by Vince Vogel
“I do believe that as the detective,” she said slowly and sternly, “it’s my role to ask questions and yours to answer them. So Mo Hamilton caught up and you let Constable McDonald go?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“He got some radio message about a fire and stormed off.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“I went back to the cottage with Mo.”
Dorring ended it there and gazed across the table at her. She looked at him as though he ought to say something more. But he merely stayed silent the whole time.
“You went into town, didn’t you?” she said.
“Did Mo tell you that?”
“Well, you ended up at the manor, so you must have passed through town. And we have a report of you visiting the barber.”
“What’s happened?” Dorring asked again.
“I’m the detective,” was all he got. “What were you doing in the woods near Gough Creek yesterday between half past five and seven?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. She was the machine again and he could almost hear her tick. Who had told her that? Surely not Patricia Johnston. Surely not the masked figure. Then who?
“I wanted to go for a walk,” he said calmly. “I enjoy the woods so I picked a nice spot to go. That place looked nice.”
“And what time did you enter the woods?”
“Around six p.m.”
“Before or after?”
“Probably before.”
“And who did you see while there?”
“I bumped into an old woman and her two Doberman Pinschers.”
“Did you know her name?”
“She said it was Patricia.”
“I think I know her,” Abigail said. “Patricia Johnston, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“So what happened when you were there?”
“She came out of her house to see me and we talked a little.”
“What did you talk about?”
“The weather. It was raining heavily. I also asked for directions back to the cottage. I was a little lost. She invited me into the dry and made me a cup of tea. Then I thanked her and left.”
“What time was that?”
“I stayed in the house for about half an hour. So I would have left around six. Maybe a quarter to seven.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“I reentered the woods and went in the direction she’d told me to go. That’s when I stumbled in the mud on the river bank.”
“That how you damaged your arm?”
Dorring glanced to his right at the bandage on his shoulder. The sleeve of his T-shirt was tucked over the top of it and for the first time, he realized that the dressing was fresh. They’d replaced it while he was unconscious.
“Yes,” he said, turning back to her. “As I fell, I caught it on a branch that was sticking out.”
“Not a bullet?” she asked, eyes pierced, face stern, the machine on and recording.
“No. A branch,” he said slowly for the benefit of the tape—and the machine. “Why would it be a bullet?”
“Someone reported gunshot in the woods yesterday at around ten to six. At the time you say you were in the woods.”
Dorring did his best not to show that this affected him.
“Well, I never heard or saw anything,” he said.
Her eyes burned into him like an X-ray.
Very slowly, she asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t come by anyone else?”
With every ounce of self-control, Dorring kept his poker face as rigid as he could. Any little sign and he was sure the machine would pick it up.
“I didn’t come across anyone,” he said. “I fell into the river and washed up a few hundred yards along, feeling stupid, wet and clumsy. Then I got back to the cottage.”
Her jade eyes were intense in the ten seconds of silence that followed this statement. They stared at him, and if he looked really hard, he could see that they were on fire. When he felt as though he couldn’t take them any longer, the machine suddenly switched off and she relaxed back into her chair. Then she took the interview into another direction.
“You said you were here on holiday,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Not to see Conner Jones?”
“No. I didn’t know he was here until I arrived.”
“Must’ve been a shock for you.”
“A bit. I guess. I haven’t seen him for nearly fourteen years.”
“You were close?”
“Yes. We spent years on special operations. Side by side. Came under heavy fire on many of them. We had each other’s backs. I guess you develop a bond through that type of thing. Not friendship, exactly. More real than that. A mutual understanding, you could say.”
“So you trusted each other?”
“Yeah. We did.”
“What about now? You trust Conner now?”
The machine was back on, the lenses of the eyes widened to take in his reaction and record as much information as she could.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Fourteen years is a long time not to know someone. People change. They say a person’s not the same person after seven years. That we’ve changed. At least a little. Some more than others. A kind of evolution of the personality. Life and time mutating us. Seven years go by and you’re changed. It’s been fourteen between us. That must mean we’re both completely different people by now.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah. I am.” He looked her right in the eyes when he said this.
“You think Conner’s changed much?” she asked next.
“Why do you care?”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spent enough time with him lately.”
“What was he like back then?”
“Why’d you want to know?”
“You will insist on asking questions,” she said.
“And you will insist on not answering them,” he said back.
A little red flushed her face and she almost bared her teeth at him, the lip twitching and then the teeth clamping it.
She took the manila folder and opened it. Pulling out a file of stapled together sheets of A4, she tossed it onto the table in front of him. He recognized it immediately.
“You know what that is?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up at her from the file. “It’s my psych report from ’05.”
“You know what it says?”
“That I was deemed competent after a four week evaluation.”
“At the Fallen Soldier Psychiatric Hospital in Helmand?”
“Yes. I spent four weeks at the DCMH facility on base and they let me go.”
“Okay,” she said. “Next question: can you possibly tell me why someone would place it on my desk?”
Dorring narrowed his eyes at her.
“Because,” he said, “they want you to think I’m psychologically vulnerable.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Now I know it was fourteen years ago, but can you recall anything that might be written in the report which might concur to what happened yesterday at the beach?”
Dorring grinned at her. He realized that she was trying to imply that he’d been seeing things. There wasn’t much in the report, so there could only be one thing which would concur to this theory.
“It says I suffered from hallucinations,” he said.
“What type of hallucinations, exactly?”
“I would see a dead body that wasn’t really there.”
“Yes. It says that you saw dead bodies.”
“No,” he said sharply. “I saw a dead body. Only one. Always the same.”
Abigail Pritchard picked up the report and began leafing through. Finding the part she wanted, she said, “It says here that you would often see her. That—and I’m quoting your words—‘She’s usually sitting in a chair or on the end
of my bed when I’m alone. She won’t speak and only gazes at me accusingly.’ Those are your words, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Dorring said in a hollow voice.
The room began to disintegrate around him. The air turned red and in a corner he saw something terrible that turned his guts to ice. In his ears he heard a man groaning. Then he turned to the walls. They were covered in blood. He sensed it in his eyes, running over his pupils, and then it filled his nostrils and he became nauseous.
“Hey!?” Abigail Pritchard cried out, grabbing his attention. “You with me?”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
“Then answer the question,” she said.
“I’m sorry, what was it?”
“Christ! I asked you, do you still have those types of hallucinations?”
“No,” he said, shaking himself back into the room. “Haven’t you read the end of the report? It says I was clear. I’d had a mini breakdown due to a traumatic experience.”
“What traumatic experience?”
She looked at him sternly.
“Doesn’t it say in the report?”
“No. This is just a psych report. Nothing about what you were doing for the SAS before you were admitted. All of that’s redacted.”
“Then as you know, those things are classified. As is that report. I take it your friends didn’t use a warrant to obtain it.”
Abigail relaxed back into the chair and stared at him. Bit her lip. Once more he recalled Jane and the icy feeling came back. So he tried not to. Tried to expel her from his head. Something he’d been trying for the past fourteen years. But like so many of the ghosts in his past, she was always there.
“So you’re a smart man,” Abigail said after awhile.
“I try to be.”
“So then you tell me, why would Conner Jones want me to think you’re mad?”
“So it was Conner Jones who put that report on your desk?”
“I don’t know who personally put it there,” she said, “but I’m gathering that it wouldn’t be there without his knowledge. He’s the only one on this island who would have known you’d been psychologically assessed while in the SAS.”
“Look,” he said irritably, “if I’m not under arrest, I’m leaving. I did you a courtesy so far. I should be making a complaint.”
Dorring stood up and his shadow swallowed her. Abigail stood up sharply from within it and brought herself up to his neckline.
“Alex Dorring,” she said loudly, “I am arresting you for the murder of Steven McDonald. You do not have…”
Dorring realized now why she was so interested in his experiences with Stevie. Because someone had killed him and they thought it was Dorring.
He sat back down and so, too, did Abigail Pritchard.
“When?” he asked.
“Yesterday between six and seven o’clock,” she said, staring right into him. “The same time you said you were falling on your ass in the woods.”
“Where?” he asked slowly, already sure he knew.
“The woods next to Gough’s Creek. Close to where Patricia Johnston lives.”
“You got a body?”
“Yeah. We got a body. Got a crime scene, too. We even got a bloodied footprint on a big doc leaf. Size ten desert boots.” She scooted back on her chair and the scraping sound filled the room. She leaned to the side almost all the way down and gazed underneath the table. With her finger, she pointed at his feet. “Size ten desert boots,” she repeated. “Just like yours.”
“How?” was all he could say.
“How, what?”
“How did it go down? Why was he out in the woods?”
“I told you. We got a report of gunshots at about six. Constable McDonald takes the call as he’s soon to finish his shift and lives out that way. He drives out to the woods…”
“Who called?” Dorring interrupted.
“An old man living close by.”
“Who decided who went out there?”
“I don’t know. The call’s come in and the guys decide. It would have been random.”
“Maybe,” Dorring said. “Maybe not. What happened when he reached the woods? Surely, he radioed in to say he got there.”
“He did. Around half six he radios in to say he’s entering the woods. That’s it. Nothing else until someone goes looking when he was reported missing.”
“Who?”
“Officer Mackay.”
“Fergus?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he find?”
“He found Constable McDonald’s car abandoned, so he entered the woods. About half an hour in, he finds Constable McDonald dead close to the river. The one you said you fell in.”
“That woodland is at least two miles square,” Dorring said. “It would have been dark by then. How’d Fergus find him in half an hour?”
“He got lucky, you could say. The body was on the bank. In a clearing.”
“And he’d been shot?”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“What makes you think that?” she asked.
“You asked if I’d been shot. It makes sense that it was a shooting.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” she said, the machine staring into him. “Constable McDonald had been beaten to death. I was at his post mortem four hours ago. Someone had kicked Constable McDonald’s chest in and crushed his lungs. He’d choked on his own blood. Then,” she was almost up out of the chair, “they’d carved something into his stomach. Can you guess what that was?”
“Yes,” Dorring said, staring right back at her. “Who Dares Wins.”
“Who Dares Wins,” she repeated. “So you tell me, Alex Dorring, what I’m supposed to think when a man with a history of mental illness starts babbling about mutilated corpses and then one with the very same wounds turns up?”
A part of him wanted to tell her everything about the past and the real reason he was on the island. Wanted to give in and tell it all. But Dorring never trusted anyone. It was a habit he’d learned and developed with MI6 for good reason. Developed it into a concrete shell that he kept wrapped around him. So no, he wouldn’t be telling her.
“I can’t, no,” he said.
She looked ready to explode, her lip curling and the jade of her eyes on fire. She stood up sharply and picked up the report.
“Interview terminated at three thirty-six a.m.,” she said. Switching off the recorder, she looked down at Dorring and added, “I need you to stand and face the wall. I’ll be putting the cuffs back on.”
He did as he was asked. She put the cuffs on and he expected her to be rough. But she wasn’t. She didn’t tighten them so they’d dig into the flesh and she didn’t push him hard into the wall. She just did her job and he appreciated that.
Then she guided him out of the room, the others dispersing from the doorway as they came out. She ignored her eavesdropping colleagues and pushed Dorring onwards along a corridor. It was lined with framed photographs of all the police officers that had been there over time. There was one for each year. He’d spotted them when she’d taken him the other way and hadn’t thought much of them then. However, now as he went the other way, one particular photograph caught his eye. It was from 1995. He recognized one of the men standing proudly in front of the station. His eyes scanned the names at the bottom as she pushed him past and there it was. A piece of the puzzle slotting into place.
But Dorring wasn’t sure if it made everything clearer or simply more opaque.
When they reached the cell, Abigail ushered him to sit on the bench and then fastened him once more to the bull ring sticking out of the top of it. Dorring said nothing the whole time. Then she went to leave.
At the doorway, she turned over her shoulder and said, “I’ll be back in a short while. It’ll give you time to think about things.”
And with that, she stepped out and slammed the metal door on him.
20
Detective Sergeant Abigail Pritchard reached McGuffin Funeral Home and
parked on the road outside. It was where the island’s autopsies were performed in lieu of an official mortuary.
The sun wasn’t due up for another three hours and the cobbled streets glittered in the headlights of the car. When she switched them off, everything was drenched in pitch black, the moonlight blocked out by the sheet of cloud hanging over the island. The blinds of the funeral home were drawn, as you’d expect so early in the morning, and Abigail rang a bell to the side of the door.
Shortly, a middle-aged man with a red face like a rash came to the door and opened it. Without a single word between them, Abigail followed him through the reception rooms of the shop. It was all nicely set out with examples of coffins on display, polished tables holding brochures and comfortable seats for grieving relatives.
He led her into the back where the workshop was. They walked through the carpenter’s section first, past the half made coffins, and then into where they kept the bodies. The gray breeze blocks of the walls glowed in the halogen strip lighting. They walked past the silver body cabinet, the thing gleaming in the electric light. Two of them had labels on. One was Stevie McDonald.
At the far end of the room stood another man. He was someone Abigail didn’t know.
“My name’s Gordon Laidlaw,” he said, stepping forward and offering his hand.
“Why’s he here, Peter?” Abigail asked the man who’d met her at the door.
“Gordon used to be a criminal pathologist on the mainland,” Peter said. “I wanted a second opinion.”
“You said you had something,” Abigail said, still not taking Gordon Laidlaw’s proffered hand.
He retracted it and looked down at the floor with a slightly embarrassed look on his face.
“I do,” Peter said. “That’s why he’s here. Gordon retired some years ago from the Forensic Services. He and his wife bought a cottage here.”
“Lovely. So you better tell me what you found, Peter.”
Peter was Peter Langley, McGuffin island’s coroner, as well as its funeral home owner. He was seventy-three and the septuagenarian was still working hard. It was as if he sensed that if he didn’t stay busy seeing to the dead on his gurneys, he’d become one of them instead. He was tall and lean and held a ruddy complexion from too much scotch. He was even known to brew it himself. Perhaps not very well, if you considered the red rash on his face that was often mistaken for a birthmark.