“Look at this,” Fletcher said and grabbed my wrist to point the torch at one of the walls. There was a plaque there, screwed into the stone by four rusty bolts. It read ‘LAB’ in large, bold letters, and an arrow pointed deeper into the tunnel.
“Huh.” There was an eerie feeling at the base of my neck, shooting up and down my spine. Was this what my father had been looking for, that day he was attacked? Who had built tunnels under Loch Ness and why?
Unfortunately, there was no time to unpack those questions tonight. We had a dead body on our hands and a hostage to find. I retrieved Dunnel’s pepper spray, surprised by how far down the tunnel it had rolled, and then Fletcher and I looked around for a way out.
When I’d tackled Kingston, we’d fallen through a trapdoor, the wood weakened by time and rain, and there were metal rungs stuck into the wall, leading up to the hole we’d torn in the ceiling.
“Can you climb?” I asked, and Fletcher grimaced.
“I’ll have to.”
I went first, leaning Fletcher against the wall while she waited, the metal cold and damp against my hands. Mist enveloped my head as I poked it out into the night, and I dug my fingers into the wet grass as I hauled myself free. I spun to face the hole while Fletcher hauled herself painfully up the rungs one by one, sticking out a hand for her to grasp so I could help pull her out into the open.
“Bee?” I called as we struggled upright, sweeping my torch over the low walls and uneven pavement.
“In the tower,” she replied, her voice muffled by all the stone. “I’m all tied up. I can’t get up.”
“Hold on. We’ll be right there.”
‘Right there’ was a bit of an overstatement. It took us a solid couple of minutes to limp through the archway and cross the few metres over to the short staircase leading up to the Urquhart Castle tower, and we had to mount it one step at a time. At the top, I shone my torch into the tower, and it landed on Bee lying in one corner, bound hand and foot by rope. She’d managed to spit the gag out and was squirming against her restraints without much luck.
I set Fletcher down against one wall, and she slid to the ground, injured ankle stretched out in front of her while she found her phone so she could call for an ambulance and a clean-up team. I made my way over to Bee and crouched down, helping her sit up. “Are you okay?” I asked. She didn’t look injured. The skin under the ropes was red from where she’d been trying to work herself free, but she didn’t have any visible bruises or cuts.
“I think so,” she said. “I’m not hurt anyways.”
I tugged at the knots around her ankles, but they were stuck fast and slightly swollen with the damp, resisting my attempts to force them open. “I’ll be right back,” I said and rose to go back to the tunnel and retrieve Kingston’s fallen knife. I should have grabbed it right away, but I’d half thought it would be better to leave it undisturbed and half didn’t want to touch it, to feel how the hilt had been worn smooth from constant use.
My feet hit the floor of the tunnel with a thump, and I took a deep breath before I turned around to face Kingston. I’d half-expected him to have stood up and walked away, but he was still lying right where we’d left him. Pulling a tissue from my pocket, I snatched the knife out of the ground as quickly as I could, my torchlight pointed as far away from Kingston as possible so it wouldn’t accidentally fall on the wet stain across his back or his still open eyes, staring sightlessly out into the dark.
My spine crawled when I turned my back on him, and I returned to the tower as quickly as I could. The blade was sharp and cut through the rope without a lick of effort. I pictured it slicing into Fletcher’s throat, parting flesh before she even had a chance to feel it. I wondered if this was the same knife he’d used to stab Jacob, slit Skye’s wrists, kill Hamish Murray, and I shuddered at the weight of it in my hand.
Bee rubbed at her wrists after I pulled the scraps of rope free and then dashed a hand across her eyes, wiping away the tears there. I helped her stand and gave her fingers a squeeze, smiling tiredly.
“Is my father alright?” she asked.
“He’s fine. He woke up about a minute after you hit him. He helped us find you actually.” I pulled MacPherson’s phone from my pocket and gave it a shake. “You might want to get a new phone. He put spyware in that one.”
Bee sighed. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”
I held onto MacPherson’s phone since it would have evidence on it and turned to check on Fletcher again. “A team is on its way to collect the, well, the body and clear the scene,” she explained as she dropped her own phone into her lap. “Dunnel said thirty minutes. He’s bringing the other MacPhersons to the station to get their statements and hopefully a confession off Raymond Sr. Alexis is safe and uninjured. She’ll be giving her statement in the morning as well. Bee, would you be willing to do the same?”
“Of course,” Bee said, nodding. “Go easy on my mother. She didn’t know.”
“What about your brother?” I asked. I sat down on the steps leading out of the castle, resting my elbows on my knees as I stared out into the blackness of the night. I could still see Kingston coming towards us, face a white blur when the light hit him, knife aglow in his hands as he moved like the Terminator, relentless and undying.
“He was helping my father with the Active Eye deal, but I don’t think he had anything to do with the… with the assassinations.” Bee sat down beside me, wrapping her arms around herself as a tear slipped down her cheek.
We had a car. We weren’t stranded here. But we couldn’t leave the dead body by itself, Fletcher couldn’t drive with her ankle, and I wouldn’t leave her here alone while I took Bee back to the city. We would simply have to wait for help to arrive.
My eyes went back to the trap door, hidden by the dark and the layers of stone between us. What was down there? Why was it down there? Who had that much time, energy, and money to build tunnels under the lake, and how had they remained hidden for so long? The tunnels had felt old, the stone tarnished by age, and there had been rust caked along that plaque and the rungs of the ladder. My father had to have found out about them. Maybe he’d stumbled on them during one of his many Loch Ness Monster hunts. Or maybe that obsession had simply been a cover for a different investigation. There was something secret and dangerous about those tunnels, and Alasdair had found out, and someone had gone after him for it.
Was he down there? In those tunnels? Was he trapped somewhere in a cage or a cell, somehow still alive after all these years? Or were his bones buried under the stone? No. I shook my head. That was dark, fanciful thinking. It was ridiculous. My father wasn’t in those tunnels.
So why did I feel his ghost calling to me from beneath the waves and the rock and all that stagnant air?
I was glad when I finally spotted the lights of several vehicles appear at the top of the hill, turning off the main road and coming to a stop near where my car was parked. “Let’s go meet them,” I said, and the three of us started hauling ourselves upright with varying degrees of success. Fletcher wrapped her arm around my shoulder, and then we began to make our slow way down from the tower, Bee illuminating our way.
Dunnel and a pair of paramedics met us halfway down the hill from the car park, and I flashed them a tired wave in hello. I passed Fletcher off to the paramedics, and Bee followed them the rest of the way up the slope while I took Dunnel down to the scene of the action.
“Fletcher said Kingston is dead?”
“I shot him,” I explained. “He was about to slit her throat. I’ll show you.”
Dunnel walked beside me as we crossed the expanse of Urquhart Castle. He looked like he expected me to turn towards the tower and was surprised when we continued on into the roofless structure. “Adams is on her way. She’s not happy about being woken up like this, but we need to get this photographed and cleaned up before the tourists try to swarm it tomorrow.”
“There’s something else,” I felt, an odd reluctance slowing my words as if the tunnels
were mine and mine alone. “But it’ll be easier just to show you.”
We’d arrived at the destroyed trap door. It was, or used to be, set into the ground right in the back corner of the structure, a small, black maw against the green grass and grey stone. Kingston had known about it, I realized. That was why he’d been headed this way despite the fact that it had seemed like there was nowhere to go. He’d wanted to lose me in the tunnels, maybe even escape through some other entrance.
“What is this?” Dunnel asked, staring at the hole in confusion.
Rather than answer, I motioned for him to follow me down the ladder. I descended once again into the dark confines of the tunnel, the air going still as we left the layer of mist behind. The temperature dropped noticeably, even just a couple of metres deeper into the earth, as I moved away from the ladder to give Dunnel space.
He stopped with his back pressed to the rungs so he could look up and down the tunnel in shock. He had one of those industrial-strength torches with him, and it pierced the dark much further than mine did, though the shadows still gobbled the light up before it found the end of the tunnel.
Then his torch landed on Kingston’s body. The black of his coat had soaked up the red of his blood, but the fabric still looked wet and glossy in the light, and there was a dark pool coagulating around his torso. His face was tipped towards us, pale against the golden locks of hair that had finally won the battle against his pomade to flop forward across his forehead, and there were three specks of blood on his cheek, vividly red like they’d been painted on.
I turned away, nausea crashing around my stomach. Did this make me any different than Townsend? I’d done it for the right reasons, hadn’t I? I’d killed him to protect Fletcher.
“It was him or Fletcher,” Dunnel said, reading my mind as he laid a hand on my shoulder.
I nodded. Logically, I knew that was true, but that didn’t make it sit any easier in my gut.
“I’ll stay with the body,” Dunnel continued. “You catch back up with Fletcher and head home for the night. Send Adams this way when you see her.”
“Tomorrow, we can wrap things up with the MacPhersons,” I agreed.
“Exactly.”
So I climbed out of that hole for the third time and started the trek up to the car park. It really wasn’t that long a journey, but it felt like I was walking across the entire country and up a mountain. I found Fletcher seated in the back of the ambulance beside Bee, her ankle wrapped up tight. Bee had a blanket around her shoulders, her feet dangling an inch or two off the ground.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked, nodding towards Fletcher’s leg. “Do we need to amputate?”
“Alas yes,” Fletcher replied and mustered up a tired grin. “Just a bad sprain. It should be okay in a couple of days.”
I drove her and Bee home. Bee insisted that she would be okay spending the night alone in her flat, so I agreed after I made her promise to meet us at the station the next afternoon. I dropped Fletcher off next, waiting until she’d limped her way up to the door on the crutch the paramedics had given her before I finally made my way to my own flat. I fell asleep quickly, almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, too tired to be paranoid about people watching the flat or breaking in while I slept or any of the things I’d been consumed by after the incident at the Kraken’s houseboat.
In the morning, I awoke with an unpleasant taste in my mouth and the start of a splitting headache. I longed to just bury myself in the duvet and pretend like I didn’t exist, but there were still things left to do on the case. So I texted Fletcher to let her know I was on my way to pick her up, and we set off for the station, the car filled with our exhaustion.
Dunnel arrived at the same time we did, running behind after his late night finishing up at Urquhart Castle. I held the door for him and Fletcher, and the three of us immediately made a beeline for the coffee in the kitchen. “Alexis is staying with a friend. I put a car outside the flat to keep watch. They’ll escort her here in a few hours,” Dunnel said. “The MacPhersons are all waiting in holding. They’re ready whenever you are.”
“Bee will also be here in a few hours,” I said. “Let’s start with Raymond Sr.”
I could only hope he would accept his fate and confess rather than dragging this out as long as possible.
The MacPherson family lawyer was already here, a bald man with a too shiny head and a navy blue suit perfectly tailored to his form. He was sitting in the interview room with MacPherson when we entered, whispering intently in his boss’s ear. He stilled as we stepped inside and then stood, holding out his hand to me.
“Harold Hart. I’m Mr MacPherson’s representation.” The lawyer had a deep bass voice and the confidence that came with years and years of experience.
Harold Hart was one of the worst names I had ever heard, but I smiled and shook the man's hand. “DI MacBain. This is my partner, DI Fletcher.”
The three of us sat down, and I looked MacPherson over. He was wearing a different suit than the one from the night before, every seam neatly pressed, a new pair of cufflinks in his shirt. He gave me a haughty look as if we hadn’t caught him about to shoot a member of his staff and almost get his daughter killed as well.
“My client is pleading innocent on all accounts,” Hart said, and I caught the snort of laughter in the back of my throat before it could make its way out into the open. “He had no idea of Mr Kingston’s actions and--”
Fletcher plunked her phone onto the table with a thunk that was loud enough to cut Hart off mid-sentence. She already had the recording she’d made the night before queued up, and she tapped the play button without taking her eyes off MacPherson.
“Why would you bring her here?” Past MacPherson’s voice snapped through the speaker, and the MacPherson sitting before us straightened in his chair, eyes widening.
“Where the hell else would I go?” Kingston demanded. He was now a ghost, trapped inside this recording.
Hart glanced at his client as Fletcher leaned back in her chair, leaving the phone on the table like a glowing sign that screamed, ‘GUILTY.’ MacPherson’s voice continued: “You were supposed to deal with her in her apartment like all the others. So it wouldn’t be tied back to us.”
“You can turn it off now,” Hart said, but Fletcher ignored him.
“It’s already tied back to you. Need I remind you that you had the police in here not five hours ago?” Kingston’s voice dropped until it was nearly inaudible, but the recording had still picked it up. “I should have cut and run the moment they showed up.”
“But then you wouldn’t have gotten paid. Those pesky DIs are no doubt right behind you. Deal with them while I handle your mess.”
“Just so I’m clear. Do you want me to kill them?”
Fletcher leaned forward and tapped the pause button. “MacPherson’s reply was just a look, but right after that, Kingston came out and tried to kill us. I can keep playing this if you want to hear the gunshot.” She kept her voice perfectly professional, but I still detected the current of smugness running through it, and I felt the same--a pleased glow stirring within my chest at the uncomfortable look on MacPherson’s face. He’d finally lost his over-the-top confidence, and worry clawed at his eyes.
“I should add that we also have Alexis Morrison and Beatrice MacPherson coming in this afternoon to make statements,” I said. I hooked one ankle over the opposite knee and leaned back in my chair. “We also have the story Hamish Murray wrote as well as the evidence Jacob Greene found on New Wave Industries. Basically, we’ve got motive, means, and opportunity. All that’s left is your confession.”
Hart glanced sideways at MacPherson and then offered us a tight little smile. “I’ll need a moment to speak with my client, please.”
“Of course. Take your time.”
Fletcher and I rose as one, and I held the door as she gathered her crutch. We stepped outside the interview room to wait.
We didn’t have to wait long. Hart clearly knew this w
as a battle MacPherson wasn’t going to win and convinced him to plead guilty in the hopes of gaining a lighter sentence. I had my doubts about that, but I didn’t mention them to MacPherson. We spoke with Mary and Raymond Jr. as well. Mary was a mess, her mascara streaking down her face despite the fact that she had just retouched it. She had known nothing of the Active Eye deal or the murder plot. She was only guilty of being complicit in her husband’s general shittiness. Raymond Jr. had been helping his father with the Active Eye project, but MacPherson had kept him well away from anything to do with murder, probably the one good thing MacPherson had done as a father in his life.
Bee and Alexis arrived at almost the same time, though Fletcher and I spoke with them separately. Alexis confirmed what Bee had told us the other night, that Bee had asked her to meet with Jacob and the others to act as a kind of mole on the inside, though she hadn’t really been able to do much of that, since MacPherson found out about their plan pretty quickly after Hamish visited him.
Bee reiterated what she had already told us and then walked us through what had happened after Kingston dragged her out of MacPherson’s office. He’d tied her hands and then thrown her in the car. She lied when he asked for her phone, saying that she’d left it in her room, and he hadn’t had time to search her, knowing that he had to get off the MacPherson estate as quickly as possible. Kingston didn’t talk as they drove, didn’t say where they were going or why or what the plan was when they got there. Bee had been confused when they arrived at Loch Ness, as we had been, but she said Kingston walked with purpose, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Our headlights up above forestalled him, though, and he pushed her into the tower and bound her feet, too, so that she couldn’t go anywhere while he dealt with us.
And we knew the rest.
“So what will you do now?” I asked. We sat in the interview room, and I’d been sitting in that chair for so long that my arse was beginning to ache against the hard metal seat.
The Hidden Eye Page 29