The centre of Inverness was Sunday-night quiet when Monica pulled the Volvo over beside Ness Bridge on Huntly Street. Almost directly opposite the red-stone mass of Inverness Castle, floodlit against the black sky. The lights of the street lamps reflected back off the black river. Monica found herself staring down at it for a moment and wondering if the dead man’s arms could have made it past the dam and be floating below her. Grasping at cold nothingness on their way out to the sea. She shivered at the image, reminded herself that the Ness wasn’t even connected to the Beauly.
‘Always trouble in this pub.’ Crawford’s voice cut into her thoughts. He gestured across to the dark exterior of the bar Bill Macdonald had directed them to. The Clach. Monica crossed to the door and tried the handle. Locked up tight. A faint glow of yellow was visible through the blurred glass above. She hammered on the door.
A buzzer sounded and the door clicked open. She caught the familiar pub smells: faded perfume, stale beer and body odour. She stepped inside and took in the row of bottles behind the bar, the shadowy room. A fruit machine flashing remorselessly in the far corner. Close to the machine a man was sitting on a bench. Hunched forward with his head in his hands. Monica moved closer. He had dark hair and was wearing a blue shirt, torn at the collar.
‘Fisher?’ Monica didn’t try to hide the shock in her voice as her younger colleague glanced up at her. His normally pristine hair scuffed into a mess. A red mark standing out on his cheek. The glasses he usually wore nowhere to be seen.
Monica had assumed Bill Macdonald’s call was about some petty criminal from the Marsh. Someone who’d given her information somewhere down the line. Hoping a detective’s name would be a get-out-of-jail- or get-out-of-a-kicking-free card. Despite Ben Fisher’s no-show at the morgue, the idea that it could have been about the young detective constable, so uptight it seemed a physical impossibility he’d ever make it past the door of a pub, let alone consume a mouthful of alcohol, hadn’t even edged into Monica’s mind. The image of him in bed nursing a copy of the SIO Handbook still seemed so much more believable that she had to double-take to check it was really him. She glanced behind her at Crawford, caught the shock on his face as one of his hands went up to his red hair.
‘I heard he’d been going out drinking a lot … I didn’t know he was out tonight,’ Crawford said defensively. Monica turned back to Fisher and swore under her breath. The last thing she needed was one of her most thorough investigators having some kind of character transformation at the start of a murder case. Especially when she was only just back on the team after half a year away herself, and not exactly at her most robust.
‘What the fuck happened, Fisher?’ Monica’s surprise at seeing him here overloaded any sense of discretion.
‘He started on one of the MacFarlanes.’ Monica turned at the deep voice from behind the bar. Big Bill’s wide face remained boyish, over a decade since Monica had last seen him. Still framed by thick blond hair. ‘Punched him, then said he was going to kill the boy.’
‘The MacFarlanes?’ Monica repeated dumbly. They were well known to the police, a problem family. One of the relics of the clan system that somehow still existed in fragments across the Scottish Highlands, even 250 years after Culloden. Representatives of a lingering tribal morality and the Celtic urge to pass a bottle and share in the wildness.
Bill nodded. He was dressed in a leather jacket that made his thick frame somehow more intimidating. She noticed now that two other men, friends of Bill presumably, dressed similarly in dark jackets, were sitting together further down the bar. They had been hidden around the corner when she first walked in.
‘They were set on kicking his head in and throwing him in the firth at Ferry Point.’
Monica shook her head slowly. Momentarily forgetting her anger with DC Fisher and feeling pure relief that it had happened in this pub, with Bill around. Fisher was lucky to be in here and not in the hospital or the morgue. But relief was tempered by the knowledge that if he’d crossed the MacFarlanes his card was marked. They wouldn’t be interested in involving the police, but Fisher could expect retribution somewhere down the line. Maybe not for years, when he’d forgotten all about it.
‘What a mess,’ Monica whispered, crouching to check on Fisher properly. The knuckles on his right hand were swollen and bleeding. A mark on his right cheekbone was coming up as a purple bruise already. Most likely a left-handed assailant, she noted almost subliminally. The young detective stared down at the dirty floor, refusing eye contact. ‘What happened?’ she asked again, still staring at Fisher but addressing Bill.
‘The usual. Your man there had been in drinking all afternoon. Started mouthing off at people. Threatening to have them arrested.’
Monica glanced over to Crawford. What Bill was describing was enough to get anyone kicked off the force. She couldn’t shake the illogical sense that it was all connected somehow: her paranoia earlier at Burger King, the body in the morgue and now this. A final cap on the shittiest of Sunday evenings. And it made absolutely no sense. Fisher seemed to value his work above almost everything else in his life. Almost like the police was a surrogate family. On the surface he had come out of the difficult case the year before with the least damage, and with his reputation as a promising detective established. Why would he, of all people, have done something this stupid?
CHAPTER 7
Despite the pain from her leg, Annabelle must have fallen into another concussed sleep, because in her dream she was back in London. Walking across London Bridge on her way to a party in a strange old Victorian dance hall. The kind of place that was deliberately shabby with upturned beer crates instead of tables and bean bags instead of chairs. She was supposed to meet someone there, maybe her mum or her dad.
She looked around. There were groups of people, all looking perfectly at home in the trendy environment. As if there was nothing more natural to them than to look perfect, posed like an Instagram image that had been hearted a million times. But there was a shadow moving slowly from the corner of the room. Across the dirty wooden floor, over those bean bags and beer-crate tables. It carried a hint of something that could taint and destroy.
Annabelle adjusted the way she was standing. Tried to adopt the pose of nonchalance she’d practised for when she was waiting outside a lecture hall at university, her hip a little off to the side, her phone held almost at arm’s length as if she were just glancing down at it, rather than compulsively checking it for notifications.
The shadow drew near and her leg began to throb. Hotter and hotter until Annabelle couldn’t help but look down. She saw that somehow a small black tent had been erected around her right leg. With horror she realised that something was moving about inside it. The pain pulsed harder, and Annabelle screamed. She looked around desperately for help, praying her mum or dad might have appeared, but the people had all turned away. Anyway, she realised now, they were waxwork models. Standing frozen under the eerie orange light.
She woke soaked in sweat, agony coursing through her body from her broken leg. Try taking deep breaths, the voice inside her head suggested, like the therapist told you to do when you start panicking. It was a laughable defence against the all-encompassing cocktail of pain and terror, but she didn’t have many options. She kept her eyes screwed tight shut and tried to breathe slowly and deeply. After a minute she found that the voice in her head had been correct: the pain had receded slightly.
But fear spread slowly to take its place. The memory of the carpet on her fingertips. Like the one in her childhood bedroom, but old and rotting. Where was she? Who had put her here? Clearly it couldn’t be the same carpet. She hadn’t lived in that house for over a decade. It was hundreds of miles from the Scottish Highlands, and Mum and Dad had acrimoniously divorced years ago. But in some strange way it felt like she’d been transported back to that quiet room where she would sit on her own with the toys. Back to that house and all the simple strangeness it had taught her about the world.
A sound c
ut through her fevered thoughts. A body shifting slightly on a wooden chair, which creaked in response. Annabelle froze; the breath stopped in her chest. Then she heard the hiss of breathing. Someone was in the room with her. Surely the person who had taken her from her car and brought her here.
Horror washed through her body like a rapidly rising tide. Slowly she opened her eyes. Instead of the impenetrable dark there was a grey half-light this time. Above her there was a smooth concrete ceiling. Her mind couldn’t quite comprehend that this was really happening, and a whimper must have escaped from her lips because the chair creaked again.
‘Shhhh … You’re safe here.’ The person stood up and moved closer, their voice almost a whisper. ‘Just think of this place as your new home.’
CHAPTER 8
Monica’s mum leaned across the worktop, her handsome face alive with excitement.
‘I thought it must have been an emergency – he said it was business.’ Angela Kennedy shook her head of thick grey hair as she recounted the story of Bill Macdonald’s late-night call to the house, asking for Monica’s mobile number. She’d repeated a similar phrase at least three times already since her daughter had come out of the shower.
The night before, Monica had decided it would be better to sleep on the sofa at her mum’s house in the Marsh than go back to her own flat. Sleeping fully clothed on the sofa was a habit she’d developed in the last six months. She slept more lightly there, which seemed to lessen the nightmares, and keeping her clothes on helped too: ready for the monster coming in through the window or the door.
Monica rubbed a hand over the painful crick in her neck. If anything her mum’s sofa was even more uncomfortable than the one at her own flat. But at least she’d be around while Lucy had breakfast – her daughter was already asleep when Monica arrived the night before. She hadn’t wanted to wake her to take her home. Since Monica returned to Inverness when Lucy was born she had tried to limit her visits to Rapinch. Bad memories of her early days as a detective, when things had gone seriously wrong with her dad, too many faces from the past. This morning she was regretting her visit for a different reason as her mum began asking uncomfortable questions. ‘I thought it might be to do with the case you were called back for, maybe he had some intel?’
If only, Monica thought. She chose her words carefully, aware that there was a chance they would be repeated in the local shop. Or anonymously on one of the online forums her mum visited to discuss her favourite topics: true crime, TV crime dramas and crime fiction.
‘It was nothing serious, a little bit of trouble at the bar he manages.’ Monica could already picture her mum conducting her own investigation. Digging into this nugget of information with her friends at the salon next time she had her hair done.
What the hell was Fisher thinking? She remembered his fixed expression in the car outside his house after she’d asked him just that question. She had turned to face him as Crawford sat beside her, staring straight ahead to save his colleague’s embarrassment.
‘I forgot to eat … I’ve been having a bit of a hard time. Since the case last year.’ He snorted a strange little laugh. ‘A bit of women trouble too actually.’
Monica had stared back at him, still struggling to fit all this with the bespectacled, geeky version of DC Ben Fisher she’d first worked with and eventually come to respect as a detective. She knew how badly the case he was referring to had affected the whole unit and the wider Highland community, but on the surface Fisher had seemed unscathed in comparison to herself and Crawford. Maybe you’re being naive? Monica had challenged herself. In truth she hadn’t given much thought to how the case had impacted the young detective. While she and DC Crawford had been recovering, Fisher had been drawn deeper into the hideousness of the follow-up investigation. Maybe this had rocked his world more profoundly than anyone realised? Clearly he respected hierarchy, the sense of safety that authority could provide. Aspects of the case had challenged these comforting ideas. Maybe it was this that Fisher was struggling to cope with? She sighed and let some warmth creep into her voice. ‘Look, do you need something, Fisher? Time off? Counselling?’
‘I’m fine. It was just a really bad night, boss.’ His face was twisted in discomfort. She could see how mortified he was to be sitting here like this, and that gave her a moment of reassurance, that he still clearly cared about the job. ‘Things got on top of me … It’ll never happen again. I promise.’
She had continued to stare at him for a long time. Watched his eyes stay locked to the back of the headrest in front. Everyone had their secrets, everyone made their mistakes. She knew that as well as anyone. The MacFarlanes were never going to make a complaint against him. Technically she and Crawford hadn’t witnessed any crime. Monica trusted Fisher as an investigator, knew from experience how thorough he was in his work. She really needed him on the case that had just come her way, she would be working closely with him, could keep an eye on him.
Cutting through Monica’s thoughts, Angela said, ‘I thought because of his boy? You remember? Andrew? I told you, he’d been caught with those drugs. Dealing them? What a worry it is for Bill and Bill’s mum.’ Angela went to stir something on the hob. ‘Do you want special eggs? That’s what Lucy’s having? Aren’t you?’ Her mum’s ‘special eggs’ were a fat-laden mix of cheese, butter, eggs and salt. Lucy nodded from where she was sitting on the sofa, already at work on the arduous task of lacing up her little trainers.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Although the smells from the hob were appealing, Monica didn’t feel like eating. ‘What happened with Bill’s son?’ A welcome change of subject.
‘He got in with a bad lot. Started using that cocaine, and selling it. A silly boy, only nineteen and he’s looking at jail.’ Angela laid the plate on the small table in front of Lucy. ‘A very silly boy, taking drugs. If anyone ever tries to make you take them you say no! Don’t you, Lucy?’
The Major Incident Room was already busy when Monica pushed the door open and stepped inside. Catching the familiar mix of smells – machine-brewed coffee and freshly applied deodorant. A thrum of orderliness and control. Almost six months away and it felt like nothing had changed.
She had already heard from the desk sergeant on her way into the station about Fisher’s unfortunate first trip to a boxing gym with Crawford. An overzealous sparring partner who had bruised his face up. A good story; it seemed like the kind of thing that would happen to Fisher, Monica decided. Probably a few of the older detectives, who DC Fisher’s references to proper procedure and best practice rankled, had even been cheered by the news.
She glanced between her two young detectives, who were sitting together at a desk. Fisher was neat again now in a blue suit and with his dark hair with its careful side parting. He was wearing a replacement pair of black-framed glasses, the angry purple bruise on his cheek partially obscured by concealer. Crawford beside him in the same brown suit from the night before, his quiff of red hair looking slightly damp from whatever product he put on it, a smattering of stubble across his narrow face. Monica had decided he must use some kind of beard trimmer rather than a wet razor to keep it permanently at that length. Despite how different the two detectives were in looks and character, together they exuded a collegiate competence, their foibles currently hidden by their formal dress.
If only they knew, Monica thought, glancing around the office as she remembered the scene in the pub the night before.
They were joined by a third detective. DC Maria Khan, a woman in her early thirties. She was wearing a grey trouser suit, albeit a badly cut and ill-fitting one in comparison to those of her two male colleagues. Monica had met the new detective in passing but not yet worked with her. She had been brought onboard to assist with the investigation and handle media interest in the case, which Monica had no doubt was going to be considerable. Crawford had mentioned that Khan had left a career in the media several years previously to become a detective after some ‘major shitshow in her personal life’. ‘She’s cle
ver, good at the job, closed book though. Keeps herself to herself,’ he had added, which in Crawford’s parlance probably just meant she didn’t respond to his attempts at flirtation. Monica introduced herself, shook Khan’s hand then looked her quickly up and down. Noted her attempts to disguise her prettiness by tying her dark hair back in a severe ponytail and wearing thick-framed glasses. Which wasn’t a bad idea, Monica thought, when you spend your days around criminals. Khan sat down at the table with Fisher and Crawford. Thankfully her presence meant the other three could act like their visit to The Clach had never happened.
‘What have we got from the missing persons?’ Monica asked, pleased that they could actually focus on the investigation. She already knew that the search of the river had failed to turn up anything so far.
Crawford cleared his throat. ‘A couple about the right age – forties and fifties,’ he said, pointing to the files on the table. ‘Would tie in with what Dolohov estimated.’
‘What do we know about them?’
‘The first one’s interesting. Sebastian Sinclair, aged fifty-three. Declared missing two weeks ago by his wife, Karen Sinclair—’
‘Wait,’ Monica cut in, ‘The Sinclairs, who own half of the Highlands?’ Sinclair Enterprises was the biggest company in the north of Scotland, responsible for dozens of major engineering and building projects.
‘That’s right. One of them.’
‘He went missing two weeks ago? Why wasn’t it in the press?’
‘Maybe the family wanted to keep it low-key,’ Khan suggested. She had an archetypal Lowland Scottish accent, from somewhere like Stirling, with just a hint of Glaswegian. Harsher than the soft Highland tones Monica was used to hearing in Inverness. ‘They’re connected. They would probably be able to keep it out of the local press for a while if they wanted to.’
Monica nodded. It sounded plausible but also begged a lot of questions. Principally, why weren’t the rest of his family desperate to find him? If they were, then surely a media appeal would have been close to the top of their priorities.
Dark Waters Page 3