‘What’s the matter, Jo?’
She took a deep breath, pointing towards the front of the hotel, pointing to the sea. ‘Help, come, there is girl in water!’
Now the two of them were running after Johanna. Onto the terrace with its rotting wooden furniture, benches with slats missing, rickety tables.
Below was the jetty running straight out into the sea, a strip of sandy beach on one side, a rocky shore on the other.
‘Where is she?’ shouted Hanlon.
‘There,’ panted Johanna, pointing to the right of the concrete jetty. The Lorelei was moored at the end with no sign of life.
Hanlon sprinted along the jetty, leaving the other two behind. As she ran she noticed that under the wooden slats of the pier, just under the surface of the sea, boulders ran the length of the structure. The tide was in and the rocks were just under water. They were dark grey covered with patches of white barnacles.
When she was halfway along the jetty she could see a body in the sea more clearly. By the orange buoy, a splash of vivid colour in the gunmetal-grey water, she could see a figure floating. Hanlon ripped off her cagoule, kicked off her trainers and leaped into the sea.
The shock of the water hit her like falling into an ice-bath. Although she was fully clothed, Hanlon was a powerful, experienced swimmer and the buoy was only a few metres from where she had hit the water. She reached the body in under a minute. She supported herself with one hand on the hard, cold plastic of the buoy while she looked at the girl. She was floating face down, her blonde hair fanning out in the water, gently rising and falling with the swell of the sea. As she swam up to her, Hanlon could see a contusion and broken skin on the right side of her forehead near the hairline. She gently trod water feeling the pull of the current. The girl’s waterlogged sleeve had got caught on the shackle that secured the mooring buoy to the chain just below the surface of the water. Otherwise she would have been carried out to sea.
Hanlon freed the material from the metal protrusion and swam back to the shore on her back with one arm cradling the dead girl’s head. She pulled the body onto the beach and turned her over.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said.
Franca’s sightless eyes stared up to the cold grey Scottish sky, her gold nose stud a sad reminder of her once forceful personality. Donald was waiting for her.
He looked bleakly down at the drowned girl.
‘She’s dead?’
Hanlon nodded. ‘She’s dead.’
She looked down at the still face. She had only known Franca in high-octane mode. Images of the girl, laughing loudly, pointing and jeering at her in the bar, throwing a punch at her, screaming at Kai. None of them ways in which you would want to be remembered, but all of them undeniably full of life at full throttle, partying, drugging, fighting, sex, violence. All in a five-hour time frame.
And now this.
First Eva Balodis, now Franca. Two drownings in just a few days.
Donald looked thoughtfully at the jetty.
‘She must have slipped when she was going back to the boat.’
Hanlon looked at the jetty, the large rocks breaking the water just underneath the boards. If you fell head first into the water you could smash your head against one. But she was sceptical.
‘Kai said she was quite out of it,’ Donald said.
Hanlon looked at him in surprise.
‘You spoke to Kai last night?’
‘Oh aye. I was at home having a wee dram or two. We chefs don’t usually go to bed early.’ He grinned. ‘I keep late hours. Kai saw my light was on, he came in, said he’d been doing Charlie with one of the girls from the boat. He did nae stay long, said he was tired.’
I bet he was, thought Hanlon.
‘Have you called the police?’
‘Aye.’ He tapped the mobile in his breast pocket.
‘Where’s Johanna?’ she asked. She had only just realised that the girl wasn’t around.
‘She’s gone back to my place,’ Donald said. ‘I told her tae go to the hotel, tell them what was going on, but she refused. She’s frightened of Harriet and Big Jim. She was crying. I guess it’s shock. I told her to wait at my cottage for the police.’
Hanlon nodded. She could hardly blame Johanna for not wanting to go back to the hotel. She wondered how Johanna had spotted the body. Well, that would be a matter for the local police, not her. She turned and stared at the Mackinnon Arms. Its dilapidated shape no longer seemed forlorn, it seemed sinister. She shivered uncontrollably. She realised that she was incredibly cold. Donald noticed.
‘You’d better go in and get some dry clothes on. You must be freezing.’
‘Will you stay with her?’ Hanlon looked down at Franca.
‘Aye, I will.’ He looked back at the jetty. ‘Must have slipped and hit her head on the rocks,’ he repeated to himself, like a man willing himself to believe that it was true.
Hanlon nodded. ‘I guess so.’
She turned and walked back to the hotel.
She thought of Nose-stud’s face, inscrutable in death. Whatever had happened, Hanlon thought, she did not believe that it was an accident. Nose-stud was not the kind of girl to leave this world by falling off a walkway. No matter how stoned she was.
Dr Morgan’s voice surfaced again in her head.
‘No, you don’t trust people, do you? Don’t you think that’s part of your problem, an inability to trust?’
No, Doctor, thought Hanlon, glancing back at the burly figure of Donald in his chef’s whites, standing patiently by Nose-stud and gazing out to
