‘And the man didn’t come from there, or you would have seen him cross the grass?’
She was alert now, intrigued. ‘I would definitely have seen that. The movement would have been visible, even in the darkness. Why – do you think he might have been hiding there?’
‘Oh, it was something that occurred to me. One last thing, then we’ll leave you to rest. Could you guess at a height for the person you saw?’
Sylvia frowned. ‘Not really. Tall, I think – taller than Marcus. But I couldn’t be sure.’
‘Thank you. I think that’s all, as far as I’m concerned.’ Fleming looked enquiringly at MacNee, but he was looking at Sylvia and didn’t notice. ‘Is there anything that you want to ask us?’
‘Just one thing. What will happen to him, if you catch him?’ Sylvia’s voice was suddenly surprisingly fierce. ‘If he’s convicted, I mean.’
It was interesting how gentle, well-bred ladies were always the most savage when it came to criminal punishment. Sylvia obviously wasn’t going to be pleased with the answer Fleming would have to give her.
‘Three, maybe four years.’ And that was probably on the optimistic side.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Sylvia said grimly. ‘It’s not really enough, is it?’
‘Certainly isn’t,’ MacNee agreed heartily. ‘And with early release, a lot less. Out on the streets again—’
‘MacNee!’ Fleming said warningly, and he stopped.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to alarm you.’
He had, though. There was a definite pause before Sylvia said bravely, ‘We’ll just have to see Marcus doesn’t go out alone on dark nights. Or hope that prison is the deterrent it’s meant to be.’
Not trusting herself to comment, Fleming said only, ‘And there’s nothing else that you can think of that might be helpful?’
Sylvia looked at her with those haunted violet eyes. Her voice throbbed with emotion. ‘Oh, Inspector Fleming, would that there were!’
It was a stagey response. With slight impatience, Fleming said goodbye and went out. She heard MacNee say tenderly, ‘Goodbye, Miss Lascelles. You be sure and take care of yourself, now.’
With the door shut, Fleming mimicked him softly. ‘ “Take care of yourself, now!” Tam, there’s times when I think you’re a fillet short of a full fish supper! You weren’t there as a fan, you were there as a detective.’
MacNee, never one to take an insult lying down, retorted, ‘And what did you want me to do? Twist her arm up behind her back till she confessed it was her? Come on!’
‘Hardly. But she really hammed it up at the end, I thought.’
MacNee bristled. ‘You wouldn’t recognize it, of course, but that was sensitivity. Still, she’s probably used to insults, and so am I. “
Such fate to suffering worth is giv’n!
” ’
‘No doubt,’ Fleming said dryly. ‘Should I give you a bit longer to recover from your star-struck state, or shall we go and find Marcus Lindsay? He may be able to give us the information we need to get this whole thing tied up tonight.’
If she had been genuinely optimistic, Fleming would have been very disappointed. Mr Marcus, they were informed by Mrs Boyter, was asleep and couldn’t be disturbed. Fleming suggested he might want to be told that the police were here, but Mrs Boyter, growing into her role by the day, said dramatically that her duty was to her master and they could arrest her before she would let them near the poor, exhausted man.
With some irritation, Fleming disclaimed any wish to enforce her obedience and arranged that he should be told they would come at ten next morning. She followed MacNee out and round to the garden, where he wanted to have a look at the shrubbery.
It was pleasant in the weak sunshine, and spring bulbs had pushed up through the weeds: daffodils and a few straggly tulips in what had been flowerbeds, and celandines under the trees. There was a pretty little arbour with stone urns on either side of the door, depressingly full of rank grass. A yellow forsythia had grown into an untidy bush and made a splash of vivid colour against the warm stone. Fleming could imagine that the house in its glory days would have been seductive indeed.
The SOCOs were still taking measurements and dusting windows for fingerprints and checking tyre-marks in the drive but it was all routine stuff, and still no weapon had been found.
‘Let’s get back,’ Fleming said. ‘I’ve plenty to do, and all this can wait. It isn’t actually a murder, after all.’
MacNee looked at her wryly. ‘Not unless he comes back to finish the job,’ he said.
14
Stuart Grant was mending the drystone dyke which separated the grazing ground from the farmyard without enthusiasm, slowly placing stones, surveying his work, then, as often as not, having to take them off to try others more suitable. The skill of dyking was not one he’d troubled to master; it might have its frustrations but it was just one more way to pass the long, tedious day.
The view, had he looked up, was stupendous: the robin’s-egg-blue of the sky, the glittering white lighthouse with its clean yellow trims, the gulls wheeling and calling, the vivid green of the pasture where his cattle browsed. He didn’t raise his eyes, looking round for the next stone.
He fantasized regularly about what he’d do when his mother died – though the old besom looked like living for ever, unless he took a hatchet to her. Balnakenny was in her name; Stuart, and his father before him, had been pretty much hired hands. Perhaps that was why the farm had never really prospered. Robert Grant hadn’t come of farming stock like Jean – not that she did much around the place – and he had worked Balnakenny for a living, without real commitment.
Stuart hated it. Maybe his father had too; he wouldn’t know. Robert Grant felt things, like anger, but he didn’t discuss feelings with his son or anyone else. You weren’t meant to have feelings. Or discussions.
But Ailsa had ignored the unwritten rules. She had a temper to match her father’s. And she felt things. Oh yes, she felt things. She’d come in and cry, and tell Stuart – not everything, never everything, but she’d tell him how she felt.
He envied her, in a way. Her feelings made her miserable in a way he never had been, but it was as if she saw in colour, while he saw in black and white. Sometimes he caught glimpses from her of what it felt like to be ecstatically happy and it made his own life seem drab, days marching in an endless procession of boredom and pointlessness.
The terrible thing was that, supposing his mother died tomorrow, he didn’t know what he’d do. Sell up, yes. But he wasn’t a fool. What was it worth, a place like this? Not enough to buy him the sort of girls that featured in the magazines he hid from his mother, that was for sure. He wasn’t a big drinker, and he was too canny to waste his money gambling – so what would he do if he didn’t even have to get up in the morning?
It would have been different if Ailsa had lived. They’d have shared the money, and if she wouldn’t have shared her life – he’d no illusions about that – maybe she’d have let him in on the fringes to see, at least, how people who weren’t like him lived.
Would he have been better never to have known her? Better, if he’d assumed life was just getting through what had to be done day by day, and as long as there was food in your belly and a roof overhead, you simply went on like that until you died?
Ailsa hadn’t accepted that. Ailsa had been hungry for life, greedy, even. He thought, sometimes, that he could have given his life for hers, if there was a deal to be made. He didn’t really want it.
But at least now Lindsay was dead. He had paid, at last, for Ailsa’s pain. Stuart couldn’t understand that pain, but he could understand her humiliation – like when he’d asked a pretty girl to dance at a Young Farmers do, and she’d laughed and refused. Since he couldn’t put his hands round her throat and squeeze until she dropped dead, he’d never asked another girl to dance. And he’d stopped going to Young Farmers years ago. Stopped going to anything, really.
Maybe time had stopped when Ailsa died. Maybe he was in some strange sort of afterlife, when things looked the same, but—
‘Stuart! I’ve been bawling for five minutes. Do you want your tractor fixed or not?’
The man who was standing hollering from the yard certainly looked the same – he worked in the local garage.
Stuart set down the stone he was holding, and without reply came over to the tractor which had stopped suddenly in the yard this morning. He described the symptoms, and the mechanic sucked his teeth. ‘Oooh, sounds nasty. You’d be better with a new one. This one went out with the dinosaurs.’
Taking off the engine cover, he chatted on. ‘Fine stushie in Ardhill the day! Place swarming with polis. Someone tried to kill that Marcus Lindsay – him that’s the big TV star.’
Stuart grunted. ‘Got him, too, by what I heard.’
‘They were saying that, but you know what this place is like. He’s back home from the hospital, and the man they arrested didn’t do it, seemingly. There’s a manhunt, now. Here, pass me that spanner, will you? Stuart – you deaf, or just daft? Pass me the spanner.’
‘I wanted to have a chance to brief you before tomorrow,’ Fleming said.
MacNee, Kerr and Macdonald were assembled in her office. MacNee had perched on the edge of the table in one corner while the others took the chairs in front of her desk. Fleming always noticed where her officers sat: they weren’t here often enough to have established ‘rights’ to particular seats, but anyone who chose the table instead of another chair was usually signalling detachment. So MacNee was reckoning he knew it all and could relax? She wasn’t having that.
‘You asked me this morning how Tam knew to go to see Gavin Hodge. I’ve been asked to review a cold case from twenty years ago and that was as a result of the link we felt might exist between the two.’
Fleming sketched in the background. ‘That’s just the bare bones. I’m making the files available to the three of you this afternoon, along with notes I’ve made on interviews I did, and once you’ve read them I’d appreciate your input. The three of you,’ she emphasized. ‘Which, if you count, means Tam as well.’
MacNee looked appalled. His dislike of deskwork was well known. Tough.
She continued, ‘But keep this to yourself meantime. The press will pick up on it and I’m not sure that would be helpful – no, to be honest, I’m sure it would be totally unhelpful, unless we’re sure this link actually does exist. So, an open mind on everything else.
‘There was another knifing recently, a young Pole injured. Kevin Docherty? Maybe. Or has a bit of a knife culture developed around here that Lindsay might somehow have got himself involved in? If that’s it—’ She grimaced.
‘Everyone in Ardhill went on about the problem in the pub,’ Macdonald offered. ‘But that was Kevin and his mates, and all of them were otherwise occupied.’
Kerr was looking thoughtful. ‘When Jaki was telling me what happened, I kept wondering why Lindsay would go and look for someone who’d rung the bell then disappeared. Docherty was a serious threat, so why didn’t he go back inside and lock the door instead of wandering out saying, “Fancy a go at me?” ’
‘Good point.’ Fleming scribbled a note. ‘Tam and I are to see him tomorrow. We saw Sylvia Lascelles this afternoon, but she couldn’t add much. And I thought – though Tam probably disagrees—’
There was a tap on the door, and Superintendent Bailey put his head round it. ‘Marjory. I was hoping—’ Then he stopped. ‘Sorry. Don’t want to interrupt.’
Fleming got up. ‘Come in, Donald. I’m just briefing on aspects of the Lindsay case.’ And how she hoped he wouldn’t accept the invitation!
‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘Just a word with you later.’
‘I won’t be long. I’ll come up to your office, shall I?’
‘Fine, fine.’ He withdrew.
‘I’d better keep it short. Andy and Tansy – Balnakenny, talk to the Grants tomorrow, OK? Make it early – it’s a long way. You’re watching for reactions to what happened last night. Stuart Grant was devoted to his sister and if he believes his mother that Lindsay killed Ailsa, there’s no saying what he might have done.’
‘Or she might have done, presumably,’ Kerr said pointedly. ‘No need to assume women can’t use knives.’
Fleming smiled. ‘Attempted murder as a feminist issue? Fair enough. Anyway, check their movements last night, and the other nights this week, when Jaki Johnston saw someone in the garden.’
‘I can tell you what they’ll say,’ MacNee put in. ‘At home. Watching TV. Both of them. All evening. Every evening.’
Macdonald promised to mug up on the programmes so he could put them on the spot, then Fleming got up. ‘I’d better go and see the Super. Tam, enjoy your reading. And Tansy, if Tam asks you just to tell him what it’s all about, the answer’s no.’
‘
Ta belka krzywo le
z
.
y
. It’s not sitting straight,’ Stefan Pavany said.
Kasper Franzik, coming down the ladder from the roof of the Hodges’ new building, glared at the foreman. He’d been in the black mood for days, days when the world went dark and a sideways glance from a passer-by was enough to fill him with dangerous rage. Direct confrontation took him to a murderous pitch.
He came down the ladder with aggravating slowness, then, ignoring Pavany, turned his back and surveyed his work.