Cold in the Earth (38 page)

‘How dare you!’ she shrilled. ‘How
dare
you? The Chief Constable gave me his personal assurance that this persecution would cease immediately. I shall report this to him at once.’ She made to shut the door.

Fleming stepped forward. ‘Please wait, Mrs Mason. We have to talk to you about Conrad.’

‘Conrad?’ She paused. ‘He’s not here. I’m expecting him back soon. He didn’t come in for his lunch and it’s nearly five o’clock.’

‘That’s right. He’s at the police station,’ MacNee said disingenuously.

‘I see. He could have let me know himself, of course, but I suppose if he’s back at his work . . . And at least you’ve come to your senses at last. You can ill-afford to dispense with the services of someone like my son, you know, and I can tell you after all that’s gone on he was contemplating resignation.’ Another thought struck her. ‘Oh – come to apologise, have you? Well, you’d better come in. Naturally I would prefer that none of this had happened in the first place, but I shall tell the Chief Constable I appreciate that an effort has been made.’

Cravenly, they didn’t correct her, only exchanging glances as they followed in her wake into the big study at the front of the house with its trophies and pictures which so eloquently showed the family obsession which had ruined her son.

They sat down, Fleming and MacNee on a leather chesterfield, cracked with age, while Brett sat down in a heavily carved wooden armchair as if it were a throne. Clearing her throat nervously, Fleming began.

It took Brett a moment to realise that this was no apology; she began to protest about false pretences but Fleming talked steadily on until she stopped and listened, looking bewildered and uncomprehending.

They had been prepared for a hysterical, even violent reaction. Instead she sat completely still and silent, seeming to shrink in the chair as the sense of what was being said got through to her. She was wearing a long purple scarf; she began pulling it through her hands more and more frantically. When Fleming finished at last, she said nothing for a second, then whispered, ‘You’ve
arrested
him! You’ve arrested Conrad? Oh no, no, no!’

The tears came then, floods and tempests of tears, with sobs which seemed almost to be choking her as she clutched at her throat. Alarmed, Fleming went to kneel beside her, offering tissues from her shoulder-bag though she dared not touch her. ‘Go and see if you can find Max,’ she said urgently over her shoulder to MacNee.

He nodded and went out, but hadn’t far to look: Max was at that moment coming across the hall. MacNee explained succinctly what had happened and saw a slow, unpleasant smile spread over Conrad’s cousin’s face.

‘Now fancy that! He always was a sod. Good to know the plods have caught up with him at last, despite him being inside the tent. You don’t think I’m surprised, do you? You’re talking to someone he bullied for years. Wonder if that’s why they call it bullying?’

MacNee looked at him with cold dislike. ‘Your aunt’s pretty upset. Maybe you could stretch a point and try and calm her down.’

‘Me?’ Max laughed. ‘Oh, I’ll give it a whirl if it’ll make you happy. But arrange these words into a well-known phrase or saying: rag, to, bull, red, a. Oops, not perhaps the most tactful thing to say, in the circumstances. To level with you, I’d phone the doctor if I were you.’

‘I’ll do that,’ MacNee said grimly, getting out his phone as Max sauntered past him into the study.

Fleming looked up anxiously as he came in. Brett was still sobbing, her breathing so ragged as to be alarming in a woman of her physique.

‘Max – oh good! I’m worried about your aunt. Has she got pills or anything?’

Max strolled over to stand beside his distraught relative. ‘Haven’t the vaguest.’ Bending closer, he said in the tones of one speaking to the profoundly deaf, ‘Pills, Auntie? Do you have pills?’

It had an astonishing effect. As if he had pressed a button, Brett’s sobs stopped and she pulled herself up in her chair; with the tears still wet on her cheeks, she narrowed swollen eyes and spat out, ‘Oh, you’re happy now, no doubt. It’s all you’ve ever wanted, to see Conrad and me destroyed. No doubt you had a hand in this, you and that woman – oh yes, I could see how Conrad was looking at her, just the way he looked at her sister. And you brought her here deliberately, that – that Delilah, to bring about his downfall! She lured him to it, I could see that. But you’ll both suffer for it, I promise! You’ll suffer!’

Astonished at this display of virulent energy, Fleming scrambled to her feet, ready to intervene if the woman showed signs of translating her threats into action. Max, on the other hand, looked amused, standing with his hands in his pockets.

‘I seem to have achieved the desired effect, anyway. Perhaps she doesn’t need a doctor after all – they can’t do a lot about a poisonous personality.’ As he sauntered out again, MacNee came past him back into the room, looking surprised to see Brett apparently quite recovered.

‘Perhaps you should go and lie down, Mrs Mason,’ Fleming suggested, not very hopefully. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

‘There’s a doctor on the way,’ MacNee added.

Entirely composed now, Brett looked icily from one to the other, then rose regally to her feet. ‘I shall go to my room. It will spare me the offence of your company. You may tell the doctor where to find me.

‘Meantime I shall be phoning my lawyer. You may inform your superiors that we will be pursuing an action for damages against you for these monstrous and totally unfounded accusations.’

She swept out, all injured majesty, leaving the two officers staring after her blankly.

‘Well, bugger me!’ MacNee said vulgarly.

‘She’s something else, isn’t she? I was worried sick, thinking she was completely out of control on her way to having a fit, and then suddenly – bam!’

‘Here – maybe she turns into a crocodile in her spare time. Their tears don’t mean anything either – and they’ve a pretty savage bite on them too.’

‘You could say.’ Fleming shook her head in wonder. ‘Anyway, with any luck neither of us will have to see her again. Whoever drew the short straw last time gets to question her.’

‘You’re not kidding.’ MacNee was looking about him as he spoke; he had never been in the room before and he began to wander around, looking at the photographs on the walls and reading the framed newspaper cuttings.

‘No wonder Conrad’s like he is,’ he observed. ‘Get all this! Bulls everywhere you look. Probably thought he was a calf, when he was wee.’ Moving on, he stopped in front of the trophy cabinet and gave a low whistle. ‘There’s a fortune here, mind you! Solid silver, some of these – I can think of a few of the local punters who’d pay good money for a tip-off. And not so much as a security lock on the window snibs.’

He cast a disapproving look at the catches on the big sash windows, then moved on to the huge marble fireplace and stood looking up at the mounted head of Champion Minos of Chapelton, dusty and a little moth-eaten but magnificent still.

‘Here – wouldn’t like to meet him down a close on a dark night, would you, Boss?’

Fleming didn’t respond. He glanced round. She was standing on the other side of the room staring up at the splendidly moulded silver bull’s-head mask with its wide, sweeping, sharp horns.

‘Tam,’ she said shakily, ‘I think perhaps I’ve found the murder weapon.’

Laura slept deep and dreamlessly and very late the following morning. She woke with a start, taking a moment to realise where she was while her mind groped compulsively for the anxieties which had dogged her every waking moment.

They were gone. She flopped back on the soft pillows, looking round the simple, pleasant room with its sprigged wallpaper and soft green carpet, and at one of Janet’s celebrated patchwork quilts which was draped over the bottom of the bed. There was even a ray of sunshine shafting through the flower-print curtains.

Stretching luxuriously, she looked at her watch. Ten o’clock – good gracious, when was the last time she’d slept as long as that? Though of course it had been midnight before she and Marjory got up to go to bed, after an evening spent sitting by a delicious-smelling fire of apple logs in the room where she had spent the twenty most terrifying minutes of her life, this time with a glass in her hand and Meg stretched out in ostentatious relaxation at their feet.

Bill had been a silent presence at their evening meal but he had eaten well and, Laura thought, listened to their casual conversation. He’d seemed happy enough to go up to bed when it was suggested, even saying, ‘Goodnight,’ almost normally as he went.

‘Try to get him to shave in the morning,’ Laura said as they cleared up. ‘It’ll be good for his self-respect.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Marjory said, attacking a pan vigorously with a scouring-pad. ‘Oh, Laura – will he be all right?’

‘Of course he will.’ She was firm. ‘Look how far he’s come in twenty-four hours. I wish all my patients had made progress as quickly as that.’

Marjory had allowed herself to be reassured and once she had coaxed the fire into life, settled down with total absorption to talk about the case, a topic they had avoided over supper. As the logs began to crackle with leaping blue and green flames, Laura was impressed by Marjory’s ability to compartmentalise, an attribute more common to men than women. Perhaps if you worked in the still male-dominated police force, masculine characteristics were a career advantage, and Marjory, with her height and build, had probably been a tomboy – you could picture her climbing trees but never wearing a pink frilly dress.

The police, Marjory had said, were hoping for a straightforward confession from Conrad, though she explained that this, in Scots law, wasn’t enough; they’d still have to find corroborative evidence from at least one other source to make the charge stick.

‘I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t think you’ll get it,’ Laura cautioned. ‘A confession would mean he accepted responsibility and he’s said already he doesn’t know, it was the bull that did it.’

‘The old excuse – “It wisnae me, a big boy did it and ran away.”’

Laura laughed. ‘Exactly. Ran away so that no one can ever find him and question him.’

‘Like Jake Mason.’ Marjory got up to refill their glasses. ‘I keep thinking, if only we could talk to him he might be able to explain what happened. But he’s apparently suffering from something called “locked-in syndrome” – horrific, you know what’s happening but you can’t do anything. Imprisoned alive inside a corpse – I’d rather be dead. Much rather.’

Laura frowned thoughtfully. ‘I’m sure I read something about them having some success with communication. If they can open and shut their eyes of their own accord – and of course he may not be able to – you can show them an alphabet board and point so that they can spell it out. You start with one blink for yes and two for no.’

‘Really?’ Marjory was fascinated. ‘Of course we’d have to get all sorts of permissions, but it’s worth a try. Certainly Rosamond Mason would probably do anything to get a response from him. She still loves him, you know. It’s very touching.’

‘Has Max been visiting?’

Marjory shrugged. ‘He hadn’t, when I spoke to her.’

They talked on, about the strange upbringing the cousins had had, the obsessive streak running through the family. At last Marjory said, ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t resist. I’m really excited – I think we may have found the murder weapon.’

The silver mask would be taken down tomorrow when the search warrant had been sworn out. Everything, Marjory explained, had to be done exactly by the book if you didn’t want the case to collapse in court. But given the nature of the injury, it seemed plausible.

‘Yes,’ Laura said faintly, an all-too-vivid picture in her mind of Conrad’s massive figure, surreally surmounted by a silver bull’s head – a Minotaur – charging down the confines of the maze on her helpless sister. Still sleep-walking? Rudely awakened? Dizzy had always been confused and frightened when she’d been sleep-walking . . .

Her eyes filled with tears and Marjory was immediately full of remorse. ‘Oh Laura, how stupid of me! Do you know, I’d sort of forgotten . . . I shouldn’t have told you that.’

‘No, no, it’s all right,’ Laura said, and not long after that they had gone to bed. But now, thinking about it, she remembered that her sleep hadn’t been dreamless after all: there had been something about the mask, something troubling her. The image of the figure in the maze came horribly to her mind again—

She jumped out of bed. She’d have to discipline herself to handle images like these, which could only intensify as the case progressed.

Downstairs, Bill was clean-shaven. He was still sitting in the chair by the Aga but he looked round when she came in and said, ‘Good morning, Laura.’

The words were only slightly hesitant and it showed he was reaching out to communicate in a normal way. That was progress, and she was optimistic that he was almost ready to start talking out his problems.

‘Morning, Bill,’ she said casually. ‘Sorry, I slept in. This is a ridiculous time to be having breakfast!’ She chattered on as she made herself toast and coffee, planning her day. She’d left a lot of stuff at Burnside Cottages and she was beginning to run out of clean knickers; if she went there and packed everything up she could be back in time for a short therapy session with Bill. Then Janet would be arriving with their lunch, as she’d insisted on doing despite Laura’s protests of competence. In fact her cheerful presence would make a good natural break since Laura judged Bill still wasn’t ready for anything too intensive.

As she put her breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, she told him what she was doing. ‘I shouldn’t be much more than an hour. I’ll make us a cup of coffee when I get back.’

Bill gave her the ghost of a smile. ‘No, I’ll make one for
you
.’

‘Great!’ she said, without too much emphasis, but as she went out to the jeep Marjory had told her to borrow – she really must arrange to fetch her own car – she was grinning. Marjory would hail it as a miracle but in truth there wasn’t much wrong with Bill that a few days of good food, cheerful company and unburdening himself to a sympathetic audience wouldn’t cure. Still, she’d take a small wager that DI Fleming would never sneer at psychology again.