McBride had waited for daylight for the best part of two hours. When it came, it crept into the room the way a woman tiptoes into your head – softly at first so you don’t hear the approach but then she’s walking so loudly you can’t think about anything else except the sound she’s making.
He’d had noisy females in his mind the whole time he’d lain in the darkness doing his best to hurry the arrival of dawn. Two of them – one he’d slept with, the other he knew he wanted to. But it hadn’t been Anneke Meyer or Petra Novak who had caused him to waken before he was due. It had been the man who had shared his company for a short time the night before – the man who wouldn’t accept a drink. Adam Gilzean was troubling him. He was prodding tentatively at him but leaving marks that wouldn’t go away.
When he rolled the blind open, McBride knew it was the kind of day that wasn’t going to get much better – for the weather or anything else. Dawn hadn’t been accompanied with a rising glow of sunlight or much else to feel optimistic about. It was dull and grey and dropped over him like a prison blanket.
On mornings like that he never wanted to run, especially if he also needed to think. These were the days when he oiled up the Trek and cycled with the weather. He didn’t ride fast, didn’t ride slow, just steady – and for several hours.
When he took the machine he preferred to most women he’d met down from its hook on the wall of the room that doubled as his office and went outside with it, McBride searched the sky for a patch of blue. He couldn’t find any but somewhere in the north the shade of grey was paler. He settled into the saddle and pedalled towards it.
Fours hours later, Adam Gilzean still loitered in his thoughts but the expenditure of energy had caused the endorphins to kick into McBride’s bloodstream and the familiar feeling of well-being they induced was permeating through him.
Kirriemuir had dropped away behind him and he rose out of his seat and stood on the pedals for the deceptive incline that would carry him into Glamis. Over his left shoulder he caught sight of the turrets of the castle where the mother of the queen had spent some of her childhood. It awakened long-forgotten memories of an assignment as a junior reporter when he’d stood in the wrong place and finished up in a line of dignitaries being introduced to Her Majesty by someone who had no idea who he was. It was a story Caroline used to delight in recounting whenever he was in danger of forgetting his humble journalistic origins.
He remembered other ways the woman who had once adored him used to keep his conceited feet on the ground. How she pricked his arrogant bubble but never with anything but gentleness – how she refused to take him seriously when he was at his most pompous. And he remembered Simon and the family they had once been.
So his long, lone journey into the hills behind Dundee had been worthwhile, as he knew it would. By the time he negotiated the last rises and falls in the road that brought him in a gentle sweep into the outer suburbs of the city, his head was at peace – even if his heart wasn’t.
The feeling of euphoria lasted for precisely one minute.
He passed a graffiti-camouflaged row of shops in a perimeter housing estate and glanced absently at the newsboards outside a dilapidated general store. An Evening Telegraph billboard screamed at him – ‘Brutal Murder of Young Woman in City Flat’.
Instinctively he knew who had committed it even though he had no clue who that might be.