The Dark Isle

by Katherine Pathak

  Kerr’s tone became clipped. “Don’t be ridiculous, you know I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, I do know that. But there was something happening with you and Lowther. I remember how thick you both were. There were elements of that operation I knew nothing about.”

  “You should be grateful that was the case. What we experienced in the ticket office of the bus station that day, it changed everything.”

  “McNair practically accused Lowther of bullying suspects in interviews. Did you witness that?”

  “The times were different then.”

  “So, you did witness that?”

  “Do you ever think about us, Dani? The way it was back then? I wanted to leave Lorraine for you.”

  Dani shook her head, exasperated. “No, it was years ago. I thank God I took the transfer to Pitt Street when I did. I had no wish to break up your family. I was young and awestruck and you were very attractive and attentive. That’s it.”

  “How did Juliet die?” His voice sounded suddenly distant.

  “Multiple stab wounds to the upper torso. She bled out. The murder site was separate from where the body was dumped. The job was professional.”

  Kerr let out a gasp. “Poor Jules.”

  “Kerr, did Juliet do something back then that made her a target for this? I remember how out of control she was becoming before I left. Did something happen after I was gone?”

  “The bus bombing hardened her. She had little sympathy for the pathetic self-justifying perps who crossed our paths in the months that followed. But we always stuck to the rules, you know that.”

  Dani could feel her frustration rising. “There’s got to be a reason for her murder. I don’t believe it relates to her retirement, she barely put a foot wrong in Fort William, was hardly living any kind of life at all.”

  His voice had drifted away once more. “Listen, Dani, I’ve got to go. There’s nothing more I can tell you. But it’s been good to hear your voice.”

  Abruptly, the line was dead. Dani was left with the distinct feeling she’d been told nothing at all.

  Chapter 30

  The impressive stone townhouse lay on a crescent overlooking the Forth. DI Alice Mann parked the car in a residents’ bay and placed a police badge on the dashboard.

  She turned to her companion. “I’m going to ask you to lead the interview. Are you okay with that?”

  DC Tom Carrick nodded. It was his investigative work that had led them here. This was the lead which fitted best with the information they had on the identity of their peat ‘John Doe’.

  Alice opened the car door. She gazed up at the castle which dominated the skyline. Alice had studied at Stirling University herself. She had fond memories of the place.

  Tom made sure he had the file of documents secure in his grasp as they approached the front door. Within seconds of knocking, it was opened.

  An Asian man in his early sixties hovered in the doorway, he seemed almost hesitant to allow them in. “DI Mann and DC Carrick?” He ventured.

  “That is correct, sir.” The officers held up their warrant cards. “May we come inside?”

  The hallway was tidy and flamboyantly decorated with oriental vases and oil paintings in gold frames. The detectives were led into a bright, open-plan kitchen where a lady in a beautifully stitched salwar kameez, of a similar age, was filling a high-spec coffee maker.

  “Mr and Mrs Mahtam, we are grateful that you agreed to meet with us.”

  Izad Mahtam indicated they should take a seat. “We are grateful to you. This is the first time we have had news from the police in nearly ten years.”

  “Would you mind explaining the circumstances of your son’s disappearance for us?”

  Izad sighed. “We have of course been through this umpteen times already with different officers over the years. If it helps find out what happened to Adnan, I suppose it is worth repeating.”

  “We have read the police reports,” Alice added. “But it really is better for us to hear the details from you and your wife.”

  Izad nodded. “I am a professor of law at the university here. But when our son went missing, I was a lecturer at the Caledonian University in Glasgow. Our family house was in Sighthill.”

  Rabia Mahtam brought over the coffees and set them down on the table in silence.

  “Adnan was twenty years old in 2008. He would have turned thirty next year.” He reached across to a shelf and selected an ornately framed studio shot of a handsome young man with thick, wavy dark hair.

  Tom took the picture and examined it closely, passing it to Alice.

  “Our son was studying Business Management at the same university where I worked. He was in his second year. Adnan had been staying with some friends on the campus of GCU. One of them called us up when he didn’t return back to their flat one night.”

  “When was this, Mr Mahtam?” Tom asked.

  “The night of 12th March, 2008. Adnan lived with us most of the time, so his friends assumed he had returned to our house instead. It was good of them to check, otherwise his absence would have gone unnoticed much longer.”

  “Who was the last person to see your son?”

  Rabia replied this time. “Adnan was in a finance lecture the morning of his disappearance. It finished at 11am. He chatted to a couple of fellow students before leaving the faculty.” He eyes misted. “This was the last time he was seen.”

  Alice leaned forward. “What about CCTV coverage of the campus and local streets? There are dozens of cameras in that area, I know it well.”

  Izad pursed his lips. “We were never shown any CCTV footage. I certainly mentioned it to the officers in charge of his case. I was told it had been examined and there was no sign of Adnan.”

  Alice frowned. This seemed unlikely. The boy couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. The last sighting they had of anyone was usually the grainy image lifted from a CCTV recording.

  “What did the police investigation conclude?” Tom asked, sipping his sweet coffee politely.

  Izad clasped his hands together tightly, as if trying to fight against a rising anger. “My son had friends at a mosque in Baird Street. The officers jumped on this information immediately. Added to this, we returned as a family to Lahore every couple of years. This was viewed as suspicious by the authorities. The assumption was made that Adnan had returned to Pakistan full-time, with the intention of training with the Taliban. Once this idea was in their heads, the search for my son ceased.”

  Tom nodded. “Was there any substance to that suspicion? Did your son display any signs of radicalisation when he lived with you?”

  Izad blinked several times, obviously trying to remain calm. “Adnan was a good Muslim. But he loved being Scottish. He had plans to become a businessman after college. Adnan had friends who were angry about the NATO presence in Afghanistan, but it is possible to associate with people who possess alternative views without subscribing to them yourself.”

  Tom lifted the file sitting in his lap and placed it on the table between them.

  They all gazed at it in silence for a moment.

  “The reason we have come here, is because you responded to the photograph we printed in the Herald. The case of your son’s disappearance proved the closest match we had to the body we found buried on Ghiant.”

  Tears were streaking down Rabia’s cheeks. “It was our daughter, Zakia, who encouraged us to call the number. She is a lawyer now, younger than Adnan would have been. She has more faith in the authorities than we have.”

  “Do you recall what your son was wearing on the day he went missing?”

  Izad answered, his wife had her head buried in her hands. “A blue sports jacket and jeans. His trainers were Nike, I believe. Sportswear was the fashion for him and his friends. This is already recorded in his case notes.”

  “But do you remember the brand of the jacket, sir? It’s very important.”

  He closed his eyes, thinking about this. “It was Adidas, I’m sure. He’d bough
t it only a week or so before he went missing, from the big sports shop in the St Enoch Centre.”

  Alice glanced at her colleague and nodded her head.

  Tom took a deep breath. “Mr and Mrs Mahtam, I’m very sorry to inform you that we believe we have found the body of your son.” He slipped the photographs of the boy’s clothing out of the file, positioning them so that the couple could view the images clearly.

  Izad’s controlled expression crumpled. Rabia tipped her head back towards the ceiling and wailed.

  The officers gave the couple a few moments to recover from the initial blow.

  Izad reached out and placed his hand on Tom’s arm, gripping the material of his jacket so that it creased. “This news is very painful to receive. My family will take it hard. But I thank you for coming here. We believed that our plight had been forgotten, our son had been forgotten. Now we can bury him properly. That means everything to us.”

  Chapter 31

  The room Dani had been given was small and dimly lit. It possessed a tiny window, high up in the wall. She had her suspicions it had once been an interview room, designed to intimidate its occupant.

  The officer who showed her in didn’t go as far as to lock the door behind her, but Dani still felt uncomfortably like a captive. She’d been given an hour. If she required longer, there would have to be another application to Chief Superintendent McNair for a slot.

  There was no time to lose. Dani opened the thick file and scanned through its contents. Now, she had a name to search for. Adnan Mahtam, a twenty-year-old student at GCU who visited a mosque near the university campus in 2006/8.

  The Baird Street Mosque was mentioned several times in the investigation papers. One of the bus station bombers had been a regular visitor there. It was clear Juliet Lowther believed he had been radicalised through his connections at the mosque. A number of individuals were brought in for questioning in relation to the bombing. Adnan’s name wasn’t amongst them.

  It was the transcripts of the interviews themselves that had caught Dani’s attention. Most were conducted by Lowther herself, with Kerr Travis in attendance. The young men being questioned all had a duty solicitor present, but there was little evidence of intervention by their legal representatives.

  The questions began fairly straightforwardly, with Lowther sighting phone and e-mail contact between the interviewee and the suspect, probing for evidence of collusion in the planning of the attack. But when these questions got nowhere, Lowther and Travis became more aggressive in their approach. They hinted that non-cooperation would result in the interviewee’s homes being raided by the anti-terrorist squad, armed with guns and batons. One of the young men wept at the idea of this, explaining how his mother wasn’t well and such a terrifying intrusion might kill her.

  Dani raised her eyes from the documents. Their contents were disturbing. This was the official account of how information was gathered during that investigation. She wondered what the hell went on informally, when they visited homes and mosques, or battered down doors in the middle of the night, without a solicitor present or a tape-recorder preserving their actions for posterity.

  She glanced at her watch. There wasn’t much time left. Dani jotted down the names of all those interviewed. Adnan wasn’t mentioned in these papers at all. By the time of his disappearance, in March 2008, the Baird Street Mosque interviews had stopped. Lowther and Kerr were working on other lines of inquiry, gathering the physical evidence needed to secure their two suspects’ conviction at the trial, which took place at the start of 2009.

  Dani tried to remember her role in these investigations. She was never invited to sit in on interviews or to view the forensic evidence that the bomb squad had retrieved from the scene. Her job lay in analysing the phone and computer data, a task which didn’t allow her to join up any of the dots. What she knew about the case against those accused of planting the bombs at Roydon Road in 2006 was what Juliet Lowther told her.

  But she’d also had another source of information during those months. Dani had begun a relationship with Kerr Travis not long after she joined Cowcaddens’ Road CID. He was married with young children, but by his behaviour you would never have known it. They were in the bar most evenings after work. Kerr helped Dani get to grips with the transition from uniform to CID.

  One of the reasons Dani had been on leave with her father on Colonsay in the spring of 2006 was to reflect on her relationship with Kerr. It felt like things were getting serious between them. Kerr had talked about leaving Lorraine. Dani wasn’t sure she wanted that. It hadn’t been her intention to break up a young family. In truth, she’d not properly considered the consequences of what she was doing with him.

  When Dani returned from Colonsay, everything had changed. In the aftermath of the bombing, the focus of the department was solely on finding the culprits. She and Kerr met a few more times in hotel rooms, but they both knew it was over. Kerr had seen children the age of his own killed or horribly injured in the blast. Even for him, this was a wake-up call.

  Although they’d once been lovers, she and Kerr never discussed the details of the investigation in private. It was obvious from the moment of Dani’s return that Kerr and Juliet were drawn to one another after their experience. They had their heads bowed at the desk in her office and stood side-by-side at the bar in Dobbie’s. It was no surprise that when Lorraine saw them together, she interpreted this bond as an affair.

  Dani knew it wasn’t. It was stronger than that. She’d had an affair with Kerr and knew how little it meant compared to what he and Juliet had gone through. They’d formed a mutual support group. No one else in the department had a look-in.

  Dani jumped at the sound of the knock. Her escort had arrived. She closed the file carefully and got to her feet. It didn’t seem necessary to examine the documents again. The significance of them was perfectly clear.

  Chapter 32

  “Tell me more of what you remember about him.” Bill hooked his arm through Joy’s. A gentle breeze blew across the shore, sending up the white sand in tiny spirals. The outline of Ghiant was clear on the horizon.

  “Uncle Rob was a physically strong man. I suppose it was his farming background which made him that way. The summer I stayed with him and Aunty Catrin, he was always out in the fields. The job was very physical.”

  “You recall him as a kind man? He showed affection towards you and your cousins?”

  “Oh, yes. He adored Aisling and Rory. Life on the island seemed to suit them perfectly.”

  “Did it always suit your aunt? She was used to living on the mainland. She played an important role in the war. Didn’t she feel isolated out here? They can’t have had many friends.”

  Joy considered this. “I don’t know. She was in the kitchen mostly, cooking for the family. She helped on the farm when necessary. I suppose I assumed she must be blissful, living in such a beautiful place with a handsome, dashing husband.”

  Bill cleared his throat. “Was that perhaps your adolescent self, projecting her own feelings onto your aunt?”

  Joy blinked several times, as if trying to make an image come clearer. “You may be right. They were terribly upset when they had to leave Ghiant for good, that much I know for certain. But Catrin lived a long, happy life on the mainland while Uncle Rob was dead within the decade.”

  Bill took a deep breath. “It was an old army colleague who got Rob a job on the mainland in the early 60s, wasn’t it?”

  Joy nodded. “Yes, the island was becoming increasingly difficult to farm for a profit. This opportunity gave Rob and Catrin a reason to leave and start again.”

  “Presumably, this man served with Rob in the war. He may be able to shed some light on Rob’s service history. You don’t happen to recall his name, do you?”

  Joy glanced across at her husband. “Oh yes, I see what you mean. Actually darling, I do.”

  *

  DI Peyton waited for the team to assemble in front of the stage in the Nabb town hall. Alice an
d Tom had arrived back from Stirling that afternoon.

  “The identification of our peat man as Adnan Mahtam is a significant leap forward.” He nodded towards Tom Carrick.

  The young DC tentatively climbed the steps onto the stage. “The Mahtam family have positively identified the clothes the body was found in. The dates of the student’s disappearance match the forensic evidence we have. The techies inform us that he was buried a few hours after death and had been in the peat for several years, judging by the degree of mummification that had occurred. Adnan Mahtam was last seen in a lecture theatre at GCU. He was a long way from home, winding up here. The family are professional and articulate. They put pressure on the local force to step up their investigation. Their son’s participation in a nearby mosque did not go in his favour. The officers in charge assumed he’d returned to his parents’ homeland of Pakistan, to attend a Taliban training camp.”

  Andy put up his hand. “So, this lad was living in Glasgow when he went missing. He had links to the Baird Street Mosque which was tied up in Juliet Lowther’s anti-terrorist investigation. Does this mean we are now treating the two murders as connected?”

  Tom glanced at his boss, “yes, I’m assuming so. The information was passed on to DCI Bevan and the team in Fort William as soon as we had confirmation of identity from the next of kin.”

  Alice stepped forward. “Juliet Lowther’s body was dumped on the island a few weeks ago, Adnan Mahtam’s body had been in the ground for several years, according to the forensic tests. He could even have been buried there not long after he went missing in 2008. We’re talking about a gap of nearly ten years. That’s going to be difficult to account for.”

  “But it can’t be a coincidence,” Peyton added. “These two bodies have a strong circumstantial connection, although DCI Bevan can’t find any evidence yet that Lowther ever came into contact with Mahtam during the course of her investigations.”