Danso was as scared as me about Malachi’s plans. Instinct told him to listen to me, not to Struthers. But his head had gone further than mine and he’d started thinking about those suicide bombers in London, about all the capabilities Dove had, and whether his spectacular death would take out someone more than himself. The ACC had consulted with the home secretary, and over the next few days senior officers from London’s SO13 terrorist team flew up to meet him. Suddenly the incident room at Oban was crammed with criminal profilers and explosives experts, tearing apart the community’s computer. Every ex-member of the PHM was being tracked down, every donor, anyone who had sent a letter or email in the last ten years. They’d got HOLMES actions raised to interview anyone who might have known Dove, even people involved in the arson or IRS investigations over in New Mexico. Some of the locals and national TV stations in Scotland had run appeals for sightings of the blue Vauxhall stolen from Crinian and the usual attention-seekers crawled out of the wainscoting – at least twenty people had seen the car and more than half of them had recognized Dove. They knew he was the Pig Island killer from the press, who were busy jumping up and down on Dove’s sacred head. Mystery of Missing Preacher: The Mad Monk of Pig Island. All of which was funny, Danso said, because the force was still waiting for the procurator fiscal to let them name Malachi Dove publicly as their suspect.
‘But what’s good,’ he said one morning, standing in the kitchen at the rape suite, still wearing his raincoat, ‘what’s good is we might know where he went after Crinian.’
It was Friday. Six days had passed since the massacre, and that, as everyone knew, wasn’t good. The golden hours for a case, the first twenty-four, had passed. But now Danso was holding up a video-cassette for us to see. ‘There I was, thinking it was all going down the cludgie, when this turns up.’ He went to the TV on his long, awkward, ostrich legs, slotted the tape into the machine and stood back, aiming the remote at the video player. ‘Inverary.’ He looked at Angeline, who was sitting on the sofa, arms folded. ‘It’s about fifteen miles from Crinian. Ever heard of it?’
‘No.’
‘Dad never mentioned a friend in the area? Family? Someone who’d been with the PHM?’
‘All the people he knew were in America. Or London. He was born in London.’
‘You can watch it as many times as you need. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know.’
Me and Angeline and Lexie all sat hunched round the TV, staring at the screen. It was grainy black-and-white CCTV footage but continuous action – easier to watch than the cut-price time-lapse of most shopping centres. The time code clicked away in the top corner and shoppers moved back and forward along the walkway, some stopping to sit on one of the four benches arranged round a concrete planter full of palm trees. A checkout girl in the window of Holland and Barrett opposite the camera gazed out at the passers-by, idly biting her cuticles.
‘In about two seconds you’re going to see him come from this side and – wait…wait…there. See him? Here?’
A man, the top of his head turned to the camera, appeared on the walkway. He shuffled across the screen, arms hanging listlessly at his sides. He was about to disappear off when something caught his eye in the window of a Superdrug shop. He turned his back to the camera and we had time to study his longish hair, the unremarkable sports jacket, the dark slacks.
‘This is the best look you get at him. It was the sandals that did it. Sandals and socks. You both said sandals and socks in your statements. It’s the kind of detail sticks in people’s heads.’
I inched a bit nearer the screen, staring at the figure. If it was my own dad I wouldn’t’ve been sure from this angle. I waited for him to face the camera. But he didn’t. He peered through the chemist’s window a little longer, then turned and continued off the screen. There was a long, silent pause. We all turned to Angeline. I’d expected her to look blank, but the second I saw her face I knew. She’d sat up a bit, her head was straight and she was staring at the screen. Her hands were on her knees, clenching and unclenching.
‘Angeline?’ Danso studied her. ‘Want to see it again? There’re a lot of these wee characters out in Inverary and—’
‘No. Not again.’ She blew out a long breath from pursed lips, a long fooooo sound, like she was trying to keep calm. ‘Bastard,’ she muttered at the TV. ‘That bastard.’
It was the jacket she’d recognized. She’d washed it for him at the beginning of the summer and that was how she knew it was him. It had needed to be hand washed because there was blood on it from the pigs. Danso passed the news back to the incident room, then came and sat with me on the sofa. We had the shopping-centre video in the player and were watching it over and over again. On the sixth time Malachi stopped in front of Superdrug I caught up the remote and paused the tape. I took a chair and placed it in front of the TV.
‘What is it?’
I sat so close to the screen that the static popped against my nose. I clicked the video, frame by frame, until Dove came backwards into the walkway and turned to the chemist’s window again. ‘I want to know what he’s staring at. We’re not seeing something. We’re not seeing this through his eyes. There’s something here…’
I searched the screen a little longer, trying to decode the blurry pixels, the areas of grey and black and white, and when I still couldn’t figure out what I was looking at I pushed the chair back, got the Ordnance Survey map from my jacket pocket and opened it on the kitchen table. I ran my finger down the list of place names: Inverary, Inveraish, Inveranan. I drew a pencil ring round Inverary and stared at it, looking at what surrounded it. A scattering of estates, a sewage-treatment plant, a power station.
‘What’s there, Malachi?’ I murmured, tracing the line of a Forestry Commission sector with my thumbnail. ‘What’s there?’
Danso got up and came to the table, looking over my shoulder, so close I could smell the dry-cleaners’ chemicals on his suit. ‘If we could look at this through his eyes, tell me, what would we see?’
I shook my head. ‘Twenty years ago I could have told you. Believe me or don’t believe me, it’s true. Twenty years ago I could have told you what he had for breakfast.’
‘And now?’
‘Now…’ I sighed and turned to look at him, rubbing my temple, wishing my head would stop thumping. Now, the answer was no. I didn’t know.
‘That’s because he’s changed,’ Danso said, reading my thoughts. ‘He’s killed thirty people and it’s made him a different creature. There aren’t any rules any more.’