Ahead of the Game

by JD Kirk

  “Is she?” Sinead asked, making no attempt to hide her smirk. “Did you ask her yet?”

  “Not yet,” Logan said, avoiding her gaze. “Building up to it.”

  “The wedding’s in less than a fortnight,” the DC pointed out. “You’ve not got a lot of building room left.”

  “We’re… taking things slow.”

  “That’s a bloody understatement,” Sinead said. Logan shot her a look, and she smiled back at him. “Sir.”

  “Aye. That’s more like it, Detective Constable. Bit of respect,” Logan said. He turned his attention back to the activity around the monument. “I’ll ask her tonight.”

  “Or you could ask her this morning, if she’s coming down the road.”

  Logan looked back at her. “Hardly the most romantic venue in the world, huddled around a bloody corpse.”

  Sinead shrugged. “Isn’t that more or less how you met, though?”

  Logan let out a little hmpf. Not quite a laugh, but not far off. “You’ve a point there, right enough.”

  The DC shifted her weight from foot to foot, building up to the next question. “And you’re still alright with it? Giving me away? Doing the speech, and everything?”

  “Christ. Speech. Aye, I should get on that, too,” Logan said. “And yes. Of course, I’m still alright with it. I’m more than alright with it. I’m delighted.” He breathed in deeply through his nose, then released all the air again as a sigh. “Speaking of weddings, Vanessa phoned me this morning.”

  “Your ex? What, is she getting remarried or something?”

  Logan shook his head. “No. Maddie.”

  “Oh,” said Sinead. She was more aware than most of the team of how complicated Logan’s relationship with his daughter was, and so was equally aware of the minefield she was stepping into. “That’ll be nice.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Logan replied.

  “Was?”

  “Happened three weeks ago. She didn’t want me there. Doesn’t even want me to know.”

  Sinead winced. “Ah. Bugger. I’m sorry.”

  “Not to worry. Two weddings in as many months? Who’s got time for that?”

  He blew on his coffee to signal he was getting back to business, chanced the briefest of sips, then put the lid back on. There was no more avoiding it. The time had come.

  “Right then,” he said with a heavy sigh, and a heavier heart. “I suppose we should go and talk to Geoff Palmer.”

  When it came to being a detective, it didn’t pay to deal in absolutes. Not until you’d built enough evidence to get a solid conviction, at least. And even then, the world had many more shades of grey than it had lines drawn in black and white.

  DCI Logan had told Tyler that himself once. Maybe not word for word, but that was the general gist of it.

  Here and now, though, DC Neish was prepared to go out on a limb and state for the record that this was absolutely the best cinnamon bun he’d ever eaten, no two ways about it. Warm, gooey, sweet, with just the right hint of spice. It really was a treat to be—

  “Detective Constable, did you hear what I just said?”

  Tyler paused mid-chew, and looked across the table to where the South African couple and their teenage son sat watching him.

  He swallowed the half-chewed bite of bun with some difficulty, forced it down with a glug of tea, then wiped his hands on a little paper napkin.

  “Sorry. Missed breakfast,” he explained. “You were telling me about finding the body.”

  The woman on the other side of the table rolled her eyes. “I knew it. He wasn’t even listening. We told you about finding the body. We were asking when we could go.”

  Tyler sat up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then cleared his throat in a manner he hoped sounded suitably go-getting and businesslike. “Right. Aye. Sorry, Mrs…” he glanced at his notes, “…Blomkamp. Can I just...? If we could quickly go over it again, that would be useful. So, you came out of here and crossed the road…”

  “The driver took us down to look at a hole in a wall, we found a dead body, we called the police, the end,” Mrs Blomkamp replied, her South African accent made thicker by her annoyance. “There’s not exactly a lot to report, and we’d like to get back to our holiday, if you don’t mind?”

  Tyler hadn’t had a lot of experience of dealing with white South Africans. His only real exposure to them had been one fleeting conversation in a pub a few years back, and the bad guy in Lethal Weapon 2. He was well aware, though, of the stereotype that they were all horrible racist bastards.

  He was also well aware that you shouldn’t put too much stock in stereotypes, but he was definitely getting both ‘horrible’ and ‘bastard’ vibes off the family sitting across from him. Their racism, or lack thereof, remained an unknown quantity at this stage in the proceedings.

  “And the head was missing when you got there?” Tyler asked.

  “Well, of course, it was!” Mrs Blomkamp said.

  “What, you think we took it as a souvenir or something?” her husband chipped in.

  “Ugh. When can we go?” demanded their son, throwing himself back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest.

  Tyler channelled his inner Logan and fixed them all with a stern glare. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but a man has died. An innocent man has lost his life here,” he said. “So, I’d appreciate it if you dropped the attitude, answered my questions, and started to take this a bit more seriously.”

  The family returned his glare. After a moment, Mrs Blomkamp pointed to his top lip. “You’ve got icing there,” she told him.

  Instinctively, Tyler stuck out his tongue and licked the cinnamon flavoured blob from his philtrum. For reasons he couldn’t explain, but which would likely keep him awake wondering about on some sleepless night months from now, he maintained unwavering eye-contact with Mrs Blomkamp while doing so.

  She regarded him with a sort of fascinated horror until he cleared his throat, tapped his notebook, and announced, “Actually, I’ve probably got enough to be going on with, for now.”

  There was something about Geoff Palmer’s face that made Logan think of a cartoon. Not all the time—mostly, Palmer’s face just made the DCI think how much he’d enjoy punching it. But, when it was encased inside the white paper hood of forensics gear, with the elastic forming a misshapen circle around his features, there was definitely a cartoonish quality about it.

  And not a good cartoon, either. Not Pixar or Disney. No, his was a face that belonged in a cheap Saturday morning kids’ cartoon, put together frame by frame in some animation sweatshop that could never quite get the flesh tones right, and didn’t know how to make eyes look all the way human.

  “Oh. It’s you,” Palmer said, forcibly exhaling when he made his way up from the well’s entrance to find Logan standing by the monument.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, too, Geoff,” Logan said. He considered this to be the end of their small talk, and got down to business. “What have we got?”

  “Ninety percent of a human body, give or take a pound or two,” Palmer replied. “We’ll have to wait for Shona to check it over and do her stuff, but I can say with some certainty that someone’s had his head off.”

  “No sign of it?”

  “My guess? Someone chucked it in the loch. We’ll need to bring the divers in.”

  Logan gave Sinead a quick nod and she retreated, already reaching for her mobile.

  “Confident this one wasn’t natural causes?” he asked.

  Palmer scowled. “Christ, not this again. I don’t attend one murder scene. One. In ten years. And I’ll never hear the bloody end of it.”

  “I didn’t say anything, Geoff,” Logan said, holding his hands out like a magician revealing he had nothing up his sleeves. “I just asked if you were confident that—”

  “Yes! I’m confident it wasn’t natural causes,” Palmer spat. “Alright? Not unless his head just fucking… I don’t know… disintegrated, or floated away.”
r />   Logan looked doubtful. “I mean… is that likely? You being the expert and everything.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Palmer muttered. “I already know what you’re going to ask, so write this down. He wasn’t killed at the scene. No blood spray, and marks on the ground suggest he was dragged from that lay-by there, down this ramp, then dumped in the… whatever it is. Passageway under the well.”

  “Well?”

  Palmer gestured to the monument. His expression, confined as it was by the circle of elastic, took on the look of a disappointed teacher. “Yes. That’s what this is. The Well of the Seven Heads. You’ll have heard of it.”

  Logan considered the obelisk. Carvings of severed heads adorned the top of it. Seven of them, presumably. A hand was holding them all by the hair, while also clutching a long, slender knife. As decoration went, it was a particularly macabre example.

  “Oh. Aye. I’ve heard of it,” Logan said, which was partly true. He’d heard, or maybe seen the name in passing at some point, but that was the extent of his knowledge. Fortunately, Google and Wikipedia were never far away, and he made a mental note to do some reading when he got back to the office.

  Logan’s gaze traced the route that Palmer had laid out. A minibus sat at the far end of the lay-by, almost directly across the road from the coffee shop. Assuming the killer had parked as close as possible to the monument, he’d have had to drag the body a good twenty feet along the side of one of the busiest roads in the West Highlands, right in front of a building with—he counted quickly—eleven windows.

  Bold, then, whoever they were. Even if they’d done it in the dead of night, which he was assuming would be the case, there was traffic going up and down the A82 at all hours. Moving a body even a short distance along it would’ve been risky.

  “We’ve found no fingerprints on the handrails, and the walls of the passageway are porous rock, so we’re unlikely to get anything off them, even if there was something to find, which I doubt,” Palmer continued.

  Logan nodded his agreement. A handrail at a popular tourist site—even before the season had really kicked in—would generally be a Who’s Who of fingerprints. The fact that the SOC team had drawn a blank told him the killer had done a thorough job of wiping them clean.

  “We’ve got the opposite problem with footprints,” Geoff continued, indicating the muddy lay-by “Too many of the bloody things, all piled up on top of each other. And that’s before the bloody bus tour trampled through it.”

  “Anything corresponding to the drag marks you found?” Logan asked.

  “I’ll have to double-check with the team, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. There was rain last night. Even if we get something, it’s unlikely to be clear enough to be useful.”

  Logan ran his hand down his face. This was not a great start to an investigation. “What about the shore? Anything closer to the water?”

  “We haven’t done a full and thorough search yet,” Palmer replied. “But there’s nothing jumping out at us, no.”

  Logan looked past the monument to where the waters of Loch Oich lapped against the land. A rough stone wall ran around the back of the obelisk at around knee-height. From there to the water was a good twenty to thirty feet through weeds and bracken.

  “How far could you chuck a head, do you think?” he wondered.

  Palmer followed his gaze, running his tongue across the front of his yellowing teeth as he considered the question. “Underarm or overarm?”

  “Either one. Just in general.”

  “I mean, it depends on the hair, doesn’t it?”

  Logan turned to the other man, a frown troubling his brow. “The hair?”

  Palmer sighed. It was loud and theatrical, and done solely for the purpose of trying to make Logan feel stupid. It didn’t work. It would be a cold day in Hell before Logan let anything Geoff Palmer had to say impact his self-esteem.

  “Yes. Obviously,” Palmer said. “If the head has short hair, you’ve got a limited number of ways to hold it. You could try shot-putting it from the shoulder, but then its face is right next to your face, eyeball to eyeball, and what sort of nutter wants that?”

  “The sort of nutter that tries to shot-put a severed head into a loch?” Logan guessed, but Palmer ignored him.

  “You could try bowling it, but that’s not going to get you very far. Overarm lob would be too unpredictable, and would probably give you too much height when what you want is distance. With long hair, though, you’ve got a handle. You can get a grip on it, and really welly the bastard. Really swing it.”

  He mimed twirling something at his side, like a cowboy with a lasso, then released his imagined grip and watched an invisible human head go sailing through the air.

  “You could put some real distance on it that way,” he continued. “Yeah, I reckon you’d reach the water no problem, if you had long hair to work with. Easy. That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

  Logan regarded him for a moment, then raised his eyebrows and gave a little shake of his head. “Well, that was both enlightening and frankly quite concerning, Geoffrey. I thought you might say, ‘ten yards,’ or something, but thanks for the detailed assessment.”

  He turned at the sound of a car engine passing through one side of the cordoned area that currently blocked the main road in both directions. Shona Maguire gave a wave from the driver’s seat, then followed the pointed directions of a uniformed constable that guided her to the car park a little further on.

  Without looking, Logan could feel the intensity of Geoff Palmer’s glare on the back of his head. He’d had his sights on Shona for some time, long before Logan came along. He’d even tried to warn the DCI off ‘his lady’ at one point, which had gone about as well for him as might reasonably be expected.

  “Best let you get back to it, Geoff,” Logan said. “Dr Maguire and I will be along together shortly. Maybe best if you don’t mention the head-twirling, though,” he suggested with a grim smile. “She thinks you’re creepy enough, as it is.”

  Chapter Five

  Bennet arrived a few minutes late for his first lesson of the day. PE. Not his favourite subject. Not by a long shot.

  The only reason he’d even taken the class was because he needed to fill up his timetable in his last year at school, and PE was the only thing that didn’t clash with his other choices. Well, it was that or Drama. Both involved jumping around making a dick of yourself, but only one had you doing so in front of a large audience, and so the choice had been an easy one.

  Actually, none of that was quite true. Yes, PE had been one of a limited number of choices available to him, but the main reason for choosing the class had been the teacher. Mr Forsyth was relatively new to the school—he’d arrived when Bennet was in Second Year—and was less than a decade older than everyone from Fourth Year and up.

  Unlike most of the teachers—Bennet’s mum included—he was a good laugh. All the students loved him. Everyone had a really good relationship with him, and Bennet most of all.

  After quickly getting changed into his shorts and t-shirt, Bennet followed the echoing thwack of bouncing basketballs and began a breathless apology as he raced into the hall.

  “Sorry, Fergus, I was—”

  He stopped at the sight of Mrs Robertson, the depute head. Cops and Robertson, they called her—often shortened just to Copsand—for reasons nobody had ever quite been able to explain. It was assumed, it had something to do with her police-state sense of discipline, but that was mostly just a guess. Only the original creator of the nickname knew for sure, and he or she had likely left school decades ago.

  Copsand stood just inside the hall, dressed in a long grey skirt and an oddly puffy blouse, scanning Bennet’s ball-bouncing classmates like she was selecting her next meal.

  “Bennet. You’re late. Why?” she asked, not bothering to turn and look at him.

  He daren’t say they’d arrived at school just after the bell had rung. His mum was supposed to be there from half-eight, and she stoo
d to lose much more than he did if she fell under Copsand’s scrutiny.

  “Oh, eh, I got chatting in the corridor, Miss,” he offered, throwing himself in front of the bullet.

  “Oh, eh, did you, indeed?” Copsand asked, mirroring his hesitation. “Then, how is it that I saw your mother’s car pulling into the car park not five minutes ago?”

  Damn it. Rumbled.

  “We’ll discuss this later,” the depute head said. She raised a wraith-like arm and pointed a skeletal finger at a plastic tub full of faded orange basketballs. “Go. Get a ball. Bounce it.”

  “Right, Miss. Sorry, Miss,” Bennet said, scurrying over to the tub.

  He regarded the sad selection of remaining balls like they were the last pieces of fruit in the supermarket, plucked out the firmest and most ripe, and gave it an experimental bounce. It gave a disappointing thup and bounced halfway back to his hand before flopping back to the floor.

  Go on without me, it seemed to say, as it lay there unmoving on the well-scuffed wood. I’ll only slow you down.

  “Perhaps you misunderstood? The instruction was to bounce it, not stand there staring at it,” Copsand said.

  Bennet picked up the ball, swapped it for another, and managed to dribble three times before it, too, sagged sadly to the floor.

  “I can blow these up for you, Miss,” he suggested.

  “That’s quite alright, Bennet.”

  “Fergus... Mr Forsyth, I mean. He sometimes gets me to blow—“

  “Yes, well, maybe if Mr Forsyth had bothered to show up this morning, you’d be having a very different conversation right now,” Copsand spoke over him. “But you’ve got me this morning. Lucky for all of us. Besides, the cupboard is locked, so you can’t get the pump.”

  “Is he sick?” Bennet asked. “Mr Forsyth? Is he sick?”

  “Fatima! Off the bloody wall bars!” the depute head shouted. “They’re not for climbing on.”