‘I’d like to thank Mrs Burke for allowing me to say a few words.’ His voice was strong and firm, sand-blasted by years of cigarettes and expensive whisky. Rebecca had to admit it was a good voice. Cultivated, yes, but still recognisably Scottish. ‘I won’t keep you long in the cold, I promise.’
There was a smattering of laughs and he smiled benevolently at his audience. Finbar was their pal. He was one of the lads. He smoked. He drank. He said what he thought. The fact that his suit probably cost more than many of them would earn in a month didn’t seem to occur to anyone who supported him.
The smile died. It was as if someone had turned off the sun. ‘I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk to you today about this very serious issue. When I was informed about the plan to rehouse a—’ He paused to find the right word, the struggle plain on his face. It was another pose, of course. He knew exactly what he was going to say. If there was one thing Finbar Dalgliesh didn’t struggle with, it was expressing himself. He gave out a theatrical sigh. ‘Friends, let’s be perfectly frank about this. Let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with here. We’re talking about a deviant. A sexual predator. And there are people in there’ – he turned in a graceful movement to point at the council building, like an actor on a stage, giving a performance – ‘who want to place this evil individual in your midst. To make him your neighbour. To allow him free access to your children.’
There were murmurs from the crowd. Even those who didn’t like the man agreed with him on this occasion.
‘Now, let me tell you this, my friends. I don’t live in Inchferry, it’s true, but I know you all to be wonderful people. Kind, warmhearted, loving. And it pains me to think that your community could become’ – he indicated the banner behind Mo Burke – ‘yes, a dumping ground for such monsters. They have a word for these people in prison. Beasts, they call them. And that’s what they are. Beasts. Sick, depraved creatures who prey on the vulnerable and the defenceless, who slake their evil lusts on the young, the impressionable.’
He paused to let the drama sink in. He eyed the crowd, waiting for the right moment to speak again, gauging the temperature. In politics, like comedy, timing is everything and he knew it. And when he did speak again, after a few moments, it was to unleash the full stentorian force of that smoke-blackened voice.
‘Well, I say NO!’
A cheer, then. Rebecca couldn’t tell if it was started by Scott, but there was no doubt Finbar was winning them over. Yes, he was playing to their confirmation bias, he was telling them what they wanted to hear – and it was working.
‘NO, I say,’ he repeated. ‘He’s had a few years in prison, perhaps not many. I ask you, is that punishment?’
There were a few desultory negative responses. They weren’t sufficiently enthusiastic for Finbar.
‘I ask you again – is that punishment?’
The cries of ‘NO’ were louder this time. Behind Dalgliesh, even Mo nodded her assent. She might not have invited him, but he was underlining her point.
‘No, it’s not punishment,’ said Finbar, happier now with the crowd. ‘And yet this deviant can come out of prison and expect to be molly-coddled by the system. Is that right? Is that the way it should be?’
The outraged cries of ‘NO’ were stronger still. He had won them over.
‘We must send them a message, right here, right now. We must tell the councillors and the officials and the social workers that we are not standing for this. If they feel this individual, this pederast . . .’
Oh, good word, Rebecca thought. It never hurts to remind the masses that you’ve read a book or two, while still retaining that common touch. This was Dalgliesh at his best.
‘If they feel this pederast deserves a second chance, then why doesn’t one of them take him in?’
More nods from the crowd, more murmured ‘ayes’ and ‘rights’.
‘Why don’t they find him a place in their area, in their streets?’
He had them eating out of his hands now.
‘But no, they won’t do that, will they? They’ll inflict this deviant on you. Just as they and their masters in Holyrood and Westminster inflict everything on you. They don’t feel the pain you feel. They don’t understand the pressures you experience every minute of every day of every week. They don’t know what real life is like. None of them. They are locked in their own little bubble of self-interest. Of party and personal gain. Not public gain. They don’t do anything that is solely for the good of the voters. Only what is good for themselves and their friends.’
He stopped to let this sink in. ‘Well, friends. Let’s send them that message. Let’s make sure that this time they DO think of you! Lift your voices, make them loud and clear, and tell them. No perverts here! NO PERVERTS HERE!’
The chant was picked up, louder than when Mo had used the same words. More fists raised towards the grey skies like exclamation marks, while the makeshift signs were waved with considerably more vigour. Finbar Dalgliesh had done what he always did: attack the establishment and work the crowd into a frenzy. The police guard looked edgy.
Chaz Wymark limped towards her, his camera around his neck, his bag in one hand while in his other he gripped a smart-looking cane of dark polished wood. He really didn’t need it to aid his movement – she’d seen him hobbling about without it often enough in order to snatch the best pictures. His partner Alan was fond of saying that he just liked to pose with it. ‘It makes him feel like a boulevardier,’ he said. ‘He can pretend he’s on the streets of Paris at the turn of the century. I’m thinking of getting him a top hat.’
Rebecca stared at Chaz, visualising him with a top hat instead of the black woollen cap he had pulled over his blond hair. She thought he’d suit one. But then Chaz was handsome enough to suit anything. Certainly the limp and the cane gave him an air of mystery.
‘Suddenly got exciting, didn’t it?’ He jerked his head towards Mo and Finbar, who had turned to face the council building, both now leading the war chant. ‘What do you think? Something going to happen?’
There was heat, certainly, most of it coming from Dalgliesh’s mouth. It looked more likely they would start some kind of haka than anything more serious, though. Rebecca shook her head. ‘No, I think it’s all noise.’
Chaz studied the crowd, making his own assessment. ‘I think you’re right. Well, hope you are anyway. I’d hate to miss anything.’
‘You’ve got to be somewhere?’
‘Got a call from the office.’ Chaz worked for a Glasgow-based news agency on a freelance basis. He didn’t make a fortune – little in the modern media world paid well these days – but it helped keep him in walking sticks. He was also doing what he loved. ‘When’s your meeting?’ he asked.
‘Half-eleven,’ she said, her heart sinking at the thought. Someone new was being sent by the accountants in London to ensure things ran smoothly on their empire’s northern frontier. And by ‘running smoothly’ they usually meant ‘see where costs could be cut’. A project manager, this person was called. The industry didn’t seem to have editors or sub-editors any more. They had been replaced by project managers, line managers, content managers and team leaders. It was only a matter of time before reporters became content originators. Dear God, she thought, Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook would be birling in their graves. To the right, of course.
The glint in Chaz’s eye grew into a beaming smile and she knew he was going to try to lure her over to the dark side. ‘Fancy a wee trip to Culloden?’
Chaz no longer liked to drive. Never at night. Or in the rain. His courage would not carry him that far. Since the accident on Stoirm he avoided getting behind a wheel, though he could do it when he needed to. He simply made sure he didn’t need to.
‘The battlefield?’ she asked. ‘What is it, another demo about the housing development? A bit late, isn’t it?’
Plans approved by the Highland Council and the Scottish government for housing to be built overlooking the historic site had excited a great deal
of passion. Rebecca couldn’t blame those who opposed it, for the whole idea did seem ill-advised.
‘No, there’s been a body found over there.’
Rebecca frowned. ‘By body, you mean a new one? Not one from seventeen whenever it was . . .’
‘Seventeen forty-six,’ said Chaz. ‘Jesus, I’m not even Scottish and I know more about your history than you do.’
‘Ach, history is a thing of the past.’ Rebecca grimaced. ‘So this body – they think it’s not a natural death?’
‘Aye,’ said Chaz, coarsening his accent, which despite his English birth was already pure Scots. ‘There’s been a murrd-err.’
Rebecca winced. ‘Please don’t do that again.’
‘You got time to come with me? We should get there and back for your meeting. Has to be a line in it for you.’
Culloden was only about six miles away, off a B road to Nairn. They could get there very quickly at this time of the morning. She looked towards Mo and Dalgliesh and bit her bottom lip. She wanted to get a quote from one or both and should really hang around and get a face to face with the woman, and now something from Dalgliesh. And then there was her editor. She was still in trouble over her visit against his explicit instructions to the island of Stoirm the year before. Sure, it had generated a few stories – exclusives, too – but she would never be able to report on what had actually occurred. She had told Barry everything – well, nearly everything – but he still kept her pretty much on a tight rein.
Rebecca shot another look at Mo as she continued to harangue the unseen representatives of local government. She wasn’t showing any signs of running out of steam and seemed to have come to terms with the Spioraid leader’s involvement. It would be some time before Rebecca could pin her down, if she’d even speak to the press.
Rebecca sighed, her breath misting up the air between them. ‘Shit, you know I can’t say no.’
He smiled again. ‘That’s what it says on the toilet walls . . .’
She gave him a mock glower. ‘Yeah, right beside your name.’
As they moved away from the demonstration, she risked another glance at Nolan Burke, but his gaze was fixed once again on his mother.
3
Rebecca thought Culloden Moor a bleak place when the sun was shining, but on a cold Monday morning with sleet pockmarking the grey sky and the air a chilly wet kiss, it was even less hospitable.
The battlefield itself was visually unremarkable, little more than a field of rutted heather sliced by pathways to allow tourists to wander over ground that looked as if it was still stained by the blood spilled almost three centuries before. What always amazed Rebecca was the silence; she could feel it that day, even with the activity that surrounded the murder investigation. She had been a child when she visited the battlefield for the first time. That was on a bright summer day and the site had been dotted with visitors staring at the memorials on the Avenue of the Clans and wandering among the blue or red flags fluttering against a cobalt sky. Her father had told her the history of the site, but she didn’t take much in. She was eight and stories of rebellion and royal succession carried little interest. Then he told her to stand still and listen and she did as she was told. She heard birds singing, somewhere far off, and the soft breeze moaning in the long grass and heather as if yearning for a long-dead lover. But there was nothing else. The tourists’ voices were muted. Even the cries of two younger children chasing each other along the pathways were strangely stifled. A car sliding past on the roadway made barely a ripple in the atmosphere.
It always gets me, said her father, that silence.
She recalled him standing beside her, his eyes narrowed as he looked around, as if he could see the aftermath of the battle: the men, dead and dying, the victors moving among them and finishing them off. And the blood, always the blood.
Maybe I imagine it, he said, a laugh forcing itself into his throat. Maybe my Celtic upbringing makes me fanciful. But this place always gets to me. That silence. Here and Glencoe, both the same. The quiet places. Do you feel it, Becks?
She had nodded and that seemed to please him. She always wanted to please John Connolly, at least at that age. Of course, when she hit her teenage years and the hormones kicked in it was a different matter. She hadn’t exactly been wild but she had been awkward and had given both him and her mother more trouble than she should have. But they came through it, as families do more often than not.
But then he had died. Too young. Too soon. Cancer, the disease that is spoken of in whispers, as if the very mention of it will bring the utterer its unwanted attention. It would feel at home here, in this place of death, where voices are hushed and the sounds of nature muffled.
The quiet places, her father had called them, but Rebecca had heard them described another way by a crime writer she’d interviewed when he was in Inverness to promote his new book.
Thin places.
Sites where the veil between this world and the next is fragile, almost sheer, where the past lives on beside the present. Thin places, where some of us can sense more than what can be seen, touched or tasted. On Stoirm, these people were called the fey. Rebecca wasn’t sure if she believed in it, but she did feel something otherwordly whenever she visited Culloden and Glencoe, just as her father had. Or perhaps, as he had said himself, she was merely imagining it. Perhaps, because of the bloody history and stark tragedy, she wanted these sites to feel different.
The police had cordoned off the entrance to the battleground and half of the narrow road, where a uniformed constable directed traffic in a contraflow system. Rebecca had brought her car to a halt as close as she could to allow them to walk along the verge to where two officers were holding back a small band of onlookers, most of whom had their phones up and were snapping away. Cars drifted by slowly, some of the occupants turning their faces towards the moorland, where a tent had been erected beyond a cluster of gorse bushes already flowering yellow. A bright light beamed through the fabric and dark shapes moved back and forth. Forensic specialists and police officers entered and exited, their bodies clad in disposable overalls, their heads, feet and hands encased in protective gear, designed not to keep the weather out but any contaminant in. The moorland inclined slightly up and away from them, but she could just about make out the very top of the visitors’ centre. On the verge, she spotted one or two professional photographers and a BBC TV crew, the pretty, dark-haired but diminutive reporter doing a piece to camera with the tent, glimpsed through a gap in the gorse cover, behind her. The cameraman, a balding veteran with a long white beard, was telling her to move slightly to her right so he could get more of the police activity in shot. She did as she was told. The visual was as important as the aural on the screen.
Chaz had selected a long lens and was snapping away at a line of officers in waterproof gear stretched out across the moor, searching the heather for any evidence. They moved slowly, etched against the dull skyline, the ground between them a patchwork of white and brown thanks to a fall of snow in the night. Their eyes cast downwards, long sticks in hand, they sought to probe and clear the undergrowth. Rebecca knew instantly that would be the image on many front pages in the morning.
‘That’s whatshername, from the Beeb,’ Chaz said as he fingered the shutter.
‘Lola McLeod,’ replied Rebecca.
‘Lola? Think that’s made up?’
Rebecca had no idea. ‘She used to be a showgirl at the Copacabana.’ She waited for him to laugh but he merely gave her a puzzled look. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know the Barry Manilow song.’
‘What, you think cos I’m gay I know Barry Manilow songs?’
‘No.’
‘Should I know showtunes off by heart, that what you’re saying?’
‘No, I—’
‘And I should idolise Judy Garland, right?’
She realised then he was winding her up. ‘Bastard,’ she said, and he laughed.
She recognised one of the officers on duty, a young cop she h
ad seen at court and at other incidents, and knew him to be reasonably approachable. He was watching the news crew with some interest, seemingly entranced by the magic of TV. The reporter had fluffed a line and was laughing at her own mistake. Rebecca heard her apologise, but the cameraman nodded and said he was still rolling, so she suddenly became serious, as if a switch had been thrown.
‘Cold work, this,’ Rebecca said, letting her gaze follow his.
‘Aye,’ said the officer.
She kept one ear open for what the BBC reporter was saying. No details yet forthcoming. Police tight-lipped. Body found just before nine that morning, when mist lifted.
Rebecca said, ‘Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me anything about this?’
His eyes moved away from Lola and her Mediterranean looks. Rebecca saw recognition in his eyes as he looked at her. ‘You suppose right.’
She nodded. She hadn’t expected anything less, but God loves a trier, as they say. ‘Do you know if there’s a press conference organised?’
‘Not a clue. You’d need to ask the media people. Or the boss.’
‘Who’s the SIO?’
SIO. She felt like she was in Line of Duty when she used abbreviations, but ‘senior investigating officer’ was such a mouthful.
‘DCI Valerie Roach,’ said the officer.
The name meant nothing to Rebecca. ‘She new?’
His head inclined slightly. ‘Up from Perth. Knows her stuff, they say, but not met her myself.’
Rebecca took a long look at the scene on the moor. She wouldn’t get anywhere near it today and she wouldn’t want to. Her father had investigated enough murders in his day and had told her that the press can be both a help and hindrance. He’d once personally arrested a young reporter who thought he was Woodward and Bernstein all rolled into one and had managed to sneak onto a locus without anyone noticing.
Don’t ever be like that, he’d told her. Get to the truth, if you can, but don’t get in the way.
Get to the truth – if you can. She had learned how difficult that was. The truth can be a slippery creature with many faces. For a lawyer, the truth is what they can prove in court. For a police officer, it is whatever brings a conviction. For the journalist, it is whatever sells the story. And back-up, if need be. For politicians it is something to be avoided at all costs. She thought back to Finbar Dalgliesh addressing the crowd.
The Blood is Still Page 2