Evil for Evil (7 page)

There was no evidence of clothes. The man had been stripped naked and left to die of exposure or starvation. She cleared her throat. ‘The shelves.’ It was a safer subject. ‘Man-made, obviously. Know anything about it?’

‘Not specifically. Oh, there’s stories about smugglers running cargoes in from the Isle of Man – maybe this was somewhere to leave
barrels for later collection. Maybe they’re just stories. But it doesn’t look recent, does it?’

‘Hard to say, in these conditions.’ Fleming looked around and spotted a ring driven into a rock nearby. Her usual caution about the press made her pause before drawing his attention to it, but he had been more than helpful and deserved a reward.

‘Someone’s tied up a boat here, look. Rusted iron – new or old? Corroded, certainly.’

Drummond shone the torch directly on to it. ‘Looks as if there’s been some sort of older fixing here, then a new ring added later on.’

‘You’re in the wrong job,’ Fleming said, smiling at him. ‘We have guys who’ll be able to date it. And the watch, of course.’

Again, he obligingly directed the torch on to it and they both studied it. Apart from being a relatively modern man’s wristwatch with a date display they couldn’t make out, it told them little.

‘Thanks,’ Fleming said. ‘That’s all I need to see.’

Drummond turned the boat cautiously, then opened up the throttle and they headed back round the island.

‘Look, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I’ve done you a favour on this. When you get reports, will you keep me in the loop ahead of the others once they catch up with the story?’

‘I’ll see you get a favour in return. On one condition. That you leave out the funny section on my seasick sergeant.’

‘It was going to be good,’ Drummond said wistfully. ‘But OK, it’s a deal. I can understand you want to spare him public humiliation.’

‘Partly,’ Fleming said. ‘And even more than that, I’m a bit short just now of something that gives me a hold over him and this is perfect.’

MacNee sat gloomily on his rocky perch. It was going to be a long time to wait, outside here with nothing to do except appreciate the
beauties of nature and the sea air. His lungs weren’t really adapted to that kind of strong stuff.

Not long after his exchange with Brodie, he saw a man come over from a jetty across the bay in a flat-bottomed boat; the slaughtered deer was loaded into it and ferried back to the mainland. Brodie drove the forklift back to a sort of bothy, left it there, then went back down and took off himself in a smaller motor boat. He didn’t offer to take MacNee back. MacNee wouldn’t have accepted if he had.

A little later there was another shot, from a field across the water, and later still a tractor and trailer came along the rough track by the shore. MacNee wasn’t close enough to see, but that presumably was another deer despatched. He’d seen for himself that they hadn’t time to suffer, but even so it looked kind of a brutal business. The one shot here was a pretty beast, kind of like Bambi’s mother with its spotted coat and big soft brown eyes. He liked his meat unrecognisable, in wee polystyrene trays with cling film over the top.

At last he saw Drummond’s boat, with Fleming on board, come out from the little pier at Innellan and head off in a curve around the island. Big Marge hadn’t been exactly cheerful last night; she’d be worse today.

It could be half an hour before they fetched him and MacNee didn’t fancy just sitting here contemplating her reaction to Drummond’s no doubt gleeful account of his disgrace. He might go and check out the bothy, if only to have something he could tell the boss he’d done.

As he neared the cottage, a browsing doe looked up, but didn’t startle away. He’d never been this close to a fallow deer before, though he’d seen one or two red ones killed by cars – and a dead man, too, after a sudden encounter with one of them on a country road. They could do more damage than you might think.

The bothy was built of rough stone, with a corrugated-iron roof
which extended over a lean-to for the miniature tractor. The window glass had long gone and been replaced by slats roughly nailed in place. The front door, its wood scoured to bare timber by the elements and rotted along the bottom, stood open on a barn-like room, and when MacNee stuck his head inside, the musty smell of animal feed greeted him. There was none of the usual farm disorder, though; in the dim light he could see sacks arranged with military precision and racks and cupboards for tools.

From the middle of the room rose a rough staircase with a solid modern door at the top. It had a lock, but when MacNee turned the handle it opened and he stepped into a loft running the full length of the building, with a small window at each end; these too had been boarded up. One of the slats had slipped and a ray of sunshine played on the dust motes stirred up by his entrance.

The roof beams came low down and only a strip in the centre gave reasonable headroom, but at one end a thick mattress with a sleeping bag and blankets was tucked under the eaves, with a camping Gaz lamp beside it. There was a very basic lavatory and basin behind a partition and at the other end a table with a camping stove on it as well as a couple of plates, a mug, a frying pan, kettle and a few utensils. There was a shelf with tins too, MacNee noticed. Beans with pork sausages, ham, corned beef; a comfortable enough set-up, if you’d to be here overnight for some reason – sick animal, or something, MacNee supposed vaguely.

And eggs. And butter. And a loaf of bread. MacNee frowned. You didn’t leave stuff like that for an emergency. Someone must be staying here.

He didn’t know enough about deer to know if they needed babysitting. Or maybe one was ill now. He shrugged and went back downstairs.

But as he did, it came to him that he wouldn’t really like to spend much time here. There was something uncomfortable about the atmosphere. Or maybe it was just the dim light and the draught of air coming through the window that was making him feel chilly.

Steve Donaldson, lounging against a car in the Smugglers Inn car park, threw away his cigarette and straightened up, looking at his watch and scowling.

‘For God’s sake, that’s after five to twelve! When’s the silly cow going to open up?’

He was a big, powerful man gone soft, with dark hair badly in need of trimming and a roll of fat round his thick neck. His fleshy mouth was permanently set in discontented lines and there were the marks of temper between his brows.

Derek Sorley, a puny figure beside him, said, ‘Scared of the polis. She’s only got a licence from twelve. Anyway, what do you think about what I said?’

Donaldson grunted. ‘Oh, I’ll go with anything that gets that bugger off the land I should be farming, by rights.’

It wasn’t what the lawyers had said – the lease agreement had lapsed, and Donaldson hadn’t been working the farm with his father – but Sorley knew better than to remind him.

‘If the plan works, I’m sure he’d be glad for you to take a lease afterwards.’

That only seemed to provoke further rancour. ‘Aye, and I’d be expected to be grateful to him. “Yes, sir, thank you sir!”’ He put on an affected voice, then added savagely, ‘And get back where you came from, you Sassenach bastard!’

Sorley, who now considered himself an authority on Celtic culture, interrupted him. ‘Ah now, that’s not quite right. The Gaelic
sasunnach
doesn’t mean English, it means lowlander, non-Gaelic speaker. To a highlander, you’d be one.’

The dangerous look on his companion’s face brought him up short. ‘Ah, well.’ He saw with some relief the pub door opening. ‘Look – there she is now. The other thing – I’ll come round this afternoon and we’ll talk about it.’

Donaldson grunted and moved on ahead. To his further annoyance he found he wasn’t first to the bar; the sergeant, MacNee, was sitting on a stool there already with a woman beside him.

‘That’s nice,’ he sneered. ‘One law for the polis and another for the rest of us, eh?’

MacNee held up his china mug in a mock salute. ‘Not really, pal. Just a wee fly cuppa.’

Georgia Stanley bristled. ‘I don’t serve alcohol to anyone before twelve o’clock. Since it’s that now, I’m ready to take your order. The usual?’

She pulled pints for the two men. Once they had carried them to a corner table she returned to the other end of the bar, pulling a face.

‘Sorry about that. Not two of my favourite people,’ she confessed, then as the door opened again and an elderly man appeared, groaned quietly. ‘And there’s another – Steve’s father. I always make sure I’ve got the counter between me and him.’

MacNee and Fleming turned to look. Donaldson senior looked to be in his seventies, shorter than his son but not unlike him in appearance. His sagging jowls had tufts of an old man’s weak, greying stubble after a careless shave and the leer he gave her from his watery eyes explained Georgia’s reaction.

‘Pint. Bring it over to me, pet, will you?’ he said with a smile revealing broken and discoloured teeth.

A little knot of people coming in gave her the excuse to say, ‘Hang
on, Hugh. You’ll have to take it yourself – I’m going to be serving.’

There was a lot of interest in Innellan’s most sensational event since a summer visitor trying to launch his boat had beached his new Jaguar below the high tide mark two years ago, and the buzz of talk rose.

Fleming heard a woman say, ‘Well, it’s just a skeleton, isn’t it? Not like a
body
, or anything.’ Her friends laughed comfortably.

She was wrong. It was exactly the same as a body – a body whose identity had been ruthlessly stripped away, right down to the very flesh on its bones.

‘That’s it,’ Matt Lovatt said, closing the gate on the last of the stags. ‘Nothing more to do, except leave them to get worked up for the next couple of weeks. I can smell them already.’

And Christie could too, now she thought about it. There was a taint on the air, rank and pungent.

‘Smells a bit like goats,’ she said.

‘A bit – stick around! They really start to stink. Gets the hinds excited – sort of like guys putting on aftershave when they’re going out on the pull.’

‘Takes more than that to do it for me,’ Christie said saucily, which made Matt laugh as they headed towards the farmhouse. She loved making him laugh – he didn’t laugh often enough.

‘What else is there today?’ she asked. ‘Kerr’s gone into Kirkcudbright.’

‘I know. But there’s not much – concentrate to take out later and there’s some fencing needing attention. But take some time off – I don’t want to be a slave-driver.’

He gave her his lopsided smile – lopsided, because one side of his face didn’t work very well any more – which always went to her heart.

‘You’re not!’ she protested. ‘Are you going in to lunch now?’

The arrangement was there were packets of instant soup in the cupboard, cheese and ham in the fridge, and you took your own when it suited you, eating with whoever was there or taking it to your room, if you liked.

Christie cherished days when she and Matt coincided at the kitchen table alone. She still knew little about him as a person; he was very reserved, but gradually she was piecing together the tiny scraps of information he let fall. They couldn’t discuss the art films he liked and she’d never seen, or her favourite pop videos, but they could agree they could barely even look at a poster for a war movie.

Matt glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll probably take a break around twelve-thirty. I was up early today.’

Christie nodded, then said casually, ‘Did Lissa go with Kerr?’

‘No. She’s found some crab apples – says she’s going to make jelly, but I wouldn’t depend on it for your “piece” at teatime.’

She’d be in the kitchen, then. Christie smiled. ‘That’s very brave. If you don’t need me I might pop round the pub for half an hour.’

‘Fine, fine. See you later,’ Matt said absently, and went on towards the house. In the pen in the yard, his dog was waiting, padding from foot to foot and swinging its tail. He let it out and it pranced round him as he went inside.

Feeling somehow deflated, Christie watched him go then walked down the farm road leading to Innellan.

It was quarter past twelve when Andy Macdonald reached the pub. He was alone; the other guys were still doggedly eating the fry-up they hoped would make them ready for the next beer.

He registered the surprising number of cars in the Smugglers’ car park without looking at them closely, but the police car drew
his attention. When was the last time he’d seen one here? Probably when he and his delinquent mates had taken the underwear off Mrs Chalmers’s washing line and draped her impressively large knickers and bras over the gravestones round the old church. In keen anticipation of another local drama, Andy went in and headed for the bar.

‘What’s going on, then, Georgia? Anyone exciting under arrest?’

‘Andy Macdonald! What are you doing here?’

The sudden materialisation of Big Marge at his elbow threw him completely. ‘Er … boss! What … oh, I’m … I’m in a caravan with some mates, along there.’ He jerked his head, then noticed MacNee. ‘Hello, Tam. Well, er … this is a bit of a surprise.’

He was babbling. Georgia, whose sympathetic expression suggested that given a chance she’d have warned him, put a pint in his hand. He took a steadying sip, then said, ‘A stag weekend, that’s all. What’s happening?’

‘Bones,’ MacNee said in suitably sepulchral tones. ‘Old bones. And watch what you say – we’ve the press breathing down our necks.’ He raised his tea mug in an ironic salute to Tony Drummond, who had edged closer.

Fleming drew Macdonald into a corner and was briefing him in a low voice when Christie Jack came in. She looked round, and Macdonald said awkwardly, ‘Sorry, boss – someone looking for me.’

He went over. ‘Good to see you – I wasn’t sure you’d make it. A Beck’s?’

‘Thanks.’ She was looking puzzled. ‘What on earth’s going on today, with all the police and stuff?’

Macdonald was saying uncomfortably, ‘Well—’ just as MacNee hailed him.

‘Come on, Andy, introduce us to your friend.’

Macdonald turned with obvious reluctance. ‘Christie Jack. This is DS Tam MacNee and DI Fleming.’