‘Eh? Why would they be involved down here?’
‘Now that’s a good question, Brian.’
As the helicopter passed noisily overhead they looked on, collective breath rising like steam in the frosty air. Meanwhile, the body of Sheena McKay lay stiff in the pool of dark congealed blood.
39
Ginny Doig stumbled across the frozen ground. She knew these hills like the back of her hand, but knowing the terrain and getting from one place to another were very different prospects. Her knees ached, she couldn’t feel her hands and she was beginning to feel tired. Even with her limited medical knowledge she discerned the first signs of hypothermia.
She knew that she had to get to the smallholding just over the hill as quickly as she could, but her legs refused to work, to obey her commands. She was staggering now, the world becoming a confusion of bright sky, cold air and frozen heather that tore at her ankles.
She stopped, hands on her knees, gasping for breath.
‘Mother?’ The little boy looked at her intently. He was dressed in the moleskin trousers and jumper she’d made for him.
‘Thorbin, you away and get a coat on. You’ll catch your death of cold.’
‘I’m dead already.’
Ginny stared into the child’s face. His thick dark hair was roughly cut, sticking up in untidy clumps; she’d done it herself with her dressmaking scissors. She hobbled towards him, hand held out.
‘You can’t touch me now.’
‘Why not?’ Her voice was stern. Ginny Doig hated her children disobeying her.
‘You can’t touch dead people.’
Just as her trembling hand reached out to his face, a trickle of blood like a small tear began to meander down his face from one eye. The trickle became a torrent, and soon his whole face was covered, a bloody mask. Only his eyes stared out, bright blue and alive.
‘Thorbin, stop that!’ she shouted. The image began to shimmer. The boy smiled at her through the gore of his own face and disappeared.
Ginny turned round. She couldn’t see her oldest son anywhere. Nothing made sense; she just wanted to sleep. As the sky began to spin she sank to her knees, barely feeling the fast-frozen heather and the hard ground beneath. Her eyelids flickered, heavy, impossible to keep open.
‘Ginny.’ The voice was her husband’s.
‘What?’ she asked weakly, her head buried in the heather now.
‘This isn’t how it ends; this isn’t what we do. We fight!’
‘I’ve fought my fight, husband. So have you.’ Ginny Doig felt warm now, cosy, as though she was lying in her bed under a pile of thick blankets on a cold winter’s night. She knew it was freezing outside, but she was comfortable, ready to sleep. With her bony hand she reached through the heather to nip out the candle that wasn’t there. The effort was enough to see her eyes close tight shut. She was breathing slowly now, her brain curating her end like the gentlest nurse.
Everything was warm, everything felt safe; everything was slipping away.
She could feel herself being taken up, strong hands pulling her body free of this earth, as though she was being taken from this life to another realm.
‘Mrs Doig!’ the man shouted as he lifted her frail body from the ground. ‘Quick, Gordon, get her in the tractor. Help me!’
Ginny Doig’s head lolled as two pairs of brawny hands gripped her by the shoulders and feet and placed her in the cabin.
The man in the dark suit could have been of any age between thirty and fifty. He was well dressed: an expensive suit, pristine white shirt, silk tie and Savile Row tan shoes. His naturally light hair was flecked with subtle blond highlights, gelled back from his head. He was around six feet tall, slim and wiry. He made sure the Range Rover was locked before he walked the few yards up to Kinloch police office.
Despite the cold day, he felt refreshed, quite comfortable in just a suit and tie, though a less robust individual would doubtless have preferred a thick overcoat or jacket on such a chill November morning.
He bounded up the few steps and into the police office. Behind the front desk, the desk sergeant stood up, his mousy hair showing grey at the temples, not looking entirely comfortable in the black T-shirt that now formed part of his uniform.
‘Yes, sir, how can I help you?’
‘I’m Grant Dunwoody. Here to see DCI Daley – my card.’ He tossed the business card across the desk, where Sergeant Shaw managed to catch it just before it fell to the floor.
‘I’m afraid DCI Daley is busy working on a serious incident. I don’t know when he’ll be available, sir.’ Shaw’s face was devoid of expression. Though he’d read the card, the man before him needed no introduction. Grant Dunwoody was one of Scotland’s – the UK’s – most prestigious lawyers; he was also prodigiously expensive. Either way, his notoriety stormed before him.
‘I’ll take a seat, will I?’
‘Can I ask what your business is with DCI Daley, sir?’
‘If you must.’ Dunwoody sighed, as though reluctant to speak to such a lowly mortal. ‘I’m here representing my client, Alice Wenger.’
‘I see. Well, I suggest you take some time out to go and see her. She’s still in the local hospital. And as I say, DCI Daley will be quite a while.’
‘I know where she is, man. I’ve just come from the hospital. Please don’t tell me my business. I demand to see the DCI the minute he’s available. I hope that’s clear?’
‘I’ll tell him, Mr Dunwoody. I can show you through to the family room if you’d prefer. Much more comfortable.’
‘I’m fine here. But tell Daley this is a matter of the utmost importance.’ Dunwoody sat on one of the four chairs facing the tall reception desk. Without further discussion he brought out a smartphone and began to flick through email messages.
‘I’ll let him know you’re here.’ Shaw walked to the rear of the office to call his boss.
Donnie O’Hara hadn’t enjoyed the best of luck during the course of his forty-eight years. He’d married one woman who told him on their honeymoon that she’d made a mistake. The marriage ended a few weeks later.
His second marriage had started off much better, but his drinking and inability to hold down a job began to irk his hard-working new wife. So, with two years of less than blissful wedded life behind them, that relationship too came to an unceremonious end.
He’d met Tracy in a pub. With a reputation in Kinloch for drunkenness, idleness and being a less than caring partner, his chances of finding love locally were limited. So, during periods of intermittent employment, but still on a limited budget, he made the occasional trip to Glasgow in an attempt to find someone willing to take him on. Mostly, though, he lengthened the odds by staying in cheap hotels and seeking comfort amongst the city’s prostitutes until either his holidays or his money ran out, usually the latter. However, on one particular evening, he hit lucky.
Sitting on his own counting out enough change to buy a last couple of drinks in a rundown pub in the city centre, he’d been joined by a woman who sat at his table and asked him for a cigarette. At first O’Hara thought she was another prostitute – they used the bar frequently – but it soon became clear that she, like him, was a lonely soul seeking the company of a member of the opposite sex.
They met again on his next trip to the city, by which time he’d managed to lose his latest job. When he told Tracey that he wouldn’t be able to see her again until he could find more work, she offered to come down and stay with him in Kinloch.
Donnie O’Hara thought long and hard about this. His last two relationships had caused him so much grief that he had been happy on his own, able to take ‘comfort’ where he found it on his trips to the bright lights. He even considered making the move to Glasgow himself. But such was his perpetual impoverishment that he relied on his family to prop him up at regular intervals, and no such support network existed in the city.
After much thought, he decided to take Tracey up on her offer, and soon they were sharing a turbulent,
threadbare existence in one of the proliferating one-bedroom flats in Kinloch’s town centre. Tracey seemed able to find jobs more readily than he, but was equally adept at losing them. In the main, they spent their days arguing, drinking cheap wine or strong cider and watching the best Netflix had to offer.
When the man had contacted them and asked them to perform the strange task, Donnie had worried. He’d only just started work at the hotel, after all. But when he heard it was only a prank – a practical joke – well, for the money, it seemed as easy as falling off a log.
Now he was regretting every minute of the whole thing as he sat chewing his nails in the room that overlooked Kinloch’s Main Street. He wasn’t sure whether it was the noise of the cars, or the bell ringing on the shop door downstairs, but he’d managed to attain a state of watchful calm, though he dreaded a phone call, or a knock at the door. He’d always been wary of the police; now he had reason to be, despite being unable to work out what had happened at the Machrie House Hotel.
Tracey was still in bed, sleeping off a bottle of vodka. They had a little cash now, but Donnie O’Hara wasn’t sure if it had all been worth it.
When the knock sounded on the door it seemed almost inevitable. He knew the gimlet-eyed police inspector with the Glasgow accent could see right through him, so instead of fear he felt a certain relief as he went to answer it, as though surrendering to the inevitable.
The man in the close didn’t look much like a police officer, though. He was certainly in his sixties, at least, and his sallow lined face and clothes looked out of place in Kinloch.
‘Can I come in?’
‘What for?’ said O’Hara, slightly taken aback.
‘I have something for you. You know, something more – for your trouble the other day.’
O’Hara pinpointed the New Jersey accent. He watched loads of films featuring men who talked like this. He was about to slam the door in the man’s face when, from somewhere, he found the courage to say, ‘I want mair money. The police are on my back, and if you want me to keep my mouth shut – well, you’d better pay up!’
The man at the door held his hands out in surrender. ‘I hear ya, buddy – that’s why I’m here. We know you need a little extra. Things haven’t gone just like we planned. Some people . . . let’s just say, they don’t have any sense of humour.’
O’Hara thought for a moment. ‘How much mair money?’
‘C’mon, you wanna discuss this with me on the doorstep like some salesman? Hey, I ain’t no Willy Loman, my friend.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind. Let me in and we can do a deal, kid.’
O’Hara reluctantly nodded and walked away from the door.
Vito Chiase followed him inside, making sure he closed the front door quietly behind him. He passed the kitchen, where piles of unwashed dishes sat in a sink above a floor of cracked, stained linoleum.
‘Can I get you a cup of tea or something?’ O’Hara had his back to the American, picking up some empty cans of cider from the table in an effort to make the flat look semi-presentable.
‘No, I’m good, thanks.’ Chiase reached into his pocket and produced a ring of cheese wire. In an instant he had looped it over O’Hara’s head and down on to his throat. He was about to pull it tight when a shrill scream rent the air. Momentarily distracted, Chiase looked behind him. At first he thought a child was standing in the shabby room, but on closer inspection it was clear that this was a small woman.
‘I’m calling the polis!’ she shouted at the top of her voice, darting to a mobile that lay on a nearby chair.
As he took this in, Chiase felt a blow to the side of his face as O’Hara’s elbow connected with his cheek. The American staggered back, but managed not to fall, though his head was spinning.
With one hand over his face he made for the door. He could hear the woman shouting down the phone to the operator to put her on to the police. Half blind, head throbbing, he made it out of the flat and stumbled down the stairs. Not sure if he was being pursued, he dashed down Main Street, knocking over Mrs McKechnie as she pulled her shopping trolley towards the newsagents.
Chiase, working on instinct now, turned the corner into the side street where his SUV was parked outside a barber’s shop. He jumped in and pressed the button that engaged the engine. As the car sputtered into life, with one eye shut he struggled to find the right gear. Again, he cursed stick-shift automobiles before eventually he made it into first and with screeching tyres sped away, but not without attracting the attention of a few curious locals in the process.
As he turned left and headed for the seafront, he cursed and banged the steering wheel with his hand. ‘You fucking asshole! You never did know when to quit while you were ahead!’
Chiase sped along the esplanade gathering speed, anxious to leave this small town far in his wake.
40
Dunwoody observed a number of things all at once. A middle-aged man he vaguely recognised rushed past his seat near the front door of Kinloch police office. Though the man was clearly in a hurry, he stopped, turned round and faced the lawyer.
‘I hope they’re keeping you waiting.’ He shook his head, then dashed out of the door.
‘Who’s that?’ Dunwoody enquired of the desk sergeant.
‘DI Scott, sir.’
Scott. He thought for a moment. ‘You mean Brian Scott?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A bloody DI! No wonder things are bad in policing these days.’
‘Brave man. He’s been shot twice in the line of duty.’
‘Third time lucky, eh? We can always hope.’
Shaw just had time to glare at Dunwoody before the phone rang. Though the policeman mumbled, the lawyer could still hear the urgency in his voice.
Distantly, a police radio was spouting forth. He couldn’t pick up all that was said, but, remembering his basic knowledge of police incident codes, Dunwoody quickly realised that there had been a shooting locally, though the where, when and whom remained unclear.
The door was thrust open again, this time revealing a chief superintendent. Though he felt he should, Dunwoody didn’t recognise her. She went straight to the main desk, where Shaw had just ended his call.
‘What on earth is going on? The back gates are locked. My driver can’t park the bloody car.’ Her accent was of the refined Yorkshire variety, Dunwoody realised. He’d had a great-aunt who had lived near Scarborough and spoke in much the same way.
He looked on, increasingly intrigued, as the desk sergeant whispered to her conspiratorially. The lawyer had been trained over a number of years in the observance of people, whether police officers, judges, sheriffs, members of the jury, witnesses or clients. The fact that he had a top-of-the-range Range Rover sitting down the road, a large house in the leafy suburbs of Glasgow, a plush London apartment and a villa in Tuscany spoke to the proficiency he had acquired. In short, he knew an incident of note when he saw one.
He watched the superintendent’s complexion change as she hurried off into the bowels of the police station.
‘Trouble, sergeant?’ he said to the harassed man behind the desk.
‘Nothing we can’t handle, sir.’ It was clear that Sergeant Shaw was of the old school: steady and dependable, especially in a crisis.
‘I’ll just step out, if you don’t mind. I have a couple of calls to make.’
As Dunwoody took the few steps down to the pavement, two police cars rushed down the hill, sirens sounding, lights flashing. He was here to make sure Alice Wenger was free to leave Kinloch and return to the USA, and goodness knows she’d paid him handsomely enough for the privilege, but something about all this activity made him uneasy. He knew he’d get nowhere with the local police, but there was always a way. Members of the press – depleted as they may be – were still the best people to shine light into dark corners and expose the truth.
He dialled a number and put the phone to his ear. ‘There’s something big on the go at Kinloch, Douglas. If you nee
d a few anonymous observations, I’m happy to oblige. If I were you I’d get down here pronto.’
‘I’m sorry, Jim. This isn’t the kind of return to work we’d planned for you, is it?’ Symington chewed her lip as she sat across from Daley in his glass box.
‘No, not exactly, but that’s the job, isn’t it? Brian and I were just saying the same thing. If we knew what was before us every day it would be a piece of cake.’
‘So, to recap: you have a dead woman in her back garden, now a man almost garrotted in his own flat. To add to that, one of the Doig sons has been murdered, the father killed himself, and Alice Wenger has been assaulted. Does that sum it up?’
‘We also have a frantic woman who was present when the man in the flat, her partner, was assaulted – probably saved his life, in fact. Plus an elderly woman with cuts and bruises who was knocked over in what we presume was the assailant’s bid to escape. Brian is off to bring them all in now. Oh, and we can’t find Ginny Doig, Alice Wenger’s mother.’
‘Shit!’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘Who is the guy sitting in reception? I managed not to catch his eye, but I recognised his face from somewhere.’
‘Grant Dunwoody; he’s here to represent Alice Wenger.’
‘Shit!’
‘That’s a lot of shit, if you don’t mind my saying, ma’am.’
‘I’m sorry, Jim. I’ve heard of him: quite the reputation. What is he here to achieve?’
‘He wants us to allow Alice to go back home. I’ve managed to avoid him so far.’
‘And why can’t we do that, Jim?’
‘Well, she’s been a witness not only to the attack on herself, but also to the death of her father. The fact that her brother has been killed and her mother is now missing also comes into play. Her best friend is the woman lying dead in the backyard, and the man who’s just been half strangled in his flat is the person who rescued her from her attacker at the hotel. Are you still with me?’
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