Cold in the Earth (33 page)

‘At least we’ve got the digger on site,’ Marjory Fleming said. ‘I’ve spoken to the Roads Department and they’ll have the snowplough up there at first light. Tam MacNee says it’s dire out there at the moment so it’s not worth trying to do anything today.’

‘No, of course not.’ Superintendent Bailey’s tone was snappish. ‘It’s hardly urgent, is it – we’re fifteen years off the pace anyway. But I don’t quite understand your theory – I take it you’ve now decided to discount the pathologist’s judgement that she was gored?’

Fleming didn’t sigh – she was quite proud of that. ‘Not really. I haven’t reached the stage of having a fully-fledged theory as yet – not enough evidence and a lot of it contradictory. As you always say, running a theory ahead of the facts is like putting the hounds out ahead of the fox.’

It was a pet aphorism; he was obliged to agree, however reluctantly. ‘So what’s the point you’re making, then?’

‘The lab has established that she was wearing what they think might have been flannelette pyjamas when she was killed. According to her sister she always wore an ankle bracelet; I found one in the old maze beside the field where the body was found, along with a scrap of rotting fabric that turned out to be the same stuff. That suggests she was at the very least in the maze when she was wearing the clothes she was killed in.’

‘Pyjamas, did you say? What on earth was the girl doing out in pyjamas?’

‘She may not have been. She might have had a blouse made of flannelette, say, or she might have been killed in her bed, then moved. But there’s eye-witness evidence to suggest she might have been in the habit of sleep-walking – we haven’t managed to ask the sister for confirmation yet.

‘The reason I want to dig up the maze is to see if anything emerges to tell us where she was actually killed – and if it was there I think we would have to discount the idea of the bull. It would hardly be charging down the alleyways.’

Bailey pounced. ‘The bull might be in the maze, but why wouldn’t she have wandered into the bull’s field if she was sleep-walking? You can see exactly how it would happen – blunders in, bull takes exception, charges, gores her. There you are – she wouldn’t even take avoiding action. Marjory, I think you’re getting carried away. Occam’s Razor, you know!’ He was triumphant.

Of course she knew. Occam’s Razor was another of Bailey’s favourite principles: some medieval bloke called Occam had said that if there was a simple explanation it was usually right. Bailey liked simple answers – and in this case, how could she say he was wrong? He’d spotted a glaring flaw in her argument which, she had to admit, had not occurred to her; had she, perhaps, allowed her dislike and distrust of Conrad Mason to blind her to the obvious?

But Tam had agreed. She collected her wits. ‘There are a couple of other factors. We’ve established when this occurred – it was in the middle of a cold snap. The stockman has orders to move the cattle inside when it’s below freezing and we’re talking about several days when there were daytime temperatures of minus two degrees.’

Bailey frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘So it was the bull’s pen she wandered into, after the maze—’

It was a weaker position and he knew it, but he wasn’t going to shift easily. Fleming went on, ‘And another thing – the person who told MacNee about her going out at night was Scott Thomson, the stockman, whose flat was next to Diana Warwick’s with a window overlooking the yard. DC Nisbet ran a check on police records and found out he had Previous. A conviction for stalking, basically.’

‘Stalking!’ She’d managed to shake him with that. It was powerful precisely because it chimed with standard police procedure: you didn’t sit around thinking up fancy ways it might have happened, you looked for someone with a record of having done something similar. ‘Play the man not the ball’ was another of the Thoughts of Chairman Bailey, but quoting it at him ran the risk of overkill.

He was chewing at his lip. Fleming waited in silence; she’d learned that the female tendency to elaborate for the sake of emphasis didn’t work with men. Nagging, they called it.

‘Suppose I see what you mean,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I’m still not convinced.’

That was the opening. A rat on its way up a drainpipe would have been left standing by the speed of her response. ‘Nor am I, Donald. But we can’t be seen to be ignoring leads in a murder case, can we? The sister’s up here writing an article on foot-and-mouth for the
Sunday Tribune
and I don’t want the Galloway Constabulary’s failure to investigate properly to be the subject of her next in-depth feature.’

Bailey shuddered visibly. ‘Certainly not. All right, Marjory, carry on. But there has to be a limit on this thing – if it doesn’t turn up something a bit more concrete in the next couple of days, we go back to the original theory. All right?’

Pleased with the effectiveness of her advocacy, Fleming was walking down the corridor before she remembered that she hadn’t even thought about her request for leave, let alone mentioned it.

Tomorrow. She’d do it tomorrow.

It wouldn’t turn! Stiff with disuse, the key resisted Laura’s attempts to lock the door to the guest suite. Her hands were shaking too, which didn’t help. She made herself stop for a deep, calming breath, then took the key out and jiggled it delicately back in again. This time it locked; with a half-sob of relief she went through to the sitting-room and sat down heavily on a sofa. The images she had seen on the screen still tumbled horribly through her mind: the crazed eyes, the fangs, the claws and the hair, the savaged victims . . .

After the first site, she’d checked back through the computer record: four other therianthropy sites had recently been accessed, all bizarre, all unhealthy. With her ears straining for the sound of footsteps in the hall, she’d taken the risk of running a Google check on the word and found thousands of entries; the ones you stumbled on easily came into the ‘wacky but normal’ category. The four which someone in this house had sought out last night most definitely did not.

She’d realised instantly what she knew about the word. It was the broader term, derived from the Greek for ‘wild beast’, for the condition known to psychiatrists as lycanthropy.

Were-wolves. These had been the images displayed, but the text had reminded her that there were many forms of were-creatures: were-bears, were-leopards, were-bats . . . Were-bulls?

Laura wasn’t superstitious. Certainly not! These were pitiable, delusional people and she was a rational scientist – but it was easier to be rational when you weren’t imprisoned by the elements in the wilds of Scotland in a house with a dysfunctional family, one of whom might have killed your sister.

The huge sash windows gaped at her blackly, great sheets of glass which a tap with a stone would shatter. And she had locked herself in; it had occurred to her at the time that unlocking the door again might prove even harder than locking it had. It wasn’t paranoid to try to work out a strategy for security, she told herself; it was purely common sense.

Then Laura noticed the shutters – solid, Victorian shutters on either side of the window. They didn’t look as if they had been painted since the pine had been varnished when the house was built and sure enough when she pulled them they creaked open. The backs were thick with dust and cobwebs but for once she didn’t care about spiders as she unhooked the solid iron bar and swung it into position to secure them. She breathed a quick prayer that the bedroom was similarly untouched.

She was lucky. It too had working shutters, so here in her self-constructed fortress no one could reach her. She even felt secure enough to feel ashamed that she’d allowed the power of myth to spook her. Especially since the psychological reality was probably more scary still.

That story the Mason cousins had told her, about Dizzy’s death being a terrible accident, covered up by Max’s father – the Minotaur, as Max called him – didn’t ring true. Who would take a risk like that for the sake of a bull – unless, of course, he believed himself to be that bull, believed rightly or wrongly that in his altered shape he had committed murder?

Shape-shifters – that was another term for them, a name that ran through the history and mythology of a dozen different cultures. And from the evidence she had seen this afternoon there were still plenty of people out there who believed an animal spirit to be an integral part of their being. For some it was an affectation, for others a sort of spiritual, New Age-style identification with the favoured beast.

For others, like the originators of the sites which had so recently been accessed, it was a darker belief altogether. These were people who believed they changed physically, who externalised violent internal conflict by projecting the guilt for their actions on to the animal which ‘took over’ their personality. Three of the sites that Laura had seen celebrated savage crime allegedly committed while in a state of metamorphosis; the fourth, sad and sick, talked of a struggle against an irresistible compulsion.

It wasn’t Jake Mason who’d been looking at these last night. And, she thought suddenly, it wasn’t Jake who had been bellowing and trampling the snow outside her window last night, either. What would have happened if she’d gone outside to investigate? Was that what had happened to Dizzy?

Conrad had definitely said that the pathologist’s verdict was that she had been gored by a bull’s horn. But surely there were other things which could make that sort of wound? Or a horn could be taken from a carcase, perhaps, and used as a weapon in a lycanthropic frenzy?

According to both Max and Conrad, Dizzy had been maddening in her desirability. She’d provoked a frenzy of rivalry and tension; Laura, after her own experience, could readily believe that day in, day out, that sort of atmosphere in this claustrophobic setting might produce the sort of internal stress which could only find relief in an outburst. Jealousy is a powerfully destructive emotion in any of its forms: it wasn’t hard to construct scenarios leading to murder.

‘
If I can’t have you, no one else will.
’

‘
If I kill you, he will suffer.
’

‘
If my son chooses you, I will lose him.
’

She could hear them saying it, could almost imagine one of them saying it now . . . She went very cold. This wasn’t speculation about something that had happened fifteen years ago. The same pressures were present, the same people were within these four walls.

Except the Minotaur. Max’s monster had been trapped, if not slain, but somehow the maze of human relationships and emotions here at Chapelton seemed as dark and as dangerous as ever.

20

It was the grinding sound of heavy machinery that woke her, followed a moment later by the loud and persistent ringing of a doorbell. Laura opened her eyes to total blackness; with a sense of panic she sat bolt upright, unable to work out where she was or what time it was, aware only of the pounding of her heart and some unspecific fear.

She had been very deeply asleep. Last night, she had refused to leave her rooms on the pretext of having a headache; she had gone to bed hungry after a supper of black instant coffee and a bar of chocolate she found in her handbag, prepared for a sleepless and fearful night.

The exhaustion of strain and grief over the past few days had proved her friend, though. Sleep had come with the force of a jack-hammer and as she groped now for the light-switch she realised that she had no idea whether or not there had been bellowing in the night or even whether any attempt had been made to breach her shuttered stronghold. She became aware, too, of a fast, steady drip-drip-dripping from outside, and then of the sound of raised voices in the hall. She got out of bed, went to the window, unlatched the shutters and opening one side a careful few inches, peered round it.

Yesterday’s fluffy piles of snow had collapsed like a fallen soufflé in a spectacular thaw. Underfoot was a grey, greasy soup of ice and water and as Laura watched, a huge slab of snow slid down the roof with a sound like distant thunder to explode with a noisy splash on the ground below. Snowmelt was dripping from the eaves above so fast that it was like looking out through a waterfall.

In front of the house there were three police cars parked; the front door was open and two uniformed men were standing talking at the top of the steps. A police Land Rover had just driven up and Laura recognised Detective Inspector Fleming at the wheel.

The machinery noise was coming from a yellow digger which was rumbling up the track towards her from the direction of the fields. It stopped beside a straggling hedge then, extraordinarily, made a 90-degree turn and drove straight through it. Seconds later DI Fleming came past the window in a sheepskin jacket, with her trousers tucked into wellington boots, kicking up spray as she hurried after the digger.

Trying to make sense of what she had seen, Laura closed over the shutter again. There had obviously been some major new development and as she bathed and dressed she tried to work out what it might be, without any real success. It was unlikely that the police would have made the discovery Laura herself had made yesterday, but if there was other evidence which had made them doubt the Masons’ favoured explanation, hers could only reinforce it – as long as she could persuade them to take it seriously and not dismiss it as fanciful. She’d have to try to get hold of DI Fleming, who seemed an impressive and intelligent woman.

Certainly her own problems were at an end. She could safely emerge for some breakfast and ask to be taken back to Kirkluce after she’d spoken to the inspector.

Her misgivings about the stiffness of the key proved unfounded; it turned easily enough and she emerged cautiously into an empty hall. A draught of damp air swept in from the open front door and through it she caught a glimpse of the police cars outside. There was the sound of men’s angry voices coming from the study.

Laura hesitated, but only for a moment. She was ravenous, and she knew where the kitchen was. With any luck, she would have it to herself.