By the afternoon, the main roads were largely passable and McKay dispatched the small team of available officers to conduct initial door-to-doors near the murder scene. He wasn’t optimistic of discovering anything new. If anyone really had witnessed the killing, they’d have been in touch by now. At most, they might find another witness who’d seen the car. It was just part of the process they needed to go through.
There was plenty of continuing activity relating to the bonfire killing, but McKay’s feeling was that they were treading water. They’d struggle to make progress until they at least knew the victim’s identity.
The Forres case was a different matter. They had known contacts to be interviewing, and at least a possible motive for his killing, and they had the means to check out his business and finances. There were countless unanswered questions, but they had some idea of where to start.
So for the moment McKay had decided to throw the majority of resource he had – which in the circumstances was pitifully small – at the Forres case in the hope that something might stick. Let no one ever tell you you’re not optimistic, Alec old pal.
It was later in the afternoon that his optimism was partially rewarded. He’d had one of the team working on the traffic cameras. It would normally have been a thankless task, but McKay had reasoned that there would be very few cars on the road in the early hours of Christmas Day. That assumption had been correct. After around 1am, the volume of vehicles was very low indeed, particularly away from the main A9.
The officer in question, a young DC called Ben Connor, had entered the office in some excitement. ‘Guv?’
The youngsters liked calling McKay ‘guv’. It made them sound like they were in some 1970s TV police drama. That was fine by McKay. At least it was better than ‘sir’, and it showed him some of the respect he deserved. ‘Son?’
‘Think we might have something.’
‘As long as it’s not contagious. Sit down. You’re making the place look untidy.’
‘Guv.’ Connor sat and slid across some printouts from a plastic wallet. ‘Several sightings of this vehicle at around 2.30am on Christmas Day. The first couple from cameras on the A9. That first one’s on the Kessock Bridge, and the second’s at the Munlochy junction. We’ve got a temporary speed camera there because of the collision record. Then we’ve got a third one on a temporary camera on the B9169. Looks like they took the north road out along the Black Isle, presumably because it was less conspicuous than going through Fortrose and Rosemarkie.’
‘What you’re saying is that they came right past my house. Pity I wasn’t up having a piss or I might have spotted them.’
‘Guv?’
‘A wee joke, son. As it were. Any sightings of it coming back?’
‘We’ve got one from the camera on the back road. Bit over an hour later. Timings are on the photos.’
McKay nodded, taking this in. ‘Where’s the camera sited?’
‘At the junction just after Culbokie.’
‘It’s a reasonable drive from there to Cromarty. Twenty-five minutes or so. If this is our vehicle, it suggests they didn’t bugger about long doing the deed. Ten, fifteen minutes.’ He paused, still thinking. ‘Not the easiest task. So they must have had it well prepared. They must have scoped out the location in advance.’
‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’
‘What’s the vehicle?’
Connor said, ‘It’s an MPV, which is what we were looking for–’
‘That’s a very good start, son.’
Connor blinked at him for a second. ‘It’s a Volkswagen Sharan. Looks dark colour from the cameras, though it’s hard to make out.’
‘Registration?’
‘The plates are fake. Relate to a BMW 5-Series with a keeper in the south of England somewhere.’
‘Of course they do,’ said McKay. ‘Still, at least that seems to confirm that this is our vehicle. So it takes us a small step forward. Next thing is to check whether there are any sightings of it further afield. If it was caught north of the Kessock Bridge that must mean Inverness or beyond.’
‘Do you want me to move on to that next?’
‘You might as well. It’s something we can usefully do while most of the world is still nursing its post-Christmas hangover. And this gives us a better idea of timing. Suggests they’d have been in Cromarty around 3am, which fits. The snow didn’t start coming down till around 3.30 or so. Maybe another reason they weren’t keen to hang around.’
Connor nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’
‘The other question,’ McKay continued, ‘is whether this was the same vehicle that was sighted outside Forres’s house when he disappeared. The witness said something large and dark, but didn’t have much of a clue beyond that. We can show her some images of the relevant type of vehicle and see if they ring any bells, though that’s probably unduly optimistic. Be interesting to see if the same vehicle is spotted more than once over the last couple of days. It’s a quiet wee place at this time of the year, so someone might have noticed an unfamiliar vehicle if it appeared more than once.’
McKay was largely talking to himself now, though happy to treat Connor as a captive audience. The next question, he supposed, was whether the vehicle might have visited the town at an earlier point if these people had wanted to scope out the location before carrying out the killing. That might have been done at any time. ‘Sorry, son. Just mulling it all over. Hard thinking doesn’t come naturally to me. Good work with the car.’
‘Don’t know if it really gets us very far,’ Connor said, ruefully.
‘It’s more than we had. This gives us confirmation of timings. Likely confirmation that whoever did this isn’t local to the Black Isle. It gives us a model of car to look out for and to reference in any media appeals. Even if these people ditch the car, which I guess is likely, someone’s bound to spot it and that’ll give us more to work on. It’s a step forward, son.’ This was the kind of speech that, in his own career, he’d always found deeply uninspiring, though it was obviously true as far as it went. But it was the bollocks you were apparently obliged to spout in a line-management role. He could tell Connor was unimpressed.
‘I guess so.’
Ginny Horton waited till Connor had left the room before crossing over to McKay’s desk. ‘He looked a bit shell-shocked. What did you do to him?’
‘Just congratulated him. Bit of a motivational talk.’
‘Ah. Poor wee thing.’
‘He’s got some good stuff.’ He slid the printouts across the desk towards her. ‘Looks like our car. Fake plates. Places the time of death around 3am.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘I’ll have a word with comms. We can reference the car in any appeals for information. Young Connor’s going to check for sightings in the previous days.’
‘Meanwhile,’ Horton said, ‘I’ve been contacted by Forres’s son.’
‘Forres’s son?’
‘A couple of the Edinburgh lot went round to break the news to him. Five o’clock on Christmas Day, would you believe? Family had just sat down to Christmas dinner.’
‘You can’t win with that kind of thing. If they’d waited, family might have complained about not being told straightaway. Must have been a hell of a shock, though.’
‘He seemed okay in the circumstances. I suspect he’d already realised the outcome was unlikely to be positive.’
‘And then he called you?’
‘I’m not quite sure why. Obviously, we needed to speak to him, but I hadn’t envisaged he’d be able to tell us very much we didn’t already know. But he told the Edinburgh officers he was keen to talk to someone involved in the investigation, so eventually he ended up talking to me.’
‘Impressions?’
‘Still in a state of shock about it all, I thought. A bit guilt-ridden.’
McKay tipped back in his chair to what looked like a dangerous angle, and stared at the ceiling. ‘You think he might have something to be guilty about?’
‘Just generic generational guilt – I should have done more to help him, I should have come up here earlier, I should have realised how vulnerable he really was. That stuff.’
‘We’ve all been through that,’ McKay said. ‘Even me. So why was he so desperate to beat a path to our door?’
‘Apparently because he wants to tell us about his dad. The real Hamish Forres.’
‘Does he have a clue about the real Hamish Forres?’
‘Who knows? He was keen to speak face-to-face. He’s driving up tomorrow. He’s keen to get back into his father’s house. Partly just for sentimental reasons but also to make sure it’s secure and safe, given that it’s likely to be unoccupied for some time.’
‘Don’t know if the examiners have finished there yet,’ McKay said. ‘But we can’t stop him once we open it up. And if he’s up here we can get the ID confirmed and get anything we can from him.’
‘I don’t know how much he’ll have to tell us,’ Horton said. ‘But he might know more than his father realised. That’s sometimes the way with children. They absorb stuff without even knowing they’re doing it. Osmosis.’
‘Bless you.’ McKay grinned and pushed himself to his feet. ‘Right, I can’t sit here blethering to you all day. Some of us have got work to do. And I can’t even contemplate that awful prospect without another coffee.’