The Darkness and the Deep (40 page)

‘Me and all.’ They both laughed as Morton checked what he called ‘the usual suspects’ but he drew a blank. ‘Oddly enough, they all seem to be subjecting themselves to the risk of learning something this morning. Sorry.’

‘What about the girlfriend?’

‘Kylie MacEwan? Yes, that relationship’s definitely a problem. Her social worker’s very stressed about the child. The family background isn’t exactly ideal – mother has three children by three different partners – and they’re trying to get the father involved. He’s living in Lanark now in a stable relationship according to the reports and at least he’s making concerned noises. Ah!’ He pointed at the screen. ‘There! She’s off as well.’

‘Right. So Nat could be at her house, maybe?’

‘Could be. But Mum’s on the dole and Granny lives there too – not that they’d make a fuss about truanting but the house wouldn’t be empty, which kids usually prefer.’

‘If you can give me the address I’ll away round there and see.’

‘I’ll get my secretary to find it for you.’ He phoned through the request then said hesitantly, ‘Would it be in order to ask how the enquiry’s going? We have a particular interest in it because of poor Luke.’

‘Luke. Yes.’ They’d tended to forget about Luke. ‘There was absolutely no way Nat Rettie, or anyone else, for that matter, could have known he’d be on that boat. He was just an accidental victim.’

‘That pretty much sums Luke up,’ Morton said sombrely. ‘He was bent on killing himself anyway, wasn’t he, thanks to Rettie? I know he’s my pupil, I know he had a difficult start in life, but I could find it in me to hope that this can be laid to his account. It might stop his talent for destruction ruining someone else’s life.’

After the detectives had gone, the house fell silent, apart from the crackling of the logs in the fire and the soft creaks and sighs old buildings always make in a low-voiced conversation between stone and timber. Marjory almost felt like an intruder as the tinny waking-up music of her laptop interrupted their tranquil exchange. She had switched off her phone, though; she’d collect the inevitable messages later, but having been forced to take this day off she was determined to make the most of it.

Not that it was easy. Her head was aching as well as her ankle and she had that light-headed, unslept feeling. What sleep she had got the night before had been made hideous with dreams of struggles with mountainous waves and deep darkness, and of a woman raking her face with her nails until the blood welled up in the scratches. Somehow, in the way of dreams, she knew this was a distraught mother – Luke’s perhaps, or even Lewis’s, though she looked like neither. Lying awake had been preferable.

Where to start? Turning to the table at her side, her eye caught the glistening mother-of-pearl shell with a tiny hole in the middle which Tansy Kerr had taken out of her pocket and put there just as she left, saying, ‘That’s for luck, boss.’ Fleming touched its smooth surface with one finger. She was certainly going to need all the luck she could get.

She flipped through the file which contained some of her own rough notes, reports that hadn’t yet found their way into the system and the famous jotter, with a follow-up report from Sandy Langlands attached.

He’d done a good job. He’d tracked down the prospective buyers and eliminated their arrival and departure times from the list; the unattributable arrival time, 7.23, was consistent with someone hearing the maroon and driving out immediately from Knockhaven. The unaccounted-for return was at 7.31: time enough to park, place the lanterns in their pre-determined places and drive back up.

At least it confirmed that they needn’t look further than Knockhaven. The road to the north, of course, had been blocked by that accident and anyone coming from beyond Knockhaven to the south couldn’t have reached it in the time available. Except, of course, Joanna Elder. The first call from the coastguard had been to the house at 7.04, before they reached Elder on his mobile. Fleming made a note of that, with a star, on the pad at her side.

Langlands had also highlighted Elder’s visits to the site in the evenings, which were consistent with his claim of taking Ashley to the showhouse: each time another car either directly preceded or followed the Mitsubishi – Ashley’s own, presumably, described in one of the entries as ‘sporty’.

Fleming flipped back to the beginning of the book. The first two entries, which were logged on the same date though some hours earlier than the first recorded visit by Elder and Randall, detailed a car which had gone down to Fuill’s Inlat and returned nine minutes later. A comment in the margin read, ‘Much too fast – in fog!’ What would someone have been doing there for nine minutes? The Wrecker had taken eight, on the 10th . . .

Fog! She remembered something about a rescue in fog. She accessed the RNLI website; it wasn’t difficult to find the account of the
Maud’n’Milly
’s previous call-out, to rescue a boat adrift in fog. And the date tallied.

Had this been a trial run, or a first attempt, thwarted by the thickness of the fog which would have meant the cox steering on radar, even in these familiar waters?

There was no note, though, of a car returning to retrieve the lanterns, as surely it must have, so presumably this had been late in the night. And of course there was the car that had appeared at three in the morning after the wreck – to do just that, they had reckoned – and then swiftly disappeared. She’d almost forgotten that car.

It didn’t feature in the jotter. Since the good lady seemed to have recorded every one of the passing rescue vehicles, she had probably collapsed exhausted into bed to sleep the sleep of the smugly self-righteous.

Fleming scribbled a rough timetable. It all hung together, which was always useful when you were constructing a case to present to the Procurator Fiscal. The only problem was that you were talking alibis again. Been there, done that.

The feeling of making progress waned as the hours passed. She had been so sure that analysis would yield a new focus for the operation, yet the more she read the more she felt it was all slipping away from her. She had a few notes to show for her morning’s work, but what she still didn’t have was a feel for the sort of person behind it. Most crimes, even the most trivial, fitted a pattern of one sort or another, had a signature that defined their perpetrator, but these contrived to be anonymous, leaving a blank where the personality should be. It made her realise the extent to which she always relied on her skill in reading that signature.

If she hadn’t that instinctive feel for direction, she knew the alternative. Boring, plodding police work, sifting through the evidence more meticulously each time, riddling it first, then sieving it and finally using that thing her mother had for sifting icing sugar. With a groan that was only partly because of the pain in her ankle she settled down to it.

21

Yet again, Tansy Kerr was feeling on the outside of things, like she was sitting at home on a Saturday night with the party going on somewhere else. The only consolation was that she didn’t think anyone else was at the party either. She hadn’t seen Tam, admittedly, but she’d seen Jon Kingsley, on his way back to HQ to work on the drugs case, and he didn’t seem to have got much further with Joanna Elder than she had herself, though he was talking it up like he always did.

She’d done her interview with Enid Davis in the staffroom at the surgery, feeling guilty because the old bag who worked there too had almost wet herself with excitement at her co-worker being under suspicion.

Awkwardly, Kerr apologised for it all being so public, but Enid had said only, with a sort of tired distaste, ‘If you’d come to my house in disguise in the middle of the night she’d have asked me tomorrow what you were wanting. I suppose this is to do with what she’s been saying about me and Dr Lewis?’

‘That’s right.’

Enid sighed. ‘Look, I think Lewis Randall is a lovely man. I thought his wife was a complete bitch who didn’t know how lucky she was. But I’m not kidding myself that she was somehow standing in my way. If she was Dr Lewis’s taste in women, I’m not exactly the obvious next choice, am I? Oh, don’t feel you have to make a polite protest. After my divorce I decided I’d had enough of marriage – more than enough – and I’d more important things to do with my life than look for another man.’

The pain of that divorce had obviously gone deep. There was enough feeling in her voice to convince Kerr that it had the ring of truth, but even so she persisted, ‘I have to ask you—’

‘I know – what was I doing when these things happened? I was at home – I usually am – but I certainly can’t prove it.’

Kerr jotted that down. ‘You’ve said you disliked Dr Ashley. Why?’

‘Oh – how long have you got? None of us could stand the woman. Poor Dr Matthews – he was always having to cover for her lifeboat absences if Dr Lewis couldn’t but she was never grateful. She treated her husband like a servant, she was snooty to the patients, and she behaved to the rest of us, even Muriel, as if we’d come in on the sole of her shoe. Always giving orders, with never a please or a thank-you.’

Kerr had dutifully recorded that as well, though it didn’t seem the strongest motive for killing not just your boss but another three people as well. If it was, there’d be a serious shortage of sergeants in the police force.

All in all, she didn’t feel she’d made much progress. There was only one thing; just at the end of the interview, Enid had said hesitantly, ‘I don’t know if I should mention this, but—’

Kerr’s ears pricked up. ‘Definitely,’ she said firmly.

‘It’s probably stupid. But I’ve got to know Katy Anderson since all this happened. She’s a nice person and I’m just afraid I’ve given her bad advice about that son of hers. I’m on my own now; to have a son . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, perhaps I’m a bit inclined to see it through rose-coloured spectacles. She’d been having difficulties with Nat and wanted to send him away and I convinced her not to – a stepfather’s always hard for any child to adapt to, I said, and this would be her chance to put things right. But I’ve heard a lot more about him since and I’m very worried. I think she’s actually afraid of him, but I can’t exactly ring her up and say, “Sorry, I was wrong. Your son’s a bad lot,” can I? But maybe you could sort of check up?’

Kerr had made soothing noises and written that down too; she’d pass it on to Tam, though it would be confirmation rather than news to him. She’d left hoping that she hadn’t spent long enough with Enid to give Muriel Henderson more food for gossip, but judging by the look on the woman’s face as Kerr left it was a vain hope.

Now she had to tackle Mrs Randall – a right old battle-axe, according to Tam and Jon, who’d be happier drowning innocent folk than having them in her house asking questions. Jon had obviously had his money on her, trying to push the boss into letting him give her a going-over, though he seemed to be wavering after talking to Joanna Elder. Kerr couldn’t see it, herself – a woman in her sixties scrambling about on rocks in the dark! Sixty was really old. You got your bus pass at sixty.

On the way into Dorothy’s sitting room she changed her mind. There were a number of photos on a side-table – you could learn a lot from photos and Kerr always clocked them when she went into a room – with among them one of a slightly younger Mrs Randall doing some vigorous crewing on a sailing boat and another two which looked quite recent: one of her on top of a hill with her son and one with her in tennis whites in a ladies’ team.

‘Do you still play?’ Kerr asked, gesturing towards this last one as Dorothy Randall escorted her in, doing a good impression of someone with a bad smell under her nose, despite the fact that Kerr had on her best jeans today and a very respectable top her mother had given her for Christmas which she’d never liked much.

‘Not at the moment, obviously. In the summer, yes.’ The way she said it suggested that, recognising a sadly limited intellect, good manners forced her to be patient.

Don’t give me that, you stuck-up old bat
? Well, perhaps not. ‘That’s a very careful answer, Mrs Randall.’ Kerr could do heavily polite with the best of them. ‘But why I’m here is because you weren’t quite so careful about what you told us before.’

Dorothy was wearing a raspberry-coloured polo-neck that looked like cashmere; it almost seemed as if the dye was seeping out of it, up her neck and into her face.

‘I can’t imagine what you think you mean.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you do, if you think about it.’ Surely the woman had to have prepared herself for this line of questioning! Big Marge had called her son’s bluff last night and by now he must have tipped her off.

‘I’m sorry, Constable, you’ll have to be rather less cryptic.’

‘OK, if you like. Could you tell me what you were doing on the night of October twentieth, when Mr Duncan was killed, please?’

This was Dorothy’s opportunity to play her ‘senior moment’ card. ‘Oh, of course, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I got it confused with another night – silly me!’ Kerr could have written the script for her. Instead, she said, ‘I’ve made a statement about that already.’

With unholy joy, Kerr realised she didn’t know, after all. Had Lewis been afraid to tell Mummy he’d failed to convince?

‘Maybe you could repeat it to me,’ she suggested. ‘Just briefly.’

Dorothy sat straighter in her chair and repeated, in a firmer voice now, the account her son had given. It was, as far as Kerr could remember of what the boss had said, almost word for word the same. She let the woman finish, then contrived a lengthy pause, with her own head bent over the notebook she was holding as if in contemplation.

Then she looked up. ‘I’ve got a wee problem with that. Your son told DI Fleming that same story, and then had to admit there wasn’t a word of truth in it.’

The flush of colour drained so rapidly from Dorothy’s face that Kerr thought for a moment she would faint. ‘My – my son said that?’