Candles and Roses (14 page)

Was that just coincidence? Or was it possible that Lizzie Hamilton’s body was out there too, buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the wilds of the Black Isle? And, if so, might there be others?

Horton shivered, suddenly struck cold despite her recent exertions and the warmth of the evening sun. Just the breeze off the sea meeting her sweat-soaked tee-shirt, she thought. But the landscape opposite suddenly seemed much darker.

She turned, preparing to begin the run back home, when she felt her mobile phone buzzing in her belt. She pulled it out and looked at the screen. McKay’s mobile.

‘Alec?’

‘Evening, Ginny. Caught you mid-run?’

‘Something like that.’ McKay didn’t often call in the evening. He was one of those—rare in the force—who believed that leisure time was just that, and he made a point of not bothering his team outside work hours without good reason. By the same token, he gave the shortest of shift to anyone who called him without justification. One or two senior officers had discovered that over the years, and it was one of the numerous reasons why McKay’s career had stalled. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We have a development.’ He intoned the last word with the air of a stage conjuror unveiling his latest miracle. ‘Appeal for information went out on the national news this evening. Control room inundated with calls afterwards. Most of them bollocks, obviously. Usual procession of the halt and the lame. But we’ve got what sounds like it might be a credible ID for our second victim.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Sounds like a match with the tattoos. And they were distinctive enough for us to take it seriously.’ He paused, obviously consulting a note. ‘Woman called Joanne Cameron. And get this. Greater Manchester again. Stockport somewhere. And a Scottish accent.’

‘Sounds plausible,’ Horton agreed. ‘She wasn’t on the mispers list?’

‘Not been reported,’ McKay said. ‘Sounds like the usual story. No-one actually close enough to her to start worrying too much. Person who called in was one of her work colleagues. Someone called Jade Norris. She and Cameron went out on the lash together in Manchester. Sometime late in the evening Cameron went AWOL. Norris didn’t think much of it. Just assumed that Cameron had copped off with someone. Reading between the lines, Norris ended up at some bloke’s house, pissed as a rat, and thought that Cameron must have done the same.’

‘Romantic,’ Horton observed. ‘So when did it occur to her to start worrying?’

‘Cameron didn’t turn up for work on the Monday. But that didn’t seem to set off many alarm bells. She had a track-record of poor attendance, especially Monday morning sickies. None of her work-mates, including Norris, were particularly close to her. Was only on the Tuesday that anyone started to get concerned, and then they don’t seem to have done much other than ring her mobile. Then someone caught the news broadcast and made the connection—Cameron was proud of her tattoos, apparently, so everyone knew about them—and called Norris. Who, bless her little cotton socks, took the trouble to call in and report it.’

‘Probably wondering how soon she can sell her story to the tabloids,’ Horton commented tartly. ‘But, yes. Do you want me to come in?’

‘There’s not a lot more we can do tonight. I’ve asked our colleagues in GMP to follow up and get what information they can. We can take it from there tomorrow. Better get some rest and an early start, I think.’

‘Be interesting to see if she has any local connections. If so, we may be starting to get somewhere.’

‘Let’s hope. I’ll leave you to get back to your marathon.’

She ended the call and stood for a moment gazing out across the choppy blue waters. It was still a fine evening, but the sea breeze was growing stronger and a few clouds were gathering on the horizon. The forecast was for the weather to break tomorrow, which could easily mean they’d already had the best of the summer. Over the firth, the Black Isle was still caught by the setting sun, windows glinting gold. The woodland to the east was looking darker, more threatening.

She began to jog back towards home, picking up pace as she ran. Isla had been in London for the day, returning on the last flight and wouldn’t be back until nearly eleven, so Horton would have only a ready meal and a glass of wine for company. It occurred to her now, pounding back along the sunlit waterfront, that this was how too many people had to live their lives. No-one at home and no-one ever coming home.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Christ, he was running late tonight.

Jimmie Morton pulled into the car park at the rear of the building and parked as close as he could, trying to save a few seconds. It had been one of those evenings when anything that can go wrong, will. There’d been a problem with the alarm at his first call. Nothing serious—as far as he could see, the system just hadn’t been maintained properly—but the device hadn’t activated properly as he’d tried to leave. He’d been tempted to leave it—allow it to become someone else’s problem—but if he did this was bound to be the night when there was a break-in and he’d get blamed for leaving the place unprotected. So he’d called out the maintenance team, who were supposed to treat alarm problems as a priority. But he knew enough about their ideas of priorities to make sure the call was properly logged, so if they couldn’t be arsed to come out tonight at least it wouldn’t be his fault.

At the next place he discovered that some kids had vandalised the rear of the building, painting graffiti slogans across a white-washed wall. At least, he assumed it was kids. One of the slogans was the independence slogan ‘Still Yes’ but there was little sign of reasoned political argument in the rest of it—just the usual obscenities and incomprehensible daubings. Again, he’d had to stop and phone it in so that in due course—probably six months or so—someone would come out and clear it up.

On top of that, there’d been a lengthy tailback on the A9 because some idiot lorry-driver had managed to lose control and blocked the northbound carriageway just before the Kessock Bridge. Morton had sat there long enough to be seriously considering taking the long way round to the Black Isle, if only he could find a way out of the tailback, but eventually the police had managed to clear a lane and get the traffic moving.

But he was at least a couple of hours late getting up here. He was tempted just to sack it off, but his van had a tracking device fitted so the bosses would know if he hadn’t completed the round. Not that they’d pay him any overtime for finishing this late.

This was his least favourite stop at the best of times. The other sites were largely unoccupied shops or office premises. His remit was straightforward—carry out a basic security and maintenance check, deal with any routine maintenance problems himself where possible, and report back any more serious issues so that they could be dealt with as appropriate. Morton had trained as a joiner but it seemed increasingly hard to get proper chippy work these days, so he’d ended up in this half-arsed role. Jack of all trades, master of nothing and nobody at all.

On the whole, he didn’t mind the work. The pay was OK, if not exactly spectacular for the hours he had to put in. Apart from the GPS system on the van, he was his own boss and could schedule his days as he thought best, as long as the full round of visits was completed. The actual activities were pretty routine. From time to time, he ended up doing some basic joinery to make a site secure or some plumbing to patch up a leak until it could be properly repaired. But anything more complicated was just reported in. Mostly it was just ensuring that the sites were safe, secure and adequately maintained.

The visits could really be done any time, but the security firm offered their clients the option—at a suitably increased fee, none of which found its way back to Morton and his colleagues—of an evening round. The clients liked that, because they thought it meant any scrotes who had their eyes on breaking into one of the unoccupied sites would see a physical security presence. Morton himself thought any half-decent scrote would soon work out that the physical presence was highly intermittent and, in his own case at least, comprised no more than a single overweight middle-aged man with a forty-a-day habit. But he did what he was told.

He supposed there was an element of risk in the job. His wife had occasionally expressed concern that he was expected to work unaccompanied. But there was little worth stealing in most of these sites. They were just empty shells. The biggest danger was that some down-and-out would break in and use the site as a place to sleep—and he’d found evidence of that from time to time. But that was more of an issue in the urban areas. Once you got out of the city, the only issue was petty vandalism. Local kids who couldn’t think of anything better to do than spray paint any available blank wall.

This place, though, gave him the creeps even in the middle of the day. Out of curiosity, he’d dug about a bit on the internet to try to learn about the history of the building. It had originally been a private house, apparently, though he didn’t know how much of the current building had been part of that original residence. Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century it had been converted into a hotel and had operated into the 1980s. Morton had a vague memory of that as a child, not that his parents could afford to go there. The hotel business had declined as people began to take their holidays overseas, and the building had eventually been transformed into a residential care home. Now, finally, it had ceased even to be that. Presumably, the costs of keeping up a large Victorian building like this had simply become prohibitive. The residents had been moved to other locations, the building had been put on the market, and now it was standing empty.

Morton could imagine the place would once have been warm and welcoming. In its heyday, it would have been an imposing place, a clear demonstration of social hierarchies with poorly-paid young maids from Stornoway waiting on wealthy holidaymakers up on golfing trips from the big cities. Now, it simply looked neglected and forbidding, a relic of another age. He didn’t think of himself as particularly fanciful or fearful, but the place felt full of ghosts. Ghosts of the well-off customers who used to fill the hotel’s lounges and dining room. Ghosts of the countless elderly folk who had lived and no doubt often died in its bedrooms.

Even in the full light of day, he was disconcerted by the building’s empty spaces—the large reception rooms with their broad picture windows looking out on to the sea, the endless empty corridors. The sense that something was happening—or had just happened or was about to happen—whenever he looked away.

They’d only started looking after the place in the spring, so he hadn’t often had reason to be here outside daylight hours. It was still far from fully dark outside, but the sun was setting over the hills behind the building, throwing long shadows across the landscape and the water. The front of the building, facing east out over the bay, was already lost in gloom.

Morton unlocked the side door he used to access the building, and made his way into the small foyer. He walked across to disable the alarm on the far side of the room, feeling his way cautiously in the half-light.

Even before he’d reached to turn on the lights, the indicators on the alarm unit had told him the system was inactive. Shit. He hurriedly thought back over his schedule for the previous days, trying to work out who’d been here last. Had he forgotten to reset it, or had it been one of his colleagues? He realised, with some relief, that the previous visit, two days before, had been on one of his rest-days. So someone else would have been responsible.

Although the other utilities had been disconnected, the owners had left the electricity operational to power the alarm system and other essentials. It probably also didn’t do any harm to have a few lights showing from time to time. Even so, Morton carried his own flashlight and tended to use no more lights than he needed. If he accidentally left one burning, that would be another excuse to give him a bollocking.

His intention was to be in and out of here as quickly as possible tonight. He’d do a quick tour of the main reception areas and the upper corridors to make sure that there were no obvious signs of any problems. Then he’d make himself scarce.

The small inner foyer led through into what had previously been the main lobby, which in turn gave access to the various reception rooms. He turned on the lights in the lobby and walked through to the large area at the front of the hotel which he imagined had once been the main dining-room. The broad picture windows stretched the full length of the hotel frontage, giving a spectacular view of the bay and the firth. It wasn’t difficult to envisage what this place would have been like in its prime—rows of white-starched table-cloths, silver cutlery, crystal glasses. Well-off guests eating substantial dinners while watching the spread of evening across the water.

Now it was just an empty space with worn carpets and peeling wallpaper. Morton walked over to the window. The setting sun threw the shadow of the building out across the grassed area at the front, down to the beach and the shoreline. Lights were coming on in some of the houses along the road below, and the sun was glinting gold in the windows of the houses on the far side of the firth. The sky was still largely clear, darkening in the west to a bruised mauve, though clouds were gathering on the far horizon where the firth opened into the North Sea. The last fine day for a while, according to the forecast.

In other circumstances, Morton would have found the view striking. Standing here, in this abandoned space, he simply felt unease at the gathering dark. Better do what he had to do, and get the hell out.

He turned, sensing again the illusion that something had been happening behind him, out of his sight, as he’d been staring out of the windows. But of course the place was as silent and undisturbed as ever. He scanned round the room to ensure there were no visible problems, no signs of leaks or breakages. Then he hurried through into the old kitchens, and checked the areas leading to the rear doors.

He completed his tour of the ground floor and climbed the wide stairway to the first floor. This was the part he disliked most. The upper floors were given over to what had been the hotel bedrooms. He had to patrol the long corridors checking the status of each room. When he’d made his first visit, some months before, he’d made a point of opening each bedroom door so that all he had to do subsequently was peer into each in passing and check there were no obvious problems. Nevertheless, it was a lengthy process, and something about the long empty corridors increased his unease. Even more than downstairs, he felt other presences. As if each room were reoccupied as soon as he had passed.