Lying Dead (15 page)

    ‘Of course. And you might pick up something that would be useful to DCI Carter. Supposing he’s interested.’

    She didn’t see MacNee look at Tucker, and both men grin as they followed her out.

‘This is DI Fleming, Mandy. She’s just going to ask you a few questions, all right?’

    Tucker made the introduction reassuringly. The inspector was still an unknown quantity; he hadn’t sussed her out, beyond reckoning he wouldn’t choose to take liberties with her, but on the whole female guvnors liked you to show your feminine side in police work, even if Mandy wasn’t exactly the type to need putting at her ease and drawing out. She might have been a bit uncertain in the morning, but by now she was thoroughly relishing her starring role in the drama.

    ‘Gave me ever such a turn, seeing her laid out there,’ she told Fleming, woman-to-woman, with an elaborate shudder. ‘Horrible, it was.’

    ‘Indeed,’ Fleming said gravely. ‘We’re very grateful to you for agreeing to come all this way to do it.’

    ‘Oh, it was my—’ Tucker almost heard the automatic ‘pleasure’ that was about to follow, but she stifled it with her hand, giving a giggle. ‘If that isn’t me all over! Only open me mouth to change feet! No problem, anyway.’

    ‘Was she a very good friend of yours?’ Given the woman’s insouciance, Fleming’s question seemed hardly necessary, but its effect, Tucker realized, was to shed a light on Mandy’s reliability as a witness: she was torn between truth and self-importance but in the end truth won, if only by a short head.

    ‘We weren’t exactly
close
,’ she admitted, then went on hastily, ‘but of course we did see each other every day. It’s just, well, you know – working in a bar you don’t get much time for girlie heart-to-hearts, with all the punters bellowing for drinks.’

    Fleming moved on. ‘How long had she been working there?’

    ‘Ooh, don’t know, do I? Before me, anyhow, but I’ve only been there six months. When I came, she was Jeff’s girlfriend.’ Mandy sniffed. ‘Supposed to be, anyway.’

    Tucker stiffened, like a hunting dog which has spotted a movement in the undergrowth, and realized the others had done the same.

    MacNee spoke first. ‘Supposed to be?’

    Mandy lowered her eyes and looked coy. ‘Well, wouldn’t like to speak ill of the dead  . . .’

    Tucker knew the type. ‘Course not. But think of it this way, Mandy – you’d be letting her down if you didn’t give us any help to find her killer. Having a bit of a fling with someone else, was she?’ He got a look of approval from Fleming.

    Mandy didn’t take much convincing. ‘Oh, if it’s for Natasha, I suppose it’s different. Well, not anyone special, I wouldn’t have said.’ She gave another little giggle. ‘Just, anyone, really.’

    ‘Is that not a barmaid’s job?’ MacNee’s tone was provocative and Mandy bridled.

    ‘There’s ways and ways. I enjoy having a bit of a joke with my regulars, but she liked to get them going. Cheap, I call it, the way she went on.’

    Tucker watched with interest the way the Jocks worked as a team, Fleming leading her on, MacNee needling her just a little; Mandy had plenty more to say, but nothing very useful.

    When she had gone, Fleming said thoughtfully, ‘Hard to know what to make of that one. Is she jealous that a younger, more attractive woman got all the attention, or is this going to give us the key to the whole thing? The regulars – now, they ought to be able to give a bit of perspective on that—’

    ‘SEP,’ MacNee said laconically, and as Fleming looked taken aback he rubbed it in. ‘Someone else’s problem.’

    ‘Yes – yes of course. Sorry, sergeant – your case.’

    Tucker grinned. ‘Thanks for letting me sit in on this, ma’am. I’ll pass on what she said to DCI Carter. Would you like me to fetch Brewer now?’

    The man was looking even worse than he had been in the morning, so exhausted that his eyes were drooping and it looked as if it was taking him all his time to put one foot in front of the other. When Tucker ushered him in and indicated a chair, he collapsed into it.

    ‘We’ll try not to take up too much of your time, Mr Brewer,’ Fleming said crisply, which took Tucker by surprise; there was an unexpected edge to her voice, now she was dealing with a suspect. ‘I’ve no doubt the Manchester police will have a lot of questions they’ll want answered, but I have a couple relating to my brief.

    ‘Have you ever been to this area before?’

    Brewer hardly seemed to focus on her. ‘Never been to Scotland before.’

    ‘Never? Not even as a child, say, on holiday?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘Right.’ His response seemed to satisfy her and she moved on. ‘Did Natasha have any connection?’

    ‘Na-Natasha?’ He had difficulty saying her name, swallowing as if it had formed a lump in his throat. ‘I don’t know. She never said.’

    ‘Where did she come from, originally?’

    Brewer shook his head. ‘Never talked about it.’

    ‘Never? What about her family?’

    ‘Didn’t have any, as far as I know.’

    ‘She told you that?’

    ‘Just never said.’ He was shifting in his chair.

    Fleming’s voice had become harsher; now she gave him a sharp look. Taking his cue from her, MacNee said roughly, ‘Come on, pull the other one. You lived with her, and she never mentioned her mother, brothers and sisters—?’

    ‘No, she never.’ There was no doubt that he was uneasy.

    They were like sharks smelling blood on the water, Tucker thought, starting to circle closer and closer.

    ‘She didn’t talk about her family. At all. Or so you say.’ That was Fleming again. ‘Where did she work before she came to work in the bar?’

    ‘Don’t know. She—’

    ‘– never said,’ MacNee finished mockingly. ‘You employed her, right? So you must have known.’

    Brewer had begun to sweat. ‘Not – not exactly.’

    ‘But what about—?’ Tucker began, but Fleming cut across him. ‘Look, Jeff, I believed you were innocent. I started questioning you hard on the basis that I wanted my belief confirmed, but at the moment you’re having the opposite effect. You’re acting shifty.

    ‘If there’s something that you’re covering up, and it’s not that you bludgeoned Natasha Wintour to death, I’d strongly advise you not to muck us about.’

    The young man crumpled, putting his head in his hands. ‘She – she wasn’t employed officially. She didn’t have the right documentation, she said – she wouldn’t tell me why – and I fiddled it so I could pay her without it going through the books.’

    Tucker eyed Fleming with some respect. The team in Manchester had picked up on this unease, but hadn’t got anything out of him. Admittedly he’d been softened up by strain and exhaustion, but even so it was impressive.

    ‘Was she an immigrant?’ Fleming pursued.

    ‘I don’t think so.’

    ‘She never said, I suppose,’ MacNee put in. ‘Had she an accent, maybe?’

    ‘Sort of, a bit. Irish, Welsh, Scottish – something like that.’

    ‘Scots? If it was, where would it be from?’

    Brewer looked blank. ‘How the hell would I know? I’m sorry, I can’t tell the difference. Look, there’s no point in asking me about her before she came to work in the bar. It was about a year ago – more, maybe, I can’t quite remember. She didn’t talk about the past. She wouldn’t.’

    MacNee sneered at him. ‘So she just came in off the street one day and said she wanted a job and by the way, she’d no references, no national insurance number and she didn’t want to pay tax on her wages so naturally that was OK?’

    ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

    ‘Why?’ Fleming had fixed him with her eyes – unusual eyes, Tucker had noticed earlier, clear hazel.

    Brewer met her gaze. ‘You never saw Natasha when she – when she wasn’t dead. There was something about her, something that made you want her desperately. To tell you the truth,’ he was defiant now, ‘I’d have done worse than that, to get her.’

    ‘And would you have done worse than that to keep her?’ Fleming’s questioning was merciless. ‘You told me, when I spoke to you first on the phone, that she’d just walked out, without telling you where she was going, or even that she was going at all. Did she go – or did you discover she was planning to leave and decide that if you couldn’t have her, no one else could?’

    ‘No, no! I swear it! I wouldn’t have harmed a hair of her head – oh God, her hair!’ He collapsed forward in his chair, sobbing uncontrollably.

    Fleming got up. ‘Tam, find someone to sit with him till he calms down,’ she said and went out. The two men followed, Tucker reflecting that perhaps he hadn’t needed to worry about showing his feminine side after all. As Tam left, she turned to him.

    ‘I should really apologize, sergeant – as Tam didn’t hesitate to point out, I was trespassing on your territory.’ She didn’t sound all that apologetic. ‘I have to say, I’m not as convinced he’s clean as I was when I spoke to DCI Carter yesterday. Perhaps you could pass that on to him.’

    ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said demurely. ‘I’ll be able to say you got more out of him than our guys did, anyway.’

    Fleming smiled. ‘Oh, we have our methods.’

    MacNee reappeared with the policewoman from Manchester who went into the waiting-room. He was holding an envelope which he handed to Fleming.

    ‘Here’s the photo of Wintour you asked for.’

    She pulled it out and glanced at it. ‘Good clear one – that’s great. I’ll put it up in the incident room for the briefing tomorrow.

    ‘But it looks as if it’s over to you now anyway, sergeant. Pity – I was just getting my teeth into it.’ She shook his hand. ‘Good luck!’

Returning to Mains of Craigie after her visit to her parents, Marjory was feeling depressed. Her father had been having one of his bad days, confused and angry, and Janet had been so distracted she could hardly speak to her daughter, who could only wonder how long it would be before he was actually beyond her control. For once she had been wise enough not to raise the subject with her mother, knowing it could only upset her more, but it was a conversation they would have to have one day.

    Then, when she reached the farm, she saw the elderly pickup and the car parked outside the cottage. There was smoke coming from the chimney too. The Stevensons had moved in.

    Marjory got out of the car, not even noticing the apple blossom foaming in the orchard below, or the evening sun warming the stone of the old farmhouse to honey-gold. She didn’t hear the hens muttering contentedly to one another as they scratched about under the old trees, or the blackbird giving a recital from the rowan on the lawn as with a heavy heart she went inside.

Chapter 8

They were all talking about it. When the truck stopped at the cottage in the clearing to take him to be dropped at his working area, it was the other men’s only topic of conversation.

    He sat on one of the rough benches in the back, composing his face into an expression of suitable interest, holding his hands clamped between his knees to stop them shaking and hoping they couldn’t hear the pounding of his heart.

    A woman’s body, they were saying. Police cars. Signs on the Queen’s Way road asking for witnesses. Someone from down south, apparently, just dumped here – this from someone whose brother-in-law was a policeman.

    He cleared his throat. ‘Funny, that,’ he said, and to his surprise his voice sounded quite normal and no one turned a head to stare. They all just nodded and talked on.

    Reaching the destination, the truck lurched to a standstill and they all jumped down. He was still working on restoring a path which had become worn away with use; there wasn’t much more to do to that section and he’d be working on his own. It would give him time and space to collect his thoughts, to plan – if there was any plan he could make, with the thoughts whirling round in his head so violently that he felt as dizzy as if their movements had been physical ones.

Gina Lafferty woke at the first of a series of muffled crashes downstairs. Her eyes shot open and she sat up, her first instinctive reaction a glance towards the other side of the king-size bed. Reassuringly, it was empty, the pile of goosedown pillows in their white Egyptian cotton covers plumped up and pristine, without the indentation of her husband’s – or anyone else’s – head.

    Of course not. As she shook off sleep, she remembered: Ronnie was still in Glasgow and, last night at least, she had retired early and alone. She glanced at the clock. Quarter to eight! She sank back on her pillows with a groan as the sound of a vacuum-cleaner, wielded aggressively, assailed her ears.

    Bloody woman! Eight-thirty, Gina had told Mrs Aitcheson, was the earliest she could come in to start her cleaning duties, but she had treated this as she always treated Gina’s instructions: she said, ‘Mphm,’ and did precisely as she chose.

    Ronnie was forever pointing out that she was lucky to have anyone at all, cleaning ladies in this middle-class enclave being even rarer than women whom Gina could call her friend. Mrs Aitcheson only came because Ronnie had made it clear that her husband’s job as night watchman at the marina depended on it, and she resented that.