by Caro Ramsay
That would be for a prosecution, Ahern knew that and knew that some defence counsel would argue some shite about the wee bastards being brought up on a council estate and deprived of the newest iPhone or designer jeans, or a job or a sense of self-respect. Aye well, self-respect came from yourself in Ahern’s opinion, nobody else. You believed in yourself and others followed suit. Nobody could take your self-respect away, you had to give it away.
It made Ahern’s blood boil, he had let it be known that he would do time for the wee shites. He’d take his bloody shotgun out and blow the shit they had for brains to where the sun didn’t shine. The violence towards the animals angered him, the senselessness of it enraged him. But the lack of respect? That really got to him. It was everywhere in society these days.
As he walked on, in teaming rain that was caught by the gusty wind, hitting him in the face then snatching at the skin at the back of his head, he amused himself by considering how he would do it if he ever caught the perpetrators. He would take his time about it too, taking them one at a time, so they each knew what was coming. He was even thinking of some way he could get the boat away if they were on the island, so they would be stranded. And he would leave them there. He could sit on the shore and watch them as they waved for help, he’d wave back. They all had bloody mobile phones nowadays so they’d call the cruise services and get picked up and then blame the national park management or the social services when all the really needed was a loaded shotgun up their arse. And a twitchy finger on the trigger.
Ahern trudged up the hill walking south to the visit centre at Inveruglass, which had been ruined by that stupid viewing tower that folk kept setting on fire. They should ban the whole bloody lot of them; he walked on, gaining height until he saw his first full view of the loch. It was leaving eight thirty, the first hesitant flicker of dawn haloed the Ben. Every day it made his heart ache as it had done for the last fifty years, sixty years if he was honest. Bar deaths, marriages, two weeks annual holiday, he had been here every day, and even on his holidays he went north to look at Loch Maree instead.
Then he smelt it. Something bloody in the air, in the rain. And the blood was relatively fresh. His fury boiled over, he started cursing, battering the longer brown ferns with his walking stick, looking to spot the body of another animal in his torch beam. A deer from the look of it. He was furious, more death, more waste of life lost by the mindless acts of those less worthy.
He sniffed the air, thinking how unusually strong the smell was. He stepped through the wet grass, slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes low but following the scent of the blood, and there it was. Well, there it wasn’t.
A flattened area of grass, blades bent and broken, over a large area and the smell of blood hanging in the mist. Lots of blood, whatever had died here must have been a big animal. He walked around a little, the beam catching footprints in the mud. Trying to keep clear of them so he didn’t mess it up for the wildlife unit and any further prosecution. He rubbed at his beard, this might be some of the evidence they were waiting for. Something had died here, but he wanted to be sure, so he looked around for the signs of an illegal snare or a trap. Finding nothing, he sighed and swallowed his anger before walking down to the café where Belinda had a mobile phone. The café wouldn’t be open yet, but Belinda would be in and she’d report it for him.
Hannah was worried. The woman had come back from X-ray, there was a fracture in her occiput that had been the result of a blunt force trauma. But what worried her more was the smell of drink that had vanished when she took the clothes off her. The smell had followed the clothes to the bag. The woman’s breath was clean, minty if anything, her hair smelled of shampoo – who shampooed over a huge head wound? Well, the answer to that was any Glaswegian drunk who got into a fight.
The day shift were talking about doing a rape kit. There was no chance of getting informed consent, but she could try and talk her round. Maybe get the patient to understand, talk her through it and see if she could be made to understand. But if it was true that the woman had suffered a very stressful event, been subject to physical violence, then showered, then that added up to some kind of sexual assault. Maybe from her permanent abuser. If there was any evidence it would probably have gone down the plughole.
Hannah believed there was a positive side to everything. The patient’s psychotic break was doing its job, protecting the victim, keeping out the traumatic memories until psyche was strong enough to recall them. If she was a victim of a sexual attack, she was very calm, too calm. Hannah had seen that many times too, that ability to hand themselves over to a caring person but this one was more wary, far more calculating than distressed.
They were waiting for a psychiatric bed then there would be further assessments, so God alone knew how long that would be. At least she had been moved to a room rather than a cubicle with a curtain round her, dressed in a hospital gown, her head wound covered by a light dressing. Anything was better than lying on a trolley in an examination room, with everybody and their mother popping through to borrow this and that and never returning it.
She seemed to be able to hear, to understand, but did not speak or respond in any way, except … well, she did. Hannah couldn’t pinpoint the common factor. The hospital didn’t faze her at all. Was she a nurse somewhere, a cleaner, maybe a doctor? A light bulb went on in Hannah’s head. Was that why the wound was cleaned? Something she maybe did by instinct, with a first aid kit or something.
Hannah found it all very confusing, but she had been told to stay here, keep monitoring her vitals, to get some form of communication going and get consent or even an ID. All hell was let loose around her as a couple came in high on all sorts of substances. She heard raised voices, swearing, then something being pushed and then a smash of something glass being broken, followed by the thump thump of security boots hurrying to the scene. Hannah felt she had had the Sunday night shift easy.
The blonde woman was lying easier now, head back, her hair swept up off her face. They had got the age wrong, Hannah thought, this woman was younger than her sixties, fifties maybe. Hannah had gone through her clothes and found nothing. Her clothes were clean apart from the bloodstains and she had good teeth, her nails were clean and cut evenly, no ingrained dirt. Two things that are rarely found on any poor bugger who is living on the street. She could have been foreign, so Hannah tried a few languages she knew hello in. The woman was fair-skinned so that cut out the Middle or the Far East, but she could be Eastern European or Scandinavian or any of those new countries that Hannah didn’t really know the whereabouts of.
She nipped out to the main desk and picked up the laminated sheet with Hello, you are in a hospital, written on it in many languages. She showed it to the woman who looked at it, reached out a hand to take it. Hannah held her breath thinking that the woman was processing the writing and was going to point at one, or point at one and then say something.
She handed the laminated sheet back.
Hannah tried to explain that they were keeping her in for observation, to make sure she didn’t have a brain bleed. ‘Did somebody hit you over the head?’ Hannah asked, lifting her own hand up as if she was going to hit herself. ‘Did somebody punch you in the eye?’ she mimed this also. The grey eyes looked right through her; they turned at the crackle of a police radio outside the room.
It looked like, to Hannah’s mind, and Hannah loved mystery writing, that the woman had been assaulted. She had been caught by the shoulder, bruised and sore, hit over the head, the slashes on her back and lower arms were, well, one directional? Then she had been stabbed, but she had pulled away at the last minute. Was that possible, a sign that she had been running, a knife went out and the victim twisted as he caught her, she had put her arms up to protect herself, somebody had battered her on the head then got her on the ground and kicked her. That was what it looked like, she had worked in A & E for five years now. She had seen it all. Except why do that when they had a knife on her?
And, the woma
n was behaving as if she was safe in here.
Which, Hannah concluded, meant she might not feel safe outside or at home? If she had been battered by her hubby or partner then they wouldn’t have listed her as missing. They would need to wait until a friend or a family member did that?
Or was this a sanctuary? Hannah turned back to look at her as the grey eyes followed her every move, not dull or dazed but alert. Hannah smiled; the woman’s mouth twitched as if she had been going to smile then remembered the game she was playing.
Hannah told her they would get her a cup of something once the doctors had cleared that, in case she needed an operation. No response. The doctor would be here in a minute – no response. In the NHS a minute can be a long time – no response.
She placed the switch for the buzzer in her hand, the patient took it. She put on a heart monitor as her pulse was fast but weak, and an oxygen tube on her top lip. All her vital signs were indicative of blood loss but there wasn’t that much blood on her … It must be somewhere.
She left the cubicle to update the police. Her shift was over. Usually she was glad to be going home but not this time, she would like to stay to see how this panned out.
After talking to the duty doctor, Hannah tried an age-old trick, came in with a cup of tea and asked the woman if she would like it. The woman didn’t respond in any language, except to hold out her hand for the tea, and proceed to drink it.
Well, that told her nothing, except the woman drank black tea and that there was nothing wrong with her vision.
Morna Taverner stood by the window staring into the rain-drenched street and tried not to make it too obvious that she was waiting. She loved her husband dearly, she loved her son and she loved her mother. She wished that some of them, any of them, or all of them, could be exactly where they were supposed to be. The child was in the bath – she could hear Finn doing his impersonation of the Death Star, so there would be more water on the bathroom floor than in the bath. Neil wasn’t home from work yet, and he was supposed to be. He wasn’t answering his mobile so he would be driving or out at a remote B and B to drop off luggage for those who thought it was fun to walk twenty miles a day in the freezing cold, pissing rain then go and sleep in a plastic bag in a field or in a stranger’s lumpy bed. Morna thought they were bloody mad, but their madness did pay for her to go to Lanzarote once a year and it financed Neil’s dream of building their forever home.
She leaned on the windowsill, peering through the glass. Should she phone her mum again? Mum had said she was just leaving the farm so she would be on her way and not able to answer if she was driving, not on these narrow country roads with their deceitful turns and hidden bends, much worse in this bloody weather and the bloody tourists doing three miles an hour on the single track road enjoying what they could see of the scenery.
Morna was needed at work and she was keen to go. She had to drive to Raigmore Hospital, two hours if she got a clear run. Somebody, or some body she corrected herself, had been attacked and left on the top of the Bealach Na Ba.
Morna fingered her mobile in her pocket. Patrick, her DCI, had phoned her twice now. She really wanted this job and if she wasn’t able to respond quickly then he would call another DC. He had a mental list that he would work through and Morna was close to the top, born and living in Port MacDuff with a good local knowledge. She wanted the job and didn’t want to pass it up. Something terrible had happened up on the Bealach, she was sure of it, and if DCI Patrick had contacted her … well, she was keen to get on and show her competencies. She wasn’t going to get anywhere if she had to say to her boss again, yes I’d like to come in and help out, I know I am late for work but there is nobody here to look after the wee guy and take him to school so on you go and I’ll catch up with you when I can.
She could imagine how well that would go down.
Why did he phone her? Was it because of something that she was already working on? Like that cut the list of possibilities down to anything. Or maybe … she cheered up as she saw some lights on the road, a car coming … then her heart sank as it went past the bottom of the road. Not her mother then. Shite, she was going to be really late.
And she didn’t want to be, not after all that time off after the accident.
She looked out the window, hearing Finn splashing in the bath, all was dark outside.
Was it her pet project? Had he seen a link with that and that was why he had phoned? Patrick had warned her about becoming obsessed with the rape she was trying to link with other similar crimes. The disappearance of Jennifer Argyll in 1987 was not an isolated event. Jennifer had been the start of something, she was sure of it. Well, she was sure of it. And DCI Patrick had heard her out, he had looked at the file saying nothing as she spoke, voicing her thoughts and suspicions. He let her run out of steam, and then said, quietly, in that very direct way he had, that a database was only that. Ask it a stupid question and it will give you a stupid answer. Well, she could recall his exact words. All he had really said was ‘Shit in equalled shit out’.
Morna had taken that to mean she was asking the wrong questions of the database, rather than ‘stop wasting police time’. A few minutes here and there, she was back on it. Patrick knew she was still trawling the system, she wasn’t hiding it from him, or drawing his attention to it, but she logged the minutes, and when he saw them he gave her a wry smile. He was a man of few words. That rare smile translated as ‘God loves a trier’.
She turned back into the room and gave the logs on the fire another wee poke, closing the door tightly and closing the vents. She had stuck a towel over the radiator when she got the first call, but that had cooled off now. Last night Finn had been painting a wizard’s outfit for a party later in the week, and had left the mask on the radiator to dry. It had a wide smile and huge ears, giving it a passing resemblance to Prince Charles at the dentist. Morna remembered she had forgotten to buy a present for whoever’s birthday it was. She’d ask another mum. She looked out the window one last time, saw no car, then walked into the kitchen to write a reminder for the party on the blackboard that held her shopping list. She squirted some hand cream onto her chapped, bleeding hands and waved her fingers about drying them in the cold air.
Then Finn was shouting that he wanted out the bath so she grabbed the Darth Vader towel from the radiator and rushed down the hall. Finn was doing his impersonation of the Death Star while lying face down in the near empty bath, a snorkel covering his face.
‘Up,’ she said, ‘out.’
He climbed out the bath, this pale-skinned creature with endless bendy limbs, red-headed and freckled. The Death Star kept pinging, the snorkel was steaming up, and Finn was waving a grey plastic X-wing above his head, keeping it to its deadly mission. He swapped it from hand to hand as he slipped his arms in his vest, then his school shirt, then his jumper. She picked him up, carrying him into the living room where his socks and wellies were warming in front of the dying fire.
She checked the clock.
‘I have to go out now.’
‘No mummy,’ he sighed, wriggling and kicking as she tried to get socks on his feet, then the wellies on his legs.
‘You will have to go next door until Granny gets here, then go to school.’
‘Haribos?’
‘No. That’s a Thursday. You get Haribos on a Thursday.’
‘What day is it today?’ The X-wing executed an impressive turn.
‘The day after Sunday.’
‘Wednesday?’
‘Nope, try again.’
‘Can I get Haribos?’
‘Nope.’ She stood him back up, his head like an orange porcupine. She tightened the belt of his house coat then marched him, and the X-wing, out to the hall where she put an old waxed jacket over his shoulders. It was long enough to touch the floorboards. Then she plonked a flat cap on his head.
Brora looked up, but the collie judged it was too wet to be bothered about going for a walk so she promptly went back to sleep.
Morna opened the front door and shoved the boy out into the rain, frogmarching him down their short front path, through the gate then up the path of the neighbour’s house. The three stories of the terraced looked gloomy and menacing in the glare of the streetlamps. The small windows looked mean; the dark closed curtains looked hostile.
Not the sort of place to run to if you were young, vulnerable and in trouble. A place where you could walk out the village and disappear. Like Jennifer Argyll.
The neighbour’s front door opened immediately, Lachlan had heard her own door close no doubt and had a fair idea what was coming. He was dressed but looked as if he hadn’t showered or combed his hair, the white streak in his hair was curled into a corkscrew. ‘When you have to go, you have to go, Morna. Alastair has already phoned me.’
‘Really?’ she was annoyed that the shortcomings of her family had been so predictable to her boss.
‘You want me to look after the lad.’
‘Just for a couple of minutes. Mum will be here soon. Or if not, can you take him to school.’
‘No problem, just watch yourself in that weather.’ Lachlan placed his huge hand on Finn’s head and guided both boy and X-wing into the house. ‘He’ll be OK here.’ He looked up into the ebony sky then at her, his brown eyes creased slightly, an old cop looking at the young generation.
Morna turned to walk back down the path, pulling up her hood. ‘Did Alastair say anything? Is it about Jennifer?’
‘No. But I doubt it, why would it be? Take care,’ and the door closed over, one final ping of the Death Star sonar.