Dead in the Water by Aline Templeton Read Free Book Online Page A

report. On the other hand, working steadily through would reflect the ordinary course of an investigation. She went to Box 1.
    The first item was Sergeant Angus Laird’s police notebook. She hadn’t quite prepared herself for the sight of her father’s familiar handwriting. He had the fine, old-fashioned copperplate style taught in those days, very strong and confident. She could hear his voice as she read, and she felt her throat constrict.
    He had been first on the scene, and on his own. A helicopter had been scrambled by the coastguard after a lighthouse keeper spotted a body, washed up on a spur of rock below the cliffs to the north-west of the lighthouse. The keeper had identified the body as Ailsa Grant from Balnakenny, a farm half a mile away.
    There had been a firm presumption of suicide, and there was a tell-tale entry explaining Laird’s conviction. ‘Deceased was visibly pregnant.’ His moral standards had always been uncompromising and there was a hint in his tone that, given the girl’s condition, this was only to be expected.
    Of course! Fleming remembered now. That was the scandal! The ultimate shame at that time, every parent’s fear – and she had to admit that even today she wouldn’t be overjoyed if Cat bounced in and announced she was pregnant, with no father around for the baby. She certainly knew her father had fretted that she, Marjory, with her independence and even a certain wildness at one time before she met Bill, might get herself ‘in trouble’ as it was always described.
    Bailey’s report came next. He too had believed it was suicide so, as she had guessed from the photographs, there had been no obviously suspicious signs. There was a cryptic passage about a ‘major breakdown in procedure’ before the body was moved to the mortuary and the word ‘recalcitrant’ was used to describe Sergeant Laird’s refusal to accept that the presumption of suicide had led to serious error.
    Fleming re-read it, puzzled. She had no problem with recalcitrant – being recalcitrant was her father’s favourite hobby – and never admitting he was wrong was standard practice. But ‘ breakdown in procedure ’. The Procedure Manual was Angus Laird’s bible: he’d always ranted against any form of policing which did not comply with it, boringly when she was a child and annoyingly when she was a serving officer herself. Yet he seemed to have let them take the young woman’s body away to her home to wait for the ambulance. He had even taken identification from Ailsa’s father and brother on the spot, which certainly now would be formally done in the mortuary.
    It was a small, personal mystery; she couldn’t afford to waste professional time on it, yet inconsistencies were sometimes like a swirl in the water which spoke of a fish below. She filed it mentally and went on.
    Fleming flicked through the statements from lighthouse keepers and their wives. None had seen or heard anything, but then it had been a savage night; with their shutters latched against the elements they probably wouldn’t have heard a brass band outside playing Sousa marches, let alone the sound of a car arriving, or the screams of a girl – muffled, probably, in any case.
    She speed-read the notebooks of officers who had arrived later and the coastguard report, then paused over the statements from Ailsa’s parents and her brother. It might be better to see the evidence of murder first. Hindsight might indicate questions not asked at the time.
    The autopsy report must be here somewhere. This was it – in a format style, typed a little unevenly in blue. It had been conducted in the mortuary of the local hospital and she ran her eye down dates, times, list of officials present. She smiled at the name DI Bailey – he’d have loved that – and turned to the report’s findings.
    It was a serious disappointment, short and inexplicit. She hadn’t expected the detail and the battery of test results that were standard now, but