Yes, they agreed, they had been together all evening in the pub. It was, Henryk said, a good place now the boys with knives were banned.
‘Did you carry knives?’ Macdonald asked, and saw for the first time a certain shiftiness. No, no, they didn’t; it was, Jozef explained virtuously, against the law.
From a side table Macdonald produced a plastic evidence bag with a large, wicked-looking Bowie knife in it, and put it down on the table in front of them. ‘Do you recognize this?’
They glanced at each other, then Henryk said that Stefan had a knife like that. He had seen it in his room sometimes.
Since that was where the SOCOs had found it, this was hardly news to Macdonald and Campbell.
‘Did he usually carry it?’ Campbell asked.
They didn’t think so; it was a bit too big to put in a pocket and he certainly didn’t wear it. Macdonald put it away again; it was to go off to the labs for testing today.
Henryk and Jozef, it transpired, knew almost nothing about Stefan. They were friends, had wanted to come to Scotland to work, and saw an advertisement from Stefan in a Polish newspaper, as Kasper too had done.
But they knew Stefan was Czech, not Polish. They had no idea why he had a Polish passport, but seemed unsurprised.
They didn’t know much more about Kasper, except that they guessed he’d been in prison, and that he’d been pleased to come to this area because he had friends here. He always carried a knife for protection; Jozef said, with marked disapproval, that he looked for trouble.
‘Where was Kasper last Wednesday night?’ Campbell asked, and Macdonald had shot him a warning look. Big Marge had been explicit about focusing on the job in hand.
They looked blank for a moment, then Jozef turned to Henryk and said something; Henryk nodded.
Macdonald raised his eyebrows to the interpreter. They had remembered – with all the aggro in the Ardhill pub, Stefan had let them have the van to go to Sandhead. Kasper hadn’t gone with them. They didn’t know any more.
After they had gone, Macdonald turned to Campbell. ‘So that still leaves Franzik in the frame for the attack on Lindsay. Hoping they’d hand you something incriminating?’
‘Hoping they’d give him an alibi,’ Campbell said. ‘Then we could stop this bloody farce and drop the charges.’
Campbell, with his usual efficiency, had filed the report on the interview with the Poles by four o’clock. Fleming read it, then sat back in her chair, thinking through the implications. It confirmed what Karolina told her, but it had created, too, a sort of echo in her mind: something she’d heard before somewhere, in another context . . . but that remained tantalizingly vague.
The information from the mortuary told her that she had indeed been right in her guess. It hadn’t translated into firm evidence – yet – but it could be a step forward.
The acting Fiscal believed – or said she believed, which might be two very different things – that Franzik was responsible for the attack on Lindsay, but unless he had crammed his feet into trainers that were way too small for him, he hadn’t been there.
Terrific – she’d eliminated the chief suspect, but without having any obvious successor to fill the position. The trouble was that you could read the crimes as two separate incidents, just the unfortunate results of the epidemic of knife crime which was becoming a serious problem nationally. Three incidents, in fact, since there was Franzik’s wound earlier to take into consideration too, though that she was inclined to ascribe to Kevin Docherty or one of his friends; she’d seen a report from the Kirkluce patrol car about scuffles between Poles and the local neds that night.
Knives. Three knives: the one found in the wound, the one from Pavany’s bedroom – again with a curved blade – and the triangular one that had actually killed the man. She had a feeling that if she could unlock that particular puzzle, she’d have the answer to the whole thing.
She kept coming back to the elusive memory – what was it that she knew, that related to all this? She couldn’t get at it; it was like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
There had been so much background noise in this case that it was hard to filter out the extraneous stuff. But her guess, as far as it went, gave her at the very least a reasonable basis for a hypothesis. Just supposing . . .
Fleming scribbled a mind map, with arrows, crossed off names. Then she reinstated some of them, and started again. It took a long time, but gradually a clearer picture started to emerge.
And at last she tracked down the thing she had been trying to remember, something her mother had told her – and immediately the significance of Jaki’s information became plain.
That could be the connection. But what? Why?
Why?
She still couldn’t see where to go with it. Then suddenly, like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape, she saw the answer as she remembered the mistake she had made in the street at Ardhill.
One by one, the tumblers started falling into place. Excitement fizzed through her. It was all making sense, with exhilarating clarity. She felt the high, heady sense of excitement that kept her in thrall to the pressured job she did. It just might be addictive.
Fleming knew now why Marcus Lindsay had so foolishly gone out into the darkness; she knew why Pavany’s trainers had been removed, and she knew exactly why Franzik’s knife had been found in the wound. And that was just for a start.
There wasn’t enough for a search warrant, quite. The sheriffs were very fussy about human rights these days, and she’d need something more solid than a deductive process to offer. She should probably wait until the labs had done their job on fibre samples from the dead man’s clothes.
But tomorrow, Cammie was coming home. She had a gut feeling that despite the gaps in the evidence, despite the imaginative leaps she had had to take, she could get better than technical evidence if she went for it, right now. Then she could trust MacNee, Macdonald, Campbell and Kerr – not Kerr, of course, she thought with a pang – to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s, ready to hand it to Bailey with a big red bow when he got back from Ireland on Wednesday. She’d take compassionate leave and start trying to mend fences with her family.
She picked up the phone and dialled MacNee’s mobile. ‘Tam? I need you to come with me. And you just might need handcuffs.’
19
Power seldom passes without great bitterness, and the atmosphere at Balnakenny was toxic. Stuart Grant had carried on with his work in the yard, steadfastly ignoring his mother’s white face and burning eyes as she watched from the kitchen window.
When he came in for his tea, there was no table laid, no food prepared. Jean was sitting by the fire, exuding malice.
Without comment, he went to the larder, coming back with a tray of eggs and a frying pan. He broke half-a-dozen into it, stirred them up with a fork, then set the pan on the heat while he fetched a loaf and butter. The eggs had stuck to the bottom when he came back, but he scraped the pan and decanted the half-cooked, half-burnt mess on to a plate and sat down at the table to eat.
Neither spoke. Stuart finished and got up. As he went to leave the room, he noticed the table where the shrine to his sister had been. It was bare. He looked over his shoulder at Jean with an unpleasant smile.
In the small back room where they watched television, Stuart sorted through the CDs. He’d mentioned
Terminator 2
to the police the other day, which had reminded him how much he enjoyed it. He switched it on and sat down.
He had been watching for about half an hour when Jean came in. With a return to her customary authority she went to the set and turned it off, then stood, arms folded, in front of it.
Her face was hard and angry. ‘I want to talk.’
Stuart looked up at her from his seat, then rose, looming over her. He took her by the shoulders and moved her bodily out of the way, turned the TV back on and sat down again.
‘I don’t,’ he said.
Jean was left staring helplessly at the son whose malleability she had in her heart despised. She was very much afraid.
MacNee glanced surreptitiously at his boss as she drove, rather too fast, down the narrow road towards Sandhead. He’d never seen her like this, so high on adrenalin. She’d worked it all out, she told him, but she wouldn’t tell him anything more.
If she had, she’d every right to be pleased with herself. He still hadn’t got it sorted out, whether the three cases they were dealing with were linked to one another or not.
If she was right. But it was exactly when you got carried away with the thrill of the chase that you got it wrong. He’d actually found himself urging caution – hardly his usual style!
Even when he enlisted Scotland’s Bard, with dark warnings about passing Wisdom’s door for glaikit Folly’s portals, she only laughed.
‘Bear with me, Tam! If a little drama is needed to get Pavany’s killer locked up tonight – well, it works for Playfair!’
The drawing room looked at its best in the evening. With the curtains drawn and the great Chinese lamps lit, with the flames from the log fire dancing in its polished steel basket, the threadbare rugs and damp patches on the walls disappeared into shadow.
Sylvia Lascelles, sitting in the upright Jacobean chair by the fireplace, was uncomfortable with the shadows tonight. They seemed to be encroaching on the little island of light and warmth she and Marcus were sharing. Though it was a still, mild evening, there seemed to be an icy breath coming from the darkness of the room behind her, and she gave a little shiver.
Marcus, sitting opposite watching the flicker of the flames, looked across to her. ‘Cold? Shall I fetch your wrap?’
‘No, no, it’s all right – just foolishness.’ With an attempt at gaiety, she said, ‘You know what I would love, darling? Just since it’s our last night here?’
He played to her tone. ‘Let me guess. Champagne?’
‘Champagne,’ she said, with a gurgle of laughter. ‘Terribly, terribly wicked of me, with my pills, but I don’t care. “
What though youth gave love and roses; age still leaves us friends and wine!
”’
He got up, smiling down at her. ‘I could arrange for roses, from time to time.’
‘Dearest boy, so kind! No need.’
But when she was alone, a melancholy French poem came into her head,
Nous n’irons plus au bois
. . . We will go to the woods no more; the laurels are all cut down . . . She turned Laddie’s ring on her finger, looking towards his photograph on the table beside her. So handsome, such a lover – dust now, as she would be before too long.
Her last night here. Ever. She would love to see what Marcus would do with Laddie’s beloved Tulach, but soon she would no longer be able to leave her flat, her prison, and photographs were the best she could hope for. The shadows were creeping closer.
Marcus came back and she heard the sigh of a cork being released. She took the glass from him, held it up to touch his. ‘Music, maestro! Not something gloomy and proper – I know!
Chicago
. Do you have it? She sang the first line from
All That Jazz
in her throaty voice, gesturing a Charleston movement with her hands.
He was meant to laugh, but he didn’t. He said very seriously, ‘You’re a great girl, Sylvia. The greatest. The best.’
And just then the doorbell rang, and Sylvia’s heart fluttered, like wings beating beneath her breastbone.
He ushered the officers through to the drawing room, then stood back for a second – in the wings, he would almost have said. Marcus had felt sick and light-headed with stage nerves many a time, so this was no different. Deep, slow breath, slow exhalation . . . Entrance.
Sylvia was smiling her special smile at the short detective. She’d joked with Marcus about her latest conquest, but tonight the man didn’t respond. He was unsmiling, his eyes not quite meeting hers.
The inspector didn’t smile either. She was a tall woman, taller than Marcus himself, with an air of effortless confidence. Not good-looking, but there was something about the face, the eyes, perhaps . . . Yes, the eyes. Clear hazel, with a penetrating gaze. But he sensed something else tonight – an aura of controlled excitement. He tried to banish the image of a lioness, moving with infinite caution towards her prey.
Deliberately, he waved the officers to a low sofa. ‘Yes, Inspector Fleming?’ he said. ‘Rather late for a social call.’ He sounded respectful, but not entirely pleased, as any middle-class householder might.
‘Yes.’ She looked towards Sylvia. ‘Miss Lascelles, our business is with Mr Lindsay. Mainly.’
Sylvia went into fluffy mode. ‘So difficult. I’m such a helpless old fool, it’s quite a performance to leave the room.’ She gestured to the cane propped up beside her, and to Marcus’s alarm he saw Fleming’s eyes go to it thoughtfully.
Sylvia was going on, ‘So darling, if you don’t mind—’
She looked towards him and he collected himself. ‘Of course not. As they say in all the best movies, we have no secrets from each other.’
‘Speak for yourself!’ The quick comeback, he noticed, got a smile from the sergeant. Less encouragingly, it was swiftly suppressed.
‘Very well.’ The inspector had not smiled.