by Iain North
‘It’s from the police,’ George revealed soberly. ‘It’s about that lassie.’
‘What lassie?’ Jim was drowsy. ‘I dinnae ken any lassies up here.’
‘Aye,’ George continued. ‘The one in the car, you remember. The police say they’re looking for another car that was seen in the place she crashed.’
*****
Chapter 4
Jim woke to the smell of stale beer. The musty odour filled the room, and wafted into his nostrils. He eased himself up in the chair and opened his heavy eyes.
His shirt and tie were encrusted with the remnants of a good night out and that seemed to explain everything. It was late. The clock on the wall claimed l0am. There was no sign of George. Given the man lived in his office and he was out, he was either working or drinking.
Jim pulled his stained tie off and dropped it into the wastepaper basket by the chair. It was silk and beyond salvage. He shuffled over to the desk. His final recollection of the night before was of George reading a fax out to him. Perhaps he was out following it up.
The fax was nowhere to be seen. Jim unearthed George’s diary from beneath the pile of cuttings he had been sifting through on Friday and opened it at the page for today.
There was just one entry: ‘Paedophile protest. Portree Place. 10am.’
Good use of alliteration, he thought.
Kyle of Lochalsh didn’t have an A to Z, it wasn’t big enough for the cartographers to bother with such a luxury, so Portree Place was probably easy enough to find.
Jim grabbed George’s spare Barbour from the coat hanger by the door. He zipped it up to the neck to conceal his discoloured open-necked shirt and lack of tie and left the office.
He ducked into the newsagent on the old ferry pier and grabbed a copy of the Sunday Mail along with directions to Portree Place. The girl behind the counter promised it was just two minutes’ walk up the road.
His gypsy death revenge story was the front page splash, accompanied by a picture of Billy Reid the news desk purloined from the boy’s parents and a snatch shot from the files of the Oban Times of Gary O’Brien being led from the sheriff court building by two police officers following his conviction. There was also a photo of the mangled Ford Mondeo in a police garage and a school picture of Samantha he had managed to obtain on Saturday afternoon and wire down before his mammoth drinking session with George.
The big man, looking as sober as ever, was standing at the entrance to Portree Place, just a few yards back from a crowd of people carrying placards and committing, for all intents and purposes, a breach of the peace.
‘What’s happening, George?’
‘Hullo. I didn’t want to wake you. I thought I’d let you sleep it off this time. You were well gone after last night.’
‘Cheers.’ Jim was still groggy. He caught sight of one of the cardboard banners being hoisted aloft by a middle-aged woman. ‘Child molester out!’ it screamed in thick red ink.
‘I leave you alone for one minute and you’re out hounding paedophiles again,’ Jim joked.
‘It’s what we good Highland folk do of a Sunday. Kind of like you southern toffs and your fox hunting.’
‘So who’s the lucky lad incurring the mothers’ wrath today?’
‘His name is Maurice Bennet. The council re-housed him here. It was all down on the quiet. Only someone recognised his picture from an old newspaper she’d lined her pantry shelves with.’
‘Unlucky.’
‘He got out of Peterhead a couple of weeks ago. Served his debt to society and was looking forward to a quiet life in the country.’
Jim couldn’t miss the sarcasm in George’s voice. ‘Once a beast, always a beast, eh?’
George nodded. ‘Would you want him living in your street?’
‘Our street’s too up market for that sort of person,’ Jim winked.
‘You fuckin’ snob!’ George retorted.
Jim knew perfectly well he didn’t want a convicted paedophile living in his street, even one who had done his time and emerged, in theory, a reformed character. Jim wasn’t quite so sure about that side of things. He kept an open mind on most issues. He had to - it was his job. But he recalled a documentary he had seen recently on television about a Russian psychologist who worked with serial killers. According to the programme, the tests suggested certain part of their brains were formed differently from other people, so called normal people, perhaps explaining why they behaved in the way they did.
Unfortunately his evidence came from a handful of ‘potential’ serial killers who had exhibited behaviour suggesting that was the road they were about to travel headlong down. He couldn’t examine the brains of convicted serial killers, because they had been blown out with a gun - Soviet punishment for the crime. Maybe it was the same with serial sex offenders, it was certainly possible. There had to be something to explain their behaviour.
There was no let up in the protest. A group of 20 or so women – some teenagers, others more mature in years – was circling the street outside the neat terraced council house, chanting ‘child molester out’, ‘beast out’, over and over again as they waved their placards furiously in the air. A couple of men stood in a scruffy garden over the road, adding the occasional comment to enflame the situation whenever it threatened to lose momentum. The house itself was quiet. The curtains were drawn and there was no sign of life.
‘They should have brought their kids,’ George snorted, ‘Maybe then he would pay them some attention.’
Jim was more interested in the people in the street, than in Bennet skulking away behind his grimy net curtains. They were a scruffy bunch, just like the folk who existed miserably in the crumbling, damp and graffiti-strew flats of rundown, crime-ridden estates like Kirkton and Trottick in his home city, Dundee. They were the sort of people who dragged local newspaper reporters out at all times of the day or night to complain about their treatment at the hands of the council. Most of their problems were trivial and could easily be rectified if they got off their arses and made some effort themselves.
‘What was he in for?’ Jim asked.
George ferreted in his pocket and drew out a crumpled newspaper cutting. ‘Here.’ He handed it over.
Jim unfolded the yellowed paper and the first thing he saw was a picture of the man’s face - unkempt hair, wire-rimmed glasses and poor dentistry. He was smiling, so the picture obviously wasn’t taken when he was caught.
‘He pounced on two young girls when they were playing. One was 11, the other 12,’ George said gruffly. ‘It happened in woodland on the outskirts of Inverness, next to an old railway line.’
Jim read the court charge contained within the story. It was just the basics - lewd, libidinous and indecent practices and behaviour. Jim had seen charges like this before. The court paperwork always went into excruciating, exhausting detail and the procurator fiscal always revelled in reading it all out in open court; part of the punishment, probably. Thankfully newspapers only published the bare essentials. That’s all they could do.
George turned to him, handed him another piece of paper. ‘He got 10 years.’
‘What’s this?’ Jim said, accepting the crumpled paper.
‘The court charge. It was in my files.’
Jim read it and winced. ‘Served five and here he is.’
‘Aye, out early for good behaviour.’
‘And what are the council doing?’
‘I guess they’ll re-house him somewhere else. And the same thing will happen there.’
George’s attention had strayed. He noticed the men in the garden had disappeared. Jim looked around for them. He spotted one of them, behind the wall of women, walking… no jogging… towards the house, with a brick in his hand.
‘Here we go,’ Jim whispered, nudging George’s arm.
The old man extracted a digital pocket camera from his jacket and pointed it at the pervert’s property. He reeled off a snap as the brick made contact with the living room window, shards flying ev
erywhere, a tinkling noise on the concrete pathway below as it crashed through, then a deafening cheer from the crowd.
‘Where are the police?’ Jim asked.
‘On their way.’
‘Clearly giving it priority.’
‘Aye.’
A minute later a siren screamed into earshot. A patrol car drew into the street, two cops inside. They didn’t look enthusiastic. George gave them a knowing glance as they heaved their bodies out of the Vauxhall Astra and sauntered towards the women.
‘Alright ladies, keep it down.’ One of the officers greeted the crowd.
‘Hi Mark.’ A couple of the women obviously knew him.
‘Who put the window out?’
A moment of mumbling followed but no one stepped forward. The crowd fell silent; the officer knew there was no point repeating the question.
The other policeman made his way up the path to the front door. He pressed the bell. A second later his colleague followed.
The bell chimed again. ‘It’s the police.’
The door opened ajar and the officers squeezed through the narrow gap. Jim tried to steal a look at the occupant but it was too dark to see anything within the besieged property.
‘They’ll probably try and get him to leave the house, at least for tonight,’ George said.
Sure enough, five minutes later the front door opened again and the officers led the man out, a tartan rug draped over his head to conceal his identity. It was a pointless gesture; everyone knew who he was and what he looked like.
The crowd erupted. George took another photograph as Bennet was directed into the street. He was lumbering around, stumbling against fence posts and railings. He looked none to steady on his feet.
‘They didn’t park the car close to his house,’ Jim whispered.
As Bennet left the relative safety of his garden, the mob swelled forward, shouting and swearing at him as he crashed into the gauntlet of hate. The man who had launched the brick through the window sprinted in behind the police, too fast for anyone to see him coming, and punched Bennet on the back of the head. Bennet collapsed forward, the police struggling to hold him up, dragging him towards the car, his feet trailing on the ground.
A kick to his back followed and one of the women grabbed the blanket and pulled it off his head. George moved in for a picture before being brushed aside by the policemen.
Bennet was bundled into the back of the car under a flurry of blows. The vehicle crept out from beneath the scrum of bodies and accelerated down the road, blue lights flashing.
Everything fell silent, the heart-pounding calm after the storm. Jim drew breath as George calmly packed his camera away. He was still working; there was no time to gather thoughts. The women were rallying round their local hack, spitting out gobs of acrid hate and loathing. Then they went away, off to prepare the Sunday roast for their loving families.
Jim drew out a cigarette, lit up and offered the packet to George. ‘Quiet life in the country, eh?’
*****
Back in the office, George chucked his notepad down next to his old laptop and dumped his jacket over the back of his chair. ‘I don’t want you to go home thinking it’s all country shows and Highland Games up here. Sometimes we do get real news stories.’
‘Indeed,’ Jim replied. ‘Which reminds me, that fax you were blethering about last night, where is it?’
‘I’m surprised you remember anything about last night.’ George scanned his desk. ‘Ah, there it is.’ He plucked it up from an overflowing tray of paper and handed it to Jim. ‘In all the excitement I had forgotten all about it.’
Jim read it aloud: ‘Highland Constabulary are appealing for information in relation to a road traffic accident which occurred on the A896 between Achnashellach and Achnasheen at around 3.15am on Friday, May 7. They are keen to speak to anyone who witnessed the incident and, in particular, anyone who saw a red hatchback-type car in the area at the time of the accident. Anyone with any information is asked to contact... etcetera, etcetera.’
‘So the car crashed at 3.15am on Friday and wasn’t discovered until the early hours of Saturday morning,’ George said.
‘Aye, but what I’m more interested in is this reference to another car,’ Jim continued.
‘The driver was in the area at the time. The police probably just want to see if he saw how it happened.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But?’
‘But maybe he was involved.’
‘Macdonald seemed happy enough to treat it as an accident.’
‘Aye, he was. But there could be more to this whole thing.’
‘Do you think she was driven off the road?’
Jim shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Look mate, you’re in danger of creating mystery where there isn’t any. It was a straightforward road accident. She was an inexperienced driver. She was going too fast. It was a big car. She lost control and left the road.’
‘Case solved?’
‘You got your story and now you can hop on back to the city and go to your wedding.’
*****
The Mazda MX6 pulled off the road into the empty lay-by. Jim needed some fresh air and a cigarette, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. Jenny hated him smoking in her car. She was quite right. It was a dirty habit.
He let the engine die and stepped out into the night. He had left Kyle of Lochalsh after a quick supper at the Marine Hotel and was now part way through Glencoe. It was still light and the high tops were basking in the evening sunshine. Jim lit a Marlboro Light and eased a flume of smoke down into his aching lungs. He thought back to the telegraph pole and the car at the bottom of the ravine. He hadn’t thought of much else since leaving Kyle of Lochalsh. Even the protest in Portree Place was now a distant memory.
Samantha: abused by her uncle and now lying in bits on a cold mortuary slab in Inverness. It was such a waste of a young life. Yes, she had killed her uncle – or had probably killed her uncle – but by all accounts he was far from blameless for his untimely demise.
Jim felt little for the dead man. Samantha, however, was occupying his thoughts. Where would she have ended up if her youth hadn’t been cut short by that telegraph pole? Maybe she would have found peace and happiness somewhere. Even if the police had caught up with her, there was no apparent evidence to pin Gary O’Brien’s death on her. He had been stabbed; forensics found the remains of a knife embedded in his charred body. But there was nothing to say she had ever been in that caravan, nothing to link her to the crime.
Jim thought of his own daughter, Kirsty. She was 17 now. They’d had their problems, but few fathers and daughters saw eye-to-eye all the time. She was at college now, studying to be a beautician. She was still living at home, but he rarely saw her. She was out all day and most evenings and just used his house as a place to eat and sleep. For her, the family home was a hotel.
Samantha was the same age, or was she 16? He couldn’t remember but it didn’t really matter. But what a different upbringing she had endured. No comfortable family home, no fashionable clothes, no caring friends, just a squalid caravan, a lay-by and an uncle who stole her innocence.
The authorities let her down. Gary O’Brien only served six months of his sentence. Then he was back out. He got what was coming to him. She deserved none of it. Jim pictured the road in his head. It was a long straight stretch, recently upgraded. She had no driving licence but she had managed to negotiate 30 miles of winding, wandering Highland highway before coming to grief. There were no black skid marks engrained in the tarmac. If she lost control, surely she would have hit the brakes before leaving the road. And what of the red hatchback? Maybe George was right. Maybe the police were just trying to trace a witness to complete their traffic accident report, finish off the paperwork. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jim was trying to create a conspiracy where none existed. Perhaps the inspector could turn his attentions to the pressing matter of the Highland Games.
He dropped the
butt of his cigarette and ground it into the gravel with his right foot.
He knew there was more to this then met his tired eyes right now.
*****
Chapter 5
Jenny was out shopping, David was at school and Kirsty was at college. Jim sat in his little study at the back of the house with a cup of hot coffee and lit up a cigarette. He sifted through the cuttings spread across the desk. There was the picture of Gary O’Brien being led away from Oban Sheriff Court to begin his prison sentence. The text detailed his offences - lewd, libidinous and indecent practices and behaviour towards a fifteen-year-old girl. The victim was Samantha O’Brien, although she wasn’t named in the story. The law didn’t allow it.