‘Did they see you?’ Jasmine asked.
‘No, I don’t think so. Perhaps. They could have, but I don’t remember them reacting. It felt as though it was happening somewhere else and I was only having a vision, like I could have walked over but not been able to touch them. I fled, though. I ran in panic, thinking I was lost in my own nightmare. Then I realised I was going to be sick, so I found a toilet. I vomited, and then after that I must have fallen asleep on the bathroom floor. I woke up maybe an hour later, an hour and a half perhaps. It was about quarter to eleven.’
‘So the festivities had started quite early that night?’
‘Earlier than usual, yes. Rehearsals just kind of broke down at about four o’clock and things deteriorated from there. I was very woozy, probably still drunk, but much calmer. Everything was calmer. There was music playing somewhere, but the house seemed still. I started to remember what had happened before I passed out, but the problem was, I couldn’t decipher whether I was remembering elements of a drunken dream or actual events.
‘With some trepidation I went back to that room, where I had seen the stabbing. There was no sign of what had been there: just an ordinary, or rather very expensive and possibly antique oak table with carved legs and a candelabra in the centre. The curtains were drawn, there were a few empty wine bottles around the mantelpiece and a smell of snuffed candles.’
‘No sheets? No bloodstains?’
‘No. I began to think I must have imagined it. I went outside. Part of me wanted to go home but another part felt I couldn’t leave the place. Mhairi might still be in there, as far as I knew. Plus there were things I wanted to understand. I didn’t want to see Adam right then, but I felt like it would be worse to just disappear, like he might be laughing about me or, worse, telling somebody. I ended up wandering in the grounds not knowing where to put myself. That was when I saw somebody dragging a body; dragging it by the legs.’
‘Did you recognise them?’
‘It was dark. I just saw shapes.’
‘How close were you?’ Fallan asked.
‘Twenty or thirty yards.’
‘Where? Were they on open ground? Gravel? Grass?’
‘The woods. They were among the trees.’
‘They? More than one person?’
‘No, I mean whoever it was and the body. But I had seen more than one figure in robes back in the room, which is why I ran when I heard someone else coming. I heard the door to the house close and footsteps on the stone stairs. I ran as quickly and as quietly as I could, all the way home.’
‘Which way?’ Fallan asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The main road or the back way?’
‘The back way. It was the shortest route home to the manse.’
Tormod glanced towards the path at the side of the churchyard, remembering his flight.
‘I spent a tortured and largely sleepless night, perhaps the worst of my life. I didn’t trust my own memory or my own senses. I didn’t know what was real and what was down to intoxication, and I wondered whether what I had seen was a manifestation of my guilt. If I had allowed something to possess me, then what might the residual effects be? But my conscience wasn’t to be denied. I had to tell the police in case what I had seen was real.
‘I spoke privately to Sergeant Strang, because I didn’t want anything down in black and white. I didn’t tell him about the drugs because I feared there would be hell to pay if the police went up to Kildrachan and seized stuff. I think he read between the lines, but I knew I could trust him.’
‘So why did you try to recant your testimony?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Callum Ross told us you came back and claimed you’d been imagining things. Why would you do that when you could trust Sergeant Strang’s discretion and when he already knew your account was potentially unreliable?’
‘Someone leaned on you, didn’t they?’ said Fallan. ‘Somebody told you to change your story or they’d broadcast your wee secret.’
Tormod swallowed, decades of doubt and regret etched upon his face. He nodded.
‘Who?’
He looked away, past the back of the churchyard, past the stone walls and the meadow, towards the woods, beyond which lay Kildrachan House. Then he answered: a single, simple word.
‘Darius.’
First Person Shooter
Duncan was in bed by the time Catherine made it home, but fortunately not yet asleep, so she went in for a few soft words and a cuddle. Six months ago she’d have been at risk of waking Fraser by allowing herself this wee indulgence, but the boys each had their own rooms now. What used to be the playroom had long been earmarked as Fraser’s future bedroom, but he was not enamoured of the idea of finding himself alone after lights out and clung to the comforts of sharing with his big brother way past his big brother’s tolerance for such a cohabitation.
She asked him what he’d done with his day. He and Fraser had been at a summer club, as although Drew wasn’t in the office this week he really needed some peace to make headway on his current project. Duncan told her at length about playing rounders, and how much more he enjoyed being on the fielding side because they’d been using proper baseball mitts. She suggested he might want to use some of his report-card money to buy a catcher’s glove of his own for playing in the garden, then made the mistake of asking, ‘Or have you already thought of something else you’d like to buy?’
He went quiet for a moment. She thought she wasn’t going to get an answer, and when he spoke again she assumed he had moved on to another subject, as was typical of his capricious thought process.
‘Greg Paterson was at summer club today,’ he began.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Well, you know you said he was a nice boy?’
‘I did. He is.’
‘Well, he’s got Trail of the Sniper for his Xbox and it’s not made him, you know, disturbed or anything.’
Oh God. It wasn’t over.
‘I know Dad said it wasn’t suitable for my age, in case it puts horrible thoughts in my head, but Greg’s had it for like a month and he’s still normal. In fact, he’s about the only boy who doesn’t go in a rage when he gets caught out at rounders.’
Catherine had to suppress a smile at the logic and the way he put it, but she was also suppressing her annoyance, and not at Duncan for his refusal to let it lie.
Drew had had words, as promised, but Duncan had read equivocation between the lines. Normally he understood that Mum and Dad were two heads on the same hydra. The boys grasped that there was little point in trying to play one off against the other when they were resolutely in agreement. Unfortunately, both Duncan and Fraser were adept at detecting the fault-lines. Drew had said his piece and handed down his ruling, but Duncan had detected his lack of conviction, same as Catherine had the night she picked a fight over it.
As she softly closed Duncan’s bedroom door she was already saddling her high horse in preparation for sallying downstairs into battle. The smell of what he was cooking wafted up to meet her, and the thought of turning dinner into another argument was enough to give her pause. Drew had done as he said he would; she couldn’t take him to task for being insufficiently convincing. That would be ridiculous.
Get a grip.
She thought of Duncan’s words, hoped she could quote them to Drew for the humour without him thinking it was an overture to digging him up.
‘Greg’s had it for like a month and he’s still normal.’
There was her fear in a nutshell, and it looked pretty silly all of a sudden.
She had argued with Drew about this, she had even been desperate enough to probe Beano about his experiences, yet she hadn’t sought the opinion of the mother and time-served police officer whose judgment she respected implicitly. Deep down she understood that this was because she already knew what Moira would say.
‘Are you daft, hen?’
Placenta-brain never wears off: you can’t think straight when it comes to your own kids. Nothing stays in
proportion. Catherine had spent a life garnering first-hand knowledge of what drove people to kill, and of what it took to execute such acts. There were a lot of things in this life that could damage children, that could take away their empathy and their innocence, and ultimately render them capable of brutal deeds in later life. Software was going to be well down that list.
She saved Duncan’s remark until they’d finished dinner, and as predicted, Drew’s laughter was tempered by a look of trepidation that he was about to be taken to task once more.
‘I did tell him that we had decided,’ he insisted. ‘I didn’t say “your mammy won’t let you”.’
‘I know, but I’ve been thinking about what you said that night, about people who disapproved of violent games never having played them. I realised it was more than just a polite way of saying I didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought just seeing them over somebody’s shoulder was enough, but the truth is I have never actually played one. I’ve never been interested; I’m not particularly interested. But I should examine the evidence.’
Drew grinned.
A few minutes later she was sitting in front of one of Drew’s computers, her husband leaning over her shoulder, launching the game for her.
‘Is this something comparable to Trail of the Sniper?’ she asked.
‘God, no. I’m not letting you near anything like that until you’ve grasped a few principles and immersed yourself properly in some gameplay. Otherwise all you’ll see is the blood and gore.’
‘So what is this?’ she asked, before the word Doom appeared on the screen, answering her question.
‘Is this the one that had you shouting at the Today programme, when John Humphrys was going on about killing people with chainsaws?’
‘No, that was Doom 3. This is seriously old-school.’
Drew showed her how to control the cursor and movement with her right hand on the mouse and her left on the keyboard, and she haltingly began manoeuvring around the virtual environment, assailed every so often by a blob of coloured pixels in a vaguely humanoid shape.
‘The graphics are like something you’d play on your phone,’ she observed.
‘I do play it on my phone,’ Drew replied. ‘But these graphics were supposedly so disturbing that the game was given an eighteen certificate at the time.’
He was serious about immersing her in the gameplay. He made her work her way through several levels, saying she wouldn’t be allowed to move on to anything else – or indeed stop – until she could make it through a map without getting killed.
‘Objective achieved, sir,’ she reported once she had lain waste to another onslaught of less-than-disturbing pixel-rendered hell-spawn.
‘Let’s move you forward a few years,’ said Drew. ‘With a wee bit of Serious Sam 2.’
This was one of the games he let the boys play, though in the interests of not prejudicing the experiment he didn’t spare her the blood and gore. It was a riot of colour, a romp across a cartoonish landscape through the eyes of a knowingly cheesy macho protagonist. She fired grenades, rockets, laser beams and cannonballs, all a simple matter of pointing and clicking.
‘When do I get to see the under-the-counter hardcore stuff?’ she asked.
‘Keep playing. I chose this because there’s a sniper rifle later in the game.’
‘Where?’
Drew brought down a command console and keyed in some code. A rifle suddenly appeared on the ground in front of her. She moved over it to pick it up, then switched to using it.
Catherine felt a moment’s unease as the wide perspective changed to the bobbing, narrow view through the simulated scope. She thought of Hamish Queen’s head, framed between similar crosshairs, but it was difficult to maintain the image when she was looking at some kind of mutant space zombie. She clicked the mouse and the zombie’s head exploded. It was hardly tasteful, but she had to concede it was unlikely to inure her to the psychological trauma of taking another human life.
She zoomed out, found another target and repeated the drill.
‘How you getting on?’ Drew asked.
It was only when she noticed him place down a refilled wine glass for her that she realised he had left the room and come back. She’d become engrossed, and she had to admit she was enjoying herself.
‘It’s laughably facile,’ she said, administering another long-distance headshot with her sniper rifle. ‘No matter the range, you just zoom in with the scroll-wheel and click. Dead-shot every time without having to bother about zeroing the …’
Christ.
And there it was: the tiny adjustment in perspective that caused the picture puzzle to look completely different.
‘What?’ Drew asked, as she hadn’t spoken, moved or even blinked for several seconds.
‘Nothing,’ she said, getting up from the PC. ‘I just need to make a quick call, then I’ll be right back.’
‘You just worked out Serious Sam is the man who can help you crack the case?’
‘Something like that.’
Moonlight Theatre
There was a clanking noise coming from somewhere as Fallan’s Land Rover made its way along the A66 into the Lake District national park. It piqued a moment’s sadness in Jasmine, as she found herself bizarrely nostalgic for the unsolved rattling sound that used to disturb her at the wheel of her lost and lamented Civic.
It was weird to think about how much the noise had worried her, what its consequences might be, what it might ultimately cost her. Every time she turned up the stereo she knew she was procrastinating, running away from a problem that would eventually have to be solved, but she had been wrong. Now the issue was completely moot, and she’d never find out what it was.
She hadn’t found out who the bastard in the silver Passat was either, but she’d stopped worrying about him too, for now at least. Maybe that was another question Russell Darius could answer.
Fallan pulled over into a layby and climbed out of the vehicle.
‘Where you going?’ she asked.
‘I keep hearing a noise, something rattling against the chassis. I’m going to take a look underneath, make sure my wee emergency kit isn’t about to come loose.’
‘Your emergency kit?’ she asked, then realised what he meant. ‘Oh. You mean you still keep a gun stashed under there,’ Jasmine said, trowelling on the disapproval in her tone.
Fallan eyed her sternly.
‘How did you say you got this guy’s address?’ he asked.
‘Police contact, via someone at Galt Linklater. I figured Darius would have rifle permits, so his details would be on file.’
‘And did you figure he would also have rifles?’
She had to concede it was a fair point.
When they were investigating the Ramsay case Jasmine recalled telling Fallan that she didn’t want him carrying guns around her. She also recalled subsequently telling him, once they’d been shot at a few times, to ignore her if she said anything so daft in future.
They were on their way to challenge the man who had killed Tessa Garrion, and most likely Hamish Queen too. It was unlikely that the mere revelation of their knowledge would cause him to cower in shame and surrender. A gun would probably help.
Jasmine had reckoned she would be a very long time waiting for a reply from Darius, far less an invitation to pop round for a chat, and had decided just to brazen it out and confront him. In terms of the investigation, there was really nothing else left that she could do.
She had found a possible lead buried amid what little information the police had revealed about Hamish Queen’s murder, but it was tentative, not a matter she was in a position to move on until she had received confirmation of something from an official source. If there was one thing she had learned on this investigation, it was that people wouldn’t talk until you had something on them. Thus she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere by door-stepping someone with a theatre connection simply because her name was Veronica, especially when Jasmine’s next question was r
egarding her part in a drug-fuelled satanic ritual that ended in murder.
‘Oh no, I think you must have me confused with somebody else, dear.’
Fallan popped back up from under the vehicle, his inspection complete.
‘It’s the exhaust,’ he announced with a frown. ‘It’s ready to fall off.’
Fallan turned the Land Rover around and drove back ten or twelve miles to a town where he’d noticed a Kwik-Fit garage as they passed through. He left the vehicle with the mechanics and suggested they grab a bite to eat while they waited for the exhaust to be replaced.
About a quarter of a mile from the garage they found a pub that looked like a Constable painting with a beer garden. They ordered food at the bar and it was brought to them outside, where they sat at a trestle table, Fallan facing the street, Jasmine with a view of what the menu informed her was an eighteenth-century coaching inn.
They sat and ate, easy in each other’s company. They could have been two more tourists, enjoying dinner outside on a warm summer’s evening as the sun began to dip. She wondered what they looked like to the people at the other tables. Good friends, perhaps? Lovers? God, no. Please don’t anyone be thinking that.
Father and daughter?
Jasmine was finishing off the last of her lemonade when Fallan’s face did that thing, a sudden alertness to his features, like a dog that’s just smelled trouble long before the humans will see or hear anything. However, he didn’t throw her to the floor or initiate any other dramatic action. Instead, he bowed his head just a little lower over his plate and took a mouthful of food, as though nothing had happened.
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