The Darkness and the Deep (31 page)

‘I agree, everything points that way. He’s got the motive, the knowledge and unless the alibis check out, the opportunity. So let’s just talk about procedure – not as exciting as jumping to conclusions, but it’s a hell of a lot safer for everyone concerned.

‘Tansy, I want you to get statements at the Black Bull and then take a crack at Joanna Elder – it’s on your way anyway, and you were talking to her at the funeral tea, weren’t you?’

‘She was rather obviously doing her social duty by Katy Anderson. Katy just looked bemused.’

‘I meant to ask – did you pick up anything useful there?’

Tansy shook her head ruefully. ‘My job on this case seems to be drawing all the blanks. Every conversation I overheard was just as you would expect.’

‘You never know, given the woman’s touch, Joanna may crack. She’ll be shaken anyway, with her husband being arrested. See if the alibi stands up, and you might just try and find out whether she knew where all the money was coming from.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ MacNee snorted. ‘That one can lie as well as a dog can lick a dish, if you ask me.’

Fleming smiled. ‘There’s a lot of it about. Now Tam, can you find out who our expert is on mobile phones? Elder claims he took a call from the coastguard at the pub; they should be able to pinpoint the area from the records. And you might brief a constable about getting a warrant for the house and the offices – cars, vans, drains and all.

‘You’ll be kept pretty busy here, Jon. We’ll need official signed statements from your lads and they’ll be bringing Elder in even as I speak. Have a shot at questioning him before we have to allow him access to his solicitor, though I doubt if you’ll get more than name, rank and serial number.’

‘Yes, boss.’

He was looking sullen. With an inward sigh, Fleming said in the interests of peace, ‘Jon, I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate that you’ve made remarkable progress on this. I’m not accusing you of anything unprofessional. All I’m asking you to do is to keep an open mind.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting for a minute that we should rig the evidence,’ Kingsley said stiffly. ‘Of course we have to be absolutely scrupulous. But having a clear hypothesis can very usefully give structure and direction.’

‘Oh, I’m all for those. I think I saw one at Glasgow Zoo once,’ MacNee said merrily, earning himself a warning look from his superior. ‘Kind of cumbersome, though – might take up a lot of space that could be used for thinking, if you got one into your head.’

Fighting the temptation to say, ‘Children, children!’ Fleming changed the subject rapidly. ‘By the way, I’ve had the report from the lab about the decoy lamps.’ She sorted through a pile of papers on her desk and pulled one out. ‘I’m not sure how helpful it is. The lamps came from Argos and they can tell from the serial numbers that they were bought in Argos in Dumfries on September third. Cash sale. There are no fingerprints of any kind – they’d obviously been polished – and the glass paint that was used was a standard one you could pick up in a DIY superstore. The only oddity was that on one of them they found faint traces of citric acid powder.’

‘That’s for wine-making, isn’t it?’ Kerr said brightly. ‘Stuff like that.’

‘Stuff,’ Kingsley said. He was smiling. ‘Oh yes, stuff. But we’re not talking about wine-making here. That’s what you mix heroin with for injecting. Quickest way to get it into the bloodstream. Right, Tam?’ He couldn’t conceal his triumphant satisfaction.

‘Oh, right enough,’ Tam said. ‘But—’ He stopped.

Kingsley raised his eyebrows. ‘But—?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’ll away and put the enquiry about the mobile in hand, boss.’

The others rose as well, and when they had gone Fleming too got up and went to stand in her favourite thinking position by the window. Keeping this lot working as any sort of team fairly took it out of you, but in a curious way it was working. The animosity between Tam and Jon meant that whatever theory one of them put forward would get aggressive scrutiny from the other; too often when detectives cooperated closely, a theory reinforced by the team’s backing was given too much weight. And Tansy – well, someone had to be civilised. It would be good if her interview with Joanna Elder turned out to be productive; she was clearly feeling dispirited at the moment about her investigative role having been so peripheral.

Fleming should have been feeling pleased. Don Bailey certainly was, rushing off to hack out a deal with the Fiscal. Elder’s conviction on both charges would be the ideal solution, and on the face of it everything hung together. With the entire community, led by her own mother, looking to her for justice for the victims, it should have been a load off her mind. But it wasn’t.

Justice: that was always the itch under her skin. It didn’t matter how often it was explained to her that a court case was about proof, not guilt or innocence, she clung stubbornly to her conviction that her job was to seek the truth. She’d seen wicked men grin at their victims as they left the dock, acquitted on a technicality, but somehow, because she had been instrumental to the conviction, it had been much worse on the couple of occasions when she’d seen a bewildered innocent trapped in a skilfully woven web of Crown evidence. One had since been released; the other still languished at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Perth prison.

Police work nowadays seemed to be all about targets and initiatives; there was nothing in the handbooks about gut feeling, the instinct that was telling Fleming right now that this didn’t quite add up. She struggled to articulate it.

There was no problem with the drugs rap. Even without the testimony of the sad and angry lads Jon had brought in, Elder’s attitude during the interview had pretty much confirmed her own and Tam’s suspicions that he was Mr Big. But what it had also confirmed, in her mind at least, was that he had been in love with Ashley Randall.

Was it possible that he could so separate his heart and his head that he would sacrifice his beloved to his own security? Could this be an example of what Laura called pathological solipsism? She must go and have another talk with her; she’d been so busy she hadn’t so much as spoken to her friend on the phone for days now.

Maybe Laura could convince her that this was entirely possible. If it wasn’t . . . it scarcely bore thinking about. If Elder’s admittedly shaky alibis stood up to examination, where were they? Searching round for someone else with a powerful reason for killing Willie Duncan? Or looking for someone smart enough to realise that killing Willie would shape the police investigation in exactly the way it had, away from the real victim – whoever that might be. They’d been there before. On Day One.

She rehearsed the case against Elder. He had been furious that Willie hadn’t gone on the boat. He had given conflicting statements about his relationship with Ashley. He had lied about his whereabouts. He’d offered his wife and an inattentive barmaid as alibis – the one with a vested interest and the other unlikely to be able to say definitely that he wasn’t there. He was a drug dealer, which meant having no moral scruples about the deaths of the innocent. And now the citric acid link with heroin . . .

Tam hadn’t been convinced, though. What had his ‘But—’ been about? She frowned, watching idly as a car, double-parked and blocking the road below, provided a bit of street theatre. She had little doubt that he’d be back to explain it now Jon had left, on the excuse of reporting progress on tracing the call, and trying to second-guess him was wasting time. She had an appointment with the pathologist later that she was doing her best not to think about and there was paper she had to shift before she left. With her usual wild enthusiasm, she returned to her desk.

Tansy Kerr was in a gloomy mood as she drove back from Glasserton to the Elders’ house. Yet again, hers had been the enquiry which drew a blank.

At the Black Bull, its proprietor, a blue-chinned man with a beer gut and dirty fingernails, had directed her to Donna Donaldson in the village, who had been manning the bar on the night in question.

Donna was a big girl, slow-moving, with an abbreviated T-shirt exposing a roll of pale fat round her midriff, straggling red-brown hair and a complexion sallow with yesterday’s make-up which had smudged all round her eyes.

Feeling she should have brought a supply of bamboo shoots to offer her, Kerr put her question. Donna listened with a glazed expression, her jaws moving rhythmically.

‘Dunno. They could of been there, I suppose.’

‘Can you remember that evening? The evening the Knockhaven lifeboat was wrecked – a very stormy night.’

There was a prolonged pause, during which Kerr could have sworn she heard cogs clanking and gears grating, then a look of almost human intelligence came to Donna’s face.

‘That was, like, the tenth, right? Oh, I mind that fine. It was my pal’s birthday and she goes, “Donna, you’re working, right? Why don’t we all come round the pub and blast a few breezers?” We’d a great laugh. Everyone was, like, stotting.’

‘Do you,’ Kerr persisted patiently, ‘remember seeing the couple I was asking about? Older couple. She was blonde. Pretty. Looked a bit like Nicole Kidman.’

The glazed look returned. ‘Nuh. There were some people in, prob’ly. Don’t know, really.’

And that had been that. The barmaid’s memory had certainly confirmed Elder’s prediction, but there was nothing to say he hadn’t noticed what she was like on some previous occasion when he’d been there, with or without Ashley.

Kerr wasn’t looking forward to her next assignment either. If your husband had just been arrested for drug dealing you would be in quite a state, whether you were in on the act or not; a police officer would hardly be top of the list of visitors you would welcome with enthusiasm to your home. It was with considerable trepidation that she turned in at the imposing entrance to Bayview House, parked her car beside the powder-blue Mercedes and rang the front-door bell.

After a pause long enough to make Kerr wonder if Mrs Elder was in hiding, the door was flung open by the woman herself, wearing a sports top and shorts, sweating and breathless, as if she had been interrupted in the middle of a workout. It was obvious, at first glance, that she was in a towering rage. There were two bright red spots in her cheeks, she was scowling and Kerr almost felt her eyes might shoot sparks at any moment.

‘What do you want?’ she snapped.

Despite a temptation to say, ‘Nothing, thank you,’ and make a dash for the car, Kerr held her ground. ‘DC Kerr,’ she said bravely, holding up her warrant-card.

‘I know who you are. I asked what you wanted.’

‘I have just one or two questions about Mr Elder—’

‘One or two? Get in line, sister! The list of questions I have about that pernicious bastard would run to more pages than the telephone directory.’

Paydirt at last? ‘I take it you knew nothing about this,’ Kerr said sympathetically.

Joanna glared at her. ‘Do I look that kind of stupid? To risk all this,’ she gestured at the building behind her, ‘when you’re making a fortune already because people are dumb enough to pay good money for houses with walls you could spit peas through and a cardboard roof—’

‘Perhaps I could come in and you could tell me all about it?’ Kerr suggested delicately and Joanna shrugged.

‘Why not? The minute there’s a warrant your lot will be trampling through the place like a herd of buffalo. One more won’t make any difference.’

Stealing interested glances about her, Kerr followed her hostess across the wide expanse of hall and into the soaring height of the swimming-pool area. She’d never seen this sort of luxury in a private house before, only once been in a hotel that had a pool like this. At the farther end there was a collection of exercise machines which looked like instruments of torture to Tansy – though maybe now she’d given up smoking she’d have to do something if she wasn’t to get fat.

Round the pool, though, there were glass tables and loungers with sharp lime-green cushions and even, bizarrely, a beach umbrella – presumably for those days when the burning heat of Galloway became too much. She could go along with that, if you added a nice chilled pitcher of something with vodka in it.

Today, however, only the last rays of pale autumn sunshine glinted on the improbably blue water and bathed the whole place in a bleak, cold light, mocking the fantasy of a tropical idyll, an idyll which was even now being ruthlessly destroyed by the evidence of two young men bent on vengeance.

‘Take a seat,’ Joanna said curtly, going to the farther end to take a lime-green towel from a pile in a white wicker cabinet and rubbing herself down.

Putting her shoulder satchel down on one of the glass tables, Kerr gingerly lowered herself on to one of the loungers. She was sure that never before had their immaculate cushions been contaminated by contact with distressed jeans and Primark trainers, considering the designer velour tracksuit her hostess had just pulled on, and her top-of-the-range Nikes. She swivelled so that she was sitting awkwardly on the edge.

Joanna flung herself down on the next-door chair. ‘All right. Can I ask you a question first? Will all this be taken away if you can prove he was dealing?’

Well, that told you where her priorities lay, didn’t it? ‘I don’t know,’ Kerr said truthfully. ‘There’s new legislation coming in about confiscation of assets and directives to get tough. It all depends, first of all, obviously, on a conviction, and secondly on what he can prove comes from his legitimate business.’

‘Right.’ Joanna’s expression was thoughtful. ‘I’d better contact my lawyer immediately to safeguard my interests. So what do you want to know?’

Kerr had been debating the first question. The most important one – could she confirm her husband’s alibi? – suggested itself, but she had a feeling the woman could be led on to talk about her husband and it seemed unlikely she’d want to do him any favours. It was chancing her arm, but . . . ‘Was your husband having an affair with Ashley Randall?’