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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: DI Marjory Fleming
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Marnie Bruce has hyperthymesia; she can remember everything she has ever seen. Everything except from one fateful night when she was eleven; she woke up in an isolated cottage with a head injury and her mother gone. Twenty years later Marnie heads back to Scotland seeking answers to what happened, but in the small town of Galloway, her mother's disappearance still burns in the air and Marnie's return looks set to tear open old wounds for many of the locals.
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Contents
PROLOGUE
1986
She sometimes felt as if her writhing thoughts were a nest of snakes inside her head. From time to time one would raise its ugly head and hiss and spit venom.
That was happening now, with the poison of rage flooding her veins and making a mockery of all the anger management classes she’d been forced to undergo. She’d had enough of being told what to do, more than enough, enough to the point where she felt she might explode.
She daren’t, though. Her nails dug into the palms of her hands so hard that later she would find neat, bloody crescents right across them.
He’d said no, the bastard. Just flatly, no, this young man with his earnest gaze, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the chair in her living room. It wasn’t the way he usually talked. They were trained to be professionally sympathetic.
Feeble, she called it. She despised him and she certainly wasn’t going to take this from him. She gave him a sideways look, the one she had perfected long ago, the ‘drop dead’ look.
It flustered him. ‘Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t have said it that way. But really, you mustn’t. It’s just that for your own sake you can’t do it. It would be crazy.’
‘So I’m crazy.’ Her voice was flat.
He was starting to sound desperate. ‘Look, I can’t understand why you would want to do it. You’d be signing your own death warrant.’
She shrugged. ‘You can’t stop me, can you? The condition is that I report, right?’ She wasn’t as certain as she sounded.
‘Well, I suppose that’s true, there are no actual injunctions, but—’
She got up. ‘That’s it, then. I’m going.’
That forced him to get up too. ‘I’ll have to take this up with my line manager,’ he was bleating as she showed him the door.
She shut it behind him. She’d be long gone by the time he came back and without direct legal authority they wouldn’t risk removing her against her will. She’d only have to threaten to scream the place down and they’d back off.
She went to the phone. Her daughter was watching some sort of dumb kids’ programme in the corner and she said, ‘Switch that thing off!’
The girl eyed her thoughtfully, looking for storm signals. Apparently finding them, she stopped. The expression on her face was too old for her years as she watched her mother pick up the phone.
He’d been waiting for the call; he sounded impatient too.
‘Well?’
‘I told him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘No. But I told him he couldn’t actually stop me and he admitted it. So that’s it.’
His voice warmed. ‘Well done, girl. Start packing.’
She felt the warm glow of his approval, but as she put down the phone, another snake stirred.
She didn’t really want to go back to Scotland – certainly not back to Galloway. She was tired of moving around and yes, she was scared. But he wanted her to move back. He needed her. He’d never said that before.
He was her centre, the core of her being. Girlfriends could be counted on the thumb of one hand; motherhood was just something that happened to you. But him …
He’d lied to her, cheated on her, abandoned her. And worse, much worse. Without him, her life would have been – well, she’d long ago decided not to go there. She’d vowed before that she was finished with him, but this time he’d promised it would be different and she almost believed him – almost.
The nasty thought, that it was hardly the first time he’d said that, popped into her mind and she had to force it back into the snake pit. It was different. He was different. He needed her, wanted her to be with him. It made her feel as if someone had wrapped a warm, fluffy blanket round her thin shoulders.
She went to her bedroom and dragged the suitcases down off the top of the wardrobe.
PART ONE
1993
CHAPTER ONE
A scream. It ripped through the silence of the trees around the cottage as a knife slashes silk.
Then the silence slithered back again as if no sound had ever banished it, as if this was just another October night with a touch of ground mist so that the pine branches appeared ghostly, floating on the thickened air.
The woman knitting by the fire looked up. ‘What was that?’ she said.
Caught up in the synthetic excitement being blared out from the TV in the corner as the goal attempt failed, her husband only grunted.
She raised her voice, irritably. ‘What was that, I said. It sounded like a scream.’
‘Oh – vixen, most likely. They’re mating just now.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘That’s half-time. How about a cuppa?’
‘You know where the kettle is.’ She went on knitting, but when he made no move, sighed, ‘Oh, all right then. Just let me finish this row.’
Before she put on the light in the kitchen, she peered out of the little window above the sink towards the direction the sound had come from but she couldn’t see anything, except a light glimmering faintly through the mist where the cottage stood on the other side of the main road among the trees. As she watched, it went out.
She shrugged, switched on the light and the kettle. If there were foxes around, they’d be after her hens. He could always get off his backside and go out right now with his shotgun – fat chance!
In the cottage, the girl stirred into pain-filled consciousness. Her head hurt, really badly, and she was lying on her face. With a struggle, she turned over and opened her eyes; that hurt too.
There had been something – some noise … She tried to sit up, but she felt so sick and dizzy that she had to lie down again. She wanted to put on the light by her bed but it was too far away to reach without lifting her head.
She put up her hand and tentatively explored the sorest part. There was a huge lump and her hair was wet and sticky. She must have hurt herself. She felt strange, sort of fuzzy and muddled inside.
She couldn’t remember what had happened, couldn’t remember going to bed. That felt weird. She could always remember everything perfectly. Much too perfectly.
She didn’t know what time it was either. It was pitch-dark outside, but that didn’t tell her much. At this time of year it could be dark at five in the afternoon.
Out here by the forest it was always like this at night if there wasn’t a moon, but now, with her sore head and her mind being all weird, she was scared. ‘Mum!’ she called. ‘Mum!’
There was no answer, no reassuring sound of movement. Sometimes Mum took pills and couldn’t hear her so that when she needed her, if she was ill or something, she had to go and shake her awake, but she knew that if she got up now she’d be sick. She called again but there was still no answer or sound of movement.
She began to cry. The sobs hurt her head and she bit on her lip to stifle them, but she couldn’t stop the tears running down into her ears.
It was cold, too. It was never very warm in this house, but there seemed to be a worse draught than usual coming through the open door of her bedroom. She’d begun to shiver and then she realised she wasn’t under the covers at all, she was sort of lying as if she’d fallen across the bed. She wasn’t in her pyjamas either: she was still wearing her black miniskirt and bomber jacket.
At least she could wriggle under the duvet without lifting her head. That was better. And if she got back to sleep it would be morning when she woke up and Mum would be awake. Probably.
When Marnie opened her eyes again it was daylight – a grudging daylight, gloomy and overcast, with rain streaming down the windowpanes and the trees outside making that roaring noise like the sea. Her head was pounding as if someone was beating it like a drum, and when she sat up, she vomited without warning.
‘Mum!’ she wailed. ‘I’ve been sick!’
The smell was disgusting and now she could see there was blood on her cover too from where she had been lying – a big dark-red stain. She was frightened now. The next ‘Mum!’ was a scream, but there was still no reassuring reply.
The door of her bedroom was open and there was cold air blowing through it – really blowing, not just the usual draughts through ill-fitting door frames. Her teeth were beginning to chatter and she couldn’t huddle under the stinking duvet or the stench would make her sick again.
Dizzy and unsteady, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She was swaying on her feet when she heard a man’s voice.
‘Hello! Anybody in?’
Why should a man be there? But at least it was someone. Marnie staggered across the room and out into the hall.
There was a man standing there, a man holding a shotgun. She gave a cry of terror; her legs buckled and she fell in a heap on the floor.
Douglas Boyd had been stumping along in the pouring rain, his shotgun broken over his arm, muttering under his breath as he walked along the road. Peggy had been on about the foxes she’d heard last night since she opened her eyes this morning – her and her blasted hens!
She insisted their screams had come from this direction, but there wasn’t a chance he’d find a sign of them at this hour of the day when they’d been cavorting all night, and weather like this would wash away even the rank smell that hung around the beasts. The only thing to be said for it was that it got him out the house.
He had been passing the old forestry cottage on the other side of the road when he noticed the front door was standing open, and stopped for a moment, uncertainly.
They didn’t have anything to do with the people here, even though they were their nearest neighbours. Peggy had gone over there to say hello when they’d moved in a few years ago, but she’d not even been asked over the threshold and the woman had been a bit tarty-looking, Peggy said, with unnaturally jet-black hair. There was a man around occasionally and Douglas had seen the girl out in the garden quite often but she seemed shy and these days trying to get to know a kiddie wasn’t a smart thing to do.
He’d seen Bill Fleming’s wife there a couple of times too, recently, her that was with the polis now. When he’d told Peggy, she’d sniffed and said that in that case she wasn’t their kind of people and they’d just keep themselves to themselves, thank you very much. So they had.
There was no car outside, but with the front door standing open, it looked as if they’d gone off in a hurry and forgotten to shut it. Well, he and Peggy didn’t always lock their own door, living out here, but this was just an invitation to any lowlife passing in a car. He’d been planning to do his good deed for the day and just close it for them, if they weren’t about, but he had called as he stepped into the hall in case he was poking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
His shock at the appearance of the bloodstained girl, her cry of alarm and her collapse, set his heart beating at a rate that wasn’t healthy for a man of his age. She was looking up at him pitifully from the floor, her blue eyes wide with fear. He could see there was an ugly wound on the back of her head.
It was rather more than he’d bargained for, doing his good neighbour bit, but this was a poor wee soul needing his help and comfort. He pulled himself together and realised she was staring at the shotgun, transfixed. He set it down hastily.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I was just out after foxes that were screaming last night. You know me, don’t you? Douglas Boyd, from along the road. Dearie me, whatever’s happened to you, lassie?’
She didn’t say anything, as if she was too traumatised to speak.
He looked round, helplessly. ‘Where’s your mum?’
The tears came. ‘I don’t know! I’ve been calling and calling.’
Douglas’s heart sank. An injured child was bad enough, but a mother who didn’t answer, in a situation like this … And maybe the scream hadn’t been the foxes, after all.
‘You’re needing to lie down and have a wee rest,’ he said. ‘Can you stand up, do you think, if I help you?’
Still crying, she pushed herself up onto her feet with his supporting arm but when he tried to lead her back to the room she had come from, she resisted.
‘No. It’s – messy.’
A door to his right was open and he could see a sofa. ‘You could go in there,’ he suggested, then added hastily, ‘just let me take a wee look first to see if there’s somewhere you could lie down.’
It was a lame excuse but she didn’t seem to notice, standing there obediently as he put his head round the door, braced for what he might find.
The room was very untidy, with a brown imitation leather suite and a wood-veneer coffee table and a carpet that seemed a stranger to the hoover. The air stank of stale smoke and there was an ashtray overflowing with stubs among the clutter: magazines, circulars, a wine glass, a bottle of white wine, empty. Discarded clothes were draped over the back of one of the chairs and a pair of shoes had been abandoned on the hearth beside the ashes of a dead fire.
At least there was nothing untoward here. Douglas puffed out a little sigh of relief. Turning to tell the girl she could come in, he noticed a plastic witch’s mask tossed down on one of the armchairs, along with a black cardboard pointed hat with an orange frill round the bottom.
Halloween. He was not a superstitious man, but at the thought of what had been happening here on that night of dead souls and unquiet spirits he gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Come on in, then,’ he called. ‘You can have a wee lie-down on the sofa and I’ll go and see if I can find your mum. She’s probably asleep.’
The girl trailed in, shivering. He helped her onto the sofa and found a cushion to tuck under her poor head; she didn’t say anything, just watched him silently as he went back out to the hall.
The doors to the kitchen and bathroom were both standing open so he could see they were empty too. The door to the other bedroom, though, was closed. Taking a deep breath, he opened it.
His first thought was that it had been ransacked, but given the state of the sitting room she’d probably been the kind to use the floor as a laundry basket anyway. The bed was unmade and the kidney-shaped dressing table was covered with pots and jars, some with their lids off, and a thin, greasy layer of powder lay on the glass top. There was another ashtray there as well, with a couple of stubs in it.
Douglas couldn’t be sure immediately that this room, too, was empty; there could be … anything, hidden under the rumpled duvet on the unmade bed or under one of the piles of clothing on the floor or even in the wardrobe.
The bed first. He pulled back the duvet – nothing below. There was nothing under the clothes, either, which left only the wardrobe.
It was a flimsy construction, with the door sagging a little on its hinges and a key holding it shut. With a feeling of dread Douglas turned it and the door swung open under its own weight.
She wasn’t there, either, just some clothes hanging up and a lot of shoes tumbled in the bottom.
He’d been steeling himself for horror and now he felt at a loss. Was the woman outside, perhaps, lying injured or even dead? But the car was gone – an attacker couldn’t have driven off in two cars. Could she possibly have walked out on her injured daughter? Or even have done the injuring herself, then left her? It was hard to imagine, but you read such terrible things in the papers these days.
He could hear the child giving the occasional frightened sob. So what now? Police and ambulance, obviously.
The phone was in the hall. He shut the sitting-room door, made his call, then went back in again.
‘Your mum seems to have gone out, pet, but you’ve had a nasty knock on the head so they’re going to send an ambulance to take you in to get a doctor to take a wee look at it. All right? I expect your mum’ll be back shortly.’
His voice sounded too hearty, even to himself. She didn’t say anything, just began to cry again.
The children’s ward was bright with pictures and posters, with a corner for toys and games at one end where convalescent children were playing. The patients here expected to be discharged within days: it wasn’t one of these heart-rending places where wan and listless invalids lay connected up to machines and drips.
The mother of small children herself, PC Marjory Fleming was grateful for that but she didn’t like hospitals anyway. They were too hot and felt completely airless when you were used to the open-air life on your husband’s farm. She’d joined the police force last year, not, as her father liked to think, because she wanted to follow in his footsteps but because she wanted a job where she wouldn’t spend her days shut up in some office.
As she strode down the ward towards another policewoman who was sitting by one of the beds, she seemed to bring a breath of fresh air in with her: an athletic-looking woman only a little under six feet, bright-faced, with hazel eyes and chestnut hair pulled into a neat ponytail under her police hat.
The other officer got up as she approached, spoke briefly to the patient, then came to meet her, yawning as she put her hat back on.
‘At last! I’m really needing my bed.’
‘Sorry! Everything’s about at a standstill with the roadworks coming in. How is she?’ Fleming nodded towards the girl in the bed, lying staring at the ceiling.
The other woman pulled a face. ‘Not saying much, apart from asking when her mum will be coming. I’ve stalled her so far, but she’ll have to be told something soon. They’re saying she’s fine and they need the bed. Any progress?’
‘Car’s gone and mother’s just disappeared. They’re going through the house just now and there’s details out talking to the neighbours. If she’s feeling chatty I can encourage her but I’ve been warned it’s just guard duty. If I question her before the fancy-pants CID get here they’ll have my guts for garters.’
The constable laughed, smothered another enormous yawn and left. Fleming turned to watch her go, nerving herself to approach the girl. She hadn’t been entirely open with her colleague; there were reasons for that but it made her uncomfortable.
She couldn’t put it off any longer. She took off her hat and jacket, laying them on one of the chairs at the bedside, then sat down.
‘Hello, Marnie. Do you remember me?’
The girl had a bandage round her head and her red-gold hair was still matted with dried blood. She was lying back against the pillows as if she lacked the energy to sit up but as Fleming spoke she turned to look at her, blue eyes vivid in her white face.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice was thin and shaky. ‘You come to see my mum sometimes. The last time you were wearing a raincoat and it had brown buttons and you had an orange and browny-green jersey and jeans and tan boots. You said, “Hello, Karen, just coming for a chat, all right?” And she said yes and then you both went into the sitting room and shut the door.’
Fleming was amused. ‘My goodness, you do have a good memory, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Marnie said flatly.
‘How are you feeling? That’s a seriously impressive bandage.’ It sounded phoney, even as she said it, the result of her own unease. The girl was too old – ten, eleven, perhaps? – to be jollied along.
Not surprisingly, it was ignored. ‘When will my mum be here?’
‘Sorry, Marnie, I’m afraid I don’t know. She’ll probably be along later.’ She hated saying something she didn’t believe to be true but she had no authority to say anything else.
‘You’re in the police. Something’s happened to my mum, hasn’t it?’
‘Possibly’ was the answer, and if Fleming were to be truthful that wasn’t the worst-case scenario. She deflected the question.
‘Something happened to your head. That’s why I’m here. We’re trying to find out what went on last night.’ She risked adding, ‘Do you know?’ hoping that this wouldn’t be stepping on CID toes. She didn’t want to wreck her chances before she even got round to applying to join them.
‘I-I don’t know. I just can’t remember. I don’t understand it – I can’t remember!’
Marnie was getting distressed and Fleming hurried to reassure her. ‘You’ve had a head injury. That’s what often happens – you find you’ve got a blank about it. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn’t.’
She saw her assimilate that, then after a moment Marnie turned her head to meet her eyes squarely.
‘You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?’
‘We don’t really know anything, just at the moment.’ That, at least, was true. She changed the subject. ‘What about your dad? Will he be coming to see you?’
Marnie turned her head away. ‘Don’t know.’
An uncomfortable area, obviously. Would pursuing it be acceptable chatting or the forbidden questioning? Fleming hesitated, but only for a moment. It was her insatiable appetite for answers that made her so keen to join the CID.
‘Does he live with you, your dad?’
‘No.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Don’t know.’ Marnie still wasn’t looking at her, perhaps uncomfortable at having to admit that.
The instinct to probe the sore spot was too strong to resist. ‘Would you like us to try to find him – tell him you’ve been hurt so he could come and see you?’
‘No!’ The response was too vehement and Marnie winced.
There were more questions Fleming itched to ask but she could see that risked going too far. ‘Does your head still hurt?’ she asked instead.
‘A bit. But it’s OK. I just want to go home with my mum.’
‘The doctor will have to decide. You’ll be getting a day or two off school, that’s for sure.’
‘I like school. Nothing to do at home and Mum doesn’t like me having friends coming round.’
Fleming was opening her mouth to ask the follow-up ‘Why?’ when she saw DS Tam MacNee coming down the ward towards her: short, wiry, walking with his usual jaunty swagger and wearing his unvarying uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, trainers and a black leather jacket.
She gave a guilty start, but her face brightened too. MacNee had only recently joined the CID and before that had been her sergeant and mentor since she joined the force. She got up and moved away from the bed.
‘Just having a wee chat, were you?’ He raised an eyebrow and she blushed.
‘I wasn’t interrogating her, I swear. She just started telling me about her mum – didn’t like having people round the place, apparently.’
‘She wouldn’t, would she? Mmm. Anything else the lassie “just started telling you?”’
Fleming ignored his cynical look. ‘She doesn’t know where her dad is and she’s sensitive about it.’
‘Oh, you’re the wee girl! We’ll have you in the CID before long, no doubt about it. Maybe not right this morning, though. I’ll take over now. Anything else?’
‘Just wants to know when her mother’s coming.’
‘You’ve not said anything about it, have you?’
‘Instructed not to.’
He sighed. ‘Well, I’m not wanting to do it either. You know what they’re thinking?’
‘Oh yes, I know,’ Fleming said heavily. ‘You’re not going to tell her that, though, are you?’
‘I’ll have to tell her there’s someone from social services coming to take her into care. But apart from that …’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll just say we don’t know. And that’s God’s truth.’
The little man who said he was a detective kept asking her questions. What was the point of them? He was wanting to know where her mother was – like she didn’t? – and he seemed to be expecting her to tell him. There was something about the questions, too, that made her uncomfortable.
Had they had a row last night?
That started it, the spool unrolling in her head as if she was watching a film …
She puts on a coat before going into the sitting room to cover up what she’s wearing. Mum’s in one of her moods at the moment, ready to go mental at the least thing and she’ll go radge if she sees the skirt. She’s sitting smoking and just staring straight ahead, and she’s opened a bottle of white wine.
‘I’m just off into the town, Mum.’
Her mother looks at her across the cigarette, eyes narrowed against the smoke. ‘What for?’
She holds up her witch’s hat and mask. ‘Just guising. Halloween, you know?’
Weirdly, her mother looks sort of horrified, staring at her and even choking on her cigarette. ‘No! I won’t—’ Then stops and there’s a long moment when she doesn’t say anything and her eyes are stretched open wide.
‘Won’t what, Mum?’ She feels uneasy.
‘It’s, it’s …’ Mum’s groping for words, then she says, ‘It’s not safe, hanging around the streets on your own.’
‘I’m meeting Gemma.’
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say even before she says it. Her mum hates it when she has anything to do with Gemma – something to do with business and her father. Her mum kicks off.
‘I’ve told you before to steer clear of Gemma—’
‘You tell me to steer clear of everyone! You’d rather I didn’t have any friends at all, in case they want to come out here. What’s with you, Mum? What have you got to hide?’
Her mother jumps up, white with anger. ‘That’s it, Marnie. You’re staying here. You’re grounded.’
‘I’m not, Mum. I’m going and you can’t stop me.’ She jinks out of the door but not before her low-cut T-shirt and miniskirt has been noticed.
‘You’re not to go out looking like a slapper,’ her mother screams after her, sounding angry, but as she runs out of the house and walks along to the place where the bus will stop she can hear the sound of crying. It makes her feel guilty and she hesitates, but then the lighted bus is coming round the corner and she shrugs her shoulders and lifts her hand to hail it.
The policeman was sitting patiently, watching her as he waited for an answer. As she focused on his face again, he smiled at her, showing the gap between his two front teeth. He’d looked nicer when he wasn’t smiling.
‘A row?’ he prompted her.
‘Well, sort of,’ Marnie said. ‘She didn’t want me going into town to meet my friend. Wasn’t anything out of the usual.’
‘How do you get on with your mum generally?’
‘Oh, fine.’
She felt as if his eyes were boring holes in her, but she wasn’t going to say anything else about that. None of his business. She volunteered, instead, that she could remember coming home, but nothing after that.
And then it all starts again.
She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home. She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, and with the row they’d had, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto a chair. The fire’s not quite out so Mum must just have gone to bed. Great – she only needs to shout through the bedroom door and go to bed herself.
She stands in the hall. ‘I’m back, Mum,’ she calls and goes on into her bedroom and—
Then the reel snapped and Marnie was back looking at the policeman. He asked her some more questions but it was making her head sore and she turned away and shut her eyes.
She heard him say, ‘A lady’ll be coming soon to take you somewhere you can stay till we find your mum, OK?’
Marnie knew what that meant – taken into care. Her mum had told her long ago that if she said something silly to a teacher about being left alone in the house or anything else, that would happen. Tears formed and trickled out from under her closed eyelids. All she wanted was her mum to come back and take her home. It wasn’t great, living with her mum, but it was all she knew. Surely her mum couldn’t have walked out on her?
The terrible thing was, she wasn’t absolutely sure that she wouldn’t. But if she hadn’t, where was she? Marnie started to feel sick again.
Superintendent Jakie McNally was under pressure this afternoon. The chief constable, no less, was making waves and McNally was old school. What the CC wanted the CC got and what he wanted was the Marnie Bruce business wrapped up before too many people started asking questions, so he could do without one of the most junior of the PCs doing just that. She was sitting in front of him now, her bright-eyed eagerness both a threat and a reproach.
‘PC Fleming, you know the background as well as I do. You were sworn to complete confidentiality when you took over monitoring from MacNee.’
‘Yes, sir, but I—’
He talked across her. ‘You know that there is absolutely no sign of an intruder or a struggle, and no evidence that there was anyone in the house that evening apart from Marnie and her mother. You know they’ve combed the woods and there’s nothing. You know the missing car was found in the station car park in Dumfries and they’ve checked it out – nothing.’
‘Yes, but—’
Fixing her with a look, he went on, ‘You and I both know why the outcome isn’t surprising, surely?’
‘Of course I do, sir.’ Fleming had taken a deep breath to be ready to power through. ‘I know it’s a possibility, but I think it’s only fair to the child—’
That was as far as she got. ‘It was, mercifully, just a knock on the head and she’s well on the way to a full recovery. We’ll be looking for the woman quietly, of course, but if we go public on this, perhaps you could explain to me in what way this would be “fair” to the child?’
Silenced, Fleming bit her lip.
McNally relaxed. ‘You see, Marjory – it is Marjory, isn’t it? – policing isn’t only about exposing the brutal truth. Sometimes it’s about tempering justice with mercy.
‘All right? That’s a good girl. Run along, sweetheart.’
Seething with anger, PC Marjory Fleming went back down the stairs from the inspector’s office, wishing she’d had the courage to say that in her view, what justice was being tempered with was not mercy but expediency.
PART TWO
2013
CHAPTER TWO
Marnie Bruce walked slowly up Oxford Street in the autumn dark, late October starting to tip towards bleak November. The air was damp and heavy with the hint of fog splintering the light from the street lamps and cars and buses into brilliant shards. The shops were closed but the shop window displays cast bright patches of light on the pavement, slicked with damp.
Waves of people swept past her so that she felt almost buffeted in their wake, people who had homes to go to or friends to see or plans for theatres or restaurants or parties, people who weren’t walking huddled round the misery inside which felt like a great sharp stone, weighing you down and cutting into you at the same time.
She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, just that it was somewhere to go, and she glanced aimlessly into the windows of the shops she passed: clothes she couldn’t afford, gadgets she didn’t want, souvenirs of a London that bore no relation to the city she lived in. And skull masks, plastic skeletons, witches’ hats, bats on nylon strings, swooping across under green and orange light.
Halloween next week. October 31st, All Hallows’ Eve. Her mother would never let her celebrate it, and after what happened the one time Marnie had, she didn’t like it either: the Day of the Dead, when restless souls stirred from their sleep, awakening heedless mortals to their duty of memory.
Marnie needed no reminder. She never forgot anything. That was the problem.
‘You’re freaking me out!’ he cries suddenly. He’s putting his hands up to cover his face, groaning. ‘I can’t take this any more. It’s doing my head in.’
She is still high on the satisfaction of being right, sitting across from him in the tiny rented flat above a Chinese takeaway that they’ve made so nice. They keep it nice too; she hates mess.
‘What do you mean?’ She is feeling the adrenaline ebbing away. ‘Don’t be stupid, Gary. It’s just an argument, that’s all.’
‘Oh no,’ he says bitterly. ‘It’s not an argument. It’s a demolition job.’
‘Gary, it’s just that you said you’d told me yesterday that you were going to be late and you didn’t, and I—’
‘Yes, you played me back the whole evening, every sodding word. You know how people talk about CCTV cameras spying on them in the street? Try living with one.’
She’s beginning to feel panicky, as if someone has put a hand round her throat. ‘Sorry, Gary, sorry! I won’t do it again—’
She has to stop another clip starting to run in her head, the one when they’re out in the park and she’s saying, ‘Sorry, Gary, I won’t do it again.’ There are others waiting to follow; she talks over them fiercely.
‘I know I’ve said it before—’
He gives a harsh laugh. ‘Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? I expect you can tell me every single time, with a description of where we were and what I was wearing and what the weather was like. The thing is you can’t help it, no matter what you say.’
She’s crying now. ‘It’s a disability, Gary. You wouldn’t blame me if I couldn’t walk, or if I was blind.’
He looks down at her – he’s tall, Gary, and not specially hot or anything, but she thinks he’s nice-looking with brown eyes and a kind smile. He isn’t smiling now.
‘It wouldn’t be weird if you were in a wheelchair or you couldn’t see. I’ve tried, but this is getting to me so it’s messing with my brain. I’m sorry, girl.’
And then Gary had been lost, like everything else, including the little flat she loved possibly even more than she’d loved Gary. It had been a proper home, a place where she belonged. She’d never felt she belonged, before.
She couldn’t afford to stay on, not on her wages, and she felt upset all the time, looking around knowing she’d have to leave. So tonight she had walked out too. Gary could settle up with the landlord. He wanted this; she didn’t.
She hadn’t cried. It was pointless, crying. If your mother disappeared when you were eleven and you went into something that was unconvincingly called a home, then if when you were sixteen even that support was removed and you were all on your own, you knew that the only thing crying did was give you sore eyes to add to your problems.
Instead you just tried to shut out everything you had the option to forget and took the misery inside you and carried it around like a stone in your heart until its weight began to seem normal. One day, though, as more and more miseries were added, there would be one that brought you to your knees. It could be this one.
Marnie didn’t know where she was going to spend the night. In one of the darker doorways she passed there was what looked like a heap of rags, but then she caught the glint of the woman’s dark eyes and long, dark, greasy hair; she had a baby shawled up to her and she held out her hand, saying something in a language Marnie didn’t understand.
She fumbled for her purse and found a pound coin. It wasn’t true charity; it was to make a clear separation between herself and someone like this, to banish the thought that this was the sort of someone Marnie might become now the ground had shifted from under her feet.
There was no reason to get spooked by it. For the moment, at least, she was all right. She had money and money was safety. She had a decent enough job waitressing and sharing with Gary had meant she’d even been able to save a little bit. If she headed across into North London, where she could walk to work, she’d find cheap lodgings, just a room somewhere. Save on bus fares.
If she walked there now, at the end of it she’d be tired so she might sleep instead of having to watch their last argument, like a bad movie, all night. It was the curse she couldn’t escape, the curse that even the shrink she’d been referred to couldn’t lift. She’d stormed out, feeling like a freak show when he told her eagerly that she was going to be the subject of a paper he was writing.
Marnie walked on, with purpose now, but still glancing at the windows as she passed. A travel agent’s display stopped her short.
A VisitScotland poster: she recognised that picture, knew the soaring arches and the intricate trefoil windows. The Chapter House, Glenluce Abbey, it said under the picture. It took her back, and for a few minutes she wrestled pointlessly with the intrusive memory.
They walk in, giggling and pushing. It’s a day out of school, so that’s cool, but Miss Purdy their class teacher is seriously uncool so they’re mucking about. The teaching assistant is taking charge now, though, and Gemma nudges her to shut up.
He’s got a squint but she’s not going to mention it because her friend fancies him and she doesn’t want to argue with Gemma. He’s boring on now about how there were monks and stuff and it’s mostly a ruin. But then they go into this building, and she’s blown away.
He uses the word ‘elegant’. She’s only heard it about people before,and not very often, but she takes it in. It’s like cool, only more. And this place is so elegant it makes her hurt inside when she looks at it: the white walls and the cleanness and the emptiness and the arches that spring upwards and cross each other and then fall like a sort of stone fountain.
That’s how she wants everything to be and when she gets home she yells at Mum because somehow she can’t bear that everything is messy, but when Mum yells back that she could tidy her room, somehow the beautiful whiteness splinters and disappears and she just sort of forgets about it.
Until now, when it had been prompted to reappear in high definition. Enough! Sometimes, if she pinched her arm really hard … Yes, success, this time.
The photograph prompted an odd sort of hunger, a feeling that her senses had been starved for years living in the city. Here in the damp murk she remembered clear fresh air, sparkling water and low green hills under a wide, wide sky – should she go back there, back to Scotland?
She had left the place as soon as she could. London is the answer for a million runaway Scots kids, and she’d had a bit of luck for once. The man who spotted her at Euston wasn’t a pimp, he was a decent man with daughters of his own. He’d got her a job in a café and she’d never been out of work since.
After a while there had been Gary, but she couldn’t even hope now that he’d come back because she knew he wouldn’t. The future was a blank sheet and no one could fill it in but herself.
Maybe it was time to confront the demons whose presence she had long ago taught herself to ignore. She could be in Scotland by tomorrow, ask the questions she’d suppressed all her life, since that night …
She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home—
No, no, no! She began to run, in the direction of Euston, London’s Scottish gateway. Sometimes physical effort helped, but this time it was inexorable, flooding back in its relentless, pointless detail.
… She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto one of the chairs …
The big kitchen, fitted out in the sort of farmhouse style which no genuine farmhouse has ever aspired to, was ringing with excited squeals as a heavily treacled scone swung from the pulley, with dramatic effect on the eager small boy’s face, T-shirt and ultimately hands as he made increasingly frantic efforts to snatch a bite.
‘No, no! We told you, Mikey – no hands!’ his grandfather instructed, holding them behind the child’s back and getting covered with the sticky stuff himself as a result. ‘Gemma, haven’t you taught your child to play by the rules? Look at this!’ Laughing, he held out his hands and went over to the Belfast sink to wash them.
‘Come on, Dad, he’s only three!’ his daughter protested, smiling as her mother held the string still so that Mikey, who was showing signs of frustration, could get at the scone.
Michael Morrison turned round drying his hands. ‘Looks to me as if dooking for apples should be next on the agenda. Head right down under the water, Mikey, old chap – that’s the best way.’
Gemma watched with an affectionate smile. The traditional Scottish Halloween was dying and Mikey would probably never even remember his grandparents’ party for him. They’d gone to so much trouble, with the orange and black balloons and a turnip lantern with a carrot for the nose and green counters for eyes and matchstick teeth in the grinning mouth. She’d just have to watch that he didn’t swallow any of the foil-wrapped coins in the champit tatties he’d have with his tea. And even though it was such a miserable night, Dad was determined to set off the rather expensive fireworks he’d got in – nothing was too good for his little namesake.
What would she have done without Dad this past year, after Fergus vanished along with most of their bank account? Dad had just scooped them up and made everything all right, just the way he always used to kiss her and make it all better when she was a little girl. And Mikey had never been happier, lapping up the attention from two doting grandparents.
As her mother filled a basin with water and dropped in half a dozen rosy apples, Gemma watched his dance of excitement with just a shade of sadness. He was growing so fast, and it wouldn’t be long before he preferred tacky commercialism and a skeleton outfit from Tesco. But at the moment, he was having the time of his life. Oh, she did love Halloween!
The name Marnie Bruce hadn’t crossed her mind for years and years.
There were voices outside the house. It was dark and windy and pouring with rain; in this quiet street on a night like this, why should there be voices outside in her garden? Anita Loudon, alone in the house she had lived in since her parents died, stiffened.
Then she heard the giggles. Children’s voices – oh God, Halloween! She’d managed to forget about it until now. She didn’t often achieve that.
It was too late now to put out the lights and pretend she wasn’t in. They’d ring the doorbell any minute and if she didn’t answer it there would be the festering contents of her carefully separated bins – to save the planet for their future – tipped all over her garden path to be cleared up in the morning.
When had the innocent Scottish guising become the nasty American form of blackmail that went under the name of trick-or-treat? And, of course, she had other reasons to hate Halloween, but she desperately tried not to think about those.
That was the doorbell now. Anita didn’t like giving them money but she hadn’t any of the usual cheap sweets to buy them off with, ready to distribute as she muttered under her breath, ‘I hope they rot your teeth.’
She didn’t recognise any of them as kids from the village; they’d come out here from Stranraer, probably, in the hope of better pickings. The leader of the little group on the doorstep, a skinny youth in jeans and a hoodie, had made no effort at disguise though Anita could see a ghost and a skeleton among his entourage. He looked too old to be out begging for sweets and his face brightened as she appeared with her purse. It darkened again as she handed him fifty pence and she retreated inside and shut the door before he could say anything. She waited for the sound of bins being kicked around, but they seemed to have been at least minimally satisfied.
Anita returned to the magazine she’d been leafing through, but the ‘Age-defying Tricks that Really Work’ article didn’t hold her attention. She’d tried most of them already, and they didn’t.
Now she knew it was Halloween she’d have to spend the evening trying to quell the guilt and the irrational sense of dread. If it overpowered her she’d have one of her panic attacks, when the room closed in round her and she couldn’t breathe. Another noise outside almost set her off until she realised it was just the children returning along the road.
She picked up the Daily Record she’d brought in, but she’d lost interest and started flipping over the pages with hands that still shook a little. Then she came to the centre spread and gasped as if a punch had taken her breath away.
The face looking up at her from the page, the bright child’s face that had dominated the headlines for so long, all those years ago – forty, she realised now, reading the strapline – was in the largest of the photographs. Other old-fashioned, slightly-blurred family snaps like his were spaced round about the article.
Anita always told herself it was all past, all safely forgotten. The heat in the room was suddenly stifling and she stumbled across to the window, flinging it wide even though the wind-borne rain lashed in, soaking her.
The cold air helped and at last she began to breathe more evenly She shut the window again and collapsed onto her chair, her heart still racing.
It was all right, all right, she told herself. No one had contacted her this time; it was just an off-the-cuff piece. Anita tore it in pieces and threw it in the bin.
She’d phone him tomorrow, though. Any excuse.
The sea was troubled tonight, roaring and crashing against the rocks as the storm swept in up Loch Ryan from the Irish Sea. There would be no ferries setting out to Belfast tonight.
The view from Grant Crichton’s large modern house on the loch side just between Stranraer and Cairnryan was incomparable in good weather. Tonight, though, the drawbacks to its position were apparent.
He had been sitting in the lounge with a pile of papers on the small piecrust table beside him pretending to work when he suddenly crashed his fist down, making it rock on its pedestal.
‘That damned noise! It’s driving me mad. I can’t concentrate. We’re going to have to do something about it, Denise.’
His wife looked up uneasily from the pile of glossy travel brochures she was leafing through, curled up on the deep cushions of the cream velour sofa beside the living gas fire. She was a neat, sharp-faced blonde, twenty years younger than her husband, fighting the inexorable onset of middle age with every weapon available, short of surgery; Grant had spelt out that he wouldn’t spring for that.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. It was a dreary sound, admittedly: the drama of the waves was muted by double-glazing and interlined curtains to a low moaning but it was hardly obtrusive. What was distracting her husband wasn’t the noise. He’d been impossible all day.
Denise’s eyes flicked to a silver-framed photo on the mantelpiece showing a curly-haired little boy pulling a cheeky face for the camera. It was fading a bit but she didn’t want to suggest having it redone. Mentioning him at all, she’d learnt in her eight-year marriage, was a bad mistake, always putting Grant into one of his moods which could last for days.
Halloween, of course, was the worst. She always phoned on Halloween and he would twitch until she had. She couldn’t just phone in the morning and get it over with, could she – oh no, she would know how it preyed on her ex-husband’s mind and deliberately leave it late. The year she’d only got round to phoning at midnight Grant had needed Valium to get any sleep at all.
Denise had tried suggesting he phone her instead, but only once. He’d refused bluntly, telling her almost in so many words that this unfinished business from his first marriage was nothing to do with her. That was what he said, but she knew it was only an excuse. Despite years of experience he was clinging to the hope that this year just might be the one when Shelley forgot – as if she would, on the fortieth anniversary. That was racheting up the tension tonight.
When the phone rang at eight o’clock Grant jumped as if he had been jabbed with a pin and when it turned out to be a member of her book club handed it over to Denise with a glare.
She took the call quickly, then went back to her browsing. The sound of the sea became audible again in the quiet room and she braced herself for another outburst from Grant. When the phone rang again, they both jumped.
He picked it up, glanced at the caller ID and grimaced towards her. She nodded, then discreetly lowered her eyes to the brochure again in symbolic withdrawal. This was delicate ground for a second wife.
‘Yes, Shelley?’ he said wearily.
Denise could hear crying at the other end of the line – loud, uninhibited crying – and saw her husband’s face contort with grief, mingled with resentment that his ex-wife had managed to provoke it.
His eyes went involuntarily to the photo on the mantelpiece and they filled with tears as he snarled, ‘Yes, of course I haven’t forgotten it was today he disappeared.’ He put up his hand to rub them away. ‘You needn’t think you have the monopoly on feeling.’
Denise couldn’t hear the words being said but she could hear the voice at the other end rising towards what would in the end become a screaming match. It usually did.
She could bear it no longer. Grant was looking tired and old, running his hand through his thinning grey hair, and his jowly face was beginning to turn an unhealthy mottled purple. She slipped out of the room.
He would be angry at the end of this, very angry. Grant was a powerful man, a controlling man, and the annual reminder of his helplessness had side effects which she and everyone in his vicinity would have to suffer for days.
At times like this she seriously wondered why she had married him. It came perhaps into the category of things that had seemed like a good idea at the time. She’d been rather taken with his forcefulness at first and as forty loomed with nothing to look back on but a string of failed relationships with commitment-phobes it had looked like a no-brainer.
She hadn’t quite realised then that with his attitudes he could have co-authored The Surrendered Wife – a recent hit at the book club – but on the other hand as a hotel receptionist she wasn’t exactly pushing at the glass ceiling.
And there were always the holidays. She was still holding her pile of brochures as she went towards the kitchen. A spot of intensive brochure therapy before he and Shelley finished yelling at each other might put her in a more resilient mood when he came out looking for a dog to kick.
In the Glasgow warehouse nightclub, midnight came with a burst of smoke effect, dramatised with orange and black laser lights. The foetid atmosphere was rank with human sweat and the crush of bodies on the dance floor swayed and stamped to a relentless, mind-numbing, pounding beat.
The girl in the witch’s outfit, abbreviated in both directions, was standing at the edge to catch her breath. She was humming to the music, smiling a little vaguely, just nicely high. She was tilting back her long, white throat to drink from a bottle of water when the vampire struck.
She gave a shriek, then giggled as the man in Dracula costume, with pale make-up and a deep peak painted into the centre of his forehead, dropped his fake fangs into his hand.
‘Sorry – just, you were asking for it.’
He had to raise his voice above the din and as he grinned at her he still looked a bit wolfish, even without the fangs. He was quite buff too, with dark-blue eyes and a cleft chin, though when she looked closer she realised that under the make-up he was a lot older than she’d thought at first. Normally someone that age would never have got through the check at the doors but hey, even if old guys weren’t her style, that had been funny. She wasn’t on the pull this evening, anyway – Jezz had only gone out for a fag.
‘God, I about had a heart attack,’ she shouted. ‘You’re mental!’
‘Can’t resist—’ As she indicated that she couldn’t hear, he moved in closer and spoke in her ear. ‘Can’t resist the lure of young, virginal human flesh.’
‘Here – who’re you calling virginal?’ she protested. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’
‘Just call me Drax.’ He held out his hand. ‘Care to dance?’
The old-fashioned way he said it was quite cute. She glanced over her shoulder but there was no sign of Jezz yet so she shrugged. ‘Why not?’
He swept her close immediately, which she hadn’t bargained for. It wasn’t pleasant; she felt hot and sweaty and she could smell his sweat too. Even in the dim light she could see the trails on his make-up.
She edged a little further apart. ‘This place is pure dead brilliant. I love Halloween, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’ The way he said it made her feel as if a door had been slammed in her face. But he pulled her back against him, really quite roughly.
She was starting to feel uncomfortable. Jezz’s tap on her shoulder was definitely a relief.
‘Hey, babe.’ He didn’t look best pleased.
Nor did Drax. He was a couple of inches taller than Jezz and a lot broader. Scowling, he said, ‘Back off! I saw her first.’
Jezz swore at him. ‘First? You stupid or something? She’s my girl.’
Drax didn’t let go. Her heart began to race; she knew what could happen when guys got started and it didn’t do to be standing in the middle. With a violent effort she pulled herself free and evaded the grab he made at her arm.
‘I’m away home. Coming, Jezz?’
She walked off without waiting to see if he would follow and when she glanced back they were still squaring up to each other like dogs ready to fight, though neither had made the first move. She had just reached the door when Jezz caught up with her.
‘Care to tell me about it, then?’ he said, and she realised with a sinking heart that not fighting had left him with a lot of aggression going spare. She was tired and coming down from her high and the last thing she needed was one of these arguments that went on all night. Or worse.
‘Tam – good. Come in.’ DI Marjory Fleming smiled as she looked up from the particularly tedious report she was attempting to write as DS Tam MacNee appeared in her office on the fourth floor of the Galloway Constabulary headquarters in Kirkluce. It was a welcome relief from a dreary task on a dreary morning.
Though it was almost eleven o’clock the lights were still on, and it looked as if they’d be on all day. The sky was grey and heavy and the plane trees whose tops she could just see outside her window were bare skeletons, black with earlier rain. That it was only to be expected in November didn’t make it any better.
She set aside the sheets of stats she was working from and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you we’ve got a problem with one of the trials calling next week. The Fiscal’s saying there’s been intimidation of one of the witnesses.’
MacNee took the seat opposite her desk. ‘Oh aye. That’ll be big Kenny Barclay, right? Well, what did they expect? I suppose I’ll need to get round there and do a bit of intimidation myself.’
His voice sounded uncharacteristically flat and she looked at him sharply. Usually his face would have brightened at the prospect of a bit of psychological warfare, at which he was a past master; the Glasgow street-fighter might have reformed long ago but the killer instinct was still there.
Fleming noticed with a pang that his hair was more grey than brown these days and his eyes were becoming hooded. Admittedly her own chestnut crop owed more to Nice ’n Easy than to nature and it was a while since she’d chosen to linger before a mirror in a strong light, but even so …
‘Something wrong, Tam?’
MacNee put on the irritating face that men tend to put on when asked that question. ‘Wrong? Naw. Why should there be?’
‘I don’t know why there should
