They had not let her sleep. They had made her stand all night.
If it had been night.
None of it made sense, except that they were enjoying her torment. Bethany stood with a bag over her head, unable to see anything. Something had been looped round her head then dropped onto her upper arms, pinning them to her sides, and then The Other had come very close, standing beside her. She had felt them breathing into her left ear as they had stood in perfect silence. Bethany could sense slow movement, and she could smell minty toothpaste, and an aftershave or a cologne that held a vague memory for her.
She knew The Other.
She concentrated on the scent, images flicking through her mind. University? No. Something at Revolve? No. Where did she know that person from? The hospital when she had her operation? That image stayed for a wee while. Her dad at the side of her bed, holding an Asda bag and pulling out things she had asked for, although he had, in the main, always brought her nearly the right thing but not quite; green grapes not black, milk chocolate Maltesers not white, original Lucozade not orange. She’d been annoyed that he hadn’t bothered to get her exactly what she’d asked for.
She closed her eyes, tears burning the memory.
The smell was an association with her dad. But who was it?
Somewhere he’d be looking for her, not sleeping. He’d be frantic, the police would be searching. Rory would have pulled strings for us surely.
Caplan got up, walked down the short corridor and stood outside the toilet, waiting, then knocked and asked if McPhee was on his own. Instead of letting him come out, she went in. The constable was splashing cold water on his face. Caplan checked that the three cubicle doors were empty.
‘What’s up?’ he asked but wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘I was about to ask you the same question. Is everything okay?’
‘Yeah. Everything’s fine.’ He paused. ‘Just dandy.’
She saw that he was close to tears.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Only this bloody cough, ma’am. I need to get back to work. I think Mackie’s monitoring my movements.’ His hand reached out to his mobile phone.
‘Callum, we are quite a close unit here. I’d like to think that if you are unhappy or stressed, you would say, and I will do my damnedest to help sort it out. Sometimes talking to somebody not involved makes a difference.’
He smiled at her. ‘Thank you.’
‘Have you been to the doctor? You seem to be getting very clumsy, a little forgetful at times.’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’
‘The only thing to be sorry about would be if you were ignoring something simple, like a vitamin deficiency, a malabsorption, that kind of thing. I’m telling you, go to see the doc and let me know. Let me know that you have been.’
She let him leave. He was desperate to get away. Walking over to where he’d been, she looked down at the five short brown hairs on the back of the sink. Not Craigo’s, not Stewart’s. McPhee was losing his hair.
Caplan returned to her office, leaving them to their work. She’d been half-listening to them turning ideas over. Chatting away, their conversation had turned to something seen on the dark web, something they didn’t have the funding to pursue. Something about gangs of teens, young teens, chasing others, catching the last one. It depended on who they caught, what happened to them. Whatever, it wasn’t nice. But, sitting at her desk and studying the map, Caplan thought about the remoteness of the areas and the uniformity of the societal status of those who were missing. They would not be missed, these vulnerable, perfect victims … except Bethany and Lisa. They were another little subset; two women with a tangible connection to those organisations that looked after the welfare of … the words crept into her mind … the other victims. And there was Glen Douglas with his lovely teeth and untraceable DNA. Caplan wondered how Linden was getting on with that. Everybody and their donkey were signed up to some ancestral website these days. And Glen Douglas, in the recent past, had lived a life that had left footprints. All they needed to do was follow and they’d get to where they needed to be, and to the perpetrators of these crimes. Glen Douglas, whoever he was, could be the key to what happened to the rest. A creeping suspicion was suggesting itself in her mind, a bigger picture, something that Rachel, from her wider viewpoint, had seen. A pattern of young, vulnerable people being taken out to a remote place and killed. Or left to die. What was the point?
Sometimes there wasn’t a point.
In the quiet of her office, her mobile rang. As expected, it was from Linden.
Caplan asked, ‘Did you ever study that short story at school, what was it called, “The Lottery”? Where a wee village in the back end of nowhere has a lottery and the “winner” basically becomes the prey. I can’t recall how it goes but somebody gets chased and stoned or something. It’s about many things but mainly man’s inhumanity to man, mob rule, the persecution of the weak or of those not worthy.’
‘I did pay attention because our English teacher had a great arse. I’d have chased him down had I been a couple of years older. I know the story, 1940s wasn’t it? What brought that to mind?’ Linden’s voice slowed. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Is that what’s going on here? Is it a game for them?’ She heard Linden tap her pen off something softly.
Then Linden was businesslike again. ‘Is there any chance, any chance at all, that this Bethany and the one with the stupid spelling have gone off together? Two young women finding some solace in each other?’ Linden’s voice slipped into that slightly crisp tone that Caplan knew well. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time that a fine upstanding woman had been led astray by somebody on the wrong side of the law, would it, DCI Caplan?’
Caplan knew her friend was digging for information on Lizzie Fergusson, and ignored it. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time, no, but I doubt they’re together. Bethany’s phone has been off. So has Shiv’s. Something has happened to those two young women. And I doubt that it’s good.’
‘Bethany might have turned her phone off so that her creeping Jesus of a dad doesn’t know where she is. Who the hell wants to know what company their twenty-one-year-old daughter is keeping?’
‘Their parents want to know. He had a location tile in her bag.’
‘Fuck’s sake. She’s not six. Who the hell cares who she’s with and where she goes? She’s an adult, she can do what the hell she wants. Let’s get one mess cleared up at a time. Where’s Shivonne? Where’s Bethany? It’s too much for both of them to have gone missing. Maybe it’s young love. Dad too disapproving. Did they have a shared history of abuse? Maybe Bethany’s trust fund for uni has gone. Look into it. Something about it feels off to me. Ghillies is not long retired and still has friends in places high enough to scald my ass from on high so please don’t fuck this up. Find her quick. Off you trot.’
‘Beth’s twenty-one, Shiv’s twenty. Ghillies is a bit, I don’t know, a bit too defensive, a bit too interested in her whereabouts.’
Linden went very quiet. ‘Tread carefully. You could be getting into something deep here. You might be digging into something that’ll embarrass your colleagues. Don’t expect to get many Christmas cards as your career goes on.’ She sniffed. ‘Let me know if there’s anything else you need. The request for the DNA on Glen Douglas has been escalated. I quoted you on the flash teeth and rich relatives. I had to be nice to people.’
‘It won’t kill you.’
‘As soon as I know, you will. Zoom call later? Anything else I can do for you? No? Good.’ The phone went down.
Caplan looked out at the lengthening list of names, then at her team, scrabbling around. They had even titled the board Operation Dark Sky. It was fitting. What they needed was more personnel, more foot soldiers.
And some funding.
Yes, some funding might be good. Might be better to wait until Linden was a bit more receptive.
Caplan went back to first principles. The identity of the boyfriend. Whoever he was, he wasn’t coming forward. Even if he was unknown to Robertson, even if he’d been out of the country, he’d now know of his girlfriend’s disappearance. So, he was keeping quiet for a reason. Because he was married?
Who was he? And the older skinny blonde with big tits? Caplan recalled how Linden had described Wilma Vance: Blonde, well dressed, silicone implants and two brain cells. She would fit Tiggerdean’s description. Did that mean it was Vance in the car? Or Rory? Rory’d been concerned when Bethany went missing, but given his relationship with her dad, he could hardly be nonchalant.
She looked at the image on her computer. The grey Skoda had been slowing to join a traffic queue and the image of the driver, blurred by the pixelation of the camera footage, was only visible through the passenger window. It was picked up again at the traffic lights at the roundabout on the A85. That image was even worse.
But there was one more image of the car rolling to a halt at the traffic lights where a partial plate was clearly picked up by Automatic Number-Plate Recognition. Caplan waited for the system to come up with something. All it came up with was 19 AC and a message that there wasn’t enough of a number-plate there to recognise.
Craigo was looking very pleased with himself, Google Maps open on his laptop, as he knocked then walked into Caplan’s office without waiting to be asked.
‘Do you know Pulpit Hill Park? It’s on her way home.’
‘I know of it but I’m not overly familiar. Have you found Bethany?’
‘I’ve found where she wasn’t,’ said Craigo confidently. ‘But we’ve had the prelim report from the tech boys in Glasgow about her email correspondence, Facebook messages and a month of phone log.’
‘Did we get a warrant?’
‘Played the mental health card; the dad and the Fiscal agreed.’
‘Good for you.’
‘There’s wee bit of to and fro but by far and away, the main contact is with someone called Angela.’
‘Angela?’ Caplan sat up. ‘Was there an Angela on her contact list.’
Craigo shook his head. ‘But there’re lots of calls and texts to Angela. On further investigation, Angela has a number on a pay as you go. Maybe something to ask her dad about this afternoon. And in the meantime, I’ve narrowed down where Bethany went after she left the Revolve Centre. It’s not ideal …’
Caplan knew it would take a team of six officers more than a month to look at all the CCTV that covered Pulpit Hill Park. But Craigo was a good deductive thinker.
‘Well, you see …’
‘Talk me through it in one minute or less. We’ve a very busy day today.’
‘It wasn’t raining when she left the Revolve. She walked along the prom, passed Lochran at the ferry point. She’s seen in the corner of the frame from the camera at the top of the park, she goes into the park then takes the path up the hill.’
‘Is that her?’ Caplan looked closely at the image on the laptop. It was her. Something about her build made it obvious to Caplan that this was the same woman that William Robertson had photographed on his phone as she had left their house. ‘Yes, definitely her, not Shiv.’
‘She doesn’t come out the park. Something happened to her in there. And this was handed in by Neesa who runs the newsagents on the corner. She walks her dog in the park and found this blue rucksack.’ He held up the evidence bag. The fluffy owl inside was crushed against the plastic. ‘The strap was cut on the rucksack. It contains all her personal belongings, except her phone. If the location tile was in the rucksack, it has gone. If I’d known we had the rucksack as evidence sooner, I’d have got a bit further with the tile.’
‘So, it’s not just been handed in?’
‘It came in yesterday,’ said Craigo, looking out of the window.
‘Why are we only hearing about it now?’
Craigo shrugged and looked very innocent.
Caplan placed her head in her hands. ‘Did Stewart bring it up here?’
‘He did.’
‘Who signed for it?’
Craigo ignored her. ‘I checked the log. There’s another evidence bag. They came in within an hour of each other. This bag had two feathers in it, big feathers, a bit stripey. They were handed in by the park-keeper. He found them in the rhododendron bushes, after seeing the birdy people there. It’s gone missing though.’ He hummed a little. ‘So I had another look at this wee toy here, a real close look, and there are two, maybe three small feathers stuck on the fabric. I’m thinking forensics will take time and too much money?’
‘Can you photograph them without touching them? Send an image to … whoever knows about feathers? That’s your type of thing.’
‘Raptor Rescue, ma’am.’
‘Was it McPhee who signed for it?’ She checked the log on the label and sighed. ‘So, the tile?’
‘Well, I called Mr Robertson, her father.’
‘Yes, I know who he is.’
Craigo ignored her; he was on a roll. ‘And asked him how he attached the tile to the leather.’ His wee beady eyes looked around the office. ‘Normal tags have a clip whereas tiles are much less conspicuous, more covert if you like. They go on with a patch. The patch isn’t there, and you’d need to know to look. There’s a small square of adhesive residue right in the side at the bottom of the bag, in the fold in the leather.’
‘And we don’t know where the tile is now because it’s been destroyed or turned off?’
‘One or the other.’
‘The person who took Bethany knew it was there.’
‘Or she did it?’ Craigo didn’t move.
‘Where does the tile go on a Wednesday morning?’
‘It stays at the Revolve from about nine to one or two p.m., then it goes home. I checked.’
‘Good work. So she knew the tile was there. Do we have anything on the boyfriend?’
‘Not as yet. Robertson’s due in for a chat in the next half hour. McPhee’s out the toilet, looking at the Octavia. We need to know how she got out of the park.’
‘A way you’ve not looked at. Would she climb the fence? How many exits are there?’
Craigo pursed his lips, undaunted. ‘Four. One that she’d use if she was going up the hill home. It’s an old-fashioned park. The main gates allow vehicles through. The Park and Recreation department had no vehicles scheduled to drive through the park that day. But I’ve seen three on the CCTV. One wheelchair taxi that was picking somebody up, Mum and daughter, Rita Lyle from Westerae gardens. Her daughter is twelve with cerebal palsy. Checks out. Another was an idiot who thought that the park was a short cut. Timing them, they didn’t even stop. Lyle saw a green van back up into some bushes. She thought it was the park-keeper’s.’
‘At the weekend?’
Craigo shrugged.
‘And?’
‘Here’s the van driving out. No windows. I’m trying to get a blow up of that logo on the side. The number plate is unreadable. Bethany would have walked right past it if she was heading home. She did not come out that park, well, not on her own two feet.’
‘Good work. Get that van traced. It went somewhere when it left the park. What about the feathers? The big feathers, I mean? Bethany has pictures of raptors on her wall.’
‘From a falcon, I’d guess from the description. Maybe a pinion feather. So it was not flying but sheltering in the bushes, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the park.’
‘So an injured bird. A broken rucksack strap? Keep the guys going on the cars seen coming out of Shiv’s car park. Go through McPhee’s desk and find out what else he’s keeping in there.’
Craigo left as Caplan’s mobile went, asking her to join her in a zoom meeting. When she did, Linden sounded and looked happy.
‘Glad you could join us. Good news, they granted the search and the expense of Mr Glen Douglas. I’m sending you through paperwork from the legal team, so if this goes wrong it’s your fault. All on the need to know, confidentiality etc. Don’t go telling everybody or they’ll all want one.’
‘I know that this is a legal minefield. I’ll be careful.’
‘And you need to be very careful how you approach the family when you find them.’
‘I’ll let you know when I do.’
‘Bethany?’
‘Yes, we’ve some movement. All the good work of the wee monkey as you call him. And the dad is coming in now to answer a few questions about the covert surveillance of his daughter.’
Linden listened in silence. ‘Weirdo. So, she was last seen heading home, then her location tile stopped transmitting? Well, even if she’s not alive her body must be somewhere. I’ll get back to you ASAP.’
Caplan was about to cut the zoom call when Linden said, ‘Wait, while you’re on, can I email you a document? Let me know what you think. My DS has a bee in her bonnet. I’d like to see what Lizzie thinks.’ On the monitor ACC Sarah Linden typed then peered at a list that had opened as a window on her screen. She didn’t look so happy now. As she was reading, Fergusson’s fair curls appeared at the corner of the screen, followed by her face, a smile and a small wave. Linden invited her to join her at the big desk, like a ‘grown-up’ she added.
Caplan hoped that the sound of her stomach rumbling wasn’t picked up by the microphone.
‘Lizzie, tell us about the woman. Stratton. The first two, Ardman and Glen Douglas, I agree have some degree of similarity. I can see why Rhona Welsh is in the mix unless her mental health is considered. Once you take that into account, and a family that noticed she was missing, she’s excluded. Pottie fits the pattern, I agree. But this other woman, Stratton, is way, way too different. And then we have degrees of difference between Stratton, Shivonne and Bethany. Run it by us again.’
Caplan suspected that Linden was looking for a reason to shoot the idea of Stratton being involved down in flames. Rachel had mentioned her. Mackie had picked it up and Fergusson had run with it. Linden was not convinced.
On screen, behind Linden’s desk, Lizzie Fergusson looked like a young, nervous DC on her first day in the job. The office, the braiding, the highly polished glass and Linden’s uniform ironed to an inch of its life seemed to intimidate Fergusson’s bobbled jumper that was almost worn through at the elbows. But she spoke with clarity and confidence.
‘Stratton had sold her house and was living in a rented flat in a less salubrious part of town, yet she drove a new Beamer and ate out in good restaurants.’
‘Sex worker, or was somebody funding that lifestyle? Something going on that made her need to be a little more financially flexible? Freeing up immobile assets? Or was she not very good with money?’ Linden looked at the photograph then held it up for Caplan to see. A pretty woman, dark hair, pale faced, slim, wide eyed and innocent looking.
‘And at the time it was thought that she’d been taking money from somebody she shouldn’t have been taking money from. A month before she died, she was staying overnight in the Balmoral in Edinburgh with a mystery man,’ said Fergusson. ‘He’s never been identified, didn’t come forward.’
‘And that led the original team to think organised crime. She owed money to the wrong person and she paid for that,’ suggested Linden.
‘Too visible for them, I’d have thought,’ said Caplan.
Fergusson nodded. ‘But I’ve read Mackie’s notes; the way Pottie and Ardman said they were moving on to better things. Stratton said exactly the same. Moving on and moving up. She was working out her notice for the building firm, Fayer Construction. They didn’t want her to leave, they were taking their time about replacing her. She was earning good money yet she insisted she was moving on to something bigger and better.’
‘Same bait the others were lured with,’ agreed Caplan. ‘But Stratton hadn’t been missing for a period of time, she was well nourished, she hadn’t been starved and while she did have that injury to her left leg, she also had two to her right. The pathologist, Leonora Spyck, not Ryce, proposed that Stratton had run into something on the terrain she was found in. Like a fallen tree.’
‘Maybe she ran away almost as soon as they abducted her? I agree the victims are very different but the circumstances have too much in common to be ignored.’ Fergusson looked at Linden. ‘Can you ask for us, lobby them to get some money to look at all this a bit closer?’
‘Do you think money’ll help?’ Linden flipped over the page she’d been scribbling on, then flipped it back. ‘The names with ticks are those who have been investigated and an explanation reached as to their cause of death that would stand up in a court of law.’
‘Yes.’
‘They have been dealt with already. And the others?’
‘Questionable,’ said Fergusson.
‘On the opinion of whom?’
‘Me,’ said Caplan.
‘Seriously? What do I say? Oh, by the way, my mates don’t think that these cases, which have all been through the Major Investigation computer systems, have been investigated properly. Come on, Christine, these guys know what they are looking for. The guys who programme these machines and input the data aren’t daft.’
‘Shit in and shit out,’ argued Fergusson. ‘I see it every day.’
‘Rachel was on to something.’
‘No offence to the terminally ill but she was a DC and never got any further,’ snapped Linden.
‘Nothing wrong with that. When she got ill, she was reassigned to inputting data,’ said Fergusson testily. ‘She’d have been recognising patterns, plus keeping a pocketbook, not a digital one. Being her age, she’d have had a handwritten hard copy stashed away somewhere, that was how we were taught. Where is Rachel’s?’
‘Her purple Moleskin notebooks?’ Caplan said.
‘Anybody want to ask Ghillies?’
‘Already have. I refer to my previous answer about Shit Out.’
Linden let out a long sigh and blinked slowly. ‘Do you think that somebody somewhere is missing something?’
Fergusson said, ‘Sometimes you don’t know what you are looking for until you know what you are looking for …’
‘Rachel knew about Ardman and she knew Stratton. That’s about it,’ argued Linden. ‘The expense of going back through all this will be huge. These crimes have no start point, no end point, no witnesses, no CCTV, nothing much in the way of forensics. We’ve no idea when these incidents actually happened. People went away. They turned up dead.’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Fergusson was on her feet. ‘Why are you talking about getting somebody to put these cases through HOLMES3 with different search engines and its dynamic reasoning engine? What do you think Rachel has been doing for the last six, seven years? Her list? How did she arrive at that? She didn’t pull these names out of the air, you know. These names are there for a reason. She was an intelligent police officer, doing her job. She may not have a fancy uniform like you Sarah, or a bunch of backwater acolytes like you, Christine, but she was an on-the-ground, doing-her-job cop. You two need to do what you need to do, talk to whoever you need to talk to, but you’ll save yourself a whole load of money and heartache if we work from the names that are on Rachel’s mind as she’s dying. I’ve no idea what more you two need, except to get your heads out of your arses and admit that a lowly DC might have connections that you both cannot see.’
Caplan watched Fergusson exit the perimeters of the monitor and heard a door slam.
Linden’s face, the crisp whiteness of her blouse, filled the screen.
‘That would have been impressive if she hadn’t left her handbag,’ she said dryly.
‘She’s right, though, there’s more going on here. Rachel knew that. That’s why she put us onto it. While we need an area of focus on this, our priority is to find Bethany and Shiv while they’re still alive. We don’t get a second bite at that. The clock is ticking and I have minimal manpower.’
‘Okay, I’ll send this upstairs.’ Linden nodded at the screen. ‘And that’s why you’re a DCI and Lizzie still makes the tea. You make it sound good.’
Caplan slipped on her jacket and went downstairs to the interview room with the two-way mirror. She stood looking in on Robertson. Mackie and a uniform were interviewing him.
‘How’s he doing?’ she asked Craigo.
‘He’s been shown the pictures. He recognised Lochran, the lad from the ferry, but none of the others, apart from Shiv. But he did hesitate over Lisa Stratton.’
‘Three females gone, and he seems to know them all?’
‘Toni pushed him on Stratton. He said he knew her face from somewhere but didn’t know where.’
‘That’s handy.’
‘He’s upset about Bethany, keeps asking if we know anything.’
‘What did he say about him not mentioning the location tile?’
‘Just that it had stopped working. He thought she would be in hospital with a brain bleed, like her mum. He was upset, not thinking straight.’
‘Again, handy.’
‘I think if we don’t tell him something, he’s going to walk out of here and tell Rory Ghillies that Paul Lochran has got something to do with Bethany’s disappearance.’
‘Does he know about a boyfriend?’
‘Nope. Doesn’t know an Angela either.’ Craigo switched the speaker on.
Robertson voice was weedy. ‘Not that I knew of, she never brought anybody home. There was a nice lad when she was at uni in St Andrews but that fizzled out. He hasn’t seen her. I called him.’
‘Yes, so did we.’ The familiar lilt of Toni Mackie.
William Robertson’s pain was etched deep in his face. The man was terrified but Caplan wasn’t sure of what.
‘You admit you put a location tile in her bag, a tag you tracked on your phone?’
‘Yes, I told you that. But I didn’t track her, I wasn’t really interested in where she went. It was more if anything happened to her.’
‘And the minute something happened to her, the tile was disabled. Either she removed it because she didn’t want you following her …’
‘She didn’t know it was there.’
‘The fact that it’s silent means that somebody did know. Who might that be? Who might not want her found?’ Mackie was baby-faced innocence. ‘You?’
If Robertson was guilty, he was a good actor. His face changed colour.
‘Or who else knew about the tag? Who told you about it?’
‘Well, it was Rory that advised me about them. Rachel had been working a case where the kid, and it was a wee kid, had a location tile in their school bag. A lot less visible than the tag ones. But for me, I kept thinking about what would happen if she went the same way as her mother. If she was alone. If there was nobody there. I asked Rory and he asked Felix Vance. He’d been to some seminar and began to use them to track his building materials on site. They are a lot more common than you might think.’ He thought for a moment, seemingly calmer now that he was on solid ground. ‘But she’d go out running and leave her bag at home. What use is it now?’
Caplan waited, seeing what Mackie would do.
‘Can I trust you with some information, Mr Robertson?’
‘Bill, please. Yes, of course you can.’
‘This might be nothing, and I’d appreciate it if it goes no further than this room, but we’ve noticed a few young people going missing. We’re trying to establish the pattern. Bethany doesn’t fit into that pattern but …’
‘Going missing? What do you mean by that? Did Rory not say that right at the start? Why? I mean why don’t you get things moving?’ Robertson sat up, a hint of aggression in his voice.
Caplan, on the other side of the wall, thought that Mackie should back off now.
She didn’t.
‘Well, we’re trying to figure out why you thought she was missing after a matter of hours. You were the one that brought her to our attention. Why did you do that? Why? You don’t know where she is, do you?’
Robertson’s mouth closed. Then he said quietly, ‘Am I free to go? I’ll be in touch with your superior.’ Then he looked straight at the mirror before walking out the door.
Mackie had left a tuna roll on Caplan’s desk, on top of the printouts about the Octavia. She’d wait until Robertson calmed down, then ask him. They had a partial plate, not enough to identify. A partial plate on an Octavia, the second most popular car for a taxi, in a busy tourist hot spot. Maybe the boyfriend was a taxi driver. She scoured the image of the car. As she expected, there was no taxi plate; that would have been easy. But there was something on the rear window, a strangely shaped sticker. She drew the outline on a bit of paper and looked at it, trying to make some sense of it.
Craigo came into her office. ‘I found the feathers, ma’am, and another ten witness statements from the park that haven’t been logged.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
‘I said that I found the feathers …’
‘Yes, I know.’ She showed him the drawing. ‘Here, if I put that in front of you, what would you say it was?’
‘Drawing of a tractor by a two-year-old?’
She regarded him for a moment. ‘If that was a sticker on the back of a car?’
He shrugged. ‘From around here?’
‘Let’s go with “from around here”.’
He thought for a moment then got out his phone and scrolled. ‘What about that? Henderson’s, on the road to Ballachulish.’
‘And who are they?’
‘Big garage, ma’am, do tractors, vans, that kind of thing.’
‘Do they sell private cars?’
‘Yes, a few. They mostly do taxis, taxi safety checks and maintenance. Why?’
‘Just a thought. What do you have there? Something important in that file?’
‘Ryce has done the physical PM on Rod Taylor.’ Craigo sat down on the end of the chair, perching there like a schoolboy handing over his homework as Caplan took the file of printouts from Dr Ryce. He bit his lip, then looked at the ceiling as if this was a report card that might be ill received.
‘Have we got some idea of what happened to Rod?’
‘Ryce can find no pathology at all, nothing. No ongoing disease process apart from those mild ailments that people your age get, ma’am.’
‘Thank you, Craigo,’ muttered Caplan. ‘But to get this straight, Rod had been dead for days, since Monday night. Todd is still alive on Thursday night. Did Todd come home from being away and find him on the bed and decide he couldn’t live without him? Do we have a cause of death for Rod?’
‘Well, Ryce thinks that it might not have been a suicide pact after all, Todd and Rod, Rod and Todd.’ He bobbed his head as he said it, like a child rehearsing a nursery rhyme. ‘You might want to read that, ma’am. Ryce has highlighted the bits we need to pay attention to. That was her opinion. Which might not be your opinion. Or even mine. I haven’t read it yet. So I wouldn’t know. Except the highlighted bits, I did read them.’
Caplan ignored him, scanning down the report, looking for the key words. Then she muttered, ‘bloody hell.’
‘Yip. There are signs, ma’am, that he was held down while somebody poured a mixture of drugs down his throat. And they held him there until the drugs took effect.’
Caplan sat in silence for a moment, digesting that. ‘He was murdered? And Todd? Suicide or murder?’
‘Suicide, Ryce thinks. We need to look at his state of mind at the time. Who knows what was going on between them? Ryce thinks that somebody, one person, maybe Todd, kneeled over Rod, a knee on either side of his head, pinning his shoulders to the bed, sitting on his chest. That’d leave both hands free to administer the deadly potion.’ Craigo handed over a small pencil drawing. ‘Ryce thinks that Rod was held by Todd like that, ma’am.’
She took the single sheet of paper. ‘Deadly potion?’ asked Caplan, wondering if they’d stumbled into a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
‘Yes ma’am, a mixture of tablets, mashed up, mixed in with neat whisky. He’d pass out quite quickly after that. There’s bruising around the shoulders, all round the anterior aspect of the joint, above the joint and in the anterior fold of the armpit. Rod had bruising on the inside of his mouth, caused by pressure of the teeth as Todd held his mouth open, then held his mouth closed. Ryce found skin cells under Rod’s fingernails. Todd’s skin. And faint scratch marks on his neck.’ Craigo tapped the drawing Caplan was holding with his biro.
‘Rod was conscious in some form. He knew. He fought.’
They both turned round as the door to the main incident room opened.
Caplan got up and left the office, ready to intercept the couple that Stewart accompanied into the room, taking them to McPhee’s desk without saying a single word. The female, harsh-faced, had a quiet word with the young constable whose pale face went even paler.
‘Who, me?’ McPhee stood up, then misjudged the distance to walk round his desk and bumped into a tower of files, spreading blue and white paper all over the floor.
‘Sorry.’ He bent over to pick them up.
‘Leave them.’
The office fell silent. Only Mackie’s barely muttered ‘Oh Jesus Christ’ floated from her lips, into the air.
McPhee stood up automatically and walked out the door without looking anybody in the eye.
The man, slightly older than Caplan, asked for a quiet word.
‘Of course.’ She went into her office and closed the door before pulling the blind down, not trusting Mackie not to lip read.
‘DCI Caplan. What’s happened?’
‘DS Davidson. There’s been an allegation of domestic violence against your constable.’
‘And the evidence is?’
‘A black eye and a fractured cheekbone. He belted her across the face. Does he have any history of that, between you and I?’
‘Never seen a bit of temper in him. Will you detain him?’
‘With no history, he’ll be out with a restraining order. The wee lassie is a mess …’
‘Yeah, but take your time processing him, please. Can you request a report from his GP and a tox screen? Be very thorough.’
‘Of course. Do you think he has issues?’
‘We all have issues, DS Davidson.’