacket was too thin to give protection. It looked as if a change in the weather was on the way; there were small waves ruffling the surface of the sea and away on the horizon a line of clouds was massing.
She had a lingering headache and after all she had drunk last night it wasn’t surprising she’d slept only fitfully, and the rags of the dream about wolves at her throat hung about her still. Everything seemed fractionally out of focus this morning, as if a sheet of glass had come down, separating her from reality. She could be grateful for that, she thought, as she walked down the rudimentary gated road that led from the chalets and caravan site down to Innellan.
The village was very quiet. Elena saw a tall woman and a much shorter man coming out of the house tacked on to the Smugglers Inn, but there was no one else around when she took the track that ran round the shoreline
, past Lovatt’s Farm.
She became aware of a strange, echoing sound, intermittent but persistent, and broken by barks and grunts. The deer, of course; she knew stags bellowed sometimes, and there were enclosures up towards the house. They seemed to be challenging each other, roaring and replying.
As she looked in that direction, a woman appeared in the yard at the other side, a thin woman with wavy long brown hair. She was carrying a bag of rubbish which she put into a bin before going back inside. It wasn’t the woman she’d seen on TV.
Elena stood very still, watching her for a moment unseen. As she walked on a man appeared, coming down over the rough grass towards the track she was on, a tall, dark-haired man. He wasn’t the man she’d seen then either.
Matt Lovatt?
He was playing with a dog, a huge, handsome, wolf-like creature, tussling and pushing it. It was joining in the fun with, Elena thought, a certain measure of respect, and the man was laughing; the bond between master and dog was evident. As the game came to an end the man gave an order and the dog immediately lay down. He rolled it on to its back, holding it there with his hand across its throat for a long moment, before allowing it back on its feet.
Catching sight of Elena he stood up, looking faintly embarrassed, and she saw with a severe sense of shock that his face was badly disfigured by what looked like burn tissue.
‘Sorry about the display of dominance,’ he said as she reached them. ‘He’s a big fella – has to know who’s boss.’
The dog was standing beside him, ears alert, extraordinary slanted eyes fixed on Elena. The man ruffled his head with obvious affection and pride.
‘He’s beautiful. Would he let me pat him?’
‘Of course. Mika, stay.’
The dog did not turn its head as she went over and stroked the thick, soft ruff of fur round its neck. It showed no interest, no sign it had even noticed her touch.
‘A nice enough morning,’ its master said pleasantly. ‘But I’ve a feeling the weather may be on the change.’
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