Lamb to the Slaughter

by Aline Templeton

  Between them, lying spreadeagled on the carpet, was what was probably Johnny, though it was hard to tell. There was blood everywhere, on the walls, on the floor, on his mother’s clothes. The smell—

  Dylan gagged, then screamed and screamed again. He couldn’t move, he was paralysed—

  It was only at that point that Ellie seemed to notice him. Her eyes were blank and staring, but she blinked, then focused on him. ‘Oh, Dylan, I’ve waited for you.’ She sounded quite calm. ‘I had to see you, to explain, so you’d understand—’ She got out of her chair.

  The power of movement came back to him. ‘Don’t – don’t come near me,’ he croaked, backing away.

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t know, you see—’

  All right? When Johnny was lying there—? She was coming towards him and he turned to run. He saw a gun, propped against a wall near the door, seized it and ran down the stairs.

  He thought it might be loaded still. He held it carefully as he ran, ran and ran along the High Street till he came to the Kirkluce Police Headquarters. In his wake, two passers-by were reaching for their mobile phones.

  ‘Drugs,’ MacNee said heavily. ‘Didn’t realise. Wonder how long that’s been going on? Don’t really need to work out a motive, do you, if she’s off her head?’

  They were all shocked. He, Fleming and Kerr stood in the workshop yard as Ellie was taken away and uniformed officers set about securing the scene.

  ‘You’d have to say she knew how to fire a gun, all right,’ Kerr said with what MacNee felt was tasteless point-­scoring.

  ‘OK, OK. But that bonny girl – can’t believe it, really.’

  Fleming had been very quiet. ‘Yes,’ was all she said, then, ‘Sorry. I’d better get back. Phone calls to make ...’ She moved away.

  ‘Men!’ Kerr was saying scornfully. ‘“Bonny girl”! Even after all this time, you still think we’re poor, pathetic, feeble creatures. But we’re not.’

  And MacNee, thinking of Fiona Farquharson, Romy Kyle and Christina Munro – and, indeed, Marjory Fleming and Bunty MacNee – couldn’t find anything to say.

  Fleming was on the phone to Superintendent Bailey when Dr Rutherford came in. ‘Sorry, can I call you back? Police doctor’s just arrived from seeing Burnett.’

  She set down the phone. ‘Dr Rutherford, do sit down. What is the situation with Ellie Burnett?’

  Rutherford looked grave. ‘In my judgement she ought to wait until tomorrow morning at the very earliest before she says anything, but she’s adamant that she wants to do it as soon as possible.’

  ‘Is she under the influence of drugs?’

  ‘Without running tests I’m not prepared to make a judgement on that. But she should certainly have a lawyer present before she makes any sort of statement.’

  ‘No,’ Fleming said flatly. ‘She has said that she is ready to speak to us, and as I understand it you are not claiming that she is medically incapable of giving informed consent. She cannot see a lawyer until we have had six hours to question her.’

  Rutherford was definitely put out. ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fleming was getting irritated in her turn; surely he should know that most basic rule?

  ‘I see. Then I can only say she would be much wiser to wait but I can’t state that she doesn’t know what she’s saying.’

  It had become an adversarial situation, which she hadn’t expected. ‘Can I be quite clear about this? If asked later, you will confirm that you agreed she could be questioned?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word ‘regretfully’ hung on the air.

  ‘Thank you, doctor.’ They both stood up, and he left, clearly unhappy.

  As the door shut behind him, Fleming pulled a face at it. It was probably something to do with the Hippocratic oath, and all very admirable, but she had a job to do. Ellie wasn’t his patient; he was the police doctor and they were meant to be on the same side.

  She looked at the time. She’d better phone the fiscal, before she called Bailey back for what was likely to be quite a lengthy discussion. With the phone calls that had come in about a deranged youth rampaging through the streets with a gun, rumours would be rife, and it would never do if the fiscal heard a garbled story from someone else, when he was technically in charge of the enquiry.

  It was a surprise, when she was put through, to hear a female voice at the other end of the line saying, ‘DI Fleming? This is Sheila Milne.’

  One of the deputies, Fleming assumed, but she needed to speak to the fiscal himself. ‘I’m sorry, I wanted Duncan Mackay.’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Mr Mackay is in hospital after a heart attack. I’ve been brought in as acting Procurator Fiscal.’

  It was unreasonable to take against someone’s voice, just because she was making an unconvincing attempt at a posh accent. Hiding her feelings, Fleming said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear he’s ill. Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘I understand they’re optimistic. They’re having to do a triple bypass, though, so he will be off for some considerable time. So for the foreseeable future I shall be in charge.

  ‘I’ve been reading your reports, naturally, but I would prefer to be briefed more directly. I want to know exactly what is being done in my name.’

  Fleming’s heart sank. The portly Duncan Mackay’s reluctance to get directly involved had made her life a lot easier; she knew from colleagues in other forces what a nightmare it could be when you had a fiscal who fancied starring in high-profile cases.

  ‘Of course, if that’s what you want,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was phoning to alert you to the latest development...’

  At the mention of another shooting, she heard a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line, but she hastily explained that the woman was in custody and seemed likely to enter a guilty plea, at least to the most recent killing.

  ‘That’s very satisfactory. Confessions are what we want – saves our time and the tax-payers’ money.’

  ‘I accept that,’ Fleming said carefully. ‘Provided we are sure of corroboration.’

  ‘Inspector, do you imagine I am unfamiliar with Scots law?’ The accent had slipped a little. ‘Look, you do your job, which is getting the evidence, and I’ll do mine, which is getting convictions. I hope we understand each other?’

  ‘I’m sure we do.’

  ‘I shall, of course, wish to visit the scene of the crime. Can you arrange for that, please?’

  Fleming assured her this would be done, then put down the phone with serious misgivings. Somehow she didn’t think Sheila Milne would be easy to work with, and with all her heart she wished poor Duncan a speedy recovery.

  She wondered what Milne would make of the crime scene, which was one of the most unpleasant she herself had ever had to attend. The state of the body and the room – and Ellie Burnett, blood-spattered and dazed-looking...

  MacNee was right, of course, that drugs were involved in this somewhere. But as she had been taken out past them, Ellie had looked full into her own eyes and there Fleming had seen such a depth of agony and despair that she felt shaken by it still.

  It seemed, as the fiscal clearly thought, a satisfactory solution to it all – but Fleming wasn’t satisfied. She pulled out the mind-map again and studied it, tapping her finger on her front tooth.

  She was playing with ideas, twisting and turning them in her mind, when, with the suddenness of the tumblers of a combination lock falling into place, she understood. There was, as she had always a little desperately believed, a rationale behind all this, but it was one so warped, so shocking, that she gasped, then shivered. It was as if she had looked into a pit of darkness, and saw the deadly game at last for what it was. She still didn’t know everything, but if she was right, there was a quality of purest evil here that she had never, in all her professional life, encountered before.

  ‘Is there someone you can stay with meantime, Dylan?’ Dr Rutherford asked gently. ‘Your father—’

  The boy’s tee
th were chattering so that he could hardly speak. The motherly Sergeant Bruce, who had only recently managed to get him calm enough to speak at all, said, ‘I’ve contacted the mother of one of his schoolfriends. She’s coming right over.’

  ‘Good. You’ll be all right then, Dylan, and I’m going to give you something that will make you feel a bit better. How are you about injections? OK? Good lad.’

  He turned to take a syringe out of his case. ‘Have we contact details for the father?’ he asked Bruce as he rolled up the boy’s sleeve.

  ‘He’s been reached by mobile phone. The funfair’s up in Elgin at the moment – five, six hours’ drive, maybe? I guess it’ll be tomorrow before he gets here.’

  Rutherford nodded. He rubbed Dylan’s arm with a swab and injected the sedative. The boy hardly seemed to notice.

  ‘You’ll feel a bit better shortly. Just sit back and try to relax.’

  Dylan did what he was told, like a zombie. As Rutherford went to the door he said to Bruce, ‘I know he’s not under age, but I want to make it clear that he is totally unfit to cope with police questioning, at least before his father gets here in the morning.’

  He spoke sternly, and Bruce gave him a cool look. ‘No one’s considering anything except his welfare at the moment. He’ll talk to us when he’s ready.’

  Dylan looked up sharply. ‘She killed Johnny. I’ll do anything you want if it helps to make her pay. It was – it was like he was my real dad. And she killed him, her with her rotten drugs.’

  Bruce sat down beside him and put her arm round his shoulders. ‘Shush, shush. Time enough to think about it later.’

  But she couldn’t stop him. He had been in shock before; now, perhaps with the calming effect of the quick-acting drug, he was starting to think about it. ‘And – and Barney, and that old guy too. Oh God, I want to die!’

  Neither adult spoke. What was there to say? Soon, the chemical comfort would ease his agony, but only until tomorrow morning.

  Fleming had detailed MacNee to join in Ellie Burnett’s interview, though she wasn’t entirely sure it was wise. Tam had been so disillusioned by the toppling of this icon of beauty and vulnerability that she was afraid he might go in too hard on a woman who must by now be teetering on the brink of mental disintegration.

  She hadn’t told him what she herself thought. It was, after all, still only a theory, and MacNee had the sharpest mind of any of her team. It would be better to let him come with a fresh mind to Ellie’s evidence – always supposing it was coherent. Which would, presumably, depend on what drugs she had taken, and when.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ MacNee gave his usual laconic response to the summons to Ellie Burnett’s interview. He’d have been offended if Fleming had detailed anyone else, but he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to do it.

  His romantic soul, the part of him that responded to love poetry and patriotism, was well concealed, or so he liked to think, and overlaid in real life with healthy cynicism. Yet somehow Ellie Burnett had got under his skin and he found that hard to forgive.

  And the drugs. He took a hard line on drugs – too hard, Fleming told him sometimes, but then she hadn’t had his experience. They always trotted out the excuses about poverty and deprivation – well, been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the scars. And when it came right down to it, you’d a choice. A tough choice, if you’d been stupid enough to make the wrong one in the first place, but not making it was your decision and you should take the consequences. He was living proof that being a victim wasn’t compulsory and he wasn’t about to make allowances for her.

  He was angry with himself for being gullible, and angry with Ellie for what she had made him feel, even if all she’d done was be what she was and sing like an angel. Added to that, what she’d done had left her son in pieces, according to Linda Bruce.

  So he was taking quite a bit of baggage with him into this interview – not the best professional attitude, maybe, but that was just the way it was. Anyway, this was an open-and-shut case, and the boss had a talent for talking even the more reluctant ones through it. He could just tuck in behind.

  But when he reached the interview rooms, Tansy Kerr was waiting in the corridor with Fleming.

  ‘I’m going to get you and Tansy to take this one, Tam,’ Fleming said. ‘I want to observe, at least for a bit.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ MacNee said, but he wasn’t happy. He could do keeping his mouth shut, but he wasn’t good at disguising his feelings if he had to speak and he didn’t want to scare the woman into silence.

  ‘You kick off, Tansy,’ he said. ‘Get the story out of her, get her softened up before I start.’

  Fleming leaned against the wall, watching quietly. MacNee had taken no part in it so far, letting Kerr ask the opening questions.

  Ellie Burnett was sitting very still, her hands in her lap. She gave an occasional shiver, and yawned twice, but showed no other signs of suffering withdrawal symptoms. The clothing she had been wearing had been taken away for forensic ­examination and what she was dressed in now – a pink flowered skirt and a home-made heavy navy sweater – showed signs of having been grabbed at random from her wardrobe by someone else. Her fair skin, drained of all colour except for the blue-purple shadows round eyes that looked too large for her pinched face, appeared almost translucent, and the ill-assorted clothes seemed to swamp her thin body. Only her hair, with its rippling, silvery-blonde waves and tendrils, had life and energy.

  Ellie seemed quite collected, sitting calmly with her hands folded in her lap, though Fleming suspected she had removed herself from what was happening to some safer place, either deliberately or as the result of profound shock. She was ­speaking in a level, lifeless voice.

  ‘Last night,’ she said in answer to Kerr’s question about her drug use. ‘H. I took it last night and then again this ­morning.’

  ‘Not before?’ Kerr was clearly sceptical.

  ‘No. Not for years and years.’

  ‘Why last night?’

  ‘I needed it – for what I had to do. I was afraid, otherwise, that I wouldn’t be able to do it.’

  ‘What did you have to do, Ellie?’

  ‘Kill Johnny.’

  Fleming caught her breath. She could sense the tension in MacNee and Kerr too, but Kerr said without inflexion, ‘You are admitting that you killed Johnny Black?’

  ‘Yes. You saw him.’ It was an unnervingly emotionless reply.

  It was MacNee who spoke first. ‘Did you know how to handle a shotgun?’

  ‘Of course. I’m a good shot. I even used to do a bit of trick shooting when I was travelling with Dylan’s father at the funfair.’

  Fleming shut her eyes in despair. She thought she knew much of the truth already, but the way this was going, Ellie would never be believed. Perhaps it was time to intervene – but how could she blatantly lead a self-confessed murderer into justification?

  ‘And did you get in some target practice with Barney Kyle and Andrew Carmichael first?’ MacNee was demanding with a savagery inappropriate to a cooperative witness. Kerr shot him a warning glance but Fleming could see he was paying no attention.

  The sudden accusation threw her. ‘No – no, of course not!’ she stammered. ‘I didn’t, I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Come on!’ MacNee sneered. ‘Who do you think you’re fooling?’

  He had disrupted the narrative and Kerr, who had been drawing out these damaging admissions, was looking understandably annoyed. Fleming stepped forward. ‘Let’s leave that for now. Ellie, why did you kill Johnny?’

  She had barely noticed Fleming. Now she turned those great tragic eyes on her and said, ‘I – I had to. You see—’ She stopped and took a long, deep breath.

  Fleming glanced at MacNee, daring him to speak, but he was listening with a cynical expression.

  ‘I was – I was a sort of hostage, I suppose. Once he had me, as long as he had me, he wouldn’t do anything. He warned me what would happen when I refused to sleep with him, showed me, even
, with a sheep he’d killed, but I didn’t believe he would do it.’ She was becoming visibly calmer as she told this part of the story, as if she had rehearsed what she would say. ‘And then when he killed Andrew – I was so shocked, I couldn’t even think straight. I needed time – but he didn’t give me time. Then it was Barney. So I had to give in. He’d have gone on, you know.’

  ‘And you couldn’t, I suppose, have called the police, to tell us what was happening, like a normal person?’ MacNee hadn’t changed his aggressive tone and she shrank back in her seat.

  ‘He told me if I did, he’d have killed Dylan long before you could have got to him.’

  The last, missing piece of the pattern fell into place. The arrows on her mind-map had focused Fleming’s attention on Black. This morning she had understood the message of the shootings, each one more callous than the last and, she could now see, each one getting closer and closer to Ellie; Fleming had even, after Black’s death, worked out what she believed had been their purpose. What had eluded her was the threat which had kept Ellie silent about murder and enduring repeated rape by a psychopath without even trying to escape, allowing him to play his terrible power game. The thought of it made Fleming feel physically sick, but the way Ellie was telling this, it sounded pat and unconvincing...

  ‘Surely you could just have sent Dylan away somewhere?’ Kerr was clearly unmoved.

  ‘Dylan didn’t want to go. And anyway somehow, he’d have reached him. Even if I killed myself, he’d have killed him afterwards. He told me. He’d have found him, tracked him down. A car accident – something. He was clever – he was a detective, you know.’

  ‘And what did he find out about you?’ MacNee said. ‘What did he discover, that meant you had to kill him?’

  ‘He didn’t! It wasn’t like that!’ She glanced at Fleming, as if sensing she was in some way an ally, but Fleming could say nothing. Ellie would have to speak for herself.

  ‘Let’s see. You’re suggesting that your victim – who, incidentally, was described by your son to one of our officers as being “like a real dad” – was some sort of sadistic psychopath?’