Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  Twenty minutes after that, the mist began to thicken into rain. Thin, weedy drops of it strung ever faster together until soon, even with the wipers on high speed, it was hard to see through the windscreen. An hour later it was as torrential as it had ever been. Container lorries and caravans slowed down on the wet roads and I had no chance at all of passing either. I switched on the radio and settled down for the long, tedious journey home.

  I drove into an empty yard. Very few things cancel an afternoon’s trekking, but unremitting rain is one of them. Sandy’s car was there, and Lee’s, but none of the usual Saturday tourists and no sign of Kirsty or wee Jon or any of the weekend hang-around kids. A day off for the rain and they’re welcome. I left my car in its slot in the shed and kicked my wet shoes off at the back door.

  ‘Hi, people, I’m home.’ I called it in from the porch. The dog appeared at the doorway, damp and mud-streaked and happy to see me. The cat looked up from the Rayburn and rasped a greeting. Nobody else said anything. Nina was there, and Sandy; they sat on opposite sides of the fire, oddly silent. I stepped in through the doorway, still high on the buzz of it, not thinking too clearly, not feeling the atmosphere. ‘What’s up, guys? Where’s Lee?’

  Nothing.

  ‘I’ll make the lass her coffee.’ Sandy stood up, cracking the knots in his fingers. His eyes scanned past mine, finding other things to see. This is not like Sandy. The last time he looked this bad, his colt was three days old and dying.

  ‘Sandy … ?’

  He shook his head and made heavy work of fitting the top on the kettle. He has arthritis, but it isn’t that bad. ‘White, no sugar, aye?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ I turned round. Nina stood with her forearms on the mantelpiece, staring at the crumbles of burning peat in the fire. All I could see was the shape of her back and the tangled chestnut of hair. Shadows of past nightmares grew up out of the fire. It’s the horses. Something’s wrong with the horses. Or Lee. Or Nina … Dear God, if it’s Nina … A familiar, throbbing heat swelled at the back of my left eye. It was gone this morning when I woke up, I swear it was gone.

  I stood behind her, both hands on her waist. ‘Nina? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’ She turned round, hooked her elbows on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s not me. Will you sit down? Please?’

  ‘No. Just tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘Here’s your coffee, lass.’ Sandy came round the counter with three mugs and a tray of biscuits, the very image of solicitude. He tried to hand me a mug. ‘Will you not sit down?’

  Jesus Christ, what is this? ‘No.’

  I moved, for the sake of moving. They stood together by the fire, each of them waiting for the other to speak. I went over to the sink, to the safe space behind the breakfast bar. We have an old steel kettle with a curving, swan-necked spout. It sits all day at the side of the Rayburn, as much a part of the place as the cat. I angled the spout under the tap and turned on the water. Pointless, but I feel better if I have something to do. I kept my back to them both. ‘Will one of you please tell me what the hell is going on?’

  ‘It’s Dr Adams. She …’

  ‘It’s Lee. The police were here. She’s under arrest.’ It was Nina who finished the sentence.

  ‘What?’ Water sprayed fan-wise over the sink as the spout swung under the jet of the tap. I switched off the tap, sat the kettle carefully back on the Rayburn and turned to face the fire. ‘What for?’

  ‘The murder of Hillary Murdoch.’

  ‘But she’s not—?’

  ‘She died sometime early on Friday morning. Her husband found the body this morning.’

  Oh, hell. Bloody, bloody hell. Three is a series. Four is Lee. Or maybe Murdoch. Then whichever one of them is left will be number five. Lee. The only one left is Lee.

  I slid down the side of the breakfast bar. The curved handle of the cupboard dug into the small of my back. The tiles were cold under the damp seat of my jeans. The stoked heat of the Rayburn warmed the side of my face. The power drill behind my left eye drove forwards in an exploding scatter of pain. The weather has broken. My head has broken with it.

  I don’t believe this is happening.

  ‘Kellen … come and sit down.’ Nina’s arms reach under mine. I am pliable, like the newly dead. She walked me over to the chair by the fire. Her eyes were close to mine, examining. ‘Is your head still bad?’

  ‘She’s next, Nina. This proves the series. Lee’s next.’

  ‘Maybe. She’s probably as safe with the police as anywhere.’ Her fingers were on my wrist. ‘You didn’t sleep last night, did you?’ She looked less pale, as if, for her, the worst of it was over.

  ‘I slept fine.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She knows the measure of my lies. She nodded at someone over my head and I heard Sandy pick up his coat and leave. I heard his footsteps in the yard, heard him pull back the door to the barn. The feed bins rattled. The colt whinnied, a high-pitched child’s voice with a breaking dip in the end. Nina left me and went back to the Rayburn. ‘Did you have anything to eat on the way down the road?’

  ‘What?’ I don’t remember. ‘No, I didn’t stop.’

  ‘Right.’ She opened the Rayburn. The smell of cooking hit my head and my stomach in quick succession.

  ‘No … Not a good idea.’

  ‘Yes it is.’ She brought over a plate balanced on a small round tray, and laid it on the floor by my feet. ‘Shepherd’s pie. Jon’s mum made it for when the weather turned.’ The rain ran in clear sheets down the window. ‘I’d say this counts as turned.’ She crouched, half kneeling, at my knee. ‘You’re not going to be any use to anybody if you’re too sick to move, Kells. You may not be getting any sleep but you need to eat at least. You eat and I’ll tell you what I know and then we can sort out if there’s anything useful we can do to help.’ She smiled and it was all so reasonable: the inexorable logic of the surgeon. I am surrounded by this.

  I picked up the fork. The smell of food won over the pain in my head. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Talk to me.’

  Nina settled down with her back to the chair.

  ‘Hillary Murdoch was due to come in and cover for Lee from mid-day on Friday. Sometime before that, she had a visitor.’

  ‘A visitor?’

  ‘She let someone into her flat. There is evidence that there was someone else there. There is no evidence of forced entry.’

  ‘It was hot. All her windows would have been open.’

  ‘She lives on the third floor of a tenement block that faces straight on to Great Western Road. A good climber could have got up there but they would have been seen doing it. May I go on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you. The visitor arrived sometime after Professor Murdoch’s husband—’

  ‘She’s married? Are you serious?’

  ‘… after her husband left for work, but before Professor Murdoch finished her breakfast. From this, knowing her usual routine, they are assuming that the time was around seven-thirty. You don’t have an alibi for Lee at seven-thirty on Friday morning, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thought not. The assailant was offered a glass of water—water, note, not tea or coffee—which was not touched. Murdoch may have made herself a coffee, but if so, she dropped it. Pieces of broken mug have been found wrapped in newspaper in the kitchen bin. There was a small volume of coffee found in her stomach contents.’

  ‘So how did she die?’

  ‘They don’t know yet. There’s a mark behind her right shoulder that looks as if someone’s pushed in an eighteen-gauge needle. It went through the muscle and on into the right lung. Something might have been injected but the temporary pathologist—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They’ve called in Colin Storey-Pugh from Edinburgh. Apparently he was Lee’s first choice for cover if it was ever needed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s trying to find out what was injected but we’re talking needles in haystacks. It could
take him weeks. There’s some trauma, as if she fell forwards after the blow, and her skeletal muscle looked as if it had gone into spasm before she died. There’s bruising under her arms and it looks as if she was lifted back into the sitting position while she was still alive. That’s as far as they’ve got.’

  ‘What about the husband?’

  ‘He came home on the first train this morning. He’d been at a meeting in Edinburgh and stayed overnight. Multiple rock-solid alibis. He turned up home at eight o’clock to find his loving wife dead at the breakfast table. He’s under sedation at the Western now. Whoever else it might have been, it wasn’t him.’

  ‘So what in heaven’s name makes them think it was Lee?’

  ‘The body was found in the kitchen. When they went through to the bedroom, they found a pad by her bed. It had Lee Adams’s name on it in Hillary Murdoch’s handwriting.’

  ‘A name’s not evidence, Nina. They can’t have taken her in on the strength of that.’

  ‘It was enough for them to take her in for questioning. They let her call a lawyer. She got hold of Doug before they left and he called in twenty minutes ago to let us known they’d just finished the first round of interviews. He’s fairly sure they don’t have a case unless they find something that can link her directly to one of the murders.’

  ‘One of … ?’

  ‘They’re taking her serial theory seriously. Storey-Pugh’s confirmed that there are mask marks on Joey Duncan’s face. He and Martin Coutts are now technically the first two in a series which has Hillary Murdoch as the third. They’ll add Eric to the list if anyone can prove it was murder.’

  ‘Why the hell do they think it’s Lee? She’s far more likely to be next in line.’

  ‘Apparently MacDonald thinks she had reason enough to hate Murdoch, and the others could have been incidental. It’s a known technique, apparently, to wipe out a few innocent bystanders and then hit the one you’re really after.’

  You have to be kidding. ‘Right. This has gone far enough.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find MacDonald and sort out what the hell is going on.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Perfectly. Give Sandy a hand to feed the ponies, will you? I won’t be long.’

  Stewart MacDonald, when he is not at the farm, not at work and not out in the fields with the dogs, is usually to be found at his brother’s forge, dallying with the tools of farriery or helping out with the horses or doing something equally rural. It’s not that he has no home of his own to go to, it’s just that he prefers not to spend very much of his time actually in it. His cottage, when I passed it, showed no signs of life: no car in the drive; no lights; no smoke from the chimney; nobody home. I took a right at the church and drove the four miles down the lane to the forge. His car was there in the yard, pulled up by the horse trough with room to spare for at least one more. His brother, quite clearly, was out.

  My head throbbed, a steady all-over drumbeat, in time with my heart. Too fast, too tight, too near to break-point. Talking business with MacDonald is a dodgy business at the best of times; doing it with anything but a clear head is downright stupidity. I did not, just then, have a clear head.

  I left the car parked by the fence and walked slowly under the archway and up towards the stable block and the paddocks at the back. The walls of the forge stood to my left, thick with centuries of whitewash. MacDonald’s father owned this and his father before him and his father before that, for generations back into Scotland’s warped and bloody past. It is his home in the way the farm is mine. He is safe here. Until now, I have always felt safe here too. I don’t have to let that go. It is not the place itself that is dangerous. Only him. And me, if I don’t calm down.

  I walked round the corner to the stables: great, high-walled, slate-roofed horse-mansions with oak cladding as high as my shoulder and brass fittings that were new when Victoria was a child. The flagged stones of the walkways are old now, worn down by the weather and generations of horses passing through. The stone feed-bowls in the boxes have grooves cut by the constant rub of resting chins. The walls are green with lichen, dry, crumbling grey-green fungus spreading in snowflake patterns across the paler surface of the stone. This is the world as it was before Stewart MacDonald and I were ever born. If his brother plays his cards right, it will still be like this and will still be in the family long after we have gone. This is the kind of thing that settles my sense of perspective. I walked on to the far end of the row, then turned left and circled the yard and back through the archway to the front door. Pain fuzzed at the back of my head like the heat from an open fire. Not bad, just constantly there. Better than it had been. The rain cooled it on the ten-yard walk from the stables to the door.

  MacDonald’s dog lay in wait for me in the porchway, a long-legged hooligan in white and tan, guarding the threshold. I bred this dog. She should know where her loyalties lie. I turned sideways to soften the impact of greeting. ‘Away and get your father, dog. Tell him he’s in big trouble.’ The dog grinned and stayed where she was, following other orders. I kicked off my shoes and pushed my way past a tangle of boots in the porchway, on into the long, high-beamed room that Duncan MacDonald has made the centre of his home.

  ‘Oh, it’s yourself.’ He was there waiting for me by the waterwheel. I love, have always loved, that wheel. I am not going to turn the feel of it sour today.

  ‘Where’s Duncan?’

  ‘He’s away off out on a job. Moira Galbraith’s had one of her event horses throw a shoe and she wants it for competing tomorrow, so he took out the mobile forge and he—’

  ‘Won’t be back until you tell him it’s safe to come home?’

  ‘I dare say he might call in at the farm on the way past, yes.’

  ‘You’re a chancy bastard, MacDonald, you know that?’

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Dr Stewart.’ He smiled. The wheel turned slowly. Tumbling water-light spun past me, out into the room. I smiled back. ‘The coffee’s in the pot on the table,’ he said.

  The coffee was hot, fresh ground, fresh poured. Three mugs stood on the table. Wherever Duncan MacDonald had gone, he hadn’t been out for long.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He poured himself a second coffee and moved over to a leather armchair that sat facing the waterwheel. ‘How much do you know about serial killers?’ he asked.

  ‘Very little.’ I sat on the edge of the great oak beam running at waist height across the full width of the room. My shoulders fitted comfortably against the glass arc of the wheel casing. Cascades of water made music behind me. ‘I know Lee isn’t one of them.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He nodded slowly, blowing across the surface of his mug. ‘Because she’s not capable of killing three folk in a row?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes. And even if she was, it’s not the most likely collection of people. Joey was a friend. She wouldn’t wish him any harm. Martin Coutts was a nobody, a number-cruncher. I can’t think why anyone would care enough to want him dead. That only leaves Hillary Murdoch, and she …’

  ‘… died quite differently to the others. Which is interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not particularly. Should it be?’

  ‘It should if we’re thinking of serial murder, yes. There should be a signature, some quirk about the way each one died that tells you that the same person was responsible for all of them. We don’t have that here.’

  ‘So maybe they’re not linked.’

  ‘Absolutely. Maybe they’re not. In fact, if you think about it, the only reason we think they might be is because Lee Adams sat in your kitchen last night and told us we had a serial killer on the loose. And then she told us Hillary Murdoch was going to be next, which was interesting, given that the woman had been dead for at least twelve hours by then.’

  He talks this way in an interview room, I can feel it: the rolling, lilting West Highland accent seeding doubt and insecurity
in its wake. I sat still for a moment, listening to the chirrup of the water, gathering thoughts that made sense. Few of those and far between. I gave up.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do. I’ve spent all day trying to fit together four separate deaths and it’s only since I’ve come home that I think maybe I’ve been heading down the wrong track.’ He left his coffee on the table and came to sit on the beam at the far end of the wheel. The glass of the casing is thick and wavy and the light coming through it is green. The sheen of it rolled over his face, easing years off his skin, adding strange tones to his hair. From here and like this, he could be thirty, a youth again, still wet behind the ears. ‘You went back up to the rock today, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘You and Lee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t find the friend?’

  ‘We didn’t find it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there to be found.’

  ‘No. But that’s you and the Rescue both. So we’re back to square one on that one.’ He held up a hand. I let out the breath before I knew that I’d taken it in. ‘Let’s just leave Eric open, shall we? He’s dead and he died in a fall. We don’t need to know any more at the moment. Then we have Joey and Martin Coutts both drugged or intoxicated, both dying peacefully in their sleep.’

  ‘Each with mask marks on his face.’

  ‘Which is halfway to a signature. I’m not forgetting that. I have your friend Storey-Pugh going over Professor Murdoch with a magnifying glass as we speak, but there were no signs of a mask when I saw her; and however she died, I wouldn’t have said it was peaceful. We’re definitely cranking up the action on this one.’ He picked up the coffee pot and refilled my mug. The coffee was tepid and heavy with grounds. I swirled the mug and watched them spin up and settle on the sides. I didn’t want, at that moment, to think. The water filled the silence until I realised he was waiting for me to speak.