The Darkness and the Deep (44 page)

She’d felt sorry for Katy’s son, with the Bastard as a stepfather. She’d tried to persuade Katy to build bridges with him; perhaps if she and Nat got close again he’d convince her that her precious Rob wasn’t so wonderful after all.

But once Enid had realised that the Bastard was trying to reach out from the grave to grab her, she’d had to think quickly. As long as Nat was around, if anything happened to Katy he’d be the first suspect and she knew the police had him on their list anyway; she’d emphasised that, quite skilfully, she thought, when she was talking to the policewoman with the ridiculous hair.

But after Katy had come into the Medical Centre, full of her plans to sort out her papers, Enid knew she had to act at once. The police would know by nightfall next day, if Katy couldn’t be stopped; maybe loosening the wheel nuts wasn’t the best plan in the world, but the situation was desperate.

There was a chance Katy might be killed, though naturally, Enid would have preferred not – she wasn’t some kind of monster, for heaven’s sake – but most likely she’d just be hurt or shaken, and when Enid heard about it she’d go round to sympathise and persuade Katy she needed a nice lie-down. Get her out of the room, even for ten minutes, and she’d have the evidence safe in her bag. Just as she would do now, as long as Katy was prepared to listen to reason.

It was her unique brand of bad luck that Nat had taken the car – however could she have foreseen that? And what would the police make of it? Vandalism, perhaps. Yes, vandalism; that was certainly more plausible than a careless mechanic. She’d push the vandalism angle to Katy and she could even arrange some over the next bit, to direct their minds that way.

Oh, the game wasn’t over yet, if luck was with her, for once. If she could just get in to see Katy, on her own. Was the visitor going to stay all night?

But at last, at last, the door was opening, light spilling out on to the paving strip outside. A woman on crutches appeared – Enid didn’t know who that would be. Then behind her came someone she did recognise, someone with ridiculously streaked red hair. The one on crutches, she saw now, was the inspector who had asked her about Dr Lewis. And the younger policewoman was holding a bundle of newspapers.

The game was over, after all. Or very nearly.

23

The road from Knockhaven to Kirkluce was so familiar now that Marjory Fleming could almost anticipate every corner as Tansy Kerr came up to it at speed and brace herself, which was just as well considering the protests from her over-used ankle. The combination of adrenaline, pain and exhaustion was a powerful cocktail; she was feeling positively light-headed, but there was no way she was going to miss out on the endgame. There had been one police car outside Enid Davis’s house in the High Street as they drove up it to join the main road which crossed it at the top; the other car she’d assigned should have arrived by now and gone with Tam to pick her up at the surgery. With this, and the fatal accident, every copper on patrol duty tonight in the Galloway area was going to be tied up in this one place; she could only cross her fingers and hope that something wasn’t about to break elsewhere.

Fleming spent the first five minutes of the journey arranging for a search warrant for Davis’s property to be sworn out and giving instructions for the digging team which had been pulled back from Bayview House to be on standby, ready to move in at first light; blood and tissue could often be found in drain traps and joints. Her next phone call was to Superintendent Bailey; it might have been more flattering if he hadn’t sounded more surprised than delighted that progress had been made. Then she sank back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

‘Boss,’ Kerr said, ‘can I just ask—?’ Then, glancing sideways, she broke off. ‘Sorry – were you trying to sleep?’

Fleming sighed. ‘That’s OK. I don’t think I could anyway.’

‘I suppose once we’d eliminated everything else, we’d have gone wider and got round to digging into Rob Anderson’s past – even Ashley Randall’s, come to that. But why just now?’

Fleming smiled. ‘Just a tiny thing, nothing in itself, really, but it caught my eye – you know how discrepancies sometimes do? I was reading your transcript of what Rob said to Katy in hospital, and one thing caught my eye. He was talking about the lights and then he said, “Three of them – too many.” But we know there weren’t three lights, there were two – if there had been another the SOCOs would have found it, and in any case the signal for the harbour entrance is only two lights. He was in shock, of course, but it was only that remark that made you believe he was confused.

‘So assume he wasn’t. What
was
he talking about? What was preying on his mind to such an extent, when he probably knew he was dying? I started to wonder what there were three of. Three crew in the boat, but that was unremarkable. He was still alive so there hadn’t been three deaths – and anyway he said “them”, not us.

‘If he’d known the other two had died—’

‘He did. Someone at the funeral tea said he’d been told, and how awful it must have been believing he’d caused two deaths because he got it wrong.’

‘Right.’ Another piece of the speculative jigsaw slotted into place. ‘And he was racked with guilt – “My fault,” he kept saying. If their deaths were so much on his conscience, I just began to wonder if there could possibly be something we didn’t know about – some third fatality. OK, it could have been a complete red herring. Maybe I was reading too much into the confused maunderings of a dying man, but what had we got to lose? We’d been focusing on the current situation and we were running out of options. He’d an unknown past which would at least bear investigation. And – well, I had a sort of feeling . . .’

Kerr stifled a smile. Big Marge’s ‘feelings’ were the stuff of police legend.

‘He was a naval officer until he went into the licensed trade, so there was no problem accessing his record up to that point. It turns out he’d been serving at Faslane, just along the road from Helensburgh where the accident happened, five years ago. According to his file, he was completely exonerated. He’d actually stopped when the child lost control of his bike and swerved into him – came over the handlebars and cracked his skull on the edge of the roof.

‘Of course it needn’t have been connected to this but if it was, there was only one person on the list of suspects – though for quite the wrong reason – who wasn’t living here in Knockhaven long before Rob ever appeared on the scene. It would have had to be quite a coincidence if he had chosen, more or less at random, to come to a place where someone happened to be nursing a deadly grievance against him. But Enid followed him here.’

‘Tough for her to accept him being in the clear.’ Kerr pulled out to overtake another car, neatly and safely enough, but Fleming caught her breath. She didn’t like being driven.

Letting it out again, unnoticed, she hoped, she went on, ‘Demonstrably impossible. And if you were, to use Laura’s word, so solipsistic that your need to punish your son’s killer was all that mattered, it wouldn’t be hard to persuade yourself that taking a drug dealer and an adulteress with a deeply unpleasant personality along with him would be a positive service to the community. And what followed you’d just put down to what Harold Macmillan once called “Events, dear boy, events.”’

‘Yes,’ Kerr said slowly, ‘I can see that. But Nat? Why should she want to kill Nat? She described him to me as a thoroughly bad lot, but surely even she—’

‘Come on, Tansy, think!’ Fleming said crisply. ‘You can do better than that!’

Kerr thought for a moment, then bit her lip. ‘Oh – Enid wouldn’t have expected him to be in the car, would she? In fact, she’d set me up – if Katy came to grief I’d be meant to think of Nat immediately. Probably would have, too.

‘I’m not starring, am I – not picking up on what Rob said either. Sorry.’

‘You recorded it, it was in the files, and that’s your job. It was my job to pick up on it, but if I hadn’t been stupid enough to wreck my ankle I’d never have had the time to analyse the evidence thoroughly. We’d have got Davis in the end, you know, by the long, slow elimination process – but God knows what mayhem she would have felt inspired to cause by then.’

They had reached Kirkluce; as Kerr slowed down to make the turn into the police car park, she laughed suddenly. ‘I was just thinking, it’s as well she’s not on a mission to improve society. Muriel Henderson would definitely be the next to go.’

‘That’s not even funny. We’d better go straight to the CID room – Tam should have Davis safely in custody by now and I want to map out the interview before we start.’

She wasn’t there. They’d tried the Medical Centre first, but it was in darkness, the outer doors closed and the car park deserted. They went back to the High Street; its handful of small shops had shut their doors and in the flats above and the terraced houses between them, lamps glowed behind drawn curtains as their inhabitants settled in for the night.

But the windows of Enid’s little house were dark, and knocking, ringing and even shouting through the letter-box brought no response, beyond bringing the next-door neighbour out to say, ‘I don’t know what all the stushie’s about but if you’d the sense of a flea you’d know she’s not in.’

Enid should have been innocently at home, having returned from work half an hour ago. How the hell could she have known they were on to her?

The sight of two police cars, an unmarked car and five officers was creating a stir. Doors were opening and Tam MacNee, deprived by the presence of the paying public of a bout of cathartic swearing, gritted his teeth.

‘I’m sorry, madam. Would you have any idea where we might be able to find Mrs Davis?’

No helpful answer was forthcoming. ‘Was it her that did it all?’ someone shouted from across the street.

MacNee ignored that. ‘You lot stay here. I’ll have a scout around the back.’ He jumped into his car and at the T-junction at the top of the hill turned right on to the main road, then immediately right again into an unpaved lane that ran down the backs of the old houses. One or two had doors opening directly on to it while others had small gardens with garages and sheds; Davis could have gained access to her house this way unseen.

It was frustrating, though. Without numbers to guide you, and with ground plans so irregular, it was difficult to work out which house might be hers. He knew the rough location and most houses by now had lighted windows. If Davis had returned, he could assume she would be cowering in the dark.

Provokingly, in the approximate area there were two houses in darkness, side by side, each with a garage built across the end of the garden. He tried the doors of both, but they were locked.

Certainly, even now a sheriff somewhere would be granting a warrant – might have granted it already, in fact. It wouldn’t bother him to jump the gun and break into Davis’s property; on the other hand, only a copper who was tired of life would risk kicking in the wrong door without a warrant clutched in his sweaty fist.

He’d need to go back to the High Street and count down from the top. ‘
The idiot race
’, as he scornfully termed the onlookers, should have gone back inside by now, reluctant to miss the unfolding drama of
Neighbours
or
EastEnders
or whatever other brain-rotting soap they were addicted to, not having the patience to wait for the final act of the much more riveting drama being played out right on their doorsteps.

As MacNee reached the junction of the lane with the main road, a blue Honda on the farther side slowed down as if to turn in, then speeded up again and drove off before he could read the number plate. His suspicions aroused, MacNee made to follow it, but was prevented first by two cars coming along on his side of the road and then by another going slowly in the opposite direction. By the time he got out of the lane, there was no sign of his quarry. He swore, and pulled into the side of the road.

Perhaps it hadn’t been Davis, trying to get into the back of her house. But he was getting as bad as the boss – he had a feeling that it was. But where did you go from here?

The panic that had made Enid Davis’s head feel like a pinball machine, with lights flashing and thoughts like random balls banging about, subsided once the police had driven away with the evidence that would damn her. Instead, an unnatural calm descended. She had heard this happened in near-death experiences: detached, you found yourself looking down on your body from a great height. She could see herself now, a small, huddled, frightened woman in a darkened car in a dark place. A very dark place.

She had no coherent plan beyond heading for the sanctuary of home, forgetting to stop at the turn on to Shore Street, lurching out in front of a car which was forced to stop with a screech of brakes. That brought a grim smile to her face; it would have been an ironic fate, if she too had perished in an accident like Timmy’s. But she hadn’t. She drove on, into the High Street.

It was only as she turned the corner that she saw the police cars, right outside her front door. It had crossed her mind that they would come looking for her quite soon, but the reality was more shocking than she could have imagined; for a moment her foot hovered disastrously close to the brake. With a gasp of fear she lifted it again; they couldn’t have her number yet, surely, and they hadn’t stopped the car ahead of her. As long as the drum-like beating of her heart wasn’t audible outside the car, she would be all right provided she didn’t draw attention to herself. She drove normally, looking straight ahead, until it occurred to her that a normal person would turn curiously to look at the police car; she managed that too and reached the top of the High Street without provoking any reaction.

Enid turned randomly left on to the main road, towards Fuill’s Inlat, where this had all begun. She drove blindly, mechanically, trying to think what she could do, fighting against the answer that was screaming inside her head – nothing.