The Third Sin

by Aline Templeton

  This was a reunion. There were always swirling undercurrents when the past intruded on the present and she’d watched all the Cyrenaics picking up their friendships again, with different emotions. Randall had seemed both excited and surprised to see Skye after such a long time, Kendra had been jealous, Jen had been annoyed at being ignored, Logie had been – well, indifferent.

  Will had been – the word ‘guarded’ came into her head. He was throttling back his instinctive reaction. And what had that been? Skye’s reaction – Louise closed her eyes, trying to picture it again – looked almost like relief. She had gone to him as if she were coming home.

  Had he, like Randall, been surprised when she appeared? She didn’t really know – and why would it matter that a police officer had seen their meeting? Given what had emerged at Julia Margrave’s inquest, it was hardly a secret that they’d had an intimate relationship. Perhaps she was placing too much emphasis on Skye’s intensity – it might be that she was just by nature a drama queen.

  She sighed and ran in a little more hot water. The fight, then – what about that?

  Straightforward enough – Randall was a prat, behaving prattishly. He obviously really fancied Skye and refused to accept that she just wasn’t into him. It was impossible to take Randall seriously.

  That left the conversation between Will and Philippa Randall, before Louise’s cover had been blown. She went through it all in her mind but she couldn’t—

  The entryphone buzzed. Swearing, Louise got out of the bath and pulled on her heavy bathrobe, remembering that Fleming had said Andy Macdonald would bring her up to speed with events.

  ‘Louise?’ his voice said. ‘Is it all right to come up?’

  She could hardly turn him away. ‘Sure,’ she said, and buzzed the latch release.

  When he saw her, he looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry – have I dragged you out of your bath?’

  Putting her hand self-consciously to her hair, which was standing out like a bush round her head, she said, ‘Oh, it’s all right. Thanks for coming. I’ve been dying to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Oh, big stuff,’ he said, following her in. ‘How are you feeling, though?’

  ‘Fine. Look, there are beers in the fridge – help yourself. Just let me get dressed.’

  She fled to her bedroom to throw on jeans and a sweater, then went to the mirror with her hairbrush. After a couple of attempts she decided it was a lost cause, slapped on some lippy and went back. Something major had obviously happened and she couldn’t wait to hear what it was, though she felt a jealous twinge that she hadn’t been in on the action.

  Andy, ensconced in the little sitting room, brought her up to date. ‘But she’s saying nothing this time either,’ he finished. ‘So that’s where we are – looks as if we’ve got our man, or woman, rather.

  ‘If she hasn’t said anything by tomorrow morning, the boss will apply for an extension to hold her into Tuesday before she has to charge her. Maybe by the time Skye’s been questioned half a dozen times she’ll think of something to say apart from “no comment”.’

  Louise frowned. ‘Do they really think that she did all that by herself? I just can’t buy her attacking me – I’d have had her off her feet, no bother.’

  ‘Yeah, I take the point. Don’t think Big Marge is very happy with it either. But she was in the car with Connell Kane so …’ He shrugged.

  ‘Will has to have been in this with her.’ Louise was very definite.

  ‘He wasn’t even in Britain at that time. Ewan checked. I reckon someone was, though – Randall?’

  ‘Can’t see it.’

  ‘Who else, then?’

  ‘I keep wondering what Will and Philippa Stewart were discussing—’

  ‘Ah, I can help you there. I read through your transcript, and it all fits with what her husband told us this morning. She was crazy about him, apparently – set up this whole party thing to try to lure him back. They talked about the police investigation – well, I guess everyone was doing that on Saturday night – and it sounds as if she was trying to make an assignation and he was a bit reluctant.’

  Louise gaped at him. ‘You mean all this – two murders – was because a middle-aged woman was lovelorn? You’re kidding.’

  ‘Scouts’ honour. That’s life, isn’t it – unintended consequences.’

  ‘Certainly explains most of what comes our way.’ Suddenly she gave an enormous yawn. ‘Sorry – can’t think why I did that. I slept all afternoon.’

  Andy got up. ‘Time I was off, anyway. Are you fit for tomorrow?’

  She was surprised. ‘Oh, are we still on to go to Edinburgh? Is there not backup we should be doing here?’

  ‘The other lads and the uniforms are on to that. Big Marge still wants to see what we can dig up about the whole banking background.’

  Louise wrinkled her nose. ‘Waste of time. I’d far rather be here, where it’s all happening. Randall’s just a klutz – and why would he want to kill either Eleanor Margrave or Connell Kane?’

  ‘Don’t know why Skye Falconer would either,’ Andy pointed out.

  ‘I know, but ..’ Louise was slipping into contrary mode but she checked herself; how could she have a barney with him when he’d saved her life yesterday? It was going to cramp her style something rotten, she reflected as she showed him out.

  The mood in the morning meeting had been buoyant and while DI Fleming didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm, she warned them not to think the job was done.

  ‘I’m not optimistic that we’ll get anything out of Skye Falconer but we have an extension and we’ll be arranging sessions during the day when we can establish whether there’s any point in my questioning her again, but anyway I’ll be planning to charge her tomorrow.

  ‘We’re still at the stage where the defence can drive a coach and horses through our case, though. We’ve no chance of charging her with Mrs Margrave’s murder unless we can place her in the area at the relevant time, so I want the neighbours near Sea House questioned and near Jen Wilson’s cottage too – did they see her around, did they see the car going out? You know the sort of thing.

  ‘I want all the main people in the frame interviewed again. Neighbours near them too – did they see them coming and going, was there anything they noticed. Try to pick up any rumours – you’ll get help there from the Kirkcudbright lads. Right – any questions?’

  A young DC asked, ‘Do we think someone else was involved? I saw her yesterday and she looked kind of wee to go around murdering folk.’

  It got a laugh and Fleming smiled. ‘Open mind, I think. Anything else?’

  There were one or two minor queries but they were easily dealt with and she was finished by half past eight.

  MacNee was waiting for her as she went out and she jerked her head. ‘Come on. I’m ducking out before the super calls me in to discuss the media coverage. Her picture was on the front page of the Herald.’

  He fell into step beside her. ‘You won’t get me stopping you. Where are we going?’

  ‘I want to see how the search is progressing at Jen Wilson’s. It’s kind of a delicate one, that, and I need to make sure they’re making a distinction between what’s Skye’s stuff and what’s Jen’s or we’ll be landed with a complaint – the sheriff was very particular about that when the warrant was sworn out.

  ‘And I really want to see the woman herself. She may have gone to the school but if she has they’ll have to do without her for a bit. I want an in-depth conversation with that young woman. I have a feeling that she could be key to the whole thing. She’s hard to read, with that quiet manner.’

  ‘Never trust those ones – “grave, tideless-blooded, calm and cool”,’ MacNee said. ‘And schoolteachers – I’ve never been overfond of them either, except my old English teacher – I’d never have heard of Rabbie Burns if it wasn’t for him.’

  ‘I wondered whose fault it was,’ Fleming said as they left the building and walked to her car. ‘That’s good – I was afraid I
might get stopped on the way out. Now, we’ve got time to plan what we need to ask her. She and Skye are obviously good mates – or at least were. From the way she was speaking yesterday she’s gone off her a bit.’

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you? If one of my pals was arrested for murder it would make me just a wee bit cagey, to say the least.’

  ‘The priority for me is how much she knew about Skye in the last two years – where she was, who she was in contact with – not her father, certainly.’

  ‘The party,’ MacNee said. ‘I want her to talk us through that, see how it squares with Louise’s report. Here – I wonder how the pair of them are getting on? Squabbling all the way to Edinburgh?’

  Fleming grinned. ‘Could be. On the other hand, maybe Louise will be inhibited by gratitude.’

  MacNee snorted. ‘Won’t last long, if she is. She’s given up smoking so she’ll be tetchy anyway. Want to have a sweepstake? Twenty miles, that’s my bet.’

  ‘Mmm. A bit more than that, I reckon. But we’re not likely to find out.’

  Presented with the search warrant, Jen Wilson felt sick. The calm, polite officers were behaving as if this was merest routine, which it presumably was for them, but to her it felt an intolerable intrusion, a sort of rape of her privacy.

  ‘But I haven’t anything to do with this,’ she protested.

  ‘Of course not, miss,’ one said reassuringly. ‘If you can identify your computer, your phone and your personal papers we can mark them to make sure no one accesses them.’

  ‘But what about my bedroom? Skye was never in there – her things are all in the spare room.’

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t know that, miss.’ He was very firm. ‘She could have been anywhere while you were out. We have instructions to be very respectful of your property, though.’

  ‘So I should hope,’ she snarled, rudely. It wasn’t his fault, but she just felt so helpless, so angry about the unfairness of it all. And she knew whose fault it really was.

  She was due at school. They assured her that she wasn’t needed at the cottage and she went, but not directly to her classroom. Wisdom dictated that she should tell the head teacher what was happening rather than leaving her to get an even more lurid version on the grapevine that was probably spreading its tendrils even now.

  Mrs Pearson was horrified. ‘I’m aghast!’ she said. ‘You teach small children – how could you get mixed up in something like this?’

  ‘I’m not. One of my friends is, somehow, but it’s absolutely nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything about it.’

  Mrs Pearson gave her a sharp look. ‘The woman who has been arrested – was she one of the group we all heard about two years ago?’

  Jen could feel her cheeks turning red. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ Mrs Pearson fiddled with a pen on her desk. ‘I shall have to take advice about this, Jen. On the face of it, I don’t think it constitutes gross misconduct but for the moment, at least, it wouldn’t be acceptable to have you in the classroom – we will have to arrange for a supply teacher. I shall, of course, keep you fully informed of whatever discussions I have.’

  Her cheeks still flaming, Jen walked back home. Her anger against Skye was building; she owed her nothing, nothing. She wasn’t going to cover for her any longer.

  But as she got near to it she saw a car pull in and DI Fleming and DS MacNee get out and go into the house. She stopped.

  Yes, she was angry with Skye, but she would need to keep her wits about her; she mustn’t get drawn into this any deeper. The police could turn anything to suit their theories.

  Jen took a deep breath, then walked on to face her inquisitors.

  There was a scarf round DC Hepburn’s neck but as she got into the car it slipped. The line of bruising had deepened to livid blacks and purples and DS Macdonald, reminded of what she had been through, decided he must tiptoe round any subject that seemed likely to be provocative. She didn’t look strong enough for the usual no-holds-barred approach.

  It certainly helped that she wasn’t stinking of smoke. ‘Have you given up, then?’ he said and saw Hepburn give him a sharp look.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You—’

  She stopped, but from the look on her face he could complete the sentence ‘want to make something of it?’

  She was clearly tiptoeing too. It felt unnatural but perhaps it was better for them to be biting off their words rather than each other’s heads.

  To move away from the subject he said, ‘What do we need to find out about Randall? It’s probably too much to hope for that there would be someone that knew something about the drugs business, but that’s obviously where the whole thing started.’

  ‘I expect it is. But a) I don’t think a bank employee is going to admit to knowing anything about it, even if they do, and b) I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it except tangentially. I can’t imagine Randall going round with a cosh in his pocket. Where would he get it from? Wander into a low life pub in Glasgow and say, “Any of you dudes got a cosh you could flog me?”’

  Why did she always have to be so bloody aggressive? ‘I’m not suggesting that. I just think it won’t do any harm to try to learn a bit more about him, that’s all. After all, you were attacked and he was the one making threats before you went.’

  Hepburn snorted. ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc.’

  He knew what that meant now – she’d used it before – but he hated it when she flaunted her superior education. ‘Why can’t you just say that I’m making an assumption that because something happened after something else, it happened because of it?’ he said, then could have kicked himself because he’d left himself open to her riposte.

  ‘Not really snappy, though, is it? Why shouldn’t I use a nice neat phrase just because it’s in Latin? You have some sort of problem with that?’

  Macdonald gritted his teeth. ‘Say whatever you like. Anyway, whether you want to be here or not we have a job to do. What do we need to ask?’

  ‘The sort of smoothie they’ll send along to talk to us will be programmed not to tell us anything anyway.’

  He’d had enough. ‘Fine. No point in talking about it, then.’

  With Ewan as his partner, he was used to silence in the car, but sometimes he’d thought lively conversation would pass the time a bit more quickly. ‘Come back, Ewan, all is forgiven,’ he thought. And they were barely twenty miles into their journey.

  What struck Fleming most about Jen Wilson, now she was studying her, was that she was very controlled. Probably you had to be when you spent your life dealing with young children; the level of patience teachers had to show day in day out would have driven her screaming up the wall.

  She must have been both irritated and upset about her home being searched, but despite the noise of heavy footsteps on the stairs and people calling to each other, she showed no sign of that, sitting waiting for their questions with her hands folded in her lap.

  They’d decide MacNee should start off, leaving Fleming to observe. The answers were coming readily enough: Jen had checked the date she’d been hesitant about yesterday – April 15th – and described clearly Skye Falconer’s arrival on her doorstep.

  ‘She was looking terrible. She had a great bruise on one side of her face, a bit grazed—’

  ‘Like someone had punched her, maybe?’ MacNee offered.

  She considered that. ‘It could be, I suppose, or she might have fallen – she wouldn’t tell me. She’d been crying a lot; her eyes were all red and sore and she went on crying for days afterwards. She got better at controlling it, but she didn’t stop. I’d hear her in her room at night. But then something happened – I don’t know what it was, but she began to cheer up. She’d been refusing even to set foot outside but then suddenly she decided she wanted to go to the party – she wouldn’t even consider it before that.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea why?’ MacNee probed, but Jen only shook her head. She confirmed her previous statements when he checked, then he
looked towards Fleming.

  ‘Thanks, that’s all very helpful,’ she said. ‘But now I’d just like to take it all back a little further. Were you very surprised when Skye turned up on your doorstep? She’d been missing for a couple of years – you must have been happy to see her.’

  Jen was visibly taken aback. ‘Well …’ she floundered.

  Fleming didn’t fill the silence. She watched Jen’s eyes, flickering up and down as she calculated her response.

  ‘Not really, to be honest. I knew Skye was all right. We were old friends – we kept in touch by email – oh, in a very casual sort of way. Like at Christmas, maybe. Nothing more. We weren’t, like, confidantes or anything.’

  Why, Fleming wondered, was she so keen to emphasise that? ‘But you must have known her parents were worried about her? You didn’t tell them?’

  ‘Oh, I know I should have. But when I went round there they were so nasty I decided just to leave them to stew. And I never thought of telling the police – I’m sorry. I expect that was wasting police time. I hope I’m not in trouble.’

  She looked at Fleming with a placatory smile.

  Fleming ignored it. ‘And where was she?’

  Jen opened her eyes very wide. ‘I don’t know. She never said.’

  And that, Fleming thought, was a big, black, thumping lie. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? And you didn’t ask?’

  ‘Oh, I did, once or twice. But she obviously didn’t want to tell me, so …’ She shrugged.

  Trying again to underline how little she knew? She’d got her defence in place now, though, and there was little point in challenging her; shifting the ground might be more useful.

  ‘I want to take you further back now,’ Fleming said. ‘In fact, right back to the night Julia Margrave died.’

  That shocked Jen out of her composure. ‘Oh no, please!’ she wailed. ‘It was such an awful, awful time.’

  ‘Yes it was. Tell me about it.’

  Jen drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘We were in the wood, looking at the stars—’

  ‘No, before that. Talk me through, from the start of the evening.’