Kai McPherson was unscrupulous, intelligent, and had a history of drug dealing and opportunistic actions. He was still dealing drugs – she had seen it with her own eyes – trading drugs for sex, cheating people out of what they were due (Nose-stud and her coke), more than capable of violence to women (although admittedly what she had witnessed was in self-defence) and very much a man with an eye on the main chance.
Murdo Campbell had been an attendee at one of the Mackinnon Arms sex parties. Bringing the force into disrepute, possibly leaving him open to blackmail or coercion. And why had Murdo buried himself away in island obscurity?
Manny had claimed that someone in the force was helping Kai with his drug dealing. Hanlon feared that this was only too possible.
She suspected that Murdo and Kai were involved in drug-trafficking, maybe with Murdo supplying and Kai selling, or possibly Kai doing both and Murdo acting as his eyes and ears on the police force for a substantial fee or cut, the profits of which he had laundered via his sister.
Kai was dirty, Murdo probably.
She got the same taxi driver as she had when she had first arrived, a few days before.
‘Oh, it’s you again! How are you liking Jura?’ He seemed pleased to see her; she was more relaxed than when she’d first arrived, that was for sure.
‘It’s very nice,’ Hanlon said. The strange thing was, she meant it. She liked the silence when she ran, she liked the smell of the place, as opposed to car fumes, food, rubbish, grit, people and the weird, not unpleasant sooty underground smells that she was used to in London. Jura smelled of pine, of ferns, of damp and decay, of water and peat, elemental. It smelled of stone and water, salt and burn. Ten years ago she would have hated it; today, no. She had thought Tremayne was crazy when he had decided to retire here, now she could begin to understand. She had called him once or twice since she’d been on Jura but she’d been reluctant to let him know what she was up to. Part of that was her natural desire to compartmentalise and her habit of not confiding in people. Part of it too was that Tremayne, her old boss, would have wanted to take control; he had never really relinquished that part of their relationship. He liked to be in charge. She smiled. It was as if she were some kind of daughter to him; she supposed he was the nearest to family that she had.
A thought suddenly struck her: I’ve had enough of London. It was a kind of revelation. She had always defined herself as a Londoner, but the unsullied beauty of the west coast had made her rethink. Then a follow-up thought: I would like to move here. She sat back in her seat, slightly amazed by this.
‘Aye, that it is,’ the driver said. ‘And the Mackinnon Arms hotel, how do you find that?’
‘The food’s very good,’ Hanlon said diplomatically. She looked out of the window, green fields and grey dry-stone walls. A buzzard wheeled lazily overhead in the evening sun, the feathers at the ends of its wings sticking out like fingers. She wondered if it was the same one that she had seen when she had discovered that Murdo Campbell was not all that he seemed.
‘Aye, Donald is a good chef and no mistake.’
Silence fell and he dropped her off at the ferry terminal. She paid and thanked him.
‘I’ll doubtless see you soon,’ he said. ‘The name is Ruaridh.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I look forward to it.’ And, strangely, she did.
The Paps rose up, huge and grey, bathed in golden light. Hanlon swatted a cloud of midges away from her head. The water between the two islands, the Sound of Islay, looked very blue in this light. But above all, for the first time in her life, she experienced a sense of coming home.
The following day, Hanlon had a light breakfast. She noticed that there were only a smattering of other guests at the tables. She went back upstairs, changed into her running gear and walked out of the hotel.
The boar on the sign gazed at her with a contemptuous expression.
She upped her pace as she jogged up the single-track road. Its grey surface was in reasonable condition. She guessed that hardly any traffic used it – she hadn’t seen a single house yet. Today she thought she would run up into the hills. She was going north now, towards the tip of the island. From there you could see another island, Scarba, across a narrow strip of water, the Gulf of Corryvreckan, named after the whirlpool, or possibly vice versa. Anyway, that was the place that Eva had allegedly drowned, her body carried back to Jura by the currents where it had been discovered by a shepherd, McCleod had told her, washed up on the shore.
The sun was struggling to break through the clouds; occasionally it would succeed, and shafts of brilliant white light would shine through the greyness overhead and play on the grey-blue water like searchlights or spotlights in a theatre. Despite the threat hanging over her head in London that excessive use of force would be a dismissible offence, she felt remarkably light-hearted. London seemed very far away, slightly unreal, as if what was happening there was not connected with her. She was far more interested in what was going on here. Kai was a firm suspect in her mind for the death of Franca. Big Jim for Eva’s demise. She was confident that someone was going to pay for the girls’ deaths, in one way or another.
In the far distance, across the water, she could see the low hills of the Kintyre peninsula. She decided that she was going to stop thinking about her case. Concentrate on the here and now.
