Кит Мори - Deadly Still

Stan hesitated for a moment, then nodded with a thin smile. ‘Of course. You’ll need my pass code number. It’s 1066.’

‘Ah, the Battle of Hastings,’ Morag mused. ‘I can remember that fine. I’ll get it back to you once I get back to the station and charge my own up. Now, please Stan, be quick, but drive safely.’

As she made her way back up over the heather slope Morag realised that she was now shaking. Jamie Mackintosh was only a few years older than her girls and now he was dead. They’d been drinking themselves stupid all night and all of them were underage. Celebrating finishing exams, she guessed.

Damn! Damn! Damn! Why the hell couldn’t I do anything for Jamie? The important question now is where on earth is Vicky Spiers?

She felt sick, but suppressed the urge to vomit as she had no time even for that. Before she went back into the pillbox to begin doing the things she needed to do, she called Torquil’s number. There was no answer and it went straight onto voicemail. She left a message to call her urgently. A minute later she called again, with the same result.

Then she felt unable to hold back the wave of nausea any longer. She ran back down the slope to the roadside and vomited some distance from the pillbox. She had been careful not to contaminate a potential crime scene.

The killer was not prone to self-doubt. Yet there were differences between the mundane considerations of normal life and the inevitably pedantic ruminations that followed a murder.

Have I left any sort of clue? Is there anything that could link me to the bastard? Was I too sure of myself and made a stupid mistake that the local plods might fathom out?

Such thoughts had been nagging away every minute of every hour since the killing. All the bits and pieces that needed to be disposed of had either been destroyed or washed and discretely discarded. The laptop had been thoroughly searched and any suspicious files had been carefully disposed of. There was no link.

My god! But there is something I haven’t thought of.

I’ll have to risk it and go back.

But, no. It’s a thousand to one that anyone will notice. I’ll leave it and trust in fate.

Torquil had taken the snaking headland road on his classic Royal Enfield Bullet 500. Visibility in the mist was not too bad, allowing him to open up the throttle and zoom past Loch Hynish with its crannog and ancient ruin, passing along the edge of the machair, the sand on peat meadow that intervened between the heather covered Corlin Hills and the seaweed strewn beaches below.

A couple of miles on he took the fork down towards the deserted fishermen’s hamlet of Cabhail and parked in the isolated layby, then jumped down and scrunched across the shingle beech to the entrance of St Ninian’s Cave, one of his favourite places in the world.

The great basalt columned cave had been used by generations of island pipers, including his uncle, the Padre. He remembered the day when he had first taken him and his pipes and introduced him to the cave’s special magic. The young Torquil had hoped that he would one day follow in his uncle’s footsteps and become a champion piper and winner of the Silver Quaich. Much to their mutual pleasure he duly did, so that there now resided a Silver Quaich on each end of the mantelpiece in the manse’s sitting room.

Nature had carved this sea cave beautifully, so that it seemed to hold a sound perfectly for a moment and Torquil was able to hear the correct pitch of his playing. It was a natural tape recorder for a musician.

For a couple of minutes he ran through his repertoire of warm-up exercises, to get his finger movements right. He played a string of leumluaths, taorluaths, grace notes and birls. Then he played a couple of reels, a strathspey and a piobaireachd. He found it an excellent start to the day and a great way of problem-solving, because strangely enough the pipe music always cleared his head and allowed him to see solutions.

He felt the need of such help this morning after his conversation with Lorna over the wedding favours, as well as his dilemma about who would be his best man.

He felt altogether in much higher spirits when he emerged from the cave to return to the Bullet, albeit no clearer about his choice of best man. Stowing his pipes in the panier he saw that he had left his mobile phone in the other one. Picking it up he found nine missed calls and nine voicemails, all from a phone number he did not recognise.

‘Damnation,’ he muttered angrily at himself. ‘I’m an idiot all right, leaving my phone here. Someone wants me urgently.’

He called his voicemail and was surprised to hear Morag’s voice. All of the messages were from her and each successive one was a curt rejoinder to call her immediately on this number, until the last one, spoken in an icy tone: ‘DI McKinnon, it’s me again! I need to speak to you urgently as this is a matter for both uniform and detective branch. Wallace and Douglas Drummond, our special constables are with me now. We have an extreme emergency situation at the pillbox on Harpoon Hill. We have taped off the area and I am sending them out to search for a missing teenager. I am at the scene waiting for you to attend. Call me as soon as you receive this and I’ll give you the details. I repeat — this is extremely urgent!’

He did as she bid and listened in horror and disbelief as she briefly recounted the events of the morning.

Putting on his Cromwell helmet and adjusting his Mark Nine goggles he started up the Bullet and, doing a U-turn, accelerated into the mist.

The local office of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the Western Isles Council was on the first floor of the Duncan Institute, a strawberry-pink-faced building right in the middle of Harbour Street. All of the buildings and shop fronts on the crescent shaped street were different colours and all of them were maintained through a council grant, justified because it helped the local tourist industry.

The Western Isles council, administering the Outer Hebrides and whose main office was in Stornoway in the Isle of Lewis was the only council in the whole of Scotland to have retained the official name in Gaelic. It was a decision that Councillor Charlie McDonald completely agreed with. A staunch Scottish Nationalist Party member for his entire political life he had a vision of a Scotland independent from the United Kingdom, which would need, in his view, a part of it to retain its roots and its ancient language. That part, he believed should be the Hebrides and some of the West coast of Scotland, for this had been the region where the Gaelic had been spoken for centuries. He had lobbied hard to have all road signs labelled in the two languages of English and Gaelic.

All of this was the nationalist view that he promulgated to the people of his ward and which everyone believed. The truth known only to himself was a different matter. Charlie McDonald was an opportunist. Although he had made his name in local politics, he had loftier ambitions, and had set his sights upon one day becoming the Member of the Scottish Parliament, or MSP, for the Na h’Eileanan an lar — the constituency of the Scottish Parliament — which had exactly the same boundaries as the Western Isles Council. The present MSP was in rude good health, though, so he knew that he would have to just bide his time, stay in the public eye and remain popular.

Charlie McDonald knew only too well that maintaining popularity as a politician was not an easy matter, if one wished to stick strictly to the book. Being a pragmatist, he was prepared to curry favours and use whatever means were needed to gain advantages to those constituents that mattered most to him, while still doing the job for the better good of the many. It was important, of course, never to be seen to be biased.