‘What a waste,’ said the elderly man standing close to him on the shoreline. He was the one who had found her an hour or so earlier and called his discovery in.
‘Yes,’ Campbell said, ‘it’s very sad.’
The sound of vehicles – he looked up to the road above the shore – an old Volvo followed by an ambulance.
DS Catriona McCleod pulled up next to the familiar Land Rover of her colleague and the ambulance stopped behind her. She got out of the car and shivered in the cold sea breeze. They were on the east side of Jura, a hundred or so miles west of Glasgow, the Kintyre peninsula a low dark smudge across the choppy grey Atlantic. The cloud was low and, although it wasn’t raining yet, there was moisture in the air. Behind them the enormous shapes of the island’s mountains, the Paps of Jura, were invisible in the mist. But you knew that they were there. They were always there, stone giants dwarfing human activity.
‘Down here!’ called DI Campbell to her from the seashore below. The tide was out and she could see her colleague and another man bending over something invisible from where she was standing.
‘Wait by the ambulance,’ she said to the two paramedics. She’d met the ambulance at the ferry – a drowning, no suspicious circumstances – and escorted them to where the body was. Like Campbell, she was local, she knew where to go.
‘We’re in nae hurry,’ said the burlier of the two, grinning.
McCleod went to her car and took out a pair of latex gloves from a packet in the door compartment. ‘Stay!’ she ordered the border collie who was crouched in the rear hatch space of her Volvo, panting, eager to join in.
She sat down on the driver’s seat, kicked off her trainers and pulled on a pair of green wellingtons. She clambered down the slope with its coarse grass and made her way over the rocks to the seashore, where Campbell was standing with an elderly man.
The wind blew her long hair around her face. She twisted it back into a ponytail and secured it with a band. The breeze was ruffling Campbell’s short red hair. The old guy was bald and weather-beaten; he was wearing an old yellow oilskin. Retired fisherman, she guessed. He had that look. The sea was grey today and looked rough. Although the wind wasn’t that strong, white horses danced on the waves away from the shore. She could see a fishing boat rising and falling, tossed by the Atlantic as if it were weightless, ploughing through the swell a few hundred metres away.
The three of them looked down at the drowned girl. McCleod looked questioningly at Campbell; he shrugged as if to say, nothing to get excited about. They could hardly talk freely in front of the civilian but it wasn’t her place to send him away. Campbell answered her unspoken question.
‘It looks like a tragic accident,’ he said.
‘Do we know who she is?’ asked McCleod.
Campbell looked at her. He had very green eyes and McCleod noticed how they almost changed colour to a dark shade of jade as they reflected the grey from the sea and sky. She couldn’t say that she liked him very much, he was arrogant, stand-offish, but competent enough.
‘She’s from the Mackinnon Arms,’ he said. ‘I saw her working there.’
‘Och, of course,’ said McCleod, ‘Eva Balodis.’
Campbell, surprised, looked at her questioningly. ‘You know her, then?’
‘That woman Harriet – Harriet the manageress, I can’t recall her surname now – she called in a missing persons on her yesterday. Said she was very worried about her.’
‘Did she say why?’ Campbell asked. ‘I mean, other than the fact she hadn’t turned up for work?’
‘Well, she’s from Latvia, as far as the manageress knows, she has nowhere else to go, all her stuff is still in the hotel, so she hadn’t done a flit.’
She looked down at the girl. ‘Seems she was right to have been worried.’
The old man watched them impassively, taciturn like many of the islanders. He was dressed in scuffed and work-worn clothes and an old oilskin. Campbell, in a green Barbour jacket and worn cords, looked as if he’d stepped from a Boden catalogue. Even the trousers looked artfully distressed rather than old.
‘She said that Eva had talked about swimming the Corryvreckan whirlpool – in fact, Harriet made quite a point of it – and now…’ she nodded in the direction of the body ‘… here she is.’
‘Well,’ said Campbell briskly. ‘Well, there we are, then. Almost certainly an accident.’ Jumping the gun a bit, thought McCleod. It was as if Campbell wanted this done and dusted as quickly as possible.
‘How did you know her, sir?’ asked McCleod.
‘Oh, I don’t really know.’ He was studiously vague in that way that people have when they want to avoid a question. ‘I must have bumped into her at the hotel with my grandmother; you know she lives near Craighouse.’
Craighouse was the only village on the island. Not many people lived on Jura, the ones that did were mainly retired. During the summer the population swelled slightly with tourism but in general, everybody knew each other. It was odd that Campbell should have been so unaware of how he knew the girl. More than odd. And the whole way he was handling this was unusual for him. Normally he was a stickler for procedure, cautious in the extreme. Today he seemed very rushed, anxious to get everything tidied away.
‘Can I go now?’ said the old man, who had moved away from them and was now sitting a couple of metres away on a boulder while the two police officers talked.
‘I’m
