Cold in the Earth (2 page)

Fine. Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming was ready to go on duty.

Laura Sonfeldt closed the main door with its chipped and battered paint, then the metal security door, and walked slowly down the steps outside the Women’s Refuge.

It was bitterly cold. A piercing wind whipped driving rain down the narrow New York street, sending litter skittering across the sidewalk. A sauce-smeared fast-food carton blew against her camel slacks but she barely noticed, blinking back tears as she tucked her blonde hair inside her striped woolly hat, pulling it down over her ears, turning up the furry collar of her coat and gathering it tightly about her slight frame.

She was suffering agonies of guilt. It had been such a touching farewell, there in the shabby common room with its motley collection of begged and borrowed chairs and tables, where the walls and floor bore the scars of careless living, spilt food and children’s mess and no amount of disinfectant could disguise the smell of soiled diapers and kids’ sick. The women themselves were stick-thin with living on their nerves and their drug of choice, legal or otherwise, or else obese from comfort-eating to blot out the fear which had eventually brought them to the shelter, but all had the same haunted and watchful eyes. They had said goodbye to Laura with speeches, hugs, tears and a garish plaster figurine of a mother and child which was in her tote-bag now.

Abandoning them had been a hard decision, even if she’d never been sure how much good she’d managed to do in these past five years of being a listening ear to a never-ending succession of desperate women, most of whom carried the sort of personal baggage that doomed them to be perpetual victims. Counselling always seemed a bit like offering a sticking-plaster for an amputated limb; to have any sort of chance of straightening themselves out they needed intensive psychotherapy, and even then . . . Well, she’d found herself becoming more and more cynical about her profession, even if – or perhaps because – her own sessions with spoiled and wealthy socialites had funded her
pro bono
work here at the Refuge.

If it hadn’t been for her mother, she’d probably have drifted on like this for years without subjecting her own generalised dissatisfaction to proper analysis, shoemakers’ children being notoriously ill-shod. But when the transatlantic phone call came from her mother’s next-door neighbour – ‘Jane will probably kill me for this, but I thought you ought to know she’s had a mild heart attack’ – along with the pang of fear had come clarity: she was an exile in a foreign land with a misleadingly similar language, and she was desperately, intolerably homesick.

It would have been different if it had worked out with Bradley, but it hadn’t. The Rhodes scholar she had fallen in love with at Oxford and married in a romantic ceremony in the college chapel two weeks after her graduation had turned into a merchant banker back home in New York. As her experience of the Bowery and his of Wall Street diverged further and further, the marriage died by slow and wretched degrees until it was a positive kindness to put it out of its misery.

Even then, she hadn’t thought about going home. She had good friends and the exhilaration she’d initially felt in New York hadn’t altogether disappeared. She couldn’t really complain about her job with a large firm offering designer therapy mainly to women whose child-like frames gave their disproportionately large heads the look of potatoes on sticks; it paid well and made few demands beyond the ability to stop yourself telling them to get a life and a square meal. She’d justified its triviality by her work at the Refuge, sometimes feeling guiltily that she got more out of the arrangement than they did.

Now, though, she could only think how tired she was of city life, weary of its noise and its smell and its polluted air, its intractable problems and its belief that perpetual motion was the same as progress. As she dodged the dirty spray thrown up by a car going through a flooded pothole, she thought longingly of the quiet green English countryside and of her mother who despite having lost one daughter had never so much as hinted that the other had a duty to return. With one last, guilty look up at the grimy windows Laura tramped off up the sidewalk. That part of her life was over. All she had left to do now was to go back to her apartment, get on with booking her flight, and break the good news to her mother; her lips curved at the thought of hearing the pleasure in her mother’s voice. And she’d stop being Laura Sonfeldt; that wench belonged in the foreign country which felt like the past already. She’d go back to being Laura Harvey, a woman at home, at peace.

When she let herself into her rented third-floor walk-up the red light on her answering machine was winking. She pressed the message button without foreboding, pulling off her gloves as she listened and tossing them on to the couch beside the telephone table. It took a moment for the sense of it to sink in, then she froze in the act of unbuttoning her coat, as if the chilling words had turned her veins to ice. She heard her own voice cry, like a child’s, ‘Oh no, no! It isn’t
fair
!’ before she fell on to the couch, sobbing as if her heart would break.

Marjory Fleming set down her pen, rolling her head to ease the stiffness in her neck and shoulders and cupping her hands over eyes which were smarting from the strain of peering at the figures on the computer in front of her. She yawned hugely.

It was late January, a Monday afternoon, and the rain was battering the windows of the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters with what seemed like gratuitous violence, blotting out the view – such as it was – of the roof-tops of the market town of Kirkluce, midway between Stranraer and Newton Stewart. The lights in DI Fleming’s small fourth-floor office had been on for much of the day and she had spent most of it compiling statistical returns.

Was it really worth the work she’d done to get herself promoted – the studying, the exams, the courses, the interviews? To be fair, she enjoyed her CID responsibilities and she had no problem with the management element: having kids gave you all the experience you needed in adjudicating squabbles, negotiating, motivating, and when it came to the crunch putting your foot down. She knew that her nickname – Big Marge – while on the whole affectionate, indicated a certain wary respect and she didn’t mind her reputation. She wasn’t immune to the pleasures of power and the money didn’t come amiss either, with farming in the state it was in at the moment.

But the paperwork! More by the month, it seemed, never mind the year. Down at the charge bar it took thirteen separate forms just to admit a drunk to the cells to sober up. And try that in triplicate for the work up here on the fourth floor.

She hadn’t really analysed at the time why she had felt so driven to get first her sergeant’s stripes and then promotion to inspector. It had taken Bill to suggest, with his usual shrewdness, that it might have something to do with her need to prove to her father she could do just as well as the son he’d always wanted. But it hadn’t worked, had it?

Angus Laird, ‘Sarge’ to generations of Galloway police officers, had made himself a legend in the Force, as much by length of service as by his abilities. He had stayed on long past the time when he could have collected his pension because in his own eyes he
was
the job; he saw himself as an old-fashioned copper, keeper of the flame, a one-man bastion against the touchy-feely revolution which had ripped the guts out of the Force. The top brass said all the right things, but with a certain relief, when he went at last into bored and frustrated retirement.

Marjory didn’t tell him when she applied to join, but on her first day in the job had presented herself to him in uniform, much as a labrador puppy would hopefully offer a trophy to its master. She might have fared better with a half-chewed slipper. He made it clear she was only a token woman who would never make more than a second-rate contribution to a man’s world.

Her elevation to sergeant and her impressive work in the CID didn’t change his mind either. ‘Whatever you do, it won’t be enough,’ Bill always warned her when she agonised over it, but somehow she couldn’t just let it go. Her promotion to inspector followed in record time.

‘He can hardly say I haven’t done well now,’ she had said triumphantly to her husband as she prepared to go and tell her parents of her success at their retirement bungalow on the outskirts of Kirkluce, about five miles from the farm.

Bill was a quiet man who weighed his words. He hesitated now, before saying gently, ‘You do realise you’ve totally blown it? He’ll never forgive you for achieving what he failed to achieve for all his years’ service.’

She stopped, stricken. Of course he wouldn’t.

Still fiercely erect at seventy, with a shock of pure white hair, Angus Laird’s eyes had narrowed with what she recognised in dismay as jealousy and even hatred.

‘It’s a sad day for the Force I was always proud to belong to, when they’re stopped from appointing a man to do a man’s job. Or it would be, if it was a man’s job any more.’

That was all he said, while his wife Janet, plump, warm-hearted and uncritically admiring of both members of her family, had exclaimed at Marjory’s extraordinary cleverness and said how proud she was. Which, unfairly, had meant very little to her daughter.

Marjory sighed. Today was one of her days for looking in on them on the way home; her father, as always, would be sitting watching television while complaining that there was nothing worth watching these days, and her mother would ask her, just as she had done when Marjory came home from school, ‘What have you been doing today, dear?’ She knew better than to mention paperwork, which would only provide a focus for her father’s scorn.

Anyway, sitting brooding wasn’t going to get it done. She was reluctantly picking up her pen again when there was a tap on the door. ‘Come!’ she called, setting it down with alacrity and looking up expectantly.

‘Got a moment, ma’am?’ PC Sandy Langlands was a young officer with dark curly hair and a cheery countenance and Fleming’s face brightened.

‘Come away in! You’re a welcome sight.’ As he took the seat on the other side of the desk, she added, indicating the disorder of papers on her desk, ‘But don’t let it go to your head. Hannibal Lecter would be a welcome sight right now. If we put in the hours we spend number-crunching to keep civil servants sitting on their fat backsides drawing their fat pay-packets we could get the crime figures down without any daft government targets – but don’t get me started. What can I do for you?’

Big Marge was famed for not mincing her words. Langlands grinned. ‘Mostly social, actually.’

She took note of the word ‘mostly’ as he went on, holding up a wodge of tickets. ‘Burns Supper. It’s on Saturday . . .’

She looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Did DS MacNee put you up to this?’ she demanded.

He was taken aback. ‘Well, yes, he did, right enough.’

Fleming groaned. Tam MacNee was her senior sergeant in the CID who quoted Burns in and out of season and treated as heresy her low opinion of the man who was the locality’s greatest son. Allegedly. She leaned back in her chair.

‘Listen, laddie, I’ve nothing against haggis and neeps and tatties. I’ve even got nothing against the man’s poetry. It’s this mindless praise of the man himself sticks in my craw. If he’d been writing today he’d be working for
Loaded
. He’s got that phooarr! love-’em-and-leave-’em mentality and schmoozing was his other favourite activity – specialised in sucking up to the toffs and then stabbing them in the back when they got tired of being exploited. You’d have to put me under restraint to get me to sit and listen to that hypocritical bastard being drooled over by maudlin honest men and simpering bonnie lassies.’

‘I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?’ he said demurely.

‘With those powers of deductive reasoning we should have you in the CID. Right, we’ve sorted that. Now, what was the other thing?’

Langlands looked startled. ‘The other thing? How – how—’

It did her no harm to have a reputation for mind-reading. ‘The thing you really came in to see me about.’

Flustered, he said, ‘Well – it’s a bit tricky. Off the record, if you don’t mind, ma’am.’

Fleming grimaced inwardly. The ‘bricks without straw’ game, as she called it privately, was one of the curses of police work, when you were expected to take action without using the evidence you’d been given to justify it. ‘Mmm,’ she said, not committing herself. ‘As long as you understand that if it’s unofficial it may tie my hands.’

‘Yes, ma’am. It’s just – well, it’s a problem with one of the DSs and I thought a word from you could maybe stop it ending up a formal complaint to the Super.’

‘Fair enough. I appreciate that, Sandy.’ She did, too. A formal complaint about a subordinate was a procedural nightmare. ‘Let’s have it, then.’

The constable cleared his throat nervously. ‘It’s – it’s DS Mason.’

Not the biggest surprise since her Christmas stocking. ‘Oh aye?’

‘PC Jackie Johnston – do you know her? Just started three weeks ago.’

‘Can’t put a face to her, I’m afraid.’ As DI her responsibilities were on the crime side, and she didn’t have a lot to do with officers in training.

‘Right enough, she’s a quiet wee lass and just between ourselves I’m not sure she’s cut out for the job. She was about hysterical after he’d finished with her, just because he asked her to administer the caution and she hadn’t got it off pat. She’s never going to win through if someone with fifteen years’ seniority on her and fully twice her size loses it and yells at her.’

Fleming sighed. The Mason temper: she could think of three generations of that family who’d had it, and it wasn’t the first time Conrad had indulged the family vice. He wasn’t all that popular with his colleagues anyway, but as MacNee had once said, ‘He’s maybe gallus but at least he’s got smeddum,’ and she couldn’t help but agree: there was a bit too much of Jack the Lad about him, but he had that spark of lively energy called in Scots by the name of an ancient insecticide, guaranteed to make fleas jump. She was reluctant to lose him for the sake of a lassie who, to use another Scots word, was so fushionless that she wasn’t effectual enough to have mastered a basic professional requirement. Still, harassment was harassment, especially in modern employment law.