Bitter End Part 3

did. Fizz would pretend contrition, admit that her nosi ness and manipulative behaviour were totally unacceptable,

and continue to operate with a level of adroitness

and chicanery that would shame a weasel. He felt her stir uneasily beside him. Swivelling his eyes, he met her deadpan denim-blue gaze and returned it with equal blankness. After a moment she broke and said, Are we going for a closer look or what?'

'Certainly,' Buchanan said, hardly sounding smug at all, 'since that's what we're here for.'

She ducked that one by getting out of the car fast and walking ahead of him down the driveway while he was locking up. She had her hair loose today -it always ended 17. up that way anyway, fighting off all attempts to restrain it with Houdini-like ease -and the breeze was making it struggle madly as though it resented being rooted in her scalp. Every time he saw her like this, stomping around in her Doc's with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, he was struck by the disparity between her child-like appearance and her quite terrifying a.s.surance. The incongruity wasn't so clean-cut when he saw her in the office -maybe

the darker clothes she wore for work made her look taller or more grown up -but, in jeans and the same baggy sweater she'd worn the first time she'd blasted into his. .h.i.therto placid existence, she could still pa.s.s for a school kid -and a decidedly cherubic one at that.

When he caught up with her she was staring down into the hole left by the explosion.

'Looks like they had a cellar down there,' she said, pointing at an area of plastered wall that showed signs of having once been shelved. 'I can't imagine what sort of blast it must have been to have caused such destruction.'

'Gas,' Buchanan told her, wondering where she'd scavenged her information and why that detail had escaped her. 'There's no gas mains in this area so, apparently, the Gra.s.sicks stored several gas canisters in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

They used gas for cooking and also for one of those fake log fires. One of the canisters must have been leaking for days. The house was probably full of fumes when Mrs Gra.s.sick arrived and she struck a match or something.

That's the trouble with North Sea gas: you can't smell it like you could the old stuff. Not so easily anyway.'

She bent and picked up a piece of paper but saw nothing of interest on it and threw it away. 'Okay, so the police are quite happy about the case -accidental death, as far as they're concerned -and you have the go-ahead to pay out the cash, so what is it that's worrying you about the case?'

Buchanan was astounded. Was she reading his mind?

'Who says I'm worried?'

She looked at him with strained patience. 'Buchanan, 18. you've been sitting around with your knuckles in your teeth for three days. There's something about this business that's got you running scared. Yes or no?'

Buchanan wasn't going to lie to her but that didn't mean he had to give her any information she didn't already possess. 'Who put you on to this, Fizz? Beatrice?'

Fizz hooted rudely. 'Beatrice? Buchanan, you've got to know that Beatrice is as tight as a Trappist monk on Good Friday. She lives but to do your bidding.' She kicked sullenly at a piece of debris and decided to come clean. 'I happened to see the letter from Lothian and Borders police ... the one saying they weren't taking the matter any further. I was curious so I looked it up in the files.'

'You were curious.' Buchanan nodded comprehendingly.

'Well, well. You curious, Fizz? Whatever next?'

Fizz showed him her middle finger and stalked away to the edge of what had recently been a patio. Buchanan followed her for a better view of the three widely separated houses that shared the side road.

The remaining buildings were probably over a hundred years old, which was far from unusual in the Borders. With their solid construction and big gardens they would each have been valued at something around two hundred thousand pounds had they been in the Edinburgh area. Here, Buchanan suspected he'd be lucky to find a buyer at anything over fifty-five thousand. The basic design of the remaining three houses was identical -an indication of what Brora Lodge had probably looked like: st.u.r.dy, pan- tiled, with two dormer windows set into a steep roof, and a stone-built porch to keep out the winter winds. They were set haphazardly with reference to the street, which was probably a newer addition: two facing it, one sideways on, as Brora Lodge had stood.

The closest house had taken a fair bit of the blast. All the windows on its near side were boarded up and there seemed, from this distance, to be no sign of life around it at all. 19. 'So, what's the big deal regarding Vanessa Gra.s.sick?' Fizz persisted, sticking forth her bottom lip. 'She's Lawrence Gra.s.sick's wife, isn't she? Why does that make you nervous?'

She took note of Buchanan's exasperated expression and ploughed on. 'She was still married to him, I take it?'

'Yes, Fizz, she was his current wife,' Buchanan barked without looking at her.

'Wife.' She was silent for a couple of restful minutes, her absorbed stare drifting from her boots to Buchanan's face and back again. Then she nodded. 'Right. Lawrence Gra.s.sick's wife. Right. You don't want to make an a.r.s.e of yourself on this one, do you? You don't want to pay out the filthy lucre and then have it turn out she was murdered after all. She left the lot to her business partner, right?

Every last penny.'

'Virtually every last penny. Yes.'

'Uh-huh. But something is making you jumpy, isn't it?

Come on, Buchanan. I've seen you like this before. Cough it up.'

There was no way she'd ever drop the matter now, Buchanan realised, and if he were to face the truth, he'd have to admit to himself that it would be a relief to share the problem with her. She had her faults but sometimes her devious mind saw solutions where his didn't.

'There are one or two anomalies that are making me . . .

well, just a tad uneasy,' he admitted. 'For a start, there's the question of what Lawrence Gra.s.sick's wife was doing, turning up at their weekend place at two-twenty-five in the morning.'

'Is that when the explosion happened?' Fizz's stare was as intent and unblinking as that of a cat at a mouse hole.

Buchanan could almost hear her brain whirring. 'Maybe she had been there for hours and the gas had just leaked out.'

Buchanan would have dearly loved to agree with her on that. 'That's what the police believe. However, one of the neighbours claimed he heard Vanessa's car draw up not 20. more than a few minutes before the bang. n.o.body is taking him seriously, since he was the only person to hear it and there was nothing to corroborate his statement -but

it makes me uneasy just the same.'

Fizz turned to look down the hill at the nearest house, the one with the boarded-up windows. 'If it was the guy who lived there you'd think he'd be close enough to know what he was hearing.'

'He didn't live there,' Buchanan said, fighting an increasingly black depression. The chap who lived in that house wasn't at home at the time of the explosion. He was here . . . with Vanessa Gra.s.sick . . . and he was blown to bits.'

Fizz's eyes widened perceptibly at that and she cast a quick glance at the ground around her as though she dreaded to see pulverised body parts besprinkled through the gravel.

Buchanan summoned up a smile. 'Don't worry. The police have been over and over the ground with fine- toothed combs. You can be sure that all traces of Vanessa and her neighbour -one Jamie Ford -have long gone.'

The breeze swirled round the remains of the gable wall causing a tight whirlpool of dried leaves and rubbish at their feet and stirring up a smell of wet charcoal. In the distance a door banged, clearly audible in the silence, and, from the furthest visible house, a person in tan trousers emerged, followed by a brown and white spaniel.

Fizz turned her back on the figures and fixed her eyes on Buchanan's. 'What you're wondering is,' she stated, 'whether the police were maybe too scared of Lawrence Gra.s.sick's influence in high places to start de-skeletonising his cupboards.'

Buchanan himself would not have put the matter so strongly. He had more respect for Lothian and Borders police force than Fizz had, probably because he had got up its collective nose, and suffered the inevitable repercussions, less often than she had. 'I don't really have any firm 21. suspicions at the moment. I just don't want to do anything too precipitous till I'm a little easier in my mind.'

'Yeah, yeah,' she said, as though it were merely a matter of semantics, and without turning round, stuck a thumb over her shoulder and added, There's one of the neighbours.

Aren't you going to stop him and see what he has to say?'

Buchanan was by no means sure that he wanted to take that line of action -not yet, at any rate -but before he could reply it became obvious that the choice was not going to be his. The neighbour, who transpired to be a well-built, middle-aged woman, clearly had him in her sights and was moving fast to cut off his escape.

'Something I can help you with?' She bellowed the words as soon as she came within earshot, but the tone of her voice translated them into something more akin to, 'What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing in there?' She had a large florid face and her eyes, behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, looked like tadpoles in a jam jar. From the hip joints up she was a substantial cube in a fawn anorak, but below that line she was only a pair of skinny legs in black leggings. Buchanan couldn't help but be reminded of an animated Weetabix.

Fizz leapt into the fray as usual, smiling with all thirty-two teeth, and tripping forward to meet the Fury like a toddler approaching Santa's grotto.

'That's very kind of you,' she crooned. 'We're from Buchanan and Stewart, Mrs Gra.s.sick's solicitors. This is Tam Buchanan.'

'And your name is?' said the Fury, making it clear that she would have no hesitation in checking out their bona fides.

'Fitzpatrick. I'm Mr Buchanan's a.s.sistant.'

That was stretching the truth a bit but, as Fizz well knew, Buchanan wouldn't quibble in front of witnesses. He held out his hand. 'It's good to know that someone's keeping an eye on things.' 22. 'Jean Pringle.' She shook it, but her big square face showed little sign of mollification. She had one of those voices you'd have difficulty in cla.s.sing as male or female.

'You wouldn't believe the number of people we've seen prying around. Looking to see what they can pick up, I've not the slightest doubt. My husband had to stop someone carrying off one of the stone troughs last week. I told Mr Gra.s.sick about it when he was here but I see no sign of him doing anything to make the garden secure.'

'He's very lucky to have such thoughtful neighbours,'

Fizz told her, laying it on thick. 'I'm sure this whole business must have been quite a strain on all of you.'

'Dreadful.' Mrs Pringle cast her eyes around to check on the dog, which was sniffing around a heap of rubble with an avid interest that, regardless of what he'd just told Fizz, made Buchanan's stomach churn. They've been coming and going for days -fire brigade, police, ambulances and goodness knows who -knocking on doors, taking statements, annoying people. You've never seen the like.'