She was still here, in the cold, small room with no windows. There were two buckets now, one empty and one with water. A clean flannel, folded up, sat on the rim. A piece of black cloth lay beside it.
The sight of the water brought on a desperate thirst. Her lips were dry, the side of her mouth was cracked open. She managed to roll onto her knees, making her way over to the bucket like a hobbled donkey, where she kneeled, dipping her lips to the surface and drinking, trying to ignore the dizziness in her head. Closing her eyes, she dipped her face in, regaining some clarity.
It did clear her head. She fell onto her side, her body cradling the bucket and then she decided to panic. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
In that panic was the persistent but dull memory of the figures who’d been crouching in the bushes, a falcon with a broken wing lying nearby. Bethany had known them but the more she tried to see them, the more elusive their faces became.
She’d thought the jab in her hip was accidental. They’d apologised, laughed, the three of them. She’d actually laughed when they’d pulled on the protective gloves.
Then, it all got very hazy.
Sunday breakfast had been interesting; Aklen acting as mein host, but Caplan could see the strain on his face. In the caravan, he was at the three-ring burner in the small kitchen area passing rolls with sausage and vegan sausage out the window, careful not to mix them up. With mugs of coffee, Aklen, Mags and Emma sat and munched their way through most of the shopping. Caplan, collar up against the early chill, listened to the conversation, adding very little, looking at her daughter, thinking about Bethany. The girl hadn’t returned overnight, and she’d texted Bethany’s father to prepare a full list of his daughter’s friends and contacts, mobile phone numbers and her email address. He’d called her back, clinging onto any comfort after a sleepless night. William Robertson was like a lamb in a storm. How awful must it be not to know where your child was, helpless to know what to do for the best.
Looking at her own family in daylight, she thought that Emma had lost weight. Emma told her she looked tired. Both agreed that Aklen was better – he had his enthusiasm for life back, but he still needed to be careful.
Listening to their casual chatter, she doubted they noticed that she was going in to work that day, all of which meant that Caplan couldn’t use the tiny shower in the caravan because there was no room for her to dress. Even when she put her laptop in her case and hung her ID round her neck it was a bit of a surprise to them. On a Sunday. As if the other three had a working week.
Her work phone had been beeping most of the night with updates. Lizzie Fergusson had been on the nightshift, sending the odd text re her thoughts on ‘Nicholas’ that had ended with an optimistic I think I’m onto something. Sarah Linden’s texts were progressively rambling, about how did Rachel stay married to That Tosser for that length of time. And if she, Linden, didn’t know about Nicholas, then there was nothing to know. Rachel’s comments could be the ramblings of a drug-induced stupor and Rachel wasn’t to be trusted. She’d been a bitch at training college and after all, look who she married. Her texts had continued on a similar vein for the rest of the evening.
Caplan had a thumping headache from lack of sleep so she pulled the Duster over in the first lay-by, scaring the birds who were feasting on the dead deer, and phoned April Farm B&B.
Betty said she was welcome to use the shower in room four; the guests had left but the cleaner hadn’t got round to cleaning it yet. But by the time Caplan got there, it was spotless and she took a long time to shower, to do her stretches, ease off the tension in her neck. After a change of clothes, pulling her dark hair up to its chignon, she took a good look at herself in the full-length mirror, checking that she was smart. Then she paid Betty and left to stop at the Shore cafe where she had toast and green tea, out in the fresh air, where there was peace and quiet with only the low rumble of the early ferry approaching from across the water for company. She never knew when she might get to eat again. It was nine o’clock when she got up from the table, leaving a tip, and drove the five minutes round to the station. She called Fergusson. Her call was answered immediately.
‘Are you sitting down?’
‘Yes, I’m in the car. Do you have something?’
She heard Lizzie Fergusson pause, take a deep breath. ‘Well, I know my way round a search engine.’
‘I’ve never doubted that.’
‘Well, I’ve found the fatal incident of Nikolas Kane Ardman. Nik with a K. Body found on the 23rd November 2016, deep in a forest near Beauly to the west of Inverness. Why was Rachel Ghillies looking at that?’
‘Good question.’
‘I’ve checked. She had nothing to do with the case. Neither did Rory. But,’ Fergusson added, ‘his injuries bear similarities to your dead body at Glen Douglas. They were on the wire overnight.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Glen Douglas and Nikolas Kane Ardman. Same injuries. I thought my screen hadn’t refreshed or something but it’s true.’
‘Okay.’ Caplan thought for a moment. ‘Fractured fibula and left canine tooth missing?’
‘Yes. But Ardman’s remains were skeletal, really, so nobody knows what else.’ A long silence. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Keep digging. Bye for now.’ Caplan rang off, recalling Ryce’s words about the diabetic man, dirty, found in a remote Glen with an injury to his left leg. She was calculating the timeline when Mackie came in and plumped her fifteen stone on the seat, making Caplan wince.
‘Right, ma’am, I think I found him.’
‘A Nikolas-with-a-k Kane Ardman, perhaps?’
‘Oh, you know.’ She looked disappointed. ‘Did you get the other one?’
‘The body in Glen Douglas?’
Mackie shook her head. ‘No. But another one that’s a bit of the same. Andrew Pottie?’
‘Go on.’ Something was niggling at Caplan now.
‘Body found in remote place, injury to the leg. I’ve printed out this.’ She handed an A4 sheet of paper to Caplan and kept talking as her boss regarded the image of a man, little more than a spotty wee boy.
‘Brief history. Andrew Pottie, date of birth 12th October 1999. Suffered from alcoholism and mental health issues. Both warranted periods of hospitalisation at Gartnavel Hospital. Then discharged via the Loch Lomond Drop-in Centre to a supervised bedsit in a unit in Alexandria. Then he got a job, unspecified in the report, and left around 28th December 2019 and wasn’t seen again until his body was discovered near Clatteringshaws Loch on 14th May 2020. Cause of death, unascertained.’
‘Where?’
Mackie shrugged. ‘Galloway? Down there somewhere.’
Caplan frowned. ‘There’s no crime there, Mackie. He found a job, left, and probably returned to his drinking habit.’
‘Cause of death, unascertained.’ Mackie wasn’t going to let it go.
Caplan thought for a moment. Mackie had a good brain behind the eccentricity. ‘Any pre or post-mortem injuries reported?’
‘Fractured fibula, left leg. Left canine tooth is missing. The skull had a few fractures. A few other minor fractures to long bones and ribs.’
‘And cause of death was unascertained?’
‘Been dead for too long. Predation. Couldn’t say exactly what killed him. Rumours were he’d pissed off somebody, they took him out there and beat him up.’ Mackie pursed her lips. ‘I’m thinking Rachel gave you the names for you to find out whoever “they” are. If it was all totally unconnected cases, then us trying to find commonality would get us nowhere. But it’s taken me and PC Fergusson five minutes flat to find similarities in location and age, plus broken fibulas. See what I mean?’
Caplan tried to follow Mackie’s logic. ‘Maybe.’
‘Do you think this could be big?’ Mackie was keen.
Caplan paused.
‘Do you not agree with me?’
‘Let’s find out more. Good work. We’re busy with Glen Douglas and the Rod-Todd situation. We’re short-staffed. I don’t have a DI. And we’d need to apply for funding to look into this further. We need evidence to show there’s a case here. What do we have? Three bodies, in the middle of nowhere, young people, similar injuries, over what? Seven years? It could be folk being daft. Is it common to break a fibula? I don’t know. But I do know I have other priorities on my desk right now.’ Caplan glanced at the clock. ‘I’ll look at it when I have time.’
‘Well, don’t leave it too long, or they’ll be pulling some other poor bugger out the woods in a body bag.’ Mackie stood up, hesitantly. ‘If you are sure …?’
‘Sure, for now.’ Caplan followed Mackie out.
Craigo’s desk was covered with its usual chaotic pile of papers, which on closer inspection were applications for medical reports, more scene photographs of the Roderick Taylor and Peter Todd locus, plus a printout of the spreadsheet of the house-to-house enquiries that had been ongoing in the quiet cul de sac. She couldn’t help but notice what different lives the two deceased had led. She pulled a Post-it note from the edge of the monitor. Rod and Todd anniversary, 2nd Sept, see La Fiorentina. She googled it to see it was an Italian restaurant in Balloch. Was Rod out or did they do takeaway? Whatever, she was sure Craigo was on it. Scattered amongst the scene photographs were unfolded maps and dirty mugs, but Craigo himself was absent. Caplan reached over to pick up a photograph of an oblong box, nothing else but the box. It could contain a box of expensive chocolates, a small picture perhaps. She consulted the log to see that this was the Amazon delivery to the house of the deceased. The contents had yet to be located but a note from Karl Pordini said he was happy to go back and have another look.
Caplan felt a little stab of disappointment, empathising with Mackie, keen to work on a case that wasn’t a case.
There was a single update on Craigo’s desk. Nobody had been traced who had spoken to or seen Bethany Robertson after she left the Revolve. Bethany’s phone remained off, non-trackable.
She went back into her office, knowing that, in McPhee’s absence, Mackie was watching her every move. Caplan made herself comfortable and checked her messages sent through the secure system. More had been added to the Rod and Todd log; no history of depression, no red flags reported except, in hindsight, it had been a year, maybe more, since somebody had set eyes on Roderick Taylor.
Logging on to the case file of Ardman, Caplan checked who had been working on it when the body was discovered. The name Ghillies was absent. As she read on, bits of the case came back to her, more because of the remote location where the body had been found. It was a bit of a mystery, but there was little suspicion of foul play. Had Fergusson stumbled on the right one? Certainly no major investigation team had been set up to look at the disappearance of Nikolas-with-a-k Kane Ardman. Nobody had noticed he was missing until his body turned up in 2016 and it was thought that the body had been lying there for two years or so, in a natural shelter formed by the root system of four trees that had fallen in a single incident. The lifted earth had formed a clam-shaped roof, and a matching basin on the ground. He had crawled in there at some point and died, his body slowly decomposing and subject to predation. He was deep into the forest, there was little chance of somebody stumbling across his body.
Nikolas, aged eighteen in 2014, had dropped out of the little bit of society that he had ever connected with. He had been brought up in the care system and had gradually moved north aged about sixteen. The only way of tracking him was through his DWP payments. He had stayed in a few Glasgow hostels before going to a unit in Edinburgh, the Ashdown Community, before dropping off the radar altogether; he had packed the few personal possessions he had and left. His ‘friends’, well, the few that could recall him, presumed that he had drifted away. Nobody knew where he had gone or why. Nobody cared. Caplan had a quick flick back through to the records of the Ashdown Community staff. Paul Norman, Mo Maitland, Sean Connell, Robbie Fraser and Karen Mullan. One full-time, two-part timers and two volunteers. And that, from what she could read, was the story of this man’s young life.
She requested sight of any more detailed files from deep storage while she kept reading. Ardman was found two years later. That was an estimated date calculated from when he had last picked up a DWP payment and from the estimation of time of death by the forensic pathologist. He was found lying in his natural shelter by a walker who had got totally lost and was himself in need of medical attention when he finally stumbled onto a road. Probably, like Ardman, the walker had taken shelter in the shallow roof of the uprooted trees then realised he was sitting beside skeletonised remains.
It was reckoned that even before death, Ardman had been emaciated. He had a few teeth historically missing, but the left canine looked as if it had been knocked out, perimortem. He could have been involved in an accident at some point as he had a fracture in his lower left leg that had not healed. The pathologist remarked that he wouldn’t have been able to walk very well with an injury like that. How he managed to get to where he was found was a bit of a mystery but nothing that couldn’t be explained by him running into the forest while under the influence of God knew what then hurting his leg. The body was too decomposed to test for metabolites of drugs, but a hair sample told a story of a long history of substance abuse, though he had been clean for a few weeks before his death.
There had been enquiries of course and there, eventually, she found Rachel’s name, attached to the case tangentially, as part of a wider missing person’s enquiry that had been looking for a woman called Rhona Welsh, whose body had later been found in an isolated part of a forest near Tain. That was all it said. She’d been listed as a missing person, vulnerable status, four days before she was found. She was identified by her parents.
It had taken much longer to identify Ardman’s body. People with such challenges as he had faced in life tended to slip and slide through life without getting their DNA on record if they were careful enough not to be found guilty of any crime.
There was a small note on the file saying there was nothing to recognise facially due to passage of time and scavenger activity. The post-mortem examination had suggested that he may have been alive when he crawled under the roots seeking shelter but he had passed away exactly where he had been found.
It was odd.
But was it suspicious?
The remoteness of the location had given rise to speculation that somebody else had been involved. Certainly, somebody had taken him 150 miles from Edinburgh to Inverness. His last known official address was the Ashdown Community, his single person’s apartment within the supervised unit in Edinburgh. There was a link to a website in the references. It was a website full of conspiracy theorists. Even then, there was a favoured scenario; one guy hitching a ride, the driver gets fed up with him, punts him out the car saying that a bus will be along in a couple of hours. The hitcher stands in front of the car hoping it won’t drive on. It does and clips the left leg, causing the injury. He decides to take a short cut through the forest not realising how vast it is, how disorientating it can be. Maybe Ardman fell and he crawled into the shelter of the giant tree roots for cover. He may have fallen from the top of the exposed root plate, as if he had been walking through the long ferns and the moss, not really paying attention, maybe drugged, or stoned. Nobody had come forward, nobody had seen him since he walked out of the apartment. Nobody had noticed he had gone, nobody had reported him missing. The website reported that somebody had said Ardman had been happy to leave – he had said that life was going to get better. Impossible though it seemed, it did appear that his short life had got worse.
But what had happened to him in those intervening months?
He had travelled a fair way.
Where had he been?
It was noted that his ‘last seen’ and his last DWP payment was March 2014. Then his body was found in 2016 with too many variables to give an exact date of death.
Rhona Welsh had gone missing, been found dead in the woods and identified. To Caplan’s mind they were not the same ‘fit’. Welsh had a history of severe depression; she had been sectioned a few times to safeguard her own health. Her brother and sister had raised concerns. She had been missed and been loved.
And Rachel had said, clearly, find ‘them’. Not him. ‘Them’.
What did she know? Ardman found in a rural area, with an injury to his lower left leg, just like the diabetic in Glen Douglas. Many more similarities with Ardman than with Welsh.
How neat would it have been if the local radio news story of the body in Glen Douglas had come to the ears of Rachel and it had fired some synapse in her brain? Caplan knew that wasn’t true; Rachel had asked to see them before the body in Glen Douglas had been discovered. The timeline didn’t fit with Rachel’s diagnosis or the terminal prognosis either. Something in early September had prompted her to get in touch with her old colleagues.
Caplan lowered her head to the cradle of her hands, elbows on her desk, and tried to think. She had Bethany and Shivonne to find, she shouldn’t be sidetracked by Rachel’s deathbed mutterings, yet instinct told her that Mackie and Lizzie were onto something.
She heard the door to the incident room open and somebody walk across the floor. Craigo was sitting at his desk, still in his jacket with the collar turned inward. He had a file in front of him and his little eyes were screwed up as the podgy forefinger of his right hand ran down a list on his computer screen. The forefinger of the left hand did the same on an A4 piece of paper covered in small, dense font. Caplan tapped the glass of her office, indicating that he should join her. DC McPhee had arrived, lingering near the whiteboard with the box of wipes in his hand. Mackie was now sitting at her desk, her head dipped behind her screen, spying on him.
Her phone pinged. Ghillies wanted a progress report about Bethany. She texted back that she had moved the investigation up a notch and it was now an official enquiry. She’d listed Bethany as vulnerable due to mental health. She had no idea if it was true, but she had to work the system.
She then found the number for the Revolve Centre and spoke to Karen Beattie, the day manager; Shivonne hadn’t returned, her bed hadn’t been slept in, but that wasn’t unusual. Mo had called in sick so she was busy. Down the phone Caplan heard a buzzer, and Beattie said she’d need to go. Caplan hung up and was still looking at the handset when Craigo came in, pausing at the door as if he had forgotten something, or got a stabbing pain in his gut.
‘Do I close the door?’ he asked, needing clarification.
‘You usually do,’ replied Caplan. ‘Have a seat. What’s up with Mackie?’
‘She’s trying to find out what’s going on with DC McPhee and that young lady that he’s courting. It’s very important. To DC McPhee. And no doubt to the young lady concerned.’
Caplan sat back in her chair, moving her phone and the paper pad to one side, her laptop to the other. ‘Bethany? Shivonne? We’re going out to see Robertson when we are through here.’
‘Can I be back by lunchtime, ma’am? Vet’s coming to the farm.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘The cows don’t know that.’
She nodded at him, acknowledging he did far more hours than he claimed for in overtime. ‘I need a recent image of Shivonne from somewhere. Instagram, I’d imagine.’
Craigo said, ‘Oh, and CCTV has been requested. We’ve timed the route home. We’ve traced Shivonne to the Ship Inn. They were not together. Shiv was very drunk going back to the Revolve.’
‘But never got there?’
‘No. I’ve two locals finding how she’d get home, only three or four ways and it’s less than a mile. And she’s well known in the pub. She left at closing time, last seen walking away on her own. Bethany’s last seen would be back of three, Shiv’s was half past eleven. She was the same as she ever was. Bethany was known to walk past the ferry terminals. There’s a timetable and routine there – something might come up.’
‘Can you get me some background on Shivonne? MacDougall, isn’t it? Good. Peter Todd and Roderick Taylor? What happened to them? Are they related to the Simpsons?’ She pointed in the direction of the action wall in the incident room, the cartoon picture clearly visible through the glass panel.
‘Oh, they’re Rod and Todd Flanders. From the Simpsons. They’re religious. They eat cucumber and cottage cheese.’ Craigo nodded.
Caplan swung a little in her chair. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re talking about, have you?’
‘Well. No.’
‘What do you have?’
Craigo opened the file and licked his lips in concentration. This was part of his little routine; he could recall this information off the top of his head and would still recall it if she met him in an old folks’ care facility in forty years’ time. ‘Peter Todd was a forty-eight-year-old financial adviser, took over his dad’s business, and very successfully from the look of his bank accounts. Office in Glasgow, going back in after three years of hybrid working. He went into Edinburgh one day a fortnight. He got on well with his colleagues. Like I say, his financials look good, but we’ll keep digging. There’s a fourth account we’ve found at a different bank where money’s going into a premium bond account, under Rod’s name only. Todd doesn’t have any bonds. Todd and Rod have been together over twenty years. Rod was fifty-two, worked as a chiropodist purely doing home visits until he hurt his shoulder and found the job too uncomfortable. That would be over four years ago now. As far as we can ascertain, he’s been a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy. It could be two years since he’s been over the door.’
‘Mental health issue?’
‘Waiting on GP notes. Todd was the one who went out with pals. The neighbours thought Rod was too poorly to leave the house. It was their anniversary on the second of September. It’s in Todd’s diary, starred and underlined. It was important. He bought champagne, Jacquart Mosaique. He ordered a meal from a good Italian in Balloch. They don’t do take out, but they made it up for Todd to cook at home. There were few visitors to the house, one regular who might be a health worker of some kind?’ Craigo rattled his pencil on the desk, thinking.
‘Macmillan maybe? Or a mental health nurse if he had been openly talking about suicide?’
‘My thoughts exactly, ma’am. As Todd said to Mrs Gains, this was the way they’d bow out.’
‘Any other regular callers to the house apart from her? Him?’
‘A her, ma’am. No other regular callers. This lady only visited Rod when Todd was out. Todd has a life, and Rod doesn’t. Nobody ever looked in on him, apart from the lady. I’m trying to trace her. Easier tomorrow when things are open. The IT guys have Rod’s laptop on their list but they say as it’s probable suicide there’s no rush. There’s also a tablet somewhere so I’ve sent Pordini back to the house for that. Mrs Gains is positive that the visitor was related to the cancer.’
‘It’s all so bloody sad.’ Caplan blew out a long breath through pursed lips. ‘Ryce has scheduled the PM for tomorrow morning, after she’s checked the medical records. It’s true what she said. I’ve known those with terminal malignancy. Rachel. My dad. You see it in them. Ryce saw nothing in Rod when the body was admitted. He looked healthy.’
‘Apart from being dead, ma’am.’ Craigo handed her a photograph of them both, standing on a beach, arms round each other.
Caplan wouldn’t have recognised them from the inert waxy figure in the bed, or the puffy blue-faced man swinging from the banister. She noticed that Craigo was quiet. He was watching her as she looked at the photographs. Todd had been a handsome man, fair haired, big generous features and a wide smile.
‘Pordini found a few pictures of them from round the house. That one came from the bedside table.’
‘The one Rod looked at every night? It was important to him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm. Wider financials? Had they insured each other? Other money? Other family? Ryce will be on to the GP first thing tomorrow. Let’s make sure that we have it all mapped out correctly.’
‘It’s all very sad.’
Caplan placed the picture down in front of her, looking at Rod with his Buddy Holly glasses and the wide grin that had etched deep lines in his face; evidence that he smiled often. It made her wonder what Todd had been like. ‘If I’d planned to take my own life, with my loved one coming with me, I think I’d like them to be beside me. Why would I not take whatever they had taken? Especially if we had the drugs? Why not take the same thing, lie down in bed beside them, hold them, then let the waves take you, drift away.’
‘I can see you’ve been giving this some thought, ma’am.’
‘And you? What would you do?’ Caplan looked at her colleague. ‘Nobody could’ve attended that scene without it crossing their mind.’
‘Me, ma’am? I’d climb to the top of Ben Lora, sit and watch the sunset, then slip away. Or as the sun rises, one or the other, everything comes and everything goes in its own time. That’s always been the way of it.’
‘What about your cousin out there?’
‘Oh, her, well.’ Craigo shook his head. ‘Well, she’d eat the biggest takeaway and then get totally rat-arsed, pardon my French, ma’am. Then she’d pass out on the big comfy sofa. In fact, she’s done that many a time when perfectly happy.’
Caplan looked out to where Mackie’s gaze was following McPhee around, like a hunter after her prey, like the falcon after the kitten. As McPhee went to sit at his desk, Mackie’s head darted from one side of her monitor to the other. It’s what made her such a good police officer in a small village like this; she was extremely nosey.
‘It’s the hanging that doesn’t seem right to me. Find out more about Peter Todd, the kind of person he was. Something drove them to take their own lives. They seem happy on their anniversary on the 2nd of September. A week later they are both dead.’ Caplan wrinkled her nose, thinking.
‘Does that explain the holiday brochures?’
‘Who knows? You thinking they were planning a nice romantic getaway? Well, I have holiday brochures, Craigo. I never bloody get to go on one, do I?’