Bad Blood (30 page)

‘Chief Inspector Alexander says the more I cooperate the better it will be for me. And you can say I have, can’t you?’ He leant forward eagerly. ‘I’ll answer any questions you have – anything you want to know.’

‘Just the one,’ MacNee said. ‘The fire-bombing of the cottage at Clatteringshaws Loch – did you know where the girl was staying?’

Crichton’s face went crimson. ‘No, I—’ he began, then under the cold disbelief of both detectives, he changed his mind. ‘I didn’t want to know,’ he cried. ‘Drax phoned and told me. I didn’t know why – not until I heard what had happened and then I knew that was all part of their attempt to fit me up for that too. He knew I was angry with the girl and he hoped I’d go out there and his dirty work would be blamed on me. That’s if he did it – maybe he just set up Michael to do that for him too.

‘Well, they’re both dead now, and may they rot in hell for what they did.’

With a glance at MacNee, Fleming got to her feet. ‘Terminating the interview, 10.38,’ she said for the benefit of the tape and switched it off.

‘That’s all, Mr Crichton. And yes, you have cooperated but in this case it won’t do you much good. You’re accessory to a murder and more than that, you have blood on your hands because you said nothing, just to save your own worthless hide. There’s a woman fighting for her life in hospital as we speak and it’s only chance that Morrison’s wife, his daughter and his grandson didn’t die too before he blew his brains out.

‘Perhaps they may rot in hell, but I wouldn’t be at all certain about your own destination.’

She swept out. MacNee gave her a sideways look as he joined her. ‘Well, you certainly tellt him.’

‘Foul creature!’ She gave a shudder of distaste. ‘We’d better pop into Nick’s office. I want to suggest they might find there were some instances of Lee’s “displeasure” that Grant hasn’t told them about yet.’

DCI Alexander was in high good humour. ‘We’ve so much stuff coming in now we hardly know where to start,’ he said.

‘An
embarras de richesses
,’ MacNee said. It was a phrase he had adopted from Hepburn, though without adopting her pronunciation, and the look Alexander gave him was faintly puzzled.

‘We’ve discovered that Morrison owned the farm next door and there were almost a dozen illegal immigrants living in a squalid barn, mostly working as virtual slaves in his construction business. The farmer’s decided that cooperating fully is in his best interests.’

‘It’s your charm that does it, Nick,’ Fleming said. ‘You’d softened Crichton up for us nicely too.’

‘Get what you wanted? That’s good. Last night sounded a bit messy.’

Fleming winced. ‘You could say. There’s a victim in a very bad way too. Any idea what’s happened in Glasgow?’

‘Another good haul up there. They’d a sort of dormitory above the nightclub and it looks as if that was a temporary stopping-off point before they filtered the immigrants into Glasgow. Some, of course, must have gone south, but that was riskier – the busload that was picked up on the M6 was our breakthrough.

‘Oh, and there was one quirky little detail. They were running a double set of books, of course, and the accountant working them at the nightclub – top grade, according to our forensic staff – seemed to be in some sort of relationship with Lee. When they fingerprinted her they discovered she was actually Kirstie Burnside – do you remember her? Child murderer, Dunmore’s only local celebrity.’

For once, Fleming was lost for words. It was MacNee who said, ‘Oh aye, we ken her all right. We’d have dug the place up looking for her body, if we’d had any suggestion where to start.’

‘I’m having a dram, anyway,’ Bill said firmly as they cleared up after a supper of poached salmon with green beans and boiled new potatoes. ‘The medication makes allowance for that – in fact, I shouldn’t miss it.’

‘So you say. Bed at nine, though,’ Marjory said. ‘And no farm work at all, not so much as a walk round the hill, until you’ve had your check-up.’

‘He said I wasn’t to think of myself as an invalid, so stop fussing.’ Bill fetched the bottle of Bladnoch and the heavy crystal tumblers from the cupboard and headed off to the sitting room with Meg the collie importantly leading the way.

Marjory put a match to the fire that Karolina had laid and sank down into her armchair with an exhausted sigh.

‘You’re needing an early night more than I am,’ Bill said as Meg, looking reproachful at the absence of immediate warmth, settled on the hearthrug.

Marjory took the glass from him. ‘Just a bit depressed,’ she said, then corrected herself. ‘That’s not right – how could I be depressed, when I’ve got you sitting across there looking better than you’ve any right to look, and Meg there by the fire whinging – just be patient, Meg, it’ll get hotter in a minute. And a dram – what more could a girl want?
Sláinte!
’

Bill sat down opposite. ‘Still depressed, just the same?’

‘My whole world hasn’t fallen apart, thank God, but it’s hard to feel cheerful about the inquiry into Morrison’s death as we tried to arrest him, and the inquiry into defying firearms regulations and not preventing my staff from doing the same hanging over my head.

‘And the devastation that solipsistic sod caused! He was too arrogant to accept the humiliation of being exposed for what he was,
and conceited enough to believe he was so central to their existence that his family would prefer to die than to live on without him.

‘I went to see Gemma today and it was pitiful. She’s going to need a lot of help; she’s trying to square the loving father she knew all her life with the monster he became and it’s not working – she’s in pieces. She’s a nice girl, Bill, but she’d been kept dependent. He’d never let the wind blow on her and I can’t think how she’s going to weather the hurricane now.

‘He thought he was such a big man but really he was nothing more than Daniel Lee’s puppet. I doubt if he’d even have thought of the whole illegal immigration racket if it hadn’t been for Lee – he was definitely the brains behind the operation, along with Kirstie Burnside.

‘It’s so strange, Bill – she seems to be very clever, a brilliant accountant, they said when they’d checked out the way the consortium’s books had been falsified. She’d even done a set that clearly the other two partners knew nothing about, which ran all the money-laundering stuff through a separate account in their names.’

‘Sophisticated stuff, then. She’ll be wasted where she’s no doubt headed. There’d be banks queuing up to employ her, with talents like that. They’d probably never have found out about the Libor scandal if she’d been in charge.’

Marjory smiled. ‘Bill Fleming, the cynic! But yes, it makes me very sad to think of the life she might have had, if Lee hadn’t seized on her. It was all about control with him – a psychopath, with all the characteristic charisma and cunning, getting his satisfaction out of operating at one remove.

‘I don’t know whether calling his nightclub “Zombies” was deliberately significant, but it certainly wasn’t a random choice. Anita Loudon and Kirstie Burnside were little more than that. They both called themselves his slaves, as if that was a badge of honour.

‘There may be more to come out about his operations once they’ve worked Crichton over. The consortium’s treatment of the
immigrants is going to be a major investigation, apart from anything else. And I’m happy to say that with no one to share the blame, they’ll throw the book at Crichton.’

Bill shook his head. ‘Hard to take in the scale of the destruction Lee caused. And to that poor girl Marnie, as well.’

‘Between them they inflicted a miserable life on her and now she’s still in intensive care, thanks to them. The outlook isn’t good, from the medical reports we’ve had.’

‘Don’t write her off,’ Bill said. ‘She must be tough. Maybe if she’s used to weathering hurricanes she’ll have the strength to fight through.’

‘If she wants to try.’

The fire was burning strongly now, with the flames licking at the apple logs and their warm scent filling the room. Meg stretched herself out with a sigh and Marjory leant back in her chair tiredly.

‘I’ve had enough for today. Let’s talk about something else. Do you know, Cat actually called me today, wanting to ask me about managing probation orders for a paper she’s doing for the course? Maybe it’s a sign of a thaw. It’s about the first time she’s asked for my input since she went to senior school.’

‘She was just preparing herself for the hurricanes,’ Bill said.

‘She wouldn’t have to if she didn’t whip them up for herself,’ Marjory said dryly. ‘But look at the time, Bill! Get to bed, right now!’

‘Haven’t finished my dram,’ he grumbled, but he drank what was left in his glass and got up. ‘You should come too – you’re looking awful.’

‘Oh good, that makes me feel so much better. I’ll take these through and then I’ll lock up.’

At the door, Bill turned. ‘You haven’t told me all the gory details but since there’s to be an inquiry about firearms regulations I assume you were right in there with the man with the gun. Next time you feel a bout of heroism coming on, just remember you’ve a husband with a heart condition who might take badly to a shock and wait for armed response, OK?’

‘Thought you told me you weren’t to think of yourself as an invalid?’ she said, but as she set the fireguard in place she thought guiltily of the number of times Bill must have thought he might be left with a broken world. Perhaps she owed it to him to be more sensible in future, though it was easier to decide that in principle than in practice. Somehow she couldn’t quite see herself in the heat of the action stopping to think. ‘Ah! Mustn’t do anything rash.’

Bill’s health was still a worry, of course. They were all putting on a brave front, pretending everything had been put right, as if he’d broken his leg and now it had been fixed. Bill himself was in a sort of euphoric haze at the moment, which was natural enough. If you were facing execution and had been given a reprieve, you would feel almost giddy from relief – she was experiencing a touch of that herself right now.

But once that wore off, in the dark days of winter that lay ahead, what would stick with you would be that very graphic reminder that you were mortal. Even more than the wrinkles and the grey hairs, actually believing that one day you would die, whether tomorrow or in thirty years time, marked the end of youth. When you were young, though you knew all about death in theory, you blithely didn’t believe it would really happen to you. She and Bill had been young, by that definition, until last Saturday afternoon. They weren’t any more.

Bill had suffered from depression once before. She would have to watch out for the signs and make sure it didn’t take hold this time.

Meg was waiting for her by the back door, her tail wagging in happy anticipation of the final run around outside before bedtime and Marjory looked at her with a rueful smile. Dogs had it right; live in the moment and enjoy it to the full – a lesson both she and Bill would have to learn.

She didn’t recognise her mother when she came in.

Somehow DI Fleming had managed to arrange a prison visit out of hours. The visitors’ room, with its vending machines and children’s toys in one corner, seemed vast and as she sat waiting at a scarred table Marnie had time to consider jumping up, saying it had all been a mistake and leaving.

Then a door at the further end opened and a prison officer ushered in an old woman, very thin, with slumped shoulders and untidy, rusty-white hair. She looked across and without any sign of animation or interest came over to Marnie’s table and sat down. She had bright-blue eyes.

Like her own, Marnie realised. It was a shock. She remembered her mother with black hair and eyes that were an indeterminate grey; she couldn’t be much more than fifty now but this woman looked twenty years older than that.

‘Mum?’ she said uncertainly.

The woman gave a thin smile. ‘I suppose so. They said my daughter wanted to see me.’

‘Did you want to see me?’ It was all she could think of to say.

Kirstie shrugged. ‘I don’t want anything, really, any more. I’ve had enough.’ She leant forward across the table. ‘They watch me, you know. They won’t let me do it.’

Marnie had imagined her mother cruel, harsh, mocking. In hopeful dreams she’d imagined her at last responding to the ties between them. She’d never thought of this. Struggling with a sense of unreality, she said, ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of things.’

‘If you like.’

‘When you left me at the cottage, when I was struck over the head, was it Drax who hit me?’

A little animation came to her face at the name. ‘Drax?’ She lingered on it lovingly. ‘No. He wasn’t there. He was waiting for me, of course.’

Sick bile rose in Marnie’s throat. ‘You hit your own child? You hit me, then you left me? I could have died.’

‘I told you,’ Kirstie said, as if she was explaining to a child. ‘Drax was waiting for me at the station. It had all gone wrong, the business. We had to go. He wanted you out of the way – you just came back at the wrong time.’

She was disposable, worthless. When she was tense, the scar from her bullet wound hurt; it was hurting now. With her throat stinging from suppressing the tears, Marnie said, ‘Was he my father?’

‘No!’ It was a cry of pain. ‘He should have been. But he would never give me a child. You were just a mistake. He’d left me then, you see.’

Marnie heard the words but if she didn’t block their meaning she couldn’t go on. Just one more question, then she could leave.

‘Who was he, then?’

‘One of the screws at the prison. Peter Redford. Never said anything but I knew he fancied me.’ She smirked. ‘I was pretty then, you know, prettier than you are. When I was discharged I’d nowhere
to go so I went to him and he took me in. Didn’t care what I did – Drax was gone.

‘I said I’d marry him. Then Drax came back, so of course I left.’

‘Did he – did he know about me – my father?’

‘Never saw you.’

‘Did he – did he look for me?’

‘
I
don’t know. We’d gone.’

‘You didn’t want me. Why didn’t you leave me with him?’ Marnie burst out.

Kirstie gave her an impatient look. ‘I was only six months gone. I couldn’t have.’

‘You could have waited—’

‘Drax would have vanished by then. Don’t you understand?’ Her voice was impatient.

And somehow, all of a sudden, Marnie did. His name had been short for Dracula and he had sucked out the essence of her mother’s humanity and left her less than human too.

She had only one more question. ‘What was my father like?’

‘Oh kind, soft – a fool!’ There was nothing but contempt in her voice.

Now she could go. Without farewell, without a backward glance, Marnie walked to the exit door and said to the prison officer, ‘I want to leave now.’

Outside the prison, the air was very fresh and cool. It had stopped raining for the moment and Marnie walked fast, as if to put distance between herself and the woman she had known as mother.

It would be easier now. It wasn’t that Marnie was worthless, it was simply that long before she was born Kirstie Burnside had no love left, as Peter Redford had found.

Peter Redford. It wouldn’t be hard to trace him, the ‘kind, soft fool’ who was the better part of her heredity. By now, the heartbreak
he had felt would be long forgotten, though, and he would have his own life.

She wouldn’t try to find him. The price she, and others, had paid already in her search for answers was too high. She was simply Marnie Bruce, a name without connections, a name that was hers alone. Tonight she would be back in North London in the tiny flat Anita Loudon’s legacy had bought her, beginning on the task of quelling the memories, clearing the ruins of the past and trying to build her new life.