The Darkness and the Deep (15 page)

8

There was an almost visible pall of mourning over the town as Tam MacNee walked down the narrow wynd between high walls which led from the end of Willie Duncan’s street to the irregular square of buildings behind the Anchor Inn, the raucous screams of the gulls overhead a shocking intrusion on the strange, heavy silence. MacNee usually enjoyed it when his business took him to one of the coastal areas which was part of Galloway Constabulary’s wide rural district, but this wasn’t the day for admiring a seascape.

When he reached the sea-front, the only traffic seemed to be to and from the lifeboat shed; the streets were almost deserted and several of the shops were shut. Where a knot of people gathered it was for a brief, muted conversation before they went soberly on; here in this close-knit community there was no public sign of any salacious enjoyment of sensation.

The Anchor was shut up, as it would be anyway at this time of day. It had a double frontage and a door on to Shore Street, but access to the Andersons’ flat was from behind, and after glancing in the window at the empty bar MacNee went back round to the square again. The Anchor had a garage and a small yard with empty barrels and stacked crates down one side, as well as a pocket-handkerchief lawn which had a straggling cherry-tree in the middle with a bird-feeder hung on a low bough; a blue-tit and a sparrow flew off at MacNee’s approach.

The back of the inn looked as blank as the front, showing no sign of life. He looked sharply at the drawn curtains at a window on the first floor, but that of course didn’t prove that anyone had spent the night there. He inspected the garage, trying the handle of the side door. It was locked, but there was a tiny window, grimy and cobwebbed. He bent down to peer in.

There was a car inside. He hadn’t seen the report about it and anyway couldn’t read the number plate, but this was a small green Peugeot, the sort of thing you might well run as a second car. So had Nat Rettie quietly come home and gone to bed without being spotted? MacNee went over and rang the doorbell, a long, authoritative ring, then stepped back to observe the curtains. There was no sign of movement; he rang again, three or four times, then had another look. Still nothing.

That, of course, didn’t prove anything either. At this time of day the boy should actually be in school, though Tam would be very surprised if he was. From Control, he got confirmation of the car’s make, passed on his own suspicion that the boy could be inside, then walked on thoughtfully towards the lifeboat shed.

He’d known the Andersons ever since they took over the pub and he liked them both. He had a particularly soft spot for cheerful, bonny Katy, so happy in her work and just daft about her husband, poor wee soul. Tam wasn’t much given to empathy, or ‘going saft’ as he was more likely to put it, but he couldn’t help wondering what it would do to her if she lost her husband and then found out that it was her son who had engineered not only his death but the deaths of two other innocent people. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Fleming was coming out of the building as he approached it, provoking a flurry of movement in a group standing idly on the pier, with notebooks and cameras. He saw her smile – well, bare her teeth, anyway – then speak to them briefly before heading for her car. They followed her like a cloud of flies, shouting questions which she ignored.

MacNee was ready to jump in when she paused to pick him up, driving off again before he had even slammed the door.

Headmasters hadn’t been as young as this when he was at school – at least his certainly hadn’t. Feeling the weight of his twenty-six years, DC Jonathan Kingsley followed the headmaster of Kirkluce Academy through to his office. The man looked not much older than he was himself and he was wearing quite a sharp suit with a Paul Smith shirt open at the neck.

‘Peter Morton,’ he replied to Kingsley’s introduction, waving him to a seat. ‘This is a very sad business, isn’t it? We’re all in shock here. Luke was a good lad – gave a lot to the school, and to the community, of course, with his lifeboat service. Tragic that it all had to end this way. Coffee?’

‘Tragic,’ Kingsley echoed, and expressed a preference for black, no sugar. This was, he reflected as Morton passed this on to his secretary, a curious way to describe someone recently outed as a predatory paedophile, but he’d heard before of the reluctance of headmasters to involve their school in that sort of scandal. Did Morton see Luke’s death as a heaven-sent way out of a nasty, messy situation?

If he did, then the man was wasted as a headmaster. The London stage was crying out for people with that sort of acting talent. When Kingsley said, ‘I gather there were some problems with him?’ Morton’s only reaction was a rueful smile.

‘Oh dear. Yes, I’m afraid he was having difficulty with discipline. Such a shame – he was so enthusiastic about his subject, so ready to help with extra-curricular activities, but I’m afraid kids today don’t have much respect for these virtues. We were doing all we could to help him, of course, but—’

‘Did you have any complaints about him?’

The man’s untroubled eyes met his squarely. ‘Not that many. A couple of conscientious parents were worried about how much their children were being allowed to learn in his class, but that was all. No, quite honestly the main problem was what the kids were doing to him. He was getting a pretty hard time from some of them. To tell you the truth, we were beginning to wonder if he was in the wrong profession.’

You had to go for it. ‘Were there any allegations of child abuse?’ Kingsley asked baldly.

The transformation was remarkable. Morton jumped as if someone had jabbed him with a needle. ‘Child abuse! No, never! Have you had a complaint?’ He certainly wasn’t untroubled now.

‘We have information that yesterday a child made a complaint that she had been abused by Mr Smith.’

‘Good God! Well, if so it never reached me.’ He was pressing numbers on his phone as he spoke. ‘Sarah? Would you find Mrs Walker for me – ask her to come to my office as a matter of urgency? Thanks.’

He replaced the receiver. ‘She’s the Child Protection Officer, but I can’t imagine that if there had been a complaint like that she wouldn’t have come straight to me. There’s a strict protocol – Luke would have had to be suspended immediately.’

The pause, as they waited for Mrs Walker to appear, was going to be awkward. The other question on Kingsley’s list – the whereabouts of Nat Rettie – seemed a good way of filling it.

Morton turned to his computer, scanning through files. ‘The absent list should be here, unless Sarah hasn’t had a chance to compile it yet. Oh yes, here we are. Nat Rettie isn’t in today – natural enough, I suppose, in the circumstances.’ He closed the file, then looked up sharply, his face suddenly alive with suspicion.

‘Oh, hang about! These allegations wouldn’t have anything to do with Nat Rettie, would they?’

Kingsley didn’t confirm it, but he didn’t deny it, either.

‘Rettie,’ the headmaster went on, ‘was conducting a vendetta against Smith. I suspended him once on the basis of a report from Luke and ever since he’s been out for revenge. Ah, here’s Fiona.’

The woman who came in was middle-aged and slightly overweight, with a kind, motherly face. She had obviously been crying; she looked enquiringly at Kingsley as Morton performed the introductions and explained.

‘The officer has heard that a girl made a complaint of abuse yesterday against Luke Smith. Did it reach you?’

A look of unfeigned horror crossed Fiona Walker’s face. ‘
Luke
? No, no, of course not! I’d have come to you straight away, and so would any other member of staff. But who—’

‘The detective won’t confirm it, but I suspect that Nat Rettie’s behind this. So the girl, no doubt, will be—’

‘Kylie MacEwan,’ Fiona supplied grimly. ‘Of course we have to deal with this totally professionally, but if it’s anything other than another stage in Rettie’s war of attrition, I’ll be astounded. Probably the only person abusing Kylie is Nat himself.’ Then, with tears in her eyes, she went on, ‘And you know what they’re saying, Peter? They’re saying that it happened partly because Luke was trying to throw himself overboard and they were distracted, trying to stop him.’

It crossed the detective’s mind uneasily that perhaps this new kind of Head wasn’t as different from the old kind as you might imagine when Morton turned a gimlet eye on him. ‘Is this true?’

It would be on the news today anyway. ‘Yes, that he was trying to commit suicide. There would have been other factors, of course.’

‘And about Kylie and Nat?’ Fiona pressed him.

‘I can’t discuss that, but what I can say is that I shall be wanting to talk to Kylie.’

‘You and me both,’ Morton said with feeling. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Constable. We’ll play it by the book.’

‘I’m sure you will, sir,’ Kingsley got up. ‘I’ve got another preliminary interview to do, but I’ll come back later with a woman officer and talk to the girl formally then. And if Nat Rettie turns up, you will let us know?’

That had all shed an interesting light on the information received. The teachers were an impressive pair, and if Kingsley had to put money on it, he’d back their analysis of the situation. Still, you couldn’t be too careful with Child Protection issues; he took the precaution of contacting the Social Work Department, though by the time he found the number and tracked down the appropriate person, he discovered she had been informed already. Yes, Morton and Walker were definitely a class act.

It was a heartbreakingly beautiful day now as Fleming drove the short distance along the coast road between Knockhaven and Fuill’s Inlat, high above the shore. A periwinkle sky had clouds like lace doilies and the gannets, wings folded, were performing their arrow dives into a sea that was Prussian blue, artistically edged with a few white-crested waves. Yesterday’s storm had subsided to a comfortable swell, like some monster sated by its swallowed prey.

The scene at Fuill’s Inlat was in stark contrast to this benign innocence. The tide was out and the deadly rocks were now no more than picturesque boulders, lapped by waves which sparkled in the sunshine, but all around them and strewn on the shore was the detritus of last night’s disaster: ropes, engine parts, white plastic buoys, shreds of orange nylon. There were black slicks of oil in the pools left by the retreating tide and as Fleming stepped down to the water’s edge on the pebble beach a bedraggled RNLI pennant was washed up at her feet. Her mouth twisted; she felt nauseated by the wickedness, the waste, the awful injustice that a mission to save the lives of others should end like this. The sick mind of the perpetrator seemed to have tainted with evil even the salty freshness of the air.

There were half a dozen SOCOs in their white overalls here, painstakingly gathering up and bagging whatever might be considered evidence, and lifeboat officials were present too, sombrely watching the operation. Normally this would have waited until the investigating officer had viewed the scene, but in these circumstances Fleming had instructed that they should go ahead.

As Fleming and MacNee went towards them, the crime scene manager who had been directing the activities of a photographer came over, with an enquiring look. When Fleming had identified herself, he said, ‘Ah! We’ve got something here that might interest you.’ He turned to pick up two large plastic evidence bags which had been tagged and parked on the ridge of springy grass behind the beach.

‘We found these on either side of the bay, one on the higher rocks to the south there, the other in a niche at the side of that tumbledown shed. Facing out to sea, green one set to flash, red one a steady beam. Not working now – battery run down, I’d guess.’

They looked at the exhibits. They were beacon-shaped lanterns on a sturdy plastic base, one with green glass, the other red.

‘Where would you get lights like that?’ Fleming wondered. ‘Ship’s chandler’s, perhaps? We might get a lead out of that.’

The SOCO shook his head. ‘The colour’s just glass paint. Sort of thing my wife gets at the craft shop – she’s into Tiffany lamps. Otherwise they’re just the standard sort of light you might use for camping – look, there’s a searchlight in the base too. Very practical.’

‘Not any sort of specialist store then?’ MacNee asked gloomily.

‘Could be Halfords, Milletts, Argos catalogue, even—’

MacNee pounced. ‘If it was a catalogue purchase they’d have records, wouldn’t they? We might get at it that way.’

Fleming, with a housewife’s more specialist knowledge, looked doubtful. ‘I hate to be a wet blanket, but there’s definitely an Argos store in Dumfries. One in Ayr as well, probably, and a Halfords. It would be easy enough to get them from there without leaving a purchase record. Have you picked up anything from the sites where the lights were set up?’

‘Not a lot. Nothing from the rocks, right down to the shoreline, but they’re checking the side of the shed now. It’s not hopeful, though – no smooth surfaces.’

‘What about the lights themselves?’

‘We’ve dusted them, but nothing’s come up. The lab boys’ll maybe be able to turn up something more for you.’

‘We can always hope,’ Fleming said, then as the man went back to his work she and MacNee slowly climbed the track together.

‘That’s it, then, isn’t it?’ she said heavily. ‘It’s definitely murder. Someone planned all that, carefully and cleverly. They put these in place when they knew the lifeboat had gone out in poor visibility—’

‘So someone with links to the crew, like Rettie?’

Fleming frowned. ‘I think I remember they went back to firing maroons, like in the old days – publicity stunt, basically. So anyone within earshot would know there was a call-out.

‘These things would only have a limited battery life, so you’d have to be there to set them going. You’d know the battery would run down a few hours later and if everything went according to plan and you managed to wreck the boat, the chances are no one would even notice before you managed to remove them. And if it hadn’t been for you spotting them the chances are we’d just have put it down to human error.’