Evil for Evil (33 page)

He’d burst in, full of apologies, and he’d had to sit on the table at the back since she only kept three chairs in her office. When there were four in the team, it was instructive to see who chose to perch on the table; it was usually a signal of disengagement.

Macdonald, though, dominated the meeting from his perch. He was possibly unconscious of the triumphant glance he had shot at Hepburn as he finished his report. Fortunately, Hepburn didn’t seem to have noticed it either.

‘It’s beginning to come together,’ Fleming said. ‘Get off a request to Cumbria Police Authority for anything they can dig up on Andrew Smith, Andy. We need an immediate follow-up on Calum Findlay – you and Ewan can get yourselves down there after we finish. Door to doors are going to bring in a lot more stuff, now we know who we’re talking about. And I’ve been passed a note through saying that Derek Sorley has
confessed that he and his nasty little pals let the stag out but denies with some passion that he’d anything to do with the rest. Where do we start?’

‘It’s an
embarras de richesses
,’ MacNee said with a sly grin at Hepburn. Everyone looked taken aback, including Hepburn; the accent really was atrocious.

‘We still have to start somewhere,’ Fleming said hastily. ‘Drew Lovatt’s bust-up with his mother over the gambling debts; let’s take it from there. What happened in the years between leaving here and being returned to die?’

‘Went on gambling,’ MacNee said. ‘Got himself arrested in bad company. Debts got worse. They always do.’

‘We’re coming round to organised crime again, aren’t we?’ Fleming said. ‘And you could make a case – he’d talked about where he came from, they thought it would be a good place to leave him undiscovered.’

‘Not a lot to say about a boring hole in a cliff,’ MacNee argued. ‘Wasn’t the sort of cave boys could have fun with. Anyway, them sitting having a blether down the casino, swapping childhood memories? Don’t see it.’

‘Haven’t noticed a lot of gangsters around lately,’ Campbell said dryly.

Macdonald frowned. ‘Finding the body set it all off, right? Say that once it was discovered, the Lovatts presented some sort of threat to the murderer, or murderers – could have taken more than one to deal with Smith. So they had to neutralise the threat …’

‘I think there’s a problem with that.’ Hepburn had been very quiet as befitted the new girl; she glanced at Fleming as she spoke, and received an encouraging nod. ‘If they came from Manchester, they’d have to hear about it first, then get themselves into position to deal with the Lovatts. It would be pretty quick work, and strangers
are kind of obvious in a place like this. I think the problem is we’re assuming
post hoc ergo propter hoc
.’

There was a stunned silence, and Hepburn turned bright pink. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Law was part of my general degree. Just means, because something happened after another thing, it happened because of it.’

‘You could try just saying that, then.’ Macdonald’s tone was unfriendly, and Fleming gave him a sharp look.

‘Go on, Louise,’ she said.

‘Sorley and his pals didn’t choose to cause trouble for Lovatt because those kids, by chance, had found the body – they’d their own reasons. So it might be more constructive to consider that whoever set the house on fire and killed Melissa Lovatt might have had their own reasons too. Stop looking for a connection. Change the emphasis.’

Fleming saw her point, saw too that Macdonald had stiffened. It was obvious where Hepburn’s reasoning was going to lead; if he pitched in now to defend Christie, she’d have to drop him from the case immediately. He didn’t, but she could see the effort it took in his clenched jaw.

Hepburn was going on, ‘Lissa Lovatt was convinced that Christie Jack was behind the fire, that this is all about some relationship she had, or wanted to have, with Lovatt. We’ve had unreliable statements from her – we definitely need to take that one further.’

‘On the other hand,’ MacNee said, ‘what’s the first thing you do when a woman’s murdered? Check out the guy she’s involved with, right? That was Kerr Brodie, and we knew he wanted shot of her. And with where he comes from, he’d not need to be told what to do with a broken bottle. He maybe held a grudge about Lovatt – he had the money, the farm …’

‘Absolutely,’ Macdonald agreed with some fervour. ‘We’ve got a
known villain on the doorstep, with his sidekick right on the island itself. Tam and I could get down to Stranraer and—’

‘Yes, I’m sure we need to talk to them.’ Fleming’s tone was cool; Macdonald’s reason for supporting MacNee was blatant. ‘But they’re not going anywhere, and right now I don’t want any more pet theories being trotted out. I want to focus on the situation that’s bubbling away in Innellan.

‘Let’s say that Louise is right and finding Andrew Smith wasn’t the trigger. But Innellan’s a sleepy little place – or it was. Then something happened, something that changed it completely. If it wasn’t discovering his remains, what was it?
What changed?
’

She looked round the circle of faces, frowning in concentration, then at her watch. ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get ready for the briefing.’

As they got up and filed out, she said, ‘Tam – give me a minute.’

MacNee sat down again and looked at her enquiringly. After a moment, she said, ‘I know I’m spaced out for lack of sleep, so maybe I’m overreacting.

‘OK, given all the information that’s coming in now, I can believe that we’ll crack it, possibly even in the next few days, but I can’t shake the feeling that if we can’t work out what the
something
is that happened—’

MacNee supplied the ending, ‘You think Lovatt could end up dead?’

‘It would have a hideous logic. Working up to it – his house, his wife, his dog. Him. If Brodie’s really behind it, he’s safe. If not …’

MacNee’s reluctance to give up his favoured theory showed, but he conceded, ‘You’re maybe right. So …?’

‘I said I wanted Lovatt brought in for questioning, but I want to go down there instead. Get him to stop buggering us about, then tell him to stay at the inn and we’ll put a guard on the door. Buy a bit of time that way.

‘And once Andy and Ewan have interrogated Findlay, I think quite a lot will be clearer. He could be key to the whole thing.’

‘What about Louise?’

‘Louise? I want to leave her here, thinking,’ Fleming said. ‘I’ve a feeling it’s something she’s good at.’

MacNee left, and Fleming began gathering her papers and her thoughts for the evening briefing. Her tired mind, though, churned to and fro. The quiet village. What changed? The inhabitants didn’t.

They did, of course. It was a holiday place, where in the summer the population more or less doubled in size. There wouldn’t be many people around now, but you could rent a chalet or a caravan any time. Strangers there would be just part of the normal landscape – even Campbell’s gangsters would pass unnoticed. That would be easy enough to check, right now.

Fleming clicked on to the list of interviews, then sighed. No gangsters – just a couple of families and the single woman who’d been attacked by the stag. She hadn’t really thought it would be that straightforward.

Eddie Tindall jumped into his car, feeling shaken. Maybe he should have drunk the whisky after all. He felt he needed it. What was all this about?

And what was he going to do now? Up at the chalets, the woman had said, and he craned his neck to look out of the car window. The ground rose steeply on the other side of the road, and he could just glimpse some buildings set into the hillside above.

He could drive up, but cars made a lot of noise. Whatever this was about, he didn’t want Elena to discover that he had been, well, spying on her – he didn’t like the word, but it fitted the facts.

The only way he could get close was on foot. Even then he could
be spotted, but Eddie needed to find out what she was up to. He got out, locked his car and set off along the road until he reached the track leading up the side of the hill.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked further than the width of a garage forecourt and the steep gradient had him panting for breath. The gates, too, bothered him; you couldn’t open them quietly, and anyone nearby would hear the clanking of the bolts and be warned someone was coming. His heart was in his mouth as he reached the first chalet, then another, but there were no cars outside and one even had the curtains drawn. It was out of season, of course.

As the next chalet came into view, set up a little from the track, he saw her car parked beside it. So was this where she had been staying all this time? Why? What was there here for her?

The vista must be the big selling point. He turned to scan it, shading his eyes against the setting sun. His eye was caught by what looked like a farmhouse where there had been a big fire, but the scenery was certainly pretty – no, beautiful, on a clear day, with an almost cloudless sky: green grass, trees in their autumn colour, dark-blue sea, waves with tiny white frills like old-fashioned waitresses’ caps. And the island, that looked the way an island would look if a child drew it, a neat shape, with the low cliffs and trees at one end.

Maybe it was just knowing what had happened there that made him feel uneasy about it, but he wouldn’t have chosen to sit looking out at that for days on end. What could Elena be doing here, without spas and shops?

And why was she using the name Natalie Thomson, the name of a prostitute whose murder, Eddie had always thought, had been the reason why Elena had agreed to marry him at last?

Even now, after a day with windows and door standing open, Matt Lovatt still choked a little as he came back into the farmhouse sitting room. The carpet, the upholstery, the curtains, even the cracks and crannies of the woodwork, had all been saturated with the smoke and every flat surface had a greasy film of soot. When he picked up the cushions he had slept on, another tainted whiff arose from them, and he returned them to the sofa hastily, without shaking them.

The room was icy cold. There had been warmth in the sun earlier, but now it was going down and as dusk fell the chill gave warning of another frosty night to come. Lovatt slumped on to a chair and looked around him with hopeless eyes. He ought to do something, at least, to clear up, but the scope of the task put it beyond him. It would cost thousands to get this sorted out, and it hardly seemed worth it now his life was falling apart.

The deer needed attention he hadn’t the strength to give them at the moment. If he wanted calves next year, the stags should be put with the hinds any time now; their bellowing was getting desperate, poor
beasts. But he’d need Brodie, who was nowhere to be found. He’d checked the penned stags and found they’d been fed and watered, but he suspected Christie had done that.

Wearily, he dug his phone out of his pocket and keyed in Brodie’s number again. Still no answer, and there wasn’t any point in leaving a message; he’d left two already. So he’d just disappeared, had he? Lovatt’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. With a rat like Brodie deserting, the ship couldn’t be far from the rocks.

His hands, he realised, were growing stiff with the penetrating cold. It would only get worse as the night drew on; he’d have to light a fire. There was no electricity – or water, come to that – and it would have to serve as light too after dark. Assembling kindling and logs was a straightforward, mechanical thing to do, better than sitting here nursing his exhaustion and being tempted to close his eyes. He’d tried that, and what formed behind his closed lids had brought them flipping open again immediately.

It couldn’t stop him thinking, though. Even as he carried the log basket through from the store off the kitchen, even as he crumpled the paper and laid on the sticks, his mind was buzzing.

Lissa. Christie, poor, sweet Christie, out of her depth and causing more trouble as she tried to help. Lissa. His father – his dead father. His mouth dried. No, no, no! Shut your mind, he told himself. You’re good at that.

Kerr, then – the missing Kerr. Just how much did Kerr hate him? As much as this? Oh, he’d sensed long ago that the man’s genial manner covered rancour like make-up covering bad skin. He wasn’t sure why – perhaps because he was his boss, with the property and a developing business or perhaps because, though he might have a face to frighten the horses, he still had two legs. Or perhaps because Kerr owed him for giving him a haven when he’d needed it and a good job now – and as someone once said there is no more corrosive emotion
than gratitude. God knew he’d tried hard to do the right thing for him and for Christie, even for Lissa, in a way, and he’d hoped to do it for others in the future.
And wreck their lives too, to salve your conscience?
a cruel inner voice mocked him.

Lovatt struck a match and the paper, with its coating of greasy smuts, flared up in a sudden burst. The kindling, dried driftwood from the shore, roared away and he fed it little by little, until the dry bark on the small logs he’d placed on top caught too and then he added more, and more, and more, until the fire in the grate was dangerously high and his face was flushing red in the heat. All but mesmerised, he went on, uncaring. Suppose the whole place burnt down. He should care?

The quiet voice behind him made him drop the log he was holding, with an oath.

‘I think you’ve put on enough wood, Mr Lovatt. The fire brigade’s hoping for a quiet night.’

He swivelled round. There was a woman standing in the doorway, the tall inspector, and the flickering firelight made her look strangely threatening. There was a much shorter man beside her.

‘The door was open. I hope you don’t mind us walking in,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you remember DS MacNee?’

What early conditioning was it that made him scramble to his feet, made him say, ‘Yes, of course,’ when he wanted to scream, ‘No, no! For God’s sake, leave me alone!’

He heard that same calm, conditioned voice saying, ‘Do take a seat, but I’m afraid everything’s absolutely filthy.’

Fleming moved closer to the fireplace where he was standing, her eyes glinting in the amber light. ‘First things first, Mr Lovatt. Let’s start by having you tell us the truth about your father.’

‘He’s not in, again. I’ll check down on the shore, but he’d have to be mental to be out there in the freezing cold.’

Crouched in the corner behind the armchair in his bed-sitting room, Cal Findlay heard the voice of the sergeant who had questioned him earlier. He’d known they’d be back, but he hadn’t thought it would be this soon.

The crunching of gravel at the front of the house seemed ridiculously loud. He was straining his ears to work out what they were doing when his mother started up on one of her moaning rants: ‘Oh, the evil! The wickedness!’ His face contorted with rage and he mouthed a string of swear words under his breath.

The detective had come back. ‘Do you think he’s inside? Better take a look in the windows.’

Findlay hunched his shoulders, contorting himself into an even smaller outline. He dared not even look, but a gentle thud on the windowpane told him that someone had bumped his head peering in.

He could hear the footsteps going on along the path round the corner of the house; they’d be on grass after that, so he couldn’t hear them. It seemed a long time before he heard the voice again, saying, ‘Nothing? Me neither. What do we do now?’

‘Kick the door in,’ a new voice suggested. Findlay’s heart skipped a beat; he muffled his gasp of horror as he waited for the reply.

The sergeant’s voice came. ‘Big Marge is down at the farmhouse. We can drive round a bit to see he’s not out on a wee walk then check in with her.’

Crunch, crunch, crunch. Then the sound of a car driving away.

In the silence, the memories came flooding back. He fought to block them, as he had done all these years. He’d learnt to live with his fear and go on as before, even if it just seemed he was putting one foot in front of the other on a pointless journey. Silence, secrecy. Until …

Cal had known since last week that this moment would come. He’d shirked it before, but now there was nothing else he could do. But he was sobbing as he eased his cramped limbs and stood up.

She was leaving the chalet again. As he saw the door handle turn, Eddie moved faster than he had done since he played right wing for his school football team three stones ago, to dive behind a scruffy bush beside the track. He grazed his knee, and he felt a right berk peering through the leaves, but being caught there would be worse.

Elena got into the car and drove off down the track. There was a sharp branch digging into him, but he didn’t move until he heard the clanking of the bolts on the top gate, then he trotted across to peer over the drop on the further side.

That was the sound of the lower gate now, and then the car came into view as she drove round the curve down on to the main road. If she was going off somewhere, there was no way he could follow her – not without his car.

She stopped at the road, and then turned not right, towards the road out, but left into the village. That was a relief: he wasn’t going to lose her. Maybe she was just popping down to the pub – but from his vantage point, Eddie could see she was driving past the Smugglers Inn. A pint of milk at the local store, then? But now he thought about it, he hadn’t noticed a local store, and come to that he’d never known his wife drink milk.

She was going to meet someone
. Jealousy, lulled by the isolated setting, woke again to active life. There was a man in this, somewhere. His gut cramped at the thought.

If he chose a chalet that looked unoccupied, he could park up there and not be noticed. Then he’d be ready to follow her next time, wherever she was going.

DC Hepburn was standing outside, shoulders hunched against the cold as she stood round the back of the Kirkluce HQ, in close proximity to the dustbins. She was smoking a Gitane, a habit acquired on visits to her mother’s native France. She needed to think, and as Sartre or Camus could tell you, the greatest ideas come with a cigarette between your yellow-stained fingers.

She was feeling depressed. Maybe she’d got it wrong at the meeting? Maybe she shouldn’t have opened her big mouth, when Macdonald had spelt it out already that he wasn’t much taken with the Christie Jack theory. Something going on there? Personally, she thought the woman was a crazy, but sometimes men went for that.

There’d been a sense at the meeting that things were coming to a head. She was good at picking up vibes, and Big Marge was vibrating like a Rampant Rabbit. With so much quality info coming in now, you’d have thought she could relax a bit and just settle down to the steady, routine investigation. Instead, she was so tense you could twang her. She was expecting fireworks.

Being left at this end had been a bummer. She’d bust a gut to get on the team, brought in the best stuff, and she hadn’t done that to play stay-at-home while everyone else went on the Seal Team 6 job. She might have a problem with Big Marge: women were notoriously the worst kind of sexist bosses.

On the other hand, she’d kind of liked being tasked with thinking. A novel idea, in the force. It didn’t happen a lot: routine, yes, action, yes, thinking, not so much.

So she’d better get on with the thinking bit. Hepburn took another deep draw on her cigarette, but still nothing seemed to come. Sartre’s sort of idea, anyway, wasn’t really the kind to go down well at Kirkluce HQ.

Hepburn was almost ready to stub it out and go back into the
warmth of the station when one of the catering staff appeared round the side of the building with her own packet of fags, a middle-aged woman with menopause-blonde hair. She had a duffel coat huddled over her overall and she greeted Hepburn morosely.

‘Not right, this – driving us out in weather like this. Uncivilised, that’s what it is. And set to get worse tomorrow – the forecast’s shocking.’

Hepburn shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re wrong. They usually are.’

‘Aye, you’re right there.’ Her gravelly voice suggested that gin as well as cigarettes might feature in her life. ‘It’ll probably be worse.’

The characteristic Scottish pessimism made Hepburn laugh, and after a moment her companion joined in.

‘Och well, that’s what I always say – you have to laugh, eh?’ Then she looked at her more closely. ‘Here – you’re one of thae detectives, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’ It still gave her a little thrill to say that.

‘Terrible thing, that, down at Innellan. Nice wee place, too – you’d never think something like that could happen there.’

‘You know it?’ Hepburn said hopefully. Maybe the woman came from Innellan, knew everyone concerned, had some vital piece of knowledge …

She didn’t. ‘Never been there. Saw it on the news a wee while ago, something about some fella with a farm down there giving a break to wounded soldiers.’

Hepburn hadn’t really thought she would. She stubbed out her cigarette.

‘Better get back to work. See you again.’ She bent to pick up the butt and put it in one of the bins.

Hepburn was walking along to the CID room when the thought came to her. She remembered the broadcast, because she’d been in the
canteen at the time and there had been jokey remarks about Innellan being on the map now.

Suppose that was exactly right. Suppose the programme had broadcast to the nation that this was where Matt Smith/Lovatt was to be found, and someone had come looking?

Maybe it had nothing to do with the case, but you couldn’t deny it was an original thought. Maybe the Sartre method wasn’t so crap after all.

Hugh Donaldson opened the door reluctantly. His son would walk in, and friends who might drop by wouldn’t wait once they’d knocked. He knew exactly who it would be – the effing polis.

He was totally pissed off. Fair enough, if Sorley wanted to confess he could go and say anything he liked to the buggers, but it was way out of order to dump him and Steve in it too. Now they were making a big deal out of nudging a bolt on a gate that should have had a padlock anyway. There were plenty gallus lads about; all they’d done was expose the weaknesses in the system, like they always said in the newspapers. Still, it would be two against one saying Sorley had done it on his own; Steve would back him up. It was just that there might be one or two problems, and he wasn’t wanting to have to deal with them now.

Hugh’s face was set in surly lines as he opened the door. When he saw who stood there, though, it relaxed into a leer which showed his broken and discoloured teeth.

‘Well, my dear, and what can I do for you?’

The slim, pretty blonde whom he had seen in the pub didn’t smile, but held out her hand to him, a hand with skin that looked curiously smooth and shiny. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

‘Course I do. You were at the pub the other night. How could I forget?’ he said, with a nauseating attempt at gallantry.

‘Not then. Before that. Long, long, before that,’ she said, as he moved forward to shake her hand.

She was holding something. As he keeled over, five seconds later, something flickered in his mind, but before he could fix on it, the darkness came in.

‘So when one of our officers said the name Andrew Smith to you, you must have realised that your father had died, in a peculiarly unpleasant way?’

Lovatt’s face, physically immobile on one side, and deliberately immobile on the other, gave nothing away. ‘Yes, I knew. Yes, I lied to the young woman. But since I had nothing at all to do with it, I thought it wouldn’t help to send you off on a wild goose chase.’