Cradle to Grave (53 page)

Cara was a strange woman. Perhaps it was the drugs, but he’d been struck by her lack of emotion when she heard about her father’s death. It could have been shock too, of course, but Pilapil had said bitterly that Cara didn’t care about him anyway. And according to Kershaw, who’d read all the trial reports, the nanny had been Crozier’s old girlfriend’s granddaughter. Maybe Cara blamed him for introducing her into the house. Maybe she saw her father’s death as rough justice.

So how aware was she of what had been going on? It was, MacNee remembered, Cara who had talked about the people staying in the guest house when they broke the news of Jason Williams’s death. Had she been part of an exercise to frame Lisa?

If so, why had she spoken to him yesterday? Ryan must have told her what MacNee had been asking him and she’d then made a point of seeking him out to drop her husband in it. In a situation like that, when you had cooperative evidence from an unexpected source, you always asked yourself what was in it for them.

Had she, he wondered, realised that the net around Ryan was closing tighter and tighter, and been sharp enough to seize the opportunity to put herself in the clear, innocent and ignorant? You tended to think of her as a junkie crippled by her habit, but many people who were heroin-dependent could live all but normal lives with careful management.

That gave him an excuse to phone Fleming. She couldn’t complain if he was alerting her to a new idea. He picked up his mobile and dialled. Still on answerphone.

He looked at the kitchen clock. It was almost one – she’d been there a long time. Maybe Cara was singing like a canary and they would be arresting Ryan even while he sat here, missing the fun.

When Fleming opened her eyes, everything was swimming in front of her and the light from the bare bulb overhead made her screw them up again. Her head was spinning so that she thought she might pass out again if she tried to lift it. She was lying on a flagged floor, and she could hear someone crying.

The waves of dizziness subsided a little and she risked turning her head. Kim Kershaw was sitting on the floor, slumped like a puppet whose strings have been cut, with her head on her knees, making sobbing wails.

‘Kim!’ Fleming croaked, but either she wasn’t speaking loudly enough or Kim was so lost in her anguish that she was unaware of anything else; certainly, there was no response.

Fleming put a hand to her head gingerly and it came away sticky with blood. Sticky – that meant a lapse of time. How long? She had no idea. She lifted her arm to look at her watch, but the face had smashed in her fall. Was it minutes? Hours?

Her mouth was parched, and the cold from the stone floor was seeping into her. Not good, if she’d been unconscious for any length of time, with another injury to her head. She could wiggle her fingers and toes – good. She pulled her dry tongue away from the roof of her mouth and licked at her cracking lips.

‘Kim!’ Fleming managed to speak more loudly and Kershaw raised her swollen, blubbered face and looked at Fleming on the floor with what seemed like surprise.

‘Boss,’ she said, frowning. Then, ‘Are you all right?’ Her speech was slow and she looked almost as if she was having difficulty focusing, but at least this was some sort of response.

‘I hit my head. Could you help me sit up?’

Fleming was lying half under a stone shelf; she hadn’t the strength to crawl out. For a moment Kershaw only looked at her with a dazed expression, then said uncertainly, ‘Yes, of course.’

The cramped space made it hard for her to get close enough, but at last she had a hold on Fleming’s arm and pulled her sideways. Wincing at the pain, Fleming forced herself into an upright position against the back wall. The room spun round her and her stomach heaved; she shut her eyes, which helped, and when she felt steadier, she opened them and took stock of her surroundings.

They were in an old-fashioned larder, much like the one in Mains of Craigie, with the stone shelves that kept things cool in the days before refrigerators. Now it was acting as a storeroom with stacks of tins and paper goods. What the hell were they doing here? Her brain still felt fuzzy and unclear.

Kershaw had said nothing else. She had stopped crying; she had sat down again and was looking straight ahead with a blank expression.

Delayed reaction – she’d gone into shock. With a sense of desperation, Fleming said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, ‘Kim! Kim, can you hear me? Can you tell me exactly what happened? I blacked out.’

Her head turned, and she frowned again. ‘I – I was crying. I don’t know. Perhaps I tripped, and then the door shut.’

It started coming back to Fleming. ‘Of course! I was in here, looking for the laptop Cara mentioned. Then you lurched on top of me and I fell.’

There was certainly no laptop here – and then Fleming remembered, with hideous clarity, the other thing. ‘Cara knew that Lisa Stewart was dead. She couldn’t know that unless . . .’

Unless whoever killed Lisa had told her
. She didn’t say it aloud, but at last she had a terrifying insight into Cara’s reason for stopping them from leaving.

Joss Hepburn had tried to warn her, but she had convinced herself that it was another empty threat. And now they were being held until the man they called Badger Black arrived to carry out their execution.

‘Whose car is that out there?’ Ryan said as he came in.

Cara was waiting for him in the hall, an unusual act of wifely devotion, and he looked at her with some suspicion. There was usually only one reason why she sought him out, but she’d had enough this morning not to be desperate yet, unless she’d really overdone it.

Hiding the stuff and rationing it was the only way he had kept her functioning. She ordered him to restrain her but then resented it, and he was never sure that she wouldn’t do something spiteful like changing her will to cut him out – if there was anything to leave, but he couldn’t afford to think like that.

He was tired of the whole mess, so tired. He’d been kicked around by the woman for years, because he had let himself be bought and she was like her father when it came to getting value for money. Maybe he wasn’t a very strong character, but then Gillis too had been helpless against her iron will. Once all this was over and he had worked his way into the business, he decided, he wasn’t going to lift a finger to stop her killing herself with an overdose.

Whatever. Right now he was going to take a stand. Cara would have to listen to him for once, instead of giving him instructions, and he’d dope her to the eyeballs to get her to toe his line if necessary.

But Cara wasn’t twitching. Indeed, she looked as if she was on a high, and he said warily, ‘So, what have you been up to?’

It was only then he became aware of a banging sound, and a voice shouting, and frowned. ‘What’s that? Nico mucking about again?’

Cara smiled. ‘No, that’s Marjory Fleming and her constable. Poor sad creature – she’s just lost her daughter. I felt quite sorry for her.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘In the cupboard at the back. I’m keeping them until Badger Black arrives.’

Ryan gaped at her. ‘Have you lost it completely? Who’s Badger Black?’

‘Friend of Hugh and Paddy’s. Well, more an employee, really.’ Cara gave a little giggle.

Ryan felt he was losing his grip on reality. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me that you have locked up two police officers – two police officers! – because you’re waiting for someone Lloyd and Driscoll are sending? What’s he going to do?’

Cara giggled again. ‘Kill them. He’s a hitman. That’s his job. He’s good too. Hugh got him to do a little favour for me yesterday. He’s been like a father to me, you know, better than the one I had.’

‘What “favour”? No, don’t tell me – I need a drink.’

Ryan headed for the sitting room and Cara followed him. ‘I told you we should just have dealt with Lisa Stewart right at the start, but you wanted to do it differently and look what a mess you’ve got us all into! It was time someone sorted everything out, and that’s just what Hugh and Paddy have done. They’re
real
men.’

She looked contemptuously at her husband as he filled a tumbler with vodka, drank half of it, then sank down on one of the sofas.

‘I – I don’t know what to do,’ Ryan said helplessly. ‘You can’t get away with it.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly! But Badger’s a serious professional – the best in the business, Hugh says. He’ll take care of everything.’

‘They’ll come looking for them.’

‘No they won’t. Someone phoned and I said they’d left an hour ago.’ Cara sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

Ryan’s mind, the quick mind he was so proud of, was racing round and round like an animal frantic with fear. Supposing he went and let them out. Cara couldn’t stop him, but he knew what would happen then. The person on the hit list wouldn’t be Marjory Fleming; it would be him. And even if what he’d been accustomed to thinking of as the worst happened, they’d be waiting for him in prison too.

He looked at the glass in his hand. Might as well blot it out. There was nothing else he could do.

Fleming turned away from the door she had been banging, trying not to feel crushed by the disappointment. She had heard the voices in the hall and reasoned that the Fraud Squad ought by now to have sworn out a warrant. Clearly they hadn’t. It was just Ryan coming home, presumably, and of course he would be in on this as well.

Kershaw was still slumped on the floor in her fugue of grief. Fleming had, in the least alarmist terms possible, explained the situation, but she wasn’t sure how much had sunk in. She wasn’t even sure that in Kim’s condition the idea of sudden death mightn’t be appealing. She was on her own – battered, terrified and on her own.

There was a current of air coming through a grid on the back wall, providing cool ventilation for the larder – and indeed it was cool, not to say cold, with the dank air seeping through it. The grid was small, but not, she thought, impossibly small; if it could be dislodged, she with her larger frame might have difficulty but Kershaw, who was slight, should be able to get through – though the question remained, how much use would she be once she got to the other side?

Fleming checked it out, but it had been embedded in cement round the aperture by workmen who intended it to remain in place for the next few hundred years, but if she used the penknife she always carried in her bag, she just might be able to loosen the mortar. It would take time, though, and she had no idea how much time they might have. Not much, probably – and now she remembered that she had left her bag in the sitting room.

Don’t panic. Face facts. Decide what you do when that door opens and a man is there who has come to kill you. Two of you could overpower him, but it was hard to believe that Kershaw could react. No back-up, then, and the added problem of protecting a helpless colleague.

Fleming was seriously chilled already. There was a damp film on the stone floor and she had to chafe her hands to try to get more feeling into them. Kershaw was shivering – Fleming really needed to get them both moving or their limbs would stiffen up.

She didn’t hear voices or footsteps. Suddenly the door opened and she was taken by surprise, completely unprepared.

27

Tam MacNee’s spirits rose when his phone rang and he saw the number. The boss must be at home; she’d taken her time to phone him, but he’d forgive her.

When he answered it, though, it was Bill Fleming’s voice at the other end. He liked Bill; they didn’t meet often enough. It crossed his mind, as Bill made the usual polite enquiries, that Marjory might have mentioned his enforced time off and this was a kindly gesture. Well, he was always on for a pint.

But Bill didn’t sound like a man making a social call. He sounded concerned as he asked whether Tam knew where Marjory was today.

MacNee looked at his watch. ‘I know where she’ll have been,’ he said. ‘She said she’d be going to Rosscarron House in the morning, but she’d be back by now.’

‘That’s just the thing. She isn’t. I’ve been trying to get through on her mobile, but she’s not answering, so I phoned the station, but she wasn’t there. They even tried Rosscarron House for me, but they said she’d left.’

It wasn’t like Bill to get worked up about his wife’s whereabouts. ‘There’s lots of places where there’s no signal,’ MacNee said soothingly. ‘She’ll likely be back for the briefing at six.’

‘Yes,’ Bill said, but he sounded unconvinced. MacNee thought he was going to ring off, but then he said, ‘Tam, I know she would kill me if I made any sort of fuss, but you know this Glasgow hitman that’s been seen in the area – Badger, she said they called him?’

Suddenly MacNee went very still. ‘Hitman? No.’

‘Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t . . .’

‘Go on, Bill. You can’t stop there.’

‘That girl, Lisa Stewart. She was killed yesterday in a hit-and-run – you knew about that maybe? Well, Marjory had been a bit worried before because that Hepburn creature had threatened her to try to make her drop some enquiry she was making about Crozier’s business, and she was scared they might have taken out a contract on her. But she told me this morning the girl seemed to have been the target after all and it was nothing to do with her. She was embarrassed, said she’d been overreacting, but it struck me—’