Lamb to the Slaughter

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Any reason?’ MacNee asked bluntly.

  ‘If I had, I’d have come to you with it long ago. It’s just ... well, I’ve told you what I think. Over to you.’ He turned away and went back up the stairs.

  MacNee looked after him, his eyebrows raised. ‘Could be right, you know. Jealous of the Colonel, and if Kyle got across him somehow—’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’d be a lot more worried about suicide, given the way that boy’s looking. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.’

  Fleming gasped as she entered the studio. The contrast between the starkly white walls and the dramatic colours of the paintings on the walls was startling, but more startling was the fact that each of them had been slashed, again and again, so that the canvas hung down in streamers. For all she knew about modern art, this could have been deliberate, but the Stanley knife lying on the floor in front of them suggested otherwise. She and MacNee exchanged troubled glances.

  The artist was sitting in a chair facing out into the courtyard and he was crying quietly. There was no other chair in the room; Fleming went over and crouched beside him.

  ‘You seem very unhappy, Ossian.’ Her voice was low, attractive, inviting confidences.

  He turned his head as if only now registering the police presence. There was bruising coming out already round one of the light blue eyes and the thick, dark lashes round them were wet and clumped into spikes like a crying child’s.

  ‘I’m losing her,’ he said. ‘He’s taking her away and there’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘She’s made her choice,’ Fleming said gently. ‘You have to accept that.’

  ‘But I can’t, I can’t! What does it say about me? If she preferred that – that oaf, to someone who creates – created these,’ he corrected himself with a whirling gesture towards the damaged paintings, ‘then I’m nothing.’

  It was very pathetic. ‘Look, lad,’ MacNee said with gruff kindness, ‘what you’re worth isn’t to do with what anyone else thinks. I know you’re seeing Dr Rutherford. You go and talk to him. That’ll help.’

  Forbes-Graham only shook his head, still staring hopelessly out of the window. Fleming noticed that his nails were not only bitten to the quick, but raw. His problems, though, weren’t really their business. She wasn’t sure she’d get any sense out of him at all, but she might as well try.

  ‘Did you know Barney Kyle, Ossian?’

  He turned his head slowly. ‘She hated him. He was bad for Dylan, a bad influence, and Dylan’s her world. Or he was – till now.’ His face darkened. ‘I wouldn’t have minded sharing her with him – but Black—’ He spat the name.

  That degree of loathing was, in the circumstances, worrying. ‘And the Colonel?’ Fleming went on. ‘What about him?’

  Forbes-Graham scowled. ‘She needed him, that was the thing. She told me, if it wasn’t for him, she’d be on the scrap heap. She’d have done anything he wanted.’

  ‘And what did he want, Ossian?’ She made her voice softer again, coaxing him to talk.

  ‘What would any man want from Ellie?’ he said, then jumped up so suddenly that Fleming almost overbalanced. ‘Look! There she is! See for yourself!’

  She straightened up, looking with considerable curiosity at the woman she had heard so much about, and saw a slight woman with silvery-fair hair which came down to her ­shoulders in pre-Raphaelite waves. She had the sort of delicate beauty which is unfashionable in this brasher age, with fine features and porcelain skin, but she looked tired and thin, and her grey-blue eyes, as she looked up at Black helping her into the van, had an expression which Fleming could only describe as haunting. She could see just what MacNee meant, and when she glanced at them both men were gawping at Ellie with identical expressions on their faces.

  Fleming cleared her throat loudly, and MacNee jumped. ‘What are you going to do now, Ossian?’ she asked.

  He didn’t speak, watching intently as Black slammed the doors of the van shut and drove away. Then he collapsed back into his chair. ‘Gone,’ he said dully. ‘Gone.’

  MacNee was prowling round the studio, possibly, Fleming thought, to cover his own embarrassment. Suddenly he said, ‘Boss!’ with urgency in his tone.

  At the back of the studio a corner had been blocked off to provide a small lavatory and a basic kitchen area, with a sink and a microwave. Propped against one of the storage cabinets was a double-barrelled, over-and-under shotgun.

  Tansy Kerr’s spirits had lifted when MacNee summoned her to accompany him out to Ravenshill while Fleming interviewed Ossian. She’d hoped to be given a more interesting detail this morning but nothing had happened, what with the boss being in late, and all the fuss about Salaman ... She had a dreadful feeling that it had something to do with what she’d told Tam about Will, but she’d made a deliberate decision not to go there.

  She’d made a point of occupying herself with trawling through every report she could lay hands on, hoping to redeem herself by finding some wow-factor evidence, which so far hadn’t appeared, but she reckoned that by now she knew more about the details of the case than anyone else did, up to and including Big Marge.

  Still, it looked as if penetrating insights wouldn’t be called for. Everyone was playing it cool, but there was a mood of excitement – and, of course, she had fancied Ossian Forbes-Graham for it from the start.

  He hadn’t been arrested, just agreed to ‘help the police with their enquiries’; he was at the station now. And she and MacNee were heading off to ask Daniel Simpson at the clay-pigeon range some very pointed questions.

  MacNee had been upbeat. ‘Ossian’s got the motives, you see – weird ones, but no one ever said he wasn’t weird. And by his own admission, he nicked the gun out of one of the lockers. Claimed he hadn’t managed to get any ammunition for it, and that if he got some he was only going to use it on himself, but then—’

  ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Kerr finished for him. ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘Tricky situation. His father owns the clay-pigeon business, so by extension the guns, and they’re all properly licensed. If he claims his son had it with his permission, given that it wasn’t loaded and there wasn’t a single cartridge in the studio, we haven’t a leg to stand on.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’

  ‘Lean on Simpson, for a start. Find out if he’s as casual about ammunition as he is about the guns. I came up here earlier, and I could have helped myself to a gun myself if he was distracted for a few minutes, after he let me see where the keys were and watch him while he tapped in the code.’

  The place was very quiet when they arrived, with only one car, presumably Simpson’s, parked outside. When they went into the converted steading, he was sitting reading a shooting magazine.

  As MacNee showed his warrant card and mentioned their names, Kerr saw unease in Simpson’s eyes.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said roughly. ‘What are you ­wanting?’

  ‘Just a word about security,’ MacNee said.

  ‘You saw it all last time, when you were wasting my time, pretending to be a punter.’ His tone was unfriendly. ‘Is this an official inspection, then?’

  ‘Let’s call it that. Are all your guns accounted for?’

  ‘Of course they effing are. You don’t think we let the clients take them away as a party bag, do you?’

  ‘You count them out, and you count them all back in again, you might say?’

  MacNee, Kerr thought, was enjoying this, like a cat finding a mouse whose self-preservation skills were seriously underdeveloped.

  Simpson got up. ‘Yes, all twelve of them, though I can’t remember when we last used more than four. People bring their own guns. But I suppose you want to see for yourself.’ Looking elaborately bored, he led the way through to the back office, fetched a key from a drawer, then went to a ­security pad by a doorway and keyed in a number.

  ‘You don’t change the code, then? That’s the same as it was when I came out last time,’ MacNee
pointed out unhelpfully.

  ‘So? There’s always one of us here when the place isn’t locked up, and there’s an alarm system, of course.’

  He showed them into the windowless room with three steel cabinets against one wall. He unlocked the nearest.

  ‘These are the guns we use mostly.’

  There was a rack to hold four guns, with a gun in each slot. Simpson looked at MacNee. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘And the next one.’

  His shrug indicated how pointless he thought all this was, but he did as he was told, gesturing to the four guns inside.

  ‘And the last one.’

  He was looking towards MacNee as he opened it, rather than into the cupboard, hoping, Kerr guessed, to see a look of chagrin. When, instead, MacNee’s gap-tooth smile appeared, Simpson’s face changed and he whipped round to see three guns, and a space where the fourth should have been.

  ‘But – but—’ he spluttered. ‘It can’t be missing! We haven’t had a break-in or anything.’

  ‘We’re not suggesting you have. When was the last time you opened this cabinet?’

  Simpson had turned very pale. ‘I couldn’t tell you. Months ago.’

  ‘I see. Where do you keep the ammunition?’

  ‘We have to keep it separate.’ He locked the cupboards, saw them out of the room and closed the door. Catching MacNee looking at the keypad, he said defensively, ‘I’ll change the code later.’

  ‘Right, right. Smart thinking, locking the stable door like that. You wouldn’t want the horse getting back in, or anything.’

  Trying to ignore MacNee’s sarcasm, Simpson went to a cupboard on the far side of the room, pulled some keys on a chain out of his pocket and opened the door. It was stacked with boxes of cartridges, marked with numbers which meant nothing to Kerr.

  MacNee jerked his head towards the keys. ‘Is that the only one for this cupboard?’

  ‘Giles has his set on a chain like this. Makes it easier to have it handy along with the others we use a lot.’

  MacNee went on, asking if there was a log recording how many were used, but it seemed that this was another area where the casual attitude prevailed too and it seemed unlikely that anyone would have any idea whether some had gone missing or not. Simpson was looking less and less happy.

  Still studying the boxes in the cupboard, Kerr asked, ‘Which are the ones that hold buckshot?’

  ‘None of them. We never keep it. You’d only need it if you were going to shoot deer, or something like that.’

  MacNee looked at her quizzically as she asked, ‘How would you get it, if you wanted it?’

  ‘Easiest off the internet, probably. Or a gun shop, if you wanted to go and get it yourself.’ He named the only one locally, a country store about ten miles away.

  Kerr got out a notebook and scribbled down the name. MacNee was clearly intrigued, even a little irritated, by his own ignorance of the line she was taking. Well, she’d felt that often enough working with him. Time for a bit of role reversal.

  ‘I think that’s all I wanted to know. What about you, sarge?’

  Torn between annoyance and curiosity, MacNee agreed and they left. ‘What was all that about?’ he demanded as they got back into the car.

  ‘I’ve read the post-mortem report. It was buckshot that was used.’

  ‘Right,’ he said slowly. ‘So wherever he got it, he didn’t get it here. Damn. Opens up a whole new set of enquiries.’

  ‘At least it opens up something,’ Kerr pointed out. ‘Our problem so far has been every line we’ve followed shutting down. I suppose it’s the gun shop, next.’

  21

  DI Fleming left the interview room with DS Macdonald, nodding to the constable at the door as she went out. She wasn’t happy.

  ‘What did you make of that, Andy?’

  ‘Nothing to go on, really, was there?’

  She groaned. ‘I was hoping you’d spotted something that had passed me by. He’s got access to a shotgun, he’s got motives, of a tenuous sort, and he’s vague about where he was when Carmichael was killed. That’s all, and I can think of a dozen people that applies to, and he claims he was home with his parents on Monday evening. We’ve no case, have we?’

  ‘Not so far. I could go out and check with the Forbes-Grahams, though.’

  ‘Might be an idea to do that before we turn him loose and they know what they need to say to back him.’

  She was frowning as they walked along the corridor. ‘I just don’t know about Ossian. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe he isn’t. He has such weird reactions anyway that I can’t get any feel for it.

  ‘I don’t think we need worry too much about Ellie Burnett’s safety, though, whatever Black says. If anything, I’d think Black would be a likelier target, and I reckon he can look after himself, now we’ve removed the gun.’

  They were just reaching the bottom of the stairs. ‘OK, Andy, you head off then,’ she was saying, when a policewoman came hurrying down.

  ‘Oh, ma’am, I’ve been looking for you. Mr and Mrs Forbes-Graham are at the desk, wanting information. They’re – well, she’s very persistent. I think PC Brodie’s getting a bit frantic, if you know what I mean.’ She delivered her message and went off with a small smile that indicated a reprehensible, if human, enjoyment of another’s misfortune.

  Fleming went across to the glass door which led into the entrance hall and saw a solidly built dark man and a woman with greying fair hair and wearing drifting draperies, at the reception desk. The woman seemed to be having what might diplomatically be described as an animated discussion with the duty officer.

  ‘Ah,’ Fleming said. ‘Trouble.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Might as well take it on the chin. It’ll save you a journey, anyway.’

  ‘I’m right behind you, boss.’

  ‘Behind me, I notice, not in front,’ she said tartly as she opened the door and walked across to the desk.

  Murdoch Forbes-Graham, standing a little back from his wife and looking uncomfortable, turned as they approached, but Deirdre, in full flow, paid no attention.

  ‘I demand to speak to the person in charge. I ask you again, where is my son?’ She had a plaintive but penetrating voice.

  PC Brodie was a probationer, a somewhat chinless young man who, as the inspector approached, was opening and shutting his mouth, trying to get a word in, and failing. As the detectives reached him, he cast Fleming a pitiful look, his round blue eyes glassy with alarm.

  Trying hard to put codfish out of her mind, Fleming said, ‘It’s all right, constable, I’ll take over,’ and was almost blown away by his sigh of relief.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Forbes-Graham? I’m DI Fleming. This is DS Macdonald. Shall we go into the waiting-room?’

  She led the way, ignoring Deirdre’s querulous litany of complaint. ‘And I learn of my own son’s detention in a phone call from a neighbour – a neighbour who had seen him being driven along the High Street in a police car! I demand to know where he is, and what right you have to treat him in this way...’

  Getting her to sit down by means of hand-signals wasn’t easy, but eventually Deirdre subsided into a chair, still complaining. ‘I have had no satisfactory explanation, none at all. Is this what we have come to – the police state?’

  Fleming said nothing, simply studying her hands, and taking his cue from her Macdonald, too, showed no reaction. Sooner or later surely the woman would realise that when you wanted information you had to stop talking in order to get it.

  Murdoch was looking acutely embarrassed. At last he interrupted, with a tentativeness at variance with his appearance and bearing, ‘My dear, I think you should give the officers time to answer our questions.’

  She gave him a wounded look. ‘I’m sorry. I am, quite ­naturally, overwrought. My son was exhausted when he came home last night – exhausted! And now this! However—’ With a sweeping gesture she indicated that the officers could now begin their apology.

  Fleming wa
s in no mood to play games. She let the pause lengthen, then said, ‘Right. Shall we start again? I understand you want to know what has happened to your son. Since he is not a minor, you have no entitlement to information, but in the interests of good relations I am happy to talk to you.

  ‘Your son has not been arrested. He agreed to come here to answer some questions, and you may be able to help us here. My sergeant and I would like to question you both, separately. This may help us to eliminate him from enquiries, but of course it is entirely up to you.’

  Deirdre clasped her hands and bowed her head. She had very dramatic body language: Fleming interpreted this as relief, perhaps, that there had been no arrest along with a prayer for a successful outcome.

  ‘I will do anything, inspector, anything, to help you clear my son’s name.’ She gave Fleming a tremulous smile.

  Murdoch, however, was unimpressed. ‘I’m somewhat uneasy about this, inspector. You mean, you want to check our stories against one another – and against what Ossian has already told you?’

  It was, of course, exactly what they wanted to do, but it was supremely unhelpful to have it spelled out. Deirdre’s face changed and her hand went to her heart.

  ‘You mean – you are going to use us to try to trap him? How – how despicable!’

  ‘Not trap him, madam,’ Macdonald put in earnestly. ‘We only want the simple truth – that’s easy enough, surely?’

  There were, Fleming reckoned, at least three people in the room who felt that simple truth was a difficult if not impossible demand, and that was to give Macdonald’s sincerity the benefit of the doubt.

  Murdoch said frigidly, ‘Of course it is our duty to answer your questions. But there is no way I would permit my wife to be taken away and interrogated on her own. She is extremely sensitive, and she is quite distressed enough already.’

  Deirdre’s eyes obligingly filled with tears. ‘My husband is right. I shall certainly refuse to say anything, unless he is present.’

  ‘Very well,’ Fleming said, in some irritation. Her patience was in short supply today, and this pair would have made Job curse God and die. ‘Mr Forbes-Graham, your son was found today in possession of a shotgun which he tells us he took from the lockers at your clay-pigeon range. Did he have it with your permission?’