Cradle to Grave (45 page)

He’d known all along that Lisa Stewart was holding out on them, that there was something important there, and maybe if they’d brought her in instead of going along with Kershaw’s touchy-feely approach, they’d have got it out of her. As DS MacNee drove to the Rowantrees Hotel, he was kicking himself, too, for not going in harder right at the start.

She’d seen Gillis Crozier going into the little wood where he met his death. From the level ground on top of the rise where Nico had noticed her standing, she could even see right in among the trees – MacNee had checked it himself. So had Lisa witnessed the murder, or . . . ?

She’d been out walking, by herself, from the sound of it. Nico had been definite there had been no pushchair, and it would have been clearly visible from below. She’d told MacNee the baby had been with her, though – had she hoped this would sound less suspicious? And if she’d felt the need to lie about that, had she done more than just watch?

Nico couldn’t say. He’d gone back into the house just after he’d seen her, with what he suspected was unease at the thought of encountering her. You couldn’t call him a reliable witness in general, but this was convincingly circumstantial.

Then it struck him. After Crozier entered the spinney, it would have taken five minutes, maximum, to reach the field above. Lisa had been on the hill, with no time to reach him before he got to the other end. She couldn’t have got into position in time to kill him herself, but she had almost certainly seen who had. And that had been the secret he had sensed – she had been scared to tell them what they needed to know, in case she herself became the prime suspect. This time MacNee wasn’t going to pussyfoot around. He was going to hit her with it right away, smack between the eyes.

She’d picked a nice billet anyway. He swung the car in through the gates under the rowan trees and parked on the wide gravel expanse in front of the hotel. He noticed a grey-haired woman sitting at the window of the room to the right of the front door, who craned her neck as he approached. Was he imagining it or had his arrival somehow unsettled her?

He went into the hall and pinged the brightly polished brass bell on the reception desk. The smell of furniture polish was familiar: it was the one Bunty always used to use. His house was smelling of dust and neglect now, and he was having to clear his throat when a woman appeared, wearing an unconvincing smile.

‘Can I help you?’

He produced his warrant card. ‘DS MacNee. I believe you’ve someone called Lisa Stewart staying here?’

There was no mistaking the reaction he had provoked this time. The woman’s face flared as she stammered, ‘Oh – oh dear! Yes – well, I mean no, not really.’

‘And you are . . . ?’

‘Susan Telford. My husband and I own the hotel.’

‘And Lisa Stewart’s staying here – or maybe she’s not?’

‘Oh dear,’ Susan said again. ‘It’s – it’s a little unfortunate. I’ll take you through to Dr Forbes. She’ll explain.’

The name rang a bell. Lisa’s neighbour, who’d been injured in the cliff fall. A sensible woman, judging by the statement he’d read.

She was the woman he had seen at the window. Her leg was in plaster and she too was looking definitely flustered. When Susan had introduced him, with a pleading look at her friend, Jan took a deep breath.

‘I’m afraid you may not be very pleased with us, Sergeant. Lisa Stewart has left. We debated informing you, since she said she had instructions to stay here, but we decided not to since we had no real locus in the matter.’

MacNee could take criminals, but heaven preserve him from middle-class, middle-aged wifies who used fancy words to put him in his place! Disappointed and angry, he said stiffly, ‘That’s a pity. Where’s she gone, then?’

‘I’m sorry but we don’t know. There’s a bus goes past just after eight and I would guess she must have taken it.’

‘I only went in to check at eleven o’clock,’ Susan said, eager to be helpful. ‘I just wanted to see she was all right—’ She stopped suddenly.

MacNee’s ears pricked up. ‘Oh? Some reason why she shouldn’t have been?’

There was an awkward silence. Then Jan said, ‘She tried to drown herself yesterday. One of the other guests rescued her before any real harm was done, and I suspect it was just the trad-itional cry for help.’

‘You don’t maybe think that when someone’s disturbed like that and wanders off, that it might just be an idea to get us to look for her before she has another go?’

Susan fluttered, ‘But you see, she left payment for the room on the table . . .’

‘So that was all right, then – you wouldn’t be out of pocket.’ His tone was hostile.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean . . .’ Susan protested. ‘I know it sounds . . . but I just meant—’

‘Mrs Telford means that Lisa made an organised departure. She had taken all her belongings and paid her dues. That didn’t suggest that she was in a distressed state and she’s an adult, after all.’ The eyes behind Jan’s spectacles were cool and unyielding.

Getting aggressive had been a tactical error. Swallowing his annoyance, MacNee said, ‘Then I wonder if you can help me. She’s a suspect in a murder case and anything you can tell me might help us to trace her. As far as we know, she had no family?’

Describing Lisa as a suspect had the desired effect. After exchanging a worried glance with Susan, Jan was prepared to be helpful. ‘She told me that, yes. And she had no settled home. She and her partner were constantly on the move in the past few months.’

‘Do you know why?’

Jan did not reply immediately. Then she said, ‘I think you had better sit down, Sergeant. Susan, would you be very kind and bring us some tea?’

Glad of the excuse to leave, Susan hurried out.

‘I promised Lisa I wouldn’t deliberately betray her confidence, but that if I were asked, I wouldn’t lie. Reluctantly, I feel I have to tell you what she told me.’

Jan went on to tell him of Crozier’s persecution, and of Lisa’s misery about her life of lies – the ones she told and the ones told to her.

MacNee had listened in uncharacteristic silence. Then he asked, ‘Did she say anything about being at the scene when Crozier’s murder took place?’

Jan shook her head. ‘No. I had the distinct impression, though, that she still had secrets. I hoped that over time she might trust me enough to let me try to help her. She was certainly a very troubled soul.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ she concluded, ‘I don’t believe for a moment that she murdered that baby. She’s a sad person, not a wicked one.’

She wasn’t a bad old biddy once she unbent, MacNee reflected, as he drove back to Kirkluce. But she hadn’t been able to tell him what he needed to know: where to find Lisa. Where the hell had the woman gone?

Lisa was possessed by a sense of urgency now. There was a train to Glasgow in ten minutes, and she’d taken a wrong turning on the way to the station and had to ask directions. She wasn’t sure how much further she had to go.

She was still feeling nervous about the Ryans. She knew it was foolish: Jan’s explanation had made total sense, but she found she wasn’t quite able to shake off a fatalistic belief in their power to find her. Perhaps once she was on the train on her way to Glasgow she might recapture the sense of freedom she had felt all too briefly in the café this morning.

There was the station now, on the opposite side of the road. It wasn’t busy; she took a quick glance left and right, then hurried across.

Lisa never saw the car that hit her. She felt it, though: agonising pain shot through her as she flew through the air. She heard a woman scream. Then there was a sickening crunch as her head hit the kerb. Then nothing.

It was a man who reached the pitiful, rag-doll body first. The eyes were wide open, round blue eyes like marbles, and already they were glazing over.

He took out his mobile phone. ‘Ambulance,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you’re not needing to hurry.’

The silver Ford Focus accelerated away, overtaking the cars in front through a dangerously narrow gap. Once it was round the corner, it slowed to a more decorous pace, then took lefts and rights into a warren of little streets.

The driver was smiling, a wide, satisfied smile. His luck had held, after all. It usually did – he often joked about having sold his soul to the devil in exchange. It certainly wouldn’t have done to fall down on this part of his commission; this was meant to be the easy bit, more or less a favour for a friend. The next one would be a lot more difficult.

As he turned into a quiet side road, he heard the sound of sirens and smiled again. He got out, locked the car and walked away, tucking his driving gloves into his pocket. There was a respectable householder in Glasgow who would be very surprised when the police called to question him about a hit-and-run.

Arriving for his shift at three, Andy Macdonald bumped into Kim Kershaw as she came out of the CID room.

‘Just knocking off?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, but I’m going to the canteen first. I’m desperate for a cup of tea.’

‘I’ll come with you. You can fill me in on what’s been happening – arrests, breakthroughs?’

Kershaw pulled a face. ‘Fairly quiet today. Just the routine stuff. But I can fill you in on the Hepburn interview this morning. There was some pretty weird stuff going on with Big Marge.’

‘Nothing like a bit of scandal with my jam doughnut.’ Macdonald fell into step beside her.

There were half-a-dozen officers in the canteen, sitting at tables and watching TV. Sergeant Linda Bruce, holding her tray, was just finishing her chat with the woman behind the counter and she moved away smiling as they came up.

‘It’s all yours. And I can recommend the shortbread.’

‘Sounds good,’ Kershaw said. ‘I’ll have that, Maisie, and a tea, no milk, no sugar.’

As the woman turned away, Kershaw’s mobile rang. She scrabbled in her shoulder bag, then, glancing at the number, stepped aside. ‘You carry on, Andy – I’ll be with you in a minute.’

‘Doughnut, please, Maisie,’ Macdonald said, ‘and—’

From behind him, he heard a sound he had never heard before, a primitive howl like a tortured animal with a human voice. Frozen in shock, he barely heard Linda Bruce’s tray fall to the ground with a crash. When he managed to turn round, Kim Kershaw was on the ground, crushed in an agony of pain. She was screaming, ‘No! No!’ and her clenched fists were beating on the ground.

Bruce fell to her knees beside her. ‘Kim, what’s wrong? What’s happened?’

There was no answer, except more of those terrible cries. Macdonald bent to pick up the phone that had fallen from Kershaw’s hand, his own hands shaking. ‘DS Macdonald here. Who am I speaking to?’

The woman at the other end of the phone was in tears too. ‘It’s dreadful. It’s Debbie, Mrs Kershaw’s little girl. She – she took a sudden turn this afternoon and – and I’m afraid there wasn’t anything we could do.’

‘So, tell me about carousel fraud,’ Fleming said to Purves, as they drove out of Girvan. She wanted something to take her mind off the fear that had possessed her since Dave’s disclosure. ‘Something to do with VAT, isn’t it?’

‘VAT and fake businesses – on an international scale here, from the looks of it. At its simplest level, you register your company for VAT, then buy goods – as it might be, DVDs – from another EU country and they’ll be zero-rated. Then you add the VAT to the price when you sell them, pocket it and disappear instead of forwarding it to the taxman.

‘This scam’s more elaborate. They’ll have some sort of syndicate. Mr A, the importer, sells to Mr B, Mr B sells to Mr C and so on, with VAT being theoretically added each time. The first company pays the tax; the rest all ‘reclaim’ it and finally it’s exported to another EU business, zero-rated, of course. Then, having paid one lot of VAT and got all three, four, five or however many lots generously refunded by the taxman, the companies disappear and the whole merry-go-round sets off again. Multi-million-pound profits.’

Fleming pursed her lips in a silent whistle. ‘We did think money-laundering had something to do with Crozier’s curiously amateurish little rock festival, and the foray into building as well.

‘The Ryans and Pilapil were obviously in on it, and presumably Hepburn was involved at the American end, exporting the DVDs to Ireland. He certainly knew what was going on. He was very edgy about it.’ It was an understatement. ‘Edgy’ was not quite the word for what she had seen in Hepburn’s eyes.

‘With reason, I would guess,’ Purves said. ‘I don’t know a lot about the big boys in Glasgow, but from what Dave said, getting involved wasn’t a clever idea, whatever the rewards.’

It didn’t help the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘What’ll happen to Dave now?’

‘On his way to a safe house, even as we speak. That was the final deal. We can be sure he wasn’t followed, so no one will be looking for him – yet. And he’s an unobtrusive sort of guy. We’ll fix him up with the papers and he can find a driver’s job in a city south of the border easily enough. He’s got no family ties so they can’t get at him that way, and we’ve spelled it out to him that provided he goes straight he should be able to keep out of their way.’

‘Expensive way of weaning him from a life of crime, but effective, I would reckon.’