by Caro Ramsay
Mathieson sat down and clicked a few buttons on the computer. She reached round to retrieve her cup of coffee, took a sip, her eyes off the screen for a full ninety seconds. She glanced at it as she rearranged a file from the left side to the right as it was impinging on her view. She flicked it open to check the date on her timeline of Costello’s ‘last seen’. She hoped this film would tell them something one way or the other as she wanted some closure on Costello’s case, they all needed it. Mathieson, despite her reputation, had a lot of empathy for Costello, but the DI needed to be brought back into the fold, no matter what she had done.
Costello did not have the record of a dodgy cop. In some ways, she had a worse issue; she was moralistic and that was an easier recruit to vigilantism. Mathieson could paint that scenario easily, she could understand it perfectly.
She clicked play and let the screen change, still not paying it much attention, somebody shouted from the opposite side of the room about a sandwich order that was going down to Subway. She asked for a twelve-inch wholemeal with avocado, chicken and all the salad, but no peppers, before adding a packet of Doritos. She could be here all night and she could never work with an empty stomach.
Mathieson turned back to the computer and began to watch, noting the time the film started with a view of a blade of grass glinting and quivering with perfect spheres of rainwater. It was 21.27. A slight frown appeared on her forehead, both in concentration and concern. She had been expecting the long view clarity of CCTV. Due to the incidents on the loch in the recent weeks, all the CCTV cameras at the car park at Inveruglass had been turned along the shoreline or out onto the islands themselves. This was digital video taken by a camera that had been set to film anything it caught in its sightline.
She was worried about what was coming next, watching with a weird mixture of elation and horror in her stomach. She might be a bitch but she knew to admit when she had been wrong.
The camera had been set to look out over the water, moving slightly when buffeted by the wind or when Kieran adjusted its position. Occasionally a white cloth covered the lens, wiping it clear of rain. For a while the screen was filled with an image of the loch, nothing more, nothing moving but the raindrops pattering on the surface. The camera was being switched on and off, the clock changed, moving on only by a minute or so. Kieran was obviously switching it on when he thought he saw some movement, then he would focus in on something in the water that proved to be imaginary. Then the camera would pull back, going in search of something more promising.
Mathieson was trying to think of Kieran lying on his stomach at the top of the hill, a few metres higher than the viewpoint. Instead of the clear view right down the loch, a famous view often seen on postcards, Kieran had picked this spot for the clear view to the island, looking east rather than south east. From where he was looking, the car park would be behind and below him, over his right shoulder.
Then the camera jerked, as if it had got a fright. Mathieson could imagine Kieran hearing something that made him turn. The camera moved along the ground slightly, blades of grass came close as the camera dropped. Kieran was now closer to the ground. Hiding? It was more of a pull back into cover than a fall. Mathieson frowned. The film of grass getting wet with raindrops continued, with no further movement. Was that it? Kieran had dropped the camera at the first sign of trouble and the film had caught nothing more?
But the camera kept filming, minutes passed. Mathieson was about to sip her coffee when she saw something. She could make out the top of a figure on the right side of the frame, a mound of dark, the head and shoulders swaying from side to side with the effort of climbing the steep hill up from the viewpoint. She wished she had visited that scene herself, then she might have a better idea of the lie of the land. The camera was near the water’s edge but in an elevated position, the walker was coming up from the car park, she thought. The figure stood at the top of the hill, looking out over the water with no idea he was being filmed. So that meant the camera had already been abandoned or Kieran was very well hidden. Or this visitor had no notion to look around for a covert cameraman. From the darkness of the film she couldn’t make out who it was, but he was well dressed for the weather and didn’t really seem bothered about being seen. Then someone else appeared, quickly from the left screen.
The attack was swift and brutal, three low level stabs before the first figure had time to turn around. Mathieson let out an involuntary squeal, and pulled back, her colleagues turned to look at her. The first figure was now on his knees, the camera caught the flash of a blade. She put her coffee down.
Bannon came over, to stand behind her, looking over her shoulder, watching as the knife went in again and again. She pressed pause as the man in the anorak turned towards the camera, trying to get away.
Mathieson took one look at his face.
‘Donnie, Donnie. What the hell did you get yourself into?’
Anderson sat on the side of the table, perching himself there, comfortable with the situation. Alastair Patrick was standing in the corner, his legs locked at the knee, arms folded, his jaw tight, unreadable. Anderson was wary where Patrick’s allegiance lay. His demeanour was not that of a detective who had just bought into custody a murderer, or a rapist. It was more like the local drunk had been brought in for pissing into the harbour again.
Anderson was keeping his own allegiance neutral. Mathieson had updated him on the contents of the file using the word ‘military’ to describe the stealth of the fatal assault on Donnie McCaffrey on Loch Lomondside. His eyes swivelled to Patrick as he updated her on the orange carpet and that it might be worth a look at the HikeLite website, he said quietly when Patrick’s own mobile had distracted his attention.
Sometimes the better dance was with the devil.
Anderson handed over a mug of soup made by Patrick’s wife; Oscar Duguid looked like he needed it.
‘So, welcome back from the dead, Oscar. How does it feel?’
‘I’m not proud of what I did. But I did need to do it.’ He sipped his soup savouring it, his lips making smacking noises. Anderson heard Patrick move behind him, readjusting his position. He could feel the tension from the other man’s body. Somebody here had a secret.
Oscar Andrew Duguid, clean, beard trimmed, sat in the small interview room at Port MacDuff, he seemed to have shrunk from the ambling man that rolled out of Anderson’s arms, then helped him out the icy waters of the stream.
Anderson was patient, waiting for Oscar to feel comfortable enough to start talking. Starting at the beginning and working his way to the end. Anderson was interested in where Oscar was going to start, suspecting that the story might start much further back than Oscar might be willing to reveal. Maybe as far back as Jennifer.
There was no talk, no eye contact so Anderson thought he had better jumpstart the conversation.
‘Whose idea was it to fake your own death?’
Oscar screwed up his face, rubbing his thumbs deep into his eyes and shaking his head. But there was no answer.
‘You do remember Mary Jane.’
‘Of course I do.’ The voice was strong, sounded intelligent and eloquent.
Anderson pushed a picture across the top of the table to him, the picture George had given to him. Oscar didn’t look at it before turning it over and pushing it away.
Anderson tapped the back of the photograph. ‘That was my daughter, that girl you adopted was my daughter. You going missing sparked off a chain of events that led to her death, so don’t give me any shit about what a hard life you have had.’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ said Oscar. ‘It’s my loss too.’
‘Of course, but you did know that she had died.’
He nodded.
‘And how do you know that, if you are living in the middle of nowhere, out of touch with society?’ Anderson leaned back in his seat. ‘Who told you? You are no Bear Grylls, so somebody is helping you. Who?’
Oscar Duguid closed his eyes in a very deliberate slow blink.
‘This is a place where people come to run away, they are very good at hiding you here. Walking around, how many different accents have you already heard? All those home counties professionals that couldn’t take it anymore and had to get away.’
‘Very few went to the lengths of faking their own deaths.’
‘I just wanted to disappear.’
‘So how did it go, you bought a small dinghy.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘OK, somebody did. Somebody bought one for you, from somewhere. Might be a bit obvious if they found the Jennifer Rhu burning, the small boat still attached but a second boat you had just purchased was gone. Nobody had to know about the second small boat that actually got you off the Jennifer Rhu and back to shore. So who bought you that? Who was your partner in crime?’ Anderson folded his arms. ‘And to be clear, it was a crime.’
It was a guess but he knew he had struck gold. There was a mastermind in this and it wasn’t Oscar Duguid. His gut feeling was that Oscar was a man in search of nothing more but a quiet life.
‘It’s all nothing to do with me. I’m happy sitting in the corner of the pub, or in the back room, eating the leftovers, having a shower, moving around but mostly living up there near the lodge. It’s fine in the summer, not best in the winter. The winters are tough,’ he said, touching the reddened skin of his cheek, as if it was still tender. ‘I have a hut. It’s fine.’
A look passed from Oscar to Patrick. All he got back was a brief nod. It was not returned. Anderson made a note to search the hut.
‘Who bought the second boat? We need a name?’
It came as no surprise when Oscar Dugiud’s lips opened to form the name. ‘It was George Haggerty.’
The story that Oscar Duguid told was frightening in its simplicity. He had a boat and he was a good sailor. George Haggerty had bought a small boat with an onboard motor months before in Glasgow. Nothing that could be traced back to either of them. Oscar sailed out, set his boat on fire before returning to shore on George’s boat. Then he tied it back up again behind the yacht George had owned at that time. He left his own dinghy tied to the burning remains of the Jennifer Rhu.
‘The Jennifer Rhu?’ asked Anderson, ‘Named after?’
‘Jennifer Argyll,’ he said through a painful smile. ‘She was a crush of mine. She needed to be remembered.’
‘More than Abigail?’
‘Yes. Oh yes. If I had stayed married I would have died. My life was managed from the minute I got up to when my head hit the pillow. The life of being a husband and father wasn’t for me. I had to bail out. Nobody’s fault, I’m just no good with four walls, pension schemes and thirty-five hour weeks. At the time, nobody said anything apart from how sorry they were. We got away with it.’
Oscar was used to sailing off on his own, it raised no suspicions. They found the boat still burning and the presence of the dinghy alongside suggested he had tried to free it but had fallen overboard. Search and rescue found nothing. There was nothing to find.
‘Who insured your life for two million pounds?’ asked Anderson, and saw Patrick’s eyes narrow and flicker. He hadn’t been expecting that.
‘I did.’
‘Who advised you to do that?’
‘A friend.’
‘A particular friend?’
Patrick was paying a lot of attention now.
‘George Haggerty.’
‘Of course it was. And what did you think when Abigail was insured for two million and she was then murdered, with all that money going to … oh yes, her husband. George Haggerty.’
‘I didn’t get a penny.’ Oscar looked a little confused.
And looking at him, Anderson believed him. ‘Of course you didn’t, you were dead. Abigail got it, and now George has it.’
He had escaped the madness of his married nine-to-five life to escape to a different madness of this life up here. This was where he wanted to be, where he was born. And then he started mumbling about wanting to be here with Jennifer.
He heard Patrick sigh, Anderson felt that he was kicking a puppy. This man needed help.
‘Do you want to rebuild the lodge, Oscar?’ he asked gently.
And then Oscar began to cry.
Patrick tapped Anderson on the shoulder, time to call it a day.
‘Was it all back to bricks and mortar?’ he muttered as Oscar was taken away.
‘Life’s loss but I bet the money will be useful, though not to him,’ said Patrick in response. ‘Not bricks and mortar. Cocaine.’
‘What?’
Patrick’s voice was low. ‘Look, the North Coast 500 is a gift to a dealing network. The place floods with tourists. Then consider that anybody who builds on land on that route is on the gravy train for life. Somebody couldn’t see a way of bridging that gap between what they had and what they needed. So they killed until they got what they wanted. The oldest motive in the book. Money. Pure greed.’
‘They killed Abigail and Malcolm for that?’ Anderson sat back down.
‘Looks like it.’
‘Do you know who they are? Anything to do with a company that might be driving luggage around the North Coast 500, specifically?’
Patrick gave a short sad smile, ‘Yes, but it will break somebody’s heart.’
One of the men looked right into the camera. The camera jumped, and rolled to the side, the world tumbled making Bannon and Mathieson both twist their heads as they tried to make out what they were seeing. A dark figure moving toward it very quickly, and then veered off to the right.
‘I think that’s where the boy makes a run for it. He gets chased and we know what happens next.’
The camera was still moving, sliding to the left towards the drop to the water where it was found. There was a jerky image of the female figure walking backwards, then dropping to the ground, and clumsily getting to her feet again. Then the screen filled with movement of limbs and shadows, that image was lost as the camera became airborne and started to film grass and sky. Then the screen filled with dark, murky water.
‘Bloody hell, what was that about? What were they doing there?’
‘Diane, you need to get that middle section slowed and analyzed.’ Bannon realized that the DCI was shaking. It wasn’t easy to watch the death of a colleague, unable to do anything about it. Except catch the man who had used that knife.
‘Why don’t you go and put the kettle on? I’ll get a note of the timings, there’s one bit where the second attacker looks right at the camera. The tech boys will be able to catch that and work it up. We’ve got one of them, Diane. He’s on a shoogily peg, it’s a matter of time.’
‘They might be able to do something, but the lower part of his face is covered. Don’t get your hopes up. They killed McCaffrey. That student was very lucky to survive and I don’t think Costello, if that was Costello, would have been able to get out of there alive.’
They were settled down for a second viewing of the film, fortified with black coffee and the knowledge of what they were about to see, they hoped they could watch it this time with more analysis and less emotion.
‘That look like McCaffrey to you?’ asked Mathieson.
They watched as the guy on the ground tried to get back up before they saw the blade again. The guy on the ground then stopped moving.
‘Was he dealing? That looks like an organized take down,’ offered Bannon.
‘There’s no evidence of that anywhere in his life, he was a normal young man with a wife and kids. How the hell did he get into this? Shit! Who is that?’
Another figure appeared.
‘That’s a female. What the hell is she doing?’
‘Walking backwards? There’s somebody behind her, she’s talking to them, hands up trying to appease them. The camera has moved to follow, showing that Kieran was still filming. He got the murder on film.’ Only seven minutes had passed. They both leaned forwards, watching carefully as the smaller figure turned to the camera and seemed to fly through the air with such force that h
er body juddered as she impacted the ground. The bigger figure, walking up behind her, was still bringing his arm down, following through from the strike to the back of her head.
The enhanced film moved frame by frame showing two dark figures started moving, pulling at clothes. They took their time, confident that they would not be seen, unaware of the low light camera watching from the undergrowth. They had on gloves, their faces covered, clearly very forensically aware. They were wearing something like black boiler suits.
‘What is going on here?’
‘Mixing the blood, the DNA? I don’t know. So we have Donnie, two assailants and one other unidentified … victim? He’s pouring the contents of a bottle. Do you think that’s cheap whisky? And what’s he doing?’ One of them had pulled back Donnie’s face and was tapping something in it. The taller one kicked the prostate small figure with his foot, the hat slid slightly to reveal some short blonde hair. Mathieson groaned.
‘Well we know what happened,’ said Bannon over her shoulder. ‘We need to know who those two are? Any ideas?’
‘Too clean to be regular drug take downs. That looks military to me.’
‘Let’s go through the file again. And you’d better phone Anderson and tell him, I’m sure he’d like to know.’
THIRTEEN
Friday, 1st of December
Morna got up, thinking how cold and damp the house was. She walked into the shower, letting hot water run over her, wondering if they had enough bread left to make toast for breakfast. Neil had forgotten to get any shopping. She needed to feed Finn before she delivered him to her mother’s so she could get to work.
When she got dressed, she walked into her son’s room to start the difficult task of waking up her six-year-old. The room was very cold, the air damp, the curtains at the window billowing, lifting the hem from the carpet. She turned round, looking at the bed, the shape of the duvet, ruffled up on the bed like a small log. Before she reached out to it, she knew her hand would go right down until it reached the mattress. The bed was empty.