by Tom Clancy
“Interesting,” Gorrie said finally. “Did you know Mr. Mackay well?”
“Yes, of course. Not well, as you put it. But of course I knew him. He was staff.”
“He had only been here a few months?”
“Six weeks, two days.” The owl eyes blinked. “He had worked here in the early nineties, before moving on to Numberland Power. There were then a series of jobs of increasing importance. His wife wanted to return to the area, I believe, because they were due to have a child and she wanted to be near friends and family. He was very qualified.”
“I’d like a look at his resume, if that is possible.”
“What is this, Inspector? I read that his wife shot him.”
“We try not to draw hasty conclusions.” Gorrie rose, but then softened his tone, thinking to add to the manager’s willingness to cooperate. “The evidence leans in that direction, certainly. But we must make our inquiries. We have our procedures, as you do.”
Horace nodded almost sympathetically.
“I’d like to speak to some of his workmates,” said Gorrie.
“That can be arranged.” Horace pushed a button on his speakerphone. The woman who had shown Gorrie here reappeared. “Krista will assist you with whatever you need.”
The deceased’s staff members had little information about Mackay, responding to Gorrie’s suggestions that he might have had a randy appetite with shrugs rather than winks. His secretary, however, seemed to have formed a mild attachment. Tora Grant called her boss “charming” and “very able,” but as Gorrie continued with his questions, her answers dribbled down to bare yeses and noes. Finally, the inspector put it to her directly.
“Did you have sex with him?”
Her face turned so red it could have been mistaken for a traffic light.
She started to say something, but quickly stopped. Gorrie waited a bit before gently prompting. “He seemed quite an attractive man.”
“A hug ’n a kiss, a little flirting ’s all we ever did.” She took a hard breath, which made it seem to the inspector that she was lying. “I dina’, but might have, I’ll admit it.”
Her skin color returned to normal with the admission. She looked slightly angry, but gave no hint that she was going to cry, or say anything else. Gorrie waited a moment, then fell back to a few routine questions, circling around.
“Did you know if he had a gun?” he asked.
“Never heard.”
“Was he acting strange in the past week or so?”
“Not so’s I could tell.”
“Meet his wife?”
“Ne’er. Ne’er. Not.”
“Very definitive on that.” Gorrie made a show of folding his notebook away, a well-practiced trick — he was setting up to lob the seemingly casual question on the way out the door. “If anything occurs to you, please call me,” he said, handing over a card.
“Yes.”
He took a step, then canted his head to the side as if inspiration had just beamed in from Scotland Yard. “Anyone else?”
“Else?”
“Do you know of other girlfriends?”
She turned scarlet again. “I—”
The secretary had overheard several conversations, as it turned out, but one woman in particular stood out, Cardha Duff. And she should stand out, Gorrie decided when he saw the department phone records: Mr. Mackay had called her two or three times a day for the past three weeks.
* * *
From the time Cardha Duff was a young girl, she had hated drugs of all kinds, even aspirin. And yet now at the age of twenty-six, she needed drugs to survive — to be precise, 150 milligrams of Synthroid every day. Cardha Duff needed to take this drug because her body no longer manufactured thyroid hormones, due to the fact that she no longer had a thyroid.
The doctors had removed it six weeks before, after discovering a gray, roundish mass on the right anterior lobe. The mass, about the size of an old farthing, proved to be cancerous; the lab report classified it as medulary thyroid carcinoma, a relatively rare form of cancer that was often hereditary and more often caused by radiation. The origin in her case was not known; she hadn’t bothered taking the genetic test because she had no siblings or offspring to warn and decided, quite sensibly, that the cause made little difference to her. There was no treatment or cure beyond surgery. Her prognosis could be estimated from the two different survival charts included with the material she received while preparing for surgery. Depending on which graph one preferred to consult, either 78 or 91 percent of patients in similar circumstances lived five years after the discovery of their disease; ten-year survival was either 61 or 75 percent. Given her young age, Cardha was more likely to fall in the positive end of either curve; there was much reason for optimism. But numbers and percentages told you nothing about your future, and much less about yourself. They told you nothing about fear, and failed miserably to track the daily ironies of “getting on with things,” as the pamphlets implored.
Such as the daily irony of the small blue pill. Without it, she became depressed and couldn’t concentrate. Taking it made her head buzz, but forget to take it and she felt as if her skin were made of tissue paper. She slid a pill out from the bottle and pressed it onto her tongue, washing it down with two sips of grapefruit juice.
Cardha had barely swallowed when she sneezed. It was a scratchy sort of sneeze, the kind that presaged a cold.
Not what she needed this week. She had a job interview tomorrow at the Playhouse. It was a small position as assistant house manager, but she wanted it badly, part of her campaign for a new start, a fresh go, propelled by her cancer and the realization that she might very well die soon.
The phone rang. As Cardha reached for it she had a premonition that it was about Ed and his wife, the ghastly murderess. So she wasn’t surprised when the inspector introduced himself.
“Of course, Inspector Gorrie, I’ll tell you everything I know,” she said. “I have a doctor’s appointment in a half hour. Could you stop by after that?”
The inspector consulted his appointment book. He had a few other matters to attend to. First thing tomorrow morning?
Before the operation, she would have agreed, risking the job interview or even rearranging her plans to meet the inspector. But now she felt stubborn — nothing, not even Ed Mackay, God rest his soul but damn him at the same time, would take her off course.
“The next day perhaps?” she asked.
The inspector agreed and rang off after receiving directions.
Cardha sneezed again. She hated drugs, but she’d have to get something for her cold. She poured another glass of juice, lost track of herself for a moment — had she taken the thyroid pill or not?
Cardha decided that she had, and resolved to get one of those multicompartment pillboxes with the days of the week inscribed outside. Then she put up her tea and went to see if the morning paper had arrived.
* * *
Amid the long clutter of innuendo spewed by Christine Gibbon about Ed Mackay’s sins were the names of a few locales where his sinning took place. She was only slightly more selective than the telephone book, but here at least DC Andrews had done a good job narrowing down the list. He had already visited six of the establishments, returning with nothing to report. Inspector Gorrie took the last three himself, visiting them in succession after lunch.
The verdict at all three was similar: “An eye for the lasses” or “a real oinker,” depending on whether he’d bought rounds lately.
At Lion’s Bridge the owner winced as they were speaking, seeing a customer come in. Gorrie immediately guessed the reason.
“Cuckold?” he said.
“I wouldn’t, uh, put it that way,” said the owner, who also worked as bartender during the day. Gorrie asked a few more perfunctory questions, then went over to see the party in question.
“Hate the bloody bastard, always winkin’ at me. Not a person deserved dyin’ more’n him, I don’t mind sayin’.” Fraser Payton pulled up his whis
key, shooting it down his throat. “I had a mind once to wring his neck with my own hands, and still to God I wish I’d done it some nights. I might still, mind.”
“Hardly worth the effort now,” said Gorrie.
“Aye.” Payton pushed the glass along in the direction of the bar, catching the owner’s attention.
It was not hard to guess why Payton hadn’t assaulted Mackay while he was alive — he stood perhaps five-two, a good head and a half shorter than Mackay. He looked to weigh less than half the man.
Still, the short types often had nasty tempers; it occurred to Gorrie that someone with such a deep hate might have killed the wife to cover up the murder, then staged it as a suicide.
“The man was a bad one, Inspector. My Margie was a ripe fool. With her mother now. Run along home to Mom, she did.”
A string of synonyms for the lower reaches of the female anatomy spewed from Payton’s mouth. Gorrie looked at the man’s hands on the table — slender fingers, almost delicate. You could judge much by a man’s hands, but you couldn’t decide whether he was a murderer or not — too much variety.
“When did your wife leave?” Gorrie asked.
“Seven years this September. Right ’fore he left Inverness.”
“Seven years?”
“He was scared o’ me, I’ll tell you that,” said Payton.
The bartender approached to refill the drink. “Steady, lad,” he told Payton.
“Scared o’ you?” asked Gorrie.
“You’re dreamin’, lad,” said the owner.
“Aye, he was. I heard he’d come back — I’d seen him sulking around. And didn’t he see me three days ago, up in Rosmarkie? Aye, was him, as if he were someone more than a shit, meeting with the council member — hid when he saw me. He did.” Payton turned to the bartender and raised his finger. “Hid. Hid.”
“What council member would that be?” said Gorrie.
“Cameron,” said Payton triumphantly. “Ewie B. Cameron, on the land council, among others. A gentleman. Had the sewer in front of my house fixed two years ago. I don’t hold him any ill will, Inspector — a fair man and for the people, as were his ancestors.”
“Are you sure it was Cameron?” asked Gorrie.
“Oh, yes. And Mackay, the slog. Saw me come in and turned away. Scared o’ me. What he didna’ know, as far as I’m concerned, he could ha’e her. Would ha’e served her right. Could have been my old wife there in that bed, pulled the trigger.”
“Three nights ago,” said Gorrie, his tone light, “would have been the day before Mackay died.”
“The wife killed him,” said the bartender.
“Inquiry will decide that,” said Gorrie.
Payton reached toward the bottle in the bartender’s hand, tipping down the neck to refill his glass again.
“You’re sure it was Cameron?” asked Gorrie.
“It was him.”
Gorrie leaned back in his seat, considering the coincidence of the thing. For if his memory was correct, Ewie B. Cameron, latest in a clan of noble and semi-noble Scots, had been killed in a traffic accident the same night Mackay and his wife had died.
An odd coincidence, to be sure.
SIX
INVERNESS, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS MARCH 6, 2002
Frank Gorrie sat near the window in his old platform rocker and watched the lights of a car out on the street slide across the dark bedroom walls. It was chilly, quiet, his wife dead to the world under the heavy quilts, her breathing soft and regular.
Gorrie couldn’t sleep. He was wearing his flannel robe and wool socks and had put one of Nan’s hand-knitted throw blankets over his lap. The chair was comfortable, though it creaked when he went rocking back too far. The springs, Gorrie thought. They needed to be oiled. He’d given it a tick on his mental list of waiting house chores. The list was long, and there were many things on it that deserved priority. But oiling the springs wouldn’t take much time. Maybe he’d find a spare moment over the weekend. He ought to anyway. Easier than fixing that runny tap in the loo. He’d try to make a point of getting it done. Next weekend seemed a reasonable target. Meanwhile, Gorrie was trying not to rock too far back in his chair. It was late. The stillness exaggerated every sound. He did not want to disturb Nan. Five nights now since he’d been able to get a decent bit of rest. Or was it six?
He counted backward. Outside, the car moved unhurriedly along the street. He could hear its motor running, and the low shush of its tires as it drew to a halt by the traffic signal at the corner intersection. Then its lights froze on the wall above his bed. Gorrie noticed the diffuse red glow of the stop signal through the frosty window-pane. A law-abiding driver. Commendable. It was getting on two o’clock, stub end of the night. There were only 130 officers to police the sixty thousand civilians in the Inverness Command Area. Scant odds one of them would be around to cite some luckless sod for running a stop signal. Besides Gorrie himself, of course. And he surely wasn’t about to leave the plump, worn-in cushions of his favorite chair.
The signal turned green and the car rounded the corner. Its lights grazed the window, fluttered from wall to wall, then slid across the ceiling. Gorrie counted backward. Five nights, aye, sitting here awake and wide-eyed with a throw over his legs. Wasn’t until a full day after answering the call to Eriskay Road that he’d gotten himself into a twist about it. Gorrie did not know the reason for his delayed reaction. But his mind had been making up for it ever since.
He sat there thinking. Nan shifted under the pile of quilts. He couldn’t tell whether she had moved from her side onto her back, her back to her side, or from one side to the other. The room was very dark. In the winter she had a habit of pulling the quilts up over her head. Slept like a rock under all that fabric and filling. When the cat came pawing at the footboard for her morning meal, you could rely on Nan to be oblivious. Or pretend to be oblivious. It irritated him, obliging that cat’s whims. Sometimes Gorrie would thumb his chest grumpily and protest. Last into bed, first out, he’d say. How’s that for a rule? Where’s the equity? Who rates higher in this household, me or the bloody fur ball? Nan scarcely heeded him, except perhaps to give him a wry little smile.
Gorrie realized he’d almost leaned back too far, gotten the chair to where its rickety springs would squeak. He carefully eased it down. His rocker was different from the cat. The tiniest noise out of it was enough to disturb Nan through her blankets. She’d heard him rocking last night, and the night before. Leave it to Nan. She had peeked an eye out from the thick folds of her covers, asked Gorrie what was bothering him. Not that she didn’t already have an inkling. Or better. Edward and Claire Mackay’s deaths had given a fair boost in popularity to the local papers and telly news broadcasts. Certainly it was meatier dish than the traffic watch, daily stats, or a piece about drunk and disorderly teens setting a brush fire in some city park. And Claire’s former flatmate, Christine Gibbon, had been generous to reporters with every appalling detail of the sight she’d come upon at the bungalow. Nan had his number, all right. Leave it to her.
Gorrie stared at the quilts gathered up in a mound over his wife’s sleeping body. She was a big woman. Even twenty-five years ago, when he had dropped down on his knee to propose to her, it couldn’t have been said that she had a waifish figure. But he hadn’t wanted to marry a nudie-magazine centerfold. Nan knew her best attributes and put herself together in a way that accented them. And when she got that certain randy look her eyes… in spite of his occasional grumbling, Gorrie had no cause to be envious of any man with regard to his conjugal pleasures. Give him his choice of rides, he’d always pick a luxury-model sedan over a Fiat. Not that he didn’t appreciate the latter’s strong appeal.
Another car approached his house, rolled past. Its headlights swept the walls. Shadows scattered from them like black butterflies, then regrouped. Gorrie thought about the deceased Claire Mackay, and how she had looked in the abattoir that was once her bedroom. Claire Mackay lying in that dash of a baby-doll nightie, her
leg half wrapped around her husband’s corpse, one hand spread on his naked chest, the other around the gun she’d used to kill him before ending her own life as well. Gorrie could attest that she had been a woman with eye-catching physical attributes. A shape like hers took maintenance. Probably she’d stuck to a regular exercise routine. No doubt she had watched her calories. There had been enough of her exposed for Gorrie to know she’d had no leftover padding from her recent maternity.
He wished it were possible to wash away his recollection of the gruesome sight she’d made of herself above the neck.
Gorrie frowned. Made of herself…
Claire Mackay. Five nights now he’d been thinking about her final act, and the way she had apparently committed it. A bullet in the mouth, its trajectory blasting through the palate into her brain. That method had the surest results in gun suicides involving a head wound. Took some effort, though. It would have required Claire to turn the firing hand toward herself at an awkward angle, most likely gripping its wrist with her opposite hand to steady the barrel. It would also have meant she would be able to see the barrel as she thrust it into her mouth. Well, unless she’d closed her eyes the entire time. They’d been open when he found her, but their lids could have raised postmortem. At any rate, a shot to the temple was more common. Only one hand was needed to grip the gun. It was easier, and usually cleaner. Less blood and tissue splatter. Usually. But it had a downside too. A nervous jitter would cause the bullet to glance off the scalp, inflict nonfatal damage, and leave the person crippled or a dribbling vegetable.
Gorrie supposed the messiness of the scene was another of the things that had niggled at him these past nights. In his experience, women tended to avoid ruining their faces when they did away with themselves. They swallowed pills or poison, slit their wrists in the bath, went to sleep breathing automobile exhaust. If they used a pistol, the fatal shot was most often pointed at their chests. You couldn’t state it hard and fast, naturally. But neat was the preference. A fit specimen like Claire Mackay, who cared about her looks… Gorrie wouldn’t have thought she was one who’d leave herself to be found mutilated. And then there was her racy wear. It wasn’t what she’d have put on before polishing the nails, setting the hair in rollers, and going off to dreamland. A woman didn’t slip into a provocative nightie like that, make an irresistible package of herself, unless she was in what you’d call a romantic mood. Yet Claire’s passion for Ed had gone into a sudden tailspin, hit some jagged divide in the moments before it would have brought them to an act of love.