Silenced for Good Read online

  ‘How did you know her, sir?’ asked McCleod.

  ‘Oh, I don’t really know.’ He was studiously vague in that way that people have when they want to avoid a question. ‘I must have bumped into her at the hotel with my grandmother; you know she lives near Craighouse.’

  Craighouse was the only village on the island. Not many people lived on Jura, the ones that did were mainly retired. During the summer the population swelled slightly with tourism but in general, everybody knew each other. It was odd that Campbell should have been so unaware of how he knew the girl. More than odd. And the whole way he was handling this was unusual for him. Normally he was a stickler for procedure, cautious in the extreme. Today he seemed very rushed, anxious to get everything tidied away.

  ‘Can I go now?’ said the old man, who had moved away from them and was now sitting a couple of metres away on a boulder while the two police officers talked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Campbell said, giving an apologetic smile. It transformed his face, making him look very boyish. ‘DS McCleod, this is Ronnie Fraser. He found the body and called us. Mr Fraser, could you go with my colleague? She’ll just be asking you a few questions, then you’re free to go.’

  ‘Aye, come along with me, sir. We’ll just go up to my car…’

  ‘Oh, and, Catriona, send the paramedics down. They can take her away. The tide’s coming in. Don’t want her floating away.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  She walked back up the beach with Ronnie Fraser. He walked with the unhurried trudge of the countryman. She told the waiting men to fetch the body. As they unpacked the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and scrambled down to the shore, she looked back at Campbell, who was standing with his back to her, staring out to sea.

  She turned to the old man. ‘Now, sir,’ she said brightly, ‘just a few wee questions. Firstly, your full name please…’

  As the questions rolled on, where he lived, the sequence of events, the chronology of the discovery of the body, she found that she was operating almost on autopilot as she took down the answers. Her mind was more preoccupied with Campbell. It wasn’t just the way he was handling things or the uncharacteristic forgetfulness about where he had met Eva.

  Campbell’s grandmother was ardent Free Church of Scotland. They were a strict, some would even say fanatical, Calvinist branch of Christianity. They were no fan of drink. She would no more have gone into a hotel bar where alcohol was served than McCleod would have visited a brothel.

  Campbell was lying.

  As if aware the DS was thinking of him, Campbell turned and looked directly at her. She recalled stories that she had heard, pub rumours, that Campbell was a bit of a ladies’ man. It was very believable. Maybe she would have been tempted herself, if he weren’t such a stuck-up prick.

  As McCleod thanked Ronnie Fraser and watched him walk away back to where he lived, she wondered, were Campbell and Eva an item? No, they could never have been an item – she wouldn’t have been presentable enough for Campbell. She would have been an embarrassment.

  Was she your side-piece, sir? That was far more likely. Not good enough to be a fully accredited girlfriend, but just good enough for a quick one when need or the opportunity arose. Was that why the DI was being so economical with the truth, why he was in such a hurry to close the book on this one, an embarrassing ex-lover? Self-interest seemed to be taking precedence over justice. Whatever had happened to Eva Balodis was not going to be gone into with any great rigour.

  Well, she thought, I for one will be keeping a close eye on the investigation, that’s for sure.

  3

  DCI Hanlon looked out of the small window of the plane – a Twin Otter according to the information sheet from the airline – on the flight from Glasgow to Islay. The laminated leaflet also showed a stylised map of Scotland with the flight routes indicated by red dots. The one she was on went west of Glasgow, down the river Clyde, over the Argyll peninsula that hung down from the main body of Scotland, as if stretching out to Northern Ireland, towards the island of Islay in the Atlantic and its northern neighbour, Jura. It was the smallest plane that she had ever been on. The interior was basic, with seating for a dozen or so people on either side of the short, cylindrical fuselage, and the pilot and co-pilot separated from the passengers by an undrawn curtain. If she’d leaned forward, she could have tapped the female pilot on the shoulder.

  Her mind was far away from the flight, from the now of things. She might have left London physically, but mentally she was still there, in that small, sparsely furnished police office with a view of the Thames.

  On the one side:

  ‘Professional misconduct… Unacceptable use of force… Gross misjudgement…’

  Phrases from the charges she was facing and the ongoing disciplinary hearing and meetings with the IOPC.

  On the other:

  ‘Proportional use of force… The officer felt threatened by the arrestee… Self-defence…’

  She looked out of the window to take her mind off recent history. She felt conflicted by the turn of events. Part of her was outraged that it had come to this, but part of her, she now realised thanks to Dr Morgan, acknowledged that she had overstepped the mark. But how she felt was comparatively unimportant. Her future was out of her hands. She was under few illusions as to her career path. Corrigan, her boss, mentor and protector, had retired. She wasn’t exactly friendless in the Metropolitan Police, but it surely felt that way. She was like a wounded lioness in a pack; the others had smelled her weakness and were moving away from her. Hyenas were circling in the distance.

  Even before the incident there had been indications, intimations, of her career mortality. She had heard (while waiting in a queue in the canteen – there had been one of those sudden lulls when a chance remark that would normally have gone unheard boomed out) someone refer to her as a ‘has-been’. She had initially felt like walking up to him, challenging him, but when she had looked at him, twenty-six to her forty, ridiculously fresh-faced, she had thought, Maybe, maybe he is right. Maybe I am. Or maybe the world of policing has changed, and I haven’t.

  She had slunk away, wounded. Pretended she had forgotten something on her desk.

  She had now endured a week of not being at work. She was beginning to feel like a ghost, that she wasn’t living in her studio apartment so much as haunting it. Work had always been there, like a drug, to stop her thinking, to stop her brooding. Now it had been taken away. What could she do with her free time? There was only so much physical exercise she could do, she had no other hobbies, she despised the TV, didn’t own one, had no interest whatsoever in books or cinema.

  She forced her thoughts back to the noisy plane. Let’s not think about London. It was low tide and she looked down at the muddy banks of the river Clyde, grey and brown, the red and green buoys marking the channel clearly visible from up here. Cranes standing by the sides of the waterway looked like giant metal herons. The sprawl of greater Glasgow gave way to the wrinkled, matt green of the hills, dark, geometric shapes of the conifer plantations with occasional lochans, small lakes, reflecting the gunmetal-grey of the sky, which mirrored the colour of her own eyes.

  Well, it certainly made a change from London, the endless streets, the underground, the people.

  Below them now she could see the sweeping gold of the beaches and patches of white where the water was breaking. Her view was framed by the thick white strut holding the wing to the body of the plane, and the air was blurred when she looked forward by the circular agitation of the propeller, invisible as it spun, the air almost visible as it trembled in front of her. The noise of the engines, a powerful droning roar, was mind-numbingly loud.

  She watched two ferries far below which looked like bath-time toys for children, gaily painted red funnels, white superstructure and blue hulls.

  She gazed almost dreamily at the sea, thirsting to be in it, to feel its cold, clean immensity wash everything away, wash her clean. Hanlon loved wild swimming.

  She tried to focus on the view. Her thoughts wouldn’t let her. They were leaping around unhelpfully like scalded cats.

  She was going to have a psychiatric assessment on her return. Mandatory.

  Hanlon believed in preparation. That was why she had paid to see Dr Morgan. She wanted to know the kind of questions that they might ask so she wouldn’t stumble into their traps. Know your enemy.

  The trouble was, having seen Dr Morgan, she was uncomfortably aware that the doctor might reasonably say, ‘But you do have a problem. You can’t even get on with people who want to help you. I’m not your enemy, I’m your friend. I’m trying to help you. It’s you who is tearing yourself apart.’

  She was going to spend some time staying with her old boss, DI Angus Tremayne, now retired on Islay. He ran a guest house, accommodation in a converted barn away from his house. Generally, Hanlon disliked the intimacy of B&Bs. You might have to make conversation. She hated small talk.

  But staying with Tremayne would be fine. He knew her. He would leave her undisturbed while she did what she wanted to. He had provided her with detailed running routes, swimmable lochs, good deserted beaches. He had borrowed a mountain bike for her. She had a triathlon competition in three weeks’ time. It would be her first time as a veteran. She liked the term, ‘veteran’. Someone with experience. Certainly it was a damn sight better than ‘has-been’.

  She would spend her days in holistic, natural training in the company of some of Scotland’s most beautiful scenery.

  But then the original plan had had to be modified. Tremayne, not the most organised of men, had cocked up the dates and had people booked into his guest house during Hanlon’s slot. She felt she had to get out of London so, until his B & B was free, she had booked herself into a small hotel on the neighbouring island of Jura, the Mackinnon Arms, for a fortnight. It had looked fine on the website.

  Now she could see the southern end of the Argyll peninsula. It seemed incredibly neat and tidy from up here. A patchwork of fields and toy tractors and tiny cows and sheep. It was getting cloudy now. The mist and the rain were rolling like smoke over the hills with their muted brown and purple colours with yellow splashes of gorse.

  Hanlon gazed bleakly down.

  ‘I think that you’re addicted to violence. I think you like the adrenaline rush, the danger. I think you like losing control.’

  Thank you, Dr Elspeth Morgan, BSc (Hons) Cantab, MSc, CPsychol.

  While they had discussed her life history, Dr Morgan had pointed out to her how the violence had started as one-off incidents – policing had been more robust twenty years ago, certainly with men like Tremayne around. Then it had become habitual, she had enjoyed the excitement, the thrill of violence, and then one day she found she had crossed a line, allowed the red mist to descend, and never looked back. She went looking for trouble these days; she was addicted. And she had never tried to do anything about it other than feed the beast. She had sought out dangerous, challenging situations. Dr Morgan had said it was like talking to someone who had become accustomed to breaking into lions’ dens and then complaining when she was attacked. Until now. The dawning of a slow sense of self-awareness.

  The plane was descending now through wispy banks of cloud, down onto the runway. And she caught a glimpse of high, conical hills in the background, covered in silvery grey scree, the Paps of Jura.

  Her journey’s end.

  ‘So you’ll be a tourist here?’ asked the taxi driver politely as they drove across the island of Islay, where the plane had landed, to the opposite side where Hanlon was due to catch the small ferry that ran back and forth between Port Askaig and the smaller island of Jura.

  He studied the woman in the back of his taxi: slim, her face was attractive but hard, grim-looking. Her grey eyes watchful. She had the kind of mouth that wasn’t built for smiling. She looked guarded and sad. Maybe a bereavement, maybe a divorce, thought the driver. He liked guessing about the background of his passengers.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Her tone discouraging any conversation. The driver persevered. He was a genial, talkative man.

  ‘Did you know that George Orwell lived on Jura?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was flat, dismissive.

  ‘Oh.’ He retreated into silence; he felt a bit wounded. Surely politeness cost nothing?

  Hanlon looked out of the window of the car at the gorse and the bushes of alder and mossy spindly trees stunted by the wind and spray. Fields full of sheep staring incuriously at the taxi and dry stone walls. Grey rocks covered with light green and yellow-gold lichen rose above heather and fronds of bracken.

  ‘I’ve seen this so many times before, usually in drugs and alcohol… You’re the first person I’ve met with a violence dependency. Most of my clients are quite pleasant.’ As opposed to me, thought Hanlon. ‘But it’s like all addictions. Like I said before, starting off as fun, then a steady escalation, there are a well-defined series of stages, until we have total addiction, an inability to live without it.’

  Get out of my head, Dr Morgan, in your chichi Hampstead study with your repro Giacometti sculptures and cubist art. And your fucking Mondrian rug.

  The driver, studying her face in his mirror, saw her scowling furiously; her lips moved occasionally. God, she looks like trouble, he thought.

  She wrenched her attention back to Islay. There was a feeling of enormous space and emptiness about the island, which she guessed might partly have explained the taxi driver’s garrulousness.

  ‘So you’re staying on Jura?’

  ‘Yes.’ She finally took pity on the taxi driver and tossed him a crumb of conversation. ‘I’m looking forward to swimming. The beaches are lovely, I hear.’

  He pulled a face. ‘Too cold for me,’ he said. ‘I’m more of a Mediterranean man.’ He laughed, relieved that they were having a normal conversation. He didn’t enjoy driving morose, irritable people around. She was probably stressed, he decided. So many people on the mainland were these days.

  ‘Mind you don’t swim in the Corryvreckan.’

  She frowned. ‘The Corryvreckan?’

  ‘Aye. It’s a whirlpool, just off the north of Jura.’

  ‘Really? Is it far?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No, not really. It’s at the tip of the island – there’s another island to the north and it’s halfway between them. It’s the third biggest whirlpool in the world, or so they say…’

  I’d like to see that, she thought.

  The driver added, ‘Ye can doubtless hire one of the fishermen to take you. It’s kind of impressive, but you would nae want to fall in.’

  They drove over the brow of a hill and there was Jura in full glory.

  ‘Wow,’ said Hanlon, her troubles momentarily forgotten.

  4

  As the small ferry crossed the narrow strip of water between Islay and Jura, the water an incredible ultramarine blue, the hills on Jura, the Paps, seemed to rise up massively in front of them.

  The boat got closer to the Jura side and Hanlon could see a Land Rover with police markings and an ambulance as well as several other vehicles waiting to board. She stood impatiently, her suitcase next to her. Several other foot passengers were waiting; they all seemed to know each other. The bow door on its enormous pistons descended with a muted clang onto the concrete of the landing area. Above the roar of the engines, a member of the crew shouted instructions to the drivers in their vehicles and then waved them down towards the slope that led up to the road above. Three cars and a delivery van disembarked, the metal ramp clattering and clanking below their wheels as they drove off, then it was the passengers’ turn to walk off and up to the road.

  Hanlon looked curiously at the police standing by their vehicles. Professional interest. Something had happened, you could see from their body language, a tell-tale tension. The Land Rover was driven by a uniform and there was a tall slim man with red hair standing by the passenger door. He was a commanding presence. She was too far away to see him properly, but he had that kind of calm self-assurance that the good-looking so often have.

  The police presence and the proximity of an ambulance. A death? Not an accident – nobody seemed in a hurry. She wanted to go up to them, the tug of curiosity was almost irresistible. But she didn’t.

  Various vehicles met her fellow passengers, greetings were exchanged and car doors slammed. Engines started and cars drove off. In five minutes, everyone who she’d been on the ferry with was gone.

  Now it was the turn of the police car, the ambulance and the other vehicles to drive onto the ferry. She looked in through the passenger window at the red-headed man. He was talking on the phone, his features fine-chiselled, his mouth full. He was as good-looking as she had suspected. He looked intently lost in thought as he terminated the call and said something to the uniform who was driving. The vehicles were on board, the bow was raised, and the waters churned white and blue as the CalMac ship reversed away from the terminal. She watched as it headed back towards Islay then she turned and looked around impatiently for the car from the hotel that was supposed to be there to pick her up.

  No sign of it. Hanlon felt anger rising inside her. She hated inefficiency, and this was plain sloppy. She looked at the single-track road, the absence of vehicles. You could hardly blame traffic for being late on Jura.

  Hanlon took her phone out of her pocket and glanced at it. No network coverage. The detective who had been on the phone must be on a different network. She swore in irritation and looked up at the road just in case the hotel car might be visible. Nothing.

  There was one vehicle still parked there in the ferry car park, an old Volvo. The door opened and its driver got out, a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, short, slim with long dark hair and a thin, pinched face.