Lamb to the Slaughter

by Aline Templeton

  ‘She’s fourteen,’ Kerr said. ‘Girls are always horrific at fourteen.’

  ‘But look how they improve later.’ Smiling, Wilson moved up closer to her on the bench seat.

  They had driven the twelve miles to Newton Stewart to find a pub where they weren’t likely to run into anyone who knew them. Having a sandwich and a Coke – a Diet Coke, in Tansy’s case – wasn’t exactly compromising, but going to such lengths to avoid their colleagues so they didn’t have to be careful all the time certainly was. They hadn’t had lunch in the canteen for weeks now, ever since – it – started, and they’d hardly gone to the same pub twice in case they got recognised as regulars.

  Kerr was starting to get nervous. She hadn’t wanted to come so far today and now she said, ‘Will, they’re going to start talking about us if we’re not careful.’

  He took her hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. ‘Nonsense! Everyone always thinks other people are interested in what they do, but in fact most of us are so caught up in our own lives we don’t even notice.’

  ‘I only hope you’re right.’

  ‘’Course I am.’ He pulled her closer and turned her face so that he could kiss her.

  ‘Oh, Will...’ As always, she melted, returning his kiss, then said wistfully, ‘But I do so hate all this secret stuff. Where are we headed, Will?’

  He made a rueful face. ‘Headed? I don’t know, love. We’re happy just now, aren’t we? And that’s all that matters.’

  Kerr wasn’t at all sure that was true, but she agreed anyway. What else could she say? They had stumbled from comradeship into love and they’d made themselves a little, perfect, secret world, but he was the one who would have the big decisions to make and it was still early days. Before you broke up a marriage, even if it was one like this that was dead already, you had to be absolutely sure you were doing the right thing, for the sake of the children. She shied away from the thought of the children.

  Wilson, with just a hint of impatience, was changing the subject. ‘So what do you reckon? Dylan was pretty definite about there being two shots so I think we can assume he was right. Did she think she was firing over his head and got the angle wrong – hit Barney square in the back?’

  ‘A tragic accident? But of course, you suggested that this morning – an accident with a poacher,’ she reminded him helpfully.

  ‘That was top-of-the-head stuff,’ Wilson said stiffly, frowning. ‘I didn’t mean it as a serious suggestion – just thinking aloud who else might be around with a shotgun.’

  She could have kicked herself for lack of tact. She remembered now that the boss had rubbished it at the time, and Will had been miffed, especially when Ewan Campbell’s idea of an ambush had been taken seriously. She went on hastily, ‘Absolutely. So what about the Colonel? Another accident?’ Not that she thought for a moment it could be, but he would enjoy telling her why not.

  ‘Hardly!’ Wilson, restored to good humour, flicked her nose. ‘Do keep up! How could she accidentally shoot someone at their own front door like that? No, you’d have to suppose that unless a connection emerges – and I’d put money on that it doesn’t – the whole Munro business is a complete irrelevance. It’s the sort of accident that’s just waiting to happen, now you can’t take neds like Kyle and Burnett round the back and explain the law to them in the only language they understand.

  ‘It’s different with the Colonel. There’s plenty people might want him dead.’

  ‘Ossian Forbes-Graham, for a start. If he thought the old geyser was having it away with the wondrous Ellie, he’d gun him down without a second thought. They’re all inbred, his class, and he’s barking.’

  There was bitterness there, and Wilson looked quizzical. ‘Not still thinking about your rugger-bugger, are you, Tansy?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she protested. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. I just think it stands out a mile. And I’ll tell you something – if I were Ellie Burnett, I’d be paying for protection.’

  As she spoke, her mobile phone rang; a moment later, so did Wilson’s. He got up and walked away to take his call as she answered hers.

  They both finished at the same time. ‘Well!’ they said simultaneously as he came back to the table.

  ‘Back to HQ, immediately?’ Kerr said.

  ‘What’s that about? Someone confessed?’

  ‘Better step on it going back, or they’ll start wondering what took us so long, when we’re supposed to be in Kirkluce.’ She was edgy.

  Wilson gave her an exasperated look. ‘We were in the middle of talking to someone, right? No one’s going to put a stopwatch on us anyway.’

  Fleming was frowning. ‘Where are Will and Tansy? I gave instructions that they were to be told to drop everything and come straight back. It shouldn’t have taken twenty minutes.

  ‘What were they doing?’

  Campbell, as usual, said nothing as Macdonald shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Interviewing the Gloags and Dylan Burnett, I think. Plus talking to some of the kids at school.’

  ‘Were they in the canteen at lunchtime?’

  ‘No.’

  Fleming’s unease about Wilson deepened. Could there, she wondered suddenly, be something going on there? That would be all she needed. But Will, with three kids under six – and even if he would, surely Tansy wouldn’t...

  She drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘I’m reluctant to start, and then have to recap the whole thing for them. I’ll give them three minutes.’

  She’d had to go through it all once already for the superintendent’s benefit. When she’d briefed Bailey and the Chief Constable this morning, she’d stressed that there was absolutely no proof as yet of a connection between the two murders, but though they had nodded gravely, she’d sensed she wasn’t taking them with her. Menzies had only stayed ten minutes, then gone off to Glasgow to catch a flight to London, and she’d heard him say to Bailey, ‘Sounds as if you’ve got this wrapped up, once you sort out the details. My wife will be pleased – she’s been most distressed about poor Andrew.’

  So Bailey had been at first incredulous – ‘You don’t mean to tell me she couldn’t have killed the boy, even by accident?’ – then agitated. ‘I’ve had the CC’s wife on the phone thanking me for clearing it up so efficiently,’ he said.

  ‘Then she was seriously premature,’ Fleming said tartly. ‘It certainly didn’t come from me. You heard what I said this morning.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Bailey said testily. ‘But where do we go from here, Marjory?’

  ‘You’ll be the first to know, Donald, once I know myself.’ She got up. ‘I’ve this and that to do. Like prepare a statement for the press officer.’

  He went pale. ‘Oh God, Marjory, the press—’

  But she hadn’t waited to hear his lamentations. ‘Haven’t time to go through that,’ she’d said – but now here she was, wasting that precious commodity on two junior officers who needed a good kicking.

  ‘I suppose we’d better get on with this,’ she was saying, as there was a knock on the door and Wilson and Kerr appeared, she looking flustered and he, after a glance at her face, sullen.

  ‘Didn’t you get the message to return immediately?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Wilson said, with a glance at Kerr which Fleming interpreted as a warning to let him do the talking.

  ‘So? What kept you?’

  ‘I’m sorry. We were talking to someone and I didn’t quite realise you meant us to break off in the middle of an interview.’

  Kerr’s eyes were lowered and her arms folded. Fleming was all but certain this wasn’t true. She pressed him. ‘Useful interview?’

  ‘Sadly not. A member of the public stopped us and said he’d information about the murders, but what he meant was he had theories.’

  ‘And you couldn’t have cut him short?’

  Wilson was looking at her very directly, his eyes wide and innocent. ‘We did. Once we realised.’

  Now she knew he was lying, but today she
didn’t have the luxury of time to deal with it. ‘I’ll leave it there – for the present,’ she said coldly. ‘Sit down.’

  Kerr slid into a seat with obvious relief; Wilson took a moment to greet the other two men before he took his place. Fleming recognised it as a small gesture of defiance, but wasn’t unwise enough to be drawn.

  ‘We’ve had very unexpected results from the autopsy,’ she began, and saw the astonishment in their faces as she told them.

  ‘You mean,’ Kerr said at last, ‘that there really was someone hiding in the bushes, like Ewan suggested?’

  ‘Seems so. From the angle of the shot, it looks as if it was fired at fairly short range from behind and to Kyle’s right. Incidentally, the pathologist also thinks it likely the trauma was such that he would have collapsed almost instantly, though given the momentum of the bike he’s not prepared to state categorically that he couldn’t have been carried on. Anyway, I’ve asked the SOCOs to do a focused search in that area of the farm track.

  ‘The other thing is that the gun that shot them both had been loaded with buckshot. You wouldn’t use that for ordinary rough shooting, or shooting at clays. It’s what you’d need to bring down a deer, say, which suggests the killer had his targets in mind when he bought the ammunition. But what is there to link the Colonel and Barney Kyle?’

  ‘And a dead sheep,’ Macdonald said.

  Fleming was startled. ‘Dead sheep? Oh, of course. I’d forgotten the dead sheep.’

  ‘So had I, to be honest, until—’ Macdonald stopped.

  ‘Until?’ Fleming prompted.

  ‘Until – until I – er, remembered,’ he finished lamely.

  She gave him a look of exasperation. What was wrong with them all? Was lying contagious? ‘Anyway, the dead sheep. We don’t know, of course, how it was shot – or that it definitely had been shot, even. But in the peculiar circumstances of finding it dumped in the Craft Centre ... You’d have to say it doesn’t sound like run-of-the-mill animal cruelty for kicks.

  ‘So what are we to make of that – someone shooting a sheep, an elderly man and a young tearaway? What’s the connection between those three?’ She looked round them questioningly.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Campbell said, ‘Could be random. You know, a sniper, like they get in America.’

  Fleming looked at him in horror. ‘Don’t say that!’ she begged. ‘Don’t even think that, outside this room! Can you imagine the effect on the public, if they think someone’s wandering around, ready to pick them off when they go out to the shops for their messages?’

  ‘You’d have to say there’s something in that,’ Wilson said thoughtfully. ‘There’s a weird feeling about this whole thing. Especially the sheep.’

  ‘Let’s leave the sheep out of it for the moment,’ Fleming said desperately. ‘Focus on Carmichael and the boy. Someone wanted rid of them both. Is it about the first murder – the boy, say, witnessing something incriminating? Is there something we don’t know about that unites them? Or has someone killed two people who separately have given him reason to want them dead? Let’s have some focused thinking here.’

  Macdonald sat up. ‘Pete Spencer – he’s done a runner. He lives with Romy Kyle, but she doesn’t know where he is or what’s happened – she was in her workshop last night and he was gone when she got home. He wouldn’t open the door when our lads went round there to break the news, and the neighbour says he left with suitcases in the middle of the night.’

  Suddenly everyone was sitting up. Fleming’s heart lifted. ‘So he had a very direct connection with the boy—’

  ‘And Colonel Carmichael had found out about a financial scam he’d been running. He’d form, had served time for it – he might have been prepared to take drastic action to stop that happening again.’

  They were all excited now. Kerr said, ‘And Gordon Gloag said that Barney really hated Pete – went on about it. And—’

  Wilson interrupted eagerly. ‘If there was aggro with the boy, once he’d had to bump off Carmichael, he might have thought he was as well to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.’

  ‘A dead sheep,’ Macdonald quipped.

  Only Campbell didn’t smile. ‘I don’t see why he’d want to kill the sheep, though. It was sort of like a warning, you’d say.’

  ‘Right,’ Kerr said. ‘So it was a warning. Carmichael owned the Craft Centre, so this was him saying, “Don’t shop me, or else.”’

  Campbell was dogged. ‘But why wouldn’t he put it in the garden at Fauldburn House instead? The Colonel might never see it at the Craft Centre.’

  An uneasy feeling stirred in Fleming. Why, indeed? And how could you be sure that Carmichael’s immediate reaction after a threat like that wouldn’t be to come straight to the police with the story? But the man had fled, after all...

  She fought down her misgivings. ‘We’ll get out an All Points Bulletin. He may be gone already, but it’s the best we can do. Will, you look after that. Tansy, get the number of his car and run it past the ferry companies. Ewan, find someone to swear out a warrant for Mrs Kyle’s house and whenever it comes through I want you and Andy to go over there. Best contact Victim Support to be on hand as well, though – don’t forget that Mrs Kyle’s just lost her son, and this is going to make things very much worse. And there’s the CCTV footage too – Tansy, once you’ve got the registration number, get that organised to see if it tells us anything about Spencer’s movements at the significant time.

  ‘And, it goes without saying, any brilliant initiative you come up with yourselves.’ She smiled. ‘OK, that’s it.’

  They got up to go, and Fleming was activating her computer when the thought struck her. ‘Andy,’ she called after him, ‘where did this information about Spencer’s scam come from?’

  He came back with obvious reluctance and Fleming could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down. ‘Er – a tip-off.’

  ‘A CHIS?’ She gave him a hard stare. She didn’t think for a minute it had come from what was now known as a Covert Human Intelligence Source, and she could see him squirming.

  ‘Umm – you could say.’

  Tam MacNee, no doubt. But she let it go. There are some things it is simply better not to know.

  ‘Fine. Thanks, Andy.’

  ‘What happens now, boss – to Christina Munro, I mean?’

  Fleming pulled a face. ‘The timing’s up to the fiscal. The complaint will be reduced to culpable and reckless discharge of a firearm, so it’ll be heard in the Sheriff Court instead of the High Court and it’s a summary offence so there won’t even be a jury. She’ll probably plead guilty, and if the Sheriff’s in a benevolent mood, given an early plea, the background and the fact that she had a night on remand, she’ll only get a slap on the wrist.’

  ‘To be honest, I’m glad about that,’ Macdonald said. ‘Oh, you can’t have old ladies loosing off guns when they feel like it, but the neds have it all their own way these days.’

  ‘This one didn’t,’ Fleming said soberly. Then, prompted by a niggling doubt, she went on, ‘Andy, what’s your feeling about Spencer?’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t know the man, boss.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what makes me uncomfortable. Three things, actually. One – OK, making a run for it is suspicious, but it’s also seriously dumb. It’s like fixing up a great neon sign saying “Guilty” and pointing it at your head.’

  ‘See what you mean. Conmen aren’t usually stupid. You’d think he’d have brazened it out.’

  ‘Right. And two – why would the police coming to the door have spooked him? He’d have known they’d be coming to break the news to Romy. It’s more the reaction of someone who thinks they’re at the door because the game’s up.’

  Macdonald was much struck by this. ‘That’s right! I didn’t think of it that way.’

  It was a little like having a conversation with herself. Andy Mac was sound enough, with his own strengths as a detective, but he’d never have the flair for picking u
p connections and discrepancies that had made Tam invaluable on occasions like this.

  She realised Macdonald was looking at her and she said hastily, ‘Sorry, thanks, Andy, that’s all.’

  ‘You said there was a third thing?’

  ‘Oh – oh yes.’ She didn’t like thinking about this one. ‘It was Ewan’s comment. As you said, he’s got a knack of putting his finger on the problem. Why the dead sheep? You don’t think we really do have a sniper, do you?’

  Macdonald laughed. ‘No, I don’t. This is Kirkluce, not the American Mid-West. And Spencer may just have gone because he reckoned he could get clean away, and was scared that once the investigation started we’d finger him and he’d be trapped.’

  ‘It’s a good thought. Thanks, Andy.’

  He left, and she went back to the computer to work out a press statement. She’d have to discuss with Bailey how much she told them. It was tempting to give them the usual line about on-going enquiries, at least until the homicide charge against Munro was officially dropped, but once you put out an APB it could easily leak. It could leak from within, too; she was painfully aware that there was an officer – or more than one, even – who had in the past done a line in tip-offs to the press.

  She could only hope they’d pick up Spencer soon. It wasn’t as easy as you’d think to disappear. If you weren’t to leave a money trail, you needed to get your hands on cash and it sounded as if he’d left on the spur of the moment. He’d have a credit card, most likely, and if he used it they’d catch up with him before long.

  ‘Cheers!’ Pete Spencer lifted a pint of Guinness to his lips. ‘You’ve got a bargain there. Goes like a bird.’ He reached over to an adjoining bar stool and opened a bulging briefcase which was lying on it. ‘Here you are – log book, MOT, insurance...’

  The cheerful, round-faced Irishman sitting on his other side raised his glass too. ‘Good deal for the both of us, so it is.’ He handed over a thick wad of notes.

  ‘Thanks. Gives me a bit of spending money!’

  ‘Where are you off to?’