Cradle to Grave (4 page)

Her grandmother looked very tiny as she took her place in the witness stand, thin and frail, but with her pain-racked body fiercely erect and her chin tilted. Her flame-red hair looked almost like a flag of defiance.

But compared to the loud, confident tones of the barrister, her soft Scottish voice sounded hesitant as she said, ‘But she’s always loved the bairns.’

‘I can’t tell you how good it is to have you back, Marjory.’

There was no mistaking Superintendent Donald Bailey’s sincerity. Even his bald pate was rippling as he gave her a beaming smile. ‘We had a couple of shocking substitutes wished on us – shocking.’ His plump face clouded as he detailed a few of the inadequacies of Fleming’s temporary replacements. ‘But we have to put all that behind us now.’

‘Absolutely, Donald.’ There would be no one happier to put it all behind her than DI Fleming herself. But she suspected Bailey, whose inadequacies when he was an inspector she had exposed in her most recent case, was no longer as supportive of her as he had once been; her suspicions were confirmed as he went on.

‘There’s something I have to say to you, though – not official, you understand, just a word to the wise. For your own sake, Marjory, be very careful for the next bit. There were mutterings in high places about the adverse publicity all this generated. So cover your back – everything by the book, all “i”s dotted, “t”s crossed. Keep your head down, that’s my advice.’

She had worked that out for herself, but it didn’t feel good to have it spelled out. ‘Thanks for the warning, Donald,’ she said, a little stiffly. ‘I certainly intend to.’

‘Of course you do!’ His voice was slightly too hearty. ‘Excellent, excellent. The matter’s closed now as far as I’m concerned. Now, to business . . .’

There was a considerable backlog, both operational and administrative, for Bailey to go through with her. Fleming’s head was spinning by the time he shuffled the papers together on his desk and said, ‘That about covers it.’

Fleming flipped shut her notebook, keen to get going. She wouldn’t be out of here before midnight, by the looks of things.

‘Thanks, Donald. That’s been enormously helpful. Anything else?’

‘Our most immediate problem at the moment is the flooding. There was a demonstration yesterday afternoon – you heard about it?’

Fleming nodded. ‘There’s a lot of sympathy in the town. It’s all in places where houses should never have been built. For instance, the Carron – I can remember myself seeing flooding at the mouth there years ago, so why the council allowed the project to go ahead without proper flood defences being in place . . .’

Bailey snorted. ‘Absolutely ridiculous! They’ve been talking about defences for years and done nothing about it – there should never have been planning permission. And after all this rain, every river and burn is in spate, of course. I can tell you, Mr Crozier isn’t a popular man at the moment.’

Gillis Crozier was a local lad who had done well out of the pop music he had been promoting since the late seventies in London, then a few years ago had reappeared to buy Rosscarron House, a former shooting lodge on the Rosscarron headland, as a second home. He had a finger in a lot of pies, though, and this latest property venture, right on his own doorstep, looked to have been ill judged.

‘And of course,’ Bailey went on, ‘this pop festival has been a flashpoint too.’

Fleming smiled. ‘I’ve two teenagers planning to go. They seem to see a three-day mudbath as a pleasurable activity, though I suppose for Cammie, as a rugby player, mud’s more or less his natural element. I’d have thought Cat might have been more delicate about it, but apparently someone called Joshua who’s coming from the States is not to be missed. With a band called Destruction – big in retro disco, she tells me.’

Bailey looked pained. ‘If you say so. But the point is, we have two problems. The householders there who are flooded out were upset already over “the invasion of the Great Unwashed”, to quote the gentleman who insisted on seeing me personally to complain.’

‘It’s bringing much-needed casual work to the locality,’ Fleming pointed out. ‘Ushering, catering, rubbish collection – these events are good business. And the shops will get a boost too.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Bailey said tetchily, ‘that’s all well and good. But there are a couple of problems it’s thrown up and I’d like you to look into them as a matter of urgency. In the first place, Crozier’s filed a complaint about vandalism. Cables that were laid out last week to be connected have disappeared – massively expensive, it seems. Then yesterday he saw that someone had written in weedkiller in the camping field, “No raves here.” Or, to be strictly accurate, since the wet weather had made the weedkiller spread, what it actually said was, “No Daves here,” but you get the gist.’

Fleming couldn’t suppress a choke of laughter. Bailey looked surprised, then grinned himself. Sometimes, if only sometimes, the humour showed, which leavened his pomposity.

‘Oh, I suppose . . . But really, Marjory, it isn’t funny. Crozier is quite worked up about it, and he’s worried about what they might do, with a lot of high-voltage equipment coming in.

‘The other problem is the report from Traffic about that bridge over to the headland.’

Fleming shook her head. ‘Haven’t been there for years. I can’t remember what it’s like.’

‘It was only built for the shooting estate. You’re talking about hundreds arriving over the next few days – indeed, a handful of them have apparently arrived already. The Carron’s high, of course, and Donaldson, the new man in Traffic . . . Well, between these four walls, Marjory, I think he’s a bit of a fusspot. He’s saying he’s not sure about the bridge with that level of traffic.’

Fleming was startled. ‘But surely to get insurance they must have done a proper risk assessment?’

‘Of course. So this is a complete bolt from the blue.’ Bailey’s expression indicated that in a properly ordered society this sort of upset would not happen. ‘So what I want you to do is go out and see Crozier, try to get a handle on the vandalism and make your own assessment of the bridge. I can’t bear to think of the trouble it’s going to cause if it has to be cancelled – all those disappointed fans with nowhere to stay and nothing to do.’ He shuddered.

‘Right,’ Fleming said, getting up quickly before he could think of anything else to add to her workload.

As she went to the door, Bailey said, ‘We really don’t want to encourage Donaldson to be overcautious. If we all went down that route, we’d end up afraid to get out of bed in the morning.’

The obvious implication was that real chaps laughed at Danger, snapping their fingers in her face. Fleming felt rather differently, aware that her precious children, along with the precious children of hundreds of other parents, would be crossing this dubious bridge. She decided to go and talk to Donaldson before she left.

Before that, she had to go to the CID room and see her officers for the morning briefing. The team she liked to work with most closely was depleted: Tansy Kerr had resigned and gone off on a belated gap year while she thought about her future, so that left Andy Macdonald, Ewan Campbell and Tam MacNee.

Oh, yes. Tam MacNee. The knot of nerves in her stomach, which had dissipated slightly while she talked to Bailey, gave another twinge.

Music with a heavy beat was, as always, playing when Alick Buchan opened the door to Gillis Crozier’s office, having been kept waiting in the kitchen by the Filipino who always came up from London with Crozier, and in Buchan’s eyes looked down on the peasants who were outdoor staff.

The office had stark white décor, furnished in the minimalist style with a lot of glass and steel, which quarrelled with the original Victorian features. Buchan always felt uncomfortable in this room and it wasn’t entirely due to the way his boss affected him.

‘The Rosscarron Cottages?’ Crozier, unshaven and showing signs of having dressed hastily, looked stunned as he was told what had happened. He was a big, powerfully built man running a little to fat, with dark hair gone grey, and a long face seamed with lines, which gave him a saturnine appearance. ‘That – that was where my parents stayed, where I grew up! Who’s living there now?’

‘Kind of hard to tell. The girl was in shock. She says there’s a woman stays in one and maybe a couple and their baby in a holiday let.’

‘No time to waste, then. Let’s get things moving.’ He went over to his desk, picked up the handset, listened, then frowned. ‘It’s out – no Internet either, then. OK, you get down there and check it out, Alick. I’ll send someone into Kirkcudbright to alert the police and rescue services. Then I’ll be right behind you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Buchan went out, resentfully experiencing the slight easing of tension he always felt on leaving. He’d no reason for it: Crozier was a good employer, paying a fair wage and not making unreasonable demands – even ready to say thanks for a job well done. But Buchan liked to think he tugged his forelock to no one, yet somehow here he was doing it: ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir!’

They’d been in the army together, though the other man had gained a commission. Crozier hadn’t had any more advantages than Buchan had himself, growing up in the Rosscarron Cottages out there at the end of ‘the road to nowhere’, as the locals called it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so galling if he’d relied on privilege to get him where he was now, rolling in money – though Buchan had resented the toffee-nosed bastards who’d had it all handed to them on a plate too.

Up here on the headland, the bruise-coloured clouds seemed to wrap him like a shawl. With the wipers going at double speed, Buchan pressed on down the narrow road, which ran for a mile across bleak, featureless moorland, ducking into a passing place as a large silver Mercedes drove up towards him. Oh, he knew his place! But there’d be some fun when people started arriving for the festival.

Lower down, the visibility was better, but all he could see was drifts of rain sweeping in from the sea, below on the left there, a sheet of gun-metal grey. On that side, a smaller road – barely more than a tarmac track – led down a slope, then along the river to where the flooded houses had so mistakenly been built. Straight ahead was the Carron itself.

The bridge that crossed it was a wide, sturdy structure set on wooden struts embedded in concrete piers with elaborate wrought-iron railings and a tarmac surface laid across the wood and metal of the bridge itself. It was a version of the bridges built on estates all across Scotland by Victorians for their posh shooting parties and the lorry loads of slaughtered birds being ferried south.

With steeper, shelving banks here topped by low bushes, the river was contained and the bridge was still well above even its present high level, but even so Buchan cast an anxious glance at it as he drove across. The flood water was gushing angrily along, frothing and bubbling, with small rafts of branches and debris collecting round the base of the piers.

Standing water splashed around the wheels of the jeep as he drove the mile and a bit from the bridge down the other side of the river to connect with the road running along the shore of the Solway Firth – the road to nowhere, which finished at the Rosscarron Cottages. Near its mouth, the river had overflowed its banks, but it was much worse on the far side, where the smart houses with their sea views were awash, the cars parked outside engulfed in water and mud. They’d have to shell out a fine premium for their insurance next year! But then, they could afford it, jammy beggars.

From here, it was less than a mile or so to the cottages and his foot unconsciously slackened on the accelerator. There was no telling what he’d find: people distressed, injured, dead, even. He’d had experience of that serving with the army, but at least there you always had back-up. He kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, hoping to see Crozier’s huge black Discovery, but the road behind him remained obstinately empty.

Buchan turned a corner into the short straight before the cottages and found himself suddenly feet away from a wall of earth, rocks and rubble. He swore, slamming on his brakes, and brought the jeep to a shuddering standstill, its nose into soft earth.

His first thought was to back up and inspect the damage, mercifully slight, his second to go back and warn his boss before the Discovery came barrelling into the back of his jeep – Crozier was famous for his lack of respect for local road conditions.

The landslip was blocking the road and the foreshore, right down into the sea. He listened, but all he could hear was the sound of the waves and the steady hissing of the rain, not voices or screams or anything. A good sign or a bad sign? He wasn’t sure, but anyway, here was the boss now. He flagged him down, pleased that the responsibility for dealing with this was his no longer.

‘Welcome back, ma’am!’

When DI Fleming arrived for the morning briefing, DS Andy Macdonald came forward to shake her hand and there was a smattering of applause.

Fleming coloured. It was kind of him, but it made the moment of getting back to business as usual more difficult. ‘Thanks. Glad you’re pleased to see me,’ she said, then went on briskly, ‘I only hope the mood lasts once I’ve finished tasking you.’

She went through a list of reports she wanted and the priorities for the day, then, after the meeting, dealt with individual queries. Perhaps she was being oversensitive in noticing that Tam MacNee had positioned himself on the outer edge of the group, but she worked her way towards him anyway.