I had that sinking feeling you get when your wallet goes missing or your favourite indie band signs for Sony.
I switched off the courtesy light and sat back. Why had Jake asked me to go see Daisy Adams? A sudden stroke of chivalry, not wanting to upset the lady farmer? How likely was that? About as likely as him turning up unexpectedly to give me a wad of cash to buy a present for my daughter. Deek wasn’t the stupid one. It was me. Robbie Munro, Deek’s very own DIY defence.
I could see it all. Deek had been sent by Jake to put the frighteners on the woman, and some bloke had stepped in and ended up with a knife in his chest. Daisy was the only witness, a loose end that needed tying off. That’s where I came in. How better to muddy the water than by a second visit, with your lawyer in tow and ready to explain away the countless fingerprints left behind the first time?
The more I thought about it, the more I had to grudgingly admit it wasn’t such a bad defence. I’d have to withdraw from acting. Even Jake would have to realise that, though he wouldn’t like it. On the bright side it would mean I could go back to looking after my daughter, instead of putting my custody claim in jeopardy by running around trying to have Deek acquitted of a crime he’d probably committed.
I put the key into the ignition and then slammed the steering wheel with the heels of my hands. Probably committed. Probably wasn’t good enough. I was only guessing that I was part of some devious plan. An educated guess, but a guess nonetheless. How often had I told a jury that probability of guilt wasn’t good enough? The test was proof beyond reasonable doubt. And it wasn’t as simple a choice as ditching Deek for the sake of my custody claim. Who could reasonably say that it was in the best interests of Tina to live with her down-at-heel dad in a one-bedroom flat when she could live with her grandmother in the lap of luxury?
Working on legal aid rates that hadn’t increased in all my time as a defence lawyer, the only way I was going to afford a better place to live was to cut my business overheads. My biggest outlay was the office rent and to wipe it out I needed to have Deek Pudney acquitted. I remembered Paul’s departing words of encouragement.I know you, Robbie. You’ve got what it takes, to do what it takes.
Did I?
I turned the key and started the engine. I was about to find out.
18
The same bored-looking pony and shivering donkeys stood in the field adjacent to Sunnybrae Farmhouse as I trundled my way up the rough track. The animals had been joined by an equally bored and cold-looking police officer, standing guard at a front door that was now criss-crossed with yellow and black tape.
He crunched his way across the gravel courtyard to meet me as my car came to a halt alongside a couple of police vehicles.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked, once I’d alighted, pleased, no doubt, to be doing something other than standing around, inhaling donkey-dung fumes and being drizzled on.
I flashed him a smile and my Law Society ID card. ‘I’m here to see the scene of crime officer.’
‘There’s two of them. Who exactly is it you wish to see?’ he asked, sounding suitably unimpressed.
‘Either will do.’
‘You haven’t anything arranged then?’
‘It’s more of a general enquiry.’
‘About what?’
‘About the murder.’ You know the double one that took place in the house that you’re standing directly in front of? I would have added if I’d thought it might have helped. ‘I’m acting for Mr Pudney.’ The cop looked at me blankly. ‘He’s been charged with the murders. I’ve just come from the court.’ Nothing. I held up my ID card again in case he’d missed it the first time. ‘I’m his lawyer.’
‘Sorry, sir, I’ve not to let anyone into the crime scene.’
I laughed at the apparent misunderstanding. ‘Oh, that’s all right. I don’t need to go in. I’m happy to speak to someone out here.’
All I wanted was the low-down on what scientific evidence there was, if any, that linked Deek to the body of Daisy Adams. When my client came to court in a week’s time, the Crown would need to be satisfied of a sufficiency of evidence to fully commit him for trial. At the moment they had a few fingerprints to tie Deek to the murder of the man on the kitchen table. If there was nothing connecting him to the dead woman, I might be able to go over Hugh Ogilvie’s head and make representations to someone at Crown Office. If I explained how Deek’s fingerprints got where they did, someone more reasonable and more senior to Ogilvie might make a more qualitative, less vindictive assessment of the evidence and order my client’s release.
Admittedly, it was a long shot. If Deek’s dabs were all over the dead woman too, he was in deep trouble, but there was nothing to lose and I might as well learn the worst now as later.
The cop looked to his left then his right, as though hoping someone would come and relieve him of having to make an executive decision. No one did. He pressed the radio attached to his tunic breast.
A crackly voice came back, ‘Go ahead.’
‘I have a . . . ’
‘Mr Munro,’ I said.
‘Mr Munro. Says he acts for one of the suspects and wants to speak to a SOCO.’
‘Would that be a Mr Robbie Munro?’ crackled the radio in a depressingly familiar tone. Dougie Fleming.
The cop looked at me. I held the ID card up yet again.
‘Yes, Robert Alexander Mun—’
‘Then kindly tell him,’ the radio crackled, ‘to Foxtrot, Uniform, Charlie . . . ’
Trust Fleming to be all over this, keeping things tight, making sure that any evidential findings were released to the defence only when absolutely necessary.
The cop tapped the radio, after Fleming had completed my phonetic dismissal. ‘Copy that.’ He turned to me. ‘Did you get that, sir?’
Anyone whose duty was to stand guard outside a building in the middle of nowhere was probably not on the fast track to Chief Constable, but the only plan B I could come up with was to engage him in conversation and see if he’d managed to glean anything about what was happening inside. He couldn’t have been out here all day. He must have taken a break for lunch or coffee, and cops, like lawyers, liked to talk. A little information was better than none.
‘Yes, I got it all right. Still, it’s a terrible business,’ I said, an ice-breaker to which the cop could hardly take issue. ‘You’ll be glad to get off duty. Any idea how much longer they’re going to be in there? Must be nearly finished by now.’ I nodded towards the building just as Dougie Fleming hove into view, wearing a black raincoat, arms folded. He must have exited by the side door. He came no further than the corner of the farmhouse and stood there, glowering through the dreichness of that late afternoon. I thought at first he’d come out especially to give me the evil eye until I realised he was looking past me, down the field to the road. I followed his line of sight to a set of headlights swinging onto the track and slowly making their way towards us.
‘Anyway, I’ll be off then.’ I searched my pockets for my car keys, stalling for time until the vehicle, a black BMW, had come to rest a few yards from me. A uniformed WPC emerged from the driver’s door and walked across the courtyard to meet Fleming. The passenger door opened and a woman about my own age, maybe younger, long dark hair, climbed out. My built-in radar told me she wasn’t a cop. She walked over to me, smiled stiffly and offered a hand. I accepted.
‘Vikki Stark,’ she said.
My grip tightened involuntarily. Vikki Stark? This was her. The woman on whom my hopes of keeping Tina rested. What was she doing here? She obviously didn’t recognise me. Why should she? Up until now I would just have been a name to her.
‘And you are . . . ? she asked.
‘Oh, just keeping an eye on things,’ I said. No way was I going to try and explain why I wasn’t at home with my daughter and instead twenty miles away at the scene of a murder. We’d meet again. By then I’d have thought up an excuse. I turned to the cop. ‘Oh, well. Can’t stand about here chatting. Keep up the
good work. Nice meeting you, Mrs—’
‘Miss.’
‘Miss Stark.’ I gave her a curt, professional and what I hoped was a cop-like, nod of the head and started towards my car.
‘Have they said when Daisy’s body will be released for burial, officer?’ Vikki called to me.
I turned. ‘Sorry, that’s information only the officer in charge of the investigation will be able to divulge.’
I was about to take my leave before there were any more awkward moments and then it struck me, Daisy? She’d said Daisy, not Mrs Adams.
‘Did you know the deceased?’ I asked.
She stared at her shoes for a moment, then looked up and brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘I was allocated Daisy’s case when she applied to adopt Molly. It was all going so well . . . ’
‘The other deceased individual. Did you know him too?’
Vikki shook her head. ‘I’ve been shown the photographs. I’ve no idea who he is. Then again, I hadn’t spoken to Daisy in a while.’
‘Was there a man in her life? Anyone special?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Vikki said, turning up the collar of her raincoat. ‘Am I being interviewed again? Because,’ she tried to smile, ‘if I am, I’d rather do it somewhere less damp, if you don’t mind.’
The sound of crunching signalled Fleming and the female uniform fast approaching from my starboard side.
I stepped forward and we shook hands again. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to go, but I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Detective Inspector Fleming.’
I didn’t actually sprint, but, in something of a Le Mans start, I made it to my car and away before Fleming had covered the twenty yards to where in the rear-view mirror I could see Vikki standing, staring after me.
19
Around noon on a Sunday, Radio Scotland transforms itself from an informative current affairs medium to a station hurling accordion music at the hard of hearing. I was in the kitchen making lunch. The preparation of meals had become a major part of my life. B.T., that is, Before Tina, I’d grabbed a snack wherever I could and eaten it in my car, at my desk or, more often than not, slumped in front of the TV. Not any more. Kids, so my dad told me, needed to learn to eat sitting at a table and at regular times. According to him, it was all about maintaining a set routine. Sometimes I feared for my daughter. If you’d dipped the well of wisdom and pooled my dad’s knowledge of parenting with my own, you’d have ended up with at best a very small puddle.
Tina came through as I was scorching something under the grill. She tugged at my shirt.
‘Can we go and feed the ducks?’
‘Not today,’ I said, rescuing two slices of roasted cheese and burning my fingers in the process. I hurled them onto a wooden chopping board where they continued to singe silently. Was burnt cheese carcinogenic or was that a myth? I decided to eat them and make more for Tina.
She followed me to the fridge and back. ‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s raining.’ In support of my submission, I pointed to the rain-spattered kitchen window.
‘But ducks like the rain.’
‘I know, but I don’t.’
‘They’ll be hungry.’
I stopped slicing cheese and stared down at the little fed-up face. I didn’t like lying to my daughter, but found it the best way of winning arguments. ‘It’s Sunday. You don’t need to feed the ducks today because they go to a special duck place at the far end of Linlithgow Loch and get all their favourite things to eat there.’
‘Who gives it them?’
I was going to invent the Duck Man, a mysterious benefactor to all of duck-kind: Santa Claus with webbed feet, but he sounded incredibly creepy even to me, so instead I came up with, ‘It’s just all there waiting for them. All the things they like the best.’
‘They like bread.’
‘Oh, there’s better stuff than that,’ I said, geometrically arranging slices of cheese on to bread. ‘There’s cakes and biscuits and . . . ’
‘Toasted cheese?’
She said toasted cheese, I said roasted cheese. We’d been down that route; neither of us was prepared to concede. ‘Probably . . . ’
‘Sausages?’
‘No, ducks don’t like sausages.’
‘I like sausages.’
‘Yes, but ducks don’t eat meat.’ Did they? ‘Now, you go and watch the telly and I’ll bring your lunch through to you. How’s that sound?’
It sounded acceptable, but temporarily so, because Tina departed only to return as the next batch of cheese and bread was starting to melt.
‘Me and Gramps saw a duck eating a worm once. It was in a puddle and was all gooey and horrible.’
‘After lunch why don’t we go to the new soft playroom?’ I said. ‘Have you been to a soft playroom before?’
But my daughter wasn’t to be sidetracked from her line of questioning. ‘Worms are meat, aren’t they?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, not taking my eyes from the grill.
‘But you said ducks don’t like meat and they do.’
‘That was probably a silly duck that didn’t know the worm was made of meat, and ate it by mistake.’
‘How wouldn’t it not know?’
‘Well, ducks aren’t very clever and worms don’t have faces, do they?’
Tina gave me the look I’d seen hundreds of times before on the face of Sheriff Albert Brechin. The look that said, usually quite correctly, that I was drifting beyond my knowledge of the law, or, on this occasion, the diet of the Mallard duck.
‘Sausages don’t have faces,’ she said.
I removed the toast, cut the slices into quarters and laid them onto a pink plastic plate with a Disney princess on it. ‘No, but the animals sausages are made out of do.’
Tina paused to think about that. Did she know where sausages came from? Cows and pigs slaughtered, minced and stuffed into sausage skins. Her wee face screwed up. Had I broken the news too suddenly? Had I scarred her emotionally or, worse, created a vegetarian?
‘What about BN biscuits?’ she said. ‘They’ve got faces. And so do Jelly Babies and fruit bears.’
I handed her the plate. ‘Grandpa told me all about the new soft playroom. He says it’s great fun. Would you like to go there after lunch? I bet they’ve got one of those pools filled with plastic balls,’ I said with as much excitement as I could muster.
Tina took her lunch through to the living room, where fortunately her line of questioning moved on to the likelihood of there being a chute at the soft room and whether there would be other boys and girls there.
As it transpired there was indeed a chute. There were quite a few of them and lots and lots of boys and girls, conveniently fenced off from the café area where later that same afternoon I sat reading the Sunday paper, sipping a coffee, eating a pastry and thinking that this childminding lark wasn’t so bad after all.
I’d finished the important stories on the back page and was flipping the newspaper over, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The smile that I now knew belonged to Vikki Stark beamed down at me. She stood there, a small child clamped onto her leg, hiding its face.
‘Fancy meeting you here,’ she said, with a glance around at a café packed with parents and pushchairs. ‘Would you mind if we shared your table?’
I could hardly object. Nor could I make an excuse and leave. Not while Tina was whooping it up somewhere in the depths of the plastic-padded arena.
Vikki sat down and began to coax the child to take off a woolly coat, hat and scarf. ‘We met, yesterday,’ she said, as I attempted to raise the newspaper between us. ‘I didn’t catch your name.’
There was nothing for it. I folded the newspaper. ‘Robbie Munro,’ I said, lighting the blue touchpaper and waiting.
Vikki stopped, leaving the child half in, half out of its coat. ‘Robbie Munro? You’re Robbie Munro? I didn’t know you were a police officer. They told me—’
‘That I was a lawyer? I am.’
‘But ye
sterday . . . up at Sunnybrae . . . ?’
Why hadn’t I gone to feed the ducks?
‘I was there on business,’ I said, and hoped that would be enough.
‘And you are Tina’s dad?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I thought you were on paternity leave? I’ve tried to visit you a couple of times to see how things are going, but . . . ’ Vikki glanced from side to side. ‘Is Tina here?’ Two possible answers sprang immediately to mind. One was, no, I’ve popped in unaccompanied for a peaceful read of my Sunday paper amidst the hordes of screaming kids. The other was, duh. I deemed neither appropriate in the circumstances.
Perhaps Vikki realised the stupidity of her question for she added quickly, ‘The kids love it here, don’t they? Do you have much experience of children?’
‘Well, I did go to school with them for many years,’ I said. ‘In fact, I used to be one.’
She smiled a non-smile. ‘And, of course, some people never grow up, do they?’ Once she had managed to divest the child of its outer garments, Vikki stood up and laid them on the seat she’d vacated. ‘Could you watch that for me while I put Molly into the soft room?’
She took the girl by the hand and tugged her off in the direction of the multicoloured padded area. I returned to the newspaper, not reading, my mind racing, ready for what I expected to be a thorough interrogation upon Vikki’s return. What kind of business had I been doing up at the farm? Why was I working when I was supposed to be looking after my daughter? What kind of care could I provide when I really was working if I couldn’t look after Tina on my days off?
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