Cradle to Grave (21 page)

The jury was convinced, the police blatantly less so. They had taken Lisa’s acquittal badly, describing the verdict as ‘disappointing’ and saying flatly that there would be no further investigation.

Even so, it had left the baby’s brother stigmatised. That must have been a sickening blow for the Ryans, on top of the loss of their daughter, and it was no wonder poor Cara had chosen to deaden the pain.

At the time, Kershaw had on the whole been inclined to believe the nanny’s story. There had been plenty of cases in the past that showed that while young children might not have a full understanding of their actions, the capacity for evil was definitely there.

But that was before the stories had started to leak out about the red-haired nanny’s temper. There had been a backlash, and Kershaw remembered the grandfather uttering threats, which were certainly unpleasant, if understandable. That was Cris’s ideal employer – well, there was always more than one side to a person’s character. Hitler loved animals.

Crozier certainly hadn’t been universally beloved – not by his son-in-law, not by his gamekeeper, who was now squarely in the frame for his murder, with a witness to testify to his drunken rage and DI Fleming, no less, seeing him emerge from the spinney, where the body was found.

Her orders were to get Buchan to agree to come in for questioning, since they didn’t have evidence to arrest – not yet, anyway. She’d wait for Campbell to come to pick her up before she tried, but she did hope he wouldn’t be too long.

It was kind of eerie, plodding in the mud around the deserted houses. DC Ewan Campbell, in thigh-length fishing waders that were a little too small for him, surveyed the depressing scene.

The water had receded, leaving a thick layer of silt behind, and the stench, wafted on a breeze from the sea, was disgusting. As Campbell walked round the stranded cars, he tried to work out the cost of all this – millions, certainly.

The doors to some of the houses had burst open under the force of the flood water; these he entered, working his way through a layer of sludge, negotiating the flotsam of furniture – a kitchen table upside down in an entrance hall, a sofa at an angle halfway up a staircase, a huge plasma-screen television face down in a doorway.

In one house where access to the staircase was clear, he went upstairs and somehow it was even weirder to see everything normal here. He found he was looking guiltily at the footprints his waders had left on the pristine cream carpet.

Other front doors were still locked, as their owners must have left them. One of these, Campbell noticed suddenly, had a nameplate saying, ‘Jamieson’ above an electric bell. He pressed it from force of habit then, feeling foolish, knocked on the door. There was no answer, no sound of responsive movement from inside.

He hesitated for only a moment before kicking in the door. In the general chaos here a search warrant seemed an unnecessary formality and damage to the door wouldn’t even be noticed in the massive restoration. After a few well-placed kicks, the lock broke and he pushed the door open against the resistance of the mud, which was a full nine inches deep on the ground floor. He called, ‘Hello! Police. Anyone there?’

There was no sound, beyond the glooping noise of the rippling mud disturbed by his entry. He looked about him.

Here there were signs that someone had done some clearing after the house had been flooded. Tables had been stacked on top of wrecked sofas, every upper surface was piled with belongings and, most telling of all, there were a lot of muddy footprints on the beige stair carpet. Was the owner of the footprints upstairs, refusing to answer, hiding somewhere? He could hardly be unaware of Campbell’s presence.

It was an uncomfortable thought that someone might be up there, silently waiting for him. Moving cautiously now, Campbell took off the waders and parked them; then, in stockinged feet and on tiptoe, he climbed the stairs.

The upper floor here, like the one in the other house, had suffered no damage. The doors to a bathroom and three bedrooms, leading off a galleried upper hall, stood ajar, giving glimpses of neat, conventionally decorated rooms. He pushed the doors of the first two open with due caution, waited, then looked around. They were all empty.

It was a nice house, expensively fitted out and with good-sized rooms. The ones to the front had the sea view that would have been the property’s greatest selling point. Yes, it was very nice; in fact, he could just see himself and Mairi here, with a good bedroom for the wee one, and a room for a little brother or sister as well, and then there wouldn’t be a spare for visits from his mother-in-law.

The room at the far end was the master bedroom, the largest of them, with windows on two sides and a small en-suite shower room. And here there were definite signs of recent occupation: a kettle, a camping stove, jars and tins, packaging and rubbish in a bin.

Campbell touched the kettle. If it had been warm, that would have told him something. It wasn’t.

The bed with its rose-patterned bedspread was neatly made, and there were no clothes lying around. In the bathroom, the basin and shower were dry, but again that didn’t tell him anything. He had no idea how long it might take for drops of water to dry, but on balance the indications were that someone had been living here since the flood, but wasn’t any longer.

Even so, it was again with some caution that he went to open the built-in wardrobes. They covered one wall and were quite big enough to provide a hiding place for someone who didn’t want to be found. One proved to be empty; the other held only a man’s clothes and shoes, including a pair of wellies caked in mud. But there was certainly no one hiding there, so it looked as if their quarry had fled, perhaps after seeing the results of his handiwork – if, indeed, it was his.

Campbell went back downstairs, put on the waders again, wincing a little at the tight fit, and left the house. He cast a speculative glance at the garage, but without a warrant any evidence found would be inadmissible in court, so a search would be pointless, or even counterproductive.

He ploughed through the mud back to Crozier’s Discovery, which Pilapil had suggested he should use. Kim would be at Keeper’s Cottage waiting for him to bring her, and with luck Alick Buchan too, back to Rosscarron House. He just hoped that she’d managed to sweet-talk him into coming quietly.

As the sound of the car’s engine died away, the small man with thinning grey hair, crouched in darkness and nine inches of mud at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, let out the breath he seemed to have been holding since he heard the engine of the car he guessed must be from the police arriving. He was trembling uncontrollably, partly with cold and partly with fear.

He groped his way to the door, fumbling for the handle, then tried to open it. It hadn’t been easy to close it in the first place, and now the pressure of the mud was holding it shut. For a panic-stricken moment he thought he was trapped, but another frantic shove got it open wide enough for him to wriggle through.

He blinked in the daylight as his eyes adjusted. His lips tightened when he saw the damage to the door – but after all, what did it matter? The devastation round about him was only a reflection of the devastation of his own life.

He waded to the stairs. He hadn’t even had time to put on his boots and now his socks and his trousers were filthy. He’d have to use some of the precious water remaining in the tank to clean his feet. He’d been sparing with it, but there couldn’t be much left by now, and anyway the man he had seen was just the vanguard: soon, others would follow. The neighbours would return to assess the damage; the clean-up operation would begin. What would he do then?

He had no idea how it had come to this. After Margaret’s illness and death, it had been like a sort of madness, when the anger he’d felt about the unfairness of her suffering, and his own, had spilled over into rage directed first at the intrusion of noise and strangers on his quiet mourning, then the destruction caused by another man’s greed. And now his life was in terrifying chaos.

He’d had an alcoholic friend once, a professional man who had lost job, home and family, and had eventually died on a cold night, sleeping wrapped in rags under an archway in a Glasgow backstreet. He and Margaret had marvelled sadly at how such a thing could happen. Yet here he was, in a worse position, even, than his friend, and he had been no more able to stop himself.

There were still some of Margaret’s sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet and he had a bottle of whisky he’d salvaged from the cocktail cabinet. He was still too scared to take that way out, but perhaps as he became forced to accept that there was no other escape, he’d find the courage from somewhere.

10

Fleming held the phone a little away from her ear, pulling a face as, after the most perfunctory enquiry about her state of health, Bailey demanded to know what on earth was going on, in tones which suggested that in finding herself at the scene of a murder Fleming was in some sense culpable.

The stickiest part came when they got on to actions taken last night after the discovery of the body.

‘Yes, yes,’ Bailey said. ‘MacNee was policing the site, and Hay came to raise the alarm, but you haven’t told me what you were doing, Marjory.’

She swallowed. ‘I’m afraid I had to go to bed.’

There was an awful silence, then, ‘
To bed?
’

‘I’m sorry. I had concussion when the car crashed and I was quite simply unfit to continue.’

Fleming could almost hear Bailey recalling the regulations about harassment. ‘I – see. But Marjory, the golden hour, when we have our best chance of good evidence, wasted!’

‘I agree, it was most unfortunate. But now I have officers in place . . .’

She went on to describe the tasks she had allocated and her own activities – background checks to be made on Crozier, interviews to be done with family – and talked bullishly about Alick Buchan as the prime suspect.

As always, Bailey liked the thought of a straightforward you’re-nicked-sunshine. ‘An early arrest and charge would certainly cover your back,’ he conceded, ‘but I have to say it’s looking a bit exposed at the moment.’

Fleming didn’t need him to tell her that. She rang off feeling depressed and with a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She had let herself into Crozier’s study to have privacy for her phone call, and she looked around it now. There was a control deck for the house’s sound system, but apart from that the white, impersonal room told her almost nothing about the tastes of the man himself. It was clinically tidy, with a desk that had only a computer, a tray of pens and two wire baskets on its glass surface.

Fleming wasn’t used to desks that looked like that. Though she could always find what she was looking for, her own could only be described as deep litter and in her heart of hearts she suspected that those who were always putting things away either hadn’t enough to do or had something to hide.

With a pop festival meant to be going on right at this moment, Crozier would have had plenty to do, yet there was nothing in his out-tray, and his in-tray held half-a-dozen invoices and a couple of business letters.

There was a huge cork board on one wall and here there were schedules, letters, lists and Post-it notes galore. Fleming squinted at a couple, one about a band called Zombie and the Living Dead with a technical specification that went over her head, another demanding plaintively what had happened to the running order for Saturday night. Certainly, they all related to the festival, but surely there should be more bumf than this?

There was a bank of filing cabinets on another wall and Fleming went over to look. There were two marked, ‘Festival’; these were unlocked and she pulled them out, looking without much interest at files with labels like ‘Bands’, ‘Accommodation’ and ‘Lighting’.

The drawers below were identified only by numbers and letters, and these, when she tugged experimentally at one or two, seemed to be locked. Pilapil, presumably, would have the keys, but she’d leave that until there was better-qualified manpower on hand to do an in-depth search. The computer would have to be checked out as well.

Fleming was just turning away when she noticed that one drawer in the end stack was not fully closed. It was almost an invitation and she went back to pull it open.

For a moment she stared at it, not quite understanding what she was seeing. Every file was empty, and the hangers had been put back so hurriedly that the drawer was unable to close properly. She pulled open others in that stack and the one next to it; they too were empty, though the sagging cardboard of the sides showed that they had not been unused.

She felt sick and cold. Pilapil had, as requested, locked the study and given her the key last night, but she had been feeling too ill to think clearly. She should have demanded every key, and while she slept someone – or more than one person – had come in and cleared out – what?

Something they didn’t want the police to see, that was for sure, but she didn’t know what it was, and now she couldn’t see how she was going to find out. There had been plenty of opportunity to destroy anything that needed destroying while she slept.

Kershaw looked around the meagre kitchen of the Buchans’ cottage with a shock of pity. It was so bleak, so lacking in any sort of comfort! You were always hearing about poverty in the inner cities, but rural poverty was every bit as wretched and often unsupported by charities and the ‘initiatives’ beloved of governments looking for the popular vote. There weren’t a lot of votes in country areas.