Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

On her first pass, she identified the house. She couldn’t immediately see a place to park, so she drove to the corner, turned round and cruised slowly back. About a dozen yards past Coyne’s house, a set of headlights flashed at her. Her first reaction was that someone had noticed her predicament and was indicating they were about to move out of their space. Then she recognized Neil’s Ford, a car almost as scruffy as its owner. She drew level and they dropped their windows simultaneously. Joanne’s nose twitched as the stale aroma of unwashed male rolled out towards her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You were supposed to go off at midnight and leave chummy to his own devices.”

Neil yawned. “I couldn’t do it. I tried to clear it with the boss but I haven’t been able to raise him. I can’t get through on the mobile, his home phone’s on the answering machine and he’s not responding to his pager. I can’t believe it. He’s never out of touch. And last night, of all nights, when he knew we were starting a fresh surveillance. It just doesn’t make sense. So I decided to stay till you got here, just in case.”

Joanne gave a sly smile. “I bet I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“He’s birding it,” she said.

“Bollocks,” Neil scoffed. “He’s like a monk, the guvnor. He’s forgotten what it’s for.”

“You lot never forget what it’s for,” Joanne said. “He came back from seeing that lecturer the other day with a real spring in his step. And he asked me for a restaurant recommendation.”

“God, he must have been desperate.”

“Thank you, Neil. Anyway, I reckon he’s gone off to her place and decided that for once he’s going to forget about the sodding job and have a good time.”

Neil shook his head. “He’d never turn his pager off.”

“That’s what you think. So, what are you going to do now?”

Neil reached down and turned the key in his ignition. “I’m going to piss off back to the Yard and get my head down for a couple of hours until he gets in. Wherever he is, he’ll be in this morning to see what’s what, I bet you any money.”

“That would be a mug’s bet. Hang on till I turn round again and I’ll slot into your space, OK?” Joanne drove off. By the time she’d swung round, Neil was edging out, leaving room for her to pick up the surveillance. She waved him off and settled down. She only hoped Gerard Coyne wasn’t planning on a bike ride this morning.

Caroline pulled up at a roundabout on the edge of Inverness and killed the stereo. “Where to now?” she asked.

Fiona yawned and scrubbed her eyes with the edge of her fists. She had that empty nauseous feeling that comes with too little sleep and too much adrenaline. The rain had stopped and there was a thin grey mist hanging in the air, leaving Inverness looking even more like a ghost town than the hour itself. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I know is that the guy who owns the garage where Kit keeps the Land Rover is called Lachlan Fraser.”

Caroline snorted. “Like that really narrows it down.”

“I take it Fraser’s a pretty common name hereabouts, then?”

“You could say that. The ancestral seat of the clan chief is about half a dozen miles up the road. Fraser is about as common a name round Inverness as Smith would be in London.” She put the car in gear and cruised towards the centre.

“Where are you going?” Fiona asked.

“When in doubt, ask a policeman.” Caroline headed on down the main road. “We’ll either find the police station, or we’ll find some night-shift woolly suits in a patrol car sneaking a fly bacon butty at the all-night snack bar.”

“You think Inverness runs to an all-night snack bar?” Fiona said, the professional sceptic.

Caroline flashed her a dark grin. “Don’t make the mistake of falling for the tourist board propaganda. Inverness is a lot more Morvern Callar than it is Local Hero.”

“Does that mean you know where to score me a wrap of speed?”

Caroline’s eyebrows rose. “I suspect you’re either too early in the morning or too late at night for any action like that round here. I take it that was a joke?”

Fiona’s grin was savage. “Only technically. Jokes are supposed to be funny, and the way I’m feeling right now is anything but. Better make do with the all-night snack bar and a shot of caffeine. If I do end up in the arms of the law, the last thing I need is for them to discover I’m pumped full of amphetamines.”

“Hang on, there we go.” Caroline was off on a tangent, waving over to her left where a DIY super store occupied most of the horizon. Its vast car park contained a fish and chip van, a police car and the business end of an articulated lorry. She veered into the slip road and cruised across to the police car.

“You get the directions. You’ve got the right accent. I’ll get the breakfast,” Fiona instructed, clambering out of the car and stretching. Desperate as she was to get to the bothy, she needed food and drink more than the five minutes she might save by not stopping now. She leaned on the high counter, smelling the rancid agglomeration of stale fat, cheap vinegar, fried onions and diesel. The menu was written in magic marker on what had once been a white board Describing its present colour was beyond Fiona’s vocabulary. Old men’s underwear was about the closest she could come to it. The board offered fish, chips, burgers, sausages, rolls and pies. Another sign announced the availability of ‘Tea, coffee, asorted skoosh’. Fiona smiled at the large man behind the counter. Judging by his pallor, he lived off his own cooking.

“Two chip rolls, please,” Fiona said. It was probably the safest option. Besides, all that complex carbohydrate would keep her going for a few hours. “And two teas,” she added.

“Aye, right,” the lard mountain said. He turned away and tended his hissing fryer. Fiona turned to see how Caroline was getting on with the police officers. She was bent over, leaning into an open window, her face all cheerful openness. Would she and Lesley have made it, Fiona wondered? Probably not. First love seldom did. And then she’d almost certainly have lost Caroline as a friend. With a sense of dawning amazement, Fiona reached the complex realization that Lesley’s death had actually given her a gift. She scratched her head, deciding to file away the thought for another time, when she could consider it properly. Right now, she was struggling to hang on to any sense of reality in what was increasingly resembling a nightmare.

Caroline straightened up with a nod and a smile and set off back towards the car. Catching Fiona watching her, she gave the thumbs-up sign. “There you go, darling’,” the chip van man said, plonking down two overstuffed bread rolls on a pair of paper napkins. Fiona handed over a fiver and waved away the change, concentrating instead on juggling the two chip rolls and the two polystyrene beakers of tea.

Back in the car, they fell on the food and drink. Between mouthfuls of surprisingly tasty chip butty, Caroline explained where they were heading. “Lachlan Fraser’s place is out towards the airport. The bobbies knew him, right enough. Not for any bad reasons, you understand. Just because…well, they know these things.” She drove intently, sandwich in one hand, tea between her thighs, careful on the corners not to spill her drink.

The streets started to waken as they drove, yellow oblongs of light suddenly breaking the grey facades of houses. Now the occasional car or milk float hummed past them, and the first blurring of light in the east started to leak into the night sky. Fiona wondered where Kit was. Whether she’d be in time, or whether she was already too late. Whether the killer would stick to the plot, or settle for an approximation.