Lamb to the Slaughter (23 page)

A uniformed officer came towards her, a neat man with a dapper moustache, and she recognised Sergeant Christie from the station at Newton Stewart. ‘Evening, ma’am,’ he said gravely. ‘I’m afraid we have a tragedy here.’

Fleming had had dealings with Christie before. He was pompous, but a conscientious officer who, if lacking in imagination, could be relied on to do everything by the book – a useful attribute, in such circumstances.

‘I’m not clear exactly what’s happened. Brief me.’

‘The farmer’s Christina Munro. Elderly lady, something of a recluse, as I understand it. A group of youths has been subjecting her to a campaign of intimidation.’

‘Yes,’ Fleming said hollowly. ‘I heard about that.’ And she hadn’t done anything about it at the time, hadn’t seen it as a priority in comparison with the murder investigation.

‘Tonight, apparently, two of them came back, and she seems to have had a brainstorm and gone after them with a shotgun. The victim is Barney Kyle – shot in the back as he was riding away on his bike. The other lad, Dylan Burnett – he’s in the car over there with a woman constable.’

‘Unhurt?’

‘He’s in shock, seemingly, but otherwise he’s all right. Luckier than he deserves to be.’

‘We can be thankful for that, at least.’ Fleming was suffering a fair degree of shock herself. She had been told only that a youth had died, in suspicious circumstances; to discover that, like Andrew Carmichael, he had been gunned down was horrifying. And the worst of it was that perhaps it could have been prevented.

Was she to assume that it was at Christina’s hands that Carmichael too had met his death? Presumably, though a motive wasn’t immediately obvious. No doubt one would appear when they looked into it. Could Christina, in her youth, have been another of the Colonel’s extra-marital ­interests, say? They must be much of an age.

‘Where is she now?’ Fleming asked.

‘In her cottage. My constable and one from the other car are with her now; I think DS Macdonald has told her to stay there for questioning.’

‘He seems to be finished with the paramedics now. I’ll go and have a word with him. Thanks, sergeant.’

She set off, shielding her eyes with her hands as she stepped into the glare of the headlights. She didn’t see Tam MacNee until he spoke at her side.

‘Boss.’

She spun round. ‘Tam? What the hell are you doing here?’ She was angry; if he’d heard something was going on, and followed the cars, she’d flay him alive. Or suspend him for a week, after he was cleared to come back.

‘I wanted to speak to you before you went in there. I’ve something I need to say.’

He was very serious, disquietingly so. ‘Get it over with, then,’ she said with some unease.

‘This needn’t have happened. I told you I was worried about what Christina might do.’

‘I remember. You passed it on, and it wasn’t your responsibility after that, Tam. You’re on sick leave, remember.’

‘Oh, like I haven’t noticed? But what I didn’t report was that when I visited her she’d a loaded gun parked by her door. Going out to pot rabbits for the cats’ tea, she said, but she was half-daft with fear, maybe dangerous, even. I should have taken it off her then – or,’ he corrected himself, ‘if you’re going to nitpick, said what I’d seen and had someone else take it off her. But I never thought she’d do anything more than fire it over their heads to scare them, and to tell you straight, I thought it wouldn’t do the little bastards any harm to get a fright. If she felt she was totally helpless, she could have taken a coronary next time they tried it on and she didn’t deserve that.’

Fleming was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘So you should have reported what you saw, but as I said at the time, Tam, you were acting in a private capacity. No one expects the public to police the gun laws.’

‘There’s more.’

‘More?’ she asked bleakly.

‘This afternoon I went into Johnny Black’s motorbike showroom, where there were a load of school kids hanging around. Burnett and Kyle and Gloag were there, and I said I was police and gave them laldie. Warned them that farmers have guns and scared folk sometimes go crazy. I reckoned I’d put the frighteners on Gloag and Burnett, but Kyle’s a different type – could just have taken it as a challenge. I was in the pub having a drink with Andy Mac when I saw the two bikes go tearing along the High Street and I thought if we caught them at it we’d be able to get them in court. We arrived just as Burnett had found out what had happened and was on his way for help.’

‘I – see. And there were a lot of people around who heard you?’

‘Black and a guy called Dan Simpson were in the showroom as well as a lot of bairns I didn’t really register.’

‘Even so, we can hope it won’t be a problem – at least, not an official one. What you feel yourself – well, that’s something else.

‘I’m feeling guilty too, that I didn’t move on the whole thing sooner, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing. Anyway,’ she said decisively, ‘there’s no time to wallow in guilt. Give one of the uniforms a modified statement – no need to mention more than that you were worried about the situation – and try to forget about it. What’s done is done.’

She knew, as she walked away from him, that it was small comfort. There could be trouble, and they both knew it. And while she didn’t have time to wallow in guilt, Tam at the moment had all the time in the world.

Christina Munro looked very tiny and frail, sitting on a wooden kitchen chair beside two officers in their body armour gilets. They hadn’t known what they were coming to, except that it was a shooting, and calling, ‘Come out with your hands on your head!’ through a megaphone at a safe distance while they waited for backup from an armed response unit was an entirely new and distinctly alarming experience. When the little old lady appeared, too arthritic to get her hands higher than her ears, tension had evaporated in snorts of stifled laughter. She had pointed to a shotgun, standing behind the door. Later, DS Macdonald had cautiously checked that the safety catch was on, then wrapped it for testing.

She’d admitted that she’d fired it, almost gleefully. ‘I only fired in the air,’ she said. ‘Just to scare them, that was all.’

They could smell the drink on her breath. DS Macdonald had told them to sit with her, listen to anything she had to say, but not ask any questions until he came back. The old biddy had sat in tranquil silence, stroking a cat that had jumped up on to her knee. It was all a bit surreal.

The officers stood up when DI Fleming appeared, with DS Macdonald behind her. Christina looked up. ‘I know I’m in trouble,’ she said defiantly. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. But I’m not sorry.’

Without making any response, Fleming looked at her, then looked round the room at the cats, one on the woman’s knee, one curled up in a chair and one watching from the top of the dresser with an air of interested detachment. A very pretty greyhound had taken up its post at the old woman’s side.

Fleming turned. ‘Caution her and take her in,’ she said. ‘And see to it that someone takes care of the animals. I’ll see her at headquarters later.’

‘See someone takes care of the animals!’ Andy Macdonald said bitterly to Tam MacNee, when Christina Munro had been taken off in one of the patrol cars. ‘All very well for her to say that. Where am I expected to find someone, this time of night?’

MacNee, waiting to give his statement when someone was free to take it, looked round with an experienced eye. ‘The cats’ll be fine till the morning, then you can call in animal welfare. The dog—’ He hesitated.

It was standing by the door, where it had last seen its mistress, tail tucked in between its legs, every line of its body drooping.

‘It’s a bonny dog.’ Macdonald clicked his fingers. ‘Here, boy,’ he said, but the animal didn’t seem to hear him.

‘Poor beast,’ MacNee said. ‘I don’t even know its name. I’d better see if it’s on the collar.’

As he approached, the dog turned its head, and then, perhaps recognising a former acquaintance, twitched the very tip of its tail. When MacNee stroked it, and turned the collar to see if there was identification, it leaned into him, as if grateful for the contact.

‘It’s taken to you, Tam,’ Macdonald said, amused.

‘Dogs take to anyone they think’ll give them food,’ he said gruffly, but he went on stroking its narrow head. ‘Och, I’ll take him back to Bunty. She’s used to strays.’

‘Put it in my car and I’ll give you both a lift home when we’re finished up here. I’ll need to get back to the boss – that’s the pathology team arriving now.’

Macdonald went out, leaving MacNee in the kitchen feeling useless and excluded, alone with the unhappy dog and his own wretched thoughts.

‘Suppose you tell me exactly what happened, Christina,’ Fleming said gently to the old woman sitting on the other side of the table in the stark impersonality of the interview room. Andy Macdonald had gone through the formalities for the video recording, and been told her full name – Christina Margaret Munro – her address, and her age, seventy-six.

She was still wearing the maroon crocheted hat and its incongruously cheerful flowers quivered as she shook her head in a movement of denial.

‘They said something about murder,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’

Fleming and Macdonald exchanged glances, the thought occurring to both of them that it might be safer to have a medical check before proceeding. ‘I want to be quite sure that you understood the caution, Christina. We can pause here, if there’s a problem.’

That got a surprisingly spirited response. ‘’Course I
understood
,’ she said fiercely. ‘I may be old but I’m not stupid.’

‘No, no,’ Fleming said hastily.

‘It’s just it doesn’t make any sense. Who’s dead? If someone’s dead, it’s nothing to do with me.’ Her voice was querulous.

‘Suppose you tell me exactly what happened this evening,’ Fleming said again.

Christina gave a shuddering sigh. ‘It all started a while ago,’ she began. As she detailed a history of persecution by Kyle and his friends, Fleming, at least, began to feel uncomfortable. The six hours of questioning before a suspect was entitled to have access to a lawyer was vital to their conviction rate, but usually it was a teeth-pulling operation to get information. Now, Christina was freely making admissions which any lawyer would have warned her were most unwise. A jury might have sympathy for what she had suffered, but shooting in the back a seventeen-year-old who was riding away on his bike wasn’t self-defence.

‘It was because of the donkeys,’ she said, at last reaching the events of the evening. ‘They were attacking the donkeys’ barn – at least one of them was.’

‘Kyle?’ Macdonald asked.

‘I didn’t know who they were. They both had helmets on. And the donkeys were screaming. They’re old, they’ve had hard lives. The only comfort they’ve had is since I took them in.’ Her voice was fierce. ‘If those savages got to them, they were going to hurt them, and I had to protect them from that.’

‘How did you know they would hurt them?’ Fleming asked.

Christina stopped for a second. ‘I – I suppose I didn’t
know
. But they were the worst they’d ever been this time, more violent, and I knew if they didn’t do it this time, they would the next. So I fetched my gun.’

Fleming hated to ask the next question. ‘Was it loaded?’

‘Yes. I’d decided what I was going to do, next time they came. I had it right by the door.’

Admission of premeditation. Fleming could almost hear Macdonald groan. He was a decent man: Will Wilson, or Tansy even, might not have felt the burden of the woman’s naive disclosures quite so much. She certainly felt it herself and it was all she could do to ask the next question.

‘So, when they came, and you felt the donkeys were ­threatened, you went out with your gun?’

Christina nodded.

‘And what happened then?’

‘I warned the one who was attacking the barn to stand back. The other one shouted something, then he ran past me and went off on his bike. The one at the barn paid no attention until I fired the gun into the air. Then he turned – he was scared. Served him right,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘He ran away and got on his bike. Then I went back inside.’

Macdonald said gently, ‘Christina, had you been drinking?’

She looked, as she would have said herself, black affronted. ‘Drinking? Me? A wee sherry at the New Year, that’s all I ever take. But I’ve brandy in the house for medicinal purposes, and I was that shaken up I had some, after.’

Fleming knew she had to say it. As a police officer, she had little sympathy with the view that the perpetrator should be given more consideration than the victim, but the words almost stuck in her throat as she said, ‘After you’d killed him?’

Christina looked at her pityingly. ‘How could I have killed him? I fired up in the air, he was wearing one of those helmet things. Even if it had hit him coming down, it wouldn’t have done him any harm.’

‘Did you fire the other barrel?’ Fleming asked.

‘No. I just fired once. That was all. I don’t know what this is about. I’m an old woman – it’s all very confusing.’

Abruptly, the inspector got up. ‘DI Fleming is terminating the interview at this point. Stay where you are, Christina.’ Macdonald switched off the tape and followed her out.