Bad Blood (13 page)

She arrived at the farmhouse in a gloomy mood. She needed Bill to cheer her up, pour her a drink and talk about something that had nothing to do with police work. In fact, why shouldn’t they phone the next-door neighbours and see if they’d like to come over? The Raeburns, running a dairy farm themselves, had the same interests and concerns and Hamish was always good for a laugh.

Her spirits had lifted as she went through to the kitchen. Bill was there, sitting in the sagging chair by the Aga, but he was fast asleep with a mug of tea, still full, balanced precariously on the arm. Meg the collie, wakened by Marjory coming in, registered her arrival with a wave of her tail then shut her eyes again.

Smiling, Marjory went to rescue the mug in case Bill knocked it over as he woke. It was cold so he seemed to have been asleep for a good while. It must have been a very tiring day, for him and the dog, and her spirits sank again. Neither of them were as young as they used to be; there was grey around Meg’s muzzle now and Bill, when she looked at him more closely, looked positively drawn.

She cleared her throat and her husband opened his eyes.

‘Good gracious, did I doze off?’ He sat up. ‘What time is it?’

‘Half past six. What time did you come in?’

He still looked fuddled with sleep. ‘Can’t remember – half past five, quarter to six?’

Marjory emptied the cold tea into the sink. ‘More tea or a drink before supper?’ she said, going across to the freezer. ‘There’s a goulash here but it’ll take an hour at least.’

‘Oh, a drink, I think. I’ll open a bottle of red. Then an early night. It’ll be another heavy day tomorrow.’ He heaved himself out of the chair.

‘What were you doing today?’

‘The tupping’s over so Meggie and I were taking the ewes back up the hill. Rafael’s sprained his ankle.’

Marjory looked at him in dismay. ‘Oh no! And of course Cammie’s away for training, just when you really need him. Maybe they’d give him time off—’

Bill recoiled. ‘
What?
When he’s still working to consolidate a place in the team?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh sorry, that was blasphemy, I suppose. You’d better call Jake and see if he’ll come out of retirement for a bit till Rafael’s on his feet again.’

‘Lassie, I did it myself for years before I ever got Jake in at busy times. And Cammie’ll be back in a couple of days.’

‘You were in your twenties then. You’re not twenty now. And look at you – you’re shattered!’

‘Och, it’s nothing a sit down and a glass of wine won’t sort. And a good night’s sleep.’ He gave a huge yawn as he opened the bottle and put it on a tray.

No point in suggesting the Raeburns, then, and Bill obviously wasn’t going to be in sparkling form either. Marjory felt the gloomy mood descend again.

Denise Crichton put the finishing touches to the little watercolour that she’d started at the class this morning. There was still something wrong with her boat; it didn’t seem so much to be floating in the water as lying on top of it, but the artist who ran the class had said she was showing signs of improvement. He was always very encouraging to ‘his ladies’.

The other thing that was good about taking the class was being able to annex one of the bedrooms for her studio. She’d had fun setting it up, though she didn’t really need the big easel, and the elaborate box of oil paints hadn’t even been opened yet. Most of the time she didn’t actually paint at all. The main purpose was to give her somewhere to escape from Grant when he was in one of his moods.

They seemed to be getting more frequent. Yesterday he’d been impossible and had barely seemed to notice whether his wife was there or not and tonight, after a supper when she tried to make bright conversation and got only grunts in reply, she’d retreated to her sanctuary and heard him go into his study and close the door. A little later she thought she heard the car driving away, though she hadn’t heard the car door slammed in Grant’s usual vigorous way.

She was curious enough to glance out of the window and yes, the car was gone. He hadn’t told her he was going out – back to the office, she guessed. She did hope that there wasn’t anything wrong on the business side. Being married to Grant without the perks of success would be a bleak prospect.

It was quite a bit later that Denise heard a car’s engine and what sounded like tyres on the gravel. She glanced out of the window again, but it wasn’t there at the front so perhaps she’d been mistaken. She went back to her boat, but after dabbing at it a bit longer decided with a sigh that she was making it worse, not better. She washed out her brushes and packed away her paints, planning a nice long bath then bed. She wasn’t going to wait up for Grant.

But when she went downstairs to finish up in the kitchen she noticed light showing under the door of Grant’s study, so it must have been the car after all. She knocked, then put her head round.

‘Oh, you’re back! I wasn’t sure. I’m just going off for a bath – do you want a cup of tea or anything?’

Grant swung round in his chair. ‘What do you mean, back? I haven’t been out – I’ve been here all evening.’

Surprise made her incautious. ‘But I heard you, going out earlier—’

His face was mottled red with temper. ‘Then there’s something wrong with your ears! Anyway, how would you know, up there in your so-called studio? I’ve been here all evening. Is that clear?’

She realised he was actually shaking with his emotion and she
knew enough not to argue. ‘Fine, if that’s the way you want it. You were here all evening.’

‘Right, right,’ he said. There was a little fleck of spittle at the corner of his mouth and he took out a handkerchief to wipe it away. ‘You go on up to bed. I’ll come up later.’

‘Goodnight,’ she said, closing the door and going through to the kitchen. What had all that been about? The car, she suddenly noticed through a side window, had been parked round there, not in the front where he usually put it. He must have been trying to come back quietly.

Why did he feel he had to sneak out? It was really crazy – if he was having an affair or something he could easily just say he was going back to the office and it wouldn’t occur to her to question it.

Denise toyed with the affair idea. As she wiped down the sink she thought wistfully of alimony – lots of money and no Grant. But she certainly wasn’t going to rock the boat by demanding an explanation until she was quite sure she had all the evidence she needed.

It was one of those perfect late autumn days: clear blue sky, a sharp touch of frost in the air, the leaves on the trees thinning out now, but still showing red and gold. As Janette Ritchie set out on her usual walk down the hill to get her morning copy of
The Herald
, the cold air prickled the back of her throat – almost like the bubbles in champagne, she thought. With the deep blue of Loch Ryan below it was such a perfect picture that she felt quite sorry for all those poor, deluded folk who went off to live in Spain and would never know the sheer joy of a sunny November day in Scotland.

Unconsciously prompted by the brilliant display of berries on a mountain ash growing in someone’s garden, she was humming ‘O Rowan Tree’ as she came to the children’s play park. Shelley’s flowers, still lying on the bench where she had placed them, caught her eye and she stopped, hesitating.

The petals of the roses had browned into decay and the foliage was withered. Though Janette felt her usual revulsion about going into the park, she really ought to remove them. There was nothing more pathetic than memorial flowers left to rot, she always thought.

She opened the gate and went over to pick up the bouquet, then, with a grimace of distaste, gathered up the slimy petals that fell as she moved it and looked round for a bin. There was one over on the far side, just beside the slide, and she bit her lip. The last time she’d been in that area was forty years ago, and the picture was vivid in her mind even now.

There was nowhere else to put them. She dropped the flowers in the bin and turned. She saw, first of all, the shoes: smart nude-beige shoes with a medium heel sticking out from behind the slide. One was lying on the ground beside a foot with toenails painted a bright red. There was a dark red and cream skirt rumpled up the legs. There was a cream sweater – no, a partly cream sweater patterned with great rust-coloured patches that clashed with the skirt. There was a head with blonde, rust-streaked hair – but the top was just a great bloody mass of something.

That was when she screamed, screamed and screamed. But no one came, and she had to stop screaming sometime. She could do nothing here, and if she looked again she thought she might faint. On legs that were barely able to support her, Janette staggered out of the park, looking frantically up and down the deserted street. She was in such a state of shock that she wandered up and down for five minutes before it occurred to her to go to the nearest house and ring the bell.

The photographer had just left. In her white paper protective suit DI Fleming stood grim-faced beside the slide, looking down at the pathologist as he crouched at his work. After a brief, nauseated glance at the victim she was concentrating her gaze on the back of his hooded head.

‘Not killed here, I can tell you that for a start,’ he said. ‘Method – straightforward enough, unless something emerges later.’

‘Any indication about the weapon?’ Fleming asked, though given the mess it was hard to imagine that there could be.

‘Blunt instrument – that’s about all I could say for certain. Something long and narrow, applied with force – a crowbar, possibly. Once we’ve done some measurements I might be able to be a bit more precise.’

‘Was it – was it quick?’ The thought that it might not have been sent a shiver down her spine.

He thought for a moment. ‘With that degree of force, unconscious after the first or second blow, most likely. May even have been knocked
out first.’ He picked up first one hand then the other to scrutinise the nails. ‘Looks as if she didn’t get a chance to fight back, anyway. Hang on, we’ll have a look at the back of her head.’

Seeing him grasp the matted hair, Fleming turned away to look over her shoulder. DS MacNee had arrived; he was standing by the gate of the play park in conversation with the uniform detailed to record visitors to the site. She made a gesture encouraging him to put on a suit and come in but he just looked blank. MacNee was even more squeamish than she was.

The pathologist put down the head again. ‘Blow to the back, there. Can’t say it was definitely the first one but it seems likely to have laid her out.’

That was something, at least. ‘I suppose I needn’t ask about estimated time of death?’

‘Not with any degree of accuracy. There’s rigor developing but a frost last night would have speeded that up and I’d need an indication of how long she was there and where she’d been beforehand – a warm room, say, would complicate it further.’

‘So it’s the usual – ETD sometime between when she was last seen and when the body was found?’

The pathologist gave a weary smile. ‘Old ones are the best ones, eh? I daresay you wouldn’t go far wrong with an assumption of somewhere between seven in the evening and midnight or thereabouts. Know who the lady is, then?’

‘The woman who found her thinks she knows her but with the state she’s in we’ll need fingerprint confirmation, I suppose.

‘Anyway, let me know when there’s any more you can give me.’

Janette Ritchie was sitting at the kitchen table in the house next door to the park, a blanket draped round her shoulders, too shocked to cry. There was a woman PC – well, a girl really, since she didn’t look much more than sixteen – patting her hand in a tentative way while
her hostess hovered, ready to offer more tea, though Janette hadn’t even touched the mug in front of her because she was afraid she would spill it if she tried to pick it up.

How could it happen
twice
? To her – why to her? It had been so awful the last time; she’d taken weeks to recover, even though in those days she had been young and busy, with Shelley to prop up, her own kids to look after and no time to brood. She didn’t like to think of herself as old but she certainly wasn’t as resilient, and this – this had been worse than Tommy with his poor bashed head. This looked as if someone vicious had enjoyed doing it.

‘I’ve got to think about something else,’ she said aloud, and as if on cue the door opened and two people came in – a tall woman, smartly dressed in a dark trouser suit, and a short man in a black leather jacket and jeans.

‘Mrs Ritchie?’ she said. ‘I’m DI Fleming and this is DS MacNee. Do you feel able to talk to us? I know you’ve had a dreadful experience.’

She had a low, attractive voice and her eyes were so sympathetic that suddenly the tears came. ‘It was awful – awful!’ Janette sobbed. ‘And there, of all places, right there!’

As her hostess tutted sympathetically and found a box of tissues, the detectives sat down at the table. ‘There?’ Fleming prompted.

Janette scrubbed at her eyes and blew her nose. She mustn’t go to pieces now.

‘Right where I found Tommy – I found him, you know. Oh, it was a field then, of course, but even after they made it into the play park I couldn’t forget. I walk past it every day but it’s only because Shelley does her remembrance thing that I ever set foot in it.’

She had to explain, then, all that had happened that day, with the sudden appearance of a woman who looked uncannily like Kirstie Burnside, whose child-face was seared on their memories. The officers listened without speaking, but Fleming’s hazel eyes never left her face and she could feel the intensity of their interest.

When it came to the events of the morning, the questions started but they were all straightforward and somehow afterwards it felt as if she had somehow been relieved of at least a part of the horror. At the end, though, she felt totally shattered and DI Fleming seemed to pick that up.

‘You’ve been an enormous help, Janette. But I think you’ve had enough for today and you should go home and have a lie-down. Is there someone who can stay with you?’

‘I could go to my daughter’s,’ Janette said. ‘She’s got two little ones, you know, so I’d be better round there with something to take my mind off this. They’re ever so sweet, a boy and a girl, four and two.’ She went on for a moment, then stopped. ‘Sorry, I’m blethering. You haven’t time for this – I don’t know why I’m going on like this.’

‘Shock.’ The sergeant spoke for the first time. ‘You away round there and see the bairns – that’s the best thing. You’ll be fine.’ He gave her a rather alarming smile and she smiled back, a little uncertainly.

‘That’s the way!’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’re a wee stoater, isn’t she, boss?’

Fleming smiled. ‘A star, indeed. Thank you very much for your help, Janette. Someone will take a formal statement later but we’ll let you get your breath back first. And now we’ll get on with finding the person who did this.’

As they left, Janette said slowly, ‘You kind of feel someone’s taken charge, don’t you?’

As the PC smiled, Janette noticed that she had a rather impish face. ‘Oh, that’s Big Marge. She’s in charge, all right. Wouldn’t like to have her after me, I can tell you that.’

Kylie put her ear to the door of Daniel Lee’s office and listened. He’d been on the phone and she didn’t want to burst in and interrupt him when he was in a bad mood, and he’d been in a
really
bad mood this morning. Hung-over, likely.

As his management assistant in Zombies – one of the most successful nightclubs in Glasgow – she had what was a dream job with nightmare episodes. You met really cool people and Drax was exciting to work for: when he was your best friend it gave you a real high, which was why you didn’t just walk out when he took a sadistic delight in suddenly taking you down. And if you screwed up – OMG! The stationery cupboard on the landing had been christened ‘The Crying Room’ by his previous assistant.

She had only lasted six months and Kylie, coming up four, was living on her nerves, with her partner making ‘it’s-him-or-me’ noises. She wasn’t sure she’d last to six. There was this morning to be got through, for a start.

She hadn’t heard anything for a few minutes now so she tapped on the door.

‘Drax – have you finished phoning?’

Drax was sitting pushed back from his pristine desk in his starkly white office with his cream leather office chair tipped back, arms clasped behind his head and long legs stretched out. He turned to look at her, scowling.

‘Guess,’ he said.

Kylie’s heart sank. Sarcastic was dangerous. ‘There was a message from a Mr Crichton to phone him. He said it was urgent.’

Lee sat up and swung round suddenly. ‘And what did you say?’

‘I-I said you were on the phone, but I’d give you the message.’

‘You said I was here?’ His eyes were blazing now.

Kylie shrank away. ‘Well, yes—’

‘And what if I don’t want to speak to him now? What if I want to put him off without spelling it out? You’re there to intercept unwanted calls, for God’s sake!’

Unwanted calls, OK, but calls from his business partners hadn’t come into that bracket before. She knew better than to argue.

‘Sorry, Drax – should have thought.’

‘Thought? You are getting ideas above your station, aren’t you? Leave thinking to those of us with the equipment for it – when plankton gets ambitious it only causes trouble. Try just doing as you’re told.’

‘Yes, Drax.’

‘Now get out. Unless there’s anything else?’

‘No – no, that’s all,’ she said, backing out. She’d got off lightly and she wasn’t going to put her neck on the block by sticking around, even though there was a problem with the guy who did the lighting that he’d have to deal with and she’d a list of bookings for their special ‘band night’ series that needed to be confirmed too.

As the door shut behind her, Lee drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment then picked up the phone.

Crichton was agitated – almost hysterical. Lee held the phone away from his ear, his face taut with annoyance, but when Crichton ran down his voice was soothing. ‘Chill, Grant! Getting worked up’s not going to change anything.’

It didn’t seem to have any effect and Lee’s face darkened. ‘OK, so this is a complication, but we’ll deal with it. And there’s no point in kicking off now – we talked it through, remember? Just do what we agreed. That’s all. OK?’

Crichton hesitated, then agreed, and Lee finished the call, then brought his fist down on the desk and swore violently. He was addicted to risk, but only when he was in control. For the moment at least, he certainly wasn’t.

DC Hepburn was yawning and looking haggard this morning. She’d been wakened at 3 a.m. by her mother, fully clad, insisting that she’d better hurry to get up for school because she’d been late the last two mornings; it had taken another hour to coax her back to bed and then she couldn’t get back to sleep herself.

She wasn’t in any mood for DS Macdonald’s pointed remarks about Marnie Bruce as they drove to Dunmore.

‘I’d have her right at the top of the suspect list. That yarn she spun us about the women coming to Loudon’s door to lynch her – what would you say all that was about?’

‘I would say that it was about Anita telling lies,’ Hepburn said. ‘If what she said was true, how come the mob was outside Marnie’s window?’

‘Good question – the mob outside her window. Suddenly they’re out there baying for blood, and she doesn’t know why, she didn’t do anything, she’s baffled? Aye, right! Doesn’t make sense, which is why she concocted the stuff about having to escape from Anita’s house out the back.’

‘She did. Anita agreed with that.’ Hepburn glanced sideways at Macdonald, whose face was set in mulish lines. ‘Are you saying that just so you can disagree with me?’ she demanded. ‘Because—’

‘No, I’m not!’ Macdonald raised his voice. ‘I am using my judgement, based on considerably more years of police service and expertise than you have. You might care to remember that, Constable.’

‘Pulling rank?’ she needled. ‘Fine, Sergeant, if that’s the way you want it.’

There wasn’t really anything more to say after that.

Lennox Street was congested with police vehicles and personnel, as well as gawping locals clustered along the line of the blue-and-white ‘crime scene do not cross’ tape outside Anita Loudon’s house.

‘Ghouls,’ Hepburn muttered as they drove past to find somewhere to park and for once got a grunt of agreement from Macdonald. They had been tasked with interviewing anyone the uniforms had found with useful information and they were pointed in the direction of a harassed-looking police sergeant.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got one here for you to make a start on. Lady next door. Mrs’ – he squinted at a list in his hand – ‘Gordon.
Elderly, not very mobile, but all the strength’s gone to her tongue instead. Nearly had to send in a raiding party to spring my lads. Hope you’re prepared for a long stint.’

‘Oh good,’ Macdonald said hollowly as they headed up the path. The front door was open; they tapped on it and got an eager, ‘Come away in, come in!’

Ivy Gordon was white-haired, beady-eyed and in a state of high excitement. She was sitting in a chair beside the window from which she had a commanding view of the activities next door, with a Zimmer frame in front of her.

‘I think that’s the SOCOs going in now,’ she informed them as they came in.

His mouth twitching, Macdonald said, ‘Do you watch a lot of crime series on TV, Mrs Gordon?’

‘Never miss.
CSI
, that’s my favourite. Now, sit down and I’ll tell you all about Anita Loudon.’

They did as they were told, after they’d shown their warrant cards and Macdonald had given their names, though Ivy wasn’t much interested.

‘The thing you have to understand is that Anita’s parents were decent, god-fearing folk. Nothing wrong with the way they brought her up, I can tell you that, but all along she’d a taste for the gutter.’

Hepburn blinked. ‘The gutter?’

‘Oh yes. That laddie, Daniel Lee – no father, of course, that anyone ever knew about, and wild. Impudent, too. I wouldn’t soil my lips with telling you what he said when I gave him laldie for coming over the wall to scrump my apples. And, of course, Kirstie Burnside – there was bad blood in that family. Oh, they said she was a victim of child abuse, but how did that happen? I’ll tell you – bad blood.

‘But of course the Loudons were fair devastated when it all happened – devastated. To see their wee girl, ten, eleven years old, maybe, up there in the court – well, her parents were just never the same again.’

Macdonald and Hepburn exchanged glances. ‘Sorry – in court? Was she charged with something?’ he asked.

‘No, no, of course not – don’t be daft. A witness! Surely you mind what happened?’

‘I think I might have been too young,’ Hepburn said tactfully. ‘What was the trial about?’

Ivy sat back in her chair. ‘Mercy me, what’s the world coming to when the police don’t know something like that? Tommy Crichton’s murder, of course.’