Her gaze turned away from the sea to the building itself. From this angle, facing the sea, it looked even more dilapidated. The black paint on the window frames was almost all gone, the tiles of the roof looked uneven, some of them cracked. Weeds sprouted on the terrace. Big Jim’s kingdom, like his face and body, was visibly crumbling.
Hanlon walked around to the front and into the hotel entrance. The forecourt of the hotel now had a couple of Range Rovers parked in it. In the back of one of them, through the rear window, she could see oxygen tanks and other bits of diving gear. She went inside and glanced into the bar as she walked past.
There were three thickset men, jumpers and jeans, presumably the Range Rover owners and divers, sitting chatting with Big Jim at a table. She saw Big Jim pick up a full pint of lager, raise it to his lips and unhurriedly down it in one. He put the glass down with exaggerated care and motioned to the barman for another one. There was another group in there, two men and three girls, talking to a figure in chef’s whites, presumably about the menu. Hanlon guessed that these were the party from the yacht she had just seen.
She went up to her room, showered and changed into trousers and a patterned shirt, lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She noticed a dark brown stain on the plaster near the window – damp, she guessed.
Thoughts ran through her head: Big Jim, McCleod telling her about the history of the hotel, speculation as to what the yacht was doing there. It was all a blessed relief from fretting over the fallout from her assault on the suspect in South London. She yawned. She had been up since five, a flight from Heathrow to Glasgow and then, after hanging around Glasgow airport for a couple of hours, the short hop to Islay. She guessed she must have covered five to six hundred miles. She closed her eyes and fell asleep more or less immediately.
6
She woke up a couple of hours later. The phone in the room was ringing. She picked it up, was she coming down for dinner? She had phoned down earlier and booked for eight o’clock. She glanced at her phone, it was now nine, the kitchen was closing soon.
Shit, thought Hanlon. She hated being late.
‘I’ll be straight down.’
She washed her face and dragged a brush through her unruly black hair. She looked at her reflection in the mirror in the bathroom. Her dark, straight eyebrows drew attention to her cold grey eyes, her strong nose with a slight kink in it from where it had been broken in the past and a slight bump on it, another break. Her cheekbones were high, her jaw emphatic. It was a challenging face. Intimidating.
She left her room and walked along the poorly lit corridor – several of the light bulbs had blown and not been replaced – through the fire door and down the main staircase to the dining room. She blinked in surprise as she walked in. All traces of the mess that had greeted her earlier in the day had been expunged. It was like a completely different room. The cheap wooden tables that she had seen earlier were now covered with starched white tablecloths. There were candles on the tables bathing the room in a soft glow. It was a magical transformation. She was shown to her seat by a quiet Eastern European waitress.
A name badge was pinned onto her blouse: Johanna. So the dead girl was probably Eva, thought Hanlon. Eva Balodis, the girl with the multiple piercings.
There was a woman by the till that she recognised from the group photo she had seen on the noticeboard earlier, Team Mackinnon. The name came back to her: Harriet Reynolds. The divers she had seen earlier were just leaving; one of them spoke to the restaurant manageress. His voice was quiet but his tone was furious. He was obviously extremely angry. Hanlon could hear every word he was saying.
‘Thanks for a lovely meal…’ the accent educated Home Counties: generic, featureless, self-confident ‘… you’ve been fine.’ He stressed the you; obviously someone else hadn’t been.
I wonder who that might have been, she thought sarcastically.
The man continued, ‘The food’s great, and we have no complaints about the hotel, but after what that drunken cunt, pardon my French, of a landlord said to me, we’re not staying a minute longer.’
‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’
Harriet Reynolds was tall and slim with a long face and short-cropped hair. She looked like a teacher from an exclusive girls’ school, thought Hanlon. She handled the irate customer with practised coolness.
‘Is there nothing I can do to make you change your minds?’
‘No,’ came the short answer. ‘You can reimburse me later. I’ll e-mail you my bank details. Tell your boss he’s a twat. We’re off now, getting the last ferry.’
‘Enjoy Islay!’ said the manageress, a hint of despair now in her voice.
Perhaps Big Jim made a pass at him too, thought Hanlon.
The food was extremely good. Surprisingly so. The hotel’s fine-dining credentials, which they’d made a big deal of on their website, were very much on show. She had carpaccio of lobster, an amuse bouche of a raviolo of scallop and, as a main course, local ‘wether’, a two-year-old sheep, with a brilliantly green mint jelly and gratin dauphinoise.
As she ate in these comfortable surroundings, she was struck by the ambivalence of the hotel, its
