Dead in the Water Read online

  Dead in the Water

  Aline Templeton

  www.hodder.co.uk

  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

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Eloise with fondest love

  CONTENTS

  Dead in the Water

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  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, raisi
ng 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.’

  ‘Today she’d a face like a dropped meat pie when it didn’t go her way. They’re saying she’s like that about everything – the depute PFs are all muttering. And there’s rumours about her taking a strange interest in some of the minor cases that wouldn’t usually come her way. Like prominent citizens’ speeding tickets, for instance . . .’

  Fleming looked at him sharply. ‘Tam, what are you saying?’

  ‘Me? I’m saying nothing. Only that it’s the Fiscal’s decision whether to prosecute or not. And she’s had a big extension put on to her house.’

  ‘Are they suggesting she’s doing favours? That’s serious stuff.’

  ‘Oh, no one’s daft enough to come right out and say anything. Just mutterings, like I said. They’re all hoping Duncan Mackay recovers and comes back.’

  ‘He’s not far off retirement. I think we’re stuck with her. And of course the Super will go doolally about the headlines.’

  MacNee nodded in sympathy, then opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Tam,’ Fleming cut in, ‘if you’re going to quote Burns at me, or tell me I never died a winter yet, I swear I’ll do you a mischief.’

  Wisely, he shut his mouth again and in gloomy silence they took the long road south to Kirkluce.

  It was no surprise, when DI Fleming reached her fourth-floor office in the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters in the market town of Kirkluce, to find a message waiting for her from Superintendent Donald Bailey, requesting an urgent meeting.

  She grimaced. Sheila Milne had obviously got to him already. Mobile phones had their uses, but all too often it only meant trouble came your way faster.

  Fleming had never relished deskwork, but it looked positively tempting compared to having her head pulled off by Bailey. She might as well get it over with – do the penitent bit, suffer his recriminations and hope the storm would blow itself out before there was significant damage to life or property – but it wasn’t a fun way to spend quarter of an hour. When she reached his office and heard a crisp ‘Come!’ her stomach gave a nervous lurch.

  To Fleming’s surprise, she was greeted with, ‘There you are, Marjory! Good. Now, what are we going to do about all this?’

  She could read the signs of displeasure – furrows in his brow going right up into his bald head, plump cheeks flushed, down-turned mouth – but apparently she wasn’t the target. She had barely sat down before he began his tirade.

  ‘That woman is simply, totally and utterly impossible! I have never heard such impertinence in my life. She spoke to me in a tone that – that – what’s that phrase? “Would be offensive if the Almighty God used it to a black beetle!” Who does she think she is? Oh, I’ll have to see the Chief Constable about this – though of course he’s in the States for a fortnight.

  ‘She had the gall to suggest this was an incompetent Force – and on what grounds, pray? That an advocate who specializes in finding loopholes had found one – as if cases didn’t go off because of technical failures by the PF’s office every week! Then she’d the nerve to rant about a waste of money, and demand an investigation! I pointed out this would only waste more money and I certainly wouldn’t authorize it, since the reason was plain as a pikestaff – an unfortunate mistake.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Donald. There’s no excuse. An elementary error.’

  ‘I won’t deny it’s most unfortunate, but these things happen,’ he said with uncharacteristic magnanimity, explained as he continued heatedly, ‘To be honest, what concerns me more is the Fiscal’s general attitude. Naturally we must comply with all lawful instructions, but Mackay always had the grace to acknowledge expertise. I haven’t directly crossed swords with her until now, but you have had unwarranted interference, haven’t you?’

  As she agreed that working with the Fiscal was no bed of roses, Fleming breathed a grateful prayer for the Law of Unintended Consequences. Sheila Milne losing it today had given Fleming useful protection against the woman’s hostility, dating back to a murder case over which they’d disagreed, when Milne had been proved wrong.

  ‘So,’ Bailey was saying, ‘what can we do about it, Marjory?’

  ‘Tam MacNee’s got suggestions, but I don’t think any of them are legal, or even in some cases physically possible. Short of that, I’m not sure that there’s much. Comply with definite instructions, but keep reports as general as possible, while we do what’s needed, I suppose.’

  ‘Good, good. That’s what we need – a strategy.’ He sat back in his chair, propping his fingers together in a pyramid over his paunch. ‘In a sense, she’s even threatening the position of the CC and I can tell you now that he won’t like it at all. Questions may have to be asked at a higher level, with the Lord Advocate, perhaps. Though of course, today’s problems weaken our position. She’s been trying to get her foot in the door – this gives her a chance.’

  ‘Yes. And the headlines tomorrow may not be exactly friendly,’ Fleming warned. Bailey was inclined to panic about adverse press coverage.

  His frown returned. ‘I have to say that worries me. A bad press can do us a lot of harm.’

  ‘Perhaps you could issue a statement regretting that a mere technicality should ruin months of painstaking police work, pointing out that despite this setback we will vigorously pursue further investigations to ensure justice is done in the end. The press always like that – how the courts are too soft and more in
terested in the rights of the criminal than the rights of ordinary decent working families.’

  Bailey was impressed. ‘Excellent, Marjory! I’ll get the press officer to draft it right away.’

  ‘Fingers crossed. And I can only apologize again.’ She got up. ‘I’d better go and tackle my desk—’

  Bailey shifted in his seat. ‘Actually, there’s something else I have to talk to you about.’

  ‘Oh – fine.’ She sat down again, then realized Bailey was looking distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘Ms Milne’s parting shot was to remind me of government policy on cold cases, and she’d obviously been trawling the records. There is only one unsolved murder on our books and she wants it reviewed. Nineteen eighty-five – before you joined the Force, Marjory. A girl found in the sea, down at the Mull of Galloway.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fleming said slowly. ‘I remember something about that, but only very vaguely.’

  ‘I am hoping you will take this on. I’ve called the CC and he agrees we should check it out ourselves. We don’t want to wait until there’s a demand for an external review – reflects badly on our efficiency.

  ‘The thing is, I was in charge and your late father was involved. I’m afraid his behaviour led to a formal reprimand, and it may make difficult reading for you.’

  ‘I see.’ She was taken aback. Her relationship with Sergeant Angus Laird had never been easy, but she had always believed he had an unblemished record as a straightforward, if distinctly old-fashioned policeman. Nineteen eighty-five – she would have been twenty-four, still living at home, doing a series of unsatisfying jobs. But she’d never heard of a problem at work; she wondered if even Janet, her mother, knew. She realized Bailey was waiting for her to speak.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just – surprised. Yes, of course, if you want me to review it I’ll treat it like any other professional commitment.’