No, thought Hanlon, I saw Big Jim busy screwing that up with those divers leaving early.
‘We tried getting shooting and fishing parties in. That didn’t work. Now we are trying the gourmet food approach, and that’s not working.’
Hanlon looked at her, hard-faced. You haven’t mentioned sex parties or coke smuggling on your list, she thought.
Tears filled Harriet’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s all been a bit much, Eva dying, Jim cracking up… then that poor girl the other day… I don’t know how much longer I can go on…’
Hanlon thought to herself, You must be in a bad way if you’re so open with me, but then she reflected, maybe it wasn’t so surprising, Hanlon not only knew what she was going through but she was also a stranger; it’s often easier to unburden oneself onto someone they respect but don’t really know. All the more so as, after she left, Harriet would never see her again.
And now your head chef is planning to pull the rug out from under your feet, thought Hanlon. Presumably there were bookings for the summer months predicated on Donald’s Michelin-star-level cooking skills. Without those – and how could they ever replace him at such short notice? – disaster loomed.
She looked at Harriet’s pleading face. She doubtless thought that Hanlon might well be able to get Big Jim arrested for drink-driving. Or trying to assault a police officer.
‘Just keep him under control,’ Hanlon said.
Harriet nodded her head sadly. ‘I’ve tried but he’s getting worse. I don’t think he even knows what he’s doing these days, and he can be violent.’ She took a tissue from a box and blew her nose vigorously. ‘I’m sorry, I’m actually frightened. I think he’s going to hurt someone or himself.’
‘That’s evident. Where was he going anyway?’ she asked, suddenly curious. ‘That road doesn’t lead anywhere, does it?’
‘Oh, God only knows where he was headed for,’ Harriet said impatiently, ‘and you’re right, the road only goes to the end of the island. I know it doesn’t alter how bad his behaviour was, but he was unlikely to meet any traffic.’
‘Well,’ Hanlon said, ‘if I were you, I’d leave him.’
At least I’m not being thrown out, she thought. That would disturb my plans.
Harriet shook her head. ‘He’s a good man, it’s just that he’s got a problem.’
‘Well,’ Hanlon said, standing up, ‘if he gets in my way again, he’ll have another problem, a massive one.’
She walked up the stairs to her room.
16
Hanlon had showered and changed her clothes; now she lay on her bed checking her e-mails on her phone.
Nothing concerning the investigation against her.
Well, no news was maybe good news. Various possible scenarios, all unpleasant, all too sadly realistic, bobbed around in her consciousness. To take her mind off things she ran through the morning’s events.
Kai and Murdo: the delivery was on for the following week. Three kilos of cocaine. Maybe a hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth. If it was pure it would then be cut, so maybe double that amount. And Kai was going to meet up with Murdo on the Thursday to discuss it. Kai, with his Glasgow/Paisley contacts, probably money laundered through The Sleeket Mouse. She could probably, as the manageress, put a couple of grand a night through the till as non-existent sales of high-end wine and champagne. At say two hundred pounds a bottle, that would just be ten bottles on a fifty-cover night. It wouldn’t raise anyone’s eyebrows. Or fifty-pound glasses of whisky or cognac. Easy. Then invoices for non-existent sales of goods, black truffles, turbot, hand-dived scallops – it was probably easy to get quite a lot of money shifted that way.
Then there was the issue of Big Jim. Had he killed the German girl, Franca Gebauer? Hanlon still thought of her as Nose-stud. An attempt to have sex with her, Franca refusing, Big Jim lashing out as he had done at Hanlon. In the morning he might not have remembered. Or possibly Harriet had covered up for him as she had his drink-driving, the power behind the throne.
She found Harriet an oddly compelling character. She was obviously both competent and intelligent, so why was she in this backwater? Donald had every reason to be here, a rest from the stresses of working in London kitchens and his own plans to get a place of his own, but what was her reason?
Most of the criminals that she had met in her career hadn’t been particularly evil. But there were exceptions. Was she one of these? Hanlon could easily see Harriet as a Lady Macbeth figure, directing Big Jim’s actions. She was probably the one who had organised the sex parties. She had probably filmed Kai and Eva’s porn film. It was hard to imagine Big Jim doing it. And if things went wrong, it would be Big Jim who would carry the can. And Harriet would be managing the finances; he’d sign anything she gave him, in all probability.
Where had he been going when Hanlon had met him on the road? The thought of Harriet as Lady Macbeth had triggered the image of the three witches: ‘when shall we three meet again?’ She wondered if it was to discuss something with Murdo and Kai. Would Big Jim be there on Thursday?
Well, she’d be there in one form or another, that was for sure.
After lunch, Hanlon wandered around the back of the hotel to look for Donald.
He was sitting outside the kitchen on an upturned plastic mixer-crate drinking a pint of lager.
‘Hi, pull up a crate,’ he said, nodding at a stack of them. Although she’d been at his cottage before, she had never really looked at Donald properly. She’d
