Dead in the Water (20 page)

‘So you don’t think he would have retained specimens, say, of the foetal tissue?’ She’d been pinning her hopes on that.

‘Unlikely, I’m afraid, given how useless the man was. Still, you could try the present labs. They may have archive material.’ Bailey was looking more cheerful now they were discussing other people’s shortcomings rather than his own.

He wouldn’t be happy about her next question. ‘Moving on to the Lazansky accusations – you didn’t at any stage speak to Marcus himself.’ She hadn’t meant it to, but it came out like an accusation and she saw him turn red.

‘My dear girl, the man was in America! His parents had spoken to him on the telephone the day before all this took place.’

She didn’t like being called his dear girl, and she didn’t like having wasted her time leaning on Marcus Lindsay to test for weaknesses in his alibi. ‘That isn’t in your report,’ Fleming said icily.

She had never spoken to him in that tone of voice, and she saw shock register on his face, along with consciousness of the tone he had used himself. ‘I’m – I’m sorry if I sounded offensive. It was unintentional.’

Fleming didn’t say anything, and he went on, ‘I don’t remember precisely what I noted down. The thing was that young Lazansky was so firmly ruled out that it didn’t seem important. Sorry.’

There was no point in humiliating him further. Their future working relationship was going to be awkward enough, and whatever she might feel at the moment, damage limitation was called for.

‘That’s the end of my list at present, Donald. Thanks – that’s been helpful. Just one more thing I’d like to ask – personal, not professional.

‘Do you know why my father agreed to let Ailsa Grant’s body be taken home? It was so unlike him, not to do everything by the book.’

‘I wish I could tell you, Marjory. I asked him, naturally; he was a good officer, in his old-fashioned way, and if he could have produced some proper reason . . . but all he would say was that he’d made the decision, and why did it matter, anyway, and he stuck to that.’

‘That was my father!’ Fleming smiled wryly. ‘Don’t suppose I’ll ever know. Anyway . . .’

Bailey got up. ‘Finished? That’s good. I’ve a couple of meetings this afternoon. Thanks, Marjory.’

He was out of the room before she could even say goodbye. Not a happy bunny.

She should never have agreed to doing this. Their professional relationship had worked well because he was fundamentally lazy. He was, though, a competent administrator and in general a decent and fair-minded boss. Fleming considered him a better superintendent than he had been DI though she had never expressed her opinion, even to Tam – who probably knew anyway, and agreed. But she didn’t want that opinion forced upon Donald.

Had he really thought she’d perform a cosmetic exercise? If so, how little he knew her! Perhaps that was her fault. His patronizing ‘my dear girl’ had made her hackles rise, and he had seen a side of her he’d never seen before. But then, she’d played the deference game – even, with quiet amusement, pandering to his subconscious conviction that he was entitled to it by gender rather than rank.

That wasn’t altogether a comfortable thought. Women were often accused of being manipulative, and Fleming didn’t like to think she was. On the other hand, wasn’t ‘manipulative’ one of these gender-specific adjectives – ‘she is manipulative, he is brilliantly diplomatic’?

Janet Laird had once told a teenage Marjory, deep in introspection, ‘It won’t do any good, pet. It’s like peeling an onion – you take off the layers and when you reach the middle there’s nothing there. And all it does is make you cry.’

It was sound advice. The Bailey problem certainly wasn’t going to be solved by thinking about it, and it wasn’t going to be solved any time soon. With a sigh she got up and collected the coffee mugs. Neither of them had been touched; they were cold now and there was a scummy film on the surface.

When Diane Hodge came into the conservatory, her husband was by the window watching progress on the building. He turned with a triumphant smile.

‘See that? Always pays to turn nasty. If I hadn’t beaten up on Stefan, they’d still be poncing around, marking time at my expense. But that’s them started on the roof now – he seems to have conjured up a roofer from somewhere.’

Diane went over to look. ‘That’s Kasper,’ she said, pointing to the man in a precarious position on top of the wall. ‘I noticed he wasn’t there yesterday or this morning. I hope he knows what he’s doing – it doesn’t seem very safe.’

‘Ah, that’s the advantage of a gang like this,’ Gavin said complacently. ‘You don’t have any of the scaffolding nonsense the local brickies insist on – doubles the cost! A few ladders were good enough in the old days, and that’s what you get from these boys – sound, old-fashioned workmanship.’

Then he noticed that his wife wasn’t in her usual casual clothes. ‘You’re all tarted up. Where are you off to?’

He seemed to have forgotten his festering grievance. Diane, who had planned to announce coldly that she’d had enough of his tantrums and was going away for a couple of days, changed her mind and said, ‘I just decided to pop up to Glasgow for the night. I’ll be staying with Hayley – we’ve promised ourselves some retail therapy.’

‘Good idea. You could stock up at M&S food too, and I’ll give you a list for the wine merchant.’

He sounded quite enthusiastic about her proposed absence. Was that a calculated insult? She considered a sharp response, then decided there was no point in resurrecting the quarrel. She was looking forward to a break from him, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable if he felt the same.

‘I’ll be leaving in half an hour, if you can have the list ready by then.’

‘Fine, fine,’ he said heartily. ‘I’ll just go now and see what we’re low on.’

He hurried out, leaving her to reflect uneasily that he did seem very pleased to be rid of her. They’d had their share of ups and downs over the years, with family problems not to mention the rest, but they’d been on a more even keel since coming back to Sandhead. She hadn’t thought there was anyone else in the frame at the moment. Perhaps she was wrong.

For once, Fleming was keen to phone Sheila Milne. This time, she would set the agenda.

She announced herself formally. ‘DI Fleming, Ms Milne.’ So ridiculous, for the Fiscal, when you worked together so closely! It had always been Christian names with her predecessor, but Milne had at once made it clear that any such intimacy would be unwelcome. Humble coppers should know in their place.

‘Inspector. Good. Where are we with the Grant case?’

‘Progress is steady but necessarily slow,’ Fleming said smoothly. ‘I was actually phoning because you had expressed concern about the complaint Marcus Lindsay made to you. I just wanted you to know I had gone and offered an apology.’

Fleming heard a tiny gasp, swiftly covered up by a cough. When Milne spoke, she sounded guarded. ‘I trust it was accepted?’

‘He was very relaxed about it. In fact, he claimed the complaint had been a misunderstanding in the course of a joking conversation with you. I hadn’t realized you were old friends.’

‘Was that what he said?’ She sounded angry. ‘That is a complete distortion! It is only the slightest of acquaintances – I ran into him on a couple of social occasions.

‘It puts me in a position where very properly relaying what he had said could be thought to be doing a personal favour and I am most unhappy at being misrepresented in this way, most. I wish to deny it categorically.’

Admittedly, Fleming had made this call with the express intention of tweaking the acting Fiscal’s tail, but she was totally unprepared for what sounded almost like panic. It prompted her to go on. ‘I did wonder why he should mind so much about entirely routine questioning. Still, if it was an ill-judged joke—’

Milne seized on that. ‘Yes, yes, of course. I’m sure he has nothing to hide. Have you – have you eliminated him from your enquiries?’

The truthful answer, after what Bailey had said, was yes, probably. Instead, Fleming said pompously, using a meaningless phrase she particularly disliked, ‘We’re not ruling anything in or anything out, at this stage.’

Milne’s voice was definitely shaky. ‘I – I see. Well, keep me informed, won’t you?’

She rang off abruptly, leaving Fleming to stare at the phone in some astonishment.

Sheila Milne looked down at the pile of files on her desk, waiting to be marked ‘pro’ or ‘no pro’, indicating her decision on whether or not each case should proceed to prosecution. She wasn’t seeing them.

Her stomach was churning and she felt dizzy with the shock. What was at stake was her job – or more than that. She looked down again at the papers on her desk; if a file detailing her activities landed on another fiscal’s desk, would they be marked ‘no pro’? She didn’t think so.

It had seemed so trivial at the time, just a little favour for someone glamorous she was anxious to impress. No one would ever check on her decisions, unless suspicion arose. To make absolutely sure it didn’t, she’d asked him to do that one simple little thing, and he hadn’t done it – selfish bastard! Like all men.

She should have left well alone. Why should it have come out, even if he was questioned by the police on some totally unrelated matter? She’d brought this on herself, by her own neurotic stupidity. But then, that was only the latest in a series of idiotic mistakes. How could she have been such a fool as to contact him in the first place, and then to attract Fleming’s attention?

Doing the favour hadn’t got her anywhere with him in any case, and even if it had resulted in a brief romance with a glamorous actor, it would hardly be compensation for losing your job and ending up in jail. What could she do now, to stop this becoming a total disaster?

‘I can’t face the pub this evening, Jaki, but I’ll take you down and fetch you back if you fancy it,’ Marcus Lindsay said as they sat over coffee in the drawing room after Mrs Boyter’s excellent supper.

Jaki shuddered. ‘You’re kidding! I’m staying put, and the doors had better be locked. Kevin could be hanging around out there, waiting for revenge. Freaks me out, just thinking about it.’

They were alone, Jaki huddled as close to the fire as she could get and wearing a chunky-knit sweater she’d bummed off one of the cast who was in a B&B with serious central heating. Sylvia, despite Mrs Boyter’s anxious coaxing, had eaten little at supper, and retired exhausted to her room immediately after.

‘How much longer do you reckon we’ll need to be down here?’ Jaki asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her tone and not quite succeeding.

‘Mmm. A bit dire, isn’t it?’ Marcus replied to the tone before the question. ‘I can see it running into next week, the way things are. And I haven’t made it any better, marooning you with Sylvia and me here. Sorry, love.’

The smile he gave her, the smile which largely explained Superintendent Playfair’s screen success, almost had her regretting they’d broken up. Almost. Not quite.

‘It would have been worse if I was in Ardhill, after what happened last night,’ she said truthfully. ‘At least here we’re out of it.’

She looked round the drawing room, which had been such a great setting for Sylvia’s impoverished and reclusive character, at the decaying fabrics and the damp patch in one corner of the elaborately plastered ceiling and the threadbare oriental rugs. Then she said, ‘Do you mind me asking what you’re going to do with this place? It’s like – well, cut off, you couldn’t live here, and—’

‘And I obviously can’t afford to keep it up,’ Marcus finished for her. ‘I know. Of course, I should sell it, but somehow . . . well, my father really loved it.’

But he’s dead, Marcus
, she wanted to say, but her eyes followed his gesture to a photo on a side-table, and she wasn’t sure that was quite true. She was beginning to have a weird feeling about Laddie Lazansky. He was like a ghostly presence in the house: Sylvia and Marcus always talking about him, so many photos around the place – three more in this room alone. She’d only seen one of Marcus’s mother, a faded snap which suggested it was only there because it was so good of the huge black Labrador at her feet.

Marcus was saying now it had been his mother’s house. ‘They were pretty broke latterly and after Papa died she got frail herself and let things go. She seemed to lose all interest after he’d gone – funny, really, when you consider that in many ways they’d led very separate lives.

‘I’m contemplating holiday flats, perhaps – go into partnership with a developer and save something from the wreck, but Sylvia sees it as sacrilege. She’s determined that it should all be just as it was when she came down here with him. She was utterly destroyed too when he died. He was . . . quite a man.’

He had poured them both large malts to go with the coffee. Jaki had begun to appreciate them – that addictive flame as it hit your throat – but she wasn’t accustomed to neat spirits. Perhaps it was the whisky talking when she asked, ‘Didn’t your mum mind about Sylvia?’

‘If she knew, and I suspect she did, she never gave any indication. We weren’t close. She didn’t invite intimacy and to be honest, Sylvia was more of a mother to me than Ma ever was – very protective, fussed over me, all for my own good, of course. And I could understand just what my father felt. He was a very passionate man, very warm, very charismatic. It’s years since he died, but I – I miss him still.’