Cradle to Grave (28 page)

Campbell had said there were signs that the man had been living in the master bedroom at one stage, anyway, so that was where she headed first.

It was a pleasant room, a bit fussy, with flowery curtains on the bay window and a dressing table with a frilly flounce. And he was there, lying on the bed with a glass at his side, which had spilled whisky on to the rose-patterned cover.

At first Kershaw thought he was dead, but when she bent over him, there was still a thready breath. She got out her mobile, looked at it, swore, then ran out of the house, back to the radio in the car.

Suicide was as good as an admission of guilt. Tam MacNee could be right after all. Damn, damn, damn!

13

After DS MacNee had left, Lisa Stewart jumped up. She was churning inside, as if the panic she had managed to control was building up and would have to burst out in a scream, like the steam from a pressure cooker. She felt as if she’d been trussed up in sticky threads, a Bilbo Baggins in a Mirkwood of her own making, caught in a web of tiny lies.

The lies about Crozier were straightforward enough. If Lisa had admitted Crozier was stalking her, that scary little man with the menacing smile would have had the handcuffs out before you could say, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ He suspected she had killed him, she could tell.

He’d rattled her, pulled her out of her safe shell, exposing her confusion and anger. It was only with a gigantic effort of will that she had drawn herself back into the detached state where it was all happening
out there
, not
in here
. She was paying for it now with shaking hands and a pounding heart.

But the other, smaller lies – she’d have to remember precisely what she’d said – like the baby being with her that afternoon. It had sounded better, suggested improbability – who would take a baby with them if they meant to attack someone? – and it was a safe enough lie: they probably wouldn’t ask Maidie, and if they did, she probably wouldn’t remember.

And having lost her mobile – she fingered it now in her pocket. She almost wished that she had. Perhaps she should have ignored the message, pretended it was indeed lost. But at the moment she was stumbling around in scary darkness, and this was her only chance to make sense of what had been happening, of getting answers to the questions whirling round in her head, questions that she should have asked long ago.

She wasn’t a fool. She could smell danger, but even now, she couldn’t quite believe that it would come to
that
.

‘So,’ DI Fleming said, ‘the position is that we’re looking for Jamieson, we have an APB out for Lee Morrissey, and we’re keeping an open mind on everything else. It’s natural that at this stage we should have to follow up several lines of enquiry.’

She sensed she wasn’t taking Superintendent Bailey with her. The frown lines were running right up into his bald head.

‘That’s all very well, Marjory,’ he was saying unhappily, ‘but I told the chief constable it looked an open-and-shut.’

Fleming almost groaned aloud. It was her own fault, of course: she’d talked up the case against Buchan to give herself breathing space, and she was paying now for that short-term gain.

‘We haven’t ruled him out completely, of course, but after questioning him, I’m not optimistic. Obviously we’re still waiting for full forensic details, but I’ve had an interim report saying that the SOCOs found a flattened area in the bracken right at the bottom of the spinney, consonant with someone having lain down there. There’s no sign of broken vegetation leading from there up into the copse, but there are signs that someone came from the top and waited concealed close to where Crozier was attacked, though it’s just flattened grass and bracken and they can’t get footprints. Which bears out Buchan’s story, and means that my having seen him coming out from the trees doesn’t prove a thing.’

Bailey was looking distinctly uneasy. Before he could say anything, Fleming hurried on, ‘I did also think we should be looking into the business Crozier was running. There seemed to be odd things going on.’

‘Oh, no doubt it will be investigated in due course. But first things first.’ Bailey was dismissive. ‘This is all very unfortunate. The Scottish press has been having one of its periodic rants about police incompetence, and the CC was anxious to demonstrate a copybook operation. And I won’t conceal from you, Marjory, that he wasn’t altogether happy that you would be the senior investigating officer.’

Fleming’s stomach gave a nervous lurch. ‘I’m very sorry if he doesn’t feel confident. We only have one other SIO available and he’s caught up with a drugs operation at Stranraer. And I would claim I had a good record—’

‘Yes, yes, of course you have, as I pointed out. And no one could say that it was your fault that the start of the investigation was botched. But it may mean that your problems with the last case are raked over once again, which won’t do any of us any good. It’s, well, unfortunate.

‘It would be a very good idea, Marjory, a very good idea indeed, for your top priority to be showing significant progress – something solid and substantial.’

Good gracious, would it? Thanks for the tip – it hadn’t occurred to me. I thought I would concentrate on minor irrelevancies, ignore a few obvious leads, take as long as I liked . . . Fleming did a little riff on the response she wished she could have made as she went gloomily back to her office.

The red light on her phone was winking to tell her there were messages waiting. There always were. For a moment she thought of ignoring them, of clearing space for thinking and reading through the reports that were building up, but buying time, as she had seen already this morning, sometimes came at too high a price. She picked up the phone.

Good decision! A few minutes later, after speaking to Kershaw, she was hurrying back to Bailey’s office.

‘Marjory?’ He looked surprised, then, as he saw her face, hopeful. ‘Something come in?’

‘Jamieson,’ Fleming said a little breathlessly. ‘Kershaw went to his house – the one that was flooded – and he’d tried to kill himself. She called in the air ambulance and he’s on his way to hospital now.’

Bailey’s plump face brightened. ‘Now, that’s
really
good news!’ Then, collecting himself, he added, ‘Of course, very sad, very sad – a man feeling constrained to take his own life. But it’s as good as a confession, isn’t it?’

‘No. No, Donald, it really isn’t.’ He mustn’t be allowed to go dashing off with that idea. ‘It may be the line the media will take, but he didn’t leave a note of any kind, so it will depend on evidence emerging.’

Bailey’s face fell. ‘Oh, I suppose it will.’

‘This is a man whose home has been wrecked. Kershaw has spoken to neighbours who say that he’s had problems since his wife died. I agree remorse could be one interpretation, but we mustn’t make assumptions, even when speaking to the CC.’ Fleming couldn’t resist that tiny dig. ‘And we have to hope he survives and can tell us what we need to know.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Marjory. And supposing he doesn’t – where does that leave us?’

‘Just getting on with the spadework, Donald, like we were before.’

When she got back to her office, Fleming found another two messages. The first told her that Douglas Jamieson had been dead on arrival, and the second that Kershaw had just found a chainsaw in his garage.

DC Kershaw, wearing plastic gloves, dumped the huge chainsaw in the boot of the jeep, along with her disgusting boots, and got back in. The arrival and swift departure of the air ambulance, with all the attendant drama, had left her feeling deflated once it was no more than a speck in the sky.

She’d had a chat with a couple who were dragging spoiled furniture out of their ravaged house; the Jamiesons, they told her, had been a very ordinary, pleasant couple until Margaret’s illness, but after that Douglas had been, as the wife put it, strange, or according to the husband, totally bonkers.

‘The festival,’ Kershaw said. ‘Mr Jamieson was very keen to stop it going ahead. Was that what you all felt?’

They had looked at each other, then shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she said, and he added, ‘The rest of us were OK with it. It was only one weekend and it’s just kids, after all. We’ve got grandchildren ourselves. But quite honestly, I’d find it hard to blame Douglas if he took the law into his own hands and killed Crozier for what he’s done to us here. I just hope it doesn’t mean we can’t sue him, that’s all.’

Not the sort of epitaph you would choose to have, Kershaw thought, as she drove away. What sort of man had Gillis Crozier really been? A god to Cris Pilapil, a devil to Douglas Jamieson – presumably somewhere in between, like most people.

She could go back to Kirkluce now, with her limited triumph – she’d found the man, after all. But she had a nasty feeling that MacNee would claim victory for his point of view and she certainly hadn’t any counter-arguments to put forward. She’d even come to believe he was probably right. But going back to be crowed over wasn’t appetising.

She would have to turn left at the end of the road to reach the Bailey bridge, which seemed to be doing its job very effectively – just as well, since there was little chance of a new one until all the wrangles between the owners, the council and the insurance companies were resolved. There was an unspoken assumption that if you chose to live in the backwoods, inconvenience was only to be expected.

Instead, she turned right. She would go and have a chat with Maidie Buchan, the stoic victim of a nasty husband and of the mother-in-law of every woman’s nightmares. It would be good to find out a bit more about the bizarre set-up at Rosscarron House, and Maidie had spent more time with Lisa Stewart than anyone else too. Kershaw still hadn’t quite given up on that.

MacNee was definitely strutting as he came into DI Fleming’s office. ‘What did I say?’ he gloated. ‘Jamieson – there we are!’

Fleming was out of all patience with MacNee at the moment. ‘Where are we?’ she said coldly.

‘Well . . .’ MacNee gave her an uncertain look. ‘It looks bad, doesn’t it, in the circumstances?’

‘Yes, it looks bad. But it doesn’t prove anything, except that we now know Jamieson had a chainsaw and I will agree it’s perfectly possible – even likely – that he used it to sabotage the bridge. But there’s nothing beyond motive to connect him directly to Crozier’s murder at present, far less to the murder of Mr X. I’ve got Macdonald and Campbell contacting the witnesses from the campsite to find out if anyone saw him in the vicinity, so until then we won’t jump to any conclusions. Anyway, how did you get on with Lisa Stewart?’

MacNee hesitated, and Fleming’s ears pricked up. ‘Well?’

‘Kershaw’s got a point,’ he said reluctantly. ‘There’s something not right there, but I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t believe Mr X is her boyfriend, though – I can tell you that. My guess is that he’ll turn up before long. But I reckoned she was lying about almost everything else – what she was doing here, living right beside the family, why they kept moving around and where she was at the time Gillis Crozier was killed.’

‘Mmm.’ Fleming looked thoughtful. ‘It would be convenient to get hard evidence on Jamieson, but we need to keep Stewart in the picture for the moment anyway.

‘But, Tam, the other thing I want you to do sometime is to get back to your pal Sheughie in Glasgow. Remember what he said about one of the big boys hanging around?’ She told him about the emptied filing cabinet.

MacNee nodded. ‘Like we said, a pop festival’s a gift for cash-laundering. And if there’s a consortium, Rosscarron’s a great meeting place too – no one to notice who’s coming and going. Are we getting the Fraud Squad in on this?’

Fleming shook her head. ‘Not yet. The super thinks it would be a distraction. I don’t want to scare anyone off, but we could put out a few feelers here and in Glasgow among the CHISes, get the word going that it could be worth their while if they’ve a story to tell.’

After MacNee had gone, Fleming’s thoughts ran on. There was no doubt in her mind that something was going on there that neither Declan Ryan nor Cris Pilapil wanted the police to know about. And Joss Hepburn was in on it too. Oh God, Joss Hepburn!

Why the hell did he have to cross her path? This morning Bill had got up very early and was on his way by the time she came downstairs at seven. Usually he’d have lingered to chat while he finished his tea, but she’d found his mug by the draining board, only half empty.

Surely he wasn’t going to be stupid about an old boyfriend from twenty years ago – more, in fact? But Marjory knew she should have told Bill when first she spoke to him on the phone after she got back to headquarters. He would definitely believe that such a surprising encounter would be at the top of her mind – as indeed it had been – but she’d ducked it at the time, and now he was obviously reading more into it than there really was. Her meeting with Joss was just a casual, rather uncomfortable encounter – that was all.

But she would have to see him again, professionally of course. He was her best bet for finding out what was going on – the weakest link in the chain, she guessed.

Or perhaps that was Cara. Heroin addicts with no supply problems could lead lives that were relatively stable, and it was just possible she might be more with it next time Fleming spoke to her. Lack of inhibition could make her more communicative than any of the other residents of Rosscarron House seemed inclined to be.