Footsteps in the Dark
Page 49
“Is there anything else you remember about him?” Calum asked. “Anything he said?”
“He wasn’t local. And he didn’t care. There was nothing there to reach. Mum’s… She’s terrified. We can’t pay them.”
“Of course not,” Calum said with disbelief.
But he realized he’d lost Julia’s attention. Her surprised gaze had fixed instead on a point over his shoulder.
“Adam?” She sounded baffled. And it was only then that Calum remembered they couldn’t explain Adam’s presence to Julia without betraying Chrissie’s secret right in front of her. He swung around quickly.
“I…thought I could, um…” Adam stuttered. Calum had never seen him at a loss for words before. “I wanted to see how you were.”
“That was nice of you,” she said. But the frowning glance she threw at Calum was puzzled.
Out in the corridor, Calum dispatched Willie John and his DCs to start procedures to monitor the airport and the two ferry terminals; one in Stornoway, the other in Harris, because if the attacker had any sense, he would prioritize getting off the island.
Finally, there remained only the two uniformed constables on guard, and Adam.
“I’ll take you to your hotel,” Calum said. He began to walk, and Adam followed without comment.
The car was back in traffic on the main road, when Adam spoke again. “I’m sorry, Cal.” He gave a heavy sigh. “Of course the murder investigation has to be the priority.”
It was an olive branch, the first thing Adam had said to Calum that didn’t feel weighed down with old anger. And the first time Adam had used Calum’s old pet name. Any name, really.
Calum took a treacherous, masochistic pleasure in the pain it gave him.
He said carefully, “You have your own priorities. I understand that.” He hesitated and glanced sideways. “What are you going to do? About the chess piece? About Uilleam?”
Adam ran his hand back through his hair, an absent gesture that still somehow left the shorter locks on top of his head falling back in perfect, seductive order around the sides of his face.
Calum’s eyes fixed front.
“I wish I knew,” Adam said.
“It would be helpful…to the investigation…” To me. “If you could keep it confidential for a short while.”
He glanced quickly at Adam again. The look Adam threw him made it clear the underlying plea had been understood.
“My boss’ll want a report soon,” Adam said. “But…I’ll do my best to stall. Once he knows…he’s a Twitter account in human form.”
Calum snorted.
It felt like a truce.
“I need to go back to talk to Uilleam, though,” Adam said. “He has to understand the queen will be forfeit if he doesn’t put that story of long-term prior ownership to official channels. I mean… I suppose he can claim Lewis was under the Norwegian crown when his ancestor brought it in, but…”
The car pulled to a halt outside the front door of the hotel.
It had been an insignificant interlude. Maybe five minutes. But Calum didn’t want the peace between them to end.
He needed to say it, though. “No one’s going to believe they didn’t find it recently. I have to put it into the evidence locker before the new SIO arrives, and then…it’s fair game. Treasure trove, like you said.”
Adam unbuckled his seat belt and opened the passenger door.
“Possibly. Though…” He shrugged. “Hard to believe, but sometimes I’m actually wrong.” He climbed out of the car, then leaned inside again, hand propped on the roof. He met Calum’s too eager eyes, and his expression slid from wry amusement to something that looked like pity. “And sometimes,” he said softly, “you are.”
***
The rest of Calum’s day was an exercise in futility.
He called another briefing, listened to accounts of progress that hadn’t been made, and gave out a new list of tasks. So far, only a handful of the hundreds of names checked on ferry and plane manifests for the previous four days, cross-checked with past, serious criminal activity. They unearthed a few convictions for possession, a convicted burglar from Watford, and someone who’d served time for assault in Dundee. But no convenient flags for a hard man from Glasgow.
With his limited manpower, Calum organized a watch on both ferry terminals and the airport, in case a name came through, though he knew the likelihood was vanishingly small.
Chrissie’s interview had given them nothing. She’d found Tormod dead on the floor and seen no one else. They closed off Seonag and Julia’s flat in Stornoway as a crime scene until the Inverness forensic team could get at it, after dusting what they could for fingerprints. But it was a formality. From what Julia had said, the man had been wearing what amounted to a pro’s uniform to avoid leaving DNA traces.
Calum called one of his old mates in the Glasgow force, a DS called Jimmy Leary, to ask him to nose around any word of a hit on a bad debt on Lewis. But Jimmy’s surprise underlined his own nagging unease…because it was extreme even for the thugs they’d customarily dealt with. Bad debts usually led to broken legs or no kneecaps. Not a cut throat. It was bad business. Dead men couldn’t pay you back.
So he had to ask himself—what else had Tormod been up to?
At four thirty they heard that the IP address used to send the threatening emails to Tormod had been traced to a public computer in an Internet café on Woodlands Road in Glasgow.
Every line of inquiry was collapsing around them. But these kinds of people weren’t accustomed to leaving loose ends.
Chief Inspector Martin, when he called in, was sympathetic but unsurprised. “You’ve covered all the angles. The only one expecting miracles was you. The Inverness lot’ll stand a better chance.”
Which did nothing for Calum’s mood. By ten o’clock that evening, cross-checking yet another list of passenger names, Calum was ready to swing for someone.
He leaned back in his office chair and squeezed his eyes shut until sparks appeared behind his lids.
He used to be good at this. At thinking things through rationally, while knowing too, when to listen to his gut. But this time…
Maybe it was being here. Back at home…
He had to stop reacting and start reasoning.
Focus!
A murder committed over a bad debt. The murderer staying behind on the island to rub the message in, even though he must have known the risk. An island was easily closed off.
What was he missing?
The extraneous factor? The chess piece?
Perhaps he needed to look at it from another angle. He’d been so focused on indications of a professional hit that he’d sidelined the piece as an active factor.
Well, yes, Calum, because that’s where all the evidence points.
But what were actually the odds of a priceless antique turning up at a murder scene and having nothing to do with it?
Calum hadn’t thought of a rational reason why it would be left behind by the murderers if they knew what it was, but that didn’t mean a reason didn’t exist.
Maybe he’d been too logical, closing off his instincts. Maybe he’d been so preoccupied with staying away from Adam, he’d failed to examine all the avenues.
He lifted his phone and looked at it for a second or two, then deliberately pressed the mail app. It felt like defiance. His personal email account. “For Calum 5.” He tapped it open without second-guessing himself.
Mairi told me today that my indifference has broken her heart. She said she loved me since we were children and marrying me was her greatest dream. And I understood that she is me. I loved you from childhood, and my love broke my heart. Sometimes I wish I had never known you, and then perhaps I could have told myself that my strange feelings were nothing. Imagination. In innocence, perhaps I could have lived something like a normal life. But I bit the apple. I cannot un-know. She deserved someone to love her as she loved them. But this is the world of the living. Each day behind my mask, I think t
hat of the two of us, you and I, you were by far the more fortunate.
Calum read it twice before storing it in the locked folder he’d created.
Then he called the number for the Suilven Hotel.
***
When Calum arrived, Adam was sitting at the hotel bar, dressed in a thin black V-neck jumper and black jeans. The outfit was casual and unassuming, while most of the other patrons were dressed up for a Saturday night out, but Adam looked to Calum, effortlessly, the most glamorous person in the seriously dated room. A couple of young women standing at the perpendicular leg of the bar seemed to agree, because they were eyeing Adam like starstruck lions sizing up a gazelle.
Calum pulled up the red velour stool beside him and sat down. Before leaving the station, he’d changed out of his uniform into a pair of blue jeans, a casual collared pale-green shirt, and a light leather jacket he kept in his office for emergencies. Emergencies like going to meet someone in a bar.
“Hey,” he said. Adam looked up from his contemplation of his glass. His drink was half gone. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“No problem.” There was still distance there, of course. Calum had cemented it in a long time ago. “You want a drink? The bar’ll be closing soon. Or…are you still on duty?”
Calum thought about it. “Yes and no,” he said. “But on the whole, no.”
“Well.” Adam smiled, though he didn’t show his teeth. “This is Isle of Harris gin. It’s good. Have you tried it?”
“Too expensive on a policeman’s salary. I’ll have a pint.”
Adam opened his mouth as if to argue the point, but he didn’t. He attracted the barman’s attention, ordered a pint of lager, and despite Calum’s protestations, put the drink on his room tab. Calum took a sip and considered his approach.
“What you said in Uig,” he began. Adam raised an eyebrow. He was almost ridiculously attractive, as if the universe had created him and dropped him back into Calum’s life just to sneer at him. “You said there were reasons you didn’t discount Uilleam’s story.” Adam’s focus on him was unnerving. “Can you tell me what they were?”
He waited for Adam to claim his pound of flesh, but he merely frowned and pursed his mouth into a thoughtful pout. Calum looked away, only to find the two women down the bar avidly studying both of them now. Gearing up, he realized, to make a move.
“Let’s find somewhere we can talk.” He slid off his stool and led the way to a small rectangular table tucked into a corner of the room.
They each took a chair on either side, facing each other.
“Okay,” Adam said. “The Macaulays. Genetic research suggests the mainland clan is most likely descended from Vikings. The name comes from a derivative of Óláfr. But, with Macaulay males on Lewis, concentrated in Uig, the analysis of Y-DNA’s different. It shows genetic origins in Southwest Ireland. That specific DNA marker’s very rare in Scotland, and there’s a theory it may come from Irish slaves, taken by Vikings to the islands. They called them thralls.”
Calum rubbed his mouth with the tips of his fingers. “So…I suppose…that bit might fit.”
“You may not remember local legends of a convent in Mealista. It was called Tigh nan Cailleachan Dubha.” His Gaelic accent was creditable. “No evidence has been found it actually existed, but…”
“But Uilleam Sgàire backs it up,” Calum said.
Adam’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “And that’s another thing. I’ve been doing some work on that name. It’s only used in the Macaulay family in Uig. And Uilleam’s right. The proper English translation isn’t Zachariah, it’s Iskair. In Old Norse, írskr means Irish.”
Calum rubbed his forehead.
“And,” Adam barreled on, “Uilleam said the pieces went to Ireland from Iceland. I didn’t mention that’s the second main theory of origin—that they were carved in Iceland by a famous female artisan called Margret the Adroit. Plus, the Lewis chess set was the first we know of to have bishops as pieces. And those carvings—along with a coincidental easing of some epidemic of illness—could be why the nuns thought they were sent by God.”
He sat back, waiting.
Calum chewed his lip. He was unnervingly reluctant to piss all over Adam’s enthusiasm, but his role was devil’s advocate.
“None of that’s new, though. Uilleam could have found all of it by reading around, if he’s as obsessed with the chessmen and his family as he seems. He could have just…incorporated it to create this legend to protect their queen piece.”
Adam frowned. “From Treasure Trove laws you mean?”
Calum shrugged. “Maybe. Though…I admit, he’s shown no sign of wanting to benefit. He could have sold the queen alone a thousand times over to a private collector.”
“If he doesn’t believe that stuff about the pieces protecting the island,” Adam said, “he’s a bloody good actor.”
Calum sighed. “Maybe his own father fed him the story. Who knows how far this goes back.”
“To the twelfth century?”
“Adam…” It took a moment to understand Adam’s flinch of surprise, the same reaction Calum’d had to “Cal.” Calum hadn’t called Adam by his name for a very long time. “I was just going to say,” Calum went on stiffly, flushed with self-consciousness, “that it’s far more likely to be a legend than anything like the truth.”
“And I agree,” Adam said. “But it’s my job to follow the threads to wherever they lead. You know legends often turn out to have a basis in reality. If the successive eldest sons really have been aware of the location of more pieces through the generations, superstition and family tradition could have prevented them from trying to profit from them. Well, until Tormod.”
They both took a sip of their drinks and mulled it over.
“So, why are you listening now?” Adam asked at last. “You thought the chess piece was irrelevant.”
“Because…it feels like too much of a coincidence.”
Adam said slowly, “So you think someone else may have found out about it?”
“Perhaps. But the problem with that is, the murderer left it behind,” Calum pointed out, but as he spoke something tightened in his chest. “But maybe that’s because the piece wasn’t where he expected to find it, and he didn’t have time to search after Tormod disturbed him. Maybe, he didn’t know it was in that bag, ready for Tormod’s meeting with you. I mean…who’d treat a priceless object like that?”
“But the man who attacked Julia and her mum said he was after what Tormod owed,” Adam reminded him. “He didn’t mention the piece.”
“I suppose it’s possible their attacker was here to get Tormod to pay up, but…someone else got to Tormod first and killed him. I mean, if Tormod told the people he owed that he had a priceless object to sell, why would they dispose of him before they got their hands on it? Or at least got repaid from it? But…Uilleam’s a very old man. If he’s been talking too much…it’s possible Tormod’s murder had nothing to do with his debt…”
An electronic bell began to shrill with hideous insistence.
“The bar’s closing,” Adam said.
“Kevin,” Calum said. They both stood in obedience to the sound. “Kevin’s with him every day.”
In the corridor outside the bar, Calum called the station and asked the duty DC to check for Kevin Reid on the PNC.
“Wouldn’t he need background checks to work with vulnerable people, though?” Adam asked doubtfully when he finished the call.
“If he disclosed any convictions, it’s not unusual to overlook them in favor of rehabilitation. But…” Calum sighed. “Let’s face it, he doesn’t have to be a convicted criminal to be tempted by stories of a priceless treasure. That’s just me…hoping for a big cosmic arrow pointing his way.”
The corners of Adam’s mouth twitched up. “It’d be a hell of a coincidence, though…if the people Tormod owed were on Lewis when he was murdered, but they had nothing to do with it.”
“Coincidences happen,” Calum said. “More
often in this job than you’d believe. What the guy did to Julia and Seonag… That’s what I’d have expected for Tormod. It makes no sense that they’d kill him.”
“I suppose…I see that,” Adam said slowly. “But in any case, Kevin couldn’t have attacked them at nine thirty in Stornoway. He was in Uig when we arrived at nine forty-five. Uilleam said he was a little late, but…”
“But Uilleam was up and dressed,” Calum agreed. “So Kevin had been there a while. We can conclude that attacker wasn’t him. And…Julia’d have known him anyway, balaclava or not. Doesn’t rule him out for Tormod, though.”
“It suits you,” Adam said suddenly. “Being a policeman.”
Calum stilled.
“Does it?” he asked warily.
Adam grinned. “Yeah. It’s not what I pictured you doing, but…I should have. That righteous urge.”
Calum huffed in unwilling amusement. Then he sobered.
He cleared his throat loudly. “Adam. I…wanted to say…” Adam’s smile fell away. His eyes glowed like mercury in the flat, dim light of the hotel corridor. Calum forced himself not to look away, to do this like a man. “I wanted to…to apologize. For the things I said when we… At uni. Last time we…um…we met. I was just…” He groped for some form of words that might begin to explain the complexity of all he’d felt, but all he could find was, “It had to end.”
Adam studied him for guarded beats of silence. Then he sighed. “And I put up a fight. I should have known better. I should have known you better, after four years.”
Familiar emotion balled in Calum’s throat. He swallowed hard, trying to dislodge it. “Then…you knew I didn’t really…”
“That you didn’t really believe I took advantage of our friendship to try to pervert your sexuality? That I didn’t try to make you believe you were gay?”
Calum drew a shivering breath. “I know you didn’t. But…you refused to accept I’d realized I’m straight. So I…lashed out.”
Adam’s expression slid again to pity.
“I’m not gay!” Calum looked away and dug for defensive anger. Scrabbled for it. “I’m at most bisexual. I’ve had lots of girlfriends.” As if Adam didn’t know. Those last months at uni after they’d split, he’d made sure Adam saw him with them.