Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4)

by Oliver Davies

  “I’ll run the plate through the NAS for you if you want to hold off for a bit on putting out a local alert for the car.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea. Shay’s access to the National ANPR Service was a higher grade than mine and offered better-searching options. I emailed the licence to my team and printed off a good-sized copy to give to Philips.

  “Can you and Caitlin go to Louisburgh Street with this?” I asked, handing him the printout. “You’ve got the girls’ work details if none of them is at home, right? Text me as soon as they confirm that this is the man they met at Harpers.”

  “How on earth did you get this?” Philips wanted to know as he slipped the sheet into a folder. I pulled out my phone, opened the shot Shay had spotted Anthony in and zoomed in on the background figures.

  “The new photos that came in earlier. See the shirt? Shay managed to clean the face up enough for biometric scanning to find a match.”

  “Nice work!” Caitlin was already putting her jacket on as she peered at my phone screen. “That’s a pretty crappy shot of him. We still haven’t had any luck with Nicholas, by the way. None of his contacts has heard from him.”

  Yeah, that wasn’t good. Well, all we could do for now was focus on finding our chief suspect and leave missing persons to get on with trying to trace Nicholas Albert.

  “Want me to run that name through the PNC, Sir?” Collins asked helpfully as Philips and Caitlin headed off.

  “Yes, please do.” The name might bring up something that the ‘cleaned up’ photo had failed to find on the PNC or the PND.

  “I heard,” Shay told me as I went back to my desk. “One less job on my list, right?”

  “What am I looking at?” I asked as I sat down again and glanced over at his screen. “Are those NAS hits coming up already?”

  He nodded. “Limited search, so yeah, quick results. I’m only checking along the A9 for one set of plates over the last thirty days. Looks like he was using his own car, so that’s good. So far, I know every camera clocked him between Perth and Inverness on March twenty-third… no, make that between Perth and Invergordon.” The page was still scrolling steadily as the hits kept coming. That was crazy fast!

  From the looks of things, once the search results had finished coming in, Anthony had driven up from Perth that Saturday and was last spotted on the A9 that day by a mobile camera unit near Helmsdale at three in the afternoon. The next hit after that was from another mobile unit below Thurso two days later, the day we knew he’d visited Mey, Freswick and Old Keiss castles. After that, nothing at all until he’d been caught again in almost the same location, driving towards Thurso last Thursday afternoon. That had been the last sighting. If Anthony had left the area and driven south again since then, he’d either switched vehicles or kept off the A9 to do so.

  I emailed Munro to ask him to put out a general alert on the Nissan and went out to join Collins and Mills in the main office. We had quite a few hotels, guesthouses, camping sites, and letting agencies we needed to call again, and I thought I might as well work from Caitlin’s desk for a bit and give my cousin some distraction-free room to work in. I pulled up our original list, divided it up, and we all got busy.

  Caitlin’s texts came in about fifteen minutes apart. All three girls confirmed that Anthony Tait was the man they’d met at Harpers. When she and Philips got back, I handed over the rest of my call list to them and went to see how my cousin was getting on.

  “You’ve borrowed a satellite?” I asked, surprised when I saw his screen. I thought he’d have gone straight for the HMRC records or the utility companies to find out who Anthony banked with, now that he had his name and address to work from. ‘Follow the money’ was usually his first choice when trying to track someone. Maybe he’d done that first? This could just have been a little project to occupy himself with while he waited for his software packages to burrow their way into the bank records. He shrugged minimally.

  “I thought it was worth a shot. After all, it’s a clear afternoon out there, and we’ve got plenty of daylight left. It only took a few minutes to program it to tag cars of the right size and colour, and it’s much faster than driving around the countryside looking for our Nissan.”

  “Not if it’s under cover somewhere,” I pointed out. He was getting a really good aerial view, though. Much clearer images than you usually saw on mapping sites. “How many possible matches has it found?”

  “Only fourteen so far. Ink blue isn’t one of the most popular car colours. I’ll release the satellite again as soon as it’s finished going over my search areas.” He pulled a face. “They don’t like it if I hog one for long, but you can’t cover the ground as quickly when you need to zoom in close enough to pick out individual cars clearly. Oh, these are the places Anthony stayed at, by the way.” Another window popped up at a touch. “All paid for by card. He checked out of the last one on Thursday, though.”

  I took a deep breath. Maybe he’d only just got hold of that information.

  “You do know what I’ve just spent the last half hour doing?” I asked, and he glanced up at me, looking mildly puzzled.

  “You’d still have to call around anyway unless you want to explain how I got that information.” That was a fair point. I really hadn’t thought things through before saying anything. “And he might just have paid for the last three nights in cash somewhere, too, so that’s also worth checking for.”

  “Sorry. I was slow. What else have you got so far?” I dropped into my chair.

  “Not much. I’ll send it over. I should have more soon, though.”

  “You’re checking those two other numbers he called?”

  “Of course. Shouldn’t take too long now. I tried pinging them, but they’re both out of commission.” So we needed to wait for the metadata again.

  Shay’s ‘not much’ was actually a useful clump of background information on our man. Anthony was single and had been living at his current address near Perth for the last three years. He spent a lot of his time away from home, travelling around Scotland. Anthony was self-employed and earned some of his income by writing travel articles and reviews. The rest of his earnings appeared to come from selling original landscape paintings.

  Anthony had spent the nineteen nights in Caithness that Shay had already accounted for in six different places, staying only three or four nights in each of them. Whatever else he’d been doing up here, given his sightseeing trips, it seemed likely that Anthony had also been working on more articles and/or paintings to sell. Two of the guesthouses, near Mey and in Thurso, hadn’t even been on our list because we’d only been looking within ten miles of Wick.

  I spent a few minutes finding some more places up there to make it look as if I’d decided to widen our accommodation search and sent the new list out to the team. Collins stuck his head in a bit after that to report that he hadn’t got any hits from the PNC. No criminal record for Anthony Tait. I got a few updates back from them all over the next hour as they located each of the places Anthony had stayed at, and then, finally, the metadata we’d been waiting for came in just after three.

  The last call from Anthony’s phone had been made at ten fifty-one on Thursday night, and his phone had been ten miles up the coast from here at the time, five minutes’ drive north of Keiss. Shay pulled up his satellite’s sweep results again.

  “It could be a coincidence, but that call came from the little parking area for Nybster Broch, north of Old Keiss Castle, and there’s a blue car that could be our Nissan parked there now. Think it’s worth checking? I doubt any patrol cars go down that little road very often, so there’s not much chance of any of Munro’s people stumbling across it.”

  I pulled up a street view of the spot. Open fields, a gentle, grassy slope from the car park down to the sea and the nearest houses a good distance back on the A99.

  “I’ll send Mills and Collins up there to have a look at it.” Those two would probably be glad of a change of scenery by now.

  From the ea
gerness with which my DCs jumped up, that was certainly the case. There were a few detectives, like DI Morgan, who’d happily spend all of their time in the office, but most of us didn’t feel that way.

  “I don’t want either of you touching that car if it is our vehicle,” I warned them. “In fact, just stay well away from it until we get there if it is.”

  “Roger that, Sir,” Collins said cheerfully.

  Once they’d gone, Shay told me the locations of the phone that had made and received three other calls to and from Anthony’s phone last Thursday. The last of those locations was interesting. Well, that would have to wait awhile, but we’d definitely be calling on Charlie Soames sometime soon, preferably armed with more information than we currently had.

  Collins called in at twenty-five past three. The car at Nybster Broch was our Nissan.

  Twenty-Four

  Caitlin

  There was a strong, chill breeze blowing when we all climbed out of our cars at Nybster Broch, but the sky was a pale washed blue, and the sun was actually shining for once, so I supposed we couldn’t complain. Collins and Mills, who’d been keeping warm in their own car whilst they waited for us, got out too, and we all huddled up in a tight circle. Well, five of us did.

  “Alright,” Conall told us as Shay opened up their boot and started rooting around in a large kit bag. “Here’s what we know from looking at satellite images from Thursday night and the following days. A car parked up here between ten forty-five and eleven. A second car, this one, pulled into its current spot between eleven and eleven fifteen. It hasn’t moved since, but the first car was gone by eleven-thirty.”

  “So our Mr Tait drove off with whoever he came here to meet?” Collins asked.

  “Either that or they helped him to dump a body here first,” Philips said, staring around at the windswept fields and down to the shore. We already knew that more than one person had been needed to dispose of Visser up at Castle Sinclair Girnigoe.

  “Right,” Conall agreed. “That’s the other possibility. Shay’s going to need some time to go over the car, so I thought the rest of you could have a bit of a look around whilst I assist with that.” He pointed south along the footpath toward the broch. “You see that stone thing sticking up a few hundred metres away. That’s the monument that was built right in the middle of the bloody site. They moved it in the eighties, so it’s just to the west of the broch now. I want two of you to go along the path whilst the other pair see how far they can get along the shore without getting their feet wet. The tide’s pretty low at the moment. I wouldn’t go any further than the broch itself, given our timeframe. We know that several other cars pulled in here over the weekend, so there have been a few sightseers up and down that path since Thursday. I doubt they’d have missed anything as obvious as a body lying around, but we should still check. Buzz me if you find anything, alright?”

  Shay was pulling on a disposable white suit over his clothes, going full SOCO, probably more for our benefit than any concern about contaminating evidence. Collins and Mills volunteered to try the shore route, so Philips and I set off along the fenced-in path, walking slowly and examining the healthy growth of weeds to either side of the track.

  The gentle slope beyond the safety fence gradually gave way to a steeper drop on our left, and we hadn’t gone far before reaching a part where a sea-eroded cleft came almost right up to the fence. Wide and dark below us but bright at its narrower neck where a strip of sunlit blue water and rocky strand was visible. The sides of the geo were steep but probably not much more than twenty feet high. We exchanged a look. Anything dropped over the fence and falling directly below this spot wouldn’t be visible from here. How often did the water reach high enough to wash the inland edges of the bowl out?

  “Wait here for Mike and Darren to reach it?” I asked, and Philips nodded his agreement.

  “I really can’t see anyone climbing over the fence at night to drop a body down there, but who knows?”

  Well, maybe not right here on the edge of the drop, no. But you could climb over a few feet further on safely enough. The fence was only made up of wires strung between posts, but the top wire was barbed. Good for snagging your clothes on. We occupied ourselves looking for any caught threads and bits of cloth whilst we waited but didn’t find any. After a couple of minutes, the boys appeared at the neck of the geo, waving when they saw us watching for them. They picked their way towards us and then disappeared from view as they neared our end of the cleft.

  “See anything?” I called down.

  “Definitely no bodies down here,” Mike’s voice came echoing up, “We’re just checking for dropped objects with our phone lights. There are piles of loose rocks all over the place. Good place to turn your ankle if you’re not careful. I don’t trust this overhang much either.”

  “Keep your bloody voice down while we’re under it then, unless you want to drop more rock on our heads,” Darren advised more quietly. “The whole thing looks pretty unstable to me.” Another minute and they both reappeared. Darren tilted his head back to look up at us. “Nothing down here. We can’t get much further along the shore by the looks of things. The next finger sticks out into the water, and we won’t be able to follow it round. We’ll double back and come up and join you when we’ve checked the last little stretch. I wouldn’t mind a look at the broch myself.”

  “There isn’t much to see,” I told him. “I looked at some pictures online. It looks cool from the air, but there’s not a lot to look at when you’re on the ground.”

  “Grassy bumps and some low stone walls,” Mike agreed unenthusiastically. “I had a look myself on the drive up. Exciting stuff.”

  “Yeah, but it was first built over two thousand years ago. That’s pretty cool.”

  “Newer than the Great Pyramids, or the Parthenon in Athens, and they’re a bit more impressive than the remains of a little dry stone tower,” Mike countered. “Caithness has more of these Iron Age brochs per square mile than anywhere else in Scotland. They’re all over the place up here.”

  That was true. Defensible round towers must have been really ‘des res’ in this area back then.

  We left the lads to check out their last stretch of shoreline and resumed our slow walk, failing to find anything before we reached the monument, a square block of a thing consisting of a round, inner, turreted tower enclosed by straight walls. I think it was designed to look a bit like a miniature castle, but it really didn’t. There was a weather-worn figure of a kneeling boy on the top of the tower and carved heads at the corners of the walls, which reached well above my head.

  Apparently, it had been built to commemorate the archaeology enthusiast who’d first excavated here over a century ago. I didn’t think much of the idea of slapping something like this on top of an important ancient site, and I was glad they’d moved it. Still, in those days, most ‘archaeologists’ were busily damaging and plundering ancient ruins all over the world, so I doubted it had raised any eyebrows at the time. They could have hired a better sculptor, though. This thing didn’t even have any artistic merit and appeared to have been stuck back together with mortaring between the stones when it was moved.

  The rough inscription carved into a stone on one side called the thing ‘Mervyn Tower’, and below that, another read ‘Sir F. Tress Barry Bart. F.S.A. 1895’ Some Victorian baronet then.

  “What does F.S.A. stand for?” I asked Philips.

  “No idea, sorry.” I looked it up later. The letters meant that he’d been a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

  Mills and Collins came jogging along the path to join us as we began to walk over the site. As Collins had said, there wasn’t a great deal to see. Lots of grassy bumps and ditches and exposed dry stone walls. No bodies or conveniently dropped pieces of evidence, though. You reached the central chamber of the broch itself through a single narrow passage between head-high walls and was over twenty feet across. Those outer walls were a good fourteen feet thick, given the length of
the entryway. We all stood in the middle for a minute, looking out, trying to imagine what it must have been like in there when the structure was intact and roofed. Dark, smoky and extremely whiffy, probably. Did they herd the livestock in here too, in times of danger?

  We searched the site methodically before trooping back to the parking area. Conall was putting the kit bag away when we reached them, and Shay was sitting in the Nissan. Well, maybe the owner had left the thing unlocked. More likely, Shay had done that remotely before any of us had even got out of our cars. We had reasonable grounds to suspect that Anthony was in possession of controlled drugs, given the ketamine found in Visser’s system, so a search of the car was legally covered, anyway.

  “Nothing?” Conall asked, looking unsurprised at our acknowledging head shakes. “Well, we’ve got three different sets of prints and some hairs from the car, so that’s something,” he told us. “No blood traces anywhere, not that it proves anything.” No, a well-bagged body wouldn’t necessarily leak. “Shay’s looking at the sat nav history now.”

  “Want us to do a quick check to the north?” Mills asked.

  “Yes, you might as well. They weren’t here for long, so their options were limited.” His glance towards the sea needed no comment. If a body had gone into the water, who knew where the tides and currents may have taken it by now? It certainly hadn’t been found washed up anywhere since Thursday night. It could have become jammed between offshore rocks, though. We’d need a dive team to look into that possibility if it came to that.

  You could scan every inch of the close-cropped neighbouring fields to the north with your bare eyes, but there could be hidden dips or recently disturbed turf out there. After conferring briefly, Collins hopped the fence into the nearest field whilst Philips and I went to check out the overgrown slope of ground below it, and Mills went down to the shore itself.