Cold in the Earth (17 page)

It was pitch black outside. There was no moon and no sign of stars; after living in towns and cities this deep darkness was almost shocking. It wasn’t raining, but there was a strong wind blowing and she could just see bushes being whipped about in the garden below. She dropped the curtain again. As she was turning away, she heard a noise from somewhere not far away. It sounded like a bull, or a cow, perhaps, bellowing. She didn’t know much about animals, but it sounded as if it was in distress.

They’d slaughtered all the Chapelton cattle, hadn’t they? And there certainly wasn’t another farm between here and there. Could they have missed one, left it wandering alone and terrified among the corpses of its herd?

Laura looked out of the window again, but apart from wavering, indecipherable shadows she couldn’t see anything. She was getting cold now too. Trying to put the thought of the wretched creature out of her head, she got back into bed and tried to compose herself for sleep.

10

‘Good morning, ma’am.’ PC Langlands was at the reception desk the following morning when DI Fleming came in. Instead of calling her usual cheerful greeting, she looked straight through him, leaving him searching his conscience for a reason and nervously anticipating a summons to account for whatever it was.

Oblivious to the trouble she had caused, Marjory Fleming plodded up the stairs to her office, her whole body heavy with the weight of her misery. Perhaps, she reflected briefly, it just showed what a cushy life she’d had that she’d never before felt wretched like this.

She’d never been at odds with Bill before, for a start. They’d had the odd quarrel, but until yesterday they’d always been on the same side. It hadn’t been easy recently, with all that was going on, and the lengthening pauses in their evening conversations had been thick with unspoken thoughts. But Bill was a reasonable man and after all it was at his insistence that she had gone to stay with her parents precisely so that she could carry on her job.

Still, his sympathies were naturally with his friends and colleagues; hers were too, only she did feel a certain resentment that while she was understanding about their difficulties, they seemed entirely unprepared to make allowances for her own. Did they think she enjoyed this, for heaven’s sake? She didn’t say that to Bill, though; for days now they had talked stiltedly about the children, her parents, anything but what was uppermost in both their minds.

Yesterday, when he picked up the phone, she knew from his voice that he had heard about the day’s events. Tired of papering over the cracks, she said abruptly, ‘Have you been talking to Susie?’

Yes, he had, and it was clear where he stood. ‘It’s been a bad business. It’s an awful pity you had to be involved.’

‘You
know
I haven’t any choice,’ she cried, feeling betrayed. ‘You know I don’t like it any more than you do. None of us wants this—’

‘But it was so badly handled! Couldn’t you have intervened, worked at persuading them to accept the situation instead of putting in the heavies?’

‘You think we didn’t? Perhaps you can suggest the easy way to make someone who’s barricaded themselves in and whistled up a protest mob comply with the law?’ She was angry now. ‘I can promise you we tried everything else – it’s too expensive to mobilise that number of people unless there’s no alternative.’

‘Oh, if it’s a question of
money
, of course—’ There was pent-up rage in his voice.

‘Your money. Their money.’

‘If it’s our money, it’s not how we’d choose to spend it.’ Then Bill stopped and she heard him take a deep breath. ‘Look, Marjory, we’re getting into a quarrel over this and it’s not constructive. You have your point of view and I have mine. It’s just I was very upset to think that you’d lost a good friend.’

Good friend! ‘Did she tell you what she did to me?’ Marjory’s tone was dangerously quiet.

‘Did? No.’

‘She spat in my face.’

It silenced him and she enjoyed a moment of bitter satisfaction. When he spoke again his voice was softer.

‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry, love.’

She hung up on him. She knew it was stupid. She had waited for him to ring back. He hadn’t.

This morning she was suffering for having taken an olive branch and trampled it underfoot, and she was worrying about the children too. Cat, under Janet’s influence, was rapidly becoming a Fifties throwback: Marjory rarely saw her without a pinny on and she had even said reproachfully, ‘Mum, why don’t you pull out all the beds to clean behind them every week? You can’t have a clean house if there’s dust under the beds.’ Like her grandmother, she’d taken to waiting hand and foot on the menfolk and her brother was rapidly becoming a male chauvinist piglet.

But last night, when Marjory had got home late, lacerated after the day’s problems and her conversation with Bill, Cammie was still awake and in tears when she went into his bedroom. Playing Racing Demon with Grandpa had palled; Cammie had made the mistake of saying it was boring and his grandfather had taken his revenge by confiscating Cammie’s beloved GameBoy.

The child put his arms round his mother’s neck and sobbed. ‘I don’t like it here any more. I want to go
home
.’

‘I know, I know. It’s a bit tough, isn’t it? But maybe it won’t be long now.’

She managed to soothe him, kissed him goodnight and went wearily downstairs trying to work out what to do.

It wasn’t that she had any brief for the GameBoy – just the opposite – but Cammie was, after all, a kid who’d been uprooted from home and this was just plain bullying. How typical of her father to react with vindictiveness to any slight, real or imagined! What was so sad was that he and Cammie had been developing quite a good relationship and this had created a no-win situation. If Cammie went on feeling unjustly treated it would sour his affection for his grandfather, but if Marjory waded in and forced the return of the stupid thing, her father would never forgive Cammie for causing him to lose face. It was Angus who would be the principal loser: it was his problem, his choice . . . Still, it was a shame.

She could hear the sound of the television as she came downstairs; it had barely been on since the children arrived. There was a light in the kitchen, though, so her mother must be working there. She could go and talk to her about it.

It didn’t, of course, come as news to Janet. In her own inimitable way she managed to be sympathetic to everyone without taking sides; after listening patiently she had told her daughter not to fash herself, that it would all be fine in the morning and why did she not get herself off to bed for a good sleep because she was looking real peelie-wallie?

Marjory had agreed, but it was still one more reason for feeling depressed. She let herself into her office and sat down at her desk to check her e-mails, hoping against hope that there wasn’t another exercise like yesterday’s on the agenda. For once, the thought of paperwork was positively inviting.

She found nothing too alarming: the tasking group anticipated no serious disturbances over the next twenty-four hours, she had a debriefing appointment with the Super, a planning meeting, a request for permission to go on a training course and there was a circular about planned alterations to the canteen. And a note, unsigned, which said in quotation marks,

‘For the future be prepar’d

Guard whatever thou canst guard:

But thy utmost duty done

Welcome what thou canst not shun.’

She read it with a wry smile. No prizes for guessing who’d sent that one.

Marjory was in the middle of a report when the man himself knocked on the door and came in.

‘Tam!’ she said. ‘I got your note – appreciated the support if not the message. You bloody try welcoming—’

Then she noticed his expression. ‘What’s happened?’ she said sharply.

He sat down. ‘We’ve maybe a wee bit of a problem on our hands, boss. We’ve just had this call from the guys digging a burial pit over at Chapelton. They’ve found a body.’

Laura began her research in the morning in the offices of the local weekly paper, the
Galloway Globe
, and found that the editor, a round, cheerful man rejoicing in the name of Neil MacSporran, was delighted to be helpful. He set her down with back copies of the newspaper and even recommended a few people he thought would be happy to talk to her.

By eleven o’clock she was drinking coffee and eating featherlight oven scones in the kitchen of a farm near the coast towards Wigtown which had lost its stock in the first week of the epidemic. The place was eerily empty and silent; the farmer’s wife talked incessantly while her husband said nothing but paced like a caged animal, often stopping by the window to look out over the deserted fields. She talked, he didn’t, which worried Laura: he was in a high-risk profession for suicide and a reactive depression, left untreated, was a recipe for disaster.

As she rose to go, she said to him, ‘Have you been offered counselling?’ and at last saw him animated.

‘Load of blethers!’ he snorted. ‘My certies, lassie! If you caught me having any truck with a daft-like notion like yon, you’d know I’d gone clean gyte!’

The vocabulary was obscure but the meaning was plain enough and perhaps he knew his own business best. Laura grinned, agreed that he might not be the ideal subject and left, promising to come to see them again.

She had lunch in a cosy café in Wigtown and a useful chat with its proprietor, then after a browse through a couple of the bookshops for which the town is famous and more conversations, she had pages of notes to write up and she headed back.

She’d booked in to the Glen Inn for another couple of nights. It would give her a chance to find out if the Thomsons remembered Dizzy and she might even pluck up the courage to ask the unpleasant Mrs Mason for her recollections, though these were unlikely to be positive; Max had said the two women had been at loggerheads.

Lisa had clearly been pleased about the extra business even though she had looked this morning as if the strain of catering for several visitors single-handed was almost overwhelming. She confided that she and Scott had been very late to bed; they couldn’t lock up until the cousins left the bar and they’d stayed up till all hours quarrelling. ‘Bellowing like two of their own bulls,’ she said with a nervous giggle.

‘Oh! I wonder if that was what I heard last night,’ Laura had said, though on reflection she was fairly sure the sound had not come from inside the hotel. If it was a lone animal she could only hope they had found the poor thing today and put it out of its misery.

Driving back over the now-familiar territory to New Luce, Laura planned the rest of her day: she should write up her research on her laptop while it was still fresh in her memory, and she’d bought a copy of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, with its Galloway background, which would keep her comfortably amused in her room and out of Max’s way at least until dinnertime.

Just before she reached New Luce she realised there was a police van behind her and she slowed down to let it overtake. There were two police cars in the car park of the hotel too; it must be something to do with the slaughter at Chapelton.

She was completely unprepared for what awaited her. As she opened the front door, Max emerged from the dining-room at the side of the hotel, looking white and shaken.

‘Laura!’ He pounced on her, grabbing her arm so hard that it was painful. ‘Where have you been? I needed you!’

‘Max, whatever’s wrong?’

He gestured behind him to the open door of the dining-room where Laura could see uniformed police and two or three other people sitting at one of the tables. ‘They came this morning – they’ve found a woman’s body in the field they were digging up. It’s been there for years. Laura, it’s my mother, I know it is! I always thought my father might have killed her – why would she have gone away and never got in touch with me?’

He began to cry, great tearing sobs. Laura, dumbfounded, put her arm round his shoulders and looked helplessly round for somewhere he could sit down.

‘Here – take him through here.’ A woman had emerged from the dining-room and was holding open the door to the small residents’ lounge on the other side of the hall. She was tall, with an air of easy authority; she had reddish-brown hair, neatly shaped, and a wide, good-humoured mouth but, Laura thought, her hazel eyes were cool and watchful. She wouldn’t miss much.

It took a few minutes for Max to regain control. Visibly embarrassed, he fumbled for a handkerchief. ‘I can’t think why I did that. Sorry. Not my style.’

Before Laura could speak, the other woman said, ‘You’ve had a considerable shock, Mr Mason. You were extremely helpful to us this morning, helping us to deal with your aunt until DS Mason could get here, and this is a very natural delayed reaction.’ She turned to Laura. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Fleming. And you are . . . ?’

‘Laura Harvey.’ A raised eyebrow invited her to elaborate and she added, ‘I’m here doing a piece for the
Sunday Tribune
on the local effects of foot-and-mouth.’

She felt, rather than saw, the woman stiffen. ‘You’re a journalist?’

‘A psychotherapist. It’s a feature article.’

It didn’t look as if DI Fleming’s opinion of psychotherapists was a lot higher than her opinion of journalists. ‘And your connection with Mr Mason?’

Laura had no intention of going into that. ‘We know each other in London.’

‘I see.’ Fleming was clearly putting two and two together and making about twenty, but if she chose to jump to conclusions it wasn’t Laura’s job to stop her. She said nothing, and Fleming turned back to Max.

‘Are you all right now, Mr Mason?’

‘Oh, sure. My father’s murdered my mother, but hey! I’m cool with that.’ Max was recovering his composure.

Colour rose in Fleming’s cheeks. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Yeah, fine. But look, I’ve had about as much as I can take for today. Leave me with my friend, OK?’