The following day, Saturday, Hanlon decided to pay a visit to the village where Cameron had grown up. She had been meaning to do this for a while. There was something deeply suspect about him. Aurora’s belief that he had killed her mother. Griffiths’ concerns about abuse. Aurora’s drink and drug abuse could well have been triggered by a traumatic childhood. Hanlon very much wanted to see where everything had begun all those many years ago. The past cast a long shadow.
She got in her car and headed west.
As she drove past the huge police station by the A82 in Dumbarton she thought of Murdo Campbell again. She both liked and respected Campbell – he had certainly helped her land her current job. She wondered if he might be around for a drink since she was passing so close to where he worked. What do I make of him? she wondered. It was a question she found herself thinking about quite a lot. On the plus side he was intelligent, good-looking, had a great body and a reasonably pleasant personality. He could also do various country things that she couldn’t. He could stalk, he knew a lot about the local flora and fauna and he could certainly skin a rabbit.
On the negative side, he seemed too quiet. Hanlon had heard he had a reputation as a ladies man, but she wondered how true that really was. He seemed more the kind of man you married, rather than had a fling with, and Hanlon was not the marrying kind. She kind of suspected that Campbell was. Then she laughed at herself, maybe Campbell just didn’t fancy her.
She pulled her attention back to the here and now. She was driving around Loch Lomond, the huge hills that surrounded the long wide body of water grey and black and forbidding under the winter sun, reaching up into the sky. There was still snow on their peaks. She smiled to herself; she liked being back in the highlands. Edinburgh was fun, but it felt crowded and polluted. Out here was where she wanted to be.
Hamish Cameron, she thought as she turned right at the head of the loch at a village called Tarbet and headed north, what about Cameron?
At first she was inclined to think that he had driven Aurora away simply by his controlling personality. She guessed it would never be easy being the only child of a highly successful, driven man, but then the spectre of child abuse had reared its head. Let’s not get too carried away, she thought. We only have Griffiths’ opinion for that. Hanlon frowned angrily. She had her own memories of an intensely unhappy childhood, memories that she was aware that she had repressed and locked away. Now Dr Elspeth Morgan, her self-appointed therapist, was rattling at that door. Hanlon controlled the key, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to let her in.
She hadn’t spoken to the therapist for months. There was always something else to do. She was quite aware of the fact she was putting off the inevitable. Some nights as she lay alone staring at the ceiling, she was aware of the terrible burden of regrets and self-imposed unhappiness that she was dragging around with her, but her pride and arrogance and fear of letting her guard down prevented her from talking to her.
She could understand white-hot rage and black crippling shame when it came to childhood memories. But this wasn’t about her.
She remembered what the lecturer had said about Aurora breaking down when incest had been mentioned. And there did seem something more than a little creepy about a father who had an oil painting of his naked daughter on the wall of his study. She certainly couldn’t remember anyone else she’d met having that as decoration.
Or maybe not. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. Maybe it was just art, or business; everything in that room was for sale, after all. Did that include Aurora?
To understand the present, we have to revisit the past. Those had been her therapist’s words. That was what she was doing now, hoping to get a better handle on the present by delving into Cameron’s and, by implication, Aurora’s history.
She drove along the winding road through beautiful hilly countryside. The predominant colours at this time of year were muted, the omnipresent grey of the rock, the brown geometric forms of the dead bracken. The sky seemed huge after Edinburgh. She felt she was in the middle of nowhere. Her spirits began to rise.
North of Oban, she drove over a bridge to the far side of the loch and hung a right until she saw the white sign streaked with rust that said, ‘Lochdubsliabh’. The place where Cameron had grown up.
She drove past some houses into the village centre. It wasn’t a big place or very pleasant to look at. It wasn’t picturesque, no danger of it being overrun by tourists. There was a scattering of sizeable granite houses, a village shop still managing to hang onto a living somehow, a small new executive estate, a fifties council estate, four or five startlingly ugly two-storey small blocks of flats, brown pebble-dashing, a public area with scuffed grass and dog turds and a couple of swings, one broken. There also wasn’t a soul in sight. It was a depressing place. No wonder Cameron had left.
She went down to the harbour, for want of a better word, a concrete slipway, a jetty, a few boats on moorings attached to buoys, a stack of plastic fishing boxes. That smell of old fish that lingers around working quays. The water looked cold, dark and ominous.
The wind ruffled her thick dark hair; the sea was the same colour grey as her eyes and about as warm. On the other side of the loch she could see Kinnachan House, a faraway dark geometric shape below the treeline on the far side. She wondered if Hamish Cameron had grown up in the council houses; they seemed of more or less the right vintage.
She glanced at her watch: eleven fifty. There was a hotel on the road above where she was standing, the Etive Hotel. She looked up at it; it had a front bar and a back bar. Standing patiently, staring down at her by the door to the back bar – the locals’ bar – were three small old men, identically dressed in long dark coats and flat caps, two smoking, one not. The regulars, she guessed.
She started walking up to them. The pub opened early; she heard two loud clicks as bolts were drawn from inside and the three men disappeared inside. Hanlon walked up to the door and followed them in.
They were lined up by the bar as she went in; they stared at her curiously, as did the barman.
‘Guid morning,’ one of them said, politely.
‘Good morning,’ Hanlon said. ‘I was wondering if you might be able to help me.’ They were younger than she had first thought, maybe they were of the right vintage to know Cameron.
‘We’ll do oor best,’ said one of the others.
She explained that she was a journalist writing a piece on Hamish Cameron, the famous art dealer, and asked did they know anything about his family? They heard her out suspiciously.
The three of them conferred in a huddle and then, ‘Aye, we knew the family. I’m afraid you’ll no get a positive comment out of us concerning them… I was at school with Hamish Cameron.’
‘Really?’ said Hanlon. Close up he looked a good decade older than Cameron. That’s what poverty and booze can do for you.
‘Aye,’ said another, ‘and I used to work with his younger brother. Graham.’
Well, that was news – she didn’t know he had any family. ‘What were they like…? Can I buy you a drink by the way?’
She could; she bought them all halves of bitter and a double Scotch each. The four of them moved to a table in the corner.
‘Hamish Cameron was a wee shite,’ the old man who had spoken first said. ‘I’m Tommy, by the way. His parents lived up the brae. His dad was a fisherman, like we are.’
‘Were,’ corrected one of the others.
‘Anyway,’ Tommy said, ignoring the interruption, ‘if he shook your hand you had to count your fingers afterwards – isn’t that so, Dugald?’
‘Aye, that’s true,’ Dugald said. ‘He was a wee chiseller. Anyway, his dad, Hamish’s dad, died at sea – he was drowned. He left the boy some money. Hamish would have been aboot what, fourteen, I guess and he went aff tae London as soon as he was sixteen, as soon as he could.’
‘And his brother, Graham?’
‘Aye, a different father. His mother was a bit of a hoor, she’d go with anyone,’ Dugald remarked.
‘I did her,’ said the third fisherman, who had hitherto been silent.
‘Aye, well, that kinda proves Dugald’s point, Eck does it not?’ Tommy pointed out. The three of them laughed.
‘True,’ the old guy, Eck agreed. ‘Aye, very true.’
There was some more conversation; it pretty much echoed what Cameron had told her. That his family were indeed from there, that he had grown up poor and that his story about staring wistfully across the water at Kinnachan House, the mansion on the hill, was completely plausible.
‘How did he get on with his brother?’ she asked.
A shrug. ‘He was fifteen or so years younger, hen. He’d have been one or two when Hamish left, a wee bit young to have formed an opinion one way or another, I would have thought.’
‘Does he still live here?’ she asked out of idle curiosity. It would be nice to talk to him about Cameron.
A headshake. ‘Naw, the last anyone heard he was in prison. His dad had a hell of a temper, so did the boy. He beat someone up and went down for it. That came as no surprise to me, well, to any of us from the village. He was always a nasty wee kid, and, Jesus, he could really go aff on one, especially if he’d had a drink. I think we were all kind of relieved when he disappeared.’
And that was more or less that. No one missed the Camerons and the mention of the name hadn’t brought any revelations of child abuse. Hanlon had a nose for the concealed; she didn’t feel that anyone was holding anything back.
She got back into her car and checked her phone for messages. There was one from Griffiths asking how she was getting on. She texted him to say that she’d be available to see him in Edinburgh on Monday. There was one from Paul Wyre to say that Julia Swinson had said she was interested in talking to him – he would be free at eleven a.m. the following day, Sunday, if she wanted to swing by. More importantly, there was one from Luke to say that he had some potentially very important information on Aurora, if she would care to come round in the evening on Monday. She thought for a moment and called the Student Advice Centre and made an appointment to see Peter Reiss.
Another incoming message on her phone, Murdo Campbell replying to her text. Would she care to meet up for a drink at Tarbert, Loch Fyne later that afternoon? She messaged Campbell straight back, yes, she’d like that.
‘Jesus, Hanlon, what happened to your face?’
She frowned; she kept forgetting about it, until she saw her reflection in bathroom mirrors or when people mentioned it. Like now.
‘I got beaten up, someone trying to scare me.’
Campbell said, drily, ‘I take it that didn’t work.’
‘No,’ Hanlon said.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Campbell asked. Now he looked and sounded worried. She felt a flash of annoyance – she hated people fussing over her affairs. Just a hint of someone trying to tell her what to do and she felt immediate anger, and the desire to do the opposite, just to spite them, no matter how intelligent or caring the advice. What she got up to was her own business, and if that included being beaten up, so be it.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’m just at the start of things. It’s getting complicated.’
Campbell sighed. ‘When I put your name forward for this I thought it would be fairly straightforward, or at least not dangerous, and now look at what’s happened.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You’ve been beaten up and a girl’s been murdered.’ He smiled. ‘Can’t you just find a normal job? Get a job in the Co-operative?’
She laughed. ‘Say that again.’
‘What?’ He was puzzled. ‘Co-operative?’
‘I love the way you say that word, Murdo, Cope-erative. It’s so sweet.’
He shook his head. ‘Changing the subject’s not helping, Hanlon.’
She looked at him hard in the eyes. ‘It’s my life, Murdo.’ Her voice was serious – don’t push me.
He held her gaze. ‘It’ll be your death, Hanlon.’ His voice equally serious.
‘Here’s your coffee.’ It was the waitress. The spell was broken. They thanked her and Hanlon looked out of the window at the view. It was a sight she knew well. The picturesque fishing village was the nearest thing to a town from where she currently lived. It was a half-hour drive or, if she was feeling energetic, a two-hour walk or so from her village.
The hotel whose bar they were in was one of several built along the road that ran besides the picturesque harbour. There was a quay below them with fishing boats moored up to it and a pontoon on the far side of the harbour where yachts were berthed. Across Loch Fyne she could see lights going on in the houses on the other side of the water. It was a pretty, almost idyllic scene. Certainly nothing like the bleak desolation of Cameron’s home village.
Campbell looked tired and careworn.
‘How is your investigation going, your Godfather-style murder?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘It’s not. Nobody’s going to talk, not on the record anyway. Everyone’s scared of Millar. He’s an evil bastard.’ He looked out at the harbour. ‘We found a body in the Clyde last year, an informant. His tongue had been cut out. Millar let it be known that he’d done it himself. The guy’s crazy, but unfortunately far from stupid. You don’t want to mess with him.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’ She wasn’t really interested in Millar. Psychotic gangsters were not her concern. Then, ‘Did you find out anything on Morag McMillan for me?’
Campbell nodded. ‘Yes, I did. She died of asphyxia – we suspect that something like a bag was put over her head when she was unconscious. She’d been drugged. Diazepam.’ He shrugged. ‘It certainly wasn’t Millar’s handiwork. It was far too gentle – he doesn’t go in for subtlety. If he’d killed her we’d be scraping bits of her off the ceiling.’
Hanlon nodded, drank some coffee. There was a family of swans on the water; she had never realised that they went anywhere near the sea before.
‘And how is the search for Aurora going?’ asked Campbell.
‘I’m not really getting anywhere. I was at the village today where her father grew up. I learnt that her uncle is some kind of black sheep. Have you come across a Graham Cameron?’
‘Who’s he?’ Campbell asked.
‘Hamish Cameron’s brother.’
‘No, I can’t say I have. It doesn’t ring any bells. I’ll look into it.’
Hanlon sat back in her seat. It was hot in the upstairs bar and she had taken off the sweater she was wearing. Underneath she had a tailored blouse with a dark T-shirt underneath. She looked good. Campbell was a man who prided himself on the ability to be decisive. He had meant to ask Hanlon out for quite some time now, but he never did; he kept fluffing his lines. Or failing to deliver them.
Just do it, he told himself, just do it. Hanlon’s very grey eyes were looking at him questioningly. He felt himself getting angry with his reticence. Ask her out. She can only say no, for heaven’s sake – as worst-case scenarios go, surely that’s liveable with. OK, but where to? Certainly there’s nowhere around here. What even would she like to do?
He decided to take the plunge. ‘There’s a Picasso exhibition in Glasgow,’ he said, desperately. Did she like art? Who knew? It was as good a thing as any to suggest.
‘Really?’ Her dark eyebrows rose interrogatively. God, that black eye of hers was spectacular.
‘Would you like to go?’ he asked hopefully.
‘I hate Picasso,’ she said. She frowned; she suddenly looked furious.
She’s got a good face for anger, thought Campbell sadly. He felt himself turning red with embarrassment; he was pale-skinned and he blushed easily. It made things even worse. God, I wish I’d never opened my mouth.
Hanlon continued, remorselessly, ‘All that Cubist shit.’
‘Oh.’ Campbell stared at his highly polished shoes. That went well.
Hanlon nudged him lightly with her foot. He looked up, to see a broad grin on her face.
‘I’d love to go. I was only kidding.’
Halleluiah! thought Campbell. There is a God.