The man was wearing a traditional belted plaid, its colours muted and soft. Underneath was a rough shirt. And on his head was a cap with a sprig of holly pinned to the peak. It looked to Roach as if the corpse had been transported forward in time from the battle in 1746.
Bremner straightened. ‘It’s the anniversary in a couple of weeks. The battle.’ After a pause he added, just in case she didn’t know what he was talking about, ‘Culloden.’
‘Significant, you think?’
He made a plosive sound with his cheek. ‘Beats the hell out of me. I mean, all this is a new one on me. Jesus. It’s just so bloody . . .’
‘Weird?’ she offered.
‘And then some.’ He fell silent again, his teeth working at his lip. ‘You know they’re making a movie about the battle, don’t you? Filming up at Glen Nevis.’
She had already thought of that. There hadn’t been so much excitement about a Hollywood roadshow since Mel Gibson had clipped on his hair extensions for Braveheart. The production company had been shooting Conquering Hero all over Scotland, for interiors utilising the studios near Cumbernauld normally reserved for the Outlander TV show. The film wasn’t so much about the battle as Bonnie Prince Charlie and his opposite number, the Duke of Cumberland. The news had reported that the whole thing had proved controversial because the script was less than flattering to the Highlanders, or at least that’s what was being claimed by Spioraid nan Gàidheal.
‘You think maybe all this’ – Bremner waved a hand over the body like a magician’s assistant at the big reveal – ‘came from there?’
‘At this stage I don’t know what to think. But a chat with the film people is definitely on the cards.’
Bremner nodded and they watched the technicians snapping, snipping, dusting and probing. One eased the man’s hands into plastic so that any residue under the fingernails or on the skin was protected. Another unrolled a larger section of plastic sheeting to wrap around the weapon as it was carefully removed.
Roach stared at the dead man’s face, the skin pallid, the eyes open as if staring at the tent covering him. He needed a shave, she realised. His hair, what she could see under the bonnet, was long and lank. She tried to guess his age. Late thirties, maybe? Early forties? Death had smoothed his features and the lack of colouring didn’t help. The dead don’t boogie, she was once told. They also don’t age.
Her mind asked him questions.
Who are you?
What was your life like?
Were you married? In love? Do you have kids? Is there someone waiting at home, wondering where you are, even now frantically dialling everyone she or he knows, looking for you?
How did you get here?
What the hell happened?
Naturally, she didn’t hear any replies. The dead don’t talk much either.
She sighed. ‘I hate a mystery.’
6
The child still lives within. The years pass, geography changes, yet the child lives and breathes. And remembers.
The memories are living, breathing things too. They have a will of their own. They can be forced down, they can be locked away, but they always find a way to resurface and to break out. It can be the tiniest inducement that awakens them. A smell. The way light strikes water. A form of speech. A musical phrase.
Something, anything, from a past that is best forgotten. That is best dismissed as having never actually happened. That it was someone else’s memory, someone’s else’s history, someone else’s pain.
But then comes that nanosecond of stimuli, that’s all it takes, and it comes flooding back.
For the past is present, the present is past.
The house.
The stairway.
The sounds from below.
The room.
Always that room. And the child is back there.
That tiny, square room with the white walls and the worn carpet and the single bed and the wooden dresser and the window that lets in light but little of the outside world. The glass is artificially frosted, sticky plastic sheeting clinging to the surface to prevent glimpses of the world beyond or, more importantly, the hell within. A corner of the plastic has come loose and the child is able to pick at it and peer out, but the view is limited: the corner of a roof, the branches of a tree, a patch of sky. To pull the cover back further would result in punishment and the child is punished enough. All that can be seen through the opaque glass are smudges and the suggestion of movement in the street below, people and dogs and cars, of lives being lived. That is the world beyond that room and that staircase and that house. An ill-defined world of shadows, vague silhouettes oblivious to what is happening just a few feet away from them and of the child who yearns to be free.
That’s all it takes. Just a second. The merest glimpse of a face among many. Older certainly, yet still the same. A sentence overheard and a voice still recognisable. And once seen and heard, everything collapses into rubble. A life carefully constructed, a fiction society has assisted in maintaining, cracks and splinters. And is revealed.
It cannot happen. The child cannot allow it to happen.
7
Elspeth McTaggart was squat. There was really no other way to describe her. Rebecca had seen photographs of her old boss in younger days – she might have been called dainty back then. But her enjoyment of life had left her torso larger while her stature remained diminutive. Her face was lined and leathery, her hair, dyed a curious shade of red unknown in the natural world, always cut short and tight to her skull. Her eyes were forever lively, bright, ready to signal a sharp question or a cutting remark. She sat behind the desk in her small first-floor office above a coffee house on Union Street. They called the patchwork of streets and lanes where Elspeth had her base the Old Town and it was a part of Inverness Rebecca enjoyed being in. She had snagged a parking space in the square outside the railway station and walked towards the news agency Elspeth owned and ran as a one-woman concern. It was early in the year but the tourists were already in evidence, walking the narrow streets and alleyways and peering into the shopfronts amidst a babble of languages and the clicking of shutters. Inverness was an all-year tourist city and although not as sprawling as Glasgow or Edinburgh it was still cosmopolitan. And it was growing fast.
Elspeth was hunched behind her desk like Yoda, if you could imagine Yoda smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and drinking tea like it was the elixir of life. The year before she had taken a tumble and damaged her hip, so she now used a cane to help her get around. You and Chaz should form a club, Rebecca thought, seeing it propped up against the desk to Elspeth’s right-hand side. Luckily her vast network of contacts meant she could sit in the office much of the time and still keep her finger on various pulses around the Highlands.
‘So, they’re still trying to reinvent the wheel, eh?’ Elspeth’s voice was like packed earth during a long, dry spell – hard, cracked, unyielding. In her journalistic career she had taken on local councillors and MPs, high-ranking police officers and low-life crooks. She had shown no fear or favour to any political party or special interest group. She’d stood up to her own management while other editors had held their acquiescence before them like a shield.
Her nickname during her latter years editing the Chronicle had been satnav because she would happily tell anyone where to go.
Rebecca had taken a very rare lunchbreak to visit Elspeth to tell her about Les Morgan and what he had said in the staff meeting, then later in Barry’s office with the door closed. It had all been very brief, to the point. The industry was in crisis. Drastic measures were needed. Changes had to be made. More emphasis on digital content. Post stories there first.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Elspeth, firing up another cigarette with a gold lighter given to her by her ex-husband, a man who owned five hotels across the Highlands. They had divorced after ten years of marriage because they had different needs. As Elspeth put it, he needed a wife who would stay at home, cook his dinner and clean his boxers. Sh
e, however, needed her career and a succession of one-night stands with younger women. She had come to terms with what she had suspected about her sexuality, on some level at least, only after she had married. It had come as something of a surprise to her husband, though. Despite that, twenty years after the divorce, they remained on friendly, if not intimate, terms. Elspeth had played the field for a few years but had recently settled down into what she called a close approximation of wedded bliss with a woman called Julie, ten years her junior, who owned a small café-cum-bookstore in Drumnadrochit on the shores of Loch Ness. In the eighteen months that Rebecca had worked for Elspeth at the Chronicle, she had never once made a pass at her. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted.
Elspeth blew a long line of smoke into the air. This was a place of work but, as she was the only one who worked here, the law against workplace smoking could go take a flying jump to itself. Satnav had spoken.
‘They never bloody learn, do they?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘They’re amalgamating all the editorial staff so we’ll all work on whatever title needs it. A moratorium on new hires.’
‘Did he use that word? Moratorium?’
‘Yes.’
Elspeth snorted. ‘Get it up the pretentious wee sod.’
Rebecca couldn’t help but smile. ‘There will be no more freelance help, so no holiday cover; the extra work will be shouldered by the remaining staff. Each reporter should be able to create at least fifty stories a week, he says.’
‘Christ, it’s a production line,’ said Elspeth.
‘He wants more comment in the paper and online to help engagements.’
‘Click-bait. The danger with that is they ignore serious stories in order to draw traffic.’
‘Sport is being cut, he doesn’t think it sells papers now.’
A ball of smoke erupted from Elspeth’s mouth as she considered this and shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s right. Time was, it did, but the junior football clubs all have their own websites now. Fans can go there and read a report, see videos. And Inverness Cally has heard the siren sound of the nationals and telly.’
‘We’re losing one content manager,’ Rebecca said, and Elspeth wrinkled her nose at the term. She still called them subs, but the industry liked to change job designations. It helped when paying people off. Make a sub redundant, create the post of content manager. Same job, different title, less money.
‘And what’s Barry saying about all this?’ Elspeth asked.
‘Nothing much he can say,’ said Rebecca. ‘He’s out, too.’
He had dropped that bombshell in the stairwell after she’d met with Les Morgan. Rebecca had asked him if he was going to fight what was going on and he’d only shaken his head. She had told him that he couldn’t let this happen. He was the editor: he had to stand up for the titles, he had to stand up for the staff. He had to fight. He’d said there was nothing he could do.
‘I’m out too, Becks,’ he said, the words so heavy that he’d had to force them into the world.
She had stared at him, shocked into silence. She’d had her run-ins with Barry, but more often than not she had been at fault. ‘But . . .’ It was all she could manage.
He’d glanced back at the door to the editorial room, then stepped down a few stairs to take them further away. ‘Don’t tell anyone, okay? It’ll be announced soon.’
‘But who will be editor?’
His lips thinned into what might have been a smile if it hadn’t been so sad. ‘They don’t need an editor.’
‘They don’t . . .’ Rebecca couldn’t quite grasp what she was hearing. ‘They . . . what? I mean . . .’
‘There will be a content supervisor,’ he said.
In her Old Town office, Elspeth laughed. ‘A content supervisor? Oh dear God, they really have taken over the asylum. Any idea who?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘Apparently Les Morgan will take over for a while. The “transition period” they’re calling it.’
‘Aye, transitioning from one mess into another.’
‘Then they’ll appoint someone, I suppose.’
‘One of the staff?’
‘Doubtful. London will want someone of their own in there. Anyway, none of us are experienced enough, apart from Hugh, and I can’t see them giving him the keys to the kingdom.’
‘True. Hugh was never one to let a shit idea get in the way of making his opinions known.’
‘I wonder who he learned that from?’
Elspeth tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth and squinted across the desk. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean, young lady. I was a company man all the way.’
‘Then why did they sack you?’
‘They didn’t sack me, I was invited to leave.’
Rebecca laughed.
Elspeth plucked the cigarette from her mouth and laid it in an ashtray that had passed the need to be emptied about ten smokes ago. She leaned forward. ‘So how do you feel about all this?’
Rebecca sighed. She hadn’t yet fully processed the news. She knew the job would not be what it had been when Elspeth was in charge, when, despite pressure from above, getting the story as close to the truth as possible was paramount. It wouldn’t even be what it had been under Barry, when standards fell along with staff numbers. It would be something new; in her opinion, something less than journalism. A process line of copy, covering an even wider area than at present, with little or no time to get out and do what she did best, which was actually talking to people face to face. She had come to an agreement with Barry that, if she could convince him it was necessary, she could get out and do so. He was an old-fashioned hack at heart so generally he didn’t take that much convincing, although he was capable of putting up a good fight. It often meant she had to do extra hours to make up for it, but she didn’t mind. Her mother lived in Glasgow and her only real friends in Inverness were Chaz and Alan, so lack of personal time wasn’t much of an issue. There had been Simon, a solicitor from Nairn, but that relationship had foundered on the rocks of a miscarriage, something no one else knew about, not even Chaz or Elspeth. Or her mother, for that matter. The relationship had been in trouble prior to that, at least on her side. Simon had tried to keep it afloat, but when she’d come back from Stoirm the previous autumn she had finally scuppered it. She had invited him out for a drink – if that hadn’t tipped him off something was wrong, nothing would, because up until that point she had never made first contact. They went to a quiet lounge in a hotel across the Ness and had a long talk – well, she had a long talk, he merely sat and listened, occasionally asking a question in a quiet, strained voice. She told him there was no future for them together, that it was not anyone’s fault, that it wasn’t because of the baby. There just wasn’t anything there. She fell short of saying it wasn’t him it was her, but it was implicit.
He had sat very still for a long time, staring through a large window towards the castle on the hill opposite, the reflections of its floodlights shimmering on the shifting waters of the river. When he finally looked up at her, she saw the pain and the questions in his eyes and she felt her heart break. She didn’t want to hurt him, she’d never wanted to hurt him, but she couldn’t go on like this.
He stood up and left without a further word and she felt something like relief mixed with what might have been a little bit of self-loathing. If she was honest with herself, it was loss too. She recognised that, all right. She knew about loss. The baby. Her father.
Her phone, which had been sitting in front of her on Elspeth’s desk, vibrated and brought her out of her thoughts. As she reached for it, she realised she’d kept Elspeth waiting for an answer. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t. I’ll just have to wait and see.’
Elspeth settled back in her chair, her right hand unconsciously reaching out for the cigarette. ‘That’s all any of us can do, Becks.’
Rebecca glanced at the caller ID, saw it was Bill Sawyer’s number. ‘Bill?’
‘Spoke to my pal over at Inshes.
’ Police Scotland’s Inverness headquarters was situated in this eastern area of the city, part of a business and retail park near Raigmore Hospital. ‘He says they’re playing this all very coy.’
‘Don’t they always?’
‘That’s all he’d say, though. That DCI Roach, she’s tough, and they’re all shit-scared about pissing her off. Sorry, love – looks like I’ll need to earn that Happy Meal another day.’
Disappointing but not surprising. She knew the police liked to keep as much to themselves as possible.
Specialist knowledge. Her father’s voice, as usual, echoed in her mind. We can’t put everything out there. We need to keep much of it back, for evidential reasons, for investigative reasons, for legal reasons. And then there’s the wee bits and pieces that we’ll maybe use to trip up a suspect, something only the real culprit knows about a crime. She remembered him pausing then and giving her the smile that always telegraphed something cheeky was on its way. Of course, sometimes we do it just to piss off reporters.
‘My mate did say one thing, though.’ Sawyer’s voice interrupted the playback in her mind. She saw Elspeth watching her expression with interest but patience. She must have sensed this was a story-related call but she knew Rebecca would tell her everything. That was the kind relationship they had.
Rebecca asked, ‘What?’
‘This murder? He said word was that it was weird.’
8
‘Weird? In what way?’
Val Roach pushed a tablet across the desktop towards Superintendent Harry McIntyre and watched as he swiped through images with his forefinger. He was a big man, well over six foot tall, and the bulk of what she saw filling his crisp uniform was muscle. He had been an athlete in his younger days and had never lost the need to keep his body trim.
McIntyre blanched as he studied the photographs. Despite attempts by crime writers to convince the world differently, murder was still uncommon in the Highlands and so, by extension, any unlawful killing would be deemed unusual, to an extent. However, this was exceptional, as McIntyre now saw.
The Blood is Still Page 4