Blood Substitute (2 page)

‘It's fantastic,' I whispered, leaning over to kiss him. ‘Thank you.' I slipped it on.

‘What do you think we ought to do about James?' Patrick asked.

I had forgotten all about it. ‘Why not call him back and ask when it would be convenient for us to call at the nick? You're not going back to work and I'm not going home until Wednesday.'

Patrick looked at his watch. ‘We've an hour and a bit before we have to set off back to the rectory to get changed. He could join us for an ale now and we can arrange it.'

I rather thought this was more to do with extra beer than anything else but felt all warm and soppy towards him after the wonderful present so agreed readily. James, it transpired, was on his way home but nearby (are policeman allowed to use mobile phones while driving?) and said he would be with us shortly.

When he arrived I saw that the bruising was beginning to emerge on his face and his mouth was a little swollen but he appeared content enough and I knew he must be very pleased with the match result.

‘Och, I heal well,' he said in response to my query. ‘Your good health,' he went on after thanking Patrick for the pint. ‘And where are you off to tonight?'

‘Toby's in Royal Crescent,' Patrick replied.

‘Man, you'll need to take out a mortgage on your house. Folk tend to get all dressed up when they go there, don't they?'

‘Black tie suggested but not mandatory. Ingrid reckoned it was about time I frightened the moths out of mine.'

‘Joanna's always on at me about the place when it comes round to birthdays and anniversaries,' the DCI mused gloomily.

‘I'll report back to her,' I promised gleefully.

‘When d'you want this chat then?' Patrick asked.

Carrick's good-looking features darkened. ‘Not now, that's for sure. Not on your special day.'

‘I can't believe whatever you might say would prove to be that much of a dampener.'

‘Nevertheless, I've absolutely no intention of burdening you with my private worries now. Shall we make it Monday morning?'

Patrick leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘James, old son, by not sharing a wee piece of it with us now we'll be thinking of you all solitary with your worries when we're drinking our bubbly tonight. I had an idea something was really bothering you when we spoke earlier.'

‘Please,' I added. ‘And then you and Joanna come out to eat with us on Monday evening.'

‘I've said nothing to her about this,' Carrick admitted. ‘But if what I've been told is true then she'll have to know eventually.' He was silent for a few moments and then said, ‘You remember when I was on a trip to Scotland a couple of years ago and met Lord Muirshire?'

Patrick said, ‘Of course. You just happened upon the Case of the Buried Opera Singer. Only she wasn't dead. And that led into the Case of the Secretly Imported Crooks for Cash. An Italian by the name of Capelli – I seem to remember shooting his murderous minder – was behind most of it and he was using weekend bashes at a castle belonging to Lord Muirshire as a front for his little business but without his lordship knowing what was really going on.'

I'd only had a brief walk-on part right at the end of that one but had been told by the pair of them about most of it afterwards. Other details had emerged at a later date – for instance how Carrick had at one stage thought Patrick had been too heavy-handed in questioning the aforementioned opera singer, had lost his temper and taken a broadsword to the inquisitor in the castle hall. Patrick had grabbed another similar weapon and the brief but electrifying duel is, I understand, still being talked about. The lady had actually been a little sloshed and shut her own hand in a drawer. Oh, and Patrick had won.

‘That's right,' Carrick said. ‘I don't think I mentioned to you at the time that Ross, Lord Muirshire, had been a good friend of my father.'

‘Who was drowned at sea, I understand,' Patrick said.

‘Ross was there, on the yacht, when it happened.'

This came as a surprise to me, for none of the circumstances had been discussed with us before and I had assumed that the accident had been on board some kind of fishing boat. I knew that Carrick wore a Kennedy tartan kilt but had not questioned before how a Lowland fisherman – both names are connected with Ayrshire – would have clan connections.

Patrick, also apparently a little puzzled, said, ‘It was a private yacht then?'

‘Yes, a racing yacht belonging to the then Earl of Carrick. My father was a distant cousin but nevertheless close to the family.'

‘So you're blue-blooded,' I said.

He gave me a twisted grin. ‘I'm
told
he fully intended to divorce his wife and marry my mother – who was four months' pregnant with me and only seventeen years old at the time – but he was knocked overboard by the boom, the sea was freezing cold as it is off Scotland for most of the year, and that was that. The rest of the tale, in a nutshell, is that my mother had me, my pillar-of-the-Kirk grandad endeavoured to thrash the sin out of me as soon as I was old enough to tell him I hated him, and Mother and I upped from her parents' house to an aunt in Crieff where she changed her name to Carrick. That was the story as I understood it – until last week.'

We waited.

‘He's not dead,' Carrick whispered. ‘Robert Kennedy is still alive, although not very well, and has just been released from prison where he served six months for his part in a bank robbery where two security guards were shot and injured. He was driving the getaway car.'

Patrick broke the ensuing silence by asking, ‘Where did this happen?'

‘London. He's been banged up in the Scrubs.'

‘Are you quite sure?' I asked. ‘Couldn't it be a man with the same name – I mean, it's not an uncommon one.'

‘I've requested the CRO to double-check in case there's been an IT error, but otherwise I'm pretty sure,' Carrick answered. ‘I was doing my weekly trawl through convicts released throughout the UK – it helps to know which villains are back in circulation – when the name jumped out at me. I went into his records; right date of birth, next of kin listed as someone I'd once heard Ross mention. I rang him – Ross that is – and told him what I'd found out. We couldn't really discuss it over the phone as he had dinner guests that evening and would only say that he'd heard nothing that would confirm what I'd told him but would contact people. He himself was on the boat and they'd looked for the man overboard for over an hour. He wasn't wearing a life-jacket – I'm not sure people did back then – and the sea was like liquid ice. He's insisting it must be someone else or, more likely, a man who's stolen his identity.'

‘That sounds much more likely to me too,' Patrick murmured.

‘I can hardly devote police resources to investigate this,' James went on as though Patrick had not spoken. ‘But, obviously, I must get to the truth.'

‘Aren't there photos of this man?' I enquired.

‘Yes, and I've seen them.' Carrick shrugged, obviously having difficulty keeping his emotions under control. ‘But he was in his early twenties when he got my mother into trouble and that was thirty-seven years ago.' Then, his voice breaking a little, he added, ‘Just an unhealthy thuggish-looking man in his late fifties.'

‘How can we help?' I asked.

‘You can't really. I just wanted to share it with you.' After a pause he said, ‘But I wonder if …'

‘Yes?' I encouraged.

‘Perhaps when you're not busy you'd cast your gaze over this character who's been listed as next of kin. According to the records he lives in your neck of the woods. I simply can't take time off right now to look into it.'

‘A pleasure,' Patrick said. ‘Where does he live?'

‘On Dartmoor, somewhere near Princetown. His name's Archie Kennedy and the address is a farm but I've no idea whether he is a farmer.'

‘I'll do it,' I offered. ‘I'm always looking for excuses to head for the high moor.' Not only that, I was, belatedly, planning my next novel and had only got as far as deciding that it would be Sherlockian, dark, and bog-ridden.

Carrick looked dubious. ‘You'll be careful, won't you, Ingrid? This man might be a distant relation of mine but I ken that side of the family are a wild bunch.'

‘I'll be birdwatching,' I told him. ‘That means you can carry binoculars and point them absolutely everywhere.'

Strictly speaking the farm wasn't near home at all but quite a journey to the centre of the moor. After driving through Tavistock and then on to Princetown I had turned off on to a single-track road and, according to the compass, was now heading roughly south. Passing a few cottages and a barn I clanged over a cattle-grid and the road immediately deteriorated into a rough track with rudimentary passing places. Before me the moor stretched into apparent infinity: great russet and olive rolling downs, some of them crowned with granite tors. Overnight persistent rain had ceased, the wind direction now north-westerly bringing heavy showers with hail in dark grey and white curtains that blotted out some of the distant hills. Far to the south the sky looked brighter over Plymouth and the sea. It was a different climate down there. A different world, for that matter.

A couple of miles farther on the track entered a narrow gully, briars and the previous year's winter-bronzed bracken brushing the sides of the Range Rover as it bounced over the ruts. I involuntarily ducked as the vehicle scraped beneath a small rowan tree. A heron took off from the banks of a little stream that was in full spate and flapped away like an affronted umbrella only to be mobbed by crows. After driving parallel to the stream for a short distance I forded it and the track then climbed steeply, almost like a river bed itself with water flowing into it off the surrounding slopes.

For some distance the track ran alongside a leat, the water as clear as molten glass, long green tresses of waterweed shivering in the current. Then, with a thunderous roar, hail blotted out everything. I slowed the car and pulled up at a point where the track appeared to veer sharply to the left, waiting for it to stop.

It was actually ten days since our weekend in the Bath area and the first opportunity for me to have a day off with a clear conscience. People imagine when you tell them you write that you drift around for most of the time in long flowing gowns thinking Higher Thoughts while sipping from a delicate tall-stemmed wine glass. I thought back over my ten days: I had written not a word. Instead, there had been an every-evening crash course in punctuation for Matthew after an out-of-the-blue discovery that he was struggling with English; Katie was still at home with (another) chest infection, necessitating two trips to the doctor's, and I had spent a lot of time with Justin who is in trouble at school with behavioural problems. In short, he is noisy, stroppy and just like his father at that age. Vicky, bless her sweet little soul, is no problem at all and being with her had been a salve for all the other worries.

Somehow I had found the time to ride George – Patrick had been unable to get home – as although a real gentleman he gets bored and breaks out of the field to jaunt around the district if not regularly exercised. Katie's pony Fudge follows along and the pair snack in any gardens where people have unwisely left the gates open. He had recently inflicted upon himself a nasty cut from the barbed-wire fence. The field is not ours but we had paid to have all the wire replaced with post and rail fencing. George had subsequently put Plan B into operation and started jumping out, again with Fudge rattling along behind.

The children have a nanny, Carrie, and there is other help with housework, but I cannot expect them to cope with the other events that had occurred: blocked drains, a young jackdaw falling down the living-room chimney and then flying about, covering everything in soot before it could be released through a window, all of this culminating the previous day, while I was out shopping, with Justin climbing a tree he had been specifically forbidden to as it overhangs the river. He had fallen some fifteen feet from it to land in a pool, cutting his head on a rock, the intrepid Carrie plunging in to rescue him. There were now three stitches inserted in a large bump on my son's forehead and I had promised him faithfully that his father would have a few thoughts on the matter to share with him. The fact that Justin had been incredibly brave about the stitches and that he had managed, his head pouring blood, to swim to where Carrie could grab him mitigated things a little – here again, surely, was an action replay of his father's boyhood. And no, we were not going to chop down the tree.

The hail petered out to be be replaced by rain and I leaned over to gaze out at the bleak Foxtor Mires that were now unveiled to the left and below me. This was the ‘so horrible a place' renamed the Great Grimpen Mire in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Deadly dangerous to the unwary, it all looked pretty innocuous from up here but the lurid green patches, literally rafts of mosses floating on deep water above the impermeable granite beneath, are warning enough to the knowledgeable walker. There are ways across the mire, used only in the summer months, but one needs to be in the company of an experienced guide.

I could see from my vantage point that the track was flooded for a short distance about a hundred yards from where I had stopped, water gushing across it and then down into the valley. The track acquired a lot of black, peaty mud after this and then forked, the left-hand route sort of slithering down towards the boggy ground and disappearing from sight around a rocky outcrop. I was not perturbed: I had an Ordnance Survey map and the farm was marked on it. I set off again and as soon as I had crossed the flood my mobile rang. I pulled up.

It was Patrick, asking after Justin and relieved to know that, although being kept off school for the day, and quiet – which was different and wonderful – he seemed perfectly all right.