Chapter 21

Get into work early, having awoken filled with the guilt of sleeping with another man’s wife. Funny, where was that yesterday morning? Where was the guilt? I was too occupied with work, waking in the middle of the night to get on with the job; I had no time for it. This morning, however, I wore it like a suit.

‘Guilt is for me, if I choose it, not you,’ she said.

It didn’t matter. I looked at her in the morning light – she was wearing the change of clothes she’d packed in her overnight bag – and thought she looked beautiful and sad, and the guilt weighed even more heavily upon me.

My guilt has no outlet. I’m not going to give Harry a call and confess, hoping for absolution by means of a free pass from the cuckold, or a call to arms, and a dawn duel in a Culbokie field. And so I tackle it the only way I can. By immersing myself in the job at hand.

What logic does my brain allow me in this? You may be a lesser person for your actions, but at least you’re a hard-working detective. Now go and prove it.

Only Elvis is there when I arrive, and we exchange a nod and no words. I don’t stop to ask if anything happened overnight, and he obviously has nothing of significance to tell me.

I get a drink from the back of the open-plan, standing in silence, staring at the wall, while the machine noisily spits out the milk and then the dark stream of coffee. I’m still consumed by thought when the sound has ended, the flow of liquid has stopped, and it’s only the rich smell of the coffee that pulls me from the momentary stupor.

Back to the desk, first sip, open the inbox. Nothing from the situation room in Inverness relating to our story. Nothing in amongst the dross to help us progress the investigation, so I reduce the inbox to a small icon in the bottom right-hand corner, take a brief look at a picture of the sheer face of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, another sip of coffee, and then pull the notepad over. Time to make a list, in the old-fashioned way. Things we need to get done, and who’s going to be doing them.

Sutherland and Kinghorn to check the status of the three other closed-off wells on the Black Isle.

Progress report from Wade. Any further test results on the corpse, establish whether she’s been in touch with a forensic anthropologist.

Find out from Inverness if they’ve discovered any sign of a break-in at the morgue.

Report from Fisher on the three cults she was looking at, and whether any of them require my further attention.

Establish the whereabouts of any descendants of the last of the Balfours.

I need to speak to Darnley and Quinn about where we go from here on identifying the boy via the public. It feels as though it’s become accepted that no one knows who he is, and that can’t be right. I’m not sure what else we do, having embraced (and been embraced by) the media, social and regular, but doing nothing, and changing nothing, will not get us anywhere.

There’s still Catriona Napier, and the possibly innocent photograph of her walking along High Street, hand in hand with a young child. And neither should we forget Belle McIntosh, and the farmer’s mate, Lachlan Green. As I’ve allowed my mind to wander, and as the apparent strangeness of the case has grown by the day, Lachlan, in particular, seems to have slipped beyond thought, as though his part in this is no longer of interest. And we caught Belle McIntosh out in a painful lie, but a lie that on the surface tells us little. The telling, if there is any, is in the obfuscation. If she can hide that, what else might she be choosing to hide?

But it was Belle McIntosh and Lachlan Green who started it all, and who still represent the most likely, basic and straightforward explanation as to how the boy’s body was placed at the bottom of the well in the first place. The two of them need to stay on the list, and they certainly need to be spoken to again. Yet we have no tangible evidence on which to bring them in, and we certainly have no tangible evidence on which we could base an arrest warrant, and that is what we need. A plain-thinking cynic could see no other possible account for the boy’s presence in the well. It must be them.

Unable to immediately think of anything else, I get to my feet and step away from the desk. Coffee in hand, I walk to the window and look out on Knockfarrel as it’s touched by the first light of a thin autumn sun.

How’s the guilt coming along, detective? Well, it had been fine, until it just juddered back into my head there. Not sure where it came from, but then, guilt hardly needs an invitation.

A noise behind me, and I turn at the arrival of Sutherland, walking into the office at the same time as Fisher. And out of nowhere, here comes the Beige Man, the first time the thought has come back to me. Elizabeth Rhodes and her tale of the Beige Man. How curious. I try to remember how it ended, but there’s nothing there.

I remember the mood of the tale, and the beach and the sand and the dog named Noodle. And I remember Elizabeth’s lonely feeling of detachment, and what almost sounded like fear when she talked about him and the hold he had over her, but I don’t recall the end.

Who was the Beige Man?

Fisher nods at me as she takes a seat on the other side of the office. Sutherland approaches, holding aloft a brown paper bag.

‘Doughnuts,’ he says. ‘Emergency over,’ he adds, smiling, ‘you can stop looking so worried.’

‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ I say, and I head back to my desk.

‘Chocolate, jam-filled, sprinkles or regular?’ he asks.

‘You got four doughnuts?’

‘Eight. I always get eight,’ he says, and I feel like the parent who doesn’t pay enough attention to his teenage children.

‘Regular,’ I say, taking another sip of coffee as I sit down, and thinking that I might need another coffee after I’ve eaten the doughnut.

Sutherland places a regular, sugared-frosted doughnut on a napkin on my desk, then walks round to his own desk, the first bite of a chocolate doughnut already taken.

‘Thanks, Iain.’

‘Boss,’ he says.

‘Sir,’ says Fisher, coming up alongside my desk.

‘What’s up? You heading straight back out?’

She looks curiously at me, then realises she’s still wearing her coat.

‘No, sorry, sir. I left this note for myself last night, and wanted to tell you as soon as you got in. I’m usually in before you . . .’ she tacks on at the end, and then shrugs. I don’t think there’s any need for me to explain why that wasn’t the case this morning.

‘What have you got?’ I ask.

‘Well, you remember the crackpot witches’ cult from outside Tain we were talking about? The ones who made page five of the Daily Star?’

‘Of course.’

‘I think we may have to go out there after all. Alice was working last night on chasing up the descendants of the Balfours. After the estate was sold off, the family moved to a smaller property north of the Cromarty Firth. Large house, extensive grounds, but far fewer outbuildings and subsidiary dwellings. Then, inevitably, they had to downsize further, there were poor marriages, there were mistakes, and gradually the family was broken up. Ultimately we seem to be no nearer pinning down actual living descendants, but we’re still working on it.’

‘But from what you first said, I presume that the house the Balfours moved into is now owned and run by the crackpot witches. Who probably aren’t crackpot witches at all.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Bang on, Constable, good work.’

‘Thank you, sir, but it was Alice mostly. She won’t be in until after ten.’

‘It was both of you, thank you.’

Quick look at the clock, dawn still not fully emerged from the dark of night. Just over half an hour to Tain.

‘Can you just have another check for anything on them, please; even the dry, official stuff, like how long they’ve been there, details of the woman who owns the house, that kind of thing. I’ll head up there in forty-five minutes or so.’

‘You want me to give them a call and set it up?’ she asks.

‘I’ll doorstep them.’

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she says.

‘Yep. Thanks, Fish, just see what you can get.’

She nods, and she’s gone.

‘You off to look at the wells?’ I ask Sutherland, turning back to him.

‘Yep,’ he says.

‘We need to speak to Catriona Napier too,’ I say, and he nods. ‘I’ll go round there after I’ve been out to the cult house. More than likely I’ll bring her in.’

Look back at the list. Coffee and doughnut to hand, guilt suddenly dispatched to the long grass, time to start chalking things off.

 

There’s no guard on the gate. Indeed, even the gate is of little use as security, a regulation farm gate incongruously placed between two broad gateposts of pale, smooth stone standing far apart, leading to a straight driveway up to a large sandstone house.

There is a broad expanse of grass on either side of the driveway, with seventy to a hundred sheep liberally dotted across. To the right, the lawn ends in woods, with a low hill rising behind. To the left, farmland. Hardly the remote glen as claimed by the Daily Star, but that’s unlikely to be the report’s only exaggeration.

There are several cars parked in front of the house, but also an area for parking outside the estate wall, just off the A9, and I make the decision not to drive onto the property.

Park the car, through the gate, closing it behind me, and walk up the long driveway towards the house, the sheep regarding me warily as I go, the two or three closest moving slowly away, still eating grass, not really looking in my direction, and with little enough drama to not cause a mass stampede to the far corner of the field.

I stop near the top of the driveway and look back. Although it’s not far from the coast, there’s little sight of the water from here, bar a stretch of the Dornoch Firth to our left. Nevertheless, the air is clear and has the quality of being by the sea, so that even if you couldn’t see the water at all, you would know it was close by.

The trees have almost all shed their leaves, bar a few in a small copse on the other side of the A9, down towards the town. The air is autumn air, winter still a few weeks away.

This may have been a smaller house and much smaller estate than the one on the Black Isle, but it could hardly have been a hardship moving here for what was left of the Balfour family. One supposes that the hardships came in guises other than location, with so many of the family lost to the war.

‘What do you see?’

I turn at the voice, having not heard the footsteps behind me. A woman in her early forties, dressed for farm work. Mud-spattered Wellingtons, although the mud is dry, jeans and a checked shirt, the sleeves rolled up above the elbow. Her hair is loosely tied back, strands falling over her face. There’s something almost clichéd about the way she’s dressed, but then, she’s working on a farm, so why wouldn’t she be wearing mud-spattered Wellingtons?

‘Detective Inspector Westphall, Dingwall,’ I say, holding out my ID card.

She’s looking me in the eye, not interested in the ID.

‘Avoiding the question, I see,’ she says, smiling. ‘Classic detective. Always asking, never answering.’

You never know what you’re going to get with people, and I don’t have the measure of her yet. A beat, then I turn and look back down the gentle slope of the driveway to the limited vista of the woods beyond.

‘I didn’t mean it literally,’ she says, as I turn back.

‘I wasn’t going to answer literally.’

‘No, I don’t expect you were,’ she says, then she indicates with a small nod for me to follow her, and starts to walk towards the side of the house.

‘We’re round here,’ she says. ‘You can join us for breakfast, although I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who can identify the boy in the well for you.’

That’s one downside of being on the news. Everyone sees you coming. Everyone knows why you’re there.

‘Can I ask you your part in the set-up?’ I ask, stopping.

Always better to speak to people on their own, and I’m about to be placed in the middle of a crowd of I don’t know how many.

‘Set-up?’ she says, and again she’s smiling, although this time there’s a withering quality to it. ‘Don’t you mean operation? Dodgy outfit? Sacrificers of small children and drinkers of blood? Coven, perhaps?’

She gives me the look that’s supposed to make me feel bad at the use of the term, accompanied by shame for whatever assumptions she supposes are being made in my head, then continues, ‘We’re an agrarian commune. People have been living the way we do for tens of thousands of years. It’s perfectly natural, and all the cretinous morons that make up so-called society, living vicarious, detached lives in their detached houses, connected to the world around them by Wi-Fi and the phone in their hand, think that we’re the freaks. Makes me so cross sometimes.’

She’s quite animated by the end, and I let her run through her small speech, thinking it a little defensive given nothing more than the word set-up. It’s not much to base anything on, but it does immediately point to a siege mentality, and I shall log that and see if there’s anything else to support it.

On the other hand, if a national newspaper printed a story telling everyone you murdered the household pets in the area on a monthly basis, you can see how a siege mentality would set in.

‘What is your part in the agrarian commune?’ I ask, deadpan.

She gauges the question and my tone, to see if there was any mockery implied in its simplicity, then says, ‘I’m the accountant.’

I can’t stop my eyes looking down at her Wellingtons, and she can’t stop herself smiling, her annoyance of a few seconds previously disappearing.

‘There’s not a huge amount of accounting to be done. I help out on the farm.’

‘How many people are here?’

Another beat.

‘You really are classic, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘Looking to get someone on their own, hoping to make a little more of a contact, hoping to loosen the tongue. You’ve got your eyes and your smile . . . Come on, I’ll take you round. I’ve got work to do. These sheep won’t milk themselves,’ she adds, the joke delivered in what must be a familiar tone.

You’ve got your eyes and your smile . . .

I haven’t heard that before, although I was aware that I had eyes. That smile, that the women are all apparently talking about, comes to my lips as I walk behind her around the side of the house.

The extent of the farm, such as it is, becomes clearer as we get to the side and back, and the area opens up. There is a long, patchy field of heather, in various declining colours of autumn. There are greenhouses down to the left, and a couple of short polytunnels.

As we come around to the back of the house, there is a large fenced-off area with perhaps fifty chickens, many slowly on the move in various directions. Beyond this there is an extensive herb garden, and behind that, and running round to the other side of the house, a field of raspberry and strawberry plants, which have settled down for the winter, and fields of root vegetables which are coming to season’s end, or have already been cleared for the year.

A large extension has been added to the back of the house, with huge windows looking out over the land, up to the slight rise behind the property, and to the hills beyond. There is one long dining table in the extension, people packed around it eating breakfast.

The accountant stops, now that we’re within sight.

‘You want to come in for breakfast?’

‘I’ll wait here,’ I say, and she nods.

‘Fine, I’ll get Franklin.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, and she walks away, and is quickly inside.

A few moments, and as I turn away and look down at the random movement and noise of the chickens – the smell of them their most arresting attribute – I see the turn of heads, as the workers of the agrarian commune look over in my direction. I choose not to watch them, as they watch me.

I wonder if they eat the chickens, or just have them for the eggs? Perhaps they put a couple of chickens to the sword on special occasions.

‘You know what’s worse?’

I turn quickly, not having heard the door open, nor the approach of footsteps.

‘Franklin?’

‘The worst thing is the people it attracts,’ she says. Short, greying hair, something of the Katharine Hepburn about the face, and a broad Glaswegian accent. ‘I don’t care about the mindless, I don’t know, the mindless shit. You know? I don’t care what people think we’re doing here. I don’t care if people think we’re stealing their animals or murdering their children or whatever, because ultimately, you see, when someone says, that’s a disgrace, who was it got their pet kidnapped? they don’t have any answers, because no one got their pet kidnapped. Literally no one.

‘So the gawkers and the complainers, Jesus, they can all get to fuck. But the worst, the very worst thing, is the fucktards we get up here. You wouldn’t believe. Ha!’ she says, and she shakes her head. ‘You polis, you know about fucktards. Well, we get ’em all, every last one of them. They think we’re into spells and potions and live sacrifice, and they can’t get up here quickly enough. Then we show them how we live, and what we do, and some of them go off, tail between their legs, disappointed, and some of them get abusive, assume we’re lying and don’t want them, and cause all sorts of trouble, and some of them just slyly piss off, certain in their own knowledge that we’re just as bad as the newspapers want to make out.

‘And yet, do any of these fuckers have one iota of proof?’

Another shake of the head; she looks around her domain, glances back inside the building where our meeting is being treated as a spectator sport – although quite a few of them look away as she turns towards them – and then she’s back, looking at me with all the disdain she can muster.

‘Smells like shit standing next to the chickens,’ she says, ‘but we’re not moving. What d’you want?’

There, in fact, is a decent question, because I’m not here to accuse them of anything, and I haven’t turned up, SOCOs in tow, to search the place. I’d been hoping for more discretion and a better welcome, and it’s up to me now whether I choose to make the conclusion that can be drawn from their obvious displeasure at the arrival of the police.

‘You know the history of the house?’ I ask, nodding in its direction.

This seems to surprise her, and she turns warily to look at it, giving herself time. That instant guardedness with which we’re so familiar, while the interviewee assesses just how underhand she thinks the interviewing police officer is going to be.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’m not here because of stories in the papers. I’m not interested in your commune, or in whether or not the Devil’s Ring exists . . .’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘I’m interested in the house.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the boy in the well, the death of whom I know you’re aware I’m investigating, was found on property on the old Balfour estate. When the Balfour estate was broken up, the family moved to this house.’

I leave it at that for the moment, and she gives me what I can only admit is the appropriate look.

‘So fuck?’ is how she eventually expresses her complete disinterest in this connection. ‘Seriously,’ she continues, ‘what possible shit am I supposed to give about that?’

‘I’m not looking for you to care,’ I say, ‘or even for you to be that interested. I’m interested in the connection between the estates.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s none of your concern.’

‘Well, please feel at liberty to fuck off.’

‘Yes, I certainly can do that. And I can also be at liberty to return later this afternoon, mob-handed, to run a thorough investigation of your operation, in answer to numerous complaints received by my station in the past six months. What would you prefer?’

She gives me the regulation harsh stare. She doesn’t need to know that we’ve never received any complaints.

Yet, despite the attitude and the coarseness of her language, there is an attractiveness about her, a softness even, that goes against the grain of her demeanour. Like she’s putting on the gruff tone for my benefit, and not quite pulling it off.

‘Would you like me to show you around, or do you want free rein?’ she asks. ‘I’m sure most of us wouldn’t mind you rummaging through our bedrooms. Perhaps you’d like to set up cameras in the bathrooms and showers? Wouldn’t be the first time some man’s asked to do that.’

‘Are you done?’ I ask, and there’s an acknowledgement in her look that her petulance is wasted on me. ‘I’ll just look around. Tell me what’s off-limits, and I won’t go there.’

‘Seriously?’ she says. ‘If I tell you anywhere’s off-limits, it just gives you reason to be suspicious about why I’m not letting you see it. I was being facetious. I’ll walk round with you, if you can handle it. You can choose what you look at, and if it’s everything, then so be it. I don’t want you having to come back.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t.’

She walks quickly away, back towards the extension. When she opens the door, she doesn’t march straight through, but stands waiting, her back turned to me, until I’m walking up behind her and entering the breakfast room, and the beating heart of what may be the Devil’s Ring.

The members of the Devil’s Ring, such as they are, are feasting on yoghurt, porridge and seasonal fruits.