Cold in the Earth (36 page)

‘Right. I suppose that’s progress: we’ve established that the body couldn’t have been buried the night she disappeared. So, was it stored somewhere? We’re not going to know, are we? Especially now we’re ordered to back off the Masons.’

MacNee looked surprised. ‘Problem?’

Fleming sighed. ‘I’d better warn you – Bailey may be going to take me off the case. You know he’s been resentful right from the start that we couldn’t just go along with Conrad’s solution . . .’

She told him the rest of the story. When she confessed that Laura Harvey was even now at Mains of Craigie, MacNee put his head in his hands and groaned.

‘Whatever possessed you, woman?’

‘She’s a nice person, Tam, and she’s scared.’ Fleming was defensive. ‘She thinks she’s stirred up the sort of emotions that got her sister killed and this way she can keep her head down and be safe until we get this cleared up. And, well, she’s going to see if she can help Bill too.’

MacNee looked at her sympathetically. ‘Bad, is it?’

‘Very bad.’ Her lips tightened; she obviously didn’t want to talk about it.

‘So,’ he said, getting up, ‘what’s the next step?’

‘We’re waiting for the soil analysis. It’s gone to the labs in Glasgow but I’ve a mate who’s a chemist at the local agriculture college and I sent him some samples so he could have a preliminary look at them today.’ She sighed again. ‘I’m not hopeful, though, are you? Let me have it straight.’

‘No. I have to say, I’m not. But what I do know is that Mason’s version stinks. It’s minging.’

‘Mmm. You know what my first mistake was? Not reporting his lapses of control to Bailey. Conrad’s one of his blue-eyed boys and if I say anything now he’ll think it’s because of this. Oh well . . .’ She shrugged, then opened the policy book lying on her desk and looked at it gloomily.

‘“Sooner or later, one must pay for every good deed,”’ MacNee quoted sententiously.

Only half-listening, Fleming said, ‘Box!’ pointing to the receptacle labelled ‘Burns Fines’ on her desk.

‘No, no,’ MacNee protested. ‘Spanish proverb. It’s true, too. Look at me putting a dunt in the car when I went out to rescue Laura in the snow.’

As he left, she couldn’t help thinking bleakly about what he’d said. Her good deed in offering sanctuary to Laura could lose her this job; she hoped that Laura’s good deed in offering to treat Bill wouldn’t similarly backfire.

She went back to trying to work out what she was going to write. Five minutes later the phone rang.

Laura sat at the desk in the farm office, with its view out over the farmyard and fields, while she put the finishing touches to her article. She was quietly satisfied that progress had been made this morning. Bill still wasn’t talking fluently but under gentle prompting he had given her an insight into the distressing end of his flock: animals suffering fear and pain, lambs killed before their mothers’ eyes by insensitive officials deaf to his pleas, carcasses left heaped in stinking piles.

In Bill, the son of generations of farmers, the shepherding instinct which man had developed somewhere around the dawn of human civilisation would be deep-rooted. To have to watch, helpless, while wolves destroyed the fold would have been agony – an agony, too, which he had to bear alone after a demoralising period of solitude and deep anxiety. The protective shutting-down of the system to deaden unbearable pain was hardly surprising. What he needed now was to be convinced that the support was there to let him deal with it safely.

He was still sitting in his chair but when Janet Laird appeared with his lunch – a little surprised to find a strange woman installed – he had muttered a greeting, which was, according to his mother-in-law, a step forward.

In a low-voiced conversation with Laura as she left, she told her how delighted she was not only that Bill was getting help and would have someone with him during the day, but that Marjory would have someone to talk to when she came home at night.

‘It’s an awful hard job, being in the police,’ she confided. ‘Angus, my husband – they all thought he was a hard man but I’ve known him upset many a time even if he didn’t say much. And Marjory maybe doesn’t think it but she’s her father’s daughter. She’s taking all this to heart and she won’t let on, even to her mother.’

Laura sensed the hurt. She said gently, ‘It’s very common, you know, that people don’t want to burden their families with their worst problems. It comes of not wanting to distress them – a sort of protective love, even if it does sometimes warp the whole relationship.’

‘Like Bill.’ She immediately made the connection; those soft blue eyes were surprisingly shrewd. ‘He’s
very
protective. He needs to be. Marjory’s a clever lass, you see, and she’s doing a tough job. Bill’s proud of her, right enough, but he’s not one of these “new men” they seem to have invented – not that I’ve ever met one, mind – and he has to feel he’s still able to look after her. So he could be not saying anything because she’d have to look after him.’

‘You’ve never thought of being a psychologist, have you?’ Laura suggested, amused. ‘You’d be very good.’

She got an old-fashioned look. ‘Me? Away you go! I’m just a housewife. You know, I’m sorry for these young ones today. It was much easier for us. Angus always knew he was master in his own house.’

‘Did he, indeed?’ Laura challenged her, but a giggle, showing two still-fetching dimples, was the only response as Janet got back into her car.

Laura smiled now, thinking about it. This was a good, strong, supportive family and she had little doubt that once this terrible time was over the wounds would heal and that essential illusion of comfort and safety would work its magic again, though not immediately and not, perhaps, ever as completely. ‘Never glad confident morning again,’ as her favourite Browning had it, but even what remained was well worth having, especially in this lovely place.

She glanced out of the window. The rain was stopping now and a glinting, pale lemon sun was forcing its way through a rift in the grey chiffon sky. She noticed the faint beginnings of a rainbow starting to form its arch across the valley, deepening in colour and strength as she watched. The cliché was inescapable: it suggested all the usual sunshine-after-rain, promise-of-better-times-ahead stuff, but trite as that was she felt her spirits lifting.

And there was a special magic of place here too. There was a particular harmony in the lines of the hills and the angles of their meeting which was as satisfying to the eye as music to the ear. All it needed to complete the idyllic picture was sheep, safely grazing . . .

A movement caught her eye and there was Meg coming out of the back door to race in exuberant circles, barking in excitement. A moment later Bill stepped out too, walking slowly and stiffly. Behind him came the stocky figure of Hamish Raeburn, the neighbour who had called in after lunch, hovering anxiously at his elbow.

Laura had left the men together with a murmured suggestion to Hamish that even if Bill didn’t say anything he might be persuaded to take a walk, and she was glad to see it had worked. Fresh air, exercise and a change of scene would probably do him more good than half-a-dozen sessions of psychotherapy. She turned back to her laptop.

She had been working for about quarter of an hour when she heard a bell ringing – a doorbell, it sounded like. She got up uncertainly, then remembered the front door she’d noticed as they drove round to come in at the back. Presumably it must open into the hall at the foot of the stairs.

The bell rang again as she hurried down. ‘I’m just coming,’ she called as she wrestled with bolts top and bottom which didn’t seem to have been moved for some time.

At last she got them pushed back and opened the door, a polite smile on her face, which vanished as she saw the man who stood on the doorstep, his face black with temper.

‘I’ve got a score to settle with you, you snooping bitch!’ he snarled.

It felt as if her heart had stopped. She tried to close the door against him but he put his shoulder to it and with contemptuous ease jerked it out of her hands. He slammed it shut again behind him and stood, a terrifying figure in the narrow confines of the hall.

Laura screamed, but there was no one to hear. Bill Fleming, still silent but walking much more strongly now, was a mile away and to his friend’s satisfaction was showing no sign of tiring.

‘You mean,’ Marjory said stupidly, ‘you actually have found signs of blood?’

James Macdonald, her scientist friend, was amused. ‘Wasn’t that what I was looking for? Only in one of the four samples you gave me, though – the one marked A2.’

They had sectioned the ground into 100cm squares; A2 was nearest the back of the hedge and 100cm away from the left-hand corner. She’d also given him B4, C5 and D1. ‘Nothing in any of the others?’

‘No. I suggest you direct the lab’s attention to the A samples first, when they get round to testing them. They won’t have any problem – we’re not talking traces here.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’

‘Someone – or something, I don’t have the equipment here to test if it’s human or animal – bled quite copiously into the soil. I would guess a severed artery, something like that? Not just a cut finger anyway.’

‘I see. Thanks, James – I owe you one.’

‘Don’t suppose you’re grateful enough to dish the dirt on this? No? Oh well, I’ll get it out of you over a dram or two later – and you’re in the chair.’

She put the phone down, still feeling stunned. It had all been theoretical until now. Under Bailey’s inquisition she had been uncomfortably aware that the evidence on which she had authorised the demolition of a historic (if neglected) garden feature was very slender, just a scrap of material and a fragile gold chain. Oh, no doubt if she went to Bailey now he would probably point out that in the countryside small animals died violent deaths at the teeth of predators on a regular basis and it was to be presumed that they bled as they did so. And of course she could see that it would only be after the labs typed the blood and ran DNA samples that they could say definitely that it belonged to Diana Warwick.

But in her own mind, she believed it. The emerging picture satisfied her in a way that the scenario involving the bull and its crazily protective owner never had. She could see the girl, sleep-walking into the maze along the least over-grown aisle, just as Fleming had done herself, then wakening, perhaps, to find herself trapped in a blind alley, turning, befuddled by sleep, to be confronted with – who? Or, she thought with a superstitious shudder,
what
? The A2 sample suggested she had huddled, or been forced, into the left-hand corner formed by the angle of the hedges. Fleming roughly scribbled down a grid, then blacked in squares A and B 1–4. She’d ask the labs to start with these samples.

The big question was, what were her chances of pressurising Bailey into allowing her to pursue the Masons before proper confirmation came through? She knew the answer to that: somewhere between zero and none at all. He would point out, with a certain logic, that in the context of a fifteen-year-old murder another few days were neither here nor there.

Looking at it dispassionately, she had to admit that her sense of urgency had a lot to do with her own domestic situation. She needed time at home with Bill, time to make contact again with the man she had thought she knew so well, but given the touchy situation with Bailey, it wouldn’t be smart to push the issue. In any case; she’d her neglected policy book to write up and thousands of words of interviews to sift through. Doing that, and just taking time to think things through, would probably be a more productive exercise than flinging herself on her horse and galloping madly off in all directions.

As was her habit, she began a mind map, taking a fresh sheet of paper and writing DIANA in large capitals in the middle of it, adding the names of Scott Thomson, Jake, Brett, Conrad and Max Mason round about. For quarter of an hour she worked, scribbling in evidence, ideas and conclusions as they occurred to her in the appropriate area until the page was almost covered with her random thoughts.

She sat back to look at the pattern she had created. Around Jake Mason, comments were sparse. If you accepted that Diana had been attacked in the maze, it exonerated the bull and obliterated the motive Jake’s nephew had suggested. That left the sexual motive – the same as for all the men – and she had noted here Jake’s repelling of his wife’s offer to return. What was certain was that he had not accessed the Internet sites.

Which went for Scott Thomson as well. He had form, though, and that was often a strong indication. But Tam, who had a good nose for these things, had thought he was telling the truth in the recorded interview; she circled that in red as a reminder to listen to the tape herself.

That left the three Masons. By Conrad she had written ‘uncontrollable temper’, by Max ‘manipulative’ and by Brett ‘unbalanced and hysterical’.

Could she see Brett imagining herself into a bull and somehow ‘goring’ her victim? She had a sudden comic vision of her Brunnhilde figure charging down the alleyway with a horned helmet on her head to
The Ride of the Valkyries
– but this was no joke. Jealousy was a powerful emotion and judging by Charlotte Nisbet’s report on the interview with her, Brett was a woman consumed by it. Fleming tapped her pen thoughtfully on Brett’s name.

Then Max. She had disliked him on sight and Laura, too, had been frank about her distrust. He was almost the personification of the Scots word ‘sleekit’ – smooth, sly, hypocritical – and Fleming had no difficulty in believing him to be cold and calculating enough to bury his guilt along with the body and walk away. Another of her jotted entries linked Laura’s mention of drug-taking in connection with lycanthropy with Max’s teenage conviction, but then, against Conrad’s name, she had entered Rosamond Mason’s statement that Conrad was experimenting too but was lucky enough, or smart enough, not to get caught.