He had sent Sam a text saying that he was liaising with the local police – such as there were – and discussing his own position in what was now a murder inquiry. He’d be back on the last ferry, and meanwhile, Sam should pick up something for supper from the shop – eggs and frozen chips easiest. It was hit or miss whether he’d get it with the terrible reception.
He had not told his nephew about the further complication.
The police were stretched thin dealing with the drug smugglers.
‘We’ve no bodies to spare you,’ the DI Simon met had said. ‘I’ve the official OK to leave you as SIO on this one – anything you can find out pass it over. Can you do the usual interviews – where last seen, who with, anything unusual reported and so on? We’ll have to rely on you to progress everything and we’ll send someone over as soon as we can. But I’m afraid you’re on your own for the foreseeable. OK with that?’
Simon saw the DI glance at his arm.
‘Fine,’ he said.
He would go home, shower, change, then to the pub, and ask Iain if he could set up a mini-inquiry room in the snug, which was little used except on busy Friday and Saturday nights. He could ask questions there for the next few hours, as locals came and went, try to build up a picture – though he was pretty sure it would be more of a faint sketch. Once he had talked to the landlord and whoever came in first, he knew the others would turn up in the course of the day.
*
Loud music came through the open window of the spare bedroom.
‘Drop it a bit, Sam.’
Sam did. Just.
‘Thought you were out helping Douglas.’
‘Didn’t feel like it.’
Simon stopped on his way to the bathroom. ‘Not the way you usually are.’
‘No, well. What happened anyway?’
‘Tell you about it when I’ve cleaned up. Have we got anything to eat?’
‘Eggs. Bread’s a bit elderly.’
‘Can you make a start?’
Sam didn’t move.
The water flowed cold, then boiling hot, before settling for lukewarm. It was one of the trickiest things, taking a shower. Baths were not much easier. Simon looked at the top of his left arm, from which no arm now grew. The skin and flesh had healed, but even though the prosthesis fitted well – far better than those people had had to put up with until the last few years – there was still the inevitable chafing until it all hardened and toughened. He had to clean it and rub creams into it morning and night. But the angry redness had faded. It was settling down.
He remembered every time he looked at it how lucky he had been, how he had got away with the loss of one arm, instead of his life. He had been in pain, he had been frustrated and angry and tired of it, but he had never once asked why. ‘Why me? Why this?’
Because there was a clear answer. It was the people struck down by random illnesses, not attacked by deranged criminals, who were haunted by that question. As a cop, even in CID, he put himself in the line of fire every working day, they all did. Given the level of danger out there it was only surprising it didn’t happen more.
It took time to make sure his arm was thoroughly dry. If it wasn’t he was asking for trouble.
Sam was whisking up eggs and frying tomatoes when he finally went back downstairs.
‘Sorry – no bacon or anything. I’m toasting the bread.’
‘That’s fine.’
Nothing else was said until they sat down, the food in front of them.
‘OK,’ Sam said with his mouth full. ‘So?’
Simon told him, about the bullet hole first. The easy bit.
‘I knew it. I mean, I didn’t but … it was just peculiar. Didn’t you think?’
‘Of course I thought. I’m a policeman. I’m CID. It’s what I do all the time. With any dead body, it’s always a possibility – sometimes a very remote one, sometimes barely one at all, because all the evidence points in another direction, but it has to be in your mind. With Sandy though – it wasn’t my first or even my second possibility, I admit.’
Sam had put down his knife and fork and was looking at him. ‘Who the fuck? WHO?’
‘No idea, for now. Possibly it’s a why before it’s a who.’
Sam shook his head. ‘You’d think this was the safest place on earth, this island.’
‘And you’d be pretty much right, in terms of violent crime. This is way out of the norm.’
‘What do you know about her? Sandy? Did anyone know anything?’
It was Simon’s turn to stop eating. He hesitated. Strictly speaking, this was unethical, but his nephew had taken to Sandy, and Simon was genuinely interested in his reaction to the news that Sandy had been a man. He had no idea what it might be. Surprise, surely, but after that … shock? Disgust?
What he would never have expected was laughter. Sam stared across the table and for a split second there was no reaction at all, but then he let out a shout of laughter, and punched the air.
‘Bloody hell … good for Sandy … that’ll stir up the Wee Free. Bloody HELL! Alexander not Sandra … and thinking about it, you know … well, I barely met her – him – just on the journey here and it was focus on the weather and my state … but looking back, it figures. Yup. Never cross your mind, Si?’
Sam was still chortling as he finished his plate of eggs and toast, but then stopped quite suddenly and went quiet. ‘Only
… Sandy was murdered. Doesn’t really matter, does it – who or what, man or woman … someone shot him. And not by accident instead of a rabbit. I mean – sod it. No one should have their life ended that way.’
‘No.’
They sat, thinking, going over it, trying to make sense of it. It was a quiet night. There was always some wind on Taransay but it was so faint now it could barely be heard down the chimney and the window catches did not rattle, the curtains hung still.
‘Oh, and I thought I’d be moving on from here, maybe tomorrow or the day after.’
‘Going home?’
‘No. Maybe join up with a couple of friends in London – least that’s where they were last I heard.’
‘London,’ Simon said. ‘What to do, Sam?’
‘You know … meet up.’
‘Just meet up?.’
Sam looked puzzled.
‘And when you’ve met up? What then?’
Silence.
‘Have you got enough money to get to London?’
‘Oh. No. I thought …’
Simon stood up and collected the plates. ‘Well, you thought wrong, Sambo. You couldn’t even be bothered to get out there to give Douglas a hand again and he could do with it, Kirsty’s sick every day at the moment, she can’t do much to help until she’s over it. So don’t expect me to put my hand in my pocket for you to doss off to London.’
‘So I’ve got to stay here then?’
‘No. Did you get return ferry and train tickets when you came here?’
‘Er …’
‘Thought not. OK, I’ll give you money for your tickets back. And I mean, back to Lafferton. Either that or stay here and work.’
He had never spoken to Sam like that – he had never needed to. Sam wasn’t lazy or a sponger, he had always been an eager, active, cheerful boy, but he was not a boy any longer, he was a troubled young man who was unsure where his future lay or what step he wanted to take towards it. Perhaps he should have gone easy on him, even though he was not a soft touch for money to join whoever in London.
Iain was happy to have him set up in the snug, and there were five regulars drinking to whom he could talk first, including Douglas, but also Fergal Morne, whose farm was the nearest occupied dwelling to Sandy’s cottage. Fergal was deaf, son of a father and grandfather who had also sheep-farmed in the same place, and who also had been deaf. He was married with a daughter, whose hearing was perfect, and dreaded having another, for fear it would be a boy who might carry the gene. Fergal wore hearing aids though they still left him listening to the speech of others as through a wall of cotton wool. But he was good at reading both lips and expressions.
‘It was a big shock, Sandy … big shock. Never thought she’d do that to herself, I tell you. Good woman – good neighbour, though I never went inside the house, no once. She came to us.’
‘Did she talk about herself, Fergal? Before she came here – you know where she lived, what she’d done, family, all of that?’
Fergal’s face registered that he was listening, taking in what Simon said, working out the questions but slowly, carefully, and it was only when he had thought that it became animated again.
‘No. She said nothing, ever. Very private woman, Sandy … though I never grasped that she’d any secrets, anything bad, you understand? She went out a fair bit. She’d walked the length and breadth of Taransay many a time. Saw her down on the beaches or across the top. Aye, she was fit and active.’
‘When did you see her last?’
‘Maybe four days ago. Day the last storm brewed up.’
‘Where?’
‘In the stores, and then she was driving her jeep homewards and we passed – you have to stop for one another, you know how it is – we waved. Nothing else.’
‘How did she look?’
Fergal shrugged. ‘As usual.’
‘Did she always go off on her own, over the island?’
‘All the time. I used to think she’d nine lives, she was always scrambling down the cliffs and setting up a rock fall or coming back fast to outrun the tide or something of that nature. Wild woman. Aye, Iain said she’d as many lives as a cat. Only she ran out of luck.’
‘Did she have any visitors?’
‘We didnae watch her house through the net curtains all day.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t but you must have been aware of any visitors.’
‘No, I wasn’t … which doesn’t mean there were none, you ken?’
‘Sure. Was there anything different about her last time you met? Did she seem worried about anything … a bit preoccupied maybe?’
‘Not that I noticed. But we didn’t stop to talk much.’
‘Fine. Now if there’s anything at all you can remember, however small, let me know, will you? It might be important, Fergal – people don’t always realise and they dismiss some little thing. Anything you remember that seemed … not quite as usual, not right, about Sandy, her house, her vehicle … anything. Don’t feel awkward about it, and never think you’ll be wasting my time or anyone else’s.’
‘There’s nothing. But I’ll do as you ask, I’ll certainly do that.’
And so it went on. No one had seen or heard anything or anyone. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing rang a bell … it was all the more strange because the island was so sparsely populated and yet so close-knit. No matter that they lived scattered around, they looked out for one another and everyone knew what went on. But about Sandy – nothing.
Only one thing came up, but although he racked his brains about it, Serrailler could not for the life of him work out why it seemed in some way significant. But it did.
Derry Muir delivered everything there was to deliver round the entire island – stuff that had been ordered from the store or off the ferry, mostly to those who could not come to the quay and collect it themselves, maybe because they were too old or infirm or their vehicle was out of action. Derry had not known Sandy any better than the rest, because she always fetched her own stuff, but they had chatted in the bar, and once, a month or so ago, Sandy had helped to tow his van out of a pothole near her house. She’d asked him in for a mug of tea and they had discovered a mutual passion for curling. Derry and his wife both took part, travelling to competitions between different leagues on the mainland, and Sandy said she had lived in Canada for three years in her early twenties, and discovered the sport there. They had talked about it until Derry had been an hour behind, and after that, he had called and taken her some curling magazines. He had even suggested she come with him and Monica one time to watch and even start playing again. Sandy had been non-committal.
‘I don’t see how it could have to do with anything – the curling. Or Canada.
‘Neither do I, but thanks, Derry. It could mean something.’
But what the hell that was Simon had no idea, though it stayed in his mind and he gnawed at it over and over. Because there was nothing else. No visitors to Sandy. No vehicles. She had always come and gone at strange times, so seeing her walking across the moor or the beach at nine in the evening or clambering down the cliff path as dawn broke was not regarded as unusual. She had been her familiar self. The last time anyone in the village had seen her had been on the night of the storm, when she left the pub with the inebriated Sam, to give him a lift home. And so far, it still seemed likely that Sam had been the last person to see Sandy before she was killed.