by JD Kirk
“No. Stayed down. I’ve sent them into the school to talk to the headteacher. See if we can find out any information about Fergus’s next of kin.” Ben checked his watch. “Reckon they should be back shortly.”
“So, what… You weren’t getting them rolls, either?” Logan asked.
Ben shifted around on his chair, still fiddling with the height adjustment. “Well, I mean… Again, we thought they could get something later. When they were back. They could be a while yet.”
“You just said they’d be back shortly!”
“Aye. They might be. But they might not. And, well, Tyler and I both missed breakfast, so…”
“I don’t even want to hear it,” Logan said, raising a hand for silence. He gave a slow, disappointed shake of his head. “You selfish pair of bastards,” he muttered. “And after me putting my neck on the line for you, an’ all…”
The last time Sinead had been in this office, it had been for fighting. Shari Woods in the year above had got wind that her sort-of-boyfriend, Simon Reid, fancied Sinead and—despite the fact Sinead had never so much as spoken to Simon in her life—Shari had tried to exact revenge by flushing Sinead’s head down one of the girls’ toilets.
Shari had been a big lass. Determined, too. But, driven by the desire not to have her head flushed down one of the girls’ toilets—or any toilet, for that matter—Sinead had fought back. A nose had been broken. Blood had been spilled. None of it Sinead’s.
She still remembered her parents turning up. The look of embarrassment on their faces. The long ride home in silence.
They’d made her write an apology letter to Shari. They’d driven her round to the girl’s house next day to deliver it, only for the bitch to rip it up in front of her.
Shari’s dad had come out. Voices had been raised. Accusations and insults hurled. Sinead’s dad didn’t throw the first punch, but he’d thrown the last one.
After that, they’d gone to McDonald’s, eaten McFlurries, and laughed more than they’d laughed in years.
The office had seemed bigger then. Now, it felt stiflingly small.
She hadn’t encountered Bryan Stannard, the new headteacher at Lochaber High School, as he’d only taken up the role in the last few years. He was an immensely heavy-set man with wild greying hair, hands like bin-lids, and a shirt that was two sizes too small around the neck.
He wore dark-tinted glasses—presumably because of some sort of eye condition, because they in no way made him look cool—and a tie the colour of custard.
It struck Sinead as an unlikely colour choice for him. Everything else about his attire was stern and unwelcoming, and this impression was backed up by one of the best examples of ‘resting bitch face’ the DC had ever seen.
She suspected that someone else had suggested the tie to him, perhaps in an attempt to soften his image and make him seem marginally less terrifying a figure to the younger pupils.
It hadn’t worked. If anything, it just made the rest of him seem even more sinister and threatening by comparison.
His weight was clearly putting pressure on both his chair and his lungs. He creaked and wheezed like an old accordion as Hamza broke the news that the PE department had a new staff opening.
“Beheaded?” Mr Stannard said with a gasp that might have been shock, but may just have been the air struggling to get through his collar-constricted windpipe. “In what sense?”
Hamza, to his credit, didn’t skip a beat. “In the literal sense, I’m afraid,” he clarified, although quite why this needed any clarification, he had no idea. “In the sense that his head was removed from his body.”
The headteacher’s chair groaned like the deck of a ship on rough seas. “I say,” he muttered. “That’s… I don’t quite know what to say about that. God. Poor Fergus. What a way to go.” He considered the surface of his desk for a while, the varnish marked with a million scuffs and scratches. “How absolutely awful. Do you know who did it?”
“We’ve just opened the investigation, but we’re pursuing a few leads,” Hamza said, exaggerating a little to make it all sound a little less hopeless. “But we’re struggling to build up much of a picture of Mr Forsyth’s life. Relatives. Friends. Where he’s originally from. That sort of thing. We hoped you might be able to help.”
Mr Stannard appeared shocked by the very suggestion. “Me? I mean… I don’t tend to socialise with the teaching staff or get to know them on a personal level, but I suppose—”
“The school in general, we meant,” Sinead interjected. “Surely, someone here talked to him? Knew him a bit? He must’ve had friends.”
“Oh! Right, yes, I see!” Mr Stannard said, chest wheezing with relief. “Yes, I can absolutely find someone who can…”
After a couple of aborted attempts, he leaned his bulk forward enough to push the intercom button on his desk phone. It rang for a couple of moments before a young woman’s voice crackled out from the speaker.
“Yes, Mr Stannard?”
“Ellie. Is it Ellie?”
“Yes, Mr Stannard.”
“Ellie. Do me a favour and track down Mrs Robertson, would you?” the headteacher asked. He flicked his eyes from the phone and tick-tocked them between the detectives sitting across from him. “There’s someone here who’d like to talk to her.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Shite.”
Logan looked up from his desk, and over to where DI Forde was sitting with the index fingers of both hands poised over the keyboard of his computer.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hm? Oh. Nothing,” Ben replied. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth for a while, then whispered, “Password. Password,” just loud enough for the DCI to hear.
“Have you forgotten your password?”
“Not forgotten, no. Just… misplaced it in the old mental filing cabinet. It’ll come to me, though.”
Ben leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. He was unlikely to find his login details written up there, he knew, but he felt that the change of scenery might help trigger something.
The only thing it triggered was a mild sensation of vertigo, so he stared down at the keyboard instead, and pecked at a few of the keys with a sense of resignation.
“This isn’t it. I know this isn’t it,” he said, then he clicked the mouse button. “Oh ho!”
“Is that it?” Logan asked.
“No,” Ben said, visibly deflating. “I thought it was for a second, but it’s chucked me back out.”
He threw a glassy-eyed gaze in Logan’s direction, sucked in his cheeks like he was trying to pass himself off as a fish, then whispered, “Password,” another three or four times.
“You can get it reset,” Logan reminded him.
“That’s admitting defeat,” Ben said. “I’m not doing that. I’ll get it. Just give me a minute.”
Logan turned his attention back to his own screen. He’d pulled up what they had on Ross Lyndsay. This hadn’t taken long, as they didn’t have very much worth mentioning.
He had no criminal record. No parking tickets. No speeding fines. No D&Ds. Nothing. He was, by all accounts, a model citizen.
Tyler had sent a couple of emails to Lyndsay’s employers before heading home yesterday evening, and the replies had come to the shared mailbox while Logan and Ben were driving down the road.
Nobody had any complaints about his work or his attitude. Nobody was aware of any skeletons lurking in his closet.
Yes, he could be a bit highly-strung, both employers agreed, and he’d once had a full-blown panic attack over a spilled pot of soup in the hotel kitchen, but he was a nice guy. Harmless. Salt of the earth.
He was also, Logan had been quick to note, about the size of a Hobbit. Fergus Forsyth was considerably taller, even without his head.
On the one hand, this made him a more likely suspect. Unlike Logan—or anyone of a normal height and build, for that matter—he would be able to move around freely in the tunnel below the well.
On th
e other hand, could he feasibly have lugged Fergus’s corpse out of a car at that layby, over to the well, and down the slope, before dumping him there in the space below the well?
Not on his own, certainly. Not without help.
Which didn’t rule him out, of course. He might still be involved.
But Logan wasn’t feeling it. He’d give him both barrels of the full interrogation treatment, of course, but his instincts told him that Ross Lyndsay almost certainly wasn’t the man they were looking for.
He clicked over to a scan Sinead had made of the notebook they’d retrieved from Fergus Forsyth’s drawer. There were a couple of pages filled with handwritten dates that stretched back just under two years. The writing was bunched together, one line below the other, but the dates themselves were spaced out by a few weeks at a time in the early days, then gradually became more regular until they were twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays.
They stopped a couple of months ago, and the pages that followed had all been blank.
There were a couple of numbers written on the first page—a phone number, which had turned out to be Fergus’s own, and an eight-digit string of letters and numbers that was presumably the password for something.
Probably not the one Ben was looking for, though.
None of it made sense yet, but Logan got the feeling it might turn out to be an important piece of the puzzle.
“Got it!” Ben announced. He clasped his hands and shook them in the air above his head, celebrating this minuscule victory. “I’m in.”
“Well done. Was it ‘password’?” Logan guessed.
Ben gave a snort, protesting just a little too much. “No. Of course not,” he said, then he hastily clicked the mouse a few times and had a quick scan of the inbox. “Email in from Ross Lyndsay’s boss at the primary school.”
“Seen it,” Logan said.
“And one from his other boss at—”
“Seen that one, too.”
“Oh, well aren’t you on the ball this morning?” Ben retorted. “Have you called Mitchell back yet, by the way?”
Logan shot a sideways glance at the mobile phone on his desk. He’d been expecting to have had several missed calls from the Detective Superintendent by now, but there were none.
He wasn’t sure if this should make him feel better or worse.
“Not yet. I’ll get to it shortly.”
“Wouldn’t say boo to a goose,” said Ben.
Logan frowned as he replayed the sentence in his head. “What?”
“Ross Lyndsay. Reading the emails here. Sounds like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose,” Ben clarified. He clicked out of the inbox and turned his attention to the shared folders where the case files were stored. “Mind you, always thought that was a strange saying. I mean, who would? Vicious bloody things. Geese, I mean. They can break your arm.”
“You’re thinking of swans,” Logan corrected.
It was Ben’s turn to frown. He shook his head. “It’s geese.”
“It’s not. It’s swans.”
“Wouldn’t say boo to a swan? Nobody says that.”
“No, I mean… Forget it,” Logan said, just as the door to the Incident Room opened, and both detectives’ stomachs grumbled at the thought that Tyler had made it back with the food.
They were both disappointed, and at least one of them physically recoiled when they saw Moira Corson looming in the doorway.
“The Chief Inspector wants to see you,” she declared in a voice that could not have sounded less interested if she’d tried.
“Who? Both of us?” asked Ben.
Moira shook her head, raised a hand, and pointed in Logan’s direction like someone out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “No. Just him.”
“Oh, thank God,” Ben whispered. He grinned at Logan and gave him an encouraging wink. “Nae luck, Jack!” He laughed. “You be sure to give young Alisdair my best, and I’ll look after your bacon roll if Tyler turns up before you get back.”
The office Sinead and Hamza had been shunted into was smaller than the headteacher’s and felt like it served less of a specific purpose.
Mr Stannard’s office had clearly been meant for him and him alone, from the family photographs on the shelves, to the risers under the desk that lifted it to a more practical height for his bulk.
There was nothing to indicate that this room had any fixed owner. It was the most generic office either detective had ever set foot in, and considering they both worked for Police Scotland, that was really saying something.
There was nothing personal anywhere in the room, just a desk, three chairs, and a bookcase filled with box files at the bottom, and books at the top. The labels on the box files all read, ‘Paperwork,’ and while Sinead couldn’t make out the names on the spines of the books on the upper shelves, she reckoned there was a pretty good chance they were all called, ‘Reading Material,’ or something equally as vague and uninteresting.
It was an office that had been assembled based solely on the dictionary definition of the word, each component slotted neatly into place with no real understanding of why.
Ironically, the woman sitting behind the desk felt like the perfect inhabitant of a room like this one.
She had introduced herself as Mrs Robertson, warned them that she had very little time to spare, then ushered them into the office and ordered—not invited—them to take a seat.
There had been no need for the introduction from Sinead’s point of view. She had spent six years in Lochaber High School, and while she’d had no direct run-ins with Cops and Robertson, the depute head had been a constant presence throughout the DC’s school career.
She sat across from them now, her hands shoulder-width apart, palms flat against the desktop. There was something oddly disconcerting about the pose, and both Hamza and Sinead continually felt their gazes being drawn to her hands, as the subconscious parts of their brains worked to figure out why anyone would ever sit in such a way.
Anyone who wasn’t playing the title role in a Hammer House of Horror movie, anyway.
She had seemed largely unsurprised by the news of Fergus Forsyth’s death. The murder part had raised an eyebrow, and the decapitation had brought the other one into line.
She’d known something was up, though. No-shows were rare among the teaching staff, she’d explained. Oh, sure, they pulled sickies regularly, but they always phoned in, usually laying it on far too thick as they coughed or whimpered their way through the call.
They all knew better than to just fail to show up. ‘Death’ was pretty much the only explanation Mrs Robertson would accept in such instances, so it was just as well for Mr Forsyth that he fell into that category.
“You don’t seem particularly upset,” Sinead felt compelled to point out.
“I’m not,” the depute replied, with a level of frankness that caught both detectives off guard. “I didn’t know him. We weren’t friends. He was a subordinate who worked in the same building. That’s all. While I am, of course, sad for him and anyone he left behind, I don’t have the luxury of moping around, grieving. My thoughts must now turn to finding a replacement, and keeping the department going for the next few weeks.”
Sinead and Hamza swapped looks that spoke volumes. Mrs Robertson didn’t fail to pick up on them.
“Does my attitude shock you?” she asked.
“It just seems… A young man died. A member of your staff,” Hamza said. “And you just seem a bit…”
“Annoyed,” Sinead concluded.
“I am. I’m livid,” the depute head agreed. “Frankly, it’s a massive headache for me, at a time when we’re already short-staffed. We’ve got exams starting in just under a month. There’s no way we’ll fill his position in time.” She sighed and looked out the window to where a sports field lay just beyond the car park. “Thank God it’s just PE. If it had been a proper subject… I shudder to think.”
“Yeah. That would’ve been tragic,” Sinead said, making no effort to hide her distas
te.
“Was there something you specifically wanted?” Mrs Robertson asked. She checked the clock on the wall above the door. “I’m supposed to be covering a class in fifteen minutes. One of those coughers who over-egg the pudding.”
Sinead couldn’t formulate a question without swearing, so bit her lip and nodded for Hamza to take the reins. The coldness of the heartless cow on the other side of the desk was incredible. There wasn’t even a pretence of concern or empathy. Not so much as a flicker of pity or regret.
“Can I ask when you last saw Mr Forsyth?”
Copsand narrowed her eyes a little as she turned her attention to Hamza. “Why do you ask? Am I a suspect?”
“No. Of course not,” Hamza assured her. “We’re just trying to establish time of death.”
“I thought you had people for that sort of thing? Gadgets and whatnot?”
“I think you might have watched too much TV, Mrs Robertson,” Hamza said.
“That’s very unlikely. I don’t own a television,” the depute head replied, with an air of superiority that told them she believed herself far the better person for it. “Mr Forsyth had a class on Monday afternoon. Last period. He delivered it, as planned, then presumably left soon after.”
“And school finishes…?”
“Three-forty,” Sinead said, earning herself a fleeting puzzled look from Copsand.
“Yes. That is correct,” the depute head confirmed. “The last bell goes at three-forty. I ask all teaching staff to remain on the premises until four, but some of them are a law unto themselves.”
“Is that how you’d describe Mr Forsyth?” Hamza asked.
“No. I wouldn’t describe him as anything. He was a PE teacher. He could run, jump, and throw a ball. The pupils liked him, I believe. But that’s essentially all I know of the man. You asked when I last saw him? Last week, sometime.”
“I thought you said—” Hamza began, but Copsand responded before he could get to the end of the sentence.
“I said he taught last period on Monday. I know that for a fact. I don’t have to have seen it with my own two eyes to confirm it,” she explained. “If you’re asking when he left the premises, I’d have to say between three-forty and four, and likely leaning towards the former. If you want to know anything else about him, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong person.”