Cold in the Earth (25 page)

Then there was Jake Mason, accused and unable to defend himself. She made up her mind to go to the hospital tomorrow to see him for herself. It was looking as if the police would end up being judge and jury on his case and it was hardly fair that he should be condemned unseen as well as unheard.

Her appointment with Bailey was at eleven; she could drive over to Dumfries in the afternoon. She was phoning to have her diary cleared when Tam MacNee came into the room.

‘We’ve just been told they’ve given the all-clear for Chapelton,’ he said when she put the phone down. ‘The Masons will be able to get back in whenever they want.’

Fleming made a quick decision. ‘Slap an embargo on the information until tomorrow. And get someone to swear out a search warrant for the house. I’d like to go up there myself and try to get a feel for the place without Mrs Mason throwing hysterical fits at me like missiles.’

MacNee grinned. ‘She’s a piece of work, that one. Young Charlotte’s got her knickers in a twist, says you’ll be getting a complaint about police brutality because she asked her if she’d had a row with Diana Warwick. She says the woman’s either aff her heid or as sleekit as they come and has the whole thing worked out. If you’re looking for someone who would have done the girl in before breakfast and still had a good appetite for her porridge, she’s your woman.’

‘She’s not really going to lodge a complaint, is she?’ Fleming was always one to go straight to the essentials. ‘That would be all I need.’

MacNee shook his head. ‘I phoned Conrad. He’ll talk her down.’

‘You spoke to him, did you? Did he expound his theory?’

‘Aye, did he! Wouldn’t let me off the phone till he’d bent my ear for ten minutes.’

‘What did you make of it?’

MacNee considered his response. ‘You can kind of see it, in a way. I mean, the man would have to be daft to do it, but there’s no evidence that says he wasn’t. It’s just a wee bitty convenient, though, to my way of thinking.’

That was exactly what had struck Fleming too, but playing devil’s advocate she said, ‘You have to say it fits the facts very neatly.’

MacNee sniffed. ‘That’s what I don’t like about it. We both know things like this aren’t neat, they’re messy. Real messy, when you end up with someone dead.’

Abandoning her brief attempt at impartiality, Fleming agreed. ‘Conrad was so keen I should accept it, it turned me thrawn and I just dug in my toes. Not that it’s unnatural: if a salmon could speak it would ask you to let it off the hook too.’

‘His wee cousin was pretty taken with the idea as well. Now he’s one that wants watching. Clever beggar – put me right off at the start of the interview with that sort of smarmy, toffee-nosed stuff that gets any honest Glaswegian’s dander up. Then he throws an emotional wobbly when I mention his mother.’

Fleming was interested. ‘There’s something there, you know. He insisted it was his mother’s body we’d found but he seemed quite detached in the morning, helping to calm Brett down, then in the afternoon when Laura appeared he went into complete collapse.’

‘She’d probably be able to give you a list of psychological reasons for that, all with fancy names. It’s probably a syndrome. It always is, these days.’

Marjory gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Oh aye? You know my opinion of psychology.

‘But tomorrow I have to report to Bailey. Guess what his reaction’s going to be to a conclusion that would mean the whole operation could be stood down within days. And maybe it’s right enough. We’ve no hard evidence that it isn’t.’

‘There’s just one thing,’ MacNee said slowly. ‘One of the questions I asked was where the cattle would be at the time. Obviously, if they were penned you’d have to be a maniac to get yourself gored. Now Max said they’d be out in the fields but then I was dumb enough to let him know the context before I asked the question.

‘So I spoke to Scott Thomson after – though mind you, he was pretty edgy about it too – and he said he’d instructions to bring them in if it went below freezing. If we can fix the date, we could check with the Met Office.’

‘We’ve got that somewhere.’ Fleming turned to her computer. ‘There was someone they talked to in the village. She remembered Brett Mason phoning to say she needed her help in the house because the housekeeper had walked out at the weekend. The reason she remembers is because it was the day of her mother’s funeral and all Brett said was could she come in the afternoon, then?’

‘That sounds like our Brett.’

‘Yes, here it is. January twenty-ninth was the funeral so the weekend would have been the twenty-sixth/twenty-seventh.’

‘There’d be a lot of Burns Suppers that night,’ MacNee said fondly, ‘with it being so near Rabbie’s birthday.’

‘Tam!’ Fleming jingled a box on her desk threateningly. It had a pound, a 50p and a 5p in it already.

‘No, no!’ He hastily constructed a cover-up. ‘It’s just you might find someone had an alibi, if he was a keen Burns man.’

‘It would hardly alibi him for the whole weekend, would it, unless he was so drunk as to be incapacitated. And don’t get carried away with the notion that anyone who likes Burns can’t be a villain. The man was a ratbag – his own mother was ashamed of him.’

MacNee rose with dignity. ‘I shall not stay to hear his memory abused. I’ll put the warrant in hand and check up on the weather.’

‘Thanks, Tam. And say I have to have it by first thing tomorrow morning, even if they’ve to drag the Sheriff away from his tea to get it. I want to get up there before I go in to see the Super.’

The cloud base had come down to ground level so that the rain was no longer falling but hanging in the air in tiny droplets which clung to clothes and skin and made breathing like inhaling cold steam. The sodium lights in the hospital car park were fuzzy orange shapes in the grey murk and the windows of the hospital were pale yellow shapes in the dark bulk of the building, its edges blurred by the smoky swirls of vapour.

The woman got out of her car, a Vauxhall Corsa, locked it and set off towards the main entrance with unhurried steps which belied the nervous pounding of her heart. She was bareheaded and within a few steps her blonde hair was covered with a fine, damp film.

She had no idea what might be waiting for her inside, no idea what forces her return might unleash. She wanted to see him alone first, see him without having to explain to anyone who she was or why she was here – wanted, above all, to see him without Brett, his incubus, at his side. How different everything might have been for them if Brett hadn’t fled back home from the ruins of her marriage and set about ruining theirs!

She still loved him. She always had. It wasn’t a choice she had made; indeed, how often she had wished that it was!
Real love is not conditional,
she had said to him once,
love is a condition from which there is no recovery.
That was in the happy days when they still talked romantically together, before events, like wedges driven in with hammer blows, split them apart.

The hospital doors swung open as she approached and she stepped inside, blinking at the brilliance of the interior after the darkness outside. She paused, brushing moisture off her hair and blinking away the droplets clinging to her eyelashes. A man, on his way out, smiled. ‘Terrible night out there, isn’t it?’ She smiled back, an unobtrusive figure in her Burberry raincoat.

There was no general board to give her information, as she had hoped there might be. She was forced to invent a friend who was a stroke patient, so that the receptionist would tell her which ward he might be in, before discovering he wasn’t and suggesting he must have been discharged. Then she hung about looking at the WRI shop, now closed, until the receptionist was busy with another query and would not see her going into instead of out of the building.

The ward was on the second floor. She chose the stairs as being less conspicuous than the lift if someone noticed her and she changed her mind about going in. Visiting hours were over now and the hospital should be settling down to its quieter night-time routine.

The main door to the ward was standing open and she could hear the sound of voices and laughter coming from the office just inside. Setting her feet down quietly to make no sound on the hard floor, she went in. Ahead lay a short corridor with rooms opening off to either side. Some, with long windows on each side of the door, showed double rows of beds; others were obviously single rooms.

Nervously she drew level with the open office door and saw that its entrance was blocked by a policeman, standing with his back to her. He was engaged in banter with women inside; she could hear their laughter.

Holding her breath, she slipped past. She hadn’t thought of a police guard, though after what she had read in the newspapers it wasn’t surprising. And at least it gave her a clue; only one of the rooms had a chair outside it and a table with a newspaper and an abandoned coffee mug. She scratched on the door and opened it.

The room was dark but there was a light over the bed. He was lying there, propped up a little on pillows with tubes leading between his body and stands with bags of liquids. His arms lay slack at his sides on top of the neatly folded sheet, as if they had been placed there by someone else. His eyes were closed, but his face – oh, slackened and distorted by illness and blurred by age, certainly – was still the face of the man she loved. His hair was still dark, still close-cropped, crisp-curled like a lamb’s fleece.

Her eyes filling, she went to the bed. Involuntarily she stretched out her hand to run it through his hair as she so often had; with a shock of remembrance she felt its unexpectedly silky softness. ‘Jake, oh Jake!’ she mourned.

The eyes opened slowly but he did not turn his head. Choking back her tears, she moved forward to stand in his line of sight.

‘Jake, it’s Rosamond. How are you?’

There was no response. She had no way of knowing if he couldn’t hear or if he had heard but chose to ignore the wife who had thwarted his will and left him all those years ago.

‘They were looking for me. I thought it was best to come back.’

Still no reaction. She took his hand; it lay unresisting and flaccid in her own.

‘Do you want me to stay? Or should I go and leave you?’ She studied him intently. He blinked, but no flicker of emotion crossed his face.

She bit her lip. She had no experience of the victims of strokes and it was hard to know what she should do. She had almost made up her mind to leave as quietly as she had come when the door was suddenly flung open.

‘How the hell did you get in here? Stand away from the bed!’ The policeman in the doorway was very young, hardly more than a boy, and there was a level of panic in his tone.

She did as she was told. ‘Please don’t worry. I’m his wife. It’s all right, truly.’

‘But you shouldn’t be in here! No one’s allowed in without permission.’

‘You were talking to the nurses. I didn’t want to disturb anyone,’ she lied. ‘There’s no harm done, I promise.’

He looked a little calmer, but still scared. ‘OK, you’re his wife. I’ve seen your picture. But you could have been anyone. This is going to mean real trouble for me when I report it.’

She seized her chance. ‘Look, constable, let’s do each other a favour. Smuggle me out again and no one will know.’

‘But they’re looking for you, aren’t they?’ he said, but she could see that he was weakening.

‘I promise I’ll come back to do it properly tomorrow.’ She sighed. ‘It was just that I didn’t want to find a reception committee waiting for me before I could speak to him myself. Not that it’s done any good.’ She looked back at the inert figure on the bed, his eyes closed now. ‘I don’t know whether he can’t respond or whether he’s ignoring me deliberately.’

‘Oh, I can tell you that.’ The constable seemed proud of his newly acquired medical knowledge. ‘It’s called locked-in syndrome. They think he can probably see and hear but he can’t move or speak.’

She stared at him in horror. ‘But that’s – that’s dreadful! He’s a clever, active man—’

‘Not any more,’ the constable said with the callousness of youth which knows itself to be immortal. ‘Look, if we’re going to do this we’d better make it quick. They’ll be round soon to put the lights out.’

He put his head out of the door. ‘They’re still having their tea-break. Off you go. Remember, tomorrow, you promised.’

She left as quietly as she had come. Outside, a wind had got up and was tearing the mist to rags. She could see a glimpse of the moon, and this time the drops on her cheeks were warm and salty.

15

Tiny stones from the gritting lorry bounced up off the road and pinged against the body of the car as Marjory Fleming drove along the main road in its wake. She had been travelling quite fast; as she turned off on to the untreated road leading up through Glenluce she felt the back of the car start to fishtail. Her stomach lurched, though she steered it out of the skid competently enough.

That was careless! Yesterday evening’s fog had left wet roads and of course the hard frost which had followed meant black ice today. They’d be having fun in Traffic this morning – cars in ditches, jack-knifed lorries and complaints from everyone about the gritting being too little, too late.

Becoming a statistic wouldn’t do her cred any good. She drove on at a more respectful speed, paying extra attention to the road, though she couldn’t get her personal problems out of her mind. How strange it was that at the start of this upheaval she had been worried about all the wrong things! Like her father, for instance: she had expected to have to field constant questioning and comment from him but in fact she’d hardly seen him and when she did he was absorbed in the children and showed no interest at all.

She had a friend who practised what she called prophylactic worrying: her theory was that since everyone knew that what you worried about never happened, you chose the worst thing you could imagine to worry about and then you’d be all right. She claimed it worked, though Marjory had never been totally convinced and certainly in this case could never have imagined anything coming between her and Bill. And yet . . .