Lying Dead: A Marjory Fleming Thriller

Chapter One

The wind had dropped with the sunrise. It was a beautiful May morning, with the soft, pearly light so typical of the south-west corner of Scotland, but it was cool still; vapour clung to the tops of the trees and there was a sweet, damp, earthy smell after a heavy dew. He got up to have a chilly shower – he must see if something couldn’t be done about the hot-water supply – then dressed in his working jeans and checked shirt and went down the rickety staircase and across the living room to open the door.

The wooden shack, his home since he was freed on licence six months ago, had walls weathered by time and the elements to a soft silvery grey. It stood in a clearing surrounded by rough grass studded with the stumps of felled trees, crumbling and mossy now. Beyond that, a tangle of undergrowth formed a natural enclosure: at this time of year the grass had feathery seed heads and the creamy flowers of hawthorn and cow parsley gleamed against the lush dark green of nettles and docks. From a snarl of brambles, a robin was shouting a melodious challenge to all comers. Sitting down on the dilapidated bench outside the back door, he drank in the peace and freedom which remained a novelty still.

He enjoyed his work as a forester; his hands were hardened now and his muscles had strengthened so that he didn’t suffer as at first he had from the physical demands it made. He had nearly finished repairing a path for ramblers; after that, he would be putting up owl nesting boxes as part of the Forestry Commission’s wildlife protection programme. When he heard the eerie cries on a moonlit night, he would enjoy thinking that the bird sweeping through the clearing on great, silent wings might have been a scrawny chick in one of his boxes.

Yes, he was a contented man in this simple, solitary existence, with only his books for company, though he would once have pitied someone who earned a meagre living by the work of his hands and didn’t own a house or a car or even a shower with reliably hot water. But after eighteen months when there had been little else for him to do for hours at a time but think, he had come to the conclusion that serenity came from lack of expectation. Not happiness, no, but that was a luxury he had been forced to realize he couldn’t expect. The nearest approach to it was this pleasure in the warmth of a spring morning and the tranquillity of his solitary world. It was tempting him to linger now, when he should really be getting ready for the day’s work. Just five more minutes . . .

When the mechanical, insistent call of a mobile phone – a silly, chirpy little tune – broke the spell, his first reaction was one of alarming rage. He had believed himself alone and he was being spied on; it seemed a violation as gross as if he had been sitting on the bench naked. He had been under surveillance for too long to be rational about it.

Jumping to his feet, he headed towards the sound which seemed to be coming from the edge of the clearing where it joined a forestry road, his hands unconsciously balled into fists, angry enough to take on any intruder.

But there was no one to be seen. In front of him the track was empty and a moment later the ringing stopped. He looked about him uncertainly.

Could it be some rambler who had dropped the mobile nearby without noticing? It was a popular walk, winding up through the forest to a panoramic viewpoint. Perhaps, if it went on ringing, he could trace it and restore it to its owner. It wasn’t likely to be far off the track.

Provokingly, the sound stopped again just as he emerged from the clearing, but it didn’t take long for him to establish its source. There was a woman lying on her front, her head turned to one side, just beyond a screening hawthorn bush at the very edge of the track. She was wearing jeans, a white shirt and a light blue tailored jacket. She was dead.

It wasn’t hard to tell. The long dark hair veiling her face was sticky with blood and on one side of her head a wound gaped, showing a glint of bone and a mess of tissue.

He staggered as if someone had struck him. With the random irrelevance of shock, he found himself thinking, That’s why you say, I’m staggered. He shut his eyes as if it might be a bad dream, as if when he opened them a blink would have wiped away the monstrous sight.

Of course it didn’t. She was still there, still as shocking in ugly death. He had never seen a dead body before. He steeled himself to look directly, to walk towards her. He saw that she was wearing trainers and her clothes were glistening with dew, then his eye travelled reluctantly to focus on the mutilated head. He was beside her now; he bent down and gingerly put out his hand to push aside the curtain of hair.

The shock this time dropped him to his knees. He knew who she was, though her hair, when last he saw her, had been close-cropped like a boy’s and hennaed red. How could he forget that seductive mouth, the tiny diamond glinting in the side of her nose? – they had tortured him in dreams. But the mouth was sagging open now, the olive skin waxy and discoloured. The huge dark eyes, which had looked at him with what he had believed was love, were closed, one of them puffy and sticky with congealed blood.

The last time he had seen her was in court, when she had looked at the jury with those same limpid eyes and delivered the evidence which had put him behind bars. And if he called the police now, what would they assume? She was lying outside his house; there were his footprints in the dew-wet grass beside her body.

His world splintered about him. The sun was still shining, the birds were still singing, but it was as if a stone had been thrown at a looking-glass, showing up his tranquil, contented existence for the illusion it was.

At any minute there might be ramblers. Soon there would be other foresters on their way to a project up by the viewpoint. There could be no concealment then.

He wasn’t going back to prison. That was his only coherent thought, and moving like a zombie he went back into the house to fetch a tarpaulin he used sometimes when the roof leaked.

As he walked back out again carrying it, his face was set in hard, emotionless lines. Turning his head aside, he wrapped it round her slight frame, then levered the package, rigid and bearably anonymous now, on to his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. The inanimate body was surprisingly heavy, though, and he faltered a little as he took the weight. Then, regaining his balance, he set off through the belt of undergrowth, ignoring the thorns which snatched at his legs as he carried her in her tarpaulin shroud, the fading sound of the robin’s song from the bramble bush an impromptu requiem.

It was eerily dark and quiet as he stepped into the green shade of the forest. On all sides, the trunks of the larches rose high above him, bare apart from the jagged spikes of old broken branches, with low cloud still lurking in their canopy of foliage. As he climbed the sloping ground, there was thick soft grass to deaden his footsteps and even when he stumbled on a concealed stone or snapped a twig the sound was muffled. With no scrub for nesting there was no birdsong; the silence, too, added to his sense of unreality.

This section of the forest was unfamiliar territory. He’d never worked here, or felt tempted to explore; he had no idea how far it might extend before he would come to a track or one of the swathes of ground where timber had already been harvested. His every instinct was to take – it – as far as possible from his own back yard, but fit as he was, his burden seemed to be growing heavier and heavier. He blanked out the thought of how small, how slight she had been; all he was carrying was a dead weight which very soon he would be forced to set down, at least for a rest.

He could hear a sound now: the soft babble of water over stones which indicated one of the countless little burns running down the steep sides of the valley. He headed towards it, his breathing laboured, and saw that on the other side the trees were thinner, sparser and of more recent planting. He paused.

On the near side of the burn lay three great fallen trees, their branches dry as tinder and their exposed root systems linked, elaborate as a vipers’ knot, to form a bank. They must have stood at the outer edge of the old plantation, unprotected against the winter storms which topple the giants of the forest as a man might blow down a house of cards.

Grimacing, he set down his load and sat down himself, leaning his head back against the gnarled root mass and closing his eyes. Despite the cool damp air, he was sweating and his heart was racing with fear as well as physical effort. Time was passing. He checked his watch: in half an hour a truck would come to take him to the project he was working on and by then he must not only be ready, but calm and normal.

There beyond the burn, the forest was beginning to thin out. This was a fine and private place to spend eternity, with the murmur of water and the guardian presence of the trees. A hollow had formed at the base of the bank of roots and with deliberate lack of reflection he picked up the formless bundle and laid it there. It looked neat, impersonal, a package not a person in its tarpaulin cover.

The tarpaulin . . . He dared not leave it. There was no reason why they should find – it – for years, until this plantation’s turn for felling came, but he couldn’t take the risk. It must have his prints all over it and there would be traces of his sweat, minute skin cells shed by his hands. In twenty years’ time, thirty, they would still have his prints and his DNA on record. He had to take it with him.

When he removed it, though, she would become a person again. A person whose face he had seen on the pillow next to him, a person who had transformed his agreeable, respectable – oh yes, and dull, dull, dull – life first into a fantasy of enchantment, then into a horror of betrayal and despair. Circe. Delilah . . .

She was dead, he told himself. An inanimate body. A corpse. Her soul – if a soul could be discerned – was elsewhere.

With the resolve of desperation he stood up and with his head averted jerked the edge of the tarpaulin. He pulled it towards him, gathered it up and walked away without looking back to see how snugly she lay on her back, as if the cavity beneath the vipers’ knot of roots had been hollowed out especially to receive her.

PC Sandy Langlands, his boyish face weary-looking after his night shift, emerged blinking blearily from the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters in Kirkluce just as DS Tam MacNee arrived for duty and got out of his car. It was warm already, early as it was, and there was a sticky, sultry feel to the air.

MacNee was wearing his customary summer garb of jeans, white T-shirt, black leather jacket and trainers, though the difference between this and his winter gear might not be immediately apparent to the casual observer, since it consisted only of dispensing with the semmit his wife Bunty insisted he don under the T-shirt when the weather was less clement.

At the sight of his colleague’s haggard appearance, MacNee’s face brightened, his smile exposing the gap between his two front teeth. ‘Man, Sandy, you look like the wrath of God! Heavy night?’

Langlands groaned. ‘You could say. Lost five quid to Wilson, playing poker. We were on back-up and it was dead quiet. Not one call in from the patrol cars the whole time – the night seemed to go on for ever.’

MacNee’s grin faded. ‘I blame the weather,’ he said bitterly. ‘A week of this, and everyone’s in a good mood. You know what the high point was yesterday? Two drunk and incapable – you couldn’t even call them disorderly when they were just passed out in the park, not bothering anybody. Four of the lads went to that one and they’d to fight for the privilege.’ He gave a resigned shrug. ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s desk work again today. I tell you, I’d have gone into the bank instead of the polis if that was what floated my boat.’

The constable greeted this assertion with a certain scepticism. Tam as a bank clerk didn’t really square with his appearance, which was still that of the wee Glasgow hard man he’d been before Bunty, a sonsy lass from Dumfries who punched well above her not inconsiderable weight and had some very old-fashioned ideas about respectability, had taken him in hand. Tam on the other side of the counter with a stocking over his head was an altogether more plausible image, but Langlands refrained from pointing this out. He was too young to die.

‘Right enough,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Well, I’m away to my bed anyhow.’

‘You do that, laddie. I’ll see what we can drum up to keep you busy tonight.’

MacNee went on into the building. The reception area was quiet, with only a couple of people in the waiting area who looked as if they might have come to inquire about lost property, and Naismith, the desk sergeant, was showing an elderly lady a leaflet about home security. It looked like being another quiet day and MacNee, with a sigh, went along to the CID room.

He was surprised to hear, as he reached the open door, the voice of DI Marjory Fleming in full flow. It wasn’t often that ‘Big Marge’, as she was known to her subordinates in recognition of her commanding height and the personality that went with it, came down from the fourth floor to give someone a rollicking in public. Rollickings were usually private and painful.

‘And if not, I’ll have your guts for garters,’ she was saying in a favourite phrase. ‘Frilly ones, with wee blue rosettes at the side.’ It was only this unexpected elaboration, and the gust of laughter that greeted it, which made MacNee realize what he was hearing. No one laughed when Big Marge was giving them laldie.

The voice was that of DC Jonathan Kingsley, a relative newcomer to the Galloway Force with a gift for mimicry which had proved operationally useful in working undercover to break up a drugs ring. MacNee had heard, with appreciation, his take-off of Superintendent Donald Bailey and suspected that there was a Tam MacNee too, which he hadn’t heard, but he hadn’t known about the Big Marge act. It was pretty good, especially considering Jon’s normal voice had an English accent. Grinning, MacNee went in.

Kingsley stopped instantly. ‘Uh-oh! Sorry about that. Back to your desks, guys!’

There were five other officers in the room. Four of them, exchanging sidelong glances, went back to their tasks. Only DC Tansy Kerr, her neat, gamine face flushing, said sharply, ‘There’s no need for that, Jon. Tam likes a joke as much as anyone.’

‘Of course he does!’ Kingsley’s voice was offensively soothing. ‘Morning, Tam.’ He too turned away, but MacNee could see his smirk reflected in the expressions of the men facing him.

It was true, of course, that Tam and Marjory worked closely together. They went back a long way, having been partners from the time Marjory joined as a rookie, and her promotion hadn’t damaged their relationship. Tam had no ambitions to rise to any sort of administrative post: he loved his job with its endless variety, and working with paper in an office on your own held no appeal when instead you could be out on the streets dealing with the public or here in the CID room enjoying the jokes and the cut and thrust that went with being on the team.

Kingsley was becoming a dangerously divisive figure. He was clever and an effective officer, but he was also arrogant and nakedly ambitious. He didn’t like Tam, which was fair enough in its way since Tam didn’t like him either, and in any group, the clash of personalities is a fact of life.

But it seemed now as if Kingsley’s objective was to create his own gang, excluding MacNee from the common currency of jokes and complaints inevitably made by lower ranks about their superiors, subtly implying that he’d run to Fleming and clype – he, Tam, who had been raised in one of the rougher parts of Glasgow with an attitude to tale-bearing which made omertà look like a set of recommended guidelines!

He went to fetch the file he’d been working on the day before, and Kerr came across with a report she’d promised to look out for him. She must have dyed her hair again yesterday – it was kind of a hobby with Tansy – and it was bright yellow with a streak of dark green at the front.

MacNee leaned towards her confidentially. ‘Maybe no one’s liked to tell you, Tansy, but your hair’s gone mouldy.’

Kerr didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Your problem is you’ve no fashion sense, MacNee. Look at Jon over there –’ she raised her voice to attract attention, ‘see how he’s colour-co-ordinated? That funky beige shirt just matches the colour of his teeth.’

There was a general guffaw at this and Kingsley shot her a look of intense dislike. MacNee joined in, adding with malicious satisfaction, ‘There you are, Jon. As Rabbie Burns says, "It’s innocence and modesty/That polishes the dart."’

Kerr groaned and Kingsley scoffed. ‘Innocent and modest? You should have been at the pub after work last Friday.’

Cheered by this exchange, MacNee settled down to another day of pushing paper. Maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could find something in the files that would give him an excuse to go out and interview someone. And if he did, he’d take Tansy with him as a reward.

Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming set the paperweight to the right of the computer screen on her desk, considered it, then moved it back to the other side. She could, unusually, actually see the surface of her desk, which the office cleaners were forbidden to touch; pulling a face, she took a tissue and removed the accumulated dust. Taking another one, she licked it to scrub away the ring left by a coffee mug. It wasn’t a method you’d see used on How Clean Is Your House? but it worked, sort of.

She picked up the pen pot which seemed to be acting as a dating agency for ballpoints, producing hybrids which she was ready to swear she’d never put there. Some had obviously dried out; she threw those away, then tipped out the pot, marvelling at the detritus of paper clips, rubber bands and stray coins collected in the sludge of sticky ink blobs at the bottom.

For once in her life, Fleming was on top of the job. There was no outstanding Government form, demanding information on the number of breaths each officer took in making an arrest. There was no major investigation at the moment, just the ongoing problems with alcohol and drugs, petty theft and vandalism which were all being satisfactorily dealt with at a lower level. She’d a couple of appraisals to do later and she was jotting down budget proposals to discuss with her superintendent, Donald Bailey, at their regular meeting tomorrow, but she’d had no difficulty in working office hours for the last week or two. She wasn’t under pressure, and she wasn’t enjoying it one little bit.

Perhaps she’d become addicted to the adrenaline rush that came from being permanently stressed and these were just withdrawal symptoms. But if she was honest with herself . . . She usually was, blaming Calvin, as Scots do when they don a moral hair shirt, but it was a habit she couldn’t break, so she had to admit that one of the things she liked about her job was the white noise of permanent over-commitment which blotted out the voice of domestic conscience.

This last spell, she hadn’t been able to plead overwork as an excuse for ignoring the dusting, snatching a ready-meal from the freezer and even, when it got right down to the wire, taking a mountain of dirty clothes for a service wash at the launderette – and how boring it was! Bill, her farmer husband, was more ready to help his wife than most of her male colleagues were theirs, as far as she could tell, but he had his own heavy load to carry.

And in fact, it was just as well she wasn’t at full stretch at the moment. Over the years, it had been largely thanks to her mother, Janet Laird, that the household chores didn’t get totally out of hand and that the Fleming children, Catriona and Cameron, actually knew what it was like to have good home-cooking as well as someone with all the time in the world to listen to them.

Janet had always behaved as if Marjory was still a lassie who had somehow acquired a husband and children to be gathered under her own motherly wing. And even Angus Laird – ‘Sarge’ to the officers of the Galloway Police Headquarters for more years than anyone had wanted to see him serve, and a father who had never forgiven his only child for being a daughter not a son – had served his time on the touchline when rugby-mad Cammie was playing.

Until recently. The last few months had seen Angus retreat into a strange and troubled world where his only emotion was rage at the terrifying confusion surrounding him. Marjory had watched impotently as her mother aged ten years and her plump and comfortable frame wasted away to alarming frailty. With her days and nights dedicated to preserving from actual harm the physical husk of the man she had shared her life with for forty-five years, corrosive anxiety had destroyed her cheerful serenity.

‘Janet, you can’t go on like this,’ Bill had said to her gently, taking her thin hand in his. ‘He’s still strong. He could hurt you in one of his rages.’

Janet’s brown eyes looked faded, as if the tears she had shed had washed some of the colour out of them, but she drew away her hand and responded fiercely, ‘He still knows me, Bill, still calls out for me sometimes. And as long as he does, how could I leave him? What would he feel if he wanted me and I wasn’t there?’

And Bill, recognizing defeat, had raised his eyebrows to his wife and she had shrugged helplessly.

That was the worst of it: Marjory was bad at helpless, and she wasn’t very good at Bill’s kind of philosophical acceptance either. While she went round regularly, Janet had an army of friends who were supporting her on the practical side so there was nothing for Marjory to do except fret over her mother’s increasing distraction. Janet seldom managed to finish a coherent sentence while Angus was awake; it was almost as if, using the instruments of torture – sleep deprivation, uncertainty, fear – he was trying to draw Janet after him into his own disordered world.

Marjory couldn’t bear it. ‘A home – somewhere he’d be well cared for – you’ll make yourself ill . . .’ Whatever vow of silence on the subject Marjory made before she went to see them, she couldn’t stop herself returning to it, and Janet would look hunted, as if her daughter’s urging was one more burden she had to cope with.

Yesterday, with Angus for once asleep, Janet had said in a tone that was, for her, almost sharp, ‘You’re rich, Marjory. You have Bill and the children – you don’t need me. But poor Angus – I’m all he has.’

Marjory had felt ashamed, justly rebuked for her selfishness, and that was on her conscience too today. Her relationship with her father had always been difficult. No son could have tried harder than Marjory to make Angus proud, but her success in his own profession had only made him bitter. In being promoted beyond the rank he had achieved, she had somehow diminished his life’s work in his own eyes.

Intellectually, she’d recognized long ago that she would never win his approval, but emotionally a tiny hope had always remained of a more mellow old age. It hadn’t happened, of course; in old age, in senility, you don’t become different, you become more intensely whatever you were. She could never hope now for understanding, reconciliation . . .

But she couldn’t, surely, be jealous that her sick, needy father was absorbing all her mother’s time and attention? It was a most uncomfortable thought.

Restlessly she got up and walked to the window, a tall, fit-looking woman in her early forties with clear hazel eyes and neatly cut bright brown hair, showing only a few threads of grey at the temples. She opened it wide; it was very stuffy in the office today and she had an unpleasantly muzzy head. A fly flew in, then buzzed stupidly against the panes as she unconsciously drummed her long, slim fingers on the window-sill, looking out on the street scene below.

Fleming liked this vantage point with its view over Kirkluce High Street. Through the new green leaves of the plane trees below she could look down on the traffic, motorized and human, as it went about its business in the thriving market town.

It was particularly busy today, with the recently established Friday Farmers’ Market. Popular with producers and consumers alike, the market gave the farmers a fair price instead of the pittance paid by the supermarkets, and the customers a chance to know where their food came from and what had been done to it on its way to their plates.

Bill would be down there somewhere. Raising only sheep now on a small hill farm, he didn’t have a stall, but farming was a solitary life and he enjoyed the social side, catching up on the gossip and having a pie and a pint at lunchtime with some old mates. He’d have brought in eggs from Marjory’s hens to the stand which their neighbours, the Raeburns, always took to sell cream and cheese from Hamish’s dairy herd as well as Kirsty’s dried flowers and home-baking.

Marjory consulted her watch. She could take an early lunch hour, pop out and have a chat with Kirsty . . . But it felt all wrong.

She sighed. This benign spell of weather had meant that even their regular clients were more inclined to strip off their hoodies and sit around, roasting their pale grey goose-pimples to an equally unbecoming shade of puce, than to get out there and do a dishonest day’s work. It was just too quiet; that made her uneasy too.

Again, she looked at her watch: eleven forty-five. She’d done enough overtime, heaven knew, to tack on an extra fifteen minutes. There wasn’t so much as a breath of air coming in through the window and the oppressive atmosphere was making her headache worse. She might feel better outside and then come back with more enthusiasm for checking through the files, neatly laid in her in-tray, for the first appraisal. Well, she might. It was always possible.

Feeling like a schoolgirl bunking off, Marjory hurried out, masking her guilt with an ostentatiously purposeful air.

Chapter Two

Drumbreck, a scattered hamlet strung out around a sheltered inlet near the estuary of the River Cree, just north of Wigtown, was looking as slickly perfect as a picture postcard this morning. The tide was in; a pair of swans, exuding majestic indifference, sailed round the pontoons of the marina between the expensive yachts and dinky little boats which jostled and clinked as they rode their moorings, glossy paintwork shimmering in sun-sparkles from the waves, while a school of Mirror dinghies was circling round an instructor in an inflatable with an outboard motor. It looked stage-managed, an advertisement shoot, perhaps, for Your Holiday Paradise.

The houses too, tucked round the margin of the bay or on the rising ground which sheltered it, were all trim and freshly painted, even if a number of them showed the signs of being currently unoccupied: no car outside, half-lowered blinds, shutters closed on downstairs windows. By this evening, though, with a half-term holiday week ahead, it was a safe bet that the 464s would soon be arriving and this select little enclave would again leap into active social life which would become more and more frenetically social as the summer approached.

Within easy striking distance of Glasgow, Drumbreck was much favoured by businessmen keen to adopt the sport once described as standing under a cold shower tearing up fivers. Not all of them, perhaps, were as keen on the activities which took place on the heaving deck as they were on those which went on after the sun had sunk below the yardarm, but if seasickness, along with a degree of terror, was the price of acceptance in Drumbreck society, then it must be paid.

The Yacht Club by the marina, once a mere wooden shack for occasional sailors, had been transformed by a major fund-raising drive four years ago into a smart social centre with a swimming-pool, gym and squash courts.

It all drove up the property prices, so that by now almost none of the houses, whether substantial villas, with a bit of ground, or two-bedroom cottages, were owned by families native to the area. And it wasn’t surprising, when Drumbreck was looking as it was this morning, with glinting water covering what lay beneath: at low tide, the boats now floating so jauntily would be stranded on the mudflats below.

A Land Rover Discovery appeared, turning cautiously into the narrow road round the bay then pulling up in a parking area outside a pretty cottage set above the road, painted the colour of clotted cream with bright green paintwork, and with a steep flight of steps leading up to it through a terraced garden. A buxom blonde, in jeans and a green camisole top revealing ‘invisible’ plastic bra straps, jumped out and went round to open up the back. It was packed with cases, boxes and Marks and Spencer carrier bags, and she stood back, hands on curvaceous hips, looking from it to the flight of steps with some distaste. A small child, strapped into his safety-seat, began a monotonous chant, ‘Want out! Mummee, Mummee, want out!’

Her only response was an impatient sigh. Groping in her Prada bag for house keys, she prepared to embark on her unappealing task of haulage – no fun at all in this sultry heat. She was sweating already, just looking at what she had to do. First, though, she turned to look along the shore road towards the marina, shading her eyes against the glare from the water.

The nearest house was a charmless Victorian monstrosity, large, sprawling and run-down, an eyesore in smart Drumbreck. The litter of diseased timbers, discarded plasterboard and chipped sanitary-ware in the yard to one side suggested a renovation project, but the way the grass had grown up round about hinted at slow progress. It had a large paddock to one side where a tall man in a blue-checked shirt and moleskin trousers seemed to be working a curiously small flock of sheep with a black-and-white collie.

The woman’s face brightened. Taking a few steps along the road, she called, ‘Niall! Niall!’

Niall Murdoch looked round. ‘Oh, Kim,’ he said, without marked enthusiasm. ‘You’re back.’ He had very dark hair, falling forward at the moment in a comma on his brow, and with his strong features and deep brown eyes, he was a good-looking man; though there were lines about his mouth that suggested temper, they gave him a sort of edgy charm. He was looking sullen at the moment but his brooding expression could, with a certain generosity of spirit, be considered Byronic.

Kim’s nature, when it came to men, was generous to a fault. She wasn’t easily discouraged, either. Ignoring the complaints from inside the car, becoming more insistent, she swayed along the road to lean over the dry-stone dyke separating the paddock from the road.

‘Yes, that’s me just back to open up the house.’ Her Glasgow accent suggested that it had been only recently refined. ‘Here, it’s great to see you! Like last summer, all over again.’ Her smile was an invitation.

‘Yes, well,’ Niall said flatly, then added, ‘Adrian coming too?’ He spoke without enthusiasm. Adrian McConnell was a sardonic, smart-ass accountant he’d fallen out with over the extension to the marina years ago and the man never lost the opportunity to put the boot in. Truth to tell, his own ill-advised response to Kim’s overtures last year probably had more to do with private revenge than anything else, and it didn’t compensate for her personality which, once the novelty was over, affected him like nails scraping on a blackboard.

‘Not till tomorrow, with Kelly and Jason for the half-term week.’ She pushed back her hair and gave him a sidelong glance. ‘I’m all by my wee self tonight.’ Then she added, with an unenthusiastic glance towards the car, ‘Well, apart from him, unfortunately.’ She gestured towards the child confined in the car, whose protests were starting to sound tearful. ‘He’s such a crabby little sod.’

‘Yes. Look, Kim, I’m sorry – I’ve got to get on. It’s the trials tomorrow, and this bloody dog doesn’t seem to know its business.’

Kim gave a throaty gurgle. ‘Oh, Niall, you never learn, do you! Glutton for punishment!’ she giggled. ‘But don’t you worry, pet, I’ll be there, cheering you on. I never miss it – I always think the trials are the proper start to a Drumbreck summer. Come here and I’ll give you a big hug, just for luck.’

Niall, with resistance in every line of his body, submitted. Kim embraced him, then patted his cheek.

‘Well, I suppose I’ll need to get on with heaving all this stuff up into the cottage. It’s so hot, though – really sticky!’ She looked at him hopefully, then, as no offer of help was forthcoming, said, ‘You know what? The marina should be hiring out porters. There’s a real business opportunity.’

Niall had turned away already. Sulkily, Kim went back to the car, where the child had started wailing.

‘Oh, you just shut up, Gary!’ she snarled. ‘You’re not going anywhere till I get all this dragged upstairs, so you may as well get used to it.’

Scowling, Niall Murdoch turned away. Stupid bitch! He’d have to get free of her somehow. Not that he suffered from pangs of conscience: given his home life he reckoned he was entitled to do whatever he liked. His wife wouldn’t care, and his daughter treated him like something she’d found on the sole of her shoe.

But Kim McConnell, unfortunately, wasn’t the sort graciously to accept a hint that time had moved on; she had a big fat mouth and a spiteful nature. He didn’t appreciate her comment about the sheepdog trials either, even if he knew people laughed behind his back.

Jenna had seen to that. ‘Face it,’ she told him, with the sort of brutality you shouldn’t have to take from your wife, ‘you’ll never train dogs like your father did. You haven’t the personality for it. And even if you did win, you wouldn’t be proving anything because he’s been dead these past six years – remember?’

Niall had actually believed that once the old man wasn’t there, putting a hex on him with his critical eye and mocking his failures, he’d have the confidence to win. It mattered; somehow his father, rot his black soul, had instilled this into Niall’s consciousness as a measure of the man.

It was hardly asking for the moon. All Niall wanted to do was take the crown, just once, in the piddling little kingdom of the local sheepdog trials which his father had for a decade made his own. Then he could retire gracefully, but despite his best efforts at training a number of dogs, years of humiliation had followed, particularly unpleasant in this glossy world where all that mattered was material success. This was his last throw of the dice: he’d borrowed an exorbitant amount from the business to buy Findlay Stevenson’s champion, Moss.

Findlay, overstretched by borrowing himself, had lost his farm during the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Since then, he’d travelled the countryside with Moss, winning trials wherever he went, to boost his new business of training up working dogs and selling them. It had taken five thousand pounds to part the dog and his master.

Niall hadn’t mentioned the loan to his business partner. Ronnie Lafferty wouldn’t react well. A Glasgow scrap metal dealer, he looked like a bullfrog and had manners to match; he had a trophy wife, the lustrous Gina, and he had no interest in anything except the bottom line. His sole reason for taking a half-share in the sailing school and marina along with Niall was that with it came automatic membership of the exclusive Drumbreck Yacht Club. He’d been turned down once before, and he hadn’t liked that one little bit.

Niall was frankly afraid of him. Lafferty hadn’t made a fortune in his sort of business using sweet reason and goodwill, and if he found out . . . But he wouldn’t have to, Niall had reckoned; given another title to its name he could sell the dog on, probably for more than he had paid for it, in the next couple of days . . .

The only problem was that the dog wasn’t living up to its reputation. Niall was beginning to suspect, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, that he’d been conned. The