‘I had a conversation with Ms Milne yesterday and I understood from her that you had complained about the interview we did with you. It had seemed to me we were only making legitimate enquiries, but—’
‘Yes, of course! A complaint would have been ridiculous!’ Lindsay was seriously put out. ‘I don’t know what Sheila Milne is thinking about – oh, hang on, I made a joke about it during a personal conversation. I can’t believe she took it seriously. This is a waste of your time – I do apologize, inspector.’
He seemed very anxious not to upset the police. That was interesting, and it was interesting too that Milne had not declared a friendship – had, indeed, all but denied it. ‘You know her, then?’ Fleming asked.
She wondered if she was imagining his hesitation, but then she saw MacNee was giving him a sharp look too. Lindsay said, ‘Yes, I knew her in Glasgow.’
Despite an inviting pause, he didn’t expand on that. Fleming asked, smiling, ‘An old girlfriend?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’ He smiled too, an amused smile that would have been convincing if she hadn’t noticed, yet again, that the tiny muscles round the eyes hadn’t moved.
There was a tap on the door, and a woman stuck her head in. ‘Can you go across to make-up, Marcus? They’re getting ready for rehearsals.’
Lindsay got up with alacrity. ‘Sorry, inspector, sergeant. I have to go. But please don’t hesitate to come back if there’s anything more I can help you with.’
Jaki, who had been listening silently, held up a mug. ‘You can still have coffee if you like,’ she offered with a smile. A genuine one, this time.
‘Thanks, but we’d better get on,’ Fleming said, again to MacNee’s disappointment.
‘What did you say that for?’ he grumbled as they left. ‘I could just go a cup of coffee. And she was a nice lassie too.’
‘Your star-struck behaviour with Sylvia Lascelles is bad enough. You’re not needing another screen idol,’ Fleming said as they passed the catering truck.
A voice said shyly, ‘Hello, Marjory,’ and she looked up to see Karolina leaning out of the open hatch.
‘Oh – Karolina! I’d forgotten you were working here! How’s it going?’
‘It is very good,’ she said. ‘Everyone is very kind, and they like my cooking.’
‘What’s not to like? I’m glad it’s going so well. How much longer will they be here?’
‘Three days, maybe four. They decide when they see how the filming goes.’
‘For God’s sake, look where you’re going! See what you’ve done, you young idiot! I’m in costume, and we’re filming in ten minutes!’
Turning at the sound of the furious voice, Fleming saw that a tall, dark young man, who had come hurrying down the steps from the catering truck carrying a washing-up bowl full of wet, earthy vegetable peelings across to the compost bin, had rounded the corner of the truck at speed and cannoned into Marcus Lindsay, who was standing in conversation with one of the technicians.
Lindsay began brushing off the clinging debris, but the jeans were wet and dirty. With a cry of dismay, a woman from one of the other trucks came rushing across, and also started to berate the culprit.
He was standing with his head bowed. He muttered, ‘Sorry,’ but Lindsay only said angrily, ‘The best thing you can do is just get out of the way,’ and turned away, asking the agitated woman what could be done. They went off towards the truck she had come from, still in anxious discussion.
The chef, viewing this from inside the truck, hurried down the steps. ‘You’re pushing your luck, sunshine. You’ve been about as much use as a chocolate frying pan, and now this. I’m warning you, three strikes and you’re out.’
The young man said nothing but scowlingly gathered up the peelings and continued on his errand. But Fleming was concerned to see that as he went, he directed a look of purest hatred at the unconscious Lindsay’s back. Certainly, Lindsay had been angry, but this was an extreme reaction – and he looked, too, as if he’d been in a fight, with bruises on his face, a shiner and a bandaged arm. A violent young man, it seemed. She saw that Karolina had noticed both what had happened and her own reaction, and the girl’s face flushed.
‘That – that is someone I am to know from Poland. Kasper. He was being with us last night at the farm – this is all right?’ Her agitation showed in the breakdown of her usual fluency.
Fleming was disconcerted, but said immediately, ‘Yes, of course. It’s your house, Karolina. You don’t need to ask me if you want to have guests.’
Karolina looked as if she was about to say something, then thought the better of it. ‘You are very kind.’
‘Nonsense! We’d better get on, anyway. See you later.’
MacNee too had observed the small drama. ‘Wouldn’t like to meet him up a dark close on a Saturday night,’ he remarked, but added plaintively, ‘Are we in some kind of hurry? I’m sure we could have got our lunch if you’d asked. They’re frying onions – I’m starving!’
Fleming was unsympathetic. ‘You’ll get something back at the canteen.’
‘Oh aye, cheese and pickle, when we’re late like we always are,’ he said with some bitterness.
‘Better for you than fried onions. Oh look, they must have sorted out the clothes problem – there’s Marcus back in costume. You have to say he’s convincing.’
MacNee followed her gaze and saw a man with his back to them, in a navy fleece with longish grey hair, apparently asking something of one of the crew, who pointed towards the catering truck. When he turned, they saw it wasn’t Lindsay, but an actual workman of some description, his jeans and trainers white with dust.
He strode past them but before he reached the truck Kasper reappeared with the empty bowl. Seeing him, he stopped, but the older man came up and seized his arm, half-twisting it in what looked like a painful grip. He started speaking in some foreign language, then shouting as Kasper dropped the bowl and turned with bunched fists, replying with what seemed to be defiance.
Fleming and MacNee both spun round and MacNee stepped forward. ‘OK, OK, that’s it. Break it up, right now!’ he said roughly.
Neither man heard. Kasper broke the grip on his arm and aimed a blow, which was parried effortlessly. Then the shouting began again as they circled each other.
A crowd was gathering. Lindsay had emerged from a truck, a plastic cape round his shoulders; he stood on the steps, staring.
MacNee grabbed the older man, yanking his arm up in a half-nelson, and Fleming seized Kasper by the shoulders from behind, spinning him away. Neither struggled, but breathing heavily stood glaring at each other.
‘Do you speak English?’ MacNee demanded, and as neither seemed anxious to reply, Fleming called, ‘Karolina!’
The girl came from the truck reluctantly, her face aflame with embarrassment. A chef in a white apron came along behind her.
‘Perhaps you can translate,’ Fleming suggested, but before Karolina could say anything, the chef said, ‘No need. He’ll understand what I’m saying, all right.’
He walked over to Kasper. ‘You’re fired,’ he said. ‘Now get out. OK?’
The young man’s dark eyes shot fury, but his adversary gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Good!’ he said in English. ‘Now you can come back. Right away.’
‘Able to speak English after all, are we?’ MacNee said. ‘Have you and your pal quite finished? I’m letting you go, but next time you’re on a charge.’ He was still holding the man’s arm; he released it now, though Fleming suspected he had given it an unnecessary extra twist as he did so. The man rubbed at it, but made no complaint.
In the silence that followed, Karolina stepped forward. She had a short, angry conversation with Kasper, and at the end of it he made what sounded like a plea.
‘
Nie!
’ she said, then turned and walked back to the truck.
Fleming once more saw rage flare in Kasper’s face and tensed, ready to grab him again, but instead he said something savagely to the older man and then, as the other walked off, followed him.
‘Well!’ said the chef blankly, ‘what was all that about?’
‘Search me,’ MacNee said. ‘But I tell you something – if it was me, I wouldn’t be turning my back on that one. Not without body armour – and maybe not even then.’
9
With some reluctance, DI Fleming dialled Superintendent Bailey’s number. ‘Donald?’
‘Marjory!’ It sounded as if he’d jumped when he heard her voice. ‘I – I was hoping for a word with you today.’
Now came the hard part. ‘I’m in my office all afternoon. When would it be convenient to come and see me?’
She was holding her breath. Her normal practice was to go to her superior’s office; she wanted to make the point that this time it was different. He needed to realize right from the start that she was in charge.
In the silence, she could hear him realizing. Then he said, ‘Of course, that will be easier since you have all the papers there. In ten minutes?’
She allowed him this fig leaf to cover his embarrassment. ‘Thanks, Donald. Ten minutes is fine.’
He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Fleming squared the papers on her desk, made sure her list of queries was on top, and switched on a kettle on a tray in the corner of the room.
When his knock came the kettle was boiling. ‘Coffee, Donald?’ she asked as he came in.
‘Very kind,’ he said gruffly, going to sit down.
Fleming hadn’t thought of the political implications of being out of her seat behind the desk, the seat of power, and briefly wondered if he would take it to reassert his authority. But he sat down meekly enough on the visitor’s side, while she brought over the mugs.
He was looking round him. ‘It’s not often I’ve been here, since I had your job. Always enjoyed the view up here on the fourth floor.’
‘Yes. I like looking out into treetops. They’re coming into bud now – spring’s well on its way. It would be good if the March winds would drop, though, now we’re into April.’
She was starting to babble. It wouldn’t get any easier; she had to take a grip, now. ‘The investigation,’ she said.
‘The investigation,’ Bailey echoed heavily. ‘Yes.’
‘Let me brief you first on what I’ve been doing.’ She outlined her sifting of the evidence, and told him she had seen the Grants and Marcus Lazansky/Lindsay.
‘My first question for you relates to initial interviews with Jean and Robert Grant, while you still believed Ailsa had killed herself. You stated there was no suicide note. What searches were made?’
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I’m afraid we took her mother’s word for it. It looked straightforward enough, and it seemed intrusive to do a search at the time.’
‘But later, then – did you establish whether she had taken anything with her – clothes, a wallet, a bag?’
‘Not – not that I recall. But I couldn’t say for certain – it’s a long time ago.’
‘You see, if she’d been planning to meet someone—’
‘Yes, I don’t need it spelled out.’ Bailey’s interruption was tetchy.
‘Sorry. Of course not.’ Fleming looked down at her notes. ‘The site was the next thing. I couldn’t find any report on that. Was there an investigation of tyre-marks, say?’
‘Marjory, we were talking about days later! There’d been heavy rain, a dozen cars coming and going at the site. There wouldn’t have been the slightest point.’ He was becoming very defensive.
That was his problem, and he’d just have to deal with it. She went on, ‘I went there myself to have a look. There was a gap on the cliff edge that looked a plausible place for the body to have fallen from, but after all this time the configuration may have changed.’
‘Ah! There I can help you.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘The lighthouse keepers agreed that for the body to finish up where it did, it must have gone over on the west side, and there were muddy marks around the place. Nothing useful, of course, given the torrential rain that night.’
But you didn’t log that anywhere, Fleming could have said, but there was no point at the moment. ‘You saw no signs of a struggle?’ she asked.
Bailey frowned. ‘Not – not that I remember. I probably checked it, automatically, at the time, but it’s hard to be absolutely sure, looking back without records.’ He didn’t sound convincing. ‘But of course, then we just thought she’d thrown herself off – and the keepers and the helicopter crew had been moving around the area, churning it up. There wouldn’t have been any point,’ he said again.
Had all policing at that time been so incompetent? Fleming had a sinking feeling that perhaps it was a particular rather than a general problem. All she could do was move on.
‘There’s no record of searching the farm for rope that might have been used to bind her wrists. Was that done?’
‘Ah, now that I do recall. There was any amount of it lying around, anything from cables to clothes-line. But you must remember, Marjory, that in those days pathology didn’t have the resources to give chapter and verse from a fibre or a fragment of tissue.’
‘I was going to ask you about the pathologist. His report wasn’t very helpful. Do you remember what he was like?’
Bailey snorted. ‘If you thought the report wasn’t helpful, you should have met the man himself. Ought to have been retired years before, but they were closing down the mortuary and transferring everything to either Dumfries or Glasgow. His practices were rooted in the Fifties not the Eighties, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Died not long afterwards, actually.’