The Darkness and the Deep (25 page)

But her domestic worries would have to wait. She was here to work. Professionally, she wasn’t happy, and that was an understatement on a par with saying the new Scottish Parliament seemed to be going a wee bit over budget. The forty-eight hours after the murders, in which most cases are solved if they’re to be solved at all, were long gone. There had been unprecedented levels of public support and information, yet here she was over a week later, having sifted through a volume of evidence which had sent her computer into one of its periodic fits of nervous exhaustion and threatened to do the same to its operator, no further forward.

The golden rule of crime investigation, ‘Every contact leaves a trace’, was about as relevant here as a copy of the words of the Red Flag at a New Labour Party conference. Despite the reams of information from the scene of crime team and the pathologist giving impressively precise details about the wreck and the deaths, it was really no more than a fatal accident report. The murderer’s contact was limited to those two lamps placed at the scene, and Fleming would be willing to bet her egg money that all the lab report would produce was a sophisticated chemical analysis of the paints used, naming in the last line a popular commercial brand, available in your nearest B&Q.

There was always the other time-honoured principle, ‘Who benefits?’, but as the Super had said to her with more than an edge of impatience in his voice, ‘You don’t seem even to have worked out who the victim is in this case, Marjory, let alone the murderer.’ This was, she had to admit, kind of an important weakness in their investigation.

Eyewitnesses seemed the only hope. There was certainly no lack of willingness from the public: judging by what had crossed her desk every man, woman and child in the relevant area – and a good number who weren’t – had chipped in with their tuppence-worth. Fleming’s personal favourite was the woman who had phoned to say that her dog, ten miles away in Whithorn, had suddenly sat up and howled, ‘just when those poor souls would be perishing’! Perhaps it wasn’t that funny. They were just grasping at anything that fractionally alleviated the gloom.

Given the planning, the Wrecker must have checked out the site at least once, probably more often than that. But under cover of darkness, say, who would notice a torch beam on that isolated shore? Or even in daylight, days or weeks ago, who would remember an innocent rambler scaling the rocks? It was only by chance that Tam had spotted the lamps.

And if the plan had failed? If the more experienced Duncan had been at the helm, if Anderson hadn’t been distracted, if the lifeboat had come safe home, would the Wrecker even now be working on a new one?

Yes, Fleming thought with sudden conviction, yes. It would be another low-risk scheme you could walk away from. And that, she suddenly thought, was the key to it – the Wrecker’s determination not to pay for the crime. Laura’s term, pathologically solipsistic, had highlighted that: common as the instinct for self-interest may be, this was the cold-blooded sacrifice of two lives – innocent by any standard – for no reason other than improving your chances of getting away with eliminating a third. So perhaps she’d moved a step closer to knowing what the Wrecker was like, which didn’t, unfortunately, answer the ‘Who?’ or ‘Why?’ questions.

You didn’t, normally, have to know why, except for professional satisfaction. Why anyone did anything was always highly speculative and all you needed in court was hard evidence against them, but this case, with its lack of any form of hard evidence, was different. In this case, motive was all they had to guide them to the victim, never mind the perpetrator.

The village was awash with rumour and counter-rumour. It was all to do with drugs. It was nothing to do with drugs. Lewis Randall had done it because his wife was having an affair with Ritchie Elder. The doctor would
never
do a thing like that and anyway, people just said there was an affair. Joanna Elder had been behaving strangely – or maybe it was natural enough, if the rumour about her husband was true . . .

And now Kingsley had come back with a new one, that Randall had been having a relationship with Enid Davis, one of the surgery receptionists. They’d have to follow up on that one too, because the trouble was that you couldn’t ever dismiss a story out of hand. Small-town gossips had the dirty habit of occasional accuracy.

What hadn’t emerged was a shred of hard evidence. There was Jon’s belief (she’d almost said determination) that it was all drugs-related and Tam’s assertion that both women he had interviewed had been lying about something. Tansy hadn’t come up with much that was useful yet, and both men agreed that interviewing Lewis Randall was, as MacNee put it, like talking to Teflon – ‘It all just slides off.’

And that was the problem at the moment: everything sliding off. Nothing seemed to stick, nothing held together to offer even a coherent theory, while she was under pressure from every side – not least from the occupants of the car which was passing her now as she walked up the hill.

Chief Constable Menzies and Superintendent Donald Bailey were sitting in the back, resplendent in their best uniforms. She turned, her hand half-raised in greeting, but Donald, on her side of the car, didn’t see her. Or ignored her, quite likely. She wasn’t flavour of the month at the moment.

Don was desperate for a quick result and he wasn’t going to get it on this one; however hard he pushed, she wasn’t going to be bounced into ill-considered action. He was very keen, too keen, perhaps, on the drugs theory, Kingsley somehow having managed to bend his ear about it. It was neat, plausible, and he liked the idea that cracking the murder case might smash the drugs ring at the same time, killing two birds for the price of one budgetary stone.

But whatever Jon might say, Fleming wasn’t ready to go along with it – not yet, anyway. It just didn’t smell right; you’d only to think of that case in Ayr, a young man who’d been dumb enough to tangle with the big boys and ended up with two broken legs after being pushed into the harbour. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t elaborately planned and, while he had declared afterwards that it had been an accident, no one was in any doubt that this was a message, loud and clear, ‘Don’t mess with us.’

Today, if things had gone as the Wrecker intended, this would only have been a service mourning another tragic accident at sea. Marjory could almost feel a mind, a someone out there – someone in this crowd, even – who was cunning, ruthless, totally self-absorbed, and now – afraid? Someone who knew the lifeboat had been called out: well, sound tests had shown that was most of Knockhaven. Someone familiar with the tides: you’d only to take a walk along the shore. Someone who knew the pattern of the leading lights coming into Knockhaven harbour: Tansy had been able to check them out in
Reid’s Almanac
in the local library. Someone who hated enough, or loved enough, or was frightened or greedy enough to kill three people to get one . . . She sighed. A hamster probably got pretty sick of going round and round in a wheel getting nowhere as well.

The town hall was a handsome Edwardian building with a gallery across one end and a stage at the other. Trestle tables had been set out to line the walls, laden with plates of the sandwiches, scones and shortbread apparently deemed suitably sombre; tea and coffee were being dispensed from a line of urns just below the stage.

Marjory spotted her mother almost immediately, directing operations to replenish empty plates, and was starting to make her way towards her through the milling throng when Bill’s voice at her shoulder hailed her: ‘Hello, stranger!’

She turned with a smile to kiss him, wincing inwardly. She hadn’t got home for supper once since all this happened and this morning Cat, coming into the kitchen, had given a small shriek and cried, ‘Who is this strange woman? Oh yes, I remember – she used to be my mother.’ Bill had said Cat seemed to be eating all right, but if his daughter was being devious he would be no match for her.

‘Quite a turnout, isn’t it?’ Bill said. ‘Janet’s in her element, mind you, queen-beeing around. She’s got half of Galloway roped in to help with serving the tea and on baking duties – even Laura’s made scones though I’d have to say if she’d told me they were pancakes I wouldn’t have argued. She’s over there.’

Marjory waved to her friend, then went to speak to her mother. Enid Davis would probably be here somewhere, and perhaps even Joanna Elder as well; Janet always seemed to know everyone, and having been so involved in the organisation for today she might be able to point them out.

Janet delivered the information unhesitatingly. They were part of her army of workers and like any good commander she knew who they were and where they were. ‘That’s Enid, there, doing the teas. They closed the surgery, of course, as a mark of respect, and the receptionists came to ask what they could do so we put them on the urns. That’s Cara Christie, and there’s Muriel Henderson, look – spending most of her time blethering as far as I can see.’

Enid Davis wasn’t blethering. A pleasant-looking woman, neatly dressed in a navy suit, she was filling polystyrene cups with quiet efficiency and handing them out to a seemingly unending queue. The rumour about her and Lewis Randall seemed improbable on the face of it, but perhaps after a beautiful, selfish and (allegedly) unfaithful wife you might fancy a change.

‘And that’s Joanna Elder over there – bonny woman, isn’t she?’ Janet broke off. ‘Annie, you’ll need to bring through more shortbread. They’ve been at those plates like gannets.’

Joanna Elder was, indeed, bonny. Wearing a silk blouse of palest pink under a Chanel-style black bouclé wool suit with chunky gold jewellery, she was nibbling a scone as she stood behind one of the tables. She was enviably slim and certainly didn’t look as if the death of the woman she had described to Tam as a close friend had caused her too many sleepless nights. It was hard to imagine such a dainty creature scrambling over rocks in darkness – but of course she was probably seriously fit, given the gym and the swimming pool.

Another surge of arrivals obviously marked the end of the burial service for Rob Anderson. Fleming saw that Lewis Randall and his mother were among them, stiff and awkward-looking. Rob must have been his patient so they would have felt reluctantly obliged to put in a token appearance here before the journey to the crematorium. She studied the man with interest; even at this distance you got the impression of an impenetrable reserve.

Following them was a little knot of people clustered round Katy Anderson and the crowd parted respectfully as they went down the hall. A short, burly man had his arm round the widow’s shoulders and Ritchie Elder, looking tired and drawn, was just behind as they reached the urn where Enid Davis was serving tea.

The women seemed to know each other. Fleming saw what was almost a smile come to Katy’s face and she began a low-voiced conversation with Enid as one of the men took a cup of tea from her and put it into Katy’s hand. A few minutes later Joanna Elder went across and seemed to be offering formal condolences.

Her work of identification finished, Fleming glanced round the hall. There was quite a number of people she knew but, though they might nod and smile politely, they avoided conversation. She was marked out as being here in her official capacity and the police failure to reassure a shaken and anxious community with an immediate arrest was being laid at her door. And perhaps they were right, at that. It was a bad feeling.

There was nothing more useful she could do and there would be the usual mountain of paperwork on her desk; if she planned to be home for supper tonight it would make sense to go back and tackle it now. Tam and Tansy were still here; she’d spotted Tam talking to a group of older men and Tansy, having drifted around with a cup in her hand discreetly eavesdropping, was now speaking to Katy Anderson, Enid Davis and Joanna Elder. It would be interesting to hear her report; a good girl, Tansy, and learning all the time.

Fleming couldn’t see Jon, though. He seemed to play his cards very close to his chest and it was fair enough for Tam to hint that he wasn’t a team player. But the reports he’d turned in were good stuff and if you wanted to use intelligent people you had to give them the chance to prove themselves.

She was just on the point of looking for Bill again to say goodbye when there was a loud banging on a table. The man she had seen with Katy Anderson was on the platform, waiting for silence. ‘That’s never Willie Duncan going to make a speech!’ she heard someone say incredulously.

He began by denying it. ‘I’m not making a speech. I’m just saying Katy here’ll be needing a wee hand in the pub for the next bit. I’m doing tomorrow night and down there’s a list you can put your name to.’ He stepped down, his reputation for taciturnity untarnished, and from all across the hall men started forward to volunteer.

Fleming smiled. There were drawbacks to village life, but the generosity of the support you got at times like this more than made up for them. And she didn’t envy Willie’s job tomorrow night; the pub would be packed to the doors. It wasn’t often you had solidarity as an excuse for a few wee bevvies.

No doubt Tam would be putting in for a surveillance detail on that one, but if he thought he was going to get overtime he’d another think coming. A couple of halves of shandy on the taxpayer was her best offer.

Ritchie Elder’s eyes were fixed steadfastly on the road as he drove home with his wife after the funeral tea, but his mind was far away. They would be committing her body to the flames now, Ashley’s soft, exquisite body, the source of so much delight. His throat constricted; with a physical effort he set his jaw and suppressed the emotion which had left him weeping night after night. They had told him what she’d looked like when they found her and he wished they hadn’t. It all seemed to have got worse, not better, after the first shock wore off, and he could almost feel his self-control disintegrating.

He’d moved into one of the spare rooms, making the excuse that with so much on his mind he wasn’t sleeping well and didn’t want to disturb Joanna. He hadn’t said that waking from a restless dream of Ashley, alive and warm and responsive, to touch alien female flesh was intolerable. The dreams where Ashley was cold and dead, with a featureless horror which had been her face, were worse.