Bad Blood (4 page)

MacNee’s adored wife, with a heart as generous as her figure, could never see the downside of any situation. It was a characteristic which, while endearing in itself, was a source of considerable frustration to her more cynical husband.

‘She probably would,’ Fleming agreed. ‘So what are you going to do?’

MacNee groaned. ‘God knows. Like Rabbie Burns said,
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!
He’s needing to see he’s looking a right tumshie.

‘Still, it’s my problem.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better look in on Kenny before I go off duty. He’s been throwing his weight around lately—’

He broke off as the phone on Fleming’s desk buzzed. As she took the call he got up, signalled that he would leave and headed towards the door.

‘Who?’ Fleming said, then, ‘Marnie Bruce? Oh –
Marnie Bruce!
’

Shock showed on her face. MacNee stopped dead, then turned round slowly.

‘Tell her to wait.’ Fleming put the phone down and stared at her sergeant. ‘You heard. What are we going to do about
that
?’

The early shift was almost over and DC Louise Hepburn was finishing off a report when MacNee came back into the CID room. He’d been short with his subordinates all morning – well, him being five foot six (and three-quarters, don’t forget the three-quarters and preferably round it up to five foot seven) made that inevitable, but today something was bugging him and he’d been cutting everyone down to his own size so aggressively that you began to feel you were in an oriental court and obliged to keep your head lower than the king’s.

‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘You’ll do, Louise.’

Mentally kowtowing, Hepburn said, ‘Something you want me to do, Sarge? I’m due off shortly but I’m not in a hurry if you want me to stay on for a bit.’

‘Shouldn’t take long, but thanks for the offer. There’s someone called Marnie Bruce just wandered in off the street and asked to speak to DI Fleming. Find out what it is she’s after and then write it up. There’s no rush on that – the boss is in a meeting all afternoon
so tomorrow’ll do fine. Report direct to her – I’m off tomorrow. All right? Thanks, Louise.’

‘No problem, Sarge. In the waiting room, is she?’

Hepburn headed off along the corridor feeling brighter. MacNee’s black mood seemed to have lifted, and after a morning at the computer it was good to have something more interesting to do.

There was only one person in the waiting room, a slight, neat-featured woman. Her hair, feathered round her face, was an unusual reddish-gold and her light-blue eyes had an odd expression, almost as if she were seeing something more than just the room around her.

‘Marnie Bruce? I’m DC Hepburn. What’s the problem?’

This wasn’t the way Marnie had planned it, which threw her. She could remember Fleming vividly – well, of course she could – and she had gone back over the scenes where she had featured in Marnie’s life, looking for any questions arising from them. There wasn’t much to go on, really, but she sensed a hidden agenda and she’d had time on the long journey north to work up a determination to find out what it was.

She’d been prepared for disappointment. The PC Fleming she remembered was likely to have moved, or even left the police years ago, but the receptionist had recognised the name immediately and Marnie had felt a great surge of optimism.

This girl, slightly foreign-looking with her untidy mass of dark curly hair, olive skin and dark eyes, was a let-down. She looked to be in her twenties and certainly couldn’t have any recollection of what had happened.

She said firmly, ‘There isn’t any point in explaining it all to someone else. I wanted to speak to PC Fleming. They said she still works here.’

The other woman’s lips twitched. ‘I’m afraid she hasn’t been PC Fleming for a long time. She’s Detective Inspector Fleming now, so as you can imagine she’s a very busy woman. I’m to hear what you have to say and then I’ll report to her if we can’t sort it out now.’

Marnie frowned. This girl seemed to think she could just fob her off. But there had been another policeman – DS MacNee.

‘Is – is DS MacNee still here?’ she asked, and of course the name triggered the image.

He comes down the ward and sits next to her bed. ‘How are you feeling, lassie?’ he says.

She ignores the question. ‘Where’s my mum?’

She was having to peer through what was running in her head and it was very distracting. She saw Hepburn looking at her strangely. Reckoning she was just another nutter, probably – and perhaps that wasn’t wrong.

‘I’m afraid he’s off duty.’

‘I’ll come back when he’s on duty again, then.’ Marnie made to get up. ‘Tomorrow?’

Hepburn shook her head. ‘He’s away tomorrow. And I couldn’t say when you’d get him – we work shifts and we’re out on calls a lot.

‘Look, why don’t I find a cup of coffee for us and you can give me some idea what this is all about – OK?’

She was out of the room before Marnie had a chance to respond. She sat back on the padded bench and closed her eyes, allowing the interview with DS MacNee play on in her mind. There was, she realised, very little to go on there. He’d just asked her standard questions, giving nothing away, and unlike PC – no, sorry, Detective Inspector – Fleming he’d had no previous connection with her mother. And it didn’t look as if she’d get to see Fleming without talking to this girl. She had resigned herself to it, though with a bad grace, by the time Hepburn came back carrying two paper cups.

‘It’s not great coffee – warm and wet is about the best I can say for it,’ she said cheerfully, setting them down on the low table and producing cartons of creamer, packets of sugar and a wooden stirrer from her pocket.

‘Just black.’ Marnie sipped at the greyish liquid, though she
noticed that Hepburn didn’t pick up hers. She put down the cup again, deciding to follow her example.

‘Is it all right if I call you Marnie?’ Hepburn barely waited for her nod. ‘Right, Marnie. Talk to me. What do you want to ask DI Fleming about?’

‘I want to know why I never heard anything after my mother disappeared and I was taken into care all these years ago. I want to know if she’s alive or dead. I want to know whether she chose to disappear or whether somebody killed her.’

She had the satisfaction of seeing Hepburn’s eyes widen in sudden interest, then added, ‘And why there was never an inquiry.’

Having bashed out her report, Hepburn saved it and left the CID room. She picked up her rain jacket from her locker, pulling up the hood after a glance out of the window. There was a steady drizzle and under the leaden sky it was getting dark already.

She paused on the doorstep of the police headquarters to light a Gitane, an addiction acquired during visits to her French mother’s family, cupping her hands round the lighter to shield the flame, then taking a long, luxurious, and yes, faintly desperate draw.

She should give it up. The cost was becoming ridiculous, on her wages, and she was beginning to feel a bit of a sad loser, huddled round the back by the dustbins in her break, with winter ahead. Yes, she should definitely give it up. Just not now.

She was still reeling a bit from the impact of what Marnie Bruce had told her. A kid of eleven, assaulted and abandoned in a remote cottage with her mother gone – and no follow-up? It couldn’t be like that, surely. There must be more to it, but she’d had to be careful that her report didn’t have a hint of criticism since it was obviously a case that Big Marge had worked on in the dim-and-distant. She’d stressed, too, that there was something odd about the woman – not exactly a nutter, but definitely strange. There had been hesitations
that suggested Marnie might be hearing voices that certainly weren’t coming through to anyone else.

It was a pity she couldn’t have talked it over with Big Marge today, but she’d had her instructions. She’d just have to go back home now. She inhaled a last lingering puff, then crushed her cigarette out against the waste bin.

Hepburn’s feet were dragging as she walked towards her car. She had a long drive ahead of her and it wasn’t as if she was looking forward to what awaited her at the other end.

Her colleagues assumed she was saving to get on the housing ladder by living at home, on the edge of Stranraer, and she’d let them think that; it sounded so pitiable to be trapped by her family circumstances. Her mother Fleur had declared English an ugly language and flatly refused to learn it and her father, fluent in French himself, had never insisted. Once he died, Fleur had found herself helpless and friendless.

But still intransigent. There was nothing, Louise reflected bitterly, as stubborn as a French mother who declared that at her age it would not be elegant for her to learn English like some little child. Louise could take over her father’s place as social facilitator.

In the first devastation of loss, Louise had given up the flat she’d been renting in Kirkluce and come home. Once the formalities of sorting out her father’s estate had been completed, it seemed fairly obvious that Fleur would return to France. Naturally, it couldn’t be discussed while she was shocked and confused and clinging to her only child, but Louise would be leaving home again once Fleur got back to normal.

Only she hadn’t. The confusion showed no signs of clearing and Louise never knew from one day to the next what she would have to confront when she got home.

The house was a villa, white-harled and standing on the shores of Loch Ryan looking out along the sea loch between the low hills, a pretty house with a pretty view, but Louise didn’t even glance at it.

‘
Maman
, I’m home,’ she called in the French that was the only language spoken at home, and as her mother appeared from the kitchen at the back of the house Louise was struck, as she so often was, by Fleur’s beauty and elegance. The bloom was fading now but her face was still a perfect oval, with high cheekbones and delicate olive colouring, and she had pansy-brown eyes which even as she approached sixty remained luminous and unhooded. Her long dark hair, without even a thread of grey, was caught up in a clip at the back, with wisps slipping forward becomingly. But she was wearing a nightgown.

‘Darling, you are so late! But I made coq au vin, so it won’t have come to much harm.’

Automatically, Louise glanced at her watch, though she knew it wasn’t three o’clock yet. She felt faintly sick. ‘
Maman
, it’s not bedtime. It’s still the afternoon.’

A cloud came over her mother’s face briefly. Then she laughed, pointing through a window to the gathering gloom. ‘No, no, it’s dark – look! You work too hard. But come now and have your supper. I’ll have a glass of wine to keep you company and you can tell me what kept you so late.’

She went to the kitchen. As she opened the door the delicious, winy smell of the casserole floated out but Louise really wasn’t hungry – and not just because it was four hours until supper time.

There the cottage was, exactly as Marnie had remembered it, just a bit shabbier, and it had been pretty run-down even back then. The trees seem to have sidled closer, though of course they couldn’t have, really; they were still on the other side of the sagging wire fence. It was just that the great pine boughs had grown longer, as if they were reaching out in kinship to reclaim the wooden house.

It was one of the cottages built for the workforce needed to plant the massive forests of the Galloway National Park, most of them
redundant long ago. The bleached shingles that covered it were a dried-out silver-grey now and indeed rotting in places, Marnie noticed.

Her memory of it was entirely accurate, of course; how could she have expected anything different? Yet with all the repetitions that had replayed in her head these last years it had taken on a sort of unreality, and it was somehow a shock to see it there, as if she’d stepped into an old movie she’d watched too many times.

As the service bus pulled away Marnie walked towards it along the side of the main road, the Queen’s Way running from Newton Stewart to New Galloway. The rain, at least, had gone off, but it was damp and dreary and the sky was dark with purplish clouds. Pine needles clumped onto the soles of her shoes as she walked, deadening the sound of her footsteps. Across the track on the farther side of the house, a plantation had been felled leaving a massacre site of stumps and dead branches, making the house look curiously naked.

Marnie had told herself that just going to the house she’d once lived in wasn’t going to achieve anything but even so she’d cherished a slender hope that the occupants might know what had happened after they left. It was something to do, anyway, while she waited for the police to get back in touch.

She reached the five-bar gate. They had never bothered to close it and it stood open still, but rotting at the base and with the hinges rusted. The rough grass round about was untended, with clumps of bracken and nettles and brambles round the edges. No change there, then, and the paintwork round the windows was peeling as if it hadn’t been renewed since they left.

There was no one around and the cottage had a deserted feel. The curtains at the windows were hanging limp and there was a big crack in one of the panes. Even so, she hesitated before she walked through the gate and when she reached the door knocked once then paused, listening.

A couple of cars passed, their tyres swishing in puddles on the
road, but there was no responsive movement inside. She knocked again; the sound seemed to echo in emptiness and she stepped aside to look through the sitting-room window on the right, cupping her hand against the pane to break the reflection.

It was weird, as if she’d opened a time capsule. She hadn’t expected the familiar furniture would still be here, yet there was the brown sofa, the wonky standard lamp with the orange shade, the cheap coffee table, now missing a great splinter of the wood veneer. It was the setting her flashback memories always produced – and yet it wasn’t. The familiar, grubby disorder had gone and it was almost clinically tidy and bare. The dissonance gave her a sense of confusion that was close to nausea.

Their landlord must still own it. Who was he? Nothing came back to her, so she presumably had never known; her mother would have looked after all that. Certainly, it looked as if it had been empty for a long time. Who would want a run-down place like this, stuck out in the middle of nowhere?

She wandered round the house. The other windows were too high to look into, and on an impulse she tried the back door – locked, of course. The front door no doubt would be too, but she went back and rattled the handle hopefully. It didn’t yield, but the lock looked as if it hadn’t been changed and a sudden thought struck her.

The stone at the foot of the pine tree nearest the house was embedded in soil and moss but she was determined, scrabbling and tugging at it and eventually seeking out a smaller, pointed stone to use as a lever. As it came up small pale creatures scuttled and squirmed away from the light in panic but there, speckled with rust and earth, was the key they had always kept there.

Marnie brushed it clean then went to the back door and turned the key in the lock. It opened with a squeal of unused hinges and she stepped inside with a stirring of expectation.