Кит Мори - Deathly Wind

‘And with that strange bruise on his back it looks as if he may have been held under,’ suggested Torquil. ‘But he was a big bloke. Would it have needed a lot of strength to keep him under?’

‘Not necessarily,’ returned Ralph. ‘His blood alcohol level was high enough to have anaesthetized half of the fishermen in West Uist.’

‘Huh!’ said Wallace Drummond, doubtfully.

Torquil crossed to the whiteboard that was usually used to keep darts or table tennis scores and picked up the marker pen.

‘All right, we have a suspected murder victim,’ he said, writing the name Liam Sartori on the board and enclosing it in a box. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘He worked for the new laird,’ Wallace Drummond suggested.

Torquil nodded, wrote the name Jock McArdle nearby and enclosed it in a circle. He joined the box and the circle with a line. ‘What else?

‘He was from Glasgow. Not much taste in clothes,’ said Douglas.

‘He had a run in with Calum Steele,’ said Morag.

Torquil added Calum’s name and circled it.

‘And he had a run in with Ewan,’ Morag added.

Torquil turned and stared at her in surprise. ‘Did he now? When? I didn’t know about that?’

Morag coloured. ‘Sorry, Torquil. I thought I had told you. I’ve just – I mean I had – things on my mind. I’ll get the report book.’

She got up and went through to the main office, returning after a few moments with the large loose-leaf ledger. She put the book down on the table in front of Torquil and thumbed back the pages.

‘Here it is. Early last week, a couple of days before he … was last seen. Ewan cautioned him and his companion, a Danny Reid, about messing about with a motorboat in the harbour. When he approached them they did not realize that he was a police officer and started giving him lip. You know what a gentle giant he is—’ She bit her lip, and went on. ‘Anyway, he showed them his warrant card and they just kept on being abusive and derogatory about West Uist, and about being the new laird’s right-hand men. Then one of them tossed a cigarette end into the gutter and Ewan gave him the option of picking it up and taking it home or being run in there and then.’

Morag grinned as she recalled the scene of him telling her about it. ‘When he began rolling up his sleeves – to use Ewan’s words – “he fair scuttled down and picked it up”. But Ewan thinks they went off muttering about getting him back.’

Torquil tapped the marker pensively on the table then turned and added Ewan’s name. He hesitated a moment, then enclosed it in a box. ‘We will use a box to indicate that Ewan is … also dead.’ He sighed and drew a line between the names. Then he added the name Danny Reid, circled it and drew interconnecting lines with Liam Sartori, Ewan McPhee and Jock McArdle.

After a moment he wrote the word ‘dog’ near Jock McArdle’s name and enclosed it in a box, and underneath it wrote the words ‘suspected poison’, followed by a question mark.

‘Right, now let’s focus on the Wee Kingdom for a minute,’ he said. ‘Liam Sartori had been there, delivering letters, as I understand it; Lachlan told me about it. And the letters were all legal documents on behalf of the new estate owner, Jock McArdle, informing the crofters that he was going to have wind towers erected on the common grazing land adjoining their crofts.’

Ralph had been quiet since his presentation. Now he interjected, ‘I am guessing that it is the same letter that the laird himself delivered to Rhona at the hospital!’ His normally calm visage turned stern. ‘I have every reason to believe that was the trigger for her heart attack.’

Torquil nodded, then turned and under the heading of Wee Kingdom added Rhona McIvor’s name, which he duly boxed. He turned to Morag. ‘We’ll need a copy of that letter.’

Morag had been making notes. ‘And I expect we’ll need to interview all of the crofters.’

Douglas Drummond snorted. ‘Aye, the ones that are still alive.’

And Torquil wrote the names as prompted by Morag: Alistair McKinley, Megan Munro, Vincent Gilfillan, all of whom he enclosed in circles. And then Gordon MacDonald and Kenneth McKinley, who received boxes.

‘What about the family?’ Morag asked.

‘Good question,’ replied Torquil adding their names alongside the other members of the Wee Kingdom community. Instead of a box or a circle he drew a large question mark beside their names.

As Torquil began making notes about the respective post-mortem findings on Liam Sartori and Kenneth McKinley, and then linking their names with the word EAGLE followed by a question mark, Wallace Drummond verbalized the growing anxiety that they had all been feeling ever since his brother’s earlier comment. ‘There seem to be an awful lot of folk’s names in boxes on that board!’

Torquil moved to another part of the board and made similar notes about the contents of Ewan’s notebook. He wrote the words: GUNS, BOND, FAIR FANCIES HIMSELF, then on another column KATRINA, FAMILY and WIND.

‘SAS, camouflage clothes and guns,’ mused Torquil as he tapped various entries on the board with the marker pen. ‘And all that slug goo that was found in Kenneth McKinley’s stomach – it all adds up to a rich fantasy life, I think. So BOND may have been James Bond! He saw himself as some sort of secret agent, it seems.’

Morag snapped her fingers. ‘Maybe that’s another link with Katrina Tulloch, the vet? Maybe he fantasized about her?’

Torquil circled Katrina’s name, adding lines to Ewan, Kenneth McKinley and the poisoned dog.

‘It is a spider’s web you have there, Piper,’ said Wallace.

‘You are right, Wallace,’ Torquil mused. ‘But where is the spider?’

Guilt had been a constant companion to Katrina for several days, but never more so than now, as she lay half-naked next to Nial Urquart in the long grass of the machair.

‘I love you; you know that, don’t you, Katrina?’ Nial murmured, his lips playing over her throat.

‘Nial, I – I—’ Abruptly she sat up and began reaching for her discarded jeans and knickers. ‘I think this was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened.’

He caught her wrist and pulled her back down. ‘It was inevitable, Katrina!’

It’s just that I feel so bad, so guilty about—’

‘About Megan? She’s my problem.’

Katrina bit her lip. ‘I meant about Ewan.’

‘Ah yes, of course. But even so, I think we were bound to end up as lovers. There’s chemistry between us.’

And despite herself she had to agree. She had felt it for some time as well, but had done her best to suppress the feelings.

‘How did you manage to find me?’ she asked, as his roaming hands began to work their way under her clothes again.

‘I suppose I knew that you’d be checking out the coast again.’

‘You were lucky then. I had been busy and had to get specimens off on the ferry.’

He chuckled softly as she straddled him. ‘Right now I feel I’m the luckiest man alive.’

Alistair McKinley whistled Shep, his collie, and patted the rear seat of his old jeep. Beside him was his large leather hunting bag full of shotgun cartridges and his old 12-bore shotgun. He started the engine and set off.

As he turned out of his drive he saw Megan Munro waiting for him, arms akimbo. He stopped alongside her, immediately aware of two things. Firstly, she had been crying, and secondly, she was in a belligerent mood.

‘Alistair McKinley, where are you off to with that shotgun?’

‘Megan, lassie, I know that you’ve had a bad time of it, what with Rhona and … your man, yesterday, but’ – he sighed with a hint of exasperation – ‘I’m not feeling that great myself. And where I go with my shotgun, for which I have a licence, is entirely my own business.’