‘I don’t think they took it seriously,’ went Maggie now. ‘The possibility that Nick could have done it.’
‘They were so intent on charging Duncan,’ Yvonne agreed.
Maggie had told Yvonne everything. She didn’t know why. She didn’t even like the woman, but she trusted her. Maybe it was the fact that Yvonne reminded her in some ways of Duncan. She had the same straightforwardness about her.
‘We’ve got to break Nick’s alibi,’ went Maggie.
‘But how?’
He had a cast-iron alibi. The police had established that he hadn’t left the school play rehearsal, and there were folk who could vouch for that. He’d either been on stage or in the wings with the other actors and teachers, apart from a twenty-minute break when he’d gone outside for a fag – alone, but one of the other kids had joined him after ten minutes, which wasn’t even close to being enough time for him to have got to The Phoenix Centre, murdered Dean, and got back to the school.
Maggie sighed. ‘How can it be possible to tell whether he sneaked off for a bit?’
‘But it would have taken him what, half an hour at least to run across town, kill the boy, run back . . . call you to lure you to the Centre. He had the main part in the play. Oberon. Surely he’d have been missed? No. I think he must have got someone else to do it and set up an alibi for himself, so he’d be in the clear.’
‘But who?’
‘Could he have something on one of the kids in the programme? Could he have blackmailed them into doing it?’ Yvonne grimaced. ‘At least your alibi is holding up.’
Aye, right enough, that was the only ray of hope in this whole mess. Pam and Liam said their police interviews had been very short. The cops obviously weren’t seriously looking at Maggie.
Because they were convinced they had their man.
Duncan’s altercation with Dean had been in the most public place possible, outside the newsagent on the High Street with about twenty folk watching. There had been a scuffle. Dean had howled about how Duncan was attacking him ‘again’ and had appealed to passers-by for help.
Open and shut case.
Duncan had been charged with murder and remanded in custody awaiting trial.
9
Lulu - January 2019
Lulu had been dozing in the passenger seat, on and off, all the way from London. Nick had insisted on driving all the way to give her a chance to catch up on some sleep. She was now down to one zolpidem every four days and was finding it pretty hard going. And when she did manage to fall asleep, often the dream would come. The dream where she was hugging Milo, and then tying the blue twine round her neck, pulling a chair under the big old hook in the ceiling . . . Sometimes she tied twine round Milo’s neck too.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about Milo.
They were travelling, now, through a secret valley, an idyll of green fields and woods hidden amongst the desolate hills of the Scottish Borders.
‘You wouldn’t think, to look at it now, that it was such a hotbed of anarchy, would you?’ Nick smiled. ‘Cattle reivers and outlaws and running battles between the Scots and the English.’
It helped him, she supposed, to talk about what had happened here five hundred years ago rather than twenty. But Lulu could just imagine them, those leather-jerkined desperados, peering out at the road from the cover of the trees.
‘It was known as The Debatable Lands in the 16th Century.’ Nick slowed the car as they rounded a bend in the road and a particularly beautiful scene was laid out before them: blowing verges of cow parsley, grey drystone walls, peaceful fields of grazing cattle and sheep. In the near distance was a stone cottage set in a colourful garden, the wooded slope behind it rising to a bleak hilltop. ‘A kind of no-man’s land. So lawless and dangerous that neither Scotland nor England wanted responsibility for it. There was even a decree, issued by the English but agreed on by the Scots, wiping their hands of the place. Pretty much the only time Scotland and England have agreed on anything. We had to learn it by heart at school. “All Englishmen and Scottishmen, after this proclamation made, are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every such persons, their bodies, buildings, goods and cattle as do remain or shall inhabit upon any part of the said Debatable Land without any redress to be made for the same.”’
Lulu felt a shiver on the bare skin of her arms. ‘Wow.’
Nick suddenly grimaced, and she knew he was reflecting, as she was, on what he believed Maggie had done here, five hundred years later, with similar impunity.