Dark Waters

by G. R. Halliday

  ‘Here.’ Crawford slid a photo out of the file. It was a corporate image, the kind that might appear on a business website. A slim man in a blue suit in his fifties with dark hair, smiling slightly. An authoritative pose with his hands locked together in front of him. She held the photo at arm’s length and mentally compared it to the decomposing corpse in the morgue. ‘It could be him, although the body seemed heavier.’

  ‘Might have put weight on since?’ Crawford said.

  ‘We’re going to need DNA from his family.’

  ‘I’ll get in touch with his wife,’ Fisher said, sounding more eager than ever. Another good sign that last night was a one-off, Monica noted hopefully. His phone buzzed on the desk as he was speaking. He glanced down at it, then frowned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just someone being an idiot,’ he said sniffily, holding the phone up. Khan leaned in beside him to read the message out.

  ‘“Looking for training tips. Are you free to demonstrate some boxing this evening?”’ As she read it a huddle of detectives in the corner of the room working on another case let out cackles of laughter.

  ‘Just ignore them, Fisher,’ Monica said, pointedly turning her back to them, but thinking, At least the boxing story’s sticking. ‘Do we know anything else about Sebastian Sinclair?’

  Fisher switched his phone to silent as Khan opened a copy of a local lifestyle magazine. A feature was spread over several pages with a picture of Sebastian Sinclair and a woman standing together outside a large office block.

  ‘I recognised the name and remembered reading this a few months back,’ she said, pointing to the headline, BROTHER & SISTER TEAM PUSH COMPANY FORWARD. ‘Sebastian Sinclair and his sister Heather took over the running of the company after their father passed away. Apparently they’re expanding the business, doing well with it.’

  ‘Would seem to make the organised crime angle less likely,’ Monica said, wondering again why the family would report Sebastian Sinclair missing but not want it covered in the local press. Some kind of corporate embarrassment? ‘What about the other one? You said there were two.’

  Fisher held up a photo of a smiling man wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Dark hair splattered with grey. Monica squinted at the image. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Theo Gall. He’s a bit younger,’ Fisher said. ‘Declared missing by his wife Pauline Gall almost three weeks ago.’

  ‘What do we know about him?’

  Fisher scanned down a printed sheet. ‘Born in Inverness. Convictions for theft of an automobile, falsely claiming benefits, tax fraud, assault, driving while under the influence …’

  ‘Career petty criminal. He sounds the more likely, especially from the organised crime angle. We should still have his DNA on file,’ Monica said as she stood up. ‘Khan, if you can draft something for the press, an appeal for witnesses in the area. Fisher, you start going through the house-to-house information from locations around the river. There’s a chance someone saw whoever dumped the body.’ She thought about it for a second. ‘Find out if there’s an anglers’ club, birdwatchers, walkers visiting the area. They might have noticed something out of the ordinary up in the glen.’

  ‘What about the hydro workers?’ Fisher piped up.

  ‘Hydro workers?’

  ‘You know the hydro dams up in the glens, for generating electricity. When they were building them they dug huge tunnels under the mountains, dammed whole glens. They’re major engineering projects – need regular maintenance,’ he said, speaking authoritatively. ‘Workers actually have to drive down into the tunnels, check the pressure and so on. One of them might have seen something.’ Despite his slightly patronising tone Monica was encouraged again by the re-emergence of his geekiness.

  She nodded. ‘Look into it. Is there anything else?’

  Khan seemed to hesitate. ‘A call came in this morning, ma’am. A woman out in a place called …’ She picked up a piece of paper from the desk and Monica noticed her chapped hands and chipped fingernails. Clearly manicures weren’t high on her list of priorities. For a second Monica’s curiosity kicked in and she found herself wondering about Khan’s transition from media to police. Maybe the new detective would tell her herself somewhere down the line if they became close. Maybe not; some things were best left unsaid. ‘A place called Little Arklow?’ Khan continued finally. Monica nodded. She knew the village – out in one of the glens, notorious for troublemakers and dropouts.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t think she was very well. Apparently she calls the station a lot, was shouting down the phone.’

  Monica sensed the new detective was concerned she might be wasting her boss’s time with a pointless lead. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said that she knew what had happened to our victim. That –’ Khan hesitated again ‘– that the people who killed him had killed before. Lots of times.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Annabelle struggled desperately to bring her heart rate back under control as she tried to process what she’d just heard: Just think of this place as your new home.

  ‘No!’ the shout ripped involuntarily from her throat as she turned to face the speaker, her whole body shaking uncontrollably. ‘Where am I? Why did you bring me here?’ The flood of adrenaline had even overwhelmed the pain in her leg. The person was standing in the corner of the room, just a shadow in the poor light. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ But the moment of righteous indignation faded as the figure stared back without reply. ‘I’m going to get up, and I’m going to go.’ Annabelle’s tongue was a lump of lead in her mouth. Still the person didn’t reply. She began edging to the side of the low bed, her leg singing with pain.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ The person moved a half step towards her. Annabelle couldn’t judge the age or sex of the speaker from their voice. ‘Your leg was very badly broken. The Doctor attempted to save it, but it was touch and go.’

  ‘I don’t care. Just let me go.’

  ‘The Doctor said this might happen.’ The voice was flat and dead in the same way that the room was dead. An unearthly relic from a half-forgotten nightmare. ‘I don’t want to do this, but he said I might have no choice.’

  Annabelle watched, frozen, throat like clay, body clamped tight, as the figure reached to the ground and picked something up. It was some kind of face. For a moment her frantic brain assumed it to be a living thing. A head hanging separate from its body. She sank back in horror. The figure lifted the head closer so Annabelle could better see it. She shrank further back on the bed. It was a kind of mask. It looked to have been made from a metal can with holes roughly cut for the eyes and mouth.

  ‘He said I should strap this on to you if you didn’t stay calm. Once it’s on any noise you make will just come echoing back into your ears, so there’ll be no point shouting.’ The person gave a strange little laugh. ‘Now, are you going to stop being silly and do as you’re told, or do I have to put this on you?’

  CHAPTER 10

  It was still morning as Monica followed the road west down the glen beside the River Beauly until it became Strath Glass. A wide, flat valley with mountains rising on either side. She pulled into a lay-by on a rise in the road when she spotted the mobile control-room van. When Monica banged on the door there was no response. After a minute she noticed the volunteer searchers in the distance working their way slowly up the river; probably the team leader had gone down to work with them.

  Monica watched for a moment as some picked their way among the silver birch and Caledonian pine trees by the water’s edge. Others waded in the shallows. The spring sun had broken through the clouds; the lines of snow on the mountains in the hazy distance stood out as sharp white edges against the sky. She took a deep breath of the mountain air and allowed herself a moment to appreciate the silence and being alone in the wide-open space. It was almost funny. She lived close to one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world but only ever seemed to visit it for the darkest reasons. Like searching for the
person or persons who had killed and dismembered the still unidentified corpse in Raigmore Hospital’s morgue. The corpse of Sebastian Sinclair? Theo Gall? Or someone else, someone they didn’t know yet?

  Under the gentle light the searchers in the distance put Monica vaguely in mind of children guddling in the water for minnows. She remembered a camping holiday with her parents – Glen Coe, south of Fort William on the west coast of the Highlands – back in the mid-1980s when she was becoming an awkward teenager. When the weather was good there was nowhere more beautiful, and if there was enough of a breeze even the biting midgies were stilled. She recalled lying beside a slow-moving river. The smell of dried heather and the sun’s heat on her skin, watching some younger kids wading in the shallows. Those cheap fishing poles bought from the campsite shop. Just a bamboo stick with a wire and plastic net on the end, fulfilling some primal urge to chase and catch and contain. They would take the little fish from the river and keep them in claustrophobic jars and buckets, taking ownership of them. Monica remembered watching, trying to understand the impulse, why people needed that control. Her father was the same. His need to be in control seemed to grow as she became a teenager and began to assert her independence. He started to check the books she brought home from the library in central Inverness before she was allowed to read them – she had to hide the Stephen Kings and Clive Barkers under the ancient history texts. To check where she was after school, who she’d been speaking to on the way home. For some reason she never felt able to discuss these things with the few school friends she trusted, to ask if this was normal. It had felt like a betrayal to her dad, who she had still loved then. She always felt safe around him as a teenager, a contrast to school, where she faced casual taunts about her height and the way she looked on a daily basis, even though he was so controlling, as if he thought she was still about eight.

  Things had been easier when she really was that age. Daddy’s girl. She remembered his prison officer’s uniform – maybe it had fired her interest in joining the police. One Sunday, as a child, she had gone with him to see where he worked out at Carselang Prison. In the middle of nowhere, framed by mountains. She was allowed into the entrance office, even though Monica’s mum had explicitly told him not to take her inside the brooding Gothic pile. Please, Dad! All right, but just don’t tell Mum! She remembered the smells, an enclosed mustiness mixed with the scent of far-off cooking, distant shouts echoing down corridors. How thick the walls were, how proud she’d felt at sharing that moment with him. The way the other officers gathered round and spoke so respectfully to her dad, the men laughing at his jokes.

  And she couldn’t help remembering another time, twenty years later, when she made the same drive across the prison’s entrance bridge for a very different reason. This time as a junior detective investigating the death of one of the prisoners, a case that her dad became embroiled in. One that had coloured all her memories of him and finally ended everything between them.

  Monica caught herself thinking of him again. Why now, when she had barely thought about him or why she had left Inverness in years? It’s because of Lucy. The answer came straight back from her subconscious. Everything that happened last year, and now watching her getting older, almost to school age. It’s taking you back to your own childhood. Monica shook her head. Her upbringing hadn’t been perfect, her parents had their faults, but they never physically hurt her, they always loved her. It wasn’t until she was an adult that things went really wrong with her dad. This time Monica felt a moment of panic rising from her stomach with the thought, and she glanced around the wide landscape. Suddenly feeling horribly vulnerable beneath the open sky. She took a deep breath and got back into the Volvo, forced the illogical feelings down into her stomach, then checked the time to take her mind off them.

  Only 11.30 a.m. Little Arklow was a twenty-minute drive.

  ‘Most likely a waste of time,’ she whispered. But when a call came in claiming to know the identity of a murderer someone had to check it out. She was here anyway, so it might as well be her. Besides, keeping busy seemed like a good idea when her mind seemed determined to dredge up every uncomfortable memory it could.

  Just before the village of Cannich the road split in three directions. One went on towards Glen Affric, a second to Glen Mullardoch; Monica took the third. A hard right that led along a single-track road in the direction of Glen Turrit. She knew that further up the valley the road was private. But the dead-end town of Little Arklow was situated a couple of miles before the public road ended. What was left of the town anyway.

  Monica remembered hearing a late-night radio documentary, BBC Scotland probably, during a long drive back from a case she’d worked in the far north-west Highlands. It had been about the building projects that Fisher had mentioned. The thousands of workers who were brought into these remote Highland glens to carry out the dangerous work. The presenter had mentioned the history of Little Arklow. Originally a camp for Lowland Scots and Irish workers, it was a permanent village from the 1940s to the 1970s while several dams were built in the area. At its height there had been five pubs and over two thousand residents, but when the work ended, those who could moved on.

  After fifteen minutes Monica came to the painted sign: LITTLE ARKLOW. Half of the cheap prefab houses were without their roofs now. A stray dog stared back at her from a narrow alleyway. Visible behind it the ever-encroaching forest of silver birches. What remained of the place was a magnet for troublemakers and misfits, drawn by low rents and free squats. Monica glanced at the single battered-looking pub that remained halfway along the main street. The Turrit Arms.

  Not the kind of place we’d bring Gran for lunch on a Sunday drive, Monica thought, looking in at the grimy windows. As the idea occurred to her she remembered a recent trip they’d taken with a complaining great-aunt. Every time they’d stopped she had made a fuss about the child lock on the back door of the car, which prevented her from getting out, until Monica had spent a frustrating ten minutes in a rainy lay-by disabling the thing. She shook her head at the irritating memory and slowed to check the house numbers, stencilled in fading black paint on the whitewashed doors. Fifty yards further up the street she pulled over at number 76, killed the engine and got out.

  Down a side street a group of four men were sitting on plastic chairs. Beyond them in the distance dark mountains were visible: Glen Turrit. And beyond that Glen Mullardoch and Glen Affric. The body could have been flushed out from a river in any one of those long valleys. How many hundreds of square miles to search? A lot. As if hearing her thoughts the four men raised their heads in unison, turning to watch her. They were dressed in an assortment of shabby tracksuits, jeans and jackets. Faces hollowed out by the long winter past.

  She turned away to the house and double-checked the number on the gate matched the one she’d written in her notebook because the place looked abandoned. It was a traditional Highland croft house – an ideal holiday home except for the harling peeling from the walls, the holes in the roof and the advancing birch forest on either side which seemed to be about to swallow it. The door was opened before Monica even knocked. A woman wearing a faded Oakland Raiders baseball cap over greasy grey hair looked out at her. Her face was dirty and weather-beaten. She glowered up at Monica from under the brim of her hat.

  ‘You on your own?’ the woman said, peering beyond Monica. ‘Proof they’re not serious.’

  ‘I’m looking for Gillian Keegan?’ Monica held out her warrant card. The woman barely glanced at it.

  ‘Won’t do any good anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ But the woman had already turned and gone inside.

  Medieval was the word that came to Monica’s mind when she followed her in. The floor in the kitchen was compacted dirt, and a birch branch poked through a hole in the broken window. Gillian was perched on a chair by the fireplace, attempting to light a roll-up from the embers. With the smoke rising around her face in the shadowy room she made Monica think of the stories her mum used to t
ell her about the Cailleach, a Gaelic witch.

  ‘You never answered my question.’

  ‘No one wants to listen.’

  ‘Try me,’ Monica said, glancing around for somewhere to sit. She realised that Gillian was already using the only chair and instead stayed standing.

  ‘No one listened when it happened to my friend Euston Miller either, that’s why.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was murdered four years ago. Same as the one in the river.’

  ‘Who murdered him?’ Monica asked. Watching Gillian’s face under the shadow of her cap.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be the one telling me that? They weren’t interested when I went to your lot about him. They said he’d done it to himself but he wouldn’t have. Not when he was so close.’

  ‘Close to what?’

  ‘Someone got him drunk.’ Despite Gillian’s distracted air, Monica could hear the genuine distress in her voice now. ‘They drove his car into Dog Falls in Glen Affric. He didn’t do it himself. He wouldn’t have just left me.’

  Monica wiped the back of her hand across her face. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said mechanically.

  Gillian stared up at her with something close to malevolence in her eyes. ‘As if any of your lot care when some drunk from out in the sticks turns up dead.’ Her voice dripped contempt.

  Monica was about to reply when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She dug it out, went to switch it to silent then realised it was actually an alarm. A reminder that if she didn’t leave now she would be late collecting Lucy from nursery. She swore under her breath and hit the snooze button.

  ‘I’m here now,’ Monica said. ‘Who do you think killed him?’