Bad Blood (3 page)

Anita always told herself it was all past, all safely forgotten. The heat in the room was suddenly stifling and she stumbled across to the window, flinging it wide even though the wind-borne rain lashed in, soaking her.

The cold air helped and at last she began to breathe more evenly
She shut the window again and collapsed onto her chair, her heart still racing.

It was all right, all right, she told herself. No one had contacted her this time; it was just an off-the-cuff piece. Anita tore it in pieces and threw it in the bin.

She’d phone him tomorrow, though. Any excuse.

The sea was troubled tonight, roaring and crashing against the rocks as the storm swept in up Loch Ryan from the Irish Sea. There would be no ferries setting out to Belfast tonight.

The view from Grant Crichton’s large modern house on the loch side just between Stranraer and Cairnryan was incomparable in good weather. Tonight, though, the drawbacks to its position were apparent.

He had been sitting in the lounge with a pile of papers on the small piecrust table beside him pretending to work when he suddenly crashed his fist down, making it rock on its pedestal.

‘That damned noise! It’s driving me mad. I can’t concentrate. We’re going to have to do something about it, Denise.’

His wife looked up uneasily from the pile of glossy travel brochures she was leafing through, curled up on the deep cushions of the cream velour sofa beside the living gas fire. She was a neat, sharp-faced blonde, twenty years younger than her husband, fighting the inexorable onset of middle age with every weapon available, short of surgery; Grant had spelt out that he wouldn’t spring for that.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. It was a dreary sound, admittedly: the drama of the waves was muted by double-glazing and interlined curtains to a low moaning but it was hardly obtrusive. What was distracting her husband wasn’t the noise. He’d been impossible all day.

Denise’s eyes flicked to a silver-framed photo on the mantelpiece showing a curly-haired little boy pulling a cheeky face for the camera. It was fading a bit but she didn’t want to suggest having it redone. Mentioning him at all, she’d learnt in her eight-year marriage, was a
bad mistake, always putting Grant into one of his moods which could last for days.

Halloween, of course, was the worst.
She
always phoned on Halloween and he would twitch until she had. She couldn’t just phone in the morning and get it over with, could she – oh no, she would know how it preyed on her ex-husband’s mind and deliberately leave it late. The year she’d only got round to phoning at midnight Grant had needed Valium to get any sleep at all.

Denise had tried suggesting he phone her instead, but only once. He’d refused bluntly, telling her almost in so many words that this unfinished business from his first marriage was nothing to do with her. That was what he said, but she knew it was only an excuse. Despite years of experience he was clinging to the hope that this year just might be the one when Shelley forgot – as if she would, on the fortieth anniversary. That was racheting up the tension tonight.

When the phone rang at eight o’clock Grant jumped as if he had been jabbed with a pin and when it turned out to be a member of her book club handed it over to Denise with a glare.

She took the call quickly, then went back to her browsing. The sound of the sea became audible again in the quiet room and she braced herself for another outburst from Grant. When the phone rang again, they both jumped.

He picked it up, glanced at the caller ID and grimaced towards her. She nodded, then discreetly lowered her eyes to the brochure again in symbolic withdrawal. This was delicate ground for a second wife.

‘Yes, Shelley?’ he said wearily.

Denise could hear crying at the other end of the line – loud, uninhibited crying – and saw her husband’s face contort with grief, mingled with resentment that his ex-wife had managed to provoke it.

His eyes went involuntarily to the photo on the mantelpiece and they filled with tears as he snarled, ‘Yes, of course I haven’t forgotten
it was today he disappeared.’ He put up his hand to rub them away. ‘You needn’t think you have the monopoly on feeling.’

Denise couldn’t hear the words being said but she could hear the voice at the other end rising towards what would in the end become a screaming match. It usually did.

She could bear it no longer. Grant was looking tired and old, running his hand through his thinning grey hair, and his jowly face was beginning to turn an unhealthy mottled purple. She slipped out of the room.

He would be angry at the end of this, very angry. Grant was a powerful man, a controlling man, and the annual reminder of his helplessness had side effects which she and everyone in his vicinity would have to suffer for days.

At times like this she seriously wondered why she had married him. It came perhaps into the category of things that had seemed like a good idea at the time. She’d been rather taken with his forcefulness at first and as forty loomed with nothing to look back on but a string of failed relationships with commitment-phobes it had looked like a no-brainer.

She hadn’t quite realised then that with his attitudes he could have co-authored
The Surrendered Wife
– a recent hit at the book club – but on the other hand as a hotel receptionist she wasn’t exactly pushing at the glass ceiling.

And there were always the holidays. She was still holding her pile of brochures as she went towards the kitchen. A spot of intensive brochure therapy before he and Shelley finished yelling at each other might put her in a more resilient mood when he came out looking for a dog to kick.

In the Glasgow warehouse nightclub, midnight came with a burst of smoke effect, dramatised with orange and black laser lights. The foetid atmosphere was rank with human sweat and the crush of bodies on the dance floor swayed and stamped to a relentless, mind-numbing, pounding beat.

The girl in the witch’s outfit, abbreviated in both directions, was standing at the edge to catch her breath. She was humming to the music, smiling a little vaguely, just nicely high. She was tilting back her long, white throat to drink from a bottle of water when the vampire struck.

She gave a shriek, then giggled as the man in Dracula costume, with pale make-up and a deep peak painted into the centre of his forehead, dropped his fake fangs into his hand.

‘Sorry – just, you were asking for it.’

He had to raise his voice above the din and as he grinned at her he still looked a bit wolfish, even without the fangs. He was quite buff too, with dark-blue eyes and a cleft chin, though when she looked closer she realised that under the make-up he was a lot older than she’d thought at first. Normally someone that age would never have got through the check at the doors but hey, even if old guys weren’t her style, that had been funny. She wasn’t on the pull this evening, anyway – Jezz had only gone out for a fag.

‘God, I about had a heart attack,’ she shouted. ‘You’re mental!’

‘Can’t resist—’ As she indicated that she couldn’t hear, he moved in closer and spoke in her ear. ‘Can’t resist the lure of young, virginal human flesh.’

‘Here – who’re you calling virginal?’ she protested. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’

‘Just call me Drax.’ He held out his hand. ‘Care to dance?’

The old-fashioned way he said it was quite cute. She glanced over her shoulder but there was no sign of Jezz yet so she shrugged. ‘Why not?’

He swept her close immediately, which she hadn’t bargained for. It wasn’t pleasant; she felt hot and sweaty and she could smell his sweat too. Even in the dim light she could see the trails on his make-up.

She edged a little further apart. ‘This place is pure dead brilliant. I love Halloween, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes.’ The way he said it made her feel as if a door had been slammed in her face. But he pulled her back against him, really quite roughly.

She was starting to feel uncomfortable. Jezz’s tap on her shoulder was definitely a relief.

‘Hey, babe.’ He didn’t look best pleased.

Nor did Drax. He was a couple of inches taller than Jezz and a lot broader. Scowling, he said, ‘Back off! I saw her first.’

Jezz swore at him. ‘First? You stupid or something? She’s my girl.’

Drax didn’t let go. Her heart began to race; she knew what could happen when guys got started and it didn’t do to be standing in the middle. With a violent effort she pulled herself free and evaded the grab he made at her arm.

‘I’m away home. Coming, Jezz?’

She walked off without waiting to see if he would follow and when she glanced back they were still squaring up to each other like dogs ready to fight, though neither had made the first move. She had just reached the door when Jezz caught up with her.

‘Care to tell me about it, then?’ he said, and she realised with a sinking heart that not fighting had left him with a lot of aggression going spare. She was tired and coming down from her high and the last thing she needed was one of these arguments that went on all night. Or worse.

‘Tam – good. Come in.’ DI Marjory Fleming smiled as she looked up from the particularly tedious report she was attempting to write as DS Tam MacNee appeared in her office on the fourth floor of the Galloway Constabulary headquarters in Kirkluce. It was a welcome relief from a dreary task on a dreary morning.

Though it was almost eleven o’clock the lights were still on, and it looked as if they’d be on all day. The sky was grey and heavy and the plane trees whose tops she could just see outside her window were bare skeletons, black with earlier rain. That it was only to be expected in November didn’t make it any better.

She set aside the sheets of stats she was working from and said,
‘I just wanted to tell you we’ve got a problem with one of the trials calling next week. The Fiscal’s saying there’s been intimidation of one of the witnesses.’

MacNee took the seat opposite her desk. ‘Oh aye. That’ll be big Kenny Barclay, right? Well, what did they expect? I suppose I’ll need to get round there and do a bit of intimidation myself.’

His voice sounded uncharacteristically flat and she looked at him sharply. Usually his face would have brightened at the prospect of a bit of psychological warfare, at which he was a past master; the Glasgow street-fighter might have reformed long ago but the killer instinct was still there.

Fleming noticed with a pang that his hair was more grey than brown these days and his eyes were becoming hooded. Admittedly her own chestnut crop owed more to Nice ’n Easy than to nature and it was a while since she’d chosen to linger before a mirror in a strong light, but even so …

‘Something wrong, Tam?’

MacNee put on the irritating face that men tend to put on when asked that question. ‘Wrong? Naw. Why should there be?’

‘I don’t know why there
should
be,’ Fleming said crisply. ‘But if you go around looking as if someone’s stolen your scone, it doesn’t take exceptional sensitivity to work out that whether or not something
should
be wrong, all is not bluebirds and sunshine in the world of Tam MacNee.’

He favoured her with a black look. ‘So what if there is? It’s nothing to do with my work.’

‘Can I take it that “my work” is code for “you”? But when going out to do over Kenny Barclay doesn’t produce that spark of bloodlust, I wonder how effective you’re going to be.’

Fleming waited as he thought about it, chewing his lip. She owed MacNee a lot; he had watched his protégée go past him professionally without rancour and smoothed paths for her which lesser men might have seamed with potholes. With his ‘hard man’ self-image, he was
always reluctant to talk about his problems but there had been a disaster before when he’d brooded alone. She’d kept it light; would he open up?

At last he said grudgingly, ‘Oh, all right, then. It’s my dad.’

‘Ah.’ MacNee’s elderly father had been estranged from his son for many years, ending up alcoholic and homeless in a Glasgow alleyway and lucky to have survived this long, but MacNee had found him secure and comfortable lodgings and she had thought the problem had been taken care of. ‘Back on the streets, is he?’

‘If it was just that!’ MacNee gave a short laugh. ‘No – he’s getting married.’

‘
Married!
’ Fleming gaped. Davie MacNee must be pushing eighty and there were other reasons why she wouldn’t have described him as a catch herself. ‘Oh – is it the woman that took him in last year?’

‘Maggie? If it was Maggie I’d be breaking out the champagne. And I’m not saying it couldn’t have been, mind – she’s aye had a soft spot for the old devil.

‘That’s part of the problem – she’s jealous.’

‘Right,’ Fleming said carefully. It wouldn’t do to show unfeeling amusement about this version of the eternal triangle being played out among the Glasgow geriatric set. ‘Who’s the lucky lady, then?’

MacNee looked at her sourly. ‘It’s all right for you to laugh.’

‘I didn’t!’ she protested.

‘Oh, not right out loud, maybe, but I could hear you anyway. It’s not funny from where I’m sitting.

‘Maggie says this Gloria’s an old friend from the backstreets, another alkie, and Maggie’s beside herself because she’s drawing Davie back to his old ways when he’d got on an even keel. And she can’t be expected to go on giving him a home with the pair of them coming in roaring drunk and – well, going up to his room.’

This delicate euphemism almost undid Fleming. It was a triumph of self-control that she managed to say gravely, ‘Very difficult. What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll take suggestions. You’re not meant to have to go around breaking up unsuitable relationships when your dad’s eighty next birthday. I’m going to have to away up there now and take time off tomorrow to talk some sense into him – and meet the bride.’

That did it. Fleming began to laugh, and after a reluctant moment MacNee joined in.

‘At least you’ve realised there is a funny side,’ Fleming said at last. ‘Better out than in, you know.’

‘I couldn’t tell Bunty. She’d be all for coming up with me to help choose the wedding dress. She’s no sense, that woman.’