A parting gift, p.18
A Parting Gift, page 18
She wasn’t sure what response she’d expected. She’d spoken before she’d allowed herself time to think or hesitate. If she didn’t say something immediately, it would be increasingly difficult for her to express her views later. She didn’t expect him to be comfortable with her response, but she’d hoped he might at least accept it and that it would prompt him to think about his actions.
It had been a vain hope, she realised almost immediately. Nightingale just shook his head, his expression suggesting that all his worst expectations had been fulfilled. ‘And that’s it, is it? I try to apologise. I admit I’ve behaved badly. I try to make amends as best I can. And you just throw it back in my face. I know what it is. None of you bastards up here want me around. You’ve been gunning for me since I arrived.’
‘Brian–’
‘Don’t pretend. At least Alec fucking McKay’s honest about what he thinks of me. You just behave like Little Miss Perfect till you’ve got the chance to get one over on me. And now you’ll do your best to screw me over. You really are a cold-hearted bitch, aren’t you?’
‘For Christ’s sake, stop playing the victim. Anything that happened last night was your fault. You can’t just expect me to sweep it under the carpet because you give me a half-hearted apology.’
He jabbed a finger in her direction. ‘Do your worst. Make a formal complaint, if you like. If you try to bring me down, I’ve plenty of favours I can call in. Plenty of people who’ll happily destroy your reputation to protect me. Who the fuck will support you? Helena Grant as part of the bitch mafia? Alec fucking McKay who’s got about as much credibility down south as Father fucking Christmas? Just think about that before you start making threats. Think about your own future.’
The explosion of fury seemed almost to have come from nowhere. She’d issued no threats, and had done nothing but state her views as calmly and dispassionately as she’d been able. Before she could say anything more, Nightingale had climbed out of the car, slamming the door loudly behind him.
She watched him stride off towards the building entrance, wondering if it had already occurred to him that he’d left his overnight bag in the car boot. In other circumstances, she’d have retrieved his luggage with her own and taken it in for him. As it was, she’d just drop the keys of the pool car back into reception and let him come and find it when he was ready. That would probably add to his anger towards her, but she suspected there was already little she could do about that.
The real question now was whether she had the courage to do what she was increasingly sure was right.
Chapter Thirty-One
Helena Grant sat curled up on her sofa, working her way steadily through the files that Mike Everly had sent over. She was feeling mildly guilty, as she still tended to when she worked from home. It had become more commonplace during the pandemic, of course. Although the nature of policing meant that most activities had to be carried out in the office, they had been encouraged to work from home whenever possible.
Grant had never felt entirely comfortable with the idea, though she knew this was mainly because she’d become too set in her ways. Even Alec McKay had been persuaded it wasn’t necessary for him always to be in the office from the crack of dawn to the end of the evening, though that might have had more to do with the rekindling of his relationship with Chrissie.
In her own case, the dynamic was the opposite. Following the dramatic ending of her previous relationship, she’d seen the office as a refuge. It was somewhere she could go and forget about her personal life, could throw herself into her work and depend on the support of people who, with a few exceptions, were primarily colleagues rather than friends. Home held few attractions for her.
It was the project that had brought her back home this afternoon. Earlier that morning, in preparation for the forthcoming kick-off meeting, Everly had emailed over to her a stack of detailed material relating to the consultancy work so far. She’d realised from a first glance that she’d struggle to make sense of it if she tried to read it on screen, so she’d printed the key documents off and then, on a whim, brought them back home to read. She told herself it was a sensible decision. If she’d stayed in the office, she’d have struggled to concentrate, distracted by the noise, the interruptions, the countless other claims on her attention. But she still had a sense that she was bunking off school.
On the other hand, the documents needed her full attention. There was a mass of material – reports, discussion papers, research analysis – much of it phrased in ways that felt almost like a foreign language. Even the most mundane words – agile, champion, road map – seemed to have different meanings. Her first thought, as she skimmed through the text and charts, was that she was well outside her comfort zone. Her second thought was that she was perhaps too far outside, and that she should bail out of this before she made even more of a fool of herself.
It took her a few more minutes, fortified by a strong coffee, before she persuaded herself that she was up to the job she’d taken on. She was an intelligent woman, accustomed to working with data and evidence. She had well-developed analytical skills. But she was trying to make sense of a document that, in part, was written in an unfamiliar language. As she worked her way through the material, she began to develop a suspicion that there was less to it than met the eye. She found herself increasingly highlighting passages, scribbling question marks and comments in the margins.
The overall thrust of the reports was sound enough, she thought, but some of the conclusions and recommendations were based on very shaky evidence. She was imagining how this material would be received if she were presenting it in court or to the Fiscal.
She knew she had to be careful not to dismiss the consultants’ conclusions too casually. There was a tendency among working police officers to mock anything that smacked of ‘management-speak’, as if the force had no scope to improve its effectiveness or organisation. Sifting through the jargon and obfuscation, there was considerable good sense in the recommendations, which she could envisage improving their work. It was just a question of distilling those gems from the mass of verbiage surrounding them.
Feeling in need of refreshment, she put the papers aside and went into the kitchen to make herself another coffee. Returning to the living room with the refilled mug in her hand, she walked over to the window and gazed out at the view.
This was why she’d chosen to live here, what had sold the house to her on first sight. From this slight elevation, she could look out across the Beauly Firth to the far shore, the dark mass of Inverness visible to the left, the sweep of the landscape opening up to the right. On a fine day like today, the waters were a pale blue, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.
She was turning to resume her work when she noticed the grey van parked at the rear of her own car, immediately in front of the house. She was sure it hadn’t been there a few moments earlier when she’d risen to go to the kitchen and she wondered vaguely who it might be. They didn’t get many vehicles down here. Occasionally, delivery drivers would park here to kill time between gaps in their schedule. But usually they parked further along the road where there was a better view of the firth.
As she watched, she saw a man jog hurriedly down the path back to the van. He had his back to her, a baseball cap pulled low across his face. He jumped back into the van, did a U-turn and pulled off down the street. She watched the vehicle disappear, noting its registration through force of habit.
She hadn’t heard the doorbell, but maybe he’d just left something. She walked back into the hallway and opened the front door. There was a neatly wrapped cardboard box sitting to the left of the door.
She’d heard, just before leaving the office that afternoon, about McKay’s strange delivery. She stepped out on to the path and walked round the package. There was no obvious address label or other marking. After a moment, she fetched her phone and took photographs of the box from various angles. She texted the images to McKay and then dialled his number. He answered almost immediately. ‘Hel?’
‘Are you free for a few moments?’
‘I’ve just been summoned by Brian Nightingale who wants to see me immediately. So, sure, take as long as you like. I see you’ve just sent me a text as well, so I’m clearly popular.’
‘I just wanted to get your view on something. Have a look at the picture in the text. Does that look familiar to you?’
There was silence for a moment as he looked at the photographs. ‘That’s at your house?’
‘Left just now. Grey van.’ She recited the registration number. ‘I only saw the guy from the back. White, average height. Wearing a black jacket, jeans and a baseball cap. Think he was wearing a face-mask, though I only saw that for a second.’
‘That’s a different reg from the one we were given for the delivery at the Gillans’ house. We need to get the package removed and checked out.’
‘I’m inclined to look at it first. I don’t want to end up making a fool of myself.’
‘You won’t do that. But your choice.’
Without saying any more to McKay, she went back inside the house. She found some disposable gloves and a sharp kitchen knife, then returned to the package. Leaning over, she slit down the parcel tape across the top of the box. Once she’d cut through all the tape, she folded back the twin flaps and peered cautiously inside.
Her first reaction was to laugh. The box contained what looked like some form of rag doll, a toy she might once have had as a young child.
‘What is it?’ she heard from the phone.
She raised the phone back to her ear. ‘I’m not sure, exactly.’ She had crouched down by the box and pulled it towards her to peer inside. ‘Some sort of doll.’
‘Doll?’
‘Like a cloth doll or a rag doll.’ She reached into the box and, taking care to minimise her contact, she tried to lift up the doll to get a better look. As she did so, any thought of laughter disappeared. ‘Christ.’
‘What is it?’
‘I was right. It is a rag doll. Quite an old, slightly threadbare one. Like a toy some child no longer wants…’
‘That’s very poetic, Hel, but–’
‘But it has a severed head. It’s an old, slightly threadbare rag doll. With a severed head.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘I said immediately, Alec. Not in fifteen minutes.’
‘Aye, so I was told. I came as soon as I could.’
‘I’m not accustomed to people disobeying my instructions.’
‘I’m not accustomed to being treated like someone’s personal lackey.’
McKay was in Nightingale’s office. Nightingale had told him to take a seat, but McKay, characteristically, had ignored him and was prowling round the room, as if seeking some point of vulnerability. He knew the constant movement was irritating Nightingale, which seemed a sufficient motive in itself.
‘You’re not beyond being disciplined, Alec.’
‘And what are you going to discipline me for? Taking an urgent operational call so that I was briefly delayed in attending a routine meeting with you?’
‘I was thinking more of insubordination.’
‘We’re not in the army. I’m just telling you what happened.’
‘What was this call anyway?’
‘From Helena. She’s working at home and she’s just taken a delivery.’
‘A delivery? You don’t mean–’
‘A doll.’
‘A doll? Had she ordered a doll?’
McKay stopped prowling and dropped himself into the chair opposite Nightingale’s desk. ‘Oddly enough, no. But that wasn’t the only interesting thing about this doll.’
‘Go on.’
‘Its head had been severed.’
Nightingale blinked. ‘What?’
‘Someone had cut off its head. And slashed open its body.’
‘But why would anyone send something like that?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? We have to assume it’s some kind of signal or message, like my delivery yesterday, but it’s hard to see quite what it’s intended to communicate.’
‘Other than “we know where you live”?’
‘That’s the bit that Helena’s most likely to take to heart, but it must be something more than that. The doll itself looks old and well-used. I’ve had it sent to forensics.’
‘And no other clues or indications in the box?’
‘Like the others. No labels or information. Just a plain cardboard box. Delivered by a guy in a grey van. I’m getting the plates checked out.’
Nightingale unexpectedly slammed his fist on the desktop, with the air of a student teacher trying to regain control of his class. ‘Christ, this is a fucking mess. We seem to be getting nowhere. Why the hell was this doll sent to Helena Grant?’
‘That’s what intrigues me,’ McKay said. ‘Deliveries to me and to Helena. Suggests there’s something personal about this. Though I’ve no idea how that would link to the Gillans or the Dawsons.’ McKay rose and resumed his roaming around the office. ‘We’ve got people looking at the Gillans’ business interests but we’ve not so far uncovered anything suspicious. The car-hire business seems to have been Andrea Gillan’s personal baby. She built it up as an offshoot of her husband’s commercial hire business, and it produced a decent profit. The commercial business is a bigger and more complicated set-up, with various agricultural subsidiaries. It’s a bit of a tangled web of companies, and it’s possible there’s something dodgy concealed in there. But the number-crunchers reckon it might just be set up to deal tax-efficiently with the seasonality of the various operations.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the detail. But we’re only at the start of pulling that apart so it’s possible we might find something more interesting in there.’
McKay had mainly been detailing all this because he wanted to remind Nightingale that the team had been beavering away over the past couple of days. He was growing tired of humouring a man who couldn’t be bothered even to be present at the investigation he was supposedly leading.
McKay’s own priority was to get back to Ginny, to test out the wild hunch he’d had when viewing the TV news report. The more he’d thought about it, the less convinced he’d felt. He recalled a training course, a few years before, in which the trainer, some kind of forensic psychologist, had talked about the phenomenon of motivated perception – the tendency to see what we want to see. McKay couldn’t recall much of the detail but he remembered some of the experiments the trainer had described. The core message had been that human perception was notoriously unreliable, particularly when faced with an ambiguous image or incident.
That was no doubt the case here. Isla had thought she’d spotted her brother. Ginny had believed she’d seen the witness from Loch Morlich. McKay had thought he’d seen – well, something else again. Something which, the more he considered it, barely made any sense. They were each of them imposing their own preferred order on something that, in reality, was little more than a blurred set of pixels.
‘We need to find something soon,’ Nightingale was saying. ‘I’m hoping this might have some significance.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards McKay, who leaned forward to examine it.
‘This the image you found in Dawson’s mail?’
‘Copy of it. We’ve got the original bagged up.’
McKay gazed at the image for a moment. Then he picked it up, held it out in front of him and squinted at it.
‘I wasn’t asking to you admire it,’ Nightingale said.
McKay was still staring at the picture, his head tilted slightly to one side. ‘Can I borrow this?’
‘Take it. It’s just a print-off. I’m getting the tech people to see if we can do a reverse image search on the internet to identify her. If that fails we can try it on the Dawsons’ relatives and any friends or associates we identify and include it in a media appeal.’ Nightingale was watching McKay’s face. ‘Mean something to you?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Probably just motivated perception.’
‘Probably just what?’
‘Seeing what you want to see.’ McKay’s eyes remained fixed on the image. ‘Or, in this case, perhaps seeing something you should have seen long before now.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Later in the afternoon, Isla forced herself to leave the house and take the short walk down to the shoreline. She felt she didn’t make enough of where they lived. It was a glorious place, particularly on a fine early autumn afternoon like this. She stood at the edge of the narrow beach and gazed out across the waters of the Moray Firth towards the Black Isle. Immediately ahead of her was the jutting promontory of Chanonry Point, the favoured site for dolphin-spotting in the area. To her right, curving out as if to meet Chanonry Point, was Fort George, an imposing army base built after Culloden and still, for the moment, used as a working garrison. There were no signs of dolphins today, just the dancing whitecaps raised by the mild breeze.
She told herself she just wanted an opportunity to take some air and clear her head. Ginny would no doubt have achieved the same effect by taking herself off for a run along the coast, probably covering more ground in her first five minutes than Isla had managed in the last twenty. That was fine. Isla was no runner, and preferred a gentle amble along the waterline, the clear sea lapping against the stones just a metre away from her feet.
Today, she’d stopped at one of the benches to enjoy the view, allowing herself a few moments just to think again about the events of the previous evening. She still didn’t know what to make of Tristram’s behaviour, and continued to feel bad about driving him away so abruptly.
She’d spent the morning in the office but then, with a stack of formal documents to read through in preparation for a meeting the following day, she’d decided it would be more productive to spend the afternoon working from home. As soon as she’d entered the house, she’d regretted her decision, wishing she’d stayed out until Ginny returned that evening.
