Cradle to Grave (9 page)

‘Do we know who he was?’

‘The witnesses had gone by the time I arrived, but one of the coastguard lads said there was a girl living there too, but she was out at the time.’ He hesitated. ‘At least, they thought she was. I just hope to God there’s not any nasty surprises when we start clearing the rubble.’

‘The witnesses – where are they?’ Campbell asked.

‘They took them all to the hospital in Dumfries. There’s an older lady has a suspected broken leg, and the couple with the baby were in shock.’

‘Best turn Kim Kershaw back, get her to go there.’ Campbell nodded towards the radio phone in the inspector’s hand.

‘Good thinking,’ Macdonald acknowledged, and delivered the message. ‘We’d better get back ourselves, anyway. Nothing for us to do round here, until we can find out what’s happened to the girl and talk to her.’

‘That’s the JCB breaking through now, look,’ Michie said suddenly, and hurried off.

‘Good,’ Campbell said. ‘Don’t like boats. I get sick.’

‘In two minutes?’ Macdonald said bracingly. ‘You can’t possibly.’ Then, as Campbell said nothing, he shrugged. ‘You’re not normal, that’s your problem.’

‘I just want to check very briefly on the campsite before we go down to the cottages,’ Fleming said, as they drove away from Rosscarron House, the radio chattering in the background. ‘I’d like to see the situation there first hand.’ Her voice was higher-pitched than usual and she was talking fast. You’d almost think there was some subject she was trying to avoid.

‘Fine,’ MacNee said shortly. He’d been deliberately resisting Fleming’s attempts to put things back on their old footing. She’d given him an official flea in his ear, and however right she was, and however childish his own reaction might be, he’d planned to stand on what he saw as his professional dignity for a bit longer. This, however – this was altogether too good to miss. He’d never been hot on dignity, anyway.

‘
Madge
,’ MacNee said, lingering lovingly on the name. ‘You know, I always kinda wondered where Madonna got the idea from.’

Fleming coloured. ‘Oh, yes, laugh away.’

‘Oh, aye, I’ll do that all right.’

‘But if you so much as breathe a word of it around the lads, I’ll . . .’ She paused to consider her options.

‘Have my guts for garters?’ MacNee suggested helpfully.

She gave him a quelling look, then with triumphant recollection went on, ‘I shall see to it that it gets around what happened when you tried to arrest Annie Maclehose for soliciting.’

MacNee looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, ‘Fair enough.’ He couldn’t resist returning to the topic, though. ‘You didn’t know he was coming?’

‘Wasn’t it obvious? Cat had said something about Joshua and a band called Destruction, but when I knew him, he was Joss and the band was Electric Earthquake. Then he went off to the States and I thought he’d sunk without trace, like most pop bands do.’

‘You didn’t exactly hang around for long talking about “Auld Lang Syne”, though, did you?’

Fleming looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, you know his nose is crooked? Bill did that.’

‘
Bill?
Here! Are we talking about the same guy – the “hardy son of rustic toil”, good-natured to a fault?’

‘Well, there were . . . reasons.’ Fleming’s colour deepened further.

‘Reasons?’ MacNee knew the value of persistence in interrogation, and when Fleming sighed, he reckoned she was cracking. To encourage her, he said, ‘And if I knew the story, I’d not be so likely to find myself speculating to Andy Mac, just accidentally, mind.’

Fleming acknowledged defeat. ‘There’s no time just at this moment. I’ll tell you on the journey back. Now, not an ideal site, this, is it? They don’t seem to have given much thought to what it would be like in weather like this.’

The rough field up at the back of Rosscarron House was on a slope and near the bottom it was marshy already, with visible streams trickling down. Although only half-a-dozen vehicles had arrived, the ground had been churned up by the lorries bringing in equipment to the upper field, and it was hard to see how the numbers arriving later could be catered for.

There was a gate with a Portakabin beside it, presumably for security staff, though there was none in evidence. When they drove through, though, a youth with a row of rings in both ears appeared in the doorway and shouted, ‘Hey! You need to show your tickets.’

Fleming drew up and produced identity, looking round. ‘Haven’t much here to stop gatecrashers, have you?’

‘Team’s coming this afternoon. Just a couple of us at the moment. Not much doing anyway, weather like this.’ He shot back inside.

‘The security’s rubbish,’ Fleming said, as she coaxed the big Vauxhall up the slope. ‘Asking for trouble, frankly. And I’d have taken the four-wheel drive this morning if I’d known about these conditions. I tell you, Tam, I’m worried.’ She parked beside an elderly camper van, which seemed to be the hub of activity.

It was brightly painted with amateurish flowers, and its sliding door was open. From it, a canopy had been rigged up as protection from the rain and a dozen people were huddled under it, laughing and talking. From a speaker Mick Jagger was belting out ‘Satisfaction’, and inside a bulky woman was dispensing tea from a huge teapot, and a large grey-haired man, similarly middle-aged, had a crate of beer at his feet, which seemed also to be for sharing. They must have been a good twenty years older than the next oldest in the group but for the moment at least were the life and soul of the party.

The man was in conversation with a young man with unnaturally blond hair and a petulant expression, but as Fleming and MacNee got out of the car, he broke off to call out to them, ‘Come one, come all! Beer or tea – beer from yours truly, and tea, if you fancy it, from my good lady Angela.’

Then, as they approached, he frowned. ‘Not really dressed for it, are you, my loves?’ he said, looking askance at Fleming’s walking shoes and MacNee’s trainers. ‘You’ll learn that the first rule is to come equipped, when you have as many battle honours as we have.’ He indicated, with some pride, the stickers that almost obliterated the back windows of the van. ‘Glastonbury 1970, that one there. Day after Jimi Hendrix died – we were all in mourning.’

The blond man gave them a narrow stare. ‘Something tells me they’re not your average punters. Cops?’

Interesting, MacNee thought, watching him as he and Fleming took out their warrant cards and she explained that they were just checking out the site. Admittedly, they looked out of place, but people who instantly thought of cops usually had reason to know. He looked around the others too, with the trained observation that had long ago become instinctive.

‘Any problems?’ Fleming was asking.

There were two girls who looked about sixteen. One of them asked, ‘Do you know when the catering’s coming? We didn’t, like, bring any food or stuff – thought they’d be here by now.’ Then she giggled, looking up under her eyelashes at the spiky-haired young man beside her. ‘We’re, like, starving – I’d do
anything
for a burger.’

‘Don’t you worry, my love,’ the large grey-haired man said. ‘We won’t see you go hungry, will we, Angela? We’ve learned enough to know the catering always lets you down and we prepare accordingly.’

He turned to Fleming. ‘Bob and Angela Lawton. Not much impressed with this, to tell you the truth. The Portaloos are all right – the toilets are always the first things we check, aren’t they, love?’ Angela nodded confirmation, and he went on, ‘But the ground here’s shocking for these poor kids. High water table, see – they’ll all be sleeping in waterbeds if it doesn’t stop raining. I suppose that’s Scotland for you, isn’t it? But we love the Scotties, don’t we, Angela, so we keep right on coming to these festivals, all the way from Dorset.’

He beamed patronisingly, and MacNee felt Fleming’s eyes boring a hole in him. In a contrary spirit, he said, ‘Good to hear it, sir. Hope you enjoy the music.’

As they turned away, he noticed the blond man have a brief, low-voiced conversation with another young man, before heading off down the slope towards the house. Not a camper, then.

‘All the business stuff seems to be in the upper field, beside the stage,’ Fleming said, as she started the engine. ‘The lower field seems to be all there is for tents – it’s not exactly T in the Park, but it’s going to be ridiculously cramped if they get any sort of gate.

‘Anyway, what do you make of the groupings among that lot? The blond man – staying at the house, I’d guess. The two girls together, though if I was their mother, I’m not sure I’d let them out. Three obvious couples, and then the two young men – the short guy with spiky hair, and the taller one with sideburns. The guy with the spiky hair seemed to be with the girls, but the other one didn’t seem to be with anyone. Wouldn’t have thought many people came to things like this on their own, would you? And the couple with the caravan – too good to be true?’

‘Check,’ MacNee agreed. ‘The guy, though – probably just came hoping to pull.’

‘That would figure. But I’m not happy about this whole thing – the organisation seems far too casual. I don’t know how many they’ll get, out here in weather like this, but it could be a disaster waiting to happen. The Kirkcudbright lads will have to keep an eye on it once the numbers start building up.

‘I’m going to have a close look at the bridge on the way back and see if we can find a reason to declare it unsafe. If much more water starts coming through and the headland’s cut off, there’ll be a major logistics problem with food supplies, for a start. And we’ve enough trouble down at the Rosscarron Cottages without looking for more.’

DC Kim Kershaw looked with considerable pity at the pair in front of her, as they sat together in a patients’ sitting room in the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary. They barely looked old enough to be parents, and their six-week-old girl, yelling lustily, looked as if she didn’t find them convincing in that role either. Her mother who, Kershaw reckoned, couldn’t be more than eighteen herself, jiggled the baby helplessly for a bit, then thrust her at her partner, in tears herself.

‘You take her, Craig. I don’t know what to do with her and I’ve just – just had enough! Holiday! Some holiday! OK, it was cheap, but you never said there’d be, like, nothing to do. Then the weather, frigging rain all week, and now this!’

Craig put the baby to his shoulder, patting her ineffectually. ‘Not my fault, was it?’ he said, aggrieved. ‘I nearly got killed too, remember. But we didn’t, right, so what are you greeting for, Donna? That’s probably what set her off greeting too.’

As Donna opened her mouth indignantly, Kershaw stepped in, raising her voice above the noise.

‘I was wanting to ask you about last night.’

It was no use. She could barely make herself heard over the din and the distracted parents weren’t listening anyway. Kershaw went out into the corridor and looked hopefully up and down. Spotting a nursing auxiliary, a middle-aged, competent-looking woman, she hailed her.

‘Look, have you a minute? I’m a police officer, trying to get a statement from the young couple in there, but their baby’s bawling so I can’t hear myself think, let alone speak. Any chance you could take it out of earshot for a bit? I won’t be long, I promise.’

The woman gave her a good-natured grin. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ve had three of my own, so I know what it’s like. Ten minutes is all, though – I’ve to be somewhere after that.’

With order restored, Kershaw produced her notebook, took down personal details and repeated her question.

‘There was this kinda . . . well, just noise, really, like, loud,’ Craig said. ‘We were upstairs with the baby, ken.’

‘Do you know what time it was?’ Kershaw asked, but he shook his head.

‘Just – it was pretty dark. All the lights went and the house was, like, shaking like it was an earthquake, sort of. And Donna was screaming and yelling. It was like we were in a horror movie, only, well, real.’ He shuddered. ‘I grabbed the bairn and went to the door – bashed my face on a sharp edge . . .’

He fingered a scratch on his cheek, and Donna put in, ‘Nearly dropped the baby too.’

He glared at her. ‘That was with you hanging on to me and yelling we’d all be killed. Didn’t help.’

Hastily, Kershaw interjected, ‘And then?’

‘It was the water downstairs,’ Donna said, shuddering. ‘I was, like, going mental. It was all slimy and muddy with sort of stuff in it and you couldn’t see and it was up to our knees – I’ll be waking up screaming the rest of my life.’

Craig’s expression suggested that he did not relish the prospect. He went on, ‘Then we got out, and Jan next door was calling help or something. She’d hurt her leg. She’d a big torch by her door so that was better, and she kinda hobbled out with a stick. But the road was blocked so there was nowhere to go and it was that wet and cold.’

‘Thought we’d die out there,’ Donna put in. ‘So I go, “If we’re going to die anyway, might as well die out of the rain, right?” And Jan goes, “If I don’t sit down, I’ll fall down.” So we went back in and found somewhere we could sit. But it was, like, horrific. I’m scared to go to sleep – I’ll wake up screaming—’

‘Yeah, you said,’ Craig said unsympathetically, and she put out her tongue at him.