9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: DI Kelso Strang
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
In far northern Caithness a man has been drowned. But why was his body left in a ruined croft house as carrion for the merciless ravens? When DCI Kelso Strang arrives to investigate, he finds the village of Forsich still in the grip of a hatred going back years that seems to infect the families most closely linked to the victim. The strands of a web of conspiracy are tightening round Gabrielle Ross who, whether saint or sinner, is poised on the edge of madness or self-destruction. But the player in the whole deadly game that Strang most wants to interview is her father, Patrick Curran. He can't, though, because Curran is dead - dead, but casting a long, long shadow.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 597
Ähnliche
CARRION COMFORT
ALINE TEMPLETON
In fond memory of Fiona Robertson, who had an indomitable spirit
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee,
Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man
In me or, most weary cry, I can no more.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
In high summer on the bleak northern coast of Scotland where the land at last gives way to the hungry seas, it is never completely dark. The bogs and standing pools of the Flow Country shimmer in the pale but relentless sun and life is in a state of frenzy before the brief light season gives way again to the long winter darkness. There is a background hum of insects and on the heather moors bees labour in a dizzy ecstasy of scent and colour.
For days now the sun had shone in one of the rare spells of windless weather and as Gabrielle lay in bed the humid air seemed to lie like a thin blanket layer on her skin.
The merciless light, and her own troubled thoughts, made sleep impossible. She longed with an almost physical hunger for the blessing of soft, velvety darkness but even with the curtains drawn there was at best a lavender-grey dusk around midnight for an hour or two. At last she gave up, sliding off the mattress with a glance at her sleeping partner, and with infinite caution left the room. If David woke and saw her she knew he’d want to get up and make her a cup of tea, keep her company. He knew the small hours of the morning were a bad time for her.
In the kitchen she ran the tap cold then filled a glass with water, pressing it to her flushed cheek as she went through the silent house to stand at the great picture window in the sparsely furnished living room, looking out but barely seeing the bleak moor and the random patterning of pools and lochans, ink-black in the low light.
A movement caught her eye: a small owl, quartering the ground on its broad, rounded wings, noiseless as a moth, listening and watching for movement. Gabrielle shuddered, feeling in herself the shivering of a terrified vole, afraid to stay, afraid to run. As she watched, the bird swooped in an unhurried, elegant glide. She shut her eyes so that she wouldn’t see the tiny limp body hanging from its talons as it rose from the kill.
When she opened them again, the bird had gone. But death was all about you in this place, brutal and alien as a lunar landscape. The killers were the kings here: the birds of prey, the foxes, the skuas, the ravens that did not always wait for life to be extinct before they went for the eyes. Even the marshland bred carnivorous sundews and butterworts and the bogs around even the tiniest dubh lochs were traps where animals could be drawn in to their death. Animals, and even—
But she knew she mustn’t think about that now. That was a long time ago. And she’d promised David she wouldn’t obsess over things that couldn’t unhappen. She’d promised – but then words were easy.
Only words, though. Everything else had become hard and painful since her father died. Paddy had been her anchor; now she was adrift. Day by day, little by little, she was getting worse. It had been such small things at first, like believing she’d put her keys in her handbag when she hadn’t. Everyone did that, didn’t they? But then she had to make a list before she did anything – and still something would go wrong. She had even struggled to be sure what she’d dreamt and what was real – and the awful humiliation of confusing a dream with reality still made the sweat spring out on the back of her neck even as she thought about it.
Friends had made allowances for her, telling her about their own idiotic forgetfulness on occasion and she was grateful for their kindness, if not reassured. You didn’t lose your mind all at once; it was small things that accumulated quite gently and slowly, like snowflakes falling, falling, until the day when the avalanche came crashing down and swept away the pretence that nothing was wrong.
After that, they blamed losing the baby for her distracted state. It was only natural, David told her soothingly, kind and loving even though it had been her fault and his baby too. But it was more than that. She had to face up to reality and recognise that she needed a complete break.
So, she’d come back to the very basic house that Paddy had refused to give up even when he hardly used it any more, as if she might find here something left of the love that had enfolded her like a security blanket. David had arranged everything, even to restructuring his job with an Aberdeen oil firm as a computer troubleshooter so he could work a lot from home while she took time off to recover.
She should have found peace up here where there were no demands on her and no stress, where it was so quiet. Deathly quiet. But she hadn’t. Somehow, she’d managed to forget how toxic the atmosphere was in the village, where even after all these years no one had forgotten or forgiven anything.
Gabrielle took a deep breath, and another, and another, fighting down the sense of panic that never seemed very far away. She must go back to bed, take one of the pills that would give her a couple of hours’ sleep before the dawn woke her again to another long day.
It was getting lighter already. As she turned from the window she heard the eerie, haunting whistle of the owl returning but she didn’t look back.
CHAPTER ONE
He had been waiting in the yard, watching the farmhouse. The light in her bedroom had gone out, but he knew she wouldn’t be asleep.
It had been later than usual before the lights in the downstairs room went off and there was still a light in her parents’ bedroom. Kirstie wouldn’t move until she was sure they were asleep, and it was another of these warm, light nights; even people as old as they were might feel the restlessness that seemed to possess everyone at this time of year.
Calum wedged his skinny, adolescent body into the angle of the barn where he would be invisible from the house. He seemed to stand here for longer and longer every night and it was driving him mad. He gave something between a sigh and a groan; enforced patience and rampant lust were a bad combination. It was like voluntarily entering a torture chamber every single night.
At last the bedroom light went off. This was almost the worst bit, waiting when he was sure they must be asleep, but she apparently wasn’t yet convinced. Then at last he saw the back door open and her slim form slip out and run across the grass towards him.
He grabbed at her, but she fended him off. ‘Not here! They might get up to open the window or something,’ she hissed, darting ahead of him out of the garden and looking back teasingly over her shoulder as she ran along the stony track that led up the hill at the back of the village to a building right on the edge of the moor.
The old croft house, abandoned many years before, had always been an illicit playhouse for the local children; being forbidden to go there because of the dangers of broken glass and crumbling stonework had only made it more attractive. But there weren’t so many kids here now and most of them spent their lives inside staring at a tablet anyway.
Now it was Calum and Kirstie’s own secret place, out of the sight of prying eyes. At this time of year, you never knew when people might be about, and Kirstie was nervous. She had mega-strict parents and while it might not be true that her father would kill her if he found out what was going on, that was certainly what she always said.
Most of the roof was off, but there was still a sheet of corroded corrugated iron in place over one end of the main room, where you could get a little bit of shelter if the rain came on. The door had been roughly boarded up with a couple of planks nailed across it, but you only had to pull on it and it would swing back on its rusted hinges.
He caught up with Kirstie just as she reached it and caught her in a rough embrace. The door was standing wide open tonight; they must have forgotten to shut it properly. Giggling, she responded as he walked her backwards through the doorway, still kissing her. Then he stopped abruptly and let her go.
There was a man asleep on the floor under the open sky, a man with dirty, smelly clothes, his face begrimed with dirt. And he was lying on their rug, the rug Calum had stolen from his mother’s linen cupboard.
He swore. Kirstie looked over his shoulder, gave a little squeal of fright and pushed him back outside. ‘It’s a dosser! How’d he get there?’
‘How the hell do I know? I’m going to find out—’
Furious with rage and frustration he turned back but she hung on his arm. ‘No, no! We don’t want to start anything. If he goes, “Who are you, then?” and begins maybe yelling and shouting, they might hear it down the house and my dad would come out. Just shut the door and let him be.’
Even as he shut it obediently, he knew with a terrible sense of inevitability what she was going to say next. She was saying it now.
‘I’m away home, Cal. Even if he left, I’m just, like, revolted with that smell. It’s gross. And he’s likely got bugs.’
‘We could go up on the moor,’ he urged with some desperation. ‘We’re not needing shelter on a night like this.’
Kirstie looked at him blankly. ‘On the moor? With not even a rug? Yeah, that’ll be right! I’d get eaten alive, Cal. The midges are bad enough out here, anyway. Dad would go, “How come you’ve got all these midge bites when you’ve been in your bedroom all night, Kirstie?”’
He could recognise when he was beaten. ‘Oh, all right, if you’re going to be fussy,’ he said sulkily. ‘I don’t suppose I can make you.’ Before the words were out of his mouth he realised his mistake. ‘Sorry, sorry, that came out wrong—’
But a mulish look had come over Kirstie’s face. ‘No, you can’t, Calum Cameron. No means no, remember, and that’s what I’m going to say right now. No. Got it?’ She walked off back down the track without looking back, scrubbing her fingers through her dark curly hair as if the midges had got to her already.
He could feel them biting himself, clustering round him in an infuriating, inescapable cloud. Tormented, he flailed at them, then swearing in a fury of frustration he kicked the door of the croft house again and again, but there was no sound from inside. The dosser hadn’t wakened – drunk, probably. And God knew how long he’d be planning to squat there.
Even if he managed to patch things up with Kirstie he still couldn’t see her agreeing to go back in there, even if the man had gone tomorrow. She’d made her views clear about open-air sex too.
The bastard had only ruined his summer, that was all.
‘What shift are you on today, Kirstie?’ Fergus Mowat asked pointedly on Friday morning.
His daughter, looking bleary-eyed, was sitting at the table in the farmhouse kitchen, hunched over a mug of coffee. She eyed him resentfully. ‘Well, like, early, obvs. Wouldn’t be up at this time otherwise, would I?’
Fergus, who had risen as usual at six to get out round the farm and was back for his mid-morning break, looked pointedly at the clock. ‘It’s five to ten now,’ he said. ‘You can’t walk down to the cafe and be there by ten o’clock. You’re going to be late.’
Kirstie said, ‘So?’ and gave him the dumb insolent look that would make the Archangel Gabriel himself long to slap that pert little face.
He could feel himself going red. ‘Look, lassie. Your mother went to a lot of trouble to get you this job. It’s not just yourself that you’re letting down, it’s your mum.’
His wife, Rhona, working at a battered desk in one corner of the room with a chequebook, an account book, a pile of bills and a frown, looked up. ‘Don’t worry, Fergie. If Morven’s not happy she’ll soon let her know. Kirstie, ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky?” I wouldn’t choose to get the rough end of her tongue, myself.’ She went back to her task with a sigh.
Kirstie gave her a darkling look but after a face-saving ten seconds slid off her chair. ‘I was just going, anyway,’ she said to no one in particular, grabbed her canvas satchel from the floor, slung it over her shoulder and left, not quite slamming the back door.
Fergus blew a ‘Phou!’ of frustration. ‘How long till she leaves home?’
Rhona gave him a sideways look. ‘You just make her worse,’ she said calmly.
‘Well, she started it,’ he said, then had the grace to laugh. ‘Oh, I know, I know. I don’t suppose it does any good.’ He carried his mug, along with Kirstie’s, over to the sink and put it into the dishwasher. ‘And why couldn’t she have done that?’
Bent over her bills, with her lips moving, Rhona didn’t reply but then he didn’t expect her to. They both knew the answer – she was fifteen and a half, and she had made it into an art form.
‘I’m away off up the hill. One of the hoggets up there was limping yesterday so I better take a wee look at her, see she’s all right today. Back at half twelve.’ Rhona grunted something that might have been a farewell as he left but he wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t a swear word addressed at the accounts.
It was another improbably beautiful day. What was it – almost a fortnight now without a drop of rain? Just every so often you got a spell like that, which was all very well but if it went on any longer he’d have to start shipping water out to the troughs.
He set off as he always did up the track that led past the abandoned croft house, gradually being weather-beaten to a ruin. He’d known the old couple who’d lived there; they’d had a few sheep on the little field near the house and there’d been a productive vegetable garden too, long overgrown. Fergus had bought the land from the family who’d inherited for grazing but the house itself was worthless. He often thought about them as he passed, struck by the melancholy thought that with the way farming was these days, one day his own much larger house and farm would lie abandoned to nature. Kirstie wasn’t going to want his sort of life, that was for sure.
There were ravens circling around it, he noticed suddenly. Like any sheep farmer, he hated the birds, the ruthless killers who hung about at lambing time and homed in on the sheep, helpless in labour, and the weaker lambs. It added insult to injury when the bird protection lot claimed they only took carrion; he’d lost ten lambs this year in attacks that seemed positively sadistic, yet you left yourself open to prosecution if you defended your vulnerable sheep with a shotgun. Not that he didn’t do it – sheep should have animal rights too.
Another raven arrived, and then he saw one dropping down inside. Had a sheep got in there, somehow? The walls of the house had been crumbling away for years so it wouldn’t be surprising if an enterprising ewe, pursuing the sheep’s favourite hobby of self-destruction, had wandered in and then been too dumb to find her way out again.
Surely, he’d have heard her complaining about the situation, though. They didn’t normally suffer in silence, so it was probably some other carrion – a rabbit, a hare, maybe? He walked round the house, looking for a break in the wall but couldn’t see one; the door was still barred. He shrugged, ready to walk on.
But something stopped him. There were too many ravens for small carrion; as he looked up, another arrived, and he could hear coarse cawing arguments going on from the other side of the wall. With growing concern, Fergus went to the door – the nails in the planks fixing it shut might be rusted enough to break if he pulled at it. To his surprise the door swung back easily under his hand and he stepped inside.
It was like a scene from a horror movie. There was a man lying on the floor and five of the great glossy-black birds were perched on his shoulder and around his head, so absorbed in their struggle as they tore at his exposed flesh that they didn’t react to the door opening.
Hoarse with the horror of it he yelled and rushed at them, clapping his hands. They were huge, threatening, this close; they startled at the noise, turning to eye him, their scimitar beaks bloodstained, but with insolent slowness did not immediately relinquish their prey. He caught one of them a blow with the back of his hand and at last they flew off. As a wing brushed his face he felt pure panic in a Hitchcock moment; were they rising only to attack him from the air?
But they were flying off, though only to join the others circling watchfully. The moment Fergus left, they would be back. What was he to do?
Reluctantly, he looked at the body. He was sadly accustomed to the savagery of their attacks on his sheep and his lambs – the pecked-out eyes, the tongue torn from the socket, the intestines pulled out from the creature while it still lived – but he had to fight nausea as he looked at the mutilation of one of his own kind.
It was in their usual pattern, going first for the soft flesh of eyes and mouth. The clothes – jeans and a long-sleeved checked shirt – had protected him so far, though before long a questing beak would break through these too; just an unusual type of fleece.
Dear God, he hoped the man had been dead before they started. Surely, he must have been! Even ravens would have been wary of attacking a living man – and when Fergus thought about it, surely there would have been more blood. No, this was some down-and-out who’d been shacked up here and just died; probably a druggie.
He’d have to phone the police, but by the time someone in a central office somewhere had taken the call and passed it on to Thurso and they managed to get themselves out here, hours could have passed with Fergus stuck on guard, fending off a renewed attack. The birds wouldn’t give up easily on such a promising meal.
He looked around. The man’s clothes were filthy, damp and muddy, but he was lying on a surprisingly clean-looking tartan rug. If he pulled it out from under him he could cover him up with it and surely that would give him long enough to fetch a tarpaulin cover and weigh it down with stones.
Moving him would be a distasteful task. Shuddering, Fergus tugged at the rug and the body flopped over as if it were boneless – a while dead, then, and with the movement he caught the sickly smell of corruption. He shuddered, though in its way it was a relief to know the poor sod definitely hadn’t been alive when the birds began their gruesome picnic. He didn’t touch him afterwards, just left him in the position he’d fallen into, covered him up with the rug and hurried out to the barn.
When he came back, the ravens were still there; more, even, than there had been. Grabbing some stones from the garden first, he spread out the tarpaulin on top of the rug and weighed it down.
Then he went back to the house and before he even made the phone call came back with a shotgun. They could prosecute him if they liked. If he got a couple of the bastards, it would be worth it.
CHAPTER TWO
It had been a serious tactical error. In a bid to distance himself as much as possible from the guests arriving for his father’s seventieth birthday drinks party, Kelso Strang had positioned himself in the farther corner of the sitting room but as it filled up and the sound of braying well-bred voices reached decibel levels to rival the parrot house in the zoo, he found himself trapped.
It all took him back to the cocktail parties of his army days. He had loathed them in the days when attending at the whim of the colonel was a professional duty; as a filial duty it was no better. Like the colonel, Major-General Sir Roderick Strang loved cocktail parties.
Mary Strang loved them too. Her face was bright with the joy of holding a party in her very own house after more than forty years of army billets and she was bustling about, greeting old friends and new neighbours and plying them with her very own cheese straws. Kelso might have pleaded a sudden emergency if it would only have annoyed his father – always so ready to take offence – but he couldn’t bring himself to deny his mother her transparent pleasure in his presence.
Now, as he found himself pinned into the corner by a mustard-cords-wearing Perthshire neighbour who had nothing worth saying to say but was saying it at length anyway, he cursed his conscience.
‘Do you shoot?’ the man said at last.
As a one-time sniper in Afghanistan and former member of the Police Scotland Armed Response Unit, Kelso had a mad impulse to say, ‘Only people,’ but again his social conscience got the better of him. ‘No. Do you?’ he said instead.
The man looked at him as if he’d said, ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘Well, yah. Not much point in living in Perthshire if you don’t shoot.’
‘Mmm.’ Kelso couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but the man was up for the small-talk challenge.
‘Though there’s fishing, of course. D’you fish?’
Kelso had to disappoint him again. ‘No,’ he said, then added in extenuation, ‘I live in Edinburgh.’
‘Weekends too? Can’t think what you’d find to do at weekends, staying in the city.’
It was almost with relief that Kelso saw his father’s rigidly upright figure spearheading its way towards him, as the crowd of guests parted like the Red Sea before Moses. The relief ebbed as he saw that he was leading across a tall girl with dark hair in the Kate Middleton style framing a long narrow face with large brown eyes.
‘Someone I want you to meet, Kelso,’ he said, ruthlessly interrupting the anecdote his neighbour had embarked on to illustrate how boring it had been last time he’d had to stay in Edinburgh. ‘Rosie Metcalfe – you remember Major Metcalfe, of course?’
‘Of course,’ Kelso said politely, nodding to Rosie, who gave him a smile that exposed rather too many teeth with a flash of upper gum and unfortunately accentuated an already-strong resemblance to a horse. A thoroughbred, naturally.
‘She’s here on her own with her parents.’ Smiling, he turned to Rosie and patted her arm. ‘Can’t have a pretty girl like you wasted on all these old buffers like me. And Kelso’s on his own now too, since his wife died last year.’
He should be past caring about his father’s tactlessness but Kelso’s stomach knotted at the casual mention of Alexa, killed with their unborn baby in a car crash. Perhaps someday he would stop being haunted by grief and the irrational feeling of guilt at having signed the authorisation to switch off life support, but that day still seemed a long way off.
Sir Roderick turned to the other man. ‘Now, Douglas, you come with me and leave these young people to get to know each other,’ he said and swept him off.
There was a small, awkward silence. Then Rosie said, ‘I’m very sorry about your wife.’
She seemed a nice girl. She was looking sweetly sympathetic and she had carefully not noticed the scar that ran down the right side of his face. Kelso gave a small grimace. ‘So am I,’ he said lightly. ‘And I apologise for my father. He’s had a subtlety bypass.’
Relieved, she smiled. ‘Oh, I know! Aren’t parents ghastly? My ma is just as bad. Are you on leave?’
Kelso frowned. ‘On leave?’
She looked puzzled in her turn. ‘Aren’t you in the army? Your father—’
His lips tightened. ‘I used to be, and he wishes I still was. I think he imagines if he states it often enough it’ll come true.’
He could sense her discomfort. ‘So – do you have another job?’ she asked.
‘I’m a policeman.’
Her eyes opened wide. ‘A policeman? Really?’
She might as well have said, ‘Good gracious, how awful!’ It wasn’t that he hadn’t had this response before. Indeed, among his parents’ friends it was the standard reaction, so it was probably unfair of him to say, ‘Yes. Dreadfully déclassé, isn’t it?’ and he felt guilty when Rosie went red with embarrassment.
‘Sorry,’ she stumbled. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘No, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry – that was rude of me. I’m a detective inspector.’
Her face brightened. ‘That sounds very interesting. Do tell me about it.’
Training would out. Girls like Rosie, veterans of a hundred dinner parties, knew all the levers they were supposed to press to keep a conversation going. Veteran of a distressing number of army dinner parties himself, he felt the familiar wave of almost overpowering boredom sweep over him.
‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Lots of paperwork and stuff, like everything else.’ A description of the last murder case he had been involved in wouldn’t be exactly cocktail party conversation.
He was suddenly gripped around the legs and an accusing voice said, ‘Unkie, I was looking for you. You were hiding.’ His niece Betsy was scowling up at him, her big blue eyes full of reproach.
He laughed and bent to pick her up. ‘Well, I’ve been here all the time. Maybe you were hiding from me.’
She shook her blonde curls violently. ‘No, I wasn’t.’ Then she turned to study Rosie and, all woman even at three, gave her a suspicious look. ‘This is my unkie,’ she said firmly.
‘It’s her version of Uncle K,’ he explained. ‘This is the redoubtable Betsy.’
Rosie laughed. ‘I can see that,’ she was saying when Kelso’s sister Finella came up, carrying a bottle of Prosecco. She held it out.
‘Mum wants you to circulate with this. There are senior army officers dying of thirst out there. Sorry to drag him away, Rosie.’
Rosie said goodbye with a certain amount of relief, Kelso thought, as he went to do as he was told with the bottle in one hand and Betsy on his hip, casting a triumphant glance at her rival over his shoulder.
‘You owe me one,’ Finella said in his ear as they walked away. ‘There was a look a desperation on both your faces.’
‘Oh dear. Nice girl, but—’
‘I know. Daughter of the Regiment. Not your type.’
He didn’t have a ‘type’. Alexa had been a one-off and there wasn’t another. He let it pass. ‘Do you think I can escape once I’ve gone round with this till it’s empty? I don’t want Ma to be upset.’
Betsy grabbed hold of his cheeks on either side and turned his head towards her. ‘I want you to come and see my drawing I did for you. Now!’ She jiggled up and down.
Her mother gave a resigned sigh. ‘You shouldn’t pander to her. On the other hand, it would give you an excuse.’
Kelso grinned. ‘Discipline’s your job. OK, Betsy. You’re a brat but I’ll do anything to get out of here. It’s bringing me out in a rash. I do sometimes wonder what Grandad would have made of all this.’
‘Knees-up down the pub with his miner mates after the shift was more his style. Dad always says darkly that you’re very like him. How are things going, anyway?’
‘Fine. It’s an interesting job. I’ve just got back from Ayrshire helping to mop up a crime syndicate – targeting farm machinery, would you believe.’
Finella nodded. Then she said, ‘Are … are you around for a bit? I might pop in sometime.’
‘Sure,’ he said easily but, trained in observation, he looked at his sister more closely. She’d tried to make that sound offhand, but her body language was saying something different. She was looking tired too, he thought, though Betsy – tugging at his hair impatiently now – was enough to exhaust anyone. ‘Are you—’ he began, but before he could finish his sentence his mother appeared.
‘Now, you two, we didn’t arrange a party for you to stand talking to each other. Fin, Audrey Stephenson was hoping to have a chat – she’s over there by the corner cabinet. Off you go!’
Rolling her eyes, Finella departed. Kelso said, ‘I’m just going to do a round with the bottle and then Betsy’s going to show me her drawing, aren’t you, monster?’
Mary wasn’t fooled. ‘I expect you’ll be taking off after that, won’t you? Thanks for coming anyway, darling. It means a lot to Roddy.’
Kelso doubted that, but he didn’t argue. As he finished his task and made his way to the door with Betsy crowing in delight, he saw that Roderick had noticed and his lips were tightened in exasperation.
PC Davidson, sent out from the Thurso Police Station to the Mowat farm on the edge of the village of Forsich, was very young, chubby-faced and pink-cheeked. Perhaps in a gesture towards gravitas he had grown a small moustache, but to Fergus Mowat’s jaundiced eye it looked rather as if it had been stuck on for a fancy-dress party. Wet behind the ears, he concluded.
‘You took your time. Did they tell you what the situation is?’ he asked.
The man shook his head. ‘Never do,’ he said simply. ‘Just, incident reported out here.’
‘Ah,’ Fergus said. ‘Got a strong stomach, have you, laddie?’
‘Course,’ the constable said stoutly, but Fergus could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down as he swallowed convulsively, and the pink tinge faded from his cheeks as he listened to the details. ‘That’s … that’s horrible. Was he … was he properly dead?’ he said at last.
‘Oh aye, he was dead. Very dead, is my guess.’
‘Right.’ Davidson squared his shoulders. ‘Better get it over with, then.’ He followed Fergus up the track, casting nervous looks up at the sky on the way.
‘It’s all right – they’ve given up. Brought down a couple of the buggers and then the rest scarpered,’ Fergus said, gesturing towards the sagging wire fence round the garden of the cottage where a couple of the black birds, like crumpled rags, hung upside down.
The sun was high in the sky now, baking down on the tarpaulin that had protected the corpse from the birds, but the flies were gathering and when the constable lifted it up the stench was indescribable. He dropped it back, choking, but Fergus, who was standing at a safer distance, gave him credit for managing not to throw up.
‘Come down the house and we’ll get the wife to make a cuppa,’ he said, and Davidson nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Rhona was nowhere to be seen. Fergus switched on the kettle, fetched the mugs and waved him to a seat at the kitchen table.
At last Davidson found his voice again. ‘What happened to him?’
Fergus shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Dossing down there, maybe a drug overdose? Who knows. Could have been there quite a while.’
‘I’d say.’ Davidson got out his notebook. ‘Better take down all the details. Full name?’
It took some time; the constable wasn’t the speediest writer. But by the end Fergus was satisfied that he’d got down the main point – that the man had been lying as if he was asleep and had only tipped over onto his face as Fergus pulled the rug out from under him to be able to cover him up. ‘Quite a smart-looking rug for a down-and-out,’ he added. ‘Not that I suppose that matters.’
‘No sign of foul play, though?’
‘None at all. Unless you’re talking about the birds.’ Fergus gave a short laugh at the pun, though Davidson only looked bewildered.
‘Right, right.’ He tucked away his notebook and stood up. ‘I’ll request immediate assistance. They’ll have to send someone along from CID.’
‘Better make it fast,’ Fergus said grimly. ‘The smell of that’ll have every fox in the area gathering and if they think I’m going to stand guard all night they’ve got another think coming.’
The head office of Curran Services was in a building overlooking the busy harbour in Aberdeen where trawlers and the great ferries for the Northern Isles and Scandinavia competed for harbour space with the PSVs – platform supply vessels – that provide logistic support to the oil rigs out in the North Sea. It was a lot quieter these days, with the downturn in oil prices, but Curran Services was well-enough established and shrewdly enough managed to have weathered the initial storm and had even taken over a couple of its less-well-managed rivals.
Ailie Johnston was short and stocky, with grey hair cut in a neat middle-aged bob; shrewd blue eyes, very bright behind sensible spectacles, were her only striking feature. She was frowning as she came into the boss’s office.
The man who sat behind the huge solid teak desk that had been Pat Curran’s up to four months ago looked up and noticed her expression.
‘Got a problem, Ailie?’ he said.
‘It’s just that Niall’s still not in. I’ve tried phoning and leaving messages, but he’s not replied. Should I maybe be getting someone to go round to his flat?’
Bruce Michie seemed irritated by the question. His small mouth tightened into a pout and he shrugged. ‘If he’s sulking because I gave him a right flea in his ear last week, it’s his problem. It’s Friday now – leave it over the weekend, Ailie, and if he doesn’t turn up on Monday you can send someone round with his P45.’
The PA hesitated. ‘That’s all week no one’s seen him. Should we not …?’
Michie gave a short, sneering laugh. ‘Are you feart he’s perished all alone in his flat and any time now his cat’ll get round to taking wee nibbles – supposing he’s got one? For God’s sake, he’s a healthy loon. Probably went out on the randan at the weekend and now he’s playing sick. Like I said, leave it till Monday.’
There was a flush of annoyance in his pudgy cheeks and Ailie subsided. Arguing with the boss was way above her pay grade. She turned to go, then paused. ‘Any news of Gabrielle? You went up that way last weekend, didn’t you?’
Michie didn’t look pleased about that either, his stubby fingers drumming on the desk impatiently. ‘Gabrielle? Didn’t see her. It was just a fishing weekend. Last I heard she was still much the same. Just needing a good rest. Probably.’
‘Right.’ Ailie went out, her mind still on the woman who had briefly been her boss. It was a shame about Gabrielle Ross; she’d been determined to carry on Pat’s business – not easy in the fevered financial climate at the moment.
He’d been a good boss and a smart businessman, though there were those who said if you went to sup with him you’d be wise to take a long spoon. His drainage business up in the Flow Country had gone bankrupt but he’d come out all right and then made his fortune with Curran Services. There were folks up in Caithness who’d spit on the ground if you said his name, though.
Right enough, not a lot of people were neutral when it came to Pat, but Ailie always spoke as she found, and she’d liked him. Larger than life, Pat had been − a big man in every way, a force of nature with the legendary charm of the Irish, and it seemed all wrong to see Michie with his pot belly and his bald head sitting in Pat’s great leather swivel chair, his wee leggies almost too short to reach the ground – but fair away with himself even so.
Working for Pat had been like living with a north-east gale: exhilarating, as long as you could still stand up and it didn’t actually blow the roof off. It hadn’t seemed possible that he could go, just like that, at only fifty-four.
And Gabrielle, poor wee soul, had done her best to step into his size twelves, when she couldn’t be more than twenty-four or five. She’d thought the world of her dad and he’d been grooming her to take over – just not for another ten years, supposing he could ever be persuaded to retire. She’d come in the day after the funeral, white as a sheet and with black circles round her eyes, but she’d still put Michie back in his place when he’d tried to sideline her.
Oh, she was her father’s daughter all right – tough enough to do whatever had to be done and like him not prepared to suffer fools gladly, so she’d enemies as well as friends. But in the oil world you needed to be tough, especially if you were a woman, and Ailie admired that. She’d rather be working for her now than for the sleekit Michie – sly, slimy wee nyaff.
Latterly, though, Gabrielle just seemed to lose the place. She’d been utterly devastated by Pat’s death and maybe she hadn’t given herself enough time to grieve. There was a lot of talk about that fire, and then the tragedy of her losing the baby, but Ailie had seen the signs of problems even before that – always neurotically double-checking on everything, panicking that something vital would be missed. She hadn’t been surprised when the breakdown came.
She could only hope that a rest would do the trick. But if Ailie had Gabrielle’s income she’d have been thinking about relaxing by a pool with a sun umbrella and a glass of chilled Chardonnay somewhere warm, not Caithness. She’d only been up there a couple of times herself and it seemed gey bleak. Still, maybe she was wanting to be near her mum – though she’d never seen any signs of Gabrielle wanting that before.
Ailie sighed as she walked back to her office. She still was a wee thing worried about Niall too – funny that he hadn’t answered her messages all week, but with Michie ready to take her head off if she brought it up again she’d better leave it till Monday.
CHAPTER THREE
Gabrielle came out of sleep reluctantly, her mouth thick from last night’s sleeping pills. The familiar feelings – misery, fear – swept in like a tidal wave, worse than ever today. She gasped at the onslaught, but she had a choice – stop thinking, stop feeling. Just – exist. Breathe, in and out. No more than that. Think automaton.
She sat up, swinging her legs out of bed and standing up far too quickly so that light-headedness forced her back down again for a moment. But then she was up and in the shower, the force of water beating on her head drowning out everything else.
She spent as long there as she could, but when she came out and looked at the clock it had only taken ten minutes of the long day that lay ahead. Ten minutes – was that all? It had felt much longer. She towelled her long dark hair and left it to dry in its natural tousled state – no more hair straighteners for her, ever again, and she pushed the memory fiercely out of her mind as she struggled to drag her comb through it. It just looked a mess now; she’d really have to get it cut, she thought, as she dragged it back into a ponytail.
She’d have to get her own breakfast today. David had gone offshore for a couple of days dealing with a computer problem on one of the rigs, but when he was at home he always left out her breakfast before going to work – Dorset Cereals honey granola, a pot of natural yoghurt and the cafetière primed with coffee so she had only to pour in the boiling water, almost as if he didn’t trust her to do it for herself. She’d got a bit tired of the honey flavour but he’d stockpiled several boxes in case she couldn’t get her favourite out here in the sticks. Well, it had been her favourite, but it was like that old joke of Paddy’s: ‘Monday you like baked beans, Tuesday you like baked beans, Wednesday you like baked beans, Thursday you like baked beans – how come all of a sudden on Friday you don’t like baked beans?’
It made her smile, then the tears came to her eyes. Oh Paddy, Paddy! She’d always thought of herself as so independent, tough – ruthless even, when necessary. But she’d been kidding herself. She’d been dependent on her father all along and when he died she’d fallen apart and could barely function. And David had been there, so calm, loving, utterly loyal, somehow holding the pieces together. He’d never reproached her; for that she owed him a debt she could never repay. It wasn’t his fault that day-to-day his too obvious concern and protectiveness was driving her—she clamped her lips shut before she could say ‘mad’.
She mustn’t, even as a joke. The memory of early onset Alzheimer’s claiming her gran was always in her mind; she had watched with an aching heart as the clever, lively woman slipped with terrible inexorability into a demented twilight. It ran in families, sometimes.
She gave a little shudder. She felt as if her nerves were strung on a rack being pitilessly stretched tighter and tighter. One day they would snap, unless she did what David said to do: blank out the past and live only in the moment.
When she was working it had all been so different. The big diary open on her desk would be crammed with meetings, visits to suppliers, lunch dates with possible new clients. She’d lived on adrenaline, relishing every minute of it. Paddy used to laugh at her enthusiasm, telling her to pace herself a bit better, but she knew he was pleased.
She had met David, not in Aberdeen, oddly enough, but at a drinks party her mother had given when she was up here for a duty visit. His best friend had at that time been working on the decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear plant and David was a regular weekend visitor. Their attraction had been immediate; he’d called her the following day and it had gone on from there.
Paddy had taken to him at once and given his blessing to the marriage. When they’d told him she was pregnant, he’d been moved to tears. Gabrielle had never been so happy.
The shattering suddenness of his coronary had destroyed her too. She hadn’t quite realised it at the time, though, being too busy taking over the reins. Bruce Michie, the junior partner, was both vain and feeble, which was a bad combination; she wasn’t going to let him sideline her and take control of Paddy’s company. She thought she could cope. Oh, she had the will, all right, even now. It was her mind that was betraying her.
The trivial memory blanks like forgetting where she’d left her mobile became bigger mistakes, like finding her wallet in the freezer or the milk in the cupboard under the sink. She couldn’t seem to get even simple arrangements, like appointments, clear in her head.
Her doctor had soothed her with talk of hormones and ‘baby brain’ combined with shock and grief. ‘Take proper time off,’ he said. ‘No emails, no phone calls. You’ll be fine.’
She had promised to keep her weekends work-free and on that Saturday morning she’d got up late, had a long, leisurely, self-indulgent pampering session and took time to choose what to wear for lunch with friends after David’s golf foursome.
She’d joined him as he finished breakfast in the conservatory kitchen they had built onto their small terraced house. She looked at her watch.
‘You should be getting ready to go,’ she said, then realised he was hesitating about leaving her alone.
‘Will you be all right? They won’t mind, you know, if—’
‘Don’t be daft!’ she said robustly, though it chilled her that he should be concerned. ‘I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘All right, then. If you’re sure.’ She had shooed him out to sort out his clubs and then waved him off from the doorstep.
He should have stayed. If he had, it wouldn’t have happened. But she mustn’t think about that.
It seemed to be hardest in the morning. She was so infinitely weary, so vulnerable to the confused, despairing, frantic thoughts that still kept piling in. It was like throwing her whole weight against a door while violent forces kept battering it and battering it. Someday, she knew, the hinges would give way and it would fall over and crush her.
The waiting room at the doctor’s surgery in Forsich was busy this morning and at the reception desk Francesca Curran was out of temper, a not uncommon occurrence.
‘No, Mrs Macintyre, the doctor can’t fit you in today and there isn’t a free appointment until next Thursday.’
Mrs Macintyre seemed inclined to argue and Francesca’s lips tightened. ‘No, I told you, Mrs Macintyre. There just are no spaces and it doesn’t sound urgent—’
Mrs Macintyre wasn’t impressed by that. Her tirade went on for some time and Francesca waited until it eventually ran down, tapping her fingers on the desk. ‘If you’ve managed to convince yourself that you need immediate attention, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Accident and Emergency at Wick. Goodbye.’
She put the phone down and said tartly to her colleague, who was working at the computer, ‘You can take the next call, Cathy. It’ll probably be Mrs Macintyre arguing the toss and if I take it I’ll be rude to her.’
Cathy made a non-committal sound that could have been either sympathy or a comment on the politeness, or otherwise, of the previous response. As the doctor’s stepdaughter, Francesca could be as unhelpful as she liked without running the risk of being sacked. And now here was the other stepdaughter coming in from the door that led into the doctor’s house, the one who was allegedly ill though no one talked about what was wrong with her.
Francesca greeted her sister without enthusiasm. ‘Ah, the prodigal daughter!’ She knew there was an edge to her voice; somehow it always crept in when she was confronted with her younger and prettier sister, who was skinny with thick wavy dark hair, where she herself was definitely bulky and had fine straight hair of a shade that Gabrielle had once maliciously described as ‘animated mouse’. And now her sister was wealthier too, thanks to their father’s gross favouritism – and that hurt, that really hurt, especially when she needed the money for a home of her own. At her age she shouldn’t still have to be living with her mother and stepfather.
‘Where were you this morning?’
Gabrielle looked at her coldly. ‘Aren’t you getting tired of that particular joke? And what do you mean, where was I? I was to meet Mum at eleven-thirty but she’s not in the house.’
Francesca gave her a pitying look. ‘According to her it was ten-thirty – she came in here at quarter to eleven and said she wasn’t prepared to wait any longer. God, you’re in a bad way, Gabby!’
She knew how her sister hated the name and she knew, too, that Gabrielle was making a big deal out of being stressed out, but it was an attention-seeking ploy, in her opinion. Admittedly losing the baby had been sad but this was all about Pat’s death, really. Fran had lost her father too, but somehow only Gabrielle was entitled to make this sort of melodramatic fuss about it. The way she had poor David dancing attendance on her was positively disgusting too. All that was wrong with her was not having Dad around to tell her every five minutes that she was wonderful.
He’d never bothered telling Fran she was wonderful, had he? She’d hated him for that – at least, that was what she told herself; loving him when he made it so clear he was only interested in his other daughter was too painful. Of course, she hadn’t sucked up to him like Gabrielle had. It had always set her teeth on edge when Gabrielle called him Paddy, her cutesy mixture of Pat and Daddy. What was wrong with Dad?
A flicker of reaction showed on Gabrielle’s face, but she only said airily, ‘Oh, Mum must have got it wrong. Can’t think why she didn’t phone me. I’ll catch up with her later. Not to worry, Fanny.’ She walked out.
‘Fran’ was fine, but Francesca hated Fanny just as much as Gabrielle hated Gabby, so now they were quits. Somehow their conversations always ended up back in the nursery. Every so often when she saw other sisters who were friends as well she felt a pang of wistfulness, but with Gabrielle it simply wasn’t possible. Thanks to Pat Curran, their relationship had always been dysfunctional and now what she felt for her sister was something close to loathing.
How like Fran, trying to get her on the raw. Gabrielle hoped she’d managed not to show what a jolt it had given her, being told she’d got the time wrong. She had written it down carefully last night on her list to herself, but the arrangement had been made in the morning when she often felt a bit woozy, so she could have got it confused at the time – or else, as she had claimed, her mother could have got it wrong. She wouldn’t put money on that, though.
Still, it was odd that Lilian hadn’t called her; it would only have taken Gabrielle ten minutes to drive in to Forsich. She fished in her bag, but even as she did so she remembered that she hadn’t switched it on this morning. Her stomach lurched; something else she’d forgotten. But that was quite normal, she told herself firmly; everyone forgets to do that sometimes. Even so, her hands were shaking as she checked it.
Sure enough, there was a missed call and a couple of texts from a presumably irritable Lilian. She didn’t want to read them, and she didn’t want to respond to David’s ‘All right, love?’ right now either. She switched it back off again and drove on to Thurso alone for her groceries, just to get out of Forsich. She spent as little time as she could in the place; even when you’d learnt long ago not to care what people thought, it wasn’t pleasant to get hostile looks – and worse.
Fran’s constant sniping didn’t help. Admittedly, they’d never been close. Perhaps the small age gap had meant that Fran had resented her right from the start, for usurping her position as the baby. They’d bickered their way through childhood until, when she’d been fourteen and Fran sixteen, their parents had separated. Fran had chosen to stay here with their mother – and still lived at home – but Gabrielle had insisted on going to Aberdeen with vibrant, exciting Pat.
Oh, maybe he’d made it a wee bit more obvious than he should have that she was his favourite, but you couldn’t blame him. Fran had been such an infuriating, whiny child, forever nursing a grievance, and it was no wonder he couldn’t disguise his irritation with her. Jealousy had corroded the girls’ relationship long, long before the business over Paddy’s will. And then there was Gabrielle’s sin in marrying David – unforgivable, apparently, despite ‘I saw him first’ not really applying to adult relationships. Fran seriously needed to grow up.
That childhood decision hadn’t done anything for Gabrielle’s relationship with her mother, either. She’d been labelled a traitor, even though it was Lilian who’d been unfaithful and broken up the marriage. Just when Pat’s drainage business was collapsing, Lilian had embarked on an affair with the local doctor – the rat deserting the sinking ship, in her teenage daughter’s eyes. She hated, she truly hated disloyalty and she’d never been able to forgive her mother for this betrayal at the time when her father needed all the support he could get. Malcolm Sinclair was good-looking, certainly, but prosy and pompous and Gabrielle was convinced it had a lot more to do with Lilian making sure of a comfortable lifestyle and status in local society than it had with any sort of illicit passion.
Whatever the locals might have said it hadn’t been Pat’s fault that environmental theory changed and the draining of bogland to plant trees stopped being the way to save the planet and became an ecological crime. He’d been a local hero before that for bringing work to the community, and if some of them had lost money by investing in the business, so had he. It was only because he’d had the guts and vision to pick himself up, work flat out to start another business and prosper that they hated him.
That, and Gary Gunn’s death …
She refused to accept the burden of guilt for that; it was an accident, that was all. Death and sore loss were the story of her life just now and if she didn’t shut her mind to all of it the darkness that lurked about her, so close now that she could almost see it out of the corner of her eye, would sweep in.
Thirteen was hideously young to die, though. She never failed to put flowers on his grave when she came up to Forsich.
‘That all right for you, Mrs Sinclair?’
The hairdresser held up the big round mirror behind her. She was fussy and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be impressed by his handiwork. She only came in when she needed a trim; it had to be a posh hairdresser in Aberdeen for her blonde highlights.
He heard a tiny sigh and noticed the brief compression of her lips, but she only said, ‘That’s fine, Dennis. You’ve done your best,’ and gave him a little, gracious smile as befitted a doctor’s wife. She’d got a lot grander since the days when she was married to an Irish navvy made good. She’d worked in the local Spar then, but now it was all voluntary work in the Shelter shop and charity committees in Aberdeen.
She was a good-looking woman, though. What age was she now – late forties, fifty, even? – but she was slim and toned-looking, with delicate features and clear blue eyes, and if the unwrinkled complexion owed something to Botox, it had been skilfully enough done for it not to be obvious.
He was just brushing the hairs off her shoulders when she raised her hand in greeting to a woman walking along the pavement who had stopped, peered in and then opened the door. Lilian gave a little worried sigh.
‘That’s my daughter Gabrielle, Dennis, late as usual! She can’t seem to remember the simplest arrangement these days.’
Dennis smiled. ‘She’s not the only person with that problem. Ask any hairdresser!’
As her daughter came over, her face was reflected in the mirror above her mother’s. There was a resemblance between them: they had the same shape of face with well-defined cheekbones and a clear, arching brow line, but in the daughter, you could see the Irish heritage – the pale skin, the dark-blue eyes ‘put in with a sooty finger’. Terrible hair, though. Scraped back from her face into a ponytail like that it did nothing for her and inheriting Pat Curran’s determined jawline hadn’t done her any favours either. She looked strained, with dark circles under her eyes, and he remembered there had been rumours about a breakdown.
‘Can’t believe you’re her mother. Sister, surely?’ Dennis said, knowing his client.
‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ She was laughing up at him when Gabrielle reached her. ‘What happened to you this morning?’ she said.
Gabrielle coloured. ‘I was positive we said half past eleven. Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake?’
‘Of course not. I’d been thinking we could have a quick coffee before my appointment and that was for quarter past eleven. I wanted to speak to you, anyway. I texted but you didn’t reply.’
‘I know. Sorry – I forgot to switch on my phone.’
‘Oh, I see.’ She gave her daughter a sharp glance, then said, ‘Well, I suppose we all do that from time to time,’ in a bracing sort of way.
‘Of course we do. How long are you going to be? I was just going along to the Co-op.’
‘I’ve done my shopping.’ Lilian paused, and Dennis guessed what she was going to say next – they’d been talking about the news that was all over the town. Was that an anxious glance she was giving the nervy daughter?
‘There’s a bit of a fuss in Forsich. Malcolm was speaking to the police surgeon today and apparently they’ve found a body up at the Mowat farm.’
Gabrielle stared at her. ‘A body?’
‘Oh, some tramp who seems to have been dossing down in one of the sheds, apparently. It’s not at all pleasant, from what Malcolm said – you really don’t want to know. Try not to listen to the gossip. You’ve had more than enough to cope with recently and you know David hates it when you get upset.’
‘Yes – yes, I know. Right. I’ll just get what I’m needing and head home.’
Her mother gave her an anxious look. ‘You are all right, aren’t you? You could come home with me if you like. I think maybe it would be wiser—’
‘No, I’m fine,’ Gabrielle said hastily. ‘It’s a lovely day. I’ll go for a walk.’
‘Don’t forget the sunscreen. You know you burn easily. And you won’t forget when David will get home, will you? He worries if you’re not there.’
‘I won’t forget. Why should I?’ Her daughter’s voice was challenging.
‘Of course you won’t,’ Lilian said too heartily. ‘I’m just a fussing mother hen,’ she said with a smile to Dennis.
