Dead in the Water
| Dead in the Water |
| DI Marjory Fleming [5] |
| Aline Templeton |
| 2009 : Scotland |
had been pregnant, her body washed up on the rocks. Twenty years on
the murder remains unsolved; her father is now dead, and her mother
refuses to talk about what went on all those years ago.
Detective
Inspector Marjory Fleming is called in to reopen the case that her late
father, a policeman, was unable to put to rest. As Fleming digs deeper
it becomes clear that her father had struggled to keep secret some of
the shameful details around the young girl's death.
Can she handle the truth she will unearth, not just about her father but about herself?
Dead in the Water
Aline Templeton
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Aline Templeton 2009
The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the Author
of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the
prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 9781848947122
Book ISBN 9780340976944
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Eloise with fondest love
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Colin McCredie, Blythe Duff, Morag Fullerton and all the
Taggart
team for their generous help when I was with them on location, to Aga Phillips for her kindness and patience in providing Polish translations, and to Robin and Gillie Johnston-Stewart for fresh insight into farming in Galloway. I am grateful, as always, to my agent Teresa Chris, my copy-editor Helen Campbell and my editors Carolyn Mays, Alex Bonham and Kate Howard.
Prologue
October 1985
The north-easter came tearing through the night across the Irish Sea. Thundering waves lashed the cliffs, launching themselves as walls of water thirty, forty feet high round the Mull of Galloway, the exposed southernmost tip of Scotland. In this hell of howling wind and roaring water, the air was thick with salt spray and blinding squalls of rain.
High above on the headland, from the solid bulk of the great white lighthouse, the lantern’s beams stabbed at the encompassing darkness as it revolved, revolved, revolved slowly and steadily through the night.
And far below, in the boiling waves, something tumbled over and over as the breakers rolled it towards the cliffs.
As the light of an uneasy dawn lit the sky with streaks of fiery gold and dull, angry red, the man in the lightroom below the lantern switched off the huge light, yawned and stretched.
It had been a wild, wild night, but with it being near enough November now you had to expect it. The lighthouse had stood against many a worse storm than that in its hundred and fifty years, and John Fairlie never minded the solitary night shift. He was a quiet, dreamy man, fond of his own company, happy to watch the dramas played out by the elements from his crow’s-nest position, making the records and checks in his own unhurried time, reading a bit. Poetry – that was his favourite. You could think about poetry, after.
The wind had dropped to an unnatural calm though there was still an angry sea, with a greasy sheen to the surface and a heavy swell. John opened the little door giving access to the platform around the base of the lantern, white trellis-work cast-iron, and climbed out.
It had been hot and stuffy in the cramped office below the light. The shock of the chilly air made him gasp, but he welcomed its freshness, taking deep, hungry breaths. There was nothing better than this: high up in the clear air, the world to yourself apart from the seabirds wheeling below you with their raucous cries. Kittiwakes they were mostly, this morning, as well as the usual herring gulls. He liked watching the birds, particularly the gannets, when they were doing their death drops with wings folded, but they wouldn’t be fishing in a sea like this. There were no puffins this morning either, to whirr on their busy way like so many clockwork toys.
John looked down through the mesh of the platform – you couldn’t afford to suffer from vertigo in this trade – and saw smoke beginning to curl from the chimney of one of the assistant keepers’ cottages across the courtyard. He’d be relieved shortly.
He had turned to go back inside when it caught his eye. Just to the north of the lighthouse, a small stack of rock reared up, needles of sand-coloured stone, with a half-submerged flat surface between its base and the face of the cliff. There was something lying on it, some dark mass, but with gold strands that rippled in the waves that were washing over it. John stared, shading his eyes.
‘Oh is it weed, or fish, or floating hair –
A tress o’ golden hair, o’drownèd maiden’s hair . . .’
The words came to his mind and his stomach lurched. Fumbling the catch on the door, he went back in to fetch the powerful binoculars kept in the office. His hands were shaking as he came back out and focused them.
He left without even shutting the door, half-falling down the ladders before he reached the spiral staircase, then taking the hundred-odd steps at breakneck speed, even though he knew that there was no need to hurry for the sake of the girl who lay dead on the rocks below.
1
‘Well, I think we could confidently state this has been a complete disaster, DI Fleming.’
Standing under the impressive portico of the Glasgow High Court of the Justiciary, the woman who spoke was wearing a fake fur coat, wrapped tightly about her against the keen March wind. She was tall and bulky, with the thick pale skin, full red lips and dark blonde tresses of a Tamara de Tempicka model, but at the moment those lips were pursed in disapproval and her pencilled brows were drawn together above slightly protuberant blue eyes.
The woman coming out behind her through the revolving doors was tall too, but with a long-legged, athletic build. In contrast to the other woman’s exotic pallor, she had a fresh complexion and she was not pretty, nor even handsome, but she had an interesting, intelligent face, clear hazel eyes and a humorous mouth. Today, though, her expression was grim.
DS MacNee, a small man wearing a black leather jacket, white T-shirt, jeans and trainers, emerged to line up beside her in a pose suggesting this was not the first street fight he’d found himself engaged in. Both officers wore identical expressions of angry humiliation.
‘I can only apologize, Ms Milne,’ Fleming forced through her gritted teeth. ‘I should have checked.’
‘Yes, you should.’ The acting Procurator Fiscal’s tone was icy. ‘That colossal waste of time and money will have to be explained.’
‘I understand that.’ Fleming did, too, and she wasn’t looking forward to the process.
‘I shall be talking to Superintendent Bailey about an enquiry. I am extremely—’
She broke off. The door was revolving again and the sound of laughter and loud, cheerful voices assailed them. A couple of photographers, sitting on a broad low wall beside some unhappy-looking shrubs, suddenly moved forward, raising their cameras.
‘Here’s them coming now,’ MacNee said unnecessarily, and without discussion the three of them headed for the car park opposite, to avoid the exultant villain who, after months of intensive police work and meticulously assembled evidence, had been told there was no case to answer and was even now emerging triumphant, immune from prosecution on these charges at least, and ready to go back to his interrupted life of crime.
‘See lawyers?’ MacNee said bitterly in his strong Glasgow accent. ‘Of all the sleekit sods—’
‘Only doing his job,’ Fleming said, driving through the city traffic. ‘Being smooth and cunning’s what they’re paid for.’
‘And who does the paying?’ MacNee returned to a long-held grievance. ‘You and me, that’s who, and all the decent folk who’d rather not have their houses broken into and their cars nicked. Just so some bugger can come up with a daft technical objection that gets the man off.
‘Anyway, his lordship had only to look at that bastard’s brief to know he was guilty, no need for a trial. The day that one’s defending an innocent man’ll be the day the Rangers and Celtic get together to form a social club.’
‘It was my fault, though, Tam – I can’t get away from it.’ In a gesture of frustration, Fleming ran her hand through her crisp chestnut crop, greying a little at the sides now. ‘I was fair away with having got the man to make that unguarded admission – last piece in the jigsaw! Never occurred to me to check Hatton’s procedure.’
‘He’ll be sick as a parrot too. He’s a decent lad, even if he is English.’
‘Well, there’s a compliment, coming from you!’ Fleming said. DS Hatton was indeed a decent lad, and the collaboration between the Galloway and Cumbria police, nailing a criminal with an extensive stolen cars practice on both sides of the Solway, had been a triumph. They’d picked him up on the Galloway Constabulary’s patch, but somehow no one noticed that Hatton, as the arresting officer, had used the English caution on Scottish territory, which invalidated any evidence procured in later questioning. No one, that is, except MacNee’s ‘sleekit sod’ who had, with a smirk of triumph, produced the objection in court this morning and got the case dismissed.
‘It’s bad enough losing this one, but the kicker is that Sheila Milne’s been waiting like a cat at a mouse hole for me to get it wrong. Now . . .’ Fleming groaned. ‘The woman wants to jerk us around, that’s the problem. Always quoting Statute 17 (3) to point out that the Procurator Fiscal is the investigator, while the police are nothing more than her agents, and now she can claim I’m not fit to operate except under close direction.’