Phyliss McNeill had nothing but nice things to say about Kaj. ‘Such a lovely young man!’ He was polite, helpful and friendlier than any of the previous upstairs tenants had ever been, ‘a real credit to his parents.’ He’d not only made a habit of asking her if she needed anything picking up at the shops but had also occasionally taken her Jack Russell out for evening walks, when she wasn’t feeling up to it, to save her daughter the trouble of having to come over. The daughter had two school-aged children of her own to look after, and it wasn’t always convenient, with her job as well and all. Kaj had even fixed a few little things like dripping taps and sagging cupboard doors in her flat for her.
I’d always had a bit of a soft spot for the old-fashioned granny types who insisted on trying to feed you treats myself, and the tea that Phyliss insisted on laying out for us attested to the quality of her baking. That she’d become genuinely fond of Kai was painfully obvious. This nice, elderly lady was the first person I’d seen shed genuine tears for him since we’d got here.
“I still can’t believe it,” she told us. “His poor family must be absolutely devastated. And you say it wasn’t an accident after all? I don’t know what the world’s coming to, I really don’t. Such awful things going on all the time.”
“Did you ever see, or hear, anyone arguing with Mr Visser?” Caitlin asked her.
“Goodness, no!” The way she said that made it sound like she couldn’t imagine anyone ever having any reason to. “He didn’t have a lot of visitors, except for his friends from work, and Kaj was very good about keeping the noise down upstairs. He usually slept over at their places when they were having a bit of a night out, and he’d always be as quiet as a mouse about it if he did get home late. There was a nice young lady he brought home a couple of times last summer, but nothing came of it in the end. He didn’t have much time for dating, between all the extra hours he put in at work and tinkering with cars in that garage of his in his spare time.”
If Phyliss chose to believe that Kaj had been such a paragon of virtue, I didn’t see any reason to disabuse her of the notion now. When asked if she’d noticed anyone calling on him recently, she was able to tell us of one man she’d heard ringing his bell and gone to the window to have a look at, but only so she could mention him to Kaj when she next saw him. A well-dressed middle-aged gentleman, stoutish and clean-shaven. Kaj had told her it was just one of his friends’ dads, wanting to talk to him about his car. That had been three or four weeks ago, she thought.
“It was a very nice car too if it was the one he climbed into, but I suppose people with money have it because they know how to save a bob or two when they can.” No, she couldn’t tell us what make it had been, but it looked expensive, ‘a big, shiny red thing.’
After we’d extricated ourselves, I found myself hoping for Phyliss’s sake that the next upstairs neighbours would be nice people. The woman wasn’t lonely, compared to many retired widows. She had plenty of friends by the sound of it and family living close enough to pop in regularly, but inconsiderate neighbours could make anyone’s life unpleasant, and Kaj had set the bar rather high for any future tenants to live up to.
Twenty
It was a little chilly and drizzling slightly when Shay and I set off for our run that evening, but we soon warmed up and, after a couple of miles, the light rain petered out altogether. Shay had picked us a route of footpaths that would mostly keep us off the roads, and even though there weren’t any decent hills to navigate, he set a brisk enough pace to make keeping up with him challenging. It was good to switch off for an hour and enjoy the fresh air and the exercise, but I have to admit I was happy to slow down to a jog for a bit while he let off some steam by running an extra, fast circuit of the little loch that marked our halfway point.
We didn’t bump into anyone during the whole time we were out, although I did see occasional figures in the distance. It made a nice change from the heavily wooded routes we sometimes ran together near Dores. You could see for miles up here, the sky a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree dome, vast and liberating. My cousin’s flushed and grinning face when he caught up with me again after his second lap of the loch spoke volumes. He’d attained his runner’s high, that euphoric and pain-free state that some people got from this kind of exercise. I’d long suspected that one of the reasons my cousin got so grumpy when he was kept inactive for too long was that he didn’t like being deprived of that particular buzz.
There was a delivery van pulling up outside the house when we got back, and Caitlin gave us a wave from her doorway as we came up to her.
“Nice pants,” she said, taking in Shay’s baggy joggers with a wry little smile. “What are they? More of your hemp gear?”
“Mainly bamboo cotton, actually.” Eco-friendly and sustainable, naturally, but they also happened to be really comfy to wear, too, super soft on the skin. I had a pair myself, although I preferred long, loose shorts for running unless it was really cold out. The delivery guy came over with his stack of pizza boxes, and Caitlin fished in her pocket for his tip whilst I took them off him.
“Thanks. I’m starving. You were nice and quick.”
He gave her a beaming smile as she handed him the money. “And thank you, miss. Enjoy your meal.”
I guess, with prepayments online being the norm these days, a lot of people didn’t tip the delivery guys anymore, not that everyone always had. Collins appeared at Caitlin’s shoulder, eager to get his hands on the food as the driver went off.
“Good run, boss?” he asked cheerfully as he relieved me of the boxes. “Rather you than me. Still, at least it stopped raining for you.” He disappeared inside with the food, but Caitlin lingered a moment to tell us they’d ordered more than enough for everyone, in case we were interested.
“Sounds good. I’ll pop over after I’ve had a quick shower,” I promised, and she left it at that.
I felt much fresher after I’d cleaned up properly, although the low water pressure was a continuing disappointment. I left Shay to take his turn in our bathroom and went on through to join the others, taking a chilled six-pack with me as an offering.
It was so-so pizza, nothing special, but I’d worked up enough of an appetite by then to enjoy it. I checked for new updates on my phone as I ate, but there had still been no sign of Nicholas Albert when the patrol car had left his place at six, at the end of their shift.
“What did Shay make of what Phyliss McNeill had to say?” Caitlin asked as she reached for another meat-loaded slice. I was sticking to the margherita with mushrooms she’d ordered in case Shay accepted their invitation. It was a bit greasy, and I doubted I’d eat more than three slices. Still, with Collins and Mills on hand, I doubted any leftovers would be wasted.
“Not much. He said it was possible her stout, middle-aged guy might be Charlie Soames if we wanted to show her his picture. He’s got a red BMW, so that might be the car she was talking about.” Just because Kaj had been sleeping with Charlie’s wife, that wasn’t enough, by itself, to currently make him much of a suspect. Anthony, if that was even his real name, was looking far more promising just now.
Caitlin nodded as she chewed thoughtfully. “I suppose Soames could have gone to have a word with his rival if he’d found out about him. And I don’t suppose Kaj would have wanted to tell Phyliss who his visitor really was if that was the case.”
I had to agree with her. Most people prefer to be thought well of, and Phyliss hadn’t seemed the type to look favourably on casual adultery. Why upset her unnecessarily? Besides, unless Charlie had mellowed a lot over the years, I didn’t think it likely that a ‘quiet word’ would be his preferred method of dealing with a situation like that. He’d be far more likely to send round the guys he’d used to scare his undesirable tenants off with… now that was a thought! I wondered if the physical files of those complaints reports held more detail than the electronic versions I’d read. We’d have to see if we could dig them out tomorrow.
“And Nicholas Albert?”
Philips asked.
“We’ll go looking for him in the morning if he doesn’t get in touch with us tonight.” According to the information Shay had supplied, the fish market in Scrabster harbour currently employed Nick, three miles from Thurso itself. We ought to be able to find him there. It was beginning to look like he might have decided to stay at a friend’s house overnight, and if he wasn’t the type to worry about being without his phone, he might not even nip home to fetch it before going to work tomorrow.
When I went to see how he was doing, I found Shay on our couch munching his way through a plate of cheeses, olives, chopped veggie sticks and crusty brown bread from the selection he’d laid out on our coffee table. He rarely bothered cooking if he was the only one who was going to eat. I helped myself to a spare carrot stick and dunked it in one of his dips as he tapped an earbud to pause his music and look up at me inquiringly.
“Caitlin and I were thinking of watching a film before bed if you fancy it?” I offered before biting into it.
“Coding,” he told me absently, as I might have guessed from the distant expression on his face. “The last batch of CCTV clips came through while we were out, and I’ve already checked them. No luck there.” Temporarily stalled as we were, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d picked up some unfinished project to keep himself occupied with. Best to leave him to it in that case. Shay sitting blankly staring at nothing didn’t mean Shay was unoccupied. He could spend hours compiling and editing code in his head before typing any of it out.
The thought of more greasy pizza wasn’t very appealing, so I piled up a snack plate of my own from the goodies on offer to fill up on before letting myself out again.
Nicholas Albert didn’t call us that evening, so as soon as it hit eight o’clock the next morning, I tried his number again. No answer.
“We’re heading up to Thurso then?” Shay asked when I put the phone down.
“I think we should, yes. I’ll leave Mills and Collins down here to see about digging out those files I wanted us to look at.”
“Have them phone the people they got those photos from again, too,” he suggested. “Maybe friends of theirs might have more pictures from Harpers that night that we could look at. It’s worth a go.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, although if Nicholas could provide us with up-to-date contact details for Anthony, we wouldn’t have any need for a photograph to identify him from. After all, we already had statements from the three girls confirming that he’d left their house with Visser that night, and they could all recognise him on sight. But what if everything Anthony had told Nick was a lie? How well did those two actually know each other? Any number Anthony had given out might just turn out to belong to a discarded burner phone. If the man had latched on to the group that night with the sole intent of getting to Visser, that now seemed very possible. None of our suspicions had been proven yet, but the spiked drinks theory seemed like the best explanation for everything that had occurred. It wasn’t impossible that Anthony had dropped Kaj off at home, as he’d claimed to have done, or that our victim had taken it into his head to go out again, but I seriously doubted that was what had happened. Talking to Nicholas was my current number one priority, but that was no reason to neglect any other options we could think of to help us to track Anthony down.
After a quick conference with the team, who were still eating their own breakfasts, Shay and I set off. Philips and Caitlin could follow us up to Thurso when they were ready to move. By the time they caught up with us, we could have already finished checking the house, which suited me just fine. Nick’s phone hadn’t moved overnight, but that didn’t guarantee he wasn’t in there.
It was a nice little drive up. Apart from the scattered villages we passed, it was all green, open country; little clusters of trees, endless hedges and mile after mile of flat fields all around us, many dotted with herds of scattered, grazing sheep. The morning was slightly overcast but quite bright. We had Loch Watten on our right for a couple of miles early on, but that soon disappeared behind us.
Thurso was an attractive little town once we’d crossed ‘Thor’s river’, now the River Thurso, and were driving through the centre. Northern Scotland was generously seeded with Scandinavian derived place names. Even the word ‘kilt,’ so inseparably connected to Scotland in most people’s minds, had its origins in Norse, not Gaelic. People forgot, these days, that for centuries these lands had been under Viking rule.
Thurso proper had a very generous amount of nice stone houses and cottages, most boasting well-tended gardens, and I saw far less ugly, modern boxes than most places seemed to have sprouted in the past few decades. That changed a little as we moved out towards the outskirts on the northwest side of the town and the buildings began to have the ubiquitous look of grey, pebble-dashed modern housing estates everywhere. We soon left that neighbourhood behind, too, as we continued towards Scrabster on the A9. Half an hour after leaving our rented accommodation outside Wick, we were pulling up outside Nicholas Albert’s house.
It was a pretty little place off the main road, with great views out over the bay and up towards the harbour and plenty of space between it and the nearest neighbours. Nick’s car was still parked in the driveway. We rang the doorbell and waited for a while before making our own circuit of the house. I slipped a glove on to try the back door, but it was locked.
“I could climb up and see if any of the upstairs windows are open, have a look inside?” Shay offered hesitantly, but I shook my head. Not a good idea. That was exactly the sort of mistake Munro was expecting us to make. We didn’t have just cause to enter the property without permission like that. Once we were back around the front, I gave the front door a try, too, but that was also locked.
“Time to break a drone out instead then?” Shay asked. “It’s not too breezy for them just now.”
He hadn’t brought his ‘mothership’ with him on this trip, but he had a couple of the little ones in a case in his pack, charged and ready to go. We got back into the car, and he set his laptop up on his knee and wound his window down a little. I doubted anyone would have noticed the mini drone flying out, even if they’d been watching. From a distance, it could have been a big bug getting loose. The small, frosted glass bathroom window at the back had been partly open, so he flew around to that first and neatly guided his little spy inside.
“Door’s shut,” he commented and dropped down to the tiles and changed the camera focus. “Not enough of a gap to get under. The hall carpet’s in the way out there.” We didn’t want to risk crippling the thing and leaving it stranded, so he flew his drone back out of the window and moved to the next one along. The main bedroom? It seemed likely, as that was the window with the best sea view. Unfortunately, the curtains were drawn, so we couldn’t even get a look inside.
The obedient little drone zipped around to the side of the house as Shay’s fingers guided it with practised ease. The window at the side was no more helpful. Main bedroom again, but also blocked by curtains. That room must get plenty of light when both sets were open. The last upstairs window, to the right at the front, gave us a view of what must be the spare bedroom. It was furnished but empty, the bed not even made up. Nick probably only did that when he had friends staying over.
“Letterbox?” my cousin suggested, calling the drone back. “You could write a note on the back of one of your cards and drop them both through.” That sounded like a reasonable idea. “Careful not to squish it,” he warned as he handed it over. “I’ve set it to hover in place so it won’t just drop when you let it go.”
I delivered my card and the mini drone and went back to the car. Shay waited for me before beginning his interior exploration. Hall, living room kitchen, another closed door that may have been a downstairs cloakroom or a store cupboard. We’d seen those open rooms through the downstairs windows already, but now we could look around properly. There was nobody hidden away downstairs in there. Not unless they were behind that closed door.
“Th
at can’t be much of a room anyway,” Shay decided, making measuring estimates. “Most likely just a downstairs toilet.”
Upstairs, there were only three doors leading off the landing, and they were all closed. Again, with not enough of a gap between the wood and the carpet to slip the drone through safely. Well, it had been worth a try. Shay fiddled with his laptop and brought up a sound sensor screen, taking the drone up to the bedroom door. Not a flicker of activity on the graph. I went to pretend to try the doorbell again, to let the drone out.
“What now?” Shay asked when I was back in the car, and he’d docked it to its charging station and put the little case and his laptop away again.
“We’ll head for the fish market. Can you buzz Caitlin to let her know where we’re going?”
“Sure,” he agreed, pulling his phone out as I got us turned around and headed back up to the road. Our next stop was only another mile or so further on.
Twenty-One
Scrabster was an important northern harbour, catering to offshore support ships for the oil, gas and renewable energy sectors as well as housing the local fishing fleet and the terminal for the car ferries out to the Orkney Islands. Scrabster also provided a stopping point for visiting cruise ships. The marina had been revamped a few years back with a new pontoon layout, so there was no more clambering up and down ladders for boat owners who wished to moor up there. The chilled fish market, right by the quayside, had all the required facilities on hand to cater for visiting vessels wanting to offload their catches. Around a thousand different fishing vessels used the port every year, sometimes landing over thirty million pounds worth of fresh fish and shellfish between them. It wasn’t only the local boats that used the place.
Scrabster itself was a small settlement. There was an Inn across the road from the harbour for overnighting ferry passengers, a café, a restaurant, and a scattering of houses. I drove around the harbour to park up in the car park by the marina, and we walked down to the long, red brick building that housed the fish market.
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 17