by Tom Clancy
Minutes after Sergeant Barry announced the Herc was coming up on Cold Corners, Nimec felt its skis deploy with a thump. Then it made a sharp left turn, and the level white spread of the airfield swelled into his window.
On the ground at last, Nimec unbuckled, zipped into his parka, shouldered his bags, and went about exchanging farewells with the airmen.
The wind was staggering as he descended the exit ramp to the field. A downscaled version of Willy, it had a more modest complement of personnel shuttles and freight haulers waiting to meet the plane. Also present was a small welcoming committee clad in the ubiquitous cardinal-red survival gear. It seemed colder here than at McMurdo, and the party’s members wore full rubber face masks that rendered them indistinguishable from each other. Nimec saw somebody he guessed was its leader step toward the plane ahead of the rest.
Nimec had taken about two steps toward the shuttle bus when that same person rushed over and swept him into a tight, eager embrace.
“Pete.” A woman’s voice through the mask, muffled but familiar. And close against his face. “God, I’ve missed you something awful.”
Nimec’s surprise dissolved in a flash of happiness. He smiled openly for the first time in hours, ignoring the raw sting of the wind on his lips.
“Same here, Meg,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.
EIGHT
SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS
GORRIE WAS STOPPED AT A RUSTY OLD PUMP AT A little service station south of Newtonmore, working its hose toward the rear of his hatchback, when another driver pulled up on the opposite side of the island, exited his Vectra, and went around to stand alongside him.
“You’ll want to let me piss in your tank before filling it from that pump,” the man said. “Healthier for the engine, guaranteed to be more economical.”
Gorrie waved the fuel nozzle at a paper coffee cup on his trunk.
“No, thanks,” he said. “But you ought to make that bloke in the convenience shop a like offer before he puts up another pot of spew.”
“Really?” The man broke into a grin. “Well, I’ve got news, it’s already done. What else you think you’ve been sipping right there?”
Gorrie grinned back at him.
“How’ve you been, Conall?”
“You mean before or after motoring fifty kilometers through the fog?”
“Och, you’re reminding me of Nan,” Gorrie said. “I’d expect you’d be grateful, consider it a holiday to be rescued from your shoebox office in Dundee.”
Conall snorted. “Got me on that,” he said.
They extended their hands, shook vigorously.
Gorrie opened his gas tank door, unscrewed its cap, inserted the fuel nozzle, and squeezed the handle, feeling in vain for a lock to hold it in the “on” position. It would have been nice if his coffee were drinkable, he thought. Conall hadn’t griped for nothing. The weather was indeed drearily foul, with occasional plops of rain and soft hail coming out of the smoky gray mist.
The pump’s sluggish dial readouts were turning behind a scuffed, grime-smeared glass panel.
“All right,” Gorrie said. “What have you brought to make me happy?”
“And violate enough of the Procurator Fiscal’s rules to get me fired from my job several times over?”
“That too.”
Conall reached into an inside pocket of his leather car coat. He took out a cardboard floppy-disc mailer.
“Here you go,” he said, passing it to Gorrie. “Preliminary lab results on your fallen peach and her husband.”
Gorrie nodded, stuffing the mailer into his own topcoat.
“Appreciate it,” he said. “Don’t suppose you had a chance to give the files a look.”
Conall shook his head.
“Afraid not,” he said. “But I hear the coroner’s ready to confirm the deaths a murder-suicide, issue a report that’ll put the inquiry to a fast and easy rest.”
Gorrie considered that a moment, then shrugged.
“We’ll see, brother-in-law,” he said, and finished gassing up.
“What about my redhead?” asked Gorrie.
“Aye, that’s where you have yourself a piece of something to match the weather,” said Conall. He took the gas pump and held it out like a pointer. “An interesting case.”
“And?”
“Report is nae finished.”
“Conall—come now. Not a hint?”
His brother-in-law leaned back on the blue fender of his car and shined an idiot grin. Then he began pumping fuel into his Vectra.
“I suppose this will cost me a pint or two around Easter,” offered Gorrie finally.
“I was thinking of those fine cigars ye had at Christmas.”
“That was Fennel had ’em, not me.”
“Fennel and you are close as stones in a castle wall.”
“I’ll send my sergeant after the report.”
“The sergeant you complained had flown off to Paris for a job hunting art thieves? The lass who has not been replaced despite your crying buckets of tears to the superintendent.”
“Not to the superintendent.”
His brother-in-law smiled. “Ten cigars.”
“Two. They’re five pounds apiece.”
“I suppose you’ll find out soon enough through official channels.”
“Three.”
Conall returned the nozzle to the pump. “Truth is, the lab report won’t tell you anything, save the T4 is more than a wee bit high, above 37 ug/dLs. Very high, that. She had a great deal of phenylephrine hydrochloride in her stomach as well. Now, if you cared to get technical—”
“Conall, you’re irritating my nerves,” said Gorrie. “What does it mean?”
“Five cigars?”
“I’ll see what I can do about the cigars, lad. I’ll do my best.”
“She had no thyroid. She was taking artificial thyroid hormone because she’d just had her thyroid taken out. Cancer, I suspect.”
“And?”
“Well, she took too much of it, you understand. The hormone. That’s the T4. You’ll have to fish out the medical records, but the thinking is she forgot what she was doing and took two pills a day instead of one, two or three times. And then she took the cold medicine and it gave her a stroke. Far too much of that too. Small dose together might even have killed her, but here there was no chance. Some people have no sense when they’re medicating themselves.”
“Stroke?”
“Aye. Bad luck. Sort of thing they warn you about at the chemist. It could also be suicide, I guess. But it’d be a very clever way to do it—too clever. Easier to get a gun like the Mackay woman.”
“Getting a gun is not that easy for most of us,” noted Gorrie. They hadn’t been able to trace the weapon, though he’d put DC Andrews back on it three days before.
Conall shrugged. “More than likely it was an accident. Medicine was taken off the market a year or two ago.”
“Matched the type on the floor?”
“I believe that will be the report.”
“Do you ha’e anything else for me, laddie?”
“Not a thing. Arm nick was the sort of thing you would get giving blood. Nice work on the thyroid incision, I’m told. Takes a real artist to sew it up.”
“Her face was puffed up.”
“Aye. The sinuses. She had a cold, remember?”
“Aye.”
“There was a bruise on her chest, probably bumped herself falling.”
“Can you give blood when you have a cold?” Gorrie asked.
“Why not? Five cigars,” added Conall. “And I’d like the disc back when you’re done.”
“Aye,” Gorrie grunted.
An accident then, like council member Ewie Cameron’s accident. A coincidence, random and unconnected. The sort of thing that happened all the time.
A walrus waited for Gorrie in his office, polishing its tusks on a large piece of pastry supplied by one of the girls down the hall. He sat behind Gorrie’s desk, brushing
crumbs away with his stubby fins, every so often touching his enormous mustache to see if any had strayed there.
The walrus was the deputy area commander, whose arrival at the Inverness Command Area’s CID section could bode no good at all.
“Sir,” said Gorrie, who had been warned by scurrying comrades before he approached.
“Inspector Gorrie, I’m pleased you could make it this morning,” said the deputy commander, Nab Russell.
“I’ve been nosin’ around,” answered Gorrie. “What brings you here, Chief?”
“There are rumors, Inspector, that your methods of detection are not proceeding with the snap and polish expected of the Northern Constabulary,” said Russell.
From another man, the words would have been meant to elicit a laugh. But another man was not the deputy commander. In a minute, Gorrie knew, he would begin to cite the Constabulary’s unprecedented detection rate—62 percent, up four percentage points from the year before and, more importantly, four points higher than that of the Central Constabulary. Not that there was competition, mind.
“I believe a review of my methods will pass any muster,” said Gorrie.
“You’re trying to connect a traffic accident involving a respected council member—a legate holder, a man descended from heroes, Frank—an unfortunate accident to a tawdry suicide?”
“At least one was murder,” said Gorrie.
“Cameron slept with the wife?”
“No evidence of that. I didnae even think it has been suggested.”
“Where’s the connection then?”
“It would be premature to connect them, sir. Inquiries are being made.”
“Inquiries, lad! I’m not the bleeding press. What is it you have?”
“The dead men met together the night they were murdered,” said Gorrie. “That’s it.”
The walrus pounced. “One was murdered by his wife. The other died in an accident.”
“Manslaughter, at the least.”
“Pending an investigation—and that is not your case,” Russell reminded him.
“I didna ask to be assigned it, sir.”
“You made hints.”
“I followed strict procedure when I met with the detective sergeant in charge,” said Gorrie sharply.
He had. The hints were made in a pub later on.
“Frank.” The walrus leaned to one side, then slid back in the desk chair. With appropriate adjustment for specifics of geographic locale, the speech that followed could have been given by nearly any police supervisor in the islands of Great Britain since the Romans. Crimes to be solved, yes, but flights of fancy not to be indulged. Connections sought, but fantasies nipped in the bud. Investigation to be pursued, but wild-goose chases to be foreclosed.
In some cases, the obvious was the obvious. And there was the detection rate to consider.
Finally, Gorrie couldn’t take any more of it. “Her hand was at the wrong angle,” he said. “I didnae think it could be suicide.”
“What?” asked the walrus.
“She was holding the gun the wrong way to have killed herself. If she were a man, perhaps, or stronger, but to have fired it the way she did, the bullet would have traveled further to the right of her head. To fire it the way she had”—Gorrie held his own hand to demonstrate—“her arm would have had to have been twisted.”
“The autopsy says that?”
“The report only notes the angle of the wound.”
“And the body might not have been moved? Or the arm jerk back as a reflex?”
“You’ll have to trust me on this, Nab. My instincts—”
“Frank, instincts?”
“I helped you out of the traffic division—”
“For twenty years you’ve held that over my head. Twenty years, lad.”
“And I’ll hold it twenty more, God willing.”
The walrus had no argument for that. More importantly, he was finished with his Danish. He rose.
“You have to close these cases out, Frank. The London papers are having a field day with us.”
“I wouldnae thought you cared about a London tabloid, Nab.”
The phone interrupted a recapitulation of the earlier lecture. Gorrie reached over and picked it up.
It was the detective in charge of the Cameron traffic accident case. They’d just found the truck they thought had hit the council member.
Gorrie caught a glimpse of an ancient stone house on his right as he turned down the road near Loch Ness where the truck had been found. Fifteen years before, the stone house had been the residence of Kevin and Mary Mac-Millan; it had been the scene of the first murder he’d ever investigated. Tidy case that—wife on the floor with her head bashed in, husband holding the hammer he’d done it with when the constables rushed in. Sergeant Gorrie spent more time typing up the report with his two-fingered typing than he did interviewing the suspect.
The truck was a year-old Ford, registered to and stolen from Highland Specialty Transport the night Cameron had been killed. It was a large diesel tractor, its front fender scratched slightly, one of its headlights smashed, and on its fender a small speckle of “something red and dried, foreign, not part of the finish”—the young detective’s exact words in his preliminary report—had been found.
“Tip came in directing us here on the hot line,” said Lewis. “Newspapers good for something, at least.”
The two investigators stood near the cab as one of the forensics people ran a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner across the floorboards. The exterior of the truck seemed fairly clean, not what you’d expect if it had sat on the side of the road gathering dust for a week.
“Cleanest lorry I ever saw, inside and out,” said Lewis. “You could eat off the floor.”
“Vacuumed?”
“Maybe.”
“But that’s likely blood on the fender. And the glass.”
“Aye.”
They could do a DNA test on the fender, and attempt to match the headlamp glass with glass at the scene. If this truck had killed Cameron, they would know it.
“We’re under five minutes from the spot where Cameron was found,” said Lewis. He pushed back the hair on his forehead. He seemed to be combing it down to hide a bald spot, except that he had no bald spot. “If it was here the morning after the accident, two dozen constables missed it, along with myself at least twice.”
“When do you think it was left here?” Gorrie asked.
Lewis shrugged. “We’ll set up a barricade and ask people who pass this way going from work.”
Gorrie stood back a few feet and surveyed the scene. The shoulder across the way was wide enough for a waiting car, easily parked in the shadow of the pines.
Hadn’t the words Specialty Transport been on one of Cameron’s pads?
Gorrie reached into his pocket for his notebook, though even before he opened it he realized he hadn’t written down what the council member’s pads had said.
Bad detective work, that. What would the walrus say?
“Sergeant, have you a phone I could borrow?” he asked Lewis.
“It’s my personal phone, Inspector.”
Gorrie held out his hand.
Melanie, the sister’s American friend, answered on the second ring. Ms. Cameron was out, but she volunteered to check the pad. Gorrie listened as she pulled open the drawers.
“Right or left?” she asked, and his heart sank.
“Left, I think.”
“Nothing here. Wait, I’ll try the right.”
It was there. Halfway down the page of the second pad was the note: “Hgh Spec Trprt?”
Highland Specialty Transport. Or highly special transportation. Or Hugh Spectre Transport.
“There was a phone number, wasn’t there?” asked Gorrie. “Read it to me, would you?”
He punched the number into the sergeant’s phone, even though it meant breaking his promise to the sergeant that he would only call the nearby number. A very correct though very young bureaucrati
c voice answered on the other end.
“UKAE Nuclear Waste Regulation, Transport Division.”
“Transport Division?”
“Sir, can I help you?”
“What precisely is it you do, son?”
“I hang up the phone if I don’t have an explanation as to why this is not a crank call,” said the man.
Gorrie explained who he was and why, more or less, he was calling. The young man became considerably more helpful. He believed he had spoken to Cameron, who sat on the area Land and Environment Select Committee. The council member had inquired about forms and regulations governing transport of spent nuclear fuel. The conversation had not lasted long; Cameron had been referred to Constance Burns. The head of the UKAE Waste Division liked to deal with elected representatives personally.
“She takes all VIPs,” said the young man. “I’m not sure if she spoke to the committee member or not, just that he would have been referred.”
“Could you tell her that I’d like a word?” said Gorrie, who wasn’t sure if he qualified as a VIP or not.
“Afraid she’s out of the country on vacation in Switzerland. She calls in every morning and evening. Shall I give her your number?”
“Why don’t you give me hers instead?”
“Well, sir, our privacy policy—”
“Come now, be a good lad,” said Gorrie.
“Well.”
“You never know when you might need a favor,” suggested the inspector.
“As a matter of fact, if it was convenient, I could use one. There’s a matter of a speeding ticket.”
“Speeding? And when were you in the Highlands?”
“My girlfriend, Inspector, she suggested a holiday and, well, you know how it is. . . .”
“You’re going to fix a ticket?” asked Lewis as Gorrie punched in the number for Ms. Burns’s mobile phone.
“I was hoping you would,” said Gorrie.
The phone was off-line. Gorrie left a message, then dialed the hotel next. He had the clerk ring the room, but received no answer.
The plant manager at Cromarty Firth had emphasized how safe transporting spent uranium was. Gorrie decided to drive over to the plant and find out why the matter had been on his mind.