one thing is not negotiable. She is also going to have to be someone Olive
would like, because she's going to be very close to her.'
Abruptly, a violent shiver seemed to pass through him. 'Hey, come on,'
he exclaimed. 'Let's get moving or we'll freeze to the ground.'
He steered her forward down the track. 'One more hill,' he said, 'then
we'll turnback.'
They trudged on together, down then up another crest, the steepest of
the three they had tackled. Louise was breathing hard by the time they
reached the top. Neil took a hip-flask from another of his pockets and handed
it to her.
'What's this?' she gasped. 'Whisky?'
'Irn Bru,' he grinned. 'I don't drink, remember .. . especially not when
I'm driving.'
He watched her as she drank, deeply from the flask, not daintily from its
cup.
'So what about you?' he asked, as she handed it back to him. 'Do you
have a soulmate?'
She shot him a quick, almost furtive glance. 'I think so, but his is taken.'
Neil was silent for a moment. 'You might be surprised. He has a special
soul; dark and mysterious, I suspect, but there's a lot of it to go around.
There's more than one of him: that's as well as I can put it.'
He drew a great breath. 'Did you mean all that stuff yesterday, about
giving up men for good?'
'Sure I did. I've been married twice and both times were disasters; my
other relationships were no better, culminating in the episode with Warren.
I've known other women with similar track records, and for a while, I thought
like most of them that all those guys were to blame for not loving us enough.
'Then after the last one, I tried to put myself in the shoes of all those
partners, and for the first time, it occurred to me that in most cases, the bulk
°f the fault had been mine. Since I was a young girl I have been obsessed
with acting, not out of ego ... at least I don't think so ... but because I was
addicted to it as strongly as an addict is to crack cocaine.
'I have been impossible to live with for any length of time. Short-term,
that was fine. People tell me that I'm good-looking, successful, rich, and
some have even added that I'm very good in bed, any man's dream. But as
every relationship developed, I became more and more remote, as my
partners, quite justifiably I see now, wanted more of me than I was prepared,
or able, to give.
'So... and when young Mr Silver, who's as sexually interchangeable as
anyone I've ever met, came on to me, it really was the last straw ... I
decided to withdraw from that world.'
She gave her deep throaty laugh. That I would have no more of men,'
she murmured, 'that I would live the rest of my days as a Garboesque
figure, alone, independent and unto myself. That was my clear vision of
my declining years.'
'Was?'
She nodded.
'Until when?'
This time Louise was standing slightly below him on the hill. She looked
up at him; at his dark hair, flecked with grey, at his soft blue eyes, and the
web of lines around them, at his once-broken nose, at his expression which
to some suggested stolidity, but which in fact he had fashioned over the
years to mask a developing intellect.
She took hold of the front of his jacket, drew his face down to hers, and
kissed him, lightly, on the lips.
'Until very recently,' she whispered.
210
61
Pringle and McGurk had said nothing at all to Raymond Anders, from the
time they had collected him from his holding cell in the West Yorkshire
police headquarters building in Leeds until they had installed him in similar
accommodation in Galashiels.
They had watched him squirm anxiously, seated beside the sergeant in
the back of the car; they had listened to his occasional pleading question
about where they were going and how long the journey would take. Yet
deliberately, they had said nothing; not one single word.
Now, on Sunday afternoon, refreshed, and having gone over the
assembled evidence, they were ready to begin. Anders had been formally
cautioned by Chief Superintendent Charlie Harrison, the uniformed
divisional commander, and advised that he was being held on suspicion of
murder; he had been advised to call a solicitor and had chosen Geoff Lesser,
a formidable High Court practitioner from Glasgow.
Suspect and solicitor were together when the two policemen walked
into the interview room.
'Are you two ready to talk to me now?' asked Anders plaintively as they
sat down opposite him and loaded the tape recorder. Pringle made the formal
identifications for the record.
'Thanks for confirming, Mr Anders,' he continued, with a glance at
Lesser, 'that we've had no informal discussions with you prior to this
interview of the matters under investigation. Would you just repeat that for
the tape; that we've said nothing to you until now.'
'Not a fucking word,' exclaimed Raymond Anders. He was a tall man
but he sat hunched at the table, fair hair dull and needing shampoo, dandruff
on the shoulders of his dark jacket, stubble on his long sharp chin.
'Thanks, that's sufficient,' said Pringle, pleasantly. 'Do you know why
you're here?'
They told me in Leeds; something to do with the murder of a girl on a
trout farm.'
'Who said anything to you about a trout farm? I thought our colleagues
in Leeds simply detained you in connection with a murder investigation.'
The superintendent caught the quick glance from client to solicitor. 'No
point looking at Mr Lesser,' he said. 'We haven't discussed the case with
him either, and he's not going to lie to the tape for you.
'So. How did you know about the trout farm?'
'I guessed. I heard it on the car radio; that was it.'
'Which station?' asked McGurk.
'Radio Borders.'
'Hold on a minute. Does that mean that your sister was lying to the
police when she said that you arrived at her place at just after five on
Thursday night?'
'No! I did. She was telling the truth.'
'In that case,' said the sergeant, 'prepare to lose your driving licence.
The news of Miss Adey's murder wasn't broadcast on Radio Borders until
four thirty. It's a very local FM station, so to hear it you couldn't have been
further south than Alnwick.
'You must have been doing around two hundred miles an hour to get to
your sister's when you did, yet still hear that broadcast.'
'Maybe it was Radio Scotland, then.'
'They didn't broadcast the news until just after five, and you can't pick
them up in Leeds.'
'Congratulations,' said Pringle. That's maybe no' the fastest opening
lie I've ever heard in a formal interview, but it's up there with the best.
Would you not agree, Mr Lesser?' The lawyer scowled at him.
'Okay,' the superintendent continued. 'Let's cut away the fat and get to
the meat of this. I'm going to accept that you got to your sister's when you
both say you did. Where did you leave from?'
'Hawick; that's where my office is.'
'Right, that's a tw
o-and-a-half-hour drive to Leeds, minimum, in good
traffic conditions; so you must have been on the road by quarter to three.
Correct?' Anders nodded vigorously, starting a small white dandruff storm
falling towards the table.
'But you had an appointment with Miss Adey, in her diary, in her
handwriting, timed for four o'clock on Thursday afternoon. More than that,
you'd a date with your girlfriend on Thursday night. Actually, son,' he
whispered, confidentially, 'I think she's your ex-girlfriend now.
'As far as I gather from the boys in Leeds your sister and her kids looked
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AUTOGRAPHS IN THE RAIN
in perfect health. So, what made you up stakes, just like that, and bomb off
south? Could it be that after the robbery at Country Fresh Trout went horribly
wrong, after instead of being blindfolded and tied up in the dark Miss Adey
wound up with her skull smashed in? Could it be that you panicked and ran
for it?'
'I don't know anything about her getting killed,' Anders protested. 'I
don't know anything about the robberies.'
'Robberies?' Pringle exclaimed. 'Since when have we been talking about
more than one robbery? No, son, I'm interviewing you, no' the other way
around. I'll get to the others later, and then you can get to telling me how
you connected them.'
'In the meantime,' Jack McGurk broke in, opening the briefcase which
he had brought into the room, 'we want you to tell us about this.' He took
out a clear plastic bag and laid it on the table. It contained a thick wooden
baton, around fifteen inches long, with a large lead weight set in one end. It
was blackened and scorched, but still clearly identifiable.
'This was found by detective officers, when they searched your house in
Hawick under warrant on Friday morning. They found it in an old oil drum
in your garden shed.' The sergeant fixed the suspect with an icy look. 'It
had been in a fire, but forensic examination identified hair, blood, tissue
and bone fragments which were sticking to it, as coming from the murder
victim.'
'McGurk's an angler,' the superintendent offered. 'He reckons the thing
was probably used to kill fish. We found the bones of a small trout in a
plate in Miss Adey's kitchen. The lassie probably helped herself every so
often, for her supper.'
'Her Last Supper,' said McGurk, grimly.
'Don't be dramatic, Jack,' Pringle chided. He looked at the solicitor. 'In
the drum,' he told him, quietly, 'we found the remnants of a large hooded
waxed cotton jacket which had been soaked in petrol and set on fire. This
club, which was the murder weapon for sure, had been wrapped in it.
'We've got a video tape which we can show you. It was taken at night
and you can't identify the people in it, but we know that one was a tall man
in a jacket very like the one which was burned, and that the other was Miss
Adey, because it shows her murder. She tried to defend her employer's
property with that thing. It was taken from her and her skull was bashed in
with it.
'That's bad enough in itself for your client. Now I'll get to the other
robberies. This was the third inside two weeks from a trout farm in the
area; the total value of the stock stolen being around thirty-five thousand
pounds, give or take a few.
'We know that all three thefts were committed by the same gang. There
are two other linking factors; all three farms had very poor security, and all
three had been visited by your client in failed attempts to sell them video
surveillance systems.
'There's one other odd wee fact too. The second robbery happened after
the resident manager... the very large resident manager... had been lured
away by a bogus call telling him that his father, who's recognised as one of
Hawick's top bevvy merchants, had been severely injured on his way home
from the pub. Our man here just happens to drink in the same boozer as Mr
Symonds senior; but the licensee told us that he wasn't there that night. His
girlfriend was, but he wasn't.
'I don't think you're going to argue with me if I suggest that the Fiscal
will support charges of murder and theft against Mr Anders, on the basis of
what I've shown and told you.'
'No,' Geoff Lesser agreed, with a heavy sigh. 'I'm not. In fact, I propose
that you do just that, to put Mr Anders' detention on a proper legal footing,
and to enable me to consult with him properly and at length about his
defence.'
Ten minutes later, the two detectives were back in Pringle's office; Anders
had been charged formally, and left alone with the lawyer.
'That was easier than I'd thought,' McGurk mused, aloud. 'I didn't expect
that Lesser would just roll over like that, and let us charge him.'
The neither,' said the superintendent, 'but I know why he did. Suppose
he'd pulled out all the stops, and we'd bailed Anders, pro tern. The rest of
the gang must be feeling pretty insecure right now. The boy's probably
safer in the jail; that's what his lawyer's thinking.'
'Maybe,' McGurk agreed. He was staring at the window, absently.
'What's up?' asked Pringle. He reached into a compartment of his desk
and produced a bottle of whisky and two glasses. 'Come on. Let's have a
nip to celebrate.' He poured two small measures, and handed one to the
sergeant.
'You still worrying about your wife?' he asked.
'Yes. But that wasn't what I was thinking about.'
'Oh aye?'
'Yeah. I didn't mention this before the interview, not just because it
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would have muddied the water, but because I wanted to be certain. Now I
am.
'That boy Anders ... I've seen him before.'
1
AUTOGRAPHS IN THE RAIN
62
'He's dead sure of that?' the Head of CID asked.
'He says he's "Under oath" sure, and big Jack's not a fanciful lad. He
says that on the afternoon after the Howdengate robbery he went to Raeburn
Place on a whim, to watch Lander and Symonds play for Jed Seconds ...'
'Yes, I know; Karen and I met him in the bar afterwards.'
'Well,' Dan Pringle continued, 'when he was walking across to the
pavilion after the game, he saw someone go up to Lander and speak to him.
Lander answered him, then he saw Jack, broke off his conversation with
the other guy straight away and came across to talk to him.
'That other bloke was Raymond Anders.'
'Hmm,' Andy Martin murmured. 'That's interesting, I'll grant you. I'm
not sure what it tells us, if anything, but it's interesting. Why should Anders
show up at Raeburn Place? Guys from Ha wick are not likely to go up to
Edinburgh to watch Jedforest seconds. That's like a parish priest having a
season ticket at Ibrox.'
'Whatever the reason is, it wants checking into.'
'What was Lander doing on the night of the robbery?'
Autographs in the Rain Page 29