Lying Dead (47 page)

    Jenna felt, rather than saw, her daughter stiffen and the knot of tension in her gut twisted again. ‘I can’t think what you need us for. It’s surely clear enough.’

    ‘Just one or two things, if you wouldn’t mind?’ The inspector moved to hold the door open and Jenna found herself being ushered through it, with the woman just behind her.

    The other detective was following, with Mirren. Jenna saw her point to a small metal badge pinned to Mirren’s grey cotton top.

    ‘I’m sure I’ve seen that before. What is it?’

    ‘SSPCA.’ It was a grudging response.

    ‘Oh, I went out on a call with them once. There was this awful man running a puppy farm – you wouldn’t believe the cruelty—’

    Jenna hung back, still looking over her shoulder, but Fleming was pointing to the shed and asking where the dog was kept and somehow she had to comply.

    ‘Mirren must have been very relieved to hear the dog was safe after all,’ Fleming said.

    ‘Yes.’ But it wasn’t as simple as that, otherwise Jenna wouldn’t be so worried. Mirren had known all along that the dog was all right – or at least, she’d thought she’d known. Then suddenly, she’d flipped. It was something to do with the computer; that had been clear yesterday. There was something there that she didn’t want the police to find out. Jenna had tried to check last night, but it was protected with a password she didn’t know and she hadn’t felt strong enough to tackle Mirren about it. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know. She couldn’t get out of her head Mirren’s strange response to being told about her father – ‘I didn’t know he was dead.’ It had haunted her: why should she have known?

    Suddenly she realized that the pause had lengthened and the inspector was looking at her. She couldn’t see the eyes behind the dark glasses but it made her feel uncomfortable.

    ‘You’re worried about Mirren, aren’t you?’ Fleming’s voice was very gentle, very sympathetic.

    To her dismay, Jenna felt tears spring to her eyes. ‘Difficult time – we’ve been dreadfully upset, naturally—’

    ‘She was very anxious that we shouldn’t look at the computer, wasn’t she? Do you know why?’

    ‘She has a right to privacy – we all do!’ Jenna blustered, but feebly.

    ‘Children can get into a lot of trouble on the internet. It’s a big problem.’

    ‘Yes – yes. I know.’

    ‘Have you checked what she’s been accessing?’

    There was a huge lump in Jenna’s throat. ‘She’s got a password.’

    Mirren and Kerr had just come out of the house. Mirren was talking animatedly and at a gesture from the detective they went to sit on the wall of the garden. Jenna made to go back to them, but Fleming was speaking again.

    ‘I’ve got kids myself, Jenna. I know just how you feel about them. You’d do anything to protect them, and that’s what you’re trying to do at the moment. I respect that.

    ‘But there are two things I’d say. The first is purely practical – if we need access to the computer for investigative reasons, we’ll get it. It’ll be slower, but we’ll get it in the end.

    ‘The second thing is that she’s much more likely to need protection from the sort of people she could be meeting on the internet. She’s vulnerable – from what I’ve seen of her, I would say very vulnerable. She doesn’t have many friends, does she?’

    Jenna’s eyes welled over, silent tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘No. But look at her now, talking to your girl there. I haven’t seen her talk like that in years.’

    ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

    ‘I – I suppose so, but it hurts. If she can’t talk to her own mother, what does that say about me?’

    ‘It says she’s thirteen.’

    ‘Oh – I don’t know!’ Jenna pushed away the tears with her fingers. She’d been too busy once they came here to keep up with friends herself; what she’d said about her feelings now, to this strange woman, was more than she had said to anyone for years. ‘What am I going to do?’

    Suddenly the gentle voice became very firm. ‘You’re going to give us permission to access the computer. You needn’t even tell Mirren you have, if you arrange to be out of the way – take Mirren shopping or something. You do need to know what’s going on, for her own safety.’

    Jenna gave a shuddering sigh. ‘All right. Yes, I give you permission. Though I feel I’m betraying her. But as you know,’ she said emphatically, ‘Mirren was in the house from just after seven o’clock. I can absolutely vouch for that.’

    ‘We’ve noted your alibis,’ the inspector said, which to Jenna seemed a funny way to put it, but perhaps that was just the sort of thing they had to say.

    Mirren and Kerr had got down off the wall and were walking across the yard towards them. Fleming turned.

    ‘I think that’s everything. We won’t take up any more of your time.’

    As they left, Jenna said, ‘You seemed to be having a good chat with the detective.’

    ‘Yeah, Tansy’s cool.’

    ‘What did you talk about?’

    ‘Oh, stuff.’ Mirren walked back into the house, oblivious to her mother’s hurt.

‘She’s in with the rougher elements of the Animal Cruelty people, as far as I can make out,’ Kerr said as they walked back to the car. ‘God knows what they may have prompted her to do.’

    ‘At least I wrung out permission to access the computer. Macdonald can come down later – she’s going to keep Mirren out of the way.’

    The car was parked in front of the Yacht Club again. As they reached it, Kerr looked back round the sweep of the bay, with the pontoons and the pretty boats. The tide was on the turn, but the mudflats hadn’t been exposed yet and under the cloudless sky the water shimmered blue. There was a swan with its wings half-raised in the sunshine and terns were fishing out towards the estuary, the strong light silvering their plumage as they folded their wings in kamikaze dives.

    ‘You know something? I really don’t like this place – gives me the creeps. Something about the atmosphere, I suppose—’

    ‘There isn’t an atmosphere,’ Fleming said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with it. A lot of people use it for acting out a sort of fantasy life – expensive hobbies and parties and drink and sex and probably the smarter drugs too – and when it looks like trouble, they leave instantly. That’s not a community, that’s a stage set. And just at the moment, it’s a set with the flats falling down.’

    As they drove off, Kerr said, ‘I asked Mirren about the evening of the fire, just in the context of the dog, and she said the only time she’d gone out of the house that evening was to feed Moss, and the way she said it, I believed her. I can’t see how she could have had anything to do with Niall’s death.’

    ‘Yes, it’s probably true. There’s just one thing. I was thinking about the pathologist’s verbal report when she did her initial assessment of Niall Murdoch’s body on the dock there.

    ‘When a body’s been in water it’s notoriously difficult to fix a time of death. She wasn’t prepared to state anything officially until she’d had time to do proper calculations based on the body temperature and the temperature of the water – presumably that’ll come with the main autopsy report next week. But she did say that off the top of her head she’d be inclined to favour an earlier rather than a later time of death.

    ‘It struck me when I was talking to Jenna. We’ve based the early limit on Niall phoning home at seven – but we only have her word for it, after all.’

Chapter 23

Tam MacNee seldom went to Glasgow unless he had to. It was his past, and even if the series of slum flats he’d lived in, with their stinking shared cludgies on the stairs, had been torn down to make way for tower blocks where they used the lift instead, he still felt uneasily that somehow he might blunder into a time-warp and find himself back in the part of his life he had done his best to forget.

    It was a smart city now, Glasgow, a City of Culture, no less, with glittering shops and galleries and posh restaurants, but underneath he could always sense the raw, raucous heart of the place, still even feel the tug of his tribal loyalty to Rangers. He’d only to hear the strains of ‘Billy Boy’ coming out of a pub and his mind would run on wading in Fenian blood.

    Because somewhere, under the accumulated layers of respectability and police service, the old Tam was still there. He would never quite trust himself to go off into the narrow streets and alleyways which he knew like the back of his hand, to the spit-and-sawdust bars where the hard men he’d shared those streets with still drank – the ones who weren’t in Barlinnie or scattered from an urn on the Rangers’ pitch. He told himself he knew how they’d look now – sad and seedy, locked into a cycle of violence and ill-health – but he couldn’t purge his mind altogether of that warped image, the glamour of a life lived on the edge of danger. Nothing in his life now came close to the heart-stopping thrill of escaping disaster by the skin of your teeth, because you were quicker and smarter. It was an addiction; you didn’t recover, you just had to keep clear of the people pushing it.

    Today, though, he would be headed for the Southern General Hospital, where Adrian McConnell had been taken after his suicide attempt in his posh house in smart Bearsden, where folk talked with a plum in their mouths and ‘sex’ meant what the coalman brought the coal in. He’d taken care to arrange to meet Sheuggie for a drink afterwards in a bar run by a chain nearby, where they’d taken out all the atmosphere before they brought in the red velvet benches and the fake oak tables.

    Adrian McConnell’s letter had been duly faxed through, along with the message that the man had recovered and was prepared to talk. MacNee had left it on Fleming’s desk, along with a note to say he’d left for Glasgow.

    MacNee swung the car into the inside lane of the motorway. The signs for the city centre were coming up now.

It was a pathetic missive, Fleming thought, picking it up off her desk and reading it again. Pompous, self-pitying, cold – and yet there was that hint that he would have wished to be other, if he could.

Dear Kim, I know that the first thing on your mind when you find that I am dead will be money. You can rest assured that I am not lost to all sense of duty. You and the children will be well provided-for, and you will be free to fall into bed with the next man who comes along, or else to drink yourself to death without anyone trying to stop you. The choice is yours.

   
Naturally, with the daily humiliations heaped upon me by you and the children, I have considered divorce. But what would be the point? I might escape from you but not from them; they would forever have a place in my life, and it became borne in upon me that to pursue a political career with that sort of baggage would be to invite more public and more excruciating humiliation.

   
I had a chance of escape a few years ago, and I have only my own lack of courage to blame that I did not take it. Afterwards, I told myself there would be a second chance and this time I would let nothing stop me. The man who killed Davina killed my dream too. That dream was hope and without hope existence has no point.

   
Adrian

How would a wife feel, getting a letter like that as her husband’s last words? And how would they deal with it, when the death attempt failed and they had to meet each other over the breakfast table?

    Still, the confession in his letter wasn’t the one she and Tam had been hoping he’d make. Tam would question him, of course, but this looked like yet another blind alley.

    She’d have to get on up to the forest where the search was going on, about five miles from where Davina’s body had been found. At least you could get vehicles up there and it wouldn’t mean another hike, but the whole thing was probably an exercise in futility. She’d been hoping for evidence that this was where the woman had been killed, but so far at least the SOCOs hadn’t come up with anything.

    A quick check showed that her e-mails were unpromising – and there was the one from Chris Carter, unanswered. She certainly didn’t have time even to think about that at the moment.

MacNee didn’t like hospitals. They smelled of despair to him, and when he went into the ward where Adrian McConnell had been taken he averted his eyes from the men in the other beds, lying unnervingly limp and still or with tubes and wires attached to them, as a nurse led him to the screened bed in the farther corner.

    Adrian McConnell was sitting up, his hands folded in front of him. He looked very small and neat, wearing striped pyjamas buttoned up to the neck and dark-rimmed glasses; he was propped against pillows under a neatly turned-down sheet and white cotton blanket, like a little boy who’d been tucked in by his nanny and told not to mess up the bedclothes. His eyes were bloodshot but he was quite composed, and it was hard to imagine him as the recent survivor of a dramatic brush with death.

    MacNee introduced himself. ‘How are you?’

    ‘All right, thank you.’ McConnell had a small, prim mouth and a very precise way of speaking. ‘I’m to be discharged very shortly.’

    MacNee sat down on one of the bedside chairs. ‘You’ll understand we need to ask you some questions. The police have, of course, seen your note.’