Lamb to the Slaughter (42 page)

For hours she’d been unable to sleep except in brief snatches, when she would wake with wet cheeks. Then in the early morning she’d dropped off at last and woke in a panic to find it was eight o’clock.

When she got downstairs, the children, on their way to school, hovered round her with unnatural solicitude. Cammie had done the hens for her and Cat – all grudges apparently forgotten – had cleared up breakfast and even washed Bill’s porridge pan. She’d given her mother a bear-hug before she left, too. Marjory was touched by the affectionate gesture, but it all contributed to the feeling of unreality she was ­struggling with.

Janet had insisted on going back to her own house where she had old friends all about her, so Bill had driven her back after a supper when they had found good memories to talk about. Janet had shed a few gentle tears, but Marjory dared not let herself start. Her mother’s control was amazing.

As Janet left, Marjory had said to her anxiously, ‘You’ve been so calm – you’re not going to go back and cry all by yourself, are you?’

‘I lost your father long ago, pet. I did my grieving for him then, and now I’m just glad he’s not bewildered and unhappy any more.’

Pressing her lips together, Marjory nodded, and her mother went on, ‘It wasn’t his way to show it, but you know he was real proud of his clever lass.’

Marjory had managed not to cry until she waved the car away, but it was these words which had haunted her dreams.

Bill had less than hopefully suggested she take a day off, but accepted that working, when she had no time to think of anything else, would give her respite from the exhaustion of a grief that had so totally taken her by surprise.

Work had taken her mind off it, all right. The fuss over Salaman had had time to build by the time she’d got in, and she’d hardly caught her breath before she’d Bailey on the phone. It really was the last thing she needed; she’d done her best to calm him down with assurances that it was nothing they had said and then sent for MacNee to try to get to the bottom of it.

MacNee arrived in a cheerful mood. ‘Och well, at least it gave the Super something to say at the press conference,’ he said cheerily.

She gave him a jaundiced look. ‘I can’t imagine where this story can have come from,’ she fretted. ‘No one seems to know anything about it, but the editor got on the phone, claiming the information came from a police source. I told Donald to point out that unofficial police sources are not our responsibility.’

‘Right enough,’ MacNee approved. ‘Serves them right, sneaky sods.’

‘But where can anyone have got that idea?’ she persisted.

‘Somebody must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Probably.’

There was something about the way he said it... ‘Tam,’ she said sharply, ‘you didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?’

‘How could I have?’ He was trying to look hurt at the suggestion.

She wasn’t amused. ‘I asked you a question, and you didn’t answer.’

‘There are some things,’ MacNee said sententiously, ‘that it’s better not to know.’

Fleming was tired, worried, wrung out by emotion. She lost it.

‘MacNee, if this is your doing, I’ll have you on a charge!’ she yelled. ‘You can tell me all about it, or I pick up that phone to set up an internal investigation. And you can consider yourself suspended.’

‘Marjory—’

‘Ma’am,’ she snapped. ‘Is there permanent damage to your brain or something? It’s the only charitable explanation.’

She saw that she had got him on the raw, but she didn’t care. ‘We’ve got a murder investigation –
two
murder ­investigations, that are going nowhere. Every time the phone rings, I’m expecting it to be to tell me someone’s been gunned down in the High Street, and now I’ve got a doolally sergeant.’

MacNee’s face had gone rigid with anger but then she saw something else too, something worse – uncertainty. Her fury evaporated and she put a hand to her aching head.

‘Sorry,’ she said tiredly. ‘Sorry, Tam, I didn’t mean it. Forget what I said.’

‘I’m prepared to make allowances, ma’am,’ he said stiffly.

It was clear she wasn’t altogether forgiven, but she wasn’t about to grovel. ‘I shouldn’t have spoken like that. But if you’ve landed us in this mess, you should apologise too.’

‘I didn’t say I had,’ MacNee pointed out, but he wasn’t about to push it, adding hastily, ‘I think you’ll find Will Wilson will be putting in his resignation, though. And after that you won’t have to worry so much about leaks to the press.’

Fleming gaped. ‘Will – he’s been behind them?’

‘Well, let’s just call it a hunch I’ve got.’

She pursed her lips in a silent whistle. ‘Salaman’s going berserk, got his lawyers on to it already, and libel comes expensive. I wouldn’t like to be in Will’s shoes this morning.’

‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow,’ MacNee said callously. ‘But here – there are one or two things Tansy came up with yesterday...’

It was a blatant attempt to change an uncomfortable subject, but she let him get away with it. He seemed pretty confident that whatever he’d done wasn’t going to backfire, and he was right – the less she knew about it, the better.

She listened with considerable interest to what he was telling her. ‘Let’s bring the Farquharsons in for questioning, separately. We’ve clear evidence they’ve been comprehensively lying to us, and formal questioning might shake them enough to get at the truth. Though it’s hard to see what link they could have had with Kyle—’

Her desk phone rang. ‘If that’s more on the Salaman ­business,’ she said, looking daggers at MacNee, ‘I’ll have your guts for garters.’

He grinned at the familiar threat.

But it wasn’t about Salaman. It was a message from the control room that there was an on-going incident at the Craft Centre; a car had been sent, but they had thought she would want to be informed.

‘Thanks,’ Fleming said. ‘I’ll be right there.’

She felt hollow inside. Another victim? ‘On-going incident,’ she said to MacNee as they hurried downstairs. ‘Could that mean they’ve caught someone in the act?’

‘If it’s firearms, you’d better not go rushing in,’ MacNee cautioned. ‘You haven’t got body armour, and neither have I. And I obviously can’t afford to lose any more brain cells to a stray shot pellet.’

It was a barbed comment, but there were more important matters to attend to at the moment than MacNee’s hurt ­feelings and insecurities.

The scene at the Craft Centre when they arrived was rather less dramatic than the one Fleming had constructed in her imagination.

There was a police car in the centre of the courtyard which looked as if it had been abandoned rather than parked as officers jumped out in a hurry. There was a small blue van with its back doors open, with a rocking chair, a sound system and a couple of suitcases visible inside. It was parked outside Ellie Burnett’s shop; the door to the flat upstairs was standing open, and Johnny Black was standing in front of it with his hands on his hips, surveying the scene.

At the other side, two officers were talking to Ossian Forbes-Graham. He was standing beside them quietly, every line of his body proclaiming dejection: head down, shoulders drooping, hands hanging by his sides.

Seeing Fleming and MacNee arrive, the woman officer turned and Fleming saw that it was Sergeant Linda Bruce. ‘Bit of a storm in a teacup, ma’am,’ she said in a lowered voice as she reached them. ‘Ms Burnett’s apparently moving in with Black and Forbes-Graham took exception. Says the lady’s being forced against her will but I’ve spoken to her myself and it’s nonsense. Frankly, she looks to me as if she’s badly needing someone to look after her.

‘But anyway, young Ossian sees himself as her knight in shining armour and has a go at Black there. Seems to have come off worst – he’ll have a fine shiner to show for it tomorrow. But he was going on shouting and carrying on, trying to pull things out of the van when Black went upstairs to fetch more stuff, and in the end he called us.

‘With all that’s gone on, it got top priority, but quite honestly ...’ She gestured towards Forbes-Graham and shrugged her shoulders.

Fleming nodded. ‘Looks like a case of giving him a flea in his ear and leaving it at that, especially since Burnett’s moving out. We’d been planning to have a chat with him anyway, so no need for you to hang around. Tell him to go back to his studio or whatever he calls it and wait there for us.’

‘Ma’am.’

As she returned to her colleague, Black came towards them. ‘Sergeant MacNee. And—?’ He looked enquiringly at Fleming.

‘DI Fleming,’ she supplied. ‘I gather you’ve had a spot of bother.’

‘Yes, we bloody have. See here, inspector, I know this looks trivial, and in a sense it is – I can handle a lad like that with my eyes shut and one hand tied behind my back, without bringing the law into it.

‘But I’ll be straight with you. I’m worried. The guy’s obsessional about Ellie and after all that’s been going on I’m afraid of what might happen. You have to ask yourself, what has he done already? He’s not normal – you’ve only to look at him.’

He certainly had a point there. The constable was escorting Forbes-Graham across the yard, the young man walking with exaggerated, dragging steps, as if he hadn’t the energy to lift his feet clear of the ground.

Fleming said only, ‘We have noted your concern, Mr Black. As I understand it, with Ms Burnett moving in with you today, there won’t be the same opportunity for harassment.’

‘There certainly won’t. I have gates to my yard below the flat and I plan to keep them locked. But even so, inspector, I feel there’s more to it than that.’

‘Any reason?’ MacNee asked bluntly.

‘If I had, I’d have come to you with it long ago. It’s just ... well, I’ve told you what I think. Over to you.’ He turned away and went back up the stairs.

MacNee looked after him, his eyebrows raised. ‘Could be right, you know. Jealous of the Colonel, and if Kyle got across him somehow—’

‘To tell you the truth, I’d be a lot more worried about suicide, given the way that boy’s looking. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.’

Fleming gasped as she entered the studio. The contrast between the starkly white walls and the dramatic colours of the paintings on the walls was startling, but more startling was the fact that each of them had been slashed, again and again, so that the canvas hung down in streamers. For all she knew about modern art, this could have been deliberate, but the Stanley knife lying on the floor in front of them suggested otherwise. She and MacNee exchanged troubled glances.

The artist was sitting in a chair facing out into the courtyard and he was crying quietly. There was no other chair in the room; Fleming went over and crouched beside him.

‘You seem very unhappy, Ossian.’ Her voice was low, attractive, inviting confidences.

He turned his head as if only now registering the police presence. There was bruising coming out already round one of the light blue eyes and the thick, dark lashes round them were wet and clumped into spikes like a crying child’s.

‘I’m losing her,’ he said. ‘He’s taking her away and there’s nothing I can do.’

‘She’s made her choice,’ Fleming said gently. ‘You have to accept that.’

‘But I can’t, I can’t! What does it say about me? If she preferred that – that oaf, to someone who creates – created these,’ he corrected himself with a whirling gesture towards the damaged paintings, ‘then I’m nothing.’

It was very pathetic. ‘Look, lad,’ MacNee said with gruff kindness, ‘what you’re worth isn’t to do with what anyone else thinks. I know you’re seeing Dr Rutherford. You go and talk to him. That’ll help.’

Forbes-Graham only shook his head, still staring hopelessly out of the window. Fleming noticed that his nails were not only bitten to the quick, but raw. His problems, though, weren’t really their business. She wasn’t sure she’d get any sense out of him at all, but she might as well try.

‘Did you know Barney Kyle, Ossian?’

He turned his head slowly. ‘She hated him. He was bad for Dylan, a bad influence, and Dylan’s her world. Or he was – till now.’ His face darkened. ‘I wouldn’t have minded sharing her with him – but
Black
—’ He spat the name.

That degree of loathing was, in the circumstances, worrying. ‘And the Colonel?’ Fleming went on. ‘What about him?’

Forbes-Graham scowled. ‘She needed him, that was the thing. She told me, if it wasn’t for him, she’d be on the scrap heap. She’d have done anything he wanted.’

‘And what did he want, Ossian?’ She made her voice softer again, coaxing him to talk.

‘What would any man want from Ellie?’ he said, then jumped up so suddenly that Fleming almost overbalanced. ‘Look! There she is! See for yourself!’

She straightened up, looking with considerable curiosity at the woman she had heard so much about, and saw a slight woman with silvery-fair hair which came down to her ­shoulders in pre-Raphaelite waves. She had the sort of delicate beauty which is unfashionable in this brasher age, with fine features and porcelain skin, but she looked tired and thin, and her grey-blue eyes, as she looked up at Black helping her into the van, had an expression which Fleming could only describe as haunting. She could see just what MacNee meant, and when she glanced at them both men were gawping at Ellie with identical expressions on their faces.