Candles and Roses (18 page)

It was a decent place, well-furnished in expensive-looking taste, not that McKay was any judge. Cameron was a well-built man in his mid-fifties, with closely-cropped grey hair. He looked like someone who’d once been a sportsman but had now put on a few too many pounds. He was dressed in a slightly bulging back polo shirt and a pair of expensive-looking slacks.

‘How can I help you? Old Morrie said someone had called round, but I didn’t realise—’ He ushered them through into the sitting-room. ‘We can talk in here. My wife’s in the kitchen with the girls.’

‘It’s about your daughter, Mr Cameron. Joanne, I mean.’

The colour had drained from Cameron’s face. ‘Joanne?’

‘You might want to sit down,’ McKay said. ‘I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

Cameron lowered himself on to the settee. ‘Go on.’

‘You may have seen the reports of the body found near Rosemarkie, Mr Cameron?’

‘Aye, in the cave there.’ He stopped. ‘Christ. Joanne?’

‘We think so,’ McKay said. ‘We’ll need your help in confirming that. I’m sorry.’

Cameron had buried his face in his hands. But in the moment before McKay had seen his expression. There were echoes of the way that Scott had responded to the news of his daughter’s death. After a moment, Cameron looked up. His eyes were dry. ‘How did it happen?’

‘We don’t yet know the full story, Mr Cameron. Again, you may be able to help us in piecing it together.’ He lowered himself into an armchair opposite Cameron. Horton did the same. ‘Have you seen your daughter recently?’

Cameron looked up. ‘Not for a few years.’

‘Did you have some sort of falling out?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said. ‘I mean, not as such. There was no grand argument. We just didn’t get on.’

‘Any particular reason?’

Cameron had dropped his head into his hands again. ‘I was going to say you’d have to ask her. But you can’t, can you?’ He looked for a second as if he’d made a joke. ‘Her mother left me. Twenty-odd years ago. Just walked out one day. I don’t know where she went. She wouldn’t give me an address.’ He shrugged. ‘She tried to get custody of Joanne. Came up with all kinds of lies about me. But I got the best lawyers I could and fought her every step of the way. And I
won
.’ He spoke the last word with a bitterness that made McKay start. ‘In the end, I won because she’d just walked out. No reason, no excuse. No word where she was going. I don’t even know what she lived on. She didn’t know how to work. She only knew how to sponge off me.’

‘So you looked after your daughter as a single father?’

‘Aye. I kept her. She was mine.’

‘But then she left?’

‘Ungrateful little bitch. Walked out one day when I was at work. Just like her mother.’

‘How old was she then?’

‘Seventeen. Eighteen, maybe. I forget.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘Inverness at first, apparently.’

‘To her mother?’

‘No. She had no idea where her mother was, any more than I did.’

McKay wondered whether that was true. Perhaps, like Mrs Scott, the mother had a closer connection with her daughter than her husband knew. ‘Where was she staying?’

‘Christ knows. With some friends. She wouldn’t tell me who. Wouldn’t give me her address.’

‘Did you keep in contact?’

‘Only for a week or two. She was after money at first. She’d just finished at school. Hadn’t found a job. Wanted me to bail her out.’ He shook his head. ‘You can imagine my response.’

Only too well, McKay thought. ‘And after that?’

‘I tried to contact her a couple of times on the mobile number I had, but it was unobtainable. That was it.’

‘You didn’t contact the police?’

‘What would you have done? She’d left home of her own free-will. She was nearly an adult.’

‘And that was the last you saw of her?’

‘Aye. Until you two turned up tonight, hadn’t heard a word about her.’

‘You didn’t know she’d been living in Manchester?’

‘News to me. But then she could have been living in Outer Mongolia for all I knew. Or cared.’

‘You’ve remarried?’ This was Horton.

Cameron looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. ‘Aye, five years ago. Receptionist from the office. Divorcee. Two bonnie daughters.’ Cameron stopped. ‘Murdered, you reckon?’

‘It looks that way,’ McKay said. ‘The investigation’s continuing.’

‘You’ve got two of them, haven’t you? Bodies, I mean. So you reckon it’s somebody local?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind,’ Horton said. ‘The first step is for us to confirm that this is your daughter. We’ll need you to make a formal ID.’

‘There likely to be any doubt?’

‘We don’t think so, I’m afraid. But we don’t have definitive confirmation.’

‘I see. So what do I need to do?’

‘We’ll make arrangements for you to view the body, Mr Cameron. It’ll be at the Raigmore. You work in Inverness, I understand. Will you have any difficulty getting time off work? An hour or so is all we’ll need. Tomorrow if possible.’

‘Aye. Reckon they’ll give me an hour off to view my own daughter’s corpse, don’t you?’

‘Aye. I should think so.’

‘Then what?’

‘We’ll need to take a statement from you, Mr Cameron. Background.’

‘We could do that now. I’ve told you most of what I know already.’

‘We’ll do it properly, shall we? At Police HQ. Perhaps after you’ve completed the ID.’

Cameron was staring back at him. It was an expression that in a Glasgow bar might have suggested a fight was imminent. ‘Fine by me,’ he said.

‘If you let DS Horton have a contact number, we’ll call you first thing to confirm the arrangements,’ McKay said. He pushed himself slowly to his feet. ‘My sincere condolences on your loss, Mr Cameron. I appreciate this must be a shock.’ He paused. ‘Can I ask about Joanne’s mother?’

‘What about her?’

‘Do you have any contact address for her now? We’ll need to get in touch with her.’

‘Last I heard she was in Edinburgh somewhere. But that was at the time of the divorce.’

‘Do you still have that address?’

‘Aye. Somewhere, probably. I’ll dig it out.’

‘I think she’d want to know, Mr Cameron, don’t you?’

‘Maybe. That’s up to her.’

McKay stood for a moment, as if intending to offer some response. Finally, he said only: ‘We won’t disturb you any longer then, Mr Cameron. We’ll be in touch in the morning.’

He and Horton didn’t speak until they were heading back out of the estate on to the main road. McKay felt as if he’d been holding his breath for the last half-hour.

‘He was a piece of fucking work, wasn’t he?’

Horton had her eyes fixed on the wet road. ‘Fits the pattern, though, doesn’t he?’

‘You reckon?’

‘Respectable-looking household. Daughter has fall out with father. Walks out. Mother’s already walked out.’ She turned on the car headlights. It was almost as gloomy as a winter’s evening. ‘Question is why. Why’d the mother walk out? Why’d the daughter go?’

‘I think we can guess the answer to that. Or part of it.’ McKay shook his head and gave a theatrical shudder. ‘What worries me is that new family of his. Jesus.’

‘We need to get social services to check them out.,' Horton said. 'But we’ve no evidence. We don’t know.’

McKay was staring out of the window, watching the rain-sodden fields of the Black Isle, the dark waters of Munlochy Bay visible to their left. ‘We do, though, don’t we?’ he said, quietly. ‘We do know.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘I still think you should jack it in.’

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘Because he’s a creep.’

‘That’s not a good reason. Plenty of people are creeps.’

They were sitting in the pub bar in The Anderson, engaged in what was as close as they ever came to a row. Kelly sometimes thought it might be easier if they just came out and shouted at each other, the way most couples seemed to. As it was, it often turned into this kind of low-level sniping, ostensibly good-natured but with each of them becoming more and more entrenched.

Jim Anderson, the American owner, was engaged in some activity behind the bar, no doubt trying to ignore the whispered exchanges in the far corner. He tolerated them ordering two Cokes rather than one of his specialist beers, given that they wouldn’t actually be old enough to order alcohol in his native Philadelphia. Greg’s dad was a regular here and was one of the few people who ever chose a Captain Beefheart track on the bar’s typically idiosyncratic jukebox. ‘You kids OK?’ Jim called, mainly just to remind them he was still present.

Kelly waved back. ‘We’re fine. Just having an argument about creepy pub landlords. Present company definitely not included.’

‘Well, that’s a relief. You’re the one working in The Caley, then?’ He continued arranging bottles of some Belgian wheat beer with his back to them. Jim managed to combine the avuncular with the mildly acerbic, and Kelly was never sure how seriously to take him. But it was clear that, as ever in this small community, word had got around.

‘Are you going to warn me off as well?’

‘None of my business. You seem smart enough to make your own decisions.’

‘There you are,’ Kelly said to Greg. ‘Not everyone lacks faith in me.’

‘I don’t lack faith in you. But you’ve said yourself that this Gorman guy’s weird.’

‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

They’d met up today after her stint at the bar, and headed down to Chanonry Point to try to spot the dolphins. When you lived up here, it was easy to become blasé about the school of dolphins that lived in the Firth, but whenever she saw them Kelly felt surprised and cheered by their sheer playfulness. It was the kind of thing she needed after the gloom of the Caledonian Bar. In the event, the rain hadn’t lessened and so they’d done little more than have a quick scurry along the beach, enjoying the driving rain on their skin and the blast of damp air from the Firth. They’d ended up sitting in the car, munching sandwiches from the Co-op, patiently watching for any signs of the elusive dolphins. On their way back they’d come into The Anderson, mainly seeking shelter and warmth. Its deliberately ramshackle charm was a world away from the seedy gloom of the Caledonian.

‘That’s what they all say,’ Greg observed, ‘right up to the point when the mad axe-murderer strikes. I’ve seen the films.’

‘If you say so.’ She contemplated the remains of her Coke. ‘It’s strange, though. The way he keeps insisting she just left. Like he’s protesting a bit too much.’

‘You think her body’s interred just below the cask of Deuchars in the cellar?’

‘No, of course not. I just get the sense that there’s something he wants to say. Something he wants to talk about.’

‘That he dismembered her body and left it in the lockers at Inverness Station?’

‘It’s not funny.’ She knew he was joking only to cover his own anxieties. The police were being cagey about the bodies that had been found, but everyone was getting jittery. She’d heard there’d been police around the previous night outside Rosemarkie, blue lights up on the driveway to the old retirement home. Nobody knew what the story there was—probably just another break-in—but the lurid rumours were circulating already. Her own parents, normally paragons of good sense on such matters, were getting anxious about her being out and about on her own. For her own part, she wasn’t worried in daylight hours, but she had no inclination to be out after dark without Greg.

‘Don’t try and make yourself his confidante, that’s all. He’ll get the wrong idea.’

‘I’m not going to give him any opportunity to get any ideas at all, wrong or right.’

‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘Shall we push the boat out and have another Coke?’ The bar was starting to fill up with the dog-walkers who used their dogs as an excuse for an early evening pint. Given the rain, this evening’s walk was likely to have been even more token than usual.

‘Yeah, why not?’ she said. ‘You only live once.’

***

McKay arrived home around seven-thirty. He and Horton had finished off at the office on their return from the Black Isle. He’d worked through a trail of pointless e-mails, while Horton had trawled through the records trying to find information on Archie Young. The basic file hadn’t been hard to find. As Brewster had said, Young had been a primary school teacher and, at the time of his arrest, acting head-teacher at one of the Isle schools. It was unclear why suspicion had initially fallen on Young, although some form of anonymous accusation had been sent to the school's parent council. Young’s details had then been identified as part of a wider national investigation. Young had been arrested and his computer and laptop seized.

The investigation into Young had come to a halt following his suicide. Strictly speaking, particularly given Young’s profession, Horton would have expected the enquiry to continue. If illegal material had been discovered on Young’s systems, a key question would have been whether his proclivities had been confined to the downloaded material, or whether he’d acted on them in his day-to-day dealings with children. But that question—and indeed the initial question of whether any illegal materials had been present on the computers—had not been pursued. Horton’s impression was that the investigation had been discreetly allowed to lapse. She didn’t necessarily draw any sinister inferences from that. Most likely, it simply wouldn’t have been a priority once Young was out of the picture. She could imagine that it might have been easier for all parties for the story simply to be airbrushed from history.

Frustratingly, there was nothing in the file about Young’s wife or daughter. He was described in the notes as ‘single’, with no indication whether he might be divorced or separated. The next-of-kin was shown as Young’s father, the address a retirement home in Inverness. Horton had followed that up, but the father had died several years earlier and the home had no other information. There was no mention of a daughter. This at least explained why no-one had made the link between Archie and Rhona Young. No doubt if the investigation had proceeded, this background would have been uncovered. As it was, they were left with an unhelpful dead-end. As with Cameron, the question was why and in what circumstances Young’s wife had left him.