‘Aye, come along with me, sir. We’ll just go up to my car…’
‘Oh, and, Catriona, send the paramedics down. They can take her away. The tide’s coming in. Don’t want her floating away.’
‘Yes, sir.’
She walked back up the beach with Ronnie Fraser. He walked with the unhurried trudge of the countryman. She told the waiting men to fetch the body. As they unpacked the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and scrambled down to the shore, she looked back at Campbell, who was standing with his back to her, staring out to sea.
She turned to the old man. ‘Now, sir,’ she said brightly, ‘just a few wee questions. Firstly, your full name please…’
As the questions rolled on, where he lived, the sequence of events, the chronology of the discovery of the body, she found that she was operating almost on autopilot as she took down the answers. Her mind was more preoccupied with Campbell. It wasn’t just the way he was handling things or the uncharacteristic forgetfulness about where he had met Eva.
Campbell’s grandmother was ardent Free Church of Scotland. They were a strict, some would even say fanatical, Calvinist branch of Christianity. They were no fan of drink. She would no more have gone into a hotel bar where alcohol was served than McCleod would have visited a brothel.
Campbell was lying.
As if aware the DS was thinking of him, Campbell turned and looked directly at her. She recalled stories that she had heard, pub rumours, that Campbell was a bit of a ladies’ man. It was very believable. Maybe she would have been tempted herself, if he weren’t such a stuck-up prick.
As McCleod thanked Ronnie Fraser and watched him walk away back to where he lived, she wondered, were Campbell and Eva an item? No, they could never have been an item – she wouldn’t have been presentable enough for Campbell. She would have been an embarrassment.
Was she your side-piece, sir? That was far more likely. Not good enough to be a fully accredited girlfriend, but just good enough for a quick one when need or the opportunity arose. Was that why the DI was being so economical with the truth, why he was in such a hurry to close the book on this one, an embarrassing ex-lover? Self-interest seemed to be taking precedence over justice. Whatever had happened to Eva Balodis was not going to be gone into with any great rigour.
Well, she thought, I for one will be keeping a close eye on the investigation, that’s for sure.
3
DCI Hanlon looked out of the small window of the plane – a Twin Otter according to the information sheet from the airline – on the flight from Glasgow to Islay. The laminated leaflet also showed a stylised map of Scotland with the flight routes indicated by red dots. The one she was on went west of Glasgow, down the river Clyde, over the Argyll peninsula that hung down from the main body of Scotland, as if stretching out to Northern Ireland, towards the island of Islay in the Atlantic and its northern neighbour, Jura. It was the smallest plane that she had ever been on. The interior was basic, with seating for a dozen or so people on either side of the short, cylindrical fuselage, and the pilot and co-pilot separated from the passengers by an undrawn curtain. If she’d leaned forward, she could have tapped the female pilot on the shoulder.
Her mind was far away from the flight, from the now of things. She might have left London physically, but mentally she was still there, in that small, sparsely furnished police office with a view of the Thames.
On the one side:
‘Professional misconduct… Unacceptable use of force… Gross misjudgement…’
Phrases from the charges she was facing and the ongoing disciplinary hearing and meetings with the IOPC.
On the other:
‘Proportional use of force… The officer felt threatened by the arrestee… Self-defence…’
She looked out of the window to take her mind off recent history. She felt conflicted by the turn of events. Part of her was outraged that it had come to this, but part of her, she now realised thanks to Dr Morgan, acknowledged that she had overstepped the mark. But how she felt was comparatively unimportant. Her future was out of her hands. She was under few illusions as to her career path. Corrigan, her boss, mentor and protector, had retired. She wasn’t exactly friendless in the Metropolitan Police, but it surely felt that way. She was like a wounded lioness in a pack; the others had smelled her weakness and were moving away from her. Hyenas were circling in the distance.
Even before the incident there had been indications, intimations, of her career mortality. She had heard (while waiting in a queue in the canteen – there had been one of those sudden lulls when a chance remark that would normally have gone unheard boomed out) someone refer to her as a ‘has-been’. She had initially felt like walking up to him, challenging him, but when she had looked at him, twenty-six to her forty, ridiculously fresh-faced, she had thought, Maybe, maybe he is right. Maybe I am. Or maybe the world of policing has changed, and I haven’t.
She had slunk away, wounded. Pretended she had forgotten something on her desk.
She had now endured a week of not being at work. She was beginning to feel like a ghost, that she wasn’t living in her studio apartment so much as haunting it. Work had always been there, like a drug, to stop her thinking, to stop her brooding. Now it had been taken away. What could she do with her free time? There was only so much physical exercise she
