Big Jim was dead, Kai was dead, the Mackinnon Arms was closed. She had cycled past it early this morning, the boar on the sign looking self-satisfied, well pleased with the way things were going. Well, Donald will be happy, she thought. It’s made his plans to buy the place easier.
Now she was sitting on a hill watching Campbell’s island home. Unlike McCleod’s untidy house and weed-choked, muddy driveway or Donald’s ramshackle cottage, the policeman’s grandmother’s house, an eighties-build bungalow with the pebble-dashing so popular in Scotland, looked immaculate. The garden, with its plants that did well on the west coast, fuchsias, hydrangeas and nasturtiums, was laid out with military precision.
Murdo Campbell’s grandmother lived about two miles from McCleod on the road to the ferry to Islay. The house stood on the spur of a small hill and overlooked Islay and the distant shores of the Argyll peninsula. The view from the living room must be superb, thought Hanlon. She thought of Dr Morgan’s repro Giacometti sculptures. Who needs art, Doctor, when you’ve got nature to look at? she thought with more than a touch of contempt.
For once, the critical voice of Dr Morgan that had been nagging her in a highly annoying fashion for the past week, the voice of her conscience, was silent. Ha! thought Hanlon. And then her complacency vanished. She was uncomfortably aware that she was managing to find someone to quarrel with who wasn’t actually present, but was a good five hundred miles away.
At least the mystery of why Campbell seemed to spend so much time at his granny’s was partially explained in his favour. Who wouldn’t want to stay there?
There were two cars parked outside on a block-paving drive. Campbell’s BMW and a small Honda that she guessed belonged to the old lady.
Just then the front door opened and Campbell appeared. He was wearing clothes not dissimilar to her own: walking boots, a green cagoule, army trousers. He had a small rucksack slung over one shoulder. She saw him stretch as if he were going running, and then he started walking up the hill towards her. Working from home, are you?
She felt a momentary twinge of alarm; she did not want to confront him hiding in his garden. Then she saw that he was on a well-beaten path that ran from the back of the house into the hinterland of the island, towards the first of the Paps that towered above them. The path ran within about twenty metres of where she was crouching. She lay down flat, screened from his view by bracken that grew waist high on the hillside.
From her hiding place, she heard him passing by, the squelch of the mud beneath his heavy boots clearly audible, and then, a few moments later, she silently slipped down onto the path behind him.
The well-worn track led through the low slopes, twisting this way and that, sometimes dipping down, but ever upwards towards a high peak, not one of the Paps themselves, but a substantially high hill. She walked along in utter silence. There were few birds around, the only sound was that of running water from the myriad of small streams invisible under the thick, tangled roots of the heather and small bushes and trees that grew up through it. To have walked off the path would have been practically impossible; it was a beautiful environment but a harsh one for the walker.
Following Campbell, unlike following Kai, was exhausting. He moved very fast along the track into the high, rocky Jura hills. The path they were on was used by sheep – she occasionally saw their excrement – and here and there were the remains of dry stone walls, some surmounted with rusty wire, that had obviously fallen into disuse over the years. The walls were grey and patched red, green and white with lichen and emerald with moss. To her right was a very tall, more modern fence, about two metres high, made of tough-looking wire mesh. It had to be a deer fence, she guessed. The track paralleled it for a while and then turned away.
She hadn’t expected to be following Campbell, it wasn’t part of any grand plan, but the last time that she had encountered him in the hills alone, it had been to meet with Kai. She was now hoping that something similar was going to occur today. As she walked, she thought it was funny that modern communications should be so prone to interception that it made security sense to have a face-to-face meeting rather than discuss things over hackable mobile phones. Then again, reception, or the lack of it, was a huge issue out here.
Hanlon guessed that Campbell was about a quarter of a mile ahead of her. Occasionally from the crest of a ridge she would catch a glimpse of him, far in the distance.
As they walked, she wondered who he was going to meet. Maybe the deaths of Kai and Big Jim had forced a rethink of the three-kilo drug delivery. A small plane or a drone could drop a package off in the middle of the hills, that was one possibility; another that he was meeting someone the way he had Kai. Either way, she’d be there to witness it.
Annoyingly, he never seemed to be hurrying, but he remained consistently ahead of her even though she was practically running. It felt like being in a nightmare. She could see the marks of his boots on the black, peaty mud of the path as it snaked between the wiry, tough stalks of the heather that grew waist high and the light green columns of the stalks of bracken. She saw
