‘It had to be you. You faked the brain sections and the animal tests to make it look as if the men in Achnagelloch had died from sheep
‘He wasn’t murdered!’ insisted Morag with flashing eyes. ‘He fell from the cliff. It was an accident! The whole thing was an accident! If the farm workers hadn’t been so greedy the sheep would have been safely buried and none of this would ever have happened!’
‘How about Colin Turnbull, Morag? What did he do wrong?’
‘Perhaps I can answer that Doctor,’ said a foreign voice.
Bannerman turned round to see a man emerge from the animal food store. He was holding a gun. Bannerman felt himself go cold when he looked into the man’s eyes. He had seen them before. They had been above a ski mask up on Tarmachan Ridge. He’d only seen them for a second but now it all came back to him. There had also been two other occasions when he had seen this tall, fair, good-looking man. The first had been when he had been partially obscured behind Morag Napier when they had both come into the restaurant where he was eating in the Royal Mile and the second time had been in van Gelder’s car up in Stobmor on the night he had been assaulted in the car-park. ‘You’re van Gelder’s son,’ he said.
‘My fiance, Peter,’ said Morag. ‘We met and fell in love when I first went up to Scotland with Lawrence.’
Bannerman reckoned that Peter van Gelder had to be at least ten years younger than Morag and he was very handsome. ‘Really,’ he said.
‘We didn’t want any of this to happen,’ said Morag, who was now sobbing. ‘It was a simple accident. There was a leak of a chemical they use for treating the quarry stone and it killed a few sheep. It all stemmed from that, a tragic accident. That’s all it was. The company would have been forced to close down if the accident had been made public. There was so much resentment to their success among the locals. Peter’s father would have been ruined and we couldn’t have got married as we planned.’
Bannerman looked at Morag and shook his head. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ snapped Morag.
‘Will you tell her van Gelder, or shall I?’ asked Bannerman.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said van Gelder.
Bannerman turned back to Morag and said, ‘You’ve been used. The story about a chemical to treat stone is rubbish. They’re using the quarry as a dump for dangerous, illegal chemicals. The one that killed the sheep workers and Colin Turnbull was a powerful mutagen developed for biological warfare.’
‘Tell him it isn’t true!’ demanded Morag.
‘He also murdered Lawrence Gill,’ continued Bannerman, as he saw all the pieces start to fit. ‘He was the fair-haired man who pretended to be Gill at Cairnish post office. He even tried to push me off the Tarmachan Ridge and the only person who knew I was going there was you; I told you on the phone the morning before I left. You must have passed on that information to him.’
Bannerman could see by Morag’s expression that he was right. ‘You were the one who told him where Lawrence Gill was going because you overheard the conversation on the phone with Shona MacLean.’
‘But Peter just wanted to reason with Lawrence!’ protested Morag. ‘He just wanted a chance to explain why I had switched the slides.’
‘The slides came from Creutzfeld Jakob patients?’ asked Bannerman.
Morag nodded.
‘Why?’
‘I knew that Lawrence would make the connection with the official report of
‘How?’
‘He overheard me talking to Peter on the phone.’
Bannerman stared at Morag in silence. ‘And now Peter is going to kill us,’ he added.
Morag looked bemused. She turned to van Gelder. ‘Tell him this is nonsense,’ she pleaded.
‘I’m afraid the man has a lot more brains than you, you stupid bitch,’ said van Gelder, matter-of-factly.
Morag looked stunned, as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘But we love each other …’ she said distantly.
‘Love?’ mocked van Gelder. ‘What do you think I could possibly see in you, you dried up old bitch? You were useful and now you are not. It’s as simple as that.’
Toxic waste is big business Morag,’ said Bannerman. ‘Governments pay through the nose to get rid of it. It’s an embarrassment and a political liability.’
Morag did not register having heard what Bannerman had said. She was staring wide-eyed and unblinking at van Gelder, the man who had just shattered all her dreams with one viciously unkind outburst. Van Gelder held her stare with an amused smirk on his lips. Bannerman used the opportunity to move his hands slowly along the bench behind him until he felt his fingers wrap round the thin, wire bars of a rat cage. He heard the rat scuttle about inside it and hoped it wouldn’t go for his fingers.
‘And now the end is near, as Mr Sinatra would say,’ smiled van Gelder.
‘I did everything for you,’ said Morag in a low whisper. ‘I lied and cheated. I let you …’
“That was a treat,’ sneered van Gelder.
‘You bastard!’
Van Gelder raised the pistol higher when he thought that Morag was going to rush at him, and she stopped. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘But then you always did have trouble relaxing …’
Bannerman sensed Morag tense beside him. ‘And how do you plan to dispose of our bodies?’ he asked van Gelder.
‘I’m going to drive you both back up to Achnagelloch. You’ll be buried under a thousand tons of rock on the next blasting day, along with Turnbull.’
‘Why did Turnbull die?’ asked Bannerman.
‘He was doing some stupid little geological survey to impress us. Unfortunately he stumbled on to a cave where that greedy old bastard Sproat had hidden a pile of dead sheep because he was too mean to bury them properly. It was Turnbull’s own fault for ignoring the warning signs to keep out of the area. He must have contaminated himself when he examined the sheep.’
Morag snatched a scalpel up from the bench and started to move towards van Gelder. The look in her eyes said that she was not to be reasoned with.
‘Put it down!’ commanded van Gelder.
Morag kept moving towards him.
‘Drop it, you stupid bitch!’
The latest insult made Morag raise the scalpel above her head and lunge at van Gelder. The Dutchman fired and Morag was jerked backwards by the impact of the bullet. She collapsed like a discarded rag doll, a red stain spreading over the front of her white lab coat and an expression of surprise etched on her face.
‘And now you, Doctor,’ said van Gelder.
Bannerman swung the rat cage round and threw it hard at the Dutchman. It caught him on the face and knocked him over backwards, where he hit his head off the wall and slid to the floor. The cage burst open when it struck him and the rat was now perching on his face, sniffing around his mouth and nostrils.
Bannerman saw that van Gelder still had hold of the gun; he was not totally unconscious. He was groaning and lifted his left hand up lazily to brush the rat off his face as if it were a playful kitten disturbing his sleep on a sunny afternoon. Bannerman gambled on making a bid to get the gun, and failed. He was still a metre away when van Gelder opened his eyes and levelled the gun at him. ‘You’ll pay for that,’ he grunted, his eyes red with anger. ‘I’ll blow your bloody knees off first.’
There were four rat cages on the bench above where van Gelder lay. Bannerman reached up and shoved the one nearest to him so that it pushed the others off the end and down on to van Gelder. The Dutchman cursed and struggled to free his gun arm from the tangle while Bannerman made a lunge for the door. It was locked. He turned to see van Gelder getting to his feet. A rat was attacking his ankles. He kicked it across the room.
There were half a dozen animal watering bottles on the table next to the door. Bannerman started throwing them at van Gelder but the Dutchman avoided them with ease and they smashed harmlessly off the far wall. Van
