Deathly Wind (12 page)

Then she chided herself again.

‘What a mess, Katrina, you bloody fool! How do you get yourself into such messes?’

Once Jock McArdle and Danny Reid had left the cottage hospital, Torquil sat and drank a cup of tea with Ralph McLelland and the Padre in Ralph’s out-patient
consulting-room
.

‘That McArdle is an unpleasant fellow,’ said Ralph. ‘I know he was upset, but he’s not going to win any prizes for
politeness
.’

‘Calum Steele said something like that, too,’ agreed Torquil. ‘And Calum isn’t himself renowned for that attribute.’

‘I thought that you handled him rather well though, laddie,’ said Lachlan.

Torquil gave a wan smile and sipped his tea. ‘For now. But he’s wanting to come back and talk to me about his dog. Apparently Katrina Tulloch says it may have been poisoned.’

‘The world doesn’t seem to be with Mr Jock McArdle at the moment,’ mused the Padre. ‘What do you think he meant when he said he’d deal with things?’

Torquil shook his head. ‘I think he believes that Sartori was murdered. He saw the scratches on the face, but he didn’t buy them being done by an eagle.’

Ralph McLelland stood up. ‘Well, it’s only speculation at the moment. The post-mortem may tell us more. Can I go ahead?’

Torquil took a final swig of tea and stood up. ‘Absolutely. He’s been formally identified. Let’s see what you find.’

Jesmond, the Dunshiffin Castle butler, was looking nervous when Jock McArdle stormed into the hall with Danny Reid at his heel.

‘I have bad news sir,’ Jesmond said. ‘I tried your mobile but there was no answer. It’s Dallas, sir. I called Miss Tulloch the vet, and she’s on her way. But I think it’s too late.’

‘What’s happened?’ McArdle snapped.

‘I heard her howling, sir. I found her lying in the
billiard-room
, shaking and frothing at the mouth. Then she just – died! I think she may have been poisoned too, sir.’

Ralph McLelland called Torquil at home that evening, as he and the Padre sat sipping pre-dinner drams of whisky.

The Padre watched his nephew speaking to the GP-
cum-police
surgeon over the phone, then replace the receiver, looking grim-faced.

‘It looks as though you were right, Lachlan. There’s no doubt in Ralph’s mind. He’s pretty sure that it was murder. And he thinks he has strong evidence to prove it.’

The mouth-watering aroma of fried kippers greeted Torquil as he came down to breakfast the following morning. The Padre was standing by the Aga reading the latest edition of the
West Uist Chronicle
. He sighed and handed the paper to his nephew.

‘Calum has been busy,’ he announced. ‘He sails close to the wind a lot of the time, but he may find himself in a spot of trouble with this.’

Torquil sat down and spread the newspaper on the table beside his place setting. There was a large photograph of the two wind towers on the Wee Kingdom and the headline:
WIND OF DISCONTENT.

The article that followed it was one of Calum’s rants:

Torquil lifted the paper as his uncle handed him a plate and put the skillet of kippers on a cooling board in the centre of the table.

It’s not too bad as an article,’ Torquil said. ‘I guess he’s just echoing local opinion.’

‘Ah, but he then goes on to get a bit personal about McArdle and he calls his employees “henchmen”. Not content with that he accuses them of intimidatory tactics, and mentions again about them throwing his camera into Loch Hynish.’

Torquil picked up his knife and fork and began to eat as he continued to read.

‘It’s the article on the next page that I meant though,’ Lachlan added, as he poured tea.

Torquil turned to the inside page and saw the photograph of the body of Liam Sartori lying below the causeway. The face had been digitally blurred, but beneath the photograph was the headline:
HAVE THE KILLER EAGLES STRUCK AGAIN?

There was a blown up insert at the bottom left of the
photograph
, featuring a golden eagle swooping on some prey.

‘Good grief, he’s gone mad!’ Torquil exclaimed. And he read:

‘The bloody fool!’ Torquil exclaimed. ‘What’s he playing at? It’s bad enough that he’s published a photograph of the poor
chap’s body but to write that drivel. It is as if he is inciting some idiot to go hunting for eagles.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Blast Calum and his inflated ego. Why does he feel he has to sensationalize everything?’

‘And there are a lot of hotheads around,’ agreed Lachlan. ‘But he’ll get flak from people like Nial Urquart and the bird lovers.’

‘Damn!’ Torquil cursed, as he pushed his plate aside. ‘That’s all I need with a murder investigation on my hands.’

No sooner had he said it, than his mobile went off. Morag’s name flashed on the view screen.

‘Torquil have you seen—?’

‘Aye, Morag. I’ve got the
Chronicle
in front of me. Calum Steele is a prize idiot.’

‘He is that,’ Morag agreed. ‘But I didn’t mean the
Chronicle
, I’ve just been watching the tail end of the early morning Scottish TV news before I take the kids to the minders. Kirstie Macroon has just done a piece on the
“Killer Eagles of West Uist”,
and she had a tele-interview with Calum. We may be in for an influx of reporters and sensation seekers.’

Torquil groaned.

‘I’ve got everything teed up for first thing though,’ Morag went on. ‘The Drummonds and Ralph McLelland are coming in. I thought we’d have the briefing in the recreation-room at the station. I’ll have it all ready for when you get in.’

Superintendent Lumsden had left a message with Morag for Torquil to telephone him as soon as he set foot in the building.

‘I think his gout must still be playing him up,’ Morag said with a grimace that told Torquil exactly the sort of reception he could expect when his superior officer answered the
telephone
. And indeed there were no pleasantries or preliminary banter: the superintendent just went straight for the jugular:

‘Why the hell is it always the same with you, McKinnon? Do you set out to embarrass me with the chief constable? Why
do I always seem to hear about what’s happening on West Uist when I look at the TV news? Killer eagles for goodness sake! Have you no control over that numskull reporter Calum Steele?’

‘The freedom of the press, Superintendent Lumsden,’ Torquil returned.

‘Bollocks! Why didn’t you let me know about this?’

‘I was going to contact you this morning, sir. I knew nothing about this story until I read the newspaper this morning. In fact, it may be more complex than the report on the TV.’

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the
telephone
, and then slowly, Superintendent Lumsden growled, ‘Go on, McKinnon, surprise me.’

Torquil took a deep breath. ‘I was going to contact you this morning, sir, after my meeting with the police surgeon. Doctor McLelland did a post-mortem last night.’

‘And?’

‘We haven’t had the meeting yet, sir. But there is a strong possibility that the man’s death was more suspicious than we thought.’

There was an interruption on the other end of the line and Torquil heard someone else talking in the background, and then Lumsden replying to them.

‘Right, McKinnon, spit it out, I’m going to have to go. I’m about to take a call from the laird of Dunshiffin.’

‘It may have been murder, sir.’

Torquil winced as the superintendent howled down the other end of the line.

‘Right! What a bloody fiasco! Have your meetings Inspector, then report back to me straight away. Meanwhile I’ll see what your laird wants.’

‘He isn’t my laird, Superintendent—’

But the line had gone dead.

When she heard the phone being replaced, Morag popped her head round Torquil’s office door. She sympathetically
smiled at him. ‘Everyone is here. Are you ready to start? I’ve got the tea and biscuits ready.’

The atmosphere was subdued in the recreation-room, because everyone was conscious that PC Ewan McPhee, the big wrestling and hammer-throwing champion was no longer with them.

Torquil began by informing them all about the Scottish TV early news programme and about Calum Steele’s piece in the
Chronicle
.

‘Aye, but what I can’t understand is that anyone would listen to the wee windbag’s theories,’ said Douglas Drummond.

‘Och, it is because he is a man of letters and not an ignorant fisherman like you,’ replied his brother. ‘Or like me, for that matter – even though we both beat him in the Gaelic spelling contests when we were all at school. You remember them, don’t you, Piper?’

Torquil grunted assent and brought the twins to order by clapping his hands and standing up. ‘What Calum has done – is done!’ he said. ‘But although he has made the national news with his talk about killer eagles, it actually looks as if there is a more sinister killer abroad than an eagle. It looks as if there is a murderer on West Uist.’

He gestured to the local doctor. ‘Ralph, would you give us a summary of your post-mortem findings on the body of Liam Sartori?’

While Torquil had been speaking Ralph McLelland had been plugging his laptop into the station projector.

‘I’ve done this as a Power-Point presentation,’ he explained. ‘That way I can show you each stage of my
examination
, from the initial finding of the body by the causeway, through my preliminary external examination of the corpse, the post-mortem dissection, and the pathological and
microscopic
specimens that resulted from it.’

He looked at Morag. ‘Can we pull the blinds?’

And a few moments later with the room in partial darkness
he pressed the home button on his laptop and a photograph of Liam Sartori lying on the rocks by the causeway flashed onto the wall.

‘As Torquil has just told us, the media have drawn attention to the so-called talon marks on the face of the dead man.’ He pointed a laser pen at the wall and indicated the livid lines on the face with the little luminous red arrow. ‘Quite clearly, if these are talon slashes then they lead us to think that they are the same marks that we so recently saw on the face of Kenneth McKinley.’

‘And are they, Ralph?’ Torquil asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ the doctor returned, changing the slide with the touch of a finger, to reveal the body of Kenneth McKinley and the deep gashes on his face. ‘What do you think?’

The others all craned forward to look.

‘I am not sure,’ said Wallace.

‘Isn’t there some test that will tell?’ Morag answered.

‘I honestly don’t know – yet,’ replied Ralph. ‘I’ve never come across a death as the result of an attack by a bird of prey. But the point is, it could have been. And we also have to ask several questions. First, could he have fallen off the causeway after being attacked by a bird, and then risen stunned from a knock on the head? Could he have then staggered forward to fall face first into a rock pool and drown?’

‘What makes you doubt that, Ralph?’ Torquil asked, already aware of Ralph’s findings.

Ralph moved to the next slide.

‘This!’ he said emphatically.

And they found themselves looking at the naked back of Liam Sartori, as he lay on the metal post-mortem table in the cottage hospital mortuary. Ralph directed the luminous arrow of his laser pen to a discoloured area that started between the dead man’s shoulder blades and ran up to his neck.

‘In my opinion this mark was caused by a foot,’ Ralph said. ‘You can see petechiae, tiny pinpoint haemorrhages dotted around and the spreading purple discolouration. This would
be consistent with a foot having been stomped down hard on him – and maintaining pressure for some time. Possibly holding him underneath the water surface of that rock pool.’

‘You mean after he had staggered there?’ Wallace asked.

‘Except that we think he was dragged there, rather than staggered there,’ said Torquil. And he described the position of the dead man’s collar, the disturbed shingle where he had fallen.

‘Here’s a photograph of how we found him,’ said Ralph. ‘Bearing in mind that the Padre had pulled him out of the pool, yet the position of his collar would be hard to explain.’

He then ran through a number of slides detailing the morbid anatomical dissection. Despite herself Morag felt decidedly queasy and had to look away. The Drummonds, well used to gutting fish and removing vast amounts of entrails nodded with interest and sipped tea.

‘As you can see there, I am squeezing water from the lungs. But the question is, did that water get there before or after he died?’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Douglas Drummond.

‘Well, the presence of water in the lungs doesn’t by itself tell us a lot. It could have got into his lungs after he was dead.’

Wallace slapped his hand on the table. ‘Gosh, I see what you mean. It could have been made to look like he was drowned.’ Then he eyed the police surgeon doubtfully. ‘But how else could he have died?’

‘From this,’ said Ralph moving the slide to a photograph of a human brain resting in a large stainless-steel dish. Once again he manoeuvred the luminous red arrow of his laser pen to highlight a large clot of blood that had formed over the left temporal area. ‘That could have killed him, although I think it may have just been enough to stun or knock him out. He could have sustained it in a fall, but equally, he could have been hit and then fallen.’

It is not easy, this science of yours, is it, Dr McLelland?’ mused Douglas, his voice full of respect and awe.

‘Did you do a diatom test, Ralph?’ Torquil asked.

‘I did, and here it is.’ And with a press of the button the wall was illuminated with a microscopic section of what looked like bubbles in a mush of red pulp. All over the field were small dots of a greenish hue. ‘Those bubble-like structures are alveoli, the air pockets in the lungs, and those little dots are tiny unicellular organisms called diatoms. The water in the rock pool sample I took is full of them. This slide shows that they are present both inside and outside the alveoli. That implies that his heart was beating for some period of time after he was in the water. The diatoms have been inhaled and have entered the bloodstream. I have other samples that I have yet to analyse, but if I find them in other organs it is pretty conclusive that he drowned.’

‘And with that strange bruise on his back it looks as if he may have been held under,’ suggested Torquil. ‘But he was a big bloke. Would it have needed a lot of strength to keep him under?’

‘Not necessarily,’ returned Ralph. ‘His blood alcohol level was high enough to have anaesthetized half of the fishermen in West Uist.’

‘Huh!’ said Wallace Drummond, doubtfully.

Torquil crossed to the whiteboard that was usually used to keep darts or table tennis scores and picked up the marker pen.

‘All right, we have a suspected murder victim,’ he said, writing the name Liam Sartori on the board and enclosing it in a box. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘He worked for the new laird,’ Wallace Drummond suggested.

Torquil nodded, wrote the name Jock McArdle nearby and enclosed it in a circle. He joined the box and the circle with a line. ‘What else?