The unforgiven dead, p.19
The Unforgiven Dead, page 19
At last, the wolf released Angus from her glare and strutted imperiously back towards her pack. The other wolves crowded around her, yipping in sublimation like fawning courtiers. The alpha ignored their adulation and loped off into the forest.
Chichester took a pull from the hip flask then passed it to him again. They stood in silence, watching as the wolves melded back into the shadows of the trees, grey ghosts returning to their graves.
He tried to hand the hip flask back, but the laird shook his head.
“Keep it,” he said. “A gift from James Glas to Angus Dubh. Raise a toast to me when this is all done.”
Chapter 25
The hip flask sat snug against his chest in the inside pocket of his coat as he walked back to the Land Rover. He could almost feel the heat of the whisky radiating out from it, a warm glow to stave off the freezing mist that had descended with the night. In the woods, the visibility was so poor, he could only see a few meters in front of him, but once clear of the trees he could easily make out the dark silhouette of Dunbirlinn Castle and catch his bearings.
Soon he reached the sweeping road that led past the stable block. Water spat from the ornate fountain outside the stables, making an obscene noise in the darkness, like a horse pissing. No lights were on in Mrs. MacCrimmon’s cottage. Presumably she was still at work in the castle, waiting on Lady Chichester’s every whim. He pictured Faye riding out on Bessie two nights ago, dressed in her long green cloak, her path lit by a full moon. What had she felt? Excitement at the Samhain celebrations to come? Anger after the row with her stepmother? Embarrassment over Ewan’s clumsy attempt to kiss her? Certainly no inkling of what was to come, no sense of the horror that lay in wait for her.
But you did, Angus. You did. . . .
He dug his fingernails into his palms, then reached for the hip flask. The metal felt warm and heavy. Drink up, said a voice inside his head. He unscrewed the cap and raised the hip flask to his lips. But before he could take a sip, he heard the distant sound of engines growling in the darkness, heading his way. He replaced the cap and strode past the stable block. Once he rounded the corner, he saw three sets of dim headlights probing the mist. The convoy began to take shape, two police cars and a bigger vehicle, a fluorescent blue-and-yellow liveried Transit that he recognised as a crime scene investigation van.
The vehicles skidded to a halt next to his Land Rover, which was still parked outside Ewan Hunter’s cottage. Doors were flung open and police officers jumped out like coiled springs. Heart thumping, he ran towards Ewan’s cottage. He heard a familiar Glaswegian accent rapping out orders. Nadia turned at his approach, a frown wrinkling her brow. “Angus, what are you doing here?”
“Err, nothing,” he stuttered. “I was heading back to the village hall, but thought I’d check if Ewan was home yet.”
“And is he?”
“Eh . . . no.” He glanced over her shoulder and saw Constable Archie Devine wrestle a Big Red Key from the boot of a police car. Archie gave the metal door ram an affectionate pat with his meaty paw.
“What the hell’s going on, Nadia?”
“We got a warrant to search Ewan’s cottage.”
“But why? What’s happened?”
“He’s gone missing, Angus. Nobody’s seen him since Mrs. MacCrimmon broke the news of Faye’s murder to him yesterday.”
“Aye, but he could be out on the hill?”
“True, but Crowley doesn’t want to take the chance. He could be halfway to France by now.”
“What about port authorities?”
“On alert.”
“Any hits on ANPR?”
Nadia rolled her eyes. “No, but he could have changed the plates or taken a road with no cameras. Look, Angus, we have thought this through and the sheriff in Silvaig agreed to a search warrant. Faye was seen slapping Ewan on the night she died. He has previous for violence, an unprovoked attack that left his victim in hospital for a week. He must have known where Faye was going that night and he has no alibi worth a damn.”
She glanced at Archie and gave him a brief nod. The big man almost smiled, then stalked towards the door with the Big Red Key.
“But he might be back,” Angus protested. “Is this really necessary?”
“Motive, means, opportunity,” Nadia said. “He had them all. If we’re wrong, we’re wrong, Angus. Worst-case scenario we might have to fork out for a new door.”
She gave him a faint smile, then walked past him.
“Okay, Archie,” she said. “Let it rip. Wait! Check it’s locked first.”
Another uniformed officer stepped forward, twisted the handle, then shook his head.
“As you were, Archie.”
The big man drew the ram back deliberately, then thrust it forward with amazing speed. Angus saw nothing but a red blur before he heard the sound of splintering wood. The door flew backwards and crashed against the inside wall where it came to rest, askew on its hinges. Archie stood aside, satisfied with his handiwork. A couple of uniformed officers funnelled past. Angus heard them stomping around inside, calling Ewan’s name. Twenty seconds later they reemerged, shaking their heads. “Naebody here,” one of them said.
“Right, tell Forensics to stop hiding in their van and get in here,” Nadia said. She turned to Angus and threw him a pair of blue nitrile gloves. “Shall we?”
He snapped on the gloves. “S’ppose so.”
Nadia stepped past the shattered doorframe.
“What exactly are we looking for?” he asked, following her into the hallway.
“Evidence, Angus. He’s a gamekeeper: Maybe we’ll find an actual smoking gun?”
Angus stared at her, not remotely amused.
“Sorry,” she said, “I make shit jokes when I’m nervous.” She wrinkled her nose. “Bit pongy in here.”
The uniformed officers had already turned the lights on. Nadia glanced through the door to the right into a living room that was barely big enough for the couch, coffee table, armchair, and TV. Pizza boxes, fish and chip wrappers, and crumpled Tennant’s cans covered the coffee table, overflowing onto the rug below.
She backed out and gave Angus a tight smile, then glanced over his shoulder as the forensic team waddled in, rustling like dry leaves in their Tyvek suits.
“Hope you’ve not touched nothing, DI Sharif?” one of them barked.
Nadia raised her hands. “That’s a double negative, Scobbie.”
“What are you, the grammar police? Beat it!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Okay, keep your hair on, Scobs,” Nadia said.
They squeezed past the forensic team out into the night. Angus sucked in a lungful of clean, cold air. He watched the scene of crime officers unload some lights from the back of the van. They clicked the tripods into place and a few seconds later the front of Ewan’s cottage was bathed in a sodium glow.
He blinked, dazzled by the brilliant white light. His eyelids fluttered, and in those fractions of a second when his eyes were closed a series of images flitted through his head like electrical pulses. Drops of ruby blood hit the surface of a pool, diffusing on impact before being carried away on the current. Phosphorescent flames tore at a corpse that hung from the branch of a tree. He could smell lighter fluid and the sickly sweet stench of rendered fat and charred flesh. He saw skin blister and ignite in a purple flame. He saw Donn Fírinne—the Dark One—arms outstretched. Behind the ravenous sound of the blaze he could make out a low murmur, a raspy incantation in a language he could not understand.
He spun around, away from the blinding lamps. The afterglow from the burning body was seared into his retinas. He clenched his fists, willing the vision away. Slowly, the image faded. He stood for a second and waited for his heart rate to return to normal.
“Come on, let’s sit in the car. It’s freezing out here,” Nadia said.
“Aye.” He nodded. He waited for Nadia to turn towards the car, then dug the bottle of pills out of his coat pocket. He tipped two yellow tablets into his palm and swallowed them dry, working them down with his saliva. The pill bottle felt light. He gave it a shake and realized with dismay that it was empty. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .”
Grinding his teeth, he followed Nadia towards the car and climbed in beside her. She already had the heater on full blast and was warming her hands. “You okay, Angus?”
“Aye, bit of a headache.”
“Did you get your case sorted?”
He frowned at her, momentarily confused. “What? Oh, aye . . .”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, bone-weary. “Ewan will probably turn up. I don’t think he’s our man, Nadia. And even if they find forensic evidence that Faye was in his cottage, it proves nothing. They were friends. She probably visited loads of times.”
“Aye, true. Could be a waste of time. About ninety percent of the stuff we do is. Still has to be done.”
He sighed. “So what do we do now?”
“We wait.”
As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long. The car had barely heated up when a uniformed officer rapped on the window. Nadia wound it down. “Something you have to see, boss.”
Nadia cocked an eyebrow at Angus. Despite the tiredness, he felt a surge of adrenaline. He was out of the car and marching alongside Nadia towards the cottage before he knew it. A white-suited SOCO waved them forward.
“What have you got, Scobs?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, leading them down the corridor to the last door on the right, which Angus knew was Ewan’s bedroom. Inside, another SOCO was crouched on the floor like a big maggot amongst a drift of empty crisp packets, sweetie wrappers, and lager cans. He was lifting small scraps of shiny paper with tweezers and dropping them in clear evidence bags. Angus glanced on the wall by Ewan’s bed and saw faint rectangles where the photographic collage of Faye had once been. His heart sank.
The SOCO held one of the shreds up for Nadia, a photograph of Faye, torn down the middle. “They’re all of the victim,” Scobbie said. “Must be about twenty or thirty. All torn to shreds.”
Nadia’s eyes flicked towards Angus. “Right, thanks.”
Suddenly another voice boomed from somewhere else in the house.
“Boss! Boss! We’ve got something here!”
Scobbie swished past them, practically running from the room. Angus and Nadia were right behind him as he barrelled into the kitchen. The smell was worse in there, the main culprit an overflowing bin in the corner of the room. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, and the kitchen table was covered in snares, fishing equipment, bowls, cereal packets, and empty whisky bottles. The SOCO, however, was kneeling on the scabby linoleum beside a washing machine.
“What you got, Felix? Oh . . .”
Angus and Nadia peered over Scobbie’s shoulder. His guts seemed to clench as he saw what the SOCO with the ridiculous name was holding in his gloved hands. He heard Nadia blow out a breath of air. She caught his eye and gave a tremulous smile.
“Smoking gun,” she said.
Chapter 26
Angus trudged towards the front door of his cottage as if his boots were filled with lead. After the discovery at Ewan’s place, there had been a frenzy of activity. The ghillie’s name had been released to the press. Angus had sat with the rest of the MIT in the incident room to watch the News at Ten, which had led with the story. Ewan, the news anchor informed them, was armed and potentially dangerous. Immediately after the segment, the phones began to ring— callers from as far apart as Thurso and Galashiels calling to say they’d spotted Ewan Hunter out walking a dog or doing a grocery run or shopping for cable ties in B&Q. The photograph the media had been given by the PR department was a police mug shot, taken an hour or so after Angus had nicked him for assault. Ewan’s hair was wild, his complexion pasty, and he glared at the camera with hatred in his eyes. He looked like any two-bit psycho spotted every night of the week outside pubs and clubs up and down Scotland. Which probably accounted for the volume of useless phone calls.
It was impossible to run down every lead, but ironically, there were no local tip-offs from folk who actually might know Ewan. By midnight, Crowley had ordered them to call it a day, although the DCI himself did not seem in the least tired. Nadia and the rest of the MIT detectives were billeted at the Glenruig Inn, which had a separate accommodation block, but Angus wouldn’t have been surprised if Crowley had a sleeping bag in the village hall. Or perhaps he slept standing up, like Agnes and Muriel.
As Angus put his foot on the bottom step, he still could hardly believe what they’d found. How could Ewan be so stupid? Angus slid his key in the lock and was about to open the door when he heard the sound of footsteps. He turned and a familiar gangly shape emerged from the shadows.
“Are you ignoring me, old bean?” Gills asked.
“Bit busy, Gills. What with the murder and everything.”
“It’s the ‘and everything’ I want to talk to you about.”
“I don’t follow.”
Gills stepped into the puddle of light around the doorstep. “They tell me you got out of the church just in time?”
“Aye.” He sighed. “It was a bit close for comfort.”
“You saved Raymond the Waver’s life.”
He shrugged.
“Did you . . . see anything?” Gills asked.
Angus shook his head, eyes downcast. “It’s not what you think,” he murmured. “I heard the rockfall, nothing more.”
“But there is more,” Gills insisted. “There’s much more to all this.”
Angus briefly closed his eyes. All those missed calls today—he’d known Gills was concocting some theory; that’s why he’d ignored them.
“Listen, Angus, that rockfall, it fulfils a prophecy.”
He stared at his friend, expression blank. “Really?”
“Aye. When I saw that flattened church this morning, I knew it meant something. It’s late, and I won’t bore you with every detail, but it concerns something foretold in the 1500s by a reputed seer, Gormshùil Mhòr na Borgh.”
“Borgh, as in the village on Barra?”
“Aye. That’s where she lived. And died. She was executed, but that’s by the by. The point is, Gormshùil made any number of prophecies that have come to pass. She said, for instance, that one day windmills would rise from the North Sea, which must have seemed nonsense to folk back in the sixteenth century. But look at the number of offshore wind farms we now have in the Highlands.”
“She was a green-energy visionary—so what?”
“One of her prophecies remained unfulfilled,” Gills continued, undeterred by Angus’s scepticism. “Until today.”
The light flattened the deep wrinkles on Gills’s face, but he still looked old, like a sage in a fantasy film. “There’s a huge rock that sits on the mountain, above MacVannin’s croft. It used to be known as Clach Rìoghalachd, the Royalty Stone. At one time it was part of a stone circle, probably where early tribes inaugurated their kings. Gormshùil said the day would come when the stone would slide down the mountain and crush a church. I was there today, Angus. I saw that stone lying amidst the rubble of MacVannin’s church.”
“Gills,” he said, growing tired with this nonsense, “that may be so, but I don’t see the relevance—”
“I’m getting to that,” Gills said, cutting him off. “The second part of Gormshùil’s prophecy says that when the Clach Rìoghalachd falls, the MacRuari line will come to an end, and the wretched will be possessed by demons—”
The old man’s hand shot out and grabbed Angus’s bicep. “Listen to me, Angus,” he hissed. “This is just the start. The prophecy warns there will be more sacrifices to the old gods. I spoke to the Witch from Rhu today, and what she said confirmed—”
“Who the hell’s the Witch from Rhu?”
“She’s a seer, Angus, like you. . . .”
Angus shook himself free of Gills’s grasp. “I’m not a bloody seer!”
He took a deep breath, trying to control his temper. “I shouldn’t be saying this, Gills, but Ewan Hunter did it. He was infatuated with Faye and killed her when she turned him down. That’s all there is to it: no prophecy, no witches, just a horrible crime committed by someone who couldn’t take rejection. Now, if you don’t mind, it’s been a long day, and I need a fucking dram.”
He turned his back on Gills and fumbled with the front door key. He could feel Gills’s eyes boring into his back, but when the old man next spoke, his tone was soft.
“How many more must die before you see?”
Angus hesitated, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.
“Close your eyes and see, a’bhalach,” Gills pleaded. “Before it’s too late, close your eyes and see.”
Angus poured a hefty measure of Talisker into a cut crystal glass. He’d barely taken a slung when the snug room door opened and Ashleigh padded in, half-asleep, a dressing gown wrapped around her.
“You’re home,” she said, blinking away sleep. “I thought I heard voices?”
“Nope, just me talking to myself.”
“First sign of madness.” Ash yawned.
Nadia had said the same that morning. He took another pull of his dram, feeling somehow guilty.
“Christ, Angus! What happened to your face?”
Ash raised her hand and brushed the back of her fingers down his cheek.
“It’s nothing, a ghràidh. I’ve had worse cuts shaving,” he said, recalling the words of the cheeky young paramedic.
“But what happened?”
He put down his dram and took her hands. “Did you hear about MacVannin’s church?”
