Bitter End Part 17

'Indeed it was, and quite a repository of miscellaneous information he turned out to be. Not particularly relevant information but plenty of it and all readily available on 107. request -or even minus a request.'

Fizz got the picture. 'But he was able to tell you where Poppy had been treated?'

'He was able to tell me where Mrs Pringle and Mrs Armstrong had gone to visit her, which probably amounts to the same thing. All his information was secondhand, unfortunately, most of it gleaned from Mrs Pringle herself, so he wasn't able to corroborate her version of events. But, yes, he did seem to be certain that Poppy was in the East Borders Infirmary, just outside Berwick. With a bit of luck, and a few of your irresistible smiles, we should be able to find somebody who remembers where she was headed when she left.'

'Ah,' said Fizz, pretending to look huffy. 'So that's why you wanted me with you: to make use of my s.e.x appeal.'

'Only on the male staff,' he defended himself, laughing.

'I'll mount my own a.s.sault on the females.'

'Fancy your chances, do you?' Fizz couldn't help saying, even though she could hardly expect him not to be aware that he was gorgeous.

He looked at her steadily for a moment, the amus.e.m.e.nt fading from his eyes. 'I don't know. How would you rate them?'

There were two ways to answer that, Fizz decided: the first way would pander to his conceit and possibly give him ideas above his station; the second way would leave him wondering, which was always good practice. She said, 'To be honest, I'm not sure what nurses go for in a man.

Possibly a tropical infection or an interesting skin disease.'

'And what about you?' he said lightly, riding the punch.

Ts there a man in your life?'

'No. If I'm not earning a crust, I'm studying, so I don't have time for a man.'

'Don't you get lonely sometimes?'

Fizz studied the scenery, wondering if he meant 'lonely'

as in lonely or 'lonely' as in h.o.r.n.y. The answer to the former possibility was, 'No, I don't have time to be lonely' 108. and the answer to the latter was, 'It's none of your sodding business, right?' In fact, come to think of it, none of it was any of his business.

She said, 'No. I don't do lonely.'

'You don't do lonely?' he echoed. 'That must be nice for you. How do you manage it?'

'I suppose I'm just used to being on my own,' Fizz hazarded. It wasn't something she'd given a lot of thought to, introspection being another thing she didn't do. Her grandfather had brought her up to be independent, which was a smart thing to do seeing as he had been in his mid-fifties when her parents were killed. He had taken pains to instil in her the precept that you should never get used to a crutch that somebody could kick away. OK, he had probably been referring more to drugs than to relations.h.i.+ps but the principle held good for both. She'd tried learning up with a guy once or twice and it had invariably ended in trauma -for the guy in question, not for her largely because she'd felt that the relations.h.i.+p cost more, in time, in commitment, and in self-sacrifice than she got out of it. Regular s.e.x was great, but it wasn't worth the shackles. Maybe, one day far away in the future, she might be tempted to team up again but it wouldn't be while she had goals of her own she wanted to pursue.

'What about your parents?' Giles wanted to know.

'Dead,' said Fizz shortly and changed the subject before he got too nosy. 'What about you? Is there a Mrs Cambridge and half a dozen little Cambridges waiting for you back home?'

'G.o.d forbid!' he said, laughing, and added with admirable directness, 'No, there isn't even a girlfriend right now. I'm like Tam: untrammelled.'

Fizz was way ahead of him there. She had a notion that he was curious to know precisely what sort of relations.h.i.+p she shared with Buchanan so she wasn't surprised when he went on, almost without a pause, 'He is untrammelled, I take it? I only ask because it would be 109. a very understanding girlfriend who would be happy to let him spend so many evenings with you. Does that mean there isn't one?'

'I think she has a puncture at the moment,' Fizz said, which distracted him enough to let her change the subject again. 'Have you spoken to him today? I meant to phone him at lunch time to see if he'd heard anything from his police contact, but I got sidelined.'

'No, I confess I expected to get all the latest news from you. I hadn't realised you wouldn't be in the office today, but I dare say Tam would have called me on my mobile if he had anything to report.'

'He would have,' Fizz felt confident enough to say. 'So that means DCI Fleming is dragging his heels, which surprises me not at all. G.o.d, it's like drawing teeth! We don't seem to be able to get a clear lead from anybody.'

'Plenty of Mwclear leads, though. If we could just sort out the wheat from the chaff.'

More like the chaff from the c.r.a.p, Fizz thought, enjoying her view of his perfect profile. It was a long time since she'd felt like sketching anything -art college had virtually cured her of that -but give her a piece of charcoal right now and she could capture his face in thirty seconds.

He frowned a little, unaware of her scrutiny, and said, Tam was telling me last night about the estate that's for sale. What's it called? Lammerburn? Yes, well, the word is that Vanessa Gra.s.sick was poised to make a whole lot of trouble for the owners.'

'Where did you hear that?' Fizz asked, snapping, mentally, to attention. 'In the Waterloo?'

'Yes. The locals were up in arms about the terms of the sale -I expect you know all about that? -and Vanessa Gra.s.sick was getting them all geared up for a full-scale protest. She had good contacts in the media and, of course, in the legal profession and she had intended, as soon as the estate was put on the market, to have every man, woman and child in the area out there with banners, 110. celebrities, pipe bands and virtually everything but a flypast of the Red Arrows.'

'Wow! Really? That's incredible! I knew she'd complained to the owners but I didn't realise she meant business on that scale.'

Fizz felt the faint stirrings of an unworthy suspicion way in the back of her mind. Giles had taken his time about sharing this tasty morsel of information with her.

Had he been tempted to keep it to himself?

'You think it's important?' he said, taking note of her enthusiasm.

'Well, yes. Don't you? I mean, the Menzies family would have been spitting tacks if they thought she might k.n.o.bble their sale. There's a couple of million pounds or more tied up in that deal and that's a lot of money, even to the Menzies family.'

'An ancient half-crippled woman and her spineless son?

You met them, I didn't, but the picture I got from Tarn--'

'I wouldn't put anything past that old witch,' Fizz insisted. 'She's been used to getting her own way for far too long and the very idea of "ordinary" people telling her what she can do with her own property would have her biting the carpet. Maybe she can't get around much herself but that milksop son of hers would hammer tacks under his toenails if she told him to do it.'

'What about her husband? He's still alive, isn't he?'

Giles seemed only now to be appreciating the possibilities inherent in his information. 'Where is he right now?'

'He's back home in their Edinburgh house,' Fizz said, 'but I reckon we can forget about him. My money's on Mrs Menzies. She's the spider in the centre of that web.'

'You really think she could make her son commit murder?' Giles stopped at traffic lights and took the opportunity to look at her seriously. 'Murder, Fizz. Think about it. Think about the amount of pressure you'd have to be under to actually take someone's life. Mrs Menzies would have to be a real Svengali to do that.' Ill 'I wouldn't be surprised if she were,' Fizz returned, knowing perfectly well that she would have been. Giles was probably quite right. Even her goofy son wouldn't go that far just to keep his mother's spirits up. He wouldn't have the bottle for it. 'I don't say I could imagine Niall putting a bullet into someone -nothing violent like that -but laying a trap . . . that's something else. He's not the sort to appreciate the effects of his actions. Not really. Trying to make him understand the human tragedy the evictions would set in motion was like trying to read The Times in a wind tunnel. It wouldn't take much to talk him into arranging a gas explosion in Vanessa's house if he thought it would go off when the house was empty.'

Giles nodded, taking that on board. 'Right. In fact the whole business could have been intended from the start to be nothing more than a warning to Vanessa to pipe down.

Niall Menzies -or whoever set up the explosion -may

have been unaware that she was meeting Jamie Ford there that night.'

'Um . . . yeah,' Fizz said, but more out of politeness than because she actually agreed with that conclusion. If Giles's reading of the facts were true, Vanessa's visit to Brora Lodge would've had to be purely coincidental and coincidences, in Fizz's opinion, were roughly on a par with solar eclipses. They did occur, but not often enough to make them a factor in your day-to-day calculations. Nope.

Somebody had to have known full well that Vanessa Gra.s.sick would be meeting Jamie Ford there that night and had arranged a welcome for both of them.

And who would be so intimately aware of Vanessa's plans? Probably not her husband. Not, at least, if the meeting was what it appeared to be: a romantic rendezvous.

Joseph Rudyard, her business partner? He was in a position to overhear her phone calls or maybe glimpse her diary, and he was also the one to benefit from her death.

It was annoying that Buchanan had refused to allow her to sit in on his chat with Rudyard. She'd let him get away 112. with it at the time because he had scared the s.h.i.+t out of her by spelling out what harm it would do her career if Gra.s.sick took against her, but now she was sure that was a load of codswallop. Whatever Buchanan thought about it, she was d.a.m.n well going to have a close look at Vanessa's main beneficiary at the first opportunity.

They stopped for a meal at a great little bistro on the outskirts of Berwick, the sort of place Fizz preferred but Buchanan avoided like the plague. The colours were bright and the music was loud and the waiters were cheerful. It was fairly new and the management had gone for character and atmosphere in a big way, covering the walls with trompe l'oeil scenes of Italian harbours, fis.h.i.+ng nets, floats etc and making a speciality of sea food, which Fizz adored.

Actually, the tuna steak she chose was dry as a bone and she could hardly hear what Giles was saying because of the background music but, hey, she wasn't paying for it.

When the check arrived she could tell that Giles wished he wasn't paying for it either. He made no comment, and neither did she, but she noticed that he didn't leave a tip.

'How do you want to play it at the hospital?' she asked him as they got back into the car. 'Do you admit to being an insurance investigator or does that make people clam up?'