Evil for Evil Read online

Afterwards, it came back to Marjory in flashes, in daytime nightmares: the grim drive through the darkness up to Glasgow, neither of them speaking and her own hands gripping the wheel so tightly that the knuckles shone white under the bleak lights of the motorway; the unnatural quiet of a busy hospital at night, familiar from a thousand professional visits, yet made ominous by her own terror; the confusion as neither she nor Bill could remember the directions they had been given, blundering through half-lit corridors into dead ends, shivering with cold and shock, and always the beat in their heads – ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry, before it’s too late.’

  They found the ward at last, and a nurse showed them into the families’ waiting room and said a doctor would be with them shortly. Marjory refused tea; she knew her teeth would clatter against the mug. Bill didn’t seem to have heard the offer.

  There was another woman there, a woman with disordered greying hair and clothes that looked to have been thrown on at random. Called out of her bed as they had been, no doubt, and from her drawn face she too was obviously under strain. Marjory managed something that was more of a rictus than a smile.

  To her surprise, she encountered something close to hostility. ‘Are you Catriona Fleming’s parents?’ the woman asked abruptly.

  Frowning, Marjory said, ‘Yes, we are. Who are you?’

  ‘Ann Bradshaw. I’m supposed to be your daughter’s academic adviser.’

  A red flush of anger came to Bill’s pale cheeks. ‘Supposed to be? You mean you’ve failed? My daughter could die because the woman who was supposed to be looking out for her welfare didn’t bother?’ He was shouting at her, shaking with emotion, his fists bunched at his sides.

  ‘I can understand that you’re in a state of distress, Mr Fleming,’ the woman said frostily, ‘but shouting won’t help. Perhaps if you would sit down, and let me explain—’

  ‘Explain!’ Bill exploded. ‘Explain!’

  Marjory, with a growing sense of dismay, touched his arm. ‘We need to know exactly what happened, Bill.’

  For a second he glared at the hand on his sleeve as if he might strike it off, then took a deep, shuddering breath and allowed his wife to pull him towards a chair.

  Focus, Marjory told herself. Try to block off the picture of your daughter slipping away in a room somewhere near here, the body systems closing down … Focus on what this woman is telling us. It would be easier if she didn’t feel so cold – was there no heating in here? Trying to control the shake in her voice, Marjory said, ‘What happened, Ms Bradshaw?’

  ‘Dr Bradshaw. As they presumably told you, Catriona was brought in with an overdose. She collapsed at a nightclub. Fortunately there were other students with her who knew who she was, and contacted me. At one o’clock in the morning.’ She didn’t sound thrilled about that.

  Bill bristled. ‘My daughter doesn’t take drugs,’ he said flatly.

  How many times had Marjory heard that from overwrought, naive parents? She wouldn’t have described herself as naive, though; she would swear she would have noticed the signs if Cat hadn’t been clean until now.

  ‘I think it may be a new development,’ she said. ‘Has Cat been finding it difficult to adjust to university life?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mrs Fleming.’ As Bill’s face got redder than ever, Dr Bradshaw hurried on, ‘She didn’t register. I left a note saying that I needed to see her, but got no reply. She hadn’t signed on for lectures, and she wasn’t in on the three occasions when I went to the hall of residence looking for her, and she ignored the other notes I left, asking her to get in touch. She seems to have dropped out before she ever started.’

  Bill staggered, then collapsed backwards into a chair as if he’d been punched. The angry colour drained from his face, leaving him looking so grey that for a terrified moment Marjory thought he’d had a heart attack. But he said, brokenly, ‘Dropped out? But this is what she’s wanted to do, all her life! She’s worked so hard—’

  ‘Will Irvine,’ Marjory said suddenly. ‘Her boyfriend – is he here?’

  Ann Bradshaw shook her head. ‘Not in the group she was with. I have to say, she doesn’t keep the best company.’

  Will and Cat had always been inseparable. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong … And then Marjory remembered: Mary Irvine – she hadn’t stopped to chat the other day. She’d thought it was strange at the time, but if Will had dumped Cat, that would explain it.

  What a time to choose, when Cat would be feeling insecure and vulnerable anyway! Her dreams of university had all been of being there with Will, studying together and moving on to happy-ever-after. Hot rage grew in Marjory’s heart at his callousness. If Cat died—

  She mustn’t let herself think that. Cat wasn’t going to die. Every weekend, in hospitals up and down the country, kids were brought in with overdoses – Marjory had seen plenty, and the medics were brilliant at saving them from the results of their folly.

  Not all of them, though. Marjory felt a huge, hard lump in her throat, felt the back of her eyes prickle – but she wasn’t going to cry in front of this unfriendly, judgemental woman.

  ‘I appreciate that you’ve been dragged out in the middle of the night, Dr Bradshaw,’ she said coldly, ‘and I should think you get tired of dealing with students who take drugs. But you are so obviously unsympathetic that I’m finding it very difficult to be in the same room with you. I’m sure you would rather be back in bed.’

  Dr Bradshaw got up, running a hand over her face. Her eyes, Marjory noticed, were red-rimmed with tiredness. ‘Indeed I would,’ she said. ‘I’m concerned for Catriona, of course I am. I apologise for sounding abrupt. But I’d never met her, and I spent most of last night here with one of my students who developed leukaemia last term. He died early this morning.

  ‘So, yes, I’m finding it hard to drum up sympathy for someone risking her healthy life for the sake of what she no doubt saw as a good time. I hope you have better news shortly.’ She went out.

  Marjory hung her head. She would have said she couldn’t feel any lower, but now she did. Bill, still slumped in his chair, was weeping quietly, and she couldn’t stop herself. Tears were rolling down her cheeks when the door opened.

  The registrar was young, and he looked tired as well. ‘Mr and Mrs Fleming? Your daughter will be fine. We’ll keep her in for another hour or two, but then you can take her home.’

  The relief was overwhelming, but his tone was cool too, and Marjory remembered wretchedly how often she had felt impatient when it came to these self-inflicted disasters. How different it all looked from the other side! And now, for the first time in her life, she understood how it felt to dread the power of the law.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. We’re truly, truly grateful. But will this … does this mean a report to the police?’

  ‘Not this time.’ His tone implied that there might well be a next, and worse time. ‘It was mephedrone – they call it bubbles, or meow-meow. A so-called legal high, though it’ll be classified very shortly. You can see her now, if you like.’

  Marjory said awkwardly, ‘I’m very sorry, Doctor. I know every parent says this, but she really hasn’t been someone involved in the drugs scene.’

  He smiled, briefly. ‘To be fair, from the effect it had and the amount she had taken, I don’t think she was habituated. Perhaps this will have given her enough of a fright to stop her trying it again.’

  ‘We’ll see to that.’ Bill was on his feet and his colour had returned.

  Marjory wanted to believe him, but her confidence was shaken. Cat’s reaction to her splintered dreams was unpredictable. She could turn her back on everything and look again for the solution she had chosen as a way of escape.

  Cat was dozing when they reached the ward, her face leaden and tear-stained, and Marjory stood looking down at her precious daughter with both pity and fear in her heart.

  DS Tam MacNee was tired. He gave a yawn which threatened to dislocate his jaw, but there were hours still ahead before he could abandon his self-imposed
vigil. He’d tuned the car radio to a sports chat station, but eventually even he felt it was telling him more than he wanted to know about football, and resorted to his own thoughts for company.

  How often, he wondered, had Rabbie himself mounted this sort of coastline watch when he was an exciseman? Maybe there had been a path right along here even then, at the end of the track past the chalets and caravans, where MacNee had parked. It would be colder, if you’d only a horse instead of a modern car, but Rabbie had certainly taken quite a bit of satisfaction in the arrests. Maybe it was a wee bit at odds with the image he’d liked to present, but MacNee wasn’t going to attribute hypocrisy, that most despised of Scottish vices, to his idol. He’d prefer to think of Rabbie having been a sort of eighteenth-century detective, doing the job MacNee was doing now and passing the hours of boredom in thought.

  He wasn’t sure the boss had believed him, but he had, indeed, done a bit of sorting out of his personal problem this afternoon. He’d had a chat with the doctor, who’d given him advice about a clinic and also about the level of topping-up needed meantime to keep Davie on an even keel. But the doctor had also warned him that Davie had to want to cooperate for rehab to be effective, and that was something MacNee didn’t want to think about.

  The other thing he’d done was to drop in on the excise boys at Stranraer. They were more than interested in what MacNee had to tell them, and happy to have a cutter on standby, ready to be called in at speed over these next few nights when there was no moonlight and a forecast of cloud cover – smugglers’ weather.

  If MacNee was right in his analysis, Brodie would be desperate to get a shipment in while the police had other things on hand and MacNee was apparently tied up dealing with his father. He’d be under pressure because he’d have known it wouldn’t be long before MacNee was back on his case. So – tonight, tomorrow night?

  At one stage he had thought he caught a flicker of movement on the island, but it was so dark that even with his powerful binoculars it was impossible to see clearly on land. It could well have been one of the deer anyway, and though he watched for a while he didn’t see it again. It was a boat he was looking for, which would be clear enough against the paler sea, but none had appeared.

  So not tonight, then. The red streaks of dawn were appearing, and with another enormous yawn MacNee turned the car and bumped off down the track again.

  With his mind totally taken up with the prospect of revenge, it was only as he drove back, seeing the burnt-out wing of the farmhouse below, that he spared it a thought. He had just driven past Sorley’s chalet, and he had little difficulty in attributing blame. What could be easier? A quick trip down with – what, petrol, paraffin? Then straight back up again before anyone knew what was going on. But it was one thing to see how it could be done, and another to be able to prove that it had been.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ Georgia Stanley said, ‘Matt’s not here. Round the farm, maybe, or over at the house.’

  ‘Right,’ DC Hepburn said. ‘I’ll go and have a look for him.’

  She had been cast down at first about Fleming’s absence this morning, but thinking quickly, she’d made her pitch with Sergeant Naismith to do the interviews herself before she could be allocated elsewhere. Naismith, looking frayed round the edges this morning, had nodded it through.

  Her plan had been to interview Lovatt first and Christie Jack after that, but she changed her mind.

  ‘Christie Jack – is she around?’

  The woman looked at her doubtfully. ‘Well, she is, yes, but she’s not herself – terribly shaken, poor lamb. They interviewed her yesterday and that upset her. Do you really have to put her through it again today?’

  Once you can fake sincerity, someone had once told her, you’ve got it made. Helped by soft brown eyes, Hepburn had made the skill her own.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, sounding genuinely regretful. ‘Afraid I do.’

  Georgia sighed. ‘Oh, I know you’ve got a difficult job. Through here, then. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. And maybe you could get her to eat a biscuit, if I brought some.’

  Her response was non-committal, and her mind was elsewhere as she followed Georgia through to the back of the house. Psychology had been one of the subjects she’d studied at uni, and she knew the characteristic profile for an arsonist: disturbed background, insecure, impulsive; often a loner, lacking love and support; suffering deep frustration; looking for revenge, perhaps, as some sort of remedy for emotional distress.

  Melissa Lovatt had been eloquent about Christie, and what she had said squared with most of that. When you pitched in an element of post-traumatic stress, the girl was almost a textbook case.

  Though it was a mild, sunny morning, Christie was sitting forlornly by the fire, her hands held out to it as if she were cold. Her eyes were blank and she had huge dark circles underneath them.

  ‘DC Hepburn.’ She showed her card.

  ‘Another one,’ Christie said dully. ‘I told them everything I could remember yesterday.’

  ‘I know. Sorry to have to bother you again, when you must be feeling pretty rubbish. Terrible experience.’ She had a very easy manner; she sat down on the chair on the other side of the fire and leant towards Christie, those sympathetic eyes fixed on her face.

  She gave a little shudder, but she responded to the tone. ‘Yes – yes, it was. Terrible.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m here to have a background chat, not to give you the third degree. Just to get a clearer picture, OK?’ She smiled, got a wan smile in return and went on, ‘It’s tough this should happen just when you were starting to get over your war experiences.’

  ‘Was.’ Christie sounded bitter. ‘They probably told you I had a flashback after I got Matt out of the fire.’

  Hepburn nodded, but she wasn’t interested in flashbacks at the moment. ‘Sort of thing you’re trained to do for a comrade, I suppose,’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ Christie agreed, a bit too eagerly. ‘That’s exactly right. And of course I tried to rouse Lissa first, but I didn’t know I was expected to go in and take her by the shoulders and shake her in case she’d doped herself.’ Christie couldn’t keep the antagonism out of her voice.

  Georgia came in with the coffee, just as if Hepburn had orchestrated a little pause so that her next question could sound more like conversation than interrogation.

  ‘Have a biscuit,’ she said, then as Christie shook her head, added, ‘Oh, come on. Georgia’s going to blame me if you don’t.’

  ‘Certainly am,’ Georgia said heartily, and Christie obediently put one on her plate, earning an encouraging smile from Georgia as she left.

  ‘I’m getting the impression Lissa wasn’t an easy person,’ Hepburn said. ‘Difficult, even.’

  Christie looked at her for a long moment, unconsciously crumbling the biscuit on to her plate. Then she burst out, as if unable to help herself, ‘She’s an absolute cow! Poor Matt – if ever there was a decent, honourable man, it’s him. You can see that all the constant whingeing really gets to him, but he’s so patient with her! And what does he get in return? She goes off and has an affair with Kerr Brodie, and flaunts it, right in front of him.

  ‘Mind you, I get the impression he won’t take it for ever. He’s been quite short with her lately when she’s been drooping around in that pathetic, poor-me way she has.’

  Hepburn was quite taken aback by the success of her chatty approach. There was real venom there, exposing the sort of hatred that might well prompt you, if not to kill, exactly, then perhaps not to strive too officiously to keep alive.

  ‘Did she give you a hard time as well?’ It sounded a casual question.

  ‘Oh God, yes! Little sniping remarks all the time, then foul hints about me having a crush on Matt. Really stupid.’

  Christie’s face, Hepburn saw, had taken on a flush of colour. She went on, ‘Of course I admire him! He just about saved my life, with this offer of somewhere I could go to try to get my head together. He didn’t have to; he’s
just a good person. And he gave Kerr a job too, when he’d probably have been on the scrap heap otherwise – so he goes screwing Matt’s wife. But there isn’t anything going on between me and Matt. I wish there was!’

  It was all there, wasn’t it? Smoothly, Hepburn went on to slotting in the other elements of the profile. ‘Have you family to go back to now, if the house is uninhabitable?’

  ‘Family?’ Christie laughed. ‘Went into care when I was about ten.’

  Disturbed childhood – tick. ‘That’s rough. So now …?’

  ‘Oh, they say we might be able to camp in the main house in a day or two, so I’ll hope to do that – if Lissa doesn’t kick me out for deliberately trying to leave her in a burning house. She’s getting out of hospital today.’

  It was time to up the pace. Hepburn’s voice grew a little harder.

  ‘Do you have access to a car?’

  Christie looked taken aback at the change of subject. ‘Yes, I can always borrow one if I want to go into town or something.’

  ‘Have you been in town lately?’

  ‘Not for the last few days – a week, maybe? Why?’ She had tensed up, sitting straighter in her chair.

  ‘Did you fill the car up?’

  ‘Fill the car up? Oh God, you’re asking about petrol, aren’t you? You think I set the house on fire?’

  ‘I don’t, Christie. It’s just there has been an accusation that you might have.’

  Christie swore. ‘It’s Lissa, isn’t it? Oh, you don’t have to answer, I know it is. She’d tell any lie to destroy me. And you were nice to me so you could fit me up – what a bitch!’ Her face was crimson with anger; she was shouting now.

  Impulsive – tick. Frustrated – tick. Looking for revenge – double tick.

  ‘Get out! Don’t come back, unless you’ve got proof – which you won’t have, because I didn’t do it. And I didn’t try to leave Lissa to burn. Pity she didn’t, though.’

  Georgia came hurrying through. ‘What on earth’s going on? Christie, are you all right?’