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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: DI Kelso Strang
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The fifth in the DI Kelso Strang series from the author of the DI Marjory Fleming novels DCI Kelso Strang is led to believe that something very odd is going on around the prosperous fishing port of Tarleton on Scotland's south-east coast. Firstly, a young detective inspector is traumatised after witnessing a doctor throwing herself off a cliff, and accusations of extortion have riven the local community. When the ugly death of a young farmer sets off a murder investigation, Strang finds himself caught in a spider's web of criminality. He is entirely unprepared when he is struck by the worst tragedy of his career, even though it has connected him with an advocate's assistant, Catriona, daughter of DI Marjory Fleming.
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3
BLIND EYE
ALINE TEMPLETON
For Elaine Singleton,
who wanted to know what happened to Cat.
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.
A Smuggler’s Song
Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
The east wind was blowing today, the wind that had an edge as keen as a butcher’s knife, the wicked wind that had savaged the gorse growing near the cliff edge into surrealist shapes. There was a salty burn in the light spray it whipped up from the sea and the browned pink petals of the thrift clinging to the rocks ruffled as it passed across.
It had been a day just like this the last time he’d been here: sunlight then sudden shadows as clouds were whipped across the sky. It was a fine, bracing day for a walk to dramatic St Abb’s Head, with its sheer cliffs and the surging sea below that, hour by hour, tide by tide, was eating them away. He had started out on the path from the visitor centre but veered onto the tarmac service road that hugged the cliff edge to reach the lighthouse and the farms beyond. There were a couple of groups on the same pilgrimage, and a spaniel that raced around, excited by the force of the wind blowing its ears back.
Just as there had been, that other day. As he had reached the spot where he was standing now, a car had driven up the path and parked not far in front of him – a sporty yellow Cooper S. He remembered feeling irritated – what was wrong with people? They had legs, didn’t they? If everyone started bringing cars up here it wouldn’t be long before it was all a churned-up mess.
The car door opened and a young woman jumped out. The wind snatched at her long blonde hair, sweeping it back from her face. She slammed the car door behind her and took off, running with a springing step straight to the cliff edge twenty feet away. Then she jumped.
He had agonised afterwards. Was there something – anything – he could have done to stop her – launched himself at her, shouted? But by the time he realised what she was going to do it was too late anyway; she hadn’t paused, not to think, not to pluck up courage, as you would imagine a woman planning to take her own life would do. As she disappeared from view, he stood frozen in shock.
Then people were screaming and he had grabbed his phone just as others did the same. The emergency services were on the scene quickly and he hadn’t needed to look over to make a report on the broken body on the rocks below. They’d had to call out the lifeboat to bring her in.
At the fatal accident inquiry, one of the other witnesses said that the woman had raced to the cliff edge as if all the devils in hell were after her. When it was his turn, he had confirmed that yes, she’d jumped out of the car and run, but it hadn’t seemed necessary to dramatise it by saying what his own thought had been.
Beneath the windswept hair, he had seen that she was smiling, her blue eyes bright, her face eager as she ran, like a little girl who was late for a party and couldn’t wait to get there.
It had been attributed to depression after the coronavirus pandemic, but in those last moments she had looked excited. What wretchedness in her existence had made a death like this hold such joyful promise?
It was afterwards in his working life that he began to be haunted by a persistent unease. Someone had told him once about The Hum, a pervasive, insistent low humming that is reported worldwide with no satisfactory explanation. Not everyone hears it, and it has driven some of those who do to the edge of insanity.
He seemed to be the only person to notice the constant trickle of nasty minor criminality, like a quiet indeterminate mutter in the background that was never quite clear enough for him to pin down. But it was getting louder.
He had come here on his day off, as if to see whether returning might in some sense lay a ghost. It hadn’t, of course, but the wind ruthlessly blowing all the cobwebs away did clear his mind. What he could see now was that unless something more serious, and nastier, happened there was nothing he could do. And he was very much afraid that it would.
‘Don’t go,’ Niall Ritchie said. ‘It’s asking for trouble.’
Sarah Lindsay looked up from her breakfast coffee at her partner. Niall was standing by the door, almost blocking it, and she felt her stomach knotting with tension. She’d always hated confrontation and she was nervous enough already about the day ahead.
‘Oh, please, Niall!’ she said tiredly. ‘What are you talking about? We’ve been over and over this. I feel we haven’t discussed anything else for all the months we’ve been waiting for the trial to call. I’ve made up my mind to testify because it’s right and I’m not going to change it now.’
‘Then you’re a fool,’ Niall said.
‘Give me one good reason why I should.’
He raised his voice. ‘I’ve given you a dozen!’
‘For the hundredth time, that’s why you haven’t convinced me. Please give me the real reason – it might even make me reconsider.’
Niall hesitated. She could see his cheeks above the dark beard take on colour and he dropped his eyes. He said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Sarah shook her head helplessly, then shrugged. She went to the door and after a second he moved aside. He was slight and not quite as tall as she was; he didn’t really have the physical presence for a bully.
‘You’ll regret it,’ he said ominously. ‘We both will.’
The man in the legal wig had hard grey eyes, deeply hooded, a soft, loose mouth, a thick roll of fat round his neck and a paunch that he carried like a bandsman bearing a bass drum. His steely gaze was skewering the police constable in the witness box.
She was visibly shaking. ‘No, that’s not right,’ she said.
‘No? Not right?’ He hadn’t raised his voice, he’d dropped it, which somehow made it more frightening still. ‘You admitted you had put it there – but it’s not right?’
‘I didn’t, the way you mean—’
‘Yet your fingerprints were on the wallet?’
She was starting to cry. She was very young, very slight and there was an uneasy movement from one of the jurors.
He noticed at once. ‘No wonder you’re upset, PC Moore. It’s hard to disobey orders when you’re being bullied. You’re a very junior officer – it would be unfair to blame you when the superiors who could be expected to guide you have an axe to grind themselves.’
He wasn’t gauche enough to turn his head to look towards the body of the court where DCI Kelso Strang was sitting, having given his own evidence. He didn’t need to. He just carried on smoothly, ‘I’m sure the ladies and gentlemen of the jury will understand your problem – and may even feel some indignation that you should have been put in this position.’
Choking back her tears, she made one more brave attempt. ‘It wasn’t like that—’
But he was turning away. ‘No further questions.’
Tears were spilling over as she turned blindly to go. From the bench, the sheriff said, ‘Wait, please,’ and turned to the procurator fiscal, who shook his head, looking bleak. ‘Thank you. Now you are free to go.’
Wiping her eyes with her knuckles, the constable blundered across the court room and Strang, his face set in angry lines, got up and followed her out. He’d recognised what was going to happen when Vincent Dunbar’s cross-examination of his own evidence had been brief, almost perfunctory – the defence would claim that this was a stitch-up, with evidence being planted on their innocent client. There had been no way to warn PC Moore what was about to happen to her; she was only just out of her probationary year and QCs like Dunbar ate witnesses like her for breakfast – from the looks of him, with black pudding and a fried tattie scone on the side.
Moore was sitting on a bench, scrubbing at her eyes with a tissue. She stood up when Strang came over and said, ‘Oh, sir, I’m really sorry—’
He smiled. ‘Don’t be. There’s not a lot you can do when you’re attacked by a man-eating tiger. Find a mate, have a cup of tea and slag him off. You’ll feel better.’
She gave an uncertain laugh. ‘But we’ll lose the case …’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. It just means that a small-time ned got off with it but he won’t be able to resist doing it again and we’ll get him next time. Forget about it.’
As Moore left, looking reassured, Strang’s own face darkened. Sure, losing a case was all part of the day’s work but it was the slur on his own integrity that stung. He valued his hard-won reputation as a decent copper and he’d been traduced in a public forum, with no right of reply.
One of the court officials came over to speak to him about a trial diet that would be calling the following week and before they had finished their conversation he heard cheers, rapidly suppressed, from the courtroom. He withdrew to a corner as Dunbar, sweeping his client along with him, came past in a little procession with his jubilant friends.
Disgusted, Strang followed in their wake and found himself coming up to the outside doors beside a young woman wearing an academic gown over a dark suit. He’d noticed her sitting on the bench behind Dunbar; she was tall and perhaps a little too thin, but she was vividly attractive, with fair hair and very blue eyes.
He stood aside to let her go in front and she said, with a slightly mocking smile, ‘Thank you, DCI Strang. Generous, in the circumstances.’
It would be more dignified to smile insincerely and let her join the well-wishers outside but he was too angry.
‘Perhaps I could ask you to tell your principal that nothing – nothing! – was planted on his client and that I deeply resent the implication.’
She skirted Dunbar’s noisy group, going out of the Edinburgh Sheriff Court and onto the Royal Mile. Then she turned to him, still with the same mockery in her smile, ‘Good gracious, Chief Inspector, you don’t think Vincent Dunbar would stoop so low as to defend an innocent man, do you?’
He was surprised into laughter. ‘Oh, of course I know, really. It’s just hard to take, being smeared like that when you take a pride in honesty.’
‘Dirty work, down here at the coal face. And to be honest, it doesn’t get a lot dirtier than Vincent Dunbar.’
Her frankness was astonishing. ‘But you’re working for him?’
‘I wish! I’m an advocate’s devil, unpaid, and he’s my devil master. Beggars can’t be choosers and if you get an offer, you don’t turn it down.’
Strang looked at her with interest. They were just passing a smart cafe and he said, ‘I’m needing a coffee. What about you?’
‘Above my touch,’ she said ruefully. ‘Every credit card I have is maxed out.’
‘Have this on me, to demonstrate my forgiving nature. As long as associating with a police officer won’t wreck your street cred.’
She brightened up. ‘That’s really kind. And anyway, I like cops. My mum was one till she retired.’
‘Come on then.’ He held open the door. ‘You know my name, but I don’t know yours?’
‘Catriona Fleming. Cat,’ she said, and led the way over to a table.
Driving on the motorway when you couldn’t see wouldn’t be smart so Sarah Lindsay couldn’t even give way to tears as she drove home down the A1 to Tarleton. It had been a horrible, horrible experience. She’d given truthful, straightforward evidence, at considerable cost to herself, but she’d been made to look like a police stooge and a fool.
A fool. That was what Niall had said. But he hadn’t just been talking about what would happen to her in the witness box; there was something else that he wouldn’t tell her. What was the secret he knew but she didn’t? She gulped, scared now.
What was getting clearer and clearer was that their relationship was doomed. In the first lockdown they’d been stuck, each in their own one-bedroom flat, which had been miserable; they hadn’t really been ready to move in together before, but now it suddenly seemed the obvious thing to do. And as if that wasn’t risky enough, they’d had a sudden rush of blood to the head and decided they’d move to the country as well. Now Working From Home was a Thing, there was nothing to stop them.
They were both city folk but Niall had always talked about organic farming and after they’d watched his old DVDs of The Good Life so often that the discs started hiccupping, she’d let him convince her. The need to save the planet was becoming more urgent all the time; there was something romantic about making such a direct contribution.
Prices for flats in Edinburgh were high at the time they sold and with a combined mortgage they’d been able to buy Eastlaw, a little sheep farm that wasn’t much more than a small-holding, from a retiring farmer who had run down the flock – and the house – before selling.
Starting with forty sheep had seemed manageable and after taking a course to get an organic farming certificate, Niall had been fired with enthusiasm. There was a bit of arable land too and liberated rescue hens would produce free-range organic eggs to sell.
Sarah had certainly been more wary but they wouldn’t be relying on the income for subsistence; she had a home-decorating consultancy and Niall was an accountant for a large business and worked almost entirely online anyway. The farm would be like a hobby for him and she’d pictured herself rosy-cheeked, bringing in baskets of fresh eggs and bottle-feeding orphaned lambs. To breathe country air would be wonderful, especially here, surrounded by gentle green hills and woodland, with a view up the coast as far as Tantallon Castle on a clear day.
It was a clear day when they came to look at Eastlaw. She’d gripped Niall’s arm and said, ‘Look out there! This is just – just idyllic!’ She would swear there hadn’t been a day like it since.
Intoxicated with the view, they hadn’t been bothered by the dilapidated state of the house that went with it. ‘Oh, we’ll do it up gradually. It’s fun just camping,’ she’d said airily to visiting friends who, while impressed by the outlook when it was visible, obviously felt it didn’t entirely make up for primitive plumbing and open fires as the only source of heating.
It wasn’t fun now. Organic farming was exhausting because everything had to be done the purist way, without recourse to pesticides or chemicals, and squashing bugs by hand rapidly lost its appeal. The sheep all seemed to be hypochondriacs, going into decline at the slightest excuse, and since you couldn’t just give them antibiotics it meant expensive vet’s visits. Sarah found, too, that she absolutely hated hens; despite their fluffy appearance they had nasty sharp beaks and so ruthlessly enforced the pecking order that a miserable victim would often be left all but featherless and the only kind thing to do was put it out of its misery. Niall hated despatching them but she’d told him he was the farmer and her job was merely to cook it – which wasn’t too arduous, the poor creature being pretty well oven-ready anyway.
Discovering that rats liked eggs and ignored humane traps was almost the last straw; it wasn’t long before they were bitterly regretting their decision. Niall’s employer’s business folded and hers dried up. They’d be destitute now if Gresham’s Farms, an umbrella company for organic farms that supplied all the big supermarkets, hadn’t taken them on, promising a guaranteed market for what they produced.
A certification officer had come round not long after and gave them top marks for integrity, if not for husbandry, and mercifully Jimmie Gresham had been quite happy with that, even if Sarah couldn’t see how they were ever going to make it pay. With only Niall and the animals for company, she’d often thought she should have paid more attention to what she’d felt when they were watching The Good Life: that if she’d been Barbara Good married to the irritating Tom, she’d have killed him.
Once the virus was in retreat, she’d managed to get a cheap lease on a little shop in Tarleton to sell decorative furnishings. It barely washed its face but it gave her an excuse to escape the farm and she’d been hoping it would be a way to make local friends.
When, to her astonishment, Doddie Muir had the nerve to come into her shop and ask for a ‘retainer’ to keep an eye on it and protect it from ‘trouble’, unspecified, she’d laughed in his face. ‘Chancer!’ she’d said. How confident she’d been then!
He wasn’t a threatening figure – bald, fairly slight, with a receding chin – and it had seemed a quiet little town. So it was quite a shock when she found the paintwork on her shopfront scraped and scarred one day. The following week a stone was thrown through the window.
She wasn’t confident after that. She asked around and, suddenly, the shopkeepers who’d been friendly enough before were less forthcoming. They didn’t, apparently, know what she was talking about, though it was clear they were lying.
Eventually the quiet Asian lady, Mrs Patel, who ran the small convenience store next door said, ‘It’s not that much, you know. Easier just to pay.’ And she didn’t want to say anything more.
Niall had taken the same attitude. It left her feeling helpless and when Muir slimed his way in next time, a sly grin on his face, she’d talked terms. It wasn’t ‘that much’, really. But everything had gone so badly wrong for them lately that even ‘that much’ meant giving up something else. She could have gone to the police, of course, but she hadn’t any confidence that they’d take effective action – or at least, not until her shop was totally wrecked. There was no way she could find the money for repairs.
It was only when a senior policeman from Edinburgh, DCI Strang, had turned up on her doorstep that she’d mentioned the problem. He’d accepted her offer of a cup of coffee – a tall man, good-looking apart from a jagged scar that disfigured the right side of his face.
He’d wanted to know if they’d had any problem with farm machinery being stolen and she’d given a hollow laugh.
‘Such machinery as we have is the sort we’d probably have to pay someone to take away.’
He’d laughed too, but warned that stealing quad bikes and even tractors was big business and suggested that it might still be as well to keep them secure. He was very easy to talk to and the conversation soon drifted on to her real problem.
He was interested immediately. When she’d explained, Strang said, ‘Well, as you’ve obviously realised there’s no way we can mount a twenty-four-hour guard outside your shop. You can always install security lights and a camera but I think you’d probably only get pictures of a stocking-mask, which wouldn’t be much help. If you have the stomach for it, we could set up a trap. We give you marked banknotes, you give them to him and we take it from there.’
‘Oh, I’ve got the stomach for it, all right,’ she’d boasted. ‘Anything to stop his nasty little racket.’
She’d naïvely thought that in court all she had to do was tell the truth about what had happened, not appreciating how cleverly truth could be reshaped by an advocate at the top of his game. He hadn’t even suggested Sarah was lying, just that she was stupid, which felt worse.
Her neighbours were antagonistic now. They had wanted no part of it and obviously felt that as an incomer she had no right to cause this sort of trouble, and it was hard to be robust when a cheerful greeting was met with silence and a glare. And Doddie Muir, who hadn’t bothered her since the police got involved, would be free to slither in next week, probably with an increased demand. He’d be feeling vindictive and she felt sick at the thought.
Now she’d have to go home and listen to Niall saying, ‘I told you so.’ Her heart sank as it always did when she turned off up the little road leading to Eastlaw.
From the first, she’d been horrified by the farm next door. The dogs that spent their time tied up outside with only a dilapidated wooden hut for shelter upset her, and the way the yard looked, with abandoned implements rusting where they stood and empty plastic bags left lying till the grass grew up round them, made anyone coming to visit them think they lived in a slum.
Ken Blackford, the farmer, was coarse-featured and coarse-tongued, mocking the new townie neighbours and their daft ideas. His, he had pointed out at their first meeting, was a farm, while theirs was a small-holding, inviting her to ask the difference.
‘A farm makes money and a small-holding doesn’t,’ he’d said, and roared with laughter at the tired old joke.
The thing was, he was right – his farm was thriving, despite the disorder. His sheep produced twins and even triplets that could then be sent off to market while Niall’s flock struggled even to keep up the numbers once he’d sent off his quota of lambs to Gresham’s.
‘Ken was born to it,’ Niall said bitterly, ‘and I’m having to learn the trade. And if you’re prepared to use every chemical in existence it’s easier, even if it’s poisoning people and the environment at the same time.’
Of course, they were at a permanent disadvantage because you had to charge so much more to break even and not enough people cared about the planet to pay more for their food, when it came right down to it. It was a constant strain to meet their commitments, let alone make any serious profit. When they’d lost the turnip crop they’d been growing for winter feed to a plague of cabbage root fly, Jimmie had stepped in with a supply at cost, but that had still been money they couldn’t afford to spend.
It was the rats that really got to her – those hideous, squirmy bodies and scaly tails that wriggled through her dreams at night. There were feral cats in the stackyard on Ken’s farm and she’d thought they might be the answer; she put out food to tempt at least some of them over but he spotted what she was doing and bawled her out.
‘They’re working cats! If they can get food from you, do you think they’ll bother their backsides to catch rats?’
She’d withdrawn, on the verge of tears, and from then on avoided him. He seemed to have a horrid fascination for Niall, though, and once it became legal to go back to the pub they would set off together while she sat at home miserably in the dark sitting room in front of a grudging fire – the Waterfoot Tavern was the sort of bleak, dismal Scottish pub where even if women weren’t formally banned, they wouldn’t want to go.
Ken was out in the yard as she drove past. Sarah didn’t turn her head but she knew he was watching her, probably with the usual snaggle-toothed sneer. She gave a little shudder as she drew up beside their own house with its neatly tended garden. The inside of the house might be still a horror they couldn’t afford to improve but plants had been non-negotiable.
She paused for a moment, head bowed, then reached for her phone and texted: Coffee tomorrow, elevenish? Please!!
The reply was immediate. Sure.Not good?
Not good. She didn’t elaborate; she’d tell her all about it tomorrow. Briony Gresham was her only friend and she always offered a sympathetic ear to Sarah’s problems.
She switched off her phone. She had to take a deep breath and square her shoulders before she could bring herself to get out. Home sweet home.
CHAPTER TWO
Niall had gone off round the farm when Sarah had left for Edinburgh. He was feeling sick and hollow inside; she hadn’t listened to him. It was such a little thing to make all that fuss about, but he hadn’t been able to convince her to drop it. He’d been warned that he’d better stop her, and he’d failed.
Apart from the reason he wasn’t going to tell her, he couldn’t think of anything that would have been persuasive. He’d tried, ‘There’s a local feeling that you shouldn’t be doing that,’ and all she’d said was, ‘Why?’
Feeling sick wasn’t unusual for him: it was how he felt every morning as he went out to work on the dream farm that had turned into a nightmare. There must be an awful lot of people who, like him, were fervently wishing that they could just reset the clock to the time before the ravages of the pandemic had swept the country – many of them undoubtedly for more dreadful reasons than his. But with clear, glorious hindsight he could see this had been a terrible mistake, in every possible way. He and Sarah had been in lust rather than madly in love to start with and now they were so tired, their sex life was non-existent – at least, that was the excuse they gave. He wasn’t sure they even liked each other any more.
She’d always had so much cheerful confidence. She was pretty and bright, and she was the one with the talent for business, which had suited him well enough; despite having a good head for figures he’d always been a bit dreamy – indolent, even. But in the lockdown, so much longer and harder than they had ever imagined it could possibly be, there had been nothing that she could do and it had all but destroyed her.
He was the one who’d wanted this, the responsibility for making it work was his, and he’d been forced to realise that he just hadn’t the instinct for farming. He’d read all the books about it and felt all the right things emotionally – oh yes! – and he was never happier than when standing on his own land watching his Cheviots when they were safely grazing. But when it came to dealing with their day-to-day problems, he existed in a permanent state of barely-controlled panic.
Then, of course, there had been the exotic vegetables fiasco. You could charge over the odds for these and he’d prepared the ground meticulously for the planting – without ever considering whether they would be likely to thrive on an upland farm, exposed to everything coming in from the North Sea. It had been soul-destroying to see the hopeful shoots shrivel with windburn and the salty air and by then he’d missed the planting season for the crops that would grow. So no money at all, instead of the bonus he’d been dumb enough to expect.
Rats he couldn’t just poison inflicted disease on the hens and sometimes even attacked the younger ones and chicks, leaving them half-dead with injuries that turned his stomach. Then there were the foxes – twelve good layers decapitated last week, after one got in through a loose plank in one of the hen houses. More money lost.
Allowing Eastlaw to join the organic farms under the Gresham’s umbrella had saved them then. Jimmie Gresham had been supportive, but the bottom line still was that this was a business and the pressure of fulfilling his quotas kept Niall awake at night. He’d been worried sick when the rather sneering report on the first formal inspection – great on organic procedure, skills non-existent – came in, but Jimmie had just laughed.
‘No soul, these guys! It’s the farmers like you that carry the flame. You’ll learn, lad!’
He’d been relieved and grateful then for his backing but every day was a painful struggle as more and more complex problems appeared and he was drawn deeper into active dishonesty. He’d always liked to think of himself as idealistic, honourable; funny to think of that now, when there were so many conflicting pressures that he couldn’t even imagine what an honourable way out would be. Some days he felt as if his head was spinning.
Still, this morning at least he had jobs he could cope with; there were potatoes to lift and fencing that needed renewing down at the bottom of the hill. It was even quite a nice day for it: no wind for once, and a bit of actual sunshine.
But on the way down he saw a sheep, right at the boundary with Ken Blackford’s land.
It seemed to be standing oddly, just staring into the middle distance. The sheep around it were nibbling away conscientiously; was there something wrong with it? And if there was, was it the sort of thing that would sort itself out or the sort of thing where it would need a vet – or even the sort of thing when it would just suddenly drop dead where it stood? He’d had that happen before, with all the ensuing fuss and expense.
Niall became aware that Ken was standing behind him. He turned and saw the man’s patronising smile.
‘You’ve been watching that yowe for ten minutes. What’s your problem?’
He swallowed. ‘Oh, just checking her out to see if she’s all right.’
‘You’ve not noticed before? That one’s often in a bit of a dwam – just staring into space like that. There’s folk I know the same.’
Niall laughed to cover up his embarrassment. How could Ken know his sheep better than he did himself? With exception of the ones who had a noticeable feature, like a crumpled ear, he still couldn’t tell them apart.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘She was standing a bit longer than usual, that was all.’
As he said it, the ewe gave a little twitch, then dropped her head and began grazing. As Niall headed off to fix the fence, Ken called, ‘That wife of yours – got off to the court today, did she?’
‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely, but didn’t turn his head.
He got back to the farmhouse around four. Sarah hadn’t got back from court yet and he couldn’t settle to anything. He was getting more and more afraid; he didn’t know what would happen now, regardless of the outcome.
He tensed when he heard her car drawing up. He was in the kitchen; he went to switch on the kettle so he could look busy and not have to meet her eyes when she came in.
‘Hello!’ he called as she opened the front door. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Thanks,’ was all she said as she hung up her coat, but from that flat, dispirited tone in her voice he could tell what the verdict had been. So would things just go back to the way they had been before? And would that be better or worse?
Niall was just so, so tired. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take it, getting more and more enmeshed and helpless. He’d always tended to ignore problems, hoping they would go away, but he’d tried turning a blind eye and it hadn’t worked – it really, really hadn’t worked.
It was just he couldn’t see what else he could do.
DCI Strang had enjoyed ‘supping with the devil’, as Cat Fleming had termed it, but it was the ‘not guilty’ verdict he was thinking about as he drove back to the Fettes Avenue police station. It had been the sort of minor case that he wouldn’t normally have been involved in; local CID would have been perfectly capable of dealing with it. He had gone there after much bigger fish. The stealing of farm vehicles was an escalating problem nationwide. He’d managed to wrap up a gang over on the west coast a few years ago and now he was following up on signs that organised crime could be expanding into this area.
Of course, quad bikes had always been an easy target for petty theft with many farmers even obligingly leaving their keys in the ignition, but larger equipment had been safe enough before. You couldn’t exactly sidle up to someone in a pub and say, ‘Want to buy a combine harvester?’ Now, though, if you knew the right people, there was an expanding market in countries where agriculture was only just becoming more mechanised.
He’d had a hint suggesting that some of the ‘right people’ might just be operating from the south-east coast, with its ancient links to Northern Europe and the Baltic, and Strang had been visiting a farm where a theft had been reported and asking round locally when the George ‘Doddie’ Muir situation came up. Since it had been reported to him, he’d actioned it to go through, with today’s unfortunate results.
As he’d said to poor PC Moore, you won some, you lost some. But he simply couldn’t understand why Vincent Dunbar QC was getting himself involved in defending such a petty crime.
First and foremost, though, as he told Detective Chief Superintendent Jane Borthwick when he reached her office, he was seething about the attack on his reputation.
She was disappointingly unsympathetic. ‘It’s offended your vanity,’ she said crisply. ‘That’s what’s getting to you. It’s hardly the first time the police have been falsely accused of planting evidence. It makes up for the occasions that you and I both know of, when one of our less scrupulous brethren has done exactly that and got away with it. You just had a nice clean pinny on and a nasty boy jumped in a puddle and splashed it. The story won’t be more than a couple of paragraphs on an inside page.’
She was right, of course. JB usually was. ‘I still resent it but there’s not a lot I can do about it, I suppose. I met his “devil” on the way out and I couldn’t resist saying to her to tell her principal it hadn’t been a plant and she just laughed and said he wouldn’t stoop to defending an innocent man. Poor devil, I should probably say, having to work with him – she was only a kid.
‘What does interest me, though, is that someone like Doddie Muir could get Vincent Dunbar to defend him. It was marked down as extortion, but Doddie’s hardly the Camorra – more like the sort of bully that says he’ll beat you up if you don’t give him your lunch money. A local shopkeeper agreed to cooperate and got done over in court, so she’ll be worried about what he’ll feel free to do now. Lawyers playing games with evidence don’t think about the results on the ground.’
‘I doubt if you’d get your devil to go along with that,’ Borthwick said. ‘They look at it from the other side.’
‘This one’s mother was in the force, apparently. She was pretty balanced. And very hungry.’
‘Hungry?’
He laughed. ‘Unpaid and broke. She only eats at the weekends when she goes back to the family farm. I stood her a cup of coffee and she fairly tore into the scones.’ He realised the boss was looking at him oddly and hurried on, ‘I feel a bit guilty about the witness who was brave enough to testify – I’ll need to check that the lads at Tarleton will keep the screws on Muir to make sure he doesn’t give her grief.’
As he drove back to his house, a fisherman’s cottage that looked out over Newhaven Harbour and across the Firth of Forth to the Fife coast, he found himself thinking about Cat Fleming. She had quite a mordant tongue and a refreshingly pragmatic attitude to the punters who would provide her bread and butter – ‘And jam,’ she had said, looking lovingly at the dollop she had just ladled onto a scone. ‘And if I do it as successfully as Vince the Victorious, jam I shall have. Otherwise it’s starvation.’
Kelso had laughed. He’d felt a bit like an uncle taking out a precocious niece for a treat, which was probably what had prompted him to ask if she’d like him to take her out for a feed sometime.
She’d bitten his hand off. ‘Oh, please! Could it be Wednesday? Midway between weekends, so you see I’m always ravenous then.’
He was looking forward to it. But the ‘niece’ thought had reminded him that he was having his real niece, Betsy, for a sleepover tonight while his sister Finella and Peter, the new man in her life, went out for a meal.
After Finella’s problems with Betsy’s father, Mark, who had abdicated all responsibility and was even now doing time in Saughton Prison for fraud, Kelso was very protective of the women in his family but Peter seemed a pretty solid guy. Though Kelso had been on hand to stand in as a father figure, it would be better for Betsy to have someone who was there all the time.
Fortunately, Betsy seemed to have taken to Peter too, treating him to the cajoling little sideways glances, with eyelashes employed to great effect, that she’d been practising for years on Kelso. When Finella and Peter dropped her off, he was amused to see that she was enjoying having what she saw as two suitors for her favours.
‘Peter lets me stay up late,’ she announced with a pointed look at Kelso. ‘And I can have ice cream.’
He was impressed that Peter said firmly, ‘Come on, Betsy, that was once as a special treat,’ and that Betsy didn’t argue, just pouting a little as she trotted off to put her suitcase downstairs in the bedroom.
‘Little minx,’ Kelso said fondly.
Finella smiled and Peter laughed. ‘Can’t argue with that. She’s a good kid, though.’
Betsy came back to wave them off, then went importantly to the shelf where Kelso kept books for her.
‘Now we’ll choose books for bedtime after we’ve watched CBeebies. And I’ll read the stories to you.’
He’d muttered in the past about the tedium of slogging through Peppa Pig and it went without saying that he was glad that his niece had learnt to read, but dear God, it was slow and boring! Insomniacs would pay good money for a recording, but if he fell asleep he’d never be forgiven.
‘That’s fine, Betsy,’ he said. ‘But let’s go for a walk round the harbour and look at the boats first, shall we? It’s a nice evening.’
Maybe after lots of fresh sea air she’d drop off first, but he wasn’t counting on it.
When she heard Doddie Muir’s key in the lock, his wife, Myrna, dried her hands on the tea-towel she was holding and went through to greet him ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Oh aye, fine,’ he said jauntily. ‘Mr Dunbar saw me right.’
She narrowed her eyes. He had the sort of stupid grin on his face that she recognised immediately. ‘You never drove back all the way in that condition? You’re a right eejit. How good is he at getting folk off when they’re caught drunk driving?’
‘Oh, he’d do that right enough,’ Doddie said, undaunted. ‘And where’s my tea? It’s been a long day.’ He went past her, through the hall to the little kitchen and sat down at the table that was covered with a seersucker cloth and laid with cutlery and a bottle of beer.
‘It’s just stovies,’ Myrna said. ‘Didn’t know when you’d be back.’ She fetched plates and began heating it up while he opened his beer and took a long swig. ‘So – when are you going back to put the posh cow in her place?’
Doddie swallowed and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Off limits,’ he said. ‘Mr Dunbar said I’m to stay out of trouble.’
She stopped and stared at him. ‘Who’s he, to go telling you what to do? I’ve missed the money this last bit.’
He gave her a pitying look. ‘He’s the top man and it wasn’t me paid for him, was it? And it’s not just me – the word’s gone out.’
‘Oh,’ she said flatly, slapping stovies onto his plate and setting it down in front of him. ‘It’s come at a bad time, then, when we’re all strapped for cash. You’ll have to see the boss and get him to give you overtime or we’ll really be having to tighten our belts.’
Doddie scowled. ‘Your belt’s only just meeting so it wouldn’t do you any harm. What’s for sweet?’
There was a rhubarb crumble in the fridge ready to be put in the microwave but from spite she left it in there. ‘There’s a yoghurt if you want it.’
‘Yoghurt!’ He made a disgusted face, downed the last of his beer and got up. ‘If that’s all you’ve got for me after the day I’ve had, I’m off out.’
When he’d gone – to the Waterfoot, no doubt – Myrna sat down to eat her own yoghurt, her mind on what he’d said. It had been sort of a weird spell, waiting for the trial, when everyone had been kind of paralysed and she’d been looking forward to things going back to normal where everyone just minded their own business and didn’t go snooping round. But an order was an order, and here in the Caddon they’d all understood that down the years, generation after generation.
Livvy Murray – DS Livvy Murray, if you please – had been feeling upbeat ever since she got the results of her sergeant’s exam. It hadn’t made a huge amount of difference to her daily life but it meant a welcome boost to her pay packet and she felt different, somehow. She’d tried to shrug off her previous failure, telling herself that it was just because she hadn’t worked hard enough, but there had been a sneaking fear that it was actually because she was thick. Now she’d a piece of paper to prove she wasn’t and it had restored her self-respect.
The pandemic had been hard for everyone and for the police, right in the forefront, dealing with people who would deliberately cough or spit in their faces, it was harder than for most. Murray had caught it early on and got it lightly – she’d had worse heavy colds – so she’d reckoned she was lucky, being probably immune even before she’d got the jabs.
There was comradeship and plenty to do in the working day but sitting in lockdown in her tiny flat had been a depressing business, leaving her more introspective than she’d ever been before. She’d spent quite a bit of time considering what she wanted out of life.
A good police career, certainly. She’d completed the first step and she’d confidence now that she could go further. Apart from that …
Her social life had opened up again since the lockdown lifted and she’d even gone on a few Tinder dates, but saying she was in the police had proved a bit of a passion-killer. Anyway, no Mr Right had appeared – frankly, not even a Mr Maybe-Could-Be-Almost-All-Right, if she was prepared to cut him some slack. Most of them had come into the not-sodding-likely category.
She’d barely seen Kelso Strang over the last bit. He’d said, ‘Hello! All right?’ when they’d passed in a corridor and he’d made a point of congratulating her on her success, but that was all. It was high time she stopped kidding herself that he would ever see her as anything other than a not entirely satisfactory junior colleague, and after a bit of a tussle, she had. Well, mostly. It was professional respect she was hoping for, that was all – and of course she loved the challenge of being involved in the SRCS cases.
The last one, though, she’d definitely blotted her copybook. Strang had always before made allowances for her, but this time he’d actually given her a formal reprimand and it had taught her a lesson that she’d failed to learn before, about taking matters into her own hands.
Driving home after her shift, though, she was happier than she’d been for months, ever since Angie Andrews’ message that DCI Strang wanted to see her about a job tomorrow. There was no indication of how long it would take; all she knew was that it wouldn’t mean an overnight stay.
‘It’s in Tarleton,’ Strang said when she reported for duty at his broom-cupboard-sized office. ‘Do you know it? On the Berwickshire coast, not far off the A1, about an hour’s drive as far as I can remember. There was an extortion case we lost in the Sheriff Court today – Doddie Muir, a small-time ned with a big name defending him—’
Murray had heard all about it. ‘I saw PC Moore afterwards. She told me what had happened.’
Strang pulled a face. ‘Was she all right? She was given a hard time.’
‘She was quite – er – colourful about the QC. More hopping mad than upset, I’d say.’
‘That’s the way to take it. He’s a nasty bit of work – I spoke to his devil on the way out and even she loathes him. I’d better explain the situation. This case only happened to come my way because I have an ongoing investigation into theft of farm machinery and I was doing a warning round of the local farms, and when I spoke to Sarah Lindsay, she told me about Doddie Muir. I was struck myself by the fact that none of the other shopkeepers who were questioned were prepared to say anything at all and I’d like to know why.’
‘Scared?’ Murray asked.
‘Possibly. What I want you to do is go down and have a chat with the witness, try and find out what the scene is locally. You can say we’re anxious to reassure her that we’ll still be keeping an eye on this Doddie Muir. I may not be her favourite person after what happened but you’re good at drawing people out.’
She felt a warm glow at that. ‘Do my best, of course.’
‘She might be more likely to open up to a woman. To tell you the truth, it’s a job that could have been done by a local PC but, according to DI Gunn, the only woman who works from the Tarleton station is not, shall we say, the sort who would invite confidences.’
Murray grinned. ‘I get the picture. Right, boss. Report back here?’
‘You could arrange to see DI Gunn after that – you may have questions if anything arises from the interview. Remind him about leaning on Muir and ask if he’s got any idea where the money for a top lawyer is coming from.’
Murray left the meeting with a warm glow. It probably felt like that if you were a Catholic when you came out from confession, assured that you had been forgiven.
‘Briony! Briony!’ Jimmie Gresham called on Tuesday morning.
‘Yes, Dad,’ Briony called back wearily from the kitchen. As she waited for his reply, she made a face, mouthing, ‘Is everything in order for the party?’
‘Is everything in order for the party?’ he said.
When was she ever not organised when she’d been given her orders? ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. He was always a bit on edge when the supermarket buyers came up, but he’d been fussing about this one more than usual and she added, ‘Is there likely to be some sort of problem with it?’
‘No, no, not at all. Just – well, you know what Andrew’s like on these occasions. He’ll pick any faults he can,’ he said, coming through from the hall.
‘Yes, I know.’ Just like the way you try to get one up on your brother when it’s the other way round. ‘I’ll check again with the caterers, if you want, just to make sure they’re ready.’
‘Right, right,’ he said, his eyes scanning the immaculate kitchen. ‘I’ll get into the office, then.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ Briony said, busying herself with checking a list. To her relief, he grunted and went off. There was definitely something bugging him, though – the guff about his brother had been an excuse.
It was days like these when she just couldn’t imagine how her sweet, gentle little granny had coped with the expectations of her two large and powerful offspring – a blue tit having to minister to a pair of cuckoos.
Gran had been a mother to her since her own mother had cleared out and Jimmie had made it plain that she had to choose between going with her and staying with him. For Briony it was no contest since she’d always been a daddy’s girl and whatever he did was right. Jimmie was a larger-than-life character; the fathers of her school friends always seemed vague and shadowy compared to him and she’d been proud to be his daughter.
She was proud, too, of her family’s roots that ran deep in Tarleton, from the great-grandfather who was a skipper and who had been swept overboard in a storm at sea, to the grandfather who had then taken on the boat himself at the age of fourteen and given her uncle and her father the means to become the figures in the community they now were.
She could have made a career for herself elsewhere but she’d never really wanted to. As the spoilt only child, life at the farm was too pleasant for her to want to try. She’d a generous allowance from Jimmie, she could live at home and pop up to Edinburgh to do interesting charity work and meet friends while Gran did all the heavy lifting with making a home for her son and granddaughter.
Lockdown had put a stop to that, and then Gran had died. Briony, feeling all but destroyed by grief, found that Jimmie expected her to take over where Gran had left off.
It was an unconscionable shock when she found that her own wishes weren’t paramount any more – not when it came to what Jimmie wanted. She’d taken it very hard indeed and things had gone a bit pear-shaped at that point. But it didn’t make any difference; when she got herself back together again, Jimmie still wanted what he’d wanted before. She could make herself ill again by resisting, she realised, or she make it easy on herself and fall into line.
Her cousin Rob, Andrew Gresham’s son – three years older and her partner-in-crime when they were kids – had always been her rock and they’d shared grievances as social victims of Covid who shared the same problem: fathers who used the force of their dominant personalities to impose their will.
‘I’d a good business going, and everything just collapsed,’ Rob had said bitterly. ‘Now if I want to eat and have a roof over my head, he’s got the upper hand.’
‘But he’s given you a proper job,’ she’d argued. ‘I’ve just become a skivvy, organising his diary and all the professional entertaining for him as well as keeping house. If I was a boy it would be different but he doesn’t rate me, despite having brought me up to think the way he does. His own comfort comes first so it suits him to keep me tied to the kitchen sink and the most I’ve time for is a bit of boring stuff in the farm office. Uncle Andrew isn’t as bad as Dad is.’
Rob looked at her for a long moment. ‘You think? Really? Just after I crawled back, we had the big confrontation – you know, the one we’d managed to avoid all these years by never having one-on-one conversations. I was dumb enough to say, “You’ve never loved me, have you?” And do you know what he replied?’
Briony shook her head.
‘He said, “How could I? You killed your mother. A murderer before you were an hour old.” Made me feel great, I can tell you.’
Briony looked at him in horror. ‘That’s a wicked thing to say! That could do terrible psychological damage.’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, like they say, “I’m mad, me!” So I just have to get on with it. Anyway, I get on fine with Jimmie.’
He did, too. And Jimmie was like that – he got on with people, and perhaps she was just being petulant. He might be bone selfish but he’d certainly never have been cruel to her like that. Poor Rob!
Personally, though, she had no problem with Uncle Andrew, though he was quiet and a bit dour. Michelle, his second wife, was all right, though Briony was a little wary. She was quite hard, but then she’d probably had to be growing up in the Caddon among the low-lifes, and in the Gresham family it paid not to be over-sensitive. They just had to accept that on a social evening like tonight, where comparisons could be made, a ridiculous sort of rivalry operated.
Briony glanced at her watch. Just time to make a totally unnecessary call to the caterers before going to meet Sarah at their usual cafe in Tarleton. It sounded as if she might be needing a bit of mopping-up.
CHAPTER THREE
It was nearly half-past ten when DS Murray arrived in Tarleton. Sarah Lindsay might well be at home licking her wounds but it made sense to see if she was in her shop first before driving out to Eastlaw Farm.
Her immediate impression was of a thriving town with a harbour at its heart – and a proper working harbour too, not just a marina, with what looked like a fish market at one end and quite a bit of industrial stuff and warehouses and big ocean-going ships too, tied up along the quay. Beyond it to the south was what must be the smart end – a lot of big, solid old houses as well as new ‘executive’ homes extending up the slope behind. Commuter land, she thought: you’d get a lot more bang for your buck here than in Edinburgh, and there was a station too. There was parking along beside the harbour so she found a space and left the car.
The main street ran along the line of the shore. Murray was always interested in the number of charity shops; they told you a lot about any town. Here there were a few, but they didn’t dominate like in some places, and the stuff in the windows looked pretty good – she might even have a wee sneaky rake around later herself, if she’d time. The usual suspects like Boots and Costa Coffee featured, but there were quite a few smart gift shops as well as a couple of fashion boutiques and a very enticing gelateria. She’d noticed a caravan site on the way in so there would be tourists too, looking to spend their holiday money.
She didn’t see the sign for Sarah Lindsay’s shop, Interiors, so she explored a couple of side streets. Even then she didn’t see it and as the main street curved uphill the shops petered out and she hesitated, frowning.
There was a narrower road that continued along the line of the shore and she could see that there was another small run of shops and crossed over to it. Here the houses were different: smaller, many of them opening right onto the street, and these shops were a bit run-down: she could see a bookies, a scruffy cafe, a small convenience store, a cheap-looking dress shop. And there, in the middle, all elegant with grey paint and white cursive writing, was Interiors.
Displayed in the window was a chair draped with swathes of what even Murray could tell were designer fabrics – the kind where if you had to ask how much it was per metre you couldn’t afford it. An arrangement of silk flowers stood on a white tripod table with a classic white pottery urn on the floor beside it. There was a ‘Closed’ notice on the door.
She didn’t know a lot about merchandising but even she could tell that this sophisticated-looking shop was in the wrong place. Admittedly, the local residents might know it was there, but repeat business for soft furnishings must be limited – how often does anyone change their curtains? You certainly wouldn’t get passing trade from the visitors who might come for a browse in the classier shops. They wouldn’t see anything to tempt them to cross the main road and the sort of people who did patronise the shops here wouldn’t be able to afford what Interiors was selling.
Murray walked back to her car. Eastlaw Farm, next stop. You had to hope that the farm was making a living for them since she couldn’t see Sarah Lindsay turning much of a profit here.
‘Didn’t go too well, then?’ Briony Gresham said.
Sarah Lindsay’s shoulders were slumped as she sat in the corner of the Rendezvous Cafe. She sat up as Briony came in with a groan.
‘You could say. I’ve ordered coffee but if they had a licence, it’d be brandy.’
Briony sat down and nodded to the waitress for her usual flat white. ‘Bad as that?’
She was – well, what Americans call ‘homely’, if Sarah was honest, with untidy mousy hair and a round face but she’d reached out at a time when Sarah felt she hadn’t a friend in the world and been welcoming.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Quite as bad as that. You don’t realise how helpless you are in the court. This loathsome big slug of a man with a wig on could say whatever he liked but I was only allowed to answer his questions and he shut me up if I tried to explain. I ended up looking so stupid.’
‘Don’t tell me Doddie got off? Everyone knows about his little enterprise.’
‘Yes, but “everyone” wouldn’t admit it. I should have listened to you when you told me not to pursue it. Now he’s just going to come back again and I won’t be able to do anything about it. I’m scared, to be honest.’
Briony thought for a moment. ‘He probably won’t, you know. He won’t be looking for more grief from the police and they’ll be watching him.’
