Lying Dead (20 page)

    ‘You didn’t need him to make a fool of you at the trials. You’ve been doing that unaided for years,’ Jenna said spitefully. ‘But you could just think for a moment about your daughter.

    ‘I’m seriously worried about Mirren, Niall. She’s besotted with Moss. I don’t know what she’ll do if she finds out you’ve killed it. Is your relationship with her not bad enough already? You’re prepared to go ahead and break her heart?’

    ‘Too right I am! It’s about time she grew up. All this touchy-feely-veggie nonsense – and you’re only encouraging it by pandering to her. Give her proper food and she’ll eat it soon enough when she’s hungry.

    ‘And if you reckoned this was the way to persuade me to change my mind, you’re not very bright, are you? It’s had the opposite effect.’

    Niall pushed back his chair angrily and stood up. ‘The sooner that bloody animal gets the chop the better.’

    She stared after him as he went out. The marriage was dead; she knew that. But was it rotting now, and spreading contamination?

As she heard the chair scrape across the floor, Mirren fled as silently as she could, her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle her anguished sobs.

    She went down the dingy corridor to her mother’s office, shut the door quietly behind her and switched on the computer. She knew what she had to do.

Tam expressed himself delighted to join his boss in the Salutation. Bunty, it seemed, was away staying with a sister in Glasgow, leaving Tam resentfully home alone.

    ‘It’s the livestock,’ he said bitterly. ‘With her away, it’s like being in charge in a cat-and-dog home. I’ve had to miss my lunch break, going home to let them out.’

    Bunty was famous for her tender heart, and the MacNee villa in Kirkluce was seldom without its complement of war-weary tomcats and stray dogs. ‘How many have you got at the moment?’

    ‘A three-legged mongrel, a puppy that doesn’t know what a newspaper’s for, a tom with stitches where he’s had the chop and three females, one of them expecting.’ He took a sup of his pint of Special. ‘Last time I counted, that is. But then, I haven’t been home since eight this morning.’

    Marjory laughed. ‘You’d miss them if they weren’t there. Under that black leather jacket you’re just a big tumphy.’

    Tam glowered. ‘A softie – me? Listen, if I wasn’t feart for what Bunty would do to me I’d let the lot of them out to play in the traffic. She’s left a list of what they all like to eat, and a stack of “healthy meals” for me. How come they get to eat what they want, and I’m to have “healthy meals”?’ He said the words with loathing, then brightened up as the barman appeared with their pies and beans. ‘Thanks, Donnie.’

    ‘Right,’ Fleming said, lifting her knife and fork. ‘Tell me about the report on the robbery.’

    ‘Three inches thick, for a start. My bum’s numb from sitting all afternoon. But it’s interesting, I will say.

    ‘The prosecution case was that there’d been five thousand quid, give or take, with some cheques as well, put in the safe after the sponsored events. It was one of those old-fashioned efforts – they probably built the old club round it. Weighed a ton, with a couple of locks to open it. Not much kept there, usually, just the bar takings and a couple of silver cups.’

    ‘So who held keys?’

    ‘Duplicate set at the bank. The other set, somewhere on the bar premises, but on the Saturday they didn’t open because of some posh gala do they were having in Newton Stewart that night, and it was closed then on Sundays. So Ingles as Hon. Treasurer put the money away on Saturday afternoon and kept the keys.

    ‘Story was, he went back at around eight on the Sunday, let himself in, opened the safe and took the money, cleverly breaking a window to suggest an outside job.’

    ‘And it couldn’t have been?’

    ‘Broke the window from the inside, didn’t he?’

    ‘Ah. Not an experienced villain.’

    ‘You could say. Sad, really. He was just leaving when the cleaner arrived.’

    Fleming raised her eyebrows. ‘Kind of late, wasn’t it? Her usual time?’

    ‘I couldn’t tell you, but no one picked up on it. Ingles probably didn’t know the routine.

    ‘In her witness statement she says he called, “Who’s that?” and when she told him he said, “It’s all right, Mrs Aitcheson, it’s only me putting something in the safe.” Then as she went to the cleaning cupboard he came bursting out holding something in his hand and assaulted her. Laid her out – lucky she survived.

    ‘Used a marlinspike, apparently. What the hell’s a marlinspike?’

    ‘Don’t ask me. Is it the sort of thing you’d use in the office of a yacht club?’

    ‘More likely just leave it lying around, from the sound of it. Anyway, she survived to give ID evidence against him.’

    ‘Corroboration?’

    ‘The rest’s circumstantial, but solid stuff. The keys were in his possession, and they found a couple of the cheques in a drawer in his house. Open and shut, really. And then he tried to get Davina to swear out an alibi for him and she testified against him instead.’

    ‘Ah.’ Fleming pounced. ‘You could be just a wee thing peeved if the woman you’d done it for shopped you.’

    ‘Particularly if she’d gone off with the goodies. Lack of recovery didn’t do him any good when it came to the sentencing.’

    ‘Right enough.’ She sat back, frowning, and her empty plate caught her eye. She pulled a rueful face. ‘Every time I eat one of these things I regret it afterwards.’

    ‘Now that’s a funny thing. I don’t. I should have made it a double while I was at it.’ Tam’s glass was empty too. ‘The other half?’

    Marjory shook her head. ‘I’ve to drive later and I’ve not finished this one.’

    A few officers had come in now and were propping up the bar. There was a lot of banter as Tam waited for his pint, but rapt in thought she barely heard it.

    When MacNee, with a last sally over his shoulder, came back, she said, ‘So what’s the scenario? Why does she come back here? She was scared enough to leave the locality and change her name – what possesses her to come back and see him?’

    ‘Ah, there you have it – as Rabbie says, “
one point must still be greatly dark – The moving ‘Why?’ they do it
.” Unfinished business?’

    ‘Or looking for a truce, so she could come back home?’

    ‘Didn’t sound as if she liked it much when she was here,’ MacNee pointed out. ‘Jon said she’d run through the existing talent, got herself a reputation – you’d think she’d have reckoned Manchester would give her a bit more scope.’

    Fleming sat up suddenly. ‘Hang about! Suppose she didn’t. Suppose he got on her trail somehow, went down to Manchester, killed her there, then brought the body up here for disposal?’

    ‘He’d think it wouldn’t be found for years.’ MacNee was impressed with the theory. ‘You wouldn’t guess you’d have such bad luck.’

    She fished out a pad from her bag and began scribbling notes. ‘I’ll want his work records, car registration – might get something from CCTV. Dig out his mugshot – someone might have seen him in her locality.’

    Then she stopped, and swore. ‘So of course, that means involving Carter again, who thinks deaths that don’t come in multiples don’t count. We’ll get stick for an unsolved murder while he sits on his backside doing nothing for us as long as he possibly can. Spelled it out when I spoke to him today.’

    MacNee looked shocked. ‘Dearie me, that wouldn’t be you showing politically incorrect racial prejudice, would it?’

    ‘Nothing to do with race,’ she retorted defensively. ‘He’d be a pompous, patronizing bugger if he was a direct descendant of William Wallace.’

    ‘Now you see, me and Tommy Tucker are just like that.’ MacNee held up smugly crossed fingers. ‘Would you maybe like me to try some telephone diplomacy instead of you putting the heid on the man? As you say yourself, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’

    She gave him a withering look. ‘Time I went back to work,
sergeant
. What about you?’

    ‘Me, ma’am? Oh no, I have starving animals that need me. But you know where I am if anything breaks. I could be tired of their conversation by then.’

Shaking with impotent rage, Adrian McConnell went into the little sitting-room overlooking the bay, picked up his
Herald
and opened it with a crack, though with the red mist in front of his eyes he was unlikely to be able to read it for some time. The window was open; he could hear his daughter talking to her friends as they went down the steps to the road.

    ‘So he goes, “When will you be back?” and I’m like, “Hello-o? You think I know?” and he goes, “Ten o’clock!” ’

    ‘Ten o’clock!’ one of the others squealed. ‘Is he out of the Ark, or what?’

    ‘So I go, “I am so-o not going to do that!” and suddenly I’m thinking, ohmigod, he’s going to ground me! And then you guys ring the bell and I’m like, I’m out of here!’

    Peals of girlish laughter followed and their voices died away as they went off, trouble on the hoof.

    Adrian found he was grinding his teeth, a bad habit his dentist had spoken to him about before. Kelly was getting completely out of hand and there was nothing he could do about it.

    And Kim was no help – on the contrary. The row had started at the supper table: Kelly hadn’t come in till almost two last night and he’d wanted to know what she was doing. All he got was the evasive, ‘Stuff,’ and when he tried to tell her she wasn’t going out this evening until she answered, he got no support from his wife.

    They’d both been round at some friends’ for sundowners after the day’s sailing; he’d no idea how much Kim had drunk but she’d certainly been knocking it back. And by the time she’d had a couple of glasses of wine over supper she was definitely the worse for wear. He’d pointedly taken water himself at the meal, which was a tactical error, since once Kim had laughed at him and opened a bottle, it left her with it all to herself, and once she started she wouldn’t stop.

    So when he’d confronted their daughter, Kim had made it all worse. ‘You do look silly when you’re cross, Adrian,’ she had giggled. ‘Doesn’t he, kids? Just because he doesn’t know how to have a good time doesn’t mean we all have to be boring, does it, Kelly pet?’

    Kelly shot a triumphant look at him, Jason a pitying one. ‘We were just, like, mucking about,’ she said airily. ‘Didn’t notice the time. How about you chill, Dad?’

    He knew when he was on a loser. He subsided in silent fury until he had the child on her own, away from her mother, but then she had just walked out on him, shutting the door on what he was saying when her friends arrived, all of them looking, like Kelly, as if they were heading for a street corner to tout for trade.

    The door slammed again and he looked out to see Jason leaping down the steps. His father had no idea what he was doing either. And if Gary wasn’t safely upstairs asleep in his cot he’d probably be off to a toddlers’ rave somewhere too.

    Anger drained out of him and he could only feel sick with despair. Everything had gone so terribly, terribly wrong recently.

    Kim’s heavy drinking worried him – would he be able to get her back to more normal consumption when they went home? – but in a way Kelly’s goings-on worried him even more. It was like a gathering boil, with foul matter accumulating until, sooner or later, it must burst.

    He hadn’t read a word of the article he was staring at concerning the latest idiocy of the Scottish Parliament. He put down the paper and got up. Kim was on her own, and if he was to get any sense out of her it had better be now before she had a chance to finish the bottle.

    She was well through it already. When he went into the kitchen, she was still at the table with a glass in front of her. She patted the seat next to her invitingly.

    ‘Come to keep me company, pet? ’Sboring through here all by my wee self.’

    He pointedly went back to his own place at the other end of the table. ‘Kim, we need to talk about Kelly. Seriously.’

    His wife pouted. ‘Kimmie doesn’t want to.’ She sloshed the last of the wine into another glass and pushed it towards him. ‘Let’s go through to the front room and make out on the sofa like we used to when we were kids. Better than the back of your car.’ She giggled.

    Kim always got amorous when she was drunk. It was beginning to put him off sex completely. He tried again.

    ‘You’re her mother – doesn’t the prospect of a gymslip pregnancy worry you at all?’ It worried the hell out of him: what would the Press say about a political candidate who couldn’t bring up a teenage daughter with proper standards?

    ‘Silly! She’s been on the pill for ages.’

    ‘On the pill?
What?
’

    ‘Oh, you’re just so
square
! They’re all on it nowadays. They’re not stupid – not like we were.’

    He didn’t like to be reminded of the reason for their own marriage. He scowled.

    She had reached the belligerent stage. ‘If I’d been as smart as Kelly, I wouldn’t be married to a boring stuffed shirt who only gets excited about politics. I’d be with someone like Niall – oh, I know you look down on him because he works with the boats and you’re a fancy “accountant”,’ she put mocking quotation marks round the word, ‘but I tell you he’s got it over you where it counts.’