The Darkness and the Deep (35 page)

‘I’ve been thinking.’ She indicated the paper in front of her. ‘One of the good things Jon’s done is have the drug samples he picked up in pubs around the area analysed, and what they’re telling us is that they’ve all come from the same source – Ritchie Elder’s operation. He didn’t have rivals in the area who might have taken out Willie in a turf war, which was something that had crossed my mind. So if it isn’t drugs behind this, someone, in all probability, killed Willie to make us believe it was.

‘So I’ve been focusing on the other deaths. Luke, poor lad – there’s absolutely nothing suspicious. Which leaves us with either Ashley Randall or Rob Anderson as victim.

‘Of course we have to dig deeper. But looking here,’ she pointed to a circle with the name Ashley Randall at its centre, and lines coming from it, ‘what catches my eye is this – the figure in the shadows.’ She tapped Lewis Randall’s name. ‘Jon’s talked to him, you’ve talked to him – neither of you came back with anything to say.’

MacNee grimaced. ‘Funny bloke. Either there’s nothing there, or under that cool exterior there’s a seething mass of passions.’

‘That’s almost poetic, Tam. See, you can do it yourself – you don’t have to quote Burns. And it’s cheaper. Anyway, there are the women to consider too in that area. Dorothy Randall, Joanna Elder, Enid Davis.’

‘Enid Davis?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘No one’s talked to her yet. Oh, I know what you said about Randall’s attitude to her, but if he’s a seething mass he may be secretly harbouring a passion for her – the most improbable people inspire timeless love. Look at Camilla Parker Bowles. And if Enid could be sure that only Ashley stood in her way—’

‘OK, OK, Enid. And Dorothy, if you ask me, would cheerfully strangle anyone with her bare hands if they so much as looked at Lewis sideways—’

‘And Tansy says Joanna would auction her grandmother for ten pence on her maintenance cheque,’ finished Fleming. ‘Do you reckon it could be a woman’s crime, Tam?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not? But aren’t you forgetting someone?’

‘Nat Rettie,’ she said slowly. ‘No. No, I’m not.’

‘Maybe we need to pull him in again.’

‘I’ll give it some thought. What I need is some space to think this through, and I won’t get it here at my desk so I’m going to take off. I want to have a chat with Laura too, if I can get hold of her.’ She glanced out of the window; the sky was clear and white clouds, driven by a brisk breeze, were scudding by. ‘Maybe she and Daisy would fancy a walk on the beach. I’ve a couple of things I want to ask her advice on.’

MacNee looked at her sharply. ‘Bill all right?’

‘Oh, Bill’s fine. We’re working our way back to where we were and I reckon we’ll make it. No, it’s – it’s Cat. I think I told you she’s far too chummy with Kylie MacEwan.’

Nat’s girlfriend. MacNee nodded. That maybe explained Marjory’s hesitation about him.

‘There’s something upsetting Cat and she’s not eating properly. And I can’t get her to tell me what the problem is.’

‘Laura’s just the lass you need to talk to, then.’ He was one of Laura’s big fans.

‘That’s what Bill said, when I told him last night.’

‘That’s good.’ Tam had detected a certain constraint in Bill’s attitude to his wife’s friend; Marjory would be pleased if Bill was coming round. ‘Away you go, then. Say I was asking for her.’

Her eyes watering in the wind, Marjory Fleming pulled up the zip of her weatherproof jacket as far as it would go, and sank her chin into it. Laura Harvey’s small figure beside her was bundled up in a pink wool coat with a striped beanie hat pulled down over her ears and a matching scarf wound three times round her neck, while Daisy raced in circles round them on the hard sand below the tideline, her ears blowing back like small furry pennants.

Laura sneezed, then laughed. ‘It’s this air! It tickles the inside of my nose, like the bubbles in champagne.’

Marjory looked about her. ‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ Her gesture took in the wide majesty of the sky, the deserted beach, the spits of rock running down into the sea, the low, wind-barbered shrubs on the other side of the road where their own parked cars were the only vehicles in sight. Above their heads, seabirds leaned into the wind, with the occasional keening cry.

Laura paused to stare out to the empty ocean with its white-capped waves foaming in, to vanish in a flurry of spent bubbles in the coarse sand. ‘Alone in the universe!’ she declaimed.

‘I wish!’ Marjory said with feeling, and her friend turned to look at her.

‘How’s the case going?’

It was a measure of Marjory’s maternal disquiet that she waved aside the investigation which had been occupying most of her waking hours. ‘I do want to ask you about that later, but what’s worrying me most at the moment is Cat.’

She filled in the background, then went on, ‘We haven’t been happy about Cat’s friendship with this girl, even before all the worrying stuff about Nat Rettie came out. But it’s only very recently she hasn’t been eating. Last night I think she fed her supper to the dog when no one was looking and then when I’d comforted myself with the thought that she’d eaten a meringue, I smelled sick in the bathroom. Mother’s worried too. You know how it is with adolescent girls.’

‘Anorexia nervosa.’ Laura nodded. ‘And you’re right to be concerned – it’s a psychological cliché that it often afflicts conscientious, well-behaved girls like Cat.’

‘Not at the moment.’ Marjory laughed shortly. ‘You should have heard what they said at her Parents’ Evening! I tried to talk to her about it at bedtime last night, and she just denied it flatly. She doesn’t seem to have lost a lot of weight yet, but I don’t understand, Laura – what’s it about? What can we do?’

‘The nervosa bit indicates that it’s got an emotional rather than a physical origin. Sometimes it can happen when the family – especially the mother – has an obsessive attitude to food, dieting or not eating anything that isn’t specifically “healthy”.’ She caught Marjory’s eye and they both laughed.

‘Not
exactly
Cat’s problem,’ Marjory said ruefully.

‘Nonsense. You’re perfectly in proportion for your height,’ Laura said robustly. ‘The other theory is that it’s sexual, a subconscious fear of having to deal with the problems of being a woman. Extreme weight loss means you don’t menstruate, effectively becoming a child again. From what you’ve said, it wouldn’t be at all unlikely that she’s feeling threatened by her friend’s precocity. There must be a lot of conflict between what she knows is right and sensible, and loyalty to her peer.’

‘So how do we tackle it?’

‘Don’t worry. Cat has to sit down to meals – you’d be astonished how many children don’t – so you’ve spotted it before it’s had a real chance to affect her physically. I don’t believe this is an on-going family problem; I think if we tackle the situation she’s in at school, try to take away the pressure she’s feeling, it would sort itself out.’

Marjory sighed. ‘I feel so guilty – she had such nice friends, before all the foot-and-mouth fuss. She says they talk to her quite pleasantly again now, but of course she’s cut herself off by her friendship with Kylie.’

‘Why don’t you ask her to walk round tomorrow after school and have tea with me? I might manage to get her talking. Say I wondered if she’d like to see Daisy.’

‘She’d love to. She and Bill were both wondering how she was getting on. Thanks, Laura.’

‘No problem.’ The dog, perhaps hearing her name, had come panting back to her mistress’s feet and Laura bent to pick up a seaweed root to throw for her. ‘So – what about the case? Everyone’s talking about it, of course. The rumours in this place fascinate me – it’s like a flock of starlings, all wheeling one way and then for no apparent reason wheeling round all at the same time and heading in the opposite direction.’

‘What’s the latest?’ Marjory asked with interest.

‘Ah! The latest but one was that Willie had gone around saying definitely he wasn’t a target, so his death had to be just to divert suspicion. But then, with Ritchie Elder being arrested, they’ve decided Willie was wrong.’

‘You’ve no idea how relieved I am that they’re not up-to-date yet with the latest development. I was beginning to think they had my office bugged.

‘Keep it to yourself, but we’ve got evidence that Elder couldn’t have set up the wreck of the lifeboat. So I’m going to assume, at least for the moment, that he didn’t kill Willie either.

‘Laura, I need you to talk me through it, from a psychological point of view – did I ever think I would hear myself say these words? But the thing is, we just can’t get a proper handle on it – tiny bits and pieces of information are coming in, but painfully slowly, and all that any of them seem to do is prove a negative.’

‘If you’re talking psychology, actually having a negative instead of a wishy-washy maybe this, maybe that, would be a rare treat. Oh God, Daisy’s found a dead bird! Daisy, drop it!’ Laura rushed ahead to drag the reluctant dog away from her trophy.

Marjory followed her, arguing. ‘Yes, but no one expects you to bring someone to court at the end of a therapy session, do they? Bear with me. There isn’t the faintest shred of evidence to suggest that for all his personal problems, poor Luke Smith wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If what we’re talking about is the deaths of Ashley Randall and Rob Anderson, a group of suspects suggests itself.’ She outlined them, then added ruefully, ‘Of course, if we manage to eliminate all of them, Knockhaven has a population of around two thousand who could have heard the lifeboat being called out and decided wrecking it would be fun, but at that point I resign from the Force and start doing farmhouse B&B instead.’

Laura smiled, but her brows furrowed in concentration. ‘You said the last time that you believed the killer thought the wreck would be put down to an accident – but once it wasn’t, to be so determined to protect yourself that you’d mow another person down in cold blood . . . Though of course, the idea was probably suggested by the stories flying round about Willie saying it was meant to be him.

‘It’s not hands-on stuff. It’s not psychopathic killing for the perverted pleasure of direct violence. The methods suggest a sort of dissociation, a reluctance to get your hands dirty, squeamishness, even. The wreck, for example – you could almost persuade yourself that you had invoked outside agencies to achieve the execution. And even the car – that’s at one remove too. Sort of, “I don’t like what I’m doing, so if I pretend I’m not . . .”’

‘But if you felt like that, how could you kill innocent people?’

‘Certainly, it would present problems for anyone who wasn’t a full-blown psychopath. Unless you somehow convinced yourself that the others weren’t innocent – or I suppose the way you could square it might be by arguing that killing someone who in your eyes was fit to die unfortunately resulted in collateral damage, like dropping a bomb. The second death – to continue the military image, you’d class that as shooting someone in self-defence. But all I’m doing here is thinking aloud. Were you leaning particularly hard on any of your suspects at that time?’

Marjory considered. ‘Not specifically. Asking questions all round, which I suppose might make anyone feel uncomfortable.’

‘So it’s an extreme reaction to a low-level threat. It all suggests a very high degree of self-love, self-preservation.’

‘Solipsism. That was what you said.’

‘It’s not a clinical term, just a way of describing someone with a vastly inflated idea of the importance of their own wishes – someone who sees life as a play in which they’re not so much the leading character as the only character. The killer here seems to be egocentric to a seriously dangerous degree. And you don’t need me to tell you that the first death is a taboo broken. The second one is easier – and, if you’re threatened again, a wasted investment unless you eliminate the next equally ruthlessly.’

‘So somehow we have to be sure of getting to the truth before someone stumbles on it?’

Laura’s shrug was eloquent.

‘So – why are you doing it at all? You love yourself – why do you expose yourself to a risk like this?’

‘Love, hatred, gain, revenge – the usual. Or a combination.’

‘Well, that covers most of our suspects. Couldn’t you just be a bit more specific?’

‘What you want isn’t a psychologist, it’s Gypsy Rose and her crystal ball. Or one of these profilers who can tell you the killer is five foot eleven, with a taste in sharp suits and an Oedipus complex.’

Marjory stared at her. ‘You could be describing Lewis Randall. Except he must be at least six foot.’

Laura burst out laughing. ‘There you are, then! But realistically, he could just have divorced her, couldn’t he? And if you hated your wife enough to kill her instead, you’d probably want to put your hands round her throat.’

‘I take the point. But his mother – she hated Ashley, who was a bad wife to her son. If he wouldn’t divorce her . . .’

‘More plausible motivation, certainly. Who else have you got under the microscope?’

‘Enid Davis – allegedly in love with Lewis, though Jon swears he’s not interested.’

‘Killing the wife would be quite a speculative venture unless you were sure he wouldn’t seize his freedom and go off with someone else. But Joanna Elder – is she still in the frame?’

‘Very much so. She had a lot to lose, if Ritchie turned her out. Oh, he’d have to pay her off, certainly, but it’s not the same.’

‘So you think it was aimed at Ashley, then?’

‘Not necessarily, I suppose.’ Marjory pulled a face. ‘There’s Nat Rettie, Cat’s friend Kylie’s boyfriend and Rob Anderson’s stepson. Big problems there, and there’s a trace of evidence that makes Tam think we might have been a bit hasty in writing him out on the basis of an alibi provided by Kylie, whom I wouldn’t trust round the corner.’

Laura considered that. ‘You wouldn’t put the wreck down as a teenage crime, would you – too meticulous? But then again, they all spend hours on computers playing these intricate fantasy games, so elaborate planning mightn’t be as unnatural as you’d think.’