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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: DI Marjory Fleming
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Pleasure is the highest good: the Cyrenaics practised the principle until the death of one from an overdose and the apparent suicide of another. Sobered, the group went their several ways. One heads to Canada, another disappears and a third is believed to have committed suicide, at least until his body turns up two years later in the wreck of a car swept up on to the Solway mud flats. DI Marjory Fleming finds the case on her own patch, obstructed by the unpleasant and resentful Inspector she has been asked to direct, and DC Hepburn and DS Macdonald, still at loggerheads, don't make it any easier.
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Seitenzahl: 571
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THE THIRD SIN
ALINE TEMPLETON
For Jennie and Hugh, and Matti and Bill, with much love
‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last – memory gives way.
Nietzsche
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
October 2012
Julia was wild that night, her long blonde hair streaming as she danced like a maenad among the trees.
Jen watched her warily. She was high. Well, they all were, all the Cyrenaics, of course, but Julia – oh yes, Julia was beyond that – way beyond. She had thrown off her coat despite the cold and she’d just tripped on a tree root, gnarled as an old man’s foot.
‘You’ll break your ankle, J,’ Jen shouted. ‘Chill, for God’s sake!’
Julia turned. Under the bleached moon her face was all white planes and black shadows, her eyes pits of darkness. She laughed a great, joyous, uninhibited laugh.
‘Chill? How can anyone chill on a night like this?’ She flung her arms wide, embracing the universe, the whirling galaxies overhead. There was an edge of frost tonight and above the angled branches of the trees the black bowl of the night sky was studded with diamonds.
Tonight you could almost hear the music of the spheres, Jen thought, interwoven with the restless muttering of the trees. The rest of the Cyrenaics drifted around her: Connell, Will, Skye, Randall, Kendra. Only Kendra’s husband Logie was missing, running the pub.
Skye was laughing and dancing too, a sprite alive with energy. ‘I’m floating,’ she called. ‘I don’t need to touch the ground!’ Then she stopped, staring up at the sky, a mood swing making her suddenly serious. ‘We’re so small. We’re so – so nothing. We’re ants – ants to be stepped on.’ She ground her own small foot into the leaf mould.
Was that what started the first wave of unease among them? Afterwards, Jen couldn’t remember, but her sensory exhilaration began to fade, along with the effects of the last spliff.
‘How come we don’t see this every night?’ Skye tilted her face up to Will who was standing nearby.
‘Light pollution,’ Will said. ‘Too many lights, everywhere.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, spare us another eco-rant!’ Randall wasn’t high; the cigarette he was smoking was the kind you could buy across the counter but he’d got drunk tonight instead, drunk and belligerent. He was younger than the rest of them and something had definitely put him on edge; perhaps it was Skye, spirits restored, twirling herself into Will’s arms to be gathered into an embrace. ‘What are we going to do now? Just stand around in a wood all night? OK, we’ve seen the Dark Skies effect – who’s coming back to the pub?’
‘Slow down! Just feel the night.’ Connell’s voice came from deep shadow, under a towering Scots pine, on the edge of the group. As usual.
All Jen could make out was the bulk of his darker shadow and the paler smudge of his face: bad, beautiful Connell who didn’t play their little games with anyone except Julia. She felt a stab of pain at the thought. And she could, indeed, feel the night, like invisible fingers creeping about her, chilly, sinister. She gave an involuntary shudder.
Kendra moved across to Will, her brother-in-law, and Skye. ‘Will, you were going to point out the planets,’ she said. ‘I can do Orion, up there – see?’
Will turned away from Skye, his attention caught. ‘The Plough next, then.’ He put his arm round Kendra’s shoulder, directing her gaze. ‘Look, high up – higher. Got it?’
Randall gave a disgusted snort, throwing down his cigarette and stamping it out. ‘That’s enough communing with nature for me. I’m cold. Anyone coming back to the cars? Skye?’ But Skye twirled away again, throwing him an impish glance over her shoulder.
Jen was cold too, and there was too much going on tonight. She felt the tensions in the group tingling like nettle stings on her skin. If she and Randall left, it might break up the party. Before something happened.
Why was she thinking that? It was foolish, of course, just the effect of the dramatic surroundings of ancient trees, moonlight and darkness. Even so, she’d be a lot happier once they were back in Logie Stewart’s smartly decadent gastropub.
‘I’ll come,’ she said, then looking round, ‘Where’s Julia?’ It was ten minutes since she’d seen her disappear among the trees.
‘Off to worship the gods of the grove, no doubt,’ Connell said in that dry, sarcastic way he had.
Jen’s eyes went back to him. She didn’t really like him – not like, no – and she wasn’t sure that any of the others did either, apart from Julia, but he got the stuff for them. And did Julia like him – or was the relationship built on need not inclination? Julia was getting in deep these days.
‘Come on then, Jen.’ Randall put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Let’s leave these morons to gape. I left a bottle in the car.’
She could smell the drink raw on his breath; you always could if you’d been inhaling rather than drinking yourself, and she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to find herself alone with a Randall who had something to prove to Skye and had declared his intention of getting drunker still. She was beginning to feel spooked, though, and she allowed him to sweep her along.
They went in single file along the narrow track they had followed to the clearing until the broader forestry track that cut a swathe through the trees opened up ahead of them.
An owl hooted, another owl answered and twigs crackled in the depths of the forest as if people were walking beside them unseen. Jen drew a little closer to Randall’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette, glad now that she wasn’t alone. It was a relief when they turned downhill and she could see Will’s 4x4 parked lower down the slope.
The sound that reached them, a horrible sound, a sort of choking, gurgling cry, froze her to the spot.
‘Dear God, what was that?’ Jen could feel blood draining from her face.
Randall looked pale too in the moonlight, but he said only, ‘A rabbit, probably. They scream, you know, when the stoat gets them.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said, but when she turned back he followed her. She didn’t break into a run, not until she heard the voices calling, ‘Julia! Julia!’
They reached the clearing again. The others were all there together, Connell in the middle shouting, ‘Julia! Where are you, you silly bitch!’
‘Have you seen any sign of her?’ Kendra demanded.
Randall shook his head. ‘What was that noise?’
It was Connell who said, ‘Some animal, I guess.’ But he went on, ‘I think we’d better just check on Julia, though, in case she’s got lost. The way she was going on, she could have tripped and knocked herself out somewhere.’
He was sweating, Jen noticed with an almost clinical detachment. What had he given Julia tonight? And, more importantly, where was she?
‘Fan out.’ Will took control, directing them out on different angles. ‘Don’t go too far and get lost yourselves.’
The cries began echoing all through the forest: ‘Julia! Julia!’ Jen found herself shivering convulsively, with cold and with nerves. She had to force herself to move on through the multiple paths ahead, avenues of trees that beckoned then withdrew the invitation in a snarl of brambles and nettles, straining her ears for a cry of, ‘I’ve found her!’ that didn’t come.
Slower, slower. She was putting her feet down very deliberately now but even so she almost trod on her.
Julia was lying across a path, little more than a track, splayed out on her back, her top pulled off one shoulder as if she had been too hot. Her teeth were bared in a grimace and her face was suffused and sweaty. In the relentless moonlight her eyes gleamed, wide and glassy.
Jen didn’t have to touch her to know she was dead. But with a shudder of revulsion she bent to pick up the limp arm. It was hot – scarily hot – but there was no pulse and she dropped it again as if it had burnt her fingers. Then she screamed.
Later, it all came back to her in flash frames. Connell, grim-faced, being comforted by Skye. Will, a policeman himself, unable to look his colleagues in the eye. Kendra, who had summoned her husband, clinging to him in tears. Randall, looking like a scared teenager, explaining to his mother on the phone. Then later, Julia’s mother, small but dignified, holding herself upright despite her stick, her sternly handsome face rigid with the determination not to break down here.
Jen had been the last to give her statement; the others had gone, and when Mrs Margrave’s eyes swept over her it felt like a scorching flame. Until then, Jen had felt detached and emotionless, as if she were viewing the dramatic events from behind a pane of glass; now she burnt with shame.
In her heart of hearts, Jen had somehow always known that their relentless pursuit of pleasure would end badly. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal had been their literary bible and now they were seeing the flowers of evil indeed. And from somewhere a voice from that older bible came murmuring, ‘The wages of sin is death.’
And not Julia’s alone. Connell was charged with drug dealing and culpable homicide and two days later his car was found in the car park by the lighthouse at the Mull of Galloway, a letter to Julia’s mother taped to the steering wheel. Will, sacked from the police force, went off to Canada and Skye, without a word to her parents, left home and vanished.
Randall, the baby of the group, prospered in his job with an Edinburgh merchant bank and Jen, still teaching in the little school at Ballinbreck, nursed her grief and pain and anger and learnt to live with the ghosts.
It was only in 2014, the Year of Homecoming, that the shadows began to stir.
On television it seemed such a cheerful, harmless invitation: the pictured Scots, either bonny or famous and sometimes both, calling the exiles home for a party, for a love fest of mountains and lochs and ceilidhs and pipe bands and whisky – so warm, so welcoming, beaming into homes worldwide in thousands of advertisement breaks.
The Year of Homecoming! Visit Scotland!
‘Where’s the remote?’
At the snarled question Heather Denholm, already stiff with apprehension, began a futile patting around the sofa she was sitting on.
‘I-I don’t know, Donald. You had it last—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Her partner flung himself out of his chair to turn off the set then stormed out, his face contorted with what you might assume to be anger but she thought could be pain. With this VisitScotland commercial constantly appearing it was going to be a difficult year.
If it had been her daughter who had disappeared and for two long years she’d had no idea if she was alive or dead, she’d certainly have found the thought of happy reunions with returning loved ones hard to take.
So it was natural enough that he couldn’t bear it – even if it sometimes sounded as if he hadn’t … well, actually liked her very much.
The flyer delivered to the doorstep along with a couple of catalogues was on its way to the recycling pile when the headline caught Jen Wilson’s eye.
‘The Year of Homecoming in Ballinbreck,’ it said and she read it with mounting unease: a village party inviting the diaspora to return, held at Ballinbreck House.
A shiver ran down her back. Why, for God’s sake, would you want to do that? Why try to bring back the people who had left, rake up a past that was better forgotten – much better?
She looked at the signature – Philippa Lindsay. Philippa, who liked to refer to herself as the ‘Lady of the Manor’, though with a light laugh to show she was using the term ironically, whose Lady Bountiful moments had been few, far between and carefully calculated.
So what was in it for her? Why would Philippa want to provoke a reunion that would risk opening up old wounds?
Then suddenly, she knew – knew as if she had read the mind behind the message. A fit of rage shook her; she crumpled up the flyer and threw it in the bin, as if destroying it could somehow destroy the thought behind it.
It wouldn’t, though. There would be people in the village with family overseas or in London or even closer at hand, in Glasgow or Edinburgh, who would welcome the idea of a grand reunion. The Lindsays, for once, would be popular.
If it happened, the seething emotions that had settled to an uneasy calm would break out all over again. She had to try and stop it.
Jen went to her laptop, clicked Create Mail, then hesitated. Could it do any harm? Probably not, though it might not do any good. She tapped out her message, took a deep breath and despatched it.
The speed of the reply surprised her. What it said left her shocked, bewildered and very, very angry.
Logie Stewart looked up from his laptop. ‘That’s Will saying that with all this Year of Homecoming stuff he might pay a visit back.’
‘Oh, really?’ Kendra said. Her voice sounded perfectly calm, her face was tranquil, as if the thought of her husband’s brother coming home was a matter of no more than mild interest.
‘Amazing that he feels able,’ her husband went on, a slight chill in his voice. ‘After all that happened.’
‘After all that happened,’ she echoed. ‘Yes, amazing. Do you want a cup of tea?’
She didn’t wait for his answer before going to make it. As she filled the kettle she found her lips shaping the words that Will had quoted to her all those years ago: he that would keep a secret, must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep.
It was only words written on a piece of paper, but it had been folded up, put in an envelope, addressed and sent on its way and its seismic effect was starting.
So be it: Fiat justitia, ruat caelum – Let justice be done, though the heavens fall …
CHAPTER TWO
March 2014
Philippa Lindsay was taking trouble over her appearance today. She took her Max Mara silk-cashmere sweater, a delicious warm red, out of its protective bag and paired it with designer jeans and a smart little DKNY jacket; her audience would be impressed that she’d taken so much trouble – or they should be, anyway. Poised, assured: that was the effect she was channelling, and if she established her authority right from the start it would be less likely that anyone would argue over the arrangements she had decided on already.
She was pleased, too, with her hair: the new shade of ashy blonde was what her hairdresser had vulgarly called ‘classy, not brassy’ and though Philippa wouldn’t quite have put it that way herself, it worked. She touched a little concealer under her eyes and then completed her make-up with a soft-red lipstick to match her sweater, enhancing her rather thin lips just a fraction over the edge.
She’d been scrupulous about working out too – not a trace of flab – and she was still looking good; fully ten years younger than the date on the birth certificate she didn’t care to look at, she told herself. She didn’t register the grooves of disappointment that soured her mouth or the little temper lines that had hardened between her well-tailored eyebrows.
Brimming with confidence, she went downstairs to breakfast.
Her husband, sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal, looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were off somewhere today.’
She turned from spooning coffee into a cafetière to look at him with a frown. ‘I’m not, Charles. I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You don’t usually treat the locals to designer stuff. The only time I ever see you wearing it is when you want to impress your friends in Glasgow.’
Philippa had naturally high colour and her cheeks flared in rivalry with her sweater. ‘That’s a silly and spiteful remark. I have to look after my clothes because as you don’t hesitate to tell me, we’re not made of money.’ She left the words, ‘And whose fault is that?’ hanging in the air.
It was a pity if Charles was in one of his spiky, sarcastic moods. Since he never listened to local gossip she’d managed to put off telling him what was happening, but soon he was bound to find out and she’d decided it would be wise to break it to him before he found out.
‘Actually, today I’m making an effort because we’re planning the Year of Homecoming party.’ She said it casually, apparently concentrating on pouring the water over the coffee grounds.
It was Charles Lindsay’s habit to ignore his wife’s activities as far as possible, more or less in self-defence, but this was going too far. ‘I told you before, Philippa – no! I thought you’d dropped it.’
She threw him a glance over her shoulder as she pressed down the plunger of the cafetière. ‘There’s no point in saying no. It’s too late. I sent the flyer round ages ago, and there’s been a good response. I’ve invited everyone to hold it here.’
Charles choked on his cereal. ‘You’ve … what?’ he spluttered.
Philippa gave him a small, triumphant smile. ‘I told you that was what I was going to do.’
‘And I told you not to! For God’s sake, Philippa, what are you trying to do? Wasn’t there enough trouble before?’
He pushed back his chair and jumped up to confront her. His pose might have been intimidating if she hadn’t been taller than he was, and she took advantage of that to look down on him pityingly.
‘I should have thought you’d have realised by now that there was no point in bullying me, Charles.’
He struggled for words. ‘Bullying – me bullying you! That’s a sick joke, do you know that? You bully everyone. It comes as naturally to you as breathing. Do you know what they think of you in the village – how often they dive down a side street if they see you coming?’
The tide of colour rose in her cheeks again. ‘That’s a lie. They’re happy enough to come to the things I arrange. And I can tell you people are really enthusiastic about this.’
‘That’s because you’ve offered to host it here. And apart from anything else, that’s a bad idea. One way or another it’s going to run us into expense and with the economy the way it is we don’t have the money for lavish, manipulative gestures.
‘I’m not sure why you’re set on this, but any reason I can think of is frightening – playing games with people’s lives. Sometimes I think you’re crazy – power crazy.’
Philippa gave a silly titter. ‘Power crazy – that sounds very grand! You flatter me.’
‘Not really,’ Charles said tiredly. ‘When we were in the nursery we just used to call it wanting your own way, and you’ve never grown past the infantile stage. You want your own way all the time.’
‘Why don’t you leave, then?’ she said shrilly.
He had turned to walk out; he swung back. ‘Because you own half the business and you’d collapse it for sheer vindictiveness. That’s the only reason, believe me.’
Philippa was left staring at the door he had slammed, feeling for once a little shaken. She was no stranger to marital rows, but she’d never known Charles be – well, vicious.
She still wasn’t going to pay any attention. He’d get over it. Her hand was shaking, though, as she poured out her coffee.
Ballinbreck, on the shores of the Solway Firth between Balcary Bay and Abbey Head, was a picturesque fishing village, the haunt of smugglers in days gone by and now generally prosperous enough. The pretty harbour, home mainly to leisure craft, was a draw for tourists to support the small hotel and self-catering cottages as well as a couple of artists’ studios, craft shops and galleries.
The seventeenth-century houses, harled and whitewashed or colour-washed in a spectrum running from pale cream to deepest blue – with one unfortunate shade of purple – were looking particularly charming in the watery spring sunshine, Jen Wilson thought as she walked along the main street.
There was a ‘Chocolate and Cupcakes’ fundraiser at the little local school where she taught and her Primary 4 pupils had been high as kites about it for days. Cupcakes were definitely beyond her but she’d made enough chocolate crispies to ensure obesity and dental decay for fully half the school.
She loved occasions like these. The mums would be out in force today, and the grannies, as well as a number of other people who realised that the home baking on offer would be seriously underpriced, but whatever the motive it brought people together. The village was growing, with a good number of new houses spreading round the back, and charity events were a bridge for the ‘incomers’ to get into the local community.
The woman who ran the general store and post office had promised an iced and decorated cake to raffle, so Jen went in to collect it, admired it effusively, and was just on her way out carrying it carefully when she all but bumped into Philippa Lindsay, hurrying in.
‘Oh – sorry, Jen,’ Philippa said. She didn’t look directly at the other woman, moving round her to pass.
Jen put a hand on her arm. ‘I hear it’s going ahead – the party.’ Her voice was cold.
‘Oh, yes, the party.’ Philippa gave a false, social laugh. ‘It’s proving very popular, giving the village a sort of focus for this year, you know? A lot of people are arranging family visits round about it. Well, you know how it is with the young – it’s more tempting to come and see the wrinklies if you know your friends are going to be there too. And it’s a community thing – you know how sentimental expats are. It’s going to be a shot in the arm for the local economy.’
‘Very public-spirited,’ Jen said. ‘What I want to know is, did the fish take the bait?’
Philippa’s thin lips tightened. ‘I don’t know what you mean. If that’s your attitude, you don’t have to come.’
Jen held her gaze steadily until Philippa’s eyes dropped. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You invited me. I’ll be there.’
She walked away.
April 2014
Eleanor Margrave had smelt bad weather all day. After a bitter March of relentless frost and snow it had turned sultry and today the air felt thick, oppressive. A headache was gripping her skull like a vice.
It was late afternoon when she heard the first dull moaning of the gathering storm, a complaining wind from the south-west, muttering and grumbling. Looking out from the sitting-room window of Sea House across her strip of garden to the Solway Firth, narrow at ebb tide and muddy-brown under low, sullen clouds, she could see the scrubby trees above the shoreline starting to sway as the wind rose, then to bend and twist.
The spring tide would be turning now down the estuary, racing over the sand flats with the driving wind, faster than a horse could gallop, according to local legend. She wanted to listen for the roar of its arrival but when she tugged at the handles to raise the sash window with her rheumaticky hands it had no effect.
Even with the window shut, though, she could hear the rushing waters now and when she craned her painful neck to look west, there was the line of surf with its cloud of spray encroaching on the sand flats with menacing speed. She sat down to watch; it thrilled her, just as it had thrilled her when she’d been taken down to see it as a child, being given dire warnings about its dangers.
The first fat spots of rain slammed on the windowpanes and even as the low breakers started to cover the shore the wind noise rose with the storm screaming in from the Irish Sea. Though it was only six o’clock the light went rapidly and she found herself sitting in darkness. It had turned cold again and the bleakness outside made her melancholy.
Eleanor got to her feet and limped slowly into the hall that ran from the front to the back of the house. With a door at each end, the draughts were fierce on a night like this and she shivered as she crossed it. The Aga kept the kitchen cosy, though; ever practical, she had pretty much lived here during the cold spell but she’d been pining for the long light evenings in the sitting room watching daylight fade to a glimmering gold on the sea outside, trying once more to capture even a hint of its glory on her sketch pad.
Sighing, she made her supper and ate it in the chair by the stove off a folding table, watching the small TV set up in one corner. They were advertising the Year of Homecoming extensively now and she watched with a small, cynical smile. In the run-up to the vote on independence for Scotland, no heartstring was to be left untugged.
At least the headache had cleared and the warmth eased her painful joints. She found herself nodding over the killer Sudoku she tried to do every night, to prove to herself that her brain was still working, jerking awake with a ‘Tchah!’ of annoyance each time.
She was dozing when the peal of thunder broke directly overhead and she woke in a panic, convinced the ceiling was falling down – something to do with her dream. She sank back in her chair with a gasp as the room lit up with a lurid flash of lightning and seconds later heard another, just as loud.
The old house had withstood storms for two hundred years and Eleanor loved them. She always watched the moods of the sea from her window as if they were dramas with a celestial cast played out for her especial benefit and it looked as if tonight they were lining up for a spectacular. She went back to the chair in the window of the sitting room, picking up a throw from the back of the sofa and wrapping it round herself
The son et lumière was, she judged, more or less at its height with forked lightning flickering every few moments and the crashing rumble of one thunderclap barely fading before the next took its place. The sea below her was tossing, white-capped, under hissing sheets of rain, but the tide had turned again and the shallow waters were making their slow retreat.
Gradually, the intervals between strikes grew longer, the rumbling fainter as the electric storm moved on. Show over. She yawned, ready for bed now; satisfied, replete almost. Storms were always cathartic, as if wildness outside somehow purged the emotional storm that had raged within her ever since Julia’s terrible decline into drugs and death.
As she got up she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, just to the left of the house. She turned her head, peering into the darkness, but could see nothing. A trick of the light, perhaps, a shadow thrown by distant lightning flickering behind a waving tree. She folded up the throw and put it back neatly over the arm of the sofa, but she felt a little unsettled. It was almost midnight; she had no near neighbours and with the nearest house quarter of a mile away, no one could have a reason to be about in weather like this. No good reason, anyway.
She was not by nature nervous, and anyway, you couldn’t afford to indulge your imagination when you lived in this sort of isolation. She’d just go and check that the doors were locked then make herself a cup of tea and take it up to bed with her—
The knocking on the front door was alarmingly loud in the silent house. She stood in the hall staring at its unrevealing back in fright.
After a moment, it came again, louder, more imperative.
She would be crazy to open it without knowing who was there, she thought, suddenly conscious of her frail body, her brittle bones. Even if she went to an upstairs window and looked down she wouldn’t be able to see because there was a porch over the doorstep. She could pretend she wasn’t here or hadn’t heard – but then would they just break in?
There were keys in all the doors leading on to the hall. She could lock these, retreat upstairs, call the police on the phone at her bedside, but it could take half an hour or more for anyone to reach her. And what if they cut the phone line? There was no signal for her mobile here.
Her heart was fluttering. When she went to lock the nearest door, her hands were shaking so that it was a struggle to turn the key and when the beating on the door began again she jumped so that she knocked it on to the floor. This time, though, she heard the sound of a woman, a child, even, wailing desperately.
Eleanor was no fool. There were criminals who wouldn’t hesitate to use a decoy to gain entrance, and even women who were evil themselves. But you could die of exposure on a night like this and there was no other shelter. She switched on the outside light, fixed the chain across the door then very cautiously opened it.
The figure on the doorstep was small and slight – and alone. A woman – a child? It was hard to tell. Not threatening, anyway, and clearly distressed, with a livid bruise on the left cheekbone. She was wearing a thin jacket and jeans and she was shockingly wet, dripping as if she had come straight out of the water. Her hair, plastered to her head, was long and curling; as Eleanor released the chain to admit her she saw that her eyes, wide with distress, were as grey-green as the sea itself.
A mermaid, she thought, like the little figurine that had sat on her mantelpiece since a visit to Copenhagen twenty years before. She waved her inside.
‘What on earth’s happened to you? You’d better come through to the kitchen, where it’s warm.’
The girl glanced up at her blindly; she was shivering so much that her teeth were chattering loudly enough to be heard. There was no colour in her face and for a moment Eleanor thought she might even collapse, but she made for the Aga as if with an instinctive response to its heat, huddling against it like an animal.
‘I’ll get a towel,’ Eleanor said, retreating. She was glad to have a moment to collect herself.
Had the girl really come up out of the sea, after a shipwreck, perhaps? Boats came to grief sometimes in these tricky waters – but no, if she’d waded out just now she would have been filthy with sandy mud, and she was only wet. Been walking for a long time, then, while the storm was on?
Under the kitchen light it had been clear that she was older than she’d looked at first – late twenties, early thirties, even. It was also clear that she was in shock and at risk of hypothermia. She’d have to stay the night, until she was fit to contact her family or friends.
Yes, Eleanor knew her duty but it was with a certain reluctance that she set about fetching towels and bedlinen from the airing cupboard and turning on a radiator in one of the spare bedrooms. The girl would need to get out of those wet clothes too, so she took a thick pair of pyjamas out of her chest of drawers, gave a longing glance at her own cosy bed, and switched on the immersion heater for a bath.
When she got back to the kitchen, the girl was standing as she had left her. She didn’t seem to notice that her clothes were steaming; she was still shivering and still looking blank.
‘What you need is a brandy,’ Eleanor said, handing her a towel and going to the larder. There should still be brandy left from mince pies at Christmas and though it was a year or two old it shouldn’t actually have gone off. ‘I think you should get into a bath as soon as possible too but the water won’t be hot enough just yet. Sit down and drink this and I’ll make a cup of tea. I know I could be doing with one.’
The girl was dabbing at her hair with the towel but she looked at the glass as if she had never seen one before and took a moment to grasp it. Eleanor took her by the arm to urge her into the chair beside the Aga. Her passivity was quite alarming.
‘Now tell me what’s happened,’ she said gently. ‘Did you have an accident?’
She got no answer. The girl was still staring at the brandy; it was a moment or two before she put it to her lips, swallowed and shuddered, then took another sip.
At least the convulsive shivering was subsiding. Suddenly it occurred to Eleanor that she could be foreign, failing to understand what she had been asked. There were a lot of middle Europeans in the area now; she tried German, without result, then French, then miming.
‘Eleanor,’ she said, patting her chest, then ‘Your name?’ pointing. When there was no response, she pointed to the bruise, now spreading in vivid glory. ‘Accident?’
It seemed more as if the girl was disconnected than as if she didn’t understand. As Eleanor made tea, she kept up her attempts to communicate, but without success. The most she got was a shake of the head at a plate of biscuits, but the girl drank the brandy and the mug of tea. It was only when Eleanor turned back from making a hot-water bottle that she realised she had begun to cry silently.
There was no point in asking her questions. ‘It’s time you were in bed,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’
The girl got up and followed her. She had a canvas rucksack that had been set down at her feet; it was still soaking wet but when Eleanor suggested she left it by the range to dry she shook her head violently, clutching it to her and holding on grimly.
‘Fine, if you want to keep it with you. But you’d better empty it and spread out your things to dry – it’s soaked through.’ Feeling ruffled – did the girl think she was going to steal something? – Eleanor took her upstairs, pointed out the bathroom, the pyjamas, the bedroom, put the hottie in the bed then left her and went back downstairs.
She’d have to try again in the morning to find out what this was all about, once the girl’s shock had worn off a bit and she wasn’t so tired herself. There really was something very strange about her and she remembered her own fanciful reaction: that here was a mermaid come ashore.
It was only as Eleanor was dropping at last into an exhausted sleep that she remembered the fairy tale: the mermaid was dumb. In exchange for her human legs, she had given her voice.
It was a beautiful morning after the storm, though wrack thrown up into the narrow garden below Sea House bore witness to its power. Eleanor got up with the burden of her unwanted guest hanging over her: she really must find out where the girl had come from – and where she would be going to, as well. She’d done her duty in succouring the distressed but she certainly wasn’t issuing an open-ended invitation to stay. It was still early, though, so she got dressed as quietly as she could. After what had clearly been an ordeal last night the girl needed all the rest she could get.
But when she came out of her bedroom the door to the spare room was standing ajar. The curtains were open, the room was empty and the bed was tidy, with the flannelette pyjamas neatly folded on top. There was no sign of her visitor.
Eleanor sat down heavily on the bed, her knees suddenly weak. Would she go downstairs to find her credit cards and her car gone and the house ransacked? The saying ‘Sooner or later, one must pay for every good deed’ was ringing in her ears as she hurried downstairs as quickly as her creaking joints would let her.
But downstairs everything was in its usual place. It was as if her unexpected guest had been a figment of her imagination – or perhaps, she thought with a nod to fantasy, had merely vanished into sea foam. That a mermaid in legend was famously an ill omen she put firmly out of her mind.
The onrushing tide that had played with the car as if it were a dinky toy, tumbling it over and over as it swept it far up the Firth, retreated slowly. The car settled on its side, then with the next tide, less violent, rolled on to its roof. At last, abandoned on the sandy flats, it settled into the soft silt.
Inside it the man’s battered body, unrestrained within the car, settled too, settled and stiffened.
CHAPTER THREE
May 2014
Was there anything, anything at all, more enjoyable than sitting in a pavement cafe on the Rive Gauche on a sunny Saturday morning in spring, people-watching through the thin blue haze of smoke from a Gitane with a knock-your-socks-off espresso on the little zinc table in front of you? If there was, Louise Hepburn couldn’t think what it would be.
She came to Paris as often as her work as a detective sergeant in the Galloway Division of Police Scotland allowed to see her mother, though Fleur didn’t reliably recognise her any more, slipping into a cruelly early twilight in the care of the religieuses at a convent nursing home near her sister Coralie. She seemed content enough there and calm, her moments of unhappy confusion mercifully brief.
Louise had found it very hard to let her mother return to her homeland from Scotland; theirs had been a close and loving relationship and her sense of loss was acute. Her visits to Paris had been clouded by dread of what further deterioration she might find but over time she had learnt a sort of acceptance that allowed her to take pleasure again in the city she had always loved since childhood holidays with her mother’s family.
Now she stretched luxuriously like a cat in the warmth of the sunshine, her eyes half-closed, then hearing her name spoken looked up to see a tall young man coming along the pavement towards her, raising his hand in greeting.
Embarrassed, she sat up. ‘Just caught me basking,’ she said awkwardly. ‘Great to see you, Randall.’ Then, before she could help herself she blurted out, ‘Goodness, you’ve changed!’
He laughed easily. ‘The beardy student look doesn’t go down very well in business circles.’
Louise had seen his photo on Friends Reunited, then Facebook, but she hadn’t seen the tout ensemble. Randall Lindsay was pinkly clean-shaven now and wearing a pale-blue shirt in thick, expensive looking cotton with a coral-pink cashmere sweater knotted loosely round his shoulders.
Oh, very BCBG, Louise thought dryly. Bon chic bon genre – good style, good class; the very uniform of the French upper-middle. Even his scruffy student look at Glasgow University, she now remembered, had been very carefully on trend, and as Randall gestured to a waiter she began to regret her impulse to contact him.
They had known each other a little at uni having discovered they both hailed from Galloway, though he came from the smart sailing territory in the south while she came from Stranraer where the sailing was mostly done in ferry boats to Ireland. When she discovered he was working in Paris, Louise had thought meeting up sometimes might be fun; her aunt had a busy social life and her cousins had left home so she was often at a loose end on her visits.
Having ordered his coffee, Randall was studying her. ‘Now, you haven’t changed a bit. Still the same crazy girl, I bet!’
He said it in an admiring way, but she almost had to sit on her hand to stop it going up to smooth her dark curly hair, which had a will of its own. She knew her own student look had been casual to the point of indifference, owing a lot to Oxfam, but she would have hoped that her Diesel jeans and Karen Millen top might at least have spelt out a change of style.
‘So,’ he was going on, ‘what are you up to these days? You didn’t say on your page.’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m a bit careful. Trolls get in everywhere—’
‘Tell me about it!’ Randall leant forward eagerly. ‘I didn’t put the merchant banking bit on mine. You in the same business?’
Now she really was regretting her sociable impulse. ‘Not exactly. I’m in the police. Detective constable.’
He gave a low whistle. ‘Wow – a copper eh? What the hell took you in that direction? Not much money in it – with your degree you could have been a lawyer.’
‘I could, yes.’ She knew she sounded frosty. ‘But when I looked into it, I realised that this seemed much more interesting and challenging. And it is – I wouldn’t give it up for anything.’ She couldn’t resist adding, ‘And I like the fact that it’s public service.’
‘Very laudable.’ Randall’s lips twitched in a little, patronising smile. ‘And I’m sure you’ve had a lot of fascinating cases.’
‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘And you – what bank is it you work for?’
He told her. He had been based in the Paris branch of a British bank for the past year, a chance to use his degree in French.
‘And what brings you to Paris? Are you sleuthing? “On a case”?’ He indicated quotation marks, looking elaborately round the cafe and indicating a blameless French pensioner. ‘Now that old guy there – in your professional opinion, doesn’t he look distinctly suspicious?’
‘Not really,’ she said coolly. God, what a prat! If she got up and walked out it would be rude to the point of downright aggression, but she was tempted. Fighting the impulse she explained about her mother. ‘I come over to see her occasionally,’ she said, playing it down in case he suggested a regular meeting.
‘Shame I didn’t know sooner. I could have whisked you round a bit. But in fact, I’m more likely to see you back home.’
Louise was surprised. ‘In Galloway? Didn’t think that would have been your scene any more.’
‘Oh, I pop back from time to time, you know.’
She thought he looked oddly shifty as he said that – perhaps ashamed of admitting to going anywhere so uncool. But he was going on, ‘And my mother is taking this Year of Homecoming stuff terribly seriously – there’s a three-line whip out for some grand event she has in mind, so that was it, of course. Did you ever meet my ma?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You didn’t, then. Once seen, never forgotten. Most people bear the scars for years afterwards.’ He laughed. ‘“She Who Must Be Obeyed”, you know? People in the village run when they see her coming.’
Looking at her son, Louise could well believe it. His air of confident authority probably went down well in banking circles but it was getting right up her nose. She shifted the conversation to mutual acquaintances until she felt able to look at her watch and claim another engagement.
Randall looked disappointed. ‘I thought we could run this into lunch. Come on, chuck your date! I go to this great little place near the Bourse – the patron gets the foie gras straight from his brother’s farm. Oh – my treat, of course.’
As if it was charity to a humble copper who couldn’t possibly afford the local he usually popped round to from work, Louise thought, and if that was meant to impress her he’d really blown it. ‘I’m afraid I don’t eat foie gras,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m lunching with my aunt and I couldn’t possibly let her down – she’s getting on a bit and I couldn’t disappoint her.’
Louise crossed her fingers surreptitiously as she spoke. Her Tante Coralie would have had reason to be surprised to hear that, not to say annoyed, since she was currently lunching with two equally youthful looking and elegant Parisiennes in their own very chic local bistro. However, Louise felt sure she would forgive the slur if it allowed her niece to escape this objectionable young man.
Randall got to his feet reluctantly. ‘Too bad. Well – see you at the other end, then?’
‘Absolutely. Great to see you,’ Louise said with what enthusiasm she could muster and left, giving an airy wave before he could complete the move he was making to kiss her.
He probably won’t bother, Louise told herself as she headed back across the river and bought a baguette from a stall near Notre Dame to eat in the Square du Vert-Galant and contemplate the bustle of the Seine.
The tourist season was just starting to get under way and the bateaux-mouches were plying their trade up and down, though there were still more tourists in the glass-roofed cabins than hardier souls braving the river breeze on the open decks.
She lit up once she’d finished eating. How strange it felt, sitting here and knowing that the day after tomorrow she’d be back at police headquarters in Kirkluce, Galloway, having to huddle round the back by the dustbins to smoke her Gitane, probably in pouring rain. It really was high time she gave up. She might even do it.
‘What I don’t understand is why they requested you,’ Detective Superintendent Christine Rowley said petulantly. ‘I told Tom Taylor I’d be happy to review their processes in the case and you would have thought he’d have jumped at the offer of an experienced senior officer.’
It was a wet Monday morning, but DI Fleming’s gloom had been lifted by the invitation to take a look at a murder case in Dumfriesshire that had been going on for some time without apparent progress.
She was trying to conceal her pleasure, though, saying, ‘Mmm,’ as non-committally as possible, though she could have explained that the superintendent – known to her officers as Hyacinth after the redoubtable Mrs Bucket – had gained a reputation for being toxic that went well beyond the bounds of Galloway. Rowley had come from Edinburgh and was unwise enough to make it clear that in her eyes the job out here in the sticks was only a stepping stone to promotion back in civilisation.
Instead, Fleming said with careful tact, ‘He probably felt that doing it at superintendent level would be overkill. It’s an informal request and with all the constabularies being technically merged into one force now this is more like asking a colleague to brainstorm than calling in a formal case review.’
Rowley pouted. ‘The merger wouldn’t have happened at all, if I’d had any say. Now we’re just a division instead of a force – indeed, a subdivision of that division – our successes are going to get blurred.’
‘Our failures, too,’ Fleming put in, with malice aforethought.
Rowley’s sallow skin took on an unattractive flush; she had gone blonde recently which somehow made her skin tone muddier than ever. ‘Compared to other forces – when there still were other forces – it’s a shining example of my good practice, but who will notice that now?’
Here we go again! Once Rowley began on a lament for the diminution of her prospects of becoming a chief constable since there was only one now for the whole of Scotland, it could take quarter of an hour out of the working morning.
Fleming seized on a pause for breath. ‘Anyway, I’m to get in touch with Detective Superintendent Taylor, is that right? I’d better do that now before I get caught up in sorting through the weekend reports.’
Escaping, she headed for her office on the fourth floor of police headquarters in Kirkluce, a market town on the main road between Newton Stewart and Stranraer. She took the steps two at a time; she’d become more conscious of the need for fitness since her husband Bill’s heart attack last year. She was tall – five-foot ten in her socks – and she’d carried the weight that had crept on more or less unnoticeably. She was getting her athletic figure back now, though, and with the intrusive grey hairs in her chestnut crop judiciously camouflaged, she felt she was limiting at least some of the damaging effects of middle age.
And the new task was good news. There had been something of a lull recently and she’d had to take on her share of the chores that were the tedious side of modern police work. Skilfully managed, this assignment could even provide her with an excuse to palm off the statistical return that was currently lying reproachfully on her desk to someone else. With hope in her heart Fleming shifted it to one side as she sat down.
She knew why Tom Taylor had asked for her. He was in his late thirties, young to have made super – another reason for Hyacinth to be snarky about him – and he was new to the job. They had met at a course geared towards bringing together several neighbouring forces before the Police Scotland reforms came into operation. He had sought her out to ask about her most recent murder case and they had been deep in discussion when his senior DI Len Harris appeared, a sharp-featured man with a neat pencil moustache, every hair of it bristling.
He clearly saw this cross-border détente as fraternising with the enemy and was embarrassingly chippy with his senior officer; though Taylor was wise enough not to rise to provocation the atmosphere became uncomfortable and Fleming made a tactical withdrawal. Since then Taylor had come to her with a couple of queries, which by tacit agreement she had not mentioned to Rowley; she would be very surprised if he’d mentioned them to Harris either.
However, she knew no more about the case in question than she’d read in the press releases: a man’s body had been found in a battered car stranded on mudflats off the Dumfriesshire Solway coast last month, just after a storm and a particularly strong spring tide. Given the conditions, the presumption of accident had been the obvious one: the car, perhaps on one of the low roads running right beside the Firth, had either misjudged a corner or been swept away by a tidal surge and the notoriously treacherous Solway had claimed another victim.
A later release had announced that the police were treating the death as suspicious, but with nothing about it to attract press attention, it had merited only a small paragraph in the Scottish papers. Since then Fleming had heard nothing more and it was with considerable interest that she dialled the number she had been given.
Detective Superintendent Taylor answered the phone himself, his voice brightening when he heard her voice.
‘Marjory! Thanks for getting back to me. I take it Christine told you what this is all about?’
‘Not really, no, except it’s to do with this body that was discovered in a stranded car.’
‘That’s right. Oh, I can send you over the reports if you agree to get involved, but if I brief you on the situation over the phone now I can speak in confidence, I hope.’
‘Of course.’
‘The car was reported stuck on the mudflats near Newbie – treacherous stuff, we nearly lost a tractor trying to get it off. The boffins tell me that from its condition it had been thrown about in the water but as usual they’re reluctant to commit themselves to anything more specific than that, given the weather conditions at the time.
‘Anyway, it finished upside down with the corpse in a corner of the roof.’
‘No seat belt?’
‘Presumably not. None of them was broken. Of course, that’s not of itself significant. As you and I both know there’s all these morons with a death wish out on the roads who don’t use them – the body was a vivid example of what happens if you’re unrestrained when a car goes out of control.’ He paused.
‘I sense a “but”,’ Fleming prompted.
‘Yes, a but … He didn’t die in the accident. The pathologist is prepared to be specific, for once – he was killed with a single blow to the back of the head. The weapon was round and very solid. Could even have been a cosh but there’s no sign of it – either removed or washed away after the car entered the water.’
‘A cosh – could be a professional? Right,’ Fleming said slowly. ‘Do we know if he was driving?’
‘Inconclusive. Lots of smudges on the steering wheel but no clear prints. His prints were clear elsewhere, though, so it was presumably his car. Anyway, that’s the story, basically. But we have a problem, Marjory. We’re embedded in the mudflats, you could say.
‘The car’s number plate was false – it’s all too easy to get them on the Internet, so that was a dead end. The engine number wasn’t any use either; the original owner sold it in a private arrangement five years ago. Now nothing’s happening. It’s like Einstein’s definition of insanity around here – repeating the same action and expecting different results. I’ve got dozens of lads out there duplicating investigations they’ve done already. And this is the bit I will deny flatly if challenged – I have absolutely no confidence in Len. He’s sloppy, he hasn’t an idea to take forward, he’s going round and round in ever-decreasing circles and acting like a Rottweiler guarding a bone and he won’t let anyone else take over. He’s been so offensive to his DCI that she’s off with stress.
‘I need your help.’
Suddenly it didn’t seem quite such an attractive proposition. ‘And what makes you think he’ll let me take it away without taking my hand off first?’ Fleming asked.
‘I’m going to have a very straight talk with him. If we haven’t some progress to show for the time and the money in the next couple of weeks there’ll be an official case review, with his methods scrutinised. I think he’s scared himself – he’s actually a very insecure individual.
‘You’ve got a good record. Now we’re all meant to be working together, I want to tap into that. Please, Marjory – as a favour to me.’
‘Let me recap,’ Fleming said dryly. ‘You don’t know where the car came from, you don’t know when it happened, you don’t know who the body is—’
‘Oh, we know that,’ Taylor said.
‘Do you?’ Fleming was surprised. ‘I haven’t seen anything about that.’
‘No,’ he said, a little awkwardly. ‘We haven’t announced it yet. Dragging our feet a bit, I admit. The thing is, going by the DNA records we have he’s been dead for two years.’
When the doorbell rang, Heather Denholm was peeling potatoes. ‘Can you get that?’ she called through the open door to the sitting room. ‘My hands are wet.’
Her partner Donald Falconer, who was watching the six o’clock news, grunted and got up. She heard him cross the hall to open the door, wondering who their visitor was, ready to abandon the potatoes and be hospitable if necessary.
Someone on TV was reporting on a new protest about fracking somewhere but she could hear none of the normal sounds of greeting from the hall. Curious, she put down the potato peeler and came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.
Donald was standing very still by the open door, staring at the girl on the doorstep. At first glance she looked to be no more than a teenager, dressed in skinny jeans with a black-and-white striped T-shirt and a grey waistcoat, worn open. Her dark hair was piled loosely on top of her head and she was very pretty, with striking blue-green eyes and delicate features. Looking more closely, Heather realised she was older than she had seemed and the thought suddenly struck her. Could it be …?
‘Well, well, well,’ Donald said heavily. ‘Fancy that.’
The woman’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘Hello, Dad.’
Heather came forward. ‘Are you Skye? Oh, I’m so pleased to see you! Your father has been so worried about you, all this time.’
Donald shot her a cold look. ‘Have I?’ he said ominously. ‘Oh yes, perhaps I have. It had just slipped my mind – the searches in case you’d had an accident and come to grief somewhere, the phone calls to the hospital and to everyone I had ever heard you mention, the police enquiries that had them questioning me as if I’d done away with you myself. You didn’t think of maybe just phoning or sending me a text to say you weren’t at the bottom of the Solway Firth with your pal Connell?’
Skye bit her lip. ‘It was … difficult,’ she said.
Donald drew in his breath but before he could say anything Heather cut in. ‘There’s no need to stay standing on the doorstep. Come in, dear. I’m Heather.’
With an uncertain smile Skye shook the hand held out to her but her eyes went back to her father’s face and she only stepped over the threshold once he had stepped aside.
On the news, they were talking about a royal visit now. Donald killed the programme and sat down in his usual chair while Heather fluttered about, ushering Skye to a seat on the sofa.
‘Would you like a drink or something, dear?’ she offered.
Skye shook her head.
‘Whisky,’ Donald said.
As Heather scurried to the kitchen to get it she heard Donald say, ‘And are you going to tell me where you’ve been?’
‘No.’ Skye’s voice was flat.
‘You don’t think you owe it to me?’ Donald’s voice had risen. ‘It killed your mother, you know. Proud of that?’
Heather felt tears come to her eyes. That was cruel – and not true, either. How would the poor girl feel after an accusation like that?
Hostile, apparently was the answer. ‘I heard it was cancer, actually. And you’d both made it very clear to me that I wasn’t welcome at home any more after what happened.’
‘You’re surprised? The reports after the inquest – disgusting! And if you think you can just swan back here, come home as if nothing had happened—’
‘I don’t. A lot happened and everything changed. I only came to tell you I was back in the neighbourhood before one of the neighbours did.’
‘Why did you come back at all, then?’
