Candles and Roses (22 page)

‘He already did something,’ Greg pointed out. ‘He assaulted you.’

‘Well, it was hardly—’

‘It was assault. He grabbed you by the shoulders. He forced you against the wall. Assault.’

‘I suppose. But he came off worst.’

Greg laughed. ‘Aye, I’d like to have seen that bit. But even so it’s a serious business. We need to report it.’

‘We?’

‘Well, you. You can’t let the bastard get away with something like this.’

‘That’s my decision, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But that’s not the point. That’s not what concerns me about this. I mean, I got out OK and I’ve no intention of going back.’

‘Well, I’m not one to say I told you so— ‘

‘So don’t. I’m not going back, even if Gorman might be inclined to continue employing someone who’d just kneed him forcibly in the balls. I’m more concerned with what this might mean.’

‘What might it mean?’

‘If he was capable of attacking me like that, I might not be the first. Or the last. Maybe he’s more dangerous than I thought.’ She stared blankly into the rain-washed night.

‘This is Lizzie whatshername again, isn’t it?’

‘Hamilton. Yes, in part. He was really weird about that. All this stuff about her having just left. How it was nothing to do with him. He kept repeating it. Like he was trying to persuade himself it was true.’

‘You really think he might have had something to do with her disappearance?’

‘I don’t know. But there was something odd about the whole business. The way he kept coming back to it. And, like I say, if he’s capable of assaulting me like that, then who knows?’

‘OK. So what do you want to do? Call the police?’

‘I think I should do that anyway, don’t you? I didn’t want to do anything till I’d spoken to you, but I think I need to tell the police what he did. Whatever might have happened before, if he did that to someone else—well, I wouldn’t forgive myself.’

‘I can’t imagine the police are likely to be able to do very much,’ Greg said. ‘It’ll be your word against his.’

‘And who would you believe? Me or some creepy drunk?’

‘You, obviously, but that’s not the point. There just wouldn’t be enough to make any prosecution stick. And even if they did it wouldn’t be anything more than assault. You were the one committing GBH.’

‘In self-defence.’

‘Well, yes. But it wouldn’t stand up in court.’ He giggled. ‘Especially after you kicked him in the bollocks.’

‘Very funny,’ she said. ‘So you don’t think I should tell the police?’

‘No, I think you should. But don’t expect them to do much more than give him a warning. Which might be enough to stop him trying it on with someone else.’

‘What about Lizzie Hamilton? Do you think I should mention her?’

‘I don’t know. I imagine they know she worked for Gorman, so it might interest them to know he’s capable of something like this.’ He paused. ‘And, yes, maybe you should tell them what he said about her. I don’t know how the case was left, but it might give them a reason to have another look at it. But don’t start throwing around accusations. Just give them the facts and let them decide what to do with them.’

‘Thank you, Judge Judy,’ she said. ‘I was wondering about contacting McKay.’

‘Who?’

‘DI McKay. The guy we saw at the Clootie Well. You remember. He gave us his card. Told us to contact him if anything else occurred to us.’

‘I think he was talking about what we saw there. Not something different like this.’

‘Who says it is different? I mean, they’re hunting this Black Isle killer. What if it does turn out that Lizzie Hamilton was another victim? Then it’s relevant, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a big if. But I suppose so. Anyway, from what I saw of that guy McKay, if he’s not interested, he’ll soon tell you so.’

‘That what I thought. And even if he passes me on to someone else, it’ll probably have a bit more clout than if I just phone the enquiry number. I’ll give him a call in the morning.’

‘Thank Christ for that,’ Greg said. ‘Knowing you, I thought you were going to call him tonight.’

She laughed, then leaned against him, allowing him to put his arm around her. ‘Even I’m not that pushy,’ she said. ‘Now give me a cuddle. It’s bloody cold out here.’

***

Only lightweights confined their running to the warm dry days, especially in this part of the world. If you weren’t prepared to run whatever the weather, then up here you might as well not bother.

Horton made a point of running every free evening, come rain, hail, snow or blizzards, all of which she’d encountered since living here. By those standards, tonight was relatively mild. The worst of the rain had passed, at least for the moment, and there was just a slow persistent drizzle, little more than proverbial Scotch mist. She hadn’t even bothered to don any protective clothing, content to be soaked to the skin as long as there was a hot deep bath waiting on her return. Isla was cooking tonight and, by the time Horton returned, would have cracked open a bottle of red for them to share while the food was being prepared. Life could be worse.

In truth, she liked running in the rain. It kept her alert and refreshed, and she enjoyed the contrast between the heat of her body and the chill damp of the surrounding air. She’d completed her usual circuit tonight, out past Fort George, and then returning back along the waterside towards Ardersier. The lights across the Firth were a hazy orange in the gloomy twilight, and the village itself looked warm and welcoming ahead of her.

As always when she ran, she’d allowed her mind to drift into neutral, her thoughts ranging aimlessly across the day’s business. It felt like they were wading through porridge with the murder cases, picking up a fact here and a fact there, slowly building a picture of the victims and the surrounding personnel, but never finding anything to provide the breakthrough they needed.

As McKay had said, the answer was likely to lie in whatever linked the three victims. And that would itself lie somewhere in their respective pasts. All they could do was keep digging away and hope that eventually something would emerge.

The other question, she thought, as her mind ranged aimlessly around the few facts they had established, was whether there was any significance in where the bodies had been found. The Clootie Well. Caird’s Cave. The old care home. Those locations had not been selected accidentally. In the latter two cases in particular the killer had gone to some lengths to place the bodies there. The question was why.

As she pounded along the shoreline, she replayed in her head the various interviews they’d conducted with the Scotts, with Cameron, with Reynolds in Inverness, and with Brewster in Cromarty. Something, some point, was nagging away at her, but she couldn’t pin down what it was.

She was almost home before she realised. It was only a tiny point, but it had intrigued her. The McNeils had mentioned their elder daughter, Emma, who had died of leukaemia. Horton hadn’t quite put two and two together previously, but she’d registered from the transcript of McKay’s interview with Scott that, at some point in Katy Scott’s childhood her relationship with her father had changed. Scott had hinted that the change was associated with Emma’s death—’a tough time for all of us’—but had then suggested that the real cause had been nothing more than Katy hitting adolescence. Emma, he’d said, had gone the same way at the same age.

It was surely possible, though, that the impact of Emma’s death on Katy had been more than simply emotional. Perhaps Emma, in those rebellious teenage years, had offered her sister some kind of protection from her father. Perhaps Emma herself had been the primary focus of her father’s interest, deflecting his attentions from her younger sister. At the very least, if Emma and Katy had been close, they would have offered each other some mutual company and support in the face of whatever Scott might have inflicted on them. Horton could imagine that Emma’s death had ripped away what little comfort Katy might have had in that household.

She wondered now whether, in those last despairing months of Emma’s life, Katy had ever made a trip, perhaps with Emma or her mother or both, to the Clootie Well. Whether they had tied one of those sad votive offerings of clothing to the branches around the stream, or left some childhood toy of Emma’s to rot slowly in the damp Highland air. A last desperate throw of the dice, hoping for some miracle that would never happen.

It was all too possible. It would have been a clandestine visit—God-bothering Scott would never have tolerated that kind of pagan ritual—but Horton could envisage it happening. And she could imagine that that final visit, perhaps accompanied by her mother and sister, would have gained a special significance for Katy. The last chance she’d had to preserve the only thing that made her life tolerable. A chance that, in her heart, she must have known was non-existent.

Horton paused on the edge of the village, allowing her thoughts to run on. It was nothing but aimless speculation, but she knew that sometimes this kind of random musing, coupled with the pounding energy of her running, led her to insights she could never achieve through more rational deduction.

Had the killer selected the Clootie Well because it had some particular significance in Katy’s life? If so, how did that tie into the other victims, the other locations? Joanne Cameron’s body had been found in Caird’s Cave along the beach from Rosemarkie. Found, as it happened, by a father and son who’d gone there to play pirates. Another passing comment snagging in Horton’s mind.

Cameron had said that Joanne and his ex-wife had been ‘two of a kind’. He’d talked about them having fantasy tea-parties at the beach, implying that his ex-wife had brought the teddy-bears. The Camerons had been living in Fortrose. If you were visiting the beach from there, where would you go but Rosemarkie? If you were a young child, what would be more exciting than a cave? Had Caird’s Cave been selected because it had some particular significance for Joanne? One of the last places she remembered being happy and secure before her mother had left her in the hands of an abusive father?

If that was the case, what was the significance of the former residential care home for their third victim, Rhona Young?

Horton was motionless now, oblivious to the chill evening air, feeling the rain dripping from her dark hair, soaking through her tee-shirt and track suit leggings. Her brain, barely consciously, was ferreting for the nugget of fact that she knew was there. Something on Archie Young’s scanty file.

There had been a father. Living in a retirement home in Inverness. Was it possible that at some point he had been in the home near Rosemarkie? It was a long shot. But perhaps Rhona Young’s grandfather had played similar role in her life as that played by Emma Scott for her sister. Perhaps the grandfather had been the one source of comfort, perhaps even of protection, after Young’s wife had left. Perhaps she recalled visiting him in the care home, knowing that he was being moved further from her. Perhaps Archie Young had deliberately moved his father so it was less easy for the granddaughter to visit. Perhaps he had been afraid of what the girl might say.

Horton shook her head, suddenly aware of how cold and damp she had become. None of this was anything more than the most tentative, unevidenced speculation, just her mind taking an idea for a walk. But that was the way her mind sometimes worked, and she knew better than to disregard the outcomes.

No doubt she had many of the details wrong. But the killer had chosen those locations for a reason. They had some significance to the killer and, most likely, to the victims also. She had identified points in the victims’ lives that might explain that significance. A reason why the killer might have chosen to take the victims back to those places. Back to a point in their lives before the worst had happened.

The detail, she thought, wasn’t the point. The point was that, even if she was only half-right, the killer must have had access to those details about the victims’ past lives. Not just the broad truths about their abusive upbringings. But those specific moments in their lives. The knowledge of what had really mattered to them.

The killer was someone who, in some way and at some point, had been inside the victims’ heads. Deep inside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

McKay was back in the office by seven-thirty the next morning. His mind was still churning through the events of the previous evening, just as it had been for most of the night. The session with Robinson had continued along the same lines. Robinson had continued to ask short but piercing questions, and McKay and Chrissie had continued to open up, finding themselves expressing views they hadn’t known they held or referring to events that they hadn’t realised had been significant. At least that was McKay’s own feeling. Afterwards, they’d both seemed reluctant to discuss what had happened, as if they were each still coming to terms with what had been revealed.

And what was that exactly?

In the cold light of morning, it was difficult for McKay to be sure. At the time, he felt as if he’d opened himself up completely, revealed aspects of his personality or thoughts that were unknown even to him, let alone to Chrissie. But thinking back now it was difficult to identify anything of substance he had said. Similarly, although he’d had the impression Chrissie was speaking with accustomed openness and honesty, he couldn’t actually recall any real detail of what she’d talked about.

Perhaps the whole thing was just a sophisticated conjuring trick. He had no doubt that Robinson was very skilled at what he did. It was just that now he was no longer sure quite what that might be. Maybe no more than smoke and mirrors.

And where had it left the two of them? McKay wasn’t sure. By the end of the session it had felt as if they’d stripped everything bare, removed whatever illusions had been constraining or sustaining them. As if they’d demolished a stage set and were now ready to start creating a new reality.

That feeling hadn’t lasted any longer than it took them to walk back to the car, heads bowed against the ceaseless drizzle. By the time they’d arrived home, McKay had been sure only that there were no longer any certainties. That he couldn’t take for granted that his marriage would continue, that Chrissie would always be part of his life. He no longer knew if that was what she wanted. But then he no longer knew if it was what he wanted, either. Equally, he didn’t feel that anything was finished. If they were going to make it work—to make anything work—they would have to start from scratch. The question was whether they had the will and energy to do that.