by Iain North
‘You told your wife, didn’t you?’ Amber placed the menu down on the table.
‘Yes.’
‘That was very honest of you.’
‘She deserved the truth.’
‘And how did she take it?’
‘How do you expect?’ Irritation crept into Jim’s voice.
Amber shrugged her shoulders. ‘You’re still together.’
Jim nodded. ‘Just.’
‘So why bring me here?’ She ran her hands through her hair, pushing brunette curls back from her freckled face.
Jim caught her hazel eyes for a brief second. It was a second too long. He knew perfectly well why he had brought her. It wasn’t to further her career in journalism, but he couldn’t admit that to her. He was struggling to admit it to himself.
‘Business, that’s all,’ he said, staring into the remnants of his pint.
The waiter arrived at the table. Jim ordered their food. ‘Scampi, please, and I’ll have the steak, medium.’
He handed the menus over. ‘And can we have a bottle of red, please.’
The waiter nodded, and left.
‘I’m glad you did,’ Amber declared softly, smiling. ‘For the work experience, that is.’
*****
Chapter 7
‘Have you any idea where Maurice Bennet is?’ Jim bellowed down the mobile telephone. The signal was breaking up.
‘What you want him for?’ George replied.
‘I thought we might have a word.’
‘Give me an hour or two. I’ll find out. Are you heading down this way?’
‘Yeah. See you in the Marine Hotel for coffee about 11-ish?’
Okay.’
Jim slipped the Blackberry into the map compartment in the door of the Vauxhall and started the engine.
‘There we go,’ he said. ‘A date with a child molester.’
Amber pulled her seatbelt on.
‘Are you just humouring me again?’
‘You thought it would be a good idea to interview him. I’ll go with that. We’ll see where it leads.’
‘If he agrees.’
‘If he agrees,’ Jim nodded, knowing it was a long shot.
‘Do you think the Sunday Mail would take it, if we got a good story out of him?’
‘I doubt it. It’s not really their cup of tea. They’re victim orientated. But it might find a home in one of the broadsheets if we pitch it right.’
Jim pulled out of the hotel car park on to the main road.
‘Who’s George?’ Amber asked.
‘He’s my West Highland contact, although don’t tell him I said that. You’ll like him. He’s been following Bennet. We’ll see what he’s dug up.’
‘Should I put some questions together?’ Amber pulled a notepad out of her handbag.
‘Good idea. Put down what you want to know. But don’t get your hopes up. He’ll probably just shut the door on us.’
At least it would keep her occupied. Jim knew from painful past experience that long journeys in the car were an ideal breeding ground for the sort of uncomfortable questions he didn’t have the stomach – or balls – to answer right now, not after last night’s interrogation.
After dinner they went out to the pub and everything was okay. Back at the hotel, the turned in early, in separate rooms. He phoned Jenny before nodding off. There was still an atmosphere, but the frost was thawing. She picked up the tickets for Majorca, checked their passports were still valid, bought suntan lotion, the usual holiday preparations.
What he failed to mention, however, was that he was touring the Highlands with Amber Harris.
‘I suppose the one thing I want to ask him is why he did it.’
Amber was doodling on her pad. It was the first question Jenny had asked, once she had stopped crying. ‘But how do I do that?’
‘Let’s just see what happens.’
*****
They were approaching Achnasheen. Amber put her pad away.
‘I need cigarettes,’ she said, rummaging in her bag.
Jim scanned the gauges in front of him. ‘And we could use some petrol.’
They pulled into a tiny filling station just off the main road – a couple of rusty pumps and a little shop under a creaking canopy.
‘Can you get me a Mars Bar?’
Jim handed Amber a twenty for the petrol and some small change for the chocolate bar.
She sashayed into the cabin and he plunged the unleaded nozzle into the side of the car. Jim glanced after her. She was standing by the pay desk, chatting with the young man behind the counter. His eyes remained on her as the fuel flowed.
Back on the road, he opened the chocolate bar wrapper with his teeth and took a bite of caramel and nougat. They were stuck behind a motor home. But he didn’t overtake and a couple of miles from the petrol station, he pulled the car on to the grass at the side of the road.
Amber peered out of the window. It was raining. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘Can you think of any reason why someone would crash here?’
Amber shrugged her shoulders.
‘See that telegraph pole?’ he continued.
Amber gazed across the verge and nodded. It was a few feet back from the carriageway, the vegetation around it flattened.
‘This is where Samantha O’Brien met her end.’
He stepped out of the car and wandered round the bonnet. Amber watched for a second or two and then reluctantly got out to join him. She pulled the collar of her leather jacket up to ward off the cold, waterlogged breeze.
Jim peered down the embankment. It dropped perhaps 10 metres to a stream at the base of the gully. The Ford Mondeo was gone now but the smell of petrol lingered in the damp grass. Some fragments of windscreen glass were evident on the ground and a slash of blue paint scarred a jutting rock.
‘This has really got to you,’ Amber observed.
‘I’m just looking for answers, that’s all.’
‘Will you find them here?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘Probably not.’
They stood in silence for a couple of minutes, Amber kicking her heels on the tarmac.
She returned to the car, but Jim remained at the top of the embankment. Maybe it was just an accident. Maybe he was wasting his time. But there was a nagging doubt in his mind.
*****
George was standing at the bar with a pint in his hand when they arrived. Jim held the door open for Amber.
‘Always the gentleman,’ George laughed.
‘How’s it going, mate?’ Jim threw his soggy Barbour over the back of a vacant seat in and strolled over.
‘What are you having?’
Jim checked his watch. It was just after eleven. ‘A couple of coffees, and one for yourself.’
The barmaid took their order and disappeared through a door at the back of the bar.
George cast his eye over Jim’s female companion. It was time for introductions.
‘Amber Harris, this is George Cameron.’ She smiled and the pair shook hands.
‘I’m just going to the ladies.’
Once she was out of the way George asked the next question without opening his lips.
The sly wink said it all.
Jim’s denial was quick, almost too quick. ‘It’s not what you think.’
‘I bet it’s not.’
‘She’s just started in the business. I promised to help her out.’
He was struggling to convince himself, far less someone as worldly wise as George.
The old man lifted his pint and smirked. ‘Maybe you could leave her with me for a week or two and I’ll show her the ropes.’
Jim frowned. ‘What’s Bennet been up?’
A quick change of subject not lost on the old man.
‘I hope I haven’t caused any offence.’
‘Why would you think that?’
Jim perched himself on a stool next to George and ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘I’ll tell you later, maybe.’
‘Intriguing.’
But George left it at that. ‘Bennet has been re-housed. The council found him a cottage out of town. Apparently he’s got work in the area so they couldn’t move him too far away.’
‘Don’t tell me, he’s the new janitor at the local primary?’
George coughed into his beer. ‘Thankfully, no! Word is he’s got a job at Kishorn.’
‘The deep water base?’
‘Aye.’
‘So now he’ll have the environmental protestors as well as the local mothers to contend with.’
George’s glass was empty, but the barmaid was back with the coffees and, after she’d decanted the two cups from her tray, she gladly refilled it for him.
George creamed the head off. ‘So are you taking your young lady friend up to see him?’
‘Amber and I will pay him a visit,’ Jim ignored the innuendo. ‘Besides, I want to go to Kishorn and speak to the guy who found Billy Reid swimming in the dock. It’ll kill two birds with one stone.’
George’s attention didn’t stray from his glass. ‘Have fun then, kids.’
Amber returned from the bathroom, her tousled hair back in place.
‘George has found Bennet,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll have our coffee, then we’ll pay him a visit.’
*****
‘Pays to be a pervert,’ Jim said as the Vauxhall Insignia pulled up in front of the country cottage Maurice Bennet now called home. The low building sat back slightly from the road, alone and surrounded by silver birch woodland sloping up the hillside to low crags above.
‘Paid for by the council?’ Amber enquired.
‘I guess so, and we’re the ones footing the bill.’
‘I wonder if he’s in.’ Amber was making sure her notepad was to hand in the top of her bag.
‘We can but find out.’
Jim slipped the key out of the ignition and straightened his tie. ‘Are you ready for this?’
Amber looked uncertain. ‘Ready for what?’
‘He might have bought himself an Alsatian.’
‘I hadn’t thought about that.’ She looked tense. She was obviously psyching herself up for the encounter. Preparing the ground mentally. Jim did it without noticing these days.
‘Just get ready to run,’ he advised. ‘I’ll leave the car unlocked.’
Jim pushed open the wooden gate, led the way up the gravel path, freshly cut lawns and beds of bright pansies flanking them.
‘It’s nice.’ Amber was impressed.
‘It must be a holiday cottage. The council probably rented it privately for him. They couldn’t put him back on one of their estates.’
Jim chapped the front door. They waited. There were no audible signs of a dog. Amber looked relieved. He knocked again, a little more forcibly.
‘I don’t think he’s at home,’ Jim sighed.
They stepped back from the door and followed the gravel along the front of the house, peering in through the front window. Floral drapes blocked the view.
‘We’ll have a look round the back,’ he suggested.
Their view into the kitchen window was blocked by a roller blind. Jim rapped his knuckles across the back door. No response.
‘Back to the car. We’ll drive down to Kishorn and see if he’s there.’
The journey took no more than 20 minutes. The road skirted the end of Loch Kishorn and, as it began its rise over the mountains to Applecross, they swung left, down a single-track strip of tarmac running along the edge of the water.
‘Desolate,’ Amber observed through the rain-streaked windscreen.
They passed a garage and some yachts sitting out of the water on tall, spindly stilts of timber. Ahead was the gate where Jim and his cronies braved the mist and rain during the early hours of Friday morning.
‘Nothing much changes,’ he added, turning the wipers up a notch.
As they approached the yard gate, an old man in a security uniform appeared from a portable cabin. He walked slowly up the offside of the car, checking the pair out as Jim brought the vehicle to a halt.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
Jim lowered the window.
‘I want to speak to the guy who was on night duty Thursday through to Friday.’
‘And who might you be?’ His tone was friendly enough. Curious Highlander.
‘I’m a journalist.’
‘Where’s old man Cameron?’
‘George?’
‘I thought this was his patch.’ The guard spotted Amber, touched the brow of his cap. ‘Miss.’
She responded with a friendly smile before the guard’s attention returned to Jim.
‘It is. I’m working with him on a story for the nationals.’
‘And you want to know about the boy in the dock? You’d better talk to the polis.’
‘I’ve spoken to Eddie Macdonald.’ Jim thought a little name-dropping would do no harm at this juncture. ‘But I thought the night watchman might have seen something.’
‘Maurice? I doubt that very much. He spends the nights in his caravan.’
Amber interrupted the security man. ‘Maurice Bennet?’
Coincidences, Jim thought.
‘Aye. God knows what he does in that caravan by himself all night.’
The guard drew his face closer to Jim’s and his voice lowered to a barely audible whisper. ‘I’ve heard what they’re saying about him. To be honest, I don’t want to know.’
There was a look of disgust on his weatherworn face.
Jim could smell stale tobacco and tea on his breath. ‘Is he about?’
‘Naw, he’s supposed to start at six but he’s off on the sick, has been last couple of days. Between you and me, a lot of the lads here didn’t want him working with them so the bosses put him on the graveyard shift.’
Jim gazed out through the tear-stained windscreen and pondered for a moment.
‘Is the yard working just now?’
‘They’re bringing in equipment at the moment. It should be up and running in a couple of weeks.’ He looked out over the fence and smiled broadly. ‘I worked here in the seventies, you know, on the Ninian Central. Those were good times.’ There was pride in his rough voice.
‘You finish at six?’
‘Aye.’ The guard eyed Jim with vague suspicion.
‘Could I buy you a drink later?’
‘What for?’
‘I’d like to find out a bit more about the history of this place.’
If you’re buying mate.’
Jim nodded.
The guard left the car and wandered back to his lair.
‘I’ll be in the Strathcarron Hotel from eight.’
Jim raised the window and slipped the car into reverse.
‘It’s just an old oil yard?’ Amber said. ‘Why do you want to speak to him?’
‘It is, Amber,’ Jim responded sagely, ‘But Billy Reid ended up here. Samantha O’Brien might very well have been here and now we find out that Maurice Bennet was here too, on the same night.’
He spun the car round and accelerated back up to the main road.
‘We came here to speak to Maurice Bennet and now we’re going to do just that.’
*****
The car drew up in front of Bennet’s cottage for a second time that day.
Amber gazed up the path. ‘The curtains are still drawn.’
‘Lazy bugger might still be in his sack,’ Jim said, a newfound enthusiasm in his tone.
They retraced their steps to the front door and Jim knocked loudly.
‘If he’s not at work he must be around here somewhere.’
‘He could be out?’ Amber suggested.
‘Where? The guy’s a loner.’
‘Getting some messages?’
Jim knocked again.
‘Maybe he’s taken his Alsatian for a walk,’ she grinned.