No Stranger to Death: A Scottish mystery where cosy crime meets tartan noir: Borders Mysteries Book 1 (4 page)

After settling the squirming puppy on the front passenger seat, she had put the box and its pitiful contents into the boot of her car. Once home, she officiated at the second burial of the day then telephoned a local animal shelter to ask if they would take the tiny creature which was now curled up on her lap. Despite assurances that young dogs were easy to re-home, she had made her first ever visit to a pet shop the next morning, returning with a
Puppies for Dummies
book, dog food, a collar and lead, and a bed Mac would never sleep in because he preferred to share hers.

Leaving Kate to serve up the delicious-looking lasagne she had taken out of the Aga, Zoe wandered through to the sitting room. Further talk on anything but the blandest subjects would have to wait until she and Kate were alone again. Despite their apparent concentration on a host of other things, she knew children always overheard what adults would rather they did not. She had learned this lesson the day Eva had told her grandmother to be extra kind to Zoe because she was still getting over having to put her hand up a man’s bottom that morning.

Kate’s sitting room would have been huge, had the abrupt curtailment of building work not left the remains of the original party wall protruding halfway across it. This marked a boundary between two separate areas, one for the children and one for their mother and her work. Zoe settled herself into a deep armchair on the adult side of the room.

A desk sat against the wall, holding a computer and printer, a pen pot made from a handle-less mug, and a set of stacking trays. An acrylic magnifying dome was close to hand on the mouse mat. Hanging above all this was a framed montage of family photographs, none of which, as far as Zoe could see, featured Kate’s ex-husband. A pine shelf unit stood close by, packed with neatly-labeled box files, several large reference books and lots of smaller ones, and boxes of CDs.

The centrepiece of the children’s side of the room was a three-seater sofa, its faded green cover partly hidden by a multicoloured throw. It faced a television with DVD player, satellite box and games console stacked beneath it. A stretch of storage units, taken from the house’s redundant second kitchen, was piled high with boxed games, DVDs and books.

With the exception of an occasional stray toy, the children and their possessions generally respected the invisible line between their territory and that of their mother. Even Bluto usually found the extra energy required to bypass the good furniture and settle himself on an arm of the children’s sofa. One of the few rules of the house was that nobody but Kate touched her desk and its contents.

A lull in the noise coming from the kitchen told Zoe the children were tucking into their meal. Kate joined her soon afterwards.

‘That should keep them busy for a while, though there’s bound to be a stushie later when Frankie serves the ice cream. He always takes extra for himself.’

‘I suppose Mac’s under the table waiting for dropped food,’ Zoe said.

‘He is, and I’m not complaining. Since you’ve been coming here I haven’t had to sweep the kitchen floor nearly so often.’

‘He has his uses.’

‘He’s certainly better at housework than Ken ever was. Perhaps I should have gone for a puppy rather than a husband.’

‘Some women might agree with you.’

‘But not you, Zoe, surely? It must be completely different when you’re widowed. You’ll wish you’d had more time together, rather than feeling all those years had been wasted, like I do.’

Zoe always found Kate’s animosity towards her ex-husband difficult to respond to, and now she felt guilty as well. ‘But the children came from your marriage. You wouldn’t want to be without them.’

‘Of course not. I’m grateful to Ken for siring them, but that’s all he did. He might as well have sent his sperm through the post, like a prize bull, for all the use he was in raising them. My life actually became easier when he left, can you believe that?’ Kate paused and frowned. ‘You’ve done it again, haven’t you?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve managed to dodge the question and make me talk about myself. Did they teach you that at medical school or does it come naturally?’

Zoe laughed, then asked, ‘So what are you going to do about Erskine Mather?’

‘There’s nothing to do. It’s ancient history. If we meet again, I shall behave in a much more grown-up manner, ask after his mother and comment on the weather, that sort of thing.’

‘Good for you.’

‘And talking about history, I have a new client.’

‘Where from this time?’

‘Phoenix, Arizona. He’s called Noah P Reece the Third and he wants me to do a family tree for his father.’

‘Mr Noah P Reece the Second?’

‘How did you guess? He thinks they may be descendants of William Wallace. Frankly, he’s more likely to be related to Mel Gibson, though I didn’t tell him that, of course.’

‘It must be interesting, poking about in people’s pasts.’

‘A lot better than poking about in their nether regions.’ Kate grimaced. ‘I could never do your job.’

‘It’s not all piles and warts. Often the only thing people need is someone to talk to.’

‘Well they’ll certainly be wanting to talk to you over the next few days. You’ve become a local celebrity, Mum says. She’s been getting lots of calls from folk asking about you.’

Zoe groaned. ‘That’s the last thing I want.’ She glanced at her watch and stood up. ‘Whoever it was I found and however they got there, I wish I wasn’t involved.’

‘It’ll die down eventually,’ Kate said, ‘Although I know a way of speeding up the process. You need to deal with everybody’s curiosity in a oner.’

‘How do you suggest I do that?’ Zoe said, taking Mac’s lead out of her pocket in preparation for dragging him away from the children’s leftovers.

‘Meet it head on. Come to The Rocket with me tonight. Most of the village will be there, acting shocked and loving every minute of it.’

Zoe shook her head and said no, but Kate wasn’t going to be deterred.

‘I recommend you give them all a chance to hear at first hand what you saw. The more gory details the better. Then they’ll lose interest in you and move on to deciding who did it. I’ll drop the bairns off with Mum and pick you up at the back of seven.’

Chapter 5

They pulled into The Rocket’s small car park at around seven-fifteen and bagged the space of a car just leaving. The vehicle which followed them in wasn’t so lucky, and had to reverse out to park on the road.

Kate picked the remains of a boiled sweet from the leg of her jeans and got out of the Volvo. She leaned over the car’s roof to Zoe. ‘I can’t believe it’s only a day since we were last here.’

‘It’s certainly been an eventful one,’ Zoe said. ‘Promise me we won’t have to stay long.’

There had been no public confirmation of the identity of the corpse in the bonfire, although media coverage made much of the police ‘refusing to confirm or deny a link between this gruesome discovery and the disappearance of retired landlady Christine Baird’. Zoe was referred to in Police Scotland’s official statement as ‘a woman walking her dog’, but it was only a matter of time before identification of that woman spread further than Westerlea itself. She had gone back to using her maiden name when she came to Scotland, but would that protect her against people whose job it was to dig up the past of anyone remotely connected with a sensational crime?

As they reached the back of the pub, Zoe halted.
Coming here was a stupid idea. Feeding people’s curiosity would only make matters worse.
She was about to turn around and walk back to the car when Kate linked arms with her and said, ‘You’ll be okay. Come on.’

The two women walked along the side of The Rocket, past an open window out of which came the sound of classical music and the smell of frying onions. On Main Street, the pub’s sign creaked, the black and white depiction of a steam train swinging to and fro in the breeze. The green tips of bulbs planted in the window boxes were already beginning to show, and neatly-trimmed conifers stood in tubs on either side of the small porch.

Zoe opened the door and peered into the bar, which was as crowded as it had been the night before, though now child-free. She stood motionless until Kate nudged her and told her to get a move on.

‘Evening ladies.’ Ray Anderson’s voice boomed from behind the polished counter. Some people insisted on shouting at Kate, and he was one of them.

All conversation stopped and the throng of bodies parted to let the two women through. An open fire burned steadily, with a stack of logs on its hearth ready to be thrown on whenever it started to die down. Some of the piled-up logs were smouldering one evening, but when Zoe alerted Ray to this he simply grinned and told her it was always happening and not to worry. An entire wall was covered with paintings, photographs and sketches of steam trains, references to the new name the pub was given in the 1950s on the slim grounds that Robert Stephenson, inventor of the steam locomotive, may have passed a drunken evening there a hundred years earlier during the building of the railway bridge at Berwick-upon-Tweed.

‘Red wine?’ Kate asked Zoe as they reached the bar.

Straightaway several hands went into pockets and there were cries of, ‘I’ll get them,’ and ‘This one’s on me’. Dod Affleck, the herdsman at Tolbyres Farm, tapped Kate’s hand to gain her attention before making his offer.

Zoe’s eyes met Ray’s as he dried a pint glass that looked like a tumbler in his huge hands.

‘First drinks are on the house,’ he said. ‘You’ll need something, Doctor, after the shock you had this morning.’

As soon as Kate and Zoe sat down on two hastily vacated stools, they were bombarded with questions. What had Zoe seen? Was the body Chrissie Baird’s? Who did the police think had put her there?

In the end, Zoe gave an account of the morning’s events to the room at large. While disappointed at her avoidance of a graphic description of the body, failure to identify it, and assertion that DCI Mather had not confided in her about anything, everyone seemed satisfied enough to start discussing the matter between themselves again.

No longer the centre of attention, Zoe sipped her wine, resisting the temptation to gulp it down and immediately order another. Dod was asking Kate’s advice on what to buy his wife for Christmas, so Zoe studied the people around her. There were more unfamiliar faces than usual, several of them looking ill at ease, as if uncertain they should be there. The hubbub gradually diminished as people left, enabling her to pick out individual conversations.

‘Has to be Chrissie,’ a small, red-faced man said. ‘Cannae be anyone else. Jimmy’s no seen her since Sunday morning, when we left for Melrose. Said she was going to church then out selling poppies before driving down to see that daughter of hers.’

‘I warned him she’d be trouble, that yin.’ Zoe recognised this speaker, Eric Sibbald, who ran a butcher’s shop in Kelso. ‘Told him, I did, but still he went and married her. The age difference between them, how could he hope to keep her out of mischief?’ Eric led a communal shaking of heads at the perils of taking a much younger wife. Although itching to point out that Chrissie Baird was the presumed victim here, Zoe stayed silent.

The earlier speaker said, albeit grudgingly, ‘Aye Eric, but you’ll admit she looked after Jimmy well. A grand cook she was.’ On this occasion heads nodded.

‘Not a patch on Ellie, not even her cooking.’

Zoe had to crane her neck to see the dissenter, a thin, grey-haired man in a Fair Isle sweater at the back of the room. Dod leaned over and whispered, ‘That’s the first Mrs Baird’s brother, Robbie Grant. He never spoke to Jimmy after he remarried.’

Ray cleared his throat. Coming from a smaller man this would have failed to gain anyone’s attention that night, but the whole room turned to look at him. ‘Can anybody tell me why it took so long to notice she was missing? Today’s Tuesday, she left on Sunday. The lassie only lives in Newcastle.’

‘Aye, but Chrissie wasn’t expected there until last night. The daughter rang about midnight, and Jimmy was in his bed. He only knew Chrissie hadn’t arrived when he got up to let the dog out early this morning and found a message asking where she was.’

This last piece of information was delivered by a soft voice from behind Robbie Grant. Zoe had not noticed the woman before, and was forced to lean forward precariously on her stool to see her now. The Rocket’s usual clientele was predominantly male, and she and Kate were sometimes the only women in the place, but tonight the sexes were more balanced in number. It was as if the regulars’ wives did not trust them to gather the very latest intelligence.

‘Which must mean the rumour about her having a fancy man somewhere is true,’ Ray said. ‘Why else would she go off a day early?’ He looked around, apparently waiting for someone to come out in support of his theory. Instead, the whole room went quiet. For what felt like several minutes, the only sound was an occasional click of dominoes.

Just as the silence started to become embarrassing, the door from the kitchen burst open. Everyone turned to look as it banged against the legs of a table, obliging the young couple who were sitting at it to grab their glasses to stop them from sliding to the floor.

Hazel Anderson came in carrying a bowl of steaming roast potatoes between oven-mitted hands. A good eighteen inches shorter than Ray, she wore blue-checked chef’s trousers which emphasised her broad buttocks. Zoe studied Ray’s face as his wife came to a halt, swaying slightly. She recognised a mix of emotions she sometimes saw worn by the spouses of dementia patients when they thought no one was looking.

The expression did not last long. As Ray placed a woven mat on the bar top and Hazel set the hot dish down, it was replaced by the neutral face he adopted when suggesting to a customer that maybe they’d had enough to drink and should consider going home. ‘Thanks, love,’ he said.

Hazel turned away from the bar, her face red and damp. ‘Evening ladies and gentlemen. Help yourselves. You’ll need these. Save me washing up.’