Bad Blood by Aline Templeton

it’s worse than that. Her daughter Marnie has turned up demanding to know what steps were taken to find her mother and why she was told nothing at all after she was taken into care. I haven’t spoken to her myself, but I gather Marnie thinks her mother was murdered.’
    Rowley groaned. ‘Causing trouble?’
    ‘Certainly wanting answers.’
    ‘So we give them to her – why not? If she doesn’t know who her mother really is it may come as a shock but—’
    Fleming was shaking her head. She tapped the file in front of them. ‘We can’t, not until we can get legal permission for an exemption from the injunction.’
    ‘That could take weeks!’
    ‘Yes. And meantime, if we aren’t in a position to give Marnie the information she wants, is she just going to go away quietly or is she going to decide we’re covering up and contact the press?’
    ‘An immediate injunction to stop her,’ Rowley suggested. ‘That would be quick enough.’
    ‘A gagging order?’ Fleming said doubtfully. ‘The press tend to get very interested in those.’
    Rowley obviously realised she was right. ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ she snapped. ‘You were in at the start of this – I wasn’t.’
    Even though she had known perfectly well what the bottom line would be, Fleming still felt aggrieved. If she’d been in charge, instead of being a humble PC, she’d have – well, what would she have done then? She didn’t know, and certainly she didn’t know now.
    ‘All I can suggest is that I talk to her, give her as many facts as I legitimately can and try to persuade her that we did our best at the time and thought it wasn’t in her interests to start a public hunt.’
    ‘I suppose so.’ Rowley didn’t sound impressed, but she was looking at her watch again. ‘I’ve got to go – I’m late already.
    ‘Do try to keep all this under wraps, Marjory. It’s really very tedious.’
    As she swept out, Fleming pulled a childish face at her retreating back.

    Shelley Crichton was sitting on the sofa in Janette’s front room, still hiccuping a little as she sipped at a glass of cooking brandy. Two ofthe other women had come back with her and were drinking white wine, being less in need of such robust stimulus
    Lorna Baxter was well into her second glass. She was a big, bulky woman who always had high colour and now her cheeks were red as poppies with the combination of alcohol and outrage. ‘It’s disgusting, coming like that to gloat. That Kirstie must have sent her to report back – that’s what it would be! She knows there’d be a lynching if she turned up herself.’
    Janette frowned her down. Lorna wasn’t a friend of hers – ‘coarse’, was her private opinion, and the family, from the social housing at the bottom of the hill, weren’t what up here on the hill you called ‘respectable’. She was a good ten years younger than the rest of them but she’d been part of the vigilante group that had driven Kirstie Burnside’s dysfunctional family out of Dunmore after the trial and ended up in court herself. Perhaps it had been a mistake to ask her to join them at the park, but almost everyone was out at work or busy and Janette had wanted Shelley to feel supported.
    ‘I’m sure that’s absolute nonsense,’ she said repressively, but Shelley ignored her, sitting up eagerly.
    ‘Do you think so? Do you think that’s what it was? How could anyone be so cruel, so wicked?’
    Janette exchanged an anxious glance with Sheila who was a real friend, a nice, sensible woman, and she stepped in.
    ‘Don’t be daft, Lorna. You don’t know that’s even any relation of Kirstie’s. It was just a lassie with reddish hair and blue eyes – there’s plenty of them about. You’d have passed her in the street if it hadn’t been the coincidence of her coming along just when we were all thinking about poor wee Tommy.’
    Lorna bridled. ‘Oh, you think so? I tell you, that girl was the very image of her mother as a bairn. She