Bitter End Part 35

Fizz threw her useful piece of curtain rod into the bushes and backed off a step, but she couldn't bear to let him push her around without getting something out of it.

Without a preamble, which he would have cut off in its prime, she asked, Are you having me followed?'

'Eh?' He was visibly caught off balance. 'Followed?

What's this? No, I have not d.a.m.n well had you followed!

You have an inflated sense of your own importance -you

and that idiot boss of yours both!'

Tam Buchanan is no idiot,' Fizz said, hating him as much as she had bothered to hate anyone for years. 'And 215. not only is he smart, Mr Gra.s.sick, he's honest, which is a combination that ought to worry a man like you.'

Gra.s.sick immediately went apes.h.i.t and started bellowing in a voice that must have carried clearly to Tam, wherever he was hiding.

'What d'you mean, "a man like me", you insolent wee smout? You'd better watch your tongue or you'll find yourself in serious trouble, and that's a warning! Dammit, I'm not having this. There will be a stop put to it first thing Monday morning, and that's the end of it.'

He had a lot more to say, along these general lines, but he suddenly appeared to realise that he was wasting his breath on the monkey when he really wanted to berate the organ-grinder and, with a last and most insulting Tcha!', he turned on his heel and marched away, breaking his stride only once, to yell back at her, 'Now get the h.e.l.l off my land, y'hear me?'

Fizz was only too happy to comply. In truth, she had to force herself to keep to a steady pace as she stumbled out on to the roadway and headed for the main road. She had to a.s.sume that Buchanan could see where she was going but she had to get out of sight of Gra.s.sick who was now loading garden urns into the boot of his car.

A few paces along the road she found a small wood where she could hide till the coast was clear and it was only when she stopped to sit down that she realised how traumatised she was by her encounter -not by Gra.s.sick's aggression so much as by the loss of her prospects of an ill.u.s.trious career, at least as far as Edinburgh was concerned.

Her legs were shaking and something akin to a sob escaped her, bubbling up through her chest like a cross between a hiccup and a gasp. Sod the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, she told herself, looking for something not too lethal to punch.

She didn't give a hoot what Buchanan thought about Gra.s.sick's alibi. She'd see him p.r.o.nounced guilty even if she had to frame the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 216.

Chapter Eighteen.

Buchanan could not understand how Fizz could accept

the disaster so calmly. Either she was putting a brave face

on it -which would surely have been beyond even Fizz or she didn't care. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, he thought, as they headed back to Edinburgh, maybe you haven't fully grasped the situation.

'Hey, s.h.i.t happens,' was her response to his primary reaction of mild hysteria. And, anyway, it hasn't happened.

Yet. He can't take out an injunction against us till after the weekend, and as far as ruining my career goes, I'll worry about that when I'm waiting in the queue at the Job Centre, not before. That's the trouble with you, Buchanan, you worry about things before you have to and half the time they turn out to be not worth worrying about.

Lighten up.'

Buchanan made an effort to embrace this theory, in which he could discern a certain logic, but he couldn't even start to deal with the crushing weight of guilt that was his and his alone. Not only had he allowed Fizz to be identified as his accessary but he had abandoned her, at the critical moment, for a voluptuous bimbo when he might have spotted Gra.s.sick's approach and warned her to get lost.

'So, what did Mrs Armstrong tell you?' Fizz chirped, putting a firm end to his self-castigation. 'Nothing of interest, I suppose?' 217. Buchanan's optimism on hearing about Mrs Armstrong's sighting of Vanessa's car had by now, like every other ray of hope in his immediate future, evaporated. It didn't offer any fast solution to the mystery surrounding the explosion; in fact, it only increased the confusion. He told Fizz about it anyway and she was as puzzled as he.

'Why park the car so far from the house?' Fizz asked herself and then answered her own question. 'Because she didn't want the neighbours to know she was there. All the neighbours? Or just the Pringles? Or just Jamie Ford's wife? Huh?' She turned her head to check if Buchanan was listening to her. 'Was it, in fact, really Vanessa who was driving the car at that point, or could Lawrence have borrowed it because his own was acting up?'

'We have confirmation that Vanessa was in Inverness, presumably in her own car -check that, will you? -by

five-ish. Mrs Armstrong saw the car at twelve-thirty, which gives Vanessa a clear four and a half hours to get to her first appointment in Inverness. Ample time. She could do it in three if she really put her foot down.'

'But if Lawrence had been driving her car earlier he'd still have had time to get it back to her before she left home, right?'

'I suppose so,' Buchanan agreed, perceiving that she now had it in for Gra.s.sick in a big way. G.o.d help the man.

'You see?' Fizz beat a clenched fist on her knee. 'We're hamstrung because we don't know anything about Vanessa. We don't even have a photograph of her so how can we begin to tell what sort of person she really was?

People tell us that she wouldn't have looked twice at Jamie Ford. "She was too posh", right? But was she? And if it wasn't s.e.x that brought the two of them together, what was it?'

The only two people who might have the answer to that, Fizz, are her husband and Poppy Ford, and there's not much chance of either of them inviting us over for a cosy chat.' 218. Fizz looked out her window at a distant oil tanker making its way up the Forth to Grangemouth. 'No,' she said, thoughtfully, 'but it's just occurred to me that Vanessa must have had office s.p.a.ce at work and I'll lay you seven to four that lazy sod Rudyard hasn't cleared her desk yet. I wouldn't mind a look-see.'

Buchanan was immediately against the idea, and said so, but in the absence of any better leads he eventually allowed himself to be talked round to it. He was persuaded as much by the knowledge of his own guilt as by Fizz. After dropping her into this mess, the least he could do was to get her out of it by any means possible, and before Gra.s.sick could stop him.

'But, bear in mind, Fizz, that we don't have any business to be raking through Vanessa's effects,' he warned her, for all the good it would do him. 'If Rudyard is willing to help us go through her papers, that's fine, but we tell him up front what we want and give him the option to tell us to go to h.e.l.l.'

'He won't tell us to go to h.e.l.l,' Fizz stated positively.

'He's too b.l.o.o.d.y lethargic to care.'

Buchanan had serious doubts about that, but they proved to be unfounded. Rudyard was not even roused to asperity by the arrival of two visitors just as he was about to lock up shop for the weekend. The last of the staff were on their way out as he led Buchanan and Fizz into his office and cleared s.p.a.ces for them to sit down.

'We've been badly held up in the processing of Mrs Gra.s.sick's will,' Fizz told him as she wiped something off the seat and fell into it with her usual delicacy. 'But with any luck -and a little help from our friends,' she added with a twinkly smile for the bemused Rudyard, 'we're hoping to get everything wound up by the beginning of next week. That's why we thought we'd try to catch you today before you disappeared for the weekend. I know we're a nuisance but a few minutes at this point would be well spent.' 219. Rudyard was clearly at a loss to know what he'd done to bring on such chumminess in one who had barely looked in his direction at the time of her last visit. He watched closely as Fizz loosened her jacket and fluffed up her hair and it took him a moment or two to formulate the sentence, 'Uh ... no problem. I'm not in any hurry tonight.'

That's good,' Fizz said, 'because it would be nice just to have a quiet chat.'

Rudyard glanced at Buchanan but, receiving no elucidation of this remark, he returned his attention to Fizz.

'What about?' he said.

'Oh, just about Vanessa,' Fizz a.s.sured him, as though that were the most natural thing in the world and, such was her serenity, he didn't make any protest.

He must surely, Buchanan thought, have already told them everything he knew about his former business partner, and anyone else would have jibbed at the idea of being questioned for the third time about the circ.u.mstances surrounding her death. Rudyard, however, didn't give a d.a.m.n about anything and was no more miserable undergoing questioning than he would have been had they left him alone.

Fizz put an elbow on the desk and cupped her chin in her hand. 'We were wondering about Vanessa's car,' she said lazily. 'Did her husband ever borrow it -in emergencies, for instance, like when his own was off the road?'

A small puzzled frown came and went between Rudyard's eyebrows. 'I wouldn't know,' he said vaguely. 'I suppose he might borrow it if Vanessa didn't need it but I don't remember Vanessa ever saying as much to me. Why do you ask that?'

'Because, Lawrence's car was off the road for the afternoon and evening of the day before Vanessa was killed.'

Fizz smiled faintly. 'Would it be likely, do you think, for Vanessa to let Lawrence have the car and, perhaps, to have flown up to Inverness instead?' 220. Rudyard sighed and slumped lower in his seat, his expression as well as his body language indicating that he couldn't see why he should be expected to know what Vanessa might have done. Buchanan could sympathise with him but realised that Fizz was merely softening him up for the question she really wanted to ask.

'She might have gone by air,' Rudyard admitted. 'She took a plane once or twice before but she preferred to take her car so that she could nip around Inverness between customers. She definitely planned to go by car that last time.'

'I don't suppose you'd have any idea when her car was last serviced?' Fizz asked next, surprising both of her listeners.

Buchanan couldn't see the point of such a line of inquiry but Fizz clearly had some idea of where she was heading so he decided to preserve his observer status.

'No, I haven't a clue.' Rudyard muttered.

There wouldn't be any doc.u.mentation around the office, would there?'

Rudyard's mournful eyes drifted momentarily to his computer, but then he shook his head. 'No. I wouldn't have any of that stuff. It wasn't a firm's car, you see; she just claimed mileage. Does it matter?'

'That's a pity,' Fizz's forefinger touched her lip in a fair a.s.sumption of consternation. 'Would that sort of thing be on her own computer, I wonder?'

'Maybe,' he said. 'Want me to look?'