Cradle to Grave (13 page)

Now, he was controlling his irritation with difficulty. ‘We have to get real. He most likely doesn’t want to kill you anyway or he’d have done it by now. It’s like what he wants is to do in your head. So let’s eyeball him. Your granny’s house – Crozier would never think to look there. Once he’s arrived, we’ll go together, surprise him, just walk in and tell him it has to stop. Then we’ve got the rest of our lives together for happy ever after. All right?’

It wasn’t all right. It made her feel sick just to think about it. But she’d been broken down by the endless, relentless pursuit, and when Lee said unpleasantly, ‘If you’ve got a better idea, like moving house every five minutes and screaming in your sleep and twitching all the time, count me out,’ the combination of carrot and stick – eternal bliss or the hell of loneliness – was enough to make her agree.

All this walking and the troubled thoughts that came to her in the silence were exhausting when she was so shattered anyway, but it was preferable to being in that little house, the atmosphere rank with undercurrents of unhappiness. She didn’t know which was hardest to deal with, the old bat’s hostility, Alick’s resentment or Maidie’s bewildered kindness.

And she was scared, very scared. She had nowhere to go, but the longer she stayed here, the more dangerous it would be and the greater, too, would be the chance of exposure. Since it all happened, she hadn’t spent time in the company of other people, except Lee. She didn’t want to go back to thinking about Lee – Lee, dead. It was easier to think about the practicalities.

She had to get out of here
. Alick was her best bet. He was as keen to get rid of her as she was to go – she could tell from the way he looked at her. She could ask him to drive her into Kirkcudbright; there was a bank there and she could find out if she’d any money left. At least she had a credit card in the purse in her pocket.

Anyway, she was the victim of a disaster. She could go to the social services, and they’d have to find her somewhere to stay, wouldn’t they? But that would mean the police. No, not the police.

But if she stayed here . . . She was between a rock and a hard place. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, as her granny would have said.

If Granny Kenna wasn’t dead . . . Beth’s eyes brimmed. Granny would have helped her, seen her through this crisis, as she’d seen her through the last. Now there was no one. No one at all.

She had been walking for a long time – aimlessly at first, then with purpose, almost as if she felt inexorably drawn. And there, as she rounded a corner, she could see a house – his house. It was crazy to go closer, and yet . . . The predator could never imagine being stalked by its prey.

There was no one about. With her hood pulled forward and her head down, she went off the track and climbed up to where, from the shelter of some scrubby bushes, she looked down at his house, hatred in her eyes.

6

‘What the . . . ?’ The driver’s jaw dropped as his green Ka turned a bend in the road and he saw the bridge ahead, leaning at a drunken angle amid shattered spars and debris. He swore, braking sharply.

His front-seat passenger gasped, and one of the girls in the back seat screamed.

‘It’s only frigging collapsed!’ the man next to him said, stating the obvious. ‘And hey, there’s a car!’

They stared, appalled. ‘Do you suppose there’s, like, people inside?’ one of the girls asked with a shudder.

‘Have to take a look, don’t we?’ The driver released his seat belt. ‘Come on, mate. You girls stay here.’

Clutching one another’s hands, the girls waited. ‘Oh, I can’t watch!’ one cried dramatically. ‘Tell me it’s OK!’

The two men turned, one giving the thumbs-up as they came back to the car. ‘No panic. It’s empty, and one of the doors is open. Scared, not hurt, I reckon – didn’t have far to fall. But we’d better call the police.’

One of the girls had her mobile out already, then pulled a face. ‘No signal. Have to go back to that town with the funny name. So, I guess that’s wrecked the rave. Fancy a weekend camping by ourselves in the rain?’

DS Tam MacNee darkly suspected the guy had been having a laugh, though Cris Pilapil’s smooth-skinned brown face was perfectly solemn as he handed MacNee a pair of his own chinos and a shirt that was the sort of explosion of colour that made you want to cover your ears as well as your eyes, and took away MacNee’s white T-shirt and dark jeans to be washed and dried. The trainers, at least, fitted, though the chinos were a bit too long and too tight. But that was the least of MacNee’s discomforts.

He was in some pain from his abused muscles, the glass cuts on his hands were stinging, and he was smarting, too, over Joss Hepburn’s efficiency as a rescuer. The man was a bloody giant, which gave him an unfair advantage – dropping down off the bank, giving Tam a leg-up, then hoisting Marjory on to his shoulders so that with Tam’s help from above she made it to the top. Then Hepburn had got himself up, no sweat. And the bastard had thought it was funny.

Marjory had thankfully collapsed into the bed Pilapil had ushered her to, but MacNee was struggling with his duty of gratitude, despite being warm, dry and having a large Scotch at his elbow as he sat at the huge glass dining table in yet another white room in Rosscarron House. He could be struck by snow-blindness at any time, and there was rubbish music going on and on and on, though none of the other six round the table seemed even to be aware of it, far less listening.

He had his concerns too about Marjory. She ought to be in hospital even now, having a brain scan, but she’d been adamant that all she needed was rest. He just hoped she wouldn’t wake up dead.

What MacNee hated more than anything was the feeling that he was trapped. There was no way out of this until a temporary bridge was in place, unless HQ decided they were so indispens-able that they needed to be taken off by chopper. Aye, right!

He was simmering with frustration. He felt he ought to be doing something – anything – but Crozier, inviting him to have lunch with a sort of weary courtesy, had pointed out there wasn’t anything they could do. MacNee had never been good at not doing anything.

So here he was, looking at the bowl in front of him, which held rice and some meat in a pale green sauce – that wasn’t natural, for a start. Curry, they’d said, but it didn’t look anything like the curry you got in the Indian on Kirkluce High Street.

Opposite him, a kid of about seven or eight was eating a pizza, or rather mucking about with a pizza, tearing off chunks and shoving them into his mouth. He saw MacNee’s envious glance and began making faces, crossing his eyes and putting his fingers in the corners of his half-full mouth to pull it into a square shape.

‘Nico!’ Crozier said sharply. ‘If you’re going to eat like a pig, you’re going to have to leave the table and eat on the floor.’

It was so predictable that MacNee almost groaned aloud. Grabbing his plate, Nico lay down on the floor and carried on eating with suitably disgusting animal sound effects.

Crozier looked at his daughter. ‘Has he had his Ritalin today?’ he asked.

Cara looked vague. ‘I think so. I’m not sure.’

Crozier sighed, then shrugged. He looked, MacNee thought, a defeated man.

Cara had been polite when MacNee was introduced, smiling and even making a charmingly sympathetic remark, but she seemed somehow detached and MacNee didn’t have any difficulty in working out why.

He hadn’t taken to her husband, Declan Ryan, the blond man they had seen visiting at the campsite, the man so swift to identify plainclothes coppers. Ryan was ignoring his son’s behaviour and now was having some sort of domestic discussion with Pilapil.

MacNee had been surprised to find the hired hand sitting down to eat with his employer. He’d have thought, given this sort of money, that the serfs would be kept in their place. He was even more surprised by the tone of the conversation.

‘If you need loo paper and fresh towels in your bathroom, you know where to find them,’ Pilapil was saying. ‘The cleaner didn’t appear today.’

‘So?’ Ryan said insolently.

Crozier intervened. ‘Declan, I’ve told you before. Cris is here to organise my life and cook me the meals I like. He’s not here as a personal slave to idle young men.’

Ryan’s expression suggested that he would like to reply, but after a moment he said meekly, ‘Sorry, Cris,’ with a brief, false smile.

On the payroll too, was he? MacNee studied him covertly as he ate the surprisingly delicious food.

Declan Ryan was, MacNee conceded, quite good-looking if you went for the sulky, sissy-looking James Dean type. Women seemed to, though he couldn’t see it himself. With a name like that you’d guess at Irish extraction, though his accent was pure Estuary English. He certainly didn’t appear to have much control over his son, who seemed to be spoiled by his mother and thoroughly out of hand. You’d have thought a pair like Declan and Cara, sunk in ‘luxury’s contagion, weak and vile’, would be just the sort to buy some poor lassie to keep him out of their hair, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around.

The other member of the party, Joss Hepburn, had said almost nothing. He and Crozier both lit up the moment they had finished their curry, and now Hepburn was leaning back in his chair sending out almost visible waves of boredom.

Finishing his cigarette, he got up. ‘Just going to my room. Let me know when you get a signal that the outside world still exists.’

MacNee glanced at his watch, with a sudden start. He hadn’t realised how the time was passing – it was three o’clock already. If they weren’t back in some sort of communication by six, it was going to cause him problems, but there was nothing he could do about it, nothing.

Crozier was saying, ‘I’ll have to go up and tell the kids at the campsite that the party’s off. Don’t relish it, but it’s got to be done. They need to be packed up – someone’s bound to have reported it by now, so it shouldn’t take too long to get them out.’

Cara, taking an interest in the conversation for the first time, said sharply, ‘Declan, you go.’

Ryan looked at his wife for a long moment. ‘Oh, right.’ He didn’t sound happy, but he said, ‘Right,’ again, and to his father-in-law, ‘It’s OK. If you don’t want to do it, I will.’

It had been a significant exchange and MacNee saw Crozier look from one to the other, but he said only, ‘Fine. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. Tell them they’ll get refunds, of course. And at least the rain’s stopped, thank God!’

It had, indeed, and even some rays of watery sunshine were coming in the windows.

Crozier got up. ‘I’ll need to go and have a word with the contractors up in the top field. They’ll all have to be paid off. This whole exercise is going to cost me a bomb.’ He shook his head. ‘Right, then, Declan – you’ll take care of the campers? Thanks. I’ve a couple of things to do now, but I’ll drop by and add my apologies on the way back from seeing the caterers. What about Nico? Will you take him with you?’

Nico, hearing his name, got up from the floor. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he whined. ‘It’s boring.’

‘You stay with me, angel,’ Cara said dreamily. ‘Watch a DVD – that’ll be cool, won’t it, sweetheart? Harry Potter?’

The boy gave his mother a look of contempt and left the room.

MacNee cleared his throat. ‘I was thinking I’d come up the hill with you, Mr Ryan. Just to reassure the punters, ken?’

He thoroughly enjoyed the look of dismay that passed between husband and wife.

‘Oh God! That’s all we need!’ Inspector Michie looked horrified. ‘The bridge as well!’

The PC who had waylaid him in the corridor to give him the news said, ‘I suppose it’s just part of the same problem as the cottages. And at least no one seems actually to have been hurt, as far as we can tell.’

‘Well, that’s something. The rescue services are at full stretch – there’s another river burst its banks over in the Machars. But get on to the telephone engineers and tell them to pull their fingers out so we can find out what’s happened. Unless they’ve a problem needing immediate attention, they’ll just have to wait till the army’s got time to put across one of those Bailey bridge things.’

Gillis Crozier’s mind was on his unwelcome guests as he went into the cloakroom to fetch his outdoor clothes. Police in the house, on top of everything else, was just about the last straw. He had almost heard the crackling of tension round the lunch table. And when could he hope they would go?

Problems seemed to be piling in on him, but it was the family problems that made him feel someone was twisting a knife in his stomach. He’d seen the exchange between Cara and her husband over lunch. Drugs, no doubt – but what could he do?

He’d adored Cara since they’d put his tiny daughter in his arms and he’d looked into those unfocused baby-blue eyes. He’d been possessed with a fierce desire to give her the perfect life – everything that money could buy, he had promised her. But he hadn’t been thinking of heroin at the time, and now unfocused eyes were a sign of an unfolding tragedy.

Perhaps if his wife hadn’t walked out, it might have been different. She’d been the disciplinarian, but he’d always been a lump of putty in his daughter’s hands. What Cara wanted, Cara got, and an addiction problem was the result. There were days when he felt so burdened by guilt that it was an effort to stand up straight.