Cradle to Grave Page 13
‘Off at one of her sisters’ again? But when she phones and can’t get a reply, she’ll call your neighbour, won’t she? I wouldn’t worry, Tam. It won’t do the creatures any harm to wait for their tea. If the teas I’ve had from Bunty are anything to go by, they’ll be overfed anyway.’
‘Likely you’re right. We’ll walk, shall we?’ He led the way down the side road to the flooded executive homes and Fleming followed.
The water level had definitely gone down since the last time they looked and they were able to walk to within twenty yards of the properties. Fleming, feeling rough anyway, found it hard not to gag at the stink of sludge and sewage, intensified by the warmth of the sun. The road was thick with mud and cluttered with debris – nasty enough, but further on, the houses were still sitting in a foot and a half of water. She paused, considering her footwear.
‘We’d need waders,’ Fleming said. ‘Maybe they’ve got some at the house, or the water may have gone down more by tomorrow. I can’t say I’m wild about getting my clothes soaking wet and filthy all over again for the sake of interviewing someone who might not even be there.’
‘Certainly not,’ MacNee said with deep feeling. ‘Can you see anything to suggest someone’s still around?’
They stood in silence scanning the half-dozen houses, one of which must be Jamieson’s. There was no sign of life, no evidence of recent occupation.
‘No,’ she said, and feeling deflated and useless, they went back to the car. The sight of the bridge had emphasised their isolation and Fleming headed back to Rosscarron House with profound reluctance. Her headache had returned with force and she could only hope Cris hadn’t run out of Nurofen.
‘Chum me to the toilet?’ one of the teenage girls said to her friend, now entwined with Damien on a rather damp sleeping bag in front of their tent.
Damien looked up impatiently. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mel! You’re not at school now! “Please, miss, can my friend come with me to the toilets?” ’ He mimicked her voice.
Melanie addressed herself to the girl. ‘Come on, Stacey,’ she whined. ‘We’re meant to be here together – you promised. And I don’t like going away up there by myself. It’s getting dark now.’
Stacey groaned. ‘Oh, all right, if you’re going to make a big thing of it.’ She gave Damien another lingering kiss, disentangled herself and stood up. ‘Don’t go away, lover. Won’t be long.’
Blowing him a kiss, she set off with her friend up the hill.
The nearer end of the long row of Portaloos was beside the spinney near Rosscarron House and the girls took the two end ones. It was Stacey who came out first and stood looking around her as she waited impatiently for her friend.
When Melanie emerged, Stacey was giggling, pointing towards the spinney, where shadows were gathering. ‘There’s a guy there, passed out. Must be drunk. Haven’t seen him around, have you?’
Melanie peered into the dimness. ‘He’s, like, old.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘There’s no one old here, except Bob and Ange. Must be from the house.’
‘Why’d he be lying up here, then? Here, maybe he’s not well. Should we check? I’ll get Damien.’
‘What for?’ Melanie’s tone was hostile. ‘We can check ourselves, then get help if he’s ill or something.’
The girls went to investigate. It was a man with iron-grey hair, and he was lying on his side with his head against a big stone. It was only as they got nearer that they saw the blood.
Their piercing screams echoed across the campsite. Damien jumped to his feet, but another man was faster up the slope. When he reached the girls, they ran to him, pointing.
‘Is he – is he dead?’ Stacey had begun to cry.
He went to look, picking up a flaccid hand, and he was feeling for a pulse when Damien arrived. Stacey, with a shriek, flung herself into his arms.
He called across her head, ‘What’s going on, mate?’
The other man straightened up. ‘Yeah, he’s dead. Poor beggar must have slipped and banged his head. Take the girls down and keep everyone else away, all right? I’ll go and tell the police down at the house.’
8
‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ The telephone linesman came back to the little van, parked on the road towards Rosscarron House. ‘We’ve checked everything else. It’s a break in the line on the other side of the river.’
His colleague, looking weary, groaned. ‘I’ve been on the job since six this morning. If you think I’m swimming across, you’ve another think coming. I’m knocking off.’
‘Don’t see what else we can do. Make a report to the police – tell them we need access before we can repair the fault.’
He got into the car and started the engine. ‘Anyway, folk managed without the telephone for hundreds of years. Another day won’t matter.’
‘Maybe the super’s gone home,’ DC Kim Kershaw said in an attempt to cheer up her colleague.
DS Andy Macdonald grimaced. ‘It might be better to get it over with now. His reaction’s not going to be any different in the morning, is it?’
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘but you might be feeling stronger.’
Kershaw, Macdonald and Ewan Campbell were reviewing the day in a corner of the CID room. It had been long, tiring and unsatisfying, with problems accumulating and no loose ends tied up.
‘Maybe by tomorrow they’ll have got the bridge repaired and then it’s Big Marge’s problem,’ Kershaw went on with determined optimism.
‘Can’t see it.’ Macdonald was sunk in gloom. ‘All the solutions are expensive, and there’s not much urgency, really. Could be late tomorrow or even the next day before it reaches the top of the priority list. I just wish there was some good news to tell him.’
‘Haven’t found the girl’s body in the rubble at the Rosscarron Cottages,’ Campbell offered. ‘Has to be good.’
‘We won’t know for sure till we find her, and we haven’t, any more than we’ve found Jamieson. Bailey will be fit to be tied when he hears no one has any idea where he is.’
‘Maybe one of them will have turned up by tomorrow,’ Kershaw suggested.
Macdonald gave her a darkling look. ‘You’re a right little ray of sunshine today. It can get quite irritating, you know.’
‘One of my favourite films, Pollyanna,’ she said demurely. ‘You should try playing the glad game – you know, find something to be glad about in everything. For instance, Ewan and I can be glad we don’t have to go and see the super. We can go to the pub instead. Fancy a jar, Ewan?’
Campbell got up. ‘Wouldn’t mind.’
‘Join us later, Andy. Come and lick your wounds,’ Kershaw said over her shoulder as she left.
Swearing under his breath, Macdonald went along to Bailey’s office. There was no answer when he knocked.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He’d have been glad to get it over with, but on the other hand he was glad he could knock off now and go to the pub. Hey! Maybe there was something in Kim’s glad game after all.
‘I’ll get them in,’ Kershaw said. As Campbell went to a table by the window, she glanced around the pub, nodding to a couple of officers at the other end of the bar.
She liked the Salutation. It was an old-fashioned, no-nonsense pub, with wood floors that weren’t designer beech and walls still yellowed by years of cigarette smoke. There were two rooms, divided by a fireplace open on both sides, and she liked it that when no fire was burning, it just held dead ashes, not an elaborate floral arrangement of fake flowers. It served good beer, the house wine didn’t strip the skin off the roof of your mouth, and it was only a stagger across the road for an exhausted copper coming off duty. The cherry on the cake was that you were among friends: the local villains shunned the Salutation as if a dose of plague came along with the sandwiches.
The spécialité de la maison was cold sausages and she ordered two, then changed it to three. If Macdonald got bogged down, they could always eat it for him.
Kershaw was in a good mood
today. She’d been heartened by seeing Debbie so well looked after in that cheerful, friendly atmosphere, Jan Forbes’s decency and generosity had lifted her spirits, and above all she’d had a day without Tam MacNee’s sharp comments and sourly disapproving silences. People kept telling her it wasn’t like Tam, but as far as she was concerned the longer he was marooned at Rosscarron House, the happier she would be.
She carried over Campbell’s pint and her own red wine, then went back for the sausages. ‘One’s for Andy,’ she warned as she sat down. ‘Cheers!’
Campbell raised his glass, but he didn’t say anything. ‘How’s the baby?’ she asked, trying to get a conversation going. She knew he had one, but she didn’t know anything about it.
‘Fine.’ Campbell speared one of the sausages.
She was obviously doomed to ignorance. Kershaw took a sausage herself, and tried again. ‘Where do you think that girl is, Ewan?’
Campbell considered for a moment. ‘On the headland somewhere. Has to be.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Kershaw said slowly. ‘The gamekeeper who raised the alarm – she would probably have taken shelter at his house. And Jamieson – if we can’t find a trace of him over here, he could well be over there too.’ She scowled. ‘Oh great – that’s where it’s all happening, isn’t it? MacNee and Big Marge aren’t cut off from the action – we are!’
‘Typical Tam.’
‘So when can we expect to get across?’ Kershaw had started fretting. ‘Are we just going to have to twiddle our thumbs until they come back and tell everyone they’ve got it wrapped up?’
‘Likely.’
Campbell really wasn’t much fun to talk to. ‘It’s a bit of a bummer, but what can we do?’
‘Be glad we don’t have to explain a wrecked car to the super.’
The joke surprised her into laughter just as the door opened and Macdonald appeared, shaking his head in answer to her enquiring look.
‘Went off to a meeting this afternoon and didn’t check back in,’ he said.
Kershaw got up. ‘I’m buying. Pint? I got you a sausage already.’
As she spoke, her mobile phone rang. She fished it out of her bag and glanced at the caller’s number. ‘I’ll have to take this.’
She moved a little bit away, but as she listened her face became sombre. ‘OK,’ she said tersely. ‘Be right there.’ Putting the phone back in her bag, she called, ‘Sorry, got to go,’ and hurried out, leaving the two men staring after her.
‘What’s that about?’ Macdonald said.
‘Her kid, probably. Think there are problems there.’
‘How do you know that? Oh, don’t tell me. You listen, right?’
‘Right.’ Campbell finished off his pint and accepted Macdonald’s offer of another.
When Macdonald came back from the bar, he looked down at the empty plate on the table in front of Campbell. ‘Here – thought Kim said she’d bought me a sausage?’
‘Ate it.’
Macdonald glared. ‘I’m trying to play the glad game, but I have to say I can’t see an upside to that one.’
‘It’s no loss what a friend gets?’ Campbell suggested, with a hopeful smile.
‘Mum’s awfully late tonight,’ Catriona Fleming said, coming into the kitchen of the Mains of Craigie farmhouse, where her father was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, a newspaper and Meg the collie, blissfully asleep by the Aga, for company. ‘Her supper’s going to be completely dried out. What’s she doing?’
Bill Fleming looked up from the page of stock prices. He was a tall, solidly built man in his forties with fair hair, receding and greying a little now, blue eyes and an open, good-humoured face.
‘Don’t know – it’s a bit odd. Her office phone is on voicemail and her mobile’s been off all day, so I guess she’s somewhere out of range. I’m beginning to think I might phone the station to see if they know what’s going on.’
‘It’s probably the problems with the festival,’ Cat said morosely.
She had already bent her father’s ear about the unfairness of life at considerable length over supper, and he said hastily, ‘Yes, of course. She’ll have a lot on, with all that.’
‘I think you should phone, though,’ Cat said. ‘You could find out if maybe the festival will go ahead if they get it sorted out. That would be really cool.’
‘Why not?’ he said, fetching the phone. Anything that might lift the cloud of gloom that had enveloped the house since his disgruntled daughter and son had discovered their weekend plans were in ruins was worth a try.
He listened to the information the duty sergeant was able to give him, then put the phone down looking a little stunned.
‘They were a bit vague, but it seems she and Tam MacNee are over on the Rosscarron headland and the bridge has come down – that’ll explain the problem with the festival. The phone lines are down too, apparently, and no one’s sure when they’ll be back on. Not tonight, certainly.’
Cat’s blue eyes, so like her father’s, widened. ‘You mean, she’s over there, probably, like, marooned along with Joshua, for days maybe? And she doesn’t even like pop music! Oh, it’s so unfair!’
She flung herself out of the room and Bill, with a sigh and a shake of his head, went back to the stock prices.
In the meagre sitting room of Keeper’s Cottage, Maidie Buchan sat wrapped in her misery. Alick hadn’t come downstairs for his tea, but no doubt when he’d slept it off he would be demanding food, even if it was the middle of the night.
Not that he’d missed anything. There had been an unpleasant atmosphere, with Beth sitting silent at one side of the table and Ina making even more nasty sarcastic remarks about Maidie’s cooking than usual while staring at Beth in a way that was just plain rude.
Eventually, Ina said, ‘Your face is kind of familiar, with those funny eyes. I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.’
Beth jumped up and left the room, without waiting for the rice pudding. Maidie had brought through a plate to the sitting room, where she’d taken refuge, but it had been refused.
Now Beth was huddled in one corner of the room, pretending to read a back issue of People’s Friend. Ina was watching a gruesome medical programme; she always enjoyed those, the gorier the better. Maidie hated close-ups of blood and guts, but tonight it hardly mattered since she wasn’t really seeing it anyway.
The only good thing was that when she’d got Alick into bed, she had found a wad of notes in his trouser pocket. She had no idea where it had come from, but there was a very good chance that when Alick woke he wouldn’t remember anything about it. She had stashed it away as a tiny nest egg in case she and Calum found themselves out on the street one day.
Calum had really taken to Beth. She’d given him his bath tonight, and hearing the sounds of gleeful splashing from upstairs, Maidie had found herself smiling too as she made the tea. When Beth brought Calum back, beaming and glowing from his bath, she was looking happy as well. Maidie had never seen her like that; when she was laughing and smiling, she looked quite pretty.
Beth wasn’t smiling now. Maidie noticed that she hadn’t turned a page for half an hour and she was tearing at her nails. A bead of bright blood appeared as she tore off a strip of skin, but she only sucked her finger and went on staring blankly.
There was something badly wrong there. Maidie had tentatively asked her when they were on their own if she was very upset about her partner’s death, but Beth hadn’t confided, only saying that she just wanted to get away from here.
Well, they all had their problems. Maidie went back to contemplating her own.
When the sitting-room door opened every face turned expectantly to Cris Pilapil – Cara, Nico, Ryan, Hepburn, MacNee and Fleming. They had been watching some mindless quiz game of Nico’s choosing, which was, at least, better than background pop music and a strained atmosphere. The air almost seemed thickened by tension; Fleming was starting to feel she needed extra-deep breaths to get enough oxygen.
The burger he had demanded half an hour earlier was sitting half eaten on a coffee table, and Fleming was afraid that MacNee would disgrace her by falling on the remains if they had to wait much longer for Crozier to return. Pilapil had said he was dealing with some problem with his keeper – but why should it take so long? And why was Pilapil now looking like that?
‘No,’ he said to Nico, his voice very flat. ‘Someone to see you, Sergeant. Or the inspector.’
MacNee jumped to his feet; Fleming followed more slowly. She had been feeling uneasy; his tone sent a shiver through her. She didn’t want to have to confront whatever was out there. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes . . .’
Now she was being ridiculous. MacNee certainly wasn’t troubled. As the door shut behind them, he crowed, ‘The rescue party at last – about time too!’
‘Mmm.’ Fleming could only wish she shared his optimism. As MacNee preceded them down the corridor leading to the hall, she asked Pilapil if someone had come from across the river.
‘Not as far as I know.’ His face was drawn and anxious, and she was sure his mind, like hers, had gone to the absent Gillis Crozier.
The man who stood in the hall was the single man with dark hair and sideburns whom they had seen up at the campsite. He was quite tall and athletic-looking, with broad shoulders, and there was something about the way he was standing . . .
MacNee, recognising him too, stopped dead. ‘Oh – you.’ There was a wealth of disappointment in his tone.
Fleming stepped forward. ‘DI Fleming.’
‘Ma’am.’
So she was right. She turned to Pilapil. ‘Is there somewhere more private?’
‘Of course.’ He indicated one of the doors off the hall. Then he burst out, ‘Is this – is this bad news?’