She had realized what they were remarkably quickly. Who, Macdonald wondered, was ‘he’? And if they went through the back, would they find someone they’d a warrant out on? From the woman’s anxious looks over her shoulder, he reckoned they would, but the rules were so strict now that it seemed as if you couldn’t pick anyone up without phoning first to ask if it would be OK to come round.
Anyway, it wasn’t their business today. Macdonald said, ‘We’re not looking for anyone here. Just wanted to ask about the people next door.’
The front door opened a little further. ‘The Poles, you mean?’
‘That’s our information.’
‘Wouldn’t know. They all talk funny, anyway. They’ll be out working – always away before we’re out our beds. There was a real stramash this morning – woke the baby. Some folks are just ignorant – no consideration.’
‘Where do they work, do you know?’
‘Someone said they’re at some big posh house over in Sandhead.’
‘You didn’t hear whose house, I suppose?’
‘No.’ The baby, an unprepossessing child with a runny nose, had started crying, a dreary, grizzling sound. ‘Oh, shut it,’ she said, jiggling it without effect. ‘That’s all I ken about them.’
The door was closing again. Macdonald said hastily, ‘How many of them live there?’
‘Four or five maybe. No point speaking to them – wouldn’t understand a word I said. They’ve no right, coming here taking the jobs—’ The child was yelling hard now, snot mixing with its tears. Its mother went back inside and shut the door, still muttering.
The piercing screams followed them down the path. ‘That’s what you’ve got to look forward to,’ Macdonald pointed out unkindly, and Campbell gave him a hunted look.
‘Not all like that, are they?’
‘Going by my nieces and nephews, pretty much. Mercifully it doesn’t seem to be so disgusting when it’s your own.
‘Now, how do we find this big posh house in Sandhead? Go and ask around, I suppose. There can’t be too many having work done at the moment. Mind you, I don’t know why we should be doing this instead of the uniforms. Big Marge seems to have her knickers in a bit of a twist about racist gang warfare in Kirkluce.’
The great white bulk of the Stevenson lighthouse was shrouded in rain and mist as DI Fleming, pulling on a hooded oilskin jacket, stepped out of the car. She was on her own today: there had been a break-in at a solicitors’ office in Stranraer and she’d had to despatch MacNee and Kerr to deal with it, since Macdonald and Campbell were detailed to question the Poles, and she wasn’t prepared to postpone that. They were short-staffed at the moment, with one detective away on leave and another off with flu.
What a shame the weather was so bad, with the views over to England and Ireland blotted out completely! It must look fantastic in sunshine – and even today, the place looked dazzlingly well maintained, the walls round about painted white like the lighthouse itself, but with a band of bright yellow on the coping-stones. The whitewashed cottages for keepers, long since departed, had windows and chimneys painted the same cheerful colour.
Fleming set off to walk round the lighthouse to the farther side, bracing herself as she came out of its shelter into the wind from the sea, then stopped as she reached the point where she could see to the north-west.
Visibility was poor, but she could make out the line of cliffs stretching up the Irish Sea coast, sandy-coloured with a black high-water mark of seaweed round the base. And there, a few hundred yards away, was a sharp spur of rock jutting out of the sea with a low, almost level platform connecting it to the cliff. Judging by the seaweed line, this would be submerged at high tide, but at the moment it was just above the water-level, with the stronger waves washing over it. It had been well described: Fleming could almost see Ailsa Grant’s wave-battered body lying on it.
Today the sea was metallic grey, with a heavy, oily swell, and making a low, threatening moaning. That was the only sound: even the gulls flying about under leaden skies weren’t screeching. It was so cold, so bleak! Fleming shivered and turned to walk out along the headland.
The turf was springy underfoot, and all around were great wet swathes of dead bracken, brown after the winter frosts. It would have grown and spread after all these years, and the points where there was easy access to the cliff edge would have changed. And you would need that, on a wild night, impeded either by a struggling woman or her dead body.
There was, Fleming noticed, one area right at the cliff edge where rocky outcrops on either side had stopped the bracken from encroaching, and she went, rather gingerly, to peer over.
It was a dizzying drop. Here the land fell sharply away straight into the water hundreds of feet below, whereas to left and right the cliffs seemed to slope outward more, so that a body falling would strike rocks before it reached the sea. Ailsa’s body had shown none of the mutilations that a fall on to rocks would produce, so it seemed quite likely that Fleming was standing now where the murderer had stood.
She walked back towards the lighthouse, trying to think herself into his mind. He could have driven the car as far as the edge of the shorter grass here below the walls where the car would have been invisible from the lighthouse, and certainly he could have gambled on no one being about on a night like that. She paced the distance to the edge – thirty yards.
Had he been carrying her body – staggering under the dead weight, buffeted by the storm? Or was she still alive, being coerced with an iron grip across the rough ground, her hands tied, her screams torn away on the wind?
Surely she must have been dead by that stage? No woman would have consented to go with her lover to a place of such danger with a tempest raging. And yet—
There is something intensely romantic about Nature’s power unleashed. Could he have lured her there with the promise of the ultimate in passionate proposals, wild, storm-tossed . . . Heathcliff and Catherine?
Unlikely. But even so, should Fleming perhaps have it in mind to look for someone with a strong romantic streak – someone, say, like an actor? Marcus Lindsay’s alibi seemed solid enough, and surely Mrs Grant must have been told this. Why, in that case, had she been so certain of his guilt?
Her father would have stood here once, just about where she was standing now, looking down at the drowned woman, his inbuilt prejudices blinding him to any evidence of murder. Procedure, he would have been the first to tell you, existed to prevent too personal judgements, and yet on this occasion he had thrown away the rule book.
Ailsa’s father had at the very least been a strong suspect. What else had happened back at the house, when Ailsa’s hair had been combed? What other evidence had been removed, which might have pointed to him? She’d find it hard to have to put in her report that her father’s action had assisted a cover-up.
Still, there was a job to do. Balnakenny Farm was her next port of call, but before she returned to the car park, she looked back once more.
The wind blowing today, though strong enough, wasn’t gale force. She had been hesitant about going near the edge; Ailsa’s killer must have been a brave man to take the risk of finding himself going over with the body. Brave – or desperate. And how would he feel now, when he heard questions were being asked all over again?
It didn’t take Macdonald and Campbell long to find the house they were looking for. The Hodges’ Miramar was a source of fascination locally and the woman they stopped to ask was delighted to give them all details.
‘Oh, it’s a right knacker’s midden! Started off like one of thae ranch houses, ken, but I don’t know what you’d call it now, with all the bits they’ve added on.
‘That’s where you’ll find the Polish lads, right enough. At least, I suppose that’s what they are. Foreign, anyway. Keep themselves to themselves.’
‘So there hasn’t been any trouble here?’
The woman’s eyes lit up. ‘Not that I’ve heard. Here! What’ve they been up to?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Macdonald said hastily. ‘I wasn’t meaning that. Just we heard some of the boys around here had been making things difficult.’
‘Oh, there’s some right young limmers about,’ the woman acknowledged, but went away disappointed. Bad behaviour by the local neds wouldn’t be news to anyone.
Miramar stood on its own in an extensive garden up behind the village looking out to Luce Bay. It was, as described, a complete jumble, as if someone had got first one idea for the house’s layout, then another and another, without any attempt at reconciling them.
Macdonald put up the collar of his coat against the rain and stared at it. ‘Can’t imagine how they got planning permission for this. Must know the right people.
‘Pity it’s raining, though – the men’ll have packed it in, with weather like this.’
He was wrong, though. Walking towards the front door, they could see a building in the later stages of construction and three men working as if the sun was shining.
There was no one else around. They crossed the lawn towards the builders, Macdonald taking out his warrant card. As always, it had an effect: all three men stopped working and one, older than the others, stepped forward. He was wearing a beige sweat-shirt darkened by rain and his grizzled hair was plastered to his head.
They could almost see his hackles rising. ‘What do you want with us?’ he said, his battered face stony.
Macdonald eyed the bruises and the split lip. ‘Been in a fight, then, have you?’
He didn’t waver. ‘An accident.’
‘Funny kind of accident. Look, we’re here to help you. One of you got a knife wound and we don’t want something worse happening.’
‘That was an accident too.’
‘You seem to have a lot of accidents,’ Macdonald said crisply. He turned to the silent men. ‘Which of you is Kasper Franzik?’
Again, it was the older man who answered. ‘He is not here. And you cannot speak to them, since they do not understand. It is only me who can speak good English.’
He could, too – heavily accented, but perfectly clear. Macdonald found himself nonplussed. You couldn’t get far if the only English-speaker refused to acknowledge there was a problem. He had one more try.
‘We’re concerned that there’s ill-feeling between you and some of the local lads. Have you had any trouble of that sort?’
He caught a look pass between the two younger men, but they said nothing and their boss replied flatly, ‘No. None.’
‘Then we’ll have to take you at your word. Can you tell me where I could find Mr Franzik?’
‘He is gone. I don’t know where.’
The man went back to his plastering. At a gesture from him, the others too resumed work and Macdonald and Campbell had no option but to leave them to it.
‘Scary kind of bloke, isn’t he?’ Macdonald said as they went back to the car. ‘My bet is you should see what he did to the other fellow.
‘Anyway, we’ve ticked the box. Write up the report and file it and then we can forget about it.’
6
The Grants weren’t good farmers. With her practised eye, Marjory Fleming could tell that immediately.
For a start, the cattle grazing on either side of the single-track road between cattle grids were a ragbag assortment of Old Galloway, Aberdeen-Friesian crosses, a few Simmental and a lone Charollais, obviously picked up cheaply at cattle sales when the chance arose. The beasts looked dirty and their pasture wasn’t well managed either; Fleming could see docks and even dangerous ragwort growing.
A rusting tractor stood in one corner of the farmyard, minus its tyres, and the yard itself hadn’t been hosed clean of mud and dung. In the barn, machinery and tools had been crammed in higgledy-piggledy over the years, so that finding what you needed must be a frustrating business.
There were hens, too, in a chicken-wire enclosure long since pecked clear of vegetation where the miserable creatures, feathers bunched against the rain, still scavenged listlessly in the unproductive mud. It wasn’t as if grassy areas were in short supply; the enclosure would only need to be moved regularly to give them a richer environment. Thinking of her own chookies’ enjoyment of the grass and grubs in the orchard, Fleming conceived an anticipatory dislike of their owners.
The farmhouse looked neat enough, but it had a forbidding aspect, built of stone so dark that it was almost black, with dark maroon paintwork. Fleming parked and went through the gate to the small garden at the front. This was well kept too, though there were no flowers, just rows of fruit bushes and earth turned over for spring planting. The brass knocker on the front door was very shiny.
The woman who opened it looked as dour and unwelcoming as the house itself. She was tall, gaunt and angular, with iron-grey hair pulled into a bun at the back. She had a beaky nose and a prominent chin and her face was innocent of make-up, taut and shiny from soap and water. Her grey eyes had a stony, hostile stare.
She was an ugly old woman, and her daughter had been a bonny enough girl, yet Fleming could see a strong resemblance. Had Jean Grant in her day, too, been bonny enough, she found herself thinking as the woman snapped, ‘Yes? What are you wanting?’
Fleming introduced herself. ‘Mrs Grant? I’ve come to see you and your husband and son. I was hoping for a word with you all.’
‘You’re seeing me now. My son’s away and you’ll have a job seeing my husband, unless you dig him up first. He’s been dead these seven years.’