Peter May: Coffin Road

‘Which boat’s yours?’ Gunn asked him, and Maciver nodded towards a garishly painted old door of a fishing boat anchored in the bay. ‘Bloody hell!’ Gunn said. ‘You take that out to the Flannans?’

Maciver shrugged and grinned. ‘She’s game for anything, that old girl.’

Gunn looked at her, and couldn’t imagine a trip he would less like to make. He took out the original photograph of the murdered man from Eilean Mòr and held it out.

Maciver looked at it and nodded. ‘Aye, that’s him alright. Sam Waltman, he said his name was. Don’t know why that stuck. Except I remember thinking Waltman, Walt Disney.’ He grinned to reveal a mouthful of bad teeth. ‘And Sam’s not a name you hear much around here.’

‘How did he contact you?’

‘He didn’t. I got a call from a fella down in Harris. Neal something. Asked if I would take his friend out. A one-way trip. I wouldn’t need to bring him back, he said, because he would be meeting him out there, and would give him a lift back himself.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette, then let the wind whip it away from his open mouth. ‘Dunno what happened, but he parked his Land Rover up the road yonder, and it’s still there.’

Maciver followed him slowly up the road on foot as Gunn reversed back to the parking area. He swung into it and got out, to feel the wind picking up as it whipped in off the water. The Land Rover was parked on the grass just beyond the square of tarmac. It was an old beast, an off-road warrior, scraped and dented by the years, wheels caked with mud. The windscreen was opaque except where it had been smeared by the wipers in two blurred arcs. Gunn tried the doors and tailgate. All locked. He shaded the driver’s window from reflection and peered inside. It was littered with cigarette packs and chocolate wrappers. A well-thumbed road atlas of Scotland lay on the passenger seat next to what looked like the return half of a ferry ticket.

He walked around to the front of it and took a note of the registration number, then turned to Maciver. ‘I’m obliged to you, Mr Maciver. We’ll need to take a statement. Tomorrow’ll be fine. If you can’t come to Stornoway, I’ll send someone to the house. Excuse me.’

He turned away then and checked the signal on his mobile before calling the office, the phone pressed to one ear, a finger in the other.

‘Hector, it’s George. I’m pretty sure he’s our man. Sam Waltman’s his name. I’ve got the registration number of his Land Rover. Let’s run it through the DVLA and see who owns it.’ He reeled off the number from his notebook. ‘And we’ll need a tow-truck down here to get it back to Stornoway, and a mechanic to open her up for us.’

The signal was breaking up and DC Smith’s response was inaudible.

‘Sorry, Hector, I’m on one bar here. Say again?’

After a couple of crackles, Smith’s voice came through loud and clear. ‘We just got feedback from the Manchester police on the Harrisons, sir,’ he said. ‘I suppose it shouldn’t be any surprise to us that the man’s not in concrete at all.’ And Gunn kissed goodbye to even the remotest possibility of making it back in time for dinner.

On the single-track heading west towards Luskentyre beach, Gunn could see the storm gathering itself out at sea. Gone was the blue overhead, to be replaced by low grey skeins of cloud that cast their shadow over the bay. Two, maybe three miles offshore, the rain was already falling in intermittent patches of darker grey, curiously backlit in fleeting moments of dazzling sunlight that broke through the cloud bubbling along the horizon.

As he drove past the cemetery, he reflected that its permanent residents must have seen many a storm come and go. The white Highland pony that habitually fed on the beach grasses that grew among the dunes would have seen a few, too. He was grazing near the fence below Dune Cottage, and Gunn noted with a grim sense of premonition that the suspect’s car was gone. At the top of the hill, Sergeant Morrison from Tarbert was leaning against his car, which he had parked across the gate of the Harrisons’ house. Gunn drew up in front of him and got out to shake his hand.

‘Donnie.’

‘George.’

‘Well?’

‘Nobody here. Car’s gone.’

Gunn nodded down the hill towards Dune Cottage. ‘And our man?’

‘Not there either, and no sign of a vehicle.’

‘Shit.’ Gunn’s involuntary curse, barely whispered, was lost in the wind. It was Gunn who had told the CIO that they had no reason to detain the suspect, but now they knew that it was Mr No Memory who had arranged for Sam Waltman to be taken out to Eilean Mòr, where the two men had a rendezvous. A one-way trip was what he had ordered, as if he knew that Waltman wouldn’t be coming back. And now he was gone. He looked up at the glass front of the Harrison house wondering what, if any, connection the Harrisons had with this. In his experience innocent people did not usually lie. So why had Jon Harrison lied to him about what he did for a living? ‘Let’s talk to Mrs Macdonald,’ he said.

They walked down the road to her house, and Mrs Macdonald opened the door to a cacophony of barking dogs. Her yappy little dog growled and snapped at them from behind the safety of her legs, while Bran greeted Gunn like a long-lost friend, paws up on his chest, almost knocking him over.

‘Bran!’ Her reprimand brought the Labrador back down to all fours, and she stood glaring at the policemen. ‘I don’t pretend to know what’s going on here, officers, but I think we’ve all had just about enough of it.’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Mrs Macdonald,’ Gunn said. ‘I’m surprised to see that you have — ’ he hesitated only momentarily — ‘Mr Maclean’s dog.’

She tutted and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Well, I wouldn’t normally take him, but it’s hardly the dog’s fault that his owner’s a crook and a liar.’ Gunn wondered what exactly it was she had heard about him. ‘And they were off together, all three of them. In both cars.’

‘Mr Maclean and the Harrisons?’

‘That’s right. It was Mrs Harrison that came to the door with Bran. He wouldn’t dare! Normally, she would take Bran. But since they were all going off together, she begged me to keep him. Just for a few hours, she said.’

‘And did she say where they were going?’

‘Rodel, apparently. Looking for a boat.’ She glanced beyond the two policemen at the darkening sky blowing in across the bay. ‘But I can’t imagine they’d be going out anywhere in that.’

‘How long ago did they leave?’

‘About half an hour.’ She tipped her head towards the tall sergeant. ‘Mr Morrison could only have missed them by ten minutes or so.’

The light was fading fast as Gunn drove down into the shadow of St Clement’s Church and the shelter of the tiny harbour at Rodel. Sergeant Morrison, in his too small police car, drew in behind him and jackknifed himself out into the first spits of rain. He walked stiffly over to where the Detective Sergeant was standing on the quayside gazing helplessly out over the boats that rose and fell in the incoming swell, complaining and straining against the restraint of their ropes. There was nobody here, just a red SUV parked on the far quay.

‘That looks like their cars over there,’ Morrison said, and Gunn swivelled his head to see two vehicles parked up on the grass below the Rodel Hotel. Lights from the hotel itself shone into the dusk, casting feeble shadows towards the harbour.

‘Maybe they’re in the hotel. Or someone there might have seen them.’ He turned to look at the cloud and rain blowing in through the Sound. ‘Nobody in their right mind would take a boat out in this.’ He started off towards the hotel, but Sergeant Morrison grabbed his arm.