She could see into a room she hadn’t really paid that much attention to earlier, the function room. About twenty or so people were sitting, in various stages of undress, watching a widescreen TV with rapt attention. There was a lot of wrinkled flesh on offer. The baby boomers were not going gentle into that good night. She stared at what was going on in horrified disgust. Big Jim’s sleaze was bad enough, she hadn’t bargained on him being the ringleader of a group of like-minded locals. The Mackinnon Arms hotel was obviously the centre for some sort of ageing island swingers group. She shook her head in distaste.
Then she saw what was on the TV screen. If what was going on in front of her was bad enough, this was off the scale in terms of decency, in terms of what was acceptable. It wasn’t so much that the content of the porn film that was being shown on the large flat-screen TV in the function room was particularly gross. Hanlon didn’t like porn, but on the few occasions, mainly for professional reasons, she had viewed it, she had seen worse. It was who was in it.
The male star of the film, if star was the word, was Kai. So be it, if that floated his boat or earned him some extra cash – being a barman was not the best-paid job in the world. It was his partner that so enraged and disgusted Hanlon.
No mistaking those piercings. The audience, male and female, shuffling and rubbing, intent and excited by the action taking place, several of them taking their cue from what was happening on screen. Maybe even more excited by the knowledge that the girl in the film was dead. It was Eva Balodis. A mouth open and moaning with real or feigned pleasure. A mouth that would never make a sound again.
Hanlon turned her attention to the watchers. She recognised the couple in their fifties who had been at dinner, despite their lack of clothes. They were doing lines of coke – God, the stuff was everywhere these days – off a small hand mirror. And there, of course, was Big Jim, busy with a woman whose face was invisible to her. Harriet was there, fully clothed, standing by the door, watching what was going on with a look of smug satisfaction. Another service expertly and efficiently organised. The others, Hanlon didn’t recognise. She was obscurely relieved that she couldn’t see Johanna. Kai was nowhere to be seen either – maybe the reality wouldn’t live up to his on-screen athleticism. She had seen enough.
Coldly and angrily efficient, she quickly moved around the car park photographing the car number plates for future reference. They were, on the whole, expensive. These weren’t council-estate families, these were, she suspected, the local professional classes: estate agents, teachers, businessmen, trawler owners. Eva was lying in a morgue, her corpse, pumped with preservatives if they’d finished the post-mortem, would be waiting for return to her homeland and her family, and this bunch of baby-boomer sex addicts were getting off on her violated body. Well, she thought, as she took another photo, this time of a Land Rover with a sticker saying ‘Argyll For Ever’, we’ll see about that.
There were maybe copyright issues as to who had ownership of the images of Eva’s body after death. Eva was in no position to give permission to allow access to her personal history. Was money changing hands at this event? Hanlon suspected that the answer was yes. Had Big Jim declared it? Had he fuck. Did he have a late licence to be serving alcohol? She could smell weed wafting out from the ill-fitting windows. That and the coke. Allowing drugs to be consumed on the premises.
I’m coming for you, Big Jim, Hanlon thought. I’m going to get your licence revoked and I’m going to leak this to a paper and I’m going to create a real shitstorm such that the Mackinnon Arms will never survive. There’ll be another party and the next time it’ll be raided. Let’s see how these entitled baby boomers, the kind that applaud when I bust a foreign coke dealer, enjoy being nicked for possession of a class A substance. They tut-tut over terrified, trafficked prostitutes in a brothel in back-street Streatham in South London, but they’re happy to get off watching a drowned girl young enough to be their daughter being fucked for their entertainment before she died.
And in this community, small and tightly knit, everyone will know. Fingers will be pointed; tongues will wag in the fisherman’s co-op.
Good.
She had enough evidence for now. Time to get back to her room. She could hardly ring the doorbell and ask to be let in; there had to be another door. She’d break in if necessary. They were certainly not going to have the alarm switched on.
She walked around the back of the hotel. There were the couple of stone outbuildings, bothies as they called them here, and the paved area with wheelie bins in the kitchen area that she had noticed earlier. She walked up to the kitchen door and peered in. The room was dark, nobody around. As she had guessed, in such an isolated island community, security was lax. The door was unlocked, although even if it hadn’t been, she could easily have climbed in through the window.
The silver metal chain-link fly screen jingled softly as she stepped through. The room was lit by a tiny blue corona of gas underneath the corner of a gigantic stockpot full of beef-bones that was ticking away on the stove. It was a sizeable kitchen. Her glance took in the huge stove, the fat fryers, the char-grill, fridges and steel work-surfaces.
Hanlon heard voices coming towards the kitchen. There was a door that was half open; she could see shelves with cans and jars, a dry store.
She slipped in, closing the door behind her
