Dead in the Water

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Did he fall against that fender there? We can match it up with the wound on his temple. Did you, even, strike him first with that?’ Fleming’s eyes were very bright and hard as she gestured towards the cane with its heavy silver handle which was propped by Sylvia’s chair. ‘If so, we can tell that too. All the evidence we need to convict you is right here in this room. We only need to look for it. You know that.

  ‘So why did you do it, Marcus?’

  There was a long, long silence. It was Sylvia who broke it, leaning forward in her seat, trembling with rage, and Marcus knew the play was over. They’d had the denouement; now they were only waiting for the curtain to fall.

  ‘It’s your fault!’ she cried, her husky voice cracking with emotion. ‘If you were going to throw away the key because he tried to kill Marcus, that would have been all right. But you wouldn’t – you admitted it yourself. He’d have been in prison for a couple of years at most, and he’d have come back. He would always have come back, until he did what he meant to do last week. Marcus could never be safe. This was self-defence, that’s all. Anyway, why should he have anything?’

  ‘Sylvia,’ Marcus said, but there was no stopping her.

  Her lips had a blue tinge. ‘Laddie was so proud of Marcus – his wonderful, beautiful son! His first wife trapped him into marriage because she got pregnant and he was young. She was a peasant, and her son was like his mother – coarse, not worthy of him, he said. That man had a peasant’s greed – greed to the point where he would kill!’

  She was gasping for breath. Alarmed, Marcus said, ‘Sylvia, stop this. You’ll make yourself ill—’

  But she went on. ‘I knew what Laddie would do. He was a man – he was—’

  Then Sylvia’s face changed. She jerked, knocking over the table beside her. The champagne glass fell to the floor and broke as her hand went to her chest. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Laddie!’ She spoke as if the two were one.

  It was the sergeant who moved first. He was on the phone, almost before Sylvia had slumped forward, shouting, ‘Ambulance! Priority!’

  The inspector moved fast, beginning resuscitation, but Marcus knew there was no point. With exquisite pain, he heard the last rasping breath of the woman who had meant more to him than his own mother. His adored nemesis.

  ‘I know what forensic science is able to do,’ Marcus Lindsay said, his voice flat and toneless. ‘Few better, after all these years on Playfair’s Patch. Every contact leaves a trace – you only have to know where to look . . .’

  The man looked – extinguished, Fleming thought. But then, MacNee, with stubble growth on his cheeks, looked as if he’d slept in a ditch, and she was exhausted. She felt grubby too, grubby in soul as well as body. MacNee was barely speaking to her, and she didn’t blame him. She had let her triumph at disentangling the web of confusion surrounding Pavany’s death betray her into something worthy of Playfair’s Patch, and this tragedy had been the result.

  It was six in the morning. The drama and the formalities of Sylvia Lascelles’ death had taken hours; they were only now in an interview room beginning the questioning under caution.

  ‘There’s no point in fighting it, in the endless lying,’ Lindsay was going on. ‘I’m too tired.’

  ‘Do you want to make a formal confession, Mr Lindsay?’ Fleming said. Everything was going to be straight by the book this time.

  He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. Oh God, yes. The strain, waiting and waiting, expecting something to go wrong – worse than a first night.’ He gave the ghost of a smile.

  He had a very charming smile but, looking at him now, Fleming could see the lines of weakness clearly marked.

  ‘I knew nothing about my half-brother, except that he existed. To my knowledge, my father never had any contact with them after the divorce. When there was no one at the door that night, I did think immediately of the wretched youth in the pub. I was going to shut it hastily when a voice shouted in Czech, “I am your brother Stefan. We need to talk about Vikova.” ’

  ‘Vikova?’

  ‘It was my father’s old home. To be honest, I never believed his stories – what money there was in our family was my mother’s and most of that’s gone now – but the Czech government has started paying reparation. Sylvia talked about it, suggested finding out, but I wasn’t ready for the legal fees and the hassle.

  ‘But Stefan had done it, only to find the authorities knew I was the legal heir. I’m a young man – it would be unlikely that I had made a will and he was next-of-kin. So he came after me. Pretended to be Polish so there would be no connection made.

  ‘Most of what I told you was true – I genuinely remember nothing after I went round the back of the house to meet him. I only found all this out on our – our second encounter.’

  MacNee had been brooding and withdrawn. Now he said in the tone of one anxious to disbelieve, ‘So how come you knew it was Pavany – or where to find him for what you like to call “your second encounter”? Or “his murder”, as the rest of us would call it.’

  ‘Sylvia saw him attacking me. He looked up as he ran away, and she said it was like a nightmare – she was looking at a distorted version of Laddie’s face. And when she said that, I remembered the man who’d turned up at the filming. I’d looked at him, thought he was familiar, somehow, just as you did.

  ‘It was Sylvia who wouldn’t let me tell you. She didn’t trust the system. She said Stefan would only get a token sentence, that he would never give up, that he’d shown already that he had our father’s ruthlessness, even if I didn’t. When he got out of prison he would come after me; I’d be forever looking over my shoulder and one day he’d get me.

  ‘To be honest, I thought she was mad at first. I argued with her. In fact, I even put in a call to our legal expert on Playfair, pretending it had given me an idea for the series, to ask about a probable outcome, and he confirmed that unless there was major injury it would be all but impossible to get a conviction for attempted murder.

  ‘So I had a choice. I could go around for the rest of my life, being afraid of the knife in my back, or I could do one terrifying, risky thing and live in peace. And she was utterly convinced we could stage it and get away with it, that all I needed was a little bit of courage – and I was Laddie Lazansky’s son, after all. “Do you want to die because you’re too much of a coward to defend yourself?” That was what she said.’

  ‘Now I’ve heard bloody everything!’ MacNee exploded. ‘All her fault, is it – a gracious old lady that you’ve killed with what you’ve done?’

  Lindsay’s own grief was clear in his face. ‘I killed her with what I didn’t do,’ he corrected. ‘I didn’t have the courage to stand up to her, and do the right thing.’

  With a warning glance at MacNee, Fleming said, ‘As your father, perhaps, would have done?’

  Lindsay gave a short laugh. ‘Laddie? He’d have knifed the man without a second thought. He was a total bastard, but I idolized him. He was pure magic as a father, glamorous, amusing, indulgent. Oh, I know just how much there was to disapprove of in his life – the way he treated my mother, for a start, having Sylvia as a maîtresse-en-titre. But when he died, the colour went out of my life too. Everyone else, apart from Sylvia, seems grey and boring. Including me – oh yes, particularly me. I look like a faded version of him, and I think I am.’

  It was pitiable: this successful man, seeing himself always through the prism of a child’s view of a charming, ruthless sod of a father. But MacNee clearly wasn’t feeling sympathetic.

  ‘We’re not paid to listen to a plea in mitigation. Just get on with it.’

  ‘Mr Lindsay, it’s been quite a night for all of us,’ Fleming said soothingly, earning a sullen look from MacNee. ‘I’d like to finish this interview as soon as possible. What happened on the evening you killed Stefan – Stefan Lazansky, as I suppose we must call him now?’

  ‘It was ridiculously easy. He’d put a card through my letter-box a few weeks ago, hoping to be employed on building work – to
give him a better shot at me, I suppose – and I phoned him. I said I could call in the police, but I thought for both our sakes it would be smarter to talk business. He was very taken aback that I’d found him, but he agreed. I even hoped we might actually come to some sort of arrangement, but Sylvia told me I was being a naïve fool.

  ‘She insisted on being there. It would reassure him, she said, if she was in the room – a sweet old lady like her. He came in and we talked about Vikova. He wanted it in a way I never had – he sounded like my father talking about Tulach – and I knew I could never trust him. He didn’t want to sell it and split the money; he was just playing me along while he worked out the next step. And he was no actor – I could see murder in his eyes. Sylvia had been right. She usually was.

  ‘She looked casually towards me and I gave a tiny nod. A little later, she dropped her handkerchief on the floor, and when he bent to pick it up, I took her cane and brought the knob of it down on the back of his head.’

  MacNee looked down. Fleming could see him biting his lip.

  ‘And then – yes, I killed him,’ Lindsay said.

  They had it on tape. Fleming gave a small sigh. ‘Then – you phoned friends, for an alibi?’

  ‘I took – the body,’ he swallowed, clearly uncomfortable with the detail, ‘through to the library, wrapped in a rug. You were right that I found the knife in his pocket. And you needn’t look for the kitchen knife I used – it’s in the sea now, along with his damned trainers. Then I washed my hands – again and again. Symbolic, I suppose.’

  Encountering a hostile look from MacNee, he went on quickly. ‘Sylvia was amazing – utterly calm, and when the others arrived she did all the talking until I had time to pull myself together.

  ‘Later I drove down to the pub and – and left it. And that’s it, really. We’d rehearsed beforehand, of course, rehearsed and rehearsed. I kept thinking that it would never actually happen, that this was just like acting in a play – that made it easier. Sylvia was sure we would never be suspected, but I was afraid. If once the connection was made, you would find out – I knew that.’

  ‘Didn’t want us testing your DNA, did you?’ MacNee’s tone was still aggressive. ‘You had it worked out long before – callous bastard!’

  Lindsay, bizarrely, began to laugh. It was genuine laughter but with a hysterical edge to it, and it took a moment for him to control himself long enough to say, ‘You flatter me, sergeant. Though I flattered you – I thought you’d probably worked it out by now. I didn’t want to give you my DNA because if you tested Ailsa Grant’s child, you might get some rather curious results. My father told me, though I doubt if her mother ever told her.

  ‘Ailsa was my half-sister.’

  20

  ‘I’m suspending you, Marjory,’ Superintendent Bailey said on Wednesday morning, his face sombre. ‘I’m afraid I have no alternative.’

  He didn’t. Even when everything has been done by the book, a death during police questioning is subject to an enquiry, and now the media was baying for blood and claiming that police brutality had caused the death of one of Britain’s national treasures.

  ‘I know,’ Fleming said. ‘It was an inexcusable misjudgement. I should have brought Lindsay in for questioning.’

  ‘Indeed you should, instead of staging a drama which gave the woman a heart attack. I can’t think what possessed you, Marjory – she was a frail, elderly woman, in a wheelchair, for God’s sake! What could have been a triumph of police work has become a complete disaster.’

  Fleming, her head bowed, said nothing, and Bailey sighed. ‘Well, there’s not a lot more to say. We’ll have to wait and see whether Lindsay lodges a formal complaint, and take it from there.’

  ‘Thanks, Donald. I can only say how deeply I regret this.’

  The poor woman looked crushed. He had resented her attitude over the cold case, but he was not an ungenerous man. ‘Marjory, as I’ve said before, you’re the best officer I have. I’ll move heaven and earth to get the CC on side to work for a positive result.’

  She nodded, and left the room.

  Bailey sat back in his chair and put his fingers together in a pyramid. The acting Procurator Fiscal had been on the phone demanding a meeting once the news broke this morning, and she was expecting him shortly.

  The interview wasn’t going to go quite as Milne was planning, though. Fleming had wanted him to hold off from investigating the records, but he hadn’t actually agreed. So when Tam MacNee, working on the same basis, had come to him with evidence he’d got from Glasgow by the sort of devious route a superintendent didn’t want to know about, he had not allowed himself to be troubled by scruples. And what he had to say to Milne now would, in MacNee’s phrase, put her gas on a peep.

  Marjory Fleming drove home to Mains of Craigie with unusual attention to the road. Exhausted and wretched, she might drive into the back of a ten-ton truck if she wasn’t very careful. She shouldn’t be driving at all, really, given the ‘Tiredness kills’ campaign, but one more breach of the rule book hardly seemed to matter.

  She kept glancing in the mirror, but so far at least it seemed the press weren’t on to her, though no doubt there would be that ordeal to come. She turned off up the track to the farmhouse, then parked the car and dragged herself into the house. Bill and the family would be hours yet, so at least she would be able to get the sleep she so desperately needed. Things would look better after that. Probably. Or ‘perhaps’ might be a better word.

  She could hear the vacuum cleaner – Karolina at her work. Her heart sank at the thought of talk and enquiries, but pinning on a smile, she followed the sound to the sitting room.

  To her surprise, it was Janet Laird hoovering, humming to herself above the noise of the motor. When Marjory appeared, she jumped.

  ‘Oh, goodness me, pet, what a fright! I didn’t expect you home just now.’ She switched the machine off.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Mum?’ Marjory demanded. ‘You shouldn’t be doing my cleaning! Where’s Karolina?’

  Janet smiled. ‘Poor wee soul! She’s expecting again, and she’s feeling just terrible. I was out here yesterday evening, and she nearly fainted over the ironing. So I’ve told her she’s to rest, and if I do the work for her, you can pay me and I’ll give it to her – they’ll be needing the money, with another mouth to feed.’

  ‘But – but—’ Marjory protested, ‘I wouldn’t cut her wages because she’s not feeling well enough to work – you know that! There’s no need for my elderly mother to be slaving away – I can do it myself.’

  Janet’s face was glowing with the exercise and – was it satisfaction? ‘I’m having a fine time,’ she said firmly. ‘I was never one could sit still for long, you know, and I’ve been getting quite low with nothing to do and feeling useless. And then the other night, when you didn’t tell me about Cammie – I know you mean to be kind, pet, but I’m not decrepit yet. And you’re so busy—’

  ‘Not any more,’ Marjory said bitterly. ‘Mum, I’ve been suspended.’ And if her mother said, ‘Oh, my lamb!’ and put her arms round her, she’d burst into tears as if she was ten years old.

  Janet didn’t. She said, ‘Dearie me, they’re always getting things wrong. I’m going to make a cup of tea and you can tell me about it. And then you can get to your bed and catch up on some sleep – you’re looking wabbit.’

  Washed-out was exactly how she felt. Meekly, Marjory followed her mother through to the kitchen and embarked on the long and sorry tale.

  ‘I’m delighted that you have suspended Fleming,’ Sheila Milne said. ‘As you know, I’ve been saying for some time that incompetent woman has no place in the police force. Presumably now her career is at an end.’

  ‘Suspension is a temporary measure, pending enquiries.’ Superintendent Bailey’s voice was cold. ‘DI Fleming is a most valuable officer and I have every hope that she will be reinstated at the end of this process.’

  ‘I should inform you that I will vigorously oppose it,
right up to the highest level.’ Milne’s full lips tightened in annoyance.

  ‘I’m sure you will. However,’ Bailey sat back with a little smile, his moment come at last, ‘I have to tell you the police are instituting an enquiry of our own. Recently information has come to me which indicates that your marking decisions in certain cases in Glasgow were, shall we say, suspect.’

  Milne’s eyes, slightly protuberant anyway, bulged. ‘I can’t think what you mean!’

  ‘Favours for friends, you might call it, though for all we know as yet money may have changed hands as well. Or just gifts to show appreciation, perhaps? We have information already which is concerning to say the least of it, and we also have a statement made by Marcus Lindsay—’

  ‘I can’t think the court will be impressed with the evidence of a murderer.’ Milne sounded angry, but her thick, creamy skin had turned a chalky colour. ‘Flimsy, I would have said, against my word.’

  ‘You’re forgetting the paper trail.’ Bailey was enjoying himself now. ‘And once we start tracking people down, I think you’ll find your middle-class friends won’t risk a charge of delaying the ends of justice, especially since the speeding cases that weren’t raised against them then are time-barred by now.’

  ‘It’s – it’s quite ridiculous.’ She couldn’t disguise the fear in her voice. ‘I – I have nothing more to say to you. I shall be contacting my lawyer.’

  ‘Yes, I should, if I were you.’ Bailey got up. ‘We shall be contacting the Lord Advocate, and I think you may well be joining DI Fleming on suspension any day now.’

  Janet Laird had hardly spoken as her daughter told her what had happened. Now Marjory was pouring out a confession of thoughtlessness and self-loathing.

  ‘I had no excuse. I’d seen Sylvia Lascelles resting after she’d been working one day and she didn’t look at all well, so I should have considered that. I’ve seen a grown man faint under the stress of intensive questioning, for heaven’s sake, and that was only for housebreaking. But she had such spirit, you just didn’t think of her as being frail.’