‘I said immediately, Alec. Not in fifteen minutes.’
‘Aye, so I was told. I came as soon as I could.’
‘I’m not accustomed to people disobeying my instructions.’
‘I’m not accustomed to being treated like someone’s personal lackey.’
McKay was in Nightingale’s office. Nightingale had told him to take a seat, but McKay, characteristically, had ignored him and was prowling round the room, as if seeking some point of vulnerability. He knew the constant movement was irritating Nightingale, which seemed a sufficient motive in itself.
‘You’re not beyond being disciplined, Alec.’
‘And what are you going to discipline me for? Taking an urgent operational call so that I was briefly delayed in attending a routine meeting with you?’
‘I was thinking more of insubordination.’
‘We’re not in the army. I’m just telling you what happened.’
‘What was this call anyway?’
‘From Helena. She’s working at home and she’s just taken a delivery.’
‘A delivery? You don’t mean–’
‘A doll.’
‘A doll? Had she ordered a doll?’
McKay stopped prowling and dropped himself into the chair opposite Nightingale’s desk. ‘Oddly enough, no. But that wasn’t the only interesting thing about this doll.’
‘Go on.’
‘Its head had been severed.’
Nightingale blinked. ‘What?’
‘Someone had cut off its head. And slashed open its body.’
‘But why would anyone send something like that?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? We have to assume it’s some kind of signal or message, like my delivery yesterday, but it’s hard to see quite what it’s intended to communicate.’
‘Other than “we know where you live”?’
‘That’s the bit that Helena’s most likely to take to heart, but it must be something more than that. The doll itself looks old and well-used. I’ve had it sent to forensics.’
‘And no other clues or indications in the box?’
‘Like the others. No labels or information. Just a plain cardboard box. Delivered by a guy in a grey van. I’m getting the plates checked out.’
Nightingale unexpectedly slammed his fist on the desktop, with the air of a student teacher trying to regain control of his class. ‘Christ, this is a fucking mess. We seem to be getting nowhere. Why the hell was this doll sent to Helena Grant?’
‘That’s what intrigues me,’ McKay said. ‘Deliveries to me and to Helena. Suggests there’s something personal about this. Though I’ve no idea how that would link to the Gillans or the Dawsons.’ McKay rose and resumed his roaming around the office. ‘We’ve got people looking at the Gillans’ business interests but we’ve not so far uncovered anything suspicious. The car-hire business seems to have been Andrea Gillan’s personal baby. She built it up as an offshoot of her husband’s commercial hire business, and it produced a decent profit. The commercial business is a bigger and more complicated set-up, with various agricultural subsidiaries. It’s a bit of a tangled web of companies, and it’s possible there’s something dodgy concealed in there. But the number-crunchers reckon it might just be set up to deal tax-efficiently with the seasonality of the various operations.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the detail. But we’re only at the start of pulling that apart so it’s possible we might find something more interesting in there.’
McKay had mainly been detailing all this because he wanted to remind Nightingale that the team had been beavering away over the past couple of days. He was growing tired of humouring a man who couldn’t be bothered even to be present at the investigation he was supposedly leading.
McKay’s own priority was to get back to Ginny, to test out the wild hunch he’d had when viewing the TV news report. The more he’d thought about it, the less convinced he’d felt. He recalled a training course, a few years before, in which the trainer, some kind of forensic psychologist, had talked about the phenomenon of motivated perception – the tendency to see what we want to see. McKay couldn’t recall much of the detail but he remembered some of the experiments the trainer had described. The core message had been that human perception was notoriously unreliable, particularly when faced with an ambiguous image or incident.
That was no doubt the case here. Isla had thought she’d spotted her brother. Ginny had believed she’d seen the witness from Loch Morlich. McKay had thought he’d seen – well, something else again. Something which, the more he considered it, barely made any sense. They were each of them imposing their own preferred order on something that, in reality, was little more than a blurred set of pixels.
‘We need to find something soon,’ Nightingale was saying. ‘I’m hoping this might have some significance.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards McKay, who leaned forward to examine it.
‘This the image you found in Dawson’s mail?’
‘Copy of it. We’ve got the original bagged up.’
McKay gazed at the image for a moment. Then he picked it up, held it out in front of him and squinted at it.
‘I wasn’t asking to you admire it,’ Nightingale said.
McKay was still staring at the picture, his head tilted slightly to one side. ‘Can I borrow this?’
‘Take it. It’s just a print-off. I’m getting the tech people to see if we can do a reverse image search on the internet to identify her. If that fails we can try it on the Dawsons’ relatives and any friends or associates we identify and include it in a media appeal.’ Nightingale was watching McKay’s face. ‘Mean something to you?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Probably just motivated perception.’
‘Probably just what?’
‘Seeing what you want to see.’ McKay’s eyes remained fixed on the image. ‘Or, in this case, perhaps seeing something you should have seen long before now.’