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- Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
*** SHORTLISTED FOR THE BLOODY SCOTLAND DEBUT PRIZE 2022 *** This debut crime novel is set in a brutal, chaotic Scotland of the near future, where it's business at any cost for the people who live there. Archie Henderson, a passionate hunter, has rewilded his vast Highland estate filling the mountains and woods with wolves and bears. Here he runs wolf hunts with a terrible difference. But when a young man is killed by a bear on the reserve, DI Rhona Ballantyne is assigned the case. As her enquiries progress, she begins to unravel the dark secret behind the death, and uncovers a terrifying truth that will put her own life in jeopardy. Will the hunter become the hunted? A new writer to this genre, Amanda Mitchison has hit the ground running with a new spin to Tartan Noir.
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The Wolf Hunters
Amanda Mitchison
The Wolf Hunters
© Amanda Mitchison 2021
The author asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of the work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Fledgling Press Ltd.
Cover illustration: Graeme Clarke
Wolf mask: Lucy Vooght, Whispering Woodcrafts
Published by:
Fledgling Press Ltd.
1 Milton Rd West
Edinburgh
EH15 1LA
www.fledglingpress.co.uk
Print ISBN 978-1-912280-46-9
eBook ISBN 978-1-912280-47-6
To my happy lockdown family: Neil, Aideen, Jeremy, Donnchadh, Naomi, Ruairi, Eóghain and Catrìona.
PROLOGUE
Passport control at the Carter Bar border crossing on a bright December morning. A long grey frill of breezeblock four metres high and topped with razor wire runs along the humps of the Cheviots, like the crest on a lizard. An old billboard proclaims: Welcome to Scotland, Fàiltegu Alba.
On the English side a bus draws up. The doors wheeze open and out spill a bevy of Scottish migrant workers in hi-vis jackets. Last off the bus is a woman in her thirties: black jeans, grey jacket, grey face. Rhona Ballantyne is clearly not a shabby migrant worker. She is tall and very thin, with shoulder length brown hair. She has regular features, faint lines at the side of her mouth. It’s a neutral face which is thoroughly forgettable – this has been useful in the past.
Technically, Rhona is completely shit-faced, having downed all six of the grappa gift miniatures she’d brought for her friend Cat. But she still manages to hoick her bag over her shoulder, and walk directly up to the wall and join the queue a few metres from the border checkpoint.
Rhona waits, holding her vaccination certificate and her passport with the obligatory 1,000 American dollars, which she will have to change into the local Merks using the extortionate official rate. She rummages in her pocket, finds a tube of mints and takes one. Will they still have mints in Scotland?
She looks up; nailed to a pillar of the gate is a severed human foot. A practical joke? But when she looks closer there’s something very familiar about how the toenails are prising themselves away from the cuticles – in the police you do learn about death, and what time does to flesh and bone and blood.
The queue moves closer to the passport gate, closer to the foot. Behind it, pasted to the pillars of the gates, are the Peace and Stability Ordinances. A paragraph has been circled in red with an arrow pointing to the foot.
She shuffles forward, and notes that the foot is glazed, like the top of a French tart; they’ve used yacht varnish.
On the Scottish side of the border, Cat is waiting for her. Just for a moment, Rhona sees her friend as a stranger would see her: a pretty, snub-nosed woman, mid thirties, dressed in leggings and a long, flecked cardigan, a chopstick holding her hair up. Not really changed, Rhona thinks. Some women (like Cat) soften and glow with age, others (like herself) look as if some giant, red-eyed vampire spider sucked them dry in the night.
And then Cat sees her and holds out her arms.
‘Roo!’ Cat gives her a great, enveloping hug while Rhona stands stock still.
‘I thought nobody touches these days.’
‘I do!’ Cat draws back, ‘Let me look at you! You’re so thin!’
‘You mean old and racoon-eyed.’
‘That’s not what I said. I said, “thin”.’
‘Mmmm. Well, you look great too,’ says Rhona tonelessly. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’
‘I eat, Roo. I eat.’ Cat takes Rhona’s bag from her. ‘Is this all then?’
Rhona nods.
‘I thought this was you coming home.’
‘It is. I’ve brought some nice underwear. And a funeral outfit. You always need a funeral outfit.’
‘That’ll do for church then,’ says Cat.
Rhona looks at her askance.
‘Didn’t you read my letters? You have to go every Sunday now. The Holy Willies keep registers.’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Believe me, you will be,’ Cat weighs the bag in her hand, ‘You forgot the gearbox, didn’t you?’
‘Sorry.’ Rhona flinches. ‘I mean it, I’m sorry.’
Cat gives her a weary smile.
They walk across the car park to Cat’s van which is being watched over by two pointy-faced boys with cropped hair and long sticks. Cat hands them each a five merk coin and they slope off.
Cat and Rhona climb up into the van and then Cat pushes down the snib to relock the doors. Here in the cabin, they’re perched high above the ground. The seats have brightly coloured hand-knitted covers, and a pine tree air freshener hangs from the rearview mirror. Cat always was a homemaker. When they were children, she’d sewn little cushions for their den. The three of them, Cat and Rhona and her twin sister, Maggie, all bunched up together with their piles of sweets and their candle stubs and their secret pacts sealed in blood from a compass point. Together-forever-and-ever. Perhaps that is still true, even if there are only the two of them now.
Rhona sinks back into the woolly seat.
‘You all right?’ Cat starts up the engine.
‘They’ve put a dead foot up at the crossing point. They’ve even covered it in varnish.’
‘That’ll be to preserve it.’
‘But it’s medieval!’
‘Left foot? Or right?’ Cat edges the van out of the parking bay, skirting round a flurry of crows.
‘Left. And someone young. Christ, does it matter?’
‘The right foot controls the accelerator so that’s what they take for repeated speeding offences. The left foot is for the clutch. That’ll be joyriding.’
‘I hope I don’t have to enforce this.’
‘You could be lenient and just chop off toes instead,’ Cat glances at her. ‘Sorry, that was a joke.’
One of the car park boys runs into the crows, swinging his stick. The birds fly up in a rush of black. But the boy has hit home. Now he bends over to smash in the bird’s head.
Cat toots her horn. When the boy glances over at the van, she sticks up her thumb and he gives her a little yellow smile.
‘Don’t encourage him!’ says Rhona.
‘That’s his supper.’
Rhona shuts her eyes. Her teeth ache, her eyeballs ache, muscles in her scalp, that she didn’t know she had, ache.
The road sweeps round the brow of a hill and down into a valley. There are no trees any more. They pass a pair of roadside shacks with roofs of corrugated iron and uncountable small filthy children wading in puddles. The gardens grow a forest of oil drums, and rolls of rusty chicken wire. On the washing line hangs a pair of lonely jogging bottoms. Two cardboard signs: ‘The Lord Hath Mercy’ and ‘Jesus Coming Soon!’
‘This is worse than Catania,’ says Rhona.
‘It’s better than it was,’ replies Cat tightly. ‘If you’d only flown into Edinburgh, then you wouldn’t have had to see all this horrible stuff. At the airport they cater for tourists. They’ve got a piper in the arrivals lounge, and girls in mini kilts with trays of welcome whisky.’
‘That’s a great idea!’
Rhona opens the glove compartment hoping for a bottle of welcome whisky. Instead, she finds a welcome gun. She picks it up: an old Colt 33, clean, oiled, loaded.
‘What the hell!’ she says. ‘I thought you made handicrafts.’
‘I do. But everyone carries a gun now.’
‘I’m going to have my work cut out.’
‘Oh, you are,’ says Cat. ‘But the crime isn’t what really gets to you. The worst thing is the double speak, the hypocrisy of it all. So everyone trots off to church and opens their Reading of the Day App and pretends life is still okay.’
‘Did you say, Reading of the Day?’
‘Yep. It’ll pop up on your mobile every morning. Apps are part of the Kirk’s outreach programme. Sometimes they become ear worms – you just can’t get them out of your head.’
‘You wrote that the Holy Willies have been praying for Dad.’
‘How is he?’ says Cat. ‘The hospital will only talk to next of kin.’
‘I don’t really know. He had another operation yesterday. He’s still in ICU.’
‘So?’ Cat tilts her head to one side.
‘So why am I coming home? It’s time, isn’t it? I can’t run away forever.’
‘But why now?’
‘I suppose I thought the prospect of death might soften him up a bit. Make him more forgiving.’
Cat says, ‘You may be pleasantly surprised. He’s lonely. He’s always saying that he has no one to look after him. You can mop his brow.’
It’s an absurd idea. They look at each other and smile.
Cat is quiet for a moment. Then, cautiously, she says, ‘And Maggie?’
‘She’s there in my mind all the time,’ Rhona is pleased that her voice has stayed steady. ‘Any other persecutingly intimate questions you want to ask me?’
Cat just nods and keeps her eyes on the road.
At the foothills of the Eildons, the van struggles. Cat screeches down through the gears, eyes flicking reproachfully at Rhona. Finally the engine gets some traction and the van judders forward.
As they zigzag up the hillside, Rhona watches a buzzard circle high above them. It stops and hovers, wings tilting, its gaze fixed, no doubt, on one microscopic mousehole. That was the answer to life, wasn’t it? Think of just one thing only.
‘I need a pee,’ says Cat.
Near the summit they pull into a lay-by. While Cat goes behind a rock, Rhona gets out of the car and stands looking down on the valley below. She follows the glide of the river past the clumps of gorse, the crumbling walls, the little hamlet of houses with dented roofs, the churchyard with its tree stumps.
Seven years ago, she left in pursuit of Sergio Verviani, her sister’s killer. In Italy she finally managed to do what she had failed to accomplish back home; she got Verviani and several other members of his criminal network put behind bars.
But in the meantime, Scotland has changed. Of course it has – only she hadn’t expected things to be quite so desperate. Yet it’s still home. It’s still the land that has made her who she is and where, despite everything, she still belongs.
Down in the valley, shadows already rim the little buildings. Rhona thinks how meanly winter light is apportioned here. It’ll be growing dark by the time they reach home.
They head on northwest, past the old slag heaps of Lanark, loop round the south of Glasgow and come into Paisley under the dead-eyed tower blocks where the rusty metal sidings are sheering away from the concrete. In the car park below, scores of skinny children are playing among the incineration bins; the boys kicking footballs, the girls huddling on the benches, some holding babies wrapped in blankets.
‘It’ll be different when we get up north.’ Cat has both hands on the steering wheel, chin tilted up, her glasses halfway down her perfect ski jump of a nose.
‘Will it?’
‘Well, it’ll be wilder.’
‘What kind of wild? Wild as in mountains and forests? Or wild as in Wild West?’
‘Both. There’s even bears up there now. And wolves. The Ardnamurchan peninsula has become a game reserve. It’s still got loads of trees. They say that if you stop your car in a lay-by there, the bears will come out of the forest and pry open the boot. They’ll kill for a chicken sandwich.’
‘So would I,’ says Rhona.
At the Erskine Bridge Cat pays the 70 merk toll and they come out onto the A82 which, Cat tells her, is now designated a ‘signature road’ by the Scottish Executive and is duly fitted out with birch saplings along the verges and hideous modern statues at every roundabout.
Cat is driving faster now, talking easily and going over seven years of local news – which is mostly who got the virus and how they died. Rhona pours out cups of dark brown tea from a thermos.
They cross Rannoch Moor, the land rolling out flat and raw in the winter light. Eventually, the road swerves to the west and they enter the great, desolate scoop of Glencoe. They’re in the Highlands now, nearly on the home straight.
But at the first car park Cat pulls over. ‘I’ve just got a wee delivery.’
‘Here?’
‘It’s just for some friends.’
Cat takes two holdalls from the back of the van and sets off briskly along a track across the glen. Rhona, head down, trails behind. Cat, she knows, always has some money-making scheme underway.
Cat waits for her on a small footbridge. When Rhona catches up, she says, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ says Rhona. ‘But if a wild dog was chewing my leg off you’d say, “I’m just finishing off this macramé plant holder.”’
They come to the foot of the mountains. Behind a large rock stands a metal pillar with pulley wheels at the top and a loop of steel rope that disappears up the slope. From the rope hang two green plastic baskets.
Cat puts the holdalls in the baskets, opens a small metal flap on the side of the pillar and presses a switch. The baskets wobble away up the mountainside.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ says Cat. ‘It’s solar-powered. I had it made.’
‘What’s in the bags?’
‘Epoxy resin, Vaseline, tampons, paracetamol and two months’ worth of insulin.’
Rhona frowns.
‘You’ll see.’
Cat leads the way up a path in a cleft of the mountain. After a steep climb they come out onto a narrow ridge. On the far side the ground dips down into a small hidden valley, cupped between the two mountains of the ridge.
Rhona sees before her a small, squalid settlement surrounded by piles of old tin cans and plastic casing and broken machinery. In the middle are low stone byres with black plastic sheeting on the roofs, and holes for windows. The nearest byre has a white metal door that once belonged to a fridge. And everywhere there are goats: goats in corrugated iron enclosures, goats tethered to rocks, goats tied to posts in the ground.
Standing at a slight distance is a much larger building with a corrugated iron roof. Two women in brown tabards are waiting outside, holding Cat’s bags. They have hard, dark faces and hair in long plaits.
Near the entrance to the building, a hubcap filled with liquid has been set into the ground. Cat dips both her trainers in the little pool and walks towards the women. Rhona dips her feet in too and follows.
The women lead them through plastic seal flaps and into a hot, noisy workshop smelling of epoxy resin and burnt hair. At the nearest long table small boys are sawing deer antlers into fingerlength sections, and two bigger boys, one with a squint, the other with a starburst of warts around his neck, are gluing the bits together to form hands. At the next table are trays of completed antler hands onto which women and girls are gluing tiny gold balls, seed pearls, crystals, lapis lazuli, and little squares of tartan cloth.
Cat picks up a hand, ‘They’re Highland ring holders. What do you think?’
‘Creepy and hideous! Next you’ll be making lampshades from human skin.’
‘I’ve learnt what sells,’ Cat surveys the table. ‘Think of the most bad taste thing that you can. Then – and this is the real secret – you go that one step further. You add the glitz and the tartan.’
‘I didn’t know you were quite that cynical!’ says Rhona.
But Cat seems distracted. She scans the room. ‘We’re short-staffed today. Some of these orders are going to be late.’
She says something in a foreign language to one of the women.
The woman replies at some length and then turns her head away.
Cat looks worried.
‘What’s up?’ says Rhona.
‘They’ve lost a couple of young girls. And a boy.’
‘How? What happened?’
‘We don’t know. They were all good kids – not the sort to join gangs.’ She takes a breath, ‘Maybe they got sick and went off to die on their own. People do. They skulk off like dogs.’
‘But I thought Scotland didn’t get the flux? That was the one thing it had going for it.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’
‘Wasn’t that the whole point?’ says Rhona in a strangled voice. ‘Wasn’t that why you closed the borders?’
‘Of course it was. And they’re still pretending we’ve been virus-free.’
‘You never mentioned it in your letters.’
Cat gives a scornful snort, ‘What do you expect? It’s a state secret. And there are still little pockets of disease. Nobody here will have been vaccinated. They are not officially here. They’re off the record. They’d be turned away at the hospitals.’
Some of the women have put down their glue and tweezers. They’re watching.
‘What happens when they get sick?’ asks Rhona.
‘Either they get better. Or they don’t.’
‘And school?’
‘I can’t get anything in their language. They’re Moldavians. I have to speak Russian to them.’
‘Do you speak any Russian that isn’t in the imperative?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You said they were “friends”.’
‘They are. We get on well.’
‘They’re your staff, Cat.’
‘I pay them a good wage.’
‘I’m out of here. I’ve had enough.’ Rhona walks quickly to the exit and plunges back through the plastic seals. Outside, she finds a rock, checks it for goat droppings, and sits down. She eats a mint, but a drink is what she really needs.
Someone is watching her. Quickly she turns, but nobody’s there. Then she sees a billy goat looking at her with the same mournful, heavy-lidded eyes as Cat’s workers.
Cat comes out and joins her. ‘What’s the problem?’ she says.
‘I didn’t know you kept slaves.’
‘That’s not fair! I’m helping them.’
‘Helping them? You said you hated doublespeak. How can you do this?’
‘They need the money.’
‘Doesn’t look like you pay them much.’
‘It’s better than what they’d get from anyone else. And I put the pulley in and the workshop.’
‘But that was for you, for your business,’ says Rhona.
‘You don’t get it, do you? This is what they need. It’s better than charity. It means I can pay them and bring in medical supplies.’
Cat picks up a stone, flicks it high into the air and catches it again. ‘I wonder if they traded them.’
‘Sold their own children! You’re joking!’
‘Take a look at the kids here, they all have something wrong with them. But the three that have gone were perfect. They had good teeth, straight limbs, no groin rot. Sorry, Roo. That’s just how things are these days.’
Rhona feels a sudden weariness wash over her. She says, ‘Take me home, Cat.’
‘You sure about that?I thought you’d stay with us. At least at the beginning, till you found yourself somewhere.’
‘No. I want to go home.’
‘But the house…’
‘It’s still standing, isn’t it? Or is that another horrible thing you’ve just been waiting to tell me?’
‘The house is there all right.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’
‘Just, you know…’ Cat says delicately. ‘Nobody has been living there. You might feel…’
‘I might feel what? Ghosts?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I won’t be going into her room. Please Cat, take me home. Just take me home.’
And Cat takes her home
SIX MONTHS LATER
A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DIE
Reading of the Day
‘Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’
John 3.3
On a morning in June, Rhona is the duty officer and takes the first call of the day. She dresses quickly and drives straight through Fort William. She takes the public road through the scalped hills of Lochaber, past the tinker settlements and the quarry and on down to the coast.
The road ends when she reaches the boundary of Henderson’s wild game reserve. In front of her is the great steel mesh boundary fence which cuts off the Sunart and Ardnamurchan peninsula from the mainland. A coat of arms has been wrought into the metalwork of the gate; the crest shows an eagle head in profile.
On the far side of the fence Rhona can see the green woods of the estate and, just by the gate, a transparent, egg-shaped cabin. The glass or plastic of the cabin is clean and unscratched. And sitting inside is a guard wearing a green fleece. He has a semi-automatic rifle resting at his feet and he nods to Rhona while making a circling motion with his hand. She winds up her window, smiling at the idea that a sheet of glass would really save her from a wild bear. The gates open and she enters the reserve
She drives fast between columns of trees, occasionally passing neatly boarded-up houses. The road is smooth and beautifully cambered, the tarmac shiny. Yet it is also wild here. At the luxury, foreign currency hotels she is used to stage set woods that are only two or three trees thick. But this is different. These are real forests that reach up into mountains. Miraculously, nothing here has been destroyed.
What is the price?
When the road divides she heads inland. She winds the window down again. It is the freshest, dampest, cleanest morning of the world. Later, it will be hot – the first day of summer. Tiny yellow blossoms of tormentil shine in the grass and when she drives through the wood, the car plunges into pale green light from the beech trees vaulting high overhead.
A beautiful day to die.
In a lay-by up ahead she sees a Land Rover and she parks behind it.
Matt Simpson, the gamekeeper, is waiting for her. He too is dressed in a green fleece with a small gold embroidered eagle head. His tweed cap is crunched deferentially in his hand, folded tarpaulins lie at his feet.
‘You must be the new lady inspector,’ says Matt.
‘I’m not that new. I’ve been here six months.’ She looks at the tarpaulins. ‘Leave them. The men will do all of that when they get here.’
She’s made it sound as if they are on their way, but she hasn’t even called the procurator fiscal’s office yet. She always puts that off. She knows that the more people around the less you sense where you are, and what has happened.
She walks along the verge for a better view down into the dell. The clearing in the woods is about seventy metres wide, with a round, brown pond in the middle and a small shed off to one side. Near to the pond lies the body of a young man. He is naked, lying on his front, his arms loosely at his side, one leg slightly bent and with the foot facing inwards. There’s no sign of any injury, except a couple of brown smudges on his back. You might even have thought he was taking the sun. But who would sunbathe here?
And, as always, there’s that terrible, emptied out stillness.
‘It’s nobody local,’ says Matt. ‘No one from the reserve.’
‘So who is he then?’ she says.
‘I don’t know.’
There’s just the faintest quiver in Matt’s voice.
Rhona thinks: his first lie.
‘But you have some record of who comes onto the reserve, no?’
‘Mr Henderson keeps a register of car number plates. But I haven’t checked at the Big House.’
‘And you’re certain it was a bear?’
‘They’re all satellite tagged. Wilber was here at 2 a.m.’
‘Wilber? Isn’t it a wild animal?’
‘That’s his name. Short for Wilberforce.’
‘So we know the killer, but not the victim. That’s most unusual.’
Matt blinks slowly and doesn’t reply. He’s a coarse-featured man, his forehead and nose pitted by the flux. An ugly face, an honest face – or so you’d have thought.
‘How did you find out about the body?’
‘We had a tip-off.’
‘Who gave you that?’
‘A man. He didn’t leave a name.’ That’s his second lie.
‘And you don’t know who it was?’
Matt shakes his head.
‘Matt. You don’t mind if I call you Matt, do you? This is a reserve, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, I presume not many people live here?’
‘Twenty-eight adults.’
‘Exactly. And the land is surrounded by a five metre electric fence?’
‘Four metres. And only electrified over the sections on dry ground.’
‘Whatever. But the number of people likely to have seen the body is small. And you know them all.’
‘You’d be surprised who creeps in. We get a lot of tip-offs. People call up with sightings of the peregrines and sea eagles all the time.’
‘It’s nice to know there are people still interested in wildlife. But this isn’t about a roosting bird, is it? This is a little bit different, no?’ She gives him a quick, devastating smile.
Matt looks at his boots.
They walk down the bank to the dell, through buttercups and dog’s mercury. At the foot of the slope the ground is boggy, moss and hummocks of marsh grass, a buzz of bluebottles and the smell of standing water. Through an opening in the trees she can see the shore and the huge seaweed-covered boulders hunkered into the sand. The green mesh boundary fence traverses the shallows of the beach. Beyond lies the sea with the thin line of Coll on the horizon.
Matt introduces his son, Gordon, who is sitting very still on a rock, a few feet from the body. The boy is thirteen, maybe fourteen and with a lumpy nose – his father’s son. His face is set and stolid, and he holds a shotgun across his knees. He’ll remember this morning for the rest of his life.
She takes a step closer. The grass and moss are scuffed up. There is a circle of brown blood – it must have spurted out. And scattered across the ground are shreds of flesh, crawling with bluebottles. Yet the corpse, at least the man’s back, looks untouched. She’s never seen a body quite like this.
The air suddenly feels thicker. It’s getter warmer now, the flies and fluff from bog cotton and dandelion seeds are everywhere. She watches a cloud of gnats circle slowly upwards, as if climbing an invisible spiral stair. Even after all these years, she still has to quell a heave in her stomach.
She brings out her mobile and turns on the camera. At least when she is taking photos she looks at her phone, not at the terrible thing itself. She starts with the surrounding area. The pond. Click. The surface is brown and lumpy with reeds; nobody could swim in that.
Around the body, the marsh grass is broken and bent. Click. But there are no footprints. Moss springs back immediately – how many crimes in Scotland remain unsolved thanks to moss? Ah! Some pieces of bloodied string. Click. The string has a blue thread running through it – so partly synthetic and probably imported. What’s it doing here?
She clicks on the muddy feet. Then she works her way up: the calves, the thighs, the heartbreaking fuzz of pale hair on his buttocks. Click. Click. Click. And then his hands. Soft and clerical. The nails are whitish; he didn’t fight back.
There is an old scar – a pink, knobbly indent – in the small of his back. A tiny tattoo of a swallow under his ear. He’s spotty round the shoulders. And at the back of his neck, he has a tan patch where he’s caught the sun, and a tiny pink birthmark is just creeping up into the hairline. She likes necks. They are the most childlike and intimate part of a man. Down below it’s all thrust and shove and show. But the nape of the neck…
She feels Matt’s eyes on her. She stands back to get a proper overview of the corpse. Brown wavy hair cut very short at the sides, long on top. His face is in the tall grass so she can’t, thank God, see much. Nearly six foot? A big lump of a bloke: BMI 30? 35? Not an athlete, so probably tender meat. But the back is almost untouched, save for the smudges of blood round his waist. So why these shreds of flesh? Why the string? And why, she wonders, had the young man taken off his clothes? It can’t have been in order to swim – Henderson’s fence blocks access to the sea and the pond is full of hornwort. So why strip off? Was it a bet? A dare? He must have been on something.
‘Are his clothes here?’ she asks.
Matt indicates with a jerk of his head. Behind Rhona, tucked in among the trees, is a small stone shed with a blue door. On the doorstep stand a pair of Wellingtons and a pile of men’s clothes: jeans, a pink shirt, and boxers, all neatly folded and the socks paired into a ball. On top of the clothes lies a red azalea blossom and, tucked down into the trumpet of one of the flowers, is a very tightly folded playing card. Before Matt comes over she quickly places the card in her pocket.
‘Did you fold up his clothes?’
Matt shakes his head.
She turns to Gordon and he shakes his head too.
‘Who wears pink shirts these days?’ she asks.
Matt shrugs.
‘He might be one of Will’s friends,’ says Gordon. She sees Matt take a breath.
‘Who’s that?’ she asks.
‘Mr Henderson’s son. He has friends staying at the tower down the road.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
Matt’s eyes narrow. ‘I wasn’t sure. I don’t see them that much.’
‘And you’re quite sure it was a bear? Couldn’t it have been the wolves?’
‘I know it was Wilber,’ says Matt. ‘And the wolves would have left nothing. They’d have taken some of the bones away with them too. They like marrow.’
He pauses. ‘Bears are different. Bears start with the belly.’
It’s time now. She puts on her vinyl gloves and squats by the corpse. She clenches her jaw – not that that will make any difference.
She lifts and tilts back the dead man’s shoulder. She glances at the face, all askew and muddy. The eyes are shut, but the mouth – large-lipped and loose – is open, a froth of saliva in one corner. The throat has been clawed open – that’ll be what killed him. But this still doesn’t account for the shredded flesh on the ground.
She lifts the shoulder further up so that the man’s torso is clear of the ground. His chest is covered in blood, and there’s a gash down his middle – a great open red zip. It seems to swell and then something glistening slithers out. Gaining momentum, his guts slop onto the ground.
She rests the body back down again. And as she does so, she hears something. Gordon springs to his feet. He is pointing the shotgun towards the trees.
She turns her head to look, but the wood is silent. All she can see is the light slanting down between the trunks of the alders.
A pale green beech leaf floats in through the open window of the car. She puts out her hand and it lands light as air on her palm: a blessing.
She takes another gulp from the hip flask, wipes her mouth on the back of her sleeve and opens the folded playing card. A Queen of Spades, with nothing written on it, no message, a small pale blob of some kind of residue still sticking to the bottom of it. The card has been folded and folded again and then scrunched up very tightly. She takes off her gloves, wraps them round the card and tucks the bundle into the side pocket of the driver’s door.
Rhona brings out a tube of mints and the tablet from her briefcase. She uncoils the foil wrapping of the mints and, as she turns on the tablet, puts several sweets in her mouth and crunches through them. The internet connection is astonishingly good; she overrides registration details by putting in the police code and turns on Google Maps. The road and the dell with its little pond appear on the screen. She zooms out a little and notices a U-shaped building tucked in the woods nearby. She’ll get Sergeant Boyd to have a good look round there.
She zooms back further, until she can see the whole of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, a long tongue of mountain and forest jutting out into the Atlantic. The Google photography was done some time ago – before Henderson’s fence was erected – but it is so detailed that she can see the white of the waves where the cliffs drop away into the water and the tips of the trees in the forests. Up on the mountain plateau there are deep black lochans and the rock faces are grey and creviced like the hide of a rhino.
Her mobile rings. It’s Chief Superintendent Travers, who everyone in the Fort William office refers to as ‘The Bassett’ because of the bags under his eyes and his lugubrious drooping jowls.
‘Rhona? Where are you?’
‘I’m still on the reserve, sir.’
‘Who’s with you?”
‘The wolves, the killer bear, a few red deer.’
‘You shouldn’t be there on your own. Why didn’t you take Boyd?’
‘Boyd wasn’t in yet. He was at his helicopter training.’
‘Cummings, then. Why not Cummings?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Are your windows up? Is the car locked?’
‘Sir, they told me all of that at the checkpoint. And yes, I’m armed.’
‘Get the bear killed. Do you know who the victim is yet?’
‘No. It’s a young man. Caucasian. Someone properly fed, properly clothed.’
‘Not a scally, then?’
‘Not a scally. I’m sure he’ll be registered.’ She pauses, ‘And we should treat the site as a crime scene.’
‘What!’
‘I’m serious. This was no accident.’
‘A man gets killed by a bear. How is that not an accident?’
‘There’s something going on. There’s string and bits of animal meat – I think pork or bacon – all around the body. It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘So what happened then? Did the bear not kill him?’
‘I think the bear did kill him. His heart was certainly pumping when he was attacked. He was alive alright.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, it must have been a very polite bear.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘The bear didn’t eat much of him, which is unusual.’
‘How did it kill him?’
‘Ripped his throat and slit his stomach open.’
‘That’s not very polite.’
‘Sir, it’s all a bit odd.’
She can see her boss, dressed in his maroon cardigan, slippers on under his desk. He’ll be leaning back in his chair, torturing the springs.
The Bassett says, ‘Don’t tell me you’re claiming culpable homicide? What’ll you ask in the interview room? “Mr Bear, where were you on the night of the 14th June?” “Grrr.” “We will need to look at your bank details.” “Grr. I don’t have an account…”’
‘You do a good bear, sir. You could give up the day job.’
‘I’ll have to if you go on like this. Why is it worrying you so much? All you’ve got is some unaccounted-for string and bits of bacon.’
‘There’s more to it. When wild animals kill they make a huge mess. But this bear ate almost nothing.’
‘Did it get frightened away? Never discount the simple explanation.’
‘The body was flipped over onto its front. You know, kind of tidied up – like when people put their knife and fork together at the end of a meal. Why would a bear do that if he was being chased away?’
‘Maybe this fellow didn’t taste right?’
‘Yeah, but I never thought bears were that fussy. And…’
‘And?’ he asks quickly. She can tell he’s interested now, despite himself.
‘The victim’s clothes were all folded in a neat little pile nearby.’
‘Maybe he was a tidy man. Where exactly did it happen? Are you down in the woods beyond Acharacle. Is he by that pool?’
‘Yes,’ says Rhona. Of course, he knows the area. The Bassett has a holiday cottage out at Kilchoan, near the end of the peninsula.
‘Then the simple explanation is that he’ll have got stripped off to go for a swim. You know, some men are house-trained – they can fold. Think of Cummings.’
‘But on top of the clothes was a flower.’
‘Did you find anything else? What was in the shed down there?’
She’s surprised. He really does know the estate well. He must know the landlord, Archie Henderson. He probably knows Matt too. Probably knew the bear as well.
‘There’s nothing there,’ she says. ‘The door was unlocked, but there were cobwebs across the entrance.’
She hasn’t mentioned the playing card. He’d laugh at her if she said it had been scrumpled up too tightly and was worrying her.
‘It’s most probably nothing,’ he says. ‘Just a midnight bathe that went wrong.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that. There’s more to it.’
‘You and your feelings,’ sighs The Bassett.
‘I’ve been right before. You read the report from Signor Petroni.’
‘And you’ve been wrong before.’
‘I’ve been not proven before.’
‘Same thing,’ he snorts. ‘And what are you up to now?’
‘Archie Henderson is my next port of call.’
‘Well, you’ll find him interesting. He’s a man of many parts.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He can talk about anything. He’s educated, reads books. Remember books? He plays the oboe, speaks German and Russian. He got a rowing blue at Cambridge. The oar is in his hallway.’
‘Thanks,’ she says flatly. ‘That’s a real help.’
‘Take the road slowly. You don’t want to bump into another bear.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And don’t stay away too long. The summer bludgeonings have begun in Lochgoilhead.’ He takes a breath, ‘One more thing, Rhona.’
‘Sir?’
‘Make an effort. Try and be nice.’
GLENBORRODALE CASTLE
Rhona drives further into the peninsula, weaving through green tunnels of trees and at times coming out onto the banks of Loch Sunart. All the way, Henderson’s fence keeps her company and she sees the loch through a green mesh.
And everything feels almost smirkingly neat: the fence posts are all upright, the gates freshly painted, the boarded-up houses have gutters and roofs still intact. She is not used to this. Where are the button-eyed children in rags? The dented hen coops? The piles of old animal bones?
She turns in at the entrance to the castle, presses the buzzer and waits. Eventually the great metal gates open.
The drive is lined with towering conifers and blossoming azaleas and rhododendrons in every shade of yellow, red and purple. She passes a tennis court and a walled garden. Then the drive climbs on up the hill and ends in a car park at the back of a very large, red stone Victorian country house.
Rhona parks the car and sits for a moment taking stock. In the wing mirror her own bloodless face looks back at her. She should have eaten some breakfast, should at least keep some muesli bars in the glove compartment. But who is she kidding? Cat is right; she runs on ethanol and sugar, not food. If they cut her open they won’t find blood. She’ll just leak a thin, sour lemonade.
She gets out of the car. A pump thrums somewhere in the woods behind her and there’s a smell of moss and mulch. She catches a glimpse of a woman’s face at a downstairs window. That’ll be the mad housekeeper; these houses always have a mad housekeeper. But nobody comes out.
They buzzed her in, didn’t they? Isn’t anyone coming?
She examines the building. It’s a great brute of a house: five or six storeys of Victorian gothic, turrets sprouting at the corners, crowstepped gables, heavy iron balconies. But the aspect is wonderful. The house is perched high above the road. And Henderson, thanks to an expensive ha-ha, will be the one inhabitant of his estate whose view is uninterrupted by the fence.
She walks under a stone arch and round to the front door. Ahead of her, beyond the flagpole and the shining loch, lie the grey and green folds of the mountains of Appin.
Henderson, dressed in yellow corduroys and an old linen shirt, stands waiting for her on his front steps. With him are three straggly Irish wolfhounds with long red tongues and two with testicles that bloom out at the back. Like his dogs, Henderson is tall and thin. But his pelt is superior: he has a full head of grey hair swept back over craggy features and huge eyebrows. A handsome man – if you like your men beaky.
But there’s a dark, stretched look of fatigue round his eyes. She does a quick calculation; he’ll have got the news three to four hours ago.
‘Good morning, I’m Inspector Rhona Ballantyne.’
‘Archie Henderson.’ There’s not a trace of Scots in his accent. Probably an English prep school, she thinks. Then Eton, or Rugby.
He puts out his hand and she shakes it. His skin is cool and dry and surprisingly pleasant, like holding a snake.
‘You must be Roddie Ballantyne’s girl,’ he says.
‘Yes, I’m his surviving daughter. But I’m not a girl.’
‘You’re not a girl?’ He gives her a mocking smile, ‘You certainly look like a girl.’
She takes a breath, smiles glassily at him and says: ‘I’m a female graduate in my mid thirties. I am fluent in French and Italian and I can ride a horse and skipper a boat up to 40 feet long. I have a licence to bear arms and a great fat folder’s worth of other qualifications, but if you still want to go on calling me “Roddie Ballantyne’s girl”, please be my guest.’
‘You still look awfully young to be an inspector.’
‘We get younger every year, Mr Henderson. That’s what police do.’
The bitch, greying round the muzzle, lopes up to Rhona and snuffles at her groin.
Henderson clicks his tongue and the dog backs away. ‘Sorry about that,’ he says, rewarding the creature with a scratch under the ear. ‘Zezou always likes to check everyone out.’
‘It’s okay,’ says Rhona wearily. ‘I grew up with dogs.’
‘So you did. I used to shoot with your father. I’m sorry about what’s happened to him.’
She nods and then waits to see if he’ll ask more. But he doesn’t.
How can he know Dad and not know about Maggie?
Henderson thrusts his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Do you know who it was yet?’ he asks. ‘Matt told me it definitely wasn’t William.’
‘It’s a young man – in his twenties, I’d guess. Just over six foot. Does that ring a bell?’
Henderson’s gaze is fixed on the loch. ‘It’s probably one of my son’s friends,’ he says in a drained voice. ‘They’re staying up at the tower. It’s only half a mile from the dell.’ He pauses. Then he asks, almost hopefully, ‘Was he balding?’
‘No. He had a full head of hair.’
‘Did you say the body was fat?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘A bit plump, though?’
‘Well, yes.’
He sits down abruptly on the stone step. ‘It’ll be Johnnie then.’
‘Who?’ Rhona sits down beside him.
‘Johnnie. He’s the Fergusson boy. You know the Fergussons?’
‘No.’
‘They’re a big confectionary family from Ayrshire. Father is in the army. I think the mother is a Stephens. One of the Aberdonian Stephens. They’re related to the Frasers of Lovat.’ Henderson takes another breath. ‘Johnnie was a nice lad, but a bit lost. Oh Christ! I said “was”! Have you…?’ He looks at her cautiously. ‘Have you any photographs? Then I’d know for sure.’
‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that. And I don’t have any images of his face.’
‘And I suppose there’s not too much left to see anyway,’ he adds gloomily.
She doesn’t put him right.
He combs his hand through his hair, but it still flops forwards.
‘Mr Henderson, you do know that the bear will have to be destroyed.’
Henderson’s chin jerks up, ‘Wilber? Wilber has to be killed? That’s ridiculous! He’s my best bear. He was a major investment.’
‘I don’t doubt he was. I’m going out with Matt Simpson this afternoon to dispatch the animal.’
‘Matt agreed? Why was I not consulted?’
‘You’re most welcome to come,’ she gives him another little smile. ‘And if you don’t want your gamekeeper to carry out the shooting, we’ll send a police sniper.’
Boyd, she knows, would enjoy that job. He’d probably mount the bear’s head and paws in his living room. It would certainly look better than the scrofulous little pine marten he has on his old piano.
Henderson drops his voice, ‘These kind of bears are rare now. Very rare. Do you have any idea how much an animal like this costs?’
Rhona shakes her head.
‘About one and a half million Canadian dollars. He had to be air-freighted from Vancouver. He took up nine seats in a passenger airline. Nine seats! We had to have a specialist handler with him and a high spec crate. The insurance premium was phenomenal. And now,’ he wipes the hair back from his face again, ‘you’re just going to kill him!’
‘It’s the law. A man has died.’
Henderson’s jaw moves. He’s chewing on a thought. She waits.
Eventually, he says, ‘Are you sure it was the bear? Couldn’t the boy just have had a heart attack or something – and then the bear came scavenging. They do that, you know.’
She thinks back to the dell. Arterial blood had pumped out across the ground. ‘The victim, I’m afraid, was very much alive when he was mauled. I can’t go into the details now.’
‘I still don’t understand.’ He sounds petulant now. ‘I tramp these woods and mountains every day. The bears always slink away. They’re timid.’
‘I’ve never thought of grizzlies as timid.’
‘Young lady, that just shows what you don’t know. Something must have happened. Bears aren’t like people – they don’t go mad without a reason. The boy must have done something incredibly stupid.’
She sits and waits. Always wait. When it’s difficult, you wait. When it’s awkward – especially when it’s awkward – you wait.
But Henderson doesn’t answer. He gets to his feet and dusts himself off. ‘I think we need a drink. Inspector, will you join me?’
It has been a long dry morning – for nearly two hours Rhona has not had a drop to drink. She looks up at Henderson and grins.
They go inside, the dogs padding behind them. The hallway is a magnificent panelled room smelling of damp stone, old leather, and a faint undertow of fried kipper. Up on the wall, attached with metal staples, is Henderson’s oar from Cambridge. The surnames and initials of the crew are painted on the paddle.
They climb side by side up the grand staircase. The newel posts are as wide as a giant’s thigh. Henderson swings open the door to a drawing room with a bay window looking out over Loch Sunart.
Rhona sits down in an armchair by the fireplace and surveys the room with quick covert glances. The walls are lined with leatherbound books: Homer, Virgil, Caesar’s Wars, a slim little volume of dirty verse by Catullus. There are also the never opened, non books: theological tracts and old farming manuals. Everything is stored in cupboards with wire mesh fronts, as if the books were cheese in an old larder.
As Henderson pours out two whiskies, she says hopefully, ‘It’s been a long morning.’
He hands her a full glass with a teardrop of air in the bottom. She sniffs the rim. Peaty, probably an Islay malt – at least two shots worth. She tips the drink back, her throat is instantly and deliciously hot as a stovepipe.
Henderson stands with one arm leaning on the mantelpiece and his dogs curled on the floor, three hairy commas at his feet. It is, she supposes, the proper pose for a laird.
‘I should call William,’ he says. ‘But reception at the tower is terrible and he never has his phone on anyway.’
That’s good news; she will be able to get to the students before he has primed them.
Henderson continues, ‘You know I could lose my licence over this.’
‘Your licence?’ She is faintly surprised that anyone has to have a licence for anything these days.
‘From The National Trust for Scotland. Don’t you know anything?’
‘Does that let you off tax?’
‘Not quite, but it exempts me from kirk feus. And I don’t have to be at the beck and call of the Inspectorate of Elders.’
‘I see.’ She doesn’t see. She still doesn’t understand how the country really works now. But she will probably need his cooperation. She adds slyly, ‘I might be able to write a report for you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But we are dealing with a fatality.’
‘I know. And of course all this is terrible. But the whole future of the estate could be jeopardised. Everything I have struggled to create here. It has been my life’s work.’ He says it again softly: ‘My life’s work!’
Why is it only men who talk of a ‘life’s work’?
She takes out her notebook, ‘I just need a bit of background information. Can you tell me when you inherited the estate?’
‘September 2005. The death duties nearly killed us. I had to sell off our London house.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘Well, what do you do with 500,000 acres of unfarmable land? Make a paintball arena? Turn it into a giant golf course for the Japanese?’ He gives a bitter bark of laughter. ‘I’m not quite that vulgar. I wanted to do something worthwhile. I wanted the land to be true to itself.’
‘That’s a curious phrase. What do you mean exactly?’
‘The land needs to be properly wild. The estate was completely degraded when I took over. There was Sitka bloody spruce everywhere. Half the birds of prey had been poisoned and there were sheep all over the high ground, and hordes of red deer were stripping the trees. The estate was nearly bankrupt – it was all spend, spend, spend. We’d just about got ourselves back on our feet when the shutdown came. Everything went to pot. We’d been offering deer stalking at 1,000 dollars a day, and suddenly, of course, we had no takers.’
‘How does the estate pay for itself now?’
‘We do very high-end hunting. People come from all over the world to stalk our wolves.’
‘When you say “we”, are you a company? Or does it mean you and your family?’
Henderson sits down, legs unattractively akimbo. He picks a thread off the knee of his corduroys, smoothing down the material as it were a beloved fourth dog. ‘Well, not quite. I suppose my “we” is more generic.’
‘You mean “we” as in “the Scottish people”?’ God, he has a nerve.
‘The estate, the Highlands, Scotland…’ he smiles vaguely.
‘And what about your own family?’
‘They’re not too involved in the estate. Marissa hates the cold, poor love. She spends most of her time in Morocco. She’s a painter – likes the light there. And our daughter, Lucy, is training for the bar in London. Only William is up here in Scotland. He, at least, has a feel for the wild. He’s a good shot too. Well, he was a good shot, I’m not so sure now.’
‘Why not any longer? Does he not shoot?’
‘It’s not his style these days. He’s interested in books and art, and those kind of things.’ Henderson waves a dismissive hand.
‘Once you’re gone, will he continue your work?’
Henderson shakes his head, ‘I can’t say.’
He drains his glass and fondles the ear of the lankiest of his lanky dogs. ‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? They’ll say I should have gone for black bears. Black bears are much more timid. They never attack humans.’
‘You didn’t consider it, then?’
‘Of course not! Black bears aren’t indigenous to Scotland. Nobody, I sometimes feel, really understands what I am trying to do here. I don’t just introduce animals for the hell of it. But I suppose that’s beyond the comprehension of the Scottish Executive, and of those blasted Elders.’
He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. She looks up too and notes the elaborate cornices: the plaster vine leaves and eagle heads in every corner. The heads are picked out in gold paint, the tongues are red. A logo-encrusted ceiling. Cat would love it.
