Lamb to the Slaughter (52 page)

‘Ten years. How about that?’

‘That’ll teach him to mind his manners. Good result. As it happens, I’m just back from the High Court myself. You maybe read about the case – there was a lot of rubbish in the press about it being a sniper.’

Sheuggie was vague, and MacNee tried to jog his memory. ‘The victim was a guy from your patch – had a detective agency. Johnny Black.’

‘Black?’ Sheuggie was puzzled. ‘You’ve got it wrong there. Black was killed, oh, must have been well over a year ago. We still haven’t laid hands on the killer, but we know who he was.’

‘You’re kidding,’ MacNee said hoarsely.

‘Kidding? Listen and learn, my son. Sad case, was poor old Johnny. Getting a bit past it, then his only son who’d been with him in the business died, he’d no other family, and he started drinking till he never knew if he was coming or going. As far as we could piece it together afterwards, he took on an assistant without making the usual checks, and picked a right one – Joe Connolly, with a record for GBH and stalking. We had him on a rape charge too, but we couldn’t make it stick. He did it, though, right enough. I’d dealings with him – psychopath, if you ask me.

‘Persuaded Johnny to let him take charge of everything, managed the business and was operating under Johnny’s name, till he cleared out the office bank account, shot Johnny and disappeared around last March sometime. Poor old Johnny – lay there a couple of weeks before someone found him. And we’d never have known who’d done it if Connolly’s prints hadn’t been all over the place. Not that it did us any good – got clean away with it.’

MacNee found himself, for a moment, lost for words. Then he said, ‘Not quite clean, maybe, Sheuggie. Send me the mugshot. If it matches, we’ve cracked another case for you. We’ll be sending in the bill.’

‘Good God!’ Fleming said, when a breathless MacNee appeared in her room and spilled out the story. ‘Of course, we never took fingerprints from Black except once he was dead, to establish that they were his on the gun, and naturally no one ran them through the computer. If you’d spoken to one of your pals in Glasgow to find out about the agency, his death would have come out then, of course, but Tansy just checked the computer records.’

‘And John Black’s a common enough name. When Ellie killed him the media just described him as working in a motorbike showroom, so no one in Glasgow made the connection. And Sheuggie said they’d circulated pictures of Connolly as being wanted, so no doubt they’ll be in a file somewhere, but another shooting in Glasgow doesn’t really make the front pages.

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘I call the fiscal. It’s late, but I’ve got an emergency number.’ Fleming was reaching for the phone as she spoke. ‘Get her to contact Edinburgh first thing and explain that new evidence has emerged, ask for an adjournment.’

‘Aye, you could.’ MacNee was looking sceptical as he listened to the conversation and watched Fleming’s face get darker and darker.

‘But it’s a matter of justice,’ she said desperately at one point, and eventually, ‘I shall be taking it up with my superintendent,’ before she slammed down the phone.

‘She flatly refuses to lift a finger. Anecdote and speculation, she says. Nothing to do with us. If the defence can come up with the evidence, they can lodge an appeal. I’m going to see the Super, at home if he’s left for the day.’ She got up.

‘And you think that’ll do any good?’ MacNee said drily. ‘Oh, he won’t have the same attitude as she does – we’re going to have real trouble with that one – but he’ll talk about taking your time, letting Glasgow use their budget for any further investigation ... I can write the script.’

Fleming, already on her way to the door, stopped and came back. ‘Yes, of course he will. There’s no hurry, is there? Ellie will go down tomorrow for murder, and Dylan will think his mother is a serial killer and the psychopathic bastard who took a sadistic joy in destroying lives was a saint.

‘I believe her when she said she would have killed herself, if it hadn’t been for the threat to her child. She did it all for him. But will it change what he’s in the habit of thinking, if the truth does come out eventually? The majesty of the law will proceed at its usual dignified pace – they won’t speed things up.’

‘Could take years,’ MacNee said. ‘Years and years.’

When Marjory Fleming arrived home the next evening, tired and depressed, Bill was just going up to walk the hill to check on the sheep. It was a bright spring evening and after a couple of wet days the colours were particularly fresh and bright.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Marjory said, kicking off her shoes in the mud-room and putting on wellies instead. ‘I need the exercise. Where are the kids?’

‘Cat brought Jenny home. They’re allegedly working on a project, but unless it’s on pop music I don’t think much is getting done. I’ve sent Cammie off to do his homework, but he was helping me drench some of the sheep after school today – he’s getting to be a real help around the farm.

‘I phoned the plumber about that leak from the sink in the utility room—’

They set off through the fields with Meg racing in excited circles round them, talking domestic trivia as Bill scanned the sheep they passed with a practised eye, until they reached the top of the hill where they could look down to the farm and across the valley. The sky was a soft eggshell blue with slow-drifting fluffy clouds, and in the still air birds were winging their way back to roost. Below them, the old orchard was foaming with pink blossom and the low sun was silvering the slates of the farmhouse roof. Marjory turned to admire the view, taking a deep, deep breath, and Bill watched her sympathetically.

‘Hard day?’ he said. ‘What was the verdict?’

‘Murder, of course. You could see in the jury’s faces that they all believed she did the other two killings as well – you would, wouldn’t you? But she didn’t, Bill – we’ve got proof that what Tam found out was right. They faxed through the mugshot, and it’s definitely him. But the fiscal’s only interested in her conviction record – she’ll be happy now.’

Marjory’s lip curled in distaste as she went on, ‘And the worst of it is that now Glasgow knows that Connolly’s dead, Black’s murder will go on the back burner. Tam reckons it could be years.’

‘And you can’t tip her off yourself?’

Fleming pulled a rueful face. ‘Not if I want to keep my job, no. And of course, she’s not technically been tried for anything except killing Connolly, which she did. All this would just have been mitigating evidence, so the jury might bring in manslaughter.’

‘For which she’d go to jail anyway,’ Bill pointed out. ­‘Nothing you could do about that.’

‘I know. It’s just – I can’t bear to feel that Connolly somehow won, after all. That he managed to drive her to kill him, that he poisoned the relationship with her son ... The world shouldn’t be like that!’ she cried passionately.

Bill looked down at her fondly. ‘Still the idealist, in spite of everything!’

‘And when you think about it, it all stemmed from kind, amiable Andrew Carmichael. If he hadn’t been too cowardly to face up to his wife and acknowledge his daughter, his grandson would never have had to hire a detective to find him and none of this would have happened to poor, hapless Ellie.

‘Sometimes you can convince yourself that good has come out of something like this, that the shock has changed the lives of the people who became involved for the better, but this time I can’t believe it has. The Craft Centre has been sold off, the Gloags are in the throes of an acrimonious divorce, Fiona Farquharson will go on feeling bitter about her poor, downtrodden husband and Ossian will repeat the cycles of manic ups-and-downs unless that silly mother of his makes him get psychiatric help. All you can hope is that he may produce some more masterpieces on the way through.’

‘Plenty of artists have,’ Bill pointed out. ‘Creative people often seem to have that sort of temperament. Just like us farmers are all stolid, unimaginative, lacking in the finer feelings...’

‘People who fish for compliments don’t get them,’ Marjory said, but she tucked her hand through her husband’s arm as they plodded down across the next field to where some of the flock were grabbing the last few mouthfuls of grass before they settled for the night. Her mind, though, was still on Ellie Burnett, sedated, perhaps, or sleepless tonight as she lay in her cell.

The next morning, there were headlines in the
Daily Mail
. ‘Was Ellie’s victim a killer himself?’ Beneath it, an exclusive report from the crime correspondent speculated about a link between the murder of a private detective in Glasgow and the man who had lived under his name in Kirkluce, Galloway, only to die at the hands of his partner.

‘The fiscal’s fit to be tied,’ Fleming said with relish. ‘There’s pressure building strongly for an immediate appeal. She was all ready to accuse me of leaking it, but of course I pointed out that the Glasgow force, having found out, would be keen to get as much publicity as possible for having tracked him down.’

‘Right enough,’ MacNee said solemnly.

She looked at him sharply, a terrible suspicion dawning. ‘Tam – it wasn’t you, was it?’

‘Me?’ He was indignant. ‘The
Daily Mail
? That fascist rag? I wouldn’t touch it with a clothes peg on my nose and a ten-foot pole.’

He wasn’t even minimally convincing, but she didn’t push him. There were, indeed, certain things it was better for an inspector not to know.