Bad Blood (24 page)

Her career – the kind described in recruitment ads as ‘fulfilling’. Compared to ‘loving wife and mother’ as a job description it sounded about as cold and empty as the bed did without Bill on the other side. She sat up, pummelled her pillows and lay down facing the other way so she couldn’t see it.

It was no use. She tried shutting her eyes but they kept flipping open again and at last she gave up, pulled on her dressing gown and went down to make herself a cup of tea.

The light in the kitchen was on and she hesitated, wary. If that was Cat, she’d just make her cuppa as quickly as possible, then take it back upstairs. She didn’t feel she and Cat had anything helpful to say to each other just at the moment.

It wasn’t Cat, it was Cammie. ‘Good gracious,’ Marjory said as she came in, ‘I didn’t expect to find you here. I thought you’d have crashed out long ago.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’ He was looking awful, hunched over his mug of tea; the bruised cheek had swollen a bit, and with the mud washed off the other bruises and scratches that were all part of the pleasures of the game of rugby stood out starkly against his exhausted pallor.

‘I couldn’t either.’ The kettle was singing on the Aga and Marjory went over to make her tea. Meg the collie got out of her basket to greet her, though normally she would have been too lazy to do more
than open one eye at this time of night; after Marjory had petted her she went over to the door to the hall and snuffled under it hopefully.

‘She’s looking for Dad,’ Cammie said and Marjory, with a lump in her throat, could only nod. She sat down beside Cammie at the big wooden table. Meg, her tail drooping, went back to her basket.

‘Are you sore?’ she asked. ‘Do you need paracetamol?’

‘No. It’s just the usual,’ Cammie said, then, ‘Mum, I’ve been thinking. All this happened because the farm’s too much for Dad. If I hadn’t been off when Rafael was laid up, this wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Nonsense!’ Marjory said briskly. ‘If it’s a narrowed artery, it’s been going on for some time and it would have happened eventually. If I’d only been around a bit more – noticed that he was getting far more tired than he should be for a man in his forties – I’d have made him get checked out. I blame myself, if you want to know.

‘If all goes well – please God – I ought to rethink my job. Maybe shift into traffic, go part-time—’

Cammie stared at her. ‘Don’t be daft! It’s not your fault – you said yourself Dad’s problem developed gradually, so by the time you could notice he’d probably have needed the operation anyway. In any case, he’s old enough to look after his own health.

‘You know he’s always been all in favour of your job. Said to me once the thought of you putting all that energy into running our lives made his blood run cold.’

‘Cheeky sod!’ Marjory said, but she was smiling.

‘The thing is,’ Cammie went on, ‘now this has happened he’s going to have to be careful. I can’t leave him wearing himself out while I swan off playing professional rugby. Oh, I love the game. It’s been my life, but I always knew I’d be farming in the end. There are teams I can play for without the level of commitment—’

Marjory reacted with horror. ‘Wash your mouth out, Cameron Fleming! For heaven’s sake don’t say that to your father when you see him tomorrow or you’ll give him another heart attack.

‘Look, I don’t know if you know this, but your dad really was a serious contender for a Scotland jersey – not a shoo-in, but good enough to have had a trial. If he’d dedicated all his time and energy to it he might have made it, but in those days it didn’t pay and your grandfather was a lot older and determined to retire …

‘Dad gave up his dream to put food on the table for his family. You’ve been his compensation for that and he’d be crushed if you gave it up. Crushed, that is, after he’d seriously bawled you out for being so daft.’

‘But this is different. After this he’s going to have to take it easy …

Marjory was shaking her head. ‘Not according to the doctor. He’ll have to take proper exercise and watch his diet – and that’s probably my fault too, being useless with anything except the frying pan. He said he’d be fitter than he’s been for years, remember?

‘Anyway, if he needs more help we can hire it in. It’s not a problem, Cammie.’

Cammie’s hunched shoulders had straightened. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘I’m sure so,’ Fleming said firmly.

‘But of course, you wouldn’t be able to afford extra help if you’d only a part-time job, would you?’ he said slyly. ‘And you’d hate it, and you’d be bad-tempered, which would put a strain on Dad and that would be bad for him too.’

‘You’re painting a pretty picture of your mother,’ Marjory said lightly, but she felt as if a burden had been lifted. She went on slowly, ‘Cammie, was I a rotten mother?’

‘Fishing for compliments, are you? No, of course you weren’t.’

‘Cat—’

‘Oh, Cat!’ her brother snorted. ‘Cat’s got issues at the moment. She hasn’t got over making a mess of vet school before she’d even started and there you are making a real success of your life.’

‘But she’s always resented me not being able to drop everything for family – and you did too, sometimes, I know.’

‘Yes, I’m sure I did. But Dad was always there and most kids with working parents don’t have both of them around for everything. It’s usually the father who can’t be there but it shouldn’t be any different for the mother.

‘Anyway, Cat’s hardly at home now and she’s not eight years old any more.’

‘I know. But I want us to be close again. This really hurts.’

Cammie gave a huge yawn. ‘Sorry. That’s not a comment. But where Cat’s concerned, it’s not you, it’s her. She’s got to work through her problems herself – there’s nothing you can do.’

‘You sound exactly like your father,’ Marjory said and yawned herself. ‘I still wish I could just kiss and make it better, like I used to do when you were wee.’

Cammie got up and held out his injured cheek. ‘You can try it on that. I’m off.’

Smiling, Marjory kissed the bruise, then watched him go. It was funny seeing him so like Bill: rather less funny, though, to see Cat showing all the bolshiness that had made her own youth a painful experience, not least for her parents.

She hadn’t told her mother about Bill. Janet adored her son-in-law and waiting till the operation was over before she phoned her would spare her a night of anxiety; because of course by this time tomorrow he would be
absolutely fine
.

Even so, she decided, almost superstitiously, that tomorrow all she would do was wait by the phone for news. She’d every confidence in Tam MacNee coping. Of course he could.

It was such bliss to be clean and warm. Marnie had soaked in the bath until her fingers and toes were all crinkled up and then she had snuggled down in a comfortable bed. She had eaten the most delicious meal she’d ever tasted, cooked by Louise’s mum who seemed all right, except that judging by Louise’s face the things she was saying
in French weren’t as normal as they looked. She’d got up, too, before they’d finished eating and come back wearing her coat, as if she was planning to go out even though it was dark now and quite late. Louise had a real job persuading her to take it off again.

She and Louise had sat after her mum had gone up to bed, finishing off the bottle of red wine that tasted as if it was made of velvet, and kind of watching a not very good film. Louise had said she was determined not to behave like a policeman when she was off duty but they’d talked a bit about Marnie’s freak memory and that had seemed to interest her a lot.

‘You can remember everything? Absolutely everything?’ she’d asked.

‘Yes, if it’s something I saw, and the memory is triggered.’

Louise had gone very quiet and thoughtful after that and when the film finished they came up to bed.

Marnie had been afraid that once she lay down the memories would start, the memories and the worries about what would happen next, but lulled by warmth and wine she fell instantly into a deep, untroubled sleep.

Untroubled, that is, until half past two when suddenly all hell broke loose, bells screaming in her ears. Marnie was out of bed and onto the landing before she was properly awake.

Louise appeared a second later. ‘Sorry, sorry, I should have warned you! Don’t worry, it’s just an alarm I got fitted to the doors and windows so that
Maman
couldn’t wander out at night without waking me. I’ll just go and turn it off.’

There was a cry of confusion from behind them and when they turned, Louise’s mother was coming out of a bedroom further along the landing in a floaty silk nightgown, her hands over her ears. She was visibly upset, calling to Louise in French.

Louise went pale. ‘Oh God, what’s that, then?’

She headed for the stairs and Marnie caught at the sleeve of her
pyjamas. ‘There could be someone down there. You’d better call the police.’

Louise jerked herself free. ‘I
am
the police,’ she said from halfway down the stairs.

Marnie heard her shout above the continuing din, ‘Police! Stay where you are! You are under arrest.’

Then the alarm, mercifully, stopped, though Marnie’s ears were still ringing. Louise’s mother was shivering and crying; from downstairs there was no sound and plucking up her courage Marnie pattered down in her bare feet.

The sitting-room door was open. Louise had switched on the light and when Marnie joined her she was looking grimly at a broken window.

‘Don’t come any closer, Marnie – there’s glass all over the floor. Someone tried to break in. I heard a car driving away just as I got downstairs.’

Marnie’s stomach lurched. ‘This is because of me. I brought this on you.’

‘Don’t—’ Louise said, but the cries from upstairs were becoming hysterical and with an apologetic gesture she hurried away.

Marnie stood cold with fear and shivering in the draught from the broken window. He’d followed her here too. He must be watching her all the time – even now, perhaps. She scurried back into the hall and shut the door.

She couldn’t stay, letting her problem spill over to wreck more people’s lives. What was she to do? As Louise’s mother’s cries showed no sign of abating, she put her head in her hands and wept.

When Louise Hepburn got up, there was no sound from Marnie’s room. She was glad to think she was catching up on her sleep; it had taken more than an hour to calm Fleur down and no one could have slept through that.

She was feeling shaky this morning and the painkillers she’d taken for her thumping headache hadn’t kicked in yet. She’d looked in on Fleur before she came down and she was sound asleep; she could only hope that a benevolent aspect of her mother’s confusion might be that she didn’t remember what had happened, or might think it was a dream.

As Louise sipped black coffee and smoked a Gitane, she ran over the problems lying ahead. Someone to come and fix the window – priority. Fortunately she knew an emergency glazier in the town; he did a roaring trade in replacing shop windows if Saturday night in Stranraer got out of hand.

Then, of course, she’d have to deal with Marnie – she couldn’t leave her here alone with her mother now. And she couldn’t call in pretending to be ill tomorrow, with Big Marge off and Tam saying
he needed all the help he could get. Anyway, after the break-in she’d have to report it and confess what she’d done.

She felt a bit sick at the thought of that, but not as sick as she felt about the situation with her mother. She certainly couldn’t be left alone again.

There had been a woman along the road, she remembered suddenly, who had sometimes helped out in the days when Fleur had still held dinner parties for her father’s business clients – perhaps by some miracle she might be free and prepared to come.

She was. She was happy to come first thing in the morning, and Louise put the phone down with a sigh of relief. It wouldn’t be a long-term solution, but at least she could cross that off today’s list.

Then there was Marnie. She wondered if Marnie would mind doing a sort of informal interview with her; she’d been thinking last night anyway that they should try to tap in a bit more to Marnie’s extraordinary memory. If she could think of the right questions to ask her it might be incredibly useful.

Useful – and, it struck her now, dangerous. Louise might not be the only person to think of its potential, if something Marnie had been witness to at some time was incriminating to someone for some reason. Suddenly the attacks on Marnie made sense.

Time she was getting dressed. She stubbed out her cigarette and went upstairs for her shower. There was no sound from Fleur’s bedroom as she passed but she’d have to be wakened for breakfast or her body clock would go all wrong again.

Marnie could be left to sleep, though. Louise was just going into her own room when she noticed that Marnie’s door, further down the landing, was standing ajar. With sudden misgiving, she pushed it open gently.

The bed was empty and there was a note on the pillow: ‘Thanks for what you did. I’m really sorry about your mum – hope she’s OK in the morning. Marnie.’

That was all. When Louise looked out of the window, Marnie’s car had gone.

It was meant to be helpful, no doubt. Marnie had clearly felt that her being there was endangering her hostesses but in going off like this she had really dropped Louise in it. She hadn’t said where she was going and even if she would answer her phone – which was far from certain – she probably wouldn’t say.

Louise had been counting on keeping secret what she had done but if Marnie had gone missing she’d have to confess tomorrow and take the consequences, which might be very unpleasant indeed.

Hoping against hope, she dialled Marnie’s number. The impersonal voice at the other end informed her that the person she was calling was not available and the further calls she made at intervals had the same result. After a long, long day, Louise gave up and went to bed, feeling sick with worry, both about what might happen to her and, more importantly, what might befall Marnie, alone and unprotected.

Marnie had suffered some bad days recently, but yesterday had been the worst. She had left Stranraer in the dark and driven on aimlessly along roads that were empty in the Sunday calm, but she kept checking her mirror with neurotic frequency. When as the day wore on the occasional car came up behind her she found it hard to control her panic, but as she desperately turned down smaller and smaller roads to shake it off it never followed her.

She stopped occasionally – to refill the car, to have something to eat, or just to sit somewhere watching the sea, trying to blank out her thoughts – but when she stopped moving she would start twitching with the almost superstitious fear that Drax somehow would home in on where she was.

When darkness fell she still had nowhere to go. She had a sleeping bag and blankets, though, and she found a track leading into woodland where she could park up. But tired as she was, sleep didn’t
come easily and as the night frosts began the car became an ice-box. Pulling her covers right over her head, she managed at last to drop off but she kept waking with a start of fear at the strange little night sounds of the countryside, and the night seemed to go on for ever.

At first light she woke properly, stiff and rigid with cold and hungry. After two broken nights her eyes were burning and she was worn out, too, by the constant onslaught she had suffered over the last twenty-four hours of images that forced their way into her brain: she was back on the landing with Louise’s mother, she was talking to Anita, she was running from the fire, on and on. If this continued it could drive her mad. She craved a quiet mind like a traveller in the desert seeking water. A quiet mind …

She’s walking across to the abbey. It’s very grey and quiet and she can hear the sheep bleating outside, can even hear the tearing sound as they snatch at the grass. The turf’s sort of springy and she’s almost bouncing as she goes to the chapter house. And it’s even quieter inside as if no one has spoken there for hundreds of years so the quietness sort of muffles her ears and even gets into her head.

Glenluce Abbey – she needed to head back to it. She’d been able to think there and after a day of such mental confusion she badly needed to clear her mind.

Down that little quiet road she’d see Drax if he was coming after her. She’d have to wait till it opened but she’d maybe find a café somewhere on the way. Warmth and food and then the peace of the white walls and the grey stone arches – that sounded good, comforting.

She might as well live in the moment. Was there any point in trying to plan a tomorrow that might never come?

‘I spoke to DI Fleming’s daughter this morning,’ DS MacNee said at the Monday morning briefing, ‘and her husband is being operated on as we speak. I’ll give you news when I have it.’

He was feeling nervous, but his audience of officers was concerned and sympathetic. As he went on to outline the tasks for the day, he heard DC Ewan Campbell, sitting at the back beside DS Andy Macdonald, murmur to his companion, ‘Where’s Hyacinth?’

‘Important meeting in London. Much more important than a murder inquiry.’

MacNee swivelled to give them a glare modelled on his old maths master at school. Macdonald tried to look as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘Thank you,’ MacNee said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Not often I get the chance to tell Campbell off for idle chatter. You’re lined up to see Grant Crichton, right?’

‘Right,’ Macdonald said.

‘Nothing from forensics yet,’ MacNee went on, ‘though I’ll be chasing them up later today. In the meantime …’

He gave out details, took questions and suggestions quite effectively, he thought, and finished feeling pleased with himself on the whole. So far so good. He even had a bit of a strut in his step as he left the room.

DC Hepburn was waiting for him. ‘Could I have a word, Sarge?’

A look at her face told him that this was something big, the sort of thing that would normally land on the boss’s desk. She had black circles under her eyes that looked as if they’d been drawn on with a crayon and as he looked at her she bit her lip.

There would be other detectives in the CID room at the moment. ‘Come up to the boss’s office,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some chasing up to do on the forensic reports.’

Hepburn nodded. As MacNee climbed the stairs he thought of possible angles – professional, personal? Personal, he was inclined to think. There’d been something going on with her the last bit – could it be drink? Drugs – not likely: he’d have seen signs before now. Man trouble? His heart sank at the thought. Advice to the lovelorn wasn’t his style.

It felt strange to go into Fleming’s room when she wasn’t there and
stranger still to sit down in her chair behind the desk. Hepburn sat down opposite, perching on the edge of the seat.

‘There’s a problem,’ she said.

No point in messing about. ‘Personal or professional?’

‘Well, both.’

‘Oh.’ He ought to say something encouraging but nothing came to mind. ‘Better spit it out, then.’

Hepburn took a deep breath. ‘On Saturday, when Marnie Bruce refused police protection and had nowhere else to go, I – well, I took her home with me.’

‘Lassie, are you daft?’ MacNee was appalled. ‘You know perfectly well that she’s still a suspect in a murder case. Even if you don’t think she did it, and for the record neither do I, for an investigating detective to have a personal relationship like that could bring the impartiality of the whole operation into question.’

‘I know. But I was so sorry for her. She’d nowhere to go – that cow in Bridge Street had put her on a blacklist and she didn’t think anyone would take her locally. And even if they did it would have been very public, wouldn’t it? Anyone could find out.’

‘For heaven’s sake, she could have used a false name, couldn’t she?’

‘I – I never thought of that.’ Hepburn looked crushed. ‘Anyway—’

‘There’s more, is there?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Go on,’ MacNee said hollowly.

‘There was a break-in that night at my house. I’d got someone to rig up an alarm system on the doors and windows – you see, my mother …’

She stopped and took a deep breath. ‘My mother is – well, losing the place. I know you thought I was tired because I’d been living it up, but she’s waking up at all hours and she went out in that storm we had the other night and I was terrified she’d die of exposure or something. I’m at my wit’s end.’

Now he felt guilty. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I – I couldn’t. Even telling you today feels disloyal.’

‘Could happen to anyone. Just an illness, that’s all. And you need your pals, eh? OK, I got it wrong but I’d like to think I was still one of them.’

Hepburn smiled wanly. ‘You weren’t to know. But there’s more.’

‘Aye, I was afraid there might be.’

‘The alarm went off about two in the morning. When I went down to the sitting room the window had been broken but there was no one in the house and I heard a car taking off in a hurry. The alarm’s just a makeshift one – there’s no box on the outside or anything, so they wouldn’t have been expecting a problem.’

‘Looking for Marnie.’ MacNee’s face was grim.

‘I guess we must have been followed. She was driving behind me so of course I didn’t notice anything. They’d have had to be watching the station, you know. We were only together for a couple of minutes as we walked to the car park.’

‘So where is she now?’

Hepburn was studying her fingernails. ‘That’s the worst part. I don’t know. She’s disappeared and she’s not answering her phone.’

MacNee swore.

‘I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me,’ Hepburn cried. ‘I’ve completely screwed up. The thing is, I reckon I know why someone’s trying to kill her. She swears Anita Loudon didn’t tell her anything and yes, it could be that Drax thought she had. But if he knows she was here all day, he’ll know that we’d have questioned her till she told us all she knew about that, so killing her afterwards wouldn’t solve anything.

‘If she’s still dangerous to him, it could be because of something else she knows, something about the past, something he reckons we won’t have thought of yet but that she could remember if the right questions were asked.’

There was a certain logic to it, admittedly. But if there was one thing his years of service had taught MacNee, it was to keep an open mind.

‘You’ve decided it’s Lee, haven’t you?’

‘Well, you read the letter.’ Hepburn was defensive now.

‘And he’s a scumbag and you took against him because he was glaikit enough to think you were just a wee woman he could cajole. The incriminating stuff in that letter goes way back before Marnie was even born, so it can’t have anything to do with her memory, right?’

Hepburn accepted the point, reluctantly. ‘So what happens now, Sarge? Do you – do you have to tell the boss once she comes back?’

MacNee knew what the answer should be. He also knew what would happen once the official channels were opened.

‘She’s not here just now. We’ll wait and see. If Marnie gets back in touch and nothing more comes of it, we’ll maybe be able to keep it quiet. Let that be a lesson to you, though.’

Her thanks were heartfelt. ‘I’ll keep trying Marnie. I hope she’ll maybe feel she owes it to me to let me know she’s safe.’

‘We’ll both hope. Now, I’ve a couple of things to do here, but then I want you to come down to Stranraer with me. I want to speak to Shelley Crichton again. Maybe she can tell us she has a rock-solid alibi for the past couple of nights and we can write her off, but until then there’s no way I’m crossing her off the list. Or her ex, either.’

DCI Nick Alexander came into work still smarting. The searches on Saturday had turned up absolutely nothing and they’d made fools of themselves in front of the port authority. He was a proud man and he had found it hard to take the lavish sympathy that didn’t quite hide glee at the elite force falling flat on its face.

The tip-off had come from a highly reliable source, so the shipment must have been called off. They must have got word of it somehow,
or perhaps the ‘routine’ inspection of accounts by HMRC hadn’t been so subtle after all. Of course, the plods stamping around on the murder investigation wouldn’t have helped either.

Had Fleming ignored his embargo, gone and leant on Daniel Lee? If she had, he’d go ballistic. He avoided admitting to himself that he was rather hoping she might have since it would be a convenient excuse for failure.