‘Every cloud though …’ He’d said it with a fixed smile more times than he could remember. Because with Laura gone and the house sold he could finally chase the dream. He’d spent so many days working as a carpenter listening to audiobooks about epic journeys, so many nights in front of the TV watching adventure shows. Finally he’d actually done it, quit his job and gone. Australia, Thailand, Morocco, Spain, France, England, finally on to Scotland. The Scottish Highlands, ancestral home of his family at some point in the distant past. It was a kind of homecoming, the final part of his journey. His transformation. Because over the course of the year he’d been away Scott felt like he’d gone from being a thirty-year-old boy to being a man. He’d been through testing times: robbed at knife point in Bangkok, a freezing night huddled alone in the Atlas Mountains. Difficult things, but they’d made him stronger, and he hadn’t regretted a minute of it.
Until that morning.
He glanced around the mountains and then at the forest again. Over to where his green one-man tent was still pitched close to a small river, surrounded by a copse of Scots pines. Last night it had been the most picturesque camping spot imaginable. This morning Scott realised he’d made a huge mistake coming here. There was something wrong with this place.
The people had come in the early hours of the morning. After Scott crawled into his sleeping bag, zipped up the tent and switched off the light on his head torch, he’d drifted into a deep sleep. Bone-weary after the long day of hiking through the rough country around Loch Mullardoch then down into the valley of Glen Turrit, where he planned eventually to meet the road he knew ran through to the west coast. He’d woken in the darkest hours of the night when the noises started, little more than a whispering among the trees at first. A sound that could easily have been dismissed as a breeze coming down off the mountains.
But as he lay with the smell of tent fabric and the cold spring air in his nostrils the sounds persisted. Growing louder until Scott couldn’t deny what he was hearing. Voices from the woods around the tent. He’d sat up slowly in his sleeping bag. Hardly daring to breathe as the voices, two or three of them, had continued. Surely they weren’t meant for him. Surely they were for someone else. But who else could they be for? Out here in the middle of nowhere. Miles from the road. As he tilted his head to hear better, his sleeping bag rustled against the fabric of the tent.
The voices stopped and Scott froze.
He imagined someone edging through the darkness, closer to the tent. Desperately he tried to remember where he’d packed his folding knife. It had to be kids – teenagers looking to play freak the dumb tourist – he told himself as he patted blindly around, searching for the knife. But would they really come all the way out here? And there was something about those voices. Something so creepy about the raspy sounds, persistent but always just on the verge of comprehension. The way they seemed to carry a message: Here we are beyond civilisation. Here wildness reigns. With mad eyes and hair like snakes.
Scott tried hard to ignore such notions and finally his fingers closed reassuringly around the heavy knife. He grabbed it tight and carefully teased the blade out with the nail of his thumb. Straightened it until he felt the locking mechanism click into place in his shaking hand. He sat hunched forward with the knife gripped tight in his fist. Head cocked to the side for further noises. There was nothing though. Just the trees shifting slightly in the breeze and the sound of his own breath in his ears.
By the time dawn began to break Scott had almost convinced himself that his fears had been unjustified. The sounds had been a trick played by his imagination, a kind of aural hallucination, nothing more. He’d heard about that kind of thing. People who’d gone for several days without talking to another human beginning to hear voices. There was even a theory that this was what Jesus Christ experienced when he was alone in the wilderness for those forty days and nights.
Finally, when it was almost completely light outside, Scott felt safe enough to unzip the tent inner. Whatever it was, hallucination or real, it had gone now. And it would be another story to add to the rest of them when he was home in Canada. He moved to open the tent’s outer flap.
The thing was hanging about three metres away. It took Scott a moment to realise what it was because it was dressed in human clothes, and his first instinct was to think that a dummy had been suspended in front of the tent in a strange practical joke.
Up until he saw the blood. Caught its deep iron smell.
He blinked and took in the orange waterproof jacket, the black trousers, ill-fittingly forced on over the stag’s hind legs. The blood was dripping from its antlers and making a dark pool on the ground. The four legs were each attached by rope to the trees so it made an X shape. The head hung loosely down so its antlers were pointing towards Scott. In a state of near panic he looked around at the forest, the gloomy mountains beyond. Expecting someone, a figure, to be standing there among the trees, staring back at him. There was no one though, just the trees, seeming closer now, denser than the night before.
‘Hello?!’ he shouted without thinking. Out of some desperate need to feel a human connection, to know that things were OK. Immediately he slapped a hand over his mouth. Whoever had strung the stag up like that was not someone he wanted to speak to. But they were here now, hiding among the trees.
The thought sent a fresh bolt of adrenaline through Scott’s body. He swallowed and squeezed the knife tighter in his hand then looked back at the stag. It was only now that he recognised the clothes. They were his. From the backpack he’d left in the outer section of the tent. Someone had crept in, had been mere inches from him in the night, without him knowing.
For some reason this seemed the most terrifying thing of all, and Scott realised that he was shaking all over. He forced himself to swallow and tried hard to understand what was happening.
‘They left the stag to scare you. If they actually wanted to hurt you they would have done it by now,’ he murmured. ‘They could have killed you while you were asleep.’ Clearly they wanted to frighten him. A not so subtle message to get the fuck out of here, that this wasn’t his place. ‘Message received loud and clear,’ Scott said under his breath. Still scanning those dense trees. He crouched by the tent and quickly deconstructed it, then stuffed his few possessions into his backpack. In less than five minutes he was ready to get the fuck out of this valley, out of Scotland.
Stupidly he’d decided against buying a map for the trip; it had seemed more adventurous that way. And the trek from the Mullardoch Hills down to meet the road through Glen Turrit was relatively straightforward. He had no idea how far it was to the road or what the best route was. He glanced around desperately, and his eyes landed on the river. If he followed it downstream it would take him to the valley floor, eventually to the road. He shouldered his pack, glanced up at the stag for one last time, shook his head and turned to go.
Then the screaming started. Off to the side in the thickets of silver birch. A sound of primal terror, of rage, that made him freeze. He forced himself to move, then he was running over the uneven ground, the rocks and heather by the side of the river. The madness he could hear in that disinhibited scream pushed him on. Scott was good at running. He’d played soccer all the way through elementary and high school, always out on the wing. He’d even done a handful of marathons, spending his evenings during the long Canadian winters running laps in a local sports hall. In a straight race he could beat ninety-nine out of a hundred people. Especially with a head start like this.
Without even thinking about it, he shrugged the backpack off and quickened his pace. Glancing around constantly to make sure he didn’t trip on one of the protruding roots or turn his ankle on a loose boulder. The blood pumped hard in his ears so he couldn’t tell if the screams were following or not. Up ahead the landscape flattened out. For a moment he thought it might be a road. He slowed and looked around. Took a deep breath, tried to calm his breathing.
The little girl was standing at the opposite en
d of the clearing. She had straight blonde hair and was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with a character from Pokémon Go on it. She was looking directly at him, as if she had expected him to appear at that exact moment at that exact place. She was holding something in one hand. There was something about the fixed expression on her little face, a look that Scott had never seen before. As if she was somehow connected with the nature that surrounded them. The trees and the river. The things that had seemed so beautiful just the day before, but now seemed frightful, to claw at the fringes of his sanity.
He took a deep breath and stepped closer. ‘I wonder can you help me? I’m looking for the road?’
The girl stared straight back at him without replying and slowly held her hand out towards him. At first he thought she was indicating a direction, then he realised what she was holding, pointing towards him.
It was a hand, dried black. Fresh horror bubbled in his mind because he knew those darkened fingers somehow touched on a fate that was already set down. He stopped dead. There were footsteps coming closer through the heather behind him. The knife was tight in his hand. Do something! Move! But his arms stayed locked by his sides. Shaking so hard they no longer seemed to belong to him. The world rocked and his vision blurred.
When the fingers tightened around his neck from behind, Scott screwed his eyes tight shut and let the knife fall from his hand. In his head he repeated the words over and over: This is a dream. This is a nightmare.
But Scott wasn’t asleep. And his nightmare was only just beginning.
CHAPTER 15
The next morning Crawford took the turn-off for the newbuild estate high on the hill above Inverness. He glanced again at Monica beside him. Although it was almost six months since they had last worked together, she could still read his body language. The way he was sitting slightly forward in his seat told her there was something he wanted to say but was uncomfortable about. She took a breath and felt the tension in her neck from another night sleeping on the couch. It took her a moment to realise that she was actually irked she could read Crawford so easily. Maybe he could read her in the same way. The idea troubled her. The closeness that it implied.
‘Spit it out, Crawford.’ Bad news about Fisher, drinking again? She knew it was unlikely to be anything about the case. The corpse’s DNA result had come back that morning. It didn’t match with the DNA they had on file for Gall. They had already spent half an hour discussing the implications back at the office. How having career criminal Theo Gall out of the picture undermined their organised-crime theory. ‘What is it you’ve got to tell me?’
Crawford glanced over at her, green eyes widening slightly. Caught out. ‘It’s just …’
Monica stared impatiently out the window at the rows of detached sandstone houses, the uniformly perfect gardens. The heartland of upper-middle-class Inverness. Doctors, lawyers, business people, accountants.
‘Well, I was chatting to your mum the other day—’
‘My mum?!’ This wasn’t what Monica had expected, although actually she shouldn’t have been surprised. When Monica and Crawford had both been laid up in Raigmore Hospital after the previous investigation had gone catastrophically wrong, he had struck up an unlikely friendship with Angela Kennedy. Monica had assumed this was a short-lived response to the trauma of the situation, but more than once she’d turned up at her mum’s house to find them sitting at the kitchen table, chatting over tea and biscuits. Irritatingly, her mum had even taken to citing Crawford’s opinion on matters of police procedure.
‘She said about Lucy wanting a cat?’
‘Right,’ Monica said slowly, wondering just what direction this strange conversation was going to take.
‘You remember the social worker? Michael Bach?’
How could she forget. She’d worked with him on that same case, but despite their shared experience – maybe because of it – they weren’t close. Probably they both wanted to put the experience behind them. Seeing each other more often than they needed to could only be a reminder of everything that had happened.
‘He called the other day – something about one of his clients …’ Crawford turned his hand over to show the details were unimportant. ‘We were chatting, and he said a new cat’s started coming round to his house.’ Monica had visited his remote croft with Lucy the month before after a child psychologist suggested seeing Michael again might help lessen the traumatic memories from the previous case for Lucy. Monica remembered how her daughter had been enchanted by the cats there. With a little flicker of irritation she also remembered how Crawford had ended up coming on the trip after Lucy had insisted.
‘It’s quite lazy,’ Crawford went on. ‘Just wants to be inside in the warm, but it doesn’t get on with the other cats. The ginger one, Colonel Mustard, he’s been picking on it. We thought … well … maybe Lucy would like it?’
Monica felt a second flare of irritation – at Crawford, Michael, her mum. As if they knew what was best for her daughter. Just because she was a single mother everyone thought they had a right to interfere. She sighed though, because actually it might not be a bad idea. The child psychologist had even suggested an animal companion might help bring Lucy out of herself.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said finally. Crawford nodded, looking visibly relieved. He took a right turn. The buildings on this street were more widely spaced than the ones they’d passed below. Better described as mansions than detached houses. With metal railings surrounding the gardens, gates across the driveways.
Crawford pulled over outside a house with SINCLAIR carved into a large piece of slate on the gatepost.
They got out of the car. The house faced out towards the Moray Firth, the tree-covered Black Isle beyond it. To the far west Monica could see the Beauly Firth fading into the mountains. Glen Affric, Glen Mullardoch, Glen Turrit, Glen Strathfarrar, Strathconon, and the bulk of Ben Wyvis further north with the last runnels of winter snow still clinging to it, visible through the spring haze.
‘Did you find anything else about Sebastian Sinclair?’ Monica asked, remembering their conversations the day before. ‘I haven’t had a chance to speak to Hately yet.’
‘More or less what was in that article,’ Crawford replied. ‘Sinclair Enterprises is the biggest company based in the north of Scotland. The founder, Innes Sinclair, died a few years ago, left it to his two kids, Sebastian and Heather.’ Crawford reached to hit the intercom button and after a few seconds the gate swung open. ‘One thing I didn’t realise: Innes Sinclair had a ton of small businesses. Shops, garages, hairdressers, taxi companies, you name it. Fingers in a million pies. A lot of them are still owned by the Sinclairs, apparently.’
Monica nodded, stored this piece of information away. So far her picture of Sebastian Sinclair remained frustratingly two-dimensional. Little more than a cardboard cutout of a conventional Highland businessman. Hopefully his wife can flesh him out a little for us, she thought as they walked down the driveway and saw a figure appear as a dark shadow through the glass of the front door. The woman who opened the door looked to be in her forties. She was wearing pink lipstick, and had shortish blonde hair. Styled, Monica realised, like Princess Diana’s iconic look. She was wearing a white blouse with red polka dots and a matching skirt. More glamorous than Monica had imagined the wife of her 2D version of Sebastian Sinclair to be, but in a curiously outdated way, as if she genuinely hadn’t changed her hair or wardrobe since the 1980s.
‘Karen Sinclair?’ Crawford asked. She nodded, face set firm but with the hint of a smile. Monica had the strange sense that the woman had spent her life honing this expression. Crawford held out his ID and introduced himself then gestured to Monica. ‘And this is DI Kennedy.’
‘Do you mind if we come inside?’ Monica watched the moment of alarm pass across Karen’s face: bad news on your doorstep in human form. She took a fluttery step back and gestured them in. The open-plan hall and the grand staircase overlooked by a gallery made Monica think of American TV shows sh
e landed on when she was unable to sleep and channel-hopped. An Invernessian version of The Real Housewives of Orange County. So far from the Inverness she’d grown up in, where pretty much everyone she had known lived in a council-built house or flat. Karen Sinclair led them through into a sitting room. Monica took a seat on a corner sofa and admired the high ceilings, the huge windows and the views out over the firth. Crawford sat down heavily beside her and crouched forward, hands on his knees.
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ Karen blurted, her thin arms folded across her chest. ‘The one on the television.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Monica said, doing her best to sound reassuring. ‘We won’t know for sure until the DNA results are back. But we’re very concerned for Sebastian. He’s been missing for three weeks now?’
Karen nodded. Monica watched the way her hands were now clasped anxiously in front of her.
‘Will …’ Karen’s voice died away then came back. ‘What happens to me? If it’s him?’
‘Sorry, how do you mean exactly?’
‘Do … Will I still be able to live here? They won’t try to make me leave, will they?’
‘Who would make you leave?’
‘The Sinclairs, Sebastian’s sister. They never liked me because of my family. Because we didn’t have money. Now they’ll take the house from me, won’t they?’ She sounded like a panicked child.
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