What on earth was he doing? she wondered.
She approached the stationary car cautiously; an observer would have thought she was stalking it, as if it were an animal likely to rear and pounce. There was no sign of Big Jim on the road. She was very wary of Big Jim now, particularly if he was armed.
She looked over the drop down to the rocks of the shore and then she saw him. Or rather she saw his legs, poking out from behind a large, smooth boulder looking out to sea. The rest of him was screened by the stone. He was absolutely motionless. Hanlon wondered if he was dead. Harriet’s words about him taking his own life returned to her. Well, she, for one, would not grieve if he had.
She thought she’d better check. If he had blown his head off, better she found him rather than someone unused to sudden death or a bloody crime scene.
She dropped lightly down to the rocks and walked along the beach towards him. Big Jim had built a sort of three-sided shelter for himself out of fishing boxes, driftwood and a tarpaulin, the large boulder making up the third side. He was far from dead. His eyes were closed but his chest rose and fell and occasionally she heard him give a faint snore. She studied the blotched red skin of his face, his cheekbones criss-crossed with threads of blue veins, his nose a fiery red.
Next to him, his left elbow resting on it, was a crate containing a dozen vodka bottles. She nodded to herself. This place was Big Jim’s fine-weather bolthole, his secret drinking place. At the hotel there were too many distractions, Harriet pestering him for decisions, phones ringing, people wanting to talk to him. Here, there was just the sea, tranquillity and alcohol.
It was obviously where he had been coming when she had taken his Land Rover. No wonder he had been furious, his quality time with his best friend Smirnoff had been compromised.
She prodded him experimentally with the toe-cap of her boot. Part of her wanted him to wake up so she could plausibly ‘defend’ herself and hospitalise the bastard. He muttered something but didn’t open his eyes. She was tempted to take his car keys and steal the Land Rover. Abandon it halfway up the forestry track.
But she didn’t. She left him where he was and walked back to Donald’s.
22
The following afternoon, Hanlon borrowed Donald’s bicycle and cycled into Craighouse. It was about half five and she stopped at a tea rooms in the centre of the picturesque village.
It was at around six that she heard the sirens. Three police cars and two ambulances, blue lights flashing, roared down the main road heading in the direction that Hanlon had come from. Then the whump-whump of a helicopter’s rotor blades from overhead. It was incredibly loud.
The waitresses and customers alike went outside to see what had happened. People united by alarm shed their accustomed reserve. Only the one question: what’s happened? What’s going on?
Phones were produced, either frantic calls or frantic searches. Then another helicopter joining the first one.
‘There’s been a shooting!’ shouted one of the people in the café, a man who looked to be in his early sixties with white hair, looking up from his phone.
‘Two people dead.’
She raised her head in alarm. Immediately she thought of Big Jim – had he gone crazy with his shotgun?
A shocked murmur ran through the café. Terrorism? Domestic? An accident?
‘Where?’ asked a woman with a baby in a buggy.
‘Kinuachdrachd.’
‘Kinuachdrachd,’ repeated several voices in tones of almost relief. Wherever it was, it wasn’t just round the corner.
‘Where’s Kinuachdrachd?’ Hanlon asked one of the waitresses, a girl in her late teens.
‘It’s right on the end of the island, near the Mackinnon Arms hotel.’
Oh shit! Hanlon didn’t wait for her bill, she thrust a twenty-pound note at the waitress and ran outside to her bike.
As she pedalled down the road towards the hotel various scenarios ran through her mind. Big Jim shooting Harriet and Donald; Big Jim shooting – she knew it was far-fetched but it was a terrifying possibility – McCleod. It had to be Big Jim; there couldn’t be two maniacs with a shotgun, surely.
She seemed to be travelling incredibly slowly, like in a nightmare. Then she heard engines before she saw the vehicles and she pulled over to allow the ambulances past. They were obviously returning to the ferry. There were no flashing lights now.
The time for urgency had passed.
23
‘What the hell happened?’ Hanlon demanded of McCleod. It was 9 p.m. and the DS had called in to Donald’s to update Hanlon. She’d sent her a terse text soon after the ambulance incident, reassuring her.
I’m fine. Busy. See you later.
McCleod looked tired, upset and irritable. It had obviously been a stressful day.
‘A member of the public phoned the emergency services to say that there had been a shooting at the old bothy on the forestry road near Kinuachdrachd, just down from Loch Ciaran. He declined to leave his name, but obviously he had to be local, if only to know the names of these places.’
‘Anyway, I was working from home, so the call came to me to investigate, and sure enough…’
She described the crime scene to Hanlon. The door had been open; she’d gone in there first to find Kai dead on the floor. He’d been shot. ‘A horrible sight,’ said McCleod. She’d then walked up to Big Jim’s Land Rover, which had been parked some distance away.
‘He’d blown his head off,’ she said simply, shuddering. If Kai had been bad, this was worse.
‘I knew it was him immediately. I recognised the tattoos.’
Hanlon put her arms around her and they stood for a moment, locked together. She could well imagine what McCleod had witnessed; she’d seen herself first-hand the damage a shotgun could do. It must have been a horrific sight.
‘There was
