Chapter 41
FIFE
Thursday
The morning was warm, despite it only being half past nine, with only a few clouds threatening to spoil it. Art McKenzie stood looking at the cottage in Arncrouch, the tranquillity spoiled by the presence of the patrol car and the forensics van.
‘What a fucking place, eh?’ PC Don McCoy said, striding over to their car as Cameron got out from behind the wheel. ‘You couldn’t pay me to live in a little fucking place like this. I mean, where’s the local boozer?’
Art looked at Cameron to see if he had the answer, but the DS seemed to be just as flummoxed as he was.
‘I’m not familiar with this place,’ Cameron said.
‘How about you, Arthur?’ McCoy asked. ‘You’re a drunken old bastard. You should know all the watering holes around here.’
Art bit his tongue, metaphorically if not physically, and silently wondered if he could knock the big bastard out if he crept up on him and swung when he wasn’t looking.
‘I prefer to call myself “well travelled”, Don.’
McCoy laughed. ‘Is that what we’re calling it these days? Not a fucking alkie or something?’ He guffawed.
Art didn’t have words for the big man, so got down to business. ‘How is the door to door going?’
‘Fucking hell. This is one of those creepy fucking places where every bastard knows everybody else’s business.
I couldn’t live like that. Me? I prefer my business to stay my business, if you know what I mean.
’ He winked at Cameron, and neither detective knew what McCoy was on about, unless he was a secret drug dealer.
‘Right, but how is it going?’ Art said. ‘Anybody know anything?’
‘One baldy old cunt started getting a bit stroppy. Started giving me lip. Me. Fucking lip. I told him right off the bat to cool his fucking jets.’
‘Did you tell him what might happen to his bollocks if he didn’t calm down?’ Art asked.
McCoy gave him a puzzled look. ‘Aye. How did you know that? Got a fucking crystal ball or something?’
‘I just had a feeling,’ Art said. ‘Where does this man without hair live?’
‘That house just there.’ McCoy pointed to the house directly across from the cottage. ‘With his missus, loudmouth.’
Fucking hell. ‘Leave it with us, Don. We’ll have a word with him. Anything else come to light?’ Art said.
‘Nah. Fuck all so far. Although some of these twats look like they could do with being wired up to the mains.’
‘Right. We’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Catch you later, Arthur.’ McCoy saluted with two fingers and turned on his heel, shouting at one of the other Uniforms. ‘Hey, fucking knob face! I’ve already spoken to them. Dozy cunt!’ He went marching off, tutting and mumbling.
‘How?’ Art said. ‘How in the name of God is he still wearing a uniform? He should have been booted out long ago.’
‘Det Supt Breck is his uncle.’
‘What?’ Art shook his head in disbelief. ‘Pair of twats, both of them.’ He drew in a deep breath and let it out. ‘Come on then, let’s go and talk to baldy.’
They walked over to the other detached house and up the path to the front door. The front of the house faced a garden and was side-on to the main street. Art was about to knock when the door opened a couple of inches, and Art could see the chain across it.
‘Is he gone?’ an old man asked. Art couldn’t help but look at the man’s receding hairline.
‘Is who gone, sir?’
‘That police officer.’
They heard a shout from further up the street. ‘The one next to it, ya dozy wank biscuit!’
‘That one,’ the old man said. ‘He’s not coming back here, is he?’
‘No, sir. But my colleague and I were wondering if we could come in and have a chat? I’m DI McKenzie, and this is DS Reid. Can I ask your name?’ They both held up their warrant cards.
‘Ted Carr. Oh, right, I suppose so, but you’ll have to hurry. That officer said some nasty things about my privates.’ He closed the door, and they heard the chain sliding and then the door opened further. ‘Come in quickly. My wife is terrified.’
Both detectives stepped into the hallway, which was dull and dingy and smelled musty with a hint of cat piss. The man slammed the door shut and put the chain on.
‘Through here.’ He scuttled along the hallway and turned into the living room.
Two big, overstuffed leather sofas were on either side of a fireplace that lay dormant, while a leather chair that had seen better days sat over on the other side of the room.
The carpet was dark, and the walls had wood panelling on them, but nothing in the room looked recent.
Maybe they didn’t want to buy new furniture in case they expired soon and didn’t get enough use out of their purchase.
A cat walked into the room, its tail up, and went over to Art and rubbed itself on his trouser legs. He looked down as it walked over to Cameron and saw the animal had left some of its fur on his right leg. Fuck’s sake, he thought. Swipe the fur off now or pretend he hadn’t noticed?
There was a woman sitting in the chair, a cotton hanky in her hand.
‘Police officers,’ her husband said.
The wife gasped like they were really a couple of stripper grams, but not in a good way.
‘They seem to be the good ones,’ Ted said, not quite ready to believe it, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. ‘This is Penny.’
The woman was of a bigger size, and he assumed this was the woman McCoy had called loudmouth. Which was a complete exaggeration.
‘We’re here to ask a few questions, Mrs Carr,’ Cameron said, in his best placating voice, which was only really a watered-down version of, Get your fucking hands where I can see them.
‘Do you know that other officer who was here before. The sweary one?’
‘No,’ Art said, maybe a little too quickly, while Cameron shook his head.
‘He’s an awful man. I thought at first that he had stolen a uniform and was pretending to be an officer.’ Penny wiped at her nose again.
‘I’ll put in a full report,’ Art said, noticing that the cat had also shed some fur against Cameron as well.
‘Thank you. The man’s a clot,’ Ted said.
I’ll tell him that, will I? Art thought, but then wondered which of them would be getting the full force of McCoy’s wrath if he did so. ‘He must be. Not from our division, but I’ll get to the bottom of it.’
‘Thank you,’ Penny said.
‘Sit down,’ Ted said, sweeping an arm between the two sofas, giving them a choice.
They sat on one, Cameron in the middle. Art nudged him. ‘Budge, ya fat bastard,’ he said in a low voice.
Cameron tutted and scooted over to the opposite end, and Art saw Ted attending to his wife, and hoped he hadn’t seen the younger detective having to move.
Then Ted turned round, his face slightly flushed, as if he’d just said to Penny, run like fuck, while he fought the two imposters.
He didn’t say anything but sat on the other sofa, the one that the cat had disappeared behind.
Art heard it clawing at the leather, imagining what a state it was in.
This, he assumed, was the reason for the lack of new furniture.
The sofas were doubling as scratching posts.
‘As you may know, we’re investigating an occurrence in the cottage across the way,’ Art said.
‘Yes. We did notice the commotion,’ Ted said. ‘We moved here for peace and quiet many years ago, and there’s been nothing but bloody trouble.’
‘Language, Ted,’ Penny said, fanning her face with the now-damp hanky, as if her husband had started in on the filth like the uniformed officer had.
‘Sorry, but that man got my blood going. It was almost fisticuffs, policeman or no policeman.’
‘Oh, Ted, don’t talk like that. You’re lowering yourself to their level.’
Art didn’t know if she meant him and Cameron, or the force in general. ‘We’d like to know more about your neighbours in the cottage,’ he said.
‘Dysfunctional lot,’ Ted said.
‘Can you elaborate?’ Cameron said, suddenly looking down and noticing the cat hair on his trousers. He looked over at Art’s trousers. ‘Jesus,’ he said in a similar low tone to the one Art had used.
‘That old one, Margaret Wallace, she was a real hussy,’ Penny said. ‘And the voice on her. Goodness. She could have rented herself out to be a foghorn. Always shouting at the kids and her husband.’
‘How old were the kids when she was doing this?’ Art asked.
‘Margaret fostered one. She must have been about five or six at the time. The other girl, the oldest one, was about sixteen. Marcus was six or seven at the time. He was eight when he ran off.’
‘There I was,’ Ted said, cutting in, eager to tell the story, ‘trimming the bushes, when the man came walking over. He had a whisky bottle in his hand. And he offered me a swig from it. Can you imagine?’ Ted made a face.
‘I refused his kind offer,’ Ted said, ‘and the drunken galoot shrugged and drank some more. Then he started spouting off about his family life. How Margaret had ruined him. And how the daughter, Laura, was a little bast—’ He looked at Penny. ‘Not a nice girl.’
‘Do you remember much about the son, Marcus?’ Art asked.
Ted stared up at the ceiling and put a thumb and index finger on his chin, like one of the emojis on Art’s phone.
‘Yes. He was also a little… rumbunctious. Got into all sorts of mischief. I remember Toby telling me the boy had run away a couple of times, and it was hard looking after him. Then he ran away once more and nobody ever saw him again.’
‘Then what happened?’ Cameron asked.
‘There was a huge search for him. Police everywhere. Fortunately, none like that madman out there, the one who was shouting. They searched everywhere, but they couldn’t find him.’
‘And he was never found?’ Cameron asked.
‘Not that I know of.’
‘You said Margaret Wallace was loud,’ Art said. ‘In what way?’
Ted made a face like he was chewing a piece of pineapple with the skin on it.
‘She had a temper. She would shout at all of her family. Her husband, her kids, everybody. Then, when she came out and met a neighbour, you would think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
It was like she had some mental problems.’
‘Did Mrs Wallace drink?’ Cameron asked.
Penny shook her head. ‘Not that we saw. If she did, it was behind closed doors. But she had another vice.’
Ted looked at his wife, giving her a look that suggested that maybe they shouldn’t go down this road. But she wasn’t about to give up on any juicy gossip.
‘What was that?’ Art asked, prompting her, and now she was like a snowball rolling downhill.
‘Men. She liked men. And I don’t just mean her husband. She had numerous affairs.’
‘We don’t know if it was numerous,’ Ted said. ‘We only knew of one.’
‘That’s not what was said at the knitting club. There was one in particular who was there for a long time.’
‘Penny, don’t. Things might come back to haunt us,’ Ted said, but then Art and Cameron saw who wore the trousers in the house.
‘Nonsense. The man’s wicked.’
‘He was very popular.’
‘Who are we talking about?’ Art said.
‘MSP Rory Farmington. Nasty man. Thought he owned Fife.’
‘And Mrs Wallace was having an affair with him?’
‘Yes she was,’ Penny said.
‘We don’t know that for a fact, Penny,’ Ted said.
Penny tutted and gave him a side-eye look, and she pursed her lips, as if questioning her husband’s intelligence. ‘I told you years ago that I saw his car parked up the street, a little bit away from her front door. I saw him going in. With my own eyes. He stayed for an hour and then left.’
‘You don’t know what they were doing,’ Ted said.
‘He looked flushed and her hair was a mess. I don’t think they were playing Scrabble, unless it was a very intense game.’
Art had heard of the MSP a long time ago. An old windbag, just like most politicians.
‘How long was this going on?’ Art asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Ted answered.
‘Years,’ Penny said. ‘I was a homemaker, bringing up our two children, and I managed not to have any men around when Ted was at work.’
Art didn’t tell her that the old woman was in a nursing home. ‘What happened to her husband?’ he asked instead, knowing the answer but wanting to hear Penny’s perspective on the matter.
‘He committed suicide,’ Ted said. ‘Stupid man. I don’t know if he found out about his wife’s infidelities or not, but he took a bottle of sleeping pills washed down with a bottle of whisky, went to sleep and never woke up. His daughter found him. Serves her right if you ask me.’
‘Ted, have some respect for the dead,’ Penny said.
‘As much as I’d like to, they were an awful family. That Laura one.’ Ted shook his head. ‘Awful, wretched girl.’
‘Maybe she redeemed herself,’ Cameron said. ‘She got married after all.’
‘Did she?’ Penny said. ‘That’s news to me.’
‘Her last name’s Forrest, so I assumed she did.’
Penny gave a little chuckle. ‘You’ve got that wrong, dear. The little besom didn’t get married; she changed her name.’
‘Do you know why she would do that?’ Art asked.
‘She was adopted. She told me she wanted to use her birth name. Her original name was Carol Forrest. She decided to keep the name Laura, as everybody knew her by that name, used Carol as her middle name and changed her name to Forrest.’
‘Did she tell you all this?’
‘No, Mrs Wallace did. She was upset with Laura, and of course, they had a huge fight about it, but what’s new? They weren’t having fun unless they were arguing. But Laura said she was proud to change her name.’
‘Did she ever get married?’ Cameron asked.
‘Who would have her? Unless he was as daft as she was. But I think it was her temper that kept any men away from her. And now she must be in her fifties, and still sitting on the shelf.’
They chatted some more before leaving.
Outside, they could hear McCoy, shouting in the distance.
‘Let’s get out of here before that twat finds us again,’ Art said. He took his phone out as Cameron drove away.
‘Freya?’ DS Freya Munro. ‘I want you to do a little bit of research.’ He told her what he wanted and they managed to escape the village before McCoy waved them down again.