Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

The wind whisked away the smoke from his cigarette. ‘I had a good idea. I’d already started to think Becky was dead. I’d been able to follow her trail so far, but then it just stopped. So when I heard rumours about her seeing some rich South African before she’d vanished, I started digging. I found out that Strachan had moved around, lived in different countries but always for short periods of time. So I looked at newspaper archives of places where he’d settled. I found reports of girls being murdered or disappearing around the same time. Not in all of them, but too many to be coincidence. And the more I looked, the more convinced I was that Becky was one of his victims. Everything fitted.’

‘And you didn’t tell the police? You used to be a detective inspector, for God’s sake! They’d have listened to you!’

‘Not without proof they wouldn’t. I’d pulled in every favour I could when I was looking for Becky. A lot of people thought I’d lost the plot as it was. And if I’d confronted Strachan he’d have just gone to ground. But Rebecca had been using her stepfather’s name. There was no way he could connect us. So I decided to play the long game and came here, hoping he’d slip up.’

I was shivering as I listened, but the chill I felt had nothing to do with the cold.

‘What happened? Did you get tired of waiting?’ I asked, surprising myself with my own anger.

Brody flicked the ash from his cigarette, letting it disintegrate in the wind.

‘No. Janice Donaldson happened.’

His face was unreadable as he told me how he’d followed Strachan on his trips to Stornoway, inventing business and meetings of his own, taking the ferry to arrive first whenever Strachan had gone on the yacht. To begin with he’d been worried that Strachan had been preparing to select another victim. But when nothing happened to any of the women he spent time with, Brody’s relief turned first to puzzlement, then frustration.

Finally, he’d approached Janice Donaldson in Stornoway one night after she’d left a pub. He’d offered to pay her for information, hoping to learn more about Strachan’s habits, perhaps discover a tendency towards violence. It had been the first time he’d shown his hand against his enemy, a calculated gamble, but he reasoned that the risk was worth it. It wasn’t as if Donaldson knew who he was.

Or so he’d thought.

‘She recognised me,’ Brody said. ‘Turned out she used to live in Glasgow, and I’d been pointed out to her when I’d been searching for Becky. Donaldson had known her. She’d been thinking about claiming the reward I was offering for information, but she’d been picked up for soliciting before she had the chance. By the time she was back in circulation I’d gone. So she offered to sell it to me now.’

He drew down a lungful of smoke, blew it out again for the wind to take away.

‘She told me Becky had been a prostitute. I suppose on some level I’d already guessed, given the way she’d been living. But actually being told it, by someone like that…When I refused to pay her, she threatened to tell Strachan who I was, that I’d been asking questions. Then she started saying things about Rebecca, things no father wants to hear. So I hit her.’

Brody held out his hand, considering it. I remembered how easily he had battered Strachan senseless in the broch. I was conscious of the constriction of my sling under the coat, and of the cliff ’s edge only a few yards away. It took a conscious effort not to look at it, or to step away from him.

‘I always had a temper,’ he went on, almost mildly. ‘That’s why my wife left. That and the drinking. But I thought I’d got it under control. Nothing stronger than tea these days. I didn’t even hit her very hard, but she was drunk. We were down at the docks, and she fell backwards, cracked her head on a stanchion as she went down.’

Not a club after all, then, but an impact all the same. ‘If it was an accident why didn’t you turn yourself in?’

For the first time there was heat in Brody’s eyes. ‘And be sent down for manslaughter, when that murdering bastard was still free? I don’t think so. Not when there was another way.’

‘You mean frame him.’

‘If you like.’

It made a twisted sort of sense. There was no link between Brody and Janice Donaldson, but Strachan was a different matter. If she was found dead on Runa, when it emerged that he was one of her clients-and Brody would have made sure that it did-then suspicion would quickly focus on him. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have been a justice of sorts.

For Brody that was better than nothing.

Something else had occurred to me as I’d listened. I thought again how the cracks had crazed Janice Donaldson’s skull without actually breaking it.

‘She wasn’t dead, was she?’

Brody stared across at Stac Ross. ‘I thought she was. I’d put her in the car boot, but I wouldn’t have risked bringing her over on the ferry if I’d known. It wasn’t until I opened it over here and saw she’d thrown up that I realized. But she was dead then, right enough.’

No, I thought, she wouldn’t have survived the ferry crossing with an injury like that. At the very least it would have caused haemorrhaging that would have been fatal without fast medical attention, and perhaps even with it.

But she hadn’t been given the chance.

So Brody had gone ahead as planned. He’d planted evidence at the crofter’s cottage that would further incriminate Strachan: dog hairs from his retriever, an imprint from one of Strachan’s wellingtons that Brody had taken from their barn one night, and which he’d then hidden back there for the police to find. Then he’d set fire to the body, not only to destroy any traces that might link him to it, but also to hide the fact that Janice Donaldson hadn’t died in the cottage, as an examination would otherwise have found. He’d even sold his car and replaced it with a new one, because he knew there would be microscopic evidence left in the boot no matter how thoroughly he cleaned it. Using all his experience as a police officer, Brody had tried to anticipate everything.

But with murder, as with life, that’s never possible.

His cheeks hollowed as he drew on the cigarette. ‘I was going to let someone else find the body. But after a month of waiting, knowing it was just lying there, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Christ, when I went in again and saw it…’ He shook his head, mutely. ‘I’d not used much petrol, just enough to make it look like a botched attempt to torch the body. I wanted it to be identified, to obviously be murder, that was the whole point. But all I could do then was report it and hope that SOC did their job properly.’

But instead of SOC, he’d got a drunken police sergeant and an inexperienced constable. And me.

I felt physically sick at the extent of his betrayal. He’d used us all, playing on our trust as he’d steadily pointed us towards Strachan. No wonder he’d been so loath to accept Cameron or Kinross as suspects. An acid sense of bitterness rose up in my throat.

‘What about Duncan?’ I asked, too angry to care about provoking him. ‘What was he, collateral damage?’

Brody accepted the accusation without flinching. ‘I made a mistake. When the cottage collapsed, it wiped out all the evidence I’d planted. I was starting to worry that there wasn’t enough to incriminate Strachan even if the body was identified. I’d been sounding out Duncan, knew he was a smart lad. So I decided to use him.’

He shook his head, annoyed with himself.

‘Stupid. Should have known better than to complicate things. I didn’t say much, only that I’d got my suspicions about Strachan, and that someone ought to look into his background. I thought I could steer bits of information his way, let him take the credit for it. And then I cocked up. I told Duncan that Strachan had been visiting prostitutes in Stornoway.’