The Darkness and the Deep (16 page)

‘They couldn’t have known Willie was stoned and Luke was suicidal, mind. Or even that the boat would be coming back from the north not the south,’ MacNee pointed out.

‘That’s true. But on a night like last night, close enough to home for them not to be running on instruments, it had at least a chance of success. And supposing the attempt failed, what were the risks? If the boat didn’t come round that way, you could try again. If it did, but survived to report fake lights, what’s the most that would happen? There’d be a lot of shocked comment about vandals, we’d try to trace the lights and probably fail, then because no one had come to harm we’d drop it. Not worth the manpower.’

‘Right enough. And if you were watching, and saw the boat come back, you could even recover the evidence long before anyone else could get there. But is it not all kinda subtle for the likes of Rettie, though?’

‘I’m probably over-refining. He may not have thought anything, except that he’d a chance to get two people he hated in one go.’

‘Mmm.’ She noticed Tam was frowning but before she could ask him why, PC Langlands appeared, heading towards them. He had been detailed to question staff at the on-site office of Elder’s Executive Homes to find out if they’d noticed anything the night before, and establish a list of visitors to the houses.

‘Any luck, Sandy?’

He pulled a face. ‘No, boss, except I’ve a list of people who came to see the houses last night to follow up – eleven couples, plus the staff here. But the two girls in the office didn’t see anything at all. With it being such a horrible night they’d the curtains drawn and the lights on to make the showhouse look cosy, and the lights were on in all the empty houses too. And if you were getting out of a car with that gale blowing, you wouldn’t stop to admire the view, would you?’ He was looking crestfallen; he was still young enough, Fleming reflected, to cherish high hopes of a breakthrough even when conducting the most routine questioning.

‘That’s fine, Sandy,’ she said encouragingly. ‘You may find when you work through your list that one of the visitors spotted something useful. Whoever put those lights there had to get from here down to the shore during the time the houses were being shown and you might well have been peering out at the view from one of the empty houses if you were planning to buy it.’ She took the list from him and scanned it. ‘Oh – Ritchie Elder was here, was he?’

‘The girls didn’t see him until he was just going. He came into the office to say he’d to go to the lifeboat shed, but apparently he’d been going round the houses earlier chatting up the punters.’

‘Right. OK, Sandy – good luck.’ As they walked back to the car, Fleming said, ‘So Elder was here, at the scene? I’ve got an odd feeling about that man. Something doesn’t quite fit.’

‘I’ll tell you the other thing that doesn’t fit. If Rettie did this to get his old man and his teacher, how could he know Smith would be going out? This was all set up well in advance.’

Fleming stopped. ‘Of course he couldn’t. If he knew at all, it could only have been at the very last minute. I should have focused on that myself – I’ve just had about twenty-three different things on my mind.’ Then, walking on, she added, ‘But again, we could be making too much of this. The object may have been to get Anderson, and Smith was just a bonus, as he would see it. Still, the sooner we get our hands on him the better.’

Kylie MacEwan’s pert little face was a study in sullenness as she came into the headmaster’s office. Her regulation school skirt had been abbreviated to well above the knee; her shirt, worn outside it, was only just long enough to cover her midriff and open at the neck with a loosely knotted tie draped round it. She looked distrustfully at the two people she did know, and more distrustfully at the one she didn’t, a tired-looking woman in her forties with long, straggling grey hair escaping from a clasp at the back and thick glasses which magnified anxious-looking brown eyes. They were sitting round a small coffee table in one corner of the room, at the social worker’s request – ‘So much less confrontational than sitting behind a desk!’

‘Sit down, Kylie.’ Peter Morton gestured to the one vacant chair. ‘This is Mrs Barnett. She’s from the Social Work Department and—’

‘We just want to have a little chat with you, Kylie dear,’ she interrupted. ‘Nothing to make you at all uncomfortable – just a chat.’

Kylie dear favoured her with a contemptuous look which spoke volumes about her opinion of social workers in general and this one in particular. She sat down with arms folded and legs crossed, her body language a study in resistance.

‘Has something – happened to you recently? Something which upset you?’

The guarded eyes, fringed by lashes thick with blue mascara, flicked across the adults’ faces. ‘Nuh.’

‘I know that you may not want to talk about it, that you may feel guilty it happened, that people will blame you instead of him. But it’s not like that!’ The woman was leaning forward earnestly, as if she would have liked to take one of the hands so firmly tucked into Kylie’s armpits.

Morton and Fiona Walker both thought they could read alarm in the girl’s eyes but she only muttered, ‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’ Her jaws began to move rhythmically.

The headmaster stepped in. ‘Kylie, gum out, please.’ He took a tissue from a box on the table and handed it to her; she grudgingly removed the offending substance. ‘Right,’ he continued, ‘I can see you’re wondering what we’re talking about, so I think we should be a bit more direct. Did you ever have any problems with Mr Smith?’

There was no mistaking the child’s surprise. ‘Him? Nuh.’

‘Kylie, are you sure, dear?’ Mrs Barnett broke in. ‘Was his behaviour to you ever – inappropriate?’

She sniggered. ‘Like to see him try! He’s a right tosser.’

‘Was, Kylie.’ Morton spoke quietly. ‘I expect you have heard he died in the lifeboat disaster?’

He succeeded in shaming her. There was a flush under the pale make-up as she said defensively, ‘Yeah, well – whatever.’

Fiona Walker, silent thus far, leaned forward. Her kindly face was stern as she said, ‘Kylie, I’ve been speaking to some of the older girls. Nat Rettie said in class yesterday that you were coming to me to accuse Mr Smith of child abuse—’

‘We don’t use that word,
accuse
,’ the social worker protested, but was ignored.

‘Is that true?’ Fiona persisted.

At the mention of his name, Kylie became visibly agitated. ‘I dunno,’ she mumbled, her head bent.

‘Is – it – true?’

Mrs Barnett fluttered, ‘Well,
really
—’ but before she could say more, Kylie looked up.

‘Nuh! ’Course it wasn’t. Nat would just be, like, mucking about.’

‘Mucking about!’ Fiona’s eyes flashed anger, but before she could say anything more, Morton’s cool, authoritative voice overruled her.

‘Thank you, Kylie. I think that’s all we need to know at the moment.’ He looked enquiringly at Mrs Barnett, who shook her head. Kylie needed no second bidding; she was through the door faster than a weasel into a hole in a dyke.

Morton turned to the social worker. ‘Are you satisfied that no abuse has occurred?’

‘I suppose so.’ It was a grudging admission; reluctant to accept total defeat, she went on, ‘But she looks to me like a child who has problems. What’s the background like?’

Morton and Walker exchanged glances. ‘How interesting you should ask,’ he said smoothly. ‘We’ve been rather worried about her relationship with Nat Rettie – he’s over sixteen, and you probably noticed her reaction when you asked her if anything had happened to her recently. Shall I ask my secretary to find us some coffee?’

When the door eventually shut behind Mrs Barnett, Morton said with reprehensible satisfaction, ‘The MacEwans aren’t going to be pleased. They’ve got enough problems to have that woman wished on them for a month. I don’t know – it would be good to think she might manage to achieve something useful, but what I certainly do know is that this won’t have made Kylie a happy bunny.’

‘Yes,’ Fiona agreed, then her eyes filled. ‘But Luke’s still dead, isn’t he?’

The woman who answered the door of 8 Mayfield Grove in response to DC Kingsley’s knock was in her mid-sixties, he judged, a fit-looking woman and what one might unkindly describe as well-preserved. Her well-cut hair was tinted a tasteful pale gold, her face was discreetly made-up and she was smartly dressed in a pink sweater with a pink-checked tweed skirt, the matching scarf round her neck held in place with a heavy gold cameo. She looked at him as if he were a double-glazing salesman even after he had shown his card and given her the boyish smile which usually got a favourable response from mature ladies.

‘My son, Dr Randall, is at his surgery. He is a very dedicated doctor who would not allow any personal circumstance, however tragic, to keep him from his duty to his patients and his colleagues.’

There was certainly no sign of these tragic circumstances in her own face or demeanour. Intrigued, Kingsley said, ‘How very brave of him. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes, just to fill in the background?’ Reading a glacial refusal in her face, he added cleverly, ‘It might spare him some distress if I didn’t need to go through it all with him.’

She hesitated. ‘Oh, very well,’ she agreed at last, stepping aside to let him enter the hall.

It was a modern house, situated in the small network of roads forming a modern housing development off the main road which roughly divided Knockhaven into old and new. It was sparsely furnished; the sitting room Mrs Randall led him into had a black leather suite, an expensive-looking perspex coffee table, a bleached wood and glass unit down one wall and very little else apart from a large plasma-screen television. On the mantelpiece above the living gas fire in its chrome surround there was a large glass sculpture of a swan and three abstract oils in pale colours hung on the cream walls. The only photograph was a large, very glamorous shot of someone who looked rather like Nicole Kidman: Ashley Randall, Kingsley assumed.

You couldn’t readily imagine having a cosy evening in with a takeaway in front of
Big Brother
. Ashley Randall didn’t look to have been much of a home-maker and her mother-in-law looked around disparagingly as she ushered him in.

‘I suppose we can sit here. It’s not exactly—’ She broke off her sentence with a sigh, then perched on the edge of one of the leather seats as if dissociating herself from any connection with it.

‘It’s very kind of you to spare me the time on what must be a very difficult day for you as well as your son,’ Kingsley grovelled shamelessly, and was rewarded with a wintry smile.

‘Of course. My son’s wife was a very able woman. She will be a great loss.’

A fulsome tribute! ‘Had they been married long?’

‘Six years.’ Six years too many, her tone implied.

‘And am I right that they had no children?’

She compressed thin lips, carefully outlined in dark pink lipstick. ‘My daughter-in-law was very much a career girl.’

‘That must have been something of a disappointment for you,’ Kingsley prompted sympathetically.

‘It certainly was. My son would make a wonderful father, wonderful, but to tell you the truth I doubt if he would ever have managed to persuade Ashley. She was a very sel—’ She cut off the word and substituted, ‘
determined
person and she had her work and the lifeboat, of course. That seemed to take up a great deal of her time and energy.’

‘It must sometimes have been quite tricky to combine with her duties as a doctor. The practice must have been very understanding.’

At this evidence of right-thinking, Mrs Randall thawed visibly. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you how often poor Lewis gave up his time off to cover for her! I used to think he was quite exhausted sometimes, but of course
she
never even seemed to notice.’

The claws were definitely starting to show now. ‘Were they unhappy together?’

‘Oh no, no! Certainly not!’ This was taking it a step too far, obviously – a less than perfect marriage might reflect badly on her perfect son. ‘They were a devoted couple, absolutely devoted.’

He retreated. ‘So last night’s events must have been a devastating shock. Were you together when it happened?’

He tried to make the question sound entirely casual, but she was no fool. He saw her stiffen. ‘Why should you want to know? Surely it could be of no possible relevance to an accident enquiry where either my son or I was when it happened?’

‘Oh, I’m just trying to get a picture of the sequence of events,’ he soothed her, but she was on her feet.

‘I think I have told you everything that could be helpful. As you can imagine, there are a lot of personal matters to deal with. You must excuse me.’

Kingsley took his dismissal gracefully, favoured her with another of his most charming smiles and left.

Back in his car, he settled down to make notes of the conversation. He had listened intently at the morning briefing, and to what DI Fleming had said to him afterwards about the rumour her son had picked up. Her faulty reasoning – that Smith could have been one of Rettie’s targets – had struck him immediately but he calculated that picking her up on it wouldn’t make him flavour of the month. She wouldn’t enjoy having her most junior officer pointing out a blind spot; he’d save it for later so she could be impressed without feeling so directly challenged by his superior analytic skills.

What Morton had told him about Rettie made Kingsley inclined to believe the boy was more the tormentor of a hapless victim than the avenger of wrongs, though of course he’d need to interview the girl to check out the headmaster’s theory. Not that it actually put Rettie in the clear; killing off a hated stepfather was a good enough motive, but you had to keep a very open mind at this stage.

The gossip about Ashley Randall’s relationship with Ritchie Elder could mean that her husband had a pretty solid motive too – and the woman he had just talked to opened up another scenario. She adored her son, hated his wife – Oedipal-type stuff, or what? And she’d reacted with instant hostility to his faux-innocent request for alibi information.