The Darkness and the Deep (6 page)

Surely it had all been easier when her father had been a sergeant in the same police station where she was now an inspector? But perhaps not; perhaps each generation of law-enforcement officers saw apocalypse in the vices of the day.

Oh God! Was she really getting that old? She needed a talk with Laura Harvey; it was good to have acquired a younger friend who could give her a sense of perspective on this, who could remind her how Socrates had despaired of the manners and morals of the younger generation in his day too. Marjory had used that argument against her own old-fashioned father in the days when she had a starry-eyed belief in progress; she was terribly afraid she might be against it now, and there wasn’t a more middle-aged attitude than that.

She might drop in on Laura on her way home tonight. She’d been delighted that a contract for psychology-based articles with a Sunday broadsheet – and, Marjory guessed, a fairly substantial income from her dead parents’ estate – had allowed Laura to decide to settle in Kirkluce. It was handy having her there when you wanted to pick her brains and anyway, Marjory was keen to see how Daisy was settling into her new home. Daisy had been Bill’s present to Laura, who had used her psychotherapist’s skills during the foot-and-mouth epidemic to persuade him to grieve over his slaughtered herds as he needed to do, but also to put it all behind him and move on.

Daisy was a considerable gift. Meg, her mother, had a reputation in sheepdog trials which meant that her pups would sell at a substantial premium, and money was tight in the Fleming household at the moment. But it was important for Bill’s pride that his gratitude should be commensurate with the favour received.

‘We’ll have to keep an eye on Laura, though,’ he warned Marjory. ‘I’ve picked that pup carefully. She’s the sociable one in the litter – you don’t want a one-man dog unless you’re going to work it – but she’s a bright wee smout. Laura will have to see she’s not bored, or there’ll be trouble. And she’ll have Laura wrapped round her little finger if she doesn’t watch out, and it’s a cruel thing to let any dog get away with that. They need to know you’re boss – you tell Laura that.’

It would be fun to see how Laura and her Daisy were getting on. It would take Marjory’s mind off her professional problems – and perhaps Laura would even have a few psychological tips to give her about how to deal with wee Weegie hard men who were feeling threatened.

And that was even before she had broken it to Tam that Jonathan Kingsley was a graduate entry to the profession. If she were to be honest, she felt a bit threatened by that herself.

‘But where were you last night, Nat?’ Katy Anderson persisted, prodding the onions in the frying pan. She was cooking him a beefburger for his tea; he liked them, and if she was going to have an unpleasant confrontation with her son it made sense to avoid an argument about what he was meant to be eating at the same time.

Nathan Rettie, at the kitchen table and apparently deeply absorbed in the sports pages of a red-top, muttered, ‘Oh, nowhere, just out.’ He was big for sixteen, dark and heavily built like his father, and his face with its fiery plague of adolescent spots was eloquent testimony to the hormones raging within. He had a row of silver rings in one ear and another ring through his eyebrow which his mother couldn’t look at without wincing.

‘Out where?’

He looked up then, his brown eyes blazing. ‘Quit nagging, Ma, OK? I’m not some kid who gets told what to do.’

At the aggression in his tone, bad memories stirred. It took a lot of courage for her to say, ‘You are when it’s my car you’ve taken and you’re too young to drive.’

‘Oh, turn me in to the police, why don’t you? That’s what
he
wants, isn’t it? Well, you know what you can do, both of you!’ He proceeded to tell her, his voice rising as the torrent of obscenities went on.

Feeling almost physically battered by the onslaught, terrified that the outcome would be what it had so often been in the past with his violent father, Katy shrank back instinctively against the wall of the kitchen. When the door suddenly burst open and Rob appeared she gave a sob of pure relief, despite having told him as usual to leave her alone to deal with her son.

Nat was a well-grown lad but Rob was a big man, thickset and powerful. He was wearing a polo shirt which didn’t conceal the muscles of his chest and upper arms, painstakingly maintained with weight-training, and with his black beard and thunderous expression he was an intimidating figure.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that! If you think you can bully her because you’re bigger and stronger than she is, just remember who’s standing at her back.’

Nat, cut off in mid-flow, shrank back in his seat, licking lips that were suddenly dry as he recollected other confrontations with a dominant male. ‘If you lay a finger on me, I’ll shop you,’ he whined, eyes narrowed in hatred for his mother’s husband.

Anderson looked down at him contemptuously. ‘I wouldn’t soil my hands. I’ve kept out of this until now because I agreed that your behaviour was to be your mother’s business. But she’s my wife now, and by treating her like that you’ve made it mine.

‘You’re living under my roof and I’m going to spell out what that means. You’re civil to your mother, for a start. You behave decently at school. And if you so much as touch her car keys again, I call the police, whatever she says.

‘Those are the rules. And if you don’t like them, you can go back to your father. As I recall, you didn’t much like living with him before.’

That touched a raw spot. When his mother, fearing for her life, had left, Nat had chosen to stay. But the family home rapidly grew squalid; there was never any food in the house, or money to buy it with unless Nat managed to nick some from his father before he spent it down the pub. Then, without his mother to act as a punchbag, it was Nat himself who came in for the drunken beatings . . . And it could be a good life with just his mother, if it wasn’t for the bastard standing over him, waiting for him to speak, to submit.

Well, he wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. He pushed back his chair and got up, then with a final defiant stare went out of the kitchen and slammed the door.

Katy burst into tears. Rob went over and took her in his arms, patting her soothingly as if she were a frightened child. ‘I don’t know if I’ve made things better or worse,’ he said ruefully. ‘But I meant it, Katy. We’ve tried it your way – waiting for him to come round to me while I look a total prat – and he resents me like fury anyway. He might as well have something to resent me for.’

She was still shaking. ‘It was like one of his father’s rages. I really expected him to come and hit me. I know it’s not working, trying to be non-confrontational and understanding – it just makes him despise me. But Rob, you wouldn’t really send him back to Dave, would you?’

Rob sighed. ‘No, of course not. But maybe I could see if they still have a press gang in the Naval Recruitment section. A spell below decks would do him a power of good.’

Tam MacNee took up his position on the mat, his eyes half-shut in concentration, drew back his hand, then with elegant precision launched the dart to finish the game with a double top.

There was a roar of applause from his fellow-members of the Cutty Sark’s darts team and its travelling support from Kirkluce, as Tam sealed their victory over their counterparts in the Anchor Inn. It was a long-standing fixture, played alternately in these two salubrious venues, and the Anchormen, as they called themselves, had been four up over the series; Tam’s efforts for the Cutty Sark’s Warlocks, demonstrating delicate judgement and a fine restraint unknown to his namesake Tam o’ Shanter on a much earlier festive occasion, had at least done something to reduce the shameful deficit.

The group gathered around the darts board to watch the solemn presentation of the original pound note wagered on the first game, now framed so that it could hang in a place of honour behind the victors’ bar. Gradually they drifted off into smaller groups, talking and guffawing as the air grew thick with smoke and the jugs of beer had to be filled up with a regularity which Katy Anderson, in charge of pulling it, swore would leave her with a sore shoulder tomorrow.

Tam turned aside to pick up the pullover he had stripped off for that final throw. It had been knitted for him by Bunty and he took it to every darts match as a sort of mascot, even if the darts board on the front – a real labour of love and a serious challenge even to a knitter of Bunty’s redoubtable skill – made it sit oddly with his usual sartorial style, which was understated to the point of being laconic.

He was enjoying the evening. It had taken his mind off the problem at work, the first time he’d really fallen out with his boss. He and Marjory went back a long way; he counted himself a friend of the family and had shared many a pleasant wee bevvy down the pub with ‘
the hardy son of rustic toil
’, as he liked to call Bill. He’d watched uncomfortably last year as the stress of Marjory’s position as a police officer in a hostile farming community took its toll on her marriage and admired Marjory’s toughness, even when, he suspected, she was hurting badly – still was, to some extent, if you asked him. She always got a wee bit tight-lipped when you asked her how things were at the farm.

He’d been friend enough, on a good few occasions since she made rank, to tell her bluntly to her face when there was a problem brewing that was of her own making, and however little she might have liked it she’d been big enough to be grateful. This was the first time he’d ever felt she’d joined the management side, playing bloody stupid games instead of coming at him straight. He didn’t like it, and he’d resented her suggesting he’d have been heavy-handed in his dealings with an English colleague. Even if it was true. OK, especially if it was true, but he didn’t want to think about that now.

A pint was thrust into his hand as he rejoined his teammates, responded to the usual witticisms about ‘banging up’ the opposition, ‘nicking’ the prize and even (from a solicitor who was no slouch with the arrows himself) ‘causing alarm and fear to the lieges’, then slid quietly away. He was looking for someone: spotting his quarry, he moved in.

‘Willie!’ he said, positioning himself with a neat and unobtrusive flick of the shoulders next to Willie Duncan, member of the defeated Anchormen and cox of the Knockhaven lifeboat. ‘Haven’t seen you since the last time we lined up on the mat. How’re you doing, pal?’

Duncan, perched on a high stool in the farthest corner of the bar, shifted uneasily. With the wall to one side and MacNee on the other, there was no escape. ‘Fine, Tam, fine,’ he said weakly.

‘Here – you’re not the man you were with the arrows, are you? I mind you had us by the short and curlies last time.’

The group Willie had been part of was still talking, but its focal point seemed somehow to have shifted. MacNee put his elbow on the bar now with an apparently casual movement which effectively pinned Duncan into his corner. This was piling on the pressure, and he could see his victim start to shift uneasily on the bar stool.

Willie looked down into his beer. ‘We all have our off days.’

The bloodshot eyes hadn’t escaped MacNee. ‘Don’t expect you care as much as you used to, Willie? Don’t expect you care about anything all that much these days? Money, maybe, but not a lot else.’

It was with a visible effort that Willie made himself sound angry. ‘Here, what are you saying, MacNee?’

MacNee gave his trademark, mirthless smile. ‘You’re feeling pretty mellow right now, eh, Willie? Well, get this – when you’re thon way, your judgement’s shot to hell. Suppose that pager in your pocket there goes and you’re on a call for the lifeboat. Suppose it’s a wee thing tricky out there. Suppose you’ve other folks’ lives hanging on your reactions. Still feeling mellow, Willie?’

The shutters came down. ‘You’re daft, MacNee. Daft or drunk. Don’t know what you’re havering about.’

‘Aye, do you!’ MacNee’s reply was as swift and sharp as his winning dart. ‘Dead men on your conscience, Willie. Think about it.

‘Get this.’ His tone changed. ‘We can turn a blind eye to the occasional joint. But you’re not a fool – you know as well as I do the other stuff that comes with it. You know who brings it in and where it comes from. And there’s lads out there having their lives ruined, lads you’d have had on your boat if there was any fishing left. Don’t think I don’t see why you want to put up two fingers to the system – I’m with you on that, but this isn’t how to do it. Who is it, Willie? Between ourselves – no one has to know. Just a name, that’s all. I only need the end of the thread.’

Tam could smell fear and he knew he was on a loser. ‘I don’t know what the hell you think you mean,’ Willie blustered. Then he got off the bar stool, pushed MacNee rudely aside and rejoined the group, leaving Tam to grimace ruefully. Then he shrugged, finished what was in his glass and went in search of the man with the beer jug.

‘How’s Daisy?’ Bill Fleming demanded, handing his wife a heavy cut-crystal tumbler with half-an-inch of Bladnoch whisky in the bottom. She was sitting in her usual place at this time of night, in the low-ceilinged sitting room which ran from front to back of the Mains of Craigie farmhouse, her long legs curled under her in one of the deep, comfortable armchairs that they were always talking about replacing with something less shabby but somehow never did. Apple-wood logs – almost the last from the old tree in the orchard they’d had to cut down last year – were crackling in the fireplace, scenting the room with their spicy smoke, and Meg the collie, liberated from the cares of motherhood, lay stretched out in front of it, not quite asleep but with her eyes half-closed in blissful relaxation.

Marjory laughed. ‘Oh dear! I don’t think Laura quite understands. She had Daisy in her bed last night – not just
on
her bed, but cuddled up with her under the blankets.’