Cradle to Grave (23 page)

‘Out all day yesterday, up tracks and ploughing through mud, and what do we find?’ an indignant engineer complained to DS Andy Macdonald. ‘Only that someone’s had the bright idea of cutting the line to the house. You lot had better get him put behind bars, that’s all.’

‘Not up to me,’ Macdonald said regretfully. ‘I’d throw away the key.’

He would, too, when he thought about all the problems that had caused. Though, of course, if this was part of the sabotage effort that had brought the bridge down too, even the most bleeding-heart judge would have to think custodial.

That was the only interesting snippet that came his way all morning. The statements the uniforms were getting from the campers and the contractors were without exception unhelpful. No one had seen anything; few people could remember exactly where they were when, or who was with them. Half of them seemed to have been asleep in the afternoon – and probably half cut as well. ‘Nothing else to do,’ one had said bitterly.

If there was any action, it certainly wasn’t here and Macdonald was bored. If being a sergeant meant you got lumbered with organising while the others went off and did the interesting jobs, it wasn’t worth all the studying and the courses and the exams. His one hope was that when Big Marge came to be airlifted out, she’d decide she couldn’t do without him back at headquarters.

Still, at least the news coming in about the replacement bridge was good. The campers were packing up their cars, with the promise of getting off the headland in a couple of hours.

Suddenly Macdonald noticed that up at the top of the hill, just by the police tape surrounding the crime scene, there was a child – a boy, didn’t look more than seven or eight. He was talking to PC Langlands, the uniform on duty at the site, but this was no place for a kid! Macdonald started up towards them.

Langlands, a pleasant-faced young man celebrated for his sympathetic way with children and those of a nervous disposition, started pulling agitated faces over the boy’s head as Macdonald approached.

‘This is Nico, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Nico’s, well, wanting to know about his granddad.’

‘Right.’ Macdonald looked down at the child, a little uncertainly, but Nico’s blue eyes met his with total confidence.

‘My granddad was killed in there, right?’ He pointed to the clump of trees. ‘Can I see?’

Langlands cravenly retreated. Macdonald said firmly, ‘Sorry, no. It’s a crime scene. No one’s allowed in there.’

Nico scowled. ‘But I’m family. I have a right to see him. I’ll speak to Marjory – she’ll give you a row.’

Macdonald blinked. ‘
DI Fleming
will tell you the same. Whoever you are, you can’t go in.’

The boy’s face became stormy and for a moment Macdonald thought he was about to throw a tantrum. Then with startling suddenness he smiled. ‘You can tell me, then – did someone hit him and hit him with a stone until he was dead? Was there lots of blood?’

Macdonald heard a choking sound from Langlands and felt slightly queasy himself. Of course kids were ghouls, but this was going over the score.

‘I think you should go back to the house,’ he said firmly. ‘No one’s going to tell you anything and nothing’s going to happen for a long, long time. Your mum’s probably looking for you.’

‘Her?’ Nico said scornfully. ‘She’s so fried she wouldn’t know if I was there or not. But I’ll go back and ask Cris. He’ll have to tell me because he’s my servant now my granddad’s dead.’

He swaggered off, leaving Langlands and Macdonald staring after him with dropped jaws.

‘Well, look at you!’ Joss Hepburn said with his lazy smile as he came into the conference room. ‘Could catch on – rainbow make-up!’

Her nerves taut as piano strings. Fleming said in her coolest, most professional voice, ‘Morning, Joss. Would you like to sit down?’

His lips twitched as he stood surveying her teasingly from his considerable height. ‘Why, thank you, Madge. Or should I call you Inspector Madge?’ He sat down.

She mustn’t smile. ‘I have to ask you, please, what your movements were yesterday afternoon.’

‘Of course. Easier if I demonstrate, perhaps.’ Disconcertingly, he swung his long legs on to the chairs to his left, then lay down on his right side across the chairs to his right. His voice came from below the level of the table.

‘I lay down on my bed. That was my first movement. My next movement – can you see? – was on to my back, like this. I lay that way for a bit, contemplating the ceiling and the ineffable tedium of being stuck here indefinitely. Then –’ he appeared again – ‘I guess I sat up and smoked, using this movement –’ he mimed puffing at a cigarette – ‘several cigarettes. Could be I dozed, briefly.’ He put his head down on the table and made small, comic snoring snuffles, then sat up looking at her hopefully.

It was funny, but she remained stone-faced. ‘Then?’

‘Then I most likely got out my gui-tar,’ Hepburn put on a Texan drawl, ‘and just strummed awhile. I guess my only hope of an alibi, Inspector—’ He broke off, laughing. ‘No, I definitely can’t. Inspector Madge is positively my best offer.’

‘No need to call me anything,’ Fleming said crisply. ‘Since we’re the only people in the room, I can make a guess that you’re talking to me. Your only hope of an alibi . . . ?’

‘Is if someone heard me. That’s it. Otherwise, I could have popped up the hill and bashed Gillis’s head in. Except, of course, that I didn’t. Why should I? He was a mate, a professional contact. I’d nothing against the guy, except his tendency to want to tell me his problems. You may remember I was never much interested in other people’s problems.’

Hepburn looked at her quizzically and Fleming heard herself say, with feeling, ‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ then had to make a swift retreat to safely professional territory. Recalling his earlier reaction to the question, she asked, ‘Crozier’s business – you were a bit vague about it when I asked you before. Were you involved in it?’

‘Involved? No.’ Again she sensed tension in the flat denial, as he went rapidly on, ‘Gillis fixed up a lot of gigs for me, here and in Europe, so he called in a favour to get me here to headline the pop festival. Bi-ig mistake, even before all this. I should never have agreed. Boredom ought to be on the proscribed list as a form of torture.’

Ignoring his attempt at distraction, Fleming asked if he had a key to Crozier’s study.

‘Of course not. Why should I?’

‘Or see anyone going in there last night?’

‘Afraid not.’

He hadn’t asked why she wanted to know. Perhaps he was simply assuming she wouldn’t tell him. Or perhaps—

The sound of the helicopter low overhead interrupted them. Feeling anyway that there was little more progress to be made and relieved to have kept control of the interview, more or less, Fleming got up and walked round the table to the door. ‘I’ll have to go. That’s all I need to know for the moment. You’re not intending to go back to the States immediately, are you?’

He joined her. ‘Planning to confiscate my passport, Madge? No need – I’d welcome a chance to hang about and renew auld acquaintance. It’s sort of an obligation on us Scots, isn’t it – dear old Rabbie Burns!’

She held open the door for him. ‘We would just prefer you didn’t leave for the next few days, that’s all. Someone will take contact details later.’

‘But I would so much prefer to see you than someone,’ Hepburn protested. ‘I might have to pretend that I have important information I will only disclose to you personally.’

‘It’s called wasting police time.’ She added deliberately a distancing, ‘Sir. And we always ask for prosecution.’

Hepburn’s laugh was one of unaffected amusement. He looked down at her, then very gently cupped her injured cheek. ‘You put up a great front. But she’s still there, you know, under the tidy hair and the smart professional clothes – my crazy Madge. If you ever want to let her out again, I’m sure one of your officers will know where to find me. OK?’

He left, and she shut the door and slumped against it. For a moment she had thought he was going to kiss her and she honestly didn’t know how she would have reacted.

The wild, self-destructive girl she had once been was long gone, but as she stood there trying to calm her racing pulse, she felt all of a sudden bereft.

There was still one more check Fleming had to make before she left. She went through the under-stairs door at the back of the hall, hoping to find Pilapil in the kitchen. He wasn’t there, but when she called his name, he appeared from a door off the corridor beyond it.

‘Just one thing I wanted to ask you, Cris,’ she said. ‘Did anyone go into Mr Crozier’s study last night?’

‘I locked it and gave you the key.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked you. I guess there may have been other keys – who had them?’

‘I’m not sure.’

He was looking everywhere except straight at her. Fleming was disappointed in him: she’d had him marked down as one of the good guys.

‘I’m not going to let you get out of it by evasion, Cris. If you’re not going to tell me the truth, it’s going to have to be a direct, straightforward lie. I think you know that someone went into the study last night and removed a lot of papers. Who was it?’

Pilapil raised his head and looked her straight in the eye. ‘I don’t know anything about it, Inspector Fleming.’

She had invited him to do it, and he had. ‘I’m sorry you said that. Very sorry. Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind?’

His head went down but he said nothing. She had no alternative but to leave.

11

Lisa Stewart looked at herself in the mirror above the basin in the ladies’. At the parting, her roots were beginning to show, sort of like her old self was creepily emerging again. Hastily, she fished out the comb from her jacket pocket to try to cover up the tell-tale red, though there wasn’t much point, when the policewoman who had brought her here to the mortuary had seen through that slight disguise straight away.

Her mobile was in her pocket too, along with her purse, and she took it out, holding it away from her as if afraid it might bite. It must be all right now, surely . . . But so strong were its connections with distress that she had to take a deep, calming breath to steady her hands before she could switch it on.

Her eyes widened as the text message came up. It wasn’t what she had feared it might be, but it wasn’t what she was expecting either and she certainly wasn’t ready to deal with it. She had to do some more deep breathing before she felt calm enough to emerge.

DC Kershaw led the way to the small waiting room. As they sat down, she explained the procedure, then added, ‘And we’ll need the name of someone else who knew your partner. In Scotland there has to be a second witness, you see, but it doesn’t matter who – a relative, a friend, anyone who knew him.’

It was the first time Kershaw had escorted someone to perform an identification, but she had imagined they would be, if not invariably distraught, then certainly nervous. Perhaps Lisa was just very good at concealing her emotions, but she seemed disconcertingly self-possessed.

‘I can’t think of anyone.’

Kershaw was taken aback. ‘No one who could identify him?’

‘No.’ Lisa, sitting with her hands clasped loosely in her lap, didn’t seem to think this was odd.

‘What about his family?’

‘Don’t think he had any. None he mentioned, at any rate.’

‘It doesn’t have to be someone close to him, just someone who could recognise him – a friend, a neighbour, even,’ Kershaw suggested.

‘We moved around a lot, and I didn’t know any of his friends.’

Kershaw tried again. ‘Where did he work, for instance?’

‘He didn’t, not when we were together.’

This really wasn’t normal. ‘Was he on the dole? Where did he go to sign on?’

Lisa looked completely blank. ‘He never said. I paid for most things. I’d a bit of money from selling my flat.’

‘Right. How long were you together, then?’

‘A few months – I can’t remember, exactly.’

Eventually Kershaw elicited the information that Lisa thought he’d done something with sound systems before, but had no luck with where he had lived before moving in with her.

What on earth had they talked about, Kershaw wondered, or was the girl being deliberately obstructive? And no friends, no acquaintances, even if they had been moving about? There was something very strange about Lisa Stewart.

A mortuary assistant came to summon them and they followed her through swing doors to a bare side room with a glass wall through which they could see a trolley covered by a sheet with a woman in white coveralls waiting beside it.

There was a strong smell of chemicals in this area; that was what hit you first. Kershaw, concentrating on Lisa’s reaction, hadn’t considered what her own might be. She rapidly had to switch to breathing through her mouth and she braced herself as the woman by the trolley, with a sympathetic look towards Lisa, folded back the sheet.

He had been quite a tall man, and older than Kershaw had expected – early forties, probably. The top of his head was covered by a white cloth, presumably to conceal an injury, but a lock of dark hair lay across his brow. His eyes were closed, and on the cold, waxy skin a shadow of stubble was visible. She had read somewhere that it went on growing after death and this, more even than the smell, made her feel squeamish. She looked away hastily.