Anderson made good time, four hours twenty-seven minutes to Port MacDuff. He’d taken the longer but quicker route, up the A9 then across country at Inverness. The air was getting steadily fresher and colder so by the time he was eating a late lunch in Ballinluig it was freezing. By the time he drove past the police station at Port MacDuff, it was freezing and blowing a gale. He thought he might have frostbite. Despite the weather, he decided to stretch his legs after the drive and walk to Morna’s house.
He left the car in a public space and got out, making sure his case and laptop were locked in the boot. Pulling on a thick jacket and a woollen hat, he set off along the seafront, letting the sea spray, lifted by the wind, sting his face. Morna lived in Constance House, which was set one street back from the front on Castle Terrace. He stopped to watch the ferry go out, feeling the sea air in his lungs, getting the sense of freedom and of being at one with nature, in all its power. Port MacDuff had a winter population of about two thousand, double that in the summer. The sun took that moment to come out from behind thick cloud to warm his skin. The view over the Inner Sound, the water, the low hills in the distance, dark clouds chasing after the sun, was incredible. And it was so very, very quiet. He could see the attraction of living here, why people came here to escape. No questions asked. Every second person had an English accent, most of the rest were Europeans who had reasons of their own to escape to the arse end of nowhere. Beautiful though it was.
He watched a gang of bikers line up to get on the ferry, their engines roaring. The noise rolled across the bay, at odds with the beauty of the scenery. He turned round, chilled by the wind and keen to keep moving. He saw a thin grey-haired man leaning against the rail further along the harbour. Anderson was sure it was DCI Patrick. Accompanying him was a tall, leanly built man, dark-haired with, from this distance, some grey at the front, maybe even a Mallen streak. They had both been watching him, Anderson was sure of that, but there was no wave of welcome. Nor did they turn and walk away. They just watched. So Anderson waved at them both, then set off towards Castle Terrace, the map memorized from his phone. There were only a few streets in Port MacDuff, it was a small port surrounded by hills on three sides and the very deep water of the Inner Sound on the other.
He kept walking, knowing that Patrick and his friend were still watching. Anderson knew that Patrick might see his being here as a right royal pain in the arse. Patrick could do nothing but acquiesce to his presence; Police Scotland working together and all that crap. But he enjoyed the walk up to the impressive terrace of three-story houses, all painted in different bright colours. His heart was lighter, Costello was alive. He could cope with anything.
Number twelve was bright blue. The five houses in the block had a clear view over the Sound, the buildings in front had been demolished, leaving a flattened area, obviously now used as a temporary car park, a weird assortment of vehicles parked in a very haphazard fashion with no white lines to guide them. He noticed two matching vans parked, a tall young man standing at the open back door of one, clipboard in hand. On the ground were a couple of large bags, easily five-feet long. As Anderson passed, the man read the label on a small rucksack and then placed it in the bigger bag, repeating the process with the next bag, a small holdall; he was moving awkwardly, as if he had a sore neck or a sore shoulder. As he lifted the zippered flap on the long bag, Anderson caught a flash of the orange lining. The man saw him looking and straightened his posture, adjusted the collar of his boiler suit and stared directly back. To his left was another man dressed in a white coat doing something very noisy with white fish boxes, stacking them to left and right then stacking them back the other way. The rear door of his van was open, the refrigerator unit on the top was quiet. He too looked up at Anderson as if they both possessed some sixth sense that had alerted them to his scrutiny. More likely he was a stranger here and they were curious about him. Strangers here should walk along the front, take photographs, buy coffee and get on the ferry, not walk the backstreets looking for number twelve.
Better people than them had tried to psyche out Colin Anderson, so he opened the front gate of the blue house, casually looking over his shoulder to read the side of the van; HikeLite, and a mobile phone number. Anderson tried to gauge the man’s height; tall and slim, this was a young man. The fish guy was older, stockier, but was still looking over as Anderson turned to walk up Morna’s pathway.
Noted.
Morna opened the door, her face brimming as if he was a long-lost friend. If he had been twenty years younger Anderson thought he would have fallen in love with her there and then. Her red hair streamed down her back, her smile as wide and fresh as a Bavarian milkmaid.
He followed her down the hall listening to her incessant chatter, then into a cold living room. The old blue sofa was covered with a brightly coloured patchwork blanket from the middle of which a crumpled face looked out at him. The blanket was wrapped round a young boy, too obsessed by his X-wing to even look up. From the two posters on the wall, Anderson judged the creased face on the blanket was Hans Solo.
‘Somebody a Star Wars fan then?’ he asked.
‘My other half. I think it’s genetic.’ She nodded at the boy on the sofa. ‘Neil’s very good on Star Wars, Alien and Bladerunner but can’t remember to pick his son up from school. Sorry,’ she said, as if he was too important to be interested in her life outside of work. ‘I’m DC Morna Taverner. As you might have guessed.’
‘Glad to meet you, DC Morna Taverner. DCI Colin Anderson, call me Colin, I work a closed unit so we don’t need to be formal.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, then laughed.
He noticed the swing of her hair, a russet mane.
‘And this is Finn, he’s a very rude wee boy. I’ll put the kettle on.’
Anderson said hello to the boy and got a flicker of a smile in response. Anderson walked round the back of the settee, taking in the thin carpet, the cold chill in the air, the peeling paint.
Somebody was short of cash here, yet Morna would be on a good salary surely. There was a sense of this house being temporary, nothing in the way of homeliness, a few pictures of Finn on the wall, two years of primary school, proud in a uniform that didn’t really fit him. And one wedding photograph, the bride easily recognizable as Morna, the groom just as easily recognized as the man outside with the two vans. HikeLite? Those vans were expensive, Anderson wondered who ran the company. It would be too obvious if he walked back to the window and looked out to see if both vans were still there. Morna was chattering away from the kitchen, asking about his drive up, the roadworks, the weather. All the things you need to know about if you live this far from a good supermarket.
‘Is that you then?’ he asked Finn, pointing at the school photograph.
‘Aye,’ said the boy, showing Anderson his X-wing.
‘Lovely. The Millennium Falcon is my favourite. Do you have one of them?’
The boy shook his head. ‘Death Star, and Imperial Stormtrooper.’
Anderson moved slightly round the back of the sofa, stepping over a dog basket, smiling awkwardly at the boy but the curtains precluded him from seeing the vans in the makeshift car park. All he could see was a fat woman walking past with two Scotties on the same lead. Even she seemed to take a good look at the house as she strolled, oblivious to the weather. He looked beyond her, something trickling into his head, in the car park, in his line of sight, a vehicle pulling away, a small white Fiat car driven by a blonde with a hat on.
He turned back into the room, trying to keep the grin from his face, looking round his eyes saw the picture. It hung on the wall over the fireplace and was a huge photographic print of a beautiful house standing high on a cliff, old and grand. A glassed terrace ran along the front so that anybody sitting there in a comfy Chesterfield enjoying a good malt, could see the waves at low tide and on a clear day, Raasay, Rona and Skye beyond. They were easily recognizable, even to Anderson.
The gold engraving on the bottom of the frame said Le Adare Lodge.
‘Is that your house?’ Anderson asked the boy, getting a cheery, ridiculous laugh in return.
‘Nooooo.’
‘Are you sure?’
A huge nod.
‘Would you like it to be your house?’
Another big nod.
‘Is it your mum’s house?’ asked Anderson.
Finn shook his head. ‘No, my dad’s. Chewbacca lives there.’
‘Don’t you start him going on about that again,’ mocked Morna, appearing at the kitchen door with two steaming mugs of coffee and a box of Viennese Whirls in the crook of her elbow. ‘Everybody does.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. It’s very impressive. Is it French? The name?’
‘The name? It’s a corruption of the Gaelic for Dolphin Point. It’s the highest point on the coast, over there.’ She indicated to the front door, so he presumed, she was talking about the clifftops to the west. She placed the cups on the narrow table on the back wall, a bit rickety.
It dipped when Anderson sat down and leaned on it, spilling a little coffee from both mugs. ‘Sorry.’
‘No worries, there’s normally a bit of paper in there to keep it level.’
They sat facing each other. The table was so small, he could have easily reached out and touched her fingertips, her blue, cracked fingertips he noticed. And he did want to reach out and warm her tiny hand in his. He was glad she had placed a large box between them.
She put the Viennese Whirls right in front of him, still in their box. ‘Have you looked at Jennifer Argyll’s file yet?’
He was thrown a little at her directness. ‘No, not yet.’
‘That was where she disappeared.’ She pointed up at the picture. ‘Last seen walking up to the lodge.’
‘Oh right.’ It was not that the lodge itself was unimpressive, it was the size of the picture in such a small house. Anderson couldn’t think he knew anybody under the age of thirty who would have a picture in their house bigger than their TV screen. ‘You son seems to think you own it.’
‘He thinks Chewbacca lives up there and he believes Santa lives at Fearnmore Cragg farm and that he snogs Betty Alexander from the post office.’
‘The innocence of youth. Are you planning to buy the house when you win the lottery?’
‘Aye, that’ll be right. I would have to buy a ticket though to give myself a chance, Neil does think of the lodge as his ancestral home. Only because his mum used to clean the floors there and he hung around it a lot as a child. If you are here for a while, you should take a drive up to Dolphin Point, the views are amazing.’
He looked out the window, the view of the car park opposite had been obliterated by a squall of rain. ‘And do you see dolphins?’
‘That’s what we tell the tourists.’
‘And what is it now?’
‘What’s what?’
‘The house, is it a hotel or something?’
‘Nope,’ Morna said, ‘it’s a heap of bricks. Thank god.’ She leaned closer to him, he could see the individual freckles on her nose. ‘Bad karma, as if the spirit of Jennifer was making sure it was never going to be a success. Her ghost walks the cliffs, you know. I thought that was why you were looking at it, because of Jennifer.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘I thought you had read the file.’
‘I will, believe me.’ He sipped his coffee, breaking that chain of conversation. ‘So who looks after the wee guy while you are doing all this? His dad?’
‘No, Finn gets the runabout. Neil runs HikeLite, and he is so busy at the moment as he’s self-employed and you don’t want to turn away any business, do you? He’s outside I think, loading up the vans.’
‘Neil Taverner?’
‘Yes, do you know him?’ She smiled, proud of her husband.
‘I think he came forward about an abandoned old Dormobile a few days ago.’
Morna didn’t flinch. ‘Sounds like him, he loves all that old crap. If the owner hadn’t claimed it, he’d have tried to buy it.’ She shook her head, indulging the vagaries of the man she loved.
‘Works all hours, does he? Nights? The 500 is busy.’
‘You guessed it.’ She was oblivious of the seismic leap Anderson’s heart had just made, and the struggle he had not to interrogate her right there and then. ‘And for people doing the West Highland Way. Well, that was how it started. He’s now getting a lot of business out the 500 as well, it used to be summer-only trade but now the season is all year and he has two assistants, three vans and a larger minivan.’
‘What does it entail?’ He kept his voice casual, merely making easy chit-chat after a long drive.
Morna looked at Anderson and waved her hands, expansively pulling ideas from thin air. ‘Say you want to cycle the 500 on the sixth of December. Well, you would email Neil your route, the hotels you have booked, where your overnight camp is going to be or an agreed pick-up point if you are wild camping,’ she warmed to her subject, ‘and he will take the heavy bag. That means you only have to carry it from the post office to the camping site. If you leave your bag packed in the morning, Neil picks it up, and when you get to where you are going, your bag will be there for you. It’s fifty quid for the West Highland Way, hundred quid for the 500, due to the distance involved. But it’s easier now as we can make the vans rendezvous and swap bags and the vans then go off north, south or west. So, Neil is away less. We also do more remote places off the way, there’s a small extra charge to do that but it’s worth it, it’s getting so busy. Folk are having to take B and Bs and hotels further from the route, in the summer at least. It’s so popular, there are mad winter walkers out now. In that!’ She nodded at the window.
‘I prefer the comfort of the internal combustion engine.’ Anderson smiled at her. ‘Does he employ anybody?’
‘He’s very busy.’ She evaded the question.
‘Just that he has three vans, can’t drive them all at the same time so I presume business is booming as the 500 becomes more famous. There must be lots of work, I’m not from the revenue, I don’t care if he’s moonlighting.’
All Morna said was, ‘He works lots of hours,’ then she looked at Finn. She spoke like a woman whose husband was having an affair; never there, never with their son. A fractured family.
So,’ said Anderson, ‘maybe you can you tell me about Jennifer?’
‘Jennifer Argyll?’
‘And,’ said Anderson, ‘the Jennifer Rhu. Tell me what happened there.’
A look of slight shock passed over her face. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Oh, but you’d be better talking to Lachlan. He was a cop at the time, he was in charge of it. It was big news. At the time.’ She looked disappointed.
‘OK, I’ll speak to him. Is this file for me?’
She brightened immediately and opened the lid of the box. Anderson took out his notebook glancing at his watch. This could take some time.
Lachlan McRae was indeed the man Patrick had been with, he was exactly what Anderson had always imagined the inhabitants of Wester Ross should be. He was tall and solid without carrying an extra ounce of fat although he must have been in his late sixties, maybe even edging into his seventies. He seemed to absorb the weather and walked at a speed that had Anderson struggling for breath trying to keep up with him at, or maybe that was the wind snatching the breath from him. Anderson was relieved when they stopped at a set of traffic lights that had no traffic to control and Lachlan gave him very scant details of the disappearance of Jennifer Argyll thirty years before, in November 1987. The older man didn’t want to say very much about it and Anderson didn’t ask any more. It was a debrief. Anderson felt he had the measure of these two, Lachlan was ex-military and Anderson knew he was being told enough of the story to tantalize him. The girl had gone out on a date with an untraced man and had never come home.
‘So where was her “last seen”?’
It was then that Lachlan turned and looked at him. ‘Up on Dolphin Point, up at the Lodge,’ he said, with a shrug that seemed to say, so what would you expect?
They walked across the deserted street, a gust of wind blew a sudden squall of rain over the tarmac in front of them, the raindrops bounced up to soak their trousers. Anderson put his hand up to keep the water from his eyes. Once it had passed he turned to Lachlan, who was laughing ‘don’t worry you get used to it’. But Anderson’s eyes fell into the further distance where he caught sight of a woman with her hand also on top of her hood, fighting the force of the weather – but not before he caught a glimpse of short blonde hair. As soon as the woman saw him she turned and walked away, vanishing round the nearest corner.
Anderson stopped walking, causing Lachlan to turn and make sure he was alright. ‘Sorry, I thought I saw someone that I used to know.’
‘Who?’
‘Just a cop I used to work with?’
Lachlan patted him on the back, pushing him on slightly, not letting Anderson entertain any thought of following her. ‘Don’t worry about it, this place isn’t only home to the ghosts of the past, ghosts of the future hang about here as well. She’s been around for a few hours. Do you know her?’
‘I think I do?’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Does she need one?’ asked Anderson, feeling a sense of relief, but it was his relief nobody else’s. ‘Do you know where she’s staying?’
‘Not without a name.’
‘It’s OK, I’ll track her down.’
The he realized Lachlan had stopped walking.
‘The Exciseman’s that way.’ He indicated down the street and left Anderson to his own thoughts.
‘OK,’ he said to himself, ignoring the image of Edward Woodward being burned to death.
Checking into the pub was a matter of showing ID and getting a key. His host was curt to the point of being surly. Anderson could cope with that.
He climbed the narrow stairs, his rucksack over his back, laptop in his arms, the wooden tagged key hanging from his finger. Once in the clean, but tiny room, he checked his phone. No signal. Sure that he had seen Costello, he didn’t know if he was relieved that she was up and about, or disappointed that she’d felt she couldn’t let him in on what she was up to. Or maybe, as Brenda had said to him, it was simply none of his business. He could ask around the hotels but she’d have booked under an assumed name. Any official search would be flagged up immediately and he’d find his remit up here changed to tracking down and bringing in his friend ‘to help with enquiries’.
He needed to be careful.
He also tried to ignore the black rolling clouds coming in from the Inner Sound. He was hoping to go out and phone Archie, to tell him that Costello was up and about and that he would try to meet her, and then phone the office for access to the cold case file of Jennifer Argyll. He’d like to see that for himself, not be influenced by the agenda of who was telling him what.
So, he put his phone on charge. The information file tucked under the lamp on his bedside table said the best signal was down at the ferry terminal. He looked out the small window, along the water. The clouds, like his mood, seemed to be getting darker.
On the seafront, his jacket collar rolled up to keep the draft from his neck, his gloved fingers struggled to get Archie’s contact on the mobile. The call was answered immediately, Anderson told him that he thought he had seen Costello twice, up in Port MacDuff, sniffing around George Haggerty, or more likely, somebody called Neil Taverner.
All Archie said was ‘oh’. Anderson knew there was something else Archie had to tell him, something more important.
‘What’s happening at your end?’
‘I backtracked the CCTV on the night of the murders.’ Archie’s voice had that clipped quality, he was not happy.
‘Should Mathieson’s team not have done that?’
‘She was checking it for around the time of death, and is now doing six a.m. through to twelve, and on a wider range of cameras. They have somebody carrying an object that looks like the Millennium Falcon in a bin bag, going across the footbridge. Mathieson missed the exit route, the time, the lot.’
‘She’s used to investigating cops, this murderer is much cleverer than the average cop.’
‘What’s that noise?’
‘It’s a wind tunnel called Port MacDuff. It’d be lovely when, and if, the sun ever shines.’
‘Colin? Between you and I, I backtracked the footage from the time George met Valerie at the garage.’
‘Did Mathieson not?’
‘No, I was more interested in what Valerie was doing.’
‘What does she do?’ He was trying not to snap at the fiscal but he was beginning to understand the true meaning of the words wind chill factor.
‘Nothing. But I go back. You know the off-licence? George was carrying a bag. Easily seen on the footage but not on the images that appeared in the paper. It’s a bottle.’
‘Alcohol.’
‘George had been in earlier that day. He’d bought vodka.’
‘OK.’ Anderson was trying to piece this together. ‘I presume George doesn’t drink vodka. Or Abigail?’
‘Neither. I think he bought it for Valerie, gave her it, took her somewhere, and left her … Last thing on film is them walking into a crowd down near your place.’
‘Leaving her with no alibi? You can sanction a request for more footage, but I don’t think you need to bother. We have them, Archie, it’s a matter of time.’
‘He set her up, Colin. He set her up.’
‘There’s a lot of it about. Don’t worry about her, Archie. We are nearly there.’
Anderson sat in the corner of the pub with a coffee and the biggest fruit scone he had ever seen. It was warm, a small tub of fresh butter sat on the side with a small ramekin of strawberry jam, he could see lumps of fruit. He basically enjoyed his work but sometimes it was truly a pleasure. If only the locals would stop looking at him as if they were sizing him up for a wicker cage.
They had all looked round when he had walked in, the seven or eight men, regulars he presumed, from the way they looked fixed onto their seats, the shape of their bodies moulded into the leather.
He gave his order at the bar, the sign clearly said coffee and scones served. If they wanted to think of him as a namby southerner so be it. He hoped they didn’t have him pegged as a Christian for his lack of alcohol. He’d know if Britt Eckland put in an appearance. He placed the box file on the table and got out his notebook. They would know why he was here, it would be useful for him to be seen working. As he made himself comfortable, two men got up within a couple of minutes of each other. The taller, younger left by the door that pointed towards the gents and returned a couple of minutes later. The other man, bald, older with a couple of days’ stubble on his face went out that same door leaving a trail of Eau De dead fish in his wake, but he failed to return.
Anderson turned back to the file.
Jennifer Argyll had been a truly beautiful seventeen-year-old. She had grown up in Inverness and moved to the port with her parents when she was fifteen. She had worked as a junior clerk in the port authority and on 20th November 1987, she walked up to Dolphin Point and was never seen again. It was that simple.
Nothing else, but he could see how that smile, that face, might have haunted a generation. She had the look of a young Claudia Cardinale. Jennifer had, for some reason, gone off the cliff, or so it was presumed. Her body had never been found despite sea searches, leaving her to walk the clifftops forever in her ghostly form, so the rumours went.
He had Googled the Le Adare Lodge and apart from the many reports of the fire that had flattened the place on 13th of January 1995, there was not much. He looked at a few photographer’s shots of Dolphin Point itself, the pictures mostly populated with dolphins. Then he came across a website for Historic Scotland, where people had put their old cine films on line, and he found a treasure trove. He had only been looking for about ten minutes when he struck real gold. There was a film taken in mid-1950s, maybe a bit later, of Le Adare Lodge, a corruption of the old Gaelic of Leumadair, as Morna had said. The scene flickered to life to show the picture of the water, the sea, the waves, then it panned unsteadily round to reveal a man standing on the veranda of the lodge. A set scene Anderson had seen in many of the old postcards of the lodge. The man was dressed in full highland regalia, the kilt, the tartan Glengarry, the sporran, the lot and he was laughing at the camera, saying something a little self-consciously before two ladies appeared, both dressed in their best for the holidays in neat box jackets, high heels and skirts that floated round their knees. They both had hats on, handbags matching their suits dangled over their arms. The man in the kilt greeted them, and two young men also in kilts appeared carrying leather suitcases, one in each hand, and a couple of hat boxes under their arms.
The staff, no doubt.
He Googled the name. Interesting. All the names were interesting.
Were these the wives of the sort of men who would be out shooting anything in sight over the next few days? Anderson nibbled at his scone, it melted in his mouth and he watched the film, enjoying it rather than analyzing what he was seeing. It went on for seven or eight minutes, bits of film tagged together from here and there around the lodge, jaunty figures flickering in black and white, stag heads, the huge open log fire, guns hanging everywhere. He was looking at this when the convivial host turned back to the garden, the camera panned back to the grass that swept down to the cliff steps. He watched with interest as the camera turned indoors to catch a couple of kids running across the terrazzo dance floor. Anderson smiled, that was a piece of history right there. He was still munching his scone, taking a mouthful of coffee when the camera panned back out again, the kilted man stood on the veranda, summoning some other member of staff.
Clap clap.
Clap clap.
Oscar Duguid. Certainly not a common name. A few threats and a quick visit to DCI Patrick had confirmed what Anderson suspected. The kilted man in the cine film was Donal Duguid, the father of Abigail’s first husband.
Presumed dead.
His boat had been called the Jennifer Rhu.
Rhu was a village in Argyll.
And Jennifer Argyll was also presumed dead.
Anderson was being played, again.
So he did what his instinct told him to, he finished his coffee, nodded goodbye to his watchful companions, left the pub. He drove the Beamer the three miles to Dolphin Point.
In the very last of the light, Anderson stood in the breeze, fresh but no longer howling the way it had been earlier in the day. He could breathe easily. He had parked the Beamer at the south of the overgrown driveway, two huge boulders had been pushed into the middle of the dirt lane creating a natural barrier to prevent any vehicle from going further up the hill towards the cliff. He was a hundred feet or so above sea level already, and the lodge had been at the highpoint of the coast. The road from Port MacDuff had been a long slow steady climb, making the car engine whine and groan, out of its comfort zone.
Anderson had tried to do his homework. He had quickly realized that the Le Adare Lodge was not something that the locals liked speaking about. He had watched the films, seen the exhibition dances of Elenora Haggerty, some relative of George’s, Colin presumed, nothing surprised him now. He had watched her dance with a tall handsome man, they did a feature dance, every movement caught on the flickering cine film. He read that she had trained to be a ballet dancer but injured her shoulder. Anderson had hoped it was all going to go a bit Bates Motel after that, Haggerty traumatized by his beautiful mother damaging her shoulder and losing her love of dance and her sanity. But no, she gave up her dreams and settled down to life as hostess and exhibition dancer of the Le Adare Lodge, Dolphin Point, Port MacDuff and had lived a long and content life.
Then Jennifer Argyll had gone missing and the wheel of fortune turned.
It was a long walk, the lane that lead up to where he thought the house had stood was badly overgrown. The lane wound its way up a hill, around a crop of boulders to a tall rock stack right on the headline. Now he had his bearings. He zipped his anorak, and pulled his hat down over his ears, scarf up round his neck, gloves on. He trudged on, weaving his way upward through the thorns and the bushes. Sometimes he found himself walking along a good concrete road, the tarmac only slightly cracked, at other times the tarmac was broken and fractured by the plants growing through. But on the road went, narrowing slightly. He could feel the change in the air, smelling the sea breeze, the scent of salt on his face. It was fresher up here, away from the perfume of the trees and the winter undergrowth, the bare branches that pulled and tugged at him as he pushed his way through.
And suddenly he was at the top of the hill, the great rock stack to the north, the Inner Sound lay in front of him like undulating grey silk. He stood, gathering his breath. The climb had been more strenuous than he had thought, but as he walked into the clearing at the summit, the clouds parted and the sun came out, warming his face once more, letting him breathe and appreciate the crystal clear diamonds of light on the water. The dark grey churn had calmed to a sheet of silver, he could hear the gentle beat and crash of waves on the shore beneath him.
Mother Nature had welcomed him to her world.
He stood and looked around him, pulling the gloves from his hands, feeling his fingers so he could dig around in his pockets for the map. He looked at it again, the small road was there, winding up to the top of the cliff. He walked carefully to the edge, fearing that the breeze which was absent one minute, might gust again and one real blast would push or pull him right over. Was that what had happened to Jennifer Argyll? He looked out over the grey water, where the Jennifer Rhu had gone to the depths.
Anderson moved slowly towards the edge and looked down on to another bank of grass, then another below as if the cliff had layered itself, tiered to make it easier to get down to the beach. In the cine film, there had been a wooden stairway attached to the cliff face. He could still see a few wooden uprights clinging onto bare rock. The enclosed beach, a perfect semi-circle of a bay with the cliffs reaching out and high on either side, like arms to protect the pure white sand that looked as though it had been sieved onto the beach. A few cracked slabs of rock forked out into the water, waves cutting over them. Jagged fingers that would be treacherous to any boat wanting to land. Dangerous as they were, Anderson could see how they reduced the power of the waves breaking over them, making the beach itself a much safer place to swim.
He leaned over, seeing, on the face of a cliff with its levels of coarse tufted grass, more bits of the wooden stairway, playing join the dots, he could make out exactly where the steps had been. He looked at the photocopy of the photograph of the lodge, it must have been taken from where he stood. The house had faced right out to sea, from high up on the cliff, far enough back to keep it safe from erosion and the worst of what Mother Nature could fling at it.
He looked up and down, from the height of the rock stack to the beach below. No sign of the house was left, no sign it had ever been.
It was the ghost of a house.
What had he been expecting?
This was where Oscar had played as a child. He had spent his life here and he had been a friend of George’s, whose mother had danced so elegantly across the terrazzo dance floor. This was the place that George ran back to, but strangely enough, despite the emotional history he shared, he had never brought his wife or child up here. They had never met his father.
Those boys had been formed by this place. They had married the same woman. Now both children of those unions were dead. As Costello had said, something that is too much of a coincidence tends not to be a coincidence. He walked back towards the road, now he could see some outlines of the brickwork, light grey coloured granite stone, a wall only a foot high that would be solid then vanish in the undergrowth as though it had never been. He walked forward, tracing the footprint of the house. He kept turning round to look at the view, to check it was still there and then find himself doing nothing but standing looking, and looking, the view was beguiling and enchanting.
He continued to trace the outline, his feet getting wet. Looking back he could see his path, the footsteps clear in the wet shiny grass, sidestepping to the left and then wandering to the right like the footsteps of a drunk. Then he climbed over a piece of wall, now trying to find his way through drier winter growth.
Anderson realized he was standing on something solid underfoot, more than the surrounding earth and moss. He scraped the sole of his shoe back and forth, removing the dirt to reveal a white tile, edged with black. He scraped and pulled the branches back with his gloved hand, getting his face scratched and cut as the tiles of the black and white terrazzo floor revealed itself. In his mind’s eye, he saw Elenora Haggerty glide across the floor in stiff taffeta and sprung heels, he could almost smell her perfume in the air; hear the small dance band in the noise of the wind as it raced up the cliff face.
He pulled out his phone to photograph the few stones that were still standing, then turned to go back to the edge, a wall a hundred yards or so, mentally mapping out the footprint of the building as it had been the day the photograph over Morna’s fireplace was taken. It was a well-known picture of the place, he had seen a few versions on the net, on calendars and postcards.
He paused to look at the grass, his own footprints now almost faded in the rain, the blades of grass he had crushed had sprung back to life – on his footprints only, not on the new footmarks that had closely tracked his. The footsteps walked in a straight line, coming right for him, and then they had pulled away to the side, into the trees that ran down the hillside back to the main road.
‘Hello?’
No answer, just a buffering breeze warning him not to make a noise up here. This had been a still and silent place for many years. In his mind’s eye, Elenora Haggerty lifted a finger to her ruby red lips as she glided past, keeping the secret.
She was a ghost, the footmarks were real.
Whoever it was didn’t want to make themselves known, so Colin Anderson put his phone, the print of the house and the map back in his anorak pocket and made his way down the road, a little more quickly than he had come up.
Halfway down the path, Anderson caught sight of him. Somebody, moving ahead, shambling through the undergrowth. The figure started to speed up, running, pushing aside the dead bracken. Anderson shouted at him but the figure, camouflaged in black and dark green, began to melt into the landscape. Anderson gave chase, nearly catching him at the stream where the wet jacket of the man slipped out the grasp of his outstretched hand, but it was enough to put both of them out of kilter and down they went, down amongst the stones, the darkness and the icy bubbling water.
The water went over Anderson’s head. He thought no, not again; he was getting too old for this. But he held onto the man he was chasing, taking in lungfuls of water, writhing and twisting as they both struggled for air. Anderson felt his head scrape against a sharp stone, a blow aimed at his midriff made him pull back. The impact this time was hard and brutal. He still held on, trying to push himself up with his legs so the other guy could pull him free of the water when he tried to stand up. But Anderson rolled and he went under again, feeling his head strike something hard again, and that terrible fear of water filling his nose and this throat. Anderson panicked, his clothes weighing him down, he opened his mouth to scream that this could not be happening to him again. Then he felt a hand grab his jacket and pull him clear, the other man got to his feet quicker, staggering, and barely managing to stay upright. He, an older and balding man, bent over, hands on knees, taking in gasps of breath. He reached out a hand to help Anderson up.
‘I’m too old for this, pal.’
‘Me too.’ Anderson looked at the bald head, the weather-beaten face, the straggly beard and subtracted eighteen years. ‘Welcome back from the dead, Mr Duguid.’
They sat on the grass in silence looking out over the Sound, both soaking wet. The smell of dead fish rose steaming from his companion. Anderson was about to change this man’s world, he could let him say goodbye.
Anderson regained his breathing, he stood up, looking round at the rock stack, feeling colder than he’d ever felt. He looked up and saw that same woman he had seen before. She took her time looking, keeping her distance, a tranquil figure, unmoving. She turned, walking away quickly, heading towards the road, her hand up over her head, holding her hood up. But again he saw another flicker of familiar blonde hair. And, he thought, just for a moment, that she had a gun in her hand.
‘Costello?’ he shouted, his fatigue forgotten, he was running in an instant. But she was gone. He repeated her name, ‘Costello?’ quietly, more to himself than for any other ears. ‘Did you see her?’ asked Anderson. ‘That woman?’
‘What woman?’
The file from the Scub camera was now available to view after a huge delay about who was footing the bill for the restoration of a video file that might show nothing. Eventually it had been returned to the Complaints team with an invoice.
Mathieson sat down and clicked a few buttons on the computer. She reached round to retrieve her cup of coffee, took a sip, her eyes off the screen for a full ninety seconds. She glanced at it as she rearranged a file from the left side to the right as it was impinging on her view. She flicked it open to check the date on her timeline of Costello’s ‘last seen’. She hoped this film would tell them something one way or the other as she wanted some closure on Costello’s case, they all needed it. Mathieson, despite her reputation, had a lot of empathy for Costello, but the DI needed to be brought back into the fold, no matter what she had done.
Costello did not have the record of a dodgy cop. In some ways, she had a worse issue; she was moralistic and that was an easier recruit to vigilantism. Mathieson could paint that scenario easily, she could understand it perfectly.
She clicked play and let the screen change, still not paying it much attention, somebody shouted from the opposite side of the room about a sandwich order that was going down to Subway. She asked for a twelve-inch wholemeal with avocado, chicken and all the salad, but no peppers, before adding a packet of Doritos. She could be here all night and she could never work with an empty stomach.
Mathieson turned back to the computer and began to watch, noting the time the film started with a view of a blade of grass glinting and quivering with perfect spheres of rainwater. It was 21.27. A slight frown appeared on her forehead, both in concentration and concern. She had been expecting the long view clarity of CCTV. Due to the incidents on the loch in the recent weeks, all the CCTV cameras at the car park at Inveruglass had been turned along the shoreline or out onto the islands themselves. This was digital video taken by a camera that had been set to film anything it caught in its sightline.
She was worried about what was coming next, watching with a weird mixture of elation and horror in her stomach. She might be a bitch but she knew to admit when she had been wrong.
The camera had been set to look out over the water, moving slightly when buffeted by the wind or when Kieran adjusted its position. Occasionally a white cloth covered the lens, wiping it clear of rain. For a while the screen was filled with an image of the loch, nothing more, nothing moving but the raindrops pattering on the surface. The camera was being switched on and off, the clock changed, moving on only by a minute or so. Kieran was obviously switching it on when he thought he saw some movement, then he would focus in on something in the water that proved to be imaginary. Then the camera would pull back, going in search of something more promising.
Mathieson was trying to think of Kieran lying on his stomach at the top of the hill, a few metres higher than the viewpoint. Instead of the clear view right down the loch, a famous view often seen on postcards, Kieran had picked this spot for the clear view to the island, looking east rather than south east. From where he was looking, the car park would be behind and below him, over his right shoulder.
Then the camera jerked, as if it had got a fright. Mathieson could imagine Kieran hearing something that made him turn. The camera moved along the ground slightly, blades of grass came close as the camera dropped. Kieran was now closer to the ground. Hiding? It was more of a pull back into cover than a fall. Mathieson frowned. The film of grass getting wet with raindrops continued, with no further movement. Was that it? Kieran had dropped the camera at the first sign of trouble and the film had caught nothing more?
But the camera kept filming, minutes passed. Mathieson was about to sip her coffee when she saw something. She could make out the top of a figure on the right side of the frame, a mound of dark, the head and shoulders swaying from side to side with the effort of climbing the steep hill up from the viewpoint. She wished she had visited that scene herself, then she might have a better idea of the lie of the land. The camera was near the water’s edge but in an elevated position, the walker was coming up from the car park, she thought. The figure stood at the top of the hill, looking out over the water with no idea he was being filmed. So that meant the camera had already been abandoned or Kieran was very well hidden. Or this visitor had no notion to look around for a covert cameraman. From the darkness of the film she couldn’t make out who it was, but he was well dressed for the weather and didn’t really seem bothered about being seen. Then someone else appeared, quickly from the left screen.
The attack was swift and brutal, three low level stabs before the first figure had time to turn around. Mathieson let out an involuntary squeal, and pulled back, her colleagues turned to look at her. The first figure was now on his knees, the camera caught the flash of a blade. She put her coffee down.
Bannon came over, to stand behind her, looking over her shoulder, watching as the knife went in again and again. She pressed pause as the man in the anorak turned towards the camera, trying to get away.
Mathieson took one look at his face.
‘Donnie, Donnie. What the hell did you get yourself into?’
Anderson sat on the side of the table, perching himself there, comfortable with the situation. Alastair Patrick was standing in the corner, his legs locked at the knee, arms folded, his jaw tight, unreadable. Anderson was wary where Patrick’s allegiance lay. His demeanour was not that of a detective who had just bought into custody a murderer, or a rapist. It was more like the local drunk had been brought in for pissing into the harbour again.
Anderson was keeping his own allegiance neutral. Mathieson had updated him on the contents of the file using the word ‘military’ to describe the stealth of the fatal assault on Donnie McCaffrey on Loch Lomondside. His eyes swivelled to Patrick as he updated her on the orange carpet and that it might be worth a look at the HikeLite website, he said quietly when Patrick’s own mobile had distracted his attention.
Sometimes the better dance was with the devil.
Anderson handed over a mug of soup made by Patrick’s wife; Oscar Duguid looked like he needed it.
‘So, welcome back from the dead, Oscar. How does it feel?’
‘I’m not proud of what I did. But I did need to do it.’ He sipped his soup savouring it, his lips making smacking noises. Anderson heard Patrick move behind him, readjusting his position. He could feel the tension from the other man’s body. Somebody here had a secret.
Oscar Andrew Duguid, clean, beard trimmed, sat in the small interview room at Port MacDuff, he seemed to have shrunk from the ambling man that rolled out of Anderson’s arms, then helped him out the icy waters of the stream.
Anderson was patient, waiting for Oscar to feel comfortable enough to start talking. Starting at the beginning and working his way to the end. Anderson was interested in where Oscar was going to start, suspecting that the story might start much further back than Oscar might be willing to reveal. Maybe as far back as Jennifer.
There was no talk, no eye contact so Anderson thought he had better jumpstart the conversation.
‘Whose idea was it to fake your own death?’
Oscar screwed up his face, rubbing his thumbs deep into his eyes and shaking his head. But there was no answer.
‘You do remember Mary Jane.’
‘Of course I do.’ The voice was strong, sounded intelligent and eloquent.
Anderson pushed a picture across the top of the table to him, the picture George had given to him. Oscar didn’t look at it before turning it over and pushing it away.
Anderson tapped the back of the photograph. ‘That was my daughter, that girl you adopted was my daughter. You going missing sparked off a chain of events that led to her death, so don’t give me any shit about what a hard life you have had.’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ said Oscar. ‘It’s my loss too.’
‘Of course, but you did know that she had died.’
He nodded.
‘And how do you know that, if you are living in the middle of nowhere, out of touch with society?’ Anderson leaned back in his seat. ‘Who told you? You are no Bear Grylls, so somebody is helping you. Who?’
Oscar Duguid closed his eyes in a very deliberate slow blink. ‘This is a place where people come to run away, they are very good at hiding you here. Walking around, how many different accents have you already heard? All those home counties professionals that couldn’t take it anymore and had to get away.’
‘Very few went to the lengths of faking their own deaths.’
‘I just wanted to disappear.’
‘So how did it go, you bought a small dinghy.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘OK, somebody did. Somebody bought one for you, from somewhere. Might be a bit obvious if they found the Jennifer Rhu burning, the small boat still attached but a second boat you had just purchased was gone. Nobody had to know about the second small boat that actually got you off the Jennifer Rhu and back to shore. So who bought you that? Who was your partner in crime?’ Anderson folded his arms. ‘And to be clear, it was a crime.’
It was a guess but he knew he had struck gold. There was a mastermind in this and it wasn’t Oscar Duguid. His gut feeling was that Oscar was a man in search of nothing more but a quiet life.
‘It’s all nothing to do with me. I’m happy sitting in the corner of the pub, or in the back room, eating the leftovers, having a shower, moving around but mostly living up there near the lodge. It’s fine in the summer, not best in the winter. The winters are tough,’ he said, touching the reddened skin of his cheek, as if it was still tender. ‘I have a hut. It’s fine.’
A look passed from Oscar to Patrick. All he got back was a brief nod. It was not returned. Anderson made a note to search the hut.
‘Who bought the second boat? We need a name?’
It came as no surprise when Oscar Dugiud’s lips opened to form the name. ‘It was George Haggerty.’
The story that Oscar Duguid told was frightening in its simplicity. He had a boat and he was a good sailor. George Haggerty had bought a small boat with an onboard motor months before in Glasgow. Nothing that could be traced back to either of them. Oscar sailed out, set his boat on fire before returning to shore on George’s boat. Then he tied it back up again behind the yacht George had owned at that time. He left his own dinghy tied to the burning remains of the Jennifer Rhu.
‘The Jennifer Rhu?’ asked Anderson, ‘Named after?’
‘Jennifer Argyll,’ he said through a painful smile. ‘She was a crush of mine. She needed to be remembered.’
‘More than Abigail?’
‘Yes. Oh yes. If I had stayed married I would have died. My life was managed from the minute I got up to when my head hit the pillow. The life of being a husband and father wasn’t for me. I had to bail out. Nobody’s fault, I’m just no good with four walls, pension schemes and thirty-five hour weeks. At the time, nobody said anything apart from how sorry they were. We got away with it.’
Oscar was used to sailing off on his own, it raised no suspicions. They found the boat still burning and the presence of the dinghy alongside suggested he had tried to free it but had fallen overboard. Search and rescue found nothing. There was nothing to find.
‘Who insured your life for two million pounds?’ asked Anderson, and saw Patrick’s eyes narrow and flicker. He hadn’t been expecting that.
‘I did.’
‘Who advised you to do that?’
‘A friend.’
‘A particular friend?’
Patrick was paying a lot of attention now.
‘George Haggerty.’
‘Of course it was. And what did you think when Abigail was insured for two million and she was then murdered, with all that money going to … oh yes, her husband. George Haggerty.’
‘I didn’t get a penny.’ Oscar looked a little confused.
And looking at him, Anderson believed him. ‘Of course you didn’t, you were dead. Abigail got it, and now George has it.’
He had escaped the madness of his married nine-to-five life to escape to a different madness of this life up here. This was where he wanted to be, where he was born. And then he started mumbling about wanting to be here with Jennifer.
He heard Patrick sigh, Anderson felt that he was kicking a puppy. This man needed help.
‘Do you want to rebuild the lodge, Oscar?’ he asked gently.
And then Oscar began to cry.
Patrick tapped Anderson on the shoulder, time to call it a day.
‘Was it all back to bricks and mortar?’ he muttered as Oscar was taken away.
‘Life’s loss but I bet the money will be useful, though not to him,’ said Patrick in response. ‘Not bricks and mortar. Cocaine.’
‘What?’
Patrick’s voice was low. ‘Look, the North Coast 500 is a gift to a dealing network. The place floods with tourists. Then consider that anybody who builds on land on that route is on the gravy train for life. Somebody couldn’t see a way of bridging that gap between what they had and what they needed. So they killed until they got what they wanted. The oldest motive in the book. Money. Pure greed.’
‘They killed Abigail and Malcolm for that?’ Anderson sat back down.
‘Looks like it.’
‘Do you know who they are? Anything to do with a company that might be driving luggage around the North Coast 500, specifically?’
Patrick gave a short sad smile, ‘Yes, but it will break somebody’s heart.’
One of the men looked right into the camera. The camera jumped, and rolled to the side, the world tumbled making Bannon and Mathieson both twist their heads as they tried to make out what they were seeing. A dark figure moving toward it very quickly, and then veered off to the right.
‘I think that’s where the boy makes a run for it. He gets chased and we know what happens next.’
The camera was still moving, sliding to the left towards the drop to the water where it was found. There was a jerky image of the female figure walking backwards, then dropping to the ground, and clumsily getting to her feet again. Then the screen filled with movement of limbs and shadows, that image was lost as the camera became airborne and started to film grass and sky. Then the screen filled with dark, murky water.
‘Bloody hell, what was that about? What were they doing there?’
‘Diane, you need to get that middle section slowed and analyzed.’ Bannon realized that the DCI was shaking. It wasn’t easy to watch the death of a colleague, unable to do anything about it. Except catch the man who had used that knife.
‘Why don’t you go and put the kettle on? I’ll get a note of the timings, there’s one bit where the second attacker looks right at the camera. The tech boys will be able to catch that and work it up. We’ve got one of them, Diane. He’s on a shoogily peg, it’s a matter of time.’
‘They might be able to do something, but the lower part of his face is covered. Don’t get your hopes up. They killed McCaffrey. That student was very lucky to survive and I don’t think Costello, if that was Costello, would have been able to get out of there alive.’
They were settled down for a second viewing of the film, fortified with black coffee and the knowledge of what they were about to see, they hoped they could watch it this time with more analysis and less emotion.
‘That look like McCaffrey to you?’ asked Mathieson.
They watched as the guy on the ground tried to get back up before they saw the blade again. The guy on the ground then stopped moving.
‘Was he dealing? That looks like an organized take down,’ offered Bannon.
‘There’s no evidence of that anywhere in his life, he was a normal young man with a wife and kids. How the hell did he get into this? Shit! Who is that?’
Another figure appeared.
‘That’s a female. What the hell is she doing?’
‘Walking backwards? There’s somebody behind her, she’s talking to them, hands up trying to appease them. The camera has moved to follow, showing that Kieran was still filming. He got the murder on film.’ Only seven minutes had passed. They both leaned forwards, watching carefully as the smaller figure turned to the camera and seemed to fly through the air with such force that her body juddered as she impacted the ground. The bigger figure, walking up behind her, was still bringing his arm down, following through from the strike to the back of her head.
The enhanced film moved frame by frame showing two dark figures started moving, pulling at clothes. They took their time, confident that they would not be seen, unaware of the low light camera watching from the undergrowth. They had on gloves, their faces covered, clearly very forensically aware. They were wearing something like black boiler suits.
‘What is going on here?’
‘Mixing the blood, the DNA? I don’t know. So we have Donnie, two assailants and one other unidentified … victim? He’s pouring the contents of a bottle. Do you think that’s cheap whisky? And what’s he doing?’ One of them had pulled back Donnie’s face and was tapping something in it. The taller one kicked the prostate small figure with his foot, the hat slid slightly to reveal some short blonde hair. Mathieson groaned.
‘Well we know what happened,’ said Bannon over her shoulder. ‘We need to know who those two are? Any ideas?’
‘Too clean to be regular drug take downs. That looks military to me.’
‘Let’s go through the file again. And you’d better phone Anderson and tell him, I’m sure he’d like to know.’