Conall buzzed us all to go back to the cars again after we’d spent ten fruitless minutes at it.
“They weren’t here long enough to go any further than you did, and a full search here is too big a job for just the six of us. Munro can organise that if we decide it’s necessary.”
We were all hoping it wouldn’t be. If anyone had dumped a body here, it was far more likely to have gone into the sea. Bodies usually floated up after a few days because of the build-up of gases produced by bacteria in the gut. Slicing the abdomen open before dumping them could prevent that from happening, as could adding weights, and even when that wasn’t the case, there were the tides and currents to consider too.
“I’ve got a truck on its way to take the Nissan in, and they should be here any minute now,” he told us. Shay was back in their Peugeot with his laptop out on his knee. Conall tapped on his window. “Ready?”
Shay answered him by getting out and putting his laptop on the roof so we could all gather round to look at the map he pulled up for us. The discarded SOCO suit must have gone into the boot too.
“Okay, firstly, this car’s movements on the night of Friday the fifth match up to everything we’ve already learned. After leaving Louisburgh Street with Visser, Anthony drove up to Castle Sinclair Girnigoe, where he remained parked for over an hour before driving to his hotel. Now, as to last Thursday, he followed the quickest route up to Thurso from Wick that evening.” Shay used a pen to mark it out on the map for us. “At six forty-five, Anthony stopped here.” He zoomed in. “That’s right outside Nicholas Albert’s house, making it unlikely that Nick has run off on his own to hide somewhere.”
From the look on Conall’s face, it was clear that he’d already heard this.
“The car was parked there for less than twenty minutes. After that, he drove back through town, crossed the river and went east on the A836, turning off onto the B876 at Castletown.” Again, Shay’s pen marked it out for us. “His next stop was here, at seven twenty. It’s a little glamping place just over nine miles from Wick. It’s in a rural, isolated setting, and it wasn’t on the list you guys put together, so none of you called them.” There was no hint of censure in his tone, but I don’t think any of them were happy to hear that they’d missed it. “After stopping there, Anthony didn’t move again until quarter past eleven. From there, he followed this route straight to here.” His pen tip moved down to Killimster, then up through Keiss.
“What about the second car? The one that left here? Did you manage to track that from your satellite images?” Collins asked.
Shay shook his head. “Those were taken at fifteen-minute intervals. There’s no way of telling where it went.” Infra-red images wouldn’t even tell us the vehicle’s colour, and if they’d gone south from here, it was only five minutes’ drive down to Keiss and just under fifteen back to Wick. Any cars out and about that night would have shown up as fuzzy grey blobs, with no way of distinguishing one from another.”
“So, what do we actually know?” Philips asked, frowning thoughtfully. “Tait visited Nick on Thursday evening, at which point Nick effectively disappeared. He then drove to the glamping site and stayed there for four hours before driving here to meet someone. Then he left in another car, abandoning this one?”
“I know,” Conall agreed. “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t Anthony just follow them in his own car if he was sticking with them? Why leave it here to be found?”
“Maybe it wasn’t his idea?” Mills suggested. “The fact that he didn’t come back to get it doesn’t look too good. I mean, he didn’t even delete his sat-nav history.” Conall made a little noise of agreement.
“Alright,” he said, “let’s forget about all the things we don’t know and can’t explain for now. Next steps, yes? I’ll go with Collins to check out the glamping place. Mills, I’d like you to drive Shay back to the station in my car, alright?” He tossed him the keys.
“And us?” I asked, indicating myself and Philips.
“I want you two to go and talk to someone. Shay?”
His cousin clicked another tab. “These are the three sets of prints I found in Anthony’s car. None of them belongs to Kaj Visser, so I think it’s safe to say that Anthony cleaned it thoroughly after the night he drove off with him. The set on the left are probably Anthony’s. They were all over the driver’s door, gear stick, and steering wheel. The middle set currently remains a mystery.” He paused to zoom in on the last set. “And then we have these.” He pulled up another window and resized that one so they were side by side. A complex series of marker dots confirmed that the two sets were a match. “They belong to a local man, Andrew Michaelson. I haven’t had the chance to find out much about him yet, but he works at a letting agency office in Wick. I’ll send you the address. It doesn’t close until five, so there’s a good chance you can still catch him there today.”
“How did you find a match for the prints?” Philips asked.
“Michaelson was in the PNC. A common assault charge twelve years ago after a pub brawl. He was found guilty, but it was his first and only offence, so he only got a hefty fine.”
“You have remote access to the Police National Computer?” Philips sounded slightly shocked.
Shay shrugged uncomfortably, staring at his feet. “Yes, and the PND and CHS. I do a lot of consulting work for the National Crime Agency, and my laptop has been officially designated as a secure, mobile terminal for a lot of the systems and databases they use.” That was news to the four of us, but I think I was the least surprised to hear it. It wasn’t like anyone could access Shay’s laptop anyway, even if they got their hands on it.
“Here comes the tow truck,” Collins alerted us, breaking the slightly uncomfortable silence that had fallen, and I looked round to see it coming down the little single lane road towards us.
“Right. The rest of you can get going once it pulls in out of the way,” Conall said briskly. “I’ll hang back to sign the paperwork and make sure it’s clear that nobody is to touch that Nissan without my say so.” As he was speaking, Shay shut down his laptop and climbed back into the car with it. He handed Conall’s bag out to him as Darren walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
Conall was leaning on Mike’s car, drinking from his water bottle as we drove off.
“That was educational,” Philips commented as we followed Mills back onto the main road. “No wonder Mr Keane is so careful not to leave that laptop of his lying around anywhere. He certainly has some very impressive tech at his disposal. Satellite access? On-site fingerprint scanning and matching? Those drones he used in Inverness...”
“It’s a pity it was so windy out here today, or he might have had those zipping around too. That would have saved us some tramping about.”
“I’d have liked to see those in action. I suppose they’re his personal property?”
I nodded. “He builds them himself. All the specialised software he uses is better than anything our budget can spring for too. You saw how well that crappy photo cleaned up, right?”
“And I suppose he includes all of his proprietary gear in his consultancy fees? Christ! I wonder how much he’s costing the department.”
“You could always ask him, or Anderson, if you’re curious enough.”
“Oh sure, they’d just love that,” he said with a little smile. “I don’t know which would be worse. No, thank you.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You know, it does give your team a really unfair advantage having someone like that at your disposal.”
“We don’t, though, not usually anyway. Shay only works on major crime cases. You can’t waste someone like that on the petty stuff.”
“So what does he do the rest of the time? Go out with other teams in other districts?”
“I think he mostly works from home - information gathering and analysis. Money laundering, cybercrime, trafficking, the usual major league stuff.” The section of the coast we were driving down now was super
flat, even by Caithness standards, although the fields to our right had a bit of a slope to them. “Want to slow down for that little group of houses ahead?” I asked before he could try to wrangle any more information out of me. “We could look to see if any of them have security cameras mounted as we go past.”
They didn’t, but Philips must have decided it was a worthwhile idea because he slowed for the next houses to appear too. We gave up on that tactic as we neared Keiss and side roads began feeding onto the A99, making it likely that any footage we did find wouldn’t be worth checking. Our car, if it had even come this way, could have turned off onto any of them. Mills had long been out of sight, and it was going up to five by then. Best to make sure we got down to that letting agency in good time.
Twenty-Five
The glamping place was on a working farm, an easy drive away from both Thurso and Wick, as well as some great stretches of coastline. You could reach John o’ Groats in under half an hour from there too and catch a ferry for a day trip to the Orkneys, although you couldn’t make the trip across for a mere groat these days. The Dutch ferryman, Jan de Groot, after whom the village was named, had reputedly charged that amount back in the fifteenth century. Shay thought it was more likely that people had simply confused the middle Dutch ‘groot’ or ‘large’ with ‘groat,’ a coin which was then worth fourpence.
The cabins at the glamping site were attractively designed and spaced, but April was very much still in the ‘off season’ for this kind of tourism. There was only one other car in the guest car park when we pulled in. I supposed most of the winter tourists who came up here for a weekend break did so, hoping for clear skies and a good showing of the Northern Lights. It was a bit late in the year for the best showings of those now and too early for warmer weather and the busy summer season.
Showing our photograph of Anthony, and our warrant cards, at the main house was enough to get us pointed in the direction of the right cabin.
“Mr Tait’s paid up ‘til Wednesday,” the friendly lad manning the little office and farm shop told us. “If you walk down the path along the side of the field there, it’s the second one you’ll see, just beyond the trees.” He scratched his head, staring out of the window. “You say his car’s been found abandoned, though? Now you mention it, I haven’t noticed it around since he booked in, but a lot of people who stay here are out and about sightseeing all day. I suppose you’d better have a service key, so you can let yourselves into the cabin.” The way he said that made it sound more like a question than a statement.
“We’d appreciate that,” I told him with a friendly smile. It was rare that we didn’t have to ask for access to rented accommodation.
Only one other cabin was currently occupied, the lad told me when I asked. A family of four who’d arrived on Saturday morning. We passed a couple in their forties walking hand in hand up to the shop on our way down and received a cheerful ‘good evening’ from them, although they did look a little funnily at our trousers and shoes. Glamping was hardly roughing it, but we certainly weren’t dressed like we belonged here.
The first wooden pod we passed was occupied, and we could hear boys’ voices arguing inside, making the most of mum and dad’s temporary absence to let off some steam. The next cabin, a good distance away and separated from the first by a screening line of trees, was much larger and had a more traditional gable roof, not the curving, flush with the walls type typical of the smaller pods that were springing up everywhere lately. It even had a covered, outdoor porch with a table and chairs set out.
We mounted the wooden steps up to the decking, and I inserted the key we’d been given into the lock. Collins whistled as he followed me inside.
“This must be the deluxe model,” he suggested. “Talk about a home from home. I mean, you can hardly call staying in a place like this any sort of camping, can you?” Given the well-equipped kitchenette and the flat-screen TV mounted on a wall, I had to agree with him. We even found a fitted bathroom with a toilet, wash basin, and shower cubicle.
I’d stocked my bag with a few items from Shay’s kit bag whilst the rest of the team were looking over the ground to the north of the car park, and we both gloved up. I pulled out the light source to run it over the interior. No signs of any blood stains anywhere and nothing to indicate that any kind of a struggle had taken place in here.
“You think Anthony brought Nicholas Albert here?” Collins asked as he made a quick search of cupboards and drawers.
“Hard to say. We don’t know enough. Maybe we’re jumping to premature conclusions, and he just dropped him off somewhere. Lift that case up onto the counter, will you?” Anthony hadn’t even unpacked, and he’d only left one small case here. There wasn’t much in it, clothing, toiletries, a marker pen and, at the bottom, a large padded brown envelope. I lifted it out and turned it over.
‘F.A.O. - CID’ was scrawled across the front in big, black letters. I placed the envelope carefully on the counter and stared at it uncertainly.
“We’ve got gloves on, and it’s not sealed…” Collins ventured eagerly.
“I can see that. That doesn’t mean it’s not wired to explode once we pull the flap back and open the end up.” From the way his face drained of colour when I said that, it was clear that the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. Most people’s minds don’t automatically go there, even among trained police officers. He swallowed nervously.
“So, do we call the emergency coordinator?”
“That’s the standard procedure in the case of a bomb threat, but I don’t think it applies here. I’m going to call Shay and see what he thinks. Let’s do that outside, shall we?” I placed a hand on his shoulder to get him moving. Collins was a brave lad, but I couldn’t blame him for feeling a bit nervous. From the weight of the package, I calculated any explosives in there would have a very limited blast radius and the chances of there even being any were pretty low. That didn’t mean there was any need to take unnecessary risks, though. Collins would be just fine once I got him outside.
“Probably not a letter bomb,” Shay agreed when I video called him. “I haven’t found anything to indicate that Anthony would have a clue how to put something like that together or that he knows anyone who would. How big and how thick is the package?”
“It’s a padded envelope, a size up from A4, not bulging, but there’s definitely a solid object in there, maybe a phone or something similarly sized. I’d say maybe half a pound in weight.”
“Alright. Better safe than sorry, right? My portable mass spectrometer’s in its hard case in your boot.”
That was a recent acquisition he’d ordered after our trip to Lewis and Harris last spring. It would have been a great gadget to have on-hand at the distillery there and on the Jeanie, or so he’d claimed. You could set it to detect trace levels of drugs, chemical threats or explosives, and it was sensitive enough to pick up nanograms, billionths of a gram, of hazardous materials. Shay tended to be a bit extravagant when it came to equipment purchases, and he’d been using it to research the effectiveness of the different kinds of packaging materials used to clandestinely move controlled substances around. Scent molecules could travel through glass, metal and even the most non-porous plastics over time. The longer something was left in any container, the more material you’d get leaking out.
“You’ve got a couple of cases in the car. What does it look like?” I asked as I started to walk along the much shorter path that led straight back to the car park.
“It’s the bulky big black thing with a display screen on the top of it, weighs over four kilos. You can’t miss it.” The first case I checked had several little gadgets tucked away in their foam rests, but none of them looked big enough to be what I was after. The portable spectrometer was in the other one.
Back outside the cabin, I handed the phone to Collins so that Shay could see what I was doing and opened up its case again.
“You’ll want the metallic probe attachment lying next to the unit too. That at
taches at the front for air sampling, which is what we’ll be doing.” He talked me through the controls until I had the device set to his satisfaction.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now you go back in and put it down with the end of the probe pointing at the unsealed end of your package. If there are any explosives in there, it will pick up molecular traces of them in the air. Just set it going and give it a minute to bring up the results. When it stops humming, that means it’s finished testing. It’s got a really good inbuilt library of high threat chemicals in there to check for.” I think his casual, unconcerned tone did a lot to help steady Collins’ nerves as I climbed the steps again and went back in.
“It’s clean,” Shay said confidently when I held the phone over the screen for him after the spectrometer had analysed its first air sample. My face must have given me away when I turned the phone around because he grinned cheerfully. “Honestly, Con, if it says there’s nothing in there, then there’s nothing in there. We’re dealing with a barrier made of bubble wrap and paper, not a lead-lined box. You can lift that open end with a knife blade, very slightly, and give it another go if you still don’t trust it.”
I fished my penknife out of my pocket, eased the flap back and lifted the end of the envelope a couple of millimetres before hitting the vapour trace button again. I know it was a silly and pointless precaution to take, but it made me feel better, which is why he’d suggested it.
“Still clean,” Shay told me breezily after it had finished sampling again. “You’re good. No explosives. Pretty cool, huh? Better than waiting for hours for the bomb squad to show up. Saves everyone a lot of time and trouble. Can you switch it off again and pack it away before we look to see what Mr Tait’s left for us?”
I wasn’t the only one who got nervous about things. He might as well have said, ‘please make sure you don’t break my ridiculously expensive toy.’ Once I’d fetched the case and done that, I carefully eased the envelope open far enough to get a good look inside. No contact strips or wires anywhere.
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 21