MacNee paced irritably to and fro, and then his eye lit on the stock of tins. He was hungry, he realised, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten cold baked beans out of a tin. He looked doubtfully at the spoon lying on the table, then shrugged, pulled back the ring on the tin and settled down to wait.
Matt Lovatt woke up, coughing. He could feel smoke in his throat and with the sound of the sirens starting to penetrate the sleep of exhaustion he thought the house was on fire again and sprang up in panic from the sofa cushions on the floor of the farmhouse sitting room.
There were two men in yellow jackets and police caps standing by the window which had been left wide open to freshen the air. ‘Matthew Lovatt?’ one said. He was tall and broad with greying hair, and his voice was cold.
‘Yes,’ Lovatt stammered. He had slept in a T-shirt and jeans but the early morning air was chilly. As he struggled to orientate himself, he pulled a blanket off the makeshift bed to wrap round him.
‘We were informed you were staying at the Smugglers Inn.’
‘Yes, I was, but …’ How could he explain that Georgia Stanley’s kindly fussing, and his own guilt about the effect on Christie, had made the smoke-laden atmosphere in the farmhouse seem less oppressive?
He didn’t try. ‘I just felt I should be here.’ It sounded lame.
‘Where’s your dog?’ The question almost burst from the other officer. He was very young, slightly-built, and definitely nervous.
‘My dog?’ Lovatt looked blank. ‘In his kennel.’ He had a confused thought that this was some kind of check-up, something to do with the Dangerous Dogs Act, but at this time in the morning? With sirens?
‘Are you sure?’ the older man asked.
‘Of course—’ Then he stopped. Oh God, they couldn’t have let Mika out, tried to find an excuse to have him destroyed – he couldn’t bear it, to lose Mika!
‘There’s a padlock … if they’ve tampered with it …’
Not waiting to go to the front door, he climbed out of the window and barefooted ran across the yard to the dog’s enclosure, followed more slowly by the officers.
Mika was there, prancing in welcome at the sight of his master, and a huge flood of relief swept over Lovatt.
‘There he is, see? Safe in his cage. So what’s the fuss about?’
Mika had gone very still, his slanted amber eyes fixed on the men. The senior officer stepped forward, eying the dog warily as he shook the padlock. Then he turned to Lovatt.
‘You’re saying the padlock hasn’t been tampered with?’
‘See for yourself. One of my stags was released before by locals with a grudge, and now we have the sort of padlocks that would need wire cutters to open.’
They should be backing off now, apologising for disturbing him. So why weren’t they? Lovatt felt the first stirrings of fear.
‘So you can confirm that only you could let the dog out?’
Lovatt nodded.
‘And it couldn’t have been loose on the island?’
‘Certainly not.’ He was puzzled, but on firm ground there, at least.
‘Could it have got there on its own?’
What was this? Lovatt was beginning to get impatient. ‘Look, he’s a big, powerful dog. He’s locked up here in the kennel unless he’s with me. I never let him run loose.’
‘I see. Well trained, is he?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He turned to the dog with a gesture. ‘Mika – down.’ The dog dropped immediately to a lying position, looking up at his master.
‘So – you could make it do anything you like?’ the officer persisted.
‘I suppose so – within reason.’
‘Like – say, attacking someone?’
Suddenly, Lovatt felt very, very cold and it had nothing to do with his bare feet. ‘Someone has been attacked?’
His question was ignored. ‘You are denying that you or your dog were present on Lovatt Island yesterday?’
‘Most certainly I am.’
‘Matthew Lovatt, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be noted and may be used in evidence.’
The younger policeman had a notebook out, ready.
With a sense of unreality, Lovatt said, ‘Who am I supposed to have murdered, for God’s sake?’
Again, he got no reply. ‘This way.’ The senior officer took his arm, urging him towards the house. ‘You’d better put some shoes on and get a coat.’
Lovatt hung back. ‘What about the dog?’ he demanded.
The younger policeman said, ‘Oh, someone’s on their way to take care of him.’ And from his emphasis it was clear that no one was talking about a comfortable basket and a nice juicy bone.
It was a considerable relief to MacNee to get the phone call telling him that the dog was safely locked up on the mainland, and the pathologist and the photographer were even now in Innellan, waiting to come across. He left his refuge and went down to the jetty to meet them.
There had been a ground frost in the early morning, and the blades of grass were etched with silver, crisp underfoot. The sun was just coming up, and it promised to be a glorious autumn day. In the wood behind the bothy, the leaves were turning and with the drop in temperature brilliant reds and yellows had started to appear.
The pathologist sniffed the clear, cold air as he landed. ‘Aaah! Beautiful day,’ he said cheerfully, looking around. ‘Bonny place, too. We should be taking a boat out fishing today, instead of tramping about looking at remains. A few mackerel for supper – eh?’
‘Up there, Doc, by the ruins,’ MacNee said shortly. Right enough, if you’d a grim job like looking at corpses you couldn’t afford to let it get you down, but sometimes you could be a bit too cheerful. And talking about supper as you went up to inspect the body – well, MacNee was beginning to regret the baked beans just at the thought.
The photographer was lugging his kit out of the boat, and MacNee turned back to help him take it up the hill. ‘Wait,’ he said to the man who had been driving the boat. ‘You can take me back in a minute.’
Keeping his eyes carefully averted as he approached, MacNee said, ‘The SIO is on her way, they tell me. I’ll be getting back.’
The pathologist was opening his case. ‘Fine. Nasty one, this.’ He spoke almost with relish, and MacNee gave a little shudder as he returned to the jetty. He’d go straight home, snatch a spot of kip and then go in to the station in the afternoon. With all the fuss about this no one would be interested in his own triumph.
The boatman was a local, an elderly fisherman, roused from his bed and gagging with curiosity. ‘Someone’s dead, right?’ he asked, before MacNee had even sat down.
‘Right.’
‘And Lovatt’s been arrested and they’re taking that dog to be destroyed. Was it his missus?’
‘Hasn’t been formally identified.’
The old man cackled. ‘That’s a yes, then. Thought it must be. Och well, they caused nothing but trouble from the day they arrived – incomers!’
Revolted, MacNee said, ‘So it’s all right for someone to be killed as long as it isn’t one of the locals?’
He was unmoved. ‘Wouldn’t have happened if they’d cleared off. They knew they weren’t wanted.’
Fortunately it was a short crossing. MacNee clambered out ‘Thanks, Mr …?’
‘Rafferty.’
‘Rafferty – really? A fine Irish name, Rafferty. So if someone wipes you out because you’re a miserable old bastard, we just say, “Och well, he was an incomer,” and leave it at that, eh? Fine by me.’
MacNee walked off before the indignant splutterings could organise themselves into speech.
Fleming had ordered a driver to take her down to Innellan. She hated being driven but she didn’t trust herself. After virtually no sleep the previous night she’d been roused at three this morning, after lying awake with her troubled thoughts till one.
It was an FCA driver, and she sat in the bac
k with her eyes closed, as if she were trying to pay off her sleep deficit, but her mind was churning as they took the now familiar road to Innellan.
This had come as a shock, but not a surprise. She had been tense, waiting for disaster; they were floundering, still with no idea where the threat was coming from, or who was threatened, and this death had been the result.
And what a hideous, bizarre way to die! Bizarre – as the death of the man in the cave had been bizarre. There was a strange echo there. But how could you arrange that a dog would rip someone’s throat out?
Fleming knew about dogs. She’d lived with them all her life and she’d seen dangerous dogs – so-called handgun dogs – on far too many occasions. Despite the cliché ‘no bad dogs, only bad owners’, it wasn’t true – some dogs were by nature aggressive, just as some people were.
As a murder weapon, though? Lovatt could have trained his dog to attack on command, of course he could. Dogs had no innate morality and savage wardogs had gone into battle beside their masters for hundreds of years. And Lovatt had been in Bosnia; could it have done that there?
She’d met his dog, though, and it wasn’t some slavering beast that had to be restrained from attacking any passing stranger. It had accepted their arrival without reaction, or indeed interest – and of course, it would be familiar with Lissa. Admittedly, pets sometimes attacked family members, but the problem usually was lack of discipline. Lovatt’s dog was extremely well trained. This didn’t add up.
No, if it had killed her, it had been acting under instruction. Lovatt would have needed to give the order, and have trained it to understand that order, one which went counter to the behaviour demanded in normal circumstances. A complicated message to get across to an animal, however intelligent it might be.
Perhaps Lovatt thought he could blame it on the dog acting alone, reverting to its wild ancestry, but from what Fleming had seen of his affection for the animal, she didn’t believe he would. So he should be confessing any minute now, in the Kirkluce headquarters where they were taking him – she’d opened her eyes at the sound of a siren and seen a badged car travelling at speed towards Kirkluce a while ago.
If you wanted to murder your wife, why choose a method that pointed inexorably to you? Unless you had your own sad and probably sick reasons – and then you’d simply confess. That was the second time she had come to that conclusion.
So – was Matt Lovatt going to admit his guilt? Fleming realised that she would be absolutely astonished if he did any such thing.
‘But he couldn’t have done anything!’ Christie protested. She was pacing around Georgia’s small sitting room as if she couldn’t sit still, and Georgia had to move quickly to prevent a small side table going flying. ‘He was here all night.’
Georgia sighed. ‘I’m afraid he wasn’t, love. His bed wasn’t slept in.’
‘Maybe … maybe he couldn’t sleep, and just went out for a walk, or something. Anyway, why won’t they say what he’s supposed to have done?’
Georgia gave a non-committal shrug. ‘I tell you what – I really fancy a cuppa. Want one?’ She got up.
Christie blocked her way. ‘You know something, don’t you? Did you speak to someone while I was waiting in here?’
‘I didn’t want to tell you, love. It’s probably just nonsense – you know what they’re like round here—’
‘What are they saying?’
The broken, sobbing girl, who had worried Georgia so much yesterday, had disappeared. Her fierceness now was positively alarming.
‘Someone said Lissa had been attacked by his dog. Her throat … she’s dead.’
Christie stood very still. ‘Dead,’ she said.
‘It might not be true,’ Georgia bleated.
‘So they’re going to say he killed her. The dog never went anywhere without him.’
The horror of Lissa’s end had left Georgia shaken, but it didn’t seem to have affected Christie that way – or perhaps, when you’d been through what she had in Afghanistan you didn’t see things the same way as other people.
‘They’d found her before they came here.’ It sounded as if she was thinking out loud. ‘So she would be dead by …’ she looked at her watch ‘… say, two o’clock. And of course, before Matt went out for his walk, just to get some fresh air, we were together.’
Georgia gaped at her. ‘Together?’
‘Yes. I was … comforting him. In the fullest sense of the word. Then I went back to my own room, and I was still awake when I heard the sirens. And he was here with us all evening – you can testify to that. So it couldn’t possibly have been anything to do with Matt, could it? It was probably Steve Donaldson’s sheepdog – collies can be very vicious.’ She gave the other woman a bright, false smile.
Shocked, Georgia said, ‘Christie, that’s not true! Don’t do this – leave it to the police. They’ll find out the truth.’
‘The police?’ Christie laughed. ‘They’re the ones who came to complain to Matt about Rudolf being out, but weren’t interested in who had done it. And I haven’t heard that they’ve arrested anyone for setting the house on fire. We’ve got to stand by Matt – we’ve got to.’
‘I’ll tell them what I know, and I’ll be glad if that proves Matt’s innocent,’ Georgia said slowly, but unlike Christie, it was poor Lissa she was thinking about. If this was anything other than some dreadful accident, she wanted whoever killed her brought to justice, whether Matt or anyone else.
‘Fergus Crawford?’ the excise officer said, looking at some notes in front of him. ‘That your name?’
Fergie had been engaged in his usual practice of trying to make himself look smaller – insignificant, if he had known the word.
‘Fergie,’ he said.
‘OK, Fergie.’ He looked at the boy. He’d seen it so many times: troubled background, inadequate, not very bright, totally vulnerable to the sods ready to use him. He’d had a pal like that himself at school. He hadn’t been a bad kid, but he’d got a punitive sentence, while the guys who ran the operation sat back enjoying the big houses in Glasgow’s Thorntonhall.
‘Look, Fergie. It’s serious stuff you’ve got yourself caught up in. There’re some big guys involved, not just in this country. But if you told us everything you knew—’
‘They’d get me,’ Fergie said.
‘We can look after that.’ He knew it wasn’t true: the drug networks had contacts in every prison, ready to carry out whatever dirty work needed to be done. ‘You do well by us, Fergie, and we’ll do well by you.’
‘It’s the monkeys.’
‘Monkeys?’
The lad was looking at him as if he were a penny short. ‘Monkeys. Redcaps. The military police.’
Then it dawned. ‘Military police – you’re a deserter?’
Fergie shrank back, as if he’d hit him.
‘Right. I see.’ Drugs in the military – good evidence would be pure gold. The courts would come down hard; this wasn’t ton-of-bricks stuff, this was an avalanche. Come to Daddy, sunshine!
He leant forward. ‘Like a cup of tea, Fergie?’
Fergie looked at him suspiciously. ‘S’pose so.’
‘Course you would! If I pulled strings, we could even send out for a bacon butty. Now look, I’ll be straight with you. If there was someone who was using you to get drugs circulating in the military, if you give us all the stuff we need – all of it, mind you, and with you standing in court to testify – I reckon I can get the – what did you call them? – monkeys, off your back, and have you put on a witness protection programme. We’ll give you another identity, and the money to start out again, on a whole new life. How does that sound?’
He looked at the lad anxiously, and saw a gradual smile spread over his pinched face.
‘Pure dead brilliant!’ said Fergie.
‘What’s happened to my dog? What’s the problem with him?’
You tell him his wife’s been murdered – though not how – and his first reaction’s to ask about h
is dog? What was with this guy?
DC Hepburn looked at Matthew Lovatt sitting opposite her and DC Campbell in the interview room. He was shaking with what looked like anger rather than fear, and Hepburn set her feet more firmly on the ground, ready to react if the man lost it completely. She noticed that Campbell was doing the same as she glanced at him to see if he was going to answer.
When Campbell said nothing, Hepburn went on, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. We’re here to talk to you about what you did, not what the dog did.’
‘I – didn’t – do – anything. And neither did my dog.’ The words came out through gritted teeth.
‘That’s what they all say.’ Campbell seemed to have decided to provoke him.
Maybe Hepburn was meant to play nice cop. ‘Let’s take where you were yesterday, Matt,’ she said soothingly. ‘Why don’t you talk us through it?’
Lovatt controlled himself with an obvious effort. ‘Right. Where do you want me to start?’
‘Last time you saw your wife,’ Campbell said.
‘I picked her up from the hospital – she was suffering from smoke inhalation and they kept her in for a couple of nights. I drove her back to Innellan and dropped her at a caravan someone said I could use while the house was out of action.’
‘Why wasn’t she staying with you at the Smugglers Inn?’ Hepburn asked, and saw faint colour come into the undamaged side of Lovatt’s face at the question.
‘She had developed a … a prejudice against Christie Jack—’
‘Not surprising, if you were having a carry-on.’
Campbell’s needling remark got to him. Lovatt’s voice rose. ‘I was not having “a carry-on” with her. I told your colleague—’
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