Cradle to Grave (38 page)

‘Aye.’

‘But they’ll see you right, if you’re made redundant?’

A slow smile spread across Buchan’s face. ‘Oh, aye, they’re seeing me right.’

They were wasting their time here. Buchan claimed to know nothing about foreign visitors, nothing about what sort of business it was.

The dogs in the kennels by the house worked themselves into a frenzy of barking as the detectives got back into the car. As they drove off, Kershaw said to Campbell, ‘Bought his silence, I suppose. And if he’s got money now, poor bloody Maidie will stay with him to get support for her child, no matter what he does to her when he’s drunk. Sometimes I really hate men.’

Campbell felt it wise to remain silent. But then, he hadn’t really been planning to say anything anyway.

‘Cara, I made the point to her as forcibly as I could,’ Joss Hepburn said, not trying to conceal his irritation at the woman who had come to meet them in the hall as they arrived back from Kirkluce. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to order police to do anything.’

Cara was twitching and blinking, licking her chapped lips, and she was not taking it well that Lisa Stewart was not about to be charged. ‘She killed my baby! She killed my father! She blackened my son’s name!’ She was screaming now. ‘And the police are on her side, and you don’t care – or you!’ She turned on her husband.

Ryan had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘Cara, it’s upstairs. I’ve put it in the dressing-table drawer for you. Go on. You’ll feel better.’

She looked at him wildly, then ran upstairs as if demons were chasing her. As perhaps they were.

Ryan looked at Hepburn with a defensive shrug. ‘I’ve tried, you know. It’s impossible—’

Hepburn cut him short. ‘I have obviously failed to convey to you how little your domestic problems interest me.’

‘You really are an unpleasant bastard! I can’t wait to get you out of my house.’

‘Your house? Is it? Presumably we have to wait until one of Alex’s colleagues produces the will. You never know what Cris may have persuaded him to do.’

Ryan stared at him. ‘You don’t think he’d leave his estate out of the family? If that little sod has got round him somehow, I’ll break his neck!’

‘Hey, hey! What a bloodthirsty guy you are,’ Hepburn said acidly. ‘I would have thought there were quite enough bodies around already. Anyway, we need Cris on our side, remember? We have to get together now and decide what the hell we’re to do.’

‘When are you going to phone the
Sun
about Fleming?’

‘When it suits me. But I warn you, it’s too late. She’ll have passed on what she knows already.’

‘Then the sooner the better,’ Ryan said with venom. ‘If I’m going down, I want to have the pleasure of seeing her tortured first.’

She still hadn’t sent for him. MacNee was under no illusion that Fleming was too busy, or had forgotten. No, she was just making him sweat – which he was doing, wishing he hadn’t been so bloody stupid. He had to get a grip; he barely knew himself these days.

He gazed unseeing at the computer screen in front of him. The trouble with Big Marge was that she was unpredictable. He’d worked with her closely all these years, yet he still didn’t know what she would have in mind. He didn’t think she’d go down the official disciplinary route; she might, of course, but that took time and he guessed that it would be something more immediately unpleasant.

Like taking him off the case. God, he would hate that! There were so many ideas whirling round in his head, ideas that he’d have liked to throw about with Marjory, one to one, without other people to shove their oar in.

Like Kershaw. If he was out, she would be in, taking his place with the boss – all girls together! He gave a snort, startling the detective working at the next terminal in the CID room.

He could wait to be sent for, get a bollocking, hear his sentence, say nothing and leave, or he could go now, say his piece and apologise. He would feel better then. It wouldn’t be enough, but it just might soften the blow and give him a way back in afterwards. Deliberately seeking out the lion to stick your head in its mouth was an uncomfortable thought, but he got up before he could change his mind.

His knock on Fleming’s door was tentative, though, and when Fleming looked up, he didn’t feel any better. She was frowning and her eyes were unfriendly.

‘Yes, MacNee?’

‘I’ve come to apologise, ma’am.’

‘Apology accepted. I daresay you realise it doesn’t make any difference?’ She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

He hadn’t thought she would. ‘I realise it was a serious breach of security, and that I dropped you in it personally. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m extremely angry,’ Fleming said. ‘Leaving aside the personal angle, and the breach, what you did was put me at a considerable disadvantage with a murder suspect, who now knows that one of my subordinates was deliberately trying to humiliate me. Not clever, MacNee.’

Put like that, it wasn’t. ‘I accept that. I thought you’d maybe get more out of him than we would, but I wish I’d never done it now.’

‘You and me both.’ Fleming wasn’t giving him an inch.

‘I can only say again that I’m sorry, ma’am, and take the consequences.’

‘My first reaction was to drop you from the team, but you are professionally useful and while you have something to offer you have to stay. There are conditions, though. In the first place, you have to stop this childish sniping at Kim Kershaw. I’ve had more than enough of it. Secondly, I’m grounding you. Your job, until I change my orders, is sitting at a desk reviewing all the evidence that comes in. You can make a digest of anything you think significant and present it to me before the afternoon briefing each day.’

MacNee didn’t even try to argue. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘That’s all, Sergeant.’ Fleming turned back to her computer screen.

He hesitated, about to say something, then thought better of it. He was almost at the door when there was a knock and DC Kershaw came in, looking smug.

‘Hope you’re not too busy, boss? I wanted to tell you myself – we’ve got some good new evidence. Lisa Stewart admitted Williams was her partner and claims she found him dead the night before. According to her, he’d texted her to ask her to meet him, so she took his mobile phone from his pocket to remove the link with her. She threw it into the sea after she arrived at Rowantrees Hotel, but Campbell and I went paddling and found it. I’ve sent it off to the labs.’

Fleming’s face brightened. ‘Well done, Kim. That just might be the breakthrough we need. Give me a quick rundown on your interview with Lisa Stewart.’

Kershaw sat down as MacNee left, sick at heart, with his departure unacknowledged.

Lisa Stewart sat at the window of her bedroom, looking out over the front garden and Wigtown Bay. She wasn’t seeing the view, though, or even little Rosie playing with her sister in the garden below. She was trying to repair her fragmented self.

Once, she might have been angry about what had happened to her, but somehow now she hadn’t the energy for anger any more. She had stayed perfectly calm at first under the detective’s questioning, safe inside the shell where no one could reach her no matter what they said, but there were dangerous cracks in it now. The toddler this morning had opened up one of them, and Lisa had found herself telling – had
wanted
to tell – Jan Forbes about her own baby.

And Granny’s frying pan! That had opened up another, as she remembered being a little girl, watching her grandmother make the best girdle scones in the world in the pan that had belonged to
her
mother, and her grandmother before that.

She hadn’t been able to scuttle back quickly enough. She’d handed herself to the police on a plate. Oh, they hadn’t done anything yet, but they would, in their own time. Lisa had been there before; she knew all too well the slow torture of the process.

She had seen the detectives down on the shore, finding the mobile, which she hadn’t thrown hard enough or far enough. Even so, they wouldn’t be able to read the deleted text message – and thank God, she was so hardened to thinking about Crozier that the shell wasn’t threatened when they got on to that.

But it was all beginning again, the horror. The questioning, the statements, the re-questioning to try to trip you up, the relief when a day or two passed and you thought they’d believed you, then the ring at the doorbell, which set your heart thumping as you realised they were stalking you, wearing you down, until the moment when they pounced.

And now gradually, bit by bit, they would drag everything out, her shell would be shattered, and she would, quite simply, fall apart. Lisa would be back in the dock and this time there wasn’t a jury in the country who would acquit her.

Supposing, just supposing, it didn’t come to that. Suppose they charged someone else instead. What then?

For a long time Lisa hadn’t looked to her future. Getting through each day was challenge enough. Now she looked, it was bleak indeed.

A wail from the garden below caught her attention. Rosie had fallen; her sister was picking her up now and lugging her into the hotel to find comfort.

Tears started to Lisa’s eyes. She would never again be in a pos-ition to kiss it better for a crying child. And who would give her any sort of job, with a past like hers? The road ahead of her, like the one to Rosscarron Cottages, led to nowhere.

And if Gillis could always find her, the Ryans could too. The messages would start again and she would wake every morning with a sick dread of what the day might bring.

What was the point of struggling on? She just wanted it all to stop – she was tired, so tired! She hadn’t the strength to go on. There was no point.

The answer was obvious, once you thought about it. All she looked for was peace, and since she hadn’t found it even in this tranquil, reassuring place, there was only one way to get it. The means was right there below.

Lisa got up. She needed to act before her courage failed her, but then she hesitated. There was still unfinished business. She had lived stigmatised as a murderer; she didn’t want to die with her side of the story untold. And Jan – wise, kind, Jan . . . Lisa owed her the truth.

She had a pen in her bag, but no paper. Sometimes hotels had notepaper and envelopes, so she looked in all the drawers, but there was nothing. The only paper was a sheet lying on the dressing table, detailing meal times and facilities.

It would have to do. She sat down and turned it over to the blank side. She began to write, slowly at first, then faster, writing as small as she could to get all she wanted to say on to that one sheet – her last words.

Lisa didn’t read it over when she had finished. She folded it in four, wrote, ‘JAN,’ on the front of it on top of the hotel information and stood up. She took a deep breath, then walked out of the room.

There was no one in the hall, but she could hear Rosie’s subsiding wails from the hotel lounge. Lisa propped her letter on a little table by the front door, then walked out. As the door closed, a gust of air caught the flimsy note. It wafted off the surface, landing underneath an old-fashioned hat-stand.

Lisa walked down the drive, under the rowan trees, which had not, after all, protected her from harm, then across the road and between the whin bushes on to the shore.

The sea was silky calm today, a dark greyish-blue under an overcast sky. The lapping of the waves was a soothing sound, almost like a lullaby. There was a sweet, coconut perfume in the air from the yellow flowers of the whin.

Lisa stepped into the water, gasping from shock at how cold it was. She was shivering with nerves and her heart was beating so hard that it felt as if it might leap out of her chest. Turn back now? She didn’t have to do this . . .

But tomorrow would be another day of torment, and then there would be another, then another, until— They said drowning was an easy death.

She took a deep, deep breath and then another step into the water, and one more, and one more until she was walking steadily into the sea. The penetrating cold was painful at first, but as she went further and further, she began to feel a curious sort of warmth, and at last the ground dropped away from under her feet.

19

Jan Forbes sat knitting in a chair by the window of the Rowantrees Hotel lounge, her plastered leg up on a stool in front of her. She looked over her spectacles with an indulgent smile as Rosie’s mother tried to convince her daughter that the barely visible scratch on her knee was unlikely to prove fatal.

She glanced down at her pattern chart and back at the knitting, pulled a face and started picking back the previous row. The ball of elephant-grey wool slipped off her knee and she reached down awkwardly to fetch it. As she straightened up, she glanced out of the window, then stared, at first unable to take in what she was seeing.

‘Oh! Oh, no, it’s my friend!’ She swung her leg off the stool and struggled to her feet as Rosie’s father came over to see what had upset her. ‘She’s walking into the water – I think she’s trying to drown herself?!’

Before she had finished the sentence, the man was out of the room and running down the drive.